Backlog Video Game Review Thread

[SirFozzie]

This is a thread where I go through my backlog, pick a game to play at least a couple hours, and then report it. Others are welcome to mention games that they're playing and their reviews.

Jagged Alliance 3: A less-forgiving X-Com game (where weapons and tools need constant repair, taking any amount damage means you have wounds which will reduce your characters max HP until healed (and it takes up very limited supplies to do the healing), and there's no shop in sight, so you'll be needing to be very frugal with weapons and equipment. Being out in the open means you'll be shot (and thus wounded) very easily.

The system is a bit opaque (by default, the game will NOT tell you the percentage to hit, (there is an official mod) and it's not clear you can spend extra AP to Aim to have a better chance to hit.

[CrimsonFox]

The Last Day of June... a play on the title I did not expect. This is a time travel time loop game and June refers...not to the month but a woman named June. June and her husband love each other very much and she tries to surprise him with a picnic at the pier to tell him she's pregnant. They live in a seaside house in a small community, the neighbors are all outside causing a lot of hubbub, the best friend is moving, the child is looking for someone to play with, the rich hunter is shooting at a bird, and the old man is...well being oldman. The couple enjoy the pier...until it starts to rain andthey rush home and...swerve to avoid the boy running out in the road to get his ball...and crash. June dies. Her husband is in a wheel chair. But is then given a gift...to try and replay the day through the eyes of each of the neighbors to change time. Save her life. Do it carl!

I'm not crying you're crying.

Seriously gets really emotional. And that is thanks to the WONDERFUL voice cast...who surprise surprise do not say a word. Instead they make wordlike noises kind of like The SIms. That being said it's hard to actually convey emotion that way but you can read EVERY nuance in their voice, each and every one of them. The main coupkle are particiularly good.

The gameplay/graphics are reminiscient of Fable...with their railroading linear alleyways. However as you play different characters, you open up new doors that other characters can use. The puzzles are not TOO awfully difficult. I struggled for a bit on each but eventually figured it out. The problem is....it's so linear that each time you use a certain character, there is only ONE thing in the town you can interact with at that time so I spent like half an hour each time wandering through the entire town trying to find something to interact with and then once I found it, what to do. There is no variance in that. The other bigger problem is...some of the logic in this game is just plain stupid. And I mean the puzzle logic, the game logic. The world logic. I mean really the best friend is moving... She can walk across leaves on the road....UNLESS she is carrying a box and then she CAN'T walk on the leaves anymore...
so yeah...

Also the biggest plot hole of them all, mr. railroad...if you can go back through time...how about having YOURSELF just NOT go to the pier!
Or have ANY of the other characters just NOT do what causes the crash.

Nope, not an option...and thus the paradox implodes. But still it's a good story/puzzle experience. And I had never played a time loop game before. I hear they are all the rage. I've finished the game now I just have to pop the rest of the collector bubbles to get all the achievments. Oh yes did I mention there are collectibles? Yeah...there are those.

One last thing. The character design is kinda creepy. Unexpectedly creepy. SOmeone watching the game over my shoulder commented that it looked like characters from the Coraline movie. The characters have no eyes!

[MJ4H]

omg you did this thread. Ok. As you of all people know, I've recently added a number of titles to my backlog (I also get choice and a lot of bundles, so I have an enormous backlog already). I will be playing the following games that I got a fair bit more than the others, so I will make sure to drop a short review of those here as well:

Love 2: kuso (love this type of platformer)
Minoria (soft spot for metroidvania's, though I'm picky)
Edge of Eternity (JRPG - another soft stop for me - one of my early loves was Skies of Arcadia)
BioMutant (3rd person open world action-RPG, looks like the quirkiness will be a little more than I really want, but I also like this type of game)

Good idea for a thread.

[CrimsonFox]

a LESS-FORGIVING xcom?!?!? hahahahaha xcom is not forgiving in any way shape or form

[MJ4H]

Love 2: kuso

This is one of my absolute favorite types of games. It is a challenging platformer (think Super Meat Boy, VVVVVV, Celeste) with a clever mechanical twist. These games often have an instant, or very rapid, respawn time, so that you don't get terribly frustrated when you die. You don't have time to, because you are already playing again.

The charm for me in these games comes in two stages. Stage 1 is learning the mechanic, and Stage 2 is experiencing the mechanic like a new language in a conversation with the level designer.

(minor spoilers here for the discovery of the game's mechanic - you might find it more fun to discover it yourself)

I'll explain using the example of the clever mechanic in kuso. You can run and jump like pretty much any platformer, but you can also, at the press of a button, drop a new checkpoint pretty much anywhere (except mid-air). This doesn't sound like much, but it's also not the full story. The game doesn't give you the full story at first.

