Recent reviews by anigmha

Pros:
- Branching story paths that depends on your playstyle (gun-ho or stealth), your conversations decisions, your exploration of areas (intel collection). There are some paths you will never see based on what you have done.
- Story is grounded in reality with current event tensions that still exists today (so don't expect early James Bond villain plots). Feels like a Tom Clancy novel.
- Interesting to find true motives of NPCs and their factions... and you only uncover them depending on how you play
- Gameplay is a a real good mix of stealth and cover shooter.
- How much shooting and how much sneaking you do depends on how you you upgrade your character since you will unlock certain types of abilities that favours one style or the other
- Things you do in previous missions and the trust level you build through conversations with NPCs, and the intel you purchase have gameplay effects on subsequent missions
- You can upgrade equipment to your style of play
- Wait for the end credits where a news anchor reads out the global impact of your action in the game
- I have not encountered a single gameplay bug. Maybe because I played this in 2023 with all the latest patches.

Cons
- Boss battles are okay at best. Don't expect Psycho Mantis (Metal Gear) or Mr Freeze (Arkham Asylum) bosses.
- I have to play this with a USD Headphone because the game cannot product sound anywhere else.

Likes:
- Time rewind and time clone mechanics that works really well in an action game
- Tight combat controls and animation/effects
- Varied enemies
- Theme of power in the story

Dislikes
- Varied enemies should be together instead of segmented
- Too few interesting "time/clone" puzzles, most could be cut
- Epilogue is virtually non-existent

Likes
- Good story and characters
- Dual perspective story where you can switch between perspectives
- Puzzles that require switching between perspectives
- Puzzles that makes you thing in terms of associations
- Whimsical world makes the whimsical solutions to puzzles "logical"
- Just asking questions about inventory items can either spawn witty dialogue or puzzle clues

Dislikes
- The last puzzle was frustrating because an "imperfect" sequence meant failure and restart. The sequence needing to be perfect made no sense. It didn't matter if A came first, and then B. B coming first should be logical too.

Likes
- It's like that Rush Hour toy puzzle game but way more varied, way more clever and way more thematic.
- Last two chapters are really challenging
- The "where's waldo" optional challenge is strangely satisfying

Likes

- Fast-paced, stylized, action-packed micro machines
- Fun abilities and tight controls
- Varied levels and bosses

Dislikes
- Last couple bosses are just side-scrolling shmups

- Good cover mechanics
- Varied enemies
- Enemy body parts can be destroyed
- Good story
- Trust system has both story and game play impact
- Trust system makes you care for characters

Duelyst, Hearthstone and Scrolls (the Mojang game, not the Elder Scrolls one) would fight for a slot of my leisure time almost every other day. The battle is usually close but it is Duelyst that often comes out alive.

The biggest problem with Hearthstone is that it is 70% deckbuilding and 30% actually playing. Once you build a deck, all you're doing in the match is following your deck's recipe. There are only a few meaningful decisions to make during a match. Most of the time you know within a few seconds what cards to play. Yes, predicting the composition of your opponent's deck and calculating the probabilities of your and your opponent's next card draw will increase the likelihood of you winning, but that much brain power yields diminishing returns. You could literally play the match drunk and still do reasonably well.

Duelyst, on the other hand, makes playing the match as important as deckbuilding and the match itself is every bit as complex. Every turn in the match has many meaningful decisions, many options that actually changes the state of the game, many highly impactful choices that require proportionally high brain power for you to reveal them. Every turn is like a puzzle with a time-limit: Can you calculate the lethal before your turn ends? Was there even a lethal? Did you just allow your opponent to setup a lethal? The brain power you put into Duelyst matches does not yield diminishing returns as quickly as it does in Hearthstone. And what's even better is that the game is still easy to learn and the average match length hits the sweet-spot of 12 minutes (this statistic was taken from the dev and in my experience is true). Of course all this means you can't play Duelyst drunk the way you can play Hearthstone drunk and still do okay. So in that regard Hearthstone is better.

