A complete waste of time due to the horribly written and cliched story and nonexistent gameplay. Telltale successfully captured the comic: The comic was boring, inane shit with no point, the most vapid and poorly written example of a genre that has become completely repetitive and tiresome, and the story in this game is just like it. Every character is a dull, cliched mess who babbles incessantly about the most boring topics, the story is predictable as hell, none of your choices make a significant difference and there is no subtlety or deeper meaning. Gameplay is virtually nonexistent: Instead of the puzzles of an adventure game or the combat of a zombie game, you get Quick Time Events and button mashing, basically parlor tricks instead of skills. This has no more gameplay than Night Trap or Dragon's Lair, and even if you somehow enjoy the vapid story the complete lack of interaction will ruin your interest in the games. This game is almost as bad and as inane as The Last of Us 2, and Telltale deserved to die.
Wisdom Tree, first known as Color Dreams was a horribly incompetent, stupid, amoral company that had to illegally sell unlicensed because Nintendo refused to give it permission to sell its shitty games on the NES or SNES. Its games were defined by horrible control, level design, bugs, and balance. Consumers eventually realized that its games were completely unplayable and refused to buy them, so the company claimed to be Christian and changed its name to lure in religious fanatics. This is arguably the worst example, a blatant ripoff of Wolfenstein 3D that removes all that makes it fun, turning it into a joyless slog through a bland, boring environment. This game is slower, harder to control, censored and far more repetitive than the classic it so blatantly plagiarizes. My favorite retro systemwould be the SNES if not for the NES, so I know there are hundreds of far superior games. GOG, you clearly have some agreements with Lucasarts and Capcom so why not port SNES classics like Super Ghouls and Ghosts, Demon's Crest, Knights of the Round, King of Dragons, X-Men Mutant Apocalypse, War of the Gems, Aladdin, Mega Man X 1 and 2-- fuck 3--Street Fighter 2, U.N. Squadron, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Super Star Wars or Indiana Jones Trilogy? Why are you taking a treasure trove and fishing a piece of shit out of it?
Dull, pointless game with endless wandering that goes nowhere. You can only do two things in this game: Solve the puzzle over and over again and fight ridiculously easy enemies. I set the combat difficulty to the highest point and still only died a few times. Its story is just a rambling, nonsensical diatribe about Norse mythology that is ultimately pointless because everything is in Senua's head. It appears to have an interesting style at first, but then you realize that everything is a pile of rocks with occasional blotches of color. This is a bad game.
A hilarious adventure game, the best outside of Sierra and Steve Meretsky and a great example of how humor and imagination can liven up a game. It is filled with clever puzzles, hilarious jokes, colorful settings, weird characters, plot twists, and a great sense of adventure and mystery. Players are treated with respect: No hand-holding, no flashing messages showing you everything--all is left for you to discover. Almost everything in this game is perfect: There are a few times where the characters move too slowly, but otherwise, this is a near-perfect masterpiece. I know that the Super Star Wars series and Zombies Ate My Neighbors are console games, but is there any hope of getting them here? They really are excellent games that P.C. gamers should be able to experience.
Wasteland 2 is moderately entertaining, though it eventually gets really tedious, but it lacks substance, style and variety. It introduces a combat system that seems complex at first, but then you realize that no tactics are involved: All you have to do is shoot the enemies with the biggest gun and hope to win by attrition. You can move your characters, which is the only thing you can do besides shoot, but you need action points to beat the enemies before they kill you, so that is not a good idea. Poor combat could be ignored if the game had an interesting story or set of quests, but Wasteland 2 is completely pointless. Mot of the quests are inane tasks like finding dogs and fetching items, and the quests become even less interesting as the game continues. Wasteland 2 has no story, villain or point until the end, where an incredibly, technophobic plot twists is introduced moments before the final boss. Imagination: Nope, sorry, all the settings, enemies, characters and quests are bland and uninteresting. This is the most generic of post-apocalyptic worlds:: One, I realized in retrospect, was a copy of a faction in Fallout 3--but the other, a disco robot that distracted me with blinding psychedelic lights, was legitimately clever. One original idea in a 70 hour game: Wonderful. Crippling bugs and design flaws: Objects blocked my view half the time, my characters threw away their clothes, my sniper forgot how to load her best sniper rifle, the game crashed repeatedly, half the loading screens triggered error messages, the scripting broke, the probability of accomplishing skill checks on specific objects was inconsistent, items disappeared, enemies came back to life after I restored saved games--this game was a mess. Hint: Do not save over an autosave or a timed save with dead enemies around, as the enemies may return to life upon restoring the game.
