Report #68

Mount & Blade: Warband is a game most of you probably heard of. It's a mix between first-person and strategy game and has many fans up until this day.

I very much enjoyed the game. The mix between fighting battles with your character and navigating the world map is an interesting mix between different genres and makes the game diverse and entertaining. However, I must also admit, that I was a bit bored at times, since there are sometimes grindy stretches in the mid game, before you are strong enough to take on most of the enemies by yourself.

There is also a plethora of different mods, which all expand on the gameplay or offer complete conversions for the game. I played the Star Wars mod. It was made with a lot of love and is an impressive conversion of the game. However, it does have some bugs (save often!) and some unfinished things in it.

Overall definitely a recommendation from my side! Achievements are super grindy though, I did not have the patience to go for all of them.

This is a short demo of the whole game. Nova Lands is a base builder with a cute pixel look. The demo offers the first few steps of gathering resources, doing research and exploring its world.

The game is okay, but I won't get the main game. The controls are a bit clunky and I did not enjoy the overall base building too much. Seems like a lot of unnecessary micro management to me.

Hue was free on Steam a few weeks ago. I grabbed it and started it right away. It is a cute puzzle platformer where you can change the color of the world to overcome obstacles and solve puzzles.

I liked the idea, the graphical representation and the soundtrack. However I did not really enjoy playing the game after the initial ~2 hours. The puzzles were mostly easy and the platforming parts weren't to hard either. But those genres are just not for me it seems. I almost had to force me to finish the game. But not because the game itself was so bad, but because I did not really enjoy the gameplay.

Recommendation? Well, if you are into those genres, then I could see someone having fun with the game. But if you're more like me, I won't recommend the game.

SpellForce 2 is a mix between classical RPG and RTS game. The Anniversary Edition contains the base game, Shadow Wars, and the first expansion, Dragon Storm.

I never played the game before that, nonetheless SpellForce 2 just oozes nostalgia. By mixing two genres, both aspects are a bit less complex than in full fledged RPGs or RTSs. Personally I still think that both aspects shine enough to be fun. There is a nice mix between mission where you focus on your PC and their companions and missions where you build a base, gather resources and fight the enemy in classic RTS manner.

The game is quite old, but it ran good on my system and I think it mostly aged quite okay. Not great maybe, but okay. And for those who regularly read my posts, you know that I play many really old games, so I don't have too much problems with that anyways.

Thankfully this wasn't the 150 hours slugfest the first SpellForce was, but at the end I still grew a bit bored. Therefore I would only recommend the game if you're a fan of titles like that. But then you can have quite some fun with it :)