Category: Completed

Magicite (Completed)
by Chezni

 

Magicite First Impression

Upon beating Magicite, I experienced the same hollowing feeling that grasps the heart of any gamer upon the completion of a roguelike. It is an emptiness that creeps in and takes over, instilling upon the player the realization that the very thing they had been trying to achieve so hard–completion of the game–was in fact, not what they were enjoying so much. It is the survival in a roguelike that brings joy. It is the unexpected that brings happiness. It is the ability to push yourself and your character a couple inches further into an unyielding world of death and mystery that brings accomplishment. “Winning” a roguelike takes all of this away and simply replaces the experience with a feeling of “been here, done this,” which is by no means the fault of Magicite or any roguelike for that matter, but was nonetheless my feeling at Magicite’s end.

 

 

Magicite, unfortunately, will be the first game that I place in a lower Tier after completing the game than when I initially rated it in my first impression. It is still worthy of Tier 2, but as I played the game, a lot of the promised mystery unfolded in a less-than-ideal manner. Mechanical balance of the game became questionable. Class distinction grew less defined. Exploratory cleverness no longer seemed to be rewarded in the face of safe consistency. Probably one of the worst disappointments was the crafting, which seemed to hold so much promise, but in the end fell flat. By the time I wrote my First Impression review, I was under the delusion that I had only scratched the surface of the potential crafting recipes, when in fact I had completely exhausted them save for two of them, resulting in crafting feeling rather pointless and simply as a method of “using stuff to get stuff.”

 

 

Do I regret playing Magicite? No, not at all. Until its defeat, it proved to be a fun game that provided many hours of diversion. Until I had overcame its challenge, it was enjoyable to find the ways to press stats, skills and equipment as hard as I could into my favor, ultimately resulting in success. It is just that after a more comprehensive inspection of the game’s elements, questionable balance and underutilized mechanics, it no longer entirely deserves my previous acclaim. If you have some time to kill, I would still recommend it–it just must be understood that the longevity of its value or quality is not assured.

Steam Link

 

Savant – Ascent (Completed)
by Chezni

DUB THE WUB. Don’t blink or your might miss it, it’s Savant – Ascent!

 

Savant – Ascent is a rockin’ game that comes out of the gate swinging. You play the role of a V for Vendetta cosplayer (the Savant?) who gets blown out of his wizard’s tower after some kind of magical sphere goes haywire. The Savant wastes no time bursting right back into his tower, fights his way up a crazy elevator ride and destroys the magical orb and the evil glitch Vario that is possessing it. That’s it–the game ends. No, I’m not kidding. Even as a beginner, it’ll take you about 30 minutes to play from start to finish. So you might be wondering, “Chezni, why on Earth did you put this in Tier 1?” Well, truly I have spent $2 and 30 minutes of my life doing much less valuable things and for those 30 minutes you feel like a badass. So just what do you get for those 30 minutes?


 

Combat in the game involves blasting incoming enemies in a radius around you, using the analog stick (or mouse). Special enemies drop pieces of a CD which grant momentary invulnerability when you pick them up. You can hop between one of two sections on each level to avoid attacks and death is met with the acquisition of new powerups and songs in the form of completed CDs that you’ve picked up and yes, the music is primarily dubstep. It’s not the most amazing dubstep that I’ve ever heard (I tend to listen to it more than a person of my age and standing probably should) but I must admit that it’s the first time I’ve played a game that used it as its primary soundtrack and it was pretty fun to rock out to it while blasting some drones away.

 

The drones themselves spill in perfectly–first you get the common quarter notes (ones that move every beat) but then you get the more durable half-notes. I was disappointed that this is where the music-synced baddies stopped since it really made the game feel cohesive to see them moving in beat, but there are only 4 enemy types in the game. Aside from the music though, the graphics are quick and crisp and fun to look at.

 

 

True, there’s an endless mode, a time attack mode a Vario mode–but really, there’s no need to play the game after you beat it. You’ve already seen everything by then and it’s just a rehash of what was already extremely light content. I think if I were to find an apt comparison, this game is like the chocolate mint on your pillow at a hotel. No, not wholesome, lasting or even that impressionable in any way but you’re still going to eat it. It’s a freaking chocolate mint, how can you resist it? Admittedly if you don’t like to dub the wub (or if you don’t like chocolate mints if you’re stuck in the metaphor) then you probably won’t like this game. Otherwise, I fully recommend just trying this out for a bit–it really won’t take you that long either way.

