Recent reviews by Kaytree

After having played Heroes of Might and Magic III for many years, I figured I'd give King's Bounty a go after hearing it was the precursor to HoMM. A worthy precursor it is! This particular version was made after HoMM, but the overall idea was not. Anyway, you choose between playing a warrior, a paladin, or a mage and beat up monsters in an amazing tactical turn-based RPG the likes of HoMM. There are tons of interesting enemies (though they're named very lamely, like "bowman" and "horseman" :P) and spells and even continents. There's a good deal of exploration throughout the game and the dialogue is outright hilarious at times. The game isn't too short, either; I got a good 50 hours or so out of it and enjoyed it very much; I'll be moving on to its sequel, King's Bounty: Armored Princess. For King's Bounty: The Legend, though, I'd say it definitely deserves a 7.5/10.

So, a summary:
Pros
- Very interesting and fun game mechanics.
- Hilarious dialogue.

Cons
- Navigating can be a pain in the butt sometimes; it'd be really helpful if you could see where you can return a quest, for example.
- Running around and around to grab more units gets a little annoying, but I understand this is one consequence of this kind of game.
- There's a lot of waiting, either with gathering troops, or waiting for your mana to refill, or trying to find an enemy that isn't too overpowering.
- There is something a little off-putting about the game, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Annndddd, Reaper is King. So many amazing abilities. :)

A friend got me this game as a Steam gift, so I figured I'd try it out! Here're my thoughts on Divinity II:

Pros
- The dialogue is actually pretty humorous, and it doesn't come off as if it's trying too hard. The guards at the beginning are funny. :P
- There's only a moderate level of customization options, BUT you can change your name, appearance, and even your gender and class at any time.
- The ability to mindread in exchange for experience adds a cool layer of depth you don't normally see to character interaction.
- Pretty good about not being entirely linear. You find yourself wandering around a lot, doing what you want to do, until you run into enemies that are too high for your level. That's really the main metric that makes you stop from venturing into certain areas.
- I'M A FRIGGEN DRAGON GUYS DUUUDE

Neutral
- There's a pretty even number of memorable and unmemorable characters you run into.

Cons
- The game isn't incredibly engaging. It feels like it's missing something, but I can't put my finger on what.
- The music is very sub-par and almost unfitting. I find myself pretty much always listening to external music through Spotify or something while playing.
- Melee is wayyy harder than being a ranger or mage. That's not too rare in RPGs, but it's pretty much by leagues and leagues here.
- The lack of romances makes me sad, just because I love those. Also, everyone reacts to you the exact same, no matter your race or gender.
- A lot of the guards' faces look exactly the same.
- You frequently get trapped in areas where the level around you is way too high and you have little way of knowing until you're already engaged in a fight. Some say the game is just "hard," but there's a pretty clear difference between needless reloads and a game being truly, properly challenging.

So there you have it. Divinity II is fun in its own way, but I can't play for longer than an hour or two at a time, for whatever reason. The game isn't engaging for long periods, I suppose.

Atmosphere: 7/10
Fun: 6/10
Frustration: Low
Replay Value: Low
Controls: Intuitive
Rating: 5/10

This game is extremely polished for being free-to-play. It truly reminds me of World of Warcraft. Many MMO's try to be like WoW, of course, but Allods actually succeeds quite well, with most of the negative aspects of WoW (aggressive and rude player base, endless raid-gear-raid loop) yet to be seen. I can also vouch that gPotato, the playing service this game comes with, is a much better alternative to beanfun!, which is what games like Divina use. No annoying shortcuts or popups or anything, and the site is far easier to navigate.

Allods comes with a quick built-in tutorial at the beginning to let you get the hang of things, but it's a fairly standard MMO when it comes to controls. Combat is fluid and isn't simply point-to-click. Quest descriptions are long, so if you want to get absorbed in the world, there's the option to. I usually just scroll to the bottom and see what I have to do, though, with the occasional full reading of my quest log. So far the quests seem pretty standard; nothing you haven't seen here in terms of talking to people, killing creatures, collecting items, and going to places.

