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Princess Maker Refine is more or less a simulation game where you raise an orphan over a timespan of 8 years and ends when she becomes 18.

The "story" itself is just completely bland, short and uninterestening. You are a hero who killed some evil demon overlord and instead of accepting the reward from the king the hero asks if he can raise orphans. I dont see how it makes sense how this is a request or even a reward. Since there are many orphans as he says he could have just picked any kid off the street. Anyways during the game the ending only changes based upon how you trained your orphan. During that time there arent any events except a festival where you can send your orphan either to beauty contest or material arts contest, nor any interestening dialogue to see.

The gameplay is a confusing mess at first. Basically you have to send your daughter to work, keep her body and mind healthy and send her on school. Based on which job you send her she raises and decreases in various stats that have an impact on the ending. The ending is only calculated tough on reputation and the highest stat your character has. The game does tell you sometimes that a specific job increases strength as an example, but the inn increases stamina and the game doesnt tell you about it. This feels rather inconsistent.

The visual novel aspect is barebones, actually there is no story to speak of except the beginning or the end, the personality of the orphan will not change really except if her spirit is too low she becomes stubborn troublemaker. But otherwise, you can send her working in a brothel and she does it just fine and keeps her personality the whole time. There is also no real option to skip things which is in grindy multiple ending visual novel type of games a must have.

The artstyle is atleast not making me have eye cancer like in clannad, but if you dont mind early video game artstyles in the time of early 90´s and early 2000 you wont have much problems because some outfits and character models do look good. Especially the intro and endings have a good charm, more or less.

In generall Princess Maker Refine is a very grindy, boring and maybe interstening for the first playtrough, but having no skip option makes the overall process rather annoying. The game is definetly not terrible, but there are better games out there with more personality than this game due to having atleast some kind of story.

3.5 / 10 Bad game

After playing the vanilla version to release and now the enhanced edition i came to the conclusion that Space Hulk: Deathwing is a mediocre co-op shooter which could have been better if the developers focused more on the gameplay aspects instead of the graphics and maps.

The singleplayer and multiplayer is the same map wise. The only difference is that the single player campaign is only playable with a librarian psyker where you can upgrade 3 skill trees after each chapter. Now since there is a leveling and a random objective marker added, multiplayer is actually worthwile to play.

In space hulk you choose a class out of 5 which have their unique abillities. Some of course are just plain way much better than others and an medic(apothecary) is always necessary. The objectives are either go to that place and destroy that thing or activate that thing and 99% of the time you wait until the horde ends.

The combat is probably the worst in the game. Most of the melee weapons are useless because ranged is just so much better. Melee weapons feel like plastic and have no weight behind them. Since you have infinite ammo you rarely need melee anyways. The balancing is crap because there is mostly only 1-2 good options in each class. The flamethrower is pretty good and fun to use, they designed the flame very beatifully and ive never seen a better flamethrower in any other game. Using any other weapon except the standart bolter is rarely useful because it has the best range and is therefore the best against hybrids who wield guns from very far away or automatic cannons. only flamethrower and auto cannon can be useful situationally.

The maps on the other hand are fantastic, graphics are great aswell. There are many details and the maps never feel like a bunch of stock assets bunched together which would have been surely temptating to do in a narrow corridor shooter.The game finally runs also more stable and is finally now playable without owning the newest hardware.

The game tough lacked replayabillity. It tried to fix it by adding random map objective markers and a leveling/upgrade system. Playing in co-op can surely be fun, but if the game would have run on some more mod friendly engine, or had some sort of map editor the game surely would have attracted a more stable playerbase. But as it is of launch, you are lucky if you find 4-5 hosts or players who join your game.

Overall the price doesnt justify its content. The gunplay is mediocre at best and the great map design is the only thing that overshadows the shallow objective design. Even if you are into warhammer 40k, the game is probably at best only fun playing once trough. If you have a couple of friends to play the game it is probably only fun once, and the game takes about 9 hours.

5/10 Average game.

Satellite Reign is a real-time strategy that includes rpg elements.

The games premise is fairly average, you start as a company that does shady businesses in order to get a ressurection device from a company called Dracogenics that rules the city/the world the game is set it. The ressurection device gave them pretty much power over the whole city and everything is corrupt.I liked the idea with the ressurection device being a social problem but the whole game doesnt have much personality in this regard and does not really show how this affected the people except generic cyberpunk everything is bad and most people are poor.

