Recent reviews by Quitch

The idea behind the DLC is interesting, but ultimately doesn't deliver. The antagonist reveals themself almost immediately, and you deflect their schemes with ease. It doesn't resolve any of the issues with the base game quest structure either. It's just another linear quest with minimal opportunity for personal expression. Pleasant enough if bought cheap, but totally skippable.

I'd have rather liked this DLC to offer a new way for the ending to play out, by leaning into siding with the De Vespe's and betraying your own house. That would have allowed it to stand out from existing content, while also offering some real variance for people who had already completed the game.

Greedfall is Spiders finally delivering on the promise of their earlier games as they stretch their wings and make a more ambitious RPG than before. It still has the Spiders jank, and there's still plenty of room for improvement, but it is a good time and a solid RPG.

Surprisingly good were the story and writing of the NPCs. Each of your companions is interesting in their own way, and all are useful in the party. There's no dead weight, and no one whose quests you dread doing. Likewise, the main story of political and spiritual intrigues keeps you engaged throughout. The stories could do with a bit more teeth; there's a certain level of almost childlike naivety to the quest outcomes which is direct contrast to the background they're set against.

Combat will feel familiar to any who have played a Spiders game before, but works well, feeling challenging but fair.

Less successful is the quest structure, which is archaic. Far too often a quest is nothing more than running between two points to speak to people. While quests in other games often do this, they dress it up with twists, decisions, timers, or just things happening along the way. Greedfall does none of this, and I can understand why some people tire of it before the end. If you've played Starfield then it's very similar to that, but with less load screens.

Despite this, I would still recommend the game, and I'm very much looking forward to the sequel.

A thoroughly disappointing game which isn't worth your time in such a populated market.

It suffers from a pretty typical flaw of adventure games which try to use real world tools, and that is that it's very inconsistent in when each one should be used, leading to you cycling through every tool every time. Is the lever for levering things? No, it's for hammering. The metal pole is the lever. Want to get that tube? Don't cut it like you did similar objects previously, instead use the pliers to pluck it. It makes for some very tedious interactions.

Talking of tedious, the characters are dull as dishwater, and that's death for a game that's so clearly dependent on the central pairing. Going with a flat, robotic read for the robot character was a huge mistake, though the lead voice actress isn't doing much for her character either. The supporting cast is even weaker, with some shocking performances in parts.

This isn't helped by verbose dialogues which say little. Looking at some unimportant item might lead to several lines of back-and-forth between the character pair, meaning it takes forever just to look through a room. Nor does the game use shorter descriptions for repeat viewing, so you dread forgetting anything as you once again slog through six lines of dialogue because you wanted to double-check an item. At one point you need to rescan a series of rooms for an element, only for the entire room description to be regurgitated every time, with the necessary information just being appended to the end.

At least one puzzle was a struggle to solve because the characters didn't use proper English when stating why the solution wasn't working, leaving me at a loss as to what the problem was. There are numerous areas where the (presumably translated) text is rough.

There just really isn't anything to recommend this.

There's a solid game in there, but there's still a lot of bugs. Mechanics that don't work consistently, abilities that don't do what the tooltip says they do, and narrative inconsistencies within conversations break immersion. Consider waiting for more patches.

Beyond that is an Owlcat CRPG, and if you liked their previous works, you're going to like this too. Compared to Wrath of the Righteous (WOTR) it's easier to get into as well. It focuses on purely turn-based combat and slims down the tedious non-CRPG mini-game layer they always insert, though it's still present and still tedious.

Companions are strongly written, but some feel a little too distant from events. Sister Argenta is a prime example, someone with a strong personality, but which is rarely expressed. She's silent most of the time, and her personal quest is announced near the start, then nothing happens until it suddenly resolves near the end. More was needed to flesh out some of the companions within this story.

The story itself is also a step back from WOTR as it never really coalesces into a singular thread. Whereas WOTR is about the crusade and what kind of crusade you will run, Rogue Trader can't really decide if it's about you, your province, the plots of your enemies, the plots of your friends... It all culminates in a bit of a limp climax that comes out of nowhere. The Acts are just a series of unrelated threats, more akin with Kingmaker, but without even the thread that game had tying it all together.

Those who have played Owlcat games before will also know how broken their encounter design is. Not so much here, and in fact this game is far too easy because game breaking builds can be stumbled upon with such ease that it's seemingly by design. Whereas Core difficulty in WOTR had me redoing many fights, here Daring difficulty saw me never lose, and by the halfway point the enemies would never even get a turn. It has the Wasteland 3 problem of combat simply being a case of the turn one alpha strike, and all terrain is an utter irrelevance not far into the game. Modern X-Com is a much simpler system, yet still manages to be a more engaging one. There is no pre-buffing though, so halleluiah!

