Neue Rezensionen von Tavish DeGroot

This game is a masterpiece in terms of adapting an old classic. If you never wanted to play Half-Life due to its aged graphics you should definitely give this one a try. It tells the same story, in an improved engine and lifts up many of the poor chapters and locations from the classic Half-Life. Specifically speaking the entirety of Xen that has been completely reworked in level and biome design.

It's a game made by fans, and their dedication shines thoroughly. A solid 10.

I played a lot of Command & Conquer in my youth and there was nothing alike the "Challenge" gamemode in CNC Generals. At least not until I tried this game.

While it is not a traditional real time strategy game, it does take a nice spin on it. You must carefully balance your food, wood and krown (coin) income, as depleting your storage of any of these resources will ruin your settlement. You must explore and claim land to take advantage of its resources and then spend those resources on an army to defeat your foes.

The campaign is quite solid, it introduces gameplay mechanics and allows you to try out the different clans and how they operate. The campaign also hands you specific objectives in order to complete, but overall it's quite grounded in what you will find in regular skirmish matches.

But my favorite part of the game is the Conquest gamemode, and as I mentioned earlier, is quite reminiscent of the Challenge gamemode in Generals. You pick a clan and then complete different scenarios, picking up perks along the way in a rogue like dungeon crawl fashion.

This makes for incredible replayability if you enjoy the game at its core, as you can put together different perks for allowing different strategies each time you play. I love that.

I love this game. Its implementation of weapon, enemy and class design just works so well together.

You have a choice between 4 playable dwarves each being a class or archetype of their own. Their traits complement each other and having all 4 in your game makes for smooth gameplay, but it is not mandatory and stacking classes is doable and will probably only slow you down a bit.

With that said, play the game however you like it. There is a dwarf out there for you. Be it the scout that has the most mobility, he can grapple onto any surface, light up the caves and in sticky situations is quite good at saving downed teammates.

Pick the gunner if you want to mow down any bug that comes your way. With heavy weaponry and a protective shield, you are sure to handle waves of enemies with him.

If you like to plan ahead and be a little more in the background, you may also like the engineer. Deploy sentries to deal with most stragglers and deploy platforms on resource deposits on the walls and the ceiling. Then pretend to be the leader of the group, by pointing them out to your scout, as he can easily reach them.

But if you don't like any of that cooperation nonsense, you may as well just pick the driller, to fullfil your warcrime dreams, by cooking bugs with radioactive waves and burning them to a crisp with flame weaponry.


The gameplay loop is interesting, as with its procedurally generated caves and complete disregard for how many foes appear in them, each session becomes a unique adventure.

I almost forgot... ROCK & STONE.

This negative review is a shame, as I enjoy both the core game and its graphical style.

However its game design is truly plauged by incompetent decisions from the developers, that sometimes forces players to grind for resources and travel too much back and forth, taking away the experience of the otherwise amazing world generation and building mechanics.

The game is structured much like a level design that forces its players to take on a boss from each respective biome in a specific order. That being from the peacefull meadows through the black forest and ultimately to the ashlands with everything in between.

This is not bad on its own, but whenever you move from one biome to the next, all your gear is almost worthless, forcing you to attain new gear in the new biome. But why is this such a problem?

Firstly, there's light armor and heavy armor and for most people the heavy armor is the go to, because having low armor in this game doesn't only make you more vulnerable to damage, it also allows enemies to stagger you when they land a hit. And without enough armor, you can't even block their attacks. If they deal enough damage, their attacks will pierce through your block and stagger you. An event that mostly will result in your death in later biomes.

To avoid these fatal episodes, you must not only acquire the new gear you can get from each biome, you must also ugrade it and most heavy armor in this game is made of metal. Metal you must mine and bring home to process in a smelter. This is not to mention the inventory is so small and your weight capacity is a hilariously low.

This gameloop is a slog. You can barely carry any metal with you at a time, so you are forced to travel back and forth. The best way to alleviate this is to construct a remote smeltery. But all of these things take too much time.

Most of the time you will enter a new biome feeling too weak, so you avoid fighting enemies and try to gather its materials so you can fight them, only to have that gear be as useless as your previous after you kill the boss and move onto the next biome.

Honestly, I feel that the developers hates its players as each mandatory thing this game forces you to do, is a completely horrible experience.

Dying can throw you into a loop, where you die over and over again, trying to recover your items. Remember how low armor is a death sentence in most biomes.

This game has outstanding and intuitive game design. It revolves around building up settlements that you as a viceroy must guide through its struggles. Complete objectives, cut through the forest to discover glades or manage your villagers' needs.

It's a game about adapting to the hand you are given and its numerous factors allow you to pull lots of string in order to achieve it. You will be rewarded for creativity and knowledge about the game's many mechanics.

But do not worry about mechanics bloat, this game has a tutorial like no other. It will give you an objective in order to show you its purpose and then let you complete it however you like. It makes you engage in the game's mechanics at your own pace and allows you to quickly learn the ropes. This makes for an extremely intuitive tutorial and it's well put together.

In short, the game will gradually throw new mechanics as you progress in level. It begins relatively simple, but as you level up, you unlock new types of structures and cornerstones that are perks you roll for in each session.
More cornerstones makes for greater adaptability, but it also bloats the total pool of cornerstones you can attain.

You will like this game, if you love to explore and try new things each time you play.
You will probably not like it, if you hate changes, as each game is different and you do not decide which blueprints for structures you get.

To me that is a solid 10 out of 10.

All my cattle died to wall burrowing leeches. I'll play Minecraft instead.

It's one of those games that truly gives you control of your story. There's no, am I supposed to do it like this? Kind of moments. Only your choice, your story and what you do with it. For better or worse.