Brütal Legend

The most metal game ever made.

Worship the Gods of Rock

Brütal Legend is an over the shoulder adventure game where you play a roadie who is sucked into a world of pure rock and roll. The game is about 2/3 adventure, exploration, and story with 1/3 first person real time strategy.

Should You Buy It?

I got it free somewhere so I bet you can find it for dirt cheap. In any case the answer is YES. If you like Heavy Metal (the movie), Spın̈al Tap, or Jack Black you should give the game a try. Worst case scenario is that you love the first half hour and never come back.

Ratings (1-10)

Story: 8 -- If it was generic fantasy world, story would get a 6. Being set in a world of heavy metal makes it so much better.

Graphic Design: 8 -- The world screamed Rock and Roll. It was creative, amusing, and engaging. Maybe this should even be a 9.

Graphic Quality: 6 or 7 -- the game is a bit old so it's not fair to judge. Some models are blocky or cartoony. It worked really well though. 

Gameplay: 5 -- nothing wrong with the gameplay, but nothing special. I didn't get into the combo moves. The RTS elements were enough to keep me invested in the story but few enough that I didn't get bored.

Soundtrack: 11 -- it goes to 11

Voice Acting: 9 -- this is a tough one. Jack Black is always a lot of fun. Jennifer Hale is one of the best voice actors in the industry. Tim Curry brings a typical amazing performance. Some of the other voice acting is done by musicians (including Ozzy Osbourne) who aren't actors. The voice is perfect but the lines are sometimes stilted. Not too bad, but prevents me from giving it a 10.

Oxenfree

A short and sweet point and click adventure with strong interpersonal dialogue.

Review

Oxenfree is a simple adventure game that explores the hero's relationships while solving a haunted island. The adventure itself is fairly straightforward. There aren't many puzzles and the plot is mostly linear. What makes the game endearing is the dialog. It's cute, heartfelt, funny, and sad. The game had a slow start and I almost quit after 5 minutes, but I'm glad I hung in there.

Pros

• Interesting plot
• Meaningful dialog
• Good pacing
• Good voice acting

Cons

• I did not connect with the teenage female protagonist in this strong 1st person game
• As a grumpy old man, the dialog was grating to me. It sounded like a bunch of teenagers talking, with a lot of "... or whatever" and "I guess ..." and "... or something". 

Should You Buy It?

If you are a teenage girl, yes, absolutely. The farther you are from that, the less likely you should buy it. Teenage boy? Sure. 30-year old girl? Maybe.. yeah. 50 year old man?  Maybe not.

Wasteland 2

I barely remember the original Wasteland. I suspect I power-gamed it and waltzed through it.

A Short Review

On the heels of the excellent Hard West, playing Wasteland felt like a chore. Combat is mediocre. The voice acting is sub-par. The UI is lackluster. 

The RPG elements are okay. I would have liked more description of how skills work and how they relate to stats... basically they don't. The stupid grunt is just as good at computers as the genius. It was unclear how to plan for leveling. How many skills do I want to max out? Should I focus on a few or have a great breadth? Will my game be miserable if I don't have a certain skill? Do I need all the skills?

The random encounters were annoying. In my entire time playing I had about 10 encounters but they were almost all identical within two categories -- wimpy bandits or super tough lizards. The bandit encounter were a monotonous waste of time. The lizard encounters were annoying difficult and success was completely determined by how well my "animal specialist" rolled. 

The worst part of Wasteland 2 is that a single exploratory click can ruin the game. I had two such instances.

The first was in Highpool. After I saved the citizens I was walking around and exploring. Came across the graveyard and the UI lured me into digging up a grave. Look. I know it was dumb. I deserve the town to be mad at me. But in my defense, I am used to this style of game reward random clicking around. I'm fully willing to accept some punishment but what happened is the entire town aggroed on me, forcing me to slaughter them. That sucked, from a roleplay perspective but the gameplay also suffered because I lost out on quests, shops, and so on. Worst, it broke the gameflow in that I still had mandatory quests to accomplish in town but the clue-givers refused to talk to me. I had to read spoilers on the Internet to discover what to do. 

The second bad click experience was in the base. After being promoted, I was allowed to enter the base proper. In the barracks there was a nuke with a button. I hit the button. The nuke exploded, killing me and everyone in the base, GAME OVER. Uh.. seriously? You are going to leave a live nuke sitting in the barracks without even putting duct tape over the death button or a sign that says, "warning, live nuke, do not touch". I had even asked an NPC to give me a tour and he refused, saying that recruits never pay attention. Well, maybe if you had given me that tour, you and your buddies would still be alive and I would be playing Wasteland 2 instead of complain about it on a blog that nobody reads.

Summary

Don't bother. Go play Fallout 4 again. If you want squad tactics, try Hard West or XCom.

Hard West

Isometric turn based squad combat with a strong story.

Overview

The basic gameplay of Hard West is nothing new. We have seen it hundreds of times, most notably in XCom. While Hard West's take on it is fun and engaging, what really makes for a memorable experience is the story.

The game is set in the Wild West, or perhaps the Weird West. It is gritty, full of desperados and more anti-heroes than heroes. There is a smattering of the occult -- haunted Indian burial grounds, curses, Chinese herbs, that sort of thing. 

