Knights of Honor Review

It seems I'm making up for lost time, here's the second post for today.

In a recent surge of nostalgia I got the itch to play Knights of Honor (KoH), I played this game when it was released, about 2 years ago, and I really enjoyed it.
Then time passed and other games came along and I kinda forgot about this game, but now I'm back.

KoH is a real time strategy game, which simulates you being a king of a European country in the middle ages.
This is not a C&C or Warcraft kind of strategy game, it focuses more on the ruling, diplomacy, population control and war strategy part of ruling a country.
The goal of the game is to become the most powerful county in Europe and the most powerful ruler.

As always this is an opinion review and not a specific details review so here are the categories.

The Good:
Unit control - In this game you control 9 units at most, as you progress through the game, these units come and go for some particular reasons.
This is a great design choice, since it limits the player with the amount of control he/she has on the game, and it raises the level of difficulty of the game.
But it also lets the player choose their game style, if your goal is to conquer every country you'll invest in marshals, on the other hand you can win the game with trade alone (merchants), etc.
So this way you're both challenged and intrigued at the same time.

Recourse Collection - Finally a strategy game where you don't have to micro-manage all the resources.
In this game you control provinces, each province has some areas it controls, and on these areas a farm or church or mine can be built, and these structures give you the majority of resources in the game.
The good thing here is that you don't control the construction of these structures, I believe it's auto-generated by the computer, you can only affect the already existing structures in a minor way, by building structures in your province.
The only resource you control entirely is trade goods, which includes money.
Now some people will say it's a bad thing, but as you play the game you understand the meaning of the sentence "Heavy is the head that wears the crown".
You will quickly understand that you do not have the time to micro-manage every little detail in your kingdom, especially when you conquer a lot of provinces and you have to control them all simultaneously, with limited personnel.

Spies - one of my favorite features in the game.
Spies are done in a very clever way in this game, since each country can only control 9 units, you have to constantly hire and fire these units, here is where the spy comes in.
You hire a spy and wait for him to be hired by the country your sent him to in a certain position, each position has its advantages, for instance if the spy is hired as a spy in another country, you can actually assassinate the king, which is really cool.

Sound - a really nice feature in the game is the soundtrack, it is pretty loopy, but you get into the game's ambiance.


The Bad:
Graphics - for a game that was made in 2007, you'd expect a bit more finish to the graphics.
It's basically a 2D game, with 3D models used for sprites.
Although this does not affect the gameplay, it could have been nice to get a bit more animations even in the 2D world.

Computer Power - since I played mostly against the computer, I can honestly say, the computer tends to take advantage of its position.
As you start the game, the computer randomizes the diplomatic relations between the countries.
Sometimes you can start the game when you are at war with all the countries around you, and the computer starts sending troops instantly, before you even had the chance to breathe, let alone buy some decent units.
This could have easily been solved with some imaginative coding.

The Stupid:
Lead the Fight - in this game you have the option to get into a certain fight and control the forces by yourself, warcraft-style.
This feature is stupid, I've must have used it once or twice.
Since the game has so much to offer aside from this, I couldn't even muster the power to lead a fight, and when I finally tried it my results were a lot worse than the computer's.
It seems like the studio put a lot of effort into that portion of the game, and it seems as though they shouldn't have.
It's like a friend that brings you a gift and you say "oh, you shouldn't have", but in this case you actually mean it.
I imagine that the studio did not want to alienate the RTS core gamers, but I think those gamers are not the target audience for this game.

In conclusion, I give this game a 9 out of 10.
I really enjoyed trying to conquer every country in Europe, and I suggest you do the same.

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Now playing: Dream Theater - A Change Of Seasons
via FoxyTunes

Assassin's Creed Review

As promised, I give you the Assassin's Creed (PC version) review.
As a prelude, I just want to mention that I'm not a professional reviewer, these are just my thoughts on the game, so bear with me.
Plus, you pretty much have to play the game to get what I'm talking about, lets say that this is more for game designers/enthusiasts and less for buyers.

OK, so I'm gonna divide the review into three parts: The Good, The Bad, and The Stupid.
The parts reference the design of the game and its features.

The Good:
There are many good things that Ubisoft Montreal did with this game, that it's no wonder it's such a success.

The graphics, they came out with a great graphics engine for this game.
Things to notice about the graphics:

• Realistic sunlight, throughout the game, sometimes you can even see ugly building models (especially in the office level) that seem real only because of the lighting.
• Cloth, it looks like they put a lot of work into making the cloth move realistically, especially in the main character.
• The cities, the cities you visit a huge and you can walk thorough the entire city eventually, but we've all seen huge cities before, in open world games, like GTA, etc.

