The gameplay is solid enough, and there's a huge map filled with a good variety of loot and enemies. I don't think this is going to be anyone's favorite Metroidvania since it's pretty comfortable just repeating a winning pattern from Symphony of the Night and Dawn of Sorrow while not having the polish those games had, but eh. It's fun for what it is.
If you're a fan of the gameplay of Skyrim, Enderal is a great place to go looking for more. It features a large map with varied biomes, and lots of interesting dungeons to visit with small internal stories matching up to Bethesda's best. Furthermore, the character progression system and combat is great fun. Music and voice acting is similarly great -- I'm in particular a fan of the track that plays in the snowy regions. It's also clear that the developers had mastered the scripting of the engine, and many quests feature impressive setpieces. Most of the story in the game is in the main quest, and here I'm regrettably not a fan. In short, it feels like the writer wanted to tell a bleak story with themes of loss and inevitability. Since your character -- in typical Skyrim fashion -- ends up being an avatar of destruction in gameplay, the game has to jump through a lot of hoops to explain why the problems you're facing can't be solved through combat. Some of these solutions are elegant, but a lot of them are stupid. The finale was perhaps the best example of this. After the ending, it felt like as if the game had presented a locked room murder mystery, and then gleefully revealed that the murderer was capable of teleporting. Lovely. However, there is one story which I felt succeeded at basically every point the main quest failed: the Rhalâta questline added by Forgotten Stories. It presents a villain that, while mysterious, has much clearer capabilities and that can be outsmarted -- to an extent -- by the player. The main side character Tharaêl is also integral to the plot, as opposed to the Bioware style romance targets in the main quest. The questline features both fun gameplay and a story that reacts to player action, like a true RPG should. All that being said, it's a free mod. I hated the main story, but it tries and fails at doing something spectacular, which is in itself interesting. It's worth playing.
Wandersong is divided in seven acts -- most of these are excellent, some are not. The first four acts are great fun and lets you visit varied locations and meet the interesting characters there. While the overall plot is about a world-ending event, the problems the characters you meet have personal stakes and the game doesn't bite of more than it can chew. The three final acts change this. The fifth act, the longest in the game, is about a generation-spanning war between two neighbouring nations and how you convince the rulers to put aside their differences and make peace. At the time the game was written, this message would probably not have been as scrutinized. Now, after the full-scale war a certain European nation has started, the game's message about how warring nations should 'just make peace', feel like something you'd read in Chinese state media. It also doesn't help that this act lacks any new gameplay element and doesn't feature any likeable central character. The sixth chapter initially leaves you without your partner, the game's most likeable character, and is based on puzzles. Or rather a single puzzle, that you have to 'solve' again and again, by yourself. The final act works out in the exact way anyone would guess after seeing the gameplay and plot of a world ending disaster. But to the game credit, the framing is a bit different, and highlights how our hero was different from the antagonist in a nice, thematic way. If I had been riding the hype from the first four chapters, I would have probably have gives this game a higher rating. But with the final half of the game being head and shoulders worse both in narrative and gameplay, the game ends on a sour note, which means that the game's message of kindness and positivity comes of as something written by a twenty-something college kid that had their first life-shaking experience travelling to Paris. That's a shame.
Death's Door starts out grim and whimsical -- during the first half hour of play, you check in to your '9 to 5' workplace as a soul collector, pass through a security checkpoint manned by a 'Paul Blart: Mall Cop' reference, and get chewed out by a hard-nosed coworker. Also, you and everyone else is a crow. During the rest of the game, you will meet other similarly silly characters and situations: a character literally called 'Pothead', a squid riding a corpse masquerading as human, the Grim reaper in a hoodie and fanny pack. The cracks in the game begin to when you want to go deeper into these characters, beyond just the character design -- there's simply nothing there. Character's you meet don't really do anything of note, or say anything memorable. Locations, notes and item descriptions tell of the world's backstory, but there's not much reason to care when not even the in-game characters have much to say about the supposedly dying world. Gameplay wise, it's mixed. Basic movement is fluid, and you have a nice combat roll, but mobs often either swarm you or lack proper telegraphs and/or patterns. Specifically the 'Black Knight' stand-in is downright frustrating to fight before you get the Hookshot to exploit their AI. The game could also have needed some more creativity in enemy encounters -- it locks you in a flat room and spawns in three to four waves of mobs a bit too often. There are puzzles, but they are to be honest just way too easy and simple. Perhaps they're a symptom of your limited moveset; your characters slashes their weapon, and attacks with magic either in a straight line or with a AOE bomb, but even with those limitations the game could have gone beyond 'hit three switches with the magic you got in the dungeon'. Luckily most of the bosses are excellent, and feature fun, varied and properly telegraphed attack patterns. The highlight is the frog boss, that even has a lil puzzle! Overall, a charming if flawed game. Get it on discount.
