Recent reviews by The Gaming Archaeologist

Finished the stream recently, which I have archived here https://youtube.com/live/uLfGaGP7-WE

I decided to stream this after seeing it getting support on Kickstarter and seeming to be one of those good ones that actually ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ finished their products!

The story follows a witch girl from the coven devoted to Shub-Niggurath in this post-lovecraftian world where many of the horrors in the stories have been exposed and it's written in a cute way with cute characters that makes the entire story entertaining.

The main character, Charlotte LeStrange, has a strange magical ability with her eyes that seems to randomly alter the memories of those she uses her powers on, accidentally erasing her parent's knowledge of her middle name!

The story and adventure were quite fun, however, I felt that when the game was wrapping up, it felt like I should've only been half-way through the game and it was suddenly rushed. Not a bad game and it's got a cute story to it, albeit morbid and dark, but really is a lot of fun.

It's been a while to get back to this because I've been enjoying this game so much offline, attempting to try different playthroughs and see exactly what changes at the end. I had a lot of fun streaming it you can view it yourself here: https://www.youtube.com/live/DNkgYBoNBeI?si=LtyrRm6GWIauswn4&t=10026

I remember watching someone stream this and, I have to admit, I didn't think I've like this as much as I ended up doing!

The story starts off with a twist, but once you are on the station the real action starts as you start gaining Neuromods, which are used to gain abilities, similar to Plasmids in Bioshock, but with different costs to each ability. Though I cringe at the idea of these things sticking two VERY long needles right through your eye!

You have six areas (three human, three Typhon) to boost use your abilities and upgrade them in whatever order you like. The human ones give you abilities such as hacking, repairing, upgrades, better damage with weapons and such. Including an ability to slow-down time and improve your natural abilities like more inventory slots, more health and more psi.

The Typhon ones are where it really feels like Bioshock at times. You not only gain many similar abilities as to what the Typhon have, such as being able to transform into an object to sneak past detection (Or go through broken doors, like I do, when there's no other entrance) , but the ability to use telekinesis, energy blasts, mind control, psychic machine control, resistances and even summon beasties of your very own!

Unlike the world of Bioshock, this station is completely open-world where you can retrace your steps to previously visited locations if, for example, you just got the ID card you needed for a locked room or perhaps you now have the ability to repair/hack your way into a locked room, however, sometimes those creatures will come back and be waiting for you so just because you cleared a location, doesn't mean there won't be more waiting for you, but the turrets you set up should still be operational and might help you out a little.

There are a ton of fun side-missions to investigate too, which can end with you gaining valuable loot or saving human lives, if that's the road you want to go down. Much of this will all change the ending too, not to get into spoilers.

A interesting invention that really gets my goblin-brain excited is the machines "The Recycler" and "The Fabricator" because there are a huge number of junk items you can pick up throughout the areas from banana skins and cigars to duplicate weapons or consumables that you may actually never use (like in my first playthrough, I did not gain any abilities that used Psi points, so the Psi hypo was useless) and break them down in the Recycler into base materials, which you can then use in the Fabricator to build things, as long as you have the schematics and the right amount of materials. You can even get materials from using a weapon that is, essentially the recycler turned into a grenade so you can use that on enemies or even different objects in the environment that you can't collect like chairs, sound systems and so much more.

It's very easy to get lost in the amount of activities this game has, especially if you want to uncover everything or unlock achievements like attempting to track down all 257 crew members on the station. Something I've been doing myself in my current playthrough, but things are always easier the second-time through because of New Game+ where you regain all of the abilities that you had gotten in your previous playthrough, along with the tool that gives you access to some of these abilities that you get early in the game anyway. It even keeps any scanned data you had on the different Typhons so you'll be able to continue buying the relevant powers, however, you lose your entire inventory so you'll have to start from scratch with weapons and such.

I certainly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed games like Bioshock, Deus Ex or Cyberpunk due to the RPG-style mechanics in upgrading and buying abilities, though without a true level-up system the game doesn't scale the enemy based on how many abilities you may have installed.

This is indeed a strong recommendation and it's a shame that Arkane Austin was shut after making such a great gem of a game here!

