Recent reviews by Bassem

A freeware third person speed platformer. Not exactly refined in terms of gameplay, but it's free and sort of fun, and it reminds you of the the importance of net neutrality. USA, please don't ♥♥♥♥ up the Internet for the rest of the world.

Worth checking out, it's free.

Great concept, okay execution. You explore area after area, collecting loot, upgrading your gear, stealthing around supernatural enemies (or going all out on them) and coming across graves and their shadowy occupants, helping them move on with small quests.

Once you finish an area, you unlock the next. There is some back and forth but it mostly keeps you going forward. Along the way, you slowly unlock the mystery of what happened to this small region of the New World to turn it into this twisted place of shadows.

The game was made on a small budget and I think they've done a great job within their limits. It looks fine - and with the default monochrome scheme looks great - it sounds amazing, the music and audio is the game's highlight for sure, the story is just interesting enough, and the gameplay is... well, I think that's the weak point of the game.

The gameplay gets old and samey pretty quickly. I think it's more fun playing this as a stealth game, because once enemies find you they'll just make a beeline for you and you'll realise how underworked the AI and combat is. The thing is, sometimes enemies pop up around you and you're forced into a fight.

But for the asking price, it's definitely worth playing. It's a few hours of light engagement, and I have a thing for games that set a small scope and work hard at being good games within it.

Simple, cheap, fun. Looks great, love the style. Duck Hunt on steroids. Lots of splosions.

Similar to Valve's own Destinations app, Realities is free and offers a selection of locations to explore. I highly recommend it because the quality of the scans is very high, and almost all the locations have (optional) narration or photos to check.

Make sure to check out the castle ruin, the WW2 sanitarium (with audio explanation of every location + photos of how it was), and especially Death Valley which is the newest and best produced location, with fascinating locations, soulful music, and audio narration (from a book) on the nature of the desert and of man's relationship with it.

Also, in the main menu, grab the Earth globe and put your face inside it. :)

Set during the Plague years. You are tasked with rescuing the wife and daughter of the Duke of Medici, who have been stranded near the mysterious town of Apothecarium, a town rumoured to hold the secrets of the Plague.

The writers / designers have clearly been inspired by the French film Vidoq - the antagonist is a mysterious figure called the Alchemist, with weird powers and a mirrored metal mask that shows victims' faces in its reflection, and who exits the scene by dissolving into a flock of crows, and sustains his immortality at the expense of human lives. Just like the Alchemist in Vidoq.

Anyway! For a HOG, there's a lot going on in this game in terms of mechanics.

What I enjoyed

• HO scenes can be solved in one of two ways - either looking for objects as usual, or by playing a match-3 mini-game.
  
• Lots of varied mini-games and puzzles.
  
• Upgrades! All HO scenes and puzzles give you coins, which you spend in an upgrade shop to unlock faster hints, helper features for mini-games, and even cosmetic upgrades. Pretty thorough for such a game.
  
• A strategy guide that offers textual hints, as well as a flat-out step-by-step walkthrough. Very thorough.
  
• Art is not bad, if a little busy, and all interactions are animated in intricate detail.

What I didn't like

• in HO scenes, certain items morph back and forth every few seconds. For instance, a mug turns into a kettle for a few seconds, then turns back into a mug. So you have these shifting areas all over the scene, always drawing your attention and distracting you and getting in the way of just clicking the item itself - okay, I need to click the mug - oh wait, it just morphed. Let me wait a few seconds til it turn ba-WHY THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥ WAS THIS DONE. I can't for the life of me understand why in the ♥♥♥♥ they would come up with this bullcrap. This is NOT how you keep things fresh.
  
• Clunky, noisy interface that is very hard to read.
  
• Low-res graphics that get stretched if you play it in fullscreen widescreen.
  
• One puzzle kept crashing the game for me, so I eventually waited for the Skip meter to fill out and I skipped it.

I'm torn with this game… a lot of effort has gone into it, that much is evident. But in the end, I'm finding myself uninstalling it unfinished. The hidden object scenes are just too frustrating, and too few.
It's worth checking out.

I just finished a full playthrough of the twenty levels... it felt like I played triple that! This game is woefully underrated.

If I described it as "wave shooter with one weapon and three enemy types" that would be an accurate description, but it would do nothing to convey how insanely fun and relentless this game is. I had to take a break (thankfully supports pause with Menu button) to wipe down my headset and controllers, wash my face, and strip down to my underwear (in the middle of winter). It's such a workout. It's simple in the best of ways, as an arcade game should be.

