Recent reviews by Ghalen

VERY early review, but it's worth saying that so far, while it's no Pillars of Eternity III, it is a solid AA Obsidian RPG experience.

It's a beautiful game, it runs smooth and stable, and I haven't seen any Bethesda-esque bugs yet. The story shows some good intrigue and story ties to the larger Eora setting. It feels like character building has a point, and that choices matter.
The combat is fine for what it is, but sadly the kick is not an independent action(RIP Dark Messiah successor). It could do with a little bit more variety in abilities, but there is enough there to make it satisfying.

While there's still a chance for it to change between the couple of hours in I am and the end game, it is so far a relief compared to the disappointment that was Veilguard, and an easily recommended game.

The previews make the game look a lot better than it really is, and it feels really lackluster and sloppy. The reliance on AI generated content is really understated.

It really is a shame, because the concept hits some good notes.

A sweeping mercenary management/turn-based RPG that fills a lot of niche roles and laying somewhere between Battle Brothers and Mount & Blade.

7 Days was a revolutionary zombie game when it released in 2013, and has been incredibly fun despite it being stuck in an alpha state for more than a decade, but stalled out after A16, where the updates became needless, and often worse, system designs instead of actually adding much of anything to the game. Now, with A22 looming, and all the same issues the game has had for the past 6 years, it is suddenly getting a 1.0 release and a $20 price increase while remaining feature incomplete and throwing out half of their alpha roadmap to now be implement post release instead.

Basically, The Fun Pimps have been creatively bankrupt for years and are now trying to cash out on a product that I would be surprised doesn't become almost immediately abandoned for the Dev studio's new assymetrical PvP spinoff.

The game will still be worth it's $25 price tag for the little while that still remains, and otherwise will be worthwhile on a steep steam sale in the future. It can provide a lot of hours of fun, but ultimately, buying it now will just support lazy, amateurish, and outright scummy dev behavior.

In the end, The Fun Pimps were the Bandits we were promised all along.

It's not like this is the first or even the fourteenth mainstream game to require a third-party account that takes a couple minutes to create, but if it's a dealbreaker to have to take 120 seconds out of your day to enter an email and password and then forget about it, change your Steam review and make your displeasure known on a platform where it matters

This game was Spiders' response to Bioware's Dragon Age and CDPR's Witcher 2, both of which are vastly better games. That being said, for a AA-Studio game, it's fine. Spiders continued to refine their gameplay as the studio went on, but being earlier on in their development career, this game still suffers from classic Eurojank. If you've ever played a Spiders game, you know exactly what that means. Because of this, the balance feels all over the place, especially in the higher difficulties where the game feels like it was never tested. The story is a greatest hits of Dark fantasy cliches of the decade, and was severely rushed near the end. Standing out from the rest of the game however is its soundtrack, with some amazing work by Olivier Deriviere. I haven't touched this game in 8 years, but still regularly play the soundtrack. You can tell that Spiders wanted this game to be so much more than it ended up being.

Ultimately, I wish it had gotten the further attention and content it hinted at, and I'd still love to see a continuation someday. But despite all of its flaws, it is still a perfectly fine, serviceable game, especially coming from a AA-Studio. You can use Bound By Flame to kill a weekend, and at the current price of $7 that is very worthwhile, even more so if you can catch it on a sale.

A solid ARPG from a relatively small team of devs who are actually interested in the game they're making that puts Diablo IV and Blizzard to shame.

This review is a bit early on, but it is worth recommending against the slew of negatives coming out for the 1.0 release. The 1.0 release has lead to the overly common launch day issues every game seems to have lately, and while the devs are attempting to fix these issues, online play can still be rough, and is filled with long wait times to connect, disconnections, and sometimes just straight server downtime. And while all of these are good reasons to have issue with the game, they are easily overlooked by the simple fact that this game has a fully functioning offline mode, where you can play the entire game with all of its features without needing to experience any of the above issues.

This is a brutally fun hardcore RPG where every single action is taken in fast paced turn-based, that has been miscategorized as a roguelike. Despite that, the game is phenomenal, and contains features of survival and management that blend well with its hardcore nature.

Currently in 2023, the game is receiving a mixed reception, largely for the very slow development of the game, which is a fair complaint, but not one that should reflect upon the game as being bad. While slow to update, the devs have a very clearly laid out plan and roadmap, and what is present in the game is still very fun to play, and has plenty of hours of content before you even begin needing to repeat things.

The game is fantastic, and I highly recommend it if you are looking for a challenging RPG, and I eagerly anticipate the full release.

Blizzard's so greedy they won't even put their actual game up for a free weekend, just an already extremely limited trial that they should be offering as a normal demo. And any fun you might get from buying the real game gets undercut by being overpriced, underdeveloped, and poorly balanced with microtransactions that are as expensive as the base game on top of a paid battlepass.

We've fallen a long way from the days of Diablo 2.

It's times like these I wish Steam had a neutral option for recommendations. I played a lot of this game in Early Access, and enjoyed a lot of my time with it. But overall, this is one of those solid 3 out of 5 star games.

Mechanically, it feels good, and adapts D&D 5e very well into a videogame. There's a lot of bugs, and most are visual or minor inconveniences, or easily fixed with a reload. However, there are still some devastatingly gamebreaking bugs that can hard end a playthrough months after release. Additionally as it gets closer to Act 3, there are more and more interactions that just shouldn't exist, and didn't get QA tested.

The first two acts are phenomenal up to the final boss fight of the 2nd act. Immediately after that, in the sort of in-between of Act 2 and 3, it begins to fall apart. The story immediately begins to drop off, and it doesn't stop until it comes to a crash at the end, with endings that gave unpatched Mass Effect 3 a run for it's money. Writing goes downhill, the story becomes disjointed, and parts randomly end or reach unsatisfying conclusions.

What it all comes down to is the Larian special: They don't know how to finish a game, and they don't give themselves the time to do so. Almost everything in Act 3 just feels unfinished, untested, and rushed. Larian relies on pushing a game out, then relying on a 'Definitive Edition' down the line to clean up and fix the final act of their games. They did it with Divinity Original Sin II, they did it with Original Sin 1, they even did it with Divinity II: Ego Draconis. At this point I probably shoulder some of the blame for still trusting Larian ~4 releases after I've been screwed over by them again and again, but at this point it is really just tiring.

Ultimately I just feel disappointed with what could have been a good game, that has suffered greatly from being unfinished.

It's a game I'll still play with friends, but I have lost all sense of wonder with it.

If you're looking for a big cinematic RPG series, go try Dragon Age. If you want an adaptation of D&D rules, play Solasta. If you want a good turn-based CRPG, play the Pathfinder Games or Pillars of Eternity II. Otherwise, wait until Larian pushes out a Definitive Edition to fix some of what is wrong with this game, and buy on a discount.