Total War: Warhammer (2016) by Creative Assembly

I'm not a classic fan of the Total War series.

The only game I've played in the series was Rome II, which is referred to by many of the series' longtime fans as the overall worst game in the series. I actually liked it quite a bit, but just couldn't get around the various glitches, bugs, and jankiness and eventually stopped playing the game in frustration of having battles stolen from me by units glitching out and getting slaughtered.

I decided to pick up Warhammer after seeing it on sale last week for $15, and boy am I glad I gave the series another shot because I'm really enjoying this game.

I have no attachment whatsoever to the Warhammer world. I'm such a neophyte that I didn't even realize a fantasy element to this fiction existed; I thought for almost a year that this game was a Total War based on the Warhammer 40,000 variety because I didn't know there was anything else. I believe that coming from such ignorance allows me to judge the game purely based on its merits rather than viewing it through the rose-shaded goggles of a Warhammer fan.

The things that ruined my experience most in Rome II are completely removed from Warhammer. The bugginess of combat and the convoluted way that some of the strategic layer worked are gone, all refined and streamlined into a system that's very easy to understand when compared to that game. I find myself greatly enjoying battles now that they aren't plagued by units bugging out on walls or geometry or getting themselves killed when they don't do what I'm telling them. The scale is also far longer here. In Rome II, you can only have units be so powerful when at the end of the day they're all just, at most, human beings riding horses. In a fantasy setting, though, you can go balls-to-the-wall. You've got nearly indestructible emperors riding huge winged beasts, wizards that can blast apart entire enemy lines by themselves, giant cannons capable of raining destruction upon enemies. Which is great, because you're going to be fighting some pretty terrifying, giant monsters on the other side of the map. It adds an entirely new level of flavor to the Total War system. It's fantastic.

A big change that I love is that the leaders of armies are now single units with upgradeable equipment rather than elite groups of spearmen, cavalry, etc. There is truly nothing more bad-ass than watching the Emperor swoop in on a giant, man-eating Griffon to save one of your infantry units that is about to rout by smashing half of the enemy's and routing it almost instantly. I also like that there is no concept of passing time in this game, as it allows you to become more attached to your leaders rather than levelling them like in Rome II only to have them eventually die of old age even if they're your best units. It's wonderful and the light RPG leveling system adds a lot of attachment to units that could otherwise remain pretty generic.

The different factions in the game operate so differently from one another that it's almost unbelievable. The way Chaos and Greenskin factions work is so different from the humans and dwarfs that it may as well be another game. It's really astounding just how much meat is on the bone with this game. I never had much desire to play units other than the Empire or Bretonnia, but the sheer variance in their gameplay styles provide literally hundreds of hours for somebody who wants to try them all. That is an amazing amount of value considering I paid $15 for this game.

But the thing I love most about the game so far is the incredible tense feel it has. You're told pretty much from the beginning that there is a Chaos invasion coming and that you'd better prepare for it. As a Warhammer noob, I had no idea what that meant. But holy hell did I find out. Your first campaign in this game is pretty much doomed to fail, and I kind of love that. Rather than leaving me deflated and frustrated as I would have expected, it left me feeling challenged. Could I play again and, knowing what I know now, succeed? It also left me with a completely different feeling playing through a second time, like there was a dark shadow on the horizon, and I better get my crap together and be ready for it. It adds one more additional quirk to what is already a very competent turn-based strategy/real-time tactics game and makes it a truly great one in my opinion. I've seen some people complaining about the Chaos Invasion mechanic, asking for an option to turn it off, and I can see how it would be frustrating if you're a fan of the series and are looking for not much more than what you've gotten in the past. But for me, it led to an extremely tense, dread-inducing experience, like the pressure was on and I was the only one on the map who could deal with it. It feels very much like Mass Effect 2 on Insanity; a creeping sense of being completely outgunned and wondering how the hell you're going to deal with the onslaught that's coming your way, and desperately trying to make the most efficient moves possible to tech up as quickly as possible and equip yourself for the great challenge ahead.. From a narrative perspective, it feels remarkably like the oncoming invasion of the Others in Martin's ASOIAF fantasy series, or Sauron's and Saruman's war in Tolkien's LOTR series.

I found the Warhammer fiction to be really intriguing as well, and far more inspired by reality than I expected it to be. While Tolkien's Middle Earth is not tethered to anything but his own imagination, and Martin's Westeros is loosely inspired by British history, Warhammer seems to be clearly inspired by the early Holy Roman Empire and its struggle with the Viking invasions of Europe, at least from what I see in this game. I'm lukewarm on fantasy but a huge fan of historical fiction, and Warhammer piqued my interest enough to make me want to pick up a few Warhammer fantasy novels and see what they're like.

I do have some complaints about this game, though. Though not as bad as Rome II, it still runs somewhat poorly on my GTX 1080, with most battles hovering somewhere around 50 fps at 1440p. Additionally, this game has some of the grimiest DLC I've ever seen. Blood and gore has actually been removed from the base game to sell at a $3 price point, which is just as ridiculous as it sounds. I've got a feeling that this is more on the publisher side rather than the developer side, but whoever is responsible for this reprehensible practice should be ashamed of themselves. That said, a lot of the DLC is actually really good, as the additional factions freshen the game after a few playthroughs.

I really enjoy the game despite having no attachment to its fiction. It's deep technically, well-balanced, and a whole lot of fun, with a great setting and an excellent, tense campaign. And if I, someone no real interest in RTS or Warhammer, am enjoying the game this much, then I can confidently recommend it to pretty much anybody. This game is worth paying full price for in my opinion, but if you find it on sale for around $30, you'll be getting a steal. There are potentially hundreds of hours here, so if you're a fan of turn-based strategy, real-time tactics, or anything in between, pick this up without a second thought.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Playtime: 96 hours

What Remains of Edith Finch (2017) by Giant Sparrow

I haven't particularly liked most games lambasted as "walking simulators", such as Gone Home or Firewatch, but I've always been quick to note that that dislike doesn't stem from what seems to be inherent in this subgenre (short, story-focused, dialogue-heavy, and very light, unchallenging gameplay scenarios), but rather because these games put such an emphasis on story and often don't feature a good enough story to carry the game. I talked about this in my Firewatch review and felt the same way about Gone Home, though I didn't write a review for that one. What Remains of Edith Finch is remarkably similar to those two games, but I like it a whole lot more.

