This is a pretty nice bit of software that probably spawned after a teleporter mishap caused by someone who tried to teleported the Bible, a copy of Twilight Princess and a couple of iron age superhero comics (In fact the game has a PDF file with one) which is not a big surprise since the creative directow was Joe Madureira... a comic book writer and artist by trade. The main character is... well a comic book anti hero. He's the type of guy you'd see punching out with wolverine and the hulk. He's as bulky as a space marine and swings his unpractically huge sword that cleaves demons and angels in half. The combat is... ok. It's not nearly as fleshed out as the likes of Bayonetta or newer God of War titles and it's quite honestly kinda boring at first as all you can do is swing your sword and jump. This changes as you buy more moves from the merchant and learn how to counter (which is surprisingly hard to pull off at first since the enemies don't telegraph their attacks with flashing iceons like it's the case in arkham style combat). In short i'd say the combat starts boring but gets upgraded over time into being actually enjoyable and the tools you earn in various dungeons act as weapons that make certain enemies possible/easier to defeat. Staying true to the zelda series the game has a good amount of puzzles and spots where you need to use an item in order to acquire a collectible or item that pushes the game onwards. The backtracking was however limited to just the overworld as you can get everything in each dungeon by using the item you find there. This reduces the amount of backtracking. Also as someone who used to watch Samurai Jack back then i was amazed when one of the characters you get to meet was... basically the scotsman. Then you have also Mark Hamill doing the joker voice basically haunting War. I'm torn whether i should give this game 4 or 5 stars tho. There are better fighting games out there but there are only so many Zelda-likes on PC... 5.
Ok so the games story follows "Reynardo" (A punny name since foxes are called "Renard" in french) who has a magical artifact that transports him back in time every time he dies and the goal of the game is finding 4 "truths" about the world... while dying on the way. But mind you while death does unlock more of the game and you don't lose any progress this is most definitely NOT a roguelite. So the story is fairly nice... if short... kinda. Every attempt is a full 5 act story that takes about 40-50 minutes and there are 25 possible bad endings plus one good/true giving an average of 15 hours of gameplay... however that's only if you want to see all possible bad endings as otherwise you might end up winning the game in about 4 hours. My entire blind playthrough on youtube took 6 episodes around 45 minutes each. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0HMJ7qxHEk&list=PLkCfh8Be7TJHie4JgIjqNKGQtLrt_DK3K&index=1 (Don't watch it. it's boring) The game has a rather primitive crafting system where you can craft a total of 3 swords... and then upgrade them. But the swords differ only in their special abilities that use mana and doors they can open so you pretty much just want a full set of swords to open all extra treasures first and upgrade them second. The weapons look nice and all but it would be better if they had some impact on the fighting style in addition to the triggered spells. Things are a bit better with gems found in red chests but not much. They usually offer some boring stat boosts but there are more interesting ones that affect the gameplay like the ability to hurt grunts with shields with normal attacks. The enemy variety is... ok. 5 types in total. There are a total of 10 levels that don't change much between playthroughs. The chests and enemies are in the same spots and due to the nature of the game you will often replay them. The combat is your typical Arkham style fare. Honestly if the presentation weren't as amusing as it is i'd probably give it a 3.
The game is ok. It's basically Cossacs with a focus on heroes not unlike Warcraft 3. But unlike W3 hereoes here can get INSANELY powerful. Armies are gigantic and sometimes number in the thousands (the game is from 2005 so units are mostly 2d sprites). There are 4 factions each playing somewhat differently and neutral town/villages. My main gripe with the game however is the fact the story was never finished (no worries the game itself is finished but the story was to be continued in the sequels) so you get those hints of another powerful faction manipulating the events from the shadows and curiosity keeps you playing then... poof. the game ended you get a cutscene and have to wait for the sequel (that will never come). It's still a nice experience worth checking out however and maybe playing multi with a friend.
Rebel Galaxy is a solid space game recently released on the market. Being limited to only 2 planes seems weird at first but you can get used to it. The voice acting is great but the voices seem to have been recorded without using top of the line microphones so if you have music off you will hear constant static whenever someone talks. Additionally to that some songs also have some weird crackling as if they were played on a gramophone. The other big problem is the controls. The game is HEAVILY consolized. Manual turret control is... bad. Very bad. And on top of that the turrets tend to snap to target and that can get annoying when there is a load of strike craft zipping around and your aiming reticle jumping left and right making it impossible to target anything specific. Same thing applies to mining. Your mining laser simply jumps between asteroids while you are trying to get a bead on that one roid with minable resources in the area.
