Recent reviews by Gray

imo, fundamentally flawed if it's aspiring to be competitive. Borrows more from games like BF, TF2 and Brink that it does from CS or Dota, all wrapped up in the F2P model, meaning that it's aspirations to be "competitive" as opposed to merely a fun game falls flat, kind of irks me. Cheap deaths and run and gun are prevalent, classes are unbalanced, precision is useless because everyone moves way too fast, SMGs are literally better than rifles.. etc. Still, well made and pretty fun.

A man squeezes a radioactive lemon and born again with the power to manipulate the international markets with his mind! Go from squeezing lemons for a living to producing more money than the entire GDP of Europe! Induce hyperinflation, causing each country to shut down economically! Buy the state of Poland and create your new state of Lemonadia! Then sell your entire business and start squeezing lemons again and do it all again!

Like cookie cutter but with lemons.

I've just completed the game. The thin sheet of skin around my flesh gives off the sensation of a cold sweat, the only sensation that my body permits me to notice. I feel like I've awoken from a nightmare and even as I begin to type this, my mind is in a rush to bury it all again, before any of it lingers around my concious mind in order to make any lasting impact on my psyche.

I'm a bisexual male, living in Northern Ireland. My experiences socially and romantically have been practically nil, for a variety of reasons, mostly attributing to my history of depression.

I've faced the decision of joining the military before. I've loved someone outside of heterosexual norm before. The fear of being spurned by your friends, family, by governmental authorities, by your parents, by anyone and everyone.. the fear of regret from choosing to undertake the massive commitment by joining the military.. the game conveys this accurately, albeit not all of it is perfectly applicable to myself.

It's extremely depressing that gay teens have to undertake this boatload of crap about their sexuality in the most defining years of their life. Even within the context of the story, the ending is the best outcome from their circumstances, but.. no-one wins. Someone loses their life's ambition, the other loses their home and family.

I need more ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ vodka to handle this ♥♥♥♥.

TL;DR

6/10

Graphically, nothing special.
Controls are adequete, although the inability to sprint is annoying.
Mechanically, little in the ways of puzzles, although exploration rewards you almost immediately.
Story/setting/characters are handled uniquely. Allows you to take in a lot, or a little, depending on your level of attention.

Story line is extremely depressing. Have vodka on hand.

Accurate, happy, normal lesbian couple. Although Sam & Lorrie do seem to be a bit childish considering they are 17-18?

Have you tried crossing the beams?

Talos Principle is a 3D, 1st/3rd person puzzle game. For such a game, you would think that the story that it adopts would be a lot more simple, but Talos Principle goes all out, throwing information to allow you to piece together the history of the world, the characters and asking you questions that may have never even been in danger of crossing your mind, advancing from "what am I" to the nature of physical reality.

Aesthetically, it's quite unique. Whilst it does have sci-fi elements, it isn't comparable to Portal or Assassain's Creed. Environments are bright, clean, detailed and quite varied, however the UI, the techy sci-fi stuff, is all quite minimalist, only being used when needed. as opposed to the saturation of sci-fi elements that is present in Portal and Ass Creed. It does remind me a lot of Serious Sam, funny enough.

Funny, cheap, pretty, fun and most of all, sounds pretty good. Although a little tiring after a while, you can make some fun things using this game and it's a hell of a lot of fun for the tim that it still makes an impact. Definitely recommend picking it up.

I recently tried playing this game after a long while, and I suddenly remember why I dropped it in the first place.

The game itself seems relatively solid - gear is fairly balanced, at no point is it pay to play, there is a good amount of content, but there is a few crucial mistakes that prevent this game, from my standpoint, being enjoyable.

The game is fast paced - headshots are an instant kill, however you will most likely simply destroy your target via a bombardment of bullets, shooting whilst running is practically a must, and there is a small time for a respawn. In a standard firefight, the odds seem fair, however if you're going against a player who has more gear than you, and more toys to play with, it soon becomes readily apparent that you are /♥♥♥♥♥♥/.

