This is a game I've been waiting to play for quite sometime, however, I never actually got the chance to until recently when I decided to throw out the whole "I want to stream only old games" which has become a new set-up as I now stream a much larger variety of games weekly! But I'm getting off track.

Ori became popular not only because of the cute main character, but how beautifully animated it is and how it carries a deep, yet simple narrative by having no actual words being spoken and any dialog is fairly light. As with all metroidvania games, you will have to retrace your steps, however, unlike the games that name-sake is from the locations are unique and well-crafted enough that you don't feel like you're re-tracing the same damn corridor for the fifth time in a row. Hell, in some cases I've gotten lost because I was paying so much attention to the background and not where I should be going on the map.

I highly recommend it for any fan of Platformers/Metroidvania games.

My stream if interested in my genuine first-time experience of the game

Republique is a game with very strong politics as it's central theme. The name should make is fairly obvious that this is the case, but regardless, the main story revolves around 390-H, or Hope as she calls herself. The story starts where she is being harassed by guards for having a "poisoned manifesto" and then take her away to a holding cell for "Recalibration" and since this doesn't sound good we, in the mobile, use our abilities to hack into security cameras and free head, leading her on a adventure to escape this dystophian hell-hole. For actual gameplay, please look at my video stream of this game:

Part one of my stream

You can scan all kinds of items to learn information about this place and it's inhabitants. You can get hope to pick-pocket Prizrak to get a floppy disk with a image of a indie game and review from the guy, Cooper, who is helping you out. He talks about all the fun different indie games, giving you mini-reviews inside this game of games you should certainly check out! Then there's the banned books you collect which give you a real idea of the kind of world that this "Headmaster" wants to build, becoming more and more radical as it becomes more obvious that his idea of a "Utopia" is where he rules over all information from the entire world and should be trusted with it. No opinions that he might be dangerous or if he dies someone evil might take over. Just that his way is right and everyone else's way is deeply flawed!

It has a interesting twist right near the end and a fairly sad ending too! Well worth checking out, along with the books that the headmaster hates too.

I just got around to posting up all the clips and streams I did of this and I really enjoyed it. The patch I found online to update it's visuals made this a lot more fun, especially as the old scaling for it is far smaller than more modern monitors.

My First Stream

We begin by learning about Garret's history and how he gained his legendarily stealthy skills. As a homeless child he saw a man that no one else appeared to notice and attempted to pinch his pocket, but the man caught him and stated how impressed that he was that this boy could see a seeker, especially one who is trying to remain unseen. He didn't know what this meant and begged to be let go, but was offered a chance to gain better skills by working with the keepers. They gave him board, educated him and gave him the teachings needed for one to avoid detection by hiding in the shadows and using weapons to distract and deceive.

Starting out, you are a lone thief who is using his skills to not only pay for a roof over his head, but to live comfortably. Sadly, thievery is never looked up as honest work and the holy order of the Hammerites cause a constant pain in your side. Not only that, but you are not the only thief in the city with both tyrannical lords, two-faced guilds and monstrous creatures getting in your way!

Unknown to Garret though, the keepers knew this would happen and continue to observe him as he goes on a journey that will soon make him a secret Savior of mankind.

The above are spoiler-free bits of the story I can give. This is an amazing game with a really fun system with the stealth. Even though I usually dislike this genre, however the saving system in this game along with the story had me hooked. Plus I have quite the klepto behaviour in games like any RPG where you can collect all kinds of items. Regardless of if they're weapons, items or completely miscellaneous stuff that you will never have a use for! So this game was surprisingly addicting, especially as not all treasure is out in the open and often hiding in plain-sight, behind a secret wall, in a chest or hanging from someone's waist.

I also enjoyed the system in regards to what material you walk across that might alert people to your presence or that you're attempting to sneak up on them, making you think carefully about how you should approach a certain situation to try and make a silent knockout with your blackjack.

