Recent reviews by the baron

Highly recommended. Atmospheric, intriguing, simple to start with but the difficulty ramps up significantly as you progress. Great soporific soundtrack, visuals are great, lots of extras to discover if you put in the effort. I'm not sure I'll finish it without consulting walkthroughs, some of the puzzles I'm stuck on at the moment seem beyond my IQ, but that's not a criticism of the game itself - the developers are smarter than I am!

I played the first Tomb Raider on the original Playstation and remember the wow-factor, Lara standing on ledge in some vast room you'd just tackled successfully, and you'd just stop for a few minutes and look around to take in the scale of it. Video game graphics have improved to near photo-realistic levels since then, but you still find yourself stopping to admire the detail and beauty of the environments in this game. As for gameplay - thoroughly enjoyable, controls are fairly fluid, there's loads to see and do, excellent voice acting. On the downside, too many quick-time event sequences, and while I enjoy a good shoot-out there seemed to be loads of kill-all-the-baddies sections when a more involving story may have suited the character better. Those are pretty much my only criticisms. Well worth picking up during a sale.

A glorious homage to the original Alien film, capturing the look and sound perfectly and gradually introducing motifs from the original soundtrack throughout the game. Almost embarrassingly thrilling to discover voice-notes recorded by the original cast later in the game too. It completely immerses you in the Alien/Nostromo universe. Where it falls down for me is in mechanics - there seem to be very limited options for tackling the various adversaries you'll encounter, and while that fits in with the overall concept of the game and its vulnerable, human protagonist, it means that gameplay itself can become a faintly tedious creep-hide-creep-hide experience. Perhaps I approached it in the wrong way, expecting to be able to tackle an area with a combination of stealth and action - this game is not as flexible as say, Dishonored. Having said that, it does deliver in the tension department - hiding in a locker, drawing back and holding your breath (in game, and in real life!) when the Alien is right outside the door is just one example.

I've just finished the main story, have yet to try the other game modes and the DLC (a bit annoyed that the Season Pass doesn't include all of it, unlike Season Passes I've bought for other games), so will be going back to it, but I think I'm unlikely to replay the original game right through again. Even having said all this, the best Alien game I've ever played (and I go all the way back to 'Aliens' on the ZX Spectrum!).
Should mention the game seemed rather crash-prone on my normally reliable system, seems to have settled down after a recent large update but for a time it was impossible to get it to even get past the loading video without crashing to the desktop, but the following day it would work again.

Picked this up on sale, it's a blast. Not too taxing, car handling pretty good (CodeMasters seem to have a knack for it, all the way back to Colin McRae Rally on the PS1), nice variety of tracks and vehicles and it looks great (i3770, GTX660 here). There's not a huge amount of content, it doesn't take very long to finish all the races and the majority of the Joyride achievements but there's a little replay incentive with the choice of vehicles, and it's just plain good fun to load it up and speed around in a rally car. Very pleased to see the faithful ol' Mk2 Escort amongst the cars that can be won too!

On the face of it, 20 minutes walking through a dark forest but it's a case of less is more - very atmospheric and creepy - the soundtrack is amazing and all the more intense because you need to listen carefully in order to make it to the end. Worth a download just to experience it.

Great game, simple idea, easy to pick up, but can be tricky to beat. Great soundtrack too.

This is the game I installed Steam for, back in 2004. I have screenshots dated 19th of November 2004 onwards (HL2 released on the 16th) and having recently played through again just recently, the storyline, voice-acting,graphics and sheer emotional engagement still hold up, as does the vertigo-inducing bridge traversal section which is a video-game "15 minutes" that will stay with me forever, (that, and the entire Ravenholm section). This is a classic that every video game fan should play through at least once.

Good laugh, lots of tongue-in-cheek corny dialogue, nods to cheesy 80's sci-fi, with the added bonus of decent gameplay from FarCry 3, including plenty of enemy bases to attack (best part of FC3).

This is pretty good, huge open areas and lots to do, decent graphics even with basic video hardware (GT440 in this case, i7 though so perhaps CPU counts more). I found the (unskippable) storyline parts pretty underwhelming, but the voice acting was good throughout. The most enjoyable parts for me where attacking enemy bases, though the odds seem stacked against the player - once you reveal your position to the enemy, they can damage you with gunfire from vast distances when your carefully aimed sniper-fire misses. The (optional) hunting missions can be a bit tedious, but you get better gear if you complete them so they're worth persevering with. UPlay is required which is an added pain, but not quite enough to prevent purchase.

I love this game, and I can't pinpoint exactly why. Graphics are functional but nothing special, the faster cars handle very weirdly, combat can be irksome at times and gameplay does get repetitive once you've established a home-base that doesn't chew through resources at too high a rate and enough people to defend it. It's open-world,in a decently large but not vast map, sandbox with realistic limitations, some resource management but not too much to juggle. Decent voice-acting too.

Irritations - the odd glitchy graphic and mission objective here and there, constant reminders from the radio-op to do this, that and the other in-between her saying "you've been pushing yourself too hard, come back and rest" even though you can play as any character from your base of operations, the huge juggernaut zombies that immediately knock the rubber off the tyres of your car when you ram them. On other hand, the big kid in me enjoys knocking zombie heads off with machetes or guns, or mowing down hordes of undead in an SUV. Just got the Breakthrough DLC for $4 so back into the fray....