Recent reviews by ¤ βℓооđч ¤ Nico-Kun!

When I got LEGO Horizon Adventures, I got the Deluxe Edition, as I always like having "complete" editions. And while I'm gonna give this a positive review (I like several of the costumes it adds, including the ones based on other PlayStation IPs), the same caveat I added to my review of the main game applies here: get the full game when it's lower than $40, otherwise, you might feel it's not worth it.

That will be all.

LEGO Horizon Adventures sounds, at first, like a weird idea. A LEGO videogame adapting an already existing videogame franchise? However, I'd say it works surprisingly well, and makes me wish for more LEGO retellings of popular videogame franchises.

Anyway, what's LEGO Horizon Adventures like? It's a rather loose retelling of Horizon Zero Dawn's story, focusing mostly on the Nora tribe and the conflict against Eclipse. Several events from the original game are skipped or simplified, but the main threat of HADES remains, as well as Aloy's search to learn about her past. All of this is, of course, done in the classical humorous style that LEGO adaptations are known for.

Gameplay wise, this game isn't quite like Traveller's Tales' LEGO games. It still plays like a third-person platformer, but there's a limited selection of characters (only four: Aloy, Varl, Teersa and Erend), each with their own specific weapon type (bow and arrow, spear, bombs and hammer, respectively). You can also come across rare weapons and special gadgets to aid in combat against machines and human enemies. The story is divided into four chapter, not including the prologue, taking you over the four regions represented in the game, and each level has you go through a region looking for some objective, either finding a place to build a tower, defeating a machine, or even exploring a Cauldron. You'll fight several enemies in these levels, and after you're done with the story, you get Apex Hunts (where you hunt a powerful machine) and Expeditions, which is basically a free mode.

The art style, well, it's LEGO. It looks pretty damn good, and the machine designs are excellent, so in that regard, the game is great. Customization is also pretty in-depth, even with the limited roster of characters. You get Mother's Heart as a main hub, with sub-sections representing the major areas from the original game: the Nora Sacred Lands, the mountains, the jungle and the desert, and you can customize this hub with plenty of decorations and buildings you unlock as you progress. You can also unlock over a hundred different costumes, and then create 9 custom outfits for each character using pieces from said costumes, which is cool.

The soundtrack is pretty good as well, there's a song in particular I loved. And the voice acting is great, even more so since they got most of the original cast to reprise their roles.

All in all, I think this is a great game, and I can easily recommend it. Even then, I do so with a minor caveat: while I had great fun with it, I can agree with people who consider it a bit overpriced for what it is. I think the sweet spot for this game would be around $30 or $40. Any higher than that, I'd say you're better off waiting.

While the mod itself was mostly disappointing, I must say the soundtrack is quite enjoyable, and really sets the atmosphere for it. Thus, I can easily recommend this soundtrack, as an enjoyer of videogame OSTs.

Logistique, marketed as an act 1 of a series, is a Half-Life 2 mod taking place during the events of that game. In this mod, however, rather than playing as Gordon Freeman, you play as Adam, who's introduced as Ivanov for some reason, a former soldier during the Seven Hour War.

The story begins, it seems, around the start of Half-Life 2, since the introductory cutscene implies Adam Ivanov is one of the citizens living in the apartment the Combine raid during the first chapter of Half-Life 2. His wife taken, he sets out to find her by following her captors to an abandoned building. While exploring the building, Adam begins suffering hallucinations and flashbacks, which shed a little light on his wife's story, although not much.

Gameplay wise, this mod had some interesting ideas. Lacking an HEV suit, you get no HUD, and you have to check your ammo manually; you also can't use healing or suit stations, instead having to rely on classic medkits. Even then, there's regenerating health, although the enemies can quickly reduce your health. However, these interesting ideas are bogged down by some awful platforming segments; now, I don't mind some platforming in my FPS games, but in this mod, the platforming can be too frustrating at times, requiring somewhat precise jumps across large gaps, and that's without getting into the complete lack of direction the game provides, made all the more annoying by the amount of backtracking you have to do at times.

The level design, while offering interesting environments, suffers from the above point. There's a section where you go through what the protagonist believes is a giant trash compactor, and through annoying platforming, you need to reach the top, which ends up being the subway tunnels. I must say, that area, leaving the platforming aside, was cool, as was the abandoned neighbourhood.