The many tools and gadgets all have some great use as you unlock them. Lockpicks is obvious, but I also like how you change between the two different shapes, adding a more interesting and realistic puzzle element to lockpicking the Bethesda's sorry excuse. The water crystal arrows put out fires to make the area darker, allowing you to sneak more easily, moss covers the ground with a moss that makes your footprints silent, fire arrows cause a lot of damage, fly straight, but also illuminate where you are. Beyond that I'll leave it up to you to discover the many varied items and their uses. This game was more than worth it and I'm looking forward to when we enter "The Metal Age" in Thief 2!

I had this game in my library for a long time and finally got to stream all of it! It took quite some time though, as RPGs usually do. One warning going forward, however, you need to look up some ways to modify the code and some mods to improve it's appearance. Here's a fix I found, thanks to the wonderful community on steam

So this game was a pain in the ass to get up to run and had to instead load directly from the .exe. This is sadly something common with a lot of older games. Especially ones that were on the xbox too. Regardless, my points aside, here's my first experience whilst I was streaming it as a little preview of it

That aside, I'll continue with my written review:

Jade Empire is set in a fictional far-east location ruled and known as the Jade Empire. You can choose your abilities or go with a pre-set character, much like Bioware's Mass Effect series. Three types of focuses, one of each gender. One is Body where you're high in health and physical strength, One of Spirit which is focused on magic power and powerful with the movesets that require a lot of magic like transforming into a demon and Mind which specialises in weapons, but also gives you the ability to slow down time for both trap-dodging and combat.

You start out as a student at a martial arts school, often seen as the teacher's favourite much to the ire some students. After a bit of sparring you meet up with a childhood friend to hang out a little, learning about the stories of ghosts and the dead not resting, though many don't believe in this kind of thing. That said your friend, Dawnstar, has the ability to sense spirits. However, after some exploring you are attacked by bandits!

After you make your way through the mods of bandits and come to their leader, he summons ghosts who you manage to punch and disrupt. Seeing this, he freaks out until your master arrives and destroys the boat in a single move! Afterwards he warns you that there is stuff to talk to you about your true origin and where you came from along with your unique abilities.

Got around to streaming and playing this and I wasn't entirely certain what to expect with this game, but I'll try my best to be fair both considering the time it was made, but also by certain modern standards where applicable and fair.

Tex Murphy: Mean Streets is the first of the Tex Murphy series. The latest, being a kickstarted project named "Tesla Effect" that I know little about as I try to enter all these games without prior knowledge. That said, much of the prologue is contained in the instructions due to limitations at the time.

Like any mystery, this starts with a death, a PI and a young woman begging you to listen to her. The young woman's father was a scientist named Carl Linsky and he was found dead in the river after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. The police and Tex initially think suicide, however, she begs him that it can't be the case since Carl nearly drowned in that river and was terrified of going anywhere near it so him committing suicide there was extremely unusual. Armed with this knowledge, you get taken down a rabbit-hole of science experiments, a political party and a suspiciously high number of scientists committing suicide. I'll keep the rest a secret, but beyond the mystery of Carl Linsky's death, there's a lot of dark humour in this noir-style Sci-fi detective game and for a deeper look, here's my first part of the game

Continuing on however, I do have a few issues, but also some praises. Now the "FMV" factor of this game is pretty light as it's about as much motion as the infamous "Plumbers don't wear ties", but where that game failed to do anything competently, this game excelled in many of those areas. The mystery has you hooked, your contacts are semi-animated on your video phone and you have a large variety of things to talk to people about that the instruction booklet even recommends to you. Beyond that, the mystery unfolds organically and for entertainment value when investigating you have the typical options for a early point-and-click game "look, move, take, use, on/off" but you have "taste" as an option too, leaving to some hilarious dialog which either makes Tex seem crazy or the computer just starts calling you a stupid. You also get some other fun bits of dialog like when tasting a painting Tex says "Art is a matter of taste, right?" and many other similar bad jokes. You can also get electrocuted from licking light switches which I do not recommend anyone do.

I was surprised that there are a number of shooting segments in this game. 3rd-person 2D side-scrolling shooting which was quite fun, but kind of annoying as it seemed there was a never-ending supply of enemies in every location and they were all the same with the same weapons, but you had cover and they never fire down to moving through gunfire is actually fairly easy and fun.

