evild4ve

I got it because I'm a **** for games like this. It hangs together surprisingly well - a combination of mechanics from HOMM3, Disciples, and Civilization/Warlock, and possibly Eador. There wasn't one single thing here I hadn't seen before in another game, that cost less. It's pleasingly challenging, a small map on normal difficulty takes about 2 days - the overall macro strategy against the AI is well-balanced... but the closer you look at any one aspect of the game, it's like it works because they broke everything and it all cancelled each other out. No tactical positioning of units, battle scenery pointless, battle formations pointless since everything moves at the same speed and hits things, some spells ludicrously overpowered, boring micromanagement of unit equipment, time-consuming UI, it culminates in one big fight and if you win the enemy won't catch up with the experience and unit level games, and the writing and the game world are really really really boring. The tech tree makes no sense (Game developers note: Civilization's tech tree only worked because it's a rendition of human history). The hero upgrades tree is even weirder. But worst of all, worst of all, necromancers can't raise decent undead, let alone the unforgettable skeleton hordes of HOMM3. Sigh. Uninstalled.

It's a casual beat-em-up with floaty controls, pseudo-RPG character customisation, and a boring comedy plot. It reminded me of Deathspank but without the "witty" writing. The fights are hugely repetitive, the enemies are palette-swapped every so often but there are only ever a limited number of them on screen and their attack and movement patterns are easy and dull. There are only 5 buttons and it's incredibly, ridiculously easy to go flying into chasms by pressing L, L to do a charge attack. After spending a couple of hours on it, I have no sense of having achieved anything - it's just a timewaster.

I really liked it - they took a simple game mechanic and made the most of it. It's short but it only needed to be short, and I've replayed it a few times even though I have loads of other stuff in the queue on Steam. There are lots of simple, clever design decisions on show, for example as your character level gradually increases the weapons in the shop get more expensive. Which keeps you on a learning curve to figure out the combat properly. You are always having to prioritize - in an ideal world you want to have a full health bar, four health potions, three rings/amulets, a monster soul, a level 3 weapon, and to have set up a camp nearby. This will probably never be the case, meaning the play style has to adapt to the combination of stuff that has become available on this particular run. The combat tricked me at first - it is neither roguelike nor beat-em-up like. Although it uses a limited range of beat-em-up type moves, it has much more in common with old side-scrolling fighting games like Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, and more recently The Spirit Engine - all of which had quite abstract mechanics. Very basically, in AO you and each enemy have a regular attack frequency, and you need your attacks to always be landing just before the enemies' "turns" come up. When it works, it becomes like a rhythm game where you bash the enemies one side of you and then swing round to get the others just before they have time to react . The health increases on levelling up seem to diminish with each new level - e.g an extra 7 or 8 HP when a typical monster attack does 70 or 80 HP. This is genius because it means grinding is almost pointless and you play to get to the end, rather than to save up for whatever sword. Items get lost at the end and only XP and gold are kept. The levels are randomly generated but not-very-randomly, and this is also a good thing because once you get used to the pattern you can decide from the mini-map whether to take a side passage to go after treasure or just proceed to the next fight. There is no backtracking or wandering around lost, except on very rare occasions when you get a key after a chest, or die after a ressurrect point. Other than that it's always forward. And this is good. It's a casual game really, but it needs an hour of reasonably solid focus for each playthrough, and the achievements feel like they are worth playing "one more time" to get. I still need a page of the Warlock's journal because there is something somewhere I still haven't killed. It might be time to start going down the most difficult of the three routes into the dungeon.

It's pretty, but it ain't Mechwarrior 2. I played for 2 hours and haven't earned enough in-game-grind-currency to make any alterations to the basic loadout. All mechs can fly, and dodge, and move really quickly. s'rubbish.

