Recent reviews by ur doing gr8

How much do you like killing orcs?

This is a bit of a spoiler, but I met a weird guy out in the wastelands who professed his love of vintage video games. Dude's place was stacked, every wall covered with game posters, every shelf packed full of memorabilia--dude even had a collection of vintage arcade cabinets. We had a fun little conversation and after I left that town I didn't think of it again.

A few weeks later I'm out ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ off in some obscure corner of the in-game map, wandering around looking for an oasis to refill my canteens when I stumble upon a little easter egg: the buried literal truckloads of unsold 1980s ET atari cartidges. There were a ♥♥♥♥-load of them, way more than we could carry in our packs. Then it ocurred to me: you know who I bet would be into all of these cartridges? Video game collector guy.

So we load up with as many cartridges we can carry and backtrack all the way to that town. Now, we exhausted all the quests in that town, met with all the dudes and solved all their weird problems; we had no real reason to return. The game gave me no indication that this dude would be interested in these ET cartridges. No quest compasses, no journal entries, nothing. But lo and behold collector dude loses his ♥♥♥♥ with excitement over the ET cartridges. It was like we brought him the holy grail. We got experience and rewards for doing it. And this was something that we easily could have missed, something I easily wouldn't have even thought of doing. But the game knew. And the game rewarded it.

♥♥♥♥ like that will never happen in a Bioware or Bethesda game. Even in an Obsidian game, I reckon. Next level RPG.

A+

This game is a death simulator.

You can befriend a dog and have him sniff someone's dirty underpants to solve a mystery.

Divine Divinity is Diablo II made into an actual RPG, but with significantly less polish, more broken skills and writing done by people whose native language obviously is not English. But it's so much better than it sounds.

The world is huge and full of quests and weirdos and choices and consequences. There are multiple ways to solve nearly every quest, most of the dialogues have good snarky options and the whole game drips with enthusiasm. It may be flawed, it may be ugly in places, it may be silly beyond all get out, but it was obviously made by people who wanted to make it. Larian are probably my favorite developer; I don't know that anyone else is as passionate about the games they make as those guys.

Their games aren't the best. They're often uneven. Sometimes they're even complete messes. Divine Divinity is no different. But it's got a lot of character. It's got a lot of soul, and it set the stage for all the fun stuff Larian's made since.

There are games with better combat, with more coherent worlds, with more fleshed-out characters, with more memorable plots, but few games exude the joy and excitement that Larian games do. I recommend all of them.

...Except Beyond Divinity. That one ain't very good.

Volokonovka is perhaps the least interesting of the Graviteam Tactics DLCs, and it's certainly the shortest. But it presents a fairly well balanced, if somewhat straight forward, little campaign.

If you've played any of the other GT DLCs, you should know what you're in for: a new map and campaign, and new strategic and tactical situations to go with them. The landscape here is mostly rolling farmland, interspersed with a few gullies and a village or two. Force pools are relatively small, making this an ideal scenario for a starting player. It's still fun for more advanced players, but I'd recommend getting it on sale if that's your situation--which it probably is.

The general dynamic concerns a superior German force made up mostly of infantry--with a handy mortar platoon included--trying to push east. In the second half of the game the Soviets get to push back with armor, which the Germans aren't very well equiped to fight against, and try to retake what gains the Germans made. It gives the campaign an interesting dynamic with both sides having to balance offence and defence at different points. It's good fun. And being the only WWII summer map aside from the Shilovo DLC, you get a decent change of scenery from the base game.

RATING: A-

Rating: A+

This is a serious wargame. None of that fake crap that people like to call wargames but are really wussy arcade RTS chump simulators. Flashpoint Campaigns has hexes and counters and orders and turns. All of the classic components of something designed by and for true grognards.

It is my first PC "hardcore" wargame, and after nearly a dozen hours, it's a pretty neat game. Most wargames and PC strategy games still focus around manouvre and ordering each of your units with razor-like accuracy, with each tank and squad and platoon responded to and executing your will without delay and without question. Flashpoint Campaigns isn't like that. It focuses on the hair-pulling, hypertension-inducing hell that is being helpless while you watch your men, each devoted to his nation and its cause (even if its cause is stupid) really trying their best to carry out your moronic plans only to be cut down at once by enemy fire. Confusion and lack of cohesian are the killers on this battlefield. Each turn you give orders and then click the button to play the turn out, where your guys, in accelerated time, spend the next 15 minutes to an hour on their own, trying their best to get things done. Only when the turn is up and the alotted time has passed are you allowed to give new orders and react to the situation. And the more chaotic things get and the more torn up and splintered your force gets, the longer the turn takes to playout before you can react with orders, meaning that you can end up giving orders every 40 minutes whil your opponent is able to give orders ever 15, which leads to very interesting, very asymmetrical and very unique gameplay. And if you play with the optional rule limiting the number of orders you can give per turn--something I recommend for increased realism and increased stress--things can only get more jacked up if you don't have a solid plan and the flexibility to ammend that plan when needed.