To cover the negative, the issues I have are the usual ones seen in many point-and-click games where at times it isn't too obvious where you need to go or what clue you may not have picked up on, but that's a minor thing. The other though, which is pretty big, is the flying. Now I am sooooo damn glad that they have it where you have a autopilot to take you to a destination, however, it isn't perfect and every location you have to fly to in real time which really drags the game down and meant I had to cut off large segments of my stream because of how all you're seeing is that you pass vague shapes. You also have the sound of the engine (which you can disable) but there isn't much else and extra long trips, especially when you aren't certain where to go, can be draining, but that's about it for negativity imo.

This is a world where apparently nuclear war happened, mutants and heavily armed fascists are on the streets and most surprising yet! Michael J. Fox is president!

9/10 I licked a light switch and it's taste was shocking.

I was gifted this by a streaming friend who wanted to try this out on stream with a few friends to help him out so I did receive it free, purely in the form of a gift and not as some-kind of sponsorship by the developers. That said, I will be honest about this game and what it has for any curious buyers out there.

At first I wasn't certain what to think about this game as it looks like your generic dungeon crawler with similar generic characters, but how they control is quite different. My friends had played The Barbarian, Elf and Necromancer. The last one being, in my opinion way too expensive for simply an additional character.

We had a lot of fun figuring out the controls as we were using voice chat in discord and the character's sarcastic and dismissive comments were hilarious. Your characters can heal up by eating food, but if someone destroys it often either the one who brought you here, Morak, says something sarcastic or one of the characters do. Along the lines of "The warrior destroyed the food. I'm sure he had his reasons." and other slightly personalised ones based on the characters.

Playing as the wizard was, as you can imagine, more complicated than it appears. The buttons on the controller corresponded to an element (You start with three. Fire, Ice, Lightning) that you combine to make certain spell effects. For example, ice and fire creates a ball of ice projectile that chills an areas, slowing creatures down, ice and lightning creates a short blast of ice, fire and ice creates a ball of fire you can lob as a bomb, fire and lightning lets you turn into twin-balls of flame that shoot forward through enemies. As you gain gold you can buy more spellbooks to replace one of the elements, but only one, with something like hellfire or void magic. These create their own effects for interesting combos that can create all kinds of secondary of DoT effects.

Back to the gameplay...you soon find yourself disliking your friends if you take this game too seriously because gold isn't shared between the party. The one with the most gold is usually the one that runs headfirst into the piles of coins that they can see so if you and your friends are a bit too serious, this game might infuriate you at times. Especially if you have the one friend who nabs all the gold.

Personally we were just having fun and the items that you can buy often don't really give you enhancements, but rather, alternatives to the abilities you have or numerous different cosmetics to your character to make them look kinda cool or badass. Whatever you like! So hoarding the gold doesn't really hinder the other players too much, unless there's an ability that they want that aids their playstyle and the one who ends the game with the most gold is always called out by the game as "The Greediest Player" so there's that too.

The combat is like that of a twin-stick shooter with most enemies who are fairly one-dimensional enemies until you get much deeper. Where first you encounter bosses that are essentially much larger mobs with devastating attacks, then you get to the shard guardians as you are meant to retrieve the three shards for this mysterous deity-like character, Morak.

The first shard guardian was hard, but fun! It was immortal until you work as a team to activate a switch that exposes it's weak point.

The second shard guardian was a absolute disappointment. It was just a very large mob with nothing else really going for.

The third and final boss was just aggrevating! Without spoilers, it summoned endless minions from various floors of the dungeon (more powerful the weaker they got), then you had to attack them, however, they create multiple copies so you have to guess and find the right one. Not to mention as it gets weaker, the sword decides now would be a good time to start randomly attacking you, often killing players with one-hit KOs!

Every class has a selection of personal achievements that add to their gold pile and this dungeon can be re-done multiple times, but for essentially the exact same story so I didn't feel much of a reason to return to this after our streaming had ended.

