Space Colony HD

This is a curious title. I recall seeing TotalBiscuit talking a bit about this game. Although i must say it doesn't really look like the game for me. Feels too much like The Sims and busy work. The 'keep all your bars in the yellow or above' type of game.

To note i haven't beaten nor gotten very far, so a full assessment this won't be, nor will it have a score.

Graphics: Sufficient. It looks very late 90's, maybe early 2000's. While everything is pre-generated 3D models, they are probably sprites and that does just fine. Although a minor gripe is the videos seem to be playing in a tiny window vs full screen or some other zoomed option depending on my resolution.

Music: A semi-upbeat snazzy pop or soundbeat that you'd hear for some short sound loops, nothing too annoying and sounds old. We're talking the early 90's soundfonts that are primarily sine, square and sawtooth waves. Almost the integrated built-in soundfonts with most MIDI hardware that you'd hear with DOOM or the like (although not metal)

Audio: Sufficient. Sorta minimal. Something happens, effect. There's more music and background chatter.

Voice Acting: Sounds old, but at the same time they sound like they were adlibing or just having fun with their characters. Although Stig sounds a little stiff, getting the impression English isn't his first language (which might be true).

Truthfully though the humor seems to be the star of the show here. During conversations you'll overhear silly conversations, be it Tami saying she dreamed she was in a bikini contest (and got a prize for a saggy ass), or the boss openly calling one of them a total moron.

Mechanics: Being basically a management game not too unlike The Sims, you give each character orders. Although how long they are working and not working depends on the schedule. Unlike say Starcraft though, everything is pretty much done with the left mouse button (while the right-mouse button unselects options and cancels out). A number of items they will do automatically (sleep, eat, dance) during their time off.

Annoyances: Movie plays at half size (for some reason). The UI under skills has no helpful tooltip information and only gives you 'this has 2 stars in it' info rather than what the skill does. The game feels like it moves too slow and if you go fast-forward it goes too fast.


Final Thoughts: I really don't know everything that's in here, if there's more mechanics or characters or more interesting things to do; I just can't get myself into it more. While it looks like a cute game, I'm going to have to just shelf this for now. Maybe when i go senile I'll enjoy it more :P

Unmechanical

Fly, pick up, drop off in a 2.5D world. How complex can this game be?

I played and beat this game a couple years ago; playing it again not only for this review, but there was new content added. Although the game feels more like a Demo for the Unreal4 engine, and less about being a game.

Graphics: Outright this game is GORGEOUS! Beautiful! Almost breath taking. From going underwater, to seeing a heart beating in the background, to just how the entire world silently tells a quiet story. Crystals, bulbs, underwater plants, machines and gears working in the background.

Music: The game varies in a number of musical styles. It reminds me a bit of Tron, and of Portal as well. Although sometimes the music is less coherent and more broody background noise. My favorite is mid traveling when the beat really picks up, and the music box music after the light puzzles.

Audio: Explosions, the sound of metal on metal, water splashing, lasers, and a laughing mechanical asshole who taunts you the whole game. Yeah... Not too much here but what is here sounds right.

Story: You get caught seemingly by accident. Navigate the world to escape. Wordless, plenty enough is said in the atmosphere. However it isn't deep enough to really get into, other than to hate one specific janitorial robot. To note, there are 2 endings for both the game and the extended DLC. Although neither goes into too much detail.

Mechanics: Pick things up, drop them and float around. Interacting with your environment in a very physics-y way. Your mechanics are minimum, but the physics of the world are decent enough.

Other than physics, there are plenty of puzzles that get more complex, with no instruction on how to solve them it doesn't take too long to figure them out.

Length: About 2 hours to beat.

Annoyances: A couple of the puzzles glitched and i couldn't quite solve on my own for the extended DLC, i have no idea why they wouldn't solve correctly, or acted off.

Also it doesn't have controller support, and the UI requires you to use a mouse to hit new-game or continue. Otherwise it's pretty much a keyboard-only game.

Final Thoughts: While a great game, it's hardly the most exciting game. For a first time play-through, it's awesome. Even replaying it later there's a lot of details i noticed the second time around. If the visuals had been less stunning the game would have probably gotten boring.

Graphics: 5/5
Music: 5/5
Audio: 4/5
Mechanics: 3/5
Annoyances: -1
Total: 16/20, 8/10, 4/5

Space Pirates And Zombies

This game first got on my radar back when TotalBiscuit was talking about how he did some voice acting for it, namely as the narrator for the main story portions.

As a first play-through i remember thoroughly enjoying going from section to section and getting into fights, and depending on the situation in a much higher leveled area where you can't compete my role went from aggressor, to being a vulture and cannibalizing battles between the civilians and UTA to get Rez, experience and blueprints until i was strong enough to actually compete.

Alas, after 20 hours i got to the point i had my fill and concentrated purely on furthering the story and beating the game. The three acts of the game each have their own charm. The first being the tutorial, the second being before the inner levels, and the final after you get to the center and have to beat the big bad.

