BloodRayne 2 has a lot going for it, too much even. You get to keep your abilities from the first game and you earn new, stronger ones, as you progress. The base game is hard, but not unbeatable. While you will cut through regular enemies like butter, the stronger ones will often have you running around them with dilated perception on, waiting for an opening to sucker-punch them and jump away (or I’m just bad). You can get your revenge in New Game + mode, where you retain your health, abilities, and gun progress. Maxing out the gun experience is tedious due to certain limitations of gaining it. It’s an unnecessary RPG element that should’ve been removed, or at least made easier and/or quicker to get. To be fair, it’s a completionist nitpick, it barely affects the game. The story is easily the strongest one in the series. While it technically continues the final narration of BloodRayne 1, it has virtually no other connection to it. There’s very little exposition though, and you’ll probably wrap your head around it better on your second playthrough. Still, it redeems the gameplay, which is a little more complex than it needed to be.
BloodRayne 1 is one of my all-time favorite games. It’s unapologetic unadulterated gorefest of pure joy, one that has a solid story and memorable characters: you will be playing as Rayne – a half-vampire working for a secret society, trying to stop the mid-20-century Nazis from getting their hands on powerful occult artifacts. In terms of gameplay BloodRayne is an action shooter without any annoying crafting, leveling, or collectibles – you will mostly be killing people - with your blades, guns you find or pick up off dead enemies, and by sucking their blood, which is also how you restore health. Now, unlike in many other games where you play as a vampire, you don’t have to weaken them first – no one will stop you from killing the absolute majority of your humanoid foes by jumping from one enemy to the next and sucking them dry. It won’t work on every enemy, though, and it’s anyway more fun to gun them down or cut them into pieces too. And boy, can you cut them! You won’t believe until you see just in how many ways you can dismember your human opponents. You can chop off their hands, arms, legs, heads, parts thereof, slice off the upper part of their torso… it never gets old! You also have a couple of useful special abilities, and other than Blood Rage none of them are tied to any meter – you can use them as much as you want! BloodRayne has a few platforming sections, but those sections are VERY generous, and are there more for fun and to make levels more interesting, rather than for added difficulty. Speaking of which, difficulty-wise BloodRayne is simply ingenious: in the beginning you feel like an unkillable monster, but then the game slowly gets harder. That way you get to have both a lot of fun with your vampiric abilities at the start and some challenge later on. By all means get this game – you will have hell of a good time and never regret it!!
BloodRayne: Betrayal is a departure from the style of the original two games, as it is a 2D anime-styled hack-and-slash game, whose events seem to be taking place in an alternate timeline. And even though we can deduct this much, the nature of said events is very vague. The story has a lot of gaps we seem to be supposed to fill in with our imagination. Oh well, BloodRayne 2 sort of did it too. The controls in this game are not perfect, but can be made to work. They can be remapped (which I did right away), but you aren’t allowed to use mouse buttons, or even such keys as control and shift. I ended up keeping the arrow keys for movement and mapping the rest onto the numpad. That scheme got me through the game and its toughest achievements. Once you deal with the controls one way or another, you’ll see that the platforming is quite fun, the combat is enjoyable (thankfully, there are no unnecessarily complex combos), and with reasonable determination you will eventually find all the skulls by yourself. The fast-paced action is beautifully complemented by the killer soundtrack. Honestly, the music is so very fitting and badass that even I noticed. The updated Fresh Bites version adds a rebalanced difficulty and the original voice actors. I’d say both are very welcome additions. BloodRayne Betrayal is, probably, as approachable as a hack-and-slash title can get. Still, it’s not as fun as the two original games, and the new vague and less eventful story isn’t doing it any favors either. It feels like a well-done fanfiction.
