Recent reviews by HowDoUAim

A quick, yet entertaining ride through the tropes of popular RPGs from the 8-bit era all the way to modern Indie. The storyline is nothing special, yet manages to wrap up quite a few references and jokes along the way to keep your nostalgia going.

My first customer ever walked into my store, stole a health potion, called me a filthy peasant, then proceeded to walk casually out of the store. So I chased him down, stabbed him, then swept his corpse up. Upon returning to my shop, I noticed the "stolen" potion on the ground. The customer apparently wasn't happy with my price, and felt the need to throw my product on the floor. This cost him much more than the potion would have.

I dismissed this game for a long time, because of the voxel graphics. This game is actually pretty good though. There is a pretty heavy pay-to-win market in effect, but the game is 99% PvE, so it's not really pay-to-win. I say 99% because there is a PvE arena that has just released, but is still a beta build. However, every class is maxed out on level (as with most instanced MMO PvP) to even the playing field. The only advantage higher level players have are the rarer weapons/armors have better bonuses, if those even count in PvP (not 100% sure yet, not many people do arena so I've only played a couple matches). Also there is a player market where you can buy virtually anything that requires cash from other players, though some prices will be steep, as the sellers are usually trying to buy your in-game currencies by spending real money on items that can't be bought without cash.

This game is an MMORPG above all, and it does it well. It's definitely grindy, but the fighting is pretty fast-paced, making it more fun than tedious. Like Minecraft and most MMOs these days, you can craft a ton of items, and also customize your own little plot of land that can be uploaded into any available slot on randomly generated worlds. If you're looking to build bigger, you can create or join a club, and each club can create their own unique world. Also, you can unlock every class with in-game currency, and change on the fly without having to exit and reload the game. While the voxel graphics may be a turn-off for some players, this keeps the game's size small, making it a quick download that can run on almost any computer.

If you're looking for an MMO that offers fast-paced runs, and depth that is fairly simple to learn, yet will keep you addicted and coming back for more, this game is worth a play. Hell, even if fast-paced isn't your thing, you can just sit around, fish, and profit. Or craft items to sell on the market so you can buy some awesome mount/wings. Any approach is viable in this game, and it's all pretty fun.

After getting caught and sent to solitary twice for tunneling through the prison's ceilings, then floors, I took a much more straightforward approach: I pumped weights for a few days, crafted a prison shank, then beat the hell out of the guards until they just gave up and let me walk out the front door to freedom.

My original review was a thumbs down back in November 2015. The game was new and only had the base cards, lacked variety, and was generally boring because of this. A year later they've added five new sets of cards, and the game is definitely improved because of this.

The only major con I had that hasn't been fixed was that there's still no way for two people who randomly team up on Two-Headed Giant to communicate. This can be bad for the timing of who is going to use what spell, which can definitely help in certain situations.

All in all, it's improved over time with a lot of new cards to play with. And you can earn quite a few for free by playing Story Mode.

That's how I'd summarize The Guild II. It's part social/life simulator, part business simulator, RPG and strategy all mixed together to create one of the most unique games I've played. You create your family's first member, then from there, you must choose a career path. You then must go about managing your business, obtaining wealth, climbing the social ladder of your town, ensuring your bloodline continues after your inevitable death, and trying to become the most powerful family through whatever means you wish. One thing worth noting is that while I fully recommend controlling your own business 100%, if this isn't something that interests you, you can choose which aspects of your business you want the AI to manage (can be nice for those who hate micromanagement of inventory, production, employees, etc.) or have the AI manage it fully.

To expand on a few things mentioned, we'll begin with the jobs, which vary enough that certain careers can make the game play entirely differently from others. You can produce raw resources, such as wood/paper, metals, and ingredients to sell to the blacksmiths, alchemists, and priests. Or you can be the ones making armors, weapons, potions, and scrolls that sell quite well in the markets, but have the overhead cost of raw resources. Or you can be the ones using the weapons and armors to beat up opposing families who are either competing with you, or sending their cronies to attack your buildings simply because you looked at them wrong in the market yesterday. Or you can just go to the highways, and rob trading carts that are transferring valuable supplies between towns and businesses. Likewise, if you are a businessman, your own cart is subject to the risk of thievery, especially when travelling outside your city. Or you can be like me, and become a church priest, who can make documents that give social bonuses, and sell for quite a bit, in addition to being able to give sermons. With a high amount of speech, you can get a lot of money for just talking to your attendees about a magical man in the sky. Stupid blacksmith, having to buy metal and make items of value out of them, while I just prophet and profit. This is also one of the easiest ways to butt-kiss your way through the political ladder of your town.

