Kluge

Suggest watching ~30m of a LP to determine if for you (if your eyes glaze over, then probably not). Received this in a humble bundle. The restaurant kids' menu maze puzzles start out easy, quickly becoming more complex until you have to invest significant thought and time into every puzzle (the world quickly sprawls out into many different directions, so difficulty/obscurity bounces all over the place). You're never given much motivation to solve the puzzles outside the opportunity to unlock more areas with more pretentious, disconnected audio blurbs, and of course, more puzzles. The game's aesthetics are lost on me. It's a minimalist, high-saturation rendition of random human junk (art) in a variety of environments, mostly forest. I'm not willing to say it's an objectively bad game (and don't really like having to put a number on this one), but I personally didn't get anything out of it.

It's a very complex game with great detail, but you know there's something wrong when right out of the gate, they're telling you all about God mode - and you'll need to use it, because the simulation breaks every few hours without making adjustments for when things go wrong and the game errors out. It required far more time and patience than I was willing to give it, and after 4h, I was still unable to figure out the results of most of my choices. Feedback is very weak. Both the games I played through, I was stopped because my team had weak leadership and I couldn't figure out how to resolve it. Leadership is not a stat which was ever presented to me. After some Googling, you're apparently supposed to look through players bios to see who likes to play pranks, because they're leaders and prevent bad team chemistry. ??? Bad feedback systems. Actual baseball games lack any excitement, which is about how I remember real baseball. You're there to improve averages, so games don't count for much given how many there are (the primary benefit of micromanaging games is it sort of helps you understand how numbers translate to play - but again, feedback is very weak), and once they're boiled down to a fatalist game of probabilities, it feels particularly hollow. I've never encountered a game demanding I do so much observing and testing for such great lengths of time for so little mechanical information. -But it's the best sports simulator I've played, by far, and it reminded me a lot of the fun I had when I was using NREL's System Advisor Model, given they have a near-identical GUI.

Having never played Harvest Moon or Animal Crossing, this primarily reminded me of Chocobo's Dungeon 2, with a greatly expanded out-of-dungeon playset - which is fantastic. This game's **** me in for three days straight, which hasn't happened to me in years. Things are subtle and deep - not overplayed and always obvious (stay away from the Wikia except maybe to look up where fish are, btw!). It does require a pretty insane amount of time (luckily[?!], I just burned off most of my right hand so am out of work for a couple weeks) - so this might not be for someone who doesn't have time for anything but bite-sized chunks (you can't save at will, unfortunately, unless you go to sleep early). I'm having trouble praising it because I instinctively want to balance it but don't have many bad things to say about it. The run speed is dreadfully slow, but there are plenty of ways around it (I went with "**** Injector" and set runspeed to 2). There're also two games here -- there's stuff that doesn't work (grinding; watching the TV every morning for recipes, chopping TONS of wood, gifting [this should probably be redone from scratch...], farming), and stuff that carries the game to a 8-10 rating (surprise unlocks and lots of RNG tables, cool stuff to craft to make your already-cool unlocks become even better items, way more content than I think anyone would anticipate even after playing a full 10+ hours). I struggle to make cheese in real life - and love the stuff, so when I first got to milk a cow and saw cheese in the community center bundle, I knew all my milk was going in the fridge until I unlocked something to transform to cheese, and I really can't explain why it was so thrilling to finally make my first batch, but it was, so great on ConcernedApe for getting me giddy as a schoolgirl about making virtual cheese. -And now I save my cheese because I know one day, I'll unlock some awesome recipe and I'll be using cheese power to blast through the crystal mines down to level 50+ without breaking a sweat. It's such an enjoyable time investment that even as someone who looks down on losers who invest boatloads of time for a string of data in a program, I get **** right in to the same thing, and I don't even feel dirty about it. -So congratulations on discovering this game. Go out and buy it, now!

Thea's a good game - one of the best releases in the past few months. It's certainly similar to HOMM, but I think it reminds me even more of Eador. It's just a notch behind being so similar it's a clone. -So I'm just going to compare the two. First off, the story in Thea branching, short-but-fleshed-out, inventive, and boring. It strives for the same sense of absurdity and seriousness in choices as Eador, and many of the stories are actually interesting, but I never really felt invested, and maybe this is more the mechanics of being able to pop out new units so fast, I actually would get annoyed whenever I saw I had new people to micromanage. This is very different from Eador where you usually only had 2-3 heroes (or even just one for most ****), and rarely ever 4. Thea lets you bundle your people up into expeditions, but I'm not sure I see the benefit of having 30 semi-customizable units vs 3 very customizable units you've taken time to tailor finely - it certainly makes no contribution to my emotional investment. The writing in Thea has some very dramatic attention-grabbers in the little stories it tells. Sometimes, they'd actually shock me -- you know, I just didn't expect my normal-seeming folk to be nailing cats on their walls and sacrificing virgins to a roving band of rapists - it just really caught me off-guard. -So good for them on that, because it's an unusual accomplishment. I'd just be minding my own business hitting the return key every few seconds, watching my villagers collect nuts, and they suddenly decide it's time to take all the kids and put them in a gladiator-style death-match... what? Sure, okay! I hope the sequel will let me bet on who wins... The game is at the very least an excellent demo of their Honey Hex engine, but now that I've played Thea, I'm not sure I want to play many more games on the same engine without heavy modifications (it's a very well-made engine having investigated it, that said - but I don't use Unity). Back on-track... the combat card game is bad. I like card games, so I figured this would be right up my ally... but it just takes too much time for too low of stakes, and I don't seem to do too much better than auto-resolve, while opportunity rarely presents itself to lose via auto-resolve unless I'm so outmatched I'm screwed either way, so I don't feel any incentive to spend my time in it. -But I shouldn't need an incentive to play a game, right? I could auto-resolve in Eador, but I enjoyed being able to micro-manage there so I could do what I built up my army for, and auto-resolve was typically an awful choice. Content-wise, it's just lacking, and mod support certainly doesn't appear to be in the works to pick up the slack. There's a great base, and you see glimmers of an amazing, timeless game similar to Eador, but there's just not enough content in it. You play it two or three times and the experience is very similar but you have the opportunity to choose a slightly different ending. It feels complete, but just too small, like it's just a preview of things to come; maybe the devs didn't have the money to spend more time designing and implementing content, or maybe they didn't actually think the game was as good as it is and wanted to move on to something else to hedge their bets (I don't get this feeling, honestly - I think it was just a lack of time/money, which is hopefully resolved). There's a lot to build on here, and another game in this engine by the company is absolutely justified. -So I'd advise buying this as a down-payment for Thea: The Re-awakening, giving it a few playthroughs and then playing Eador if you haven't already (and I can't imagine why you wouldn't have already...).

