Recent reviews by Sir Gideon Ofnir, The All-Coping

This review concerns a good game. This is a good ARPG game.

Greatest positives:

No need to remain online to play it. Turn off steam cloud or whatever. Enjoy an old-fashioned singleplayer game.

Positives:

Too many to list. Lets just say that if you want to play a Diablo clone with 1 - 100 levels for each character, multiple build paths, the ability to customise down to the most minute of details on your equipment and a dev that provides basic quality of life functions for its development cycle, then you're in the right place.

Quality of life things that exist or were added including shared stash, difficulty unlocking for level 1 characters and a near bottomless well of craftables.

• Done with the main campaign? There's a wave survival mode if you have Crucible DLC.
  
• Want to put your build to the test? Bump the difficulty up to ultimate if you think your toon can survive getting nuked by deadlier mobs and bosses for better loot.
  
• Want a unique challenge? Go do one of the many Skeleton key dungeons which have to be done in one complete run without the ability to teleport out of the area.
  
• Want to go for maximum loot gains? Try doing the game's economy brand version of D3's rifts, except it's actually hard and requires you to have a very good build, often with good itemisation.
  
• Are you the sort of person who will likely die from autoerotic asphyxiation at some point in your lifespan? Spend hours looking for items for an obscure quest chain that will lead you to a superboss that will turn you inside out and wear your flayed skin as a trophy.
  
• Want to start again? Go ahead. Make a meme build. Have fun

Negatives:

There are very very very few. Most of the negatives are circumstantial and do nothing to spoil this juggernaut of a Diablo clone. You'll die several times to a difficult boss on high difficulty but it will be your fault for not itemising correctly, a perfectly legitimate part of the game's difficulty curve.

If I have one criticism that is just so mediocre that it wouldn't register, is that the game does little to distinguish itself from similar games of its kind. Torchlight II for example has a different aesthetic that's much brighter and cartoony, which ensures that it can't be easily compared in presentation to Diablo. But what exactly are you looking for in this game? Because its engine is simple but good looking and that's not the main draw of the game.

Buy it. Buy it and all the expansions too. I'd even recommend buying it at full price because it literally gives hours of gameplay.

Disclaimer: I've never played games in this genre.

I will say that this game is decent but it comes some drawbacks:

What it gets right:

• Atmosphere is extremely fitting. If you yearn for a claustrophobic dungeon crawler with some nice scares round each corner then this game is great for that.
  
• Enemy design is solid. I feel like encountering a new foe and learning its patterns is an experience in itself. This is especially interesting when you begin to encounter foes in bigger packs.
  
• Controls are pretty simple. You're restricted to a grid-like flat plane in real-time combat. Skills and abilities are subject to cooldown and you manoeuvre using WSAD keys. Spellcasting involves memorising patterns and pressing a confirm button. No complaints here.
  
• Gameplay-story integration is pretty seamless. There's a overarching narrative but it's not intrusive and can be skipped. You get little lore notes as well that you can read at your leisure.
  
• Puzzles! They appear early in the game and they comprise a lot of the content. They're decent and reflect a very old-school design, in that it expects the players to fail a couple of times. Very little handholding here. You earn your progression by being persistent.

What spoils it for me:

1. The combat difficulty curve. If you weren't a fan of being thrown in the deep end before you'll hate this game. I recall people hating the spiders, which come very early on in the game's progression and represent a big spike in difficulty . Though this did not present as too much as an issue for me, this is due to the relatively forgiving way this enemy can be dealt with. The problem lies in-
   
2. Respawning enemy gauntlet. There's a part later on which forces you to travel a tight corridor area with respawning raptors . Your enemies have collision so you cannot move through opponents. You're limited to either running the gauntlet or attempting to thin the enemies out before running the gauntlet. Both choices are irrelevant because the enemy respawns and you have no way of knowing the map's layout or the areas that you need to go to beforehand. If you get cornered you're dead because the enemy has a very good 'to hit' chance and high attack speed. Even if you break through, another creature spawns in its place soon after. Enjoy getting cornered. A lot. Which brings me to-
   
3. Collision unintentionally slowing down the game. This same area has a one space corridor with a door that is opened and closed using a lever. Get used to repeatedly opening/closing/spamming rest to reset the enemy positions so you can get through the chokepoint in the first place.

The above chain really emphasises how these design choices made for some frustrating elements. I don't really take issue with the combat in itself. But I think the developers, by using respawning enemies alone in certain areas, didn't think too carefully about how it would affect the pace. Much of the game's challenge is dictated by collision and positioning, in itself difficult but a rewarding mechanic. But some areas suffer from what I can only assume is a lack of broader playtesting and lack of forethought.

