BSim500

This "remake" is literally no real upgrade over the original AoE with "upatch HD" installed (a community mod which adds widescreen, HD res support, bug fixes, better AI, etc, for free, just Google "Age of Empires upatch HD" and click on the first link). The only other difference is "Definitive Edition" is Windows 10 only and has a shiny new $20 price tag (because clearly it's a brand new "2018" game) whilst the original which plays exactly the same can be bought for under $5 on Ebay, or for the "Collectors Edition" comes with AoE2 bundled in for free (which also has HD / widescreen patches...)

If the intention is an "old school nostalgia" BG clone, then it sort of succeeds. But it's not without annoyances:- Engine - The game engine is horrible. They used Unity and it's clearly more suited to FPS / horror games than isometric RPG's. Large chunks of the game has severe slowdowns (down to 18fps) in major city areas caused by the way Unity Engine layers assets when rendering groups of people. This isn't due to lack of horsepower as both CPU & GPU usage are only 30% loaded (and VRAM a mere 600MB) when the slowdowns occur. I've seen this before on other Unity games where fps drops into single digits despite the CPU & GPU being not even half loaded. In contrast, post-IE RPG's like NWN, Dragon Age Origins, or Divinity Original Sin, with RPG-specific engines are all proper 3D and run a solid 60fps on hardware half as powerful. On top of that, 15s load times (even on SSD's) on every minor area transition get very old, very quickly. At least 4-5hrs will be spent staring at loading screens. These problems can't be fixed as they're internal to the Unity Engine and walking through areas like Copperlane or backtracking through several zones is not enjoyable. Combat - It's just "OK". In theory it's tactical. In practise, you'll be repeating the same "put 2x tanks in a choke-point then get the other 4x party members to spam blunderbuss ranged attacks" MMO style weak-tank / healer / DPS setup over & over. Most trash-mobs are the same. Spells are too weak. Fighters have weak attacks since heavy armor virtually halves attack speed. Sneaking & backstabbing in combat were clumsy. Traps are weak. No pickpocketing. Can't buff outside of combat (there goes half the tactics in countering certain types of mobs). It didn't actually feel that D&D-ish to be honest. I also found the game doesn't convey what's going on in combat visually too well when too many very tiny people all look the same even wearing different armors. Bugs - Broken journal entries, damage penalty bugs, quest bugs. I got stuck in combat mode more than once (which prevents you from travelling or saving). Sound randomly cuts out when speeding up game in a crowded place (needed a lot due to not being able to run - you will walk everywhere at a snails pace). Bug in White March where chars slide forwards slowly instead of walking. Dexterity checks not properly applied in scripted events, etc. Lots of minor things. Poor design decisions - The devs seem to blindly copy everything with BG without thinking why some stuff has evolved since. One major gripe I have (with both BG & PoE) is the abnormally small "fog of war" where your 6 world saviours cannot see a large 50ft high windmill from across the street. The only reason this was in BG was because those games were written in the late 90's when everyone had 4:3 1024x768 / 1280x1024 monitors and the short view distance sort of naturally fit the low res screens of the day. On modern 1080p and higher resolutions, the 1/4 screen vision bubble looks ridiculous. Even by 2002 (NWN1), D&D style RPG's had the "fog" made far larger, more realistic and widescreen friendly and eliminated the "blind as a bat" claustrophobia and "narrow strip lawnmower pattern" 'exploration' irritations, (as has virtually every other high rated popular modern "old school" RPG, eg, Dragon Age Origins, Divinity Original Sin, etc). Baldur's Gate 1-2 were great games, but their UI wasn't infallibly perfect and is one of the first things someone playing it for the first time today with no "nostalgia anchor" picks up on. The writing is OK but only 2 chars out of the game ever seemed to be personally affected by "Hollowborn" reducing the sense of urgency. Very little humor. "Banter" felt weak & forced. Pacing of lore feels off (too much too early, then goes flat mid-game). The game caps your level halfway through rending the DLC and late sidequests reward-less. The stronghold and its constant attention seeking timed quests that pop up when you've just started something elsewhere was more annoying that immersive. I wouldn't have missed it if they had scrapped it completely. Crafting was mostly pointless (I didn't use it once) as were 90% of Stronghold upgrades. And whilst I understand the need to reward Kickstarters, many in-game comments / tombstone memorials were flat out distracting / childish. Instead of putting in a loading screen warning of how "4th wall breaking" **** they are, the Devs could have "curated" a lot or gave better submission guidelines that required they actually fit the game rather than end up resembling your average Youtube comments section. All Kickstarters are mentioned in the credits anyway. In short, the game isn't bad but they picked the wrong engine to use, and I think there was too much obsession with "over-trying" to be Baldur's Gate 3 that caused some questionable design decisions. I really wanted to like this, but I simply didn't enjoy this anywhere near as much as I originally expected.

This is a stealth game based as a prequel to "Of Orcs & Men". Stealth mechanics are generally good but with occasionally glitchy controls. Graphics aren't bleeding edge but they're well optimized and certainly more than good enough. Sound & voice acting are good. There are often multiple pathways / options to complete your route. This is also one of the few games in recent times to have a decent optional quicksave system instead of just the dumbed down hyper-consolized "checkpoint only" system, so another +1 for that. I'd give it 8.5/10, unfortunately it gets downgraded to a 5 due to a common serious game-breaking bug that's still unfixed +18 months after being acknowledged. If you replay missions (which you're encouraged to do by the nature of the game design), you can end up stuck and unable to proceed. There's a large thread on the Steam forums on this topic. In fact there are several other highly annoying bugs that appear to be unfixed and abandoned by the developers. Eg, Renaissance 1/4's end of sub-mission cutscene sometimes doesn't trigger leaving you stuck and unable to move forward, some chars get stuck after their conversation ends leaving a cluster of 3-5 enemies standing in one spot, enemies will sometimes walk off ledges and get stuck standing on nothing in mid-air, enemy alert states randomly jump one state higher than when you saved upon loading a game, etc. It's a shame because if they patched this stuff properly, I'd give it a much higher score.

This is probably one of the few "Remasters" that works out well. The mechanics are all true to form and the game gives highly flexible options for old vs new graphics as well as old vs new actions. Eg, you can have the new graphics with the old "verb bar", or the old graphics with the new verb dial, or the old with the old, or the new with the new). In that respect it's very well done similar to Grim Fandango where switching between them is completely seamless. Graphics are much sharper and in widescreen and are very much true to the original art style. Commentary and subtitles are all present. The game itself really is a 10 purely for the old fashioned wacky LucasArts humor. However this only gets a 9 as the price is a bit high considering the game was released in 1993 (and the much cheaper original is still more than playable via ScummVM). I'm always seriously wary of "remakes" as they usually either screw something up trying to modernize it too far, or are in it purely for a cheap franchise brand cash-in. DOTT along with Grim Fandango though, are surprisingly well done and very respectful to the original games and fans. Whether you've played the game before or not, it's definitely worth it.

