44
Products
reviewed
1915
Products
in account

Recent reviews by Alesch

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Showing 1-10 of 44 entries
5 people found this review helpful
124.7 hrs on record
I have to say, Todd duped me again. I bought a new SSD specifically for this game. I played it for 125 hours hoping that it would become fun. It didn't. I read that the New Game + was when the game "really started". It wasn't. It was just as dull and uninteresting as the first time around. Starfield is empty. Space is empty. The worlds are empty. The hub areas are, one and all, empty and uninteresting. The factions are cookie-cutters. The "characters" are entirely unremarkable. I played for 125 hours and I could not tell you the name of a single character in this game. I couldn't name a single place in this game.

Usually, the Bethesda Remorse has been because of bugs. That's a running gag at this point. Starfield's problems have nothing to do with bugs though (not to say that they aren't there, it's still a Bethesda game), Starfield's problem is in the design itself. It tries to be everything, any system that Bethesda has ever put in one of their games has been squeezed into this abomination regardless of whether there's any purpose or benefit. People liked the Dragon Shouts in Skyrim! They were iconic! In they go! People liked building settlements in Fallout 4! Put in base-building! Do the bases do anything of value? No. Of course not. But who cares! Put them in! People liked discovering Vaults and their little self-contained histories! Let's put in scattered outposts that you can find on planets that will also have their own histories to uncover! Will they repeat within the first few planets? Of course they will! Hell! It's all procedurally generated anyway, so you will probably find the same outpost with the same story more than once on the same planet! FUN!

There are currently 4 people on my friends list who have this game on their wishlist but who haven't bought it yet. To you I say, don't buy it. It's trash.
Posted January 2.
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20 people found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
1.3 hrs on record
This is going to be the first time I've ever written a review for a game that I've asked to be refunded. I just want to warn people who might have the same misunderstanding about what this game is that I did.

I bought Highfleet expecting it to be a strategic simulation game about fleets of giant, lumbering diesel-punk airships blasting away at each other with enormous cannons. It definitely has that aesthetic. Unfortunately for me, the "simulation" part of the "strategic simulation" that I was hoping for never manifests. Combat, the main crux of the game, is essentially a twin-stick shooter that uses your "fleet" as a series of extra lives.

It feels pretty pointless to assemble a grand fleet when that fleet never functions as a unit. Instead you control an individual ship, all alone, against the enemy fleet. You can tag-out by flying to an indicated spot on the map to switch to the next ship in your fleet, but you will only ever have a single ship actively fighting at once. For me, this destroyed any sense of immersion that the game could have hoped for. I did not like twin-stick shooter combat. The twin-stick shooter combat seems to be about 80% of the game.

I don't usually write reviews for games that I wouldn't recommend, and I'm sure there are some people who would truly like Highfleet. I was not one of them and I don't think that anyone who buys the game with the expectations that I had going in would enjoy it either.
Posted September 17, 2021.
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2 people found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
38.7 hrs on record (22.8 hrs at review time)
What if I told you that there was a Fire Emblem game set in a strange post-post-apocalyptic world where you led an elite group in a massive war between three giant nations? What if I told you that instead of playing through a series of set-piece story missions, you navigated your small force through a massive open map dotted with hundreds of cities and towns as the AI moved hundreds of armies around waging its war? What if I told you that you could fight where you chose, how you chose, and for whom you chose? What if I told you that this massive map was dotted with hundreds of points of interest that revealed more about the history of the world you were fighting in? What if I told you that this game took me over 18 hours to beat its first campaign, and another 6 to beat its post campaign? How about if I told you that I intended to play it all over again because that unlocked completely new starting circumstances if I so chose?

Now, what if I told you that that game cost less than $10?

Just click Add to Cart already.
Posted June 26, 2020.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
53.9 hrs on record
This is far and away the most expensive DLC for Total War: Warhammer II, but its worth it.
Posted June 26, 2020.
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2 people found this review helpful
1.5 hrs on record
I might have recommended Rogue Legacy when it first came out, even if it never quite clicked with me. While I personally never enjoyed it: the platforming was oddly floaty, the different heirs didn't have enough variation in how they actually played to be particularly interesting, and the game was one of the worst offenders as far as the roguelite tendency to require multiple failed playthroughs before winning is realistically possible. The unlocks are not interesting additions or more things to do so much as they are necessary components of the game that are gated off by grind.

Rogue Legacy has been surpassed in every way by the other metroidvania-esque roguelites that have come out in the years since. I can't recommend this in good conscience. Not anymore. Unless you are looking to play it for some sort of historical value, you have better options available.
Posted June 26, 2020.
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1 person found this review helpful
8.1 hrs on record
Chances are you've at least heard of Alpha Centauri. If you haven't, stop reading this and go look that game up. That is the game that Pandora: First Contact is trying to be. As far as I know, Pandora: First Contact was the first attempt at making a "New Alpha Centauri", it was at the very least the first that I've played. It's biggest competitor for the Alpha Centauri throne at the time of this writing is probably Civilization: Beyond Earth. Both use the Civ 5 engine (or some approximation of it that looks so similar that I couldn't tell) and design sensibilities. Neither game comes close to being good enough to be allowed to even speak the name Alpha Centauri.