Acting wise... It's not the worst, but a lot of the dialogue was somewhat unnecesary exposition by the main character. There were also some syncing issues when you encounter NPCs. One good point about the mod is the soundtrack, I liked that.

All in all, I can't really recommend this mod, especially since it's ending feels incomplete, as it's more a setup for a part two that hasn't arrived yet.

Mirror's Edge Catalyst is a reboot of the 2008 game Mirror's Edge, sharing most of the gameplay aspects of the original but with a brand new story. The game still follows Faith Connors, except this time around, the story starts with her fresh out of juvie, rejoining her runner clan until she gets involved in a larger plot that threatens the inhabitants of Glass; the game's setting.

To start things off with in this review, as I said above, the gameplay keeps aspects from the first game: the focus on running and parkour; even more, this game takes out guns entirely, and even encourages you to avoid combat whenever possible. While Faith has melee abilities, you're usually better off running than staying to fight, and this game provides a lot of opportunities for running. A major difference to the first game is that this one has an open world for you to traverse between missions, even including optional activities like time trials and repeatable delivery missions. There's also several upgrades you can get, both for movement and combat, although again, combat is usually better avoided.

Now, when it comes to the story, I'd say it starts off relatively strong. First Faith gets out of juvie, and not too much happens, do a few runs, until a conspiracy starts to unveil. There's a few predictable twists in the story, but even then it could've all worked pretty well, until the final mission; the ending feels a bit rushed, and it seems to set up a sequel that never came out, which is a shame (hopefully EA revisits this franchise at some point). Speaking of the mission themselves, they can be pretty fun, but here is an aspect where the game's main gameplay loop kinda clashes with the mission structure, as there's a couple of missions in which you're forced into combat with no way out. A rather egregious example is a mission in which you're trapped in a room fighting waves of enemies for a few minutes.

Graphics were good for its time, although now they've begun showing their age. There also seem to be some issues causing blurry textures in several places, although I believe there's guides showing fixes. Speaking of fixes, since the online servers were shut down on December 2023, achievements are straight up broken, but luckily there's a guide that fixes most of them, with a fan project trying to restore online capabilites as well (before the shutdown, it was possible to create custom time trials that other players could play).

The sound design is very good, and I loved the soundtrack. The dialogue, though, now that's a bit clunky, and could've used some more work, but it's not too terrible.

All things considered, I had a good time with this game, so I can recommend it.

As it seems to be tradition with Civ games, they need an expansion or two to start being really good, and Rising Tide proves it for Beyond Earth. To begin with it, it adds a new gameplay mechanic in the form of floating cities, which can be founded on the sea, and can then freely move. It's a nice addition, although limited in some aspects: to move a floating city, you need to spend production, meaning that's turns lost without producing something more useful; add on to this that floating cities don't expand their borders through culture, meaning their only way to get new tiles is by moving or purchasing them.

Another addition is the new personality traits system, and the Diplomatic Capital currency, all part of a revamped diplomacy system, as the original game had a system similar to V. With this new system, you can upgrade and get new unique abilities for your leader, which makes the game a bit more dynamic. The agreements you can sign with other leaders have also changed; instead of "give me X resource for Y gold", you can now sign spend diplomatic capital for stuff like extra production or science, depending on which traits the other leaders have.

There's also artifacts to collect now; by using your explorers, you can unearth artifacts and then research them in order to unlock several bonuses, including new buildings and wonders! Speaking of buildings, there's also a whole bunch of new buildings and wonders, some of them exclusive to aquatic cities, and there's now hybrid units, as the affinity system was reworked to allow hybrid affinities; basically, you get new synergy bonuses between affinities. Finally, there's four new leaders to play as, which adds a bit more variety to the game, although the flaws of the original can still be felt.

All in all, a worty upgrade to the base game, which I can recommend more easily.

This DLC adds a bunch of new custom maps to the game, each with their own unique quirks; for example, one of the maps has a frozen wasteland on the north and desert on the south. They basically act like any other random map, as you can set specific biome types and such, but with their own scripts they still give you results like the one I mentioned above. I liked the maps, so I recommend it for some extra variety in gameplay.