Founders' Fortune starts off well enough where you start as a pair of villagers, starting up a small village and dealing with the usual challenges of food, resources and the occasional attack from rival groups.

The problems I have, however are quite varied and at times I feel that I'm held back from doing any real city building as it can be a real struggle to get enough resources without attempting to make your characters jack of all trades at the very beginning, especially in regards to assigning them tools as the initial tool station only has room for one. Much of these improvements can be researched and stuff, however, I have found the researching in this game both slow and irritating.

To research anything, you need to mine crystals. Everything, including the very basic of farming (or you have no food) have a cost of crystals. This makes the game force you to try and turn your early settlers into jack-of-all-trades and often leading them to ignore certain tasks, despite how important you make them. This makes the start very difficult. Especially as you cannot get any migrants, until everyone is happy with at least the basic stuff, often getting their wishes fulfilled, including gaining levels and so on and even then, you only get one at a time, followed by the very short lives these characters live, you can quite easily find yourself losing your most skilled people.

Building is a bit of a pain in the ass since the way the game works is that when you choose something to build, you must have the resources. After this, you have to then set it up and the resources are considered spent already, leaving a blueprint up for the builders. This means you can't set up plans and you have to be trying your best to remember what you want to build and where or you will eventually build over things that you had planned for something else as you can't set up blueprints if you don't have the resources. Unlike other games, there's no partial building which makes trying to plan these things out difficult.

Storage for resources is irritating too because you have seporate storage for every little bit of resource, apart from some misc items. You need storage for raw food, cooked food, wood, stone, metal, coins, scrolls, crystals and because of this you need to build storage locations for these things, often making you use up far more wood than intended. It is cool to see them fill up sometimes, but most of the time it doesn't update that often and empty storage areas can appear full.

Combat training is another thing. No one does this automatically so you need to build a scarecrow for your people to train up against, which is needed because they can't even wield a wooden sword unless they've learnt how to use one! This feels like it isn't needed and makes defending yourself so much more difficult too. Atleast, you can change between combat roles and there's a different outfit setting for those entering combat and when they're doing normal work, which allows you to quite easily swap back to non-combat mode, thankfully.

I'm still playing it now though because the game isn't BAD, but Rimworld is still a significantly better game imo. Especially if you want to plan things out ahead of time and build huge communities as you can obtain people much faster, start with more and your research isn't capped by trying to get crystals or scrolls.

Played this demo, once again inspired by Splattercatgaming: https://youtu.be/eUXNRm6gtzQ?si=ws9Vt-Bzc4i-aR7c who has been helping showcase some real bangers of indie games that are coming out and this one is no exception!

It has a bioshock feel, with arriving at this amusement park at the behest of some mysterious stranger, holding your girlfriend hostage as a grand prize! The whole design of this place and the main antagonist along with the different enemies you fight through makes me imagine that if The Joker was given free reign, he'd create an amusement park exactly like this! It's very promising from what I've seen so far, being similar to games like Bioshock or Prey, but more on the Bioshock end as you don't have, at least in the demo, any ways to improve your stats.

Regardless, this is certainly worth checking out.

It's bad enough that they try to force people to rebuy this content for their new game, but they had them in two separate passes. This one, adding the additional contracts and even a new island that you had to get the DLC to access.

What really annoys me though, is that these mission missions and locations actually fill in the gap between Hitman 2 and 3. When I started playing the story missions to Hitman 3, we were suddenly parachuting into some big building where our targets were meant to be! I was so confused, but when trying out these bonus island and band area, we learn about this location based on data extracted from servers and such, pointing us to the location of the first mission in the third game.

Worse, the locations even opened up with saying "Hitman 2" which demonstrates how little effort they put into this expansion too.

Once again, this time they've actually split the content so here are all the areas you would get in the base Hitman 2 game which was enjoyable, however, this should've been free when it was released as an apology to everyone who had to buy the new game if they wanted more content.

Unfortunately, this doesn't include all of the extra stuff that came out Hitman 2, including a whole new location.

This is essentially all of the stuff from the first game, but now you have to buy this to actually add it to the game and play it (though not anymore. Think maybe it's free, but I'm not certain.) and it's nice to play those old levels again, however, I feel this should've been free at launch.

