Recent reviews by Nudiustertian

I simply could not get through this. After 6 hours of mindlessly beating on bad guys while pressing dodge when the game told me to, the thought of doing this for hours and hours more just to get the details of the story is not the least bit appealing. Maybe it will "get better" once more abilities are unlocked, but I see no reason to waste time on that when there's better games to be played. In a world where the Arkham games exist, in a world where the Spider-Man games exist, this simply has no business taking up my time. This isn't good, nor is it terrible, it's just very humdrum, and that's probably the worst thing of all a game can be.

AKA Marvel's Arkham City. In terms of combat and stealth mechanics, narrative design and even some missions, it's pretty clear where Insomniac got their inspiration from. But since the Arkham series is widely acknowledged as the best approach to superhero games since sliced bread, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. The combat isn't a slavish carbon copy either: while the Arkham series was all about countering attacks and overpowering your opponents with shock and awe, Spider-Man is much more about dodging, staying mobile and not allowing your enemies to congregate around you, as befits the glass cannon that is Spider-Man.

Probably the best thing Spider-Man has going for it is the traversal. If there's one thing a Spider-Man game needs to get right it's the web-swinging, and boy did they get it right here. Wall-running, point to point zipping, free diving and hitting your swing just before hitting the ground, it all somehow never manages to get old, and all of it is fully available during combat as well. This is about the only game I can remember where I used the fast travel system primarily to unlock the achievement for having used it, instead of actually traveling. I mean, who wants to take the subway when you can swing around the city as Spider-Man? It's not perfect -- during missions where you have to chase someone around without letting them get too far away it's still uncomfortably easy to "lose" by getting a single swing wrong and finding yourself plastered onto a building that Spidey is none too eager to leave, which can be frustrating -- but I'm willing to chalk that up to a skill issue.

The game should also get props for offering you some interaction with the civilian population as a superhero. This is one thing that was notably missing from the Arkham games, which did everything they could in terms of story contrivance to ensure the city was devoid of civilians. Manhattan feels alive with people going about their daily business, getting into arguments (this is New York, after all) and gawking at Spider-Man when he walks among them, even though most of your time is spent on the rooftops. You even have random citizens who want to shake your hand, give you a side mission or, as it turns out, assassinate you (this is New York, after all). It's really just a bit of added flavor, but a very necessary bit of added flavor, as Spider-Man wouldn't be Spider-Man if he wasn't also friendly and neighborly.

The open world activities on offer are mostly fine, although some do get a bit repetitive. It's not just that you're doing the same thing, as that's the case in any open world game, but some events, like the car chase or the civilian rescue are literally the same thing every time, right down to the animations and button prompts. The first time you do these it's cool, all the other times it's just "oh this again". At least the combat events offer variation by virtue of you getting to decide how to beat up your enemies this time, even if the context remains the same. There's also the requisite collectibles to get (just one set of them, fortunately), pictures to snap and some "research" to do, which consists of thinly disguised traversal/move challenges, with highly variable levels of challenge and enjoyment. Overall it's a decent mix, even if the map is still a tad overcrowded with every event type popping up in every district.

Graphically the game needs to be called out for its wonderful vistas of scaled-down Manhattan you can get from every angle you want, as well as its modest but effective use of ray tracing. The game still looks excellent without any ray tracing (for starters, there's still reflections even if you turn it off, which is more than some games manage), but if your system supports it, seeing accurate reflections in the windows as Spider-Man is scaling buildings and the soft glow of lights in the rainy streets really does take it to the next level. An atmospheric soundtrack, which weaves in the heroic theme whenever it has the opportunity to do so, rounds out an audio-visually impressive package.

It's not all roses and sunshine, though. For reasons not entirely clear the game thinks it's necessary for us to play out part of the story as characters other than Peter, where you walk and stealth around and solve the occasional "puzzle" (I use the term loosely, as you're mostly hunting for the interaction prompt). These sections would have been perfectly fine as skippable cutscenes; I'm not sure why someone thought adding interactivity makes it better. It's one thing to have sections where you walk around as Peter Parker in the name of immersion, but the other bits really feel like a cheap way of padding the runtime without getting anything in return in terms of experience. And because they're stealth sections, attempting to rush through them to get it over with will only result in more frustration. Fortunately they're only a small part of the game in total, but the game still would have been better without them. Every time the game popped up a "15 minutes earlier..." prompt I dreaded what was coming next.

