Recent reviews by Reality

Stargate SG-1 without the P90s

Indie Mario Maker with a 'kitchen sink' design philosophy - the costume power ups range from the Solomon's key block mechanic to Worms style projectile aiming. level quality varies. but lot of good stuff made already

Warlock (2012) is labeled as taking place in the Ardania Franchise (Majesty 2000, Majesty 2 2009) but it is really a Fusion of Master of Magic (1994) and Civilization 5 (2010)... The Master of Magic influence is strongest, but the game is MUCH more streamlined (to its detriment) than its 2 main inspirations. The Majesty Influence is SOLELY thematic and almost none of the RTS/Godsim "hands off ant farm" gameplay of the Majesty games is present - Warlock is a 4X straight through.

Majesty and it's original expansion was developed by a company named as Cyberlore and is a cult classic I have recommened many times before. Majesty 2 and Impire were outsourced to a Russian developer called Ino-co long after Cyberlore closed its doors... The Ino-Co era games have some enthusiasm put into them but receive a deservedly hostile reception from the fans of the original.

Warlock in essence is a "snowball" style 4X -- the main appeal is developing a group of hero style units and combining level up and building bonus modifiers until they are able to fight through even large groups of dragons. - However as it is a 1 unit per hex game and each unit can only engange in 1 combat each turn, this does not work as cleanly as the Heroes of Might and Magic series.

It feautures expectionally terrible AI (their 400% production boost on impossible difficulty doesn't help them whatsoever) - The game keeps itself alive mostly by HEAVY use of Master of Magic / Heroes of Might and Magic neutral enemies who tend to appear early and be further on the tech tree than possible for a human player.

Major problems with the game - Diplomacy -
Does not include Open Borders (or at least a hidden super large negative modifier for idling units near their cities) Even the immieadte end of a war doesn't teleport your units from enemy terriorty to its borders, allowing simple surronding of cities and 1 turn killing or even fight > peace > Rest heal in enemy terriroty > war again

AI trading priorty is absurdly weighted in the player's favor, impossible difficulty does not prevent them from giving hundreds of gold in trade for earlygame spells. the 1:20 exchange ratio with Mana is the worst offender.

Upkeep/Unrest
Master of Magic already had unrest in 1994! - Warlock has essentially no penalty for map painting over as wide an area as possible. Having negative upkeep of food ONLY gives a peanlty to city growth (and for growth stages 1-8 this only means 2 turns difference, although it is signigant if trying to get a city to the maximum size), Which allows hyperfocusing on the generic Gold resource.

Strange Anti-Aggresion things
City Capitol health essentially goes 250 tjen 500 around turn 40 - The scout that you start the game with essentially has the same 8~ attack that the one in Civ 5 has (Civ 5 Cities, including the capital start at 20 health!)

Any Land unit moving to water temporarily loses all of its HP and resistances and acts as a 10HP Transport boat with 0 Resistance to everything - AI gets tons of vaulable stuff killed this way, while humans will probbably refuse to go into water at all and just drain oceans they want to cross through use of the "raise land" spells.

Magic - Magic in this game is mostly a single spell per turn affair (their are exceptions if stacking casting speed bonuses, but this requires clearing high level neuatral camps and/or 80+ turns of researching spells. Additionally Master of Magic is a game famous for its magic and allowing very different feeling playthroughs by combining different (and very randomly researched) spells - Warlock technically has random research, BUT many spells are off limit without religous favor (a very tedious process to get) and non-enchantment spells have a miniscule impact (while they were game defining in MoM, direct damage, summons, and so on were also)

Warlock Master of the Arcane, for all its faults, DOES feel like a game that Ino-Co were more comfortable designing than Majesty 2 - You CAN get a sense of the developer's respect for MoM while playing it - and I think there is a place for a MoM game with a streamlined economy (no land working, just buildings per tile) and CiV style combat (much faster than the tactical view of MoM)

However, the game easiness (damage reduction possible for a turn 10 unit can be upwards of 70% with planning, and fully enchanted lategame units are screenshot worthy) hurts the replay value, even with the large differences between the 4 playable races.

TLDR
Not as hurtful of a use as the Majesty brand as Majesty 2, and doesn't make a secret (in a good way) of really being a Master of Magic succesor - however not really as satisfying, and especially lackign depth compared to Master of Magic itself (even in 2020) or a more faithful spirtual succsor such as Age of Wonders. Main appeal is the drastically high speed the game can allow the player to play with in a subgenre dominated by slow games and the "snowball a hero into being superheros" factor.

