Recent reviews by Ragnar

I have nothing but praise for this game. Right from the start it's incredibly endearing, filled with fantastic writing that both manages to be real and topical, and maintain an air of humour. The writing is top notch. Every character introduced is unique and by far the majority of them have something to amuse and entertain. Good writing and dialogue in games is incredibly important to me, and Hot Tin Roof never fails to satisfy or impress. The theme and setting are used perfectly, which combined with the wonderful music really makes the game an enjoyable experience.

The gameplay is basic, but that's in no way a bad thing. It's a non-violent Metroidvania, in which you gather new types of ammo for your revolver which in turn give you access to new abilities. The basic ammo lets you break boxes. The bubbles let you reveal secrets. The grappler lets you climb. Each time you find a new one, you're unlocking a new part of the world that you couldn't access before.

The world feels really big, too. Overwhelming at first, but you can quickly get used to it. This feeling returns every time you find some new location to explore as well, making everything even -bigger-. I would've appreciated a good map to go with the game; if there is one, I couldn't find it, which has you relying on memory to figure out where to go, where you've been. Like I said though, you'll learn your way around the place soon enough.

It's a good game, and the price is perfect. I recommend this whole heartedly. :)

Hero of the Kingdom II is a very casual and relaxed game. There's no stress, no time limits and no 'action' to speak of. It's entirely based around economic puzzles; gathering resources in many forms and bringing them together to progress. Some you need to spend, others stay with you. It's simple enough, with the real test being the ability to remember where and how to get what you need. For an example, remembering how to get hay when later in the game you end up needing some for a cow's bedding. -- And yes, that's about how the average quest goes. You'll be slaying monsters as well, but you do it in the exact same manner. "Now where can I get a shield, a mercenary and a torch to slay a giant spider?"

Even then, it's fun. It's very genuinely fun. I do need to warn you that the story, writing and dialogue are all awful. Sorry! :( I don't mean that as an insult to the developer, it's just the whole world doesn't show an ounce of actual creative thinking. It's a cookie-cutter save-the-girl quest in a cookie-cutter fantasy kingdom in which you face cookie-cutter pirates. If you want a story, avoid this game like the plague. If you want a chill, casual, resource-driven puzzle game, dude, go nuts. It's totally worth it.

PeriAreion is as flawed as can be. The outdated and ugly graphics are easily forgiven since it's not a game that relies on them. They're perfectly serviceable in fact, everything's easy to identify and that's all you really need. The animations are stiff and awkward, but you know what your little colonists are doing outside the base at a glance. There's no base interior, which I'm thankful for, and the UI for controlling colonists within the base is decent enough.

The problems with the game all arise from a feeling that the developer didn't quite know what they were doing. You can tell they studied and researched what's required to colonize Mars, but I find it hard to believe they did the same regarding game design. The control scheme belongs in a 90s game; you can only ever select one colonist at a time and your camera is stuck on that colonist. You can't move the camera around, only just spin it around your unit. This means that if you want to send your little guy over a hill, you first need to send him to the hill side, then on top of the hill, then over it. You have to hold their hand the entire way. There's no easy way to send them back to base either, making managing more than one at a time a pain. Not hard, just annoying and sluggish.

The game also comes with one of the worst tutorials I've seen. It's functional, entirely functional, but it teaches you next to nothing. Camera controls; sure. How to left click and right click, how to sort through your little dudes, how to enter and exit the main module, how to give them jobs inside of it. Done. It didn't tell me how to get ice though and, in half an hour or so, my colonists all died from dehydration.

Before that the base was a mess anyway. I had to find out that bases needed maintenance only when one of my colonists got CO2 poisoning. At first I thought it must've been a life support issue. I built a tech module which was supposed to give electricity and life support to the whole base, but it changed nothing. It was only when I flipped through the manual that I learned that you need to build a Geology module to do maintenance. At this point, the CO2 poisoning had gotten much worse with that colonist and developed into a broken arm. A few moments in a freshly built medbay would surely have saved her, but I had run out of sulfate at that point, so no go.

The sad thing is this game has plenty of cool ideas. Colonize Mars? Dude, yes! Managing a small team of colonists, building a base that'll grow big enough to receive even more. Doing research, exploring on foot and in a rover, surviving the harsh environment. All of this sounds fantastic. There's just not a game to go with it. I hate to say it, but I can't recommend this game to anyone. It's set at $15 USD right now, but I don't think I'd even suggest you check it out if it was free. Sorry. :(

So this is a surprisingly hard review to make, largely because there aren't many negative things to say about this game. It's a little old, sure, and with that can come technical problems and dated visuals, but that's something one has to expect. The awkward animations are actually a little charming, seeing how far the technologies have come since then. What is surprising though is how well the backgrounds and settings hold up. Although, yes, they tend to be a little colourless and depressing, they're gorgeously drawn and come in a crisp, high resolution. I'm kind of a stickler when it comes to 2D texture working, especially with these kinds of 3D/2D adventure games, and this one did not fail to satisfy me.