The gameplay itself is alright and has a couple of things i really liked but some are very annoying. The game has recources you have to manage but its just really barebones. Money and scientists(research time). You can research things you aquire but there arent many and the only problem is usually the money because the missions often dont give enough and you rely on having early in the game spam hacking abillity to hack ATM´s to ensure a steady income. The rpg elements are alright, you cant decide between classes and are set to 4 characters which appereance can be modified by cloning people you find on the street which also give small bonuses on stats. The equipment system is fun, you can upgrade your characters in various ways or even just skill on being able to equip more etc. Its definetly improveworthy balance wise with the skills and the items. Balancing wise heavy weapons felt in the endgame pretty useless compared to some smgs. The game is in real-time but in my opinion its not made for it since it heavily relies on stealth. The easiest way for most mission was just to send out your infiltrator with invisibillity abillity and sometimes your hacker with invisibillity cloack.

The game gives early on quests where there are often only 2-3 choices to go inside and you cant do the other 2 because your hacking or some similliar abillity is not high enough despite i constantly skilled on them. You can force hack but the chance is pretty low and it ends up in reloading the game whole time. So the game suffers from balancing issues early on which barely gets better in late because you can just run out guns blazing at some point by kiting enemies. Stealth is later on usually only a part option and the last boss in the game was very easy if you kite him but is almost impossible to beat in the way its ment to be.

The soundtrack is allright, most of the time 80s synthwave stuff, i barely remember them tough but it wasnt bad i would say.

The graphics are good, the city feels very alive with tons of people. It can be pretty immersion breaking if you notice them walking around in circles but thats about it. In itself its just regular cyberpunk stuff, not much to look at because the game didnt manage to have much more personality.

The game is full of bugs, it can happen that your troops stuck in a wall if you go into cover. Pathfindig can spazz out etc, its not as bad as many say but its still noticable and partially gamebreaking.

In the end i would say that the game is very bland, does not offer much personality and except the ending there is not much unexpected happening storywise. Gameplay is alright but suffers from issues. Combined with the bugs and rather mediocre gameplay i wouldnt recommend this game to anyone because the game is just average at best and does not offer any value to be played because there are better games in the marker that are the same genre.

5/10 average game

Vermintide 2 is a first person co-op fps where you play objective based maps and grind better loot to be able to play higher difficulties.

The game itself offers a good amount of maps which you follows losely a story within the warhammer end times universe. The story itself is narrativly pretty mediocre and almost no map offers a good amount of backstory.

The gameplay on the other hand is very interestening and unique because it offers a mix of melee and ranged combat and some classes focus more on one or the other. You level up each character which unlocks new talents and classes where each of the 5 characters has 3 classes to offer.Each class has an unique ultimate which has an cooldown that can be speed up by killing enemies or drinking concentration potions. Some are of course, way much more better than others. In each map there is a slot for healing items , potions and bombs and ranged and melee weapons.

Melee and ranged weapons are equipped before the game , same as trinkets, charms and necklaces, which offer different stats and power level. Bombs are seperated into regular bombs and the other you dont care about because the fire grenades are almost useless and nerfed into the ground . Potions are seperated into concentration, strength and speed potion. Which one you need is mostly only based on your playstyle/character class and weapon type and is therefore quite well balanced. Healing items are seperated into healing drafts and bandages. Bandages heal more if you have less life because they heal a % of your life and healing drafts are useful because they can heal you better if you have more life left and are quicker to use.

Some melee weapons are better than others while a very low amount of them are just completely superior to others the amount is good and fun. Only thing i disliked is that the games weapons are only attacking with a fixed attack combo. Especially annoying if enemies approach from the left side of the screen and your character starts making an overhead straight attack. This makes some weapons because of their moveset complete crap.

The ranged weapons usually are the worst in therms of balancing because there are objectivly superior choices to others which even every beginner sees.

The fighting does make fun and the weapons really feel good to use. Only the ranged weapons lack punch despite them being powdered weapons which should be pretty loud to use. Some enemy types are way much more overpowered than others . This doesnt matter that much because most of them are spawning equally. It only makes a difference when there is a boss coming because some are just completely overpowered in some situations or just because of their abillities and stats.

