Recent reviews by JellyPally

The following review will focus first on Civilization IV as a whole, then on the expansion "Beyond the Sword".

Civilization IV
Civilization IV was the first game of the Civ-series to go 3d, for better or for worse. The graphics are in fact atrocious compared to the newer Civ 5, and even Civ 3, with its 2d isometric graphics and heavy reliance on shades of brown. But as any fan of the TBS-genre will tell you; graphics are secondary to everything else.

You may ask yourself "why invest in Civ 4 when Civ 5 and BE is out?". Well, apart from having better graphics and adding (and taking away) certain features, there aren't many differences between these games. Some of the most important differences (or improvements as some will call them) are the limitation on movement and stacking in Civ 5. One may argue that limitations compared to older versions are negative, but the point would be moot when faced with "the stack of doom". So yes, at first glance, the newer games are better. There are however saving graces for Civ 4: Plenty of advanced and interesting mods, as well as a (more) stable multiplayer, the latter of which is laughable in Civ 5.

Beyond The Sword
BtS is arguably the largest expansion to any of the Civ games, and a must-have if you want to use mods, as most of them now require it to work. It adds quite a few new features, including, but not limited to:

• Ten (10) new civs, as well as 6 new leaders for existing civs.
  
• Corporations: The religion of business.
  
• Random events: FUN
  
• Lots of new game rules and options, to help customize your experience.

In conclusion: If you like the civilization-games, but don't care about graphics, or don't like the limitations of Civ V, or like Civ but want it to be more advanced with certain mods, or just want to be able to play multiplayer for more than 10 minutes without having problems; i would suggest grabbing Civ IV with BTS as soon as possible.

The Guild 2 Renaissance is the standalone expansion for The Guild 2, which contains all the same features of the same game and then some. Because of this, I will here review the base game along with the expansion in one review.

The game is a economic strategy and production manager game, taking place in Europe the 1400s. Your goal is to build a family, a dynasty and an economic empire from scratch, starting with just a small cottage and enough money to build or buy your first little workplace, and hiring some workers. You can choose which direction you want to expand through, be it food production like farms or bakeries, "Entertainment" industries like churches and pubs, or maybe something seedier, like robber dens, thieves guilds or money lenders. You can even try your hand at politics! The game has a surprising amount of variation if you actually play it for more than 10 minutes.

The game features beautiful music, as well as surprisingly good graphics for it's age and budget. There are however quite a few cons to this game:

There are so many bugs in this game, a few of them are even gamebreaking, others are just hilarious. Most of the bugs have luckily been fixed in community made patches, and there is even a small modding community who, now and then, create a few high quality mods.

The netcode is also atrocious, and i would suggest only playing multiplayer with friends who are patient and understanding of such problems. It isn't that much of a problem though, as i would say you'll have most of your fun in singleplayer anyway.

The Guild 2 is, despite its many, many faults, one of my favourite games of all time, and i truly recommend it to anyone who enjoy strategic economy games, like patrician or the "Tycoon" games. What sets this game apart from those games, is the important fact that you only control your family and your buildings, while everything and everyone else you can see are potential allies or rivals.

Garry's Mod started as a mod for the source engine, and turned into a virtual toolbox or playground for inventive players who wanted something different. It's hard to explain what it actually is or isn't, but to keep it short and sweet: it is a program that allows you to play hundreds of community-invented gamemodes, or just mess around with the physics engine in the "sandbox".

Most people know this game from various youtubers who play gamemodes like prop "hunt" or "Trouble in terrorist town", and some have probably seen pictures or videos made in the "Sandbox" mode.

The only cons i can think of are the facts that the first time(s) you join a multiplayer server you'll undoubtedly have to download hundreds, if not thousands of files, and some servers require you to have most, if not all valve-games installed (regardless of you playing them or not), which would eat up your disk-space.

Whether you want to be creative and make physics constructions, vehicles, movies or pictures, or you just want to play some funny game-mode you saw Seabuiscits or Markymark play in a video, this "Game" will entertain you for hours, especially with a couple of friends!

Team Fortress 2 is my most played game on steam, not due to religiously playing for hours everyday, but picking it up now and then since its release back in 2007. The game has fortunately not changed much in those 8 years, except from adding maps, weapons and cosmetics, although the biggest change was turning it into a F2P game with microtransactions. Some TF2 veterans frown upon "TF2P" and its onslaught of gibus rocket jumpers, but the microtransactions is arguably what has kept the game alive, and the development team in action for these last years.

