May 2020 update
- bugless
- enemy AI is decent enough, but it's obvious it "cheats"
- game is similar enough to HOMM to understand gameplay basics fast
The bad
- unit design does not feel diverse between fractions, and city upgrades are identical for all fractions
- enemy AI starts overpowered in all campaign scenarios
- camera does not follow enemies that are visible on the map during their turn
- campaign is not really interesting
- no development tree, so it's hard to see which upgrade of spells / city is needed to progress in direction you want
- level up menu should be divided in sections of spells / hero upgrades / unit upgrades
- it's not possible to play MP without creating external account, and company changed policy to allow themselves to sell data they collect to anyone they want
- tier IV units are overpowered, and enemy AI will make hoards of them to attack
Conclusion:
I am SP player, so I only played SP campaign. Not MP part of the game. And I think SP part of HOMM V or Star Craft 2 is way more polished. This SP campaign feels more like "quickly created, with focus on rush mode" addition, than main part of the game. If you want strategic game that is worse than games I listed above this one is a fine pick. Otherwise skip it. I could also not force myself to beat main scenario to see different ending, or start DLC content. Maybe in a few months.
Story:
Gameplay:
There is no development tree, so at first I was forced to guess which upgrade I need to build to unlock something. Upgrades are described in game rule book, but I should not be forced to dig through dozens of pages to know something as basic as city development route.
I had bad problem with beating one scenario, and went to look on the internet what I do wrong. I read "Just make party from flying heroes and conquer enemies cities fast". And it was true... we often start without a city, while enemy AI has few cities under control. If we play slow AI will easily be able to send dozens of high leveled units on us, making it impossible to win. I like to play it save and slow, so it killed all the strategic and fun part of the game for me.
Heroes can be upgraded after they level up. Although level up window is messy, with long list of hero-specific, army-boosters, spells, offensive and defensive abilities all mixed together. Heroes can equip items, but there is no comparison window between current and new gear. So we need to hover over both objects and remember stats. When heroes are stacked there is no simple way to exchange objects. They need to be dropped on the ground and picked by another hero.
Enemy AI is tuned to go after small teams of weak units, so it's possible lead them away from party by spawning scouting bird. Mana limit is quite low, so it's not possible to cast many spells on the battlefield. And I loved to play as mage in HOMMV, throwing spells on enemies to weaken or kill them without risking my troops death.
The only interesting idea I saw in this game is that when armies are grouped next to each other on general map - they will attack and defend together. So if enemy has army inside a city and 2 armies in hexes next to the city, and I attack with 3 armies - it will be 3 vs 3 army battle. If I have 2 heroes with armies next to each other and something attacks me - both hero armies will take part in the battle.
Graphic, music, bugs:
- bugless
- new game plus with chapter select
- some parts of the game can be played with sneak or shooting approach
The bad
- framerate problems without manual file edit
- there is problem to read text in game archive due to control problems
- enemies can stagger lock us easily
Conclusion:
Good stealth game with nice atmosphere and more of jump-scare focused horror. Story is not strong part of it, there are no moral dilemmas, and story as a whole it's really confusing.
Story:
Gameplay:
General enemies die easily from headshots. Semi-bosses need to be shot with few explosive bolts or close-range shotgun burst. Bosses can often regenerate, and thus it's not possible to kill them easily. So Sebastian needs to find a way to eliminate them in different way. Game does not have manual saves, but checkpoints are frequent enough that game is not punishing for dying (I died around 80 times during my playthrough).
New weapons are unlocked by finding them in-game. Enemies sometimes drop brain juice (green liquid), that can also be found in the bottles around the maps. It is used to upgrade abilities (health, sprint, ammunition stock etc.) and weapons (firepower, accuracy, reload speed etc.). General ammunition need to be found laying around, but crossbow bolts can either found or crafted from parts. Melee is not an efficient way to kill enemies, and manual weapons break after one kill.
Initial impression that game has Alien: Isolation mechanic is misguiding, as game starts with Sebastian hiding away from huge enemy with a chainsaw. Only later is it shown that enemies can be killed, and the better weapons Sebastian has (and more upgraded they are), the easiest it is to kill.
