Platform: PC

When I heard that this game featured Michael Biehn as the main voice actor I was intrigued. When I saw that it was an over-the-top homage to eighties science fiction and action movies I had to have it. The game doesn’t disappoint in the nostalgia department. In addition to the neon Tron-style art direction, there is tons of cheesy dialogue, 8-bit cut scenes (including a power rock training montage), and an incredibly cool synthesizer-based soundtrack. In terms of story, the game has nothing to do with FarCry other than it using the same game engine and open-world mechanics. There is a good balance of stealth and good old-fashioned shoot everything gun play. This sells for cheap and is well worth the low price despite its short game length.

The first Darksiders was a blatant rip-off of (some might say “homage to”) the The Legend of Zelda. While it maintains much of that formula, the sequel feels a little more like its own thing. There’s more of an emphasis on acrobatic platforming complete with pillar jumping, vaults, wall-running and… er… okay it’s a rip-off of Prince of Persia this time, but who cares, it’s a formula that works!

The game keeps pushing you along from one puzzle room to the next and along the way you earn more and more advanced tools for passing obstacles. There’s still the pop gun, portal gun and hookshot thingy, but now you can also split into two characters, control ghosts and do a little time travelling. These new skills make for a couple really brain-twisting puzzles near the end of the game.

There is still quite a bit of hacking and slashing between the brainy stuff. A few of the battles are fun, but, for the most part combat is repetitive and uninteresting and can be reduced to spastic button mashing. The first game was a tad more sophisticated in its fighting controls.

As for the story, it just as convoluted and unintelligible as the it was in Darksiders. There’s a bit less of the bible fan-fiction feeling here, but still, I never really gave a crap about anything that was going on. The dialogue sounds like it was taken word-for-word out of the Lord of the Rings screenplay. Just replace “Mordor” with “The Corruption.”

This game has been on my back burner for quite some time now. I play a little here and a little there, but it never really got its hooks in me. This was Telltale’s first foray into episodic point-and-click adventure games and it shows. There is no over-arching story to tie the episodes together, solving the puzzles is mostly just a matter of clicking on everything in your inventory and they threw in a bunch of item collection nonsense to make up for the limited gameplay options.

If you are a fan of the web cartoon it’s worth playing if only because it is probably the last we will see of Homestar and the gang for a while. There are some pretty funny moments and there are also some clever twists on various video gaming clichés and there’s even some self-aware parody of adventure game annoyances. However, once you have played the first episode, it seems like the same thing over and over. Alright, Chapmans, you’ve made your computer game, now get back to making cartoons!

While Invisible War was not without its merits, it really lacked the depth of the original Deus Ex. This third installment attempts to amend some of that and bring the series a little closer to its RPG, stealth-centric roots. For the most part it succeeds. The levels offer all sorts of play options and paths. Also, the third-person perspective stealth system works much better than the hiding in shadows ever did in the original game.

Personally, I think the original is a tad bit overrated. I attempted to play it a again before diving into Human Revolution and found it doesn’t really hold up. My God that Hong Kong level is unbearably tedious and boring. There’s a point in Human Revolution when the game frees you to start exploring a more open environment. I immediately started to get panicked flashback of my hours spent backtracking through the dull streets of Hong Kong, but. thankfully, there are quest arrows that guide lazy modern gamers back into the action.

The story as something to do with kidnapped scientists and anti-cyber augmentation zealots. Once the Illuminati were brought into the mix I tuned out the narrative and just concentrated on getting through the levels undetected. Tightly plotted and understandable narratives are not a hallmark of this series.

The Tiny Bang Story is a small puzzle game that I think is designed more for younger players. Most of the game-play is in the vein of I Spy and other hidden object games. You look at a wonderfully illustrated setting and then click around trying to find a given number of similar items like apples, toy boats or gears. Once you have found enough objects a puzzle is unlocked. Complete all the puzzles and then you move on to the next setting.

I didn’t find the puzzles that difficult. Actually, the only parts of the game where I got stuck were a couple of the hidden image sets. Here’s a hint: click everywhere! Despite its simplicity, I did enjoy playing this. I found it to be a nice relaxing change of pace after carpal-tunneling my way through a couple of shooters over the last few weeks.

The original BioShock was a great game with an interesting plot and a wonderfully unique setting. I never really understood the bizarre take on Ayn Rand though. It seemed to say that if objectivism is taken to its logical extreme that would mean people who believe in individualism and self-ownership would immediately start modifying and enslaving people against their will? That makes no sense at all, but it was enough to give you a bad guy to pursue. BioShock 2 takes place in a more deteriorated Rapture several years after the fall of Andrew Ryan. This time, however, the collectivists are in charge and, whad-do-ya-know, they suck too. I guess the theme here is it’s cool to be an indecisive, on-the-fence moderate.

