Recent reviews by Nai

What in the world did I just play?

This game is pretty bad. I bought it with a coupon, so I'm not terribly bent out of shape, but I still can't give this game much praise. Ignoring the fact that this game is near unplayable without a controller, the game's set up is terrible. Basically, you flucuate between two screens. An 'intermission' screen between each day, where you can spend earned points, and then the combat screen, which is one of several different seasons/mood variations. This game looks like it was going to be a fairy themed fighting game, but somewhere along the way they dropped the ball on multiplayer and decided to take their fighting arenas and try to inject a story into it at the last second.

Beat'em Ups made in the 90s have more variation to them than this game.

Most of the enemies are literally reskins of the first few enemies you encounter, with some of the advanced enemies being shrunken versions of bosses, so don't expect to fight a huge variety of enemies. Also, as far as your actual moves go, you do manage to get an impressive selection of special moves, but none of them are anywhere near as powerful as simply knocking one enemy into another repeatedly, like they were gasoline filled balloons holding matches.

Where the game does vary is in its difficulty. At some point, between Summer and Autumn I think, the game's difficulty spikes. They remind you that you can 'train' in order to become more powerful in order to complete the day(effectively the levels in the stage), but it amounts to you playing against slightly weaker versions of enemies you've already killed. Yes, they solve this difficulty spike by letting you grind, giving you very little natural progression.

Ultimately, this game brings together the worst parts of several genres. The static 'stage' from Arcade styled fighting games(minus the multiplayer), the grinding of legacy RPGs(Without the depth of story). The only thing that I can say that this game does right is how Freesia herself moves and responds to controller input. If they took Freesia out of this game, and put her into a game with better level design, better flow, and less grind, it could easily be a great game. Unfortunately, Freesia is tethered to her tree.

Hands down one of my favorite rouge-likes, and I've found myself diving into the Dungeons of Dredmor every so often when I need a break from other games. The art is clean and simple, and the skillsets you can choose when creating your character make every single playthrough its own unique challenge. Besides that, Dungeons of Dredmor provides modding support, and Gaslamp Games(Dungeons of Dredmor's creators) have a small but very passionate and dedicated group of modders. Rougish Rennovations and Fax Pax mods turn the base game into a very, very strange, and very, very fun place.

This game's controls and camera make it very, very hard to get into. I gave it my best attempt, but the way the camera is handled is frustrating at best, and disorienting at worst. Avoid, unless you're in love with the genre and determined to play anything from it.

Deponia, Chaos on Deponia, and Goodbye Deponia are point and click adventure games of old with a set of truly beautiful scenes and music. The game and its series aims for classless humor and heavy amounts of schadenfreude. If you're sensitive to any civil rights, human rights, animal rights, rights for the infirm, and rights of the wrongly convicted, you're likely to get offended at some point in this series.

You play as Rufus, a perpetual underdog that doesn't really seem to grasp that he's the underdog. While he can be hard to relate to at times, especially in his moments of abscent minded cruelty, he has his good moments.

The female lead character is cheekedly called 'Goal,' which an obvious jab at other games where the female lead characters are often 'finish lines' rather than anything meaningful. She stays true to her name throughout a fair bit of the first game, but becomes a living character towards the end of the first, and throughout the second and third games.

Deponia itself is a giant junkyard underneath a utopia-like society, not unlike worlds of Astroboy, and Battle Angel Alita, and Rufus is absolutely a man of his world. The series is a long stream of "connect the odds and ends to make things work" like many other games in the genre, and the theme of the game fits perfectly in the genre.

Ultimately, it's a fun ride. The story and the humor, much like the "water" in Deponia, might leave a strange taste in your mouth, but its worth investing your time in.

For those of you who have been skeptical of Sonic the Hedgehog in the last few years, you can comfortably skip all but two games. Sonic Generations, and Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed. Sonic All-Starts Racing Transformed brings cart racing to the PC in a fantastic way, and better than its predecessors. You may not love the characters, but Sonic All-Stars Transformed is a top performer in its league. Each racer has their own base attributes, which you can then modify. It has a rewarding drift system, challenge modes with tons of unlocks, a generous number of characters, powerups, and tracks, and an AMAZING online mode. I personally believe that it's worth picking up ASAP if you're a Mario Kart or Diddy Kong Racing fan. You will be VERY pleasantly surprised. I do highly recommend a controller with it, however, since it's a bit more comfortable with drifting.

If you've never played this, play it. Get it. Now. This game is set in an 'On Acid' themed post-apoc world in an isometric view, and provides an action heavy 'Action-RPG' style of play. This game provides solid challenge, near legendary narration, beautiful artwork, fantastic music, and a heck of a lot of replay value. 100% is a matter of skill for those who want a set of hard achievements, and for anyone else looking for a great game, great story, great art and music, and impressive action play, you need not look further.

Holy crap. Take the bullet madness of Gunstar Heroes, the fluid game pace of Mega Man X1-4, and marry it to first & second generation graphics & Audio, and you'd get Bleed. If you want a game that's short enough to jump into, hard enough to make you cry, and good enough to make you keep trying, this game is a surefire way to blow an afternoon or two.

Worth it if its on sale. The game is cute but the novelty of regenerating a new hero wears off pretty quickly, especaily considering how easy it is early on to get completely obliterated by anything. It has a Castlevania/Metroid style gameplay (And mimics it in many aspects, including and especially the spells), but lacks the epicness that many Castlevania/Metroid games have. The game becomes gradually easier, through debilitating traits(vertigo being the worst) cause the game's difficulty somewhat self imposed and gimmicky. Worth a cheap play.

Side-scrolling hack and slash action. It's a faster paced Double Dragon/Final Fight, but a tad easier. It's quite a bit like the love-child of old-age side scrolling beat'em ups like the two previously mentioned games married with the hack n' slash carnage of modern action games like God of War with the pacing of a slightly retarded Sonic the Hedgehog. The art style is nice to look at, and is refreshing if you spend most of your time in realistic/ultra-realistic games. The game's pacing leaves little time to enjoy much of it.

A down-side is that the game is very combo/timing intensive, and it doesn't really care much for you using your mouse. Mouse + Keyboard gamers might find a hard time playing this game. I had to dust off my Razer Naga(the one with the 12 buttons on the side) to feel comfortable playing the game. If you own a controller outside of your keyboard and mouse, definitely use it here. The game is also short, and can be finished in an afternoon of gaming.

It's an interesting game. It starts out slow, but as you advance beyond some of the starter missions and get into the second area, the action picks up quite a bit. The basic idea is that you are a 'Vault Hunter' of one of four 'Classes'. You gain levels, gain skills that manipulate your classes' main ability, and wind up dealing with a boatload of weapons, which is a good or bad thing, depending on how much time you enjoy looting/dealing with items.

Storywise, the game is lack-luster and the end, while not entirely predictable, had very little impact. Great if you like the action, not very great if you're deep on story. Multiplayer really intensifies things as you gain the ability to synergize with your friends while simultaneously fighting significantly stronger enemies.

Overall, good game when cheap.