Seneste anmeldelser af solaris32

Episode 2 far surpasses episode 1. If you didn't know these games are short point and click adventures. The stories aren't anything to write home about, there's not really any sound effects, and while the music is nice it rarely pops up and is quickly gone. So why do I recommend these games? For the massive amount of interactions you can do!

This episode takes the interactions of the first episode and cranks it up to 10! In these games your characters have various actions they can do like talk to, take, look at, and more. You can do this with anything! By far the best command is give because you can give anything to anything for unique responses. For example you can try to give a dog to a chicken for a unique response, then try giving a chicken to a dog for another unique response. This episode gives you a ton of items you can find and have fun trying them on all the different things throughout all the screens. Find an empty bottle, fill it with water, then try to pour it on your naked chest in front of your similarly shirtless brother. Or my favorite, when you find your little sister you can get her naked, then tie her up on the couch (which she loves) then tickle her and smack her butt. Not even kidding.

If you enjoyed the first episode you are guaranteed to like this one even more!

So this is a weird game. With a completely naked male lizard doctor with a featureless crotch, which the developer likes by the way, a topless lizard woman, and a completely naked 6 year old lizard girl. Yup. Oh and Fredrick, one of the 3 princes, is clearly a pedo. Although there are bits of text that say he doesn't want anything more than to look and touch, I think it becomes invalid when he pokes the little girl's nipples, is happy when she insists on staying naked, and enjoys accidentally kissing her on the lips. It should also be noted that the vast majority of text in this game is done without any images that show you what's happening.

So the story is the king who is telling a rat woman and her child a story about how he was sick and his 3 princes went to the lizard people village to get some medicine for him. The princes take the bus to get there by the way. And there's a bus stop complete with a utility pole, which the game will tell you is no longer called telephone poles. While at the village you learn of a little lizard girl that got lost in the forest.

What really impressed me is the massive amount of interactions you can do. You've got several commands to choose from like take, talk to, give, and others. Give is the best command because it can be used on anything. You can try to give the trash can to the utility pole for a unique response, then try to give the utility pole to the trashcan for another unique response. What's more impressive is that each of the 3 princes give a slightly different message for the same action essentially tripling the possible combos and interactions you can do. You can even try to give the princes themselves to interactable things and vice versus. And I didn't even find out until I was almost done with the game that the name of the area you are in at the top of the screen is another interactable object to add even more possibilities. There's also several actions that will have a unique response on a different screen. Like if you attempt to give Flewdor to the pebble in most places it will just say he would stumble. Do it at the bus stop and it will say he might stumble and fall into the street. When you get Gloria, Fredrick can hug, kiss, or tickle her, and doing all of these yields a different response on each screen, so be sure to check that out before you go to her mother. I also must say that given all the text this game has there's almost no spelling or grammar errors.

The game itself can be beaten in like 15 minutes or less if you don't bother to have fun with any of the interaction combos throughout the game. Because of them I got over 2 hours of game time, and I was only about 60% thorough with all the possible combinations and interactions.

I recommend this game because of its cheap price (I got it in a bundle), its simple yet weird story (thanks to pedo Fredrick), but mainly because of the massive amount of possible interactions you can do.

I would like to state that while I of course don't approve of pedophilia, even towards lizard girls, I do like things that push the boundaries of what is socially acceptable. I don't approve of murder either but that doesn't stop me from playing shooters. So I'm interested to see what else this developer comes up with and hope he continues to not censor himself.

I can't recommend this game due almost entirely to the story. If you can overlook my complaints about the first hour of the story and you like everything else about the game, then you would probably enjoy this. I would like to state I much prefer it when the story of something makes sense and if there are plot holes they are subtle and easy to ignore. This game doesn't care about making it's story be logical or to explain the super obvious plot holes.

Let's start with the story, which includes spoilers of the first hour, but really it's incredibly obvious what happens. What isn't obvious is that the game gives no explanation for why it happens. The game is about Setsuna, the girl to be sacrificed. In the first 5-10 minutes you are given a contract to assassinate a just turned 18 year old girl. I wonder who that could be. Obviously you aren't going to kill her.

