Othrandur

If you like the board game, stay away from this. If you didn't like the board game, stay away from this. If you never heard of the board game, stay away from this.

Very nice FPS with innovative twists (remember that this is a 2006 game). It uses the same game engine as Doom 3, but in ways that Doom 3 didn't. The variable gravity is done very well. It is often the only way through a linear zone, but occasionally, it offers alternative ways to solve a problem. Its portal mechanism isn't as sophisticated or important as it is in Portal, which came a year later, but it has some interesting unexpected consequences for the player, but that are obviously intended by the developers. If you like shooters and Portal, you'll love this combination. It's also nice to have a Cherokee who isn't a caricature as the protagonist and hero. The story is engaging and sporadically immersing. There's one point where I screwed up and both I and the character simultaneously said, "Oh, s**t! What have I done?" I never had a jinx moment with an avatar before.

"How to Survive" is basically "Dead Island" packaged as an isometric perspective twin-stick shooter, but it doesn't take itself as seriously. The gameplay is good and responsive and the fighting feels right: you're tough and fast, but by no means invincible. There's no camera control and no way to rotate the view, which is primitive by today's standards and leads to parts of the map that are permanently hidden. The crafting adds nice variety without overly complicating the game like in "Far Cry 3". The skills aren't very exciting, but they don't hurt the game either. The humor is cutesy, but forced and unoriginal. Kovac, the author of the survival manual, is a blatant rip-off of Marcus in Borderlands. I have two complaints. The first is that you can't remap the controller buttons. Only laziness can explain this in a game that's released in 2013. The second is that it uses checkpoints instead of actual saves. Again, that's just pure laziness. But what's worse is that it's not clear where and when the checkpoints occur, so you don't know when it's safe to exit the game. But overall, while this game isn't stellar, looks and plays like a game from 10 years ago, and won't win any GOTY awards, it's still well made enough that someone who likes the zombie genre (and isn't fed up with it) will enjoy it.

Keeping in mind that I'm not a pool expert, so I am not looking for the same things that an expert would, this game is almost everything I have always wanted in a game of computerized pool. The controls are very intuitive, even for very complicated trick shots. Controlling the cue stick feels natural, even with 5 degrees of freedom in 3D space (2 for where you strike the ball, 2 for the rotation along two axes, and one for pulling and pushing the stick). For a non-expert like me, having the projected trajectories indicated before the shot based on everything, including how strongly you plan to strike, makes even very complex shots feasible. The automatic slow motion, when a shot is successful, is fun sometimes, but it quickly starts to get old and it slows down the game. Fortunately, it can be turned off. I have only two complaints. The first is that the graphics are pretty, but very artificial, with just too much reflection and textures that are too smooth. It would be great if this were an option along with realistic graphics, but if realism is an option, I haven't found it yet. My other peeve is that the game is much too oriented toward a "career path". I have a job already, all I want to do is play pool. The game has a free play mode, but it's extremely limited. Maybe additional features unlock as you progress along your career path, but my opinion is that they got my money up front, so I should have all the features up front, even if I don't want to role play being a professional pool player. One thing that bothers me less, but might irritate some players is that the physics are perfect. Too perfect. Everything behaves according to an ideal, deterministic model. In the real world, the balls aren't perfect, the cue stick isn't perfect, the table isn't perfect, there are air currents, the cue stick's tip may not be evenly chalked, and even the most adept professional isn't a finely tuned machine that repeats the same moves without variation. Adding these imperfections to the model, even only as an option that people can turn on or off, would make the game feel just a bit more natural. But aside from these minor details, the game is well worth getting and it made me retire every other pool game I owned, except for the one on my iPad, which I'd replace in a second if Pool Nation were available for it.

Rise of the Triad is a revamped, old-style shooter that doesn't try to be like the newer games. It recaptures the feel of old school shooters while adding little features and twists that improve on the old without losing the spirit. It feels more like Wolfenstein and Doom than their own sequels. Keep in mind that it's an arcadish shooter with some tongue-in-cheek humor and over-the-top everything, not a serious, realistic one. It plays and displays smoothly. All in all, it's a fun game to add to a shooter lover's collection.

The absurdly low reviews are completely undeserved. Its direct predecessor, Dead Horde, had good concepts, but was fatally flawed. Primal Fears kept the good concepts and fixed the fatal flaws. It's a simple game with little depth, but it's fun to play and it has a nice amount of tension (though Dead Horde did tension slightly better). I've never been a fan of the checkpoint system I think it's a very lazy way to design games but at least it works in Primal Fears. It was one of the severely broken pieces in Dead Horde. Now, it's true that it isn't innovative, but sometimes you just want more of something you like and I don't mind having a bit of new scenery in the zombie/alien isometric shooter genre.

