by LepcisMagna 
It’s a point-and-click adventure game! I love point-and-click adventure games. I’ve only played the first two Broken Sword games, but they were both pretty consistent and good. Well, except for the goat puzzle. This looks like another solid entry (as far as I can tell) with better animation and higher quality sound. There’s a few quality of life improvements here and there, but it looks like this is another good way to spend a few hours.
by LepcisMagna 
Betrayer is an interesting game. The environment is almost entirely black and white, while enemies and items you can interact with are in red. This aesthetic lends a unique air to the game, but I think it works. As for the plot, you are shipwrecked on a foreign shore sometime in the 1700s and discover that everyone in the fort you come across is dead, with hints of Indian magicks at play. An hour isn’t enough time to really get into this game, but if it keeps the same mood going, I can definitely see myself playing this to the end.
Betrayer seems to strike just the right balance of suspense, mystery, and discovery. From what I read on Steam, it sounds like it drags on a bit as you continue to play. But for now, Tier One.
by LepcisMagna 
I don’t understand why I didn’t buy this sooner. Welcome to “Movie Car Crash: The Game”. Have you ever wished that crashing cars in racing games was more realistic? How about “so realistic it will overheat your computer”? Well, that’s precisely what BeamNG.drive is. Every surface and component of your car is modeled and deformed. This turns the game into a Garry’s Mod of car destruction. And I love it.
Really my only complaint is from the first time I opened up the game. It greeted me in glorious…. 624×441? I changed it to 1080p fairly quickly, but was then asked if I wanted to run at 39, 48, or 59 hertz.
As a person who watched action movies as a child solely for the explosions and car crashes, this is possibly the most fun I’ve had in 20 minutes in quite some time. In fact, I’m going to cut this impression short to go play around with this some more. ….Wait. There’s mods? Well…there goes my next week.
by LepcisMagna 
This impression may be rather biased. This game is basically Redwall in video game form, and Redwall was one of my favorite books growing up. You play as a mouse bard that was jailed under an oppressive rat regime. At least in the first hour, you’re trying to find your wife and figure out what happened to you.
by Chezni CRYSIS 2: BENCHMARK EDITION. Or so I’m told. I dunno, I’m about 6 years late to the scene, so I guess it’s not really a benchmark anymore if I can run this with max settings.
I think Garterbelt said it best. “You know how there are times when you go see a movie and think, ‘I don’t care what that’s about. I just want to see something blow up for Christ’s sake and mind my own business. Is that so wrong?'” That pretty much sums up my experience with Crysis 2.
by Chezni Konami, please. Are Pachinko machines really your modern legacy? Are slot machines where your merit lies? How can you abandon your fans, after releasing masterpieces such as…
Castlevania: Lords of Shadows is not a perfect game, but contains so many perfect things. The voice-acting is triple A grade, featuring the talents of Robert Carlyle as Gabriel and Patrick Stuart as Zobek. The gameplay is solid; not always the best, but sort of a simpler version of Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. The lore and plot are pretty darn solid as well, featuring throw-backs to numerous familiar aspects of the previous titles. Technically this is a reboot of the franchise, but considering that it mostly takes place long before the events of all the other Castlevania games, it still feels like a strong continuation of the Dracula-hunting universe. Lastly, and without a doubt the most potent medal to pin to this game’s chest is it’s environments. Lords of Shadows quite possibly has the best environments I’ve ever seen in a video game in my life.
Continue reading “Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Ultimate Edition (Completed)”
by Chezni When will this roller coaster ever end? Well, I should just be happy–welcome to another high point in the Deus Ex series, this time brought to us by Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
Similar to Hitman: Absolution, this is another title picked up by Square Enix and once again it shows heavily what money and experience can do to a game. Powerful cinematics, enormous detail and decent pacing, DE:HR really scores big on my first impression. What’s funny is, there’s actually a lot about it that I don’t like… some of it I even hate… but it’s completely offset because the thing just looks and feels so good.
by Chezni
*Note: To get straight to the review, skip the Foreward.
–Foreward–
There are those in the world that are architects. Put them in a room filled with Legos and they will construct a complex model of various structures, roads and buildings. There are some that are artists. Put them in the same room and they will build a clever work of art out of all the pieces available to them. Then there are people like me. People with the capacity to construct, but have no desire to do so on its own. People with the creativity to create, but lacking the motivation to do so without a purpose. You see, people like me need structure with purpose; creativity with function. If you put me in a room filled with Legos, you would soon find me creating rules, mechanical structure, objectives, goals, obstacles and enemies; leading to an ultimate confrontation hidden somewhere deep within the mystical Lego kingdom. Then I would invite some friends over to try it out. That’s where games like 7 Days to Die come in.
by LepcisMagna The trouble with drawing a series in our Steam roulette is that it really puts a dent in my enthusiasm. There’s always so many games to review all at once. Sure, I could review them one at a time, but then I won’t really be able to compare them accurately. Then, because reviewing multiple games takes a lot of time, I put it off and just don’t play anything (well, except Android: Netrunner). So it went with Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six. Finally, I got around to it; and right off the bat, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six seems to avoid many issues I have with FPSs – at least early on.
by LepcisMagna 
Dark Souls is my favorite game series. It’s good enough that even disliking Dark Souls II as much as I do doesn’t unseat it (the Valve-verse of Half-Life and Portal would likely be my second). I first heard about it in probably much the same way you have: that it is a remarkably difficult game with a fanatical fanbase. And also like many, I avoided it because I had heard it was so difficult. It was only when Chezni suggested that we co-op some parts of the game that I started playing. And I died. A lot. I hated it. I thought it was an unnecessarily difficult game – only fun for people who play all their games on hard mode. I preferred wandering around Skyrim, getting lost, and filling my quest log with a laundry list of dungeons to clear – why would I want to play a game that just wasn’t fun?
Slowly, though, I progressed. I learned about dropping from heights to deal more damage. I threw myself against the Asylum Demon until I beat it through a combination of luck and Chezni’s advice. I fought, inch by inch, through the Undead Burg. I figured, to borrow from Zero Punctuation, that “I’ll just keep tanking the rakes and maybe I’ll somehow become really psychotically into being rake-faced […] and I’ll be blatted in the face with rake if that isn’t kind of what happened.” It may have taken me half of the original Dark Souls, but eventually I found myself having fun. A lot of fun. So much fun that I kept coming back even after having beaten the game to play through on NG+. Later, Chezni and I powered through the first few hours of Dark Souls III, which turned out to be just as good as the original (I’m intentionally omitting Dark Souls II in this statement, which I’ll get in to later). So why did I change my mind, and why should you? Continue reading “Dark Souls”