Yeah, same limit, but don't worry if it goes over. The text is a bit redundant, it could use some trimming.
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Open Call for Reviews
- Thread starter felipepepe
- Start date
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Fantastic game, so happy that made it in the book. 
I'm not known for being a stellar writer but before they don't get reviewed at all, I'd be happy to jump in for that one.
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Thanks to my old Nahlakh thread appearing on the first page again, I was able to make a review of the game. Let me know what you think.
Nahlakh is an indie from 1994 by Tom Proudfoot, which tries to mix the best from Wizard's Crown and the Ultima games. But with few towns and few NPCs to talk to, and very much combat, sometimes against virtual armies of enemies, it's much more Wizard's Crown than Ultima. Which is a good thing if you like tactical combat. Of the DOS era CRPGs Nahlakh offers some of the very best tactical combat, only rivaled by Disciples of Steel and the Gold Box games, especially when the tactical options start to increase when more spells and items become available.
The game is not easy to get into; the manual leaves a lot to be desired, but fortunately there is a hint book available that is invaluable. There’s no pregenerated party, and you need to create up to eight characters from scratch, which can be a daunting task for new players. There are no classes, instead characters are defined by their race, stats and skills. To create a character you need to select one of the icons, which represent the sex and race of the character. Then you distribute the stats points, which again determines skills based on race, stats and random luck. Maxing out a few stats instead of making jacks-of-all-trades can be a good long term idea, since at the character creation every point has equal value, but later when you can pay for increases, the cost is higher for advanced stats.
Some of the skills – Alchemy, Pickpocket, Searching and Scribing – are not used in the game, so don’t waste skill points on those. There is a Search command, but it’s not influenced by the Search skill.
One novelty is that Strength is an important stat for Mages, since it governs amount of spell points. Also, spells will often fail if you don’t have high enough magic skill, which can be frustrating. And some spells can even backfire.
The game has an excellent magic system, where spells are crated by combining syllables. Some of the combinations you can find in spell books, or you can experiment to discover new spells. Or you can learn from enemies by paying close attention to what they say during combat! There is a wide variety of combat spells that affect the battlefield. My favourite is probably the spell that causes ice, and which can make enemies attack each other if they slip! I advice against looking up the spell list in the hint book, since figuring it out yourself is much more fun.
There is a very wide variety of magic weapons and armour, with a very large assortment of basic items (often just same weapons with different names, though) with lots of different prefixes and suffixes. Enemies can wear and use most of these, and all of it can be looted from dead enemies. Selling as much loot as possible is important, since you can never have too much money in this game, and there are no random encounters or respawning. Something which again means that there are some severe difficulty spikes in the game that you can’t brute force with mindless grinding to make it easier, but you have to use your current assets optimally to progress.
There is also a time limit of sorts. As time goes by you will get less and less money from selling items, and buying items will become more expensive. It’s not some economic formula, but purely a function of game time. But the more time you spend going back to town to sell loot, the more time will pass, which will again decrease profits...
This game is an excellent game if you play CRPGs for tactical combat, character development and finding interesting loot. It doesn’t bother much with story, setting is rather generic, and there’s little interaction with NPCs. So it’s at the extreme end of the combat/story axis of CRPGs, and one of the very best of its kind. Some of my favourite, and most difficult, CRPG battles were in Nahlakh.
Nahlakh is an indie from 1994 by Tom Proudfoot, which tries to mix the best from Wizard's Crown and the Ultima games. But with few towns and few NPCs to talk to, and very much combat, sometimes against virtual armies of enemies, it's much more Wizard's Crown than Ultima. Which is a good thing if you like tactical combat. Of the DOS era CRPGs Nahlakh offers some of the very best tactical combat, only rivaled by Disciples of Steel and the Gold Box games, especially when the tactical options start to increase when more spells and items become available.
The game is not easy to get into; the manual leaves a lot to be desired, but fortunately there is a hint book available that is invaluable. There’s no pregenerated party, and you need to create up to eight characters from scratch, which can be a daunting task for new players. There are no classes, instead characters are defined by their race, stats and skills. To create a character you need to select one of the icons, which represent the sex and race of the character. Then you distribute the stats points, which again determines skills based on race, stats and random luck. Maxing out a few stats instead of making jacks-of-all-trades can be a good long term idea, since at the character creation every point has equal value, but later when you can pay for increases, the cost is higher for advanced stats.