I had no bugs but on a relatively high-end PC. I started off playing as the Seleucids on Normal difficulty and it held my interest for about 200 turns spread over several weeks. There are loads of design flaws, but on the occasions when the whole package comes together and you have a really tense, satisfying battle it's awesome. I haven't played any of the other Total War games but came to them after being disappointed with the King Arthur one, and I found the basic mechanics pretty similar to Graftgold Games' Realms (1991) or Myth: The fallen lords. Too many battles in Rome II have an immediately obvious outcome because they have already been determined at the strategic/economic level. Too many of them are repeated sieges of the same cities, and can be won by putting a couple of pikeman/spearman units on the wall to hold off the ladders and then sticking them in front of the gate while the bulk of the enemy forces blunder into the gatehouse's rapid-fire, instantly-lethal, completely non-historical boiling oil, and infinite-ammunition, heat-seeking arrow towers. If they had had some of that stuff in 55BC, Julius Caesar would never have gotten out of Cisalpine Gaul. Ambushes play out exactly as you'd expect if the enemy's ambush was carried out in the middle of a desert with 20-mile visibility in all directions, by a 2,000-strong force with brightly-coloured tribal shields. "Centurion, I think I can see 2,000 warriors massing on the horizon to ambush us tomorrow!", "hmm. they must be planning to put all their archers on one side of the road, and all their spears on the other, and they don't have any cavalry at all. It must be Saturnalia - let's kill them all!" But just occasionally the ordinary battles in a big field, or defending an unwalled settlement, more than make up for all the rubbish battles in between. Stragglers from depleted units having to overwhelm an elite pike unit quickly enough that they can get in swords-reach of the archers behind them who are whittling them down, or cavalry having to cross the entire battlefield unsupported to take out the enemy's giant ballistas on the flanks before they pulverize the infantry. On the strategic scale, it's similar. Most of the time consists of settlements rebelling because they didn't have a big enough temple. "Centurion, the slaves in Brundisium have yet again revolted and formed 18 precisely-organized military units many of whom have extremely expensive equipment and training, especially the cavalry." "Ha! Fools. We will push four of those units off the walls using some cheap spearmen, and then proceed to cover the rest in boiling oil at the front gate like we did in twenty previous years". But then there are times when Carthage are holding out impressively on one side of the map, and then the Roxolani and the Scythians form a "Horde of the Steppes" and start sweeping in from the other side of the map. Every part of the game mechanics is flawed - but in a way that every couple of hours throws up brilliant, unexpected jewels that wouldn't be found anywhere else. It's worth lumbering through this game for that.

It's much less breathtaking than it looks. The puzzles, at least during the first hour or so which was all I could endure, involve pressing light switches to move floating light sources around that make certain platforms appear and disappear. At first it looks like a clever mechanic like Closure (but in 3D), but it's really just switches. In HUGE levels, with no particular idea of where you're supposed to be going or why. It isn't open exploration, there's a linear route - and it's just intentionally not marked out well, or indeed at all. It's like: if I crawl through this little space here and jump over these boxes I'm in the "next" area, which is much like the last one except the boxes are a different way round. The gigantic scale looks good, but it's dull to wander round it. Another game that had this problem was EYE: Divine Cybermancy - if you've played the particular couple of maps in that with vast outdoor areas that take five minutes to walk across but have nothing to interact with or particularly look at on the way, that's pretty much NaissanceE. Only, without anything to do at the end of the long walk, or anything to look at on the way other than grey boxes. Another puzzle that annoyed me early on involved navigating down a big grey "lift shaft" type thing by hopping from ledge to ledge (long drops kill you forcing a return to the last save), and the puzzle is that the only available light source slowly drifts up and down the middle of the "lift shaft" so that you have to wait 30 seconds between each jump. I hate it when games make things difficult in the game that would be easy if you were physically there - and in this case could feel for the sheer drops at the edges of the ledges. I'm being really down on this game. It does have a moody, mysterious atmosphere going for it. But probably so would Halo if you removed the plot and replaced all the scenery with grey boxes and put a sort of pixelly filter over the front of everything. And it could well have profound spiritual revelations waiting further into the game, about loneliness, or whether anything means anything... but I just have a creeping suspicion that I could get the same revelations by walking around a shopping mall at night wearing dark glasses. They seem to be patching it lots, and it's a genuine indie not a cynical cash-in, I could just have done with more freedom to get lost walking round a huge grey building, the linearity at the start was a huge disappointment. Back to Anti-Chamber for me!

