Recent reviews by Alex

I bought this game a long time ago, but held off on playing past the intro campaign, waiting for AI improvements and release.

I am glad to report that the game is ready to play—even on middle difficulty, with no advantage in economic/production stats over the player the AI is quite capable of pushing back. He could be more aggressive still, but it's not quite a walk in the park as it is even 1 vs 1.

Besides that, even though the game looks like Heroes of Might & Magic on indie budget, there are significant gameplay differences that do not allow HoMM veterans to hit the ground running, so to speak. A lot of things that I found annoying or not fun in multiplayer of HoMM 3 and HotA aren't present here.

The base-building and town development is done differently, the unit upgrades are done differently, you have a harder time making doom stacks of units. you can only recruit your own faction units as the captured towns are "converted" to your side, the magic system is completely different and a lot more flexible than the perpetual hunt for expert earth magic in HoMM 3, you can't hire any more than 1 hero without significant town upgrades, reducing the effectiveness of hero chains, as not only the newly and belatedly hired heroes weaker in stats, they simply can not carry even a full-sized mid-game army—having more than 3 stacks of creatures requires both level ups and specific skill upgrades.


One more thing to mention: online is a lot busier than it was before, so if you want to get trounced by real players instead of AI the opportunity is always there (though, unfortunately there's no full-on online lobby a la Battle.net, HotA or BfW. If you want to chat before a match or find a game that is not locked by password you'll have to go to official discord server )

First 6 hours, and there's already clear glaring issues to be found, that apparently were around since at least 2018 (!). I am talking about sentinels, which, the game tells you, can be fought off or hidden from.

Only, I can't dig deep enough undergound to be out of their range, terraforming laser won't allow me go deeper than 30-something meters. They can't be fought off, since new waves spawn not ten seconds later, and in space there's capital ship parked and waiting because fighting a bunch of pretty easy waves of fighters in space spawns THAT. And all that because I picked some glowing orb in the middle of nowhere...

40 minutes of trying to figure out how to lose them (can't warp or speed away because of a damaged ship and crash landing away from base). For that.

As I found out, waaaay back when, you could fight and kill them fast enough for new ones not to spawn. But that wasn't an option since apparently 2018 if forum threads found in top search results are to be believed. It's been 6 years and that hasn't been changed?

You know what this tells me? That the developers don't play their own game. Never did. Nor are they really succesful at "repairing" the game that was barely a tech demo on release.

(edit: thinking about all that I've seen in those few hours and how baffling the design of everything in this game is, I question if any of the developers actually play and like ANY videogames at all.)

I bought this because I bought all the talk of No Man's Sky being a success story, now fully realised with all the promised features from release and more!

Yeah...it's not that. NOT EVEN CLOSE.

The UI is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥: a switch to first person view is hidden in the most un-intuitive place possible (it's in one of the quick menus that you bring up while being on the ground in game); quests don't track items properly (you need 5 microprocessors to assemble a part of your ship, but if you install those into the part, the game switches the tracker to the previous step, so you need to look elsewhere to find what else you need to progress, because now the game thinks that you need more microprocessors since it only tracks inventories, not quest progress); there is only a galaxy map. No map on the planets. None at all. And if you're close enough to some point of interest, then most other indicators on the compass and the screen fade away so you have no idea which way is your base, your ship or anything else. And if you marked an asteroid in orbit it will stay as that kind of priority PoI on your interface even if you're millions of kms away on a planet's surface, screwing your UI until you get up in orbit and un-tag the piece of rock manually. Oh, and least I forget: your "compass" isn't actually a compass, there's no indicators for north, or any other permanent directions. It's just a wheel with icons on top of your screen...


In short, the "honeymoon" phase with this game was VERY short, but unfortunately I spent more than 2 hours on it, so no refund for me.

Maybe I'll stuck around and look if some kind people actually managed to mod something resembling a fun game out of this husk, but for people who said that this is "better than Starfield", I say you're full of ♥♥♥♥. This one is very close to what Bethesda ♥♥♥♥♥ out: technically a game that is just a platform for mods, empty, brittle and hollow on its own.

It's fun. Plenty of variability: enemies, builds, bonuses. Dunno if it will hold up for hundreds of hours, but among the flood of deckbuilders trying to get an easy slice of a pie that was cooked by Slay the Spire, this one is definitely well above average.

Floaty, imprecise, slow and ultimately annoying. The idea is great, but this is not Titanfall. The controls and physics are much closer to Mirror's Edge, but worse.

