The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. A solid and occasionally great first person stealth action game.

The gameplay is solid and meaty, melee is really well done, very similar to the Zeno Clash series, the gunplay is strong as well. As good as the melee is, you rarely need it, save for the occasional stealth take down. Guns pack a punch, shotguns are smartly designed, they're good for up to about fifteen feet and are useless at larger distances, assault rifles are good for longer range and the pistol is solid for when you don't want to waste assault rifle ammo picking off a single somebody. Enemies are not bullet sponges and will go down in one well placed rifle/pistol shot or a close range shotgun blast.

The stealth portions are generally rather fun but rather simple, hide in the shadows, wait for guard to move, crouch run to other shadow/hide behind/underneath obstacle and maybe do a take down if needed. The AI can be a bit too eagle eyed at times, while being nearly blind in other instances. All in all not too annoying, and I say that as somebody who usually hates stealth sections.

The "predator" portions (combining stealth and action) are really fun, you really do feel like a better warrior than anybody around you as you go from shadow to shadow while taking down anybody who catches your eye.

The writing is generally solid but the story is barely there so it would've been hard to flub either way. The characters are all stereotypical movie prisoners and/or stereotypical big bads. Dialogue is fine, plot is fine, it's all just well put together and is smart enough to realize that nobody is playing the game for the story so it stays out of the way.

Everything sounds good, music, voice acting, environment, not much to say here.

The only annoying things about the game were certain parts repeated themselves two or three times, that got a bit old, and two levels had constantly respawning enemies at several points, it was obviously trying to drive you forward but it was still really annoying.

Overall I really enjoyed The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay (especially the last half of the game) and would have no problem recommending it to somebody looking for some actiony goodness.

Gravity Ghost

Already finished it a week ago. Took me about 3 hours to play through, and I enjoyed every minute of it. The gameplay was simple but smooth and fun, the music great, the graphics pleasant, progress was quick and the game introduced enough new mechanics and ideas to keep me engaged all throughout, even though some mechanics were a bit underused. The story was a little overfraught with tragedy, but still interesting to follow and figure out. I don't have much to add other than that I thought it was worth both my time and money.

Venetica

This little underdog RPG mixes various elements that reminded me of Fable, Divinity 2, Risen, Kingdoms of Amalur and point-and-click adventure games. It doesn't surpass or even equal any of those inspirations, but this mixture of known elements still creates something original that's worth checking out. It's comparatively short, somewhat restricted and very easy compared to other RPGs, but I still found it a bit more engaging than many classic RPGs I tried to get into recently. I'm a bit conflicted when it comes to rating it, as the periods in which I thought the game was a blast were often contrasted again with periods of frustration or slight boredom in between, but overall, I quite enjoyed it despite its shortcomings and flaws.

The art style is a bit cartoony and reminiscent of Fable, but I thought the graphics quite beautiful, consistent with attractive colors, which made exploration fun despite its limitations (e.g. you can't jump, not even drop down ledges, just like in Kingdoms of Amalur). It speaks for the game that it's mostly taking place in a city and I still had fun exploring, even though cities are usually my least favorite part of RPGs. The (German) voiceacting was top notch and done by professionals, and I liked the soundtrack a lot.

The story is a mixed bag of original setting and characters combined with rather bland predictable plot (defeat all the villain bosses) which is a pity as it could have been much more. The game starts right in the middle of things without tedious introductions, which is something I really appreciate, and it was refreshing to explore something a little different than your average fantasy world (being set mostly in a fictional Venice) and meet the people and creatures within it. The world design and naming conventions are somewhat creative, but undermined by some typical fantasy tropes and clichés regardless.

Progressing in the main story often works very much like in adventure games, which is no surprise seeing that Deck13 was originally a developer of point-and-click adventures before trying their hands on this lightweight RPG. There are specific solutions you need to find and follow, no alternative ways to solve problems; the game is neither open world, nor is it entirely linear though - within the restricted areas you gradually get access to, you can freely explore and do side quests at your own pace, including any backtracking you'd like to do (or not).

