Recent reviews by Bassem

Ugly as sin, dumb leveling mechanic, awful slow-mo, crappy and unvaried boss, repetitive horde mode gameplay. Still, there are so many weapons, so many maps, so many ways to cooperate that it makes it all worth it. The game is irreverent and fun.

The more monsters you kill, the more money you get, so you can get better gear each wave. Reminds me a bit of Counter-Strike. Except here it's PvE (I like that more) and you can throw each other money. Sorry, you can throw each other LOADSA MONEYYYYY. DOSHHHH

Good in small bursts. Get on sale. Or wait for the sequel, coming very soon.

I finally decided to play this. What a rush! This is the sort of game that can be played ten years from now and it will still play great and look great. It's one of those timeless games.

Positives:

• Simple and refined gameplay, check. The free running is so very enjoyable. The sense of speed as you rush across rooftops is exhilirating. For someone like me who loves the thrill of heights, it puts a grin on my face. (You'll probably want to raise the game's FOV, it's pretty easy, look it up.)
  
• I want to live in that city. Maybe without the dystopia but, it looks so nice. The art direction in the game is gorgeous. Indoors also. I want to work in those offices. I would desk jockey the ♥♥♥♥ out of those office environments.
  
• You can take a screenshot at any time and hang it on your wall. My F12 key is wearing out.
  
• I liked the world they created. The runner culture. The story keeps it simple, with just enough to provide you with incentive. Character designs are great too, from Faith to the runners and villains. Check out the unlockable art in the main menu.
  
• I was sad to hear Rhianna Pratchett wasn't invited to write Mirror's Edge 2 because I liked her take on this. A girl on the wrong side of the law who's doing everything to save her her sister, the framed cop. Interesting backstory to the city and the characters. I'd love an animated series with the same setting and aesthetics.

The negatives:

• Combat is definitely the weak point of the game. Most of the time it's frustrating. Lots of people wish it didn't have combat at all. I think they could have made it work. You can disarm most enemies via quicktime events that suck, even if you use the slowmo button.
  
• For a game about free running, it's pretty damn linear. I've seen corridor shooters that offered more varied paths. At least I played it without "runner vision" which literally paints your path in red.
  
• I didn't mind these but it seems a lot of people did: the cutscene cartoons are not as well made as the rest of the game. Not a big deal for me.

Mirror's Edge 2 is supposed to address these issues, if it ever releases. DICE are a hostage to developing Battlefield after Battlefield, sadly. Unique and fresh games like Mirror's Edge are an exception and a rarity.

Definitely worth playing.

What a sweetheart of a game. A happy, relaxing, challenging but not punishing game that firmly adheres to the school of "even failing should be fun."

Hiding underneath the cutesy and cheerful surface is some solid game design. Simple and polished, providing you with various ways to achieve your objectives, giving you clear goals, never overloading you.

The game is very physical. (Some are even calling it sexual, and while I see where they're coming from I can also see some obsessions here.) What I mean by physical is that it all has to do with how you interact with this little alien world with your robot body, and how you grow this giant plant, guiding offshoot after offshoot, creating bridges and walkways.

As you grow your way up back to your spaceship, the game gives you a very simple and immediate way to see your progess in the game, by just looking at how much you've grown the plant. It's so clever, so... simple, again.

And let's talk about the sound design. The giant plant sings like a whale. Trees sway and tinkle like wind chimes. Cacti and bushes rattle like bean-filled toys. I found around half the game's secrets just by listening to the tell-tale sounds they emit. No wonder there's no music except in the menus; sound is a very important and well developed element.

At first you have to rely on your climbing, trampolining, and balancing skills to navigate the world you're building. As you progress and unlock more abilities, you feel more in control, and you have more options to get everywhere as fast or as slow as you want. The game's always relaxing, but it still manages to make you feel like you're improving and gaining more control. By the time you near the end, you're the master of your environment.

No game is perfect - this one is pretty close, but let me mention the things that bugged me. BUD is endearingly clumsy, due to the game's procedural animation that allows you more flexible climbing. But sometimes he's just too unpredictable and loose.
The game tells you when you launch it that a controller is recommended. It works fine with KB&M, but I can see why they recommend a controller: walking BUD around with analog controls allows for way more precision and less accidents. Climbing is easier. Gliding is much more enjoyable.

My other nitpick has to do with the inverted vertical axis when growing a plant shoot or gliding. An option to set that would be welcome, although I admit I got used to it and would probably have a hard time going back. But still, options are nice.

