Recent reviews by Lyle Shnub

Rebel Galaxy is an arcadey space game about how dope it would be if Assassin's Creed: Black Flag's ship combat were in space.

Fable Anniversary is the remaster of the British roleplaying game all about how more and more bad things happen the older you get. Cool game.

Don't Starve is a survival crafting game about burning down forests and everything living in them. It's pretty cool.

I just think it's neat.

Really enjoyed this cyberpunk CRPG in the Shadowrun setting. The next game in their trilogy (Dragonfall) is a major improvement in all respects, but this was a fun introduction. A real shame what happened to the people working at the development studio.

To the Moon is a short game about the ups and downs of life and all of the little complications in between.

The actual gameplay is basically just a scavenger hunt combined with a picture puzzle the likes of which you could find dozens of on a site like Newgrounds. It's none too difficult and as far as I could tell the game doesn't even have a failure state. However, the scavenger hunt bit is quite interesting in how it ties closely to and reinforces story points.

The story is the main selling point of this game in my opinion. Despite an absence of any voice acting, the characters presented and the story surrounding them is very compelling. That said, the story is completely linear so you are essentially buying a light novel and a jigsaw puzzle.

My biggest complaint is that there is a complete lack of any graphical options menu. This includes the ability to change the game's resolution. You can play in fullscreen, however this will stretch the game to fit your screen's aspect ratio which most likely isn't the same as the game's native resolution. This results in some weird things like an egg-shaped moon. I imagine there must be some sort of user-made fix for this, however I just played in windowed mode, which is absolutely tiny. Oddly enough, I found myself unbothered by it after about an hour into the game.

Considering this game costs about as much as a hamburger, even moreso when it's on sale, I feel like it was money well spent. If you're looking to play something in a similar vain that's a bit more depressing and grim, I'd suggest picking up Tell Tale's The Walking Dead.

This is a game that's less about slaying zombies and leaving a pile of mangled corpses and gore in your wake and more about thinking on your feet, making decisions, and well... people.

Nearly all of your dialogue options are timed. If you fail to say something, whoever you're talking to will actually react to your silence. This helps create a sense of urgency. The game also doesn't let you reload past saves to try to re-make decisions. There's most likely ways to work around this, but I highly recommend against it. I found the game most enjoyable when you have live with any decisions you may regret - and it's likely you'll make a few of those. This game is very dark and gets increasingly darker as you play it.

While the story varies greatly depending upon your choices, everything does get funneled into a few different endings. The action sequences, while fun, seem inconsequential compared to the rest of the game as you can simply retry any sequences that end in the player's death.

I think this game is great for anyone look for a dark, gripping narrative that changes based on your decisions. I recommend against watching a Let's Play of this game as it definitely feels like one of those games you really need to play, rather than watch being played.

Also: Be sure to keep your save file for season 2.

The bad: The crafting system is extremely basic. All of the menus are finnicky at best and late-game inventory management can be a pain in the ass. There isn't much of a sense of progression regarding your weapons as you're given access to the vast majority of the game's weapons right off the bat. Money quickly becomes completely useless as you can obtain every single weapon (your primary money sink) by just playing the game. At times the game can feel a bit easy, I personally played through on the hardest difficulty to amend this. I also found myself disappointed by the storyline after the end of the second act. It isn't that the story becomes particularly bad, it's just that I feel like there was so much potential that wasn't taken advantage of.

The good: It's incredibly easy to become immersed in the world partly thanks to the gorgeous graphical fidelity and aesthetic, as well as the impressive first person animations. The sfx on the guns is amazing and makes for some very satisfying gunplay. The stealth takedown system is just as satisfying. The game even rewards you for using stealth which is without a doubt more difficult than going in Rambo style. The way animals interact with each other (and other humans) is pretty awesome too. I also think that the first two acts of the story have some awesome writing.

I figure it would take between 50-60 hours to do absolutely everything in the game, but most people will have gotten to a stopping point in about 35-45. I personally really liked it and think it's worth playing.

Fantastically brutal and gruesome multiplayer medieval melee game.

The melee combat feels satisfying and visceral, however I can't help but feel the ranged archer gameplay falls short. I do NOT think that all of the classes and weapons are very well balanced. I'd recommend playing Vanguard if you're new to the game. There's also next to no player customization as of this writing, but there are plans to add more of this in future patches.

Oh, there's also some pretty funny dialogue lines.

If you liked the first one, then you're going to love this one. It's basically a better, more polished version that doesn't try to experiment with anything too new (almost to a fault). The story/writing has improved by miles, though I could be biased towards its writer Anthony Burch who I'm a fan of. My biggest gripe is that they (noticeably) changed several of the voice actors of returning characters.