Recent reviews by BinarySplit

This game did not give me hope, nor did it make me sad. It was informative. It taught me that depression manifests itself differently in different people. Some people are paralyzed with ennui, others are incensed by their own self-loathing. Though we are in similar circumstances and suffer the same condition, Actual Sunlight's author's approach to life seems radically different to my own.

I'm pretty unhappy at the moment - Actual Sunlight was the 6th game I started playing today, but it was the first that I found interesting enough to keep playing until the end. That's gotta mean something, right?

Not a very exciting FPS. Health kits and ammo packs every 5 meters, respawning enemies, linear maps and squad mates that only exist to slow you down. It's more of a chore than a game.

Oh, and it's crashy, doesn't support widescreen and won't run in resolutions above 1280x960.

It's pretty fun overall. If you're only interested in completing the story, it's only about 4 hours.

There are also a bunch of challenges, but I found that the grappling physics was too awkward to make them fun. For the main story, the physics are fine and there is enough variation in the environment to keep it fun, but if you're stuck doing the same area over and over, the physics quickly get infuriating.

I'd recommend waiting for a sale and getting it for under $5.

The music and art style are great, and I've been craving base building games, but I just don't find The Spatials fun.

The only difficulty in this game is figuring out the rules for how to optimize base building and combat. The rules aren't complicated, they're just not explained well through the tutorial or interface. Once you've got them figured out, the rest of the game is just grinding.

The grinding is really obvious too - enemies are just "Pirate (lvl 10)", weapons are "Phaser (lvl 10)", the buildings & activities have different names, but it's obvious that each level is just an improved version of the previous level. There's no complex supply chain, nor any high level unlockables that make the game interesting again.

Optimizing your base feels more like a chore than anything - if you try to make neat, isolated rooms, you're wasting 50% of your space and you won't make much profit. You're better off smushing everything together, and filling all the gaps with statues of a bald guy, because decor helps, but it doesn't matter which decor you use.

As a local co-op game, this is definitely worth the money. There are too few games that have local co-op in campaign mode to be picky. I played 2 hours with a friend, and it was good fun.

But, as a single player game, Son of Nor just isn't worth the time when there are so many better single player games out there.

The gameplay is dull. There's only one tactic effective against each type of enemy, and only a few different types of enemies. Telekinesis, which doesn't require mana and is available from the start, is the easiest way to kill most enemies, so there's very little reason to use the spells that cost mana.

The story is not very interesting. I feel like a lot of it was lost in translation, because there just isn't much there. It alludes to there being a lot more lore that wasn't explained. Also, I have no idea what happened in the ending - did my character save his people, or cause the destruction of the world, or was it a cliffhanger? I have no idea. It just cut to credits.

As a better alternative to Son of Nor, I recommend the game "Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers". It has similar telekinesis-style mechanics, but is MUCH more fun and it has a coherent story.

The plot seemed pretty interesting, but the game is rubbish. It's just a long series of cutscenes, waiting for your team members to give their awkward unskippable monologues, and "Press F to do the thing that advances to the next area" moments. The brief sections of combat aren't very good either - enemies are bullet sponges, there's way too much mouse acceleration, and there's no variety - you're always hiding in cover, shooting robots that are coming at you from the other end of the corridor.

This game could use a lot more polish. 30 minutes in, many small things had annoyed me, and I hadn't found any reasons I wanted to continue playing, so I just gave up.

+ Very nice aesthetic. It has quite a unique art style, and the environments look great.

- The text speed is really slow. You will quickly get impatient waiting for characters to finish talking. Pressing buttons doesn't speed up text, it just skips entire lines of dialog, so that isn't really an option
- The platforming is really clumsy. Even if you've played a lot of platformer games in the past, you'll fall off ledges, miss jumps, and generally get very annoyed at the controls.
- Not much happens in the first 30 minutes. You get few characters to talk to, a few signs to read, a few powerups and some frustrating platforming action.

I'm sure there's an interesting story underneath, but I just can't get past the annoying gameplay.

It's a weird game. It combines together a lot of novel game mechanics into an adventure platformer with interspersed JRPG battles. The art style and story is pretty cool. It kept me interested until the end. Quite impressive for a game made by one person. My total playtime was 3 hours.

If you get this game, make sure to read the manual (it's in a .RTF file in the game directory). There are a lot of stats and buyable items that don't have an obvious purpose in-game, but a quick read of the manual will explain everything.

Don't bother. The premise sounds interesting, but it's really just a tedious and old game that hasn't aged well. It runs at a resolution of 320x200 and has painfully bad midi music. The control scheme is completely unintuitive, and reading the manual (bundled with the game as a PDF) before playing is pretty much necessary. I barely got past the intro before I just couldn't take it anymore.

Don't bother. The Steam release is incredibly broken, and the game isn't worth the time it takes to get it working on a modern PC.