Ragegoat

Modern Times is a DLC for Tropico 4, that lets everything get more modern. New buildings and a longer time line in particular. The buildings are visually very pretty, but show up way too early. It nags me if a 1960es neighborhood in a carribian dictatorship looks like a 2015 skyline from a financial centre in East Asia. Maybe I'm just strange, but I'd like my 60es slum to at least remind me of City of God. In stead, from 1966 and forward, all apartment buildings will me bade mostly out of glass and have a helicopter landing pad on top of them. Not the third-world country in the cold war feel that Tropico is otherwise managing to cultivate very well. Other changes to the buildings are game play breaking and have obviously not been thought through. Just to mention a few thing: The farms have made it impossible to play on the hardest difficulty levels because of the terrain on these maps (and I'm talking about hardest difficulty for randomized maps - the predefined maps carrying the label "hard" are actually fairly easy). You NEED a certain area of level land with good crops to place a modern farm. The old farms you could place near a hillside, and the peasants would do their best to put up a few fields here and there to get some crops out of the meager land. So can you not just build some old-timey farms you ask? No! Once the new farms have been invented, there is NO building regular farms. This turns the start of the game into a rush to build as many farms as possible before the useless farms are invented. After this, there is no re-building farms that get destroyed, basically ruining your chance to produce farming goods. Furthermore, there is now "superior" housing buildings. Better in all ways. Who wants to play a stategy game where you have to be an idiot to use five out of six options? Without "Modern Times" you have a hard choice between the different home types offering different advantages - which is what strategy games shoudl do: face players with hard choices. I guess the increased time line is an advantage, but you'll enjoy the extra time city building only one type of housing building (that is, if you're not an idiot) and as many huge, circular farms you can fit in (which is probably not very many if you're going for a challenge). In short, Tropico 4 (which is quite amazing on its own) is simply better without Modern Times. The game design mistakes are so very basic that no game company should make them. Avoid it like you would a t-rex with acne. I wouldn't recommend that anyone buy this DLC. Don't get it if it's really cheap. Don't get it if it's free. If you have it, don't enable it - in stead put it in a coffin with garlic-covered lead spikes on the inside, and dump it on 30m of holy-water.

The first "Company of Heroes" was a rare milestone in RTS games. Not only did it master the art of telling a good story, it also added realistic, fun game play features, especially when it came to facing of units. It was smooth, balanced, well crafted, innovative, addictive and downright amazing. For CoH2, I expected more of the same. Before I played it, I honestly thought Russians were just getting all patriotic and whiny about the plot. After playing most of the campaign, I gotta admit the criticism is well founded. Russians are stereotypical EVIL in this game. It's like a cold war spy movie. The Russian officers gladly kill every surviving solider after a heroic defensive battle, JUST FOR THE FUN OF IT. **** in CoH2 however seem to be good, upstanding citizens - I have yet to see a single **** war crime in the game. While playing one can only conclude that your guys are fighting for the wrong side. Anyway, story **** and is written by someone who has no idea what Russia in WWII was all about. Enough about it. Graphics are pretty, squads work well, campaign maps are well-made. The same features that make CoH special are still there, but newly added features are rather uninteresting. The Russian winter is represented by jumps from bonfire to bonfire. Neither very interesting in terms of game play, nor historically correct: Standing right next to a huge bonfire on the front line of a war where the enemy has artillery and snipers doesn't seem like the best idea to me. The game is not a bad game - it's relatively fun to play, looks good and never crashed for me. However it fails to add anything, and the story is downright idiotic. More missions have been published as DLC, but I can't say I'm hankering for more of CoH2.

Sword of Islam is the "play as a Muslim dynasty" DLC pack for Crusader Kings 2. While the game play is fairly similar to what you see as a Christian lord, there are a number of differences. For instance, as a Muslim ruler, you're allowed up to four wives. These wives might not be too fond of each other, and you sometimes have to stop them from assassinating each other (when it suits your Machiavellian purposes, of course). Also, your wives appear to attempt to murder you with sex quite frequently ... Muslim dynasties also have a decadence score - in larger realms especially, or for characters with the "decadent" trait. The higher a decadence you have, the worse your troops will fight and the less your demesnes will produce. The way to get rid of decadence is fighting in holy wars (both offensive and defensive), participating in Jihads or fighting against Crusades. Furthermore, events like observing the Ramadan can help you get rid of decadence. Diplomacy and laws works more or less the same. Most notably Muslims do not have access to some of the interitance laws that Christan lords do, they however have special interitance laws where the most powerful son claims all. All in all, Sword of Islam is a well-crafted, smooth running DLC that will be refreshing to players who have played the Christians too much. It offers new options and lets the player face new challenges without changing the game play radically.

