Mafia 2 was a game I really enjoyed. So too was Divine Divinity. It'd be interesting to see how they fair. Though I'm not sure either would make a lasting impression on such a brief time scale.
Oh, you must review Viscera Cleanup Detail!
I've been wanting to try Divine Divinity, what with all the talk about Divinity: Original Sin. With two votes, Maybe I'll give that one a spin.
Excellent! Perhaps it shall spur on my intentions to replay it. I even have the questionable follow-up Beyond Divinity waiting in the wings for afterwards.
I'd like to hear your quick take on Metro.
I'm voting for Octodad. It's shorter and sillier.
Game: Goat Simulator
Platform: PC (Steam)
Sponsored by: Bonus Eruptus
Gifted on: June 27th, 2014
TL;DR Review:
"Play with physics" silliness.
Slightly longer Review:
In this... game (is it a game? I guess it kinda is. Maybe.), you play a goat gone wild. You jump, perform backflips, ram into people, and lick stuff. Sure, the physics are well made, with ragdoll'ing, and some semblance of an AI. I'm just not seeing the appeal here, sorry Bonus. I laughed at first when I ran in the middle of a crowd and sent them all running, but... It's just not clicking with me.
Will I keep playing? Um... Nope.
Goat Simulator (Eleima)
Oh, you must review Viscera Cleanup Detail!
I'd totally take that one up, but I'm 20+ hours in. And you could likely double that on the pre-Steam release.
TL:DR - A glorious OCD nightmare Coming to Jesus experience.
doubtingthomas396 wrote:Kehama wrote:mrtomaytohead wrote:And by greatness you mean burning fields of tall, dry grass with baddies flailing their arms while being burned alive.
And malaria!
And pulling bullets out of your arm with a leatherman!
And this is why people think FC2 is better than FC3. In FC3, you get better graphics, BUT only 1/3rd of these features!
I've played like 9 hours and I do not even know which feature is in there unless you count the mushroom cave trip as the sickness. Or is it the magical field medic skills?
Arguably the best example of it was Lotus Notes, renowned for its esoteric style, barely rewarding gameplay and an interface that counted as a mini game all on its own.
ROFLMAO! Lucky I'd finished my coffee by the time I got to that bit - nice one Doubting Tom! When I moved to a workplace that used Lotus Notes (and not to mention the 300 MB storage limit) was the first time I set up a Gmail account, then found a well hidden page to forward all my work email to that. Against our code of conduct of course...
One hour into: Don't Starve (PC)
Courtesy of: MeatMan
TL;DR Review
A very... believable... survival experience.
Way longer than it probably should be review
I'm vaguely familiar with the idea of survival games, having played Sir, You Are Being Hunted. Of all the games in my Steam library, last night I found myself very curious about Don't Starve, so tonight I decided to take on the one-hour challenge. Of course, there are no churches, phone booths or murderous robots in Don't Starve. There's the procedurally-generated landscape, with trees, rocks and animals. Basically, your task is exactly what it says on the tin: don't starve!
However, you're not really told much about how to go about not starving (which is such a design choice they put it on the damn store page). It boils down to a lot of this: explore the terrain, collect anything and everything you see, use the things you collect to stay alive, whether that's eating them or using them to fashion more sophisticated items to allow you to harvest more raw material (logs, rocks, etc.). There's a day-night cycle, and it gets dark at night, so you better be able to build a fire when night rolls around.
I'm led to believe that there's a seasonal progression as time rolls on, but after only an hour, not enough time to experience significant changes to the weather. I assume this means you have to be very well-prepared for when the cold months make resources like wood and raw meat hard to come by.
My first attempt was a disaster. I totally didn't know what I was doing, and by the fourth night my sanity was running out and I didn't know how to recover it. So I started over, read a Steam guide with some good advice, explored farther, waited longer to build my nightly campfires, built the campfires near trees/rocks so I could work during the night, and hoarded more of the important supplies. Now I'm slightly more self-sufficient (getting a pickaxe is huge, mining gets you tons of flint which you need to make more axes and pickaxes), but still very uneasy about how long I can keep this up (the food offerings are rather scarce). At some point, judging from the Steam guide, you have to find a place to build a "base", then start stockpiling.
