Recent reviews by Barricadas

I haven't seen any other game that is complemented by a thorough reading of Marx's French Trilogy, "The Class Struggle in France, 1848 to 1850", "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" and most importantly "The Civil War in France". Not only Marx but every piece of information about the real world art, philosophy, sociology, politics, pop culture and economy lets Disco Elysium to reveal another layer to the player in an alternative world that is so similar and so different to ours at the same time. If you are an ignorant "moralinternist", it holds your hand and explains these concepts to you. Apart from being an incredibly well-made RPG, Disco Elysium can also be considered as an extremely fun encyclopaedia with choose your own adventure features included.

This relation to real life allows Disco Elysium to present a familiar murder case where you can go nuts with the amount of personas that you can create for yourself. There have been lots of discussions in the RPG community regarding playing a premade protagonist and one where you can create your own, but Disco merges the two systems together by presenting a premade character and offering the best personality creation system through the dialogues where you can roleplay in a depth that I've never seen before in a "make your own character" game.

This is reinforced by the world itself. The World ZA/UM created has a great balance of real and supernatural, allowing the player character to shine with its wackiness but does not break the line where the suspension of disbelief resides in. NPC's you encounter on your murder investigation, play and act on the same thin line covering up for the "really" rare occurrences (like once or twice on a 30 hour campaign) where the story falls short.

All in all, Disco Elysium is a masterpiece and quickly found itself a place in my personal best games of all time. It's only minor faults are on the ending and the soundtrack but even they are at least better than most of the ♥♥♥♥ you'll sift through looking at the latest AAA releases of the past few years.

Masterpiece/10, thank you ZA/UM.

Great work for an amateur team. If Tripwire lends its magic touch to this mod like they did with RS team, this could easily have the success the RS mod of RS2 had.

First thing I did after completing Thief was to go back and check the release date of Dishonored and it feels very strange that Dishonored was released two years before Thief did. If it was released in 2008-2010 period this would have been a masterpiece but after Dishonored it just feels lacklustre, especially when it comes to movement, level design and story (and I say this even before including the blink option in Dishonored as it doesn't seem fair).

Still, if you enjoy stealth games, Thief is a must-play especially if you have gone through Dishonored.

Bastion was the first game that made me truly believe indie games can be as good as AAA or AA ones, maybe even better. I played Transistor shortly after and it still remains as one of my favourite games. In my recent melancholic mood, I have grown thinking about Transistor more and more, wanting to give it another go. I remembered that I haven't played Pyre yet, and decided to go with it instead.

My first impression with Pyre was that it oozes character just like previous offerings of Supergiant Games. Even the "ugly" vistas have been drawn with such care and amazingly applied colour palette, accompanied by another great soundtrack which really brings forth the strength of these diverse places you visit throughout the game. Story starts out interesting and really gets intriguing when you finally meet the oft mentioned character and this is something amazing for what is essentially a sports game. A trademark of Supergiant's games, Logan Cunningham is also there with another superb voice performance although it is not on the foreground unlike the previous games.

Unfortunately that's where the positives end. My biggest gripe with this game has been how unapologetically asks you to grind, returning to the previous challenges and old opponents. Bastion and Transistor used the same trick by making you retread your steps, but when those parts came, those games had awoken so strong emotions that I could not care less. Pyre, unfortunately, does not evoke those emotions. I know that it is not intended anyway, but at that point I would pretty much rather going back to FIFA if I'm going to play out the same scenarios over and over, as it is a much more polished sports experience.

Grind is not the only issue, story gets cut short nearly at the moment it gets interesting. Characters make up for this as I have really grown into some of them (especially *ea) but they are simply not at the level of characters in Bastion or Transistor. For example, in Bastion, you could learn more about characters while doing their extra missions, I expected the same here but, sadly, that was not the case. It's hard to praise the gameplay either. It is a fork of basketball and can be called interesting but the AI is not that good, abilities are not diverse or flashy enough. The biggest sin of all though, is the same with FIFA: pace-whoring. With enough quickness you can beat any opponent without strategizing, or using any skill other than ones give you extra speed. This really diminishes the value of the gameplay and makes every character but one extremely easy to play with, especially with fully upgraded quickness talismans.

I really wanted to enjoy Pyre and I still think that maybe there is something wrong with the time, mood and place I have played this game. Still, I know that I will find it very hard to go back to the game to give it another go, because I know that the grinding process will repeat itself over and over again.

6/10, sorry Supergiant. Looking forward to Hades anyway.

I have been disappointed by the more critically acclaimed product of Dontnod, Life is Strange. As a result, this game had fallen to the lower ranks of my wishlist. After completing it, I only wish that I had played this sooner.

