Indrigis

Let me start by saying that if you're a die hard fan of Dank Souls and I Wanna Be The Guy, Sekiro might be a 9 if not a 10 for you. I am not such a fan, so I grant it a 7. Generously. Sekiro looks gorgeous, that much is true. It just lacks free roam content that is there for viewing only. Everything is functional, sadly, so you don't get to just look in awe. However, gameplay-wise it feels like a DS game turned to 11. As if the designer listened to the fans chanting "hardcore, so hard, so fun, so elite, truly Dark Souls is the Dark Souls of gaming", shrugged and said "well, if that is the only thing you care about..." and then just pushed every other concern aside. Despite what was promised early on, the "Shinobi" part is pretty bleak. Stealth and subterfuge are not really Wolf's strong suit and most enemies are placed in such ways that killing them stealthily takes time and doesn't pay extra. Skipping entire groups of enemies means depriving yourself of experience, money and items. Besides that, many grapple points are placed just far enough apart that you won't be able to spiderman your way through, forcing you to crouch and creep around between grappling, breaking any tempo you might have had. Then there's the combat. It comes with a major problem - normal enemies are fast, come in groups and have no friendly fire whatsoever. You let go of the block button once and take a flaming arrow to the face, said arrow coming straight through three or four enemies. Annoying, isn't it? Also, nothing staggers, unlike you. So you can take an axe to the face with no warning or prior parry, just because the enemy decided to swing it and there's nothing you could do. Parry is the name of the game but it doesn't add depth, just width. You can only git gud mechanically, but not strategically, sadly. The worst offender is the camera. While it's nice of the developers to try and help the player ever so slightly, the target lock and camera reset are on the same button and target lock has a mind of its own and shifts around if you try to move the camera because... you guessed it. "Switch target" is on the same four buttons as "rotate camera". There's a setting for targeting aid when not locked on, but the game doesn't seem to aid me even slightly - without target lock enemies just sidestep while Wolf keeps moving forward even if I rotate the camera mid-combo. And while I am all for understanding that Sekiro is not a slasher like DmC V, I can't help noticing that Wolf moves so fast and jumps so high his physics are much more fit for an arcade rather than a "hardcore" swordfighting game.

Washington DC is beautiful, as expected from the engine. But it's still a city of locked doors and samey landscapes, unfortunately. In fact, the main campaign and the sidequests are worse than in the first game. There is more shooting and more shooting (did I mention more shooting) but quite a bit less story. No Times Square shootout, no good personal stories to be found and traced. Fewer echoes, seemingly, too. Another thing The Division 2 severely lacks is the proper power fantasy (well, so did the first game, . but I'm reviewing the second one here). You grow up in levels and gear score, but the game stays relatively the same - one headshot for a basic enemy, a few mags for an elite, twice the ammo supply of the entire squad (in headshots, no less) for an elite bounty tank on the highest difficulty (and what an entertaining 10-15 minutes it is... not). Your skills have pretty long cooldowns and aren't particularly gamechanging, but you always die in a few hits because the game helpfully progresses the world tier and the enemy levels to always keep you challenged. There is little flair in everything too. Diablo or even Borderlands this game is not. What remains is a competent (but aggravatingly bugged as of March 29th) game. It doesn't crash and you rarely get stuck, but there's a truckload of small things - tutorial voice lines being played every time you leave a group and enter base of operations, interact key in some situations being hard bound to F regardless of your preference (but not all the time, for that would be consistent). Some items being unreachable unless you consumed the content in the right order, et c. It's an AAA product with a paid public hype demo called a "beta" for some reason. One may be tired of playing Warframe, Destiny, Anthem or whatever else, but Division 2 doesn't bring enough content and variety to justify a full price yet. Maybe in a year or two, with extra DLCs, assuming there is a player base still.

The Battle for Azeroth is over with the Legion expansion. Now it's Battle for Azerite, sadly. You literally grind azerite to improve your necklace and that is about it. Gameplay: No new classes, no new skills, no new talents, and the artifacts are also gone. Nothing has been added except a global cooldown for all skills. And since everything scales to your level, you're guaranteed to have a pleasurable, if immensely dull, solo experience. Content: Well, there are two new islands, but the story is downright absent. You come to Kul Tiras, watch a cutscene, run a short dungeon and off you go sidequesting. If you absolutely want to see a resolution for the initial conflict, you better hit up the wiki because most of your plot progression quests make no sense whatsoever - they're there to drag you around the zone on a forced sightseeing tour, not to tell you a story. PvP: What PvP? World PvP is dead and organized PvP is just the same as before, except with even less incentive to do it. WoD gave us garrisons all for ourselves, Legion gave us class halls, again - virtually for ourselves, BfA gave us a whole game all for ourselves. And I have a hard time justifying paying Blizzard for a right to play with myself...

Destiny 2 could have been so much more if the developers actually looked at the game and decided "This is too exotic for the PC crowd". It's good it got released but none of the critic reviews mention how alien it is at it's core. The graphics are good, the music is awesome... The rest is kind of meh. First big problem with the game is that the social part is almost absent. There are two hubs where people can hang out but there's no global chat or local chat on the planets (something you could use to tell new people how to make an encounter heroic, for example). No group finding interface at all (although not too much content is available at release and there is no reason to choose a particular strike because they all give rewards from the same pool). The developers seem to be of a "It doesn't matter what you're farming, if you're farming" mindset. And the second problem is that the game offers nothing in terms of gameplay that has not been done better before it. Borderlands did the RPG/FPS part much better with more unique skill trees, a better variety of weapons and enjoyable platforming. Any MMORPG did the mass multiplayer better. Lots of games did story better. So the only thing that remains is a multiplayer RPG/FPS. And to be good at that Destiny just needs to be much more multiplayer-friendly. Assuming you're doing campaign/all the good exotic quests and have no friends who also bought the game, you'll spend about two thirds of your time alone.

For most of its runtime, Pyre is a visual novel that actively prevents the player from becoming engaged in it. Starting out of nowhere, it never really allows the faceless, nameless and voiceless player to find out what is going on, since all the other characters are only available for interaction when the developers allow it and reveal little to no information. There is contextual help in dialogue, but it typically reveals fluff details about the locales or characters, but not the overall setting. The purpose and way of reaching the goal (whatever the goal may be) remain unclear. Aside from the VN there's an aggressive football RPG. However, any RPG actions the player can take can be easily invalidated by the VN part, making freshly empowered characters refuse to participate in a Rite for plot reasons. And those RPG actions rarely change the game drastically. It is possible to make a character faster, bigger or more destructive, but there aren't any new radical abilities to gain. And the biggest problem is the uniqueness of the Rites. It is impossible to predict what lies ahead and every new Rite brings new enemies with new abilities and tactics. Whereas Bastion and Transistor allowed the losing player to reformulate their approach and try again, Pyre simply tells the player "You should have done X, but that information is largely useless until your next playthrough". Made as a mixture of disjointed elements neither of which is entirely engaging in its own right, Pyre feels like a failed experiment at something new.