The boss battles are also no more than OK, since they're all basically the same: stay out of range and far dodge their attacks, pelt them with ranged attacks until they become vulnerable, zip to close range, pummel them a bit, rinse and repeat for two or three more times and you're done. The only really memorable boss battle is the last one, but that has more to do with the story reaching its climax and the emotional payoff rather than the mechanics. I'm honestly not sure how the battles could have been made more interesting without making them frustrating, but then I'm not a game designer.

Marvel's Spider-Man is a strong recommend for anyone who liked the Arkham games, fans of Spider-Man even if they don't like the gameplay (as you can turn down the difficulty to story mode) and generally anyone who enjoys a good open world game backed by a solid narrative. I'm looking forward to playing the rest of the series.

If you got this in the latest Humble Bundle and are wondering if you should get the Season Pass to complete your game -- in my opinion as someone who liked the base game and has completed it: no, not even at the 60% discount it currently sits at. Maybe if you're a massive fan of any of the DLC characters, but probably not even then, since the added gameplay and story is rather lackluster. Deadpool in particular is pretty terrible in terms of gameplay, and he's not half as funny as they could have made him, since they still had to stick to a PG rating. The extra story bits you get are basically bolted on and completely separate from the main campaign, so you don't need it for that either.

If you didn't already feel the need to pull the trigger on the Legendary Edition before, the bundle probably shouldn't motivate you to spend more money. If the discount ever gets to 75% or something it's worth considering, but this is Firaxis, so no telling if that will ever happen.

Hogwarts Legacy is an open world game that immerses you in the world of the Harry Potter books. Duel wizards, dodge acromantulas, catch fantastic beasts after discovering where to find them, fly your broom dangerously close to the ground, find the Room of Requirement, it's all here. You won't be interacting with any actual characters from the books, as the game is set about a century in the past to allow for an original story without canon interfering, but other than that it's about as authentic an experience as you could hope for. The game's best moments are at the beginning, as you're exploring Hogwarts, which is faithfully recreated with all the little details from the books, and a few more besides. Later on you'll get to see all the shops in Hogsmeade as well, and after that the relatively sparse open world of the Scottish highlands unlocks. These first hours are well worth the price of admission on their own.

Unfortunately, for me the game doesn't manage to keep up this level of engagement. Hogwarts Legacy succumbs to a problem that plagues many open world games, in that there's lots of things to do for the sake of having lots of things to do, but none of those things are interesting. There's very little here in the way of surprises or side quests that deviate from the norm, and those that do tend to be highly scripted. To give you some idea of how exciting things can get: one of the "Merlin" challenges (left by the legendary wizard himself) consists of... hopping across three pillars without falling. That's it, just jump three times and that's one more challenge completed... only umpteen more to go. Thanks, Merlin! Some challenges can be particularly annoying because you won't be able to complete them without the appropriate spell at hand, but the game isn't going to tell you what spell that might be -- so after exhausting your arsenal you have no choice but to leave it alone and find something else you can do. Fortunately most of this stuff can be ignored if you don't care for it, but you'll still be made to sit through lots of tutorials for it as the main story rolls along.

As far as that main story goes, in the best tradition of open world games it's both perfectly linear and unnecessarily drawn out, as the focus is more on making the player explore all the mechanics in the game. The actual events could be summarized in a few paragraphs without losing anything essential, but as we need to keep the player busy you can expect lots of sidestepping, gradual revealing and "sorry Harry, your artifact is in another castle" twists. As stories go it's perfectly serviceable, but you'll find yourself in more "follow character to location/talk to character/follow them to another location" sequences than seems necessary. In terms of roleplaying, your character's appearance and gear are highly customizable, but you won't get any actual opportunities to play a role -- every interaction with characters gives you only the "agree with enthusiasm" and "agree with less enthusiasm" options, and it doesn't matter to the completely linear story which one you pick. There's a slight variation in the story depending on which house you choose to get sorted in, as there are slightly different initial side quests leading up to the main story, but after that it's the same, and the variations are not worth replaying the game with all the unskippable introduction material just to see those.

