This list has all the games I've finished in June. For the May list,
go here.
June 5th: Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves (Tome I). A nice, refreshing take on the tower defense genre. You start each level by planning traps for the night in the wolves' path, and this is very crucial because your two weapons, the axe and the rifle aren't very strong against the enemies (at least not until the middle / end game when you have enough money to buy decent blessed and silver weapons) and a pack will make short work of you in melee. The traps are quite varied and therefor fun to use; the only traps I didn't find much use for were the bonfire and the mortar. While a pretty good game, it's not without some flaws: there were a handful of noticeable bugs such as my character completely freezing once, and the mouse could go away from the screen, annoyingly jumping out of the game on an unfortunate misclick. The voice acting was pretty horrendous, and while not a very great-looking game, it had sudden spikes of lag every once in a while. But other than those minuses, a solid title. Definitely worth checking out if tower defense is your cup of tea.
June 6th: Karateka (2012). Meh...a pretty simple game. You run a straight path, angry dudes run towards you, you block their attack, hit them a couple of times, repeat until angry dude goes down, run some more, fight another angry dude, etc. for about 30 minutes until the final boss, which is just like any other encounter so far. A really short game and too monotonous and repetitive. I've played through the game twice and though I only succeeded with the Brute both times, I have no real desire to play the game more than this. Let Mariko have a happy life with the retard instead of "her true love".
June 11th: Seduce Me. Managed to win the game by wooing Esper the maid, though I fooled around a little bit with everyone, Lilia being the only one of the four girls I didn't have carnal pleasures with. Now, everyone who's heard of the game probably thinks it's just a sick sex game for perverts who can't get any in real life, but there were actually interesting gameplay elements here as well. Sure, the game has some graphic content but the card mini-games you play in order to get more points in the eyes of the girls, were actually pretty fun. And whether or not it was because of the content you got to see after successfully handling the mini-games, I was genuinely interested in developing the relationships with the girls via beating them at games (well, not beating actually; instead you had to be as good as them in most of the games) and discovering their deepest secrets (for example, who would've guessed the young redhead who's into horses and books, has a dominatrix side to her). The graphics in the game are very well drawn and the game was also quite bug-free; the only thing that struck the eye were errors in the text; namely one of the girls, Cecilia, was sometimes Ceclia or Cecelia. Anyway, I genuinely liked the game, not just because of the sex, and I encourage people to try this one out. Hey, video games are often very violent: why can't they be occasionally erotic too? At least I like to think romance and sex are much more suitable and natural entertainment for pretty much everyone, than bloody, gory action (although I like that too).
June 20th: Sleeping Dogs. A great game, but not perfect. The open world, driving, and shooting mechanics reminded me of GTA with a bit of Saints Row mixed in, while the combat borrowed heavily from Batman: Arkham games. However, in my opinion the game didn't necessarily do anything better compared to the games it copied. Despite that, the game had me addicted and I also did a lot of the extra stuff besides completing the main plot, such as found all healing shrines, jade statues and did every favor and drug bust. Speaking of which, the drug bust missions were easily the most boring part of the game, because every time it went like this: first you had to beat up a bunch of dudes, then hack the camera, and then go home and use the surveillance system to point out the supplier, and I could always tell after only a second which one is the right guy because he was always so super-obvious, compared to the other, somewhat static characters on the screen. But anyway, the main plot was interesting and the gameplay, for the most part, was lots of fun. Recommended to everyone who's into sandbox games like GTA.
June 26th: Runespell: Overture. Ehhh...let's start with the positive. I really liked the idea of the game: you play "Mythic Poker" against enemies, and bring their HP down with different poker hands. The better the hand, the better the damage. In a way, the game reminded me of Puzzle Quest. The music was also quite nice. However...the game got very repetitive QUICKLY, only after about five matches. Each victory depended on whether or not I could score a straight flush or two; if not, then it usually meant automatic defeat. The game has these "runespells" with different features (deal certain type of damage, defense against certain type of damage, more action points per turn etc.), but I hated how all of them except ally cards and passive cards had uses, which you had to replenish with silver. They were quite expensive, so I ended up using mostly ally cards (which had unlimited uses) the whole game. Also, there was only one type of passive abilities: more HP. Why couldn't there be passive cards that, for example, boost my attack? Or anything else besides only more HP? Because of these issues and without regular level-upping, I thought customization options were very limited and there was basically zero character development. I said before the music was quite nice, but there weren't enough tracks and during some of the final enemies I muted the whole game because the music got so damn repetitive. And finally, the plot made no sense and I didn't get into it at all. In short, interesting idea but sub-par execution.
June 27th: Pid. A good game for the most part. There were a couple of levels I really didn't like (Factory and Maze) but the rest of them were quite enjoyable. The gravity beam was fun to use throughout the game, the graphics and character animation were really good, and the music, except for a couple of tracks, was top notch. While not the best platformer I've ever played (it's no Braid or Limbo, while those games surely have influenced the developers), I'd still rate the game pretty high and would easily recommend it to platforming fans.
The July list is
here.