Recent reviews by Aleks

Get Fable - The Lost Chapters instead if you really want to enjoy the game.

Fable Anniversary is just a re-skinned version of TLC with clunkier control scheme, more glitches and Steam achievements.

If I got to name one game which receives a lot of hate yet is one of my favorites, Disciples III: Reincarnation would be my answer without the slightest hesitation. I'm gonna go through what most people complained about then throw my 2 cents on each criticism.

"Game is too hard." While in English version the 3 difficulties are Easy/Normal/Hard, there are Normal/Hard/Hardcore in Russian's respectively. To put it another way, there is no such thing as Easy mode in this game. For the love of Bethrezen, just lower the difficulty if you can't handle the harder one. Also keep in mind that even though the game eventually gets away from world map strategy, exploring the map and choosing the right mobs to fight for XP are vital to strengthen your armies. If you're wandering to a place where most neutral armies are currently out-leveled you, just head to other directions then come back another time. I've watched a streamer got frustrated after keeping on running into a Troll with a level-3-party (Tier 1) for like 20 times then screamed this game sucked really bad. Obviously, he was playing Disciples III: Suicide Squad Limited Edition and indeed that game sucks. While this is the case, sometimes you will find yourself in a situation where it looks like there are no neutral mobs you're able to farm for XP and the rest of the map is just too powerful. Don't worry, you can just grind the ruins, dungeons,... which are gonna be inactive for a few turns after being looted. Alternately, you can visit a training camp to level up any unit with a direct conversion of 1 gold = 1 experience point.

"This game is based on luck and not actual skills, my attacks always miss and the enemies inflict critical hits all the time." Seriously, RNG always plays an important role in this series. That is to say, your unit's stats really matter. For instance, Accuracy of the attacker and Evasion of the defender are the elements which decide if the attacks are gonna hit, crit, or miss. With a low-level party, your unit's stats are really poor, especially the Leader. For this reason, the game may seem hard and oddly unfair in early game, but after leveling up a couple of times, as stats increase, you will notice that your units do critical hits most of the time, while the enemies tend to miss more often. All in all, I would say this game is skill/stat point based instead of luck-based.

"Units need to level up 3 times before transformations." Although it seems that the developers had overdone a little bit, I kinda like the idea of this new leveling system. As a matter of fact, this is a good move for Multiplayer mode. People used to run around and slaughter any lower tier parties from others who are just a few XP points away from upgrading their units. In Reincarnation, they will have to reconsider their plans. Since every time a unit gains a "sub-level", its stats increase corresponding to the skill tree, thus making it less vulnerable despite one tier difference. By the same token, the huge XP requirements for upgrading remain a real pain in the a$$, which leads to an extremely slow-paced game. On the other hand, you can speed up the XP earning progressions in Hotseat mode settings, so this problem only seems to affect Campaign playthroughs.

"Hex grid battle maps." Whether you like it or not, it's just a matter of taste. In many ways, I find it ironic that so many wanted Disciples to be another HoMM, but then the more it became like HoMM, the less people appreciated it. There is no doubt that the old battle mechanic was what made the series unique yet I felt that it was less tactical as well as engaging in general. And so I like the new hex-based combat. Coupled with the fact that ranged units are now actually ranged, a smaller battlefield really adds up to a very tense exciting game that has a lot to do with skillful tactical decisions. Some whining about having their archers and mages self-slaughtered due to the changes in battlefield's size, they seemed to forget the Interception mechanic in this game. It's all about placing your tanks blocking the way to your fragile units, and only spending Interceptions when necessary. In short, that is how combat system works in Reincarnation, if you refuse to get used to it then this game is definitely not for you. Just don't waste your time.