Graphics: Static sprites that rotate, special effects, and blinking lights, rotating turrets. As for the backgrounds, while not as spectacular as Ring Runner, it does take a close second; Although there's enough playful tidbits here and there to make up for it.

Music: Very little of actual music, more atmospheric background noise, string instruments giving an eerie sound that goes in line with horror games.

Audio: Explosions... pew pew. Shumpth of cloak and shields powering up and down; Yeah... all the sounds are distinct and sufficient for their needs.

Voice Acting: TotalBiscuit isn't the only voice actor, as there's random background chatter via the radio. Self-destruction of ships, looking for gas or stripping jobs, and the misc random tidbits that are thrown out over and over every ten minutes or so. Although maybe the screams of ejected goons, sounds hilarious and running into them before they actually are dead.

Mechanics: There's only a few major mechanics. Selecting your ships and building them, fighting and major story elements/missions.

The hanger: You will take your various hangers and build ships, from tiny to huge. Although early on you'll have few if any ships to work with. Which is a major limitation in your ability to act, mods can give you more hangers and larger ones though.

Space Fighting: WASD to move the ship based on the direction it's facing. So if you are facing left and press W, you will move down. Based on your ship layout you can shoot lasers, missiles, crew (who are injected into other ships), bombs, mines and other assorted options. In a fight you have to beat their shields (or cloak), then their hull strength which is protected somewhat by their armor. Lastly if they have a lot of crew, the crew can be repairing the ship, sometimes as fast as you can damage it.

Since you have more than one ship, you can only pilot one at a time, however in the tactical window you can specify multiple ships to take specific targets, or swap between ships.

Since there's stealth, bombs, drones, lasers, and large ships for hauling Rez, there's a number of play styles, although fighting is going to be unavoidable at some point.

Missions: You can accept missions from any particular sector, but if you leave before the missions is done then you don't get to keep it's progress (Although you keep Rez, goons, and experience you gained). The missions generally will benefit either the civilians or the UTA, however some missions are random events, like an asteroid passing through, or a traffic jam, or needing to remove mining equipment from very fragile asteroids.

Main story missions will progress forward and you will get an indicator where and what your next main missions is, letting you get past the limitations of tech.

Story/Writing: The story is somewhere between epic universe destroying, and a slice of life with most of the main crew you start with just trying to get through and make a name for themselves or get a paycheck. Certainly there's plenty of humorous missions and sections, from harvesting 'meat' for Good Burger, to a spam AI who makes it it's mission to come after you.

Final thoughts: It's a really good game, although a hair slow, grindy and a little too useless on ships early on; The BigFightForBeef mod makes the game faster and more arcadey, and my preferred way to play.

Expect a good 20-40 hours of gameplay depending on how risk taking you are and how much you have to grind for rez or set the universe up. Some have logged hundreds of hours, which you can certainly do. Mods extend the lifetime via new playthroughs with slightly different styles of play, making larger forces and more upgrade options that aren't in the original game.

Graphics: 8/10
Music: 3/5
Audio: 3/5
VoiceActing: 3/5
Mechanics: 4/5
Story/writing: 4/5
Total: 25/35, 7.1/10, 3.5/5

Tyrian

There is just something innately awesome about this title. The shareware copy had only the first episode, but you could replay the episodes over and over again with higher and more powerful loot taking on greater challenges. Graphically, sound, music, everything felt like an arcade machine (and even the demo has 'insert coin').

As a teen playing the shareware and getting snippets of little cheatcodes to enter, you can unlock various other modes. Using a carrot ship that shot bananas, flying a tiny u fighter. Playing the arcade and getting the power of your front weapon up to the max level simply by collecting the various little upgrades as you went, eventually getting an overpowering beam weapon that killed everything on screen.

Well. You had to be there.

Graphics: Great, while not high definition, it doesn't have to be. Paralax scrolling, different enemies, clouds, asteroids, ships... just so many things so perfectly done.

Music: The music is great, it really is. Actually one of the options is there's a side program you can run or mode you can run in to just play music and it will double as a screen saver traveling through not exactly a star field, but making patterns that were interesting to fly through and could mesmerize you for a while while you were listening.

Audio/VO: Very little voice acting. 'Data acquired' 'enemy approaching' 'spikes ahead' being most of them. As with most other games, the sound is quite sufficient.

Mechanics: As a vertical shooter, well you fly and you shoot. But there's a bit more than that. If you aren't playing the arcade mode, you can purchase and sell upgrades for your ship. The generator, the side weapons, front and back gun, and finally shields. Some weapons are insanely powerful (like atomic missiles) and others are fairly weak but good to get a start on (single shooters). But price is an issue. Not only price but location, as each location may or may not have weapons of your preference.

Generally you can shoot and fire with the space (or left mouse button) and fire your side attachments with Control/Alt (or right mouse button).

There are pickups from time to time, including money, data cubes, secret level offshoots, and even weapon upgrades that are rare.

You have a shield and hull separate. Your weapons and shield are both powered by your generator, so you might have to decide not to shoot for a while so your shields can come back up. Should your get hurt really bad, a little helper ship will drop off a repair pickup to improve your hull, but this is like every 20 seconds, in case you miss one, or need more.