Exploding thomahawks. If you get hit, you die, if they hit near you, you die. Unlocked only at a higher level.

Mines. You step on one, you die instantly. EMP mines and such are worthless because who would take disabling a hardsuit over an instant kill?

Shotguns, if you find someone camping with a shotgun, you'll probably die before you realize they have a shottie.

Turrets. Since there is no spawn protection, if one of these are pointed at your spawn point, you die as soon as you spawn.

These little points above in regards to mines and shotguns might be nuisances at first, however mines protected by EMP fields or just randomly placed around to certify a kill are extremely unfair, there's no potential to spot them or to disable them, you just die. Shotties are less overpowered because, whilst they're powerful, they're hard to use and usually very situational.

However, no spawn protection and exploding thomahawks make the game unplayable for me. If these two were removed, I might actually be able to enjoy the game again, but as it is, count me out.

Alpha Prime is a Sci-Fi FPS based on a space station (a mine for a rare, new mineral called habardium.. or something) which has suffered an accident and on which there are only a handful of survivors. You have been sent in at the behest of your ex in order to save their current husband to be from the station.

The game plays somewhat like an inferior Fear, having sci-fi weaponry and the ability to slow down time for a short while, but the guns in the game feel very underpowered. The assault rifle is the only weapon that is of any worth - the sniper rifle, shotgun and pistol doing practically no damage and being inferior in every situation to just tap shooting from the assault rifle. For 10 rounds you can kill an enemy which may take a second or two, but two shotgun blasts will take perhaps double that - and the shotgun is only able to be used at close range, where your health will vanish pretty quickly.

The game is pretty unforgiving in some places with the combat. Your slow motion doesn't recharge on it's own and requires the mineral harbidudmidmm (you know, the mineral that's being mined on the station that you're turning into your own battlezone) and a single enemy, unchecked, can easily kill you. Additionally, ammunition for the assault rifle is pretty hard to find, even though it drops off of the enemies that you kill, meaning that a tight spot might grow tighter.

The game has aged to a far greater degree than Fear, whilst the Unreal 2 engine's physics and lighting standards are still adequete enough, the physics in this game leave much to be desired. Ragdolls seem to go through objects sometimes and get stuck in them, the ground is often littered with random objects which you can easily get snagged on and the lighting seems hardly like a step up on DOOM.

TL;DR it sucks

F.E.A.R is a classic FPS game for the PC in which you star as "Pointman", a soldier with a mysterious past being flung into a situation to hunt down a psychotic madman known as Paxton Fettel, who has hyjacked a rogue army of psychically controlled "replicas", which are to say, super soldiers. Oddly, they act like normal people, they even swear and feel pain, but somehow don't.. have a mind of their own, because they'r- okay, forget it. That's the theme of this game, forgetting. Wade tries to forget Alma, Aristide tries to make the world forget Alma and "bury the dead", and you try to forget the expoisition you just heard or the bit you just experienced because nuh-uh-uh-uhhhhthing is going to make any sense at all unless you go to the F.E.A.R wiki and read it all for yourself.

Apart from the confusing storyline, there's the dissappointing characters. Whilst Alma herself is a boss and is rightfully the main focus of these games, the other characters you meet along the way are somewhat more dissappointing. Perhaps with the exception of Wade.

SPOILERS INCOMING

The fat guy (I will not remember his name) never dies, he just sort of.. dissappears. He's never mentioned again. (EDIT: He is mentioned again in the next expansion, extraction point. How he got out, how he recovered from a bullet wound and how all the blood miraculously dissappeared is not explained. Also, what then happens to him isn't explained.) Ms. Wade, whilst we have some attachment to her because we had to spend some time with her, still has a lackluster death. There's no rhyme or reason to it. Instead of killing her and eating her perhaps in the apartments or immediately after finding her, they do it in the facility - and her death is only mentioned when you kill off Fettel, the primary objective of the game since the start. If you don't pay attention, you'll probably miss her bloodied corpse on the ground altogether and believe that it was a loose end. Underplaying a little much? And lastly, Fettel. You shoot him in the face. That's it. No bosses, no catching up to him, no getting him by surprise, he traps you in a hallucination and then somehow, for some reason, you're able to shoot him in the face after a few waves of weak enemies. Primary antagonist of the game, folks.