Platformers-collectathons are my absolute favorite video game genre. I grew up playing Spyro, Croc, Ape Escape, and Rayman on my PS1. New Super Lucky’s Tale has all the makings of a great platformer, but sadly it’s missing one of the core elements, which is a deal-breaker for me. First, let’s give the game credit, where it’s due. Lucky’s Tale has collectible tracking – you know exactly what you have to find in each level. Among these things are coins, which are available in surplus – you only need to collect 300 in each level, but there’s always more, so there’s no pressure. There are several hub-worlds, each populated by different peoples, hosting several levels and an actual proper boss encounter. The levels are exceptionally well-designed from the technical standpoint – they’re diverse, fun to explore and play around in. The general art-style and scenery are an eyecandy. The controls are fluid and responsive (even the arrow keys-controlled camera). The weak part of the game is its story. It starts strong with an intro creating a sense of urgency and showing that the stakes are high, but then it’s immediately mismatched with brain-numbingly childish dialog of both side (with few exceptions) and main characters. There’s never any real enmity - your main nemeses, the Kitty Litter, are anything from friendly “rivals” to actually useful members of society (I’m looking at you, Tess). Aside from the final boss, only one of them actually qualifies as a troublemaker (arguably more but the other boss is too stupid to be considered a threat) - and you still get to casually chat with her in the hub world. The whole thing feels too tame, if you know what I mean. Maybe it just didn’t click with me, but if I’d known better, I wouldn’t have bought this game. I want the events in my games to have at least a bit more depth and consistency. Still, if you don’t care about such plot intricacies that much, and are a fan of the genre – chances are you’ll love it.
F.E.A.R. 2 introduces a couple of changes (which luckily don’t include regenerating HP) to the gameplay formula of the original game. Most of them work well, like the ability to control Elite Power Armor units, most of new guns are fun. The game now tracks your collectibles (which are once again storytelling messages and reflex boosters). I don’t know how it’s possible, but I managed to find them all without a guide in one playthrough. If I could do it, so can you. Props to the devs for not making it a pain to find them. A couple of enemies have undergone cosmetic redesign, the nightmares, in particular, have become far less creepy, IMO. There is an in-game achievement system, the Awards (the DLC ones are more like challenges even). I completed the game twice, and enjoyed it immensely more the second time – when I didn’t have to worry about either the awards or the collectibles. While you can’t save anywhere anymore and have to use checkpoints, the base game feels easier than the first one. The DLC, on the other hand, is very well-balanced – it manages to be satisfyingly difficult without being too tough. Think what you will of the gameplay changes, but you can’t deny the story and the worldbuilding F.E.A.R. 2 does. Right from the get-go you get to meet Genevieve Aristide. Apparently, she doesn’t call all the shots by herself at Armacham, but answers to the Board. You’ll meet the head of the Armacham clean-up squad, who will be pursuing you throughout the game. You will learn more about secret projects of Armacham, and not just the ones you’re familiar from the first game. And then there’s one of the coolest friendly NPCs I’ve ever met, whom I won’t spoil. And of course the poor Alma, whose story is once again not a conversation topic for a family dinner, even more so this time. The events of F.E.A.R. 2 and its DLC set up the final part of this definitive FPS trilogy.
What makes Alternate DiMansion Diary stand out is that it’s neither yet another RPG-maker game set in a fantasy world, nor a visual novel. It’s an interesting erotic puzzle adventure, where you have to locate various items and figure out how to use them to solve puzzles and advance further. I don’t frequent puzzle adventures, but I’ve been able to solve all but one puzzle without outside help. Maybe if I had given it more time, I might’ve figured it out – it didn’t turn out to be out-of-this-world difficult or illogical. What I’m saying is that the puzzles do make sense and solving them is not frustrating. As you progress there’ll be a handful of h-scenes involving the main heroine, but really the main bulk of them is found in the aftergame, along with the story, explaining the mansion. So it’s a reward of sorts. Overall it’s rather enjoyable and not too long.
