Recent reviews by Solus Grimwelder

Consider this a very mixed thumbs up. Are you a fan of Spiders' work? Do you wish for a Mars: War Logs follow up that fixes many of that game's problems? How about a sci-fi version of Bound By Flame? If you answered yes to any or all of these questions then The Technomancer should live up to your expectations. If you aren't already a Spiders fan, well the decision is a bit harder.

The Technomancer is an action RPG in the vein of the later Mass Effect games. The game takes place on Mars long after contact with Earth has been lost. Water and food are scarce, and the people have largely banded into corporations that control what remains of humanity. The harsh environment has lead to the rise of mutants, whose increased strength and resistance to death from sunlight exposure make them an ideal workforce. They are treated as slaves in this society, and their plight forms the emotional backbone of the story. The player is a Technomancer, something of a Mars Jedi with a focus on lightning based powers. The Technomancers serve as guardians and enforcers of the corporations, but their vast power causes them to be viewed as a threat by many normal folk within the various companies' leaderships.

The player is thrust into this politically explosive arena and the decisions he makes determines the future of Mars society. So far so good, right? Right. This story is far better told than the one in Mars War Logs, or really any other Spiders game up to the point of this game's release. Like one might expect from a Mass Effect-like you spend much of the game gathering a team of companions and forging alliances with various factions in order to reach your desired outcome to the conflict. Romances are possible but are poorly written and lack the natural chemistry found in those from Bioware's best experiences. But overall, from a story standpoint, this is the closest Spiders has ever come to successfully aping Bioware's storytelling style.

The real issue comes with the gameplay, which is incredibly repetitive. See enemies in The Technomancer constantly respawn. And there are only a dozen or so maps in the entire game, meaning that you are going to fight the exact same battles in the exact same locations over and over for dozens of hours. There are a handful of setpiece encounters, but 95% of the game is just endless identical combat encounters. Meanwhile, the combat and gear systems are lifted almost directly from Bound By Flame. Just replace fire magic with lightning magic and you have The Technomancer. While this system is definitely an improvement over Spiders' earlier titles, it just isn't good enough to want to engage with for dozens of hours. It doesn't help that there is a very limited amount of gear to collect, and none of it changes how the game is played. Gear simply provides better passive stats, and does not effect your skills or abilities whatsoever. So expect to be using the game strategies on the last boss that you used on the first, just with higher numbers involved.

But if you enjoy a B grade RPG then you could do worse than The Technomancer. The combat is certainly more enjoyable than past Spiders games, the visuals are decent, the acting isn't awful(which I know seems like faint praise but watch just the opening level of Mars War Logs and you will see why it is a staggering improvement), the story is actually pretty okay, and there are fewer bugs present than in any other Spiders game I've played before or since, and certainly less than what you would find in many Eurojank RPGs like the Gothic or Risen games. Just keep your expectations in check and know what you are getting into, and expect to enjoy your time with The Technomancer.

I recently purchased the Commandos Pack that was on sale for a total of $1. With four games included, that means I paid a total of 25 cents for Commandos Behind Enemy Lines. At that price I don't regret buying this game and giving it a shot. But it simply does not hold up. Note that I eventually installed some mods that required that I launch the game outside of Steam so I have actually played for several hours now. I added the mods because the base version included here is more or less unplayable. Running at sub 480p resolutions, on a modern monitor I simply could not understand what I was looking at. I spent my first four or five attempts at the first mission trying to figure out which blob of three or four pixels on the screen was meant to be the thing I was controlling. I finally gave up after simply being unable to locate one of my soldiers despite numerous attempts. So I installed a mod that increased the game's resolution to 1080p. Sadly the first map is not 1920 pixels wide, so the right side of the screen was just a glitchy mess, but that isn't the game's fault. Anyways, at this resolution I could see what I was doing, but it was then that I realized that the game was suffering from insane stuttering. Considering this is a stealth game that requires precisely timed actions, the stutter made it nearly impossible to beat the mission. And so after several hours of effort, I decided that trying to find a way to fix the stuttering was not worth my time, and so I uninstalled this game and ate the 25 cent loss. Mind you, from what little I saw, the antiquated interface meant that even when working correctly I'm not certain this would have been an enjoyable experience. Regardless, anyone using a monitor of higher than 720p resolution would be wise to think twice before buying this game.