"The game is so unbalanced." A perfectly balanced TBS is non-existent. With this in mind, I do agree that the game is still nowhere near decent, balance-wise. As a traditional thing in this series, Undead Hordes are still overpowered in the extreme. While The Empire is strengthened a little bit, Legions of the Damned have drawn the short straw. Elven Alliance, who depends heavily upon extraordinary high Initiative, seems nerfed compared to how powerful they were in the previous Disciples games. Nevertheless, your playstyles and character progression paths do matter a lot. With a focused and appropriate style of playing, any party can become extremely imba to the rest of the world regardless of the original faction. That's why Reincarnation introduced a new feature called "Reserve". Apart from the normal squad, leaders can bring with them up to 4 units in "Reserve". Those reserved slots, however, are locked until the leaders get the "Reserve" abilities in their skill trees. You are able to take other types of creatures with you and can put them in your main squad anytime except in an on-going battle, hence a wider diversity of playstyles. Still, it is advisable to form a steady team with a certain strategy right from the start as your reserved units don't get much experience after each fight. Having said that, there is a fan-made mod: Balance Rework, which rebalances the game for Hotseat maps, you may give it a try if you ever want to play Hotseat. Because the provided Hotseat maps were all badly designed in one way or another. It is worth noting that Balance Rework Mod was made with the mindset of Hotseat plays, don't try it in Campaigns unless you want to deal with some ridiculous difficult fights.

I, myself, have some complaints about Reincarnation as well. Despite the fact that I really like the new combat mechanic, the randomness of special hex spawning is so freaking annoying. Frankly speaking, I feel it is more of a luck-based thing than tactical advantages. Besides, although Reincarnation is still one of the best-looking games in its genre as well as in art direction until now, some laughable unit designs do exist. To give an illustration, the Legion's main character in Campaign and their Devils look like an actual joke to me. And Holy Avengers (hell no, my favorite unit...) now look like they're from Elven Alliance instead of The Empire. What's more, Multiplayer mode is awfully unstable, here are what I've experienced: crash upon loading a saved game, freezing when activating a certain ability in combat, connection to other players lost while fighting neutral mobs, resource glitches...

Being flooded with so many negative reviews by fans of the series who had yet to play the game for at least 5 hours, Reincarnation is still a great game as far as it goes. However, I don't recommend it to the general public, or even to the so-called die-hard fans. This game has got Mixed reviews for a reason, either positive or negative ones, they all seem reasonable. Put it this way, Disciples series is like a famous Alternative Rock band, whose newest album has some Punk elements involved and it's not easy for long-time fans to get into their new style. If you can't bring yourself to enjoy new sequels to your all time favorites, picking up Reincarnation will most likely end up with a big red thumbs-down on this Steam page. In case you relish changes and appreciate improvements, Disciples III: Reincarnation may not be a bad choice for you.

Just a friendly heads-up: If you have Trial by Fire and want to play it, make sure to launch "Might & Magic Heroes VII" from Steam library, instead of "Might & Magic Heroes VII – Trial by Fire". Both will open the same executable file, but with different App IDs, so playing the DLC from library won't unlock the achievements on Steam (the DLC on Steam itself doesn't have achievements).

When H7 first came out, I had tried playing it on my friend's account (because he pre-ordered the game but couldn't get access to his PC at the time) and I had to say that it was definitely an unfinished product. I even joked to him, "Loading a map takes a year, and AI's turns are gonna end soon in the following winter.". In fact, I was telling the truth, the optimization of this game was a disaster, I got a decent gaming laptop back then and the game performed poorly. Switching from high preset to low didn't even help, probably there were some serious issues with the game itself. Another problem I had encountered was the memory leaks. Playing largest map without having the game eating up all my RAM was impossible, whenever I nearly discovered the whole map, it just happened. I have to say, my past experience with this game wasn't so good, it was pretty sad and I was so angry while playing this game 2 years ago.

I can't seem to remember the time when I bought H7 for my account, as it was completely forgotten after making me insane for a few months. Steam said that I picked it up last year while it was on sale. Well, I must have been drunk as ♥♥♥♥ then. Anyway, I gave this game a try once more, I can say it has been transformed into something else. Loading time seems to be "normal" now. Enemy's turns still take a lot of time, but compared to what I did experience, it's like they made one year turn into ten milliseconds. In addition, although the game still tends to take up more RAM usage after a certain time of map exploring, the memory leak issue rarely happens anymore.

It's funny how I still remember the first time playing H7, that was when I would have no hesitation in giving the game's cinematic a 0/10 score. In the "cutscenes" (I don't know if it is the right word in this case), which show us the Shadow Council's round table discussion about the current situation, whenever someone talked, the camera turned and zoomed into his/her face and then the dialogue began. It was pure magic how words could get out of their mouths, because... their lips didn't move at all! Terrible, I had no other words to say. Fortunately, Limbic seems to improve the dialogue problem in some of their patches, now the camera doesn't zoom into their faces and everything is a little less ridiculous.