The ending represents a step up over WOTR though, with lots of sides covering everything. You get satisfying resolutions on all your choices, and there's a lot of ways things can turn out depending on what you did.

All-in-all I enjoyed this. It's an Owlcat game through-and-through, it just doesn't hit the same highs as WOTR.

Back when I played Talos Principle it became one of my favourite games of all time. It was the spiritual successor to Portal that I had been waiting for, a beautiful blend of puzzles and atmosphere. Talos Principle II had a lot to live up to, and while it doesn’t have quite the same impact, is still a magnificent game.

I was initially thrown by the array of characters and missed the solitude of the original, but once I was able to overcome my preconceived notions of what the game should be I came to appreciate this new approach. The primary cast is charismatic and fits well into the philosophical debate that the game hopes to inspire.

This cast extends to a series of secondary characters who don’t have the same impact. While I appreciated the game using them to flesh out the challenges of New Jerusalem, none had enough character or screen time to really land. At one point I was asked to see another character by name and had no recollection who they were. The game's faux social media feed is much more successful at capturing the mood and personality of the city.

Puzzle-wise the game is a winner, with some you’ll twig immediately and others that’ll challenge your assumptions and have you walking away only to come back later to stare at them again. You only get as stuck as you want to be, with the game allowing you to hunt down and collect sparks to skip puzzles you can’t beat, though a proper hint system would have been appreciated.

About the only step back is the star puzzles. In Talos Principle, the moment where I realised I could break pieces out of puzzles and start inter-linking them as part of a wider puzzle was the moment the game was elevated into instant classic. The sequel has at similar element, but it is more simplified than my memory of the first game’s approach, and in at least one instance descends into tedious needle in a haystack searching.

The progress of technology is obvious with the maps being vast and gorgeous. You walk through verdant forests, across snowy mountain paths, over sandy desert, and wade through swamps. Each area has its own feel, and while perhaps one map was a little too windy for its own pacing good, the others all feel just right in selling you on the scale and majesty of this place.

I highly recommend this game. It’s a worthy successor.

Great atmosphere and an intriguing story, but not enough meat on the gameplay bones. Quickly turns into a key hunt, where the game comes down to weaving around enemies, getting the key that unlocks a door, then exploring that new area for a key that unlocks another door, etc.

Short and sweet, with a bit too much walking. A detective game that has a good amount of detecting, though perhaps would benefit from more investigating. It wants you to play through it multiple times, and it might have enough going on to justify two playthroughs, but not more, and something will be lost knowing all the answers to the questions.

Certainly worth one run though.

This is an odd one to recommend. As a puzzle platformer, it's neither a good platformer nor a good puzzler. The platforming sections especially suffer from far too much trial & error. Yet the supporting story is strong, and the ending elevates the game beyond the sum of its parts. It's pretty much the perfect length for what it is and is a breezy play.

The missions added by this DLC are so-so, though mission design was never the strength of the game. These missions don't slot into the existing story, rather they're all character prequels designed to give more backstory. This makes them feel awkward as you bring in existing squads alongside story squads, and are then dis-incentivised to use the story squad as nothing from it will carry over to the main campaign. The loot is nice, but I can't help but feel it breaks the difficulty curve of an already pretty easy game.

Where this DLC shines is through the new units and items, etc. For anyone who is doing another run of the game it's a much needed breath of fresh air and genuinely opens up new ways to approach the missions and is fully worth the cost for this.

It's a decent enough puzzle game, but suffers from a critical flaw, which is that the puzzle rewind mechanic requires you to solve the puzzle before you can solve the puzzle. What this means is that you spend a couple of minutes figuring out the room, then much longer executing the solution. This isn’t helped by slow movement and an infuriatingly tiny jump. Later on if you misjudge a jump, well then it’s back to another three minutes of retracing your steps.

The puzzles start out too easy, but later on devolve into a slog, but without the satisfaction of a good brain burn. There are a few good puzzles along the way -- I was especially fond of the river puzzles -- but it never comes together in a really satisfying way. The final puzzle felt no different than a hundred that came before it.

There are some unfortunate combat sections which would have been better left out of the game. Same for all the sections requiring platforming skills or quick reflexes.

The characters grew on me over the course of the game. It’s no Portal, but the writing is solid and the story intriguing. It’s let down though by the ending. It feels as thought the game either needs the ability to opt out of that ending, or for the protagonist to be a little more introspective before going into it. As it is, you know what’s coming, they know what’s coming, and yet you can’t avoid it and they dive into it with nary a thought despite the many, many hints that they might want to think it over first. It's an ending at distinct odds with the tone of the characters, which is why it needs the writing to engage with it more before rolling credits. You're left waiting for the twist that never comes.

If you’re stuck for a decent puzzle game and have played through things like Portal and Talos Principle, then maybe this is worth it, but I was very ready for it to be over by the end.