Stronghold HD is almost entirely the same as the original Stronghold but with better graphics. I wish they would do that more often and there are loads more deserving games they could have done it to. With Stronghold HD, I only realised I had played the entirety of the single-player campaign once before (10+ years ago) once I was on around the 10th mission. Which I think says the game experience itself is pretty forgettable. Stronghold is addictive, because it is a lot like Castles (20+ years ago). But unlike that excellent game, it lets you build each wall section or tower instantaneously, removing all of the tension and most of the strategy. If you have a castle, you can kill a virtually infinite number of attackers. When you are besieging a castle (in two of the 21 missions), you will only be able to progress by exploiting the fact that some archers' arrows in a volley randomly exceed their normal range when they miss (but the AI's archers only find targets using the normal range, so you can VERY gradually pick them off this way in the 2 siege missions). What this shows is that nothing in the game is balanced properly. Battering rams, armoured knights, and virtually everything else can be polished off within seconds by massed archers and/or fire. A 1x1 spike pit trap costs 5 wood. A 10x10 apple orchard costs 5 wood and you can set it on fire, so it's 100x as deadly. There is no option to block off all incoming food supplies and starve the castle's occupants into submission, which is how they normally did it IRL. The further you compare with real life, the less favourable it all becomes: castles were normally places where large numbers of soldiers were kept, as distinct from your walled cities, which might have had little blacksmiths and suchlike inside them. Onager-style catapults (c.1200) being fielded alongside knights with barding (c.1500) and crossbows (c.1300 to 1500) and boiling oil (c.never!). Boiling oil wasn't used in medieval sieges at all - due to the stuff being an extremely expensive fuel source, all the historical accounts are about boiling water.

I played about 150 turns of this and decided it isn't genuinely difficult, they just didn't design it properly. The problem is that the course of the game is heavily, if not totally, scripted - instead of the actual game mechanics providing balance. Players are basically supposed to align with either the Christians or the Pagans*, and in my game I somehow ended up choosing quest options that put me into the late game without either side having formed an alliance with me. Which meant that the Christian Saxons in Anglia** had a stack that continually scaled to be twice as strong as my strongest army, but which I could keep pinned down by repeatedly capturing a town in its territory, while on the other side of the map, Pagan Wales had about twenty stacks that were stronger than my strongest army. The combined industrial output of Arthurian England was unable to compete with either faction, despite them only having three territories at most, and the limitations of the game mechanic make it impossible to spam units or even to have the expendable generals or suicide missions that the strategic situation required. *, ** - regarding Welsh Pagans and Christian Saxons in Anglia, the game has a basically ludicrous pseudo-history that veers madly between the Venerable Bede (a real historian) and the "Slaine" graphic novels. Saxons in Anglia is weird because the Angles lived in Anglia. The Saxons themselves weren't distinctively Christian - the historic King Raedwald (AD 600) who squares off against King Arthur in this game adopted Christianity, but in reality his sons then took the Saxons back to the Anglo-Saxon gods they had before. And the religious conflict that Anglo-Saxon Christianity really had wasn't with Druids (who had all disappeared by AD 200), but with a Celtic version of Christianity. The military equipment used by the units is even more anachronistic - e.g. crossbows (AD 1066+), Crusaders (AD 1096+), and gothic plate armour (AD 1400+). Unit stats and performance are therefore basically random. Some units can have stats that are up to four times higher than others - so if two batches of similarly expensive and heavily-armed knights bash into each other, and your batch is the wrong "sort" of knight, they get wiped out. Most annoying though is the crummy, 1970s folk revival/neo-pagan conception of Druids being "at one with nature", and therefore aligning with Fairies. Everything gets conflated together - Morgan Le Fay gets identified with "Morrigan" (from a different country's folklore hundreds of years distant) because their names sound a bit similar - and the aspects of the legend that actually interested Thomas Malory and other authors of classic versions get obliterated. The combat in the game is quite fun, to the extent that it copies Total War, and on the rare occasions where a balanced battle takes place (and it isn't against fairies) it can be quite satisfying to trick the AI into being flanked, or whatever. Magic is overpowered, but it's King Arthur - so magic should be overpowered - the problem is that nearly everyone and their cat in this version can cast spells, not just Merlin and Morgan Le Fay. King Arthur and Merlin aren't even units - some warrior-king! Archers are also over-powered, possibly reflecting British sentiment about longbows post-Agincourt (AD 1415!). Killing someone with flying pointy sticks shouldn't be ten times as quick as battering them to death with heavy blunt things - if that had ever been the case, footsoldiers wouldn't have continued having a military role. The victory locations mechanic is daft - and there is never much advantage in making for a particular location on the battlefield, because the AI's archers will always be in range before you get there. Victory Locations consists of the AI grabbing them all in the first 30 seconds due to impossibly fast cavalry and always being located closer to them, and then you grabbing them with your own cavalry over the next five minutes after the AI instantly and permanently forgets it has them.

