Recent reviews by Nanako =^.^=

I couldn't tolerate it for even 30 mins before i gave up on this game. The core problem is that the writing is bad, truly terrible. Everything seems stilted and forced, people repeat things, reiterate points, address each other in overexplained, melodramatic ways like they're trying to cater to a dumb audience.

The voice acting is the worst of it, the main character and his mother are supposedly french, but have brash american accents. And not even good ones. The actors are awful, constantly changing pitch and emphasis as if they're in a pantomime and acting for children. Nothing feels natural about this, it's just cringeworthy, and endless. It does not stop. Conversations go on far too long with little of value being said.

There's one scene very early on where someone betrays someone else and pulls out a gun. Then, while holding that gun less than a foot away from their victim, they hesitate and monologue forever about their plans, while the victim makes no attempt to evade or disarm their attacker. Despite being clearly within arms reach, and the gunwoman being elderly and heavily wounded.

Then another person bursts into the room from behind, who also could do something, but doesn't. He just spends almost ten seconds loudly over-acting before she shoots anyway. The whole scene was atrociously silly and lacking in self awareness, like it were straight out of a children's pantomime. And that would be forgivable if this were lighthearted comedy

but it's aiming to be a dark, adult mystery. The consistently poor quality of the writing, voice acting and choreography makes it impossible to get immersed or settle in. It's silly, cringeworthy, and just plain bad

Also special mention for the bizarre caricatured artstyle, stiff bodies, and faces almost devoid of animation - despite their bizarre level of detail.

The skill and class system seemed neat, i think there was potential for something good here. But in a game that's primarily going to be about talking to people, these problems are intolerable. I can't tolerate Louie's drama-school tier voice acting for one more second. I'm out

Synthetik is an amazingly fun roguelike, but regretfully I'm giving it a negative.

Tonight I played six rounds with my friend.
On two of those rounds, he crashed at random
On one of them, I crashed during a loading screen
In one of them, he randomly got disconnected
And in two of them, after a death (where you can normally respawn) the game blinded him with a blue screen and counted him as dead, causing a game over when i died.

In none of these scenarios did we ever actually "lose" by the normal rules of the game. And this is not normal.
In the time i've owned synthetik, i've had at least 30 game sessions end in a technical problem, not because of losing. And this isn't just me or my friend. I've played with random members of the public, and they - not me, have had similar problems. An alarming quantity ot patches have been released with major known issues and hotfixed the next day. The bug reports channel in the discord is constantly clogged up with complaints of issues, most of which i've seen personally too.

The developer seems like a cool guy, i don't doubt that he's trying. But he's either completely oblivious to what he's doing, or (more likely) he has made a very poor choice of game engine. Either way, this game is not stable, and never has been in my experience. For a roguelike with a 1-2 hour lifespan and no save system, crashes are unacceptable, but that's what you'll get.

In all that time i've won the game exactly once. A stroke of sheer luck that no crashes or disconnects or bluescreens kicked one of us before we reached the final boss. Luck, because thats the norm. Synthetik just does not ♥♥♥♥ing work.

On average I'd estimate that about 3% of our play sessions end in victory, 12% end in defeat because we were unskilled, and the remaining 85% end in crash, disconnect, or some other technically related problem.

It could be a great game but its hella broken, and several months of patches have so far failed to fix it. I can't recommend it with all these technical problems

I'm gonna set a simple condition on this. If we can have one evening of playing without any gamebreaking bugs, ill change this review to positive.
No broken screens, no games getting interrupted by crashes or sync errors.

I dont think this is a lot to ask.