Yes, it is true that Limbic did patch their broken game, but it is also true that Limbic has abandoned their game (See: Their announcement ), how tragic... It means that there will be no further updates, no patches, no new DLCs for H7 whatsoever. Fortunately, developers left, community stays, fans still try to fix the game. There is Unoffical Community Patch, I did the campaigns with this community patch, and everything seemed alright, there were still bugs and glitches here and there though.

With that being said, patching a broken game just makes it more broken, it is true on some aspects with this game. Magic heroes were weak in the previous versions of H7, so to make the game more "balance", developers "fixed" this by buffing those heroes and their skills. You might think this move was reasonable, but the fact is that it broke some campaign's encounters. In some maps, you may find some unexpected difficult fights with the enemy's magic heroes. It was possible yet hard to beat them, so there's nothing game-breaking, just annoying.

Well, talking about "annoying", AI is the thing which annoys me the most. I heard people said H6 had the worst AI ever, H7's AI is the living proof that proves they're deadly wrong. Both scripted heroes and non-scripted ones seem clueless. Scripted heroes are not aggressive to player at all, after one or two defeats, they are just running around like crazy. Non-scripted heroes are even worse, some of them (usually empty heroes with no unit at all) just wander around doing nothing. Another annoying thing is the number of them, the first thing AI seems to do in each map is to hire all available heroes. Then they just let them run from one point to another without giving a tiny rat's ass about player's heroes.

H7's developers reused a bunch of stuff from H5 and H6, to be more specific: decent gameplay mechanics from H5 and the interface, models, music,... plus some other clunky things from H6. For instance, skill wheel and racial skills are there in the game. I liked them, especially the skill wheel, without the randomness it's easier to optimize and to choose a play-style for your hero (it's very important and really affects the power of your hero so choose wisely). Another positive point is the new flanking system in combat. The name is self-explaining, your attacking units will do more damage when attacking from side or from behind of the enemy (full-flanking), and vice versa. Some units have special abilities about this as well, like it cannot be flanked at all or can do more damage when flanking the others. This flanking mechanic performs pretty well in my game, I feel like it brings more depth into the combat system since each round I got more things to consider and worry about.

I'm more of a single-player gamer, but I did play some multiplayer maps and my experience was just horrible: random CTDs, being unable to connect (disconnected during the game), slowness, ridiculous glitches,... guess I'll just stick to the campaigns and skirmish maps then.

All in all, It's hard to say how I feel about this game, as playing it was fun yet inwardly boring at the same time. "Should I recommend this game?" is the question that I cannot find the right answer. However, with all the things I've said above, the latest version of H7 is decent, if you had tried the game right after it was released and couldn't tolerate it, you might want to give it another shot. In case you have yet to buy the game, I suggest you should wait until it's on sale then flip a coin to decide.

At first glance, Spec Ops: The Line might seem to be another generic shooter game, yet actually it is so much more than that. Quite frankly, I'm not into military shooters at all, but I really enjoy playing this game. Well, simply amazing, the story has its own way to hold the game together. It sets the pace with many unexpected twists and turns. The plot is constantly keeping you guessing and the ending is very mind-blowing, perfectly showing to us all the brutality of war. Yes, it is still one of the best stories I've ever encountered. Besides, the game does have excellent character progression.

However, the 3rd-person shooter gameplay is pretty unimpressive: the cover system is temperamental, the aiming sucks, the weapons are boring, and stealth is rarely possible. It ends up being repetitive as do most cover-and-fire games. On that basis, the gameplay is nothing special and could be considered quite bad, but I guess that is not what this game was made for.

Spec Ops: The Line seems to have excellent art style and animation. The visuals themselves aren't top-notch yet are awe-inspiring and perfectly complement the storyline. Another point of cinematic feel related excellence is the sound design. The game indeed succeeds in bringing more depth to the story than one could imagine with the perfectly-fitting yet weirdly presented soundtracks, which always leave you with the feeling that something is very off. On top of that, the voice acting is top-tier, as well as the noise and effects, they are genuinely special, sounding very real and effective.

Overall, if you go into playing Spec Ops: The Line with the mindset that it is a run of the military shooter you will be disappointed, but if you play it looking for a game that its story is both gripping and thought-provoking, try this out. Trust me, this shooter is an outstanding piece of art when it comes to terms of story and cinematic feel. Give this game a shot, it might change your perception of the whole genre more than its technically superior counterparts ever could.