Recent reviews by VxMxPx

I'm going to recommend this because I love Age of Empires II. I've bought all the expansions and enjoyed them all. However, this one feels a bit disappointing. At times, it plays more like an RPG than an RTS. There are many scripted events, and the game really pushes you to strictly follow its story, leaving little room to find your own way.

There are also a lot of water missions, which I don’t enjoy. Many missions either don’t let you build a base or severely limit how much you can. Too often, the gameplay leans toward defeating waves of enemies for loot, which feels more like a different game entirely—and that’s sad.

I love single-player mode, and in the past, I felt the balance was about 20% scripted events and 80% player-driven decisions on how to approach problems. Here, it feels inverted—80% scripted "on-rails" gameplay and only 20% open for the player to solve creatively. That’s a real shame.

It's AOE1:DE in AOE2:DE engine. You'll get wall doors and some other improvements, the rest feel the same, including sometimes frustrating AI.

I'm enjoy it overall, I'm just very sad they didn't include all campaigns from original AOE.

Pros:
- It looks great,
- 2d movement again, yay,
- fun,
- puzzles are interesting.

Cons:
- the story is not so engaging,
- the fights are really unplayable - being locked on one screen, they seems out of place,
- the cursor is too small on 4k screen, making aiming in fight scenes really hard.

Just amazing. I wish it would be longer though. But what a great and unique experience...

Wasted waaay too much time on this.

"Stranded is a minimalist adventure game..." NO. It's not a game. It's not an adventure game. I do not know what is it, It could be an interactive story, if there would be any story. It's just couple of 8bit backgrounds and kind of a nice soundtrack. Yes, you can move around, that's pretty much all you can do, and the "game" is VERY bad even at that. Character is moving too slow, and controls in general feels odd. It's hard to imagine someone can produce, and have a courage to sell such half-baked product.

I wouldn't be angry if a game would be offered as what it is. But to mention Stanley Kubrick and a minimalist adventure game, for something that basically feels like very much unfinished, non-even-a-tech-demo of a game, it's just offensive. I have feeling something went very wrong at a very early stage of development and someone said: "can't we use just what we have and brand it as some fabulous Zen, minimalistic adventure game?" Sure, why not. It's not a question of money (I've paid something like 5eur + got it as a part of one bundle), it's a question of honesty. I felt cheated, and by the amount of negative reviews here, I see I'm not the only one.