Game Reviews

There is a lot to Sunless Sea but I eventually got to the point where booting up the game just doesn't cut it anymore. I decided to move on to trying and couple of other games. I wasn't happy. Papers, Please is a game where you stamp people's passports before they enter into the country. That's it. I understand that it is a game and there are a lot of things that can happen each day but the job is just that - a job. I did not find enjoyment in checking every nook and cranny of everyone's papers for a mistake when there was a deadline. I don't like to be rushed. And that is the point of the game. They rush you and make you feel the dread of playing the game. If Spec Ops taught me anything: there is no choice, there is no reason to play. I played until I failed on the 4th day and that was it. I had no urge to keep playing. Everspace is another game that looked interesting. I really loved FTL and people recommended this game for its rogue-like appe...

Game Month Reviews   Out There : 4 hours 80% complete (alternate endings) C- Rogue Legacy : 15 hours 95% complete (skill) A- Sunless Sea : 30 hours 95% complete (new game+) A Papers, Please 30 minutes 10% complete (no fun) F Everspace 1 hour 10% complete (no fun) F Owlboy 8 hours 90% complete (secrets) A Ori and the Blind Forest 10 hours 95% complete (secrets) A+ Abzu 30 minutes 25% complete (technical issues) C   Dungeons of Dredmor 15 hours 60% complete (not balanced) C+ Hyper DBZ Champ 2 hours 25% "complete" (skill) C Child of Light 8 hours 60% complete (technical issues) B Cave Story 7 hours 80% complete (secrets) B- What Remains of Eldritch Finch 3 hours 95% complete (secrets) B- Brigador 15 hours 60% complete (side-missions) A Botanicula 4 hours 95% complete (secrets) B+ Dead Cells 10 hours 90% complete (skill) A Final Fantasy 5 20 hours 60% complete (boredom) C+ Stanley Parable 2 hours 80% complete (secrets) B+ Inside 4 hours 80% com...

A lot of people have been praising the game Inside for awhile now. I've heard it was challenging. I've heard it was weird. I've heard it had mature tones. A lot of people compare it to Limbo and they would be right to do so. The developers who made Limbo in 2010 made Inside in 2016. As you can tell from looking at the game, they removed the black layover and added a 3D graphics interface. I once heard a man refusing to play Limbo because of the main character's death sequences. If that bothered you, then seeing a boy failing in their more recent game is going to be where you draw the line. The game is just shy of 4 hours . It is short and divided up into different portions. The world is filled with a ton of nonsensical sci-fi elements that defy what we would call our modern reality. The first act was thrilling when most of your gameplay relies on hide-and-seek with opposing forces. There is a ton of tense moments as you run for your life through the woods...

I know The Stanley Parable is really short. Yes, I know I should have played it when it was first released in October 2013. The game's retail price is $15. That's insane! You would have wait for some sort of Humble Bundle or Steam sale when it's 80% off. That's the only way I could justify anyone buying a game that only lasts 2 hours . You heard me. This game is practically the same length of the demo, which I should also state is different than the actual game. Oh, you want to know what I think of the game? The game is a barrel of laughs. The narrator is charming and the game has so many things that keep you on your toes. I only found 14 endings. There are actually quite a few interesting secrets and endings that I had to discover via Youtube. Take Maxtasy's game videos. I didn't even know you could break the Portal puzzle. That was insane when I watched it. The broom closet was a personal favorite of mine. You just can't get the same experie...

Ok. I might be cheating a little bit here. I have fond memories as a kid playing Final Fantasy 4 and Final Fantasy 6 on the SNES. I remember replaying them when I was in college through an emulator. The one thing I have yet to do is play the others. I have attempted the FF7 Demo but the graphics made me cringe. It reminded me why I didn't bother going back and replaying my "family's RV trip across the United States savior" Chrono Cross. Many people say Final Fantasy 8 is a disaster and I know of one guy personally who says Final Fantasy 9 is his favorite game of all time. But what about Final Fantasy 5 ? Well... let's just say I made an attempt. The fifth edition of the saga played around with the class trees. You take "jobs" and level them up. Then later in the game you can try different jobs to make unique hybrid systems. The story was interesting enough. They developed some sort of dual-world story between humans and monsters. But I didn...

This is a game people have been recommending for having a fun challenging indie game rogue-like experience. Just by watching the preview of the game made me interested. It definitely requires a controller and a lot of patience. For the first five hours Dead Cells was a learning experience. You will die a lot. People say the game is hard like Dark Souls but interesting like Rogue Legacy . I will have to say that I made a lot of stupid assumptions and mistakes. Let me list some of them. You will not "level up" your base stats. You can build up your health, weapon damage, or skill in capsules throughout the levels. You can unlock and then build the core damage of those items with kill points. Honestly, leveling anything up over +5% damage is kind of a waste since it requires 50 instead of 10 points. You can find the various blueprints off specific types of enemies. My biggest regret is not paying attention to what you are picking up. Each weapon or skill you pick up ...