Tales of Berseria is a painfully mediocre game. It is a good JRPG in that it does all the necessary fanservice and "unexpected" plot twists but as a game it is really bland. Yes, it has rave reviews but it still follows every "safe" cliche that has plagued the genre for the last 10 years. Velvet is all "dark", "really evil" and "revenge-driven" but she's extremely prone to not killing important enemies, being needlessly chatty when butt-kicking is due and turning into a damsel in distress when the plot demands it. The supporting cast, however different and "edgy" they might look are all the stereotypical ones. A swordsman who looks carefree but is actually totally absolutely amazingly powerful, a clumsy kid whose primary role is to invoke warm feelings, a really grimdark fighter who is both grim and dark, a comic relief happy go lucky magician girl who, of course, will magically save you when a deus ex machina is needed... The combat is quite complicated and nuanced but gut-wrenchingly boring. There are a plethora of "artes" your characters can learn but you are limited to 4 artes per combo level so you either set up the most effective combo all around and mash a single button until you get calluses, start every battle with painstakingly reassigning artes to fit your present set of enemies or say "Eh, whatever" and set combat difficulty to "Easy", saving yourself a few hours. And technically the game is stuck somewhere in mid-2000s. The sublevels are small to account for the engine's limitations and when a really big open level shows up it looks like a Quake map with lots of rectangular building blocks glued together with no environmental detail or objects. SFX is flashes and animated inserts, sound is nothing to write a review about. Despite all the praise it's still a Tales game fresh off the conveyor with all the flaws and bumps lovingly preserved. You've played this before quite a few times.

Microtransactions! Are optional. I beat the game on Give Me Deus Ex with lots of praxis and consumables to spare, without touching any of the preorder/DLC items. All you could ever need can be found by exploring and hacking (i.e. actually playing the game). With that out of the way, what Deus Ex M.D. brings to the table is a few new augments and a greater plot involvement from the forces behind the scenes of the original 2000 game. However, these are not really enough to freshen the experience considerably. The new toys are fun, the familiar names tie into the narrative, but sticking to old augs and ignoring the plot works just fine. The gameplay is still solid with multiple paths to your goal and different methods of achieving it through force or cunning. There are great episodes allowing for creativity and fluid action and then there are big stretches of the game that more or less force the player to do what the designers wanted the player to do in order to see some exposition, denying some obvious logical solution to the problem that would also bypass those stretches of the game. The exposition is still somewhat of a problem. The game tends to wrestle control away from the player and show them how Adam walks through a door to engage in a plot-delivering conversation with some character instead of allowing the player to check the door with augmented vision and make their own decision on how to proceed. A few obvious traps are also forcibly ignored. Of course "two guards stand still and wait for Adam to come close before delivering some atmospheric detail through fully voiced dialogue and going their separate ways" is still omnipresent, but these voiced dialogues almost never deliver any important information, which is hidden in personal secretaries and computers instead. Prague serving a central hub for the game also results in a frustrating amount of back and forth shuttling between the two districts, especially towards the end of the game, where every side mission will be delivered to you when you're in the other part of the city and will require at least a couple trips back and forth to get all the objectives. Through my entire 30+ hours with it the game only crashed on me once, in the DLC mission, but there were some minor glitches with interaction controls not working until a game is reloaded. The graphics and performance are quite satisfactory. Why an 8/10 for a game with "more of the same, but more accessible" as its driving force? Nostalgia, I guess. However small, Deus Ex M. D. is still a chapter in the universe even if it's filler. P.S.: Breach does not seem like an overly interesting game mode. It's different enough from the main game but too much of an F2P experience with random booster packs and single use modifier cards. Maybe that's where the "we all hate microtransactions" part comes in, but let's be realistic - nobody bought this game for Breach.

The Solus Project claims to be a survival experience, but survival is not much of a problem. Food and water are abundant, a solution to cold weather (aka night) is to take a good 10-hour nap, and during lengthy thunderstorms lightning will consistently hit you for 20% of your health regardless of cover. Although there are only a handful of patrolling enemies, traps are plentiful but, again, simplistic and only hidden by darkness. The hero's greatest enemy is the game designer. Although the game is set in the 22nd century, one of the two most useful pieces of human technology available to the player is a metal tube covered in some alien roots and soaked in rocket fuel. This creates a torch that heats the player, lights up the surroundings and burns forever (seriously, it's permanent. It never requires more alien roots or fuel). The other useful piece of technology is a personal teleporter, borrowed in its entirety from Unreal Tournament. Apart from that there's no long range optics, no radar or local map, nothing that would be fitting for an interstellar planetary explorer. At least there's a PDA which can scan objects in the world, providing helpful hints like "Rock, heavy, multi-purpose" (useful for putting on buttons) and "metal tube, tool, very good!" (two required across the entire playthrough) and translate alien writings on the walls. However, all of that could be forgiven for a good plot or decent exploration. The Solus Project has neither. The plot is extremely straightforward and, regrettably, disconnected from the gameplay. No matter how many tablets you decipher, the protagonist never acknowledges that in his/her reports and acts as if he/she never knew what was going to happen. The exploration is tedious and mostly useful for artifacts (+1% to some resistance) and vanity items, having no real influence on the survival part. As a first attempt at making a game, The Solus Project is quite decent. But even in that price category there are better, much more polished and interesting games.

To paraphrase three most common complaints from people giving negative reviews: * Opened the menu on the "Grill" page, ordered a steak. Got a steak. But I wanted sushi and pancakes with a side of raspberry jam. 0/10. * This steak brings nothing new to the table. It's just a mix of meat, spices and vegetables. I've eaten all of those before. 2/10. * If I want my steak on an authentic Ming dynasty dish or want gold-plated utensils, I have to pay extra, on top of paying for the steak. 4/10. As far as reasonable expectations go, Overwatch is a damn fine steak, though. The hero roster is great, the maps are well designed, the gameplay is very fluid and satisfying. Although there could be more game modes or some extra dynamic events on the maps, the package is quite solid as it is. While cosmetic offerings do not come fast by leveling, you hardly need more than one (favorite) skin/voice line/spray for any character.

My biggest problem with R6S is the amount of pointless restrictions and omissions in the game. Defenders can block doors and use remote explosives but don't get shields, flashbangs or decent DMRs; attackers are not allowed to use the heartbeat sensor or block the doorways behind them. There are no destructible light sources or thermal scopes. Even though there are cameras in the game, motion detection alarms are not an option. It's as if Ubisoft were trying to make Counter-Strike with mutually exclusive classes instead of a proper next gen squad tactical game with customizable loadouts. While the maps are decent, they also have an element of luck to them, with some positions being easy to defend and some downright atrocious for any mode, and the position itself being random and not changeable (can't move the hostage/container/bombs). Getting the short end of the stick is never fun. And mechanically it's not very fun either. Instead of deployables being placeable via their projected model like in many other games, R6S forces the operator to shuffle back and forth until they magically raise their hands into the 'can deploy' position. It's not realistic, it's deliberately crippled control. Of course, barbed wire, bear traps and whatnot can not be placed on stairs, no, sir. Only on flat surfaces with at least a meter of free space behind them (for the operative to stand when deploying). All the traps, even the mechanical ones, have IFF, e.g. the barbed wire doesn't slow down allies. MAGIC! When the game works, it feels good. Yet, most of the time it just feels like "Game1 and Game2 did this so much better" and makes me wish for far more freedom in choosing loadouts and doing things.

