Deponia. Not nearly as funny as it thinks it is. The only game that ever pissed me off in literally the first 30 seconds with an inane tutorial that can't be skipped. Puzzles are just lacking any interest, animations are sometimes just empty placeholders. Characters are unlikeable. Made me just want to go back to point & clickers from 20 years ago.

I quit Strider.I was too damn slow.

Dreamfall chapters
I had played for two hours, realized I lack any motivation to continue and quit.

Crush Crush

I don't play a lot of 'idle' games or dating sims, but I really enjoyed HuniePop - engaging tactical match 3 plus entertaining dialogue with the occasional twist.

So when this F2P came up suggested in my Steam queue I thought I'd try it.

At first blush, the 'date sim' component of the game was somewhere between lame and irrelevant, but as a resource management game, it was fairly compelling at first. Perhaps it's borrowed from elsewhere, but the mechanic of restarting your game tactically for a permanent speed boost to subsequent play made it interesting for a while. I'd say I played somewhat compulsively for the better part of 3-4 days getting a game advanced as far as it could reasonable go without a long gap to the next point of advancement, then restart - wash, rinse, repeat.

However, ultimately the game just doesn't seem balanced. Character improvement seems roughly linear while difficulty grows exponentially. I'd been enjoying it enough to consider donating, but grew disillusioned when I realized 99% of my playtime was grinding the same small swath of play. Even using an offline cheat to advance the game by a week at a time really didn't 'break' the game - i think I've used the boost 4-5 times, and after a big jump from that first usage, even the benefit of completely cheating was fairly insignificant.

Likewise, even spending $10 on the game would create a nice spike in the linear speed growth, but ultimately it seems this game requires a balance of playing for short bursts and then going away for several days. The 'gift' process is also completely nonsensical (why does a drink cost 700,000x as much as a rose? why does that character want 50 dogs?) in what feels like a missed opportunity.

What makes this game good? The basic concept works, and for a few hours it's pretty engaging as you build up. (For me) even a bit addictive as you try to 'crack' the difficulty curve.

What makes this game great? In a sim with cliche/forgettable "characters" most of Bearverly was hilarious. I don't regret playing as far as I did just for that reason.

A bit too bad she comes as far in as she does. Despite '5 weeks' of gameplay (in 5 days - again, I cheated repeatedly) I still only got about 75% of her dialogue unlocked, and maybe 40-50% of the overall game. As for the growth, it seems to vary unevenly - but talent growth rates seems to be somewhere between 1.3x to 1.5x, so for example, level 20 humor (at x100 speed) might take 30 min, and 21 would take about 43, then the next one 64 min. Which seems fine until you see the cap is 75, so that last level would take roughly 616,000 hours.

Note that, unless you pay for the adult patch (I didn't) this game is mostly PG-13 aside from one character's annoying 'monologue.'

Max Payne (PS2)

I really enjoyed this game up until Part 3, where it's almost impossible to complete a level without dying at least once due to the large amount of 1 hit kill grenades used. I think I was at Chapter 7, and for the life of me I can't figure out how to get past this bit with 4 guys with grenade launchers standing on a balcony really far away. It frustrates me due to some annoying mechanics that makes the crosshair move back to the floor when you strafe, so it's impossible to move and shoot upwards at the same time, which makes a strategy of peaking around a corner, firing then moving back almost impossible. The sniper rifle doesn't have a zoom function and the enemies wear grey suits against a grey background so even slowing down time and firing, it is really difficult to find them and shoot them all before they kill you. Also you get this slow mo cutscene half the time you fire the sniper rifle, and I don't understand what causes it because it happens even if you miss. I've looked through walkthroughs but the strategies they give of staying near the far wall never seem to work.

This is a great game, up until part 3, I had so much fun. However, those hallucination sequences, especially the invisible floor maze where a baby repeatedly screams in the background are terrible and unneeded. Also at one point at the near the end of a difficult level I had died repeatedly on, I jumped on a railing, glitched and somehow died. If I ever go back to this it'll probably be the pc version

Sudden Strike 3.

I expected a difficult game, but not something that feels impossible on Easy difficulty, jeez.
Tried the Allied Campaign, ... not a bleedin' chance. Tried the German campaign, ... not a bleedin' chance.
This game is too sadistic for my level of patience; 'on the 100th attempt you might just get it right', ... 'no' thank you.

It's a real shame you can't give games away from your collection, rather than letting the money and game go to waste.
It would feel better to give a game away to someone who might enjoy it, than just having it rot away and never be played.

Edit: I went back to the game, since I'm quite stubborn. Lo and behold I actually made progress. I realized I was trying to play the game in the same way as I would a regular RTS, and that just doesn't work. This game is all about 'the objective', you need to focus on the specific objective close at hand, otherwise your troops will be spread out too much and you won't be able to move forwards. I'm glad I'm stubborn, as I'm really ejoying the game now ... it's hard to stop playing.