Remember Me features an extremely likable female protagonist (reminded me of Faith), stunningly beautiful atmosphere and art direction, interesting combo system, great characters, one of the best boss fights I had recently and some decent puzzle platforming sequences. Some of its qualities makes the game able to distinguish itself from other similar games and allows the player to have an unique experience.

Still, there are also quite a few places where it falls short. The story's socio-political premise falls into obscurity as they are explained only via texts you can find in-game, interesting combo system becomes useless as you can just make your way through three hit basic combos, great boss fight repeats itself for too long, one of the interesting characters, Edge, has terrible voice acting, there are some bugs and camera can get into some weird angles sometimes and puzzle platforming sequences are just not enough.

Nevertheless, positive parts of Remember Me are so strong that it deserves giving it a shot.

I hope it will be followed by a sequel in some time.

Incredibly unique story telling (and art) that explores a topic that is not usually seen in gaming. A great 15 mins experience.

Started as a promising milsim but in time, evolved into an almost perfect military simcade. I almost always find myself disappointed with the direction developers take during early access or with live service games but Hell Let Loose managed this process with excellence.

Mil-sim game developers need to admit that limitations of current networking, especially player count limits, do not allow a realistic scale of map size. Red Orchestra 2 was the first game that got this right in my opinion, dividing just one battle into multiple maps, especially with campaign mode to maintain the sense of realism and the scope of battle. Hell Let Loose tackles this in a different way, with larger maps but also with a larger player count (100).

Maps have been downsized a bit since the early development phase of the game and I think that was the correct call. Run-fight-die cycle's run part has been decreased especially with well designed maps creating natural bottlenecks around the map. A simple placement of a half fence or some bushes divide the battlefield into several sectors. This plays a huge role in how players approach objectives as the players will instinctively adjust their play according to cover placement. This natural division of the maps also helps with new players getting their bearings, so learning the maps, despite their large size, will not be a huge challenge for anyone.

Its emphasis on communication, teamwork and squad level tactics also shine within this map design philosophy. Natural bottlenecks allow no snooze fests traditionally associated with milsim games but also the maps are large enough to pull some crazy flanking manoeuvres. Games are usually are not determined by who has the better killers, but by which team has better tactics and teamwork. A flanking squad placing a garrison (spawn point) deep into enemy territory while the other squads on defence create enough diversion for the enemy team can change the whole momentum.

I had games in HLL where I had KDR over 5, kills over 80, but these scores don't matter. The most satisfying moment I had in this game was not mowing down Krauts with a machine gun but it was silently breaking from defensive engagement to push my squad east on Kursk, one of the most open maps in the game where you can be shot from distances over 400 meters. With much crawling and trigger discipline we reached our objective, built a garrison with the supplies we had on ourselves and arranged on commander chat that every squad other than one to redeploy as soon as the garrison is built. Until that point the whole team had our backs to the wall but due to that good teamwork both within the squad and between squad leaders and commander, we captured that middle objective with little resistance and managed to win the game with all objectives captured at the end.

The reason why WW2 fascinates me so much is the feeling of being a small but important part of something inconceivably larger and Hell Let Loose conveys this feeling perfectly.

This game fills the Red Orchestra shaped hole in my heart/10

Not bad but still requires lots of balance and uniqueness to factions.

Considering it's early access, I have some suggestions to make:

-Apart from the Brits who are extremely defensive and can pick anyone from a distance, the other nations don't have any unique character to them.
-8+ cards are utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and if the maximum card rate you got is 6, there is no way that you can win the game anymore.
-More unique abilities and more cards on hand would be a lot better as it is very simplistic at the moment.
-Ability to make cards that you don't own via resources is absolutely necessary. People are complaining about Katyusha spam on the forums but despite my 16.2 hours as of now, I haven't even got that card.
-More varied backgrounds, looking at that drab brown gets boring after a while.
-Regional pricing on card packs. There is no way that I will buy some cards if the price of a single pack is worth more than a 2 year old AAA game.
-A blitz mode or at least lower turn times would improve the replayability of the game drastically.
-Smaller decks. Current 40 is too high and leaves a lot to RNG. 30 would make a lot more sense with limited allied nation cards (6)?.

Overall I had fun but I know that if I won't see any improvement on these issues that's the only fun I'll have from this game. I wish there was an option to give mixed rating to games but we can't so I'll just give a yes as at least it's interesting for a couple of hours.

I had a 200 hours journey in The Witcher III and even the most conservative estimate would put the hours I have spent playing Gwent to 30 or so hours. I had enjoyed brawls and dice poker in The Witcher II but CDPR created a side game that even deserved its own game and it was truly an outstanding achievement. With Thronebreaker (and with online Gwent of course) CDPR has catered to us fantastically.

