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low rated
Retro Grade

You start the game beating the final boss. There it is Game over, 10/10...

Wait! You destroyed the time continuium and need to fix it, by undoing every attack through the entire game in reverse! With snazzy music to boot!

Graphics: 3D with your cute little Guy in a spaceship nodding his head to the beat of the music. The ships look like... well... Unity based ships for the most part. The background being either tunnels, space with debris, astroids, or circling around a space station, it looks fairly gorgeous. Each Lane is represented by a color generally, meaning which attacks will be in which Lane, or which line to be in to avoid said attacks from behind. And if you happen to activate the power to double your multiplier, the entire screen bleeds as though it's neon lighted! (not to mention the music changes slightly).

Music: Awesome and simple. Most of the music (besides say boss battles) have a nice feel to them. Although not music I'd listen to outside of the game, so it's more or less just good.

Sound: Ship shooting and explosions... what else do you want?

Mechanics: I have played it with keyboard and controller, however the higher difficulties would be better off with a guitar hero configuration. However on medium and lower, it's easy enough to switch between lanes and reverse the attacks. If you take hits, you can reverse time in order to fix it. Ultimately you start with the highest scores and you're trying to get the lowest score. Almost every attack will be associated with beats (although some of them are avoiding attacks for long periods of time).

Story: Positively absurd, tackling the hardest mission first so each mission after to the final boss is easier. It's a throwaway story, although still funny to read the mission names and descriptions of why you're assaulting the refueling station, or who you annoyed to get attacked.

Graphics: 4/5
Music: 3/5
Sound: 3/5
Mechanics: 4/5
Story: 2/5

Total: 16/25, 6.4 / 10, 3.2/5
low rated
Clarc

A maintainance robot (or Clarc) is woken up after a power outage. To his surprise none of the other robots are working, instead drunk on diesel fuel and partying like there's no tomorrow. While doing basic repairs and puzzles, Clarc finds a beautiful girlfriend missile, who gets kidnapped.

Clarc is a puzzle game, namely moving blocks around to block or redirect lasers. Checkpoints are often and generous. It's effectively a 2D game using 3D models and view.

Graphics: Simple yet cell shaded giving it almost a cartoon look. All the robots are well crafted, although it looks like it could have been a PS2 game with a little lowering of graphical effects. Everything is generally bright and obvious what is what, and the forced isometric perspective keeps you from getting too confused where anything is at any given time.

Sound: The death sound is perhaps one you'll cringe the most since you'll hear it a lot, even a few times when you manage to avoid death somehow by only getting hit by a beam for 1/100th of a second. But these are few and far between.

Music: Ranging from Funky and jazz, to upbeat dance music, to low and dreary background music. Most of it has Sine, Square and Triangle waves as part of the music in a very synth-heavy soundtrack. It reminds me of Tron Legacy's soundtrack a bit, except perhaps a little more dreary (if that's possible).

Mechanics: Simple. Pick up stuff, turn, move. that's all you really can do. However it's the world around you that changes. Turning on lasers, turning them off, redirecting them. Most of the time there's no time limit, although sometimes there are timing puzzles, such as trying to make sure your robot wins in a race by changing and fixing the course before it goes down the wrong path or gets destroyed. Some puzzles will infuriate you, and some will be fine and easy. The ones with the robots hunting you are probably the less fun of the lot; Though most of the time if you solve it even at your own pace with them on the other side of a barrier, you can get the results you need.

Controller Support: Using a 360 pad you'll learn which way 'up' points you. Up isn't really up, it's the direction clarc is facing. If you turn, the world turns around you so your view will always match where clarc is. With that in mind, you might fight with the controller for a while until you get this down.

Story: Clara gets kidnapped, Go See FATHER about MOTHER, rescue Clara, etc. about 25 missions in total. The ending is... silly, not really sure if it's a happy ending or not. Although the story drives the puzzles and where you are at, I never felt fully invested in Clarc. Still it was fairly fun in a cute way.

