Recent reviews by Bad Sector

Nice little FPS though with a strong emphasis on the "little" - the game took me around 3 hours to complete. Its size is the biggest drawback it has with very few levels and enemy variety. IMO it'd be better if there were less weapons (there are some that feel redundant) and at least an extra enemy (f.e. some flying alien).

On the other hand what is there works fine and is entertaining for the few hours it takes to beat it. The music is also very good.

If you like the traditional style of JRPG games you may like this. I liked the retro 3D visuals and it has a few neat gameplay ideas, but overall it is what it looks like. The story isn't anything special but really the meat of the game is the combat encounters - and maxxing your characters :-P. It is a game you can stop and then pick up and continue at any moment, which is great as it plays perfectly fine on the Steam Deck.

Nice little FPS. There isn't much to it, you go through levels and kill stuff. The game has its flaws and feels (or actually, most likely is) unfinished, but i think the developer had their heart at the right place.

The levels look a bit convoluted in the Hexen tradition (that the game seems to be inspired from) but in fact they are kinda linear in that there aren't any alternative paths or stuff you can do in different order (ok, there are two cases where you have to activate two switches but that is all i noticed). Also there is only a single very obvious puzzle (you have to avoid some candles on a path). You do have to find switches and there are a bunch of secrets all over the place though all you get from the secrets is more ammo.

In a way it looks like a "what if Serious Sam tried to become Hexen". While the levels aren't as straightforward as in Serious Sam (or even Painkiller) and you have to backtrack in a few areas or find how to move forward (especially with the third level which is by far the biggest one and is made up as a hub), at its core is a series of arenas with enemies spawning in (though in some cases they are already prespawned - this is also used as an incentive for you to explore the levels) and all enemies have very SS-esque behavior in that they just move towards you (and you move backwards while shooting them). Some enemies have ranged attacks and a few can teleport (which is clearly telegraphed so it doesn't become annoying) but for the most part in each arena you'll see a dozen of enemies just running towards you with no concern for their safety or trying to flank you.

The weapons feel good for the most part and they all have some sort of fantasy design, even if most of them end up functioning as the classic FPS weapon archetypes (which is a good thing in my book). My favorite is one which (IIRC is some gloves) that allow you to punch from a distance. The melee weapons feel good too - one being your fists and the other being a sword that can freeze enemies which can break after a few additional hits. However with the game having dozens and dozens of enemies running up to you and most of them using melee attacks faster than you, you only get to use melee weapons against weaker and/or slower enemies.

There is also a "blood mode" which causes everything to slow down and during that mode all your attacks also fill your health - and melee weapons become easier to use. However since it is *attacks* instead of kills that fill your health, it is better to use faster weapon unless you want to preserve ammo. Blood mode is neat and you can activate it wherever you want as long as you have enough "blood" (or whatever that is). There are two bars that fill as you kill enemies, once the first bar is filled then the second bar starts to get filled too (you can also think of them as a single bar split in two parts). You can enable blood mode while you have enough blood in the second bar - the blood depletes while you have the mode enabled and you can deplete both bars. However you can only enable it if there is blood in the second bar, but you can disable it at any time.

Sadly it looks unfinished - every few levels there is some text with story bits (though the story doesn't matter much, at the end you just kill stuff) and after the last available level you get some text that seems to imply there will be more but there isn't a "continue" button. So i guess the dev planned more levels but never happened.

As i wrote above, the third level is by far the biggest one and feels a bit different than the others who are a bit more straightforward. I think if the game was designed with a few big levels like the third one and was a bit less linear (e.g. the third level is basically a hub and you can move between the hubs as you want however there isn't a reason to do that except perhaps for secrets - but the secrets aren't really that enticing) it'd be -and perhaps be received- much better (e.g., had to complete some objective in each hub at any order you wanted so you can progress and/or unlock some other hub or area in the level).

There are also some bugs. For example the action mapping screen is finicky and for some reason it seems the available resolutions are hardcoded with the maximum being 1080p. After each level you get a scoreboard like in classic FPS games counting the number of enemies, items secrets and the time you took to finish the level but it doesn't take into account enemy spawning or items the enemies drop so you often end up with more enemies/items than the level had, making it kinda pointless (since you don't know if you missed anything). The time is also buggy as it only counts time since the last level load, meaning that if you die and reload you'd get a smaller time than it actually took you to beat the level. The secrets are *probably* counted correctly though but i don't know for sure as i never managed to find all of them.

But all in all, it is a fun short game despite the flaws, though i wouldn't recommend it outside a sale as it may either not be to your taste or not keep you entertained long enough due to the small number of levels it has.

It is an ok game, it could have been better and for every positive thing it has it tends to also do a negative thing but it certainly isn't a bad game. The biggest issue it has is that it is a bit repetitive so it'll be something to play in short sessions between other games (personally took me months to finish it).

