Gzhindra

Dark Souls 2 in not by any mean a bad game. To sum up, it is what happen when you give a great license with well though mechanics to someone lacking visions and understanding of what made Dark Soul 1 such a great game. The basis are good but the game designer should have heeded the moto "If it works don't try and fix it". Dark Souls 1 had a well thought and overall coherently made world. In Darks Souls 2 it is more like a patchwork of environments that hardly fit together without any logic. The game lacks terribly in atmosphere. The story was not the forte of Dark Souls 1 but there was a sense of purpose. There is no such thing in Dark Souls 2 as it has become only a beat them all with stats and upgradeable equipment. It is still fun to toy with but we lost something. There are at least to main game mechanics mistakes. The game has been casualized with a limited amount of respawn by enemies. If getting through an area is too difficult for you, you shouldn't worry as you can kill one enemy at a time, respawn them and after a while they simply won't be here anymore making you passing dead easy. They did this to prevent farming but they could have simply limited the number of souls and equipement one enemy can provide instead of doing this. The other broken mechanic is the weapon durability. It is base on frame rate. The higher your framerate the fastest your going to break your weapons. This mechanics is not only stupid, it is tedious and brings nothing good to the game, not even challenge. It was already the case with Dark Souls 1 but: - it lack a pause button which is not acceptable. People can have urgencies in their lives and while it understandable in PVP it isn't in PVE. - Online is forced on the player whether you like it or not - No return to Windows option in the menu.

Space run is overall a very good tower defense. Good mechanics, challenging and pretty neat with nice voice acting and a nice polish. Your missions are rated with stars (5 per missions) and the number of stars you have in total give you access to better equipment and upgrades. You pay for these equipments with cash earned after each missions. While the number of stars is limited to 5 per missions you can replay the mission as many time as you want to grind for cash. This grinding is the only fault I find to this game as I would have prefer a limit to the cash provided by each mission than having to do the same mission over and over whether it was perfected or not. It tends to be heavy on micromanagement at first since their is no pause button but not so much later in the game with the most advance equipment.

The graphics are minimalists but Ikaruga isn't about aesthetics. It is about a pure and extremely demanding gameplay and getting up the leaderboard. I love it and keep coming back to it. A little bit everyday without fail.

The only thing that this game does right is the fighting system and the skillsets. It is pretty deep and gives a lot of freedom in term of tactics. Unfortunately the class are poorly balanced and if you play in the higher difficulty levels it shows. A lot. The mage class is uber powerful while other classes become useless. Some classes are useful at the beginning of the game and deflate in the later game. The dog for example has clearly not been thought to be kept beyond the first half of the game. Too bad. The game tries to make you think there is freedom but there are very little. You can chose the order in which you are going to play the sub stories and at the end of each of these sub stories chose the good and the evil path which actually change the troops you will have at the end of the game but nothing storywise. The game is actually very manichean (binary straight good or straight bad. Nothing in between) despite what the developer was claming. The story is pretty shallow and uninteresting. It would have been acceptable if the game had real freedom but in this very close game it looks very cheap. The meta-story could be told on a piece of toilet paper. It is that deep. You have independent sub stories. Little one. But several little story don’t make 1 great story. It was supposed to be a Baldur’s gate revival but it fails miserably.

The game is very ugly and suffers from not having any music. If you can get through that you will get a very descent RPG well worth playing. It is an open RPG not a story intense close one. Nevertheless the story is still pretty cool. You are free to go pretty much everywhere and get your buttock kicked. The fighting system is not super deep but sufficient to keep you grinding. There are a lot of place to explore, many of them not mandatory and **** in each corner to find a buff gets very addictive. Overall the game is very enjoyable. It tooks me something like 40 hours to finish the game. There are several endings.

Rogue Legacy is simple in its mechanics and doesn’t bring a lot of variety but it works. The game is super addictive and can be very challenging if you want it to. Actually the first playthrough is not very hard and it just takes time but from new game (you can restart the game in a harder castle after each playthrough ad infinitum) it gets very hard. A must have for plateformers and Metroid-like fans.

The graphics are a bit outdated but apart from that it is as good as it can be. That is if you like deep fighting games with steep learning curves. The roster is very large and the characters are charismatics or at least most of them. But this is no news as this game has been out there for a while. The real question mark with the steam edition was the netcode and they delivered. It is nothing like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter x Tekken. It is even superior to SSF4 by a large margin. Actually it is on part with Skullgirls’ who uses GGPO. Even against awful connections it is quite smooth. Very impressive. I’m going to play this game for a very long time. A fighting stick is highly advisable.

Dark Souls is hard but Dark Souls is highly rewarding. It is long and it is deep, full of lore and secret and there is something to be said of this game’s atmosphere too: Dark and warm at the same time. It has also a lot of replayability. I could praise this game forever. The fighting systems appear simple at first but when you start to dig it has a depth few games have. The character development is also outstanding. Everything has its use and it change the way you play along with the tone of weapons that have their original move sets. It is a bless that this game came to the PC. The resolution is locked in the vanilla version but you can mod it in 5 min and after that the experience is perfect. The 30 fps limit is not a problem with this kind of game if your computer can keep it constant.

Shadowrun Returns conveys the Cyberpunk’s feel very well. The graphical arts and the musics are spot on. On these aspects Harebrained Schemes delivered. Do not expect a great campaign with a breath-taking scenario though. It is mostly a game editor for the community to work with and provide descent content. The campaign is short and accordingly the story doesn’t go very deep. It could be a side quest in baldur’s gate 2 actually. It is well written however and enjoyable enough. The biggest issues as it is, in my opinion, are the game mechanics and the characters development. It is fairly limited in term of strategy and the class are totally unbalanced. Pure deckers or even mages are not functionals for example and it will be a walk through the park with a character focused on ranged combat. If the game mechanics and the characters development can be heavily modified with the editor it could have the potential for great content from the community. Otherwise it will be only a nice story telling tool.

Even though the game is one big joke it a very good fps nonetheless. The references from the 80's are spot on and it is a load of fun. The secondary missions get repetitives after a while but the game ended before I was overfed. Overall it is a very good game with modern gameplay.

What an experience! It is a short game but I enjoyed every bit of it. The art direction is pretty much the best of the indie games world combined with the best of the AAA games world. It is wonderful place to be immerse in. The controls are responsive and the action relentless. My only real critic is that the few puzzles in the game are way to simple. Until you get to the Nightmare mode the game lacks challenge but apart from that it is a great game with a soul.

Simply the best hardcore platformer available. I have played it for more than 100 hours and I'm not tired of it. The gameplay is deep, technical and very rewarding. It feels a bit awkward at first but once you get use to it you flow through the levels. It's like dancing. The learning curve it quite steep but it is progressive. The very last levels of the games (added in a later patch) are not made for human though. It can get frustrating but the reward is there.