20
Products
reviewed
326
Products
in account

Recent reviews by Eric Pickles

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Showing 1-10 of 20 entries
No one has rated this review as helpful yet
13.7 hrs on record
A pretty good 4-hour experience for fans of early 3D action games. The game is taking you back to 1998 and it know it. This wouldn't look out of place next to old Resident Evil, Parasite Eve, Silent Hill. The story is good but not quite on the level of those others mentioned. The combat is something we don't see too often in games these days.
Posted 1 December, 2024.
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76.4 hrs on record (24.3 hrs at review time)
Game has some serious bugs with things not doing what they were told to do, which is essentially a deal-breaker for the competitive scene until they're fixed. Still the game is a worthy instalment for the franchise. Campaign missions can be frustrating in places when there is a part of the tech-tree blocked to you for the mission and there's no tips section at the start to warn you of that, as there was in AoE2. It's certainly the biggest RTS game since Starcraft 2 but will need a lot of support from the dev team before it becomes even as good as that game.

Edit - Since I wrote this review, two more factions have been added to the game after the game has been out for a year. This is very encouraging to see the game getting long-term support.
Posted 29 November, 2021. Last edited 29 November, 2022.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
148.3 hrs on record (35.7 hrs at review time)
One of the best games in recent times. Rewarding no matter you skill level. Beautiful art style and music. The first game in the Rouge-like genre that's a must play for anyone looking for the best games. A real masterpiece from Supergiant Games that will cement their legacy as a great studio.
Posted 10 January, 2021.
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69.8 hrs on record
A pretty good turn-based strategy in (roughly) the same vein as Fire Emblem and Advance Wars. VC is a classic strategy game with a UI that is showing it's age a bit. A lot of features that modern game developers would put in as quality of life features are noticeably missing, things like clunky menu screens that cannot always be used (particularly, when it's the enemy's turn) and the enemy AI is pretty bad in places. The positioning elements of the game offer some real strategic challenges to fans of the genre. All in all, if you're a strategy fan, you won't regret playing Valkyria Chronicles.
Posted 29 September, 2020.
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1 person found this review funny
0.0 hrs on record
One of the best games in in years, and it's a DLC! Prey Mooncrash isn't a continuation of the base game as much as it is a whole new game with the same mechanics and story universe as Prey. Mooncrash is closer to rouge-like experience where you now must play through several people trapped on a moon-base under attack from the Thypon from the last game. The kicker is that you must play through all of them in turn escaping the same base.

In many rouge-likes(lites?) the game is played in "Runs" where a map full of items will be generated and you have to run through it to the objective, if you die that map is gone, and a new map is generated that you start from the beginning in.

In Mooncrash's interpretation, you have the same map layout. The Moonbase itself is always the same, but the items, enemies, and some obstacles are randomly generated. You also generate income from a run that may be spent on a later run, your characters are also distinguished in that they have different abilities, and a unique "skill-tree" each, which may be leveled up across multiple runs. There's more to Mooncrash than the runs, you also have a story mission for each character where you get to experience an event that happened to them on the moonbase, which doesn't require a successful run.

All of this might seem to be disappointing to rouge-like fans who are interested in a hardcore experience. It's fair to say that Mooncrash isn't a rouge-like, but borrows mechanics from rouge-likes to great result.

One you've escaped with one character, you'll have the option of running through the same instance of the base with another character, with all the items the last guy took gone, all the enemies still dead, and their escape route no longer an option for you. The difficulty comes with a timer, as time passes on the moonbase, more typon appear and they get more aggressive, and the base begins to fall apart, fires starting, power-outs, radiation leaks. At the end of the count-down, the run ends in a failure.

Completing a single run with multiple characters gains more currency and neuromods for later runs. Completing the story-mode and seeing the game's end credits requires completing a single run with all the characters escaping. There's more to do in Mooncrash than that, with several achievements that require you to go out of your way, and each character's story mission to do, and some characters need to be unlocked by other characters doing certain things.

Without getting into any details, the story of Mooncrash is excellent, arguably better than the story of the main game. It fits the gameplay brilliantly, and carries on the themes of Prey: Isolation, corporate exploitation, body-horror, existentialism and perception, all borrowed heavily from the works of Phillip K ♥♥♥♥. Just like in Prey, Mooncrash also wants to talk about video games themselves, not in a moralizing "Go play outside" sort of way but instead talking about what is our relationship to what goes on in the game, why do we care and how.