This is a fun experience, but it drags on a little too long.

The game gives you the option of "broadside" combat, where you and the enemy give your sides to each to fire your biggest guns at each other and then circle around, ala a 18th century navy fight. The other option is "turret" combat, which heavily features automated guns, letting you fully focus on positioning.

Unfortunately neither is interesting tactically. If you favor "broadside" Then you want to alternate shooting them with your left and right side - not because of reload, but simply to manage your shield energy while tanking the enemy's own shots. Fun for a while, but a little too similiar early on to how it is later. Targeting and player movement takes place entirely on a 2D plane, although enemies can move vertically. Your shots have a "Doom-esque" ability to automatically adjust to enemy height so the lack of a z-axis isn't really a big deal.

If you favor Turret, you can exploit some enemy types who really don't have the ability to fire directly backward, and can use a small and manueverally ship get them from their blind spot. Turret can also do the "broadside" esque strategyies and save you the trouble of anti-air when fighting minor "fighter" type enemies.

Besides the combat, the game heavily features a "space trading system" where you can pick up cargos and deliver them to other places. It's somewhat cryptic.. In my opinion trading is only worth more than missions in the first sector, and pretty soon missions give more cash.

Money is a huge focus of the game because it has you chasing an upgrade loop - all equipment is rated out of 6, with 1 being the lowest. In my opinion the mechanics really encourage always having the highest defense (shields/hull) available, but with weapons you can afford to be a level or even 2 levels behind, even up to the final boss. Engines are a quality of life thing but I also kept them at max.

The money grind is made more aggravating by the game's pacing - it's very hard to survive from an area with lvl 4 enemies using lvl 3 equipment, without upgrading first, but the story misssions only take place in areas rated level 1 > level 2 > level 5 > level 6 with basically a sanctioned go-ahead to just fly through a bunch of areas since they have no story relevance, but an intensely annoying gap to make up once you get there.

You can die easily at first, but once you get used to the mechanics (or ignore them and over-grind money/equipment) then it suddenly gets really easy pretty fast. I appreciate that both a really small ship and a really large ship are viable (small having the advantage in my opinion due to saving grinding time) but it seems to be more due to poor enemy scaling than to balance.

In the end, this game gives you some visceral fun of opening up with a lot of guns, but you don't really need to think through it at all. The best feature of the game is you can explore all the different options in a single playthrough, since all ship equipment has 100% buyback value and you can try out an all missle ship, a fast ship, big tank, a focus on lasers, or etc, without having to pay for all these things seperately. The game has a mixed bag of flavor - the soundtrack and the "rude" options work in my opinion, but the setting is really thin, with the pirates and millitia never really being suceeded by bigger things (ala central government/empire) and aliens coexisting with humans except one "new species"... although you find people in the system they've conquered who act identically to everywhere else. Also apparently every ship uses a single pilot regardless of size. In the end... I would rather play a space game as a Fighter Pilot than a Flagship pilot.

I was warned that this game was a "proof of concept" and extremely rough around the edges compared to its sequel.

However, I feel that bigger than technical complaints are some things in the game that bothered me so much that even the prospect of fixing the game by tricking it out with community patches and mods is unappealling.

Pros
Combat Lvl 1-14
Comedy

Cons
Combat Lvl 15-21
Story
Charathers
Puzzles

CRPG games have several historical strengths and weaknesses - typcially compared to other RPGs (eg JRPGS) they are far more advanced on a systems level and their combat can even be described as beautiful - however, simply having an interesting system is not enough for a game to be good - most infamously with Jagged Alliance 2 - a game also must have enemy encounter design that is worthwhile to play against - this requires enemies to be both difficult, and smart enough to use the systems.. Divinity:OS is a game that at first, entirely succeeds in both these areas - enemy groups are diverse with fighters/archers/mages appearing together even early on, and the enemy has access to and is willing to use healing, crowd control and almost everythign the player has as early as the second encounter in the game.

Playing D:OS as a simple blobber leaves little room to criticize it - it keeps the player thinking, and you often need to take account of every enemy in a group. Having ONLY set encounters and limited experience keeps the combat stable (as far as player charather's growing) but it also forced the developers to be precise - the enemy's position relative to hazards, and their teamates is usually quite carefulyl thought out.

