Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death

6.5/10

I bought the game a long time ago, at time when I could not resist buying games below 5 dollar on Steam. I never played the game for a long time: I checked the reviews soon after, they were very bad. Its been more than 10 years since the game was release now. How was it? I think its good.

Its a first person shooter(FPS) with a linear campaigns, challenges, and coop/versus multiplayer. I think it compare quite well to other games released in the same period(But reviewers at the time did not seem to agree). If you can enjoy simple first person shooters I think you can enjoy this game.

My complains are: On PC the jump button does not seem to work all the time, the game is short and the bosses are sometimes stupid.

Battle Heart Legacy

6.5/10

Battle Heart Legacy is a fun little action RPG game. The game has basic 3d graphics but the art style is good for a mobile device. You control your character by taping on the screen, which works fine *most* of the times. The game has random encounter which are insignificant most of the time.

The game has an interesting stats and class system where you can unlock the abilities of the different classes by allocating stats (Strength, Dex, ...) on the character sheet. However you still need a trainer to learn the skill, some trainers can die in the story if you don't help them. I suggest you avoid Bard and Paladin because charisma sucks. It might be worth it if you want to play a very long time however as the bard has a passive skill which lowers the requirements for learning skills from the other classes.

Also, even if I had a rather thought paladin/fighter character, the final boss had a melee aeo attack which would one-shot me. Because of the controls and path finding my character would sometimes not be able get out in time. This was quite frustrating, as the final boss has a rather long monologue which is replayed every-time you want to figth him. It would be *GREAT* if you could just restart the boss fight after dying.

The quests in the game are simple and fun, but I found that I would get under leveled and had to grind. I think it would have been better to either put more content in the game or ease the level progression. Its a basic hack and slash so the grinding phases are not very amazing.

Overall I would recommend it you know you are going to be bored on a plane with your Ipad. At least it worked for me. The game does not require an online connection unless you want to save your character to the cloud.

Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken

7/10

Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken is a 2d platformer with guns, grenades,jetpacks, crates and elevators. It is very cinematic and gives good vibes akin to those of old action movies.

The gameplay goes from very easy to hard. The easy parts are enjoyable and the hard parts make you feel lucky. Sometimes the levels are like small puzzles.

Maybe there are a little too many crate pushing and elevator elavating for my taste however. I remember falling of an elevator by accident and having to go way back via mind control grenades to activate the switch that brings this elevator down.

Bioshock

Note: this is a review from 2010 that was is lying around on my computer (I have a few of these).

6.5/10

Bioshock is an "horror" FPS. You get to play with gunz and powers. You get upgrades and more guns/powers as the game progresses.

The gameplay is fun in the beginning but it gets repetitive. The story and setting are very good. When you die you respawn and I think its humiliating, I would rather reload and find a way to win. Overated. I will not try the sequel.

Note: The second game in the series seems too similar to the first one and seems a waste of my time, but I might try Bioshock Infinite some time

Torchlight and Torchlight 2

Torchlight and Torchlight 2 are action rpg / hack and slash games. There are many similarities between these games and the first two first Diablo games. More this later.

Torchlight Review

7/10

Torchlight is a single player game. There is one town, one main dungeon to explore and you can also open portals to some other areas. Most of the dungeons and areas are generated randomly. These dungeons and areas are packed with monsters. Sometimes  they, will come out of the scenery in great numbers.

You get flooded with items very fast, but there is a solution for this: your pet can carry items to town and sell them for you.

The graphics of the game are simple yet the art in general feels very polished. The music also fits the game very well. The game supports and has tools for modding.

The game is very polished in general, in its own style at least. The main complain is that the game is a bit repetitive. Go down, kill monster, do quests, swap gear again and again and again ... Also the different classes and skills are somewhat unbalanced.

There is a free demo of the game if you want to try: http://www.torchlightgame.com/

Torchlight 2

6.5/10

Torchlight 2 is basically Torchlight, with different classes, multiplayer, open areas, new area types and monsters and multiple towns..

The multiplayer aspect might be the most important improvement compared to its predecessor. However, even if it feels as if there has been just as much effort put in making the game, I felt more disconnected while playing. I was just going from an area to the next, cleaning everything, swapping gear, saying ok, ok, ok to what ever npc, rinse and repeat ...

