I loved DoW II and also Chaos Rising. I think you will enjoy it. I'm very glad they yanked GFWL out of those. I may replay them at some point. It's been a while now. I need to play Retribution. I haven't gotten to it yet but I can't imagine not liking it. These games really turned me on to Warhammer 40k.

Good news: The character limit for GOG reviews has been increased to 2000 characters, still short but it's an improvement!

Journey of a Roach

A short but fun, low stress & puzzle driven adventure for the whole family. Finally, a game that finds the ideal balance between being neither too hard for beginners nor too easy for veterans. It can be comfortably finished in one evening but despite its short length, this game is packed with puzzles that feel like the designers made them to ENTERTAIN you rather than stop you in your tracks.
Aside from a very basic understanding of electricity, no outside knowledge is required. All the puzzles are clued, creative but logical and don’t feel rehashed. No pixel hunting due to hotspot highlighting and no annoying timed puzzles, only one short sequence where you need to be careful where you’re crawling - thanks to the super simple controls hardly a challenge and you can’t die.

Progression is entirely linear and tiresome backtracking is non existent. You can crawl on walls and the entire world will turn around with you, thankfully it’s not all too disorienting as the level design is simple and compact. Crawling on walls is a fun feature and a key aspect of the game yet never feels like a gimmick. Interaction with the environment is very limited but it's an acceptable price to pay for such a well designed, streamlined and frustration-free experience. The only bugs you'll encounter are the cute little fat ones you get to eat in-game, and even those are optional so no worries.
As in Machinarium or Gomo, there is no spoken dialogue and not much of a story beyond the “rescue your friend and reach surface” premise. Instead, you get light-hearted slapstick humor and charming characters who mumble in a hilarious non intelligible language reminiscent of Pingu the penguin.

Sadly, the game is all too short so if price for value is important to you, you might want to wait for a sale. Not as magical as Machinarium but Journey of a Roach is a very charming game that perfectly succeeds at what it intends to do.

Final rating: 4,5 stars (rounded to 5 stars)

Ah, I should have figured as much. That's good then that they put a proper boss disposal method in the game as well. Being a programmer I often resort to using the code against itself instead. :)

Another Blackwell game come and gone: I've finished Blackwell Unbound. This is the second of the Wadjet Eye Blackwell series, and it's a great step forward from the first, not especially in tech or appearance, but surely in story and solid design. It took me about four hours to finish the base game, which I completed without recourse to Internet help (I got stuck, of course, but not deadly stuck; with meandering and staring blankly at the screen, I was eventually able to work things out).

After introducing the current-day main characters of the series in the first game, this one steps sweetly back to 1973, where we follow Joey (voiced by my friend Abe Goldfarb) and Lauren Blackwell, a hard-smoking noir dame in New York who was discussed in the prior installment, but did not appear. We join Lauren and Joey in mid-stride at the end of a busy day when they are about to head out to see if a couple of rumored cases are matters of actual spirit work, or just everyday stuff. Guess how it turns out.

There are more cases, more locations, and more clever design decisions in this than the first; it's a very pleasant game for fans of the old-stylee point and click, short and satisfying. The plot unfolds nicely, straying into some surprising areas from time to time. Another friend of mine from the NYC theater community, Stephanie Cox-Williams, turns up as The Countess, so that made the game even more fun for me.

The developer's commentary in Unbound is a little less daunting than it was in Legacy, for those who like special features, and the achievements are good fun. Lauren is a relentless smoker, and the hardest of the achievements - not counting a couple that you just need to read a guide for, because how would you ever know to do that to that - involves completing the game with her death-stick intake limited to a single pack. Because it's there, that's why.

Legacy was good, and Unbound is gooder. Looking forward to moving on through the series.

My limited list.

Lemme just say it's fun reading your thoughts as you play through the series.

I am a total fan of the series, and it's been years since I've played Legacy and Unbound. I've always wanted to replay through the entire thing, but your writeups are probably going to push me to do it sooner rather than later :)

I just finished Might and Magic 8.
And I've completed all series except 9 and 10, which I won't want to play because of bad reputation.
I enjoyed this game as well as other series. Final my party is Lv60 Knight(me), Cleric, Lich, Vampire and Minotaur.
I don't use dragons because they are game balance breaker. LOL.

My List

Trails in the Sky. A charming JRPG. Grinding is relatively minimal - basically, it you notice you're still getting decent experience for killing monsters in certain areas, you should continue to do so until you're not, which usually doesn't take long. Afterward, you can generally avoid tedious encounters.

I don't think I fully grokked the orbment system, but as it turns out I didn't really have to, at least not on the normal difficulty setting.

The story is pretty good in that it's a slow-burning thing that builds at a good, gradual pace and it's relatively lacking in histrionics. My major nitpick is the idea of various characters throughout the game encouraging adopted siblings to hook up. Yes, they're not blood-relations, but it's still quite a leap in mindset for people in that situation. I suppose the game's logic is that the kids were old enough at the time of the adoption that they could mentally be open to a change like that, but it's still weird to me.

I'm looking forward to the second chapter now.

Thank you, thuey - I'm glad you're liking the write-ups. I often don't know if I'm just talking to the air and making people roll their eyes, or if some folks are enjoying reading along, so I appreciate it. If I'm making you want to get back in there and play with the ghosts, all the better.

I enjoyed it as well, though it was a bit slow-paced for my preferences. I didn't get the best experience with it though - I played it on PSP when I'm not a fan of handhelds, and was playing it during downtime at work which was noisy so I couldn't hear the game sound and had to frequently put the game down at odd times because something came up. Still good enough that I've been waiting years for the second chapter.

