Recent reviews by Mystic Exarch

Its a stripped down version of an RTS. No base building, workers, or resources. Unit and upgrade variety are very low for each faction. Combat is also an overly simplistic rock paper scissors system. You can barely field any units to the battlefield.

Because of that, it feels less like a strategy game and more like micromanagement. You have to constantly micromanage your army composition while also spreading out your units over an entire map, because resources are based on controlling nodes. So you're running in circles to constantly defend your stuff. Lose a command point, go take it back, which takes 5 minutes. In the meantime, another control point got taken so you run back to retake that one too, and then you just lost the one you rebuilt. Rinse and repeat. Its a very tedious back and forth tug-of-war situation that makes matches feel like a slog.

I think what they were trying to do is make an RTS that's more thoughtful. Less focus on maximizing APM, predefined build orders, and massing units into a mindless death ball and attack moving like SC2. That's why the units move and fight a lot slower. And I totally respect that goal, because SC2 combat is lame.

However, slowness does not make a thoughtful RTS game by itself. It can certainly help, but its only one piece of the puzzle. Without bases and other RTS elements, all you're doing is micromanaging the units, making the slow speed of the game a detriment rather than an advantage. If there was more stuff to do in your base, more of an emphasis on macro-management, this would actually complement the slower paced combat very well. But since the combat is all there is, it gets very finicky and boring, fast.

Another problem is there only being one match type, which is control all the objectives. I always hate this in RTS games because its such an abstract victory condition. If I have a much better economy and army strength than the AI, and more control points captured, obviously my forces would eventually win, so why does the enemy still win because a lone orc was scratching its ass on some random rock that the developers decided was important because reasons?

The story is nothing great either. Maybe if it was on par with the quality of WC3 it could have supported the shallow game-play, but its nothing special.

A perfect example of why I wish Steam allowed ambivalent reviews.

What the game does well: the writing has improved drastically from Original Sin. Granted, the bar there was on the floor but I still feel the need to commend Larian for this. Characters are no longer either absurdly clownish, or sounding like a 7th grader with a thesaurus trying to meet a word requirement for an essay due in five hours.

The narrative is excellent as well. The main plot of the game is complex, with all these little interwoven pieces that come together beautifully and draw on the the rich lore of Forgotten Realms. You get many huge choices to make that can drastically affect your run, such as who to ally with, kill, etc. A lot of factions are at play and NPCs all have unique goals that intersect in surprising ways. Even side quests are tangentially related: you might stumble across a sidequest that seems a generic, straighforward objective that has nothing to do with the main story, but eventually affects one of your main quests by giving you new information, new paths, taking you somewhere you were supposed to be anyway, etc. There are multiple ways to end up getting the same information or reach the same point and as a result you never truly feel lost (except for act 3, more on that later).

The voice acting is mostly fantastic, as is the audio/visual design. D&D feels very well represented here in a high budget way, giving it a more mature and refined look than the vast majority of pop D&D content.

What the game does poorly: Act 3. This is where things start to fall apart. Quests don't have markers, which is actually good because it forces the player to use their brain and engage with the world and I wish the rest of the game was like this too. But the problem is, there are no contextual clues to point to certain objectives. Expect to have to use a guide to look things up constantly in this section. There are also points where a certain choice seems idiotic, like it will lead to an obvious failure, when it fact that is counter intuitively the one correct way to go. Forget branching narrative paths. In most of acts 1 and 2 I could talk my way through any situation, but yet in act 3 there were times in which I was forced to fight, or steal, or some other specific solution.

According to what I've read, this is partially because there are HUGE chunks of story that are completely missing if you played a custom character (which I imagine 99% of people will immediately chose without thinking about it). These gaps are filled in, though if you play as Dark Urge. So what is Dark Urge? In short: the reason the game was ruined for me.