Graphics: 4/5
Music/Sound: 4/5
Mechanics: 3/5
Story: 3/5

Total: 14/20, 7/10, 3.5/5
Post edited August 16, 2016 by rtcvb32
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misteryo: This is my favorite topic.
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rtcvb32: Are you finding it useful? I do have a ton more to post before I'm up to date. I've got to boot up Toren again so I can recall exactly what I disliked about the game, but I'll get to that soon enough.
Yes, I find it very useful. Thank you.
low rated
Bionic Dues

The city is taken over by the machines! Robots and death machines are being manufactured. After being in a short training program, you're put on the front lines to try and slow the robot forces, just long enough for support to arrive!

Graphics: Splash screen, exo models, characters, as well as the buildings, wreckage, explosions, and bots, everything is superbly done!

Audio - this needs 3 parts... Wow there's a first!
Sound Effects: Explosions, gunshots, lasers and other effects. Well done and simple, easy to know what is what, while not being too loud or the like.

Music: Superb! Although there's some repeated tracks from AI Wars, every song is good and keeps with the feel and theme. One of the songs reminds me of the FF6 factory music. And the title song! It has a fully voiced and sung song to go with the game! How cool is that?!

Voice Acting: There is a lot of it. Most of it is for the robots. Hearing them quip out lines. 'I'm lonely' and 'oops!' and 'I meant to do that!' are funny to hear.


Story/Writing: Practically non-existant. Unfortunatey the lack of a story goes to the ending too, you either win or lose, and that's it.

However that's not where the writing shines! The writing shines with all the fun descriptions. From a gun made that surprises everyone that it not only worked, but that the robots are so surprised they don't act that turn! Robots coming out from stealth and going 'Boo!', and the descriptions of some of the tech telling you how awesome it is while it's also hazardous to your health. There is so much flavor in the writing and humor, even robots have their own descriptions that tell you how they act and how you should act around them. 'Powerful shot but runs on unstable propulsion' and 'has the alimighty power of a rail gun with 1 lousy bullet' and 'The ammo bot will refill his allies reserves, but is too afraid to shoot', etc. Each time you read these you'll laugh and hope to dig up more!



Mechanics: It's a Rogue-like. Turn based, use your resources wisely. Before missions you can equip anything you get along the way, or buy/sell. There's several types of exos and you can have all of the same type if you want. Each one will specialize in a certain style of play, from long range with the sniper, to Science exo who specializes in hacking points. Each Exo has a set number of weapons they can't change out, and get upgrades when you get the more powerful Bahamat versions. However every exo could have mines and turrets you gain from equipables.

As a Rogue-like it's turn based, you go and then they go. If they are asleep, they won't act the first turn they notice you, instead just waking up. If they are already awake (for some reason) they can get a free shot at you. Stealth will keep them from targetting and shooting at you, instead going for anything else they deem a threat. Stealth however is not intended to be used while fighting (unless you get the assassin), and the stealth system will break.

There's no Melee fighting, rather it's all ranged. A range of 1 is right next to you, but some weapons can go 50+ (although rare). There's single shot weapons, be they laser rifles or machine guns, and Area of Effect weapons like rockets, welding lasers, and even destrutable fuel tanks.

At any time you can switch between exos, but this takes a turn. You can switch with stealth on to avoid getting shot. If you lose a exo you still have your other exos, but you'll be weaker. You'll also get less loot (1 loot for each exo that survives, plus anything you find).

The character you play as determines a type of bonus you get for the entire game. One will let you equip better items than you should get, one starts you with all the best exo's, one lets you skip nearby levels to get better levels, etc. This will play into how you play the game.

Missions: There's a variety of mission types. The type of mission determines the type of loot you'll generally get. Go to a science facility? You'll get sciency items! There's saving hostages, getting items, avoiding an unbeatable killbot who kills you in one hit (well, the exo in place currently anyways), destroying factories to slow their growth, assassination missions, etc.

Annoyances: The game is too long. 50 missions, each of which can take you an hour depending on how complex the place is and the difficulty level you have the game set on. There's an option to speed the game up by each mission taking 2 days, so you'll only have 25 missions, but it's still a lot.

