Report #49
Lately I’ve not felt my usual motivation for gaming and even less so for “meta-gaming” like BLAEO. It took me 2,5 months to complete SpellForce, which I started for the Think Locally theme back in May. It was an exhausting game. Also that makes my last post about 3 months old. Anyhow, here are the last 3 games I’ve finished.
Reviews
112 Operator is the sequel to 911 Operator. You manage the emergency services of a city and have to respond to calls as well as distribute your units to different emergencies popping up all over your area.
112 Operator is really really similar to 911 Operator. It's basically a overhauled version with the focus on making everything a bit bigger and more complex. Unfortunately that leads to a lot of chaos and hectic decision making which can become very exhausting with time. I think it has some great ideas but doesn't always live up to its potential. Which is very similar to 911 Operator on release. 911 Operator improved a lot with free updates and DLC, so I hope for the same in the case of 112 Operator. The developers were already really busy in fixing some of the minor annoyances and bugs, so I hope for the best. I'm surely going to return to this game.
Dark Messiah of Might & Magic
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is a FPS RPG very akin to the Elder Scroll series in gameplay. It is set in the Might and Magic universe and you play a hero set out to find the mythical Skull of Shadows and discovers that he is more than a mere human on his journey.
I've read a lot enthusiastic reviews of DMoMM, but I was pretty disappointed by the game. I did not really care for the story and the game does a bad job introducing the lore of the world, which is definitely there, but only hinted at. Apart from shooting stuff with a bow the gameplay wasn't really convincing either. At least to me. Maybe it was a bigger thing in 2006 when it was released. I'm glad it was short.
SpellForce: Platinum Edition
SpellForce is hybrid RPG and RTS. While you play an avatar which can level up and have a quest system like in any standard RPG, you are also able to build up an economy and armies like in a RTS game. The Platinum Edition includes the main game "The Order of Dawn" as well as the two expansions "The Breath of Winter" and "Shadow of the Phoenix".
SpellForce is for sure a lovely made game. It's also an interesting idea to have a mix of the two genres, which works better than I expected. The game is from 2003, and you definitely see its age. It has an okay story and it is fun to level up your character and do some questing. There are some big downsides to the game unfortunately. I had some technical difficulties, however, I can forgive them due to the age of the game. The game is fully voiced, but the voice actors vastly differ in quality. Some are quite good, others are utterly terrible. And the main reason which lead me to rate the game only as an average game: Everything takes forever. Collecting all necessary ressources: Takes forever. Buildung up your armies: Takes forever. Walking around the map: Takes forever. A lot of the fighting: Takes forever. Oh and don't ever loose your army, rebuilding takes even longer due to decreasing ressource output over time.
Honestly, this could have been a much better game, were it a bit more action packed and faster. Because apart from that, I actually enjoyed most of the things in the game.
Currently playing
I don’t know what I’ll play next, should be good games for the upcoming update #50.
Stay save and happy backlog-clearing to everyone,
Vito
Wow, 150 hours! And in just 3 months? I can feel the fatigue! You totally need a holiday from gaming, or a lot of super short and fast games to balance it!
To be fair, I sometimes left the game running while doing some other stuff, which had to do with a certain bug I encountered. But yeah, it was definitely a very long game. I won’t be starting another giant soon, you are definitely right :D