🚦AlphaDiode🚦 最近的评测

First off, I'm an old schooler and have played the Baldur's Gate, and the Icewind Dale series this game is being compared to. I really wanted to like this but after 12 hours, I just don't.

If endlessly sifting through cluttered inventory screens and constantly dying at every encounter even on easy is your thing, you'll love it. I honestly thought I couldn't go wrong with the tidal wave of positive reviews (and the reason I paid full price) but I'm just not seeing where the fun is. The difficulty just feels way out of balance, the pacing is painfully slow, the map, journal entries and its citizens provide virtually no guidance whatsoever as to where you need to go to complete quests. You just wander around and die at nearly every encounter and never make any progress. Your inventory rapidly fills up with trash items which are supposed to fit in with some wonderful crafting system but I didn't see that either because unless you have the recipes, you'll have no idea what to do with any of it.

If you want to play an old school RPG, I'd suggest get Neverwinter Nights 2 complete from GOG for a fraction of the price of Divinity and skip this one.

+Good graphics

-Inventory system is a clunky trip back to 80s.
-Extreme combat difficulty means dying and reloading ad nauseum.
-Average soundtrack doesn't fit the genre.
-Silly talking animals break immersion.
-Extremely slow pacing

What a little gem! This one has been sitting in my unplayed library for months, until a few days ago. Like many, I got it off of one of those cheap sim bundles. There are so many crap simulators flooding the market these days and I figured this one would easily fall into that category. I was wrong. It's actually quite good and alot of fun to play. A short 3 bridge tutorial gets you started on the basics. After that you're on your own.

The object is simple. Build various length bridges to support cars, trucks, trains and drawbridges that can allow boats to pass underneath, all within limited budget and material constraints. There are several different bridge types and material types with different costs and construction methods. The game claims advanced physics simulation. I wouldn't know because I'm not a mechanical or civil engineer so alot of trial and error are needed on my part.

When you're ready, you press the simulate button and watch how your bridge performs as people drive over it. If you did you're job right, you can move to the next level. Make a mistake and watch the disaster unfold in rather comical fashion. Stress analysis tools and a simulation speed slider help to pinpoint where the failures are occuring so you can beef up construction or use more expensive materials to try and stay together.

A neat cinematic camera view and even driver camera makes things interesting, especially if you want to see what it's like tumbling into a ravine because your bridge is poorly built.

Definitely recommend for sim fans and engineers.

If you have no interest in puzzle games or working on cars, this probably isn't for you. If you have an interest in one or especially both than you might be surprised that you could enjoy something like this. And that's what this is, it's a puzzle game based on car repair. Customers bring you work orders with complaints or requests much like in the real world and you have to diagnose and repair the problem. There are 76 work orders (many of them with rather humorous descriptions) in the base game and 20 in the included offroad DLC with more to come soon.

Malfunctioning vehicles are basically the puzzle to be solved and it's a very simplistic puzzle at that compared to a real car. You don't have to be a pro mechanic to play this but some basic troubleshooting knowledge does help. Otherwise you might find yourself tearing down the entire car to find the bad parts if you're clueless where to start when someone brings you a car that has trouble starting for instance.

The repair jobs vary in length, time and complexity as you go. You can order the parts you need online at your terminal and fix some of them at your workbench to save costs and increase your profit. You can also spend money on training to increase some basic skills that earn you more money per job, discounts at the parts store and speed up disassembly and bad part identification. There is also a test track and diagnostic path that you can drive the car on to help identify malfunctioning systems.

The in game music is this terrible dubstep crap that just annoys the hell of me but thankfully it can be turned off.

You won't become an ASE certified mechanic or learn to run your own repair shop by playing this, but it's a good way to kill some time without a huge time commitment with no pressure. It's definitely worth picking up on sale at the sub $10 price point that I got it at.

Recommended? Maybe.....

After giving Castlevania Lords of Shadow 1 a glowing review, it really pains me to give this a thumbs down. I was really hopeful that this sequel would follow in its footsteps as a worthy successor. Unfortunately this game is marred by a clunky camera system, weird game mechanics that don't always work right and an irritating save/checkpoint system that punishes you heavily for failure by making you repeat the same sequences and boss fights over and over again until you get them exactly right.

By contrast, the first game's checkpoint system was much better in saving your progress (even during boss fight stages) and all the artifacts and items you picked up you kept after you got them. If you died at a particular place, you would just restart at that place with all of your previous progress saved. Not here, you're forced to proceed a great deal further in most instances in order for everything to be saved. Make a mistake and you're going all the way back to the beginning of the sequence or fight. It's just frustrating and not fun.

The story is just OK. Nothing that really draws you in and connects you to its ficitional world like the first one. The levels take place in a bizarre alternating transition between the past and present which makes the game feel like a cross between its gothic horror roots and the futuristic setting of Doom 3. In the modern levels Dracula will be operating elevators, powering modern machinery and battling mechanized bad guys that are equipped machine guns, grenade launchers and electronic counter measures, it just feels out of place. The main characters aren't as memorable nor do they stir up the same level of emotion as Lords of Shadow 1.