There's also the annoyance of hacking terminals. When you start the terminals don't tell you what they do, so one will disable your weapon, steal your stealth, or just explode and take your exo with it. Some of these feel like cheap shots.

Also using Virus points and taking over bots is often less than helpful. Either they will get ganged up on, or they don't have much ammo or shields and will die. Although some of them are just bombs and explode when killed or blow up when they are close enough to the enemy, so they can be useful, but often it isn't worth it.


In short: If you enjoy Rogue-like games (like ADOM, or ToME, or other classics) then you'll probably enjoy this robot themed game. If not, then you might pass it up, or play it on easy, but don't expect to finish it often, you'll probably get bored long before you get to the end game.


Graphics: 5/5
Music: 5/5
SE/VO: 3/5
Story: 1/5
Writing: 4/5
Annoyances: -2

Total: 16/25, 6.4/10, 3.2/5
Post edited August 16, 2016 by rtcvb32
Great topic! You've played a lot of games I'm interested in and so your reviews are quite helpful.
low rated
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PaterAlf: Great topic! You've played a lot of games I'm interested in and so your reviews are quite helpful.
There's still a ton more to do, find or write. And that's just for PC, Nevermind SNES, NES or other. But I don't think I need to concentrate on those. Just updated the list of games/reviews to do. Some of them I'll be doing a full playthrough again, although I'm hesitant for The Bard's Tale for example since controller support is shoddy at best. Mostly looking at the button prompts, and it tells you to press (3), which button is that? Quite annoying. And I don't want to play it again without the controller (although I can, and probably will).
Pixel Piracy

You are a pirate, Yarr... beat the for 4 pirate lords to win?

Graphics: It's 8bit pixels that that shuffle without much sincerity. With a large number of swap and replace graphical changes to say what type of clothes, head, and facial features you have. Although not graphically impressive, it does seem to have a lot more fog effects and extras that I don't recall being there, which don't offer much except to make it hard to tell what is what at first.

Music: A couple instruments playing, possibly singing a shanty while on the high seas. Nothing complex or really memorable.

Voice acting: Yo Ho hoo! and other simple phrases. These are what you will hear. However sometimes the voices are modulated a bit, faster or slower to give higher/lower voices. It's rather silly.

Sound Effects: Perhaps a little loud, especially the sword sound. But it does the job.

Story/Writing: Randomly the characters will start throwing out random quips. 'My father knew your father' and 'the sea smells nasty today' or similar stuff. It's a playful addition. As for the story, You need to beat the four pirate lords to win. This may take a while, which is fine.

Mechanics/Gameplay: Left click will move the captain, and rightclick will move your crew. you can assign them all a job so you can have several groups instead of one massive ones. New recruits who can't survive can then stay on the ship and chuck around crap. Literally... This is something that's absurd where all your crew will not take a crap EXCEPT when on the ship, and just drop it on the deck. Having someone with a cleaning skill will just pick up the crap and toss it overboard, or against a wall which deals with it.

Combat is a matter of their big or little weapons touching the enemy. Although you can kill animals too, get feathers and eggs from chickens for example. Guns are powerful, but you'll soon have an abundance. Even non-weapons can be used, like the fishing poles, which will do bleeding damage.

Like any survival game, you have morale, hunger, and HP. On an easier mode they won't lower morale very quickly, while on harder difficulties you will have to pay them more often, or do something that lets them recover. Hanging out at the tavern letting them drink will deal with morale. Food on the other hand you need to buy food, or if you're lucky, have two or three fishing poles and have your crew fish. If you have a large enough crew with some to spare, you can have several fishing all the time and have a surplus of fish. But that's much later.

You can build or revamp your ship, add to it, make it larger or smaller. The smallest is probably a 2x1 block, just big enough to stand on, although since you can't swim it's a weird idea not to have a little extra room. Later you might make an impressively sized ship. But since you only come across them from the left, you can build a wall in case they have cannons later in the game. Of course you'll need ladders and other such things to actually LEAVE the ship. So there's that.