Being a fan of sandbox games and of the Chinese ambiance, I had very high hopes for Sleeping Dogs, but it turned out to be a dud for me. It does have some very nice elements. The look of the game is quite nice and the martial arts combat is very satisfying, once you get the hang of it. But in every other respect, it falls short. You can roam around the "world", but it's completely sterile. There's nothing to interact with. The NPCs are dumber than a clothes mannequin. There are basically three types of encounters no more (1) you meet thugs and fight them, (2) you do something to piss off the police and they chase you until they get bored of you, (3) you buy something from a vendor. The missions themselves are completely on rails and when you start one, you have to finish it right then and there. You can't go off to do something else and come back to it later. Except for the fighting, where you can see that a lot of work was put in to get it right, the rest of the game play is sub-par. Everything feels sluggish, whether it's running on foot or driving a car. Driving is made even more unpleasant by the completely mindless camera that refuses to point to where you want to and NEED to look. You can steal cars, but you can't keep them, so you're denied even something as simple as collecting cars. Oh, but you can collect plenty of t-shirts and bad pants (for crying out loud, I could do that in real life if I wanted to!). Pretty as it is, try as I may, I just can't get into this game. I play it for 30 minutes at a time and get bored out of my skull and leave with a feeling that I just wasted 30 minutes that I'll never get back. This game desperately needs an environment with more life, NPCs with a shred of personality, a greater sense of immersion, and much more freedom of action beyond just driving around for kicks (another thing I can do in real life and don't need a game for). If it had these things, it could be a great game. As it stands, it's more of a virtual tour of a severely simplified Hong Kong with mindless bots roaming the streets like civilized zombies... with an occasional martial arts fight to alleviate the boredom. Oh, and yes, there is a story, and it's not bad, but it's not enough to hold the game together in such a sterile world.

This game has an interesting, if unoriginal story, and a very nice sound track. However, it falls short in most other departments. The graphics are mediocre at best. The faded color palette can be forgiven as part of the style and mood of the game, but the grainy and coarse definition can't. It would be charitable to call this game "linear". It's almost a rail shooter. You are literally herded through a narrow pipeline and, to add insult to injury, when you go off in a slightly different direction, even if it's a dead end, the game prods you back in the right direction, as if there were any other option. The few NPCs you encounter are scripted and beyond their extremely brief scripted behaviour, you can't interact with them. Even the main character is practically scripted. You can jump and climb, but only in very specific places at very specific times. As a result, short as it is, the game quickly becomes predictable. The combat is shallow and almost as linear as the rest of the game. It's only barely more flexible than a fight in "The Walking Dead" game, and that's a point-and-click adventure where the fights are almost just a cut scene with mouse clicks! The climbing mechanics are decent, but repetitive, and it won't be long before you start signing and rolling your eyes at yet another thing to climb. Oh, and the main character, who is evidently a trained climber and is climbing for most of his days has the stamina of am asthmatic chipmunk. You'll be out of breath, fainting, and falling to your death just by hanging of a vertical pipe for a few seconds. The environment is dead. And I don't mean "post-apocalyptic dead", I mean that you can't interact with anything. You can't move objects, lift them, kick them, open doors, break glass, nothing. You're just walking through a painting. You can't even swing your machete in empty air to pass the time. The only time you can use it is when there's a target in front of you. The only things that hold this game together are a story that you want to see through and an ambiance that's due almost entirely to the soundtrack and the faded colors. Oh, I do have to give props to the voice acting, what little of it there is. It's no Oscar performance, but it's better than many big-budget games. For all its flaws, it's not a completely terrible way to pass a few hours. You decide how much that's worth to you and pay accordingly.

This game is fun, and the tension is good. The soundtrack is particularly interesting as it is modern, but still manages to capture the flavor of chiptune without the grating tinny sound. The graphics are of Commodore 64 quality -- and this isn't an exaggeration -- so I can't really say anything good about them. But the game's greatest weaknesses are its repetitiveness and linearity. The levels are all different and progressively more difficult, but only in the way that levels in Sokoban change: ultimately, they are the same thing, but just organized differently. Which is ok. It works. But it isn't spectacular. Some people love the instant death without penalty (one shot kills you, but you just restart the level), but I find that it ruins the tactical aspect of the game. Instead of planning out your moves and playing it intelligently, you'll find that it's a lot easier just to do trial and error. One of the first things the game tells you is, "don't be afraid to die," and pretty early into the game, you really won't be and that detracts a bit from the mood. But for all its flaws, my overall impression is positive. The game does what it's supposed to do: it entertains. Just buy it when it's on sale.

