The Backlog Check-in Vol. 283: 6/3/23: Diablo IV Edition
Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2023 11:20 am
Played: King’s Bounty II
Finished: Nothing
Playing: King’s Bounty II
Added: The Division 2: Warlords of New York, Evil Below, Fairy Elements, Itorah, The Redress of Mira, Sword of the Vagrant, Twogether: Project Indigos, Valkyria Chronicles 4 DLC Bundle, Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth, XEL
I’ve played a lot of King’s Bounty II, it’s packed with quests. Outside of combat it almost feels like a third person interactive story, because the majority of it is going around the game world talking with NPCs, doing fetch quests and watching story events unfold. Every so often you’ll be required to solve simple puzzles that almost always consist of activating objects in a certain sequence. There’s always a clue nearby to help you figure out what the correct order is.
The game world is fairly sizable, but compacted and dense with paths and roads to travel on so it’s not a big sprawling open world where you can just go anywhere that you want in it. It’s semi-open, but you’re pretty much stuck traversing paths and roads since you’re unable to interact with the environment such as climbing, or jumping/vaulting over things. Thankfully you have a horse and there are fast travel spots everywhere, because you only lightly jog on foot which makes the back and forth traveling (which there’s a lot of) somewhat slow.
I like the story and characters for the most part, the character that I’m currently playing as (Katharine) makes the NPC conversations more entertaining and humorous with her blunt, sarcastic and snarky remarks. Each of the three playable characters have different personalities, and their own dialogue. The problem is that the NPCs all have the same dialogue no matter which character that you play as, so sometimes what your character says and what the NPCs say don’t always align very well.
Speaking of characters, I started another game playing as Elisa to see how she is and she’s the complete opposite of Katharine. She’s a young and naive farmer’s daughter that’s a ditsy do-gooder. She somehow got it in her head that she’s the savior of the kingdom, and this leads to hilarity. Her dialogue is comedic in delivery, no matter the situation she’s almost always nice, positive and upbeat. And on the rare occasions when she does get mad, it’s childlike and cute. Despite already putting a lot of hours into the game as Katharine, I think that I might continue my new game as Elisa because I’m finding her personality a little more appealing overall.
As much as I’m enjoying the story and character interaction aspects of the game, the combat might make me stop playing it because it becomes somewhat cheap. The early game has you mostly fighting animals, bandits, guards and soldiers that are primarily melee enemies with some that are ranged such as archers, but later there’s more mages, necromancers, sorcerers, witches, wizards, monsters and supernatural creatures that are almost all ranged enemies that fire projectiles at you from a distance and use attacks and spells that cause negative effects on your squad that completely hinder their abilities and movement. The cheap aspect of this is that the enemies almost always get to attack first, so they can cause negative effects to my squad members and kill some of them before I even get a chance to do anything. I’m playing it on easy, but the devs are delusional if this is their idea of easy because it’s more like hard. And if it’s this hard already then I can only imagine how hard that it’s going to be later on.
I still think that those of you interested in the game should check it out, because I think that you might be better at this type of strategic tactical turn-based combat than I am. I usually struggle with all of the intricacies involved in this type of combat which is why I prefer more simplified versions of it, or at least easy actually being easy or closer to what I consider normal.
Games releasing this week
Aery - The Lost Hero
Amnesia: The Bunker
Bandit Brawler
Battle Grid
BlasterBeat
Bleak Sword DX
City Driver
Diablo IV
Espresso Tycoon
Greyhill Incident
Harmony: The Fall of Reverie
Loop8: Summer of Gods
Mask of the Rose
Minibong
MotoGP 23
Nocturnal
Pro Cycling Manager 2023
Raiden III x Mikado Maniax
Repella Fella
Riders Republic
Senses: Midnight
Terminal Velocity: Boosted Edition
Tiny Thor
Tour de France 2023
Truck Driver - Heading North
Undead Citadel
Zombie Soup
Finished: Nothing
Playing: King’s Bounty II
Added: The Division 2: Warlords of New York, Evil Below, Fairy Elements, Itorah, The Redress of Mira, Sword of the Vagrant, Twogether: Project Indigos, Valkyria Chronicles 4 DLC Bundle, Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth, XEL
I’ve played a lot of King’s Bounty II, it’s packed with quests. Outside of combat it almost feels like a third person interactive story, because the majority of it is going around the game world talking with NPCs, doing fetch quests and watching story events unfold. Every so often you’ll be required to solve simple puzzles that almost always consist of activating objects in a certain sequence. There’s always a clue nearby to help you figure out what the correct order is.
The game world is fairly sizable, but compacted and dense with paths and roads to travel on so it’s not a big sprawling open world where you can just go anywhere that you want in it. It’s semi-open, but you’re pretty much stuck traversing paths and roads since you’re unable to interact with the environment such as climbing, or jumping/vaulting over things. Thankfully you have a horse and there are fast travel spots everywhere, because you only lightly jog on foot which makes the back and forth traveling (which there’s a lot of) somewhat slow.
I like the story and characters for the most part, the character that I’m currently playing as (Katharine) makes the NPC conversations more entertaining and humorous with her blunt, sarcastic and snarky remarks. Each of the three playable characters have different personalities, and their own dialogue. The problem is that the NPCs all have the same dialogue no matter which character that you play as, so sometimes what your character says and what the NPCs say don’t always align very well.
Speaking of characters, I started another game playing as Elisa to see how she is and she’s the complete opposite of Katharine. She’s a young and naive farmer’s daughter that’s a ditsy do-gooder. She somehow got it in her head that she’s the savior of the kingdom, and this leads to hilarity. Her dialogue is comedic in delivery, no matter the situation she’s almost always nice, positive and upbeat. And on the rare occasions when she does get mad, it’s childlike and cute. Despite already putting a lot of hours into the game as Katharine, I think that I might continue my new game as Elisa because I’m finding her personality a little more appealing overall.
As much as I’m enjoying the story and character interaction aspects of the game, the combat might make me stop playing it because it becomes somewhat cheap. The early game has you mostly fighting animals, bandits, guards and soldiers that are primarily melee enemies with some that are ranged such as archers, but later there’s more mages, necromancers, sorcerers, witches, wizards, monsters and supernatural creatures that are almost all ranged enemies that fire projectiles at you from a distance and use attacks and spells that cause negative effects on your squad that completely hinder their abilities and movement. The cheap aspect of this is that the enemies almost always get to attack first, so they can cause negative effects to my squad members and kill some of them before I even get a chance to do anything. I’m playing it on easy, but the devs are delusional if this is their idea of easy because it’s more like hard. And if it’s this hard already then I can only imagine how hard that it’s going to be later on.
I still think that those of you interested in the game should check it out, because I think that you might be better at this type of strategic tactical turn-based combat than I am. I usually struggle with all of the intricacies involved in this type of combat which is why I prefer more simplified versions of it, or at least easy actually being easy or closer to what I consider normal.
Games releasing this week
Aery - The Lost Hero
Amnesia: The Bunker
Bandit Brawler
Battle Grid
BlasterBeat
Bleak Sword DX
City Driver
Diablo IV
Espresso Tycoon
Greyhill Incident
Harmony: The Fall of Reverie
Loop8: Summer of Gods
Mask of the Rose
Minibong
MotoGP 23
Nocturnal
Pro Cycling Manager 2023
Raiden III x Mikado Maniax
Repella Fella
Riders Republic
Senses: Midnight
Terminal Velocity: Boosted Edition
Tiny Thor
Tour de France 2023
Truck Driver - Heading North
Undead Citadel
Zombie Soup