There's a large number of skills you can teach the pirates, anywhere from cleaning (poo flinging) to how to poop properly, to fishing, to swimming, to being better at fighting.

There's islands to explore, natives to fight, and chests to open (sometimes). There's even tribal idols you can mess with to get surrounded and slaughtered! So be mindful what you touch. When fighting on ships your crew will automatically use grappling hooks to get to/from shore/ship, just don't fall in the water!. Capturing a ship means abandoning your old ship. Plundering the ship will give you gold and some of the ship's components.

All in all, it's a time sink you can beat in something like 3 hours. If you lose enough crew early on you might be better off starting over, since retraining a low level crew can be a waste of time. There are more modes but I never quite found that entertaining so I can't tell you how well they do.
Post edited August 16, 2016 by rtcvb32
Infinifactory

You are brought aboard a ship and given simple tasks. Moving blocks, cutting apart, merging together, before ultimately sending the exact configuration of the item. This is done via conveyors, pushers, and other tools given to you.

Graphics: It's 3D, more specifically it feels like... Qube. However placing of objects feels like Minecraft, which can get in the way. Seeing as you are doing first person perspective, you have to fly around the area. There's asteroid areas, ship docks, and lush forested worlds you can't explore.

Audio: There's some voice acting, although it's mostly alien talk in another language, and voice recordings either left for you, or the last thing the other occupants had last been saying before they died. Pretty good quality.

Music: Very new age. Relaxing, deep and booming almost. If you've played SpaceChem, you know exactly what type of music to expect. Very good. Very Zenny.

Mechanics/Gameplay: In first person you walk around and place blocks. These blocks ban be conveyors, pushers, rotators, destroyers, splitters, joiners, raisers, buttons and sensors, among other things. Placing parts is a lot like minecraft, and gets in the way half the time. Also gravity does play a part so you can't just have something in mid air, it has to be attached/grounded to something... Unless you want it to be moving. There's at least one puzzle where you move drills forward and back in order to remove broken parts to a spaceship, and then repair the spaceship by replacing new parts.

Like SpaceChem, it has a spacial awareness issue with the puzzles. While SpaceChem it became hard or impossible to know what was going where and how to program the lines to do what you wanted, in Infinifactory it's easy to get things stuck, unwieldy, unable to reach areas you need to reset a specific block or make minor changes. It becomes a challenge to keep your sanity while trying to figure out how to solve the problem, only in 3D.

Like all of their games, you have 3 types of solutions you can work towards.

First is speed, getting the job done as fast as possible. As there's a speed of how fast there's output, you can increase the output to tweak this, as long as your stuff doesn't get blocked up.

Second is how many blocks you placed. The minimalist but may take more steps.

Third is footprint size. This is how much your blocks take, and area in total that you work with. Smaller footprint, the better.

Naturally you don't have to optimize for all of them, you can just complete the puzzle to keep going.

Story: The story is fairly simple, you are abducted and can't go home. When you aren't doing something for them, you are put in your own little room. you can collect trophies, but that doesn't appear to mean much. The story is mostly unlocked as hearing the audio recordings of your fellow companions, or rather those that came before you, doing jobs for decades. I don't know how it ends, didn't finish it as the puzzles become an exercise in keeping your sanity rather than solving the puzzle.

Graphics: 4/5
Music: 5/5
Mechanics: 3/5
Story: 3/5

Total: 15/20, 7.5/10, 3.75/5
Post edited August 16, 2016 by rtcvb32
Thanks for your time and effort to share your thoughts and impressions.

I've added this to my favorite topics list.
Defender's Quest

Azra is thrown into the pit as she has the plague. But there is much more in the pit than is telling. In the moments when she would die, she manages to call other heros into a halfway realm and deal damage to zombies that would otherwise be unbeatable.

Graphics: Beautiful sprites, beautiful tiles, beautiful storyboards. It is a huge improvement to the original game. It's a Remake done right!

Audio: Simple, slashes and attacks and magic.

