Seneste anmeldelser af Fenixp

Nice visuals, well polished. Runs great on Deck.

Let me start off with a small history lesson: I have seen the first Alien movie in 2002 or so, and I really liked it. Coincidentally, this was one year after I got my first gaming computer and was actually getting into videogames in a big way. The first thing I thought was "This would make for an amazing videogame!"

But a shining beacon of hope appeared in the distance as I have discovered that there indeed is a game which is considered good from Alien universe (sort of), Aliens vs Predator by Rebellion. So I got that. And while it was scary enough as a Marine, Alien wasn't this constant, ever present threat which was to be feared - Aliens were just common monsters, which would give you a scare, but weren't really all that difficult to defeat. I liked the game, sure, but something just wasn't quite there. It reminded me of the second movie far more than it did of the first, and the fact that I seemed to move at warp speed didn't help either. Since then, two more Aliens vs Predator games got released, and shortly after those, Aliens: Colonial Marines came out. And finally, 12 years in which I have revisited the original movie a few times and every time hoped for a proper Alien game to exist, one came out. And it is nearly all I hoped it would be.

Alien: Isolation throws everything you would traditionally do when returning to a movie that old out of the window and executes everything with a beautiful attention to detail, replicating everything from visual design, sounds of the original, music, hell, the game even got the original cast of the fist movie on board to do voice acting. The game doesn't try to modernize, it doesn't try to make the game 'more believable' for a 21st century consumer - nah, it just says ♥♥♥♥ that, converts everything we could see in the original movie into in-game assets and ends up being that much more thrilling, nostalgic and believable for it. It's a game made by fans of the movie, for fans of the movie, a huge love letter to everything the original is.

I could probably start talking about the game tho, right? Yeah, I should do that. So, you're playing as Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen Ripley. Ellen Ripley has been considered lost for 15 years, and Amanda has been informed about black box of Nostromo finding its way to Sevastopol space station. Soon after arriving on station, she finds that everything has gone to hell, surviving people are fighting for remaining resources, androids kill on sight for trespassing, and on top of that, there is talk of some creature murdering people.

The game is mostly a stealth-based survival horror, with very few tools to defend yourself with (and while you get more of those as you progress trough the game, you very rarely get to have enough ammo), so you're left to a motion tracker and your wit to stay alive. The game gives you many tools for distracting your enemies, be it humans, androids or the Alien. You can craft items, some of which can cause direct damage, others which can serve to distract. Some levels have conveniently placed 'rewire boxes', which allow you to turn off cameras, open doors or cause distractions in various parts of a level. You can hide in lockers, vents or just low spaces like under desks or beds. These elements, and parts of the game where you need to get around humanoid opponents, mostly reminded me of games similar to Outlast or Amnesia. Individual areas tend to be open enough to allow for a decent amount of ways to get around various obstacles, and the level design itself is quite beautiful, varied and clever to keep you interested. All in all, when you're up against more traditional threats, Alien: Isolation is a good stealth game, and a decent shooter in the rare occassions you choose to approach it that way. When you explore the station, it also very rarely happens that you'd get locked out of a section of it, and so you can go back to most places you've already been - and there's even a reason to do so as more equipment you gain will open up more secret areas for you.

However, all of this changes after the Alien makes its first appearance. Suddenly, you're not just worrying about the traditional opponents. There's always the threat of the Alien, lurking above you, making its way trough ventilation ducts of the entire station. If you run too fast - you may attract the Alien. If you hit a wall with your maintenance jack, it might distract your opponents, but it might also attract the Alien. If you fire your gun, you don't just fire your gun - you may attract the Alien. (that also applies to human opposition tho - while the Alien ignores androids, when someone shoots at you and the Alien is nearby, it will jump out of airduct and start working its way trough any human it sees. Including you of course.)

The creature's AI is good enough to differenciate it from all other opponents, to make it a constant threat and to make you nervous about it, as you see a green dot on your movement tracker, circling around you somewhere above. Those are the calm bits of the game tho - when it emerges and you can see it, everything gets a lot worse as, most of the time, it only takes the Alien to notice you once for you to pretty much instantly die. Oh, and it can kill you from the vents if you miss the dribbling ooze or are foolish enough to take a look what exactly is it dribbling from. All of these aspects are frustrating, yes, along with the fact that the Alien is a lot more perceptive than the other opponents, you are going to die a lot and the only way to save your game is at fixed save stations (which are placed fairly close to each other so it's not that bad), but all of this successfully leads to one end - not cheapening the creature. Alien is terrifying, it's constantly there, stalking you, trying to pinpoint your exact location and to kill you. You'll feel that most of encounters with it are close, and that you are always one wrong step from dying. While it is, in reality, a lot more forgiving than that, the feeling of paranoia is always there, scratching at the back of your head.

