Recent reviews by Klingenmeister

I really would like to give two ratings...because the single player and multiplayer feel like two completely different games.

The campaign is at first, what you would expect from a third person shooter. First a short intro video, then a tutorial, that sends you against some minor enemys, so you can learn the basics of the game.
But soon you will find yourself in an endless tube level, that never ends. Just running straight the obvious only way, the game forces you. I mean, tube levels are common to simpler shooters, like Half Life, Doom or Serious Sam, but these games never gave you the feeling, that you are in one large tube and never be able to choose an own path of running through the game. In Half Life the levels are designed nicely designed and actually gives you the feeling of a big open complex, you are walking through.
In Space Marine you can actually see your way, you are going to walk, like a red carpet with barriers on your right and left. You can obviously see it, but cant do anything about it.
The next part are the two totally stupid followers you have. They are like a walking talking cutscene that is following you, wherever you go....because beside talking they dont do any more. Hitting enemys? Sometimes. Killing an enemy? You should praise the day.
And that is not an AI problem. Imperial Soldiers, you find in your path, are able to kill several enemys before they die like the weak soldiers they are. So even a small soldier, with the life span of a fire in a blizzard, does more kills than your followers in the entire game.
The combat system feels mixed:
Firearms are awesome, with precise shots you can even take out big enemys with your simple bolt pistol, weapons like the plasma cannon rip massive holes into entire armys and splatter them across the map. But your weapons dont look, like they have real impact. Enemys just splatter and fall down. They dont backflip, when hit in the head and dont really behave, like you are shooting them with a real bolter.
All in all your arsenal is still impressive and I praise the day I found out, that you can rip the heavy bolter turrets from their posts and carry them with you.
The melee system is completely dull. You hit an enemy, he hits you. You can do some evasive maneuvers but it doesnt feel like other THQ games like darksiders. Your character feel immobile and heavy, like controlling a tin can filled with lead.
In reality, THQs praised combat system without hide and seek, but directly storm at your enemys at all cost, make the players feel, like they want the opposite. You often find yourself heavily damaged and fleeing, cursing the stupid combat system.

All in all the campaign is a tube filled with dull enemys, places you will forget after seen them and senseless dialogs and cutscenes you never cared about. Oh, and the endboss is a pure quicktime event.


The multiplayer is a different game: You can play versus other players or coop against AI hordes. Fully customizable classes and a decent leveling system with upgrades, give you hours of fun. The best part, the exterminatus Coop is one hard ♥♥♥♥♥ to fight. Have a good team or die trying.
You can choose from 3 classes, who are seperated from their tasks. The melee (with jetpack), the tactical with medium weapons and the heavy weapons guy.

But beside all fun, it is filled with DLC content, not only skins, but two whole game modes.

I personally think, the game could be made with the Starcraft II Editor, where I played 3rd Person Shooter Mods with equal grafics and more Gameplay.

If you like small short time 2D games, this is the right choice for you:

Being in a comic like 2D world, that reminds a little bit of worms, you control one of five fighter planes with each different playstyle and abilitys.
Armed with MGs, Rockets, Lasers and Bombs, you have to shoot down the enemys and survive as long as you can.
The game gives you a leveling system, achievments and with that the ability to customize your choose of abilitys you use.
Ingame you not only fly an shoot but have basic physical elements like altitude, speed and afterburner. If you get to slow while flying up, your engine will stall and you will fall from the sky. Also you can find one use weapons on the map, that will give you rockets, EMP fields and shields.

The game has a lot of game modes like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, last man standing and some form of capture the ball mode.

Even if it hasnt that big community anymore it still has usable full functional bots, which arent that big challenge, but still decent and dangerous.

Being able to be played with only the mouse, it is a nice game on mobile devices and a short game for long traveling.

I wont talk much about this game, because it is the same as it was over 10 years ago. Nothing really changed (which isnt bad) and I am glad to see steam becoming a library for classic products, that would be long forgotten.
But charging over 20 Euros (The games price was 50 D-Mark = 25 Euro in the past) for such an old game is outraging. To top this, they want more money for an expansion set, that was community made and can be installed for free on the internet.

