Recent reviews by kwrstack

Occasionally janky physics can completely destroy serious attempts at the par achievements. You will absolutely rage at your ball randomly bouncing out of the hole it went directly into at least once per course. Fine as a time wasting game, especially w/ friends.

This game is a straight up RNG engine. You need to have some skill to participate in that engine, i.e. if you're not good you won't get the chance to get lucky or unlucky with shots at all and you'll simply miss, but even when you figure out ranging, leading, etc. you'll often find two shots from the same cannon drifting above AND below the target at the SAME TIME! Entire broadsides fired together will somehow fall inches from the target on every side without touching it. And sometimes every shot will hit. Totally up to the drift RNG.

But even better, particular locations on the ship are critical hits (called the citadel) if you penetrate the armor. Taking the drift into account, you can aim for them, but outside close range it is, of course, relatively random whether you hit this spot or not. Whether you penetrate the armor or not is, you guessed it, more RNG.

But what makes this REALLY great is on top of all that, if it DOES hit the citadel, and if it DOES penetrate the armor, the damage is utterly catastrophic, taking off up to 50% of your health per shell. Not a battleship shell to a destroyer. A battleship shell to a battleship. Same weight class. 50%. Gone. Just like that.

Completely. At. Random.

But what's even MORE fun? On top of all that, there is a tiny, tiny percentage chance that any given shot will hit your magazine. So more RNG for more massive damage.

The practical upshot of all this is while there is a significant amount of skill involved, and the chances of it happening to you at any given time are low, you can (and do) intermittently just explode for no reason. You can be winning a duel by a LOT and then a lucky, single shell, fired as a parting shot from a fleeing foe with a broken rudder and a burning deck, will completely obliterate you.

So to be completely fair, that doesn't happen much. But it does happen, and when it does it's pretty much the biggest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ever.

Basic citadel hits, which are far more common, are still pretty obnoxious, as there's little you can do about them.

So basically, skill is involved, but not really the ultimate deciding factor. If you enjoy randomly exploding, play this game. If you don't... Well, if you're really into ships then give it a try for the good looking models and see for yourself. But if you're not into ships, just give it a pass. It's not a good enough game to reccomend to anybody who isn't a Pacific Theatre nerd.

The description states: "You will take on the role of different members of the Forrester household, and determine their fate through the choices you make; your actions and decisions will change the story around you." What a joke.

The game is presented as "choose your own adventure with better graphics," but literally only one thing that you do in the entire game actually matters. You spend HOURS picking minor variences in dialogue while the game constantly insists "Tyrion will remember that," "Margaery will remember that," etc. But they don't remember and it never matters.

For example: as the current Lord Forrester, the entire family insists that I MUST retain my betrothal to a neighboring house because House Forrester is militarily vulnerable and requires allies. Through your dialogue choices you can keep or lose your betrothal. It seems important at first, but just a couple chapters later your fiance shows up with soldiers even if you failed and she bailed on you, offering, by way of explanation: "Somebody I don't like proposed to me, so I changed my mind."

It didn't matter. It never mattered. None of it matters. This game is stupid. The graphics are also not very good.

The Elder Scrolls series: Oblivion and Online are ok, Skyrim is pretty good, but THIS game is my RPG codifier.

Slower, quieter, more subtle than it's succesors, you will find no demons falling out of the sky or dragons setting towns aflame in Morrowind. Instead, the land is threatened by a slowly encroaching volcanic wasteland, a disease spreading amongst the populace, and plots, upheaval, and assasinations amongst the ruling and religious bodies. There will be no setpiece battles in Morrowind; your enemies lurk in the darkest corners of the world and are content to wait for you there and work their plots from afar.

It is a genuinely different and fascinating story.

Lots of people are panning this game for failing to live up to their desires of an epic level strategy 4X game. Lots of people are forgetting that this game is $15 base and even less on sales and never advertised itself as an epic level 4X strategy game.

This game is exactly what it's advertised and priced as: a space ADVENTURE game where you command a small fleet in exploring the frontier, putting down pirates, engaging in tense standoffs or small scale battles with the other players, establishing trade aggreements, and bringing planets into your Federation/Empire/whatever, all through episodic missions with light storytelling. Think Star Trek Next Gen with an emphasis on combat.

If you're cool with that, great! Get this game! It's fun and worth your bit of money. And if you want a more vast, epic, and detailed game, please, PLEASE, don't buy this $15 game and then come back to leave scathing, raging reviews because it wasn't the $60 game you were looking for.