Endless Space has all the problems normally associated with 4x strategy games, but few of the fun parts. The tech-tree is large, convoluted, and the discoveries don't correspond at all with the effect on gameplay. Want to colonize a lava planet? That requires graviton thingummy-jiggies on tech tree #4. Research can't be queued. Diplomacy against the AI either includes no options whatsoever, or they get switched on by some obscure discovery. Balance is everything with these games, and when each system takes 150-200 turns to conquer and the tech tree is a complicated limiting factor, even on Easy difficulty (which is boring) it's very possible to build your empire "wrongly" and reach a stage where you can't make further progress against AI opponents who only have 3 stars but chose the "right" kinetic weapons oojahmahflip from tech tree #2 50 turns previously. Combat is always between two fleets of up to 12 "command points" (1=gunship, 2=cruiser, 4=battleship). In practice, most battles are between maxed-out fleets and victory is determined by tech. Tactics and ship customisation will not change the outcome against an opponent with an extra point in beam weapons. A fleet with an extra point in beam weapons and an extra point in deflector shields will chew up an infinite number of weaker fleets suffering virtually no attrition in the process (due to insta-repair during the opponent's turn). This means the economic weight **** empire during the end-game isn't an advantage, making the end-game take even longer. They have actually found a way to make the 4x formula's classic problems even worse. The ship customisation is so limited that they might as well have kept it to templates. Choose from little, medium or big and lasers, machine guns and missiles. There are also carriers, but this is a bad use of "command points", and also ground bombardment and ground invasion options. Ground invasion could have been quite an interesting idea, but there are no significant fixed defences to bombard, and no garrisons to attack. Sieges take 20-30 turns, or you can send in a single unit of infantry for instant conquest. Sins of a Solar Empire also came out recently as an easier-on-the-eye, slightly "liter" 4x strategy game, and it's much better at the things listed above with few if any drawbacks. The one thing Endless Space does get right by comparison is that its map consists of stars and their orbiting planets, rather than the peculiar free-floating planets of SoaSE. Upgrading planets in Endless Space makes as little sense as the tech tree, but it does at least give the impression of there being a solar system whose local planets co-operate with each other to build stuff. Planets can be: barren, arid, desert, tundra, terran, jungle, asteroid belt, lava, arctic, gas giant (hydrogen, methane or helium), and they can be tiny, small, medium or huge. The differences aren't as noticeable as they should be so long as you choose advanced intergalactic bobbins on tech tree #3 (left branch), they are all equally easy to settle and look after. The graphics and artwork are mediocre. Planets of the same type look the same as each other, each faction only has six ship graphics and I defy anyone to actually tell them apart either at the strategic scale or in the close-up battle sequences. The auto-resolve battles (with added rock/paper/scissors) aren't as annoying as others have made out I had been watching them to try and better understand the combat mechanics. The problem is that you can tell who is going to win by adding up the tech levels of each gun in their fleets. Graphically, they impressed me less than Gratuitous Space Battles, as well as tactically. I got this on Steam for a single-digit sum of money and was bored within 8 hours. Get a fan-mod of Empire of the Fading Suns, or even a copy of Supremacy (1990) instead for "4x lite" done well. Don't get this.