Some of the skills – Alchemy, Pickpocket, Searching and Scribing – are not used in the game, so don’t waste skill points on those. There is a Search command, but it’s not influenced by the Search skill.
One novelty is that Strength is an important stat for Mages, since it governs amount of spell points. Also, spells will often fail if you don’t have high enough magic skill, which can be frustrating. And some spells can even backfire.
The game has an excellent magic system, where spells are crated by combining syllables. Some of the combinations you can find in spell books, or you can experiment to discover new spells. Or you can learn from enemies by paying close attention to what they say during combat! There is a wide variety of combat spells that affect the battlefield. My favourite is probably the spell that causes ice, and which can make enemies attack each other if they slip! I advice against looking up the spell list in the hint book, since figuring it out yourself is much more fun.
There is a very wide variety of magic weapons and armour, with a very large assortment of basic items (often just same weapons with different names, though) with lots of different prefixes and suffixes. Enemies can wear and use most of these, and all of it can be looted from dead enemies. Selling as much loot as possible is important, since you can never have too much money in this game, and there are no random encounters or respawning. Something which again means that there are some severe difficulty spikes in the game that you can’t brute force with mindless grinding to make it easier, but you have to use your current assets optimally to progress.
There is also a time limit of sorts. As time goes by you will get less and less money from selling items, and buying items will become more expensive. It’s not some economic formula, but purely a function of game time. But the more time you spend going back to town to sell loot, the more time will pass, which will again decrease profits...
This game is an excellent game if you play CRPGs for tactical combat, character development and finding interesting loot. It doesn’t bother much with story, setting is rather generic, and there’s little interaction with NPCs. So it’s at the extreme end of the combat/story axis of CRPGs, and one of the very best of its kind. Some of my favourite, and most difficult, CRPG battles were in Nahlakh.
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Okay, now this is just fucking ridiculous.
There are so many things that are wrong about this particular entry that it made me gnash my teef.
Back in my day, we used to call it a diablo clone. Can you please point me to the "tactical" aspect of DoW2's singleplayer campaign? All I remember was selecting every dude I could and clicking on the awesome buttons to make dozens of enemy dudes disappear without any concern for positioning or management of anything or whatever the fuck. And the awesome button spam kept going even worse as the game progressed with the expansions.
I guess if you're mentally challenged, it can be. With the amount of awesome buttons at hand, there is no challenge to find here whatsoever, barring 1mln hp guos and avatards that take half an hour to bring down, but I doubt that's what hides behind your recommendation. You can pretty much solo every map with Cyrus FFS, very hard my ass.
Except that most of these are trap options, and they get even more trappy in the expansions (Retri in particular, IIRC).
Like how? It's all the same, just that upgrading your superheroes via small blip upgrades that add nothing is instead shortened into big blip upgrades that immediately give you new abilities.
NIGGA WTF ARE YOU SMOKING
WTF ARE YOU SMOKING x2
DoW2 is about as "one of a kind" as Dungeon Siege. The only difference is that it has more awesome buttons and less mules to carry around your phat loot.
There are so many things that are wrong about this particular entry that it made me gnash my teef.
Back in my day, we used to call it a diablo clone. Can you please point me to the "tactical" aspect of DoW2's singleplayer campaign? All I remember was selecting every dude I could and clicking on the awesome buttons to make dozens of enemy dudes disappear without any concern for positioning or management of anything or whatever the fuck. And the awesome button spam kept going even worse as the game progressed with the expansions.
I guess if you're mentally challenged, it can be. With the amount of awesome buttons at hand, there is no challenge to find here whatsoever, barring 1mln hp guos and avatards that take half an hour to bring down, but I doubt that's what hides behind your recommendation. You can pretty much solo every map with Cyrus FFS, very hard my ass.
Except that most of these are trap options, and they get even more trappy in the expansions (Retri in particular, IIRC).
Like how? It's all the same, just that upgrading your superheroes via small blip upgrades that add nothing is instead shortened into big blip upgrades that immediately give you new abilities.
NIGGA WTF ARE YOU SMOKING
WTF ARE YOU SMOKING x2
DoW2 is about as "one of a kind" as Dungeon Siege. The only difference is that it has more awesome buttons and less mules to carry around your phat loot.
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2009
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- 10,153
Reviewing an rts without mentioning the multiplayer 
.