Now on to Duelyst versus Scrolls. Duelyst's sweet-spot of 12 minutes is what makes it superior to Scrolls. Scrolls have positioning similar (ehh, somewhat) to Duelyst but also have a countdown based attack system where minions only attack after every X turn. Essentially this means there are two major indirect synergies, relative position and synchronized attacks, to worry about on top of the direct ones as defined on the cards themselves. Dude, this is a lot to take in! No wonder it takes 30 minutes to finish a Scrolls match. It would've been okay if the moment to moment happenings of those 30 minutes were interesting, but sometimes it feels like a drag. Duelyst, with positioning being the only major indirect synergy, does not feel this way. Despite this knock on Scrolls, its saving grace is that it has the greatest deckbuilding interface and feature set in a card game that I have ever seen. It makes deckbuilding an absolute joy. Duelyst unfortunately copied Hearthstone's terrible deckbuilding UX.

To put all this in a nice equation: Duelyst > Scrolls >> Hearthstone.

Puzzle Agent takes place in the morose corners of the Midwest. Sure it's a clichè setting for mystery thrillers, but how this setting is expressed in a "children's book" art form turns that clichè into an interesting contrast. Graham Annable's art profoundly brings the story to life, and what a strange story it is. I say that in a good way.

The main gameplay draw in Puzzle Agent are obviously the puzzles, which are interspersed throughout the game as the story unfolds. The formula is basically narrative-puzzle-narrative-puzzle-narrative reminiscent of the Professor Layton games for the Nintendo DS. No, Puzzle Agent is not a Professor Layton rip off. Both titles are really just video game versions of puzzle story books that anyone born before 1990 grew up with. Also, although this is a Telltale game, this is not really a point-and-click adventure since there are no branching paths. Just keep on clicking the next obvious thing to progress the story.

There are a good variety of puzzles ranging from logic to spatial reasoning. I would say just over half of the puzzles offer a solid challenge for the average Joe. The puzzles that are easy are indeed the weakest aspect of this game, but they're so easy that it can literally take 10 seconds to finish them, getting you straight back into the intriguing narrative or better puzzles. It only gets frustrating when an easy puzzle is a slight variation of a previous one. The game could seriously use less of those rotating tiles, piece fitting and pathfinding puzzles which often can be solved by simple brute force. The piece fitting puzzles in particular are somewhat broken because the pieces automatically latch onto the correct position when in close proximity thereby essentially solving itself for you.

I do like how a few puzzles meld with the narrative. At certain plot points, the game interrupts you midway through solving a puzzle with an animation happening on the puzzle pieces directly, momentarily bringing you back into the story. In one part, someone off-screen steals a puzzle piece while you solve that puzzle. You can't experience narrative like this in puzzle story books. Here Telltale have shown us an example of what they do best: how they can transform traditional forms of media into a better experience through new technologies. I just wish there were more moments like these.

The one other issue I had with a few of the puzzles is that sometimes the rules are vague. For example, one puzzle asked you to determine the winner of a tournament with nothing more than statements made by the contestants. However, the format of the tournament was never mentioned (spoiler alert: it's single-elimination). Another involves fish and food chains, but it was never clear what eats what and whether there can be a fish within a fish within a fish... ya know, fishception. There are 72 puzzles (37 in Puzzle Agent 1 and 35 in 2) and I counted no more than 5 that suffered from ambiguity or outright misses necessary information to be solvable. It's a small percentage so I don't think it's that big of a deal. It just sucks when a brilliant puzzle was spoiled because the rules weren't crystal clear.

Overall, I enjoyed Puzzle Agent's story, art and most of the puzzles. Also, you should know that this review covers Puzzle Agent 1 and 2 since they are each half a game and half a story. Telltale really should've called them Episode 1 and 2.

Metro 2033 has the makings of a cult-classic: an atmospheric, claustrophobic, well-realized world that is only held back by mediocre gunplay and a story that is both compelling and underdeveloped.

