Recent reviews by Annemone

The person thought they would finally finish the game, which they never did in their childhood. But unfortunately, the game keeps crashing with an alarming frequency. Judging by the comments, it's happening to almost everyone. Sad.

Overall, it's a top-notch game.
Gameplay-wise, it's similar to Dragon Age 1, NWN2, Pillars, Tyranny, and Divinity.
There aren't that many strategy games like this, so it doesn't get boring quickly. In the second part, I sometimes got tired of building yet another settlement.

As for the cons:
The camera doesn't stay fixed on the character, which is really inconvenient. It's easy to lose track of your character and the loot chests are harder to see because of this.
After playing for 7 hours, I've accumulated a lot of saves, both manual and auto. This makes the game take a long time to load, which is a common issue in similar games, but I've never really understood why.
The control scheme is confusing. I played for a long time using the default scheme and found it difficult. It turns out that there are two schemes, and the other one is more comfortable for me.

Overall, it's a 9/10 for me. I love this genre.

Surprisingly, the gaming experience is quite mediocre. I will now describe all the key downsides that I found.

1. The dialogue system is like in The Witcher. No, no, and no again. They didn't even achieve one percent of what The Witcher offered. Usually, the choice comes down to two unclear phrases, for example, whether to let a guy talk to his brother or not. It's not very clear what will happen next. And after 2-3 minutes of conversation with a character, you don't really care about them.
2. The map is too big. It reminds me of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. It's huge, but the events are spread out equally. There's no excitement to visit all the places of interest, rather laziness. I would prefer a smaller map, but with more elaborated events, not emptiness, like in MMOs.
3. War. This is implemented very poorly. We can choose one of two sides, for example, let's take Athens. We harm Sparta, burn their warehouses, defeat their general, and... nothing, now Athens is in power, and we can continue harming Athens on Sparta's side. What's the point? There is none. And it's the same in every region.
4. Mercenaries. Here, as punishment for various offenses, mercenaries start hunting you. By defeating them, you rise in rank. Initially, I was pleased, thinking it was cool, with elaborated characters, interesting battles, and all that. But no, they're endless annoying mobs, like in Shadow of War with orcs. What do we get by becoming number 1? A message that mercenaries have become even stronger, and ten more mercenaries are added to hunt you.
5. Cult. If anyone played the second part (when we opposed the Borgias), they might remember the spider web diagram, where enemies are cleverly fitted in, they talk about their position in the hierarchy, merits, and all that. The same principle, but without any intrigue. Each cult general (there are 7 of them) has 5 followers scattered all over the map. We kill 5 followers, and the general is revealed. We kill all the generals and get access to the cult leader. What could be more boring than such a scheme? Why not, for example, have one general with 7 subordinates, and another with 3. Some walk in pairs, for someone else, a long sub-quest is needed. No, why bother with that, just kill them, they're displayed on the map. Yes, there are some interesting ones, but no more than 7-8.
6. Bed scenes. They are simply not here, the character enters the room, we look at the closed door and that's it. I play as Cassandra and I can constantly get intimate with women. I'm afraid to imagine what Alexios has. But since you can’t draw normally, you could make a game with one main character and work it all out more. It's humiliating for a AAA class project to do so.
7. Lack of seriousness. The game no longer tries to appear realistic. For example, at level 20, fall damage disappears. Also, you can breathe underwater indefinitely and other similar unrealistic features. In the regular (non-donation) store, you can even buy a unicorn that leaves rainbow trails. It's nonsense.
8. Subquests. 90% of them are fetch quests. After many quests, we call the quest giver onto the ship, and that's it. We can no longer speak to him, only kick him off the ship. And even then, only four people can be on the ship simultaneously. The quests that were added after the release are more interesting, but not by much.
9. Quest structure. It's the same every time, lacking in variety. We arrive at an island, speak with a key NPC, receive three (always!) quests, complete them, speak with the NPC again, and go kill some boss. And that's it, every time.
10. Arena and Olympics. How can you ruin the main attraction of the ancient world? Very simply, by becoming an Olympic champion after three fights with naked men. The arena consists of five battles with identical waves of mobs. We kill them, a mercenary arrives, and that's it. It's utterly disappointing.
11. Donations. The resources required for upgrading the ship are highly inflated. Eight positions can be improved, and each requires around a thousand wood, and this is not the final level. I can find around five pieces of wood in the forest, and up to eight in the sea. Yes, we can clear bases to find a few hundred pieces of wood, but how many bases are there, and how much mindless farming is required? But for a thousand rubles, I can buy a decent amount of wood. By the way, due to the map's massive size, they offer to reveal the locations of all caves, chests, and other things for 700 rubles. I have the gold edition, but who cares? Pay more. Also, the costume sets are quite expensive. You'll have to pay a lot for a skin, weapon, and horse. It's insane at this price.

After Origins, they promised to fix all the bugs and provide a product with interesting quests. But besides a beautiful world, we get nothing. The verdict is that the game has too many flaws, and nothing is polished. It's a solo MMO. 3/10.

