Recent reviews by BowlBowBowl

How to mismanage your game: 101.

Really decent VTT alternative. It has strong elements like atmosphere settings, visibility toggling, intuitive camera control, easy mini placement & facing, fun to build and a lot of creativity with CTRL elevation. HeroForge compatibility is huge, but digital minis are not cheap.

Now to the issues. Some will draw attention unfortunately. Janky right-click control (it moves camera but also is the button for the right-click menu) is one that people creating crowded scenes will quickly identify. It doesn't support hexagons yet, which is my preference over squares. Mini selection is limited, but they are working on a module to fix that situation right now (I am quite hopeful!). Max camera distance doesn't allow you to create healthy selection boxes; so if you decide to add a dungeon to that sweet are you built, you will spend a good hour setting fixing your previous build. I understand why they are making the character sheets the way they are but they hold no value in game right now, and in a very distant corner of the software, intimidating most players.

Kept best for last. Dice roller is amazing. Closest you will get to a physical dice roll; these people played TTRPGs with minis for a while, and you can tell.

After seeing the things they had to go through with the OGL scandal and the DnD One announcement, I trust the team is hunkered down to take on quite a punishment and ready to keep working on this. Can't wait for a 1.0!

What a great game. Technically, it's a bit clanky but a really good time to play it.

What a masterpiece. Had a rocky start but I enjoyed every second of it and can't wait for the next time I'm in Night City. CP2077 is a game wish I could erase from my memory to be able to play it the first time, every single time I loaded it up.

Rocky start? Yes. But storytelling means a lot to me and CP tells a Neuromancer-esqe story in a masterful way. The voice acting, the details you discover as you venture around Night City, the dialogues you find on datapads, the ability to forge the game into a fast paced massacre or a slow and stealth-fueled adrenaline rush is invigorating. I strongly recommend the female V experience; Cherami Leigh slayed it.

There are several things still waiting to be improved in the game, but it's still a once-in-a-lifetime RPG experience. Maybe they won my heart when I saw the synced animations of the drummer... We might never know.

Can't wait to finish my 4th playthrough.

Pros:
- Immense lore pool for Tolkien fans.
- Interesting race/class combinations.
- Interesting class mechanics and spells.
- Repetitive but fun PvE content.
- Mentioning PvE, there's a lot of content to go through.
- Manages to be immersive, even though it's technically out of date.
- Best community I've seen in an MMO.

Cons:
- Clunky and unfriendly gameplay.
- Don't jump. It's hideous.
- Latency. Constant latency.
- Vastly out of date graphics and mechanics.
- Fails terribly at teaching new players the ropes.
- It is not free-to-play, but free-to-try.
- It forces you to pay for content very early, yet the LOTRO store (yes, the one opening in an external browser) is extremely outdated and complex. Most of the time, you do not even understand the order you need to buy stuff.
- The LOTRO Expansion Trove released during the pandemic to allow people to get expansions at a lower price is still vastly overpriced. We're talking Paradox Interactive level of pricing.
- As an avid MMO player, who tried to give every MMORPG a try since 2001, I find LOTRO to be one of the most time consuming.

I, wholeheartedly, understand why the old LOTRO players are such big fans of this game. But if you're new, and your wallet is not full and your schedule is not clear, you probably will not get to enjoy the game as much as the old players.

Amazing animations. An enjoyable, almost thrilling MyCareer story, which feels more progressive than the earlier approaches to MyPlayer. Some games will make you actually watch the AI and skip hitting the skip button -- if you're into it.

But it feels clunky. Animations are long and will prevent you from performing your ideas on court. At the beginning of your career, your Turnover PG will be an abomination to look at and you won't understand why your character is not jumping to block the shots, properly. That's supposed to be the sense of progression. So, you're an NBA player with no know-how to block a shot or steal a ball, but your stat increases will magically grant you that intuition. Rebounds... oh, that's a long topic, but let's say if you want a challenge and you choose Hall of Fame difficulty, and you also play anything else than a 4 or a 5, you will have games with 0 rebounds with maximum effort.

You find your character committing court violation, while you were pulling the analog "away" from the line. You see your teammate leading the fast break, followed by your lob, only to see the ball flying through his hands, into an innocent bystanders head (which aren't very animate anyway). You see your 7'1" #5 not being able to box out the opposing #1 or protect the rim, while if he's a star player he'll usually grab ORBDs and dunk it.

I got drafted by Bulls in my first MyCareer attempt and thought it was the team. So, I traded. Still the same issues. The problem is, as you raise the AI difficulty, that doesn't affect your teammates. And it creates some disgusting scenes. They will still fail to find the open man, or grab boards, sometimes even nail open shots.

