Wether Mad Max is good or bad depends a lot on how many Ubisoft style of openworld games you've played so far. If it would have been the first I think it would rank as one of the best games you've played but personally I rank it as above average. Still as part of the Mad Max franchise it could have been a lot worse. What I liked is the vehicular combat and like the top reviewer said the convoy take outs are by far the highlight of the game. Though vehicular combat becomes trivial once you unlock the thunderpoons (guided missiles). What I didn't like is the beyond meaningless lootgrab and collect achievements. The only things I liked collecting we're the historic relics, but each base or scavenge area you need to clear of scrap and insignia's and nothing to spend it on anymore. It just drove me to insanity. Something Mad Max does very well is that it has a thick atmosphere of humanity's post apocalyptic descent into barbarism. It did strike a bit too close to home though, with all the going on's in the world at the moment. As such I haven't finished the game, though I think I'm very close to it, because I can only imagine it isn't going to end well.
In this game you play as a secret agent (read one man army) sent by the free world to overthrow the benevolent dictator of a fictionalized archipelago which resembles southeast Asia. You do this by contacting several of the rebellious factions which results in undertaking scripted missions where you have to capture a base or take out a certain target. The rest of JC2 is open ended though and you're free to go and do as you see fit. One aspect, which I like a lot, is that when you're harrased by helicopters you can use your winch and hijack the helicopter. Which makes this game as much about air assault as well as fighting on foot. This dynamic keeps the gameplay going and also serves as a fast means of going anywhere quickly as new targets are always nearby. Talking about the winch, this is probably your main asset as you'll be using it a lot. Apart from the previous mentioned hijacking of helicopters you will also use it to quickly get out of trouble and it turns you basically into a gunwielding Spider-Man. As for the story, what little there is could be better. The DLC however is mostly useless, it consists of cosmetics (meh), weapons and vehicles. But for the DLC weapons you can't pick up ammo, so once depleted you have to drop it in order to make place for one of the stock weapons, for which you can pick up ammo. As of the DLC vehicles, there are just better vehicles in the game already, especially when they're upgraded. One thing I consider a missed opportunity is the use of fighterjets, while they're in the game they are underused. The enemy AI never attacks you with them so there is never the opportunity to have dogfights and for groundstrikes they're simply too fast and helo's will do the job more effectively. I won't detract points/stars for it as it would just make an already great game better. To conclude, this game is loads of fun and if you're like me and you like flying and loads of destruction you won't be dissappointed.
Epic Pinball is boasting 12 tables of which only 1 is good (really good) and that is Super Android. The rest is not even mediocre, just low effort art work, lame music and generally the tables are just boring and uninteresting. On top of that Epic Pinball has performance issues (stutters and screentearing) on normal Dosbox so you are kind of forced to try different Dosbox forks, like Dosbox X or Dosbox Staging, so it doesn't ruin your playing experience. On another note, the Android or Super Android table was always the free demo table of Epic Pinball. There are plenty of websites hosting this demo version, so if it isn't too much hassle to configure a Dosbox fork you get the best and only table worth having there for free.
Redout's speed is so blistering fast I always have the feeling I can barely keep my hoverplane on the track and 34BigThings did a good job on achieving this experience. This reminds me of a quote of a Formula 1 driver, who said: "If you are feeling you are in control you aren't going fast enough." Well in Redout you certainly are going fast enough. The controlscheme remind me of Episode One Racer and I think the game is best played with a twinstick controller because of that, at least that is what I used. In the beginning expect a lot of wallbanging until you become more skilled and get better gear but I consider wallbanging part of the hover racing experience. A minor gripe is that it comes with pre-configured gamepad controls, personally I like to edit my own controller configuration. The graphics look very good, maybe lacking in detail when stationary but when charging over the tracks at near Mach 1, who cares! The music is also very good and more importantly it fits the game, it's not on the same level as WipeOut's DnB soundtrack but hardly anything is so I can't hold that against it. To conclude if you like futuristic hover racers like WipeOut, F-Zero, Star Wars Episode One Racer you will like this.
....and asked if it can have its game back. I can understand there is an appeal for late nineties aesthetics but I will never understand why it had to include broken pathfinding, confusing puzzles and a below mediocre story. Stasis strongest asset is it's atmosphere which if you've played games like System Shock, Dead Space or watched movies like Event Horizon or Pandorum will recognize immediately. Visually it looks okay, it gave me flashbacks especially to Odium (Gorky 17 here) and to a lesser extend Planescape and Fallout. It does strikes me odd they also included all the bad things from that era like the earlier mentioned clunky controls, bad pathfinding and the pixelhunting and downright annoying puzzles. [spoiler] The most dissappointing part is the story however, which seem to rely solely on gore and isolation. While I was hoping it would get good at some point, this has been a very underwhelming story. It wasn't just depressing because of certain events that occur but also of its clichéd narrrative and characters, complete with greys and a mad scientist. I cringed from the idea I had to sift through more poorly written PDA logs for clues. [/spoiler] Stasis is often compared to Sanitarium, while on a surface level that may be true but Sanitarium had a heart and a soul and as such is a far superior (written) game.
Strike Suit Zero sounds it should be my kind of game and I wanted to like it but it's hampered by technical difficulties and questionable gamedesign. First is the controls, if you use a controller you can start right away with rebinding just about every control, because the ones it is shipped with pretty much severely handicap you. This already should ring alarmbells because as a gamedeveloper you thoroughly test your game and is something you must get right out of the box. Conversely I really hate to rebind controls especially if I'm not familiar with the peculiarities of said game, but in this case the default bindings are unworkable. (Hint: rolling really isn't important in a spaceflight game!). Also for some reason SSZ starts in windowed mode while fullscreen mode is specifically enabled in the options, So every time I start the game I have to hassle to get it to play in fullscreen. Another thing is the sound. The music plays really loud while the voices are barely audible, okay this can be overcome quite easily by tweaking the volumes, but still... As for gamedesign, for some reason the developers thought it would be a good idea to tell the story by way of radiomessages. This is really a hollywood thing. Yes you can have some of it but not by this amount, it is highly distracting and actually depreciates replay value as you'll hear those messages over and over again. If you want to play a game where this is done right look at Tie Fighter. To add something positive the Strike Suit mode is actually quite usefull though very limited as you run out of power for it quickly. Also the presentation (cutscenes, music, graphics) are quite nice. I conclude with that flying games like these missions are mostly designed to stress the player out by overloading them with objectives instead of just giving them fun things to do like leisurely blow stuff up while the enemy puts up a decent fight.
