Just like a car advert tries to catch viewers' with hot babes, this game chose controversial political topic. This game is openly leftist and socialist. That is not a bad thing per se. Unfortunately, there is no variety, no added value on top of the class conflict. If this game went with a different theme, say tea/coffee drinkers (the hell, even pineapple pizza), it would end up buried among many more unsuccessful titles, and rightly so. Your fellow rioters behave in strange ways: you can tell them to take a step back and wait, but they will charge to you (and/or the fight) as soon as a) you're under attack, or b) out of screen range. I'd really appreciate if this behaviour would be configurable (i.e. stay on edge of screen, defensive vs offensive crowd). The game also advertises settings control, which is a plain lie. The game is not really trash, but it's really overpromissing and underdelivering. I'd expect this type of content from a flash game, perhaps "1.99 (tax included)" mobile purchase. Maybe it changes in later stages, but the game didn't hook me on to try to get there. If you want some mindless whacking, try waiting and get a sale deal - 12.49€ is really too much to ask. Otherwise - don't even stop and think. Now I have to get a little political. Even the very first riot starts by slaying the guards. Surely, it would make more sense to defeat them and take prisoners. Afterall, "we" should be better than "them". The equipment would be really handy - especially for a bunch of unarmed rioters facing the police, nye? And lastly: I grew up in a post-communist country. People are still trying to "restore the old order of things". The communist party is damn near entering the parliament house. Anyone, who will call me a "comrade" will require no more dentist appointments. Understood?
Try once-and-never or try once-and-forever. Two players take turns on building insulting sentences out of shared list of words and phrases. And the loser: a) must give up their seat in first class train coupe, b) is guilty of murder, c) has to keep the dead parrot, d) will not get a kidney surgery. If you can accept these premises, you're in for few rounds of plain silly humor, spiced up with way too many Monty Python references (which is the right amount of Monty Python references). You'll not spend long hours on this one, but if you'll find yourself compatible, you'll return every now and then for a round or five.
This game feels very real, but here the realism can be a double-edged sword. Do you want to enjoy the reality of being an admission officer on a border post? You must enjoy the dull, repeating, Sisyphus reality. That's what this game wants you to experience. Your job is to inspect documents, search for discrepancies, stamp passports. It's no wonder you'll be doing this and it's no wonder it will feel gray and repetitive. Every now and then the game will change rules for your job and you'll have to deal with unlucky people who don't have the documents they need today. In addition to the usual black market forgeries, stolen papers and wanted criminals. The game has an all-knowing oracle to check on you, and I have to ask "why did they employ me then?" Admitting a "most wanted" criminal can result in a warning, if it's your first fail of the day. Soon enough I stopped caring and just stamped "denied" at the first sign of discrepancy. After all, there's family to feed and I'm the only one making money. It's easy to feel detached from the process and have food just every other day. Every now & then there will be some personal moment, a visitor that will speak to you. It's a nice distraction, but it'll not really cover up the fact there is no other content but stamping passports. If that's what you want to do, enjoy! Otherwise, be warned. There are three modes after completing the "story" line, but none of them is a "free play" type of thing. As in "pretend the campaign is longer, let me play for more days". All the non-story games are challenges of some sort, and I really miss a mode when I could clean my head by just stamping passports for as long as I want to, without a mistake ruining it. Just like the campaign doesn't end with a mis-stamp.
Review written after playing story mode and consulting a walkthrough few times. The story rolls fast, and it rolls BIG. It's quite easy to get attached, even if Nathan, our hero, makes some "questionable" decisions. The day starts with "where has my girlfriend gone?", and soon the stream of events drags Nathan deep into troubles. Music and graphics are just right. It's a shame the game doesn't contain any voiceover. Occasional background noise, TV static and dial-up sound (yea, kids, the Internet used to come over the phone line. 90s were wild) alone won't cut it. Most of the puzzles in story mode are quite logical, but since I consulted walkthrough for the full thing, I can't really imagine what went through the designers' heads when they were writing the story. I feel like the "hard" puzzles are just slapped on top of the thing just because, with connection to the story being negligible, if any. The game contains considerable number of references to what'd be the IT equivalent to paleontology: 8-bit era, 3.5 floppies and CRT screens. I enjoyed every single of them, but I can imagine other (younger?) players being lost and/or disinterested in them. If that's the case, subtract half a star from this review. And I'm still very upset of what the game tried to sell as QR codes. Come on, you could at least try... Given the Atari references, you know your target demographics is nerds. Nerds, who tend to get upset by this kind of stuff, perhaps?