Story/Writing: The writing is a unique element in this game, as you will mostly see it in the data cubes. A good portion of it is comedy. Honestly I don't recall most of it, but I remember it being very good, and very funny. However only the first 3 episodes were enjoyable, the 4th went off the wall and made no sense to me. This was when I played it a while back.

There's also a ton of secrets.

Graphics: 4/5
Music: 5/5
Audio/VO: 3/5
Mechanics: 3/5
Writing: 4/5
Total: 19/25, 7.6/10, 3.8/5

Fairy Fencer F Advent Dark Force

Playing this quickly makes me realize what it reminds me of, as well as what it plays like. If you've played Hyper Dimentional Neptunia, you've played this. It feels like the engine was recycled and art assets and story was revamped. Probably the same voice actors were reused as well.

To note I've only played about 8 hours.

Graphics: Looks really really good. Especially character portraits that use 3D models but are shaded to look like it was hand drawn. If you weren't sure what you were looking for you wouldn't notice it, except that they move, although not fluidly between positions. Even the mouths moving while they are talking adds a bit to the look and feel. (Although it could be well done sprites as angles don't really change if at all)

Comparing to Neptunia, it is an upgrade, but doesn't lose it's charm trying for realism, rather adds more atmosphere and polish. Although there are some still scenes where it's manipulated by stretching to appear as though it's moving although it's obviously unnatural.

As for clothes/Costumes it isn't as jarring as originally playing Neptunia, and feels far more natural and practical (most of the time).

The graphical quality also reminds me of Eternal Sonata. So there's that.

Music: Thinking about it, i didn't really notice it. Meaning it blended well enough with the game. Loop patterns that aren't enough to annoy, changing as appropriate between scenes. Hmmm.. Pretty good.

Audio/Voice Acting: Hash, slash, bullet sounds... yeah I'm going to start joining these two together.

The voice acting is more than sufficient. While most characters have enough heart and voice acting put in, there's one or two that sound... well not sure. One that sounds like Joey (might be the same voice actor) and the girls sound very very familiar to other games or anime. But thankfully they don't sound like they are reading from a page or sounding bored. Enough effort is put in that they each have their own personality that is distinct.

Game Mechanics: Quite a few. First the game is turn based. Like Neptunia, you will move into position, angle yourself and then activate an attack, skill or magic of some kind. During your game you will upgrade or get improvements that let you do more attacks.

There's a tension/spirit meter, when it's high enough you can transform, allowing you higher attack and damage, but also unlocks special attacks you can only do while transformed. If your meter drops under a certain level you'll lose your benefit, but otherwise you aren't limited X number of rounds like in some games.

Before getting into a fight if you swing at the enemy you can get an advantage of going first, while if they get on you they will ambush you.

There's a crafting system, at the store they will allow you to synthesize/fuse items, although I've yet to need to do it, which is the usual 'give x & y and get z'. Although if you do synthesize something it will go on sale at the store, so there's a bonus.

What's new is word changing, where you take swords with fairies in them and alter the landscape, which means those swords add effects to a dungeon. Making them harder but you gaining more experience, or changing the monsters out entirely so you can finish quests that require you to take out X number of giants that only appear in the alternate field.

Quests are given/rewarded at the pub. Pretty simple there.

Story: The Vile god and Goddess fought, him to destroy the world and her to save it. They ended up both going into a sleep and are sealed by dozens of fairy weapons. You're ultimate goal is to release one of the two gods.

As for Fang, he just wants to eat and sleep. Shoulda let him stay in prison. Very much the reluctant hero only doing it because he's being pushed to.

Writing: More or less heavy on the humor. Still it's good. However when it gets heavy on conversion it turns into a Visual Novel. Thankfully the auto is at a good pace, and the scenes are fairly short, 2-3 minutes.

Annoyances: For item gathering quests where you could complete them because you already have the items, i wish you didn't have to 'accept' them, and then go and get the reward as a separate screen, a single button for 'accept and get reward' would have been better.

Graphics options don't allow me to turn off features i don't want, which is annoying, or see what all it's using so i can get a fully smooth experience.

The battles seem to take longer than they should. Maybe I'm just getting older, but i wish it had a turbo mode where they'd move and just lump all the damage/hits/other into a single 'punch' or something so i could go through it faster. As well as turn off the transformation sequence that lasts like 5 seconds each time you do it.

Also when the controller gets unplugged (or batteries run out) the game no longer recognizes it, so you have to restart with it working to work again.

Graphics: 5/5
Music: 4/5
Audio/VO: 4/5
Mechanics: 3/5
Story: 3/5
Annoyances: -1

Total: 18/25, 7.2/10, 3.6/5

RAYMAN RAVING RABBIDS

Bought this on one of the more recent sales and... although it looks cute, and it looks it's age, I gave it some tries but was ultimately unhappy with it. Were this steam I'd request a refund within the 2 hour mark.