Overall, I still recommend the game, but keep the above criticisms in mind

Roguelikes are a dime a dozen these days. It's very easy to create a lot of unstructured, randomised content without putting much thought into how the game should be presented. If anything, this is a big issue with games with roguelike features. That's why you need a bit of structure and polish to make the experience immersive.

Darkest Dungeon is a RPG roguelike with dungeon crawling and base management elements. It is one of those games with polish. It also has a good structure that prevents the randomiser fatigue I get from playing roguelikes. Here's why, in listed form:

1. Feel - This word is passed around a lot in faux gaming intellectual circles, but this game has great game feel and personality. The art style, sound design and pacing of gameplay elements are near perfect. A game should always have impact when you play it and it should be in accordance with its proposed theme.

DD achieves this; it is dark, it is foreboding, it is stressful to play and it makes you feel powerful when you achieve your goals. Red Hook fundamentally got this right. Special mention goes to the casting and performance of Wayne June as the narrator/ancestor, who perfectly bookends player choices and actions with weighty, wordy dialogue.

2. Gameplay - to compliment game feel and the themes, you have gameplay that fits. Characters share their time in the hamlet and the surrounding 'dungeons' with eldritch and unholy entities, gruesome bosses and opportunistic bandits. Everything is trying to kill your characters while making life worse for them. As a setting, few games properly convey the bleak atmosphere without coming across as hammy or silly. DD achieves this.

-An example-

A lynchpin element to this is via the mechanic of stress. Characters actively accrue stress as they play through the dungeon, caused by your actions and the actions of the environment and creatures. When characters reach a milestone in amount of accrued stress, they either start to exhibit negative behaviours such as Hopelessness or Abusiveness, or they power through the mental pain and gain positive traits like Powerful and Stalwart. These last for the dungeon, and they completely change the experience of dungeon crawling.

For this reason, stress and psychological managment are core features of the game. Things such as light level while dungeoneering, giving your characters opportunities to rest while they're back in the hamlet or camping in the dungeons and gearing your skills and inventory to help manage this stress are seemlessly integrated into the entire experience. It is extremely engaging, which leads me to...

3. Difficulty - difficulty is so frequently abused as a term. Good difficulty design in a game makes you aware of consequences of any actions you will take in the future. Bad difficulty is arbitrary and can't communicate consequences through the medium and context its based in.

Darkest dungeon has good difficulty. It punctuates this from the beginning when you boot up the game with a disclaimer; characters will die, autosaves are near constant, nothing short of doctoring your save games are going to bring back those you lose. And you will lose characters, you will fail dungeon crawls, fail to kill bosses. At worst, if you are foolhardy enough to fight to the bitter end, you'll lose everything and everyone you've sent and earned on that expedition.

The most important message that DD has for its players is that you must embrace the finality of your decisions and choices. This is why it autosaves. The game obviously has a bad rep for being ridiculously hard for new players and this sudden shock, this introduction of 'Why can't I reload before I did this?' is hard for players to deal with. But its fundamental to the experience. Otherwise, the previous points in the list would be totally invalid.

Overall, if there's a roguelike I could recommend above all others, this would be it. You should buy this.

We're in 5th edition territory for the tabletop game. I decided to invest time in playing this game as I like the universe but am left cold by the flagship tabletop game's current direction.

I've played Shadowrun Returns. To me that game was a good start but wasn't particularly memorable in terms of its plot, but the core gameplay was there.

I feel this game was better thought out. The setting of Berlin was great given that fans and the series are often fixated on Seattle as a starting point.

The supporting characters are decent; there's nothing that you're going to be writing home about if you're a seasoned sci-fi/cyberpunk dabbler. There's some nice personal touches with certain missions and how some characters approach them, very much styled like Dragon Age in that regard.

The plot is, as above, nothing that you won't have seen before if you're into this kind of fiction. There's a lot of mildly obvious plot threads taken as cues from other fiction; Neuromancer and parts of Deus Ex come to mind. The fantasy elements are underplayed which is very much for the best; there's one particularly memorable encounter just before the credits which, for fans of the lore, was a nice insert without it beating you over the head with it.

By far, the best part is the game system itself. With some good character customisation, the game does well to provide you with that chance to play as a particular archetype. I played a Rigger and transitioned into decking late game, which made for a fun experience.

My only criticism is that there's pretty much 3 other supporting cast members as part of your team. I didn't use any of the mercs and I've seen some people complain about them. To me, I don't think it is incentivising me into replaying for a while.

Your three cast members have default abilities and equipment, with a two columned advancement system for extra linearity. While I appreciate you don't want to spend years tinkering around with each character's individual stats, it is disappointing to see that you're denied of more extensive options that you have with your player character. I managed to equip them with the occassional items I've picked up but their progression is strictly linear in terms of their abilities.

