Ugh. Just ugh.

Another pseudo walking simulator with nothing to offer. Enemies can't see but they sure do listen. And they listen so good you can sprint past them and they wont notice. What they will notice, though, is you unplugging your mouth in another dimension. And yeah, you cant fight back because you already walk, what more could you want, you silly buffoon?

Level design is 80% tight corridors where you cant even dodge aforementioned blind fucks. And then we have loved by all garden labyrinths, a fucking mine and one single trapdoor which came out of nowhere and mentioned never again.

I won't go into plot department because if author didn't bother, why should I?

This whole creation, I'm sure, wasn't made because author had something to tell or any idea that he wanted to implement. He did it because he wanted to show that he could. Great, dude, cheers to you. But you'll steel have to clean my carpet after yourself.

I actually don't know why I liked it as much as I did. My guess is because this game feels like a slow melancholic autumn-y drive through pretty county side.

I came to like the overall environment vibe with more houses than there are people, the need to go and fetch some water to make coffee, the weird but surprisingly soothing voice acting and gently screaking doors.

For some reason developers decided to include gameplay features like stealth and critical attacks on unalarmed enemies, notification of which instantly drops you out of immersion but somehow making it more enjoyable in the long run. Maybe it has so little to do with the game that it comes out of another end.

The plot is a pretty simple story of your everyday boy coming back to the village to attend grandpa's funeral. Alas, as it usually happens in small rural villages, your grandpa was cursed and you have to resolve this conflict with evil powers. Considering no one of the characters is really bothered by crooked churches or talking goat heads, I guess this is just a normal Swiss day. And this chill presentation of anything that's happening here is what gets me.

One thing I'd like to change though. I'd like muvel to be a bit slower, so the player could see more of the scenery.

Forgot to mention, I think visual style plays a major role in this game. And it's good. Not marvelous or stunning, but pleasing and relaxing.

Co-op, friendly fire and instant replay. That means at least one of my five hours was spent on reenacting wild west duels with my buddy after one of us accidentally shot another.

Pretty simple fun. Alas, in second half of the game rooms become so large you don't even see enemies and that made us sad. Would be great if there were not only hostage/bomb missions but also clearing one, because there is no place for your new shotgun to shine. Although, that wouldn't be "Police" stories anymore, would it?

In short: friend = fun, no friend = sad.

I... liked it?

Honestly, I still don't know. But after a torture that was the first game, this one is feeling pretty good. No fucking tranq darts anymore. The only sleeping pill these lizards need is the lead one.

Yeah, weapon, enemy and location variety is nice, although I still have a feeling "this game is good only because the previous one was such a garbage you couldn't even look towards it without tears".

So yeah, I don't know how to side about it. Although there were no one-liners. That I disapprove.

"Why don't we make resident evil but with raptors?"
"Awesome!"

"And one of these retardosauruses will take half of your inventory to kill making combat useless."
"Wait."

"And every door will now require you to find either two keycards or jump through a flaming hoop saying that you love this game."
"WAIT!"

"And the big bad boss T-Rex will die in like four shotgun shots. If you time it well, it'll never even attack."
"What the fuck..."

Although there are two good things here.
1. Regina's thighs.
2. T-Rex entry cutscene on a roof. That music piece was marvelous.

This was not even close in plot department to previous game. For some reason Desmond and his company are now scumbags who only talk in quips like in marvel films. I also remember next to nothing else from this story.

Yeah, the mind numbing tower syncing chest opening enemy countering gameplay is still great. Although I can't say I like Roma. Main issues are that there are too many goddamn mountains which you can't climb and have to stroll around them. And due to city architecture the roof of some buildings is just a street. Can't say how many times I was confused after climbing the building only to find people casually strolling on the street.

Returning to this game after so many years left me surprised. I totally forget how loveable the cast is. Yeah, the story is silly and is just another revenge-regret scenario but damn Ezio is entertaining to listen to.

Gameplay wise though it's pretty shit, heh. Parkour works only half the time, fighting sequences aren't fluid like in later installments and... fuck it, I spent dozens of hours syncing seventy goddamn towers and picking up five hundred treasure chests and I do not regret anything.

Visually it's still great. Like someone rightly said, the only thing we want is to jump between pretty buildings. And almost all cities here provide just that. But fuck Venetia with it's stairs leading straight into water and just silly map design overall.

Will I ever be as good as Alexander?

For the first four or six hours this was my favourite game ever. I still think the gameplay here is worthy of framing and hanging in some sort of gameplay museum. Tons of different combinations, fun to use moves and complexity of states comparable to fighting games together with deep enough enemy variety makes this game a cocktail of pure octane which you are trying to drink while bungee jumping.

