Chlodwig

One of the few games that you can simply pick up, get no explanation or tutorial for, and you immediately understand how it works. You connect different geometric shapes (the "stations") with colored lines (the, well, "lines") and small shapes appearing next to to big shapes (the "passengers") want to be taken to the big shapes by the rectangles on your lines (the "subway trains"). I just fully explained the game. And the "graphics" it employs. Just another proof that graphics do not make a good game, and bad graphics do not sink it. Because the graphics of this game could've been done on a C64 with little to no loss in fidelity. It is one of those "easy to learn, hard to master" games. Because you are ever presented with new decisions and challenges. Do I need more lines or more tunnels? Should I put another train on my route or attach a cart to one of the ones I have? Because if the passengers are waiting too long, the game's over. My only complain would be that the different towns (i.e. "levels") don't really differ that much. With some you have more rivers (which is a problem because crossing a river costs you a bridge), others spawn passengers faster, in the end, though, they all play really similar with little strategic variety.

A puzzle game. Your challenge: Get to the "cup", the all holy grail, or die trying. And die trying again. And die again. And if enough brave knights died, one of the knights that comes after them will be able to walk across their corpses and not fall into the spikes that killed the others. Yes, in this game you fill the moat with corpses so you can walk across without getting your feet wet. That's the basic idea behind this otherwise rather normal platform puzzler. You have buttons that change things, you have conveyor belts (with and without spikes), you have cannons that can shoot your knights about (and kill them in the process, only to land them on buttons so they keep them pressed)... you get the idea. All done with incredibly beautiful and cute animation that makes you almost feel bad for using the cute knights as cannon fodder (and quite literally so). The only problem is that the novelty factor wears off eventually and it is, well, yet another puzzler. But for the price of what you'd pay for a pizza, so it's still a good buy.

Have you ever wondered if it's possible to make an "educational game" that is actually fun? Here's your answer. This game will make you WANT to learn about orbital mechanics, because that's how you get your rockets to stay up. That's how you can get them to meet in space so you can dock. And build space stations. And land on other planets and moons. Getting something off the ground is easy. Even getting something out of the atmosphere isn't that hard yet. And then you start to learn. Because you want that to succeed. You start calculating how much delta-V you need for orbit. You start to understand why single-stage to orbit (i.e. no dropping of spent stages) is but a wet dream. You start to wrap your mind around complicated formulas for the sake of building better rockets. Not because it is easy, but because it is hard. We're not talking about a "serious" simulation here, mind you. It's still heaps easier to get anything done in KSP than in reality. The planet is much smaller and easier to launch from. Your launch site is exactly at the equator and the "Mun" (the moon orbiting the planet) is on an equatorial orbit. That makes some things easier. And once you managed to deal with all that, you start to add one of the hundreds of (free) mods. That will improve the aerodynamic of the game. And add new challenges. There is now even a mod that changes the game to the point where you are essentially dealing with our real solar system. And communication delay. And, and, and. If you enjoy games that challenge your mind in a scientific (or at least pseudo-scientific) way, download the demo and give it a spin. Don't blame me if you lose sleep over it, though!

Free to play - Pay to win. In a nutshell, that is WoT for you. Well, mind you, it's a given that F2P games somehow have to give you an "incentive" to spend some money on them, but aside of the even more horribly lopsided F2P Battlefield I've not seen anything like this in the F2P field. Let's even ignore for a moment the fact that as a F2P player you have to spend ridiculous amounts of time to actually "level up" because the amount of XP you get per battle is ridiculously low, as a "free" player you are, essentially, the target dummy for the paying community. You're not their player, you're essentially part of the product being sold, kinda-sorta like a bot with some brains, there to make those feel good that shelled out some dough for it. You get invariably dumped into games where you're on the lower end of the spectrum, which more often than not leads to you being pretty much unable to put even a dent into their armor. It gets old kinda fast if you keep shooting at an enemy from behind (where it should be "softer") countless times for exactly zero effect before he finally realizes you're there, turns his turret and blows you out of existence. More because you're an inconvenience rather than a threat. Sure, I could buy some "premium ammo" for real money, then I might get to score a hit from time to time. But you may think it's temporary, and all you have to do is to get to the next tier of tanks, then you'll be on top of the roster. You will not, because now you get tossed into a battle of the same **** combination as before, just one tier higher. But that's not even your problem. You're now again in a "stock" tank without any improvements, in other words, you're not only the runt of the litter, your crate now also **** on top of it. So you improve it, you spend countless battles where you're little more than the target dummy for some paying player... the treadmill repeats itself until you're finally fed up and give up. I somehow wonder if there are any "free" players in the higher tiers at all... Or what do you shoot at when you spent a few hundred bucks on this game and managed to get to tier 10? Do you have to play against others who did the same? And keep spending to stay in the game? Sorry. I don't mind dropping a few bucks to a game I like, but when a F2P game starts to cost more than a premium title, without being anything close to premium, something's terribly wrong.

I'm really torn what vote to give this game. I really am. As a stand alone game, it surely deserves at least an 9. As a successor to Tropico 3, it deserves a heartfelt zero. Why? Because this game is in fact Tropico 3 with new buildings. As an addon to T3, it would have received a gold star. As a standalone game and full price title, it feels like a horrible rip off. This is, essentially Tropico 3 with a few new twists. Graphics? Same. I am not kidding, I am not exaggerating, even the buildings look EXACTLY the same as in T3. They are EXACTLY the same models with the same graphics. The character generation (i.e. how you make your El Presidente) has changed slightly, but again nothing that an addon could not have achieved. This is pretty much the only difference to the T3 addon Absolute Power, which also came with a new campaign and a few new buildings.