I spent 100 hours playing a generic nobody of a custom character with no backstory, no connection to the main plot, chaperoning and playing second fiddle to NPC companions with rich backstories and ties to the main plot. When in reality I could have had all of that for myself as well if I'd chosen Dark Urge, who does have a backstory and ties to the main plot. Thionk of it like the Bhaalspawn from BG1 and 2. Grew up in Candlekeep, orphan, mentor Gorion, friend Imoen, all that good stuff? Yeah, that.

The game tells you none of this. Instead, the character creation screen makes it look like Dark Urge is another origin character like Shadowheart or Gale when in reality they are the protagonist of the game AND fully customizable. In fact, Larian released a statement saying you shouldn't play Dark Urge on the first play-though, which I find to be nearly criminal.

So now I'm stuck wondering if I should replay 100+ hours trying to delicately recreate the same outcomes as my original play-though, all while knowing the important story spoilers that kind of make role-playing pointless anyway, or just finish my run so I at least don't have to wait 100 hours to see the ending for a run I already spent so much time on. But then that would just spoil things even more for me.

Character creation used to be fairly simple in CRPGs. You were expected to make a custom character AND be the focal point of the story as the only option. I wonder if Larian has even played BG1 and 2, let alone other foundational classics like Fallout.

So to summarize: I think you should buy and play BG3. Just play as Dark Urge. If you do that, the game will be mostly fantastic, a solid B or maybe even a B+. But with what happened to me, I just feel extremely resentful and bitter to the point where I just want to uninstall the game and maybe go play Rogue Trader instead.

Just really not a fan of the machine combat. That's why I decided to stop playing. The equipment sandbox (settings traps, using different kind of arrows, etc.) is perfectly fine. In fact that's what drew me into the game initially. I was really excited to use them tactically to take down different types of machines.

The problem is that every machine past the first few weak types is a bullet sponge. You have to knock of their armor slowly, pumping arrows into them and doing only 1 damage at a time, so you can eventually deal more damage (60-90), or deal reasonable damage immediately with a hard to land critical hit. They can also kill Aloy in a few hits which I guess makes sense for giant machines, granted. Ok, so play tactically right? Fine. But the worst part is that once you aggro one machine, you aggro them all in a whole area. So even if you use your items intelligently to take down one machine, by the time you're halfway done using traps/bombs to stun it with an elemental weakness, run in and get a critical hit, then retreat, you got anywhere from 2-10 or more machines all swarming you at once before you even killed the first one.

And its a shame too, because I really liked the setting as well. It reminds me of Numenera or other science fantasy settings, a really underappreciated genre. There was a way to make this concept work too. Just put less machines on the map. spread them out more, don't make them fight in packs, and give more XP per machine kill. That would make individual machines more rewarding and fun to fight. Instead the game wants you to just avoid the combat, I guess? Which makes it a pain in the ass to go anywhere, because the machines are literally all over the entire map.

Putting the game on easier difficulties doesn't really fix the problem either. Sure, it makes machines beatable, but then you're just cartoonishly watching Aloy shrug off mortal wounds from a swarm of machines like Wonder Woman. Not exactly fun either. So its a deeper design flaw.

Then you got all the generic open world quest design where you do boring fetch quests for NPCs, don't make any choices, etc. Its your typical side quests for busy work/collectibles.

I was mildly invested in the story and wanted to learn more about the setting, but it isn't worth playing for that. Especially when the voice acting and writing is so poor in a lot of places.

One thing I will say is that the visuals are amazing. Proof positive modern games don't need experimental military hardware to look amazing while also running well. AAA developers should take note for that, but maybe not everything else in the game.

You have to understand that game is AAA first and Star Wars at a distant second. Its chock full of repetitive, generic AAA stuff we've seen in hundreds of other games. Stuff like platforming, pointless collectibles designed to pad out progression, janky combat, surface deep pseudo RPG systems, and a terrible story. I'm surprised there weren't hacking minigames and stealth added as well.

