Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 Uprising

5.5/10

Command & Conquer is probably the longest running Real-Time strategy (RTS) franchise.

So somehow I managed to buy the expansion without the main game on steam. I thought for sure that I bought complete pack. But yes you can play the expansion as a stand-alone game.

The expansion does not contain many missions but at least you get all the units in the game.

The Good

There are great videos with actors between missions.The music is ok and the graphics are good.

The Bad

The path finding is bad. Sometimes a unit will bump into the unit in front of it and decide to separate from the group and take a big detour. Also friendly fire happens all the time in the most stupid ways. The maps are interesting but the missions are not so good. Also they try to much to make special missions. What we expect is build a base, build an army and fight. I remember a few mission where you must NOT kill an enemy unit. The game is super fast and there is no way to slow it down. But it is somewhat easy so it does not matter so much.

Sometime the game feels polished, sometimes not at all. Why the bad path finding? Why not fix it before the release of the game? Why is it still there in the expansion? 

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.