The combat is quite dynamic and gives you a lot of room to experiment with different spells and combinations. When it all comes together you can feel like an unstoppable powerhouse as you zip through groups of enemies, immobilizing them left and right while redirecting attacks back to them, but the variety in both enemies and attacks is limited and bosses tend to be little more than health sponges that shrug off most spells, requiring you to just keep dodging and casting the spells that do work until the "launch powerful attack" meter finally fills up. It's fun for a few encounters, but not endlessly satisfying in a way that leaves you excited for the next group of enemies to dispatch in creative ways. Keyboard controls deserve to be singled out here for being especially clunky; the game was clearly designed around a controller, and you'll often need multiple key presses for no other reason than that the controller needs multiple button presses.

With all that said, if you're at all into the Harry Potter universe, I'd recommend this based on nothing more than the fun you can have exploring Hogwarts and flying around on your broom -- it really is that entertaining, and the level of detail is fantastic (if your hardware allows for it). For the rest of the game it depends a lot on how much tolerance you have for the quantity-over-quality approach that comes with the open world "challenges". Personally I stop enjoying a game if it becomes nothing more than a list of chores to check off without a main gameplay loop to back it up, but I know there's a big audience out there who enjoy it as a more laid back approach to gaming, and for those an open wizarding world might be the best of both.

Midnight Suns is a mixed bag -- almost literally. The game is a mix of three separate components loosely tied together:

1. Turn-based, tactical strategy that revolves around careful choices of moves and positioning rather than RNG;
   
2. An open "world" (a single map, really) with a bunch of collectables and crafting;
   
3. A superhero-themed social simulator where you play out slice of life scenes and guess at which responses will make people like you the most.

Of these, the strategy part is the thing that provides the actual entertainment and is what you're paying the price of admission for. The open world bit is just sort of there to keep you busy in between missions, and the social simulator bits... well, I'll come to that later.

The turn-based strategy is fresh and interesting. Despite being made by Firaxis, this is not "XCOM with Marvel heroes" at all -- every attack always hits and you know in advance how much damage you'll do, there's no two-point system for making moves but instead a system where you can reposition one character as much as you want before finalizing (normally only once per turn, though) and the moves you can make each turn are drawn at random from the collective pool of abilities you equipped on your heroes, each of which has their own distinct play style. The battlefield is strewn with environmental hazards that you can bump enemies into for extra damage or instant kills, and every move either generates or consumes "heroism" points, with mundane attacks generating them and high-damage flashy abilities consuming them.

It's challenging in the best sense of the word, and there are so many different heroes, abilities and modifiers that you can have many hours of fun figuring out new strategies for cards and heroes that work well together. At the highest difficulty levels, where enemies retaliate with deadly force, you have to be so careful about what to play, and when, and how, that the game almost starts to feel like a puzzle game where you either play optimally or die horribly -- in fact, the challenges for each hero to unlock their legendary abilities are straight up puzzles. But if you're just here for the superhero power fantasy and puzzling is not your thing, don't worry -- the game has no less than 8 difficulty settings, on a gradual curve from "you basically can't lose" to "make one mistake and it's over", with the higher levels gradually unlocking the more successful you are on the lower levels.

The open world stuff is nothing special; you've seen this a hundred times before. There's a plethora of object collections you can complete and "mysteries" to investigate (which all really boil down to finding even more objects), some parts are blocked off and only opened up later as you've completed other bits, the works. Almost all of it is optional in the sense that the resources you get from this can also be obtained as rewards from missions (unless you really want those palette swaps you can only get from loot chests, I guess) and the bits of the backstory you uncover that really matter end up in conversations and cutscenes anyway, so you can do as much or as little of it as you please. It's not bad, but it's pretty obviously busywork.