The melee combat does involve blocking and dodging while dodging being totally useless because the hitboxes of the enemies are locked sometimes. If an chaos warrior does an overhead strike 99% of the time the dodge will not work despite you being completely out of reach of his axe, also enemies almost teleport a little if they lock on to you. Therefore dodge is useful only after /while blocking. This makes shield and two handed weapons very useful while one handed being crap.

The loot system is locked via overall power level and difficulty choice. If you open a crate from a level the crate is locked to a power level maximum, after veteran the maximum is 300 for each type of item in the game. More power level means more damage, being able to swing trough more enemies with one hit etc. Crates with more maximum power level than your items have will always drop "better" loot. You always get loot that is like slightly above your current highest achieved power level. So after hours of grinding at some point you reach the maximum and then the loot only matters if you want veteran items which you cant craft. This system keeps the player engaged by always giving better loot and despite a crate not giving the player what he wants you still get overall an higher power level score.

Crafting is basically scrapping in old items and upgrading other items with those materials or building a complete new weapon that is based on the current highest achieved power level on an item. You can also reroll item properties which can be annoying to do because it re rolls all item properties and makes a certain build to achieve just tedious because you mostly have enough materials to be able to re roll your equipment. Of course some item properties are just way much more better than others or written in a way where you arent sure which use it has.

The power level is very important because it locks difficulty. The amount of power level needed for a new difficulty is at the beginning too high . As an example i was missing 2 power level and couldnt play the next diffuclty with my friends. Abusing only one level grind is kinda fixed by making quickplay a good option to get better loot, because at the end of the map you get better crates with slightly better loot, which are calculated by pickups in the game which make the game even harder by draining life or replacing a health slot etc.

Also the developer is not responding to the community complaints and bugs are getting fixed way to late. Bugs that have been reported in the beta are still in the game up to date which makes the idea of a beta rendundant because there werent any fixes.

Overall the game itself has serious balancing issues which diminish many of the games good points and good attempts in creating a new type of gameplay which is still really fun in its overall design and is only gamebreaking for people who aim to play in the higher difficulties and realize the issues the game has.

7.5/10 good game

Ash of Gods is a turn-based strategy game with roleplay elements which storytelling is made in a visual novel style.

You are set in the world of Terminum and have to (minor spoiler, only the premise of the game actually) fend off(or rather survive) "The reaping" which is said to be only a fairy tale. This occurrence is a curse that makes people mad, turns healing stones into death stones and slowly kills everyone.
The story itself is really good, the premise starts off well and you really want to know how things turn out.
You take role of 3 protagonists which have a set personality but are narrated by referring to yourself. Interestening concept which really helps attaching yourself to the protagonists. Each story is very intriguing and keeps you going the whole time. Even main characters can die and the story will be continued to be told so you have to be careful to not kill your favorite characters. You constantly switch between the story of each character which gives you all the time a change of pace.

The decisions in the game you make most of the time have some sort of influence or atleast never give you some sort of pseudo influence which makes the end result the same. The personality is sort of set for the protagonists but your decisions can even make your character kill innocents because of the situation you seemed fit to do. I really loved this because it gives narrative and story wise a better story to tell but gameplay wise you also have a word to say. The dialogue on the other hand can be a bit tedious. While at times the writing can be very good, sometimes it can a bit tediously long when characters banter about things which doesnt really keep the story on. Like when characters keep on repeating things that happened in the past without putting any interestening input, this happens only on one storyline tough so its not really a huge complaint.

The combat is a turn based strategy style with roleplaying element. You have character classes and skills which level up while you travel the world of terminum with quests in mind that drives the protaginists to a destination. While there is combat there is also some sort of resource management where you have to be careful to not run out of strixes which is some sort of metal that protects people against the curse but also slowly melts away.

The combat system is makes fun and feels balanced most of the time. The combat uses energy as a resource for some abillities , movement beyond the characters movement limit and as some sort of shield. If energy is depleted you get extra damage and deal extra damage on enemies who has no energy. Most abillities tough use health as a resource. Which make energy not so viable but still careful to look on it. The game offers a broad set of tools which you can use as means of stategy. In my opinion some character classes feel less useful than others. Some only get really good later on tough. Archers are just a slightly overpowered tough because the range is huge and you can shoot trough enemies and friends. While other attacks can inflict your teammates.

