A lot of people seem to call this game a love letter to “metroidvania”, and I can’t fault them for that. This is one person’s attempt to create a truly modern 2D Metroid-like game, using all the lessons learned from the best of the best in genre and adding new elements, that weren’t tried in the genre before. This game has exciting exploration, varied locales, fantastic soundtrack, unique visuals that mix old-school 8bit and 16bit era art with subtle modern effects, surprisingly good challenge for the most part and a very interesting atmosphere that can probably be summarized as “sci-fi adventure as if Another World/Out of This World was designed by H.R. Giger”.
Tag: game review
In love with: SOMA
Time is a curious thing. 2006, the Penumbra tech demo and a completely different me. Today it all feels so far away. So many changes, so many things to happen, choices to make, emotions to feel. It’s 5 years since Amnesia: The Dark Descent. 2 since A Machine for Pigs (even though it wasn’t made by Frictional). Two more versions of me. Would all these versions of myself and me today live together? Would we understand each other? How would that work? Are we defined by our consciousness or something more than that?
Loving the: Alien: Isolation
Ridley Scott’s Alien is still an amazing movie. 36 years later its “future technology” has aged. Computers slowly render the information in 2 colours on a CRT monitor while their hard drives make lots of noises – this feels like it has no place in space flight of the future, even though space flight is usually planned to have cheaper more durable hardware installed. Yet, so many people grew up on the sci-fi with this technology, myself included. And the costume and set designers tried their damnedest to create something tangible, something real, something one would want to visit. If if that beautiful and outdated set is populated by a terrible alien creature which is as much a cultural icon as this type of sci-fi itself. How many games tried to do Alien. How many failed. And most aimed to be something closer to Aliens anyway, something action heavy and lighter on horror theme, not a pure chilling horror in space where no one can hear you scream. Alien: Isolation is hear to fix this unfortunate error.
Revisiting Cryostasis
So much stuff has happened since 2008. The last, at least for now, game from Action Forms got released and since then they were in “a stasis”. The same game got to be my second ever post that can be called a review or an opinion. Three years later me and DiodorOFF interviewed Igor Karev, as per link above, about Action Forms. And every hot summer me and my best friend used to replay the game just so we can feel the chills. It never failed. Yet, since 2012 I have not played the game and since then, I’ve gotten a widescreen monitor and, very recently, a GPU from nVidia, so now I had a chance to replay the game “the way it’s meant to be played” with the really beautiful PhysX effects turned on and running (almost) well. It was as if I was playing it for the first time again. It’s a shame that the game is still not digitally sold due to conflicts with 1c…
I tend to dislike most FMV games. I loved this one.Quick thoughts on: Resident Evil: Revelations 2
I truly find it hard to recommend this to anyone – whenever you are a survival horror or action fan, if you’re a Resident Evil series fan or RE: Revelations 1 fan… Even if you are a hardcore Barry Burton fan, like I am, I just cannot recommend this game.
Thoughts on: Batman: Arkham Knight
What Batman: Arkham fans are afraid of? Getting a bad game in the series. They will have to fight through their fears.
Thoughts on: Diablo III (with Reaper of Souls)
Well, I’ve finally completed Diablo III. Kinda funny. My friend and I played the beta of the game almost 4 years ago and wrote about our experiences (in Russian) on AveGamers. Four years… Game managed to change a lot between that beta into the retail version. And three more years later, lots of patches and an expansion changed it even further. Remembering our first impressions from the beta is especially funny, because since then we had several aRPG titles appear reviving the genre, like Torchlight II or the first The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. Games that took the same ideas of the original 2 Diablo games and went in a very different direction, There’s also Grim Dawn from Titan Quest creators that’s still in development but also looks nice. In addition, by now I’ve come to realize that the mood of the original Diablo is actually better followed up by games like Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne, rather than the modern Diablo-like aRPGs, that are far more about clicking enemies to death, than going for a slow brooding gameplay. But hey, here’s me after spending a week and a half on playing Diablo III and its expansion. And having no regrets. Yet not feeling any different either.
Late thoughts on: Grand Theft Auto V (on PC)
Last year people were joking that Rockstar intentionally spread the ports of GTA V over 3 years so it could get Game of the Year award 3 times in a row. Many played the game in all its version. I was waiting for the PC port… Actually, no. Reality is – I wasn’t waiting for this game at all. I don’t know why, but I simply didn’t care about another sequel to the series that used to be so interesting to me. I just didn’t care anymore. So when it was released, I was checking reviews, I was listening to my friends’ opinions on it, but wasn’t much interested in playing it. Perhaps that’s exactly why now, when I’ve completed it, I feel so strange.