Recent reviews by Rivatonic

After completing Costume Quest 1 earlier this year, I was looking forward to playing 2 and grabbed it in the Halloween sale. If you want to know about that one, I suggest you go read my review on it as a lot is similar.

Just like the first game, this is a wonderfully quirky game with so many jokes that I was frequently laughing out loud. In particular, the Candy Corn costume always made me giggle, despite reading the joke 50+ times. There was less meta-humour in this one than the first, but it was never boring.

The combat is very similar to the first, but improved overall. There is now only a single form of attack (compared to various QTE-styles in the first game), but they've added additional mechanics like countering that add another dimension to combat. They also added 'actor types' which are a basic form of strengths and weaknesses split between 3 classes; it sounds odd, but it's easy to understand and it adds a tactical edge.

Like with CQ1, however, I did tend to stick to the first costume you get and swap out the third as I went (the second was always Candy Corn for the achievement), but as the visuals are interesting and the cutscene moves are now skippable, that isn't too big an issue.

One issue I should mention is this game was very easy. I only failed perhaps two fights (and one was because of a glitch), but I did do some grinding in places for XP and candy (in-game currency). The boss fights were very straight forward and fit SO MUCH better into the flow of the game compared to the almost puzzle-like ones in CQ1.

The story is clever and moves on from the first with just enough nods and references to 1 to induce nostalgia. They would, however, go over the heads of anyone who hasn't played 1, so definitely play that before this. It is a sequel in every sense.

This was a fantastic game that kept all the good feelings I had for 1 and added to them, creating its own individual experience that fits beautifully into the Costume Quest universe.

Well worth your time, money and laughter.

I got this due to the immense fun I had with Daedalic's other adventure games, the Deponia Trilogy.

Most prominantly, the humour is fantastic; I frequently laughed out loud at the clever writing, the little jokes and the subtle asides. The easter eggs strewn throughout (like Captain Useless) are hidden just enough without diminishing returns. Another point worth praising is the voice acting; Edna in particular is fantastic with some of the best emotional voice acting I've ever heard.

As you might see from screenshots, the art is clearly home-drawn (they even make very self-referential humour about it in one scene), but as this was the studio's first game I feel this can be forgiven. Considering the artwork they go on to get in future games - with Deponia's art still being my favourite of any game, period - this is a solid first step.

One of the downsides of this game is the bugs. It is new to Steam (at time of writing) and there were two points when I had to change the language to German in order to progress; once with a menu puzzle and the other for the credits to roll. These events, though pretty bad that they exist at all, are brief and few.

I cannot talk about the story without giving spoilers, but I will say that it isn't as good as Deponia's. While I could replay Deponia tomorrow and enjoy it as much as the first time, I am unlikely to replay E&H: The Breakout for a very long time. The story isn't bad, as such...it's just not as good. The puzzles are much more obtuse and navigating the world is slow and arduous. Deponia's double-tap to warp mechanic overcomes this second issue.
I do have the sequel (which is also pre-Deponia), so I look forward to playing that. Just not the "I need to get play the sequel right now" way I did with Deponia.

Overall, it's a brilliant adventure game with fantastic dark humour and a compelling, well-voiced protagonist. Not as good as Daedalic's later games, but worth a play.

I got this game in a Humble Bundle, so I thought I'd give it a try.

This game is something of a cross between L.A. Noire and a horror movie; it does have detective elements where you collect clues and make deductions, but many of these 'investigations' are arbitrary at best and senseless at worst. Although I did eventually 'get' the logic behind their decisions of right, it took me a while.

If this game had stuck to the detectiving as a ghost, I'd have been pleasantly surprised; even the optional 'unsolved cases' done by meeting the victims were well done. Where this game fell apart, for me at least, is in the OTT creepy theme. There was nothing full on scary and only one or two jump scares... It was just creepy. Ghostly figures and shapes that fade away when you get close, only to reappear if you look away... The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ f**king demons that instantly kill you if you mess up a brief QTE...
With the already-creepy setting, the heavyhanded layering on of ghostly imagery made this a difficult game to finish. I hate horror. This one ISN'T horror, but I would not recommend playing this in the dark and definitely not right before bed.