Speaking of the political and social aspects, they are quite entertaining as well. If you're good at speaking, and have some charisma, you can try your luck at earning one of the town positions by manipulating votes and your fellow townspeople. Each town has a certain amount of positions available, each offering little perks and abilities to the holder, and the amount of positions is based on the size of the town. There is also a justice system in place, giving a legal alternative to murdering the thieves that keep robbing your carts, or that one family that keeps sending henchmen to attack your buildings. If you visually witness any crimes, you obtain evidence, which is all listed and can be viewed at any time. Evidence is rated on severity of crime, believability, and time elapsed since crime was committed. Believability is typically dependent on how you obtain the evidence. If you saw it with your own eyes, it's 100%. If you sent your henchman to town to investigate rumors, it's typically 50% or lower. Once you have a few severe crimes, or a lot of little ones on someone, you can probably get them the death penalty. But if you accuse someone, you are the prosecutor, so make sure you show up to the trial. If you're a criminal, or the thieves guild, it's in your best interest to make sure your prosecutors are unable to arrive to the trial by whatever means necessary.

Overall, this game's unique gameplay and combination of genres makes it worth a purchase. From what others have said, I'd advise looking into The Guild II: Renaissance over this particular version though. Each of the Guild II titles are stand-alone games, so you are not required to own this to play Renaissance. This game does have it's share of bugs, and I will list the ones I found below in the pros/cons:

Pros

• In addition to political and business aspects, this game is an RPG. Your family members have levels, stats, and perks that they can acquire every couple of levels.
  
  
• Various career paths give the game replayability. Some careers are unique in how you will play.
  
  
• Robust social system - each person is unique, and most are born instead of generated. The game keeps track of 100+ individual characters throughout multiple towns. Each person must marry and reproduce to continue their bloodlines, or become a footnote in the history books.
  
  
• This game is truly unique. Not only is it highly enjoyable, but there is no game that really comes close to this style. Sims Medieval attempted, but failed.

Cons

• Bugs/Glitches - While I have read other reviews with worse issues than I've had, I encountered one problematic issue. Rarely, when my rival families would send their cronies to attack my church, they would somehow spawn in the walls of my building. Guards would stack outside my church, along with my own henchmen I sent to defend it, unable to go into the walls to reach my aggressors. I almost lost a level 3 church, which costs a lot of gold, because the attackers were invincible. Luckily for me, they disappeared somehow before fully destroying it. But because the guards and myself were unable to stop them, I had a hefty repair bill that should have never happened.
  
  
• AI Pathing - While this is technically a bug too, it warrants it's own bullet-point. Several times I have accused an opponent of crimes, and set a court date. When the game informed me the trial was soon, I would click the accuser, right-click the town hall picture, and send him on his way. However a few times, he didn't make it, due to wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out a path to the same town hall he's been to before. This would result in not only my opponent being found innocent by default, but me getting a fine for wasting the court's time. I have also noticed that when anyone approaches the town hall from the side that has a tavern neighboring it, everyone will walk into the tavern first, then walk out and go into the town hall. Just make sure if you have somewhere important to be, you follow your character so he doesn't get lost. It's fairly rare, but annoying. Also, my children would sometimes be unable to attend school. After I paid for their schooling, they would cancel it because they are idiots who are unable to leave the house for some reason.

TL;DR - If clicker games are your thing, you'll enjoy this one. It has most of what made Clicker Heroes so great, with a little more strategy.

This game has everything that has made similar games of the genre so successful: heroes, skills, levels, addictiveness, and the never-ending loop of getting stronger, beating quests, and trying to overcome that next boss. But it takes it a step further with main quests. Before you begin the game, and each subsequent time you perform a world reset, you will have to choose a main quest before you start. A main quest is an overall goal set for you for that particular run, and it comes with a nice reward of the in-game currency that can also be bought with cash. There are also a few worlds these quests take place in, so you won't always be seeing the same backgrounds and monsters as you progress, which helps freshen up the environments you will be seeing over and over.

This game is also more strategical in how it's played versus other clicker games. In most clicker games, you can buy every hero and they all add DPS to your total. In Crusaders, each world that you visit requires a unique formation that varies in shape and quantity/size. For example, the initial formation you will use allows for 10 heroes. From there, you will unlock other worlds, that require different formations. This is where the strategy comes into play. Sometimes you will have to swap out multiple characters to see what gives you the best DPS. There are also quite a few heroes that offer nice DPS bonuses to heroes in the same row, in front of them, behind them, or all heroes. You'll also get a few heroes that give you insane gold bonuses, but at the cost of low DPS. You will soon be testing what works best between heavy hitters, and weaker units to bolster those powerhouses.

