Now that we are almost done with this series, I am sad that the next one will be it. Episode 4 sees the gang trying to get on a boat and out of Savannah, Georgia, but things don’t go as planned. There are a bunch of new characters this time around, but most are hard to care for because they make brief appearances. By this point, most or a little of your gang will be with you, but this episode is mainly lacking the suspenseful choices like in the last one. We get bigger areas to explore, a little more action, and finally, a ton of zombies.
The series has been lacking any zombies lately and has just dealt with internal turmoil, but Episode 4 skirts this and brings the gang back to realizing that the zombies are the real threat here. There’s a strange calm before the storm within the group; the conversations are tense and borderline everyone going postal on each other. I found that there was a lack of gameplay here and that it focused more on delivering a story, but that is ok in this series. There is more action with some zombie shooting, action-oriented puzzles, and larger areas to explore. I sat through the whole episode in one go because it was so intense and entertaining. You always want to know what is going to happen next.
The new characters are hard to really like except Molly because of her shady personality. The new guys are brief and seem pretty generic. I really don’t care for Christa or Omid, who we met at the end of the last episode. Christa is selfish, and Omid is boring and just seems useless. What grows even more are the characters you have right now from the original group. Clementine and Lee’s relationship really blossoms here, and their trust will be tested.
This episode is just a mishmash of everything from the past ones: lots of zombies, action, large areas, new characters, and tense conversations, but nothing very serious. What has stayed the same throughout is the constant, intense atmosphere that makes you stay in the game, and you never want to quit until it’s over. This is my favorite adventure series of all time. The game puts you in control just enough to make you feel like you made all the important choices. The game has been built up to the climax, and the cliffhanger ending here is so abrupt and so sudden that you just hang your end, knowing you have to wait another month or two for the last episode. This is just like a good TV series, but better.
Shooting things is what this game is all about, and I mean all about. Borderlands is highly successful in mixing RPG with FPS, bringing the best of both worlds to the table. Borderlands 2 is more of the same, just bigger and more badass. If you didn’t like the first game, you won’t like this one either. Fans of the last game will be very happy with this second installment.
There is actually more of a storyline here, with more main quests. Of course, there are 50+ side quests that you will pour dozens of hours into. You get to play as a new set of characters, but in the same classes. I stuck with Maya the Siren again in this one, and I loved her phase-locking ability, where I could make enemies hover in the air for a bit or do damage to large enemies. You will also be happy to know that you can customize your character’s head and skin as you find new ones as loot, but I would have liked a more detailed character customization system; it just feels a bit tacked on.
There are just so many different enemies and guns in this game that I couldn’t even count. The guns are all varied with different stats, but you will be micromanaging them again, and it does become annoying. I wound up selling or dropping about 80% of the guns I found because a lot of them are pretty useless. This goes for shields, relics, grenade mods, and other things. There are six different classes of weapons: rocket launchers, pistols, assault rifles, sniper rifles, sub-machine guns, and shotguns.
You will always be switching between different weapons in your four slots (that you slowly unlock). I never stuck with a single weapon for too long because I was always finding better ones. Enemies are constantly dropping loot, and some weapons are rarer than others. Some do elemental damage, which is actually a huge factor in Borderlands. Armored enemies are weak against corrosive weapons, and shielded enemies are weak against shock weapons. The new slag weapon coats enemies in purple goop that makes them weak to any weapon fire. Some of the weapons are pretty unique; I never found two that looked the same. Some have unique abilities like faster reload and better accuracy as you fire, and even one gun was cursed that slowed me down and made obnoxious noises when I fired. Some guns you can throw when you reload, and they will explode like grenades and regenerate in your hand. The guns are just awesome in this game, and you will be looking for new ones every second you play.
Of course, the game is tough as nails, but as you level up, you can unlock new abilities. This game is designed for multiple playthroughs because you will probably reach around level 30 and maybe a bit further even after you complete every single quest in the game. You won’t unlock all the abilities or even get the best loot until you do. In fact, Borderlands 2 is more designed around co-op this time around because the best loot is only available to more players on board. The game is also extremely tough without someone playing with you. The game keeps enemies leveled up with you, so that makes the game even more difficult than the last. One thing that I really loved was the badass tokens that would raise stats just a smidgen for completing in-game challenges.