I know I'm not going to spell this right. Botanical Binocular Botanicula is a game that has been on the market since 2012. It is usually $10 but the Humble Bundle store had it marked 75% off down to a couple dollars. You may have never heard of Amanita Design or their Samorost series. You may remember a game that I played several years back: Machinarium . I was hoping more of the same from their most recent game. I... well... let's just say the game is weird. The game starts off easy enough. You don't need a controller or your keyboard. In fact, everything is point and click. The amount of space you have to explore to identify the problems and the solutions get larger the further in you play. The game is cute and easy to follow. There are a lot of things that help define the "tree universe" as I'm calling it. Plenty of things to interact with for sure. The game might only take you 4 to 5 hours but can be completed without using a walkthrough. Do...

Brigador is a game that has been on my list for a long time. It came out in October 2015. There was a brief update in 2016 and the expansion Brigador: Up-Armored Edition came out just this last month June 2017. When I was playing Mechwarrior Online, word came out of a game much like MechCommander or the SNES version Mechwarrior 3050 (not to be confused with the first-person perspective game that also came out on the SNES). To me it looked like a really cheap version of the high-paced game MechAssault. For roughly $20, or more recently $12 in Humble Bundle or Steam sales, the game didn't really appeal to me. Boy was I wrong. My first impressions of the game was rather weak.. The first 16 missions are all part of the tutorial. 4 Missions exploring how the 3 types of vehicles work and another 4 (added in the expansion) using one of the 3 in the storyline. 22 regular missions challenge your skill in using one of four pre-select vehicles. These missions really make you...

There has been a few games that were released in the past years coined as "walking simulators." You might know a few of them: Firewatch, Dear Esther, Gone Home, The Novelist. One of them that stuck out in my mind is What Returns Remains of Elders Eldrich Eldritch Furns ... *cough* What Remains of Eldritch Finch. Ok, so I don't remember the title of the game real well. What I do know is that these types of games tend to be heavy with the narration and really short. Negatives: The game made me motion sick. It suffered the same problems as Talos Principle and The Witness: really low frame-of-view (around 50 when 90 should be minimum), head bobbing, no cursor (which was added), and fps drops. That wasn't much of a problem since I finished the game in under 3 hours . I enjoyed much of the story but they delved into a lot of mature themes. They did their best to present people's deaths in a whimsical and more metaphorical way through the eyes of each p...

This is a game that a lot of people were talking about but didn't have a lot of reviews. Like many indie games, a guy spent 5 years on this little gem before releasing it in 2004. Wait, did I see that date right? Right, Right. It was released on the Wii in 2004. I don't think a lot of people realized this game even existed until it was re-released through Steam in 2011. Not counting the Cave Story 3D version released on Nintendo's 3DS, this was actually the first time I heard of Cave Story coming out with a remastered version. The new Cave Story+ adds holiday themes (glorified mod themes) and music (can be switched between old, remastered, and new). My biggest fear was that the game wouldn't be enjoyable. Many games around that era were really difficult and unfair . Platforming could be stressful at times and many of the bosses were unbeatable on your first attempt. To be honest, I found the bosses were at the right level of difficulty where they could be def...

Child of Light was released in 2014. It was one of those indie games that came out alongside (well, a little after) Dust: An Elysian Tail . I never got around to it because I didn't feel like enough people reviewed it. Then my brother bought it and told me to try it out. I was able to play it for some time but I had to stop due to technical issues. It had to be my dual-core. It caused me issues for Shadow of Mordor and Dragon Age as well. The game just didn't stop slugging along. I tried a lot of neat tricks that may or may not have helped the game move smoother. I modified my virtual memory to help with my 4GB of RAM. I tried disconnecting to the Internet incase Uplay was malfunctioning. I changed my Nvidia Control Panel to force running the GPU with the executable file. Even changing the game's resolution didn't seem to effect performance. I managed to Chapter 5 (about half-way) in under 10 hours . That's when I decided enough was enough. On the plus ...

Hyper DBZ Champion Edition is a fan-made game using MUGEN. I wasn't expecting a game like this to come out. I expected something like this: Card Sagas Wars to come out 10 years ago. I know of the SNES game Dragonball Z: Hyper Dimension that I played for some time with my nephew. I know of the My Little Pony: Fighting is Magic Tribute Edition fan game that came out about 3 years ago. So I figured, "Sure. Why not?" I'm not going to say Hyper DBZ Champ was bad. I'm going to say it met all of my expectations of a fighting game. It's always rough learning move sets. I'm terrible when it comes to reflexes in a fast pace game like this. The good news is you can lower the difficulty and game speed to your liking. It is nice to have 9 characters to choose from and special attacks that don't require a lot of effort to pull off. It removes the awkward flight sequences from the SNES version and adds a huge variety of cinematic sequences. Whether or not...

