Well, it’s half a game of Breakout.
BIT.TRIP BEAT
by LepcisMagna Category: Tier Three
by LepcisMagna Neon Drive
by LepcisMagna Even if it is pretty, Neon Drive is just a prettier version of BIT.TRIP Runner. It has a few improvements – you get one free mistake and only rewind to the last checkpoint (of which there are more). But in the end, it’s just another game requiring perfection and no human creativity. Which is sad, because it has a fantastic aesthetic.
Too Many Games
by LepcisMagna I have too many games, and even trying all of them is turning out to be infeasible. Therefore, I am putting everything with a “Mixed” review or lower on Steam into Tier Three, sight unseen. Here is the list, in case I ever decide to come back to them to give them a fair shot:
Illuminascii
by LepcisMagna 
The promise of this game is pretty good: you are slowly waking up to a global conspiracy of some sort, in a 3D ASCII-inspired world. Unfortunately – unless I’m missing something – waking up consists of finding floating purple things and right-clicking on them. It’s…less than entertaining – just the same few pieces randomly placed again and again. I wanted to like this, but there just isn’t anything there. Tier Three.
Girls Like Robots
by LepcisMagna 
In Girls Like Robots, you must place girls, robots, nerds, cows, and more on a grid while keeping them happy on average. Girls like robots (as you might expect) and dislike nerds. Nerds dislike nerds, but like corners and girls. Robots like girls but no more than three at a time. Cows…have their own thing.
SimplePlanes
by LepcisMagna I can see why this game attracted my attention. You design a plane and then fly it. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough “simulator” to this plane simulator for my taste. It feels just a little too simple. Maybe that’s okay – but coming from X-Plane, it feels lacking, so it must go to Tier Three.
…oh. It’s a mobile game. Never mind – it would be great on a mobile device.
Secrets of Rætikon
by LepcisMagna 
In Secrets of Rætikon, you play a bird. I’m not actually sure of the plot beyond that, other than you fly about collecting triangles. The trouble is, I’m just not sure what this game is supposed to accomplish – other than sounding suspiciously like “retcon”. I mean, it’s kinda pretty… but there’s no plot, no beautiful soundtrack, no difficult to master mechanics – just flying and triangle-collecting. It’s not bad (though the “you can’t fly above this point” line is annoying), it’s just entirely mediocre. Tier Three – play William and Sly or its sequel for free instead.
Battlefield 2
by LepcisMagna 
I’m in an awkward position – I’m reviewing a highly acclaimed first person shooter 12 years after it was first released. The trouble here is that there have been dozens of AAA games that have been trying to fill the exact same role every year since then. It’s a good concept – two teams trying to capture rally points and slowly take over the map. But genre saturation is a thing, and we’ve passed that point by about a decade.
I say all this because Battlefield 2 is a good game. But it is far from original, and there are any number of other, better games that will scratch the exact same itch with better graphics and without having to install Punkbuster and GameSpy Comrade (I’ve lost count how often I’ve uninstalled those programs). Honestly, there isn’t a whole lot to say about Battlefield 2 – it was successful enough that you see the same aspects repeated again and again in every other US Armed Forces FPS since then. My conclusion is this: when it came out, it was fantastic and it deserves its place in history. But there isn’t really a reason to play it now (especially since you’ll only be playing on LAN). To Tier Three it goes.
Steam Hidden Games
by LepcisMagna Did you know there are free games on Steam that don’t have Steam pages? In fact, the only way to get them is to enter the install links into your browser directly. So here’s a special 5-for-0 deal on hidden Steam games. First up:
Joe Danger 2: The Movie
by Chezni
Ugh. Write enough reviews and you’ll just feel like you’re repeating yourself. Okay, let’s get to…
When I put this game into Tier 3, I wasn’t surprised. What surprised me was the genre of the game. Even then, it only took four minutes to figure the game out. Four minutes to identify this as a very pretty but very dumb game. I expected this to be a game where you got to play with hundreds of pieces, where you built your own movie set and tried to hit certain requirements or goals. I imagined it was going to be like “This bomb must explode, but it must do so in midair while being carried by this paper airplane,” and then you had to build the scene or something. And possibly got bonus points if you used 5 ducks in it somehow. No, I was actually disappointed to find that this is just 2D vehicle stunt game; you know, the same kinds you can find a dime-a-million-dozen on Kongregate, Newgrounds and any cell phone game provider’s service.