Recenzii recente de Quitch

My final playtime was 41 hours, but I suspect it was truly close to 30-35. I haven't played Bastard's Wound. Tyranny is a great bit of choice & consequence wrapped up in an exceedingly mediocre game.

So let's talk combat. This is based on the Pillars of Eternity system, which I found to be pretty interesting to play with. It has some of the same problems, primarily that the underlying numbers system is unnecessarily fiddly (seriously, stats or skills, just choose one!), but it was a pretty solid system overall. Tyranny is in love with abilities, you've got your talents, your spells (customisable at that), your party combos and artifact abilities. You can't fit it all on a skill bar. The problem is it's almost all pointless.

Combat in this game suffers in a couple of key ways. Firstly, in PoE, area control was key. When someone was engaged in combat, it was a significant factor. Leaving engagement hurt, and enemies were reluctant to do so, and a lot of areas provided you with means to limit the size of the engageable area. Tyranny drops pretty much all of this, with open areas, little to no penalty for leaving engage, and enemies who will do so at the drop of a hat to engage the backline. Every battle becomes a scrum, which results in every battle being about dropping enemies as quickly as possible because tanking isn't really a concept the game has.

They also added back pre-buffing. Hands up everyone who missed pre-buffing before a battle? No one? Thought so.

The other element of PoE was the variety of damage types and how they interacted with enemies. It was often worth carrying two sets of weapons so you could switch to whatever worked best for the situation. Again, pointless in Tyranny where I don't recall seeing a single enemy that cared if you did slashing, piercing or crushing damage. All that mattered was damage, DPS and armour pen.

It leads to incredibly shallow combat, which is nothing more than ability rotation. And while you have a ton of abilities you won't care about huge numbers of them because you don't need them. See, combat is also very easy, probably because there's so little depth to the combat itself so all you need is enough damage output. I was carrying healing potions from the beginning of the game at the end of the game. I think my party got wiped only once during an early Bane encounter because I was too lazy to use potions. The customisable spell system, combined with everyone being able to use spells, also means Lore as a skill becomes hugely powerful. More Lore means increasingly powerful spells, and by the end I was buffing it to the near exclusion of everything else. Party combos are a cool idea, but in practice you rarely needed to bother.

Quest design is also an issue, with far too many quests requiring you to go to an area, run to the far end through a maze, speak to someone, then run all the way back to access the world map and repeat it at another location. I had the most fun with Bane dungeons, simply because they presented the most interesting combat scenarios (still not great though), and threw a few light puzzles in there to keep it varied. Certainly better than yet another forgettable maze town. What should be great quests, like the investigation into the Archons, prove to be nigh on irrelevant, unless there's some road I didn't take that makes the mass of facts you gather useful.

And here's the problem with the world, the world as it's told is awesome, but the world you interact with is small and boring. Did you really feel a difference between the Bane village and the village of stone? Did you care about any of the happenings there? Because I didn't. The strong characters, like Tunon, are simply absent for huge portions of the game. The entire investigation piece needed to be given more importance, because it's the only thing tying together a bunch of otherwise disconnected hub quests.

The companion dialogue has the usual dreadful Obsidian pacing, with just too much available early on, and then not enough reactivity later on. In Act 3 Verse had to make a choice of where her loyalties lay, and because I had her at level 3 she stuck with me. Yet I got her to loyalty 3 on the first screen of the game! Where's the pacing?! And that hurts because I think the game has one of the stronger RPG companion casts I've experienced in a while. They do feel undercooked though, with hints around certain characters like Lantry that never seem to amount to anything.

I never met a skill check I couldn't pass that wasn't loyalty or background related. I don't know if that's a fluke of my skill choices, or just another part of the game being way too easy.

Act 3 is weird, and I can see why people say it feels cut short. It looked like the dungeon and spire that come with it could be skipped, meaning you could wrap it up in under an hour. And Act 3 is also when you can access to the big power, the power that is a total non-factor by that point.

