Even grading on the curve of being a cheap indy game, this isn't a very good game. I found the story to be muddled and confused... and the story is the highlight. The visuals are intended to be strange and stylized but just come off as bad and make you wonder if the person who is drawing them has ever seen another person in real life. The voice acting is rough, and the recording is poor quality with boomy mics, uneven levels, loud plosives and so on. The gameplay itself harkens back to the old days of adventure games but in a bad way: You have to run around trying to use various items on various things until you happen upon the right combination to progress. I really can't recommend this game to anyone.
Maybe this game gets good later, but I couldn't say because I just couldn't take any more of it. The premise is nice, something like Evoland but with a more detailed game. Rather than a linear progression of unlocking game types it looks to move you around a bit and be more narrative driven. The narrative is ok, a mix of serious and goofy with various references to it being a game and so on. However the thing is just a slog fest. You keep doing the same crap over and over, and what you do isn't much fun. I finally just got fed up of dealing with the garbage "mini-game" type things it kept throwing your way and had enough and uninstalled it. In my opinion, a game needs to be pulling you in by, at most, a couple hours in to the game. If they haven't got the premise established well enough by that point and got on to the fun stuff, they are doing it wrong. Evoland 2 still seemed to be faffing around and not going anywhere. It lacks the amusement/charm of the first one and is more or less just a bad mashup of old console games. Save yourself the money, and just go play some good old console games instead.
Unlike most of the recent space sim/shooty games out there which seem to be very complex and practically require a master's degree to get in to, this game is just good, simple fun. It is not hugely deep, you do the same sorts of thing over and over (fly to point A, kill enemy B, grab object C, etc) but you have a lot of fun doing it. The controls are great and the barrier for entry is really low. You can just start playing with little to no trouble. This is also aided by the naval style broadside combat and the restriction of the game to a 2D plane. It doesn't require the reflexes or timing of many more traditional shooter based games. Navigation is simple, combat is pretty simple, etc. I highly recommend getting this, I don't think you'll be sorry. It is extremely satisfying to play.
Syndicate Wars was a game I enjoyed back in the day. I remember I had to go over to a friend's house to play it, my PC was too slow and he had a a brand new, absolutely "screaming fast" Pentium MMX 166MHz that ran it well. So I was looking forward to replaying it. Sadly, this proves to only be frustrating. The game runs well in DOSBox, particularly if you replace DOS/4GW with DOS/32A but it has mouse issues. Randomly the mouse will become stuck to one side of the screen, rendering your game unplayable. Since there's no way to save or the like without the mouse, you have to scrap what you were doing and start over. It happens pretty often too, so it really makes finishing a mission hard. Because of the problems it is just not worth your money. It is either a bug in the game code itself, related to new systems, or DOSBox and either way not something that is likely to get fixed. So I'd give it a miss, you are likely to just be frustrated.
I Kickstarted Shadowrun Returns and waited impatiently while it was developed. When it launched I was satisfied, but not delighted. It was a good game and I was not unhappy I had funded it, but the story failed to grip me. Reviews were in the 70s and I felt that was about right. Then, Dragonfall happened and I wasn't delighted, but ecstatic. This is an AMAZING game. All that was good with the original was kept and improved, but this time around the story was first rate. I kept playing and playing longer than intended just to see what happened next. Here I disagree with reviews as they were 80s, and I'd say this game is a 90 minimum. I was one of many who encouraged HBS to release it as standalone, because I felt that if someone were to buy in to Shadowrun, this would be the campaign to do it on. Well they listened, and here it is. If you like RPGs, you owe it to yourself to own this one. The story is top notch, the art style is gorgeous, the music is superb, and the mechanics are solid. I cannot recommend it enough.
Rogue legacy is an interesting tried again, but ultimately not one worth buying. It's not horrible, but really not that great. Let's start off with a good: the game looks quite nice, the graphics are well put together particularly for an indie. The music and sound are also quite good. However the ultimate problem is gameplay, specifically difficulty. For some reason nearly all games that consider themselves to be "rogue like" think that means that they need to be really hard. Difficulty is not what makes a title like rogue interesting, rather it is the randomly generated world. It is having a different play through experience time and time again. Rogue legacy tries to make things easier what with generation system but ultimately it fails. The problem is that the learning curve is extremely steep, and you don't really get to carry anything over unless you do fairly well. So if you're having trouble initially, and keep dying, that's pretty much going to continue because you don't get to keep anything to build more power. It's a neat idea but the developers have fallen victim to the idea that more challenge equals a more "hard-core" game and thus is better. Challenge in games exist to make them interesting, not for its own sake, and rogue legacy does not seem to understand that. So I would recommend you save your money, and choose a different game of this type.
