Category: PC Gaming

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Ascent

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date September 5, 2023

Turrets in this game are annoying. They shouldn’t have anywhere as much HP as they have. Super tanky. And on top of that, the tendency of the enemies to spawn behind you, in an area you already cleared, is annoying as well.

This stops mattering us much once you buy and upgrade the minigun, though. It, and the spiderbots that you get from the mid-game boss. Spiderbots are amazing, because they deal all types of damage at the same time. So no matter who you face, they will always deal maximum damage.
All I can say about the game story: it exists. You serve a mob boss, and as the Ascent supercorp that controls everything goes bankrupt, you try to reroute some energy from one of its reactors. You’re then hired by another corp, to steal the logs of Ascent. Turns out it went bankrupt because it was putting all of its money into a Secret Project.

New areas of the city open as the story progresses. But sometimes you’re given a sidequest in an area that hasn’t been opened yet. And there’s nothing telling you that you just wasted your time getting to a blocked path.

Tags Ascent

PC Gaming

Huntdown

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date August 29, 2023

I expected it to be good, and it is indeed really, really good. The beginning is a bit deceptive, as you’re told that you have different bounties to collect.

But in fact, the game is linear, and each bounty is just a separate level. First levels are short, about 5-10 minutes each, and with checkpoints, although you get bonus for completing each level without dying. At the end of each level is a unique boss, who’s also voiced. And second boss already has two phases. Super impressive.

There are three characters to pick from, each with a different main weapon and throwing skill. There are covers, like in Blackthorne, and the covergame is the same. Your sidearm has infinite ammo, and then you can carry another weapon with a limited ammo as well. The most fun is to pick up a minigun, and you don’t have to wait long until you find one.

Tags Huntdown

PC Gaming

Ascent

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date August 28, 2023

The game reminded me of Ruiner. Same cyberpunk settings and warm palette. Fixed isometric camera angle. The controls are twin stick. But unlike Ruiner or Clid the Snail, there’s proper inventory and equipment system. And one thing I never saw in twin stick shooters is that you need to take enemy height into an account. Shorter enemies can only be hit by hipfire of while crouching, from what I can tell.

Leveling up gives you attribute points which you can distribute, but no abilities. Abilities are picked up as gadgets.
Loot is Mass Effect like, not Borderlands or Diablo like. There’s just one kind of assault rifle. But those have levels, which basically just boost its attributes, but doesn’t change the characteristics whatsoever.
What annoys me is that there’s no way to sort items in your inventory. Would be useful if I could sort items by their value. But nope.

After years of Souls-like punishment, the game is surprisingly forgiving. If you die, you don’t need to recover your loot or credits, you don’t loose XP, nothing. There is no punishment for dying.
I started the game with gamepad, but quickly switched back to keyboard and mouse. In most of the encounters, enemies pop behind you, in a “climbing over the rails” animation. Being able to just point at them helps a lot.

Tags Ascent

*.XLS PC Gaming

Completed

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date August 25, 2023

PC:

Beautiful Desolation
BIOTA
Call of Duty: Cold War
Children of Zodiarcs
Forgive Me Father
Sinking City
They Are Billions

Tried many games on Switch, but didn’t complete any 🤷‍♂️

PC Gaming

They Are Billions

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date August 24, 2023

Completed They Are Billions.
It’s a long game. The campaign is long by itself. Then a lot of the missions require you to spend an hour of real time waiting for that last wave of zombies. Then there are no saves, so if you die, you need to repeat it all over again from the very start.

The last mission is fun… until it isn’t. On one hand, there are a lot of choke points you can plan around of. But then on the other, it’s very long, and those waves are frustratingly hard to predict.

Annoyingly it is also crashed before showing me the final cutscene. Although it isn’t much of a cutscene anyway.

Tags They Are Billions

PC Gaming

They Are Billions

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date August 14, 2023

I’m starting to think that maybe I made a mistake rushing through the tech tree to unlock Mutant. More appropriate name should be Frankenstein Monster. It’s a powerful melee unit alright, but it’s prohibitively expensive.