This I'd imagine could present as an issue; I feel that the mage cast member in particularly strikes me as very situational, mainly statted with many buffing abilities and not much in the way of legitimate nuking, aside from the conjured spirits he can get and his rather paltry AOEs.

The Street Samurai suffers from a similar issue; she's meant to be a combat medic with melee but I ended up using her as a suicide unit on speed steroids who can incap a NPC each round, purely because she has a ton of extremely disrupting and beneficial melee attacks.

The weapons specialist for one was the only one that felt particularly balanced for me, which I felt, due to the linearity of leveling up your companions, was what the devs were aiming for. The weapons specialist had a nice long range weapon, a close range weapon and a variety of grenades, functionally speaking she was general enough to get more mileage out of her. Compare this to the other two, which I felt synergistically were very dependant on each other.

People who are used to isometric RPGs will find that this won't last them for a particularly long time. Other than that, it's a very good game and worth its price, as well as being much more polished than its predecessor.

DSII supposedly wasn't that great on release. So after playing the original, I picked this up a while ago on sale and was not disappointed by the purchase.

Super positives:

++Near god level character customisation. Things such as power-stancing and a variety of different weapon styles, not to mention a non-linear method of imbuing/deimbuing elemental weapons and the ability to reassign your stat points gives the game massive longevity.
++Fantastic PVP (when the community isn't undergoing a lull). Plenty of locations and arenas to conduct said PVP. There are drawbacks (See 'super negatives' )

Positives:

+Just as hard as any other 'Souls' entry, so there's plenty of time to digest the game
+The 'Illium Loyce' DLC is one of the coolest DLCs I've ever had the pleasure of playing in any game.
+ Bonfire aesthetics are an awesome way of tooling players to fight bosses or areas again without progressing to New Game +.

Neutral point:

The bosses are a bit on the 'dudes in armour' side of things. Some rehashes at times from earlier bosses. You'll either like this as a player or you'll hate it; it's a very subjective thing

Negatives:

- World is VERY mishmash in its overall visual design and there are some jarring transitions. There's also no consistent theme like DS1, nor the interconnectedness of the first one or the ability to shortcut through certain areas. The world IS non-linear at the very least but there's not a lot of technical non-linerarity that the first game was praised for by the community.
- Quality of story immersion is pretty poor, partially due to the above and due to some very obviously chopped and changed plot details mid to late in the game.

Super negatives:

-- SOUL MEMORY!

An awful mechanic which I will rip to shreds.

The Souls series is bolstered by its semi-online functionality. The idea that you can call for help by summoning people or have people invade you to kill you for experience is pretty much a given. There's also conditional multiplayer areas as well.

In DS1, match-making with players was based on Soul Level (for newbies to the series, it's basically your RPG level). If you're within a range of levels (say 1 - 10 as an inaccurate example), you can play with players in the same bracket (whether it's co-op or versus)

This meant that experienced players could delibrately circumnavigate the problem of over-levelling, or getting to a level bracket that was bereft of players. Buying items and upgrading equipment also did not count towards your 'soul level'; items were often used in a lot of PVP strategies and were key to the game's meta. You could always guess what range you were roughly at and which ranges in which areas yielded higher player populations for play.

You could also, using the original's interconnectedness, skip or run through areas that were tougher in exchange for items or equipment that might provide an unexpected fight to your opponents at lower levels. It rewarded players for taking risks and exploring the game and figuring out optimal strategies.

DS2 has soul memory.

Every enemy you kill gives you souls. Which counts towards your soul memory bracket. Meaning you can't kill enemies for fear of getting pushed out of a level bracket if you want to build PVP characters. Even if you wanted to play the dedicated co-operation player and help people at tough bosses, eventually you lose the ability to because you're auto-levelling.

The only way of circumnavigating this is equipping a ring, bought from a merchant in an obscure location in the game. The quickest route gurantees that you will kill at least three bosses before getting to said merchant. This absorbs any souls you pick up and your soul memory will stay the same so long as you have the ring on as you kill enemies.

Soul memory is unhealthy to the game's meta for many reasons that I can claim:

- It punishes players who lose souls WITHOUT spending them by inflating their Soul Memory and putting them at risk of being invaded by players who statistically are better
- It discourages PVP and Co-op PVE by elevating a player's soul memory beyond a bracket they might want to stay at (a bracket, for example, that might have more players therefore more opportunities to match with people)
- It doesn't even allow you to circumnavigate soul memory by buying items or consumables for use in fights or upgrading equipment. Because soul memory IS affected by gaining souls no matter what method you use.

It's a huge blow to the game's otherwise decent offerings.

Despite this, it's very recommended to play.

Played something like 1 hour of it.

Had massive framerate lag.

Given that I have DS and DSII, it amazes me that DSIII cannot run on my computer. Even if I do have last generation GFX with a GIG of memory.

