Recent reviews by Commissar Blam

My favourite part was when the rat shaker said "it's rat shakin' time" and then shaked the rat all over the place.

In all seriousness, this is a fun little horror game that manages to do a good job building and maintaining a very sinister atmosphere that ramps up over time despite the sheer absurdity of the core premise of shaking a cartoon rat all over the screen. I was a bit disappointed at how abrupt the ending was (and the game cracks a joke that completely demolishes the atmosphere built up to that point during it), but overall this was definitely a fun little experience that's very much worth the dirt cheap price of admission.

I want to start off by saying that this isn't a 'bad' game. The linear campaign is much more engaging and generally has much better setpieces, more varied objectives, and better map design than MW5, and the way that it dives headfirst into Clan nonsense with a completely straight face while barely stopping to explain anything is a refreshing change of pace.

That being said, it is definitely NOT worth the current asking price. Much like MW5 before being modded to high heaven everything is kind of janky (though definitely improved from MW5), the roster of 'Mechs is surprisingly small, and the difficulty curve later in the game suffers badly from "throw three dozen Assault Mechs at the player"-itis, and given that the maps tend to be much more linear and restricted than MW5's this means that the only really viable way to play is to have everyone in your Star piloting the biggest, heaviest, slowest Assault 'Mechs you've got because nothing else can survive the grinding battle of attrition that every mission tends to devolve into. The biggest reason this is a problem is because your Starmates' AI is very very bad at self-preservation, and while they're piloting 'Mechs with tremendous firepower that should - in theory - be capable of taking down even Assault 'Mechs pretty sharpish I've noticed that a lot of the time their aim is wildly off for no apparent reason (I have sometimes seen them straight-up shoot at the ground next to a badly damaged enemy 'Mech while it continues to return effective fire which is very annoying indeed).

If you enjoyed MW5 with all its flaws then you'll enjoy this one too, but as it stands at the moment I would strongly recommend waiting for a discount because as it stands I think it's got too many issues to be fully worth what it's on sale for at the moment.

Titanfall died for this.

We did boys, sweet liberty for everyone!

This is a great, genuinely one-of-a-kind military vehicle simcade game that is absolutely and completely ruined by the unchecked greed of the developers that gets worse and worse every year. Do not play War Thunder. It's not worth your time or your sanity, and this game will consume vast quantities of both.

Gameplay wise this is probably the best 343 has ever managed with Halo, but it's absolutely buried under some of the absolute worst monetisation I have ever seen in this kind of game.

As someone who only started playing Quake three days ago, I can't recommend this game enough. Gameplay feels exceptionally smooth and enjoyable compared to many contemporary shooters, which is all the more impressive considering just how fast-paced combat is - literally. There are basically zero random elements to anything (save some very, very minor spread on the machine gun) so it all comes down to player skill vs. player skill; doing well is an extremely satisfying thing because it truly feels like you've earned it. Each of the champions have different passive and active abilities, but unlike Overwatch where most characters have a giant 'kill everything around me' button Quake's abilities are much less impressive and often cannot clutch you out of a bad situation without some thought and skill behind them. This isn't to say that they're useless - that's far from the case - but steady aim and a good grasp of proper movement will carry you much further in Quake than your abilities will.

I was also surprised at how easy it was to pick up the more tecnical side of the game, particularly the bizarre and unintuitive 'strafe jumping'. Coming from other shooters where the sum total of movement is 'hold W and sometimes Shift as well' this was a fairly intimidating prospect, but a couple of Youtube guides and half an hour of practice later I was happily bouncing along faster than I ever could before - and let me tell you something, that speed is addictive. Once you've flown around the map at over double the regular 'hold W' speed everything else feels like you're moving through treacle.

Overall this game really is a joy to play and I can't recommend it enough to anyone with any interest in first person shooters at all. The Champions Pack is essentially just buying the game, and at £13 (on sale at the time of writing) it's a steal for just how great an experience Quake Champions is.