So what is it? It's a collection of mini-games, from carry the bomb, to a dance off, to throw the cow... yes those are all games... honestly if it wasn't so annoying I wouldn't be against the game, but the controls are different from each and every mini-game, often N64 'spin the stick as fast as you can' type of gameplay. But it's not really very fun to fight with the controls to try and get it to actually work.

The only game I actually enjoyed was the short rhythm game, which was hitting the left/right mouse buttons or the left/right bumpers at the appropriate times.


In the end this game is more or less shovelware. NOT recommended for anyone. Get Ring Runner, SPAZ or something else, you'll get a lot more fun for your money.

SpellForce - Platinum

A mixed hybrid RTS and RPG game where you alternate between working in a small party in a D&D style (think Balder's Gate) and base-building.

My experience trying to play this (twice) is chipped away by the somewhat annoying experience of sudden spikes in difficulty that isn't necessarily hard but requires a lot of overhead and grinding to get the job done. For this I'm pretty much referring to the single player campaign. Add to that the game doesn't limit the AI to have to gather resources but rather are simply spawned into existence and the more spawn points the more enemies at a constant supply.. Ugg, plenty enough of pet peeves.

Graphics: Zoomed out the game looks fairly decent, even zoomed in it looks about the same for the time (although a bit better). Think sorta along the lines of NWN where the models are less detailed than they could be, but are sufficient. Then again when you consider when this came out most games had 1 Gig or less of memory, and a 2 Ghz , and commanding an army of high polygon characters would have been more of a drain.

Audio/Voice Acting: While the audio is decent enough, the voice acting is stale and sounds SO much like they are just reading it off a script. If it improves later i couldn't tell you because i reached my limit with the game.

Music: Awesome music, theatrical and flowing, probably good for a little motivational boost. (Alas the music screws up any time you switch windows, so...)

Gameplay/Mechanics: More or less a typical RTS. Place buildings, get access to more types of units,some types of upgrades, etc etc. One halfway nice thing is the shrines is where you summon your units at, and you can just cycle through the shrines to tell them how many you want to build (up to 7 queued).

A unique feature is you have workers separate from your military units. So you might have 30 units gathering food and wood and iron ore, and then you'd have 30-40 units of fighting and defending units. Unlike say Starcraft that pools them both into the same max units for that race. Another unique feature is the workers don't cost anything (but time to summon). You also can assign workers to a specific building, so 5 can be woodcutters, which are a little more efficient in that way. Although if you run out of wood to cut in the area they will just stand around or keep going further into enemy territory and get hunted down.

Annoyances: Plenty enough here.

First is your units don't necessarily follow your orders. Multiple times I tell a unit to go stick with the group, then they will just wander off and end up fighting a bunch of units alone (although they were given to me rather than made so not sure what to think there).

The 'attack on the move' is screwed up. They will only seemingly attack if they are attacked, and then it messes up their next/final destination and you have to re-issue it.

If you leave the area and come back, any structures you had made, resources gathered, units built, yeah they are all gone. Just poofed into thin air. Just a bit annoying. This also includes the Fog of War and your unit grouping.

The grindy nature of some of the levels (even early on) are annoying. Even swapping out to only the best new units I had avaliable I still had issues and ended up only getting through them by building TONS of guard towers which helped keep the constant never-ending tide of enemies at bay while sending workers to deal with their guard towers and then waiting until mine re-spawned before i could sufficiently advance past a chokepoint.

Actions you can tell your characters to do isn't obvious or explained anywhere that I saw (although might be in the manual). So while you're told the letter K will KILL your unit (should you want to summon something else), you aren't told H is to HOLD the unit in place (which I just guessed at), which would have been nice early on for telling archers to stay by the towers and not wandering off or chasing after units.

The destination marker for new units doesn't apply to workers, they huddle around the shrine until ordered to do something.

No importing/exporting a character; This may sound silly, but if I end up replaying the game at a later time I'd like to keep my progress (level, money, items, etc) from previously and just have an easier time going through some of the levels. Being forced to start over again from scratch is a little annoying.

Final thoughts: If you can muster through some of the annoyances and have patience, this might be for you. If not you'll probably just get annoyed partway in like me. For RTS and RPG they are both a little lower quality then their separate genre counterparts, and I'd say not a good introduction into either one.

Graphics: 3/5
Audio/Voice Acting: 2/5
Music: 4/5
Gameplay/Mechanics: 2.5/5
Annoyances: -2

Total: 9.5/20, 4.7/10, 2.3/5

Nier Automata

The first game in a while that i feel i can play more than 30 minutes at a time and actually enjoy. No wonder that it happens to be Platinum games, who made Bayonetta.

The game starts far in the future where androids are in a war with the machines. For centuries the war has gone on, while the few surviving humans live on the moon. Your job as 2B is to try and finish the war so humans can come back to earth.

The game takes on several interesting gameplay styles, from hacking which is a two-stick shooter, to a vertical shooter when you're piloting a ship, some top down fighting, as well as full 3D Castlevania-like exploring. Although it's far more RPG than Castlevania, including side missions you can do, and has 26 endings (many which are joke endings, like 9S's curiosity getting the best of him if you leave an area the wrong way)

Graphics: Beautiful & well done. A lot of the actions and movements remind me somewhere between FF13 and Bayonetta work, which is no surprise based on who made it. Looks plenty high quality for me, although i had issues trying to go Full Screen. Slight annoyance there.

