I liked more or less every aspect of it, but playing Tacoma was an incredibly short experience. I needed 2h 18min to finish it and I didn't rush. So my main gripe with it is that the asking price is too high for the content. This being said, Tacoma is a walking simulator with some mild game elements. The main element is replaying "Augmented Reality" (AR) recordings of the crew and typically stepping in when a crew member opens his/her own AR interface to investigate the communication. There are also a few key codes to be found by searching some quarters and offices. The whole handling of these AR elements is really nicely done. There are very few games that managed to deliver such a plausible interface in a SciFi game. Besides, the concept of displaying people as abstracted AR constructs is actually a very clever way to bring animated characters into a budget walking simulator. There are no enemies, there is no time pressure, I really liked the gaming mechanism a lot. My only complaint would be that you can't really explore freely but proceed from section to section which also makes the game even easier as the area to search for hints etc. is rather small. While the graphics are not top notch and there is nothing really spectacular about the world (well, station) design either, Tacoma looks pretty good most of the time and the station feels somewhat believable. There are lots of objects which you can investigate or throw around in zero gravity and lots of background info on the crew. Also voice acting is very good. The story is interesting but feels very rushed towards the end. Actually, while I enjoyed the two hours I played it, the end really felt like money was running out so they needed to cut out three chapters that were originally planned. So with something like 8h, I would have given it a better rating, but really, 2h is much too short.
In a nutshell: grab it (only) if you liked the 1st season and if it's on sale. In short, I kinda liked the mood and story (even if many things remain vague) but honestly, I think the makers of "The Last Door" overdid the lores thing. While you could say that the extremely lores graphics (that make C64 games look hires) support the ominous atmosphere, I'd argue that they also made the game cheaper and faster to produce. Besides, the few times I got shortly stuck was because some "object" only one or two (gigantic) pixels in size blended too well into the pixel noise of the background. Besides, it makes it somewhat hard to related your protagonist(s) or even recognize any of the different characters. Actually I kinda lost track who was searching for whom at some point. The 6h playtime are prolonged considerably by the slow walking pace of the protagonist, objects obscured by the lores graphics and the game's tendency to open paths or dropping objects without any relation to your actions in rooms where you wouldn't expect it. Apart from that, most of the riddles are logical and therefore rather easy to solve. Plus the aren't many of them and the locations are rather small. Of course there are still no voice-overs, only some sound effects and music here and there. In the last chapter, I noticed some bugs regarding text being displayed much too small when using a high resolution. Also double-clicking to quickly proceed to the next scene didn't always work. Anyway, I kinda got what I expected and I bought it on sale, so I was somewhat satisfied. So I give it four stars even if three stars would be perfectly reasonable as well.
Tower 57 seemed to fulfill the promise that The Chaos Engine made in the early 90s: a topdown shooter with an interesting story in a steampunk universe. And indeed, in contrast to Chaos Engine, Tower 57 is actually fun to play. The levels are more interesting with a working in-game map, there actually is a story, the controls work great, there are savepoints, what could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a lot. There are dozens of smaller and bigger design flaws where the biggest one is that the character switching doesn't make sense. Switching characters drains your "special meter" that is needed for special attacks and that can be only refilled by either killing enemies of finding a blue rob. Now that actually means that you don't want to switch characters since you usually can't switch back in the near future and additionally your special meter is drained which you might need for a boss fight or other critical situation. On top, it's kinda impossible to level up all three characters, so the whole idea of character switching is just not working. Furthermore, even in the very first level, two doors can only be opened with the hacking tool which is not explained at all at this point. Now this would still be fine if you could carry more than one tool or swap tools with your other characters but the game won't allow that. So you need to sacrifice a beneficial tool like slowing time for the hacking tool which is somewhat useless for anything but opening doors. Besides, the hacking minigame is a cheap ripoff of the Paradroid minigame used to take over other droids. Then there's a free roaming/hub area called "Armor's den" which would be OK, if there was actually something relevant to do there. But it's just for badly done minigames and starting the next level. You can neither go back to visit previous levels nor have any relevant conversations or whatever. I needed ~10h to reach the disappointing end. So yeah, it's not bad but would need lots of polish to be great.