The combat system does have some pecularities that weaken it in places -

First - this game reverses the "linear fighter, quadratic wizard" paradigm of CRPGs - this makes the early game feel like the player's inputs have a bigger effect, but it leads to abandoning all non-support magic in the lategame, and a super-powered knight or archer's physical damage and ability to manhandle bosses lategame is a little silly.

Second - this is a game that is heavily about status effects early on - the player party simply cannot survive without abusing them against the enemies while protecting themselves from the enemy status effects - While this is limited to Single-target status effects, this is an interesting dynamic, and is preferrable to "just hit them" or "tank". However, once multi-target status effects are available - the "even-ness" is over and the human forever gets the advantage - the most broken of these are smoke and Ice - as while the enemy is smart enough to cure status - when you attack it's line of sight it can't figure out what is wrong , since it apparently just checks it's own unit conditions without thinking about such roundabout debuffs... often they refuse to even try to pathfind around.

Third - Resistance to status for the most part comes in 15% increments - While the Chance to inflict status starts at 100% but can be further improved (with ~200% being possible with the +2 gear you should have in a normal playthrough).... By giving lots of intelligence boosting equipment to a wizard, or strength boosting equipment to a figher - you can gain the ability to inflict status on enemies types intended to resist status... and just by doing the intuitive thing rather than thinking outside the box... Even the bosses can be pinned in place ...

However, I can't fault the combat for these too harshly since most CRPGs tend to run into problems in their lategame. And CRPG "time to level" is much longer than in other RPG types, so being good in "early game-midgame" is quite valuable.

As strong as the combat is, the other parts of the game suffer horribly by comparison..

The developers of this game mostly tried to make a "comedy" setting, akin to the tabletop "beer and pretzel" kind of D&D session. The problems with this are that 1: the brief times it tries to be serious are jarring due to the tone shift. 2: overexposure - when everything is a joke, you get sick of them.

I laughed quite a few times, but the game has many stinkers - the "throw everythign at the wall and see what sticks" approach tends to do that.... I think the game's weakest humor is when it tried to do overly clever "can you spot the trope w'ere subverting" stuff and when it tries to do animal (rights) related humor or anachronisms.

This game is also distictive for misusing "player freedom". This game gives the player so much freedom that they feel a sense of aimlessness, and bosses feel more like things you stumble into rather than events - even major ones. Worse, the sidequest heavy design is ultimately a lie - the end of the game has (70-80 hours) has a gate that tells you to go back and do most of the sidequests, so in the end, you have to do everything. This causes massive problems to the flow of the story, as charathers will outright tell you that you are doing unimportant things, and the "twist" moments and major stuff is hard to distinguish from "just another sidequest" even relying on dungeon/size enemy density to guess doesn't work (as even minor sidequests also have the good combat design).

I also feel that the MC are way too chatty and their dialogue options are montrosously chummy, I tried to care about decisions early on, but before the first town was up I let things take their course without reloading... even when instant executions or being sold into slavery was involved... I simply couldn't cared about soulless charathers and comic relief fodder after a while, and the MC's repeating the stock line "Fine, we'll do it your way" whenever you made them argue with each other got old.

While I'm normally a Gameplay > Story person, the lack of stress on the stakes in the story, and annoyness of the setting got to me, to put it frankly. While the gameplay is refreshingly hard (it won't roll over like Baldur's Gate) , it isn't really much better than the likes of Wizardry 8, which doesn't have this game's problems with setting and charerization... not to mention that D:OS is only hard if you play clean - even without phsyics abuse or glitches - you can use the extremely cheap resurrection or ability to kill PART of an enemy group and then Flee to power your way through, probbably even on the "save-state only" difficulty. Total Party Kills are rare, which is probbably why you game over when both MCs die rather than the whole party, but the simple step of using one of them on the backline is enough to gurantee that only a TPK causes a game over. (although going double melee would probbably gurantee safety the opposite way, by killing the enemeis before they kill you, due to the aforementioned "quadratic fighters" ) -

In conclusion - as a singleplayer experience this game is simply in too early a stage to be worth seeking out, even if you are interested in seeing the building blocks of Divinity: OS 2 -For this purpose it is probbably better to look at mid-period CRPGs like Temple of Elemental Evil and Wiz 8 to see the state of CRPG combat (as opposed to the relatively simple, lower difficulty of Bioware's Infinity engine games)... they've got problems, but are definately more fun to playthrough than this... If you plan to play for Co-op - why take the pit-stop here before doing it in D: OS 2 ?