Music: Gorgeous. Several tracks remind me a lot of Ghost in the Shell. Most of the music is full orchestra (or sounds like it), from relaxed in town music to the shrill loneliness and energetic music in the desert. Most if not all the music has 8-bit versions of the tracks for when you're hacking.

Audio/VoiceActing: All the sounds seemed appropriate, from crumbling rocks and explosions to the sound of swords swinging. Etc. The voice acting good for English. While a slight lip-sync issues (none at all in the open world, and some during cutscenes) it otherwise was good. I don't recall anyone with a bland 'reading from a page' result.

Writing: I can't recall any parts that seemed particularly off with the writing. Events that happen make sense and have a timeline they go with. The writing, including the conversations that happen while you are going from point A to point B with Pod 042 and 151 jabbering and forwarding information from the bunker is nice in it's own way. There's a good bit of humor, and some sad things that happen along the way.

Mechanics: With at some point, 3 playable characters, each character plays a little differently with a few quirks but otherwise play the same (other than 9S's hacking skills).

One thing you'll be doing is putting chips in which augment and enhance the character, from adding more weapon damage to showing you a mini-map, to auto-healing, the ram/space can be adjusted (and expanded). You can also have 3 different configurations, which might make sense if you wanted a purely battle oriented, hacking oriented, or map exploring balanced sets.

You can fuse chips and upgrade weapons and pods if you have the materials. Level 4 is the max for weapons, and 6 seems to be the max for chips.

The pod does only range based attacks, although the mini-gun and the laser are the starting default actions it can do, while the characters are more or less closer to melee range attacks (although they can throw their weapons and have them return).

Also early in the game death has a penalty without being all-ending (which changes later). Finding your body you can recover experience and materials you lost.

With hacking mini-games, if you sneak up on an enemy and hack them, you can take them over (9S only).

Speaking of Bayonetta, the dodge mechanic acts a lot like in Bayonetta, especially when you add a chip for getting a world slowdown after a perfect dodge. So there's that.

Annoyances: Had issues with the game crashing til i found a workaround which seems to work. Related to CPU hyper-threading?? Also one scene didn't finish right when hacking was used.

Game Length: Assuming you don't really do much of the side quests, here's the approximate length. I have about 40 hours in, and i'm done with the game at this point.
Ending A: 8hrs
Ending B: 12hrs
Ending C/D: 15-18hrs

Appreciations: NG+ (after getting ending C/D ending). More games need this.

Graphics: 5
Music: 5
Audio/Vo: 5
Writing: 5
Mechanics: 5
A&A: 0

Total: Rare to get a perfect score (or close enough to). But this one has in my mind. 5/5

Final Thoughts: Highly recommended. If you love RPG, Hack & Slash, or Arena Brawling, you'll love this game.

Diablo 3 (console XBox 360)

Honestly Diablo 2 in many ways was far better, including that since it was hackable mods added a lot of value and different play styles to the game that couldn't have been there before, which I loved Zy-El more than any other mod or even the vanilla game.

This is a game I never expected to play. And honestly got it for a couple reasons. First it's console and offline, second it allows Co-op play. And lastly, because it was second hand it was cheap (that and I don't want to give any money to blizzard at the moment).

While I've only played the Witch Doctor to level 60, it's more than enough to get a good feel of the game and it's mechanics, just not all the classes. So we'll go over it.

Graphics: Other than being a fixed perspective and you can't really much zoom in or out, graphically it's well done. Be it the gore on the walls, or be it the little details. Although there's less beauty and more blood than one might like.

Music: I wouldn't say the music was the classical Diablo/Diablo 2 that has it's own feeling, that is creepy and beautiful at the same time. Torchlight 1&2 do a better job. Still the music and atmosphere is high enough quality and theatrical... although I can't recall a single soundtrack that stands out, unlike in the first two games.

Voice Acting: Cain doesn't sound like he wanted to be there, but the rest of the voice actors did an awesome job. Especially Covetous Shen, who I think is actually Poe's father (Kung Fu Panda). By far him and the scoundrel are my favorites.

See that thing over there? Let's kill it! - Scoundrel

Mechanics: One stick shooter more or less, the right thumbstick is for dodging but I never used it, too confusing for what I'm used to. A number of the buttons can be assigned a skill at some point after you level. While each button is locked to a particular skill set you can unlock any button to be assigned to almost anything.

You have skills, and then you have runes, which you can think of as modifiers. For summoning zombies, you could modify them so they do poison, or they leave behind health orbs on death, or that they burn, etc.

While not every class has mana, it may as well be, as it's the same, be it ki, mana, rage, or whatever method they called them for the different classes.

The blacksmith can break down magical weapons (regular ones he won't touch) to ingredients. If he has the knowledge of the item you want to make (which you train him up), and you have the ingredients and the money (1000g+ usually) then you can make the weapon. Generally they have a couple fixed stats and multiple random ones, so it's more or less just gambling.

