ZardoZ

I have to say, this was a bit disappointing. After seeing the title screen which brought fun nostalgic memories from the Well of Souls review, i was expecting to see Ross overcome another tough, unbalanced game, like he did with Well of Souls. What i got was him failing to understand yet another ARPG and resort to heavy cheating as a result. It's not a mystery why he always only scratches the surface of skills and attributes in games like these, he simply doesn't research them well enough to understand how to make his characters viable, and when they become unplayable because of it, he blames the game for it. I had to stop the video the moment he settled for infinite life and energy cheats, and made the rest of the game (and thus the review) completely pointless. This is not new, he's been doing this all the way back to his Revenant days, where he used a one-hit-kill cheat and still couldn't finish the game. If by any chance you read this, Ross, trust me on this, cheating in a game review (or essay) is never a good solution, and i doubt many of your viewers were thrilled to keep watching when you made your character immortal, with no restrictions. The video would have been 10 times more entertaining if you kept pushing through the game to the end, or to a point where you can no longer continue.

Recently played SiN for the second time and had a total blast with the game. Thanks for that, Ross! I'm very excited about the upcoming remasters of SiN and Kingpin, which unfortunately are now delayed for more than a year and may never be released. Anyway, SiN does provide some of the best levels in the 90's shooters, i think the level design is only a step behind that of Half-Life, which in my opinion, is the very best to this day when it comes to "environmental storytelling", where the corridors of Black Mesa tell their own story and help you fill the gaps and make your own conclusions, and form theories about the bigger picture of what is happening. SiN still follows a more traditional level formula for the time, where the levels involve some backtracking and switch hunting, but they are great because they feel natural, like existing places that make the world believable, which was still at the time a very fresh concept compared to the abstract levels of Doom, Quake and Unreal. That being said, all these games are great and i love them to death. PS: Here's something curios... i've noticed near the end of SiN, where a mutant breaks through the wall, Ross got the Mancini mutant, check it out: But in my game, i get the big second act boss coming through the wall. How so? Is there different versions? Is it a difficulty thing? I played on normal difficulty so... did Ross play on easy? ?

Yeah, Mass Effect is a bad idea, because the main character already has a personality and voiced dialogue, it just doesn't work. I think the "Mind" playthroughs best work in a survival game, maybe even a survival horror game... of course the main character should be a silent one and there must be fewer or none interactions with NPC's.

@Enigmasflame Did you played the Frater version of the game or The Well of Souls version? I have Frater v1.3 and my experiences with the fighter class are pretty much what you're describing in your post. I also played on normal difficulty and i'm currently at the end of act 1, just cleared the first well of souls at level 21. So far the game is quite balanced, even easy i'd say. My attribute point distribution is 1:1 strength/vitality. I don't invest any points in dexterity, because it seems like a total waste for a melee character, even though the game lies to you that it's useful... yes, it raises fighting skills (whatever that does), but even with the base fighting skill of 70, my character never misses a swing, so what does that stat does is a total mystery for me. Now here's a mystery for you. You said the Vred Solidus does at most 60+ damage, right? Then how are you going to explain Ross' golem dying in one hit? The golem has a base starting health of 300, which is about 5 times the health of Ross' character at that point of the game. And sorry, but no matter how weak his weapons were at that point of the game, with that much dexterity he had, he shouldn't be taking 274 hits to kill the second boss of the game... or 103 for the tough Vred. You said that you're "fairly certain" that you've played the same 1.11 version of the game, but what does fairly certain even mean? Can't you say for sure which version you've played? It's right there on the bottom right of the starting screen. And if you have the 1.11 version, please tell me where did you get it? Because the only one i could find is the 1.13 version, which i'm suspecting you've played as well. One thing that i can't explain is how can Ross be so clueless to some of the mechanics in this game? I'm not sure if he missed on the skill trees entirely, because he did mention the summoning skills, and you can't miss the rest of the skills if you click on the summoning skills. What he completely misunderstood though, is the progression of the summoned creatures. He said in the video that you need to spend your own character's skill points to develop the summons, but that's not true... you develop them by letting them fight alongside you. They have their own experience bars, levels and gain their own attribute points which you can then spend to make them stronger. At the end of act 1, my golem has 15 strength and 22 vitality, which grants him 15 damage flat (which is around my average damage) and he's tanky as hell with his 1070hp which is 3 times more than my character's health at the moment. So yeah, Ross made some mistakes, but the version he played seems completely different than what me and you have experienced with the game so far. I don't know how he could miss something as vital to the gameplay, as the ability to change the difficulty setting when he's getting destroyed... so the only logical conclusion here is that his version (The Chosen: Well of Souls) doesn't even have difficulty settings, and it plays on hard by default, while you played and described Frater, which Ross mentions in the video as the more balanced and fair version of the game.