Speaking of tech tree, some upgrades that sound amazing, like getting gold for each zombie, are actually trash. And some boring upgrades, like getting resources each time a train comes are amazing, because you don’t even need to build a mine to get Iron early, for example, and by the time you need iron, you’ll have a stock of it. Unfortunately, there’s no way to reverse a decision once it’s made.

I was expecting the Mutants may be useful against other mutants and giant zombies (or are those zombie giants?). But no, it’s still more efficient to just whack them from afar.

Tags They Are Billions

PC Gaming

Mortal Kombat 1 – Reptile

I can’t say I follow up Mortal Kombat 1 closely, as I’m yet to play the previous one. But making the Reptile the good guy is certainly a ballsy move:

I like it!

Tags Mortal Kombat

PC Gaming

They Are Billions

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date July 28, 2023

The good part is see a literal wave of zombies break upon your defences. Haven’t seen anything quite like it since Starcraft 2, and here they took it to the extreme.
The bad part is that all the missions start the same, which just your HQ, so the first 10-15 minutes are just going through the motions.
The good part is that the way global upgrades system works, is that after every mission you get to pick at least one upgrade. The bad part is that some upgrades are just not very exciting, like +5 to the HQ sight range 🤷‍♂️
The good part, is that almost every mission has some idea behind it. Here’s a canyon, where zombies can come only from two directions. Here’s a peninsula, where zombies arrive only through a bridge, but in a huge wave.

And here’s a map that has no natural defences whatsoever, but you have plenty of time to prepare.

Tags They Are Billions

PC Gaming

They Are Billions

One great feature is that there’s a “roam” command for your units, that allows them to hunt zombies without micromanagement.
I don’t enjoy the fact that there are no saves in this game, as the missions get very long very quickly, and it’s easy to loose an hour or two of progress, because the last wave of zombies spawned where you didn’t expect it to. Same goes for not having the ability to speed up the game. I had to wait for 20 minutes for the last wave. Of course there are tons of fans telling people that if they need to speed up, “they’re playing it wrong”. I’d tell that those people need to get a life.

Tags They Are Billions

PC Gaming

They Are Billions

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date July 17, 2023

Thought it to be a tower-defence game, but it’s more of a standard RTS with some interesting mechanics. You’re fighting against hordes of zombies. If any of your buildings are destroyed, they spawn more zombies. And since most of the buildings are very fragile, this can quickly create a snowball effect. There are also no saves during mission, and the number of retries it takes you until you manage to complete your mission affects your score.

One mechanic I didn’t understand at first is that you can place your hunter cabins that produce food anywhere. Doesn’t have to be close to forest.

Some missions are just dungeon crawling with your hero. Those are easy and bring great rewards, but are boring as hell.

Tags They Are Billions

PC Gaming

Corridor 7

The only reason I was thinking about trying this game is that as a kid I saw it in “От Винта!”, and remembered it as a “shooter with sad pair of eyes”.

It’s a game from Capstone. Which says a lot. It uses Wolfenstein 3D engine. But that’s only part of the problem. Instead of key system, it uses a system where you need to find the correct monitor to unlock the colored doors. I didn’t notice that, so I thought that you have to make enemies open doors for you. And it actually worked!

Anyway, if Blake Stone had some nice ideas, this game has none. Absolute garbage.

PC Gaming

Beautiful Desolation

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date July 11, 2023

Completed Beautiful Desolation.
You do get to switch to your companions once or twice, but only for the sake of a single puzzle. Otherwise, they are here to provide different perspectives on the choices you have. And turns out, there are a few choices in this game.
At one point, you meet a tribe of flying human carcasses, unable to fully die, carried by their drones. You may decide to “free” them or leave them be. On another occasion, you’re given a choice between a more technologically advanced tribe that has virtually enslaved another tribe by providing them with free drugs. And on another occasion, you make a choice between a nanotech civilisation and what is basically a sentient moss.
One of the common themes is that a lower civilisation assumes that the communication of a higher level civilization is actually a “voice of God”. This happens at least twice throughout the game. First, the flying carcasses think that the drug dealers are “gods”, because they received their transmission. Then the drugdealers themselves happen to do the same, receiving transmission from the nanomachines. Who themselves were a failed experiment.
Despite this being an adventure game, there’s a minigame inside it that is basically a 3×3 JRPG-style battle. But collecting characters for it turned out to be a huge hassle.

