Recent reviews by alexwojtak

This is a fun game where you run a restaurant, but it just gets more and more hectic day-by-day. The short term goal is managing to keep your restaurant open for just 15 days, which is hard enough, but the various ways the events you choose can change the menus, your restaurant's equipment, and the customers who come in, make each play through very different.

It's fun in singleplayer as well as multiplayer, which is something not many games manage to successfully pull off, and it manages to be hectic and panicky, while somehow now anxiety inducing. You end up in a mad rush, and then you want to do it all over again.

An absolutely wonderful game, and highly recommended.

"What's the scariest game you've ever played?"
"Doki Doki Literature Club"
"What? Isn't that some Japanese dating sim?
Wait... it's on Steam...
Wait, it's free on Steam..."
[cut to four hours later]
"OH MY HOLY GOD WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL!?"

So, yeah. Scariest game ever.

Firstly, this is very much a storytelling game, lasting about three hours or so if you really go for it. Some people seem to object to that type of game, so if games like 'gone home' or 'dear esther' aren't your cup of tea, then you may not be keen,

As this type of game, it's one of the best games I've ever played. It has huge emotional depth, well written characters with responses that are very heavily influenced by the decisions you make. The story starts setting the backstory for the protagonist, and then develops into a wonderfullly atmospheric mystery. It give you a wonderful area to explore, and the humour of the characters is fantastic. In my opinion, easily worth the money, and one of the best games I've played.

There's a lot of pros and cons, but on balance this si still a great, enjoyable, expansive game.

cons:
It doesn't feel as expansive as other Bethesda games. Yes it's got a good 40 hours in the main quest, but that would let you complete the main quest and major side quests and be done. So if you compared it to something like Skyrim, that's a lot less content.

The major plot doesn't make too much sense. You do feel, for want of a better word, railroaded into conflict between the factions, and I'm just thinking "My character with 10 Cha could probably get them to sort all this out if we all just sat round a table together." The main factions all want to do what's right, but somehow end up nuking each other. No faction is really evil, and this leads to there being no way to convincingly play as an evil character.

Settlement building has a lot of issues. The settlements you can build are very limited in therms of the assets even in the game itself that you can use. There's a lot of stuff you can't remove in a way that doesn't feel like it makes sense. You can't even rip the weeds out of your garden. Mods fix an awful lot of this though.

The mouth animations are stuck well inside the uncanny valley. It looks like a cross between someone wearing someone else's face as a mask, and those adverts where they CGI a mouth on a baby to make it talk. For some reason they really made a big deal of this in the trailer, putting desdemona's speech pretty centrally when it just doesn't look good. It actually looks better in other scenes when you're not looking at it, but that leads me to my next point:

The trailer is terrible.
It really doesn't show off what makes this game so much fun to play. It undersells a lot of the really great aspects of the game. which leads me to the good points

Settlement building is far better than I expected going in. I'd not read up beforehand, and I was expecting something like heahfire for skyrim, where you can build single houses in preset locations. In reality you get a lot of settlements you can control, you can build pretty much freely, and anywhere within them, you can recruit settlers, manage food, water, defense, happiness, supply lines, build shops, make money, make health clinics, artillary support, and more. And they've left it open to mods, so already there are hundreds of additional bits of housing and furniture available. Consider what the modding community can do after months or years to tinker.

The little touches and side quests are wonderfully crafted, as ever. The little stories you stumble upon in locked terminals and notes on raiders reveal really interesting backstories with inexplicably better writing than some of the main quest.

Certain enemies are classed as 'legendary' and drop items with special additional powers, and you can also modify your armour and weapons at workbenches. This lets you really improve your weapons and hugely customise them, and adds a whole new dimension to that aspect of the game.

On the whole, for the criticism it does get, it's still an incredibly entertaining game, and well worth it.

I have been waiting years for the standalone version of this game, and it's finally here. This game has been about so long parts of the terrain code were written by Notch before he left the project and later created minecraft. You can clearly see the influences that t left on minecraft too. Chopping trees, gaining resources, mining, defending yoursefl from enemies.

The big differences are the 3D graphics, the difficulty, and the levelling. The levelling is fabulously in depth, with over a hundred skills that you can level up. Want to climb a hill? Improve your climbing skill. Want to cook? Improve your cooking skill. Want to cook with dairy? Well, that's a seperate skill. Want to learn the yo-yo? Yep. There's a separate skill for that too.

And the difficultly is insane. The free starter items make it somewhat easier, but you have to craft everything you need, and you have a chance of success. Want to make a mallet? Well, you need to chop a tree down, so that depends on your skill at that, then your skill at making the logs into shafts, the shafts into mallet heads, etc, etc. And if you're not good enough you can mess these steps up. And you can mess up putting the parts together. At low skill there are dozens of ways you can fail.

On top of that, it's one of the few games where you can get properly lost. It avoids the easy "You are here" that we're all used to, and you just have to remember which way you went. It's incredibly refreshing, and it really makes it seem like you're exploring. Taken in the context of when that design choice was made, several years ago, it really stood out. It feels like a more hostile world when you can really get turned around and lose your bearings.

At first, you may well die a lot. If you see a lion, you've got about the odds you'd expect if you really saw a lion. Not much chance. If you walk up a hill, you lose stamina. If you run out, you fall. Many early games of mine saw me killed by a moderate hill. Then again, maybe you'll run into a 20 foot tall monster who will just stomp you into non existance.