This leads to the biggest complaint I have about the series: Respawns. You respawn at certain points, but you will die hundreds of times in this game. When you do, you have to backtrack to where you died, and these maps are huge. Some maps let you use Catch-A-Ride vehicles, but most of them don’t. This was just so frustrating when I would die 15 times while clearing an area, suffer through the long respawn animation, backtrack, and sometimes die in just one hit. You go into Fight for Your Life mode, which allows you to revive with full shields if you can kill an enemy. This alleviated the frustration a tad, but if there are no enemies nearby to kill quickly, you’re screwed. On top of this, the enemy that killed you will regain full health if you die. That includes bosses. This is just so frustrating and makes me want the game to end. The second thing I really hate about this series is the constant enemy respawning. Once you leave an area and come back, all the enemies respawn. This made doing missions annoying because I just ran by them all. I understand they have to respawn in a game like this, which is focused on large maps, but I personally found it a nuisance.
If you have friends, this isn’t so bad, but be warned when playing by yourself. Besides that, the game keeps the tongue-in-cheek humor of the last game with more characters and returns to the past characters. You really get to know them more this time around with about ten times the amount of dialog. The story is decent but has a pretty crappy ending. It is predictable and isn’t anything special. Just know that you are here to kill everything, and I mean everything. I found myself entertained throughout the whole game with double the number of areas to explore, more side missions, and just more of everything. I really wanted to see more change in the series, so in the end, this game just feels like Borderlands 1.5.
At least PC gamers get enhanced visuals with some nice touch-ups. Higher resolution textures, further draw distance, FXAA, and higher FPS, which can be capped at 120, This is the superior version over the consoles because you can’t get pinpoint precision while aiming with a joystick. I could snipe like I never could on a controller, and it made the game a tad more tolerable in terms of difficulty.
I only have a few major complaints, but they are just staples of the series. If you can tolerate the monotonous trekking around, respawning enemies, and constant death, then pick this up. Fans of the last game know what they are getting into, so this is a warning for newcomers. I recommend playing this with at least one friend because the game is brutal. Lots of enemies, lots of dying. I also didn’t quite care for the constant micromanagement of all the loot. This is a great mix of FPS and RPG elements and should be played by fans of either genre.
I have to admit that I passed this one by as another ridiculous mobile game for kids. This game is one of the most fun I have ever had on a phone. The fast pace and perfectly balanced difficulty make you want to never put this game down. I got all three apples at every level in just a few playthroughs and desperately wanted more. That is how you make a good mobile game.
You play a granny who is chasing down a little boy dressed as a thief. You have to jump, zip line, and somersault your way through each level to collect every apple. Along the way, you get to collect coins, which you can use to buy banana peels, baseballs, and helmets. The helmets shorten your recovery time when you fall, and the other two slow down the little boy when thrown. The basic gameplay is simple yet addictive. One button is used to jump, but if you hold it, you will front-flip, which also makes you jump farther. It was very smart on the developer’s part to do this. The coins are your guideline on where to jump and what to do. Also very smart. I never got stuck because I didn’t know what to do or how to get to an area. The platforming gets a bit trickier with zip-lining and having to use momentum and physics to get around.
Each level is less than a minute long, but you have to do them flawlessly to stay ahead of the boy and get each apple. The level design is very clever, and there’s a nice balance between all the levels. I found that there were a few frustrating sections, but I eventually got past them and mastered the levels. The game is just so fast-paced with the flips, slides, jumps, and zip lines. The fact that you can get every apple and complete every level makes you want to not put the game down. This game wants you to beat it, and it feels really great.
Granny Smith is well worth the $1 and probably even more. More levels are coming soon, but what is here is some seriously addictive and fast-paced fun. I haven’t had this much fun with a mobile game in a long time, and that’s saying a lot. My biggest complaint is probably that you can only buy three items with your coins, and there aren’t enough levels or characters to play as. These are minor issues that don’t really hinder this excellent game.
90s kids remember Oregon Trail at school on those old, colorful iMacs, right? If you didn’t, then you had a terrible childhood! For those who did, you must play this game. Organ Trail is a zombie take on the Oregon Trail gameplay, but it is much better with a great atmosphere.
You start off by shooting some zombies, but you run out of ammo. Someone comes to help, but he ends up getting bitten, so you put him down. Yes, you can put down people in this game! After you name your characters with names that aren’t real names (you all did it!) You set off in your station wagon to the first town. This is where you decide what kind of supplies you are going to start off with. Ammo, money, tires, batteries, gas, food, and mufflers. Your station wagon is your life. If it breaks down, you aren’t getting to the west coast. In between landmarks, random events will display that will affect your character or car in some way. Sometimes harsh weather may make you drive slower; you might find interesting things on the road, lose things on the road, get ambushed by biker gangs, have to drive through a horde of zombies, etc.
