AngoraFish legutóbbi értékelései

EDIT: There is now a newer version of this game, Hero Generations: ReGen. Get that instead.

Hero Generations is a casual, fairly quick playing, turn-based, semi-roguelike game.

(Note that problems many early players experienced with the save system, resulting in a number of negative reviews, should now be fixed.)

The game is pleasant and relaxed, not requiring a huge amount of in-depth thought or strategizing, which suits me just fine. It’s easy to pick up and put back down on whim - sometimes one just wants to vege-out and click, explore a world, and have battles resolved by a quick random number generator (RNG).

Early in the game you are intentionally exposed to a little fear and anxiety, and a part of that is avoiding battles until you're stronger. Later you get the satisfying feeling of stomping creatures that you earlier feared.

The game achieves all this in a quick and streamlined way that is dead-easy to pick up and play without an extensive tutorial, and without having to memorise 16 thousand different spells and item combinations.

RNG is only a small part of the game, as a lot of the decision making is based around deciding how much risk to take in combat - do you push your luck and take on a 50/50 chance of success with an evenly matched opponent, or do you avoid those battles until you are powerful enough to ensure that the odds of an unlucky RNG roll are minimal.

If you're fighting units two thirds your strength you can fairly expect to lose, on average, one in three battles. If you don't like those odds you will need to level your strength up further before taking on those battles.

Consequently, the bulk of gameplay is about boosting your hero's base strength, which is primarily achieved by collecting gold through light questing, and by constructing buildings to generate either more gold, or that provide strength and damage boosts. The buildings you construct mostly accumulate over generations, so eventually you will have put together a small strength and gold generating machine around your core villages.

Loss in combat is a minor annoyance (slightly reducing your lifespan by around 5 'years' (turns) until you need to retire), and the law of averages evens out the occasional unlucky die roll over time.

It is possible for your lineage to end if you push your luck too far and get caught out in the wilds with only a few years left to get back to a town and find a potential mate. Your lineage can also end in the rare instance that you haven't built up enough fame or wealth to impress a potential suitor before needing to retire.

The generations system is neatly done, in that you have a choice about whether to do a big rush of exploration and combat with the current hero, or do you retire early and aim to do better next time. The incentive to retire early is that, the earlier you retire the more boosts your son or daughter start with next time. (For what it's worth, the game is pleasantly gender neutral.)

Like many rogue-lites, there is no formal save system as such. Progress is autosaved at the end of each turn and you return to where you left off next time you start the game (select "load game" in the main menu).

In terms of pacing, the game can hit a dead spot mid-game, where you’ve beefed as much as you’re going to and there is little to do other than random exploring and monster clearing while you wait for building upgrades to unlock (upgrades unlock after a fixed number of generations have passed).

I have had a lot of fun with the game so far, and can see myself dipping in and out off and on in the future. Maps re only semi-random, however, so there might not be quite enough variety here to justify repeated play throughs after the game has been ‘beaten’.

edit: updated review to reflect improvements from recent patches.

Despite having finally been released from early access after nearly two years, it’s hard to see where all the “early access” quality assurance efforts have gone. The game remains a buggy and poorly paced mess.

As far as I can tell the game is about strip mining your dungeon, as there is little obvious incentive to construct corridors, rooms and doors. Wall demolition is practically instantaneous, so there is no time cost to be saved. Strip mining also seems necessary to improve pathing (nothing to get stuck behind). In contrast to demolishing walls, however, trap setting is painfully slow, despite having numerous foundries, so there’s no encouragement to spend any time thinking about subtle traps and dungeon layout. Furthermore, each door and trap appears to have a maintenance cost that reduces your overall available mana pool, so there's a perverse disincentive to building any dungeon structures at all.

I’ve yet to crack mission four due to either game breaking bugs or poor pacing. My first game was abandoned because, despite having taken 90% of the map, my flow of minions completely evaporated and I was left watching the one or two I did have lasered by the AI. My second attempt at the mission lagged out, with around one screen refresh every 20 seconds or so – a problem in other maps, although one the game had previously recovered from after a minute or two.

Game boot and load times might easily be the longest of any of the 1300+ games I currently own. It’s a trivial point, but given the elongated load times I spend a lot of time looking at the loading screen, emphasising how bland and amateurish the loading screen looks.