Steam Link

 

Chrono Trigger (Completed)
by LepcisMagna

It’s Tier One.  I mean, it’s widely accepted that it’s the best RPG for the SNES and one of the best RPGs ever, so what did you expect?  This review is going to be on the short side (Edit: actually, having finished writing this, maybe it won’t), since almost anything I could say has probably been said before.

Chrono Trigger is a time-traveling adventure that seems to start as a cliched “save the princess”, but quickly becomes “save the world” with the help of that self-same princess.  I actually started this game twice.  The first time I got stuck on a fairly tough boss fight (The Golem Twins) and never finished.  About a year later I picked it up again, but had to start from the beginning because I’d forgotten almost everything.  (If you care, my party both times was Crono, Marle, and Ayla until I got to the Black Omen – where I replaced Ayla with another, spoilerific character)  Here are just a few of the many amazing things about Chrono Trigger:

  • The characters are lovable and distinct.  They start to feel like “your” party as you level them up, and they feel like good friends (for me, like the characters in Wheel of Time do).
  • The plot is interesting and sprawling (in a good way).
  • The world slowly opens up as you progress, giving you both a feeling of wonder and excitement and a sense of growth.
  • There are twelve different endings (depending on how you count).  This is the grandfather of what it meant to have a reactive world.  And it did it successfully – unlike many games today that have a “good” and “bad” (and if you’re lucky, a “neutral”) ending.
  • Meaningful choices are represented through action rather than description.  It’s one thing to be sentenced to death because the game asked you if you wanted to steal a guy’s lunch.  It’s quite another to steal that guy’s lunch because it’s an RPG and that’s just what you do – and then have a character in the game call you on it. (though during my second run I was found 100% Not Guilty)
  • The music is fantastic – this is the only game I have ever not gotten tired of the battle music.  I could listen to every track on this soundtrack for a very long time.  And I didn’t even know you could get the SNES to sound like an electric guitar.

In fact, I have only three real complaints – though two are significant.  From least to most bothersome: some of the quests are obtuse (which happens in practically every RPG).  As an example: there was a quest item I needed to place somewhere for 65 million years.  It get stolen, and you need to find it – but there’s no hint of where to look.  In Chrono Trigger’s favor, talking to NPCs in other circumstances is almost always helpful and the game does a great job of using your past knowledge to help you in future areas.

Inventory management is a real problem, though.  It is both difficult to figure out what something does and difficult to manage a quickly-growing list of items that spirals out of control by the end.  There are advantages to having the right equipment in the right places, but you quickly get tired of keeping such an extensive inventory.  Some screens show you item comparisons for each of your characters, but there is no way to equip an item in those screens or to see what special properties an item has.  It’s a small annoyance, but one that comes up frequently enough to merit mention.

The real problem is the combat.  For the first two-thirds of the game, fights are mostly well-balanced.  But as enemies get more and more special abilities, fights become increasingly based on luck rather than skill.  Late in the game, fights are either a chore that poses no real threat or a fight that may very well kill you multiple times with little warning.  The perfect example of this is the final boss, which incorporates all these problems with the combat.  The final boss has 12 stages.  The first nine are trivial and make you wonder why you had to fight them at all (partly due to stat re-use, rather than stat scaling).  The next two are fairly easy, but are a good challenge.  The final boss stage took me an incredibly long time to beat – through very little fault of my own.  On my first run, I spent half an hour doing absolutely no damage – without realizing it.  Worse, the last save point was before the previous two bosses.  Since I was low on items at that point, I needed to fight them again to even have a chance at beating the final boss stage.

I would trace these problems to two sources: first, percentage-based attacks.  There are several enemies (including the last boss stage) that have magical attacks that deal 50% of a characters current HP.  Some are even worse and deal damage equal to your current HP minus one.  Combine one of these enemies with another high damage one, and it’s entirely possible to get wiped out in a single turn before you have a chance to react.  These attacks make you wonder why the late-game bosses don’t just have a minion do that last HP of damage to kill your entire party.

The second source, related to the first, is gimmicky fights.  Some fights that require unusual tactics are fine – Chrono Trigger does a great job of drawing on past experiences to clue you in on how to fight a new enemy, and can give you a few turns to figure out how to fight it….mostly.  There are just a few too many fights where this breaks down – with the last boss stage, there is no indication that attacking two of the three onscreen enemies is entirely counterproductive most of the time.

By far the worst culprit of this is a side-quest boss called the Son of Sun, which will counter any direct hit with a powerful fire attack.  Instead, you are supposed to attack one of the five flames rotating around the boss, and all but the “right” one will cause a similar fire counterattack.  There is no indication or hint for this.  To top it off, you have about fifteen seconds before the boss shuffles the flames and you again have to guess which flame is the “right” one.  It’s entirely a matter of chance, and is incredibly frustrating to fight.  I willingly admit I only beat this boss through save-scumming.

