The Walking Dead is probably my favorite adventure series of all time. It surpasses most adventure game clichés like inventory management, tank controls, and disjointed pacing. The Walking Dead: Episode 3 is well-paced, and there are some of the toughest choices you have to make. Things get very serious this time around because the group is starting to lose its mental stability. There’s a lot of internal fighting, and you must decide how this all turns out.
The group is trying to get to Savannah, Georgia, because things at the motel didn’t work out so well. They find a train engine that takes them partway, but I won’t say any more. There are a few major areas you can explore with a few simple puzzles, but like usual, the opening is awesome, and I played through this entire episode and wanted the next one right away. There are three new characters introduced, but at the same time, a few people in the group die. Who or how is up to you, but you will be shocked at how this all turns out. I actually had to pause the game with my mouth agape due to the shocking turns and, mainly, how it actually happened.
There’s more zombie killing this time around, but not nearly as much as in the first episode. I found myself glued to my computer more than Episode 2, and I felt like the story was actually progressing better. A lot of bugs are also starting to get ironed out, such as the constant stuttering during cut scenes and some control issues. You won’t be exploring much, just in the main puzzle areas, but this is OK because of how much the story advances through dialog choices. This is about the time when a lot of your choices from the last two episodes will really start blossoming here. Some choices I made actually determined huge plot changes, and I realized either I shouldn’t have done something or wish I had done something, but that’s the excitement of this series. You feel like you are playing a movie and directing it yourself.
I just can’t wait for the fourth episode because things will really start going downhill from there. This episode is a huge turning point for the story, and every fan will want more.
BioWare is a company that revolutionized the action RPG genre for the western era. In a time where Japanese RPGs dominated the market, BioWare was sitting in a little studio, churning out one of the best RPGs of all time. I remember when I was younger how much of a big hoopla this game was. For someone who didn’t own an Xbox or a PC that could run the game, it still slipped under my radar. I eventually got a chance to rent the game years later on 360 and quickly got bored due to its age. I finally picked it up again on the PC, and I am glad I did. The game may feel very dated and old (an entire decade), but there’s no denying the excellent story and well-crafted atmosphere that truly feel genuine in the Star Wars universe.
You play a custom character that has to defeat the evil Sith Lord Darth Malak. He has found some sort of Star Forge to use against the Republic, so you are shadowing his footsteps to find the star maps to this star forge. This takes you across several planets, such as Tatooine, Dantooine, Kashyyyk, Korriban, Kevin, and even Taris. You acquire companions of all types along the way and endure some pretty tough battles and story choices. You have to constantly choose between the light and dark side during choices, and there are plenty of ways to go about the story.
Firstly, you can choose any world in any order. Each one is roughly laid out the same, with a larger hub area than an area beyond where your main quest and some side quests lie. I got rather annoyed with the constant similar layouts and wished for variety. Each world has the Star Map area blocked off until you fix some global catastrophe on the planet. Some are so serious that your decision will determine if you are allowed back on later. Besides running around and talking to people to get quests and buy stuff, the combat and customization are fathoms deep; fans will be pleased.
You can customize your character with a plethora of items, such as implants, shields, different weapons from lightsabers, blasters, vibroblades, belts, armor, robes, and headgear, and I haven’t even started on leveling up. You should pick your character based on how you’re going to fight. I chose to use melee weapons because you eventually go through Jedi training and get your first lightsaber. I have to say that this brought a smile to my face when I inserted my crystals and watched my character whip around those sabers with the classic lightsaber sounds. Nothing can top that.
The game allows you to customize all your items by inserting upgrades that you find or buy. This is mandatory because there really isn’t a “most powerful weapon in the game.” You just get a powerful weapon, and you have to upgrade it, or it won’t do you much good. Other than this, there is the deep leveling system. You can choose an attribute, feat, power, and skill. Feats affect what you use physically in combat and what combat attacks you can use. Powers are forceful powers, and there are plenty of them. All the light and dark powers you can possibly think of are here. I had a lot of fun using them in combat and getting an edge over certain enemies. The level cap is at 20, but most people probably won’t even hit that by the end. I finished at level 18 and didn’t have too much trouble finishing it. You can even choose how your companions level up because you can control them too! This is great for people who like variety and can’t have every skill available for their character.
