Snowmind legutóbbi értékelései

12 Labours of Hercules is a casual time/resource management game, mostly suited to younger audiences. The cartoony styled animations are pleasing to the eye and the level of difficulty is toned down to make it easy enough to unlock all achievements with moderate effort, even on expert level. The game is part of a genre most suited for mobile/tablet touch-screen gameplay, with the PC port still being fun in small doses.

12 Labours of Hercules does not take itself too serious (not much to do with the actual labours of Hercules), a fact conveyed by a lazy Hercules rocking in his hammock most of the time, the colourful map designs, the fun mini-games and the comic narration of the story videos at the end of each chapter.

All in all a relaxing and fun little game, ideal as a filler when you need a break from your normal gaming habits.


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Pros:
+ Tight time/resource management gameplay (expert mode)
+ Well designed maps providing diversity and challenge
+ Colourful art style
+ Steam achievements and trading cards
+ Well liked by younger audiences

Cons:
- Too sort at ~5hrs to complete
- It becomes repetitive after a while
- Not much replayability

Valley is a first-person sci-fi adventure, which ended up being much more than the expected walking/running/parkour simulator. The spectacular backdrops and well designed areas provide a relaxed environment to explore, while the story unravels in the form of audio messages and notes/recordings scattered around the world.

You assume the role of an archaeologist which has stumbled upon the ruins of a long forgotten expedition. By utilising a secret suit discovered within the ruins, called L.E.A.F. (Leap Effortlessly through Air Functionality), you start to put together not only the story around the expedition but also the ancient inhabitants that lived within the mysterious valley and their origins.

"Relaxed" is the key word in Valley, as there is no real pressure of pressing forward at breakneck speed or challenging enemies to fight but rather an open world with linear progression, which is completely up-to you if you want to zoom through it or take the time to appreciate and explore it (the travel option can be used at any time to return to any reached areas for further exploring).

Valley takes around 6-8hrs to complete (~12hrs with all achievements) and has a reasonable price (a steal at it's current £6 discounted tag). Recommended to anyone that has enjoyed similar titles like the Solus Project or Story about my Uncle.

Mount & Blade is an open-world medieval RPG game with challenging enemies, good combat and a plethora of mods to spice things up. Unfortunately, it shows its almost a decade old age with ok-ish graphics (by today's standards), no quest variety, empty environment, no story and no steam cards/achievements etc. Even though it is still fun to play, it's successor the Mount & Blade: Warband has improved it in almost every aspect. So it makes little sense to recommend it over Warband, unless cost is a factor.

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TL;DR: Mount & Blade still holds it's own and is a fun to play open-world sandbox RPG game but makes no-sense in buying it (perhaps on sale?) when it's successor Mount & Blade: Warband has improved every aspect of the original game and added multi-player and steam achievements on top.

I love the TrackMania series of games and spent many an hour on TM Nations Forever from release and after steam launch. So I decided to purchase the whole TM collection, starting with Canyon.

And that's where the problems and frustration start. As the trend of negative comments show, the DRM of ManiaPlanet is terrible and far outdated. Firstly, it requires an always online connection, even when "offline" mode is selected! Secondly, my old account (and achievements) worked once and after that wouldn't be recognised (even after changing password). Waiting without a reply from TM support for over a week is not really professional and of course re-installing the game does not help as it now gives a "key is in use" error!?!

All in all, TrackMania Canyon has many positives as an arcade racer (editor) but I cannot recommend a game which uses a third party service (ManiaPlanet) with so many problems and non-existent support. I've spent 30mins in game and over 10x times that scouring the forums (fora?) trying to resolve issues with it. If Nadeo isn't bothered improving their service to support their TrackMania titles, why waste any money on them? In the end I had to request a steam refund.

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TL;DR: TrackMania Canyon is a good fun arcade racer but be prepared to experience many problems with their "always online" 3rd party service required. I would suggest to download the free TrackMania Nations Forever and give it a spin ironing out any potential problems first, before splashing out on any of the paid titles. Good luck.

StarMade is the perfect space exploration sandbox game for anyone who likes Minecraft or similar procedurally generated block voxel-based games. The downside is that currently the lack of decent tutorials in place making it hard to get into, without resorting to YouTube for every little thing. To attract players from similar genre games, StarMade needs to put in place a network of official multi-player servers which are beginner friendly while support and guidance by other veterans of the game is provided before venturing further into the hostile unknown.

As a Java based multiplayer game, StarMade can be run on all popular platforms, Windows, Linux and Mac which is a big plus. In addition by combining elements from Minecraft, EVE Online, Elite Dangerous, Empyrion and Space Engineers etc it can appeal to an already huge player base which might be looking for an alternative title to sink some time in.

Currently StarMade (alpha) is offered in the form of a free to play fully functional "demo", which shows the faith the indie developer Schine has in their product. I personally applaud the sentiment and would recommend anyone that likes StarMade to purchase it to support the developers. I will certainly be keeping an eye on how development is proceeding in alpha and will give it another try further down the line.

