Recent reviews by BinarySplit

It's 2 hours long and completely linear with very few puzzles. It's important to highlight that this isn't an "adventure game" - it's interactive fiction. You don't explore, you just point the character to their next objective, which is always something obvious.

The value of the game depends entirely on whether you appreciate the story, the voice acting, the art and the music. Did I enjoy them? Not really. There were good bits (the main character's voice acting & back story), adequate bits (art and music), but the story and the other characters were disappointingly flat and underdeveloped.

If you're reading this, boy are you late to the party. Hack 'n' Slash had some pretty novel game mechanics when it came out, but it's kind of dull now-a-days. The Magic Circle pretty much has the same game mechanics with a more engaging story. Go check that out instead.

I'm a huge fan of single-player FPS games. I grew up playing Doom II, Duke3D, Unreal, Half-Life, Serious Sam, etc. I love this genre of games, but 45 minutes into Doom I can tell I'm not going to get any enjoyment from it.

Doom seems to be confused about what it's trying to be. It's too slow and the environments are too cramped for it to be a good deathmatch/arena shooter(like Doom I & II, Unreal or Quake 3), and the enemy placement is too chaotic and the environment is too open for it to be a good linear/corridor shooter(like Half-Life or Gears of War). Depending on your upbringing, when you see an enemy you will either (a) circle strafe, which doesn't work well in Doom because you are slow and the environment keeps getting in the way, or (b) duck for cover, which doesn't work well in Doom because randomly spawning enemies will quickly flank you.

I recommend watching the first episode of a Let's Play to see if you'd like ETO. This is the video that sold me on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNKq8IBDddY

The gameplay is relatively easy, but novel enough to keep you engaged. The characters, the music, the art, the "realness" of people are where Even the Ocean shines.

I'm a massive fan of the original Deus Ex, and after Human Revolution I thought Square Enix had permanently derailed one of my favorite game series. Mankind Divided isn't perfect, but unlike the last game it actually lives up to the legacy of its source material.

The maps are sprawling mazes of alternate paths, filled with side missions, lore and secret stashes. There are numerous conspiracies and depictions of how modern society is being corrupted. They've done extraordinarily well considering that this game is a prequal to the original game, meaning they have little room for making new plotlines without rewriting the history explained in the original game. That said, I really wish there was more. The first game was a prescient literary masterpiece, but Mankind Divided is a lot less ambitious with its writing and predictions.

I recommend you buy this game, but wait for a sale. It's a worthy Deus Ex game, for sure, but there are enough flaws that would make you regret your purchase if you paid full price. There are many little annoyances like bad pacing, unnecessary padding, DLC, etc., but overall this is a game that all fans of conspiracies or cyberpunk dystopias should play.

Looks great, feels great, very quickly runs out of things to do though. After 5 hours I started feeling like I had seen everything the game had to offer.

Development is going surprisingly fast for an Early Access title, so it's definitely worth keeping an eye on - the endgame content could be a patch away.

I'm a huge fan of sci-fi stories about AIs and the fragility of spacefaring civilizations. Rodina is basically an Isaac Asimov novel, but better - it put me in the shoes of a robot given conflicting and illogical orders from humans. It put me in charge of the survival of several species. It made me feel what it's like to be treated like a machine in a way that no book ever did.

Rodina might not be for everyone, but if you have an active imagination or a love of sci-fi, Rodina is a must-have.

CAUTION: May trigger empathy!

Sky Break does so many things right, it's easy to be tricked into thinking there's depth to the game. The graphics are great, the story sounds interesting, there's shooting and pets and crafting and skills to level up and exploration and a sky fortress... but none of these things really extend beyond their superficial appearance.

To elaborate on each of those points:

• Story: There's 8 journals, 2 screenshot & text-based cutscenes, and a few lines of monologue from the character. That's approximately 20 paragraphs of story total.
  
• Shooting: The shooting is alright to begin with, but you only get the one weapon & several advanced ammo types that have to be crafted. It starts to feel repetitive after 10 minutes.
  
• Pets: You can hack downed enemies and keep them as pets. You can even spend points to increase their stats! (though it doesn't feel like the stats do much) The AI pathfinding is awful though, and most of the time the pets will be stuck on something and unable to fight for you, or just unwilling to fight because they can't see the enemy.
  
• Crafting: All but one crafted item is a boring old consumable - ammo, health, etc. The one non-boring item lets you mine crystals to increase the size of your pet army up to 4 slots. I was hoping for a tech tree like Subnautica, but what I got was just several variations on "Plant + Mucus = Ammo"
  
• Skills: More inventory space is nice in the beginning, but about half way through the game there was nothing else worth spending points on
  
• Exploration: Scan environment, identify nearest unknown waypoint, run in that direction for 5 minutes, activate the waypoint, repeat for 5 hours.
  
• Sky Fortress: This really feels like a missed opportunity - it could convey story through distress calls or emails, itcould have a zoo of all the Mechas and plant species you collected, but there's hardly any of that. It's mostly just a chest to dump items in, a free healing station and a station to take you between islands.
  
• Graphics: The graphics are actually quite nice. The environmental detail gets quite repetitive, but that wouldn't be as obvious if there was enough substance to the gameplay to distract from it.

Overall, it was 1 hour of fun, 4 hours of grind, and an unsatisfying ending. I'm not unhappy with the game, just disappointed that it didn't live up to its potential.

It's a reasonably interesting meta-game, 6 hours long. I found it a lot more interesting than A Beginner's Guide. There's not much I can tell you that you can't already see in the trailer - it's a game about picking apart a game from the inside while figuring out how its development went so wrong.