As an American I never encountered Cossacks upon its original release. But I recently wanted to support these awesome Ukrainian developers who also made the excellent Stalker series. Since I already owned all those, I decided to purchase their RTS library instead, so all of the Cossacks and Conquest of America games. I decided to start at the beginning and installed this first Cossacks entry. I really wish I could give it a glowing review, but it is just incredibly unbalanced. Maybe this is a title that really exclusively shined as a multiplayer title, but the campaigns and single missions just seem borderline cruel. Even this single skirmish maps seem designed to put you at an insane disadvantage. The very first one on the list gives both your rivals all six of the needed resources to succeed. You are given four and no other bonus to offset this. So you are somehow supposed to defeat two allied enemies without 2 of the resources required to build an army. Campaigns are if anything even worse. They come down to trial and error. The first mission of the Ukrainian Civil War campaign is just absurd. You are given a handful of soldiers and told to go to the village. What village? Where is it located? No explanation. There are dozens or even hundreds of enemies lying in wait if you walk the wrong direction? Too bad. After four or five attempts I managed to reach the village with just a handful of troops remaining. I'm then told to defend said village against several hundred enemy raiders. Another five attempts later after carefully navigating the maze of enemies and turning the game speed down to the bare minimum so I could micromanage each shot of each soldier I was able to get to the village with enough soldiers remaining to successfully defend it long enough before being told to retreat to a second village where I am finally allowed to build troops. I then have five minutes or so to prep my tiny village to withstand a raid of thousands of enemies with my 20 or so soldiers and however many more I can build in five or so minutes. I have attempted this map dozens of times and simply cannot figure out how to beat it. And that is the very first level outside the tutorial! There are a half dozen campaigns. So far all of them put you in a near impossible situation where you need to follow a set of steps exactly as the designer intended to even have a chance at succeeding, yet none of these steps are presented to the player. And so missions must be replayed over and over. You need to plan five steps ahead without any knowledge of your opponent or his intentions. It is frankly impossible. The one mission I finally managed to beat after 5+ hours of trying I simply started over after each new wrinkle so that I could prepare for something that I could not have known would occur. Many of these things are scripted events that cannot occur during normal play, so there is no way to even know such a thing is possible before it happens. At one point a pirate ship stole all my resources. Nowhere else in the game is it possible for that to happen. I eventually built a blockade of frigates to stop the pirate, but then a second pirate appeared from the opposite direction and stole my resources before I could blockade that direction as well. So back to the drawing board as I spent another hour figuring out how to protect my resources long enough to build a fleet able to fight back.

If that type of experience seems fun to you, then knock yourself out. In my mind this entire game is built to be hated. Ten hours of play and I've beaten one total mission outside the tutorial. I don't mind hard games, but this game simply doesn't provide you with the tools to succeed. Winning isn't about playing better, its about knowing what will happen before it happens so you can counter a manuever that your opponent hasn't even thought of yet. It sucks and receives my whole hardy rejection.

This is probably the least time I have ever spent with a game before writing a review, but I just got incredibly stuck on the Mine level and could not figure out how to get through it for the life of me. So here we are. On the plus side I really like the visuals and atmosphere of Death Rattle. It has an almost metal vibe to it what with the Hellish, skull ridden, and occasional guitar riffs. The issues, unfortunately were just too many to overcome. First off, the lack of accessibility options was a real killer for me. I'm far from heavily disabled, but I do have motor skill issues, and the inability to rebind keys made this game literally painful for me to play. Hitting the middle mouse button is hard for me, which is why I own a mouse with two thumb buttons, one of which is always mapped to whatever the middle mouse button was supposed to be. The melee button is also more or less impossible for me to hit, with again, no option to assign that to something more logical. And worst of all for me, is the run button. It is shift like in most games, which is fine. But there is never a reason to not run in this game. There is no stamina, it doesn't seem to effect your accuracy, and your default walking speed it painfully slow. Imagine if Painkiller or Serious Sam had the speed of a Walking Sim like Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch. My pinky simply isn't strong enough to hold down a shift key for literally hours on end. There is also no option to adjust mouse sensitivity. That means you have to make far larger motions with your mouse, or adjust your mouse's sensitivity settings manually. Again, a complete disregard for those with limited ranges of motions here.

Now I want to make it clear that I don't expect every game to feature complex options for disabled gamers. This is a one person developer, and these things likely just didn't cross his mind. If you are more able to handle less than ideal key bindings and poor mouse support then you may get a lot more out of this game, as my other issues, while still not nothing, are not nearly as significant.