I need to replay it using the GOG copy "Soon(TM)." Along with all the other games I want to play...

Just to people feel stimulated to keep posting their reviews/impressions: I enjoy and read almost all of them (well there are titles that don´t interest me). Someday I will post my opinions too, as soon as I finish more games. I´m kinda a "half-player" and if anything distract me or if I stay long periods of not playing that game I lose the willing to finish it. Usually only finish games that really grap and embrace me. And your comments build me determination to finish some more of them. Thanks!

THE WALKING DEAD SEASON 2 *SPOILER FREE*

Fun interactive comic book game. Buy it for $10 or less.

+Clementine
+I like the cell-shaded graphics
+Nice presentation

-Story feels rushed compared to Season 1
-Most of the NPC characters are stereotypes in the worst most hollow, lifeless, cardboard cutout way.
-Most of the NPC characters were difficult to like. In fact, I hated almost every single NPC.
-Character interaction felt forced. For example, one moment a character is treating you like complete shit (without reason), and the next day you are expected to care about them. This was not realistic at all.
-Pointless choices that always lead to the same conclusion (this seemed less obvious in Season 1)
-Odd conversation branching. For example, you might pick one choice and it leads to a reply that could easily have been for a completely different choice, etc.
-More QTEs (Quick Time Events). Some might like this, it didn't seem necessary at all.
-Some QTEs are scripted to be lost intentionally. Why make it a QTE if there is no chance of succeeding at it?
-Can't skip credits or "next time" scenes at the end. This is incredibly grating when doing all of the episodes back to back.
-Maybe this will go for all Survival movies and games, but these characters overreact WAY too much. It's already the end of the world, everyone you know is dead, every day someone else dies, and you're a sitting duck. Are you really going to be SUPER surprised and angry when another character in the game dies?...

Just re-won MoH.

On a HUUUUUUUGE WW2 FPS binge right now so I reinstalled CoD 1 & 2 after which I may go onto Brothers in Arms.

Finished the Sacred 2 campaign in Silver difficulty with my Shadow Warrior. Complete enough for me to list it, though I'm not done playing yet - 3 more difficulties if I can hack it and several more characters to try. I've beaten the game with a Temple Guardian and Seraphim in the past, so I'll be using that as reference as well.

As a hack and slash RPG, the combat makes up the bulk of the gameplay. So I suppose I'll talk about that first. Visually it is a pretty mixed bag. Many of the physical attacks just don't have any flair to them, very mundane. On the other hand they did quite well with a lot of the spell effects, pretty flashy and cool. The sounds are very weak though, nothing feels like it has any impact due to the sound effects. Mechanically the combat is also pretty weak. I do like the idea of juggling cooldowns rather than managing a mana bar, but sadly is let down finicky/poor targeting and slightly sluggish response.

Character variety and customization is very strong all around. There are 6 attributes (base stats), a large pool of passive skills from which you can pick 10 as you level, 7 different classes (of which I've played 3), each with 15 active skills (split into 3 schools), that each have several perks you can choose from. There's a lot to wrap your head around - though the class skills are usually fairly easy to get a handle on, the base stats and passive skills might require a bit of reading to know what you need for your character. Each class is different from the other, and each class has multiple ways to play. For example, Temple Guardian has a melee school and 2 different magic schools, or Shadow Warrior has 2 different melee schools and a summoning school. Oh yeah, most classes have a Light and Dark path to follow, which changes up the quests throughout the game.

As for the world, it is massive with a ton of quests to do. Well, early on there's a ton of quests - they start to dry up in later zones. Naturally a lot of them are pretty basic kill/fetch quests, but some of them are pretty interesting. Things like setting up and attending a Blind Guardian concert, pop culture references, or just generally amusing dialogue to go with a basic quest. As I said, the world is quite massive, though truly it might be a bit too large. There's just too much dead space with no reason to visit, especially a large number of dungeons with no related quest or significant treasure. It's all quite pretty though.

Last, a little word about balance. Specifically the levelling curve. Something seems a bit off here. My Temple Guardian and Seraphim did as many sidequests as I could find and wound up massively overleveling the content (monster level scales with your level, but each zone has minimum and maximum levels). My Shadow Warrior ignored all but a handful of sidequests and most of the enemies along the way. He actually had an easier time completing the game due to lower boss levels. Of course now that's coming back to bite me as I'm 13 levels lower than the mobs in the next difficulty - things hit pretty damn hard now. I'm haven't really thought this through, something just feels wrong. Like there's a vast world to explore, but maybe you shouldn't. Or something.

Sacred 2 isn't without its faults, but it is still one of my favorites in the genre.

Same here! I just played Dino D-Day courtesy of a PCGamer/Bundlestars giveaway a few weeks ago. The game is almost completely dead (average of about 15 players any time I checked,) but I had a lot of fun.
Anyway, it rekindled my love for WW2 FPS games. I was literally planning to start a CoD-athon the minute after reading this thread. I always have BiA installed, I just found my old copy of RtCW, and I think I'll install H&D too. I might even finally buy H&D2 while I'm at it.

I got so bored of the genre like a decade ago, but now I miss it and keep wishing for more!

Here we go :P
Now we're going to be talking about this all day!

I never considered H&D to be a true FPS because it is SOOOO strategy oriented almost (stress almost) bordering on a TBS.

If you get the chance (I didn't see in mentioned) give The Deadly Dozen #2 a go. #1 is shit even for a junky, but #2 is pure slow crawling sniping bliss. Also being an indy it's relatively cheap. :D I will return with more as it occurs to me.