All of this is backed up by a decent storyline and solid writing, with fantastic music, graphic and sound design. While some bits of the game feel a bit padded, it generally manages to make you feel like its always quite fresh (I don't want to spoil anything so I'm not going to reveal how exactly), and while the game is quite long, it feels captivating enough to make me finish it. The game takes good care to pace itself properly - the first time you even get to see the alien is about 1,5 hours into it

All in all, Alien: Isolation is the best survival horror game I have played in a very long time, possibly since Dead Space, and this time, it places emphasis on the 'survival' bit. It's beautifully put together, very well crafted and it's such an innovative gaming experience that I'm pondering on making it my GOTY of 2014. Well worth your money, well worth playing.

I cautiously recommend this. Let's do a small breakdown as to why:
The good
In short, it's a linear FPS (First Person Spellcaster :-P) with a lot of neat mechanics and insane, yet rewarding crafting system and it is fairly well executed and polished up. So far so good. If you play your cards right and learn the crafting system, you have the very real possibility of becoming a skeleton-summonning necromancer who drops meteors on the heads of his enemies, infects opponents with swarms of insects, debilitates them into fear and betraying their comrades, teleports them around the battlefield and manipulates time itself. But all of this takes time and a lot of mastery over the game's mechanics. Now I'll delve into the complexities of how does it work and why do I like it...

The game technically delivers on what it promises. You do have a bazillion of spell combinations, sort of like you have a bazillion of guns in Borderlands 2 or bazillion of distinct items in Diablo, but let's look at facts - there's 3 basic elements, being Fire, Ice, Lightning, Corruption, Kinesis, Delirium, Necromancy and Phase, there's a bunch of patterns in which you can cast said elements such as guided missiles, continuous beam, curved lob and various kinds of area of effect patterns, and lastly, there's three kinds of modifiers - Destruction, Control and Mastery.

Now, the incredible variability of the game's magic comes from the fact that every one of the 8 basic elements gets a distinctly different effect based on which one of the three modifiers you use. The differences vary quite wildly, so let's take Corruption and Fire here - When you combine corruption and mastery, your corruption spell infects an enemy (or a group of enemies) with a blister which slowly grows and matures, and if you kill an enemy after it manages to mature, a swarm of flies will emerge from the dead opponent and start to seek and attack other enemies on the field. If you use mastery, however, the blister spawns a nest upon maturing, which orbits around you and infects enemies with insects that then increase your damage output done to them. Fire, on the other hand, just deals damage over time with control and stores its damage to be released later with mastery, IIRC. You can see some common patterns - destruction increases direct damage done, control causes some indirect effect and mastery debuffs enemies and increases damage done to them later down the line.

And then, when you master the crafting system, you'll find that there are also synergies between the individual elements, which will allow you to do things such as summonning suicidal, burning corpses, conjure a small black hole and so on and so forth (hint: You can get these by upgrading a legendary trough synthesis screen)

Now, it took me some time to get used to all of these various systems as these are the most important and unique part of the game, and for some time, I couldn't quite decide whether or not I like them. See, for an action game, Lichdom is an extremely slow burner and it'll take you several hours to get to the actually awesome bits, and it really takes a lot of getting used to. But after you do, it's a blast - discovering various new ways how different spells can synergize with each other, creating different patterns and seeing how it can affect your playstyle, it's just really cool, but it does require player to actually put in the effort and experiment - if you choose to remain stuck with basic three elements, which you can and nobody is stopping you, I can see the game getting very old, very fast. Oh right, three elements thing - at any given point in time, you can only have three elements equipped, where each element contains three spells - single-target, AoE and block/blink spell. That's 9 spells equpped at any given time, with some having similar roles.

Of course, then there's the actual casting of spells itself. You're a glass canon, so you have to be very mobile (depending on the sort of shield you have equipped) and while there are no limitations on casting, casting a spell properly can take up to 2 seconds - doesn't seem long, but it does serve to change your traditional twitch gameplay style into something much slower and deliberate, which isn't something I've really seen in any other First Person action game, not to this extent anyway.

There are other good bits worth mentioning - graphics and aesthetic design are fantastic, post-release support is absolutely stellar and murdering stuff does actually feel very good, but none of that is quite as unique as the core mechanic of the spellcasting itself, why is why the game has earned my recommendation. However...

