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PC Gaming

They Are Billions

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.

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

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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.

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PC Gaming

They Are Billions

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.

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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.

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

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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.

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PC Gaming

Beautiful Desolation

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.

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PC Gaming

Beautiful Desolation

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.

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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.

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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.

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PC Gaming

Clid the Snail

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.

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PC Gaming

Clid the Snail

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.

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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).

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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.

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PC Gaming

Children of Zodiarcs

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.

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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.

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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.

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PC Gaming

Children of Zodiarcs

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.

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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.

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PC Gaming

BIOTA

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.

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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?

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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.

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PC Gaming

BIOTA

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.

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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.

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PC Gaming

Forgive Me Father

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.

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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.

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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.

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PC Gaming

Forgive Me Father

Enemies are quite brutal. The melee ones are fast and hit hard. The projectile ones react quickly, and I suspect they keep shooting at you even when they can’t see you.

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As this is my first (and only) playthrough, I want to try as many weapons as possible. It’s great that you get to use most of your arsenal. Mauser is almost like a battle rifle, fast and accurate. The Tommy Gun upgraded into a laser beam is super powerful.

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The only disappointment is the grenade launcher. Indirect fire is often very beneficial, but it’s not very effective here.
Underwater level was a bit of a surprise. Not something I expected in an old-school shooter.

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PC Gaming

Forgive Me Father

Interesting bit about weapon upgrades is that your choice is between upgrading the standard weapon or changing its ammo type to something more rare and more specialised. Basically, it’s a choice between getting a more powerful machinegun or an energy beam instead.
The first boss is basically a wall throwing mines at you. But I still enjoyed it.

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The swamp level was tough. There are a few types of enemies that hide in the water, like in the first Hexen, and those are very hard to see. And with how long the camera is placed in this game, almost Turok-like, it’s hard to spot enemies shooting at you from the grass. But if you know in which direction to go first, it’s not that hard. Still, I died on that level as much as through the entire game before that.
The second boss is a pillar instead of a wall. It’s tricky: the boss shoots homing projectiles, mobs shoot homing projectiles, and during the second phase there’s a laser grinder you need to evade, that also changes direction 🤯

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PC Gaming

Forgive Me Father

This is certainly not what I expected. It’s a Lovecraftian game in its setting alright. But its a old-school shooter, most similar to Project Warlock.

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Monsters popping out of walls, weapons without reload, secrets and all that. Strict level structure. No free saves, but there are some checkpoints. Then there’s the infamous flashlight from Doom 3, though: the one you cannot use with a weapon.

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There’s an experience system, and quite an extensive tree of weapon upgrades. And also skills, such as healing.

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PC Gaming

Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer

The game does offer some interesting ideas around leveling weapons. Some weapons are unlock by leveling up your character, that hasn’t changes.
But in Cold War, most of the weapons had same set of upgrades which you had to unlock for each. And the way to unlock weapons is that you use weapons from the same category.
In Modern Warfare 2, you unlock weapons by “platform”. AK74 has the same platform as RPK, so you have to level up the former to unlock the later.
Also, leveling up a weapon unlocks attachments that are shared between all weapons. You can add a silencer to your LMG, but only if you unlock it by leveling up a particular sniper rifle.
Most attachments also support tuning, which is a bit mindboggling for me. That means that not only the attachment provides some tradeoffs, like accuracy versus Aim Down Sight speed, but you can also make those tradeoffs more prevalent.

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PC Gaming

Sinking City

Completed Sinking City.
There’s a funny pice of self-awareness in the dialog with the police officer that explains why he dislikes the protagonist:
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In most games, “choices” are about either being an alright guy or a complete asshole. In Sinking City, they are sometimes more subtle, and I like it.
At one point we need to choose between a necromancer that resurrects the dead to torture them and a Mayan vampire. Torturing dead people – bad. Eating people at night – also bad.
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In another quest, you can either give away the real killer, a decent guy who committed a crime only because his family was held hostage, or frame a politician that plans to poison his mother. I see clear Witcher influence here.
Speaking of choices, though, what you did throughout the game doesn’t affect the ending. You just pick one of the three available, and that’s it. I’m glad the were some bossfights in the middle of the game:
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Something I wish the game would make more fuss about are the weapons. They’re given to you during some key sequences, but you don’t actually get to see the process. A character would say “here’s something”, and you need to go to your inventory to discover that you’ve been awarded a Tommy Gun.
Also, what slightly ruined the experience for me is that all the investigations are basically the same. You find the clues. You recreate the sequence of events, which is almost never challenging. You unlock that secret wall. I wish the “puzzle solving” would somehow ramp up. But it never does.

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PC Gaming

Modern Warfare 2 (2022) multiplayer

Me before Modern Warfare 2 (2022) free trial:
– Why nobody likes it?
Me after the free trial:
– Oh, OK, now I see…

The most played Cold War mode is Demolition. It’s fun, because it requires some teamwork: one team needs to blow two bombs, another denies them. In Modern Warfare 2… there’s no Demolition.
Instead, everybody plays on a map called Shipment, which is so tiny that your enemies can spawn on top of you. So it’s a constant bloothbath.


The funny part is that since the map is so small and requires no skill, I’m constantly at the top, just firing my LMG in all directions.

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PC Gaming

Sinking City

Early in the game you meet a librarian with her mouth sewn. Later, there’s an interesting sidequest related to her, where you need to hunt the witch that did that to her. There’s even a boss fight and a video sequence leading to this, which is not something I’d expect from a sidequest. Leaves an impression.


There are infested areas, where you encounter more monsters and supposed to find more loot. But the mechanics work in such a way that you usually waste more ammo that gain. So I just tend to keep away from those areas.
For half of the game we’re looking for that antropologist that would help us understand the visions. And a few minutes after we find her, she just… drowns. What a disappointment.