Recent reviews by Popcorn

Very cool
Takes a while to get around between objectives with all the random side events and there is no transmog or barber or changing your base-layer clothes.
But most of the game is the combat which is nice. You start out as chess pieces and then you evolve into checkers, and then you evolve into hybrid mutant chessers and checkss pieces, and then the enemies do the same so every single creature in every single battle can wipe the entire map clear instantly given the right conditions.

Rogue Trader ruleset plays like the Shadowrun video games, which is like XCOM with multiple action points.
Unlike the Pathfinder games by the same people, this one doesn't focus almost solely on doing a 3 minute long buff routine to scrape out a 10% hit chance on the dragon.
Instead, the dragon is made out of hydrogen bombs and you are also made out of hydrogen bombs and the coughing babies are clearly heretics you have to kill.

I don't know if this game knows what intellectual property is but I do know that it doesn't need to worry about it

Takes a long time to play (loading, unloading, big map, miniature map, random encounter map, running around base)
But makes it fun to play by giving you the superpowers you need to make a dent in the great and terrible odds they put you against
I will mention that normal difficulty is hard as hell and demands probably at least 75% optimal builds so if you don't know what that means and don't want to shake the wiki to get it to empty its pockets then you should turn down enemy stats by one notch (armor class and save bonuses)

HOW THIS WORKS:
This app (Versus Edition) needs to be installed to run the main menu. It 'comes with' any of the games you buy.
You also download Spellforce 3 Reforced, Spellforce 3 Soul Harvest, or Spellforce 3 Fallen God (Or any combination of these up to all of them) to play campaigns and gamemodes

Your hours played on steam in last 2 weeks will shoot up by a huge factor because it runs all the apps at the same time or something. Enjoy.

Ultra-brief edition overview
Buy any game (I believe):
Full Arena mode, Full Journey mode,
Spellforce 3 Reforced:
Vanilla campaign, 3 races for pvp and journey, Bonus campaign
Spellforce 3 Soul Harvest:
Soul Harvest campaign, 2 races for pvp and journey
Spellforce 3 Fallen God:
Fallen God campaign, 1 race for pvp and journey

Stimulants bad ending: win at competitive multiplayer shooter
Stimulants good ending: keep up with ARMORED CORE™ VI FIRES OF RUBICON™ bosses

Very promising, feels like you're dropping into end-game World of Warcraft without having gone through the part of the game where you do 3200 quests for worthless gear and still statistically (and mechanically) suck for the next 10 hours.
Just needs a bunch more classes, a bunch more playstyles. Those might be in the oven cooking up right now.

Doesn't have features built for MMORPG fake simulation like running out of mana and drinking water and eating food and crafting elixirs and selling them and manipulating the market and monopolizing items and looting the mobs for gray items to sell to repair your gear to prevent dying to attrition

Just the killing enemies with spells in the game, with the challenges increasing per level

Built out of pure refined Chinesium, it has all the heart and soul of a farmstead survival builder with radio stations and local VOIP and an in-game music playlist feature for the jukebox. The mechanics and gameplay loop are most similar to No Man's Sky or Fallout 76 with Rust building (squares or equilateral triangles and you slap furnaces and campfires and workbenches on them). Go explore, collect wood, collect scrap, learn tech, build base, craft upgrade. Repeat 25% faster or shinier.

But you have to run around and shoot military guys that awkwardly sidestep and float into cover and also the mutated SCPs are here on the team with the zombie virus and you tame them sometimes and every third feature from Palworld is here and the screen is structured like an MMO but we have mystical gear mods and gun attachments and stickers and an in-game currency Gacha game that decides what gun crafting recipes you're going to get.

Major bummers are the time lost to the 10 minute prologue and any of the non-mandatory quests, which end up feeling mandatory because you need to grind experience points to put on level locked equipment. Also on the major bummer list is the sheer quantity of battle passes and shops and currencies and events which you must bumble through to understand to get your free Chinese New Year spring rolls to sell for more currency points than you could earn selling all of your other property 10 times over.

On the weird and strange list is all the roof-free, wall-free, bed-free bases that interrupt the landscape because other players slap down the starter house and then vanish into the quit game button.

Very cool puzzle shooter where you solve for X in high stress environments like 3 armored axemen with 2 dogs and 4 machine gunners each behind 2 snipers blocked by 1 giant meat boss, where X is survival.
Game-mandated element of roleplay in the form of automatic voiced character interactions with personality and a required character name. 21 voices split between classes and genders plus a couple of helmet-bound voice effects means that everybody looks and feels different every time you get a new quickplay team. Or if they happen to not, they're immediate best buds like they came from the same in-lore outfit.

Cash shop is all cosmetics, but not all cosmetics are cash shop. You start in prison rags, but by level ~5 (like 3 missions) you can dress up proper by spending in-game gold coins. Gold coins are shared account-wide, so after level 15 you can dress up all the classes by just beating a mission. Spend more gold coins on clothes if you wish for other colors, fancier plating. Various in-game achievements give you more clothes too. Including simply playing 5 missions.

Aesthetic is immaculately on-brand.
Optimization, poor.
Equipment and build diversity, good.

Try it with mods!

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