Recent reviews by Hg Rising

Don't really know when they did it, but now the game needs a Rockstar account I don't find myself inclined to make. Didn't need one when I bought the game some 12 years ago, but I guess they updated it. Everyone needs their own launcher nowadays...

Infuriating.

Shattered Warpgate Edit 2:

Finally got into Esamir. Need to find 2 terminals. Entire campaign area is just a campfest. I uninstalled the game.

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Shattered Warpgate Edit:

So, new update with a good idea: give people a new way to play every day, through an in-game mission system that encourages some new or off the wall gameplay, and explore an exciting story through the introduction of a campaign!

Except the campaign missions are all on one continent. I've seen that continent actually available for about 15 minutes over two days of gameplay in the evenings. Most(?) of the missions, too, require that continent to be open to complete them.

I cancelled my subscription because out of the last four or so major updates, I just don't feel I've been getting my money's worth. Devs have some decent ideas, but they really just cannot deliver on that vision. And if history is any indication, there will be little in the way of follow up to address the concerns through another major patch.

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Original review below:

I have a love-hate relationship with this game.

It has been getting regular updates, which is good, but the updates all feel like pandering to the big outfits. The introduction of the Bastion fleet carriers into the game are one of the major reasons I don't recommend this right now.

Is it a good game? Yes. It's a shooter that I come back to again and again. Hop in, shoot some dudes; giant, chaotic smashes of infantry, tanks, and aircraft. Massive slogs of infantry, desperate point holds, the game really can lend itself to some very impressive and coordinated gameplay.

All of that ruined in a matter of moments, though, because some large outfit decided tonight was the night they just wanted to bomb everyone else for the next half an hour. It's not entirely uncommon to see a Bastion, this elite asset that's supposed to be used as a major force multiplier, sitting above a fight that team has 0 stake in, just to farm. There's a big tank that a decent-sized group can field, meant to be used to counter the giant flying farming machine. Never really seen it used for anything other than being 5-tanks-in-one. Gold star for effort in trying to build a counter to the Bastion. Minus points for locking it behind the social aspects of the game, just like the Bastion.

That also says nothing on the sheer number of orbital strikes you can expect to see from one side or the other. Again, another force multiplier widely available to the organized groups.

If you're a casual, more solo player like myself, the game has been skewing in a direction that is rewarding the social aspects. Get organized, or be steamrolled. The game has ultimately become a numbers game, painfully apparent from the latest feature updates. Those with numbers get the shiny new toys, and they will always have the shiny new toys because they have the numbers. If I had wanted to sign up for a numbers game, I would have probably signed up for EVE Online or just opened up Microsoft Excel.

Instead, I get to watch the whose-who of content creators laud over each new radically more grandiose weapon of mass destruction and pat themselves on the backs. They are the socialites with followings, who will get to experience these new things, and use them to their fullest ability. I get to watch the usual suspects continuously field these impressively destructive vehicles because they will always have the resources for it. They have their power in numbers, and to the massed and organized (no matter how loosely; token zergfit complaint here) go the force multipliers.

I pay 13 bucks a month to play the more solo-focused robot faction and bounce between the different teams. I cannot even pull a single-seat fighter aircraft to attempt to counter the giant flying death ships. There hasn't been a content update for them since right around the time they were released.

Honestly, probably my mistake at this point. I should have realized it earlier, but here there are no equalizers. Only multipliers. Probably why this game tends to be so unforgiving to the newer players.

And ultimately, for the current game direction, I just really can't recommend it. Not recommended because they introduced new features that lead to situations in which I really just can't shoot back, and that's not really the game I'm here to play.

I really can't see myself buying this. I was really eager to try it and play it for the campaign, but it just feels like a "hey look, it's that thing you like, with some bigger stuff!" kind of game where the developer got ahold of the franchise and tried to quickly cash in. Rather than choose a faction to lead to victory, the game rotates you through missions for each faction (mission 1: Space Marines, mission 2: Orks, mission 3: Eldar, etc). It's really disjointed, and the voice acting is pretty flat. If you've seen the trailers, you've seen at least a handful of the cinematics present in the game.

The game doesn't even feel challenging, it just feels time consuming. Most of the challenge I experienced came from just waiting around for my resources to regenerate so I could fill in some lost infantry or get a new tank.

It's not particularly bad, just mediocre, and coming off of DoWII and the expansions, it's disappointing. I honestly don't even want to finish out the free weekend on this. I've only made it through 4 campaign missions out of close to 20, but based on those first four, my curiosity isn't deep enough to sink any more time into it. What a waste.