And speaking of busywork, we get to the social simulator bits, and this is where things start to unravel. In terms of gameplay, you interact with characters to level up your "friendship", which in turn unlocks passive bonuses and legendary abilities. Lest you think this gives you some kind of opportunity to roleplay being part of your favorite superhero team, you'd best temper those expectations: your responses are limited to "light", "dark" and "neutral" reactions, and you will want to pick the ones that level up your own character and/or friendship as effectively as possible, as anything else basically punishes you. And no, you're not going to be kissing Captain America in the broom closet either, all your relationships (or "friendship levels", more accurately) are strictly platonic. Gazing at the stars is as far as you'll get, which is treated no different from fishing, gathering mushrooms, and all the other exciting things superheroes get to do when they're not punching bad guys through apartment blocks.

Rarely has a high stakes story been so undercut by requiring the player to sit through story vignettes where characters do the most mundane stuff imaginable as part of their downtime -- not by choice but as part of the leveling mechanic. It can lead to serious tonal whiplash where one moment you're returning from a mission where the bad guys have advanced their ridiculously circuitous plot for world domination by leading you into a trap and the team is at its lowest point, and the next moment you're sitting with the monthly meeting of the book club that Blade started because he's too shy to directly ask Captain Marvel out on a date. That's not me making a joke, by the way, this is a thing that actually happens in the game. The problem here is not that the story or the characters are badly written; on the contrary, every character here is faithful to their depiction in the comics. It's just that the interactions are so frequent and at the same time so anemic (and on occasion, animated in such a lackluster way, with characters standing around like zombies) that the best friend you'll have in the game is the button you use to skip the scenes. It's really rather sad when the aforementioned book club subplot ends up as one of the most interesting parts of the (side) story.

As far as recommendations go, even though everything that's not the strategy game severely overstays its welcome, the strategy game is enough to sell it. On PC you have the added bonus that there are mods to reduce the grind and tedium of the other bits, and it's very telling that those mods are among the most popular (well, after the nude mod for the ladies, of course, because gamers). Personally I would be surprised if we ever get a Midnight Suns 2, but I would love to see the ideas on display here make a return in some form or another, even if it's not Marvel themed.

Get this if:

• You like games that use cards for moves.
  
• You like games that are easy to pick up but hard to master.
  
• You don't mind butting your head against an RNG until you figure things out.

Don't get this if:

• You want complete freedom to tinker with your deck.
  
• You want every playthrough to have an obvious way to win.
  
• You're easily frustrated by randomness.

Slay the Spire is a randomized dungeon crawler (I won't call it a roguelike, since it lacks too many elements of a traditional roguelike for that) where you fight using cards, which you obtain with one encounter at a time. This is not a deck builder where you're free to pick and choose the cards you're going to use throughout the rest of a run. Each defeated enemy gives you an option of three random cards, of which you are free to pick one -- or none, which is often the better choice. Besides fighting enemies, there are also random events that can give you cards, and shopkeepers that give you the option of purchasing cards, or removing a card (as well as pick up helpful other items).

At first sight, it may seem like this means you're completely at the mercy of the RNG (and a common complaint of new players is that the game serves up "impossible" situations), but it's more subtle than that. The choice of what cards to pick and what cards to leave is still up to you (as is the encounters you choose on your path), and over time you'll learn various archetypes and card synergies that will make or break a deck. Slay the Spire is big on the metagame: it's not so much about how you use the individual cards (tactics), but how you've learned to build decks out of them (strategy). Experienced players can make almost any run work, but expect to invest a lot of hours if you want to become one of those players. To give you an idea: I'm far from an expert myself, and after 165 hours of playtime, I barely win 1 in 6 runs, whereas pros can actually boast a win streak.

Slay the Spire is not for everyone. It has a seductively quick loop where every run takes at most an hour, giving that "just one more run" feeling every time you die horribly halfway, but that's all the reward it'll give you. Early on, there are some cards and relics that will unlock, but after that you're only in it to win it. And winning it requires that you enjoy looking back on what you did wrong so you can improve next time, or else you'll just be left cursing the RNG and how things just aren't fair. If sinking a lot of hours into carefully refining long-term strategies for winning a game sounds like fun to you, Slay the Spire may be just the thing. If you want a card game where you build decks in complete freedom, or something that offers immediate gratification, you may want to look elsewhere.