To start with, the platforming gets old very quickly. Its got wall running, jumping, sliding, etc. but to such an extent it feels more like a Tomb Raider game. Or a Disneyland amusement park. Its a bit hard to take a game seriously when you're bouncing all around the place like fun house and doing stuff that would be impossible even for jedi. And to make matters worse, it sometimes doesn't work: Cal lets go of an edge for no reason, doesn't grab it at all, etc.

Combat has a similar issue. Its not responsive, Cal often doesn't do what you want him to. But I think it was actually by design. If you take any amount of damage, Cal gets stun and loses his action. Even if you spent force points on it. You still lose the points, but the action doesn't connect. And he gets stunned for so long that by the time you recover, you get hit by another attack. Its essentially "dodge every attack perfectly, or get stunlocked" just like Dark Souls. This is what made me hate the combat. Its 5 minutes of rolling and blocking, make 1 attack, then repeat. Combine this with how ridiculously tanky bosses and certain elite enemies are (having a second healthbar you have to damage just to open them up for 1 hit at a time) and it makes combat feel like a slog. Fortunately, you can cheese it sometimes with force powers, but you only get 3 of them, which is incredibly lame, and they're progress gated like all other unlocks.

So you're not actually doing "builds" per se, even though that defeats the point of having a skill system. I hate this in action games that pretend to be ARPGs, but there is no build diversity. So instead it just feels like mandatory grinding. You're expected to unlock every incremental bonus because the game is balanced around it, so its juts action with the "RPG" being extra steps.

The most annoying thing by far though is that Cal's lightsaber is basically a pool noodle. You can hit enemies multiple times, and they just get red scratches. Even when they finally die, they don't get cut it half or anything (at least the human ones), just fall bloodlessly to the ground. It doesn't feel like you're actually a Jedi with a lightsaber, which ruins the Star Warts vibe completely. I'm guessing they did these for family friendly reasons or some nonsense because the Disney Overlords said so, which is even more annoying.

Lastly, lets talk about the story. Here's a spoiler warning, but the story is so thin and nonsensical it really doesn't matter. Anyway, the main plot goes something like this: you meet a robot that had its memory wiped, except for a hologram of a dead Jedi telling you there is a secret vault built by ancient, extinct aliens with a holocron in it containing a map of force sensitive children. You then have to go from planet to planet, randomly unlocking the droids memory in random places for seemingly no reason, until eventually you find out there is a mcguffin that opens the vault.

How did the aliens know about the force sensitive children in the present day? Don't know. Why did they record and protect this information? Don't know. Why did they hide the key to the vault on another planet? Don't know. Who were these aliens and how did they get wiped out? Don't know. How did the dead jedi learn about this? Don't know. Why did he wipe the droid's memory and send us on pointless quests? Don't know. And so on...I mean, there is literally a part where you're exploring an ancient tomb, and the only interesting thing that happens there is "oh look, these people drew trees on their walls. Guess that means they want to Kashyyyk because its the only planet that has trees amirite? Now you have to go there too." Remember how cool the Rakatan empire was in KOTOR? Yeah, so do I.

Steer clear of this one. Its corporate Disney garbage with the same level of writing ability displayed in their litany of crappy reboots and endless spin off series like Ahsoka. Replay KOTOR instead.

Its trying to be like classic FE games, but completely streamlines most of the mechanics, stripping away the tactical depth that makes those games interesting and fun.

For example, there is no inventory management aside from healing items and buff items. Each character automatically carries 4 weapons of only one type that they always have access to and never break. Red/power, blue/criticals, green/accuracy, and yellow/speed. So combat is less about preparation and equipping the right units with the right items, and more like a puzzle that solves itself. You can just scroll through each weapon as you're deciding which one to use on that particular enemy and look at the stats. There will always be an objectively right answer. For example, if the yellow one is the only one that lets you attack twice, you will usually pick that if the damage adds up to more when multiplied by 2. If the blue, green, and yellow ones have two attacks, and your hit is close to 100% on all three, just use the blue one. Its not challenging while also being tedious. They should have had units able to equip multiple weapon types (and set up weapon ranks) with things like "spears counter horses, swords counter infantry" etc. That would have actually been tactical, instead of just juggling random numbers.

