Recent reviews by ハグ / Ian_Suffix

A miraculous mix of all things Half-Life. It must be played to be believed.

A surprisingly engaging narrative that fits the roguelike template perfectly. Dogfight gameplay and discovering complimentary weapons is entertaining, although there are a lot of buttons to think about if you want access to all the tools that can help keep you alive. As you unlock crafting recipes, you'll find yourself in situations where you can pause the game and give yourself all kinds of advantages if you spent the time to gather resources. This makes crafting and weapon upgrading feel tacked-on, but it's better than leaving absolutely everything to item drops.

I bought this originally to play in VR, but it doesn't support my Valve Index (or other modern headsets, I believe). The game is better played like an FPS given all the menus you'll deal with, anyway.

The Encounters DLC is nigh essential to the experience, I think. Without its carryover subquests, the singular don't-die goal could get monotonous.

Lacks the creeping terror of other XCOM entries, but tells a reasonably compelling tale that beckons you to check out all the problems post-invasion Earth could face. In a similar give-and-take, since each available agent is like a separate class, you're given the ability to mix-and-match teams and find interesting synergy, but due to shifts in enemy composition and other damage-dealing discrepancies, not all agents will be useful to you by the third act.

My single enduring problem with XCOM: Chimera Squad is is initiative-based combat system that pressures you to focus on the enemy with the next turn, rather than enemies that are exposed or require caution. When you have the abilities necessary to delay enemy initiative, the game mimics regular XCOM Player Phase and Enemy Phase combat, but your agents are forced to uphold an action order, which makes it harder to get the most out of your agents' abilities.

The game's still enjoyable though, and that's enough for me to recommend it.

The collective experience from developing Robocraft ought to help FJ make something really great with this.

An entertaining romp for adult FPS enthusiasts with a solid narrative heart. It ends at the sweetspot of interactive fiction: short enough to look back on as consistent fun, and long enough to enjoy all its mechanics thoroughly.

This game practically gave me a brain aneurysm when I first played it, but in the end, I can see what makes it good: against overwhelming odds, the right spells in the right place will save you from near death, over and over again. It can be pretty exhilarating when it works.

Still, it takes a saintly heart to forgive a game which surrounds you with those freaking crossbow undead while trying to control enemies with shield-draining debuff-applying attacks. I can't recommend this game to anyone with short tempers. Heck, I wouldn't have even recommended this game to myself, had I known what I was in for.

The game supplies you with a liberal amount of random spells and augments of various "rarities", but doesn't explain how you can make those spells work for you. Here are some bullet tips:

- YOU MUST USE MASTERY SPELLS before doing anything else. Unintuitively enough, they don't do any damage, but they amplify critical hits from other attacks.
- You will constantly get spells which out rank your current ones, and if you don't take the time to upgrade, you'll find those "overwhelming odds" I mentioned a source of great pain.
- "Unique" spells, which can supply "Synergy" attacks, are vital for survival on later levels and New Game Plus challenges.

A bit more on Unique spells: it's not very easy to get said Unique spells unless you're grinding on past chapters for garbage low level spells to use in upgrading.

My favorite combination is Mastery-attuned Kinesis (Ray / Area) and Destruction-attuned Fire (Lob / Area). Ray attacks don't do much damage, but they can be used to halt an enemy immediately, and Lob is hard to aim, but easier to hit with than Missiles.

A great FPS adventure with great atmosphere. Bethesda's artists are simply outstanding. But you know that much, so let's hear a little criticism, eh? First, FO4 takes a gamble with its simplified dialogue system, and the consensus at /r/Fallout seems to be that it didn't pay off. Fallout was born a clunky RPG, and I cringed to see just how linear FO4 became. Very little roleplay is possible, with the exception of the excellent Far Harbor DLC, which seems to encourage a cleaner "get idea, plan, play" loop. Another ironic exception is the Silver Shroud character that "your" character enjoys roleplaying as in your stead. I also grew disillusioned with FO4's randomly dropped "legendary" weapons. Let's go back to having quirky but fun uniques, I say.

In the end, though, Bethesda's FO3 was also largely a roll of the dice. Some things worked, and some didn't. Still, Fallout is great. Here's hoping for a sequel with a better story, built on the Creation Engine's more-than-proven technology.

Did you like Alpha Centauri / Alien Crossfire? I'm afraid this game isn't for you. That's all I would have wanted to know, before purchase.

Everything that was fun in SMAC: resource gathering, colony creation, secret projects, sci-fi technology, and the over-the-top, memorable faction leaders, have been reworked so that everything is, and everyone are, tedious and uninteresting. After forcing myself to keep playing, I found that the process of combat and the threat of native wildlife are better than they were in SMAC. The game is pretty, and the soundtrack is excellent. But at its core, as many people say, it is not much more than a mod of Civilization 5.

EDIT: This review does not reflect the Rising Tides expansion. With Rising Tides, I found, CIV:BE is an almost entirely different game: exploration is both fun and rewarding thanks to artifacts and water territory made useful, and war/diplomacy makes a bit more sense. As of this update, I have 236 hours playing, and you can bet 200 of those are entirely thanks to Rising Tides. What this means for CIV:BE is that the "good" version is pricey, and thus I am unwilling to bury my initial disappointment.

Rogue-likes: the randomized frontier.

FTL's randomness makes for some incredibly entertaining gameplay as you attempt to make the most of your trip from one side of the galaxy to the other to save the Federation, all while being chased by looming, innumerable rebel forces.

You will extermish pirates to varying degrees of glee and bitterness. You will guide that lost civilian to their destination, find out it was a rebel trap, and smile. You will relish every victory.

You will have to sell that Burst Laser III so you can upgrade your engines. You will open that Mantis escape pod because you are desperate for someone who can board ships. You will lose the last bit of your ship's HP to an unfortunately timed missle. Failing to make it to the end of a roughly 6-hour playthrough is what makes your victories significant.

FTL is visually very simple, a hallmark of its indie production, but as much as it could benefit from a bigger-than-1280x800 resolution or perhaps even 3D graphics, I love how I can run it on my integrated graphics laptop.

FTL is a tremendous value and important landmark in the history of crowdfunded games. Were I to wake up in an alternate universe where I had yet to create a Steam account, I would buy FTL again, for around three incarnations, anyway.

It's difficult to describe just how much of an impact this game had on me, but it is significant. This is a game that pulls you in with its gentle, turn-based, and board-game like controls, and then, WHAM! Even though it lacks a mind-blowing plot or much of the trimmings you might find on AAA today, this game, armed with the purest and most engaging of turn-based gameplay, manages to pull almost every emotion in existence out of you. Joy, fear, admiration, disgust, you name it, your disposable soldiers and your fearsome foes will deliver.