Recent reviews by Phoenix

NO CONTROLLER SUPPORT?! It's a fighting game! Are you kidding me?

Superior in every way to the original Hexcells. More puzzles, better controls, and an additional game mechanic. I just wish it were longer.

Unexpectedly riveting.

I had intended to just watch the opening, after so many people I know were recommending this to me. "I gave it a shot," I was going to say. "It's just not my thing."

Minutes later, I was shushing my family so I could hear the movie. I couldn't turn it off until the credits rolled. SO good. Such a fantastic character study of these quite different people, their quite different lives, and their shared dedication to Dota.

I'm not into Dota. Not even a little. I think I played it one time, and didn't enjoy it. I wasn't expecting to enjoy this either. 75 minutes of Dota? Yawn.

But it's not 75 minutes of Dota. In fact, for a documentary about a Dota tournament, there's very little Dota in it. They don't really explain the game much at all, or why certain units were chosen over others. This was 100% fine with me (since, let me stress, I am not into Dota). Instead, it was all about the _players_, and was incredibly compelling.

Who do you cheer for, when you have sympathy for all of them?

EXTREMELY buggy. Constant crashes. Mouse occasionally stops responding, so you can't look around (making the game unplayable). You get to choose between unplayably slow, and turning off the graphical options that let you see where the edges of blocks are (making the entire thing a visual mess). Forced third-person perspective means that the majority of your screen is taken up by your character, so you can't see what you're doing. Multi-player is listed as a feature on the store page, but has actually been disabled in the game itself. The Options menu lists several tabs (Gameplay, Graphics, Sound, Interface, Controls) but all possible options are actually listed on the same single page. There's no in-game list of what the controls are, so you have to guess-and-check everything. "Take all" from chests won't work if your (tiny) inventory is full, EVEN IF the chest only contains stackable items you are already carrying. Map doesn't save at all if it crashes (which it will, because even quitting through the menu will cause a crash). Put something valuable in a chest to make room in your tiny inventory? It's gone forever now.

But enough about the programming faults. As to the gameplay itself, it leaves a lot to be desired. "Tutorial" map contains no actual tutorial. Walk speed is incredibly slow, and if there's a run button I didn't find it. The "Tutorial" map gave me the mission "Kill 10 Skelebobs", which were not among the FOUR enemies (so many!) that I managed to find. Bees, bats, slimes, mimics..... Speaking of enemies, let's talk about combat: Weapons only attack directly in front of your character, which is not always where you're looking. Health doesn't regenerate - at all. Any damage you take in combat is permanent, so you basically can't explore at all in this exploration game.

Long story short, it's a buggy mess of a Minecraft clone. Currently it's not worth buying at any price.

Spacechem is a triumph of logic. Most levels are pure practical puzzle solving, and the twitch-reflex levels... well, they are endurable.

This is my absolute favorite game from the Humble Voxatron Debut bundle. *Just* the right mix of puzzle and platform. Frustrating? Sometimes, but it's the _good_ kind of pain. Plus endless Community-made levels!

A fun Tower Defense, worth picking up when it goes on sale.

Braid is, in my opinion, one of the few _must play_ games (Portal being another). The visuals are fantastic, and it introduces a number of new game mechanics. Other indy games might build a game around just one of these, but Braid weaves them together into a beautiful experience.