APB was a great game that died in economic fail. Then some other people bought it and turned it into the worst form of pay2win game. Paying players run around with golden guns which are far superior to anything else the game offers, completely ruining the (previously fairly good) balance of the game. Since a four-vs-four competitive multiplayer game will suffer greatly from bad balancing, this intentional bad balancing will ruin it for everyone, probably even the guy with the golden gun. Steer clear of this!

When I played, Diablo 3 was a greedy auction house fest, with loot algorithms designed to force people to buy items from each other while giving Blizzard a cut of the money spend. Considering the price of the game and the impact it had one quality of game play, this was extremely unacceptable. They supposedly fixed these issues and removed the auction house in the mean time, so my review from back then is no longer valid. Not gonna waste more money or time on the game though, so I'll just set my score as close as possible to the average player score and then clearly state that I have no idea if the game still **** in the current version.

Ironclad Tactics is a fun combination of a card game, a board game and a storyline set in the US civil war - with robots (called Ironclads). The game play is focused on deck building as well as playing the combined card/board game, and the storyline is available in co-op. Before each map, you select a deck of cards that you can freely put together from your card collection. As you progress through the game you gain more and more cards to chose from, enabling you to put together more innovative combination. Each card played will influence the happening on the game board. You might put a new ironclad in play, give it better inventory or move it a lane down. Different maps have different objectives, and you will have to find the right deck to defeat each challenge. The story is cute and humorous, but personally I would have liked to see a darker take on robots in the American Civil War. The game offers the full campaign in co-op mode, which worked smoothly and unproblematic when I played it. There are cool, rewarding boss fights which will require you to think outside the box and the missions never get repetitive. The replay value is limited, since you'd be facing the same challenges, probably solving them with the same decks. There are some challenges (which unlock cards) that require you to do things for instance with certain types of decks though, but once that is done, there's no real need to play the map again. All in all a fun game, with an inspired rule set and a story and setting you don't see too often.

E.Y.E. is a first person futurist shooter RPG. You play a member of a cult in a dark, futuristic world. The game takes you through a series of missions, the plot develops, you kills stuff, buy better weapons, level up your character and so on. I should probably mention that I only played this co-op. Might be a completely different experience single player. The game has a great atmosphere - most of it seems to take place in huge, abandoned cathedral-like structures (which fits the religious theme of the game very well). Dialogue is great - though not in the best English all the time. NPCs insult you, swear at you and blame you for anything that goes wrong. You do have the option of just shooting the NPCs, but that might bring other people's wrath upon you. The game has no voice acting. That means you'll have to read quite a bit of text to keep up with the plot, but it also means that much more dialogue is made available. Getting into the game is rather difficult. It requires you to pick a genome even before you get started - in short that means you'll have to read up on a bunch of different genome configurations before you're even allowed to, say, shoot a gun or run around a bit - I can see how this is frustrating to new players. Maps are recycled into these rather generic missions that will be available after completing a map. These got frustrating rather quickly, and I only played a few of them. Shooting works fine, though the gun balance seems lacking. Some of the heavier weapons especially seem to kill too well, compared to the lighter versions. While the game offers you the option of bringing a variety of different guns, there's really no point to it - you're limited by weight, so if you bring a shotgun and a few shells for backup it'll just mean that you have fewer rounds for whichever main gun you're using. EYE also has a fun hacking mini game that you'll probably want to master. It's hugely stressful, requires a lot of concentration but is generally satisfying. You'll earn money which you can spend on new weapons, skills, upgrades or research. Character building is not too exciting - mostly about finding out what you want to be good at and then spending your money to optimize that. Research if fun though - you spend money to start research on something you found, and when they're done it might give you some stat bonus. All in all a fun game to play with friends, but too confusing at first. Lots of things lack polish, but nothing ruining the game. Atmosphere is better than the game play, but still some fun hours with a friend or two.

