Recommended – Klardendum

Happy about: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

28/12/2024 28/12/2024

Back in 2009 MachineGames was formed by people who decided to leave Starbreeze Studios after completing work on The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena – a good expanded version of the already fantastic Escape from Butcher Bay they’ve worked on 5 years prior. The title, that remains one of the best examples of a movie license game, was an incredible mix of different genres and somewhat of an “immersive sim-lite” and managed to perfectly replicate the mood and the style of Riddick movies in an interactive form. However, as MachineGames they’ve worked on titles that were a bit more conventional. While Wolfenstein: The New Order (and The Old Blood to a degree) had its share of curious and unorthodox decisions for an FPS game, it was still a more or less straightforward FPS. While Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and Wolfenstein: Youngblood were showing them going an even more conventional and boring route, including a lot of very generic live service and looter shooter elements into the game.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was meant to be different. An unofficial return to the ideas of Riddick and The Darkness, of sorts. And while it doesn’t stick the landing, it mostly gets there.

Happy about: OneShot: World Machine Edition

23/12/2024 23/12/2024

OneShot has been originally released about 10 years ago as a freeware game made with RPG Maker 2003. It continued the wave of the games that were designed to provide experience inside and outside of the game window, like creating new files on player computer and changing the wallpaper, like it was already done in other well known titles like IMSCARED. And its biggest gimmick was in the title – you only had one shot at finishing the game. If you did something incorrectly, the game would become permanently unwinnable and you also could not replay the game from the start once you’ve finished it. Well… in theory – in reality you could make it work again, but the concept was still bold and the tone of the game was hopeful, but bleak and horror themed.

Then two years later a commercial version of the game was released, that started moving away from the whole “One shot at it” concept, but had even more crazy fourth wall breaking shenanigans and a bigger game world with more characters. Another year later, a “true ending” path was added as a big update to said version that I personally had a lot of problems with back when I reviewed the game. Fast forward to 2022, World Machine Edition got released on consoles, recreating all of the fourth wall breaking experiences within a virtual Operating System and adding some additional details and switching a lot of the backend elements of the title. And now, in 2024, this version has arrived to PCs.

Happy about: Remnant II (with all DLCs)

26/11/2024 26/11/2024

A few months ago I’ve decided to finally give Remnant: From the Ashes a go and found it surprisingly good and highly enjoyable. A unique mix of a third person shooter, Diablo II-like action RPG and some Soulslike elements, it was a fun experience from start to finish, despite having plenty of budget-related compromises. Afterwards, I’ve decided to wait until its sequel will get all of the planned DLCs out before giving it a go, hoping that it will turn out to be a straight improvement over the predecessor. Sadly, that isn’t the case and while Remnant II is still an enjoyable game, for all of its improvements it also takes a few steps sideways and back.

Happy about: Ace Attorney Investigations Collection

12/11/2024 12/11/2024

I have a strange relationship with the Ace Attorney series. On one hand, I do admire the original game and the rest of the two titles in the original trilogy have lots of wonderful moments as well. On the other – I’m not a fan of the ratio between adventuring and visual novel storytelling they ever had, very heavily leaning into walls of text and sacrificing gameplay logic over plot twists. That’s the main reason why I stopped playing a couple of hours into The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles as it bored me to tears and I’ve never bothered with the second trilogy either. Which is why I wasn’t sure if I should give Ace Attorney Investigations Collection a go. But after playing the demo and discovering to my relief that this game, as the name implies, is far more into investigative adventuring than the other titles, I gave it a go. And I’m glad I did, as Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth is easily the most enjoyable entry in the series I’ve played. And it will probably be the last one I ever finish.

Happy about: Assassin’s Creed Mirage

07/11/2024 07/11/2024

It’s been a while since I wrote on Assassin’s Creed games, haven’t it? I reviewed Assassin’s Creed Odyssey with all its DLCs 5 years ago and you might be wondering where did the review on Valhalla go? After all, so far I’ve been playing every single major entry in the series. Yes, I did play Valhalla. I did not finish it. I will never finish it. It’s insufferably boring and I was falling asleep while forcing myself to play. That’s the bonus review out of the way, let’s talk about Assassin’s Creed Mirage – a game that started development as a big expansion for Valhalla. A fate it thankfully avoided, because it’s quite good.

O tempora: Castlevania Dominus Collection

26/10/2024 26/10/2024

O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.