Venetica has some original ideas, unusual skills that don't focus entirely on combat but are useful for exploration, finding secrets and making more gameplay mechanics of the game accessible to the player, e.g. talking to ghosts etc. (a bit similar to Divinity 2 or Dungeon Siege 2). They are only useful in specific spots though, and some are underused even, so that's also more like an adventure game than real open world exploration and RPG character creation. Leveling up and distributing points is present but not very meaningful in this game. You will probably be able to buy all skills you want during the course of the game anyway. Other elements are clearly inspired by Gothic and Risen, like the need for trainers to level up, the need for hunting skills to loot skins and teeth etc. from monsters, the choice between three different guilds to join and maybe even the fixed protagonist that you can't customize freely (female in this game, though, which is a plus in my book but might put off others).

The combat is very basic, simple and easy, and unless you're really really bad at videogames you're practically immortal in Venetica. It's also melee only, with some special attacks, but no ranged weapons and I think only two or three weaker ranged spells the use of which is rather limited. You should be able to survive most battles without a scratch, just by dancing around the enemy and hitting them with or without combos. On rare occasions you might get unlucky and die, but you can immediately return to life again with your collected shadow energy and as long as you always watch out for it and replenish it, you will never see a Game Over screen. And even if you run out of shadow energy, which is highly unlikely, you'd need to die several times in a row before you actually lose the game and have to reload a savegame. The game can be saved manually and everywhere except during boss battles.

The boss battles, by the way, are absolutely terrible, especially the earlier ones. They always follow the same pattern, first part in the real world, second part in the shadow world. And they are essentially puzzles rather than tests of skills, but quite unimaginative puzzles. Despite that, they can get really frustratring due to lacking or even misleading clues on what to do, bad camera control, serious glitches (like gliding through the boss or glitching on top of it) and repetition, as both parts of the boss battles can have several stages and you need to repeat the same moves quite a few times before finally beating them. Additionally, the space where the second part of these battles takes place is very dull. If you die in the second part, you just start over at the beginning of the second part with no other punishment than the boss being reset to its full health (arguably the worst punishment, seeing how tedious the battles are). If you leave the game though to take a break or look for tips on the net (because ALT-TAB might crash the game), you will also have to repeat the first part of the combat, if you load your last savegame. Thankfully there are only 4 or 5 of such boss battles in the game (quite predictable from the start, so not really a spoiler), and even though the first two nearly drove me nuts, I took them as the price to pay for the hours of enjoyment the rest of the game gave me. All in all the playthrough took me about 30 hours, but the game can be finished in less time.

So who would I recommend Venetica to? I guess to curious and open minded fans of adventure games and casual RPGs that are more focused on exploring beautiful places than on difficulty and complex mechanics, and to people who are patient enough to endure the few terrible boss battles in order to enjoy the rest of the game.

Finished Pillars of Eternity last month.

I enjoyed the game a lot, it's also the first KS game (99% percent of them RPGs) I've played through. Can't wait for the expansion!!

Ben There, Dan That. A simple but quite funny point-and-click adventure game. It's very easy - it'll take you less than a couple of hours to beat it because I think only one puzzle actually required me to test my brain at all - and the graphics are crude to the point that it becomes a joke in itself, but it made me laugh a lot. The running gags about adventure game heroes constantly looking for crap to steal and murdering people in their paths were particularly good.

I wish it had an option to play in a bigger window, though.

Great fun, mouse control was a bit shit though. Insane amount of mouse accelaration.

Sam & Max Save the World

Having originally completed the game about, uhh, 7 years ago, I wanted to take another look at it, now that I have completed Hit the Road as well. Thoughts? While it no longer suffers the scrolling issue of the old game, it's much clearer where you can go or not and it sports a simpler, more hassle-free interface, it's worse than Hit the Road.

