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 have to admit that I expected this game to be an absolute abomination, like most of the past games in the series. I’m surprised that the game looks good, feels good, and has some shocking moments with an actual interesting story. This is something you wouldn’t expect from a military shooter set in Dubai, but it’s here to prove you wrong. The game has you following a team of three through Dubai, trying to track down a man named Konrad, who has led the 33rd battalion to go rogue. The story doesn’t really ever make a lot of sense, but the shocking moments throughout are entertaining and memorable.
The game has a lot of real-world weapons to shoot, and they feel good, but not as good as other shooters you have grown to love. Some weapons have some sort of alternate mode, like burst fire, laser sight, grenade launcher, or scope, but other than that, the weapons are a standard affair. The game tries to use the environment as a weapon but doesn’t really pull through. You can shoot the glass out of the glass that has a bunch of trapped sand behind it to bury enemies, but there are only a few spots on the whole to do this. There are some epic set pieces throughout the game, like hanging onto a gas truck while firing a grenade launcher, using a mini-gun in a helicopter, and a few moral choice points in the game.
These moral choices are pretty disturbing, like seeing two men hanging from a freeway sign. You have to choose one or the other to survive. Another section has you firing white phosphorus down on soldiers, but you end up killing tons of civilians in the process. The cut scenes that lead up to and after these moments are pretty shocking and gruesome. This is something I would not expect from a military shooter, and I hope others follow suit. In between these moments, there is just monotonous shooting and boring brown deserts to look at, which really bring the great moments down. The characters are at least as interesting as their mental state deteriorates as the game progresses and you start to feel for them, which is also rare in military shooters full of cookie-cutter one-man armies.
I constantly wanted more of those shocking moments, but they were far and few between. It was just bad guy after bad guy, and they all looked the same after a while. You can wander around and pick up intelligence items, but how many of us are tired of doing this in shooters? The cover system at least works pretty well and is similar to Gears of War, but not as fluid. Then there’s multiplayer, which is a standard affair and won’t keep you coming back for very long.
Overall, Spec Ops has some shocking story moments that give you choice and question your moral standards. In between these moments are monotonous shooting segments through boring and brown environments. Even the sand elements are not put to good use and are almost forgotten halfway through the game. This is a fun weekend rental, but don’t expect any miracles.
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.
I have really given this game some time, and I have tried to forgive it. I rented this on Xbox 360 when it first came out and gave up after the second level. I bought this at a cheap Steam sale about a year ago and have just had it sitting on my HDD since then. I have gone back here and there to try to beat or continue this game. I just can’t do it and have finally given up. After two years of giving this game a chance, I doubt it will become better over time. The paper-thin story, poor stealth mechanics, and technical flaws just bring this promising game down.
You play as a British spy infiltrating Germany during World War II and other occupied territories for…I don’t really know. The story is presented in flashbacks that don’t really explain much other than why Violet is at that current location. You have various goals you have to complete, but there are enemies in between that you have to kill off or avoid. A stealth game has to have great stealth mechanics like sneaking, killing, and gadgets, which Velvet fails in every category. First off, she moves way too slowly when crouching. You can never catch up to enemies who are walking because they just leave her in the dust. This is extremely difficult when you are trying to quickly kill someone before you are spotted. The kill moves are pretty cool, but you have to be in the exact position the game needs you to be before you can trigger them. You also have to be extremely close, which is ridiculous. This isn’t a splinter cell where you can trigger the kill at a reasonable distance.
You get a few items to help you kill these Nazis. You can use morphine shots to become invisible, freeze time, and do an automatic kill. This is useful for a guard that has been spotted, so you can take him down really quick. You get a silenced pistol, but ammo is hard to come by, so use it wisely. Sometimes you can also use a Nazi uniform as a disguise, but if you get too close to enemies, they will recognize you. The game has shadow stealth, which means if you hide in the shadows, you will have a blue aura around you, and enemies won’t see you. This game has some of the dumbest AI enemies I have ever seen. You can whistle to lure a guard into some shadows, but he won’t see you even though you are two feet in front of him. If you are seen and try to hide, the enemies know exactly where you are, and you can’t hide from them. What kind of lame crap is that?