The protagonist, Endir, never talks. Instead you are sometimes given "choices" of what he says except it doesn't matter at all what you choose. The game makes it clear that Endir is a cold and emotionless person, using those very words. It also makes it clear he sees any contract through to the end. So the fact that he accepts a contract to kill a woman means he has no problem doing it. We travel to where she is, investigate the village looking for her, learn where she is, and go to her. We find her at the snow monument and draw our sword. She doesn't seem frightened. Instead of fulfilling our contract we are given a (meaningless) choice to swing or not to swing our sword. I choose to swing but Endir just holds the sword pointed at Setsuna, not doing anything. Then 2 mages show up and restrain Endir. We wake up back at the village and learn that Setsuna insisted we not be harmed, and that after she has left on her journey we will be free to go.

Immediately after monsters conveniently attack the village. Setsuna comes and sets Endir free asking him to help defeat the monsters. We of course have no choice and join forces with one of the mages who originally restrained Endir to fight off the monsters. After we defeat them all Setsuna says she wants Endir to join her on her journey. Her only reasoning for wanting the guy who tried to kill her and might do so again to come with her is that he's strong and could make the difficult journey easier. Afterwards we are able to walk around freely, and talk to Setsuna who is standing alone in the middle of the village. She asks us to go with her, alone, back to the snow monument. We get there, nothing important happens, and that's when I quit.

I'm going to break down the problems with this brief part of the story. First it should be noted that if Setsuna can't sacrifice herself the monsters then their attacks will only get worse, possibly dooming the world. This story is completely unoriginal. Relatively recently I played the Steam port of Grandia II (originally released in 2000) which had almost the exact same basic story premise, except that game's story took some cool turns which I highly doubt this game does, and the protagonist of Grandia II actually talks and is likeable. (You should totally check that game out by the way).

First, why didn't Endir fulfill his contract and kill Setsuna when he first had the chance? The game doesn't say and Endir can't talk so he can't say why he didn't do it either. So we the players are stuck scratching our head wondering why a cold and emotionless mercenary who accepted a contract to kill a woman doesn't do it.

Why would Setsuna want the person who tried to kill her based on a contract, and might do so again, to not be punished for his attempted murder? The townsfolk made it clear they were confused also. They also say it is a very big crime to try to harm the sacrifice which is needed to save the world. Maybe she's an idiot with a soft heart? Moving on.

Why would Endir help fighting the monsters? He's a mercenary, and I get the impression he doesn't do things unless they're in his way or he has a contract. His contract is to kill Setsuna and not save the village. Helping Setsuna fight off the monsters doesn't make sense.

Idiot Setsuna then wants her would be murderer to join her in her world-saving quest? What. The villagers are again confused, as am I.

You are then allowed to walk around freely, where you may continue your contract. Except you don't for some reason. Instead you follow Setsuna to the snow monument where you are really alone, and again don't complete your contract. All without any explanation whatsoever.

Apparently the story remains weak throughout the whole game, concluding with a lame ending.

I normally hate the ATB battle system of games like this. I tried real hard to play FF9, but because your character takes 6 seconds do a normal attack, everyone's ATB gauge continually fills. This means everyone's actions, including the enemies', gets queued which is very confusing and very frustrating. Based on 6-9's popularity I'm in the minority. This game however has a far superior ATB system. Whenever it is someone's turn to act, everyone's ATB gauge is paused until that someone's action is fully completed. And while a character's ATB gauge is full they slowly build momentum (which lets their actions have additional effects). This means it can be advantageous to have your healer sitting there building momentum while you wait for your attacker's turns.

The graphics and sound effects are nice.

I do not like the all piano music. Yes it's well done, but to me it gets very boring and tiresome. It needed more instruments. Personal taste really, to each their own. What you hear in the trailer is what you will get, no variation.

The characters don't have feet; they end in stubs as if everyone has wooden legs. Not noticeable most of the time since you have an overhead view. Just, why.

I like snow but a game needs variety. This game is said to not really have any environment variety. Just snow everywhere, all the time.

From what I hear the game is 15-30 hours depending on how quickly you go. If you take the time to talk to everyone and do all side quests you'll get about 30 hours or so. This fact was another deciding factor for me.