All in all, though, Chrono Trigger is a fantastic game that I’ll likely come back to for New Game+ (and the other eleven endings).  It does many, many things right – things that even modern games have a hard time replicating.  This game is one of those rare confluences of talent, hard work, and a bit of luck that makes for a fantastically good time.

 

Steam link.  Oh how I wish.

You can get it on Android or iOS, or rip your cartridge to play in RetroArch on anything, including Android.

Serious Sam Franchise
by Chezni

Lepcis’s First Impression of SSHD:FE

Lepcis’s First Impression of the SS Franchise

 

As I sat down and took a serious look at the Serious Sam franchise, I couldn’t help but continually think, “What a wreck.” Having read Lepcis’s reviews, I knew what was coming and I wasn’t looking forward to it. You can read the reviews for yourself by using the links above if you like, but one line he wrote sums the whole thing up. “Croteam made 1.5 good Serious Sam games […] and have just been repeating the same game ever since.” I can’t find a better way to describe this mess. There are 9 Serious Sam games loaded in my Steam folder. 2 of them are disjointed outsourced spin-offs. 1 is a terrible sequel. 1 is the original game and 5 are remakes of the original game. Let that sink in. There are 5 remakes of the same game. As much as I dislike the franchise, at least each Call of Duty game has a new Single-Player story (the caveat being that I’ve never really played a COD game). But Serious Sam? Naw, why try? Why use creativity? Just re-hash the same damn thing that achieved pseudo-popularity years ago. I’m not even kidding. Take these 6 games and put them in a pile: 1 is the original game, one is an expansion of the original game, one is an HD remake of the original game, one is an HD remake of the expansion of the original game, 1 is an unfinished fan-made remake of the original game and the last is a prequel of the original game that reuses many of the same jokes and monsters. What. The. Hell.

 

In spite of my strong feelings of anger, insult and disgust associated with a company that feels so confident that the stupidity of their intended audience is so intense that the won’t even notice that they’re just buying the same game 6 times, I can’t really say anything that Lepcis hasn’t said already. So I’ll try not to. What follows instead is a brief comparison of one game to another built up from the original seed of the first Serious Sam game–short and sweet. You’ll still be able to find the Tier that I believe the game belongs to but I will forego the usual lengthy explanation. Without further ado, let’s get into the excrement deluge that is the Serious Sam series.

 

Serious Sam Classic: The First Encounter: Tier 3

Floaty. Poor level design exasperated by bland enemy AI and non-existent enemy placement due to “teleport-spawning” enemies. Strategy against every enemy is exactly the same–kite and shoot. Instead of quality you get quantity–hoards of enemies, but none of them create a need for intelligent play since they die as fast as they teleport in. Might as well be a point-and-click adventure. Enemy visual design is creative and unique and the game is very fast paced with relative smoothness. Sam has a few interesting one-liners that are cringy, but that’s the point.  Large levels, but no motivation to explore them and little meaningful player interaction with them while fighting enemies due to simplistic designs and teleport-spawning. No need to even fight enemies either, just run through the levels until the developers force you to fight a hoard through use of a locked door or raised wall because their game isn’t well-developed enough otherwise to create meaningful confrontation between the player and enemies otherwise. For its time, mediocre. Nowadays, it’s forgettable. The original Timesplitters, a game with smaller worlds and fewer enemies, was more fun to play, and it came out a year before this.

 

Serious Sam Classic: The Second Encounter: Tier 2

A huge improvement over the original. Yes, it uses the same engine, assets, monsters etc. The biggest difference is that the level design in this blows the first’s out of the water. There are far fewer enemies that just teleport-spawn out of nowhere. Level designs create meaningful play without boxing the player in all the time and forcing them to fight arena style. When you are boxed in, it feels acceptable and isn’t overdone. Level pacing feels much better as well, not to mention more interesting looking. It just goes to show you, it’s not how pretty your graphics are, or how many enemies you’ve designed–it’s how you use them.

 

Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter: Tier 2

A direct remake but many improvements over the original. Floatiness is nearly gone. Weapon animations are more believable (there actually is animation for the pistol now). AI is still bland and arena fighting problem still exists. Teleport-spawning still exists, and level design is still relatively poor. Teleport-spawning has been altered so that enemies no longer fall into cliffs from the sky and clip to solid ground. Gone is the headless bomber riding the bull monster (or at least I didn’t see him). You can still just run through the level fighting a minimal amount of enemies. Barely nets T2, but overall just feels better.