Pandora: First Contact is a good enough game for me to recommend on its own merits. I certainly recommend it over Beyond Earth. Just don't buy it with any illusions that it will live up to Alpha Centauri. It won't.
Posted June 26, 2020.
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1 person found this review helpful
1.0 hrs on record
Proteus is different. It's a "Walking Simulator", so my recommendation comes with the caveat that if that is a 100% without-exception deal breaker for you then you should probably give it a miss. My recommendation is for people who see the Walking Simulator tag and linger on a "Maybe".

Proteus is not telling a story. At least not one that I've ever been able to pick up on? This is not a narrative experience. It is definitely an experience though. Proteus is an Art Game, and it deserves those capital letters. Proteus is an Art Game in much the same way that The Stanley Parable is an Art Game: it is a piece of art that could not exist as anything other than a video game. The two games are very different from one another though, and liking one is by no means a guarantee that you will appreciate the other. If The Stanley Parable were a deconstructionist novel, then Proteus would be an impressionist painting.

Proteus is not really a game that you play. It's a piece of software that you experience.

With that, I'm going to go find myself a black turtleneck, a beret, and an ascot.

Have a good day.
Posted June 26, 2020.
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2 people found this review helpful
35.2 hrs on record (22.8 hrs at review time)
Early Access Review
The idea of a game being "Souls-like" has been thrown around a lot. People will call a game "Souls-like" because of its difficulty curve. People will call a game "Souls-like" because it has a combat system that features a stamina bar. People will call a game a "Souls-like" because it has big terrifying bosses that generally take multiple attempts to defeat. I'm about to call Exanima not just a "Souls-like" game, but the greatest example of a game being a "Souls-like" game, despite the fact that it ticks very few of those boxes.

What makes Exanima a better "Souls-like" game than all of the other pretenders to FromSoftware's crown? Exanima feels the way that Dark Souls felt when you first played it. It nails the eerie, melancholic atmosphere. It really gets across the feeling that you are walking through the ruins of an actual place, with rooms that have purpose. Hell, the place even has bathrooms. You are walking through a place where people used to live, and it has all of the things that they would have needed to live there. Exanima tells its story in much the same way that Dark Souls did: by letting you piece together what came before and its significance to the player character from small snippets of lore scattered throughout the world. If anything, Exanima makes the process of piecing its world together even more of a focus, because it doesn't begin with a video info-dump.

Exanima is not an easy game to play. Its control scheme is very unusual, and it will take some time to become fluent enough with it to really feel comfortable. It's worth the effort though. The physics based combat is very satisfying, and still feels very unique. The recent (as of this review) Thaumaturgy update has added in the first course of the game's planned magic system and it is an intriguing start. There is a lot of game here already. I've played for 22 hours now, according to Steam, and I have only seen four of the eight (so far) areas in the game. There is also the Arena mode, which could honestly be considered a game in and of itself.

In short, I think Exanima is the best "Souls-like" game that I've ever played. You might find other "Souls-like" games to play, but you will not find an Exanima-like game anywhere else.
Posted April 18, 2020.
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14 people found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
7.2 hrs on record (3.8 hrs at review time)
This was a real pleasant surprise. I bought this purely because the art style was appealing, without really looking into what the game was like. This was a gamble, and I'm happy to say that it was a gamble that I won.

Plebby Quest will feel very familiar to people who have played Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms games. There is a real emphasis on making good use of your limited actions each turn. Each general can take a single action every turn, making the campaign a matter of careful management of your action economy. Generals have a limited number of carrier pigeons, which limits the number of orders they can give at once in battle. You've got several resources to manage. Diplomacy, religion, loyalty and morale, there is plenty to consider.

Don't let the cutesy graphics fool you. There's plenty here to keep strategy fans happy. The fact that it's adorable is just a plus.
Posted April 9, 2020.
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46 people found this review helpful
104.5 hrs on record (5.6 hrs at review time)
Early Access Review
This game is probably the closest I've ever come to feeling like I was playing a tabletop RPG with my friends while playing a computer game by myself. It evokes the same kind of feeling that King of Dragon Pass, or Six Ages do. For those of you who haven't played those games (since those who have will have already pressed Add to Cart, I'm sure) this is a game about creating stories.

It's about character growth. Not stat growth, but actual character growth. In my play-through one of my starting characters was a goofy farmhand at the outset. I didn't project that personality trait onto him, it's a statistically tracked thing. It said right on his character sheet "Goofy". After the death of his romantic interest (which was something I chose to have happen, in order to give the party a bunch of extra armour for the fight) he became "aloof". His character sheet no longer said "goofy". His dialogue changed. He was different now. He felt different. He felt more changed by the death of his love interest than he did by finding a magical fire-sword. That's uncommon in cRPGs in my experience, but it's what you'd expect in a tabletop game.

I can't recommend this game enough. I bought it on a whim when Steam's recommendation engine fed it to me, and I played for five hours straight afterwards. This one's a gem.
Posted November 14, 2019.
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Showing 1-10 of 44 entries