Combat is turn-based, with dice rolling behind the scenes. I really would have liked real-time combat, but what’s here is exciting and fun on its own. There are tons of different enemies to fight on each planet, and some are harder than others. I found the game really hard at first, but after a while, you will level up and find the game very balanced. There are some issues in combat that just really annoyed me. There seems to be a targeting problem in small areas. When you click the action you want, the characters will get stuck in an endlessly looping animation if there is someone in their way. This can cause you a battle because you have to disengage and restart the attack or move around the obstruction. This happened quite a lot, but you will learn to just live with it.
While the story is interesting and choosing how dialog will change it is fun, there are some issues here. Instead of your choice being final, some dialog trees will allow you to go back and change your answer, or no matter how you persuade or force persuade, neither will work and you can’t continue the dialog. This is usually on side missions, but I have never seen the persuade option fail so much in a BioWare game. No matter how much I leveled up my persuasion attribute, I failed an awful lot. Other than this, though, my other issue is that some dialog just drags on way too long. I found myself skipping a lot of it or just reading ahead of the voices. These, again, are just minor issues that can be overlooked.
The graphics in the game look old and terrible these days, but back in the day, they looked amazing. I can see why it looked so good then, but you can still feel the Star Wars atmosphere, and that’s what counts the most. The character models and animations are stiff, blocky, and repeat a lot, but overall they work. Even some of the voice acting is spotty at best, but overall it is pretty good.
KotOR is an amazing Star Wars experience, but the age may turn a lot of people off. My biggest issue of all is that the game doesn’t give any clues on where to go. You get no hints and are left on your own to just figure out what to do. I had to use a walkthrough through most of the game because I had no idea where to go, or some quests were very cryptic. This is a huge no-no for me and really hurts the score the most. Overall, this is an amazing Star Wars game, and any Star Wars fan will love this game.
I know I swear up and down that I will never play another crappy Gameloft game again, but N.O.V.A. 3 had me interested due to the excellent graphics. Gameloft may have crappy games, but they can really make games look good on mobile devices. Once I started playing, I realized that the visuals were all that had improved in this Halo-style rip-off FPS series. The story is forgettable, as is any Gameloft game. You’re trying to find some sort of ancient artifact to destroy an evil alien race and save humanity. We haven’t heard that story before.
I was impressed with the first level of the game because there are some cinematic scripted events thrown in here that made me think that Gameloft finally got their act together and did something right. I also noticed how less it looks like Halo and more like Crysis 2. The outfits look almost the same, and even some of the guns look the same. That’s OK because Gameloft is a master copycat, remember? After I started shooting up some bad guys, I realized how much better the guns shoot, but there’s still no life in them. There’s almost no recoil, and the controls are glitchy with random spin-around, not to mention the HUD is cramped. I highly recommend playing this on as large a screen as possible to avoid any further frustrations.
Once I got past the first level, I realized the game felt the same as the last two. The game has cookie-cutter enemies that just stand there and shoot you with a couple of vehicle sections thrown in. The game has no life or soul and just feels like a generic shooter from way back in 2003. The levels are more varied, but the art style is just dull, and there’s not much to really look at. Sure, the graphics look good technically, but artistically, Call of Duty looks like Okami. I just gave up about four levels in because I realized it was the same dull, boring crap. I never had enough ammo, which is weird. Why max out my ammo where I can only take down a few bad guys before switching to another gun? I felt like the ammo sparsity was something for survival horror, not a one-man-army FPS.
Let’s not forget multiplayer. The maps are really large, with only a few players in them, so it feels like you’re always playing hide-and-go-seek rather than Team Deathmatch. The glitchy controls and lifeless weapons don’t help either, so just skip the multiplayer altogether. If you really don’t care about quality, then the N.O.V.A. series is probably right up your alley, along with most Gameloft games. The game looks great, but other than that, you will just find a hollow and soulless shooter that looks, feels, and plays monotonously.