Of those, I would say per performance is the second largest issue for me. The tutorial level is especially rotten. My system is far from state of the art but it is well above the minimum specs, and exceeds to recommended specs with a Core i7 6700k and Geforce 1080 GTX. Again, not state of the art, but compared to what is required, it should be enough. Yet even running at only 1080p with nearly every setting turned either off or down to low, I still was getting framerates in the mid 30s. I also don't expect every game to be playable on a wide range of computers. There is a place for graphical showpieces on Steam. But I expect their listed minimum specs to match the actual requirements. This game was released in 2021 not 2011. Minimum should mean 1080p/60 or at the absolute worst 1080p/30. That I was getting 1080p/30 with a system above the recommended specs is just not acceptable. I will say that following the tutorial the two following levels did perform better, outside of at the end of the second level when I made a mad dash for the exit, aggro-ing like 100 enemies behind me, at which point my framerate dipped into the low teens. To be fair that was an extreme scenario, but considering Serious Sam 4 placed tens of thousands of enemies in front of me on its opening level, I am not convinced that this is an insurmountable challenge. And if it was, maybe limit the maximum number of enemies that can spawn at a given time to ensure stable framerates?

So let's say you are a wealthy able bodied gamer who just spent $3000 on a new rig with a 13900k, 4090 RTX, and 16 GB of 6200 Mhz DDR5 RAM. First off, congrats on winning the genetic lottery and potentially the money lottery. Secondly, is this game worth it for you? Well considering it costs $10 and you just spent $3000 on a gaming rig, I'm pretty sure we have different definitions of worth, but if I attempt to put myself in your shoes, I would say that you might enjoy this for a couple of hours. The mechanics aren't bad, and as stated the atmosphere is great. At this point $10 will barely get you a Big Mac Meal at McDonald's, so sure, plop a tenner down and give this a shot. For all the rest of us, I would suggest buying one of the 15000 versions of Serious Sam on Steam.

Maybe I am missing some key mechanics, but more likely this game is just straight up broken. In early 1940, I, playing as the British, had war declared on me by France, Iraq, and my own colonies, yet they remained listed as members of the Allies, meaning I could not use diplomacy to try and end those wars. Meanwhile, the game is still telling me about supply chain issues to my colonies which were effecting production and how I needed to protect the convoys carrying supplies to them. I will reiterate that these very colonies were now at war with me so why would I have any interest in sending them supplies? And why exactly was I at war not only with the Axis but with all other members of the Allies as well? I hadn't attacked them. I had troops stationed along the French border and was helping repel German attacks. I was actively pursuing German ships that were attempted to blockade French ports, and overall had done nothing that would warrant a declaration of war, especially not with France already at war with Germany. And, again, the game also still listed France as an ally. To demonstrate how silly this was, I was able to attack French units but entering a French city saw my units defending it not sacking it. So I could fight them but not take their territory. I should note that this scenario occurred in two separate attempts when playing as the British.

I got this as part of the January 2022 Humble Choice Bundle, and despite that I still feel ripped off. This is a terrible asset flip game that is more or less an endless runner. You drive a car down a straight line, avoiding traffic, and earn money based on how far you make it. Spend that money to make your car go faster or break harder, but why you would want to go faster in an endless runner is beyond me. There is also almost no variety to what you do on a run. Just dodge cars. Utter trash that is among the worst games Humble has ever included in its Choice lineup.

I recently picked up the Flatout Pack on a sale for a couple bucks. It included Flatout 1,2, and 3 (along with the X360 remake of 2). Having never played any Flatout game before beyond a couple demos back in the PS2 era I decided to start at the beginning. There is a lot to like about Flatout. It runs well and looks surprisingly great for a game that launched nearly 20 years ago. The physics are super loose but enjoyable to drive in. The problem is that the tracks themselves seem to want far more precision than the controls allow, and the ruthless AI will smash you to pieces with every mistake. While I had fun for an hour or so playing the Bronze Cup, I could not manage to place in a single race in the silver cup after two more hours of trying and gave up. Shame as I really did like the driving physics in the game.

3079 feels like a proof of concept. It's a procedurally generated "RPG" that has far too few variables to make that procedural generation meaningful. But let's step back for a moment. 3079 takes place on a planet consumed by war. Two factions have been fighting endlessly for seemingly no reason and it is your mission to figure out why and stop it. Who you are is never explained, nor is it explained why some galactic entity would care to intervene in a terrestrial war or why they would do so by sending in a single poorly equipped soldier.

Once you arrive on the planet you realize that you have been cut off from communicating with HQ due to the actions of an army of demons that seemingly are the root cause of the planet's issues. So your mission is to destroy these demons. I'll admit to never actually destroying said demons so I can't tell you if that is the entire game or if more happens afterwards.