Not much to say on it, but the level design is a clusterf**k. Even the overworld hub is a labyrinth of deadends, obscured paths and greyscale buildings. The individual levels are better in that they're usually more linear, but collectible-combing is a ♥♥♥♥♥. This game could sorely have used a Tomb Raider-esque collectible tracker.

If they had dispensed with the demons, stationary figures and 'ghost buildings' everywhere, this would have been a clever, short detective game with a twist. As it is, the creepiness put me off and I only finished out of a bloodyminded determination to 100% the achievements.
Play L.A. Noire instead; the puzzles are more logic-based and it's less sleepless-creepy. The voice acting in this is top notch, though. Even from peripheral characters.

After trying Stacking and being disappointed, I wasn't sure if I'd like Costume Quest. Psychonauts was good - if not limited by platforming - and Costume Quest is right up there with it.

The style is a charming, delightfully-quirky one that puts you in the role of a child on Halloween, trick or treating with their sibling. The pace spirals beautifully until you're facing off against giant monsters in a twisted maze, firing rockets.

One of this game's seeling points is its fantastic humour; like Psychonauts it puts you in the position of a child and throws referential and meta humour at you, barrelling on whether you get the jokes or not. This is one of its strongest aspects as it's funny to those who get it and doesn't slow down those who don't.

The combat is surprisingly deep considering the simple controls and is very balanced...except for the final boss in the extra adventure, Grubbins On Ice. The final boss of that doesn't follow the rules established in all the rest of the combat.
Despite this little hiccough, it is a easy to grasp, QTE-based combat with scope for personal preference.

One last thing to note is that it isn't very long; 9 hours to 100% it with all the achievements. There are shorter games out there and there are certainly longer games, but this is one of the funniest.

I wrote a review for Poker Night 1 a long time ago, but I made some good points.

This sequel expands greatly on the forumla from the first game, adding tells, themes and alcohol.

As far as the characters go, Brock is essentially the Heavy, Sam is a more boring Max who constantly refers to Max's behaviour for humour, Claptrap is an annoying robot, but Ash is a nice addition. GLaDOS, on the other hand, is genius. Combining the role of the dealer with one of the best written characters in game history really works in this game's favour.

The dialogue between the characters is better than ever. With the 4 players, GLaDOS, Max and the odd peripheral, the whole game is very alive. The natural breaks and continuations in coversation add a lot and allow funny dialogues to persist between hands. There was one laugh out loud moment where Ash (voiced by a good Bruce Campbell impersonator) made a subtle Burn Notice reference. Cracked me up.
With the original, however, they could never write enough unique interactions before you start getting repeats. And with the slow, long, ongoing nature of the game, you will get bored of them. At least in the first, there was an option to disable the interactions. In this I resorted to muting them while watching TV.

The gameplay is still poker, but it isn't a great poker sim. The 4 characters have distinct playstyles which, while realistic, makes them rather annoying and predictable. Ash will usually be the first to bust while Brock will fold or win. The 'random' cards vary from rigged against you to rigged for you, but maybe that's just the nature of the game. It's just that the regularity of the one card that'd beat me showing up in the river makes me pause and doubt.

The bounty challenges range from basic to interesting to almost impossible, but if you stick with it long enough and learn the terminology, you can do any of them. I actually have to thank this game for that last bit; I've never understood the terms used in poker, but I had to learn them to unlock all the items. The flop, the turn, hole cards, everything. It taught me well.

Overall, the characters are fun to listen to (at least for the first 6 hours) and the unlockable rewards for Borderlands 2 and TF2 give you something to aim for and take away. Once you've unlocked them though, there is very little reason to keep at it. Maybe if you particularly like a character playing, you could stick around to hear more, but there will be a limit to how many times their banter entertains you.

A decent poker game, well-written and with good other-game unlockables. Worth your time.