While the difference between an RTS and a real time RPG can be somewhat thin at times (especially when you bring mobas into the mix), but imho dow2 isn't enough of an rpg to be in a book about rpgs. I mean, if dow2 is in, why not sc2? The expansions sp campaigns are very similar in their foundation to dow2.
Saying it's hard is also laughable. I'm a fairly middling rts player (record in sc2 is low gold) and I could beat it at the highest difficulty.
You can do better than this felipepepe.
.Calling it a diablo clone ain't right though. It's just an RTS with a focus on small armies with lots of (some would argue too many) gamechanging abilities.
While the difference between an RTS and a real time RPG can be somewhat thin at times (especially when you bring mobas into the mix), but imho dow2 isn't enough of an rpg to be in a book about rpgs. I mean, if dow2 is in, why not sc2? The expansions sp campaigns are very similar in their foundation to dow2.
Saying it's hard is also laughable. I'm a fairly middling rts player (record in sc2 is low gold) and I could beat it at the highest difficulty.
You can do better than this felipepepe.
Zeriel
Arcane
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- Jun 17, 2012
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- 13,972
RTS without base building is like "ice cream" that consists of an empty waffle cone. The basis of every RTS dating back to Dune fucking 2 wasn't selecting a bunch of dudes and making them attack other dudes, it was base building with the attack phase being a resolution of how well you did the first part.
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Guess you only had to play it 170 hours to figure that out eh?Damn you right I am butthurt J_C, Dow2 is a shit game and a spawn of the decline
Yes
Meh, it's ok. It's a decline from the first game that's for sure.Damn you right I am butthurt J_C, Dow2 is a shit game and a spawn of the decline
I included DoW2 mainly because of Chaos Rising. It clearly is a RTS/RPG hybrid that adds C&C, cool missions and has better itemization than 90% of RPGs out there.
There's nothing Diablo-like about controlling 4 BATTLE BROTHERS in various combat missions, using cover, progressive fire, tossing grenades, etc... the comparison to Dungeon Siege might be closer, but that was a shitty linear RPG. And yeah, SC2's expansions clearly ape DoW2, so I'd rather have the game that did it first (and better).
Also, I agree that DoW2 isn't a difficult game to finish - you can just keep resurrecting everyone and win by attrition -, but to do it properly, with all the side-quests and earning good ratings/medals IS fucking hard. Jaedar and Darth Roxor both have +150hs each on this game, maybe that makes everything seems obvious & easy?
Anyway, what you guys suggest? I still think it's an interesting title to feature in the book.
There's nothing Diablo-like about controlling 4 BATTLE BROTHERS in various combat missions, using cover, progressive fire, tossing grenades, etc... the comparison to Dungeon Siege might be closer, but that was a shitty linear RPG. And yeah, SC2's expansions clearly ape DoW2, so I'd rather have the game that did it first (and better).
Also, I agree that DoW2 isn't a difficult game to finish - you can just keep resurrecting everyone and win by attrition -, but to do it properly, with all the side-quests and earning good ratings/medals IS fucking hard. Jaedar and Darth Roxor both have +150hs each on this game, maybe that makes everything seems obvious & easy?
Anyway, what you guys suggest? I still think it's an interesting title to feature in the book.
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- 590
Where do you draw the line though?
"fast-action RTS gameplay" - Steam
"Dawn of War II is a fast-paced and action-oriented real-time strategy (RTS)" - DoW Wiki
"Dawn of War II ushers in a new chapter in the acclaimed RTS series" - IGN
Those are only a few of the sites, almost all of them put it under RTS.
It's an RTS with RPG elements in it. You're going to add Warcraft 3 or Bioshock? Both of those have RPG elements in them.
"fast-action RTS gameplay" - Steam
"Dawn of War II is a fast-paced and action-oriented real-time strategy (RTS)" - DoW Wiki
"Dawn of War II ushers in a new chapter in the acclaimed RTS series" - IGN
Those are only a few of the sites, almost all of them put it under RTS.
It's an RTS with RPG elements in it. You're going to add Warcraft 3 or Bioshock? Both of those have RPG elements in them.
I can't wait to see Battlefield and Black Ops 3 in the next reviews. Maybe a bit of Tom Clancy's the Division? Hell you get XP in these games that you use to upgrade your character. Watch Dogs as well....
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Cut it, or expand enough to mention the mp. I don't actually think its that wrong to call it an rts/rpg hybrid (like I said, the border is p thin). But rts/rpgs as a genre doesn't really exist, so you can't expect to properly summarize one (and 2 large expansions) in one page, maybe not even in two, because there's no basic expectation of how such a game works.
