Playing this expansion was kind of a weird experience. Not only do I not like it very much, but Aftershock made me realize that I've been overrating the original game all along. Coming back to Ion Fury, what I'm seeing is not a modern FPS classic, but a game that can't quite figure out how to do the basics properly. Levels are huge and sprawling and incredibly detailed, but it became clear to me that this isn't a good thing in and of itself. Ion Fury - both the base game end this expansion - kind of fails to have individually memorable concepts for the levels. They're all more or less some variant of a huge open space with a bunch of smaller offshoots that lead back to the big area again. Levels basically play the same. Your weapon loadout is also full of redundancies, which this expansion triples down on. Like, how many ways of throwing an explosive in an arc at a middle distance for area damage do you need? There's like 5 or 6 ways of doing much the same thing. Enemies are also mostly just annoying and the high tier enemies are super easy to squish with one of several overpowered guns. No enemy feels intimidating. Most good FPS games have at least a couple enemies that make you go "oh sh*t!" when you see then, Not this game. Also, the bosses in this expansion were all a total joke. I circle strafed the final boss with the new gun and never got hit. Tape down a button and you can eat a sandwhich while winning. There's also a hovercraft and it makes the whole middle of the game kind of annoying. It's just a bad idea and it plays - predictably - pretty poorly. It's just a gimmick and also has an awfully designed boss battle attached to it. Oof. Ion Fury is ok. But that's it. The level and encounter design is middling, the weapon loadout is unimaginative in the extreme and enemies somehow have worse AI than 90's FPS games. Is Aftershock worth it? You get more of the same, plus some new things that accentuate what's wrong with the main game. So... skip it.
Over the course of a few months, I played through Dusk, Ion Fury, Project Warlock and Amid Evil. All very good games, but Amid Evil takes the crown. The level design is really interesting to look at - especially in a couple standout episodes in the middle of the game. Don't spoil the game by looking at gameplay on Youtube! I also really loved the music and the overall atmosphere the game conjures up. Another really cool thing is that every episode has a new selection of unique enemies. Each episode is short enough that you feel like you keep seeing interesting new stuff, while there's enough episodes that the game is quite substantial. The gameplay is pretty simple, but it focuses on exactly the best parts of old school shooters, so I wouldn't have it any other way. My only complaint is that the bosses weren't that great. I guess you could say the same of any 90's first person shooter, so... oh well. Either way: A modern classic in my humble opinon.
It's one of those "walking simulator" type things. I've played some bad ones, I've played some good ones. This one falls squarely in the "bad" category for one sole reason: There is no reason to actually walk around and look at things, so why did the devs choose this form? At any given time, you can only do one thing. And the environments don't really have any details for you to learn anything from, so there is no reason to look at anything else than whatever object is the one you're supposed to press "action" on right now. There are no spoken words and precious little writing. In other games of this sort, you explore your surroundings and learn from environmental details. Book titles, framed pictures, documents, items on shelves, etc. Not so in this game. Everything is empty and there is always only one thing that the directors of the game want you to pay attention to. Sometimes the game even takes control directly and forces you to look at something specific. Frankly, it might as well cut the pretenses and do this all the time. In other words, it might as well be a short film. But then, of course, it would have to compete with real movies and it would fall short. I'm currently also playing What Remains of Edith Finch. That game is everything Virginia fails to be. Go play that instead.
Based on how it looks, I expected some sort of roguelike. But it isn't really. It's more like some sort of RPG, but with very little story and a structure that superficially mimics some typical roguelikes - but without any of the stakes or need for improvisation. You'll mostly be grinding through JRPG style battles. But the skill selection is so small - and unlocked so slowly - that you'll be using the same one-size-fits-all combo for hours on end once you find one. There's precious little room for tactics and likewise very little reason to think about your moves. It's mostly a question of grinding. The music is sort of interesting and the graphics are sometimes nice enough. Just a shame that the game rules haven't been thought through all that well. The game simply misses the point of what made superficially similar games good.
I did have fun with this game in the very beginning, when I had to inch my way forward through the swamps and conserve my potions. I tried to separate the enemies from each other, so that I wouldn't have to fight groups of them at once, and during these early struggles, the game felt fresh and interesting. But then you get a companion that heals you constantly, and the game is completely trivialized. And you realize that the cheapo storytelling, cheapo quest designs and cheapo map designs are all basically exactly like what you'll see in a bad MMORPG. No interesting special encounters or battles. No interesting treasure chests. No puzzles, tricks or traps. just rote, repetitive, spammy combat that you mostly don't even need to pay attention to in order to win. There are also loads of skills and perks, but it's all so badly balanced that most of it is bad or outright busted. I used most of my gold to reassign skill points. The stores never have anything useful anyway. Then you discover fast travel, and the game officially doesn't have any excitement left at that point. Zip around and do busywork. Then delete the game when it's all turned into complete mental white noise. I love CRPG's, but this one is in the lowest tier for sure.
