goodterling

I played this because IGN said it was good, and slogged through to the end out of grim determination and to kill the last boss. It's extremely repetitive, and full of filler. Once you clear an area, they find a flimsy excuse to send you back through the exact same area, sometimes like 6 times in a row. That is some of the laziest game dev I've seen in quite a while. They even manage to botch the loot system. There's nothing to buy, you just dump all your loot on a guy who periodically gives you bonus points. And the gear upgrades are so incrementally small and frequent that you never notice any difference. Nothing's ever special because a slightly better version of that same thing is always 5 minutes away. It's a conveyor belt of 1% upgrades. If you set out to intentionally drain all joy out of the hack n' slash genre, this is about what you'd come up with.

Operencia is a lot of fun exploration through a really creative world, but it sadly relegates itself to a "casual" game due to one broken mechanic--it's too easy to rest and recharge your characters. All you need to recharge all hit points and mana of your party is a piece of "firewood", and the game throws the stuff at you. Once you realize that, it kinda breaks the game. There's no reason to not just spam your biggest spells in every fight, and even worse, there's no real reason to resort to melee combat at all, which does far less damage. This game was obviously aiming to be a friendlier version of Grimrock, but they went too far and drained it of all tension or sense of survival. What's left is nice scenery, and combat that feels like you're using a cheat code. I played on "normal" difficulty, and there was no way to switch mid-game, so maybe I missed the real challenge. But in any case, normal difficulty shouldn't feel like you've enabled a bunch of cheat codes.

After 8 hours, my game is broken and I can't finish it. When you die, you turn into a zombie that your next life must kill to re-acquire all your power-ups and health. That sounds fine until you're deep into the game and your corpse is far away. I'm 80% through the game, and it's impossible for me to get back to the place where my power-ups are WITHOUT the use of those same power-ups. I have one-sixth of my health, minimal abilities, and a pea shooter against screens full of high-level, re-spawning monsters. The game was easy for me up to this point. This isn't a difficulty spike, so much as a difficulty black hole. Had I known I was destroying my game just by dying where I did, I would've copied my save file. I feel like I'm being punished for NOT DYING ENOUGH to learn this stupid mechanic they threw at me from nowhere. So let that be a lesson if you're going to play this. Copy your save on the title screen or risk bricking you game.

This is not a metroidvania game, it just has the map structure of one. The combat is more like a fly swatting simulator. You don't clear out areas like you would in a proper metroidvania. Instead, random hordes of baddies swarm you and you have to swat them down in bunches. So all the tactical choices a real metroidvania game has you making about beating enemies who are occupying platforms go straight out the window. Sundered enemies flock in from any direction and barely care about level layout. I was so excited for this game from the trailers, but this is a deal breaker for me. The art is gorgeous, but it's wasted on these lazy mechanics.

Beneath the gloss are TERRIBLE tower defense mechanics. Here, let me list the fails: (1) Lanes are wide enough that enemies can randomly escape your fire, leaving you to discover their "actual" path by trial and error. (2) No way to "earn back" lost base points, so if you lose even one, you have to restart if you're going for 100% score. (3) After about game's mid point, you can't beat levels using your own strategy. The game demands a VERY NARROW strategy to progress, EVEN if you're not going for a 100% score. (4) The game throws shiny new towers at you, then requires you to NOT use them to finish the very next stage. TERRIBLE game design. Seriously, I looked up how people beat a particularly hard stage, and you can't use the new towers. (5) Crucial power ups can be "lost" within a half a second of appearing. They literally fall from the sky and disappear off cliffs. About half of these are crucial, and if you miss one you're screwed and your time has been wasted. This game is good for about an hour, then it REVELS in wasting your time through trial and error restarting. The high scoring professional reviews DID NOT play through the game, and the low scoring reviews did, and echo my criticism. I've played enough GOOD tower defense games to know when things are "difficult" or just "stupid". This one is just stupid.