Puyo Puyo Tsu is the greatesest vs puzzle game ruleset of all time.

This game provides acccesiblliy and speed in finding opponents, giving it a population advantage over something like Puyo Puyo Vs.

I know a Tetris Ultimate player who reports the same convenience for Tetris vs Tetris compared to other options.

However, the game does have a weak point - The actual Tetris x Puyo modes.

Swap mode - In my experience, you do all your offense during the Puyo part, and just stall out during the Tetris part.

Fusion mode - Will not live to be a long-lasting variant ruleset because of being very silly - The core idea is fine, but Also allowing you to continue to place pieces while chains are resolving and the .5-1 second grace time for adding onto combos is overkill (and unknown to both source games)

Finally, you can simply have one player do Tetris 100% of the time and the other do Puyo 100% of the time - This is controvertsial but I actually like it - The thing about this mode is the garbage and multiplier balancing between the two games but I actually like it.

Many people think it's entirely one sided, but there's actually a lot to look into, especially compared to (either games) default formulas which are obviously only balanced against their own games- The way I see it, Tetris players have the advantage at low skill levels, Puyo players at Medium skill levels, Tetris have the advantage again at high skill levels, and finally Puyo becomes top again at the end. except against Japanese players who used to play on arcade boards I think the main problem people have is that making each leap up requires a lot of mechanical skill practice (moreso for the tetris player). The speed at which you can dig down, or how high you can chain in the first 30 seconds are very important.Personally, I kind of think Puyo being better (for a wider region of time) is good, but that's just my bias toward a game I see as having the flexibility to include timing and incentivising watching both yourself and the opponet as opposed to only your own screen.

The game has a better in-game tutorial than most Puyo games, although it still ends about 1/3 of the way compared to what you can would be drilled to do by the community[puyonexus.com] However, I think it's admirable that it gets up to sandwich, even if it's not quite GTR... compartively, that at least prepares you for the hardest level AI compared to other games.

The in-game story follows the Puyo Puyo tradition of being comedic - It's one of the silliest, although it's a single story game instead of a personal story for each charather. However, being able to go to a level select and having score goals per level helps make it interesting compare to the marathon (arcade style) of other games. Personally I didn't find it that hard, but Puyo Puyo IS originally an arcade game - it ramps up drastically in midgame and again at endgame. I didn't have much chance to tell since I threw big chains at everything, but from what I've seen of steam reviews and (the day I forced my niece to play) it's a surprisingly stiff challenge. The computer's start to actively set up chains around chapters 5-6, and is where I suspect that non-puzzle fans get stuck . I did find the late-game Tetris missions to be a little stiff to beat myself, byt I enjoyed them for getting me out of my comfort zone. The end-game chapters kind of weirdly scale down, probbably because they are intended as a tutorial for the Fusion mode instead of challenging either your puyo or tetris skills. (The computer is awful at Fusion mode because tthey repeatedly drop tetris pieces through Puyos, and the animation playing out drastically slows the rate at which they place new places)

Recomendations
+ Longtime Tetris VS or Tertis Ultimate player
+ Longtime Puyo Player
+ Passable Party game (big bang mode preffered for this, since winning by score lets everyone at play out the full time and although the one serious player will still almost always win, it crushes their spirits less than seeing their entire screen filled with garabge)

- Modes where Puyo and Tetris interact.
- If the thought of running into extremely skilled opponenets in the matchmaker is a turn off.
- While it is compartively more welcoming of people new to the genre than usual, it still gets scary fast, both computer wise and online wise

The game is intended for Console first, but the PC port is fine from what I've seen of it. I like it as a Puyo fan, because i find it more reliable than Puyo VS, and I actually enjoy the competetion. Personally I despise Multiplayer Tetris and only like Tetris as a singleplayer score attack game, but it's not too difficult to get good enough to at least power through the forced tetris missions in the story even with no previous Tetris VS experience (the reverse is a bit more of an uphill battle). The bonus modes and variant rulesets give you some fairly light puzzle challenges, which are fun, but probbably only going to need a single weekend to do their job.

I don't care which game my opponet plays, as long as I get to play Puyo!

Helldivers is a stange game.

It's advertised as a twinstick shooter, but instead of having the fast twitchy action the genre is known for, it seems to focus on large stretches of semi-stealth with small arena sections a few times within the level.

The stealth mechanic fo this game is that levels spawn with only groups of low health "patrol" enemies. If these are allowed to see you, they can spawn the medium and heavy level enemies, as well as drasically speeding up additional patrol enemies.