Torchlight Vs Diablo

There are too many similarities between to two series to name them all. In Diablo/Torchlight you play a grunt/ranged lady/mageguy who goes deeper and deeper in a maddening dungeon from a single town to fight whatever evil thing is at the bottom. In the sequels (spoiler!!!!!!!!!!!!), you go after the main character of the first game who's gone mad because of whatever evil (spoiler end!!!!!!!!!!) All similarities must be intentional. Some of the minds behind the first two Diablo games have been trying to repeat their success while making Torchlight, to the pleasure of some of the fans of the genre.

So Torchlight is a reboot of Diablo made in 2009 with some gameplay innovations a new skin and style. Torchlight 2 also takes a lot of cues from Diablo 2.

So what about it? Well some of the small gameplay innovations are pretty nice but, at their core the torchlight games are copy cats done years later, they can never be as ground breaking as the Diablo games were in their day. Diablo was a master piece and revolutionary for many of us. You cannot repeat this feat just by copying, you must come up with something new, fun, and involving which has its own soul.

Eats Munchies

5/10

Physics based puzzle game. Its not bad but there must be some better puzzle games out there. The game is very short (2-4 hours) depending if you try to complete everything. Most of the time when you can't fully complete a level, its because you don't know how different objects can interact.

There is support for the steam work shop so maybe people have been making better puzzles however.

When I clicked on the steam workshop it opened a browser and not the steam client, I'm not sure if this is normal.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Campaing

5.5/10

Linear war themed FPS.They try to change the gameplay a little once in while, but its always very short. There was an open map, once (but it was divided in three linear sections). There was some freezing to death, once. There was some racing, once. You get drive and/or shoot from a vehicle once in while.

The story makes no sense if you think about it more than 20 seconds.Sometimes I'm shooting and an ally will jump in front of me.

There are many games like this nowadays so I can't recommend you to buy this one over an other one. The gameplay is a bit simpler than other similar games: you can't be prone and scopes only have one zoom. The destructibility of the environment is amazing however.

Dungeon Of The Endless

7/10

Dungeon of the endless is a mix between a tower defense game and a rogue like game. On each level, your team start in a room with your crystal. You must protect the crystal and bring it to an elevator. You explore the level one room at a time. Monters can spawn in dark rooms or rooms you enter for the first time. Many many monsters will spawn when you try to bring the crystal. To help yourself you can power some rooms and build towers in them. Your characters can level up, use skills and wear equipment. Oh and when you lose, you can't reload or anything, you must restart a new game (which will be random and completely different).

The ambiance of the game is amazing. If it was not of the games quirks, I may rate it much higher.

The Good

There are no other games like this one that I know. The ambiance, music and style are very good. The game has a lot of re-playability because of the randomly generated levels, and many characters. It also has many game modes that completely change the rules of the game.

The Bad

The game is complex and not very good at teaching things. Sometimes it does not let you do exactly what you want to do ... unless you kown a trick. For example, you can only order characters to go in rooms, but you can't tell them where to stand or which monsters to attack, but if you tell a character to back off in a other room, and click again in the room where he is standing there is a chance he will stop where you want him to stand. The problems is that there are many tricks like that and in my experience they make the difference between finishing the game or loosing. So go learn some tricks online from other players if you want to play seriously.

 

Awesomenauts

6.5/10

This game is a 2D Moba game. It is very accessible. It is funny and sci-fi themed. The music is awesome.
I played casually with friends and strangers. It was fun. I was not hooked but I enjoyed every session. It seems they have expanded the game a lot over the years. I did not follow or cared about this progression, I just got familiar with a few "nauts" and jumped into games and had fun.

Card City Night

7.5/10

What happens when you mix pokemon plot devices with collectible card games, and lots of other crazy ideas? The result is surprisingly good in Card City Night! This is a single player collectible card game (or CCG) with original mechanics. The game makes you collect cards and face many opponents in order to .... collect more cards and face stronger opponents.

The game was fun while it lasted, 10 to 20 hours I would say, depending on your desire to collect the cards and attempts to make original decks. 

