Recent reviews by Bassem

Remastered in 2022!

A truly unique game, in gameplay and style. It mixes mellow management with tactics with white kunckle combat. The concepts and mechanics are well defined and easy to use.

The WASD-mouselook camera control system is one I wish every RTS would adopt.

Excellent sound design.

I was never into RTS games, but Darwinia has always been an exception for me. I like the worldbuilding, the mechanics, and the atmosphere of the game. And the controls were familiar to me as an FPS player and felt intuitive.

Played it for a few minutes.

I'd rather play Minecraft.

Best melee combat I've experienced. The rest of the game varies from middling to frustrating to downright infuriating. And it is painfully consolised.

Your character lumbers along, jumping is a gamble, the camera is shaky and motion blur is overdone and neauseating. Open world level design is bad, forcing you to make long treks because of unreasonable obstacles.

Interface is as crappy on PC as Skyrim's.

But I played it all, and will play it again, for the excellent melee system and the drop-in co-op campaign. Check my videos for an example of melee.

I tend to find ways to entertain myself in games, beyong their intended ones. Saints Row: The Third gives me all the room and the tools I need to mess around, and better yet, I can do it with friends.

But it's more than that: all the gameplay mechanics are fun, from driving to combat to customisation. Everything is rewarded and tallied. The plot is silly but still engaging. The characters are likeable and well developed. It's just a really well made game.

And bucketloads of pure fun.

Keep your cool. Don't panic. But keep an eye on everything.

That's it... get in the groove. Just redirect them.

You're doing fine. Hey this is fun, isn't it?

More planes coming. It's okay, it's alright. Stay aware of all of them. Redirect that one. No, that one! AH QUICK QUICK awwwww.

This is how a sequel should be made. To think that Valve almost ditched the whole "portal" thing for Portal 2. Good thing they came to their senses.

One nitpick is that GLaDOS is less funny because she is "in on it" from the get go. In Portal 1, I found her much funnier in the first half when she was still that friendly digital voice uttering ridiculous, slightly sisnister statements. Here, she's just snarky and childishly mean, which is funny but not quite as much.

Back to how much I love this game. It expands well on the winning formula of Portal 1. The richer story exposition is nicely done. The new gameplay mechanics are a delight, especially when they start to combine. Wheatley is fun, then as soon as his shtick starts getting stale he gets much more interesting.

The cooperative multiplayer campaign is simply awesome, arguably more fun than the single player campaign.

Now with the level editor and Workshop suport, you can keep playing fresh new puzzles in single-player and co-op.

This game is way more fun that it should be. I mean when I really think about it, it is quite minimal and repetitive. The story is barely there. The NPCs may as well be talking trees.

But within these bounds Borderlands manages to be a whole lot of whopping fun. Those guns, oh the guns. The micromanagement. The exploding heads. Commandant Steel's eyebrows. PATRICIA TANNIS.

Oh right, and the drop-in multiplayer is such an excellent concept! WHEN it works. More games should implement this sort of cooperative drop-in multiplayer.

Yeah, a lot of things bothered me about it (before mods came to the rescue).

But what can I say? I've sunk more than four hundred hours into this game, and it keeps on giving. I'm still discovering places. Still living stories. Still coming up with new ways to play in this huge world that I've been dropped into.

Soothing, pleasant, and a genuinely good game. Even better with friends!