Item - The Siege of the Necromancer

The second in Tin Man's GA cycle is arguably the worst of the series. It starts out intriguingly as you return from prospecting to your home region to find it overcome by goblyn hordes. However, once the adventure proper starts (entering a keep whilst trying to establish what is at the source of the invasion and setting out to stop it in its tracks) it quickly becomes tedious and repetitive with goblyn encounter after goblyn encounter dotted around a very confusing game map that interlinks seemingly impossibly with itself all over the place. Little of what you find is especially inspiring (the climax in particular is anything but climactic!) and in parts the adventure is genuinely bewildering, especially a semi-allegorical woodland that one part of the keep leads to. The true path is extremely convoluted and involves going back and forth on yourself in a bid to acquire certain essential items that you cannot win without. In places, combats are heavily stacked against you (especially a battle with an ogryn very early on) and, in a similarity to the first entry in the series, in the later sections you inevitably face a catalogue of very punishing stat-tests where instant deaths are arbitrarily likely to scupper you. Even with the added Tin Man feature of collecting Achievements, there is little to encourage re-play as this is so unbalanced against you and it just is not very interesting at all. On the plus side, the art is better than in GA1 and is from a first person perspective this time, although it seems rather low-res and, if blown up to fullscreen on a tablet, appears blurred to my eye. Very disappointing overall.

More reviews by Malthus Dire