Recent reviews by dux

This turned out to be a surprisingly modern and well designed game and I though I haven't yet played it for as long as some others, I've had a lot of fun exploring and discovering what this game has to offer. In today's MMORPG landscape, particularly post-WoW, most of these types of games tend to be very similar and it's easy to forget that there are MMORPGs like Two Worlds II, The Secret World etc, which, while not as flashy and refined as the mainstream games, offer their own flavour and ultimately a fuller experience.

Two Worlds II has a far more lively world than other games I've played and excels at building an interactive world, particularly after the slow early introduction story, and despite a less than perfect spell system and less shiny graphics, it's a fun game to experience that makes you feel a part of the world, something that's often amiss from modern titles.

After looking through my most played games list I realised I owed it to the Left 4 Dead games to leave my positive review, even if it'll be lost in a sea of the other 150,000+ positive reviews. Left 4 Dead is built on a couple of basic but important principles: It's immediately playable even to new players, it's movie-esque and the sound, vision and events are important for suspense and tension during gameplay and it's absolutely hands-down a game that excels at cooperative dynamics and benefits from friendly banter.

All these things combined mean that 8 years after release it's just as fun, and despite the fairly frustrating online playerbase and mindset, and some failings towards long-term play, it's still absolutely a game that you can dive right into at any time and have some good old fashioned fun.

One of the most unique and underrated Action-FPSs' out there, Bulletstorm™ encapsulates good shooter design for me because it favours an incredible art style and scenery instead of million-pixel-resolution graphics, it favours quirky weapons that provide fun instead of strict realism and it favours an upbeat story and humour, even if it's a little cheesy at times, over tension and suspense.

Bulletstorm™is the epitome of a shooter that doesn't take itself too seriously and puts the gameplay experience first and as someone who mostly hates shooters, I found myself engaged and loving discovering new weapons and exploring the levels from start to finish and only stopping to take screenshots along the way.

As for the rating this game has here- yes, DRM is never a good thing for a game, especially when it limits the gameplay but the limitations of GFWL can be overcome by replacing a single file (see PC Gaming Wikis' #Play_without_Games_for_Windows_-_LIVE page) and only multiplayer and the DLCs are unavailable, neither of which affect the game itself and the majority reason for buying this.

Bulletstorm is still very much worth buying if you don't mind replacing a file and you're not bound by some moral obligation. The single-player gameplay experience is still just as fun from start to finish and shouldn't be missed.

One of the most beautiful ways to waste your time.

There's something special about the Trine games. They combine the best parts of artistic design and exploration for the sake of beauty with a thinking mans puzzle mechanics which can be combined and utilised in interesting and unexpected ways. Along with fantastic extras like co-op, challenges and the likes (all of which are actually worth trying out and fun in their own rights) this is one of the games I've loved from the moment I first picked up.

As for the rest of the series, Trine 1 holds a special place in my heart because I picked it up first and because it set the bar so high, but Trine 2 raises the bar and takes nothing away- it's prettier, it has more content, it's more responsive and technically improved and it's just an all round improvement, and then Trine 3, while I appreciate it a lot more than most despite its failings is still the lesser of the three.

Picking up the whole series is absolutely my recommendation, but if you only have time for one, Trine 2 is my suggestion.

As someone old enough to remember the first-hand buzz over Half-Life in highschool, but never having played it until 15 years later, I'm very glad I ignored the voice telling me it'd have dated gameplay mechanics and be dated and weak by todays stanards because I was 100% wrong and enjoyed it from start to finish.

I remember kids at school talking about how amazing the graphics were more than anything else and so I was scared that this was most of what the game had to offer, and by playing it in 2015+ it'd be just plain visually uninteresting, and that the physics engine Valve is so lauded for would be boring. I was completely wrong and while Half-Life certainly has fairly bland graphics and visual palettes by some standards, it's still artistically appeasing to look at, particularly in the intro but even the level designs and contrasts of later levels are striking at times and the physics engine is no longer impressive by todays standards, but strengthens the gameplay rather than being a dependent part of it.

What all this means is that this game hasn't aged in terms of fun gameplay and has barely aged in terms of visual style and it still felt impressive to play through. I'm sad I didn't get a chance when it came out, but I haven't missed out and I'll be revisiting this game every few years to come.

If you're one of the handful of people on the planet like me and visiting this game for the first time more than a decade and a half later- don't delay, the first play-through is every bit as fun, thrilling and impressive as it was on release.

I think the best part of strategy games is often learning how everything works and interacts and actually experiencing the learning curve first hand. It can be frustrating because you'll die because of something you didn't know about- but you remember it for next time and forge ahead and slowly climb the ranks.