State of Decays is an open world third person zombie survival game. You and a friend are coming home from a fishing trip and while you've been sipping beers and gutting fish, the dead started walking and society collapsed. The game has a well-designed form of permadeath. If the character you play get killed, you'll get to take over as one of the other members of the group. You will actually need to play different characters, as they get tired or hurt from time to time and will need a break from the constant zombie killing. The story is fine but not too engaging, but I find the base building and general survival very addictive. There are more survivor communities out there that you can interact with and might convince to join you, vehicles to run through hordes of zombies and special zombies that you need to keep an eye out for. Building outposts is a key part of turning a zombie infested area into a nice suburban neighborhood. I think these action games with strategic elements are too few and far between. The game is a console port, but a rather elegant execution. It plays with mouse and keyboard well, though the character facing might be a bit difficult to get used to for regular PC gamers like myself. Also the inventory menu doesn't take kindly to the scroll wheel, but except from that there are no problems with the UI/controls - more like tell-tale signs of a past on a console. Combat is fun - easy to learn and difficult to master. I find a certain enjoyment in the many ways you can crush the skulls of the zombies, and how good you and your character can become at fighting. Well timed dodges, rolls, drop kicks and various other moves are important for your survival. Characters gain xp in different categories, depending on what you do with them. A guy running a lot will get great cardio while one who fires a gun will become great at shooting. There is weapon specializations and personal skills that only a few survivors have (better keep that mechanic alive if you want cars fixed) and character building manages to offer you a few interesting choices without overloading you with options and information. The basic game rather short but very enjoyable, and there is much more replay value in the Breakdown DLC. If you like bashing in skulls, survival scenarios, zombies or is just a fan of post-apocalypse I think you'll enjoy this.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 is a first person shooter, where a squad of elite solders have to infiltrate, shoot some bad guys and carry out some objective. It's pretty bland, boring and did not provide me with any satisfying experience. First of all, I bought the game to play co-op with a friend. We started on normal, but quickly got bored - the game was just very, very easy. We then upped the difficulty to the hardest level, but we were still bored. This, mind you, is a setup where two human players who only played the game for 30 minutes takes over for a squad of one player and a group of three bots on the very hardest difficulty and the game still fails to challenge us in any way. The story is seen before, and details the eternal conflict between good Americans and some filthy foreign dictator or such (yawn). The briefings are absurdly long but with very little content. We ran into a bug where the game would crash upon us reaching a certain trigger - this had been reported years previously, but the developer apparently couldn't be bothered fixing it and assumed that players, like we did, would google the problem after crashing at the same place a few times and simply take another route through the map. There is no save-functionality in co-op, so a crash means starting the map over. The co-op is not well-executed either. Only one of the players get to use the map (who came up with that design decision?). The map will go to another player if the first one dies, and with more than two it can be difficult to figure out who can actually use it. The game has nothing going for it and only the most dedicated fans of the genre should even consider buying it. It pains me to see so many good models and so many programming hours going into a game this uninspired. Maybe it's just about time to stop making these Tom Clancy games?

RtCW: Enemy Territory is a Second World War first person shooter. The players are on either of two teams (axis and allies, of course) - one team has to complete a series of objectives while the other has to stop them. The players pick from different classes - soldier (with superior weaponry), engineer (access to mines and the ability to repair), medic (can heal self and team mates), a covert ops (silenced weapons and the ability to steal enemy uniforms) and a field ops, who can supply team mates with ammo and deploy artillery strikes. During a campaign (a series of maps) players will get experience in different categories depending on what they are doing and how well they do it. This unlocks better stats, new weaponry and abilities. The game works very well. The game play is aimed at making team play necessary and this works like a charm. The classes are well balanced and each class gives the player unique options and limitations - the medic for instance can always stay at maximum health, but will be hampered by low ammunition especially early in the game. While there are few negative things to say about this game, in some maps it can become rather boring when one team is significantly weaker than the other and can't get out of their spawn zone. Still a clear 10 in my book - can be recommended to anyone who loves FPS games.