It is possible to "full stealth" and not even fight the patrols, but most players seem to like semi-stealth - it's possible to burst down the patrols at long range, allowing players to achieve constant motion from objective to objective. This would make the game too easy, but it compensates a little bit with it's "shared screen scrolling" mechanic. Although this can be a disaster in games like Gauntlent (where a slower player can get pinned and everyone else has to go behind the wall to get him unstuck) the screen scrolling in this game seems to avoid this pitfall, and does a good job with its intended purpose of keeping some of the patrols alive to summon the actual enemies.

The game has 3 alien factions to fight, each of which feel fairly different to fight against, especially because the patrols are some of the most drastically different enemies for each of the races. It has mostly seamless drop-in and drop-out co-op, and can even migrate hosts (usually). I bought it with the intent only to play with a small friend group, but public games turned out to be about 3/4 of my playtime.

One of the game's stranger mechanics is the implementation of "armored" enemies - Medium enemies tend to have damage reduction except from certain angles. Certain designiated tank enemies are semi-immune to anything put the largest weapons. Generally, tanks are dangerous because anti-tank weapons can not be used as primaries, requiring some of the group tp put one in their special weapon slot (and even then multiple tanks can spawn at a time and long reload) Tanks do a good job of preventing overuse of easy to aim and wide arc weapons such as miniguns and shotguns. However, they also mean that their is a hard limit to playing the game as a "loud" group. It can be survived for a good amount of time, up to about 1:30 - 2 minutes, but continually fighting and spawning more enemies will eventually force players into a "runaway or die" scenario.

The trailers heavily focus on multiplayer shenangians, and in-game, teamates are usually much more danagerous than enemies. Friendly fire is an inevitability, but the game is pretty gentle with it's regenerating health and respawn mechanic, so it's possible to shrug off a small amount of the friendly fire, while the times you are one hit killed by badly aimed rocket launchers or supply drops are also manage.

Besides the standard missions, there are also retalitaory stirkes, and boss battles. The former is a fight in a small arena about 1.5 screens wide, with enemies spawning at a high rate. Boss battles take place in arenas about 3 screens wide. Despite how small these two are, they can easily last equally long to normal maps, as Retalitoary strikes have high kill requirements, and bosses can get out of hand when first playing against them. Retalitory strikes are decent fun as arena missions, but the arena setup invites more direct comparision to normal twinstick shooters, and helldivers cannot compete against in the context of doing the same thing as them. 2 of the bosses (cyborg and bug) are easily avoided health tanks where the real threat is spawned minions. The third boss (illuminate) Is extremely annoying and seems like it was designed for a game with different movement physics. A bullet pattern boss is great in smash tv or binding of issac, but not really suited toward this game.

The game's weakness is repetiveness. Their are only 3 meaningful missions types (normal, retaltiory, boss) and of those, only normal missions are particualrlly engaging. The semi-stealth is far too easy to optimize if playing solo, and although it can be tempting to do so to speed up the proggresion system, it is generally unfufilling. Multiplayer carries the game extremely hard, but can run into the same problem --- A well-oiled group can run into the same problem, particualrly if multiple people bring things like tesla towers or Napalm --- In some cases, even a single player bringing a distraction beacon can keep a lvl 1-15 (out of 50) group out of real combat for an entire mission on the highest difficulty.

When a patrol does go off, it's severity again depends on the group - if somebody instantly airstrikes it, a single alarm going off hardly matters - it's only when they start chaining off of each other that they are really fun. However, when first learning the game, the patrols can appear too powerful - because every alarm spawns more patrols in addition to fighting units , you can get caught by large numbers if you remain in one area, with each spawning between 3-4 units. So, the game kind of scares new players into playing too much stealth early on. However, the amount of fun to be had with the game depends on staying away from stealth as long as possible.

Personality wise - the game tries some pretty decent satire of an overly trigger happy first world democracy with fascist overtones. It's pretty funny, but is almost entirely contained in the opening cutscenes and the crazy in-level dialuge. Player charathers can shout "Have a Taste of Democracy!" while firing their guns. and so on. Although what we get is good, I kind of wish it did a little bit more... it lacks the satiric edge something like Chester Williams:Super Cop has, and the setting does feel like it could go a little further... I thin there's an implication that the WMD's that the aliens are holding are a pretense and that the humans are the real aggresors, but the game doesn't have a further comment. The game's setup also keeps the aliens races weirdly zoned off from each other at all times. No word if they're united against humanity, or also fight each other.

