Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.
"This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.
put 90 min into this new gamepass game and it's been an absolute pleasure. it reminds me of Pikmin + Rayman 2. The level progression is gated by obstacles that are unclogged by netting enough collectibles in the playspace. While the game doesn't feature puzzles, exploration is an absolute joy and very "gamey" in that it has always rewarded me for looking behind, around, and beneath every corner. The art is pleasing on the eyes and makes the levels easy to read. The game appears to be sectioned off into a handful of huge levels with their own theme (think Mario 64's painted worlds).
Thus far, I've seen zero bullshit, no forced combat to pad out game length, no hand holding. This may be GOTY material for me, alongside Norco and Elden Ring.
The first Entropy Zero was a decent-to-adequate Half Life 2 mod, employing the old "Opposing Force" gimmick of placing you in the shoes of the enemy faction. It had some nice ideas, a lot of clunkiness and some smart re-use of the Metrocop's beta voice lines to give the protagonist some character. I dimly remember to have tried the alpha demo in 2020 or something for the sequel, and I get the entire mod for the vacations. Cool.
EZ2 is a different beast compared to its predecessor: if EZ1 was a somewhat amateurish mod attempt, EZ2 tries hard. I'd call it almost the shadow of Opposing Force, trying to build something parallel but distinct to the original HL2, with a shitton of work done on voice acting, I shit you not. It helps that both the main talking roles are heavily distorted, hiding any non-professional feel that they may have and leaving you with almost a .... "professional" voicework. It's also deeply amusing that the protagonist can't ever shut up, an obvious parallel to Freeman's mutism. If we're speaking sound design, nice music and adequate gun effects, with some iffy work on recycling base lines for some characters at times (Basic combine soldiers and Mossman, essentially).
Gameplay is still a development from HL2, without the gravity gun. I'll be blunt, if we're considering only gunfights, I'd rate them as mediocre, few maps are well-designed for nice gunplay. Luckly for us, there are just 3-4 big fights in the entire game, and every chapter tries to do something different - and it works more often than not. The variety of enemies is good and some are creative (the long jump rebels, the new variety of weapons for enemies, new zombie variants, bullsquids, assorted Xen creatures, even Race X creature did I tell you that this feel like Opposing Force), the new guns are kinda meh bar the Xen grenade, a messy and unbalanced weapon that creates a black hole, absorbs everything, and spits out random items and enemies. If it wasn't incredibly fun to use to break assault waves and cause utter chaos I'd call it a clunky piece of crap, but it's fun as hell.
I even liked the plot, trying to tie in Portal, HL2 and Epistle 3 with some cheesy thrown inside. What I can't fully understand is the peculiar idea from the developers that the protagonist is some kind of incredibly "bad guy", so much that they put a goddamn disclaimer. It ain't even correct, he's just an arsehole and in the end he's more ethical than most. Must be some leftover 90ies edgy heritage from the devs.
It's worth a play? It's a mod, it's free, and it's a better HL game than..... I dunnow, Episode 1? Worth it for people that like HL2's gameplay loop, want to see some new shit, and enjoy cringy/edgy humor.
I had a solid time with this as well. Not something I was blown away by, but enjoyable. My OCD forced met o carry the turret the whole game, which added no small amount of tedium to the experience.
I had a solid time with this as well. Not something I was blown away by, but enjoyable. My OCD forced met o carry the turret the whole game, which added no small amount of tedium to the experience.
I...loved Wilson. I know it was custom built to solicit a positive emotional response from me, but the incredibly dumb chatter got a smile out of me more often than not ("Everyone likes his grandma, that doesn't count.") and the True Ending is a nice enough conclusion.
Also, now that I think of it EZ1's soundtrack was better.
Tiny overstays its welcome by a smidge, largely because the game mechanics aren't fleshed out in the late game to add greater complexity to the loop. In fact, it adds more tedium by including more mechanics that force the player to wait before puzzle pieces are moved to their proper location (think Pikmin). The endgame is littered with moments like that which make the game feel more like a poor escort question sim.
That aside, the game's platforming chops and the amount of times the game rewards you for exploring every nook and cranny is commendable and was great fun for me. The controls are smooth, the visuals are easy to read, there's very little fat to be seen here, no forced combat, no forced puzzles, no forced cutscenes or long winded dialogues.
It falls short of being great, in my book, because the game mechanics don't have enough meat to them to make for a compelling campaign. The final two levels definitely made me wish the game just got the show over with and ushered in its ending.
Been having some fun tooling about in Warsword Conquest for M&B, which is basically Mount & Blade: Warhammer. The amount of effort that has gone into this mod is really incredible. There's chaos, beastmen, goblins, orks, chaos dwarves, skaven, high elves, wood elves, 5 different human empires (Kislev, Bretonnia, etc), tomb kings, undead pirates, and lizardmen, in addition to numerous bandit factions and the odd demonic incursion. For every single race, they each have their own race-specific and tabletop-inspired troops, mounts (such as squigs, cold ones, bears, giant spiders, undead snakes, triceratops), town/tavern/castle interiors and exteriors, overworld models, weapons, armour, etc. All of that goes in a custom map based on the Warhammer world. There's magic too, except for dwarves who can enchant things with runes instead. You can also find rare merchants selling magical weapons and armour. Also there's some hand-crafted dungeons you can plunder with a few allies, assuming you can survive.