There is a Halloween event up as of me writing this, which has a formation allowing for 12 in a unique Halloween world. It's a limited time event so I've recently reset and chosen that world. What the game failed to tell me was that in 1 of the slots, I have a Witch that screams, giving all adjacent heroes -2% or -4% DPS for each monster on the screen. The reason I mention this is because this Witch is in the middle of my formation, causing me to be a bit more selective with who I put around her.

There aren't many negatives to the game. The sound is nothing memorable, but not awful. I was going to say the graphics are mediocre, but compared to games like Adventure Capitalist, whose only animation is bars, or even Clicker Heroes, whose only animation is the monsters when clicked, this game actually has animation. So that's a plus. All in all, it's a pretty good clicker with more depth than most. My strategy, a.k.a. possible spoiler but something you will inevitably figure out as you play so not really a spoiler:

In the end, Nate Dragon will end up doing 99% of your DPS, so the best strategy is to keep people around him that give him % DPS bonuses. Basically have everyone give Nate DPS buffs or give your party gold buffs. Always use the sleuth at end-game and put him in the biggest column, and use the gold bear/lion, and ALWAYS use Natalie Dragon because of the buff she gives Nate. Profit.

Speaking of profit, if you've come this far, enjoy a free legendary item that gives Nate Dragon a 200% base DPS increase: NATE-932D-42BB-BOOM (the code input screen is on the same screen you buy/open chests)

TL;DR: This game is simply amazing. It's part 4X strategy, part collectable card game, with roguelike elements sprinkled in for a game that will feel familiar in many aspects, but is refreshing in both style and play.

Where do I begin? I suppose with where I began in the game: a blank intro screen that I couldn't get past. I posted on the forums, which was quickly responded to by the developers. A few others were having this issue too. Within 2 days there was a patch released which fixed this, among many other fixes/changes. I know it's early, but these guys are updating quite often and I'm already more confident in this product than I have been many Early Access titles due to how playable the game already is.

Speaking of the game, it's great fun. The art style and lore is based on Slavic mythology, which is unique and interesting. This game plays like a 4X where survival will feel more random than you're used to, so be ready to get shafted sometimes (but that's half the fun of roguelikes, isn't it?) by things like God-created storms ravaging your town and people. But if you manage to survive, you'll find that the game has quite a bit of depth to it already, including a card game battle system and crafting systems I will discuss later.

The game itself is a little micromanage-heavy, but it remains interesting due to so many options, especially when it comes to crafting. You will be constantly trying to craft or loot better equipment to upgrade your older and newer companions with. I've spent probably more time than I should have switching out every possible option for crafting a club for example, which gets extensive when you need multiple types of material (metals, woods, leathers, gemstones, string materials, etc.) to craft an item, and later in the game you will have quite a few options of each material, and most materials add varying amounts of stats, sometimes with unique bonuses as well.

The card game is pretty interesting as well. I would suggest reading the tutorial for it the first time. It's a little complicated at first, but if you've ever played a card game it will be easy to learn. There is actually quite a bit of strategy involved for how simple it looks. The people of your expeditions and town will be the cards you use to fight your battles, which gives it a deck-building aspect as you grow in size. Most battles will be realistic, where your people will suffer wounds for taking damage, and can potentially die. Some are test battles, of mental/physical/stealth/etc skills your people may or may not have. The one good thing about the test battles is you can succeed in many parts of the game without having to risk the lives of your people, but they can be nearly impossible to win if you don't have the skills required.

One minor complaint I have is some of the text in the game seems a bit rushed. I remember doing one event/quest where my reply to a character was something like "ok cya". "See ya"or "see you" would have been alright, but "cya" doesn't exactly help immerse me in this world. Other than that, the story and game have been very enjoyable.

Some people will say the game gets too hard and you get destroyed around turn 100 in the forums. I've been playing my first game for 15 hours, and I haven't lost yet. I'm on roughly turn 350 as of writing this, and have finally found a strategy that works great. My town almost wiped when I lost half my people in an expedition, and my town was getting attacked with only 4 people defending at one point. But now I've managed to get to 15 people, with 70+ children, and am constantly hiding in my town but slowly building both population and equipment, getting ready to wage a massive conquest across my map once I get a big amount of people.

But is this game worth it? If you like 4X games and this concept sounds interesting to you, I believe it's worth the price already for you to try it out.

