Análises recentes de Majestic 12

I bought & played the original way back in 1999. I got about three quarters through the game before I got stumped. The game was amazing but the graphics and dated low resolution interface was often a struggle. This was very much a game that would have benefitted from VESA. The maze-like maps looked greatly the same and the way you moved took some getting used to. In other words, a classic but with some flaws that made it harder to play than it needed to be.

Almost 25 years later and now we have a pretty faithful remake that removes most of the annoyances of the original. Proper modern FPS controls, better gun handling, improved interface, a better map and of course much improved graphics that make the game a lot easier than you'd think.

I didn't expect to complete the game right away. I usually delve into a game for an hour or two and then come back at a later time. However, something kept me playing and I realized it was the way the game is designed: in floors. It's easy to play a full floor at a time, going from room to room, solving all the puzzles and ending the game after you've done a complete floor. Leaving behind map marks for areas you can't reach (yet) makes it easy to keep track of open ends.

While the combat is still rather basic, it serves its purpose and the fun of the game is in the puzzles, piecing together all the clues and discovering what to do next. In this I had a real blast. I recall the original being a real maze but I didn't have this feeling in the remake - I don't know if they improved the level design or if the new graphics & controls just made it less of an issue but it only bugged me a few times (the Executor level being the worst with the repeated need to go through a very long crawling corridor half a dozen times).

But besides a few small minor issues, this is one of the best remakes I've ever played. The fact I completed it in a few days shows how fun it still is today.

I miss games like these - fun, not overly complicated, colourful, nice graphics. Indie devs try too much to stand out by having the weirdest and often most unappealing graphical styles & interfaces. Form over function is a real problem but this game is wonderfully "old school" in that everything is nice & clear, it's all about the game and having fun. It doesn't do that much new stuff but it does what it does really well.

I love RPGs but I generally do not like jRPGs for two huge reasons:- jRPG combat tends to be tedious & repetitive- and there tends to be LOTS of itEven many classics such as Final Fantasy fail to engage me exactly for this reason. I'm still open to trying jRPGs in case some prove me wrong. Games such as the Persona series have managed to do exactly that, by focusing on character building, story, and adding enough non-combat elements to the game to keep you engaged.Tales of Arise, however, falls somewhere between Persona and a typical grindy jRPG. While it has a relatively strong story and a LOT of variation in setting & themes (which is important to me), it still has quite a lot of combat and not all that much to do outside of combat. The combat however is pretty good - I won't say great because the controls combined with very hectic combat often makes it too chaotic and fiddly for tactics to work the way you want to.However, for the first three quarters of the game, the combat isn't that vital - it's fun enough to complement the story and characters. The last quarter of the game however is by far the worst and also extremely grindy & tedious, consisting of combat after combat clearly designed to pad out the game in typical jRPG fashion. This last quarter takes this from a 8 or 9/10 to a 7-7.5/10.The story is very interesting & original but the pacing is quite a bit off - for the huge part of the game you're basically running around wondering what's going on and in the span of half an hour the game basically explains 90% of the questions you couldn't answer. Then after this, you STILL have a solid 3-4 hours of nothing but combat which was a big mistake if you ask me - they should have made the boss fight much sooner.The dialogue is mostly OK but it's a weird mix of serious conversations that still seem to be written as if for 10 year olds at times. There's tons of blatant "love, peace, make no war" messages that constantly get mentioned. The dialogue spells things out so explicitly so even the most bone headed player gets it - there's absolutely zero subtlety here and this makes it hard to take the characters serious. Still, it mostly works fine but compared to Persona, it's nowhere near as good.Combat takes a few hours to get the hang of because there's many subtleties the game doesn't properly explain to you. I quickly lowered the difficulty setting myself because I found it tedious to slog through the combat otherwise. Because you constantly find similar enemies, the fun of coming up with better tactics quickly dissipates and it becomes a repetitive mess of just using the same tactics over and over.The gear you can wear also adds little to the combat - you have three stats it will affect and other than that you can wear accessories which have some extra benefit but it takes luck or lots of grinding to fix the components you will ideally want. Besides this, you can invest into extra skills which adds some debt but you'll want to check play guides since it's not always clear what a skill will exactly offer.So yes, it's far from a perfect game. Take away the story and you're left with a rather mediocre jRPG that I wouldn't have played for more than a few hours tops. The story is definitely what will carry most of you on-wards and the way the game uses mystic works quite well even though the pacing could have been much improved and combat gets far too heavy near the end of the game.As such, I recommend getting it on sale and you'll get a good 25+ hours of run out of it with some 5+ hours of tedious combat near the end.