 

 

Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter: Tier 2

Once again, a strong improvement over the First Encounter. Contains much more content. Seems to contain several campaigns (including the levels from FE) as well as a survival mode. Makes me wonder why they didn’t just release FE and SE as one game. Biggest complaint is that they’re just recycling the old Sam voice clips, which I didn’t think were that great to begin with. He barely passes as being some sort of troll or ogre–definitely doesn’t pass off as being human. Otherwise, this is the strongest one yet. Definitely would suggest just playing this one and skipping the previous 3. They are, after all, just the same game repeated.

 

Serious Sam Classic: Revolution: Tier 3

Sorry, I know I said I wouldn’t repeat what Lepcis said, but I have to for this. Why does this exist? Just, why? Literally another remake of FE and SE, only with the original textures and physics.  Does Croteam think it’s really worth it sell this fan project? The only advantage to this existing at all is that the old mods that worked with the SS Classics games will work with this since it it’s got the same framework. Otherwise, this is just waste of space. It runs smoother than the Classics versions and that’s about it. It’s not even finished. Don’t even waste your time.

 

Serious Sam 2: Tier 3

Identity of the game is completely confused. You’d think that a game where you ride dinosaurs, shoot giant monsters and have a sexy blue-skinned assistant would be awesome but… it’s not. Not really. The pacing of the game is severely dropped from previous installments. Enemies are completely new and feel very different from before; the staple headless monster is replaced by a sort of space-ogre. I’ll give them one thing, and that’s that they tried something new. I don’t know if it was a step in the wrong direction, but I do know it just isn’t implemented well. It feels like a strange mix between Halo and Banjo Kazooie, but not in a good way.

 

Serious Sam 3: BFE: Tier 2

Once you get past the familiar enemies and repeated jokes from the previous installments, this one’s not that bad. I think I’d still rather play SS HD SE, but mechanically speaking this is the stronger title. Finally, there’s a new VA for Sam in a game that also contains the headless monsters. Not a fan of the instant-kill melee attack that Sam always possesses, but DOOM needs to take a leaf out of BFE’s book–you’re not invulnerable while you do it and health doesn’t spurt out of an enemy when you kill them with it, meaning that there’s a bit more strategy to it (but only a bit). I approve of infinite handgun bullets–it allows the devs to create levels that aren’t cluttered with ammo constantly, and it makes the bullets you get for the other weapons a bit more meaningful, since you’re expected early on to use the handgun quite a bit. Sam talks a bit more but isn’t quite as cringy–the VA still sounds like an ogre but it’s a little cleaner so it’s easier on the ears. Level design is pretty solid with plenty of secrets. Enemies have been re-balanced in meaningful ways. For example, the headless bombers now flinch when you shoot them, and explode on the second shot, meaning that you can point blank shoot one that is right next to you and still have time to back away before the final exploding shot. I no longer feel like the devs are just throwing swarms of enemies at you pointlessly–enemies are well-placed, don’t teleport-spawn in and make the levels fun.

 

Serious Sam: The Random Encounter: Tier 3 (Completed)

I beat this one a while back and… it just is not worth it. It’s buggy as hell but that’s not even the worst of it. It passes off as a flash game, but I’ve played flash games that are better. The first time you play, it might take you 2 hours to beat. If you knew what you were doing, it would probably take less than an hour. Guns and enemies are not really balanced, and the niches that each gun is supposed to fill is obsolete in the face of the need for constant AOE DPS. There’s a few lame jokes that might get a small “guffaw,” here and there but nothing that Duke Nukem’s or Shadow Warrior’s humor doesn’t put to shame. It barely escapes Tier 4 because I like the concept of the game–it’s just that this is a horrible representation of it. If you want to know something weird, I met one of the guys who worked on this game at PAX. The game he was advertising at the convention wasn’t that great either.  I felt a little embarrassed for him.

 

