In spite of the bad user reviews I had high hopes for this one. Even if it's just a VN: a VN set in the World of Darkness should still be a pretty great experience, right? Especially with all those nice illustrations that you can see on the screenshots, right? So, I'm not very experienced with VNs but by the standards of the ones I've played this is not a good one. It does not have voice overs, it has no illustrations for action scenes, it has no facial expressions, characters are only on screen while they are "talking" (nobody on-screen while you're choosing actions), there are even very few sounds. That's a disappointingly low level of quality. What's worse, though, is that I don't think that the writing is great either. The style of the writing is fine, I guess, but all in all the game is just so very emo and mundane - the world is neither as morbid nor as colourfully weird as what we know from Bloodlines or even Redemption. In fact, the game puts an active effort into making the vampire world seem mundane and boring. The main plot isn't particularly interesting either - you start as a pawn and end as a pawn in a plot that doesn't feel like it has any gravity nor is it very clever. The optional subplots are a bit interesting, I guess, but small and simple. Finally it's one of those VNs that have hints of systemic gameplay. There's time progression which limits the number of actions you can perform per night, there's a blood level that determines your available choices and you're seemingly building up one of the titular coteries. "Seemingly" because that whole thing goes nowhere. The blood level had potential but those contextual choices don't matter that much and there's no actual management involved in staying fed. The time progression doesn't really matter - it means that you won't be able to do everything in a single playthrough but those optional things appear to have no real connection to the main plot anyway. All in all it's sadly very disappointing.
It's rare that I abandon a game after less than an hour but sadly Zephyr is just that bad. It's a weird game that looks and kinda controls like an old-school FPS but you control a hover tank rather than a heavily armed dude. It seems kinda promising at first: The game opens with an animated and well-voiced commentator talking about a sci-fi tournament, there's nice music, then you choose a corporate sponsor that determines your tank's specs and then the horror begins. You end up in a match where, a bit like in Carmageddon, you can either score by doing laps or destroying respawning opponents. Alas, with controls similar to but much worse than in Wolfenstein 3D it's definitely not fun racing and an even worse shooter. Everything is just ridiculously frantic and choppy and it's unnecessarily complicated by vertical movement, the ability to turn turrets (which the AI can use just fine but it seems to me that no human could possibly use that effectively here) and a weird battery that you can deplete just by moving around. There's no momentum, no precision, no clear feedback. It's just not fun to play at all. After five minutes of watching enemies explode and exploding yourself you're told that somebody else won the match. I'm sure there are two people in the world who have put many hours into this game and will insist that it's in fact good if you master it but honestly: it can't possibly be worth it.