For anybody who has minimum or middle line spec computers, please read this. Look up the community forums on troubleshooting the performance issues for DSIII on computer and make a more informed decision. There is some discussion about the fact that it's a poorly optimised port and that it only appears to run on a single core on a CPU. Which, to me, is unacceptable for a modern game.

Other than the game slowing to a crawl in big areas, it played ok. I just could not carry on playing

It's a shame DSII hasn't got the level of player saturation that III has at the moment. Cause frankly, it's the superior game, in terms of it's PVP especially (PVE for DSII, IMO, isn't as good as DSI)

I need to say something important about this review; an important prologue.

I bought Civilisation 5 on release from steam. At the time it had very polished graphics and had an excellent eye-catching UI.

It, however, was extremely unpolished in the gameplay department. I had played a few games on standard difficulty (for the series; there are multiple difficulty levels in the series' games that reduce or increase the AI's boons). Firstly, resource management and growth was extremely slow and terribly fleshed out; a city surrounded by even the most fertile land would grow so painfully slowly, even when the land was improved. Worse yet, buildings, commonly used in the series to specialise cities and increase their output in food/gold/production etc, gave awful returns for their continued maintenance and had no additional effects beyond offering more science/gold etc. early on in the game.

This, combined with the 1 unit per tile rule (1UPT), a feature a lot of the old fans felt aggrieved by, made me feel like a military playstyle was better than playing a pacifist, builder or diplomat. I chucked most of my gains into military production and swamped cities with vast carpets of doom. The AI of course, could not handle the combat system, and would foolishly chuck units out to die and leave crucial areas undefended. Bad combat AI, however, is normal for the series, but it was made more apparent with the 1UPT style gameplay.

Finally, we get to the part that really ground my gears. The diplomacy was god awful on release. The diplomacy screen would be so vague about how AIs felt about you and you had few diplomatic options to affect relations bar 'declaring friendship', which the AI didn't honestly care about. And speaking of the latter, did I mention that the AI were completely psychotic on release? Even the most peaceful of civs, Gandhi (yes I'm aware he likes nukes in this game series), would declare war despite being half-way across the globe and posessing no military.

A lot of fans and, I believe even a dev at one point, rationalised it that they wanted the AI to be more competitive. Well they certainly bloody succeeded, but all the leaders became devoid of personality and the game presented itself to me as a Skynet Simulator with AIs modeled off anal retentive librarians, every AI hell-bent on loosing their marbles as soon as you so much inhaled near them. The only AI that exhibited ANY personality differences was Alexander the Great, who would call me up every three turns to abuse me verbally while he stomped all over the city states on his continent.

This was by far, in my opinion, the biggest mistake; make all the leaders homogeneous and you gut a lot of what makes Civ interesting.

The good news is that this has been improved in the amount of expansions added. Civ V is still a military heavy game because of its 1UPT but buildings, policies etc have been marginally improved to fit a more peaceful game style and the AI isn't channeling the irrational rage of a thousand shonen protaganists.

With that in mind I'd recommend it now. But the main point is this, an age old adage: be wary of buying AAA games on release, it was not worth the cash I paid, and it might be more prudent to buy it only if you really have the money to spend/

Hoo booy, from what little I played of this I can honestly say I liked it a lot, and that I wish I had more time for it. S.T.A.L.K.E.R's main charm is that its framework and central style is not unlike that of older games, in that it can be punishing if you approach the combat, inventory management system and environment in a half-assed way. A mildly more challenging game then a lot of what's avaliable currently on the market, it has a fantastic payoff if you're willing to invest in it. Its original build suffers from some bugs here and there, so modding can be an option should these crop up.

After a year nearly, I think it's safe to judge Skyrim properly. Its hype was well justified; the lore is rich, the central plot-line and quest is solid (far better than Oblivion's) and engaging and the world itself is stunningly good looking. However, its sidequests are poorly written and being the 'child of destiny' has a habit of narrowing down your interactions with the world as either 'Recieve tribute from idiots or hapless bystanders' or 'enjoy constant harassment from psychic hold guards'. The skill tree is good but needed a little more thought (some skills are just plain broken). Other than that, it's worth getting for the spectacular look and feel, just don't play it expecting a full on RPG. Keep a light hearted approach for this one.

Civilization is a particularly ancient series (excuse the unintentional irony) with a lot of prestige in its name brand and its benefactor, Mr. Meier. For the most part, each fan has their favourite game in the series past CivII, But Civilization IV in any case is my favourite one. With a wealth of content and a phenominal fanbase and modding scene, it stands as one of the most complete and interesting single-player games in existence, bar the somewhat clunky engine it runs on and the weak UI. Buy, play, mod, enjoy.