Mogul

I found Borderlands to be a very fun FPS, and I especially enjoyed the various RPG elements. I am a big fan of the leveling system, the skill trees, and the sheer variety of items and guns. The art style of the game is another huge plus, giving Borderlands a unique and distinctive feel. Combat itself works well, even if it gets a bit tedious and repetitive over time. In fact, I would say the overall "grindy" nature of the game was its biggest negative for me. I simply didn't sink the hours into this that I have into comparable games, and only ever bothered playing one of the characters through the story (the soldier). Still, Borderlands is fun, and well worth playing for fans of the genre.

This game has a beautiful atmosphere and story. It really does. Unfortunately, I simply did not enjoy working my way through the various puzzles. I just found them to be so unbelievably tedious, and only managed to put about 2 hours into this before deciding to move on to games that I actually like playing.

****. You basically walk through an artsy story that doesn't make much sense and which leaves a lot up to interpretation. The story was not interesting or compelling to me. It also takes less than 20 minutes to complete this "game." I feel compelled to be especially harsh here, because critics have given so much praise to Thirty Flights of Loving, when I couldn't really recommend that anyone should buy this. So, you have been warned.

This is basically an interactive movie, and the "gameplay" essentially consists of walking around and moving the characters through the story. There's no actual challenge anywhere, you can't "lose", and you can't do anything to affect the overall outcome. Still, despite all of this, moving through the world of To the Moon, and watching this particularly story unfold....well, it's simply beautiful. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll never quite look at a paper bunny rabbit the same way again. :P

This is a very cool little visual novel type game. As a player, you search through a computer database, read e-mails, and learn about the history of a spaceship and the people that used to live on it. There is a lot to read, and the story is quite good, with some exciting twists and turns along the way. I wouldn't rank this as one of my favourite novels, though, and given that it is mostly a novel (in video game clothing), I've come up with a score that reflects this.

Running around causing chaos is really quite fun! For a few hours. The grappling hook / parachute tools are cool to use, the combat works fairly well, and there are lots of vehicles to drive around in and lots of map to explore. Unfortunately, the story falls flat, and destroying random stuff for no compelling reasons gets old in a hurry. Or at least it did for me.

This is the most kawaii little indie game that I've ever played in my life. I absolutely love the characters in this, and their interactions with one another. Recette Lemongrass is a gaming icon to me now, haha. Who knew that running an item shop could be so much fun? The only downside, for me, is that the gameplay does get a bit tedious after awhile, especially the random dungeon crawling aspect (which is actually optional, you can run your store just fine by shopping around town and then re-selling stuff for higher prices! Capitalism, ho!).

This is a really fun little tower defense game, with loads of personality, and plenty of variety. The many different gameplay modes add significant replay value. My own interest lasted for about 20 hours of gaming time, although there are still many unearned steam achievements for me to chase down if I decide to come back and play this some more in the future. :)

I played rogue as a kid, and I really enjoy crawling my way through random dungeon after random dungeon, with no two playthroughs being quite the same. FTL brings back that same feeling, only in outer space, in really cool space ships. The game mechanics are top notch, with lots of depth, but also a fun and intuitive general approach. As a final point, I'll mention that the difficulty level found here is very high, which is a bit refreshing in today's gaming market, but unfortunately, a lot of the difficulty factor is simply luck based. I guess that's a bit unavoidable with randomized maps / encounters, but it does make the game a bit annoying at times.

For me, this game is frustrating, not fun, and essentially pointless. I suppose part of the problem is the learning curve. You start out just thrown into the map somewhere, with no clear assistance in figuring out where you should go, what you should do, why you should be doing it, or how to succeed. In my experience, I just ran towards some apparent objective getting murdered over and over again. Either that, or I just ran around the humongous map with no one at all anywhere near me. The whole experience was just terrible. I pored several hours into this, but just couldn't find the motivation to stick it out to see if things would get better.

A lot of people seem to hate this game, and I agree with the masses. Truly, truly terrible. It is a pointless clickfest, where you run around killing stuff for no apparent reason. Some "pointless clickfest" games can be really, really fun, but Diablo 3 is not one of these games.