Character design, the main character has so much Cool-Factor™, that he can sell the game by himself. Nonchalant kinda guy, means business, and an assassin of course, which is by itself a great idea for a character.
The character's hidden blade is of course the cool, silent, signature assassin weapon of the game from others, like the garrote wire was the signature weapon for Hitman.
You'll find yourself using it more and more as the game progresses.

The story, has a lot of interesting points in it, and above all has ties to real life events, which is always good, in my opinion.

Climbing mechanics, they really put an effort into this one, the climbing itself looks cool and feels controlled by the player, plus the level design is that good that you can practically climb everything in the level, which is really cool.

Addictive way points, there are a couple of things here that are genius design-wise.

• Through out the game you have to get a high vantage point to get a glimpse of the city, and find out things in it, this is quite a tedious task to perform, something along the lines of:
  Find a high place -> climb it -> look at city, rinse and repeat.
  To make it interesting to do, since it is an integral part of the game, they reward the player for doing that with a really cool overview of the city from that high point.
  And after you finish the look, you drop from this high place into a big haystack, it feels like falling off a 10-story building (not that I know how it feels).
  You got to see it to understand, but it's cool enough to make you want to find those high places over and over again.
• Saving civilians, throughout the game you see people in need, that you can save to gain bonus points. I'm a pretty lazy player and I don't really like to gather bonus points, but they made it a bit more fun to do.
  Since the entire game is pretty much sneak attacks and hiding, you don't get to fight a lot of people in the open, pretty much the only time you get to do this (without getting in trouble) is when you save civilians, so you just seek them out, to get some fighting action and bonus points.

The Bad:

Camera angles, really shoddy camera angles all along the game.
The most frustrating of them all is the in-battle camera angles, you might miss someone attacking you completely, because the camera decided it wants to show you the really interesting innocent by stander and his stand.

Repetitiveness, I can say that the entire game is repetitive, you end up doing the same thing over and over, the loop is something like this:
Go to a city -> investigate the case (do 3 "special" things) -> find the main guy -> kill him -> run away and hide, rinse and repeat.
The whole ordeal can be quite tedious, but the shiny graphics, cool features and story keeps you in the game, which is all they need from you.

Fighting engine, I don't know if it's just the PC version, or is it all versions, but I found the fighting system a bit off.
Although it gives you a lot of options, remembering all of them and using them in real-time is a bit of a problem, and it can get confusing. And the lock-on system can mess up at times too, but most of the time it's OK.

AI, the AI in this game is simply stupid, or less than what I've come to expect from a game.
For example, an enemy soldier can be on the same rooftop as you, see you, suspect you and then you move two meters aside, effectively hiding you behind a roof fixture, and he doesn't even follow you he just keeps going on with his day, as though you never existed.
I've just seen better AI in other games.

The Stupid:

This section is dedicated to the stupid features in the game, that don't make any sense.

Eagle Vision, this is a mode you can enter to distinguish between friend and foe, which sounds really great at first.
But after a few minutes of playtime, you know which is which, since all classes wear basically the same clothes, in some variations. This is specifically stupid in the case of enemies, they are the main reason for this feature i guess, the enemies are soldiers they all wear the same clothes, how can you not know they are enemies?

Control inside a cut-scene, in the game during a cut-scene, which is shown in-game and not as a movie, you can move your character around to get different angles.
When I first saw this feature, in a preview movie it seemed really cool, but it's actually really unnecessary, at first I thought I can change stuff by moving, like the camera angles of the cut-scene movie, or actually performing some actions while in the cut-scene, but nooooo.
You can't do anything, you just move to different places, while in the cut-scene, I prefer to watch a dramatically "filmed" cut-scene, than to just move around inside a cut-scene, because you're effectively inside a cut-scene.

In conclusion, this game has its share of problems but overall it is a very good game with good looking graphics. I give it a 8.5 out of 10.

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Now playing: DragonForce - Cry of the Brave
via FoxyTunes

Time for reflection

Hey all...

It's a va-ca time, it passover this week, and I have a week off.
Happy holidays to everybody.

Project Assyria is not progressing at all, and I'm quite worried about it.
But, it gives me time to reflect on my current situation, maybe look over some possibilities for a new project to participate in.
Definite candidates I'll be looking into are: openFrag and Project Wish.
Two very promising projects, which I've been following for quite some time.
They both are in very progressive stages, so it's time I kill those projects :D
Just joking, of course, I'll be looking into them, because they'll give me a good chance to just get some experience under my belt.

Plus, lately I've been tossing around some game ideas in my head, so I want to look into those too, see if there's a real game in there somewhere.
Maybe it's time for me to start my own project, maybe, I don't know yet.

Aside from all that, I've been obsessing over Assassin's Creed lately, a really good looking game, and an interesting one as well.
I might throw in a game review for that one on my next post.

Anyway, cya around...

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Now playing: Eva Cassidy - Bridge Over Troubled Water
via FoxyTunes