INSIDE is a puzzle-platformer with a minimalistic dark story. Throughout the game, not a single word is spoken, but you will still be able to understand the events and their meaning by the end, especially if you discover all the game's secrets. When it comes to the gameplay, there are no levels, bosses, or even a health system – it’s just you and the puzzles. Make one mistake and you're either dead or have to start the puzzle over. Dying immediately puts you back at the last checkpoint, so it’s as unfrustrating as dying in video games gets. The difficulty of the puzzles is fair – you won’t solve every single one of them right away, but once you stop and think a little, you’ll eventually get them all without any walkthroughs. The secrets, on the other hand, are rather difficult to find without a guide. By all means grab this game if you’re into platformers – it’s a few hours of joy you won’t regret.
General Impressions This is a whole new genre and absolute masterpiece of a game. The introduction lays it all out as it is – you get to SilentHillify your favorite childhood fairytales! The appropriately cartoonish visual style is a veritable eyecandy that cleverly camouflages the plentiful gratuitous violence. I’m positive this is one of the goriest games in existence!!! Certain scenes put Agony, Clive Barker’s Jericho, and Mortal Kombat to shame! I’m talking people maimed, dismembered, burned, tortured, gored, squashed, eviscerated, poisoned, shot, stabbed, have their eyes gouged out… you name it. Each episode, the ever so eloquent bum of a narrator upgrades them tales to rating R, while cracking up hilarious jokes every step of the way. The last episode is especially graphic, long, imaginative, and does serve as something of a conclusion. Technical Issues The game does have a couple of minor bugs. Most notably, you sometimes can get stuck and there is no way to kill yourself, so you’ll have to restart the chapter. Sometimes fiddling with your mouse, mashing the WASD buttons, or waiting a few minutes (if you’re stuck falling) can get you out of this situation, but don’t expect it to help every time. The other minor issue is that the sound of you pee will persist if you were peeing when a cutscene started and sometimes under other various circumstances where you don’t stop the process yourself by starting to move. This can get annoying but again is easily rectified by staying in place and starting to pee again, then starting to move to stop the peeing. INI files They are located in the *episode*\GrimmGame\Config folder and are quite useful. GrimmSetting.ini is your save file for the current episode. The values required to get awards can be found in GrimmStats.ini. (I had to cheat with the darkness in the last chapter of the Golden Goose episode to get the star, either it’s bugged, or I’m stupid). May all our games play so well… until next time.
Limbo is a near perfect puzzle platformer that chooses to be minimalistic with its story. It’s very beautiful and atmospheric. The controls are fluid and responsive. The entire game can be completed in less than ten hours, which is a big plus in my books. One small nitpick from the completionist in me are the collectible eggs. Some of them are hard to find without a guide and there is no indication as to where the missing ones are located. However, the game has a stupidly convenient checkpoint system, which allows you at any point to easily warp to any previous location and get the ones you didn’t find. There’s also a lot of misinformation on the internet regarding the last, eleventh egg. There is no need to complete the game without dying to get it, but you do need to have found the first ten. Do pick up this game If you’re a fan of the genre, but if you're an arachnophobe, you might want to pass on it.
Of the big three roguelikes I know (the other two being The Binding of Isaac and Spelunky) Rogue Legacy is probably the shortest and most accessible one. Weirdly enough, it is a traditional RPG in terms of its mechanics: if you had experience and knowledge of the game you could probably beat Castle Hamson (the first area) right off the bat, but then you would definitely have to level up to go further. The fighting is done well and feels fair – at no point do you feel like you have to be a world-class speedrunner to dodge enemies and their projectiles, but it’s not a walk in the park either. The neat part is that once you have upgraded your stats and armor, the first area (and later on the subsequent areas too) becomes child’s play to the point that you will routinely effortlessly and carelessly breeze through it… which is then rectified by the difficulty increasing NG+ mechanic. The best part about it is that you’re in control – until you beat the final boss the enemies won’t level up (something I definitely took advantage of). Being what it is Rogue Legacy is probably a tad too grindy, but I wouldn’t say it overstays its welcome, and once you get the hang of it, clearing the castle with your more powerful descendants will keep you entertained.