The game looks good and has a nice visual art style, but there are some technical flaws here. Animations are pretty bad, with some terrible sound effects. The footsteps all sound the same, and the animations just seem floaty and canned. I also found some of the guard’s patrols to be very long, and the overall patterns are hard to work around. It’s difficult to figure out how to take out enemies because there are no natural hints or obvious paths most of the time.
Overall, Velvet Assassin was a promising stealth action game set in World War II but has a pointless story, broken stealth mechanics, and some technical flaws. The game looks good, but other than that, there is no reason for you to pick it up. Rent this if you want to play a stealth game with a sexy protagonist; otherwise, look elsewhere.
The first DeathSpank gave us some solid RPG action with really funny dialog and wit. Thongs of Virtue is the direct sequel but feels more like an expansion. The game is exactly the same, but with new content. Unfortunately, the game also carries over the same problems from the first game, so not a single thing was fixed or changed. The story is about DeathSpank trying to retrieve three thongs from three evil bosses, but in between, you can do about 150 side quests.
The game is broken up into several areas, just like the first game. You can warp around the world via outhouses, and you will revive at the nearest one if you die. As you do quests for various people, you pick up more powerful armor and weapons along the way. There are new armor and weapons in this game, but everything else is the same. The same food, potions, and other little tidbits like chests. Some chests can only be opened with special keys that have to be fitted by a locksmith, though. There are more areas to explore in this game, which means it’s a bit longer. You can probably finish most of the game in about 15 hours, or 20 if you are slow.
Running around and whacking enemies is the name of the game, but only certain ones can be beaten when you are at a higher level. The level cap is 20 again, but it takes a bit longer to get there this time around. There are more characters to talk to, which means hours of funny and strange dialog. There’s even an area where you can steer a pirate ship and go to little islands to get quest items as well. I actually found the fortune cookie hints to be more useful this time around and rarely needed to use a walkthrough. The last game had poor hints, and even the quest descriptions were pretty poor. At least now most of them tell you where the quest giver is, so you can go back to them without having to wander around.
The biggest issues I had with the last game still exist. You can only have five health potions at a time, so you have to rely on consuming food items. This takes forever, and sometimes you will fail if enemies have projectile weapons because DeathSpank will stop eating if hit. This made combat drag out and become irritating, which just so happens to be the case here too. Most enemies that are around your level will kill you almost instantly if you get ganged up on, so running around in circles eating food is just annoying. Why this wasn’t addressed is beyond me, but it needs to be in the third game, or I actually won’t play it. The game is also full of repetitive fetch quests that I didn’t really think about in the first game. There needs to be more variety in the gameplay and/or quests, because a third helping of this would just be way too much.
Overall, Thongs of Virtue is a fun action RPG for fans of the first game. People who didn’t like the first game will hate this one too, because nothing really changed or improved. Come for the witty and funny dialog, but don’t expect anything spectacular or extraordinary.
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.
Shank had a great idea but was poorly executed with extreme difficulty, sluggish controls, and monotonous combat. The story was interesting, with lots of gore and boobs, but there wasn’t much beyond this. Shank 2 tones down the difficulty a tad, improves controls, and adds a few things to combat, but the story this time is lame, the voice acting stinks, and the game is even shorter. How Klei screwed up the sequel so much is beyond me.
As Shank, you still have your shanks, but there are a few new weapons. You can use Molotov’s and landmines as projectiles this time. The sledgehammer is a new one, but you also get to play as Corina for one level, and she has her own weapons. I would have liked to see more new weapons, but if you count the turret sections, then that could be a new one. The combat is exactly the same as the last game, but the controls seem to respond a bit more, and that annoying knockback effect isn’t in effect as bad here because you can at least jump as soon as you get knocked back. The pickup button is no longer the dodge button, so you can save your tequilas for when you really need them and not accidentally drink them.