The game is said to be unbalanced with your techs and combos you can do making the game trivially easy, and that even if you don't take advantage of the broken system it's still very easy. I personally like a challenge in my rpgs, or at least difficulty options of which there are none.

The first game I've ever refunded. I feel $40 is way too much for a horrible story I can't get into. I can forgive bad stories in a game like Earth Defense Force which is an action game where you shoot giant bugs, but in an rpg where the story is often the defining factor, it's very hard to look past. I will probably rebuy the game but only when it's seen a very heavy discount, and then only because of the battle system and my love of jrpgs.

An extremely fun and addicting arcadey third person shooter. You shoot giant bugs the size of houses such as ants, spiders, hornets, robots, and more. They explode in a nice shower of blood and bodyparts as well as satisfying death sounds. There's very little of a story as it's just mission based where your objective is always to kill everything. The lack of story is ok because it isn't needed, and what is there is B-movie entertaining.

There are 4 entirely distinct classes with each class having ~200 unlockable weapons each. Each class can carry 2 weapons except the fencer who can use 4 and the air raider who can also equip a vehicle (to request on the battlefield). You get weapons by picking up the green cases dropped by enemies and then it's random what you get at the end of the mission based on difficulty and mission number (the higher for both the better the potential weapon drops). You can also pick up red armor boxes which increase your max armor (health) at the end of a mission at differing rates for the 4 classes.

There is single player with a whopping 89 missions with 5 difficulties for each. The missions are short being 5-20 minutes long depending on difficulty and the mission. Online mode has 96 or so missions but progress in mission completion is independent of single player. You can play with up to 3 other people by having either public or private player slots. The more players the harder the enemies are compounded with whatever difficulty you chose. Weapons you find in online mode are available in single player and vice versus. The only problem I personally have with online is that there are weapon level limits you can use depending on the mission and difficulty. To use an inaccurate example say you chose mission 10 and difficulty hard in online mode, the game will only let you use weapons up to level 20, so your powerful level 50 weapon you can't use. The purpose is to have balance so people with uber weapons can't go to someone's easy game and obliterate everything. And finally there is splitscreen co-op which is something extremely rare for pc. It means 2 people can play on the same pc with the screen split down the middle, just like consoles are famous for. You need a controller for player 2.

The friendly ai is really annoying though. They are famous for getting in front of you blocking your shots and especially getting in the way of your explosives causing them to explode on you, even killing you on harder missions where friendly fire is higher. The enemy ai is adequate for the most part. No advanced tactics, they just swarm you and sometimes wander around. Occasionally they get stuck somewhere and you have to follow the radar to find and kill them to finish the mission.

The dialogue is really hilarious. Listening to your EDF soldiers talk among themselves is always good for a laugh. And of course everyone likes the EDF song "To save our mother earth from any alien attack..."

The amount of content and playtime here is staggering. Even if you concentrate on only one character you'll get dozens of hours of enjoyment. Not to mention online mode. Worth every dollar!

This is the best metroid-like game since Super Metroid. You start out weak with no abilities. As you progress you pick up health, damage increasers, projectile size and distance increasers, unique weapons, and of course various abilities. Unlike Metroid weapons don't do anything except let you kill enemies; you open up new paths purely with your abilities.

Abilities include a drone that lets you get through those tiny places because Trace can't crawl for some reason (it's ok because the drone is sweet). A drill that lets you break blocks to find hidden areas. Coats that let you "glitch" through walls. A glitch gun that changes the properties of enemies, making them easier to kill and sometimes becoming the key to solve a puzzle and getting a powerup. And more!

There's over a dozen weapons in the game, all with unique ways to kill enemies. The only problem is some weapons are clearly superior, and others are so bad you'll never use them.

The enemies are fairly unique, and satisfyingly explode into little pixels when you destroy them. The bosses are also challenging and fun. You almost never feel like the game is cheating, but instead that you just haven't figured out a good strategy.

The sound effects and especially music are top notch.

The world is large with many secrets. There are even Secret Worlds you can find that give you extra powerups. The game will likely take you 10-12 hours to beat on your first playthrough. There's also a hard mode and a speedrun mode to add more playability and challenge.