It ends very abruptly. I'm used to 5-episode games like Telltale or Life is Strange. Here there are only 2. Why is it allowed to release like this and not even indicate that it's an alpha or demo version? Losing a potential win was very disappointing. Don't buy it, there's no sign of a continuation anyway, I googled it.

Pros:
1. Non-linearity. It's small, but it's there, and it will please those who like to influence something;
2. Many characters. Over 15 hours, around 8 characters were introduced, all of them are generally different, and it's interesting to play them. At least it's definitely more interesting than playing solo with one character. You can't unlock them all in one playthrough since they are mutually exclusive;
3. Some puzzles are not bad, not difficult of course, but they are fun and add variety to the Diablo-like gameplay.
4. What I really liked is that mobs don't respawn on locations, the game is not grind-focused. I always disliked that in Diablo.

Cons:
1. The story. It's primitive and even silly, it quickly becomes uninteresting to follow the story. It's better than Titan Quest, but still mediocre. You play through the locations because of the locations themselves, not because it's interesting.
2. Leveling. When there are many characters, and you change the party for fun, it becomes tedious. Distributing skills points to each character, changing equipment to the best one, selecting talents, choosing skills - it's too long. The game is not that difficult overall (I didn't die once at the end on standard difficulty), so they could have added auto-leveling or auto-equipment. It would have removed most of the tedium.
3. Who came up with the puzzle of rolling a stone? If you push it against the wall, that's it, only save reload can help, you can't get it out anymore.

Actually, I expected more in terms of story presentation, at least at the level of Pillars of Eternity or Divinity. By the end of the game, it falls apart both story-wise and quest-wise. So you play through to the end reluctantly.
4/10.

Actually, you can zone out a bit while playing this game. The most obvious similarity is with Shadow Warrior 2, but for some reason without adding co-op, which kills the whole point of the setting. And this is strange, since in Saints Row 3,4, the creators had no problem with a joint mode. I also consider buying agents separately from the game to be a spit in the face.

Overall, the game is simple and unobtrusive, with missions at the level of those in The Division from Ubisoft. It's good for killing a couple of hours in a relaxed state after a hard day's work. But nothing more than that. If it's not on sale for at least 80% off, don't bother.

I got tired of the dull uniformity of locations right from the beginning and wouldn't recommend buying it, except maybe for fans of boring horror games. They gave it a score of 1 out of 10.

This is a review of someone's favorite game. They spent 90 hours playing it and wished there was more to do in the game.

Cons:
1. The multiplayer mode lacks online play, and the bots are too dumb to help complete missions, making it impossible to finish certain parts of the game without other human players. They spent over an hour trying to find other players for a quest but couldn't find anyone. It's strange that people are not playing this quest since they seem to be searching for players on forums.
2. Most of the side quests are uninteresting fetch quests with no significant storylines. It's not like in The Witcher series where side quests are also engaging and help build the story.
3. Loading times are incredibly long, even on ultra graphics settings. They had to play on medium graphics settings to avoid long loading times.

The rest of the game is great - the characters are interesting, the story is dramatic, the combat system is excellent, and the DLC content for characters is top-notch. Overall, the game is a masterpiece and deserves a 10/10 rating.

Draggy. I'm not a fan of the universe, but that's not important.

The repetitive tasks on each level got really boring. Especially breaking down doors and riding on big enemies. The first 10 times you can tolerate it, but damn, how many more times can you break down those poor doors/stones with trolls, spiders, and vargs? Is that supposed to be engaging? Plus, each of these enemies is pretty tough, obviously stretching out the game time. And that imp that steals things got annoying. It was funny the first time, but the fourth time? Stupid.

There are also other cons that aren't as annoying:
1. The plot is weak, it started with Loki and then they connected them with transitions. Sometimes it makes no sense at all. In the first chapter, we already see everything - glaciers, swamps, village, rocks... then all these locations start repeating themselves, alternating in a completely random way.
2. The camera isn't very convenient, it sometimes chooses inconvenient angles.
3. Why have a combo of 5 hits if any enemy can interrupt you on the third hit? I came up with a pattern - block/roll --> strong punch and so on. It's easier to catch weak enemies with the whip and they die with one hit. So there are combos aplenty, but they aren't necessary. IMHO.
4. The DLC is terrible. They crammed in all the work that didn't make it into the final product. Plus, I encountered a few bugs, had to replay a couple of times.

Pros:
1. Beautiful landscapes, really.
2. A really cool art book that you unlock with points from mobs. I recommend getting lost in it.
3. There are really a lot of bosses, and they don't repeat themselves. That's nice.
4. The puzzles aren't difficult, but some are quite interesting.

Verdict: 2/10, just not my thing.

Due to strange journalists who called the game an unsuccessful Diablo clone, I missed out on a good title.

The story is quite lively and interesting, and it's easy to play, perfect for a couple of evenings. It's not worth the full price, but for -50% it's definitely a top game.