I'm not entirely sure if there's something I should be working towards, like the aforementioned Sir..., or if this is just a "see how long you can hold out" type experience. I did bust open a sinkhole and descended into a procedurally-generated cave. I promptly climbed back out.
All in all, it was slow, tedious, somewhat nervewracking, and left me with a very uncertain feeling about what was next. Hence, I said it was quite a believable experience. I genuinely felt concerned about my ability to survive. I'm sure throwing you into the game blind has something to do with it.
Will I keep playing?
Maybe. I got my trading cards. There's perma-death, which means you can't exactly go back and "experiment" with the "progress" you've made. Whether or not there's some final objective to work towards, it definitely feels like a challenge to be able to keep on truckin'. I'll see how the feeling sits with me when I'm more rested and back in a game-playing mood.
I really liked Don't Starve and thought it was pretty fun. Even though you're kinda thrown into the world with no tutorial or explanation, my OCD and the lesson learned from adventure games in my childhood ("if it ain't nailed down, pick it up") took over. Which means I survived 16 days on my first playthrough.
One piece of advice: don't go near tall birds or buffalo in heat.
I was just gifted a copy of Takedown: Red Saber by Oilypenguin. That will be my next review after Divine Divinity.
I'm waiting for your review of this game
Game: Rogue Legacy
...
Will I keep playing? I'm not sure really. I'm at 109min and it is pretty frustrating so I might give up on it. But it doeshVe this addictive "one more turn" quality...
I'm right there with you. It's frustrating to still not stand a chance against anything outside of the castle (or even inside the castle) after as many deaths and "upgrades" as I've acquired, especially since the stupid upgrades get exponentially more expensive but your ability to earn gold doesn't scale the same way, even with the Miner class getting 30% extra (which translates to an extra 3 or 13 gold from most drops and leaves you at a severe combative disadvantage). The Xbox controls are a tad sluggish too (the downward aerial attack almost never works for me, especially when I need it to on those platforms you have to hit to activate). I found myself reaching rage levels usually unheard of, and it's pretty much the reason I asked about roguelikes in the pile thread. You do find an acorn once in a while and get a good castle to pillage (like a bad golfer strung along by the one good shot he hits every hundred attempts), and there's this adorable charm about all the different traits your offspring can inherit. It's in the mix, at least, but towards the back of the stove.
One hour review of Hydrophobia: Prophesy
Sponsored by: Archangel
Review: I think the kindest thing I can say about Hydrophobia is that it was a missed opportunity. Premise, plot, setting, some mechanics... all seem really good. Unfortunately, Hydrophobia falls down in execution.
Let's start with graphics, since that's something everyone can relate to. Hydrophobia came out in 2010, but looks like it should have come out in 2005 or earlier. Low poly characters modeled by people who don't quite seem to have the grasp of human anatomy combined with simplistic and low res textures (despite being on the highest settings) means that the game feels out of place when put up against Bayonetta, Bioshock 2, Dante's Inferno, etc. which were all released the same year.
"Well so what?" you may ask, "I like a retro style game." So do I, but Hydrophobia doesn't feel retro, it feels cheaply made.
This cheap feeling continues when you get to the voice actors. They're terrible. Hands down, the worst voice actors I have yet to hear. The main character has one emotion, panic, but completely fails to deliver that, instead giving a really muted, awkward delivery. Ancillary characters aren't much better. If I go back to play, I think I'll turn the sound off and just rely on subtitles.
Then there's the exploration mechanics. It feels like the original Assassin's Creed. Slow, clunky, and sometimes impossible to do what you're quite certain you should be able to do. Hit boxes are also poor, with the main character going into her knocked down animation when she runs over boxes, pipes, debris, etc. And that gets really old, really quick.
Bottom line, I think that the developers spent 80% of their budget on the fluid dynamics engine (which is stellar) and then realized they needed to make a game with the remaining 20%. Aside from the fluid dynamics, everything feels cheaply made.
