I'm disappointed with this game. The first Talos was a brilliant and challenging puzzle game, the story and philosophical ponderings was decoration. You could have stripped all that out entirely and still had a fantastic core game. Talos 2 is the inverse of that, if it was stripped of everything but the puzzles, you'd have a very short and mediocre game. The story and banal philosophizing in Talos 2 overpowers everything and makes the game a chore. There is so much walking and talking, it never stops. The long periods of walking are purely contrived as a space for the talking. You spend more time walking around and listening to droning than in the puzzles. If you're not buying into the dichotomy presented by the game then it all comes across as painfully tedious. I felt like screaming at the game to shut up and let me solve puzzles. It's very telling that the 'skip' functions of the game save you no time at all. The puzzles themselves have some cute extra twists but generally aren't nearly as clever or challenging as the first game, in fact nearly all of them are trivial and follow the same tricks. It's variations of the same puzzle over and over with a different gimmick. So many times in the first game I was completely stumped, and when I finally figured out the puzzle it was very rewarding. In Talos 2 many times it will take you longer to walk to the puzzle than it will to solve it. Maybe I've just become used to how the puzzles work? I'm still glad I played it and I can't say I didn't get my money's worth, but it I was expecting lot better.
I don't like Styx as a character, but he's not boring so that's something. The game is rewarding enough if you're into stealth, and the level design allows for many different play styles which I liked because I am not a fan of superpowers, so played a 'normal' stealth game as possible. Apart from some frustration with the boss fights I enjoyed my time, but it did not reach the heights of Thief despite the snarky references.
It took a while for the limitations of this game to be overcome by its strengths, but by the end I was ready to call it "underrated". Yes, it's clunky, full of repetitive content, has underwhelming combat, poor performance and is sometimes confusing but the overall dreary aesthetic, atmosphere of dread and despair, bizarre characters and story laden with ambiguous choices made it an ultimately rewarding experience.
This game is complete disaster. It looks nice, but the interface is so convoluted and unusable that the game is functionally unplayable. It's fundamentally a multiplayer game but the amount of crud you have to wade through to do anything slows games to a crawl that make the offline board game look like a speedrun. Worst purchase I've made in a long time.
It has all the ingredients typical of a dungeon crawler, but nothing in it feels challenging and satisfying more than annoying. The steampunk environment brings nothing of interest.
I loved Duke Nukem. I can still pick up and enjoy the hell out of Duke 3D today. Ion Fury not so much. Duke Nukem has a lot of variety in levels, enemies, weapons and mechanics. The levels in Ion Fury are uninteresting, the weapons are bland, the enemies generic, the byplay forced and disconnected. It seems unreasonably difficult to perceive enemies against the background, so you're often pixel hunting for movement while constantly moving around yourself. I think that has as much to do with poor artistic design as the low resolution art style. It's not an awful game for what it is and it is enjoyable to a point, but it was massively oversold as Duke reinvented.
I could have liked this game a lot if it weren't for the banal techbro plot that was obvious from the very beginning. When you know where the story is ultimately going, it's not conducive to making people care about what happens along the way. There was plenty of other stuff not to like too, like the resource harvesting grind, the unsatisfying and overly complex combat against damage sponge enemies that are much the same black smear or annoying bots. There's one enemy that is hilariously lame and deserves special mention, because I think it's one of the most poorly designed enemies I have experienced in gaming. When you encounter this enemy, literally the best way of dealing with it is to simply walk away and do something else or check your phone for a few minutes while it's screeching away in the background. Yeah, it's an enemy so ridiculous the best way of beating is to stop playing the game! There was plenty of good too, like the exploration, interesting and much more enjoyable side quests, organic upgrading and the multiple approaches to objectives. A lot of this was well thought out and I had a lot of fun trying different things, or even discovering I could have done *this* instead of *that*. The good stuff was good enough to keep me going through the whole game to the end. Unfortunately the obviousness of the main story and the complete apathy it induced towards the NPCs and the main quest ruined the game for me. I was hoping it was going to surprise and not do the obvious, but it didn't. I killed them all in the end, and didn't feel bad about it in the least. Also, the game seemed to become increasingly unstable the further I progressed, with crashes on transitioning maps, disappearing weapons, passive enemies and more. I'd like to see another game with the good parts but with a less brain dead setting and more interesting enemies.
