Recent reviews by Κασσάνδρα ☣

Iron Marines is a casual RTS/Base Defense hybrid that pretty much nails everything it wishes to do. The graphics are lovely and the gameplay always keeps you going. It is the definition of a game you can pick up at any point and play no strings attached. The achievements are also pretty fun to go through.

As for the negatives, the only one I can think of (and that one is rather subjective mind you) is that the game's writing, aesthetic and overall vibe consists of 99% pop culture references. Imagine fortnite meets the later seasons of Rick and Morty. Truly.... something. Regardless however this is not that important and shouldn't discourage you from picking Iron Marines up.

Now I know how Dr. Fauci must have felt.

Swords & Sandals Classic Collection is a bundle of the 6 earliest and most memorable S&S games. This collection for a lot of people including me is truly a nostalgia trip and I recommend it without any qualms to the veterans of the series. But if you are new, here is a brief review/description for each game in the bundle.


Perhaps the most condensed and bare bones S&S experience one can have. This is where the formula was born. It is a truly enjoyable game to waste an hour or two on. It is also extremely unforgiving difficulty wise since many of the builds and strategies that would be implemented in later S&S games do not exist here. The style is lovely. The game overall feels like the kind of thing you would come up with as a kid while doodling soldiers and knights on your textbook at school. There are few negatives to point out besides the extremely barebones and rng heavy nature of the game.

7/10


It pretty much took everything that made S&S 1 work and build up on it, creating perhaps the best game in the entire series according to many fans (me included). All the bosses are memorable, there are countless builds one can try. For a flash game most of us probably played for free on the browser a decade ago it is surprisingly deep mechanically and an overall pretty decent RPG. The character creator is fun and the progression is just excellent. New players will have a blast discovering what the game has stored for them later on and vets will try to find the most optimal of strategies. The main negative I can think of is the GRIND. The late game is full of grind upon grind. Fighting endless waves of randomly generated gladiators in order to meet the level requirements to progress further.

9/10


In my view an attempt at taking the series towards a slightly different direction that in my personal view failed. The new artstyle is just not very good and it has a hard time working with the overall budgetary restrictions of these games, creating some very trashy looking visuals that S&S 1 and 2 did not suffer from to the same degree. The new shop system is just not fun to engage with compared to the old one. The balancing is also absolutely terrible. S&S 3 makes the grind of S&S 2 look tiny in comparison due to how XP and money/shops work. Overall perhaps my least favorite of the games within the bundle. The bosses are cool and the new rock theme of the game is kinda fun.

3/10


S&S 4 pretty much takes the assets from S&S 3 and re-appropriates them towards something completely new. S&S 4 is a tabletop game with a meta-game progression. As a kid I was not a big fan of this but now after playing through all of it I must say it is perhaps one of the more solid games in the series. S&S 4 is also the only game within this bundle that to my knowledge has multiplayer (hotseat). S&S 4 does not reach the glory of S&S 2 but it is a truly ingenious direction for the franchise and a breath of fresh air.

6/10


S&S:C is basically the assets for S&S 1/2 used to create a turn based strategy game. Imagine if the total war series had turn based elements in battles just like in the management aspect of the game and it also had the budget of your school lunch money. It is legit good and fun and it provides a lot of fun game modes. The Campaign Mode is worth going through at least once and the survival mode is just a blast to play through. If you are tired of the constant grind of the average S&S game this is indeed a breath of fresh air.

6/10


The least that is said about Gross Out the better. It is a meme spin off of S&S. It needs to be played to be believed. The most rare achievement in the S&S achievement stats is the one about finishing Gross Out and that is for a reason and it ain't the difficulty.

Gross Out/10


Before going into this you need to remember that S&S games are perhaps one of the least polished things you can possibly play. Few franchises come close while also having a big fanbase. Expect A LOT of bugs. Most visual and relating to the UI but many also problematic in other respects. I have yet to find an actually game breaking glitch in the entire series.

Blissful Sleep is my favorite piece of game media set in Canada

Battlefield 1 is perhaps the most artistically beautiful and immersive FPS game I have ever experienced. But there are some downsides we shall get to shortly.

