Shadowgrounds Survivor

I picked this up in a Humble Bundle and didn't think it looked like much. On a whim I tried the original Shadowgrounds out and loved it, and I have to say that this is even better. There are 3 separate characters you play as, each with a unique playstyle. You can't turn the sniper into a brawler, and the flamethrowing fella will have to get nice and close to the baddies, but this keeps the gameplay pretty fresh. The graphics are very nice, the controls are fine and the gameplay has more tension than some AAA games I've bought. This is definitely worth a shot.

This game is fun, well made and looks good by any standards, BUT it is really priceless for the fun you can have playing it in coop on the same computer! This is one of the few games in existence which works with 2 mice and 2 keyboards on a single computer (same as Trine 1 & 2). It means that you can have the most intense and personal Coop experience where both players get equally good controls for maximum fun. The only downside is that using dual keyboard/mouse setup it can be tricky to set up controls but nothing that would stop an experienced PC gamer from having this much fun. I am so sorry for the Shadowgrounds series that it failed in sales and community support and got replaced by a fantasy Trine series... Oh well, we can still play the Survivor as it is.

The game happens parallelly to the first one, telling three different stories that intersect at the end. The good: much better voice acting, character development, greater environment variety, greater mission variety, same great playability. The bad: no boss fights, frequent crashes between missions with the soldier character (just BEFORE your progress is saved, making it all the worse) on my Win 7 64 Ultimate, badly managed secrets (some levels have none, one has two, most have one - and you're never told, so you never know whether you should try that level again to do better), and finally, the end sequence doesn't really feel like "Yeah, I did it!!!" The playtime is about half of the original game - about 10 hours on Impossible difficulty. Still, I loved the game, and if it wasn't so prone to crashing, I'd recommend it to all fans of 3rd person/top-ish-down-ish shooters.

This game is fun to play, but has a game breaking bug that randomly appears preventing loading the next level. The bug has existed for at least five years, and possibly since its original release. There was a pretty bad workaround of replacing your save file with one on the next level (losing or gaining achievements you did not have), but site that posted them has been taken down by the original game developer. GOG should at least acquire the contents of that site and provide it as support, but contacting then has only got a message with a boiler plate support email telling me to do the same things as their support page. So far a waste of time. If they fixed the bug or at least had a good workaround I would recommend it, but otherwise know what you are getting.