I was interested in this series long, long ago, beginning with the second one if I recall correctly because of what I heard about the quality of the AI players. For various reasons I never got around to playing it and recently Stardock’s position on the Gamergate affair soured me on all of their products. I didn’t buy this copy of the game either. It was a gift from a Broken Forum member so I felt that I had to at least give it a decent shake.
Illwinter is a game company composed of a Swedish duo that has only ever made multiple iterations of two titles: the more famous Dominions series and the Conquest of Elysium series. As you can tell from these screenshots, their games have only very basic graphics and user interfaces that absolutely require reading the manual to make sense of. Still they have managed to garner quite a fanbase for themselves and in fact it was by playing Dominions 2 that I joined the forum of their then publisher Shrapnel and from there to the Quarter to Three and later Broken Forum discussion boards.
So after writing about buying Assassin’s Creed: Unity all the way back in March, I’ve finally gotten around to playing it. As I’ve mentioned I bought this even though I’m pretty burned out on the formula because I couldn’t resist the idea of playing through a map of Paris. As it turned out, I really am very bored of the basic gameplay loop but I enjoyed it anyway due to the map and appreciated most of the mechanics updates.
This one was a strong recommendation by a Broken Forum member who is absolutely insane about space-themed games. Its developer is the small and independent Soldak Entertainment. I’ve never played any of their games but they made a name for themselves a few years back with their action RPGs set on a procedurally generated maps. The really big deal however was that unlike traditional RPGs in which quest givers are content to wait around forever for the player to get around to doing them, in these games the world moves on even while the player does something else and quests can become irrelevant. There may even be other agents moving about the game world doing the quests if the player doesn’t get around to them in a timely manner.
So obviously people are already playing the sequel but I’ve only just got around to playing this first title despite having owned it for a while. To tell the truth, I was rather surprised by how quickly the next one came out since this one was only released last year. Apparently it’s more of a standalone expansion than a sequel so playing this one right now is still okay. I had held off on playing this for so long because I’m still feeling burned out on the Total War formula. Back in the heyday I was one of those who thought that this property was a natural fit for this style of video game but now that it’s here I find that even the pausable real-time gameplay is a bit much for me.
Once again I find myself playing a game just when its sequel is coming out. It’s debatable whether or not this game was fully completed when development on it stopped due to some kind of dispute between the developer and the publisher. Since then they’ve patched things up and are now about to release the sequel but this version hasn’t been updated since. Anyway the tutorials are certainly insufficient and I found it impossible to understand what you’re supposed to do without referring to a fan-made guide online. But content-wise, I think this game is more than adequate and can provides many hours of gameplay provided you are patient enough.
Like everyone else I played Duke Nukem 3D back in the day but for some reason or other never got around to playing the original Shadow Warrior. I didn’t play the reboot either but noticed when it was released for free and thought I’d give it a shot when I saw a friend of mine playing the sequel on Steam. I had thought it to be a fairly light game I could slot in between more hefty ones but it turned out to have substantial content and was a more difficult action game than I’m used to these days.