As for recommending it, that's easy. I first saw people streaming playthroughs of the game, and after getting annoyed at seeing them make bad plays, I knew I had to try it myself. Now I can make bad plays and lose on my own! This is the first and to date only game I've bought in Early Access, and it's been more than worth it.

If I could describe Orwell in just two words, it would be "surprisingly smart". By that I mean: this is, obviously, a game about ubiquitous government surveillance, and that's not exactly a new theme. It would have been really easy to slap a "Big Brother BAD" plot on this, make it all about how you're one lone hero fighting the implacable government machine, give it a nice feel-good ending and be done with it. Or go the other way and go full grimdark with the boot stamping on a human face, forever. But Orwell avoids taking the easy way out, and presents a very human story about how real people might act in a world where such a surveillance system exists. Sure, all the endings you can get (and there's a few) are still much more optimistic than George Orwell would be comfortable with, but hey, if you want Nineteen Eighty-Four, you know where to get it.

The gameplay is a simple affair where, in your role as a government agent, you look through available information (websites, chat transcripts, telephone calls) and collect relevant "data chunks", which in turn unlock more avenues for gathering information... and that's less boring than I'm making it sound, honest. For starters, it's not completely linear: sometimes the data you can collect is contradictory, irrelevant, or just plain wrong when taken out of context, and you have to apply your best judgement as to what goes in -- and the very fact that you're telling the system what to think of people based on the information you select comes back to haunt you in the story. Still, if you're looking for a puzzle game, or something that will challenge you beyond "did I forget to click on something somewhere", this isn't it. You're basically here for the story, but there's enough agency that you don't feel like you might as well have been reading a novel.

Orwell isn't perfect. I got "stuck" once or twice when the game wanted me to put in some information I had deemed not worth uploading, or that I'd left to come back to later when I had more data -- the interface will track what you have and haven't seen, but not what you've seen but haven't acted upon. At these points (and some others) suspension of disbelief suffers a bit by the way the game artificially fences off information that, logically, should be available at any time. The graphics, while suitably stylized, are a bit too stylized, especially when things need to animate. The music is fine (with some dramatic touches for when you've uncovered particularly dramatic info), but not remarkable. None of these things are deal breakers, though, and overall Orwell is well worth its price tag as a solid, interactive story experience with an "It Could Happen Here!" theme that makes it that much more compelling.

STEAM-ID 76561197993673688

• Has posted a review on Orwell where he recommends it

Well, after 3.6 total hours of gameplay, I finally managed to beat the first stage -- as in, surviving it for 60 seconds. Maybe, if I'm really diligent, I'll beat the second one some day! The third... I'm really not seeing that. And after that come the really difficult levels.

Super Hexagon is twitch gaming at its most distilled. The screenshots tell you everything really: your job is to rotate a triangle around a center point in such a way that it won't hit the oncoming bands of color heading towards it, going either left or right. That's it, those are all the rules. It's just you, the game, and your reflexes.

Calling Super Hexagon unforgiving is beside the point: it lives in its own universe of abstraction where concepts like "forgiveness" are utterly meaningless. It is definitely fair, though, in that you and you alone are responsible for success and failure, with failure just being a lot more likely. But oh, does every extra second you manage to survive feel like a wonderful victory.

Not recommended for people with photosensitive epilepsy or people who are easily frustrated -- for both categories, this game is a health hazard. Recommended for people who like twitch games, and at a sale, even for people who don't, just so they can remind themselves why they don't like twitch games.

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Damn you, Hyper Hexagonest. Damn your black soul to hell!

Batman - The Telltale Series is Batman, as a Telltale series. No false advertising here. Telltale means you'll get an adventure with choices in dialogue and action, mixed with some sequences of quick time events. There's no inventory, and there are a few "puzzles" that aren't worthy of the name and just there to add flavor (gotta keep those detective skills up). If you have experience playing any of the Arkham games, it's a bit like the detective sequences in those, only even simpler. Expect no great intellectual challenges here, just a laid back story experience where you get to make a choice every now and then.