Played around 60 minutes in the campaign, then determined experience had already peaked and moved on. It's wasn't enjoyable and I definitely have some buyers' remorse, but I can't really point to anything particularly bad. It's just kind of bland -- I had zero investment in the story, the gameplay felt identical to older games in the series without feeling like there was much improvement outside graphics - and it is very pretty (but there's not too much opportunity to enjoy it since you need to be click-click-clicking). Persistence in campaign missions was nice. It gave more weight to what you were doing, rather than just asking you to spam a bunch of whatever until something works, no matter the costs. -But it didn't make the game fun, just more immersive in something I wasn't excited about being immersed in. The tech pacing felt completely unnecessary gameplay-wise and broke immersion. "Oh, we discovered this ship we flew and lost a few years ago, and now we remembered how to build a particular early-game tank." The tutorial's rendered pointless by the very slow initial pacing. Maybe I just don't have the patience anymore for games that don't throw everything they have at me at once. Eh/10

More of Fallout 3 with a few big adjustments. Pathing and combat is wildly improved over FO3, which I'd argue were its worst points. Dialogue is about as uninteresting as FO3, and the dialogue system is exceptionally irritating (it definitely isn't placating that it looks like the bad system was due to making it relatively usable on consoles), but the voice acting is substantially improved. I've only experienced one CTD in ~35 hours of play, which's kind of shocking for a Bethesda game, and I have only experienced minor glitching (mostly occasional missing textures, which is my own fault for trying to use Ultra textures on only 2GB gfx RAM). Optimization is also surprisingly solid -- I have an old A8-6600k I was worried would severely bottleneck the engine, but everything's going well, with utilization ~70-85% on 1080p Ultra (but shadows on low). Didn't get into the crafting system -- begrudgingly collected a bunch of litter for the essentials, but that's always been the case for me in Bethesda games. Bethesda took a page out of the 2000-aughts (or someone there really liked Path of Exile) by giving a %chance of enemies being legendary. They're typically unimpressive, though, largely because there aren't mods yet to limit the absurd quantity of health items drowning the player at any given time -- the game really needs a reduction of ~95-98% on Normal, and still ~60-80% on Hard. Especially once you're reasonably pleased with what you're wearing and holding, and given your health rapidly restores to 100% with any one of your 500 stimpaks if you should ever run in trouble, there's no joy in finding legendary enemies unless the item they drop has a funny name, like the furious rolling pin. -But that only accounts for maybe 1% of legendary drops... and they all involve the rolling pin. Speaking of procedural generation - Bethesda did some really cool stuff with it, most noticeably (well, for most, probably unnoticeably) with procedural generation of minor locations. I once fell to my death, and on my way to that death, I noticed a safe which I picked and looted. On reload, in this safe's place was a bartender named Mac with a little wooden stand... in the middle of the street, in the middle of nowhere. Cool! Unfortunately, the major locations range from dull to outright frustrating in boredom caused. Level design's typically great and varied, but the stories involved feel like rehashings of everything in FO3+NV but with slightly altered details. I did indeed sigh out loud the moment I realized I'd 1) be at a military-owned airport, 2) be investigating supplies going missing, and 3) everyone thinks it's an inside job (and, yes, again, it is - and yes, there's another twist at the end - BUT THE TWIST'S TWISTED DIFFERENTLY THIS TIME). They feel well-made, but they're not fun. Having the game ask you to revisit these locations after you've already appreciated the nice little design touches by doing a World of Warcraft style of awful repeated fetch/kill/escort quests is THE WORST. Music selection's initially irritating since it's all repeated content, but the game starts throwing in some new (and original!) stuff as you progress, which is a nice touch. The game almost look like it was built from the ground up for modding. The number of dictionaries and other forms of pools in place are going to lead to a 10/10 game - no doubt - but for now, it's just too flawed and dull to blindly recommend, and I actually think the game would be substantially improved by CUTTING OUT a lot of the uninteresting content currently littering the game - but at the same time, I'll probably spend ~100 hours just in vanilla before I'm ready to put it on ice for a year to come back and see what modders do with it.

You've spent weeks finally getting a Kerbel to the "mun." He's out of fuel and it's your fault. -And your contract sure didn't tell you to strand a Kerbel on the mun - it demanded you orbit the mun, and you're running out of time. You don't have any new parts to work with, and what you thought was your best - that beautiful 8-stage setup, a masterpiece of drag-conscious design - wasn't good enough. It ****, and until you correct your mistake, you ****. It was pretty and elegant - easy to understand (and it sure was expensive!) - so I guess you're like the Apple of rocket design without the benefits of using UNIX... congratulations, go man the Genius Bar. You don't click "recover kerbel and spacecraft." Nope - he effectively represents 100,000 units of currency frozen because you didn't plan well enough. Your budget's tighter than before you screwed up, but you need to build a spacecraft which can collect the kerbel, orbit the mun, and then return to not-Earth without burning up or crashing too hard. Right? Not necessarily, and probably not. KSP challenges you to think long and hard about the most efficient solutions to problems, no matter how ugly they appear. -And nobody's going to fault you for starting career mode from scratch at that point... so long as you learned enough to not repeat your mistakes, which is easier said than done.

I didn't find it to be terribly engaging. It plays a good bit like the XCOM reboot (and I'll mention I thoroughly enjoyed the XCOM reboot), but without any of the base-building mechanics or quick gameplay, instead favoring a focus on individual character development, so maybe a bit more like Jagged Alliance or Wasteland. I had trouble understanding the point of the upgrade system over something which happens automatically by soldier experience -- the way they do it is to have all units of the same type upgrade at once, but all units' points go into one pool of experience you can use to upgrade units. The upgrade names, by the way, are about as unimaginative as you can... well... imagine (upgrade 1, upgrade 2, upgrade 3). It's still tedious like customization, but doesn't really "feel" like customization because the changes are either very broad or applied to the tank. Voice-acting and situations feel both generic and inorganic. The story as a whole didn't stick with me... I'm pretty sure I'm already confusing it with Ys. The art-style is interesting and it's a refreshing exploration of the time period reimagined in a partial fantasy setting, but it has trouble overcoming its graphics being fairly simple images with a fill and a few filters applied. The UI in the game is awful, a good few steps backward from current-gen titles -- you're constantly digging through menus, confirming commands, and pointlessly re-selecting people. The combat style is interesting, though the difficulty curve is ridiculous -- it starts out incredibly difficult while you're underequipped and then, for the rest of the game, suddenly becomes easy once you unlock the HQ. Enemy NPCs can shoot at you while you run in first-person (with a very unique fatigue system), while your units can also shoot back when the enemy moves (however, the enemy AI is much more efficient at moving and doesn't get stuck on walls or not know which objects they can climb over). Overall, I was disappointed and quit mid-way through. There's obviously a target audience which'll love this game, but I'm not in it.

