Nylige anmeldelser av Durandal

Praetorians was the first game I ever played, so I was incredibly hyped for this remaster and bought it within minutes of it dropping on Steam. As such, it's very probable that I'm seeing the game through rose-tinted glasses.

Nevertheless, Praetorians is a solid little RTS game that certainly feels old. If you come in with the experience of having played something like Total War, it's gonna feel incredibly stripped down and feature-bare, but that's not necessarily a bad thing; the game is really boiled down to fundamentals like army composition, positioning, and knowing what ability to use when. But beyond that, there a few clever and unique little gameplay mechanics that I feel add a lot to the experience - for instance, dynamic construction and destruction of bridges, every unit being able to receive a field demotion to become a builder unit, and so on and so forth.

On top of this, there's even a good bit of asymmetry between the three ingame factions - Romans, Barbarians, and Egyptians. Small variations make for interesting changes to gameplay style - for instance, Roman builders can hold their own in a fight while Egyptian builders can massively accelerate their build speed at the cost of HP.

Overall, even if I put aside the nostalgic appeal of the game that introduced me to the wonder of video games, I can highly recommend Praetorians to anyone who wants a tight, dynamic RTS experience with few frills and many joys.

(On a sidenote, the soundtrack is great too. Like, really, really great.)

Portal Stories: Mel is just absolutely fantastic. So much so that it's often easy to forget that it's just a mod and not an official Valve-made expansion for Portal 2. I would gladly pay as much for this as I did for that game.

It's one thing to make a fan-made expansion or spinoff that iterates upon the main game's story and gameplay; it's quite another to make a spinoff that feels like the main game. It's clear that Prism Game Studios spent an extensive amount of time playing through both canon Portal games and taking meticulous notes not just on level design, but also on narrative beats and characterization. The disembodied voice of Cave Johnson makes a return, and while you can tell it's a different actor, Mel's version of Cave does a great job at capturing the essence and mannerism required (and hell, if Dishonored 2 can get away with drastically changing the VA for a key character, this game gets a pass for someone trying their damndest with what vocal cords they have.)

The new characters, meanwhile, are full of Portal-esque soul that never ceases to entertain. I'd even go so far to say that I like the most important of these deuteragonists, who you'll be hearing from a lot, more than I did Wheatley.

As for the gameplay itself, well, it's Portal 2... but better. Yes, genuinely, I think Mel's puzzles are better designed than those in Portal 2. They're difficult enough to make you feel like a genius when you solve them but easy enough that I, someone relatively bad at puzzle games, never felt the need to consult a guide or playthrough. While PS:M only introduces a single brand new puzzle element, the way it uses both old and new components is practically transcendental. Often solutions to puzzles will include clever exploitation of certain specific mechanics that Portal 2 never bothered with. There are mercifully few timing or movement based puzzles, placing the emphasis squarely on taking things at your own pace to logic your way through a given set of problems.

All in all, I've had an absolute blast playing this game, and all I can hope for is that if Portal 3 ever enters development (or is already in development), the people behind this masterpiece are in some way involved.

TL;DR: Apex Legends' slip-n-slide mobility meets GMod Zombie Escape mode, with a brilliant set of artistic decisions thrown into the mix. Might get stale after a while, though.

Pandemic Express is a delightfully weird game from the moment you load into the main menu, when, instead of the typical spooky horror music you might expect to be the theme song of a zombie game, you're met with... In The Hall of the Mountain King. The entire soundtrack in fact, follows this theme of classical music, with Camille Saint-Saëns making a particularly frequent appearance. That might seem like an odd stylistic choice but it genuinely works, and meshes well with the rest of the game's design.

As you might be able to tell from the screenshots, its visual style is an odd blend of semi-realistic scenery and cartoonish character models. The contrast between the moodiness of the world and the colorful players themselves gives Pandemic Express a certain feel I can't quite describe but quite like.

The cartooniness extends also to gameplay mechanics.

On the face of it, you have the typical mechanics that you'd expect from a game like this - humans scavenge for guns to shoot zombies, zombies bite humans to make more zombies, and there's enough variety in guns and zombie classes to make for a range of viable strategies. Zombies respawn quickly and can, through a system reminiscent of Left 4 Dead, choose exactly where to do so, encouraging risky plays and clever coordination, plus keeps the human players on their toes - you can run all you want, but the zombies can spawn right around the corner in front of you.