I can't help but feel this game must have been overrated even when it was originally released, let alone this remaster. Some of the gushing reviews are detached from reality. This is not a game worth playing even for historical curiosity. The story and puzzles aren't clever or satisfying, the UI is horrific and doesn't properly distinguish between interactable items, and not even the hotspot overlay helps. The shoehorning of a badly designed arcade combat system into a point 'n click was a terrible decision. The game is very short too, and that's including the pointless unfunny filler dialog and walking animations which are about 80% of the game. I was expecting a peer of Grim Fandango or Monkey Island, but this has proven to be disappointingly mediocre.
The first Elex had rough edges but you could overlook them because it was an engaging game. You wanted to learn what happened to the world, you wanted to see where the story went. In Elex 2 those minor 'gamey' incoherencies turn into yawning chasms of nonsense. Nothing makes sense. Not the condition of the protagonist, not the way the NPCs behave towards you, not the changes to the world. Nothing. It's a huge mess. The second game exposes the developers for a lack of vision. The plot is cut and paste. The characters are a mockery of characters in prior games. Apart from some interesting quests the writing is generally lazy. I found myself not caring for anyone in the game or the story at all. Uncovering backstory through discovery of notes and logs, a key enjoyable aspect of exploration, is now irrelevant because of the way the world is written. The destruction system is meaningless, it creates artificial barriers in the game that make no sense. They can't seem to get their abstraction of this system right, and how it works with your companions and dialog choices. It's particularly annoying when companions don't react to dialog choices in a way you would expect from their personality. The triggering of cutscenes when approaching certain areas or NPCs is extremely annoying. Throwing you into quest dialogs unrequested is stealing away player agency. Exploring a building at night? BAM suddenly daytime and you're talking with someone trying to pull you into a quest. In the middle of a battle with a group of enemies? Wait! You must stop to have a chat with a guy wandering in to the middle of it. These cutscenes will drive you insane. It's not all bad. The start is much easier because of the smarter placement of enemies. The combat system is easier to get to grips with, although the game feels much less challenging now. The crafting system is far better because it gives much more value to loot and a more organic improvement to weapon upgrading. I like the changes to the skill system which make it much easier to understand. The personality skill branch still seems a poor investment though. There's still plenty of interesting places to explore. NPC variety is much better too. All the complaints about performance and weird graphics are valid. I had expected much better in that regard as Elex ran very well on old hardware and my current system should be running this game comfortably. At times frame rate drops to low 20s, which is absurd given I am well above minimum requirements. Elex 2 has left me feeling underwhelmed, but they have built the foundations for a much better game than this turned out to be. Hopefully their next game fixes the shortcomings and improves on the world building and writing.
This game is bad. I have no sympathy for the protagonist, and the story feels like it was written by an executives bored wife. I wouldn't care that it blatantly copies story elements of Thief, if they'd pulled it off successfully. Instead it just makes you realize what you're missing. The graphics are bland, all the NPCs look the same, and the performance is terrible even on modern hardware. There are smaller studios that have produced much better looking games with far fewer resources. The worst part though is there's no challenge, you have to artificially make it harder for yourself. Some of the mechanics are interesting, but the gameplay has no depth so they quickly becomes boring.
This could have been a good game if you moved twice as fast, they canned the lame teleporting attacks, fixed the bugs with warping through barriers thanks to that teleporting, fixed the bugs with your gun freezing, dropped the pseudo-rpg elements that have no place in this type of game, and implemented a proper save system. In fact, a proper save system would have alleviated the frustration of some the other problems, but sadly forcing players to waste valuable time replaying large sections because of a bad checkpoint, bug or over adventurous exploration is cancer of contemporary misguided game design.
To call this game mediocre would be giving it too much credit. It had some nice combat animations, and that's all. The story is forgettable. The combat is unchallenging and as much fun as cow clicker. The graphics are average. The world is small, uninteresting and full of all that boring junk marketing teams demand be in modern games, like climbable towers and endless worthless collectables. Nearly all the "missions" are the same thing over and over. The nemesis system talked about so much quickly becomes an annoyance.
