South Park: Stick of Truth

Genre: RPG
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Released: 4. March 2014

Who doesn't know South Park? Well finally the videogame came out! It is hilarious, it is epic, and it is South Park!

Elder Scrolls Online Beta Weekend

Genre: MMORPG

Developer: ZeniMax Online Studios

Release Date:  April 4, 2014

I had the opportunity to try out the Elder Scrolls Online Beta this weekend. It was amazing, I was always a fan of Elder Scrolls games since I first played Morrowind, and although I am not a huge fan of MMO, this will be a great game.

The Yawhg

 

Genre: RPG, Adventure

Developer: Damian Sommer, Emily Carroll

The good:

- beautiful artwork and soundtrack

- replayable

- many varieties in the adventures and outcomes

 

The bad:

- short

 

The mysterious Yawhg is coming. Your chosen heroes have 6 weeks to prepare for the arrival. Can you save the town?

This is a one-to-four player game. There are several locations in the city, where your heroes can do activities, like chopping wood in the forest, or tending the sick in the hospital.While doing these activities, they gain skill points, magic for meditating, persistency for fighting in the arena, etc. Plus every time you make an activity, a special scenario appears, and if you choose well your character gains additional points, or if you make the wrong decision you lose points. All your decisions are influencing the final outcome, the fate of your characters and the town. Although don't expect a 100% happy ending even if you think you did everything right.

It is a fairly short game, but can be replayed many times. One playthrough is around 10 minutes, even if you read everything carefully. The scenarios that come up are varied, and even if the same one comes up multiple times, the outcome depends on your already gathered skill points. When I finished first, I wanted more and more. I replayed many times, tried many variants of the activities, and every time I was surprised and excited about the ending. It can be played as a single player, or multiplayer. Both types can give a great experience, but with more people the game is more convincing, and you can imagine you are really there waiting in tension for the unknown.

The game is like a beautiful drawing, and you get involved in the fantastical town's life, choose leader for talking rats, become a werewolf, or if you are lucky dance through the night with a druid. Emily Carroll did a great job with the artwork. The soundtrack is gorgeous, after I stopped playing I couldn't stop listening to Halina Heron's song.

 
All together, the music, the illustrations give a special, fantastical mood, which just draws in the player into this magical world.

Final Score:

9/10

Thief

Genre: Stealth

Developer: Eidos Studios 

Finally I got to play this game. I've been waiting since I finished Thief: Deadly Shadows in 2004. For me the Thief series are the top in stealth games, so I kind of have a soft spot for this game.

The good:

- the stealth system

- the environment, and the mood

- Focus Points, new skills and items

- can save whenever I want

The bad:

- loading screen between city parts

 

Our hero, well we can't exactly speak of a hero, he is a thief,  but he has his moral code, Garrett. He returns to the City after a while, and soon gets a new mission. Meets Errin, complications arise, and he finds out that he was passed out a whole year after the incident. He gets a new mission, and troughout the game starts to put together what happened to him. I liked the characters, Garrett brings his shadows, and I just adored his messenger crow. Spy in brothels, crawl through underground caves, it has a huge variety in levels.

The game is made out of chapters, and inbetween them the player can take on side missions, go exploring the city, collect loot, and buy new equipment. I like this structure, it's not too frustrating, the only thing I didn't like is that the city is split into regions, and it loads them separately. I was happy to see that I can save whenever I want, and there is no autosave function, like in most games nowadays, I like to have control when I want to save my game. You can choose your playstyle, whether you want to stealth trough, or bump every enemiy in the head, the game counts the choices you made and after every chapter gives you a statistic about it.

The player can choose from multiple paths, maybe slide under the city to get to the next goal, or use shadows to knock out the guards. All in all the accent is on the stealthy gameplay, with not many variants for melee combat, and that's another huge plus for me. I have played enough other games where I have to kill hundreds of enemies just to get to the next goal and that gets boring quickly.  There are many other elements that are much more interesting than just shooting or fighting, like distracting enemies, swooping through lit areas into the shadows, new tools and arrows, and there are the Focus Points. Focus Points are used to get special abilites, like seeing where the loots are in a room.

The game's middle difficulty is just perfect, but if somebody wants a big challange he can have it. The game can be played quickly, or take your time, explore everything, collect every document and loot, make all the challanges, etc. The levels are well designed, you can't go lost in a house, but you have enough side rooms and streets to not get bored by a too linear gameplay.

In the graphics I can see the old Thief games style, and that's great. Many games can't bring back their prequels's mood or style, but Eidos did a great job. Plus there are all the little details on the streets, in every room, like flyers on street walls, and little glass shards on floor.

This is a great game, worthy of the title, once you begin to play it you can never get bored of it. It can be replayed, depending on how you want to play it, maybe for collecting everything and completing every challange.

Final Score:

10/10

Plague Inc.: Evolved (Early Access)

 

Genre: Strategy, simulation

Developer: Ndemic Creations

Release Date: 20. Feb. 2014

EXTERMINATE!!!EXTERMINATE!!!EXTERMINATE!!!

Who wouldn't dream about destroying humanity? Who isn't affraid that someday a new virus appears that wipes us out? Well in this game you can create your own pathogen, mutate it and spread it so it kills everyone on Earth.