Neighbors from Hell is highly amusing (rare these days in an era where almost every other game & game critic takes themselves way too seriously). You play "Woody" a guy with an unpleasant neighbor who needs to be taught a few lessons. In every level, you're basically entering your neighbors hallway, playing cat & mouse with him around his house (you can't be in the same room as him and as well as avoiding him you have to tiptoe around his guard dog & parrot), and generally turning his own home against him. Whether it's an old fashioned whoopee cushion / saw the leg off a chair, to blocking up his toilet just before slipping his laxatives, you almost feel sorry for him by the end. The jazzy music is excellent and the art style is great (looks like "claymation"). The game is short but great fun, and meant to be played as a "casual" game. Those critics expecting 50hrs of gameplay as if it were a heavy RPG are wildly missing the point (as usual).

Overall The Perils Of Man is a decent game. It has a great plot and the puzzles actually make sense. The dimensional Risk Atlas "vision enhancement" mechanic worked well. It's relatively bug free, and the soundtrack and ambient soundscapes are well done. Voice acting & graphics aren't the best but they're also far from the worst. This is one of those enjoyable "light" adventure games like The Inner World where it can be played by adults without it feeling childish, but also enjoyed by younger players without being too taxing. Yes it's short, but overall it's very enjoyable and well worth it for the story. A realistic honest non-troll score would be 7-8 out of 10. Ignore the absurd 40-50% "professional" critic scores. Every time a good "lightweight" adventure game comes out, the same suspects of the same publications sulk and vote it 20-30% lower than user scores simply because point & click adventures aren't the reviewer's favorite genre or on the back of silly game mechanic expectations (eg, 'demanding' branching story-lines that would make no sense given an intentionally short linear plot). If people are giving "grudge scores" over its 5-6 hours game length, they need to both get over the fact the game is a $10 Indie (less in sales) and also be consistent with that voting criteria for other genres (eg, $60 Crysis 3 was a mere 7hrs length). There is no "law" that states every game 'must' be exactly 20hrs in length and it's far better that these games are made as long or short as they naturally need to be based around the plot & small development budgets rather than pad them out with weak obvious "filler" to suit the confused "demands" of a few critics. The only serious advice I can give to people new to these kinds of games wondering about the persistent critic vs user score disparities is to try several of them and find out what style of adventure game you like. Then buy similar games based on recommendations by other users of like-minded tastes. The Perils of Man is rated "Very positive" on Steam (again by users not "critics"), so the only thing these 40% "critic" reviews do is remind me why I stopped reading overly-sulky "critic" reviews years ago...

Wow, what a great game. I've played all of Frictional's previous games before (the Penumbra & Amnesia series) so had a rough idea of what to expect but this is definitely the best so far. It feels like a cross between Penumbra, Bioshock, and System Shock 2 and it works out pretty well. Frictional are probably one of the few devs who know how to make a decent horror game (ie, provide a persistent underlying unnerving atmosphere without over-saturating cheesy "jump scares" and "piano punch" sounds every 20 meters). SOMA isn't a shooter. It's a cross between a horror and a first person adventure game, but a much deeper psychological one about slipping away from your own identity rather than a shallow "BOO! HAHAHA MADE YOU JUMP IN A DARK ROOM!" 'horror' game which are prevalent these days. Graphics are pretty good overall - average to good textures but superb highly atmospheric lighting, shadow & underwater effects that fit the setting & mood perfectly. The environment (like the Penumbra games) is highly interactable and you can pick up and move almost every object. They really have done a great job evolving the HPL engine. Voice acting & ambient sounds are well done. Ambient music is just right - present and intermittent but neither in-your-face or subdued. Level designs are good. Puzzles in the game are easy but also logical. There's no point demanding super hard puzzles if they end up artificially convoluted and out of place. There's a lot of attention to detail paid over minor things too. Eg, the head-bob effect feels just right and not stupidly over-done "waddling giraffe in a surgical collar simulator" as even big budget AAA developers consistently manage to mess up. The game is checkpoint save based but also permits an option for enabling F9 Quicksave / F10 Quickload via an ini file tweak. The mouse & keyb input feel fairly solid, keys are fully rebindable, mouse has sensitivity & smoothing options, etc. Lots of little things like that add up to a sense of polish and design maturity that SOMA actually feels like a PC game well ported to a console, not a console game badly ported to a PC. Overall it's a great example of what a creative and interesting horror game should be like once you move beyond the typical cut-and-paste "formula" of jump-scares, piano thumps, screams in overly dark asylums, flickering lights, etc. There are one or two minor annoyances which preclude a perfect 10, eg, I found the Depth of Field effect even on "Low" is excessive in places and it would be nice to have the option to disable it completely or at least add a "Very Low" option that halves the blur effect again. This game is still a solid 9 though. It has come together so well, is a very fresh feeling gem in a genre of samey-ness, the horror / adventure hybrid feel works perfectly in just the right balance and the above attention to detail paid over minor things, that it's well worth a play. I sincerely hope Frictional Games continue to develop more of these in the future.

Another hit from Wadjet Eye. The post-apocalyptic environment and general atmospheric feel that Wadjet manages to consistently nail down is present. The puzzles may be slightly easy but they are logical, fit the plot and there's no "moon logic" here. (There's also no rule that states every adventure game 'must' contain increasingly convoluted puzzled just for the sake of it). Some adventure games are puzzle heavy and some are mostly story driven. This is one of the latter, and it's done pretty well. The voice acting is well done and the piano/guitar combo soundtrack is good. There are a choice of three endings (determined at the end so if you want to see all three, you can save before-hand and view them easily). Keep 'em coming Wadjet!

The actress (Viva Seifert) in the video sequences actually gave a fairly decent performance, but here's the problem : Being "unconventional" and "artsy" doesn't automatically make engaging gameplay. You basically sit in front of a "screen" and enter search terms as vague as "yes" and "us" to unravel a murder-mystery. A list of up to 5 matching videos is then brought up to watch in out of order sequence. This is interesting and different for the first 50 searches at which point you'll have already figured out the plot long in advance of watching all available videos. Then you have a choice to make : spend the other +400x searches in boredom filling in the gaps awaiting a "proper end" that never comes, or "end" early and treat it as a 30-45min game-less "narrative experience" whose "effect" on you is entirely relative... At time of writing, the user score is averaging 5.7, and honestly that's not unreasonable. The acting is well done, and plot fairly interesting so it doesn't deserve a zero, but likewise if you guess the right search terms early and figure out the plot fairly quickly, there really isn't much "game" there at any stage regardless of "narration".

It seems blanket "hater" false accusations along with mass scale deletion of non-abusive negative posts have become the new straw-man for deflecting against entirely valid criticism of amateurish writing and multiple game breaking bugs. This "expansion" isn't just bad by itself, the update that accompanies it has actually broken the base game for many too. So many glitches (eg, text box not appearing, UI flickering, save-game corruption, constant crashing, characters disappearing, gear from imported characters disappearing, getting stuck in doors, broken mods, broken multiplayer, dialogue errors, UI degradation that makes the game look WORSE than the original 1998 release, etc). Many of the 10/10 "infallibly perfect" scores contain the usual egocentric "Don't read any reviews that scored less than me", and many others come from recently created accounts with no other game reviews. The current 3.7 out of 10 is actually quite accurate given the broken state of the game. And that's in the face of a massive, deliberate and sustained attempt to try and censor as many negative reviews as possible (regardless of non-abuse) plus Beamdog's call to inflate positive reviews as a panicked response to a self-inflicted review bomb caused by non existent QA and "amateur hour" PR. After seeing Beamdog's attitude towards its customers, this is the last game I'll ever be buying from them...

