Indies in Review Part 1

At the time I'm writing this these are all the indie games I own and have played. I have finished some and barely played others so I will just write my impressions here not reviews. A few of them will get actual reviews later on if I'n not lazy and who knows maybe I'll help some people decide if they want them or not.
I'm breaking this up into 3 pieces since there are 24 games I want to talk about.

Anomaly: Warzone Earth
This is a reverse tower defense. You control a commander and guide a team of upgradable units through zones full of enemy towers during a campaign that spans across 3 cities and has leaderbords for those of you that want to show off. It has good graphics, pretty bad voice acting but good music and it's fun especially if you're tired of the standard tower defense formula.

Bastion
A lot can be said about this game but to be short it's absolutely brilliant. It's a skill based 2D Action-RPG with a lot of style, beatiful scenery and a unique premise. The world is falling apart and your character, known only as the Kid, is the only one that can get to the Bastion a supposed safe haven from the chaos where he may find answers to what is happening. That's all I'll say about the story since i don't want to spoil it for anyone. What also sets it apart from most games is the narrator who describes everything you do and makes it seem awesome even if you're just swinging your hammer around destroying crates. It has a nice selection of weapons and skills but it's the atmosphere that gets you hooked.

Beat Hazard
This is a throwback to those oldschool games where you control a space ship and wait for meteors and enemies to attack you from all sides. The twist on this is that it does all that with some very shiny effects, a good variety of enemies and bosses,online coop and leaderboards and it's all to the beat of YOUR music. If you like mixing games and music this is a good one.

Binding of Isaac
I personally love it but wouldn't recommend this to anyone who is easily offended since it has a very twisted sense of humor. Gameplay wise it's a twin stick shooter with dozens of randomly spawned items and enemies that create a different experience every single time you start it, and you restart a lot since it's very easy to die here and it doesn't save anything. It's hard but rewarding and I give it a thumbs up if you can get past the blood, guts and insanity.

BIT.TRIP Beat
This is like playing Pong with an opponent that has 1 billion ballz that went insane. It doesn't really have much on the graphics side but it does reward you with some extra effects if you do chains. All in all I found it very boring and it's also very easy to lose which means you don't unlock the next stages..the next 3 anyway since it only has 4. Not very good, I say pass on this one even if it's on sale like it was for me.

Blocks That Matter
Awesome little puzzle game. You play a cube shaped robot with a drill and you have to collect blocks made of different materials and with different properties to use them to find solutions to each level. I greatly enjoy it and it poses quite a challenge at times so I recommend this to anyone who enjoys puzzle games.

Breath of Death VII & Cthulhu Saves the World
I want to talk about these two games together because they were made by the same developer and they are very similar. They are both very very old-shool JRPGs in the vein of things like Final Fantasy 6 and Phantasy Star IV(which I highly recommend btw) but with a brilliant sense of humor that mocks some of the cliches that can be found gameplay and storywise in these types of games. Very entertaining and will get you laughing out loud so get them if you have ever enjoyed a JRPG.

Medal of Honor Review

Platform: PC

Genre: FPS

So a long time ago there was this game series called Medal of Honor, a shooter concentrating on WW2 events. But a part of the team working on the games left because they wanted to introduce some new

mechanics that EA didn't agree on. They made their own game called Call of Duty. At first it was a WW2 shooter just like Medal of Honor. But with the fourth installment called Modern Warfare they really hit it big (the previous ones were good also). So Medal of Honor was forgotten. They tried a resurrection with airborne but that didn't go as well as expected. Now EA (actually somewhere a year ago) tried to come back with Medal of Honor, a reboot to the series that seemed to be a copy/paste of Modern Warfare.

The story sets up a conflict between US and Afghani forces and unlike Call of Duty it is not as "big". Instead of going on a world domination spree, or the US getting it's butt kicked by another country it focuses on a smaller combat area ... some mountains somewhere and it follows the stories of 4 soldiers present in the war. The stories are pretty tied to each other, and you will get to like some of the protagonists and/or their friends. You don't have to be a genius to see that the whole game revolves around a true event and it's kinda tribute to the real soldiers fighting on the field.