This sequel plays about the same as the original but there have been a few improvements such as the removal of those annoying pipe-dream style puzzles that represented hacking. The combat, while fun, was pretty difficult for me and I often felt like I was dying without warning. I eventually got the hang of it once I had enough power-ups. This game felt like it moved along a little better than the first with less back tracking. The story comes to a decent finale and, in the end, I think I liked this game just as much as I did the first one.

Crysis feels much more like the Far Cry sequel I wanted back when I played Far Cry 2. Once again you are dropped into a lush island paradise in which you must shoot everything that moves, including the chickens. The overall level design is fairly linear, but each set piece can be approached in many ways. I would always prefer turning on my cloak and then sneaking into a secure location before going on my shooting sprees. It’s not quite a Thief game, but this stealth system works reasonably well. And once the snooping ended, the gunfights were very fun and manageable.

The story is not terribly interesting. Like the original Far Cry there is a not-so-surprising sci-fi twist about two thirds the way through. This twist provides a nice change of environment, but fighting squid monsters just isn’t as fun as creeping through the bush to take out commies.

Darksiders is a game that is utterly derivative of Zelda. You are tasked with exploring various “castles,” each of which gives you a new power that will open up new areas on the map. Some of these new powers include Link’s hookshot, Eopna the horse (named Ruin here), a magic musical instrument, double jump, and the Portal gun is thrown in for good measure. However, unlike a Zelda, this game is supposed to be dark and edgy. It’s kinda like a modern superhero movie where they try to make a kids’ franchise dark and brooding. I can’t wait for the reimagining of The Wonder Twins.

You play War−one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse who snarls his way through the entire confusing story. As far as I could tell there’s a war between Heaven and Hell and the seven seals have been broken or some such nonsense. Honestly, I had no idea what was going on. The characters are stupid and undeveloped and the fictional world makes no sense. It seems like every dialogue sequence contains a line or two about, “you know this is the law!” followed by a meaningless battle in order to stay within regulatory boundaries of this unspecified law. Apparently, the world beyond is a boring government bureaucracy.

Story aside, the game isn’t that bad. How can you go wrong when you rip-off one of the best games of all time? The castle puzzles are pretty good, and the boss battles are satisfying. What this game lacks is the sense of exploration that you get with Zelda. There weren’t many moments when I was tantalized by some seemingly unattainable treasure that required a power I was yet to aquire.

One final complaint is that this was a super sloppy PC port. Controller support was crap. I had to download an xBox controller emulator to play the game. The game ships with a corrupt intro video that prevents the game from launching. The fix is to delete an AMD video in the install directory. Lastly, a recent Windows update broke the video in the cutscenes. Only the bottom half of the screen was visible. That required rolling back a Windows update which did all sorts of weird things to other programs. I own the sequel, so I hope they fixed those issues for that game.

This game had one of the best trailers ever. None of the narrative spark that permeates the trailer is in the actual game. The closest thing you get is a few paragraphs of backstory on the character selection screen. This is unfortunate because Dead Island is a big open world game that gives you no incentive to explore it’s lush and detailed map. Rather than tell a story or develop characters, the quests are of the fetch and return an item variety. Even the opening cutscene is an insult. It consists of the worst “beeyotch”-laden rap song a 12-year-old wannabe gangsta could come up with.

The combat mechanics are fun and keep the game going for a while. But without the narrative hook, the chopping and bludgeoning just becomes tedious. The game doesn’t even let you play it as a pure action challenge because it uses a horrible recovery from death system that removes any real challenge in defeating particularly tough segments. Hit a thug, die, come back to life and hit him again… repeat until you win. Such a disappointment.

The Icewind Dale series is built on the same game system as the Baldur’s Gate games. Unlike Baldur’s Gate these games are focused more on the fighting and less on the story. As far as I’m concerned that’s a good thing. These old Infinity Engine games are just filled with pages and pages of boring fantasy text. It’s hard to get a sense of character and mood when every NPC has a ridiculous apostrophe-laden name like “Yxbudur’zmutkimdu.” Just point me towards a horde of goblins and let me click them to death. Icewind Dale II is very good at just keeping the monsters coming and follows a very linear progression from area to area. Not until the later chapters do you start to get bogged down with quests requiring putting specific items in specific containers to solve puzzles. The shift of pace was a little jarring and took me a while and a few jumps to a walk-through to get past some areas. I prefer the sword as a puzzle solving tool.

Many of my old complaints about the D & D system still apply here. There’s too many numbers thrown at the player and it’s difficult to know which weapons are more powerful than others. The magic system is immense and it was just too much work to figure out which spells were best against which enemies. C’mon devs, us gamers are lazy! Give us a tutorial mission or two for each class. All that said and in spite of my ignorance of the subtleties of the rules, the combat is fun and satisfying. I hope recent Kickstarter projects attempting to modernize this game system are sucessful.