It certainly seems like this mechanic just makes the game super easy, at first. You come to a tricky set of jumps to make, so you just plop down a checkpoint halfway through it. Now there's no risk! Cool mechanic, but this game's going to get boring like this!

Oh you sweet summer child.

The first hint of what was to come occurred out of nowhere. I got through a tricky little spot where I had to lure a turret to shoot at me so it would knock out a barrier I needed to get past. I did it, hopped through and plopped down a checkpoint. However, over my head, there was another turret tracking my way now. I hopped out of the way, getting under the cover of another platform. I then entered the fray to try my hand at traversing the next series of jumps when I got rapidly sniped by the turret. I didn't respawn at the checkpoint I dropped, though. I was back at the beginning of the screen! I was confused at first, but assumed I just must not have actually dropped the checkpoint. User error, surely.

Subsequent attempts to clear the room revealed the truth to me. Your checkpoints can be destroyed by objects in the room. That turret that tracked towards me had wiped out my placed checkpoint! I then recalled the blurb in the tutorial area about being careful about where I placed the checkpoints. I thought at the time it just meant don't put one where you'll immediately fall into a pit of spikes or something.

The next sequence of platforming involved me assessing as fast as I could whether each place I wanted to drop a checkpoint was safe to drop it. This added considerably to the stress of completing a series of obstacles. I felt much more frantic, but it was a very exciting rush now instead of just a feeling of invincibility knowing that my checkpoint placing ability would save me.

Knowing this new mechanic gave me the insight to look at the level design much differently than I had before. I can now understand the many clever tricks that the level designers were placing before me. It's like being able to read poetry in a new language. I appreciate not only what the poem is saying, but the very language that had been created for the designer to speak to me through.

I haven't even made it very far into this game yet, but I can already tell you it's been an utter delight. It hits the exact sweet spot for me for games in this genre. The last time I felt like this playing a game was VVVVVV.

Early score: 10/10, but will revisit when I've played more/all of it. I've only just begun to experience what the game has to offer, but based on what I've seen, I have high expectations.

Play it if you love Super Meat Boy, VVVVVV (especially), Celeste, N++
Avoid it if you hate those games or games with extremely basic/pixelated graphics

Screenshot: the room where I learned the true nature of the checkpoints.

[CrimsonFox]

I really want people to play this game and it is on several of the lists in the giveaway thread.

The game is Chicken Police and it is so fun.

It is indeed a point and click adventure, harkening back to the old Sierra games. But the production value is through the roof, something very important for that genre in this day and age. The story is a noir detective drama, complete with femme fatale feline singer (whose night club act will make you drool) who hires your character, a washed up middle aged gritty gumshow by the name of sonny featherton. And oh yes he is a chicken...well rooster. ALL of the character are anthropomorphized, Pretty much their bodies are all human and their heads are animal. The characters and designs are awesome. They stare at you as if in a Wes Anderson film. You travel from place to place with your partner, another rooster and the two of you form the famous "Chicken Police" as you investigate Ibn Westler, a ferret crime boss and a bunch of others. A top rate voice cast. Aside from standard Point and click adventure tropes there are also "investigation" scenes where you have to ask the right kinds of questions to advence. The humor is great without being too distracting or stupid. Often making references to their animal features. They know what animal they are. It's an enjoyable and entertaining interactive fiction game tanking the quality of old infocom games. It'll make you furry!

[MJ4H]

Updating my review score for Love 2: kuso, which I just completed. Unfortunately, I will have to deduct a couple of points from my score because the game took only an hour of playtime to complete.

I received some very negative letter grades from the game on my performance, but I promise that's not what's making me deduct the points. Merely the game length. I was riveted the entire time I played, it's just that the entire time I played wasn't much time.



I do not see that any additional "level sets" are included in the game, but I'm off to explore the steam workshop, etc. to see what else is available. Maybe even a level editor, which would be amazing.

Updated score: 8/10. This is still a must play for anyone that likes this type of game at all.

[Edward64]

So for those that have JA3, worth the $45?

[MJ4H]

Originally Posted by Edward64

So for those that have JA3, worth the $45?

SirFozzie is playing it live on twitch right now. I'm watching him.

https://www.twitch.tv/sirfozzie

[Edward64]

Thanks!

@SirFozzie - caught some of your JA3 stream tonight. Pretty interesting, thanks.

[MJ4H]

Another update on Love 2: kuso. Introduced my son to the game today who is 11 years old. He also likes platformers, but mostly because he loves to make levels for games. kuso has no level editor, but he still liked to play the game. In fact, he completed the game in one sitting.

