Recent reviews by Slowpork

Songs of conquest is one of those games where you will need to read or watch some guides/tutorials. Some campaigns can be brutal even for those familiar with HoMM series or similar titles from the genre. With this out of the way, let's get into review.

Right now there are 4 factions in the game. Humans, humans with skeletons, humans from the desert and frogs. You might think 3/4 races being humans makes the game boring but this can't be further from the truth as there are many ways to build your army.

Some heroes excel at casting spells, others buff your troops. Some of the Wielders specialize on ranged damage/units. Every single one gives some special bonus, like extra magic (it's called essence here), resistances (ranged/magic), racial bonuses like extra offence or defence (to human or undead), or even ultra mega specialized bonuses for one type of units.

Right now the game can offer several schools of magic - Order, Chaos, Destruction, Creation, Arcana. Plus there are a lot of combined spells from two types of magic (ex.Order+Chaos or Arcana+Creation). The main source of essence are your troops, they will generate small amounts at the beginning of their turn (or by using specials skills during battle). Of course, there are other ways to get essence - Artifacts, Research, Skills (or powers), Temporary bonuses when roaming the map (Magic towers or idols) and so on. Each faction tend to favour certain types of Essence. Magic can only be used during battle, not while roaming.

Now, let's take a look at various types of humies (and frogs).

Arleon. Humans with a twist. Their main unit roster is comprised of various humans but they can also recruit (very expensive) forest Fayes. Order, Creation and Chaos are the main types of essence used by this faction. Order is pure utility/support, it can drastically improve your defense, movement points (+initiative), reduce enemy damage or buff your whole army for one round. Creation is mostly about blocking map, skipping enemy turns or dropping Acid Clouds on your foes. Chaos is great for repositioning, reducing ranged offence for all units during battle or damage enemies with blood boil or chain lightning.

Arleon just like all factions has a wide roster of units. Knights, Horned ones are heavy hitters, Sappers/Archers for ranged combat, Shieldbearers are great at holding choke points, Ministrels buff your nearby units with their skill. Small fayes are somewhat of a glass cannon, they have great damage but die just from looking at them. Big fayes are expensive, ranged units which, when upgraded in their building can shoot random magic bolts at the enemy.

Rana. Frogs and all types of creatures of the Marsh. Their main magic is Creation, Destruction and Arcana. Destruction is a great school of magic. It has buffs, debuffs and some great attack spells. Arcana is probably one of the strongest types of magic. You can teleport your units all over the battlefield while pushing enemies away or blasting them with AoE spells.

Rana is an aggressive faction, all their units have either very high movement points or can use certain skills to instantly close the distance. Their spiders can postpone enemy turn and debuff him at the same time. Marsh guardians and giant centipedes can either quickly run up to the enemy or burrow into the ground and appear right near the enemy (giant worms are great against "campy" factions). And of course, they have Dragons. Which are very expensive but can tip the balance in your favour. For cavalry they have ravagers/riders, which benefit from BOTH types of research for your troops (Beasts + Rana) making them utterly devastating units.

Barony of Loth. Humans with an undead twist. Order, Destruction and Arcana are the main magic types. Compared to other factions they focus more on melee combat. Yes, they have a couple of ranged units (Banes or Necromancers) but the majority of your focus will be on magic and crushing enemies in close combat with your legionnares (skelly bois with shields) or other types of undead creatures. Wraiths, rats (rats, rats!!1), fused skeletons (which can...wait for it...generate more skeletons!), cultists which buff your magic power and giant fused armour/legionnares all excel at melee.

The last faction is Barya which recently received it's own campaign (which is probably the most diffcult of them all). Order, Chaos and Destruction the main types of essence used by them. Barya has the best ranged units in the game. Musketeers with great range/damage and artillery from which you can't hide anywhere on a battlefield. The good thing (if you play as Barya) is that some spells can help your obliterate half of the enemy army before he can even make his first move. +1, 2, 3 ranged attacks during one turn? Yes, please. The only big drawback these units have is that they need to reload after firing once.