This game is one of my favourite turn based strategy games ever. The goal? Conquer China. Simple enough. In pursuing that goal, there is a ton of compelling depth. You get to manage your cities and economy, acquire and manage interesting officers (such as Cao Cao, Lu Bu, and Sun Ce), build an army, deploy your units (each one under command of an officer), fight tactical battles against the forces of your rival leaders, conquer cities and territory, fight officer duels and even have debates! There is a learning curve with this game, and a bit of tediousness (for example, in every long term scenario that you play there will be a point where it's clear you've "won," but it will still take hours and hours to wipe out the remaining forces of your opposition). However, in general, I strongly recommend playing this, simply because I've had so much fun with it.

Maybe I just don't like 4x strategy games? I tried hard to get into this game, but it just all felt so pointless. There is a total lack of a compelling story in any of the game modes. Looking at the gameplay itself, everything felt like a tedious grind to me. Turn based strategy games can be a lot of fun (I've really enjoyed random stuff like Blood Bowl or the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series), but other than the enjoyable music, Galactic Civilizations II just didn't "grab" me at all.

Super early review time! After only a few days of being released, it isn't really appropriate to review an MMO, but I'm going to give it a shot. Let's start with the good news. Guild Wars 2, for me, basically grabbed a lot of the best ideas from other MMOs, and threw them all together, while adding a couple new things of it's own. You have dynamic events like Rifts, you have a quality personal story like you get in SWTOR, and you get "builds" and considerable class freedom like in the Secret World (although Guild Wars 2 does still have distinct classes). The biggest innovation is the "exploration" style gameplay. GW2 does not have quest hubs at all. You just run around the map exploring, tasks pop up on your screen, you do them if you feel like it, and then you run over to the next part of unexplored map, joining in dynamic events along the way (when they appear and if you feel like doing them). Even crafting has an explorer feel, as you mostly just make stuff and discover recipes through the "making stuff" process. In terms of running around wasting time, GW2 has mostly eliminated this. There's no flying around on a gryphon for 5 minutes in this game. If you want to go to a waypoint, you just click the icon on your map, and you go there. This is fantastic, and the game goes out of its way to not waste your time in most areas. This is probably linked to the wonderful lack of a subscription fee. Big points for that. Now for the bad news. Like the Hangover movies, in GW2, it's all just the same thing. Gameplay is very, very repetitive. In each zone, the scenery changes, but you're basically doing whatever you did in the previous zone. Your character also feels powerful at level 1, and doesn't really feel much more powerful as you level up and gain abilities. The feeling of "progression" seems a bit absent from this game. Also, in the "kind of bad" category, this game is addictive. It's really, really addictive, more so than other MMOs. This stems from the lack of natural breaks in the game (things like ok, I just cleared this quest hub, lets stop for today; GW2 lacks break points like this, it's just go go go). Even the standard pvp matches continually re-load new zones when your previous match finishes, and you have to actively quit to stop playing. This is great for not wasting your time, but bad for limiting the amount of time you spend in this game. You've been warned! On the whole, though, this is one of the best games of the year, and a must play for anyone that likes MMO style gameplay.

This is a fun action shooter, but playing this game is a lot like watching a really long movie. The story is great, and it's fun to see what happens, but absolutely everything is scripted and on rails. After you finish playing through the story (8 to 10 hours), there's not much else to do. The actual combat is not polished enough to make me want to plow through the story mode more than once, and if I'm looking for multiplayer shooting mayhem, several others titles trounce this one for that type of gameplay.

This game has had an amazing launch. Gameplay has been very smooth, and most of the bugs have been ironed out. I've played a lot of mmo's, and for me, what sets The Secret World apart is the skill system and the ability wheel. Best. Thing. Ever. One character. Do just about anything. Progression has never been this much fun. A score of 10 is a bit premature (I have no idea what the end game is going to be like), but I just wanted to recognize how much fun I'm having right now.

This is a decent time sink, but compared to other games on the maket, I can't recommend going out of your way to play this. The RPG aspects and cumbersome and not really distinctive, while the RTS elements are more annoying that interesting. If you want a great RPG party based game, there are many great games worth playing. If you want a great RTS game, there are also many great games in that genre. Spellforce offers a playable combination of those two genres, but nothing in the atmosphere, characters, story, or gameplay mechanics really stood out to me.