Amazing, i wish he'd make more games

Great potential

It reminds me a lot of Dead by Daylight mixed with Left 4 Dead, but it has more interesting gameplay, and simply a lot more stuff to do. More mechanics to play with gives it more longterm potential as a game

The environmental instakills are great, it feels like a real horror movie when you pull them off. The survivors being able to fight the killer is interesting, even though they don't often have much chance. And playing as the killer is just amazing. You switch between a physical form for direct combat, and an L4D style ghost mode where you fly around as an invisible ghost planning your next strikes. ITs great that you can lay traps and mess with doors while in the ghost mode, there's some potential for real horror

Its far from a perfect game, i do have some concerns. The biggest one is content, there's not much of it.
Four maps, four killers, and about 7 possible survivors (only 2 girls :( ) makes it feel like a game that's really early in development. I hope thats the case, and that there's a lot more stuff coming.

It also has some of the same problem as left 4 dead did, in that rushing is the best strategy for survivors. Those who keep up a rapid pace and focus on the objectives are far more likely to win than those that try to engage the killer. A bit of balancing may be needed there

The voice acting on the survivors is kinda cheesy. They are definitely corny iconic stereotypes of high school students, so its probably intentional, but i'd like to see them taken a bit more seriously

The killers feel unbalanced. Strangler and spider are great, but the giant and slasher feel laughably weak. The giant's main gimmick is a charge attack, that seems a lot like the L4D2 charger, but it's got a long windup time, is far slower, and makes a ton of noise. I've never managed to hit anyone with it yet, mostly it seems to exist so the schoolkids can easily sidestep and laugh at you. definitely needs some buffing.

It must be said, the performance is bad, it needs optimisation. I have a high end gaming rig, and i really resented having to turn things down to medium. I've played prettier games than this at far higher settings and framerates, the problem isn't on my end here.

And lastly the combat, especially when playing as the killer, is a bit spammy. I think it'd be much better if attacks were more powerful on both sides. It does get kind of silly when both teams spend two straight minutes flailing around in circles swinging wildly. But there is definitely a skill to landing those hits, gotta predict movement.

Overall, Last Year right now is fun, really fun. Its a mix of two games that are each largely unmatched in their genre, and the result is equally unique and has the potential to be better than both. Its not quite there yet, though. Needs a bit of polish, a significant bit of rebalancing, and a LOT more content.

Its a game that is badly needed though. Dead by Daylight really needs some stiff competition, i'm sick of it being the only game in town.

Fallen Enchantress is a game that had all the makings of greatness, but a vast slew of minor issues stopped it from reaching its potential.

The graphics need mention first, they're really bad in some areas. Quality is highly variable, but the terrain looks awful, and many clothing meshes are just terribly shaped. Everything looks kind of barren and empty. Some parts of the graphics look really good on the other hand, largely because of good stylization. But on a technical level, FE was bad for its time, and hasn't aged well either

The city's food/production system puts far too much weight on where you found your city. Of course location is important in any strategy game, but here, your outputs are affected massively by which specific tile you place the city centre on. in a way that scales forever and can't be compensated for. A good production tile is game-deciding, and with a poor food tile a city can never grow to full size, even surrounded by fertile grasslands and rivers. It doesn't make much sense.

The biggest flaw award though, goes to unit squads. Squads of troops can have varying numbers of people (3, 5 or 7) and everything the squad does is scaled by the number of members. When seven swordsmen swing, its not seven hits. Its one hit with 7x power.
The reason this is so bad, is the armor system. Armor is based on direct subtraction, and each individual person can wear a set number of armor pieces. This means that lategame, armor on any single unit (like a hero, or a large beast) is pretty worthless, the one mega hit from a squad dwarfs it.
But even worse than that, squads' own armor scales with their members too. So one squad of platemail knights has a frankly insane armor value and is essentially untouchable

So the lategame is dominated entirely by squads of 7 normal dudes with the best armor they can get, and everything else falls by the wayside. Heroes start to feel pretty weak, beasts and animal units are completely worthless, and even huge legendary creatures can't really compete. One of the store screenshots has a dragon in it. It's big and awesome looking, but it's going to get its scaly butt kicked by guys in armor.
In short, lategame combat is poorly balanced, illogical, and homogenous

There are a lot more flaws i could complain about too. So I will!
Governor heroes are useless. heroes gain almost no experience from anything but combat, and city governance skills are obviously not suited for fighting, so these guys will never get anywhere in levelling, they don't learn from managing their city.

