Recent reviews by BinarySplit

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.

Demonicon looks like it could have a good story, but the gameplay is just so lackluster that I doubt I'll keep playing for much longer.

Exploration is mildly infuriating because the world is littered with skill-gated loot. You need Plant Lore to loot plants, Lock Picking to loot chests, Blacksmithing to disarm traps, etc. There are 8 different skills to level up to unlock all the types of loot. The skill points for exploration skills are shared with combat skills, so if you want to be good at combat, you have to accept that parts of the world will be completely inaccessible to you.

Combat is frustrating because it's so random and independent of player ability. When you try to Parry, you have a skill-dependent chance of actually parrying, then a skill-dependent chance of having the ability to counter-attack. Whenever you take a hit, you feel cheated - you as a player were good enough to press the block button, but your character failed you.

In conclusion, if you like the sound of Demonicon, you should just play Risen instead. It's the same kind of game, but with much more fun gameplay.

If you survive the game crashing when you try to set options, and when you try to start the tutorial, you have to deal with a narrow FOV, bad mouse acceleration and a camera that leans in the direction you're turning. Playing this game will lead to nothing but frustration and motion sickness.