What a WASTE OF TIME. This game is the equivalent of those modern art paintings of one simple square. It exists only to make pretentious people feel deep for "getting" it. It's a lot of unnecessarily slow and awkward trudging around a forest, tracking down very MUNDANE mysteries that end up being EVEN MORE mundane when revealed. Your OWN LIFE is almost certainly more interesting than anything in this game. If not, you're doing it wrong.

In many ways this expansion is better than the original game. It's all the fun parts or exploring and solving cool monster mysteries, but without all those political quests in Novigrad that bogged down the main campaign. Plus all the enhancements they've made to the inventory and crafting systems make it much less frustrating now. The writing in Witcher 3 beats out Mass Effect 2 for the best in any RPG. It's the only game where I would reload saves to chose other dialog branches. Usually I'm just trying to get through them. CDProjeckt came out of nowhere and beat the biggest devs in the industry at their own game.

The "insane" part of this game are these stupid missile mazes where you guide badly controlled missiles through tight mazes without touching the walls. I made it through the first 2 of these, but I gave up after 50 attempts at the 3rd. Craziest difficulty spike I've ever seen in a game. I wanted to keep playing, but the devs kicked me out of the game with this stupid mechanic. OK Devs, you win. I uninstalled it. And here's your zero rating for the crap experience.

Fantastic game with an inspired system of short term hit points, and long term sanity maintenance. Also the best Lovecraft game ever made, since it actually respects the Lovecratian concept of insanity as the real threat. However, if you go in cold, you could easily burn a day chasing a losing strategy and end up hating it. Find some non-spoilery tips about how to juggle your resources. I played an early release and didn't know if it was worth starting from scratch, but I was hooked instantly. I can see all the additions the devs made, and their choices were brilliant. New characters, new mechanics, new narration by their fantastic voice actor. This thing feels tested and polished.

The choice to make your character LIMP through huge parts of the game is a deal breaker for me. It's just too slow to be fun. Also, it's like you're playing as someone's grandma. It's far easier to shoot a gun, dodge a haymaker punch, or just sprint for more than 2 seconds in REAL LIFE than in this game. Developers can increase difficulty through making tougher enemies or through gimping your character. Choosing that 2nd option is a recipe for frustration.

I was super enthusiastic about having the Arkham fighting system in the LOTR setting. Unfortunately, that's about all the game has going for it. It's an Orc Murdering Simulator and little else. There is a massive map that begs to be explored...until you realize it's all the same. You can't even tell the map regions apart by stylistic cues or difficulty. The hunting "system" is a joke: just kill those critters you've already been killing in droves, but, sorry you haven't done it in THE RIGHT ORDER, so kill it all again, and this time we'll pay attention. It's a shame because, though the story is forgettable, the acting is FANTASTIC. Both the voice and motion capture performances are the best I've seen in a game. The main character is subtle, understated, and full of deadly menace. There's the bold decision to keep him absolutely still in some conversations with orcs he's trying to intimidate. It's the kind of thing a good actor will do, but you don't see it in games. So major props to the devs for hiring good actors and trusting them to that extent. Someone was on the ball there. I kept wanting to see this character in something that made better use of him than slaughtering a million dumb orcs.

Literally the most overrated game ever. The combat system is a clunky, simplistic throwback to the bad old days, and it controls like a sloth on quaaludes. The drab graphics look like they're from 1998. The idea that this game and Arkham City share the same score is a sick joke.

All other auto-runners pale beside these Rayman titles. Jungle Run and now Fiesta Run are just a hell of a lot more creative and polished than other games in the genre. Fiesta Run adds a fantastic new power which is a guide showing you where to jump and punch throughout the level. This allows them to ramp up the complexity of their levels while keeping player frustration in check. These games feel like they've been play tested to hell and back, because the difficulty curve is so bang on. I'm actually not a fan of the normal Rayman platformer games--like many people I find them too floaty and slow. But these mobile games absolutely nail it.

