Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Ultimate Edition (Completed)
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)” →

Deus Ex: Human Revolution
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.

Continue reading “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” →

Deus Ex: Invisible War
by Chezni

Tonight on WHEN GOOD GAMES GO BAD.

 

I’ve played Deus Ex: Invisible War already a while back for 3 hours according to Steam. My original impression was that the game sucked. Having played and finished the original Deus Ex, I considered that maybe my newly acquired sense of Deus Ex lore and context may provide the missing link enjoying DE:IW. Nope. In fact, knowing what I know from the Original DE, as well as my experience with how good it was actually just tells me that this game sucks even more than I had originally thought. I can’t believe how far it fell. Everything about this game just feels wrong.

Continue reading “Deus Ex: Invisible War” →

7 Days to Die (Completed[?])
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.

 

Continue reading “7 Days to Die (Completed[?])” →

Amnesia: The Dark Descent
by LepcisMagna

Horror is a hard thing to do right.  Worse, even when it is done right, it has to be accepted by the viewer.  Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a puzzle/physics/horror game set in a castle somewhere around the mid-19th century.  Your mentor must be killed, but a shadow is hunting you.  From what I understand, Amnesia is well done horror.  And the first time I played Amnesia (some years ago), I think I felt that.  This time, I did not.  I don’t think it’s entirely Amnesia’s fault – I think I’ve just been exposed to more video games since then and am more aware of the imperfections.  It probably didn’t help that I was going in to it for a First Impression, either.

Whatever the reason, I didn’t find myself immersed in the world this time around.  Instead, I found myself solving puzzles I didn’t realize I was solving and a little frustrated at my walking speed and camera angles.  The first part I am okay with – if I were truly terrified, there is no doubt I would have trouble solving those same puzzles.  The walking speed is easily circumvented since you have unlimited stamina (which is a bit of an odd choice), and encouraged me to go speeding around the castle to make the most of my lantern time.

I feel quite bad that I didn’t find myself experiencing what so many others have (and I am only picking at the game because it is well-designed).  Indeed, my only real frustration was the “puzzle” I got stuck on at the end of my hour.  An invisible water monster was chasing me (indeed, the first enemy that seemed capable of doing damage) and you can only escape from it by hopping on top of boxes.  Unfortunately, there’s a hidden switch somewhere in the corridor that I just couldn’t find because I had just run out of lantern oil which made everything very, very dark (as you can see in the screenshot).

Stuck hopping from box to box, I was unable to find the switch to open the path forward.  Eventually I struck up a conversation with the invisible water monster, asking him why my sanity wasn’t draining like it does in every other part of the game when you are trapped in the dark.  Then I considered that I was talking to an invisible water monster, and realized that I, myself, must have already gone insane – so I congratulated Amnesia on its success and closed the game.

Steam link

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six
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.

Continue reading “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six” →

Dark Souls
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” →

World of Goo
by LepcisMagna

World of Goo is an award-winning indie game about building structures out of black balls of goo/tar.  It’s a physics structure-building puzzle game, and it’s….okay?  I guess?  It feels almost sacrilegious to put this in Tier Three given how many good things I’ve heard about this game.  But the thing is, I’ve played this game on Kongregate.  Well, not World of Goo specifically, but so, so many games like it.  And I’ve played better versions; you see, World of Goo has both camera issues and control issues.  You can scroll around the map by moving to the edges – but the detection is just a tad too large, scrolling around your already small play space wildly.  Grabbing new nodes is a bit persnickety, since the goo balls (used for building) in your existing structure move around randomly.  This is particularly annoying since there isn’t a good reason that the game couldn’t just automatically spawn one wherever you click (as long as you had goo left).

From a technical standpoint, the lack of any graphical options whatsoever is a bit annoying.  It runs at one (low) resolution, full screen (admittedly, I didn’t try ctrl-enter to try it in a window).  When my monitor has 8-12 times the resolution as the game’s only resolution, things tend to look a bit pixellated.  It’s a small complaint, but one that bothers me.  I can forgive Doom, made in 1993, for running at a low resolution.  But World of Goo came out in 2008 (which I’ve just realized was almost a decade ago now – yeesh).

If this sounds a bit cranky and short-tempered, I’ll be honest: I’m writing this review so I can make Dark Souls the 100th post – so my heart wasn’t particularly into writing this one.  World of Goo might be worth your time, and it is only five bucks.  For me, it must be resigned to Tier Three.

Steam link

Sunless Sea
by LepcisMagna

“Lose your mind.  Eat your crew. Die.”

This is the motto of Sunless Sea, and well it encapsulates the nature of this sea-faring adventure game with roguelike elements. The premise is straightforward yet perfectly hints at what is to come: 100 years ago, London fell beneath the earth into the Sunless Sea.  You are out to seek your fortune in this dangerous world, and can choose one of several goals. The DLC (Zubmariner) adds the goal of immortality, so of course I chose that one.