Dino Beatdown is a survival type game, where humans with high-tech weaponry fight hordes of oncoming dinosaurs. It takes place in vast landscapes, where the player must activate the power generator of one out of four bases and fight the incoming dinos. The game was first released in a rather horrendous state, making it impossible or very difficult to join or make servers, the game would crash often and such. While these issues have (for me) largely been ironed out with the first patch, the game is still full of glitches. Sound breaks down after map switch and the first person gun models don't properly react when you fire (leaving you with a feeling of killing raptors with a potato gun). While these are issues I'm sure will be solved by the developers, the game also suffers from some problems in the design. For one, the assault class seems to be the only to have an easy way of getting out of the way of the larger dinosaurs with the jet pack. The medic especially seems to be in trouble when faced with an angry t-rex, leaving them with the rather boring option of staying in-doors popping out every once in a while to pump a clipload of lead in the big lizard. The dinosaurs can't climb, so the right thing to do is get on top of something and shoot the hordes of dinos who are running around below like it's a free crack handout in a bad neighborhood. It is kind of boring that the smartest thing you can do as an "assault" is to just camp on top of something. When you die you'll have to wait until the other players either kill enough dinosaurs or they die themselves and you lose the game. This might be a very long time since the last player can just take a vehicle and go any old direction. We seem to lose a lot of players who die early after a spawn, because they don't want to sit around for 15 minutes waiting to re-spawn. The game now has an option for buying a new life after dying, but if you can't afford it you'll still have to wait. There are only three types of dinosaurs in the game - T-Rex, Raptor and Rahm. While the rahm (a flying dino that'll pick you up and fly away with you) is an interesting touch, the design hasn't been followed through here either: only the assault class has a way of surviving when dropped by a rahm. The recon and the medic will just spatter on the ground below. Killing these three types of dinos quickly become boring, and the game could really do with some more kinds. The game has a selection of vehicles, but alas, here the design is again lacking. The flying type of vehicle is a game winner - the dinos can hardly hurt you and you get to spend the rest of the game bombing defenseless lizards on the ground (and the terrain is game-from-1999-ugly when seen from above). The vehicle direction controls are mouse based, with is fine for the flying vehicle, but just feels clunky and incomplete for the ground based ones. The game is in a much better state than when it first came out (now it is playable), but that also means that all the design flaws come out. It's fun to exploit some dumb dinos who can't get to you, but it will grow old very soon.

Total War: Shogun 2 - Rise of the Samurai basically gives you another campaign similar to the original for the game. It's set centuries before the Shogun 2 campaign and as the name suggests it is focused on the Samurais' rise to power. While the cities and resources are in the same places this is where the similarities stop. The game operates with different playable factions (in this case the player can pick from six different ones, organized into three clans of two), it has new units (Samurais in particular are different - in stead of the specialized troops of Shogun 2 they are all-around units capable of shooting bows or killing stuff in close combat), new game mechanics (how influence spreads when the three clans battle for dominance), new agents who work in new ways (not just a simple re-skin of the Shogun 2 agents). In short, it nearly doubles the game play of Shogun 2 for very little money - if you found single player in Shogun 2 worth the cost of the game you'll definitely find Rise of the Samurai worth its cost too.

Sanctum combines the classic tower defense game with FPS co-op. The players will build a maze on a map and construct guns of various types with various abilities. When the players are ready the spawns start - waves of different monsters will be incoming and the players will have to rely on their weapons and the deployed turrets to kill them and stop them from getting through the maze. When monsters die the players make money, which can be used to upgrade guns or existing turrets or build new ones. The game is quite well executed (very few bugs) and the design is thought through and relies heavily on the normal tower defense games. The weapons are neat-looking, works as you expect them to work - you have three of them, a sniper, an assault rifle with grenades and a freezing gun that'll slow monsters. There is a certain variation of maps, but I never felt much of a change when switching between them - as you build the maze yourself, the maps will mostly just provide obstacles for the maze you would like to build. The game, however, got somewhat dull for me rather quickly. The incoming monsters don't offer much variation - the spawn order is random, so sometimes the only thing that can really threaten you is a spawn composed of 3 groups of the same type: as you have been dealing with varied threats you have made maze for varied incoming, so when a full spawn of flyers (that can only be shot by certain types of turrets) for instance show up, your turrets for shooting at the ground will be useless. Therefore the best investment is a high level gun, which turns the game more into a shooter than a builder. Also - maybe it's just my personal shortcomings, but I have a hard time getting beyond a fair percentage of the monsters looking like genitals. In Sanctum I never get the "tower defense" experience of leaning back and watching your awesome killing zone at work as I constantly had to rush around killing the monsters that slipped through your maze. Turrets can NOT handle stuff on their own and will gladly fire away at the front of a monster that can only be wounded from behind or pumping hundreds of rounds of lead into the belly of someone who only takes damage from head shots. It's up to you to stop the enemies that will need accurate shots, and after a number of games I was sorely tired of trying to get "head" shots on the wobbly beings with balls on top of their necks. Did I mention that most of the monsters look like genitals? Anyhow, Sanctum is a very well executed game that will be immensely funny at first but get rather boring in the long run. If you have some friends who're keen on co-op playing it will be a good purchase though.

