Recent reviews by Ghost Hardware

The atmosphere, graphics and fighting system still hold up well. On the other hand, the game requires several patches to function, the physics engine has a lot of issues, and the story barely makes any sense. Still worth playing today, but expect a short campaign.

Very short, loaded with technical issues, and the gameplay is far too simple (everything is a fetch quest). It is cute though.

While I can forgive most of the game shortcomings (several crashes, annoying reload system etc.) what I can't forgive and what prevents me from recommending it is the level design. The levels are either too short or too long, and often feel unfinished; like they were prototypes and not the final finished version. The 'open' levels in particular are awful, and a few contained some truly terrible platforming sections that were a huge pain to complete because the way the game's movement works made me miss platforms and die more often that not.

It also doesn't help that the boss battles at the end of each area involve you just circling and shooting them with no strategy involved at all, and the game's ending is atrocious. Well, that's if you could even call it at ending because it just ends with very sudden exposition and a fade to black. If I was able to grasp the game's story maybe I could have appreciated it, but the translation appears to be a poor machine translation so I had trouble understanding any of it.

The actual core gameplay is fine, but as a whole this honestly feels unfinished. Maybe the developers next game will be better, because there was some promise here.

Chaos;Head Noah is a solid visual novel but doesn't quite match up to the later Science Adventure games such as Steins;Gate.

• Excellent pacing. One of the few VN's I've played where just about every scene actually has a purpose and ends where they should. The story is always moving forward.
  
• The main mystery is intriguing and uncovering the truth kept me interested throughout the entire play though.
  
• The addition of extra routes expands on the games lore and character development, something that was lacking in the original game.
  
• Great music and atmosphere, and the voice acting (in Japanese) is above average in my opinion.

• Requires a separate patch from the Committee of Zero to be worth playing.
  
• You have to skip through the entire game in order to view the other routes, which is a massive waste of time. They should have just been accessible through the main menu.
  
• The 'D-Swords' are ridiculous. There should have been another plot device in use here for the characters to use as weapons (telekinesis, memory wipes etc.). They don't fit in with the tone of the game.
  
• The main character's personality is going to divide a lot of opinion.

A great extension to the original game and definitely worth the price of entry. The level design is great, and there's plenty of replay value with the new weapons and game mode being a nice inclusion too. It took me 3 and a half hours to finish, but I played through the levels quite quickly and didn't aim to get all of the secrets.

If I had some complaints, I found it more difficult than the base game and a part of it was that some levels really lacked ammo. It wasn't ever 'unfair', but there were a few points where too many enemies were present and I thought it could have been scaled back slightly. I think less experienced gamers will have real trouble beating this and I only played on the 'normal' difficulty too. I also didn't like the final boss fight; it was very underwhelming and was expecting something more exciting.

If the developers come back to Industria (or at least release a sequel) and correct the most glaring issues such as:

• Developing the story so it doesn't abruptly end without resolving anything
  
• Fixing the poorly designed enemy encounters (or just getting rid of enemies entirely as they weren't necessary)
  
• Adding in puzzles to break up the monotony
  
• Making it last longer than two hours

etc.

Then I'll happily recommend it because there's a good game hidden beneath all of the issues - but in it's current state it's not worth your time. If you're a fan of Half-Life and are wanting something similar look elsewhere, because Industria feels more like a demo than a fully fledged game.

While none of Fobia's flaws are bad enough to stop me from recommending it, there's still enough of them for me to say that I wouldn't buy this unless it goes on sale.

The game hotel setting is fun to explore, and obviously takes cues from games like Resident Evil. The game also looks and runs great; I never had any performance issues. The puzzles range from so easy they may as well be pointless, so requiring to think for a while about the solution, so a bit hit and miss overall. The games length is good too, and I'd say most people will be able to beat it in about 8/9 hours. I don't like forcing players to beat the game three times to get all achievements, but there's lots to collect so there's some replay value.

The game was not made in an English speaking country, but the translation is fine and the English voice acting is a little stilted but overall acceptable. The issue with the translation however, is that not all of the text is translated. Any documents you pick up, writing on walls etc. is still in Portuguese which breaks the immersion because everyone is speaking English and yet none of the in-game text is in that language. Yes, the text is translated to English when you click on it and there are a lot of languages to consider here (changing graphics isn't cheap) but it's a small thing that did annoy me.

Navigation can be a problem because I felt the game often didn't prompt you where to go next, and the lack of a map that you could reference in the inventory led to me getting lost every now and again. The story line is basic and predictable, and I wasn't a fan of putting most of the actual story in the last 30 minutes. Still, the developers did make an effort on it and I appreciate putting documents and so on around to help you work out the story, so it's not all bad.

Two problems I did have which really did impact my enjoyment were the boss battles and long walking sections. The boss battles are all terrible; you literally just shoot, move to another corner, shoot - rinse and repeat. They are boring as boring can be, and the same goes for the long walking sections. There's one in particular where you have to pick up pieces of a sphere, which went on for 45+ minutes and wasn't necessary. The entire section could have fit into a 2 minute cut scene.

Overall, 6.5/10

• Incredible art style. Seriously, the developer has some major talent in this department.
  
• Interesting puzzles that require some patience, but aren't frustrating.
  
• Responsive controls.
  
• Great sound design and music.

• The main story is very short, it took me two hours to beat it. That being said, there's a lot of unlockables after that's over so there's replay value.
  
• Overall, it's too similar to the previous game Tamashii, There aren't enough new game play features.
  
• Incomprehensible story line (well, that might be the point?)
  
• The precision platforming sections weren't very good in Tamashii and they're still poor in this one. They lead to unnecessary difficulty spikes and the next game in the series, if there is one, should include less of them.

There are some faults, but I recommended this one; especially to fans of surreal horror.

It really pains me to give Filcher a negative review because I actually think it's a great game, but the lack of a save or checkpoint system is so damaging to the overall experience that I can't recommend it.

The gameplay is solid, I love the noir style, and the storyline (as basic as it is) works well. But when I have to replay a mission 10 times or more because making a mistake is so punishing, the only feeling I'm left with when all is said and done is frustration. More than once I considered uninstalling Filcher for good and moving on, because it felt like a waste of time having to spend so long having to re-do everything from scratch anytime I failed in a mission.

The developer of the game mentioned that there's no save system because 'mission size and difficulty have been carefully tuned with this in mind', but being honest, I think there's no saving allowed because most people would be able to beat the game in three hours or less if it were permissible. And you know what, that's fine! This is not a big budget, AAA game where I expect 20+ hours of story; this is an indie game made by one person selling at a budget price. Even if the game is short, there's plenty of replay value due to the amount of secrets, rankings on the missions based on how well you play etc. So, why not just give players a difficulty option? On one end you could have 'Easy' mode where there are less guards, plenty of checkpoints, lower alarm times etc. and on the other end 'Ghost' mode where there are more guards, no checkpoints, alarm means game over etc. This way, everyone is happy - forcing every type of player to play on the same extreme difficulty doesn't work.

This is an easy 8.5/10 game with a save/checkpoint system, but without one I can really only recommend this to a niche group of gamers.

The core gameplay is fine, if a little repetitive, and the aesthetics and overall presentation are nice. But what kills Verlet Swing for me is that is features some of the absolute worst difficulty scaling I've ever dealt with.

This range in difficulty from level to level is a problem throughout the game, but the last world in particular drags it to the point where it's outright frustrating. Being able to beat a level first try, to then spending more than twenty minutes beating the next (rinse and repeat) isn't fun at all.

When the levels switch between expert level precision to something which belongs to the first game world, fun goes out the window and it's nothing but a chore to play.