The unit cap on armies feels pretty restrictive, a maximum of nine units. Although you can recruit tons of interesting novelty demons, beasts, animals, etc over time, you eventually won't have the space for such neat things, and will end up kicking them out of your army to make more room for boring footsoldiers

One of the starting equipments allows a hero to have no maintenance costs for enchantments. This is ridiculously overpowered

The factions don't really feel different, their racial traits aren't especially great, and their unique equipment is often outclassed by generic things. There's also the fact that they don't look very unique. This is largely due to all humanoids being made with a character creator, and also due to the generally poor quality of the graphics

There's a wonder that grants 1% compound interest on your gold balance per turn. It sounds like a neat idea, but there's no limits. You build it early, it breaks the game, and you're pulling effectively infinite quantities of gold out of thin air

Hellsign is a game with amazing potential, but it's showing significant signs of stagnation. Progress over the past year has been glacial, and i'm really disappointed to come back to it after that time period and find barely a handful of new enemies and little meaningful content.

It strongly needs more places to explore than just the same single house repeated over and over. More events, more variety in their placement, the entire second half of the skilltree to fill out, and a lot more content in general.

For now, i'm rating it positive for the enjoyment of whats there, the potential, and the fact that the developers sound like they're about to crest a hill in terms of content generation. I'll assess it again in six months and see if they kept their promises. But if the current rate of development remains unchanged, this review will eventually turn negative

All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

♥♥♥♥ this game was horrible, i shudder to remember it
horrible, but in a good way, yknow

its actually scary

TWW II is a truly beautiful game involving a vast and believable world map, tens of different cultures whose personality comes across well, many (far too many) battle maps and environments and visual touches. It is a world brimming with raw graphical power and environmental storytelling. I would be giving it 10/10 without a doubt. If it worked.

Unfortunately it works very poorly.

Oh it starts up, it's not like it crashes immediately and becomes unplayable. But this game (and its predecessor) are plagued by a tide of technical issues that utterly ruin the experience. It's hard to say for sure, but i reckon these are about 50% poor optimisation, and the other 50% being that the game is just too overambitious for its time.

My specs:
Ryzen 7 2700X
16 GB DDR 4 RAM
Radeon RX 570
and I've got the game running on a high speed SSD

My videocard is a tiny bit below the recommended, but everything else is well over. I think it's reasonable to expect to run this game at near-maximum settings without issues. Say, high instead of ultra. But that's not the case. Lets start with...

Map performance: It's bloody atrocious. getting 60 FPS is a pipedream. I can manage 40 if i zoom in on a low detail area, and turn the settings down to medium. Even that still feels choppy, there's constant stutters while scrolling around.

Zooming out to any modest degree (like a zoom level that you're actually supposed to play at) plunges the framerate down to 15, it's pretty awful,
To be fair, the game is really pretty, there's a lot of stuff on screen. But this PC is a monster that I built largely just for this game. It's the one thing in the world my previous hardware couldn't manage, and i spent £800 on new parts, it's still not good enough

Performance in battles is pretty good, i honestly have no complaints there. A battle has even more stuff on screen, but still runs a lot better. I think the world map is just too damn big.

Tabbing is a problem. Even in borderless mode, this is a game that doesn't like you tabbing in and out. Which you'll want to do between turns. The game will freeze for several seconds before it releases focus, and likewise when trying to give it focus again. And of course there's a not-insignificant chance of crashing here. Maybe 1% of times i try to change windows, it will crash, but you'll end up doing a lot of tabbing, so it feels prett ybad.