Excellent roguelike, but maybe the devs should have been a bit more conscious of how similar the game is to Binding of Isaac. It lacked the quirky fun I expect in current-gen roguelikes, I had trouble figuring out what many items were supposed to look like ("here's a light tan blob that looks like a cookie mostly consumed by ants -- it's some monster tooth which increases your attack power," "ummm... okay"), and the items didn't have the flair I was expecting, instead largely just changing numbers around a bit instead of necessitating a shift in playing style like Binding of Isaac items could. I initially ignored the game just by its name -- I thought it was some phone game port. It came across with the attitude of a more straight-forward arcade game out of the nineties, though gameplay is very fun for all the same reasons Binding of Isaac is. I very much appreciate the bite-size chunks you get from gameplay (where a round could last between 5 minutes and 30+ minutes) which lets me play as long as I want without worrying I'll have to continually interrupt gameplay to take care of other things. It's a very well-executed combination of twitch, luck, and skill which feels satisfying whether you reach the end on a play-through or not. Definitely recommend if you're new to the genre or have enjoyed similar titles.

So much unreal hype in these reviews. I was glad to have read them before playing, as I was braced for how bad it must be. I was first struck by how dated the Unreal engine is. They did very well with what they had, but you can only dress up fake 3D with low-res 200x graphics so much. For a while, I thought my PC either turned into a Wii, or I was playing a World of Warcraft mod. The story's tone is flat-out bipolar, rapidly switching from suicide to whimsical hang-gliding within the span of a few minutes. The characters are shallow, cliche, and poorly set-up, like the character designers spent all their time in the office playing ping pong, with NPCs' most memorable interaction with the player being the direction they point. Most puzzles are offensively obvious, while the few others rely on moon logic. The main character is simply unlikable (along with almost every other NPC you "interact" with), a bother to society and a burden on anyone unfortunate enough to interact with him. He has absurd fears which slow the game down, much to the users' frustration. "Bosses" all seem ripped from other games, whether an invisible monster drawing an eye-roll, or the stupid lug who indirectly kills himself by running into walls. The controls are ridiculously confusing and frustrating without a gamepad, trying to move multiple characters at once it clearly wasn't ported properly. Then, just before the end of the game, 505 suddenly reveals it was all intentional. Every frustration I felt, all the shortcomings I thought the game had, suddenly make sense as storytelling mechanics. My defenses were down as I realized what an idiot I am, and then they go right for the heart with the most powerful emotional experience I've ever had in gaming. Absolutely unforgettable.

Rise of Venice is a very standard ship trading simulator, which has copied everything from previous games in the sub-genre. It does this well... I experienced only one bug, though it was a critical bug which ruined my campaign play (there was a mission where the goal spawn never spawned). Otherwise, it's well-polished. With RoV, the sub-genre's been given a fresh coat of paint (though... identical games didn't come out more than a couple years ago, so this isn't particularly needed). It suffers the same problem as similar games, where there's quickly nothing interesting to do once you've figured out the trade mechanics. You cart product from an area which produces the product (or where you produce the product) to somewhere where they don't produce it, and take the profit.... over and over. I frankly think EVE Online has effectively rendered this subgenre obsolete or it would, if it weren't subscription-based. You can cart goods around and arb all you want in EVE, and it's plenty more deep and interesting when the buyers and sellers are real people, instead of waiting for consistent, predictable goods consumption having trading being just a small part of a much more grand picture helps a lot in maintaining engagement, too. Ship combat in RoV is quite clunky, and for whatever reason, I consistently had trouble getting the ship I was controlling to board enemy ships when I was right up alongside the enemy vessel, so I eventually just stopped manual ship combat and switched to automatic battles. This also isn't uncommon for the subgenre. Overall, I'd say it's shockingly unambitious, very forgettable, and merely a facelift for people who may not have already played almost-identical games. I mean it's not a "bad" game it's just a knock-off of something I've already played. If you have played almost-identical games, well... Why pay to play what amounts to practically the same game twice?

Hey look another CA Total War game, with all the same caveats poor computational optimization, lack of unit diversity, only masochists play naval combat manually, AI turn times which progress about as fast as a legless donkey, useless combat AI which stands around while you slaughter them (it's been such a long-running problem, I'm starting to think CA believes AI you massacre effortlessly is a selling-point because the player's supposed to feel like a bad*ss, instead of cheated), a boring and unengaging "metagame" (campaign map play), and sadistic camera settings which don't let you really grasp everything going on without breaking flow to move the camera and see all the different engagements while the game's paused (seriously there's no excuse for this. If I wanted "realism," or whatever it is they're going for, I'd just keep the camera zoomed in). Modders rush in to fix the many deficiencies of the game, and do a fair job with it but I'm not going to take mods into account when vanilla gameplay is so awful, I uninstalled the game after less than 5 hours of play. In defense of CA itself, however check out Extra Credits Extra History, which CA's marketing division funded. I imagine it's the most fantastic history lesson on the Punic Wars ever given.

Expect to win the game about as frequently as in vanilla Nethack. RL offers a challenging, fun, casual (hardcore-casual, though!) experience. You can pick the game up, head off and die a few times, then set it down and go do something else the dying actually serves the game very well to break the overall game up into bite-size chunks. In RL, you're effectively grinding the game to get gear, stats, and abilities for the "over-game" which is the point in which you actually have a shot in Hell of getting through to the final area. There are a few glitches here and there, usually which'll kill you by, for example, having a character apparently undecided if he's on or off a ledge, so he can't jump but dying is fun. RL adds quite a bit of fun easter egg type content throughout the castles to ensure things are always fresh, and that you always want to explore. The best part about this content is that it's very rare. You can die 50 times and never see more than a small handful of the "fun" rooms, so the freshness of these unique rooms doesn't wear off quickly like if you were seeing repeats so often, they become "normal." I would say, if you like games similar to Binding of Isaac or Nethack, you'll appreciate the intentional imbalance in this game.