I like the idea of the game, but after 20-30 hours, you should be able to survive both the single player and multiplayer versions of the hardest difficulty for each of the three alien factions, and will have probbably done all the bosses as well. I think further multiplayer could give you a bit more, but it would require a group commiting to using the bad/joke weapons or intentionally setting off alarms to make the game more exciting. However, for me, I don't really have much drive to keep playing the game. I'm going to try for one more big MP session with the friends I originally purchased the game to play with, and then I'll be more than ready to uninstall.

Majesty is a beloved childhood game of mine. Which I originally received as the pack in during Kellog's Nutrigrain's video game pack around 2001 or 2002.

The game is a hybird RTS / Godsim originally released in 2000 with it's main innovation being the independent charather AI.

The player can directly control the construction of buildings, as normal for the genre, but all of the "heros" move on their own and cannot be given orders. Instead, they all have behaviour patterns based on their class, which lets them simulate a personality. Warriors like to hunt monsters, Rangers like to explore, and Monks like to act as hotel inspectors, wandering from inn to inn.

The system is a very cool in practice, because although every hero has a "favorite" activity at the top of their decision tree, they can go against it and sometimes you can see suprising situations develop if you watch them play around... Sometimes you'll get the one Rogue who decides to be heroic instead of cowardly, and sometimes you'll see the goofiness of a high level paladin running away from the weakest goblin.

The game is truly at it's best when you enjoy it as a sandbox. However, it is not particularly friendly to new players. Any version with the 2001 expansion installed (which includes the steam version for free) will automatically display ALL expansion missions on the map without really warning players that the entire top half of the map is intended for people who've played the bottom half. Additionally, the game labels the missions "begginner, advanced, or expert" often inaccurately, as one expert mission can give you 40 days with little disturbance while you freely build up exploration parties to attack a tower on the far side of the map, while another expert mission will send dragons after you from day 1.

This is compounded by the hero AI - While the high level of independence IS the selling point of the game, at times it can be frustating instead of enjoyable. The worst offenders are the magic heroes, who manage to combine suicdal life choices with cowardice despite how strong they are (the wizard has an unnerfed 2nd edition D&D type fireball that can 1 hit kill most medium level enemies). The small RTS interaction with heroes comes in the form of "attack flags" and "explore flags" poses both upsides and downsides - flavorwise the player gives bounties to the heroes as the king. However, some heroes will simply ignore these and will find "better" things to do, while the ones willing to do what the player wants are often the Rogues, who cannot fight very well. Luckily, the game balances it out by giving several hero classes an extreme case of wanderlust - they will go out to fight monsters EVEN without flags.

The final case of the new player unfriendliness is the general difficulty curve within the missions, as many of the later expert missions rely heavily on early game difficulty, but plateau off afterwards. This makes them especially daunting at first, since it seems like you can't even get a foothold. However, once that intial stumbling block is passed, the rest of the mission is usually passable, sometimes to the point of being anticlimatic. Only a handful of missions (Spires of Death, Legendary Heroes, and Wrath of Krolm) really continue to scale through their entire duration.

Content wise - The vanilla game (the southern quests) contains 19 levels, and the Northern Expansion has an additional 12 (although they tend to be longer). Also included are two quests which were offered as free downloads for the game back in the 2000s and the demo- Balance of Twilight, Wrath of Krolm, and Vampiric Revenge.

The 19 original quests last a good amount of time on their own, and the Northern Expansion, like many early 2000's expansion packs, is almost equal in length to the original game. The UI kind of hides the downloadble/quests and the demo, which is probbably a good thing, because Wrath of Krolm was intended as a kind of post-game challenge for people who had mastered the game already, while Vampric Revenge has an Audio loop which makes it pretty annoying.

The Quests are designed quite well, as their are limits to how hard the game's engine can support while still being fun. The game also includes a Freestyle editor, which lets you see that the engine can support harder and next to impossible scenarios, which thankfully the developers kept out of the main levels.

The game contains a mulitplayer system, which has recently been restored through Steam. However, the indirect unit control and Majesty's Singleplayer Role Play focus kind of makes it feel tacked on. It is possible to play it co-op against monsters, but this isn't really differnt than playing Singleplayer, since you are usually on opposite ends of the map from one another and don't interact much in co-op.