Serious Sam Double D XXL: Tier 4

Nope. I’m not playing this game. The game’s title, immediate sexualization of your female sidekick and the way that Sam portrait looks like a pile of shit tells me everything I need to know about this game–but even then, I was willing to give it a go. Surprisingly, it was the screenshot below that was the final nail in the coffin. “My programmers wanted me to remind you that instant enemy spawning is totally acceptable. That’s the way things are supposed to work.” Nope. Just because you have one of your characters blatantly state that I’m supposed to treat a big pile of steaming excrement as something acceptable does not mean that I’ll do so–so when you tell me that teleport-spawning enemies is how “things are supposed to work,” then I’m even less inclined to accept it. Because you’re too ignorant to understand it Mr. Dev, I’ll spell it out for you. Teleport-spawning enemies changes the rules of the game in a bad way. A few enemies teleport-spawning is sometimes ok. A certain kind of enemy who’s calling card is to teleport-spawn is also ok. However, when all enemies can teleport spawn, you’re building your game’s “difficulty” based upon lies, with no reasonable counterplay. You are telling the player one thing, and then doing another. Your player can receive input visually and audibly that “you cleared out this room” which becomes false when he gets killed from behind by a hoard that immediately spawns in. There is no reasonable counterplay, since you did nothing to communicate to the player that there was danger. You’re too lazy to make a game that gives the player meaningful input so instead you design a game that requires prior knowledge. It’s the equivalent of blindfolding someone and then punching them in the face and when they don’t block it you tell them “well this is how it’s supposed to work.” Just because you told them you were going to do it does not somehow make it better. If you’re reading this, just leave this piece of refuse be and move on to something, anything more meaningful. It won’t be hard at all to find.

 

LIMBO (Completed)
by Chezni

Ever eat a good banana? You know, one that tastes great but isn’t too green or too brown? Well, what if after eating that banana and you got to the peel you didn’t stop–you just stuffed the peel in your mouth and kept chewing. Welcome to LIMBO.

 

I’ve made this pretty clear in the past, but in case you missed it, I hate puzzle games. There’s nothing appealing to me about discovering a set of linear 1’s and 0’s that I must adjust the input/output for in order to proceed to the next set of 1’s and 0’s. I also think that most platformers are non-appealing rubbish with a forced mechanic of bland platform traversing and obligatory monster head-stomping. LIMBO, as it so happens, is a puzzle/platform game… and it is AMAZING. For the first half.

 

 

The first swig of LIMBO feels like true and pure exploration of the imagination. It is a set of puzzles that are fresh, simple, non-repetitive and clever. Bear traps, rolling boulders, giant spiders–I never knew what was around each turn and I was eager to see the next challenge. There is never a tutorial  and there never needs to be one. The game uses the D-Pad and two buttons and that’s it. The level designs teach the player exactly what they need to know by building up the player’s knowledge piece-by-piece from what they have previously encountered. The last time I played a Puzzle Platformer this good was when I played Another World for the SNES and I was ready to rejoice the profound similarities. That was until I noticed that I was half-way through the game after only spending an hour playing. I decided it was best just to put in another hour and see how the game ended. That was the where the fall of LIMBO began.

 

 

It was past the half-way point that I began noticing that I was pushing a lot more boxes around to solve my problems. There were no longer neat little tricks and traps. Instead, they were replaced with platforming and switches. There was a neat bit where you climb on the letters “HOTEL” from a building of the same name, but other than that the environments are dull and uninspiring. At the end when the obligatory gravity-switching box-pushing puzzle was the game’s finale, I realized that the second half of LIMBO was filth; relegated in my mind to Tier 3 at best. Sure it’s “done well,” but it’s as invigorating as game of tic-tac-toe. Clever traps are replaced by giant buzz-saws. Mind-controlling leaches are replaced with bland pit-falls. All personality and uniqueness is completely screened from the second leg of the journey to the point where I think I would’ve had a better time just playing through the first part twice.

 

 

 

There’s little else to say beyond this as it’s not a long game. Not even the game’s “story” can redeem the ending. The boy you play as finally meets with a female shadow who stands up when he runs up from a distance and then the screen goes black. No explanation, no closure, just a heaping pile of “Ask me what it means!” The first half of this game is easily Tier 1. Given the entire compilation of the game’s contents though, it barely nets Tier 2.

Steam Link

 

 

 

Legend of Grimrock 2: Grimrockier (Completed)
by LepcisMagna

I might be cheating a bit here.  I’ve played through and beaten Legend of Grimrock 2 long ago.  Well, at least a year and a half.  But writing about it now gives me an excuse to write my first actual review, gush a bit about one of my favorite games, and talk about what makes a good sequel.  And if I haven’t gotten you to listen to what I believe to be one of the best theme songs of all time, well…get to it.  And watch the prologue, while you’re at it.

As for the specifics on the game: It’s a puzzle/grid fighter/exploration game where you are shipwrecked on and must explore an island ruled over by the mysterious Island Master (definitely no D&D overtones there!).  There are 12 distinct ground-level areas, almost all of which have at least one or two floors of dungeon.  All told, there are 34 (well, 33 plus a secret) map sections you will encounter on your quest to solve the mystery of the island.  You travel the island in a party of four, selected from 8 classes and 5 races that allow for such combinations as rat farmer.  Being a rat farmer, by the way, would mean that you level up by eating – and if you eat cheese enough (because you are a rat), you gain stats.