Let me start by saying that the game deserves a solid 5/10 considering the server issues. But assuming they're fixed... Multiplayer: Gunplay: It's yet more of Advanced Warfare except now horribly mutilated. The maps are small and full of obstacles deliberately placed to promote close range SMG shootouts over long range shots. Moreover, maps went from 3D to 3Lane, introducing lots of obstructions, headglitch spots and long corridors lined by invisible walls. Adding to that, all the weapons have been made a lot more precise and most SMGs are quite effective at 50 metres, rendering proper sniping moot. The FMJ attachment is supposed to improve penetration but any given obstacle being penetratable at all is wildly inconsistent. The movement mechanics, again, are, in a sense, more limited than in AW but with the shrunken maps they are more than enough. Scorestreaks: Instead of customizable scorestreaks from AW (a great improvement) there are now lots of one-trick vehicles which can be easily shot down with a few launcher missiles. No more map-specific scorestreaks either. Overall this feels like a great step back. Special abilities: Specialist abilities are just different from Exo-abilities. You no longer start with a full charge each life but rather charge it over time and score. On the other hand, specialist weapons tend to be a lot more destructive than anything else and some abilities are great for clutch plays. Overall: I would say that Black Ops 3 feels very forced. The borderline synthetic map design and weapon equalization waste the potential gained from what was fixed. And the whole "More like the classics" design idea doesn't work well with the futuristic wall running and explosive bows. Single Player: The campaign is not good. There are lots of fan theories explaining it all and creating a sensible timeline and plot but actually playing the campaign is not enjoyable. It's a disjointed experience devoid of really great moments or a global plot arc. More than anything, it's full of frustratingly stupid decisions made by every character without any player agency (since it's not an RPG, obviously). Zombies: Instead of a typical horde mode Zombies becomes an obscure adventure-like experience where you have to collect artifacts, perform rituals and do all sorts of songs and dances that have nothing to do with actual shooting. The biggest indicator of this is the "have one player kite the last zombie around while the other three are doing the item collection/beast transformation/easter egg completion" tradition. Is it fun? Maybe. Is it in line with the rest of the game? Not so much. And last but not the least, PC-specific issues: At the moment of writing several weapons are downright imbalanced, like Drakon, the semi-auto sniper rifle that is a 2-hit kill at any range, has very little recoil and can be shot repeatedly for quite some time due to a 28-round magazine. The server quality, at least in EU (and, I think, Australia too) is downright unacceptable with random disconnects and horrible lag and rubberbanding issues a lot of the time. Many bugs and absent features too, like mouse inversion when aiming scorestreaks by tablet, lack of separate control for ADS mouse sensitivity and the like. The matchmaking is somewhat questionable, mixing good players with all sorts of other players. Although Treyarch/Activision might get a solid B for effort, the post-release support and communication are almost absent. If it stays this way, the game might not hold its own on PC for very long.

Verily, I say, D'oh... Metal Gear Solid franchise has always been about ridiculously over the top plots with obligatory plot twists, betrayals and unmaskings and having that very tactical espionage action, keyword being espionage. TPP throws most of it away in favor of being a private military company management sim. The graphics are great, the musical score is awesome, including a lot of 80s hits collectible on cassettes, there are lots of ways to approach combat from direct fire contact to non-lethal options to lures and traps to calling in artillery strikes. The stealth aspect, however, is damaged by rather bad mobility, inability to scale walls or hang from railings and most bases having rather flat layouts. Both overland maps are quite big, with multiple outposts and bases scattered around but unless on a mission you can't do anything meaningful like find some extra information, capture an important NPC or anything else. And when you are on a mission you are suddenly limited to a small fraction of the overland map which you can't leave and which, most of the time, gets reset to a default state no matter what you did in free roam (there are a few exception, though). Even if you did something really important on a mission, it' likely to affect the global map in no discernible way. The plot itself is there but it's disjointed and is moved along by the player completing irrelevant "Daily PMC business" missions. There is no player agency either. Whenever you get to do something plot-related it's always because Ocelot and/or Miller allowed you to by making the mission available. Venom Snake can not make his own decisions in this game. And even when your second and third in command ask you to do something incredibly stupid your only option is to grin and bear it, since the only choice in the entire game is about not recruiting two NPCs. Everything else is set in stone. The game gives you an illusion of having some choice and then shows you that you're a puppet on a string. The multiplayer aspect was initially limited to losing your hard-earned resources to other players. I think it was expanded later but I was done with the game before it was any good. Rumor has it, the ferryman at the dead river loves garlic... wait, no... that's a different rumor. Word on the Net is that Kojima was forced to finish production way earlier than he intended and it shows. I believe the game could be much better with, at least, some closure, but the final game in the MGS series is not a swan song.

The gameplay is offset by two big problems: No variety and completely random rewards. You run through the same grey cities/swamps/dungeons, always at night, doing the same things everywhere most of the time. Combat abilities are non-existent. Everyone has a melee weapon and a ranged weapon. No special abilities, no skills, nothing beyond blocking and attacking. Rewards... Well, rewards are downright stupid. Gaining levels gives you nothing at all except additional trinket slots and said trinkets can't be crafted or anything. Every level you also get a white quality weapon (useless, of course). At the end of the mission you also get a random item, the quality of which depends on the amount of inconvenience your team suffered by carrying tomes and grimoires to the end of the level. The problem with that is you have no influence on what item you get or for what class. You can not do anything at all to get a certain item for your favored class except grinding the prologue over and over and over and over and over and over and over (and over). Since the gameplay itself is rather limited with no character-specific abilities, builds or, at least, visual badassitude, unless you're a huge Warhammer fan or simply crave a four-player melee co-op, you'd best skip this until the developer expands the game vastly.

This game is REALLY important. The entire selling point of all the raving reviews is that "it's very hard to describe without spoiling so, believe me, you must buy it and experience it for yourself". And, after a merciful 1.5 hours (I'm sure Davey Dearest could have filled 10 hours if he was inclined to) I can safely say that $8 was not that high a price to be reminded that, yes, #2deep4u is a thing, games will be praised solely for being "indie" as if "indie" was a redeeming quality in its own right and people will use any kind of argument to avoid admitting that they bought into the hype. The game itself is **** but, again, it's also an important reminder that wrapping and publicity can make you buy **** if you aren't mindful of the fine print. Or it's a solid argument for game piracy.

