Recent reviews by Zelnyair

It's a fun, frequently hectic game (in the best possible sense). Effectively, it's a reflex and typing-based game where you have to prepare and serve food by pressing the right keys to make and serve the right orders.

The game has a delightfully quirky sense of humour to it, but I wouldn't recommend playing if you feel hungry!

I'd recommend starting out with this game over the original. The original isn't bad, but this game streamlined a lot of controls and made it less about key tapping and doesn't use the arrow keys. It has better controls and more food to make, so I'd start here.

Definitely a quirky game that's fun to dip into, that can go from easy to punishingly frantic on later levels. Absolutely recommend playing it.

It's much easier to say "Pick up and play Five Nights at Freddy's" to understand what the game is, than to describe it, but that's kind of obnoxious to say that and leave it there. It's actually because the game is rather simple, as opposed to complex.

Five Nights at Freddy's is a game that costs less than a footlong Subway sandwich, and lasts only a small amount longer, so perhaps simplicity and shortness are to be expected.

It's essentially a point and click, first person horror game. You're a night shift security guard confined to an office the whole game, and you have to (like the title implies) survive five in-game nights at Freddy's, a failing pizzeria in the vein of Chuck E.Cheese's, in order to win.

Each night, the four animatronics in the restaurant will try to slip into your office and kill you. The only way to defend yourself is with two sets of doors and lights, and a monitor of the camera feeds, in order to locate where everyone is. The problem is, though, that using the doors, lights (that show up anyone outside your door) and monitor will increase the rate that the nightly-allocated amount of power is drained.

It's a game where vigilance and observation will get you far, as well as managing your power. If you run out of power, then you're completely vulnerable to attack, so the game trades off how quickly you can look and react with how accurately you can look at the environment.

At least in my own opinion, the game does the horror element exceedingly well. I cannot speak for how another person would react to it, but the horror element is exemplary. The creepy ambient sounds, such as footsteps, breathing, demonic laughter and childish laughter, coupled some audio cues and nothing in the way of music except for Freddy's tune (a music box version of The Bullfighters' March from Carmen) make the game feel very tense to play.

There's some visual elements of horror. The animatronics can appear to shift positions, or even stare at the camera when you check and double check on them in the monitor. Background elements can subtly change between viewings. You can flick the lights on to see the animatronics gleefully smiling at you when you light them up. The animatronics may be cartoony and colourful, but there is a certain 'soulless' quality to their eyes, mouths and faces in particular- it's a game that is clearly playing off the fear anyone had of animal animatronics as a kid. FNaF is a very dark game, so it pays to give lots of attention to being obsevant- it is not very well lit at all, intentionally. We're talking about a game whose wiki has brightened versions of screenshots in order to help you better see it. If we're being cynical, it could be argued the game is dark to mask the graphical fidelity.

There is psychological horror in the tense, creepy atmosphere, but the game is also full of jumpscares. These mainly happen when you get caught by the animatronics, so the game might not appeal if you don't like jumpscares- if you don't like the characters literally being 'in your face'.

FNaF is over in about an hour, tops, but it packs in a lot of creepiness, horror and jumpscaring. The mechanics give a less-is-more vibe, and it's very competent at what it does.

I believe it's a game that's worth playing, but not for the faint of heart, or for those with poor eyesight.

In summary, it's a short but sweet horror game that delivers well on the horror and scares, that's intuitive to pick up and play, with some easy-to-learn-hard-to-master mechanics. It's not a game for everyone, but if you're prepared to risk being scared a few times, it's worth it.

Deus Ex is probably best described as a first-person RPG. Set in the near future, you take the role of JC Denton, a nanomachine-enhanced agent working for UNATCO (United Nations Anti-Terrorism Coalition), and set out to foil terrorists and terrorism plots. I'm not going to spoil the story, but I think in general it's compelling.

The gameplay is sublime in that it offers you a variety of ways to approach your objectives, coupled with some of the best level design I've seen in any game.

One way of breaking down the game is that you'll receive mission objectives: find this, kill this person, get into this building and so on, but you usually have multiple approaches as to how you tackle them.

Deus Ex has you find and use the weapons and tools you find in the environment. In that respect it is familiar ground if you're used to old-school Doom/Quake/Duke Nukem-style first-person shooters. However, unlike those, that primarily focus on the shooting (of course), in Deus Ex it's generally an equally viable option to use stealth and incapacitation to acheive your goals Or, you can be sneaky in an alternative way and take the cyber warfare route- hack computers to open doors for you if you don't want to look around for the door code, or if you don't have a lockpick to use on it.