Dungeons of Dreadmor is a rogue-style game, in which you control an 8-bit hero (or, in the expansion, heroine) who is slaying his way through increasingly tough monsters in order to defeat the evil Lord Dredmor. The game is very hard and should be played with permadeath (I can imagine it being a bit boring without it). Character creation offers you a wide range of options, as you create a character by picking seven skills form a long range. Want a fireball throwing, Odin worshipping, axe swinging berserker-vampire-archeologist? Go right ahead! The game doesn't take itself very seriously and has a good sense of humor. The sound track is very catchy and would be worth the cost by itself imo. I immensely enjoyed playing it, even when it was handing my ass to me over and over on level one, and I simply had to play it till I got through it. Of course it doesn't provide you with amazing graphics, an epic plot or such - these things are not what the game sets out to do though ... what it does set out to do it does excellently, and if you like looting, character building and a hard challenge this is the game for you.

Dead Mountaineer's Hotel is a point and click game. At this point I would normally attempt to explain what the game is all about, but alas, after having put hours into it I still do not have a clue. The protagonist is going on vacation at this mountain top hotel. He meets the owner and the other guests and in that process hears of a mountaineer who fell to his death years previously. There is supposedly a murder riddle somewhere in the game, but I've yet to see anything of it - whether the story of the mountaineer is connected or whether it was just clumsily included to give the hotel a cool name I know not. The closest thing to a criminal act I saw was when someone locked me in my room and I had to crawl out the window to find another way in. In the lack of a riddle, a purpose, a goal or any form of measure of success, you find yourself playing something that's mostly akin to a budget-vacation simulator. As your character has no motivation for doing anything, the whole "pick up item for using it in riddle later" routine of every point-and-click adventure just becomes akin to theft since you really can't be planning to do anything but put the item on your mantlepiece. There seems to be no obvious connections between the riddles and the plot. For instance I solved this riddle where I had to pick food from a buffet based on the other guests' choices. There was an obvious "success/failure" condition, but I could not for the life of me figure out why I should care about what the character eats. Why is it successful to eat pasta and not mashed potatoes, and how on Earth would this ever relate to a murder case? Dead Mountaineer's Hotel is a pretty bad game in spite of the interesting theme (the supposed murder riddle with some hotel guests as suspects). The most fun I got out of buying it was writing this review.

Empire: Total War is a grand scale strategy game in which you play a major power approximately form 1700 to 1800. The game, like other total war games, switches between a turn based mode where you administrate your cities, move armies, do research and so on and a battle mode, where you take real time command of the troops fighting the battles of the turn based mode. The game is very pretty on a system that can run it, but has unreasonable resource demands. On a low-spec system the usage of sprites is very obvious and pretty horrible to look at. Much older games of the series (Rome, Medieval 2) looked better on such a system as they employed less sprites, and if your PC can run Empire to look good it can also run Shogun 2 to look better. Granted, it is awesome to watch a cannon ball plow through an infantry regiment. The muzzle loader infantry combat also looks very cool, but unfortunately the AI is very unimaginative with regards to using the armies, and what it does usually only amounts to a mass suicide. In older or newer Total War games the AI does much better. The AI also suffers from bugs - for instance when you shoot a hole in a fortress wall the AI might place a unit there and re-evaluate this unit's plans so often that it pushes a good (and way above recommended specs) CPU to the limit. Only way to get the game responsive again is to charge said unit - as soon as it is engaged in close combat the game will start flowing again. While the system for tech, buildings and such is way better than the older installments, Empire also lacks something the older games have: the ability to play as defeated minors. This limits the play time of the game very much, since you'll have access to the same majors beating up the same minors. The diplomatic AI also does a lot for making the game repetitive. Once you end up in war with some country you'll probably be at war till either is destroyed. Peace agreements last few turns since the AI feels very sore about having just lost a war against you decides to go lose another. On the other hand naval combat is very good with historically accurate ships, beautiful graphics and such. Best (and first) total war game for a naval battle in my experience. While Empire: Total War provides a good many hours of entertainment there are better Total War titles out there. I'd recommend playing them first.