Speaking of which, the turn times are horrible too. Again, this is the game being overambitious. Although there's a modest handful (10 ish?) of main playable races, each of those has several leaders who all spawn on the map as their own copy of their faction. And then there's the vast quantity of minor factions and roaming mercenaries too. I've never tried counting exactly, but it feels like an average game has about 40 other nations all roaming around and doing their own thing.
And when you hit end turn, they all go and take their turns too, in sequence. No simultaneous turns here.
Turn times vary wildly, but being over a minute long is not uncommon. And if you tab out, it goes slower since your PC is giving this monstrous game less cpu time.

Lastly, there's the loading times. Oh god the loading times are unforgivable. I mentioned i'm running it on a solid state drive. This was necessary, but it still hasn't helped much. Whenever i'm starting up a battle between two armies, i can expect a bare minimum of 70 seconds loading time, often far more, especially if the armies are quite large. Oh but even worse, once you're done with that battle, you get to load AGAIN to get back to the campaign map, which is longer still

It utterly destroys the game flow, and makes the combat - the signature aspect of a total war game - too much of a hassle to play. You'll find yourself skipping fights because you just don't want to sit through two horrible loading screens which in some cases end up being longer than the battle itself
And of course, the tabbing in and out works as poorly during loading screens as it does between turns. Often it will fail to work at all, and the game will stubbornly refuse to yield focus so you're forced to watch this loading bar.

This is a ♥♥♥♥ing mess.
It wouldn't be entirely correct to call this an unplayable game, but it's not fun to play. You spend far more time dealing with technical issues, and waiting for the game to finish thinking, than you do on any form of gameplay.
Turning down video settings is always an option, but even at the lowest it only goes halfway towards solving these problems, and in the process it becomes ugly as sin. You're left with a blurry awful mess that looks twenty years old, and still runs like a slug

Apparently my gaming PC that can run every other new AAA title without issues, just isn't good enough for this beast.

I could harp on about some of the other flaws it has, like the relatively simplistic empire management aspects, or the sickeningly greedy DLC policies, but the technical issues are too much already

Maybe in another 5-10 years this could have worked.
Maybe if they'd made the world less detailed, or less populated.
Maybe if they'd optimised it better.
Maybe if I'd been rich enough to buy a supercomputer

HOMD is somewhere in my top ten best games of all time.
It is an unspeakably rich, vast and beautiful universe and I'm on my second playthrough. Having taken a couple of years since the previous run, I found it haunting my dreams constantly, occasionally I'd lie awake in bed missing it like a former lover, and I had to come crawling back.
But let's start at the beginning.

HOMD is set in The House, a bizarre dimension that sucks in people from all kinds of universes, and dumps them into a world divided into vast Rooms many miles across, where people don't need to eat, but prolonged exposure to the ever present darkness is lethal. Light is life, and the population (numbering in billions) have gathered in quite a few vast cities spread all throughout the House, while intercellular explorers, like yourself, move between Rooms in crawling vehicles.
As a result of sucking in things from multiple universes, the setting is an exquisite mix of fantasy and scifi. You can find mages and sword wielding knights, along with satellite dishes and televisions. The universe seems to average out to a roughly steampunk/victorian tech level in most places though

HOMD is a game of two main components. The explorative gameplay where you move from room to room through the house, occasionally fighting foreign vessels determined to do you harm

And the Text RPG sections when you reach ports and cities, where you talk to people, complete quests, learn about the world, and suffer horrible experiences.
The text adventure sections are the best of the game by far, writing is the strongest point here, and it is amazing. Every port you come to is its own unique culture, many of them like nothing you've ever seen in any universe before. You learn about their way of life, participate in their festivals and rituals, trade stories and treasures, and get sent on complex quests for them

The sheer breadth and depth of the ports is overwhelming, here's a hand picked selection of a few of my favourites:

The City of Keys, your home and central base, coming back here is always comfy and you make most of your money by bringing information and foreign treasures home. It is a heavily victorian-london inspired industrial landscape of smog, factories and britishness, and the capital of the Seven Cities

The City of Engines, a magically powered steampunk utopia built of cogs and gears, populated by cyborgs and robots, and floating upon a sea of oil. Shame about all the robotic monsters constantly attacking from the ocean

The City of Bridges, an ill advised settlement built in a Room without a Floor, where rows of houses are constructed on an endless network of creaking bridges stretching over the abyss. The whole city is owned by organised crime, and gang warfare is common in the streets.

