I really liked first Amnesia, even tho I didn't enjoy it like Penumbra 1&2, but when I heard that they outsourced Amnesia 2 to developers that have made "Dear Esther" and they said that they have plans to make game "more like Dear Esther" then I decided to avoid it. It seems that it was right decision.

What? You expected the GOG staff to play through a new release before deciding if they accept it for their store? Is it full moon already?^^

I agree with this. I love the Penumbra series but the dogs in Overture tend to get in the way. I ended up just killing all of them instead of trying to hide so that I wouldn't deal with them again.

Still, I love the Penumbra series. Wonderful story and atmosphere. Nice puzzles, too. The whole aspect of exploring the mines deeper and deeper is quite chilling. Penumbra and Amnesia are worth playthroughs, so I'd recommend anybody willing to start with Penumbra first to see the evolution of the gameplay into Amnesia.

Well, I haven't played the game, but nothing you're saying sounds that off-putting. For example, I like the idea of a plot-relevant inventory; in fact, I wish more games had that sort of inventory system. I also don't think linear games are that awful as long as they have solid storytelling.

I can't speak about the monsters, but I think adding an insanity meter in this game would have been too gimmicky since Amnesia had that feature.

But I do dislike the idea of unlimited power from the lantern- that's too comforting for a scary game, I think :p

But overall, I don't think anything in your review is that off-putting.

I wonder if CA are going to be able to fix it up like the eventually did with Empire? They bloody well better if they want to keep the series alive.

Oh f*ck :(

I'm not surprised but will say that from the little I saw of the first - The second game's title is a million times better than the entirety of Dark Descents' game play and story. XD

I'm pretty sure they will

Just treat the game for now as a "Beta release"

In between really jank platforming, Korsakovia was a good horror game. Of course, people seem to judge TCR's horror game making skills based on the story-based exploration mod they made - not the horror mod they made later.

What do you expect for a game tailored for PewDiePie and his idiotic legion?

They definitely will, but how they managed to release this disaster is beyond me. It's not just bugs, entire AI is braindead, how this shit went through Q&A I don't know.

Sega just pushed them too hard to release fast.

Shogun 2 also was bugged, so was Empire, but nothing nearly as fucked up as Rome 2 release.

What I dislike the most though, is that they stripped the game of features. I was hoping for some MORE family management, some senatus mechanics, like in Europa Universalis: Rome, but no, they decided that already was too much and deleted it from the game almost entirely.

Dumbing down strategy games is never good.

And the worst part is, it got top ratings from the "journalists" even though multiplayer is almost completely broken and AI is the most incompetent in video game history.

The strategy game genre is never going to advance until some serious research & development is done into dynamic AI. AI is still very much an "experimental" field and requires thinking outside the box, while other areas of games development is straight forward content creation. Unfortunately none of the "big name" publishers are going to fund R&D into AI because it's a lot of time and money and no product, but in the long term a studio that did this and was able to create a good AI system would benefit greatly.

Professional "Journalists" Can kiss my ass

I remember I stopped completely listening to their Opinions once I read the reviews for Nier

Yeah...NieR's a bad game...

your fucking mom's a bad game

If you're looking for better AI, you can always pick more strategically focused games, such as those made by Ageod. They made a Rome game (actually two, but they use the same engine and set in different periods of Roman history). However, you fight on the "campaign map" as it were. So it's more of an armchair general's type of game rather than a more "entertaining" engagement offered by the Total War series. Regardless, I enjoy their games very much and they're making some fascinating changes to the engine with American Civil War II, so I expect the AI to get even better. Plus, there are other developers who do similar games.

However, I do agree that the AI aspect of strategy games is often sorely lacking and that even the best systems cannot bring it close to what the human brain is capable of.

Two things :

@Roman5 : I don't know if Earthworm Jim 3D is the same that the N64 version. If that is the case, it may not be a bad game for some people, but I don't think it can be considered a good sequel (I think I have the same feelings on Fallout 1~3 and Earthworm Jim 1~3 :)

@Ñavagon : I never realized Earthworm Jim 3D was so early in the catalogue, and if that's right (I mean : if you're not persuadotronning it through our brains) you made a painfully valid point :(


We would be in our right to expect their first batch of Judas clones to be ready and playtesting already :s