This is one of the few reviews that comes from someone who has not played the original games "back in the day". I've never owned an Amiga or a C64, although I did own a DOS computer back in the mid 90's, so I'm still a semi-old fart. I'm playing with some of the modern niceties offered by this update turned on. So I'm allowing myself to save whenever I want, instead of just at the guild, which was how it originally worked. I also have the automatic journal turned on. It's very cool that you can enable and disable these features - so you can have it exactly as you like it. One thing I don't like is that the game does not distinguish between the 3 different games when it comes to autosaves. This means that if you wanna check out another game in the anthology while having a game going in legacy mode (only Guild autosaves) - wave goodbye to all progress in that game. Very stupid programming decision, frankly. So I recommend enabling manual saves and the just restricting yourself to guild-only saves by shere force of will, if that's how you wanna play. While these games are fundamentally old and crusty as far as the game design goes, there is a real charm to it. I love the mean dungeon designs and the sometimes ridiculous giant piles of high level monsters that assault you if you have a bit of bad luck. The combat system is good, and random encounters are rare enough that it doesn't become mindnumbing. Monst encounters are triggered by special squares on the map, rather than just random chance. There's a good amount of choice in how you make your 7 character team. Although the game suggests you leave a slot open, since you sometimes get to have a monster join your team. I chose to play with 7 characters of my own so far. A warrior, a paladin, a monk, a hunter, a bard, and one of each of the two starting wizard classes. The magic users get to change class throughout the game though, and learn spells from a multitude of different magic schools. Old, but it holds up.
Really good pinball game. You only get 1 single table, but it's a deep, interesting and fun table. I had some trouble getting it to run good in Win 10, but I managed eventually. Great music, great board design, super challenging... probably my personal fave of the Pro Pinball games. Don't miss if you like pinball. Plain and simple.
Pretty ok pinball game. The physics are not super realistic, but they feel good. Graphics and music are of good enough fidelity, but not very inspired in terms of artistry. It's got some good difficulty and high score features and a handful tables to play. As such, it's actually pretty fun if you love pinball. The only real problem is that the board designs are a bit aimless and messy in terms of gameplay and lanes can feel kind of awkward to hit sometimes. The boards look like there's a lot going on, but they aren't as deep as it would seem at first. If you don't expect too much, it's pretty fun. Some people say it's buggy, but it works fine on my Win 10 laptop, except for an occasional sound glitch on the horror themed board. Buy it if it's discounted and you're a real pinball geek. Otherwise, probably don't bother. Play all the classics first if you haven't already.
Vambrace CS is basically Darkest Dungeon if you gave it anime artwork, more story and broke the gameplay into a thousand useless pieces. The interface is criminally poorly designed, to the point of making me want to tear my hair out, as even very simple things are cumbersome to accomplish and important information is hard to access, obscured, or entirely missing. This is the state of the game in December 2020, after many improvements. I shudder to think how bad the game has been early in it's run. The turn based combat system is slow and clunky and I don't really think the different classes make intuitive sense. They have a seemingly randomly designed assembly of skills that are hard to remember and don't lead to much in terms of tactical synergies. I was winning most battles by using basic attacks. Many non-basic abilities aren't attacks and can't be used more than once in a while. Often I didn't even want to use them, as it's usually better to just outright kill the enemies and worrying about healing later. That might change deeper into the campaign. There are also no interesting ways to modify or upgrade your team. No leveling up, no skill gains, no modifying anything except through equipping 1 solitary "relic" on every character, that will just modify a few stats a bit. Big whoop. Basically, if you don't find the basic actions you see early in the game super fun to use, you're out of luck, because that's what you get for the entire game. The game really, really feels like it needs some more tactical depth and just something more interesting to fiddle around with. The whole fun of RPG's and strategy games is to fiddle around with stuff, so what's the point in making a game like this that makes you explore and play battles constantly, but which also does nothing interesting at all with this? The story is also bad and the layered, interconnected rooms are super confusing to navigate unless you constantly check your map.
Back in the 90's, I liked this game quite a bit. And I've completed it a few times over the years since then. But while the nostalgia is strong with this one, it just isn't a very good game, if I'm being honest. I love old school shooters, but this one is just incredibly annoying. The level design is designed mostly with trolling in mind and I sometimes wonder if the designers even had a stroke while coming up with map layouts. There's also an over-realiance on cheap land mine placements throughout most of the game, so I'd recommend playing on easy - just to keep your blood pressure at reasonable levels. Another bad thing is that the weapons are mostly not worth the trouble. The regular stormtrooper rifle will do fine most of the time. The pistol now and then for precision shots. Later, you will get two rapid fire energy weapons that aren't much different from the rifle. Plus some grenades that are too slow to use. Mines that are entirely poinless. And a grenade launcher that is only good in open spaces, which makes it rarely relevant. There's also some sort of slightly BFG like energy weapon, but it hits inconsistently and the damage is pathetic. And in order for you to hit with your fists, you have to practically be standing on your opponent's toes. The game sounds and looks the part, as far as creating that Star Wars atmosphere, but after a while, I'm wondering if I shouldn't be playing a better shooter instead. To which the answer is "yes".
