Lucius

 

I knew nothing about Lucius other than the box art and the fact that its a cheap game that was tagged as Horror on the Steam store. From the box art and small glance at the store page it seems like its one of those tropes in horror where the child is actually the spawn of Satan or whatever and has magical powers to haunt people nearby.

As I played the first few chapters thats pretty much what Lucius is. The game starts off with you in a Kitchen and already in the first 60 seconds you're being directed to lock a lady in the storage freezer and make her freeze to death. So yes, this is a game all about being evil and assassinating people. Though, the game isn't a simple 'walking simulator'. I mean it actually has a few mechancis up its sleeve to try to incorporate 'gameplay'. At the start, you dont have any abilities. But it does play like some kind of classic Point & Click adventure game, where you walk around and look for objects in the enviornment to pickup and use somewhere else, or Combine in the inventory. The first task is to pickup a Lock and put it on the freezr, triggering one of many gruesome, entertaining death scene cutscenes. The cutscenes are probably the best thing about this game, they're all creative, very graphic, outrageous, silly, and rewatchable. The little closeups on the main characters face, Lucius, are equally funny and disturbing. He always has this stupid blank expression. Later on, the death scenes get more and more clever and insane. Crushing a guys head with a piano via telekenesis, Sawing someones head in half at a butchering area, Controlling peoples minds to commit suicide via guns or jumping off balconies, even a reference to the movie American Psycho, with the level called American Schizophrenic and you mind control a husband to murder his wife with a Nailgun. Awesome.

The game solely takes place in a massive sprawling mansion which feels more like a giant hotel or something. Its more like 3 mansions stitched together, with a big outdoors courtyard, multiple stories, and tons of bedrooms. The actual graphics and architecture of this place is very well done, the layout of the house  and the old Victorian style decorations and aristocratic vibe of the place is impressive, its like it would be a great place to have a Resident Evil game or something. It also made me think about how interesting it would be to live in a place like this. Like you could model a real house after this place and it would come together in a tangible way in real life because the architectural design in the game is so well done. Each room is distinct enough to where after a few hours you can memorize the whole place, theres lots of landmarks, especially old classical paintings which give the mansion a creepy vibe but also help you remember where you are and not feel like a maze, of course you have a map which is pretty basic but at the start of each mission atleast tells you where your Victim is with a green line and has some markings on it for basic places like the Garage, library, kitchen and so on. so even though the mansion is huge its not like this awful maze where everything is copy pasted without personality. Theres memorable rooms like the creep porno room with a peephole to the bathroom in the wall behind a poster, theres a religious room filled with crosses (which are a gameplay mechanic that harm Lucius's powers until you flip them upside down, a really nice touch I must say)

Unfortunately, thats about where the good things I have to say about the game end. The problem with Lucius is just all around terrible game design, bugs, jank, bad coding, bad execution. The concepts and ideas are fine. The game is almost like a kind of Hitman game where you have to go around and solve puzzles and cleverly take out your victims from the shadows. It doesn't really exceed in giving you this feeling or putting you in that perspective. All it does is give you an exercise in frustration and like the game saying "Fuck you" if you dare try to think of  anything logical or reasonable about the task at hand. I wouldn't even call this a horror game, really. It's a straight up Puzzle game where there is always one tiny rigid criteria of how you need to progress the missions, like finding a needle in a haystack, or worse, a screw in a haystack. This has straight up has nonsensical game design that actively fucks with you or works against you. For instance, there are optional objectives, aptly named Chores. Stuff like going around picking up laundry, brush your teeth, move boxes etc, or even a simple task like taking out the garbage turns into this ardious frustrating process. You eventually find the trash under the kitchen sink, ok where the fuck do you take it out? The mansion is so huge so of course you just waste your time walking around for 30 minutes with a trash bag in your hands until you eventually find the ONE dumpster you need to put it in to progress. Ok so anyway, doing these chores unlocks random shit, first you get a Ouja board, which spawns in your bedroom. This gives you one clue per mission, usually in the form of a riddle , and its one of the only useful things in the game. The next reward you get from doing optional chores, is a Music Box. Well what the hell does this thing do? The description in the inventory says "It will help you find what  you are looking for"  Great. It has 6 uses per mission. So you use the thing, and your whole screen flashes red for like 5 seconds then it just stops. How the hell is that useful?  It's not, unless youre already standing in the exact room you need to be in - But heres the kicker, even then it doesn't  necessarily help. How it's supposed to work is it highlights objects in the enviornment which are crucial to progress, or points arrows at things you need to interact with. The PROBLEM is that the game design/coding is so fucked up and lazy or half baked that it can point to objects or areas that are from 10 chapters in the future (or past), completely confusing the shit out of you and even actively fucking you over to the point of complete confusion and frustration. It's like, I don't know, imagine youre playing Skyrim and 3 levels in you find an item that says "Help you progress your current quest!" and when you use it, it gives you every single objective marker in the game at the same time. What the fuck is that? Awful. I didn't even realize it was doing this until like halfway through the game, thereby completely wasting my time and confusing me. When I realized how badly programmed or designed this Music Box shit is, I basically just stopped using it until I was absolutely sure It wasnt pointing at irrelevant shit from some random chapter I'm not even on. It's like, did they even play test this? Was it intentional? Why would anyone design it this way. It just seems like a really lazy bug to be honest,  I don't see how anyone could do this on purpose.

That's not even the start of the annyoing shit in the game either. At first I was thinking the game was promising, the first few levels are really easy and short. Just basic stuff like using a wrench on the stove to mess with the gas output, and having a guy smoking a cigarette go use it to blow his face off.  Or messing with a piano to make it drop on the maintenance man's head. I had no problem figuring out the mechancis for the first few levels, I was even praising the game for having short 5-20 minute levels, making it a great 'pass the controller back and forth' experience. Sadly, after the first few levels it totally drops the ball on objective design and goes pants-on-head retarded for how demandingly obtuse and cryptic the puzzles start to get. After every few missions you start to meet with Satan in a burning room, hes like your real father of sorts, and he unlocks new abilities for you to use as the game progresses. Stuff like Telekenesis, Mind Control, and eventually this fireball thing that rarely gets used. The controls are quite badly done, though. You can't open doors while you have either an object in your hands, or if you have an ability selected. Its like opening doors its self is a separate ability, so you have to manually get in the 'Open Door' stance before you can use doors.  So there is an 'Open door' stance,  4 different buttons for your Ability stances, and then another stance for holding objects. It all comes together in a clunky, confusing mess that gets tiresome to deal with. As I said, the first few chapters were reasonable enough,  I could solve the puzzles in a standard point & click adventure type way.

Then comes Chapter 4/18 "Eat Healthy"
This one seems decent enough, the head-maid is constnatly hungry and is being brought food constantly. Ok, I found a bottle of "Deadly poison" a few chapters back in the secret room under the wine cellar. Yea, there was this crazy satanic torture chamber behind a curtain in the wine cellar that I found almost at the beginning of the game. There was a random bottle of poison on the table down there. So ok, I have this bottle of poison, and I have to find a way to poison the food thats being brought to the maid. I could NOT figure out how to do this. Ran around the whole mansion probably 50 times. Of course I first went to the kitchen, where the food was being prepared. There was even a basket of bread I could interact with, but the 'Deadly Poison' didn't do anything. After probably an hour of making no progress, I had to Google the solution. Guess what? The bottle of 'Deadly Poison' that I found in the wine cellar is NOT the right bottle of poison! Yep, it turns out the one that I found is actually a bottle that you need like 8 chapters in the future. So why the FUCK could I pick it up at the beginning of the game? Again, lazy, sloppy, inconsistent, bullshit time wasting game design. It turns out I actually need a bottle of Rat Poison. It just makes no fucking logical sense. Unbelivable bullshit. So to get the bottle of rat poision, you need to find the random room in the house with a guy sitting on a stool hunched over a rat trap or some shit. Theres no direction or hints to find him, you just have to waltz around randomly until you find it. Could take ages. When you find it, your journal updates and says "Rat poison, I cant take it now, better come back when everyone is sleeping"  So atleast it hints to you that you should go back to your bedroom and sleep. This begins the first stealth section of the game. It's a trivial kind of trial and error gameplay where you wait for the NPC's to open the doors for you as you hide in the darkness. Fail over and over again from learning the patterns, atleast theres a checkpoint. So you go all the way back and grab the rat poison, FINALLY I can use it on the bread basket, and the maid dies. This is the kind of routine bullshit I went through playing this game. Oh, sure it makes sense I just have to use my 'Deadly poison' to poison her food! oh, heh, actually thats not the right poison, you need the RAT POISON, we just basically gaslighted you and let you pickup an irrelevant item from chapter 10 at chapter 3, haha trolled! Awful idiotic game design.

But by Chapter 5/18 'Holy Day Slip' the game just got lost on me. This level is taking place around Christmas holidays, with awful twinkling chime music that drones on and on (loudly) over a cacophony of other noises from the 20 guests sitting around the dinner table, some of them also singing loudly. This gets repeated endlessly for the whole mission. And since I could not figure out what the fuck the game wanted me to do, it got mind numbing and even physically painful to where I had to just pause the game and leave the room for a few minutes to get some peace and quiet. The sound design in general in this game is just a mess, characters will endlessly repeat their 1-2 lines of dialogue if you dare to get within 10 meters of them.

So the objective on this Chapter 5 level consists of the map taking you to this butler guy, standing around idle at the bartending place. The journal says "Find a way to get rid of him outside" and the clue you get is "Something slippery"  Ok, so I can make sense of that. So I think yeah, I gotta lure him outside somehow and make him slip on something. Fair enough. Well I spent like 3 hours walking around the whole damn house trying to find HOW the hell I lure him outside. There is no more direction. Before you think I'm just a moron with bad deduction skills or enviornmental awareness - I was playing it with another person, too, passing controller back and forth. So either the game is just shit and has badly designed/directed objectives, or we're both stupid. Well after grueling amounts of wandering all around the map, I eventually looked it up. Turns out you have to go outside to the courtyard , find a TINY switch on the wall somewhere to turn off the one tiny string of Christmas lights, then that for some reason distracts the butler to go outside. What? That doesn't even make intuitive sense. Why would the butler give a shit about the Christmas lights? its not his job! Hes not the maintenance worker! I would have NEVER figured that out, (1) because the switch is so small and easy to miss, (2)there is a huge scene of all these people sitting around the dining table, making loud chatter like THIS is the important area to be in, so I spent a stupid amount of time just walking around the dining room inspecting every single detail trying to find some way to progress. It even let you brainwash a few of the NPC's at the dining room, even though it has NOTHING to do with what you have to do. Why can you brainwash them? Because you're able to do it like 5 chapters later on in the game, once again another example of awful game design. Why not disable the ability to mind control these NPC's until its actually needed, preventing extreme amounts of confusion? The answer because this shit is barely playtested and moreso feels like some good ideas but then the execution is just haphazardly slapped together without care.

