Dead Space is a third-person survival horror game set on a derelict ship in deep space.
CONTROLS: The controls are fairly solid, but can be stiff and unresponsive at times. Your actions have inertia, and you can't animation-cancel out of them if you change your mind.
One thing to keep in mind is how aiming is handled; you have laser lines showing the path of your projectiles instead of a crosshair. Your projectiles WILL follow these lines, and the lines will properly terminate when they run into a solid object. Besides looking nice, this actually makes aiming a bit easier.
GAMEPLAY: As a third-person shooter the basic mechanics are as you would expect, besides four gimmicks. The first is Kinesis, which is your standard gravity gun and used for solving most of the puzzles in the game. The second is Stasis, which slows down whatever it hits and works into some of the puzzles. Of the two Stasis has more combat utility, which is likely the reason why it's the only one with an ammo limit. The third gimmick is Zero-G, which basically means you move slower and can jump between walls. The jumping mechanic for Zero-G is disorienting and annoying, particularly in one or two sections where you have to use it to navigate complex environments. The fourth is Vacuums, which is simply areas where you have a timer counting down till you die.
It's fairly close to its traditional survival horror roots; ammo is precious, and the enemies in the game are bullet sponges. In a deviation from survival horror, rather than running away wherever you can and saving your ammo for things you have to kill you are expected to kill basically everything you encounter swiftly and economically. Rather than accomplishing this by aiming for the head, you instead blow their limbs off. Since most enemies in the game are melee this may seem easy, but they're pretty quick and use swarm tactics.
There's no cover mechanic, thankfully.
SOUND: The audio here is excellent. The ambiance really sells the settings, and the enemies make fitting sounds
GRAPHICS: Dark and ominous, check. Space, check. Alien goo, check. Creepy scrawling, check. Yep, it's all here, and it looks pretty good.
STORY: A massive ship that stopped responding to communications, so a team is sent to fix whatever went wrong. The protagonist, Issac Clark, is very upfront about his primary reason for joining the mission being that his girlfriend is on the ship and he's worried about her.
NOTES: It's basically Die Hard in space.
Grade: A
Site: http://www.ea.com/dead-space
Current Price: $20
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Rogue Legacy
A metroidvania roguelike with permadeath and inheritance.
CONTROLS: Nothing too good or bad, although there is the occasional fussiness.
GAMEPLAY: It's a bog standard metroidvania, but every time you die the gold you collected goes to your Manor, and with it you can buy upgrades, new equipment (For which the blueprints must first be found), and ability runes (Which must also be found, then purchased anyway).
The trouble is that, with the exception of weapons, everything you buy makes the other upgrades of the same type more expensive. If you improve your manor to add to your HP, for example, then it becomes more expensive to buy the manor upgrade to increase your attack damage. By the same token, every rune you buy makes the next rune cost more money.
Compounding this is that every time you enter the randomly-generated dungeon you lose all your cash, meaning that you have to get everything you need for an upgrade in a single life.
You would think this would add tension and excitement, but really it just adds tedium. Pretty much the entire game is gathering money and hoping that your next choices for heirs aren't completely terrible. The fridge-horror of sending generations and generations of people off to die in the hopes of getting one that's useful doesn't even help to draw interest.
Beyond its gimmick as a genealogical game, it also has a gimmick in its trait system. The trait system basically means that almost every kid you can pick is going to have a modifier or two that may or may not change gameplay.
By and large, these are just annoying. A few are straight boosts, like Eidetic Memory or Peripheral Arterial Disorder, but mostly they're just cosmetic and/or annoying. I.B.S. turns a crippling disease into a fart joke, Color Blindness does exactly what it says, Nostalgia is Color Blindness in sepia-tone, Vertigo rotates the screen 180 degrees in the hopes of causing motion sickness, and etc...
It would hardly be a review if I failed to mention the difficulty: It's brutal. Oh, sure, starting off it's not so bad, but it's unforgiving from the start and only ramps up from there. It's intended to be hard, and doesn't disappoint on that count.
SOUND: The effects and music are solid, but not memorable.
GRAPHICS: Nothing too special here, but take note that sprite rotation and distortion are everywhere.
STORY: Some guy killed the king inside this dungeon that renders the entire family of whoever enters it penniless. Even though the king entering the dungeon would clearly have devastating effects that would justify regicide, you go kill him right back. This is why having a plot is sometimes worse than having no plot at all.
NOTES: The dungeon changes after every death. You can sacrifice 40% of what you'll earn to lock the dungeon so it can't change.
TL;DR: Entertaining for awhile, but quickly becomes boring.
Grade: B-
Site: http://store.steampowered.com/app/241600/
Current Price: $14.99
CONTROLS: Nothing too good or bad, although there is the occasional fussiness.
