Recent reviews by Marneus

Hidden In Plain Sight is possibly the best party game you can ever find. With a lot of game modes, you will be spending countless hours arguing with your friends about who's the best at stealing coins or at racing. Don't let the simple graphics decieve you, this game is a whole lot of fun.

I bought this on sale knowing full well this was some bastard mobile port, but as a fan of Dan Abnett's work I still wanted to check it out. Despite some really interesting elements, I'm sad to say that the bad outweigh the good.

Let's start with the good parts, the writing is as good as the book, as one would expect. Being able to see fully detailed locations from the book series is great. The levels are great looking and the overall art direction is stellar, despite the obviously low budget. The locations are expensive and inventive, transcribing amazingly well the grim darkness of the far future. The voice acting for the titular character, Gregor Eisenhorn, is amazing. With a rich deep voice and pretty good deliveries most of the time, the voice actor goes above and beyond what I expected from the title. The music is sometimes atmospheric, sometimes epic, a tad repetitive at times, but overall a good surprise.

Sadly, the bad is everything else. The gameplay is all over the place. It's supposed to be some Batman: Arkham like action adventure thing optimized for mobile, but with different modes of action having sometimes vastly different control schemes you're stopped in your enjoyment to readjust to the new mode your just entered. None of the key bindings are customizable. The combat system is passable at best. If it was the only problem with the game, it wouldn't be so bad. The mobile port nature of the game is apparent from the get go as many of the models, textures and post render effects hint that the game wasn't meant to be experienced on a big HD screen. The voice acting of everyone who isn't Eisenhorn is terrible, with lines that sound out of place or context, with varying degrees of audio quality and mixing. This detracts from the good work put in by Eisenhorn's voice actor and brings any possible immersion to a grinding halt every time a conversation takes place between the main character and anyone else. The janky animations during cutscenes don't help much in that regard.

What's so frustrating is that I can see the ingredients of a good game among the mess. With a tighter focus on what it wanted to be I'm sure this could have been made into something interesting. Who knows, maybe a "Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast" type of FPS thing, or a focussed Telltale point and click affair. But the multiple gameplays and the start and stop nature of everything prevent the natural flow of the narrative.

It's a shame.

This often overlooked extension to the great classic that is Quake 3 Arena includes a lot of cool team based multiplayer content. While it's true that today you will find hundreds of maps, skins, models and mods all over the internet, the content of this extension is pretty consistent with the style of the original game. Some of the stuff you'll find in here is reminiscent of the content of the Dreamcast version which makes even better and more nostalgic for me!

While nobody seems to be hosting or playing Team Arena servers any more, you'll still find hundreds of servers and players ready to kick your butt on the base game. Since this release includes Quake 3 Arena, I consider it to be the superior version of the game, even over Quake Live.

An underated FPS/RPG mix on the Doom. Includes great voice acting, a comic book inspired art style, great music all taking place in an original universe with a captivating story.

This port of the famous specialist tabletop game by Games Workshop is great despite the minor flaws in the execution.

If you didn't know it already, in this game you control a fleet from a faction in the Warhammer 40k universe. If you pick the Imperial Navy you can ram gigantic spaceworhty cathedrals into all sorts of alien ships, you can do the same but with scrapyards with the orks, or you can be a bit more subtle with the Chaos, the Eldars or the Space marines.

The game-play is directly inspired by the old navy themed wargames Battlefleet Gothic was based on with a traditional RTS twist. Everything takes place on a 2D plan despite the setting being in space. Plan your actions, move your ships around and micro manage every single aspect of the combat from firing torpedoes to initiating boarding actions as your initial master plan goes horribly wrong. You can then outfit your ships with different upgrades and faction favors to gift them with special abilities.

The grimdark future of the 41st millenium never looked or sounded so good. The sound design, musics and overall ambiance are all great. The dialogs and cinematics of the campaign are true to the spirit of the universe and are good set-pieces in and off themselves. The ships all look magnificent, the only thing missing is a way to pick our own color scheme like you can on a the tabletop.

Now of the things that aren't so great: the multiplayer implementation is puzzling. Doing quick matches against people on your friend-list shouldn't be rocket science but this game manages to make it more complicated that it needs to be. The overal campaign "overworld" in which you decide which missions you want to take part in isn't exactly great either, you'll be faced with an overwhelming number of possible engagements and you'll have to make choices as you can't fight every battle that's available to you.

Overall the game is great but needs some more polish. From what I can see, it's still being worked on by its developers so that's that, and some more DLC's are on their way.

It's probably the first Game Workshop video game that made me want to try the tabletop version; a shame that they don't publish it anymore. At least I have this game!

Deep strategy/card game in which you play against your cards in the RuneScape lore ad with a great soundtrack!

