Recent reviews by Makrillo

A very nice, choose your own adventure - visual novelesque rpg, of sorts. Sets a fantastic mood with its writing, but also with the music by Nick Roder and Dan Caine.

Not a very long game, the time it takes to complete it depends entirely on how fast you read, for me i'd say one playthrough took maybe 7 hours. Roadwarden does offer some replayability though, as you probably will not find a good end on your first foray, and there are secrets to find that you might have time to completely figure out.

Well worth your time, if you are into this sort of thing.

Sometimes enjoyable, but too much repetition, most maps feel the same and the script is just terrible. I don't care about these people or the story. The tactical combat resolution has been further downscaled from the original x-com game, with the new breach mechanic, which could have been interesting. But since you have no idea of where you are breaching yourself into, the choices of breaches mostly comes down to which has the best buffs, and with the size of the maps you are given very little room to navigate and make actual decisions. At half price it might be worth it, but I'm six hours in right now and I have no inclination to return to the game anytime soon.

Very nice presentation and pixelart and an entertaining first half cannot get this game to soar high enough for me to recommend. The decisions all feel very shallow, uninformed and unimpactful and the large moments were all very undramatic to me as I didn't feel like anything I did really made much of a difference.

The second half of the game was outright tedious and unless this sort of thing is really your jam I wouldn't recommend buying it at full price, maybe at 50% off I would consider it worth the investment as it does have some good moments.

It has nice pixels, too few boobies, but still good game.

Its still pretty good.

Should start with saying that I kickstarted this, and all other of Harebrained schemes games. I am also a big fan of Shadowrun, & Mechwarrior and were never that keen on Battletech to be honest. Though we incorporated it plenty in our Mechwarrior-campaigns and in that context it was fun. On to the review:


I find the game passable.

The mechwarriors lack character. - They ran some Save Decker campaign on Twitter, but I honestly do not even know who Decker is, one of the starter mechwarriors who is as bland an characterless as the rest of them.

The supportstaff is superdiverse. Which is alright in this universe, but I fear politics from our timeperiod is what gives you the diverse set of NPCs who you have no control over despite you running the company. Especially considering the gender-selection that you have at the start, that just feels rather unnecessary as you are never talked about in third person as far as I can tell. Anyway, the mix of characters really take me out of the immersion, not cause of it not fitting in the setting really, but because it to me "feels" like it is injected for all the wrong reasons, and not for logical ones.

The story is pretty generic and linear, as a mercenary company you have no say in how much you wanna get paid, where you should jump to or whether or not to stick with the main plot queen or not.

Presentation is alright, some things in combat are slower than they should have been. But mechs feel weighty and looks true to the boardgame.

Mechanically the game is OK, the battles are fun, but mission-design is pretty bland and without context or story it gets repetetive rather quick. I think the new X-Coms had better pacing, and I got more of a connection to my X-com soldiers than I do my Mechwarriors, whom I cannot remember possessing any individuality whatsoever. Despite you levelling them up to fit certain roles.

I have had some fun with the game, but I think they constructed an alright combatengine and settled for a mediocre wrapping. BATTLETECH gives you very limited control, and sure you can roam about and do generic mercenary-work that is extremely lackluster and misses any real context. The main story has you do missions for an uninteresting noblewoman, you never get the choice not to.

Had I been designing it I would have had the mechwarriors have more character, taken some inspiration from Jagged Alliance 2. Put more energy into giving your mercenary company centercourt, and allowed you the freedom to decide which contracts to take. I am not saying you gotta change sides every other battle, but having a gray area conflict where you actually make decisions on which campaign you apply your mercs would to me be a more interesting take than the linear and politically correct plot we are getting in this one. Powerful female warrior who sees the good in all and want to unite the reach with kindness against the mean white authoritarian men.