The ending is not entirely what I expected. I thought it would be completely cyclic, where it turns out you cause the incident yourself, or that you change the past and safe your fiance. But no, you return to where you left, and continue living “happily ever after”.

I’m not very good in adventure games. But I managed to complete this one without looking in a guide once. Maybe because some of the situations have alternative solutions, unlike most other adventures, where you have to get into the heads of the developers.
The most trouble I had was with prerendered backgrounds, it’s often hard to understand where you can and can’t walk, so I would sometimes miss crucial items, such as the drone.
Another interesting quirk is that his game has a rudimentary credit system. Sometimes you’ll find or get gold items. And their sole surpose is to be converted into credits. Ship upgrades are bought with credits, and while some are just cosmetic or quality of life improvements like the travel speed, others are necessary to complete the game.

Tags Beautiful Desolation

PC Gaming

Beautiful Desolation

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date July 11, 2023

I thought it to be another Fallout. Turns out it’s more of a Sanitarium. Luckily, there’s no pixel hunting, most active objects can be seen from afar.

We travel an apocalyptic world together with our fat brother and a robot dog. The main purpose of companions is to provide stories, and they do it pretty well.
The brother, who the hero despises at the beginning of the story, turns out to be a war veteran than became homeless due to his PTSD. And the robot dog was a prototype for a robot that feel emotions. It was a success, but she killed her creator in the process, and lied about feeling anything, so she was deemed a failure.

And the beginning of the game, we accidentally travel to the future. And the whole game is focused around our attempts to build a time travel machine to journey back. In order to do that, we try to help, or sometimes to pass rituals of what appears to be different South African tribes. All of them cybernetic or outright robotic.

Tags Beautiful Desolation

PC Gaming

Clid the Snail

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date July 11, 2023

Ok, I’m done with this game. The first episode or two were fun. But the arenas at the end of each episode became tedious and lazy, to be frank. I just end up running out of ammo, remembering enemies appearance patterns and fighting them with the infinite-ammo-rifle. Not fun.

Tags Clid the Snail

PC Gaming

Clid the Snail

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date June 17, 2023

Twin stick shooter where we play as a anthropomorphic snail. At first I thought it’s the size of a human, but then I saw some lighters and plastic straws lying around taller than myself. Strangely enough we accompanied by a firefly so tiny it must be a bacteria of sort. Later you also find a human skull that everyone calls “skull of a giant”. But then when you think you got your scale right, you meet rabbits that are smaller than a lizard.

In terms of gameplay, it seems to be a linear set of story driven missions (story being helping different animal villages fend off attacks of anthropomorphic slugs for money).

There are some environmental features: flamethrower being able to thaw some levers, and burn through enemy shields. But most of the time, we just shoot stuff while slowly walking away from it.

Tags Clid the Snail

PC Gaming

Children of Zodiarcs

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date June 10, 2023

Completed Children of Zodiarcs.
The combat system is “meh”. There are options like burning through enemies cards or giving them cursed dice. But just killing them is usually the simplest option.
The part that is actually good is the characters. Not to be confused with the story. Story is just alright. A young band of thieves is tasked by the mob boss to steal a relic. The relic turns out to be a sentient golem that joins the band. For two chapters we carve our way in, then we carve our way out. Standard, if not to say boring.
But the characters actually make that story good. Each has their own motivation, and it’s well fleshed. There’s a girl that was kept by nobles like and exotic animal.

There’s a Noble son that was left by his father in the slums, and now seeks revenge. There’s a noble guard who fell from grace by our own hand, and now seeks to redeem himself. And there’s a boy that thinks that if only he kills the gang leader, the girl he loves will turn back to good. And the finale missions are surprisingly grim and dark: you get to kill all your friends one by one.