While SOMA does try to incorporate a lot of themes from all over, it fails at following any of them consistently. There's a distinct lack of even theoretical explanation for anything either. Certain mechanics and plot devices are just thrown at the player and neither the player nor the NPCs bother to question them. Sure, hand holding would be bad it is still never clear what rules SOMA's world lives by. SOMA raises a lot of questions but does not bother answering them or at least showing any kind of author's viewpoint. Another big disappointment comes from the fact that gameplay directly counteracts the story. Attempting to listen to audio logs gets you killed by enemies with 200/20 hearing, for example. At the same time the enemies are hardly interactive and, being also invincible, become more of an immovable object than something you can outsmart. Most of the time the best course of action is to sit until you can no longer hear the enemy and then make a break for the next door hoping it actually allows you to progress, since it's impossible to have a plan. The pacing is also heavily damaged by lack of clear objectives or feedback. While it is realistic in the setting of the game, more often than not it feels like the game simply wants the player to guess what he's supposed to achieve at any given moment. All in all I find it really hard to compliment SOMA on anything in particular. The graphics and sound are okay, it does not crash to desktop... ...anymore, there are no loading screens. Itsa ok, no more.

As long as you aren't "in combat", RONIN is a very fluid and entertaining experience. You can hop around slicing through enemies, throw your sword or sneak along the ceiling and score stealthy kills. Unfortunately, as soon as you enter turn-based combat, the game becomes a lot clunkier, with limited controls (you can't walk, climb edges or instantly pull yourself to a grapple point) and artificial hurdles in the form of the lockdown mechanic. Thus, despite the hint that tells you "It's not a stealth game. Just kill everyone" RONIN's best experienced while "cheating" the mechanics and abusing your movement without getting noticed by the enemy. Hold Space to issue commands instantly. The controls aren't changeable and there are quite a few glitches leaving the heroine getting stuck in the walls, but the game's pretty unique in its genre and as long as you can avoid getting stuck in turn-based, RONIN delivers.

Not fun, dumb AI for both the aliens and the marines (the base they respawn at is the closest linearly so one wrong step can set your reinforcements a minute of walking away if they respawn behind a wall), very little general choice in what to do. Attack-move nearest nest, capture, move on, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, uninstall.

The game runs fine. Sure, it has worse graphics than any other modern game and the performance issues are right there but turning all the graphics options to a minimum makes it run ok. Doesn't crash to desktop either, so a huge progress from Dead Island here. It has a host other problems, however, like the narrative being awfully stupid with "plot twists" visible from a mile away, the cast being mostly annoying and easily forgettable and the protagonist being an unbelievable wimp who can't sprint for more than 20 seconds or swing a weapon more than three times in a row (until you learn to run for a whole THIRTY seconds in a row and master the ancient chinese art of stomping down on fallen enemies heads), and the hugely touted "parkour" being a series of "run forward, aim for a ledge, press jump and watch your hero s-l-o-w-l-y climb it" episodes. It literally has NO tempo. Techland seems to have mastered the "first person swing-at-zombies-with-flimsy-weapons" genre perfectly. Now they need to learn to make their games actually interesting.

The game looks like a bad acid trip, sounds like a bad acid trip and aims to appeal to the hipster crowd. Horrible mouse/keyboard controls which kill any good dynamics because the enemies can see you from way off-screen, so you have to carefully look and target before moving, because, obviously, you can see through walls. This does NOT add to immersion. And one more thing... You can not shoot knocked down enemies. If you shoot the door, it swings open, stunning anyone on the other side, but not killing. From there you have to either wait for the enemy to come to their senses or engage in bwutaw mewee finishews, which get you killed by a dude with a shotgun conveniently placed outside your vision range.

This here a glorified Facebook game with AAA values thrown in. All kinds of licensed cars? Yes. Any kind of tuning? No. No manual transmission either. Two careeers? Sure. Any kind of plot/reasoning? No way. Good graphics and FX? Yes, sort of. Good soundtrack? Eh... Um... There is not one, not really. There are some... tracks, but to call them a soundtrack would be a disgrace to NFSU, for example. The music is bad and so quiet you can't hear it over the engine. It's for the best, though. And this game is tightly wrapped around around multiplayer. Sure, you can play alone all you want, but it's so much more fun to read news and updates from your friends on their racing careers and to compare your results on the speedwall and why not join them for a friendly race, too? Please! We built and entire dashboard for all your multiplayer needs! The Facebook game is real and sad.

Short, has a few technical and logical problems, but worth a playthrough. Worth paying for? Maybe. Firstly the good: The game runs really great, has nice graphics and is on discount right now. But... Starting the game with my Razer Sabertooth connected makes the camera constantly pitch upwards and all the gamepad buttons are messed up - triggers turn the character, select/start act as triggers for readying weapon/firing et c. Plugging it in after starting the game allows it to work fine. Still have to actually move the mouse pointer into a corner since it's there and does nothing. The controls in general are very finger-twisting, especially the tap/hold options. To interrogate someone you have to sneak up on them, hold RT (praying that you don't actually knock them out LOUDLY) then also hold LB AND choose the option with the right thumbstick, holding all that for the entire duration. Any slip-up causes the interrogation to go to hell in a handbasket... The game's fluidity is damaged by Snake's mobility being by far very limited. If you've played Splinter Cell Blacklist, for example, you'll certainly miss options like climbing up the scaffolding and taking an enemy out silently. While MGS has its own traditions lack of logical options really damages the game. ...And exfiltrating a coastal military base in a helicopter as opposed to a boat is a stupid thing to do, regardless of circumstances.

WoD continues the trend that WoW has been following lately - make the game simpler, less dependent on other players, more accessible. And that is not a good thing, not at all. WoD is almost a single player game for the entire leveling part which kind of beats the purpose of MMORPG and when (if) you start raiding the difficulty only spikes at heroic/mythic but does so quite heavily. Questing is still the same Kill X foozles/Bring Y **** but quite easy and devoid of story. Sure, you can build outposts and get different abilities for the zone that outpost is in but ultimately do you care about that if you're going to spend 4 hours overall in the entire zone? Yes, levels fly quite fast, while plots can be summarized as "I killed a bunch of innocent animals and evil orcs, then X happened and I was sent off to the next zone". Professions have been butchered. No more fun gadgets from engineering, no silly potions from alchemy, everything is hidden behind daily cooldowns and requires materials from other professions which you do not even need to buy. Your garrison provides enough materials for your daily cooldowns. So you do not need to visit the auction house or pay attention to other people at all. The Garrison is Farmville. To send followers on missions or to check the mission results you have to actually visit the Garrison. And with missions lasting for around 1 hour you're on a very short leash. Also you get daily dungeon quests and profession orders. Sitting all alone in your own little instanced Garrison. A lot of combat abilities have been cut too. Along with any kind of choice or room for error. Just press all your buttons and it will be good. The big problem is that accessibility curve has been flattened heavily. In BC running heroic dungeons required good gear and actual skill at playing your character. So beating a heroic felt like an accomplishment. In WoD heroics and normal raids are almost (but not quite) unchallenging. So to feel any kind of accomplishment you'll have to diligently raid mythic for 4-5 days a week because everything else is accessible to 90% of the population. And that 4-5 days a week is a really heavy investment.

