Recent reviews by xSamhainx

I dont know how many hours I have on this game, on PS4, but it's a lot. I've played it pretty much every day for months.
The bad thing about the Playstation version, is that the Dragon Clan is not available. The good thing about the Playstation version, is that the whole game is not blanketed w/ the bizarre fog of the PC version. I see there's some tweaking you can do of the game's files on the forums, and I'll have to check that out, as well as deleting certain horrendous sound files (more on that later)

It's a great turn based, tile based, card based fantasy board game with animorphic characters. The entire game's animation is brilliant, you can tell the game was a labor of love. It's a work of art, that means a lot when it comes to my satisfaction as a player. Every character is loaded with personality, and they all have their special quirks. On top of this, you can trick them out with additional gear that you earn as you play.

A game session is roughly an hour, which is absolute heroin to me. Perfect. In that hour, the game can take a lot of dramatic turns - One minute I'm screwed, and sure it's over. The next, I'm eke'ing out a skin-of-my-teeth win, and killing the king with one point of life left. I start with a plan to save the kingdom, pure of heart, and then wind up a rotting vessel of corruption, bent on destruction by the time the game's over. RNG can be a cruel mistress, but in this game, she pushes me out of my comfort zone, and it's brilliant.

One of my only complaints is the sound. The music is wonderful, and 99% of the game's sound is good - but as somebody who suffers from misaphonia - I simply cannot tolerate some of the sound in this game. Once a town is in chaos, the villagers start screaming. No matter where you are on the board, the same looping sound of screaming women plays over and over, and it just keeps going. Also the sound of the dungeon tile. It lets rip with a sort of bizarre feedback loop - again, over and over. They both drive me absolutely mad, and thankfully all sound can be disabled, and I just play with the music, but it's a shame that I have to do so. Very poor sound choices. Reminds me of the first Zoo Tycoon, wherein once you build a bathroom, the entire rest of the game is spent listening to the sound of a toilet flushing ad infinitum. Charming.

I love this game, but it's not for everybody. In fact it wasnt for me at first. When I first fired it up on Steam, it ran like crap on my lesser computer, and it just didnt catch me. I didnt "get it". Chances are you wont get it either, the first time you play it. It takes a little bit of personal investment, and patience. You need to be defeated a few times, then you start getting the rhythm. I felt that there was more here, so I gave it another try. I looked up each status/effect/whatever as they happened, and started coming together. I was enthralled.

I'm excited that I still have the Dragon Clan to explore, I'm kinda waiting while I cleanse my palette w/ Rise of the Tomb Raider before I go back to Armello in earnest. But I shall return, this is one of those games I feel that I'll be coming back to over the years. On my beefy gaming rig, (or Mac) - this game will eat up a lesser system. It's also available for "free" on the Ipad, but w/ about half the character roster, and the par-for-the-course gem-pushing nonsense of mobile titles.

Clunky. Awkward. Frustrating. Pointless

These are a few of the words that I would use to describe this game. I dont mind a clunky game, sometimes that can be a rather charming trait. Like a terrible movie that's so bad, it's actually good fun. That's not the case with Bastard.

This game is punishing to play on many levels. From archaic inventory management, to choppy framerate, to laughably translated dialogue, to unresponsive controls, to wildly swinging difficulty, to re-trekking the map progress the quest. I repeat - The Quest. There isnt a lot here, and when I start asking myself "why the hell am I playing this?", it's time to call it quits.

Not only are you an illegitimate son, but you have the option to play a real bastard of a person as well. Tons of moral "choices" thrown at you left and right. Time and time again, you enter a village and the townspeople are set upon a lynching, or some other form of oppression. Do you let it go forward? (+1 benefit to you) or do you stop it? (-1 benefit to you). There doesnt seem to be any downside whatsoever to doing the rotten thing, every time. In fact, it's wholly beneficial to do so. The only upside to doing the "good" thing is, well, I guess you go to video game heaven when you die?

I guess that's what the bizarre subtitle "It's not free to be good" means. Another laughable English translation for something that probably sounds a lot better in Russian.

Sorry, I feel no remorse for sentencing a set of pixels to death. Morality plays need to have a meaningful game mechanic behind them, an advantage /disadvantage to playing either side, or I see it as pointless. This game is pointless.