That's not where the stupid shit ends, even with this chapter too. Once you lure him outside, he simply turns the lights back on and walks inside. Okay? what now?! Well of course I could NOT figure this out either and had to look it up. Turns out theres a tiny water bottle in the beginning of the level tucked away in your room that you have to pickup, fill with water, and somehow know to point your vision at a tiny spot on the ground which gives you an interaction icon signalling you can use your water bottle on it, creating a slippery pool for him to slip on after he comes to the lights. What. The. Fuck. That is so god damn cryptic and obtuse that it really pissed me off and actively started my hatred towards this game. I just mean shit like this could have been designed so much more fair and reasonably. Why couldnt the journal update and say something like  "The butler has been complaining about the lights"  or "The water bottle in my room could be of use"   Just any sort of direction at all instead of completely wasting your fucking time combing through this mansion with a fine tooth comb, its just awful.

I dare a single person to beat this entire game without looking anything up. I tried going on Youtube and watching people play this game, its really fucking obvious they're all dumbass cringe streamers who either got their Twitch chat to give them all the answers, or looked everything up beforehand before playing because they instantly run to all the right spots. Playing this shit blind is like trying to land an airplane blindfolded. Or bobbing for apples blindfolded and nose plugged,  but Surprise! one of the apple is covered in shit, don't bite it!

And it gets worse, too. After he finally slips on your icy water puddle, hes just laying there on the ground. You then have to aim your vision at a random icicle above him, use Telekenesis on it to make it fall and pierce through his head. Yeah, its a great concept and exciting way to kill your victims. But like I keep saying, its so easy to miss the icicle because again, its like needle in a haystack. There are so many ways they could have given subtle hints or guided the player better. Maybe if you look in the near vicinity of the objective it gives off a tiny red glow? ANYTHING.

I was hoping this would just be a one off shit chapter and the rest of the game would be good and brief, but satisfying puzzles. No, it never really picked up after this. The rest of the game was more extremely annoying , cryptic bullshit, sprinkled in with a few decent reasonable levels.

Then, the next level 6/18 'Fatal Affair' is about a maid being inlove with another guest at the mansion. The journal  says "Theres something going on between her and Uncle Tom"  Ok great, what now? Well of course you just have to kind of mindlessly wander around the whole mansion for probably an hour before you stumble across the room where you open the door and just see Uncle Tom banging another woman. Once again, game just wastes your time. No direction where this room is, you just need to walk around checking every room until you find it. Once finding it, the journal updates and says
"I saw uncle Tom with Susan. If I could just somehow show this to Jovita. I think Grandfather might have a camera up in his study."

Ok, great! It actually tells you that you need a camera, and where to get it. WHY is it telling me this? If it was any other chapter it would just say "If I could just somehow show this to Jovita.." and thats it, leaving he player to once again wander arind for god knows how long before being frustrated and looking it up. Why is the game design so inconsistent? Why couldn't other chapters, for example, have these kind of clues? for instance "Maybe the water bottle in my room can help" it's just baffling..I was really starting to hate the game around this point, dreading spending another minute walking around in circles in futility. So I go up, grab the camera, but it says it needs Film. I think I found that without much issues, it was nearby. So I go back, open the door to the two fucking, snap the photo. Ok awesome, I have the evidence that the Maids lover is cheating on her. Soo now I just go back and show her the photo? I go to the maid, hold the photo in my hand right in front of her face, nothing happens. I follow her on her route around the house to the bookshelf shes cleaning, combing over every single book on the bookshelf for somewhere to plant the photo for her to see. Nothing. In desperation, I use the music box. It highlights about 5 objects scattered around (and seemingly behind) the bookshelf. What the fuck is this?! Turns out, its nothing. Once again its just glitchy, shit, poor gameplay design that is highlighting random past/future objectives behind/ infront of the wall, severely confusing me. Fuck this game.

So I was pretty much at a loss here, no journal updates, nothing. My rational, logical senses arent working here. Why cant I just show her the photo? Maybe because I'm not supposed to have anything to do with it, ok that makes sense. Why cant I just plant it somewhere on her route for her to see? I'm clueless. I had to look it up. So I Googled it, it says you have to plant the photo IN HER BEDROOM, in her dresser. Why the hell would I have to do that? Shes cleaning the bookshelf every 30 seconds in the same spot, why cant I put it there? Ok fine, I eventually find her bedroom out of the 1000 rooms in the house, equip the photo, and NOW it shows me an arrow where I can plant the photo. As soon as I plant the photo, the journal updates and says:
"I should hide the photo in Jovita's room and plant some evidence to blame her for some of the other deaths."

...why is it NOW telling me this, AFTER I already planted it? Just yet another glitch and extremely poor coding? If its the case that its a glitch, and it was supposed to tell me before I already planted the photo, then its yet another weird inconsistency where the game is just deliberately telling you exactly what to do and where to do it in the journal, yet all the other missions would leave those details out and leave you clueless. After she finally sees the planted photo, shes distressed and runs to the balcony where you can then mind control her to jump off and suicide. That part was reasonable enough to figure out. It's just the giltches , the inconsistency of the journal hints, really take this game from being potentially awesome to a massive pain in the ass.

Chapter 8 is the chapter where you actually have to use the 'Deadly Poison' that I found in the wine cellar in like chapter 3 or something. I think I figured this one out without having to Google the answer. Its some alcoholic guy sitting on his bed and whining about the dead maid, constantly drinking liquor surrounded by bottles. Took me awhile combing through the enviornment to figure out that the second he puts his bottle down, you have to swap it out with another bottle that you pickup from the closet. You have to combine the DEADLY POISON with the bottle from the closet to make a Poisionous Drink or some shit, then he picks it up and dies. This level was decent enough, except for the fact I already found the deadly poision half the game before. Atleast the game throws enough hints at you where to get it. The Ouija riddle says something about chambers, and the journal says theres a secret map on the table near where you get the Camera, the map points towards the cellar. What irks me is just the inconsistency of pacing of some of the chapters. Like this should have been chapter 5 or something, its easier than the last few by miles. Its like they didnt even structure which missions to go where, its just all randomly slapped together making for bizarre and extreme 'difficulty' curves, and by difficulty I mean levels of obscurity.

The next  few chapters are alright I guess, ones about a guy mowing the lawn, you have to comb over the grass area to find a rock to plant on the ground then mindcontrol the mower to decapitate him with the blades, sure, fine enough. Then you have Chapter 10/18 'Betrayal' which is the biggest stealth mission in the game. Its another trial & error thing which starts off during a lightning storm, having to run outside to the balcony then back inside but theres a lady sitting on a chair that instantly spots you if you try to enter the room. Took me a long time of many instant trial-error deaths to figure out what to do here. The lights in the room are flashing off every 15 seconds or so, so it SEEMS like you should be able to just wait for the lights to turn off then creep past her. But no, the SECOND you get in her line of sight its instant fail. So after many failures I realized theres this hidden electricity box on the side of the house you have to telekenesis destroy, letting yuo pass....from there its just a simple matter of avoiding the AI and going down to the torture chamber, to amazingly enough, help your grandfather do a satanic ritual and torture this reporter guy, because your grandpa is in on the whole evil possession shit too. This wasnt too hard to figure out, and was kind of fun, you gotta light candles on the altar and place the blood bowls - but yet again, as soon as the game is halfway decent  its flaws pop up again. Like I said earlier, I found this torture chamber early in the game around chapter 3. And it would let me light the candles then, too. The music box would even highlight areas of this chamber like they are important objectives, even back in CH3. But we know now how unreliable and decievin the music box is. Because I remember it confusing me that I could light the candles in CH3, make a 'Ding, progress' noise, but then still say "Candle unlit" when I tried to light again. I was still having this weird glitchy behaviour on the correct chapter, too though. I would light the candles and then inspect it and it would still say "Candles unlit" I don't know, the game is just really shoddily programmed or something. It seems so half assed like no one even bothered to put this thing through quality assurance testing. Atleast when you know what to do in this game you can progress really fast. Actually working through the puzzle of what you need to do takes a lot of time, but once you know you can beat the level in like 90 seconds, so yeah I beat this one as well without having to look it up. The cutscene was awesome, you betray your grandpa and literally stab him in the back, like "Oh you thought we were on the same team just because we're evil? Haha no im more evil than you I have no allies"  It was funny and entertaining. I like the story of the game, its generic and derivitive but its entertaining the whole way what can I say. Theres a detective which follows you around the whole game so it also has this detective/mystery spin on the whole thing which really adds to the narrative too.

Instantly after this satanic ritual chapter you have chapter 11/18 which is like literally 40 seconds long level that introduces the 'Combat' mechanics where you just hold a button to charge up a fireball and shoot it at the reporter guy who wakes up as he runs around turning crosses on the walls, weakning your fireball power. Pretty goofy and stupid, but its a change of pace from the awful puzzles so I was happy with it. The enemy has a health bar and flies around with floaty physics, making the whole thing even sillier.

Chapter 12/18 'Shot For Education' is probably the best in the game? That's not saying much though. You have to kill your teacher, so you go to the classroom, he asks you a few basic math problems which you solve by holding the cue cards 1,2,3, then he goes and looks in a bookshelf for a Biology book. From here, its a dead end. He just keeps asking for the right book. Tried giving him every book in the room, nothing. Atleast the journal updates and says "I should ask for a day off from my father"  so I run around the whole mansion looking for his room. Long story short you have to distract the father, find a note with a safe code on it, unlock the safe to get a gun, find the gun bullets which are in the same office,  then return to the teacher. I returned to the teacher and just shot him in the face myself, failing the mission. That was funny. So yeah the game doesn't want YOU yourself to be the one killing the victim, the victim has to do it himself or accidentally or something. So what you do is place the gun down and mind control the teacher to commit suicide with the gun. Brutal. It felt satisfying figuring out all this on my own, the death cutscene was crazy, chunks of his brain going flying, and it wasnt too cryptic with no glitches, for once I almost had fun with the game.

I'll also note that the game has tons of achievements and its like every 120 seconds I'm getting steam achievements popping up for all sorts of menial or goofy shit, which atleast made the game more exciting than it otherwise would have. So props to the devs for that.