Unfortunately I got tired of fighting through levels after six hours mark and started to try skipping as much as possible and proceed to boss fights. Because they are never not fun. Except for weeb-grandpa, fuck this bastard. And flying midget with telekinetic powers. Yeah, they are reused as much as possible but they are so great that I don't actually mind.

I'm glad that after Elvis death the game sped up in plot department because without my boy this story went to shit pretty fast. And short version of it you're the Cringe Hand, you have an enemy called the Edge Hand. Those are the actual hand of God. That's it. And somewhere there are demons trying to do stuff to our world. But who cares about them in the ultimate battle of cringe vs edge?

Honestly, I have no idea what to say about it. Graphics are shit, level design is shit, everything here is shit but for some reason the gameplay and all those shitty things click together brewing some of the greatest boiling messes of a soup I ever tasted. It's just fun to play.

Unofficial Earth Defense Force spin-off telling the story of government-employed ninja who fight primal worms trying to take over the world.

I had two issues with this game not counting that you have to manually unlock FPS every time you start it. First, there was no controller support for me at all. Surprisingly, the game runs absolutely fine on keyboard and mouse giving me no issues with it whatsoever. Second, random crashes after cutscenes. I have no idea why but it just happens. Anyway, that were all technical difficulties I remembered. Now, to game.

No, you don't have to only use heavy sword to fight enemies. I personally had more fun using double swords and found they dealt same amount of damage but with more style points. I'm sure the same could be said about ordinary katana but its moveset is too boring for me to be used. To my amazement I didn't feel like the gameplay was dragging for too long and the game was over before I started complaining. Alas, the bosses get reused near the end making you feel cheated of another over-the-top spectacle that could have been. Also timed ant-lion boss fight that does not work due to bombs not registering explosion when they are right inside his model (actually now that I think about it, it could be that the boss just has too much health for fun battle) can suck my telescopic ninja sword. And for some reason couple of snail helicopters just stopped in midair doing nothing mid fight. But I just assumed that snails piloting helicopters are not entirely the smartest and moved on with my fun. Ah, yes, turret sections are... there. It's definitely a thing that exists there.

Visuals are as varied as ubisoft's open worlds. You always will be fighting in some sort of grey box with only difference being visible skybox. Even level on a plane is just a grey box moving through the air. Seeing such masterfully crafted locations as grey box, grey box under ground, grey box that resembles mall and other variations of grey boxes makes you feel like you died and reincarnated in 2007 cover based shooter.

Even though this game was most likely slapped together in a week I had a lot of fun. Quick time events are constant, yeah, but they are anything but hard. Direction of cutscenes is still amazing and combat doesn't get in the way of enjoyment. I think I would like another game like this today but with actual level design. God bless Keiichiro Ogawa.

This should have been the original game.

Well, where do we start? We now have gameplay that works, for starters. And improvements in absolutely every single part of it. Enemies now don't take hours to light up, we get new guns that feel different (even revolver now does not require you to jerk off your reload button to make it faster). Collectibles are no longer in the hundreds and are marked on your radar making you wonder why wasn't this in the original?

I don't care enough for resolution or graphics quality but finally seeing anything other than goddamn woods almost made me tear up. And shadow bastards now no longer gang-raping you if you step out of the road. Wow.

Voice acting quality, though, is oof level. For some reason I was constantly reminded of Subverse's girls. And they sound much, much more enticing and competent.

The plot is that Mr. Scratch now taking over your life and you are trapped in dream world resembling one of spooky show episodes. And that is actually all. After four hours you get told that all you've done is basically nothing and did not count. Scratch is still in real world, and you are still in the dream one.

Overall, much more playable version of Alan Wake with less self-indulgent bullshit and more fun. I would honestly prefer to complete this three times than original game once.

Ehh... I hoped it would be better.

Open world was a mistake. Everybody tells that OOH THIS OPENWOLD IS SO GOOD SO FULL OF CONTENT AND ALL. No, it's not. And I'm tired of clearing dungeon #50 with same three stone dogs boss fight and another talisman of diarrhea protection +1.

The thing is, I love exploring this game. It looks gorgeous. I had fun going down those dungeons in hope of finding something interesting. And when I traverse another yellow fog wall, thinking what boss will I fight now.... dogs, it's going to be dogs almost every fucking time. And when it's not a dog it will be a cancerous flailing biomass monster or dude in armor. And it's just same ubisoft busywork but with dungeons instead of bandit camps. And that makes me feel hollow.

Although I love character story quests, as always, they are amazing. Of course knowing Miyazaki not a single story here ends well and it is all the more heavy to finally sit at a bonfire to reset the world for the last time to come visit your friend who didn't make it in his or her journey.