Another milked to death, overly-formulaic, weak-plotted, crafting-for-the-sake-of-crafting, unlocking-for-the-sake-of-unlocking, 'conveyor belt' sequel from "We don't make games, only franchises" Ubisoft... If you've played half of Far Cry 3, then you've already played the whole of Far Cry Primal. Along with upcoming Far Cry 9 (due 2020), Far Cry 35 (due 2046) and Far Cry 721 (due 2732). For the love of God will you please start making some NEW GAMES, not just exactly the same game over and over and over and over and over with interchangeable texture packs & C-movie backstories swapped out each year...

I think the most revealing thing about NWN2 is the way the developers quickly abandoned it compared to the "extended treatment" given to every other Bioware / Black Isle "Forgotten Realms" games (eg, 2013 Enhanced Editions of 1998 Baldur's Gate, etc). That's why despite being made 10 years ago, NWN2 STILL has multiple serious unpatched game-breaking bugs (campaign events not triggering, save-game corruption, frequent crashes, critical NPC's getting "stuck" in combat after death at certain points, etc). The devs literally have no intention of fixing the worst "stopper" bugs. Likewise, support from the modding community is far lower than the original even today. Despite being 4 years newer, NWN2 has aged FAR worse than the original. UI & toolset is abysmally convoluted and a huge step back compared to original. Camera control is also worse than original (every mode has something wrong with it). Music & voice sets are largely just copied from the original game. A lot of stuff that "just worked" in the original has been stripped out for no reason. Eg, intelligent right-click "radial-menu" has been nerfed and now takes 4-5 clicks to do the same thing 2-3 clicks used to do. You can no longer assign dual-wield to quickslots (eg, "F3" selects both sword & shield as a pair no longer works). Graphically, it's "technically" better but as another reviewer has mentioned it often doesn't feel it due to the graphics style looking more "cartoony". Character faces look hideously ugly. Some of the original game's tilesets actually looked better from an isometric POV. Some inventory icons now look nothing like the item they are supposed to represent. Minimap looks worse. As many have commented, the game's requirements & performance are way out of whack with the graphical "quality". In fact the game somehow manages to run slower than Oblivion with HD textures whilst looking far uglier. Selecting targets in combat is slow and unresponsive. Queuing up actions for other party members doesn't always work. Longer load times. NWN 2's "improvement" of bringing back the party based system vs the original's "solo char with hirelings" is rendered pointless with such bad NPC AI. In fact "proper" party members are now more stupid in combat than "simple" animal summons were in NWN1. And it still "meshes" together less well than the much earlier Baldur's Gate / Icewind Dale stuff. Much more claustrophobic maps vs original (presumably due to the massive memory requirements). Just go buy the "Diamond Edition" of the original NWN and download some of the epic community mods like "The Aielund Saga". 10x more fun, no game-breaking bugs and double the FPS on hardware half as powerful...

Bastion is not a bad game, but it is another one of those Indie's where many people seem to be reviewing its "uniqueness" based on its single gimmick (constant semi-adaptive narration whose likeness and style of delivery is entirely relative). Problem is, once you get past the novelty, and when every trivial minor event gets "narrated" in detail, it starts to lose impact. Then all you're left with IS the gameplay which for all the talk of being "story driven" is basically a button-mashing hack & slash but far more bland, generic and boring compared to other isometric ARPG's like Diablo 2 or Torchlight. Every level looks and plays the same with the same overall "formula". You fight the same waves of enemies over & over. Likewise, I don't see how a "your world broke apart and you set out to restore it" plot is "ground-breakingly original" unless you're completely new to computer games?...

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I really couldn't get into this at all. And it wasn't because of some nostalgic FO 1-2 "love-in". So many other issues spoil it even without arguing over its "Fallout-ness":- - Chronic stutter even though FRAPS says a constant 60fps which suggests an internal engine render issue. They still haven't fixed some of this engine-level micro-stutter stuff that's plagued Bethesda games since at least Oblivion (2007) - The ugliest UI imaginable. Remember the stock Oblivion & Skyrim's UI's that everyone quickly downloaded mods to fix? Well this is worse than those but there seems to be no equivalent of "DarnifiedUI" and "SkyUI" at time of writing (which itself is 2 months after launch). Once is "acceptable" but Bethesda seem to have some serious long-term learning disability when modders have to finish their games for them 4 times in a row... - Inventory management is hideous (not helped by the fact the inventory takes up barely 1/9th of the screen with the remaining 8/9ths just wasted). Items themselves are just an A-Z mess with little sensible category grouping. Good God, I have 1997-era RPG's with less painful trading mechanics than this - Maps (especially local) are totally useless - Those awful dumbed down "Mass Effect" style conversation options (Yes, No, Sarcastic) where the conversation lines and the summary regularly don't match up, leaving you thinking "WTF?!? I didn't select that!" half the time - Hugely consolized. Simple stuff like you can't click on a conversation option anymore. You have to use the cursor keys. Problem is, when you're walking past someone and a conversation auto-starts up, you then accidentally select the "Up" option (from still walking forward if using the cursor keys for movement). Likewise, if you bind say "Use" to RMB, then issuing commands to followers is just right clicking - but so too is opening containers, so almost every other time you go to search a container you "ask" your companion to stand in front of it instead. ESC doesn't exit menu's nor does clicking the same key, eg, I to open inventory then I again to close (like almost every PC game written since the 90's including Oblivion & Skyrim). If I wanted to be forced to use a controller, I'd go buy a console... - Building settlements is mostly pointless and feels "tacked on". It's just another thing to micro-manage for little gain. If you're not there to defend it, it'll get flattened if attacked, so why bother? - Can't enter 90% of buildings in many areas. I think Morrowind's (2002) Dunmer villages had more immersion & atmosphere than this - Quicksave's randomly go missing. Happened twice now and I definitely didn't delete them myself - Dumb "hacking" mechanics - Ludicrously "bullet spongy" enemies on "Normal", even for a Bethesda game. A 3s burst, up close from a minigun and a simple human "Raider" keeps coming without a hair out of place? Seriously? - The usual "Bethesda Bugs" (plot / faction quest glitches, environmental clipping / iffy collision detection, conversation timing, etc) - General writing & voice acting is poor. The intro was good. Unfortunately the intro WAS the most interesting and immersive part of the game - RPG? What RPG? With the removal of skills and Karma, the dumbed down "simple dialogue" (because even speaking in sentences is 'too hard' for 'the modern casual audience'?), the dumbed down perks, that the "Power Armor + Minigun" is virtually given to you in Hour 1, "combat is the only option", etc, and it's turned into more of a badly paced shooter than anything RPG-like. Bethesda have been "stream-lining" since Morrowind. Some stuff was needed, other stuff not so much but still arguably acceptable. But this time, they've literally "stream-lined" the whole RPG feel out of Fallout franchise well into the realms where "dumbed down" isn't some relative opinion up for debate. It simply IS... Bottom Line : It's buggy, consolized, boring & non-immersive (post-intro). I'll give it 2 (for the intro & soundtrack), but I'm not remotely enjoyable "playing" a game where you spend nearly all the time fighting not to save your son, but against hideous UI & controls, and conversation & inventory mechanics that are another step back from "PC UI lessons (obviously not) learned" in Bethesda games sold 9 years ago...