My main gripe with Elex is the totally retarded combat system. Even when totally leveled up, it's impossible to strike more than a few sword blows in a row and it takes extremely long to recover stamina. Even worse, there's a super dumb auto-lock feature that can't be permanently switched off. Together with excessively slow dodging and totally weird hitboxes, this results in sword combat being a total pain in the rear. As the best way to quickly recover stamina and escape the auto lock is to activate the jetpack, sword fights end in hitting two or three times and then using the jetpack or running around until it recharges. Fighting multiple opponents is somewhat impossible due to the lack of sweeping blows and the retarded auto-lock. In sum, this is the worst combat system I ever came across (including Witcher 1+2). Also the balancing is totally screwed up. It takes forever until you can even use proper weapons, improve skills or manage to do easy quests without running all the time. The first 10 or 12 levels are a pain. Rocket launchers etc. are totally useless until you upgrade them - like you can virtually shoot 20 rockets at bigger enemies without any effect while attacking with a sword will cause immediate damage. Also skills to equip weapons are totally arbitrary, e.g. one laser gun needs very high intelligence and the other one very high strength. Then there's the graphics and while the landscape and animals look somewhat nice, the terrain has very little polygon detail. Looking too closely at (normal) textures reveals a staggering lack of detail as well (helmet in the intro!!!). All characters look alike and most are butt ugly with terrible facial animations. Like both women to "romance" look like eastern European hammer throwers. Some quests were broken and dialog options reversed. Message popups or alt-tab led to crashes. Still, I liked the post apocalyptic setting, the jet pack and the world design and kinda enjoyed most of the 52h hours I put in it.
I enjoyed every second of it, but quite exactly 4h of playtime is just too short for the asking price. Plus there was one potentially game breaking bug. Still with 8h I would have given it five stars. But let's begin at the start. AER is a peaceful exploration game set in a mysterious world of floating islands where the hero, a girl named Auk who can transform into a bird, is on a on a pilgrimage to collect artifacts from three temples. The graphics are presented in an artsy low poly style with beautiful lighting and colors. The islands are populated by different animals and a few humans but the main focus is to explore the world to find the three temples and the according keys to open them. The caves holding the keys and temples are indoor scenarios with a loading screen transition. Also you can't transform into a bird there, so it comes down to a mixture of some (easy) puzzles and a bit of platforming. There are no enemies and Auk cant's die as there is no falling damage. The storytelling is done by some dialogs with humans and animals, but mainly through scrolls and ghostly remnants of the past that you can make visible with a magic lantern. Where AER really shines is flying around as a bird though. It's just total relaxing and fun to explore the world while cycling around mountains and dashing through the clouds (which is totally stunning). Besides, the scrolls, remnants of the past and some landmarks/easter eggs make exploration worthwhile. Still, the world isn't very big and there's not an awful lot to do. Besides there were some bugs like Auk falling through solid rocks and most severe, falling though the remaining columns of the bridge in the ice cavern. This made it impossible to reach the key and I needed to exit the game and reload to continue. Meh. Still, this game gave me one of the best (if not the best) flying experiences in my gaming history and for this alone and the beautiful graphics, it was sure worth playing.
Like many indie titles, Crossing Souls starts very promising but can't uphold the quality later. First of all, the controls are horrible and can't be changed in any way. IMHO at least one section (dragon escape) simply can't be played with mouse/keyboard control (due to pressing "E" for climbing) but I also found the joypad setup terrible (movement on analog stick, selecting inventory items on digital pad). To make it worse, I faced all kind of game-stopping bugs like the screen getting black after changing characters or character stopping to move. Plus some of the keys don't react most of the time. E.g. changing the character only works if you're standing still etc. The screwed up controls aren't much of an issue initially, but during some precision jumping with time pressure and boss battles later, they are a show-stopper. Secondly, the game doesn't really know what it wants to be, touches a dozen genres and doesn't do anything really right. The best part is exploring the environment by using the unique powers of the different characters. But even this is only half executed and self-crippled later in the game. Then there's all kind of mini games and time pressure sequences which all have in common that they are super annoying - where the escape from the dragon is clearly one of the most terrible design sins I ever endured in my game playing history. Then there're the boss battles which are all poorly designed where some of them towards the end are really the zenith of crappy design combined with lousy controls. The story starts interesting with a cheeky tone but develops in a disappointing way with a pseudo-profound ending. And sorry, I found the short animation sequences to be rather ugly. There are three save game slots which neither have a date nor a description and you can only save at checkpoints. Still, sometimes not all progress is saved. The first 2h or so of the 10h total were fun which was ruined later by crappy controls and bad design.
The remake of Shadow Warrior in 2013 was a pleasant surprise and more or less everything that made it good is still there. It's just total fun to chop your way through demons, using chi power and listening to Wang's cocky remarks. It looks great, the controls are perfectly done, the weapons are diverse and feel just right, level/world design is great with lots of destructibles and the story is somewhat interesting. The game design is now "hub based". So it's not really open world, but you can start (side) missions in any order and you can even go back to side missions to roam freely. While this is fine, the problem is that there are only a very few different locations which are heavily (!) reused. For all main, side and bounty hunt missions plus all the trials I needed 33h, but I feel the main story line would've been just a few hours and almost everything else was playing through the same few levels again. You could say that I wasn't forced to play all the repetitive bounty hunt missions, but even the side quests and some story quests reuse the same levels. Personally, I think they also overdid the whole powerup thing. There are literally hundreds of weapon powerups and dozens of weapons and chi powers and towards the end you can even craft/modify powerups, but there's just not enough game to justify all this and I wish they had invested the time and money in some additions levels. Then there are quite a few bugs like treasure chests automatically placed in rooms/buildings you can't access. I got stuck several times (needed to teleport out and start another mission), fell through the floor and the game once froze completely. Plus not all the cars are destructible. Last but not least, while the graphics look great, the faces and facial animations are not really state of the art. And well, there's no savegame handling whatsoever. Still, I loved playing it most of the time, it's just that seeing the same levels over and over again was a bit of a letdown.
