Recent reviews by Max Power

I really wanted to like this game. I tried over and over again, and never managed to get past the second or third zones. The atmosphere is great, and it does a good job of portraying a hopeless, apocalyptic environment.

But as a game, this is utterly terrible. Why? Because it requires as much skill as the old board game "Sorry!" In virtually every situation you encounter, you're 100% at the mercy of random dice rolls. Sure, you can decide when to eat, what items to carry, and where to go, but since the map screen is just a cluttered mess of featureless dots (and the occasional icon denoting a town), you really have no idea what you're getting yourself into. When scavenging cities, you get to pick how long you want to spend at each location and a percentage chance of alerting the undead, but once you make your selection you basically just cross your fingers and hope the dice don't hate you (spoiler alert: the dice gods absolutely despise me).

Combat is boring and uninteresting, with the absolute minimum token effort of "strategy" where you wait for the dice to hopefully throw up a number that allows you to damage the rotters. Character positions in relation to the undead is about all the direct control you have, and every battle boils down basically to walking from one side of the screen to the other, popping off shots or whacking the nearest zed until it dies or the horde gets too close. Rinse, repeat.

Random events involve a "right" and "wrong" choice, with occasional special options unlocked if you have a party member with the right skill. In every situation it's pretty much a coin toss as to whether or not something good or bad will happen.

Are you seeing the pattern here?

"But Max, FTL did the same thing, and it's great!" Fair point, but even though I share some similar frustrations with FTL, at least in that game combat is engaging and tactics play a very real, tangible part in the outcome of battles. I can deal with the random events and RNG elements quite well if I still feel like I'm actively participating in the game, and more than half of my losses can be racked up to a stupid or risky decision on my part that went south. In this game, I feel as though I have no control over what happens at all; I'm just a bystander occasionally clicking dialogue options basically at random to move the story along. And after a few dozen playthroughs, the story just isn't good enough to warrant my attention anymore.

At no time after I got the initial hang of the game did I ever walk away from a loss feeling anything other than irritable disgust at having just wasted my time with a pointless exercise in futility.

If you see this on sale for something like three to five bucks, and you REALLY like the Walking Dead atmosphere, then pick it up if you wish - I won't say I didn't get at least a shred of enjoyment out of it at first. But that fun will wear down VERY quickly, so if you want my brutally honest opinion, save your money and just spend 20 minutes calling coin flips with yourself. You'll get just as much fun out of that for free.

Thanks to this game, I now have an irrational fear of windows, mushrooms, and flickering light bulbs.

Phenomenal writing. Truly unique and original setting rich with lore. Total character customizability and freedom of choice. Brutal, punishing difficulty that revels in killing you over and over again, so you can start again with a better understanding of what it takes to survive in the harsh, unforgiving world of Qud.

Be a teleporting mind-reader, or a four-armed sword-wielding behemoth with horns. Hack off your enemies' limbs and bludgeon them to death with them, or slice off their face and wear it as a mask. Put on mechanical wings and fly above the battlefield, hosing your enemies with a tank-fed flamethrower, or do the same thing as a mutant with your own organic wings and the ability to shoot gouts of fire from your palms. Chisel through grainy sandstone walls with a pickaxe, or superheat metal with fire until it's reduced to a puddle of molten slag. Overwhelm your enemies with psionic attacks that render them little more than jabbering, disoriented cretins that stumble and trip over their own feet. Gather liquids to concoct your own tonics and remedies from ancient texts, or play around with them to see what happens if you mix a little of jar A and jar B.

Get infected by fungal spores and grow glowing tendrils on your back. Contract a disease that makes your tongue swell and rot away, leaving you only with the dialogue option of "Nnnnnnnnnnn." Douse yourself with your remaining supply of fresh water to put out your flaming clothes. Get sucked into a rip in the space-time continuum and ejected at an unknown location miles underground with no light source. Find yourself hunted by interdimensional psychics hell-bent on ending you at every turn.

This game is not for the faint of heart, but if you have a shred of imagination, do yourself a favor and get this game. Endure the initial learning curve and accept that you're going to die. A lot. Trust me, it's worth it.

Really wish Steam reviews offered a "meh" or "wait for further development" option. In its current state, I can't strongly recommend this game, but don't take that for outright disapproval.

Hear me out.

This is a VERY ambitious idea, and I love the concept. For an Early Access game, it looks phenomenal, and really captures the feeling of being isolated and alone in a forgotten, dead corner of space, light years away from civilization with no hope of rescue. It's probably one of the best implementations of zero-gravity movement I've ever seen in a video game (take that for what it's worth, as I'm no astronaut). Everything in space is in constant motion, and Newton himself would probably drool at how this is represented in Hellion. Ships, stations, drifting modules, and wreckage realistically orbits stellar bodies, and improperly maintained orbits will ultimately decay and slam into a planet, moon, or other object that crosses its path. Artificial gravity makes an appearance here, and while the science behind it is hand-waved, it's pretty hilarious to watch yourself tumble head over heels down a wall when you float down a zero-G corridor only to realize you've entered a room with gravity upside-down. Air pressure is accounted for in that blowing a pressurized airlock will blast you backwards away from the door, and here's hoping you've got enough propellant in your jetpack to counter your reverse motion and get you back. Otherwise, you're doomed to suffer a slow, agonizing death as your oxygen runs out.

The multiplayer aspect is where the game really shines. You can team up with a friend right from the start in the same location and work together to collect the resources you need to survive, expand your base, and fend off would-be thieves and pirates (all of whom are other players). I had a good time playing this alone, but wayyyy more fun with a friend. There's usually something for everyone to do, and it's really cool to be able to move around your starship checking systems or prepping the cargo bay while your buddy is plotting FTL courses and piloting the ship on approach to your destination.

