The Last Door: Season 2 Collector's Edition (2016) (Linux)

What I loved is pixelart, music and atmosphere. The story was, well, nothing special, but I'm a bookworm and it's quite hard to make me surprised. I thinkt I didn't liked gameplay too (first one is better as far as I remember) - for some reason I've found some puzzle illogical and stuck a few times, but it may be just my own problem as well.

All in all the game is definitely worth trying because of fantastic horror atmosphere. It's like created by Lovecraft. And with 8-bit graphics it looks like a little masterpiece.

List of all games completed in 2018.

Skyrim VR (PSVR)

I’ve never played Skyrim before, so this was my first time ever playing the game.

I found it to be a very enjoyable open-world game, there are literally hundreds of quests you can do and areas you can explore. There are so many different quests that you can easily pick-and-choose which ones you want to do and which ones you want to ignore, you're never likely to have a shortage of things to do. However, the variety in locations and enemies is somewhat limited and after the first 100hours or so of play it did start to feel repetitive (even though I feel like I only completed a tiny fraction of the game). At that point, I started doing the main story missions until I completed them to finish up the game.

I played as a magic-using character, which was a lot of fun in VR, but on the very limited occasions where I tried using a melee weapon (twice) it felt extremely unsatisfying perhaps because there is no feedback so it feels like swinging something weightless. I also didn’t enjoy the swimming controls, which are different from the normal movement controls and much more difficult.

Overall though it’s a very fun game, and it does work quite well in VR (although I’ve never played the flat version to compare). Definitely recommended, unless you prefer your character to use melee combat.

Did you know that a real sword is not very heavy? At least the more modern types. If you add a £2 wrist weight you should come closer to feeling it.

I might be done with Fallen Enchanttess Legendary Heroes, at least for a while. I've tried it and enjoyed it, but I always win playing as Capitar with a mage sovereign. I train an army of 8 silver swordsmen and go into battle, cast fireball at the enemy, then wellspring to heal everybody, sack the enemy city, then repeat until victory.
I could see what the other factions are like, but that'll be when I come back for another go at this game.

Finished Satellite Reign a moment ago. Sadly the Steam version, because the GOG version's achievements were broken. Incidentally I was already doing a playthrough when that giveaway for the Steam version on Humble Bundle started. Anyway...

I'm inclined to say that this game blows. Well, it doesn't really but it's just so painfully mediocre and riddled with flaws. The saddest part is that this self-proclaimed spiritual successor to Syndicate is inferior to both original Syndicate games in various ways. I mean, something's SERIOUSLY wrong when the devs managed to repeat errors from the original game that had been addressed in Syndicate Wars and even messed up some things that were good even in the original game. Honestly, just two or three hours into the game I turned the game's progression system into a case study and ended up writing several pages of analysis. And then I went on to do the same for pretty much all of the game's aspects. Will have to fix my website one of these days to publish that thing. Considering that I managed to fill more than twenty A4 pages with analysis of the game it will be hard to summarise my impressions but I'll try.

First off: Syndicate was a tactical action game. It was far more similar to, say, Helldivers than Commandos or Company of Heroes, the two games Satellite Reign reminded me most off. Considering the setting it is of course kinda legitimate to add tons of hacking and other stealth elements, it is also a seemingly sensible endeavour to extend the agent's capabilities, to give them abilities. However, what they sacrificed in the process is that feeling of empowerment from the original games and the rampage that any mission evolved into. Syndicate is satisfying to this day, mowing down dozens of characters in a row with ridiculously overpowered weapons, without any chance to omit massive amounts of civilian casualties, just doesn't get old. Meanwhile Satellite Reign has some painfully slow RTS-style combat with a rock-paper-scissors system on top of it where you, comparably slowly, work yourself through shields, then armor and finally health of almost each friggin' enemy. Unless you focus on doing stealth kills using the assassin and his sword attack, which was frankly the most fun aspect of the game but simply not Syndicate. Generally, the game is so painfully slow.

That brings us to the next aspect: the weapons. In Syndicate almost every weapon felt truly unique. They weren't always practical but almost all of them were fun to play with. Meanwhile in SR, partially because of that friggin' RPS system, almost all weapons feel the same. There's basically three damage types and there's several tiers for each damage type. E.g. there's a rifle for each type, there's a minigun for each type, there's a beam weapon for two of the types, there's a "cannon" for two of the types. Only the sniper rifle really stands out but that one is so slow that it brings the already slow gameplay almost to a halt. It also doesn't help that the most powerful guns have to charge up. There's also no real surprises in the gear and augmentations (originally "body modifications" as I recall). The sad part is that the most useful enhancements are ones that give other agents the abilities of the "infiltrator" agent. Oh yeah, there's also a class system which forces you to have exactly one guy from each class at all times, one of which (the "support" guy) is utterly boring and pretty useless. And abducting agents was replaced with some weird cloning system that doesn't really contribute anything.

