I bought Ion Fury during the "shampoo bottle" controversy---and am very happy to have done so. The premises are all there: BUILD engine, a female protagonist who could be Duke Nukem's sister, big bad weapons (the three-barreled revolver Loverboy is iconic) and LOTS of enemies. The result is a hilariously frantic, and frantically hilarious, game packed with action and disseminated with secrets to discover. The Linux version is a most welcome addition. With so many modern FPS sporting hyper-detailed graphics and alien-like artificial intelligence, this is one which is _enjoyable_ to play. In a sense, it is a return to the origins---and a great one at that.
The Fall is a short adventure game, with some combat scenes, and several grim moments. The lengths the characters, all of them robotic or artificial intelligences, go to fulfill their perceived mission are disquietingly similar to human behavior. These are all the premises for a great game. However, the result is no more than good, as it seems to have been left not only barebone, but also unpolished. For instance, actions that cannot be performed are only signaled by an uninformative "I cannot", more worthy of an amateurish one-man piece of interactive fiction than of a modern game developed by a team and funded on Kickstarter. In addition, controls are a bit flimsy: in particular, drawing the gun often has the character face away from its original direction! Finally, the story is definitely short, and notwithstanding the previously mentioned grim moments, a bit cliché. Summarizing: a good start, but we expect much more efforts from the next episodes.
I remember first playing Torchlight while waiting for Diablo 3, lured by the game's developers coming from Blizzard. And I was well rewarded indeed! This is not a Diablo clone: this is truly another Diablo, in its streamlined story, imagination in the design of character of monsters, and intuitiveness of gameplay. But the Runic Games gem has one feature to tell it apart from Diablo: it is COLORFUL. As the dungeons in Blizzard's masterwork are grim and moisty, the ones under the mining town of Torchlight sparkle with lights and spring with life (ok, such life is as beautiful as it is deadly, but that's the point of the game). Because of this, I actually enjoyed playing Torchlight more than I enjoyed playing Diablo. The only real flaw, is the lack of a networked multiplayer: which means that you have to invite friends at your place and take turns managing the characters---just like it used to be when we were kids :) A must have for all adventurers.
