Recent reviews by Shax

18 minutes, 11 deaths (10 to the second boss, useless tips, a game that learnt all the wrong lessons from Dark Souls. It's not fun going straight into a game with nothing to practice the mechanics on but beating your head facefirst into a boss who can do upwards of 80% of your hp in one attack with nothing but a very tediously weak Rally system to recover from your mistakes with. In Dark souls you could at least step back to relative safety, get your bearings and heal up before going back into it.

Probably the best grind game per dollar in existence, with no microtransactions (do cosmetic DLC count? I don't recall these days) to speak of. One of the few companies I even feel remotely comfortable supporting anymore.

Best damn left4dead-alike on the market. But also a filthy money grubbing Games Workshop of one. Don't be fooled - don't buy anything that isn't on sale.

Hey, you see that number of hours? If you like alternative history, map painting, or grand strategy in general, you're going to die.

-This post sent from my DeadPhone

This review mostly concerns Liberation, not III.
Crashy, laggy, questionable connection to the ubiservers. Tutorials that come up CONSTANTLY and block up parts of the screen. Holds your hand or outright railroads you through huge sections of the plot. Has a central conceit that concerns a choice of approaching problems yet usually only lets you even try one approach.

Liberation is a really fascinating experiment on Ubisoft's part, but they seem to have no understood what the point of an experiment is. When you conduct an experiment in a business and artistic sense, you strike out and do a small job with a dedicated team, which Liberation received. You don't then expect it to sell gangbusters. Instead you evaluate the end product and incorporate its good ideas and strip its bad ones into your future work. No such thing happened to Liberation - I can't find any trace of its unique ideas heading downstream in later Creed titles. And its unique ideas, when it actually lets you use them and works properly, are gorgeous and fascinating. The different ways the city of new orleans evolves over the plot and the way it shifts the effectiveness and roles of the different personae Aveline can adopt is magnificent, and if you're interested in experiments of this kind it's worth the price of admission when steeply on sale.

But don't expect to have a good time.

An absolutely masterful perfectionist game, in the vein of Hotline Miami but with a more beautiful, poignant atmosphere and less grungy.

Unambiguously the best roguelike I've ever played, and very nearly the best metroidvania (sorry, Prime is still at the top of my heart). Go faster, kill harder, die a lot.

Hey, you, you wanna, uh, play some tabletop games?

Well there ain't no better deal on doing just that. You can even recruit total randos to play with if your friends are unreliable bastards.

A pretty fantastic, polished clone of Race the Sun with a leaderboard. It's adapted from a mobile game and so has some quirks and is light on content, but that's in my opinion ultimately a good thing, as it lets you focus entirely on improving your skill from day to day.

I don't know how to sell this game to someone who has never played Monster Hunter before. It's the best entry point yet, at least.

But if the premise of hunting monsters with skill and gadgetry doesn't appeal to you then I don't know what to tell you.

I can say that the game has been finely balanced to a razor's edge, and while there are optimal strategies and equipment that rise to the surface, everything is more or less viable, exciting, unique to play, with more content just around the corner. . .

Anyway you can thank the summer sale for making me write a review for once. Ciao.