My main criticism of the game is that it's unbalanced to the point of being unplayable, except for a few minutes at a time. New players are thrown into the game with nothing and are constantly just cattle for the few players who managed to accumulate weapons and ammo early on. The weapon drops are so rare that it's just a lottery draw if you'll be able to survive long enough to find one. There is no PVE option for those who prefer it and servers aren't scaled to the power of the players. So it may be fun for those few with a bully mentality who get no bigger thrill than ganking much weaker players, but without a mechanism to allow beginners a fair chance to come up to par, the game will just hemorrhage players until it isn't even worth playing for the handful of fanatics who are left. By the way, what makes it a pain to advance is that when another player kills you, you lose everything you had on you and start back at square one. This leaves only two possible strategies: team up with large groups, which not everyone is interested in doing, or doing very short scavenging runs and bring everything back to your global inventory (which you keep even when you die) and hope to slowly build up enough equipment to survive. That's a job, not a game. All the technical problems are secondary to the fact that there's no game balance. Even if it were technically perfect, it would still not be a pleasant experience. The only hope for this game's survival is either a PVE mode (which not everyone wants) or ranked servers. On the plus side, the mood of the game is good, mostly due to an excellent soundtrack.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Had I paid more than $2.50, I might have been frustrated by the ridiculously small amount of content in this game and I'm pretty sure there isn't even $2.50 worth based on the quantity or the "quality" of the graphics. When I read the reviews before buying it, I thought the claims of 5-15 minutes of gameplay were the usual reviewer exaggerations, but the game is really that short! Double it because it comes with its equally short prequel, Gravity Bone. Yet, for all its brevity and infantile graphics, there's something to this game: little twists in the plot that you don't see coming and a storytelling style that feels a bit like a 1960s psychological drama. As the extremely skewed reviews show, this isn't a game for everyone. You have to come at it like a wine tasting. Sure you pay too much for a small glass, but you get a taste of something you don't get every day. If you're an aficionado of the subtle things that go into a game and not just playing the games, you'll probably get something out of it. If you're looking for a game for the sake of playing it and you want a bang for your buck, you need to look elsewhere.

Let's start by setting the record straight: this isn't so much a game as it is an interactive episode of Law & Order. The "game" is entirely on rails. Where you go, when, and to whom you talk are entirely scripted. Your only interactions with the game are multiple choice selections for dialogs or objections in court, and object-finding in a crime scene. The main "challenge", and I use the term loosely, is to remember details that you saw or heard earlier because they will be needed to justify your decisions. If I were rating this purely for the game aspects, I couldn't honestly give it more than a 2.However, as I said, this is really an interactive episode of Law & Order and as an episode (7 episodes, actually), it really works. Telltale managed to recapture the mood of the TV show very well and fans of the show will find themselves unconsciously filling in any gaps because everything else fits so well. The result, as a fan of the show, is a very enjoyable experience. A big plus is that Telltale did not make use of their usual irritating and immersion-killing timed actions. One thing to consider is that "Law & Order: Legacies" is approachable even by people who aren't usually gamers and who may not enjoy more frenetic computer games, so you could finally draw in your grandmother to play computer games with you.

HeXen and Left 4 Dead had a drunken tryst and ended up with this deformed baby. The game play is clumsy, the graphics are downright ugly, and the game has all the depth of a dessicated puddle. The whole thing feels outdated and and half finished. But I won't dwell on the negative. At least it's better than Big Rigs.

As a game, this would be horrible, but if you understand going in that this is just an interactive cartoon for mature audiences, you will appreciate it for what it is... if you're a fan of the comics or the TV series, at least. It lacks background information for someone who doesn't know this series. The plot is reasonably interesting, for the genre, and the dialogs are well acted and credible. My main complaint is that the actions are timed. This is so much like a movie that you tend to sit back and watch, occasionally noticing that a reply is expected. It's very frustrating to have a timer that forces you to answer within a short amount of time. The game either needs more interaction to keep the player involved enough that a need for an action doesn't come as a surprise or it needs to patiently wait for the user to put down his coffee and pick up the keyboard or controller. As it is, the balance isn't right. Also, at the time of this review, the game is disappointingly unoptimized. Running on a top end system that runs the most demanding AAA games with maximum quality graphics at 1080p, this game frequently stalls on a frame for a few seconds, making it feel as if it's loading an overlay from a floppy disk. That's seriously amateurish, especially given the extreme simplicity of this game, from a technical perspective. I would recommend it for fans of the series, but only when it drops to half its current price.

