Is it possible for a game to retroactively poison your opinion of the series before it? Because this saccharine, overcomplicated thing did that for Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2.
The landscape is impossibly gorgeous, I haven't played a game this pretty in a long time. Finding the shrines, petting the foxes, and writing haiku are all so much fun. The combat is dynamic and exciting. The duels are breathless and cinematic. The moments after completing a mission when you chill with your horse are cute and fun.
HOWEVER, the story is bog-standard open-world storytelling, and the tropes of an open world are shoehorned in kind of painfully. Getting a poison that makes your enemies fight each other? Yawn, except now the game tries to make you feel guilty for using poisons after forcing you to use poison. Being the rebel reclaiming the land and building up a resistance? Yep, you're going to do it again. The only open-world trope that's missing is climbing a tall tower to open up the map.
It's worth it to explore the landscape and the world, and to find the beauty in the world around you. But if you get annoyed by the generic parts of an open-world game, you will probably get really annoyed by those impossible-to-ignore aspects.
If the series ended here, it would have been absolutely a wonderful, weird little appearance in the world. It's so heartfelt that you'll feel it hard to not roll your eyes, but the story has not yet become so convoluted that you can't actually follow it.
The Nemesis system is wonderful in its application, but loses its luster once you've seen the same types of enemies pop up. When Shadow of War launched, it was so riddled with microtransactions and lootboxes that the game felt ruined by gambling and money-grubbing. Even though those have been removed, there's an insane amount of distracting mechanics that have so much grinding attached to them. The story is also pretty garbage - turning Shelob the spider into a lady in a cocktail dress was stupid, and shoehorning a bad Gollum impression was bad; and the end of the story made was more of a slog than you'll expect.
Legendary game and series for its cultural impact, but also not really worth revisiting other than watching Twitch Streamers who are a million degrees better than you, and they only play like 3 of the original songs anyways.
There are SO MANY good ideas in this game, but there's also an extremely high number of frustrations that can get in the way of actually having fun with the game's high points. It's worth it to be in what's probably one of the most historically accurate games set in medieval Europe, but be prepared to lose an hour-plus of progress when you get attacked/shot by a squad of Cumans that you didn't notice while picking flowers out in the woods.
Time has not been too kind to Fallout 3, but there's still a lot of fun to be had, and enjoyable moments to play with. Broken Steel and Point Lookout are a must in terms of add-ons
I've put more hours into this on Steam than probably any other game. Aiming towards building a specific deck and playing with strategies and patterns is a lot of fun.
This is the most bog-standard open-world action game I've ever played. It's also remarkably bleak, if that kind of story bums you out. (just in case a desert dystopia murder franchise wasn't enough of a hint)
The difficulty curve is merciless. This game can make my best computer chug. I lost five dwarves to a goblin raid before I had even figured out how to train them for combat.
I love it.
