Finished a couple more tiney $0.49 (or less in a pack!) indie games I got on the Steam sale.

Cyberhunt

Normally I don't care for tank controls, but here I didn't mind them. A pretty basic infinite wave arena shmup with 500 achievements and the "innovation" that you can only unlock the 9 that are your current "missions". Well I still unlocked all 500 and had fun doing it.

Space: Elite Force

A very short but neat side-scrolling shmup with upgrades that many say is a blatant ripoff of Steredenn while the dev claims it was inspired by it. It was pretty easy, after beating the game on normal with 1 or 2 deaths, I beat the Hardcore (1 life) mode on first attempt. Infinite Mode has an achievement you need to get in the top 5 of the leaderboard to unlock, and I've only managed to make it to #52 so far, and I think I'll stop trying until the dev changes the achievement to something more reasonable.

Edit:
Pixelpunk XL

This 6DOF Descent style shooter cost me a whole $1! And in hindsight I'd rather have spent it elsewhere. Felt more like a tech demo with gameplay than an actual game. Thankfully it was 100% completed in less than 1.5 hours.

The Room

Neat little puzzle game, I can see why it's so popular. Not very hard, just need to pay attention and look everywhere. I did end up having to use the Hint button 2-3 times because I'm a dum-dum.

Sun Wukong VS Robot

A very short (under 3 hours) Metroidvania. Not bad, though the controls are way too sensitive (no deadzone) with a 360 pad. Interestingly, most of the skills (other than combat spells) can be bought for XP from shops scattered throughout the game, without waiting to find them by defeating bosses and stuff.

Inside (XB1X)

Hard to believe they actually made a better game than Limbo, but that's what they did. My favourite 2d side scrollers.

I love the style of puzzles that the developers use, mostly logical physics based puzzles that don't get repeated to the point they become monotonous. They got everything just right in my opinion- the creepy mood, the art style, the pacing and puzzles, the story telling and best of all the devs know when to end a game, instead of drawing it out until the player tires of it. I just wish we didn't have to wait so many years between their games. But good quality takes time I suppose.

Dark Devotion
I got it from the community giveaway, donated by BeatriceElysia, thanks a lot again!

Wow, the game is very, very good! Pretty hard indeed and with dark and gloomy atmosphere. The only problem is that at the beginning the dev are throwing this dark and gloomy atmosphere in your face: "Look! Look! Can you imagine how dark and gloomy the game is? Do you see how our introduction is dark and gloomy? How about the first part of the game? Is it dark and gloomy enough for you? I bet not so the hub you’ll be thrown into is even more dark and gloomy with some characters saying some cryptic thing. Dark and gloomy things of course!" Fortunately it gets better later on and the atmosphere is slowly build up, not thrown in your face.

Gameplay itself is quite interesting. I don’t want to spoil anything but it’s hardly a metroidvania game. As you go further you cannot easily go back to where you were simply because... you can’t jump in this game so if you drop down from a ledge you can’t go back. Or at least anytime you wish - there are some teleporters.

The most important part is fighting and it’s where the game truly shines. Amazing bosses and challenging regular foes is something I thoughtfully enjoyed. Fighting is stamina based, i.e. each of your action consume a part of it. So yeah, you may hit and kill one of your enemies but if that means your stamina bar is depleted then maybe it’s better to perform a dodge-roll move, get away from you foes and wait for your stamina to replenish. Boss fights (there are a lot of them!) are particularly interesting. As you may have heard the game is very difficult. Yeah, it’s true but in many cases dying and respawning in your hub allows you to upgrade your character so it’s not that you’ll constantly lose your progress. At the beginning you’ll probably die a lot and gain nothing but after some time things get smoother.

Story it’s dark and gloo… ah, wait, I won’t spoil anything. It’s not a very important part of the game but decent nevertheless.

I recommend the game, there is a lot of fun here. Avoid only if you don’t enjoy hard games or this type of games in general.


Full list

Call of Duty + United Offensive

Lately I felt the urge to play through Call of Duty 2 once again (for a gazillionth time) and this thought came to my mind: why not try the first one too. So I did and I'm not disappointed, it may be a bit dated today but great gameplay is still there. I liked the Russian campaign epecially, eastern front is not as sugarcoated as it is in the next installment Expansion is more of the same really, maybe a bit harder (I played on Regular though so not too hard) but most importantly, it's a proper expansion, not 2 hour DLC crap we get nowadays but basically a whole another game. Overall it's 8/10 for the whole package, I would recommend it to anyone really.

