Recent reviews by Bob☂🐧

I just finished this game tonight and I’m really satisfied with it.

I haven’t played many RPGs over the years, but I was really impressed with the number of options that this game gives you – having higher skills in some areas will let you through certain dialogues and tasks easier than others, and I found myself conserving skill-points for when I needed them most. If you want a challenge, live with your mistakes and don’t quick-save.

It’s obvious that the writers and developers put a significant amount of time and energy into scripting so many encounters and allowing so much variation. Particularly as there is so much ideological, political, and historical depth to it. Although the game is set in a made-up world, it’s easy to see where the real-world parallels come from, and through the writing, it appears to be a real labour of love.

There is of course a main plot, many weird side-quests, and quite a bit of politics and bigotry to work through. It might be possible to complete the main quest in 20 hours (maybe less), but I took a lot of time to explore every area I could and work the side-quests in parallel. A lot of my steam play-time will have been the game being paused in the menu while I was doing real-life stuff, so don’t read too much into it.

The voice acting was pretty good, but not fantastic. As it’s an indie game, I expect the developers didn’t have the resources to record and re-record numerous takes with more experienced actors. Within the dialogues, only key phrases and paragraphs are voiced due to the sheer volume of dialogue and options available, and reading is faster anyway. It’s probably best to take breaks while playing as some dialogue sections can be very lengthy and your attention may waver.

I sincerely hope the developers create more of this sort of thing, and that other developers pay attention to what made this my GOTY – an interesting plot, well written characters and back-story, and so much choice in how to pursue it.

Firstly, it’s an interesting story that was fleshed out reasonably well. Although to be honest, I'd expect the source book (if there was one?) might have been something like a cheap self-published ghost story picked up for < $1/£1/€1 on Amazon/Kindle store.
Moving on from that, a few negatives...

• CONSOLE CONVERSION - "Press Start to Continue" - where's that on a PC? Whenever I see this sort of thing in a game, I assume the conversion team don't understand PC gaming or don't really care.
  
• Unless you read-up on re-mapping the keys by manually editing the config files, you're stuck with 'WASD' keys - didn't bother me too much, but lefties might need to fiddle.
  
• I had to set mouse sensitivity to low, as well use the manual switch on my actual mouse to set it to its lowest possible setting - otherwise tapping the mouse makes you spin 180º.
  
• Because I'd set the mouse up as above, anything in game that didn't involve walking/moving around (i.e. menus, multiple-choice screens) meant that mouse cursor didn't work very well (i.e. move the mouse from one end of the desk to the other, or temporarily increase sensitivity).
  
• If you have V-sync set, the game is limited to 30fps (unless you fiddle with AMD/Nvidia apps to override). We now live in an age of Freesync/G-Sync, so with a graphics engine that can probably handle it (Unreal engine), its quite disappointing.
  
• Story is very linear so I felt I was only 'along for the ride' instead of being actively involved in it. I.e. look for clues; work it out (choose which 3 clues are most relevant); go to an area; repeat...
  
• Only a few side quests, but these added nothing to the story.
  
• Collectables - Sometimes when you collected a set, you'd get nice story/flashback scene, but generally I felt like these were shoe-horned in at the request of management because "adding value".

I wasn't expecting a highly detailed multi-character story from a well-known/published author.
The game kept me engaged for its run-time, but I don't think I'll play through it again. I bought the game on a sale, but I'd be disappointed if I'd paid full-price for it.

In 2011, my 3 word review of this game was literally “Awesome hat simulator” and had the ‘Recommended’ icon. That mostly remains true as I write this update in 2017, but I have now pretty much given up on TF2 as an actual game. I had a lot of fun with it over the past 9-10 years, but no longer get the same buzz I used to from it.
Community servers each have their own rules and play-styles, and can be anywhere between awesome and painful – it’s all pretty subjective. If you manage to find a community server you like, good for you – stick with it and have fun. That’s why this review is keeping the ‘Recommended’ icon even after taking into account the negatives for which I mostly blame the game’s developers…
I didn’t have much fun in the casual and ranked modes but I know other people do. MVM (game-play) was fun for a while, but just seemed to turn into a paid grind-fest for people to get more cosmetics. When I look back at the additions over recent years, the main things that draw my ire are micro-transactions and the over-abundance of cosmetics/stat counter items and taunts (and yes, I fell into that trap too). Thereafter some players took them to extremes, to the extent where I noticed it negatively affecting core game-play.