Sadly game has nasty tendency to stagger lock, so Sebastian can be hit by new enemy attack immediately after previous attack animation is over. Game never gives us a lot of health, so it's easy to be killed due to some small mistake.
It is not possible to freely jump, Sebastian can only do pre-programmed actions in certain places. Like climbing the ladder or jump above small obstacles. He can also open doors and crouch.
Graphic, music, bugs:
Side note
So far I was using <p> </p> to divide text into easier to read chunks. Looks like you can get similar effect with simple line break <hr>. The more you know.
My number of not played and started games is so low that it does not even record change when I beat something. I always wanted to have less than 500 games (where doable), so I should think of removing some trash from account before the next sale.
Next sale is in 2 weeks. Do you have game that you want surely buy? For me it’s mostly “which game from my wish list hits -75%”. Well maybe top 4 I would be willing to buy with -66% :thinking:
I realized that with so many new people here, and my spare time I don’t even have time to come here. It would be easier for me to follow what’s going on if main page would be divided by days, instead of having infinite scroll. I could just quickly browse page at the end of each day, instead of thinking about infinite poll of new posts that will take me forever to browse. There is something I really dislike with infinite scroll option, don’t really know why. It’s the same on every news site I try to browse. I prefer to have page that starts and ends in certain point, not load content forever.
I agree with the endless scroll thingie. Now I’m just looking at the top 2-3 because I dread the scrolling, whereas if it were daily it feels manageable and I might give more people hugs/comments..
Also; I think it’s interesting how The Evil within is both bugless and needs a manual file change. Doesn’t that imply you had to fix something?
https://steamcommunity.com/app/268050/discussions/0/135508031953324872/
Bugless as enemies do not fly into air when you kill them, animations do not crash game, quest items do not disappear randomly, you don’t clip through the ground etc.
Problem with framerate is more of an engine limitation. Game was designed for consoles where they had 30 FPS lock. Starting it on more powerful machine leads to problem between fact GPU can render 120 FPS and game wanting to cap it weirdly on 30 or 60 (or smth like that, I did not read into it deeply). Similar to how you run faster when you look down in Fallout 4 or 76. Framerate is tied to game speed there. It’s not a bug, just engine “feature”.
I find <p></p> gives a more consistent look over a divider or line break, especially if you’re going text heavy with multiple paragraphs, and you can also easily integrate justified functionality into it with <p align="justify"></p> for added neatness.
To compare without and with:
"Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?"
"Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?"
At first I thought “I don’t see any difference”, and then I realized that text is justified. I didn’t know this English word before. I thought you used it as “justify something”. Polish word is wyjustowany, so I think it may even come from English or some other Germanic language (like in German it’s justieren)
I used it during my master thesis, and at first I thought it’s pointless, as it’s there just to make the text look nicer. But it is actually easier to read when text is justified, it makes it easier to pick up paragraphs that start with the tabulation.
Still, I used paragraphs to divide text into chunks, without use of <br> everywhere. And use of horizontal line removes the problem of forgetting to close <p> somewhere along the way. I wish there was way to move into new line and making break without using double <br> at the end of the line though.
I’ll tell you a secret … I really don’t love infinite scrolling either. But I still think it’s way better than pagination with fixed page sizes. When I decided to do the infinite scrolling thing, I thought it would be much better to have some sort of “end marker” – maybe a red line saying “this is where you stopped reading last time, everything below here is old posts”. But stuff like that just never works well, “automatically marking stuff as read” is just not a good idea.
… also I’m not exactly sure your problem is with infinite vs pagination anyways. I mean, if you’re really disciplined about reading new posts every day (I’m surely not), you could just read from the beginning to the feed down to the line that says “Yesterday”. If you want to read from oldest to newest, to could scroll to that mark first and then “read upwards” – although yes, that’s a little painful.
So … I can think of two easy improvements that might make inf scr better for you: Have a simple “feed navigation” thing with jump links for the last idk, 10 or so days, maybe even display the number of posts in the links. And second, maybe add a toggle for the direction of the feed, so that you start at the bottom of the feed and have to scroll up for older posts – which would be weird if used like that, but great if you want to jump to the start of day and then read downwards.