Wow! The only reason I got this game was because it came in a Humble Bundle and the only reason I installed it and played it is because I heard the soundtrack and loved it. The screen shots and trailers don't do it justice. The gameplay is smooth and intuitive, and it works great with a game pad, if you have one. The music by itself is great, but in the game, it creates a surreal atmosphere that you feel in your chest. One of the main character's abilities is to "cast spells" by singing -- you get a wheel of notes to select -- but I found myself pausing in the middle of a screen just to play counterpoint to the soundtrack. I have no musical talent whatsoever and it came out sounding awesome. I spent almost as much time "singing along" with the note wheel in the first couple of levels as I did actually playing. The actual game is a mix of an arcade shooter, a dungeon crawler, and the amazing LucasArts classic, Loom. The narration is also spot on and brings depth to the character while guiding the player through the storyline. And for the record, Jenna Sharpe, the narrator, is just as cute as she sounds. :)

This is a very disappointing DLC. When I bought this, I figured that the zombie mode of CoD:WaW was just a prototype and that this expensive CoD:BO DLC would expand it into a serious zombie campaign with some added variety. Boy, was I wrong! As a reviewer has noted, most of this DLC is just the same old CoD:WaW zombie levels that you just happen to run in BO. The few new levels look different, but it's the same old boring setup: you're in a room and zombies try to break in. You kill them and patch the holes. That's it. Oh yeah. There actually is more. You earn money by killing the zombies and you can use this money to buy guns that are growing out of the walls. I have the distinct impression that slimy marketing executives from Activision called a summer intern into a board room and told him, "Marketing studies show that people like zombies! You have 10 days to add a zombie feature to CoD or you go back to making French fries at McDonald's!"

Tastes great! Less filling! FlatOut:UC put the fun back into racing games. I don't dislike games like NFS or Grid, but sometimes the excessive attempts at realism get in the way of just enjoying the race. Ironically, the reduced realism in FO:UC actually makes the game FEEL more realistic. When you drive a real car, you feel the G-forces with your entire body and you feel the resistance on the tires right through the gas pedal and the steering wheel. You adjust before the car starts drifting. Even with force feedback devices, you just don't get this kind of feedback in a racing game, so those other "realistic" games that make your car drift because you sneezed simulate the physics of the car, but they fail to simulate the reality of driving. FlatOut:UC doesn't have wild, uncontrollable drift unless you do something truly stupid, so the car reacts as it would if you were driving and not sitting behind an oversensitive plastic controller. It's very satisfying. By the way, the official line is "Steering Wheels are not supported with Flatout Ultimate Carnage. Keyboard and controller support only." Well, I play it with a Logitech Driving Force steering wheel, and it works better than with any other game I have! The game plays very nicely with a game pad, but it's just amazing with the steering wheel. The tension is just right and it really feels like driving at high speeds. Also, you may read in the specs that "XBOX 360 Controller is preset and cannot be re-configured regarding the control options." That's true, but if you have another type of controller that emulates the XBox 360 controller, like the Logitech Rumble Gamepad, you have complete control over what every button does. In fact, it's the game that I've found the easiest to set up with various controller devices. I've tried it also with a Thrustmaster HOTAS, but aside from the stick and throttle being more comfortable, I didn't have better control over the car than with the gamepad. Neither compares to how perfectly the game runs with the steering wheel it isn't supposed to support. The game itself probably deserves a full 9, but it loses a point for shoving Games for Windows Live down our throats.

Skydrift is a fun airplane racer that, to me, feels a lot like Trackmania in the air with the added ability to shoot down your opponents (who, unfortunately, are more than happy to shoot YOU down). It isn't perfect, though. The contols are the most important part of a racing game and Skydrift just doesn't step up to the plate for PC users. Console developers who want to enter the PC market have to come to terms with the fact that the standard controls on a PC are the keyboard and t he mouse. The folks at Digital Reality don't seem to have a clue what a mouse does for a living and Skydrift won't let you use it... not even to navigate the menus!!! This is sad because this is the type of game that begs to be used with a mouse. They keyboard itself does work, but the control is too jerky and exaggerated. Skydrift supports my Logitech Driving Force steering wheel, to a limited extent, and it works a lot better than the keyboard, but the default settings aren't tight enough. With the keyboard, if you frown at the keys, you do a 360 degree flip. With the steering wheel, you turn the wheel all the way to one side and you can barely manage the easy curves. With a Logitech Rumble Gamepad (an XBox-type controller, for those who don't know it), everything is calibrated correctly. It's pretty evident that this game was designed around a gamepad and little if any thought was given to other input devices. But, aside from the mediocre controls, the game is nice enough and reasonably priced, so I give it a rating that no half-done console port would normally deserve.

This low-cost combat flyer is a blast. The controls are smooth and intuitive and this lets you concentrate on flying and shooting instead of what buttons you need to press. In particular, the game makes such great use of the mouse that I'm not even tempted to try it with other controllers. Graphically, the game would have been mediocre even by the standards of 5 years before it came out. It can't be said to be a pretty game. But it plays so well, that I honestly don't care. I enjoy it more than the much prettier and more realistic flyers that cost 10 to 20 times as much (I paid $2.50 during a Steam sale for this little gem). Even at its full price of a whopping $5, this game is still worth every penny. The narration does fall a bit on my nerves at times, but it happens only before and after the actual mission, so it doesn't detract from the game play. Just a suggestion, in case the developers read this: Combat Wings would make a great smart phone game.

