Bleh. This is the most bleh crpg I've bothered to finish. Crazy production values it might have, but to what end?

The implementation of 5th edition here is slow and clunky, and incredibly unforgiving, even on the lowest difficulty. Sure, it's tactically interesting, but combat takes forever and is filled with tons of tiny little annoyances, and honestly far too swingy for a modern AAA game. Even Troika's Temple of Elemental Evil, which sports a very similar combat system (though it's 3.5 instead of 5) feels faster, though it suffers from many of the same issues regarding clunk. Even rolling skills in dialogue is slow as hell, even when you skip the main part of the animation it's just leagues slower than any other game I've played. The dice rolling animation is cute the first time but my god does it drag on the 500th time.

One thing ToEE didn't suffer from that this does, though, is camera issues! The camera's kinda goofy. When you zoom in, it tries to pull behind your character a bit (or just provide a cinematic viewpoint), but when you zoom out it angles flatter, to be a tactical camera. It only zooms out so far though, and just loves to get stuck on the multileveled terrain battlefields, which are a good idea in concept but really just feel annoying, partially because of this camera.

The world is beautifully realized, but feels a bit off, at least from my idea of the forgotten realms. It's been Larianized, I guess? No matter how serious things got, there was just this undercurrent of lightheartedness. Not as bad as their other games, but still not great. The maps don't really draw you in any direction, which made my pass through the underdark feel pretty aimless. It's got a bit of that quest-marker driven map design in it, I guess.

Finally, the story is interesting. Not as a narrative, it's pretty weak, but as an exercise in making a story that adapts to your players. That's the real strength here, right? The game lets you take many different paths through the story, and even story-critical moments are wildly variable. That's a lot of work to build, and it worked out, but not really to the benefit of the story. Player agency is crazy high, but as such the story feels meaningless, just a set of events you go through. The companion stories are a bit better, their issue is kind of a Marvelly quippy writing style (though again, less so than previous games of Larian's).

I've probably been a bit over-mean in this review, so lemme list some things I liked: Being able to go into turn based mode at any time, following multiple sidequest threads in Baldur's Gate (the city), the Gauntlet of Shar dungeon (minus the trials), most of the story beats around ketheric thorm. It's a well made game, it's just horribly uneven and imo hampered by some large issues

It just felt like an exercise in recreating the experience of playing 5e at the table, with a little bit less math and a story that, while free, still can't match the adaptability of a GM or something. It's a frustrating, often unbalanced game, and although it occasionally falls into stride (the city of baldur's gate was fun, though not really well split up) I finished the game glad it was over, with the feeling that nothing here really meant anything, no matter how pretty it looked or free it felt.

Just play fucking 5e

While it's not a bad game, it feels... ill conceived? It's definitely an adaptation of The Temple of Elemental Evil, the old D&D adventure, adapted for D&D 3.5. It really ends up feeling more like a dungeon crawling tactics game than a CRPG to me, and an unerringly difficult one at that. You could compare it to the Icewind Dale games, but those are fast and fluid and varied, mostly about the rush of combat. ToEE is slow and atmospheric, being about the dungeon crawl itself, but doesn't really recreate what's fun about doing a dungeon crawl in real life, the dynamism and flexibility of a human dungeon master's designs playing in a game that, no matter how harsh it can be, is forgiving (if you play with chill people).

Also, the game is real buggy. Or maybe just unclear about what's happening? I played with a community mod (temple+) and even then; characters stopped gaining xp randomly, turns would be lost out of the blue, the game would crash and I'd need to replay 15 minutes of rote traveling just to get back to town.

I wouldn't play this if you don't just absolutely adore D&D 3.5.

A more interesting game than you might think! Nothing groundbreaking, but solidly fun as an action game and as a dungeon exploration game. While the usual comparison is Diablo, for the isometric action rpg-ish style, but I feel the more obvious parallel is found in El Shaddai.

Two isometric hack & slash games with moveset switching and vivid color palettes? Not to mention both series are set in a kind of pop culturey Abrahamic mythology? I'm surprised I didn't see it more when researching the game honestly.

That's not to say there's no Diablo here. The levels are like individual floors from a Diablo dungeon, with a focus on exploration that El Shaddai doesn't broach at all. Somehow though, the levels seem to move past their inspirations and emerge as really wonderful little worlds, laid out in a kind of linear yet expansive (with a small bit of collectible hunting!) style that just lets the gameplay sing.

The story feels a little tired, literally being a series of like 13 fetch quests with the occasional boss battle, and that's like, in context, but I didn't find it to take much away from the game. The structure was nice, I guess. The writing is fairly cliched as well, very much drawing on the series' comic book inspirations, with a dash of MCU in Strife's dialogue, but it avoids the pitfalls those movies fall into so often by at least taking itself fairly seriously outside of that one character. Drama is never kneecapped by comedy, I guess. It works, it feels true, but it won't change your life.