The game itself is a class- and team-based FPS, with competitive undertones [spoilers]which are hidden under layers of comedy and ridiculousness[/spoiler]. The game has 9 Classes and (soon) 9 game types to choose from. With the addition of hundreds of items and weapons, each class have access to a great amount of variation of playing style and tactics. If you're not very interested in spending money in this free game, you can gain items from either random drops, trading or crafting. Besides, the stock weapons are arguably the best (except from the SMG, which is a cancerous lump of useless pea-shooting), which means that though the game is F2P, it is not Pay 2 win.

The following is a list and description of the classes, which is more of a beginners guide; irrelevant if you just wanted a review. My review is: Try this game, preferably with a friend or two!


The Scout:
The Scout is one of my favourite classes, mostly because he is a force to be reckoned with, despite his appearance. This little guy is the most agile class; with the fastest movespeed and the ability to double-, triple, or with some practice and the right gear; quadra-jump. His role is, not surprisingly, to scout the battlefield, and alert his team of sentry nests or incoming enemies. He has the least health in the game, and doesn't do a lot of damage, which means he must rely on his agility to dodge enemy fire and outmanouver them to win a fight.

Required of the player: Reflexes, Tactical Awareness.

The Soldier:
Another one of my favourites: The Soldier mostly relies on his rocket launcher to deal AoE damage (shoot feet bois). He can take a punch, but is the second slowest class in the game. His role is usually to deal damage at mid- to long range, focusing on enemy buildings and groups of players, but if played well, he can show an impressive amount of skill, showmanship, and absurd comedy. His lack of movespeed can be circumvented by learning how to "Rocket jump", which is a bizarre way of getting around, based on a glitch feature from older fps, such as quake.

Required of the player: Practice, Tactical Awareness.

The Pyro:
The Pyro is hated by many, and i must admit I only started playing him for real the last year or so. The Pyro's purpose is as you might guess; to set fire to one or more of the following: Enemies, spies, friends, buildings, furniture, the rain etc. The reason why people hate facing a pyro is because he's gonna ♥♥♥♥ on you, regardless of your class, and his and/or your skill. You might kill him, but you'll still die from the afterburn. On a more serious note: his role is to check for spies (he can ignite disguised spies to ruin their day), deflect projectiles away from friendlies, douse teammates who are on fire and immobilize ubered enemies. The pyro doesnt have much health, and has to get up real close to do his thing, so you will die a lot as him, but after a while you'll start taking more and more people with you to the respawn screen.

Required of the player: Reflexes, Teamwork.

The Demoman:
The Demoman is the demolitions expert of the team. His role is usually to take out enemy sentry nests or defend chokepoints or other areas of interest. He is a high damage, mid-health and mid-mobility class, but if played well can singlehandedly stop a push and/or win the game. The Demo is also a kind of two-fold class, and can with certain loadouts choose to be either a demoman or a demoknight. The demoknight equips some sort of shield as his secondary weapon, which allows him to charge towards (or away from) enemies, and kill them with his melee weapon.

Required of the good player: Tactical Awareness, Intelligence/Practice depending loadout..

The Heavy:
The "Heavy Weapons Guy" is one of the most underrated classes of the game, not because people think he's bad (which is not the case), but because he apparently is boring to play, which is ironic, because being a huge russian bone-head carrying a minigun sounds like the definition of fun to me.

At a first glance he seems straightforward; walk towards the enemies while firing $400,000 worth of ammunition over 12 seconds, but a good heavy has a lot on his mind: Being a large and slow target, he must constantly look around for spies and snipers who may instantly kill him if he's not careful. He also has to protect his teammates, especially the medic, either by blocking shots for them or healing them with his Sandvich™. He also has to maximise what little options for mobility he has, and know when and where to strike/retreat.

Required of the good player: Tactical Awareness, Teamwork.

The Engineer:
I think I have clocked the most hours as Engineer, not because I like him a lot, but because he is a neccessity for a good team. His role is to build, upgrade and repair buildings which help his team in various ways: The sentry gun defends an area by making the shooties, the dispenser dispenses health and ammo for teammates, and the teleporter teleports teammates from a to b.