Mass Effect meets MMO meets Star Wars. And while this sounds like it almost HAS to be a 10, it's not. Not by a long shot. The MMO part is old. There is simply nothing new, everything has been here before in MMO land. It's the same point-and-click interface that we've known since the days of Everquest and that was already stale in WoW. The only "new" part is that the boring stuff (like selling craploot) is dumped on your sidekick. Yes, every class is a pet class and everyone got a sidekick. Which sounds great, hey, while I go and play the game, I send the drone to do some boring menial work. Nu-uh. Imagine Warlock without blue blob. That's how efficient you are without your sidekick. So, in a nutshell, what it means is that everyone is a pet class. And the whole "genuinely new concept" ends right there. Then, the Mass Effect part. A metric ton of dialogues, a storyline with a detail level that is unparalleled in the MMO world... which is nice until you do some group quest for the n-th time and still have some guy in your group that doesn't skip the cutscenes that you can by that time recite verbatim because you have heard them n-1 times. And who doesn't know that choosing the "wrong" answer leads to even more and even longer dialogues. Then there's that idea, just like in Mass Effect, that you may forge your character's path with his answers to dialogues, join the "light" or "dark" side, make friends or enemies... which is really exciting until level 10 when you get your first sidekick and notice that your answers affect your sidekick's opinion about you. And his opinion in turn affects his efficiency. And the difficulty of the game is geared to having a more or less "loyal" sidekick. So can the idea to "choose your own path", you better choose the path your sidekicks want you to. The idea that you can choose your character's "light or dark" path falls flat on the face here. Oh, to be fair, you can "buy" their love with gifts. If you can afford them. I foresee a nice source of income for goldsellers in the days to come. So what's left when you strip the new game smell is a standard MMO without too much that makes it stick out from the crowd, neither negatively or positively. It's a solid MMO, mostly balanced (for PvE at least), with mostly working quests and a lack of serious endgame content, just as you would expect from an MMO that's fresh on the market. If you like Star Wars or if you liked the story elements of Mass Effect and like MMOs, you should give it a spin, if you're just looking for a new and fresh MMO with new elements that aren't staler than a week old loaf of bread, look elsewhere.

AI Wars does not shine with graphics. AI Wars does not shine with its interface. And AI War certainly did not reinvent the "build up army and then mow down the enemy" genre. AI Wars shines with its AI (the name of the game kinda gives that focus away). An AI that learns from you. An AI that you have to beat again and again, just 'cause you got it once does not mean that the same strategy will work again. Or that it will work anymore later in the game when the AI found out how you play and adapts. If you notice a plan works too well, it could well be that the AI lets you "win" a few non critical planets and think that your idea is great, only to set the trap for you on one of the more important key systems. Another thing that makes AI interesting is that you can't simply use the steamroller tactics that often give you the edge in such games, i.e. mass your forces and roll over the enemy, build a new front line, roll forwards... If you do that, you already lost because the AI gets more powerful depending on how many systems you invade and "liberate". Every time you take over a key system, you "give" the AI more "progress", which translates into more power it may use against you. In general an awesome game that only has one sore point: Multiplayer. No, it is actually stunning in multiplayer (seriously, playing this game with a few people is just plain awesome), since you co-op against the AI. What blows is that the game comes without any tool whatsoever for matchmaking. So either you have a few friends you play with or you can only hope to find someone on their boards that might want to play at the same time as you do, you talk it out and agree on a time... no "lobby" system to connect to and hop into a game with some other random player who wants to give it a spin. But if you and your friends happen to like challenging, co-op RTS games with a very challenging AI, by all means this is a great game!

It's obvious that this game was created for consoles. The menu handling on PCs is, to put it politely, braindead. It all makes sense instantly the moment you realize that it was originally meant for consoles. And the game remains consistent at this. The loading times between levels is, in one word, stunning. Usually enough time to get a new can of soda, just like you'd expect from a console game that needs to load the next level from its DVD. But ... on a PC? Now, consoles do not have firewalls or other pesky things like this. Hence, Borderlands' multiplayer option refuses to work if you happen to consider security something that you might want on your PC. Only if you turn off every semblance of protection, forward a metric ton of ports and let everything and anything connect freely to your machine, you might be allowed to hope that maybe you could possibly be rewarded with a working multiplayer session. Ok, I take that 'working' back. It might connect. For how long, well, let's say it will be a surprise for you. When you finally get to play, it's FUN! For about 10 minutes. Then you notice that, well, you're actually doing the same crap over and over and over and over... and while that was fun for Diablo a decade ago, it kinda got old by now. It's not even fun as a shooter. This from someone who loves multiplayer shooters and adores the graphics of TF2 (one of the reasons why I bought BL, the graphics sure resemble those of TF2). It just is plainly and simply no fun. And it's not even that the enemies are "only NPCs", I love Left4Dead with a similar "us 4 against 100 enemies, we're soooo unfair!" feel to it. The Borderlands NPCs are just simply terrible. Either they are brain dead zombies (no pun intended) that look at you blankly while you take potshots. Or they have superhuman radar that makes "sneaking" up to them completely pointless since they seem to know just where you are on the map, all the time, whether they can see you or not. Essentially, that reduces the "shooter" element to "fire your gun in the general direction of the enemy, absorb the return fire (no need to duck or anything, it won't change a bit), then go and collect the trinkets. Rinse, repeat. Tactics? GROUP tactics? C'mon, it's so obviously a console shooter, you're expecting WAY too much.