Onto aesthetics: this game is pretty beautiful. The colors are wonderful without being overpowering and the environment is very immersive. Like I said, for being F2P, I'm impressed at the stunning visuals, and quite enjoy the lighthearted fantasy setting of the League, though the Empire's areas are cooler. The animations are very well-done, as are the various faces and bodies of NPCs. For some reason, my elf is a fairy, but hey, I've never played a fairy character before, so it could be fun (also the NPC names are Russian-sounding and there are Russian signs in towns, likely because the makers are Russian). The map system is very similar to WoW's (the maps look almost identical in style) and even includes a feature called Automove (similar to that of Divina) so you can make a straight-shot for your next quest location without having to waste time paying attention to where your character is walking; enemy aggro is even reduced when you use Automove. Customization isn't too involved, but there are enough options to keep my character from looking like everyone else's. Even the log-out screen is nice. I really like some of the effects; for example, when I shoot an arrow, the arrow gets lodged into whatever I shot, including enemies. The voice acting is a bit robotic and the combat a tiny bit awkward by default what with both the basic attacks and special attacks crammed together on the hotbar (you can change this, of course), but it's not too shabby. I especially like how you can "plan an attack" e.g. hold an attack for the next enemy you target if the first targeted enemy was killed while you were casting.

One of the most irritating things about most MMO's is the endless running around to turn in quests. There don't seem to be many straightaway paths to anywhere you need to go, mindlessly increasing the amount of time it takes you to do anything without being any fun. Luckily, Allods implements a teleportation feature that gets you from place to place relatively quickly, though the quest placement is still odd. The quests are also very hard to do in order since they don't seem to follow a logical progression; some quests will require you to stay in the same area, and then one of them will make you go to the other side of town. Are you supposed to continue questing where you end up, or go back to the start area? Both? Seems like a waste of time to go so far to begin with, then. The music also fades in and out at seemingly random times (and also gets old quickly), so I prefer listening to my own music while playing. It's not cool that you have to get what's called a megaphone in order to talk to other people in the world chat, though, and the mandatory group/instance quests for the Empire are an annoyance since you can't progress if you can't find anyone to do the instance with you. The League has no such thing required, though.

I enjoyed this game a lot, but it is very, very pay-to-win, unfortunately. The Elf Oracle is pretty boring, but I liked playing the Kanian Ranger, Xadaganian Specialist, and Kanian Druid.

SK is a pretty fun game, especially to play with your friends (many of my friends absolutely adore this game, long after I stopped playing it). I quite enjoyed going through it alone as well. The graphics are cartoony and nice and the game is definitely worth trying since it's free-to-play: the music is ambient and airy and suitable for the overall techy atmosphere. As for customization, I really like the "main color" feature - where your character stays primarily one color that you choose at the beginning, kind of like a permanent identifier for them - and especially the equip-as-costume feature - where you can keep a piece of equipment as your visible headgear while using the stats of a better item (this way your character doesn't end up looking stupid because of mismatched gear unless you want them to). My biggest disappointment was having to go through endless grinding of the Jelly King in order to get 30 Jelly Tokens to trade for an item I needed. This is when I stopped playing, and I don't plan on picking up the game again, though it was extremely enjoyable while it lasted. Recommended.

I was given this game as a gag gift, but I figured I'd write an honest review anyway! At the beginning you're just given a horse, and you can't even name it or pick its appearance. You brush and groom it a little and it magically grows up in one game day. You train your horse and make money by taking it on errands, which all consist of either waiting at a screen while the horse goes off and delivers a letter or something, or occasionally pressing the arrow keys when a spinning arrow appears above the horse's head on obstacle courses that all look exactly the same as one another. It's pretty annoying that the game only gives me a 99% at the beginning and not a 100% on the obstacle courses, even though I got 12 out of 12 perfects, giving me a telltale sign that the math used in the game's code is a bit wonky.

In addition, the fact that you must breed your horses to level up is not intuitive at all, and means that you have to keep using different horses instead of specializing in your favorites, especially at the beginning of the game, so you can't even really get attached to them. There are also a lot of things that don't make any sense in this game; for example, to get more space for horses, you don't upgrade the stable, but instead you upgrade the well (Huh?). Also, when you upgrade your buildings, they barely look any different, with some of them only changing their color scheme; that as well as not being able to choose your horse's name and appearance are major letdowns since I love customization.

