Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I’d decided not to buy this since I’ve gotten bored of open-world games and there’s a limit to how much silliness I can take. But the unrelenting torrent of good reviews and reports of playing experiences wore me down. But who am I kidding, I was going to play this eventually given how much I’d liked the previous games. I’ll be brief here and just write about my impressions because everyone knows about this game already.

• I know I’m not saying anything new here but the sheer amount of fun that you have in this game is just amazing. I mean, it starts with an attack against a terrorist group and conventional gunplay and I was all, ho-hum, nothing new here but let’s just go through the paces. And then the game puts you on a nuclear missile and starts playing Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing and it had won me over just like that. These moments of pure win are scattered throughout the game, especially in the missions involving crew members.

Read the rest of this entry »

I bought this a while back but wasn’t intending to play it for a while yet because I knew it would take a long, long time to complete. But then my video card died and I had to RMA it and what do you know, Avadon 2 runs just fine using onboard graphics. One eerie thing is how closely my total playtime tracks that of the first game. Steam reports my playtime for Avadon as 71 hours. For this one, it’s 68 hours.

• I won’t repeat myself with regards to the basic lore and mechanics since I’ve already written extensively about these for the first game. The big, new, shiny thing here is the tinkermage class who has the ability to build up to two stationery turrets in battle. There are multiple types of turrets ranging from direct damage, whether area of effect or single target, debuffing enemies to buffing and healing allies. Naturally I made my character a tinkermage and the undisputed consensus is that it is by a large margin the most powerful class in the game. The turrets are durable enough to tank most enemies, the class has a special ability to buff and heal them, and having a healing turret around does wonders for long battles. Apparently dedicated players have completed the entire game with a solo tinkermage.

Read the rest of this entry »

As a Broken Forum regular, not having played Hatoful Boyfriend at all made me feel like a poseur. The reasons for this go back to QT3 and leads to why Broken Forum currently seems to have a user-base that is heavily into otome games. But it’s pretty esoteric so I won’t go into it. Of course, I also bought this because it has been very well reviewed (95% positive rating on Steam) and to satisfy my curiosity about Japanese dating simulations.

• I guess some attempt at an introduction may be necessary. You play as a young human female student who is enrolled at St. Pigeonation’s. It’s an elite high school in Japan in which all of the teachers and every other student except yourself are students. In case, this isn’t clear, they really are pigeons, it’s not just a case of them being represented as pigeons. They have feathers, wings, beaks and all that. An optional mode in the game does allow you to view a humanized portrait of them when each character is first introduced. But that’s just a stylized representation, they really are still pigeons.

Read the rest of this entry »

I bought this both because there aren’t many RPGs in a sci-fi setting and because it a full-fledged open-world game made by a small French developer. It’s an action RPG set on Mars, complete with skill trees, a crafting system, a morality system, a companion system etc. It’s really quite surprising how much they managed to work in, but it may have been better if they had just chosen a few things and really perfected them.

• Graphics look dated, especially when you first lay eyes on the opening cutscene but as usual with these things they’re passable enough that your eyes get used to them. To its credit, it open in media res and doesn’t try to weigh you down with a massive infodump right from the beginning. Instead, it introduces you to a sympathetic character and you glean the backstory from his recollections. That’s a pretty decent storytelling technique.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t noticed the pattern on this blog by now, I like to intersperse playthroughs of lengthier, AAA games with shorter, indie production. I bought this one because the boardgame-like mechanics intrigued me. No surprise here, since it was made by the same company that made Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble! Its title is a real mouthful because it is only the first part of what is presumably a seven-part series.

• There doesn’t seem to a formal manual and the tutorial takes a learn-by-doing approach, so the rules were a bit confusing at first but they aren’t too complex. Essentially in this first step, you need to guide a family through three ages, the Copper Age (shouldn’t it be Stone instead?), the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. The wheel is constructed of four tracks, with each track representing a distinct caste, with labourers on the innermost ring and aristocrats on the outermost ring.

Read the rest of this entry »

Between the bug reports and the derivative gameplay, I’d decided early on not to buy Batman: Arkham Origins. But then it went on sale for a few measly dollars and I just couldn’t resist. And you know what, even though I kept telling myself that I should be playing anything other a rehash of the same familiar game mechanics, I enjoyed myself anyway.

• Obviously I know nothing of what the immediate post-launch experience was like. Presumably the worst bugs have long since been fixed. I did get have some glitches and clipping issues, but they were minor and didn’t impede gameplay. The worst bug I had was that I occasionally couldn’t interrogate informants after beating up them up. To fix that, I had to restart the game and beat the thugs up all over again. It’s hard to deny that the overall experience is less polished than its predecessors but it wasn’t a deal breaker for me.

Read the rest of this entry »

I bought this quite recently wondering what a survival horror game with no combat would play like. It wasn’t quite what I imagined it would be. It is scary. That can’t be denied. But not in the way that I prefer. It’s a short game however, someone who is skilled could probably finish it in 6 hours or so so I don’t regret spending time on it.

• As advertised, you can’t fight except for scripted scenes in which you can shove away enemies. But the protagonist isn’t quite a defenceless weakling either. You can run faster than any of the baddies can. You can clamber over obstacles, jump a fair distance, squeeze into vents (seriously, they’re playing this trope straight), hide inside lockers and under beds and so forth. You can even regenerate health over time and unless you’re playing at the very hardest difficulty, all enemies will need more than one hit to kill you. This means simply barrelling past them is a viable tactic. So you may not be a fighter, but you’re way more of a parkour expert than the average person.

Read the rest of this entry »

I played Shadowrun Returns last year and liked it but also stated my opinion that it’s too rough around the edges to appeal to many people who aren’t already Shadowrun fans. I knew that the KickStarter campaign had promised a Berlin campaign and looked forward to it. But before I actually sat down to play it, they announced that a more polished, standalone version of it would be made. So I waited on it and now months later I’ve played. I am delighted to report that this is a fantastic RPG and is everything that the first game should have been and all RPG-fans should play it whether or not they are fans of Shadowrun.

• This game is epic, both in the scope of its story and in length. It is very, very strange that this is a DLC to the main game when it is so much more substantial than the original Dead Man’s Hand campaign. As its new title, Dragonfall, indicates, the story deals with dragons and there are lots of evil corps, intrigue, combat, betrayals and plot twists. You get a real team this time, complete with side-missions that involve them. It’s all very much modelled after how Bioware RPGs work and I love every bit of it.

Read the rest of this entry »