Recent reviews by SwunG

Just finished my second playthrough. Plenty of freedom to make choices and suffer the consequences for messing up/ignoring something. I'll probably replay again later.

Lotta text for an open-ended game though. It can be fatiguing in a way that I don't experience from just reading a book.

Great story that makes you feel like a master detective and then a total ♥♥♥♥, really nice visuals and just overall a good chill time.

I had a few issues here and there but I'm sure they've been covered by other people.

Going Medieval is great, but maybe don't buy it yet.

I've really enjoyed my time playing the game so far, and I expect to continue enjoying the game for at least a few more hours (compare playtime at review vs total playtime to see how that prediction pans out). Single player games naturally have a ceiling on the amount of time you can play them before you run out of stuff to do, and with early access games that ceiling is always lower. Combine this with the fact that you can only enjoy a game for the first time once, and I might have set myself up for some disappointment down the line.

This is the first colony sim I've played, so I can't compare it to other games of the genre, but I can give a brief rundown on my experience so far. I set the difficulty to hard and set out with four settlers and enough supplies to get us through a few seasons. Accepting the first refugee to flee into my lands, I then lost three of five settlers to the cannibals that showed up the next day to reclaim him. This was only the first of several times when Scuzzton suffered losses which seemed unsustainable, but these setbacks taught me which tasks were important, and which could be put on the backburner. For example: keep the booze and lavish meals flowing, don't let valuable foodstuffs decay, and *completely* unrelated but equally important: dispose of all bodies as quickly and efficiently as possible. Everything else will follow. The challenge was frustrating at times, but that made the experience of weathering many seasons along with further barbarian onslaughts feel much more rewarding.

I liked scheduling my settler with the highest culinary skill to get up a little earlier than everyone else so he could prepare the others a healthy breakfast. I disliked constantly having to tell Osfram to prioritize cooking those meals, since he would often go as far as to gather all the ingredients together without actually finishing the job, instead deciding to start lumping barley to the brewing station. Other little annoyances include not being able to easily target enemies, important since your archers seem to select targets at random. Stuff like that is not enough to keep me from recommending this game as I'm sure these are things they intend to iron out of the experience, but the very fact that this game will continue to get better means my recommendation will have to remain qualified.

I'm 26 hours in and, as I said, I can only seem myself playing this game for a little while longer (at least until they add more content).

I have no problem springing for an early access game if it is well-reviewed and looks like fun, but I have to start recognizing that my FOMO might be robbing me of an even more enjoyable experience in the future. Going forward, Going Medieval should improve steadily. But which update am I going to select as the best time to come back to it? The more I continue to play it now, the less likely I am to want to play it in the future. I love the feeling you get from learning the systems of a game like this little by little. You get an extra hit of dopamine on top of those that the game is already designed to give you. I like to prolong that process for as long as possible, which is part of the reason I love games with PvP -- you can be surprised by other players in even the most straightforward shooters after thousands of hours of playtime. By the time Going Medieval leaves early access, it should be an excellent game with far more content, more nuanced combat, and more refined controls than it has now. I'll probably still like it, but I'll already be well-acquainted with the core of the game, and possibly even a little bored with it. The only upside I can think of to buying it now is that the game might be more expensive once it is finally released.

You'll enjoy it now. You might enjoy it more later. Typical EA caveats, I guess, but seriously: Why not wait? I kinda wish I had.

There's quite a learning curve to this game, but practically any point you could plot on it is fun despite the difficulty.

When matched up against opponents of similar skill level, R6 is one of the most thrilling and cerebral (seriously!) shooters you could play. Luckily, matchmaking is relatively consistent, and the ways in which veteran players take advantage of inexperienced players, while frustrating, are not really viable once one learns to counter them (spawn peeking, etc.).

UPlay is a mild annoyance, and the players you meet are probably more toxic than your average gamers; these are the only problems I have with the game.

PROSPECTIVE OS X PLAYERS NOTE:
why did i have to go to aspyr's blog/website to learn that as of launch, mac users won't be able to play with pc users until at least the first patch (which may not arrive for 2 months!)? It should say so on the steam store page, right next to where they noted that "It is possible for Mac and PC to become out of sync during updates or patches. Within this short time period, Mac users will only be able to play other Mac users." They don't say anything about cross-platform support for the game on launch day. . . I've enjoyed the single player experience and I'll certainly play online with my friends once I have access to my PC again but I gotta say the store page is misleading. I would've held off on buying for a few months if I had been aware of this crucial bit of information.

In a sentence: There needs to be more to this game.

Shadow of Mordor is beautiful and the story is one of the most compelling I've ever played. That said, combat is pretty dry and by the end of the game amounts to doing your best to avoid ridiculous numbers of orcs by abusing the same stealth mechanics over and over again. The final boss fights were incredibly disappointing in how simple they were. They basically consist of having your hand held through completing simple objectives like stealth attacks and timed strikes that you learn early on in the game. To put this in perspective: I had a harder time defeating some of the orc captains (and their hordes of uruk) than I did beating all three of the final bosses. Kind of a let down.

I loved the atmosphere that some of the boss fights created, but personally that only kept me from believing that the boss fights themselves were an afterthought.

Lots of cut-scenes, but if you're into LOTR lore you may not mind this as much.

This was an incredibly rewarding game for several reasons:

-A captivating story that kept me coming back

-The freedom of being able to complete events in the game more or less whenever/however I wanted

-It seriously pulls off the creepy/clammy vibe it was going for, with only a few jump-scares that had me enjoying it even more

-them graphics tho

I definitely recommend this game to anyone looking to get into a compelling other-wordly rpg. I guess you could call it a walking simulator, but still it's a damn good one.