My main disappointment is that the boss fights aren’t as interesting and are pretty easy. They all play out the same, and the final boss is a cakewalk compared to Shank’s final boss, which was a serious pain. There are some environmental elements added where you can press buttons, and certain things will damage enemies or open traps. This can help you in a pinch when you’re surrounded. Weapon pickups are a new feature, but most of these are useless except the large ones, and this includes large items that can be thrown.
The levels seem a bit shorter, and the game can be beaten in just a few short hours. Besides the few combat changes, the game is actually worse than the first game due to the stupid story and disappointing bosses. The visuals are still great with lots of gore, but the fundamental problem is that you’re just hacking away at the same enemies through every level. I would have liked to see more platforming sections or some scripted events, but those are very rare in this game.
Overall, Shank 2 is a fun game to go through thanks to the lowered difficulty, but you won’t get the same satisfaction when beating tough and interesting bosses. The combat and controls have been improved a lot, but the newly added elements like weapon pickups feel almost useless. The story is lame with bad voice acting, and the game can be beaten in a few short hours. Fans of the first game (the few that there are) should go ahead and pick this up, but people who held off on the last can skip this one too.
X Blades was a pretty bad game when it came out, with combat that wasn’t fun, a lame story, bad graphics, and just all-around bad. The sequel is much better but still isn’t great. Ayumi is back, trying to find some sort of dragon sphere in Dragon Land, but she has to get through the Sky Guards, who are trying to stop her from awakening The Keeper, who is guarding this sphere. The plot is very “meh” and doesn’t have any redeeming value. The combat is decent with some fun shooting mechanics, but everything here is broken to some degree.
Take combat, for starters. There are only light and heavy attacks, and the same combos are used throughout the whole game. You can’t unlock new moves or combos, just spells. These spells consist of fire, ice, and power. As you beat up on enemies, your spell gauge will increase to one and two skulls. One unleashes a weak attack, while two are powerful. If you fill your bar up all the way, you get a health pack. This would be fine if unleashing this magic wasn’t done in a terrible fashion. Holding down the spell button to charge it and then pressing the appropriate spell button slows down combat. Why can’t I just equip the spell and unleash it with one button? It doesn’t help that enemies can interrupt the spell charge, leading to cheap deaths. Speaking of deaths, you can die very easily in this game, causing you to constantly use health packs.
Platforming is just as bad because Ayumi doesn’t jump very far, making you rely on her dash move. If you don’t judge the distance right, she will just drop like a rock after her dash. That’s why you dash jump around floating corrals, but fighting on small platforms is a nightmare because the knockback seems to be glitched because she will fly across the level sometimes if hit by large enemies. You can shoot with guns you find throughout the game, and this is at least decent. Shooting enemies feels good with the different weapons and can actually help you when you’re low on health and need to back off.
The third part of Blades of Time is puzzle-solving. This is in the form of rewinding time and using switches that you stand on. Anyone who has played Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time will know what I’m talking about. This seems to be dull and confusing at first, but you can also use it during combat. Some larger enemies need two Ayumis to take them down via quick-time events, which are poorly implemented here. I really felt this time the rewind feature could have been used in better ways than opening doors and beating only a couple different enemies. You can use your compass to find hidden items that give you various stat effects, but these are really easy to find because the compass points you right to them.
The graphics are average at best. The textures have a pretty low resolution, but the art style is nice with varied environments and different suits that Ayumi wears. Overall, everything is just flawed in some way due to poor mechanics. The combat is repetitive and dull with the same attacks; the puzzle-solving is boring and confusing; and the few platforming sections are hard due to bad jumping mechanics. The story is bland with boring characters, and even Ayumi isn’t all that interesting (she tries to be a new-age Lara Croft). The game is playable, but after you play it, you will quickly forget about it.
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.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yeah, it's pretty damn awful. Notoriously one of the worst games on the PSP. A 4 was actually being generous.…