E.Y.E. is a mixture of very good and very bad, so it scores a 5 for me. The concept is very good, though not unique. You get RPG elements of character progression and customization that are quite nice and diverse, and you get a mixture of occult and technology, which few other games offer (Clive Barker's Jericho is another). The mood is a strange brew of horror and dystopia that's well supported by an alien dialog and quirky soundtrack and it really works. The ranged weapons are very satisfying to use, being both precise and powerful. It feels right to kill someone with a single bullet instead of with a barrage that would shred an elephant. This was on the right track to becoming a very good shooter, but... the bad: It is very unstable. Performing simple things, like navigating the menus, forced me to reboot Windows 7. And I mean "big red button" shutdown, not a clean exit. I own a truckload of indie games and Source games and not one of the others does this. The interface is overly convoluted and frankly, unpleasant to use. It gets in the way of the game. Finally, the lack of polish, makes it feel more like a mod than a stand-alone game. A "version 2" of this game, with a streamlined interface and the bugs removed, is sorely needed to make it a viable contender in the shooter space. In its present state, it's a fun curiosity if you can get it on sale, but it isn't likely to make it to many people's favorites list.

There is almost nothing that I don't like about this game. Ok, there are things that make me swear, like the inability to carry the equivalent of a truckload of weapons, but these things make sense. I don't know if someone who plays this game like Schwarzenegger in Commando would rate it the same way I do, but if you enjoy using stealth, you will love this game. One of the very pleasant aspects of this game is that it makes you rethink what you just did, even if you succeeded. There are so many ways to attack the problems, that I sometimes just reload from a checkpoint to try it another way, even if I aced it. The best thing about Crysis is the playability. With well mapped keys (I don't like the default layout), you don't even think about it any more. It all just flows naturally and smoothly. The NPC AI is a bit on the stupid side and if you don't just rush into a crowd, it's pretty easy to pick them off one at a time by luring them where you want, but there are enough clusters of enemies to make this occasionally challenging until you find the best path through them. All in all, one of my favorite FPS of all time. I can't wait to try Crysis 2.

While this game is excellent on a number of fronts, it is unnecessarily unpleasant on others. The malaria, as a gimmick, just doesn't add to the enjoyment of the game and as a game mechanic, it's nothing more than a flimsy excuse for chasing down power-ups. The most unpleasant thing is that it turns everything into a timed quest. Timed quests are ok, if used sparingly and where a time element makes sense, but the constant stress of time running out for something completely irrelevant to your goals is a poor substitute for properly orchestrated suspense. But worst of all, it scuttles the one thing that makes this game stand out for the crowd: the joy of free exploration. You just can't enjoy that with this idiotic gimmick hanging over your head. A patch that does away with the ball and chain of malaria would turn this game from a frustrating curiosity to a memorable classic. Another unpleasant element is the way vehicles are driven. It's just not fun. It's clunky, erratic, and distracting. If it weren't for the vast distances you have to travel in this game, I'd prefer to run.

This game is sold as "inverse tower defense" or "tower offense" and it's exactly what it is. It is like being on the other end of Defense Grid, but you don't get a swarm at your command, just a few units. You plan a course from your starting point to the target and the units follow this predetermined path to the letter and attack any enemy in range. If conditions change or you find that your plan leads to ruin, you can alter the plan. However your units are always heading forward at a fixed pace. You can't slow them down, stop them, or reverse their course. You can only make them turn at an intersection. If this were all there was to the game, it would feel constraining and limited, but you also get a special "commander" unit who can roam the map freely, if not safely. You use him to collect various power-ups, deploy decoys and other countermeasures, and repair your other units. He'll keep you busy enough that you won't miss micromanaging the other units. It's easy to imagine dozens of ways that this game could be expanded and made richer, but it really works just as it is. It delivers what it promises and it's a very nice twist on the genre.

This is a very old game idea that harkens back to the old 8-bit days when pixels had their own zip code and a mouse was a furry rodent. But Nemesys apparently extracted DNA from some prehistoric mosquito and brought the game back to life in the modern world, and it works even better now than it did in the age when people who weren't hillbillies wore mullets. Deus Ex this ain't, but it's a perfectly fun little puzzle game that's quick to play during a break and gets progressively more difficult and requires more planning as you advance. My biggest "complaint" is that I don't think it's priced reasonably. This is basically a (good) cell phone class game on a PC screen so its regular price should be the $2.50 that I paid for it on sale, instead of its regular $10 price tag.

As others have mentioned, this is a VERY short game with very little variation. Is it fun? Yes, for a while. After that, you feel that you've done it all before. There are different "missions" that you can try to accomplish, but they're your basic Fedex variety quest. After a couple of these, you just want to tell god to buzz off and let you run this universe as you please. Which, of course, you can't because by the time you have a bit of power, the game is over. If I had to compare this game to another, it would be to Spore's cell phase: you start small, you grow, you eat things that previously ate you, lather, rince, repeat until you're too big, and then bye, bye!