Do you think that would make it better for you? Or is there some other reason you just like pages better that I don’t see?
also I’m not exactly sure your problem is with infinite vs pagination anyways
It’s not infinite scroll vs pagination. It’s infinite scroll vs list of posts made by day. Pagination is also something that would not work as a substitute, because I will end reading on 5th page (that has posts from 3 days ago), come back day later and as new posts pushed down old ones - I again see posts from 2 days ago on 5th page.
I thought more of something like Recently played, only with simple list of posts. So “Posts created on 1st January” “Posts created on 2nd January” etc. That way they would not jump around when I come back some time later, easier to find posts from certain day (say from around New Year to go back to people resolutions). And I don’t risk going back so much I see post from 2 weeks ago, and comment I want to post does not feel revelant (as it feels like necro to thread no one else was interested in for so long).
The upcoming Summer Sale is probably going to be another case of “This year, I won’t buy anything in the Summer Sale!” and then I end up buying a lot of games.
Strong will I see :hehe:
I haven’t decided what I want to get - depends on what goes on good sales on my wish list.
I have a fair amount of steam funds from trading for some TF2 keys a few months back. So I have money to spend haha
The ones on the top of my wish list that might go to a reasonable price are:
Astroneer
Fable Anniversary
Black Mesa
Trine 4
A lot of the games at the top of my wish list though are new/don’t really get discounted by much so we will see.
I could just wait and spend some of my funds on trying New World when that comes out in supposedly August now.
When the sale comes I’ll see my top 20 and sort by discount after that :P
It’s a good idea to go through what games you know you won’t play. I deleted a few last month. I could easily add more haha
I remember playing Fable game, I think it was the first one. I was walking around in my badass armor, doing quests etc. When I was near the end of the game I decided to get marry to “tick” this part of the game. I removed my helmet and saw that I am old prick xD I didn’t know you age in this game…. That was a surprise.
I’m hesitant to buy Trine 4 after they left Trine 3 in such poor state… it would need to have at least -75%. I loved Trine 1 and Trine 2, but 3rd game is bad.
The Steam Summer Sale starts a day before my birthday so I might relax my purse strings a little. There have been quite a few new releases and older games ported to Steam so I’m hoping to finally play Mass Effect Andromeda or replay the Battlefield series. Back in my console days I sunk hundreds of hours into multiplayer shooters so it would be nice to relive some of those classics.
I don’t imagine much else on my wishlist will be on sale as it’s pretty niche and recently released so I’ll just see what I can justify taking from the retirement fund and have fun. Seems like the hardest thing to achieve at the moment, but we have to try!
Might see if I can ruin your small library idea though :3
Oh boy, Andromeda. Don’t expect story that is on par with ME 1 - 3 :D
I went on your wishlist and saw that they released Andromeda, ME3, Inquisition and DA2 on Steam D: I thought it’s only Andromeda. I will not re-buy them on Steam though, and may even keep buying other EA games on Origin if price is lower than on Steam. Also quick look on Steam shows that people have crash problems with Inquisition. So may look into it before you buy something that opens Origin through Steam to play game.
Might see if I can ruin your small library idea though :3
Bad cat :glare:
I don’t really have anything certain I want to buy this year round. I was gonna look at longer games in my wishlist and consider buying them since I’m getting low but its all about whats the cheapest normally. I think I will be buying perceptions of the dead 2 though since I recently played the 1st game and I’m interested in the sequel now then waiting 10 years. Oh ill probably buy bird story to just to complete everything. Pretty much a bunch of games I’ll be buying to complete the sequels
Speaking of sequels - wonder how much Ori and Wisps will cost. I played 1st one and loved it :D
I watched the first game and it was nice. I probably wouldn’t go out and buy it myself though unless it came in a bundle I was planning on buying. While looking at my wishlist I will probably buy alicemare. It’s a cheap game and I loved 1bitheart and lieat so why not. also while looking at past prices for 7’scarlet it reminded me of the missing phone otome vn im missing on steam so maybe I should just have a theme of buying otome visual novels
huh i didnt know isthereanydeal showed free games… I was just randomly clicking on similar games and came across one. Weird