Lollipop Chainsaw

I've approached this game three times over the years but I just can't get myself to enjoy it. I don't mind the insanely stupid style and writing, although I'm not really a fan either, but the character movement and combat system are just so atrociously bad... I've played quite a few of these slasher games over the years and it's turned out to be one of my favourite genres. It almost sickens me that a game with such a budget, hype and multiple famous names behind it could get the fundamentals so wrong. I mean, already walking around just doesn't feel right, in this game - like something a teenager would end up with in a few minutes of fiddling around with Unity or Unreal. And the combat is at the same time complicated and simplistic. There are a few things you need to figure out to get good at it but even once you've gotten the hang of it it isn't really rewarding, unlike, say, Devil May Cry. Too bad.

I quit Halo Spartan Strike.It was not fun to play.The missions seem very short.You can easily complete them and they are not challenging.You end this game in a few hours.There should be a little story too but there was not any.

A Story About My Uncle (I played the Steam version)

This game is a first-person platformer. While advancing in the game you’re given snippets of narration which slowly builds the story as you play.

I went into this game expecting a slow-paced game with easy platforming and an interesting world to explore. I played for ~1hr (completing the first area and starting the second area), and although the game was slow-paced, it let me down on both of the other factors:

1 - The platforming was too difficult for me (I suck hard at platforming). I found myself struggling in the first area, having to repeat the same jump 5-10 times just to advance to the next jump where I’d have the same problem. Thankfully checkpoints are plentiful or I would have quit long before I did. The whole time I was worrying that this is just the first area and dreading that the platforming would get even more difficult later on!

2- Rather than there being a lot to explore, I found it to be just the opposite: a totally linear game with no player choice (only one path) and nothing interesting to discover along the way.

Elite Dangerous.

The lack of narrative and story, and variation in the game-world eventually got to me. The game was quite exciting at first, discovering just how big the game-world is and how realistic it feels (compared to similar games).

I reached a point though, where I wish I was rather playing an X-series game. Those games have a much richer and diverse game-world, with plenty of aliens, storyline content and narrative interactions.

So I've started to play X-Rebirth instead, and I'm having a more fun space-sim experience.

Party Hard

It's a buggy mess with terrible gameplay.

FOR SHAME!

I loved that game, every bit of it.

<span class="bold">140</span>

First non-Android game I quit this year! It's actually a repeat though, as I already quit it last year.

I decided to replay it after the new 4th level was released. I enjoyed (and beat) the new level, but I'm still not gonna try to beat the insane 'mirror' levels.

In the last couple of weeks I've been trying out several games on kongregate. Most are short games, but a few are mmo-ish type games. I've quit 2:

Animation Throwdown
A very cool idea for a card game throwing together Futurama, Family Guy, American Dad, Bob's Burgers and King of the Hill. The game uses the subject matter in a clever way, eg. combining a Fry card and a Thundercougarfalconbird card gives a Fry Delivery Boy card. Unfortunately the game is let down by its simplicity. Compared to something like Hearthstone, which is already a good deal simpler than something like MagicTG (I've been told), Animation Throwdown is effectively trivial : you can't do anything more than selecting a card to play. Everything else is automatic, like where a card is placed and which card is attacked. Well, to be fair, you can choose to combine a new card with a specific card on the board. Also, you never actually play against other players. You only play against the AI wielding other player's decks. Yawn unfortunately :P

Bit Heroes
A pint sized mmo with a very cool retro feel. On the plus side, the models and music are great and it doesn't seem very pay to win, if at all. On the minus side, too grindey for me and not enough to do. One of the fun things of an mmo should be to explore the world and take in lots of new locations while searching for quest givers and interesting mobs. Here you only get to move around freely in the small town square, from what I've seen. And other than that you can only move from small dungeon to small dungeon. I think Bit Heroes would've been a lot better if it instead had something of an open world to explore where you travel to each dungeon location and can encounter mobs along the way. And again, no actual pvp from what I've seen. You can only play against the AI fielding another player's party. Yawn again :P

Kingdoms and Castles.

Graphics and music are good, no problems with them.
But the game feels unfinished, you don't get much to build really does feel like someone stole half the toys.
If you play a peaceful game you have no reason to bother with towers etc...
Making the game utterly dull, problem is even with attacks the game quickly hits the same level.
Built everything, seen a invasion off, now bored to tears, left me feeling the same way i did about banished.
No real challenge with little variety in things to build or reasons to do so, waste of money for me.
No a bad game, really does feel like a beginners introduction to the genre.
Buy a box of stickle bricks you will have more fun.