With "the journey is the destination" in mind, Transsiberian railway is among the biggest destinations I can think of. The setup aims high, but the game brings very little extra compared to, say, a gamebook adventure. The kind of "Option X: turn to page Y" kind, you know? The story is pretty much the only content in the game, and while it's enjoyable, the game could almost work on your favourite e-ink device. No extras - almost no photos (our hero has and actively uses a camera!), no background info for either the railway or your own character. Very little in-dialog trivia. Text only, no narrator. The type of ambience music your ears will filter out after few minutes. My second - and maybe bigger - concern is about how limited the choices sometimes feel. You can somehow almost manage your two "resources" in the game - your mood (happy/sad) and your energy (awake/sleepy). But the game will make you tired when it needs to, just so it can create a situation. And soon you'll find yourself in a situation with no good choices and "who'd have done any of these" stuck in your head. All of this while everyone is drinking vodka all the time. The story is nice, and is in my eyes worth a read, but since it's forcefully linear, it's "one playthrough" type of game. In fact a 0.75 playthroughs, since the game ends sooner than described adventure. I returned to it for a second replay after two years for the sole purpose of writing this review.
Where Mafia 1 feels like solid steel, M2 is more like jelly blob. Neither Vitto's story nor his personality is as attracting as those of Tom from M1. Common criminal gets caught, drafted into WW2, wounded, and his friend saves him from returning to the front. Thankful Vitto returns to his life of crime. For basically no other reason than his desire for fast money (compare Tom from M1: not wanting to die, his only other option was mafia). The game is rich in could-have-been-a-cutscene interactive bits. Going to bed. Picking up phones. Getting dressed. Although the game lacks "free ride" mode, you can use the story to "free ride" a bit before sleeping. The main story seems to me like excercise in nihilism and futility. Vitto attempts a thing, fails, fixes it up and attemps another. No feel of satisfaction through progressing for me. Shootouts are pretty enjoyable, though. You can take cover now, peek out, which opens some degree of tactical freedom unknown in M1. But, you can regenerate taken damage by simply waiting. First aid kits are not present in the game. To heal to max, you eat/drink. As result, you will not die in the game very often.
Nostalgy hits quite hard here, so this review is far from objective. You build and run a hospital. From the automatic autopsy machine to zapping rats, if you don't clean often enough. Anything that happens in the hospital is your responsibility (and subsequently your fault, when you see a ghost with wings flying up from your screen). You're treating ilnesses such as common cold and invisibility. That escalated quickly, right? You choose your receptionists, doctors, nurses and handyman, you lay out the rooms and buy equipment, you negotiate salary with your employees, you choose how much heat is the hospital getting and an hour later you decide to start over, because you need to cram in new room with large equipment and you don't have the space now. I actually didn't ever finish the game, but I think the lower levels are worth buying the game anyway - either you appreciate the simple mindless comedy of the intro, or you will appreciate the tough challenges of the end-game. Players are reminded to be patient!
An ordinary tavern in an ordinary village. Around a table, there sit a dwarf fighter, a bard, a mage... And their existence alone annoys you, the Lord of the Dungeon. You start by defending your dungeon in tower defense style. You build traps, you prepare your army to deal with the intruders. And you take care about your wounded. And you pay your army. And you satisfy their need for beer. Tower defense! Dungeon building! Economy management! Magic! And then, when you're strong enough, you go to see the outside world (in Warcraft 3 style), to spread evil (which is good now), to deal with heroes, to conquer the ruins. All while the narrator throws witty jokes in your general direction. The story is catchy and enjoyable. All 3 evil races (DLC sold separately, I think) give you unique playstyles, You feel good as darkness spreads over green grass and blue streams. The game is unique mix of different genres, and while the play-through can be sometimes frustrating (some micromanagement included and the hand cursor is not targeting well), if you're a story gamer, you will most probably enjoy this one. Replay-ability is low to medium, though, as the story is perfectly linear and the game shows you really everything during your first take.
This game is the second "best" thing after war. Your squad faces difficult missions. Your supplies are limited. Your men are not immortal. You're trained to do one thing and do it well: You pin down your enemy and you flank them. They die and you move on to deal with more. In a sense, the fights are indeed repetitive. You stick to tactics that works. Sniping covered enemy will just not work and you will have to charge them or flank them. It's not exactly what the most fun-and-action bull**** shooters give you, but in exchange for your patience, the game will reward you with real story, real people and real warfare. The story is linear (did I mention real story?), the combats are repetitive (that's how they were fought) and your options are kind of limited (it's hard to reason with germans). You are presented with the same tactic dilemma. But you're progressing through the game steadily, although some encounters require more thinking and trying than others. Pleasant memory of the better days of Ubisoft.
Space ship crash-landed on unknown planet and it's crew is fighting for survival and if Living stars do grant, ship repair. Setting sounds good. Implementation is... uhoh. This game is micromanagement, distilled. You are giving orders to survivors. That doesn't sound that bad, does it? You. Are. Controlling. Every. Single. Movement. Your crew has no brain. They will go out no matter the conditions, to die bold death by freezing. It takes one replay to get the rhytm and after you fail, one replay to execute flawlessly, if you manage to concentrate for that long. I felt like boiling lunch-sized serving of rice grain by grain. If what you like is micromanagement and repetitiveness, you'll enjoy this game. Otherwise, move along.