I very rarely refund a game, but after just playing the tutorial I realized there is way better options for my 17.99. This aint it.
What's on the label seems like everything I'd like, and I'm willing to suffer a couple bugs along the way on a new purchase, but I wouldnt pay more than a few bucks for this even if bug-free.

It's convoluted in it's execution, and while it looks graphically cool, it's very anticlimactic. When a game bores me to death during the tutorial, it's a bad sign. While the game has blood-rousing actions such as pillaging, marching, and ultimately meeting your foes in battle - It doesnt even give you the pleasure of seeing any of this. Let me at least see my minis swing their weapons, something - No, you basically place the minis and click "battle results" and there's a spreadsheet of what happened. Lame.

This was a game I didnt even know I needed.
So far, it's really scratching my tactical itch, and I'm finding it hard to stop playing but "one more mission".
I'll be the first to admit, I am indeed new to XCOM - so I'm not suffering the fanboy rage that I see permeating the critiques of the game. "Reeee, playing woke alien hipsters!" Sorry, I have rolled my eyes at a few bits of dialogue, but if that's enough to make you forsake a title, then you dont deserve this awesome game.
Youre playing a mix of human & alien troops, and yes they are predefined (which is what most of the screeching is about), but they still have ability choices and gear upgrades as they level up. They have all grown on me, as they all have different abilities from psionics to other offensive/defensive. I cant help but snicker when my snake w/ a submachine gun breaches in and hurls a toxic loogey at an enemy. Good times.
Oh yes, breaching - every time you start a mission, you kick the door down/bust thru a window/blast thru a wall in a swat style breaching sequence. The order of troops matter, their abilities, etc., It's a cool way to start the mission, and can really influence how the mission goes. Which is usually some pretty spectacular violence and environment destruction, and it's supremely satisfying when all hell breaks loose, but I still eke out the win w/ no agents down.

The game cutscenes are done in a kinda retro comic book style, which helps give the game a very unique feel.
The difficulty for me, is perfect on normal. It's hard enough that playing stupid will get me killed, but it's not so difficult that every.single.action and every.single.upgrade has to be min/maxed and perfect or I'm dead meat. There's an overall map meta-game, wherein you're stomping out fires that pop up thru the city, while moving towards your overarching goal of busting up a criminal syndicate. Home base has research, vendors, training, and again - deep enough to keep me interested, but not so life-n-death that I cant just pick something I like "because it's cool". That's how I like to roll.

I got it for 9.99 on sale, but I wouldnt hesitate to pay the full 20 bucks

I've had a lot of fun w/ Monster's Den. It's a nice dungeon crawler, with a fairly interesting story, charming hand drawn graphics, various factions, diverse classes, freeform character styling, varied levels of quests, and some fairly brutal (yet satisfying!) combat. I've definitely gotten my money's worth, and I see myself still dabbling now and then, but it's fast headed to the back burner as the less appealing aspects continue wearing on me. When it's good, it's one of those games that can make you stand up and cheer after a brutal, lopsided turn based battle goes in your favor. The diverse range of enemies can pose a significant challenge, and plenty of times I've scraped by and pulled off the win. That's when it's at it's best.

It has a home base you build up w/ upgrades, and soon you'll have a reliquary, vault (you'll need it), merchant, and other such comforts of home to return to, after a long day of dungeoneering.

However, as the hours stack up, there are just some things that are making me not want to click that icon.

I feel the loot is just way too much, it's loot overload. I’m not on an adventure, I’m a traveling sales dept. The game is constantly heaping enormous piles of loot upon the player at every opportunity, and there’s always a nice needle somewhere within the haystack. So everything must be sifted, everything must be compared, everything must be evaluated with every character- and it's absolutely tedious. There are filtration options that help the process, but still… it's an hour minimum for me to run thru the compare on all this stuff, and it just keeps coming. It's a session unto itself. Some may find this enjoyable, but I find myself bleary eyed, and having a headache afterward.

After some time, there's an option to start running another crew of adventurers, but all I see is hours of sorting ahead for my bright eyed Lv1's . I've been just leaving them back at home base, to train. I dont have the time nor patience to manage yet another traveling sales department.