One more thing, it would be nice to have separate save slots. Now that I finished the game, I would like to preserve this "complete" save slot, while also starting a new game.

The character animations in the game may be procedural, but the world isn't. And I like it this way. I like the clever placement of secrets, the carefully designed islands and caves. But at the same time I want more, so I hope the developers release more worlds as DLC. I would be happy to pay for them.

See if you can get all the achievements. I don't usually care much about them, but in this game I have the urge to 100% it, because they are all reasonable and because it's so much fun to play.

An enthusiastic recommendation from me on this one.

See my Dead Island review for the shared basics: excellent melee system (makes up for all the negatives), pretty good looting and crafting system. Infuriating UI and consolitis.

Riptide is almost the same experience but with some improvements. The biggest I can think of is that firearms now feel genuinely powerful against zombies, and are now a legitimate choice. The weapon category leveling allows you to enjoy all sorts of weapons no matter which character you choose to play.

You can import your DI character into Riptide and continue leveling it.

The locations in Riptide: The first half are pretty crap, the second half are pretty good.
You see all these screenshots of the characters in the swamp? You're going to HATE that swamp. You can't sprint, you just slosh around, and you're gonna be doing a lot of walking back and forth. Yes there are motor boats, and maybe you can drive one for ten seconds before zombies pull you out into the water in an impossible QTE.

I still enjoyed this game plenty. It carries the positives AND the negatives of DI, with some improvements, not enough improvements sadly. But it's still DI, a bit better, and I love DI. Meleeing (and now shooting) feel just awesome.

I lost someone recently. In those first days full of grief and exhaustion from taking care of family matters, before I slept, I'd sit and try to play something to clear my mind. I didn't feel like playing my usual games. Not shooters, not puzzles, something where I could simply be transported somewhere nice.

First I thought of Bernband and Euro Truck Sim 2, but I didn't have them installed. I played Secret Habitat, I played Minecraft, and I played this game, Proteus (and a bit of its mod Purgateus).

It provides the simple pleasure of walking around in a cheerful, surprisingly interactive, rather mysterious place, rendered in fidelity low enough to let your imagination amplify it.

I've heard about and seen screenshots of many mechanics to discover, and even an end game of sorts. I haven't experienced most of them, though many patterns are now clear and I even found how to control the time of day. This is to say that there is just enough substance here to keep you interested, if you ever get bored of simply walking around.

It's a place to unwind, basically. I love walking around woods, but I don't have easy access to them.

Also, my two young nieces love watching me play it, and chasing frogs or owls or pointing at far away landmarks and getting there, talking about the cycle of night and day, about seasons, forests and animals and wandering.

Pros:

• High quality object hiding
  
• Varied gameplay offered by minigames between levels
  
• Extra objectives
  
• End-game unlimited modes

Cons:

• Low, non-adjustable graphic resolution
  
• No Steam integration of any kind
  
• Every now and then, a cheap trick in object hiding

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This is part of a series of hidden object (HO) games developed by SpinTop Games and published by PopCap Games between 2007-2009. To date they are my favourite of the genre.

Unlike more modern HO games where the items are often practically jumping out at you, here they are masterfully blended and conspicuous (sometimes even a little too much so.) The whole scene looks practically painted.

Each stage ends with a varied puzzle (crosswords, rotating tiles, spot the difference) that offers a little break and introduced the next level. And each level ends with a small informative blurb that I assume nobody will read, but it adds a bit of substance.

More modern HO games try to amp it up with plot and animations and a story and voice acting and what not, usually with bad results, because at the end of the day, it's a cheesy casual game and reaching for more just makes it awkward.
But this series focuses efforts on the mechanics of HO gameplay, and it shows in how well the scenes are made.

Shame about that low resolution though.

In this game, you read and write. You read by absorbing the environment that your character is exploring, and by actually reading ready-made phrases with blanks to fill. You can replace the entire text if you so choose.

This game is more of a creative writing framework. If you enjoy writing, or you would like to get started with writing and need a nudge, this is the right place to do it. The three worlds, while short and static, provide a scaffolding on top of which you can build as little or as much as you want.

I think this is best played in short busts. Once you've let a new take on the world flow out of you, I think it takes a while before another worthwhile one pops in your head.

On the other hand, you can easily spend an hour reading other people's contributions, and this I would say amounts to 50% or more of the game's value.

It looks beautiful, by the way. It's kind of a shame that only three static worlds are available. I am hoping for more to come as free updates. No wonder the game was released three months in advance.