GAMEPLAY: It's a bog standard metroidvania, but every time you die the gold you collected goes to your Manor, and with it you can buy upgrades, new equipment (For which the blueprints must first be found), and ability runes (Which must also be found, then purchased anyway).
The trouble is that, with the exception of weapons, everything you buy makes the other upgrades of the same type more expensive. If you improve your manor to add to your HP, for example, then it becomes more expensive to buy the manor upgrade to increase your attack damage. By the same token, every rune you buy makes the next rune cost more money.
Compounding this is that every time you enter the randomly-generated dungeon you lose all your cash, meaning that you have to get everything you need for an upgrade in a single life.
You would think this would add tension and excitement, but really it just adds tedium. Pretty much the entire game is gathering money and hoping that your next choices for heirs aren't completely terrible. The fridge-horror of sending generations and generations of people off to die in the hopes of getting one that's useful doesn't even help to draw interest.
Beyond its gimmick as a genealogical game, it also has a gimmick in its trait system. The trait system basically means that almost every kid you can pick is going to have a modifier or two that may or may not change gameplay.
By and large, these are just annoying. A few are straight boosts, like Eidetic Memory or Peripheral Arterial Disorder, but mostly they're just cosmetic and/or annoying. I.B.S. turns a crippling disease into a fart joke, Color Blindness does exactly what it says, Nostalgia is Color Blindness in sepia-tone, Vertigo rotates the screen 180 degrees in the hopes of causing motion sickness, and etc...
It would hardly be a review if I failed to mention the difficulty: It's brutal. Oh, sure, starting off it's not so bad, but it's unforgiving from the start and only ramps up from there. It's intended to be hard, and doesn't disappoint on that count.
SOUND: The effects and music are solid, but not memorable.
GRAPHICS: Nothing too special here, but take note that sprite rotation and distortion are everywhere.
STORY: Some guy killed the king inside this dungeon that renders the entire family of whoever enters it penniless. Even though the king entering the dungeon would clearly have devastating effects that would justify regicide, you go kill him right back. This is why having a plot is sometimes worse than having no plot at all.
NOTES: The dungeon changes after every death. You can sacrifice 40% of what you'll earn to lock the dungeon so it can't change.
TL;DR: Entertaining for awhile, but quickly becomes boring.
Grade: B-
Site: http://store.steampowered.com/app/241600/
Current Price: $14.99
Monday, July 29, 2013
Nagai Yamiji - DEMO [NSFW]
At its core, this is a sprite-based RPG/Platformer in the vein of metroidvania. You kill enemies for XP, upgrade your stats, and gather abilities to both make your life easier and bypass obstacles.
I'll start with the biggest problem.
CONTROLS: The controls in this game are terrible.
They can be rebound, which is nice, but there's no keybind for cycling through spells.
They're stiff and unresponsive with lots of frames that just outright drop input. The worst of the dropping comes from hit-recovery, where input is ignored until after you've landed.
The jump mechanics are awkward. It's easy to over- or under- shoot, and the more complicated jump mechanics are inconsistent.
This leads into the next problem...
GAMEPLAY: ...which is level design intended for fluid and precise movement. There are lots of moving platforms, timing puzzles, tight jumps between spikes, and things of that sort. The layouts look like they would be fun, but the poor controls turn them into a frustrating mess.
The RPG elements are straightforward with no strange mechanics to delve into, so there's just the stats and what they do to cover.
Every level your stats improve on your own, and you get five points to distribute as you like. The stat points are undocumented. This is both annoying and entirely normal, but unfortunately the stats aren't entirely clear-cut, so I'll cover what each one does.
The first two are easy:
Con: This one is straightforward. Con increases your HP.
Int: This one boosts magic damage, and I think it boosts mana recovery speed as well. Mana recharges pretty quick anyway, so it's not easy to tell.
Unfortunately, the others aren't so clear
Luk: As always, luck is a nebulous stat with no clear function.
Dex: This one takes some figuring out. At first I expected it would boost melee damage, but after sinking 50 points into it my punches weren't all that much more powerful than they started. What was confusing was how my magic kept pace with it. As best as I can figure melee damage increases with your level. I'm still unsure what this actually does.
Of course, punching seems to exist only so you're not completely helpless until you get magic. Magic can hit faster, and doesn't put you in range of enemy's wailing and gnashing teeth.
Sadly, even the magic suffers from the dodgy controls, mostly due to the fact your movement affects projectile trajectory. Worse still, since the angle of deflection changes on a frame-by-frame basis you can't really use the deflection for anything.
On the plus side you can choose to aim 45 degrees off from horizontal, which is great for shooting up and down slopes.
