Game finished in 2018:


Gas Guzzlers Extreme

Road Redemption

Duke Nukem 3d Atomic Edition

Odallus: The Dark Call

Pretty hard but fun metroidvania. Ended up "cheesing" the final boss (and one of the midbosses preceeding him) with an invulnerability power - and still died the first 3 times I attempted that....

Reading up on the now unlocked "Veteran" mode and ... too hardcore for me.

Just finished Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix on Consultant difficulty. When it was released on GOG I almost instantly gave it four stars based on my experiences from back in the day, in the review I pretty much admit that the game is pretty mediocre and it stands out for its violence. I decided to finally play the whole thing, though, and must regretfully admit that this is not just mediocre, it really, really sucks. There's so much wrong with it, I don't even know where to begin.

First off, the game just looks and feels wrong. It's in my opinion a pretty ugly game with lacklustre environments and outlandish character models. It also sounds really cheap. The writing is as generic as it gets, as are all the locations you visit in the game. Surprisingly that whole mutilation technology that the series was always famous for is the one thing that actually still holds up and in retrospect I'm actually even more impressed by it than I was back then because more than fifteen years later I haven't seen a single game that gets close to SoF 1 or 2 in this regard.

The gameplay is utter garbage, though. I can't quite fathom how a veteran studio like Raven Software failed so hard at the fundamentals of first person shooters, a genre they had been working on almost since its conception. Another GOG user referred to the game as "hitscan hell" in his review and that captures the game's problems pretty well but sadly that's only the beginning. They messed up almost everything that one could in a shooter.

The level design in combination with the enemy behaviour pretty much break the whole game's singleplayer experience. It's ultimately almost entirely a tunnel shooter that leaves you no room to maneuver nor to apply any sort of interesting tactics which would already be pretty bad in your typical sci-fi shooter but becomes kinda even more jarring in a title that apparently had aspirations to become a realistic tactical shooter. And somehow, within the confines of these super linear levels, the game is riddled with unfair and utterly implausible enemy placement or rather spawning because the game blatantly spawns enemies in awkward situations, sometimes right in front of your eyes. And in spite of the simplicity of the levels they managed to include quite a few spots where it's hard to find the right way or figure out what to do to get ahead. And there's stuff like enemies always knowing where you are. Once you get the thermal goggles you can actually observe human shapes appearing out of thin air just beyond doors and constantly aiming at you through the walls even though they have no right to know where you are. Then there's shit like the fact that apparently the player has a complex hitbox, just like the enemies, and you can never predict how much damage you will take from enemy fire. The same burst can barely scratch you or drain half your health and you have no control over it.

Then there's truly painful stuff like stealth missions with a barely functioning stealth system or jungle sections where the enemies' sight is not restricted by all the foliage. Or the slowest crawling in game history during which you can't even fire your gun. Or the OICW rifle with an "intelligent" grenade launcher that can't hit anything. Sadly all these things that were apparently meant to give the game depth are gimmicks that are worthless at best or broken at worst.

And of course the game fails to add interesting stuff over time. Basically the initial enemies do everything you will encounter throughout the entire game, some are just more deadly depending on the gun they are carrying - and there's no sensible difficulty curve there. There's a few random enemies with automatic shotguns and they will just blast you away in half a second if you don't kill them in maybe 250 milliseconds. And with the aggressive enemy behaviour and enemies always knowing where you are you usually don't even have a chance to, say, use grenades to even the odds. And any sections that try to spice things up, like the three or four bossfights, are just utterly silly and annoying.

This post still doesn't really capture how terrible the game truly is, though. My biggest fear is that the first game, which I still hold in high esteem, actually suffers from many of the same issues and it just never occurred to me due to nostalgia.

FoxTail (GOG)

This a point-and-click adventure game.

It has nice pixel art and the gameplay is old-school, by which I mean it is fairly light on dialogue/story and mainly consists of finding items and using them on other items in the environment to solve puzzles. I prefer this approach in point-and-clicks, my main complaint with modern ones is that they are way too heavy on the dialogue. In fact, FoxTail has no voiced dialogue at all, it’s all text.

This is not a humorous game, but it is very relaxing and mellow, there are also no dead-ends so you don’t need to keep multiple saves in case you lose an item or use it incorrectly. The puzzles were mostly on the easy side of the spectrum and for the most part quite logical (there was only one puzzle I didn’t really understand the logic behind it, and I still don’t even after I solved it). There are also at least a couple of things I just stumbled on by exploring around and being curious.