If you can get past a buggy game with sub-par graphics and poor voice acting, I think that there's a really interesting plot to be found, I'm just not sure if I can get past all that.
Edit: Almost forgot: Is this the Dark Souls of it's genre? No.
In every possible sense and permutation of the word, no.
Link for Doubting: Hydrophobia: Prophesy (Taharka)
One hour into: One Way Heroics (PC)
Courtesy of: Eldon of Azure
TL;DR Review
Quirky, yet serious in a Japanese sort of way. "Turn-based" RPG + mandatory side-scrolling + rogue-lite elements. Easily one of those "aaand it's dawn" type games if you're not careful.
Windbag's Delight Review
Another Steam gift I was totally not expecting. Only maybe two or three days into the sale, wasn't a flash deal or anything like that. Clearly I wasn't aware of how things worked around here. It's already pretty cheap at $3.50, but during the sale it was $0.75. I could have bought it with the profits from my trading cards almost 10 times over. And it was gifted to me. Like I said, my wishlist was more of a "watch list", but I appreciated the gesture all the same. Add in Steam trading cards, and I figured I should crack it open and see what's inside.
The feel of the game reminds me very much of Half Minute Hero, the title screen as much as anything is strikingly similar. The English is good, but is stilted in places (feels almost like an "indie" Japanese game). It's a traditional sort of genre mixed up in a very exotic way. You start by rolling a character: name, class and "perks" (which are free skillups to your various traits or additional enhancements). Then you select your world. Here's where things start to get interesting: each world has an alphanumeric code associated with it (think FreeCell). The page has a few "special" worlds (with codes) that have interesting features attached: a "community" world, where your progress (or lack thereof) gets shared with people as you progress; a world where there's a big bad not far from where you spawn; a world where you can't gain experience but the enemy drops are better; and a world where all the NPCs are merchants. You can also just roll a random world, or type in a code and see what you get. You can play the world on "Easy" or "Hard" mode. Easy mode gives you some more inventory room and has a defined moment when the final boss appears; on hard mode, the boss appears randomly.
Then you spawn in, and you see what the fuss is about. The graphics hearken to 16-bit SNES games, the characters and settings remind you of typical western RPG/high fantasy/Zelda type settings, but the gameplay is unique. You play in discrete "turns", something I didn't notice in the trailers. Moving in any of the cardinal or ordinal directions is a turn. Equipping an item from your inventory is a turn. Using an item from your inventory is a turn. Attacking with your weapon is a turn. Interacting with an NPC is a turn. Changing directions is not a turn, which is very helpful. There's a giant black wave of doom coming from the left side of the screen, and each "turn" it advances closer (in a straight line, you can outrun it though, which means you can give yourself room to work). If you trap yourself between it and something like a mountain or the wall of a building, game over. This also means it will consume the landscape behind you, which is peppered with items, enemies, NPCs and other assorted RPG staples. In short: use it or lose it, literally.
So you have to charge forward from the darkness, fighting the random things which want to kill you along the way, leveling up, buying better gear (weapons and armor do degrade over time), keeping up your health, stamina and energy (oh yeah, energy's a biggie, you drain it almost constantly and if it runs out you can't use special abilities, and your health and stamina won't regenerate). You traverse various biomes, from pasture to desert to snow, each having different effects on your adventuring and containing different potential goodies to collect (the snow biome in particular has some rare flower thingy which you can either use as a weenie recovery item or sell for a decent chunk of cash). There's also bodies of water and mountains, which take considerably longer to traverse, drain your stamina hard, and leave you very vulnerable to attack. Certain skills make them easier to traverse, but not much. One of the most important and powerful skills you have is Awakening, which freezes the world around you for three turns. Almost always used to run like a sissy little coward from a fight you know you can't win, or at least that's what the game tells you after you die from getting mobbed. Naturally, it's restricted to five uses, period. I've used it twice in one run, that's as much as I've done. There's presumably some big bad called the Demon Lord which you have to fight after enough time, but I never made it far enough to fight him. Got close, though.
