Recent reviews by tautology

It's like someone wrote a shoot-em-up without actually ever playing one. It's got all the elements, but it so dull that I actually fell asleep whilst playing it.

Avoid unless you have insomnia.

A simple 2D platformer with bad graphics, painful sound and terrible mechanics. I could forgive a lot if it had some simple features to make it enjoyable. It doesn't.

You end up constantly playing the first few levels, because it doesn't bother to incorporate a decent save system. The character movement is painfully slow, the jumping is off and the controls are clunky to say the least. Even a simple thing like being able to disable the dire "music" would improve the whole experience.

It turns this into something that's boring at best; painful and frustrating at worst.

One of the best mouse and keyboard shooters out there.

This must be an example of gaming reviews to get it to be "Mostly Postive": there's nowt positive about it, it looks like a child's first messing around with making a game.

Poor graphics, lack of saving, lack of gameplay, annoying repeating sound loop, lack of options, buggy. Avoid.

Do my fellow reviewers actually have ears, or have they just evolved a rudimentary hearing that can only hear endlessly tedious and repetitive noise? The so called "music" that the other reviewers dribble on about is so annoying I had to remove my headphones within seconds of starting the game. Expect the same not repeated for 5 minutes without any real pattern.

In terms of the rest of the game: it is not only offensive to the ears, but painful on the eyes and it's not even fun to play. Avoid.

The developers appear to have published a minigame and forgot to actually include the game itself.

Would be ok after a total rewrite to actually put a game in there.

BitD, when us youth (at the time) would rush out and buy the latest Fighting Fantasy games as soon as they were released. Then play them for days, mapping every single route (as you had to). This was reknowned for being one of the worse ones: it has a linear plot that feels like it goes on for ages, but you have to follow a prescribed path or you will lose. Also the art was one of the worst of the series.

Combine that with some stupidly hard creatures (at least if you try and follow the rules) and you have not the best subject matter to start with.

In terms of the conversion: I felt let down. There was no map like in Forest of Doom, nor was there a rework of the interface like in Appointment with FEAR. Fortunately they redrew the awful art!

If you want to relive the games from your youth then buy it, but don't expect any replayability from it or anything special.

HSL is a roguelike, which has had all the complexity (and fun taken out of it). It's almost as if the author has read the wikipedia entry on a roguelike and then decided to write one without ever trying trying to play one.

There are no tactics (other than move backwards and fire), no specific skills to learn required. You are at the mercy of the random number generator - a random number generator that seems very tempermental.

If you like roguelikes, save your money and play a decent one instead.

It's a bullet hell game where you can't actually see the bullets. This makes it a game of random dodging to try and game enough scrap to buy enough weapons to take out the enemies before they shoot.

Either reduce the complexity of the background, make the enemy shots not the same colour as aforementioned background or make the various ships not all the same shade of grey.

I don't get the postive reviews at all. This game is an exercise in torture: it's a simple mouse and keyboard shooter, but the majority of your enemies are little black dots that you can't actually see until they're half a pixel away from your character. This means that when you try and fight and dodge the real enemies you end up randomly dying. Combine that with your view radius getting smaller if you get hit means that it actually gets harder if you make a mistake.

Maybe I'm weird, but I don't want to play a game just to die from (virtually) invisible enemies every time it starts getting interesting.

Plus the soundtrack is terrible. Avoid, just avoid.