I first read about Legendary in a magazine months before the game was released and i was hyped up with the idea of fighting fantasy monsters from various legends around the world in modern environments. The idea sounded excellent, but when the game came out, it got several negative reviews (it is always either positive or negative, nobody seems to give middle of the road reviews :-P), so i ignored it until a few years later when it was available for like $1 on a sale and bought it - but my computer at the time decided to break and i forgot about it until now.

So after playing "Rogue Warrior", another game that i found entertaining despite the "mixed" reviews here on Steam, i decided to see around my library for something that seemed to have a similar vibe and found Legendary, which unsurprisingly has also a "mixed" rating. Also i didn't notice it before, but it was published by Gamecock, a publisher that was founded (and now doesn't exist anymore) by the same people that founded Gathering of Developers (aka GOD Games) at the past and later would go to found Devolver Digital. I always liked the shooters those companies published, even if they weren't always well received (e.g. KISS: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child), usually due to their lower budgets and often being made by new developers.

And indeed, Legendary seems to be more or less made from the same mold - sometimes it feels that the developers tried to bite more than they could chew, but it does look like they tried to make a good game even in the places where it stumbles a bit. Still, as long as you go in it with the understanding that it is not a big budget AAA production (even if at points it looks like it would like to be one and sometimes feels like they should have focused more on the bits they could do good and avoided the bits they weren't as good at) it is a genuinely entertaining game.

I do not really want to spoil the game, although i should note that starting a new game does not play the intro cinematic - you have to do that by selecting that option yourself from the Single player menu (it is right above New game).

As far as the gameplay goes, it is a mostly standard FPS game, with the AI being a bit clever but nothing special, although each enemy type has its own behavior which is very nice. It has a nice gimmick with the "animus" energy that mythical creatures (not humans) leave around when you kill them and you can collect, which you can use to heal yourself or create bursts of energy to stun the creatures (for some creatures this is a necessity to do).

As i wrote above, each enemy type has its own behavior and each need a different strategy to handle, with humans having the most common behavior (they run behind cover and pop out every now and then to attack you) and are the easiest to kill (a shotgun blast does the trick). Other monster types are Fire Drakes, which are easy to kill with a shotgun or the axe, but you can only harm them when they are about to attack (they spit fire or blasts) and they tend to curl up in a ball and run around (they are invincible in that state), werewolves which IMO are the most fun to battle (and also the most common mythical enemy after a point) since they aren't very tough - the alpha werewolves are, but not extremely so - but they seem like they have the smartest AI (mainly because they run around and climb up and down on walls) and in order to actually kill them you need to decapitate them (otherwise they'll wake up again) which adds an extra element of hurry. Another nice enemy type is the Nari, which are basically tiny fairies with talon-like legs that often fly around in flocks. Nari have the ability to become immaterial, passing through walls, floors, etc and become materialized either right before they attack you or with an animus blast which stuns them for a second or so, so you can gun them down. Their have very little health so they die quickly, but you can only attack whem while they are materialized and they immaterialize fast. Their most common way of attacking is hitting you with their talons or sometimes "possessing" items and throwing them at you (they can also manipulate the possessed item - i'm not going to spoil it, but there is a point in the game where a Nari possessed a deadly... item that had me laughing for its absurdity :-P).

Other enemy types are Griffin, Minotaurs and Blood Spiders. The last ones have the simplest behavior: they come at you and explode, so you have to find their mother (aka spawn point) and kill it (it dies quickly). The Griffin is initially very hard and you need a combination of animus blasts and firepower to kill a single one, but later in the game you often find rocket launchers in the vicinity and a single rocket will blast them to pieces. Minotaurs are both the hardest and the worst/most annoying enemies in the entire game: all they do is come at you (they even knock down obstacles) and once they are near enough they hit you with a gravestone (or something like that) they carry. And they are *very* tough, especially on the front side. They are supposedly easier to kill if you attack them from the back side, but this is easier to say than do since they always turn to face you and you cannot outmaneuver them unless you stun them with an animus blast. But this only lasts for a second and even with the most powerful weapon, this is not enough to bring them down - you'll run out of animus energy quickly, so a better idea is to just try and keep them in a distance and shoot them in the face. They'll still take a ridiculous amount of damage before dying though.

Fortunately these three enemy types are rarely seen and only used to spice up things (although in the case of Minotaurs there is a bit of too much spice), especially the Griffin. There are some other more specific enemy types (e.g. the Golem near the beginning of the game) but those are either mostly scripted to drive the game forward or confined in a single area of the game that you never see again (e.g. Echidna Tentacles). The scripted ones tend to be quite impressive despite the dated graphics, though.