I do have a couple complaints though. The story is very confusing. Even after beating the game and reading all the notes I'm still not sure what was going on. It's ok though because a game like this the story isn't important. My last complaint is that powerup locations don't appear on your map. In all 2d Metroid games with a map, there's a circle on a map section to show there's an item there, and it becomes a dot when you find it. No such thing here. But there is a yellow dot in the upper right if you've found all items for that map, and a purple dot if you've uncovered all parts of that map.

If you love the Metroid games you are all but guaranteed to love this game too. Buy it, you won't regret it!

I was going to give this a positive rating, but the negatives just started piling up. This isn't a bad game, it's just not nearly what it could've been. Instead of being New Vegas with its various in depth systems, well-written and interesting dialogue, choices that matter, and then building off all that, Bethesda instead got rid of that stuff and turned this into more of a shooter.

After playing and fully beating this game I wanted to replay New Vegas some to remind myself how the previous most recent installment played. Although this game overall falls short of New Vegas it's still a fun game to play and you can easily get ~100 hours out of it if you opt to explore everywhere and do everything. But I would recommend you wait for this game to get a nice sale before you buy. For this review I will be comparing it to New Vegas which is still the best of the fps Fallouts. Also, this review is for the base game with no mods.

+ The gunplay is the best yet.
+ Weapon mods can now be crafted and virtually every weapon can have mods applied to them.
+ Armor now has multiple pieces instead of only being a single piece suit. Furthermore these individual pieces can be modded too.
+ Considering Bugthesda's track record with releases this game is relatively bug free and surprisingly stable. I put in over 100 hours and had only 1 crash, no game breaking bugs, and just a small amount of usually funny glitches.
+ The exploration is great as is expected from a Bethesda game. There's a wide variety of places to explore in a large map.
+ The new perk system is unique and pretty cool, but it came at a heavy price. Gone are skills such as survivability and medicine and the various weapon skills. Now all that is handled with perks that only require you to be a certain level and have a high enough SPECIAL stat.
+ I personally like how weapons and armor no longer degrade (except power armor).
+ It's fun to kill legendaries and know you will always be rewarded with a unique item for your efforts.

+- Power armor is no longer another suit of armor but an actual machine you can get in and out of. You can even mod the different pieces of it. The problem is you get your first one in the first few hours of the game. That would be ok because at first you don't have many fusion cores which are needed for it to run. That is until a little bit later in the game when you're swimming in them and can use the power armor 24/7, even without the perk that increases the fusion core's lifetime.
+- I'm not one to harp on the graphics, but while they are improved from the previous games they still aren't that great. Some textures are downright horrible, even to me.
+- The main character now speaks. In rare instances this can add to the game by having your character speak a short line about what's going on. The rest of the time it just slows down the dialogue. Although there is a questline where you get to be a superhero and speak in character of said hero. That wouldn't be nearly as interesting if your character didn't speak.
+- Being able to build houses and various other things at your settlements is a very cool idea in theory, but in practice it's almost completely useless from a purely gameplay perspective. It doesn't help your character or anything else in the game in any way; it's there only for those creative types who love to build. Problem is its very poorly explained how to actually do it and it's currently not as fleshed out as it could be. Yes your settlements can come under attack which is what defenses are for, but this is actually very rare and you can completely ignore it with absolutely no repercussions. Any named quest-important characters are invincible of which there's way too many.

