Recent reviews by Legolas_Katarn

Supported Swery65 due to my love of Deadly Premonition, not knowing what to expect from this. Found a beautiful and bloody puzzle game with a plot supported by its mechanics that tell a story of a gay transgender woman's efforts to navigate the early stages of a relationship, her identity, and her relationships with family and friends. With its short length it explores more themes through narrative, metaphors, and mechanics focused around societal violence deterring you from becoming who you are in a more frank way than usual, telling a violent story on queer existence without the expected exploitative content and conclusion often found in similar media. Great soundtrack.

Hitman 2 takes my GOTY of 2016 and makes it even better with improved AI, graphics, and mechanics. It also takes that 2016 game and puts it all into this one, along with the sequel's improvements to the old areas. Both games include some of the best designed levels I've seen; with a lot of ways to kill your targets, to learn about the area and characters, and even amusing secrets and activities that can bring you closer to your targets. Continues with strong dark humor and a gameplay approach that acts more as a puzzle and social system than a traditional action or stealth game, all taking place in a huge playground. Made all the more impressive with what happened to the developer and them still putting out an improved sequel with as many features and upcoming content as this has. The first of the timed contracts with Sean Bean was the best that they have done so far, and I'm looking forward to their two future maps and whatever other free content they add this time.

Well constructed mystery game making use of a beautiful early PC art style. Requires you to pay attention and to make more reasonable deductions while cross referencing known and logically assumed data, all while allowing for different ways of getting to the answers without the forced hand holding of most mystery games, making it one of the best uses of the genre since Her Story.

Shadow Tactics Blades of the Shogun will play in a very similar way to the Commandos series or Desperados Wanted Dead or Alive. It's a top down stealth based game that allows you to control five different characters, each with different passive and active abilities. Each of the 13 missions will have you controlling anywhere from 2-5 of the game's characters allowing them the ability to design missions around certain characters strengths or allowing each to contribute in different sections. Every mission has nine activities you can complete to earn a badge and three different difficulty settings, these don't unlock any new gameplay features but can give you a reason to try out certain missions with different playstyles or cause you to limit yourself to make the game more challenging. The game has good production values with some nice looking maps, good voice acting, a good soundtrack, and I only ran into a bug twice (one that caused a patrol to get stuck and one that prevented a badge from unlocking). There is more of a story to the game than Commandos offers, more like Desperados with the characters having more personality. The character personalities are shown more in the actual gameplay as well with them having different lines of dialogue based on the situation, time of day, or weather. One of the only negatives is that three of the characters have the same passive skills, one just has less passive skills, each has their primary weapon as an ability, and all of them share two of their five abilities (a gun with limited ammo and a healing item). Though each character only has three unique abilities they might have more options available, four of the characters can change their melee attack to be nonlethal, two abilities allow you to have new actions once used, and a grenade weapon one character uses can be switched between explosive or a non lethal gas. One of my favorite games of 2016 and one fans of the games it is based on or fans of stealth games should play.

A budget shooter in the style of Geometry Wars. The game control could have been a little more precise, I played the game with a PS3 controller. The camera feels like it is zoomed in to close and it takes a little to long to reposition itself. Your ship has health and takes damage when you run into enemies or are hit by enemy fire and you are given a few bombs that destroy the enemies around you. A map on the top right of your screen shows the location of your ship and enemies, but when you start fighting enemies from all sides it seems to get in the way more than anything else, it is useful to show the locations of dropped powerups though. Powerups can give you bombs, health, speed boosts, rapid fire, triple shots, and homing shots. The poweups will wear out over time but if your ship is destroyed you respawn at the start of the wave still keeping the active powerups that you had. There is not much regular enemy variety, they include a ship that shoots at you, one that attempts to dodge your shots, a group of ships that spawn in a row along one side of the map and travel back and forth trying to run into you, two unarmed enemies, and a very annoying type that appears in random spots in the map and shoots you. A large boss spawns every 10 waves as well as regular enemies, the bosses aren't too difficult to dodge and are easy to hit with their side. It is difficult to avoid the fire of the enemy type that appears near you and they are easy to crash into due to a combination of the camera, how close they appear to you, and because of the boost powerup. The game is not that good and there are better things to spend your money on, but it can be entertaining for a short time.

A story about a knight who is attacked, along with the rest of her group, by a dragon, and wakes up near a hidden town full of people trying to escape the war between neighboring nations or their past lives. Writing is decent, nothing terrible or offensively stupid like in a lot of VNs but nothing too unique or interesting. Nice music. Five characters to have an ending with, each with a good and bad ending. Mediocre art. Few choices. Very short so not much time is spent on the world/people. Without the writing having anything particularly good about it and without the hilariously stupid moment present in a lot of VN it doesn't leave much of an impression as being either good or bad in either an entertaining or memorable way. I got it in a bundle, I definitely would not suggest paying the $20 price for it.

A very short visual novel with an uninteresting story, poor visuals, and boring cliche characters. The game is fully voiced but the voice acting is so poor you will probably wish it wasn't. 24 different endings, certain ones reveal more of the plot and other ones change things about characters so they couldn't have the same continuity. There are a lot of choices but the game is so short that you will basically make a few decisions which will set towards a certain set of endings, you will then get 2-4 other choices each leading to a unique ending. I managed to get all the endings in the game in under two hours. The main character doesn't even seem to like his best friend and girlfriend very much so at least I wasn't alone in not liking characters.

The game has gotten worse with age, and wasn't very good to begin with.

Terrible camera, one of the first people you can talk to in the game even tries to defend the poor camera. Sonic sections take control away from you too often. Terrible mini games like pinball, fishing, and a shoot em up section in Tail's plane. Poor lyrical music. City hub areas add nothing to the game and are a waste of time. Boss fights are easy and not enjoyable. Glitches that can cause you to get stuck on or fall through objects, usually when running over speed boosts. Poor story with poor voice acting. Playing as most of the other characters makes the game even less enojyable, usually removing the ability to run fast making the game lose whatever interesting stage design could result from that.

An excellent metroidvania style game. Great options and character upgrades to play the way you want, different playable characters, challenging boss battles, and a great artstlye. A game that shows how even smaller Kickstarter projects from lesser or unknown developers can lead to high quality games.

One of the best games I have played. An excellent story with great narration, memorable moments and characters, great music, and a perfect ending. Beautiful art style and design of the world and stages that help to tell the games story and the worlds history. Fun gameplay with a lot of different weapons to unlock, special moves to use, and additional options to make the game more challenging. A must have and one of many indie games that shows that a team with talent, passion, and creativity can accomplish so much more than a massive AAA studio.