I would say its easy to make good decks just by using offensive cards that go well together. There are many ways to win a game, and some of the opponents in the game have very interesting decks based on specific cards. However I think it would be very difficult for a player to make one of these very interesting decks because:

• Cards are given randomly to the player.
• Those special cards that allow interesting special strategy are rare or expansive.

I think the game would have been a lot more fun if the player could make interesting decks like the ones the AI opponents have. But it was was fun playing against these decks anyways.

An other thing that could be improved is the user interface used to create new decks. Its possible to sort the cards differently but there are no filtering options.

I can't recommend this game to everyone, but if you like puzzles or CCG and are looking something different, this game might be a great addition to your collection.

Bastion

6.5/10

Maybe I had too much expectations for this game? Things were looking very good at first. The narration, is amazing, the art and ambiance are great. I got bored somewhere in the middle, and it felt like it was good again at the end.

Again, my old joystick did not work with this game. I played with keyboard and mouse, the controls were not bad. In some circumstances my progress was not saved which was annoying. There is some replay value, but I'm not interessed.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

7/10

I'm not a Batman fan, but I think Batman: Arkham Asylum is a solid title. Many games based on movies or comic book intellectual property are rushed and of poor quality, this is not the case here. 

My only critics are the following:

• The game did not work with my old joystick, and control were a bit awkward on keyboard, mainly the is no "always run" feature. I went to buy a Xbox 360 compatible controller which worked on PC.
•  Somethings don't make sense. Ok, maybe its a batman video game ...
• There are "riddles" in the games, most of them are not really riddles.
• One boss fight in the middle of the game is at least 15 minutes long, and its barely a fight as you can only run away until the final cut scene. It was actually much longer than that for me as I died multiple times.
• The game often has some un-intuitive game mechanics. Both for bosses and some small time criminals. For examples, even some thugs, which look identical to the 99999 other thugs you beat at this point in the game can block indefinitely. The only way to beat them is to jump over them or stun them with the bat claw.
• Likewise, bosses often have un-intuitive rules or mechanics. It often is a guessing game the first time you face the boss. At least when you die once, a splash screen tells you how you can defeat the boss. 

Otherwise I had a lot of fun playing this game.

Final Fantasy XIII

4/10

So I was all exited to play a JRPG again. I read some reviews about FFXIII, which were somewhat bad, some people complain about the dumb battle system or other mechanics ... But I told myself lets just play this, lets just relax and enjoy the show, I don't care about those things...

I started playing, and at first everything was good... I enjoyed the pretty graphics and let the story draw me into the game ...

But the more I played the more it became annoying to play ... and now I guess I'm somewhere in the middle and can't muster the will to play this game again. The lack of control is one of the major source of frustration in combat ... Sometime the game really seems randomly, unexpectedly unfair, and the rest of the time its boring and easy.

Now I don't feel like playing a JRPG ever again. Stay away. You've been warned.

ArcaniA: Gothic 4

6.5/10

Gothic 4 is an action RPG in a fantasy setting. The game is similar to the Elder Scrolls(Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim) series but is more simple. And actually, that's one of its better qualities. When I play an Elder Scroll game I spend a lot of time trying to optimize my character  and the game is so big I have the feeling of being  lost. In contrast Gothic 4's main quest takes you through a series of sandboxes each with its own optional quests. Also there is no classes or races, just a series of skill lines where you distribute points, its straight forward and unless you distribute evenly all your points you wont regret your choices (and even then I think the game will be enjoyable). I did get enough points before the end of the game to max lightning and fire skills, and put enough points in a melee weapon skill line to be able to swing my weapon continuously. I would equip two-handed swords with bonus magic damage, it was a lot of fun.

It seems that some quests have alternate endings which is great. Also there are many secret areas. I found some that were very hard to find and other times the game would tease me but I would not know how to get to a room.

The graphics are beautiful on my 5 years old PC, I just don't remember playing games with such great scenery.

The story and voice acting are what pull this game down in the rating. Its the typical prophecy/destiny story. At the end I was a bit bored and because of the way the story unfolds, I was thinking "OMG, can I kill the final boss already? Stop making me run around". 

Some error must have been made while recording the voice actors initially because sometimes the voice of an NPC changes. Its as if they patched their mistakes but sometimes had to rely on a different voice actor.