This also makes the weapon upgrade system very frustrating. You just get "tokens" that you can spend to upgrade each character's weapon colors individually. This even carries through each of their class upgrades in case the weapons change. But this just further makes everything feel streamlined and generic. Also, it makes it very hard to pick which color to upgrade. You kind of need all 4 colors to be upgraded, since the best one is really going to depend on the situation.

And then on top of this, the weapon triangle is very confusing. You have an "advantage" or "disadvantage" system that seems to be somewhat loosely based on armor type vs. weapon damage type instead of the classic swords > axes > lances > swords system. I was never able to figure this out through and it always just seemed kind of random which units were bad or good against others. Sometimes advantage or disadvantage would matter a lot, or sometimes it wouldn't matter at all. There is an in-game manual, but it explains this aspect rather poorly.

The mission design is very boring. Most fights are open arenas with very few terrain features where the objective is just "kill all". It makes fights turn into mindless, slow slugfest where the best strategy is to deathball all your units into a pile to protect the squishes and then proceed methodically. Healers get infinite uses as well, so there really is no reason not to play slow and boring, especially when the enemy outnumbers you 5 to 1 and will easily pick off your weakest characters immediately, giving them permanent injuries that reduce their stats.

And don't forget the UI. Its clunky. Most things are based on mouse but then randomly some will be keyboard. For example, the weapon scroll. You have to use the arrow keys, even though everything else about attacking requires using the mouse to click. Because of this, combined with the fact the game doesn't have a tutorial, I didn't even know there were different weapon colors until a few missions in.

Lastly, the story is pretty bad. You get recruited to fight a war, but spend a bunch of time goofing around fighting bandits and rebels. Some wizard shows up looking for an "aspect" and then disappears. Is this explained? No. Now back to fighting a war. There is no sense of pacing and getting the player used to the characters. Which are also pretty dull. Their main dialogue is mostly juvenile and expository. There are supports, but they're all things like "What's up, oh you like beans? Cool. Bye." For a game that focuses so much on the visual novel aspect (even to the point of having beautiful portraits of characters) this is an odd choice.

Skip this one.

I expected this to be better, since the game cost 20 bucks and is made by one of the creators of Fire Emblem. But this game is not like FE at all. In fact it diverges pretty wildly in terms of design.

First of all, the graphics are terrible. For a game that came out in 2019, it shouldn't have such a bad resolution. You can't even change it, either. Sure, you can fullscreen with f4, but you have to do that every single time you load in. And even then, it looks very grainy. If you alt tab for any reason, it messes up your computer's native resolution as well and its pain in the ass to get back inside the game.

Then there are a bunch of idiosyncracies. First is that pressing escape closes the game, most likely causing you to lose progress, and there is no way to change this key binding. Its a huge mistake, because esc is treated as a "back" option in 99% of games. I don't know why you would ever need to quit the game so fast to justify this. And I'm not going to unlearn a habit like pressing esc that has served me well for my entire life of gaming just for one otherwise mediocre tactics game.

The unit animations are also pretty stiff and generic. The sound is not great either, constantly switching back and forth between 2 tracks over and over again every time a different unit takes its turn. One track for the overmap goes for a few seconds, then a jarring switch to the combat track. Even the GBA Fire Emblem games that were working with much less memory had more diverse tracks that flowed better between combat and the map.

Now sure, some of these issues are due to SRPG studio. But I've seen free to play Patreon games being made by developers that work off donations that are better in almost every way.

