Recent reviews by fang

Seems like a love letter to the Strategy RPG Genre, with obvious influences from Final Fantasy Tactics, Vandal Hearts, Shining Force, and Dragon Force.

Gameplay is mostly a mix of Fire Emblem/Shining Force's tactical maps and Ogre Battle's squad based combat.

The world is like a mixture of Wheel of Time and the Stormlight Archive with the plot playing out similarly to Vandal Hearts mixed with Suikoden.

The music is also pleasant and is sometimes reminiscent of what you might hear in Suikoden or your favorite fantasy rpg, but not being so similar as to be stolen.

All in all, it's quite a fun game with a lot of variety (the units you get, the artifacts you find, and the traits you have access to are all random) and the combat mechanics are deep.

The only gripe I really have is that the scenario design often means that the best method for winning battles is to use a handful of tanky units you move to just within enemy range as bait. Once the enemies pounce, it's best to swarm as getting the first hit in this game is extremely important. This can often lead to whatever units are engaging in combat first being over-leveled as it doesn't pay to draw enemies out with your light infantry unit for fear of losing half the squad after the first enemy volley.

Despite that one gameplay flaw, I found myself restarting 2 times before completing my first playthrough as there is simply so much to learn and I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and because of the irresistible urge to grind my entire army to Gold Classes.

The game play loop is a helluva good time. It's addictive. Buy it.

Don't bother. It took me a little while to recognize it, but if you decide to take the combat route in this game, even with a character and squad specifically built for combat, it is little more than a Save Scum Simulator.

That doesn't even cover the bugs either. Alt+Tab your screen for too long and suddenly the music will turn off in the game and never come back on. I've also encountered a bug where the square the game uses for placing party members at the beginning of a battle is completely misaligned. Other times, while placing Evans before a battle, the game indicates extra squares, presenting a misleading placement range for him.

The game lacks mechanics to support certain character builds and ideas, such as the Tank. The Evasion skill cannot possibly be working as intended either, as due to the primitive AI of the game, enemies simply do not target characters with high Evasion due to the low chance of success. I tried to create a melee tank with high Evasion and Armor. It doesn't work. 70 HP, high Evasion and Armor, and he almost never took any damage simply because Faythe or Evans were always being ganged up on and murdered by the AI instead. The only way to protect a character and force the enemy to attack your Tank is to completely hide said character from the enemy's field of view, which takes up precious Action Points to pop in and out of cover. The enemy AI seems to ignore the character standing in their face, giving them ranged penalties for being in Close Combat, to target characters further away instead. So, I suppose in a roundabout way, the Evasion skill does work, considering that the enemy AI won't even target the player with high skill in it in the first place.

A workaround would be to give everyone in the party but the Tank a Tag in Evasion, thereby forcing the AI to choose your Tank, but isn't this actually just indicative of bad game design? This strategy would eventually backfire though, as your characters with actual skill in Evasion won't be receiving any Learning Points in Evasion! I can easily picture a play through where I tag Evasion on everyone but Jed in the first Act, only to have Jed end up the most evasive character by mid Act 2 due to him constantly being targeted. Conclusion? BAD GAME DESIGN. Wait, who am I kidding? If you try this, the character without Evasion tagged will die in the very first round of combat, and if it's Jed, he won't even get to move before he's dead because of his low Initiative.

Imagine you were playing Dragon Age or some other similar game with a squad-based combat system, and the only way that you can make Alistair, your tank, be effective at all, is not to pick the right skills for him to be a better tank, but rather to pick skills on the entire rest of the party to force the AI to treat Alistair as a tank instead. LOL. It's actually laughable.

There were recent updates to the target selection of enemies, but it was apparently only meant to affect the rate of Reaction Fire. I take this as a sign that the Dev team thinks that Evasion is "working as intended," clearly ignoring the fact that it's almost a completely useless skill unless you're playing Lone Wolf, due to the fact that no player is going to accept a battle where a character drops. The solution? Save scum! Also, since this update, Evans seems to take reaction shots with the weapon he doesn't have selected. He's sitting there with a pistol in his hand, with Pistolero, increasing his reaction shot chances with pistols, and he consistently pulls out his rifle to miss reaction shots. LMFAO.

