Recent reviews by Dennis Reynolds

Is it as good as Limbo? No, I didn't think so. The main problem I had with Inside was that the puzzles just weren't all that difficult. In a game as short as this one, that's kind of an issue. There were only two or three puzzles that took more than a few moments of consideration, and the game also lacks the skill-based platforming that made me love Limbo so much. Limbo had some truly tough platforming segments that took quite a few tries to get through. It never felt unfair, but your timing had to be impeccable. That's not really the case in Inside, which doesn't have much in the way in difficult platforming either.

Those are my two main complaints with the game. Outside of a couple puzzles, it just lacked the relative difficulty of Limbo. Limbo wasn't an incredibly tough game by any means, but Inside makes it look like Dark Souls by comparison. The only difficult part of Inside is finding the thirteen or so secrets, although once you know what to look for they aren't bad.

Inside does have its perks, though. The game is absolutely gorgeous, and has a much better sense of scope than Limbo ever did. It's also rock solid technically. There wasn't a single hiccup to be found in the four-plus hours I played. The world of Inside is wonderful as well, even if the game doesn't delve nearly deep enough into what is actually happening. The story itself is left mostly up to interpretation. I don't necessarily hate that, but a bit more clarity would have been nice. Then again, Limbo lacked that as well. The physics and animations are great as well.

So would I recommend Inside? Yes, I would. However, I'd recommend you wait until it's on sale. Twenty bucks for a three hour game is just too steep for me to give an outright "buy it" recommendation to. Ten bucks would have felt perfect. Fifteen I could have worked with. Twenty is just too much. For all the beauty of the game and the unique setting, there's just not enough meat on those bones and there's little to no replay value outside of finding the secrets.

My suggestion is to wait for the next Steam sale and pick this up for 25-50% off. It's a fun, solid game, but overpriced.

Blood and Wine is The Witcher 3 at its best. It offers a gorgeous new map to explore filled with things to do, an entertaining story with great characters, and plenty of side quests to waste away your time with. Toussaint is a wonderful new area, and vastly different from the two main areas in the base game. It's bright and colorful and filled with great architecture. It's also really neat how you can basically see all the major landmarks in the area from just about anywhere, something that wasn't really the case in either of the two main maps in the base game simply because they were so big (and Velen was so flat). If you liked the main game, there's really no reason to skip Blood and Wine. It's fantastic.

I can't say with absolute certainty how long Blood and Wine is, but between it and Hearts of Stone I got nearly fifty hours. I did just about everything in both expansions, so that should be a pretty good estimation.

This is easily one of the best expansions I have ever played. It adds a considerable amount of new content to justify the price tag (I got somewhere between 15 and 20 hours out of it), something that isn't the case with most DLC these days. It also tells a great story, and introduces (or revisits) some new and very interesting characters. It represents the base Witcher 3 game at its best.

Easily the best open world game I've played since Morrowind, and probably the overall best when you account for the excellent story and writing. It's also the most playing time I've sunk into a single-player game since Fallout 3. Just a fantastic overall achievement that everyone with any interest in a fantasy RPG should play.

At first, I damn near hated this game. That's because I spent the first few hours thinking that permadeath was a thing in this game, and the game did absolutely nothing to tell me otherwise. In an early battle, a certain character can die and be dead forever. In fact, I've since learned that that character dies at that point in the story regardless. However, as the game didn't explain this well, I assumed that, like Fire Emblem, all of my characters were mortal and, thus, anyone who fell in battle was not coming back. This led to a lot of frustrated reloads when a battle didn't go perfectly and a character went down.

Of course, I then learned that that was not the case, and that characters were merely knocked out if they fell in battle. This completely changed the game for me, as it went from incredibly frustrating to a lot of fun when I wasn't constantly concerned about my oft-used characters being dead forever.

With that knowledge, combat is quite enjoyable. I wouldn't say it's incredibly strategic, and I think the abilities of a lot of characters aren't nearly as useful as simple attacks 90% of the time with only a few exceptions, but it is fun. The only downside is that it's quite easy to game. Since character strength is based on health and you and the enemy team take turns using a character, it's typically more convenient to take an enemy down to one or two strength and leave them alive rather than kill them outright, as a weak enemy who can only deal out a few hit points will then waste a valuable enemy turn that could have gone to a stronger foe. The game becomes somewhat easy most of the time utilizing such a strategy. You also need to focus on leveling up all of your characters, and so getting enemies down to one health and then letting your lower-level characters pick them off seems to be the smartest way to go about it.

There's also not much variety in the combat. You basically fight the same four enemy types with varying strength and armor over and over again throughout the game, with a fifth thrown in for a couple of battles, along with several against enemies with the same class types as your own squad.

The story in the game is solid. I liked the characters and the overall plot is interesting, although as the first of a trilogy you obviously can't expect it all to be wrapped up here. This game sets the stage for the two acts to follow, and does a fairly good job of it. I thought the ending was a little too abrubt. It just kind of ends a minute after the final battle. I didn't expect a full resolution, obviously, but a bit more meat after that fight would have been nice.

The main downside to the game is that character deaths can often feel arbitrary. You never really know when a dialogue choice will mean the permanent death of a character, and that's more than a little annoying. Nor, as others have said, do you know when you can pick just one dialogue choice most of the time. This leads to some frustration, and it's all on the game's design. I get the realism angle, as sometimes in life choices have unintended consequences, but it all feels so arbitrary here, and I certainly think it could have been handled better.

All in all, though, I would definitely recommend the game. The visuals are fantastic, the combat is enjoyable, and the story is solid. It's not a perfect game by any means (and I've read that the second game addresses a lot of the problems), but it's worth a play through if you like this style of turn-based RPG.

Easily my favorite Final Fantasy game of all-time, and the last great one before the series started to go downhill into irrelevance.

As a port, it's solid. The backgrounds are ugly, but I didn't really expect them to re-do all of them for a port of a sixteen year old game. The characters themselves look fine, and the cut-scenes look great. I've had no issues with controller support (using the PC version of the 360 controller), and I like that you can edit buttons, as the game originally has B as confirm and A as back, which is stupid. Was able to easily swap them and then no issues.

There are built in cheats for anyone who is interested in that sort of thing, along with more useful legit abilities like speeding up combat and turning off the over-long pre-fight cut-scenes (which I believe were there to mask loading on the PSX but are obviously no longer necessary). Removing those scenes alone probably cuts your overall game time by a couple of hours, especially if you're playing legitimate and thus are likely grinding a lot.

The card game still sucks and is totally pointless.

Anyway, Final Fantasy IX received a solid port. It's not amazing, but it's perfectly acceptable. I'd say the game is a little overpriced at $21.99 (I paid $16.79, but the price will go back up soon). It should have released at no more than $15.00. Still, if you're a fan of the original game or want to play the best and last great game in the series, or just one of the better JRPGs ever released (by the way, why can't we get Chrono Trigger on Steam?), this would be a good choice.

My copy of the game is broken. I am stuck in the police War Room and nothing I do will trigger the additional officer to come in so that I can finish the investigation. If the game were better I might have the patience to go back and start over, but after investing several hours into it only to get stuck at this point, I'm done until they patch this game. I can't recommend a game that has game-breaking glitches like this. Stay far away.