As far as guns go, you can only carry two guns plus an axe and four grenades of two types (molotov and fragmentation). The guns you can carry are either a pistol, a shotgun, a rocket launcher or one of a few machine gun types that escape me since i never cared about the details of them. There are three machine gun types, a weak (which is often found in enemy hands early), a middle powered one (which is often found in the "good guys" hands for most of the game and in enemy hands during the later parts of the game) and a very powereful one (which is found in the hands of a few enemies later in the game). Most of them are found in enemy hands (as mentioned) or lying around. There is no real reason to use the pistol as it becomes useless quickly and you do not see it for more than the first few levels.

Overall the game is of average length for a linear action game (it took me around 8 hours to finish it) and i had a lot of fun with it to the point where i think everyone was hard on it when it came out 10 years ago. It is not a masterpiece, but it has its moments and it is entertaining. Considering the current price (3 euros here), i'd recommend it hands down to anyone who likes playing FPS games, even if you play it in between bigger (and more hyped :-P) games.

A note of warning though. Apparently some people have issues with an elevator near the end. Old games like this (especially UE games) tend to have timing issues with modern fast computers, so i always run them with a framecapper (like RivaTuner Statistics Server) at 60fps. This tends to fix a ton of problems with old games, so i highly recommend using one as i didn't encounter that problem myself. Also i highly recommend checking PCGamingWiki for a tool to increase the FOV (i used 105 myself without issues) and info to disable mouse smoothing which improves responsiveness.

It is a short (~2h) FPS with generic gameplay, it doesn't try to innovate but at the same time it doesn't do anything wrong either (technical issues aside, see below). Its main "feature" is the protagonist swearing all the time, most often when he's hit by enemy fire (the swearing clips are also mixed as an end credits song :-P). If you find that sort of thing cringy or even insulting (i dont), you probably want to avoid it. Also the story is generic action movie story, nothing special but at least it is coherent.

Apparently the game was released as a full price ($60 or $50, depending on the country) game and was slammed hard for it - and various other reasons (not offering something new, the graphics being low resolution, etc). But i think as long as you can look past the dated graphics (which aren't really that bad overall, they just weren't top of the line at the time of its release) and don't mind the few technical issues (see below), it is worth the current price. If you are in doubt, you can wait for a sale, it seems to go around $1.5-$2 every few months.

Note that there are a couple of technical issues: first, the game's support for widescreen is awful (also known as vert- meaning that you actually see *less* vertically when you use a widescreen instead of more horizontally, which is the expected) and it becomes even worse since you cannot change the FOV (which is already borderline annoyingly low). You *want* to play this game at a 4:3 resolution - personally i have created a custom 1440x1080 resolution in Nvidia's control panel exactly for playing 3D games that have issues with widescreen and i recommend doing that.

Secondly, the game's physics and motion seem wonky. I recommend using an external framecapper like RivaTuner Statistics Server to cap the framerate at 60 fps. I think anything above that might introduce bugs and glitches, even if it seems to work.

This is a very big (actually i wasn't aware that Source can do maps that big) and long top-notch quality map (took me around an hour to finish it) that could easily be part of a Half-Life 2 episode. Congratulations to the mapper and i *highly* recommend it :-).

If Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs was called just A Machine for Pigs without the Amnesia part, it would certainly have a much better reception as, while there is a very faint connection between the two Amnesia games in the background (in that it is implied that they are in the same "universe"), A Machine for Pigs is really a standalone title of its own that is cut from a different cloth than that of The Dark Descent.

The first thing you will notice is that the game has very high production values compared to the first Amnesia, looking closer to a AAA product than an indie title. And even though Amnesia's castle brick walls have "just" been replaced with brass corridors, chains and gigantic Steampunk clockwork machines that serve mostly the same purpose of creating a sense of dread and claustrophobia, the amount of environmental detail in the A Machine of Pigs is also way above and beyond the first game. The audio side shows a similar standard of quality especially when it comes to the music which i found the best of all of Frictional's games so far. The voice acting wasn't as good as in SOMA, but it was certainly better than the first Amnesia, at least as far as the main character is concerned.

As i wrote above, A Machine for Pigs plays differently from The Dark Descent. The gameplay is somewhere between a walking simulator and a light adventure game where you have to explore the environment to find the right button to press or place the right item in the right slot to continue. There is no real puzzle solving (i think of all of Frictional's games, the Penumbra series have the most involved puzzles) nor you have any form of inventory management. Unlike the first Amnesia and the Penumbra games, A Machine for Pigs has no inventory at all and the few cases where you need to use an item you just pick it up and keep it in your "hands" - because of that the game never puts you in a situation where the item you need is not near your location. Personally i found this to be the weakest aspect of the game and the most dissappointing for me as puzzles are my favorite element of these games.

