Recent reviews by BillyTheFish

Pure nostalgia!

Fantastic game, but seriously marred - as was Tomb Raider 2013 - by the piss-poor voice casting.
Every character in these reboots (apart from Lara herself) speaks with an American accent.
Medieval Japanese priestess? Modern Russian mountain-dweller? Byzantine sea-captain? Doesn't matter. they all speak with an American twang.
Totally destroys the immersive experience and there's simply no need for it.
Here's hoping this is addressed in 'Shadow of the Tomb Raider''. Surely they can hire some voice talent that can do accents other than their own?
Still well worth playing, though.

This is the online CCG I've been waiting for since I stopped playing Magic: The Gathering as a physical card game fifteen years ago. A well balanced, well thought out game that is not dissimilar to M:TG but does away with the concept of land-for-mana and simply grants you one extra mana each turn. This makes for a faster, more dynamic game IMO.

Unlike the various incarnations on M:TG on Steam, Elder Scrolls: Legends is much more fluid in terms of card selection, meaning the deck tweakability is endless and with each new drop, you are encouraged to experiment more and more to build that 'killer' deck.

For the whiners, this game is emphatically NOT PTW. All you need to do is put in the game-time and patience and those Legends will eventually be yours. You can shell out real money if you can't wait, but there is absolutely no need to. The more you play, the more you learn in terms of strategy and card useage. Grinding is both rewarding and a learning-curve.

Loving this!

UPDATE AFTER HoS EXPANSION:

What can I say? The Heroes of Skyrim expansion is huge and does not disappoint. It has added tons of new content including dragons, werewolves and - brilliantly - shouts, as well as massively increasing the card choices available for deck-construction. A fantastic game just got even better!

UPDATE AFTER SPARKYPANTS TAKEOVER:

Ruined. The game has been reduced to a buggy Beta with a hideously ugly layout.

UPDATE APRIL 2019:

I'm big enough to admit when I'm wrong. SparkyPants have turned this around and fixed a great deal of what was so awful on (re) release. I'm still not wild about the smaller card sizes, but the game is pretty much back to its old self in terms of playability.
'Highly Recommended' once more!

Essential. Just buy it!

Burial at Sea - Episode One feels like a DLC. Tacked on and ultimately superfluous. This - Episode Two - is something else entirely. You play as Elizabeth waking up in the Toy Store directly after Episode One finishes. What happens next is a story-driven stealth-em-up which touches base with most of the high points of the Bioshock franchise so far. From Rapture to Colombia, this is an awesome swansong for Levine's trilogy.
An absolutely essential purchase. Your Bioshock experience is not complete until you've played this.

A waste of both your time and the developer's talent.
Will no doubt be seen as 'profound' by Hipster-types lacking in intellectual depth, but the ten minutes of your time that this pointless 'game' takes up would be much better spent elsewhere.
Go make a cup of tea...

A beautiful, simple and ridiculously addictive little gem of a game. Whether you dip into it to waste a few minutes or go full-on hardcore all afternoon, the aim is the same. Try to keep your speeding craft in the air without hitting anything.

A minimalist idea wonderfully executed. If only more games were like this...

PS - Don't forget to buy the DLC too!

A charming little gem of a 'point and click' puzzle game, beautifully illustrated and ridiculously cheap (I bought this as a 'special' for £0.19!)

Five increasingly involved levels of play are just enough to keep you occupied for a rainy afternoon (if you space it out). It also has Trading Cards and Steam Achievements.

Bargain!

Another of these oh-so-amusing inverted physics games in the same vein as Surgeon Simulator, and, just like that game, it has neither the wit nor the charm to keep you interested once the Trading Cards have dropped.

If you like this sort of thing, the pinnacle is undoubtedly 'Octodad: Dadliest Catch'. This is a poor substitute.

My original positve review is below this one. The state of Nosgoth now (eight months on) is very different from the enjoyable yet bugged Beta version I reviewed. The game is a lot more polished these days and runs better without a doubt. Sadly, it has been hidden behind a wall of SquareEnix proprietory nonsense requiring registration and personal details. So far, so routine, I hear you say. Fair enough, but annoying when the game wasn't that way to begin with.

What really brings the game down for me though is the way it has gone league-based. A lot of people who latched onto the game when I did seemed to have taken it far more seriously (I was only ever a casual player). I am therefore still a lowly rank (and don't care) but as a consequence of this ranking structure, the matchmaking will occasionally drop one of these hardcore warriors into your 'I'm just having a bit of fun' game. Cue the usual swearing, frustration and unpleasantness that these saddoes always bring to something that should be fun. I dread to think what the experience would be like for a complete noob just joining, though I suspect they will be shielded from the 'elite' players until they get past the starting level cap.

So, unfortunately, no longer recommended and now uninstalled. A shame, because this had potential to be something far better and more inclusive. Ironically, since I wrote my origninal disparaging comment regarding TF2, it has come back with a vengeance and is full of new maps, new content and new ideas. Therefore, I'm leaving Nosgoth and going home.

TL:DR - Fun casual game in Beta, now for hardcore fanboys only.




I am slowly weaning myself off Team Fortress 2. A combination of Valve's utter indifference and Backscam.tf's corruption has killed the fun in both the gaming and trading side of Steam's one-time flagship, so it was with a heavy heart that I decided to look elsewhere for some F2P multiplayer fun. CS:GO doesn't appeal to me as I find it too full of try-hards pretending to be Rambo. I don't want realism, I want fun!)

Nosgoth is just out of final beta and looks like it might offer a decent alternative. If you remember the old Legacy of Kain games, this will be a familiar game world. Players compete in a twenty minute 4v4 humans vs vampires deathmatch; ten minutes per side, first to thirty kills. There are currently four classes on each side, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. For those of you that like shiny trinkets, the game randomly drops currency and items, with an award for each consecutive day you log on plus occasional bonuses for winning (anything from perks to new skins). Trading will be added soon, so the devs say.

Graphics and gameplay are great (with only a few bugs remaining) and there is a reasonable learning curve and a decent amount of players (with more discovering this every day) which means that Nosgoth looks like it's here to stay and will only improve as the months go by. Even now, it has that 'just one more go' vibe to it, which is the hallmark of any decent game.

The matchmaking is all over the place right now, but this will even out as more people start playing. For the moment though, you may find you get taken apart regularly once you get past Level 15, as the matchmaker throws you in against the big boys at that point.

Nevertheless, this is a polished and well-constructed game, and I look forward to seeing how Square Enix shape this game going forward. This will do nicely until Valve decide to give a toss about TF2 again, if they ever do...