If you like this, you haven't played good tower defense games. PJ Monsters is super minimalistic, not in a cool way, but in a lazy way. The sprite variety is extremely limited, and they have no death animations. The towers have no graphical indication to being upgraded. There is a huge priority to earning a perfect score by taking no hits on your base, but there is no way to "earn back" a hit on your base, which results in a frustrating need to restart from zero. But the biggest negative by far is the paths the enemies follow to attack your base. The whole point of tower defense is to devise a strategy from what you know about the enemy types and the terrain they must follow. But for half the maps in this game the field has an "open" design that leads the monsters right past your base in the middle of their attack path. This makes a mockery of tower defense strategy, since the baddies are arbitrarily "deciding" not to kill you, rather than falling to your strategy. Overall, this game makes me appreciate Kingdom Rush and Fieldrunners, and the effort their developers put into them.

This game has the worst case of invisible walls EVER. You have to feel your way through the game like a blind person, guessing where the "real" path is, because the developers funnel you down an invisible hamster tube which only loosely coincides with the environment. I expect some invisible walls like God of War has, but a narrow tube? Lazy! I kept hearing how great the graphics were---and there are some beautiful views--but far more common are repetitive BROWN textures. A lot of the backdrops merge into a BROWN soup, making it hard to see ledges and such. The combat is God of War minus the creativity, and double the repetitiveness. There are weird combat difficulty spikes where I was hitting baddies for so long I thought the game was bugged. Nope, I just had to hit them even longer. The one bright spot is the Titan battles, which are Shadow of the Colossus "climb and stab" style take-downs of giant creatures. Fun, but nothing new here. I'm still waiting for someone to do some real, current-gen innovation for this mechanic. Overall this game plays like it was made in the late 90's, and looks like it's from around 2003. I do not get the high scores it's receiving.

Game starts out nicely, but eventually reveals some frustrating flaws. It demands absolute precision from the player, but is pretty sloppy with its own hit boxes and timings. Boss characters are given massive amounts of invulnerability frames, which aren't indicated in any way, that you're forced to learn by trial and error. Conversely, you can be damaged at any time, even during special moves when your character is just a blur, which is maddeningly counter intuitive. Many people are reporting they never get past the final boss, which leaves little incentive for me to play the final quarter of the game. This is a punishing game for 15 year-olds who have the time to play it as obsessively as it demands. I used to have that sort of patience, but now I realized games are supposed to ****. On the plus side, it has amazing style and a great sense of exploration. Really unique stuff. But with all these rave reviews, I thought someone really needed to chime in with a reality check.

Brilliant combination of puzzles and high concept science fiction. It engages the same part of your brain as Portal 2 using completely different mechanics. When you do solve a puzzle, it's always a great payoff and you can't wait for the next one. The story that unfurls is compelling stuff about consciousness and self that will make you think. The Swapper is a one-game refutation to anyone who says video games are just mindless violence. My one complaint is that the title of the game doesn't do it justice. Such an elegant game deserved a more elegant title.

Heart of the Swarm is not so much a game as a guided tour. The game holds your hand and carefully walks you through every stage like your a 5 year old. It's actually pretty insulting--like one big extended tutorial for stupid people. How far have we fallen from the tense and frantic game play of Warcraft 3? Remember that? Apparently Blizzard thinks its customers have lost half their IQ points in the past 11 years.

This is a fantastic reboot, and very few people are acknowledging the real bright spots. They've transformed Lara Croft from a bimbo sex object to a real person you care about. I found myself not wanting to die in the game because I didn't want the character to suffer. When's the last time you felt that in a game? Half-Life 2 with Alyx, if you're like me. The much hated quick time events are in the first hour of the game. Many of these haters did not play past them! Later on the quick time events become thrilling as they're incorporated into huge cinematic set pieces, and they're very intuitive instead of frustrating. This game has fantastic suspenseful combat. I just finished Crysis 3 and Far Cry 3; neither game produced the frantic feeling Tomb Raider does regularly. This game has perfect controls. When you miss a jump or something it's always your fault not the game screwing you. This game has great exploration. I couldn't wait to see what's around the next corner. The only negatives I have are those early quick time events and the stupid dialog coming from the henchman. They really should've come up with some better lines for those guys. But really it's the transformation of Lara Croft that should be widely praised.

