Trine

A good action / puzzle platformer. The mechanics, abilities, character customization with trinkets found in levels is solid, well executed and good gameplay.

Overall it is a great game mechanically, but I found myself not that engaged or motivated to play it. I would imagine it is more hectic and engaging while playing local co-op, but I was playing singleplayer. Story is ok, but perhaps it was the linear level design that is constantly pushing the player in one direction.

With other side scrolling platforming games with large open worlds, like Aquaria and 1000 Amps, there is a sense of exploration and amusement at discovering new things and secrets. In level based platformers like this one, it's more of a get to the end level (Repeat until game is done). Yes there is exploration throughout the level, but it just doesn't engage in the same way.

TL;DR : Good platformer, better with friends - beat levels, collect things.

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

It's an RPG that stresses earning money and shop mechanics more than exploring it's world and characters. You are supposed to earn enough money to pay off increasingly larger amounts of debt, but this only encourages grinding at your store.

You can leave the store with a hero character and explore a dungeon to gather treasure. This mode plays like an Zelda on the SNES, top down action combat, but unlike Zelda is straight up combat with only three special abilities per character. When your doing nothing but it for 5-10 dungeon floors against the same old slimes, pumpkins, bats, and what the fuck ever it gets boring and tedious fast. Also with a limited space of what you can take back to sell I found I had to be constantly managing my inventory, but that crap is with all RPGs.

There is also a crafting system for more valuable items, which means more dungeon grinding for ingredients. But under the fixed time constraint to earn money, it's very possible to ignore.

Only the first 10%-20% of content is introduced by the game, the rest you have to dick around to find/ start the unlocking events. Upon finishing paying off the debt, I had only unlocked 2 dungeons and 2 heroes, out of like 8 dungeons and 9 heroes. According to the wiki and realizing the amount of grinding to unlock it all I realized my patience with the game had worn out.

TL;DR : Beat the game by grinding only the first 20% of content? Lots of playtime promised though.

Bully: Scholarship Edition

A nice action sandbox game, although in my inexperience with the genre I don't have anything else to compare it to.

Fair warning is that it is a poor PC port, no windowed mode or advanced graphics settings, mouse has some sort of analog dead zone which exaggerates large movements and totally ignores small ones, mini games designed for analog sticks but using the mouse can be frustrating to get used to.

There is quite a lot to do between missions, collectibles, and mini games. I was able to get 97% completion within 50 hours so it's a fairly long experience, probably longer if you feel like messing around in it instead of going straight from one objective to the next.

Combat is clunky, only hit and grapple, and most bosses are invulnerable to grapple. So it's button mashing hit most of the time. You do get combat upgrades that are just holding down hit after x amounts of button mashing it, but it's all largely irrelevant.

For me it was enjoyable up until end game, then all that was left was reoccurring boring mini games, and directionless mischief in the sandbox. There isn't anything branching story so there is also no reason to replay it as well.

TL;DR: Do you like sandbox games? Can you stand poor PC ports?

Adam's Venture Episodes

Originally posted : October 16th, 2012 @ 8:37pm

Adventures in caves with a band of unlikeable stereotypes. As soon as the titular character opens his smug mouth, you can't help but think: "what a douche bag." Lots of rocks, painfully slow walking speeds, with sprinklings of bible puzzles in between.

Yeah, it's a Christian game with a bunch of biblical references everywhere. To it's defense it does have really well done environments.

A plus: pretty rocks and sand. Cons: everything else, but thankfully any suffering playing this game will be short.

TL;DR : Pretty environment art religion game. Avoid.

AirMech

Originally posted : October 16th, 2012 @ 7:59pm

A dota style game, with focus on unit control and "strategy". It has the neat gimmick , but core gameplay has some problems. Your hero unit doesn't have a wide variety of skills, so must instead focus on building a preselected array of units to place and command on the battlefield. Except that both your mouse and keyboard are both mapped to your hero, so you can only select one unit at a time and give orders one at a time, and you have no control of where they go to attack ( closest enemy base only). So each game plays out as a frantic scramble capturing bases until one side amasses enough units to swarm the home base. This is a poor excuse for strategy as you can't order flanks, have to position each unit by hand, taking your hero out of the fight, and come into the game with a preset unit loadout that may already be disadvantaged against your opponent.

It is well polished and technically excellent, but core gameplay imo is frustrating and tedious.

TL;DR : Avoid.

Rochard

Originally posted : October 16th, 2012 @ 7:48pm

An action platformer with the gravity gun and control over gravity. The gameplay is fun, and straightforward with collecting new upgrades to expand your options. The story isn't anything special, just some poor motivations to go from one level to the next, so it's pretty ignorable. The game is actually pretty short, as 3-4 hours is definitely enough to beat it as long as your not going for every collectable doodad, and even then it doesn't anything else going for it to make you want to play it again.

Overall it's a well polished game, entertaining for a few hours, and a great example for Unity developers to see a finished commercial game made with the engine.

TL;DR : 2D Gravity gun, worth a play. Short and not worth replay though.

Blacklight: Retribution

Originally posted : October 2nd, 2012 @ 1:02am

A decent, fun F2P FPS that had just enough new tricks in the bag to make it different than other experiences. Yes there are unlockable customization items (guns, armor, tools, and killstreak items) that to own permanently you have to grind to afford, I don't mind as it's something to look forward to buying what I want. There are cheaper rentals too that'll remain competitive with personally customized guns.

The game is pretty fast paced, so twitch reflexes and good use of tactics are key. Overall it is a standard PVP FPS really, just with neat modifications like cloaking, revives, temporary wall hack ability, mech piloting, deployable turrets and mines all put together with a good variety of game types. Though the amount of maps available for certain modes, 1 each for two types of game modes, leaves something to be desired.

This doesn't really stand out as something amazing, but it's not bad either. If you like the genre, it's good and has future content to come.

TL;DR : Futuristic customization heavy Call of Duty with wall hacks. Try it out?