The field of tower-defense-meets-shooter is beginning to get crowded, with games like "Dungeon Defenders" and "Orcs Must Die" to face off against. Sanctum holds its own in large part because of its style, but the game play isn't as dynamic as those other two games. In Sanctum, the character, Skye, is clearly there in a support role and the towers do most of the work. The weapons are just too weak to take out swarms single-handed. The relatively small amount of character/weapon customization adds to the feeling that Skye s a servant of the big machine and not the main protagonist. This isn't necessarily bad; it's just the choice the developers made as to where to draw the line between tower defense and shooter. Some games draw that line more toward the side of shooters. Sanctum is definitely a tower defense first and a shooter second. But this combination does work well. It's nice to be able to go lend a hand when you find a hole in your defenses, but it's more stressful to have to go to the tower to upgrade it instead of doing it from a bird's eye perspective. The DLCs are really not the big deal that some people have made them out to be. They're cheap on an average day but when they go on sale, as they often do, you can get the lot of all DLCs for less than a cup of coffee at Starbuck's. If you like the tower defense genre, you're doing yourself a disservice by not having this game in your collection. At the very least, put it on your wish list and grab it the next time it goes on sale.

This is a very fun simulation that anyone with a even a mild interest in planetary mechanics should own. Used properly, it is very educational, but it has a very serious flaw that makes it more an item of curiosity than a true simulator: calculations are based on your time step instead of a true interpolation of the movement equations. Basically, it appears to just calculate the positions from one frame to the next and interpolates the motion as a straight line between those two points. What this means is that if you set a step of 1 second per frame, you get a very precise approximation of the motion of the stellar bodies, but if you accelerate the process and set the steps to 1 year per frame, the planets and stars no longer travel along smooth curved paths, but along a jagged path of connected straight lines. Aside from being ugly, this also gives incorrect results and often sends planets hurtling out of their orbits at tremendous speeds, which would not have happened with a better interpolation. The bottom line is that you can correctly simulate only stable systems at high speed; you can't speed up the effects of a destabilizing force to see what would actually happen. For all this, it's still well worth the $10 (or less if you grab it during one of Steam's sales). I mean, seriously. Don't you want to know what would happen if aliens replaced our sun with a black hole? Or what would happen if half the planets started orbiting in the opposite direction? You know you do! I now know and I sleep better at night for knowing it. ;-)

I almost didn't buy this game, and what a mistake that would have been! The trailers and screen shots don't do it justice. Never mind for now about the look of the game or any of the details. Bottom line: this game is FUN! You can play it for hours or just pop in for 10 minutes. How you play it, how long you play it, where you go... it's all under your control. And it's not just fun, it's also funny. You can try not to laugh, but they'll eventually throw something at you that will crack you up. It's been said many times, but one of the great things about this game is the almost infinite selection of gear. You often have to pick between two very similar items that trade off one advantage for another, but often enough to keep you interested, you come across that item that outshines everything in its class and you go, "Oh, yeah, baby! You're all mine!" The world is so rich in loot that you're guaranteed to run out of inventory space and shed a tear as you leave behind a shiny new Vladoff that you could have sold for a small fortune. I usually hate cartoonish games. Except for masterpieces like Machinarium, I find that they detract from the atmosphere of the game. But Borderlands got the semi-cartoonish look so right that it feels like living inside a comic book. If you get this game -- and great Scott! why wouldn't you? -- do get the DLCs also. "The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned" DLC turns this into an awesome and bizarre zombie shooter that easily doubles the value of the game all by itself. I'm probably not the first to say this, but graphics aside, Borderlands is what I had hoped that Rage would be like.

This could have been a very good game. The graphics are nice and the setting is nicely done. The controls are a bit quirky, but not overly so. The voice acting isn't stellar, but it's above average. The hacking system is very cool. All the ingredients are there. But what ruins it is cut-scene hell. You can't take two steps without the game yanking control out of your hands to dump you into yet another damn cut-scene. It completely wrecks the immersion. For all the visuals and the occasional puzzle, this game end up amounting to nothing more than running from one cut-scene to another while avoiding obstacles. There are better and more clever ways to tell a story in a game than to turn it into a movie that's interrupted by brief bouts of running along a completely linear path. By the way, you CAN skip the cut-scenes, but they're about 90% of the game content, so you won't have a clue why you're doing what you're doing if you skip them. Granted, the game is so linear that you actually can play it without having a clue as to why any of it is happening, but what's the point? So, if you can stand just sitting back while the game plays itself and occasionally being allowed to run the character from point A to point B, you might enjoy this for the view. It is pretty. But if you prefer to play a game yourself and actually have choices in what happens, you'll be disappointed in this title.