Call of Duty 2

I'm proud to say that I finished it on Veteran (hardest difficulty) once, although it took me a few dozen attempts on each mission. This time I played on Regular as I just wanted an relaxed playthrough. Graphics are better compared to the first one but generally it's just more of the same WW2 goodness. The biggest change is that they got rid of a healthbar and implemented the "bloody screen" known from later installments, so basically when you are hit you just duck to cover and regenerate in a few seconds. Some people don't like but for me it's a good change. Overall a 9/10.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I did not play a Zelda title since Oracle of Seasons for Game Boy, so my experience in this series is pretty much nonexistent.

I must say I quite enjoyed it: not only is it a beautiful game to behold, it also plays really smooth and is filled to the brim with details and content. Weather, weaponry, elements and combat were pretty well merged too, being quite logic (weapons break, elemental interactions, lightning attracted to you if you wear metalic gear, cold/heat...) without being burdening or tiresome to deal with.

If I had to pick a con, it would be that unless I messed up "temple order", the difficulty of some temples that are supposedly for starters were mindnumbingly difficult with their puzzles taking into account when you're "supposed" to do them, but considering this is a (big) open world game it's to be expected that I probably took a wild turn and ended up where I shouldn't (or that I'm dumb as dirt when it comes to solving some of them, who knows).

I must say that although I recovered all my memories, I did not complete ALL temples and I did not find all kolog seeds, so I'll run it all over again and try to find them, but only after getting the DLCs.

I am sincerely impressed with it and recommend it wholeheartedly.

It was worth to get smacked, stabbed, pierced through, slashed, bombed, frozen, burned up, shocked, pushed down cliffs and rammed.

Borderlands Pre-Sequel

I don't know who got this idea to make this DLC as a full game but lemme tell you - it was bad idea.
You can feel that it was pulled out and masked DLC - balance is off, some things like low gravity works not-so-perfectly (enemies can clip through the object or land in weird places).
Side mission are mostly fillers. XP reward is bad. BL1 and BL2 had some gems in side acitivity, but not there.
Oh and half NPCs that have radio contact with you use british accent. Combine that with try-hard2be funny dialogues and you can imagine snorefest that can be compared with awful chinese&french accents in good ol' Deus Ex.

Forget about getting any decent gun beyond middle tier (violet color), you gonna sport trash gun for 3/4 of the game.

Only two things were good in Pre-Sequel. New energy guns are cool addition to the arsenal, the one that act like Gluon Gun from HL melts everything.
Another one was Grinder machine that let you chew 3 guns into other one, you can spend Moonstones to get something one tier higher.

Hope they introduce them again in BL3,,,

Into the Breach, Jul 4 (GOG)-I was ultimately disappointed with this one. I watched a lot of let's plays of this and was really excited to try it out. The first few runs were enjoyable but it soon got old faster than I would have liked. I think the gameplay and mechanics are great but the punishment for failure is too great. Its really discouraging to spend 1.5 hours in the game and then lose and have to start all over. I really like the idea of knowing exactly what the enemy will do and planning around that but I think the character progression is too incremental compared to the speed at which the quality and quantity of enemies increases. And if the in game character progression is minimal that leaves it upto the player to progress which can be difficult in a game compared to chess after a few matches. Ultimately I feel normal mode was just a tick too difficult and easy mode was almost trivially easy. Also, I felt a lot of the units were samey and they frequently had abilities that couldn't be used efficiently. If you have a power that hits everything in a row, but you can only ever line up a single enemy for it its no better than a power that hits just one square.

Full List

Finished Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. It does feel like an expansion pack to BL2 rather than its own game, but in the end, I still enjoyed it. It took some time to get over the fact that that the writing, voice acting, and humor mostly fall far short of the standard set in BL2. Once I got over that and accepted the game for what it is, I had a lot of fun with the low gravity and the laser and cryo weapons. Also, the loot system is a lot more like BL1, so I enjoyed that and wound up using a lot more variety of weapon types where in BL2, I had just a few guns that I stuck to. And the Claptrap DLC is really good, apart from some boss fights that are ludicrously tough if you don't play co-op.