If you have experience with Telltale games, you'll know by now that the games are much better at presenting the illusion of choice rather than actual choice, and this one is no different. In fact, there's only one major branch in the story (in the sense that events are substantially different), but it's a branch of the form "does X happen before Y, or Y before X", so they quickly meet up again. Every other choice you make at best has a slight effect on how the main events unfold, but those main events will always unfold. For every "X will remember this", you can't tell if "remembering" means they'll act any differently, but they probably won't. Initially, the game seems to be setting up an intriguing dilemma of "who do you trust with your secrets", implying that you have to pick a side, but this never really goes anywhere. Characters may express approval or disapproval of how you've been doing things, but beyond some initial dialogue they won't act any differently. Choice, yes. Consequences, not really. Of course, this only becomes really noticeable if you replay the game, and replaying the game also means redoing all the fixed sequences, which a bit of a chore. You would replay this once out of curiosity, but no more than that.

The lack of real choice doesn't mean you end up with a bad story. The story starts off strong, gets a twist in the middle that plays nicely on your preconceived notions of what's going to happen (if you already know your Batman lore) and then unfortunately dips at the end with a lackluster conclusion followed by an almost obligatory cliffhanger/sequel hook. The confrontation with the main villain at the end, in particular, feels like it could have been much more than what we get. There was a rich opportunity to draw on the parallels between Batman and the villain, but nothing is really done with this, so that you're only left with a QTE sequence as they duke it out in fisticuffs. Overall, the story suffers from the same problem a lot of Batman stories do: as you progress you get the uncomfortable feeling that the villains aren't all that wrong, and Batman isn't all that right -- which is good if you explore that as a theme, but the game doesn't do that (nor does it really have room to do that, given its format). It's nice that you get to choose your "style" of Batman, but the lack of real consequences ultimately makes that a lot less interesting than it could have been. There's a lot of room for choice even with a relatively fixed character like Batman, and I'd love to see a game that really tries. This isn't it.

Graphically, the game looks fine, but with noticeable frame rate drops that absolutely have no business being there when running on the kind of hardware I ran it on (16 GB RAM, SSD, GTX 1070). Fortunately this only happened to me on scene transitions and not (noticeably) during action scenes, so gameplay wasn't affected, but even so -- when your cel-shaded adventure game has worse performance than Arkham Knight, you know you're doing something wrong. (For that matter, when your story is ultimately less engaging than that of Arkham Knight, you're doing something wrong.) The music is fine, if unremarkable (it doesn't feature any of the old Batman themes, but then I didn't expect it to). The voice acting is excellent all around.

If you're a Batman fan and you're not averse to the Telltale brand of semi-interactive fiction, this is worth getting on a sale -- not at full price. If you're not a Batman fan, I wouldn't recommend this on its own merits at all. I'm giving it a thumb's up because I feel I got my money's worth, but I can't shake the feeling that it could have been much more, and I doubt I'll be picking up the sequel any time soon.

Well, um, that happened.

Originally posted by Joseph Bernstein, Buzzfeed:

One of the things independent games ask us to do is accept that a three-minute game can be as valid as a thirty-hour one. Games like these make it hard to disagree.

Yeah? Well, I find it not the least bit hard to disagree, mainly because this is not a game. You can't win or lose this. You can call it an experience, or an experiment, and that doesn't make it better or worse than games, but it is not a game. Call me a conservative stick in the mud for applying categories here, but when you've got reviewers spouting off nonsense like this I think some pushback is in order.

Do I recommend this "game"? Look, it's free, it's (very) short, it's inoffensive, there's some nice images of the Horsehead Nebula in the background and the whole thing is set to Grieg's "The Death of Åse", which, in its simplicity and tragedy, somehow fits a narrative about a fly perfectly. It doesn't have enough running time to become pretentious and reading this very review takes more time than actually going through it -- it would be the height of spite for me to give it the thumbs down. But if you seriously think some great masterpiece is being presented here (or even "[an] experimental deliberation on the meaning of life"), you've been bamboozled.