When it works, it is truly great. Vivid colors, some combat variety, lots of dialogue and humor. But the combat variety is dulled by the huge cooldowns on most abilities so your fighters will rely on lots and lots of autoattack and your mages will use the same 1-2-3 spell set every turn, because everything else is on cooldown. The dialogue... Well, it's all voiced. But it's so pompous it begins to hurt halfway through. Yes, yes, we're saving the world, blah-blah-blah, skip-skip-skip. Oh, you want to go with us? Sure. Oh, you've decided to not go with us? Ok. Why does this take five screens of text? Also, crowd control is very unreliable so quite a few fights can only be beaten by either blatant quicksave scumming or by massive overleveling. Environmental effects are decent and a breath of fresh air. Except after level 10 I could not care less if I was standing in a fire or in a poison pool. The best way to wage combat is to BLAST EVERYTHING! Many puzzles can be cheated through with the use of certain items but then again, you can't teleport anything over a knee-high obstacle... It all feels like Larian were really trying but had to cut a lot of corners to deliver the product. The game might improve over the next half a year with patches.

This game is, more or less, a nail in id Software's coffin. id Tech 5 proves to be quite underwhelming - the character textures are great, while the environment looks atrocious, there is zero interactivity in the environment - your lazerkraftwerk can cut chains and thin cover but you never get to use that in combat creatively, the combat itself is pretty meh with weapons that have no impact and enemies that just spawn on a trigger and swarm you instead of being well placed. Most importantly, there's neither charm nor general innovation here. Also, you do not pick up ammo and armor automatically. So you have to tap 'Use' over every body and every piece of robot debris. And then there's the occasional 'Pick up' hint while running around so you have to backtrack and pixel hunt for that ammo pack/medkit. This gets really tedious after a while. The brightest part of the game is easily the "lean out of cover" key. That one is good, really, but at the same time that's about it. The New Order could use a chill pill. Better, more destructive weapons, less dead seriousness and more focus on fun gameplay rather than infinite repetition of the "**** are bad and we do not condone, glorify or endorse the beliefs, ideologies, events, actions, persons or behavior of the **** regime" stance. Yes, I get it, **** are bad, that's why I'm killing them. Can we please make this killing fun?

DAO fails at three important things - story, engaging gameplay and any kind of morality-based choice. Sure, there is a lot of lore. But (just like in every other Bioware game, unfortunately) it's not that important. Yay, dwarves! Ancient race! Thaigs! Golems! Story! Shapers! Stone! Now go and kill 718 foozles, you lousy Grey Warden. Because Dwarves are your sworn allies and not in any kind of trouble, but, you know, the plot compels you to go through the Deep Roads and GET YOUR RECOMMENDED DAILY AMOUNT OF LORE! And the combat is downright bad. Your AI companions must be repeatedly programmed to do things in a "If ... then ... " fashion and you have a limited amount of tactics slots per character (does that sound stupid? It is). As for the main character - it's Baldur's Gate all over again. You swing your weapon, numbers fly out, but enemies don't react to your swinging at all. Unit collision is horrendous and playing a rogue or warrior is a recipe for boredom because they have zero AoE and 90% of the fights are against 5+ enemies. So you are much better off going as a mage, who has all the crowd control and MASSIVE AoE at his/her disposal. Choice, again, is all grey and grey. No matter whether you are good or evil - every decision can be justified from either standpoint. I understand undertones, but this is ridiculous. In the end, DA:O could be a good RPG, but the overabundance of tedium, amount of fighting vs. actual story and the plot-induced invisible walls kill any sort of enthusiasm for it.

Beautiful, really beautiful. In the graphical sense. Nice music too. Can't say anything bad about the crafting part. Very interestingly implemented and varied. But the actual gameplay is quite subpar. The story, which has always been a staple of Final Fantasy games, this time around is not even remotely engaging. Don't get me wrong - the whole "big bad empire" vector is done quite nicely. In the cutscenes. You, as a hero, don't get to really encounter the Garlean Empire until you're almost at the level cap. Until then 80% of your time will be spent doing fetch quests and reducing the population of local monsters. Also, you are a silent Chosen One in the worst sense. Sometimes the story calls for a dungeon. Well, you'll have to find three more Chosen Ones for that. And after the boss is dead, all the NPCs act as if you're the only Chosen One and the other three did not exist. The combat system is nice, although not exactly varied. You have combos, you have some AoE abilities and that's about it. None of the combat abilities actually look or feel satisfying. The archer just gets to shoot the bow with different colored flashes signifying different abilities. And then that very archer gets three AoE attacks. Which all do roughly the same damage, cost roughly the same amount of energy and occupy three slots on your hotbars. Except one of them has a much smaller radius. As for suplexing a train or doing something really COOL - no, that's not happening. Stun an entire group of enemies? Freeze an enemy to the ground then blink away and unleash a Pyroblast? Nope. But the worst part by far is the technical implementation. Almost everything in this game speaks of lack of user friendliness: To use a key item on an object you have to: a) target the object; b) open your inventory; c) find the key item; d) right click the key item; e) click "Use". Not simply right-click the object, no, sir. And there's no choice in using the items, really. One item for one task. If you want to insert materia into your gear, you need a crafter of that particular item type. Not just a separate materia specialist. If you want to run a dungeon, that's fine. You can queue as one class, then swap to another and continue questing/farming/something. When your turn comes, you switch back to the class you queued as and enter. And suddenly you find yourself unable to: a) Use private chat; b) Blacklist goldsellers; c) Open your Free Company window; d) Open your friend list. Presumably all of this was done to make players focus on the task at hand... If a player leaves your dungeon group... Well, you have to stick around in the dungeon and pray for a new one. You can not teleport out, you can not invite someone manually, you can not even change your class. Lost a tank/healer midway through? Run is over, because most players do not set that "Join party in progress" checkbox. Then there's the bane of a lot of people: The AoE dodging. Bosses, you see, have AoE abilities. And the actual area of effect for those abilities is clearly highlit for everyone to see and move out of. But there's something very wrong with the timing for that. You move out of the AoE zone a good couple seconds before the cast is over. You are standing on the other side of the room... And then you get hit! This damage lag can be really two or three seconds. All the other abilities at the same time will work fine. Of course, even eight months after release the game still suffers from random disconnects. And while we're on the subject of user friendliness. A lot of dungeons will have story cutscenes. Right in the middle of them. So if you're watching a story cutscene for a quest that sent you there, everyone else is either waiting for you or pulling the boss while you're locked in that cutscene. Of course you can skip them and rewatch later from an inn. If you know about that option and want to actually skip past parts of the story. This mechanic is rather unfriendly towards anyone who has beaten the story quest before. Sure, all of these have workarounds but the sum of all small problems weighs heavily. One other thing that you start noticing rather quickly is how FF XIV is trying to be NOT WoW. Down to wording. There are no instances/dungeons, there are duties. There are no daily quests, there are leves. There is no threat, there is enmity. There are no bosses, there are lords of the lair. There is no pleasure in playing, there is frustration. Overall FF XIV is just right for you if you wish to spend time walking around beautiful landscapes and enjoying sunsets, gathering items and then crafting something. If you want to be a fighting class, the game is not really for you. P. S.: A Botanist's tool of choice is not a gardening implement like a shovel. It's an axe. Botany in this game is not about sowing seeds and nurturing plants. It's about chopping down trees. And that's the kind of design that fuels this game.

