Recent reviews by newdamage

It's fun. If you've played earlier Diablo games, you should know what to expect. Choose a class, start the game and point > click > KILL BEASTIES.

To the developers credit, they've streamlined the game playing experience quite well. Inventory management and selling old equipment and leveling up are all easily handled in this iteration of the game. You can also retcon skill tree choices that haven't worked for your character build by paying a small penalty in gold.

Best parts for me remain the same as earlier editions: finding new loot and leveling up your character with new and more deadly skills.

Fun.

This game is simple fun. Just survive as long as you can. That's it.

The fun comes into play as you figure out HOW to survive. Want to become a buzz-saw, fireball-spewing, electrical storm? Sure, no problem! Want to toss holy-water bombs and surround yourself with a force field that melts undead minions at a touch? Your wish is my command.

So just grab your controller or keyboard and go survive for as long as you can. Even when you don't, it's so simple to just jump back in and try again!

To put it simply - I found this game to be fun. It's a large open world where you run around and battle robot animals (as well as other people from time to time). I mean, what can go wrong with that!

The robots are well designed and offer up a variety of challenges. I had to pivot to different strategies depending on the type of adversary. The weapons and skill system is well balanced. I never felt overpowered and even towards the very end of the game, my battle strategy was often: RUN AWAAAAAYYYYYY!!! There's very little button mashing and more than a little strategic planning involved when tackling some of the late game rob-animals.

The world is a mixed bag. I really liked the main story but a lot of the NPCs and side quests were pretty vanilla. The set-up at the start of the game took some patience to get through. If you're expecting storytelling and NPCs on the level of the Witcher series, you may be disappointed. But uncovering the secrets and reasons behind the world in Horizon was interesting, and at times it did some serious pulling on the heart strings.

I'd heartily recommend this to anyone who likes open-world, action/adventure oriented gaming with strong role playing elements.

At the end of the day, the Pathfinder system is a bit byzantine and the story in the game is run-of-the-mill. It's not great and it's not terrible, it's just not something I would recommend unless you're either: a fan of very challenging RPGS, or a big fan of Pathfinder 2 or Baldur's Gate style RPGs.

There's better balanced and easier to play games out there.

Okay, this is my third review revision and I am going to recommend the game. But in doing so, I definitely want to make clear that this game can be quite difficult, even on standard difficulty settings. It took me a long time to understand the many nuances of the game enough to successfully complete a campaign. Before that, I sunk a lot of hours into playing campaigns that I ultimately lost. More often than not, I play video games to unwind after a stressful day, so I'm not typically looking for a herculean challenge when booting a game up.

With all that said, once you do get the hang of things, the challenge becomes more entertaining, instead of the head banging against the keyboard thing it felt like during the first 40 or so hours of playtime.

To understand some of my concerns with the game, I left my original review below.

ORIGINAL REVIEW OF TW: WARHAMMER II
Problem with this game is that I just don't find it very fun. It has an annoying propensity to generate deathstacks, which essentially eliminate hours of planning on your part.

I've played the game with three different races and it pretty much works out the same way every time. Plan strategy, build up an army, run short of resources and then get crushed by a deathstack.

Just not a lot of fun. The point of a game is to provide a fun environment to solve challenges, not waste hours of your time on pointless challenges.

Update 7/20: I gave the game another shot, after loading Warhammer 1 and I found it's just not as much fun or balanced as the first game. If you like a fast-paced, chaotic-style strategy game, this could be for you. But the insane pace of advancement and death stacks just gets tiring after a point and it seems the point of the game eventually just becomes building a doomstack of your own so you can repeatedly auto resolve combat encounters in your favor against more numerous forces. Just not a ton of fun for me. Still a thumbs down.

Honestly, an atrocious rehash of the last X-com game for $60.

It's still the same chess match, but lacking the freshness of the last game but with all the frustrations that were inherent with the previous title -- good and bad.