Another great game on the Amnesia series, but this one takes a different approach: this is primarily a survival horror game. You play as a French soldier during WWI stuck inside a bunker and you have to find a way to escape. The game is non-linear: you can complete the objectives in any order. The bunker is abandoned, it is incredibly dark and eerie, and falling to pieces. And then there is the monster: an ever-present and intelligent threat. It hides in the walls and reacts to your movements. If you make too much noise, it comes out starts hunting you. It knows how to open doors and will smash anything that is in the way. But it also knows to hide in holes and wait for prey (ie: you) to run by to kill it. You CAN fight the monster, but this only buys you a few minutes of relative safety. There is a very unexpected depth to this game. Unlike other Amnesia games where you are basically a victim all the time, here you have several options at your disposal. You have some control - but you have to very carefully balance your scarce resources. Another unexpected feature is the monster's behaviour. It has its routines and it is predictable to a point, but it WILL surprise you. Don't get complacent. The game is not exactly "scary", but there are genuinely blood pumping moments. The thrill of having the monster mere centimetres from you as you tiptoe around. The primal fear as you turn tail and just RUN LIKE HELL when the monster spots you. It is a game of highs and lows. A lot of time you are just feeling your way in the darkness and hiding in a closet, or you are just scouting for resources. But then you decide "let's do this" load up on grenades and just push through some obstacle to grab a key item, monster be damned! After completing the game you unlock new game+ which gives you tons of options to customise the game - like monster aggression or amount of resources. This makes the game superbly replayable. It's a great game. I really recommend it.
This game starts out interesting, but it becomes shockingly boring after a while. I haven't finished it, but I played long enough (20 hours) to get the point. The enemies are uninspired. The first enemy you encounter is basically a headcrab, except that it morphs into stuff. So you're walking around and HA! mimic in your face. That's kinda cool, except for the part that it happens ALL. THE. TIME. EVERYWHERE. The rest of the enemies are either floating blobs that shoot balls of stuff at you or walking scribbles that shoot balls of stuff at you. Also, exploding blobs. You get the point Weapons are underwhelming, and you are always artificially low on ammo - you can manufacture ammo, but you carry so little that you have to constantly go back and forth to replenish ammo. Also, the point of these kinds of games is that you can focus on some kind of specialization, but specialisation is for chumps. I invested a lot in engineering early to be able to upgrade sentry guns, but sentry guns just get demolished no matter how much I upgrade them. So I learned my lesson: just go for maximum conventional damage output. Enemies jus get deleted - problem solved. Exploration? You are absolutely not rewarded for it and the game forces you to follow a preset path anyway. Story? It's the old "you suffer from amnesia" bit. It's been done. Characters? Completely irrelevant. I did not care one iota if they lived or died. The game does have is a bunch of gimmicks. The mimic thing and being able to trigger computers with a foam dart crossbow - those are cool, but they don't carry the game. And just to finish, the game sort of implies that you are "prey" hunted by this unimaginable threat. There is nothing of the sort: enemies are pre-placed and they act like every other enemy in every other game: they see you, they shoot you. You move away, they forget that you ever existed. All that this games does has been done better elsewhere. Don't spend €30 on this.
This is a true adventure game. You - as a loyal valet - are dragged into a foolhardy wager that your master made, and in the process you will have to travel the world and make sure your master (and yourself) makes it through in one piece within the 80 day limit. You will meet people and get dragged into the strangest situations: some comical, some sombre. You will win some, you will lose some, you will laugh, you will make a fool of yourself. It's all part of the job :) The game is, at its core, a "choose-your-own-adventure" type game with an incredibly simple interface and a simple goal: you have 80 days to go around the world. Achieving this goal is not hard, especially after you understand how the game works, but that isn't really the "point". The true joy is in exploration and just trying different things. After a few play-throughs you will start challenging yourself "what if I go via south america this time?" or "what if I just don't use trains at all?". You will find an assortment of strange and amusing situations. The writing is excellent and the setting is just so great for this: it is steampunk, in an age where everyone is just experimenting with new technology and wacky concepts in transportation. The game is very low pressure and casual. Even if you miss the deadline, you can just continue the trip as normal until you finish. I think it is possible to die, but in like 20 play-throughs I've only ever come REAL close once (and only because I messed up badly). Even running out of money isn't a huge deal (it will delay you a lot, but it isn't game over). You can just leave your trip and come back - the game autosaves. But even when things look bleak, you can still sometimes snatch victory from defeat. The only real downside is that you will eventually start seeing repeated dialogue (a limitation of the medium, of course: since it is all text, eventually you will get repetition). But that is a small issue. I highly recommend this game.