HunieCam is pleasant "clicker" and management game where you direct a bunch of cam girls in their sleazy endeavours.

Each girls has talents, appeals to certain "fetishes", has some vices ("alcohol" and cigarettes) and you have to make them do cam shows to get money from their fanbase. The main concepts are easy to grasp, but the game gains in complexity progressively making it harder and harder to micro-manage the actions of your girls accurately. The vices and the stress levels of the girls will make it harder and harder to get things done in a timely fashion if you don't pay attention. As you might expect, balancing the actions of the girls with their cost and the desires of their fans will not get easier as their numbers increase... and with the escort service introduced later in the game you even have to watch out for STD's.

I did enjoy the fact that the vices of each girl can evolve, not only based on the objects you can give them, but also based on their actions. Overall, I kinda disliked the whole "clicker" aspect. I would have much rather liked something with only straight sim management.

The music is nothing to write home about, unlike the bombastic music that was used on the first reveal trailer (and that incidentally motivated me to keep an eye out for this game). It's okay but won't motivate me to ask for the OST separately.

I noticed that a lot of people didn't like the art style, even back when the game was first announced. I'm one of the people who actually enjoyed it more than what was done on HuniePop. If anything, it's pretty tame compared to what we saw in the first trailer.

All in all I'd say it's a decent game that may be a bit too expensive for its own good.

Lol. Seriously?

For the first time, I don't feel let down by the promise of a first person Roguelike.

I've only played a few games, but this game is deeper than your usual roguelike-like and its difficulty is uncompromising. Don't expect any hand-holding while you delve into the dungeons of this game.

While this isn't on par with the wide variety of actions in a traditional roguelike, Barony already offers most of what you would want, from cursed objects, unidentified items, spells and wide variety of equipment. The first person adds some interesting ideas, making booze interesting and displaying some effects in a rather amusing maner... just wait until you get some poisoned or rotten food and you'll see what I mean.

One of the most questionable aspects of the game is the mouse driven inventory management. I do find that to be kind of a mess and would prefer to have the option to use my keyboard instead.
A lot of the fights will also require you to be reactive. Since everything happens in real time, you won't have time to think and ponder your equipment choices for too long.

I have yet to try the multi-player portion of the game and will probably update my review accordingly.

As it stands I do consider this game to be the best first person roguelike experience I've ever had, right in front of Delver.

Inquisitor looks old, plays like and a 90's RPG and will be spewing very long blocks of text at your face. If that doesn't turn your off, keep reading because there's much more to it than that.

You can kind of guess this game is going to take some time to finish from the get go and that impression would be right, I'm only around 20 hours in and there's a lot to do and a lot to see. In the first act, you're helping the local branch of the church to solve several cold cases of mysterious murders and unexplained disappearances, tracking down heretics and allies of the devil. The game takes the form of a really old school isometric RPG, not too dissimilar from Arcanum. You will be wandering into an original world mixing a middle-age central europe setting with medieval-fantastic aspects. Think "The Name of the Rose" meets "Lord of the Rings".

The game will have you speaking to a lot of people to fill your journal with information and clues and to collect evidence, picking and using skill from your character sheet, selecting and equipping spells and managing your inventory. While the mouse driven interface can get a little bit confusing, hiding some vital parts of your character sheet under what looks like very small tabs on a 1080p monitor, you can use (and definitely should learn) the keyboard bindings for most actions.

The variety of items you will come across is just mind numing. From potions and spell scrolls, to weapons and armors, all items have different levels of quality, need to be repaired and maintained in working order, and combined to ensure your survival against the spawn of the devil and the creatures of the wilderness.

The combat, while on par with the 90's tech powering the engine, is nothing really exciting and can get quite frustrating if you're trying to use skills and spells on top of your trusty sword. The special effects (confusion, blindness...) while incredibly creative, can be very off-putting to say the least.

What really sets this title apart from the modern games that pretend to be RPG's today is the writing. Sure there's a lot of it but it's both well written (or should I say translated) but is also engaging an immersive. It's likely that you will want to know more about the world... and the NPC's will be more than happy to tell you all you may want to learn. I found the conversations with certain characters to be rewards in and of themselves.

The music is nothing short of amazing, taking a really classical route with an early baroque feel, far removed from the generic post romantic and modern orchestral music. A choice fitting the universe in many ways.

It should be said that Inquisitor also does a better job at analysing the psyche of its character and reflecting some of the dark parts of the human condition much better than any other hipsterish indie non-game. Most of that exploration flows organically with the gameplay, the setting and the artistic direction of the game. Just for that I think anyone with a passing interest in character development in games should at least take a look at the first act of this game, just to see how to do it right.

I love this game and I would recommend it to anyone loving old-school RPG's, however, remember the introduction of this review, it might not be your thing and that's totally understandable.