I am a club level amateur racing enthusiast and avid sim racing fan and Motorsport Manager gave me a chance to experience all aspects of the sport other than the driver's seat perspective.

Very in-death behind the scenes simulation, which is easy to pickup (brilliant tutorials and tips) but will take a lot of time to master how to best balance expenditure vs performance to be competitive within the current year's rules and regulations. The only thing missing, is the lack of official licensed racing cars, tracks and championships content but Steam workshop do fill in some of the gaps.

My best moment of Motorsport Manager came at an unexpected mid-season race, while running in the long (50-60laps) vanilla race tier3 European Series league. I was struggling to maintain my 4th championship position, the team boss was unhappy with the performance of the team and was one race from getting the boot. So having gambled on a mixed strategy of 2-stops and 3-stops for my drivers, with questionable quality of engines and brakes, I pushed them all through 49-laps of the race, ignoring their complains, to have them end up on the podium with cars finishing literally on fumes (0.00 laps of fuel left with 1/2 lap remaining). I lost the top spot on the line due to an engine failure but the boss was over the moon afterwards nevertheless. That screaming and nail biting finish of the last lap of the race, made in my opinion Motorsport Manager worth every penny. Highly recommended!

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PS: Also my thanks to Playsport Games that gave us a free week of playtime of this excellent game (20-27/03/17). Can't wait to finish all the core leagues and then try my hands on some of the custom workshop content.

I bought the Gothic after reading some of the positive reviews. Unfortunately, my experience with Gothic has been nothing but filled with installation and stability problems and today I decided for the first time to request a refund.

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The long explanation:
I've got a typical Win10 i7(4th gen)/nvidia860 (upto date) setup and had no problems with any other games so far. But running Gothic (vanilla) froze my rig again and again (a first for me in over 18 months). I spent hours researching how to make Gothic work and downloaded community patch after patch (followed the excellent guide by Arc Gothic Fixed for Win 7/8/10 [18.12.2016]) without success. That's when the serious problems with Windows10 started, explorer freezing, right click taking over 5mins to show options, not being able to reboot etc etc After 2 days of snail pace investigation, I finally traced the problem to one of the community Gothic system packs, which messed up my system. In the end, once all the patches were removed, Win10 was back to order (but Gothic still freezes).

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TL;DR: I'm sure Gothic is a great game but after so much effort put into making it work on my Win10/i7/nvidia its just not worth it. If the developers are not bothered to release an official patch to make it work, then why should anyone buy it (unless you have an older rig) even on a steam sale? Not recommended.

TL;DR: A 15yo could have written a better "game" than this. AVOID this time waster garbage
(even with the 80% off sale currently; not worth it)

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Pros:
- Can't think of any, except for the Steam achievements and cards
(if you don't mind ~1.5hrs of boredom hell to get them)

Cons: (long list but will try and surmise it here)
- Full screen, low res; can't be changed
- Blatant rip-off of Mr Robot's signature logo
- A bad imitation of the excellent Hacknet/Uplink games
- Poor English language throughout
- Tedious typing throughout of net addresses
- Auto-written chat msgs, virus code (<- dribble) by spamming randomly the keyboard for each char typed
- Tons of basic network errors, e.g. not hex MAC addresses, numeric TCP IP's with port counts over 65K etc etc
- Two mini-games which won by randomly spamming the keyboard
- Linear progression; I've seen power-point presentations more interactive than this
- Many more little things, which I won't even bother listing

2/10

Overload 2 is looking to become a briliant successor to Descent. With enemies hidden in ambush, nibble and accurate controls, smart AI avoiding your fire (pending on level) and creepy labyrinth like designed levels, it brought back memories over two decades old, playing Descent on my good ol' x486 PC driven by the monstrous Voodoo card!! Can't wait for the release!

rF2 is an improvement over the most excellent rF1 (king of online racing of yesteryear) but it needs a lot of polish around the edges to compete with other current titles of the genre. The physics model, tyre & weather simulation and top notch FFB are what differentiates rF2 and makes it "just about" worth its current price-tag (p2p online).

On the other hand the dated graphics, interiors/cockpits, lacklustre tracks (laser scanned anyone?), no official licenses, minimalist steam workshop implementation and non-existent multiplayer lobby beg the question of choosing rF2 (pay to play online) over racing titles like iRacing (sub and fees) or Assetto Corsa (perhaps Project Cars too), which are seemingly more accomplished in much less development time. To put it in perspective, in a mere couple of years, Assetto Corsa has improved by leaps and bounds and currently established as the preferred choice of the modding community and online league racing sim enthusiasts.

In spite of the stiff competition, I would recommend rF2 to dedicated and serious racing enthusiasts for the sim experience. In addition, now that Studio 397 have taken over, the development road-map looks very promising (monthly updates, DX11 at long long last, UI revamp, VR, spotting, mp lobby etc) which at long last will bring rF2 a much wider recognition (not just for purists) and instead of a maybe vote it would be a definitely yes to buy vote.

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EDIT: A small correction, as mentioned in the comments, rFactor2 now includes online multiplayer in the price tag (no more online subscription or lifetime payment). Thanks.