The giant evil hand pointer is vastly too large, and it’s consequently difficult to target precisely, not least because you’re hovering above an isometric 3D plane and it’s often not clear whether you should be clicking on the base of the 3D terrain block or the top of it (which might instead result in selecting the adjacent block instead).

Pathfinding is poor, and minions repeatedly get “lost”, often stuck behind single objects completely out in the open. For example, I had to rescue a mob of about 8 units bouncing off a spawner, despite there being two clear paths on either side. Units often run out of food or don’t get paid, presumably because they can’t route to food or cash, despite half my dungeon being micropig spawners, taverns and treasure.

The minimap is largely worthless, with no clear signaling about where an attack might be coming from, and little attempt to distinguish rooms, enemies, minions, etc.

Ultimately, the game seems primarily a fairly traditional, uninspired RTS; spam barracks (monster spawners or whatever) and rush enemy - he or she who builds the most barracks (or barrack-like spawners) fastest wins. You are basically forced to have all your units running around in one mass mob due to the single rally flag, so any kind of subtle tactics are out.

There may be a good game under the surface here, but after five hours of perseverance I have yet to see it.

edit: I have now flirted with skirmish mode because I desperately want to give this game a chance, and I can see that there's a little bit of complexity here be unlocked, at least as far as research paths. The campaign is the tutorial however, and as the campaign is borked I'm finding skirmish mode to be a little too overhelming to take on for what looks like a fair bit of trial and error to get anything out of. And to be honest, without a campaign to get me hooked, sandbox mode was always going to be a bit too open-ended for my short attention span.

Transistor is like candy, in that it gives you a rush but ultimately leaves you feeling a bit empty.

Initial impressions are fantastic - the first few minutes of the game has genuine emotional punch, voice acting is great, graphics are vibrant and evocative, and the game’s soundtrack is arguably one of the best ever released for a computer game (I’ve purchased it). The game is set in a unique and engaging world, and a range of intriguing characters are regularly hinted at.

Disappointingly, the story remains surprisingly lightweight given the cracker start, and the game finishes with both the world and the characters remaining enigmatic and unexplored.

Gameplay is primarily combat in a modified “real time with pause” style, which suits me great and has a ton of potential. You have the ability to combine a large number of different powers and effects, creating some genuinely interesting combinations. Unfortunately there is little variety in enemies, and consequently, combat lacks depth and replayability.

I feel bad being critical about a game this good, but for a game only a few steps away from having been a genuine classic I can’t help but reflect on what might have been. If only the developers had explored the intriguing world and characters they have created in a little more detail.

Regardless, Transistor is undeniably a top-shelf game by any measure, and a worthy (though not essential) addition to anyone’s game catalogue.

I like candy.

TinyKeep is a (very) casual roguelike based, in part, around speed-running a scripted sequence of dungeon levels.

After completing the game you unlock an enhanced difficulty mode. Hardcore Steam achievements presumably add some additional, longer term play value.
 
The fact that this plays better as a speed-running game rather than a more traditional roguelike is obscured by the campaign scripting, which is written in a way that implies more story than is actually the case. Ultimately, the dialog is simply an excuse to provide some light direction to point the player towards what they need to do next.
 
Room layouts within a level are procedurally generated. The rest of the game is fully scripted, including the sequence of levels (including dungeon graphics and type of monster), event triggers and (very light) mini-puzzles.
 
There's no direct character leveling or stats, however there are altars scattered around which give you random, permanent boosts which accumulate, and therefore have the effect of making your character more powerful over time. As you might expect, some boosts are more powerful than others, meaning that the luck of the draw can play a part in the success of your run.
 
There is no inventory system and no loot, other than picking up a sword and shield on the first level. The sword and shield are not in your starting room and the game can be a bit confusing here as you can't damage the guards until you get the sword, and it turns out that you need to do a crazy sprint to find these while dodging the guards, setting the tone for the rest of the game, although this is not explained.
 
It is not possible to save your game, if you need to turn off your computer half way through you'll be starting again from scratch next time. (As of patch v1.2 you can, however, quit the game in the middle of a run and pick up from the start of your most recent level next time you play. Your save is still wiped, however, if you die.)
 