Also sometimes there are bugs when you speak to the NPCs in a specific order, they'll talk to you about something an other NPC has told you yet. 

The AI is stupid. It pretty much just charges at you. Often ranged mobs will trow missiles at you but will hit the mellee mobs which charge you.

It is a pretty, fun, relaxing game if you can get over its flaws but I can't just recommend it to everyone. It took me 24 hours to finish the game.

Alien Breed: Impact

6/10

A good third person shooter horror game with hostile aliens.

Good:

• Upgradable guns!
• Sci-fi Horror setting.
• Secret areas
• A few boss battles..

Bad:

• Few alien types.
• Repetitive sometimes
• The character takes for ever to pickup items or login in computers. (its part of the horror setting but its annoying after 5 minutes into the game)
• The controls to trow grenades could have been better.

The game is not remarkable but it was ok fun while it lasted. The campaign was just 7 hours (and I was slow, maybe someone else would finish it in a few hours on the first try). No regret there as I would have been bored of the same mechanics if it lasted any longer. Also the game was bought very cheap on Steam.

Saints Row: The Third

7/10

This over the top third person shooter, disorganized crime simulator and sandbox game delivers suitable doses of entertainment, provided that you can forget anything you know about morality (spoiler: its pretty hard to go from point A to point B without any collateral damage, you might as well enjoy it!).

Lots of customization, lots of crazy challenges, the campaign is completely insane. I did not play a Grand Theft Auto (GTA) game since GTA3,  but these games seem tame and boring in comparison to SR3.

Crazy, unbridled,  fun ... and lots of virtual murder and damage to private property. Don't let your kids play this! But its okay to enjoy in private if you are open minded and know the difference between fiction and reality.

 

 

DLC Quest

5/10

So this game was for sale at 75 cents on Steam so I gave it a shot. The game is not bad for this price, but there is probably an other game that you should be playing instead.

 This game parodies downloadable content (DLC) in video games. It is a basic platformer with jokes. You collect coins which you use to buy DLC  There were a few good jokes. Sometimes DLC allows you to advance into the game, some other times is completely useless. I got stuck at the end of the game because I bought to many useless DLC. 

Everything is brown because of a useless DLC

Nope, not fine, I'm done! Bye game.

I did buy those because I thought I was stuck and that some DLC would allow me to progress, but then I found a gate which can only be opened for many more coins than what I have and I don't feel like going back and collecting them. The game lasts less than one hour on the first play through.

Dota 2

6/10

A long time ago, I was playing warcarft III on my laptop Pentium 4 laptop. It had a hard time running the game because it did not have a real graphic card, but it was still a lot fun. I would play the game online via the automatic match making system on good old Battle.net. When I was bored of the vanilla game I would play custom maps. Starcraft and Warcraft III came with great map editors which allowed to completely change the rules of the games within custom maps. A map would be automatically downloaded upon joining a custom game that featured.

The community was very creative and many new genres were born. There were a lots of survival maps, evolve maps, racing, sniper maps, board games,  ect And map creators were able throw-in their own ideas as well as drawing ideas from their peers. Some ideas were great and original and gave birth to their own sub-genre, like tower defence maps.

Warcraft 3 was a RTS where you controlled leveling (RPG style) heroes (as well as building your base and your army). A lot of custom maps put more focus on the heroes and less on the base and on the armies. Armies, creeps(mobs), and bases would exist only for the sake of leveling your heroes and crush your enemies.

What was innovative on the RPG front  in Warcraft 3 and in these maps was that your character would go from level 1 to the maximum level in within the time of game (30-60 minutes). In comparison traditional RPGs have your character slowly level over the course of long campaingns (30+ hours). Making strategic choices for a character is what the fun is all about in RPGs, and its even more fun if you make these choices every 2 minutes instead of every 2 hours.

Also these map often brought a competitive and team work aspect which make the experience much more intense for the player.

 Replay value is ensured by a very large selection of heroes but you'll want to play a the same few heroes lots of times to master their usage in battle and make a difference and win your games.

The most popular "hero battle" map became "Defence of the Ancients" or DOTA. It had a wide selection of carefully balanced and original heroes (in character, in their abilities and use in combat). I'm pretty sure that at some point DOTA became much more popular than vanilla Warcraft 3 as it was becoming harder and harder to find games via the match making system but there was always hundreds of DOTA game listed and these would often attain the maximum number of players in a matter of seconds.