There’s a tradeoff between good story and sound gameplay sometimes. Last mission is played without your mage, which I relied heavily on all my game. Luckily, it is still not very difficult.
And the last surprise is a bit of an epilogue during the credits roll.

Tags Children of Zodiarcs

PC Gaming

Children of Zodiarcs

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date June 4, 2023

What attracted me to that game were obvious references to Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy IX.
You have the basic mechanics from FFT, such as picking the direction each character faces at the end of their turn. The visual style resembles FFIX. You also start as a band of charismatic thieves.

But, the creators added card mechanics on top of that.
So each character has their own hand of random skills that you need to manage. After picking a skill, you also need to roll some dice. You perform this action by shaking your mouse (at least that part can be disabled in game settings). So, when you only want to attack the next guard, you have to deal with two layers of randomness and turns that take forever.

Tags Children of Zodiarc

PC Gaming

BIOTA

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date May 24, 2023

Completed BIOTA.
One unexpected feature from that kind of a game is that you can save on any screen, if there are no enemies or hazards on it. This especially helps in some platforming episodes.
There are episodes in mech and submarine. A homage to Metal Slug, maybe? Those aren’t very good, though. And the worst one is the pre-final episode, where you need to rappel down while shooting enemies. I was about to drop the game at that point, because of how random that piece is. Completed it only because I got lucky.

The final fight is Star Fox style. If I wanted to play Star Fox, I’d play Star Fox, not an arcade shooter, don’t you think?

So despite the attempts at retro-vibes and introducing a new mechanic in each zone (sliding, lasers, etc), I can’t say I enjoyed it much. If it wasn’t for the save feature, I would have dropped it somewhere in the middle.

Tags BIOTA

PC Gaming

BIOTA

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date May 20, 2023

Faithful 8bit metroidvania. With different biomes and all that. I’d say it’s even a bit too faithful, to the point of being boring.
It’s also very hard to figure out what’s going on due to the 8bit style. Is that a platform or the background? Will that projectile pass through the platform or not? Can I shoot down that projectile? The only way to know is to die trying.

The game uses progression system that I remember from some Zelda games: you need to buy a key item or character to progress. But first, you need to find a purse large enough to hold the money.
First boss is an acrobatic one. You can’t shoot it. Instead you need to jump avoiding its attacks and press button that drops a bomb in its mouth at the right moment. The following bosses are standard, though. You just shoot them until they die.

Tags BIOTA

PC Gaming

Forgive Me Father

Post author By TheAleosha
Post date May 17, 2023

Completed Forgive Me Father.
The third boss, Dagon, is a tricky one. It disappears underwater. And your “rockets” are extremely slow, so they are not effective at all against it. Better stick to hitscan weapons. In its second phase, it starts flooding the valley, and the character can’t swim. So you need to remember in which order the valley if flooded.

The mines are quite tiring, so I ended up running past most enemies, as I was also running out of ammo for everything by that time.
Following two immobile bosses and one partially mobile one, it made sense the introduce a mobile player-sized boss. The only problem with that approach is how the game renders enemies. If you rememeber even Wolfenstein 3D, you start your game facing Nazi soldier back: enemies were drawn from multiple perspectives. But there’s no such thing in Forgive Me Father. Enemies always face you. So, it’s very hard to figure if the boss tries to run away or run towards you. Still, it was one of the easier encounters, and I beat it on the first try.

I felt like they tried too hard to make the final episode too hard. The levels are long, there are so many enemies you run out of ammo all the time, and the final level has some annoying jumping puzzles, that you won’t find anywhere else in the game.
Feeling like I just bruteforced the final boss, Cthulhu. It’s a static boss, like the very first one, no need to aim much. And just like the first boss, it’s a bullet-hell one. Luckily at that point I had fully upgraded Necronomicon that gave me enough invincibility to bear the worst of its attacks.

Tags Forgive Me Father