This is a difficult game to review. On one level it has a certain charm, graphics, atmosphere, ambient sounds, etc, are fine. It's very different and hugely creative. On another, it degenerates into a cross-between "rogue" like gameplay and the mother of all grind-fests. You can trade, but it often isn't worth it since most trades rarely cover the cost of fuel or supplies of the journey. There's combat, but that isn't worth it either since it costs more to repair your ship than you get back. You can upgrade your ship, but that isn't worth it either as you end up far worse off in terms of increasing fuel costs relative to static quest rewards. Ship movement is painfully slow. As others have said, "story" seems to consist of 200x sidequests with no real main quest "glue". Game has a lot of potential, but also has seriously unbalanced resource management & mechanics in general. I think this is really one of those games where either the "feel" of the game will "click" with you, or it simply won't, and for me it didn't.

I've no idea what all these "professional" reviews are about, crying because the GFX aren't like $50m Crysis 3. The GFX are fine, no different to other modern adventure games, far better than many "pixel art" Indie platformer's that are getting up to 80%, and better in general than Grim Fandango Remastered that scored 85%. The art style obviously isn't intended to be about photo-realism (neither is the point & click adventure genre in general). The escape from the world's most notorious prison fortress based plot is done quite well, the atmosphere and jazzy soundtrack are great and the switching between dual characters approach works well. Voice acting is good for the main 2 characters and average for the rest but by no means poor (I've heard a LOT worse even in big budget AAA games). Puzzles are OK-ish, maybe a little on the easy side but mostly logical. Demanding every single adventure game's puzzles be targeted towards MENSA members, have a plot that turns the player into an emotional train-wreck or be "totally unique" is just as silly as giving every single FPS game 30% score if it includes shooting or "surviving" something. 1954 Alcatraz may not be the best adventure game out there (or even the best by Daedalic), but it certainly deserves more than the joke 35-40% scores some "professionals" are giving (especially when many of the same ones are giving 'infallibly perfect 100%' scores to half-broken AAA games that are still barely playable even after 3 months of patches...

Quantum Conundrum is developed by Airtight Games under the direction of Kim Swift (lead project designer of Portal) and surprisingly, it's just as challenging & creative and the closest thing I've seen to clever Portal style mechanics sequel in all but name. You play the twelve-year-old nephew of the brilliant but half-mad genius Professor Fitz Quadwrangle (decently voiced by actor John de Lancie (remember Q from Star Trek?)) Something goes wrong and dimensions start to shift. Soon you're put through a series of Portal-style levels, but instead of controlling just direction, you also control gravity & time through a combination of 4 dimensions you can eventually select at will 1. Fluffy (everything 10x lighter), 2. Heavy (everything 10x heavier), 3. Reverse (gravity is reversed and anything that isn't nailed down accelerates up at the same speed it would normally fall down), and 4. Slow time (by a factor of 10-20x or so). The game works out really well, soundtrack and voice acting are good, GFX are OK (you obviously don't play these for super eye candy). The puzzles are very well thought out which is what counts in these games, and if you loved Portal then this is well worth a shot. I'm giving it a 9 rather than 10 as some timed platforming is a little tricky (at least before you get the slo-mo dimension shift), but it's hardly a game-breaking issue.

The high ratings for the original "cult" game primarily arose from the way the game turned every trivial action into a QTE (Quick Time Event). Back in 2005, spammed wall-to-wall QTE's were humorously deemed by some to be "the future of immersive gaming". How wrong they were... Whilst remastering a 1990's game which simply doesn't work on modern OS's anymore is fine, if a Direct X9 game that's a mere 10 year's old needs "remastering" but ends up looking or playing little better, then it starts to smack of one of those "cheap cash-in on the current re-release craze" games. If your idea of a "game" is "QTE's interspersed with gameplay" (instead of gameplay interspersed with QTE's) and childish games of "simon says" every time you pick up or move an object, then you'll probably love this... As another reviewer here said, the controls are so hideous that if you wanted to simply play it for the plot, you're better off just watching a Youtube walkthrough... Score : 1 for the plot & music, -9 for the abysmal QTE's.

Game starts well, but outside Cyseal everything rapidly gets bogged down. Pacing & movement speed are abysmally slow & after 70hrs I still wasn't even 2/3rds of the way through & simply lost interest. Instead of a major plot line kept flowing in a linear fashion with minor sidequests, it follows multiple interlinked paths of a major plotline which must be done in precisely the order the devs wanted (which you have no idea in advance). Eg 1 : To enter a wizard's house guarded by a barrier, you need object A to active portal (which you don't know you need). You get it from person X (which you don't know they have unless you kill & loot their body breaking the plot) as person X merely says "you need to provide proof you're friendly with person Y" without telling you they will give object A in return for the unspecified item of proof you need, which you don't have anyway & don't know you need because you've played areas in the "wrong" order even though they were the "right" order in how you traveled across maps. Eg 2 : You have to talk to animal X (who only appears once) to get a quest but you accidentally initiate conversation with character who doesn't have Pet Pal talent, so you exit conversation and try to reinitiate with char who does have it, but animal X has now disappeared for good. This isn't an "old school" intellectual challenge, it's simply "fake open world" linearity & quest bugs dressed as something else. It's actually far better to have a Neverwinter Nights style progression where the main plot is split into linear chapters and kept flowing at a pace that maintains interest across 60hrs whilst simultaneously giving the player full freedom of travel & sidequests within each chapter than this confusing frustration-fest of endless main plot dead-ends & illusory "open-ness". The journal / quest NPC's are sorely lacking in any meaningful quest data so you end up first losing track & later on losing interest out of "slow boredom". I've been gaming for 25 years and a lot of what gets called "hardcore old-school" out of confused nostalgia actually isn't. In DOS, you can easily play 4-days of 3x hours a day sessions & feel like you haven't made any progress at all which wasn't the case with "PC golden era" RPG's. It's sad because the GFX, soundtrack are fine, the turn based combat works mostly well, the difficulty is refreshing, etc. But there are so many annoyances that spoil it. Some sidequests are area limited & fail without warning if you stray too far. The game is riddled with "progression bugs", ie, you'll regularly get a "mid-quest" comment about a plot you haven't even started yet that makes absolutely no sense (which is precisely why some "protection" for quest items / locations makes sense & isn't considered "dumbing down"). The puzzles are nonsensical and often involve either tedious pixel hunting for tiny 5-pixel size switches, sticking barrels over poison vents or "rock-paper-scissors". Other problems : ambient NPC dialogue is repeated every 20s, crashes 4-6 times per day, enemies dance about during your combat turn which combined with a small "hitbox" means you'll often inadvertently order your ranged character to waste their AP's running behind the enemy instead of attacking them. You can't even pause the game short of ALT-TABbing and using Process Explorer to force suspend the game (hitting ESC and bringing up the main menu keeps the game running). I've no idea why any dev would leave out a pause option as people get interrupted all the time. Camera only rotates 90 degrees, after a quest is completed related dialogue options still show up, poor inventory management (everything uses the same size reused icons with no visible text unless you manually mouseover your 150 similar looking inventory items...) Trading is equally tedious and can only be done one at a time (ie, if your fighter char sees a magic staff, you can't just click on your mage to compare equipped items), tedious rapid weapon degradation, etc. This stuff falls into the "fun vs realism" thing - it may be "hardcore" to some but it simply isn't fun - and isn't that the bottom line of playing games - to have fun?... Overall, I liked the early game but once you leave Cyseal and it starts to "branch out" across multiple forests, the whole thing gets bogged down in a convoluted mess of main quest dead ends, pixel hunting / RPS puzzles, "over-loot" and cumbersome trading & inventory management. It's like the devs looked at what's wrong with "dumbing down" in modern games, but then wildly over-compensated in all the wrong areas by creating a game with such an unhelpful main plot progression / journal system / nitpickity micro-management centric mechanics, it actually ends up more frustrating than challenging. Score : 6 (8 for inside Cyseal during the first 10hrs and 4 for the rest where the game virtually grinds to a halt for days on end under one main quest dead-end after another and tedious pixel hunting "puzzles").