The market was limited to those owning a copy of Warcraft 3 but after few years people realized that this untapped genre could become very popular. Many "MOBA" games (WTF, worst video game genre acronym ever, the only thing is it rhymes with DOTA really)  games were announced. The fact that the free to play business model was becoming increasingly popular probably helped.

I won't waste anymore of my time explaining this read these wikipedia articles if you want:

• MOBA
• DOTA2

The Good

The graphics are better than those of Warcraft 3.

The game is free to play.

The game is not pay to win.

Its practically a port of the Warcraft 3 mod, you'll find that the game plays exactly the same, and that 90% of the times the existing heroes of DOTA 1 and their abilities were copy pasted into the game. To this day they are still releasing Heroes of the original map (once every few months or something).

Steam integration is excellent, I got dragged into the games because my friends were playing.

The Bad

Getting a game started takes forever. There are many steps and if anyone disconnects or fails to "accept" or to load the map, its back to square one. For some unexplained reason, even if  my filters are very wide (all game modes) it can take me more than 10 minutes to be matched with other players. After the match making part players have 10 seconds to click the "accept" button. If one of the 10 players fails to click in time, everything is cancelled and its back to square one. After that the game loads the map. THE ONLY ONE MAP. If a player fails to load and connect withing TWO FRIKING MINUTES (everyone else must wait that amount of time) its back to square one. Lets just say that its rare and happy occasion when I use the match making system and it works on the first time. On average it takes me 20 minutes to successfully start a game with strangers and once it was over 20 minutes. These problems should be easy to fix, they come bad designs. First, the match making is broken, they should fix it. Second, THE ONE MAP OF THE GAME should be already loaded from the hardrive, it should have loaded while we were all waiting for the matchmaking system to match us. Then if a player fails to connect or respond after 20 seconds it should be replaced with an other player searching for game INSTEAD OF SENDING BACK THE 9 OTHER PLAYERS BACK TO THE MENU.

Backward logic. You might think that attacking the enemy soldiers all the time and pushing combat zone into the enemy territory is the right thing to do.WRONG. The right thing to do is to only give the finishing blow. This will give you the gold of killing the enemy unit without pushing the combat zone into the range of the enemy tower where you would not be able to give the finishing blow and gain gold. Actually its even better if you get you get your own troop dead to prevent the enemy heroes to gain gold and experience. So that's the game in DOTA, get the finishing blow on enemy or allied soldier while also fighting the enemy heroes. People  even bring monster from the forest to intercept and kill their own soldier to put the enemy heroes at a disadvantage.

The game is full of tricks and secrets. I feel that this is intentional to put newer player at a disadvantage. The game has a "Secret Shop". My experience with secret shop in Warcraft 3 custom map was when a cheater would edit a map and insert a secret shop he could exploit to give himself an advantage. DOTA and DOTA 2 have their own legit, official secret shop. Also the are many unwritten rules that experience players will take advantage to get out of a situation without a scratch where a new player would have lost all his hit point for example: While in the range of an enemy tower, if it attacks you pretending to attack one the soldiers on you side will make the tower target an other unit (and probably save your life or allow you to attack other heroes within the tower's range). Video Link. Other tricks. So basically the game is rigged to give experience an much greater advantage than what they would normally have in a fair game (where all the rules are known by each players).

The game is not welcoming to newer player. To give an example a friend I play with who loves the game, but does not give a damn about the game's complexities, has still not understood how the shop interface works and how to complete a recipe, the secret shop does not help there. He attacks the creeps when he wants to and gets killed by the towers all the time. We played about 20 games. He still has fun with because we are all friends, but in a public match he would be hated and people on his team would complain to him all the time.

Also I took screenshots in the game but cannot find them on my steam profile or on my harddrive. Sooooo no screenshot for you DOTA2.

Conclusion

I play the game with friends once in while, because its accessible (free to play) and we can all play together. However I don't like the community and what has become "acceptable" in this game. The more I learn about the tricks of the game, the less I want to play it. I decided to review the game now even if its in beta because the things I don't like are unlikely to change and I probably won't be playing the game when it releases. I think Valve should not have tried to port the game and bring the bad logic to the new game. The should have taken the good stuff and let go of the what makes the game unwelcoming for new players.