Music: Beautiful synthisized music, from the epic title menu, to the lazy map, to the hurried and frantic battle music, it all is a pleasure to listen to. There are slight hickups when the music loops, but that's the only problem.

Mechanics/Gameplay: It's a tower defense game. Depending on how much energy you have, you summon your unused warriors to empty spots to fight for you. they include Berzerkers, Rangers, Healers, Knights, Ice Mages, and finally Dragons. When placed they start at level 1, but if you have spare energy you can boost them up to level 5, where they become stronger, unlock abilities, and might reach further than before. You can hire more companions having up to 6 of each, but each hire makes later companions more expensive.

Levels have 4 modes of play. Casual, Normal, Advanced, and Extreme. The higher the difficulty, the harder the waves, as well as the better the loot. You'll get loot based on if Azra is unharmed as a perfect score, or just beating the level.

As you play the heros will level up permenantly. This means more hitpoints hitting harder, but skill points you can boost or give skills for them to learn. (this isn't the same as Boosting).

Story: While trying to survive, Azra learns of the curse, the plans for a demi-god to come to the world and take over, of her palce in it (and why she can go to the halfway place), as well as recruit friends along the way. It's said that this has the best story of any tower defense game (there's also 2 endings). There's also plenty of humor, mostly Slak being the comedy relief and threatening to tear his pants off and fight naked or some other silliness while collecting skulls.

Graphics: 5/5
Music/Audio: 5/5
Mechanics: 3/5
Story: 4/5

Total: 17/20, 8.5/10, 4.25/5



Note: Previously I played and beat the game when it was using Adobe Air. I was highly critical of it to my own degree. But now that it works with the new engine, is fast and beautiful and better than before.
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Post edited August 21, 2016 by rtcvb32
low rated
Pixeljunk Shooter

A signal from a planet being drilled into requires rescue of workers.

Graphics: Simple, clean, Flash-ish graphics that look like it's calculated rather than sprites. Environments are well done, different colors and textures signalling what's the foreground, background, what can be interacted with, and what enemies are.It almost has a Cell shaded and cartoon style, although I'd wager it's not using a 3D engine.

Audio/Music: Sounds are good, simple and clean. Music has a tepid jazz elevator sound, while at the same time with an undertone of horror, like things are about to turn incredibly bad.

Mechanics: Controller recommended, works with 360 and PS2 controllers. Fly around, shoot loose rock to get through tight spots, collect diamonds as well as crew who are stranded and waiting for help. Most of the time they will survive either in a special bubble to protect them (in lava or the like) or waiting patiently in their yellow suits while waving.

The game has a semi 3D feel, like there's 2-3 blocks deep. This lets the physics work, where collecting or shooting lava/water doesn't collect 1 for 1. Still environmental challenges include lava, ice, water, explosive gas, and a magnetic oil. In most of the game you need to not get injured too much, or get too hot. As such there's no health, just how cool you're kept. Some suits will change how your ship acts. Shooting water, or lava, or inverting hot is cold and cold is hot.

Story: The story is unfolded when you collect the crew waving flags. There are something like 20 or 30 of them, how the tremors started as they were drilling, and things going from bad to worse. The writing is okay,

Coop play: Playing co-op requiring either two controllers or one with keyboard/mouse is sorta like follow the leader. Best if you both are discovering it at the same time. Although the entire game can be beaten with one player, I seem to recall an additional boss avaliable only with a second player. But this was a long time ago.

Annoyances: PixelJunk Shooter 2 isn't on GoG :(

graphics: 4/5
sound/music: 4/5
Story: 3/5
Mechanics: 4/5

total: 15/20, 7.5/10, 3.75/5
low rated
Ring Runner: Flight of the sages

I must admit, in my youth back in the early 90's I played a little game called Operation: Inner Space. This game was fun, simple, and kept me occupied for dozens of hours with races, fights, upgrading, and tons of little things before the actual basic quest came to mind. Capturing icons for currency, shooting fire your enemies as a dolphin. Ahh sweet memories.