Chapter 13/18 Peeping Tom  was awful.
I thought this one would be a breeze.  I knew of the peep hole to the bathroom from earlier in the game. The victim is a maid. On her route, she goes to the bathroom and looks in the mirror. I figured great, just look through the peep hole and use one of my abilities to fuck with her somehow. Tried for probably hours, could NOT figure it out. This one is just fucking insane. No journal updates. No directions. Only thing journal says is "She is taking care of the laundry" and you just watch her go around the house and pickup random articles of clothing. I could just not figure out what to do here, spent ages following her around, looking through the peep hole, trying all sorts of shit.
Get this;
Turns out you have to go to the laundry room and use telekenesis on a random iron into the washing machine, so the maid goes to the broken washing machine, ending her shift, then she goes to take a shower. What the fuck. For one, who the fuck is gonna figure that out? For two, why even have the maid go to the bathroom earlier in the mission, confusing me? It seemed like before using the iron that I had to do something with her in the bathroom, because she would go there and look in the mirror and I could see her from the hole. Yet another instance of the game fucking with you and wasting your time. After I Googled that bit about the iron I could figure out the rest on my own. I even guessed previously that I was supposed to some how get her into the bath, then use the hair dryer on the bath with telekenesis from the peephole to electrocute her. Its just the bit about the iron in the washer that was obscure cryptic bullshit that no one would ever figure out. Couldnt they put a note in the journal like "I hear the washing machine is having problems lately" or some shit? They did similar things for other chapters, why not this one? Terrible. Also, again, the controls in general are sloppy and jank, so when you pickup the hairdryer with telekenesis its this really low budget early 2010s physics system where you have to use both analog sticks in conjuction to swing the shit all over the place and its just this tedious painstaking process, Its kinda silly and fun in how stupid it looks but more than anything it just feels low budget and shit.

Chapter 14/18 Overdose of Fumes was mind numbingly shit too.
Theres guys in the garage, theres an air vent running, the chapter title makes it obvious what you have to do.
Theres a panel operating the air vent outside the room, but you cant do anything to it. Tried everything. One thing that fucked with me, is once again, I picked up an object in like chapter 5 that belonged to this chapter (14). It was a 'Dry Rag'. The fact that they let you pickup crucial items from later chapters at any point in the game just basically ruins the whole experience. You're supposed to go in the garage and notice theres a rag on the table along with some paint thinner, I noticed the paint thinner, but it took me awhile to realize I had the rag to combine it with. Well, even then I had the rag with the paint thinner. Ok, great. I need a way to make the guy inhale it and die. The problem is I cant put the rag on the table because theres 2 guys there.  I need to lure the other guy out. Tried for ages, tried everything, mind control, nothing works. Turns out............you have to use the iron in the washing machine AGAIN. Two chapters back to back, same solution?! No fucking way. What the hell is wrong with these devs? I would have never guessed its just the same solution twice in a row. Total brainrot game design. After this you just put the rag on the table and then use telekenesis to turn the car on to make it look like the guy died from inhaling car fumes or whatever, fucking shit game, but again, the concept is great, just the execution is painful to play through.

Chapter 15/18 is very short, youre just in the garage with a guy chained to a shelf and you have to find a way to kill him. I tried fireballing him over and over but he just scoffs it off. Theres even a can of gas above him I tried shooting fireballs at, but nothing happens. Makes zero logical sense. Why cant I just shoot the can of gas with fire to make him blow up? After wasting a bunch of time, I found out theres A TINY pixel perfect spot you have to aim telekenesis at to unscrew the gasoline to make it pour all over him, then you can fireball him to death. Again, another chapter which basically makes no sense. Frustrating.


Chapter 16/18 'American Schizophrenic' (play on the movie American Psycho) has you outside in the garden with your mother, who you have to kill. the journal says theres no power to the shed, and you need to turn it on for some reason. If by some chance at this point you never noticed theres a power board in the garage then you're probably fucked here. What I did for a long time was painstakingly follow the power wire from the shed to the house, but its just a dead end. Seems like lazy design more than anything. You can see the power wire from the shed, but it eventually just goes into the wall in a sloppy way and just ends. If the game were carefully designed better, you would be able to see the power wire go all the way to the power box in the garage, giving a reasonable yet subtle hint that this is what you have to do. But no, the games shit, so I just had to keep guessing. I eventually found the garage power box, but I was doubtful if this was the right thing to do, because the texture on the power box is so low resolution it seems like a really unimportant asset, its like 120x120 pixels kind of thing, you cant even read the text on the labels. I figured if it was what you had to do, youd be able to clearly read the labels like "Kitchen"  "Garage"  "Shed"  kind of thing. Well, it IS what you have to do, its just sloppy game design again. Theres a tiny fuse nearby on a shelf you have to pickup, luckily theres big boxes with "FUSE" on it nearby, so it gave me some clue. So turned the power to the shed back on, then I had to figure out to get the nailgun and find the tiny box of nails inside a box on a shelf nearby, use the air pressure machine on the nailgun, and NOT kill her myself with the nailgun, but instead mind control her husband when he gets close to kill her himself with the nailgun. I mean yeah, its an amazing idea/cutscene, obviously inspired by American Psycho so I like the reference, I guess the level was ok? except for the 'power the shed' bit with the lazily designed power cord just disappearing into the wall. It could have been executed better, with the power line from the shed being more distinct and running along the wall to the power box in the garage instead we just get a sloppy job again.


Last two levels are thankfully really short
17/18 is this first person camera angle inside a room with a cop, you just swing some statues with telekenesis around and the cop gets scared and shoots around the room, breaking the crosses on the wall recharging your powers. Then he shoots the ceiling fan, which falls down and decapitates him.
Last level is a fight against your father
At the beginning, it shows two pictures. A puzzle piece, and a fireball. So its asking you if you wanna do another puzzle, or combat. I picked combat, cause I figured thats the shortest way to get this game over. Then its just this short fight inside the burning mansion where you fireball down a few preists and then your father shows up with a fire extinguisher and fireballing him seems to do nothing cause he just sprays it away. Took me quite awhile to figure this one out. More tedious bullshit. Cant do damage to him at all. Turns out theres a random pillar in the room you have to mind control and make fall on top of him when hes standing at just the right spot. Ok great. Games over , end credits.

I'm really surprised to see that this game has 3 sequels. Maybe, just maybe, this first one is a rushed product and hasn't gone through much playtesting and the sequels have actually improved and fixed all the complaints I have? I'm doubtful, and I don't know if I'll ever play them. But the first Lucius game is a fine example of something with a great concept, something that could be even fun to watch a playthrough of (when the player knows what to do) - But actually playing the game yourself for the first time is a complete pain in the ass, arduous task of time wasting "What the fuck do I do / where the fuck do I go" laughable gameplay of finding needles in haystacks or actively being deceived by the games many bugs/glitches or just generally poor design. I have to say I'm sort of disappointed and misled by the tag 'Horror' on this game. It really is just a puzzle game, when I installed it, I was more wanting a kind of cinematic 'walking sim' without much bullshit. How disappointed was I to spend 10+ hours slogging my way through this slop.

3/10




 

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare

 

After playing the previous game, Advanced Warfare I was thinking maybe the COD series has started to lose its touch, with the far future high tech sci-fi stuff. Well, this time around, Infinite Warfare has taken it even further, into space, making the whole experience feel bizarre, like I kept asking myself "what game am I playing?" because it feels more like Star Wars or Star Trek than Call of Duty.


The idea this time is that its even further into the future, like year 2200 or something. The story unfortunately this time around is like the most bland CoD campaign I've ever experienced.  The characters are so stock-standard and one-dimensional you barely even remembr any of them. Except theres one character which is this like sentient robot called Ethan, I guess hes like the only memorable character but even still its lukewarm. Like every (or most) CoD campaigns, it centers around defeating a blatantly evil antagonist, lately its apparently always modelled after and acted by some real world famous celebrity. In the previous game, Advanced Warfare, it was Kevin Spacey. This time around, its one of the guys from Game of Thrones. Sadly hes really fucking boring, feels like hes there for a quick paycheck, you only ever really see him on computer screens in-game, he just stands there and says these evil monologues like "We will conquer you and make you suffer ha ha ha Mars eternum" the whole time, its dull. That's basically the whole story, you're the commander of some Star Trek spaceship and you and your team of mostly women (?) go around talking absolute military jargon nonsense for 15 minutes at a time before flying off to some enemy base to stop the evil invaders.

This time around, the game has a sort of hub area. Instead of linearly loading from one level to the next, its like they wanted a more open-ended experience that almost tries to avoid as many loading screens as possible. This means that when you complete a mission, you always have these long periods of down-time of watching your character manually leave the area, fly off to some place, then fly back to your base, then go through the elevator on your base, then walk around your base chatting about military jargon, then going back to the base hub-map, then selecting the main mission. It felt really unnecessary and boring. You know, I play CoD games mostly for the 'Go, go go, nonstop action!' but in this game, you frequently just have tons of periods of downtime where youre doing nothing except listening to characters talk about uninteresting garbage or flying your stupid little spaceship around.

Anyway, you beat the first mission or so and are granted with the ability to either choose side missions or main missions from the hub map, it was confusing at first because it forces you to select a random side mission before it will let you progress the campaign. That pissed me off. But after that, you can select main missions for the rest of the game. Apparently the reason to do side missions is to unlock new attachments or perks or something, but I never gave a shit. The unlocks/perks system in this game is different than the last previous ones. Instead of having experience points or skill points and seeing skill trees like Advanced Warfare, it seems like it just unlocks guranteed perks after each mission, making the whole thing seem pointless and trivial and inconsequential.

The actual combat in this game is probably atleast a bit better than the last game. The arsenal is a bit more fun to use, despite being even more in the future some of the guns are less futuristic looking and some are more aesthetic and tactical. Like you have a gun that looks almost like an M4, and one that looks like an AK. The guns look better and are more fun to use, and have more personality in them. Unlike Advanced Warfare, looking at guns on the ground you can actually tell them apart and understand their pros/cons because it shows you an image of them and its obvious which ones are SMG/Assault rifle or shotguns etc. There seems to be more variety. I still dont really like the arsenal and the guns arent great, but its a step up. Also, unlike the previous game which had a super overpowered wallhack gun sight you can get, in this game you can get one, its called Thermal or Trojan scope, but its way less effective and toned down which overall makes the combat more engaging because you dont have this super overpowered scope the whole time.  Also, its funny how in the previous game I wondered how these modern CoD games dont let you choose a loadout before each mission - well in this game you actually can. After choosing a mission from the hub you have to manually walk down to the armoury and then you can choose your loadout from a guy called Griff. This is the standard stuff of choosing 2 weapons, attachments, then gadgets. The gadgets once again are annoying to use, convuluted, and clunky. The controls for them suck like the Left/right bumpers, but even worse is the UI elements trying to show the gadgets. Its these two tiny icons in the middle of the screen and you cant even tell what they represent so the whole game whenever I tried to use a gadget It would be almost a total surprise what would come out of me. I really prefer the earlier Cod Games where its just a simple Grenade button or at most a flashbang or something, all these new gadgets like Spider bots, Drones, Hacking, Foam walls, Shields, whatever else shit is clunky bloat. Maybe if they could figure out a fun control scheme for it, it would be enjoyable, but even then I think its unnessesary gimmicks.

