Recent reviews by Mukluk

I'm 20 hours in and I am very sad to have to NOT recommend this game.
I bought this thinking it was like Heroes of Might and magic, or Age of Wonders. And while it has some similarities it has some things that are very much its own.
You cannot get higher tier units by yourself. You have to go to prioritize going to random villages and grind quests to get them to like you enough to give you a schematic for a better barracks, or to hire a unit from them, or to possibly learn how to include a 6th zombie in your army (what?).
Because of this behavior, after 2 losses I had to give up on playing spoiler free and google where to go to increase army stack sizes, because my size 5 army full of tier 2 units was getting hammer by size 7 armies of tier 4 and 3 units by the enemy AI.
The story encourages you to build lodges to harvest materials, and capture allfire nodes, but this hyper-aggravates the AI so they hunt you down mercilessly.
Units take a long time to build, so losing an army feels catastrophic and hard to come back from. If you only have one training slot it can take 20+ days to rebuild an army, which encourages you to reload when you get wrecked. This feels cheesy but necessary, and is further complicated by the fact that there is no quicksave or quickload buttons, forcing constant menu navigation and loading screens.
You don't realize it at first but you have a timer. Your growth triggers the enemy to attack you, so even if you keep to yourself and try to build up, once you are strong enough the hammer falls.

I really enjoyed the gameplay up until that moment. Once they lock on to you it doesnt matter if you try to lift off your flying wizard tower and relocate. They will hunt you down and do not stop.

And after 3 runs, and 20 hours, I don't have the energy to try this balancing act a 4th time.

I recently finished the inevitable excess DLC (about 7 hours for me) and I greatly enjoyed it.
I took my group from the main campaign that was already built. It was a pretty solid group, I'm not a top tier min maxer but the party was solid. The regular fights you come across were quite challenging and I had to reload a few times due to dying to a million lightning bolts and other crazy attacks roasting them, or everyone getting cursed and permanantly turned into dogs. I can easily see how any sub par parties wouldn't be able to progress.

Funny enough the final boss fight was over in seconds, it was easier than the random encounters.

The writing was GREAT, i absolutely LOVED the plot twists for this short story.

One minor negative thing I can add is that if you are playing with "deaths door" (meaning if a party member goes down, they get "deaths door" then if they go down again they die, which is removed by resting in a safe location) there are almost NO safe locations to rest. You can camp anywhere in the dlc but getting off the deaths door debuff seemed impossible, I just disabled the deaths door mode after spending many diamonds resurrecting people.

I had a really hard time deciding to thumb up or down this game. The art is gorgeous, the story is engaging and kept me interested, the characters were fantastic. But there were so. many. bugs.

Here is a list of what I experienced, which forces me to not recommend this:

-Weapon swaps at random. I completely unbound the keys for weapon swapping to make sure I wasn't clicking anything by mistake, it just likes to swap weapons with no warning.

-Falling through world (this one only happened once to be fair)

-When exiting game you will come back in in random locations, sometimes in some you have never even been. You can log back in miles into the fog of war, in a place you have never been anywhere NEAR. In fact, in 24 hours playing this game only two times did it actually load me back where I left off.

-If you are playing in windowed mode and want to tab out, you have to ctrl+esc or alt+tab TWICE to get the game to let go of your controls. Relatedly, if you close the game entirely from windowed mode you have to ctrl+esc one more time as it is still holding your mouse/keyboard hostage.

-There is virtually no ability to climb DOWN. I don't know if this is a bug or a design decision but there are many ways in game to climb up but climbing down is basically looking for things to break your fall on the way to the ground. Only a couple of ladders in the game let me climb back down them the same way I climbed up them.

-Multiple input commands on one key, which leads you to constantly doing the wrong command. Space bar is jump, dodge in every direction, grab, and jump grab. You cannot seperate these in key bindings. You will often watch helplessly as your character does the wrong command sometimes leaping to their death.

-Tons of items in walls or slightly buried in the ground and cannot be interacted with, yet show they can be interacted with.

-Multiple times during the story you get stripped of all your gear and later it gets given back, you then have to spend minutes re-setting up all your equipment and hotkeys cause it just dumps it into your bag haphazardly and doesn't put it back where it was.

