This took me waaay longer than I expected! I was always curious about the Gothic series since it's popular among the people from my country. After I saw the trilogy on sale for like $1, I bought it without hesitation. I skipped the first game because I feared it would be too clunky to me and because I heard the second game is better.

So far this is the hardest RPG I've ever played. From the very beginning I've struggled in combat, couldn't even defeat some random flies and midget goblins, I couldn't get into the city because I looked like a hobo, got lost because I was too poor to buy a map and I got my ass kicked by a bunch of bandits because I thought taking them all on alone was a great idea. Things get easier later on but the challenge is present all the time. Combat's pretty fun once you figure it out, however the controls are clunky and designed to be played with the keyboard alone - seems like mouse support was added just as an afterthought. The dragon fights are pretty disappointing though, especially the final boss.

Gameplay aside, the lore and the world are top-notch. The story Nearly every single character has something interesting to say. There are many side quests to do and the have lots of variety. The world is so small and yet it feels so big - there's something in pretty much every single corner - an item, an enemy or just some decor. The graphics seem decent for their age, too.

Moving on to technical stuff, the game won't run out of the box on newer systems but with some community fixes it will run fine on Windows 10. It's surprising that there's still an active community for this game. People out there are still making mods with new quests, locations and storylines, some are even creating machinimas.

Gothic II is not a game for everyone. It's high difficulty, lack of hand-holding and clunky controls may put off a lot of people, but those who don't mind any of that are in for a real treat, a true gem of a RPG.

State of Decay: YOSE was an impulse purchase I made back when the devs gave free copies of the "remaster" to those who owned the original version of the game. It seemed like a unique zombie survival game with its own quirks.

It has some interesting base building mechanics - while you're out doing typical zombie apocalypse stuff, the rest of the group stays occupied - they may work on something in the base, go on a zombie hunt, argue with each other or just rest. You can also switch between them. There's permadeath so once you die, that character's gone forever. I don't like how there are endless, repeating tasks in the game and how it's not immediately obvious which mission will progress the main story and which is just a chore that will come back eventually. After a while the missions get boring since you're doing the same stuff all over again. It doesn't help that the missions appear on a timer so once you progress through the story you have to wait until the game decides to give you the next mission.

As for the DLCs… Breakdown is basically the sandbox version of the main game. I was so not going to go through all of it again for some achievements so I skipped it and went straight to the Lifeline DLCs, which was okay. It puts you in a new location, adds a new, shorter story and adds a couple new gameplay mechanics, however it's still mostly the same game.

Additionaly the port doesn't seem to be good - my PC struggled to stay at 60 FPS, especially when driving around. The game also has lots of bugs - broken animations, weird car physics or NPCs not getting up after getting downed despite not being attacked.

If you're looking for something different than most of the zombie survival games out there, State of Decay: YOSE may be your thing. Personally I think it was decent but I don't think I'll go back to get the rest of the achievements.