This game has been sitting on my wishlist for a while, and I finally decided to pick it up during a sale. Reading through some of the other reviews, especially the negative ones, there are some valid claims. This game is all about high level management, and you will get frustrated because your colonists continue to load tomato after tomato into a vending machine, instead of a diverse group of vegetables. There is no way to prioritize how many bots of each you want made, just how many bots total. And it can get rather arduous to micromanage and try and get everything running like a well-oiled space base.

But the game still plays great. I've established bases on all four of the planet types, and it's a blast getting more colonists and managing base expansion. Overall, the game feels like a spiritual successor to Firefly Studios' Space Colony, but with a much broader scope. Your ship lands, a few colonists get off, and from there you string together a handful of solar panels and plastic domes in an attempt to turn a profit. It's a great way to spend a few hours, and while there are a few frustrating points, I don't think it comes close to overshadowing what Planetbase is and what it achieves. And with a little extra polish from the developers, they could really take the game that much further.

Astroneer is a very zen-like experience. From the music to the minimalist graphics, to even the environmental hazards, the game challenges you but not in a way that actively tries to frustrate you. Overall, this leads to a rather calming sense of wonder as you explore the different landscapes across the various world types. The various hazards seem to come in the form of different kinds of plants populating the planets in the system, and while they are certainly dangerous, they don't interfere with your exploration, which I find much more enjoyable than some kind of scaled risk-vs-reward kind of setup (like one might find in Subnautica).

While there is a definite cap on what you can accomplish in the current game (very little research which can be quickly burned through due to plentiful research nodes) and a limited number of buildings, getting lost on the various alien planets and building little bases on each of them is certainly an enjoyable experience,

Despite being in Early Access, the game feels so much more along and quite less buggy than a lot of titles I've spent considerably more on. I haven't experienced any game-breaking bugs, and certainly no crashes that have left me aggravated. Overall, I'm excited to see where the development of the game goes and hope they keep the game polished as they continue to add more features.

At the time of writing this, I'm only about 3 hours into the game, but having reached chapter 4 on the middling difficulty, I'm getting an indication that what I have thus far experienced is probably all the game really has to offer.

Other reviewers all seem to sum Remember Me up as "a game that got disappointed it wasn't a movie, and takes its frustrations out on the player." This is almost immediately apparent by the end of the first two chapters (chapter 0 and chapter 1, with chapter 0 being a tutorial/prologue kind of thing). Ironically, for a game about memory loss, I'm the one finding most of the characters and story forgetful. On top of that, the game seems to forget to introduce characters in any way that makes their sudden and unexplained appearance (ie, the bounty hunter in chapter 1) logical in any way. I can definitely feel that the story is there, but the cutscenes feel somewhat out of place, and leave me feeling like things weren't explained properly. It's like I'm missing some background explaination and plot pieces, and this starts almost immediately as of the end of the first chapter.

The story feels rather disjointed from the actual gameplay aspects. The gameplay itself is rather linear. Travel along strict routes to reach your destination. It's simple, and even with all the parkour aspects, the game is still rather narrow. Every now and again, the game will open up to a large open area and you have to combo-chain your way through mobs of enemies. You can "customize" your combos with little boons that make each hit do something, like return some health or cut some time off a power cooldown. Overall, it feels a little like a fighting game, where you have to mash key combinations to basically chain damage on enemies, except you only have two keys, LMB and RMB. The only difference is in what order you feel like chaining them in.

The game very much wants to be a grand epic like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, with majestic backdrops and grandoise settings, and a rich story. It's very much apparent as you're scrambling around and the game stops to pan the 3rd person camera in a way that showcases the magestic spires of New Paris, or a wide open expanse you have to parkour your way through. But it falls short by then really limiting the camera controls. The camera is particularly aggravating because on more than one occasion, I've been hopelessly running in circles looking for an indication of which ledge I need to jump to in order to progress, only to have it be cut off by the horrific camera angling not an inch off screen.

It still very much tries at the least to provide some interesting gameplay mechanics. The finishing moves are interesting, and usually entail scrambling peoples minds and blowing their memories out through their eyes, nose, and mouth. The "memory remix" feature used to progress the storyline in some instances (again, going back to that sudden bounty hunter at the very beginning of the game) allow for some very rich, intimate character development that basically allow you to both experience that character's flashback and backstory, and quite literally change the outcome in a way that impacts the game. What's a shame is that thus far it was used once, had me excited for getting to scramble the memories of all of the bosses or other important characters in ways that would be meaningful to the story, only to have that yanked away and replaced with 3-QTE finishers for the bosses.