Jewel upgrading and weapon crafting goes to level 10 I am pretty sure. For as much as you are paying them, it doesn't feel like you get much much in return.

Gameplay: Very linear gameplay with a few side quests you can take. Feels more akin to the original Diablo with randomized quests, as such a different difficulty setting and different play-through some quests will be avaliable that weren't there before. Although quite often there's quests that only ever came up the first time too.

The different companions can be equipped, but cycling through them is a pain, and they only can get a special item (to their custom class), weapon, and a couple rings and amulet. That's it.

Also the maps are not very random. Some in-between maps might be random, but if there's any quest data or the like, or special events, you can be sure it's a fixed map.

Also several times in the game it adds waves of enemies coming forward. Be it spiders from the ceiling you can't see, or the ledges where skeletons are climbing in through the window. I can't say i care for wave-based combat.

Storyline: Fairly decent as things go, I can't say Diablo 1 or 2 were much better. But it gets annoying with Azmodath monologues of how you're pathetic and going to die, and he will be the prime evil. etc etc. One good plot twist pushing to the 4th act, but the last act felt pointless with the new Diablo look/feel.

Randomly all over the place Cain (or others) leave behind books that add to the story. Orders guards were given, Azmodath's orders to his minions, a bit of lore about the goatmen, etc. They add some flavor but not enough.

Appreciations: You can change the difficulty at almost any time to be higher or lower. There's Easy, Normal, Hard, and Master Level 1-5.
No exp penalty, instead your equipment takes a 10% hit per death.
No identify or town portal scrolls. It's given to you for free. (although you have to be able to be untouched for 5 seconds to cast it).
The videos are AWESOME looking. While you know it's CGI it's really hard to tell.

For a price you stash can add 20 more slots. But it gets expensive quickly, considering the low gold drop...

For a price the gems can be extracted. (although they are weak enough even at higher levels I don't know if it's worth it).

Annoyances: Every item is level locked and some weapons class locked. Which is a real bummer. A legendary spear at level 15 you'll encounter again with the same name and upgraded stats with level 22 or higher. This means Keeping items other than for starting characters is just about pointless.

Disassembling EVERY SINGLE ITEM takes 2-3 button clicks, rather than a 'do them all'.

Selling off mundane items gives you 3-12 gold per item. That's it. Selling off your magical equipment goes for a few hundred maybe. And money drops is crap, often you see them picking up 100g or less per pile.

Most of the stats didn't appear to really help much, the straight up total of damage or defense was more important than the other bonuses. So even a legendary item will be dwarfed by a higher level blue item if it has significantly higher damage output.

Due to the difficulty variance, it's either too easy, or too hard. No perfect balance.

Only 60 item slots. It sounds like a lot (and you can stack similar items together like gems) but the wasted space from mundane items you end up picking up, you can quickly run out of space starting the 2nd act depending on how often you run against mobs.

Gems are reduced to a mere 4 types, one per attribute. No skulls which in D2 were used for health steal/mana steal. In many ways it's like Oblivion vs Morrowind, a disappointing backstep in mechanics.

Graphics: 4/5
Music: 4/5
Sound/VO: 4/5
Gameplay: 3/5
Story/writing: 3/5
Appreciations/Annoyances: +2/-2
Total: 18/25, 7.2/10, 3.6/5

Final thoughts: Good for a single play-through, but playing through again and again feels like a waste of time. Your items are never good enough, and you can't pass them down due to the level requirements, and the slowness even when power-leveling is annoying.

If you have the option it's good to rent/borrow for a weekend, then return it. It's not worth buying full price or owning.

Braid

This was an unexpected title. I'm still confused as to what to think of it (at least the ending).

At it's core it's a simple platforming/puzzle game with a specific mechanic, namely you can reverse time. So there's no extra lives, you simply rewind time to fix mistakes you make along the way. Of course some mechanics involve time that doesn't flow backwards.

Each world has a theme behind it, one of them you have your shadow that re-does the actions you just did. One of them time only moves when you move, and left/right adjusts how far forward/back time goes. etc.

Graphics: Beautiful, hand drawn. After playing this and seeing the various almost watercolor look of the art style, it's safe to say it has it's own style that you won't confuse for anything else.

Music: Beautiful, although the different time mechanics and reversing the music makes the music have a very different meaning. But it's all instrumental from what it sounds like.

Sounds/VO: There's the 'doing' sound and... little else. A little singing in the background of the epiloge but can hardly consider that voice acting.

Mechanics: left, right, flip switches, reverse time, and drop a ring (for slowing time down in one specific world).
After each world you can assemble puzzle pieces into a picture. Each picture has 12 pieces and aren't very hard to assemble.

Story: Of princesses and castles... the ending is... confusing... Need time to digest it and learn what it really means.

Annoyances: Had to look up how to solve a number of the puzzles, as I could only get half the pieces.
No controller option for configuration, so using keyboard is slightly annoying.