FTL is excellent at this process. I've died in this game more than I've died in just about any other game and I've barely been playing it over more than a few months, but rather than getting pissed off and ragequitting I'm encouraged to try something new, to adjust my upgrade order, to select a different interaction with a ship, to mix up my weapons or combat technique or any number of different approaches to avoid or deal with the same problem in the future.

It's a game that relies on RNG heavily, which normally makes for a really boring end game, but with FTL there's tons of end-game content and once you think you've learned everything and mastered the intricacies of turns, combat, crew members, upgrades and everything else there's still a heap of goals to strive for, new challenges to attempt and things to do.

It's a fantastic game that never makes me feel rushed, and in those moments when I do feel pressured because I'm losing it's alright because I know I can adapt and try things a little different next time and get just a little bit better and a little bit further.

This brought back the fun, interesting dialogue, characters and stories of old Point and Click adventure games and gave me a healthy dose of nostaliga and was a real joy to play. It's just a shame it's so damn short compared to the titles I remember from the older days.


The writing, characters, world and art-style are all important things for Point & Clicks, and The Inner World gets all of them right. Due to the short length of the game the characters don't really develop, but they mostly have enough backstory and care of writing to have more than one dimension. They all have reasons for doing what they're doing and even short interactions like helping the character involve a motivation of some kind that you don't see written into too many games these days.
The world is rich and interesting and again, thought and care and good writing have gone hand in hand to create a diverse landscape with enough character to feel immersive. The art-style is friendly but layered enough to add time and history, and importance where it's due.


My biggest complaint with The Inner World is the short length and lack of content. Although it's well written and shines as an upbeat story, with only 3 memorable characters and a couple of protagonists and a handful of areas it just doesn't have enough content to explore and ultimately feels rather shallow. As a result it's good value for money when on sale, but is hard to recommend at full price because of the low level of content to explore.

Some may find this far too easy, and at times I think it feels a little too casual, as though you're merely exploring an interactive artbook rather than solving puzzles and furthering the story with gameplay, but these moments are sparse and unless you have a hard time investing in the story or characters, or don't enjoy the writing then you'll find plenty of joy in just exploring what's here, nevermind solving the puzzles.

Other than that The Inner World really doesn't have anything to criticise. There are a couple of sections where it's not particularly intuitive on how to progress, and the age old Point-and-Click problem of disjointed solutions becomes apparant, but these are mitigated by the wonderful hint system and become easy to overlook.
Perhaps you could complain the small extra content game unlocked after playing isn't fun and essentially pointless, but that's hardly a compelling reason against buying the game.


Priced on Steam at £11.99/$14.99/13.99€, The Inner World clocks in at a typical 7-8 hours of gameplay, and has enough charm and dimensions to warrant an additional playthrough or two down the line. It's very fairly priced if you don't mind the short length and goes on sale for up to 85% off, which is a bloody bargain.

* An animated series based on the game is/was planned, a demo of which is available here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STsqPrG8L7E
* Funding for a sequel, The Inner World 2 - The last Windmonk, seems to have been approved in 2015 as mentioned in this German press release[innovation.mfg.de]

Strange, exuberant, grimy and fun. Grimm takes the boring and safe modern versions of the Grimm Brothers tales and other wimpified stories and turns them into episodic set pieces for the player to play through, turning them back into the dark, dismal and macabre moral stories they were originally intended to be. Despite many technical limitations and drawbacks, Grimm has keen writing and a fairly unique gameplay style and with great source material and in good old fashioned Spicy Horse Games' style, turns it into something wacky and fun.


Grimm is worth noticing because of its unique gameplay style, strangeness and storytelling. When reduced to simpler terms it's probably best described as a 3D platformer with a collect/complete mechanism similar to that of the Katamari titles, but with a stronger focus on storytelling and writing, and boy does the writing shine. With source material like Grimm it's hard to go wrong, but as this game tries to show, due to modern safety, mass appeal and 'Disneyfication', we often do. Using exuberant writing and matching it with the macabre mix of childish wonder in the characters and an equally childish mucky & disgusting art style in the set pieces, it really brings the Grimm tales and other story pieces to life while still holding enough fun gameplay value to catch the attention of anyone who might not familiar with the stories and tales.


At nearly 8 years old at the time of review, and built in Unreal Engine 3, Grimm is still very enjoyable and due to the catoonish style the graphics haven't aged as poorly as you'd expect. Yet it does still feel like dated artefacts in low budget set pieces. But I think this is a more personal thing and if you like the simplified art style of other Spicy Horse games then you'll have no big issue with the graphics or art style.