Edith Finch is notably different from those games in that I felt the story succeeded in carrying the effort and provides the emotional heft necessary to make the game worth playing. While the story in Gone Home had nowhere near the impact on me its writers seemed to expect, and the twist reveal and unsatisfying conclusion of Firewatch left me feeling cold and disappointed, Edith Finch's story hit like a ton of bricks to the gut. This is a story about the last surviving member of the Finch family, Edith, and her rumination upon the curse that has taken so many members of the family due to accidents, illnesses mental and physical, and violent crime. Experiencing the story felt very much like opening Pandora's box to me; there's a whole lot of sadness and the game's somber mood, supported by a great score and some lovely melancholy scenery, is uplifted by small moments of levity in which hope seems to shine through. This is not a happy story, and though I wasn't personally moved to tears, I could easily see how one would be.

I can't really analyze this much as a video game, as it is pretty light on gameplay mechanics and heavy on story, and I can't go into the story much without spoiling its impact. I will note one stupendously designed segment of the game during Lewis Finch's story, but I'd rather not describe it in detail because it should be experienced blind. But it's a wonderfully designed segment that tests coordination and does an extraordinary job of engrossing you in the young man's experience. The game is full of notable sequences like this that help set it apart from the games I mentioned earlier, where Gone Home had not much to note and Firewatch had you trekking over samey landscapes and performing busy-work tasks.

My only complaints are that the control can be a bit wonky in some of these unique sequences, and that the game ran surprisingly poorly on my i7 4790k / GTX 1080. I experienced quite a bit of stuttering and some odd frame drops for a title that, while beautifully constructed, is decidedly not a graphical powerhouse.

Edith Finch is a remarkable work of art that's wonderfully designed. thoughtfully constructed, with a poignant story focused on the hope that drives us to persevere through painful experience. It is quite short, though, so you're better off waiting for a sale than paying full price for this one. But if you're looking for a engaging story that will leave you thinking long after you've completed it, I would heartily recommend you give What Remains of Edith Finch a shot.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Playtime: 4 hours

Assassin's Creed Origins (2017) by Ubisoft

I have a really hard time actually selecting a star rating for this Assassin's Creed Origins.

There are some things it does so well that it's just a joy to play; the environments are stunningly well-crafted and the graphics are gorgeous. But there are also some features it's either completely missing or does so poorly it leaves me wanting to bang my head against the wall because they detract from what could have been such a better game. It also runs very shakily, with regular, ugly frame drops.
If you adore the series like me, then go ahead and pick this up. You'll get enough out of it to make it worth a purchase (as I feel I did). But if you're not a fan then skip Origins unless you love Egyptian history. This game won't convert you. And I'd go even further to say that if you're lukewarm on the series, you probably want to skip this, too. All it really does well is open world and soundtrack. So unless one of those two are something you love in a game, you're probably not going to like Origins enough to spend $60 on it.

I'm pretty stunned that there are a number of things this game actually does worse than its predecessor, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, which is a game that many consider to be one of the poorer entries in the series.

For starters, free climbing is an absolute mess in Assassin's Creed Origins. The reinvention they worked so hard on in Unity with the Free Climb Up and Free Climb Down buttons, and the perfection of that system into what I consider the smoothest free climbing in the series in Syndicate is completely gone from Origins, which instead has reverted to the absolutely terrible "One Button to Free Climb" system that birthed the frustrating moments of the worst game in the series (in my opinion), Assassin's Creed III. Get ready to randomly jump off walls into the middle of 8 enemies in a courtyard when you're trying to stealth, or to begin climbing up the wall next to you when you're just trying to reposition yourself in the middle of a fight. In addition to this, what you can climb is not really indicated visually anymore. Some buildings have clear grooves that are not usable as handles, and there are statues that have no handholds whatsoever that are easily scalable. Some spaces seem to far to jump but you can with ease, others seem clearly in reach but are not. It's completely arbitrary and leaves you feeling railroaded.

In addition to the poor free climbing, combat is a mess. Ubi has swiped Witcher 3's combat system without shame, except the smoothness of that game is completely gone, leaving you janky, unnatural, strangely timed animations, and dodges that happen inhumanly fast yet still get you hit by enemies because the hitboxes feel so imprecise. And you have no Signs or potions to deepen the experience. It feels weird, it looks bad, and it's shallow. It's not fun. I played through Witcher 3 on Death March and had a lot of fun, so it's not that I'm bad at video games. Origins saw me turn the difficulty to Easy almost immediately so I could just button mash and blast through the enemies and avoid the combat almost completely.

The stealth is not as good as Syndicate, which made great improvements such as using cover and specific designs in the environment to your advantage. It's not even as good as the stealthy side missions (saving child workers, etc) in Syndicate. It's the same stealth gameplay from Black Flag, which was fine... 4 years ago. Really disappointing if you love the stealth genre like I do and were happy with the improvements from Syndicate.

Another puzzling design choice is the complete removal of the Codex and the historical info blurbs that pop up as you're free roaming. One of my favorite things to do in an AC game is to free roam, hitting map markers, while reading the historical blurbs that pop up to provide improtant context. It's absurd that Ubi would completely remove them from this game for the first time. I'm a layman to Egyptian history and they could have provided some great context to some of these characters. It's great knowing that they're based on real, historical people who actually lived. That context is completely gone and the majority of these characters I'm meeting are way too thinly written without it. They're dry as paper and may as well be scarecrows with costumes. The story is mediocre in general. It's a generic revenge tale with some oddly inconsistent tone (Bayek seems awfully cheerful for having a young son who was brutally murdered less than a year ago) and peppered with some awful voice acting. Bayek and Aya's performers are great, but Layla's is awful, and a lot of the minor characters are inexcusably bad, too.