With 10h, the game is on the short side but despite of its shortcomings, I found it worth playing. I'd recommend to get it on sale though. In its core, "phoning Home" an exploration based action adventure with a bit of crafting, some survival aspects plus some skill, action and puzzle elements. None of these elements is totally annoying but most of them aren't that great either. E.g. the only real enemies are orange energy clouds which appear out of the void in the most inappropriate moments. The crafting element means to collect materials to craft energy cells, fuel, repair kits and a shield for Ani. Nothing of this is really difficult or exciting. You also need to craft some things to proceed in the game which forces you to run around for resources. Then there's Ani who needs to be protected from rain and corrodes even in optimum conditions. Actually, I found this idea to be the most annoying in the game: whatever you do, Ani's corrosion increases about 1% per day (even without rain, storms etc.) and at 20% the corrosion is beyond repair. The best aspect of the game is exploration where you need to use certain abilities (thrusters, teleporter etc.) to proceed. There's nothing really alien about the world to explore though apart from two or three giant trees. Actually most of the time it looks like somewhere on earth. This includes the spaceships, settling and alien remnants. Besides, the "alien" machinery and space ships tend to be rather low poly with blurry textures. E.g. the crashed alien ship towards the end is about as visually disappointing as possible. Generally, the game and world design lacks polish. The skyscraper you need to rescue Ani from is another example as it should be totally awesome to climb a tower and fight a pterodactyl but it's just more of a crude fiddling around in an ugly plain vanilla constructions site. Last but not least, there is absolutely no language setup as the game forces the OS settings on you without any choice.
Despite of the beginning, this is not really a walking simulator in the sense that you can freely roam and explore a landscape like in "The Vanishing of Ethan Carter" or "Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture". Actually, instead you move through a house room by room in a very linear way and each room tells the story how its former inhabitant died. These stories are usually quite short and typically presented in a unique way like a dream or comic book. Some of them could be called mini games but this wouldn't do them justice as the interactions are solely used to simulate a certain state of mind. Which works pretty well. Even though not every texture and every 3D model is totally perfect, the game looks beautiful most of the time mainly due to very good lighting and use of shaders. In quite a few rooms, you feel like moving around in a painting. Like in most other "indie" games, there are no real animated 3D models of humans though. The very few humans shown are rather static models with their faces covered, hidden or turned away. Also, all you can see of your protagonists are their hands (and feet), but there is not a single animated human face in the game. Which can be seen as a design element but is of course also the typical "indie" way of saving money. So yeah, this was an interesting experience with stories of bittersweet sadness but a very, very short one, too. It took me just a bit over 2 hours to reach the end. This brevity is partly caused by a lack of content but also by the absence of puzzles which lets you move too quickly from room to room. So I'd advise get it if it's on sale - not because it's bad, just because it's too short for the asking price.
Well, Thimbleweed Park is not a bad game, but it's totally overhyped and more like a fangame than something that qualifies for a commercial release in the 21st century. There are lots of minor flaws but the main issue is that it thinks it's much funnier and better designed that it actually is. Indeed, it starts really terribly with one of the worst voice acting performances (the German homicide victim) in history followed by awful dialogs of the Mulder/Scully lookalikes with the Sheriff/Coroner/Hotel Manager (with all that "a-reno" and "a-boo"). This is worsened by the fact that you can't skip dialogs. While the minimalist walking animations somewhat resemble that of the very first LuscasArst adventures (Maniac Mansion/Zak McKracken) they are just ugly and don't fit the pseudo retro style. Plus the characters move much too fast most of the time, so it looks like they are not walking but teleporting. Then there's the issue that the game actually only pretends to be lores, so when your pixelated characters move away from you, their pixels become smaller which totally breaks the retro look. Regarding the puzzle design: admittedly, most of the puzzles are logical to some degree (apart from things like charging the battery which show the typical lack of scientific education) but there are two consistent flaws throughout the game. Firstly, some puzzle solutions simply don't work until a certain point in the story was reached. Secondly, some things only work with certain characters. This can be frustrating as its not always clear that a puzzle can't be solved yet or a different character is needed. Actually there are just too many characters and they wouldn't be needed if the designers hadn't limited certain actions or items to one specific character deliberately. Honestly, I also missed exciting locations (like in Zak McKracken), found the story to be somewhat bland and didn't like the ending. Well, and there are much too few save slots.