The bad
Right, here comes the biggest flaw the game has, and I feel it's gonna be a dealbreaker for some - and that is enemy variety. There are ranged dudes, meele dudes, dudes spawning other dudes and dudes who are casters, but are actually just a more difficult kind of ranged dudes. They come in unded and living variety, but you hardly ever notice what it is exactly you're fighting, unless it's a boss or a miniboss. I would have definitely liked to see more distinct enemy types, which would ideally force me into switching my sigils around to see if I can get more effective against them.

Then there are the 'powerful' enemies - I don't have issues with those per se, I have actually enjoyed the major boss fights the game throws at you, it's the randomly generated mini-bosses I hate. Sometimes, and note it doesn't really happen that often, sometimes the game just generates boss abilities which lead to extremely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ deaths, where the enemy one-shots you without you being capable of doing all that much about it. Thankfully, this does not happen all too often.

And lastly, there's linearity. Aside from an occassional side-dungeon here and there, and a few quite open maps, the game is extremely linear, with slightly more open arenas for larger battles. There is some exploration involved, but not quite enough.

Judgement
The game is extremely ambitions, but flawed. I'd suggest getting it on the sale, unless you want to support the dev who's extremely generous with functional updates. All in all, have enjoyed the time I have spent with it, and I would recommend it.

Just about the best FPS of 2013, and it is yet to be matched in 2014. Fantastic combat (both meele and ranged), satisfying weaponry and even a decent storyline.

One of the best real-time strategy games I have ever played with Workshop support, cloud saves, achievements and working multiplayer. And it seems a bit crisper to boot. Definitely recommended, now we should get Rise of Legends.

Let's make one thing clear before somebody gets the idea of looking at my friends list - yes, I do have the author of the game in there. I am not actually affiliated with him in any reasonable way, aside from exchanging a few words now and again. Nonetheless, my opinion might be biased, that's why I'll try to explain it in detail. Oh, and I have finished the game when it wasn't on Steam yet.

So, first of all, a word of warning: The Moon Sliver is a game strongly focused on telling you a story, with very light puzzle elements. It stands somewhere between Gone Home in focus on freedom of movement and exploration and Dear Esther in telling a mysterious story which is quite open to interpretation. If this is something you are not into - not a game for you. If, however, previously named titles got your attention - read on. Or just buy the bloody thing, it's as expensive as two bottles of beer and my recommendation thingy glows somewhere around these words anyway.

Right, you're still reading. First of all, I stand by the comparisons I have made above, so I'll use them as a baseline. At first, you're likely to notice two things - quite apparently lower production values and fantastic music. To elaborate: In terms of graphical design and fidelity, the game is not nearly as flashy as games like Dear Esther or Gone Home might be.

Graphics are quite spartan, yet very functional. I feel that the simplicity of the graphical presentation is often enough used to set a feeling of loneliness and desperation, which it does quite well. At any rate, if pretty is what you're looking for, I'm sad to say that's not part of the package, and repetitive assets don't help much.

Music, on the other hand, is quite wonderful. It sets the tone very nicely and is used to underline the desired mood of individual locations.

When it comes to most important bit of the game, the storyline, I find that the less you know when you start it, the better. Suffice to say it's captivating and definitely kept me playing all the way until the end of the game, which is not a particularily long journey, nonetheless long enough for me to lose interest in most games. Writing is very good, and aside from the way it handles reading notes (no, there's no voice acting, just a lot of quality writing), I was very happy with it.

The story is told both trough enviromental cues you can see in various locations and notes and books as already mentioned. You will also run across a few simple puzzles and the entire game is based around exploration of a small, yet very open island - you will not see the linearity of Dear Esther here, you can go just about anywhere, at any time you want, altho some locations require information obtained at other ones.

Right, I have opened the subject earlier, but I feel I should elaborate on it a little more - the game is short. Even by Gone Home standards short. You'll beat it in under hour and a half, and you don't really have much of a choice in the matter as it doesn't support save states. The game is designed to be beaten in one sitting tho, and it's hardly too long, so that should not be an issue.

All in all, The Moon Sliver was an experience worth remembering, and that's more than I can say for most games that I have played recently. For the asking price, you're hardly even taking a risk, so if I got you even slightly interested, just go for it.

(Anmeldelse skjult)

If you don't mind highly flawed games, and if you don't mind games which kind of count on you making a bit of your own fun, EYE is utterly fantastic. Flawed, unpolished, but you can be a katana+pistol - weilding stealth hacker. Or a dude with a minigun. Or a PSI warrior with a massive hammer. Or ... You get the idea.