There is also, of course, the fact that the placement of skill checks is simply odd in this game, on the whole. What you end up doing is finding an ideal path for leveling up skills that feels totally unnatural due to the fact that the game and devs seem to be (intentionally or not) encouraging specific, linear paths in this game for skill progression. It's quite disappointing that learning what path to take in the game is almost more important than learning the game mechanics.

It's like Groundhog Day, but more frustrating, and you don't even get to kiss Andie MacDowell at the end of it, or really learn anything about life or yourself.

Stealth is a huge mess as well, but I won't get into that.

As has been pointed out in the forums, fights are tuned to the absolute MAX difficulty that is achievable for only the most perfectly tuned CHARNAME and parties created by players who have played, restarted, and played again ad nauseum. I say this as someone who has completed all but perhaps 2 combat encounters (2 encounters which are lousy with turrets and enemies with Initiative far beyond yours, and of course 2 or 3x the number of combatants, making the action economy the Mt. Everest of climbs to overcome) in the game without losing a party member before the new changes to downed characters. It's much like Icewind Dale 2 in this sense. The worst part is, due to the overtuned and completely RNG based nature of the game, even a fight you've completed 10 times over is going to result in a several hours long save scumming session that you can't even cheat your way through with in-battle saves. Yep, you can't save during combat. That means if you're in a fight where your party needs a bit of luck to survive a specific round, you'd better pray they do. If your party needs luck on more than one of the combat rounds to make it through in one piece? Good luck. Better set aside the entire day. This isn't with a reserved strategy, either. This is with characters throwing out multiple flash bangs, smoke grenades, disruptors, and stasis fields, representing boat loads of credits, and with characters using cover and regen and combat stims liberally.

As I said, Tuned to the absolute MAX in many instances.

I would also not recommend going to the community hub, as if you disagree enough, the devs seem to show up on alternate accounts to ♥♥♥♥ with you incognito.

TL;DR - The game is designed in such a way that you'll barely have any understanding of the world, combat system, skill mechanics, or much else by the time your 2 hour refund period is gone, and unless you've played one of this developer's games before, you'll likely win 0 combat encounters either. If you enjoy smashing your testicles in a phone book for hours on end, then this game is for you.

The first playthrough is one of the greatest gaming experiences you will ever have.

good

A spit in the face of two of the greatest CRPGs of all time. This piss poor excuse for a role playing game will forever be the dried and crusty brown skid mark on the Fallout franchise. The game is too bright and happy, too clean in so many ways and they did almost nothing to respect the classic games which came before it. Bethesda bought the rights to an amazing and iconic franchise, riding the wave of classic CRPG nostalgia sparked by Dragon Age: Origins, and attempted to cash out with little effort or care beyond their marketing campaign.

Gameplay issues such as enemy levels scaling to match the player and being given unique or powerful weapons with too low of a durability rating to make them viable alternatives to your starting gear are a slap in the face to the history of this amazing series.

By the time the events of Fallout 2 had rolled around, The wasteland was becoming a somewhat progressive place (relatively speaking), with intelligent deathclaws roaming about and Super Mutants like Marcus working together with humans, towards a future of mutual understanding and equality. Both have now been relegated to mindless enemies for you to blow apart in amazing, detailed 3D! Speaking of which, how is it possible that the original Fallout games had more satisfying death animations than this over-budgeted AAA title?

Game of the Year??? Yeah, maybe before Gamer Gate and with every gaming magazine plastered with another ad for whatever mediocre gaming experience that Bethesda was going to squeeze out from betwixt their hairy butt cheeks that quarter. Seriously, and this irks me to no end, the year that Skyrim came out was the year that Dark Souls debuted. Game Informer awarded Skyrim Game of the Year and Dark Souls was relegated to an honorable mention for the Capra Demon. Did any self respecting gamer who spent any length of time on both titles actually come away thinking that Skyrim was the better, more memorable experience? Much of the same can be said for Fallout 3.