Okay so I'm kind of crapping all over the game here, but it does still do some things amazingly well. The addition of RPG elements, including ranked loot, really help push you towards exploring, too. At its best, Origins will keep you up all night hitting question marks on the map, levelling your character, getting new loot, and generally just progressing and clearing the map. The open world is spellbinding. There's such a variety in terrain -- desert, arid mountains, oases, cities, woods, etc -- That you never get tired of simply hopping on your camel or horse and exploring. There's verticality, water to dive in, tombs to raid, and caves to spelunk. And the variety in cities is excellent as well. Gone are the samey cities from past games, and back is the huge variance in cities such as between Florence and Venice in II. The Greek architecture of Alexandria, the old Egyptian setting of Memphis, and the varied small oasis towns and camps in between them keep everything fresh and you never feel tired of exploring. There was a point for about 50 hours when I was just free roaming, having a blast experiencing these great environments, and I seriously considered changing this review to positive. But roaming an open world can't carry a game by itself. So I eventually grew bored of hitting points of interest and continued Origins' story missions only to be forced into bad mission design, bad combat, badly designed stealth segments, and bad plot writing, and began hating this game all over again. A lot of this game reminds me of Assassin's Creed III, with all its poor mission design and bad story.

To be concise, the problem is that too often the great stuff in Origins is broken up by one of the negatives I mentioned earlier. I'll stealth through two or three bandit camps, hit points of interest, gain levels and hunt loot while progressing my character, taking in the quiet moments and enjoying the great soundtrack... Then I'll run into a free climbing snafu, or get bogged down in its clunky combat for 10 minutes, or play some drearily designed story mission that kills any desire to keep playing.

Despite all my hours logged currently standing at just over 100, I still haven't finished the game. I've cleared most of the map icons from free roaming, but the story, combat, stealth, and general mission design failed to engage me to such an extent that I have no desire to actually complete the game. I've already gotten what I wanted out of it: A great open world experience that I can take in at my own leisure. It's unfortunate that so much other frustration got in the way. And because of that I can't honestly recommend this game to any but the most hardcore Assassin's Creed fans. 

Origins is nowhere near as good as II, Brotherhood, or Black Flag, but still a more enjoyable experience than the putridly awful III and the below average Unity.

⭐⭐

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015) by CD Projekt Red

I try only to write reviews if I've got something to add about a game that I haven't seen many other reviewers already noting. I'll make an exception with Witcher 3.

This game is just as good as every media outlet and amateur reviewer says it is. It might actually be, all things considered, the best game I've ever played.

This game creates an experience that's far more than the sum of its parts. The excellent visuals and music, the lovely sound design, and the painstakingly well-crafted environments, NPCs, and quest and dialogue writing all combine to give this game a lived-in, realistic feel that very few games have been able to exhibit. Every corner of the world feels real. There's so much to experience across the several maps that you can simply wander from place to place for hours upon end, taking in all that there to experience. None of this is procedurally generated, either. It's all hand-crafted, and for those willing to look, there are some incredible things to find.

Early in the game, the player character Geralt meets a gung-ho historian off to chronicle the war. Geralt tells him not to go, that the warzone is a chaotic, anarchic wasteland and he'll be killed simply for the quality of his boots. The historian laughs it off, and offers to play a Gwent card game with Geralt. If Geralt wins, he can win a unique card from this NPC. Later in the game Geralt and Vesimir find themselves underneath a tree full of hanged civilians. Upon searching the foot of the tree, Geralt can find a half-finished history book, and the Gwent card the historian was carrying if it wasn't won from him earlier. The entire game is littered with moments like these; very subtle, missable details that only a minority of players will experience, yet CDPR has worked hard to place in the game anyway because they truly care about the depth of their world. I've played it through to completion several times and each time I find something new.

The quality of writing is so good that it will propel you to finish the game regardless of whether or not you like the combat. The characters are so likeable that you'll grow attached to them before too long, and the quality dialogue and voice acting makes the plot points hit that much harder. The unique thing about this game is not so much the quality of its writing, as there are quite a few games with solid writing, but the depth to which this quality of writing goes. From the main questline to the most minor sidequest, you can always expect to be pleasantly surprised. I was hooked by the very first monster hunting sidequest in White Orchard when you discover just why this Noonwraith is roaming around the well in this small village. Each NPC seems to have a lovingly crafted backstory of their own, and even the most minor fetch quest has its own wrinkle to make it interesting. The high quality of these quests is even more impactful in a world of Mass Effect Andromedas with their disposable, MMO inspired, procedurally generated fetch-quests. They don't make them like this anymore. This is a game in which the most minor sidequest you take on will take you nearly an hour, and it will make you stop and think about a dilemma, or a question it poses, through its quest writing. It's amazing just how much quality content the writing team put into this game. Nothing is disposable, everything in the game serves to garner an emotional reaction or ask an important question. It's packed to the brim with quality content to experience.

The most criticized aspect of this game is the combat, which I actually find to be quite enjoyable. I recently finished my first Death March playthrough and I found the challenge to be quite satisfying. I very rarely felt cheated, never had to cheese the game to get past a particularly difficult section. The difficulty was very well balanced and I felt a strong sense of accomplishment upon completion. The abilities scale very well, going from utility in the beginning to being overpowered within the game world if you focus solely on improving one aspect. Aard, my favorite ability, becomes an absolute world-wrecker if you continue to improve it, allowing you to force blast a small city of enemies at its highest levels. All other abilities are equally useful, and they allow you to build Geralt in whichever way you choose without feeling like you're missing out on anything. Very few RPGs are as balanced as this one is. The combat itself is enjoyable as well, requiring quick dodges and counters the way you would expect a witcher to fight. Each monster type is unique and requires its own strategies, allowing you to fall back into similar patterns whenever you face one type, but there are enough different types of monsters that you'll never face one type for long enough to get bored. To me, the humans were always the most challenging.

