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The game happens parallelly to the first one, telling three different stories that intersect at the end. The good: much better voice acting, character development, greater environment variety, greater mission variety, same great playability. The bad: no boss fights, frequent crashes between missions with the soldier character (just BEFORE your progress is saved, making it all the worse) on my Win 7 64 Ultimate, badly managed secrets (some levels have none, one has two, most have one - and you're never told, so you never know whether you should try that level again to do better), and finally, the end sequence doesn't really feel like "Yeah, I did it!!!" The playtime is about half of the original game - about 10 hours on Impossible difficulty. Still, I loved the game, and if it wasn't so prone to crashing, I'd recommend it to all fans of 3rd person/top-ish-down-ish shooters.
Set on terraformed Ganymede where something's gone wrong, this game totally scratched my action sci-fi B-movie itch. Graphics ranging from very nice to wow (the final environment), great music to go with them, ending that has a few plot holes but still brings a kind of catharsis, and - last but foremost - great playability. The game is well balanced, there's a reasonable variety of weapons, and there are enough bosses/special monsters to avoid repetitiveness. Near the end, a bit of fatigue comes with some less inspired missions (taking down generators is less cool than taking down aliens), but the final fight and the aforementioned ending make up for it. Cons include horrible voice acting (the voicing feels like done by the devs&family to save costs) and a few design flaws (like as soon as you kill a boss, the game loads a new level, so you can't pick up whatever bonuses were dropped on the ground during the fight). But you know what? It doesn't matter much because this is a great shooter. It may not be perfect, but I loved playing it from start to finish, which doesn't happen to me that often.
Classics are always difficult to rate. Should I look at the games through the eyes of the kid I was when I played Double Dragons for the first time? Or from the vantage point of the 30+ years of game development that have passed in the meantime? Or through the glasses of the now more experienced gamer who almost has trouble imagining what was so appealing about the games back then? These games were the pinnacle of beat'em ups in the late 1980s and in 1990 (when DD 3 was released). Today, they serve as a reminder that even though by far not everything in the game industry has changed for the better, the action genre has gone a long and fruitful way. There's no point talking about the graphics and sound because they are limited by the time of their origin (even though I'd say that on the C=64, the music was better than on the arcade) - the biggest issue is the playability anyway. Fighting strategy mostly consists in finding out whether you should keep the enemy at a distance or get as close as possible, sometimes you're doomed no matter what because the random generator just doesn't have its best moment, and I mostly went through each game using just one move that suited me best (fist punch in DD 1, kick in the sequels). The games are repetitive and dull; what saves them partly are a few nice enemies and, well, yes, the memories. When it comes to adventures, some 1990s' games are still best, RPGs have their greats in both the previous and the current millenium, but when it comes to this genre, I'll stick to the more recent games. Don't get me wrong, I still love the Double Dragons, but I just won't play them anymore.
Pharaonic was my first brush with the Dark Souls / Soulslike genre, and I liked it. Setting the game in the ancient Egyptian era is a nice idea and works well to bring in all kinds of monsters. Enemies are always random gender (except for bosses), and you can play for a man or a woman (or even a woman with a male voice and vice versa). The graphics are good (though not really excellent), in cartoon-ish style, yet resisting the temptation to swing in the manga direction. The music isn't bad, but it's utterly forgettable. So it's not visually or audially stunning, but it has very good playability and its difficulty is set right. The fights are tough but fair - you (almost) always have to blame yourself for your countless deaths, which was a new experience to me in comparison with all those games where enemies move and are generated randomly and often you just can't prevent your death by any means. What makes an action game stand out are its bosses - and Pharaonic has a fair amount of them, all of them different and interesting. Throw in a few nice pop-cultural references (Tomb Raider and the Cthulhu mythos spring to mind), and you get an entertaining game that will keep you occupied for tens of hours. I played through the game twice - it took me about 40 hours the first time and maybe 25 the second when I knew how to deal with different kinds of enemies. The second playthrough didn't really differ much style-wise, even though I tried a completely different skill set. This lower variability gave me no motivation to do a third playthrough to get the last possible ending, but I enjoyed the game for those 65 hours. It's not stellar, but it's very, very solid.
2D action cyberpunk adventure with RPG elements? Sounds like the regular eclectic nonsense that developers are usually trying to have something to talk about and differentiate their game from the rest. But in this case, it all blends well and is used to tell a great story. The graphics are stylish, consistent, and varied enough to keep your eyes interested throughout the game. This is how I would imagine the world of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (which was obviously a big source of inspiration for Dex, maybe together with Effinger's Budayeen cycle and a bit of Matrix for a better taste). Paradoxically, I liked the ingame graphics better than the static pictures used for storytelling in places where AAA titles have movie scenes. The soundtrack is superb. Even during the less original missions, the game never became boring because of the wonderful music. And now the best news: story is king, erm, I mean CEO, as cyberpunk worlds are always ruled by megacorporations. It's interesting, it's captivating, and it has a satisfying conclusion. I don't think it has ever happened to me before that I shed a few tears for the villain. Or maybe let's put it this way: I have a backlog of around 500 games just on GOG, and I intend to play them all (well, most of them at least), but Dex is still a game I will definitely want to play again.
Firewatch as a whole isn't a bad game, not at all. But its shortcomings sit in the most crucial areas - gameplay and story. Especially the ending, which smashed my impression from the game from solid four stars down to three. Pros: The semi-comics style of the graphics is consistent and succeeds at creating a captivating atmosphere. Lighting is the key, providing different moods from sunrise to midnight. And as more fires break out in the woods, the air goes grey with smoke. Where the game really excels is the sound department. The voice actors are good and their dialogues well written. The music is just wonderful. It's the proverbial soundtrack that will outlast the work it accompanies. I've already uninstalled the game, but I'm going to buy the OST and keep it in my music player for some months. And now the cons: Unfortunately, the game doesn't reward exploration - no easter eggs or interesting events if you leave the strictly linear path the authors have prepared for you. If you try to just roam, you can get confused, as sometimes you pass by a group of trees, and a few game days later there's a passage to another game area, without any ingame reason why the map had changed. Also, there are bits which look like a puzzle, achievement or easter egg, but in fact aren't either. For example, there are 10 mystery books scattered all around the forest, and if you collect them all... nothing happens. The most problematic part, though, is the story. Evil corporations, corrupted governments, and secret societies with sinister agenda are fine. Deeply humane, moving stories are fine too. Firewatch could have been either, but instead, it builds the story - and very well! - along one line and then tries to hop to the other one. It doesn't work. If you prepare the players for an epic climax, you shouldn't serve them an intimate heartwrencher. The kind of ending the authors went for would have required a different story to tell before. This way, it felt just unsatisfactory.