The appeal of it is in the carefully laid out waves of enemies that come in all kinds of patterns and layouts. Twenty levels feels more like sixty... I was loudly exclaiming "NO MORE" and "♥♥♥♥" as I bent backwards like Neo to avoid enemy fire while shooting my dual pistols each to one side. I kept wondering if the levels were generated on the fly because it honestly felt like I was at level 50 or something.

At $8, it's reasonably priced for what it has. Please give it a go, it keeps escalating until it leaves you breathless. Don't be turned off by the waveshootiness of it. This is good stuff.

I am all for flying in VR through abstract shapes, but this is really barebones. And five dollars? That's just cynical. If you want to fly and glide in VR through dreamy landscapes, while weird music plays, for under ten bucks, go buy Lucid Trips for an experience that's ten times better.

Five bucks for this. For shame.

What I enjoy

• No unlocks, no leveling up, no grind.
  
• Most of the playerbase seems to prefer PVE, which makes me happy.

What I don't like

• The AI is… when it's good it's great, and when it's bad it's terrible. Every once in a while I'll turn a corner and find an enemy NPC aiming up at the sky, immobile, as if bird hunting. Overall though the AI is great.
  
• A couple of the game modes are tedious and frustrating.

Fallout + Borderlands + roguelite FPS

WASTED puts you in the shoes of a string of disposable characters that share a permanent loot stash. Try your best run and make sure to leave good stuff for the next character to use, because you'll be dying a lot.

At first sight it may remind you of Borderlands, but the similarity is visual only. WASTED is a roguelite, though it does not have the wealth of loot and items that Borderlands or roguelikes usually do. Instead, you will be encountering the same pool of weapons and armour and consumables on every run. This is a game where you won't spend any longer than 2 seconds comparing similar items to choose which to keep.

This is a conscious choice because for better or worse, WASTED is meant to be a lot more fast paced that your average dungeon crawler (or is it?). On every level of the bunker, if you stay for too long, an overpowered NPC starts hunting you, spurring you to rush the rest of the floor and find the way down or out. It's not too unforgiving - as long as you keep moving at a steady pace, this "purifier" won't catch up to you. Unless the level's random layout throws a couple dead ends and you need to backtrack. Personally I can't stand this forced time limit. Especially since the game keeps encouraging you to deploy traps and use stealth, both of which require time to do right. It's like it can't decide if it wants to be fast paced or not. If we were able to hide from him or trap him, it would make sense - but the purifier just moves inexorably towards you.

Aside from the dungeon-bunker itself and your ramshackle house where your stash is, there is an outpost where you can pick up a few quests. This aspect of the game surprised me. There are several quest givers with fully voiced conversations.

WASTED doesn't take itself too seriously. It's got a fun, violent, foul-mouthed edge to it.

What I enjoyed

• Enemy infighting, pioneered by Doom. Any group of enemies will start eliminating each other if they shoot each other by mistake.
  
• Localised damage on enemies with different effects (arms, head, groin…)
  
• The world building, conversations, and enemy barks are all fun to listen to.
  
• Buffs, debuffs, and gear-based stat increases make for a light RPG feel

What I didn't like

• That ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Purifier that forces you to rush all the time. Completely goes against the idea of sneaking and laying traps that the game encourages you to do, as well as constantly looting.
  
• Poor gunplay and melee. This is an FPS after all, so it's an important part of it, but it feels lackluster.
  
• Way too much knockback when you get shot. And if you're up against an automatic weapon, you'll pretty much get stunlocked. There are items to mitigate this, but the default is *too damn high*.
  
• Some UI annoyances that get in the way of the fast pace.

I'm not very much into roguelikes so I didn't get very far into the game. Everything escalates in the lower floors. Way better weapons, way stronger enemies.

Thumbs up, and ♥♥♥♥ that Purifier, dumbest idea in the game. Buy on discount.

Yeah it's a thumbs down but I also wanna say to the developer, keep it up and don't give up. And I didn't mind the voice acting because it felt natural. Especially the bit with the argument. The story, not so good. Need to improve on this. Gameplay, same. Overall it felt maudlin without substance.

For a higher-budget version of this, check out Annie Amber. Also a sentimental look at someone's life, with the theme of space. It is getting the same criticism but it's a much larger and grander game. Even with its amazing visuals, it's getting poor reviews for its dull story and boring gameplay.

Anyway, keep going. I can only hope to be able to make something like this.