When it first released there was some talk of graphics downgrades, bugs, and obtuse UI. However CDPR have completely eliminated all of these issues with the most extensive round of post-release patching I've ever seen for a game. Every major bug I remember encountering has been eliminated from the game, it looks phenomenal and runs very well, and the UI flows like a dream whether you're using mouse and keyboard or a controller. In addition to this they added a ton of free DLC, so make sure you've got all that stuff set to download after you purchase the game.

To top all of this off, this game has the best DLC offerings I've ever seen in a video game, period. Better than Minerva's Den, better than Lair of the Shadow Broker. The writing in Hearts of Stone is the best I've ever seen in a DLC, and is the high point of the entire Witcher series in my opinion. And the sheer amount of content added in Blood and Wine is mind-boggling. If you buy Witcher 3, buy the Game of the Year edition without any second thoughts.

This is a game you'll put hundreds of hours into without regret. You'll be missing the characters long after you've finished it. Any time you hear a music track from the game on YouTube you'll immediately become nostalgic for the game. Witcher 3 is truly a towering achievement in every sense of the term, it's one of the very few games in which I can't find anything to criticize. It's an absolute masterpiece, and no matter what types of games you enjoy, you should buy it and give it a shot.

It might actually be better than everyone says.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Downloadable Content: Hearts of Stone (2015)

The most compelling aspect of this expansion is the characters it includes, the story it tells, and some of the art direction—the last of which is something far different from what you find in the main game.

The character of Gaunter O'Dimm introduces something that all Witcher games have lacked, in my opinion: A compelling antagonist! O'Dimm is a well-nuanced villain and extremely compelling for that fact. In addition to him, the character of Olgierd von Everec and his brother Vlodimir may be some of my favorites in the entire Witcher series. It's tough to say too much more without spoiling it, but the presence of these characters in addition to Shani from Witcher 1 made this content a joy to play through. Learning about their backstories kept me interested the whole way through—especially Olgierd's—and I think they're worth the price of admission alone.

AHHHH! Spooky.

In addition to this, the sheer artistic muscle of the design of some of these characters and locales—Iris von Everec, the Caretaker, and the von Everec estate—are all superb. They're so dark and horrifying in the way the main game was not, that I can only assume the artists were either let completely off their leashes, or some fresh blood was brought into the team specifically to help design some of this stuff. I never really found myself spooked during the main game (save for maybe the Rats in the Tower quest on Fyke Isle), simply because in most cases Geralt is so powerful and in-control of what's happening that I ended up sharing his confidence. Hearing his bewildered reaction to the horrifyingly creepy content of the von Everec Estate led me to having a similar reaction. I loved the experience of that.

It's not all rosy, though. The new enemies added by Hearts of Stone are often way too spongey. I'm not sure the answer to complaints about the main game being too easy was necessarily, "make them take more hits to kill". Some of the Fallen Knight enemies are a complete chore to whack through—even on lower difficulty levels—taking a dozen or more hits to kill and not offering any difference tactically from human enemies in the main game.

In addition to this, the new gear and runecrafting abilities are nearly completely ignorable and don't offer significant change to the way you build Geralt's gear loadout or abilities. This was later fixed in Blood and Wine with some really inspirational additions, but don't come into Hearts of Stone expecting a huge revamp.

Olgierd and Geralt finna drop the hottest hip-hop album of 2015

In the end, this is well worth playing just on the strength of its characters, its antagonist, the darkly compelling new locales it adds in the northern Novigrad area. Although it can be played after the conclusion of the main game, I feel it fits best when played during the main campaign, somewhere within the Novigrad storyline, before completing Triss's quests and before leaving for Skellige. The end of the game provides significant changes to the world depending on your choices during the endgame quests, and it can feel jarring to go directly from the world of the epilogue into Hearts of Stone, where things are set back to how they were before the conclusion of the game.

Hearts of Stone rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Downloadable Content: Blood and Wine (2016)

Blood and Wine provides an historic, beautiful send-off for one of the greatest games ever made

This is the best piece of downloadable content I've ever played, and it's not close.

Blood and Wine hearkens back to a time when developers released on-disc expansions rather than simply pieces of DLC—which are often disposable nowadays. There's an unfathomable amount of new content present here; a brand new map that's the equivalent in size and content of Velen/Novigrad and Skellige of the main game, making equal to around a third the size of the main game. There are also dozens of additional quests, an entirely new storyline filled with new characters, new ways to upgrade your skills, new gear, new monster types, a completely different setting, an all-new soundtrack. Blood and Wine probably could have been called Witcher 3.5 and that wouldn't have been an exaggeration.

Players who have experienced the main game can be confident that the level of storytelling in Blood and Wine's main quest is equal to that which you've come to expect from CD Projekt Red. It provides an exceptionally satisfying conclusion to Geralt's story, and introduces some new characters who are as interesting as you'd expect. That said, one of the most disappointing things about Blood and Wine is the drop in quality present in most side quests here when compared to the main game. By far the strongest aspect of Witcher 3 is the universally high quality of its side content. Nearly all of the side quests in the main game are extremely compelling and feature a high level of writing quality. Sadly, Blood and Wine falls a bit short of this standard. The Vintner Contracts are all disappointingly similar; speak with the vintner, take the contract, go kill a monster in a cave. There are disappointingly few narrative wrinkles added. Additionally, some of the side quests fall victim of the "Help 5 Stonecutters", or the "Complete 15 Camerlengo tasks" type of open world bloat that always serves to bore. While this drop in quality from the main game was disappointing, they're often still at least as satisfying as other open world games, and in most cases, more satisfying. Compared to other open world games, they're pretty good—but compared to Witcher 3's main game, they fall a bit short.

