Recent reviews by TVictorian

Moon Studios knows what it's doing here. Occasionally there's bugs, sometimes gamebreaking ones, but with the patches those have been mostly worked out by now. That out of the way, this game is gorgeous. Even better than its precursor, Ori & the Blind Forest, with the visuals, the sounds, the animations, everything. Loading into the game is a joy in itself just to run around and look at the world. The controls are tight and work beautifully on either mouse and keyboard or controller.

Unlike its precursor, you actually fight in this game, and it's handled surprisingly well. There's a wide variety of attacks and abilities to use, and although I never felt like there were many intense fights outside of the bosses and combat shrines, any of the abilities felt decent to use. Being made for use with a controller, there's a certain amount of auto-aim even with mouse and keyboard. As a mouse and keyboard user, this annoyed me on occasion, but for the most part it was actually a plus, keeping combat fluid and letting me focus on dodging and keeping my tempo. Combat isn't all, of course, and the intense escapes that Blind Forest players are familiar with make a return as well, making sure you never know what's around the corner.

This is a short game, as you can see by my playtime it took me slightly less than 18 hours to complete the game once, with most (but not all) collectibles and sidequests. Replay value is limited to those collectibles, sidequests, and achievements. If you're into that, expect plenty of challenge getting the one life mode achievement, among others. For everyone else, this game is still well worth your money. It's a fantastic, well made game in every way that you might want to replay just so you can experience its exquisitely crafted world again. If you're new to this series, I heavily recommend getting the precursor to this game, Ori and the Blind Forest, so you can see just how far Moon Studios has come.

I really, really want to give a thumbs-up review of this game. I do. There are so many good things about it, it becomes an emotional rollercoaster, which I love. But I cannot ignore the problems this game has. Technical and developmental problems which the developers fail to address and which users, to this very day, still struggle with. Case in point: This is a game made for consoles. It will never be able to live up to the power of a PC player.

The graphics are lacking. For a 2015 game, even among consoles, this looks horrid. The characters look like they're made of cheap fiber. Their hair is made of either plastic, or wet plastic, depending on whether it's raining. The lip sync varies between acceptable, and nonexistant. In one scene during my game, the main character did not move her lips, at all, for the entirety of a whole conversation. Add to this the numerous bugs that have never been fixed, as Before the Storm was in development: All audio, music and background sounds, cutting out during conversations, save for the voices themselves. Cutscene audio tearing up and sounding like a cassette tape that got smashed with a hammer and then cut apart with a sawblade. The possibility to have to restart at a checkpoint because you are animation locked to rewinding, but with nothing to rewind. Just to name a few.

My gameplay experience was touching, though my immersion continually broken by the bugs I kept experiencing. All the way up through episode 4 and the beginning of episode 5, I fell in love with the characters, and the setting. If you're familiar with them, I would have describe this as a mixture between Night in the Woods, and Quantum Break, two other extremely good, atmospheric games, with all the emotional impact and character development of the former, and a distinct feeling of urgency, of the inevitability that no matter how much control you have over time itself, your time is slowly burning up, which comes from the latter. But it was a hassle to get through all that way, across a system that so desperately wanted to work most of the time, but fell short.

I have a high-end PC. I can run some of the most graphics-intensive games you can find on the highest settings, without problem. So it astounded me when, time and again, this game displayed faults more in line with an amateur development studio that didn't even bother checking its own work, or playtesting before release. It stinks of sloppiness, something I would never expect from a game that has an Overwhelmingly Positive rating and dozens of awards.

So if you're reading this, and you've still decided to go ahead and get the full pack, and if you're anything at all like me, do yourself a favor. End off in the art gallery. Wander around if you like, but never leave the art gallery. Just close the game, and accept that you got the happy ending. The ending you, as a player, deserve, without going through the rest of the madness that is Episode 5. The final sequence, leading up to the "true" ending of the game, sucked whatever fun was left out from me. All of it.

If you don't know what you're doing playing solo, good luck progressing in any way.
If you don't know what you're doing and playing with friends who do, expect them to leave you in the dust very quickly.
Very noob-unfriendly, takes forever to learn the tricks of the game, which is why people who recommend it usually have such high playtimes.
Only buy this if you're playing with friends who also haven't played it before and won't ditch you if they find a rare and powerful item.

