Recent reviews by Bread Wizard

This is a really fun spin-off/sequel to Cultist Simulator. It offers a much more relaxed way to explore the world of Secret Histories and it's characters. But it amazingly retains it's arcane way of figuring out how the game and it's rules work from Cultist Sim. I would only recommend this game if you really enjoy Cultist Sim's lore and storytelling though, easily becoming one of my all time favorites. I look forward to this game's future!

Easily one of my Top 10 games of all time. I love how the world and stories it spins are so enrapturing and how I can explore and influence them. The gameplay is quite replayable and engaging (usually, there are times where it stalls for a bit). The Endgames are really fun and chaotic too. Thank You guys for making such a cool game.

Pretty cool throwback to a simpler time

TLDR at the bottom This is a great and short arcade collector-shooter with a cheesy 80's vaporwave aesthetic and story that breaks down the Far Cry formula to it's best aspects.
It's 100% worth it on sale. Here are my detailed thoughts:

[The Game-play]
A fun arcade collector shooter like it's predecessor but with a smaller scope. This is a god-send imo, your way less likely to get fatigued by running around getting everything. You have a level-up system that is much more streamlined and simple than a perk system. With those combined you level up and get more powerful while you explore and clear enemies and bases, which produces a pretty satisfying game-play loop. The gun-play is not much different from Far Cry 3 except with some nice neon visuals and a smaller but solid arsenal. The enemies aren't different from Far Cry 3 either but with neon, except the namesake Blood Dragons which are a boss-like enemy that are great to test your power through out the game.

[The Story, Visuals, and Audio]
It's a fun cheesy 80's action movie with all the great tropes baked in. Really tongue and cheek writing down the enemy and bestiary descriptions. Lots of neons and chromes, dark reds and bright greens that bring the whole picture together. The music is blood-pumping synth heavy vaporwave which perfectly compliments the action-packed game-play.

In conclusion this is a really fun short game with a lot of charm, solid 8/10.

I can't say much about this game that others haven't other than its a great game. So here's a few thoughts:

-The story is one of the best narratives written for a game. Although it does lose itself for a little bit in late-midgame and the type of game it is messes with the story's pacing, still a 10/10 tale.
-The Collect-a-thon open world genre is quite over-saturated today (in no small part thanks to this game and Ubisoft trying to ride off of it's success) but this game does it well. I wish there were more rewards for %100 but it was still fun to explore every nook and cranny for everything.
-In turn, The Rook Islands are a extremely well crafted environment reminiscent of Far Cry 1's setting. It feels like a live world with random patrols, wildlife, and civilians wandering around.
-The gunplay and stealth are good enough, I think the bow is the stand-out in your arsenal, with a few fun trick arrows and it being a silent weapon.
-Audio is terrible, it's the orginal audio from the Xbox so it's all compressed, took me a while to get over it.
-The Ubisoft launcher being baked into the Steam release does suck though, it takes a minute to load and requires a Ubisoft account.

In conclusion this game is great and definitely worth it on sale. 8/10 would go insane again.

Alright, so I got to preface this with I did not complete the game but still wanted to lay out my thoughts for this game as I think there is a lot of cool and good things about it. I also used a shader to make the game look much more vibrant but I do like most of the visual design of the game and I used Tom's Mod: Vanilla Plus to make the game feel and run better.

The Story: I played about 60% the way through it then read the rest of it off of the wiki. It has a decent start and a good intro to Jackal, The Buddies, and The Factions but it slowly degrades into same-y quests that don't feel that all interesting. The factions still being hostile to you although you're doing their dirty work doesn't feel too great and they're generally a weak part of the story. Jackal is cool, I like how he is written and the interviews with him are a cool thing to find and listen to, He's easily one of the strongest things about the game. I do like how the Buddies can affect how you go about a story mission, but I'll get more into that in a bit. Lastly, I do think the ending is interesting, I won't get into much more for sake of spoiling a 13 year old game.

The Gameplay: It's as mean as the first in many ways, with the good and bad. I loved the feeling of fighting and ambushing the Guard-Posts and other hostile areas...at first. As I kept playing it got more monotonous and annoying to have to fight through groups of enemies that respawned if I blinked. Especially since that they were put on common routes that you couldn't just run past even though you cleared it 4 times in the past 10 minutes (on the hardest difficulty, I'm sure you could on the lower ones). Questing was pretty repetitive after a while, there where only so many types of objectives given with different flavor text. The gun play was alright, pretty standard everything considered, they did have nice animations and degradation added a lot to the strategy. The vehicles were quite fun, they handled well, and did make fights and strategy a lot more interesting. Fights in general had a fun aspect of how you should go about attacking and your environment played a big factor in that. The map was good for immersion and I did like that as well. All-in-all I like quite a few aspects of the gameplay, its challenging and strategic but the flow of the loop got annoying and stale after a while.