The lower quality of side quests aside, what I find most compelling about this expansion is the way in which it fixes some of the mechanical, gameplay side of things that I thought fell short in the main game. One of the things I love most about RPGs is how addictive it can be to continue exploring and unlocking higher, more devastating skills. In the main Witcher 3 game, this is more subtle; often the new skills you're unlocking progress Geralt in small ways, and you have such limited ability slots that you're forced to specialize. The most impactful change in Blood and Wine, for me personally, is how it blows up this subtlety and grants Geralt some extremely powerful changes in the form of Mutations via one of its side quests. These mutations unlock new, powerful modifications to Geralt's abilities, such as adding a freezing effect to the Aard spell, which is capable of devastating crowds with ice akin to a Northern Wind bomb in absurdly satisfying fashion. It also unlocks new ability slots, allowing you more diverse powers. These new abilities are very expensive, and require a large investment of Ability points and Greater mutagens, but they're worth it, and they gave me that strong addicted feeling that I get from RPGs with great skill progression systems that I felt was missing in the main Witcher game. It's by far the best skill system ever in a Witcher game, and it's on par with what I consider some of the best skill trees in gaming—something like Mass Effect 3, for example.

CD Projekt Red has also fixed a common complaint I have regarding Witcher gear. I never want to wear anything aside from Witcher swords and armor sets, because they seem appropriate narratively, look really cool, and have great ability buffs. However, in the main game, it's very easy to level to the point where they become obsolete. They've changed this with the Aerondight sword, which levels alongside you—a welcome change—and Grandmaster level Witcher gear, which provides significant bonuses when all items of the same set are equipped, for example; being able to add 3 different blade oils at once (Grandmaster Wolven gear), or strongly buffing the Quen spell (Grandmaster Ursine gear).

In addition to this kind of addictive stuff, you also acquire a villa, which you can pour money into to improve. Another thing I've loved in games ever since Monteriggioni in Assassin's Creed 2.

Tying this all together, of course, is the superb world and narrative design, giving you a stunning locale and populating it with vast, incredible stories to experience. The new enemy types are very fun to fight against, and seem to have more involved twists in fighting them than those of the main game—which were very simple—and those of the prior expansions, Hearts of Stone—which were too spongey to really be enjoyable to fight against. The Shaelmars are fun to bait and dodge, the new vampire units in the Alps and Bruxae provide ample challenge and force you to approach the fights tactically and prepare with oils and potions (at least on Blood and Broken Bones, my preferred difficulty level). And the main plot of the expansion takes some very unique twists and turns that I didn't expect, including one setting that was so superb and unexpected it literally knocked my socks off. They flew off my feet, at force. That happened. I swear.

It's really, really hard to find fault with this expansion. If you liked Witcher 3, it's an absolute must-play. I'd gladly pay $40 for it and not second-guess my decision—it's that good. At $20, it's an absolute steal, and if you can find it cheaper than that, then go for it. If Witcher 3 wasn't your thing, this isn't going to change your mind, as it's just more of what the main game did well along with a further refinement of the RPG elements that were already present.

Unlike Hearts of Stone, I'd wait until after the conclusion of the main game to play this one. It's essentially the final chapter in Geralt's story, and it'd feel weird playing some of this stuff before completing the events of the main game.

Blood and Wine rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Middle Earth: Shadow of War (2017) by Monolith Productions

Officially licensed games are typically not all that impressive due to publishers making a profit on the name alone if not the substance of the game. Shadow of Mordor was a surprisingly good game in that regard. It was released an underdog and turned out to incorporate some interesting new ideas in its nemesis system, some nice tidbits from Tolkien's legendarium to find, and some nice sound design. It provided me 40ish hours of decent entertainment until I grew bored of the grind towards the end. I still haven't finished the game. There just wasn't enough meat on that bone to keep me playing past the 40 hour mark.

When I first saw it previewed, Shadow of War really interested me in terms of its overarching metagame. But sadly there really isn't much new here despite the efforts at evolving the original game. There's a new system in which you're fighting a literal war between orc armies, but it's so bogged down by an abysmal UI and a grindfest of new orcs constantly flowing into areas that it really doesn't do anything to add fulfilling gameplay on top of the foundations set by the first game. There's a neat system of storming enemy forts but there's so much dry, boring legwork to do ahead of this that it feels like a grind almost immediately despite a lot of it being new to this game. You're supposed to be able to manage your own loyal orcs into attacking others and doing certain more subtle treacherous acts, but it's so difficult to keep track of what your orcs and your enemies traits are that the whole thing is just an obtuse clusterfuck and I ended up just saying screw it and killing the enemy orcs myself, which became tedious after a dozen or so hours. This is in large part due to the bad UI, but also because the core gameplay mechanics here just aren't all that much fun after you've done them 20 or 30 times -- Especially to those of us who've done this stuff in the first game. And this is a game that expects you to repeat them many, many more times than that.

There are some new areas this time around to differentiate the game from the same brown, crappy areas that permeated the first game outside of Nurnen. Minas Ithil, initially, was amazing! It was so cool seeing a city that I'd read about in Tolkiens works come to life. Sadly, there just isn't much substance to the areas outside of the initial feeling of, "hey, this is different!" One of my favorite things to do in open world games such as the Assassin's Creed series or Witcher 3 is to wander the open world, immersing myself in its environments, its denizens, and their daily lives while I collect all of the things listed on the map. The collectibles in this game don't do very much for you at all, and the world itself is unfortunately pretty bare, without much depth past orcs taking dumps in bushes or walking around aimlessly from point A to point B. Sure, there's a human, Gondorian city in the beginning. But beyond the visuals being different, ie. marble buildings and streets instead of muddy ground and wood huts, there isn't anything actually setting it apart from the Mordor areas of the first game. There don't seem to be any civilians, anywhere (where'd they all go? Minas Tirith?), and the soldiers that are present are either fighting, standing around, or behind the gate lying there injured. And that's just a very small portion of the map -- 80% of it is just a ton of orcs running around doing the same orc things they were doing in the first game. It doesn't feel like a real, lived-in space; it feels like a gamey arena in which you're supposed to fight orcs. This game suffers from what old open world games used to suffer from back when they all copying the GTA3 -- It's got a vast, wide open space peppered with absolutely nothing interesting aside from lots of bad guys to fight and some collectibles that, while they give you some interesting tidbits of information, do very little to make you want to chase them down otherwise.

A lot of this is hurt by the fact that the combat and stealth are almost wholly unchanged from the first game. If you loved the gameplay of Shadow of Mordor, you'll like this one. I was always lukewarm on the combat and stealth of the first game and was disappointed not to see it evolved upon in this game.