The City of Masks, a paris-inspired bohemian paradise of coffee shops and theatres, ruled by an aristocracy of immortal, symbiotic Masks, which take over the body of their wearer and are passed down through generations

Phobetor Quinn, the city of drugs and dreams, where every kind of pleasure is obtainable. A vast metropolis of illusions where the sky is dominated by vast imaginary creatures, its considered rude to stare.

Eld Abrathat, a city of cults and religion, built in the skull of a dead god, where thousands of new religions constantly vie for an audience, with new cults being born and dying every day

Buzzard's Omen, a glowing neon urbanscape whose main industries are prophecy and gambling. Fortune tellers hawk secrets at every corner

Byssus, Capital of the Empire of Thread, a bizarre gothic landscape of spires and steeples, where a race of ascended ubermensch enslave mortals and murder gods. Rather real gods, of the lovecraftian sort, are chased down, pulled from the skies and butchered. Equal parts terrifying and awe inspiring

Bluesteel Court, a nation of chivalry and nobility, where armoured knights ride giant dragonflies, while nobles live in dukedoms upon the Shelves

Wordhunter's hearth, a hunting lodge populated by the word hunters. If they catch you, they'll extract a randomly selected word from your memories and devour it (without telling you which), permanantly removing that word from reality. Whenever that word appears in any dialog in future, it is a blank space instead, leaving you only able to guess exactly what someone was trying to say. It is the strangest and most interesting punishment for failure i've ever seen in any game

You get the idea, it's varied. The sheer imagination on display is mind boggling and this is a universe I would like to live in. It's also crazy huge, whenever you think you've seen it all, the house just keeps on going and you find another brand new nation with several cities of their own, each equally well written and fascinating. There is a lot of content in this game.

What's really interesting is that most of these ports are not simply isolated, but are part of one of a handful of larger nations vying for survival in the House. All of them have their own major internal problems, which lead to complex and enthralling quests for you to help them out and decide the fate of the nation. For example:
In ghoulwatch, seven eccentric candidates vie for election as the new governor. You get to pick your candidate and become their campaign manager, going on tour to spread the word and convince voters to pick your guy.
In the entomarch, a civil war is brewing over slavery, and you can tour the cities convincing their ruling baron/esses to back one side or the other in the coming conflict. You can even play both sides to force a stalemate, that prevents bloodshed while allowing slavery to be gradually legislated away

Each of these nations has a lot of nuance and politics going on which you can meddle with to shape the fate of millions, and it's rarely as simple as choosing one side or another

There are also companion quests. There's a veritable horde of officers you can recruit who are all unique characters with their own backstory, baggage and agendas you'll end up dealing with. These quests often teach you a lot about the culture those people came from

Aside from that, there is a Main Story. And it's pretty great, real compelling and a lot of effort is put forth here, especially in the graphics. It concerns two gods encouraging you down different paths to ultimately decide the fate of The House, along the way learning horrible truths about what this place is and how it came to be. It is entirely optional though, and much like an elder scrolls game, you could play for thousands of hours without even starting the main story.

Enough about story, moving onto presentation.
HOMD has an utterly excellent soundtrack. Almost all of the music is dark, gothic and unsettling, but quite notably, it's all also low key and generally unintrusive, which means you never really get tired of it, this is quite important.
As for graphics, you can see for yourself in the images and videos here on the store page. It has a rather special handpainted watercolour style, which is just a tiny bit abstract, but detailed enough to get an impression of the places you're in. Each port has exactly one vast image to depict it though, and quite a lot is told only through text, so some imagination is needed.

Continued over the next ten comments, because steam reviews are absurdly restrictive in wordcount