Sad to see that this game went this way. The old one was such a classic and a interesting change to the usual tower-defence game, however, the sequel takes everything and instead tries to turn it into a sad, money pinching attempt of a game. The story is pretty non-existent, the idea of switching heroes could be cool, but kinda ruins the point of having friends then you've got the god-awful gamepad layout! The buttons were totally unintuitive and it just felt WRONG. Not to mention the dreadful and terrible microtransactions in the game.

Attempting to form a team when you are first starting the game together as you all need to finish the first couple of tutorial missions, including looking at the map, before being allowed to join. It was a real pain to mess with this, however, it is free so I leave it up to you to decide what you feel about this game.

Stream

This was another game that, when entering, I had no actual opinions of it, however I found myself really enjoying it and getting pulled into the adventure on stream!

Minor Point: Please download a patch to fix the game's resolution as, like many older games, the resolution wasn't designed for modern monitors since we had quite the technological revolution so you need this. Especially if you plan on streaming like I did, or you'll get a similar experience with what I did in my stream below. Link

Now to talk about the game itself. You play as Kate Walter, a young woman who works for a firm and is on her first case that takes her outside of the USA to get the official purchase documents signed by the last surviving owning family member. However, things go wrong from the get go. First of all, she's dead which will make signing any document difficult. Second, you need to know that you can use documents like items to see the man handling the account, but one final snag, and this is a big one, there is another heir! Because of this, the one handling the account cannot/will not sign the document so you must go looking for this missing heir.

As you can imagine, this is no easy task and you have to track down this missing heir whilst dealing with people who are being difficult, phone calls from loved ones, your boss and a awkward, but lovable Automaton! There are so many lovely designed scenes with breath-taking imagery that, to me, still looks good today, despite the massive leap in technology. The puzzles often involve Hans' fascinating and impressive clockwork mechanisms which can at times be a pain, but also it's quite fun to watch these things work and how when you solve the puzzle all the different cogs and gears line up perfectly! I can't wait to play the sequel and I highly recommend it to anyone who is a fan of point-and-click adventure games!

Stream + gameplay

Finally got around to reviewing this game, which I had a bunch of fun playing with a few friends of mine, killing monsters and doing missions. Though the game looks impressive and killing Scaven never gets old, there are some issues that make it difficult for me to recommend this game.

My stream for gameplay and how online works

The opening is very well made and the story gets you hooked instantly. The Scaven are now on the surface and taking the city by tearing apart everyone and everything that they come across! You choose one of a handful of heroes (Five. Mage, Dwarf, Warrior, Witch Hunter, Elf) to stand up against this horde and disrupt their advance, starting with the first mission where you have to set off a horn to inform the entire city of the attack.

Beyond this, the game operates much like Left4Dead where you are special Scaven types (Elites, Rat Catcher, Gas Rat, Ratling Gunner, Assassin and Rat Ogre) which often appear at random, usually to abduct one of your number or create confusion. They are all dangerous in their own ways and I'll list them, for fun, for your forewarned knowledge.

Elites: Improved version of the normal Scaven. These ones are bigger, have more armour and take a little more patience to take down than the typical normal Scaven.

Rat Catcher: They catch and drag you away from everyone else (like the Licker)

Gas Rat: They wear the clothing of a plague bearer and throw gas bombs at you. The gas itself slowly drains your health and clouds your vision.

Ratling Gunner: As you can guess from the name, this Scaven carries a Gattling Gun on it's back and unleashes hell on you the moment it opens fun! These are usually a pain in the ass to take out as they have better health like Elites.

Rat Ogre: Much like the Heavy from L4D, this can spawn randomly. You will hear it roar, the music changes and it comes out of the shadows, charging at full speed and shrugging off any attacks you throw at it.

Assassin Rat: This one acts very much like the Hunter from L4D. He sneaks around and makes certain to pounce someone, stabbing them repeatedly. He's got low health, but if not killed he'll disappear to come back with a fresh attempt.