The Steam version also contains an editor - However, the editor's UI is somewhat archaic, and it's not a full editor, requiring users to use programs (as simple as notepad) to finish the scripting if they really want to do anything. It's still possible to play the maps and mods that more tehccnical people have made for the game, with the most notablr being the excaellent total conversion that is Majestic Majesty.

As a port the steam version gives you "Majesty Gold" and "Majesty Gold: HD" Majesty Gold is essentially the disc version, and due to directdraw and other archaic requirements, will not run well on most computers (I got it to work with everything but the intro cutscene) . HD is the same game but it works on modern computers with no normal hitches. It does contain some messy holdovers from the original - Trying to run a map with a huge number of heroes past day 80ish will still cause HD to crash, but in normal gameplay slowdown and crashes are rare, even on a Win8 or Win10. The only possible advantage to Majesty Gold is that you can launch Majesty seperate from the Northern Expansion, which kind of makes the map look less cluttered.

The game contains a lot of flavor and personality despite appearing at first glance to be an intentially generic fantasy setting. There is a good amount of "soft lore" which you can find in unit and building descriptions, I think this is mostly because the country is sometimes refered to as "mythological" which does not refer to "real life mythologies" but instead encourages that it's lore is really intended as a starting point rather than a definate political/creation myth history.

Nonetheless, the earnestness of the presentation helps it rise above being generic. The game is recongizable influenced by D&D and Tolkien type fantasy, but sometimes does it's own thing - for example, the elves in this setting are depicted as Hedonists and associated with Rogues and Gambling as opposed to the typical high elder race idea. In other cases the game revels in the genre instead of subverting it. The 14 hero classes are all distinct visually, given nice portraits , have a class by class random name generator (the barbarians being my favorite with things such as Ug the Skullmasher) , and tend to have very differnt behvaioral AI. The presentation is also helped by it's voice acting, the heros all have really memorable (usually humorous) lines, and the game's narrator does a Sean Connery impression which has to be seen to be believed.

As far as recomending this game - I think it's really good flavorwise, and it should be played at the very least because of how experimental it's gameplay is - I do think that the caveat that people who didn't play the disc back in 2000 will run into rough and frustating sections is a fair one - As a general advice - if the game starts to stomp you, try recruiting Paladins, who have the best survivability (more important than offensive stats, probbably a translation of Armor Class due to the general 2nD D&D combat design). Try to avoid breaking the game (barbarians) and enjoy it for what it offers - A Fantasy Kingdom Sim.

This is a game that can grow on people very quickly, but just as often alienates people.

I kind of blame this on th new marketing for this game. I have no idea why the steam trailer compares the game to Fire emblem when the original developer was somewhat derisive of fire emblem and open about the actual influences from western sources (master of magic and traditional wargames)

Same deal with the people treating it as a rougelike...

If people went into the game with the mindset that it's a startegy game, I think complaints about the rng, losing units but not campaigns, and so on, would be greatly reduced.

Turn limits on normal mode are pretty generous, and I can say that (since I haven't replayed many of the campaigns until steam prompted me to reinstall) since the old days they seem to have bloated the campaign recruitment list s to give you even more of an advantage. Random footpads and impact units in the former loyalists vs Undead campaigns is the most obvious.

If you want to beat it on hard mode just to say that you did... you can abuse "turn back to any turn". I think it's probbably better to get into the user made content earlier than to force yourself though

Here's my two cents :

Singleplayer is enjoyable and fairly light for the first 5 campaigns.

Then skip Legend of Wesmere (or play on easy) since it's a boring slog.

Most of the remaining campaigns have many maps, but each individual map is medium sized or only has combat in a limited section of the entire map, so it's reasonable.

2 maps of Son of the Black Eye, most of Northern Rebirth, and 2 maps of Delfador's Memoirs are the only others ones that I think have moments where they slow down too much () there are still high-difficulty but short/medium maps in rest of Son of Black Eye's campaign and the other late campaigns such as Under the Burning Suns.

User made (singleplayer content) is often of pretty decent quality and there are plenty of "best of " lists to get you started if you don't want to gamble on whoever.

Multiplayer in public games has 3 main forms -
A: wacky custom maps (some slow, some fast)
B: Super small maps that upset the balance between the 6 factions but can be over fast

C: games played on respectable medium sized maps - the fun of these does depend on willingness to GG or to take the initiative - Wesnoth does have the flexibility to be either a fast game or a slow game, but when it does get stalematey, someone should admit the point of where the positinal disadvantage is too much in order to prevent the 40 minutes of stalling that is techincally often still possible but does not aactually offer a chance of comeback.