A comical and surprisingly in-depth RPG that has a lot going for it. As others have mentioned, this game brings to mind the ASCII multiplayer games like Legend of the Red Dragon, and my favorite, Usurper, that were popular back when Doom II and 56k dial-up connections were cutting edge technology. But I digress, I'll list the pros and cons I personally found while playing this game, while rating each (+ to +++, - to ---) on how enjoyable or unenjoyable it is:

Pros

• Soundtrack (+++) - The soundtrack for this game is amazing. The intro theme instantly caught my attention as I started the game for the first, and every subsequent time. I can't actually name a song that I don't enjoy. The tavern theme is good, most of the fight and boss songs are also great. There are piano renditions of the songs available as free DLC which can be found in the game's folder, and they are equally awesome.
  
  
• Gameplay (++) - The gameplay is highly addictive. There are so many things to do in addition to the main storyline. You can mine for ore to make items, read randomly generated library books and hope you get exp, upgrade your home, do side-quests for townsfolk, craft items for a chance at better equipment, fight in an arena, go through randomly generated teleports for harder monsters/better loot, the list goes on. A lot of the crafting/searching requires energy, which refills as you do normal fights, giving a nice balance of grinding mixed with many other fun side jobs to keep the repetition as minimal as possible.
  
  
• Combat (++) - Considering you will spend a good portion of your time battling, it's a good thing that combat is for the most part enjoyable, despite the lack of graphics or animations. In fact, there are many games with graphics and animations that have a less in-depth system than SRPG has. Typically you will use the 1-4 keys to perform various combos with different moves, in such an order that you are creating combos with a starter move, chain moves, then a finisher. Each class also has a heal move, and learns other moves such as an ultimate attack, stackable shields, ways to block enemy power attacks, etc. There is one annoyance I have with combat, but that will be discussed in the cons.
  
  
• Story/Writing (++) - While I haven't beaten the game, the storyline is fairly generic in terms of plot. However, the writing is solid and there is quite a bit of humor to the story. It all begins with the backstory you are given about your character after you create him or her, which is pretty much a randomly generated mad-lib story with random events describing your character, and is pretty amusing most of the time. This game also loves potatoes for some reason. You will encounter potatoes as a random event, you will find weapons with "potato" in the name, then you will find items that can boost your weapon if it has "potato" in it's name, which few do. I give this two +s for having humor and being well-written, despite the aforementioned generic plot.

Cons

• Combat (-) - As I mentioned above, combat is a mostly enjoyable experience. There is, however, quite a bit of grinding that must be done to build up your character. While this isn't too bad, the personal issue I have with this is that I tend to start spamming attacks fairly quickly (1, enter, 2, enter, 3, enter, 3, enter, check hps, heal or repeat). 95% of the time this works. The problem with getting into this groove is most monsters have a perk or two from a nice-sized list of perks you can view the effects of by typing "?" into the battle. You must pay attention to what bonuses your opponents have. Some of these perks can be devastating, including one that instantly reduces your max HP by 50% for the entire battle (this can be especially bad against bosses that have insane hps, ensuring you will be fighting them for quite some time), or one that constantly drains almost all of your MP/Rage/Ultimate. I've had monsters with Gigantic (deals major damage to you often) also have the Caustic (player starts with 50% max hps) or Punishing (deals 50% more damage if player is lower than 50% hps) perks, and kill what I felt was a fairly powerful character in 2-3 hits because I wasn't paying attention. In this game, one death means you have to restart (unless you play Softcore). I guess if you pay more attention than I do, this won't be an issue, but it's very easy to get into the habit of hitting the same keys over and over.

Overall an amazingly fun game. You can pick it up for a few minutes, or a few hours, and no matter how much or little you do, will feel as if you've improved. There's a lot I haven't even covered, some of it may be considered spoilers, but there is so much to unlock that won't be directly available to you at the beginning that it gives you even more reason to keep going.

I've tried everything to get this game to play. I've fiddled with various options in the settings.exe, run.cmd, and settings.cfg files to disable the videos and many other things. Also ran in various compatibility modes, as well as installed Microsoft XNA framework.

No matter what I do, every time I start up I get a black screen that quickly exits back to the desktop, with a message reading, "Can't create D3D object. (0x80004002) Unrecognized error value." I've also searched Steam forums and Google for this issue, and I see that many people using a 64-bit operating system seem to be having this issue, but there is also nobody that knows how to make the game playable.

No game should be this difficult to get running. I can play much older games with a simple compatibility change, yet this game just seems to hate 64-bit OSes.