The character's are voice acted well enough; some of the lines suffer from being read from a script rather than spoken naturally, but the overall quality is just fine. Not a single character is offensive, even the ones that follow pretty blatant stereotypes. The ruffian, the evil minion, the sassy protagonist. I rather enjoyed them and the personalities they carried. Like the voice acting, the story isn't anything ground breaking or shocking. It telegraphs coming twists pretty blatantly and yet it never feels like it detracts from the game. All of this just sort of exists around the real meat of it.

That being, of course, the puzzles. This is a very genuine point & click adventure / puzzle game and I adore it for it. The puzzles are great! A few of them do follow a bizarre sort of adventure-game logic, but they never go without subtle (or overt) hinting, and when you're stuck you can always get past it just by looking around, talking to people and inspecting your inventory. My main driving force in this game was always just to solve the puzzle and get to the next one. Really, this is where the game shines, and I don't regret a moment spent playing it.

I do wish there's more I could say about it, really. I've spent hours and hours in it already and I feel like it deserves this big fat review. There just isn't much more to it, and that is in no way a detractor. If you're out for a point & click puzzler, you could do a lot worse than this. :]

This is not a game that's easy to review for me as it's easily the most internally polarizing game I've ever played. It's a game that I both love and hate in equal measure, one that makes the most obvious, horrible mistakes, while still managing to dazzle you with its heart.

The game starts off really well with a beautifully rendered slide-show cutscene that looks as if it were painted by hand. It does a perfect job of setting up a mood and introducing our protagonist, and is immediately followed by a very simple and easy tutorial. It's a tutorial that nearly lies to you though, starting you off with a couple of puzzles, only to then bind you to what comes to be something like two hours of primarily dialogue, wandering about and looking at things.

The game is slow. It's insane how slow it is. The story gives you almost no hooks to catch you with other than the hope that you'll enjoy the characters and the -promise- of a mystery enough to continue. The actual puzzles in the first two chapters are all very simple. The game does a good job of telling you what you need to do in order to progress, and as you figure out the methods, it'll hint towards the means. They're (mostly) well designed and a joy to unlock, but they never quite feel like they're the main focus of the game.

The main focus is the story. It's not a bad story either, it's sweet, it's got its mystery and its build up, but the pacing is glacial. Finishing the first two chapters took me about four hours and in that time I learned extremely little. Yes, you do find out tidbits about both Sam (the protagonist) and Dr. Styles (her employer), but none of it is surprising and none of it carries the shock that the writers seemed to intend. The 'accident' is mentioned very quickly in the game and you're told not to ask people about it (and the game doesn't let you, either), but when it's finally revealed what happened -- it's completely predictable and almost disappointing. A cutscene shows Sam responding to it with shock, surprise, grief and empathy, whereas the player's reaction is more likely that of; "That's it? Really? That's the big reveal?"

Yet, like I said, the story isn't bad. It's just not good. The characters are fine, admittedly even if they feel like they're taken out of a teen romance story, with the orphaned sorta-gothic tough girl acting as the lead, who ends up living with a dark, mysterious and secluded, brooding man with a dark secret and-- yeah. You see where that's going. Along the way she gathers around herself a group of social stereotypes, all of which feel entirely two dimensional. Yet, again, they're not bad. They're entirely likeable even.

Then there's the graphics. Another point that really has me struggling to make a decisive judgement on it. It's gorgeous. Mostly. All the environments you go to are beautifully rendered, clearly handmade with so many little touches. I can only think of a couple of locations where I actually wasn't impressed with what I saw. Some of the locations are straight up amazing, even. Check the screenshots and you'll see exactly what I mean. Yet I did say that they're gorgeous, mostly. Mostly. See, all this amazing art is actually given to you at a surprisingly low resolution. Playing at 1920x1080 I was exposed to gorgeous art that had been muddied by being stretched out across the screen. It felt like such a waste. It's only a 5gb game too, it's heart breaking that they didn't just up the size and add higher resolution backgrounds.

This is then combined with another good & bad, the character models. They actually look just fine. The resolution is high enough and the details are good enough. The lighting in the scene illuminates them well and the shadows are actually rather pretty. Yet despite this, the fact that you have a high resolution 3D character in a lower resolution environment causes them to pop out horrendously. Not a single character in the game ever looks like they're a part of the world they live in. You're constantly reminded by how the world is nothing but a 2D plane. To make matters worse is that every once in a while the models are given idle animations that are way, way too exaggerated. One scene has the American sitting on the grass, constantly going between leaning back and sitting forward, with him kicking his leg into the air in between. As the conversation goes, he'll do this constantly.