Your only real objective is to solve the mystery of the island, which you think may have something to do with the glowing rocks (no, not those glowing rocks – the other ones) you’ve been picking up.  While finding all the glowing rocks might seem like just a giant fetch quest, the glowing rocks are more incidental to your exploration of the island, and you don’t actually need all of them to finish the game.  Communicating your goals is mostly done through gameplay and the expectation that you are here to play a game – plus a note or two from the mysterious Island Master.  And some talking heads.

Before I get into what I liked, I should probably start with the things I didn’t like – and there’s really only one complaint.  Some of the puzzles are just too difficult.  Thankfully, there’s a website that will prove quite helpful if you have this problem.  This doesn’t knock it from being a perfect game in my book for two reasons: insanely difficult puzzles are part of the charm of puzzle games evocative of the ’90s, and, when you do solve them on your own, you feel like a genius.

A Perfect Sequel

Legend of Grimrock 2 is both a perfect game and a perfect sequel.  Let’s start with what makes it a perfect sequel.  Legend of Grimrock (the first one) was a ten level dungeon crawl.  Grimrock 2 expands on this by making the game about three times as large and adding several new environments.  Between the fantastic art and level design, each area feels new and unique enough that you never get bored – and every inch is packed with secrets, monsters, and items.  It’s this consistently high content density that makes it a good sequel.  Going bigger can often lead to the game feeling emptier – if Portal 2 had any failings, it would be this – but Legend of Grimrock 2 avoids this entirely.

Another problem with sequels is making a second game that’s just more of the first.  Or possibly several games.  While that can be acceptable (or at least tolerated) in a multi-title story, a mechanics-driven game needs a compelling reason to be more than just DLC.  And Legend of Grimrock 2 delivers here as well.  Between vastly improved AI (the first Grimrock had an issue with sidestepping to avoid damage) and a remarkably improved engine that allowed for interconnected maps and external environments, Grimrock 2 took everything Grimrock 1 did, fixed the problems, and made everything else better.  This is especially impressive when you look at how well and tightly-crafted Grimrock 1 felt.

Finally, though a sequel needs to feel different than the first, it also needs to feel like it is part of the same story or world.  While Grimrock 1 was a claustrophobic and grim dungeon crawl, Grimrock 2 is a vast island of high mystery.  But even so, there are times when you are crawling around in catacombs or pyramids in Grimrock 2 that feel unmistakably like Grimrock (even though the actual Mount Grimrock is nowhere to be seen).  There’s a distinct tone shift from the first game, but it keeps enough of it around to still feel like the game I fell in love with – and somehow makes it even better.

A Perfect Game

There aren’t any tutorials in Grimrock 2.  From the first moment, you just do what makes sense realistically and within the confines of the game world rules as you learn them.  There are some signs that give you hints, a few scrolls that teach you how to cast magic spells, and recipes that teach you how to make potions – but all these are incidental.  The primary method of interacting with the game is just WASDQE and the left and right mouse buttons.  When something happens, it’s clear why it happened and what caused it.  Overburdened characters have a snail in their portraits and a darker outline.  Injured characters have a bright red glow and blood stain.  In both cases, you make a distinctly different walking noise to tell you something is wrong.  New mechanics are introduced slowly and deliberately, giving you time to adjust.  You never feel lost or helpless – at least as far as the mechanics go.  Each class is distinct and well-defined, and the skills all have helpful explanations that are there when you need them and ignorable when they aren’t.  All this goes back to giving the player more information and keeping that information helpful – and here at least, everything in Grimrock 2 wants you to succeed.

That isn’t to say the game is mechanically simple or easy.  Far from it – later in the game and on harder difficulties, managing health and attacks while moving can be difficult and fast-paced.  Having a wizard in your party is useful, but requires good management of resources.  The spellcasting system involves drawing patterns in nine runes.  The first spells you learn are simple, one-glyph standards like fireball – but later spells can use all nine (in fact, the one “unfair” enemy requires the use of a nine-rune spell to defeat).  Even better, the runes all have a meaning that can allow you to intuit new spells (and there’s nothing stopping you from trying the hardest spells as soon as you have the stats).  Having an alchemist lets you keep an almost endless supply of potions around as long as you have the know how, so you never truly have to worry about running low on health potions or resurrections.  The best part of all of this is that you don’t need to use a wizard or alchemist or fighter or rogue.  You could go through the game with a party of farmers, if you wanted.

