Recent reviews by FatRats.org

This game has a nice tone to it and that everyone isn't simply ontologically good or evil. I haven't gotten far enough in it perhaps, but it seems a lot of classes within the same archetype are a bit too similar; it's still pretty fun though, and has surprisingly good voice acting which I wasn't expecting.

If you enjoyed previous historical titles you'll probably find Dynasties fun. They've done a lot for the campaign 4X system and have added a lot of depth to it without throwing so many things at you that it's bothersome or overwhelming, yet it adds a lot of of flavor to the setting. The various resource types in Pharaoh/Dynasties rather than having gold for everything, including unique resources often just giving you more gold, from previous Total War games is a big improvement.

The game might not be for everyone. Cavalry is seemingly non-existent outside of chariots, which is probably fitting to the time period but some people might not enjoy it. I like how chariots are niche units rather than some reskin of a shock cavalry unit from other games. They're pretty damn good, but you just need to have only a small amount of them. Unit mass greatly affects run speed now, and 2-handed lightly-equipped units abound that are meant to be for flanking or chasing down ranged units. Overall it plays pretty different, but it's enjoyable and feels distinct enough from other titles that even if it possibly isn't your preferred battle style you might enjoy a campaign on it from time to time.


I'd like to see them maybe try and reskin a few units that are more or less shared with various factions to try and link up the units' phenotypes to the faction better, but overall I'm having a lot of fun with Dynasties and glad they made it. I haven't yet tried the initial iteration of Pharaoh though. As someone else mentioned, I wish they brought back faction specific general speeches like they had in Rome 2.

They ruined Old Inferno, and gave up on trying to make Cobblestone a decent map. At least there's still a highly played game with recoil and a lack of bullet sponges.

If you liked the first Mount & Blade this one is better in some ways, worse in others, but overall maybe a little better imo. If you've never played the first one, well you're in for a treat because this is kind of in a genre of it's own, love it.

They really need to make it so NPC lords sell/drop excess food though. I know there are mods for it, but they stop working on new patches occasionally, and it really should just be something very apparent to the devs as needed.


This is a very sandbox game though, if you want a story and quests look elsewhere, there's pretty much none of that here.

Really fun silly game that's just there to let you observe strange fights on various maps as well as a take control first person option on a unit (which you can keep doing after it dies or even before and jump to another one of your units). The devs regularly update it so you don't have to worry about if it's ever going to come out.

The only negative is there seems to be no plans to implement multiplayer in the future. I'd play this game probably more than any I have if it allowed for 1v1s and especially 2v2s. It'd be great if they even offered that as a DLC option after the game is released. For $15, the game is easily worth that, and I'd happily pay for some $25 DLC that implements multiplayer in the future to play with friends.


For Frodo!!!

This game was a lot better than I expected it to be. Easily worth more than the asking price and an absolute steal if you get it on sale. The different weapons you can get along with the fact that there's weapon durability, but unlike a lot of games it really gets it right. You aren't going through weapons like crazy (unless you throw your melee weapons often), yet you still want to save your very best weapons for bosses or tight spots, but not so much so you feel t hey're just strapped on you and never used. There was some pretty great creativity on several boss fights and the OST was nice and fitting with the game. I really Black Figure Pottery art style and will probably be going through the new unlocked difficulty as some point for another play through.

I bought this game at a steep discount since I liked rally car racing as a kid and haven't seen any of it it in so long as well as there not being (imo) any decent racing games in the better part of a decade (maybe Forza's but I don't have an Xbox). Anyway, this is hands down, either the best or second best racing game I've ever played, it's easily worth the full price if you like realistic racing games. Be warned though, it's rally racing, so while sometimes you'll be on asphalt or concrete, a lot of times you're on very uneven dirt flying as fast as you can and skidding around corners hoping you don't lose control and slam into a tree.


Edit: You should probably have/get a controller if you're thinking of playing this though. I've never tried it with keyboard and mouse, but I'm guessing it's far from ideal.

If you never played this on the original Xbox it's a great RPG with solid storytelling, good character development for companions and and overall nice premise which reveals itself; things not often found in a lot of modern RPGs for sure. The combat is probably best about 40% of the way into the game and a little north and south of that. Before that you don't have a lot of abilities and afterwards things aren't really scaling with you due to how the world design is at that stage in the game; it becomes too easy even on the highest difficulty option, even with intentionally using a subpar build and average gear. The story is still great which is what you're mostly playing an RPG for so at the very least it's worth one play through, or additional playthroughs if it's been a long time.

This was a game that took me a long time to get into. I'd play it for 30 to an hour or so and then put it down for weeks or months. I'd really recommend looking up a tutorial video on the basics. Maybe not so much because the game does a bad job of explaining it, but if you don't sit down and play it for at least 2-3 hours it might be easy to forget some things about it that would be detrimental to your play.

Anyway, it's more like a empire management game than something like Total War or Civ. It isn't turn based, and at the same time things aren't really on a 'build timer' like in an RTS. A lot of things revolve around Recruitment pools which are affected by several factors, but regardless there's no way to say that some workers or this combat unit or that combat unit take X amount of time to finish really (unless you already have the total amount of recruits stockpiled already). It's a fun game but not for everyone. Look up a video of it and see if it peaks your interest, it's obviously more fun to play than watch but if it doesn't interest you in the slightest it's probably not for you.

The big weakness to this game is the diplomacy. You can (afaik) only be on War or Truce terms with any faction. There are no alliances. Factions will declare war on you, often in the beginning and shortly after as well as break truces, but usually once you get the ball rolling you can get enough prominence to just pay tributes to anyone you need to for peace and just focus on one enemy at a time. If you trash on a faction long enough though, making peace with them will cost a colossal amount every week, still this is what the game seems to amount to.

Overall, it's a fun game, but the diplomacy is a real killer for replayability, I'm almost done with a playthrough and can see myself doing one more in the future (aside from the one DLC), but after that I don't think it'd really ever interest me again. I hope whenever Hegemony IV is released that it has a much more dynamic diplomacy to it, because most everything else is pretty great.

Really a great game. A lot of people will give it a big knock for it's combat compared to later Witcher titles, but it's not all that bad when you consider that you're getting a very good story going along with it. The Sign magic in particular can get absurdly overpowered and laregely makes up for the lackluster melee-system about half way through the game. A lot of fun and about twice the content hour-wise as it's next sequal.