- Let's start with the dialogue system. Instead of having many options in a list like all games before, you get an amazing 4 options! They also took a page from Mass Effects book of dialogue for dummies and don't even tell you what exactly you will say, just a general idea.
- The "choices" you get to make in dialogues and quests are entirely meaningless (when they are even present at all). New Vegas often gave you multiple ways to solve many quests, usually the different paths being based around different skills. In this game you don't really get to be "evil". The best you get are sarcastic responses which don't change much if anything. Someone gives you a quest you can either do it or not, no choices. The only exceptions being in the main story missions where you can choose to help one faction or the other, but in the end even that doesn't matter. More on that later.
- I hate how conversations are realtime now. It just causes problems when other characters can jump into the convo due to whacky camera angles. It's also a pain in the neck when the character you're talking to keeps moving and when they get a few feet away the convo auto ends. In order for the companion menu to pop up you have to be exactly right, but your companion keeps moving disengaging the menu. This happens A LOT. Why did they remove the companion wheel?
- The story is easily the worst of the Fallouts. Who cares about my son I got to see for a whopping 2 minutes before the bombs dropped? Who cares about my idiotic spouse because (first hour spoilers) when they have a gun pointed at their face and are told to surrender their baby, refuse so they can get killed and have the baby taken anyway thus losing any chance at redemption? Way to be a good parent stupid.
- The endings are stupid and lame. You get the same generic quasi-cutscene for each faction with the Institute getting a very slightly different one. There aren't any descriptions of consequences of your actions for the various factions and cities you've interacted with. This is no doubt because you can keep playing after the final story quest. The final quests for the 3 factions against the Institute are the exact same: destroy the Institute in the exact same way. I will say that in this game all the factions have their good and bad points with none clearly being evil or good. Except the Minutemen who are clearly good, but they're boring and lame.
- There's a distinct lack of different weapons you get to play with. This is offset by legendary weapons you can find, but those are just the same weapons except with unique effects.
- There's a huge lack of crafting in this game. In New Vegas you could break down ammo and build it into different types of the same ammo. Speaking of, there isn't the huge variety of ammo like there was in New Vegas. There you had your regular ammo as well as armor piercing and hollow point. There was also a large amount of food you could cook, dependent on your survivability skill. Here you can cook anything at any level as long as you have the items.
- Speaking of skills they're completely gone. You can use any weapon at any level. Skills added depth to the game by affecting things like how much health food and stimpaks healed, how well you handled weapons, and so on. Now that depth is gone.
- With the lack of skills means the lack of dialogue skill checks. Before if someone had a problem with a computer virus you could convince them you could help by passing a science skill check. Your SPECIAL stats could even be used other times. Now the only check that is done is your charisma to pass speech checks.
- There's a lot of enemies we're missing. Where are the centaurs, nightstalkers, nightkin, spore plants, bighorns, coyotes, giant mantises, geckos, cazadores, and giant ants? Yeah ok different climates for some of those, but they only added like 3 new enemies to this game while taking out a whole bunch. Lame!

This review was longer and more in depth, and I would've discussed more things, but character limits.

This review originally written on June 4, 2012 on GameFAQs but is too long for Steam read the rest of the review here:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/928126-titan-quest/reviews/150772

Also, this review was written before Grim Dawn existed, the spiritual successor by the same people. Grim Dawn is even better, check it out if you liked this!

"A “Diablo clone” that’s better than Diablo and perhaps the best of its kind."

Immortal Throne is an expansion which adds a whole new act to the already 3 act campaign of Titan Quest. I also played using the fan patch version 1.17. This review is of Titan Quest as a whole including the expansion.

TQ is a hack and slash RPG much like Diablo. You run around clicking monsters to kill them, gaining experience and leveling up. The main focus of these types of games is the finding of loot dropped by monsters and chests. I will now go in depth about the various features of this game.

GENERAL GAMEPLAY INFORMATION
I wanted to make a section to tell you about general gameplay features and facts to aid you as you read this review. The max level in TQ is 65 and IT increases it to 75. When you level you gain 3 skill points and 2 attribute points to spend how you like. The attribute points can be used to increase your max health or energy, or increase your strength, dexterity, or intelligence. There are 3 difficulty levels with the next highest one being unlocked after beating the game on the previous difficulty.

STORY: 8/10
The story is never a big deal in these kinds of games. They're merely there to give you a reason to progress forward and kill more monsters. What is nice and something you don't often see in these kinds of games is that there are more characters you can speak to than just the quest givers. These extra characters will tell you a little bit about something, either the main quest or the situation that NPC faces. What's more is each character will say 4-5 different things if you repeatedly talk to them, and not always just a short sentence either, but real plot advancement. There's a lot of story here for both the main quest and side quests if you care to talk to the people. Of course you can completely ignore them, skipping the dialogue to progress the quest.

GRAPHICS: 10/10
I'm not an expert on graphics by far, but the graphics here look pretty good for their time. It gives my 6 year old laptop trouble, that's for sure. The physics engine for killing enemies is simply tons of fun and I will go more in depth into this later.