This game is like a bad steak. You're hungry. The smell of cooking fills you with anticipation. It looks great on the plate. You cut a piece, hmmm doesn't feel quite right. You put the piece in your mouth and ugh no thanks. The setting of the game is appealing, but the combat meat of the game is bland, not cooked properly and profoundly unenjoyable. Disappointing.
This is an old but intriguing game. Yeah, the puzzles aren't hard and it can be a bit annoying to control, there's no volume control, resolution is fixed and the over-acting is cringeworthy, but the unique setting and atmosphere makes up for the defects. Given I bought the game for under a dollar I felt it was more than worth my money and time for the experience.
I loved the ideas behind Shadwen, on paper. Unfortunately in practice they don't work. The default pause state and rewind feature serves to remove the tension that makes stealth games enjoyable, and it destroys world building narrative. I had thought the orphan would give strong motivation for a pacifist style of play, but the reality is it turns the game into one long tedious escort mission. The game doesn't work, even before we get to the broken mechanics. The AI is one of the worst I have ever experienced. The world and level design is absurd, with trees growing indoors, wooden platforms sprinkled around randomly. It feels extremely contrived and gamey. The crafting system is mostly pointless, existing only to justify looting. The limited abilities of your character is frustrating, everything is reliant on this absurd grappling hook on a bungee. You can jump around like spiderman but you can't simply throw an object. Credit to the developers for trying to do something original, but sadly it simply doesn't come together into an enjoyable game.
I have read a lot of opinion negative and positive about this game, and at times I have agreed with both. I've finally fallen on the side of it being a good game, but it wasn't easy. The first ten hours of this game are brutally hard, hard enough that at times I've quit and felt like I can go nowhere and do nothing. I'm fine with it being hard, but the controls do feel sloppy and watching meters and your opponent in the middle of battle is difficult. It takes a bit of effort to get a sense of those things without watching them. I stuck with it and now the game has really opened up. It feels so satisfying now. I feel confident of exploring, getting quests done, approaching enemies and being able to handle them. You can never let your guard down which is good. The game really does give you a great sense of scale and adventure. This is a big game, and it doesn't lose anything by being so big. The quests are well designed, and even the simple fetch stuff is given a reasonable context. I am disappointed the trainers don't give you a cool training dialog when you learn skills though, like PB games of the past. It's a little thing, but it added so much to those games.
NEO Scavenger is a lot of fun and addictive. Unfortunately the simple brilliance of the core game is let down by immature game design reflected in the terrible UI, reliance on Flash and cheap and lazy permadeath mechanic. You can work around permadeath by regularly backing up and manually restoring temporary game files and the game doesn't lose anything.
The Beginner's Guide is an anti-game. It's a meaningless collection of incoherent junk, with no real gameplay, into which the player is duped into projecting significance that doesn't exist through a bogus story. It's literally a joke on pretentiousness, and as such it's very clever and worth 11/10. However, I'm giving it a 0 because it's a joke, not a game. Now go read all the "deep and meaningful" reviews and have a laugh.
The plot has no depth to it at all, which probably explains the unrewarding ending which consists of a couple of vague slides. What's to show if no story has been told? There's no explanation of anything in the game, apart from the intro sequence. The final encounter, while predictable, makes no sense at all because all you've done is return things to their previous status-quo. How does help you at all? Combat in virtually all encounters consists of sidestep-turn-attack over and over again. You can beat the strongest enemy with a butter knife with this simple tactic, and not get scratched. When it's not like this you're typically blocked in or surrounded, but that's usually avoidable. The end consequence is that all your character development is largely meaningless, because you either win easily or you're heavily dependent on the RNG in a battle of attrition. All it does is speed up your victory or slow down your death. I'm not sure if this is an innate flaw of the grid based mechanics of the genre, or this game simply lacks the gameplay depth of its genre forbears. I suspect the latter. The character classes felt very unbalanced in respect to available pickups. Ranged weapons felt too weak, and considering the chore that was spellcasting it was also relatively underpowered. I also barely used alchemy at all, in fact the game would have been better without it completely. You don't need to use any potions in this game, it's just there because it's expected. Solving puzzles and finding secrets was the most enjoyable part of the game, and the giant spiders were the most arachnophobia triggering of any game I've played. While I can't say that I didn't have fun with it, it's hard to recommend. Put another way, I don't feel like I wasted my $5 but I won't be buying the sequel.