Where the game goes totally off the rails, and, in my opinion, truly makes itself unique is in its mobility system - not only can all players (save one rare class of zombie) double jump and gain ridiculous mobility through sliding down hills and then jumping, but human players can propel themselves ridiculously high into the air by jumping and then shooting down against a nearby wall. Verticality is an incredibly important part of the game and you can tell a good player from a bad one by how much they take advantage of every possible opportunity to cover stupidly long distances through all the methods available to you. It's a set of very well designed systems that is, admittedly, hard to learn, but once you really crack it and get into muscle memory you'll be flying around the map in no time. If you like how the movement feels in something like Apex Legends, Pandemic Express will be right up your alley.

The biggest issue at present is simply the lack of content to engender long-term interest. Gameplay always follows the same loop and, though there seems to be a decent selection of maps, the only major difference between them is whether the train you escape on at the end is an actual train or an elevated cable car. That difference does make for some strategic variation, but not enough to keep the game from falling into a certain meta that gets repetitive after a while.

Overall, Pandemic Express is a genuine joy to play, but I worry that joy will become stale soon if we don't see major additions to gameplay; what keeps PE's spiritual predecessors (GMod Zombie Survival and Zombie Escape mode) fresh is the huge variety in locations, weapons, survivor tools, and zombie classes, meaning that while gameplay looks roughly the same every time there's always a lot going on under the hood. I'm confident that, if Pandemic Express adds more weapons, more utility tools for the survivors, more maps, and more zombie classes, it will secure its rightful spot as one of my favourite games in recent memory.

This is hands down one of the best purchases I have ever made, and I've only played this game for around 2 and a half hours at time of writing.

The original Risk of Rain was a gloriously fun game that was part survival horror and part mouth-watering power trip. Its seamless blend of platforming-action and roguelike mechanics created a gameplay cycle that I've never seen repeated since: one of alternating phases of "I am a god of death that slays everything that stands before me" and "if I stand still for even an instant I will be sent to the god of death".

Risk of Rain 2 takes everything that made the original Risk of Rain great and turns it up to 11. Fundamentally, this game is an exercise in the ultimate absurdity: giving you a dizzying array of artifacts that will, in the span of 20 minutes, turn you into an unstoppable force, and then pitting you against an entire planet whose sole purpose seems to be to kill you.

The gameplay consists of choosing a Survivor, which is a character with a few unique abilities all designed to give it a relatively unique playstyle. You then run around the map, killing enemies to get money to buy items that will make you more powerful, and ultimately searching for a teleporter that allows you to get to the next level. All the while, the difficulty is constantly increasing for every second spent in the game, so you need to have a balance between playing too quickly and entering a more difficult level with too little equipment... or playing too slowly and getting swarmed as the quantity of enemies the game throws at you gets turned up to 11.

All this leads to a game that starts slow and simple but very quickly becomes fast-paced as you are swarmed by increasingly powerful enemies with ever more complex ways of destroying you. You will be surprised. A lot. You will die. A lot. You will enjoy it. A lot. I would actually recommend going into this game as blindly as possible, because half the fun is getting into a comfortable rhythm and then being surprised by an enemy doing something totally unexpected and kicking your ass.

The only "negatives", and I use that word very loosely, are:

- The graphics are a mixed bag. Textures are boring and uninspired and the 3D models are in a very weird uncanny valley of being too simple to be modern and too complex to be old. A lot of the animations are clunky and weird to look at, too. With that being said, it's obvious that the majority of this is caused by a concession to performance - given the sheer quantity of enemies and particle effects on-screen at any given time, sacrificing visuals for the sake of gameplay was absolutely the right move, and after a while you stop caring about the visuals entirely (or at least I did). Moreover, particle and lighting effects are glorious; fights are bright, flashy, and exciting to look at, even when they become cluster♥♥♥♥s later on in the game. Moreover, there is a unique joy that this game gives you as you progress: any new items you pick up are visually represented on your character model, so you'll start the game looking like a relatively generic sci-fi soldier and slowly look more and more like some deranged murder-god as syringes, ukuleleles, feathers, shields, gasoline cans and more start piling up on your body. It's really neat.

