Recent reviews by Nals

Hey did you like Warcraft 3 back in the day?

Remember how Blizzard massacred it? This isn't that. This is them taking one of the all time RTS greats and treating it with total respect. The voice acting is great, the new art is perfect, the extra work done to the old cutscenes to make them better then ever.

I'll admit I have no idea how this thing handles competitively because I've never played it that way. But if you are like me and love those old RTS games with huge campaigns you should buy this one, because $30 is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ steal. 50ish odd campaign missions, all of them excellent quality, one of the longest and most fleshed out RTS campaigns that exist. Great story, great characters, great mission variety, it's got it all.

And this is only the beginning. They've got two expansions planned, and a roguelike coop mode to keep with the time for what actual RTS games seem to be doing well at.

If you were a Command and Conquer, Warcraft, or Starcraft person back in the day but never "got" Age of Empires, you should try this game. It's the best childhood memories for me, up there with stuff like Morrowind or Deus Ex og. There's a reason you see people pop off with PROSTAGMA? whenever it comes up, because it lives on in a lot of our hearts.

Damn good work to all involved. Y'all deserve a pat on the back and I hope sales match the level of quality you put into this.

Do not buy this game.

Months ago I would have recommended it wholeheartedly. Hell, I did to many of my friends. But that's because months ago this game seemed to have a future, and had everything it needed to play properly for most people.

Outside of the free weekends, the game struggles to hit 1k players total, which means you'll almost never find games. If you are just starting, you'll be forced to play with bots for the majority of your gametime, at least until you hit Champion where most of the players live. This can easily take 30+ hours. 30+ hours of ( bad ) bot games, just so you can grind up the gear to get to Champion. It's a miserable experience, and it's doubtful it'll ever be fixed.

Worse is the devs themselves. This game has potential sure, but the devs seem focused devotely on squandering all of it. They disappeared for 3-4 months when the game needed balancing most to work on a Xbox console port that's been left dead in the water. The balance patch they finally put out was anemic and not at all what the game needed, fixing a single weapon type, while nerfing several of the already weakest classes. They "balanced" more then half the roster out of the game, forcing players to play very specific class roles just to enjoy the experience.

They also let slip recently that they wanted to do paid cosmetics. After a large enough outrage ( because the game was in an utterly broken state, and they hadn't even begun talking about fixes by this point. ) they dropped that and said they'd NEVER! do paid cosmetics. It was a slip of the tongue, whoops!

Few months later you've got Shadows over Bogenhafen, which includes the only reliable way to get cosmetics, which is why they say it's priced at $10. Thanks devs. And this is sadly a common theme with these devs. They outright lie to their playerbase, then when they get called out on it, call the playerbase terrorists and thugs.

It's still buggy in ways no launched product should be buggy. The netcode is still awful. They are forced to constantly undersell the game just to keep the population up enough for the diehards to keep playing. It's in a bad state right now.

To the devs credit, they are promising that they want to fix all this, and intend to have a much faster/consistent patching schedule now. So maybe in 3-4 months this game will be something I can recommend again, and we can all be happy. But it's been 6-8 months of nothing but disappointment out of Fatshark, so I'm doubtful.

To give you an example here of what I mean by this mismanagement/company.

The game was very close to unplayable. Netcode issues, bugged patrols, silent specials ( think specials from L4D ), only 5% of the weapons/class skills actually worked. Huge bugs that'd stop progression on a level half the time. And they put out 1-2 patches, then said it was XBOX version time.

We all complained. Said maybe they should wait on the XBOX version so they could fix the PC version. One of the devs compared us to terrorists, and said obviously Fatshark wasn't putting everything on the XBOX version, we'd get our patch eventually. That we just didn't understand game dev, and it was insulting to Fatshark that we'd even insinuate something like that.

Literally the next day the CEO said everyone was working on the XBOX version, PC would have to wait. Followed by a different dev on their livestream saying all hands were on deck for the XBOX version.

Finally the XBOX version came out, and we asked where our patch was. They said we'd have to wait two more months, because the balance team had been working on the XBOX version, and now it was time for the entire offices vacation.

When we complained about how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid their priorities were ( I would hope they should recognize their entire office would be leaving for vacation right around the end of the XBOX launch, maybe they should have had the balance team.......go back to PC to get it fixed up. ) we got called out for being mean to Fatshark, why can't devs have vacations. I have zero problems with the devs getting 2 months off, I do have problems with the devs not putting anything into the PC for months before their vacation so we'd have to wait additional months just so they could ship out the XBOX version.

It's a mess.

What the ♥♥♥♥ is happening.

This is the sequel to Dear Esther, not the sequel to Amnesia.

It's not a scary game, the enemies are easy to avoid, the puzzles are simplistic, and the atmosphere is almost nonexistant. It's the story of a bad person wandering his house wondering what he did wrong in a similar style to Dear Esther.

If you liked Dear Esther, you will likely enjoy it. If you wanted Amnesia p2, this ain't it.

OUR WISDOM TASTES SO SWEET. TASTE AND SEE.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES. FOR THEY CORRUPT.

Yeah, so this game is a bit odd to recommend. It's an MMO, and people don't tend to think good things when they think MMO. But it's got an oddly satisfying single player storyline that touches almost every major and minor conspiracy mankind has come up with, and brings it to life.

As an MMO, it's kind of bad. But as a single player RPG? It's actually pretty damn fun, especially if you like seeing what humanity has come up with over the years.

Let's be honest here.

This isn't DMC5. But that game would never have been made anyway.

What it is is an easier, more accessible DMC game. Some parts of it are dumb, some parts of it are bad, and some parts of it are great, and ingenious.

If you have the rocks to give it a chance, and stop comparing it to what could have been, you might just be suprised by quite a few of the tricks DmC has. At the very least, the environments are something everyone should see at least once, and the combat, while much more basic then that of the previous entries, is still interesting enough that it'll keep you going to the end.

And if you are one of those unlucky people who could never get in to the old DMC games, someone who picked up DMC3 and got rocked by Cerberus, someone who couldn't even beat Dante in DMC4, and couldn't understand what others saw in DMC1, well, you'll probably enjoy this game quite a bit. It's more complex then most action games these days are, and has enough interesting ideas to make it worth it.

I originally refused to give this game the time of day. A friend convinced me otherwise, and I'm glad he did. This isn't the DMC5 I wanted, but it's a good step in the right direction from a studio who just started dabbling in the franchise. Even though I doubt it'll ever happen, I'm anxious to see what they could do going forward, if they manage to understand the mistakes they made.

I have Brutal Legend on my PC right now.

God is real.

I've never done coke, but I imagine this game is a pretty accurate representation about what it's like.

Let me put it this way.

This is a game about chicken GI Joe gaining a concience, finding bugs that allow him to control minds, and using them to overthrow Penguin Hitlers evil regime. He does this by joining the Budgie/Cardinal resistance, and jetpacking around in Contra Style levels.

It ends with you ascending a launched nuke, and learning that telepathic Space Owls are in fact the real threat.

This is all told through sick guitar riffs.

I can't think of a better game on Steam right now honestly. It's only about 4 hours long + another 2 for Co-Op, but it's totally worth it.

Complete Global Saturation.