Next is the card system where you can use up to 5 magic cards during a turn. Instead of using a character you can use one of these cards. In my opinion it is a little bit poorly implemented because most of the time it doesnt serve as a useful porpuse especially in early game because the cards are limited and mostly crap except the healing , shield and sometimes the damage card. Later on you can get better cards, stronger cards tough can only be used after a couple of turns.

In order to understand why the cards are most of the time useless i have to explain the turn based system. While you can take more characters it comes with a downside. You have to use each character once in order to get a next turn whith a character. This makes it really hard to justify using a card because it doesnt deplenish a turn you have to use . And if you have less characters you can use your characters more often. If the enemy has only one character and you have a character in the frontline he gets rekt every turn you make despite you cant do anything to help him. This adds another strategic layer by also looking at the enemy numbers. Killing every enemy without thinking can end up in bad situations and characters can die after 3 wounds. As an example : This is why a card that gives a character more damage feels useless because it gives the enemy another turn in which you could instead attack him and try to get a turn faster.My sole complaint is that cards are very situational and this is why some arent as useful as others.

Overall its fairly decently balanced tough because you can ignore the cards part early on mostly and only later it gets really useful if the battles get harder.

The soundtrack is just plain perfect. The soundtrack has either this celctic or mongolian feeling to it and fits often to the situation by either giving your epic combat music or tenebrous mongolian throatsinging.

The artstyle is beautiful to look at and will still look good in 10+ years. Every cutscene,combat map,background and character looks fantastic and offers many details. The animations are pretty good to look at and even characters of the same class can have different animations. The speed of the combat animations is possible to increase if you feel like they are too slow .

In the end i can totally recommend this to everyone who likes rpgs,visual novels,turn based strategy games or all of them. The game itself offers a huge brandwith of features and strategic gameplay elemts which are mostly well implemented into the game and the story combinded with the awesome artstyle and soundtrack offers a fantastic experience that is only having some combat balancing issues and sometimes excessively long dialogue.

7.5/10 Great game

Evoland is a RPG-parody that leads the player trough different kinds of RPG gameplays during its cliche story.

While game starts off with basic action-adventure gameplay it evolves into turn based combat with leveling and later on into hack and slash. While each gameplay type is really just their most common stereotypical form, it doesnt evolve into anything bigger than that. The action adventure part is a zelda parody, turn based is final fantasy (7) parody and the hack and slash is diablo. Each is just the basic barebones of the games they parody and therefore really unenjoyable after a couple of minutes. It starts to drag on and get boring and the only thing that keeps you going is some new cliche they implement via a new chest that you open. All of the bosses are also just parodies of known bosses and just follow one attack pattern you have to repeat.

The graphics start with 8-Bit to 16-Bit towards "HD" 3D.

The story is a stereotype mix out of zelda and final fantasy 7. Almost all of the jokes werent funny at all because calling your main character Clink and the antagonist Zephyros isnt funny at all. You could expect all of the jokes just by having a side character called Kaeris. I cant remember that i liked any of the "jokes" they presented because almost all of them were references. As an example DLC Quest had a similliar structure like the game but was shorter and was based around one single issue with modern gaming.

After i finished the 3 hours of the game i didnt really felt i enjoyed the game in any way because neither the gameplay nor the jokes were any funny.

The game is playable but boring and most people who get the references arent really enjoying neither the story or the gameplay because they have seen better in other games.

3/10 Bad game

Darkwood is a story driven horror-survival game with minor rpg elements that is set in a forest in poland were your main goal is to escape the forest.

First of all i want to describe the astethics because that was first a major selling point. The pixelart is wonderful and partially looks directly out of some very good painting. I love this horror-gory styled artstyle and many compare it as being lovecraftian or cathulhu like. The comparisment comes probably from the horror that you cant really describe unlike something simple as a guy with a chainsaw. Definetly rememberable and very atmospheric and scary.

The soundtracks and the ambient sounds are fantastic. Music itself is only used to support a general feel in a certain situation. Sometimes this only is made by ambient sounds like wood cracking or birds chirping. The soundtrack itself is very good but not really memorable because it blends in in the game so well that makes it more a part of the game rather than standalone music slapped on a game so the player has something nice or fitting to hear.

The gameplay is totally solid, during day you explore, loot, try to do quests or/and go further in the main storyline. At night you have to barricade, trap your house and defend yourself against foes that want to kill you. During that random things can occur that yourself cant even explain very well and the game isnt really using jumpscares to scare you but rather the whole game itself is 24/7 tense and every second an enemy can come behind and attack you. This is especially the case during the night because enemies will come but its scary that you dont know when.

