Recent reviews by Scottx125

There's just something about this game that doesn't feel as good as the previous 2. The annoying thing is I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the story, for me the previous 2 games go you into the meat of the story and allowed you to gradually discover the plot, which itself was interesting. Here, you find an artefact and cause devastation and have to fix it. That's pretty much the plot. Not exactly great.

Idk, this game isn't bad. But I just feel apathy towards it which is worse as I've no desire to come back and finish it. I'd give this game a 4/10 (In reality it's a 6-7/10, but it loses points for failing to interest me in playing it).

So, I've finished BG3. And it's an amazing game. It's an 8/10. This is because the final act fell a bit flat for me. The amount of decisions and interactions you can do in Act 3 feels far less than Act 1 or 2. Many times I'd go around hoping to make a decision that would have some sort of effect, or be able to speak to the dead who are linked to a quest I'm doing. Yet I can't use speak with dead on them or they refuse to talk to me as they have "nothing to say".

The ending also feels a bit flat, it's over very quickly. And there were honestly harder fights earlier in the game. Though, maybe because I collected tons of allies that made it much easier. I don't know. Plus after you win, there's no celebration or party where you can tie up loose ends. In Dragon Age: Origins, one of my favourite RPGs of all time. You get a final section where you can say goodbye to your companions and find out what they'll do next. You get nothing here. A short "Let's celebrate" and then cut to a shot of Baulders Gate, and then credits roll. IMO this is one area where Larian is really weak, wrapping up their stories. Though even in Divinity Original Sin 2, at the end you get to talk with your companions and wrap things up somewhat..

The story is okay. The companion stories and side quests were generally better than the main story, the engagement of the story for me peaked in Act 2. But it serves the game well enough and has plenty of high stakes moments.

I also had far more bugs the further I got into the game. Some of them were pretty annoying forcing me to reload to the last auto-save losing 30 minutes-1 hour of progress.

If I had to rate each act, Act 1 was 10/10. Act 2 9/10. Act 3 7/10. The final battle and ending was a 6/10(there are better, harder boss fights in this game). You might ask why do I still rate it a 8/10? Because despite BG3s failings, it pushes the bar for CRPGs and RPGs in general. And employs a fair and decent business model. But most importantly, those issues only really detract from the enjoyable experience of this game in Act 3. So I'd definitely buy this game at full price if you're a fan of RPGs. If not, wait till it's cheap enough for you to give it a try.

TLDR - 8/10. It's a great game in Act 1 and 2. But the amount of cut content, especially from Act 3 is weighing the game down like an anchor. Things feel out of context, cut short or downright missing. It can be a 9/10 or 10/10 if that content gets added. But Act 3 just feels disappointing compared to the earlier acts, especially the god awful ending.

Final notes:

I gave this game a 8/10 because I felt something was missing in Act 3, In all honestly I began to feel that things felt cut short in Act 2. I did some homework and found that a TON of content, content that was talked about and mentioned like the Upper City in Baulders gate is completely cut from the game. I don't mind cutting content, sometimes it just doesn't work. But the fact that it was mentioned and then cut feels like they wanted to get the game out of the door ASAP. I'm sure they'll release some if not all of the content cut in a new definitive edition (it's a LOT of content). But really it should have been here in the first place. So -1 point for that alone.

A lot of my other problems also seem to stem from the cut content, stories feeling rushed or cut short (esp companion quests and the Act 3 story). Lack of armour/gear available at merchants (there was meant to be gear crafting) etc. Until this is all added in, I can't give this game a 10/10 rating.

If you love DnD, try this game out! It has plenty of endings, sub plots and quests for you to go on. It has romance options, epic battles, gods, demons and more!

Whilst this isn't the best CRPG type game I've played, it's better than the previous game Pathfinder Kingmaker which I just couldn't bring myself to finish.