Sleeping Dogs wants to be a GTA with an oriental flavor. What it turns out to be, actually, is a bleak open world game with a slight smell of John Woo movies. Not even taste, no... S.Dogs offers you the option of choosing your allegiance but it influences nothing apart from the acquisition of certain skills. Side activities like dates and karaoke aren't too engaging and although the dates (and using massage parlors) strongly imply you having sex with the girls, nothing is shown. Brave this game is not. DLC costumes, guns and vehicles are sort ****. All the missions are done in vehicles provided to you and carrying any kind of gun outside of your apartment makes you a police target immediately. And the game is full of "chase this guy on foot for five minutes and then take him down in melee" sequences where shooting the guy fails the mission. Smart this game is not. What's left is an extremely dragged out and watered down Hong Kong action movie broken into small parts hidden among a bleak GTA clone.

A brilliant homage to the sci-fi action movies and the pop culture of the 80s. Yes, the game could use some more length and a greater variety of enemies. Or a more involved plot, maybe. But it is what it is. It's a game where you can hunt dinosaurs with lasers firing from their eyes with a futuristic neon-painted bow. Or a sniper rifle if you're cheap. A lot of new games try to be as serious as they can, although we've all seen serious before. But this one is for the nostalgic gamers.

Have you ever wanted to chop up a giant robot with your sword? Well, that will have to wait until you've taken its health down to a preset amount. After that you can deliver two or three cuts and the affected body part is destroyed for good. Every other cut after that is more or less for your own sadistic enjoyment. Revengeance is all about wanting to do something outrageous and being consistently slapped on the wrist. You can't do great damage until you have blocked, dodged and jumped your way through a preset sequence of attacks from the enemy that will severely hurt you unless you block/dodge/jump. And if you've been a good dog you'll be allowed to engage in the iconic Blade Mode. For a few seconds. Of course, that only applies to bosses. Slicing through the lesser enemies is quite easy. Slicing a VIP in two before you have the chance to cut off the Oh So Important Left Hand is quite easy too. Can't cut that hand off a corpse, obviously. Quite an enjoyable grindfest that keeps reminding you that you are merely a cyborg, not an Enemy Cyborg

Quite beautiful, yes. But at the same time quite boring. The old school vibes are good, but, you know, Wolfenstein 3D is also very old. And very simplistic. And that is what Shadow Warrior channels. The sword is extremely reliable for taking down multiple enemies in melee. It also heals you. So what can be done to make the player feel alive? Right, invulnerable enemies. Some invulnerable until you've killed all the trash, some invulnerable from the front. Bad game design? Old school! Huge levels that are easy to get lost in? Old school! The one tiny problem is that halfway through the game it stops making sense, so when you're lost you keep asking yourself TWO questions - "Where do I go from here?" and "Why the cat did I even come here?". In a certain level you also get complete darkness for free. And, of course, miles and miles of identical graveyard with identical houses, some of which have a lock on the door. And some doors will magically open once you've killed everything (even if you have no idea where that everything is stuck due to some AI glitch). Weapons? Well... There's the sword and there are several fartguns. You can upgrade them but their destructive power stays quite meh. But sometimes you have to fight a boss. Solution! You get infinitely respawning ammunition to compensate for the power of your fartguns. The process is a cycle. Enter a room. Have the door lock itself behind you. Kill everything. Run around the room trying to activate every object in sight. Kill something that got stuck somewhere. Run around the room again, this time some door or console might actually activate. This is all very oldschool and very sad.

Even now after all the updates and patches (assuming there were any, of course) the game suffers from atrocious technical issues. Like the mouse cursor not showing if you have a gamepad connected. And I have one. And no, I do not feel like giving my PC a reacharound every time I want to play a particular game. So, assuming you decide to grin and bear it. The interface is optimized for the mouse and optimized badly at that. The highlighting of menu items is nonexistent and managing inventory is quite hard due to no paperdoll being present and the actual inventory slots being switched with an ultra-precise tilt of a thumbstick. The top tier menu actually has many more items than are shown on screen. How many? Well, you'll just have to scroll through them and see, young man. Assuming you have managed to equip items and learn skills somehow... Moving with the thumbstick will also lock you in place for no reason occasionally. The character gets unstuck after 3-5 seconds on his own, though. Binding skills to buttons is done by going into the skill's menu and pressing Y. Press anything else - you've upgraded something. Pressed Y? Good, no way to exit the binding interface. B(ack) will replace your B binding, obviously. The loading times are three to four times that of any other game, too. As for the gameplay stuff such as mechanics, item variety and skills... This has nothing on Torchlight or Diablo. Those two are way more fun and way more player-friendly. The only reason to buy this would be the price tag and the latter levels which are rumored to be good. But suffering through the rest isn't worth much.

The best thing about Prototype is the freedom of destructive action. You can dropkick a helicopter or tear off a tank's turret then smash it dead with that very turret. Pity you can't tear down buildings. And that destruction (and a new power) is the only high point of the game. The rest is worse than in the original. The plot is completely an excuse one and the protagonist is extra stupid with a side of macho man pain, which really lowers the amount of care given. The graphics are rather outdated, too. With no real innovation and a reduced array of fun activities this might be worth buying at a sale but only if you've completed over 90% of the original and desperately want to see a couple new enemy types.

While surely it is a great endeavor with huge production values Lords of Shadow fails terribly as a game. Good for watching, maybe, but playing it is a chore. The combat is rather bad due a to a very shallow moveset which gives you ten weak attacks executed in various combos and only a couple strong ones which either require a combo before them or consume lots of magic and don't really make much of a difference. Add to that a fixed camera with no target lock and you're left tapping X again and again and AGAIN because landing something bigger isn't worth the effort and risk. Enemies also get a lot of unblockable attacks they promptly use outside of your camera view. Timed blocks and dodges, again, give you no significant advantage. Grabs, throws, disarms, using the environment? Nope, not in this game. The other big part of the game is puzzles. While they might be challenging occasionally there's always a scroll nearby that allows you to bypass them for the price of losing the experience reward. And half of those puzzles don't even make sense in context. They are puzzles for the sake of puzzles. You must make all the flippers in a **** automaton green BECAUSE REASONS! Also the game does a LOT of handholding. You have to come near EVERY extra-strong door and examine it so the game can condescendingly explain that the door is extra strong and you'll need some outside means of opening it. Only after that the outside means will be available to you. Any significant object or action will immediately get a camera focused on them for a good five seconds while the character is still being hit by the enemies off-screen. If you press a button while interacting with some mechanism you WILL watch the mechanism do whatever you requested until you are allowed to exit the interaction and be on your way. Every level also has a challenge. Only unlocked AFTER you beat it. You know, FOR REPLAYABILITY! Broken game flow, dull combat, bland level design with a fixed camera and no mobility (insurmountable waist-high fences everywhere) and irrelevant puzzles make this an exercise in frustration rather than an enjoyable game. Great graphics, though. Almost as god as in... Any other game with a budget.