Wade's death was a bit more appropriate, and although we're given very little insight into his character, his death still seems appropriate. Perhaps not in the way that he died, but the fact that Alma kills him. Fact that he shoots fatty, and that he brings about his own death, directly, because of the guilt that he can't FORGET.

SPOILERS OVER

That all said, the game is overall, pretty fun in bursts. You get an arsenal of weapons of which you can only pick 3 to carry at any given time, mechs and tougher enemies tend to serve as bosses, you're not only limited to grenades, you have mines, remote bombs, the unreal 2 engine delivers dynamic lighting, big explosions feel BIG and your guns feel appropriately powerful. Enemies will explode into little giblets if you hit them with enough force, with I've often been able to do with the shotgun. Enemies respond appropriately to being shot (okay, somewhat, they are supersoldiers, but they're also human, so it's a half and half thing) and their AI is decent enough to sometimes flank you and sometimes, outright kill you. You're constantly upgrading yourself via the use of health boosters and reflex boosters, which allow you to go into slow motion for a select (usually kinda one-sidedly long) amount of time. There's also a variety of types of enemies, giving some true difficulty to the game as it goes on. The controls are good but require some rebinding for modern tastes and Pointman feels like he has some weight to him.

Oh, and, F.E.A.R is not scary. Not even in the slightest. There's a few true scares, but, it's usually not adequete of the "horror" title. It's more appropriate to call it horror "themed". There's the "theme", but it's really just an FPS.

I'd recommend it, but, I'd prefer F.E.A.R 2 to it. You don't NEED to play F.E.A.R 1 in order to understand F.E.A.R 2, either.

Afterfall is a game that was developed as an indie title, most definitely. It's a 3rd person shooter which tries it's hand at horrror and pulls it off worse than FEAR did. Additionally, it primarily expects you to use melee, when their melee system doesn't work. Blocking is completely pointless, so you're mashing attack.

It's narrative is all over the place, it incorporates elements and then neither explains them nor brings them up again and half of the time it doesn't know what the hell it's doing. For example, Dr. Tokaj, your character, a seasoned psychiatrist living in a nuclear shelter below the surface and away from the dangerous outside, is told to go down into the sublevels of the shelter in order to investigate a large section, accompanied by two guards. One of the "infected" come along and Tokaj tries to do an analysis, and once it's clear that the zombie isn't a "person", the guard holding it in place proceeds to beat the crap out of him, so Tokaj proceeds to shoot him with a tranquilizer for "beating up that poor man".

And then he proceeds to outright slaughter tens of these zombies in the next room, brutally.

It also frequently takes away your weapons, so there's no point in really "saving ammo for later", because later you won't have a damn thing, like in Silent Hill Downpour. In cutscenes you get your ass handed to you when in gameplay that would not even be close to the case, and there's a billion inconsistencies present or concepts or areas that are in the game that are just.. never explained, and it's difficult to really tell you about them without spoilers because they're narrative based. Additionally, it appears to think that the monsters it keeps throwing at you (that are easily defeated) are scary, which leaves me with the suspicon that they just thought that lumping a bunch of popular things into a blender and then giving you whatever the result is would also be popular, even if they're completely conflicting.

This game tends to follow a pattern, in which an indie developer takes poorly functioning mechanics and then tries to match their product up to the standards of the AAA industry. They can't create the spectacle that the AAA industries can, nor the graphical fidelity, so it sort of ends up as a 8 hour slog because they've ignored the mechanics entirely and just made a bunch of content. They try to put in horror aspects.. but you can easily defeat anything that's thrown your way .They try to make a mystery.. but they never actually resolve anything. They try to make a love story.. but there's no actual chemistry.

Terrible.

10/10.