As fun as the gameplay is, it's VERY stingy with loot-drops. For example, you only get the chance to get 1 item each, at the END of every mission (which can last anywhere from 10mins to 30mins, depending on how good you are and how large the mission is) so trying to get loot was a REAL pain in this game. Sadly you can't trade items either and although everyone gets 1 item, it's still VERY slow progression, especially considering you can get a duplicate of the weapon you have equipped. If you find dice in the game it can increase the chances of getting something better, but good luck with that!

Thankfully there is a mechanic to destroy these spare weapons for ores that can be used to alter, modify or create new weapons! Sadly, it doesn't give much so it isn't too great of a trade off and you have to EARN it. You need to be of a certain level before you can access the smithery for breaking stuff down and such. Same for other features I feel should've been available at level 1, like the ability to enhance your gear and to collect bounties off the bounty board (which often gives you the ore you'll want) so it is one hell of a grind, which is why it's difficult to recommend this. Oh, forgot to mention. If you fail the mission, you only get the XP for Scaven killed and such. No resources, loot or hidden items that you may have found in the mission, that move location upon subsequent visits.

What makes this all worse is, at the time, my PC had a sub-par cooling situation. Even after cleaning it out and everything, it continued to over-heat and this machine has handled Cyberpunk 2077 (at release), The Witcher 3, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Alien Isolation and more, yet this game still forced my PC to turn-off due to heating. Even as I upgraded my case and such it STILL over-heated.

Currently I bought a water-cooling system and as far as I can tell, this has been the only way to stop it getting too hot, however, I've not actually tested this so another warning is make sure you have a VERY cool set-up with plenty of airflow. Like any multiplayer, it's more fun with friends and if you have a group of friends, then go ahead as that can often defeat these flaws, however, if not then I struggle to really recommend this at all as the grind solo won't be very fun. Especially with how the difficulty appears to spike up with the more players in your team.

Breakdown:

Pros:

Easy to join a game

Very nice graphics

Missions are often varied

The character's dialog between each other is quite funny as they dislike one another, throwing snide comments.

Using a bomb to clear Scaven never gets old

Cons:

EXTREMELY slow loot progression

A Stupid Difficulty Spike, based on players, not loot or levels

Features that improve the game are level-locked

Long missions, which wouldn't be so bad if not for everything above

Confirmed that this game runs hot on most rigs. Be certain to have your case extremely cold!*

This game was picked for me and my friends to stream on a weekend and though it was a lot of fun and showed some great promise, there. The game has a passive-collection system in the form of the adorable creatures called "Drakes" who are sadly not decended from Dragons, but that doesn't matter as these little adorable things do a lot of the building everywhere in camp, but you need to craft the amulets yourself for travel between the corruption to each island.

Monsters will routinely attack the island and there's so much stuff you can smash apart, collect and such to make back home. Not to mention, if you keep the Drakes well fed, not only will they gather stuff for you, but they'll continue to work and be happy! They also have the chance of finding objects you might find useful, dumping them in the mail box for you to get later.

Though we didn't get far, the story certainly had me intrigued. You play as this kid (I assume teenager?) who is on the outskirts of their city, looking back at it and their mobile, having a message from a love interest that says "I think we should see other people" which was an immediate Oof, but we ended up following a magical raven that brings us into the world of the Drake! You are given the task to not only be the guardian of the Drakes, but to also clean up and destroy the corruption that infests this whole world!

Now for the technical standpoint:

Graphically it has this cute cartoon look that I love and first time seeing a Drake I was just in love with the adorable thing! Oh, forgot to mention they even get you gifts too! Anyway...I found that the game didn't hamper my CPU like previous games I've played for our Saturday game and it worked well with streaming. I don't remember encountering any graphical glitches either.

Controls were great, no major issues and buttons were in the appropriate places. It just feels natural to play with a controller which I only do for certain games, usually 3rd person games. I also use a 3rd party controller so if it picked up mine without any issue, it'll certainly be compatible with whatever you have!

