Recent reviews by AG

I bought this years after release in sale and just played it for the first time. I heard Kevin Conroy passed away and grew up with him voicing Batman and Mark Hamill the Joker. I played the whole thing to 100%, even the Riddler challenges that I never bothered with in previous games.

Its got some flaws - you could play all Arkham games on Ironman mode, but I doubt there's a single player on the planet who got through the Riddler races without dying. Don't know why they weren't just AR challenges. Few glitches here and there but nothing game breaking.

The story was the real draw. The main antagonist really steals the show. Heh. Although it wan't written by Paul Dini, and it's a bit repetitve, at least the writers were functioning adults compared to what's on offer these days.

So the last WB game I'll ever play, but it was worth it. RIP Kevin Conroy. I don't think we really appreciate true artists anymore.

Short Review: This is the best RPG since Baldur's Gate 1 & Planescape Torment & Fallout 1. About 50 hours offline, not completed yet.

Long Review: It's difficult to summarise how awesome this game is. I've been playing RPGs since the early 90s, and this actually improves on them. I gave up on that concept about 20 years ago. I'll try and break it down.

GRAPHICS & ART: They arn't just a leap ahead, the artists for this developer are inspired, talented, and they've created something beautiful. Even more than their past games.

GAMEPLAY: Although this doesn't have the hundreds of spells & feats of D&D, they've managed to create a 'complete system'. It's difficult to describe, but Baldur's Gate 2 & Fallout 1 & 2 had top tier combat in comparison to other games with more abilities for example.

RPG SYSTEMS: Neocore have always had a talent for this in my opinion. No useless feats. No abilities that are half complete that need upgrades to almost serve any function. If your character was a basketball character in a sports game, Neocore makes your character shoot hoops - not like other games where you still feel like a dwarf with 1 perception, 1 dexterity, and 1 in 1-handed despite power gaming the opposite. And you're still shooting 1/10 hoops.

Story: Awesome so far. Do yourself a favour and watch 'Excalibur' from 1981. This developer gets it and always has. They actually make the game feel like it's part of the film, and they're expanding on the mythology.

Value for Money: Don't know when games became so expensive, and I've never paid more than £25 for a game new, but I'd pay £40 for this or a sequel, or a remaster of KA: The roleplaying Wargame 2 if they made it.

Final thoughts: I bought all of Neocore's games except the Warhammer one. King Arthur 1 was my favourite. No 2 was unfinished and disapointing with a few bugs and you could see the great game it could have been. But they've hit a home-run here and I wish them all the best with the expansion and future games.

Decided to complete the game. Died twice: once to caragor humping while I reached for tea, and the second when I got fedup at the first boss battle. Over 2000 Orc captain kills at 20 hours. Forgot to check at 100 hours played offline.

Was gonna copy>paste all issues but Steam won't allow it. In short: they took out loot boxes but game is fundamentally designed around them. Wont buy another one. Only completed it as I always do that for games I buy.

It's an awesome game. Enough said. Mods actually make it better. Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica mod both. Hope the BSG guys continue for X4: one of the best mods I've played for a game in 20 years.

I didn't buy this full price because High Moon deserve the licence and respect the IP.

Graphics: Would look bad even 10 years ago. They actually managed to make the environments and transformers look worse than FOC.

Sound: Some sounds are actually missing (like the transform sound), other times the music is too low, or the voice overs are too low, and the special effects hearing damagingly high. No tinkering with settings helps. Other times it's like they purposfully sabotaged it - soundwave in vehicle mode sounds like the 30 year old POS my cranky old neighbour drives with the rickety alternator belt you can hear coming from round the block.

Gameplay: Painfully easy and boring...until you get one-shot killed. At one point I was sipping a cup of tea with one hand, and lazily panning around with the mouse and destroying enemies with the other as they constantly respawned from opposite sides of the map. Then I was so bored I decided to transform and melee a bit, resulting in enemies respawning ontop of my character and getting one-shot so fast I thought the game had crashed. So, great balancing there. They also switched around some of the controls, and the FOV is worse than FOC.

They also botched up transforming - its not as seemless as in WFC/FOC and theres a delay between modes, so no more awesome moments...at all.

And they did away with Perks. The fact that this game occurs before FOC is no excuse - the purpose of a sequel (IMO) is to expand on the originals.

The one good thing about it: Some of the original voice actors are all there. Starscream sounded off (voice over sound was low so hard to tell), but the writing is so bad, and the writers obviously didn't know the material and characters so it's nowhere game-redeeming.

Lore: The main reason I bought it. Nothing new - bad thing comes out of the past, defeat everything to stop it. The story doesn't make sense, and doesn't dovetail the universe'/timelines well at all. More like duct tape, bubblegum and Michael Bay.

Things I expected them to improve on:
1- You're stuck with boring characters; characters you already played in the past two games, characters that have been reduced in power, you play them many times through the game, and their preset special abilities are either boring or dumbed down e.g. clutch drone is now a sentry drone, Soundwave cant summon laserbeak and rumble, Optimus has a shield...

2-Developers should study this game for creating the most soul crushingly boring XP system of all time. Levelling up gives you gearboxes that randomly unlock characters in multiplayer, upgrades and one-use items. Except they duplicate most of the time, and because its random you can't focus on one weapon. I never used the hacks at all, and didn't need the one-use items. Also, unlocking these 'gearboxes' consists of clicking the mouse repeatedly to be rewarded by a load bar and a repeat item, which usually gets converted into crap I didn't need. Meaning you can go through the whole game, level up and complete (the boring) challenges, and still not get anywhere near seeing even half of all weapon upgrades.