The story is laughably bad in most cases and forgettable in others. Most of the characters are cliche and there are some plot holes present that make me think any time spent in the writing room here was likely spent trying to finagle Tolkien's legendarium into justifying some of the odd writing moves here. For example, why did Shelob even want the "new ring" (ridiculous in its own right but whatever)? She had it for like a quarter of the game and didn't do a single thing with it but sit in her cave, presumably staring at the wall? Another character has been fighting orcs his entire life and knows the treachery they're capable of, yet still tries to make a deal with them that you can see going wrong from a hundred miles away. The entire thing is ridiculous and the prerendered cutscenes suck you right out of the moment anyway.

They've added some loot and some RPG elements to this one, which was very interesting to me in previews, but they're incredibly basic and don't even really warrant mentioning. The equipment is all very generic looking and the stats make the barest modicum of a difference. There are class tiers of equipment now, and the only stuff different enough to notice is the top tier stuff, but obtaining a full set of legendary gear requires so much grinding that it isn't even worth it. Perhaps if the top tier stuff was interesting in some way it might warrant the grinding in the way that a game like Diablo, Destiny, or Borderlands does, but this stuff doesn't. And all of the lower and middle tiers are not notably different. Sure, the middle tier stuff has some unique perks, but none of them make any real impact on the gameplay.

The loot system seems only to have served to make the balance of this game skew heavily towards grindiness. You've got to accomplish the same tedious stuff over and over but the loot perks and abilities give you very disappointing rewards for doing so. And what you're doing to gain experience and loot is not only uninteresting, but requires you to repeat the same activities so frequently. You can spend 4 hours grinding experience by taking out or recruiting enemy orcs, but they'll be replaced again by fresh orcs once time passes and you'll have to spend another 4 hours doing the same stuff over again with the new guys that have just come in, all while these activities and the setting get old and tiresome, while rewarding you with loot that you never see making an actual difference in gameplay. It loses its fun factor very quickly and this continues ad nauseam throughout the entire game.

It's really the pacing that's a problem here. Some of this stuff is fun initially, but not for the amount of repetitions that you're required to do to progress into conquering an area. Something else aside from this core gameplay loop of kill/recruit, then take fortresses needs to be present to drive you forward -- Whether it's an enticing plot, interesting characters with good dialogue, loot or new abilities that greatly increases your player character's power, a well-crafted game world you can lose yourself in, SOMETHING! And there's nothing here that does that. It's the same repetitive, dry task of killing/recruiting/ambushing orcs that leads to chasing loot that has no impact, upgrading your abilities not far past what they were in the first game, or progressing an unengaging story.

I didn't even notice the much-maligned microtransactions but I can't help wondering if they ruined the balance, because this is just not a fun game to play after a few hours. If you loved Shadow of Mordor, then sure, give this a shot. But after putting 40 hours into the first game I found that I grew tired of this one way before that.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 22 hours

XCOM 2 (2016) by Firaxis

XCOM 2's predecessor XCOM: Enemy Unknown was a fine enough game, though even with its expansion (Enemy Within) and mods such as The Long War, I often felt myself growing bored towards the latter half of the campaign. Snipers were too overpowered with the jet pack suit and high ground perks, the overarching strategy layer was tedious to manage for the majority of the game and non-existent once you got enough satellites up, and the UFO combat instances were pretty bare-bones and not very much fun. I often found myself getting into the game a bit before growing bored and putting it down. I've only ever finished it once despite my nearly 100-hour playtime on Steam, which does not include another 50-60 hours of playing time on the Xbox 360.

Most of this has been solved by XCOM 2's sheer added depth. The overarching strategy layer has been completely revamped from Enemy Unknown and now gives me an extreme sense of "just one more round" that I've gotten from some other games such as Firaxis' own Civilization series. XCOM 2 is incredibly addictive and weaves into tactical combat missions way more intuitively than the strategy layer in the first game ever did. UFO combat with your own fighters has been completely removed, replaced by UFOs that hunt your big airship and involve a specific mission type that I won't spoil because it's amazingly fun and legitimately surprised me when it first happened.

But more than anything, XCOM 2 features something I didn't realize was lacking in the first game until I played the second: A far more effective mise en scène and an immersive quality that the first game lacked. The first XCOM feels like a game. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but XCOM 2 really puts you into the cast's predicament in a way the first game does not. There's something about the maps and the added character depth that I think adds this feel, but I can't put my finger on it. Perhaps it's the way the maps sometimes will feature the overgrown ruins of gas stations, towns, abandoned family homes, and ruined cities, or how engineers and scientists now have names and all of the soldiers have written backstories. It really provides the feel of a grassroots guerrilla effort in a conquered world, which was a much more interesting premise to me than the first game's invasion defense. The story is also more interesting, with a few more unique twists than I would have expected.

Storytelling, though, is obviously not this game's forte. The strategy layer is much, much improved from the first game, and though the tactical combat and RPG management system of both the Avenger (your aforementioned giant airship) and your troops and equipment is mostly unchanged save for a lot of added depth. Weapon mods have been introduced and there is now a new, semi-random way of developing the most powerful mods and utility items for your troops, which helps to add to the addictiveness of the strategy layer since you're constantly looking things to do in order to give your engineers time to develop the next shiny new toy for your troops to use. Armor types are more balanced and include flavor from the mechanized units introduced in Enemy Within. Psi Operatives have been completed retooled with their own twist that I think works incredibly well, certainly much better than the first game. The entirety of squad management has been retooled and streamlined.

The strategy layer and the tactical combat feature an added emphasis on creating tension, and while this works well and feels natural for the strategy layer, it sometimes comes off as forced with clumsily inserted mission timers in the tactical missions themselves. I don't mind the occasional timer, but I feel it could have been better implemented than just "blow up this common-looking piece of alien machinery before the timer ends" missions. The absurdly common mission timers served to keep me from buying the game for nearly a full year-and-a-half after its release before I finally found it on sale for ~$20, and shortly after some vanilla gameplay I ended up downloading a mod that removed them entirely. I would have greatly preferred having mission timers for much fewer encounters, perhaps only for one or two specific mission types. It feels like a crutch, like somebody at the top decided the tactical missions needed added urgency in order to create tension, and the people designing the missions either couldn't think of a good enough game mode to do this, or didn't have the time to do it.

