Πρόσφατες κριτικές από τον [DW]Terminator

Lucas Pope's latest title is certainly a wild departure from Papers, Please. It's no less detail-oriented, however, and requires you to fill in the gaps in your clues with your own deductions. This makes it a unique, and surprisingly challenging detective adventure despite its very simple mechanics.

If you're patient with it, and either are looking for or simply don't mind a mechanically-light but cognitively intensive experience, you'll find a lot to like here.

Full review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXKl3pfn0WE

A vapid, soulless ripoff of Mass Effect done extremely poorly, with the XCOM name slapped on it as if that's going to make it any better.

The plot is completely ridiculous and is set up as some sort of prequel to the Firaxis XCOM games. Problem with that being that there are only token references to anything XCOM, with it becoming more and more obvious that it's a cynical cash-in the further into the game you get. Even if you remove the notion of it being an XCOM game entirely, the plot is absurd and extremely poorly-written, from the humans just "somehow" being able to hotwire alien doors down to the headdesk-inducing stupidity of the major plot twist. The main character is effectively "Gruff Growly McGrowlson" without any personality or noteworthy traits other than "he's a grizzled veteran." None of the other characters are interesting in any fashion, instead all being cardboard cutouts that exist purely to have NPC's around to move the plot forward.

The AI, both friendly and enemy, is incredibly stupid. It's not at all uncommon for your guys to run directly into enemy fire, expose themselves entirely to said enemy fire even when sitting "in cover," get stuck on things, and so on. You're constantly having to give them orders and engage healing just so they won't get themselves killed. Enemies aren't any better, though at least they throw grenades on occasion to try to flush you out.

The shooting mechanics are functional at least, but they're nothing more than that. The weapons themselves aren't satisfying to use, and the shooting itself is just your normal cover-based shooting that you've seen in Gears of War or Mass Effect... just completely unrefined and unpolished.

The game's riddled with glitches and other technical problems, some of which are hilariously nonsensical. For example: it's an NVIDIA-optimized game, yet turning on NVIDIA's PhysX functionality causes the game to crash every single time you try to play it, until you disable the feature. Tons of animations glitches, sound bugs, and so on pop up all the time. Sometimes entire lines of dialogue are missing entirely, as if they just couldn't be bothered to implement them due to time constraints or something.

It should be noted that this game started life as an FPS. More specifically, it started off as something that looked like a really crappy version of BioShock, yet was eventually retooled into what we have now, which is a garbage Mass Effect ripoff. There's no creative drive here. No soul. It's just a game that was cobbled together to complete a contract and be a cynical cash-in on the series' popularity. Except, nobody wanted it. Fans of XCOM want more XCOM. They don't want this crap.

Needless to say, the game is awful. Don't buy it. Don't even look at it. Just let it be forgotten, as it should've been in the first place. If this weren't branded as if it's an XCOM game, it would've been completely swept under the rug as "just another crappy ripoff." Let that be so.

I have to preface this recommendation by saying that To The Moon isn't really much of a game. It's an interactive story, and a phenomenal one at that. So if you're one of those people who refuse to play interactive story experiences for whatever reason, then you'll probably get nothing out of this.

For the rest of you, I say strap yourselves in and give it a shot. To The Moon is an emotional journey through a dying man's memories in order to fulfill his last wish of going to the moon. To say more really spoils what makes it so great, but suffice to say I went into this with fairly low expectations (it is an RPG Maker title after all) and came away from it wondering why we haven't had more stories in gaming that were this compelling. I couldn't actually pull myself away from the screen until I'd completed it and left going "argh, the feels!"

As a result, I can do nothing but recommend To The Moon. Just know what you're getting into.

Borderlands is for people who enjoy the extreme tedium of Diablo-style hack n' slash games' "kill, loot, equip better gear, sell the rest, repeat until you get a game over screen," but want it in a very simplistic FPS format. The only things that add variety are the selection of characters, each of whom has a single unique ability that becomes incredibly boring to use after you realize that the level-ups only provide passive bonuses, and the selection of odd modifiers on guns that give them unique properties and result in supposedly millions of weapons, most of which procedurally generated by the game using these modifiers and various weapon components. The problem with this is that no matter what goofy modifier you stick on a shotgun, it's always going to behave like a shotgun. It becomes a matter of swapping out (insert gun here) with (insert gun with better stats but is effectively the same thing here) whenever you come across a new one. And the worst part is that the weapons aren't even satisfying to use. The weapon handling in Borderlands is so bog-standard at best and the enemies are such bullet sponges that you never feel like you're wielding anything powerful. All you ever feel like is that the game will probably toss another weapon at you sometime soon that will make taking out the enemies slightly faster than before.