Human Resource Machine is a short and sweet game that tries, and somewhat succeeds, at gamifying programming. My main gripe is that the games attempts to teach programming are very uneven. The game progresses from simple puzzles to more challenging ones; to progress you need to use the solutions to the puzzles you've already done in more complex ways, building your knowledge -- at least in theory. In practice the game sometimes gives you multiple puzzles that are solved in more or less the same way in a row, only to suddenly introduce a puzzle that requires something completely new which hasn't been used before. The way the game visualises the logic of a computer program is great, and it's satisfying to watch your avatar execute your program to successfully solve a puzzle. Later in the game this gets a bit annoying however, and I found myself setting the in-game speed to maximum to get on with things. When you reach the later levels, the programs you need to create get a bit too complicated for the tools you're given. Even when coding in Notepad you can at least copy, paste, and indent -- no such features here. The visual presentation is, as mentioned, great, and the game's humour goes a long way to make you want to proceed to the next puzzle. But overall I feel that the game is a bit of a brick wall for a beginner and a bit limited for somebody more experienced. If you enjoy programming I would recommend this when it's on sale; at full price, or as a learning tool, it's so-so.
KOTOR can be said to be an early modern Bioware style role playing game. Story-wise, there is a two part intro, with the first part providing a tutorial and the second part an intro to the story. Afterwards a consistent hub is opened to the player, where the NPC companions can be engaged in banter. These conversations don't impact the story, but do provide some backstory and worldbuilding. While there are some branching paths for which order to tackle the games stages, or planets, they all eventually converge. The writing can be said to be good enough - rarely jarring, but seldom engaging. There are some nice set-pieces and ideas, I personally was very fond of a quest-line where you set out to defend a man accused of murder. Some companions are also much more interesting than others - HK-47 is deservedly a fan-favorite. Your player class broadly falls into the classic categories of warrior, rogue and wizard. Sadly, none of them are very interesting to play, with each combat encounter consisting of the same procedure of buffing yourself, removing buffs from the enemy and then focus-firing one mob at a time while disabling the rest, or just nuking them all if they're weak enough. It all wears a bit thin a bit too early into the game. This is not helped by a clunky, unoptimized interface which seems to have been designed with console ports in mind. Overall, there are definitely some interesting quests and characters here. But is the overall quality high enough for it to deserve its status among fans? Not really, in my opinion. For every interesting quest and character there are two completely mediocre. Luckily, there aren't many big faults with the game either; the underwater/space walk sections being the only really egregious example. If you're into Star Wars, don't let this review stop you: go in, you'll have a blast. If you're not a fan, I'd recommend a run on the lowest difficulty where you just do the quests that seem interesting - you'll have a good time.
Trails in the Sky SC follows up where the first game left, both story-wise and gameplay-wise. The story is continued and finished in a way that feels like a natural expansion to the first game – it holds on to what made the story so compelling to begin with, while at the same time increasing the stakes. The gameplay is competently handled and is still fun even at the end of the game. It has enough bells and whistles to set it apart from other games in the genre, but it is undeniably the game's weak point. Now that that is over with, I can cease my attempt to write an objective review and tell you the truth. Which is, TitS:SC is a game I like very much; I have since long passed the point where I could write an unbiased review. While I can see the things that turn some people away, they are for me parts of this game's cohesive whole - a game that I love. I use that word very deliberately, and that is coming from someone that considers himself a bit jaded when it comes to games. Trails in the Sky SC is everything I want in a video game. I can, of course, not guarantee that you will have the same experience, it's by no means a perfect game – but if you buy both TitS and TitS:SC and like them even half as much as I do, then you will have gotten your money's worth many times over.