My only gripes with this game, is that:
1. The pacing at time feels slow.
2. Voice acting is and sometimes isn't used, making for awkward moments (prob budget issues in dev).
3. Lack of certain types of weapons and gear, I used a 2H Greatsword and I ended up using one from act 3 all the way to act 5 as I didn't encounter any that were better.
4. Puzzles... The puzzles in this game SUCK. I prefer logical puzzles or memory puzzles. I don't like puzzles within puzzles, or puzzles that require you to solve a riddle to even have an idea of how to start approaching the puzzle. Or puzzles that if you missed a book on a shelf you have no idea on how to start solving it..
5. The game could do with more hotbars. I was running out of room towards the end of the game.
6. Crusader mode.. IT SUCKS. I turned that crap off shortly after experiencing it for the first time (kinda bs that one of the endings requires you to have not used auto crusade).

There are more issues but the above one's are the most pressing.

I'd give this game a 7/10. It's a long haul and you have to stick with it but it's a great game at its core. And if nothing else, it took me 160 hours to finish this game on my first run. So you're gonna get your moneys worth that's for sure!

A nice little game if you are a casual player and want something to pass the time. Unfortunately I found myself getting bored after the first hour as the game is very repetitive. Even with the random events in the game, there's not much to keep you invested aside from building more of your store and unlocking a few new decorations or devices that allow you to craft products instead of buying them increasing your profits. The game would be better if it had more management options, more varied interactions like competing against other stores. More events, perhaps having to hire cleaners to keep the store clean to improve appeal or guards to deter and prevent thieves from stealing.

The price is also a bit too high IMO. I've played mobile games with more depth for £5 with more replay value, quite frankly the cost of this game is just too high. If it had more depth then you could justify the price, but it doesn't.

TLDR; If you want a quick casual repetitive game to play if you're bored buy this game. But if you want something with a bit of depth you can play for more than 2 hours before getting bored, this game isn't it. The price is also too high for the lack of depth this game has. I'd compare this to GameDev Tycoon. Which is cheaper and has far more depth and replay value.

I'll keep this short but concise, the discovery and the open world makes this game amazing paired with the dark souls bosses. And there are a LOT of bosses and a LOT of content to go through. I've played 44 hours and only done the first 2 bosses. This can be both the hardest and easiest souls like game depending on how you play. If you rush the game, it'll be extremely difficult, if you take your time, do all the dungeons and get the right gear and levels before you do an encounter, it'll be much easier but still punishing.

The only real issues I have with this game so far are the poor explanation of some in-game features such as Great Runes and how to enable them. The options menu for settings is slightly lacking. And by far the biggest problem is the performance of the PC port. It's dreadful, especially in the starting zone. I'm talking about random micro-stutters and in some cases massive FPS drops from a solid 60fps down to 10-20fps for a few seconds before recovering. It's not too bad later in the game, but in the starting zone it can cause you to lose fights which can be extremely annoying.

Edit 30/12/22: Just finished the game after several months break. I feel like the game is just too long winded. After about halfway you get less direction on where to go and what to do, and with no journal to keep track of things, you forget what quests your doing and struggle to figure out where to go without googling it. At that point I lost most of my motivation and stopped playing. You also burn out from the gameplay loop as well, kill mobs, get to a boss, kill it, repeat. The story/lore for me was the most interesting part of this game and still is, but piecing it together within the game is a frustrating endeavour.

I'd give this game in it's current state an 8.5/10. It missed being a 9 because I felt the game was too long winded, leading to burnout. Also by the end of the game, I'm relieved that it's done, and I'll be honest with saying I don't want to play this game any time soon for NG . I'm also deducting points for how obscure the story telling is, there's some great lore in this game. But figuring it out is a task all of it's own. You can leave the player guessing without making them read every single item for lore snippets to figure out a story. The game would have been better if it had a journal and log where as you progressed and learned more, the pieces of the puzzle would be in a simple concise area for you to read through and put together. Anyway that's my little rant over, final score is 8.5/10.