Both Prey and this DLC have received a criminally low amount of attention during and since their release. Prey belongs on any list of modern classics, with it's DLC sitting right next to it.
Posted 22 November, 2018.
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1 person found this review helpful
71.5 hrs on record (31.9 hrs at review time)
Prey is a criminally over-looked game in a year with many high-profle releases. It's very reminisent of Bioshock games, and the older System Shock games in terms of its playstyle. You're exploring a huge, ruined, city-like place picking up audio-logs and gaining super-powers and guns. You'll come across a room and learn through enviromental stotry-telling what happened in there.

As similar as it is to the -shock games it by far outpaces them in terms of gameplay. The Gloo-gun is a treasure, firing stcky globs to slow enemies down and also sticking to walls to useas steps to climb them. The crafting-system is sublime for a FPS, as are it's options for exploring and side-missions. My main complaint is the kind of repetative story beats (We can't get through this door, better back-track across 3 sections to do the thing that opens the door. This happens all the damn time in the main objectives. It feels like "exploring because we said so" rather than anything natural). In addition to this the mid to later game enemies are far too repetative and bullet-spongy unless you built your abilities just right.

The story is very much something out of a Phillip K ♥♥♥♥ book. Sci-fi paranoia and a lack of trust in what is even real. The setting of TALOS 1 is one of the best game settings in a good while, easily up there with Black Mesa Labs and Rapture. The space station has a layout that's easy to learn and navigate internally, as well as externally. You get to spend a good amount of time outside TALOS 1 in space with a jetpack. The outside of the station matches the inside, so you can navigate your way around the station and go in and out of air-locks for alternative routes to your destinations.

However, like everything in this game the story starts out amazing and full of potential, then lags in the middle, then ends in a semi-decent place. One of the cooler aspects of the narrative is, like Bioshock Infinate many of the storys "Themes" are thinly covered comments on videogames themselves, which is always nice to see. There's comment about player choice, immersion, and VR simulations. At the core of Prey's story is the question "How would you really behave if the chips were down?". You can tell people and yourself that you'd be a self-sacrificing hero who weighs everything out fairly, tries new things, and accepts responsibility for your actions. Prey will repeatedly ask you if you hold to that when it really counts.

Prey is a must play for someone interested in story-telling in games, someone who wants to see cool new abilities and options for problem solving, and someone who wants a new improved version of Rapture to explore, (and who has the patience to put up with a plodding middle and occationally repetative combat).
Posted 26 November, 2017.
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1 person found this review helpful
51.0 hrs on record (22.3 hrs at review time)
Early Access Review
The objective of Factorio is to spend as little time playing it as possible. You build machines which build machines which build machines etc. You want to design your little factories and mining operations to do as much of the work for you as possible on your way to finish mission objectives. Surprising ly addictive. You'll be playing this into the small hours.
Posted 28 November, 2016.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
44.4 hrs on record (37.3 hrs at review time)
This puts a new spin on level design, with all the missions taking place on the same map, with different start points, objectives, and enemy placement for each mission. This is a great little playground to roam around in. It's very short but doesn't repeat itself, it's six missions all feel very different to play, with one serious and dark main story mission, and a bunch of other missions that are much lighter and differently paced. My main problems are with it's length, and the fact that the follow-up game, Phantom Pain, is no-where near as good as this. This has the occational humour and quirks that old MGS games had but Phantom Pain is dearly missing.
Posted 17 August, 2016.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
13.1 hrs on record
By far one of the best survival games out there. Offering a weird and wacky world for you to explore in, look for food and build weapons. Don't starve sets its self apart from other survival games with it's cartoony look and it's top down view as opposed to first person view. Everyone should give this a try.
Posted 17 August, 2016.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
78.6 hrs on record (41.1 hrs at review time)
Since this came on steam in 2013, I think it's appropriate to review it in the context of it being 2013.
This game doesn't hold up. It was amazing at the time, but everything is has has been done better by other games since. The world is under-developed by modern standards. The theme park, snowboarding and 'sex-club' sections are jarringly out of place, the tone and pacing is basically non-existant. The characters aren't fleashed out enough when you hold them up to modern standards, and don't cut them the slack that players were giving them back in 1996. Large parts of the game are tedious, from grinding missions, busy work, to not being able to skip the summon's intro cinematics.
Having said that, when playing, you can catch a glimpse of what people saw back around 20 years prior, it's worth having a look at because of it's status as a 'legacy' game. A game that's defined a large part of gaming's history.
Posted 7 January, 2016.
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Showing 1-10 of 20 entries