There is a lot of Cold War tech to play with, and battles move extremely fast and are extremely bloody once contact is made. The graphics are clear and attractive and have a pretty striped-down, utilitarian feel to them, which works but if someone needs to actually _see_ a tank model to have a good time playing war, you might want to look elsewhere.

The AI seems smart as hell, and you can go toe-to-toe with it across numerous individual scenarios and four separate campaigns where you keep your forces between battles. I haven't actually tried the campaigns yet, but I am excited at the prospect. I just want to hold off until I can go through a battle without getting my ass handed to me first.

Too scary :-(

I love '80s action movies as much as the next schmuck, but this game was evidently intended for 12 year-olds only. Cut scenes are stupid and take way too long. The intended humor lacks any understanding of timing and when to give up on a failed joke. It has a HILARIOUS over-long tutorial where the gruff action hero protagonist complains about how much he hates tutorials. I don't even think they tried. On a scale of zero to turds from a butt, I'd rate this slightly less embarrassing in its implications of the creators' collective maturity than Duke Nukem.

Rating: A

Graviteam Tactics is a game that used to be called Achtung Panzer, but after some sort of nonsense involving the old publisher, they had to change the name when it went on Steam. Or something. I don't know the specifics.

But it's a good game. More people should know about it. It's not very accessible and the UI is confusing, but once you get the hang of it, it's a good time. Though I'll admit, after nearly 25 hours so far, I still don't totally know what I'm doing. That speaks partly to the game's depth, but also how to the lack of transperancy regarding mechanics.

At its most superficial level, it's kind of like a Total War game set in World War II. But it's a lot more of a sim than Total War is, and the design intent is very different. The Ukrainian fellows who made Graviteam Tactics are well known in sim nerd circles for their tank simulators, at least one of which used to be on Steam but doesn't seem to be any more and I don't know why. Their obsession with WWII and tank damage models served them well for making a game of a grander scale, where you command little germans or little soviets in squads and weapons teams, and whose lines of communication and chain of command you must manage as you order them to march onwards towards the slaughter. After a battle in this game, one can find the battlefield littered with meat. Manflesh, to be exact.

You have a bird's eye view of the happenings, starting with the turn-based operations map where you move companies of men and tanks around, check their supply and tell them where and whom to attack. Once a battle commenses you get dumped into the planning stages of the real-time mode, where you set up your little soldiers and give them their opening orders. Opening orders are important, because they have no command cost and allow you to set up your plan and watch it unfold. Your squads and teams for the most part work on their own, though you can of course order them, but they decide on their own behind which trees to take cover, when to shoot and when to hit the deck -- you have no control over such precise details. The best you can do is tell them a general location to move to and a general direction to concentrate their fire. There is little micromanagement in the game, and you are even disuaded from trying to micromanage, as giving orders costs you command and the more into the fire your men get, the harder it is to command them. It's a neat little system, but it isn't readily apparent when you start the game up. It took me more than a few games--and reading more than a few game guides, of which, I might add, there are scant few--to know what the hell the blue bar at the top of the screen meant and why it would change when I tried to order my half-dead, panicking engineer squad to suck it up and advance into machinegun fire (which is a terrible tactic, by the way).

Between battles you can manage your men, splitting up their squads and allocating ammo and fuel for vehicles. It's a fun a little management game, and is pretty simple. You cannot build units in the game, so what you start with is what you get, though there are usually reinforcements showing up on certain turns and whose arrival and availability you are well informed of.

Operations are dynamic and different each time you play, with the possibility of fighting over the same town or the same hill across multiple battles, each side taking and subsequently losing the objective over the course of one or two in-game days. It gives the game a fun, fluid and unpredictable narrative that enhances replayability.

In addition to the operational campaigns, you can also play individual battles with units from force pools on any part of the included maps. What's kind of lame, though, is that you can't set it to have the computer generate the enemy force, so you always know exactly what the enemy has right from the get go. Major bummer for me.

BUT IN CONCLUSION: it is a solid game that deserves more press and more people talking about it.