Recent reviews by Baines

Trial and Error: The Puzzle Game
In many cases, the "puzzle" appears to simply be to find the proper timing to perform a single action, so that your ball will take the correct path through moving obstacles. The penalty for a mistake is having to wait for the ball to roll and/or be carried back to its starting position.

A simple way to spend a quarter-hour of a day, flying around either aiming for score or just looking at colorful boxy scenery.

It only takes a few minutes to confirm that this is not a very good game.

Beat'em-ups can be very simple games, but various physical and audio touches can carry titles that lack in complex gameplay. Fighters Unleashed is not only a very simple game, it lacks any of those physical or audio touches. Beat'em-ups are about physical violence, but attacks here have no impact. Audio is weak, enemies barely flinch, attack animations have little "omph" and no follow-through. Animations are also used awkwardly at times, with the player just standing in the air for air combos or using a weird attack when landing. Even the beat'em-up staple of punching a vending machine for an item is weak, with the stage object taking no damage and the recovery item simply appearing on the ground next to it.

The same lack of attention and polish is evident in the game's UI. Menus do little to draw attention to the currently selected option, just slightly increasing its size. The default Unity start-up config screen is used to handle most settings. There is nothing like a "how to play" screen (nor of course a button config option) in-game, you just have to figure everything out through trial and error (not that there is much to figure out.) The game even lacks an "Exit Game" option, either as a menu option or a key command, you have to Alt-F4 to exit the game.

Hook is a relatively simple puzzle at heart. In some ways, it is closer to a maze game than a puzzle. First you locate which pins can be safely removed at the moment, and then you find the paths that allow (only) their removal. You repeat until all the pins are removed.

Hook is a relatively slow starter. The first puzzle is the menu screen itself. New elements are added very slowly. For the majority of the game, there is no penalty for mistakes; it is only around puzzle 30 or 40 (I forget which one) that the game puts a limit on how many times you can pull the wrong pin. The game never limits how many times you can attempt to pull pins, which means you can take your time getting them one at a time even if several pins can be safely pulled at once.

Hook's saving grace is that it knows it is a simple hour-long distraction, and is priced as such.

At its simplest, Drox Operative is spaceship Diablo. But the game is much more than that. The AI is running a multi-party 4X game; the player acting as kingmaker or kingbreaker as necessary to reach his own goals. Just reach your goals before the 4X game ends, even if it means betraying (temporary) allies in order to delay their victory.

Just give the game a chance, as it can take more than one game for everything to click.

Another Minesweeper-style dungeon exploration game, with added QTE/timing-based combat. The game itself simply doesn't seem particularly good, feeling very much as if little to no thought or effort were put into it.

Despite having a "tutorial", a five page help screen, and the ability to right click on nearly everything to see details, the game doesn't bother to ever explain basic information to the player. The game tells you how to block, but never bothers to teach the timing of either blocking or the counter attack. You can socket gems into equipment for bonuses, but the game never tells you this. You just have to happen to click on a piece of equipment and then click on the non-descript empty block that appears to just be menu decoration to bring up the socketing menu.

Game mechanics just don't seem particularly well balanced. Being able to block near perfectly is king. You probably can't even beat the second dungeon without excellent blocking or taking advantage of the ill-explained checkpoint system. It looks like you can min-max your stats, or easily waste your level up points if you don't know what you are doing. Luck plays perhaps too much a part in exploration.

Not much thought or effort seems to be put into enemy design. No enemies feel particularly special or memorable, in part due to the generically bad CG art and in part because abilities seem almost randomly assigned at times. Multiple enemies have the ability where they get stronger every three turns.

Ultimately, the game just isn't that much fun to play. It ends up being less than the sum of its parts.

Recommended with a caveat. This is very much a mobile device game in design. It is very easy to argue that there isn't enough "game" to warrant its regular $5 price tag. I don't recommend it unless it is on sale.

Fatal flaws:
Pac-Man 256 quickly becomes a game of luck rather than skill. The limited forward view combined with the design of the maze means that often you have to blindly commit to a path, with danger only being revealed after it is too late to escape. Sometimes there appears to be no safe path at all, where nothing short of an active power-up could have saved you. As your score increases, the number of ghosts increase. In single player, around the 10,000 point mark you will be entirely reliant on your current power up lasting long enough to safely reach the next power up. (In multi-player, things are a bit different due to some power-ups being replaced with "revive a fallen player" items.)

Power-ups themselves leave a bit to be desired. At first, it looks like there are a large number of power-ups, but some are just "better" versions of others. The different power up designs also vary in effectiveness, a critical flaw when the game has you choosing three power-ups to appear. Freeze is at best nearly useless, and is too often an outright liability. (Slows ghosts, but the main danger of ghosts is when they are in front of you, not chasing from behind.) Cloak makes you invulnerable, but other abilities make you both invulnerable and fatal to ghosts. Abilities like Tornado and Pac-Men are unreliable, sometimes they are highly effective while other times they leave you open to danger.