Refunded

From Software is the only non-indie developer left that does make complete, working on release games with no microtransactions, battlepasses or other ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

And they just don't do bad games. More than that, they just keep pushing the limits of game design. People said that Elden Ring could never be as good as advertised, that it will be an empty, hollow, openworld a la garbage that Ubisoft ♥♥♥♥♥ out for the last two decades. And From just went and proved naysayers wrong.

Sekiro—another game that I (and I am sure many others) dreamed of since playing first two Tenchu games on PS1. The sequels to that were each more underwhelming than the next, with the series quietly going under. From Software just went and made the best Tenchu game ever, and lack of rights to the franchise was likely more of a benefit than not. They went through fans' wishlist for a sequel, and did all of that and more, and for this I will be forever grateful to them.

And now Armored Core 6...

I honestly never expected to see another game in this series. Not after Dark Souls took off the way it did.
High-speed mecha-builder action is just too niche of a premise for a game in this day and age.

And that did not matter to From Software at all. They just went and did it again—the game people dreamed of, made real, here and now. And their recent fame made even newcomers to the series give this game a chance. And what do you know, seems many people liked it.

So, if you want a recommendation—there you have it. I recommend this game, this series and this development studio.

Great game, great developers.
It's the first "city-builder" I genuinely liked, specifically because AtS does its own thing, instead of going by a design template made for other games.
Every aspect is great: the art, the music, the writing (not much of it here, but just enough, and just good enough to stir imagination in all the right ways), the gameplay, replayability, wide selection of difficulties that really alter the game, meaningful meta-upgrades and the inclusion of a mode that disables them. It's a complete, polished, well optimized game. Feels refreshing in this day and age, not needing to wait for bugfixes or post-release feature updates.

No complaints from me whatsoever.

Slay the Spire this is not. Nor Slice & Dice (not on Steam, it's on itch dot io) edit: actually just released on Steam, better try Slice & Dice instead of this.

-everything in UI is either way too big or too small

-instead of short tutorial that takes a minute at most and no hand-holding from then on, this game starts slower. Not much slower, the tutorial is still brief, but it could be even briefer.

-no in-game encyclopedia with keywords, items and other game elements available for looking up information. Maybe unlocks later, but then, why not immediately?

The game didn't grab me. slow start and UI being an eye-sore didn't help. Refunded.

"Meh" rating would be more appropriate here.

It is a competently made game with a lot of care put into it. But it just isn't the same as 3 and 4. There is no feeling of speed and flow in combat. And the story that was stupid but endearing just tries too hard this time. DMC 5 has everything on paper. But it just isn't fun for me. Hell, I had more fun with failed reboot than this, as strange as it may sound. Because DmC when it came out, was a major letdown. I only beat it once. But I did BEAT IT. Not this one.

Maybe I'm just too old for video games. Or maybe the developers of DMC 5 are.

Good game.

Played it a lot on PSP over a decade ago. I don't have the time for games like those anymore, where grind is put on top of grind on top of several New Game + cycles and even more grind. It's a fun and much more involved kind of grind than even Disgaea.

It's a game made by min-maxers for min-maxers. + there is a story that starts like a very lazy parody of sentai-superheroes that gets a couple unexpectedly good twists in the second half. Typical anime storytelling—two good ideas hidden behind tons of tedious, mediocre graphomania. But gameplay is good for what it is, so if you have too much free time and enjoy dungeon-crawlers and min-maxing character builds—get this game.

Even more so than the previous one, this DLC is an excellent addition to the base game.

In essence, each assassin unit provides a counter to a particular set of enemy mechanics: Sniper can clear bloom spreaders without approaching into their attack range. Same goes for most other enemies. He is the most straightforward of the four, and can easily serve as a main stay damage dealer on your A team.

Pariah, or Anti-mage if you will, can shut down enemy abilities, buffs, and cancel warp rifts denying enemy reinforcements (though that one can be done a limited amount of times per mission, so it should be used wisely). She also does good damage and can delay warp surges.

Assasin (whatever her designation in-game, those WH40K terms and names are often blend together) provides scouting and sneaking behind enemy lines. Anti-armor attacks+disables+AOE — she can clear mid-tier enemy squads on her own or with minimal support.

The last one seems to be a melee specialist and I haven't tried him yet, but with how useful the other 3 are I am sure that he also has a lot to offer.

All of that plus boarding missions (this REALLY should have been in the base game) and new enemies one of which appears very early, is also very nice.

TL;DR : Get both DLCs if you buy the game, otherwise it will feel a bit bare bones in comparison.