3-They could have allowed you to switch transformers per level as in WFC. It was great to see other transformers fighting alongside (but not in the way) during levels - why not allow the player to switch?.

4-Dinobots. No choice or expansion here. You play a mute Grimlock and the environments arn't as destructible as they were in FOC. This is late in the game and the developers can only be applauded for maybe realizing they were crap, and knew that if they actually tried, they would only make something bad significantly worse.

Conclusion: not even worth the Steam sale price. Fans arn't missing out on anything lore wise, Writing makes your favourite characters sound like morons, and even if you could makes it through all that, the technical issues and bad design decisions are a constant draining, and totally BORING experience.

I've been gaming for 25 years, loved the original Syndicate/Wars, backed this via Kickstarter and was suprised at the level of quality from the game based on the funds raised.

Unfortunately at release the pathfinding was broken. I gave it 3 months (which you've pretty much had to to with all PC games from the beginning of time) and its now improved. But still kind of broken. I won't go into the great moments and missions I had in the syndicate games, but the greatest thing about those games (which has yet to be replicated) was sending all 4 agents off to do different strategic tasks, like assassinate, blow up bank, stand ground with persuaded citizens and mow down enemies, infiltrate base steal hover car and fly to a point where all agents meet from all corners of the map to extract.

Although it might be a performance issue:

i7 Processor
6GB DDR3 Ram
x2 HD5870 ATI Video cards
64 Bit Vista OS

But until they get it working you'll never get those moments in this game because pathfinding doesn't work. I'm gonna shelve it for now, and see if 5 lives patch it some more. It's a step in the right direction as I didn't expect to see a game like this ever again. If it is a performance issue then maybe I need to hack into the national grid with an upgraded machine and make the winter nights even darker by the amount of power needed to run the game.

This game is broken. Latest version, played from start, bug prevents game completion.

Retrospective Review.

I replayed this game recently and finished it. I didn't encounter the Galahad Grail shard bug. It's obvious the game wasn't finished. Even if it was Neocore made some really peculiar (stupid) design decisions, and it could have been an outstanding game.

The graphics look like an oil painting that fell on the floor and a dog dragged it's ass across before the paint dried. Stuff doesn't work (Lancelots grail shard spell, etc). The sound guy should have been fired by Neocore - you zoom in and hear broken sounds like enemies farting at each other, and zooming out is effectively like pressing the mute button. Most of the game is played in silence.

Every time your mouse hovers over something a big f*** off tool-tip instantly appears (adjusting the slider to delay them doesn't work) which is like someone sticking an opaque post-it note on the screen constantly. Somone thought it would be a great idea to have the narrater say "AN ENEMY HERO IS CASTING A SPELL" every time AN ENEMY HERO IS CASTING A SPELL...

Which is often.

The story is a reworking that's good but there isn't enough of it, and a big part of something isn't really explained.
Campaign-wise; the demons (TM) are flooding from all demonic gates across the island of ancient England - but apparently only one of them works, and every 7 turns or so sends a generic weak army at you. The army is so weak that I thought all William Pendragon had to do was build a wall in front of it - like the Stargate iris...
But unless you use this army to grind, there isn't enough game to level all three of your armies. And forget using the dimplomacy option (which is really good BTW - the benefits outweigh wiping out territories).

They mullered the Knights of the Round Table. I played as a champion, but I suspect the Warlord wasn't as good in melee, the sage build looked interesting but they all suffer from faults listed below. Then you come across knights that are built better than your character - they should have just let you build a character.
Story-wise (apart from main arthurian legend characters) the secondary knights are lifeless, pointless, and characterless...they're efffectively just another army unit. The fact that some have clone character models from the previous game, but names I don't recognize from arthurian lore just boggles the mind - why not just name them by the character model from the first game to give them a bit of life?.

You can see some effort went into this game, but either a prat of a manager (or someone on the team) did stupid crap, or their funding ran out, or publisher trouble, etc. Which is a shame because their RPG mechanics are excellent, the animations and graphical quality of the units are amazing that (even today) provide moments of visual poetry - where else can you build a golem that slowly wades into battle against an army and scatters them with a swing of a truck-long sword, or red,white,black dragons swooping out of the sky to freeze and ignite enemy armies. The giants are actually intimidating - they charge an enemy, lower their shoulders and smash into them with huge weapons that send enemy soldiers or cavaly flying convincingly all over the place. The rag doll physics are so convincing I feel like donating to horse rescue charity after some of the battle's I fought in this game.

They almost got scaling right for items and armies. Let's just say that as the game progressed I wasn't bothering to use/make artifacts, my melee Knights useless (outclassed by elite units), spells were useless (they implements a magical shield for each army that gets reduced as offensive spells are cast at it - but the battle is usually over by the time one of you're spells actually penetrates it) - so I ended up just one-shotting most enemies with my elite units.

I think they implemented a HP / Damage based difficuly system, so mileage may vary.

AFAIK the game breaking bug is still there - but although it seems to be a random thing, it's still indefensible that it's in the game.

I changed my recommendation - it's worth it if you buy it in a Steam sale, make a beeline for the Galahad shard quest (can be done in a few hours, you get given an army), and then place £30 or so quid on the table in front of you and decide if it's worth spending on Neocores next game depending on what happens.

Replaying this has made me re-think not buying another Neocore game, but I'll need to see some extremely positive reviews before buying the upcomming Warhammer game on day one.