The first episode was just amazing and had some shocking moments. I have been waiting for this episode, but I feel a little letdown this time around. Lee and the gang need to find food because they ran out at the motel they are holding down. You go to try to find food and wind up on a dairy farm, but the food isn’t exactly what you think it might be. There aren’t as many shocking moments, and they don’t come off as surprising as in the first episode. The big moments are more dialog choices than actual gameplay, which is disappointing. One moment does have you chopping off a guy’s leg stuck in a bear trap, but other than that, the other moments are pretty typical, like yanking a gun out of a guy’s hand. In fact, there aren’t even really that many zombies in this episode; they kind of take a back seat to the internal struggle on the farm.
The game plays out exactly the same, but there are fewer exploring segments and even fewer puzzles to solve. In fact, this mainly felt like an interactively animated episode rather than an adventure game. Not to say that is bad, but fans of the first episode may find it disappointing. There are some more important choices you have to make, and that is probably the biggest switch from the first episode. Some changes actually determine the lives of a few characters you probably got attached to. Episode 2 does what this series is doing best, and that’s slowly drawing the characters’s personalities out and constantly making you question how you feel about them.
The game isn’t so much tense gameplay-wise as story-wise. The whole time, I was surprised when something did happen. You are thrown important choices and need to make decisions quickly at times when you least expect them, and they really make you think. I had such a hard time picking almost every choice because sometimes the right thing to do isn’t the best thing to do. A lot of times, I wonder how that will affect me later on in the series.
Overall, Episode 2 doesn’t have as much action or surprising moments, but it expands the character’s personality and gives you some seriously heavy situations that force you to make big decisions. The episode also puts zombies on the back burner for the problems on this farm and the group, so be prepared for that.
Hector is an adventure game for adults, which there aren’t many of. Most have cutesy, colorful graphics, crappy voice acting, and a cheesy story to keep teenagers and unknowing casual gamers interested. This game may be shallow in gameplay, but it makes up for it with crass British humor that is disgusting and funny at the same time. The game is about a deadbeat police investigator who has to deal with a hostage situation. Instead of storming in and dealing with it the right way, he does everything the terrorist says. This leads to the three main areas of the game where you have to solve puzzles.
You start by just clicking on everything and seeing what you can take, interact with, and talk to. This is a standard adventure game affair, and there’s nothing different at all. This is a by-the-books adventure game and doesn’t try anything fancy or new. The three areas are a park, a clock tower, and a porn shop, which all need to be dealt with as demanded by the terrorist. The porn shop needs to be shut down, the clock tower needs to be up and running again, and the guy at the park needs money to restore it. What makes the game interesting are Hector’s comments and the wisecracks and gross jokes thrown between characters. The game even makes fun of Brits themselves with chavs, overall British terms, and inside jokes.
Most of the puzzles are decent, but the hint system is there to help you and insult you. Instead of just simple hints, you have to read all the insults the game throws at you, which is entertaining. Thankfully, the areas can be completed in any order, so that adventure game quirk is out the door here. Most items are so absurd that you know there’s only one thing you can do with them. The entertainment value also comes in the form of what you need to solve the puzzles, like a garter belt for a fan belt in a beat-up police car. The battery is also dead, so you use the chav in the station as teaser bait on a psycho old woman at a bus stop. Push him down into the hood of the car, and you have a charged battery. This is funny, disgusting, and entertaining. The graphics are nicely drawn in a flash animation cartoon style, but the voice acting is spotty. Overall, Hector Episode 1 is an entertaining adventure game, but not for the lighthearted.
Osmos HD is an upgrade of the physics game where you are an omega trying to become the biggest. The game is very hard, but somehow satisfying when you beat a puzzle. The game requires a lot of concentration and finicky maneuvering, but the game is still enjoyable.
Pushing around the blog requires you to tap around the microbe with the touchscreen. This is like a jet booster, so the faster you tap, the faster it will float around. Around you are red microbes that you must avoid until you are bigger. Eat smaller ones until you consume the biggest one or complete the goal. Sometimes you will be orbiting a giant microbe and must complete the goal before you get sucked up.
The hardest part of the game is tapping just right and keeping good speed. You can slow down time or speed it up by swiping the screen left or right. This allows you to bump bigger microbes out of the way without being consumed. The visuals are pretty decent, and the game has a nice atmospheric soundtrack, but due to the high difficulty, this game is far from relaxing.