TOG gives you a whole new set of rules, mechanics, and scenarios with which to create a fantastic, immersive narrative while in a sandbox-style game. If you liked the previous major DLC expansions, this one's a must-have (by far my favorite), probably adding the most content of any DLC yet-released. Religions, pagan religions, and even vassals are now all dramatically more fleshed-out, with CK2 now being a large handful of games' content all in one. Paradox also started adding many more context hints in this game, explaining certain effects which are temporary (for example previously, there were many actions which'd affect an NPC's opinion for x years, but the game never hinted at that now it gives specific durations for actions which affect opinion). I agree TOG does introduce a lot of questionable balance choices, though... In TOG's start date, there are a good few nations able to totally dominate the map within a couple decades, no matter which difficulty level you're playing at. Playing Norse effectively voids out the entire casus belli system (particularly if setting ambition to claim a kingdom) as you can declare wars against just about anyone for large pieces of territory for rapid, dramatic expansion. Rebellions have been revamped as well, and now are more along the lines of what's in Victoria II (though this mechanic still isn't nearly as complex as in V2). I'm not sure it really adds any benefit to the game other than flavor and some more chaos, which keeps the game from feeling stale. Some rebellions will require even large states to hire mercenaries and call in allies to defeat, which increases the risk of expanding exponentially faster than you assimilate newly-conquered lands. AI seems significantly improved, as NPCs seem more prone to aggressive expansion, quickly gobbling up tens of smaller states in a handful of years, than working up to defeating the larger ones which might not be historical so much, but is more balanced considering this is what players do. The Independent States tab in the ledger shrinks pretty quickly with time, and I don't think that's a bad thing at all. The DLC introduced a few new bugs, but mostly only text-related, and I haven't yet experienced a crash playing TOG for ~30 hours. For instance, sometimes choices in dialogue options won't show effects or who's affected, only icons, and there seem to be many more instances where a character's name is replaced with something like "text_consort_titlename." I'll also state support for how Paradox does DLC content, with fluffy stuff (new portraits and song packs) being sold for a buck or two, but with all the core changes being included in the main DLC. It lets me choose which content I want and don't want based on which nations/regions fit my usual playstyle. There's no invasive DRM, and the prices are very reasonable, so I'm a huge fan of Paradox's respect in general toward customers.

Minecraft has inspired many good even great games from the indie community, certainly including Terraria (which was actually a game). However, if we're going to judge this as a creative toy rather than a game, well there are many far-superior games which come with extremely powerful world-editors, unit-editors, etc. So why are you guys building a replica of the Enterprise instead **** new WC3 or SC2 custom map, or new animations, characters, or UIs? Maybe you want to create flying dragons for Skyrim, or just new music? There're a ton of moddable games out there people want to play in, but not necessarily create for, and it's generally pretty simple to mod games, even when script editors are involved. Particularly for Blizz games (and I haven't touched SC2 modding due to Activision/Blizz rules, on top of their DRM), the modding tools are powerful enough to allow you to create whatever kind of game you want, faster, simpler, prettier, and just more fun than possible to do in modding MC. For music, use something like Fruitloops why limit yourself to the extremely simple, and unwieldy tools in Minecraft? To that extent, I just don't get it and as a game alone, Minecraft just doesn't have much content. If I thought there were going to be massive monthly updates like we see in games like Don't Starve, I'd stick around but Minecraft's just too barren this late in. It was all hype, and it showed a ton of promise (mostly because it was actually being developed), and then.... it pretty much stayed the same. It's difficult to really score this, though. Objectively, especially. I mean even though the base game is more-or-less unsupported at this point, the modders are still going full-steam and dramatically increasing the usability, flexibility, and enjoy-ability of the game. It's just a bad game (which was very promising) without good tools to help the modders out. So... I give the base-game alone 2/10, but 4/10 considering the current mods.

A truly exceptional game. This is one of those games budding designers and developers will look at for years. We can only hope they learn from UIG's mistakes. Rife with game-killing bugs, bad time-wasting mechanics design, and a physics engine which would make anyone cringe. The physics simulations are actually about on par with Big Rigs (look it up!). Everything in the game feels like the publisher was asking the dev team to fulfill a checklist of ambitious mechanics which just didn't fit in the genre, and the dev team was really bitter about it, so gave them their checklist items while refusing to put anything above the absolute minimum amount of effort into the game. There are simply no redeeming qualities. Avoid!

Mixed feelings on the game. It basically plays like a HOMM-type "dungeon crawl," except you're a Spanish explorer, and there's more might than magic... HOM would be more appropriate a comparison, I guess. The difficulty curve is absurd it starts excessively difficult, then becomes pointlessly easy. I screwed my first adventure up pretty severely. After that, I switched ironman-mode on and played through the whole game with very little in the way of challenge. Even the very few battles some others noted as difficult (the revolters at the city on the first map, for example) were already too easy, being able to wipe out the enemies before the ten-turn survival timer. The difficulty sliders don't seem to create much more challenge unless you let the enemy combat AI blatantly cheat, which is just silly and immersion-breaking. The combat is very flavorless... I liked three soldiers, two scouts, and a highest-rank doctor. There's basically one enemy... tan man. Some walk a little faster, some are obnoxious and shoot, then run back behind combat lines, but they all die with a few clicks. Between the combat and the ease (excluding cheating for the AI), there's really no replay value in E:C except maybe to look at the different pieces of dialogue, and I can't imagine justifying the time investment for that. The aesthetics are pretty, and background music decent (being an indie game, there apparently wasn't enough in funds to really expand on the music where it needed it lots of looping, but it was good). As many have mentioned, the lack of transparent foliage in the "world map" was a horrible decision, and the camera angles are far too zoomed in. Yes, the foliage looks good, yes I appreciate it.... now quit making me stare at it, I want to play the game! Traveling on the "world map" is actually pretty horrible. Clicking interactive objects frequently fails to work correctly, and I have to mention AGAIN how non-transparent foliage makes travel extremely tedious. I actually liked a lot of the side dialogue (though I've already forgotten the overall story something about wanting to explore the Americas and getting stuck with a bunch of unhappy Spaniards, and then you get dumped into Aztec territory and you're helping the tribes there out because.... Idunno, you're there?). The way actions in-game shaped dialogue were occasionally not shallow and made a real, logical, satisfying impact on the way the game played out. Some of the events in the game are absurd and didn't match the overall tone of the game... some just seemed really slopped together and added just to make something interesting happen, which ended up not being very interesting at all. The game managed to make skills relevant in dialogue without doing something silly like having a message pop up saying you need 8 more points in spelunking to swing from a rope, but also without being obtuse. The game overall feels very solid. I can think of a few significant flaws, nothing too horrible to ruin it, but I can't think of anything spectacular. It was a great opening for a new dev team, and hopefully they'll expand on this.

I really shouldn't be posting this as a review (this is my true score, but I don't want to detract from my point with a review of the actual game), but I figured it had to be said, and it is very relevant to the content of this particular game. Always-on DRM for single-player games is always cracked. Go to whatever tracker, and you can find this game running perfectly by people carefully bypassing the DRM. It functions better than the "real" game, and has shown Ubi's always-on DRM as both ineffective and extremely detrimental for players. Diablo 3 is cracked, Far Cry 3 is cracked, SC2 is cracked and multiplayer-capable through LAN (probably publicly online I don't keep up with piracy *that* much), even MMORPGs like WoW have private servers facilitating piracy (as well as legitimate modded and/or free-online play). WINDOWS is cracked iOS is cracked, everything is cracked, so devs need to quit thinking they can reinforce a dam when the water just flows over, anyway. Always-on DRM does NOT deter piracy. Once it's cracked, it's cracked, and no pirate cares what fancy ways the devs came up with to try curbing it, it's still easier to install and play pirated than legitimate. If the devs/pubs really cared, keep the DRM active and bugging people off until a cracked version is widely distributed in public, then de-activate the DRM, because it's no longer doing its job any better than CD keys. I wonder, sometimes, if devs purposefully go with publishers on outrageous DRM schemes just to show the publishers what a ridiculously pointless and horrible idea it is, and which will be criticized to no end by the people who PAID for (not pirated) the game.