The shooting monotony (found in any war-FPS) is split up by some ATV-driving sequences and a rail-shooter like level when you are in a Apache helicopter taking down ground targets. Like mentioned before I thought the game to be a Call of Duty rip-off but I can say I was pleasantly surprised by it. The story had it's cinematic moments, and developed step-by-step to a pleasing ending. They actually made a good story, without too many rambo-one-man-team moments and made me feel sorrow for some of the guys when holding a position in a house crumbling around us and ammo draining by the second.

While the game looks ok and the gameplay is nothing out of the ordinary, the one thing that really shines is the sound, and here I'm talking about everything included: voice-acting, soundtrack and pew-pew sounds. Also I just need to mention the Linkin Park ending song from the credits which really hit the spot.

One complaint I would have about the singleplayer campaign is that it's waaaay to short and the quality of the cinematics that are not rendered with the games engine is dubious to say the least.

Also I cannot mention a bug due to it's size. Somewhere at the begining of the game I went into a yard and almost everything wasn't there. I could see only door-frames and floating objects. When nearing a door I could clearly see enemies spawn behind it (actually inside a house I guess) and could kill them through what should've been walls.

Moving on to the multiplayer.

This is a different story, and when I say different I mean completely. The game was divided between two teams for the single and multiplayer components. So the multiplayer was made by DICE (known for their Battlefield games, which are awesome played online, although I suck at them). But here they kept their formula and even put the Frostbite engine in (the singleplayer being made in a heavily modified Unreal Engine 3) ... still it's not as good as expected. They only put in 3 classes (assault, something and sniper ... probably named differently) and 15 levels for each. For as much as I played is a total dissaster ... since there is no balance and higher level player can kill you before you even twitch (it might be my poor skill ... but still) ... I will come back with more info about maps and game modes when I'll play more ... 'till now I haven't seen anything new or innovative.

the bad: short campaign, bugs, unbalanced multiplayer

the good: story, presentation, Dusty (what ? I really liked the guy)

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Alan Wake Review

Platform: xbox360

Genre: thriller, horror survival

The player heard about a new game called Alan wake. It was a game promising a new tweak to the horror-survival gameplay. It also promised a captivating story just like one of Stephen king's novels.

On a rainy day of May the game was released and the player rushed to get it.

...suddenly I awoke on the couch and the game finished installing ... I reached out for the controller and turned off the light. It was late at night and I was struggling to progress. I had my controller and i was runningi low on battery. I reached for a new set. They weren't there ...

... hours passed and all I had was this foggy world where I had to relly on Alan's flashlight and the weapons he had collected. I helped him find the pages he was collecting but I missed a few. The creepiness has faded away because the camera kept showing me when the creeps appeared. But I was amazed of the scenery although it kept following the same pattern ... The forest ...

The story kept the player tied to the screen ... He tried to escape rhe temptation but he failed ... miserably. He couldn't always predict what was going to happen. He will never expect a rockstage all fired up to mix up the monster killing with the glorious power of metal ...

One thing kept ruining the cinematic experience of the player. He kept seeing how the lips wheren't in sync with what he was hearing. But he didn't care that much because the game has delievered. It didn't deliver much but it was a very ok release after all ... The player had it ... He had his driving sections, collectibles and a great deal of story and armosfhere ...

... The reader now notices he ended reading this short review ... He walks away ... Unaware of what is happening in Bright Falls

Baku: Alan Wake was a very refreshing experience in the vortex of bad or boring horror games. Not many games have really managed to get me immersed in the experience as this one did, enough that I finished it in a single session (while COma was next to me trying not to get scared as horror games sometimes have that effect on him) which does not happen very often.
The story was very engrossing for me and it's pacing was spot on. The way you found out what happened in the past from the novel pages you find lying around was great and Alan's struggle to find his wife in a town that seemed to become darker and creepier as time went on was brilliant.
As far as gameplay goes the mechanic of using light to weaken enemies was interesting and the game always gave me just enough resources to keep me tensed up which is just what I was expecting so kudos to the developers.
I didn't follow this game much before launch but I had a very pleasant surprise and all in all it's one of the best horror survival games I've played in a while and frankly I'm just waiting for a sequel to explain more about the dark force that inhabits Bright Falls though some things may be better left unexplained.