Again I played the campaign on Hardened difficulty. I think in this game more than the last, the AI is  way too accurate. If you poke your head out for a split second, youre already taking damage. After about halfway through the campaign I was dying almost atleast once per checkpoint. At least like all CoD games, they are forgiving and abundant with frequent checkpoints, but still I found myself getting really pissed off and frustrated with some of the sections in this game, mostly with how stupidly accurate the AI can be. I never really looked forward to, or enjoyed, fighting robot enemies in video games. They  arent as satisfying to fight against as humanoids, probably because no bloodspraying or grunts and grons as you shoot them or something, or its not as immersive I dont know - but sadly in this game theres quite a few sections where youre fighting droves of robot soldiers that are bulletsponges, sprint towards you and explode, and kill you in a second flat. Theres one level where the entire level is comprised of this and its miserable and not fun. Theres other sections where you are up against this big mech type enemies and you have to run around the map picking up rocket launchers to destroy them, also sucked balls because it makes you do these quick-time events as the final blow and its really easy to fuck it up and miss the tiny place it wants you to shoot, then making your character instantly vulnerable and you probably instantly die having to do the whole section again. Mostly, the enemies feel like massive bullet sponges in this game compared to the last, even the humanoids, and their accuracy is unfair at times.

I don't know why CoD campaigns always find it necessary to shove in vehicle sections, maybe because its easy to program and its showoff hollywood explosions or something. Usually I dont mind them too much, and sometimes its even a nice touch like in Modern Warfare 2 the skidoo or something. But sadly in this game its like every 15 minutes youre forced into this spaceship which has the most nauseating, motion sickness controls and visual effects its such a pile of shit - I hated it.  You fly around in this space ship, having to shoot down enemy ships, but the screen is flying around in circles so god-damn much it feels like I stuck my head in a washing machine. Theres way too many visual effects on screen, the HUD is obnoxious, these spaceship sections were genuinely like physically painful, hurt my head and eyes, and felt exhausting to look at after just 60 seconds. Towards the end of the game theres like an entire 20 minute segment inside the spaceship and I questioned if I even wanted to finish the fucking campaign because I kept failing the ship segment and it was like actual torture to keep retrying. Terrible and abundant ship segments.


As for the actual missions themselves, once again it was just disappointing or boring. As I said before, too much downtime. By the time you feel like youre actually in the combat and playing the game, it feels like it only lasts a few minutes then youre back doing some flying section or walking around listening to people talk for 15 minutes or some other gimmicky segment. One positive thing I can say is that atleast in this campaign there seemed like a lot less handholding from the AI teammates. The main complaint I had with the previous game was that you were constantly being bossed around by the NPC's, getting told when to shoot, where to stand, what to do etc. But in this game, there semed like a lot more segments where the player is free to play how they deem fit without the AI yelling instructions at you. So in that regard, it felt more like a video game experience than merely playing out some movie script. Sure, there are a bunch of moments where the AI is telling you what to do, but overall it felt like more moments where I was noticing that I had to freedom to do what I want, mostly.

There are a few zero-gravity segments where you will suddenly be floating around in space, but theres still enemies shooting at you as well who are also flying around. Mechanically though this is weird and seems out of place, because you still need to constantly be behind cover, because the AI is still super accurate even while flying around in space. So its like theres this whole emphesis to fly around in zero gravity, but most of the time I found myself floating to the ground anyway to hide behind some piece of cover the whole time, making the whole concept pointless. Its like these segments of the campaign were only balanced around the easier difficulties, while on Hardened and above it makes the whole flying around in zero gravity thing not viable. I found it strange and stupid.  

Not sure what else to say, really. The story as I said is really boring, and theres way too much of it. As I keep saying, theres too much downtime! I'd find myself half asleep on the couch waiting for the hordes of characters to stop talking their jargon, or waiting for the cutscene of the plane to land, or this and that tedious bullshit. Just plop me down into a battlefield with a sentence or two of what to do, I dont need a 20 minute exposition, its fucking annoying. Main Characters die here and there during the campaign but I never cared or barely even noticed or remembered who they were its that shallow and uninteresting. The few times the main antagonist shows up during cutscenes he just says some cliche one liner or is the shallow evil man so its eyeroll stuff really. Speaking of eyerolls, a lot of the deaths is especially eyeroll inducing I've found. Mostly sitting around behind some piece of cover waiting for my health to come back, pop my head out for a brief second and die instantly, making me redo the last 5 minutes kind of stuff. Or having to kill the giant mechs. Or the robots. Yeah, I'm repeating myself now.

The game really isnt any better than the previous one. It has some things that are better, then it has things that are worse. Overall it makes it feel like the same level of enjoyment. It has better weapons and arsenal, the controls and combat are slightly better with the gadgets handling, it has the ability to choose your loadout which I guess is kind of cool, the graphics of course are slightly better and has some nice lighting effects and super high budget high quality assets, but its like for every positive thing it has going for it, it has equally as many negatives compared to the last game. Like the awful constant flight sections, the completely uninteresting story where nothing cool ever happens, the constant boring downtimes - oh, and I almost forgot: They changed the mission structure. I mean, usually in CoD games you have levels that are like 15-20 minutes long. The kind of bite sized levels where you can tell yourself you'll just boot up the game and play a mission or two and go to bed because you know theyre short and managable. But in this game, theres only 7 main missions. Each one is over an hour long. Frequently I'd say to myself "Alright, I'll play a mission and then go to bed"  but then find myself launching the game and having to wait 20+ minutes before I'm even into the next fucking combat segment! Just sitting around listening to people talk or watching shit cutscenes. Then I have over another hour to get past one mission. I really preferred shorter, bite sized levels than this grueling drawn out huge mission structure they went with here, its annoying and can feel draining. Most of the levels take place inside space ships or these high-tech industrial settings which all look generic, the same, and mostly uninteresting. Towards the end of the game your ship crash lands on some desert planet which was I guess one of the most interesting parts of the game? Hard to say. I'm really hoping the rest of the CoD franchise can make up for these 3 medicore games in a row (Ghosts, Advanced Warfare, Infinite Warfare) because this shit has been really underwhelming as someone who's been around and played since the very first game in 2003.

4/10

Call of Duty Advanced Warfare

 

After what feels like years I finally got back to the next Call of Duty game in the series I've yet to finish. This time its Advanced Warfare. I knew nothing about it, but by the looks of it its looks like they're going with the fiction based scifi futuristic approach. Well, I usually am not a big fan of that setting so...

The premise is...the game starts off...uhh..I beat the game like 1 hour ago and I still barely even know. Something something CEO (Kevin Spacey) of super rich company building Exosuits and high-technology, then some point in the campaign theres a super secret twist where hes now the evil guy that wants to take over the world and have "A war to end all wars" - I don't really know, its all kinda stupid. Yeah it has super high budget and production values, its got the famous actor Kevin Spacey playing at first as the main friendly guy, then antagonist, but beyond that the plot is just generic and forgettable. Atleast the big name actors keep it interesting, the story would be a lot less exciting without him I think.

The whole game you're being handheld by a small team of other AI. The main guy is called Gideon and hes this old gruff kind of basic pro tactical war guy. He kinda just tells you where to stand, when to run, where to move, what to do , at all times. Its like the game forbids you to ever think for yourself. It's so on-rails and corridor it feels like a mobile game or one of those Arcade games you play by aiming a light gun at the screen. I mean really, the whole campaign you barely feel like you have any freedom at all. Every step of the way is just some AI telling you exactly what to do or the objective is just "Follow the npc". What the fuck.

The basic gameplay and combat is all of this super futuristic high-tech weaponry and novelty abilities. But you dont even get to choose your loadout or pick which gadgets you want. I dont know why these modern COD games dont just let you pick your load out, at least have some semblance of player agency and freedom but nope. Every mission starts off with a little screen that shows what gadgets you have avalible for the mission, stuff like Slow-mo, double jump booster pack, Walking on walls etc. But most of the shit you can only do at scripted segments when the AI tells you. Other times, the controls are so shit and clunky that just trying to fumble with the DPAD to try to activate your abilities is more hassle than its worth, constantly pressing the wrong buttons and abilities. The grenade controls are also shit, you have two 'cateogries' of grenades or some shit. Left bumper is the tactical grenades which is stuff like showing all enemies through walls (wall hacks) or EMP grenade and some other thing. Right bumper pulls out the lethal grenades like Frags, Homing grenade, etc. Then once you hold a bumper you have to slowly cycle through the grenades in the category with another button. Its clunky as hell, how the fuck did they make the controls on a call of duty game so awkward and clunky?  The HUD is atrocious and hideous, theres not really a HUD but its like your guns have all sorts of technogizmo screens all over them showing your ammo counts and this and that, its a mess and isnt that cool to look at. I generally just kind of hate the way all the weapons look, its too futuristic and far removed from anything tactical or immersive or anything, it just looks dumb and gimmicky and over the top. The weapon system is the basic two gun limit where you just walk around and pick up different guns. But moreso than any other COD game they all kind of look the same and have nonsensical names so you'll never remember what gun is what, none of them really act any differently and 90% of them are just some marginal variation on a machine gun. The only thing that really matters is what attachments the gun has. Stuff like red dot sight, acog sights, or the best thing in the game: "Target enhancer" - I quickly realized that any gun that has the attachment 'Target enhancer' is just overpowered because when you aim, it lets you see a highlight of enemies behind all the walls so its like free wallhacks. Ok, game figured out. Ignore every gun and just pickup Target Enhancer. Great.

I played the difficulty Hardened and it was probably a mistake. But I dont want to play some piss easy, linear, corridor AI handheld game with ZERO challenge, but the Hardened mode here wasnt any fun either. You kind of just randomly take damage from all sides like thousands of peasents throwing peas at you, your screen is constantly covered in jelly (low health) and you just have to sit in a corner and wait for the jelly to go away from all the peasents throwing peas at you. Nowadays, the more I think about COD campaigns the less and less theyre appealing. This is mostly just fucking stupid. Yeah Its kinda dumb fun seeing just how many millions of dollars these developers can throw into making a campaign so over the top and flashy, chaulk full of scripted events cutscenes and dumb corny patriotic voice acting, but the actual gameplay segments like I said before are so handheld it feels like every level is just one giant hallway escort mission, except in reverse, where the AI is escorting me. I would  die multiple times almost every checkpoint, but its like I dont even think I can say its a player skill issue or something, it just feels like the way the enemy combat works is like RNG if I get hit by bullets or not. It just feels weird and bad like theres some number generating rolling dice that if I'll get hit too many times or something. I don't know, its been awhile since COD combat felt that exciting and interesting.


A lot of the levels are very samey with nothing standing out. It's a lot of high tech warehouses, city streets, factories, labratories. Thats about it. Theres about 15 missions, and from my memory it seems like almost half of them are just pure bullshit or filler. Like these boring handholdy stealth missions where all you do is follow the AI around and wait for him to tell you when to move. Or these shitty vehicle missions where you fly a jet through a laughably linear path while shit blows up around you. Or the car sections where once again you just drive in a straight line with a few left or rights to take. Or the mech suit sections...just ugh. It really is like the whole game is just some corridor but its just an illusion that youre in this big packed world, but just the walls of the house are painted with a sky texture. On the one hand the game has really impressive graphics, with great lighting shadows and shaders, and high quality character models, but on the other hand if you can see through the facade everything is so small scale and on-rails that the illusion just kinda falls apart. It's a really shallow game, constantly it will say "You are outside the mission area!" Like if youre not doing EXACTLY what the script says the game shits its self and demands you return to the script. It barely even feels like a fucking video game, it just feels like I'm acting out a script to make the program go to the next step. Weird.

