Recent reviews by igyman

Unlike several RTS games that came in recent years that offered fun campaigns but lacked a good skirmish mode, this one seems to offer a complete package. Two campaigns with roughly 15 hours each and a solid skirmish with three AI difficulty levels and three possible victory conditions. And online multiplayer, if you're so inclined.

In terms of gameplay and atmosphere, Tempest Rising takes heavy inspiration from almost all Command & Conquer games. There are elements from the Tiberium series, elements from Red Alert and elements from Generals and the result is gloriously fun. When it comes to elements not seen in C&C, there is a sort of research tree for each playable faction, called Doctrines which lets you unlock various passive bonuses and upgrades. But, you cannot unlock the entire tree in a match, only about 50%, so you are encouraged to pick and choose the upgrades that suit your playstyle for a given faction.

Music is also on point with several tracks actually done by Frank Klepacki and the rest by other composers in that same style - in short the soundtrack is awesome and very reminiscent of C&C in its style, like most of the game.

So far the game looks polished to a T, no performance issues or bugs. As for any flaws, I'd say the skirmish AI may need a bit of tweaking. It may be cheating a bit too much even on Easy difficulty. It's still very much beatable, but when you see it constantly sending streams of troops against your one base AND managing to build a total of three Construction Yards with several surrounding buildings in different parts of the map, something starts to stink and you start wondering how insane will the Normal and Hard difficulty be in comparison.

With all of that, I would still easily recommend Tempest Rising to anyone looking for a good base-building RTS, especially if you are a C&C fan, like me. There's more than enough fun to be had in the various modes it offers.

I found out about this game by pure accident. I was looking for a good sci-fi game and ended up looking at some friends' wishlists, running into this hidden gem in one of them. Thanks to that, I ended up playing a really well written sci-fi drama.

As this is a narrative game, the gameplay involves running around and talking to various characters, with a very light puzzle sprinkled here and there. The story starts a bit slowly, but once it gets going, it holds you to the end (the real end, not the fake-out one), whichever end you end up choosing of the seven available ones.

Visually, it's a game that makes the best out of objectively simple environment and character models and still manages to give you a stylized and believable world and characters.
The voice acting and soundtrack are both very good and fit the mood of the story at all times.

All in all, the biggest flaw of this game is that I had to dig to find out it exists. What good are any of those youtubers and twitch streamers, if none of them actually bring any light to good games like this one.

Decent action RPG. Can it measure up to something like Baldur's Gate 3? Absolutely not! But it's still pretty fun, if much less replayable.

They finally made a fun traversal and combat system, but the writing and the branching storylines we had in previous games suffered. The main story is solid and any writing related to Solas and the DA lore is good and pretty interesting.
The companions and their story arcs, however, range from extremely cringe-inducing (Taash) to good potential but not fully realized (Bellara, Lucanis, Emmrich) to solid and pretty interesting (Harding, Davrin, Neve).
The non-companion sidequests are overall better compared to what was in DA Inquisition, but are all still completely linear with no branching options.
The music is OK, but not very memorable. The voice acting is overall pretty good.

Finally, the biggest praise here goes to the programmers and QA who delivered a well-optimized and polished game that looks good, runs smoothly and doesn't crash.

Pretty substantial demo, letting you play through what looks like the entire prologue and a bit more. Looks good and works pretty nicely, if you've updated your graphics drivers. In terms of issues, I've only noticed a strange localization issue with the keyboard key icons (e.g. it will say Strg instead of Ctrl, even though everything in-game is set to english).

V Rising mixes crafting with Diablo-like (Or Hades-like) combat. You are a vampire who woke up after a long slumber and decided to reconquer the land. Not much of a story beyond that premise and some text blurbs about certain locations and each boss.

The gamplay consists of hunting for resources to construct your castle and various crafting benches and the like within it, crafting gear for yourself and then using that gear to kill bosses. Each boss you defeat for the first time nets you an unlock (a new crafting recipe, or construction option) and a spellbook point which you use to unlock a new spell. Then the cycle starts anew - craft new gear, which is how you level up, and go kill the next batch of bosses to unlock new crafting options to be able to kill more bosses. There's also a day-night cycle and since you are a vampire, that means staying out of sunlight and using nighttime to hunt for your targets.

Even for someone like me, who doesn't really play games with a heavy emphasis on resource farming and crafting, this game was pretty fun - until somewhere mid-way through the final act. Then it became a souls-like. And let me tell you, it's no Elden Ring.

Still recommending it though, because it was predominantly fun and has a fairly realistic asking price.

The game has a very strong story, pretty good visuals, music and acting. The combat is decent, but could have been polished a bit in the design phase and some "fat" trimmed to make it smoother, especially the character switching mid-combat.
The map, despite the great visuals is too big for this game, giving me the feeling of spending too much time running around between points A and B compared to actually doing the excellent story-driven quests. This kills a lot of the replay value for me that the story aspect of the game clearly offers.

More importantly, the game is technically far from release-ready, with random crashes galore in my 60 hour playthrough. This is the main reason for the negative review, as I can't recommend the game even with all the good stuff in it due to how irritating and frequent the crashes are. The review will stay negative (because there's no "neutral" option on Steam) even if they end up fixing the game, because that's how bad the release version's stability is.

A phenomenal real-time tactics game, Shadow Gambit puts you in control of a colorful crew of undead pirates as you hunt for the treasure hidden by their very dead captain. It takes some small inspiration from Star Trek Away Team, as most missions let you put together your own three man team out of the crew members you have available at the time. While each crew member will fit into certain archetypes (e.g. infiltrator), no two crew members are the same and any team composition is viable.

Speaking of crew members - you unlock (revive) the roster at a steady pace as you complete missions and you do it in a non-linear fashion, meaning you choose which crew member you want to revive at any given opportunity out of the entire roster of eight (you will get them all by the end).

The mission/story flow is also less linear than a usual RTT game, as you will have several missions available at most times and you can complete them in any order you want (you still need to complete them all though). There's some optional content as well that you can progress through in-between missions, while you are on your ship.

The story will take somewhere between 30 and 40 hours to complete with at least 10 hours more for any leftover optional narrative content. The game is highly replayable, so you may even want to complete in-game badges (challenges) after all the story stuff is done and get that last unlockable secret.

Technically, the game is well polished and runs smooth as butter - no stability or performance issues of any kind. There's no online-only requirements, no live-service bs or anything like that, just a nice, polished single player game. Money well spent for any real-time tactics game fan. I cannot recommend it enough.

Solid platformer. Kind of like Ori and the Blind Forerst with a slightly darker vibe, somewhat higher difficulty and some boss fights. Be aware that the platforming has a significant difficulty spike in the second half of the game and since you die from one hit, frequent respawns and repetitions can lead to some frustration.

A wholesome, family-friendly game promoting traditional values through purging of all kinds of heretics and demons, most often by turning them into mush. 40000/10, would purge again!

Three crashes IN THE MAIN MENU while waiting for the shader cache to build. The third crash completely froze up my PC, forcing me to restart the system. Instant uninstall.