The building is incredibly involved, and you can make wonderful structures with the tools in game. Now you can create a standalone world, you can keep them safely stored without any worry of them ever being deleted. You can create your own city, level your skills, and know it's all safe for you to come back to if you have to leave it a while, and that's well worth the wait.

It is really hard to not recommend this, as I would count Baldur's Gate as my favorite game of all time. So while I am not recommending you buy Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, I am still wholeheartedly recommending you get Baldur's Gate, as it is absolutely incredible. If you have never played Baldur's Gate, go to GoG or somewhere and buy the original game. I have easily sunk 200 hours into the original game, back when it required swapping multiple CDs. Only buy this if it is a last resort and you absolutely cannot play Baldur's Gate any other way, as even here it is incredible. But buy the original elsewhere, and not this.

There is really so little work they needed to do to this to make it great. If it was absolutely unchanged it would still be incredible, but sadly the changes they've made are for the worse. There are still stability issues which I don't get with the GoG version, but the most notable problem is the cinematics.

In the original Baldur's Gate, you would get these beautiful (for the time) cut scenes of the area you were entering. The opening cinematic has been replaced with a far worse attempt to recreate it, and most areas have nothing more than a brief glance at the area. The cinematics created such a great feeling of the area you were aout to enter, in nashkel, beregost and the gnoll stronghold, that removing them seriously dents the game experience.

The game of Baldur's Gate itself is as glorious as ever, but this is simply not the best way to play it. It isn't the revamped experience that was promised. It is apparantly possible, with some modding, to get the game back to normal, cinmatics and all, but it seems very backwards to have to do that just to undo the changes that are the supposed selling points of this 'enhanced' game.

The most remarkable thing (of the many remarkable things) about this is that somehow the designer persuaded people to refer to it as a game. It's not a game. It's a webpage. You click through badly written text about depression and that's it. Free or not this should have been rejected out of hand from appearing here. This fails as a game. This fails as text. This fails as a means to raise awareness of depression. A LOT has been said about the behaviour of the developer, and whatever the truth to that, a huge amount of legitimate discussion has been quashed. Whatever the behaviour of some internet trolls, trying to silence legitimate criticism of this blog post masquerading as a game is certainly not acceptable.

Even though it's a very early version of this game, this is already a really enjoyable and scary gaming experience. You can really see the potential in being able to carve out your campsite from the natural woodland around you. It's a delightful hybrid of survival horror and minecraft/wurm online style building. Being able to turn off the monsters is a great feature, and the things you can build are varied and well balanced. You get a sense of achievement when you make a log cabin.

The part that makes this really scary is that you're never quite sure if you're being hunted. It drives you to build as fast as possible, and the scarcity of food means you end up having to range out into danger.

There's the basis of a truly great game here.
It still needs polish, a wider variety of craftable structures, a story, and if it can be left with the option for users to add mods to it, this could be absolutely incredible.

Ah, Spore. I've played this when it first came out with its crippling DRM, and limited installs. This current version on steam works a lot better and is a lot easier to just jump right into when you want a game. And that's a big deal. Being able to just fire it up and start making creatures adds so much to the overall experience, while being stuck in DRM hell really puts you off before you've begun.

The basic idea was always flawed. As has been said, by trying to go from a bacteria to taking over the galaxy, you just can't cover everything. You end up with 5 minigames rather than one full one. That said, there's something enduring and fun about this that makes it worth a purchase. It's still entertaining to swim your bacteria around, or devour your enemies. I've long since made it to the center of the galaxy (as close as the game has to an end goal) and I still want to come back to this game. If only they'd been more willing to relinquish control from the start and open this game up to modders, they could have added the content this game sorely needed, like fleshing out each section.

Still fun, but oh, it could have been so much more. It could have been great.

After hearing about the debale of Yogventures, I was directed to TUG, which seemed to be being touted as the replacement, of sorts, as a game that would allow such a great deal of flexibility and freedom. I thought I'd take a shot at buying it.

The first warning was when my usual PC wouldn't run it, despite it having no problem with things like Skyrim, bioshock infinite and other AAA titles. The game, it turns out, requires DX11, and a 2Gb graphics card, along with a whole host of other outlandish features just to run. That is, if you're missing any of those, it won't run slower, it just won't run at all. The recommended settings are even higher. My higher end PC doen't have the 3Gb graphics card it recommends, but at least it'd run.

After this, I figured this must be a pretty incredible game to have such lofty requirements. I mean, I know it's early access, but they must be doing something with all these requirements, right?
Starting it up, I can't describe how disappointing it is. This looks like a unity game someone game up with in a weekend. The graphics do not look good, for any stage of development. This looks absurdly bad.

The really worrying thing is that this looks like the developers have an engine and are making a game in it, which is fine for an indie game, but it isn't fine when they are devouring resources like this. The state of the game doesn't give a lot of hope they are going to be able to optimise this to run on lower spec machines once there's something worthwhile actually there.

I hope I'm proved wrong, and this becomes the sort of game it looks like it could be, but right now it feels like Yogventures part II. A developer that has lofty goals, a partnership with Yogscast, and an overreaching ambition it can't match.
If you want a game like this to work, maybe take a lesson from minecraft, and focus on getting things to work mechanically before requiring a computer of the gods to run it.