Recent reviews by geøstigma

Sanctum 2 is a surprisingly well made TD/FPS hybrid and surprisingly fun to play. In Sanctum 2 you are to prevent alien forces from reaching your "Core" by steering them into long maze-like roads filled with towers and keeping them under constant fire from your own weapons.

It is a TD game so towers are essential for your success, but its also a FPS so, as mush as u depend on your towers, they depend on you and your weapons/perks, so both aspects of this game are very important, from tactical planning to sharpshooting. Speaking of towers, weapons and perks, there is quite the selection to choose from and you can pretty much build any type of character that suits your play style. In addition, every towers behavior can be programmed manually to shoot exactly what you want him to, giving you much more control over the course of action.

Enemies in this game are well thought, well designed and they come in all kinds of different shapes and sizes, and will require you to use all of your arsenal. You will be fighting anything from small, foot sized rat like monsters that will just charge you and explode, to a hard and heavy, tank sized armored bugs that wont even bother with you and will head straight for your core soaking up all the tower damage and providing cover for the rest of the enemies.

Levels are pretty much like enemies. They vary a lot, so anything from a small square to a huge maze like levels with many paths, alien spawns and even multiple Cores will happen. These levels are real well made and even the smallest of them don't hold your hand and tell you how or where to build your defenses, tho, some levels will have quite a lot of unbuildable terrain(note the blue outline in fist screenshot, everything outside it is unbuildable terrain) but will still provide you with countless options and superb replayability. Also, I wanna point out that these levels are visually appealing and very beautiful, and that they often have many cool things you can find and discover within them if you feel like it.

Progression system is fun and the game will reward you based on your action, so, for example, staying alive for the whole wave will earn you some extra XP which will give you access to more towers, weapons and perks. Eventually, when you feel strong enough, you can start playing with "Feats of Strength" which will make enemies either stronger, faster, more durable, regenerate their lost HP, make death permanent, refund you less when selling your towers, or all of the above at the same time. These make the game super challenging, much more replayable and incomparably more fun, they will count towards your overall completion and will reward you with +20% to total XP count, per feat enabled, when you finish the level, if you can finish it that is :)

Last thing I wanna go over is the multiplayer. First off, I just wanna say that I never played this game solo and that I think that any game that has a co-op campaign option should probably never be played solo in the first place and I highly recommend playing this in co-op and co-op only!
So the multiplayer is awesome! You can bring up to 3 friends to play with you, each with their own towers, weapons and perks, and with the good character customization that this game has, none of you have to be even similar to each other. Also note that for every friend that you play with, aliens will be tougher, and I'm not really sure how the equation goes, I never gave it a thought to be honest, but it all seems to be balanced and challenging no matter how many of you are playing together. You all have your own resources to build with and each player is awarded its own resources after a wave is finished but you can also choose to share them between yourselves without any penalty as much as u like.
Speaking of MP, and playing with friends, I have to mention the one and only flaw I encountered while playing this game and that would be communication. As much as an optional text-to-speech bot is giving its best to pronounce the words you type in, this game is just too fast paced to type during a defense and you should by all means stick to voice chat. However, in-game voice chat is really bad, it cuts off and lags quite a bit even when there is no lag at all. Fortunately enough for all of you who don't speak much, there is a "ping" option that lets u summon a beacon of light to a targeted location that is sure to get other players attention for you in a heat of battle. So, if you wanna have a good team play, use Skype, Steam Voice Call, Teamspeak or whatever you prefer, just don't rely on in-game voice chat.

With all above being said, I really have no reason not to like this game, and not to recommend it to all of you TD and even FPS lovers. Don't be fooled by this games frequent huge discounts, Sanctum 2 is a blast and for what it offers, well worth even at the full price. So if you like TD games even a little, you will love Sanctum 2; if you like FPS games, there's plenty of that in here too, and if you suck at base building you can always let your friends build for you :P

Honestly, since the one and only flaw I can think of(and trust me, I thought a lot!) is that easy to workaround, and there so many good sides of this game,
10/10

Edit: My opinion on the game hasn't really changed even though my writing did significantly. The only reason I'm editing this review is because of the Steam's 2016 Autumn sale tasks ;)

This game lived up to my expectations even tho they were pretty high. Gameplay is nice and fun, commands are responsive, AI is pretty good and game had a few really challenging parts, although, its story is whats making this game stand out from other TPS games. Amazing scenario, story telling and great actors alone make this game worth playing. Get it, play it, love it, all recommendations

What to say that has not been said already. If this game was a cup, it would be overflowing with epicness.

If you never played it before, you are in for a story you will never forget(most likely you wont understand it either if you havent played previous Legacy of Kain games). Naration is just epic, all voice actors(Kain especially) are very gifted voice actors and will make every cutscene feel amazing. Also, story is well written and leaves little to nothing unexplained but rest assured that after finishing LoK series, all shall be revealed.