But really I'm kinda surprised at how much fun I had with this game. The themeing and art design are fun backdrops for stellar, if not groundbreaking, combat and levels. If you're in the mood for a very Video Game video game, but wanna stay away from the poison in games as a service, I really highly recommend picking this one up. It's only 40 bucks full price too, which is a real boon.

Oh the switch version is a little unstable, if I left it on too long (like in sleep mode without closing the game) it would tend to crash, but otherwise felt and looked great (especially on that handheld OLED screen aha)

It's hard to talk about this game on it's own terms, because it's really easy to say "It's Diablo 1 x Runescape x Baldur's Gate", and because it really seems to be inspired by Diablo 1 and BG. The runescape comparison is mostly a tone thing, but if you've played the Divinity Original Sin games, that same tone is here (but it works better here, at least for me).

But yeah, it's a diablo-esque isometric ARPG, set in a nice sized open world with interesting, if simple, lore, and tons of colorful characters! Not many of them are incredibly memorable, being mostly vehicles for kinda 4th wall-ey jokes or otherwise absurd situations, but they're enjoyable and fit the light tone of the game well.

The only thing that got in the way of my enjoyment of the game was the boss design. I'm not saying diablo 1 & 2 had great boss design, but these bosses have a habit of just spamming huge aoe attacks that cause you to stun, unless you've put your levels into the right kind of defense (spells), which, being a sword man dude, I had not. I say play on easy if you're gonna focus on being martial. All the difficulties do is increase/decrease the amount of xp you get (so like, on easy you level up faster). That's a nice way to do it, except if you change your mind late in the game you basically can't change the difficulty, even though the option exists.

Basically if you like Diablo but wish it was a CRPG that made fun of you for being a Loot Head you'll like this. Also if you like rpg towns I think you'll find a lot to love here, the world isn't enormous, so it's pretty detailed and VERY loveable. The characters aren't crazy memorable, but the world is.

Diablo 3 is the hollowed out husk of everything interesting the first two games did. The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s heavy on WoW’s art style, which blizzard used on everything at the time. It’s fine here, but I’m not sure the cartooniness quite fits right. Then you get started playing, and you get a taste of the Dota-ey/MMO-ey skill system that’s in use. The loot’s the same way. Actually, at many points in the game, I felt like I was playing a Diablo event for WoW rather than a true blue Diablo game.

It’s funny, because it’s not like Diablo 2 is even that far off from this, but it’s solidly on the other side anyways. There’s a crunch, a crpg quality to it all. It’s not based around cooldowns and active ability combos, it’s scrappier. Less smoothly designed, I guess, but it’s way more engaging.

Again, the loot’s a similar story. Unless you’re at endgame, you can pretty much boil loot down to how many green arrows it has vs how many red ones. It’s less about each piece of gear and more about just getting new gear that does more damage or whatever. I mean Diablo 2’s materialism was never my favorite feature of it, but the personality and connection that system apparently engendered is wholly gone here.

I guess you could call the story more put together in 3? The first act (and the first half of the fifth act) builds the new conflict well, and has some interesting ideas, but every act afterwards gets further from them. Act 2’s fine but feels a bit thin. Act 3 is a retread of Act 5 from Diablo 2, but just more. And Act 4 just feels like a thematic betrayal. Act 5 is, like I alluded to earlier, better. It’s more like Act 1, but by the end it’s thin again. Certainly worth playing if you managed to get through Act 3.

Anyways, this is like Diablo themed jangling keys. They managed to strip the depth out of one of the (on the surface) most straightforward game loops ever, and in doing so just broke it. It’s technically not bad, like it’s a functional game with ideas, but it wasted my time for sure.

At it’s core, Diablo 2 feels like an attempt to just give people more Diablo 1. More dungeons, more quests, more locations, but still the same mouse driven hack and slash gameplay. That’s pretty standard for a sequel, I think, but what’s weird about Diablo 2 is how much it fits in with games released today. Basically, in addition to more of Diablo 1, they’ve also tried to heighten the experiences Diablo 1 gave.

For one, Loot is lootier, more disposable and more greed-inducing. Rather than a secondary thing in the first one, not all that different to how loot is handled in other RPGs of the time, loot is the primary driver besides quests here. There’s tons of little dungeons scattered throughout the game, each with a locked chest of randomized loot waiting at the end.