I dont know if my nostalgia is blinding me or what, were previous cod campaigns this linear and without player freedom? Was every single mission just following some AI jackass around? I dont think so , but its been awhile... But yeah, theres like two missions I can even remember and I just beat the game 1 hour ago. One mission I remember is this giant straight bridge. All you do is crawl your way in a straight line across this bridge, hiding behind parked cars. The only reason I remember it is because its like the only mission in the game where you almost feel like you have some agency to do what you want instead of just following AI. So it was just a dumb mission that acted basically like a shooting gallery where you are free to progress at your own pace and engage in the gameplay as you wish. The other mission was around the beginning where you go through this little villa, then inside these houses to rescue the president. Turns out, as a twist, the whole thing is just a testing simulation to prepare your character for his new bionic arm, and they make you play the whole segment twice. It wasnt exactly great, but I guess memorable.

Of course the game has to force in some sort of upgrade mechanic,so at the end of every level you get these upgrade points, i guess depending on how many headshots you got, or how many kills, or whatever shit, and you can upgrade stuff like your recoil reduction, health, grenades, sprint. Nothing crazy. Really barebones. I'd almost prefer if this shit wasnt even in the game and it was just fully balanced around one setup, but nope, its a modern game so it needs a upgrade ability.

Towards the end of the game you meet up with different characters, this lady character which is pretty boring where you just stealth around or do this dumb drone minigame on a computer screen which was really boring and frustrating, the game has some bad use of objective markers where sometimes it should have objective markers telling you what to do when it doesnt, like the drone segment with the glass building being just a total fucking mess and annoyance. Yeah theres just way too many dumb, filler, novelty, gimmicky level segments. I remember having this problem with the last game, Ghosts, too. Just give me straight up, boots on ground, constant well designed levels, where I dont have to follow a fucking AI guy around waiting for the script to play out, where I get to use cool and fun guns, and high production quality. They cant do it anymore. Its the most dumbed down, boring, predictable, hand-holding baby shit ever, as I said before, It barely feels like I'm playing a video game, but like watching a script play out where I sometimes do a few trivial things here and there.

Atleast the games shooting is just decent, again, I dont like any of the weapons or the arsenal, i cant remember a single weapon, only the stupid wall-hack attachment gun scope. I dont even know what to say about all the bionic arm gimmicks, they just felt shoehorned in as an excuse to say this game did something different than the last. The most entertaining part about the game was Kevin Spacey and how he big surprise, turns into a bad guy that wants to take over the world. It was just interesting to watch the high production values and big budget over the top explosion segments and what not.

Towards the end of the game, the last few missions just start taking a nose dive. First of all you have to do this boring jet level which was a joke. Then, your arm gets blown off so you have to play an entire level with just one arm, which means you cant reload, which means you constantly have to pickup a new gun. Atleast it was a change of pace, and atleast it was a level that made me feel like I actually had to do something myself instead of follow AI but it was overall kinda stupid. Then the last mission is a fucking mech section where you have to do this annoying romp through the streets spamming rockets at everything that moves, of course I died multiple times to random bullshit, yada yada, you get to the end of the game and make Kevin Spacey fall off a cliff then end credits. Ok. Like I said, the best thing about the game is just sitting back and watching out a dumbed down, linear, easy to play action movie basically, but especially the whole futuristic fictional spin on the COD series, the way they've taken it here with how unasthetically pleasing the whole arsenal is, the goofy exosuits, the boring, unimaginative levels, this might be one of the worst COD campaigns I've played so far.

4/10

Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Kingdom Come Deliverance is a game by Warhorse Studio's whom have never released anything before making this their first game. They're a relatively small studio, at first only having 60 or so members, by the time the game was released around 150 people worked on it. The reason I was interested is that most RPG's take the super high fantasy route with goblins and magic spells and all that, but Kingdom Come is almost like a realistic simulation of what it was really like in medevial Europe. I saw a few clips of gameplay before I bought the game and the combat in particular looked really realistic, weighty, and gritty so I eventually picked it up on sale and sat down over the course of a few weeks and played through the long 60 hours it took me to reach end credits.

Before you start the game theres only two difficulties. Normal and hardcore. Of course I picked normal, but its interesting to note that Hardcore has a bunch of fundamental changes that make it really realistic and immersive such as not being able to see where you are on the map, no fast travels etc. There's no character creation, and the reason why is quickly apparent. As the game starts off, you find yourself playing Henry from the small village of Skalitz. You're the son of an accomplished Blacksmith, as the story goes, and the first few hours of the game sees you roaming about your home village doing menial tasks for your father, as a sort of long tutorial mission. The game is very story driven, there are tons of high quality cutscenes and even more dialogue scenes and tons of talking to NPC's. Theres this massive overarching narrative which follows the whole game that never escapes you, the game feels much more story driven and with a clear direction than most other RPG's I've played. At times it almost feels like a TV show or this giantic never-ending movie instead of a video game. There's so much talking to people, sometimes you can just spend 20 minutes talking to the same guy. The game has a heavy historical religious context, with everyone you interact with constantly talking of Jesus Christ and Christianity, its really fascinating in terms of the historical aspect, the way of life of people back then, and learning how people thought and behaved back then, they did a great job with the immersing the player into that mindset and way of life, what it was like to be born in the world back in those days. Of course everything is voice acted, and for the most part the actual writing and voice scenes are interesting, mostly in part because the main player Henry is just a likable guy whos evolution is fascinating to watch play out. Of course at the beginning of the game you're just a lowly peasent and you suck at everything. The game has a plethora of skills and abilities and stats because its a true in depth RPG: core stats like Strength, Agility, Vitality, etc, skills like Lockpicking, Thieving, Stealth, Drinking, Alchemy, Reading,  combat skills like Warfare, Defense, Mace, Swords, Bow etc...and at the beginning of the game you suck at all of it!  The game is very immersive in building that power fantasy of starting from nothing ,to becoming a presteiged  knight. Zero to hero. Because at the start of the game, it basically is way harder than the middle or ending of the game, its one of those kinds of games that is hard in the beginning and easy as you level up all your stats.

So tied into the heavy story narrative is this fact, that since youre just a lowly peasent blacksmiths son, it makes sense that you will suck at combat abilities and most other skills. The way you level up your abilities is by simply using them. If you want better lock picking, you have to lockpick easy chests. If you want better combat, you have to just do combat over and over or train with people in an arena. Stuff like that. As the game progresses the narrative never gets dull or boring, for as much story the game has its always pretty fascinating with entertaining supporting cast and characters. Henry's home village of Skalitz gets raided and destroyed by some unknown army for an unknown reason, then you find yourself getting taken in by nobility in some castle, eventually you find yourself working for various Lords and taken under one of their wing, Sir Radzig. The voice acting and writing for the characters are for the most part great and entertaining. The main cast of characters you keep interacting with such as Radzig, Hans Capon, Sir Robart the main man who teaches you combat and training,Divish,  Hanush, even the drunk partying priest you end up doing a few quests with, the writing is believable and you get to care about the characters and are interested in what happens to them. Even the villians and antagonists are well written and interesting, this guy called Toth whom stole your fathers sword, is cunning, maniacal, witty, and is a great adversary you find yourself pitted against as the story progresses. So while the game is very story focused, the story is well executed and I found myself invested in most of the characters and excited to uncover more and more of the story.

Though, thats not to say that it's this linear experience where you cant do what you want. No, it is an open world RPG with tons upon tons of side quests and other things to do. About 20 hours into the game I found myself enjoying it so much that I started completely ignoring the main quest because I didn't want the game to end too soon, and just started doing lots of side quests. That's not something I do very often in games, but here since the game felt so unique and I enjoyed the immersive realism and low-fantasy setting I just wanted to explore more and more of the world. A lot of the side quests are almost simply fetch quests, but many of them arent and involve many steps and twists and turns. For instance, one quest involves figuring out a mysterious death at a monastery construction site which has you playing almost a detective role interrogating people and trying to figure out how a brick fell and killed this guy.  You go through lots of steps and finally track down the murderer and confront him and it plays off in a satisfying manner. However, it is kind of weird that for many quests you literally get no reward at all, no gold, nothing. It's ok, I just wanted the experience of having more stuff to do and more stories to see.

Now, of course Kingdom Come isn't just a simple story game. It is a fairy complex in depth Action role playing game. You can kit your character out with tons of different armors and weapons. The inventory system is elaborately designed and looks pretty cool, you can equip armors in all sorts of different slots. Each piece of your body can not only equip armor on it, but also multiple layers upon layers like shirts and cloth underneath, then plate armor or chainmail above and so on. There are about a dozen or more different slots and armor combinations you can equip and the inventory screen even gives you a nice little visual display showing how you'll look. This in turn makes looting in the game very satisfying and exciting. Theres tons of loot to collect, and the whole game every step of the way I was constantly trying to find that next armor upgrade or weapon to play with. Since the game is trying to be realistic and immersive, its even more interesting because all of the equipment is period accurate and you can even learn things about history and how real combat and armour worked. For instance, the game has several categories of weapons, of course, like Short sword, Longsword, Axes, Maces - but the thing is, swords are mostly useless against heavily armoured foes. It just makes sense that a slash wont be able to do much against a guy wearing plate mail, so with this in mind, even the most expensive fancy sword wont be that effective against a lowly bandit wearing heavy plate armor. For this, you'll want to use a Mace as its pure blunt damage can do huge force of impact damage, knock them around, or even knock them out instantly. Its cool how the games combat realistically accounts for this and compels you to change up your tactic depending on what type of enemy you might expect to face in the future. Of course the game has stat systems for all of your armor, weapon damages, etc, and its simple enough to easily understand but not overly complex to where its just annoying to deal with, but beyond the mere stats of your armor and weapons pure player skill is almost more important, like knowing when to use Swords or maces, where to aim your swings such as if the enemy is wearing an open-face helmet to stab them in the face, when to use a shield or when to use a Longer sword for reach, things like that are just as important as merely looking at some stats.