I remember asking buddies at the time what they thought of the game and the general consensus was that the game was interesting and fun to explore, but that it was forgettable with a bad ending. Personally, having been a massive fan of both Fallout 1 and 2 and having played Arena, Daggerfall, and Morrowind, I was appalled and genuinely sick at the idea of Bethesda getting their hands on such a huge piece of my childhood and I knew from the beginning what an absolute bore this game was going to turn out to be. I was right. I was completely right.

So, I suppose the best that can be said for this game is that it definitely delivered on what anyone experienced with Bethesda trash could or would expect and it certainly takes a degree of talent to take the polished gems that were Fallout 1 and 2 and distill them into reeking, steaming piles of Brahmin dung which are somehow more forgettable and boring than any Elder Scrolls game they've shat out before.

1/10

I'd rather be a fluffer at the Corsican Brothers film studio; I'd rather lose an arm wrestling match to Francis in Broken Hills and walk away with my very own souvenir to commemorate the experience; I'd rather wh0re myself out for Jet on the streets of New Reno with deathclaws and Frank Horrigan as my main Johns; I'd rather play almost anything than this disgrace of a game.

Avoid at all costs. For the price of this piece of garbage, you can get yourself the Classic Fallout Collection here on Steam and enjoy a much better, deeper piece of art.

I had seen and read reviews stating that this game hearkened back to the atmosphere and storytelling of the classic Fallout games and so I was hopeful. Giddy, even. Imagine my disappointment when I began playing and found it equally as shallow as Bethesda's poor efforts. The humor and atmosphere of Fallout 1 and 2 are nowhere to be found and the quests are shallow exercises in running from Point A to B and maybe to C with little to challenge the player other than skill thresholds to be met and boring, Elder Scrolls type combat with guns for brief interludes to the endless trekking about.

I did appreciate the references to previous entries published/developed by Interplay and Black Isle, but it's just a facade and a shallow attempt to garner nostalgia in those who grew up with the original, GOOD Fallout games. Choose one faction over another? The result seems to be nothing more than a difference in which group of enemies you face in the random battles forced upon the player by roving bands of assassins.

Gone are the days of solving quests with a myriad of skills and techniques or discovering things such as being able to assassinate someone with a drug overdose or by planting explosives on their person, so buckle in for sub par, repetitive first person shooter combat in this entry of Elder Scrolls: Gun Mod.

5/10 won't play more than the 18 hours I already sank into this sorry excuse for a Fallout game.

You're better off pretending that Fallout Tactics was the last Fallout game ever made like I do. You'll be less disappointed and much happier for it.

If you want a rewarding experience from Obsidian Entertainment, I would recommend checking out Alpha Protocol (if you can find it), Star Wars : Knights of the Old Republic 2, or perhaps Pillars of Eternity (though I would stick to the first as the second was less than impressive).

good game

(Review text hidden)

I wish the action economy was correct. You guys have made seemingly arbitrary changes like making disengage a bonus action for everyone instead of an action. So what's the point of cunning action? just a dash? also, what about a Monk using Step of the Wind? The action economy is the way it is in 5e for a reason and if your engine can't accommodate for that in the state its in then I hope the engine gets some overhaul to make it work.

I now have learned that you guys are going to be using a modal switch for Smite. Shame on you. Shame.

I also look at the way your action economy works in BG3 so far and I am worried for the way extra attack and flurry of blows are going to work. it also doesn't appear that your engine is capable of allowing for things like Divine Smite (which is used after a successful hit lands) to be implemented accurately. I am envisioning a Smite mode you can turn on that automatically makes you smite when you land a hit, and I suppose it would work, but I'm very concerned as many Paladins will save their Smites for when critical hits land to maximize the damage they can do per spell slot. I love your work, but I hope your time is now being spent doing whatever it takes to make everything work as intended.

I still recommend this game, because I have much faith in you.

It's good