Platforms are weird. You can jump up through them but not back down. Intentionally, at least, as getting get knocked down results in you falling right through them. This is sometimes exploitable, but more often it just compounds the game's control problems. There are several sections where you have to climb shafts of alternating platforms while dodging projectiles. If you get knocked down you'll fall all the way to the bottom and have to start over. Of course, the hit recovery is such that even if you don't get knocked down you'll often slide off a ledge and still wind up falling all the way to the ground stunned anyway.
Pickups and defeated enemies usually, but not always, fall through platforms. While mana pickups aren't important health certainly is, and having to backtrack to retrieve those precious red orbs is sometimes risky and always annoying - assuming they didn't fall into spikes anyway.
Some platforms are solid when approached from the side, which is just perplexing and makes a few of the jumping puzzles more frustrating than ostensibly intended.
If you can work past the problems, then gameplay is solid.
The sprites are drawn and animated well, but the world art can be a bit bland and some of the placement is sloppy.
SOUND: As far as sound goes, it's not bad. The sound effects are solid, but the music is a little chaotic.
Sadly, the voice acting is poor and sometimes unintelligible. Subtitles would help, but there's no such option.
SPECIAL FEATURES: Speaking of features, it has a Gallery for viewing unlocked CG and a Museum so you can interact with every enemy in the game. Spoilers aren't prevented by changing the Museum, but by loading your save game and throwing simple barriers in your way.
Notably absent is a content lock, so the NSFW content can't be disabled.
STORY: The plot is generic and tissue thin; schoolgirl falls down a hole on the way to school, schoolgirl finds lovecraftian cult, schoolgirl fights for justice and survival. The most I can say about the story is that it exists, and exists only to give the game some basic context. Don't expect any surprises.
NOTES: I played the demo, which I am fairly sure is representative of the full game owing to the fact that the demo is, in fact, the full game with everything after the first boss locked until you stick a license file in the game's folder.
TL;DR: I can say it's not a bad game, but it's sorely lacking polish. The biggest sticking point is the poor control. None of the problems are actually core parts of the game, and all of them could be fixed in patches, but I have to judge based on what is instead of what could be.
Grade: D
Site: Links to adult content are not permitted, so you'll have to google it. Sorry.
Current Price: $6.50
I'll start with the biggest problem.
CONTROLS: The controls in this game are terrible.
They can be rebound, which is nice, but there's no keybind for cycling through spells.
They're stiff and unresponsive with lots of frames that just outright drop input. The worst of the dropping comes from hit-recovery, where input is ignored until after you've landed.
The jump mechanics are awkward. It's easy to over- or under- shoot, and the more complicated jump mechanics are inconsistent.
This leads into the next problem...
GAMEPLAY: ...which is level design intended for fluid and precise movement. There are lots of moving platforms, timing puzzles, tight jumps between spikes, and things of that sort. The layouts look like they would be fun, but the poor controls turn them into a frustrating mess.
The RPG elements are straightforward with no strange mechanics to delve into, so there's just the stats and what they do to cover.
Every level your stats improve on your own, and you get five points to distribute as you like. The stat points are undocumented. This is both annoying and entirely normal, but unfortunately the stats aren't entirely clear-cut, so I'll cover what each one does.
The first two are easy:
Con: This one is straightforward. Con increases your HP.
Int: This one boosts magic damage, and I think it boosts mana recovery speed as well. Mana recharges pretty quick anyway, so it's not easy to tell.
Unfortunately, the others aren't so clear
Luk: As always, luck is a nebulous stat with no clear function.
Dex: This one takes some figuring out. At first I expected it would boost melee damage, but after sinking 50 points into it my punches weren't all that much more powerful than they started. What was confusing was how my magic kept pace with it. As best as I can figure melee damage increases with your level. I'm still unsure what this actually does.
Of course, punching seems to exist only so you're not completely helpless until you get magic. Magic can hit faster, and doesn't put you in range of enemy's wailing and gnashing teeth.
Sadly, even the magic suffers from the dodgy controls, mostly due to the fact your movement affects projectile trajectory. Worse still, since the angle of deflection changes on a frame-by-frame basis you can't really use the deflection for anything.
On the plus side you can choose to aim 45 degrees off from horizontal, which is great for shooting up and down slopes.
Platforms are weird. You can jump up through them but not back down. Intentionally, at least, as getting get knocked down results in you falling right through them. This is sometimes exploitable, but more often it just compounds the game's control problems. There are several sections where you have to climb shafts of alternating platforms while dodging projectiles. If you get knocked down you'll fall all the way to the bottom and have to start over. Of course, the hit recovery is such that even if you don't get knocked down you'll often slide off a ledge and still wind up falling all the way to the ground stunned anyway.