Just like other factions their roster is also pretty varied. The have assassins, frontline fighters, pikeneers, pipers (support troops), combat hyenas and tinkerers.

The gameplay itself is somewhat similar to HoMM. Your roam the map collecting goodies, free units, capturing/razing/pillaging cities and, of course, battling other wielders. Villages, towsn and Castles are your main sources of gold and units. Proper economy wins games, so city building is crucial for crushing your enemies.

Compared to HoMM you can't teleport right to every single enemy city on one turn or stack insane amount of units, so you game crashes (SoC has unit cap). Movement points are very limited and every action wastes some of them. There are of course other stark differences but these are probably the biggest offenders from old games.

After you finish suffering (heh) in the campaign, you can continue doing the same in skirmish! There are plenty of maps, challenges for dozens of hours, and while the campaign has only 3 difficulty levels, skirmish has a lot more, so you can tailor everything to your liking. Want to suffer? No problemo. Last difficulty, here we go! Want to learn the basics? 1st or 2nd difficulty is your best bet.

And that's pretty much it. Songs of Conquest is a great game for those looking for something similar to HoMM while not having so many utterly broken mechanics (kinda). Buyer beware though, at times the game will piss you off. Just like other strategy games at certain points.

Great, casual game.

Sometimes I think Japanese developers are competing with each other at creating the dumbest, most infuriating game mechanics.
The game is old and unpleasant to play. Watch or read the synopsis if you really want to know the story. Save your braincells, time and money, do not buy this abomination of a game.

Read the other negative reviews and the responses from the devs (+ their rabbid fanboys) to understand what you are getting into. This game features one of the worst game designs I've probably ever seen in an RPG. Atrocious combat system doesn't help either as the game will constantly throw several heavily armoured enemies at you. While other RPGs offer you at least some opportunities to level up or gather some companions, this games basically says, "f*** you lol Deal with it". Yeah, such a great "RPG" title.
Waste of players' time and, honestly, not worth the money.

Overrated.
Sometimes more is less. Obsidian clearly were not aware of that when the storyline/quests had been written. It's like they've been going with "Go big or go home". Well, I'd rather go home then.

First several hours the game was interesting enough as you explore the world, talk to NPCs, complete the quests and do all that RPG stuff. By the end, you skip through most dialogues and finally understand how micromanagement hell looks like. PoE is not some heap of trash like Dragon's Dogma but it still has glaring issues which become too apparent the closer you are to finishing the game.

I played it once and I don't want to do it again. Why? Well, your decisions don't really matter. Reputation with other factions? Pretty much useless (read about it on wiki). Your companions? You meet some of them too late, their sidequest are complete dead ends with no proper closure. Where's sense of pride and accomplishment™ in that?

Skill hell. There are lot of them. But why do you need them in a game with fixed number of enemies, that do not respawn? Also, after a certain time you completely stop using 80% of said skills (also broken already learned skills that still show up when mages level up). And non-existent AI does not help at all. 6 characters, all with their unique abilities, good luck micromanaging all that during a fight without pausing every 0.5 second.

Technical and sound issues. Some voice overs are too loud. Certain skills will burst your ear drums, while other can't be even properly heard. Your companions constant remarks inside your stronghold. Did anyone test that? For a game that old and with that level of graphic fidelity the performance is pretty bad. I suspect it has something to do with character models/AI. As soon as the fighting starts your FPS will drop significantly. Certain towns with lots of NPCs also suffer from poor performance. Developers' lack of experience with Unity? Might be. I even tried Upscaling the game to 4k to see whether it's being CPU/GPU bound issue. Same performance. Something is clearly broken.

Lots of redundant systems and unnecessary complexity. I came to play the game, not to read War and Peace or to constantly stare at loading screens because the locations are so small (and you need to fast travel constantly). Some classes are very situational. For example, monk. You get to use your skills from being wounded. What if the enemy ignores you? Well, too bad, buddy. It's 5 useful characters now. Better luck next time. Cipher is another strange class, and is completely overpowered by mage or priest. It has somewhat traditional mana system which is replenished with every hit on the enemy. But the speed of replenishment is sooooo slow. Hell, I might think that going full mage spam instead might be a great decision.