It's a basically ill-conceived, badly implemented game in a shiny package. Starting with the positive, the (spoof) high-fantasy setting, voice acting, and artwork are extremely good by any standards and manage to stand out in an extremely crowded market for this sort of stuff. In particular, the Undead as a civilian race along with skeletal council-representative are splendid. The political decision-making is "lite" but entertaining e.g. you can support or veto an Elfish motion to make all the war-machines out of renewable materials, with predictable and meaningful effects on production costs and public opinion (which influences the economy and also battles). After making a great start with things that fantasy strategy games get wrong more often than not, they somehow botched almost everything else in the game, starting with the game. It's a "lite" RTS bolted unceremoniously onto a "lite" strategy boardgame, and in the RTS you can basically cheat by destroying all enemy units with an infinitely fast, indestructable, regenerating dragon. The strategy boardgame has at least two flaws I'd consider fatal: firstly the units' relative importance here doesn't carry over into the RTS. A basic "Trooper" might take the full production resources of a country for a turn to produce at the strategic level, or about 10 seconds at the RTS level. However at the RTS level they are worthless cannon fodder, but at the strategic level when combats are auto-resolved they get a "fair" chance of destroying enemy units. The second fatal flaw is that the resources carry over between maps so once you complete one map, you can start the next with an unstoppable army. The problems with the RTS are more subtle and could be solved in different ways. Personally, I would:- remove the fixed population cap, nerf the perfectly accurate anti-aircraft defences, make the dragon constantly consume resources, slow down the units or make the maps bigger, make the units carried in from the strategic level irreplaceable and more powerful than the RTS-level equivalents, and replace the whole "control point" system with something less clunky. It's virtually impossible to lose, unit special abilities can't be used quickly enough, the computer can churn out units (by clicking!) so quickly and so soon that the dragon is needed to mop them up, (at which point you just win), but if you get hold of 2 out of 3 or 3 out of 4 recruitment "control points", the producing units impossibly quickly advantage goes from the computer to you pretty quickly. It's just a mess, and it feels like it resulted from a complete lack of thought followed by a policy of obstinately ignoring playtesters who would have picked up on these problems. The dragon could have been introduced into a bog-standard C&C clone and worked better without all the stuff they did to the RTS formula to try and balance the dragon. Three more problems: using the dragon makes strategic unit production and delivering commands temporarily impossible; the dragon cannot even be summoned in sea battles (due to there being no "recruitment centres"); and there is no option to auto-resolve with dragon. If you could auto-resolve with dragon so as to completely ditch the RTS segment, and had an option to dump unwanted gold, it would be possible to have a passable boardgame a bit like Risk without the strategic depth.

I bought this in the Steam sale and ended up feeling disappointed even with 75% off. I quite appreciated the humour, but it tries too hard a lot of the time, and the witty quips when he chops yet another clone get tiresome. The real problem is the awful game engine, the poor level design and the fact it's a console-port. Console ports don't usually bother me, but in combination with the other problems it manages to remove all interest value from the combat. Like "I'm in a wall, there are five (identical) enemies milling around behind me, I can't control the camera, I'll mash some buttons and just hope they die as easily as the previous 500 of them." Levels are scripted to the point of ridiculousness, the upgrade tree **** because it mostly revolves around powering up the special moves that you never use because you'd then need a hand for the mouse to control where you look, a hand for the w,s,a,d to control where you're going, and a third hand to actually press the attack buttons. Deadpool: a game for three-handed Beavis and Butthead fans with very low standards of level design.

20 minutes was enough to see it's nothing like the original. It had already upset me loads by the point where you get a teleporter on the first level. The original was divided into screens, and you had to spend a few seconds at the start of each screen planning your route, and sometimes timing it so that you'd be on a certain platform when a certain guard was turned the other way. All of that is gone in the remake, as the camera follows you (in an uncomfortably close close-up) and the levels are continuous. Some new mechanics have been added for the sake of it, such as an aimable gun. Sounds like a good idea doesn't it? A little laser sight instead of automatically hitting anything at the same height on the same platform but, it's less fun. The atmosphere is gone too, everything feels extremely chirpy for some reason the character modelling and voiceovers feel like a 2002 remake, not in terms of actual graphical quality but in terms of the design aesthetic. I can't believe they got rid of the old intro, which was one of the best intros of its day. And it's a console port (not a port exactly, but the menus and everything else are clearly designed for them). Well of course, the original played on consoles didn't it? But differences have emerged an OLD console could port quite happily to PC with W,A,S,D and three buttons, and a logical options menu at the start. New consoles have been evolving in a different direction for 20+ years, and the Flashback remake is for a new console. Having shelled out $15 on this, I like to think of the developers, who are largely the ones from the original game, going out and having one last hurrah before they all die of Alzheimer's. This thought consoles me.

