A nostalgic classic. A classic I frankly would not enjoy as much without that nostalgia, truth be told.

There's a lot good with it, and a lot bad. Juhani's entire plot is immensely rushed and she feels more like a character I added through a fan-made restoration mod than one from a finished product. The cruelty of the council gaslighting her could have been spotlighted more to set up the later twist, but no, that depth isn't really there. It feels very first draft and then they had to ship it.

As an role-playing game, the dialogue fluctuates between giving you plenty of character building options that express multiple viewpoints and feelings, to being stuck in a binary between "The council is great and could never do wrong" and "I love killing orphans and eating puppies." It's a bit disappointing if you want to be a tad more jaded than full-on Jedi superfan, but without having to be Space Hitler.

And gameplay wise as an RPG, it's wretched. It really is. The character building is nonexistent. Blasters not scaling with dexterity but melee scaling with strength completely negates the other half of the combat tree. Blasters are good if you want to self-impose a difficult challenge on yourself, a turn-based version of a no-hit run. But as an actual character choice that won't have you pulling out your hair as the stronger melee enemies completely mop you up as you deal the same amount of damage you did on Taris? Oh, oh god. A Teras Kesai run would be easier. I truly believe Bioware giving Canderous and Zaalbar strength stats but ranged signature weapons was to trick people into handicapping themselves, as a 3-melee party makes the game difficulty insignificant at any point.

It is funny to play this and be like, "Oh, this is the start of the Bioware formula." Every post-KOTOR Bioware game is reskinned KOTOR, even moreso than BG2's influence on Bioware's future games. The non-linear 4 points to get the macguffin, the post 3rd macguffin story event, talking to party members on the ship after every planet, it all started here.

But I have to be honest with myself: How much of the game do I really like? Kashyyyk is a horrible auditory nightmare. Manaan has THREE goddamn court case quests, and eye-searing scenery. Taris has a dedicated sewer level. Tatooine is basically just a hallway city and then a desert. The companions are bare bones and one dimensional outside of a few. Zaalbar says nothing. Mission may as well have died on Taris for how much she contributes afterwards. Juhani, lol. T3 doesn't exist after seducing the door to the sith base. Carth is memetically hated on, but hey, he actually talks throughout the entire game and has an arc.

But I love the game regardless. Even on PC, where it is the worst port I have ever played. Thanks for the two decades of memories, KOTOR. I hope that remake never comes out.

Fixed a ton of issues I have with the base game. Shorter, better mission variety (with alternate playstyles with the alignment system), better character builds. I enjoyed making Tarkus melee for a while even though he is so clearly not designed to be, to the point he will yell, "Tactical Squad caught in melee!" as he does 1400 damage sword to a cultist.

Story is more fun too than simply, "We are Space Marine, we save world." A shame Eliphas' beautiful Dark Crusade voice is gone, but it is hilarious Steve Blum voices half the cast.

The deployment and infestation system are thankfully gone. They could have slapped "Chaos Cult Corruption" on there to replace it, but thankfully thought better of it.

The corruption system is deeply lacking, and I never felt pressured to go either way. The pure equipment was enough to carry me on hard, and I never was compelled to do the corrupting mission alternatives to save time or for better gear. So in a way it felt like a very nothing mechanic, even if I appreciated its existence and do think it served more than the ones I had issues with last time.

Good game, good game. A shame Space Marines are just so damn boring to play as after a while.

I haven't returned to this in well over a decade, and oh my god, I see why. It is OUTRAGEOUSLY monotonous. They seemed deeply insecure in a lot of aspects of this game as they moved on from the traditional RTS of its predecessor to a radically different Company of Heroes with RPG elements style. And it really, really shows.

First is the horrible inventory management, that I can only compare to the modern Destiny style of loot where your inventory is clogged with dozens of items that are all .3% stronger against a specific enemy type. My brain is not wired to enjoy looting when I only ever actually upgraded my gear maybe 3-4 times per character, despite picking up numerous amounts of trash.

Then the length. The game has too little mission variety, too few possible character builds (again, see the lame itemization), and too repetitive enemy types to be over 10 hours long. Maybe they felt too embarrassed to release a 5 hour game after the hype Relic came off of with Dark Crusade, but Jesus. They should have just bit the bullet.