Multiplayer has one or two issues. When we played it, you weren't allowed to co-op until you completed the tutorial, which is fair enough I guess as the story is highly focused on your journey and it'd be weird if one teenager turned into multiple! We had to look up online how to join as it was never explained straight away, but apparently it's after the tutorial finishes, which is after you activate the Lighthouse. This was a pain as the three of us had to play the game singleplayer for a while before we could finally link up!

That said, we were having a lot of fun, but what ended it was when the game crashed. Crashes are not a major deal breaker, especially as after the entire hour it only happened once, but we lost ALL our progress. At first we were confused, wondering why it wasn't auto-saving, but it appears that, again, at the time, it was bugged and you had to make certain that you save because the auto-save was a little tempermental. So we lost all our story progress, all our weapons, buildings and so on, but when exiting I noticed that my character and her level was still there!

Stream of Part 1, hopefully more in the future

This review will be quite biased due to loving this game as a child-hood favourite of mine from back on the PS1! It's always a delight to see a game that you loved get updated, but you must be asking exactly how "updated" can it be.

My stream of the game

Visually, there isn't much that can be done for the character models, being 2D, much like the pre-rendered images in FF9, but reversed. Instead of seeing smooth characters walking around a blocking image, it's 2D characters with imperfect animation walking around a smoother 3D environment. This isn't as bad and it even enables you to notice things in the environment that you may not have before back on the old SRT TV when sat down on the floor after a hard day of going to school, getting bullied and now time to escape!

Anyway, for those who are already fans, this is a easy pick. The inclusion of achievements enhances the game as it pointed out locations and things that I had never done before. There are also no major game-breaking bugs or issues that you generally see when the remake is half-assed as I have experienced with certain FF games that get upscaled.

The music comes out a lot more crip too, so again, if you're already a fan, go ahead and join on the adventure again!


For those who have never played this game:

Story:
Grandia is a JRPG where you play as Justin, a boy who wishes to become an adventurer like his father before him and his before him. The game starts with cryptic images of an ancient civilisation and voiced lines from the general of the Garlyle Forces (The Military) General Baal, as he wakes up from his dream and discusses vaugly their mission with his son Colonel Mullen and Lieutenant Leen.

We get to view out the window to the nearby town of Parm where we play as Justin who is proving his worth to the bullies in that he'll discover hidden items to prove he'll be a real adventurer one day! The real adventure begins not too long later when you get investigating ancient ruins that the army just so happen to be investigating.

Gameplay:
Combat is done in a turn-based style, somewhat familiar to the ATB system in FF7, however, when one of your character's turn is ready, combat is paused so you can take your time to choose between combo, critical, magic&moves, Tactics, Defend, Item and Escape.

A concept I love in this game and have not seen in others (besides it's sequel) is that even though it's turn-based, the map is fairly open where characters need to move next to each other to attack, allowing certain bosses to have abilities that draw people close to them for a limited AoE attack that can be extremely brutal. This allows you to put your more magic-focused characters to stay out of close combat and time to intercept them as the enemy has to walk to them.

Combo is a basic attack where you swing twice (or more if equipped with a certain item) and dealing basic damage. You run up to the enemy and swing away.

Critical is where you take a moment to make one big swing. This is a single hit with more damage than a single swing, however, it is able to cancel out a enemy's action if they're in the process or charging up a powerful move or spell.

Magic & Movies: Self explanitory. You gain moves based on your weapons and your skill with each one, same with magic. It's not always obvious how big an area of effect might be, so be certain to note it down in your head, but most fall into the category of either "single Target" or "All ..." so you shouldn't get too lost with this.

Tactics: For those who want to let the AI do battles for you. Good for grinding, but I never used this myself so I can't comment on how good it is in any aspect.

Defend: You can choose between either putting up a strong defence, often making most attacks do minimal or no damage or Evade where you can run to a different spot across the free-form map that you fight on.

Item: Easy to understand. Pick an item to use like potions, food and even equip a different weapon. This is great if you want to level up multiple weapons or use certain weapons for certain enemies. i.e. Holy mace VS Ghosts

Escape: Another easy one. You attempt to run from battle, allowing you to abandon it, but the monster will still be on the map to face you if you wait around too long.

