Recente recensies door coolDisguise

If you like RL Escape Rooms, you will probably like this game, taking the concept back to its digital roots. Even when only playing the base game, you can see this game has evolved over time. In the beginning, you only had interactions and inspections of objects and a hint system in order to solve puzzles. Little by little this was expanded to include e.g. wearable items with interactions, multiple height levels of maps, a save feature for larger levels (Portal DLC). You are not limited to either single or multiplayer, as far I can tell you can play any map alone or with friends (except for some community maps, which is usually mentioned on the workshop page). A map editor for creating your own maps with your own puzzles is also included.

The game thrives through the continued support by the devs as well as by the community. The devs have given us many (smaller) free DLCs and are actively promoting the community map building efforts, while still offering (bigger, i.e. ~5 maps) paid DLC for a reasonable price with a good level of polish.

You have some options to visually customize your character to your liking. Some of these options are also included with some of the DLCs. The price in my opinion is very reasonable for what's on offer here, it's a lot of fun.

The game just oozes charm and is a loveletter to the fans of the franchise. It is heavily inspired by the older games and still manages to improve on them. The developers actively listened to their community and gave us many features the community wanted for free (additional customizable online gameplay rules, graphics filters), they fixed existing bugs (which seems is not common anymore nowadays) and released a DLC with actual new content that people in the forums asked for.

If you like the brawler genre, this one is for you. You can play the main game either level by level or arcade style in one go.

The core concept, in itself interesting, is what at the same time brings the whole game down.

Your character can change into different forms by lighting candles. There are 4 forms in total, each having 1 special ability and at least 1 weakness each:
Anima - just a orb-like flying soul, which is only hindered by laser walls and can teleport a short distance through regular walls.
Umbra - a shadow form, which can submerge and thereby squeeze through any kind of bars but is killed by light and for some reason falling into pits.
Skeleton - just a skeleton that can throw a bone to reach switches. Killed by spikes and pits.
Human - a human that can roll over spikes up to a certain length. Killed by pits, spikes (if not rolling) and guardian creatures.

The progression between forms is where the problem is located:
you can only change forms by lighting a candle. Once it is lit, it is used up and except for some special candles that bring you back to the Anima form you can only progress forward from Anima to Umbra to Shadow to Human.

In order to progress backwards you have to kill yourself, i.e. just throw yourself into the next pit or obstacle until you reach the form you want to be. This is not a bug, this is intended - you will respawn at a save circle and candles you previously lit will be extinguished, so you can THEN use them again.

You might on occasion wander somewhere just to realize you now have reached a dead end and the only option is - you guessed it - kill yourself to start over, because you lit a candle and your current form cannot progress further. This makes the game extremely tedious and frustrating.

This could be fixed by more voluntary control over the transformations and checking out the map in advance allowing for tactical planning, but as for now the game is just trial and error at some points. And you better remember the correct order where to go or will be doing this over and over and over.

Don't get me wrong, from a technical standpoint what's been achieved using RPG Maker seems alright and maybe even an accomplishment, the characters and sprites seem alright and there's a hint of mystery to the story - if it wasn't for the gameplay.

Just play it. It has ponies.

What is there left to say about KF 2 that hasn't been said?
It's well made, the developers still care and even produce new content multiple times each year.

If you like wave based cooperative shooters, this is a great game, though easier than KF1.
You might get annoyed by Zeds that get reshuffled via teleportation to a different part of the map in order to catch up with you.

It's almost 2020 and the devs still support this with updates and new content, thumbs up!

Trine 3, as one would guess, is the third installment in the Trine series. A series, that prides itself on its visuals, physics based puzzles and the mechanic to switch between three characters with different skillsets with just a buttonpress.

While Trine 1 and 2 featured 2D gameplay, Trine 3 is the first title in the series to go for 3D explorable levels with fixed camera angles. And this jump into the third dimension is not without its flaws.

This game ends on a cliffhanger, because the developers were too ambitious this time around and just couldn't get all of the story finished without compromising their product, so they decided to focus on what they could afford to create with the budget at hand and keep up the quality of it. This is a problem that might happen, we have even seen big development studios that fell into that trap. And it's the right move to at least assure the quality of what's there instead of putting something together half-heartedly.

So the final product looks fantastic, the gameplay and story are true to the series. So what are the (other) problems? If you played Trine 1 or 2 you might remember you could gain new skills for all of the three characters. That's gone. Each one has about 3 skills, which is significantly less than in Trine 2. It's also not as difficult as the other ones and there are no difficulty settings to chose from, to begin with. The puzzles are alright. The enemy variety (compared to Trine 2) has lessened.