Reus is really not a "god game" in the conventional sense. It's more like a real-time puzzle-oriented city builder I guess that's a mouthful, though). The mechanics in the game are pretty well-fleshed-out, and you're sometimes expected to make fairly heavy choices (for example, whether or not to annihilate a civilization to appease another for the sake of "progress," or whether or not to burn militaristic villages to the ground because you were careless or had unfavorably favorable building bonuses dropped on you). However, the game remains fairly cartoony and ultimately a bit shallow, as far as narrative goes. I would've loved to see the devs delve deeper into some of the issues they bring out through mechanics and very limited "story," but this isn't done. The narrative, thus, is ineffective and left by the wayside but that's okay, because it's a casual game with a casual-game pricetag. It's a fun game with enough content to probably get you through a few hours before peaking. For the developer, this game is a diving board, and insofar as creating a fun game and interest in the devs' future work, I can't wait to see what comes next, "god game" or not, and I'm glad they're not going to be just another phone game developer.

This was a pretty big let-down for me, personally. I love just about everything which comes out of Paradox, love economic sims, and I love complexity. Heck, I still follow and play openTTD. Unfortunately, while the game is very complex, there's just not much depth in CiM2. There's no real progression, poor balance (just take out a massive initial loan, build a metro going over most of the city, and you're done), the challenges are mostly waiting games (in city "revisits," you frequently need to do absolutely nothing to win just wait for money to accumulate from lines you set up in earlier levels), and you're stuck with maybe 15-ish vehicles total for 6 different types of transportation (three of them operating effectively the same way). The non-story challenges are just silly, with many people asking you to build a line somewhere already covered, but they want direct (and unprofitable for me!) passage from point X to point Y instead of needing to use multiple lines. There's another which pops up every now and then which offers cash for purchasing x vehicles, which is just really lazy on the devs' part it's not fun and quirky, it's lazy and uncaring. The game gets particularly tedious in designing lines, where you're just going along roads clicking a mouse button over, and over, and over. That's just to set stations up. Then you need to click the same 50-200 objects all over so vehicles know where to move. -No, you can't just have the game go linearly through the stations you just set up (station 1, then station 2, then station 3, etc) that'd be too "simple." Micromanagement gets worse when you're constantly changing ticket prices back and forth because "there's an economy." This is supposed to be what's keeping you engaged while you wait for more money, but these are really the times the game annoyed me because I knew I had to keep switching to the CiM2 window to babysit my company. It adds complexity, but not depth there's no meaning, or feeling of accomplishment, it's just there to take time up. The people in the city aren't interesting, there aren't interesting problems to solve, designing lines wasn't interesting after the first few, and it just really lacks the engagement I expect out of econ sims and Paradox games. In games like CK2, you CREATE an engaging narrative, facilitated by the game. In CiM2, there's just no narrative to create. "Today, I made lots of money and moved a lot of people I have no reason to care about. Tomorrow, I will move more people because a dialogue box told me that's what I'm supposed to do." Occasionally (after 1-3 hours of play, generally), it'd CTD, and that'd annoy me, but I kind of expect that out of sim games. I went through the entire game, thinking there was going to be something new introduced or some exciting game mode if I kept slogging through levels, but there wasn't. I finished the last level, a dialogue box popped up saying I won, and depressed me by having me wonder what else I could've done with my time. Quite honestly, I preferred traffic management in SimCity4, and SimCity4 has many, many more mods, much more depth to gameplay, and just more content all-around.

This is definitely one of my favorite games in the past couple years. Survival elements seem too harsh at first, but seems easy once you've started figuring things out. (if you're having trouble, look up recipes for the crock pot). Insofar as that, I'd say the game is immersively complex without being complex to the point where you give up. The game is full of variety, and the massive dev updates (instead of spitting out garbage DLC) makes you want to buy the game multiple times just because you know you short-changed the dev by only paying what was asked. The art style is excellent, though the fake 3D engine has obvious drawbacks. Enemy variety and drops are particularly excellent. Even though common enemies drop the same items almost every time, those enemies' drops are needed for progression in crafting and survival in general. Every single mechanic flows exceptionally well together, unlike anything I've before seen in a game. There's never a time when I said "why's this mechanic or item even in the game?" (well, okay except the pumpkin jack-o-lantern that was relatively useless?) I played this game with my wife at the same time, and we both loved it. We swapped stories about what does what, and how to interact with in-game objects in a new way. This game should be an example for game developers in maintaining a sense of wonder by not revealing everything to the player right away. It's very similar to Binding of Isaac in this way or Nethack, along with many other roguelikes. There's just a TON of content, without any of it being forced on you, so unlike the many linear games AAA releases bring. As others say, the game does eventually get "old" once there are fewer new things coming up on you. The dev updates are wonderful, but if you've already explored the vast majority of the game, adding 2-5% more content isn't really enough. It's the same with mods and the modding community. Modding is "semi-supported" (maybe more like "barely tolerated"), and there are some good ones which enhance gameplay, but there are no decent overhauls, which is unfortunate. I look forward to playing the game again in a year or so, knowing there will definitely be enough content for me to jump back in and enjoy myself.