I mean you are the editor so you obv decide what goes into the book, but imo the current review is not good and not good + dubious inclusion is a bad combo.
I don't really remember the ratings/medals, but iirc its mostly fluff that doesn't do anything (except perhaps the possibility to attack twice in one "turn"? But even if so, it was easy to get).
And I didn't have 150 hours in the game when I first played campaign and it was still easy
It's a tough and subjective issue. I draw the line on whether it's interesting to an RPG fan & the genre itself - like being innovative or historically important.
BioShock is a dumbed-down System Shock 2, so it just got a brief mention at the end of the SS2 review. WarCraft 3 is famous for its hero units, but that had already been done in games like Warlords Battlecry and Rage of Mages, which also pushed the RPG elements much further - Blizzard has never been innovative, they just copy ideas and add a ton of polish & marketing. So there's no reason to give these games a separate review.
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You know, I usually like you, but I gotta start questioning why a lousy, ingratiating worm who doesn't really have a grasp of what an RPG is professes to write a book about them. I mean, that sounds harsh, and it's meant to, but... come on. What next, JA2? The Legend of Zelda? You have to draw the line somewhere and not erring on the side of "too loose."
Else you just kinda dilute the focus of your book. Quality over quantity. You don't need to add as many as possible. Or at least make these dubious RPGs a separate part of your book, like an appendix.
Else you just kinda dilute the focus of your book. Quality over quantity. You don't need to add as many as possible. Or at least make these dubious RPGs a separate part of your book, like an appendix.
For the past 3 years I've been saying that I'd rather err for more than less. Easier for me to cut then to add, easier fr a reader to skip a page than to wish for an article.
JA2 was voted thee Codex's #13 best RPG of all time. You saying it shouldn't be in the book?
And Zelda is mentioned on the "History of JRPGs" articles as one of the off-shoots of the early JRPGs:
Fuck, just saw a typo.
Fair enough. There are two other reviews on the cut line, and I'm not 100% sure I can go over 480 pages yet, so I'll leave it be for the time being and put it first in line for cutting if the need arrives or it stands out from the full book.
Of course, if either you or Roxor want to write a DoW2 review to replace this one, I'm fine with that too.
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BTW:
Dow2 is a shit game and a spawn of the decline
Seems silly to stop other BATTLE BROTHERS from having this experience just because Commie woke up butthurt today.Alright, Chaos Rising was awesum. Chaos was a much better opponent than the faceless tide that are the Tyranid. Some pretty cool missions in there, too, like the one on the Space Hulk. Also, W40k Chaos corruption and conspiracy. Good stuff
95% of that is spent on multiplayer, which is completely unlike the singleplayer.
And yet from the same thrad:
Chaos Rising must have looked like the best gaem evar after that so go figure, there's no way in hell I'd consider trudging through dow2 singleplayer again today. Also it was 2010, way before I even got my true edge
Also, make sure to check that thread again for how many times people refer to the game as some sort of a dumb hack'n'slash action game.
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I, on the other hand, might very well play chaos rising again someday. Although I'd certainly quit before starting the final mission, because 1mln hp guo is not gud.Chaos Rising must have looked like the best gaem evar after that so go figure, there's no way in hell I'd consider trudging through dow2 singleplayer again today. Also it was 2010, way before I even got my true edge
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After taking a look at the to-do spreadsheet there occurred a slight nudge in ma' hippocampus.
Why has no one reviewed these titles?
Wiz VI
Champions of Krynn
Gateway to the Savage Frontier
ROA:Blades of Destiny
Silent Storm
Spellforce
I have to admit a few of these took up more than a few hours way back in the day. Maybe the spreadsheet is not up to date?
No one wants to touch Wizardry VI ? Blade ?
Are these traps for the unwary?
Like if a "friend" was to volunteer to review some of these would he (or she) be subjected to intense scrutiny and flames of rage?
Why has no one reviewed these titles?
Wiz VI
Champions of Krynn
Gateway to the Savage Frontier
ROA:Blades of Destiny
Silent Storm
Spellforce
I have to admit a few of these took up more than a few hours way back in the day. Maybe the spreadsheet is not up to date?
No one wants to touch Wizardry VI ? Blade ?
Are these traps for the unwary?
Like if a "friend" was to volunteer to review some of these would he (or she) be subjected to intense scrutiny and flames of rage?
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