SOUND: 10/10
The sound effects are pretty good. Everything sounds like it's supposed to and the enemies all sound believable. Occasionally the death sounds of certain enemies can get annoying, but that's it. There is also full voice over for all the dialogue in the game. I'm not an expert on voice acting either, but I can say with a fair amount of confidence that the voice acting in this is actually very good. The people you talk to, especially of the main quest, all do their role very well. You can tell the voice actors put real effort into it, and in the case of vendors and others, had a lot of fun. To me this is what counts and I never have trouble listening to the dialogue.

SKILLS: 10/10
The skills are where this game really shines. How it works is that at the beginning of the game you select your gender and start the game. Upon your first level you can select your first skill mastery. There are 8 skill masteries in TQ, with a 9th one added in the expansion IT. When you reach level 8 you can select your 2nd and final skill mastery. Each mastery has many different skills you can learn such as passive skills, ones you must activate, and ones that stay active for a certain reserved energy cost. Each skill can be upgraded with points many times, the average being 12, making the skill better and better. When you level up you get 3 skill points to play with which I really enjoy. I much prefer having more skill points and longer skill advancement than fewer points and shorter, but more meaningful, skill advancement. The skills are broken up into tiers and to get access to the skills at the next tier you must invest skill points into a bar on the left. Investing in this bar will raise your health, energy, and attributes; I believe a unique feature to this game. As you can imagine this enables for massive replayability to try out all the different skill mastery combinations.

The only downside is that at least a few skills in each mastery are just plain useless or have limited usefulness. On the plus side don't worry if you put points into a skill that later you decide sucks, because by going to a certain vendor you can pay to have skill points returned to you, with the price getting incrementally larger with each point you have returned. You can also find items which will raise your skills, even allowing them to go beyond their max for even greater benefits.

LOOT: 10/10
Loot is the main focus of these kinds of games and this game does not disappoint. There are several different tiers of loot with the higher tiers of course being harder to find. There are also vendors who occasionally sell good items, but the best loot is always found. Higher difficulties will reward even better loot and more set items and uniques. There are also relics and charms dropped by monsters which you can add to your equipment to make them stronger. Higher difficulties have better relics and charms.

MONSTERS: 10/10
There are 4 acts in the game with the expansion and each act has many unique monsters for you to fight. Although the monsters aren't palette swapped, their behavior and attack patterns generally don't change much. This isn't a big surprise though. The different monsters do have their own unique drops that you won't find from other monsters. The bosses are generally fun and usually challenging. The bosses also have their own unique drops to farm for. Monsters and bosses (as well as chests) do respawn but only when you quit the game and come back.

COMBAT MECHANICS: 10/10
First I want to say something about the physics engine for killing enemies: it's awesome! Whenever you kill enemies their bodies react fairly realistically to how they were killed. Kill an enemy with a magic explosion? The body goes flying into the air! Kill a monster with a single powerful blow from your axe? The body shoots backwards! Such a thing is very nice for not only getting you immersed but helping to prevent the game from being repetitive.

Something to note is that the game plays slower than others of its kind. I know most people want their game to play at 60fps and be real fast, and that's fine. Personally I found it a tad annoying in games like Diablo 2 and Torchlight where you and the enemies move so fast. In this it's slightly slower paced to make it easier to fight enemies and not constantly miss clicking them and running around crazily.

Another thing I like is that enemies almost never run away and archers don't really move away from melee characters until later in the game. What annoys me in other games are the enemies constantly running away and then I have to run them down. In this the melee monsters swarm around you, and the archers and mages mercilessly rain arrows and magic on you. It just feels *right*.

Finally I really like the fact that all magic items are identified. Instead of the tedious chore of carrying around identify scrolls, you always know what the items are and do. You also can create a teleport and tele to any unlocked place at any time, exactly like a town scroll in Diablo. Again this removes the tediousness of carrying around these scrolls and I find this very convenient letting you think about the game itself instead of the annoying scrolls.

Rest of review continued on GameFAQs via the link at the top because it's too long to all fit here.

This review originally written on June 18, 2012 on GameFAQs

"A unique tower defense and FPS hybrid worthy of your time."