There's almost no point in even talking about the story or writing in general because it's all so thin it might as well not exist. The story is almost nonexistent in and of itself, with nothing to keep you interested until the game has its incredibly unsatisfying conclusion. Nobody I know plays Borderlands or any other Diablo-style game for the writing though, so I suppose that isn't as big a deal as it sounds. The game doesn't take itself too seriously, at least, but the jokes just aren't very funny. Wasted potential everywhere.

People say, like they do about every game that supports co-op, that Borderlands is better in co-op. I suppose if you like an incredibly laggy version of the normal singleplayer that plays no differently apart from having even more bullet spongey enemies than usual, then sure. Maybe you can find something to make fun of. The most amusement I got out of the co-op was initiating melee duels with the friend I was playing it with, and since I was a good number of levels higher than him, I basically took him out in one or two hits every time. Of course that means he was completely useless against the enemies I was taking on at that point and we had to go back to the earlier areas so he could even get leveled up to be even vaguely helpful against the hordes of mindless enemies at my level, so that certainly didn't help. I guess if you attempt to make fun of the game while you're playing it with a friend then it can be better than the mind-numbing tedium of the singleplayer, but even doing that you get bored pretty quickly.

For the life of me I can never figure out why people enjoy this sort of game in general, nor this specific one. It's just a grindfest. Grind to get leveled up so you stand a chance against foes in the next area, grind to get new equipment for the same reason, grind to advance the pathetic excuse of a plot, grind to complete quests... Nothing in this game is designed to actually be fun or enjoyable as far as I can tell. Addicting to people who are already addicted to loot gathering? Definitely. But not entertaining. With so many other games out there that are better-made and offer far more enjoyable experiences, I see no reason at all to recommend such a mind-numbingly boring title as Borderlands to anyone who hasn't already gotten hopelessly addicted to it or its sequel.

When it was first released, Napoleon was being charged for at full price ($60 US)... when it has no place being charged at full price. It was released a bit under a year after Empire: Total War and plays almost exactly the same. In effect, it's a standalone expansion for Empire that Creative Assembly and SEGA tried to pass off as "the next major Total War game." It certainly has a number of technical improvements over Empire that make it not run anywhere near as badly, as well as some additional features, but I have issues recommending the game.

The lack of content compared to Empire is the chief issue I have. It seems at first like there might be quite a bit, as there are 4 campaigns to start with. Two of these are based on the actual historical events of Napoleon's Italian campaign and the French invasion of Egypt during the era. The other two are the French "mastery of Europe" campaign and the Campaigns of the Coalition, which are basically the grand campaign limited to France and the Coalition in a campaign to defeat Napoleon's France, respectively. All four of these campaigns feel incredibly limiting compared to what we're used to from the previous Total War games. There are eight playable factions, compared to the 11 that were in Empire, and a few of those factions are only playable in certain campaigns (ie. Portugal and Spain are only playable in the Peninsular campaign). Each faction does have its own units, but they feel pretty much the same across the board due to the nature of warfare during the Napoleonic era. They attempt to supplement the game's shortcomings in variety with a lot of DLC that makes the game seem more like a cash grab than anything else.

Like I mentioned before there are some improvements over Empire. The AI is slightly better than it was in Empire (which isn't saying much... the AI in Empire was pretty stupid), but it's a pretty negligible degree that you really only notice if you played a lot of Empire. It runs quite a bit better (probably in no small part due to the lessened amount of content), they improved the battle simulations a bit, and they tossed in some additional multiplayer features like the multiplayer campaign. So that's nice to have, of course. The only real problem with that is CA never really sorted out the netcode all the way with their engine so issues that popped up in Napoleon still persist even in subsequent games.

I could go on about how I personally find the warfare of Empire and Napoleon to be rather dull (line infantry squaring off under artillery barrages with cavalry charges to break up the monotony seems cool the first few times you do it... then you realize that's how every... single... battle goes... it wears thin incredibly quickly), but that's just me. I'm well aware there are plenty of people out there who find that incredibly interesting. If you liked Empire, you'll probably be able to get something out of Napoleon. Had CA & SEGA released it as an outright expansion to Empire rather than a full sequel (ie. a "Napoleonic Campaigns" DLC), I feel like it would've been better as a whole. As it stands, we have a full standalone product that is basically a stripped down version of Empire with some slight improvements in certain areas, and I just can't recommend it based on that.