So to sum things up, this is for people who enjoy imagining, writing and reading. This is for people who like looking at a painting and imagining a story to go with it, then another, then five more, then hearing other people's stories about it.

Croteam have been excellent lately with their marketing (the promo videos for Serious Sam 3 BFE and its Twitter campaign were spot on) and here they've stepped it up a notch. Offering not one but two free games (this public test here, and the puzzle game called Sigils of Elohim - look it up on Steam)

And it works. After playing Sigils of Elohim and this - let's call it a mix of beta and demo, because that's pretty much what it amounts to - the final game is definitely high on my wishlist.

Here are some thoughts that ran through my head while playing the public test:

• This looks amazing. Here's my new desktop wallpaper. And here. And here. *F12 intensifies*
  
• I gotta have the soundtrack for this.
  
• You're so right, sentient computer terminal thing. Life IS hard to define.
  
• Wait a minute, I have robot hands?! *switch to third person* I'M A ROBOT WHAT
  
• How the heck do I solve this puzzle? What if I put... aww yeah. I am so frickin smrt.
  
• Are you telling me this demobeta thing has secrets? Plural? That introduce completely separate gameplay mechanics?

In short, play this ♥♥♥♥.

It's very polished, the music is incredible, and it looks lovely. The item descriptions are full of snide and sometimes sinister remarks. The general atmosphere of the game is a blend of frenetic happiness with dark undertones, and it conveys that really well.

Otherwise... I mean I get that it's satirising consumer culture, mobile games with micro-transactions, and entertainment addiction... But in the end all you're doing is burning things, collecting coins, and burning more things. You're doing the things you're supposed to be laughing at.

As for the story being told, it never really resolves into anything that makes much sense; instead it's happy to drop hints here and there and pull at your heartstrings without substance.

What little gameplay is there is pretty refined - the burning effects and physics are fun to toy with.
I think "toy" is more fitting for this than "game."

Overall, I still recommend it because it's so well put together. And really, I want that soundtrack.

Let's be clear: Going through this will be exactly as if you're leafing through the novel with illustrations of the various setpieces, while voices act out the various dialogues and music plays in the background.

You'll be looking at gorgeous, static illustrations, reading the novel's text phrase by phrase, and listening to the dialogue voiced very competently by various actors.

There are no animations, except for some story-within-the-story segments presented as a puppet theatre, very entertaining, sadly in short bursts.

Some sound effects help to set the scenes, and the soundtrack is very engrossing and does the most to add thrill to the experience.

Even the characters are not shown; you'll only see static silhouettes. I really didn't like that. Maybe it was meant to not impose an image of the character upon the reader. But combined with the rest of the static experience, it just felt lazy.
Besides, you unlock character cards as extra content viewable in the main menu, and the characters are illustrated there, in full detail. So why not expand it to the rest of the adaptation?

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The Thirty-Nine Steps (the 1915 novel) was important because it was one of the earliest examples of the man-on-the-run thriller. As such, it is held in high regard, and has been the subject of many adaptations in film, radio and theatre.

But let's face it; for today's reader, it's a pretty dull story.

And seeing how this is a digital adaptation of the novel, it's impossible to view the two separately. It's inevitable that you'll experience some boredom due to the source material. So the question now becomes, what does this adaptation add? Does it present the story in a way that enhances the experience? Is it immersive? Does it expand your view of the story's setting and details?

I'd say yes. I read the novel for the first time, right before playing this. And putting aside the vague boredom I felt both times, my understanding and immersion was definitely higher while playing this.

This being England and Scotland, and the 1914 version of both at that, seeing them illustrated before me certainly helped me be transported there, since I'm so separated from the story's setting by both time and space.

Unfamiliar terms and objects now made sense because I could see them (e.g. dovecot) Certain sequences now played correctly in my mind. Etc.

It could have done more. It could have shown characters in full detail rather than as silhouettes. It doesn't have to become a cartoon, but animations for important actions would have greatly improved the storytelling.

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Personally, I would have preferred a completely different way to present this novel. I would love a proper, 3D first person experience of the whole thing, think Dear Esther or Gone Home. Even if it was still entirely linear. But I understand how that would be difficult, even impossible (how do you present a linear story if the player can run around London and the moors of Scotland?)

For what this sets out to do, it does a very good job. Not perfect, but a very good job indeed. I look forward to more adaptations from The Story Mechanics and I hope they improve their formula.