It's also much harder to go back to previous levels and pick up many of the artifacts you'll need to make your character strong enough to face the tougher enemies in the late game after you unlock the special powers required to get to them. There isn't an individual level selection system like the first game. Instead you have to select a previous location and then find a special room which allows you to teleport to an area of the that location where you think you might have left something behind. It takes way more time to do and just means more repetition of the same convoluted areas over and over.

I'd say it's worth picking up only on sale and only if you're a fan of the first one (having completed it) and Mirror of Fate and have an interest in the story. That's alot of ands. At the time of this writing, I haven't finished it and I intend to see it through but after 15 or so hours I'm getting ready for it to be done.

Overall 5/10

Time, patience, skill and the heart to watch your truck and payload rollover into a ditch without throwing your computer out the window are what you'll need to play this game. It's brutally hard and unforgiving but an extremely satisfying offroad simulator. The premise is very basic. Explore and unlock (or decloak as they call it) the map to reveal hidden vehicles and structures. Collect them and then proceed to deliver loads of lumber to the designated sites. You can customize your vehicles loadouts and tools at garages you've unlocked and use the map and compass to plan your route. You'll need it, plan or drive poorly and you'll be rewarded with a mouthful of mud/water and trying again.

There are repair trucks, refueling trucks, winch/rescue trucks and loading cargo trucks some even with their own fully operable cranes. There are also smaller scout vehicles like jeeps for mapping and finding the points of interest. Escort your delivery trucks with the needed support vehicles to ensure they arrive safely at their destination. The game support mulitplayer sessions as well and this is where it really shines, allowing you to form offroad convoys with your friends and help each other out, each person filling a needed roll in the convoy.

Its sandbox style maps allow you to go anywhere and do anything at any time. My only gripe is the game lacks a traditional save/load feature. It saves continously and automatically saves as you play and you can quit at any time and can continue later where you left off. But you can't save half way through an attempted delivery or before a risky maneuver and then reload if things go horribly wrong (which they frequently do). This means if you screw up, you have to either reset your vehicle and try again or attempt to winch yourself out of trouble and continue the fight. This can be both intensely frustrating or satisfying if you're really hardcore about it. It certainly teaches you to be careful and not drive with reckless abandon. Regardless, there needs to be an option for it IMO.

The devs have promised regular updates and content additions in the following months which is good and we'll see. But for a kickstarter backed, small dev project it's remarkably polished and delivers alot of offroad driving pleasure.

8.5/10 overall

A decent mini sequel to Castlevania LOS 1. No where near grand in scope but there's alot of gameplay for the price. The objects and gameworld are 3D rendered but goes back to it's 2D side scrolling roots. That doesn't detract much from the gameplay fortunately. Mirror of Fate helps to flush out character development and some unanswered questions from the story. The combat is good and most of the levels are designed well enough. However there are a couple of boss fights and very poorly designed levels that require hair pulling, frustrating precision to make progress and when you fail you're forced to repeat stuff you already did making you want to throw your controller across the room.

It's not required to play LOS 2, as they recap the story to date but it's a nice addition for the gothic horror fan and if you played LOS 1 to completion.

7/10 Overall

Another rubbish simulator by UIG. These guys just keep cranking out trash and I don't know how they stay in business. After getting burned once by a different title from them I swore never again. The only reason I even have this is because I got it with a simulator bundle. Supposedly the development team was different on this one so I thought I'd give them another chance but it's not worth the HD space or bandwidth to download it. The idea itself has potential if you're a simulator fan but it's so horribly optimized and the gameplay is awful.

Fantastic little adventure indie gem. Not one word is spoken the entire game (the characters just speak kind of like the sims and they don't say much). Yet it manages to tell a powerful and emotional story through music, character expressions, body language, cutscenes and sound effects in a way that's truly unique. It's short, I finished it in a little over three hours but that didn't detract from enjoying the playthrough. It's definitely worth getting on sale. A 360 gamepad or controller is required so skip it if you don't have one. But I'd say buying a cheap generic controller just to play this game would be well worth it and would open up other titles to play that use a gamepad.

A refreshing take on tower defense strategy with with a supernatural theme. Nice musical scoring, sound effects and a decent albeit simplistic storyline makes it more believable and immersive. It's quite addictive once you get into it. It's kinda short but I think has some decent replay value as the game's many traps, weapon types, magical artifacts and terrain based tactics provide for alot of flexibility and different approaches to progressing through the levels. There is also of course a fairly typical multi-branch skill tree that lets you develop your style however you want.

You basically plan your strategy and setup your traps during the day and then execute it at night, the object being to survive and make it to the next night, which progressively gets more difficult. There are many areas of the map that need defending, so careful planning, timing and execution are essential. And the devs of course left the ending wide open for a sequel which I can say I'm looking forward to. Definitely worth picking up on sale.

Just buy this game while it's on sale this week 1-14-14. You won't regret it!