I was hugely disappointed in T2. The very first spell I tried was so overpowered I could just walk through the game mashing one button and everything died. You feel more like a exterminator spraying **** than anything else: just clearing out areas full of bugs. Rinse and repeat. It's the ultimate grind-a-thon. I quickly bumped the game up to highest difficulty, but it made no difference. They throw so much healing potion at you, and your mana regenerates so quick that everything feels cheap, like you've got a cheat enabled. This is a game you'd give to your 8 year old nephew or something. Definitely not the Diablo III alternative so many people keep claiming. The first Torchlight had a lot of charm and challenge. This thing is just an unbalanced mess.

I suspect a lot of people throwing out these 10s haven't made it past the half way mark of the game when the need for constant reloading arises. Grimrock has a great idea, but a flawed execution. The worst of all is the painful way you're forced to spell cast by manually clicking on runes every time EVEN when you're just repeating the same spell. This badly needs to get patched. It's like a mini game testing your mouse dexterity and it will kill you over and over. Also the game difficulty goes right off the charts by the time you're halfway through. I'm all for a challenge, but Grimrock's "Normal" difficulty would be "Nightmare" by the standards of any game I've ever played, and there's no way to lower the difficulty without starting over. Also, in the later half of the game, dodging becomes crucial, but the game's odd, chess-board like grid movement system makes this a frustrating crap shoot of random death. The game makes a fantastic first impression, but eventually turns into a frustrating reload-a-thon only the most OCD gamers will put up with.

The whole game feels like filler that was cut from the original. The first thing they do gimp your character, and you're forced to play the whole game at a fraction of your power. Plus the difficulty curve is all screwed up. I breezed through to the end when heavy weapons were suddenly mandatory, then had to reload a thousand times. Story is totally generic, and there's not one visual you haven't seen already.

Wow, this is so overrated. If I was just judging by the voice over and story it would be a 10. But unfortunately the combat falls way short. The fighting is ridiculously simple--like a game from the 80s, but not in a good, retro way. The enemies just fade out without death animations which is very unsatisfying. The game's laughably easy with the hardest thing being that the hit boxes for the sprites seems off so you have to pass your projectiles beneath the enemies.

As a big fan of the first Alice, I had my doubts. But Madness Returns outshines the first one in every way. There is a HUGE Psychonauts influence here (and at one point the developers pay homage in a laugh-out-loud manner). The exploration is amazing, the story is more mature and compelling, the combat is more intense than MANY of the top line FPS games out there.

There ought to be a special level in hell for game designers who kill you with things you can't kill back. In dead money you will die mostly by radio signals, a red vapor, and holograms. NONE of which you can kill back. The whole game feels like they purposely chose the most frustrating bits of Fallout and built a game around them. Like when you're trying to navigate on its useless "local" maps through areas which are confusingly split up into multiple loading areas. In Dead Money THAT'S ALL YOU DO. It's just one big rat maze you have to negotiate over and over. When you finally do get out of the rat maze (following what's got to be the most lengthy backtracking segment in gaming history), dying by red gas and radio signals is replaced by dying by unkillable **** more radio signals. The game is frustrating right up until the very last segment which is so frustrating I finally gave up and watched the ending on youtube. I don't know who at Bethesda came up with this, but they need to never design a game again.

This is a fantastic game. I was expecting a cheap God of War Clone, but it's far better than that. For one thing the Horseman War is far more interesting a character than Kratos, whose one-note vengeance act is wearing pretty thin. Great atmosphere, fun combat, very creative puzzles, and some of the best creature design ever. It's a long game with tons of bosses, and they're all awesome looking. New elements are constantly introduced to keep it fresh--grappling hook, horseback combat, and even some Portal dynamics near the end. The biggest criticism is that Darksiders doesn't do anything new, but combining all these great elements from other games so successfully IS something new.