This is just essentially recycled content from the first game that you could've bought, back when the first Hitman game came out, but now it's inaccessable and you have to buy it as part of Hitman 3, or as they now call it "World of Assassination" to try and hide that they're essentially reselling you older content.

There's six missions, spread across each of the first game's areas with it's own little story that ties in to a different story, revealed at the end. Some of them are very difficult to deal with, especially the merc who knows you're after him and will routinely send out his body guards to check out whoever is following him, so this will put your skills to the test.

So here we are with the third and final combination, though this time it actually remembered the mastery of past missions I'd done to that solved that headache for me and made trying to get mastery on all areas much easier.

Whilst It's good to have my progress saved, this game, alone, seporate from the DLC of buying the previous content from the past two games, is actually short if you were going to focus on just the main story and moving forward, but the new locations are quite nice and have plenty of opportunities to take advantage of for assassinations and so on. Including adding in injectors that look like pens, adding to that whole gadget thing with this game.

Even after finishing the game, they hold limited assassinations that can be done, released every so often with an accompanying DLC that adds a new costume. These newer ones have unique dialog, repurposed locations and known people for actors. For example, for "The Undying" You get the outfit, a explosive robot and a unique target you have to kill multiple times in different ways, played by Sean Bean (as a bit of a joke at how often he gets killed in movies, ect) which takes place on the Miami map.

Nowadays you can't buy the earlier games so you have to buy the packs if you want to get access to those earlier levels and there's also other DLC that's available for other levels that you could've bought for the first or second game like Patient Zero and the Sarajevo Six pack so it seems like the creators are trying to drain you of cash, suggesting you should really only got for this games and related packs when on a sale. This greed really does lower my rating of the game and you can see from all the negative views on steam how much people hate these pricy DLCs.

The actual ending I won't spoil for obvious reasons, however, it allows for any future game to be made or just to be ended in an open way where you can assume he's still out there hunting down new targets from the shadows and getting dressed in suspicious clothing.

Something that's great for content creators, however, is that if you own an Nvidia with the associated software, it records your assassinations for you, meaning you can build up a nice collection of deaths or maybe just save the ones you were really proud about and want to share online. Regardless, it's a fun little feature that can give you plenty of content for the future!

Shadows of Rose Review: (Backloggd: https://www.backloggd.com/u/TGA_backloggd/review/2411706/ )

So after finishing the main game, I took the time to move onto this DLC next (https://youtube.com/live/jVTLvyZbbWc) where we play as Ethan's child, Rose, but older and years after the events of the main game.

It's difficult to get into the story without spoiling too much, but essentially Rose gets exposed to some of the mold that was collected from that site as it contained all kinds of memories, including those about a crystal that can remove one's abilities, which Rose wanted to try and become normal and fit in with other kids.

What's frustraiting is that you are stuck with a 3rd person camera angle (regardless of how you may have played on the main game) and you are without weapons and abilities for quite a while, forcing you to be extremely restricted with your ammo as there's no shop in this world so it is more like the earlier RE games in that regard, not to mention there are only two weapons you get, being the basic starter pistol and shotgun so if you played a high difficulty like me, you're not going to have a fun time until you've completed it a few times.

Certain characters return, including one very angry one from RE7 and the final boss was very difficult since you mostly use your powers and abilities to try and take her down and the weapons barely do anything to them.

The visuals were very creepy, including how the enemies were models based slightly on existing assets, however the monsters were done in an extra creepy fashion as they try to suck out your essence.

There's even a Doll House stage, similar to the one in the main game, only where the Dolls are trying to kill you and you even get chased by that creepy Mia doll with it's glowing eyes and jittery movements that put you on edge, even when you think you have the upper hand.

Completeing this is also worth is as you gain more Completion Points (CP) that you can use for unlocks, getting you closer to some of those infinite ammo unlocks or whatever else you may need or be short on. The ending was a little disappointing as it just mirrored the ending of the main game...unless you're meant to complete it on Village of Shadows difficulty for something more, but I've not tried that as of yet.