Oh, man.... I'm so glad I pirate games before buying them right now. I've been hearing good things about "that Walking Dead game" from co-workers for a while, so I gave it a go. I was coming here to see why on Earth they recommended that to me. (Oops!) I was told of character depth and exploration, as well as meaning in choices not presented in a binary format. For this game, it's quite the opposite. Characters are just "there." I guess you are expected to have seen the early part of this series, which I did not (wish I had, because I hear it was even better toward the beginning). There aren't really any meaningful choices in the game which isn't objectively bad, but it doesn't have any character development, either. There aren't many weapons, but there's not an unreasonably limited amount of weapons, which I think would actually be good if the weapons were very different. Unfortunately, a machete pretty much functions the same as a hammer or a sledgehammer, and enemies are all the same, so the weapons' differences (within their own classes [melee, handgun, rifle]) are mostly skin-deep. Melee combat is pretty boring, and I have no idea why auto-aim would be default-enabled on the PC, but melee and ranged combat is fairly well-balanced (that is, the increased power of ranged weapons is often outweighed by the disadvantage of grabbing nearby walkers' attention). There's a "companion" kind of system in the game, but nobody ever fights alongside you in-game. There's not really any point to it. Survivors generally require more supplies to heal than they're able to scavenge (none of which I ever ran out of), there's no special reward, and there's no reason at all for them to be in the game, really. Levels are pretty small, and shockingly enough, repeated over and over in scavenge situations. The devs at least made item and enemy placement in SameLevel semi-random. Praise Jesus for the man who implemented that... I would've quit the game early on if I had to go through the exact same scavenge missions. The game devs decided to limit inventory, both in how much you can store on-person, and how much you can store in your car. By doing this, they've effectively limited how many weapons you'll ever use. Find a favorite weapon in each class (I brought the early bolt-action rifle and machete to the end), dump the rest. The game does a good job at getting a few cheap scares in. It's no survival horror, though. There were maybe four or five times it managed to catch me off-guard, and the first few levels gave me the sense of dread. They give you more powerful weapons as you progress and same-strength enemies, so combat ends up very uneven, totally ruining the atmosphere they appeared to be going for. That said, you can just go through the game with a first-level melee weapon without much trouble. I somehow managed to get the game to run at 2x speed (did this when I enabled "windowed" mode) on the last three levels and didn't have any problems getting through. It actually made the game feel much more intense. The game is indeed about 5 hours long. There's replay value in that you're forced to choose between "story" levels, so you can go back and do the other ones (not that you'd want to). -But really, it's probably the shortest non-indie game I've ever played. With a pretty mediocre graphics engine (or poorly utilized one, perhaps), it's shocking that this game takes up >8gB of storage. I'm not at all sure how they managed that. It's a forgettable, unpolished game with little depth. I'm giving it 3/10, but the game was running at 2x speed through the end level, so all I remember was shooting a bunch of super-fast zombies in the face with a machine gun, which was a pretty decent ending for me!

I was meaning to do a more pithy review, but lost my edge when I saw someone else already called Proteus an "interactive screensaver." I agree, and I do like a lot of "art games." Proteus, though, is extraordinarily slow-paced. It generally left me confused, which would be fine if it were going somewhere, but there didn't appear to be any ultimate "point" or there was, but well beyond the very short 20m I gave it. For example, a ring of fireflies formed at one point and made a large pillar appear, which must have released some type of invisible sleeping gas. It was probably the coolest moment of my experience, leaving me thinking "Mm. Okay." I did try to like the game, but I guess I'm not nearly patient enough, nor interested in a game which doesn't adequately present itself as more than a distraction. Ultimately, I found myself wishing there was no interactivity at all, and that the character would progress by himself while I ate a bowl of ramen noodles. And then I wondered why I don't just eat outside before realizing I had frustration to unload here (and it's 2am!). It did have soothing graphics (I think "beautiful" is an exaggeration it took me a while to figure out when I arrived at the side **** [and now I'm doubting my perception], partially because some of the tombstones were swaying). The music was soothing, too kind of reminded me of some of the early music in Rotohex. Proteus is very different, and bold in that originality, but I can't say it was refreshing. (But it is definitely thought-provoking reviews here are particularly polarized)

Orcs Must Die! is a fun diversion. They've combined FPS with tower-defense. The traps are fun to place and watch, and being in on the action takes away a lot of the tedium that eventually sets in with most TD games. There are quite a few mechanics at work, but I really wish they would have created alternative currencies or role-playing persistent upgrades (beyond the skull system where you can get just one upgrade per trap). The coin currency is essentially the only currency you use throughout the game, and thus everything depends on it. This tends to make the first couple waves quite difficult to not let an enemy get through, and later waves too easy. In normal difficulty, the game doesn't feel particularly challenging, but once you unlock the nitemare mode (for which you unfortunately must complete every level on the normal difficulty), getting beyond the second level's pretty tough. The nitemare difficulty would have been a welcomed addition to the game, but it unfortunately is the same levels, dialogue, and cutscenes with much more difficult monsters. With many low-budget games, a good chunk of time has gone in to making the game look great without much processing power required, and Orcs Must Die! is a particularly good example of how good aesthetics will beat good graphics any day. Modding tools really would have turned this good, fun game into a massive and fantastic time sink. Unfortunately, you're stuck with DLC from the devs, and that's it. It seems a bit odd they'd do that, too, considering the TD genre became popular only by Blizz having their RTS games effectively be a platform, with very powerful modding & map-making tools allowing Starcraft/Warcraft to be a simulator, RPG, RTS, FPS, MMO, and just about anything else you can think of. It's certainly a game which could have been much better (and that's absolutely not to say it's at all a bad or unenjoyable game) with more dev time focused on giving consumers more choices. I suspect there'll be a sequel, and hopefully they'll add it in then. I look forward to it.

No way you can fault this game for lack of content. There's plenty, and (semi-)random-generation of items, caverns, and veins keeps the game interesting for many hours. With all sandbox-type games, however, there comes a point where you feel like you've gone through just about everything there is to explore. You know how the mechanics work, how enemies work - you've found all the interesting artifacts, and have the NPCs you're interested in. .... And then you go online to see the Terraria Wiki, and -- HOLY #(%*, there's a freaking CLOUD level! You find out you've only explored half the content, and on your way to explore it, the devs release even more new content in an update. Content updates in Terraria are a real treat. It's not just a few balance changes and a a couple new items -- they add new biomes, more monsters, a new NPC, different trees, new mechanics, many new weapons, and major crafting changes. Even if you do play Minecraft, and reviewers are correct in calling Terraria a "2d minecraft clone," the vast amount of different content, different mechanics, and environments still make Terreria a bargain, and likely a very fresh, enjoyable experience for you.

I think there's definitely a solid foundation to the claim of the game being "incredibly immersive" - in most aspects. The story is fairly believable, the voice-acting quite well-done (for a video game), and the characters seem fairly deep. The graphical quality of the game is fantastic, and the design is very pleasing to look at (though some more variety in objects would've been appreciated). The physics involved in the game are a bit screwy, especially when the game determines whether or not you can pick objects up, but that's quite forgivable. Combat is what you'd expect with cover-based shooting. The hacking mini-game is surprisingly intense, and the options to explore in the game are rewarding and interesting. There is an issue with Deus Ex being so serious, however, and that's when they let you do whatever you please. I was getting a bit bored with the quests (throughout the game, I never found the quests interesting - just something I had to do so I could progress to the next area) and decided to massacre the police department. It was fun and intense. It didn't fit my character at all when he got back to the storyline dialogue, however, which broke immersion. Overall, I was often wanting more action in the game, and it was difficult to come after breaking the "timeline" of the story by wiping out every collection of gang-members, police, and civilians I could find. I recall wandering around gunning civilians in the Asian environment, and killing a civilian who was apparently important, dropping something that seemed to have no significance. However, upon picking it up, my character decided to phone a security officer at the company the character works for. The conversation went something like "Do you think a pendent with some insignia on it will come in useful." "Yeah, why?" "Just wondering." Overall, I enjoyed the game, and I think playing it on the hardest difficulty would have been much more preferable (keeping in mind I'm not particularly good at FPS games) -- at medium difficulty, there just wasn't any point wasting time with stealth.