That being said, a party of farmers might be a bad idea – though still doable.  There are no unfixable mistakes – even throwing yourself down a pit can lead to good fortune (and in the case of Chezni, he made a point of throwing himself down every pit he found).  The game rewards exploration in every form, and lets you make mistakes that inconvenience rather than kill you: few things are immediately fatal.

I love Legend of Grimrock 2.  It may be that my review is overly-biased because the combination of exploration, grid-based combat, and dungeon crawling reminds me a lot of D&D, and I love D&D.  But I think you should still give Grimrock and its sequel Grimrock 2 a shot, keeping in mind that it’s a game about mechanics, balance, and that je ne sais quoi that made that second edition of D&D great.

Steam link

Sonic CD (Completed)
by Chezni

When I was little, it took a few weeks of effort to finally crush Sonic CD into the dust. Robotnik defeated, Amy Rose saved, Metal Sonic destroyed–it was a moment of triumph. Put to the wayside, memories of Sonic CD warped and twisted with countless other Sonic titles, to the point where I began to think that my memories of time traveling and racing Metal Sonic were simply a fabrication I had created. When I happened to see “Sonic CD” available on Steam, it finally clicked. This was the Sonic game, my first Sonic game, that I had played 20 years ago. I hadn’t made it up after all. Today, I loaded it up to see just how much my “adult skill” matched up to my 2nd grade form. What took me weeks as a child took me 70 minutes in my living room with an X-Box controller. It was still fun though.


Sonic CD is much like any other game in the series. You run through loops, collect rings, move too fast to know where the heck you are going; the normal stuff. Being no stranger to the 2D Sonic platformers, I think this one is nearer to the top than others. As far as the staple principles of a Sonic platformer, it moves quickly, the levels are relatively interesting and open, and the pace of the game is, well, fast which is good. There are some interesting facets that set it apart though, the biggest of which is time travel. Scattered throughout the levels are signs that point to the future or past. Running by one and picking up enough speed will shoot you through time in the respective direction indicated. This means that each and every level in the game was designed both graphically and mechanically 3 different times, and at many places in the level you can swap between all three (past, present and future). Unfortunately, I’m not sure exactly what my motive for doing so is. Maybe if I was very familiar with the game I would have a preference for which time-period I enjoyed traveling through in a particular level, but because I have no idea what any of the time periods have in store, I just swapped them at random so I could see the different graphics and listen to the changed music.

The music, oddly, is worth mentioning. Sonic has always had pretty decent music, but Sonic CD stands apart in that its music is of a higher quality. Probably having something to do with the fact that it was on a CD and not a cartridge, the music widely ranges from calming to techno to funky. It doesn’t quite have that retro charm that say Sonics 1-3 have, but considering that each of the 3 time periods for each stage have their own music, it’s really interesting to hear how it is remixed to fit the new settings.

Collectively, Sonic CD is a good game and I would recommend it to any Sonic fan. It doesn’t take too long to beat, and even if the game doesn’t click entirely with you, the music is fun to listen to and there are even some nostalgic 90’s Sonic cartoon animations unique to the game that you get to watch. That being said though, the purpose of the time-traveling is a little confusing, and like most Sonic games, if you want the “good” ending, you have to collect the Chaos Emeralds–something that is equally unclear as to how to achieve. While I may not be particularly motivated to uncover all the game’s secrets, I believe the game has merit and belongs in Tier 2.

Steam Link

A Bird Story (Completed)
by Chezni

 

Caw Caw. A Bird Story took me by surprise in that… it is literally a story about a bird. To help you understand, consider this: To the Moon (made by the same guy) was much more than just “going to the moon.” It was a rather emotional ride that made the player face the issue of loss–loss of memories, loss of self, loss of a lifelong love–it was heartbreaking, but it created a real feeling in the player that is not really found or explored that much in the gaming genre. In short, the moon ended up being a much deeper symbol that represented something real. Looking once more back to A Bird Story, it’s a bit of a let down that there was no deeper meaning. You can just take the title at face value–there’s nothing deep or profound here.

The entire story of the game is not completely awful (it helps that the game is only about an hour and a half long) and its told entirely without words, which is interesting. A boy, whose parents are never home lives a lonely sad life–his schoolwork is failing, no one plays with him on the playground–it’s a bit depressing. One day after school, he saves a bird from being attacked by an animal (giant badger?) and nurses it back to health. The bird sort of solves all the boy’s problems–he’s popular on the playground because suddenly he’s “the kid with the bird,” the boy isn’t lonely at home, and he’s motivated in his schoolwork by using the bird as the focus of his studies… but nothing really comes from any of this.

