Recent reviews by Chet_Awesomelad

Good game.

There's an issue with the audio in this game. Even with the Speech volume slider set to 1%, some speech plays at 100% volume. At other times, even with the Speech volume set to 100%, some speech plays so quietly that the music drowns it out.

Honestly, the game seems like a fun game with an interesting storyline, but I can't stand playing when half the time the characters are delivering dialogue I can't hear them, and the other half of the time I'm getting my eardrums blasted.

Play the role of a secret agent fighting multiple enemies at once, using a customised deck of cards that represent your moves and attacks. You take turns drawing a hand of cards and using them to deal damage or move around the combat area, all while managing your health, momentum (used to play cards, like action points), and combo (which increases when you deal damage, and can be spent to play extra powerful cards).

The enemies are predictable - you're told exactly where they'll attack and how much damage they'll deal - so it's up to you to choose the best cards from your randomly-drawn hand to either block or evade enemy attacks, and to dish out damage. Watch out though, as some enemies will counter your attacks or will deal damage if you step directly in front of them. The enemy attacks are locked in once they have you in their sights - you can trick an enemy into committing to an attack, and then move away so that they hit their ally who was behind you.

Use the environment to your advantage: push enemies off buildings to instantly take them out, knock an enemy into an obstacle for extra damage, or spring off a wall and deal a devastating flying punch attack. Finding the perfect way to manipulate an enemy into a vulnerable spot and then unleashing a powerful attack to knock them out is really satisfying.

Pick your path through the enemy compound: initiating fights, getting upgrades, buying new cards, and making choices along the way. You can pick the harder route for extra rewards, or take it easy until you reach a hospital to recover your health. Planning is essential when it comes to managing your health and your money.

The game is randomised so that it essentially has infinite replayability - each round you'll find different cards, different upgrades, different enemies, different random encounters, different path layouts, etc. There are also several starting decks, which make every new game feel different. The enemies get harder as you advance through the game, and there are boss enemies which have unique abilities at the end of each enemy compound.

This is a great game to play while you're watching a YouTube video, watching Netflix, or chatting online to your friends - it's turn-based so you can take your time selecting your moves and you can pause whenever you want. It also saves your run if you quit the game, so you can always pick off where you left it last time. If things start to go south and you die, you can jump right back into a new round.

If you like Slay The Spire, Into The Breach, Monster Train, or other turn-based deckbuilding games, then I'm sure you will enjoy this game. It's basically the same concept except with sweet martial arts moves!

This game is v v good.

Really fun game! Satisfying combat, really fun ODM movement, cool upgrades to your character, and conversation moments with different characters that allow you to draw on your knowledge of the show, Don't play if you haven't seen Season 1 and Season 2 of the show, as it contains spoilers and does not cover all the events and conversations from the show so it can be confusing.

Tried to play this for the first time in several months, since it just received a big update. Changed the resolution in the game menu and now whenever I launch the game an error pops up saying it can't allocate textures. Great ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game, guys.

The basic gameplay loop is essentially the same as Mount & Blade Warband, except Bannerlord also comes with vastly improved visuals, animations, sound, music, UI design, quest design, campaign AI and a new recruitment system. Many of these changes improve the quality of life significantly, making it easier to get to the fun stuff.

The devs have also been pumping out updates with bug fixes and balance changes. I expect this game to be improved even more as the devs continue to release new content and improvements.

Not impressed with the half an hour that I played. I like the original Gothic games and this is NOT a remake, it's a complete reimagining. The developers have changed a lot and so far none of the changes have improved this demo over the original game. Here are my thoughts:

- The overarching plot has been kept the same but the characters, the story and the world have been redesigned. The introduction has been completely reworked. I expected the world would be made to match the layout of the original game, but it's totally different. I got lost several times, whereas that was not an issue in the original game.

- You can't use the mouse cursor in the menus or while selecting dialogue options, the game has clearly been designed to be played with a controller. Navigating the menus while only using WASD is clunky as hell, especially when there are several tabs to click through and a large number of items to select. I'd much rather just be able to use the mouse.

- The game is riddled with unskippable cutscenes. In the first half an hour there are like 20 minutes of cutscenes. The cutscenes are too long and the story is filled with B-movie action and writing. The voice acting is not particularly good.

- The protagonist narrates every one of his actions in the opening scene, even though he's alone. It's really weird and uncomfortable to listen to. In the original he is more of a blank slate but in this demo he's a scaredy cat who mutters to himself.

- The combat system in the original Gothic isn't good, but this combat system is just as clunky. The combat system in this demo is similar to For Honor with multiple blocking/attacking directions, which is great for one-on-one fights but in the first fight you take on multiple enemies and it quickly becomes annoying to deal with. I'd much rather a regular third-person action RPG fighting system.