The areas in which the developers improved were the controls (e.g. just keeping the jump button down in order to glide is soooo much more intuitive) and differentiating the characters more (the thief won't be your combat character anymore, since the knight is now really useful and the wizard won't be as useless because he now conjures a standard size box and can smash it into enemies). Also the level design was improved - all collectibles are now clearly visible - you might need to find a certain area, but they aren't hidden in the lava anymore (Trine 1) or such. Also if you want to go look for missing collectibles you can now see at which part of the level you're missing them and can jump to that checkpoint instead of playing the level again up to that point.

Since there are no skilltrees and level ups, the collectibles are pretty useless this time around - they grant you access to bonus levels (which are nice to play), but nothing more than that. I always like if games unlock an art gallery or something with collectibles, so you're not forced to find them and there's a sense of worth in finding them - that's not the case here. As for bugs: I found that sometimes the thief and wizard don't exactly target the exact object you want them to interact with and the wizard sometimes has problems to interact with an object at all. Moving to another position solves this, usually.

Should you get this game then? Well, maybe. If you liked Trine 1 and 2, you might be a bit disappointed, but you also might not be. If you didn't play Trine 1 or 2 before, I recommend playing them - at the very least Trine 2. If you get this, get it on sale, favourably in the collection with Trine 1 and 2. It's alright, it was too ambitious, but it still is Trine.

A great remaster of a great game - yet first things first: it might crash for you and I mean at the last boss and it might not be fixable. You can try to open up the task manager and set it to only use one core and it might just work, especially if you skip the cutscene before and after that boss, but it might as well not work. Fortunately, for me this workaround enabled me to beat the game.

So, about the game itself: it contains levels that are reimagenings of the original levels and they're really good, they're well made, the music is great, the voice acting is good. Also there's now an additional tutorial level and another level as the final level (the story has been somewhat overhauled/made clearer) and you will still recognize enemies and parts of levels if you played Ducktales on either NES or Game Boy.
One of the strongest points is the boss design: some now really look massive (as they should) and they are way more interesting in terms of attack patterns.

So what's negative about it? Well, the crash bug that happens for many people (as I gathered it's mostly Nvidia users) of course and even when the characters speak, that's not animated. They might move, but they don't open their mouths. That's a shame. Other than that this game is great fun, and fortunately the cutscenes (which happen a lot and carry the story) are skippable (you wouldn't want to sit there and wait some minutes on your x-th playthrough).

There are multiple difficulty levels, on most you can leave the game and come back later, there's (tested on a 360 pad) controller support, achievements and it might even have Steam cloud as it tends to go to "Synching" after quitting, though it has no cloud symbol in my library.

If you feel like gambling on wether it will crash or not

or

are confident in your abilities in platforming and willing to skip cutscenes in order to reach the final boss before the 2h mark (which might be a little difficult if you watch every cutscene once and don't the rush the levels) so you can use the Steam refund system if it crashes

you should give this a look, when it's on sale.

If it wasn't for the crash I could recommend it without needing to think twice.

It's free, it's fast paced and a lot of fun.

The controls are very simple: you press a combination of directions and your pig does duck, jump and/or attack in that direction. The goal is simple as well: kill as many wolves as you can before they kill you. Luckily they even bring weapons you can use to attack them.

For the low price of FREE what's not to like about this?

The last and best in the Hexcells series (so far, in case it's going to be continued) provides the same kind of gameplay as Hexcells Plus did, but gives you now 3 crucial features:

- Steam cloud lets you continue your progress where you left off on another computer or after formatting
- Continue puzzles in progress (instead of having to go at it again from the beginning)
- Puzzle Generator: after "beating" the preset levels you can now play levels generated from one of 1 000 000 000 seeds

Although there are no new mechanics introduced and I think the proximity mechanic (which at least for me takes a decent amount of time for counting and double-checking) is overused, this is a solid game with the Puzzle Generator giving it a lot of replayability if you just cannot get enough of the basic puzzle principle. I recommend picking it up in a bundle along with the other 2 in a sale.

A definite jump in difficulty from regulars Hexcells, this game also plays like a combination of Minesweeper and Nonograms and introduce a new concept (2-Hexcell-range proximity indicators). While every puzzle has a unique solution that you can deduce, you often have to consider upt to 3 or 4 facts at once in order to make progress. Its only downside (for me) is, that it has many big boards that take forever instead of challenging smaller ones. I recommend getting this in a bundle with Hexcells and Hexcells Infinite. The latter also got Steam cloud, generic puzzles and you can finally save in between a puzzle instead of having to leave the game open.