Then there's the difficultly. Even on the lowest setting, some of the units are unusable or die constantly to RNG. You have to hope you don't randomly get crit or killed by a thief with some weird 1 durability weapon that has massive damage. I also picked up a knight in mission 2 that is only level 1 (the other units are already 6-7 by this point). I had her (sword) attack a brigand (axe) from full health. She failed to kill it and then got finished off next turn. There are also basically unbeatable optional objectives that require you to fight units that pretty much kill one of your guys every single turn. Sure, you can avoid these, but what's the point of having them there if they're so ridiculously hard? The weapons have such lower durability that I felt like I needed the extra rewards. Maybe this wouldn't be a big deal if permadeath could be toggled off, but you can't. You can save every 5 turns but that really isn't enough. Why not just let me save every turn so I can try different tactics if the game is going to be so hard?

Speaking of the weapons, there is a weird design with those as well. As previously mentioned, they have really low durability, and there are way too many types. Example: for swords I already found shortsword, longsword, service sword, and merc sword and they are all basically within the same exact starting tier but have only slightly different stats. I understand wanting to get away from the boring iron > steel > silver tier system of FE, but what's the point when each of these are only slightly different? They aren't that tactically different or change the unit's strategy. Some just hit harder but are less accurate, or more accurate but hit softer, etc. I don't really see the point when the difference is so small and they constantly break anyway. Item management is fun, but when weapons break so fast, its hard to kit out your units the way you want. Especially when the shops don't actually sell the full weapon variety. I would have liked to see a system that uses more of the special weapons from FE like the longsword (sword against cavalry) or hammer (axe against armor) rather than just different numbers.

The map design is also very strange. Some of the early levels are set up in such a way you get sniped by artillery right at the start and/or gave to spend several turns trying not to lose your weakest units while you march into the actual fight half the map away. Axe guys can scale cliffs for whatever reason, which I guess theoretically counters this impassable terrain, but they quickly get overwhelmed when they are fighting alone like that.

Perhaps a good story could make up for all the flaws, but the story is actually very generic. The characters don't have much personality or life, and the dialogues are very brief between missions. Also there aren't even any supports, as far as I can tell.

Skip this one, its all over the place and doesn't meet the standard you would expect for a game that costs 20 bucks in 2019.

Your choices do not matter at all. This is not an RPG. The main draw of the story is the murder mystery, but the mystery is impossible to officially solve in-game in the sense that no matter how you choose to conduct the investigation, whether you succeed or fail any dialogue checks, whoever you accuse is innocent. This is because the game doesn't let you accuse, suspect, or even investigate the real killer. Even more baffling, there is concrete evidence for other people being the killer, and its never explained why that evidence was there if they weren't the killer. Its a really cheap bait and switch because I guess they thought it would be a good "twist" or whatever if it looked like it was 99% obvious one person was the killer but they ended up not being one anyway.

One thing I did appreciate is that its possible to figure out who the killer is before the reveal, even if there is no concrete evidence behind it and its more of a process of elimination (also a couple of really obvious hints in act 3). Still, there are a ton of holes an unexplained issues with the killer being who they are.

I just don't see the point in a murder mystery game that's this linear and railroaded. Obsidian are known for having so many branching paths in their games so I don't think it would have been impossible to do. Of course, the story as-is is constructed in such a way that it doesn't work at all if the player is ever allowed to suspect and accuse the real killer. But still...without interactivity actually mattering, it just boils down to a VN with lots of tedious puzzles and slice of life that serve no purpose. They should have written the story in such a way as to accommodate choices better, rather than write a linear story and then try to shoehorn choices into it so they can take advantage of their reputation for making excellent RPGs.

Which is a shame, because if you look at it as a pure VN, the story is actually quite good. The dialogue is well written, the characters are complex, etc. This is definitely the level of writing we've come to expect from Obsidian. Which is why I would rather have had the game just commit to openly being a full VN.

If you're a big history nerd, like VNs, and aren't put off by the lack of choices mattering, you might want to check this out. For everyone else, I would say not.