I read the review of CoolDadTx, and while I think a lot of his complaints are valid, I don't see them as terribly as he does. It makes sense to me that there was a fairly broad mix of enemies, and that taking out the mages and ranged enemies first is a logical tactic. Tactical positioning and timing is important, knowing when to use special moves matter, having retreat avenues or preparing beforehand matters. This game is a long way from being the worst I've played combat wise, it forces you to think tactically rather than button mash. I like games where you can roam around and explore, there's plenty of unique and interesting quests, and the characters have well... character, and this game provides that. It doesn't take itself too seriously, provides plenty of humor, and the ending was satisfying. It's not without its problems, and there are many minor annoyances, but overall it was a good experience.
It has some worthwhile moments, but it never reaches the heights of its predecessors and I never felt invested in the story. I found the missions a lot more enjoyable than navigating around the 'city' with its lifeless inhabitants. I feel it would have been a better game if they'd dropped that part completely and concentrated on creating more interesting missions like in the original.
I know what you're thinking, the game is probably bad but hey it costs virtually nothing on a sale right? Wrong! Not only is the game is not worth it at 50 cents, every moment you spend on this terrible game is time taken away from a good game. If you value your time, don't waste it on this garbage.
I find it difficult to accept many of the positive reviews made here for this game. In all honestly, you could barely call it a game at all. It's more like an interactive story in the vein of Dear Esther than a game. It's boring and predictable, the controls are awful and the choices are superficial. It's about as horrific as ordering neopolitan icecream and discovering they gave you all strawberry. Do not buy even on sale.
DRM issues aside, it's a tiny crippled game that doesn't game close to measuring up to its predecessors. Hopefully the failure of this game will be a watershed moment in gaming history.
People have far too romantic a view of games depending on the source, or having been an early supporter of the game pre-release are unwilling to look at it with a truly critical eye. As a marketing exercise it's been fantastically successful, but as a game it fails miserably. It is no better than a slot machine. Yes, there is some strategy and tactics involved that improve your odds, but they're so outweighed by random circumstance as to be virtually pointless, it's like buying two lottery tickets instead of one. It needs to be fixed and that won't happen as long as people are willing to put a smiley face on any old rubbish.
I am a fan of city builder, transport style games and I feel I have to warn similar fans against buying this game. It's crude and simplistic in the extreme. You'll never get the feeling of building a COHESIVE transport system, it's all stick a token bus stop there and run a tram over there without any allowing for any intelligent approach. Sure, ad-hoc stupidity might be how urban transport systems are planned and run in the real world (where I live anyway), but people play these games to do better than the real world. There's no control over schedules, no allowance for interchange, no way to see where people need to travel apart from vague color scheme. Route building is fundamentally broken. For example vehicles can't return down the same line without a loop, you can't get vehicles to use the same stop twice unless it's closing the loop, you can't place stations diagonally, you can create tram and train lines, but not bus lanes or roads, why? The cities themselves are tiny, the maps look like they were copied from SimCity 1. If you strip away the graphics, the basic game might be something you could expect from 20 year old freeware, it's so inferior to other older games of the genre it's not funny and a long way away from the sophisticated transport game it sells itself as. No doubt they had dozens of people working on cute graphics and a single intern working on the actual game engine, they don't appear know the meaning of the word "sandbox" either. Given you can't actually do anything in this game to fulfill your inner urban planner, the game essentially boils down to ticking off popup tasks which becomes unbelievably boring very quickly. I tried... but it's a dumb game. Do not waste your money.
I picked this up ages ago on a steam sale after checking the reviews here. Naturally in my enthusiasm for a bargain I ignored the negative comments. It couldn't be that bad, these people are just whingers I thought. What a fool I was. Just in case it's popped up again for $5 and you're wondering if its worth a cup of coffee, listen to the poor reviews. Yes, this game is aesthetically nice but the fact is the controls are teeth jarringly bad even with a lot of tweaking and the perspective is obstructive. You'll discover what a horrible mistake you made literally within 30 seconds of installation.