However...

Ignoring the many, many complaints about the game's difficulty (which are semi-legitimate, as the game is punishingly difficult and utterly devoid of hand-holding, but hardly a deal breaker for me personally), it's important to note that the game is still very obviously in development and incomplete. There are a number of placeholders for planned features that do nothing currently, which is fine, but it's the numerous bugs that really undermine the otherwise exceptional scope of this game. I lost count of how many times I lost resources I spent hours collecting because of a glitch, or died because I logged off in my cryopod and came back another day to find myself drifting in space at a location I'd attempted to loot the day before with no means of return. Ship systems will freak out and stop working for no discernible reason, lag spikes will cause those last few inches of a docking approach to suddenly rubber-band out wide and send you bouncing off of the station tumbling on all three axes, and sometimes particular servers just decide not to let you log in at all.

Then there's the "Don't Panic" update. I really like the idea of maintaining a decaying habitat cobbled together out of salvaged modules and subject to constant barrages of micrometeorites and solar radiation, but the current implementation is just a *bit* too brutal in my opinion. Maintaining a station of any decent size requires a near-constant presence of players, otherwise hull breaches will vent all of your precious atmosphere while everyone's at work, school, sleeping, eating, spending time with family, or doing pretty much anything other than playing the game. It's a bit too demanding on a time investment to make it worth it in the long term. I don't necessarily want this aspect done away with, and I do understand some of the more practical reasons for it (keeping server clutter under control), but I think it could stand a bit of balancing and tweaking.

As such, once you've established a decent base for yourself and your buddies, things that started out being fun start to kind of devolve into trivial chores that *have* to be done if you want to keep playing, and pretty rapidly lose their charm.

So my "yes" recommendation is more of a "maybe." I'd say watch this one. If it looks or sounds fun right now, get it on sale. I got a solid 80+ hours of entertainment out of Hellion as it was as of the time of this review, which is as much or more than you'll get for a AAA game with a $60 retail price. If you're iffy, then hold off and wait for further development. I have a good feeling about this one.

It's Carmen Sandiego for grown-ups. Awesome.

While not quite as frightening as Amnesia, and with some of the hostile encounters slightly more irritating than unnerving, SOMA more than makes up for the (mild) loss of shart-your-pants factor in its presentation, and absolutely astounding story. At least once through the course of the narrative, you'll experience malaise, fool's hope, heart-racing terror, edge-of-your-seat anticipation, jubilous exhiliration, crushing despair, and just beneath the surface of it all, a sense of pure, blank loneliness.

I personally figured out the first major reveal pretty quickly, but it didn't stop me from continuing, and man am I glad I did. Stories that are this thought-provoking and deep are few and far between, and while it didn't confront me with any existential questions I have not at some point or another considered, nothing I can say would do the experience of its presentation justice, and I refuse to spoil the experience for anyone even slightly interested in going on this ride.

Alls I can say is, "WAU, this one's a gem."

Beautifully simple co-op shooter in the spirit of 1986's Aliens. Not often I have this much fun getting horribly killed time and time again.

Power cell depleted, firearms and flashlight non-functional, only weapon left is a wrench that's about to break. Down to 20% of my oxygen supply, tram station is three pitch-black, freezing, airless floors above me. I can hear a crowd of those things shrieking and clawing at the door to the closet I took cover in. I've been awake for almost 24 hours and can barely run.

Found one grenade in a drawer, and I have less than two hours to get back to Central before the generator overheats and I'm stuck here forever.

On top of it all, I seriously have to poop.

A game centered around the premise of the psychological impact of horrific experiences, this game is a pure gem. Not only is the Stress system a unique and original touch, the game is ruthless in its wonderfully Lovecraftian presentation, getting you attached to your characters just to force you to watch them be slowly driven insane before they're slaughtered before your eyes. Heroes will lose their will to fight, abuse their party members (thereby nudging them down the path of insanity as well), duck and run at a critical moment in a fight, steal loot from the group, or in the worst cases, simply have a heart attack and keel over dead in the darkness.

In your hamlet between adventures you can treat your afflicted characters by sending them to meditate, or to pray to their god, blow off steam by indulging their decadent tastes at the brothel, or drink themselves into a stupor. But even then, the imperfect characters may occasionally blunder, losing some of your valuables in their rambunctious recreation, or find themselves in trouble with the local authorities.

Don't expect an easy run from this game, either, and I caution you, if you're prone to swearing in frustrated anger at video games that rake you time and time again over the coals like I am, don't play it with your kids nearby. Even with careful resource management, meticulous planning, and well thought-out battle tactics, things will still go south at the worst possible moment, costing you one or more of your favorite heroes in a stroke of ill fortune. This is not a game for the faint of heart, or those expecting to be endowed with godlike "Chosen One" status.

This is a game about the dark aspects of humanity and its fragile, tenuous grasp on stability and sanity. And it's simply brilliant.

Easily the most true-to-roots video game adaptation of the original spirit of the Alien franchise I've ever seen. The old AvP games were great and all, but that was the approach best summed up in Vasquez's words: "LET's ROOOOOCK!"

No, this one puts you in the dirty, grimy claustrophobic retro-future dominated by sociopathic corporate suits, and never lets up on the high-pressure terror of constantly being hunted by an unstoppable menace. This is Alien at its finest.

The only minor gripe I had was that they characterized the classic Xenomorph XX121 more like a lumbering, tank-like behemoth rather than a cunning, agile master of stealth and ambush tactics, but that was relatively easy to overlook. The experience was nothing short of thrilling.