The leveling and magic system in this game really interested me and I've not seen much like it before apart from in certain really old-school RPGs. Leveling the character does the normal things, increased stats and amount of xp for the next level. However, you also have xp and levels in weapons and all four magic elements.

The weapons are often for moves, but can also be blended with magic to create some epic displays of power. Every weapon level comes with it certain stat increases, such as how I laughed at how powerful I made Sue because one of her main weapons (throw) gives you a bonus to strength with ever level and so I focused on that. Magic does the same so you'll often focus on earth and fire for your heavy hitters due to the stats that they improve.

Magic is must the same. The more you use it/more enemies you hit helps it level up quicker! Certain spells it can be VERY easy to level up, such as water which gives you all your healing spells, starting with heal. With the SP spare you can heal outside of combat and collect xp from doing so.

Just like with weapons, as you level them up you unlock new abilities, or in this case, spells. Not only that, but some spells require two seporate elements to be at a certain level and they give xp to both elements at the same time. Combinations like below:

Air + Fire = Lightning Magic.
Air + Water = Ice Magic.
Earth + Fire = Explosion Magic.
Earth + Water = Forest Magic

Each one having it's own unique spells that can't be obtained alone such as poison, magic block, move block and even buffs and healing. This certainly makes for a grind and because of how you only see a ????????? for every ability you don't have, it's exciting to find out what that spell is that requires such a high level of fire and only on Feena? The characters have access to unique spells too so you can't be certain what one person might have, however, the basic spells you get when you first get each element is always the same.

The fully-animated scenes of this game always blew me away and was why it was on two discs on the PS1 and for me the nostalgia was great as they are still well-crafted and beautifully animated, however, they aren't perfect. There's only so much up-scaling can do with old footage after-all, as demonstrated in this highlight of my stream of this game, around my Birthday and the only reason I streamed it: https://youtu.be/erQAR1XaJjk

I believe the game still performs well and you can find many endless hours of fun through the adventure! That said, I will once again admit that I am biased so this review isn't as free of it as most others that I write are.

Like numerous WB games, there's a LOT to be said about it. Not just from the content, but also the press surrounding it, how it went in heavily on microtransactions and even has a Orc Merchant character who smirks and cheers whenever you spend money to get random Orcs in these lootboxes.

This has been changed and gutted, but it's clear that this game was built with that in mind from the very beginning as all Orcs and Equipment have a rarity value that plays exactly like mobile games and MMOs (Commons, rares, epics, legendaries being the highest) making it a fact that cannot be ignored as it permeates every part of this game. That said, let's talk about the gameplay.

All I really have to say about storyline and gameplay is that if you enjoyed the first game, then you'll certainly enjoy this one. Especially in it's current state and not how it used to be prevalent with micro-transaction filth. Now it's a far better game, though flaws have been cleaned up too. However you also still have things like daily challenges and ect that remind you of it's failed attempt to be a full-priced game that was lousy with Micro-transactions.

The story essentially continuing the fight and battle from the first game, but then getting wiped out by the Dark Lord and having to start over. Interesting idea, however the only issue I have with this is you don't start with the ability to dominate Orcs and we all know that's one of the most fun bits of this game is dominating and controlling legions of Orcs. There's even a mechanic later of bringing them back from the dead to be zombies that are under your control!

With many side-missions to keep you entertained for hours, one of the things I hated using was the fighting pit. You have no control over your Orc as they fight a different orc and even if yours is a Legendary that you've leveled up, improved their abilities and more, they can still be defeated by a Common at half it's level making you curse the fighting pits and just getting on with the far more interesting side-missions like collecting artefacts, uncovering the past or finding Shelob's fragments that are scattered throughout the world and give you a look in her role for the rise of the dark lord.

