As others have pointed out, Gone Home only takes a maximum of two hours to complete 100%, and much less to speedrun. Its excuse is that it's an experience, rather than a game. But like all games of its ilk, that excuse is hard to swallow. I want the best of both worlds - a game that is fun to play, and is also an experience (Beyond Good & Evil). Sadly the gameplay in Gone Home is very basic, and all you really have to do is pick up scraps of paper thrown around the different rooms. You can interact with other objects, but why bother. And through these scraps of paper you start to learn the story behind this empty house - a story that seems half baked, and isn't very interesting. But you don't really need to concern yourself with the plot. If you're intrigued, great. If not, you needn't bother - you can collect those scraps of paper without having to read them, making the game last a little over an hour. And that's considering you interact with everything you can in each room. Gone Home is such a thin & basic game, people seem to have completed it 100% in under ten minutes.
BIT.TRIP Flux is basically one of those one-sided Pong games, for lack of a better phrase. You move a paddle around while objects come flying at you, and you need to hit them. Not very exciting, but hitting those objects enhances the music playing in the background, and missing them serves as a scratch on a record. Sadly, the music in BIT.TRIP Flux is so generic and repetitive, it didn't matter whether I succeeded or not - it still sounded the same. And since I didn't like the music, I had no incentive to try to play a perfect game. With the type of music on display, missing a note or two didn't produce much of an effect. I only kept playing because the game seemed adamant on not letting me fail. Not trying very hard and not succeeding very well, I reached the second boss before getting bored, only to realize I've been playing on easy this entire time. Switching the difficulty to normal & starting over, the game became so difficult, I needed to play an almost perfect game to advance. It's quite a change from me sluggishly moving my mouse on my desk, not having a mousepad, and missing a ton of things coming my way, to me repeatedly dying on the second level. Not wanting to go through the same exact levels again, considering each level feels and sounds exactly like the previous one, I decided to quit. The effort I needed to put into this game just wasn't worth it. Granted, some levels are memorable, but I couldn't tell you which ones they are, since they're in-between levels that all look the same. And they're only memorable because they heavily referenced Pong - enough for the game to seem unoriginal. BIT.TRIP Flux just feels like an iPhone game trying to pass itself off as a PC game. It just feels like 10% of an actual game, especially since apparently you can beat it in just over an hour. I don't mind the idea behind it, which isn't anything new, but it needs to be padded up a great deal to be anything other than a time waster.
Iron Storm seems to hit that sweet spot of being a cheap yet fun FPS. Maybe because it isn't designed with cheapness in mind. Despite its crude and outdated graphics, it seems some real effort went into making this game, adding an extensive plot to it, and making it as cinematic as possible. Which made the game very atmospheric. But the game is also very difficult - partly by design, partly due to the many cheap deaths peppered in, and partly due to the bad hit detection. On your first mission you'll be in sniper heaven, with snipers who seem to take less than a second to aim, shoot & kill you. It doesn't help that the sniper rifle is overpowered, turning any shot into a killshot. Using it myself, I could hit someone in the elbow, once, and they'd still go down. Or I could use a machine gun and blast enemies in their head & torso repeatedly, and nothing would happen. Which forced me to use the sniper rifle as well. But trying to decide whether a distant badly rendered object has an enemy behind it isn't very fun. It doesn't help that enemies seem to be able to see you through solid objects. It seemed like enemies sensed me, rather than saw me, so my best bet was to stay far enough, and use my sniper rifle to take one after the other, without them seeming to care the person next to them got shot. Enemies are either very stupid or very smart, getting me killed more often than not, since I didn't know whether an enemy was camping, or going to run towards me without any cover. You also get a lot of cheap Serious Sam style deaths, where a hallway you cleared suddenly has enemies in it once you backtrack. Picking up some ammo or pulling a lever also spawns a ton of enemies gunning for you. You'll find yourself abusing the quicksave & doing things over and over again, taking away all the fun from this game. Iron Storm is an old, crude FPS, but has some very interesting level design. Had it been good, I could see myself spending hours in its levels in multiplayer mode.
Playing this game on normal difficulty, I felt like I was playing on baby mode. A lot of missions take no longer than a minute to complete, and if you somehow fail at them, you can instantly restart them & try again. Missions are also far and few between as far as variety goes - there are only about three missions overall - kill a bad guy, defend a good guy, and the occasional mission where you get to do something halfway interesting. Gun, as its name might suggest, is a GTA clone set in the old west. And having seen quite a few GTA clones up to now, Gun seems to be the best copy so far. Not that it says much. Although you can engage in hunting, gold digging & poker playing, they're all easy and don't offer much of a distraction from the main game. You can try to roam the map, but it's rather small & uninteresting. As far as plot goes, it doesn't really matter. Not to say it doesn't exist - the game tries to be as cinematic as it possibly can, with its limited graphics, but I was never made to care for the bland main character. And with cutscenes taking longer than the actual missions, I oftentimes skipped them. You don't need them to know what to do. Sadly, for a GTA clone, Gun is incredibly rigid. Meaning you either complete a mission how it wants you to do it, or you'll struggle to complete it. In many missions you'll have your hand held, with you having someone to follow, or you having to reach certain checkpoints. It doesn't help that the first series of missions are tutorial missions you don't really need nor want. My only other major gripe is with expectations vs reality. Having a game set in the old west I expected a gritty realistic take on an iconic era. Instead I got Gunsmoke and Bonanza, with dubbing that was either stereotypical or out of place. I did get some enjoyment out of shooting 3 baddies in a row while riding my horse, hearing atmospheric music in the background, but I wanted more. Also, I'd prefer less glitches, stuttering & crashing.