Do you know how many unique non-repeated bosses are there? I mean, bosses who you will not fight a second time or meet in random dungeon or something like this? Eight (including that cosmic sack of shit in the end). Do you know how many are actually fun to fight and not being a giant madly flailing biomass of bullshit jumping across the arena? Three. You will meet almost every goddamn boss at least three times. Tell me how open world was a good decision for this game and how full of content it is. I think Miyazaki is more busy making another fucking poisonous bog than to make an interesting boss fight.

If you actually ignore around 80% of "content" here it would be good. Just skip all dungeons that do not lead to any additional locations. It would be amazing if only there weren't so many goddamn repetition. Yeah, It's beautiful and all, but was it really worth it?

Oh yeah, and the scythe moveset makes me sad. Remembering how gorgeous was the moves of Friede's scythes I hoped for at least something similar but for some insane fucking reason scythes now have vertical slices instead of horizontal and why the fuck do they? That's not how bloody scythes work, you dinguses.

"Hey, Trigger, you dumbass. Tell me something. What color's the sky up there?"

Proceed to breakdown and cry again even two years later

Will undoubtedly revisit this game again in the future. Just after I stop randomly tearing up remembering it.

My friend told me he would enjoy this if it was any media other than video game. I do not entirely agree, but I would like to see a musical or theatre play of this.

So, at first I though this was going to be good. Then I understood everything. The writers who made this plot are probably stroking themselves now watching in a mirror. What starts as an interesting concept turns into a year long slog which seethes self indulgence from every orifice.

The gameplay is nonexistent. You walk and shoot. Two shots for adidas bastards, three for ordinary bastards, six for big ones and so on. Of course, you first need to light them with a flashlight, just standing and looking at them for 10-15 seconds on normal difficulty and 5-10 business days on hard. This continues for around 12 hours. That's all gameplay you'll get. I felt dead while playing this shit for two playthroughs straight.

The level design is nonexistent. For twelve fucking hours you will slowly shuffle through goddamn forest. And God forbid you want to explore anything two meters off the beaten path. Shadow fuckers will spawn every 5 seconds and will gang rape you.

Remedy here made up interesting concept, I'm not gonna lie. But absolutely nothing were build on this concept at all. Every scaffolding they had is holding on boogers and faith.

You are generic writer who came in a rural-quiet-mystery-town on a vacation with wife because you are in a slump and can't write. You arrive at a cursed cabin to relax and surprisingly your wife disappears and dark dudes start to chase you. Turns out, it's all going according to your latest novel which you are currently writing in aforementioned cursed cabin. And Dark Presence is making you to write it the way it wants. But you are such a good writer so you wrote yourself escaping and clearing this mess, but you need to get back to the cabin. But you don't know what you will do after you get back to it. So then out of writers ass comes deus ex machina in a face of Thomas Zane, previous victim of Presence and he gives you a light clicker from your childhood because fuck this and with that you can fight the darkness. You then kill Dark Presence, write new ending, free your wife but for some reason go mad and get lost in your fantasies. You then proceed to go through the whole game again and get yourself together. The End. Fuck this.

This will be biased. Heavily biased.

I have been playing SpellForce 1 since I was a child and enjoyed it way more than I should. Cool rune system, shit load of possible skills to learn, spellbook you can organize and fill yourself and neat race gimmicks were and still are there.

The second installment was not met as warm. Everything was extremely simplified, characters weren't engaging or likeable and overall I didn't have any colourful emotions. (Actually, playing it again couple years ago made me realize it was not that bad but then Demons of the Past came and I couldn't handle how retarded it was.)

Then I joined SpellForce 3 beta testing and saw that once again it would feel like SpellForce 2 but with additional jerking-off to sector mechanics. Disappointed I shelved this game for years. Now, after playing reforced version I can say that I just needed time to become open-minded to change.

The game continues the trend of SpellForce 2 to become more RPG-dialogue-characters-based compared to the first one. The game now has actual story, the characters are loveable and I have absolutely no issues with how things are written. I also did not expect the music to catch my interest but it did. Alas design-wise the game is pretty bleak. Characters and units often fade with background making battle scenes a brown-grey mass of animated texture. This of course unit dependent but still, if *I noticed it then it must be pretty obvious issue.

Now lets talk about gameplay itself. I love jerking-off to my sectors. Initially I thought it was a bad idea designed only for the game to be different from other RTS. I was wrong. Sectors bring a lot of strategy thinking into the field along with worker management. You have a menu of three races from which you choose to take out one on a date in a map. Sadly, you never will take two of them at the same time like in SpellForce 1. Yeah, all three races feels different to play, but I still compare them to six from the first game and they never come close. The unit's pathfinding sometimes just doesn't work making you wonder where did your ballistae disappear to when you are storming enemy capital only to find them driving donuts in a puddle on another end of the map.