I was initially hesitant to pick this up. Reported bugs and all. Well, after two years, three expansions and a number of patches... It still ****, despite the rave reviews (note how like 80% of those are from 11.11.11-13.11.11 fanboys are so fan). The idea is kind of good an open world RPG with a lot of freedom to do and be done to. The implementation, however, is atrocious. The PC version's interface is STILL limited to the capabilities of a console and the keyboard/mouse is STILL pretty much being shoved aside. I can't even use any keyboard/mouse controls unless I unplug the x360 gamepad. But entering the character name no, can't do THAT with a gamepad. Not allowed! Bad gamer! Get up from your chair and TYPE! The in-game UI is bad. I mean, seriously bad. The compass shows a number of weird symbols with no indication of what they are or how far they are. So, there's this... barbed spear ahead. Okay, let's go see. Oh, joy, I've discovered the Dreaded Asswind Glade. What do I do with this discovery? Is it somehow useful? Now, my character is weakened by the sunrise. Yeah, I know, I've been bitten by a vampire fledgling, I reckon. But... No character status page. Where do I verify my suspicions and find a cure? Right, under "Magic Active effects" oh, ok. And a cure? Google that, Prisoner. The melee combat is so uninspired it hurts. I mean, the whole idea of having first-person view combat without auto-aim using a gamepad is a perversion but whatever. I can swing a sword, it might hit someone, they will grunt maybe and then they'll swing back. The level of combat interactivity is sooooooo amazing. Battletoads on SMD had a similar one. And if you want to be able to block with a one-handed weapon, you'd better forget about using an off-hand weapon or magic spell. No point in having an empty hand there grab a shield for blocking (and blocking doesn't even do anything a lot of the time. Backpedaling while slinging arrows or spells is a LOT more effective). I know this is not Devil May Cry, but god forbid melee combat was actually fun to do or watch. But wait, there's magic. It's also pretty meh. You have a right spell, a left spell and a shout (with a huge cooldown). If your spells are identical, you have a special perk AND you manage to press both triggers at once you get a stronger version of the spell. Combining different spells for a variety of effects? NO! THIS IS NOT SOME ANIME CRAP! GET BACK INTO YOUR SEAT, PRISO... GAMER! Summon familiar costs 89 magicka. But I can't get it to work. It drains my magicka bar and does nothing. I know, I must have less magicka than is necessary to cast that. Hi, I'm Tellah, anime crap reporting for duty! Nope, my max magicka is 100, so?.. Speaking of combat in general no numbers. So have fun guessing if your weapon/magic is ineffective against the target or they just have a boatload of health. I'm not touching the story because it's more or less an industry standard open-world games must only have an excuse plot so that the player is not inhibited in their actions by some stupid story advancement or anything. And Skyrim is no exception meet people, kill people, go on randomly generated quests... Much like a single player MMORPG. Just without the MMO part that could give the player some really big and challenging fights. In conclusion: Skyrim is not a bad game. It's just not worth the money or the time.

There's one thing that needs to be established first. Shadowrun Returns is NOT a game. It's a mission editor with a free sample campaign attached. And it has cost its backers a solid $1.8M to develop. And as far as the sample campaign goes... It's bad. The interface is clearly tuned for tablets and has no hotkeys. The game mechanics are very simplistic unlimited ammunition, "big" action points that allow you to move or shoot and rather unpredictable cover mechanics where you can't predict if an object will actually give you cover until you are able to move near it. All gloriously copied from the new X-COM, only without love and polish. Add to that pretty ridiculous hacking (it's entirely like normal combat, but simpler and looks like Tron), an absolutely sterile world where you can't enter non-mission related buildings or get some miscellaneous reading (newspapers, datapads et c.) and a godawful stat distribution screen which gives you no hint as to how much benefit each stat gives besides checkpoints that grant new skills. What you get in the end is an unenthusiastic attempt at transferring the pen and paper game to a computer. Many famous writers and designers are rumored to have worked on this but Shadowrun Returns shows no love put in it. Not anywhere. At least it's rather cheap so you can buy it and hope for user-generated content on Steam Workshop.

Awakened is extremely short and not really scary. Surely there are cultists and their leader and nightmares, but none of it feels like it matters because deep down in your heart you know that anything that jumps at you will eat lead (or plasma) and die. Moreover imaginary enemies drop physical loot when they perish. Which makes the whole scare thing even more ridiculous. Did I mention it's short?

Bioshock Infinite does look and play nice. It has bright colors, amusing powers and an abundant supply of health kits, salts and weapons/ammunition. But it is also very shallow. The combat lacks tactical depth due to regenerating shield, predetermined tear locations and the overly useful "Charm Object" vigor that works on turrets and automatons. The exploration, although present, doesn't offer any extra options except for an occasional infusion. Your choices do not matter at all (you only have two, to be honest). You get your answers too late to change your perspective on things and the ending is way overcomplicated. Yet it's a merry roller coaster ride with bright colors and amusing vigors that go boom. Just not quite as engrossing as the first Bioshock or System Shock 2.

The game tries hard and gets a lot right. And it gets a lot wrong. On the bright side there's the distinct lack of quest NPCs, but rather quest areas marked on the map that you just need to reach in order to be on the quest. Then again all these are the same. Kill waves of attackers, gather stuff off the ground, maybe even... do something else (no, not even remotely often enough). There's no reason to really care about that. Wander around the map hoping for events to pop up until you have gained enough experience to progress to the next map. Sure, there are VISTAS! Which serve no purpose, as they did in Assassin's Creed. Geez, there's a whole world around this point! Nope, no reason to care. There are a lot of fun things too, like the whole cattle launcher affair, but they're fun once only. Otherwise it's a grind and then some more grind. And tedious exploration for the sake of map completion achievements. As for the Multiplayer and Role-Playing parts... This is pretty much an anti-social MMORPG. You can resurrect others and you can work for a common goal if you are at the same event, but you don't even remotely care about others' classes or builds or whatever. This is especially bad in dungeons. You literally have no reason to bother with tactics just mash everything you have and maybe some combos will happen maybe, or maybe not, or whatever and you know, being a tank is not a good thing it's actually not a thing at all and rogues make the best tanks due to jumping around and I'm not even motivated to find flaws in this because it's BORING AND STUPID. Also you have 30-40 skills to unlock, out of which a whopping 5 (yes, FIVE) are available for use at any time and you pretty much don't even need anything beyond the five you actually like because if you want situational skill A you can't just use it anytime unless you unequip the always useful skill B beforehand. The personal story is good, somewhat personal and influenced by your character creation choices, but... After you're done with the first arc of it you are forcefully sent on an amazingly stupid and overwhelmingly boring and hugely pointless task of getting to know more of one of the lesser races of the world. WHY? WHY ON EARTH WOULD THE DESIGNERS THINK YOU WOULD EVER WANT TO DO THAT?! Oh, and as for the 8.0 user score can't help but notice the amazing amount of 10 points reviews published on 28/8/12 (the day after launch, no less).