This game was developed from the earlier mobile game, Plague Inc, and adds a couple new features. Create a pandemic that started from a single little bacteria or fungus or virus, choose whatever you would like and mutate it into a serial killer. One person doesn't wash hands, next one already infected and so on. It's a simple simulation, if not played on harder difficulties it's not too challangeing.
WARNING! The games content is not full, still early access, but it is stable, and they are planning in the next weeks to add multiplayer.

The overall look is beautiful and detailed, 3D models of the viruses, pretty pictures of cities, many diagrams ad graphs, nice color scheme. So name your epidemic and the apocalypse can begin.

There are three ways you can customize it, collecting evolution points and using them to mutate symptoms, resistances and other aspects which help you make it spread faster, make it more lethal and slow down the cure. Yor only "enemy" is the CDC, where they are developing the cure. It is your job to be faster than them if you don't want any nasty remaining humans to survive.Spread it continentally, through water and air, infect those rats and flies.

I think it will be worth to wait for all the components, just hope a Unicorn virus doesn't attack us till then.

Final Score:

6/10

Reaper - A Tale of a Pale Swordsman

Genre: Platformer, RPG, hack and slash

Platform: IOS, PC

Developer: Hexage

Release Date: 9. Sept. 2013

 

 

The good:

- artistic style

- story

The bad:

- choosing a side is not that important

- battles get boring

- the sound

I have to tell, I'm not a fan of IOS games to play on PC, or a version of them for PC, and this is not an exception. They are either too short, or too repetitive, or interesting but not challangeing enough, so I get bored, and there are so many game that are soo similar, it's not even worth it after the third Temple Run copy. I know it's hard for a game to come up with something original, and for mobile games are even less options, but still there are some original games, so it's not impossible. I have to admit, this game has some original mix of elements.

At first I only tried it because it looked cute. I don't know how it plays on a phone, but for a PC game it's a little dull. It's a simple game, with a mix of RPG elements (leveling, choices, inventory and equipment, XP), combined with action, hack and slash (couple of combinations for battles). Although this is not too innovative. The enemies come in waves or attack you by walking near, and they get harder to kill as you level up. At first it's is nicely balanced, but later on it gets boring that too much XP is needed for the next level, and after a couple of levels you can't buy much many new stuff and you loose interesting, since there is not enough reward. 

Every level you get to shoose a new skill, you have to choose from several cards, but it gets annoying that in one level-up you get two cards you want, in the next neither is good for you and you can't go back to choose from the last cards. All in all it's a pretty casual game, and I don't think it needed a PC release.

The best thing in the game is the artistic style, and the story is kind of interesting, that's the only thing that kept me playing. A lone pale little cutie knight (although everybody in the game notices how sickly and ghostly he looks) gets caught in a war between the local tribes of the Wilderness, the magic users, and the soldiers who want to take their land and oily thing (oh the irony). You can take sides, choose who to be friends with, although not always, and if you want to level you have to make quests for each sides, plus there is your friend, Old Grey Beard, who helps you the whole time. 

The graphics are nice, there are a variety of enemies, everything looks in place, the colors as well. The levels are varied, they have diversified backgrounds and matching enemies, so they did a nice job with that. The only thing that bothered me was the music. I don't think that's the music you choose for a game like this. But that's only my opinion.

I don't recommend buying this game for PC, although for phone it's acceptable, and it's better than the other games I have recently played, or unless you like simplier little RPG games, maybe for a little relaxing to turn your brain off.

Final Score:

5/10

Journal

Genre: interactive adventure game

Developer: Locked Door Puzzle

Release Date: 17. Feb 2014

This isn't a game for masses, not a first person shooter with high quality graphics. It isn't a whole world of role-playing with monsters, weapons and magic. This isn't a strategy game with huge armies to control. If you only play games because of these, then back away slowly from this game. This is just a simple story about a young girl, and how she struggles with some events in her life.

With all the Telltale Games (Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us) interactive stories are becoming more and more and more popular. This game is not that great neither with story, neither with gameplay, neither with graphics, but it crawls into your heart. In it's 1-2 hour gameplay, you control a girl and have to rebuild her somehow-erased journal, walking through the sketchy, but beautiful hand-drawn pages of the journal. I have to admit the surroundings and 3D elements could have been made better, but the journal parts were weird in a lovely way and the narrating circus parts were just magnificent.

I think indie game maker, Richard Perrin, did a great job with this game's story. You are in a fog the whole game, you don't know the most important thing, and it is seldomly mentioned. The game focuses on speaking to other character, and deciding how the girl should behave. There are a couple of bigger decisions, but you can't change the major storyline. Because you are a little girl nobody wants to tell you anything, your parents don't want to tell you why they separated, plus you have troubles at school, struggling with anxiety, and depending on how you behave with your friends will decide how they treat you in the end. Just like in real life. The story deals with these things, which might seem difficult even for an adult, but how these things are even more difficult for a child. Meanwhile there is another storyline with shadow figurines, which at first might seem like it has nothing to do with our young girl, but in the end integrates slowly into her life.

I highly recommend this game, although as I mentioned it before, not for anyone who can't appreciate a simple but makes-you-think story.

Final Score:

8/10