LeonidasRex

This is possibly the most beautiful and emotionally moving game I've ever played. The visual style and puzzle design is as whimsical as Psychonauts. It's not a challenging game, because the point of the game is story and mood. If you grew up with an abusive alcoholic parent, then Papo & Yo will make you feel like a kid again.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

If you're an older gamer with a head full of useless gaming memories, then Game Dev Tycoon is for you. How will the NES fare against the Commodore 64? Will a ninja game do better as action or RPG? Do you know video games because you spent thousands of hours of your life playing them over the past few decades? This with this game you can turn that knowledge into million of unspendable dollars. I'm rating this a ten---for an indie that you can probably get for $5 or less on sale. The graphics and sound effects are minimal. The music gets annoying quickly. But the idea and underlying gameplay are clever and well-executed. You can start in your garage writing the equivalent of Zork, and finish the game with your own console and MMO.

Expeditions: Conquistador combines an exploration game, a tactics game, and a lot of writing. The tactics game is a fairly simple turn-based system on a hex grid, with various classes and special abilities. The exploration game includes a camping simulation in which you assign party members to various tasks. Both games are fun to learn, then they become tedious and repetitive as you find the one best way to win. The writing is terrific. Somebody really put their heart into it. The text is where you'll find most of this game's imagination and variety. Don't skip it. This game is not a history lesson on conquistadors. Half the available characters are women. Many of the story options involve politically correct concerns about racism and colonial oppression. Maybe some people enjoy "historical" games full of modern sensibilities; I would have preferred to learn how the actual conquistadors saw themselves and their world. The tactics game also fails to deliver much history. I was expecting small numbers of well-equipped Spaniards versus large numbers of poorly-armed natives. But this game's battles involve equal numbers of men on each side, where a metal-clad steel-wielding Spaniard is equivalent to a leather-clad obsidian-wielding native. It's not a fatal flaw, but it's certainly an opportunity missed. Expeditions: Conquistador is a fairly good game that could have been so much better. If you don't mind your video games giving you lots to read and not much historical accuracy, then this title is definitely worth $10-15 on sale.

An uninspired Diablo 2 clone, dumbed down for the kiddies. It's much too easy. In three hours on Hard I might have drunk three health potions. There's no sense of world, no persistent characters, and no storyline to speak of. There's not even a world map to give you any sense of this world you're expected to save. It fails as a game, and it fails as a story.

It's pretty, but it's not much ****. They stripped the original gameplay down to bare bones, then tacked on a ton of Hollywood glitz. It seemed like they would have preferred to make a movie. XCOM:EU is great when it comes to voice acting, swooshy camera movements, and scary hissing aliens. There's not much plot and the characters are paper-thin, but it has excellent low-level production values such as animation, art, and sound effects. The gameplay is merely a way to make you sit still so that you can appreciate how much work they put into the visuals.

This is yet another hex-based puzzle game. The game mechanic is pleasant enough, though it includes a heavy random factor that prevents you from taking the game too seriously. There's also no tutorial or help feature, so you just have to infer and then remember exactly how the special pieces work. My particular gripe with Fractal is that the aesthetics are so poor. There's no story, no character, no reason to solve the puzzles. The art backdrops are a mishmash of half-finished sketches with no particular theme. And the music is almost unbearably bad. This is one of the rare times I wanted to turn off the music and just hear the sound effects, but the game doesn't permit that. This might be a good phone game, where gamers don't expect much in terms of art or sound. But as a PC game, it lacks any sense of polish or presentation.

I didn't like this game at first, mostly because I didn't want to be a little guy in a suit and tie. But once I gave it a chance, it grew on me. The style is distinctive and memorable. The idea of tying a time-rewinding game mechanic to a guilt-oriented storyline worked very well. Each new group of levels presented an interesting new twist. If you like cerebral puzzle games, you'll like this.

An attractive athletic girl must work her way through improbable dangerous puzzle rooms, occasionally shooting enemies. It's Tomb Raider in a ship. Except that the girl isn't nearly as interesting as Lara Croft, and the inside of a ship isn't nearly as interesting as ancient ruins. We see glimpses of a dark futuristic world amok with terrorists, but none of it seems related to the immediate tasks of jump, climb, shoot. On the plus side, the water and other visuals are very pretty. The artists did their jobs well. But it feels less like playing a video game, and more like watching a futuristic remake of the Poseidon Adventure.

SPAZ is really two games on top of each other, and they don't mix well. One of the games is a complex space combat model. Beams work well against shields but not armor, point defenses stop missiles, scanners negate cloaks, and so forth. Somebody put a lot of thought into that space combat system, and it could have been the foundation **** game similar to Faster Than Light. But then there's the second game, an arcadey space shooter in which you blast your way through endless waves of enemies while amassing experience points to acquire better equipment with which to defeat bigger enemies. So the delicate rock-paper-scissors of the first game gets trampled by the second game's rush to XP. There's no point thinking too hard about ship layout and other tactical decisions, because most of the time the fleet with superior tech simply crushes the opposition. And even when the battles are close, there are no tools to help you understand why you won or lost. There's no combat log, no slowing of time, no rewind to review the battle. I often lost ships and battles without having any idea why. Was my fleet poorly designed? Did I use the wrong tactics? Was the enemy fleet simply too powerful? I didn't mind losing, but it was unsatisfying not to know why I had lost. And it was even more unsatisfying not to have much reason to care. There's no risk of losing in this game. There are no real setbacks. You just spend ten minutes fighting a battle, and if you lose then you spend ten minutes in tedious resource acquistion so that you can try the battle again, or try another battle. There are no real defeats and therefore no real victories. No emotional arcs. The flashy lasers and explosions become drudgery. You don't win this game with superior tactics or loadout decisions. You win this game with raw patience. If you grind away at battles that are not too easy and not too difficult, then eventually I assume you'll win. After 32 hours, I don't have any more patience for it.

This is a difficult game. When I started, it took me five tries to get to the end on easy. Two hundred hours later, on normal I can finish nearly every time. The fighting looks simple, but if you stick with it you'll find amazing tactical depth.

Silly game developers, rabbids are for kids! Rabbids are about potty jokes and simple physical humor. This game repeats the mini-games from other rabbid titles, wrapped in a framing device of watching TV all day. But the kids young enough to enjoy the humor barely understand what broadcast TV was, and certainly won't get all the adult in-jokes. For example, a frequent mini-game involves a movie studio where they're filming an old late-night movie, such as Night of the Living Dead, or Red Planet. (I'm 41, and those movies were way before my time.) While they're filming the movie, actors from other movies wander through the set and spoil the shot. Your job is to shoot the invading actors and prevent the movie from being ruined. It's all very clever in an abstract intellectual way, but it's a terrible mismatch with the simple physical humor of the Rabbids. My son is 10, and he loved all the other Rabbid games. I'm 41, and many of the jokes left me scratching my head. We turned it off after an hour. If you're over 50 and still have the sense of humor ****, then you might enjoy this. Otherwise stay away. The humor is too lowbrow for most adults, and the jokes are too archaic for kids. It's sad because somebody obviously put a lot of work into this. But the concept is self-contradictory. And don't be fooled by the positive user reviews. They reek of spam.

I finally signed up with MC just to give this game a 10. It's a very low-budget game, so don't expect a lot of glitz. But the money was well spent, and the actual game underneath is excellent.