This game looks pretty, and is easy to jump in and play. For me, though, I found the physics and controls to be very wonky and unintuitive. The skiing + jet pack stuff just doesn't feel smooth to me, and I never really felt like I was going that fast either (even at speeds where I would never get shot or hit things that I was shooting at). There also seem to be class / weapon balance issues, but that's not unusual for a game like this. I can see why people would enjoy playing this, but it's just not my style I guess.

Imagine taking League of Legends and Team Fortress 2, throwing them into a source code blender, and seeing what you'd get. That game is Super Monday Night Combat. Is it fun? Yes. I mean, you're running around defending / attacking robots and towers in FPS mode while "thinking the game" MOBA style, with the added touch of collecting coins like you're Super Mario. The atmosphere, visuals, and combat dynamics are all solid enough. However, do I think that this is a great game that I'll play a lot? Not really. Still, it's free to play, and well worth trying out if this blend of gaming genres appeals to you.

This game is good, and kind of fun, but it didn't really seem special to me. It felt very outdated and required way too much micromanaging for my taste, and everything was a bit more stressful than fun. I can see why people enjoy this game, but for my part, I actual like watching Starcraft II competitive matches on youtube much more than I like playing the game myself.

The atmosphere is great, the music is great, the visuals are great, but the game itself is average. Combat gets boring quickly, and too often feels like the bad kind of grinding. Flying around with your character is a novelty that doesn't end up working that well. Still, the Truly Free model that Aion recently adopted offers great value, and this game is much better than most other "free" MMOs that are out there right now.

For me, the combat system in this game made it nearly unplayable. I just didn't enjoy it at all, and actually didn't finish this game (a huge rarity for me, as I play to the end of just about every game that I buy). The story also was uninteresting to me. BioWare has made a lot of great RPGs, but I don't consider this to be one of them.

Majesty 2 is very similar to the original, with some graphical improvements and AI tweaks. One slightly annoying tweak is that your heroes seem much stupider, and refuse to do much of anything if you don't throw down reward flags. The difficulty curve is also a bit strange, and some missions are trivial, with others being extremely hard. This issue continues in the expansions (Kingmaker, Battles of Ardania, Monster Kingdom), where the missions are punishingly hard, and not in a "fun challenge" kind of way. The challenge, in most of these maps, comes from not knowing what or where the lairs / objectives are, and getting demolished if you build your early base in the wrong order or wrong direction. Still, this game is a fun time sink, and I mostly enjoyed plowing my way through the campaigns.

This game is really good, and works well overall. On reputation, it is perhaps the best game in the MOBA genre, although I can't say that I've played any others. I can say, though, that League of Legends is really fun. The main problem with the game, for me, is the fact that the heroes are horribly unbalanced and obviously so. Combined with the fact that you often end up on or against a terrible team (especially if you solo queue), and, yeah, many games are just horrible and a waste of time. Still, this game is good enough and has sufficient depth to it that I think it is well worth trying out.

This game is a mess. It has awkward, clunky controls, sluggish gameplay, and a grindfest feel to the action (and not in a good way). For me, the "fun factor" for this game just isn't there. I do find the blend of action and tower defense elements to be intriguing, and I like the idea of this game, but actually playing it was a disappointment for me.

The humanity! I tried to get into this game, and have some fun with it, but I just couldn't. As a management simulation, this game just didn't work for me. From the menus, to the player skill sets, to the actual game simulations....nothing here was really fun or appealing to me at all. I should mention that I love the Baseball Mogul series, so it's not like I have a general dislike for sports manager games.

To me, this game is a single player RPG with annoying MMO bits tacked on. The single player RPG parts are watered down and wildly outdated, and the MMO parts are fairly terrible. Still, it's kind of fun, and I did enjoy parts of the story and levelling up (even if combat is a fairly bland grind compared to some other MMOs). I did have more fun with this than several other games, even if SW:TOR was mostly a disappointment for me.