What the game does have is great choice & consequence stuff, and there look to be a lot of cool ways things could play out. But it's not enough, because trying again would mean slogging through really dull combat, and having to wade through huge dialogue trees again just to hit some loyalty/wrath triggers. More companion stuff needs to happen in relation to events in the world, rather than as massive history and personal background dumps up front. And events in these little towns need to have some impact. Outside of unlocking abilities, I didn't feel the impact of loyalty, wrath and fear anywhere near enough.

One other area the game deserves credit is for managing to be such a land of grey. Almost everyone you meet has a point, and yet are also terrible people surviving in a terrible land. There are few out-and-out evil people, and pretty much no out-and-out good people. Everyone does what they must to make it.

I was actually a little disappointed that the game went with such a world shaking plot because it ends up making the world feel smaller.

On Kyros, I was certainly left confused, and wasn't sure what was intentional confusion. Kyros is often described as a woman, except by Sirin who states he's a man. You're told almost no one has any dealings with Kyros, which is why she's so mysterious. But Sirin talks about him throwing a number of soirées and inviting a whole load of people. So which is it? Everyone thinks Kyros knew you'd get your power and it's all part of her plan. But then Kyros at the end looks like a bumbling fool. Is making you an Archon her big move to end you? I just wasn't sure how the game wanted me to see Kyros, are they some master schemer, or just a idiot with a power? I preferred Kyros as a mysterious figure used to setup the world, without taking part in it, because they instance they get involved they become less and frankly seem like a bit of a pillock.

All-in-all I'd recommend Pillars over this, because while I loved the idea of this game and its world, I think Pillars is a better game.

I grabbed during the Halloween sale after getting tired of waiting for it to arrive on iOS. Now, I'm at risk of being that guy on BGG who plays a game once then begins declaring its design flaws, but after five or so games I'm not feeling it. This has been described as a board game designed for the computer, and you can immediately see some of those nasty computer design flaws creeping in with opaque design. During the day the odds of what you pull from a dungeon are different from night. What are the odds? Who knows. How are they different? Who knows. And that's computer design right there, hiding the mechanics from you so that you have to bash your head against the game to brute force an answer from it, and some people will come away with the wrong answer just owing to RNG.

The game heavily revolves around three decks of cards: items, spells and tricks. You can either use a card for its ability (spend gold to equip an item, affect someone or something, or magic to cast a spell), or burn the card on skill checks. Now, what I found is that 90% of the time you will burn cards, meaning that you care little about any of it except that icon in the corner telling you what symbol it is. A lot of cards seem oddly designed to be cast on another player's go, and perhaps this changes over time, but I was damned if I found I had the time to do that. Perhaps humans are more plodding, but the AIs nipped around the map and having a requirement for a fast mouse hand in a digital board game just strikes me as totally bizarre. Talisman handles this much better (at least in single player) where you can pause the game to give you time to set your play in motion.

My biggest complaint though is that I didn't find much in the way of decision making going on. You play the hand you're dealt, and at the start that means your strategy is going to be based on your character. Got someone good at fighting? You're going to go for a fighting victory. Now, you could go for prestige too, but given that fighting will get you prestige...

The greatest variation in what people will do is based on where their quests take them, except you can't see where people's quest objectives are, which heavily limits your ability to impede them outside of reactive plays, or fighting them as you stumble across them. I wouldn't do much more than check the score summary to see who looked to be the person closest to me in terms of winning, then throwing something at them if possible. I didn't really strategise much.

And there's the nasty RNG, which again, is opaque. Hitting a dungeon for questing? Multiple possible results, no way of knowing the odds. Bunny has better odds, but you don't know what the base odds are nor what the modifier is. Again, classic video game design, but is even more annoying in a game which is trying to be like a board game with a small number of deeply meaningful decisions. People talk about RNG in Talisman, but here it seems especially harsh because they keep the game time short to make it good for multiplayer. You get a couple of bad turns and you're pretty much boned.