You have to understand that since it makes me automatically biased to Ring Runner. The moment I started playing, I realized although the game was unrelated, it felt like a continuation, a sequel by a different author, but with more love put into it. Mind you Inner Space had to deal with 100Mhz machines or so, and programming languages with C++ was in it's infancy so there's quite a limit the game could have had.

For the first six months I couldn't play the game, and not due to issues with hardware or software, it was my head. While the controls of Inner Space was arrow keys, control, shift, z... Ring runner had me using a completely different hand to move the ship around, and aiming with the mouse. This (much like inverting view controls) had me quit the game in defeat. Later however when I got my hands on a little wireless receiver letting me use our 360 controllers, I got to play the game again. And... the different hand configuration was familiar enough (yet not the keyboard) that I could play it. And twenty hours later still loved the game. Although not big on online play, so I'll cover as much of this as I can stand to.

So in short if you enjoy space games with Newtonian physics, ships highly customizable, space battles, and very humorous stories, this game is for you. If not... I'd give it a try anyways. You might just be surprised.

It's a 2.5D game. Everything is made in 3D however you work in a 2D plane. While you may crash into rocks, debris, buildings, and others, your friendly ships will never stack up so much you will hurt each other. You won't have friendly fire so fire away!

The first introduction levels (escaping an exploding space station, avoiding a mine field, as well as fighting tons of prospectors), you'll know within this frame of time not only how to basically play, but if the game is for you. However it's not always so upbeat, there's quite a few levels that are slow and lazy, taking your time is all you can do (especially if you want to get the extra bonus objectives). I better save some of this for the mechanics.

Graphics: While the ships look superb, and the firefight is good and splashy and has lots of flare, the real beauty is the background. Randomly generated space with planets, stars, gas clouds, asteroids, all moving on it's own way in the background. If I could disable all foreground activity and just capture several random backgrounds and make them desktop images, I would...

Music: Playfully upbeat, slow low jazz, semi-errorishly confusing title screen, it's all good. Although all the soundtracks I'd listen to outside of playing the game, it's still enjoyable, and diverse enough you shouldn't hear the same two longs too close back to back with eachother.

Sound effects: The characters talking is a combination beeps, blips, typing, or other simple repeated patterns based on who it is. Nero your hud is fast and squeaky, while others will quickly become obvious, including you who's unique voice it is, all without uttering a syllable. Anyways, all the sound effects are good that I can recall.

Story/Plot: Wake up with no memory on a space station, escape, get caught and become a slave. Leaving slavery to eventually track down a sage who might be in a dozen of possible locations throughout the universe, with Hapty and your Anchor drive to take you there. There's a lot of humorous writing, from the unshaven miners, to turrets being kept as pets, to going on missions to sell Dvorak keyboards. There's also tons I mean TONS of hidden humor in flavor text of items you buy. I recommend reading most of them, of how more guns were effectively duct taped to make the 6 barrel rifle, to the regulations of having a backup energy drive, to the accuracy of some groups who would shoot at a Guy with an apple on his head and eventually hit the apple some 30 minutes after starting due to random spread shot. Believe me I'm scratching the surface :)

There's a lot of missions. Hunting, survival, chasing, being chased, stealth, arena, avoiding detection, manning a cruiser, racing, or just talking with someone. There's a lot of variety and it will keep from being boring with the constantly changing objective.

The entire game is based on a book that's written, although I haven't had a chance to read it yet. :(

Mechanics: It's not a twinstick shooter. Rather you turn left/right, and have a trust to go in the direction you want. Newtonian physics means if you drop using your engines you'll keep drifting for a very long time with no friction in space. Regardless you'll quickly find if you're more the runner and gunner, the stealthy rogue marking your enemies, the turret and trap layer, the caster, or the grappler tossing trash at everyone. You could even have a duo ship where you and a friend can fly the ship together (the only co-op option in the game, although your friend only controls a second set of guns and reserves while one of you actually flies the ship).