This game is basically a WoW clone, but a very good one. It's fun progressing through the game, and I enjoyed the dynamics that the rifts brought to the table. I have played each class extensively, and they all work well, although PVP tends to be unbalanced (with different classes taking turns being way OP). I especially enjoyed playing as a Chloromancer, as it allowed me to play a type of role that felt fresh and a little bit innovative. The problem with Rift, unfortunately, is the end game. It quickly becomes a boring grind, where you end up doing fairly tedious things over and over again. PVP in the same battlegrounds. Do the same daily quests. Run the same instances. You know the drill, and in Rift, the drill doesn't have the staying power that I was hoping for.

This game is awe inspiring, and an experience that I would recommend to anyone. The visuals, music, and overall atmosphere pulls you in from the first few minutes, and never lets you go. It took me awhile to adjust to the combat / stealth gameplay, but once I did, it was really fun sneaking around and getting stuff done. The only thing that bothered me was the boss battles. They are stupid, annoying, and in many ways, don't fit into the game properly. I also didn't find this game to be addicting at all (certainly not in the way that something like Skyrim is); I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but there you go.

This is a fun game, and the controls and very smooth and intuitive. It's very simple to jump into some multiplayer matches, run around, and shoot stuff. Unfortunately, I got bored fairly quickly, and soon asked myself "why am I playing this?" The game didn't provide any highly compelling answers, at least for me. In general, this is a great FPS game, it just seemed to lack a point and didn't have that much staying power.

I'm 130+ hours into this, and I still haven't done everything that I want to do, or explored all of the game's content. This game is simple HUGE, and provides an incredible opportunity to roam around the land and have all kinds of fun. On the negative side, the menus seem a bit clunky, the inventory system is extremely annoying, and the dragons are a bit of a joke to fight off. I also must be one of the only people who pretty much never uses the dragon shouts, and thinks that they are stupid. Still, on the PC, modding can improve many of the annoying features of Skyrim, and on the positive side of things....well, most of the game is a giant positive. I liked Morrowind, hated Oblivion, and think that Skyrim is on a completely different level from either of those predecessors.

Ah, **** I love them. :P For a tower defense game, the voice acting here is amazing, and helps create an enjoyable game world. The gameplay itself is highly addictive and rewarding, with lots of towers that are actually worth building, and several fun challenge modes that help provide variety. I actually think that this is the best tower defense game that I have played so far, but it still left me wanting a little bit more from it (and not just more levels or "modes" or anything like that).

This is a bit of a niche game, but I've enjoyed the 30+ hours that I've put into it so far. For me, it's a game where I can just relax, turn the in-game sound off, play whatever music I want in the background, and move some fantastical football players around the field. Blood Bowl is meant to be played as a turn based strategy game, just like the board game (which I've never played), and the pc version feels a lot like an animated board game. It even has dice rolls that determine whether you do things like catch a pass, dodge a tackle, or even pick the ball up off the ground. Because these rolls are based on player attributes, and can go wrong for you at any moment during the game, there is bit of a frustration factor here. The learning curve for this game also seemed very high. Still, once I figured out how things generally worked, I found myself playing a deep and enjoyable (if not perfect) strategy game.

This is an amazing game with a great soul. The gameplay is fun, but what makes Bastion special is the atmosphere. The narrator is awesome, the music is amazing, and the story unfolds in a very impactful way. There was a certain point during the game where a song started up in the distance, and I was just blown away by the emotions it involved. You'll know when you get to that part. I should also mention that this game has good replay value, which is enhanced by special game modes and the "dream" challenge levels, which I really enjoyed. Just say yes to Bastion. You won't regret it. :P

I'm a bit surprised by how many people seem to hate this game. In terms of gameplay, there are only minor differences between Mass Effect 3 and Mass Effect 2. The characters are still interesting, the combat is fun, and the overall story is solid (despite several annoying plot holes). There were several moments during the game where I had to step back a bit, and just look around and absorb how awesome something was. Sure, there are a number of things that I found annoying. For example, I loathe the new James Vega character. The new multiplayer mode is very repetitive, and generally stupid. There is also the incredibly awful ending, and the annoying fact that one of the best squad members is only available through day one DLC. This checklist of negatives, however, does not make Mass Effect 3 a bad game. I still found it to be well worth playing, and a quality addition to the Mass Effect series.