The Good:
- This is not a simple card battle game but a true RPG that presents many ethical dilemmas with consequences directly impacting the gameplay and story.
- The prevalence of gray rather than black or white is a common theme in the Witcher books and games, essentially it is one of the most important reasons why this world is so fascinating. With Meve, after so many books and games we get to experience what it feels like to be a white or at least a lighter shade of gray (for the Witcher world of course) in a world dominated by gray and against all expectations. This works amazingly as it keeps the atmosphere of the game fresh after four games, eight books and a couple of comic books.
- Voice acting brilliantly reinforces the immersion into the world CDPR created and allows the player to feel some kind of familiarity with every character quickly. Especially Meve's masculine voice befits the character perfectly (Lucy Black).
- As traditional with Witcher games, some of the side quests have stories as intriguing as the main story.
- Finding new combinations to use, for example:

• For high points low damage: Lyrian Scytheman - Rivian Pikeman - Lyrian Cavalry setups
  
• For high damage low points: Rivian Onager - Rivian Sapper - War Wagon - Wagenburg setups

- Interesting abilities and combinations keeps the game fresh until the very last moment of the game.
- Riding on land, passing judgement on issues regarding law and order is quite an empowering feeling, especially due to narrator informing you of the results of your actions and frankly, I would love to have more of it in an open world sandbox game.
- Upgrading units via army base, unlocking or improving their abilities is a huge factor to keep a card game taking 40-50 hours fresh.

The Bad:
- No balance at all. Some of the cards are practically useless and some of the cards make every battle a triviality.
For example:

• If you have a combination of Black Rayla, Xavier Lemmens, Reynard Odo and if you want it to be more overpowered, with a healthy amount of Rivian Hajduks, there is simply no battle that you can lose even on the hardest difficulty.
  
• The game goes on to the very last moment with this casual approach but suddenly on the battle against Aep Dahy things get ridiculously hard. He has a massive 80 card deck and most of the Nilfgaardian cards are able to call cards from the deck including Aep Dahy's special ability, which gives him to instantly replenish destroyed units from the deck. Add to that his two Call for Aid cards, adding a total of eight cards to his deck, he practically has a chance to play one more round than you do.

- AI usually has a hard time dealing with cheesy tactics. If you maximise the amount of Rivian Pikeman in your deck and increase them in numbers with Aretuza Adept (Lyrian Scytheman+Aretuza Adept+Reinforcements has the same effect), playing these two cards at the beginning of the round one is a 90% guarantee that you will win the first round, turning every standard battle into a shortened battle of only one round.
- Angren is supposed to be ugly, and chaotic with all the monsters living there but a better job could have been done with the environment, rather than bleak brown.
- Mahakam is a great place to visit but the units you get from Brouver Hoog are a lot underpowered (useless maybe?) and storywise, visiting Mahakam felt like it was not worth the hassle. Especially compared to the performance of Dwarven battalions in the books, they are quite inferior to what is expected.
- Expected Geralt and Cahir to be more overpowered cards and Battle of the Bridge to be harder, but the game was too easy at that point that I did not care at all about losing or optimizing them.

The Ugly:
- The game has a huge memory leak issue. It would often start with 700-1200MBs of RAM in use, rising to 6500-7500MBs RAM use in a couple of hours, requiring me to restart the game often.

With all its shortcomings, Thronebreaker is still an amazing game to play, especially if you fell in love with the world of the Witcher.

After being utterly disappointed by the tediousness of Assassin's Creed II, a game revered by many, the series as a whole lost my interest. Hearing that this game takes place during the Bolshevik Revolution, I thought this might be a good way of testing the waters for Syndicate and Unity which interests me due to the time period they take place in.

Witnessing that they have managed to create another dreadful experience in one of the most vivid time periods of history full of conflict, I sure won't be giving Syndicate and Unity a chance.

To list the cons:
1- Terrible story in which their ♥♥♥♥♥♥ templars vs. assassins take the foreground. I am not against the idea that this might be used as forging a continuity within the series but being the foremost conflict in an experience that drastically changed the world politics for the recent hundred years, it is so much out of place.

2- Animations for assassinations and moving into hiding spots are clunky, thus forcing you to consider the time of when the animation ends, rather than when you take action. This causes a disconnect between the player and the game as your rhytm is constantly challenged by these animations.

3- Some sections require you to match the exact milisecond of what the game expects from you, you miss that ridiculous timeframe, you're dead.

All in all, Asssassin's Creed Chronicles: Russia is not a fun game to play.