Pickups and defeated enemies usually, but not always, fall through platforms. While mana pickups aren't important health certainly is, and having to backtrack to retrieve those precious red orbs is sometimes risky and always annoying - assuming they didn't fall into spikes anyway.
Some platforms are solid when approached from the side, which is just perplexing and makes a few of the jumping puzzles more frustrating than ostensibly intended.
If you can work past the problems, then gameplay is solid.
The sprites are drawn and animated well, but the world art can be a bit bland and some of the placement is sloppy.
SOUND: As far as sound goes, it's not bad. The sound effects are solid, but the music is a little chaotic.
Sadly, the voice acting is poor and sometimes unintelligible. Subtitles would help, but there's no such option.
SPECIAL FEATURES: Speaking of features, it has a Gallery for viewing unlocked CG and a Museum so you can interact with every enemy in the game. Spoilers aren't prevented by changing the Museum, but by loading your save game and throwing simple barriers in your way.
Notably absent is a content lock, so the NSFW content can't be disabled.
STORY: The plot is generic and tissue thin; schoolgirl falls down a hole on the way to school, schoolgirl finds lovecraftian cult, schoolgirl fights for justice and survival. The most I can say about the story is that it exists, and exists only to give the game some basic context. Don't expect any surprises.
NOTES: I played the demo, which I am fairly sure is representative of the full game owing to the fact that the demo is, in fact, the full game with everything after the first boss locked until you stick a license file in the game's folder.
TL;DR: I can say it's not a bad game, but it's sorely lacking polish. The biggest sticking point is the poor control. None of the problems are actually core parts of the game, and all of them could be fixed in patches, but I have to judge based on what is instead of what could be.
Grade: D
Site: Links to adult content are not permitted, so you'll have to google it. Sorry.
Current Price: $6.50
Introduction
The state of gaming journalism is horrible.
It's nearly impossible to find an honest, well-reasoned review of games in this mire of payola and/or angry people yelling into cameras.
Most people would respond to this by yelling into cameras until they drew enough attention to suckle from the bosom of review bribery, but not I! I shall stand against the corruption, and speak the truth!
I do this not for honor, not for glory, but for lack of a camera into which I can yell angrily.
I'm going to state right up front that I expect to review games that contain objectionable content. As I'm focused on the game aspects themselves I won't be touching on such content in my reviews, but I'll still make it clear when and how a game is NSFW, offensive, disgusting, and/or otherwise not family-friendly.
The TL;DR goal here is to review a wide swath of games, with a focus on things that would normally be overlooked or avoided.
I'm not going to be going out of my way to look for terrible games to mock or searching for gems to praise, but instead looking at basically anything that comes my way.
I'll try to go beyond simply saying what a game has done wrong or right, and go into what makes it so. People often forget that reviews aren't just for players, but are tools to help developers improve their craft. Simply saying something is good or bad without going into the reasoning behind that call doesn't provide any useful feedback.
By the same token, I'm going to pay attention to suggestions on how to improve my reviews and my writing. I recognize that I'm as fallible as any human, and as such scores aren't final and reviews are subject to change.
I hope to mostly review reader-submitted suggestions, but when that's not an option I'll review free games, paid games I own, and the occasional demo.
It's nearly impossible to find an honest, well-reasoned review of games in this mire of payola and/or angry people yelling into cameras.
Most people would respond to this by yelling into cameras until they drew enough attention to suckle from the bosom of review bribery, but not I! I shall stand against the corruption, and speak the truth!
I do this not for honor, not for glory, but for lack of a camera into which I can yell angrily.
I'm going to state right up front that I expect to review games that contain objectionable content. As I'm focused on the game aspects themselves I won't be touching on such content in my reviews, but I'll still make it clear when and how a game is NSFW, offensive, disgusting, and/or otherwise not family-friendly.
The TL;DR goal here is to review a wide swath of games, with a focus on things that would normally be overlooked or avoided.
I'm not going to be going out of my way to look for terrible games to mock or searching for gems to praise, but instead looking at basically anything that comes my way.
I'll try to go beyond simply saying what a game has done wrong or right, and go into what makes it so. People often forget that reviews aren't just for players, but are tools to help developers improve their craft. Simply saying something is good or bad without going into the reasoning behind that call doesn't provide any useful feedback.
By the same token, I'm going to pay attention to suggestions on how to improve my reviews and my writing. I recognize that I'm as fallible as any human, and as such scores aren't final and reviews are subject to change.
I hope to mostly review reader-submitted suggestions, but when that's not an option I'll review free games, paid games I own, and the occasional demo.
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