Month before Steams AoE2 was released I was playing the old version of the game on GameRanger, where it runs more stable, has equal patchs and new good features.

If you have your old AoE2 CD, install it and use GameRanger. If you never have played this game, wait until it is reduced. Stopping modern gaming industry from going down the hill, by releasing old games as new games, because the new games arent that big burner anymore, wont solve the problem.

When I was young, I played a lot of tower defence games in Warcraft 3. But Orcs must die sets a new level in this genre.
Combining a 3rd person action game with tower defence, it created the ultimate action survival game.
Set in a fictional fantasy universe, you have to defend humanity against hordes of orcs from another dimension. For that, they built big fortress' around the portals, you have to defend.

For that, you not only have weapons and spells, but a big arsenal of traps and mechanical defend systems, from ordinary spike traps to big swinging clubs, burning pits and big brutal mechanical grinders.
Every level is made of one or several floors with one or several directions the enemys can spawn. You have to defend the rifts to the normal world, so the orcs dont conquer it.

Using the right collection of traps, wisly using your abilitys and being a tactical genius desides about victory and defeat. The game doesnt take you lightly. With the first levels being easily understandable and mostly fast to solve, some maps are difficult beyond everything encountered before. Some maps need tricks you have to find out all by yourself, some just need you to be fast like sonic, defending two rifts at once.

Having a small storyline, mostly living from comedy, the campaign is really fun to play. After one playthrough you unlock another difficulty, that is a serious challenge (and was a real pain for me).

It isnt a real game for casual players, but a good game, for tacticans, that not only want to think but slay their way through their enemys.

Short said (and not completely true) the game is the same as the first one. You also have to defend your fortress against a big army of Orcs, with traps, guards and magic, but the game, still looking the same, changed a lot of things:

Coop: The whole game can (and should) be solved in 2 player Coop mode. Both players choose their weapons of choice and defend the tunnels and floors together. The big contra is, that money and inventory is not shared, but seperated.
Since every player has at least one weapon, and mostly have one spell and one artifact, you have to ask, which slot you should use for traps.
If one player use 3 slots for said things, he still has 8 slots for traps and other things, but two players with each a weapon, spell and artifact only can choose 2 traps each, so coop means less varity in trap placement.
Still, two players can be at 2 places at once and can do better crowd control. A lot of maps from the first game (some of them are playable in the second one, if you have both games) are way easier if played in coop.
No Skilltrees but big unlocking system: You no longer have a skilltree (which is bad) but have way over hundred different traps and items you can unlock and upgrade, so even after playing the campaign, you still wont have unlocked everything.
The simple trap system from the first game is gone. Now you have a ton of new traps, you can upgrade and customize (a bit), big weapons like the magic rocket launcher, all spell rings from the first game and new artifacts, that give you boosts and special abilitys.

With a good campaign, a lot of challenge maps (some of them are quite hard again), some DLCs, the game has a lot of content you can play for hours.

It is recommended to play this game in coop, because some maps are way to hard alone.
All in all the second game feels way more easy than the first. The big variety of weapons and abilitys and the use of two players at once spamming their weapons, the orcs feeling weaker and the traps are able to be upgraded, it is more casual than the sometimes nearly impossible nightmare mode of the first game.

I cant really say much to this game, because I wasnt really able to play it.

While most of the other players never got behind the loading screen or the main screen, me and my Coop Partner were able to open a Coop Lobby. But starting into the first mission, it was mostly a total confusing mess:
The controls are strange and not very movement friendly. Most of the time you find yourself helpless rotating around, looking for the enemy shooting at you, never having the feeling of flying through space. It feels like controlling the spectator camera of an FPS game, that controlling a space ship moving through vacuum of space.
The missions are unclear and hard to understand. You shoot at everything that shoots at you and try to follow the objective keys, which is very irritating and boring.
The game is full of stuff, that seems to be really important, but is never explained to you. It seems that you need fuel, air and ammunition, also you can somehow get new weapons and equipment. But all of that is unclear and really hard to understand. Often you find yourself getting shot and starting to loose air until you die, which isnt very satisfying. Also in Coop you instantly respawn with 1% health, just to get killed again.
Last but not least: Disconnects, asyncron gameplay and bugs. It wasnt very easy to maintain a nice multiplayer round.
All in all, we never got to the end of the first chapter and deinstalled the game. I know, many of the problems were a player-side problem of understanding the game, but it is so frustrating and boring, that you simply dont have the mood to understand it.
Beside of that it lures you with an open world, that simply doesnt exist. Maybe it is somewhere in there, but we never found it.