Unlike other top-down view perspective game you have only a limited viewpoint in form of a cone which can increase or decrease. Things that arent in your viewpoint cant be seen except immobile structures. You craft slowly better items and upgrade your workbench to be able to make even better items. Only thing i disliked was the fact that there arent that many things to craft i wished for a couple of different traps or melees etc. because there arent really many choices there.

The weapons on the other hand are hard to craft and take very long. Even when you get weapons the game still feels tense because enemies are still dangerous if you dont see them and ammo is very limited because it can only be found or traded but that is in very low quantity. You only feel at the very end of the game a little overpowered and stocked with weapons guns blazing if you really looted much and always saved your ammo which happened to me but i died also often by trying to melee kill strong enemies instead of using my gun.

The story itself starts out very well with a story telling twist. During the game you search for clues to what happened to you, the forest and how to get out of it. The ending doesnt really explain why everything happened for this you always had to pay attention to what people told you and some of the items you have found. The ending isnt directly slapping you the answer of what happens to your character but isnt way too vague like some horror games are. I grasped the ending directly and it comes totally clear what is happening when you get to the true ending. Both endings are good in my opinion and makes the story for me very memorable.

In conclusion i totally recommend this game for everyone. Even if you dont care about the story, the horror elements and fun gameplay itself make the game totally worth it. The game is perfectly long and stops when the gameplay starts to be repetetive. There are many things to discover and find out but you can also just rush for the ending and miss a lot.

8.5/10 Great game

The Secret Armory of General Knoxx is a DLC that sets your story on a huge highway were you fight off an enemy army and try to get into the Armory of General Knoxx to get that juicy loot you want.

Sounds good right? Well the whole thing feels more like a chore to play. The DLC is set on a huge highway were you have to drive back and forth and back and forth over and over again because in order to proceed in the main quest of the DLC the quests always are set on the other end of the map mostly. After some time i really almost quit because the biggest challenge was not getting your car destroyed by the enemies troops otherwise it will be a boring walking simulator for you.

The enemies on the other hand are great and passing the highway for the first time was a pretty fun experience because the enemies are pretty unique and and some spice to the pre-existing enemies of the base game.

The loot at the end of the game can be good but it depends if you even need it because if you already beaten all the other quests its only useful for a new game +.

Overall i would say the DLC had some potential but ended up in a disaster by a design choice of the developers to artificially increase the play time of the DLC.

3/10 Bad DLC

Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot is a DLC that sets you in a gladiator like arena with different challenges and mutators to spice the things up.

The whole gameplay in this DLC is just fighting off waves. The whole idea with the mutators that add different challenges doesnt sound bad but playing wave after wave feels more like a chore in this DLC because the enemies require not really any skill to beat but much ammo and good guns because they are just a couple of bullet sponges.

There isnt really a justifyable reason to play these waves because the enemies dont even drop loot or xp and the only reward is an XP point or two for your character.

The problem is also that the waves are only really beatable in late game or you were lucky and found a couple of very good guns already. In the endgame you dont really need that reward that much and wasting your time grinding for a better weapon would pay off more than doing this chore.

Overall the worst DLC for the Borderlands game because it just feels like a quickly made and unbalanced copy paste idea to get more money out of the community

2/10 Terrible DLC

The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned is a DLC that sets you in a place were an evil scientist made zombies out of people and your job is it to clean up the mess.

The premise starts well until you meet the first monsters. The zombies are really underpowered and can be beaten at the first levels of the game. The only way you can get any challenge from this dlc is by going there directly after unlocking the transportation system.

The quests are bland and boring and suffer from being more like a chore than being fun. Collecting 100 Brains isnt fun at all.

The story is as bland as it can be but atleast the humor is okay.

The whole thing doesnt have any teleports so if you quit the game you have to walk the whole map again from the beginning of the start. Not really fun.

The reward is obviously not really good except you play it in early game. The last boss fight was rather annoying than hard.

The artstyle and setting/atmosphere was great tough and the swamps were good to look at because it was a huge difference from the bland desert artstyle of the main game.

I cant recommend this DLC because it is poorly balanced and only fun for people who really enjoy zombie settings.

3.5/10 Bad DLC