Along the way toward your goal, you meet strange and fascinating people, visit alien islands, and occasionally sail off the edge of the world to meet an elder god and have his minion join your crew. The draw of all this are the countless, beautifully written stories you run into at every turn. This game is narrative storytelling done right – a well-written text adventure punctuated by vast, empty sea.

On that note, it might be tempting to criticize Sunless Sea for the sheer time it takes to get from one point on the map to the other. Your ship moves painfully slowly across seemingly endless sea.  But I think it would be impossible to have this game without those long moments of nothingness.  Indeed, at the heart of Sunless Sea is a feeling of exploration.  Your supplies running low, the terror mounting as you sail into utter blackness simply hoping for a port to appear on the horizon. That’s what makes exploration exhilarating – and it would be impossible to have the moments of adventure and discovery without the blackness between. That’s something Elite: Dangerous tried to have, but spread itself too thin in the process.

From a mechanics standpoint, Sunless Sea is very straightforward.  You purchase fuel and food, keep within sight of land to stall rising terror from your crew, and occasionally battle a sea monster or pirate ship with under-powered weapons and a paper-thin hull. This is my only point of contention with Sunless Sea: the AI for the pirates is bad enough that you can just follow right behind them and win every time, while the sea monsters are maneuverable enough that very little can be gained from fighting them for most of the game – it’s easier to just run away.  There’s little middle ground to the challenge, which is a pity.

Even so, I can forgive the terrible combat since Sunless Sea is much more about exploration and narrative adventure – and that it does well. There are few reliable trade routes that are worth the supplies required, so your best bet is almost always to continue exploring – story events will often reward you handsomely. The stories you find are typically as isolated as the islands they take place on, but there is enough connective tissue in quests from London that it never feels entirely disconnected.


I’ll admit, I’m struggling to write this – partially because I’ve been idle for so long and partially because anything I could write is put to shame by the quality of writing within Sunless Sea.  I’ll leave it at this: Sunless Sea is a solid Tier One – something you can get lost in; not as perfect as FTL, but forgiven for its depth of story and perfect evocation of being a Zailor on the Sunless Sea.

Steam link

Boss Monster (with Expansion)
by LepcisMagna

 

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Too long a while. That’s mostly because I’ve been playing Dark Souls III – a review I want to write soon, but one that I’m not sure I can do justice.

In the meantime, I have played another board game with Chezni at our FLGS. This time, the game is Boss Monster with its expansion “The Next Level.”  When we first played this some time ago, it seemed a tad simplistic, but with a lot of potential.  Now that we’ve played with the expansion, I can say definitively that the game – as it comes out of the box – is disappointing.  The typical game goes something like this: You are the boss of a dungeon, à la Dungeon Keeper (the original, not that abomination).  You build a dungeon using card “rooms,” and heroes come to attack you and the other players based on the room card treasure types (of which there are four).  You have a rather limited pool of spells you can use to help yourself or hinder the other players, but they are sorely underused.  There is very little interaction with the other players beyond choosing your dungeon treasure specialization.  Once you’ve built a reasonable dungeon, the game becomes a bit of a slow plod to the victory condition (beating all the heroes or acquiring 10 hero souls in our game). This is quite sad, since the rooms and spells are varied and interact with each other in interesting ways.

So here are the problems: First, spells are criminally underused unless you fall into the “Mage” category of dungeon (even then, the rooms which allow you to draw spells are typically underpowered). Second, games are either too short (with normal victory conditions) or far too long (with the alternate game modes). Finally, interaction with the other player dungeons is almost nonexistent and the heroes themselves aren’t unique or interesting enough to provide challenge or variety enough to make this a good game. This is terrible, since the cards themselves are well-made, pretty, and well-balanced.  Chezni and I spent some time trying to fix these problems, and here’s what we came up with:

Changes:

  1. Draw a room card OR a spell card at the beginning of each turn, and remove all the “Haunted Library” cards from the deck.
  2. In a two-player game, set the win condition to 20 points.  In general, increase win conditions for fewer players and increase loss conditions for more players.
  3. In a two-player game, remove half the ordinary hero cards if you are playing with the expansion.
  4. Set a maximum for +x spell cards to +3 for balance.

These changes allow for an early race to build a suitable dungeon, but ensure that once you have a good enough dungeon you are able to focus on inhibiting the other players by drawing spell cards instead.  Since the Sorcerobe School cards do essentially this, it makes sense to just remove them from the game. Increasing the victory condition allows you to have a more entertaining game by ensuring you get epic heroes and good use out of spell cards. Together, these fixes bring this game from “okay, but flawed” to “actually fun”; or, in PICD terms: from Tier Three to Tier One.

Amazon link

 

EDIT 2018-10-03: We have confirmed that this is a fun game with the above changes for two players.  Adding spells makes the game far more dynamic and interactive – things can change quickly and there’s a lot more play between bosses, rather than just running your own dungeon.