But the game's biggest problem is the world / mission design. Already the original Syndicate stood out with map and mission diversity and, at the time, impressive unique mission scripts. Bullfrog further upped the ante in Syndicate Wars which had some really memorable missions that built a pretty cool grim universe. Well, Satellite Reign takes place in an "open world" that is filled with nothing interesting. Almost all "missions" in the game are about breaking into a building that is located in a restricted area and getting out of there again. And you basically only do this to get more tech and money, preparing you for the meh ending. There's the occasional assassination but those are so friggin' easy (you literally just walk up to a guy somewhere and stealth kill him) that they basically don't count. So throughout the whole game you do nothing but either evading or killing patrols and cameras, entering the same bunker doors and getting back to the city streets. It's just friggin' boring and basically the opposite of the Syndicate games.

And as for the content... Syndicate never was story-driven but it worked for those games. In the original game you basically just built up your corporate empire and that's all you needed, that alone made the game pretty darn satisfying. Syndicate Wars had more of a story, with a religious cult threatening the corporation that achieved world domination by the end of the first game. The story was just told through walls of text on the mission briefings but it was enough, combined with the distinct missions it managed to get me involved. Meanwhile in Satellite Reign you control these four guys who work for some corporation that wants to bring down some other corporation. You aren't this powerful business dude anymore, you're a lackey of some chick at some corporation that wants you to bring down some other corporation because those guys are evil - wait, wasn't being evil the whole point of Syndicate? What kind of motivation is that now? And it also doesn't help that the briefings and messages from the chick are basically just instructions, with VERY little world-building going on there. The background story is told through logs that are completely detached from the gameplay. That's even worse than in Syndicate Wars and I didn't even bother to read those. At first the logs provided too little information, by the time I had enough logs to figure out more of the story I just didn't care anymore and didn't even bother to read them at that point. Plus, I never found all the logs and the last thing I want to do now is search the whole city for them.

Long story sort: this Syndicate-successor is totally not Syndicate. Is it a bad game, though? Well, besides being utterly monotonous - not really. The stealth-based core gameplay is decent, if not diverse at all. I really enjoyed the fact that there were many possible approaches to infiltrating each compound thanks to the hacking, zip line, ventilation shafts etc. and finding a perfect route was immensely satisfying. And once in a while, when all hell broke loose, it did get pretty fun and exciting, requiring quick thinking to defeat the superior forces. There's just been too many games that did both, stealth and tactical combat, much much better than Satellite Reign.

Oh yeah, I liked the graphics with that colourful neon style (although the game is pretty badly optimised) as well as that kinda synthwave soundtrack that occasionally pays tribute to Syndicate. That bassline from the original game is actually back and some of the ambient music sounds a lot like the Syndicate Wars soundtrack. I just wish there had been a lot more music, there just wasn't enough unique tracks for a game this long.

Avernum 3 Ruined World (GOG)

Finally brings the revamped trilogy to an end. Great series that defines what the old RPG's were about: go everywhere, uncover every single square of every map, talk to everything, kill everything, steal everything until you find yourself at the end. All done in turn based form of course, the only way to play a true RPG.

This game ended the first trilogy quite well, though it's not my favorite of the trilogy. It did drag out a bit longer than seemed really necessary for the story and, overall, I think it was a bit longer than the first two games anyway.
But still an excellent game and series as a whole.

I particularly like how you are given freedom to role play your own way in a lot of situations, even when there is a clear way that Jeff Vogel intended you to solve something- you can still often ignore that and do you own thing. For example in one part of Ruined World you are obviously meant to set up a war between two factions to your benefit. But I'm not a fan of elaborate schemes and decided to ignore what the game wanted and just kill everything in both camps. Simple and effective and the game let me do it, even though clearly it meant me to do something else.

I had good success using my build roadmap from Crystal Souls: Dedicated shield and sword melee character, polearm melee character, dedicated elemental mage and dedicated healer. Once the two melee characters got there respective skill trees to 10/10/10 weapon/hardiness/parry, switched their development to priest and mage from that point. So by end game you end up with two durable casters for close up work, backed by two dedicated squishy casters. Plus all characters get at least one point in priest spells so they can all cast the base heal in an emergency. Worked well, as it did in Crystal Souls.

I absolutely recommend these games to people that enjoy turn based games built on a grid. Just don't try to play them all back to back...there's only so long you can keep looking at the same sets of identical tiles without going mad. Space the games out over time to keep it fresh. They are 50 hour or more (depending on how thorough you are completing everything).

I need a rest now from Spiderweb games for a bit. In the meantime I can think where to go from here the next time I return to Spiderweb games...I could go straight onto the second Avernum trilogy or maybe start on Avaddon.

It might as well be because I'm a cheap bugger, but I don't buy often game that have a real end... I'd rather play and replay something like Hearts of Iron III or Il-2 Sturmovik, or play a MMO.

Plus, since I don't have the latest, best computer, I don't follow the news and must miss lots of great games.

Congratulations! And thanks for your opinion.
Could you try to estimate how much time it took you to accomplish the game (and the trilogy)?

Blackwell Unbound (2012) (Linux)

Suprisingly good game. I really liked it!
• interesting story with some twists
• amazing music
• great, really great voice acting
• fascinating characters
• outstanding melancholic atmosphere

After The Blackwell Legacy I was somehow intrigued, but all in all the game was rather mediocre. Now I can see that the series may be the best $2 invested. I thought it's hard to surprise me, but what I've found here... well, nothing I expected.

