Recent reviews by Paarma

Last time I was playing this game about 15 years ago in 2010, and I still have my saves, and they work. That's something. It's quite difficult, especially as I have no memory of how to play this game, but it was pretty easy to get back on track. I like how there's even official steam input controls for gamepad that kinda work.

No idea what difficulty I set for myself 15 years ago, but in some fights, I'm really getting my hiney handed to me on a silver platter with extra beating, from some I survive with barely enough troops. So lot of grinding and quicksaving is involved, but it has a nice feeling of adventure to it. Kinda classic 00's games, works well on widescreen monitor too.

Great for space trucking or running the streets.

I guess I can't say anything more that others haven't said a billion times, this is a piece of art.

So many stories packed into a single package, both self-made, and written ones. Felt awesome after beating Orin without reloading, with just Shadowheart left standing and battling up to a dozen bhaal cultists all by herself, she's the GOAT.

Despite the less cohesive 3rd act, it's something I've been longing to play for 20 years I think, since the first Baldur's Gates. I've probably spent the last month nearly every day playing this and exploring every nook and cranny, there's just _so much stuff_ and so well done too that I just can't get over it.

Just get it will you.

Skinner box game with nothing really rewarding, just more stuff to do with ever increasing difficulty. You can spend a lot of time in this and find working combo tactics against the enemies if that's your cup of tea, but it doesn't really amount up to anything satisfactory.

Skip if you value your dopamine/endorphin sensitivity.

I've got way more hours on another platform, if you wonder about the half an hour there.

Fast paced fights, smooth at least on AMD 6800XT and R7 3700X. Lot's of stuff to explore and neat world-building. There are occasional graphics oddities like super-bloomy torches and stuff, but I've noticed very little texture popping and stuff. KB+M controls feel ok, though I keep using my spells accidentally.

Menu controls have kinda stupid stuff like WASD for selecting and Enter for accepting (instead of something closer by, like E or F) and you can't use mouse to exit menu (even by clicking the "Back" button in options for example) which is frankly just stupid, considering they go through all the other accessibility options in detail. I'm not in need of special features, I support them, but basic UX stuff is bit lacking. Not enough to earn a downvote though.

Gear upgrading/crafting etc. feels bit burdensome though and it's kinda hard to tell what's the difference between the different sigils until you try them out, most of the time it's just fire rate and damage ratio, with some special stuff for rarer things.

Storywise, it's ok. Not much special and I have couple of predictions like Luna probably isn't dead but actually is the enemy hand through some weird thing, and that the demoted lightless general you meet before going to Palanthor is probably a traitor. But I haven't played enough to confirm these suspicions.

Pretty sure I wouldn't get this at full price tag, maybe discounted. But it's a quality product as long as they sort the kinks out. It's been a long while since I've gorged on AAA level single-player campaign game without obnoxious online features. Feels fresh to me, but I haven't played Doom etc. in a long while now.

While animation, world and others are top-notch quality, there are a number of game design choices that just make it a bad choice for a kid's game. First up, there's a very low effort visible throughout the game, and I encountered some issues that break the continuity, or are just badly done etc.

Couple examples:
1. At grandparents house you need to find some chickens and carry them to coop. Except one of the chickens outside the house eventually wonders off the area where you can actually interact with it, making the task impossible to pass unless you reset it.
2. When you need to find the George's dinosaur, there's a line that encourages you to find a taller person. There's the mother pig in the screen over, but she's not the solution, and if you went that way the task is reset so you need to watch everything all over again.

Some others have mentioned unskippable cutscenes. This can be extremely aggravating because if for example at the tall castle (Windhorn or something, I don't play it in english) you watch the sights with the telescope, if you press opposite direction of where you initially pressed, you go back to previous sight. All fine, but they have the same 1 or so minute conversation about every single scene. Also you cannot exit the telescope until you watched all the locations.

None of the potential things have the kind of interactivity you might expect.

1. Going to daycare for example could provide with chance to draw stuff by yourself, play the flute, play with blocks etc. but all are pre-scripted and cannot be exited. E.g. the blocks is the worst of the bunch as you need to press space x3 to watch the character order the blocks in descending, "random", and ascending order after which you can go out.
   
2. At the beach you're prompted to go swimming, but you're interrupted by a cutscene, after which you get a literally 4 seconds or so scene of Peppa and the character splash once at the water with their hands.
   
3. Also at the beach there's a pond where you can "find items" from a ponds. As per the grandparent's explanation. However, the scene consists of one pond, and you find a coin, which Peppa steals immediately claiming it as her own finding.

There's so many little things that, when done with effort and love could have made this a great little game toy for younger kids. My 5-year-old is kinda ok with it, although visibly frustrated with the repetition even at the short session we had. She still wants to get back to it though, to see probably what can be done further, but so far I think we've uncovered most of the scenes that the game has to offer apart from the snowy mountain and potato town.

Thus, in conclusion. There's activities for sure, but if you do mistakes you're forced to rewatch the same cutscenes over and over again and anything you do is linear like Helsinki metro.

Low effort content, non-matching dub animations, bugs etc. Absolutely not worth the about 40€ price, get it on a huge sale if you absolutely must have it.

Wow, what a trip. It's essentially the original system shock, but everything's brought to modern day standards. If you didn't feel like playing the original due to clunkiness, try this out, it's butter smooth and creepy. Still has the original secrets too, minor logical adjustments to levels as well as some QoL features too.

I only encountered 1 greater bug so far in first cyberspace trip where near the end, after destroying the mm.. "electric pillar" you get in and back out back to the energy pillar area, you might get locked out from progressing and might have to load auto-save from beginning of the Cyberspace start. If you don't do it, then you should be fine.

Also not sure if it's a bug or not, but the textures are strangely pixelated. It adds up to creep factor, but not sure if it's intentional or not.

Regardless, I love it. I'm sure you'll enjoy it too. So far I'm still on the first level. Taking my time enjoying the atmosphere and recycling stuff.

Awesome nostalgia trip. Loving the changes that have happened in the world after previous games, added lore and still the familiar feel.

Very exciting, unfortunately it keeps crashing on my computer when I got to frozen foods or if I go to the chemical storage near beginning and press mouse button. I'm on ultrawide monitor and the settings menu keeps becoming unresponsive too so it's a bit of a shame.

Anything I could do to make it less crashy? On AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, Radeon 5800XT and 32 gigs ram.

Quite retro-aesthetic game with somewhat incredible machine-style contraption building, though bit on the more higher physics level. Even the tutorials are a bit challenging to complete with the relatively low amount of information given each time, it requires you to experiment and test different approaches quite some.

Would I recommend this, sure. If you're up to the challenge and don't mind putting some effort behind understanding the game, it requires some skill and thinking to get through with. If you wish for an easy game to sit down and relax with, this might not be for you.