Game starts out very atmospheric and promising. Lighting and shadows are great. Audio, soundtrack & voice casting well done. Unfortunately there are a number of issues that spoil it. First of all as many others have commented on, the game is basically a 10-12hr game that's been artificially padded out to 20-22hrs via a combination of level/mission over re-use and checkpoint save system that adds nothing to gameplay or challenge by forcing you to backtrack or replay large sections over & over and just gets very tedious very quickly. Many objectives you have to do twice, other levels you have to backtrack all the way to the start - when this is done sporadically it works, but when it gets overdone it becomes boring, obvious "filler" and breaks immersion when you look upon the next chapter as a boring chore to be "grinded" rather than a game to be immersed in. The gun's hit detection vs humans can be iffy, whilst QTE's (Quick Time Events) and "over-scripting" (endless unnecessary micro-cutscenes that "snatch" control away from the player) are another pet hate and this game is replete with them. Almost every single simple action from pulling a lever to removing a door lock involves a "simon says" QTE. Combat often involves button-mashing QTE's. Another point gets deducted for the most ludicrous "penguin in a neck-brace" overdone side-to-side head bob that can't be disabled. It doesn't remotely represent reality of how you see / perceive your own body movement even when sprinting. In real life your neck & eye muscles automatically compensate for most of it, whilst your visual cortex filters out most of the rest (same way you don't consciously notice your own nose even though you're "seeing" it all the time). Your head sure as hell don't snap violently from side to side just from jogging in a straight line. Overall score is about a 8-9 for the first 20-30 mins but then rapidly drops to a 6-7 when you realize half the game involving backtracking & replaying checkpoints is far more "filler" than plot and done in the most annoying way possible. Multiple other annoyances (no quick-save with checkpoint only saves too far apart, QTE's that are more annoying than immersive, absurd motion sickness inducing head-bob, etc) further reduce it to a 5 for me. I really wanted to give it more but it can be so frustrating & boring to play beyond the first 1-2 hours (and replay... and replay... and replay...). If this were about 5-6 hours shorter in length minus the above annoyances, I'd have probably given it a score of nearer 8-9.

Superb point & click adventure game. Fairly original plot that pulls you in, good music, fairly atmospheric sci-fi / film noir hybrid feel to it. Game is by the same company who did the 5x Blackwell games (also well worth a play for point & click adventure genre fans). The timed "combat" mechanics can be a little clunky at first. Character swapping was done well though and the two halves of the story seemed to be paced just right. Gameplay is around 8-9hrs overall. Here's hoping for more Wadget Eye adventure games in future. PS: Ignore the morons whining because low-budget Adventure Games Studio engine indie titles don't have the same GFX or gameplay as $66m Crysis 3...

The "game" is literally 30-40mins long, but because your character has a "forced slow walk" (no run, jump or crouch at all) it pads that out to 60-90mins. Short narration based games aren't bad in themselves, but REALLY SHORT sub-1 hour story-driven games are actually too short to build any sense of empathy or rapport with the main character you're supposed to be "playing". It's over so quickly any intended tragedy based emotional response is watered down into mildly-disinterest. It's also buggy. You get stuck behind 6 inch rocks, and you instantly drown if your head dips below the water in some points even for 0.5 seconds. I actually managed to accidentally break the game within the first 10 seconds by jumping down on the rocks to explore them with the not unreasonable expectation **** adult being able to climb back over a 12" rock, and ended up well and truly stuck there forcing a restart. The second time I drowned 10ft away from the shore... A quick glance at other reviewers with gushing 10/10 scores reveals half have given 10/10 to every game they've reviewed (which for many is only this one), whilst the other half seem to be the "pretentious snob" crowd that "nouveau art forms" seem to attract with comments like "Ignore the low ratings as they are not the intended audience. This is a work for adults." and "I guess this game is not for everyone, just the intelligent" (which certainly speaks volumes as to who they perceive the "intended audience" to be (ie, the "fake talent with people issues" crowd apparently)... Overall : 3 (+1 for effort and +1 each for GFX/sound but nothing else for having literally no game-play or game length). Given there's literally almost no interactivity, I get the feeling the writers simply chose the wrong format for the story and it would have been better off as a 2-3hr short novel / movie / non serialized TV drama rather than a 30-60min fake game.

Great atmosphere. Fairly original plot & story-telling. Puzzles are logical & fairly creative. GFX are good as is the voice acting. A very solid Sci-Fi adventure game.

Is this some kind of joke? Less-than-stellar GFX on a modern low budget indie game are absolutely no problem for me, but less-than-stellar GFX at 1-20fps on a GTX770? Seriously? On lower end hardware suitable for most Indie games in my second HTPC (ie, a HD7790), fps drops to literally 1-4fps on highest setting (lower than Crysis 3). Turning settings down to "lowest" boost scores to around 28fps with GFX that now look worse than some 2001 era UE1 games (eg, original Deus Ex) that runs at +250fps on same hardware. The stupid thing is - both CPU & GPU usage are well below 100% in Process Explorer when this happens so the issue is a broken engine not lack of horsepower. In-game anti-aliasing seems totally broken as well and if you try and force AA on in the GFX drivers, the whole screen turns white & rainbow coloured. Mouse sensitivity / acceleration is also all over the place. I just cannot understand why modern developers who are making a game with "not bleeding edge GFX" (to put it politely) - especially Indie devs who don't need "heavy" game engines - cannot look back and see what previous developers got right on 1995-2010 engines that ran on single / dual core CPU's and primitive (by today's standards) GFX cards, that 2014-2015 devs still struggle with today with 4-8x the CPU & GPU horsepower. Are all Unity Engine powered games this totally broken & inefficient? Does every single modern game - even Indie games - need weeks of post-launch patching just to become playable? If so, then why don't developers use an older more efficient engine like Source (Half Life 2, Portal 1&2, etc), UE3 (Bioshock Infinite, Borderlands, Mass Effect trilogy, etc) or even older UE2 (Bioshock 1&2, etc) that runs 3-10x faster on half the required number of CPU cores with better or at least no worse than parity GFX? Crazy. Another game with great potential spoiled by a total train-wreck **** engine.