The small design flaws and technological failures however are abundant, especially in the earlier episodes, and range across the board from minor things like lack of controller support on the launcher, strange limited resolution options, no launcher resulting in manually having to set the resolution and other settings again and again for each of the 23 episodes, to more obstacle causing problems like crashing every time you Alt-Tab out of the game, gameplay freezing, launch errors and plenty more.

Many of these problems are bluntly addressed in the Discussion threads as unfixable due to the source code having been lost along with many other company artefacts due to a lightning strike and power loss, and as always the Community has found and posted many relevant fixes and useful information, but it's still reason for pause when considering a purchase if you're on the fence.


Priced at just $9.99/8.99€ for the Complete Pack at the time of review, and STILL unavailable in the UK due to problems with Steam Store integration, it's best to try Episode 1 - A Boy Learns What Fear Is which is available directly from the store page for free (and includes access to the trading cards without imbursement). The first episode is pretty representational of the 22 others, and if you enjoy the gameplay, story or writing enough to try out the other episodes then the Complete Pack is the most sensible option. All episodes can be played for free, but since the Episodes and Seasons are both overpriced when compared to the Complete Pack this option doesn't make much sense, though for those on a budget it's worth noting that the latter seasons are far better and Season Two is probably the best of the three.

Due, presumably, to the limitations of the Steam Store, this title never goes on sale on Steam, but has been included in bundles for as little as $1 for the Complete Pack, so looking around for a better deal may well be a better option, but even at $10 and even with the technical problems and other issues, this is still a strong recommendation for anyone with a grammatical fondness or anyone looking for something a bit out of the norm.

* The First episode is available for free and includes trading card drops. It's a great way to test whether you'll enjoy this title
* Grimm has been made available on Windows phones via GestureWorks https://gameplay.gestureworks.com/virtual_controllers/9791-grimm
* Collecting all the secrets gives reason to play through another few times and reveals the light and dark versions of several gameplay elements in a gallery
* There are a number of interesting, detailed and blunt replies to various questions from the developers in the forums including those from American himself

FMV games are in sorely short supply on Steam and elsewhere, and good ones are even rarer still. So, while MISSING: An Interactive Thriller has some rough edges, may be a bit too unchallenging and remains both short and unfinished, it's still a strong recommendation from the high production value and fun gameplay experience alone and is a must buy for fans of FMV.


One thing that stands out about MISSING: An Interactive Thriller is its great flow and pace. This may seem insignificant, but a title that combines a video game designed from the ground up and a short TV episode also designed by a team from the ground up, into one solid fun experience is no easy feat. The number of things that can go wrong at any stage and detract from the final product are much higher than for each one alone and its a testament to clever design principles that it's all fit together to produce an, albeit short, fantastic interactive video-story game.

The high production value of the video also stands out and while the gameplay graphics are by no means lacking, they do occassionally pale in comparison to the very well shot and editted sequence of video.

On the flip side, the puzzle design is very simple and easy which lends itself to the story rather than the gameplay, which is probably the more sensible priority choice. The puzzle design, while it has some annoyances mentioned below, deserves mention as doing the job well and remaining fun under the restrictions and limitations a title like this produces.


While the puzzles are clearly designed to facilitate the narrative and pace, they nonetheless often feel lacking in terms of challenge and overall satisfaction. The first chapter is by far the most interesting and exciting as it introduces the player to the premise and very smoothly introduces the mechanics, but after learning how to interact it just becomes an, at times, near-tedius matter of finding objects and putting them in the right place, akin to the lacking gameplay of many early Point & Click titles.

I initially felt cheated by the very short playtime of less than an hour, and I concede that the price is very fair for the quality of the production and product and that the future episodes will definitely add to the overall value, but with very little replay value and ultimately one dimensional gameplay it's hard to credit the game for length and this may be a reason to hesitate for some, at least in the early development stages.


Priced at just $3.99/£2.79/3.99€ and clocking in at nearly an hour of interesting and high quality interactive FMV gameplay, MISSING: An Interactive Thriller is hard not to recommend and the only thing that should hold you back is in perhaps waiting to ensure further episodes are developed. The developer has stated they're working on sourcing funding for both the gameplay development and video production and that they hope to aim for longer and higher quality episodes in the future, which are all great things to hear, but with no mention of when or how those things are likely to happen it's ultimately up to the player to decide whether an unfinished story is worth taking part in. Otherwise if you don't mind playing it for the short but unique and interesting gameplay experience, you're not going to be dissappointed.