Finally a decent DLC from FatShark.. Despite the fact that it's probably slower to get rewards with this expansion, it's very fun, at least for the first few times. But for free you can't really complain especially when all it does is add content which was sorely needed. I will say that whilst this DLC is good, it could have been so much better. Random map configurations, more mission varieties and curses/events on each level would have been welcome. And more testing of some of the more annoying features would be nice, I can't tell you how incredibly annoying it is to be running through a level just fine. To then suddenly get a boss mixed with explosive skaven who blast team members off the map instantly killing them causing a wipe of the entire campaign. There should be save points (and a longer campaign IMO) where you go through each layer of the northern wastes, you get 3 save zones roughly 30-40 minutes of gameplay apart where you can save and resume your progress if you sacrifice your coins or abilities. After going through each chaos gods domain you get to the citadel of eternity where the difficulty ramps up significantly and if you lose here you lose the campaign. You should get rewarded with boxes of loot at the end of each section and gain a bonus prize for winning the final level. That's just my opinion however.

TLDR: Great DLC, could easily have been amazing. 7/10.

Honestly... Its minecraft but with an end goal, less freedom of gameplay, slower progression and is extremely laggy.

Great game, especially the mods. Get it!

KSH abandoned the game.

Quick review:
Pros-
1. NPC's are really good in combat.
2. Animations are nice.
3. Improved graphics.
4. More depth to single player.
5. Quests in single player give better rewards.

Mixed-
1. Family / Generational System - What's the point when it takes 15 years, probably 50 hours of running on max game speed to get the next generation of your family ready to take up the mantle?
2. Siege system - It seems as if there were bigger plans for the siege system, but they didn't come to fruition. I WISH you could target specific walls with siege equipment so that you could destroy an individual wall rather than it wanting to shoot the wall closest to the siege artillery on the map..

Cons-
1. Multiplayer combat compared to single player combat sucks.
2. The performance in relation to the graphical quality is pretty meh.
3. Game still has a few bugs, not as many as launch.
4. Tactical AI... It's the same damn thing every time. They just tell you to guard the flanks or skirmish. There's no real consequence if you don't do as your told. And ultimately leading battles in person is often worse than using auto-resolve... I tried a hard battle in shield wall formation, circle formation with my archers surrounded by infantry in square formation to protect them from the horse archers, default devolve command mode and then auto resolve. The best result came from auto resolve.. Even though it still resulted in a loss... Formations seem completely pointless at the moment. They shouldn't just modify AI behaviour to block more or attack more, they should give some tangible bonuses to morale or armour. The circle formation should give bonuses against horse archers, square against cavalry etc. The only major deciding factor in battles seems to be auto resolve bonuses, troop quality and numbers. Tactics or formations make ZERO effective impact.
5. Skills... They are HELLISHLY slow to still grind. Not because they take awhile, but because the methods of earning XP for many of these skills such as trading etc are so few and far between it'll take you 10-20 hours to max a single skill. That's nuts. Especially when you need to level steward ship and leadership to improve your party size (which is vital in this game).

So whilst the game HAS improved, especially in regards to adding some more quests, locations, bug fixes, performance improvements and small gameplay chances here and there. Something just feels missing. You can run around the entire game as a merchant but you can't create a trade empire running endless caravans buying out lords like some sort of merchant republic, you can't just play as a mercenary who rents their services out because you have nowhere to run as a base of operations for training elite troops or equipping your own custom mercenary band... It seems as if whilst you can sudo roleplay these other types of things in the game, they are all eventually railroaded into the vassal-kingdom gameplay. And whilst fun, after awhile it's the same old thing and there's little challenge in that. And everything that intends on supporting that system moves so slowly such as the family system, that eventually you just get bored because nothing new is there to keep your interest. Sure you can become a king but once you create a stable realm with a decent power base, that's it. It's just attack/defend rinse and repeat till you get bored. I just wish there was more.. Perhaps dynamic events that kingdoms get faced with.. disease that kills off family members.. A faster family member system so your family can branch out and your current character can move on faster. I just wish there was more depth and complexity to keep me interested in the vanilla game...

It seems mods will have to come to the rescue, I'm just thankful the devs are actually listening to the modding community and making it as open to modding as possible.. So with the expectation that this game gets extensive modding support, Bannerlord is a 7/10 and recommended for purchase IF you enjoy sandbox games or liked warband. Without the modding it's a 4-5/10, and I would not recommend the game to anyone unless you just want warband with a fresh coat of paint, a better engine and a few new in-consequential features.