And heres where it seems like the biggest frustration or confusion of the game can seemingly occur for a lot of players. I've read a few accounts of people saying the combat in this game is either awful or brilliant, or way too realistic and tough. It's almost all of these things and more. The combat is probably the most impactful, realistic, and 'clunky' out of all RPG combat games ive played. When I say clunky, I don't even mean it in a bad way. Just in the way that if you actually had to wear all this armor and try to swing around a sword or weapon it would be really clunky, and this game reflects this in a convincing and immersive way. The game is using CryEngine and it has a physics based combat system where you can swing your weapon in 5 different directions, its a very in depth, fluid, and visceral combat system. The clinking of the armor against swords or grappling each other when you get too close to bash the other guy with the back of your sword, its intense. It uses an automatic lock on system that acts as the core of the combat. For the first 10 or so hours, I had a real hard time wrapping my head around how the hell I'm suppose to win any fight in this game. But I just reminded myself that you're supposed to be shit at the combat in the beginning, and the game even offers you a training arena near the beginning of the game where you can constantly keep practising your combat skills, learning how it works, and even leveling up your stats which matters a huge amount. So I would keep practising the combat with that Captain Robard guy, getting level ups to my combat, and learning how to actually play. Its a unique system where at first it seems kind of bad and awkward, but once you know what to expect its a really satisfying and intense experience. The games mechanics can sometimes tend to be rough around the edges, like the fact of how Grappling works isnt well explained, or if it is explained in the in-game tutorials, it literally lies to you and explains its self wrong by saying "Get close to an eneemy and press Left trigger to grapple" -- You dont even need to press left trigger, you just walk into the enemy and tap the attack button once the grapple is initiated, then it seems like whoever has the highest Strength stat wins the clutch. So thats another thing that isnt explained, its not explained anywhere that certain mechanics are based on your stat levels, like winning grapples is determined by who has the highest Strength.  

When the game starts off, you lack a lot of the combat mechanics. After you train a bit, you learn the ability to perform something called a Perfect Block. This ability is pretty straight forward, a green shield appears in the middle of the screen for a brief second, and when you see it and press BLOCK, you perform a Perfect block which costs no stamina and is a great and satisfying defensive ability. Its a very small window of when the green shield shows up and you can block. Now, theres another ability you learn shortly after called Master Strike. Unfortunately, this one isnt very well explained in the game. I had to google search exactly what was going on with this thing cause I couldnt really make sense of it just from the in game details. But the general idea is, IMMEDIATELY (or just before) the green shield shows up letting you Perfect Block, if you block the instant you see the enemy performing a strike you can do a sort of parry, which combines the free no stamina cost Perfect Block - but also it does some parry damage or stun the enemy for free. So you get both a free stamina block, and a stun or damage on the enemy. It's a fun ability to perform, its very satisfying to pull off and makes the combat feel both skillful and addicting in a way, the rhythm timing, staring at your enemies hands or shoulders to see the exact moment he will be executing his move then you perform the Master strike, the combat is decently mechanically dense and overall fun to use so abilities like this make it all come together, it just sucks that it isnt very well explained in the game, even with multiple tutorials. You also learn the ability to do Combo's which is something like striking in a set pattern directions, but I actually never found it very useful because the enemies almost always interrupt your combo chain before you can even finish it with their own Master Strikes or Perfect Blocks. 

A great way I trained a lot of my combat abilities, and practised my skills, was the weekly Rattay Tournament. Once every game week, a quest will automatically engage telling you of a tournament in one of the main cities. Then you can go and pay a small fee to be put into the tournament where you engage in a series of rounds against multiple opponents. This also isnt explained well at first, the guy tells you its only 3 rounds, but what he means is - its the best 3 of 3. So 9 rounds total, really. But regardless its a lot of fun, not that hard, its a great way to level up your abilities, and you make lots of money and even every time you win the tournament you get rewarded with exclusive pieces of armor and equipment which made wanting to do the tournament even more appealing, I had lots of fun with that. One event in particular, after winning the tournament for the first time, and you defeat the champion, he gets so butthurt and salty that he sets up ambush for you outside of this village you frequent, hes a guy called Black Peter and he wants to kill you just because you won the tournament from him. Well, early in the game if you encounter this guy just fucking run and come back later. His weapon is poisoned, hes wearing plate armor, so I died like 50 times to this guy, reloading over and over trying to take him out. Finally I was able to by some stretch of luck but by god did they make this encounter punishing. It seems like he stays in that spot forever so you can just come back later and try to deal with him, but I really wanted his items so I kept painstakingly trying. Its the fact that he poisons you after 1 hit and you then rapidly die from poison damage which is mainly what made it so brutally challenging, but its a fun and memorable encounter anyway.

The game also leans even harder into the realism, atmosphere, and immersion with its many survival elements. You have to eat food, but not rotten food or you get food poisoning which really fucks you up. You have to sleep, but not sleep too long or it ruins all your Nourishment and makes you starve. You have to bandage yourself when bleeding, you have to make sure youre not dirty or people wont respect you as much. If you drink alcohol it has realistic long lasting consequences, its almost like 15 minutes in real time your character is bobbing around the screen.  You have to frequently repair your equipment because even after just one encounter, as it would in real life, your items get damaged from being beaten on. You can learn to repair them yourself, with the Maintenance skill, and Armorsmith and Repairsmith kits, which has a lot of useful perks built into it too. You can look at your character sheet of buffs and debuffs, and theres all sorts of realistic debuffs like after a combat encounter you might have a concussion or a Hangover, you can even eat too much if you go past 100% nourishment and you get a debuff for being bloated. It's a fun balance of trying to stay in the perfect match of all these things, and never really do the survival elements wear the game down or become a chore, its not over the top where you have to constantly micromanage, enemies are constantly dropping food items on them, and if youre sick of having to deal with it you can even opt into using perks which massively increase the time inbetween having to eat/sleep etc. One complaint I will say that while sleeping the damn clock ticks down so slowly, especially in the last hour for some reason!? Why does the last hour of sleeping take as much time as the first 7? I mean I guess thats realistic too, is it suppose to emulate the feeling of not wanting to get outta bed in the morning? I'm not sure if thats necessary.

More areas where the games mechanics can be rough around the edges is when youre faced with multiple enemies. As I wrote earlier, it forces a lock on system whenever combat is engaged. But if you find yourself ambushed by multiple enemies, say after the random encounters during Fast travel, then if you desperately try to run away the game just keeps snapping back to the enemies via auto lockon and it can be frustrating and just annoying and not make much sense. The only way to disengage the auto lockon is to Sprint but in the process the controls kinda become a jumbled mess. Yeah, it makes sense that realistically you cant effectively fight multiple enemies, and after you level up your stats enough its possible to reliably win encounters of 2-3 enemies, sometimes the actual experience of dealing with multiple enemies feels more like a controls/design blunder than a meaningful immersive encounter. It's also weird how for a lot of the campaign it keeps pitting the player in these massive warfare battlezones with dozens of enemies, where the player doesnt even really have to do anything but can almost just stand around and wait for the AI to kill eachother to progress, its like the game is first and foremost balanced and designed around 1v1 combat, but theres tons of segments, even forced main story segments, where youre in these massive battles and it feels a little unpolished or underdeveloped.  But overall, once I got the hang of it and leveled up my character, I was constantly seeking out battles and willingly engaging in open world combat encounters just because it felt so satisfying to play, the graphics and animations can tend to be incredible and very detailed, the enemies voice lines while fighting you can be hilarious and have real personality, so the overall combat experience is just really fun for the most part, especially when the looting is so enjoyable and its always fun to see what kind of items you can pick off the enemies corpse to sell later or use yourself.

Since the combat can be so ruthless and unforgiving at times, you can quickly find yourself in a situation where you thought everything was fine, but then you get swarmed by 5 enemy bandits and you cant sprint away and you die very quickly. Well the game is kind of unforgiving and unorthodox in its save system, so its not uncommon for me to randomly lose 20+ minutes of progress because I hadn't thought to save. The way saving works, is, you can only save by sleeping in beds, but not just any bed, it has to be a bed that specifically says 'Sleep and save' on the prompt. I never really figured out what determines what beds are Save beds vs regular beds, because seemingly at random there are beds around the world where you can save but others you cant. So you need to sleep for a minimum of 1 hour to save, or the game will sometimes automatically save during Quest progress, OR you can buy or craft a potion called Saviour Schnapps to do a manual save at any time. This save potion isn't too easy to come by, atleast for maybe the first half of the game, so I mostly ignored manual saving and instead just slept in as many Save beds as possible. But I still a few times definitely found myself frustrated and pissed off at suddenly losing 20 minutes of progress to a random bandit encounter I couldnt escape from. But overall I actually like the save system, I like that it forces the player to try to stick with his decisions and try to make everything more meaningful than the other typical RPG's where you just quicksave before every action, making those games feel a bit trivial. So I'm glad Kingdom Comes save system tried something different to alleviate that, I think it works for the most part and makes your actions have more weight to them than they otherwise would, and its worth the few frustrating instances of losing progress.


I played the game for 60 hours, and could have played for a lot more. Even at the end of this long playtime, I'm not bored of the game and could easily buy all the DLC and play those stories too, and come back and do the rest of the side quests. The graphics and open world landscape is among one of the most visually appealing and immersive games I've seen since basically ever, its a really lush countryside mixed with villages and castles, the world is pretty comfy to just live in it does feel like you can get sucked into it because the way everything is laid out is really believable. There are so many mechanics that I havn't mentioned, the speech system of course has many dialogue options for every single encounter, there are speech checks, theres intimidation options, theres Charisma options, even small things like having to frequently wash yourself in water basins or else people will comment youre filthy and wont respect you as much, if you wear more prestegious armor they'll comment that you're a prestegious Knight, etc, makes the world really fun to engage with thats one of the reasons I wanted to just stop the main quest and instead go do a bunch of side missions because the world is so well done. There are big main cities such as Rattay with lots of merchants and trainers who can instantly boost some of your stats, theres an in-depth horse riding system where you can buy horses and upgrade your horse, press Y at any time to whistle to call your horse who will reliably spawn around you, use that to ride around the open world, although I will note this too can be rough around the edges with constantly colliding into bushes or other clunky objects can interfere with your horse. I havn't even mentioned the Perks system which every single category of skills also has dozens of perks you can choose from when levelling, and theyre not necessarily even upgrades its like the perks have Pros & cons so it makes you think if you even want to get any, I thought that system was really fun to play with and made the whole leveling process exciting because It wasnt needlessly convoluted and complex but almost felt like it was optional if you even wanted any perks or not. A couple main complaints with the game is basically that it can be pretty buggy, probably because its not this huge AAA game but a relativiely smaller company developing it, it still is visually more impressive than most AAA games, but it can have a lot of bugs or required me to google some things during some quests to figure out if something was bugged or not, commonly it was. Another complaint is sometimes the quest marker will tell you to go somewhere, but thats not really where youre supposed to go, youre supposed to go above or below the place its showing you or take a completely different route to get there, just wasting tons of time fooling you, that sucked. Another complaint is this whole Monastary segment where you have to become a monk to infilitrate the monastary to kill some guy, that whole segment could have been done better because it has this whole daily schedule you have to follow and if you dont they keep throwing you in solitary confinement or resetting your items, it was more tedious than anything, while the concept was cool and it wasnt that bad, some things about that whole segment also felt buggy and underpolished too. The game kind of ended on a cliff hanger, which I guess was sort of disappointing but at the same time makes me hyped for a sequel so there's that.