5 hours of my life I won't get back, and don't regret spending.

I made my choice, and I have to live with the knowledge that I did what I thought best. There's always going to be that part of me, though, that wonders: What if I had chosen differently?

Like everyone else says, I think, the less you know, the better. Just get this game. It's short, and you won't regret buying it, but you will have to live with the decision you make. You only get one shot.

I got through most of this game without crying, and then the ending cinematic sucker punched me right in the feels.

Ori and the Blind Forest is a tale of love, hope and sometimes, sacrifice. It's on an entirely different level from anything else out there. Even though the few named characters speak very little or not at all, they are filled with personality, bringing to life the gorgeous artwork and letting the amazing music of this game do its job. I haven't gone a day since finishing this game without listening the heartbreaking main theme music. Just getting this game for the OST is worth it.

That said, aside from the story the game mechanics themselves are an emotional journey. Some moments were frustratingly difficult, taking what seemed forever and dozens of deaths to complete successfully. Others were a joy to run through, even though I died several times on them, I learned what killed me and made my way past it much more easily on my next try. Sometimes the game can be confusing, making it a little hard to find out what the objective is at a given point.

A must-buy on sale, and you can put serious thought into buying this game at the full price. Even after I had finished the story, I went back and hunted down all the secrets, just to be able to see more of the beautiful artwork and the care put into making this game.

If you're new to this game, I recommend finding and exploring the Black Root Burrows included with this Definitive Edition as soon as you can. It contains two more trees with new abilities, one of which will make your life much easier in several sections, especially with its supporting skills, and another which will give you access to some secrets as soon as you find them, giving you small boosts which could prove vital.

Nominated this game for the "I'm not crying, there's something in my eye" award. This game set out with a mission to depict life in the middle of a war, and as I and many others can tell you, it succeeded so well at that.

Despite all the bugs and glitches and occasional brokenness, this is a wonderful, wonderful game. If you see it on sale, GET THIS. If you loved XCOM:EU and XCOM:EW, GET THIS.

You will almost certainly encounter something broken on your first playthrough. From graphics bugs, to gameplay bugs, to my personal favorite which nobody else has of all settings reverting back to default every time I load up the game. But the base game is wonderful, when you take your A-team of crack shot Sharpshooters, your Xtreme hacker Specialists, your undetectable and sword-slashing Rangers, and Grenadiers where everything seems to just violently blow up around them to an alien facility to fight the best ADVENT has to offer, and win, then leave the facility to violently blow up with tiny explosive charges, it is a great feeling.

Add in the hundreds of great mods there are for this game, and you have something on the next level. There are dozens of amazing custom classes to use, many of them with their own custom abilities that make playing with them as rewarding an experience as playing with the base classes for the first time. Gameplay modifications, some throwbacks to Long War for EW and some brand-new make the game amazing in their own way. And there is no end to the amount of soldier customization options in the base game and so much more that mods can offer. Firaxis has their sights set on a group of punk resistance fighters who carry the insignia of a military organization, but are anything except military. Yet it is also perfectly feasible to organize your soldiers with military-esque camos(or real life military camos, with mods), give them military-like headgear, and go out to fight the aliens and ADVENT in organized warfare.

The difficulty settings make me feel that each setting really is unique. In XCOM:EU/EW I felt like there were really only two difficulty settings, with the first two and last two being interchangeable. This game thoroughly does away with that, and each difficulty setting from Rookie to Legend provides its own challenge and its own pace of the game. The enemy variations on each setting feels appropriate for that setting, so this is a definite high point of the game.

Please, whatever negative reviews you see here, know that I've read them too and I thoroughly understand their concerns. But if you loved XCOM:EU/EW or strategy/tactical games in general, XCOM 2 is one of, if not the, best games out there for the genre. Underneath the many bugs, the sometimes painfully annoying timer constraints, and the rush to keep up in the tech race, is a gem that, in my opinion, truly is a successor to XCOM:EU. It might not be for everybody, but like I said at the top, if you see this game on sale, BUY IT.