I wish I could say that, out of everything, at least the graphics are okay, but even they come off as very cheap - despite the 3D - especially since the backgrounds of the obstacle courses obviously just repeat after a few screens. The models of the horses all look the same, with separate horse breeds just being colored differently. My male fire steed (which was randomly named Katelyn for some reason) has the same build as the first horse I was given, and doesn't even react negatively to me washing it with water despite its fiery genes, which would've been a neat effect to add. When I bred my two level 1 horses Alane, the unicorn, and Katelyn, the fire steed, I got a level 2 unicorn who looks exactly like Alane, not some cool-looking hybrid of the two, which is odd given that all that would be necessary is a simple texture swap or combination like any of their other horses. Very disappointing.

The music is extremely generic: there's only one track that continuously plays throughout the entire game, and it's just low-key happy music, nothing memorable. The tutorials are also extremely annoying since they show up every single time you enter each area, whether you've already read the tutorial or not. The quest notifications are very slow, with each one lasting a few seconds. Problem is, you'll be sitting and waiting on 9+ notifications when you have multiple horses out on quests. And, last but not least, the precision is terribly off, making it very hard to give your horse potions or groom it without it moving around everywhere and forcing you to try every little spot that might trigger the correct action. Thus, altogether, the game is very unpolished, having about 12 hours of gameplay - from what I hear - of doing the same things (waiting at a screen and hitting arrow keys) over and over again. Definitely a funny gag gift to give to your friends as a joke, but, as to be expected, the game itself is not very fun. It does have a charm to it, though, being a cutesy game for young people.

I have the most magical horses of the land.

Pros
- Has most of the good things about Diablo and Diablo II, though it's quite an obvious protege.
- Gold is automatically picked up, yay.
- Nice mindless game to play through if you're not looking for much variety.

Neutral
- Not too crazy about the art style, but it's not bad either.

Cons
- Generic dungeon crawling with quests on about every level. Kill this, retrieve item, return to town, repeat. There's no originality here.
- The skill tree isn't very interesting, and isn't really a tree at all.
- Dungeons are often needlessly filled with many dead ends, requiring a looottt of time to backtrack overall.
- It's needlessly difficult to heal at the beginning for some reason; you generate not even one single hit point when out of combat and health potions aren't always easy to come by or buy early on.
- The voice acting for when traps are sprung, etc. is a bit annoying, as well as low quality.
- This game requires a lot of grinding to be able to defeat monsters; the yeti on levels 10 and 11 is way overpowered compared to the rest of the monsters leading up to that point, and the ogres starting on level 12 are sudden, too.
- Magic casting is ridiculously slow at the beginning, almost comically so.
- Incredibly repetitive content; the quests are for randomly generated items or to kill random beasts, and always just for a formulaic reward in experience, fame, and gold.
- The sound effects are also very redundant; every single attack by an enemy has only their one designated sound effect, so enemies that attack quickly sound super annoying. The game is also too loud and ear-piercing even on a low sound effects volume.
- There are many miscellaneous bugs with the game, such as my dog sometimes appearing over gaps where he cannot walk such as ascending and descending stairs, and the hitboxes for picking up items are some of the worst I've ever seen.

Basically, I recommend this game only as a mindless bit of entertainment to play through. There's nothing very defining or special about it.

Hero Siege is a nifty little indie game.

Pros
- Very fitting pixel graphics.
- Interesting and creative skill tree; it reminds me of Diablo II. :D
- Good content for the price I got it for! There are several worlds which contain multiple levels and dungeons and bosses each.
- There are a good number of characters to choose from at the beginning (8 once the samurai comes out). Not bad.
- The loot pixels actually make you feel like you're collecting something pretty and worthwhile. :D

Neutral
- The animations are very basic, but that's no biggy.

Cons
- The few phrases of voice acting are of noticeably bad quality, but given how simple and fun this game is, it's understandable.
- Sometimes you get instakilled if you're in the wrong place, but it doesn't happen too often.
- Gold feels pretty worthless even though there's a lot of it. You can use it to buy temporary buffs, but, well, they're only temporary.
- The interface is a little clunky.