Exploration: The map is quite fun to explore with a lot to find. Scouting Guard-Posts is pretty fun to do the first time around but as I said, although they don't stay beat for long. Taking the Safehouses was one of the easiest things to do but always had so kind of supplies to find, I never used the sleeping mechanic, so I feel it was a bit useless. Finding all of the diamond cases was the real meat of my exploration, they took you just about everywhere and had a lot of interesting and fun spots they were hiding. Using your GPS to find them was a neat and immersive mechanic to use. The Predecessor and Jackal tapes were pretty cool listens, immersive, and had some neat spots to be found. I do wish there was a better fast travel or just smoother system to get around the map, Its a slog to keep fighting endless enemies trying to get to places.

The Buddy System: This is one of the coolest ideas the game has in my opinion. I feel a fellow by the name of Eldd from a tom'sHardware thread layed out this mechanic the best so I'll just put that here:

"All of the playable characters are different types of mercenaries. The playable characters the player does not choose to play become non-player characters who are friends of the player's character and who can be found in bars around the in-game nation. These friends are called Buddies and they can serve various roles in the game. All of the buddies offer side missions to the player, completion of which increases that buddy's standing with the player. Additionally there are a few "extra" buddies that can be found. In any playthrough the buddies that can be met is random and not all buddies will appear.[8] The player's "Best Buddy" and "Second Best Buddy" can play additional roles.
The player's "Best Buddy" can provide the player alternate, or "subverted" ways to complete most of the main story missions. These subverted missions always require more steps than the standard mission, but they often make the final objective easier. For example, bringing a container of defoliant to one Buddy who has access to a plane, will allow him or her to deprive the enemy of cover when the player assaults a plantation, or bringing a fuse to a buddy that has a bomb will allow him or her to blow up a bridge, simply crushing an enemy barge beneath instead of forcing the player to assault the barge. Completing subverted missions also increases the player's standing with the best buddy and adds "upgrades" to every safe house in the region, such as vehicles parked outside, medical pickups and ammo pickups. However, the inevitable final objective of a subverted mission will always be that the player must rescue their buddy (Who by the end of the mission is heavily outnumbered by the enemy and must be rescued). The player must choose to either take on a shorter, more difficult mission, or a longer but easier mission.
The player's "Second Best Buddy" can come to the player's aid when they fall in battle if they are "rescue ready". The buddy will move them to a safer location, then revive them and help fight off the remaining enemies. The buddy then needs to recuperate and will be ready to save the player again once they are visited at a safehouse.
Buddies can be wounded or killed in battle during subverted missions, buddy rescues, and other circumstances. When a buddy dies, their death is permanent, and the player has only a limited number of possible buddies in each region. When all of the player's buddies are dead, subverted missions and buddy rescues are no longer available. When buddies are wounded in battle, they will mark their position with a smoke grenade and cry out for help. The player can choose to render aid, or simply leave the buddy to die. If the buddy's wounds are minor enough, the player can inject them with a syrette to fully heal them. However if the buddy's injuries are too severe, the player's only option is to euthanize them by either overdosing them with syrettes or looking away and shooting them in the head. Buddies usually have three "lives" where if they're shot down a third time, the player will not be able to save them. Their last words before death are usually "thank you.""

I feel the only thing that weighs down this is that you can't fully choose who are your best buddies, it makes sense that it's tied to a history/bond thing but still is a bit clunky.

Audio: Its pretty good for the most part. Weapons and Vehicles sound good. Its pretty cool to hear enemies make callouts to each other trying to fight you. There are some nice tracks that add to the African setting, albeit a bit generic at times. Only nitpick is that combat music starts up whenever you shoot your gun, even when your not in combat.

In Conclusion: I can see why so many people love this game, it's quite immersive and has a lot of interesting mechanics. The story is pretty grounded for the most part also. Yet, I couldn't fully get into it towards the end. It got tedious and stale after a while, and the gameplay loop wasn't very rewarding, but the highs of the game were pretty great at the end of the day and I did enjoy the buddies and combat quite although the lows were pretty low. I'd give this a 5/10, leaning more towards 4 than 6. I'm looking forward to checking out Far Cry 3, as I've heard it called the other best Far Cry game (this franchise seemed to have peaked early, huh?). Also kinda odd they completely ignored Far Cry 1, but I am a fan of the theory that Jackal is Jack Carver.

For a game from 2004 I was actually quite impressed with what it offered. The story and characters of the game are pretty simple but still help drive the game to where it goes and has a decent conclusion. The music and graphics are unfortunately nothing to write home about, but the Level Design and Gunplay make this game really fun. I played and the game on the Realistic difficulty and would never recommend it at that level, the ai practically has wallhacks and with shoot you with a AK from 500 meters away and still manage to one-tap you. Yet, being deathly afraid of what's around the corner and the strategy of how you go about hitting the checkpoints and clearing rooms/camp of enemies is a truly unique experience to this game. You can feel the age of this game, but I think this adds to the charm and quality of this game in a good way. It's a solid 6.5/10 for me and I'm very much looking forward to 2.

I love this game. First game I bought on Steam. It's gotten a lot more detailed and the map has gotten better. I recommend this game to people with a little patence and like laid back games.