Is it just me, or has the AoE, once the flagship of the RTS genre, deteriorated into boring mediocrity.

(a) Graphics-wise, this is a huge step backward. I'm not even talking about realism: the variety of units, the details on buildings, the terrain, everything has been simplified to a point where I feel I'm playing a f2p mobile game.

(b) The gameplay of the campaign is unbearably boring. The idea of having history lessons followed by an actual campaign mission is great in itself. But the game simply doesn't deliver. You show the vast and marvelous castles of Dover or York in the movie, and then in the game I end up seeing a frigging rectangular wooden wall with a single gate. WTF?

(c) The fact that you can no longer use hotkeys for fast building -- is insanely uncomfortable. I mean, I get it, they are trying to go in the MOBA direction with fast gameplay, quick attacks, no time to properly develop etc. But classical AoE was just not about it. People who play DOTA/WoW are not gonna appreciate this genre.

So ultimately, is this a good game? It's fine, if you're really looking for a fast-paced f2p-like RTS, and also wanna learn a few things about the early medieval history. But, clearly, I would rather recommend something like Ancestors Legacy which is what the AoE 4 should have ideally been like.

Very polished graphics and physics, fine-tuned and interesting battle and traversal mechanics. This I think is exactly what you expect from a top-notch triple-A title. The plot at times felt a bit too simplistic and close to naive, but it had a sort of cute family-friendly charm to it as well. The map feels underutilized, and I think many more side missions could have been added. But overall, a solid 4/5 for pretty much the experience you expect from Marvel's Spider-Man lore.

UPD: after playing the original one, this one feels more like a DLC, than a full sequel. In terms of the script, and the whole immersion experience, in the transition from the friendly neighbor Spider-Man to an-even-more-friendly Miles Morales I think the game lost something.

Spider-Man character lost its awkward charisma, swapping it with the Disney-like childish naivete of Miles Morales. Police radio feed now became an app and calls from his friend. Lots of the turning points in the plot are over-exaggerated, while others are hardly explained (the whole background and the purpose of the Underground are unclear and cheesy, or the Venom power that Miles got is... well... just random). Yeah... I guess I'm not the target audience for this game. Still could work as a cute DLC for the younger audience.

While the attempt was grandiose, the game was just ok, and in that discrepancy lies a strong sense of withdrawal.

I know, I know... When you're the studio behind the Dishonored and Prey, stakes are high and risks are often not worth taking. But Arkane had the balls to take it, and for that, they have my utter respect. The game has a very unusual and peculiar concept, with strong story-driven gameplay which plays with the concept of causality in the quasi-open world framework, making it the central driver. In combination with Tarantino-esque atom-punk aesthetics, the game is a very solid attempt to create a quite interesting framework. That being said, after being left with a post-completion aftertaste for some time, I must admit that the feeling of confusion and incompleteness is all I am left with.

This game is reminiscent of a half-drunk uncle during a family gathering who constantly makes barely appropriate outdated jokes and winks and elbows everyone around for recognition: "Ha ha ha, got it?"

Yes, we get it. And, no, we don't care.

The game is very incoherent and inconsistent, both in terms of its narrative and the gameplay overall. Breaking the fourth wall is easy. Doing it in an original and interesting way for the player to keep their attention and not break the immersion is borderline impossible. I think this was the game's biggest mistake, which makes it stand out, but not in the best light.

With only a few solid and entertaining missions, the game fails at its core, with the narrative lacking any thread tying the pieces together. Sure, there were some very cute references (although many of them might be too subtle for people outside the post-Soviet enclave). But, again, players are not your distant nephew who are forced to seat through the nonsensical family gathering meal pretending to care about the non-existent narrative or express their fake excitement about the incoherent gameplay.

And exactly this, not the lousy humor, is what sets the game apart from titles like Subnautica, Raft, and Stranded Deep. The game fails to give me a reason to care about it and falls miserably short of convincing me to laugh at its jokes.