The good:
- The game has tons of little details and rewards exploration
- The Harry Potter atmosphere is 80% there.
- There's a ton to explore & discover
- The spells are used well and combat is largely satisfying
- They integrated all the elements of the book's school system into a good working game making it feel organic enough
- Voice acting is top notch
- There's lots of little things to do like collect floating pages, grow ingredients, brew potions, solve puzzles, etc.
- Clearly a lot of love was put into making this game
- At first you'll be wearing the silliest outfits since you'll wear what you loot but later on you can change any part of your outfit to look like any other style you've unlocked or discovered.

The bad:
- The game trickles spells to you which isn't bad except that you level up mainly by exploring and discovering things and you'll constantly find stuff that requires spells or abilities you haven't unlocked yet ... but the map doesn't keep track of these. This means you'll be doing a LOT of re-threading old ground.
- The "school" atmosphere of the books is not really there. You don't sit down to eat, enjoy candy together, you don't really hang out with friends in the common room, you don't get to form many relationships - especially not create enemies! This part of the game feels very bare bones which is a huge shame because it's what made the books so great. The fact you enter the game as a 5th year explains some of this but still ... look at Persona 4 & 5 to see how it SHOULD have been done.
- There's too much solo stuff (so far) - you can do duelling in pairs but once you go explore you're on your own. It would have been cooler if you could take friends with you.
- The dialogue can be a bit poorly written in terms of continuity. Characters will say things that make no sense or don't match up with what happened before. For example you were told not to speak of what happened prior to arriving at school yet immediately people mention you got attacked by a dragon while no-one was told! There's many such examples which will break immersion.
- It being set 100 years in the past with all new people means you don't really get that many jolts of nostalgia as you'd expect. It makes sense but still ...

The Ugly:
- The "woke" stuff is incredibly immersion breaking. For a game set 100 years in the past, they use an ultra-modern very-woke vision such as letting you create a male character with a male voice ... and letting that character sleep in the female dorms. Also, there's a trans bartender (female looking) with a plain male voice which was clearly added to make the woke crowd happy (yeah, that worked ...). It's all too on-the-nose and blatant. Also wouldn't someone who was born male and wanted to be female use magic to get a female voice? It just doesn't work and takes you out of the immersion every single time. They also refer to the player as "they/them" in English instead of "he/him" or "she/her". This is not the case in most other languages so it was a very deliberate choice.

Basically this is a pretty great Harry Potter themed world minus a lot of the stuff that made the books so great. It's far more like one of the last movies than any of the first 4-5 and we all know the first 4-5 books were by far the best. It's a shame they HAD to force more woke stuff into this, however. That and they really should have let the player have a group of friends like Persona 4 or 5. Instead you get separate friends who you do quests with now and then but otherwise don't even greet you.

And also: compared to both the books & movies, the game feels too ... friendly. Without Malfoy the books would have been a lot less engaging. The game doesn't have a single antagonist among the students. You sometimes hear some gossip about other students but 95% of what you'll hear about you is positive. Come on, this is high school! You WANT competition, you WANT to be the underdog! By making you a mary sue (really, you are ...) they turned you into quite a boring character and then to deny you an adversary among the students ... a HUGE missed opportunity!

Currently the game for Elex II is "mostly positive" and I think this is a fair rating. Here's why.

Gothic was an open world RPG with none-linear plot elements and a specific kind of combat which has been carried across the Risen series as well as the Elex series. The combat still mostly works although it feels rather dated compared to more dynamic action games such as the Batman series. It's not that different from Skyrim however.