Card Hunter is a deeply enjoyable game. It's a fusion of traditional Dungeons & Dragons tabletop and Magic: the Gathering style card game presented in a charming aesthetic that mimics classic D&D boards. The mechanics, while odd at first are quick to learn and work very well. There's a full suite of some 30 multi-mission adventures on offer, along with fleshed-out PvP that's accessible basically right off the bat in a competitive state.

Oh, and all of this is free. Not bad, right?

BUT - and this is a very big BUT - the amount of RNG involved in the gameplay is absolutely through the roof. Each character you control draws every move (up to and including actual moving) from an unseen, randomly shuffled deck of cards. The only guaranteed draw is the basic movement card which is always given to you at the start of each round. Absolutely everything else from attacks to healing spells to self debuff cards is completely random.

It is maddening and sadly all too common for my fighter (big chap who hits things with a sword/club/lightsaber) to go several rounds in a row without drawing a single attack card, and then draw a single kind of crap one before going another round without. For a class that's supposed to be up close and personal at all times this is downright deadly, especially since in the campaign adventures monsters seem to have an incredibly strong chance of drawing their most potent attack more or less every turn. This also applies to the priest (healing and buff/debuff support) and mage (killing things from far away), who are also both often caught without anything useful in their hands in the heat of the action.

Don't get me wrong, Card Hunter *is* a good game. The positives definitely outweigh the negatives by a fair margin. But I cannot stress enough that it can sometimes be an incredibly frustrating experience because so much of it is left down to the whims of RNJesus. The only thing you have complete control over is the positioning of your characters. Play it, but be very aware of that fact because it WILL bite you in the arse with alarming frequency.

Unless this has a serious discount, don't buy it. It has a lot of things wrong with it, and the devs dumped it before finishing the game. BUT some modders have taken up the challenge of releasing patches for the game anyway using its source code, and so far they've been consistent in their releases.

The most annoying thing about the game by far is how your station residents are incredibly sluggish when it comes to doing anything. I've had two starts where everyone suffocated in their space suits because they took a million years to actually get around to building oxygen recyclers when ordered, and another where everyone suffocated because they refused to build an airlock to actually get into the mini-station they'd just built. When you order a squad of security officers to move to an area with raiders in, it's a coin flip whether or not all of them will actually go there. I lost one citizen and one of my two officers to a raider attack when one of the officers decided to - I ♥♥♥♥ you not - stand around playing a handheld game instead of actually doing his job and shooting the raider that just killed someone.

It's quite frustrating sometimes, but worth the whole 69p I paid for it. I wouldn't pay much more than that for this game in its current state, though - if you do want to pick it up, I would advise you to not pay anything more than £1.50 or so for it.

Company of Heroes is, quite simply, the best RTS I have ever played - I would even go as far as saying that it's one of my top five favourite games of all time. The visuals are excellent in spite of its old age; though there are several mods available that improve upon these for those of you who enjoy super close-ups of your units.

The campaigns are enjoyable and offer a solid amount of single-player gameplay. However, I personally did not find them to be particularly replayable. The meat of the game is in the excellent skirmish and multiplayer modes, which offers up a huge range of maps - though there are only two game modes (point capture and good old fashioned annihilate), no two matches ever come out the same. The scale of the action is just right; small enough to allow for tactical squad gameplay while being large enough to feel like an actual battlefield, unlike Dawn of War II (which was oddly enough inspired by CoH).

As for mods, there are many very high quality ones available. Want the Eastern Front without the pain of CoH 2? Sure! The Trenches of the First World War? Of course! More 'realistic' gameplay, North Africa, shedloads of new historic vehicles, weapons and infantry? There are mods for all of that. There's even a mod for German prototype supertanks and exploding donkeys with rocket launchers strapped to them, if that's what you're into.

In short, Company of Heroes is a superb game that I cannot recommed enough, whether you're already into RTS games or looking for your first one. It has given me dozens of hours of entertainment and I am sure that it will provide dozens more. As it's a relatively old game now it's very cheap for what you get; so there's no reason not to buy and install it right now!