I bought the game for 3€ in a Steam sale, and for that money it is well worth the time.
The game runs very smooth on a 16GB machine with an RTX 1080 card.
The Good
Story
Story is serviceable. The Bad Guy is Really Evil. You are the son of a resistance fighter in some random tibetan/nepalese/whatever country. Your mother
left for the US with you as a child, but for some reason still trained you to be a fighter. At least, nobody mentions or wonders why you are handy with all
those weapons that are lying around. Also, nobody asks
where you were or how your life was, but accepts you as the son of the former leader. The story sets you up in the game and is motivation for some of
the missions, and that's it. It is by lengths better than in Assassins Creed: Origins (the "Egypt" episode).
Gameplay
The gameplay is good. It is a typical UbiSoft game, with lots and lots of collectibles, but at least you can buy maps that list the collectible locations. The
fighting is good, despite the occasional QuickTime event.
Update: After four weeks and getting in 10 hours of gameplay, I find that
the curse of Ubisoft still applies. The gameplay is a tedious collectathon with
lots of breadth but no depth. The constant nagging of karma missions while I'm
exploring, the lack of direction and the boring story made me quit the game
after 10 hours in.
The Bad
The intro is unskippable, which is highly inconvenient if the game crashes juuust before the end of the intro. Otherwise I haven't encountered
any bad bugs. The convenience of playing old games is that you get to play the best version there is. At least for offline games, where they
don't patch out songs from the soundtrack and so on.
The Ugly
The game is connected to the UbiSoft launcher, even when you buy it through Steam. That launcher updates itself every time you launch it through Steam. It also requires a (burner) email address for launching the game.
I should maybe start looking for a crack/patch that allows to remove the UbiSoft launcher by replacing it with a small program that mimics it but uses fewer resources.
At least Far Cry 4 does not have microtransactions.
An HTML game that implements the addictive features of Gacha games very well!
Link: Number Gacha
It's a really hard sokoban-style puzzle game about grilling sausages, with very little handholding. It does not tell any story but simply drops you into the puzzles without any explanation. On the flip side, the levels are well thought through and build on each other.
It seems to sell for €30, but I got it for 5€ in a sale, which is quite worth the money.
I struggled with the first "world", averaging maybe one or two levels a day with light play. The second world introduces three new mechanics, which make for complex puzzles again.
Unfortunately, the biggest level in the second world introduces three further mechanics and in addition also is very long and tedious, which put me off the game. I watched the solution on Youtube, and maybe I will revisit the game but that level introduces too many new mechanics without a way to play around with them, and in a setting where each of the new mechanics must be executed flawlessly in a 60+ move sequence.
A surprisingly complex tower defense. It has the appeal of the
GemCraft series, but
the mechanics are different. You build your defense towers along a path on
hexagonal terrain and at the same time build up the economy of your village
to provide for more resources to build more towers. The first games you play
are spent on unlocking all the buildings in some kind of meta-game. Once you
have unlocked all the buildings, there is a change to the whole game dynamic
as now you can chase beating the game to level 30, when all hex tiles are
exhausted. After beating level 30, there is the chase of high-scores by getting
your economy and defense good enough to survive wave after wave.
The game could be better, as the first 10 to 15 rounds of a game are mainly about kickstarting your economy, and that slog gets somewhat repetitive. Instead of having to play through these rounds, the game could start you in round 8 (or whatever) with ample resources instead. Otherwise, there is lots of strategy involved combining the right kinds of towers to find synergies. There is the bad luck of drawing bad tiles, but that usually isn't too punishing.
If you like tower defense games, this one is certainly one of the best in the last 5 years.
Tainted Grail - The Fall of Avalon
The game is a quite good RPG. It borrows heavily from Skyrim, Gothic, Morrowind and a bit of the Witcher and Elden Ring, but the mix is quite good.
You start as somebody possessed by King Artus, who wants to regain dominion over Avalon. The island has been taken over by the Red Blight, and the Knights of Kamelot are reigning from afar, not necessarily well. It is a grimdark setting but manages to be not entirely bleak.
Graphics
I'm playing this on an old(ish) PC with an Nvidia RTX 1080, with graphics at 1080p and "low" setting. The graphics are still OK. The world feels very handcrafted, and for example some of the ruins feel hand-placed but without much transition from the landscape to the ruin blocks. It strongly reminds me of Gothic in that regard. The general idea of the landscape reminds me of Elden Ring, except that the landscape is more gray and not in the glorious colors of Elden Ring.
World
The world is compressed, but still feels believable (for a fantasy RPG open world world). It is not littered with Ubisoft-style
fetch quests and collectibles, and soulless question marks with nothing to explore there. There are some side things to do,
like collecting cooking recipes, collecting ingredients for magic potions, some mild crafting, but it is all for making you a
better fighter, or keeping you alive. The crafting feels very close to Skyrim.
The characters inhabiting the world are grimdark, mostly, but there are also some weird characters and even mild attempts
at comedy. They are not as present as Jaskier in The Witcher, but not having everybody be within the grimdark framework
makes for good entertainment.
Gameplay
The game loop consists of exploring the world, mildly guided by quests, and then selling the loot at merchants, and maybe
crafting new stuff. The skills / leveling are taken from Morrowind, where doing any activity improves your ability in it. So,
cooking a meal slightly improves your general cooking ability. Running around a lot improves your running ability. And
conjuring monsters improves your general magic ability.
The fighting feels very much like Skyrim, having bow and arrows, magic and close combat. The fighting forces you
to switch weapons more often than Skyrim did, but that adds to the variety.
Story
There are various factions and various side quests that are well-written. There is a lot of (English) voiced dialogue,
which can get tedious at times, but on the other hand, it is spoken well and the voices feel in-character. Even the
side quests have a lot of spoken dialogue and I haven't found a quest without talking yet.
Conclusion
Overall, the game is interesting and touches the right buttons for me. It's
enjoyable to just go through the scenery, finding new caves to explore or
citizens to speak with. I am currently in the first act of the game and already
am overpowered (summoner magicians usually are), but that's fine.