He discovered a trick I hadn't known about pretty quickly, which is that if you hold down R2 the game changes to slow motion. No hint of that in the tutorial or anywhere else that I saw, he just discovered it. Made some of the tricky parts a lot easier for him than it was for me, I can tell you.

Also, I noticed when he started up a new game there was an option for other sets of levels, so I do believe there are more "quests" for me to complete than I had originally thought. I'm torn about whether to update my score from 8/10 to 9/10 because of this, because that was a primary reason I lowered the score, but I don't love the amount that being able to play in slow motion changes the difficulty of the game. I'm going to tentatively update to 9/10 still with an asterisk. I want to see how good the other two (three?) quests are before settling on a final verdict. However, I'm probably going to move on to one of the other games and just come back to that one now and again.

[MJ4H]

I'm going to do a minor bit of venting here as I'm starting another game I will possibly be reviewing here, Death's Gambit: Afterlife.

There are two things that bug me about starting new games, often to the point of just ditching the game:

1) Making me watch countless cutscenes before I can even see if I like the game. I can't count the number of times I watched 10 minutes of cutscenes and within 1 minute of actually being able to control my character and see what the game was about I knew it wasn't for me and ditched it. As a result, there are probably more games I ditched out of fear of wasting that much time and energy and just gave up a couple of minutes into a series of opening cutscenes that I would've liked. Just don't have that in me anymore.

2) Forcing me to make game altering decisions before I've played even a moment of the game. Pick your class! Here's 6 wildly different characters you could be with absolutely no context for why you would choose one or the other.

The latter is the case here, but I just needed to vent for a second.

[SirFozzie]

Terra Invicta:

File this one under: Watch someone play it before you buy it. It's completely, utterly and absolutely overwhelming.

Take Shadow Government. Combine with Xcom. Combine with Proto-Kerbal Space Program.

What do you have?

A big, sprawling, very BUSY game.

On earth, you're trying to fulfill goals based on your faction about an alien invasion. You're going to be doing political things to try to sway large chunks of the nations of Earth under your sway. Controlling key points in national governments will allow you to divert resources to building a space program to eventually build bases on other planets in the solar system, for the raw materials that you need to build a fleet to defend your faction (not necessarily the earth, considering some factions want to leave space to the aliens, or even collaborate with the aliens..). Eventually, over the space of a couple decades, you can take the fight to the aliens (if that's your factions goal) for supreme victory.

And you have to pause every two weeks to issue your councillors new missions all the time (or risk the other factions taking control of earth's governments). While building those fleets. While doing research for the NEXT generation of fleets, one component at a time. While building multiple space stations. And while controlling those fleets in battle.

It's damn impressive.

It has a very passionate audience, who love the minutaie, of the sheer level of THINGS you need to do to win. It may not be for you.

But, here's the thing. For 99% of us, that's going to be WAY too much, and I'm not sure the game has ways to automate doing the things that you don't want to do.

So if you're thinking about it, watch at least some of this video (and the series) of a streamer playing this game. It will make up your mind one way or the other. (for example, in this video series, the streamer starts by insinuating themselves into France, and decides to bring the other parts of Europe into a Pan European Union. He has to sway all these smaller nations to their point of view, one at a time, to finally kick out the other factions supporters, and merge them into the European Union. Again, he has to issue new orders to his councilors (agents) every two weeks of game time to do so. We're 3 hours in by the end of the first video, and it's still the very embryonic START of the game)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...6k7lPURPo0LBEj

[CrimsonFox]

Behold the Ring!



Do NOT trust these puppies. They lie. The puppies are a lie. You are trapped in a nest of the Owl who claims to be your friend. You stumble into darkness and meet The Shadow who claims to be helping you. You gather up your courage and various items along the way to slot where they need to....and charge forward, attacking all sorts of strange and mutated nest creatures. Oh god did that snake just poison me?
Ahhhh I'm dead.
Ahhhh what's that blob? *BOOM* I'm dfead
Oh look two burds....ah they hit twice...I'm dead
Oh hi there wanderer, where are you off to--*Ouch* I'm dead...
Hey Owl can you help-oops I accidently attacked you! NOOO WQAIT! I'm dead...

So the Ring of pain plays on. A roguelike card game. You quest through each ring gathering up better equipment. Each time you get an achievment, that opens up more cards for subsequent visits. Succeed and you open up higher difficulties.

Like Slay the Spire it involves a learning curve...and also luck of the draw. You mustmustMUST study how each creature works and use their patterns to your advantage.

Oh yes....don't die


RING OF PAIN awaits