I played Mechanicus for 12 hours... and quit it. The developers made a consequent and balanced turn-based combat system: cognition points are spent on strikes and shots (except weak guns), which may be gathered from the obelisks or enemies' corpses or be earned when your minions are being hitted. Thus, the idea is to rush on the obelisks and to expose servitors to fire. On practice, a servo-skull skill with 2-turn cooldown spoils that concept, since it allows to gather the points from a distance. So, arranging defence in a corner of a map is a more effective tactic than rushing into the fight to sieze strategic points. And it won't work out - you don't have enough firepower to drive the enemy out. Especially since there's at least one obelisk at the start squad location in half the cases. I encountered only one interesting battle where you have to lure enemies into a corner and then move to their rear using a flying platform. Incidentally, you can't see foe's HP and armor type - you need to scan it with a servo-skull. However, you will benefit more if you scan an obelisk/corpse and spend this cognition point on a shot. Equipment and augmentations are cool indeed, though there're some questions to the classes. I set up a 4-point laser that shots through multiple enemies, but regarding scant amount of combat situations one should pray to the Machine God to get an opportunity to use it against at least two. Traveling through the tombs out of combat is similar to Darkest Dungeon, including dicisions like "pole this weird device" and its consequences. Nonetheless, in DD it might cause a failure of a campaign, whereas in Mechanicus even on Hard you can safely violate precautions and you won't suffer much. Someday I will continue playing. Tensive atmosphere, organic music (...inorganic?), simple but good combat, augmentation system are a stem that I like.
I've bought Alan Wake on sale. I didn't expect much, just wanted to play something new, you know, to break out from my settled genres. Controls. All complains about it are true, it feels clunky and unresponsive indeed. Moreover, camera doesn't allow you to observe foes sneaking from behind, whereas the game really loves to focus incoming enemies when the combat begins. Gameplay does have the idea: light frightens enemies and makes them vulnerable to weapons. However, the implementation is mostly wrong: you just remove the "dark protection" and shoot them to death... to inexistance. There's some good tricks like using flares to buy time for healing, but I would like to see the gameplay in more defensive way: - using flares and flashlights to control a more or less vast ground while you're running a generator or something; - wading through the darkness along temproral sources of light; - to have means to avoid close combat instead of spamming flash grenades if things are going hard. And no abundance of ammo - it's ridicolous! Story. I've never read S. King, I mostly sticks with sci-fi, though I like H.P. Lovecraft stories. Nonetheless, the plot hooked me in the second episode, but along the rest story I haven't been able to suspend disbelief, since the events was getting more and more fantastic and magical. Was it bizzare enough to a.wake tho? ;) In summary, if you're not a fan of that kind of stories like me - save your time, don't play it.
I didn't really think this game would surprise me. I watched the trailer and considered the game as a stupid retro shooter, but I gave it a shot. And I haven't been wrong =) Project Warlock has plenty of problems, almost in all the aspects. On the other hand, I was really enjoying the shooting. I launched modern FPS games with that ultra ghrapics and whirlwind gameplay, but couldn't stand with it more than 20 minutes. Astoundingly, Project Warlock could cling me with its simplisity, it allows to not be distracted by that complicated 3D enviroment and just enjoy low quality noisy gun bangs. Still, the problems. Almost all enemies don't live more than 3 seconds. You shouldn't choose a right approach - just keep shooting and take cover if you have a hard time. In this regard guns don't demand any tactics as well. Monsters should be tougher. Magic. Lightning sphere is overpowered for sure, Bomberman is OK, Holy Guard is OK, the rest spells are garbage. You can't play magic-only build as you run out of mana quickly enough (even with a proper build) and have to switch to firepower or draw an axe for mana restoration. And goddamn, there's no way to select a spell conveniently: you must hold SPACE and scroll the list, that badly distract you in combat. I know, this secret system by sticking to walls and spamming SPACE is a kinda legacy, but it significantly breaks a pace. Nonetheless, I've played Project Warlock 2.5 times (0.5 is the first playthrough when I lost all lifes on the 3rd boss as I didn't know about RUN mode on SHIFT) and enjoy it. The game could be (and had to be) fixed by the developers, but, obviously, they just abandoned it. So, this is a game with a decent core and messed up the rest. You can try it if you wanna go retro with some inferior RPG elements.
The best that Darkwood offers is a tense horror experience without jumpscares. So, the first hours are great indeed: you are exploring vicinity for materials, get scared every rustle and shadow, barricading the shelter, shaking with fear at night when you catch sight of some creature through the boarded up window. You learn the Forest, and eventually you end up with understanding that you shouldn't spend resources on barricades (there're almost useless), you shouldn't touch every meter hoping to find scarce timber or gasoline - there are plenty of them everywhere. The one thing still remain - enemies can give you a lovely sweaty clutter every time you overestimate your capabilities. Nevertheless, I highly recommend to give a shot to this game. There are options for replaying to go deep to the peculiar lore, you get slightly new generated terrain every following playthrough. And don't forget your sense of humor - even in such a dark place it may be useful.