Dishonored is beautiful, but a bit shallow. Although immersive and stylish as a stealth game it fails at a very important thing grey stealth state. If you are ever noticed good luck, everyone in the immediate vicinity knows where you are (and extra soldiers magically appear out of thin air, too). If you approach everyone individually and stack bodies somewhere none of the enemies will ever suspect anything. Also, the dark sight skill is pretty much a necessity as it gives you the second best utility out of all, outshined only by the blink. Unless you go for the no magic achievement, in which case good luck to you... It is not a bad game by any means, it just lacks freedom margin there's usually more than one way to reach your objective unnoticed, but the only effective ones involve blink and high ledges. There's more than one way to kill a bunch of enemies, but, again, the effective ones are based on time stop and explosives. And, maybe, the occasional time stop and possession, if you are eager to waste mana. That's the entire game process there's the one boring but effective way of doing things and then there are a number of exciting but time consuming ways prone to failure. Choke him carry him drop him. Repeat N times, where N is the number of patrolmen. Or you can quicksave and try to do stage a mass casualty with rats, razorwire traps, grenades, et cetera. And actually pull it off on your third or fourth quickload. Oh, and Callista takes baths fully clothed...

This game has: One pretend deep plot, a dozen frames per second graphics performance, a few gross of grey rooms, grey doors with big rotary handles and grey crewmen-turned-zombies, three clumsy melee weapons, dull puzzles that don't give much of a challenge, but rather force you to redo them until you guess what you are supposed to do. Note - it's not "How do I do this and that?", it's "What the love am I supposed to do here?!". Example - one puzzle features a crewman dead in a chair in front of a broken window. His chest is full of glass shards. You possess him and... five seconds later you hear a siren blaring, twenty seconds later you hear (or even see) the glass break, then you see a failure screen. You can exit the room, you can enter another one, but it won't matter. Have fun guessing what the problem is. This game doesn't have: a point where it becomes interesting, a point where it actually starts making sense, a point where the story told by the sketches becomes somehow relevant to the ship's story. Also there's the heat-as-health mechanic, which is as innovative as it is idiotic. Because, somehow, warming your hands at a lightbulb helps you survive a few more hits from a fireman's axe.

Quoting from one of the reviews here - streamlined. You don't have any freedom where it might force you to make a choice. Gone are the multiple bases, gone are base assaults (you get one over the course of the game), gone is inventory management, gone are different roles for the aliens - all sectoids are sectoids, no navigators, no engineers, no soldiers. Managed combat - gone, your snipers can only shoot if they haven't moved this turn, unless you pick a special perk which incurs an aim penalty. Oh, yes, perks - they are hidden from you until you actually get an appropriate rank, so planning character development is also gone. Of course you can plan new recruits' development ahead after one of your soldiers reaches colonel in desired class. But guess what - you can't plan classes. All recruits get a random class upon promotion. The aliens have the advantage of a free move when you see them. Yes - you see a cluster of aliens and they all immediately get a free move. Thankfully, they only use it to take cover. Oh, you don't have to bother with managing ammunition now. It's unlimited (but you still have to reload). But gosh, unlimited ammunition for an autoacannon means free destruction. We can't have that. So free targeting is also gone. You can only destroy cover if you aim at an enemy and miss. But you have rockets! One per mission, with a 10% miss rate and an epileptic aim camera. At least the graphics are pretty. Except they aren't. Unreal Engine 3 has is limits and the multilayered layout will have you ripping out your hair in frustration when you spend a good minute rotating and elevating the camera to activate that one movement spot AND MISSING IT! The game isn't all terribad, surely, but it tosses too much of the orginal's brilliance in favor of streamlined and unburdened gameplay. Did I mention it messes up your saves so any Ironman game has a ~25% chance to end in a premature defenestration?

It does have a good game somewhere at its core. But the unnecessary cluttering of the screen with debris and corpses, which block useful pickups, the unimpressive arsenal (sometimes weapons will shoot through some platforms, sometimes they won't, the game will autoswitch to the grenade launcher about ten times more often than you wish and weapons are only distinguishable by icon, which are all alike), the universally huge input lag (a little birdie says the game is done in Flash) and the general lack of creativity (fight type I enemy, fight type II enemy. SURPRISE! BOTH TYPES AT ONCE) bring it down a lot.

Bastion would have been just another shoot-and-dodge (or hack-and-slash if you favor melee weapons) game if it wasn't for the Narrator. The beauty lies in the fact that its story is literally being told along with you playing, not in bursts interrupting your gameplay. Thus you get a 10-hour long tale, that might not contain overly heroic deeds, but is a tale nonetheless, with great graphical and musical presentation. The weapons keep flowing in and they all have their place, as do the special skills. In the end it's quite worthy of both time and money spent on it.

KS is one of the better visual novels available on the English market, at the moment. It has a great engaging (albeit too dark in certain routes) story, fantastic music and, most importantly, it is... believable, for lack of a better word. Of course, the necessary VN cliches are in there, but the characters don't feel overly stereotypical as it happens in many others. It being free is just an added bonus.

This game is constantly compared to Portal (game designer and all), but the problem is that whatever likeness to Portal has been diluted, painted pastel colors and dumbed down so severely that it's more of a Farmville FPS. Slightly boring toothless kind-of-fun for the whole family. You repeat the same pseudo-entertaining tricks for six hours, like a slightly stupid dog jumping through hoops, in process discovering almost nothing about almost nothing, and, for lack of a worthy narration, entertaining yourself by looking at various paintings in various dimensions (they change, somewhat predictably, in a cringe-inducingly fun way). Now that I think of it... the game is a dementia simulator. You don't know who you are, you are locked in a strange place with no reason and you do strange things because a condescending voice in your head tells you to. Meanwhile learning the laws of physics and enjoying the view.

I wanted a new chapter in the Max Payne story, but all I got is a generic grade B TPS. The Good: As everyone agrees, the graphics, physics and whateverics are great. And that's about it. The Bad: Triggers! Triggers everywhere!!! You open that door - three guys SPAWN behind you. Blam, reload. You kill that last guy - congratulations! Cutscene! Reinforcements arrive, take your women, raze your village and fart in your general direction. Ok, cutscene is over - you're in the middle of the room, hidden behind the flimsiest object around. Oh, and you're holding a pistol. Enjoy the epic gunfight. Speaking of cutscenes - there's more than enough of them (unskippable, to boot) to confuse you for the entire game. "Why am I doing that?!", "Errr, shouldn't I be shooting him instead of staring?", "Why am I not moving? Oh, cutscene over, right. Better press something.", "Goodness gracious! Why did I just lock the door behind myself right after I wandered outside in plain view of six mooks?". And if you're still willing to endure all that for the sake of good plot and characters - you don't get either. The plot is largely non-existent and amounts to "Where shall I kill today? Ah, right - in ". The characters around you give you no reason to care about them, they are there just to give you a reason for killing more brazilians. And there's one important aesop - it's ok to heavily drink on the job. No one seems to care, least of all Max himself. You drank two bottles of whiskey? No problem, your aim is steady as always. Maybe I'm too hard on the game. But it would've looked SO MUCH BETTER under the name "GTA: Sao Paulo" or, for lack of carjacking, "Brazilian Shooter 3D".