Recent reviews by Ezah

A solid 7/10 game from the mid 00s, Fable Anniversary is a run little hub based RPG where you get to run around being a Hero, whether Good or Evil (or even both), and solve all the world's problems.

Melee combat is fairly basic attack and block, with a build up to a block breaking heavy attack. The spells are what makes the combat interesting, as you can enhance your melee and ranged attacks to trigger multiple times, support yourself with several types of summons, slow time, flank an enemy, or just be a wizard and blow everything up. You're encouraged to combine all of the types of combat, which can flow together rather well.

The world is cozy and fun to be in for the short time that the game runs (about 25 hours for 100% for me). Several distinct towns with houses to purchase, pub games to play, and shops to visit. It's all very basic town life mechanics compared to today, but there is fun in the simplicity and how you can experience it all in a quick whirlwind theme park ride.

Overall it's a fun little blast from the past. It's good to go see, live in, and make your mark on the world of Albion for a short time for a visit back to the 00s.

Hogwarts Legacy is the Harry Potter game that I've waited over a decade for: spells to sling, puzzles to solve, Hogwarts to explore, classes to take, all with a cozy cast of characters to experience it with.

The core foundation of the game absolutely knocks it out of the park. The spells feel wonderful to cast and all have their own unique uses in combat and the environment. Combat is a highlight of comboing spells and tools to outwit various enemies that are more susceptible to some effects than others. The world traversal with a broom is fantastic, allowing for high maneuverability everywhere outside of buildings and dungeons. The students and professors of Hogwarts all have the charm of the Harry Potter cast we came to know and love in the books.

The down side is that everything around the core game feels like a series of boxes that had to be checked to fill out the game. The talent tree offers one buff per spell/tool, with no real reason to choose one play style over another. Rewards are just replacing one stat stick with another as your legendary item for clearing a hard dungeon is replaced by a common item from a random mob because a few level ups made the original items obsolete. Outside of the 3 relationship quest lines, most characters hand out a fetch quest and then are never heard from again. The open world outside of Hogwarts and Hogsmeade has some merit to support combat and environmental puzzles, but for the most part does not add much to the experience.

After taking the rose tinted glasses off, this is a solid game where I thoroughly enjoyed using a fun combat system to charge through a mediocre story and environment. The foundation is solid and holds great promise for a potential sequel.

The black sheep of the Crysis trilogy, Crysis 2 is an urban shooter from the heyday of console shooters that is better than its reputation. Technical prowess aside, the nanosuit gives a lot of options to explore the environment, and the close quarters arenas with multiple pathways and weapons caches make for a fun variety of approaches. Stealth can be used to silently pick off enemies, or make your position known then sneak away under cover of cloak to misdirect enemies how you want. Pick up an HMG and activate maximum armor to become a walking tank that blasts everything to pieces.
Either way, sitting back to observe the battlefield through the tactical visor allows for a strategy to be developed and provides support for that strategy to be executed. That battlefield isn't as broad as Crysis 1 or 3, but the city blocks of New York provide ample opportunity for innovation.

Age of Empires 2 was a great game that ignited a love for history in me when I was a child. From the heroic tales of El Cid in Reconquista Spain, to the feel of betrayal and need to avenge the Demon King Nobunaga, to the Aztecs under Montezuma welcoming gods and being swept aside by the diseases and greed wrought from the Spaniards under Cortez, AoE2 brought fancy tales from history and gave them meaning and context and put me in the driver's seat to make that history happen.

Age of Empires 4 inspires that same wonder. Beautiful modern day shots of English landmarks under Norman rule with game characters overlaid to model how events may have occurred in the real world. Explanations for who the main players are in the political landscape and how they affected the course of history, and slotting you in as the player to fight alongside these larger-than-life figures and make your own mark upon history.

The gameplay itself is good. It's the first major Real Time Strategy game in nearly a decade, and it does have some flaws that I'm not a good enough player to fully appreciate. But at it's core, to me, Age of Empires has always been about exploring history's characters and events while building majestic towns and big armies. Age of Empires 4 absolutely fulfills that ideal and I hope it can inspire a completely new generation of the wonders of our world's history.

A fantastic collection for a fantastic series. Bioware did a great job of streamlining all three games to make for a seamless experience, blowing their individual entries on Steam out of the water. Mass Effect 1 looks and plays much better with having its systems updated to match its successors. The only thing they could have done better would be to make this collection more modular so that you can just have a single game installed to reduce used hard drive space.

As for the games themselves, Mass Effect 1 is a great RPG filled with a fascinating galaxy to explore. Mass Effect 2 trims back much of the RPGness in favor of a more action oriented, character focused game that takes the lore from 1 and focuses it into a great caste of characters as you prepare for an impossible task that requires the best of the best, no matter where they come from. Mass Effect 3 expands upon the gameplay from 2 and opens up a ton of interesting possibilities. 3's story focuses on the culmination of the arcs from the previous iterations and emphasizes how your choices from all of the entries affect the ongoing storyline.