Shelob has the ability to turn into a sexy woman, because, it's not like that's been done a billion times before! Though I admit she did have the voice of the very sexy Claudia Black so I also would like to give it a pass too. You get an ability to summon spiders if you find all of them, but it's a shame that the spiders come in only one size catagory and you can't, for example, have a Caragor-sized spider to charge around on, but that's a minor thing and it's especially fun when you're hunting a captain who is terrified of spiders so you immediately break him.

Without giving spoilers, the ending is certainly an interesting one and gives you a reason to come back and keep playing it and in a way that fits the narrative of the story, even giving you new powers and abilities to try out.

The game currently comes on sale quite often so if you're interested in more Shadow of Mordor, then certainly go ahead. If you want a fun action game then this is certainly fun and worth the price it often is on sale. Especially if you can get all the DLC to mess with extra characters and stories.

I can't believe I've not reviewed this...I think I was waiting to return to this game and get all the achievements. Something I only save for games that really inspire me to go 110% for them. I originally streamed this years ago and certainly didn't know what I was going to get with this!

First part of my stream

Now before continuing I'll get content warnings for this game out of the way for those that need them:
Sexual Abuse (referenced and suggestive imagery), gore (decapitations, blood, open wounds), body horror, Childhood Sexual Abuse (only written down and alluded to for first and DLC case) and that's all that comes to mind. I apologise if I missed any.

When I started this game up my assumption was that it would be a horror visual novel similar to others I had played in the past, being fairly typical and "middle of the road" in regards to horror (as there's only so much you can do with a VN, right?) however this would prove to be one of those that, like The Letter, has a lot of depth to it and can be really haunting. Even if you're the type not easily scared by horror or gore.

Unlike The Letter, this game doesn't have nearly as many branching paths, however, the choices in it were great and very fulfilling imo.

Story:
(It's been a while so bare with me...)
You play as someone who wakes up with amnesia and has a mysterious mark on your wrist. Soon you learn that it's a curse and when investigating a building that you feel a strange draw to and a clue about your curse you are greeted by a creepily human-like doll that's just sat there as if it were alive. The person you search for, turns out to be dead with flowers bursting from their stomach and before you can get any answers you meet a few strangers who were looking for the same person and needed help in their investigation of a haunted school.

The doll is actually alive and speaks to you about the curse, suggesting that they might be related somehow and you on on a adventure of tracking down these haunted locations and removing the spirits.

Gameplay:
As a VN you can imagine that there isn't too much here that you don't be expecting, that said, you are able to choose only one person to bring with you on these investigations and each one may give you a different insight or even have a skill to help with your investigation.

When you have a final showdown with the spirit, you have a selection of items to use that, when used, will create a different reaction and depending on what you do, you may either banish the spirit (effectively destroying the spirit and sending it to oblivion) or help them pass on (pacifying the spirit's rage, releasing everyone from it's curse and helping it pass to the other side) which in some cases were easy if you payed attention to who this ghost was, what happened in their life and, ultimately, how they became what they are now.

This adds more of a story aspect than real mechanical benefit from what I remember, but either ending is up to how you feel in regards to these lonely spirits who often ultimately died in a painful way that they didn't deserve. There are also timed sections where you need to make a choice or end up dead. A life-or-death situation where the wrong move can cost you your life which happens either due to the spirit finding you first before you are ready, a trap being set off or even attacked by a vicious/possessed animal. Again, the solutions are there if you look for them, however, not everyone will be able to identify them or even understand the order they need to be used in, but the save system is fairly generous so it isn't too bad. Again if memory serves.

The art is perfect in it's ability to portray images that evoke horror and fear. I wasn't too certain of it at the beginning, but I found myself really liking it. It's certainly not your typical brightly-coloured anime style and there is a lack of typical emotes like sweat drips and ect, however, this all just adds to the game. I don't think I could've taken these moments are seriously as I did when playing this if the art looked like, say, Hero Academia or Spy X Family. If anything, this is closer to Attack on Titan with it's use on dark colours that convey the seriousness of the series.

This is a really good horror VN that took me completely by surprise! I highly recommend it, but only if you can stomach through the content warnings mentioned earlier. They don't pull their punches in the topics of this game and it's all the more reason to play it!