Overall, Osmos HD is worth the money, and you can play in the story mode or arcade. I wish there were more modes here, but at least the levels vary, so you won’t get bored. Casual gamers may get turned off by the sheer difficulty of some levels and the amount of concentration and precise movements required to move on. Give the demo a swirl before you buy.
Dear Esther is a game from indie developer The Chinese Room that is a visually stunning adventure game, but it is lacking everything else. If you like slow-paced games or just want to relax and not worry about anything but moving your character, then this is probably exactly what you’re looking for. Everyone else, stay away.
You start out on the beach with no objectives, so you just start wondering. This is all you do in the game while a narrator spews poems at you. There isn’t really a story here except that a man is searching for a man named Donelly, and you are writing letters to a man named Esther. As you wander around the level, you will see various things like abandoned huts, shacks, and strange writings on walls. I felt the game had an atmosphere that was a mix of Penumbra with a bit of Half-Life 2 thrown in. If you walk into a dark area, your flashlight will turn on, but there’s really no need to wander off the main path. If you do, you may get a little extra narrative, but it isn’t worth it because you have to walk all the way back to where you were.
You literally do nothing but walk. There aren’t any other buttons except zoom and take screenshots. This wouldn’t be so bad if the pace wasn’t so slow and grueling. You literally walk at a crawl, and I get that it’s so you can take in the scenery, but it doesn’t really change much until you get into the caves. There’s only so much ocean and swaying grass one can see before you get bored. The only thing you look forward to is the next piece of narration.
The game is stunning to look at, but you won’t see the true beauty of the engine until you get into the caves, where you get to witness gorgeous water and lighting effects. This is short-lived because this area is only about 10–15 minutes long, as are the other four areas. This leads us right into the game’s worst problem: It is less than an hour long. Even when you get to the end, you still don’t know why you played this game or what its purpose is. The story is very vague, and you never quite know what’s going on. This is hardly a game and is more of a technical showcase. If you can stomach this sort of thing, then go ahead, but you aren’t missing anything if you skip out.
Dear Esther does try something that most games don’t, but with zero gameplay and only being barely an hour long, it’s hard to justify that $10 price tag. There aren’t even any downloadable chapters, which is a real shame. Will I be keeping an eye on The Chinese Room’s next game? You bet because there is a lot of potential here, but I just felt it was clearly wasted.
Adventure, strategy, and RPGs were the pinnacle of PC games back in the mid- to late-90s, and Sanitarium is one of those games. You play Max, who suffers a car accident and is stuck in his own insane delusions, or is he? You explore 12 sick and twisted chapters with excellent voice acting and very interesting characters, but don’t forget those adventure puzzles.
The game isn’t much different from the standard adventure game, where you wander around and click on items to proceed to the next area. Your icon is a magnifying glass, and you hold down the right mouse button to move your character around. This was my first annoyance with the game, being that the characters walk so slowly and there’s no run button. Despite this, clicking on things is actually interesting because most of it doesn’t even pertain to the real world. Your first area is an asylum where guys are bashing their heads against walls, and the people you talk to are completely out of their minds. This gets even worse as the game progresses, but that’s a good thing.
As you collect items, you find ways to use them in interesting ways, and it actually makes sense. However, most of the time, the way to use them is so obvious that you will miss it. This game isn’t exactly easy and just gets harder as the game progresses. You get thrown a couple of puzzles at the beginning, but towards the end, the game gets very puzzle-heavy, and they are not fun or easy. Sure, they are unique to individual worlds, but they aren’t easy. I had to use a walkthrough through most of the game because I just couldn’t figure out what to do most of the time.
My favorite part of the game was wandering around and talking to people and hearing their strange voices or weird stories. The worlds themselves are characters because each one has a big problem to solve, but thankfully each level is small and it’s not easy to get lost. The game is paced well with some CGI cutscenes (of course they look horrible being from 1998), but it’s nice that this game feels high-budget for its time. I always looked forward to the next zany world and the weird characters I would run into. I never got bored and always wanted more. The game is nicely paced at around 5–6 hours, and it had a satisfying ending. The one surprise I had, however, was a couple of boss fights. Most adventure games don’t have these, but these were strange.