Speaking of gameplay, combat is good, fast and dynamic and fairly challenging at some points. Puzzles are entertaining, and a bit challenging every now and then. Only thing that is worse, in my opinion, compared to previous Soul Reaver game is that there are no things to collect, as health upgrades or glyph magic and that the world feels much smaller than the one in the original Soul Reaver

Pros:
-Epic Story narrated by epic voices
-Fast, dynamic combat
-Fun puzzles
-Detailed world and nice visuals

Cons:
-No "secret" collectables
-Can crash on PC's with multi core CPU's(avoid by making it run on only 1 core)

9/10

Let me start by saying that im a huge fan of LoK series for a very long time and that i have played every one of this amazing series titles countless times... except for this one. I finished this game right before writing this and i must say that i now fully understand why BO2 was the only title in the series that i was evading during all of my series replays.
This is, in my oppinion, the only title from LoK series that is bad and here is why:

TL;DR Version
Cons:
-Scarce and crude story, unworthy of LoK titles.
-Boring, repetative combat with bad mechanics, little to no enemy/weapon variation and useless abilities.
-Easy level progress with boring, repetative encounters and puzzles.
-Progression system is barely useful, not fun and it feels forced.

Pros:
-Kain(and his voice actor)
-Simple yet fun boss encounters for the most of the time
-Story, though deficient, is a part of one of the greatest stories ever told

-Story and Acting:
While in previuos LoK games naration is plentyful throughout all of the game, BO2 seems to be missing that, and story is barely worth following untill chapter 7 where it kinda starts to develop. Story telling is scarce and crude, every character except for Kain sounds like it has absolutely no written dialogue and is improvising on the spot, while in every other LoK game, every single dialogue sounds absolutely eargasmic. Plot is plain and simple, story develops as expected with no twists or surprises that LoK series are known for. Also, levels have close to no narated cut scenes or dialogues except for the occasional level introduction and conclusion.

-Character Progress:
In BO1 we were exploring caves, collecting armors and weapons with different properties, learning new spells and sacrificing our blood for more powerfull items, in SR titles, exploring was the key for progress, rewarding those who take alternate routs, climb high places, shift between realms and dive deep, etc... In BO2, the only aspect of character improvement is HP increasing and you do this by draining dry the enemies that you kill and syphon ancient containers of vampiric lore which are neither hidden nor hard to reach and you will probably get them all on your first run without even trying. Also, the thing with enemy draining is really boring, tottaly unnecessary and time consuming, considering that u need to completely drain your victim which can take up to, roughly, 5 seconds and if you want to get as much as possible you will need to kill every single civilian you encounter.

-Gear:
Kain has no weapon of his own except for his claws and every other weapon that you can pickup is exactly the same and differs from other weapons only by the light and heavy attack on grabbed enemy and, ofc, attack animations while damage, speed and integrity are the same for all weapons(not sure about this but it definitely feels like that, no distinguishable difference). Kains armors(tho purely cosmetic) look absolutely amazing tho, and many enemies are well designed and fit into the world perfectly.

Combat:
Combat is realy bad in my oppinion, its the same for every enemy and rly slow and easy. Even tho Kain can dodge, parry, grab and "combo", all of this is poorly executed and tottaly no LoK-ish. BO1 combat felt more engaging and dynamic.
While enemies do hit pretty hard, even the worst average players will have a hard time with dying in this game cause attack patterns that enemies use are all alike and consist of 3-5 light attacks with either a power attack(yellow/blockable) or unblockable finisher move(red/unblockable). Good thing is that almost every fight can be avoided or escaped from if player chooses to do so.
If however, player would rather fight and rely on his vampiric prowess and supernatural powers, he would shortly realize that he is limited to a 3-hit combo with "no-matter-what" he wields and a set of a nearly useless, so called, Dark Gifts, that can only be used if Kain parrys enough blows and are basicaly the same thing with a 3 levels of strength(the ones that matter for combat at least).

Boss battles:
Thesse are pretty good and true to the LoK series and old school boss battles but there are few bosses with some very monotone stages that require you to do certain things many, many, many times before they let you proceed to the next battle stage, but overall, this aspect is probably this titles strongest aspect.
Bosses are pretty much battle puzzles that you need to solve using your abilities while simultaneously staying alive and fighting back.

Level Progression and Puzzles:
Levels are long, filled with monotone enemy encouters and full of repetative, super easy puzzles that can barely be called puzzles. Now, some may think that these are easy for me cause i already played the game once but i assure you, these puzzles barely classify as puzzles and, my memmory of this game was very vague when i started my last(2nd) playthrough and i last played it roughly 8 years ago. Basically, if you are not pulling a box, you are mind controlling a human through a glass window to pull a lever for you and shooting a sigil every now and then with a TK power.

Im pretty sure i named it all so far.

I would also like to say that, while i do think that this is a terrible LoK game, it could still pass as an playable adventure game with a cool main character and would probably be a successful title for younger ages if it was not so violent.

2/10 as LoK title
5/10 as an action/adventure game

This game is amazing, and this is coming from old school MGS fan and Raiden hater. All Metal Gear elements are there, like multiple situation aproaches, extreme playability, addictive gameplay, hours long comm link dialogues full of cool rl info and ocassionaly comedy, vr missions and ofc, the cardboard box.
Visuals are great, immersive and are NOT DEMANDING as stated in system requirements and also, sounds and ost are pretty cool.
Only thing that i dont like about it is that areas are kinda empty for my taste since i like them "prop stuffed" but considering extremely fast and fun gameplay, you might not even feel like i do about it.
Recommended to every Metal Gear fan and anyone who likes fast action gameplay(that doesnt force button mashing) and swordplay!