Uses up way too much CPU causing framerate drops because it constantly insists of loading areas in the "background". What happened to old fashioned loading screens? You could load in an entire level at once that way and never have to deal with feeling like your character is moving through mud. This gets even worse when many enemies are on screen at once. Typical corporate cash grab. I'm sick and tired of games being so poorly optimized that they require ridiculously beefy rigs because there is so much bloat in it. In this case I was barely able to play the game on the absolute lowest settings.

The star of the game is the army management system. Even though its a double edged sword (it can be too detailed at times) its also super fun and the amount of customization is insane. Far more in depth that a regular Fire Emblem-like, you get to control each unit as a squad instead of individual hero, customizing their classes, formation, equipment, stats, traits, etc. Its a really creative and refreshing idea that I had a lot of fun with.

The downside is that about halfway through, the game becomes too easy. Your units can reach tier 3 (max) of their classes by this point and the enemy is throwing mostly tier 2 classes at you still. So the solution the developers came up with is throwing hordes of enemies at you, which only makes the problem worse. Not only does it feel like a slog, but it also gluts your characters with even more XP and stat gains as they level up to a point the enemy never really catches up to in terms of stats even when they are tier 3.

Some kind of level cap would have been nice. It also sucks that most level-up stat gains and shop lists are randomized. This makes it very difficult to actually customize your army they way you want to. Maybe letting the player buy anything they want would have been too much, but something like a longer shop list populated with random items would have been nice, just so you don't have to buy a unit with bad stats just to hope that the next one that populates is ok, and you can somewhat reliably get the specific stat increase items/affinities you need to build your army a certain way.

It also kind of sucks that the main heroes either don't upgrade their classes ever, or only get them through story sequences. It would have been fun to customize them into different play styles just like with the regular units, which were honestly more interesting at times due to having more options.

The story is probably where the game takes the biggest hit. The plot makes no sense and is super generic/predictable. At times it even relies on deus machinas that aren't even explained at all. Stuff just kind of happens conveniently, without any buildup to it, so there is never any tension. For example, with the supports, you basically get one for each pair of characters, not a C, B, A line that deepens their relationship slowly over time. Instead you get one support where two people instantly become friends or lovers after one interaction. And on top of that, the dialogue itself is super bland. None of the characters really have that distinct of a personality at all, aside from a few shallow traits.

If you buy it on sale, you'll get some decent bang for your buck (took me 40 hours to beat) but the overall experience is still very mid.

The biggest system in the game by far, which is the parkour system, since that is 99% of what you will be doing, doesn't even work right. It has the same exact problem with platforming I've seen so many times in other games, all of which mainly just boil down to things failing horribly to register or detect. For example, when jumping off a ledge, the jump key will usually not register so you fail to jump and fall and die. Now go repeat an entire section only to die 10 more times until the game finally decides to register your jump. This also happens with things like detecting a roll at the end of a fall to avoid taking damage, which basically never worked for me.

There is combat, which is also terribly janky. The game tells you to literally avoid it wherever possible, which turns out to be good advice. Except other times it makes it seem like fighting is mandatory. Until you realize that even in those sections you can just avoid it. Which is confusing, but I guess its also cool that there are different ways to play.

But when both of those ways are bad, there really is nothing left to like about it. The story isn't interesting and the art style is bizarre mix of minimalism and highly saturated contrast. Even with brightness and contrast at the lowest levels, most of the game is blindingly white, while dark areas like vents are pitch black. You can turn up the brightness to navigate the dark areas, but then the outside areas get even more eye-searing. After a while I got sick of having to open the menu constantly and change the settings, so I just left them on low and stumbled through the darkness like a blind bat, which is fine I guess since those areas are rare. But the game is still boring to look at because everything is one color: white. Here and there are tinges of blue, red, yellow, etc. but you rarely see more than one of these colors together at once. If I had to guess, its because "of an abstract art direction that ties deeply into the game's themes" or some other typical corpo excuse for spending less money on the game. Which is consistent with the low budget anime quality of the cutscenes.

Pass on this one. I got it for 2 bucks and don't even want to finish it.