The game plays best when you sprint around the levels as it can feel quite slow if you're just wandering. Playing the game as a speed-run, however, creates a nice flow and manageable craziness that does effectively get the adrenalin flowing.
 
Combat is simple - attack with sword or block with the shield. The dev has suggested that timing hits is worthwhile, but I've not had any trouble just whacking away. Blocking seems kind of useless as successfully landing a hit creates a knock back that gives you enough time to launch the next attack. When mobbed there's even less incentive to block.

To add complexity to play, there are a number of ways to use the environment to your advantage, for example traps effect both you and the monsters, meaning you can kite monsters to their deaths, and fire pits can be tipped over to set adversaries on fire. Monster types will also sometimes fight each other.
 
The foundation of the game is incredibly solid. The graphics are evocative, gameplay is smooth, and I've found no noticeable bugs.
 
To my mind, unfortunately, the game suffers from a noticeable lack of variety. Each run the levels are basically the same, and the lack of inventory, drops or emergent events leaves no great incentive to explore.
 
This is a shame, as a ton of additional unscripted content would give the game a lot of potential staying power, particularly as a quick diversion.

As things stand, however, I've bounced off the game in less than three hours, and I suspect most others will find the same. There's simply not enough here to justify the investment.

Considering an alternative? I can highly recommend Full Mojo Rampage instead.

I've been very willing to give this game a go, but my patience is about up. There have been a few improvements since the early builds, and the game claims to only be "50% complete", however it's still clicky and retains its designed-for-tablets feel.

Problems continue such as an unskippable, patronising tutorial which is unnecessarily drawn out by forcing you to practice simple concepts. Controls remain fiddly, and bugs remain, such as annoying and inexplicably looping sound samples, and crash on exit.

Annoying is something the game does well, such as the nails-on-blackboard nagging sound when you draw down your power to zero, and thereafter have to wait a minute or two for more pink bubbles to pop up so you can make the noise stop - apparently part of the game is about not drawing down your power too far, you know, by using it the way its intended.

The game also remains tediously slow, and I don't mean casual, meditative, relaxing slow, I mean waiting with literally nothing to do for minutes at a time.

For a game that's about building a civilization, and trades heavily on a visually striking aesthetic, it also remains a weird design choice to have the game mechanics designed around forcing the player to destroy the bulk of the attractive terrain features and bland your world down to a featureless, flat expanse of meh. Anno, or even Tropico, this game is not.

The relatively new mini game, travel/expeditions, is also tedious and shoe-horns an overly drawn out puzzle mode into what is supposed to be a civilization builder. Sorry, if I want a puzzle game I'll play Bejewelled.

The purple bubble clicking remains, deservedly widely criticised in the early builds as a click-fest. It's just toned down in the later builds to fewer bubbles with larger payouts, although there's not much offered to keep you busy with the time actually saved by this change.

This game had so much potential, yet continues to demonstrate so much to dislike for its players. At "50% complete" I am no longer confident that there is any realistic potential for greatness, there is simply far too much wrong with the core mechanics for there to be any realistic hope of rescuing from mediocrity this failed effort.

Long Live the Queen is a piece of interactive fiction masquerading as a life sim, and suffers horribly from this pretence.

Given the above, it's worth emphasising that I don't have a problem with interactive fiction such as Kentucky Route Zero and The Walking Dead.

My main issue with Long Live the Queen is that the game is presented to be something that it manifestly is not, although for the first 2-3 play-throughs the relative meaninglessness of the player's actions aren't at all obvious. Had this review been written 2-3 hours in it would no doubt have been overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic.

Long Live the Queen's core gameplay is straightforward. Every week (each week is essentially a turn) you chose which one or two of the 42 available skills to level up by an average of around 15% (out of 100).

This is a lot of fun, and for the first few playthroughs feels like you're genuinely customising your character to suit your strategy and play style. Were this a roguelike, in the vein of FTL, or a procedurally-oriented life simulator such as Kudos 2, this would have been enough to have kept me playing for hundreds of hours.