Let's start out with the three negatives I've found: the text can be really hard to read, so it can be tough to tell what's going on. The story is even more difficult to follow since there's no voice acting whatsoever besides NPC greetings (which I don't mind so much) to accompany the small text. Quests can be annoying to read the descriptions for and items on the ground can be hard to find for the same reason, but the game has so far been fun to play even without knowing for sure what I have to do at each step. Occasionally the text on some screens doesn't even show. The quests are also sometimes given to you after you've already completed a stage, so you have to go back and complete the stage again, but this is far more fun to do in C9 than it is in other games I've played, especially MMOs.

The screen looks cluttered and overwhelming a lot of the time, partially due to how many colors are used simultaneously, but it's not game-breaking; just takes a bit to get used to.

Sadly, last but not least of the negative things about this game, spambots are in tremendous number all over the servers, messaging easily a few times per second. This is tied with the small text as the biggest problem about C9.

Here's a neutral: the way your character starts off seems a little too advantageous, as you can wear one of three widely different costumes - each one increasingly conservative with the last one being a full suit of armor - from the very beginning. I started off with the most revealing outfit because it didn't feel right to be so armored-looking at the very beginning. Some of the clothing options include extremely impractical things like angel or schoolgirl miniskirts and lace stockings, but I don't always mind being a doll fighting monsters.

Now onto the good things: the customization seems pretty awesome; female faces are characterized by whether they're "alluring", "hardhearted", or "enchanting", which is a nice small addition. The tattoos are numerous and, though the available colors are a bit too saturated, they're still a cool feature. The choices of hair color seemed very dull and the hair meshes don't seem completely polished, but the different hairstyles look really nice and fairly original, surprisingly. This is an extra plus to me since I love being able to customize my character.

The music in the tutorial is an interesting metal/rock combination, which I haven't heard before in an MMO, so kudos to them for originality. After that, it's a happy, magical ballad, very dreamy and fitting for such a game. When you're in a busy area, there's even the sound of idle chatter.

Attacking is very fluid and makes me wonder why this game is free-to-play: things like this seem fairly polished in this game, so I'm impressed. The bounding boxes aren't ridiculously small nor far too large, either.

Ultimately, Continent of the Ninth Seal feels like a mixture of the fighting game Dead or Alive (for the attack combo features), Fable (for the previews of skills and the arrows on the ground to your destination), and D&D games and is pretty fun so far, even though my girl runs like an anime schoolgirl/ninny with her arms cast out to the side. :P

An action RPG so incredibly reminiscent of Diablo II that I got addicted to it insanely quickly; nostalgia for D2 can hook me pretty fast. While playing this game, I even wondered aloud about how the developers haven't gotten sued by Blizzard themselves, a good thing that! That's to be expected, though, since some team members of Blizzard North, the developer of Diablo II, actually worked on Torchlight! This makes Torchlight spectacular, and with the memorable gothic feel and sounds from D2, this game feels more like it's part of the Diablo series than even Diablo III does, which is quite a feat. Even the keys are the same, including the ability to map spells to F1-F12, one of my favorite parts of D2.

If you like Diablo II but feel Diablo III doesn't hold up to the series, or if you just like the genre in general, and if you don't mind a more cartoony look, Torchlight is definitely a game for you to try. Torchlight 2 is coming out, too, so keep your eyes peeled for that!

I consider this game to be one of my favorite games that I've happened upon by chance. I've always enjoyed Greek and Roman history, so I stumbled upon AoEO in my search for Greek-related games. I quite like the graphics, despite them being a bit cartoony (I never did mind that, really). My favorite civilization to play is the Persians (because of their strong cavalry), but sadly, their civilization is premium content, and I was only able to play them in a demo. I ended up settling with playing the Celts since I didn't like the Greeks or Egyptians as much.

I like AoEO mainly because I love RPG's. That may sound silly and irrelevant since this is an RTS, but you can actually build an empire and buy upgrades over time to improve your units, instead of starting every game over with absolutely nothing like in most other RTS's like Starcraft (a game I also love, however). Part of what hooks me to the RPG genre is the leveling up bit, and I like seeing that in others.