List items
-
#1: When I heard that this game was going to have Rome: Total War-esque family trees in it, I decided I needed to buy it. As a sequel to a classic but flawed game, Crusader Kings II does everything right. The only thing it does not do very well at is telling you how to play it. To learn how to play it, I highly recommend checking out the Let's Play Archive, where this an instructional Let's Play (basically an endurance run, if you've never heard of Let's Plays before) of this game.
What makes this game unique is that it combines grand strategy and role playing games in a way that no other series of games has done before. You roleplay as the head of a medieval European dynasty (or a Muslim dynasty, or, soon, the leader of a Republic, which will be interesting to see). The way the game handles this results in some of the most amazing game stories I've ever heard.
That doesn't really do it justice, but I don't want to go too long, so, to sum up, if you like grand strategy, Game of Thrones, Medieval history, emergent gameplay of the sort that Chris Avellone loves to talk about, and you don't mind putting some time in to learn a game, you should already own this game.
Also, it has 32 person multiplayer, which is crazy and awesome.
-
#2: Such a cool game. Goes for a neo-noir cinema feel, as opposed to the comic-book noir of the originals, which I personally thought worked out great.
I recommend playing it on pc if you can, because... well, did you ever try using manual aiming in Red Dead Redemption? It was hard as fuck to hit anything, right? Well, the shooting in this game is like that too, on consoles. You need the precision of the mouse and keyboard controls to be able to play it that way. If you're playing it on consoles, use the soft lock, it doesn't make it too easy, because for most of the enemies, you still have to do some aiming to get the headshot you need to do any damage to them at all, but it keeps the game from becoming impossibly frustrating.
Anyways, what makes this game really strand out in my mind is the voice actor for Max Payne. He does a really fucking good job here. I just don't expect video game voice acting to be this good, usually, I guess.
In addition, the gameplay, aside from the mm, somewhat minor quibble with the shooting on consoles mentioned above, while still being very Max Payne, is a lot better than it was. Instead of being able to jump at walls and kind of slowly sink to the ground while maintaining the same pose, Max will now smash into the wall and fall to the ground like you would expect someone who just leapt headlong into a wall to do.
If there's any game I would compare this to, it's Mafia 2 (which I also really liked). Except it's much more of an action game, obviously.
-
#3: Such a beautiful game. It's like Myst, only even lovelier and detailed, and without those tricky puzzles to get in the way of what really matters. It's that joy of exploration that Shigeru Miyamoto talked about when describing what inspired the Legend of Zelda. Remember the first time you found one of the Telvanni cities in Morrowind? This is like that turned into an entire game.
Load Comments