First and foremost the positives: It perfectly bridges that gap between Arcadey shooty-shooty-bang-bang type games like Call of Duty and ultra-realistic millitary simulators like Arma. The game is simply gorgeous. If you disable HuD the multiplayer will at multiple occasions look like a pre-rendered cutscene with how beautiful and atmospheric everything is. On top of all that BF1 has an extremely fun gameplay loop. The class system is amazing. The game rewards teamwork above individualist heroics. Overall I would be hard pressed to find a better game than BF1 in its genre. This is truly a masterpiece on almost all fronts.

Now for the negatives: Here is the thing. The negatives are not even about the game itself but mainly about EA. EA to put it mildly stinks to high heaven. First and foremost the game is abandoned. That is to be expected since a lot more BF games have come out since then. But the state it was abandoned in is just disgraceful. Cheaters roam the public servers ruining the game for hundreds of people. Balancing is a rare occurance and only 1 out of 10 games at most will actually be enjoyable.... if you play in the public servers that is. Yet again the community came forward to pick up the corporate slack of EA. The community servers are excellent and the place you should be looking forward to playing in. Cheaters are almost non existent and the games are far more balanced. Besides that well. It should also be noted that EA is quite heavy handed with moderation of what it regards as "hate speech" which frankly is defined as something so broad that you should probably refrain from any banter no matter how mild and any profile creation with any edgy or political message on it.

Overall. I couldn't recommend BF1 enough. As long as you can get around EA's nonsense you are bound to have barrels of fun.

A game all about scoring points by inflating anthropomorphic dragons.

I got this game for 8 cents or something via a coupon and I must say, it was truly worth its money. The game is extremely simple and bare bones and very much in the spirit of old NES games however it manages perfect syncronicity between its game mechanics. Everything works here, from the enemy AI to the combat to the progression to the bosses. I would recommend going for all the achievements. For 8 cents I got 4 hours of enjoyment. Which is truly quite an achievement. I recommend this game without any caviats.

Dying Light is perhaps one of the best Survival Horror Zombie games on the market right now for an extremely low price (during sales of course). That being said there are some massive caveat that need to be mentioned

Lets start with the Positives:

-Dying light has perhaps one of if not the best atmospheres in any zombie game. The music is very thematic and puts you in the mood. It takes place in a very unique setting and it is stylized enough for the graphics to not show their age at all! It looks as good today as it did in 2015. On top of that your actions actually have visible impact on the world. For example at one point someone asks you to bring them a book about gardening and when you do after a while you can see that he actually built a garden. How cool is that?

-The gameplay loop is simply addicting. The game always has you doing something but it never overwhelms you. It allows you to go on your own pace (minus some story related missions). Slicing zombies, parkouring around, doing side quests and challenges is amazing.

-Looting, at least for the first half of the game, feels really rewarding and meaningful. The game incentivizes you to always look for supplies in a way few games have managed.

-The controls are extremely good. Parkour feels smooth and exciting.

-The level design is very good. There is a lot of environmental story telling which is always something worth praising a game for. Houses feel lived in. Everything feels like it has a place and it is not there just for the sake of being an arena.

A few things I am mixed on:

-There is a loot rarity system. The game doesn't double down on it too much like Assassin's Creed: Odyssey or anything, you can completely ignore it, but it is there. If this is something that turns you off, I would still tell you that it is not a big deal, but it is worth mentioning.

-The game occupies this weird position between being an action game and an immersive sim. The game has some strict rules of engagement that the player can use to their advantage in many ways but it does not go far enough to be a proper immersive sim.

Ok NOW for the negatives:

-The balancing is sincerely the most trollish I have seen in all gaming. I am going to be honest with you. I can not remember the last time I died due to a legitimate reason in this game. It is all cheese on the game's end. Things like instakill exploding enemies behind doors that don't allow you to react, resistance buffs not working against certain types of damage, jumps that seem plausible but you end up instakilling yourself if you attempt them. And all of those deaths cost you XP. The funniest part is that your character is also extremely overpowered. From a very early point you got access to abilities and tools that will allow you to dominate, so the only times you will see yourself dying is over the game deciding to mess with you. I sincerely bet the entire "balancing" design documents included a picture of a troll face copy-pasted on every page and nothing else.