Skavenblight on the world map
A high elf castle interior
View from a high elf tavern (they really went overboard on the high elf stuff)
A view of a lizardman town from the top of the temple steps
Some chaos lads from the mod page
Also from the mod page, saurus after killing some goblin scum
It's not perfect though. There's the odd script error (which generally doesn't interrupt the game), and sometimes you'll find something like a huge pile of lords and patrols trying to kill a single enemy caravan, but somehow failing. I once found no less than 14 lords and 3 patrols from the same faction all stuck in one spot, trying - and failing - to attack one other lord, which is probably why they were getting their territory wrecked in the mean time. The AoE spells and throwables can also be absolutely devastating in sieges when everyone gets bunched up. Same applies to the enormous ogres (about twice the height of a normal guy) and their literal cannon-sized shotgun blasts that can easily take out 10+ troops if they get lucky, and you might get a bunch of them behind cover defending a town. That's a good time to have a powerful and accurate gun to shoot them in the head right quick; the skaven jezzail is good for this. Overall though it's pretty fun; I've helped the lizardman empire wipe out the undead pirates, and currently working on eliminating the tomb kings to gain complete control of the south of the map.
Booted Trudograd and felt like I might have went into another dimension when some of the sprites were slightly changed. I am near the end so I hope I did not lose out on much content.
Got burnout from rts. Specificaly from rts in which each mission is expected to take an hour or more to beat.
Suddenly decided to give Lords of Magic: SE another chance. I am absolutely in love with the music, voice acting(most of it) and the visual design of units and buildings.
I absolutely cannot stand the junkiness of combat. Still can't.
I finished Voyage: Journey to the Moon by Microids. Loosely based on stuff by Jules Verne, it follows Michel Ardan's journey to the moon in a 19th century space capsule. There he finds intelligent life, some ruins and lots of plant life. Atmosphere wise it reminds me a little of The Dig, it's got the same feeling of the world feeling properly alien, especially in the beginning when you start to explore it.
It's a fun adventure game in general, and it's also fairly impressive in more than one way. It's got a shitton of optional content and alternative ways to accomplish your goals, as well as a Sierra-style score. It even has a fairly elegant way of giving you things you may potentially be unable to figure out yourself, which I thought was better than a full-blown hint system that would tell you the solutions to puzzles instead.
It also made me realise how ridiculous it is that in almost all adventure games out there, you can only combine two items at a time. Usually the way it works in other games is that you first combine a+b to get ab, and then combine ab+c to get abc. But here you can even combine four things at a time.
That said, as can be expected of Microids, some of the puzzles can be really mind-boggling, and with a few it was particularly frustrating when I knew EXACTLY what I needed to solve something, but the game was being stupid about it. The item combination stuff can also get tiresome in the long run when you have to combine the same stupid fruit of 4 colours among themselves for the umpteenth time - by the end I had enough of it to a degree where I just decided to finish the game instead of pursuing the few optional objectives I knew I had left.
The "basic" path to winning is pretty reasonable though, and with a little patience you should never need to look up a walkthrough to get through it.
Been giving Batman: Arkham Knight a spin. Played the first two on release back in the day, kinda skipped Origins.
Once again you are the goddamn Batman, and he's doing worse than usual. On top of keeping people in his personal Gitmo (so THAT is where Damian gets it from!) he's tripping balls and hallucinating the Joker, who died in the second game and gets cremated at the start of this one. You've got a big chunk of Gotham to explore by grapple and glider... as long as you aren't forced to drive the Batmobile around. You still do the predator thing and pick enemies off one by one, or get in the thick of it and fight them with your firsts and gadgets. The whole flashing symbol above their heads makes combat not too challenging, and it's just a matter of picking off the most dangerous enemies first before cleaning out the chaff. You can improve on the Bat by completing missions, winning fights and completing side objectives to become tougher and stronger, but most equipment is locked behind story progression.
Scarecrow takes the central stage but there's several villains out there tearing up Gotham including Poison Ivy, Penguin and Two-Face. The game's namesake is the Arkham Knight, who's basically evil Batman and even though I'm not too familiar with the bat-lore it's pretty fucking obvious who the guy actually is. Batman's been quite a dumbass so far: early on you rescue a cop, turn away from him, then start a Zoom call with an unmasked Barbara Gordon using a screen that pops up from his arm that you can easily see if you look over Batman's shoulder. Nothing came of it, but it's pretty stupid of him, just like the part where he removes his cowl out in the open and puts on a new one.
Not very far in just yet, but I'll play a bit of it every now and then and see where this goes.
I beat The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel. A pretty cool entry in the series, but too many little girls, who are annoying af. I like the towns/villages, the overall plot, and combat is nice. Most towns/villages had a cozy feel to them. The only problem with combat is how OP the speed stat is. You'll be breezing through most of the game, except one boss fights. The final fight of the game was a bit annoying, but I got it on my third try. The overall plot is okay, with a mix of school life and politics.