Multiplayer is also more competitive, with a ladder (at least in Resurrected, not sure about the original release), but also just feels more global. What comes out of this in particular isn’t a live service game, but you can feel what would become GaaS forming around you, like an addictive husk. In a way I think you can blame much of the issues the game industry faces today on Diablo 2, but I think you’d be overeager to do that. You can see where the shockwaves come from though, the focus on what Melos Han-Tani once called [“the treatmill”](https://melodicambient.neocities.org/posts/2020-12-20-Treatmills, or, Hades, Roguelites, and Gacha Games.html).

Honestly, beyond that, it’s a great 2001 PC dungeon crawler. I’m still not convinced by the mouse-driven controls (so much so that I got this on switch lol), but the art is gorgeous, the plot is interesting if a bit simple, and the whole experience is really like a roguelite with an enormous budget, and no permadeath lol. It’s got some bits that are beholden to the less desireable qualities of fantasy aesthetics of the time, particularly in the jungle and desert regions, but even those have enough wild successes to not call them anywhere close to a failure.

Basically, you should probably pirate this game.

I think most of us were wary in the leadup to FFXVI dropping. Personally, the stated influences (such as Game of Thrones and God of War 2017) didn’t seem like they’d make a great Final Fantasy game. I like GoT just fine, but it was literally a commentary on the heroic tropes that my favorite FF games embrace. And I just straight up don’t like God of War 2017 and TLOU and all the other games of that ilk, with their prestige walking tours and great looking-yet-poor feeling controls.

I’d even gotten a taste at what FF feels like when mixed with that, in FF7R, which I didn’t like for exactly those reasons. It flipped back and forth between big budget prestige and the worst kind of MMO sidequests, not even talking about how the combat felt like even basic enemies were tough as stone.

What I don’t get then, is why I like FFXVI, when it really feels so similar to 7R in so many ways, from the action combat to the MMO sidequests to the big prestige moments. I guess one thing that’s different is there’s less of the tech demo-ey “walk slowly behind a character while they exposit about the place you’re in so you get to know it better”. Honestly there’s none of that, which is great cuz that annoys me beyond belief. Also the combat’s got way more to it here, with more abilites and powers and a UI for selecting them that isn’t terrible. The sidequests are still mostly MMO fetch quests, but they’re given a fair bit of context in the writing and the way they link together from chapter to chapter.

None of this feels like enough to explain why I love this game so much though, while really not enjoying what might as well be it’s brother. Maybe it’s the lighting? There’s a wonderful almost painted soft quality to the way light scatters on skin here. It could be the fact that it’s not taking 10 hours of story and stretching them over 50 hours……………… actually that’s probably a big part. And what’s here is great stuff too! Sure it’s not exactly breaking new ground, either for FF or for medieval fantasy stories in general, but there’s a genuine sense of anarchy (of the organized striking against the powers that be variant) both to the characters and the way the world is built, tying obvious evils like slavery and war to more nebulous ones, like climate change.

In practice, the GoT influence ends after about 10 hours, and what replaces it is a nice semi-grounded fantasy story (which I think is where FFXII comparisons have been coming from, along with the way the world map is structured) with stakes that rise and rise until you’re basically 12 again, watching the gurren lagann movie in your mom’s house, letting talk about humanity’s innate will and imperfection comfort you and light a fire in your heart. I still don’t love the 2023 AAA-isms (quest markers and sidling through two very close together cliffs should both be made illegal), but they only just mar a game with a real genuine beating heart. Makes me wanna pick up FFXIV again too, to see if the expansions in that are this good too.

I've got a huge amount of love for simple, short dungeon crawlers. Ultima 1 (or, even more, Akalabeth) is kind of the ur-example here, being short, sweet, and filled with tiny little gameplay loops. Diablo honestly falls between Ultima 1 and Akalabeth in terms of narrative complexity, but is built way more out mechanically and, obviously since it's 15 years newer than ultima, is presentationally a bit more full. Still though, at it's core it's the same thing. Get a quest, explore the somewhat random dungeon, get gold, get better gear, dive back into the dungeon. The lore and story here are cool and imagination-provoking, the presentation is all super cool and very heavy metal atmosphere, but of course the real star is the dungeon and the kill-explore-loot loop. It's the perfect length, the perfect complexity, and the perfect amount of inscrutability. My only thing is I'm not fully into the mouse driven hack and slash thing, especially at such a low resolution. Just feels needlessly imprecise. Anyways definitely play it and probably don't buy it from blizzard if you can

Hyper Light Drifter is a pretty simple game, a 2d hack and slash with a liiiiittle bit of souls and a fair bit of zelda in it, and it's just gorgeous. Gorgeous and sad and hard, just like anything that takes influence from souls should be. The exploration is fantastic, the soundtrack is phenomenal, and the art is just jaw dropping. The combat's tight as fuck too. Maybe a little overtightened in places, where bosses can stunlock you to death from full health, and a tiny bit loose in others, but 95% of the time it's satisfying as hell. It's worth playing, even on an easier difficulty, just for that good good neon depression

This is the last mainline fallout game I hadn't beaten, and now I have. I'd put it off for so long mostly because of that Hbomberguy video, but also because I'd tried booting it up previously and had never gotten very far.