Great art design & soundtrack. Voice acting is OK though 1 or 2 more additional voice actors would have been welcome. Original well written and immersive plot (keep 'em coming Jane Jensen). The puzzles for the most part made sense and the "magic interface" was original and very well done. Cutscene GFX aren't the best though it doesn't detract from the gamplay and the game does have a good atmospheric feel. Definitely worth a playthrough overall.

Good characters, voice acting, and soundtrack, original plot, puzzles are neither too easy or hard (and fairly logical). Good art style GFX. Feels quite "polished" overall with a great feel (and soundtrack). Well worth a play for adventure lovers.

This is actually a neat little cross adventure/platform/puzzle game. GFX & art-style are pretty good for what it is. You basically take 3 out of 7 characters down into the cave (in any combination). Some levels are common, others are character specific. Each character has its own unique feature (the Adventurer has a hook on a rope, the Hillbilly can breathe underwater, the Knight's is invincibility whilst standing still, the Monk's is Telekinesis, the Scientist can hack computers, the Time traveller can teleport through some obstacles, and the Twins can clone themselves). Puzzles are of moderate difficulty but mostly logical. No inventory management (each char can carry only one object at a time) and some back-tracking (not too bad though). Obviously there's some replayability as it takes at least 3 play-throughs to experience all 7 characters unique levels. The "voice of the cave" adds some humor. Playable via keyboard or controller. I don't usually like platform games very much, but this was better than I thought it would be.

When they say "It's a blend of DAO and DA2" what they really mean is "it's 5% DAO + 45% DA2 + 50% even more dumbed down for consoles!". GFX aren't bad, neither is the sound - but it's the controls & combat that tear the heart out of the Dragon Age franchise. The PC version of this game is simply NOT made for a keyboard + mouse. Period. It's a badly consolized port in all but name. Can't remap mouse buttons, extra mouse buttons not supported. Can't "click to move" (because consoles don't have mice), can't "click to loot" (because consoles don't have mice), no mouseover ability tooltips on your action bar (because consoles don't have mice), no screen-edge mouselook (because consoles don't have mice), there's no key to select all party members at once (because consoles don't have keyboards), etc. Spot the pattern yet? As for combat, the hyped "tactical view" is too close / zoomed in to be useful. Inside caves it's literally totally useless. It's also rather pointless since you now can't pause and issue commands to party members one after the other as the game auto-unpauses when you switch team-members! Order party members to attack someone in real time, and they'll take ONE swing at the enemy then sporadically run off doing something else at random. It is absolutely nothing like DAO's combat and the whole "we promise we've included tactic mechanics, honest!" obviously consists of little more than an adding an overhead camera on top of half-DA2 / half-console "action adventure" game mechanics in a failed attempt to fake "strategic depth" to woo both crowds (DAO fanbase + the "casuals"). That combined with replacing auto-attack / queued actions with mindless button mashing feels more like you're playing Gauntlet and the "arcadey" input controls now bear no resemblance whatsoever to Dragon Age Origin's... It's so blatantly obvious DAO's perfect combat system (and 40x quickslot mouse-based HUD on a 1080p screen) has been stripped out for one single reason - consoles don't have mice - therefore instead of doing what they did with the original DAO and creating a seperate optimized PC keyb + mouse + 2ft HUD, now anything that relies on a mouse will be stripped out, and replaced with a Lowest Common Denominator "simulated console controller" input. Throw in oversized HUD elements in the PC version (that are obviously designed for 10ft TV's), and the massive negative backlash against DAI (both here and on a dozen forums including Bioware's own) really is justified. Overall rating : 2/10 (+1 for GFX, +1 for sound & music, -8 for broken lazy consolized port and "designed for young children" button mashing "tactical combat" mechanics).

GFX quality is decent overall, no problem with sound track either. Environment / atmosphere / lore is decent. I really wanted to like this game (I own Endless Space by same dev), but unfortunately, there's just too many issues to merit more than a 5/10. "Side-quests" from villages are more annoying than fun, with time limits being too short early game. The "battle phase" is incredibly tedious and you really have to "auto-complete" everything just to stop the game grinding to a complete halt. Screen-edge scrolling is randomly stuttery (no it's not my CPU/GFX card), a few crashes, tech tree doesn't show research summary unless you mouseover everything one... by... one... There's no pop-up warning about units with unused turns, cities in revolt or a stalled production queue, no mini-map, units don't always complete their ongoing movements when you hit the End Turn button. Biggest overall problem though is pacing. You expect turn-based games to be slow but this really is something else. After 100x turns the overall level of progress felt more like 25-30 turns in other TBS games - and that was on "fast" gameplay. Another reviewer said "It's like playing Civ at 1/4 speed" and that is so true. There really needs to be a "extra fast" option for those of us who cannot spare 2-3 DAYS per game. This is not slow in the "greater strategy depth" sense, it's simply slow in the "artificially inflated no of turns required to research or construct anything" sense...

As other reviews are saying, the PC version is basically broken. 30fps cap, clunky controls (keys seem to "mimic" a badly ported analogue controller), non-rebindable keys, poor camera control, are the tip of the iceberg. The ONLY way they'll stop churning out these intelligence insulting infantile rubbish ports is to stop buying them until they get their act together!

Good Lord, where to start? Controls : Badly ported consolized controls (mouse speed all over the place & inconsistent from one menu to the next, 1 second laggy delay in all movements (compared to 0.3-0.6s in most fluid games), smartphone menu is a simulated analog stick, predictive targeting keeps jumping about, cannot crouch or jump without "contextual" actions, "uncovering" takes a few seconds to "unstick" from a wall, combat feels massively clunky, sluggish aiming and poor "gunplay" in general. Driving : BADLY game-breakingly broken (long 1s delay in turning regardless of speed, brakes unresponsive, two speeds - stop and 80mph, can't shoot from vehicles, collision detection broken with oncoming traffic & objects), etc. Physics are a joke (everything either weighs 100 tons or is totally weightless and there's no sense of friction on the roads at all). AI : Police "rubber-banding" ruins fun of chases, AI characters/cars spawn & despawn 20 meters from you especially during chases, AI broken on crime quests (if you take down a mugger, NPC's will treat you AS the mugger), helicopter locks laser sight on you even when zigzagging at 80mph, side missions get spammed too fast. The city looks alive, but only as long as you don't interact with anything (you can't even talk to anyone), immersion breaking contradictory random tags "HIV positive blood donor", etc. Hacking : Nothing more than "Press Q to win" novelty which becomes boring after first 20mins and is nonsensical anyway (hack mechanical steam pipes?), hacking traffic lights ahead merely creates jams in the middle of the road where you want to drive (and pursuing enemies are so close they bypass it), hacking a bridge will simply cause police to "teleport spawn" the other side anyway after 5 seconds, trying to hack behind you (looking back) is impossible without crashing, super annoying hack puzzles. Nonsensical plot : Aiden is a "hero" who got his own niece killed whilst committing a crime (then blames everyone else) then since goes on a crime-fuelled rampage - to stamp out crime), Aiden keeps saying he needs to remain anonymous when the authorities and the media mentions him on the news all the time. Aiden doesn’t want to get arrested, so later on he gets arrested in order to break into prison to intimidate a witness there who can identify him even though the police already know who he is and are after him. Missions get ultra repetitive & tedious (I stuck with it for 8hrs up until Act 1 ("Not The Pizza Guy") then gave up out of sheer boredom as they're all the same recycled "meet contact and escape ambush" cut & paste sub-plots that are obvious padding to make the game longer than it should be, GFX : Texture pop-in, GFX texture quality low and massively dumbed down from E3 footage (ie, blatantly false & dishonest marketing), poor performance, chronic stutter, missing face texture bug, AMD cards run 20-40% slower than they should, lengthy unskippable cutscenes (made worse by lack of quick/manual saves), alt-Tabbing back & forward loses VSync & triple buffering requiring highly annoying switching from fullscreen to borderless and then back to fullscreen again to avoid 30fps lock in rate (and usual D3Doverrider fix doesn’t work due to game being 64-bit), some building sign textures are low-res & have visible JPEG artifacts. Everything else : Dual DRM (Uplay + Steam), no quicksave or multiple save slots (see +300 pages on Ubisoft support forum about game-breaking save-game corruption for why this is important), Some journalists were openly bribed with a free Nexus 7 'gift', long load times, final boss QTE, all that "city scale freedom" and you still get “You are leaving the mission area” messages, people’s metadata feels contrived and on an obvious "random number generator" algorithm after 20-30mins of play, overheard phone conversations reused over & over. 95% of the Skill Tree makes little difference to gameplay, 90% loading screen bug, unbalanced weapons (pistol more powerful than grenade launcher). Ludicrously inefficient (3GB VRAM required for ugly textures complete with JPEG ringing artifacts?) Overall : A nasty little PC port **** that falls way short of what could be great potential. Maybe a sequel will fix what's broken, but this is one wildly over-hyped train-wreck.

