Recent reviews by anilEhilated

It's more Golden Idol. All that Golden Idol needs is more Golden Idol.
Admittedly, a lot more Golden Idol would be ideal.

Literally the only reason to ever own Skyrim. Admittedly it's a pretty great one.

An accurate depiction of the peaceful and tranquil life in rural Spain, complete with a tour through the local historic sites and helpful locals teaching you the basics of the language as you play, with ever so important dictionary like "Mierda" being repeated at you forcefully until you get it right.

You've got a rickety old submarine and a fairly large ocean to explore, filled with enemies, treasures and the occassional powerup; same old metroidvania formula with a slightly novel control scheme since the thing can only go forward. The exploration itself is fairly satisfying, with plenty of secret areas to uncover and a lot of loot to be found; the map is pretty large and largely pretty to look at.

The rewards for the exploration, however, are where the game starts to falter: while you can and will upgrade your sub in multitude of ways, there is nothing that would change the way you play too drastically. You basically just unlock deals of meaning with barriers that also happen to serve as weapons; those can be further customized but their upgrades are largely useless, not least because of the fact that whenever you get a new weapon, the oceanic fauna apparently receives a memo just in time to whip up a new species of palette-swapped murderfish with just enough health to render your new toy meaningless. The combat is boring and frustrating, something you will be painfully reminded of at the end of the game where "kill all enemies to open the door" becomes a recurring staple of map design.

Thankfully, it is not that big a part of this game: most of the obstacles in your way are good old-fashioned puzzles that shouldn't stop anyone who hasn't voted for Trump for more than a couple seconds. Your primary tool is a grappling claw and most of the puzzles deal with underwater physics, so apart from a few annoying split-second timing sections they're enjoyable enough.

There's a story. It might or might not carry some kind of environmental message, but it works well enough; I do appreciate it being styled as the narrator reading from a children's book, while the game doesn't do anything interesting with it, as a framing device it is servicable and the narrator is actually really good at conveying the bedtime story mood. "It was Swish!" will probably stay with me for quite a while.

I suppose I had fun, but in the end the game feels rather bland. As far as metroidvanias go it is medium-sized but even that starts to really drag on due to the fact the mechanics just aren't very fun and don't ever really shift past introducing a new puzzle gimmick. Did not 100%, am not likely to play again.

To sum it up: if you're looking for a magical underwater metroidvania with great renditions of undersea fauna and flora, fantastic music and a devastating array of fun powers to wield...
Get Aquaria.

Yeah, it's goofy and good.

To elaborate: Victor Vran pretends it's an APRG in the vein of Diablo. In reality, it's more of an action game with a bunch of RPG elements. There's a lot of buffs and debuffs and damages and armors but most of it can be ignored during the slaughter. The key gameplay mechanics are dodging - something you'll be doing a lot of in the action game way, by rolling from projectiles, jumping over shockwaves and whatnot - and mastering weapons.
There's under twenty weapon types, but each handles differently (by having three attacks associated with it) and each has different mechanics associated with it - so with a shotgun you'll be timing shots and executing enemies, with a scythe you'll harvest souls of and use them to empower your moves and with a rapier you'll be counting your hits to get the maximum out of its combo-empowering abilities.
You can switch between two weapons on the fly and you aren't locked out of any by stat requirements - simply because there aren't any stats. You get passive boosts by equipping a set of cards with values associated with them and figuring out the most effective hand of cards you can use with your limited capacity is actually quite fun.
The emphasis on action gameplay is also further reflected in level design - the maps aren't randomly generated and there is a set of challenges on each one to complete for extra loot and experience; those range from "accidently fulfilled" to "good luck figuring out a build that can do this" in difficulty - and if that isn't enough, another set of (really rather bastardly) challenges for each map opens up on beating the final boss.

Graphics are nice enough, could use less spiders but that's a pretty common issue with RPG devs running out of ideas. I think this game actually suffered a bit in the story/presentation department by coming out at around the same time as Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, with which it apparently shares a lot of style - hell, even logo/title screen with a steampunky hatted hunter looking in your general direction. I wouldn't call Victor Vran derivative, though; for one, his hat gets mercilessly mocked throughout the game.
Which brings me to the story and writing and what's actually tying all that murder together. The story is minimal - there's this cursed city and you're there to figure out what happened and destroy the ancient evils, blah blah skeletons vampires ghosts demons. The game is thankfully aware of how shallow this is and pokes fun at it quite a lot. Victor Vran doesn't take itself seriously - at all. Your constant companion is a snarky voice in your head that isn't ever afraid to deliver a low blow to your confidence - from the abovementioned hat mockery through pondering the meaning of mass murder for loot and experience to videogame references. The jokes are mostly rather memetic in substance and a lot of them fall flat but they're usually delivered fast enough to make at least some of them stick - my favorite is probably the Stanley Parable dungeon.