The progression system feels like an endless grind and you do not dare start a new career, unless you're a vivid NBA 2K player. The badge system sounds amazing but you find yourself spending copper badges on half of them, because they sound like the stuff to make a solid NBA player, but it poorly reflects the game and feels very algorithmy.

I hope to see the KB24 covered NBA 2K21 to be better than this, as I've been playing this series for many years now and would be thrilled to see it flourish and improve. After watching "The Last Dance", the game felt even more clunky, and it was a "tearing up" moment.

One of the best grand strategy games out there. Funnily enough, only Paradox grand strategies, such as Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron or Imperator are contesting the throne on this topic.

After CK2, EU4 is definitely the most evolved one. With all the DLCs, updates and content packs, it'll throw at you a big basket of content, which requires long hours of gameplay to figure out. But once you understand this is not a combat simulation game - let's be honest, we all declared war on the smallest country bordering us when we first played this game - but diplomacy and behind-the-curtains actions play a big role in strengthening your country, you'll start enjoying it a lot more.

Most fun thing is to pick a one-province minor or on-the-fall major and making it to 1821, while the diplomacy map mode shows off your skills in expanding and then some.

Get to Very Hard difficulty as soon as you can. That's where the real challenge begins, and you'll have to min/max everything to be able to contest your rivals, including diplomacy. Game becomes something more than pass-time simulator at that point.

Some major cons overshadow its success, though:

- Devs are pretty bad at creating transparent tool tips. We know there're countless mechanics in the game, working with other countless mechanics. But making the player suffer for it and force them to walk this huge learning curve is cruel. You'll need a certain amount of experience to understand how things really work.

- Some DLCs are overpriced with not enough content. But once you start playing with that DLC and start utilizing that additional tiny mechanic (such as province development, native policies, or edicts), you won't be able to go back. You find yourself contemplating buying a game that costs around $200.

- The UI scaling is still missing. It's 2019. Imperator has it - same development studio. EU4 needs it badly. The peace treaty menus and the diplomacy menus have been infinitely making the game play less smooth because of this issue. Including the 4k monitors; your game will look like it was hit by Rick's size-alteration-ray. Some mods cater to this but every patch brings back this issue.

- Combat system is inferior to CK2, Hearts of Iron, Victoria... And even Stellaris. Having played them all, the mechanics that settle a dispute between two armies in EU4 are quite terrible and luck based. You can master this to your advantage, but the fact that Lady Luck is constantly messing with people's lives here is omnipresent.

- Stability mechanic is outdated and will haunt you if you don't become a great power or reform your country enough to develop a decent ruling family.

- Some mechanics such as "vassalizing peacefully" is tremendously out of reach. Some alliances are just not worth it because of this, because you'd rather wait for an opening and swallow them.

There're some other tiny details that could be fixed, but better leave them out of what already is a very long read.

Even if the issues I mentioned are visible, they do not cripple the game play. And I still believe EU4 covers one of the most interesting eras in political history and does a good job at it. The excitement you get from running a campaign for a couple of days to see how far you can get your country is quite astonishing.

This is a great indie strategy/survival type game. It is simple, effective and enjoyable. And the best thing is it has some amazing mods to offer more than you see at the initial installation.

There're a few downsides but let's start with ups!

- It is addictive, easy to learn and hard to master.
- It is realistic; almost spot on logical gameplay.
- The graphics are not heavy and tiring but very enjoyable and sweet.
- It lets you feel intigrated to your village/villagers because they all have names, happiness bars and individual health/hunger/education problems.
- The economy/trade system is simple yet effective, let's you craft your own economic tree.
- The advancement feeling is not through a typical research routine but rather the sense of accomplishment with your town.

But there are a few downsides and I believe the developers will nail these in their next game.
- Only the mods will give you cosmetics and diversity. For example the CC mod has almost 60-70 buildings and incredibly cosmetic items and new resources but the core game lacks these.
- The day-night cycle is barely noticeable.
- The aging of your population doesn't make sense. They age more years than you spend on your town. (a town with 10 years of history will have people that aged 50 years in that town)
- People do not share food and let their child die. But they do share heat if the winter is harsh, which is an upside.

Overall this is an incredible indie game and I spend some decent time on this thing and I still enjoy it. Which makes it one of those games that I want it to have more because I played it a lot.

Try it. You'll like it.

Fun co-op mode and a good revamped version of the good old Alien Breed from C64. If you were a fan like me, you'll enjoy this!