This is one of the most fun games I've ever played. It is an open-world 3rd person shooter with some interesting mechanics: you have a grappling hook which can be used for travel, but can also be used to tie up vehicles and people. You can also use it to steal enemy helicopters. The other main mechanic is that you have a parachute which you can deploy whenever and use it to travel long distances (or just avoid fall damage). The combination of parachute and grappling hook opens up a lot of possibilities. There is a story, but the story is dumb and not very good. Where the game shines is in just allowing you to cause random chaos all over the island. There are settlements and military bases all over the place (hundreds of sites!) with targets that you have to destroy and things to collect. Each site is its own "mini game" - you get to decide how to approach it and how to deal with the military response. The enemy spawning system is well done. They don't magically spawn around you and they don't have infinite reinforcements. It's challenging, but not unfair or cheaty and you can actually fight somewhat strategically. Combat is fun. Explosions are very satisfying. The setting is a HUGE archipelago and it is gorgeous (the graphics aged very well imho). A lot of effort was evidently put into it: you have some nice nature but also nice, nice beaches, detailed structures and small cities. And it the world feels alive. I love just driving or flying around the islands instead of fast-travelling. Even boats are fun to use (boats are usually an after-thought in these games). You end up finding random little surprises all over the place. The game doesn't artificially limit you - you have total freedom to go anywhere and do anything. The game has some minor issues. For example, the weapon selection is very limited and enemies are dumb (also there are like 4 variations of enemies). I did not encounter any bugs, though. I'm out of characters. The game is awesome. Get it.
People kept bludgeoning me over the head about how great this game was. The best way to describe this game is "generic platformer with delusions of grandeur". Gameplay is extremely shallow, to the point that after about 15 minutes you have experiences pretty much all of what is possible to do in-game. The rest is just minor incremental upgrades. At the best of times, it is an "ok" game, but it is still a platformer at its core, and never improves over that initial first impact (which I admit was exciting). The first hour is fine, then it gets gradually worse and worse until it culminates at the end in one of the most frustrating boss fights I've ever experienced. But what kills me is the Sunday morning cartoon plot we have going on here: bad guys are bad, good guys are good, good guys start winning, but then bad guys strike back and it looks like it is all over, but then good guys win in the end. The game is called "beyond good and evil", but it never goes "beyond" classic tropes and extremely well-defined roles. And the cherry on top is that all the dead (good) characters get revived in the end - just to drive home the point that there were no stakes to begin with because we will just wave a little magic wand and presto, all fixed. This is supposed to be the pinnacle of storytelling? This game was released in 2003, in the same year as, for example, Max Payne 2, Call of Duty, Jedi Academy and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. All of those are much, much better games. 2 stars because it was a complete disappointment. At least it was cheap.
This is a programming puzzle game. You are given programming challenges and you have to write a computer program that solves that task. The game has several problems though. The challenges (in the later levels) are all basically staples of programming 101. They are not particularly challenging for expert programmers, and the puzzles lack imagination and force you to write the same logic over and over again with small variations (in one challenge you literally just swap "add" with "sub"). The game has about 40 puzzles, but more than 50% of the game is basically a tutorial that could have been covered in a help page. This is just lazy from the developers: you are getting actually very little "content" - most of the game is "challenges" where the solution is "take this NEW feature (addition, subtraction, etc) and use it to solve the problem in the obvious way". The programming interface is also atrocious. It kinda works fine for very, very small programs, but once things start getting a bit more complicated it becomes unmanageable - you will have lots of arrows pointing everywhere and you can only see like 7 lines of "code" at a time. This is made worse by the fact that the programming "language" only has a handful of constructs - it's "kind of" assembly, you see? - so writing a "if x == y then foo else bar" is 4-6 extra instructions. Writing this the first time is fine, but writing this the 8th time is just annoying and makes the "code" very hard to read. You might be wondering if this is at least educational. It absolutely is not: you spend more time fighting the interface than you do learning stuff, and the challenges are boring. You are not really learning about programming, you are learning about how to beat a (bad) game. In short: stay away from it.
This game is a casual, low pressure puzzle game, where the goal is to place pieces (buildings, etc) on a procedurally generated island to score points, and try to score as many points as possible before running out of pieces. You start by drawing a few pieces. You can place them freely, and you have to meet a certain amount of score before you can draw more. As long as you keep hitting that score, you can keep drawing more pieces. If you run out of pieces, it's game over. The points you score depend on the synergies with other buildings and features of the island (trees, etc). For example, a lumber mill will score one extra point for each tree nearby, but will lose points if there are other lumber mills nearby. There are dozens of buildings and synergies to explore. After a certain number of points, you can leave the current island and a new empty one will be generated. This game compares well with Dorfromantik (also a great casual game, btw). Islanders is slightly less polished and the graphics are more basic and controls are a little bit clunkier, but that does not detract from the fun. There are only two real downsides to Islanders, IMHO, but these are minor. First, sessions tend to be very, very long, because if you "play to win", you can aggressively leverage placement mechanics to score massive points and stay alive for ages, and then strategically bail out of the island once scoring becomes hard. This resulted in multi-hour sessions for me (thankfully, you can save the game and continue later). The other downside is that your creations are ephemeral. Because they don't persist, so you will probably care less about aesthetics. I found myself making ugly clumps of buildings just for the score, whereas in Dorfromantik I cared (probably way too much) about aesthetics. It is not bad, just different. Islanders is still a solid game on its own merits: a unique and nice casual game that won't wow you, but will put a smile on your face.
