Fun to see Viticulture on vin's list. I've owned the game for a few years now and really didn't care for it but kept trying to see what everyone else saw in it, and this year it grew on me a little bit. Mind you. every time i play it as a two player game i feel like i have a better time with it than with multiple people.
But this year, Nations and A Feast For Odin has taken hold as the holiday game of choice. With honorable mentions to Summoner Wars and Viticulture.
Thanks for the list Jeff! Hope to see ya around someday at the Texas Pinball Festival and if you're in Dallas for some reason, check out Cidercade attached to Bishop's hard cider brewery.
@the_hot_giant_dolphin: you can play the Exeed system for free on tabletopia, or go to the publisher's website and download a Print'n'Play version, you just wont get the Street Fighter decks.
@benpack:Have you tried this designer's earlier game BattleCON? i'm wondering how the Exeed system compares to the BattleCON system.
[edit] ...also, i too, would like to see more card/board game stuff on Giant Bomb.
Well, at least they did briefly touch on what my biggest gripe with the game is, which is all the scripted stuff that happens mid mission, sometimes requiring you to restart. It makes it feel less like a strategy game at times, because you can't really plan for some tank or invincible magic woman suddenly appearing directly next to your units. I wish there were more missions that were just strategy.
Though, i say i like the first VC game as a unique take on a semi-real time tactics game, this is 100% why i never finished it.
Was hoping this game didn't pull that kind of thing.
Oh damn! I was going to give my "best taste of the year" award to whoever put D:OS2 highest on their list but seeing some unexpected pinball love has shaken things up.
@stryker1121: The armor is a bit confusing at first and, specifically the magic armor, diminishes a lot of the fun you had with elemental combat/combos. It was fun to lay down a puddle in D:OS and fallow it up with electricity that would shock anyone who's standing in it. In D:OS2 you have to whittle down the magic armor before elemental statuses take effect. So hitting a guy with ice won't "chill" that target unless the hit depletes the magic armor and touches the targets vitality. Considering how much D:OS2 seems to favor physical damage, it can be difficult to deplete magic armor and the cooldown on spells are fairly long so it often feels wasteful to use them before the magic armor is gone.
There are spells in the game that require source points to cast. It's quite awhile before you have the means to efficiently replenish those source points so they become spells you mostly never use because you never know the right moment and you don't want to waste them on the wrong moment.
There are new elemental variant surfaces in the form of cursed surfaces. They can't be extinguished by normal means. Elaborating on this maybe kind of a spoiler, so i'll spare the details.
@stryker1121: The first Divinity: OS was a little more straight forward than DOS2, which adds just enough new features to be confusing for people who are familiar with the first game.
@boonsong: The game plays very well with a controller, i played all 150 hours of it with a controller and, other than the inventory being a bit more tedious, i felt the controller was well implemented.
@eloj: @ivdamke: To be fair, the difficulty of the game is very dependent on the make-up of your party and possibly a large amount of foresight that you're not going to have in your first playthrough. So the difficulty could be a crap shoot for certain people, while others just happen upon a build that works from the start.
Going into the combat of this game you really need to think way outside the box in same cases. You can do such things as have a single character initiate combat while the rest of your crew sneak into the fight and get a free hit in, stack boxes to block the AI's pathing, start a fight - kill one character - flee - rinse repeat, or even initiate a conversation with a character while another character picks their pocket. There are a lot of aspects of this game that familiarity with other games becomes something of a problem.
As demonstrated in the quick look, seeing what will happen and than restarting to be better prepared for it is pretty common in this game, which is a bit lame and makes it feel like it's Save Scum: The Video Game. But then again, there is so much to do and so much to experiment with that someone else will have a much different experience with the game.
Don't get me wrong, i like the game, it just didn't have the same impact for me as the first D:OS and it had enough design flaws in it to be needlessly frustrating at times.
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