Recent reviews by BinarySplit

The music and art style are great, and I've been craving base building games, but I just don't find The Spatials fun.

The only difficulty in this game is figuring out the rules for how to optimize base building and combat. The rules aren't complicated, they're just not explained well through the tutorial or interface. Once you've got them figured out, the rest of the game is just grinding.

The grinding is really obvious too - enemies are just "Pirate (lvl 10)", weapons are "Phaser (lvl 10)", the buildings & activities have different names, but it's obvious that each level is just an improved version of the previous level. There's no complex supply chain, nor any high level unlockables that make the game interesting again.

Optimizing your base feels more like a chore than anything - if you try to make neat, isolated rooms, you're wasting 50% of your space and you won't make much profit. You're better off smushing everything together, and filling all the gaps with statues of a bald guy, because decor helps, but it doesn't matter which decor you use.

As a local co-op game, this is definitely worth the money. There are too few games that have local co-op in campaign mode to be picky. I played 2 hours with a friend, and it was good fun.

But, as a single player game, Son of Nor just isn't worth the time when there are so many better single player games out there.

The gameplay is dull. There's only one tactic effective against each type of enemy, and only a few different types of enemies. Telekinesis, which doesn't require mana and is available from the start, is the easiest way to kill most enemies, so there's very little reason to use the spells that cost mana.

The story is not very interesting. I feel like a lot of it was lost in translation, because there just isn't much there. It alludes to there being a lot more lore that wasn't explained. Also, I have no idea what happened in the ending - did my character save his people, or cause the destruction of the world, or was it a cliffhanger? I have no idea. It just cut to credits.

As a better alternative to Son of Nor, I recommend the game "Tiny and Big: Grandpa's Leftovers". It has similar telekinesis-style mechanics, but is MUCH more fun and it has a coherent story.

The plot seemed pretty interesting, but the game is rubbish. It's just a long series of cutscenes, waiting for your team members to give their awkward unskippable monologues, and "Press F to do the thing that advances to the next area" moments. The brief sections of combat aren't very good either - enemies are bullet sponges, there's way too much mouse acceleration, and there's no variety - you're always hiding in cover, shooting robots that are coming at you from the other end of the corridor.

This game could use a lot more polish. 30 minutes in, many small things had annoyed me, and I hadn't found any reasons I wanted to continue playing, so I just gave up.

+ Very nice aesthetic. It has quite a unique art style, and the environments look great.

- The text speed is really slow. You will quickly get impatient waiting for characters to finish talking. Pressing buttons doesn't speed up text, it just skips entire lines of dialog, so that isn't really an option
- The platforming is really clumsy. Even if you've played a lot of platformer games in the past, you'll fall off ledges, miss jumps, and generally get very annoyed at the controls.
- Not much happens in the first 30 minutes. You get few characters to talk to, a few signs to read, a few powerups and some frustrating platforming action.

I'm sure there's an interesting story underneath, but I just can't get past the annoying gameplay.

It's a weird game. It combines together a lot of novel game mechanics into an adventure platformer with interspersed JRPG battles. The art style and story is pretty cool. It kept me interested until the end. Quite impressive for a game made by one person. My total playtime was 3 hours.

If you get this game, make sure to read the manual (it's in a .RTF file in the game directory). There are a lot of stats and buyable items that don't have an obvious purpose in-game, but a quick read of the manual will explain everything.

Don't bother. The premise sounds interesting, but it's really just a tedious and old game that hasn't aged well. It runs at a resolution of 320x200 and has painfully bad midi music. The control scheme is completely unintuitive, and reading the manual (bundled with the game as a PDF) before playing is pretty much necessary. I barely got past the intro before I just couldn't take it anymore.

Don't bother. The Steam release is incredibly broken, and the game isn't worth the time it takes to get it working on a modern PC.

There really isn't much to this game - run to the end of the level as quickly as possible, shooting all enemies on the way. The gameplay isn't very tight - jumping is floaty, your gun's projectiles are slow, there's no crosshair. The levels are very easy and the only criteria is to pass them and kill all the enemies. The leaderboards are full of cheaters with impossible times. There's just no feeling of achievement - you're not doing something difficult, and you can't compete because competing with cheaters is pointless.

Shadow of Mordor is more cutscene than game. During combat, you get frequently interrupted by mini-cutscenes where Uruk captains introduce themselves. Right after slaying a mission critical Uruk, you get a cutscene before you can loot them. It's infuriating! I just want to play this otherwise interesting and beautiful game, but in the middle of every action sequence I seem to get interrupted by an Uruk who spends more time reciting his taunt to me than it takes to for me to pop his head off with an arrow. You can't even skip these cutscenes - you just have to sit there waiting for the game to give you control back.

If you're looking for a movie that makes you do all the tedious bits, then takes away control for all the excitement, then you'll love Shadow of Mordor. If you prefer games where you actually have direct control over the main character, then find something else.

8/10

The story, art, puzzles, and core mechanics of the game are superb. Ether One is a mixture of narrated first-person exploration (aka walking simulator) and environmental / inventory puzzles (similar to a point & click). The environment is incredibly detailed and tells the individual stories of many inhabitants in the town of Pinwheel. It's very well written. It took me 9 hours to complete, which felt about right for the amount of content. If I was only judging the game by these qualities it would get a solid 10/10.

There were a few annoyances that brought my score down. For instance, the walking speed didn't feel fast enough, even with the Run key held down. Also, many of the clues were on notes in the game world, but you couldn't take them with you and it wasn't obvious which ones were going to be needed later so you would sometimes have to go back and find them.

If you're a fan of narrated exploration games or point & click adventure games, you'll definitely enjoy Ether One. There may be a few annoyances, but the core experience is highly worthy of your time and money.