K&L2 is a third person shooter that takes you to a grim, dark, grimy Shanghai where the the mismatched partners in crime fight for their survival when relation with the Chinese underworld breaks down. It's made for two players and this is where the game shines. The visual style of the game is rather uncommon - you watch from a third person perspective, but the camera movement, film grain and such are done to give it a feel of watching a movie. While many dislike it, I find that it adds a nice, realistic mood and helps avoid one of the problems of third person shooters: that the same guy is doing the same thing in the corner of the screen for the entire game. The movie-feel also comes out in the firefights - the characters will yell and scream at each other and it does a lot for the combat. Another good feature here is a developed cover system, that makes two guys shooting at each other look more like an action movie than a bunny hopping idiot-fest. The cover system sometimes gets annoying when the character decides to take cover behind something else than what you expected, but it's fairly rare when you get used to the system. The story is very grim, fairly realistic and more akin to a movie than a game (there is no Russian uranium, no stereotype middle-eastern or south-American dictators that need American lead or such) and you get the feel that the game is based on the story rather than the story being based on the game. The game is best for two players, and the highest difficulty was a cool challenge for me and the friend I played it with. The game won't last long though, but there is plenty of variation for the relatively short duration - I didn't manage to get tired of any of the things the game wanted me to do, even at second play-through. Definitely worth playing through, but make sure to get hold of a friend.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a horror FPS game set in the mad world of H.P. Lovecraft's works. The player is a private investigator tasked with investigating a disappearance in the village of Innsmouth, which would be familiar to fans of Lovecraft. The game is heavily focused on the horror aspect - for the first long time you're not armed and merely have to explore or avoid the locals, which makes for a mighty frightening experience. The game operates with a madness-counter of sorts, and the more mentally stressful things you see or experience the more this counter will rise. The result is some heavy blurring of vision and such, which is a very cool and very unwelcome effect in some challenging situation. The story is captivating and stays true to Lovecraftian horror - the main character commits suicide in the opening scene after which the game jumps back six months and accounts the events that led up to the suicide. The game has no HUD but rather communicates though sound, post processing and such, which adds a lot to the feel of the game. There are flaws in the game though. Whereas the first couple of acts have a very high quality the quality drops around the middle of the game. The story makes less sense, the environments are less inspiring and you get the impression that it's added merely increase game time. The quality rises again near the end though and delivers a satisfying conclusion after some of the more mediocre parts. The game operates with save points, so you will find yourself doing the difficult parts of the game over and over. Also it won't run on some video cards (google it before you buy it). This is a problem that won't ever be fixed as the developer is not in business any more. Definitely one of the better games I've played in the genre, and one of the only ones I think captured the spirits of Lovecraft's works.

Legend of Grimrock is a classic-style dungeon crawler along the lines of Eye of the Beholder and Dungeon Master. You control a part of four characters and work your way through the levels of the game fighting monsters, solving riddles and exploring. The riddles are absolutely amazing - they dare challenge the player, and not just for finding secrets or such - if you want to get through the main story you will actually have to solve some pretty challenging ones. In some aspects LoG has a better design than the old games it's based on. For instance having a lifestone in each level that will revive any dead characters means that you have to load your game when your last character dies, not the first one. The classes also offer you a wide range of options for specializing your character. Also LoG has the best alchemy game play I've ever seen. When you drink a potion you end up with an empty bottle. Then you can put something new in it and you'll have a new potion. The amounts of bottles you find determines the total number of brewed potions you can have at any particular time, not the total number you can expend during the game. Makes potions much more usable. The magic system is rather badly implemented though. Casting a fireball is a five click operation. First you have to open the spell interface, then click the three runes constituting a fireball and then click the "cast" button. In comparison swinging an axe is a one-click operation, which makes magic a bit useless. Why the spell interface isn't linked up to the num-pad is odd - it has the same shape and seems to be designed for that. Combat works fine - some people seem to dislike the harder fights where you actually have to dodge around the enemies, slam doors in their faces, lure them into traps and jump on top of them through pits in the floor. I, however, found that very entertaining and I doubt my interest in the game would've been as high if you could just stand-and-fight every battle in the game. In conclusion Legends of Grimrock is an absolutely fantastic game. There are no bugs, very few annoyances, lots and challenge, pretty graphics and I had a very hard time putting this game down before I got through it. I consider it worth every cent, and if the magic interface gets fixed I'll up the score to 10.