Trine

6.5/10

I got the game for cheap on steam at some point. Only got to play recently. To sum it up, Trine is a platformer with physics and puzzle elements. You can swap between 3 characters at anytime: the rogue, the wizard and the warrior. The rogue has a hook and bow. The warrior has a shied, a sword and eventually a hammer and can lift heavy objects. The wizard can spawn objects and use telekinesis. You gain experience points and find items that boost their ability. The skill point that you allocate might give you an edge to go trough an area but usually there are multiple solutions to each puzzles.

I said "puzzles" but the levels are more like an obstacle course. I don't remember anything mind blowing  like in Braid. You usually just need to find a way to pass through. Monsters spawn on your way; they are not very challenging on their own but they could put you in a bad spot if you're not careful. The spawning stops for a while when you kill a bunch. There are just a few areas in the game where you really have to fight special monsters. Also you'll find items in chests. I almost passed by my first chest without looting it, the graphics are pretty and all, and I thought it was just part of the background. There are many chests and experience potions in hidden areas which require a little bit more work and exploration to find.

My favorite character is the rogue because it can just zoom around like Spiderman with the hook which seemed to be the fastest way to go trough many areas. Also at some point, I would kill monsters faster at range with the bow than in melee with the sword. I remember that an item that poisons arrows made a big difference.

The game was quite enjoyable while it lasted, the graphics are beautiful and the story is like a fairy tale. I think that physics adds a nice touch to the platformer, but I was not impressed; many other games out there have cool puzzles that must be solved using physics mechanics. Also sometimes I felt like the controls failed me but maybe its just me being a sore loser. It took me about 7 hours to complete the game, and I'm sure its possible to finish it a lot faster on your first run if you don't bother to kill so many monsters as I did.

Splinter Cell Conviction (PC)

I wrote this review in 2010 when the game came out but never published it until now.

8/10

Good game. Different from the other Splinter Cell games. Splinter Cell Conviction is a stealth third person shooter.

In single player, when you start a mission enemies are usually unaware of you and from there you can either try to remain undetected and take them down silently or engage in cover/shoot fire fights. You can only take a few bullets before you die but if you hide for a little while your health comes back. "Hit and run" works well for this reason and because enemies will loose track of you if you hide after they lost sight of you. Taking down an enemy in melee give you points that you can use to "Mark and Execute" enemies. That is, you mark a small group of unsuspecting targets in your sight or through one of your gadgets and when you press the execute button the character takes them down in a small animation. You are not invincible while "executing" but it might be more effective than what you can do with your own skills. Also some enemies with an helmet which take two bullets in the head to be killed require only one bullet if "executing" and guns which only shoot in bursts will shoot one bullet in the animation. I think that if you would try to shoot that fast when you are in control, it would not guaranty your kills because there is a loss of accuracy between consecutive shots. On an other subject, there are "interrogation" scenes (which I'm not a fan of) where you get to destroy the face of some key enemy characters. There is on level in the game where your mission fails if you get detected before you enter the main area. Soon after that there is an automatic save, a 2 minute animation, and then you have 2 seconds to react and then you have a few seconds to kill some guards and go through a set of doors. And if you fail at any point, you go back before the cut-scene The most annoying part in the game.

On PC the multiplayer is lacking several features. No chat lobby. No list of games. No chat when all players must click ready before the game can start. There is automatic match making but: when the game launched there was no voice chat in game. In coop, cooperation is needed and there was no way players could communicate. No way to tell your random friend "Hey come back here idiot we need to both be there to complete that objective!". People would fire in the walls. Write on the floor with their guns. Pathetic. Fortunately they fixed the "no voice chat" issue on PC with a patch. But to my knowledge there is still no keyboard chat. The multiplayer part of the game was probably made for Xbox Live and they did not care much about PC. Also every time I start the game, it forgets some settings like invert mouse, and there is no way to change it once the multiplayer game is started. Also multiplayer is limited to 2 players. The multiplayer part of the game can be a lot of fun but because it is lacking basic features you can't seriously consider it a multiplayer game. (I would rate that part of the game 3/10)