Unfortunately, over time, it starts to become obvious that these skills are only noticeably used to pass skill checks associated with tightly scripted events that occur in the same week and same order, every single game. Furthermore, the game demands hyper-specialisation as many skill checks require skill levels of between 50% and 100%.

This leads to the first problem, that is, your skill choices only noticeably matter at pre-defined points. For example, you might need to have Economics skill level 30 in week 4, and Decoration skill 40 in week 6 to trigger a significant event chain. This means that if you happen to randomly level these skills up in the reverse order the event chain simply never triggers, even though the only difference in your skill "build" is a couple of weeks.

There's only a very short amount of time available to specialise as well, as the game runs for a maximum of 40 weeks although in most cases will end at least five weeks earlier due to failed skill checks.

Tight timeframes mean that there's little opportunity for nuance, exploration of skill trees or character customisation. After a few play-throughs, the game inevitably becomes a process of "level skill X to prepare for scripted skill check Y in week Z", then "level skill A to prepare for scripted skill check B in week C", and so on.

It gets worse, however, as skill checks are so rare, and the skills so numerous, that you can find yourself unknowingly levelling useless skills for weeks beyond the time the last skill check in the game has occurred for that particular skill.

Furthermore, in many cases, skills have no noticeable purpose and presumably only come into play in certain dialogue trees that can unwittingly be closed off even though the game makes no effort to prevent you from continuing to level these skills thinking they might have some future purpose.

Finally, for something that is supposed to be a life sim, about relationships and personal development, with little meaningful warning and with only a couple of trivial ways to avoid it, we learn in week 35 that we have instead been playing an economic and military simulator all along - that the failure of a 14 year old girl to prepare for scripted events in weeks M and N has fundamentally influenced a kingdom's economic development and military preparedness over a period of barely three or four months.

Life sims work best when the story being told is the player's, not the developer's. Consequently, life sims need to be as unscripted and open ended as practical in order to allow the player's unique story to shine through meaningful customisation, emergent events and improbable outcomes.

Unfortunately, all that's happening in Long Live the Queen is that traditional interactive fiction dialogue trees have been obfuscated by an abstract series of player-chosen numbers presenting an initially misleading illusion of player agency, although in practice it is only the developer's story that is actually being told here.

edit: my opinion has not changed

Kentucky Route Zero is best described as an interactive visual novel, along the lines of Superbrothers: Sword & Sorcery EP.

There is a huge amount of talent being demonstrated here, and primarily for that reason I'm ultimately going to give this game the thumbs up.

Unlike related games such as the marginally more successful The Walking Dead, however, it left me with little real feeling of player agency.

Sure, there is some flexibility to move around and experience different absurdist vignettes between story-arc set pieces, however for the most part these don't pretend to influence the narrative progression in any observable way.

The game doesn't demonstrate any noticeable sense of self-awareness about this either, like in The Stanley Parable.

Ultimately, the best comparison I can draw is to meditative extended video-clips, such as Baraka and Powaqqatsi, in that this game is a thing that exists primarily to be watched and admired.

As a meditation to be watched and admired, this game succeeds admirably.

The block colour/silhouette style is gorgeous; the audio sparse and evocative; and the melancholy dialogue intelligent, mature and well written.

The setting is whimsical and dream-like, with absurdist elements, and the pacing and tone works well in the context.

I'm on the fence, however, about whether I think that Kentucky Route Zero is any good as a game.

As I would define a 'game', player agency seems to me a defining characteristic. Agency might be via micro-decisions, such as what to shoot in a linear FPS, stat progression trees and character customisation in an RPG, or varying strategic and tactical choices influenced by the randomness of procedural generation. It is the perception of player agency, even if only a perception, that adds a level of immersion that allows one to be drawn into a story and personally invest in it.

In Kentucky Route Zero, while the player moves various protagonists around the screen and clicks dialogue choices, these rarely have any noticeable influence on the story other than exposition.

I therefore find myself drawing comparisons with other, more established, non-interactive media, such as graphic novels, literature and film that are more reliant on narrative and where examples of mature, quality story lines are plentiful.

How, then, does this game compare to great film, great literature, or a great graphic novel? On that basis Kentucky Route Zero can reasonably claim to be good, I think, but not quite great.