I’m glad that Konami keep releasing games and collections from the time when they developed good games and were respected. Three years ago they released the really cool Castlevania Advance Collection that collected all “IGAvanias” (Castlevania titles with “metroidvania” world design, usually produced by Koji Igarashi) released for the Game Boy Advance. That collection was full of absolute bangers, though it was a bit of a shame that the games were just emulated originals, with all of their faults and bugs intact. But at least it was preserving the classics.

Now its time for the titles, originally released for Nintendo DS, with a cool bonus game added in. Surprisingly, revisiting these games was somewhat less enjoyable overall.

O tempora: Doom + Doom II

11/10/2024 22/11/2024

O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.

Well, it finally happened. I’ve finally played both classic Doom titles start to finish and even all of its official expansions. It might sound weird to some, given how huge and important Doom has been for the development of FPS and game industry as a whole, but it just so happened that I was never much of an id Software games player. Even though Spear of Destiny was my first introduction to this type of games, I just never really played through any of their titles start to finish until decades later. Which includes the classic Doom games – I have played and finished the original Doom (that is, the first three episodes) a very long time ago, but I’ve never played any other title in its entirety apart from the Playstation version of the Final Doom, which was my only point of contact with the Doom II expansions. And yes, I did get it back in the day, because I thought it was the “final definitive version of Doom”, not realizing that it’s a completely different game…

But now Doom and Doom II have been officially re-released on all modern platforms in a remastered package by NightDive, with all of the official, and even some previously unofficial, releases combined into one game. And I’ve decided that it was finally time to give it a proper go.

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Happy about: Remnant: From the Ashes (Complete Edition)

03/08/2024 01/10/2024

I have to give it to Gunfire Games – they seem to be a highly adaptable studio. Founded in 2014 by parts of the team who worked on Darksiders franchise in the by then defunct Vigil Games, I’m sure their original desire was to immediately go into creating Darksiders III. But they’ve adapted to the realities of the market and to built portfolio and keep the studio alive created several VR projects for the then booming initial wave of VR popularity brought in by Oculus Rift. One of which was called Chronos that played like a tough hack and slash inspired by Souls-like games and featured a setting that included both fantasy and post-apocalyptic Earth imagery, which they’ve already played with a lot for Darksiders. This also allowed them to get better acquainted with Unreal Engine 4 which they then used to create a visually beautiful (but incredibly frustrating and unfun) Darksiders III. And to follow that project up, they’ve seemingly decided to experiment with the third person shooting mechanics (as one of the Horseman – Strife, – is a gun user) while reusing a lot of the resources they’ve managed to create up until that point and created a genuinely clever mix of different genres – Remnant: From the Ashes. That also served as a sequel to Chronos (later to be re-released for flat screens as Chronos: Before the Ashes).

And it is really bizarre how they’ve seemingly just experimented and scrambled a bunch of ideas together from what they had on a rather low budget only to create their best game up until that point.

Happy about: Riven (2024)

22/07/2024 22/07/2024

It was two years ago that I’ve finally played Myst from start to finish for the first time. After decades of attempts to “get it”, the game clicked with me, most likely due to the direct controls that made playing it far more convenient than the classic screen by screen navigation. And while its The Chronicles of Amber inspired story didn’t grab me that much, the constant sense of discovery in that game as the main aspect of its puzzles certainly did. Hence why I was very excited to learn that Riven: The Sequel to Myst was getting a similar treatment as well, so I could finally understand how people in Rivne live with all of these puzzles around… Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

Anyway, the Riven remake is out and, from what I’ve checked in video form after completing it, quite different from how the game used to be originally. So, I suppose, I will never know if I like the original game, but I definitely enjoyed this one.

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O tempora: Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition

17/07/2024 17/07/2024

O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.

Beyond Good & Evil has always been a pretty odd game. Inventive and unforgettable in many ways, but also clearly unfinished and frustrating in many others. Born out of incredible ambition of the team inside Ubisoft, back when their games were fresh and exciting and not the same game with different coats of paint released several times a year with 15 minutes of end credits they’re known for nowadays. Though even this game’s release was a bizarre choice on the company’s side – released the same day as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, another beloved classic, the two games competed for attention, leaving both of them with very high critical scores but less than exciting sales figures. Nonetheless, a sequel Beyond Good and Evil 2 have been in development for… who knows how long, as the game was originally announced back in 2008 (just 5 years after the original), and the development of it has been far more troubled than that of the first game, since no one knows what it’s going to be anymore… That is, no one knew at all until 20th Anniversary Edition remaster of the first game has been released that, among other things, has additional elements that seem to exist specifically to tie the game better with the prequel concept last shown in 2018.

But, that’s all great and all, yet BG&E is now a 21 year old game and not games age well. Is it still worth playing, with the fresh coat of paint or not?