- The multiplayer is a bit rough around the edges right now. Lag is unavoidable and there's no way to ensure you're only playing with players with low ping short of inviting your friends (which, to be fair, is what you should be doing anyway). Communication tools are also largely absent, consisting only of a very simplistic ping system (which, admittedly, suffices for most important communication - "go here", "attack this", "look at this important item", etc.) and text chat. At present, the community is not very cooperative, with most players generally acting like it's singleplayer with other players acting as bonus DPS against bosses at best and thieves of your hard-earned items at worst. I can't tell whether the lack of forced cooperative systems is deliberate or not, but there is a certain merit to it, as it puts the onus on the players themselves to coordinate and cooperate rather than using gameplay systems to handhold them to it.

- There isn't much item variety at time of writing, especially among higher tier items. This is a bit jarring, coming from the original Risk of Rain; it had far more items, so every chest you opened felt like a true roll of the dice. In RoR2, you'll be getting a lot of Old War Stealth Packs. However, the "early access game" disclaimer on this page and the very visible indications of "we're working on adding more stuff" in the game itself should tip you off to the fact that this state of affairs is temporary and will be fixed over time.

If you're reading this, I'm sure you've already figured out what this game is largely about, so let me give a comment on what it feels like to actually play:

This is, hands down, probably the hardest game I've ever played (when it comes to the multiplayer).

Describing the learning curve as "brutal" doesn't do it justice. It's practically inhumane. The lack of an effective tutorial, slews of hidden gameplay systems and mechanics that are not referred to anywhere in the game itself, and a tiny but very experienced playerbase means that as a new player you will have no clue what you're doing and will almost always be matched against people who very much do. This last part is the most significant by far - the gameplay systems are complex and hard to master, but it's doable. What isn't so doable is beating people with infinitely more experience than you when you've just barely figured out the core gameplay mechanics. The singleplayer mode really doesn't help in this regard, since the AI is criminally stupid and makes up for it with sheer numbers - not a good reflection of real multiplayer matches.

If you are masochistic enough to enjoy a game where you will lose, lose, lose, and lose again, over and over and over, until you sloooooooowly get good enough to start winning, this game is a brilliant experience unlike any other. But if you're not willing to put in literally hundreds of hours to git gud, and can't stand the idea that you will get your teeth kicked in practically every match by people who know about parts of the game you didn't even know existed, this game is not for you.

I've had a lot of frustration with Wargame: Red Dragon, but something keeps me coming back, demoralizing as playing this game may be. Maybe it'll do the same for you.

(On a sidenote, if you're even slightly interested in the field of Cold War era military technology, this game is remarkably educational in the sense of presenting lots of those in an easily digestible format. You'll be able to tell apart a MiG-29 from a Su-27 in no time! Obviously don't use this as an actual resource, but it's a nice starting point for further research of your own - often just going "ooh this vehicle looks cool" and then googling it is enough.)

Is it polished? About as much a shoe that's been on a world tour of fertilizer factories.

Does it have a lot of content? About as much as someone who recently died of starvation.

Is the performance good? About as much as a brain surgeon on crack.

But most importantly, is it fun?

...about as much as you can expect from a free social game cobbled together by one dude. If you don't have a mic, a social attitude, and a somewhat laissez-faire expectations, you will not enjoy this game. If you have those three essentials, you will.

If Subnautica is not the perfect open world survival/exploration game, it is certainly the blueprint for one.

Brilliantly combining exploration, survival, and story in a beautiful world, moderated by a creatively designed crafting system, Subnautica is an exercise in excellent pacing. The flow of the game is such that everything new always feels just slightly out of reach - until you push yourself that extra mile and reap the rewards of swimming a little further than you feel comfortable with.

To top it all off, the setting is wondrous, not only in its uniqueness but also in its execution. Around every corner is something new and unexpected - something beautiful, or terrifying, or downright adorable. Slowly, you will discover not only the world, but its quirks and behaviours; fear will turn to mild irritation as your experience with a particular predator grows, only to return to square one when you encounter yet another horror just a few hundred meters deeper.

Subnautica is a game of adapatation to adverse circumstances, and believe me, the result is infinitely more satisfying if you can take part in the whole process on your own. My greatest regret as regards this game is the amount of spoilers I've taken in across multiple playthroughs, reading the wiki, etc., because I will never be able to experience the true depths of emotion that this game transmits to a player that goes in blind.

