Platform: PC

I think with this I have finally played through all of the original Infinity Engine RPG games. Icewind Dale I & II are still my favorites of the bunch. Those were about building up characters and skillfully fighting though areas. Torment is all about story, story, story. Normally that’s a good thing, but when that story is told via an endless scroll of text and dialogue trees is gets really tedious. I may have been able to deal with all the text with a more adventure game style interface where you get animations of who’s speaking and some visual cues as to their emotions. Why can’t dialogue be fun or gamified somehow? Instead I sat in a daze as thousands of lines of text flew by waiting to hit the 1 key until I was out of options.

I guess the story is unique. It’s not your standard “defeat the evil creature” narrative. You must find out about your forgotten past lives and solve the mystery of your identity… eventually, by defeating the, um, evil creature.

Your character is immortal and can’t be killed. Instead you are respawned every time you die without consequence. I’m not complaining too much. I don’t long for the good old days when games were hard to beat, but there has to be some motivation for improving your character and doing well in combat. Eventually, you run out of immortality. In fact, at that point in the game I was in an unwinnable state and wasn’t about to go back to an old save to relive the joys of scrolling through the same text again. I had to revert to a god-mode cheat for that penultimate battle. I don’t know. That just makes a game feel broken to me. I was able to kill the final boss without cheating. So that’s something.

Ubisoft only knows how to make these open world games with paper-thin story lines and lots of side challenges that don’t amount to much. I had already played the sequel (which I got for free) before I had played Watch Dogs (which I also got for free). Apparently, if you wait long enough, all Ubisoft games will eventually be free. I knew what to expect going into this: lots of “hacking” which consists of vaguely Pipe Dreams style puzzles or, more often, just holding down the “Q” key. My main reason for not passing on this was the prospect of exploring a virtual Chicago. Turns out in Montreal they think Chicago is surrounded by rolling hills and filled with exploding steam pipes.

The game does what it does well enough. I suppose I could have spent hours and hours finishing side missions, but the fact of the matter is that much of the tasks are just not very interesting. Taking down gang hideouts is fun and a few of the racing challenges are okay, but that’s about it. Some of the more hacker-ish things are just about looking for the correct camera or following glowing wires until you reach a box with a “Hack” icon above it. Watch Dogs 2 is superior in most respects. In that game you get drones and other tools to exploit. There is far more variety and fun to be had in virtual San Francisco, so skip this one and play the sequel.

I’ve been playing this off and on for the past few months. This is supposedly designed as a multiplayer experience and have been playing it as such. The campaign is not at all interesting narratively. It has something to do with a bad guy with a space hare lip controlling an orb thing that grants powers to the good guys. I lost interest in the first cut-scene.It’s all very pointless and boring.

But the multiplayer game-play is crazy fun, right? Not exactly. The game doesn’t really do anything original with its mechanics. Just a basic FPS with game modes that amount to defend this thing, destroy this thing or capture that thing. There is no satisfying end goal. The hook is supposed to be finding exotic weapons and gear. Who cares? Borderlands did this but it didn’t take itself seriously. It was fast and fun. Destiny 2 tries to pass itself off as an MMO or something but it just manages to make the game bland and repetitive.

This game is a bit of a mixed bag. I really like the main characters and it has some genuinely funny moments but there are weird tonal shifts. One moment characters are bloodletting themselves to please an ancient Mayan god, the next you are walking around asking people to comment on the panties you found.The big issue with most point and click adventures is whether or not the puzzles make sense. Again, Broken Sword 2 is hit or miss. When your goal was clear, the puzzles made sense and had just the right amount of challenge. But many times you were put in a situation where there were no clues as to what you even should be trying to do. A few times a puzzle’s solution involved talking to a random person one more time after you thought you had exhausted all your dialogue options. Thankfully, there is a pretty robust in-game hint system. Spoiler alert: you never need to use the panties.

Despite the flaws, all the chaotic threads come together in the climax and I ended the game thinking that I wanted to play the sequels.

This one was a freebie from GOG.com of which I knew nothing about before playing it. Turns out, it is a 2.5-D platformer—meaning, it’s a 3-D rendered game but you only move in the standard two dimensions of a classic platformer. I’m not a huge fan of platform games, I’m not very good at them. Thankfully this one is slow-paced, not too twitchy and yet, it’s not quite a puzzle platformer either. There is just enough action and thinking to keep an old-timer like myself interested for a few hours.

There is a little bit of a story which is told mostly through comic style art cut-scenes. There is also plenty of junk to collect if your the type of OCD gamer that goes for that sort of thing. Exploration is limited and it doesn’t take much effort to uncover secrets. Overall, and enjoyable game that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

A while back I gave this game a spin during a Steam free weekend and ended up setting it aside I guess because I couldn’t quite grok the stealth mechanics. On this second go around I’ve realized that it’s all about using your magic skills for just about every encounter. In fact, by the end of the game the player is well-nigh invincible will his arsenal of teleportation, mind control and time dilation. I’m too old to be wasting my time mastering a video game, so I welcome it when games feel like they get a little easier as I go along.

There’s enough of a thread of plot to keep it engaging to end. It’s all a pretty basic damsel in distress narrative with the usual litany of video game story-telling cliches. At least it is set in an interesting steam-punk world. Or more appropriately, whale oil punk.

I managed to finish the game only having to kill two characters, so I got the “good” ending. Hurray! I suppose.

Games journalists (I can’t believe that’s really a thing) seem to love this game, I thought it was tiresome. Every game a new world is generated that you’re supposed to jump around looking for treasure, secrets and rare upgrades. If you die, that’s it. Permadeath. A game for shut-ins and the insane. So, why didn’t I like it? My problem is that I don’t find you basic platform-game mechanics all that interesting and, without a narrative hook, I lose interest fast. Believe me, I tried to like this one but no thanks. Sayonara, uninstalled-ed!

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. This game is the epitome of bland first person shooters and Id Software should know better. They still seem not to know that there are colors beyond brown. There are no attempts at originality here. The post-apocalyptic setting is like a colorless, un-fun Borderlands. The barely-there plot is a rehash of the Fallout fish out of water structure. The driving sections are a bore and you are forced to do win all these tedious races. I guess the shooting and A.I. is acceptable but you are constantly back tracking to the main hub to get new missions. This game is not worth the five dollar sale price I paid.

I thought it was Game of Thrones, but this is definitely the weakest Telltale release. I don’t mind that this is geared for children, but the thing that makes Telltale games work is difficult choices. I felt all the decisions in this game were pretty obvious and didn’t have broad ramifications. Also, when you have Patton Oswald and Pee Wee Herman as your lead voice actors, you’d think there’d be a bit more room for comic hijinx. Alas, this is not the case.

Witcher 3 is a massive open world RPG that’s full of detail in terms of visuals and story. It’s was no surprise that it would take weeks for me to finish. As of right now GOG is telling me that I spent 100 hours to complete the main story line and I still have two expansions to complete. There’s just so much to explore and do.

I played on a normal difficulty, so the combat was just enough to be challenging but not a bottleneck to the story. I felt like I wasn’t as reliant on potions and magic as I was in Witcher 2. That game had some truly challenging boss fights. This one was much more casual feeling. I could pick up and play at any old time.

The strength of this series is the characters and story. Even NPCs from minor side quests are given a little story blurb in the character logbook. There’s so much rich backstory, at times it get to be a little overwhelming.