Останні рецензії користувача Tiamonster

It's not often that I say this, but buy it on a console. The PC port has clunky controls that debilitate gameplay, and the game crashes randomly. Steam says I played for 20 hours, but I spent four of those hours replaying missions after the game crashed. I'm sure at least 45 minutes was wasted on my tank getting stuck on nothing, slowly draining my action points.

Forgetting for a second that the game is in dire need of a proofreader, the UI and mechanics are a mess. The HUD that appears for each character can hide important visual information in a battle. You can "lose" a medium-sized character behind a large creature or inadvertantly click an action button while trying to click something else. Playing the game for the first time requires a lot of trial and error, which would be okay if the game allowed you to save. As it is, it appears to save automatically every 30 or 45 minutes with no option to skip dialogue or the long sequences of Oregon Trail-like movement.

The game begins with a notification that your choices affect the outcome of the game, but I was on rails for the seven hours that I played.

I continued playing despite the issues I encountered because the world that was being built appeared to have promise. After multiple ominously vague and poorly written scenes, I wasn't interested anymore.

I would recommend The Fall based on the voice acting alone. Luckily, it also has a strong story and chilling atmosphere. It mixes platformer action with point-and-click adventure, and, while it doesn't do it well, it's well enough to get by on. It's the first piece of a longer story, which I didn't know going in, but am absolutely fine with. Hopefully, the next piece will improve the action portion, but, regardless, they have my money for the sequel.

Steam asks me to say "yes" or "no", so I choose "no" in this instance. With that said, if you are interested in what games can do, this is a must play. Absolutely.

Between the art and the soundtrack, Kentucky Route Zero is beautiful. You watch scenes literally construct and deconstruct. The ever present ambient music calms you. Personally, the musical performance at the Lower Depths in Act III justified my purchase (though I did buy it on sale). The unfortunate part is that it isn't a game and there isn't a plot. There aren't even characters. It's simply a world that you explore. There's a foundation for a strong game, but the execution relies on one aspect (atmosphere) and abandons everything else.

I admire its ambitions--the dialogue selections become a personality test for the player through (sometimes seemingly endless) dialogue selection, and the pacing, when done well, is done VERY well--but, for me, it hasn't (as of Act III) been successful. Random things happening to / at / in the vicinity of empty shells of characters drives me away. I found myself skipping dialogue, hoping to push everything along. Conway limps through the entirety of Act II, nearly slowing the game to a hault by discouraging you to explore the world. Even magical realism and surrealism need a tether; and that may occur in the remaining two acts but that's a little too late for me.

If there were a better way to experience a story other than reading it, Gone Home would be it. Not once did I feel like I was playing a game or watching it or reading it. I experienced the story as Katie did.

In a nutshell, Katie returns home after a long absence, thinking her mother, father, and sister will be there to greet her. They’re not, and she has to explore the house to find out where they are. That’s selling it short, though. What starts out as borderline horror point-and-click (complete with a thunderstorm and flickering lights) turns into an overload of emotions: pity for your father, shame for your mother, fear and courage for your sister.

It all builds to one final scene, where I found myself standing at the entrance to the attic holding back tears.

In other words, just go play the damn thing. Seriously.

You are Stanley, office employee. One day, you get up from your desk, and everyone is missing. You don’t know where they are or what you should do. All you know is that there is man narrating your every move. Technically, I believe it's interactive fiction. I wouldn't call it immersive, because it shoots for meta. (Take, for example, the Broom Closet Ending, which is a self-referential conversation the narrator has with himself when you stand in the broom closet too long.) By the end, I think it suffered because of the comedic aspect, but I enjoyed it. There were very few puzzles, so you spend most of the time listening to the narrator and doing (or not doing) what he says, just to get a reaction. You replay sections multiple times, and he becomes as agitated as you. He plays tricks on you. You mess with him. You become buddies. But, in the end, the game isn’t about your bromance with the narrator, it’s about Stanley and his stupid, little life.

This was my go-to puzzle game when I needed to kill time. It layers each of its mechanics slowly, and, before you know it, you’re stumped in a puzzle where gravity is sideways, alternate gravity is upside-down, the map screen is tilted at a 45-degree angle, and the Newton-wannabe that you control is falling off of the platform. Luckily, when you die, you can rewind time in a very Braid-like manner to re-attempt the puzzle. The game is built on the ability to rotate the screen, changing the gravity for the protagonist and allowing him to access otherwise unreachable destinations. In each puzzle, you must get a key and go through a door. This simple goal becomes complicated when the Escher-inspired puzzles begin rotating. As you explore more puzzles, other features are introduced: a white plane and a black plane, the ability to change or align these planes’ gravity, and a portal that flips the 2D puzzle entirely.

I find the black-and-white art beautiful, but it’s distracting or obscuring in some puzzles. The story also takes a note from Braid: minor bits after a few puzzles, fed to you with a vague, heavy hand. I’m not sure where the Faux Newton plot is going, but I don’t care. As long as you don’t take the game as seriously as it wants you take it, it’s enjoyable.

I should like this game. I’m always on board for ye old point-and-click adventure, and Deponia knows it predecessors. It forgets, however, that their fan base is now living the year 2014. You know, where annoying manboy protagonists are not at all endearing. Manboy Rufus is bad enough without his town of whiners. Every character you speak with has to either insult Rufus or recall some stupid thing he’s done in the past. Everyone. I put two hours in before I found a kernel of a plot that didn’t involve someone proclaiming Rufus as a failure or the ginger-haired damsel in distress that fell from the sky. Her name is Goal, by the way, and, she’s spent most of my playthrough unconscious. Rufus claims that Goal belongs to him and that he will save her. The only other female character is Rufus’ roommate/ex-girlfriend, who’s your typical, annoying girlfriend that never stops complaining.

The puzzles are solid, I’ll give it that. I found a few head scratchers. I even laughed a couple of times. But, after a few hours of the game, I couldn’t deal with Rufus and his friends. The story seemed to be circling the disappearance of Rufus’ father, the former mayor that abandoned him years ago. I wanted more of that and less of Rufus’ attempts to woo the woman in the tight jumpsuit.

Stripped-down, real-time strategy that becomes more difficult with each FTL jump. You hop from location to location outrunning rebels and attempting to reach a point multiple sectors away. Each sector has randomized waypoints and one point that leads to the next sector. A waypoint can have a store, another has a beacon projecting a distress call, yet another has a rebel scout ship. When you enter battle, you allocate power to various sections of your ship: shields, weapons, oxygen, etc. At the same time, you attack the opposing ship, which is also rerouting power and scattering its crew to its best ability. You also scavenge resources in order to make your jumps, you repair your ship, you replace your crew. It’s basically [insert your preference: Star Trek/Babylon 5/Farscape/Cowboy Bebop/Firefly] in indie game form.

The game starts in the 8-bit world of Nintendo, and, as you play, the world evolves around you. You find another dimension, you find cell shading, you find turn-based battles. It concentrates on nostalgia and offers little else. It’s not challenging, and it doesn’t have a goal. You just travel through the world solving simple puzzles and unlocking new features.