This is one of those rare awe-inspiring games. The atmosphere is just perfect and the musical score just enhances it. Some scenes are just jaw-dropping. The gameplay is also spot on. The controls are responsive (except mousing over keys on keypads), the graphics are sharp, the story is compelling and the characters are interesting. A warning, though: when you first play the game, some things may irritate you, but you will soon see that they make sense. Your inventory size is limited and you often have to leave behind precious things that you KNOW you'll need later. But that makes sense. No matter how much you're enhanced, you're not a pick-up truck. Already, the game makes unrealistic concessions to allow you to tote a bazooka, a sniper rifle, a mini-gun, and crates of ammo through public places without being noticed or even through metallic air ducts without making a sound. You might want to try a Schwarzenegger-like charge through a cluster of enemies, only to find that a single bullet can kill you. Well, shucks. A bullet really CAN kill you. The game forces you to play smarter than the usual shooter. That's a good thing. At first, the hacking just seems arbitrarily frustrating and you might try to avoid it at all costs... until you figure out how it works, and then it becomes fun! The only thing that remains that still frustrates me is that you can't carry more than one of each type of weapon (to sell them). If you have a pistol and you pick up a second pistol, it gets converted to ammo and you're left not with two pistols but one pistol with more ammo. But that's a drop of lameness in a bucket of awesomeness. And yet more awesomeness: you really can play this game many ways. Early decisions have an impact on later events, so you can replay it trying out different approaches and you will see different results. The result is that you'll probably replay it many times, playing the good guy, the bad guy, etc. This might not be a fair comparison, but the nanosuit in Crysis does "feel" more powerful than the enhancements in Deus Ex. I wouldn't mind a cross-over where I could play DE using a nanosuit, just to compare. :)

There's a lot to be liked about this game. The atmosphere is right for a zombie apocalypse setting and the controls actually work well, once you remap them to something that works for you. Where the game loses appeal for me is in the micromanagement of each of the characters. Your characters (1-4, depending on the stage of the game) just stand there like Happy Meals on legs, as Spike would put it, unless you actively manage all of their actions. You can (and should) pause the time to plot out their individual actions and not try to handle them all at once, but this gets tedious. Adding some character AI to let you manage as many or as few of them as you want would have gone a long way toward making this a pretty awesome game. Even just basic behaviors like "follow this other character", "if you see a zombie, run away from it" or "if you have a weapon, use it" would have made a world of difference. Most tactical games have some degree of autonomy for the units, even when micromanagement is the goal. But if you don't mind having to micromanage the 4 characters... ALL THE TIME, the game is quite fun and during its good moments, kind of feels like an isometric version of Left 4 Dead, which is not at all a bad thing. Hear that, Steam? An isometric version of Left 4 Dead would be awesome! Just saying. :-)

This little game is a gem! The visuals and the music combine perfectly to create a surreal atmosphere that's both bizarre and charming. The characters are all quirky, in the best possible way. Now, too much cuteness can become tacky and even repulsive, but Machinarium manages to throw bucketfuls of cute at you without ever crossing that line. It's a bit like being in a cross between a Pixar short and the sci-fi cult classic, "Fantastic Planet" ("La Planète Sauvage"). The latter, coincidentally, is also a Czech production. The whole thing is clever and imaginative and completely immersive. The puzzles are fun and you're in for a few nice surprises and chuckles in terms of games within the game. The game is very short and the replayability is quite low, in large part because it's linear and the puzzles are not randomized. Some would criticize the game for this, but that would be misunderstanding Machinarium. It's more like a movie experience than a video game that you can play over and over, and I've had far less fun at movies for less time and a more money. But even if you play it only once, that one time is worth it and you're missing out if you avoid the game just for that. My only complaints are (1) the resolution is fixed, which is normal for this kind of hand-drawn artwork, but unsatisfying when you have a 1080p screen that's used only partly, and (2) since this is a flash game, when you right-click, you get Adobe's useless menu, which kind of breaks the mood. I bought it today, played through it, and it left me with a sense of joy and satisfaction, and maybe a little twinge that it's over. And to hell with replayability, I'll come back to it again just to revisit this wonderful little world.

I'm sad to have to give this game such a low score, because it's otherwise quite fun. But it has an unforgivable flaw: you can't save your progress. No, seriously. Forget all your progress. Forget all your upgrades. Forget the loot you accumulated. If you leave the game, it's all gone. Oh sure, the game has checkpoints, but they're used only to resurrect you during this specific game session. If you leave the game, kiss your checkpoint good bye. Even an indie game can't be forgiven for not having a save feature. Even a very inexpensive indie game. People wouldn't tolerate this of a free game, nor should they. If you're the kind to play a game from beginning to end in one sitting and you have a generator to ensure that you won't lose your game in a power outage, maybe you won't care about this. Personally, I find in unacceptable. And they have the gall to present you with a menu option, when you start the game, that says, "continue campaign." Do you know what that does? It lands you right back at the beginning! Thanks a lot!