The grind is far greater than the game's limited content. You will unlock new power-ups quickly at first, but this rate soon slows to a crawl.

There just isn't much to do. The basic game doesn't change. There are no alternate modes of play. There isn't any real test of skill, as no measure of skill will counter the random death factor.

I want to be able to recommend this game. It is free, after all, so anyone can try it. But it just isn't good.

Lost Mythologies is short, simplistic, and honestly a bit annoying. The models look pretty. Individual animations are basic, lacking real follow through or impact, but acceptable for a free title. While your character is normally grounded, it is hard to miss that she floats rather high above the steps in the starting area.

Combat uses light and heavy attack buttons, which each having a short chain. However, there is no impact or feedback from hits, nor do different hits carry any different effects (pushback, knockdown, stun, etc). You can dash out of anything, which is necessary as there doesn't seem to be a block. There is a jump, but it appears useless, and you can only do a single weak attack while airborne. You have three special attacks, but all three are too slow to use mid-combat, which makes the two close-range specials useless. The only useful special appears to be the long-range projectile, which appears to do little damage, but does let you hit targets from outside their attack range.

There are only a few enemy types, and you'll fight them over and over across a map that is too big for its little bit of content. Enemies feel like damage sponges, even though some die in a few hits. The boss is a major damage sponge. Combat mostly consists of mashing a button around three or four times, then dashing away from anything still alive before it hits you.

The boss has an attack that hit some distance beyond its graphical effect. The camera becomes an issue whenever there is more than a few enemies around, and remains an issue throughout the boss fight.

On a side note, the game has a single achievement that should be awarded simply by starting the game. This achievement does not get awarded. It apparently only worked for a few days after release, being broken with the English user interface update.

Crown and Council is a simple time-waster. As a free game, and an entertaining way to spend at least a few minutes, it is hard to not recommend it.

It just isn't a well-designed game. By design, it is a simply strategy title. You gain gold based on the territory that you hold, and spend gold to attempt to capture enemy territories. Whether or not your attempt succeeds comes down to random chance. Unfortunately, the game is so simple that it is ruled by that random chance.

You can neither shift the odds of battle nor mitigate risk. You cannot build superior force short of stockpiling gold in order to launch successive separate attempts. While the game later introduces more factors, at its core there are few strategic decisions to be made. That minimal strategy ultimately means nothing when results are entirely random, where the difference between taking three territories in a single turn and failing to take any territory for three turns straight is entirely random chance.

Crown and Council, at its core, takes the chance-based gameplay of titles like Risk and Dice Wars and increases the random nature further.

On more technological matters, there is no ability to resize the game window. If your vertical resolution is around 768 (such as with laptops or even smaller desktop monitors), then the Windows taskbar will cover the button used to end your turn. You either have to move your taskbar to the side (revealing the button), or maximize the game window (revealing the top few clickable pixels of the button) to proceed.

Riddled Corpses is a pixel-graphics twin-stick shooter. It is an overly grind-dependent repetitive experience.

As you kill enemies, they drop gold which can be spent to unlock new characters, upgrade your characters, and to buy beneficial items. Unfortunately, this upgrade system is the root of the most critical issue with the design of the game. Simply put, the game appears to be designed primarily to be a grind-heavy time sink rather than an entertaining experience.

Against the bullet-sponge enemies, your starting character is pitifully weak. I'm not sure it is possible to even beat the first stage of the game with an unleveled starting character, as enemies will at times spawn faster than you can kill them. If it is possible, it is presumably a time-consuming soul-draining process, as it takes forever to whittle down the life of even the mid-boss, much less the stage boss.

Weapon upgrading becomes increasingly expensive with each level, and the starting character can be upgraded I believe to level 20. Alternate characters, which have beneficial special abilities that the starting character lacks, are relatively expensive. Enemies drop gold frequently, but the individual amounts are tiny compared to shop costs. Due to how underpowered you are, you will have to play (and die) several times just to upgrade your character enough to efficiently farm the gold to buy and upgrade (as they will also start horribly underpowered) the next character, who was apparently designed to help you farm gold a bit more easily.

Through this experience, you will either keep playing the first arcade stage repeatedly, or you will be playing the arena-based survival mode. You should be replaying survival mode, as you can get a better gold return for time invested.

By the time you level your character enough to actually be effective in arcade mode, you should already be sick of the title.

The title does have issues beyond the grind, though. The HUD can block the view of enemies in the upper left of the screen as well as long the bottom. If you have to move through those areas, you will eventually take hits from unseen enemies.

Graphics-wise, the game is retro-style blocky pixels. It isn't so bad in small screenshots, but it can be somewhat annoying at fullscreen. There is a rather awful filter option you can use, but you might as well stick with the default look.