If you never played Serious Sam before, you might enjoy this game. At least I did when I first tried it. Painkiller being my introduction to this type of game, and it having a horror theme and a half-decent soundtrack, I was into it. I found it difficult, so it was fun. But one corrupted save & 2 Serious Sam games later, and this feels like Serious Sam for kids. Every enemy behaves the same, mindlessly running towards you, and are easy to avoid and gun down from a distance. And because all enemies simply run at you they crowd together, and are easy to kill with a grenade. Also, having played Serious Sam it's incredibly easy to guess where enemy spawning points are located, and where cheap deaths are located - those places that if you reach them, you'll cause 10 enemies to spawn around you. All I really had to do was stand next to a spawning point & wait, to kill every enemy in the level. You see, you need to kill all the enemies to advance, which turns this game into a chore. Enemy AI is fairly stupid, so more often than not they get stuck behind some item & you have to go search for them. Think of searching for a camper in Count Strike. Not very fun. To make that chore much easier, you're given an arrow that points at enemies, and when they're all dead, points at the exit. Which does make things more bearable, but makes the game easier - when an enemy is rushing you from behind, or spawning behind you, you'll know. I would have much preferred killing all enemies to be an achievement, not a requirement. Getting from A to B, or having to kill 80% of the enemies would have been much more fun. And frankly, that's the biggest problem with this game - it being a chore. It's like a Serious Sam game made not fun. Levels all look the same, enemies are stupid & easy to kill, and they all behave the same. You have collectibles to go after, like gold, but there's no point to it. And when the game does become hard, like when fighting a boss, it only becomes more of a chore.
Ever wanted a GTA game set in World War 2? Neither have I, but once the game started, with it having a big emphasis on stealth & sabotage, I actually got excited to play it. Sadly, instead of letting you explore this interesting world, you're instantly whisked away into a series of rigid missions. And many missions later, once you get some time to roam the map unperturbed, you realize there's just not much to do living under a hostile regime. Climb a ledge & you're labeled a spy. Look at a soldier sideways & you're shot. So having to go from point A to B, all I could do was breath & tread lightly. Not very fun. There is that GTA wanted level mechanic, so you can escape trouble, but here it just feels wrong. Having the Nazis forget you by simply hiding or driving far enough from them just feels off. Sadly, everything else taken from GTA feels off too. Cars are slow & hard to maneuver, and are a great way to get unwanted attention, so why steal them. You can beat people up, but it's too easy and there's no reward in it. You can shoot people, but weapons' aim is so bad, it's quicker to kill them by punching them. And like in GTA there is a plot to tie it all together, but it's extremely nonsensical, and features walking stereotypes. The acting in this game ranges between amateurish & cringe-worthy, but seeing the dialogue, even good acting couldn't save this game. The script seems as if taken word for word from a 70s action movie parody, or some teenager's fanfic. It's as if they were penned by a writer with only an afternoon to spare, & no desire to do the work he got payed to do. Who then got studio notes to sexualize every second sentence. This game does try to move you by having a minor character killed, but seeing as he got me killed in a mission by randomly opening fire, giving away my cover, who cares. But frankly, I couldn't care less either way. With this game's many loading screens & cutscenes, I felt like I was watching a movie with mini-games wedged in.
Very little animation, stingy voice over (which the subtitles don't always match), bad mechanics, tacked-on plot, passable graphics, repetitive puzzles, surroundings not very interactable, weird character responses ("Nothing doing there"), bad click recognition, glitches galore. Simply put, Subject 13 is a puzzle game that feels the need to excuse itself by throwing in a plot. It seems you're the sole survivor of some catastrophe, and it's up to you to discover what exactly happened. Helping you in your search is a possibly malicious computer-sounding persona, who seems to treat you as a subject in a still active experiment. It's an interesting premise, or rather trope, but plot progression is achieved by collecting "testimonies" - diary entries of the people that perished. Not being integrated into the gameplay, nor needing it to advance, I couldn't care less. As for the puzzles, they range from mindless brute force puzzles, to puzzles a 5 year old could solve. In fact, often times you'd know what you need to do, and your only problem is finding out the very rigid path the game wants you to take to advance. Trying to reach a high ledge, you'll need to find a hidden keycard, open a storage area with it, take the ladder from it, place it just at the right spot, and voila. The puzzles are extremely difficult solely because of the game's mechanics - you not being able to move the camera around too much, and being forced to use the mouse as a hand - to drag items to move them, rather than simply clicking on them. In addition, the problem solving is rigid - you can't use item A on B, but rather B on A, and you need to place items at just the right spot for things to happen. Getting very little feedback and being forced to find ridiculous solutions to problems didn't help either - such as using a knife to cut a cord you can remove by hand, or using soda to remove rust. It's just bad design. Add all the glitches to it, and this feels like a very early beta. Just bad.