Another up and down is the voice acting. The voice actors themselves were very likeable. Their voices fit their roles and they did their lines well. The downside is that this game is stuck with the ye olde adventure game type of talking. It's the kind where as they talk, a box of subtitles pop up. Once the character has finished speaking those lines, they stop. The subtitles go away and a new box opens. Then the character continues. Every time this happens there's this weird and awkward pause that completely snaps you out of it, and really shouldn't be happening in a modern game like this. Conversations should be fluid, especially with such a lovely cast; people should actually talk like they're talking to each other. Not like they're by themselves and reading subtitle boxes one at a time.

So what's the verdict? Honestly, despite everything, I want to like this game. I do. Every part of it just shines with heart and effort. You can tell that on every front, the developer put their heart and soul into the game. They worked -hard- on it, and that fact gives it so much charm and likeability. This shows best in the art I believe, but also in the puzzles themselves. They're rather simple, I admit, but they're a joy to solve. They're fun! I wish the game had more of them, a LOT more. It's fantastic to chase after Daedalus clues! It's equally fun to flip through the book of magic tricks to apply them to a situation, then map out the choreography. Simple, yes. Easy, yes. But fun. Charming, clever and full of character.

So I really believe I can suggest this game to people that enjoy adventure games. If you're okay with slow pacing, if you enjoy an easy story and you'd rather have fun puzzles instead of difficult ones, this is a game I can recommend to you. Like I said, this game is a labour of love and I want to see more from the talent behind it. :]

When I first started playing this game I honestly thought very little of it. A free to play hunting game just didn't sound fun to me. I was dead wrong. The moment you get your first kill is the moment you learn to love this game. It's a game that requires patience. You have to be mindful of the noise you make, how visible you are and even the wind direction, as animals can easily smell you if you're not careful. You have to listen out for calls, track them by marks and droppings, and then when you find it, you need to get a clean, painless kill. The game doesn't punish you for not killing the animal in a single shot outright, but if you wound the target instead of killing it, you can expect a few minutes of having to track a panicked animal, instead of being able to harvest it immediately and move on.

The selection of weapons as you begin the game is terribly limited. A single rifle, which can be upgrated with a subscription to a basic shotgun and a revolver handgun. But as you play, and if you're willing to put a bit of money into it (and support the devs, they're nice folk!), your options grow vastly. Several varieties of rifles, shotguns, handguns, bows/crossbows and muzzle loaders can be bought, along with a huge variety of ammunitions. Shotguns can have buckshot, birdshot or slugs, for an example.

Not only that, but the gear and equipment you can get is fantastic as well. A variety of different outfits with different stats that'll help you against different prey. Urine spreys and lures to attract prey. Wind indicators and ground blinds. Camping gear, climbing gear, first aid kits. There's a lot of selection in regards to what you can bring along with you. It helps too that the game is gorgeous. It's not 'next gen', but it's pretty. The maps are huge. You can wander around for literally hours stalking prey and constantly be seeing new and interesting terrain. The land makes such a huge difference to how you hunt as well, how you approach your prey and whether or not you get seen or not.

The only downside is that, well, it's "free to play". Sort of. The game has a mix of subscription fees and micropayments, and some may find that distasteful. There are those that want one or the other; if you're buying stuff for micropayments, then you shouldn't need a monthly payment. If you're paying monthly, then you shouldn't need micropayments. The subscription does give you a few items and the basic guns you need to hunt every animal in the game, mind you, but if you want variety in your weapons or looks, you'll likely need to pull out the credit card; again. And yet, I don't really personally mind. This is a niche title and the developer needs to be funded if the game is to survive. A nice way (or at least an optimistic way) of thinking of it is to look at it like a sort of kickstarter. You fund the game, and you get rewarded.

Still, like I said, I can easily recommend this game. I'm not a hunter. I'm primarily an RPG / strategy / Dota 2 player. Yet I just absolutely adore this game. Every hunt is so satisfying, and it has these really nice ups and downs, where you go from tensely stalking your prey, to just relaxing and wandering the woods seeking the next. Plus. It's free to check out! What've you got to lose? :)

I genuinely adore this game. I'm not a huge fan of racers, but there's just something about Bugbear's games that make me love them. The damage you can cause and take, how your cars get beat up as the race progresses and just how gorgeous the games they make are. As it stands the only thing I can count against it is that the multiplayer lobby is skeletal at best in features and that it could do with a bit more optimization, but that's it. The game feels good, racing is fun, derbies are violent and funny, and multiplayer really is where the game truly shines at the moment.