The soundtrack is a little bit orchestral, with some definite electronic and techno underpinnings. The song from the main menu is one of my favorites, though I can't say much else stood out for me.

Overall, the game had potential, but overall it missed its mark. I can't really say the game is "bad" in any one aspect, it's just maybe not good. "Playable" might describe Remember Me in one word, or as an alternative, "forgettable." Overall, I'd give it a 2.5/5 for what it delivers on, and wish they had maybe taken things in a slightly different path. It's an interesting game, maybe worth a look at a $10 level, but probably not worth picking up past the first run through.

This is an amazing game. It's completely reliant on reading a lot of text, but it fits in with the hacker-working-from-their-terminal kind of narrative the story thrusts you into. The soundtrack is a perfect mix of chill techno music as well as some more faster-paced action songs that helps immerse you into all the commands you're going to be throwing at servers as you attempt to break in. What's particularly interesting is that the game uses several true linux commands for many of the common functions (ls, rm, scp) that really make it feel like a real operating system you're using to break into systems around the internet.

On the minus side, it's kind of easy to get caught up in rushing through systems without really stopping to poke around. With the threat of active security features giving a sense of urgency to complete my tasks and move on, I can't help but feel like I missed out on files I should have been reading that contacts in the game would reference after I completed objectives and progressed the story. Still, it seems like a rather authentic hacking simulator, making use of that thrilling text-based console the media associates so dearly with hacker-types, and turning it into the backbone of an enjoyable game.

There Came an Echo is a sequel to a game known as Before the Echo (formerly Sequence, but I guess big corporations are still into suing indie companies because no one plays their board games anymore). As such, it's probably best that anyone new to this franchise start there, because some/most of what goes on in the story probably needs the context set forth by that initial game. It's a good game, definitely worth a couple bucks.

There Came an Echo is a voice-controlled game. To my knowledge, there's little to any types of these games on the market, so as far as being something different, Iridium Games has produced something that I believe to be rather novel. While some reviews point to hit-or-miss voice recognition, I found that most of the voice recognition worked flawlessly and really immersed me into the game. I rarely had times where I had to repeat something, or on the off chance I did need to repeat an order, I rarely had to issue it a second time. I'm actually very happy with how well they managed to pull off such clear voice recognition, and it's a point where There Came an Echo really shines.

The other major positive is the soundtrack. Back is Ronald Jenkees, who had his music featured in the prequel. However, I believe he worked much more closely with Iridium Games this time around to compose songs specifically for the game, which I think is great to see. Jenkees is also joined by Big Giant Circles, who comprises the other half of the music. Together, they create an interesting soundtrack that definitely matches the game's somewhat futuristic cyberpunky kind of setting. It might be what you'd expect if Daft Punk did the soundtrack to Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and some of the more actiony ones are definitely catchy (like the song LAX).

I do have to say that my feelings regarding the story are somewhat mixed, however, as it seems like cutscenes greatly outweigh actual playtime by a sizeable margin. In all, you can barrel through the game inside of a couple hours, with the ten short missions spaced out with a lot of exposition from the characters. The story itself can be somewhat confusing at times, especially in the late acts, where I can only describe it as "bordering on meta." It starts out as it's own game in the beginning, crosses over into it's prequel territory in the middle, before finally shattering into some bizzare new dimension altogether. While I can't say I should have expected something all that different from Iridium Games given their last game, this new twist seems a little too much. Still, I found the story reasonably captivating to hold me through to the end in one sitting, and I know there are worse campaign experiences out there.

I recommend There Came an Echo, simply on the grounds that overall, I feel way better spending my money and time on this game than I feel about having spent money and time on Watchdogs. For it's somewhat convoluted story and short gameplay segments, I think it still does a good job of at least building on a very interesting universe. While it doesn't do it particularly well, I believe it to be a respectable enough effort to earn some praise, because far too many games released just don't make me drop everything I'm doing and focus on it quite like Iridium seems to be managing to get me to do with their portfolio thus far. If they release some kind of third installment, I'd be all over TF2 players are all over unusual hats.

Most games have stories. Kentucky Route Zero, however, is less game and more story. You shouldn't come to Zero expecting a whole lot of action or adventure; it's very point-and-click and a little heavy on the reading. But what Zero lacks in the excitement department it makes up for in a unique art style, amazing music, and surreal story that really grabs you and holds you in.

It's not exactly finished, with three of the five parts released, but I'm fairly confident that each one flows nicely together and tells a story worth experiencing, at least once.