Your inventory has limited space (think of your items as shapes on a grid that you have to try and slot together as best you can), and the skill points system means that you'll place different emphases on different items. Some will be more useful to some players than others.

The skills system is the most prominent RPG element. As you explore places and complete goals, you will earn skill points that can be invested into different skills in order to level them up. Do you want to upgrade your skill with rifles, so it's easier to kill them with a sniper or assault rifle, for instance? Maybe you could use the points to upgrade your hacking abilities instead. Maybe you can use them so that you can heal more health with medkits? Your choice, and in general, neither option is 'wrong'. There's a nice tradeoff between "Do I drop my rebreather so I can pick up the knife?", for instance, and "I've found an underwater passage- I wish I didn't drop my rebreather", if that makes sense.

The level design is great, and complements the wide variety of options. For instance, you'll usually find a door code written down somewhere if you aren't able to hack it open. You can usually disable alarms that would attract enemies... Or you can shoot your way through them if you're feeling confident. There's a wide variety of options to access areas in most instances- it is pleasingly complex.

Regarding shooting... it's a double-edged sword. Deus Ex has combat in it. It's certainly permissible to upgrade the different weapon types and kill enemies that way, but it's.... I'm trying to think of how to put it.... It's not that it's not a shooter, or you can't play it like a shooter, but it really is not like Doom, for instance, where it's not an option to avoid your enemies, really.

The way the weapons work is that you keep your aim on the enemy for a few seconds in order to make the shot accurate. You can find in-game weapon mods that increase clip size, accuracy, add scopes and silencers for instance, but in general it means that if the game becomes a firefight with you and a bunch of terrorists, you will be likely to miss a lot if you keep moving around. This is in contrast to the likes of Doom, that relied on you moving out the way of enemy fire, and never penalised your accuracy for it. Here it's slower, and dare I say, a bit clumsier, because, well, it's just not a straight-up shooter. It doesn't seem to be designed like an FPS, put simply.

Basically, if Deus Ex were only a FPS, it would not compare that well to the classic PC shooters- Doom/Quake/Duke Nukem etc.

As it stands though, it's a fantastic game, with intricate level design that allows multiple angles of attack, as well as multiple tools and skills that allow you to choose your approach, and by extension, how you choose to play the game, without seeming like you're forced onto one track, the mentallity of "I put points in lockpicking, so I have to keep picking my way through doors each time.". Nope- perfecly feasible to look around for a code if you feel like it.

It's a fantastic example of level and gameplay design, Deus Ex. Thoroughly recommend.

The Unreal Tournament 2004 mod (and running on the same engine, still)), Killing Floor is now a full-fledged game all of its own.

Killing Floor does not do a lot, but it does it well. The idea is simple- you and up to six other people go and clear a map of all the ZEDs (the official name for the game's monsters- they're basically zombies for most intents and purposes). After each wave, you have a limited time to find the Trader to buy and sell weapons and restock your ammo. When the timer elapses, her doors shut and then you're left to fend for yourselves and kill another wave of zombies. This culminates in the final battle against the Patriarch.

There are a few things going for the game. It's class-based, and it has a progressive levelling system. The more you play, the more experience towards a level-up you'll get, making you stronger. It's a simple idea to keep you coming back for more. Enemy variety is great- they all have strengths and weaknesses much like the player classes. From the invisible Stalker to the fireball-shooting Husk to the fearsome monstrosity the Fleshpound, it keeps the game feeling fresher for longer.

The game looks perhaps a bit dated (it runs on a 2004 engine, after all), depending on your set-up, but it's very visceral. Hack s zombie's head off their neck, and they'll spurt blood, for instance. Headshots will often make brain matter explode out of them in a gory fountain. Shooting high explosives at them reduces them to a bloody mist that feels very satisfying.

The greatest strength to the game, though, is the gunplay. Weapons feel weighty and punchy. Guns handle well- there's no crosshair, so use aim-down-sights effectively unless you practice a lot with hip-firing. Guns handle well because they have kick- they will move about from where you pointed them if you keep your finger on the trigger, much like a real gun. Some of the best gunplay in a shooter.

Another great asset to the game is that it balances difficulty and co-operation well. It's natural to assume you fight more zombies (which you get two dozen or more at a time on screen) with more players, but zombie health will also go up, in addition to the difficulty you fight on. It's a fantastic way of high-risk, high-reward, since levelling up is often dependent on the total damage your class has inflicted.