I recomend people to NAME THEIR LOBBIES instead of using the default "Username's map" because it helps others to consider what you want out of the game. Granted that if the map is Isar's Cross everyone knows what you want out of the map.

All three are fun in their own way, and you can enjoy different ones depending on how much time you have available

The factions are arranged as follow :

Loyalists - easy to learn, emphasize offense on your own time of day.

Rebels: easy to learn, emphasize attacking on enemies negative time of day, low HP makes slow grinds that other factions are cabable of less desirable

Undead: easy to learn, emphazie glass cannon mass Adept with the bare minimum of support units (ghoul/skeleton/zombie) to wall off the Adepts and stall for time of day to be right.

Northerners: Medium to learn - can be a swarm faction with practice, larger numbers of units let them use zone of control more effectively than others. Emphazie swapping out units (grunt//troll mostly) in front line/back line during time of day and a more rigid retreat/advance schedule than others.

Knaglan Allaiance: Difficult to learn, low movement usually is a bigger downside than defensive advantages is an upside. (map selection can help)

Drakes: difficult to learn - have to be ready to work with a small number of units at the beggining due to high costs, forced to use entirely different compositions against different factions instead of cookie cutter recruits (saurian vs loyalists comes to mind). Lower defense in general (dodge rate) means that you don't really want to use them until you've gotten to the point where you feel comfortable "playing boring" to offset luck.

PS: The best map to get used to the multiplier is probbably 4P Clash (a 2 v 2 map) due to it's medium-small size and emphasizing moreso holding a line as opposed to splitting armies or capturing villages at a far distance from each other.

Wesnoth is a game that you have to work with to get the most out of it, and to be honest it's not really designed to help you with that, singleplayer tactics don't translate to multiplayer well, and differnt mechanics aren't presented with the weight of their respective importance (time of day vs resistances, movement cost vs total movement etc). I think there is a lot of redeeming value in the mods (rpg maps and survial stuff) to tide your interest over until you can actually learn how the core game works. At least for me.

I did play tons of it through 8th grade and most of high school, but at least 3 1/2 of those 5 years were basically spent at an incredibly low skill level and almost entirely in "wacky" multiplayer maps. I ended up never touching it in college. I've come back to it now, ironically because of the ways it is unlike fire emblem...

Wesnoth is a game that keeps things simple in order to deliver a strategy experience that is adaptive for the reason that a wargame is- it is not about tech trees or booming economies, and it is not an RPG. Instead it is about your on-the-field strategy and positioning with no time given to excess. You are only the commander and there is no "ordering the use of abilities" or knowing any given unit will win an engagement - local combat is assumed to have any degree of failure or sucess due to morale failure/and other factors - Because of this the commander must be prepared to win the board without total dependcy on singular engagements, and if expecting (or as) the enemy does so, it is to be dealt with via Change - a few turns retreat, even if it means giving up a village, will likely only give 1/3 of a unit in difference as opposed to the 3-4 that being persistent against luck would. Every fight is confirmation of what the enemy is doing and an oppurtunity to to know that they don't have their force elsewhere.

Wesnoth is great because it helps you to remember to use strategy in your strategy games.

Their are dozens of puzzle games these days. Some are really fast action things like tetris or Bequeled where you have to think on your feet and have fast reflexes. Others are esoteric and ask you to solve problems like adventure games in the vein of myst, king's quest, machinarium, etc.

This game struggles with picking a camp. Some levels ask you to go through outrageously fast, while others take a lot of time (or at least it feels like a lot of time by comparison). It also has a reallly terrible difficulty curve that seesaws between difficult levels and cakewalks which you have to deal with starting in the first chapter of the game, and is still an issue by the fourth and last area.

Graphics and controls do their job, I kinda like straight up space: Lots of pretty pictures of Nebulas and Wolf-Rayet Stars and things are included in this game. It's always easy to tell what is background and what is a phyiscs object, which some of these games struggle with.

You get levels that ask for a degree of pre-planning and then precision execution of each step, and then levels with such a bizarre 1-step solution that the only way to find it is to keep throwing trial and error restarts using different angles and timings, and then watch the game play itself when you finally get it right.

This is the main problem with the game. Satisfaction. It's addictive enough where you want to beat all these par challenges, but once you've overcome them, you don't get any sense of "♥♥♥♥ YEAH I DID IT"