The campaign consists of two adventure lines. Each adventure line is linear, except there is one "prequel" adventure which is not unlocked until you have advanced the story sufficiently. Each adventure tells the story of the main character who is on some quest -- perhaps to find his father, to cure a disease, or to beg Death to return his wife. The story is told by visiting locations and making minor choose-your-own-adventure decisions where you can acquire better guns and equipment, followers, and money. The Narrator does a great job with spot on voice-acting. The story is told in the past tense. Instead of "choice 1: you go to the saloon, choice 2: you go to sleep" you are presented with "choice 1: Solomon went to the saloon, choice 2: Solomon went to sleep". Framing the story as a legend of the past was more engaging for me because it helped my suspension of disbelief. I'm not dodging bullets and burning witches, I'm helping tell the story of a man who dodged bullets and burned witches.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

It's a Western. I have to make the pun.

The Good

Engaging story. Fun tactical missions. Very atmospheric. 

The Bad

"Normal" difficulty felt a little too easy, but switching it to hard just beefed up enemy hit points. This made the game very hard but not more fun. I decided that it was more fun to play on easy mode. Maybe later I was good that I could have bumped it to hard.

The interface is generally pretty good, but sometimes you think you are behind cover and aren't. That is a huge big deal and you can be killed in one shot. I died more often to "oh dang, I thought I was behind cover" than any other reason.

The Ugly

There were a few minor but obvious bugs. Surprising since the game has a lot of polish. For example, every so often a location I had previously visited and "exhausted" would play it's description. Once I had to exit the game and return because I was stuck in a loop of visiting places that were closed (this wasn't a big deal, I didn't lose anything). Also, it looked like there was some placeholder dialog. Normally when you leave an area it just gives you a single choice like, "Leave the saloon while you still have your wits about you". A few times the choice was "End the event", where event was clearly the programmer name for the location you were visiting.

Should You Buy It?

Yes. You like XCom. You can tolerate Wild West. You like good stories. I don't usually like Westerns, but this one drew me in. 

Sam and Max

Point and Click comedy adventure puzzle game in the Telltale Style.

Nostalgia

I loved Sam and Max Hit the Road way back in the day. Lucas Arts was wonderful back then. Since I've enjoyed the Telltale Games I've played, when I saw a Sam and Max bundle, I had to buy it.

Overview

After playing two of the Sam and Max games, I am underwhelmed. The humor is okay, but not enough to keep me engaged. The puzzles are poor -- often obscure or requiring trial and error. There is a lot of tedium running from one end of town to the other just to try another combination.

Recommendation

Sadly, I can't recommend the game. I should be the biggest fan but I barely finished the first game of the series and the second I mostly used spoilers.

Endless Frontier

A collection based idle game for ios.

Overview

Endless Frontier is an idle game, which means that it largely plays itself. The genre has been growing rapidly and idle games are becoming more sophisticated. In this game you collect heroes to form a team to kill wave after wave of enemies. More powerful teams can go farther and kill faster.

The collection aspect is reminiscent of Puzzles and Dragons. Since I don't like the puzzling in PaD but wanted to see more of the collecting, Endless Frontier held my interest.

The Good

There are a lot of options and strategies. There is collecting and leveling, so common in our post-Pokemon world. The game needs periods of idle time but you can generally give it less or more attention depending on your availability.

The Bad

This game has two fatal flaws. The first is the semi-mandatory 30 second ads. When you watch an ad, the game speed doubles for twenty minutes. When playing without the boost, the game feels slow and I would have quickly given up on it. To make matters worse, the ads crash the app about 75% of time. 

You can buy a speed boost in the game, but for me this has problems. If I was paying to disable ads, I don't mind that, but that's not how the boost is presented. For all I know it's an additional boost on top of the ads. Another problem is that I severely dislike that sort of payment. I don't want to pay for a week of benefit. I would rather pay a higher price for an app that is permanently unlocked. The only subscription based game I have paid for in years is World of Warcraft, and that is a huge value for the money. Lastly, the price of the speed boost is exorbitant at $5 per week. I will get much more enjoyment out of a $10 app than two weeks of this silly thing.

The second fatal flaw is that the game must be running in the foreground to really progress. This is becoming normal for the genre and I don't understand it. I understand why clicking should be mandatory, but why differentiate between the app running in the foreground vs. sleeping? If I have an hour-long run that doesn't require my attention, why hijack my phone so I can do something else? You expect me to stare at the screen for an hour? To make matters worse, the game is a big battery drain. 

Conclusion

If you don't mind the ads or paying $5/month and don't mind dedicating your phone to this game, there is fun to be had. Even still, it's free to try. 

Small World 2

Why play board games with people when you can play against an AI?

Overview

Small World is a medium-light area-control board game. At the start, you pick a race and conquer part of the world, Risk-style. Each race offers a unique ability to help conquer more, score points, or defend against the other players. It offers interesting decisions and good replayability. 

The strongest feature of Small World is how well it balances the excitement of attacking other players with the inherent unfairness of direct conflict. In essence, the game scores like a peaceful non-competitive game with little interaction, but feels like you are a mighty conqueror devastating the other players.

Computer Adaptation

Overall, this adaptation gets a B+. The screen, graphics, sound, UI.. just about everything gets a solid A. They did a great job bringing the game to the computer. The only flaw would be the AI, which is still pretty good. Still, even if I give the AI a B, that is so important to me it brings the whole game down to a B+. For a game of this type, the AI is more than sufficient. If you have never played Small World before the AI will certainly beat you for the first few games and be challenging for a dozen more.

Recommendation

I'm not sure who I would recommend this game to. I received a free copy as a gift and it was a pleasant diversion. I think the board game benefits from the social aspect of playing with humans and the computer version suffers for it. I suppose I would recommend this game for anybody who is a fan of the board game but wants more options for playing... like you only have two people but want a 4-player game.

(I am reviewing the Steam version for PC. I have also played the iPad version of Small World 1 and have similar thoughts.)