Killing Floor has seasonal Summer, Halloween and Christmas event to liven things up, and it receives regular updates as well as some free content such as new weapons in addition to all the maintenance- weapon balance and so on.

It's a game that's a bit of a one-trick pony in that it's a wave-based shooter- that's all it does, but it does that exceptionally well. It's a master of its craft.

Take the role of Dust, an enigmatic warrior who wakes up in a glade one day with no recollection of who he is. Together with the sage Blade of Ahrah and its cute Nimbat guardian, Fidget, the trio set off to explore the magical land of Falana to try and get back Dust's memories.

Dust: An Elysian Tail has a lot of Metroid and Castlevania in its makeup. You'll be doing things like backtracking, and finding areas that you can't initially access. You'll have bosses to fight and goodies to find- it's that sort of game. Refreshingly old-school in many ways. The action is more akin to a brawler, however. Something like the Shank games, Odin Sphere or Muramasa: The Demon Blade.

Options-wise, the game supports an XBox 360 controller if you wish to play with that, but there are no inherent drawbacks to using the mouse and keyboard over the controller. You can rebind the keys for your convenience if you wish as well. It's like you could barely tell this was originally a console game!

One great plus is that colour-blind mode is present, which will give you a text indicator of what colour the gates in the game are (I don't think this is giving much away, but you will collect different coloured gems to open up corresponding coloured gates). It's not something that is a personal issue, but it is hard to see how this would be a bad thing.

Another great option is HUD scaling. You can alter the size and position of all the HUD's elements- the health bar etc. This can greatly increase gameplay comfort and pleasure.

This is probably the most crucial factor- the game runs smoothly, like warm butter on toast. You have different resolution options, but it ran on my laptop, 4GB RAM, Intel i5 dual core processor, without any slowdown or any performance hindrance that was noticeable. It did not crash once. I can only imagine how well it runs and how great it looks on more powerful machines.

It just seems incredibly well-optimised for computers. It's just excellent, in that respect.

*Ahem* gameplay. Dust's bread and butter is a chain system. You have a few different sword combos you can perform, as well as Fidget being able to shoot magic bolts. The higher the combo chain you can get without breaking it, the more experience you can gain. Get enough, and you'll level up, getting a skill gem to put into a stat you wish to improve (HP, damage etc). You can also parry and counterattack if you have a good sense of timing, in addition to being able to dodge your enemies' strikes. There's also a light economy and crafting system. You can get some equipment to enhance your stats, and you can also collect dropped items and make them into new equipment.

The mouse is incredibly responsive when it comes to attacking, and combat is generally satisfying. You can fairly easily go flying through the air like a whirlwind of destruction! The chain system is something that gives you more reward, more experience, the better you are at it, encouraging you to hone your skills.

Beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder, but the game looks gorgeous, in terms of both art and animation. There's a hand-drawn cartoon style to the characters, all of whom are anthropomorphic animals, making look like the best Don Bluth movie he never made. That's meant with the highest respect. Backgrounds have a nice painted style to them like something out of Rayman, and Dust has some idle animations, again, an old-school throwback. It's a world crafted with a lot of love, with lots of different environments and terrain to go through as well. Colourful, but dark when the environment calls for it.

The story is generally very compelling and well-written, with one or two twists and turns that you may have not seen coming. It's a script that also has a few game references, but doesn't relentlessly shove it in your face that it's trying to reference something. It's rather sensible and grown-up in that respect. The voice acting is generally well done, also. If you have a discerning ear, you can possibly pick out slight differences in audio quality, but it's nothing serious enough to wreck your experience. The soundtrack, by Hyperduck Soundworks, is particularly exceptional, with music that fits the mood of each area well.

Length-wise the game will clock in at approximately 8-10 hours, depending on your pace, but the length can easily double if you pursue all the collectibles and side-quests.

In terms of downsides or nit-picking, the game is arguably on the easy side, but you can remedy this if you play on Hard or Insane difficulties. It depends a bit on how well-seasoned with games you are.

Another limitation for some is that there is only the one weapon that you stick with throughout. You can't unlock or use different weapons, nor can you unlock different combo attacks. You can get, without giving too much away, new abilities, or variations on what you have, but you can't get a bona fide new weapon or any new combos. The upgrade system when you level up is rather linear- you can put points, as it were, into any skills, but you can't go too far into one stat compared to the others. It's strictly making you tougher, stronger and so on. No new attacks or anything special like that.

It's a game that's very much worth your time. You will not regret playing it, I have that much confidence in the title.