The game took me 81 hours to finish.
I feel like I am also nearing if not the end, at least the last 3/4 of Grimoire. Fun exploration, a decent amount of puzzles, mostly cool graphics, and mostly fun combat. Like in the av
Bove game, speed is a must have stat. It's either kill or be killed in some battles. You need to get iniative, or risk dead mages. The penalty for death and reviving is brutal. I save a lot. If someone dies, I just reload the game. For many hours now, the party has held its own in combat. Slaughtering most foes, as long as I go first.
Ialso went back to Solasta, and I am replaying Syndicate. I've completed the first five or six missions.
Welp, finally finished Exile 3 after playing it for the first time since the 90s....
In all the years I never knew how the trilogy ended.
Tempted to try out A4-6 now, just to see where the story goes, but I have to admit I'm a little burnt out after all the combat in the finale. If I'm going to attempt A4 I'm going to need to munchkin the shit out of it.
Welp, finally finished Exile 3 after playing it for the first time since the 90s....
In all the years I never knew how the trilogy ended.
Tempted to try out A4-6 now, just to see where the story goes, but I have to admit I'm a little burnt out after all the combat in the finale. If I'm going to attempt A4 I'm going to need to munchkin the shit out of it.
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2.
Can be real troublesome to get working,but it truly is one of the best games of all time. I'll play Mysteries of the Sith once I finish Dark Forces 2.
I want to get into platforms to take a rest from RPGs , so i got Super Mario Odyssey. I only played 2 hours but the game is fun, not a game that i would binge on a weekend but one i could see myself clearing a stage everyday.
Tomb Raider 2. I hated the Venice level but I've settled in with this pretty well since. Still too much combat for a game engine that really isn't designed for it. It also always bugs me when a protagonist dual-wields pistols but doesn't use them like a John Woo hero would (i.e., the main reason dual-wielding pistols was such a thing in the 90s). What I like about the series is the exploration and the deliberate way you have to set up to make long jumps and such.
Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus. A well-regarded 3D platformer but I think I might drop it because it's actually kind of boring to me. There's nothing that I can pinpoint as being obviously wrong with it, but I keep forgetting that I'm in the middle of it. Bland in the way that 1990s kids stuff was, I guess.
I'm hoping to finish up Metroid Dreadful tonight so I can finally try out the Link's Awakening remake or update or whatever you wanna call it. I'm getting sick of Metroid Dreadful's bullshit. It's a Metroid game in name only. Metroid Prime 4 better be the real deal or I think I'll be done with that franchise for good.
Back to play-, eh, modding Fallout New Vegas: Tales of Two Wastelands. Modding scene is still very active, with a lot of new animation mods being released each week. Apparently you can assign animations to each weapon individually now, which opens up a lot of new animation possibilities, such as this satisfying reload animation:
The patch mitigates some of the most egregious balance issues the game had, but little more. Backporting the better balanced weapon stats of FE7 helps the enemy a bit, but does a lot to free the game of coming down to very middle of the road RNG. The fix don't really make any awful units truly worth using (maybe one of the fighters), though a good chunk of the aggressively mediocre units (Raigh, Fir and, to a lesser degree, Trec get the push they need to warrant a team slot. Roy is way better with only minimal stat buffs thanks to the indirect buffs of triple effective rapier, faster supports when he already had some of the faster supports in the game and getting a promotion at a somewhat reasonable time, Echidna and mid-game Dieck also work better thanks to less awful axes) are certainly much way better. Notably Chad and Shanna are untouched, because their early utility still makes them high tier units, even though there's no reason to use Shanna after her sister joins, and minimal reason to use Chad when you get your second thief (Chad can recruit a unit, and there's a few chapters multiple thieves can be useful in). Alen and Lance's viability is still at the whim of the RNG.
Lack of ambush spawns rids the game of a lot of its most frustrating moments, though being an extra turn away renders many of those that spawn behind you pointless. The extra promotion items were definitely needed, though I've reached the desert and have yet to find any extra guiding rings (the most needed). There's two minimal changes I'm surprised didn't make it though: Thrones/gates aren't nerfed, while Gonzalez and Perceval really should have the same bases regardless of what chapter they're recruited in (at least before hard mode bonuses).
The patch makes two mildly controversial changes. Firstly it swaps the recruitment of two units. It makes perfect mechanical sense: It frees you of a character who winds up being an escortee in her introduction chapter, and the existing plot gives plenty of reason to stall her joining, and in exchange gives a unit who really should be fighting in that level and gives her a minor exclusive buff that makes sense. She just kinda appears due to lack of plot edits, but it works fine. Also adds some more devil axes among enemies, which doesn't really do anything but can be mildly amusing.
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2.
Can be real troublesome to get working,but it truly is one of the best games of all time. I'll play Mysteries of the Sith once I finish Dark Forces 2.
Only played the Jedi Academy before and just started playing this. First two levels on Nar Shadaa and i am already given a few opportunities to flank my enemies via clever level design.
Controls are a bit wonky though