Endurance system is not that bad when you can always save scum your way through the game. There are not many encounters where you really need to think about strategy and what not. Final Boss and a giant lizard are probably the only ones. For everything else there exist pathfinding exploits and aggro abuse, thanks to a rather simplistic enemy AI.

The game can be somewhat worth for one playthrough. But later? Nah. When playing a game feels like a chore, it stops being fun.

The game might seem unforgiving at first but it becomes close to a cakewalk after just several missions. Unfortunately, the balance is heavily skewed towards Adeptus Mechanicus. Necrons are not that dangerous with proper equipment and upgrades. To be honest, it would have been great if the devs added more special moves to necrons and either completely removed or nerfed player's cohort skills. Ranged weapons are very powerful, close to being outright broken.

The most fun I had, was when I started doing achievements which forced me to disable AoE and ranged guns. At least now I had to use various AM units (which are great, even though a bit too strong imho). Only melee weapons for your tech-priests really change the game flow, in a good way. You can't jsut simply snipe Necrons from miles away, no, you have to get up close and personal and utilize Opportunity attacks to block those pesky Immortals from wrecking your Omnissiah blessed face.

The sound and visual design is great. Very fitting and 40k like. You will explore several locations of the Tomb World, which differ a lot not only visually but also in a way cognition (needed for extra actions) can be used which can contribute greatly to the difficulty of the mission. When not destroying and trying to collect Necrons, your cohort moves through a tomb prompting various events which might damage, heal your units, or even given you extra cognition/black stone.

The story is there, with three different endings. I wouldn't say it was the greatest narative ever witnessed by mankind but it's good enough, with plenty of friendly banter among Magos, Tech-Priests and other crew of the ship. There is even a (kinda) secret quest. Full completion should take around 20-30 hours depending on how you clear out different locations. It's possible to complete nearly all missions without hitting 70% of the Tomb World awakening.

All in all, W40k: Mechanicus is a decent game, with good enough story, great visuals and sound, interesting even though kinda easy gameplay (later on). Considering it cost me less than 5€, I'd say it was certainly worth my money.

I bought the game for pennies on one of the recent sales. The reviews looked good, so I thought to myself, this might be a decent Japanese RPG. Yeah, no. There is nothing decent here. On paper it might look good: hunt monsters, hoarde loot, complete quests and all that jazz. In reality, monsters are giant bullet sponges, loot is not that great or rare, and quests...well, the script for those was probably written by some intern during his (single) lunch brake.

Visually the game is ugly. Unmodded Skyrim levels of ugly. NPC models are terrible. At least, the animations are good (great even). Not the facial ones though. Honestly, the devs should've disabled them completely when talking to NPCs, to avoid the embarassment.

Sound design is decent, nothing spectacular.

Now, gameplay wise you will be running. And running. And running. A lot. And to make it even better, YOU WILL HAVE LIMITED STAMINA. Screw the players, am I right, guys? Damn, just like in Skyrim you play as an 80 year old who never done any cardio in his life. And coupled with clunky UI, you can't use potions or stamina restoration stuff quickly. Yeah, so fun. At least during the fighting I did not have much problems with stamina.

Combat is strange. Big monsters are usually bullet spongy bastards who refuse to die. Sometimes even smaller ones too. But mostly the wide boyes. By mistake I took an escort mission from the capital (these are great). I had to accompany some knight dude to some strange castle somewhere in the mountains. Funny thing is, quests/areas/enemies don't show you their levels, so one wrong step and you will be eating grass. Good thing the knight dude could deal 700-1000 damage (guesstimate). He was two-shotting most enemies, which me and my useless team of good for nothings, would be trying to kill for 5 minutes (that's only one enemy!). The knight dude was so great that he helped me not only to get some gear way above my skill level but also tons of experience. Thanks, knight dude.