Do remember that this is an early access review though, and the game is missing a lot of features still (like the entire singleplayer campaign), so take that with a grain of salt. :)

If you have any love for Icewind Dale or the Infinity Engine games, you'll love this. I cannot recommend this game enough. It's brilliant fun from start to finish, and it's definitely THE dungeon crawling D&D experience. The voice acting is stellar, the world you explore is gorgeous, the music is amazing, it's just a fantastic game all around. I love it so utterly and completely.

Life is Feudal: Your Own is definitely a product of our ongoing craze and love for the survival, sandboxy, constructive and destructive genre, while taking another step towards its logical extremes. The game is a beautiful one, the graphics and the lighting do not fail to impress, which helps bring life to a vast world filled with trees, mountains, swamps, beaches and the ocean itself. Although at the time of writing the game is clearly an Early Access one with plenty of missing features, what's there is evidently plenty to hook people in.

The game gives you plenty of options on how you'd like to play it. You can set how fast or how slow your skills level up, from a glacial crawl to rocketing into masteries. You can set skill caps, either letting the player master every profession, or give them just enough to master one and dabble in one or two others. The latter adds an incredible amount of flavour, where you see farmers who are actual farmers, carpenters who are actual carpenters. They've specialized, they've mastered their trade, and although they may have the ability to help out here and there, they'll never become the town's second blacksmith. To some this may sound bad, but look at it this way: this is Life is Feudal. You're building a town, and in this town everyone, every player, has a purpose. They become gears in a grander machine, where everyone relies on everyone else.

In that kind of game, on that kind of server, you won't find that one guy that's a master blacksmith, carpenter, architect, herbalist, and so on. You won't find a massive castle built by a single person, vast and full of every imaginable thing, but equally lonely. During my play I was invited to join a town. A small one, admittedly, but immediately the community became evident and clear. You had farmers with their plots outside the walls. You had the blacksmith with his shop, a herbalist with another. I was lucky enough to be apprenticed as a carpenter, witnessing wood cutters at work, hauling timber to their newest farmhouse.

That doesn't mean it has to be though. If you're the kind of person that prefers the Minecraft approach, worry not! As I mentioned before, the skill rates are completely up to you. If you want to master the art of logging from peeling the bark off a tree, you can set those settings up and just jump in. You'll be able to master every skill and build your own little kingdom. This goes in multiplayer as well, meaning you can have a small group on a high skill rate server that'll be able to rival a low skill rate server's larger community.

Nothing is perfect however, and this goes doubly for early access. I don't fault the game for any of its bugs or glitches, but it helps that I honestly didn't run into many. The only thing that actually showed up was that sometimes items wouldn't load in and I had to restart the game. No crashes, no memory leaks, no massive frame drops out of nowhere. The frame rate, admittedly, was pretty awful even on the lowest settings, but that's par for the course during early development. It can only get better. Yet this doesn't leave me with a lot of complaints! The UI is a little clunky, but that tends to be cleaned up during development. Wolves are a bit deadly when you're starting off as well, making running into one early on a deadly affair -- and honestly, that's about it.

There's already a good selection of servers out there with a modest but dedicated population, too. For anyone who's been seeking a game like this, I find it easy to recommend. Just be warned; this may be a little too hardcore for a jump directly from Minecraft, at least for some players. For the rest, that's most definitely a good thing!

Jagged Alliance Flashback feels to me like the first true and genuine attempt at making a new Jagged Alliance game since the original two. Right from the start it's clear that the people making this game are fans of the original and that they're truly trying to re-capture the gameplay. The map, its sectors and the way you move on it are all faithfully recreated. Movement in the game itself has been modernized a bit by using larger tiles, but the game honestly benefits from it. The addition of very clear indicators that not only show your cover but the angles towards your enemies is a fantastic one. There's no guesswork in whether or not a piece of cover works at an awkward angle, the game straight up tells you before you move. Not only that, but it tells you this in regards to every enemy visible to your guys.

The gunfights feel satisfyingly lethal as well, and with added polish will no doubt match the brutality that I came to love from JA2. Your mercs can die and often quite easily, if you're not careful with them, and it takes little to make them bleed. The blood effects are fantastic as well, with battlefields quickly becoming spray-painted in red, splattering onto walls, objects and the ground in fantastically exaggerated ways. There's no realism in it, but this is one front where realism truly is neither needed nor wanted.

As with any early-access games, bugs are to be expected before its release, so no points are taken from their existance. Only just ecchoing the ever present warning that if you buy this game during early access, you're getting it as is. What I played was satisfying, fun, visceral and deadly, and it's no doubt the closest thing to a true and real Jagged Alliance game we've had in over a decade.