Another element that A Machine for Pigs has it different - and in my opinion, worse - compared to the first Amnesia game is the lack of physics manipulation in the environment. Ever since the first Penumbra tech demo that Frictional released back in 2006, their games had this tactile feel with the environment being easily manipulatable with mouse gestures that mimic (crude) hand motions. A Machine for Pigs still does have that, but unlike the other Frictional games, only a very tiny part of the environment can be manipulated and that is almost always when that part has something to do with a task you are trying to perform - everything else is static. This is brought awkardly in the forefront in one of the early levels where (to avoid spoilers) you have to put some items in a container and despite having an abudance of items around the container, you have to go at the other side of the room to pick up more items because those near the container are static objects.

On the topic of levels, game progression in A Machine for Pigs is also different from other Frictional games in that it is strictly linear - except in one tiny part of the game, you never need to go to a previous place and once a puzzle or other obstacle is addressed, you can only continue forward. Much like the weaker puzzles, the game provides very little agency in that after every few steps, your character writes in his journal exactly what he should do next, expecting from the player to follow the script.

In terms of story and atmosphere, A Machine for Pigs has both abound but - again - in a different form than The Dark Descent. In the previous game, the story is given to player in small scraps to be pieced together mainly from notes, flashbacks and short loading screen segments (and after while, a few short stories published alongside the game). In A Machine for Pigs, the story is given more directly to the player in the form of phone calls, phonograph recordin and - again - notes, but this time the notes are more clear in their content and are written by someone who knows what is going on. Personally i found the story of A Machine for Pigs more interesting than the story of The Dark Descent, although the characters of the first game were much more interesting (in large part thanks to them getting some attention - A Machine for Pigs is focused on the main character). Similarly, the atmosphere in A Machine for Pigs was more to my liking, although that is mainly because i like Steampunk settings and big clockwork steam machines. A big difference between The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs is that the former is focused on creating a scary atmosphere (although during the 2/3rds of the game the way this was done became predictable and at least personally i found the monster more annoying than scary) whereas the latter is instead focusing on the madness that lead to the creation of the machine in the title, having almost no paranormal element. This makes the A Machine for Pigs the less scary between the two, but i'd say that the focus on the machine itself - complemented by the superb sound design - makes it also the more atmospheric.

There are a few negative spots in the writing though. The main character's thoughts are often described in a manner that is often too 'poetic' - borderline pretentious - considering the situation he is in and his immediate concern for finding his children. This might be deliberate, to give the sense of performing a play (there is such a reference in the credits, after all), but i found it distracting and clashing with the overall atmosphere of the game.

However despite the negative aspects of the game and the differences it has compared to the first Amnesia, i enjoyed it and i would easily recommend it. I do not write game reviews on Steam often, but considering the low rating it has and how this did not represent in the slightest the experience i had playing it, i decided it was worth the time to write a recommendation.

TimeShift is a decent FPS game with a gimmick that isn't seen often: the ability to manipulate time. You can slow down (ok, that is kinda common), pause and even reverse time. This is used to solve numerous puzzles in the game - often the game will automatically highlight the correct action for you but not always and not all puzzles will be solved the same way. But beyond puzzles you can also use the time manipulation to run faster, cause explosions (you can stop time, shoot an explodable container, run away and restore time to actually have the explosion happen), steal enemies' weapons and avoid grenades.

As far as the rest of the gameplay goes, TimeShift is probably closest to Half-Life 2 although not as polished. You get to drive vehicles, travel in a train, fly in a zeppelin and gun down enemies and other set pieces.

Visually the game was very good for its time (it was released in 2007) and personally i loved the overall theme of a dystopian retrofuturistic city. While AAA games have more detail nowadays on their environments, i think TimeShift - thanks to some texture and lighting effects - looks better today than some other games of its time (no, i'm not including Crysis here :-P). Although the human models might be a bit on the repetitive side.

It is a small space shooter (...as in you shoot in space, not that you shoot spaces) with simple 3D graphics and a 3rd person "behind the spacecraft" view. The game controls using exclusively the keyboard with the arrows or the WASD keys and space or ctrl for shooting. The gameplay consists of series of levels where you have a single goal which is one of shooting enemies down, avoiding obstacles, shooting a specified number of enemies in a given time limit or taking down a big boss. When you are supposed to shoot down enemies you also get powerups, but those persist only in the level (as does your health, which resets after each level).

Generally speaking, it isn't anything special to write home about, but it is a good "time waster" - especially considering the price. Personally i also really liked the background music.

On the negative side, i'd say that the game becomes repetitive after a while (so it is only good for short bursts between other games or for your lunch break at work). Also i am not fan of saving only every few levels because of said repetition.