Ultimately, if I want to be taken for a ride I actually get better immersion from letting a story wash over me while reading or watching a movie. At Kentucky Route Zero's pace, the interaction can tend to break immersion rather than enhances it.

It does seem to me, however, that there may be a tendency for those well aware of the woeful absence of genuinely intelligent, complex and mature themes in most games to be a tad overenthusiastic when they find a game that does take a decent stab at these, even if it fails on virtually every other measure by which we normally assess computer games (Rock Paper Shotgun 2013 GOTY, I'm looking at you).

Having said that, after now playing through Episode III, I feel compelled to add that for the first third of this installment the game genuinely transcends its limitations to become something truly sublime. It is therefore even more of a disappointment when the remaining two thirds of the same episode drops the ball a little on several levels. Nonetheless, there is certainly potential for masterpiece if the game's best form can be recaptured for the remaining episodes.

Having now played through Episode III after decent break from the release of Episode II, it is also worth adding that the game doesn't hold up at all well to extended pauses between episodes. The complexity and nuance of the characters and story, one of the game's big selling points, is also its biggest downfall as the minutiae is particularly hard to recall several months down the track. For this reason, I'd urge people to consider resisting the need for instant gratification and wait for the complete five episode experience.

Episode III is slightly longer than the first two episodes, possibly due to some repetitiveness. With two more episodes to go, one might estimate that a full meandering playthrough will likely take around 9 hours, which seems fair for a game of this type.

Edit: updated 30 June 2014 to reflect having played through Episode III.

Pinball FX2 is a very polished product. The tables are diverse and well thought out, and common shots and ramps rarely drain directly unless you've put some weird spin on the ball.

In terms of bugs, the game is solid, but for me required a couple of system tweaks to make it playable due to what was otherwise pronounced input lag (disable v-sync and drop the "maximum pre-rendered frames" setting to 1 in your video drivers). Check out the pinned thread in the Steam forums for more details.

Additionally, for me, the Spiderman table is completely unplayable as a ball goes missing half way through a game and never reappears.

Neither of the above problems was resolved when I recently refreshed my system with a new install of Windows 8 64, upgraded from Windows 7 64.

A huge amount of work has gone into table designs, every table puts its own unique spin on things and all are originals. This means that they are also a little more forgiving than many real world tables as they don't have to factor in eating your money.

All tables reward skill, and generally offer a good variety of modes, multiballs and combos to keep things interesting.

The ball physics are excellent, although ball speeds are perhaps a little bit faster than real world tables (noticeably faster on some tables, less so on others). Regardless, if you are already a fan of real-world pinball you won't have any trouble picking things up where you left off.

Even though I've been a die-hard pinball fan for many years, I've tended to shy away from electronic versions as they've not given me the same satisfying real world sense of interactivity, from the slap of the flipper buttons to nudging the table.

Pinball FX2 doesn't solve this lack of physical interactivity, in that controls are simply left and right space bars for the flippers and the control keys and space bar to nudge the table.

In my case, however, I've recently acquired a new mechanical keyboard, and if you're like me and need a bit more physical feedback to recreate the experience you're used to I can highly recommend the investment. My mechanical keys now provide exactly the right tactile slap from hitting the flippers.

I also find that, as I'm a decent player, most tables are generous in awarding kickbacks, and therefore my main reason for nudging is rarely necessary (and if you're not a decent player, why would you even try?).

The sound is quite effective at ball-clack noises, bumpers and the like.

My biggest gripe with the game is that some tables get carried away with the video-game potential through such things as glowing balls, sped-up balls in certain game modes, and full video-game style mini games.

If you are someone, like me, who prefers a more 'pure' pinball experience, you will find that these tables can get irritating very quickly. Thankfully, there is enough variety (if you can afford it) to largely stay away from the more painful examples. I've also turned off ball glow trails in options as I was finding the ball glow was sometimes interfering with my ability to read the ball.

As you will observe with a quick overview of the available DLC, Zen Studios have taken full advantage of its Star Wars and Marvel licenses. In my view this is a shame as the non-licensed tables feel far more creative, original and varied than those heavily reliant on movie imagery and sound-bites.

Overall, however, I've had a lot of fun with Pinball FX2 and can enthusiastically recommend it.