Now, perhaps as I learn the decks the game will open up in terms in terms of strategy, as knowing what you might be able to draw seems to be a big part of it. For that reason it seems bizarre that the game won't tell me what cards exist until I've seen them, and I haven't seen a way of looking at the discard pile either.

Finally you have unlocks. These suck, because they effectively lock you out of online play until you've ground them out as some equippable items are just plain better than others.

It's certainly a game I'll try some more, and another I think that would fare better on tablet than PC, but I can't help but feel that Talisman is just better for this kind of game (once you've added the expansions).

I picked up for like two quid in a sale a while back. It's a pretty minimal effort conversion, with nothing to make you hate the UI, but certainly nothing impressive either. The real issue is that the underlying game itself is pretty pants.

Now, I knew this was a risk which is why I bought it so cheap. Lots of reviews, especially of the board game, talking about its flaws. They're all pretty spot on. It's one of those multi-player solitaire games. Interaction between players is virtually non-existent, and even if you pull a card which affects other people, you weren't making a choice, it was just random chance.

The other major issue is you will spend 50% of the game just healing. The game is brutal when it comes to punishing you, especially early on. Monster in your area? Probably too strong for you early on. Fate card? Well you better pray to the RNG gods because there's ♥♥♥♥ all you can do about that. And then when a card punishes you you're using one of your precious two actions to heal the damage. In fact one card might do enough damage to cause you to spend multiple turns using half your actions to heal. Once you've developed enough to handle things you're still going to be caught in a repetitive loop of the same two actions turn after turn.

There's no real arc to the game either. You complete quests for VPs, which consist of running to locations, picking up coloured tokens, and then exchanging them for other coloured tokens. It doesn't matter which locations you're at, only which tokens they provide. And when you've done one quest you go on another pulled from the deck. The game doesn't build a story, it just stops when someone did enough quests.

Perhaps there's something to be said if you were playing this on a tablet where you just want to kill some time, but it feels like there's so little going on in terms of meaningful decision making. Certainly there's no reason to play this multiplayer because you have nothing to do with the other players.

A masterpiece of VR simplicity. It's pong, in VR. Yet it's also so much more. The amazing soundtrack, the snarky AI, the perfect art design, and the challenge that ramps up in just the right way. It's one of my essential VR experiences.

If you have multiple play areas available, then use the one with the most width. This gives the AI a wider area to return the ball and makes the game even better.

This is the game that made me buy the Vive.

Frankly, the more floor space you can throw at it the better, but when you find yourself strafing with dual weapons, or virtually lying on the floor to dodge bullets yet still feeling like a badass, you know you're onto something special.

Great soundtrack and meaty FX bring the experience home.

Be warned, this game uses in-game motion and encourages you to finish quickly. This is a combination designed to get your stomach rolling. Not everyone will suffer, and I was fine at first, but once I got confident enough in the mechanics to start rocketing around the arenas I stopped feeling so good.

Game also needs to spend more time on teaching you how to jump properly, and I think wall climbing needs to lock you in position so your slight arm movements (because there's no wall to actually hold and keep your steady) don't lead to the camera bobbing back and forth.

The game everyone needs to play right after the tutorial. It really is the perfect introduction to VR, while also having some games which are cool in their own right.

Big fan of Rick & Morty but this just did nothing for me, Humour didn't land, character's talked for far too long about nothing and often over one another so you can't always hear what they're saying, and there's little to do except figure out the one gimmick in the room that will move you to the next. And when it ended I was glad, and that's never a good sign.

The master volume for the game is also too loud compared to other games

Simple to play, incredbly hard to master, this game is pure addictive fun. Can't recommend it highly enough.

This game is all promise and potential but doesn't deliver. It starts out strong when you arrive on a blacked out ship with a mystery ahead of you. But you've quickly got a gun in your hands and the lights get switched on and the atmosphere departs.

It's a game that feels undercooked and that more was planned than was delivered, especially given the amount of dead space in what is already a small environment.

I did like that it doesn't hold your hand, there are things to be figured out, but alas the best path is to clear the ship then come back to the environment, and that makes for terrible pacing.