But just because I can only glean a relatively shallow (but still greatly satisfying) layer of that emotion, doesn't mean you can't get the full experience.

Please, reader,

buy this game.

Indulge yourself in a journey like no other.

A really well-designed game is one in which the core mechanics can grip you even if there isn't all that much meat on the bones of the game.

They Are Billions is that kind of game. I figure you, reader, have the ability to look at screenshots and video clips, so you probably don't need me to provide an intricate explanation of how the game basically works.

It's early access, with all that entails - well, mostly. For having been rushed out the door due to overwhelming demand, the game is remarkably polished. I've played for quite a few hours now, and I only noticed a bare few incredibly inconsequential bugs, which is very impressive considering the early access nature of the game.

The game looks beautiful (though I am very easy to please), runs well, and is generally quite competent. Close examination will occasionally expose something messy, chiefly in the vein of slightly broken english or a mismatched building description. The RTS mechanics are robust, uncomplicated, and functional, though building placement is sometimes frustrating due to a lack of camera rotation and vague spacing requirements. Perhaps the most glaring issue, on a technical level, is the atrocious unit pathing - but I'm sure that'll be fiddled with eventually.

Design-wise, the game is a bit patchier; there are six reasonably diverse units available, though, balance-wise, only two are considered particularly essential. There are also three defensive towers. The voice acting is generally pretty good and I found myself enjoying listening to my jolly, sarcastic, psychotic soldiers, though I've heard some complaints about the "text-to-speech sounding" announcer. Aesthetically, everything is beautiful and runs very smoothly, even as thousands of zombies pour into your screen.

Gameplay is pretty standard for an RTS, with a number of unique (and often clever) twists, ranging from small "oh that's cool" moments to huge subversions of the typical "classic" RTS playstyle. The central mechanic, naturally, is that of the NPC zombies that pose a constant, existential threat to you - and are very, very dangerous indeed. While expansion is a constant necessity throughout the entire game, it feels very high-stakes in the early game, as you have to balance map-clearing, resource gathering, scouting, building, and, most importantly, protecting what you've already built. Even a single zombie in the wrong place can completely ruin your day due to the infection mechanic, in which all occupants of a sufficiently damaged building are turned into zombies - usually leading to a massive chain reaction.

Updates and fixes are constant (and I mean constant - I have to download some tiny bug patch nearly every day). The dev team is active and apparently working their ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ asses off.

In general?

I'm not a person who's very good at "classic" build-expand-conquer RTSes, so I've generally avoided them. They Are Billions, however, is a purchase I'm almost certain I'll never regret.

My most enthusiastic recommendation is provided to you, dear reader.

I've played a lot of games across the years. Most of them are fun; some are outright exhilirating.

Still, I've never quite experienced the joy of charging across a grassy field with dozens of other French soldiers, yelling VIVE LA FRANCE both through voicechat and spamming the "B" key (yes, the devs included a keybind for yelling patriotic things) as you approach the last horrified British survivors at a run.

Until I played Holdfast, that is.

If you have a mic, a loud voice, and a good sense of humour, this game is likely to be one of the smartest purchases you are make in your lifetime.

It's ridiculously fun.

SOMA is brilliant. It is an incredibly atmospheric horror game where the horror comes far less from overt scares and more from atmosphere, biting tension, occasional confused terror, and the implications of all the little story details you find here and there.

This is a rare horror game where the monsters are far, far less important than the story, and indeed, many people believe that the monsters actually detract from the experience; yet even these possibly-unnecessary monsters are really well done. I don't think of myself as very easily scared, but at two points in the game, I just had to stop playing for a while because I could not go on while that thing was there.

The fact that probably the scariest part of the game is one in which there are no monsters is testament to the overall quality. In sound, especially, the game just excels, and will more often than not make you extremely nervous.

In terms of length, the game is just perfect - it's long enough to feel satisfying but doesn't overstay its welcome. If you want to come back for more, there are quite a few custom scenarios, most of which are very high quality, but none really have the same grip as the main story so I haven't gotten too far into them.

I give this a very strong recommendation. The only qualm I have with this game is the price - maybe I'm thrifty, but 27.99 Euro is perhaps a little bit excessive given the length of the game (10-ish hours or so), but on any sale, and perhaps even without, my shining seal of approval goes to SOMA; probably one of the best gaming experiences I'll ever have.