This remaster was treated with so much love and care. It was put in good hands and they delivered. Everything about this is great. Rise of the Triad is a goofy game you are sure to have plenty of fun with. And it has a map editor so you can make your own maps once you finish all the pre-made episodes.
Any game that punishes you for not being perfect at it from the second you start playing is a bad game and the developers should feel bad. There is a special place in the deepest darkest pits of Hell for anyone who creates an experience that is intentionally designed to frustrate the user.
The original Fallout is one of the greatest games ever developed. A classless CRPG where you can do whatever you want with your character. You can pick one of three pre-made characters, but don't do that. Make your own. The game has a fantastic story with the best villain in the entire series. The environments are appropriately bleak and depressing. The world is dangerous. The combat is turn-based and tactical. There are no 'go exactly here' quest arrows. You have to pay attention to what people are telling you and work your own shit out. Play Fallout.
The sequel to the original Fallout (which is fantastic, by the way) this is quite possibly the best installment of the Fallout franchise. It still has the strategic isometric turn-based combat, and not much has changed from the original in terms of the controls department. It's still gloriously simple, but be warned that if you're not particularly high in Strength with either a decent unarmed or melee skill, you're gonna have a bad time in the beginning. An extremely rich storyline, hours upon hours of complex gameplay, and a talking Deathclaw in your party.
This is the game that got me into Dungeons & Dragons, and in turn tabletop gaming as a whole. I loved this game back in the day, and I still love it just as much, but I do have some issues. The writing is top-notch. Probably the second-best out of all of the Infinity Engine games (the best being Planescape: Torment). Every character, even the annoying ones, are very well written (at least in the original game). A lot of the areas on the map are just empty. It's a slog to go through an unnamed map area in the hopes of finding anything interesting (and sometimes you do, which is why you do it) to have to walk all over the area to remove the fog of war and then move on to the next area to do the same. They fixed this in later Infinity Engine games, which I'm grateful for. Real-time with pause is a BAD mechanic and they never should've went with it. Combat happens in real-time...sort of. Initiative order is still there, so in a way it's still turn-based, but discerning whose turn it is and who's next is I'm pretty sure not even possible, so it makes tactical play irrelevant. Your combat encounters will rely 100% on RNG. This Enhanced Edition even has some really great new improvements on the original, but it also has a handful of new characters and some locations, not all of which are on par with the quality of the original game. But a few badly written parts in the Enhanced Edition doesn't take away from the greatness that is the rest of the game. If you're even a little bit of a D&D fan, or even if you're just wondering what D&D is all about, then play this. Especially with 3 coming out soon.
Saints Row 2 is the only game in existence where you can get both high and drunk, dress up in a hot dog suit, and then go four-wheeling in a mall, all at the same time, for absolutely no reason. 10/10. But the PC port is...well it's bad. It likes to crash, there's a weird bug where sometimes it will run WAY faster than it should, models and textures are bugged...it's bad. Also I don't care for the art direction in this one and much prefer 1's art direction.
A perfect dark fantasy game by a great developer using an engine that makes for some of the best RPG gameplay you'll ever experience.
Doom 3 takes the Half-Life approach to the game. You are Generic Marine Guy (not to be confused with Doomguy who is much cooler) who just got transferred to the UAC base on Mars for...reasons, I guess. You arrive with a couple UAC higher-ups who are there to talk to Mr. Obvious Bad Guy about him being an obvious bad guy. Your first assignment is to find a missing scientist (not Mr. Obvious Bad Guy) and as soon as you do, the invasion starts. From there, you get from level to level finding new weapons and uncovering more of the basic plot through PDAs you find, which act as keys as well as pre-recorded audio logs and email logs. Doom 3 has the best Hell levels of any Doom game, and it's just a shame they were all so short. Play the regular game or the BFG Edition, they're both perfectly fine. Play the regular game if you're going for more of a "horror" vibe, play the BFG Edition if action is more your jam.
Mediocre at best. ZERO customization (unless you buy the pack that lets you have purple wings, whoopdefriggindoo), all shops have been replaced by a vending machine which only lets you buy/upgrade your weapons. The weapons are mostly average accept for the armchair, which is pretty decent. I really only ever found the stomp power useful, the rest I barely touched. The map is fairly small, the activities are sub-par, the musical number gave me a headache, and the whole watered down story is told through a storybook style narration. Six different endings, so that's cool I suppose, it's the only thing that adds any form of replay value to the game. You DO get to shoot Satan in the face, so there's that. I'd pass on this one unless you can get it on a BIG sale.
Shadowrun Returns is the first good Shadowrun game to see the light of day since Shadowrun on the SNES in 1993. For those who have no idea, Shadowrun is based off of a cyberpunk/fantasy tabletop RPG set on Earth in the year 2050-something, where magic has returned to the world and elves, dwarves, orcs, and trolls (not the 13-year-old Call of Duty player kind) exist. In Shadowrun Returns, you run through the streets of Seattle to investigate the murder of an old friend/fellow runner, uncovering a massive conspiracy along the way. Character creation options include your average warrior types, mage types, Riggers (who control drones) and Deckers (who are basically glorified computer hackers). It's a fantastic entry into the Shadowrun universe if you've never played the tabletop game, or even if you have. The combat is turn-based (sort of X-COM style), and in some areas later in the game this can get annoying as the game will force you to be in combat mode even when there are no enemies. The game is also pretty short; I think my first playthrough took about 10 hours, and that was going through and talking to everyone possible and doing every possible side job. That said there is a degree of replay value as there are a lot of different character types and trying them all out is just fun. Sure, Dragonfall and Hong Kong make better use of the game engine and the mechanics, but this is still a solid game that is definitely worth playing.