The game looks just like an improved version of the initial XCOM, with some really nice lighting and particle effects. Unfortunately it also runs surprisingly poorly. I'm playing a nearly 2-year old game on a GTX 1080, and I'm experiencing regular dips down to around 30 fps when I'm zoomed out, or there's a lot of fog on the screen. That's pretty inexcusable for a turn-based tactical game like XCOM, and it's really disappointing that the team couldn't have optimized it better. It doesn't affect gameplay (which at this point is far less buggy than the original XCOM; I haven't seen even half the glitches in one full XCOM 2 campaign as I did in even half of a campaign of Enemy Unknown), but is quite an eyesore.

Another complaint I have is regarding the game's soundtrack. Michael McCann (of Deus Ex Human Revolution fame) did the first game's score, and it was fantastic. It lent the game a brooding, scary feel that the otherwise cartoony art design would not have imparted, and that feel is sorely missed in XCOM 2. The score here is utterly forgettable; the same cheesy, uplifting Hollywood tunes seem to play whenever you enter combat. It takes away the feeling that this is guerilla warfare against a technologically superior enemy that is committing various atrocities against your species, that you are hopeless outgunned and scratching and clawing at an enemy that has its boot on your throat. Instead it makes the game feel like a triumphant, heroic Hollywood action film; that you're destined to win in glorious combat. It clashes directly with the games maps, which feature ruined and decrepit homes and the absolute destruction of the human way of life, replaced with a polished cities that just seem off. It fails to impart the sense of an epic struggle, in which many of your own troops will die in the missions that you will not always succeed in. After about 15 hours I simply muted the music in the settings and resigned myself to getting by on just the ambient sound design of the tactical levels and the Avenger instead, which is really quite good compared to the stale, monotonously average soundtrack. At its best this soundtrack is a poor imitation of McCann's previous work, at its worst it's an overly loud cacophony, egregiously clashing with the tone the rest of the game tries to impart. I should note that the music is not bad, it's actually quite good, and composer Tim Wynn is obviously a talented man. I just feel that not only did it not fit the game, it actively dampened my experience. Perhaps this is due to the direction given to Wynn and not the man himself.

These criticisms are really not a big deal, though. XCOM 2 does not strive to be an artistic game, and so it probably should not be judged as one. It did, however, succeeded in grabbing me in a way that I rarely felt from XCOM: Enemy Unknown and that only the best of video games seems to do. It had me fiending for just one more scan, one more mission, one more piece of tech researched. It had me playing until midnight on a work night, skipping my runs and workouts to play for just a few more hours. And it held me throughout without fizzling out and becoming tedious. It's a great game and there is a serious dearth of good tactical RPGs on the market these days. Jake Solomon and Firaxis have succeeded in making a game that you can play forever a la Civilization.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Playtime: 127 hours

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen (DLC)

So I really liked vanilla XCOM 2. I thought it added quite a bit and fixed some of the issues I had with Enemy Unknown and its expansion Enemy Within.

It's amazing how much War of the Chosen has done the same with XCOM 2. This is definitely a full-blown expansion and not just a DLC. Hell, it's maybe even more than that; potentially something between an expansion and a full blown sequel. It's clear that a lot of the ideas here were probably once potentially part of what they wanted to do with XCOM 3. So much content and depth has been added to the existing systems within XCOM 2 that they could easily have handled the bulk of a sequel if given time to pad out the narrative in a full development cycle.

I've seen a lot of people gripe about the $40 price tag, but to summarize this really quickly: If you liked vanilla XCOM 2 as much as I did, War of the Chosen is well worth that price. Pick it up now, no need to read the rest of this review. It's just a way deeper, way more polished version of vanilla XCOM 2.

Most noticeable is that there's an entirely new narrative layer added to the game. Vanilla XCOM 2 was somewhat sparse when it came to the main narrative, but I didn't find that too much of a drawback because I enjoyed the gameplay in both the strategical and tactical layers so much. Now there are several new enemies, an entirely new enemy type to add to Advent and Aliens, and several new allied resistance units that all play a role in this narrative. It pads out the game and adds a ton of mileage without adversely affecting the pace. In fact, the pace actually feels better now. In vanilla XCOM 2 I felt the game begin to drag towards the end. That's now been alleviated by having more to do. And these new characters and factions are all superbly well-written and intriguing, enough that I'd say they're more compelling than anything in the base game. The hero units they offer and the enemies (clearly inspired by Shadow of Mordor's nemesis system) all serve to scale up the balance as well. The strongest units in the game, both allied and enemy, are now nearly twice as strong as the strongest enemy units in the base game could have become. No exaggeration. It's an absolute blast akin to getting Orlandu into your squad in Final Fantasy Tactics... Except that now there are 3 enemy Orlandus to deal with as well. I love it.

Aside from this big stuff, there are also some great quality of life and depth changes to the game's foundation. Soldiers now bond with one another and gain perks when together on a mission, there's a newly revamped perk system with ability points you gain during combat a la Final Fantasy Tactics' JP, the UI has been improved, structure building has been rebalanced and streamlined, there are now hero units to recruit, units become fatigued and need to rest if you send them on too many missions, difficulty can be altered (including lengthening the controversial mission timers from the vanilla game)... And probably a ton more little things that I'm forgetting. I notice new things constantly every time I play, it's really amazing the work Firaxis has done in less than two years. It feels like they took XCOM 2 off the shelf, thought "we can make this game way better", worked on it for a couple of years, and rereleased it as a better version of itself.

The game also runs way better now, too. Some have debated the grossness of locking optimization behind a $40 expansion, and it is pretty grimy, but I felt the need to touch on that in this review. I no longer see the frame drops to 25-30 fps that I did in the vanilla game, and although bugs have occurred with more frequency than during my vanilla campaign, I chalk that up to XCOM 2 having nearly 2 years of patching and this expansion being less than a month old.