Elex II is very much a Gothic style game but it feels more rushed. Throughout the game I encountered both things that were well done and things that clearly could have used more thought or effort. Here's a little overview:

THE GOOD
- enemies are your main source of XP meaning that levelling happens organically as you explore the map and kill enemies. I like this because it rewards exploration & combat.
- the map is BIG and has plenty of interesting locations to visit
- the game uses fast-travel points which is handy to avoid wasting time.
- the game is quite polished in terms of bugs & stability. I encountered few bugs
- there's plenty of stuff to do - lots of quests - and many are not linear. There's also tons of stuff to pick up and no inventory limit
- The Jetpack is really really good once properly upgraded.

THE BAD (or the MEH)
- it feels like some areas received little attention - the city to the East has plenty of monsters but is rather devoid of anything really interesting for example and this carries across most of the game. The locations feel like they had content cut - you have items to pick up (just the same stuff you find everywhere else) and monsters but that's it. Almost no scripted events, no quests, no special unique enemies. You can enter buildings that have a TON of stuff but almost none can be picked up. It feels odd. The first Elex game had more lore to discover I seem to recall - they could have added more pre-war notes, diaries, etc. to flesh out the world so I don't get it ...

- There are a LOT of fetch quests - the majority of quests feel very meh and require you to run all over the map. It's recommend to seek out the teleportation points first to save you time in the long run.

- exploration is sometimes rewarded and sometimes isn't. At times you'll almost be certain that you found a "hidden" path that will have some treasure at the end ... and there will be nothing there. At other times you find great loot in a very common place. OK it's realistic but odd game design.

- A lot of game systems feel half assed. It's as if they had great ideas and then cut them down for the finished game. This is not uncommon but it is rather noticeable. Items are marked 'resource' but are clearly NOT a resource and are only to be sold. This hints that originally they were used in crafting but that idea was clearly scrapped which leads to a bigger problem (read below)


THE UGLY (or the properly bad)
- Skills & teachings. I know, this system was part of Risen and Gothic before but in Elex II it feels particularly poorly implemented. You have to find teachers to teach you new skills - skills needed to get better at melee or ranged, to craft armor, improve your jetpack, etc. This sounds great EXCEPT some skills can only be taught by very specific people. You can play this game for 15 hours and still only have found teachers for half the skills you can learn. It means it's possible you'll miss out on for example magic until three quarters of the game is already played.

- Item value is just plain bad and 95% of the items have no use except to sell. You can collect 1.000 items and only make enough money to buy a single skill. The game has quite a few items to pick up and at first you don't even want to sell them in case they're needed for crafting or quests. Tip: they're not. It's all junk. You cannot dismantle items for resources to use in crafting either although the devs may originally have had this idea. But the problem is most items are only worth 1-5 elexits which is pathetic because investing in the blacksmith skill will let you craft better weapons that sell for hundreds of elexit. I make the vast bulk of my money selling weapons - so why even add so much junk to pick up? It's filler that is pointless since maybe 5% of your money will be gotten this way but you'll easily spend hours picking up stuff across the game! Why not let people craft things of value by combining multiple found items instead for example? Because most exploration is "rewarded" with these items, it hurts even more when the combined value of loot in a single building is a mere 100 elexit and you need to loot 40 such buildings to be able to afford a single new skill!

There's a lot more to get into but it's mostly already been said by others. Elex II is still a fun game to just spend your time exploring but don't expect a well crafted game. It's a rather rough diamond - rougher than the first Elex game - and one made within budget constraints I suspect. On sale it's well worth a buy though.

This is a game to play while watching something else on a second screen. It's addictive but also time consuming. It's great for those who have OCD and want to destroy every little thing they can. It's also a good "just a little longer" game.

Basically, the game revolves around you destroying stuff, using the raw materials to craft better gear, destroying more stuff with the more powerful gear, fighting zombies, exploring, doing quests ... and that's basically it. It doesn't have any decent story, it doesn't have much lore or stuff to read or listen to. 95% of your actions will be whacking at things to get the materials.

If this is not your kind of thing, avoid this game but to those who would enjoy this, it's a great game to play while multi tasking on a second screen or listening to a podcast.