This week is my week off from work. You know what that means? Music. Movies. Games... well, if I can find any. I did play quite a bit in the previous weeks. Let's see what I can't scrounge up. Dungeons of Dredmor The game is simplistic in design. For a couple dollars, you can get this dungeon crawler filled with tons of abilities. That's half the fun, right? Well, not in this game. Pretty much everything in this game is revolved around playing with all the abilities on the first few levels. Then you die and try something else. The problem is you aren't exactly supposed to beat the game. If you somehow live long enough past the first 3 levels, the game turns into a slog of a nightmare. The game gets repetitive and monotonous. Although you have a small pocket dimension (like in Chrono Trigger) to move around and lay down goods, your inventory gets pretty tight when trying to craft. If you want to craft anything meanwhile , you have...

Humble Bundle came out with a special "sea" theme package. In it was this little game called: Abzu . I hesitate to call it a game. The average playtime is right around 90 minutes to 2 hours. It is one of those "walking simulators" like Firewatch where you just move around and interact with things. The feeling of controlling a character makes the game less than a movie and more interactive like a game. Though you could probably find an online webstream of the game on Youtube or Twitch. I played through maybe the first 30 minutes and... well... I didn't like it. The controls weren't tight, the camera was in the way, there wasn't an option for first person or VR support as far as I could tell, the game stuttered rather badly (probably because it wasn't optimized for my crazy setup), and it froze during one of the main cinematic moments (probably because I didn't find all three cameras before moving to the next area). I fully support th...

It is currently E3 2017 and... there isn't much to see. You got a hat-throwing plumber in Mario Odyssey, the never-ending Skyrim, and a couple of Metroid games. I guess an HD remake of Shadow of the Colossus is something. But E3 also came out with the announcement of sequels like Ori and the Will of the Wisps. That was my signal to try out the original definitive version of Ori and the Blind Forest. How'd it fair? The game is relatively short. I must have completed it in about 10 hours. The difficulty was tough but fair. I think certain areas where you had to perform consecutive highly-skilled platforming moves without saving made it much harder to complete. You can count about 100 of my deaths to those sections, maybe another 50 in the ending sequence. The expansion added a couple of new areas that might have been more beneficial to me if I didn't reach the ending credits first. At least the fast travel between safe points made the game a little more enjoyabl...

Owlboy came out of left field for me. It was a game that was under development for 9 years and it probably took me that many hours to beat it. It was a lovely game that turned your expectations of your stereotypical adventure game upside down. The animation was fluid and the music was splendid. The lore was deep and would take a normal person some time alone with their thoughts to figure out the actual history of the game. I honestly didn't have much negative to say about the game. I enjoyed it quite a bit. My only problem was that there wasn't a quick way to get from dungeon to dungeon. If you reached the end of one place without finding the lost coins you were searching for, you had to backtrack through the whole dungeon. Some areas were pretty challenging but not beyond reason. If you really wanted to collect every coin and complete 100% through the ridiculous cannon challenge for the rare cloak that sits on the rack of the buccaneer shop then be my guest. The ...

Another batch of games to try out. People have mentioned how FTL-like this one game could be. Was it? Sunless Sea Positives: The setting of the game is very interesting: you are on a boat... that's about it. You have to venture to all sorts of areas of unknown to discover whatever goal you are seeking, whether it be figuring out what happened to your father or trying to buy a house and retire. Although the game can be unsettling sometimes or even downright depressing, the atmosphere sets the right tone with what type of game you are playing. There is a right balance between keeping the lights on so you don't get terrified or preserving fuel by traveling in the dark. Your crew will get hungry but you can always try and find alternative ways to eat through gathering the creatures of the deep or dining with strange characters on tiny islands. Chartering each location you visit nets you enough cash for the fuel you spent and developing a trade route for about anything...

Rogue Legacy came out of left field. I had no idea what I was going to encounter. I ran into a post the other day with a guy who recommended this game for its randomly generated maps and characters. What did I think of it? Rogue Legacy Positives: You might be doing essentially the same thing hacking and slashing your way through a castle but the fun part is that it is a new experience everytime you pass those gates. Your character will be different. He or (yes even) she will be one of a dozen classes, have traits with about 100 possibilities, use abilities from a pool of about 20, and can be equipped with different weapons and runes to improve performance. The castle changes everytime you enter so the enemies and mini-bosses will be unique to the experience. The goofy traits might seem detrimental to your goal at first but may actually help you in completing challenges and reach areas otherwise impossible. Negatives: The game is very dependent on your skill. A person mi...

I actually played two games this weekend. Since a lot of people are busy playing Mass Effect: Andromeda or Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I decided to backpedal with a couple of games recommended by a few of my friends. FTL (Faster Than Light) is an awesome space combat adventure game where the majority of what you do depends on the roll of the dice. Will your decision come out positive or negative? Will you be able to survive with the consequences. So when someone told me that there is a game out there that does the same thing I figured I would give it a shot. What did I think? Out There Positives: The game is polished. The artwork is nicely drawn and easy on the eyes. The interface is actually well thought out. Finding a way to balance between keeping your fuel, oxygen, and hull levels makes the game a challenge. Learning an alien language is a nice touch. Finding new ships in outer space is cool. The random encounters and the amount of lore put into the game makes the who...