The World Next Door

It's a mixture of Visual Novel and Match-3 game, except that the Match-3 is in real time and takes places on a board that your character can freely move around on to switch tiles while being pursued and attacked by enemies, and the Visual Novel part is not that heavy because the dialogues are generally shorter and combined with choices, and in between both parts you get to walk around and explore a bit, even do some minor "quests".

The quests are really simple though and usually only involve finding objects and giving them to the right characters, or even just talking to the right characters. The game is also split into several parts, or days, and you don't get clear information on when to solve the side quests. Some can only be solved at least one day later, others can fail if you don't solve them the same day you got them, and you don't get much of a clue about that.

The Match-3 games are fun, but a bit easy. I did die a few times because I got too careless, but none of the battles are really challenging, and especially not the boss fights. I'm not complaining about the latter as I'm not a big fan of boss fights, just saying this game is not really about challenges. Apart from the story mode, there is a versus mode for two players, which might be more interesting, but since I only played solo, I didn't try it out.

I really liked the art and music, and the story, while simple and leaving a few open questions, was nice enough, too. I'm pretty sure some would find the whole thing too hipstery and politically correct (the kind where they use "they" instead of "she" even if someone looks quite obviously female), but I didn't really mind. All in all I quite enjoyed it, it entertained me for a few evenings with shorter sessions (I didn't keep track of the time but my guess would be something between 2-4 hours).

EDIT: Forgot to mention, despite its simple 2D look, it made my cooling fans run louder than some complicated 3D games. (I think it's made with Unity.)

Homeworld Remastered Collection

I played both of these games with the Players Patch 2.3 patch - Definitely helps with the balancing of the game.

I remember playing the originals and having a great time. The remasters (to me) felt more like a grind particularly towards the end of both games. The originals definitely play better and if you can happily live with dated visuals (particularly HW1 and Cataclysm (Emergence)) then I'd recommend them over the remasters.

It's actually an australian accent. The game was made by 2k Australia, and after the game performed so well, the studio got shut down.

Deponia: The Complete Journey & Deponia Doomsday

Decided to make the most of the Steam Summer Sale by playing through one of the better point and clicks released in the post Lucasarts era. I'm reviewing both games at the same time because they have the same characters, setting and play the same way. Deponia: The Complete Journey consists of the first 3 games, which forms a nice trilogy. Deponia Doomsday is the 4th game, which takes a slightly different tone with some different mechanics.

The games follow the story of Rufus, a man who dreams of leaving his garbage ridden world of Deponia, for a new and better life on the floating satellite city of Elysium. Rufus is a selfish, vain, ignorant protagonist, but as this is a humorous game, he fits the bill quite nicely. The games all tend to convey a message in the background that suggests protagonists in point and click games usually make things worse for a lot of people so that the protagonist can accomplish his goals. Off the top of my head the worst thing I recall doing in Monkey Island is sealing Stan inside a coffin, in Deponia, destroying someone's livelihood so you can get 1 item they own is fairly common.

The 4 games follow the standard Lucasarts formula for a point and click, with the addition of a few 'minigames' consisting of a puzzle you need to solve, Doomsday adds puzzles with time limits. In terms of difficulty, many puzzles require abstract thinking with more ludicrous solutions appearing in later games. I only had to consult a walkthrough for the first game once, the 2nd game twice, and a few times each for the 3rd and 4th games. At one point in the 4th game you are required to attempt to grab an object, that all logic tells you is too far away, and then must attempt to grab it an additional 3 times despite each attempt resulting in a sentence going along the lines of "I can't reach that".

Overall all four games were funny and taxing on the mind, and they all have the same feel as classic point and clicks. The 4th one is a bit of a let down compared to the original trilogy, often requiring lots of repetition. Notably it also has an achievement that requires you to go through all 243 potential combinations during a certain puzzle. I would definitely recommend the complete journey, however Doomsday adds very little to the story, so I would only recommend it if you're desperate for more Deponia.

Adding a few more for me:

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
I missed the Kickstarter for Bloodstained, as it was launched during a few years when I wasn't gaming at all. Having wishlisted the game as soon as possible, and purchased it shortly after release, I regret that I didn't back the Kickstarter immensely.