Metro Exodus is an incredibly authentic compilation of the best and the worst of the post-soviet era embedded in the post-apocalyptic shell which amplifies both extremes.
I might be biased, because I played with the original (Russian) voiceover, and I painfully well recognized many of the archetypes developers encoded in the plot. The plot and the characters are very strong and solidly executed. They are distinct, rich, they are enjoyable to interact with, and they evolve throughout the script.
The combat mechanic is actually quite enjoyable, finding the perfect balance between the open-world freedom of exploration and fps. The stealth is perhaps the least refined part of the gameplay, but its clumsiness is compensated by the very subtle morality meter, which has a very direct impact on the outcome of the game. In no other game I had so much care to not blow my stealth cover to not have to hurt anyone.
Overall, this is easily the best open-world fps I have played in quite a while!

The Two Colonels is the condensation of the darkest and the most disturbing aspects of the Metro: Exodus, extracted into a distinct tragic story, where the ending was pretty much predefined. It is this feeling of entrapment, both in terms of the setting (radiation-contaminated ruins of Novosibirsk) and the predestined storyline that makes the overall narrative so powerful and profound. I am not a huge fan of horror shooters, so was not too excited about the gameplay, but what made me through the few hours of this DLC, was exactly the contagious feeling of duty and determination that Col. Khlebnikov radiated (no pun intended) through the lens of Col. Melnikov.

The overall narrative of the game is well-designed, and for the most part, the decision-making and the consequences of those decisions are very direct. In very few games have I spent this much time weighting my dialogue choices and analyzing the complex political and sociological network built under the hood.

The game is nonetheless quite raw, especially for the second one from the same studio in the same genre. The X-com-esque combat mechanics is not well balanced, with a lot of the abilities and skills being overwhelmingly useless. In most cases, relying on raw DMG per hit was good enough with the abundantly easily accessible tactical weapons doing the mess-cleanup job afterwards. Unfortunately, close turn-based combat is the strongest part of the game. The exploration aspect (both on the world map and in rather compact local maps) is boringly useless, while the legion skirmishes leave an impression of purely cosmetic additions, rather than the integral part of the game advanced which they absolutely should have been.

Despite the narrative and the overall plot being quite captivating and borderline addictive, the characters were devastatingly flat, cartoonish, and unlikeable. In other words, this game really is a ~50hr long history/ethics lesson, where the actual gaming and interactivity component was pretty much left out.

“Surviving the Aftermath” is a very solid SimCity-esque settlement builder in a post-apocalyptic setting.

For the most part of the game, the eco is incredibly well-balanced, with literally every building and each spent resource (especially in early game) having a massive impact moving forward. The game gives some handles to progress from very detailed micro management at the start to more or less a passive management. Towards the end of the game, however, with an established self-sustaining eco, the gameplay becomes progressively more boring.

Another important caveat, is the resource management (putting different sources into different storage buildings): while the game gives some handle on that, the current mechanic is very inconvenient. I inevitably ended up overfilling some of my storage containers, while the others remained more or less empty. Interaction with the external world (outside the main settlement) is also quite boring most of the time.

The limitation of the things you can do kind of reminds me of a mid-tier board game, and I think this aspect could have been massively improved (see Wasteland, Expeditions: Rome, etc).

That being said, the actual settlement planning and building part, which is probably what the game was targeted towards, is very solid. So I definitely recommend this game.

While the dark lore of the game is captivating and very promising at the start, the gameplay is really raw and sometimes even boring. In fact, the outer shell of aesthetics and storyline is really the only selling point of the game, with its core being rather mediocre.

Exchanging items between the settlers is horribly ineffective, task scheduling often doesn't work as expected. Scouts... what's the point in them anyway (especially later in the game)? Progression of the settlers is also something I didn't quite understand. They sometimes age during one scenario, then rejuvenate in the next scenario. Some of them disappear from the selection menu, so it's really hard (and not very rewarding) to stick to uping a solid core.

Hopefully, the idea can be developed further into a more robust gameplay. For now, I would really not recommend this game, unless you're really into the genre.