Platform: PC

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.

The sequel to Shadowgrounds doesn’t offer much new. There’s the same aliens, same corny voice acting, and the same top-down shooting mechanics. However, I liked this one a bit more. This is probably due to the slightly improved control scheme. I also think the game was helped by the lack of an attempt at creating deep narrative. You get a paragraph of text and some narration before each level and then you’re off to shooting hordes of aliens. Simple, short and worth the two bucks I spent on it.

Life is Strange uses the same branching story game play as Telltale’s games. The twist here is that your character has the power to reverse time and undo choices. There are a handful of puzzles that require some creative time shifting but the reality of this mechanic is that it is simply an alternative to using a quick-save. The real focus is on story and characters. In early episodes I was really annoyed by the mindless teenage banter. I get enough of that phoney YouTuber-style psychobabble from my own daughter. After about the third episode I began to get used to it. What’s left is an interesting drama about renewed friendships, a missing girl, disturbing visions, and the darker side of a quaint Northwestern hamlet. It’s like a somewhat sterile cross between Twin Peaks and Donnie Darko.

The first F.E.A.R. game did a really good job of building up the tension to provide creepy scares and atmosphere. This one is just an in-your-face string of loud, quick cuts of Alma that fire off with such regularity that they just become part of the background noise of the game. This background noise also includes the multitude of text info items you pick up and never need to read. So, as far as a horror story goes, this wasn’t so great. I didn’t really know or care about what was going on.

The main attraction here is the first-person shooting with your enhanced bullet-time super power. This is fun for the most part, but it gets quite repetitive as you traverse in a straight line from one generic military compound to the next. There are a couple moments of variety in the middle of the game in which you control a mech and can just mow down everything. But other than that, this is a straight up hallway shooter and I could take it or leave it.

Kathy Rain is a point and click adventure which uses the same AGS engine that all the games from Wadjet Eye games use. Visually it’s as impressive as the best games in this niche. The Wadjet connection goes a little further in that all the voice over direction was done by Dave Gilbert. Unlike his games, here there is no commentary track filled with gushing praise of New York based voice actors. Thank goodness.

So, with all that said, fans of the genre will know what to expect in terms of quality and game-play mechanics. I found the puzzles to be mostly fair, although there’s a whopper of a riddle in the middle that just tested my patience. The story has a very strong beginning which sets up the primary mystery to be solved. However, as the game progresses it descends more and more into the supernatural(?) and starts to lose its impact. Maybe they are setting up a larger story arc here, but the ending just didn’t feel complete.

This game was a $5 budget CD when I bought it over a decade ago at CompUSA but I never got around to playing it until now. I have seen it rated on several lists as one of, if not the best strategy game of all time. I can see why it has its reputation. There is a ton of depth in the technology trees and every aspect of the game can be micro-managed to you heart’s delight. The early stages of the game are fun as you explore the planet and set up your first bases. However, gradually the game becomes and overly-complex and tedious exercise in unit management. One might argue that is just the game’s depth showing its hand. Fair enough, but to me it just feels like work.

There’s a point in which every game, no matter your strategy, begins to feel exactly the same. The AI opponents are always saying the same stuff and behaving the same way. There is no real variety in the terrain beyond forest, dirt and fungus. As such there is no need to adapt to a strange alien world or anything like that. The science fiction theme only served to make all the technologies difficult to understand at a glance. Matter Editation, unlike something in an Earth-based civ game, is meaningless to me and tells me nothing of how it could be used to bolster a particular strategy. Not that it matters, because it feels like the game randomly just gives you these tech discoveries.

Again, I can see the appeal. The whole “just one more turn” thing got me for a couple of nights, but lack of variety wore on me. I think I’d be willing to try a more modern Civilization sequel if my mood and the price was right.

Another arty walking simulator for the PC. This one is all about the nature of choice and free will within a game world. You play Stanley, an office worker who finds that everyone in his office is gone. The game is dominated by an often funny narration that tries to get you to follow the “correct” path. The whole point here is that every time you think you are subverting the game but straying from the correct path, the narrator explains how your choices don’t matter. Ha ha. ART! A fine exercise but definitely not worth more than a couple of bucks or an hour of your time.

It’s been a little while since I’ve played a current generation FPS, so maybe I just impressed with the slickness of it all, but I enjoyed this one. The New Order, unlike the 90’s Wolfenstein, is very story focused. The premise here is that Blaskowitz got konked on the head, woke up a decade later, and found out the Nazis had won World War II. So, first things first, get a gun, join the resistance and shoot everything that moves.

The action is paced so that you aren’t blasting everything Serious Sam style. There are stealth tactics and lots of hidden extras to be found through exploration. A big part of the game is the new welder gun thingy. You can use it to cut through metal fences, chains and crates. This adds to the exploration but it’s not that impressive as a weapon or new game play mechanic. I usually stuck with the standard machine guns, shotguns and silent strikes. All the weapons can be dual wielded and there are bonuses for pulling off specific types of kills.

As I said before, there is a big emphasis on story here. The situations are pretty ridiculous and over the top. However, there is a seriousness to many of the character interactions that just seemed out of place. This included a couple of embarrassing “love” scenes and a side story about a Jimi Hendrix wannabe who won’t fight because Americans are just as bad as the Nazis or something inane like that. In the very first level you are given a binary choice which doesn’t really affect the story path much, but it does set up Death’s Head as a great villain.