Recent reviews by Zalasta

I don't really post reviews; I think that this is the first one I've ever done here, and it's sad that it has to be a negative one, especially for a game that followed after Kingmaker, which is arguably one of my favorite games of the last decade or so. I tend to think that I have a pretty broad spectrum of games I find entertaining, and am pretty forgiving of issues if core mechanics and play are fun, so it takes quite a bit for me to not like a game. Kingmaker, to me, is so frustrating, so unforgivingly and unrelentingly unfun, that it has not only made me not like the game, not only guaranteed that I will not buy future products from Owlcat, but it actually actively impacted my mental outlook and caused real relationship strain within my marriage. Let me explain.

I had a blast with Kingmaker, and continue to go back to it again and again, with different permutations of play, all of them have been fun in their own unique ways, offering different challenges, and so I thought the same would apply to Wrath. However, where Kingmaker accomodated variety in class creation and progression, this grindhouse ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ made it abundantly clear that my choices were stupid, and I was a bad player, possibly a bad human being, for making said choices. This is weird, since the core mechanics and fundamental rules and abilities are literally identical to Kingmaker, so cause for that rests entirely upon the scenarios the game puts the players in. After discussing the game with other trusted friends who have progressed farther, I have been told that this is simply the way this game is made, and that ostensibly it gets better after I get farther than I had. To me, this is the equivalent of saying, "Look, the game forces you to suck dirty hobo ♥♥♥♥ for a while, but then it takes its hand off your neck and you get to only deep throat when you want to." The balancing of encounters and fights are seemingly balanced around statistical min/maxing as the bare minimum, and any real deviation from it will be ruthlessly crushed, Mythic feats and abilities be damned. A +4 circumstance bonus to saving throws and AC means ♥♥♥♥ all when I am regularly rolling 16 under their spell checks, and an elimination of spell resistance is worthless when every enemy I have cast on saves against every spell my party casts as well, typically for minimum damage. Healing is, within the scope of my experience, actively counterproductive to winning combats, as single units are regularly outputting in one turn more damage than I can expect to heal back in 4 whole rounds of focused healing, which takes away from possible damage sources, furthering the involuntary train being run on my party.

Not that focusing exclusively on martial classes is any help either. My main character is level 8 and has 31 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ AC. THIRTY ONE. It might as well have none, since they have managed to be crit 5 times from 6 attacks over two turns in one round of combat. Who gives a ♥♥♥♥ WHAT my AC is if it's all bypassed anyway and I get exploded before my next character can do anything to mitigate it? I've lost 2 characters, as in they are DEAD, not Death's Door, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dead, need to be resurrected, in the unfun slog through Dredzen or whatever the hell that city's name is, because I can't back out to remove it at an encampment, and the two sets of supplies available to rest from don't remove it, even though it's a long rest removal mechanic. Again, not that mitigation means anything with the spells and abilities I have access to, in the face of an overwhelmingly stacked lineup, because +2 against evil outsiders means ♥♥♥♥ all when the saves are apparently starting 10 over my own party's baseline.

I'm sure there's some sort of optimized build, combining the right characters, in the right order, that's been tested out on a spreadsheet to ensure the greatest set of statistical variance from mean regression to ensure some sort of minimum performance that will allow me to survive until the game gets fun, but guess what? That's not fun to me. At that point I'd rather have no choices at all, than be given a breadth of options, 99% of which I cannot take or be subjected to statistically non-trivial hinderances otherwise. It's like whoever designed map encounters actively hates TTRPGs and wants to drive off as many prospective players as they can.

None of this begins to tackle the continual series of bugs I keep running into in game. I had a character cast Dispel Magic on an enemy caster, only for it to fail due to concealment granted by Blur, A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SPELL. What circularly meaningless ♥♥♥♥ is this?! Portrait healing and buffing is so bad that Wrath actually gaslit me into questioning if it was ever a mechanic at all in other games within this genre. I had to install BG2 and test click healing on portraits, just to make sure I wasn't losing my mind or going prematurely senile. It turns out it's just badly implemented, with healers walking up to the intended target and then just standing there, spells pre-loaded for next round, when their target will be unconscious and, since they're inevitably melee characters, I run the risk of misclicking and healing an enemy AGAIN, since it's a regular occurrance due to poor cursor hit detection. Also, who the hell decided what feats are recommended for character progression? If a new player trusted those decisions (which I tried out on my 3rd reset of the game, just to see if I was being overly stupid or something), they'd hamstring themselves so badly that I imagine they'd give up even sooner than I did.

This whole series of issues STILL doesn't touch on the Crusade system. Where kingdom management in Kingmaker was a blast, with plenty of choices, different paths to take regarding crises, and a relatively expansive set of options to grow the larger campaign world from, the Crusade is the exact opposite in nearly every way. There is no strategy involved at the outset. You simply camp in the capital until you can purchase the maximum allowable of the 3 (4 if you're lucky) kinds of units that can be deployed, find an army or two, or a single fortification, pit your 3 units against their 6-8, barely win or get crushed, then head back to the capital to hit Skip Day 6 or 7 times, and repeat the whole process over, and it's unskippable since you need to win certain fights to even progress. Why put it in at all? There's nothing fun about it.

Online forums recommend setting things to the easiest setting, or going on the Nexus and getting 7 or 8 addons to balance things out. When the best options are either to ramp down the difficulty so much that you might as well be playing a visual novel game, or throwing a Skyrim's worth of addons just to make things bearable, it's indicative you did a ♥♥♥♥ job. Wrath has not just made me not want to play another Owlcat game, but I have apprehension about exploring any game of similar vein again. It's turned me off of a whole genre of games beyond the ones I've already played and can trust to not be this bad, again, in my opinion.

The whole sequence of events made me so irritable that I started snapping off to people near and dear to me from misdirected frustration, and I'm used to frustration in games. This is the first time a game has made me so angry and frustrated that I inadvertently took it out on others. Let me re-iterate: I found Wrath of the Righteous to be SO BAD AN EXPERIENCE, I TOOK IT OUT ON OTHER PEOPLE. I have NEVER done that before. Ever.

However, your mileage and experiences may vary. On the plus side, the little bit of voice acting I experienced was top notch, the musical score was appropriately thematic and compelling, and the character portrait and design was excellent. Keep your art assets, fire everyone else, including executive producers and CEO.

Brutal. I had to butcher my horses in order to prevent a slave and worker revolt long enough to get to town where I could sell my 'grave meat' and meet their salary payments. I was slaughtered by bandits essentially at the city gates.

Will spend lots of time on this game.

About half an hour into the game, and I've encountered a ♥♥♥♥ talking clam and some guy outside an inn trying to scam me on Amway. Will continue to play.

Can't recommend it enough. Beautiful aesthetics, a FANTASTIC story, and damn good gameplay. Parts of it make my heart ache, parts of it had my fist pumping in the air, and parts had me set in grim determination.

Gorgeous environment, an interesting implied story, and some really excellent lateral thinking puzzles that you are gradually intorduced to. It's Myst, without the endless saves and 60 hour backtracks and missing acorns and ♥♥♥♥.

Just bought, and it's already my new favorite game. Hopping around to some great music, beating the crap out of blobs, minotaurs with harps on their horns, and huge dragons. How can't you love it?