Tactical FPS games have a root starting point and SWAT 4 is that starting point, around the same time Rainbow Six started to huff paint thinner and bore cleaner and keep inventing reasons for terrorists to attack Vegas, Sierra walked in, plopped SWAT 4 down in it's police brutality glory and walked back out. A game where every door breech means either mild disappointment or a firefight with some goon with a TEC-9. SWAT 4 is a tactical FPS game about running a 5 man SWAT team through a variety of incredibly tense scenarios with an emphasis on not being CoD. Guns are pretty much terrible outside of semi, you will lose points for just gunning everything down, you have to actually try to detain people albeit the limits of which are stretched to "yeah just tase that guy, his heart can take it." The game comes into its own with levels as well, you start with boring stuff like "detain an illegal gunsmith" before getting a 180 and having a "detain a serial killer before he kills his next victim" or "deal with a cult" and so on and so on. The game keeps you ramped up. And the only issue I could give the game is the AI levels vary pretty hard. Your team are fairly good at following orders but the enemy are just weird. You can shoot a guy with a few 9mm JHP's, he slinks into a corner and despite 4 other officers standing in front of him, he still goes down in a blaze of glory for no reason. But that's the only thing I could burn this game on, everything else is still gold. Take down armed robbers with a paintball gun that shoots pepper spray, convince yourself that the civilian you just shot a 40mm baton round with deserved it, it's nail biting fun.
The Roaring 20's are an underused decade for video games, where cars, machine guns and crime were rampant. Outside of flavor added to other games, there are a few who bother with 100 year old history and Omerta's one of the few who do. It's half business management/half turnbased combat and it all boils into a cacciatore stew of good, bad and misplaced. Story doesn't matter for this, so let's get to the meat. The gameplay is an "open world" RPG game but that's a bit of a lie. You're stuck with your HQ, a certain mix of buildings to expand into and a list of 3 things you can buy and sell, beer, liquor and guns and a vague approximation of enemy gangs. Nothing special, just add businesses, rob places and play your cards right and you'll have illegal money printers in minutes. Turn based combat is fairly similar to other games and it's compitent enough for you to have fun with. That's Omerta's biggest issue, it's so normal that there's nothing that makes it feel special. The gunfights are usually only for missions or to get the cops off of you, the map doesn't let you buy and create joints and premises, you only find them. I could theoretically see a sequel refining the issues I discussed but given Kalypso's gone away from "recreate every old game we like" to "PRINT TROPICO MONEY", I doubt Omerta will get a sequel that'll flesh it out. If you can get it for pennies and expect nothing but a few basics, Omerta's a fine game. Besides that? Eh. There are better out there.
Fahrenheit is a impressive game, it has a dirt simple plot and yet because David Cage has the self control of a sugar addicted kid given a box of cereal, it shoots off the rails and goes into several different directions on what it wants to do. Fahrenheit is the weirdest game he's ever done, and every game he's made afterwards has been toned down because of this. Story? Murder mystery involving a few characters that ZOOMS off the rails in the mid point and NEVER recovers. Ancient aliens, secret societies of hoboes, ressurecting people from the dead, cults and SUPERPOWERS in a game that starts off as a murder mystery. Gameplay is fairly basic, wander around an area, talk to people, and then as you get comfortable David takes a baseball bat to your teeth in the form of a QTE section and you have to live with it. Fahrenheit isn't good, but it's such a mess of a game that it becomes good as you watch and think "David had to tell people to do this, write these words." It's fantastic to watch, and tedius to play.
The amount of hours I put into playing this game's demo when I was 6 is immesurable. I don't know why, but I loved this game. And now, I can play it and actually understand it more than using it as a digital trainset. Chris Sawyer's Locomotion is Chris attempting to remake Transport Tycoon in the RCT1/2 engine, and it's almost good. Almost. If you like Transport Tycoon, try this. If it doesn't work for you, go download OpenTTD. Locomotion operates on the same basic framework of RCT with TT's skin attached. Slap down trains, stations, truck depots, roads and so on to maximize profits on everything from passengers and mail to food and oil. It seems simple, and it is for the most part. The big issue with Locomotion to me is the AI rivals. They're hilariously overkill. To steal from my review of this game on Steam, whatever problem you have with this game, the AI will take it and multiply the result by 10. You set up one railroad line and one train between a cow farm and a food processing plant, the AI will make a two line, heavily signal driven murder machine that ferrys hundreds of cows to the plant even after said plant goes under. It's HILARIOUS to watch the AI bankrupt themselves making these overly elaborate freight lines, and in my opinion don't even bother competiting with them. Find your niche, make your objective and watch the map get overfilled with useless railroad lines.
I'm fairly certain more people have played Rollercoaster Tycoon than caught chicken pox. It's a franchise that is just as fun to me now as an adult as it was when I was 9 smacking down pre-made coasters and rigging some to explode. That is a testament to the basic premise of RCT and Sawyer's work in making a basic concept work. RCT 2 is less of a direct sequel and more of a refinement on RCT 1, and out of the three I'd advise you do RCT2, then either 1 or 3 depending on if the graphics of 3 scare you. But like the first game, you manage a theme park, build rollercoasters and make a killing off of charging people to use the bathroom. The graphics have a lovely chunky feeling with just a little detail to them, the music is Allister Brimble's bleepy MIDI fun, and it sits in the same tier of time sink as Civilization where you can lose hours of your life perfecting coasters. The only real con is that your park goers are serious light weights when it comes to coasters, and I don't even mean ones where you rigged it to max out the G forces. Even a mildly exciting coaster will be repelling attendees like nothing else, meanwhile the baby coaster will print money like nothing else. It's not a bad criticism, if anything it's funny to watch massive queue lines to my coasters that are little more than flat tracks on the ground.
Banished is a game I own on both Steam and GOG for the reason of "I never double check" so the 20~ hours I've spent trying to keep my settlers from dying of the sniffles hasn't translated. But I can tell you this, Banished is a simple city builder that lets you do more than the bare neccessities. The only issue is it doesn't go much farther than that. You control a small gaggle of goons out in the middle of nowhere with a barn and a hope to survive, so you set up building sites and manage jobs hoping they stay alive long enough to not die when winter comes. And the game gives you that basic premise, a set of tools and then goes home to do nothing. It's not a bad game and it's an effective time waster for other downloads but there's nothing to stock to you. Building stuff is simple, the UI is simple, graphics are simple, the only thing I take issue with is the AI but that's mostly because they take just a little too long to get focused on stuff so when your farmer dies of pneumonia, it'll take a day or so for the new farmer to get to the field and hopefully save your potatoes from rotting. I think 20 bucks is overkill for a game like this but 9/10 it drops to 5 in sales and for 5 bucks, it's not too bad.
There's not much I can add to the overall sea of compliments that are given towards this game, it's an entertaining monument to Bullfrog games before they were entirely eaten by EA. It's basically the same idea as Dungeon Master except rather than build a dungeon kill heroes, you're trying to build a hospital and keep people alive enough so you can charge them. The humor is the same dry British flavor that gets channeled into Monty Python and digestive biscuits and makes the game so much more entertaining than you'd expect. It's worth the price, full or not.