It’s still “In Development” so it’s only part of a game (it took me a few hours to complete the existing portion). It doesn’t yet have a proper ending, but the next chapter is supposed to be coming this month and I’m looking forward to it!

I’d definitely recommend this game if you enjoy classic point-and-click adventures, or even if you just enjoy relaxing/mellow games.

Consortium: The Master Edition, Nov 1 (GOG)-I'm not sure what to make of this. I enjoyed the first half a lot: interacting with the crew and investigating a murder mystery. But all of the meta game and conspiracy theories at the end weren't great. It's so short (only a couple hours) I'm tempted to do another playthru but it would be a complete joke because I'd just end up choosing all the worst dialog options to see what I missed. As much as the ending stumbled for me, I think there should be more narrative games like this.

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I also thought the chatting up people was the most interesting part.

Next one down. Just finished Soldier of Fortune: Payback. Oh my....

Now, I had already played Payback back in the day, so I knew roughly what to expect. I knew that it is a Soldier of Fortune game only in name, I knew that it was a small release, I knew that it was a poor man's Call of Duty created by amateurs. I knew that there's no John Mullins or any other references to earlier SoF games here and I knew that also the series' hallmark feature, detailed mutilation/dismemberment, is crappily executed in this one, quite literally turning humans into blood-filled pinatas.

Now, first off: the game is playable and I had genuine fun at times. As a matter of fact I'm willing to make the controversial claim that at times it's better than Soldier of Fortune II. For starters, it had functional bossfights, the fight against a Hind was actually pretty good. Parts of the levels were also decent, giving me some tactical freedom in somewhat open environments once in a while, something SoF II utterly lacked.

The problem is that the game feels cheap from start to finish. It's seriously an amazing example of how to make a "modern" shooter in the style of Modern Warfare at minimal costs and reminds me of City Interactive's (now CI Games) pre-Sniper: Ghost Warrior titles. There's you, linear levels (but with some decent arenas), objective markers and literally hundreds of enemies per level whom you slaughter by the dozen. Once in a while the action is interrupted by utterly terrible cutscenes, if you can call it that, where you see the terrible character models deliver utterly pathetic dialogue in first person. And once in a blue moon there's a silly scripted in-game sequence like riding on the bed of a pickup while gunning at a guy in another vehicle. And all of this is tied together by the most forgettable plot of all time, delivered by the most cliched voice acting of all time. That's all there is to it.

There's no interesting challenges, there's nothing special to do, enemies do literally nothing but run around like idiots and shoot. Even any enemy use of grenades and such is scripted and rare. So it's just shooting, taking cover, shooting, taking cover. Period. Most of the time things work, once in a while there's suddenly an enemy who just kills you with one or two shots from a shotgun or grenade launchers, but nothing too terrible. Checkpoint placement is okay most of the time.

Hilariously there's just five or six missions which really only take place in three settings (two of them take place in generic middle-eastern locations, two of them in generic jungle locations) and can be finished in about four hours. Then comes the hilariously bad ending that almost had me shake my head in disbelief.

The game also suffers from some really weird audio problem: the falloff of enemy gunfire is so high that you can't hear the guns of enemies standing maybe ten feet away from you. I don't think I've ever play another shooter suffering from this kind of problem.

So ultimately it's a functional, at times even somewhat fun, shooter that is in many regards so bad that it's almost good.

Oh yeah, the music was decent.

For some reason I just can't get into the game. It's really badly paced, in my opinion, and there's just too little variety gameplay-wise. Combat is decent but not good enough to keep me engaged for long, it lacks cool climbing or polished stealth mechanics and such that keep me enjoying Assassin's Creed games to this day. And there's too few side quests and the ones that are there take up too much time. Every time I see that a quest requires me to go to the opposite corner of the world I feel like that's the moment I should take a break. It reminds me of Two Worlds where the first quests you got already sent you to remote locations all over the map.

Admittedly I probably don't use enough fast travel. I'm generally reluctant to use fast travel because it makes me anxious that I'm missing content or at least interesting situations and the fact that it uses up resources in Horizon is another nail in the coffin. But travelling manually is just so boring in this game compared to many other sandbox games somehow. I've also spent far too much time hunting and crafting - I loathe the fact that you can craft so much right away. My OCD kicks in and I try maxing out everything I can (except XP-related stuff) before making quests. And that bores me.