The game is set in a world ravaged by a nuclear winter. Most levels take place in underground train tunnels and stations that sprawls beneath Moscow. On paper that seems very mundane. However 4A Games have paid so much attention to detail in creating this post-apocalyptic world, – from the warring factions that occupy each station to the weapons made with scraps – breathing life into this world swarmed with death. Even the de facto currency, rare pre-nuclear bullets, makes sense in this world.

The currency in this post-nuclear world has a very unique gameplay implication. You can either use your money to buy equipment or use them as originally intended, as bullets for your guns. In the world of Metro 2033, shooting at enemies is literally spending money. Too bad what could have been an awesome gameplay mechanic is left underutilized simply because there isn't that many things to spend your money on. Perhaps this game should have been an open-world game.

The guns in this game feel good but the enemy AI and variety makes for average gunfights. There are memorable roller coaster moments though... quite literally. These shootouts on moving trains are exhilarating. Juxtapose that with the deliberate but tense dark corridor levels where your flashlight is your most important weapon, and you have the peak and valleys that make a great FPS game.

Now if you didn't know, Metro 2033 is based on a novel of the same name. The video game version suffers from underdeveloped characters and plot developments used more for mission context and less for an exploration of themes. But what else is new in video game stories? In spite of all that, the story is actually more interactive than it lets on with an ending that is determined by your actions throughout your playthrough culminating to a realization of how bleak our world and its inhabitants, including yourself, can be. The game intentionally obfuscate the narrative system with good reason so I won't describe it any further. My suggestion is to play the game as if you were in that world and not as a game to just beat.

After completing the outstanding 'Bionic Commando: Rearmed', I was eager to see if Grin, the developer, could transfer the swing mechanic into the third-dimension. 8 hours later to beat the game on Hard difficulty, I can confirm they did. No other game does it better, not even the Spider-Man games. There is a learning curve due to the free-form nature of the swing mechanic. But once you master it - once you grasp where to attach your grapple, know what point in your swing trajectory to detach your grapple, understand which direction to shift your weight to, and think far ahead to identify your next two or three grapple points - once you master all that will you truly feel like a "rad" Bionic Commando.

The swing mechanic also integrates with the combat fluidly. You swing around to avoid bullets, lasers, missiles and other projectiles all while getting into angles that will allow you to strike the enemy at their most vulnerable side. The enemies are usually a mix of airborne and ground units which presents a plethora of challenging scenarios and opportunities for badass maneuvers. Your arsenal is primarily the usual shooter-game affair except for this one move where you latch on an enemy with your grapple, zip towards them at high speeds and kick their face in. Swing, zip-kick, swing, shoot, swing, zip-kick, shoot, swing, shoot, and so on and so forth at different enemies without ever touching the ground. When you have a chain going, it's beautiful.

Unfortunately, there are a good number of areas where the fight is too focused on the ground. You can still swing, but since most of the enemies in those areas are infantry units and sometimes there isn't much room to swing or there are too few surfaces to grapple onto, the game feels less like Bionic Commando and more like an average third-person shooter. Also, the fact that you can't zoom your gun while swinging despite being able to do so on foot means half of your bullets are likely going to miss when going for fancy shoot/swing combos. It encourages the separation of combat and swinging when the game is at its best when the two are merged seamlessly together. Thankfully the game is at its best majority of the time.

Now moving on to the artistic aspects. Before the game was released, a graphic novel was made available called 'Bionic Commando: Chain of Command' (which I was still able to find via Google search). It sets up the game's plot and promised an exploration of the theme of human enhancement - using bionics beyond a "cure" for physical disabilities. Well, the game's story squandered that opportunity (although the story is still passable by gaming standards). The score, however, is an amazing modern interpretation of the 8-bit original.

Finally, the multiplayer. There is nothing much to say. I've never tried it since the population is virtually nil. I would imagine Capture The Flag would be awesome with the game's unique traversal system. If you're reading this and know others that are interested, we should get a game going (though we have to use Hamachi or Tunngle since Capcom dropped their servers).