Despite the screams of anguish of certain melodramatic reviewers, this actually works very well on 64-bit Windows 7, if you have reasonably powerful hardware, so don't let that fear deter you from trying this excellent competitive shooter. This is only a team death match game, and it does that extremely well. The recently added single-player mode is a great way to practice your navigation, shooting, and avoidance skills. You'll need all the practice you can get because this game is all about skill and tactics. You don't get overpowering space bazookas and area of effect weapons. You have to be able to aim and you have to be able to do it as you're drifting in space and turning along three axes. And you need to be aware of your environment because the enemy can sneak up on you from any direction, including above or below you, and there are plenty of places where they can hide. It would be interesting to see this game expanded to have more roles, like the usual medics and engineers, or to add things like mines or defensive structures, or lockable doors/gates, etc., but the game is suspenseful and frantic enough that you don't really miss them when you're in the fray. The game is worth having just for the ambiance of the space combat. I don't know of any other game that gives you this, and the bar is set pretty high for anyone who wants to compete on this level.

On paper, this game might seem like a cross between Portal, Tomb Raider, and Twin Sector, but it sure doesn't feel that way when you play it. The graphics are nice enough, but nothing to fall on your knees for. The atmosphere might work if there were a decent plot, but it's basically: you fall in a hole, find a gravity gun and a big ball metal, so "obviously", these must be used to help you press the glowing blue and orange buttons. Oh, and to crush innocent monkeys. The whole thing just feels contrived and meaningless, so there's no sense of immersion and you're left shaking your head and asking, "why would someone have built this place?" You're always aware that you're in a game solving some artificial puzzles that are so simple, if sometimes awkward, that you wonder why they didn't just put the exit right by the entrance. And there's something missing: a hero/star/protagonist. You're certainly not it. In this game, you're nothing more than the guy who's taking the ball out for a walk. Your ability to interact with the environment is nil, except for the occasional blue button. The ball isn't it either. It's just a big, stupid ball that's in your way half the time. Damn thing isn't sentient or cuddly like a weighted companion cube. It's not the gun. All that does is tug at the big stupid ball or push at a handful of things, and usually not the things that you want to push. And it's not the environment either. It has about as much personality as the ball. It's not a completely horrible game. It's pretty and except when you get stuck between two pebbles and are forced to restart a level, it doesn't feel too badly crafted, but it's just not much fun or interesting or exciting. Oh, and I was going to give it a charitable 5, but this pet peeve of mine just lost it another point: the strength of a force field, like gravity, is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. That means that if you're half the distance, it's 4 times stronger. If you're 100 times the distance, it's 10,000 times weaker. The gravity gun in this game has a constant strength regardless of distance, so you can tug at the ball from 300 yards as if it were on your lap, but it's too weak to lift the ball out of a hole if you shoot it point blank. Suspension of disbelief can only go so far.

First, a caveat: I am reviewing only the solo aspect of the game. I have not tried it in coop mode. I hesitated to get this game because of the lukewarm reviews, but when it went on sale, I figured I would give it a chance. This is a fun little game. Yes, it's just one in a big herd of similar top-down alien/zombie shooters, but it holds its own against the rest. It isn't as fast paced as some, but it does a good job of setting a suspenseful mood. I'm eager to try AB 2 and 3 just based on what I've played so far of 1. One of the nice features, that sadly not all top-down shooters have, is the ability to rotate your point of view. This is a personal preference and many will probably disagree, but I don't particularly like the Q and E keys to rotate the perspective, just as I don't like using the mouse wheel to change weapons, so I swapped them. Rotating with the mouse wheel is both a lot faster and it feels more natural and intuitive. After a few minutes, it feels as if you're just turning your head to look around. I did the same thing for Trapped Dead and it improved the gaming experience immensely. Another thing that some will love, but others will hate, is that you're "closer" to the character than in most other isometric shooters. It feels a bit more immersive, but it's also a bit more claustrophobic, which might be intentional to enhance the horror/suspense. Still, I prefer Trapped Dead's approach of letting the player zoom in and out to whatever level feels most comfortable. It's almost impossible not to compare Alien Breed to Alien Swarm, given that they have almost identical themes. Despite being free, Alien Swarm is slicker in look and in the feel of the controls (though I miss being able to rotate my view), but I can't really say that one overwhelmingly outclasses the other in enjoyability. My suggestion is: if you like the genre, get both (and probably AB 2 & 3 also). With one being free and the other(s) at a paltry $2.50 on sale, why deprive yourself of a few hours of fun? You'll spend more just on pop corn at a bad movie.