I put the game off for a few months after buying it because I was hesitatnt if the game would be really daunting or if the combat would be too hard, but not really once you get past the first initial learning hump and understanding that its a Zero to hero kind of game, that the beginning has a steep learning curve and that it actually gets easier as you keep playing, the game is a brilliant experience and I'd almost dare to say one of the greatest RPG's I've played to date. It has all sorts of amazing small touches like even having this big codex detailing everything about medieval history, complete with paintings and drawings of medieval life about everything you discover in the game, I loved those artistic touches like that. The map as well looks brilliant with its hand-crafted painted aesthetic, they just really nailed a lot of aspects with the aesthetics, UI, and personality in this game, you can tell its a passion project with a lot of care and attention put into it and not just some corporate sell out game made to appeal to lowest common denominator, the devs really just made a game THEY wanted to see made, and it shows.

9/10

Two Worlds

 

Two Worlds is a game developed around mid 2000s when Oblivion was all the craze. The devs have not seemingly released a game before it, hoping to pickup on the open world RPG craze of the time. They even are quoted as saying Two Worlds is the "Oblivion killer". Well, upon release the game was panned by everyone. People really had a hate boner for this game and had nothing nice to say about it. Its been sitting in my Steam library for years as I picked it up dirt cheap one time and my backlog is getting thin so I finally chose it to see why its reception is so bad.

The game starts off with some story about your sister being lost or kidnapped and you have to save her. The voice acting is the first standout thing, all the characters talk in this Ye olde english like Shakespere or something, and while its admittedly pretty awful, it also has this unforgettable charm to it. Like, what other game does this kind of stuff? Atleast it dares to be different. They constantly say things like "Forsooth" "Verily"  "Nay" and so on, its just kinda entertaining listening to all the different words theyre using and trying to talk to eachother in the same deadpan voices. You can visually change how the character looks, but its really minimal just a few faces and hair. You dont create a character with different starting stats and gear or anything.

You start off in this cellar, kill a few goblins, and pickup some items and get greeted to the inventory and looting screen and interface. It's a nice interface, the icons are very well designed and appealing, everything is well laid out and has personalized decorations, its a big deal to me the way the interface is laid out on RPG games. A bad interface could totally kill my motivation and desire to find new items for example. But in Two Worlds, the attractiveness of the icons and the way it uses Diablo style inventory tetris, already off the start made me want to collect all sorts of items, armors and equipment.

After this initial start, youre just plopped into this giant open world with little directon. The graphics are about average for a 2007 game, though the world is very huge with impressive draw distance and particularly satisfying reflections on the water and depth of field effects. The landscape is this typical European forested hillsides and villages, at times the game world looks identical to Oblivion which they were trying to compete with and it shows.

You start off on the very top of the North of the map, and I soon figured out that the further south you go, the game exponentially gets harder. In a way, this game design kind of reminds me of how in Diablo 1 you start off at the top floor of a dungeon, but the further down you go in the dungeon, the more and more it gets harder. This game world is like that too, except its just the direction South on the open world map. I like it a lot, it makes it so its linear feeling despite it being this huge open world, youre never really too confused about if youre in an area thats too hard, if its too hard then just walk more North and fight enemies more akin to your abilities! Admittedly, this took a few hours to all figure out, and the struggling until then was a bit confusing.

A lot of the games mechanics are sort of obfuscated and take a few hours to really understand how it works. The main questline, for example, is hard to even follow and figure out which quests are even the main ones. On the map screen and quest log, it sorts the quests by area that youve picked them up. But it turns out, the main quest is called "Tainted blood". It doesnt have a different color than any other quest, it doesnt look particularly different, so its very easy to accidentally do tons of sidequests  even though all you want to do is the main quest. Thats something I wished was better laid out. After I realized the main quest is under "Tainted blood", things started to progress a bit easier, though.

So to do the main quest, you read these entries under "Tainted blood" and theyre all vauge without much direction. This game isnt as much like modern RPGS like Oblivion or Skyrim where it just has a big arrow pointing to exactly where you have to go, its instead more like Morrowind where you actually have to carefully read every word in the quest log and actually read the location or even general compass direction of where it expects you to search. Although it does have quest icons on the minimap and game map, theyre extremely confusing and it took me a dozen or so hours of gameplay to even figure out what they all mean. The quest icons are these tiny little colored dots, Green dot, blue dot, red dot, etc. Honestly, I still dont really know what all the different colored dots mean. But they generally point you to some direction of a quest, or even just a place where you first obtained a quest.

Actually, my main complant and critique of the game is the whole Map quest icon system and minimap is just bad and hard to follow. The icons should of been made better and easier to decipher whats going on. For instance, the main quest is all about picking up these different magical stones to give to a guy called Gandohar to help you get your sister back. You need Earth,Wind,Fire,Water. After you get all these stones, the games basically over. At the beginning of the game, it gives you a vauge hint where one or two of these stones are. One of the stones is held by the leader of this military clan in some outpost. But, when you get to him, its locked behind a gate. The seemingly only way to actually get the main quest objective is to do a bunch of side quests. Thats another thing I dont like. A lot of the times, in order to progress the main quest, you are forced to do random side quests and youre not even sure if what youre doing is making progress towards the main goal or not. Its always some tangentically related thing like you need X object but in order to get it you have to do side quests for this person so you can build reputation for their clan so they will help you, stuff like that. So once I got to the Leader who has access to the quest item, I had unlocked like 5 different side quests for these guys. This part of the game was pretty confusing, it was all sorts of head scratching stuff like I have to go to so and so location, but I had no idea where it was, or I could just kill a certain person, but it doesnt tell me where he is, theres a real lack of direction and the map system's different colored dots dont even point you in the right direction, more often than not they just point to where you've obtained the quest and thats it. Eventually I found out where to go somehow, and reading the quest log one path I could take was to simply walk inside some guys house and pick up some Forged document on the floor, return it to the leader, and then I had access to the main objective stone. Ok, cool, one down.

At this point I'm just starting to understand all the systems and what the game expects of you. As for the combat, I was commonly scratching my head and wondering if I'm understanding it right. The combat is very simplistic and minimal. You just press mouse1 to attack, tap a few times to do a few different followup animations, and you can press Q to do a backstep almost like Dark Souls invincibillity frames. So you just wait for the enemy to swing, backstep, click once or twice for a few swings ,repeat. I sort of like how the core of the combat is really minimal, again, it reminds me of something like Diablo 1 or 2. Of course you can supplement this basic combat with 'Active skills', these are skills that add abilities with new animations such as swinging your sword in a circle to hit more enemies, but I found a lot of these active skills are just not as good as the basic attack (More on the skills later).

So with the basic combat, I just started roaming around the start of the map killing any enemies I found, looting their stuff to sell later, and get myself some equipment. Well pretty soon I kept finding sudden, massive difficulty spikes. Like I would go from easily dealing with a group of enemies, to suddenly a Silver wolf would instantly annihilate my health bar in one hit, killing me. Its very jarring when this first happens, it makes you feel like youve missed something or you dont understand the game. Whats happening is that I simply encountered enemies too high for my characters level. In retrospect, the color of the name of the enemy gives a hint. Green means theyre below youre level, yellowish means around your level, Red means danger and they will kill you fast. So what youre intended to do is keep sticking to the North part of the map where the enemies are easier, level up, and slowly make your way to the southest part of the map where the hardest enemies are. Once I grasped that combat the sudden huge difficulty spikes were mostly gone, leaving me to happily explore, kill bandit squads, goblins, attacking wildlife, to level up and get more loot to collect.

On my way to completing the main quest, I knew I would probably have to level up a ton to get the upper hand on the increasing enemy difficulty as I progressed south, so I'd frequently kind of just wander around, discovering new areas of the map (uncovering the black fog), Following the main Red roads, killing lots of bandit camps I come across. While the combat is really minimal, it also surprisingly frequently throws a ton of enemies at you at one time. Its not uncommon to see a group of 10-20 enemies trying to attack you all at once, its weird because the combat system doesnt really seemed designed around accounting for that many targets. So what you end up doing is kind of just kiting them around, getting some swings in here and there, running in circles, etc. Luckily lots of weapons have different ranges and swings can hit multiple enemies, so the combat is still overall enjoyable even in these huge awkward battles, despite how clunky it can all seem and look.

So I began exploring the map and leveling up, finding all sorts of dozens upon dozens of different armor pieces, Chest, boots, gloves, helm, 4 Ring slots, 1 Hand weapon + shield or 2 Hand weapons, etc. The loot is really enjoyable! There is even a feature where you can hover over items, and if two highlight Green, it means you can instantly combine them by simply dragging ontop of eachother and it just adds them together and upgrades the stats, with no downside. Once I realized this it was really fun to try to find the same items over and over again, unlike other RPGS where it gets annoying to find similar items, in this game it encourages it and is a resource. 

It almost feels Arcade in its gameplay and design, I think thats one of the reasons I found it so addictive. There is horseback riding, too, but its one of the most janky and clumsy parts of the game so I mostly ignored it. For starters, you can only find horses randomly in the world which you basically just steal, then the controls and animations seem to have a mind of their own. Its only marginally faster than running on foot, its not even that big of a difference. You can do combat from horse, but I never even cared to do it because I just didnt like the horseback mechanics. I guess a complaint I have is that travelling across the world can be tedious and boring sometimes, like you can teleport from various different teleport shrines once you unlock them, but sometimes theyre few and far between, or you have to spend 10 mins just walking on foot back to the nearest teleporter because you cant simply just open your map and teleport, you have to do it from one of these stations. The horseback riding could of been better, but at the same time, Im kind of glad it isnt and youre moreso compelled to just be on foot the whole time, I never much like horseback mechanics in games anyway, except maybe Mount & Blade.

The level up mechanics aren't very complex either, its quite easy to grasp and work with for the most part. You have your standard 4 attributes, Strength, Vitality, Wisdom, Dexterity.  These are almost self-explainatory, though Dexterity is the one I was most confused with. I was never quite sure exactly what it does. Does it make me have more attack speed? Does it make me miss less often? Well I dont even really miss already. Does it do something else entirely? I still dont really know. I ended up mostly ignoring the Dex stat the whole game, except for raising it to the bare minimum required for some items. The game could have added some tooltips explaining exactly what this stuff does. I mostly focused on pumping Strength as high as possible for the most damage, and Vitality for when I felt like I needed more health. Every level you get 5 attribute points and I think 2 skill points. You also can seemingly randomly get skill points for doing quests or progressing certain quest areas.