Which dovetails me nicely into the post-game elements. It's a roguelite, so death is permanent, but there's a meta-level of advancement. The worlds have codes, after all, and the world select screen remembers your last two random worlds and the farthest you got in that world. I haven't bothered to re-play a world yet. After you die, you are "graded" on your performance. It ranks four things: level at death, distance traveled, battle prowess (enemies killed/damage done) and treasure chests opened. You also get extra marks up and down for certain accomplishments/shortcomings (think Super Smash Bros.). It distills down to a final grade and to the all-important Hero Points. Hero Points allow you to unlock new things to improve your chances in future runs. The core component of this unique rogue-lite RPG is the Dimensional Vault. You buy slots in the vault with Hero Points (first slot costs 5, each additional slot costs 5 more than the previous). Any items you had on you when you met your untimely demise can be stored in the Vault, capacity permitting. When you start your next adventure, there will be an NPC at the exit of your starting castle where you can pull the items you stored in the vault. Hero Points can also be used to unlock new Perks and even new Classes. The new classes can also be unlocked by completing certain tasks, which are spelled out on the unlock page. You start with only two classes: Knight and Swordsman. I unlocked the Hunter class by killing an enemy with a Bow... even though I blew myself up in the process, since I was using "Bomb Arrows" at point-blank range. The Hunter class is really slick, somewhat squishier but he has a "dash" ability which lets him move faster, he can see the HP of all NPCs, friendly or hostile (since you apparently can attack non-hostile NPCs; the guards in safe houses threaten you when you talk to them), and he sees if there are off-screen enemies (it's a red arrow with the number of squares away, but that's better than nothing). There's another three or four classes, but I'm going to try to unlock them without Hero Points. Haven't unlocked any new perks yet, they're a tad expensive. Hero Points are cumulative, though (unlike f*cking Rogue Legacy gold), so maybe I'll go after the Lockpicking skill to make treasure hunting easier.
For everything I did, it feels like there's something I didn't do. The advancement mechanics are such that it really encourages you to keep playing, to keep exploring, to find bigger and better things so that you can maybe try some of those special worlds like the no experience world, or the "massive stronghold only 50 km away" world (by contrast, in the Easy mode of the main game, the Demon Lord shows up at 400 km, my best is something like 300-320 km).
Will I keep playing?
Abso-freaking-lutely. Yes, dying early sucks ass, but you don't feel cheated by it. There's some online integration which is cute (like the "community" world, but I think if multiple people are playing any world it will send updates to everyone; also, it has the option to send things to Twitter *dundundun*), and there's that sweet, sweet advancement which makes you feel like "this next playthrough will be the one!" And then when it isn't, you only have yourself to blame. The game can be a little broken record-ish at times (when you die, it tries to give you tips based on gameplay telemetry; I've been scolded at least twice for forgetting to use Awakening), but again, some of the rough edges and the stilted English translations give it this cute indie charm. Plus, even though I didn't pay for it, at $0.75 this may have been one of the most cost-effective bargains of the Steam sale. Now I just have to juggle it amidst the rest of the pile; I totally forgot it falls under the roguelike/procedural generation category...
I'm with ya Bubs, One Way Heroics is such a pleasant surprise.
Sounds like the Dark Souls of Rogue Likes
Good review! I'll get it on my wishlist and pick it up somepoint.
Game: Rogue Legacy
Platform: PC (Steam)
Sponsored by: SaintHilary
Gifted on: December 23rd, 2013
TL;DR Review:
Die. Again and again and again.
Slightly longer Review:
As if the hint in its title hadn't been obvious enough, Rogue Legacy is well... A rogue like. Your father has been poisoned or whatever and you're doomed to enter a castle over and over again until you can retrieve the cure inside it. Except every time you die, one of your heirs takes over. And so on and so forth which means every child has absolutely no choice but is instead doomed to take up his or her parent's quest. I guess you could say this is a 2D side scroller and the controller has been working perfectly for me, not sure how a mouse and keyboard setup would feel like.