Once you buy ships and parts (or acquire them from play), you can customize. You'll have a number of slots ranging from 1 to about 8. Some things can be added on til they are full, some are primary and some are unique. You'll understand what I mean. Each part will generally give you some bonus, either to your shields, hull, energy, or give you weapons, more ammo, or unique abilities (like refilling your ammo for a fee in spare energy). But that can take a while to customize and optimize based on play style, often the preset they give you will do fine for a while.

Controller support: good. So there's that. While a PS2 controller or other will just give you numbers for what button, the 360 and some other controllers will actually tell you the name of the button and type.

Tutorial levels: Really good. Although the whole first several hours is a tutorial, giving you a chance and forcing you to play each archetype with missions that match it.

Graphics: 5/5
Music/audio: 5/5
Story/plot: 8/10
Mechanics: 5/5

Total: 23/25, 9.2/10, 4.6/5
Attachments:
Post edited August 17, 2016 by rtcvb32
Nox

I originally tried this game out with curiosity, and I can't say it's all that good. In short it's a Diablo-esk clone, wearing it's inspiration on it's sleeve. While Diablo was dredging down into the horrors deeper in the cave systems, in Nox you are on a more RPGish adventure.

With my experience with the game, the resolution higher than it's default 640x480 doesn't offer much of an improvement for play; The early 90's CGI is a fun reminder of just how old the game is, with a large amount of humor thrown in for good measure.

I got pretty far in the game (originally), probably 3/4ths of the way and found the game ultimately lacking where I quit. Perhaps most annoying is each time you die, you're taunted for not getting past the tutorial level, or getting the book, or saving the village, or any number of other events that you were currently working on.

So first there's 3 classes. Fighter/Warrior, Hybrid/Conjurer, and Mage/Wizard. Because the offsetting of fighting moving enemies the fighter/warrior is probably the least useful class (although I probably won't play through it entirely to know for sure). The Mage/Wizard class has potential with strong spells (magic missile, fireball, lightning, shield, etc), but you run out of mana fast. So ultimately probably the best is the Conjurer class, which lets you summon creatures to fight for you, as well as being the middle balanced class.

Although you're heavily limited by how much you can cast due to mana and very much like Diablo in this way, there's quite a few mana crystals set up everywhere to do quick recharging. The crystals recharge fairly quickly too, so 1-2 crystals will almost always fill you right back up.

Graphics: It's late 90's graphics, and might even give Diablo a run for it's money (although Diablo 2 is still slightly better). Lighting is pretty good with shadows and the like based on where you can see, and windows letting you peek through to other rooms. Overall it's decently polished.

Audio/Voice Acting: The Twack of your staff will become the most heard sound you, and it's a bit annoying. Other sound effects are well enough. Voice acting is fairly competent, not flat lines read off a paper so there's that much at least. Mostly shop keepers and Aldwyn's dialogs are what you'll be hearing, although some town folk telling you of the rising undead or other threats that are going on.

Music: Lite Instrumental, more what you'd expect to hear by a couple musicians playing in a D&D inn to earn a few coins. Unlike Torchlight it doesn't have the eerie and very tone setting Diablo music. Still it's not a 30 second repeating loop of the same annoying song either. Mostly it's unmemorable.

Gameplay/Mechanics: Mouse and keyboard. Mouse is left click is attack, and rightclick will move you. You've got to place your hand in the wasd location, but not for movement. A-G are keys for your hotkey spells, and Z-C are your quick healing slots. (Antidote for poison, health, and mana). While used to the Diablo way of doing things, you'll soon have 2-3 keys on common spells or actions to keep you occupied and running from crystal to crystal to refill mana so that's not really an issue.

Melee combat: sucks. Straight up. You have to get almost on top of them, and if they are a cowardly type running away, you'll be lucky to hit them. Curiously no one cares if you destroy their barrels.

Ranged Combat: Iffy at best. Unless you have an autolock or a computer AI, your hits will miss 3/4 times as you won't have precise enough shots to hit. This includes arrows, fireball spells, charged staffs, etc. Magic Missile or other assisted aiming with ranged works great and almost never misses as they circle around the enemy until they hit (or hit a wall).

