Oni was a very hyped anime-style game back in the day. This game was made by Rockstar before getting into 3D Grand Theft Autos and other games. This game has a lot of potential but is flawed in a lot of ways that make the game more boring and frustrating than bad. With that said, the only redeeming quality is the good-looking combat animations and challenges.
Right out of the gate, you will notice that the controls are complete, both upside and backward. All the combat moves are on the shoulder buttons. Why in the world they thought of this is beyond me. You actually don’t really use the face buttons all that much. This makes jumping, fighting, and shooting clumsy and cumbersome, and you can’t change the controls to something more natural. These are just some of the worst action and adventure controls I have ever used. The actual combat is fine, but executing these moves is a pain. I felt like I was stumbling over myself because I had to think about the controls. These just aren’t natural! Jumping with R1, L2, and L1 is kick and punch, and you pick up items with R3. What?! I felt like I was trying to solve a Rubix cube, not play a game.
Secondly, there is the exploration factor. The levels are boring. They all look pretty much the same, with flat, boring textures, and the design is confusing and labyrinthine on some levels. There’s no direction, and your compass is useless. The bar gets smaller as you get near an objective, but if you are two flights down, it will act like you’re standing right next to it. Enemies are stupid and clumsy, boss fights are frustrating, and the game just can’t compensate for its own design with the clumsy controls. I can’t tell you how tired I got after just three levels of finding this colored console to open the same colored door over and over again.
The story isn’t really worth sticking around the 14 levels either. The anime cutscenes are nice, but you probably won’t even get through this slog of a game. I tried really hard to keep going, but there was never a change of pace. It didn’t help that there is no mid-level saving and the checkpoint placement is unfair. If you quit in the middle of a level, you have to start all over. There are just a lot of annoying things with this game, but even if it were flawless, you still have the fact that the game is just boring and not very fun.
When it is all said and done, only the hardest core of anime fans will stick around until the end. You really had to have played this when it first came out, then come back for nostalgic purposes. The game is just clumsy and boring, but it has so much potential if only the developers spent more time on it. As it stands, I really can’t recommend this to anyone.
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 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.
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