If you're new to XCOM 2 but like turn-based tactics games, you should begin by playing the vanilla game to completion first. War of the Chosen adds so much that it might be overwhelming to deal with on a first playthrough. And the vanilla game is good enough by itself to warrant a purchase and playthrough. And that way you'll come to appreciate War of the Chosen so much more for all of the great content it adds.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Domina (2017) by DolphinBarn

What seems like a relatively charming pixel art management sim with a great soundtrack and interesting premise ultimately gives way to intense frustration.

As a history major with a focus on Roman Civ I was really ready to like this game, and I did... Until I ended up watching fights and having my seemingly superior gladiators get their asses kicked in fights that they should have been winning. Look, it's no problem if that happens, fine. The problem is that there's no feedback whatsoever as to why this occurs. The action happens so quickly that you're left scratching your head as to why what happened occurred.

So after bumbling through blindly for my first couple of games I decided to consult some guides to try and figure out what the hell was actually going on during the fights. Turns out... There really aren't any to be had. There are guides out there that will tell you what upgrades to purchase, who to employ, etc. But nothing about what stats guide gladiators and how they interact with other types during battles. So maybe nobody actually knows? Maybe the stats play out somehow, or different types of gladiators beat other types in a rock-paper-scissors style triangle, but if there was some kind of framework guiding such interactions then I was blind to it. It seemed like the two sets of AI simply ran at each other until one randomly died. I couldn't tell whether superior equipment was the cause, or a stat like aggression or evasion came out on top. I'm not asking for the game to hold my hand, I'm asking for the game to be a game and allow me to learn and improve by having its underlying systems be identifiable. They are not, and as a result, it just feels cheap and left up to chance no matter what you do in your gladiator school, even on the easiest difficulty setting.

I ended up following a guide which said to increase your gladiators' AI all the way via meditation and hire key employees and take key skills, so I did that, yet the same thing kept happening. In some fights my gladiators would absolutely paste the competition, in others they'd just be completely ineffective and die. I had one specific instance where one of my gladiators was absolutely crushing the competition, taking minimal damage and 3-shotting enemy gladiators. Then, abruptly, against an enemy gladiator with seemingly inferior statistics, he got absolutely starched and killed. I still don't have a clue why.

After several more fights and continuing to analyze the stats to each gladiator I still had no clue whatsoever as to why this was occurring, so I eventually dropped the game in frustration and I can confidently say I won't be going back without a major overhaul to the underlying systems that guide the actual fights.

Maybe I'm just an idiot, but the entire thing seems broken to me.

⭐

Playtime: 2 hours

Firewatch (2016) by Campo Santo

I'm a huge fan of story-driven, atmospheric experiences and this is a game I really, really wanted to like.

I was immediately intrigued by the prologue, which seems a simple enough choose-your-own-adventure type portion, but does very well to invest you in your player character, Henry. After doing some research I discovered this game was made by the same people responsible for The Walking Dead Season 1, which I adored and consider one of the best written games I've played. Walking Dead Season 1 had characters that you ended up growing incredibly attached to, and the same ended up being true of Firewatch. Unfortunately, that did just enough to get me to finish the game, because I was disappointed with pretty much every other aspect of Firewatch, including the story's resolution.

Firewatch looks really good for an indie, but it didn't run so great on my system (i7 4790, gtx 1080, 16gb RAM). I would experience pretty regular frame drops through my nearly 6 hours of play. And while the game looks very good, I never felt much drive to explore after the first couple of hours simply because there just isn't much to find. Aside from some notes in caches, I never found anything more interesting than a slightly larger tree or a nice viewpoint, and soon I began avoiding any exploration altogether because the characters and the dialogue had grabbed me so much. Any actual "gameplay" (ie. "walk here and then click the radio for a dialogue option") became a chore, a barrier behind which the game would reward me with some more bits of dialogue from these two characters that I had really grown attached to. There was a specific moment about 2-3 hours into the game where I was informed that I had to cross the entire map in order to find somebody to help me through a fence, and I came very close to just quitting because I almost didn't feel driven enough to take the next step. That's how dry and unfulfilling I felt the actual gameplay was in Firewatch. But I ended up doing it anyway just to hear more of Henry's and Delilah's story. I was fully invested in these two characters.

And that's really saying something considering how short this game is. The ability of these writers and the voice cast to grab me so quickly is pretty impressive now. The big problem I had with this game is simply that nothing else even came close to being as compelling as the relationship between Henry and Delilah. There's an overarching mystery that drives the plot forward, but once you actually begin to uncover what's going on it just felt too hokey, too clumsy, and just not believable enough despite being pretty grounded in reality. One of my issues with this mystery was that I simply wasn't feeling the isolated paranoia that my avatar within the game, Henry, seemed to be feeling. His actor seemed close to completely losing it, whereas I was just making my way to the next task and hoping for some interesting Delilah dialogue. The game failed to impart any sort of anxiety due to the setting and the isolation, possibly because it was so short, or that it had to skip days in order to keep things interesting due to a lack of any real gameplay systems outside of walking to an area indicated to you and pushing a button, or reporting back to Delilah via your radio.

Firewatch reminds me a lot of Gone Home. Both games offer an interesting setting and premise with some well-written characters, both try to impart a feeling of creepiness which succeeds at first but both ultimately fails to amount to anything substantial and becomes overly hokey after just a couple of hours. Additionally, the resolution of both games' mysteries are wholly unsatisfying, and the endings in general are not very good. Firewatch, in particular, really dropped the ball and left me feeling unfulfilled; like I had wasted my time despite really enjoying the characters and dialogue. It's the type of experience that will you have you saying, "Really? That's it!?" as the credits roll. If the ending had been a fulfilling conclusion for these two characters then I believe I'd have recommended this game just on that strength alone. But squandering the story of two compelling characters left a sour taste in my mouth, and for that reason I can't recommend it to others until it begins selling at a sub-$5 price point.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 6 hours