Magic: Magic Missile, and Fireball and all spells seem to work well enough. Generally you just need to get near the enemy and the magic will probably be good enough. If you run out of mana you'll fully cast the spell but it will fail. Thankfully you don't have to stop moving to cast so it's very much encouraging to use Circle Strafing.

When you get more than one copy of a magic spell, you upgrade it much like Diablo 1, giving you spells up to level 3?.

Traps: These aren't explained at all. You can cast 3 spells into a wizard's trap, pressing T, however you drag the spells into 1 of 3 trap configurations. Can't do the same spell more than once per trap, so no super duper 9 magic missile attacks.

Conjuring: You don't actually summon monsters, rather you charm monsters based from your known monsters list. You do have a default fireflies spell which will rush out after enemies (one time use). Perhaps the annoying thing with summons is if you have enough of them and have to step on these little elevators (blocks just large enough to stand on) then a number of your minions won't follow you and it's a pain to get them to follow.

Story/Quests: The story of trying to prevent the world of Nox from being overtaken is the main quest. Go here, get this, kill these, etc. Side quests will include removing urchins, thieves, an ogre tribe, etc. The quests and story is actually fairly well written and fleshed out, I just wish it wasn't attached to this game.

Depending on which class you play the game actually has introduction chapters, or potentially entirely different quests.

Annoyances: A number of annoyances beyond ranged and melee combat come forward. Magic spells getting interrupted, the fact you can only have a stack of 9 items total (so get 9 apples? Can't pick up more. Although you'll automatically eat food if your health is less than full). Inventory doesn't appear to have any form of sorting so there's that. Being taunted each time you die.

Note: 8/28/2016, beat it. Annoying...
Attachments:
nox.jpg (96 Kb)
nox_death.jpg (143 Kb)
Post edited August 29, 2016 by rtcvb32
Witcher 3

There may not be enough time in my life to properly appreciate what this game is. I may be in the 'honeymoon' phase of this game, but it is quite astounding nonetheless. The gameplay, the writing, the character interaction, the dialogue, it's all quite remarkable. To me it's absolutely everything the first Witcher game was trying to be. A lot of fun. That's saying a lot coming from a heartless cynic like myself.
low rated
Alien/Zombie Shooter 1

To note, Zombie Shooter 1&2 and Alien Shooter 1&2 are made by the same devs, Sigma Team. Zombie Shooter 1 and Alien Shooter 1 use the same engine (Effectively). Same mechanics, same characters, upgrades, weapons, etc, the theme is just slightly different. If you've played one, you've played the other.

For both games I had issues getting it to display correctly, although setting Alien Shooter to 16bit graphics seemed to fix it so everything wasn't invisible. This however didn't seem to matter with Zombie Shooter so much.

ZA Shooter 1 plays like a twin-stick shooter, except I don't see an option to use a gamepad. Mouse is used for pointing and even movement, left click is attack, right click is move. You can also use WASD for movement. However movement is floaty (and worse when using the mouse), you'll often get stuck behind stuff, in hidden wall rooms, desks, etc. The numbers 1-9 are for different weapons, 1 being your starting pistols (infinite ammo).

Levels are laid out. Generally the objective is 'kill everything' or 'get to checkpoint'. Although setting explosives you find on the level is sometimes needed, generally to stop spawn points.

The game isn't programmed with the ability to go forward/back, or even leave the level. Pressing the spacebar will respawn you, or move you to the next level. Between levels you can buy/upgrade/restock.

The AI aren't very smart. They often get stuck on corners of walls similar to you and can't navigate well if it's not in a straight line.

The story I couldn't tell you how it is, since I keep not noticing or reading it when going from level to level, since it's in brief little blocks.

The music is limited to only a few tracks, a semi-metal heavy beat and something more somber for the title screen.

Graphically the game looks like a mid 90's DOS game. Although it's a bit similar to Postal in that regard (which I haven't played hardly any of).

In short the game is sub-par. Good for some mindless fun but don't take the games very seriously.
Attachments:
az_level.jpg (378 Kb)
Post edited September 02, 2016 by rtcvb32