Graphics: 5/5
Music: 5/5
Mechanics: 3/5
Story: 3/5 ?
Total: 16/20, 8/10, 4/5

A Virus Named TOM

Got this in a humble bundle a while back, and gave it a whirl. Now I've re-tried it. And... well... while it's simple and a 'pipe dream' scenario, it's annoying as fuck.

Graphics: Indie and simple. Does the job, clean. The animations are funny, remind me a little of how Samari Jack is drawn. So pretty good.

Music: Simple, more or less I think I've heard the same tune over a half hour playing it, deep base, too slow to really get jazzy into but too fast to relax to.

Sound Effects/VO: Some voice acting with the animations, so I guess that's good. As for the sound effects, there's either cackling or you blowing up. Not enjoyable.

Mechanics: Grab tiles and rotate them. Try and get every single circuit covered so you infect the hardware.

Later they 'encrypt' the tiles, just makes them a mystery what direction is right until they have power.

Fixed and teleporting power across the screen through the back (think packman left/right passages).

Drones are added to add difficulty. Unfortunately this is where it gets annoying as fuck. Following drones and a screen full of them (minus one) just gives you annoying busy work trying to solve the puzzles. Annoying enough to just quit outright.

Story: Feels Shoed in for the game, or so it feels like. Not really too in depth. Although you'll get messages from the corporation telling you how much they hate you and how they are upgrading their drones. Etc...

Graphics: 3/5
Music: 2/5
SO/VO: 3/5
Mechanics: 2/5
Story: N/A
Annoyances: -1 (Those fucking drones).

Total: 9/20, 4.5/10, 2.25/5

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines

Watching a review of the game convinced me to play it.

So, it has humor, good voice acting, a decent story overall, and first play-through wasn't too bad. Being my real intro into the world of darkness, it's sorta sad the game didn't go longer. Although there are major annoyances along with the good.

Graphics: Looks like Xbox360 era graphics. Which isn't too much a surprise based on the age. Those you can talk to look and sound great, while the other NPC's (homeless, gang members, tong, etc) all are lower quality.

Music: Pretty good. Several musical tracks stand out, although I think the night club at the Asylum is probably my favorite.

Voice Acting: A few of them are a bit cheezy. The pawn shop owner sounds like a stoned surfer, while Velvet (VV) has the most seductive and alluring voice. Jack... well... he's a laugh, but not in a silly way. All in all the voice acting is awesome.

Sound effects: Guns sound like guns, explosions like explosions, etc etc...

Mechanics: Being a game from a Pen & Paper origins, a lot of dice rolling is likely behind the scenes. Regardless, CTRL will move to a sneaking mode, left click for attack, right click for your power, F to feed. and E to interact (or stealth kill). F1-F3 change options (Melee weapon, Ranged weapon, Armor/Clothing).

Lockpicking: This is more or less automatic. If you have the skill required you will succeed. if you don't you fail. You can boost your stats to 5 for a few seconds if you were off by only a little bit, costs a few points of blood to do it though.

Hacking: You can activate hacking on computers, which will more or less put in the password or random garbage. Mostly for accessing email, or some hidden command like unlocking a safe rather than having to pick it yourself later.

Seduction/Persuasion/Intimidation: These skills are automatic. If they are sufficiently high, you get unique conversation options. Like seducing a girl to giving you blood, or telling the man on the corner to give you his watch OR ELSE... Although didn't seem like it was used nearly as much as it could have been. But that's partly due to limitations in the linear gameplay.

Combat: Feels quite a bit like Morrowind, and not quite enough like Bloodrayne. Swing your tire iron, or shoot, etc. All melee combat is done in 3rd person. Switching between weapons on the spot is annoying so it's best to choose one and stick with it unless you have to.

Story: Good, at least for the first playthrough. However an annoyance at how linear it is becomes apparent on a second play-through when you try to go a completely different path. Many of the missions are the typical fetch/kill/dothis missions.

Writing: Some of it is really good, going from serious to outright funny. Some of the ads/commercials about margarine is enough to make you laugh. And Malkavian has it's own set of fun jokes on the side.

Clans: So far only played two, (Malkavian as the second playthrough). Honestly the craziness was fun in it's own way after knowing what the options for dialog more or less meant, although most reactions to the craziness didn't match up well.

Appreciations: Seems care was taken to try and offer ways around most missions assuming you didn't take lockpicking/hacking and wanted to sneak (which is required if you're Nosferatu probably...)

Annoyances: A few things stand out as quite annoying. The difficulty suddenly spikes when you go after the sabbat and after that. Mostly we're talking the boss battles. If you don't build a combat-based character which can soak a lot or deal a lot of damage, you'll die over and over again. Best to activate god-mode using the console and get through it.

The linear story allows little deviation. The false choices, where all three options lead the same path of conversations, or the same ending. Aside form the optional sub-quests, none of the main quests have any real difference in them.

There's no way to save your ghoul (far as I can tell), which is an ass-move by itself.