After seeing Nilesy play this (and not do particularly well, if I'm honest), I thought I could do better. When it was cheap in a sale, I grabbed it.

As a business sim, it's rather lacking. The economy is very predictable and very easily exploited to make money a waiting game rather than a commodity. If you make sure you have a few thousand to pay your employees at the start of each day, you never need worry again. Set up a situation where you're earning more than you're spending and leave it running for a few ingame days to let the income pool.

Or at least you could do that, if the game didn't pause every few minutes to tell you that one of your hundreds of employees isn't feeling well. Thanks, but that's what the HR Report's for. Between pauses for sickness, deal changes and end of day reports, the flow of the game jitters too much to easily farm money. Granted most if not all of these pauses auto-continue on their own, but for those 30 seconds or however long, your entire business is paused. When 5 people go sick in one day, that's a lot of wasted time.

Then there's the worst aspect of the game; theft.
There's a chance that one or more of your employees - especially in the late game - can start stealing from you. One or more times an ingame day, you'll get a pop up saying that x amount of money has been stolen and that you should find the thief. This x can be as low as $100, but I've seen it as high as $5000. Of course by that point I earned five times that a day, but the pop ups were annoying.
The way you find the thief is to read the thoughts of your employees (that's a mechanic, Rollercoaster Tycoon-style) to find the one who thinks "they won't notice it missing". This can be any one of your hundreds and there's no way to sort by thought (unlike RT). You have to go one by one or wait until their theft obviously impacts their lifetime earnings.
I eventually worked out quicker ways, but it's a drag. You catch one and there are two new ones the next day.

Menu-heavy games usually allow the keyboard to move and select. In this one, however, you have to click everything. Sick employee, click the OK. New day, click the OK. Another bloody thief, click the OK. It's bloated, unwieldy and quickly becomes a drag. I only have so many hours in it because I had it on in the background when I was doing other things. And even that's just so I could satisfy my 100% achievement compulsion.
Now that I have, I immediately uninstalled it and will probably never go back to it.

Kinda funny in places (company names and some descriptions can be a good laugh the first time), but the mechanics need fine-tuning, the economy balancing and the menus un-terribling. Nilesy made it look kinda fun, though.

The world of Dishonored is fantastic; it is so rich and well-established by way of in-game books, notes, overheard dialogue and even just little scenes upon which you can stumble. Some people call Corvo, the protagonist, boring and characterless, but what's facinating is the effect that your actions - and by extension, Corvo - has on those around him.
People treat you differently by way of subtle changes in speech or tone and the lasting effect on one particular character is nothing short of brilliant.

As far as gameplay goes, Dishonored isn't perfect. The stealth mechanics are pretty close to perfect, with leaning around corners, clearly visible alert warnings and a multitude of clever ways to get around without being seen, but it falls apart a bit in the combat. Corvo is heralded as a master of arms, able to 'beat three men at once', as a guard can be heard saying. Ironically, fighting more than one person at a time can be infuriatingly difficult. And that's on moderate settings.
Because almost all NPCs use a combination of sword and pistol, you can cross swords only to be shot at point blank range by someone you can't stop, they can kick you; an unblockable attack that deals as much damage as a bullet, or they can just swing their sword as you jump backwards out of range and hit you anyway. Their sword range is about three times the length of their sword and you must block every single hit.

The killy death tools are nicely varied, allowing for very stylish kills with grenades, crossbow bolts and shrapnel mines, and that's not even touching on the supernatural powers. Adding them, the game becomes a flowing action of combat adding a clever third dimension to swordplay (at least the way I fight). Aside from just jumping and teleporting high, time manipulation, rat control and blasts of wind are just some of the tricks you can use.
Admittedly, you'll probably find one or two powers that you use more than the others, but the options are there to experiment.

While the story can be a bit predictable, it serves as a good framing device to take you across the breadth of Dunwall, killing and stalking people of all kinds. Also all of the cutscenes are skippable for those who want to try speedruns.

The DLC is an interesting topic, allowing a new perspective on the story as well as some different powers and amazing sprawling levels.