Red Dead Redemption Review

Platform: xbox 360
Genre: sandbox

I will start this review with a confession. I always wanted to play a good western game although I cannot say that I'm a big fan of the genre. I didn't see any Clint Eastwood movies or the highly-acclaimed Deadwood. Also, on the gaming side of things, I only played the Call of Juarez series and I tried Gun but it kept crashing to desktop. Other games like Dead man's hand, Red Dead Revolver have passed me by. (Baku: Nothing missed there since Red Dead Revolver is not really much of a game as it's comprised mostly of arenas where you shoot a bunch of people to get revenge for something or other buy some new weapons then go on to the next arena and kill a bunch more people)

Rockstar Games, known for their Grand Theft Auto franchise took their unique gameplay style along with the somewhat mature(Baku:I think it's really mature with just enough humor) mature characters and story to the Old West. What came out of it ... is awesome. They kept the open world formula with lots of distractions from the main plot but they replaced the cars with horses. At least this might be their first game where the means of transportation are fully licensed. The setting is huge and of course some parts of it are closed till a certain point in the story. Some might say that the world is too empty and it might not have easter eggs or funny references at every corner as you may find in some of their other games but it doesn't matter. Personally I had lots of fun riding my horse (with no name) through the desert, killing and skining everything that walked, watching people die of thirst and then vultures coming to eat them, picking flowers, searching for hidden treasures or helping random civilians in need. The list of things to do is enormous ... add the side-missions, mini-games, the achievement to tie a unlucky-female and put her on the train-tracks, capture better horses and so on and you have a huge game with lot's of things to do.

The main plot is awesome, it integrates a lot of stuff related to that period like the mexican revolution and the noble indians. From my point of view the story could be summarized as the end of a era ... the end of the cowboyz and outlaws and the coming of "civilization". I found it a bit sad, but that may be because I really liked the main character ... John Marston. He is a ex-outlaw on his way to redemption. Unlike Grand theft auto where nobody had a problem with hookers, John is a family oriented man. I think from all that Rockstar threw at us, he is my favorite character(Baku:And the rest of the cast isn't too shabby either, they created a lot of intriguing characters)... And without any spoilers I take off my cowboy hat and bow before Rockstar for the awesome ending.

The gameplay is nothing more than you would expect it to. Go to a letter on your map, watch a cutscene, mount your horse, go from point A to point B, shoot something/someone ... mission succesfull. The cool part is that as you advance through the story you can buy newspapers that will have news related to what you did. Also there are some challenges that can keep you distracted and have to be triggered in a way. These vary from collecting plants to killing and skinning some sort of wildlife (there are a lot to choose from, from rabbits to bears) or find a hidden treasure. Of course at higher levels they can have more and more special requirements like shooting 5 birds from a moving train (Baku: which took me about 1 hour to complete... damn birds).

As the shooting goes you can take cover almost behind anything, and (I see it's a trend now) a bullet-time effect ... that slows down time and you can precisely target your opponent. This is widely used in duels against random folk that just have a death-wish or something.
Although you may call it a western-GTA I found it a different game and I had a lot of fun with it. Also it cannot be a GTA because John Marston doesn't have a cellphone and an annoying cousin to invite him to playing poker or darts.

the bad: sometimes riding session can get boring and long, some graphical issues
the good: the story, the characters, the setting

Dead Money (Fallout New Vegas DLC) Review

Platform: PC

Genre: (DLC) RPG

Well, let's give a go to DLC reviews. Although I'm not a big fan of theese and I prefer a old fashioned boxed add-on, some DLC's still shine. Of course, I'm not talking about those that give you a new skin/suit or just a overpowered gun.

So, Dead Money... This and the other DLC's to come are reason I cannot finish New Vegas. I want to play through all of them before I end the game. That, plus the exploring of everything in the game. It is the first one, and in pure Bethesda Style is a masterpiece. You are taken to a abandoned Brotherhood of steel Outpost where you are gased and find yourself in a dark place. It's the Sierra Madre Casino that protects it's riches. Without spoiling much, i can tell you that the characters you will meet are awesome and have very interesting backgrounds. The setting is filled with smoke and creepy-ex-residents of the Sierra Madre which only die if you cripple one of their limbs. Also death cam come from various traps scattered through the scenery or from a collar that you cannot get rid of and will explode near certain emitters. If you want to spend more time in the darkness, appart from a extra snowglobe there are some hidden stashed you can collect.

There's not much to say though without spoiling anything. The story is great, it would've been awesome if there would have been more space or if you could go back to find all the stashes.

Oh yeah ... it also raises the level cap to 35 :D.

The bad: a bit repetitive
The good: awesome characters