Regarding characters part. The skill tree is just dumbed down to 3-4 skills for a branch of which you will use one. Maybe two if you feel like spicing up your life. Spellbook is still not present at a capacity where you want to open it. And because of unified skill wheel I have no idea what character is using what skill. And often I realized that I actually don't care.

Overall this game is as close as it could be to SpellForce 1 considering today's trends. It's definitely better than second installment in every single aspect and surely surpasses the original in writing and characters department and I even felt that childlike joy when playing it, even if it's far from nostalgic SpellForce 1 I had built inside my head. After completing it I found myself wanting more. Loved it, hope to see more.

Oh yeah, regarding multiplayer. It's actually fun. Especially if you play against couple of friends and nobody knows all those competitive strats making a match drag on for two hours and there are no more resources left on a map and you just throw first grade units at each other.

Ok, plot, yeah. So, looks like there is a mage-rebellion going over because neckbeard wizards think they are superior to ordinary mortals. And your dad is the leader of this rebellion. But you didn't like his methods so you rebelled against his rebellion and instead of ass-whopping he did the next reasonable thing for a parent to do in this situation. He decided to execute you. Luckily, you were saved by some itty-bitty-gritty warmonger. Eight years past. You are serving in army, together with aforementioned warmonger. You were sent to a village nearby to investigate possible plague outbreak. While you were there you realized the plague is magical and is not contagious. But general told you to stick your opinion up your arsenal and carry on with the order to purge the village. You are too righteous to do it so you disobey. Logically, for that you are getting sentenced to death by all the way through colonoscopy and now chilling with spiders and lunatics in a cell. Then leader of a new religion is coming towards you telling you are the child from a prophecy and he needs your help in locating the source of the plague. You don't really have a choice, so during the next ten minutes you proceed to massacre old comrades in prison break attempt. You then tasked to gather possible allies in your quest, which acts as a tutorial for three races gameplay. Then you investigate your dad's old laboratory and find your mom who sings the song on telepathic level which blows the minds of those who were not gifted a spark of magic. Alas your reunion was cut short as the cult leader who you're working for teleports behind your mom and sucks her spirit into the amulet. Your mom was a specimen from long extinct nation by the way, obviously super intelligent and powered. She survived the great reset by the power of oversleeping. While slicing the pope in half, you politely ask Lacaine (that's the name of the cult leader) to return the mom back. He does not agree and blows up the lab. You wake up five weeks later and find that everything is gone to shit. Well, at least the plague is gone, innit? Now you need to gather another rebellion against Lacaine and his Purity of Light lunatics to protect the world from devastation and unite all people within your nation. While you do that you find out that the rune which you were using all that time to resurrect has some weird properties like ability to control minds. And that's bad, if you don't get it. Also people die if their rune is destroyed. That's sad :C. Anyway, you storm Greyfell, the capital, where Lacaine is planning to open the portal to nether and summon old gods and in final fight you kill him, freeing you mom in the process. Alas, the portal is open and chthonian entity is trying to get through it. The only way to close it is to destroy the amulet with your mom inside. You do it with teary eyes and everything ends. In the aftermath, the queen decides to establish "The Circle" of mages to represent wizardry of all lands. And you together with your companions are the core of it. Then you go get drunk with elf-girl and everything is good that day. The End.*

Update 1.
So I finished soul harvest. Everything up there still applies here. Dvarwes are too complex for my silky smooth brain and I couldn't be bothered to manage all their stances in battle. No issues with dark elves, because people riding on dinosaurs and throwing spears that make enemies bleed makes my head produce happy chemicals. The only way it could be better if these people were half naked women.

The story though is pretty bleak this time around. I didn't vibe much with characters or ideas told but eh, like with half naked women we can't have everything, right?

Update 2.
So I finished fallen god. Yep, that's what this game was always about. The best campaign out of three. Trolls themselves are pretty easy to pick up and play, their huge figures absolutely break pathfinding and the only way to train advanced units is to literally build conveyor belts where your green dudes walk from one station to another getting club for smacking, then a sock with rock for throwing and finally a tree to obliterate enemy buildings. Simpleminded fun, just how I like it.

This time around the story is pretty heavy and does not tell us about a world-ending threat which we must stop. This time it's more personal. This time it's survival. And this time it's about what will you sacrifice for this survival.

So after completing entirety of SpellForce 3 I applaud Grimlore Games and ask them to make more. Please. We need it. I fell in love with this game again because of you. Don't you dare run away for twenty years again.