Full german review:
http://www.topfree.de/space-engineers

Grind materials, build a Space Ship and crash it into a meteor. The dream of every kid. Actually, the game is doing good in fulfilling this dream.
The game runs on a modified version of the Havoc engine and offers a decent 3D space enviroment with realistic physics in zero gravity and vacuum.
With a toolset of different forms of blocks, building parts and engines, you can design really nice looking ships and are also able to fly them.
With focus on realism you wont find laser guns and warp drives, but the survival in a hostile environment with the constant need of energy ressources to maintain your vital systems.

The game isnt really finished and playing the survival mode doesnt feel, like its worth the time.
But the core of the game is amazing:

Building: You are able to build complex structures, that can do different tasks in different situations, like battlestations, refinerys, mining rigs, scouts, transporters and space stations.

Factions: You are able to team up with other players, and make alliances and war with other factions. Also systems can be protected, so they are only usable by you or your teammates.

Technological Playground: To play with the game-engine you have a big toolbelt of tech: Sensors, wheels, pistons and rotors, remote controls, explosives and artificial gravity. From creating an elevator to building a big racing track or an automatic repair station, you can build, what you can immagine.

Weekly updates give you a feeling of safety, you dont have in other early access games. Still on an early stage, the game is constantly evolving and hopefully will be a big thing in the next years.

Because of the limits to the engine, the game world currently very small and empty.
If you dont have a good PC or if you are not creative and just want a space experience, the game will disappoint you.
But if it is your big thing to build and create, this game already has everything you ever wanted.

If you ever wanted a downgraded simple Minecraft with less building and more power, this game is your chance.
Similar to Minecraft, you start in a random generated World and have to build a house and craft tools and weapons.
Other than Minecraft, Terraria has a big focus on adventuring, dungeoncrawling and farming of items. You start, like in other games, with ressources like copper, iron and gold, but soon find yourself with a big load of exotic items, made of meteorite ore, demonic material, grass, flesh, fire, and everything else you can imagine.
In addition to that, the game has up to 10 different bossfights, with each its own loot and level of difficulty, several forms of random events and attacks on your base.
In the style of old 8bit games and with the power of modern systems you get a retro looking game, that can compete with modern games. In combination with the small size of the game and the low price, you get a simple funny creative game, that can hold you for up to 100 hours. At least this is the time to complete all content and find all secrets and loot.
Characters are saved separately to the world files, so you can travel between your saved games and even join online servers with each of your characters.
Fighting demons with a fire sword, shooting a giant bee in a bee hive with explosive arrows, discover underground mushroom forests and summon ancient evil...to slay it, all that is Terraria.
With a completely customizable enviroment and dozens of furniture sets (equal to every biome and underground cave), hundreds of bocks and other placeables, you can build, whatever you want, up to deadly arrow traps and peaceful gardens.

I personally dislike the fact, that it is a 2D game, but looking onto my past as a former DOS games player and looking onto the massive destruction you can unleash on your enemies, this is a game, you should try...also, dont play alone, bring your friends!

I am so tired of the completly mental decisions the devs take every patch. Now farming is completly useless, since it is random if you actually get more harvest than you lose by making seeds for the next harvest. It is way easier to go to the snow region to kill one of the 1 million mountain lions or bears, that seem to never stop spawning, making it impossible to travel without having your inventory filled with meat.

The balancing ideas of the dev team make no sense, and havent make sense since they removed changing zombie health and strength seperatly in 2015.

The new city layout would be an awesome new feature, IF cities would actually spawing large enough, even when turning city size to max.

Still better than Killing Floor and 10 years later there is still no new better horde shooter on the horizon :(