On the planet you join with the humanoid faction and take on quests for their leaders. These quests are technically procedurally generated but they are so basic and pull from such a small pool of variables that it would be more accurate to say that there are about 5 quests that you simply repeat the entire game. The larger problem here is that the rewards are also random as are limitations like being unable to kill anyone. If you don't happen to like any of the variables you simply have to wait for a new quest to pop up or find another quest giver. This is infuriating as all quest givers (and all characters for that matter) look identical and have no names. So finding a quest that gives you whatever item it is you need to progress can be a nightmare.

Of the 7 hours I played this game, five of them were spent trying to get a quest giver to reward me with the demon slaying sword you need to beat the demons. You cannot beat the game without it and there is no indication which of the randomly spawning (and unspawning) quest givers will give you the sword. After 5 hours of making no progress I eventually restarted the game and in 15 minutes had the sword I needed. So to summarize, the random elements this game is so proud of lead to boring, samey quests that can take hours to give you the items you need.

Some of these items can also be purchased at shops but shopkeeper spawns are also random. Sometimes the only shopkeepers are fighting on the frontline of the war and combat does not stop while you are in a shop. Plus, again, all shopkeepers look identical and are not named, so good luck figuring out which shopkeepers you have checked in with and which you haven't. And of course their random inventories could mean that none of the shopkeepers have the item you need and so you just have to walk around killing enemies waiting for the current group of shopkeepers to be killed so a new batch can spawn that might have the items you want.

3079 also allows you to build and destroy blocks like in Minecraft but there is no crafting system and I could not for the life of me find any real benefit to mining or building, especially considering your efforts would be quickly demolished by the ever ongoing war.

Lastly, you have your stats and skills, which are improved through use, The Elder Scrolls style. You do not gain new skills as the game progresses, only level up the skills you have. So just play the game and level up while your enemies do the same. Pointless. I am moving on now to try 3089. Let's hope the developers used their experience making this proof of concept to allow them to actually make a fully featured game.

Having just finished this new Bright Memory game, I have to say I enjoyed it a lot, though not quite as much as the original. Both are incredibly short but there was some optional stuff in the original that slightly padded the length out. The combo system in that game also forced me to mix up my technique. In this one there is no combo or rating system, and enemies are not more or less resistant to any certain weapon type. This means you have a ton of options, but no real reason to use most of them. Each weapon has an alt. fire but they are all basically a grenade launcher except for the first weapon which fires tracer rounds. So, more or less all of the combat options from the first game are present, but without incentive to use them, I stuck with blasting things with a shotgun most of the time. More variety in enemy behavior and weaknesses might have helped here.

That said, the gunplay is still incredibly satisfying, using your sword and dodge moves as defensive options mixes things up and overall the combat is a blast. Visually the game is fantastic and runs incredibly well on my older machine. The story is definitely more understandable than the original game, but considering the original was utter nonsense that isn't saying much. This one has no real backstory, nor does it provide any motivation for any of its characters, but I at least understood my goal of reaching the black whole and defeating the Emperor and General Lin. I can't tell you the why or how part of any of that, but, again, it's a step up. Likewise the voice acting, while still nowhere near good, is definitely improved over the original release.

Having beat the game in 2 hours I can say that I would have of course preferred something longer that forced you to make better use of your abilities, but I still very much enjoyed this follow up and hope that the Studio's next game keeps up this level of quality while expanding the breadth of the experience.

Journey To The Savage Planet is a great Metroid Prime inspired sci-fi exploration game. Your main goal here is to explore and scan a newly discovered planet. While there is combat, it is only a focus in the DLC. During the main game, you will be mainly platforming using a rapidly expanding arsenal of moves. There are both main path objectives you need to complete to earn upgrades required to progress, as well as side objectives that earn you improved versions of those upgrades or the game's equivalent of a health tank.

The entire game is very tongue and cheek. Your ship serves as your base of operations and it is littered with jokes. FMVs play in the background advertising crazy products. You regularly receive words of encouragment from your zany CEO back home, and an AI companion seems to care very little about your well being, seeing as you are just a 3D printed copy of the original you who died long ago.

That humor, combined with interesting visuals and superb controls make Journey To The Savage Planet well worth the investment. It took me 10 hours to finish the main objectives and around 80% of the scanning. It's not a long game, but it doesn't overstay its welcome either. Plus, its open world is small enough that every area is littered with things to do. There is no need to walk or drive or ride for 5 minutes to reach an objective like in some games. Overall very much worth playing.