The downside of these slow, stealth-based games is they can be lacking in F**k Yeah moments, but Dishonored makes up for that in lasting enjoyment, replayability and a world that you can be lost in for days.

This one's a tricky one to recommend. It's good in that the melee combat feels like a massive focus, but it has some fairly large issues.

Yeah, the melee is clever in the localised damage, limb-removal and headshots. But the weapons degrade really quickly and the repairing system is arbitrary as hell; $2000 to fix a broken sword? What sense does that make when you're alone in a sewer? Also, small thing, but it bugged me; when you pick up any 'weapon', including alcohol as a crafting ingredient, there's a chance it'll replace your equipped weapon. Sucks when you accidentally pick up a bottle of whiskey and down it instead of hitting a zombie.

Later in the game you get guns and let me tell you, they are utter sh*te. Without modding the game (or maybe choosing the gun-focussed character), guns are NOT worth using against zombies. A good fatal headshot mod fixes this, but makes special infected too easy. Weigh it up before using.

A note about the human enemies; they're basically zombies with guns. 5 magnum rounds to the chest doesn't slow them until the 6th kills them. They use cover and have unerring accuracy even when you're running. Overall they suck.

The crafting upgrades are very specific - you need to use the right one for your character, or it's almost useless - and the right ones make the game very easy to tank, even with weaker characters. Collect every loose item you can and don't sell them unless you REALLY need money. As soon as you do, you'll need one of the bits for a recipe, guaranteed.

It may sound like I'm complaining a lot, but these things are all peripherals to a remarkably solid close combat system. I've not tried the 'analog' controls, but even the keyboard ones allow a very fluid fighting style with minimalist controls; dodging, jumping and crippling hits are all easy to learn and tricky to master meaning that you can spend hours on end practising against the infinitely-respawning enemies.
Choose your character carefully as it will completely dictate your playstyle; a bold move for a co-op game like this, but it adds replayability enough to try all 4.

Single player can get a bit grating at times, not for difficulty, just because it is made as a co-op. Cutscenes, dialogue and even the death system are all geared for multiple players. A lot of these things should have been tweaked to make single player seem as legitimate as co-op, but it's not deal-breaking.

Give this a go, especially with a friend or three.

This game was great fun. Took me this long to play it because of severe running issues on my old computer (refused to even start due to my Nvidia graphics card that was certainly good enough to run it), but it ran like a dream on my gaming desktop and looked stunning.

The direction and animation in this game is phenomenal and the redesign of Lara is much better than she used to look (will look? Prequels, eh?). Despite uproar over gameplay changes, this was a very fun game with plenty of exploration but still linear enough to find your way and move the story.
The writing is pretty good and the voice acting is above average; it's refreshing to hear a realistic British accent even if she does say 'elevator'.

The game can be a bit heavy-handed with the QTEs, particularly at the beginning, but hours of playing around and exploring is enough to drown that out.

Also worth mentioning: the death animations. God, this game has a lot of death animations. No simple ragdolling for Lara Croft. Enjoy watching a few particular ones again and again as you fail to get past the damn quick QTEs.

Nonetheless, this is a very polished game with only a couple of bugs (worst was when I did a combat roll and slipped through a rock into the void).

I heartily recommend this game.

How have I not written this yet? This game is utterly fantastic. It takes the very stable base of Fallout 3 and fixes 99% of the issues I had with it.
The map is smaller, but there's still tonnes to explore. The characters - in particular the companions - are brilliant; you can even assist your companion in their own tasks, making them stronger.
One of the best things about this game is how the faction system works. While Fallout 3 based it on Karma, New Vegas adds individual town relations, allowing you to make and break alliances as you wish. Also the plot has multiple endings dependant on which faction (if any) you support. This means that however you play, you can complete the game well. This is a massive improvement on Fallout 3 where if you fell out with the Brotherhood, you had no chance.

There are occasional crashes, but if you save often you'll be fine.

This is currently my top game, so I fully recommend that you take a trip to Vegas.