The only notable progress you make is measured by gold: the amount you have when you die is passed on to the heir who then uses it to upgrade the manor (your base, I guess) or buy equipment (which is again passed on). And you better spend every penny, because you lose it all when you re-enter the castle.
This game has brought no small amout of frustration as I have a tendency to die pretty quickly. The worst is when I die with a pretty substantial amount of gold in my pocket but not quite enough to buy gear or upgrades. And then I still have to give it all up to access to the castle.
Will I keep playing? I'm not sure really. I'm at 109min and it is pretty frustrating so I might give up on it. But it does have this addictive "one more turn" quality...
Rogue Legacy (Eleima)
Game: Rogue Legacy
TL;DR Review:
Die. Again and again and again.
Will I keep playing? I'm not sure really. I'm at 109min and it is pretty frustrating so I might give up on it. But it does have this addictive "one more turn" quality...Rogue Legacy (Eleima)
Just wanted to check back. Here I am a few days later, and it's all I'm playing, I've even dropped Dust: An Elysian Tail, so... Yeah, addictive "one more turn" thing going on right there...
Eleima wrote:Game: Rogue Legacy
TL;DR Review:
Die. Again and again and again.
Will I keep playing? I'm not sure really. I'm at 109min and it is pretty frustrating so I might give up on it. But it does have this addictive "one more turn" quality...Rogue Legacy (Eleima)
Just wanted to check back. Here I am a few days later, and it's all I'm playing, I've even dropped Dust: An Elysian Tail, so... Yeah, addictive "one more turn" thing going on right there...
You should really finish Dust, It's one of my favorite indie games.
Eleima wrote:Eleima wrote:Game: Rogue Legacy
TL;DR Review:
Die. Again and again and again.
Will I keep playing? I'm not sure really. I'm at 109min and it is pretty frustrating so I might give up on it. But it does have this addictive "one more turn" quality...Rogue Legacy (Eleima)
Just wanted to check back. Here I am a few days later, and it's all I'm playing, I've even dropped Dust: An Elysian Tail, so... Yeah, addictive "one more turn" thing going on right there...
You should really finish Dust, It's one of my favorite indie games.
Counter-opinion(-ish): I enjoyed my time with Rogue Legacy more and the wife enjoyed watching me play and I've returned here and there to play a few times. But then again, I got 117% (118%?) in Dust. But I played that once and haven't thought about playing it again. Rogue Legacy would be much harder to pick back up again, as is evident by my many deaths when I did that in NG+.
Taharka wrote:Eleima wrote:Eleima wrote:Game: Rogue Legacy
TL;DR Review:
Die. Again and again and again.
Will I keep playing? I'm not sure really. I'm at 109min and it is pretty frustrating so I might give up on it. But it does have this addictive "one more turn" quality...Rogue Legacy (Eleima)
Just wanted to check back. Here I am a few days later, and it's all I'm playing, I've even dropped Dust: An Elysian Tail, so... Yeah, addictive "one more turn" thing going on right there...
You should really finish Dust, It's one of my favorite indie games.
Counter-opinion(-ish): I enjoyed my time with Rogue Legacy more and the wife enjoyed watching me play and I've returned here and there to play a few times. But then again, I got 117% (118%?) in Dust. But I played that once and haven't thought about playing it again. Rogue Legacy would be much harder to pick back up again, as is evident by my many deaths when I did that in NG+.
I played Dust once as well, but they're good for different reasons. RL has that difficulty that drives you forward, while Dust is a story with engaging characters.
I find the story to be more engaging and memorable than the difficulty.
I played Dust once as well, but they're good for different reasons. RL has that difficulty that drives you forward, while Dust is a story with engaging characters.
I find the story to be more engaging and memorable than the difficulty. :-)
And I'm typically more mechanics driven but enjoy seeing a game's story progress, too. Or something like that.
See, that's the weird thing, I'm typically into games for their story. So by all accounts, I should prefer Dust to Rogue Legacy, but the former just isn't grabbing me.
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