Thanks for making this kind of games, Wedjet Eye!

List of all games completed in 2018.

I think ruined world took me somewhere between 50-60 hours. The first 2 games of the remade trilogy took around 40. So the trilogy would be something like 130 or so. I also recommend playing them in order, though your characters don't carry over, the world and the NPC's definitely do and it's nice to come across some NPC you already know from the previous games.

If you tried to play straight through the story without exploration and side quests, then those times would be halved easily. The games don't level scale to you though, so shortcutting the story could result in a difficult end game with low level characters.

I guess I just kinda finished Mini Metro. That is, I played each level at least once, scoring high enough to unlock the next one and get the basic achievement for passengers delivered.

Well, I must say, I'm pretty disappointed. Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty nice idea and I could see its appeal as a mobile game but as a desktop title it's rather... humble. I was certainly expecting more considering its gigantic success. I get it, it's "mini", so any comparisons to, say, Transport Tycoon or even Zachtronics games are somewhat out of place but the truth is that even as a little casual game it didn't quite grasp me as much as it could have.

The concept as a whole is pretty nice, actually, but first off, I don't think its full potential was used, secondly, there are these small design decisions I just don't like. For instance it's kinda frustrating that you can have a line that has actually enough bandwidth to be stable but the trains don't plan ahead and will fill up on low-priority stations and then skip the ones that are overflowing. I get it, that's exactly the kind of problem you have to work around in this game, I just didn't like that this particular problem is the most common reason for failure. I also really didn't like the unpredictability, the game would be much better to me if you had some preview, a bit like in Tetris, that shows you in advance what rewards you will get during the next couple of weeks, or if stations had some preparation time instead of popping up suddenly and being active straight-away.

And generally I would have liked the game more if it were more about building a growing system and optimising it (like in the Zachtronics games), rather than being a sort of survival game that's all about high scores. I also would have preferred a slightly smaller level of abstraction. Particularly the idea that passengers can be delivered to any station that corresponds to their type was kinda disappointing to me. That's just how the game is, and that's fine, many people obviously loved it the way it is, it's just not what I would have preferred.

Finally: I liked the presentation all in all, the minimalistic visual style that looks like a subway plan is pretty great, actually. The audio was also pretty nice, putting you almost in a trance, but as much as the game's audio portion had been praised I expected the game to genuinely create some catchy music as the network grows, rather than just creating some trancy ambience.

Oh well. It's still a pretty good game, just not my cup of tea.

Zeno Clash

When you think FPS, you think of a shooter, not a brawler. However this game attempts to do just this. This plays similarly to a standard brawler, you fight 1 - 5 enemies at a time, occasionally they'll have a weapon that you can pick up and use and every so often a huge guy comes along thats slightly more difficult. The setting is unique, the story is... unique, though it does leave questions unanswered. The game isn't too difficult, I never really mastered dodging though you it isn't really needed to win the game. It's a good game, albeit quite short, I'd reccomend it, though probably only during a sale.

Panzer Dragoon Orta (XB1X)

The old Original Xbox exclusive rail shooter now runs on Xbox One and boosted by 4x resolution, or 16x resolution on One X. I had to give it a try. Obviously the pre rendered cut scenes look like they did in 2003, but everything done in engine looks incredible. It always played at 60fps even on original Xbox, so that hasn't changed...just now it's near 4K as well. Basically, if you own the original or even 360 digital game, this is a free HD remake- it really does look that good.

I had a lot of fun with it. Rail Shooters are a dead genre, but that's what makes playing one (and Orta is the genres pinnacle) feel like something really fresh. In Orta at least, there is a bit more to gameplay that just waving the cursor around to hit things. You can accelerate with brief speed bursts, decelerate as well as switch between one of three forms: base mode is the balanced dragon with lock on lasers and decent dodging ability, heavy mode has slower and more damaging lasers but no speed boosting and glide mode has a quick firing low damage auto target laser and the best agility.
Mastering the three modes and using each at the right time is key to beating the game at higher difficulties. It's really well balanced fast gameplay. I'll be coming back to it again to get better and beat the harder difficulty level for sure. As well as paying some of the many unlockable missions.

Plus by finishing the main story you unlock the original Panzer Dragoon as a bonus game, which I've already had a quick play of mission one. It's the OG Xbox port of the PC port of the original SEGA Saturn game running emulated on Xbox One. And it works well, but unfortunately isn't enhanced like the main game.

Once again - thank you for all the details!

Unfortunately, due to some personal reasons I have very limited time for gaming and I'm trying to avoid such a big time investments. However, on the other hand, what you've written makes me really want to play the series. It looks like an epic story, deep and long enough to generate immersion effect I really love in crpgs. I hope I'll be able to try it soon. The games are already in my backlog, I need "only" the time issue to be solved ;)

By the way - I'm always spending in crpgs much more time then people who report their times to HLTB :D That's also the reason I'm often asking about that aspect :)