I was initially disappointed with this until I realized it's more of an interactive fiction piece than a point-and-click adventure. The puzzles, such as they are, are pretty much linear, "use A on B", and are either damn obvious or so pointlessly obscure that it's best to look them up on a walkthrough and avoid repeating wads of dialogue. There don't seem to be any user-choices affecting the route of the story (so far, I'm probbaly about 1/2 way through) The dialogue is impossible to skip, and the UI is almost insultingly basic. That's all the bad stuff the good side is that it's quite well-written, well-acted, well-drawn, and well-directed. The horror element works by putting the character mostly in very mundane environments and then popping something nasty actually quite disturbing to look at, credit due to the artist on the screen. Anyway, don't pay more for it than you would if you were renting a horror movie or a paperback book. On reflection it's mostly quite "schlocky" stuff but as is often the case it does feel like more than the sum of its parts at the time.

Over-rated. Unholy Heights makes a really good first impression but there isn't really enough to do. Once the rooms fill up there is just -lots- of waiting around to buy the next bit of furniture or wait for the tenants to fall in love and have kids. Levelling up the monsters is enjoyable and important, but it makes the player too risk averse. It can take hours to get a whole happy family of werewolves so why risk them dying in a difficult quest? The tower-defence combat is a sub-game, and it's dull the strategy just involves maximising DPS depending on which monsters happen to be in the building during an attack. If the random attacks were even slightly challenging it would improve things. Overall, for all that it's adorable and lovingly executed, it's just a stripped version of Theme Hospital incorporating a so-so tower defence game.

If this game had been released in 1990, which is the period that its graphics, gameplay and story intentionally harp back to, it might well have changed the course of adventure gaming's evolution. It has all the nostalgia of going back to the Lucasarts and Sierra golden age. (but the game it reminded me of most is actually an immensely obscure Atari ST point-and-click game called "The Grail", due to both games having a combination of a religious protagonist and irreverent sidekick in an alternative fantasy setting)... it's basically the game that the games that The Secret of Monkey Island was making fun of were trying to be... arriving twenty years too late, after everyone has grown up and had kids. The story is tightly written and lovingly realised, it sticks to the simple idea of a robot worshipping humans in a world where all the humans have probably died out, and embellishes it to the nth degree, with great success. Other recent games have also told this story, but not quite so well. The highlight of the game is the voice-acting by a robot called "Ever-Faithful Leobuilt". He only says about ten lines but they will make you sit up and listen. The actor deserves an award for it. The puzzles are also very tight as with all old-school point and clicks there are a couple that are just too 'lateral' for probably anyone to work out without looking up the answers, and one that involved two crucial items being hidden in a five-pixel-by-five-pixel box on a screen you'd never have any reason to backtrack to... but the overall logic and difficulty of them is like "Machinarium" (another game it has a lot in common with). The items you carry round in the inventory are genuinely useful which helps give it realism and none of the item combinations are surreal. Most of the combinations produce some sort of reaction or quip from the main character or the sidekick, which keeps it entertaining this is a huge achievement to pull off in a game like this, writing something and acting it for nearly every possible thing a blowtorch could be used on. The story is a tad predictable but only because other games have told it less neatly. There is a ton of stuff that gets mentioned in passing but which the main character never sees because it is only tangentially relevant to him. The story is also a bit short and there are only about 10-20 locations in the game but it really only needs that many, and any more would have been unnecessary padding. This is a delicately crafted work of art and only a handful of these games ever reached this quality and you can't see that by reading a review, so go buy it!