Sanctum is a tower defense game at its heart. You build towers and create mazes to stop the waves of enemies. All of this is in done in first person and when the wave starts you can use your 3 guns to personally attack the enemies. As the developers have said this is the first game ever to have this combination and it sure is fun!

GRAPHICS: 10/10
The graphics are pretty good all around. It can be taxing on older computers so it should be noted that the developers have thoughtfully allowed you to edit the engine files to reduce the graphics even further. To me this is a huge plus because if I couldn't do that I couldn't play this game. My only complaint is that the lower your resolution the fuzzier the text gets. I can barely read it at 800x600. The higher your resolution the harder the game is on your computer. That said this game lets you go down all the way to 320x200! So if your computer is real bad you can turn the resolution down that far and play with ease when you start the wave, then turn it up in between waves to build.

SOUND: 9/10
There are some nice sound effects when you build and do things like that. The gun sounds are kind of lackluster but this isn't heavily focused on that. Nothing bad about the monster sounds either. The music is actually really good and doesn't get repetitive or annoying.

STORY
No score because there isn't a story and tower defense games don't necessarily need one. I think they have released some lore and stuff in preparation for the sequel but I haven't read any of it. All I know is that you're a girl and you have something on your left arm that allows you to build towers. Your goal is to stop the invading monsters from getting to the giant blue core. What that core is I don't know.

TOWER DEFENSE ASPECT: 10/10
As I said this game is tower defense at its heart and it does not disappoint. There are several tower types, all useful to varying degrees depending on your play style. Something this game does that sadly few TDs do is allowing you to build a maze that the enemies are forced to run through. This allows for even more strategy than just simply building at certain spots outside of the enemies' route. On most maps you can create their route! You also have a set amount of towers equipped that you can then use to build on the level. This means even more strategy.

FIRST PERSON SHOOTER ASPECT: 9/10
This game is a shooter at a distant second. When you manually start the next wave of enemies you can then shoot them with your own weapons which you choose before the level starts. This part of the game is pretty basic as expected. The weapons are simple but each one does have an alternate fire which adds more variety. You can also upgrade them with your money to make them stronger. Despite shooting not being the main focus it's still essential for beating the levels.

What gives this a 9/10 instead of something lower is the fact that all enemies have a weak spot that can be exploited by you for a great increase in damage. Further, some enemies can only be killed by hitting them in their weak spot, something that isn't easy for your towers. There is an enemy that can only be hurt from its back. A tall enemy with a bobbing head that only takes damage from attacks to its head. Still another that has armor that greatly reduces damage to it and the only way to temporarily remove the armor is for a single concentrated shot (sniper) to hit it in the head. All this means a lot more strategy and player input is required than just simply shooting the enemy. Unfortunately if you have horrendous aiming skills you may have trouble, but there is an easy difficulty for you to enjoy.

ENEMIES: 9/10
There are more enemy types than the ones listed above, and they're all distinct. There are also flying enemies which pay no heed to your carefully made mazes. The designs are unique and interesting and follow a similar theme.

LENGTH AND REPLAYABILITY
There are several maps to enjoy including a few free ones and others you must pay for (worth it). Each map has 4 difficulties as well as various survival modes to play. On normal a map will take an hour or so to beat. There is also multiplayer but I never messed with that.

FINAL SCORE: 9/10
This is a must play for any fan of tower defense, if only to check out something new and unique in the genre. Even if you aren't into TDs check this game out (so long as you at least like FPSs) and who knows it just might get you into the genre. I got this game on a sale and it's worth it even at full price. There is a demo so if you aren't sure give it a spin.

This review originally written on May 29, 2012 on GameFAQs

"Almost as good as the original, don’t miss it!"

This is a standalone expansion of Half-Life. I recommend you play this after Blue Shift because I think it's better and I like to save the best for last. The ratings and my feelings of this expansion are gauged in relation to the first Half-Life.

STORY: 9/10
Here you play one of the marines by the name of Adrian Shephard who enters Black Mesa. You get split up from your team and the game is you progressing along fighting aliens and black ops. The story actually isn't as interesting as Blue Shift, but this has a really cool ending.

GRAPHICS: 9/10
Again the same graphics as Half-Life, but to be fair this was released soon after so not much time to really improve them. Plus it keeps the same feel so not a big deal.