All in all, I don't think I can recommend this game. It has strong points for sure, but for the price you are paying right now I feel it isn't really worth it. If you can get it for around 25-30€ I would say it is worth trying it out though. 6/10

In Kingdom Come: Deliverance, you play as Henry, an average young man becoming an adult in a medieval world in which he knows nothing about anything. The story is about Henry growing into a man of action, and while it is cheesy at times, it is proficiently told and very few things bothered me with it.

The game sports a one of a kind melee-system, where you soft-lock to single enemies and use directional pointers to determine your swings, time dodges, parries and ripostes according to enemy swings. It works very well in 1vs1 combat and it requires both Henry's skill level to be appropriately high, but also competence from you as the player. In combat vs. multiple opponents it does not work as well, and those often become rather chaotic. Which I suppose is sort of realistic and not something I can really faullt the game for. It just means you want to avoid getting crowded as much as you can, as swordfighting is deadly and early on it might be better to just leg it and run away to fight another day. There is no shame in that!

Other systems the game employs is a charisma-system of sorts that is highly dependent on what you wear, people will react differently to you if you come strutting down in shining armor, in dirty armor or even covered in blood or dressed as a filthy peasant. The stealthsystem also relies on you wearing darker colors and soft clothes for noise.
Stealthkilling has not worked for me very well though, as it feels like everyone within a 100m radius wakes up when I strangle someone in their sleep. I dunno if that was Henry being poor at stealth though, or if it is a flaw with the game itself, or a design decision made so you cannot easily sneak in an murder a whole crew of bandits as they sleep.

It sports a full on alchemy-minigame where you mix different ingredients and brew potions according to specifications, which is kinda fun. You also need to sharpen your blade, and repair your armor every now and then in order for them to not fall into disrepair. It happens infrequently enough that it isn't tedious busywork, but often enough that it is something you gotta think about every now and then.

There were a couple of quests that to my mind were rather poorly constructed and forced a fail-state on you as the player, which I personally do not like. If I get told "You can sneak into this castle and do this great thing" I do not want the game to force a failurestate on me within 30 seconds of the "quest" starting. It may as well have been a cutscene then. And the "relationship"-stuff you do in the game feels very lackluster and could have been written better to be honest. As it is now it feels like a cheap way to trigger boobs, which isn't the worst thing in the world of course. But I would have liked to see the relationship continue after the courtship.

There were also quests that were great, of course, a lot of them in fact. But the one that really stood out to me was one where you become a medieval hitman and have to use your wits to locate and murder a specific character. (Or handle it in any other number of ways). It took a bit of control away from me, and started to play more like a Hitman-game for the duration of the quests, which I thought was pretty damn great.

Graphically the game looks impressive, it is hard to believe it is done by a smaller company and not a triple A developer. The voice-acting is also very well done. And while the music at times is a bit too intrusive and unnecessarily bombastic, it is quite good and sets the medieval tone very well. You really feel like you are in an actual medieval historical world as you walk around in the different towns, especially when you enter castles and churches and look at the paintings on the walls, the tapestry and the such. The game really immerses you, and walking around in the forests also invoke the feeling of real norther European forests.

All in all, I gotta recommend this game. It has many small flaws, a few major ones but it is such a great piece of art which really immerses you greatly in the world they carefully crafted. It really elevates the game above all the small annoyances you can find within it, and it becomes so much greater than the sum of its parts. To me it is one of the best RPGs to ever have come out, it has a soul and a warmth that no other RPG has managed to do. Should also mention that I kickstarted the game years ago, as that could possibly be relevant knowledge.

It's alrite.

A greatly delivered theme, and a tonne of style does not manage to carry the fairly shallow gameplay.
Hard to recommend at the price, maybe at 7-8€ it would be more worth your money. The soundtrack is awesome though, buy that!

The game looks very nice, but the broken AI ruins it. Enemies go up to your walls and look at your settlements while you murder them, leaving their ladders behind. They ambush your army, only to run up and look at it, their general charges in and dies horribly as the rest of their army retreat across the field to stand in a big blob and wait for your slingers to throw rocks at them until you run out of ammo. Then you charge them with everything you have and they break and flee. And this on legendary difficulty... avoid this game.