And the final entrant for the messy mechanics that betray low confidence or general indecisiveness in what the game should be is the deployment and Tyranid infestation system. Why are days a thing, exactly? Why not just fail the mission if you die instead of miraculously being saved each time and have a day pass? The only penalty for missing out on days is optional missions, and goddamn do you not wanna do those anyway after the first 30. Tyranid infestation also feels useless. Apparently it affects how many tyranids you see on missions on the planet, but frankly, who cares? Is it worth spending hours on side quests to see a few less squads of termagaunts?

But maybe the worst thing they did was have the protagonist be a silent self-insert. The fun banter is reserved only for the four squad members, and Force Commander is just a presence they will mention to dissipate any inner-circle spats. I don't know why they moved on from the fun banter of Dark Crusade, but it was a terrible mistake they never rectified until the final entry, which was far too late.

It is a fun game despite my complaints, but it's not a game I would have finished if not for sunk cost fallacy. I desperately wanted to not launch it anymore, but I was close enough to the end that I couldn't just leave it as is. Angel Gate is the real cinematic battle of the game, and then... It just keeps going for 5+ more missions? At a certain point, enough is enough.

It would be nice to live in a world where this was given more than a year and a half of development time. I don't understand the logic behind rushing this when Mass Effect 2 released the same year. Why not take the time to polish it and have back to back big sequel released, at the very least? It seems smarter even from a profits standpoint.

It's not a perfect game, but you already know that. Even the biggest fans can't deny it has issues. I actually liked the gameplay, and only had it weighed down by the notorious endless waves. If it only stopped at one wave of enemies per encounter, I'd have enjoyed my time even more.

But the character writing is fun, and if you're someone who pursues characters over all else then it's an ideal game as that is its strongest and most finished aspect.

I loooooove the concept of the plot centering solely on the lives of a group of misfits in a single city over a decade. That is something I wish more stories would focus on, and one I'd love to have seen Bioware revisit instead of returning to their usual story formula.

But the real star of the show: The friendship/rivalry system. Even now, in 2024, RPGs prefer the shallow, binary affection system over this. Why? It is so much more rewarding, with such replayability potential to see all story of a character, and different perspectives on their personality, without having to behave like a perfect cypher to attain enough Good Boy Points to prevent yourself from being locked out of their arc. If Trespasser, a far worse game and bigger failure, inspired the likes of Half-Life, why couldn't this system spiritually live on in other games? That's the real tragedy to me after playing this.

One of my absolute nostalgic favs. Played the Guard on hard (ha), and might be the first time I ever did a full campaign as IG.

Hard difficulty was hair pullingly frustrating, but in a way also made me think way more on the game and what I needed to immediately do instead of just turtling and death balling. Strongholds do NOT fuck around and instantly wiped me out as soon as I loaded the map the first few attempts against some factions. Even the higher strength normal maps had me restart multiple times to get a good start going, and sometimes making me realize rushing with a small force was better than sitting back waiting to amass a larger one. Even made me micro more than I'm used to when doing single player in an RTS, making my sentinels dance around because their building/vehicle kill potential was too good to be wasted and it would be a game over if they died.

The Risk campaign style makes for a fun gameplay loop, with some borderline cheating rewards as extra spice to keep painting the map fun. But honestly, it does get monotonous to essentially be playing skirmish mode with zero sense of tech progression. Being able to get your relic-level weapon on map 1 made me realize that I enjoy the sense of "Oh, this is the last level, so they're giving me all the really strong shit now" in RTS campaigns. But you already had two Dawn of Wars do that for you, so whatever, yknow? But I gotta admit, I enjoy a heavier narrative focus, and I realizing the single player was just a generic vs. AI with an intro and epilogue did make it lose a bit of magic for me. If I wasn't playing on hard and it kept my interest through the varying difficulty of the maps, this would have been my millionth "Okay I did one stronghold, I'm good" run.

Now, I gotta say though: fuck Necrons and their ability to just shut down any source of damage, and fuck the pathfinding. Oh my god playing a horde army like IG is miserable with how many tight corridors are in EVERY GODDAMN MAP. I had conga lines across the entire map unless I carefully microed each squad. Good lord it's somehow worse than Brood War dragoons. You made the Chaos stronghold have instakill AOE pulses with pathfinding like THIS? You fucking monsters. You knew what you were doing. The inquisition is on the way.

It has charm. It tries hard. Maybe not incredibly hard, but still. It tried.