Not all of this is as simple as flipping through menus. When a gang attacks, you have to ram them off the road with your car, or their bullets will cause precious damage to your car. When you see a horde, you have to decide how to approach them. Is the horde docile? Then sneak through at a slow speed. You can blast your way through or hire mercenaries to protect you, but they are very expensive. There are events that you run into where you have to decide whether to help the person, leave, or kill them. This is a game about surviving a zombie apocalypse, and it is very dark and moody. These events make the game feel like a true adventure. Even scavenging at any time can be a risky move due to how many bullets you have and your health. If you don’t survive, you could possibly die by taking too much damage!
Of course, you can rest and heal your group, but this costs food. Using medkits should only be kept for yourself so you can quickly heal after scavenging. When you reach a town, you can either buy upgrades for your car and pay to repair it, or you can use the scrap you find to do it yourself. This costs lots of food and may not be successful if you don’t have enough scrap. Sometimes you can take jobs for people or trade with them for items you desperately need. I have never played a game like this where I had to think about every single decision so much.
My only main issue is that the game can be too hard sometimes, and the shooting mechanic is clumsy. You hold back the gun and let go to shoot, but the three pixels that help you aim aren’t much help. I found the aiming too sensitive and desperately needed a longer guide or larger projectiles. The shooting sections are the hardest in the game because tons of zombies will come after you, so you must constantly be on the move. I found the character’s moves too slow—just barely faster than the zombies. If this issue were fixed, this game would be perfect. A lot of people will be turned off by the Atari 2600-style graphics, but they add to the charm. The atmosphere is surprisingly well done here, despite the ancient-looking graphics.
Overall, the game requires a lot of thinking and careful strategy but throws in enough random events to make it seem almost realistic. The shooting mechanic is finicky, and the character moves too slowly, but I couldn’t put this game down. Even after dying halfway across America, I tried again because the next journey was completely different from the last. I even decided to take more of something else and try again. This is a wonderful game, but it may not be for everyone.
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.
In Rochard, you play John Rochard, a miner on the mega-corporation space program Skyrig. Your team hasn’t found anything in a long time and is about to get their project funding cut when they come upon something strange. This just so happens to be some weird alien artifact, but the story pretty much stops there. You find out there’s a bad guy, and then you run off to stop him. That’s as far as the story goes, and it’s completely forgettable and uninteresting. The ending doesn’t even make any sense. Rochard also has unwieldy controls and terrible dialog.
You get one weapon, but this is also your gravity gun, or G-lifter, that you can use to move stuff around. You can switch to your rock laser, which is like a gun, and then you have grenades. Things seem pretty easy for a while, then when you get 3/4 through, the game gets really tough combat-wise. The controls are not fun because the game requires you to use this G-lifter in combat as well. If you have three bad guys, two robots, and two turrets shooting at you, it leaves you pretty much screwed because you can die in just a few hits in this game. If there’s a heavy crate nearby, just turn on zero-gravity to move it in front of you as cover. This completely sucks because you have to switch to the G-lifter and be completely vulnerable. You can shoot grenades at any time, but you have to aim them.
The G-lifter is mainly used for puzzles that require you to move circuit breakers around, boxes, and laser cutters. Very rarely are the puzzles challenging, but when they are, you really have to think. Sometimes you are flipping the room up and down, using gravity, and jumping. The rest of the game is usually a breeze if you aren’t getting killed 20 times by the same set of bad guys. The main challenge is figuring out how to get through different force fields because these are what the puzzles are wrapped around. Blue ones mean you can’t put crates through them; red means you can go through; white means nothing can go through; and yellow means weapons can’t go through. Remembering all this is important, but in the end, the puzzles are pretty uninteresting.
Jumping around the world of Rochard is pretty boring thanks to the terrible story, bad dialog, and unlikable characters. They are cheesy, corny, and just overall bad. There are only a few interesting moments in Rochard, but the overall game is a decent puzzle/platform run. If you can stomach the bad controls, poor combat mechanics, and lame story, then you will have a few hours of fun here.
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Yeah, it's pretty damn awful. Notoriously one of the worst games on the PSP. A 4 was actually being generous.…