As a big fan of Civ V, I must say that when I first heard of Beyond Earth all those years ago, I was really interested in it. A Civ game in space? Sign me up! However, when I actually played it, I found the game to be somewhat disappointed. Now, before I delve deeper into this review, let me point out that only recently did I go back to the game, and played it with the DLC, so some of the details I mention here might be part of the DLC, and not in the base game.

To start with, what's the best part of Civ? Well, the civilizations, at least for me. It's nice to pick a specific civilization with its own leaders and abilities, and in this, this game falls short. Rather than having a Unique Ability, and two Unique Items (buildings, units, improvements) like Civ V had, in this game, the only difference between civs is the unique ability. This ends up causing all civs to feel very samey; there's no real differences as you progress through the game.

And that brings me to the next point: progression. While in traditional Civ games there's a clear progression from the Ancient Era all the way to a Future Era, in this game you are already in the future, and there's no real advancement to speak of. Sure, there's a tech tree, or web, in this case, but it lacks that feel of technological advancement than the main games have. This also ties into the victory conditions, which, other than Domination and Time, all need you to research specific techs, then build a wonder, and then spend a lot more turns doing a repetitive action, or just straight up waiting. There's no Culture or Diplomatic Victory; it's all different flavours of a Science Victory.

Despite these flaws, the gameplay remains pretty similar to that of Civ V, and so I enjoyed it. The alien environments are really good, and having alien creatures instead of barbarians is also nice. I must admit I was a bit of a fool by attacking aliens on sight; turns out they remain peaceful towards your units if you don't attack them, so it becomes a calculation of cost vs benefit, as attacking the aliens can provide science bonuses and such. A new gameplay mechanic present in this game is the quest system. Basically, you'll get specific objectives as you play, and can make decisions to affect the outcome of quests, which basically give you one of two benefits.

Another new mechanic is the affinity system. On paper, it sounds good; kinda like the ideologies in Civ V, there's three main affinities: Harmony, Purity and Supremacy. Each affinity unlocks specific unit upgrades, but at the end of the day, there's no disadvantage on trying to get all affinities to max, especially when each affinity unlocks a victory condition.

All in all, Beyond Earth is a somewhat disappointing game, but not one I wouldn't recommend, as I still had a fun time with it.

I learned about this game because of the news of its imminent shutdown, and decided to give it a go for the easy perfection. And now, I must say, what a way to fumble an interesting premise and cool looking world. Sure, on the surface it's yet another "alien virus infects mankind, some people have immunity and fight back", but the aesthetics of the crystallized enemies, and the short intro I played let me wishing for more.

Personally, I think this game could've worked very well as a singleplayer game focusing on the premise. The use of hero shooter mechanics could've worked well, having access to an ultimate and that stuff, but at the end of the day, trend chasing doomed this game.

This DLC for Age of Mythology: Extended Edition is bad. There's no other way around it. Now, it'd be unfair to say I didn't find anything good about the DLC; personally, I liked the addition of a Chinese civilization with its own deities and mechanics. The Garden, a building unique to the Chinese, allows them to get resources that might be otherwise limited, and that's a cool addition. And some of the god powers are fun. No, my problem lies elsewhere: the campaign.

SImply put, the Tale of the Dragon campaign is terrible. Some of the cutscenes are bad, at some points you have no idea why you're doing what you're doing, or who your enemy is, and the scenarios themselves are, for the most part, terrible. In the first scenario, you have to build a dam, which is basically sending your workers to some rocks near a river. All the time, the AI sends waves of enemies to attack you. Another scenario has you start in the middle of a deep jungle, about to be attacked by an overwhelming force; in fact, the guides I found recommend basically abandoning said fortress and spending a lot of time hidden in a deep corner of the map. And the final scenario has you climb a mountain, with triggers at certain points that spawn a whole bunch of enemies to attack your base. Not only that, the AI is broken as well. In that final scenario, there was another enemy AI right next to my base, which could be considered a threat... If it had bothered to attack at all.

From all this, it seems pretty clear the devs in charge of this expansion didn't put a lot of work into it, and personally, I can't really recommend it unless you want to get all the achievements, or don't want to be missing content for the multiplayer mode. Otherwise... It's not good.