At first I was really pleasantly surprised, it was fun and kinda chill, all the new stuff in the first bit (from leaving the vault to getting to the citadel) was fun if a bit flawed. The biggest flaw was that dude who wants you to blow up megaton for no reason, but there's also just navigating DC being a bit of a nightmare, and the weird sickly green cast on everything.

Once bits from the older games start showing up though, man, why? Why is it like this? The brotherhood's depicted very strangely, in that they're like the enclave but not evil and not comically patriotic, but they don't feel anything like their depiction in the other games. The enclave feels true to form I guess, but the fact that they're even here feels like a misstep. Why is this game constructed out of fanservicey-references to the old Fallout games and modern DC landmarks but devoid of any commentary on politics and built in a way that cheapens everything they reference.

It's a fun enough sandbox I guess, though the map feels randomly scattered about with no flow to it. The story is bunk, the art style is marred by GREEN, and the tone is all off though. Honestly, just play new vegas. There's nothing here that makes 3 worth playing

For a while there I was really iffy on Prey. Sure it was an imsim that did everything right, but I just wasn't having much fun with it. I've warmed up to it now, after messing with some settings and turning the difficulty down, but I've still got some issues with it.

So, starting with the good, this really does feel a lot like system shock. Specifically the best parts of system shock 2, where you're hacking your way through a reclaimed station, reliving the lives that were lost before you got there. It's got the horror thing too. A different, more modern type of horror, but the lineage is there. Also, you can definitely feel Chris Avellone's hand in the writing, specifically when there's questions around identity and personality that I won't get into because honestly I thought they were the best part of the game. The other aspects of the plot, the bits dealing with morality in particular, work a bit less well, but still ask interesting enough questions. Beyond all that though, it really works just like System Shock.

Except, not quite. I think there's two ways it differs that kinda hamper the experience. First and more minor probably, it's objective marker-driven. I don't know why an imsim would be, but I tried playing with them turned off and it didn't seem particularly designed around it. Not enough signposting in places. Second and more major for me, especially before I turned the difficulty down: I really didn't click with the enemy design. The mimics are fine, but everything bigger either felt wildly spongy (compared to the amount of ammo you can obtain) or way too fast and long-ranged to take advantage of in that imsim kinda way. Even when I turned the difficulty down, they just became easier to deal with, not any more fun. And that sucks! Because a lot of this game has pretty mandatory combat!

Honestly I thought this was about as good as System Shock 1, which is really strange, because that game is a scattershot collection of ideas that would become the imsim genre, where Prey knows exactly what it wants to be, what kind of imsim and what kind of horror. Honestly I think part of it is just too much capitulating to modern game design values, both with the horror-enemy design and the objective structure. Only in the last hour did I really get to know the station as a place, and that's just because the objective markers glitched out on me occasionally, luckily never during a part that would've been impossible without them. It's a good game, but I don't think it's a great one

At first I was kinda disappointed by Boltgun. First of all, I had trouble running it on my laptop, so I got it on my switch instead. Don't do that! I got it to run fine by turning off all the post processing, but there were still parts that ran horribly and occasional glitchyness. Once I got it running though, I started feeling like chapter 1 (out of 3) was boring, in the same way Prodeus ended up for me. The themeing was great, but the guns were just fine (outside of the titular boltgun, which was awesome) and the levels were just a bit too tough to find my way around, especially considering the lack of an automap.

Then I got to chapter 2, and the Quakey-ness of things ratcheted WAY up, the levels had much clearer progressions, and the last four weapons got introduced, and WOW what a difference. All of a sudden I wasn't just stuck with the shotgun (not my fav shotgun in a boomer shooter) when my boltgun ran out of ammo! I was platforming and zooming around from key to door, circle strafing big ol Warhammer horrors with a revolver rocket launcher thing, and it suuuper clicked. When Ch3 started I was worried there'd be something to screw with the click, but instead it kinda just keeps the vibe from ch2 going, but ups the level concepts to a new level of clarity and interest! It's just a ton of fun.

If you're into warhammer and boomer shooters, even casually, I'd give this a shot. I'd even try to push through ch1 if you're not loving it. I would prooobably err on the lower side of difficulty, since it feels a bit highly tuned for my tastes, but regardless it's just good kinetic fun.