Recent reviews by Allus

This game only finally clicked for me once I stopped trying to play it like a "Saints Row game" and really embraced the superpowers you're given. I still think SR2 was the best game in the series, but this entry was tons of fun.

Not as good as Saints Row 2, but still an extremely fun crime sandbox. Highly recommended.

Kentucky Route Zero is a nice little piece of magical realism in a stylish, chill package that rewards thorough exploration.

I really dig the art style (as demonstrated in the trailers and screenshots on the store page), and I definitely recommend turning on "Classic" mode in the video settings for the full effect. The sound design is also quite good, and while there isn't a lot of music in the game, the music that is there is absolutely perfect in its timing and puts the proverbial cherry on top.

The ending deliberately leaves a lot of plot threads unresolved and open to interpretation, in a very Bradbury-esque way, so if that's something you're sensitive to, just be aware of it.

Overall, an enjoyable 10-hour experience, perfect for passing the time if you're stuck at home and just aren't feeling up to a more high-octane game at the moment.

Pretty fun hacking game. Difficulty curve is much more forgiving than games like Uplink, which I see as a positive. Also uses quite a few real-world tools in its puzzles, which I appreciate, as someone who works in IT.

Would definitely like to see some new additions to the main campaign, even as DLC.

Last time I tried to play Bioshock, I played the original, not-remastered version, and I got fed up with it somewhere around Neptune's Bounty. Conveniently, Witcher 3 caught my eye around that time and distracted me enough that I completely forgot about my short jaunt into Rapture. Having just recently finished CrossCode, I spotted this on my list and decided to give it another try.

You just lost
For this attempt at playing Bioshock, I opted for Easy difficulty, supposing that part of the reason I quit last time was that the combat was too frustrating and the story beats weren't coming quickly enough to keep me interested. Given that I did complete the game this time, that proved mostly to be the case. It did still feel a bit too easy, and knowing what I do now, I could probably go back and play it on Normal without too much difficulty.

That being said, the story, while interesting as a "what if" kind of thought experiment, wasn't particularly engaging for me. For the majority of the game, your sole motivation is two guys yelling at you over a radio, and Manchurian Candidate-style brainwashing aside, there's no real reason for you to continue following their instructions, other than you being stuck in Rapture without anything better to do.

As Yahtzee, of Zero Punctuation fame, is fond of saying, "a game review must ultimately boil down to one question: is it fun?" And despite the unmotivating plot, I did have fun exploring Rapture, listening to the audio logs of its denizens, and running errands for a mad artist (Fort Frolic was easily my favorite stage of the game), so I guess I'd better recommend it, then.

Buy this for your friend who thinks they have "nothing to hide."

While I, personally, love this game, after trying to get two of my friends into it, I appreciate that it is not for everyone. In hindsight, my love for this game is not solely for the game itself, but also for the immense and passionate player community that has built up around it. (Having a nice HOTAS+pedals setup also helps.)

This game is technically an MMO, but it doesn't really feel like one. You can play your entire time in Solo Mode (as I am frequently content to do), never seeing another human player, and yet still participate in and influence the same universe that all the other players occupy. There's no overarching story where you are a hero who's destined to save the galaxy. You're just a dude (or dudette) trying to make a living in the vast expanse that is the Milky Way. You're given a free starting ship, directions to the nearest station, some welcome emails from Frontier, and that's about it.

At the very least, you're gonna want a controller. It's almost impossible to play this game with a keyboard and mouse. (Edit: Several players have pointed out in the comments that they have no trouble playing with a mouse and keyboard. Personally, I had a really bad time trying to do so, but YMMV.) However, even with a controller, you're gonna find that you can't fit all of the essential functions on it. For example, my preferred controller layout is this[www.dropbox.com], which is still missing buttons for headlights and landing gear. Even so, I'd take the time to see if you enjoy the game while using a controller before you invest in a HOTAS and pedals (which is ideal).

Second, play the tutorials and watch the accompanying instructional videos. These teach you essential techniques for effectively manuvering your ship. Think of it like learning how to drive: it's something you (usually) have to do in order to navigate everyday life, and you had to learn it for the first time at some point, but it pretty quickly becomes completely automatic.

Finally, don't be afraid to get out there and explore. Your starting ship is free to replace (sans any upgrades you add) so don't worry about dying or running out of fuel. Learn all the hard lessons while they're cheap to learn.

The community has built up a truly astounding array of tools to help players find their way in the galaxy--from general tools like the wiki[elite-dangerous.wikia.com] to specialized references like EDDB[eddb.io] and EDSM[www.edsm.net]. (There are, of course, the official forums[forums.frontier.co.uk] as well.) You can even contribute your own discoveries back to these projects through software like EDMC[github.com].

• Asteroid mining is massively boring and doesn't scale as you get bigger and better ships, so don't even bother. (I mean, you can do it once or twice to see what I mean, but its utility diminishes fast.)
  
• If you want to blow things up, and don't mind getting blown up a few times yourself, head into a combat zone, pick a side, and start racking up those vouchers.
  
• If you want to blow things up, but would rather not die so much, or prefer less hectic battles, try the assassination missions.
  
• If you want to play Space Trucking Simulator, try the trading missions or just buy and sell goods on the market.
  
• If you want to get out there and see the galaxy, first do enough passenger, trade, or other missions to get enough credits to afford at least an Asp Explorer[elite-dangerous.wikia.com] and a grade A fuel scoop, and then join an expedition[www.edsm.net] on EDSM or take an extra-long passenger contract from Sothis[www.edsm.net] or Ceos[www.edsm.net].
  
• If you really get into the game and want to step up your immersion, get a head-tracking system[www.edtracker.co.uk]. This will let you actually look around organically and elevates Elite Dangrous from a great spaceflight simulator to an excellent spaceflight simulator.

• Very long FPS sections broken up by far too little story
  
• It succeeds a little too well at making everything realistically dark and hard to see
  
• Getting hit causes all the light sources to get massive Fraunhofer diffraction, so not only are you dying, but you can't see sh*t
  
• You have no context whatsoever, and no motivation to help the guy who's talking to you over the radio, other than there not being anything better to do

I got to the end of one area, and then I immediately loaded into another area that looked almost exactly the same as the one I just left, to which my reaction was, "F*** this noise."

Then I played 4 straight hours of Witcher 3 and found myself actually having fun.

Skip it; play Bioshock Infinite instead.

I played an hour of this game, which consisted mostly of endless, vacuous dialogue, followed by a single, bland dungeon stage.

Then I saw this was an IDEA FACTORY game, and everything made sense.

Even 75% off, this game isn't worth it.

This game has a lot of the things I like about roguelikes (procedural generation, emergent gameplay) and none of the things I don't (permadeath resulting in hours of progress lost). Technically, it does have permadeath, but it's not the game-ender that it is in most roguelikes.

As you complete missions, your character generates fame which allows you to liberate new stations and thereby unlock new items in the shops. When you inevitably die or get captured, sure you lose that particular character and all of the items on them, but your liberation progress and all of your unlocks remain. Once I got used to that and stopped worrying so much about losing any one character, I started enjoying the game a lot more.

One piece of advice: play the defector missions (click on an already-liberated station from the liberation screen). These are the game's "puzzle mode"--you're given a specific loadout to accomplish a goal and unlimited, consequence-free retries. By their very nature, these missions make you learn new ways of handling situations, or show you loadouts you never would have considered before (e.g., silenced automatic rifle + slipstream).

I can highly recommend this game to anyone who thinks the concept sounds even a little bit cool; I went into it thinking it would just be "ok-cool," and it exceeded all expectations.