Now, onto quests and moving through the world. As I mentioned earlier you will be running a lot. I don't know whether the game has mounts or something similar but I do now that there exist portable portcrystals which you can place around the world to teleport instantly to that place. Too bad, you still have to run for 10-15 minutes to get there the first time. And that's why escort missions are great. What can be better than running through hordes of enemies for 20 minutes only for your braindead company to die to some shmuck. Great quest/map design.

AI. There is not much I but a lot of A in this game. You have 3 pawns in your team to share your burdens, help with monsters and serve as pack mules when there is too much stuff in the inventory. Your personal pawn can gain experience, you can even buy skills for that genius. The other two can be borrowed from other players, meaning no experience or buying skills. They will be using stuff their owners bought/gave to them. Sounds great on paper, in reality, most players don't know how to build their pawns. This can lead to some interesting findings like mages having no heal ability during a fight or some other similar experience. Again, in theory, paws should help you dealing with monsters, in reality, ranged pawns go to melee some fool and when flying enemies attack they will be trying to kill them in close combat. Even if these geniuses use ranged attacks, they will miss a lot. During fights with big enemies these troglodytes will be running into enemy strikes and getting themselves killed in 5 seconds. Be ready to revive your pawns. Or just let them bleed out and solo the game like a real, hardcore player. Still, better than using them.

So, what do we have in the end? Clunky interface, boring quests, strange difficulty spikes and bullet sponges, completely brain dead AI and lots of running. Does it sound like a good game to you? To me, it certainly doesn't. I don't know if the devs tried to copy Dragon Age: Origins or what but what I do know that they failed miserably. Soulless game with plethora of performance issues even now, after so many years.

Some games stay decent even after many years, Titan Quest is not one of them. I first played it when it was released, when Steam was not that popular and CD/DVD disks were still a thing. Looking at the game right now, I wonder, what the hell did I find in it?

The good game in my book should either have an engaging story/quests or a great gameplay loop. ARPGs usually don't have an interesting story but it's not a problem when the gameplay is great, right? Wrong. Because TQ does not have it either.

Loot should always be a priority for ARPGs and TQ fails miserably at this. To beat the game (+Immortal Throne expansion) on Normal it takes about 20-40 hours. By the end of IT you should be around ~lvl40. Half decent items start dropping aprox. around level 30. For comparison, Grim Dawn a spiritual succesor to TQ allows you to get a fully leveled character in less than 10 hours, if you know what you are doing. And the funny thing is, the main source of experience in TQ are monsters, not quests like in GD. So, you can't simply zerg rush the game. You will have to grind like madman for the last 10-15 levels, while running through small numbers of enemies who do not drop anything worthwhile 95% of the time. You will probably find more equipment through traders by portal jumping from town to town. Getting relics is a pain, ingredients needed for these relics are very rare. Honestly, I don't know how many hours do you need to play to have a decent stash for a rainy day. And if you truly want to enjoy asinine game design, look up Experience Chart on TQ Wiki. I don't know how anyone in the developing team was like, "Yup, sounds good. Let's roll."

Level/map design is another big flaw which can't be remedied through mods or other means. First Act, Greece, is pretty decent but after that...Gods, have mercy on poor fools who decide to venture into Egypt. I've witnessed bad map design in many games but this one will probably be in my top (or bottom) 10 list. And don't even get me started on Immortal Throne expansion. Whoever thought that constantly backtracking for 2-3 minutes to a quest giver is a good idea, should be whipped with baguette. Obviously the devs wanted to prolong the experience to create an illusion of content, which this expansion lacks honestly. Again, Grim Dawn expansions offer better bang for your buck.

Visually the game still looks decent, even now. Here I have no complaints. The sounds and music are also pretty good. Unfortunately, this is not a rhythm game or some tech demo. I can't enjoy these without either a good story or an addicting gameplay.

In the end, should you buy it? No. Especially when there are plenty of decent ARPGs out there. If you really, really like the setting and made a mistake of buying TQ, install mods for extra XP and Loot. These make the game much, much better.

"MOVE! WITH HASTE! QUICKLY! WE SURPASS NAGASH" simulator.

Игра года, не иначе.

P.S.: Миша, где мульт?