-The story is atrocious. If you are coming in for a good story consider this review to be a negative one because you won't find it here. The game is at its best when you do side quests and interact with the world, but it poops itself when it comes to the main narrative. It is guaranteed to make you facepalm at least once within the first few hours of play.

-If you plan on buying DLCs your inventory will look like an absolute mess and you can't do anything about that. It sucks a lot.

Warsaw is a fine game for people who:
-Are Darkest Dungeon veterans and are looking for a similar yet so slightly different experience
-People who want a turn based Darkest Dungeon-esque game without the extreme commitment other games of that caliber require (the it takes just a few hours to finish a campaign)

Warsaw is not for:
-People who look for the best possible game of this type, go for Darkest Dungeon instead first
-Newbs

The game is overall ok. I am enjoying my time with it quite a lot and I am planning to 100% it, however, it feels like it could use a lot more polish (HA) before it is a decent enough game for me to start recommending it to everyone without caveats. The game is not newbie friendly, the tutorial is terrible (walls of text upon walls of text does not count as a tutorial, this is what game manuals used to be for), the music is lacking (I *think* there is only two tracks but I am not sure), some of the animations are quite stiff and the game is a bit slow when it shouldn't. However despite all that, Warsaw is solid and I can certainly recommend it to connoisseurs of this type of game

Asterix and Obelix XXL Romastered should be ideally reviewed in two parts

1)The Asterix and Obelix XXL part
and
2)The romaster part

1)Asterix and Obelix XXL:

I am not a fan of action platformers, I never played them as a kid and I don't play them now HOWEVER Asterix and Obelix XXL is perhaps the only exception to that rule. A&OXXL is perhaps one of the best action platformers out there. You go through an epic journey that is very much authentically in line with the legacy of the Asterix and Obelix comics. Every one of the 6 continents you visit is unique, with special enemies, themes and challenges. The gameplay is deep and thought provoking to a large part due to the rather unique enemy formations system. Those pesky legionaries are not just charging you mindlessly the way your average enemies tend to do in such games, they got tactics and they can very easily outsmart you if you are not paying much attention. The puzzles are good however they are not really the meat and potatoes of the game in my personal opinion. Some negatives include the combo system being very shallow. There is only two combos worthy of investing in, the tornado combo and then the upgrade for the tornado combo. Everything else is more trouble to perform than it is worth. Besides that the only other negative I can think of is the late game. The final areas are just pain for the sake of pain. There are a couple of bottlenecks that will feel extremely unfair... because they are. Other than that Asterix and Obelix XXL in my view is an excellent action platformer.

2)Romaster:

I feel like a remasted should be judged primarily on the grounds of "did it enhance the gaming experience the original provided" and as far as that goes then yes. The Romaster succeeds in all the basics. The new graphics in particular are very interesting. You know this feeling when you re-visit a game you played as a kid and it looks like complete ass even though you remembered it looking much better? Well, somehow the Romaster looks exactly how the idealized version of the original looked in my head to the extend that the original itself looks more alien to me at this point. And yes, this is a long winded way of saying that the graphics are great and on-point. Finally I would like to mention that Romaster allows you to play the game full on in original graphics with just the click of a button, no loading screens, no menus, simply click R2 and the game changes to OG graphics. Besides the graphics the Romaster adds a few new features that have me more divided than anything. The new difficulty slider is... well... not good. I think the original had a very natural difficulty curve that is sort of lost with this new slider. On top of that the new highest difficulty that has been added is very much a pain and not worth engaging with. It increases the difficulty of the game very much artificially to such degree that makes you wanna quit and uninstall. The new challenges are also a mixed bug. The game was obviously not build around precision platforming and that makes many challenges extremely unbalanced and infuriating. Engage at your own discretion.

Conclusion:

Asterix and Obelix XXL Romaster is everything a remaster is supposed to be. It is an outright upgrade over the original with the only issues lying with the new features added (difficulty slider and new challenges). Of course one can ignore the challenges and play on normal difficulty hence in my view this is really not a deal breaker. As a result I can only recommend this game.