Aside from finding the humour significantly more hit and miss, there are some things that I didn't really like about the game. Things like repetition. I mean, why must I always begin each episode in Sam & Max's apartment with another baffling assignment from the commissioner? Why must this "hilarious" gag with Bosco/Sybil repeat in every episode? It gets old before I even reach the fourth episode Also, some heavy backtracking makes the game a bigger chore than it needs to be. Aside those, eh, I guess it's an OK point and click adventure.

Hopefully, Beyond Time and Space will be a better game, but I'm not holding my breath.

P.S.: On a technical note, it was quite annoying having to reset the game's settings each time I started a new episode. Thankfully, Telltale fixed that with the sequel.

Full list.

I finished playing Axiom Verge a few months ago, it's a really fun super metroid clone. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who's looking for something similar to it. Although there's a ton of weapons and honestly I didn't use all of them, but variety is always good.

Now I'm playing terraria, and man, for being so simple it's a really fun game too. It's hard to believe I play it one minute and then 2 hours just flew by.

In the last few days, completed Life Is Strange - Episodes 1-3.

Added it to my 2015 Done List:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2015/post42

Absolutely loved those episodes and can't wait for Episode 4.

Nice review of the game. Bought that one during the summer sale and will be getting into it shortly (hopefully as Im playing Metro, F.E.A.R., and Wolfenstein currently). Always heard good things about the game, but somehow missed it when it originally came out.

Star Wars: Battlefront II

I'm talking about the Rise of the Empire campaign here. Obviously you can continue battling on the maps for ever though. It is extremely fun. The missions are not all balanced, and sometimes it spawns you extremely far from the action. Also the AI is one of the stupidest I've ever seen. So I probably can't recommend it for the campaign, but just fighting it out wih your friends? Ahh ya. Tons on fun.

Yes exactly! Something about the darkness/shoot out the lights game design felt like an afterthought, not like in Splinter Cell or Thief where light truly plays a major part in the game.

Speaking of the lights, did you notice how many times you shoot out the lights and mysteriously there is still light from nowhere while in buildings? Things like that didn't make sense to me.

Also, I swear there was a part in the funhouse where a set of lights kept coming back after I shot them.

I might just play through again on New Game+ to make sure I'm not totally crazy with all these things.

No love for Supreme Commander?
It's pretty much Total Annihilation perfected with a great sense of scale and epic,multi front battles going on that really test your skill on RTS and rushing often get your ass handed to you.

Aye, shooting out lights and still having light was weird. didn't notice one coming back. Was crazy annoyed by even the notion of indestructible lights though.

The Journey Down, Chapter Two: A really good point-and-click game. The story is interesting, the artwork is amazing, with a unique African ("Afro-noir," according to the devs) vibe, and the music is absolutely beautiful. It's part two of three, with three upcoming probably next year. This one picks up right after the cliffhanger ending of the first part and ends with another one, but the story in between does a good job of filling in more backstory and plot without hitting you over the head with a ton of exposition and setting up a couple of twists that lead to the next part.

The only real con I noticed were consistently inaccurate or misspelled captions. I expect at least one typo for any text-heavy game, but there are more in this one than I've seen in a number of amateur games. Some of the voice recordings are of a noticeably lower quality than the rest, but I only noticed that a few times.

Overall, very much worth playing if you like this style of adventure game, even with the episodic nature of it. I'm really hoping that it ends up here on GOG once all three parts are released; having the soundtrack as an extra (either free or as a purchasable add-on*) would be a nice extra.

* In this particular case, I would be absolutely okay with paying full price for the soundtrack as a separate purchase, because it is that good. Also, their original composer passed away last year and apparently there's an album of his music up for purchase., from which all the proceeds go to charity. I think it was a nice touch that they featured that as a very muted 'hey, if you like his music, you can get this, too' ad at the end of the behind-the-scenes extra that's unlocked once you finish the game.

The rest of my games