NBA 2K12 is very good, in theory. It has great visuals, an amazing soundtrack, and a nice array of gameplay options. The MyPlayer mode in particular is really fun, and well designed. Unfortunately, I feel like this game is meant to be played on a console. The PC version controls are very obviously still meant to use two analog control sticks, and on a keyboard, things work terribly. Trying to re-map keys so that the game plays more smoothly did not help at all (or at least didn't for me). The menus are also awful. Not only is it hard to navigate around, but information gets displayed in the most annoying ways. I actually have had fun playing NBA 2K12, but I can't overlook how bad it is in certain aspects.

If you want a nice little game to play for 10 minutes at a time, then Orcs Must Die! is great. In general, though, I felt that I was playing something solid but unspectacular. This game just doesn't have the depth, longevity, or high end "awesome" factor for it to compare well with the best games that I've played.

This is playable, and kind of fun, but mostly disappointed me. The FPS + tower defense combo is a nice twist, but for me, Sanctum got tiresome very quickly. It just felt like something was a little bit off in terms of the game balancing / weapon synergy / level design. In the same genre, I that Orcs Must Die is a step above, and that's not saying too much.

Mass Effect 2 took everything that was great about Mass Effect, and made it better. Most of the annoying aspects of the first game were removed, and I really only have one complaint about the second one (the planet mining -- ugh). What really stood out for me was how well the sequel built upon the decisions that you made in the original. What BioWare has done here is something truly special.

The first Mass Effect game is a great start to an unforgettable series. Combat is fun, and the story is great, but the characters are the heart and soul of Mass Effect. Sure, Mass Effect has its flaws -- the inventory system, the repetitive sidequests, the awful "hacking" mini-game to open/unlock stuff -- but these are all minor annoyances. The bottom line is that the Mass Effect series is awesome, and you don't want to miss out on any of it. :)

For me, the best part of this game came at the very end. There was a lot of fun dialogue and interesting little moments in my Portal experience, but in general, I think that this game is highly overrated. I found that a lot of the puzzles themselves were more frustrating than interesting; easy to solve, with most of the difficulty coming from physically moving things around. I'll also add that Portal is a very short game; it didn't take very long at all to complete, although I suppose that I didn't really mind that aspect of it.

I must say I'm a bit surprised by how high the Portal games are generally rated. Portal 2 was more fun than the original, but it still only took me about 8 hours to play through the entire game, and that's with me exploring around a bit and not really hurrying. Despite 8 hours being very short for a game, it felt like a very long 8 hours (and not in a good way). Much like the original Portal, things simply get very repetitive, very quickly. Despite some fun dialogue and interesting levels, for the most part, there just isn't a whole lot of depth to the Portal series. It's just a bunch of fairly simple logic puzzles, running around to complete those puzzles, and witty dialogue. That's ok for what it is, but it's not something that I fell in love with.

I picked up Dragon Age: Origins - Ultimate Edition during a Gamefly sale, and for $7.49, this has been the best value that I've ever gotten for my gaming dollars. Dragon Age gripped me from the moment that I started playing it, and after over 100 hours of gameplay, I'm still having a blast. To me, Dragon Age plays a lot like a single player linear-ish MMO, if that makes any sense. Because you can set a "casting priority list" for each of your party members, switch characters whenever you want, and issue commands while the game is paused....yeah, I really felt like I was using special mind control powers over a fairly typical MMO party. Once you add in some great character development and dialogue, the kind that BioWare is well known for, along with a gripping story, the result is an RPG classic. Origins is a can't miss game for anyone who loves mages and warriors and rogues and stuff. Dragon Age isn't a perfect game, as no game is, but for the sake of bumping up the score, I feel compelled to give it a 10 out of 10 (after all, I can't select 9.5, which is what I think it deserves). I'll also mention that the extensive DLC content, as well as the Awakening expansion, just add more of what makes Origins itself so much fun. If you haven't played Origins at all yet, then I definitely would recommend buying the Ultimate Edition.