Ok let's get to the point here. Play the story and uninstal the game because unlike games like the X series the entire universe is static and... well sadly boring. It still has some good ideas behind it tho! The ship. While initially a bummer you can upgrade it via artifacts. And you can't upgrade every component to its maximum in one playthough (there are only enough artifacts to max out 2 stats assuming you don't touch the third at all) and those upgrades affect how your ship looks. For example if you put all your points into hull and engines your fighter will pretty much turn into a corellian corvette bristling with automatic turrets. Trading/Mining. Another idea done half right but ultimately becomes boring and tedious. You see since you play as a fighter rather than hauling things in your miniscule cargo hold you have a series of freight drones that attach to cargo containers and follow you around allowing you to trade even in a fighter. Having containers following you slows your ship down but you can just leave them when attacked deal with the pirates and simply reattach them back to your space choo choo and haul on. Mining works in a similar fashion. Fly up to some asteroid and fire at it till it breaks. it might have a nugget of ore inside. Once you find one (or more) just launch a freight drone at it and done. Combat Starts out hard but in my case things started to get trivial once i upgraded my hull. The automatic turrets do their job admirably and with 5 of them i could just ignore the pirates when hauling cargo and they would die before i reach the station anyway with minimal hull damage at worst. Things are likely harder if you turn your craft into a speedster rather than a battleship. Universe The games weakest point. It's boring and streamlined to the point of nausea. You have 5 races all wearing their hats with pride and portions of the universe are locked untill you do a story mission. Additionally "higher level" sectors contain better weapons.
This game is a lot like C&C however it has a lot of twists and often tackles balance problems differently. For one thing the game rewards you for being humane... as in taking prisoners after a fight rather than killing everyone. This brings me to the games biggest twist. You see there are 3 sources of income: Oil - Self explanatory. Oil pump -> Truck -> Refinery Gold - Stationing infantry in banks (It's a pretty nice feature! Allows turning some buildings into fortresses with the right mix of units) lets you tap into its safes. Prisoners - Capturing a prisoner of war not only gives you a bonus cash injection but with hte right reearch it also steals money from enemies. Additionally a prison fully "staffed" also passively generates income (no i have no idea how it works but i would wager on slave labour). So you get some nice diversity with the economy. What about the combat? It's rock paper scissors but again with a twist. You may remember how many times your tank had to shoot infantrymen in games like Red Alert 2 to kill them each shell delivering scratch damage at best? Well it's not the case here because one shell from an abrams pretty much oneshots every infantry unit... however it can't take many kornet rockets in return. And finally airstrikes ships and artillery. You can't control airplanes directly in this game. You can only send them on strafing runs and select the main point you want them to attack. They will then proceed to the target and drop half of their payload on it. The other half is dumped on other targets of opportunity. All in all aircraft are by fat the most powerful and fragile units in the game if you don't count in ships. The expansion pack is a mixed bag. On one hand it overhauls artillery, balances healing units (they were too powerful) and adds mercenaries along with ships but the expansions campaign is punishingly difficult to put it lightly. It's a pretty original (and good) take on the classic RTS formula.
First of all i'd like to actually call this game a roguelike rather than roguelite since endless mode is... pretty much that. You have your hero an unexplored "dungeon" made out of cards some gear and a limited number of food with your goal baing finding the next flight of stairs repeating untill you die. Death however is not a scenario where you lose everything since during your travels in either story or endless mode you might encounter cards with a token tied to them. By performing a certain action you can aquire said token which in turn transforms into more cards for your deck after you die or kill the boss in story mode. Basically almost every expedition ends up giving you extra cards to encounter in later games... and not all of them are good cards. All in all the card part of the game is a giant boon for eventual future development or DLC since adding new cards should be a relatively simple (and hopefully cheap) affair. The combat itself is... ok considering it was made with a gamepads lack of precision in mind so the character often jumps around in order to hit (especially noticable when attacking after a roll) but its generally responsive enough (you can cancel attack animations by rolling) and the times i fell into a trap when rolling were more due to me misjudging the distance my character rolls or not spotting the trap in the first place. My only real gripe is the camera on some (large) arenas not allowing you to see some enemies. This is fortunately somewhat remedied by on screen indicators that show you attacking enemies giving you enough time to roll or counter. All in all i think the game is one of the better recent releases and something to at least check out if you'd like to see how a merge of CCG, Roguelike and Arkham combat plays out.
At the time of its release it was a pretty amazing title. A fusion of CS, Quake with added vehicles (something very rare in games at that time with "Codename Eagle" being pioneers of having vehicles in mutiplayer and Mobile Forcess perfecting the formula... then the Battlefield series happened and mobile forces became its shadow. And going back to MF... it's a fast paced jumpy shooty classic FPS with vehicles being an important feature. There is one problem tho. it was 13 years ago and games moved. Nowdays there are many better titles if you look for a good FPS with vehicles. Renegade X and Unreal Tournament 2004 for example. Still if its on sale i'd say you should check it out anyway. Who knows it might be a hit at a lan party.
