Recent reviews by I am Jack's Wasted Life

This is the best game I've ever played.

As a longtime Paradox fan, I was prepared for the standard bare-bones start that all their games have. I was not disappointed on that front. What I was not prepared for was my PC that can run CP2077 on ultra 4k @60+fps running this game @15fps on anything over 2k resolution. Paradox... You guys gotta get your ♥♥♥♥ together. This is embarrassing.

I ate the Pope. 10/10

This game is hot garbage, but I'm having a really good time.

Recommended with some important caveats. Before you buy this game, you need to be aware that the DLC is absolutely, 100% essential to having a good time. Without the DLC, this game feels like the skeleton of a good 4X without any actual content. That's by design too.

If you're not familiar with Paradox, their entire business model is based on selling a game framework, and then releasing dozens of DLCs over the course of many, many years to flesh out areas that feel lacking. It's pretty shady really. The "full experience" is gonna cost you a ♥♥♥♥ load of money before you're done (wait for sales). You don't need every DLC mind you. Some are just new pictures and stuff, but a lot of them totally change important game mechanics and expand the complexity and scope of the game.

All that said, Paradox games, when expanded by their DLC, are some of the deepest most robust games I've ever played. But, if you buy this game without knowing that you're committed for the long haul, you're just throwing your money away.

I've never liked point-and-click adventure games, but I've never played one like this before. Every choice and consequence makes sense. Puzzles are solved with logical components. The story and characterization are solid and believeable. This is truly a great achievement in game design and reductionist theory. It's a short but extremely dense journey, and I enjoyed every second of it. Eagerly looking forward to completing the whole season.

This is a true story (requires expansions):

Became King.
Learned secret of immortality.
Went crazy.
Appointed Glitterhoof, my horse, as chancellor.
Afraid that horse-chancellor might die someday, so made her immortal too.
Fell in love with immortal-horse-chancellor and took her as concubine.
Immortal-horse-chancellor-concubine became jealous of my son, and attempted to assassinate him.
Had immortal-horse-chancellor-concubine-assassin arrested and forced to listen to bad poetry until she went insane.
Immortal-horse-chancellor-concubine-assassin-lunatic becomes possessed.
Possessed-immortal-horse-chancellor-concubine-assassin-lunatic murdered by demon horse.
Defeated demon horse in single combat.
Became depressed over immortal-horse-chancellor's death.
Committed suicide.
Kingdom fell apart.

Would destroy kingdom over Glitterhoof again. 10/10

You may be looking at my 250+ hours spent playing this game, and my negative review and thinking, "what gives?" Well... I can't say that I don't like this game, or that I won't play it again (because I will), but this game is a big number simulator. You click a button to make your number bigger. That is LITERALLY the whole game. But there's something weirdly cathartic about having a really big number. I can't quite put my finger on it...

You click the button and think, "man, my number is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ big. Mmmm, look how big my number is. That is the biggest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ number." You gotta click those buttons every couple minutes too, or your number won't get big fast enough, and nobody wants a ittle number. Chicks dig dudes with big numbers. You want your number to dwarf all other men's numbers. You want a number that's so big that it scares people a little, and they think "I don't know if I can handle all this number," but they want to try it anyway... My number is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ huge.

I am recommending this game with a few caveats. It's 2016 as I write this, and I refuse to play The Witcher 3 until I beat the previous two, and we all know that I have to play The Witcher 3... I HAVE TO! I am now 50-something hours into this beast and I'm not gonna lie to you, it is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ grind sometimes. Collect ten of these, bring this to there, grind money, farm herbs... It reminds me of some of the worst parts of WoW at its low points. There's also The Witcher's graphics, which, in its day, probably would have melted my face off like the ark of the covenant, but now they're pretty rough. The gameplay is equally dated and suffers from some truely bizarre implementation choices (Parapa the Rappa style combat?). It takes grit to get through it sometimes.

But despite all of that, there is a seed of greatness taking root here. Even by modern standards, the original Witcher has an incredible depth to its mechanics (flawed as they are), and a richness of character and storytelling that is woefully lacking in most games (even modern RPGs). There's no black and white moral scale here to define your actions. No need to max out your good or evil points to get this or that ability. Just choices. You make choices and you live with the consequences. That's the price of admission. Sometimes you'll make a choice, and twenty hours later that ♥♥♥♥ will come back to bite you in the ass, and it's not because you made the wrong choice, but because there wasn't a right choice. This game's not about finding the optimal path of least resistance. It's about moral ambiguity, and the story of an active participant in history, ♥♥♥♥-ups and all. This game made me step away from my keyboard a few times to think it over before I made my choices. I agonized over them sometimes, but in the end, no matter the outcome, it always felt right.

I will say this however: If you're just trying to get through this to play the next one, you don't have to. The Witcher 1 isn't a blank slate either, so no matter which one you start playing, you'll feel like you only know part of the story. And if you insist, but just can't take an 80-hour game, just play it on easy so you can get through it quick and see what happens. That's where the Witcher does its best work. The story.

I am so glad I finally bought this game. Despite having watched several hours of reviews and playthroughs on YouTube, I wasn't convinced at all. But, when I finally got my own two hands on it, I couldn't stop playing.

The first thing I noticed is how smoothly it plays. The combat in particular is just awesome and really makes you feel like Batman (weird right?). But I also noticed that the game isn't at all easy. Some people may point to the fact that your character never actually dies as being a kid gloves mechanic, but that's where the Nemisis System steps in and ♥♥♥♥♥ in your cheerios. Let me explain a little.

The Nemisis System is a super basic AI algorithm that executes whenever a significant amount of time passes that creates a sort of living heirarchy for your enemies. Some enemies will rise, gaining power and followers, and others will fall, losing rank, or dying outright. A formula is used with a random number weighted by their levels and abilities to determine who wins or loses each engagement. When you die, a huge amount of time passes, and the heirarchy changes considerably. So, even though you've spent the last 4 hours culling a target's followers and gathering information on his weaknesses, if you lose when you finally engage, not only does your target become stronger, but ALL those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ you killed before to set up the encounter get replaced by NEW ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I'm not gonna lie, it made me scream at my cats a few times (which is what I do when I'm angry at an inanimate object and no one else is around).

Sometimes you get really unlucky too and the collection of abilities that your prey earns over time makes them LITERALLY unkillable until you level up, or set up a particularly devious assassination. Other times you can execute a kill perfectly and eliminate a big bad ass in just one precise attack (which feels ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awesome by the way). The combination of nigh impossible fights, and super smooth ninja assassinations made it feel like the difficulty was always just right.

The second thing I noticed is that every mechanic and subsystem work really well together and make the game a lot of fun to just ♥♥♥♥ around in. Some mechanics don't make any ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sense at all, but they're still really fun to use. Like, there's this one where you get a speed boost whenever you hop over a rock. Why you would get a speed boost from hopping a rock, I have no idea, but it's like it's own little racing game where you have to hit all the little speed boost markers to get to your destination the fastest (extra fun when you're chasing down some orc you just scared the bejesus out of).

Anyway, this review is waxing a little thick, so I'll finish by saying this game is great, and not at all what I was expecting. I even kept playing for a while after beating it, which in and of itself almost never happens. Can't wait for the sequel or a real xpac, because if I had to ♥♥♥♥ on it for anything, it would be that the ending felt really hollow.