Recent reviews by [BusyBees] Jim!

The good: Fully voiced dialogue. Lots of neat dice rolling mechanics for perception and during dialogue sequences. It is equally fun to nail a dice roll as it is to flub one and deal with the RP consequences. I dig the exploration and world building.
The bad: The companions, while fully voiced and fleshed out, just aren't clicking with me. They are all annoying rather than charming. I can't help but be reminded of Dragon Age: Origins, where every single companion was a fun hang and it was a tough RP choice to decide who you brought along on the next quest. Here, I'm just going by who will be the least likely to chastise me for every dialogue option I choose. Trick question! At least one of my companions will hate every choice I make, vocally and frequently.
The ugly: The combat stinks. I'm not a D&D guy, so I'm relying on the game to explain these mechanics to me. Unfortunately, the game does a terrible job at providing feedback. Why did I miss that attack? What can I do to not miss or miss less? The game simply isn't providing me any insight, or if it is it is obfuscating it enough that I'm not picking up on it. It took me hours until I figured out that my ability "true strike" is something I'm supposed to cast on *enemies* and not as a buff on allies, because the unhelpful tooltip just says "gain advantage on the next attack", which I took mistakenly to mean "the person I cast true strike on gains advantage on their next attack", which I don't think is a big leap to make. What it really means is "YOU (the caster of true strike) gain advantage AGAINST the thing you casted true strike on". Some, but not all, of my abilities are also limited to a few uses per rest. The game indicates that these abilities replenish every round, which is not strictly speaking true. What they mean by that is you can choose to use one of them per round as an action, not that you can keep casting them every round. I'm honestly still not certain which of my abilities work like that and which don't. A little bit of proof reading could have gone a long way here, as well as having a cleaner UI. For D&D people out there this probably all goes without saying, but I'm a babe in the woods here and I have an expectation that the game is going to clearly explain these mechanics to me, and it simply doesn't. So instead I'm just guessing at what I'm supposed to do while hoping for the best and expecting the worst. Aside from that I'm also constantly fighting the camera, which likes to spasmodically take control away from me to zoom in on people's knees as they are dying, or just go completely black if characters are moving around the outskirts of a battle. I think this is what the game considers a "cinematic" camera. Finally, I've run into a number of frequent bugs during combat, but mostly of the minor animation variety. Ever see a t-posing ogre fire spears out of its pelvis? That's a sight you won't soon forget.

All in all, I'm not having a great time. I'm no stranger to getting dumped face first into D&D mechanics that I don't understand. BG 1-2, games that I adore, do that as well. But at least with those games I could get enough feedback as to what is going on that I was able to trial and error myself into understanding how to roll a character that is effective. I bet that if you really liked Divinity 2, you would feel at home here. That game doesn't click for me, and so far this one doesn't either.

This game is so instantly off putting that I wonder how it maintains a mostly positive review score. It gives off deep euro-jank vibes, which normally would be good but here it just doesn't click. The biggest sin this game commits is being so dull and uninspired. I expected the combat to be visceral and kinetic, but it is positively lifeless.

The game is very proud of its presentation and story, as evidenced by the numerous and occasionally unskippable cutscenes. This is a bizarre choice because the voice acting is atrocious. Who knew that Achilles was an Eastern European gopnik?

I wouldn't normally be so hard on a game like this, but I feel suckered in by the fake positive reviews and mid-range price point, so I have to give them a big thumbs down.

Stay cheeki breeki out there, Menelaus.

This game is so incredibly boring and I can't for the life of me understand where the mostly positive reviews are coming from. I mean, Colonial Marines was terrible but at least it gave you something to talk about with your buds while you played it. Not so with this game.

Please don't buy this trash.

This is a great little game at a good price point. It reminds me of Centurion: Defender of Rome (1990).

Very fun!

This might take the cake for the worst interface I've ever seen put into a game. On top of that, I tried several combats and every time was spawned underneath the ground. Because of this, I'm not sure what is here qualifies as playable. Aside from that, there seems to be a lot going on in the game, but I was completely lost as to what to do or how.

It is very cool to see VS explored again and I'm happy to support it, especially with that reasonable price tag.

At the moment the game feels very bare bones, and I ran into a few bugs in my short playtime, but here's hoping the developer sticks with it and we see a little VS renaissance. Good luck, dev!

Clunky combat with some of the most inconsistent hitboxes I've ever seen, tons of boring quests that amount to nothing more than fedex type activities, and LOADS of poorly translated exposition that reads like edgy teen goth Tolkien fan fiction.

Pass on this one.

Gloria Victis is what you get when you cross a factions based PvP MMO with Mount and Blade. If that sounds great, that's because it kind of is. Unfortunately, the game's population just can't support what this game is trying to do. Encountering enemy players is rare, and the vast majority of sieges are against unprotected settlements. It's a shame, because I think the core game here is decent.

For all the hate it gets, I expected SOTA to be absolutely dreadful, but what I found was a decent little indie RPG. Sure, it is cheap looking and has some wonk, but many of the RPG mechanics and quests are surprisingly deep and well done for what is ostensibly an MMORPG. Highlights for me are the morality system, and quests that have multiple ways to solve. These things are par for the course in single player RPGs, but in MMOs they are pretty rare and they surprised and charmed me here. It's a shame that the game economy, where pretty much everything of value seems to be meant to have been crafted by the players, is clearly built to be run by a robust player base that simply isn't there, and possibly never even was. The game isn't AMAZING or anything, but there are worse ways to spend an afternoon or two, and I never felt pressured to buy anything.

Thumbs up for me.