For the most part, it's a goal-centric version of SimCity set in the Caribbean. The aesthetics and graphical improvements are beautiful. It doesn't have the same performance issues as Tropico 3, nor is the interface as clunky. The series really hasn't evolved since the original Tropico release however, but the improvements have been immense. For anyone who played SimCity Societies and was justifiably outraged at the terrible gameplay, I think Tropico 4 is a great place to pick up after SimCity 4. The game is very polished, level design thoughtful, music enjoyable, appropriately absurd (while still encouraging some thought with fantastic quotes), and has fairly balanced mechanics. After essentially using the same formula for decade, I wouldn't expect any less. Managing building placement is particularly enjoyable, as efficiency can be dramatically reduced if you build too many intersections on your road or try to have a massive hub of activity in the center of the island. Producing an island which efficiently imports, exports, and shuffles around resources feels very rewarding. The only major complaint I have is the game's too easy. It's very time-consuming to complete missions, but generally never easy to fail at. You also don't often have to be at the computer after you've planned a huge list of building projects except to choose how to handle random events. The mechanics require some thought, but after you've experimented for a couple hours, it's difficult to continue improving strategy. There's also no end-game content I found enjoyable, which seems strange for a city management simulator.

There's just a lack of content. It takes a great deal of effort to marginally improve your fleet's status after you hit around level 15 or so - and if the randomly-generated map, in which your don't know where blueprints are scattered, doesn't have anything beneficial for you within your level range of solar systems, you end up stuck - which isn't okay when you've invested 5+ hours in that map. Combat gets old fairly quickly, shooting the same weapons at the same handful of ships who utilize the same tactics over and over, on missions you've already done 5+ times. With more variety, more AI programming, and more upgrade mechanics, this game can be something great. The first few hours, I loved the game, but it felt much more like grinding after those few beginning hours when there was a strong sense of novelty.

I enjoyed this game. It's a solid attempt at a modern roguelike. It's very replayable, and discovering new ways to use the many, many skills and items is rewarding. Turnbased may seem like the obvious choice for a roguelike crawler, but I much preferred how Binding of Isaac handled combat - having it real-time. Due almost solely to their decision to keep it turn-based, combat is tedious. Nethack was saved from being tedious due to the unique level of detail in the game. There were hundreds of types of monsters, hundreds of different items, a fascinating "BUC" system, deities, factions, and on and on. Dungeons of Dredmor does not match this level of detail, as others have noted -- we're talking about a much more shallow game, with maybe 20 different NPC types, ~100 items, poor inventory management, a fairly clunky GUI, and adequate graphics. Don't forget -- while DoD has a low price tag, Nethack is free and easy to modify. OTOH, the crafting system is an addition.... but the items aren't particularly interesting, and the poor inventory management ends up leaving you unable to craft what you want as there isn't enough inventory space, and this ends up turning DoD into a bit of a "inventory management game." While I recommend trying out DoD, I don't believe their attempt at "bringing roguelikes to the masses" was much more than stripping out most the work that went into Nethack and putting a mediocre graphical overlay atop it. Nethack was also able to get away with lack of balance (that is, one game could be dramatically easier or harder than the last based on one randomly-generated item you happened to find) because everything had strengths and weaknesses. In DoD, there isn't much room for strategy -- you hit the target, the target hits you - back-and-forth until someone dies. It's kind of like cover-based FPS games, but without any of the intensity. With all this criticism, there are some glimmers of great design within, and I hope we'll see continued development from Gaslamp Games.

This game is just about perfect. It's priced on its length -- I don't think you can criticize a 3-6 hour time of gameplay with a $5 price tag. This game is definitely not short on content within those few hours, however, and it's never tedious. NPCs are diverse, but never "too" difficult (not that you probably won't die a few times completing the game the first time). Each play-through is different, and each time, you learn new mechanics, new items, and new secrets - which is much the same draw as Nethack. There's never a shortage of novelty - you don't get into a "groove" of hitting the same buttons under the same conditions -- there's NO grinding because after entering one semi-randomly-generated room, the shooting mechanic could dramatically change. The review faulting it for "cartoon gore" and being depressing is a bit obscene. It's so cartoonish and absurd, the idea that you can fault its liberalism with gore compared to the gore in a game as Modern Warfare, where you're shooting at representations of much more lifelike people, is silly. The story is witty, and surprisingly well-done considering how short and non-linear the game is. Most important about this game is its achievement of creating a non-linear roguelike which FLOWS. Everything flows very well -- nothing feels clunky, and having power-ups affect how your character looks (often in ways you wouldn't expect) is a great addition. Addicting, mysterious, and an enjoyable diversion, the game is well-worth the low price tag, and an experience I won't soon be forgetting (something I can't say for the $50+ generic brown FPS games I've played). I'm deducting a point for the **** monster, however. That was just wrong on all levels.

Recall Limbo. The devs drop you into a game with no instructions and no plot, but it's easy to figure out. E.Y.E. does the exact opposite. They stuff you in the middle of a plot with plenty of strange dialogue and give you twenty-three videos as a tutorial, but the game remains obtuse. I've played plenty of RPGs and FPSs from Far Cry to Witcher 2 to Battlefield 2, and I still had no idea which buttons I was expected to press. A previous reviewer stated he was able to skip all the videos and jump right in. I imagine he's a genius, spent a half-hour (or more) pressing buttons to see what they do, or's lying. Aesthetically, the game is "a bad kind of dark." Often, you're in dark areas with poor light, and ugly textures. It's generally excusable when using a high-end game engine, as the technology compensates. However, I guess this is a taste preference, because others have praised the game's aesthetics. Psi abilities can be fun to use and watch, but using the standard weapons is very dull. The AI itself is very dull and unrefined, which is probably why I was bored with combat. They run right at you after spawning from the ground, do their attack, and die (not necessarily in that order). That said, enemy AI is much more interesting than friendly AI dialogue, which I guess was not originally written in English. It shows, though it doesn't excuse the obtuse characters who lack depth and development. However, while I was bored out of playing the game to the end, there're a LOT of ideas in this game I hope will be further looked into. I actually thought the hacking minigame was a bit fun (... out of combat) -- it's sort of like an old-school RPG game where you have basic stats displayed and use your abilities to create a weakness and attack before the object you're hacking "kills" you. Research was fascinating, and I think a far superior mechanism than how the latest Mass Effect handled research (remember? scan, scan, scan.... eyes droop.... Oh - something to click on for the nth time for x resources! ..... scan, scan, scan......). Someone previously wrote about how the game's research mechanic is most similar to X-COM's - and that isn't the only influence it had. X-COM was the first game I played with the inventory management scheme as EYE has, similar to how Res. Evil 4's works. Overall, I liked a lot of the mechanics I saw at play in EYE, but I didn't enjoy the package enough to tolerate more than a few hours. A well-funded and long-developed sequel may produce the gem whose sparkle is occasionally glimpsed at, and that's the only reason why I'd recommend buying the game.