Was initially looking forward to it, but the controls annoyed me right from the start. No rebindable keys (and you can't use cursor keys - WASD only, "Shift" means "Left Shift" only, etc). Wizard's "combo's" also felt out of place for Gauntlet (which is about simplicity). Gameplay is highly monotonous (and yet I loved original Gauntlet on the Spectrum). I just couldn't get into it. Would have given it an 7-8 for overall gameplay, but Gauntlet's poor PC port keyboard support knocks it down to a 4. Cursor keys for movement have been around for oh 30 years or so (hint : if you're left handed with the mouse, then your right hand is naturally over arrow keys not WASD)... Come on people, stop tacking on a half-a**ed crippled keyboard bad port job as an afterthought to controllers.

It's impressive it was created with such a tiny design team, and the atmosphere and audio are nice, but there are several major annoyances which sadly spoil the game. Firstly there are game breaking "collision" bugs. If you use or drop the puzzle sphere in the wrong place it can bounce out of range (or even fall through the floor) so you have to restart. Secondly, I suffered from highly distracting chronic screen tearing even with both the game options and GFX drivers forced VSync to "on". Other people on the net complaining about the same thing, and yes this is the proper release not an "early access build". Thirdly, keys are not remappable (a relatively simple feature) and are inconsistent. Up and down arrows move forward and back, but left and right arrows "turn" instead of strafe (but WASD work as expected and strafe not turn). Finally, the biggest annoyance is no quick save. Some of us have busy schedules and can only "snatch" 10-15mins during certain periods. If it takes 16mins to complete a chapter and you quit just 30 seconds before completion, you'll have to restart the whole chapter over again. What are us busy people supposed to do, not game at all until we have a clear 5 hours? Come on people, this is 2014 PC gaming not 1986 cartridge based consoles. Even Doom in 1993 had a QuickSave feature, as have many other small-dev Indie games over the years using the same Unreal engine... End score = I would have given 8 out of 10 without the 4 annoyances, but it shrinks to 4 out of 10 with them as combined they make the game highly frustrating rather than fluid and enjoyable.

Initially I thought this was going to be a "poor man's" rip-off of Portal, but am pleasantly surprised to find it's a great game in itself. It has the same overall style (though not humor) as Portal, there is a plot but I won't spoil it here though. Many of the puzzles were great especially in the second half with coloured laser reflectors & electric cords. Requirements are quite low - should run fine even on a low-end gaming PC. Physics are good (as they need to be in a physics based puzzle game!) Some "professional" reviewers sulking about the sterile non-photo-realistic textures - um, that's pretty much the point of the location! Likewise, this is an Indie title and judging it by AAA standards is just silly, especially given Portal itself is a derivative of "Narbacular Drop" (Google it to understand Portal's early development). Voice acting & music aren't bad - what do people expect a full 200-piece orchestra on every puzzle game? If you liked Portal, then this is definitely worth playing overall as a game in its own right.

Just when you think Portal couldn't get any better, Portal 2 comes out. Much longer in length, even better puzzles, hilariously funny scripting & voice acting (especially "Cave Johnson" & Glados). Some negative reviews here have some fair points (very high prices for purely cosmetic DLC), but much of it is simply "I don't like puzzles", which is pretty silly. I don't like sports games but instead of leaving negative reviews for them, I simply don't buy what I know in advance I don't like! Likewise, "It's too much like the original" is a GOOD thing these days when some other developers have a tendency to repeatedly destroy franchises with dumbed-down "cinematic" tat (Thief 4 anyone?)... Overall I'll give the game a 9 simply because there were one or two crashes-to-desktop on mine. It would have gotten a 10 without them.

I could write a long rambling review saying what everyone else has already said about this complete catastrophic train wreck of a "game" ranging from the tiny level sizes and loading screens every 30 meters, to the broken audio to the dumb QTE's and micro-cutscenes which break immersion more than they add, to the dumbing down of the light-gem from 11 states to just 3. Instead I'll just post one example of many of what kind of "casual audience" they're targeting for Call of Thiefy 4. This is a genuine objective from Mission 1:- "Get 4 Headshots" Headshots. In Thief... When playing a Khajiit in Skyrim or replaying a 1998 game gives you a better "Thief" experience than 2014 Thief, you know the franchise is now dead... Do yourself a favor, go buy the original trilogy dirt cheap on GOG, then treat yourself to Dishonored if you haven't already played it, which although different from Thief, doesn't actively take the p*ss and insult your intelligence like this putrid train-wreck masquerading as a "Thief sequel"...

Fantastic FPS puzzle game. Gameplay is different enough as the game progresses that it doesn't get boring (new puzzles & ways to deal with them are introduced). GlaDOS is quite funny in places. Maps are well written and the mind-bending physics are pretty creative. It's only real shortcoming is fairly short length. Well worth playing though.

Fantastic game. Top-notch 1950s soundtrack, very atmospheric underwater setting. Weapon & plasmid combat balance "feels" just right. Good voice acting, great plot (and plot twist). Nice low frequency rumbles of the Big Daddies (if you have decent headphones or speakers). Bioshock is one of the best games I've ever played, up there with Deus Ex, etc, for "top 5 games of the decade"). A worthy "spiritual successor" to System Shock 2. It's sad that a 2007-era game (which doesn't feel "dated" at all compared to many others) is of a far higher "polished" finished production quality than many bug-ridden 2013 games...