The game also scales quite poorly, at times. It's rough getting going, and the game can be fairly merciless - but that's really when the game is at it's most satisfying. You'll be thankful that you're only facing a few enemies instead of a full stack (max 6 enemies), once they start stunning, poisoning, and throwing ranged attacks. However, once you get powerful, you'll find these small groups of 1 to 3 enemies are hardly a challenge at all, yet they seem to comprise a majority of dungeon encounters. Here we go again: an hour of blind clicking whack-a-mole w/ zero challenge, as you clobber the same 1-3 enemies ad infinitum, just praying that you finally find a group of at least 5 or 6 foes for some fun. Or better yet, the dungeon objective to just end the thing.

So it's gets grindy as you level up, and your mileage will vary according to your tolerance for such.

Thankfully, the game has recently added an "adventure mode", which is basically setting up a random dungeon, with a random (or configured as you wish) party, for some ad hoc one-shot dungeon crawling. This is brilliant addition to the game, with the ability to set how many levels, enemy types, dungeon environment modifiers, and even the final boss. There are even weekly challenges (with leaderboard), if you're the competitive type. I can see myself coming back to this mode more than anything, when I need a quick dungeon fix, and every encounter and piece of loot means something.

It’s a fairly good game and solid concept, and also a one-man show, so I got no problem forking over full price to a starving artist who is active on the forums and supports his product. It just needs some work on the busywork and grind, and your mileage will vary depending on how much you’re willing to meet the game halfway on these things.

Book of Demons kept me entertained, it's not the best action RPG I've played - but it definitely scratched the itch and kept me playing for over 15 hours. A great homage to Diablo, with an interesting papercraft style to it, and a creative card-based equipment/upgrade/runic system. There's a lot of good streamlining that keeps the game flowing well, and onto the next area. However, the bane of the genre - becoming overpowered, reared it's ugly head at about the halfway mark, and I found myself nearly omnipotent for a few hours. Thankfully, it did ramp up a bit and i started to get a good challenge, and the final few boss fights had me actually having to pull out all the stops and scramble a bit.

I have to give props to the devs - it's really well done. For as bombastic as the action gets - The entire screen will be filled with explosions, smoke, fire, poison, creatures, and the game never stuttered, never slowed down. This is on at least an 8 year old Alienware laptop I have hooked up to a TV, it has problems with a lot of modern games, but this ran really well. No problems, no slowdowns, no bugs. The sound is great, i cranked it to where my neighbors definitely hate me if they didnt before.

I enjoyed it, and I see myself giving it another run with another class - in a while :)

I thought it was a great game. Just enough time to invest, before I want to move on to something else( around 30 hours). Just enough skills per character to make it interesting and varied, (6 active and 3 passive choices apiece) without giving me analysis paralysis. Just enough strategic depth to get slaughtered if I bumble headfirst into the fight, yet able to pull off a killer and satisfying level if I slow down and take it tactfully. I've seen complaints about the difficulty, I thought that was just right. For one, they dont dump health potions on you. Healing is available, but it's meted out by several different methods, and for me, that just makes the game more thrilling. I hate it when I have a heal bot, or buckets of potions, making the challenge irrelevant - thankfully, this game approaches healing intelligently and it's better for it. The Arthurian theme was interesting, and I enjoyed using all the varied characters. The art style really drew me in, I love this form of animated-looking game, it's brilliant. It's like playing thru an animated series. Yeah the story is your typical big baddie trying to take over the world, but arent they all? Doesnt bother me. The art is awesome, the tactical combat is fun. Kept me hooked!

There are some games that get it just right, when it comes to challenge, and risk/reward - this game just nails it perfectly. I'm starting a lot of battles thinking "Wow - I'm dead. When was my last save?", and I pull it off. Barely, and everybody is on low health, zero mana - but I prevail, and it's pretty satisfying.

The premise is simple: You are progressing thru a series of skirmish battles on a grid, much like Darkest Dungeon. Along the way, you level up and better arm your minions, and your town hub sits as their place of respite. That's where the DD comparison ends, as your characters all battle it out in a 3D arena against a somewhat-matched set of foes. They also arent as disposable as the DD characters, however, and there's far less RNG frustration.

I love the characters, the abilities are fun to use, and as you arm them up they change appearance accordingly. Any game where I can roll a Ninja alongside the prerequisite elves n' dwarves, shows a level of creativity that I appreciate. The varied monster design is also great, especially the "colossal" foes - get ready for a moment of terror when you see a Hydra for the first time, and the subsequent feeling of elation when it lets out it's final bellow and hits the ground (If you did your job right)

It's a great game, at a great price, and I cannot recommend it enough