The skills are the other category. It's just a small page with a few different sections. Theres a section dedicated to archery related skills, Mage related skills, Non-combat skills like Lockpicking, Stealth, pickpocket etc,  and then you just have your core combat melee skills. Beyond these categories, there are also two different 'modes' of upgrade. There are Passive skills, which as it sound just give you a permanent buff. Then there are 'active' skills which you have to add to your hotbar quick key and use like skills from an MMO or something. I mostly ignored all the 'active' skills in favor for getting as many permanent buffs as possible, which is a very viable route it seems. There arent that many, either. Maybe 5-10 really go-to skills per 'build'  (archer, mage, warrior I guess are the possible builds, really).  So I just went for the Passive abilities like, permanent damage increase, Critical strike, Knock down enemies, and so on. Each skill can only level 10 times, too. I like the skill and stat system ,its very down to earth and easy to grasp, but it also has enough to play with where it felt exciting and rewarding to constantly get levels, I found myself caring and wanting to plan ahead of exactly what I was gonna do with my character, and it all worked out in the end and I made a pretty satisfying and powerful character just by using my intuitions about the system.

The weird thing about skills, though, is that at the start of the game most of them are Locked. It doesnt really explain, but the way to actually unlock the skills you want and actually spend your skill points in useful ways, is you have to first find a Skill Trainer that for a fee, will unlock the skill for you. Well for the first like 6 hours I could not for the life of me find one of these guys, and just walked around the whole time with 10+ unspent skills. Its weird that there isnt skill trainers sooner in the  game, but the first time I found them was when I went to one of the major cities and there was a place with like 10 of them.

The game also has a rather unique and complex Alchemy system where you have a whole section in the interface dedicated to potion crafting. I dont know a whole lot about this, but theres also a passive skill dedicated to it, which I maxed,  then you can combine random ingreidents from your inventory to the 5 different alchemy slots, for a total of 10 ingredients per potion. These ingredients seem to come in two varieties: "Temporary" and "Permanent" So you can find items that say like "Temporarily raises Strength by 20 for 5 minutes"   OR you can find items like "Raises strength by 5. Effect is permanent"  -- So the thing is you can actually create potions which permanently increase your stats! The way to do this is weird, though, and took some headscratching to figure out. I really only did this at the end of the game also, Its totally fine to ignore Alchemy for the whole game, I only checked it out around the end of the game because I was curious to see all the mechanics the game had to offer. But yeah, to create permanent potions you strangely have to add up to any 9 Permanent ingreidents, then any Magic potion. If you do anything other than this, it will turn the end result into some random thing, or turn it into a temporary potion. Weird, but once I figured that out, the knowledge it brings is insane. Constantly able to craft potions which permanent increase your health and armor is pretty nutty.

So I was getting so much enjoyment from just exploring, leveling up, looting items killing enemies and pushing my character further and further South to the more difficult content, trying to complete the main questline, One day I found myself just waking up and playing Two Worlds for like 8-12 hours straight! Shocking, I know. I thought this game was supposed to be awful? I was finding it strangely addicting, charming, and enjoyable. The soundtrack, atmosphere, the all around personality of the game is unforgettable. A lot of moments of the soundtrack sound like something from Runescape, but then other times it has these oddball piano/techno songs too, it seems obviously out of place, but in a way its also enderaing and nostalgic sounding so I rather enjoyed it and made the experience feel cozy. It's just a world I found myself experiencing for the most part.

The game is obviously rather rough around the edges, the animations are especially janky looking. While the game runs at 60fps, it looks like the animations are barely at 20 they look super choppy and weird. For some enemies, especially later on in the game like the Dragons, its possible to sort of stunlock them over and over and it makes their animation look horrid and instantly repeat its self, making the game look like some sloppy Alpha game. But maybe all these things come together in some strange way which gives the game its own personality and aura. The ridiculous Olde english voice acting, the main character being so in love and gushy with his sister that it seems insestious at times, the random out of place techno music, the hand decorated interface and colorful detailed item icons, the way the character will randomly announce stuff to himself in the enviornment  like "It's raining, its snowing"  or when you attack enemies sometimes the main character with laugh with glee like an evil maniac. It just oozes with a soul of its own and is hard for me not to appreciate. Some games feel like they were put together by robotic inhuman corporate drones, but games like this, while rough around the edges, feel like they were made by actual people that put their own personal touches on what they were working on, creating this interesting world that I found myself not wanting to put down.

The game can be fairly buggy, I think picking up one of the main quest objectives failed to trigger some script when I picked up the Air main quest item. Apparently its supposed to trigger some goblin invasion that kills the whole city, but it just never happened and the quest remained incomplete on my log. Not that big of a deal, I could still progress, but it sucked that the log was incomplete. A few other times it seems like it was giving me quest icons on my map despite the log contradicting it. Like for the Fire objective, the log would say "No one has any clue where this is yet" -- But on the map, it would show me an icon of where to go all the way south of the map, past my characters level and ability! Not sure what was going on there. The game is very open ended and doesnt hold your hand much at all, its possible to entirely miss areas, main cities, locations if you arent paying attention. I almost missed the entire Desert section because either my game sort of bugged and didnt point me there, or I just went an alternate route. The different areas of the map have all sorts of different enemies, the desert has these stone dragons and weird animal warriors, theres a burnt forest area down south that has Hell warriors in full plate mail among other things, theres another area with a lot of these huge scorpian things, the game has tons of enemy variety so that also made it really fun to keep exploring and pushing my character to the next level. There are ghouls, zombies, even at night time there is this mechanic where enemies you kill can come back as Ghosts, and you cant even hurt them unless you enchant your weapon with some Element! The first time you encounter this its a mindfuck.

 Luckily enchanting your weapon with some ability is really easy, you just need a element gem which are really easy to come by. However once you imprint an element on your weapon you have to stick with it and cant undo it, so I had to make sure which one to use (Fire, cold, Spirit, poison etc). The game has a lot of mechanics that are simple, yet satisfying to try to wrap your head around and figure out exactly how they work. Another one of these mechanics is the whole 1 hand VS 2 hand issue. You can use a shield, but theres no actual way to block yourself. Shields say "Parry" on them, but Im not really sure what it means? Does it just mean I have some automatic chance to block hits? I'm not sure. I opted to instead go for 2 handed weapons and go full out on damage. There is so much weapon variety, Polearms, Axes, Swords, Two hand swords, Blunt weapons. Each weapon has different categories of damage. Slashing, Piercing, Blunt. Each enemy can have strengths and weaknesses to any of these damage types. Like a skeleton would be almost immune to Slashing damage, so using a blunt weapon would suffice better. Its cool and clever having to think about that stuff. I like that it makes you make all these decisions. For the first half of the game, I went with this two handed mace that I sometimes upgraded using the combination feature. Later on, I started using two hand swords like Katanas and Flamberg that I bought from city merchants. The actual aesthetics of the armors and weapons for the most part are appealing too. Some of the later armors look a bit too fantasy, but for the most part I was getting into gearing up my guy with all sorts of different Chainmails, platemails etc, and everything you put on is reflected by how you look.  

For the most part, this is one of those kind of games that start off really hard since you dont know what to expect. Like if you dont realize enemies with RED names will fuck you up, you can easily get one shot by random seemingly weak enemies like Wolves, bears,etc. Thats what happened to me. I thought the game would be trash and annoying because I would randomly encounter enemies that would one shot me. But once I realized I just had to back off and level up some more, then return, the game was really enjoyable and easy! I went from a total chump getting shit on, to becoming a God making the whole world mine. Thats what a good RPG does for me. Unlike Oblivion, this game DOES NOT have level scaling. In oblivion, as you level up, so does the world around you. Almost paradoxically making leveling up being a bad thing and making your character worse (In modern days, Diablo 4 is now guilty of this..). In many ways, Two Worlds actually IS the Oblivion killer, atleast they dont have this shitty level scaling! It feels great to better yourself and come back to a challenging area and now dominating it with your new gear and stats.

Though, there are still a few places in the game where these weird difficulty spikes show up. Like later in the game, there are these Giant variations of enemies. Like Giant scorpians, or Golems. I can easily kill all the surrounding enemies without losing any health, but get touched once by these Golem or Giant variations and its instant death. Its almost like theyre programmed to be One hit monsters to keep the player on their feet. Weird design decision I guess, but understandable. Death in this game isnt even a big deal. Theres not much penalty for dying. You just spawn at a respawn location nearby and can run right back to the enemy you were just fighting and their health is even the same. I guess its kind of disappointing that you can cheese the game so easy and have no penalty, but its also not that big of a deal in a massive RPG such as this where its not so much about player skill, but about stats, gear, and knowing how to properly plan your character. For me, its a matter of pride of being able to actually 'fairly' beat the enemy, so if I die multiple times I dont just corpse rush the AI, I try to back off and go level up some more first.

Once I finally got all the main objective Element stuff, it was obvious to me I was near the end of the game. Sometimes the quests are really obtuse like at this part it was telling me to "Find someone who supports the pentagram" I have no idea how to do that, ended up having to Google it. Turns out I had to go to one of the random necromancer towers and kill the guy ontop, ok, easy enough. After that it gives you a quest to "Free kira" and tells you to go fight Gandohar, the villian guy youve been dealing with all game. Well, since I didnt even want the game to end yet, I held off and just walked around doing side quests, exploring the map, messing with Alchemy and items because I was having so much fun with it. Thats the sign of a good game, not wanting it to end!

The game has multiple main cities which are absolutely brimming with dozens upon dozens of citizens. At first its overwhelming because I had no idea how to differenciate generic copy paste NPC with 'special' onces, but luckily there is a way. The icon that shows up when you hover on NPC tells you what they do. Green means Quest, Bag icon with coins is merchant, Red means skill trainer, Blue means respec.  Once I realized this it was a breeze and excitement to run through the big sprawling major cities often stocked with dozens of traders, looking at their wares, etc.

Well after I decided to finally continue the main quest, it came to a halt really quickly. I went up to the big bad boss stronghold, killed all the enemies around him like the cool Hell demons and dragons, zombies etc. Then a big red monster spawned which could one hit me (and did once) But because I had been leveling my gear and character, using alchemy for permanent potions etc, using the Magic system (which I havnt touched on because I usually ignore magic on RPGs first time around, I just used the most basic minimum level spells 'Blessing' to give myself temp strength buff, and Heal spell)  I was able to kill that boss very quickly. Then, the main villian Gandohar talks to you and basically asks to join the dark side, or to kill him. I choose to kill him. The shocking part is he was REALLY easy. He acts like any other regular NPC enemy, he barely could do any damage to me, and I kill him in 2 hits. Then, you get a really short cutscene of you and your sister riding off on a horse, and the game kicks you back to main menu. Not even any end credits! Doesnt seem like you can even play after the game ends, you can reload previous save thats it.

I think Two Worlds is a very underrated RPG. It may be janky, have sloppy programming, rough around the edges, confusing quests and worst of all a bad minimap and hard to navigate quest system, but everything else about the game was engrossing for me especially the looting and sense of character progression. I think people back in the day were too enamoured with Oblivion to ever entertain any alternatives, its a shame because this game needs a lot more love, I could see myself replaying this in the future, sure. Theres even a sequel, Two Worlds 2,  which I am pretty excited to play now.  I beat the game in about 25 hours, by the way. Could have beaten it in 15 if I didnt wanna stick around so much longer just enjoying it, so that says something.

7/10