Usually I play a strategy game for a few days and then move on. I love strategy games but most fall in the "late-game" trap where it becomes more frustrating than fun due to the massive size of your world/empire/city/etc. It's especially annoying when you have to end a game for the day only to return the next day and having forgotten half the stuff you were keeping track of.

This is why Against the Storm is so good. It doesn't HAVE a "late-game". You create a settlement until you reach your goal and then move on to another settlement. Each settlement takes about an hour to two hours to complete.

You may think this would get repetitive but the developers crafted a clever system where you don't have a single building that has a specific task. You have 4 races of people who each have their own needs and each building also produces MULTIPLE items. To make wooden boards you don't have one but half a dozen buildings, with each building having other items to produce alongside wood. The quality of the item (= how many raw resources you need) also depends from building to building.

But this is not all: YOU DO NOT GET ALL BUILDINGS! In fact, at the start you only have the most basic of buildings by default and you get offered new buildings by completing orders. You can pick these buildings from a small pool that gets randomized each time. This means that for each choice you need to think and consider what is more important to your colony. Do you go for clothes or for food? Are there orders you can't complete because you miss a certain production line?

Besides this you have to also be aware of what resources the map offers. Some locations have no stone, others have tons. Some have little food, some have loads.

There's far more to the whole picture than what I briefly explained but suffice to say what makes this game so great, is that you can have a single game at the end of the work day, have a few hours of fun and complete a single colony. Unlike games such as Civilization that require 10+ hours, it makes it a great deal easier to go "Ok, let's have another new colony!".

I'm very glad I bought this game since it's a fresh wind among strategy games. I actually can't think of another strategy game that is similar. If the devs can continue to add content without harming what they already have (which to me is pretty much a complete & polished game) this could become a true classic.

I'm conflicted on this game. It has good stuff going for it but just as much that just didn't work as well. To sum it up

THE GOOD:
- I like the isometric view & the way you can rotate it
- the graphics are a little like detailed pixel art ... but without it being pixel art. I like it.
- the game doesn't hold your hand too heavily and lets you figure things out yourself
- the game isn't too hard - I only had to Google a few puzzles

THE BAD:
- it's all very linear - if you're stuck, it's often because you didn't do a certain thing
- some puzzles have little to no logic but are about interacting with something to make something else change.
- the game is rather short. It's easy to complete in a few hours tops and has no replay value.

THE UGLY:
- the final parts of the game are by far the worst and just aren't fun. By that time the only thing keeping you going, is the knowledge it's almost over and you'll uncover the missing pieces ...
- ... except the game does NOT give you the missing pieces. The entire game spoon feeds you hints without ever confirming anything for sure. That's not that bad except the ending feels rather pointless and doesn't quite work.

It's an OK game which I would recommend if on sale for €2-3. For full price? No. I still give this a thumbs up because I want to encourage the developer to make more games such as these but to learn from the weaknesses in this one.

I guess I can recommend this game ... I mean, it's well made, has great voice acting, good dialogue & kids will probably love it. It's basically an interactive fairy tale adventure.

HOWEVER. Don't expect a King's Quest game of old:
- "puzzles" are often very linear, action based, reaction based, involve simply using items instead of puzzle solving
- there's no mouse controls - it's all keyboard based, clearly geared for a gamepad
- there's no large open world to explore like in all the past games
- don't expect a large inventory of items - you'll only ever have a few items to use at most
- dialogue is extremely limited - it's mostly scripted with little to no interactions
- you can ONLY interact with something. No "pick up", no "examine", etc.

Ironically, it shares some of the flaws of older games AND has extra flaws:
- the game features a LOT of walking & traversing areas
- you can NOT skip dialogue even if you accidentally trigger the exact same one
- you often don't know what item you'll interact with - you can kind of see from the direction he looks at but since there's no way to examine an item before interacting, it's extra annoying

In the end, it's a competent and well made game but it has its flaws (but so had the older King's Quest games ...). It's something entirely different made for a younger audience. If you're into that kind of game, this will be perfect for you. If you're looking for a traditional point & click, you won't find it here.

This is one of the few modern point 'n click games that gets it right. The graphics aren't too stylised, the dialogue is witty and funny, there's plenty of things to interact with, the interface works well, etc. Basically, the way I expect a point 'n click game to be.