The Engineer is not a combat class, and usually needs teammates or buildings present to survive a direct confrontation.
It's important to note that anyone can play engineer, but playing engineer well relies on one's timing and placement of buildings.

Required of the player: Patience, Intelligence.


The Medic:
The medic heals people, and it's usually enough to point your medigun and a friendly heavy and grab something to eat while he cleans house. Like the heavy, however, there are subtle amounts of things to be aware of when playing medic: It's your responsibility to look backwards while your teammates fire forwards, in other words; be a mini-scout, warn your teammates of ambushes or spies. You can of course choose to be a "Combat medic" who only heals people when you have nothing to shoot at/stab, which is fine, because the medic melee weapon has some uncanny ability to always crit when you need it to.

The most noticeable effect of a medic on a battlefield is however not that he heals people, but that his various medi-guns have various "ubercharge"-effects, which he can activate after reaching 100% uber by healing teammates:

• Stock medi-gun: makes the medic and his target invulnerable.
  
• KritzKrieg: Gives the medic's target free critical hits on all his shots/attacks for the duration.
  
• Vaccinator: Gives the medic and his target a short lasting shield against certain types of damages. <<but senpai, why use the baca vaccinator when you can use the sugoi Medi-gun-sama?>>. Because the Vaccinator builds uber faster, and uses just 1/4th of the total ubercharge on each charge you filthy weeb.
  
• Quick-Fix: something something overheal. <<but sen->>. shut up.

Required of the player: Tactical Awareness, Teamwork.

The Sniper:
The xXMLG1337DeathReaperElfXx of TF2. Point and click adventure to dispose of teammates, more or less useless in close combat. This is not CS, you will not carry your team.

Required of the player: Patience, Aim

The Spy:
Rain on everyone's parade with an instant-kill backstab, disabling and subsequent destruction of buildings, and the ability to cloak or disguise as enemies.

Required of the player: Intelligence, Sadism

(I actually have closer to 150 hrs played, but it was before i added it on steam)

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is the revival of the classic "X-Com" series of turn-based tactical games, with modern graphics, utility and design philosophy. The game takes place in the near future, and gives the player the role of commander of the "XCOM Project". The game has two distinctly different gameplay scenes: the strategic and the combat screens.

The strategic screen gives you a manager-like control of your base, and lets you make decisions about what to build, what to research, what to buy/sell, etc.

The combat screen gives you control of the tactical, turn-based combat of your squad.

The game starts out with basic terran equipment and Xenology, and the "story" goes forward only as you achieve certain milestones, which is an interesting way of progressing a game. Such milestones can be the capture or elimination of certain aliens or artifacts, or completion of certain research projects. In the long run, you'll see your base and your soldiers evolve from being small and weak, to being big and effective.

There is too much depth and variation in this game to write a thorough declaration of features here, but rest assured; this game will challenge you, if you let it. There are however fans of the old games who state that the new game is lacking in features, compared to the classic games, and they would be right. What the game lacks in quantity, it makes up for in quality. Less is more, gentlemen .

If, however, you are one who appreciates quantity over quality, I would recommend the varius DLC's for this game, especially "Enemy Within" , as well as a community-made module called "Long War". I must warn you though: Both the DLC and especially the mod will make the game incredibly hard, so i suggest postponing the installation of "Long War" until you have clocked at least 20 hours of the game. 20 hours goes by with the blink of an eye as long as you enjoy turn-based , tactical, manager, base-building, role-playing, sci-fi games.

There is also a 1v1 multiplayer mode, which is only the combat screen, and lets the player choose their units from a pool of both X-Com and alien (and EXALT, i believe?) , but i would again recommend you to postpone that until you are more than familiar with the game.

Buy it for: Its excellent single player experience, as well as feeling like the saviour of mankind.
Pirate for: To see if it's actually something you might like, especially the DLC's.

Sid Meier's Civilization is the flagship series of turn-based strategy games, and has brought the genre forward in the same way that Skyrim brought RPGs out of the basement.

Civilization 5 is in many ways both different and the same as it's predecessors. It differs by changing the map and movement to operate in hexagons instead of squares, as well as adding city-states and new, beautiful graphics.

What it doesnt change is the awful, awful multiplayer coding of previous games. It might as well be called Lag/desync/disconnect/crash Simulator 2010.

Buy it for: it's excellent single player experience.
Pirate for: not worth paying that much for half a game, when the other half has been broken and "fixed" (though not really).