SOUND: 10/10
We get all the same sound effects from Half-Life plus more due to all the new content. What few music pieces there are seem to be recycled from the first game though. There are some new voices for the guards and marines which I like.

WEAPONS: 10/10
Not only do we get nearly all the weapons from Half-Life, but we get more! Notable additions are three new alien weapons. One basically serves as a grappling hook type thing which is pretty interesting but doesn't have much use beyond that. The other two are useful to save ammo for your big guns, but this method isn't needed as you get lots of ammo for everything.

ENEMIES: 10/10
We see a return of all the enemies from Half-Life but with several more. The new creatures are interesting and unique. A certain type is also very tough and can be tricky to fight especially in a certain area with no light… Unlike Blue Shift we get bosses! There is a boss you must figure out how to get rid of much like a certain one in Half-Life, and a final boss which also requires a bit of cunning.

LEVEL DESIGN: 9/10
Unfortunately this game is more linear than Half-Life or Blue Shift, but still not bad. There just aren't as many puzzles or alternative ways of getting places. However I must give props to the tutorial which is where you go through advanced training in boot camp. Pretty cool!

SQUAD: 9/10
Unique to this game is that you get other fellow soldiers who can follow you around and do things. The only ones of note are the engineer who can burn through certain doors, and the medic who can heal you and allies. A few times these guys are used to get past a certain point and you must keep them alive to do their job. They could've done more with them, but at least they tried something new.

LENGTH AND REPLAYABILITY
This game is short clocking in at roughly 3 hours or so. This is the game's main flaw. It has a lot of new things like enemies and weapons, but not much time for you to savor it. Regardless it was fun while it lasted and it's still a blast to play with the new weapons and fight the new enemies.

FINAL SCORE: 9.5/10
Rounded up to 10/10 for GFAQs. This game does what an expansion should do and that's keep the same great gameplay but add more content to play with. This game isn't quite as good as Half-Life mainly due to the length, but that shouldn't stop you from playing this!

This review originally written on May 21, 2012 on GameFAQs

"The weakest of the Half-Life games, but more Half-Life is always good."

This is a standalone expansion of the original Half-Life, and the second and final expansion. I recommend everyone plays this first after Half-Life and before Opposing Force for various reasons I will explain. The ratings and my feelings of this expansion are gauged in relation to the first Half-Life.

STORY: 9/10
You play as Barney Calhoun, security guard. You are actually the security guard you see banging on the door at the very beginning of Half-Life, pretty cool how it's all linked. You experience the events of the resonance cascade but at different parts of the facility. Your main goal is to escape with the scientists. The story actually isn't bad, but it ends kind of abruptly and feels like there should have been a little more.

GRAPHICS: 9/10
These are the same graphics as the original Half-Life which is both good and bad. The good part is it all looks the same and this expansion came with an HD pack for all the original Half-Life games. The bad part is that when this game came out in 2001 the graphics were starting to look dated even for the time. This isn't a big deal to me as I enjoy the graphics (with the HD pack).

SOUND: 9/10
The sound is the same as Half-Life. Not changing the alien sounds is fine, but I would've liked some new voices for the guards and scientists. Although there is a new voice for a certain scientist, that's it.

WEAPONS: 8/10
The weapon system works the same as Half-Life but you get a fewer selection of weapons to play with and no new ones. This is very disappointing.

ENEMIES: 9/10
You see a return of nearly all of the enemies from Half-Life, but that's it. There is nothing new which is again disappointing.

LEVEL DESIGN: 10/10
This is the only part where this game lives up to Half-Life. The level design is very similar and the few puzzles and situations where you must figure out what to do are very fun. And you get to revisit my favorite level!

LENGTH AND REPLAYABILITY
This game is extremely short, clocking in at 2 hours, 2 and a half if you play on hard and take your time like I did. Still, it is fun to play as Barney and re-experiencing the levels in a future playthrough is certainly viable.

FINAL SCORE: 9/10
The game is good and well made, but rushed and without any real new content. You should play this before Opposing Force because if you play it after you will be disappointed expecting this to at least be on the level of content of Opposing Force. If you liked Half-Life, this is still a must play.