I wish so much they didn't try to attempt any narrative. The game's fun and challenging. I do agree with others that in many late-game instances, you DO have to die to figure out how you're supposed to solve the puzzle, but this is excusable. The film noir aesthetic is beautiful and immersive. - But after finishing the game, I felt cheated more than ever before. The game keeps hinting at a narrative -- that the game's making some type of commentary on... something. It seems to really be trying at some points, but at the end, nothing really makes sense. Nothing is explained, and there's not enough of a coherent story to make interesting theories on like in Braid. After finishing, I ended up scouring Internet forums looking for someone to enlighten me. Instead, I found some of the most frustrating nonsensical drivel I've yet read. It was confirmed to me that while LIMBO's creators made some attempt at a narrative, there was nothing substantive. Seriously, I'm not OCD, but the game's lack of a story rips a huge hole in an otherwise brilliant indie game. But.... with most games pretending even harder to have a story and failing equally hard at six times the price, I can't give LIMBO a bad rating. In the end, it's a great, enjoyable, rewarding puzzle game great for night-time play.

Many great points already made. Game has a lot of promise and is very innovative and interesting mechanics, but the Wii kills it. I've been trying out a Wii in the past couple months and trying out just about everything, and the unfortunate conclusion I've come to is that the main computer itself is solid and smart -- it's value-conscious and has forced devs to value aesthetics over how many gritty-brown pixels they can shove in. This is best shown in Okami which has some of the most fantastic cel-shading graphics I've yet seen. The Wiimote, however - as has been mentioned - just doesn't have many practical applications outside of point-and-shoot, and that is also very clearly demonstrated in Okami. My God -- there's a mechanic where you hunt "wanted" monsters and when you kill one, you have to cross out the name. It took me 10-20x more time to draw a line through a name precisely right than kill the monster. This is a common problem -- the Wiimote should never be used for drawing. Ever. A much less frustrating problem is how broken the game seems after bombs are introduced. Combat was already very easy, but bombs cause incredible damage, cost virtually nothing, have large range, and can be deployed precisely at long range. I can't believe the devs introduced that, tested it, had professional testers test this, and then left it in as-is. It breaks the game. The story is sometimes a little heavy in a bad way, but it's broken up with some witty and what I imagine was pretty time-intensive dialogue broken up with novel animations, breaks in music, and character depth. The story is overall charming, though having a small bug-wisp-man threaten to reside in a god's kimono if not rewarded is just a bit beyond "the line." Very much recommend others give it a go, and very much hope if the devs do something like this again, skip a lot of the "drawing" mechanics which add nothing but frustration to the game (such as having to draw a line through the names of monsters you've killed).

I think if you enjoy games like WarioWare and Mario Party, you will enjoy this -- and if you don't, you will not enjoy WW:Smooth Moves. Mini-games have great variety and the devs did great, innovative mechanics using the Wiimote, which is surprisingly rare with Wii games. There are some fun multiplayer games, but just not enough. Once the nunchuk gets involved, gameplay becomes very challenging -- I doubt anyone calling the game easy has made it to the "red elephant." Playing the hard levels works up a sweat and requires a fair amount of mental agility to keep up. While the majority of controls and concepts are very intuitive, there are a couple I still don't understand and fail at every time the mini-game comes up. The game is absolutely hilarious in some parts with graphic devs showing a great eye for absurdity. That said, the "movies" in the game should have been skippable because they were simply "cute" -- not funny, interesting, or disturbing - an odd part of the game which in a different universe from the rest of the game's atmosphere. The game has solid replay value and is one of the only Wii games I find myself picking up every now and then to play after having effectively finished it.

Gameplay is very easy, but very varied. 2d/3d worlds are fun and controls very intuitive. There's a great variety of weapons, personalities, mini-games, and game mechanics. There are way more mysteries in the game for any one reasonable person to find in a play-through, and that makes trying new tactics in the game very fun. Dialogue is superior to most Wii games, fwiw - with plenty of wit and unexpected personality. Character depth should have been developed more, but there was enough to empathize with characters. Definitely agree with others on that "Hamster Wheel" section of the game -- and there are quite a few other examples of drawing the game out for no reason other than to frustrate the player and waste his/her time without enjoyment. Puzzles aren't too difficult, but sometimes needed objects are placed in bizarre areas forcing you to go through everything five times for a couple hours, then realize you needed to go further back in a way which doesn't seem to make sense. There's excellent variety to the atmospheres created in the game. Some parts of the game just feel unbalanced -- there are rewards for tediously hunting treasure, finding recipes, and playing mini-games, but they don't make any significant impact on gameplay, while spending an hour in a type of gladiator pit breaks the game, making the character uber-powerful. SPM has the typical Mario problem of pits which give no indication of if they're useful or not supposed to be jumped in -- a very bizarre skinner box technique. Overall, a very fun game, and the only Wii game of over ten which I actually played to the end.

Movement is slow and clunky, and character is unable to strafe. Boat sections in particular are very frustrating to try navigating. Much of the game is an annoying escort mission. Enemies are "zombie-like," meaning they're very slow and have poor pathfinding. Voice acting is sub-par and the dialogue very bland. Controls are unintuitive and I would have liked more musical and atmosphere variety. With the bad out of the way, the boss fights are very impressive, unique, and fun. Being able to "combine" items in inventory usually means you need to use moon logic or click every single item on another - but RE:4 handles it very well. Enemies are well-varied and surprising. Puzzles are challenging enough to be enjoyable but not too much to become frustrating. Balance and pacing are solid -- unlike many in its genre, it does not draw out gameplay by making you walk around aimlessly for 30m+. Devs create tension very successfully though the game cannot touch the ankles of games like those by Frictional in creating an atmosphere of dread. Still, the game is a fun shooter with plenty of gameplay variety, very worthy of a play.

Tedious and extremely repetitive take on "Crush the Castle," which itself is pretty tedious. Gameplay attempts variety, and while it gets different flavors, it's all still ice cream. Really bad ice cream with drawn-out physics. More than "Crush the Castle," I think this game could be compared to a mini-game in WW:Smooth Moves, except instead of hundreds of entirely new novel concepts and fun, it's just a slightly different take on the same mini-game over and over and over.