I don't think this game will ever become a beloved classic, but it's definitely a step above the typical point-and-kill ARPG in gameplay and gets a lot of points in my book for its admitted and embraced silliness. Definitely worth getting on a sale.

Screw the haters.
Okay, here's the deal: the game is a Souls ripoff. It's also nowhere near as good as the Souls games. Does that mean it's bad? No.
Lords of the Fallen takes the Dark Souls formula and twists it a bit. You got interconnected areas to explore, you got respawn points to find, you got deaths to do, it's all there, but it's got its own additions to the system. It does magic really well - even the gimmicky-looking but fun spells like Mimic have use - and it has a really cool attitude to subquests: yeah, they're there, but forget tracking and a journal - you remember to do them, or you don't. This may sound annoying and backwards but given the rather small size and huge interconnection fo the game's world, it opens a lot of rewards for exploration: you get this mysterious item, wonder if that guy who alluded to it has something to say about it, better go talk to him - on the way, oh look, secret switches I missed and a whole new area filled with giant ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ spiders.
Completionists won't like it - or the fact that there's a bunch of choices with very definite consequences that can lock you out of rewards - but it encourages thorough approach and constantly being on lookout for secrets, and the game is chock-full of those.

Okay, the elephant in the room and what most people hate: combat. It's slow. In addition to good old souls' stamina, attacks just come out slowly even with fast weapons. It's not very stylish or action-packed and emphasises strategy over reflexes. I can't really speak for the people who hated it but here's a tip: try out the biggest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stick you have in your inventory. Wielding slow and powerful weapons has rarely been so satisfying and I maintain this game has the best-feeling warhammers I ever cracked goblin skulls with.

What else is there? The setting is obviously nowhere near Souls stuff and you will get tired of the endless snow, the story is really predictable (although the novelty of medieval audiologs helps with that a fair bit) and most of the bosses are variations on Big Guy In Armor. Mechanically they are mostly handed well (two exceptions aside) but could use a bit more creativity in visual department.

What it really comes down to is this: it tries to be Souls. It's not. But it's a solid tribute and definitely a good game for at least the one playthrough when you get all the magic of exploring harsh, unforgiving and content-packed environments. The real "failure" of Lords of the Fallen is that it doesn't live up to the source material - but when the source material is brilliant, being just good is nothing to be ashamed of. I wouldn't by it at full price but this game is a very solid sale pick.

Oh, and don't buy the DLC. It blows - about an hour long and ending with a boss that's just piling one idiotic design decision over another.

I'm not a sniper. Anyone who ever had the misfortune of playing a shooter with me will confirm I'm physically incapable of hitting the broad side of a barn at point blank range. I still had fun with Sniper Elite 3.

Here's the thing: the main selling point of its series is its wonderful ballistic model, with which you can set up a sniping experience as close to real as possibly, taking into account distance, muzzle velocity (whatever the hell that's supposed to be), gravity, wind, heartbeat, phase of the moon and the zodiacal sign of the poor sod in your sights. Screw that.

My elite sniper used his sniper rifle about a third of the time in missions. The rest was spent running around the maps at full speed while cackling wildly as he led the obliging Afrika Korps into landmines, carelessly placed munition boxes and lookisthatacorpseoverthereBOOM situations. The maps are pretty large and set up in ways that almost always leave you to pick your approach - and there's plenty of opportunities for guard AI mind♥♥♥♥ery, usually involving explosions. I mean, you can sneak and stab and snipe if you want to, but finally it's just an option.

Oh, and there's a story. Thankfully it's mostly unintrusive, excpet for a couple of laughably hammy cutscenes near the end and incredibly overacted narration by our badass hero. One nice touch though - the rather silly and completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ useless superweapon we're trying to stop the Germans from building is actually one they were really considering. Historically nice.

To sum it up: the Sniper Elite games were always marketed as this weird ballistic simulator marketed toward WW2 nerds and people willing to wait five hours to take the perfect shot. Nothing wrong with that and it's still there - but this time around it comes packaged in an actually good game. Wouldn't pay more than ten euros for it, though.
Oh, and if you buy the DLC, you get to shoot Hitler in the balls.

There's a lot of descriptions of the story, features, whatnot this game has; they're not helpful. Here's the important part: while Super Panda Adventures look like yet another indieshovelwarecashgrab on nostalgia for games that weren't that good anyway, it's an Actually Good Game.
Don't be fooled by the screenshots, it's not derivative of marios, sonics, yoshis and other animals of dubious genealogy and sinister genetics: this game is a cutesy little metroidvania all of its own. And it's fun as hell.

Let me put it this way. It's the best effing shooter since Bulletstorm, which was the best effing shooter since Painkiller, which was the best effing shooter since Doom 2. If any of those games sounds even remotely up your alley, go for it.
Also it has a pretty damn great storyline, which is essentially unheard of in this genre.

e: And with the sale prices being what they are there is absolutely no excuse to not play this. This line was totally not added for want of a badge.