Recent reviews by AerieD

You are a renowned lute player on a mission to bring peace to the world. Unfortunately, the world is more interested in swinging enormous weapons at your unprotected body. Challenging but rewarding.

A great game for discovering just how tactically useless you really are.

How to time travel:
1) Start up Total War: Warhammer II
2) Play Total War: Warhammer II
3) Check the clock and be amazed at 12 hours having passed mysteriously.

To begin with, I was a little disappointed in Vermintide. Sure, playing through with friends was fun but once you'd cleared all the maps, the whole thing became a bit grindy for what seemed like minimal reward.

Recent updates however - both free and paid DLC - and in particular the new Quest system, have hooked me right back in. I feel like I'm cursing the dice a lot less, and I'm encouraged to just jump into games with strangers in order to complete certain tasks. There's still the odd improvement that could be made, and I'd love to see a much larger expansion that threw in new enemies, maybe even a new Hero, but if you're a Warhammer fan, a co-op survival fan, or both, you'll enjoy Vermintide as it is.

A short review, but necessary.

Turn based games are not my thing. Generally speaking, modern/ futuristic games are not my thing. Games with permadeath are not my thing.

With all that said, I could barely get away from my machine playing XCOM. I enjoyed everything about it - from the tense moments where you hoped you hadn't stepped a square too far and cost yourself a good soldier, to the dawning realisation that you should've built an extra satellite because the month's almost over and China's in full panic.

My main criticism is probably that the early game can feel incredibly difficult if you've never picked this or anything like it up before, and it's quite punishing to lose multiple countries in the first few months because you can't afford to field a good team whilst planting satellites everywhere. Later on, when your team's decked out in Titan and Archangel armour, and you're picking enemies off across the map with a squadsight sniper, and you've realised your mistake and coated the world with eyes-in-the-sky, you'll feel you can almost close your eyes and take home a win.

I haven't taken on Enemy Within yet (mind control was the bane of my life in Enemy Unknown, and from all accounts it gets worse there), but I'm already set to preorder XCOM 2 based purely on 1 campaign run. You won't regret picking this up!