Gemini Rue is efficient and workmanlike, but nothing more than that. Let me compare this empty shell to a good adventure game I played recently: Professor Layton versus Phoenix Wright. Professor Layton versus Phoenix Wright is an imaginative game: The premise is that the characters are thrown into a medieval world of witches and inquisitors, where magic is commonplace, even though they come from the modern world. Seeing Phoenix Wright, a lawyer become acclimated to life and the legal system in such a world is interesting, and it makes the experience feel fresh. Gemini Rue’s world is bland, mostly focusing on two areas. One of those areas is a dull, featureless facility. Its other setting is a e futuristic Noir city, which quickly turns out to be pretty bland: Everything looks like a modern city, with only a tiny scrap of future technology, and very few items can be manipulated. Both parts of Professor Layton versus Phoenix Wright are satisfying, and though the two sometimes intersect, neither feels repetitive: They require thought and versatility. Gemini Rue has two different characters, but only one is interesting to play: The other is stuck in a dull facility where he spends most of his time performing the same actions, riding elevators, performing boring tests and failing to develop a personality. Professor Layton versus Phoenix Wright has good puzzles and humor: A variety of eccentric characters, classic puzzles, and court cases create colorful gameplay for the players. Professor Layton is a puzzle solver, and there are dozens of brain teasers for he and the other characters to solve, some of which are tricky. Sometimes poor writing makes the instructions confusing, but the puzzles are usually explained well. Court cases also function like puzzles, and though sometimes logical solutions are incorrect, they are gripping and exciting. Gemini Rue’s puzzles are ridiculously simplistic: I never needed more than a few minutes to solve any of them, and when I did, I felt little satisfaction since the solutions tended to be incredibly obvious. Pacing is the one area in which Gemini Rue succeeds: Professor Layton versus Phoenix Wright tends to have overlong chapters, sometimes requires the player to scroll through long dialogue sequences that he already saw after failing, and can repetitive after a long session.
This ridiculous excuse for a game is a complete mess with a horribly written story and no gameplay. All you do is click everything hoping to find the invisible objects, then use them on the one place available. This is supposed to be an adventure game, but there are no puzzles. What about the story? You go into a man's mind to give him one last happy memory before he dies,that is the entire thing. All the characters, even the ones who are supposed to be genius scientist, act like children and are quite annoying. You explore dream worlds, but there is no dream imagery: The settings make Inception look like Super Mario Brothers 2. Plot holes: Your client married an autistic woman whom he was encouraged to meet by his friend. This opens up many flaws in the story: His friend supports the relationship, opposes it , and then supports it again. This inconsistency is never explained or developers, it just sits there, a roadblock to coherence. He gets upset when he finds out that his wife has Autism. This fails for so many reasons: He knew about her autistic behavior, this just gave a name to her condition; her disease never affects their relationship, which seems to be perfect. Nothing in the story would have changed if she was neurotypical. A broken lighthouse is a constant throughout the story, and it never gets fixed. It symbolizes nothing, affects nothing, serves no purpose to the story and is completely pointless. It might have been a very awkward and poorly designed metaphor for their relationship, except that their relationship is perfect so it makes no sense in that context. Eventually, the characters travel through time. Time travel works in a story if it allows the viewer to see things from a new perspective and gain information not present in other times, but no, the only thing learned is that the client is named after his dead brother. Another pointless part. This game is shit, and belongs on the scrapheap of history with Ultima 8.
Ultima was a complex series of role-playing games, but it suffered from the awkward interfaces and navigation that were common in its time. Ultima 7 improved upon those flaws, and though it was still problematic, it succeeded as an epic adventure in a large, detailed world. Ultima 8 was a rushed pile of worthless bullshit that crushed all the style and value of the series, leaving only the crippling. Ultima's role-playing is gone: The character is no longer the greatest symbol of goodness and virtue, he has become a genocidal sociopath who destroys everything in his path and cares naught about anyone else. You have no choice but to follow the commands of all the irritating characters in this stupid, featureless world, one filled with empty space and confusing wastelands. Players no longer search for curiosity's sake, but because they have no idea where to go or what to do until they stumble upon the right cave. Virtue is irrelevant, as the Avatar must be pure evil. Ultima 8 is not even consistent: Commit crimes most of the time, and you will be killed--but under certain circumstances, you must kill and steal from innocent men. Have fun trying to figure out the difference. Controls, jumping, combat, perspective: All are terrible. Electronic Arts forced Origin to turn this into an action game, but the great combat of Wing Commander and Crusader bear no resemblance to this shit. Jumping puzzles appear throughout the game, but you never get a clear indication of where you are jumping, the position of the target relative to the character, or the length of the jump. One can easily spend hours on a single jumping puzzle. Fighting suffers all the same problems, and involves nothing more than blindly clicking on the enemies, only slightly less tedious and frustating than Diablo. It was compared to Super Mario Brothers, but Mario is defined by its steady controls; clear situational awareness; exciting action sequences; imaginative settings and enemies; and clearly defined objectives, none of which are present in this game. Ultima 8's magic system is a mess: The worst example is a type of magic that requires the player to place items in very specific spots throughout pentagrams, leading to endless frustrations and confusion. This has to be repeated many times to complete one training sequence, one of the many pointless, tedious, extraneous sequences that destroy the pacing. Never play this game. Electronic Arts destroyed Origin, and if its executives get one cent from this game, they should be declared thieves and suffer horrible punishments. Rating: negative googleplex stars out of infinity