Bloodstained makes you play (at least until they release the other playable characters) as Miriam, a "shardbearer" who is able to make use of the mystical skills of demons in combat. Fighting your way off a galleon, you find your way to a village and a demonic castle from which evil energy is overflowing the land. You must travel through this castle, hunt down a former friend, and discover the true evil that endangers the entire Earth.

Over the course of your journey, you receive a range of special abilities such as double jump, inversion, and teleportation. These enable you to reach new areas of the castle, discover hidden items and other secrets, and gain immense power. Important in your quest is your ability to craft items and cook food, through which you can further increase your power.

If this sounds like the classic "Castlevania" formula, that's because it is. The game was designed by Koji Igarashi, the brilliant mind behind the Castlevania series and one of the fathers of the Metroidvania genre. It features a number of callbacks to that earlier series, but a story and animation style that stands on its own. As such, although you may be experiencing flashbacks at some points, you will still find a new experience.

Technically, the game runs like a dream. Despite my 940MX being far under the "minimum" specs, I was able to run it consistently at 40 FPS using the "Epic" preset and 720p resolution. Controls are responsive; animation is nice; and the music suits the game well. Although earlier versions may have been buggy, in my 30 hours of play time (Version 1.05) I did not encounter any gamebreaking bugs.

All in all, Bloodstained is definitely worth the money. I can't wait until they release the free DLC!

Kindred Spirits on the Roof
In Kindred Spirits on the Roof (KSR), your main character is an everywoman named Toomi Yuna. One day, she realizes that she can see two spirits atop the roof of one of the buildings at her school. They talk, and she learns that these kindred spirits cannot move on until they solve their last regret: they have never had sex. Oh, and -- being two women -- they don't know how. Your task over the course of the novel is to make a yuritopia by indirectly helping a number of your classmates explore their feelings and desired, in the hopes that these spirits will learn what they need and be able to cross over.

Mechanically, KSR is a very interesting take on the visual novel genre. The game has you select scenes from a day planner, and saves automatically after each scene. First you go through the main scenes in an arc (marked by bears), then go through supplemental scenes dealing specifically with the girls you are helping from their perspectives. Once you've gone through all the supplemental scenes, you unlock another main scene. Repeat until the game is over... then you unlock extra scenes which flesh out the characters and their motivations more.

Being a yuri visual novel, KSR has a number of sex scenes. These scenes are uncensored, but note that they are softcore in both their illustration and their narration. You get a couple illustrations for each of the seven couples in the game. Also worth mentioning is the sheer amount of food porn; even though the food is not illustrated, the descriptions of the various items were making me hungry as I played the game.

There are a few drawbacks. KSR was originally released in 2012, and so the resolution of the images is low compared to more recent games. The game is notoriously laggy after it's been open for a while, and (unless you go for the Full Chorus DLC) it's only partially voiced. That being said, it is still well worth your time and money. I'd say 4.5 stars out of 5, for sure.

Just finished Watch Dogs on PS4. It really is a mixed bag, although my perception of the game is probably additionally negatively affected by the fact that I returned to the game after a long break and the already convoluted story became even harder to follow.

Anyway, it really isn't a bad game. The story and atmosphere are pretty great (although I guess that's one of the game's more polarising aspects), there's solid shooting mechanics, there's vehicles (albeit with atrocious handling) and the mission design and stealth gameplay are also pretty great. The problem is that the one thing that is supposed to set the game apart from other sandbox games, the hacking, can be summarised as "some objects can be used from a distance or while riding a vehicle". That is a bit of an oversimplification, since there's also some hacking minigames or basic puzzle scenarios involving cameras, but still depressingly accurate and pretty much my main issue with the game. It's missing something that really sets it apart from other sandbox titles.

Surprisingly the one thing that I enjoyed the most were some of its multiplayer features, even though I'm not much a multiplayer gamer. I.e. hacking other players or getting hacked by them results in a pretty cool match where one player has to stay hidden, while dressed as a civilian, while the other one has to find them. That was gameplay-wise possibly my favourite aspect of the whole game.

Anyway, the truth is that I wouldn't really recommend Watch Dogs to anyone, with so many other great sandbox titles out there. I presume Watch Dogs 2 is much more enjoyable but that one is very far down my list.

Moonlighter

Not a bad action/rpg/merchantsim, but I liked Recettear more.