Overall, Sanitarium is an excellent adventure game that shows how great the 90s were on the PC. You can pick the game up on GoG.com for only $6, but I did run into one huge problem. The game crashes a lot on the newer operating systems, and GoG never addressed the issue. If you can, get the CD and use it on an older operating system (like Windows 98), but otherwise, you will have to trudge through the constant crashes.
BioShock is awesome! Buy it! That is probably all you need for a review, but that’s not really a review. Anyway, if you don’t know the plot of BioShock, then you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months. You play a nobody named Jack who crashes into a plane and discovers Rapture. A failed underwater city whose founder, Andrew Ryan, turns crazy, and all the people of Rapture have gone nuts. They go nuts due to the plasmids they use to gain power. Also, the ADAM that can make you turn into anything you want is very valuable and is the key to rapture. The Little Sisters gather the ADAM, and the Big Daddies protect them. The story is full of plot twists and secrets. It’s probably one of the most original stories in any game period. The gameplay is like that of an average shooter, if you want it to be, or it can be a genetically enhanced one. That’s the beauty of BioShock. It can be anything you want; it can be boring, fun, stupid, or lame; it’s all up to you.
The game’s narrative is one-of-a-kind and what most games copy these days. The story is told through radio transmissions with no cutscenes. That is extremely hard to do while keeping the player interested. Atlas guides you around, telling you how to get to Andrew Ryan, but the world around you also tells the story of Rapture through audio diaries, things written on walls, and what the psychotic enemies blurt out. This is a rare form of storytelling in games, which is why BioShock is such a classic.
The graphics stand up pretty well today with DirectX 10 enhancements, but they are so subtle you won’t even notice. There are supposed to be better water effects and physics, but I didn’t notice a difference except that your steps cause ripples in the water now. There are lots of graphical problems on the PC that were never addressed, but they don’t hinder the game much. The game is very surreal, and it just sucks you in. The big thing here is the gene splicing and all the plasmids. There are so many of them, and you can do whatever you want with them. You can shoot fire from your hands or freeze your enemy with an ice blast. There are others as well that let you gain more health or hack turrets and safes better and faster. There is just so much detail here, it’s nuts. You can use a camera and research your enemies to learn their weaknesses and gain new plasmids and tonics. The only disappointment was the lack of any multiplayer whatsoever. All you can do is play this game to experience the true beauty of it all. BioShock is one of the best games in years, and I assure you that you will have more fun with BioShock than with Halo 3 or Metroid.
Angry Birds, why are you so popular? Everyone plays this game, and everyone who hasn’t has at least heard of it. It was a digital phenomenon that sent a little indie game developer soaring into the millions. There is every type of merchandise available for a $1 game. Why is it so appealing to everyone? The game struck a perfect balance between hardcore perfection-type gameplay and casual gamer fun. While Rovio put out a Seasons and Rio version of the game, the series was getting tiresome. Space adds a couple new layers of depth to the series.
The game involves gravity play, as you would expect. Yes, you are in space, and yes, the game plays differently. You flick your birds across space and try to get them sucked into the gravitational pull of planets, where the usual obstacles and pigs lie. The added layer is that you can approach these puzzles from multiple angles. Have a bunch of blocks on one side of a pig? Flick your bird on the opposite side of the planet, watch it fly around using the pull of the planet, and knock it down. As puzzles get harder, multiple planets are lined up, so trick shots are needed.
The usual birds are back, along with a couple of new ones, like the ice bird, which freezes blocks so they shatter. The new gravity gameplay actually makes the environment a puzzle, so it doesn’t feel like the same type of puzzle over and over again. This also makes the game harder, so if you were afraid of that, it came true. This actually makes the game more engaging, and I could play in longer spurts because each puzzle felt really different. There is a new model that is almost like a Space Invaders clone, where you have to knock through aliens to get to the moving pig at the top. It’s fun but also hard to get to because these levels are hidden golden eggs throughout the game.
Overall, Space adds a much-needed layer of depth using gravity, and I like it a lot. I feel this game is geared more towards core gamers than casual gamers, but both still apply here. There are hundreds of levels to start with, and obviously, more are coming. If you love Angry Birds, then Space is an exciting and long-awaited sequel to a worldwide phenomenon.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.