My main problem with the game is honestly that as a parody of gridiron football, it really doesn't work. This is likely the fault of the source material, but no one who created these rules and even the aesthetic actually seems to know what it is besides that you can throw the ball and tackle people. It's not offensive to me that it doesn't care for what it's satirizing, but rather, I see the missed opportunity for things like overtime, an actual shift in offense/defense lineups, downs forcing you to get the ball down the field, etc. There was a lot more opportunity for actual gameplay mechanics to engage with rather than rolling. Even the units feel very very boring and homogenized, all able to pick up the ball and run with it, all able to tackle whoever they want. The only difference is some are better at it than others. It would have been more fun for me personally to have the more specialized roster roles of gridiron football rather than the generalized ability to do everything, some just do certain things better.

Now, the dice. Oh my god. It is pain. There feels to be very little strategy, more that you just hope your RNG goes well. Sometimes your characters decide to just not listen to you, which is always really fun in a video game. This would be fine for like, one off-shoot unit like a possessed daemonhost or something. But two people in your campaign roster with the loner trait ignoring rerolls, and your ogre hving a 83% chance to just not do anything for a turn? Oh, it's awful. I was losing my mind.

The lack of simulation also hurts a bit in blowout wins. It's very, very dull to be up by 5 with 3 turns left and the AI is playing like it can actually make a comeback. It'd be nice to just press a button to fast forward through all that.

The commentators are not nearly funny enough to be doing their same 3-lines-per-match dialogue on a constant loop for the 10-20 minutes the matches go for. But repetitive commentators are a common sports game problem, so hey, they got that part down.

It's not a bad game. But a frustrating, unpolished one. And this is just me, but I wish the singleplayer was a bit more involved than a generic human campaign. There is, technically, a story, but it never really feels like it. You're just playing a bunch of vs. AI matches with scripted events to change up the field of play every couple games. If nothing was written to make you feel like you were coaching an underdog sports story, then at least let me play more than one faction.

Skaven for life.

Really frustrating, really gorgeous, really fun. I wish the game valued depth over breadth. Act 3 completely falls apart under its own weight. Too many quests, too many unfulfilled promises of characters you saw the previous two acts, too many bugs, the pacing is horrendous while the previous two were as tight as can be. Endless waves to bring to mind Dragon Age 2, replacing difficulty with simple numbers to bring mild variety to how much running around talking to NPCs completely unrelated to the main plot you do. This isn't helped by the fact it remains so buggy that at certain points the game feels like it's actively fighting against you as you play it, with guards seeing through walls, NPCs running through walls and out of existence, characters hitting nothing mid-air and falling to their deaths, etc. They need to focus on these instead of removing homoeroticism.

But it is a beautiful game. The world feels good to be in, the characters are likeable and wonderfully voiced. The voice acting of the main cast in this are a testament to the beauty and legitimacy of the artform of voice acting. So much of this game is carried on the shoulders of these incredible performances, and they never falter.

My main complaint with them is they all feel rather edgeless. And Larian further sands off any remaining, because people felt hurt by Lae'zel's bluntness, or Wyll's narcissism. It's a shame the company is so insecure over their writing, and I'm sad to admit it makes me think less of it as a whole.

But I'll always be happy I played it. And there's not really more I'd want as a creator than for someone to feel that way about my work.

Tremendously gorgeous visuals and direction, beautiful performances by the two leads carrying the weight of acting out a wide array of personalities and emotions on their shoulders. The love and effort here is palpable.

The writing is so strong it handles the difficult premise of the entire story taking place in what is essentially three rooms. It retains such a deep sense of mystery and need to fulfill your curiosity, a longing to see what and who is waiting for you in the cabin this time.

The safety of stagnation vs. the painful, endless cycle of growth and rebuilding hit me hard. It stumbles a bit at the end but carries through, and even as the credits rolled I immediately went through it all again.

Does not hold up well for me tbh! I've learned as I've aged that I'm really not into the, "What if Tolkien, but with sexual violence and swears" sub-genre of fantasy. Story beats feel a lot like Game of Thrones fanfic. Someone in the writer's room was hyperfixated for sure.

Even as an isometric RPG fan, the combat feels lackluster and not very visceral. The skills feel impotent even as a powerful mage, and there's nothing that really stands out in the gameplay loop. The constant waves of Darkspawn in the third act certainly make it all wear very thin.

But the companions are very fun and memorable, and really, what else do we play Bioware games for? Maybe one of the strongest overall parties in their games. Everyone stands out and shines, with lots of fun ways to treat them either lovingly or cruelly. Rare Bioware game where being evil is actually fun.

Still will always be something I recommend, however. Dragon Age really holds a place in the gaming lexicon regardless of its age.