All the strategic greatness of Age of Empires 2 and its expansion, The Conquerors in one package... AoE2 HD Edition is great for people who never played the original release and want something that will work on modern systems without any problems. It's also great for people like me who absolutely loved AoE2 to begin with and was hoping for the ability to play it on modern operating systems without running into graphics or sound glitches or having to go through the workarounds for multiplayer after the MSN Gaming Zone was shut down.

That said, for an HD Edition, there's decidedly little that's actually "HD" about it apart from being able to run in modern resolutions (just bear in mind that fullscreen runs at your desktop's resolution and there's no way to change the resolution ingame). I feel like this is mitigated by the fact that it's still a compilation of Age of Empires 2 + The Conquerors expansion, with their gameplay pretty much unaltered from the original releases and patches apart from integrating Steam achievements and using Steam for the multiplayer setup. AoE2 wouldn't really benefit all that much from significant visual upgrades anyway. After all... it's the fantastic gameplay that's kept people like me playing it pretty regularly for going on 15 years. And that's precisely what you get with this package.

This is a 12-hour long cutscene with occasional third-person shooter segments and grind-fest multiplayer. It has almost none of what made the first two Max Payne games so great: the phenomenal storytelling, gripping plots, noir styling. The one thing it *does* have that the original two did is solid third-person shooter gameplay with cool bullet time mechanics. Only problem is that out of the 12 hours the story goes, maybe 45 minutes to an hour and a half of it is actual gameplay. The style in this game isn't noir. It's like the movie "Man on Fire," which on its own is actually a really good movie, but here it comes across as a bad crossover fanfiction. Replacing the noir style with Hollywood action/thriller was a terrible idea. It constantly feels like the game's trying to trigger epileptic episodes by having bright colors and distortions as well as random text from the dialogue (much of which is completely pointless to emphasize so why they bother with it is beyond me) flash all over the screen. The plot itself is rather stupid and has basically nothing to do with Max Payne; frankly they should've just made the protagonist someone else. Ultimately it insults me as a Max Payne fan that they didn't care at all about what made Max Payne 1 & 2 so special, and even outright spit in my face with segments like the graveyard sequence. It also insults me as a reasonably intelligent person because the plot is so incredibly thin and predictable, yet the game keeps acting like it's some masterful example of the art form. When there actually *is* gameplay, it's pretty decent, though you'll find the camera often spazzes out due to the cover in the environment, causing you to die because you can't get an angle on anything (which is especially annoying during the "last stand" thing the game does). Multiplayer's tolerable once you get to rank 4 and can create your own classes, but it's punishingly unfair to new players and there's barely anyone playing it so I advise not even bothering.

In summary, a badly-presented 12-hour cutscene with occasional third-person shooter segments that are decent, multiplayer that's a total grindfest and is completely unfair to new players, and a litany of technical issues. It's insulting to me as a gamer, as a Max Payne fan, and as a person with even reasonable intelligence. Don't bother.

Extremely violent, rather unnerving, and totally trippy, Hotline Miami is an interesting and absolutely brutal action game that surprised me with how much I actually ended up liking it. It requires a lot of patience and a keen sense of timing, but it's ultimately one of the most incredibly satisfying action games I've played in a very long time... when I'm not getting frustrated beyond belief by the incredibly high difficulty that is.

This isn't really much of a game. You basically just click on things until you find something that works. Sure, it's completely absurd and rather silly, but that's all it's got going for it. It's extremely short, there's barely any interaction, you'll find the same 2 or 3 songs on loop the entire time, and even the humor runs the gamut from awful to legitimately funny. I say avoid it.

Just to be clear: I recommend the games that this package contains. Mortal Kombat 1 is more of a historical curiosity than a truly good game anymore, but it's still worth playing. MK2 is a fantastic fighting game experience that saw the MK series at its peak (just be warned that the AI in it is legendary for being ludicrously difficult). Ultimate MK3 is an excellent version of MK3, which, though it has numerous issues and isn't quite as good as MK2, is still an enjoyable fighting game.

What I *don't* recommend, however, is this specific pack. The MK Kollection (Arcade Kollection, depending on where you're seeing it) is a weak port of these three titles that uses Games for Windows Live as its DRM and for the multiplayer component. There are issues with the emulation, including sound glitches and seizing up of controls whenever you access the menu for the Kollection itself. GfWL is also a problem, obviously, and the multiplayer component itself seems completely broken from my experience. Considering MK1, 2, and 3 were all released and re-released across many platforms, you're bound to find better versions available.