I played this as a fill-in between other games, fully expecting it to be a schmalzy allegory for a boy dealing with his dad's alcohol abuse. That aspect of it was quite interesting to me personally, but I also support the idea of games moving into more difficult narrative and emotional territory. I think I read that this was actually autobiographical on part of one of the developers making this game a risky proposition commercially and something very raw and close to someone's heart, creatively. The gameworld is quite beautiful, without being graphically impressive it is just nicely, nicely designed. Although the 3D environments were probably quite simple to put together and there are a lot of copied and pasted houses on show they are imaginative and clever. Things like (analog) levers that fold the entire map in on itself, or flexible ramps made out of flying houses. It should manage to put a smile on your face. The reason I give Papo & Yo quite a low rating is that it really boils down to a few (10?) extremely easy puzzles slotted into an extremely basic story. It would have been quite okay to quadruple the length of this game, stretch a few of the basic mechanics (freeform, epic-scale, physics puzzler!) into more challenging puzzles and pick up the story again a bit later after you've had some fun levitating huge buildings in from the horizon to land on top of tiny frogs or some such. The story is delivered so honestly that it can't be faulted for laying it on thick. But it's the sort of story that someone who hadn't suffered parental alcohol abuse would tell about parental alcohol abuse... but being told by someone who had. The most poignant moment in the game for me wasn't in the story at all it was when you kick a football at Monster, and just for a moment he snaps out of being a lumbering, coconut-chomping cartoon character and patiently throws the ball back to you, like a Dad. Overall, this is maybe a 2-hour wonder for younger players. If I was an alcoholic father, I would buy this game for my children so they knew what to do with me.

The Inquisity bits in the town are just big dialogue trees. You have to guess who has the next bit of evidence by wandering round talking to everyone about everything. Potentially, it could have been as good as the "Blade Runner" PC game, with the aim being to collect enough evidence to get a conviction but it's nothing like as slick. Act I's whodunnit was so deeply predictable that I'm not sure whether to waste time on Act II and beyond.

Taking a critical appraisal, this is a better successor to Heroes of Might and Magic III than the official sequels. It's not without its flaws, which I'll list a few of, but the "solidness" and balance of the game more than make up for them. Whether its due to patches or having a top-end CPU and graphics card, I haven't had any of the problems with bugginess or slowdown that others have mentioned. As with a lot of games like this it feels like if I played it solidly for 12 hours it would probably crash, but the impressive implementation of auto-save means there probably wouldn't be too much of a problem if it it. The fantasy setting is workmanlike not embellished like Disciples, or entirely superfluous like Fantasy General or Warlock:master of the arcane. The units on the battlefield behave 'just right' and seem to be quite carefully balanced so that even after 10+ hours of obsessively harvesting every experience point and magic on a map (which in this game isn't remotely necessary, to its credit), there will still be encounters that are challenging. Exploration is cleverly compacted so that each individual map tile has loads of encounters inside it, which are found by exploring on the spot. This avoids the common problem of getting wiped out by a strategic-level rush while your hero was off doing a quest far away from the capital city they should have been defending. The combat is so similar to HOMM3 that they should be paying royalties for it. You can't build up huge stacks of 1,000 skeletons, there is no "Defend" command, no "Retreat" option, and no bonuses (as far as I can tell) for surrounding or flanking enemies, or "zones of control". I was surprised I didn't miss these things much and I think it's probably because there is a bigger random element to the combat and multiple counterattacks. If an imp squares up to a spearman, it isn't predictable which will live and the advantage goes to the side that best distributes counterattack damage between its units. The hero units seem very similar I haven't tried them all, but they are tide-turners rather than single-handed army wiper-outers. Although there are only 4 classes, there is a fair bit of specialization between them, and their perks are subtler than HOMM3 no adding +1 damage to every archer in the army type stuff (yet, afaik). One big negative for me was the realization that the game didn't involve a 4D strategic layer like Empire of the Fading Suns there aren't payoffs between fighting a war on one shard and building up defences on another. The shards are more like the successive progression from mission to mission (e.g. Dawn of War II) different routes to suit different playstyles. Special mention goes to the people who painstakingly wrote very literal descriptions of each type of unit along the lines of "A dragon is a big, flying reptile that breathes fire and lives along time". Personally I preferred that to the tendency of these games to give everything a backstory and put their own spin on every unit. In Eador, a dragon is a dragon, an elf is an elf, and a giant slug is a giant slug. The tutorial is a totally different (and inferior) experience to the actual game. City building is routine stuff with a bit of ability to optimize territories for different resources, but no microscopic focus. There is a random event system like in Castles, or Galactic Civilizations do you send local adventurers to kill the spiders, or the town guard, or do you send the adventurers to kill the spiders and then the town guard to kill the adventurers and steal all their equipment causing some other unforeseen consequence to pop up 50 turns later. Overall I think they spent a huge amount of time on the game balance and it pays off the encounters match the territories they happen in, the units have the right relative strengths, the improvements from levelling them up make the right amount of difference, no one spell, item or creature makes an army unbeatable, and numerical advantages can be made up for with creature tiering and vice-versa. Probably the work of several people with degrees in writing wargames and a long playtesting process, which might have happened on a pen and paper hex-grid between two beardy dungeons & dragons fans, with funny shaped dice, over the course of the last 20 years before they made a PC version. They deserve some of your money.