There’s a heavy motif of imagination where you’re not entirely sure if everything you see is real or in the boy’s head. He jumps off a building with an umbrella and floats safely to the ground. He builds a giant paper airplane and sails around the world to floating islands. He’s struck by lightning and crashes. The game never offers the barest hint of an explanation concerning any of these things; you have to make of it what you will through a sheer imagination of your own. I imagined that the bird was a representation of zest for life–a symbol of the boy’s choice to live on in the face of depression in spite of the gloomy circumstances around him. The game deserves non of my theories or explanations though, since it makes no effort on its own to throw any hints or clues to the player.

In a point of strange conflict, a school teacher and veterinarian try to take the bird away from the boy (presumably to nurse it back to health properly) and the boy escapes from them on a giant paper airplane into a storm, where he is struck down by lightning and the bird disappears. Then, with no substantial tension, the bird just reappears. There’s a bit more, but after that the game sort of ends, teasing at the sequel for To the Moon. It’s almost as if the developer was like “Yeah, sorry, I know this kind of had no point… uh, I’ll make the sequel to To The Moon at… some… point.”

In the end, the game had good music, and even though it was kind of a waste of time, it was pleasant enough to not be a total failure, and so I put it in Tier 2. Is it a game? No, not really. It feels more like it should be one of those shorts at the beginning of a Pixar film. You never really play the game; about 80% of the game is just watching sprite-art cutscenes. However, if you’re someone who is very low-key, and just sort of wants to watch a slightly interactive short-story about a boy and his pet, then go for it–in regards to that criteria, even though it’s a bit bland, it’s certainly well done.

Steam Link


Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (Completed)
by Chezni

First Impression

So I sat down over the weekend and finished DM of MM and I can say that it maintains its status as Tier 1 through to the end. I’m not sure if it cusped my mental “favorite games of all time” at any point, but it’s a solid game that even threw a couple curve balls at me that I had not quite experienced in an FP (First-Person) RPG before.

 

 

–Obligatory Spoiler Warning–

 

Overall, the story wasn’t anything to write home about. You play as Serath who is possessed by a demon–near the end you get the customary “good path/evil path” choice which affects minor aspects of the end-game. I, of course, chose the evil path because, (to quote Dark Helmet) “Good is dumb.” That and the evil path came packaged with a sexy demon. I suppose there are those out there who would’ve chose the young and peppy Leanna but frankly when I abandoned her in a prison and she turned into a Lich, I just laughed. Sound cold? It’s probably because you haven’t had to listen to her talk. The Succubus is hilarious by comparison.

 

 

The overarching plot is that Serath is the foretold Dark Messiah, bringer of doom or somewhat. Along the way, forces try to stop you–and I can’t say I blame them… I mean, you are sort of the villain in their eyes, even if you choose the good path. The final conflict comes in the form of a dual with a mighty Necromancer but… let me be real here. The combat–while fun–is not complicated and I won easily just by stun-locking him with my daggers. At the end of the evil path, you can choose to rule the world with your demon father, or with the Succubus that lives in your head. That decision was a no-brainer.

 

 

I’m assuming that there are roughly 4 endings to the game–2 divergent good and evil paths, each with the choice to join your father or not. I only bothered to get the ending where I joined the Succubus, but it was a bit lackluster (I imagine the other endings are likely to follow in suite). Essentially, Serath’s demon father zaps the Succubus, but Serath uses the power of the 7th Dragon’s Skull (it’s a McGuffin) to send his father back to hell. The majority of the cutscene is just your father talking about how he’s immortal and how he’ll seek revenge. It was a let-down, simply because you don’t get to see anything like Serath and the Succubus ruling the world together, or at least them celebrating in some way. Oh well.

 

 

The real fun of the game comes from the levels and their design. The multiple-pathways thing that I mentioned in my first impression maintains itself pretty well through most of the levels and there are enough traps and odd hazards that even though you are never free from the reigns of the plot, it was still fun to jump around to all the nooks and crannies looking for secrets. At about the 25%-75% portion of the game is where it really feels the best. The designers start giving you some pretty cool items including a bow that shoots climbable ropes that you can use throughout the entire game, magical elemental weapons and stat-changing gear. The equipment is a bit sparce, but that just makes what you find all the more unique. Unfortunately though, at about the 75%~100% portion, the game just starts giving you the same stuff that you’ve likely found already, if you had a modicum of curiosity to find some of the game’s secrets.

 

 

I recommend it as a definite pickup if you like FPRGP’s, multiple endings and/or a plot light enough not to get in the way, but existent enough to give purpose for your adventure. I may pick up the game again sometime in the future and do a pure wizard run, or maybe restrict myself from using the healing spell to add extra difficulty. Either way, my memories of this game will remain positive in the future.