While playing a Malkavian you're suppose to hear whispers and voices telling you useful or useless information. I could barely hear them and could never make them out. Maybe that's because you need a 5 speaker setup. Regardless it's a disappointment i couldn't experience that much. I really wish there was a volume slider specifically for that, so I could raise it.

Final Thoughts: Being what it is, it's definitely worth playing. It has at least 1-2 playthrough's worth of content mostly to try out different play styles and clans, however beyond that I'm not sure. Needs more mods or content added, although I've found a few it doesn't look like there is nearly as much as I expected. I've heard the game was unplayable at launch, but it's playable with the unofficial patch (which is automatically used in GoG's version). Feels like a little re-balancing is needed.

Graphics: 3/5
Music: 4/5
VO/SE: 4/5
Story/Writing: 4/5
Mechanics: 3/5
Annoyances: -1
Total: 17/25, 6.8/10, 3.4/5

140 is wonderful. It and Mr. Bree+ are my favorite platformers.

Decker

This is a freeware, and/or otherwise incomplete game. From what I've seen elsewhere, it's based on 2nd edition Shadowrun rules. Seeing as I can't really access the help file (stupid windows 7) I kinda am working blind. Although even blind you learn how to do things.

Decker, is a rogue-like. Random rooms, random layouts, random monsters, etc. Even the contracts you need to do are random, and what's for sale. Although what's for sale means very little later on when you put time down to make your own programs and even your own firmware and chips.

Every month you have to pay 500c, this is likely rent and food. you can upgrade this, but it gets more expensive, and you get access to higher quality items and contracts.

To start with you can choose where you want a boost. Skills, hardware, money, or programs. Although 'boost' merely means they start at level 2 rather than level 1. Hardware isn't something you can upgrade so easily so that's probably your best bet.

Many times you'll be playing via stealth. Don't get noticed, try not to bring attention to yourself, if you did, hope you silenced the room beforehand so an alarm isn't triggered, etc.

Missions are usually in the aspect of 'download some file(s) for me' or 'disable these nodes', 'make a backdoor' etc. So far statuses seem to be:

I - In progress
C - Complete
F - Failure (usually only when the alarm rings when the mission states you shouldn't)
T - Time Limit (contract notes)

Graphics: Looks Windows 3.11. Functional, slightly annoying UI.

Sound: Sounds like Windows 3.11 sound effects, simple 'dings' or the like.

Story: No story. I am guessing this could be added as the game is available at sourceforge, to make the game actually have a point. Plus a few addons might be nice, if someone wants to put their time into this. Maybe updates to using the newest/updated rules.

Mechanics: When you aren't busy buying/selling/selecting missions, you can use the arrow keys to navigate the matrix map. Each turn takes 1 second.

Programming: You can make your own programs, they take time. Based on your programming stat, so you can make a program up to your stat's value. Got a 3? Make up to a level 3 hide, armor, medic, etc.

Chips: This is also under programming, but you need your chip design up. You also need a burner, which is about 1000c, so don't bother making a bunch of hardware. Plus it takes a long time. Might take 5 days to program the chip, and 15 days to burn, so...

Nodes:

Data Storage: You can scan and download files, assuming there isn't a guardian you have to go to first (good hiding you can bypass on a per-file basis, one at a time). After you scan the files, evaluate them, else you might download files that are worthless (and 80% of them are). Download the files with value, the ones that are under *contract* (unless you're suppose to delete them), and source code and programs. <Passcode> and <Clue> are used via evaluate.

There will be worms and other protections on some files, holding them hostage so to say. You need to deceive them first, and then use decrypt. 3 failures will likely cause a self-destruct so if you fail twice, deceive again and you're less likely to lose.

IO Nodes: You can scan the room to tell you what it is and how it's used. there's a few you should disable by default (the ICE portal) and the high speed internet access (lowers downloads to 1 turn).

Portals: These are purple, you enter one by default, a second one will take you to another system entirely, later missions have files and IO nodes split up.

COP: This node allows you to disable any alarms.

Missions:

Download/steal/erase files: all the same, while erasing is a little easier you either have to download, erase, or both.
Alter Files: same as 'download' except you have to alter/edit it.
Activate/Deactivate IO, or sabotage: Mostly disable the appropriate IO nodes. Although sometimes they won't be named, or be identified as such, in those cases you may have to simply disable all IO Nodes until your contract notes say it's completed.
Create Backdoor: Get to the CPU and create a backdoor. You can do this is you are stealthed or convince the node you're legit. Fail too many times and you can cause a red alert. Even if you have a backdoor you have to create one to finish the mission.
Crash System: You have to remove all ICE in order to crash the system. Virus can steathfully deal damage to ICE, although attacking them may be faster and better, assuming you don't get ganged up on.

Failure states: You can fail by dying (usually getting kicked off by virtual health going to 0) or not paying your rent on time. You're most at risk early on and via trial and error. While you can heal it takes time & costs money. But best not to fail in the first place, better to pull the plug and bugger a run than get killed.

Final thoughts: As a time waster it's not bad once you get going. However other than being free, there's no big merit to play this, unless you enjoy rogue-likes (like me) or love the Shadowrun theme, or want to try something a bit different.

Download at