Anyway, it's sad, because in terms of content and presentation the game is a friggin' masterpiece. I absolutely love the setting and story, I think it's still the best-looking game out there and the voice acting and music are also amazing (although the latter is somewhat repetitive).

I'm sure I'm gonna finish it some day but if the game doesn't take up pace later on it may take years until I do so.

Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, Nov 2 (Wii)-This was fun but I learned I'm pretty terrible at rail shooters. Lots of backstory was lost on me as I have only played RE4 before. It was pretty short at just under 10 hours including replaying several levels to unlock more powerups and secrets.

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There were times on the second play though that I almost decided to take a break. It does use movie style story telling at the expense of emergent gameplay like a Bethesda RPG for example. But that's basically big Sony published games in a nutshell- carefully controlled story over gameplay variety...one of their other core businesses is the film and music industry after all.
People say it's an RPG, but if it is I still maintain it's poor one, but still a good game if not treated as an RPG. But I admit, last year I played this and Assassin's Creed Origins within a few months of each other, and I preferred Origins.

I like the concept of fast travel not being entirely free. But that may be the way I play these sorts of open world games. I see where the story wants me to go, then I go everywhere else and explore first, then finally finish with the main story quest all back to back when there is nothing else to do. So I explore the map on foot (not even using mounts) and tend to use the fast travel only as a late game convenience once I've already been everywhere.

Panzer Corp (GOG)

Describing this one is easy, it's the old SSI 5 Star General series from the 90's reborn. Those old SSI games are some of my favorites of the 90's, I still play them sometimes even now.

But I think these new Slitherine games improve on the old formula in just enough subtle ways to make them better, based upon my experience with the Panzer Corp base game. First of all the campaign scenario are more difficult than I remember in Panzer General. After the first couple of missions, where I only managed marginal victories, I got back into the groove and could usually manage decisive victories. But I normally only pulled off the decisive victories on the last turn that qualified for them- so by the barest of margins. I seem to remember being able to do it much easier on old General games. The advantage of elite over strength units seems to have been toned down as well. But a lot of that I'm basing on memory and could be wrong.

Some good balance changes that I like. Tanks, no matter how experienced and over strength, can't just walk over well entrenched infantry in tough terrain like they could in Panzer General. The power of artillery seems to have been toned down from the dominant force they were in earlier games. I remember my old elite artillery units in PG being able to single handedly wipe out infantry from entire cities...not very realistic.

The old issues are still there as well. The enemy AI is still weak on attack and can still easily be tricked into a salient and obliterated. To make up for it the AI still cheats- sending a strike plane deep over your lines and picking out your soft artillery unit when it should not have even known it was there.

But brilliant easy to get into turn based fun overall. My glorious German forces have now finished sweeping across Europe and across the USA and now stand unchallenged so everyone can live happily in peace for ever after in the glorious Reich.

Total Overdose, quite the fun action packed game with chance of rewind and with great loco moves on top of the action shooting and slow motions, wonder if finishing all side mission does something?

Hybris Pulse of Ruin on steam, 60 hours logged in steam 45 hours needed to beat the game, the reason it was 60 hours is because i lost a few times and probably did other stuff.
Still a pretty great rpg maker game that i think is underpriced for what all it delivers, especially the story and combat are something you probably don't see much.Also bosses how much they can vary, bosses were varying in how you could attack them or choose to defend, because some enemies were too strong if you kept attacking them and had to defend so they cooled down or had a certain way of order to attack them to beat em.
Still quite some grammar mistakes and some side missions weren't logged as completed even though i had all the materials.It's a linear game, but you could choose to go to certain locations for completing some side quests, also there were some mini games. Very likable characters and even some story twist that surprised me.
Would rate it 4.5 stars from 5. Need to write a proper review somehow, but can't post it on steam except the forums due to win xp.

How is that?

It's something about cannot connect to servers which is probably due to having windows xp i pressume. I can download games and update them but you can't post a review without the client if it doesn't let you with the server issues, you can visit the steam forums but not check who posted to you, no screenshots or videos can be posted without the client.
Well i couldn't even download a game from steam until i added someones fix for steam in a certain file.
Too bad they don't let you post a review with only a web browser i believe.
Is this what you wanted to know?

They do let you post a review with only a web browser. I believe only if Steam has recorded you playing for a certain minimum amount of time though (5 minutes? 15 minutes? I don't know), so if the OS issues prevent it from being recorded that's a problem.