-You can be hit or even killed by many enemies through walls. Had it happen many times. And I'm not talking about rocket launchers I mean claws and spit.

-There is no visual indicator for your running stamina. it doesnt use the same stamina bar as your weapon swings, but when it runs out you suddenly slow way down which can lead to you getting caught if you were fleeing enemies.

Around all these many bugs was a great game that I played to the end. But after all these headaches I cannot currently convince myself to play the DLC or the sequel.

This was a very fun game that gives you many ways of getting past most problems.
Small example: Locked door?
-search the area for the keypad code
-search bodies for a card key
-rip the door down with high strength
-shred the door with a recycler grenade
-find a vent to possibly go through and get past it
-use hacking skill to open it from a terminal
etc

You have a lot of options to "play your way". The story itself was good with a few delightful twists. It does give you a warning to not use too many neuro mods early on on alien abilities or else the systems wont recognize you. I took that to heart and really regretted it later on. Feel free to try those alien skills out if you wish to do so!
I greatly enjoyed this game and it inspired me to go play the dishonored series afterwards as it has many of the same systems.

This was a unique game. I went into it thinking it was like superliminal due to the trailer, but it is honestly its own thing.
While solving puzzles you are hearing snippets of a relationship between two individuals, and it tells their story while you play the game.
I personally enjoyed the puzzles far more than their story, but you may like it more for the latter.
Nice for what it was, don't regret my time spent.

I came into this game as a fan of pathfinder, dnd 3.5, divinity original sin series, pillars of eternity, and many other similar titles, but this was my first game based on 5e.

Overall I enjoyed the game and its systems, and if you like turn based fantasy you would probably enjoy 95% of your experience in this title! I especially loved watching the cutscenes with the 4 voice acted companions you created with different personalities bicker with one another.

The few gripes I have are these:
If you don't already know 5e the game does a very poor job of explaining many elements, with some tooltips completely missing basic information such as range or radius of spells altogether.
"legendary actions". Basically, bosses will take extra turns, and during those turns, the bosses aren't punished for things like "standing in a wall of fire" because it isn't technically their normal turn yet. I was told by others this is not how legendary actions are used in pen and paper and was an incomplete interpretation of the mechanic.

That said, the rest of the journey was an enjoyable one, overall I'd give it an 8/10 for its game type.

I had never played a rhythm game before, and this was an absolute blast. The music and animations can't help but make you smile when you get a successful streak going, and you see everything start dancing along with you. It took me 3.5 hours to clear the normal campaign, but there are higher difficulties if you wish to challenge yourself.

An eerie story of a game that was rather enjoyable. This is not a "jumpscare" game. If you are looking for that it will only get you once or twice. This is more about the psychological tail of a disturbed man and what he and his family went through. Dark, creepy, and interesting. There are multiple endings so I watched the others on YouTube after I finished to understand the full story. Worth the price IMO!

If you liked Battle Chasers, you would love this. It utilizes the same combat systems, fantastic "comic book" imagery, and incredible music that made me want to download it for my own playlists. Very much enjoyed this title.

I came back and played this game after playing Frictionals other titles: Amnesia and Soma but left disapointed. There was very little story and it felt like most of the game could be summarized in a few sentences. The ending didn't answer most of the questions (but possibly intentional since there is a sequel).

Two major complaints I had:

1) I HAD TO PUT A PIECE OF TAPE ON MY SCREEN FOR THIS. The game lets you interact with things and often (but not always) shows a cursor when you look at an item you can interact with. After I was halfway through the game and at a control panel covered in buttons and I couldn't see what I was clicking on, I had to put a piece of tape on my monitor in the middle to use as a makeshift crosshair to proceed.
2) The melee controls. To swing the hammer or mining pick you have to click down, drag left, then drag right after a slight delay. If you time it wrong, you spin your character like a top and don't swing at all. This lead to me sneaking up on an enemy then spinning and it proceeding to murder me, many times. This control was not one that you could change in the settings, I checked.

Overall, despite loving the other games produced by this company I'm not sure if I'll play the sequel to this one after this experience.