It's addictive, but almost nothing about the game is well-balanced, impressive, or that fun. With a ranged character, all of the mobs are always stronger than you, meaning the gameplay reduces to running round in circles letting off area effect rounds from a blunderbuss. The loot is mind-boggling, it's impossible to tell whether a drop is better than your current equipment without looking through the stats, and even then it's too complex to decide if the critical hit bonus or the elemental damage bonus or the attack speed is more useful. For a game with so many inter-related stats it works surprisingly well, and the mobs somehow manage to continue being exactly as much tougher than you all the way through the game, without getting noticeably easier or impossible to beat. I'm tempted to think there is a much simpler system behind it all and the game just gives the impression you're tinkering with dozens of little plus and minus buttons on the character sheet that do stuff. The enjoyable futility of the gameplay and gear progression is a lot like Deathspank. But unlike that game, none of the monsters involve any particular tactic. Diablo is a much better piece of work than Van Helsing, and I think the positive comments here are probably due to the game giving an excellent first impression for a budget title it is extremely well-polished and professional looking. It just has a crummy gameplay mechanic. A lot of reviewers seem to like the witty dialogue too, but I think the constant subtle references to other games like Skyrim, Dishonored, Orcs Must Die and probably some others I can't put my finger on are more fun.

I played the first few levels of this, up to a point where a civilian dressed in a burqa ran into my line of fire and I accidentally shot her. The game had been heavy-handedly building up the civilian tragedy aspect and the justifications for this sort of thing happening - but it seemed completely out of character for the morally ambiguous protagonist to yak on and on in the cut scenes about stuff like how "it's okay not to follow orders if we can save an American life" and then not have anything at all to say for himself after mowing down an innocent woman with a machine gun. And I was left thinking "oh well, I guess that probably happens all the time in Iraq" - and decided I had probably felt guiltier the first time I ran over a pedestrian in Grand Theft Auto. The gameplay mechanics are atrocious - there are no consequences for getting shot so long as you can hide behind a conveniently placed rock for a few seconds until the bloodstains clear from the side of the screen. Red Steel on the Wii (!!!) had a similar depth of realism and tactics. It's completely linear - the guns all feel and sound the same - which is a complete mistake in the case of the AK47 and M14. A rail-shooter is pretty much the last sort of game that should take on moral questions.

Like all cunning satires, E.Y.E. is in many ways better than the media tropes, games, and films it makes fun of. Cyberpunk wasn't a setting or a look and feel - all of that is just how the mainstream received William Gibson - it was deconstructing and rebelling against an odious and bloated genre of science fantasy. E.Y.E. is continuing that - the garbage dialogue that everyone goes on about is mocking the player for being docile enough to enjoy a Skyrim-style subquest whose author uses every cliche in the book to try and make the gamer care about a digital non-entity. This game is saying "stuff all that, have a proper bloody cyberpunk gunfight: Gibson, Harlan Ellison, Blade Runner etc etc were all very literary and clever but all they really bequeathed us was a desire to blast through gangs of punks with a cybernetically enhanced warrior". And that's what this game is - the sorts of gunfight Robocop would have - you'll blitz through wave after wave of inferior beings with a cybernetic killing machine. Then your clip will run out and you'll get pinned down and have to be repeatedly resurrected. Like the cyberpunk tropes. My favourite is the factory in the first level, the inside of which looks exactly like the aftermath of the fight between Sgt. Motoko and the robot tank at the end of Ghost in the Shell. Like they just didn't tidy up afterward, left the bits of the tank there, and hundreds of years later it's a location in a game. This is like Syndicate without the backstory (!?) - cyberpunk's backstory is the ruins of human literature.