Very mixed feelings about this game. On the one hand it's a great example of what indie games can achieve with just 2 developers. The general idea is good. GFX are "old school", but that's certainly not a problem in itself (I like retro gaming in general) and has zero bearing on my score. On the other, as others have said, the mechanics are more about luck or "dice throwing" than skill or strategy. It's not "hard" in the positive sense of "if you make a mistake you can learn from it and improve", it's hard in the tedious sense of "what a random number generator decides no matter how well you play". When you get "dealt a bad hand" something like 14 times in a row (happened to me) right from the start and there's no manual save, the game gets very tedious very quickly. And playing games should be about enjoying them, not killing off all enthusiasm during the first couple of hours. The game also crashed twice, which further underlies the need for a manual save/load, as after the second crash, I just couldn't be bothered to replay it all after losing all progress through no fault of my own. If the game had a better balance between skill & luck (say 75% skill, 25% luck) it would be really good, but right now it's almost 10% skill, 90% luck, which greatly detracts from the gameplay.

"You look like you need a monkey" "'How is the goat, over?' 'The goat is nervous. How do you think the goat is?'" An "oldie" but very definitely a goodie. Great level design, good weapons feel, fantastic swinging 60's soundtrack, and just epic gadgets ("horny pheromone robot dog" that distracts any pursuing Alsatians, anyone?) They just don't make games like this anymore. NOLF is one of the greats from the Golden Era of PC gaming, with a great sense of humor (something a lot of modern games that take themselves way too seriously could learn from).

This is a good game overall. The soundtrack is fantastic. The 3D 2D silhouette switching works well for the most part, and some of the puzzles are good. Graphics art style is excellent and very atmospheric. Voice acting is pretty good and contains some professional actors (Elias Toufexis, Bruce Dinsmore & Vanessa Matsui, etc). I would have given it 80-85%, but sadly it gets only 70% due to a number of game-breaking bugs (mostly clipping collision detection issues, ie, getting stuck in the floor after jumping down from a height or an object in the wall (especially in some areas of the circus). It's not broken as in "you can't finish it", but expect to reload a few times in one or two areas if you bump into the "wrong" thing. It's a shame as the game has a "fresh" feel to it, is very atmospheric and would have been superb had it been released bug free.

Yet another example of "paid shill reviews" with a ridiculous gaping chasm between 76% "professional" review vs 28% actual gamer reviews averaged over +200 scores (a dead giveaway). Out of all the genres which require consistently high FPS, racing games are right up there with "twitch" FPS. This game is hard-coded (locked) at 30fps and the "fix" to run at 60Hz is basically to speed everything up 2x so it ends up unplayable. It looks a joke. Almost like the devs are going out of their way to mock fans of the franchise. It really does redefine the word "pitiful". The last PC game I can remember being locked at 30fps was made in 1996... Low FPS aside, you've also got surprisingly poor GFX filled with aliasing ("jaggies"), blurry textures, lengthy unskippable cut scenes (people actually want to PLAY racing games, not sit and watch some weak B-movie backstory). If this is "next gen", then I prefer "last gen" games which were actually fun to play. In years to come this game will be remembered for being the "new benchmark" in disastrous consolized PC ports.

This is why I love Metacritic. The "professional critic" vs community reviews shows up 'manufactured hype' 10/10 shill reviews for bad games like a flare at night. At time of writing, the "official" CoDG critics scores are 85/79/67. The community score is 1.6 (16%). When you have a gap that large, something is seriously wrong somewhere that no amount of hype or criticism downplaying will cover up. I believe the phrase "jumped the shark" is entirely appropriate here. Ghosts is sadly one "cash in on the CoD franchise" release too many. Actual review Almost everything is a step backwards. No FOV slider on PC's. Theatre mode removed. Old previously fixed bugs are now reintroduced (like mouse sensitivity jumping about all over the place if you're running FRAPS to record gameplay footage). I thought my Logitech G300 was dying. So did many others given many similar comments online elsewhere. Nope it's the game. The PC porting optimisation is appalling. The game runs even slower than BF4 with little noticeable increase in quality over previous CoD games. In some places, GFX look like 2007/2008-era games. It's like Dragon Age 2 vs DA:Origins all over again half the fps for *inferior* quality textures. The issue is not "people's hardware is too slow because its next-gen launch time" some games engines are just plain badly written. 6GB min RAM for this? You must be joking. I've seen amateur modders do far better with Oblivion. Voice acting is a step back, constant crashes, sound issues, server issues, poor AI, etc, are just icing on the cake. No point repeating them all as everyone else here is saying the same thing. Even without technical issues, the main issue for me is that it's lost its general "fun-ness". It's just plain boring. If you've played older CoD games, then you've pretty much seen it all before. Many times before. If these half-finished bug-ridden dumbed down rehash sequels are representative of next-gen games, then all I can conclude is that next-gen "so smart it's turned full circle and become **** again"... At this rate, I'll be getting a lot more fun replaying modding older games in future, something a lot of people seem to be increasingly doing with bug-ridden glorified Beta releases booted out with little to no quality control, and an over-reliance on using "day one" gamers as unpaid patch testers due to marketing dept. release date p*ssing contests. Battlefield 4 was rushed out to compete with CoDG, and CoDG was rushed to compete with BF4. Both have masses of low-rated reviews for the same reason More bugs in each than the inside of an ant's nest. What in God's name is going on with gaming studio's these days? Not impressed at all either with the individual game, or "next-gen" releases in general so far.

I have to agree with other reviews. Riddled with bugs, missing textures, audio issues (clipping & sound lags), server crashes, soldiers die instantly upon respawning, etc. If you don't want the game to be judged on these things, then don't rush it out unfinished! It's ***WAY*** overpriced for what it is (basically another unfinished CoD arcade shooter pretending to be a "serious" military game with massive pre-release over-hype). I loved Call of Duty as a game in its own right, but the obsession with trying to turn every... single... shooter/franchise... into a "scripted cinematic experience" is getting very tedious. +5% GFX improvements do not seem to correlate with +100% higher system requirements. GFX somehow manage to look *worse* in some areas. The issue is not "everyone has slow hardware", it's simply a badly optimized inefficient engine in terms of quality/performance ratio. 4-5hr bug-ridden single-player campaign. "Levolution" just marketing speak for "dynamic map scripting" which is hardly unique. "Ooh look! Pretty pre-scripted building collapsing" seems to be the beginning and end of BF4 'improvement' over BF3. It seems the more "cinematically scripted" new games become, the less fun they are to play in terms of actual gameplay. And given the game was released by EA (enough said), you can bet all of the premium priced DLC's will take priority over bug fixing...

I'd love to tell you how the game plays, but I can't the cursor keys don't work for moving forward back left right, and you can't remap ANY controls whatsoever! The controls menu simply shows what keys do what it doesn't actually allow changes. The PC version even has a picture of a console controller in the options that's how bad the PC port is. I know this isn't a AAA game by a major studio, but even so, there is a reasonable user interface baseline which quite frankly, this game doesn't even meet 1990's "shareware" games standard (even "Doom" in 1993 had standard cursor key controls). WASD vs cursor keys flexibility is for left vs right handers and variable mouse position to the left vs right of the keyboard (and even then many right handers prefer cursor keys some right handers also use the mouse with their left hand). This is not exactly a "new thing" and has been known to PC game designers for what 20 years now? Not being a major studio is no excuse This is by the far the worst game interface on any game in years.