Recent reviews by soupfaace

Selaco rips!

Just finished playing an hour of this game and am finding it hard to come down. It's very exciting. It's a well-realized, F.E.A.R.-like first-person shooter (in only the best ways).

It can be fast and frantic—with enemies who move and take cover and feel as if they're coordinating with one another; it can be slow and thoughtful—in rich and reactive environments, full of little interactions and discoveries and secrets, that encourage slow exploration and returning to previous areas.

(And, yeah, it runs on GZDoom. Further evidence that games aren't their engines; huge multi-million dollar investments aren't necessary to get something exciting, flashy, clever, and etc.)

Colourful, funny, challenging.

Much like Minesweeper, it takes very little to start playing; much like Civilization, it takes a lot to stop playing. This game presents a very easy, but overlapping and complicated set of choices to make on every turn. Smart, quick, rewarding.

Homefront: The Revolution is not revolutionary, but I've found it provides numerous small objectives and activities that are fun and quick to play.

Moment-to-moment, it is very similar to Far Cry and Dying Light, but whereas those games have large open areas and more involved objectives, H:TR places them in a smaller, denser urban space and makes them achieveable in about half the time. I find myself playing for anywhere between 20 to 90 minutes, taking over occupied Philadelphia block by block. Given that the level of challenge starts low and increases slowly, and that most of the objectives and enemies are quite similar, I feel that the game is perhaps best played in these smaller sessions—a few objectives over lunch.

The story moves along whenever I'm ready to move it, but it's not what keeps me returning to the game. I like finding and eliminating the five snipers in an area, sabotaging enemy electronics along the way, looting the corpses I made when running past a patrol, quickly hacking a comms tower or reclaiming a guerilla safehouse.

It's a well-made visual novel and fantasy NBA-Jam–alike—weird and fun and delightful on every level. It is unusual in its setting, tone, mechanics—but also unusual in the quality of its interactions, between its characters, between sprints and tactical staging of players during the matches, even in moving around the cursor to twiddle with little items in the UI. Fantastic in every sense, I recommend playing Pyre (with a gamepad)—and, should you find it slow to start, giving it the benefit of the doubt.

It's DOOM without doors or walls. It's Geometry Wars in first-person. Devil Daggers is a fast-paced first-person arcade shooter with a dark, chunky look reminiscent of Quake being rendered in software.

It's fast and unrelenting. It's simple and very challening. My mouse hand is sweaty.

I like Invisible, Inc. quite a lot. It's an excellent turn-based tactical game along the lines of XCOM, but without as much of that game's strategic overhead and randomness. More than being like XCOM, Invisible, Inc. is a stealth game that encourages you to avoid guards, cover your tracks, hack and pickpocket rather than hunt enemies, set up shots behind cover, and kill.

This difference creates a great deal of tension and excitement. The moment-to-moment decisions are suspenseful because of good tradeoffs between exposure, the costs to move and peek, and the ever increasing security level. You can take out guards, but only for a little while. All your decisions are important and deliberate. You don't feel screwed by the game because it has hidden outcomes and costs behind dice rolls: If you lose an agent in Invisible, Inc., it's because of the tactical choices you made, not because they missed an 80% quick shot!

The levels change significantly, as they're generated procedurally, and provide a good variety of situations and challenges. The look and sound of the game is great, with a light cyberpunk theme and sharp, stylish character art. It's currently playable only with the mouse and/or keyboard; adding controller support would make this easier to enjoy while on the couch in Big Picture mode—but that's wish-list stuff. I've enjoyed my time so far with Invisible, Inc. and am very happy to have given it a shot.

Challenging and goofy, this weird game is great for when you have two or more people around. The game's menus are awful and difficult to navigate, but once you're in the game proper, that frustration turns to fun.

A fast, colourful, DOOM-like shooter? Yes, please.

Five Nights at Freddy's is a scary game. Fun to play on a TV with a small group in the dark—much more stressful to play alone, in the dark, with one's face near the monitor. The game is easy to pick up and understand, but still challenging and very frightening.

Know that it runs only at 1280 × 720 and requires a mouse, so may not be ideal for all TV setups.