- The lighting is awful, it's too bright and saturated during the day and then it's pitch black at night. I had to fight some enemies at night and my character put away his torch, so the screen was literally entirely black except for the UI, it was ridiculous. Torches should cast a larger light too.

- The menu options for graphics are very limited, for example there's only a generic "Post Processing" option so if you want any post processing effects you also have to put up with frankly horrendous camera blur and chromatic aberration. I'm not playing this game at 30 fps, I don't need camera motion blur. Let us adjust individual options!

- The game doesn't teach you combat or other mechanics in a natural way, it just pauses the game in the middle of the action to basically show you a five slide long PowerPoint presentation explaining how the game works. I can't think of a worse way to teach mechanics, it's really jarring.

- There are obnoxious markers and highlights on top of all collectible items that can be seen from metres away and can even be seen THROUGH WALLS, so the UI just gets cluttered with these markers and highlights that tell you exactly where to go and what to interact with, instead of getting to discover things yourself.

- A minor annoyance, but in order to vault up ledges you need to stop under the ledge and then hit Space - if you hit Space on the approach then your character just jumps towards the ledge and doesn't climb it. It makes exploration particularly stilted and annoying.

- Finally, the game locked up when I opened the quick menu and tried to equip a torch. It wouldn't let me close the quick menu or open the game menu so I had to Alt+F4. What a terrible ending to a terrible experience.

Honestly feels like a downgrade from Rise of the Tomb Raider.

Visuals: The ray traced lighting technology is woefully underutilised. The shadows look grey and flat, everything looks washed out. Lara' hair looks like flat plastic and doesn't interact properly with the lighting. The levels look beautiful from a technical standpoint, but the characters all look worse than in Rise. It's like the fidelity has been increased but the actual design is worse.

Gameplay: The level design for the first area is a major step backwards. Rise had open areas with multiple pathways and different approaches. The first two hours of Shadow has one small area to explore and the rest is just linear and filled with cinematics. Apart from that the gameplay is exactly the same as Rise. I grew tired of walking through linear corridors and having no opportunities to explore.

Story: So far the story has been convoluted and boring. I just want to get to the part of the game where I get to explore, solve puzzles, and fight some enemies. Instead about 80% of the first two hours is cinematics and boring linear sections that require you to follow someone around or walk through corridors. The game finally opened up only to almost immediately take that freedom away and force me back into a linear corridor that led to a frustrating boss fight. The game doesn't seem to understand that there needs to be ebb and flow, instead it just forces the story down your throat for way too long without giving you any fun stuff between. Also, the fighting animations in this game make Lara Croft looks like an absolute psycho - it's difficult to connect and empathise with the protagonist when she's stabbing dudes in the throat with a knife.

Bugs: I encountered a number of minor issues that caused frustration - trying to skin an animal or collect a resource requires you to stand in one particular spot, you can't just approach the resource from any angle; jumping and climbing were wonky as hell and often required me to walk until I was standing directly in front of the climbable area facing it dead on, otherwise the climbing animation wouldn't play; combat is clunky.

Cinematics: If you thought the cinematics in Rise were melodramatic and unnecessarily long, then you're in for a wild ride because the cinematics in Shadow are frankly ridiculous. Awful overacting, exposition dumps for days, and make sure you don't skip any of the cinematics because guaranteed you'll end up in some completely different area with totally different action and you'll have no idea what is happening. The game also ignores gameplay to serve up cinematics, like even if you stealth past all the enemies the game will still play a cinematic saying they detected you and then causes all enemies to go into alert mode and start attacking you.

Overall I wouldn't recommend this game. Rise of the Tomb Raider has better gameplay, better story, and looks only slightly worse because it was released a few years ago.

- The Last of Us-style high-quality cutscenes and mocap acting.
- KoTOR-style exploration across multiple planets, each with their own theme and design.
- Metroid-style level design, with lots of branching paths and hidden secrets.
- Sekiro-style combat, with parrying and stamina/health system.

This game borrows from a lot of other games, and it's a very solid all-rounder with some challenging combat, puzzles, and platforming. The force powers are integrated well into both platforming/puzzle-solving and combat. You can unlock new Jedi moves by levelling up, and you can upgrade your droid by finding workstations on each world. You can also find tons of customisations for your Jedi, droid, ship, and lightsaber.

I would recommend turning the difficulty up because the default difficulty is rather easy, and when the difficulty is up you will need to think more about your approach to combat - time your attacks, dodge incoming attacks, conserve force points, etc.