Mass Effect is a great set of games, with each entry offering something different, and each playthrough offering new choices to be made and relationships to be forged. Mass Effect is one of the best set of games, and this Legendary Edition does it every bit of justice.

Morrowind is a favorite of mine and a classic that is still fun to play today, but unfortunately I can't recommend it to someone who hasn't played before unless you're willing to dive into guides before starting the game.

The biggest stumbling block isn't the graphics, but how obscure yet important certain stats are in the game that can lead to an experienced player to become a God within the first few hours of the game, or lead a new person to founder hopelessly against the mud crabs around Seyda Neen. Combat can feel terrible if you don't dump starting points into agility and use a major skill for a specific weapon. Movement is slow without a high speed stat or a small handful of items in specific locations. Spells constantly fizzling out because you barely have any points in willpower, and then magicka doesn't regenerate without resting, etc etc.

This isn't to say that Morrowind is a bad game. Far from it; it has a fantastic setting, lots of interesting people, a great main plot to get invested in, and the world is littered with huge power ups that are a delight to find, especially since they will retain their effectiveness throughout the game and aren't tuned to your level just to be discarded for a random trash weapon 5 levels from now.

If you want to give it a go and don't know anything about Morrowind, I highly recommend reading a few guides for how to build out a character and some locations to go for equipment and quests to make the first few hours smooth. The start can be rough, but the journey is absolutely amazing and still stands as one of my favorite games to experience.

Blood and Wine has a reputation for being good and big enough to be better on its own that many other games in its own right, which isn't far off from the truth. There is a huge tonal shift as you journey from the dark, beaten down, war infested lands of the Northern Realms and Skellige to the prosperous, French-inspired, bountiful vineyards of Toussaint. There is a fantastic main storyline just like Hearts of Stone, but there is also a large quantity of side content that adds a whole new dimension to the game, from whole new categories of monsters, to a higher and much more powerful (not to mention expensive) tier of witcher diagrams to hunt down, to building up your own vineyard, competing in a knight tournament, and expending your abilities to amplify your mutagens. It really feels like the jump from the Velen/Novigrad region to Skellige all over again, and it's great to have what truly feels like an expansion to breathe new life and a natural extension to an already great game.

Hearts of Stone adds a stand alone storyline similar in length and slightly higher in quality to any of the main area quests and filling in the lesser used areas of the Novigrad region, especially the North and East, while providing a few new tools to play with, such as runecrafting and the Ofieri tier of equipment. If you played the first Witcher game you're in for a real treat as several aspects from that game return here, including the Order of the Flaming Rose and everybody's favorite medic, Shani. Altogether it's a delightful little addition to round out the main game while adding in a new tale with some quite fascinating characters that are fully removed from the war with Nilfgaard and the Wild Hunt that engulfs the rest of the game, and is absolutely worth pursuing.

Baldur's Gate is a good game with entertaining and interesting writing buried behind an absolute slog of an early game. Much of the game is played at level 1-3 of D&D, which in this particular version is extremely brutal as every spellcasting class becomes useless for the first half of the game, and even then you get to save and reload constantly due to dice rolls not going your way. Given enough patience, there is some good gameplay to be found, and the original story of Baldur's Gate and its inhabitants is quite interesting, but the entire game is completely outclassed by its successor, Baldur's Gate 2, simply by starting at level 7 or so and allowing more leeway with spell casting, skills, and not having everybody explode the first time you stumble across an ogre.

There is very much a good game in here, and the writing is solid throughout, but the amount of reloading required for most options simply isn't worth it.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) is one of the best exploratory RPG games in a bygone era, and one of the few Star Wars stories not revolving around the Skywalker saga. This particular version certainly lacks polish, as it does not have 1920x1080p or controller support, and crashed to desktop during every cutscene. The game usually stabilized after the first crash, and was generally perfectly playable with a little bit of persistence.

The gameplay itself holds up well as you journey around a random dude as one of three classes in a modified D&D style 3rd person RPG, and following the true D&D and Jedi arc of becoming a completely overpowered force of nature by the end of your journey, finding plenty of intriguing characters across a variety of interesting and embattled locales in the struggle between the Sith and the Republic. The hub based system, using small localized areas that are relatively dense with quests and characters, is refreshing today when compared to modern day open worlds that drag out and water down their content.

As far as classics go, this one holds up well as it is still a dense, tightly paced adventure with plenty of strategizing available to get around gameplay obstacles. There are certainly a number of things that did not age particularly well, like artificially keeping your level low to maximize levels in a secondary class, light and dark side choices being the difference in Jesus healing the sick and deciding to murder a bunch of peasants because their presence disrupted your view, potentially getting chain stunned by certain abilities and then reloading to have a cakewalk fight without changing strategy, among others, this game was revolutionary in 2003 for its storytelling and is still a fun blast from the past to play now.