Recent reviews by Bubbay

Honestly, the first day was really bringing me into the story -- voice acting was great, the story was presented in a compelling way -- but by day two it became nearly impossible to play due to bugs.

Sometimes I'd click to interact with something. get flung into the air, and land out of bounds, sometimes movement would just....stop, and prevent you from moving anywhere. It wasn't an invisible wall preventing you from going into certain areas that some games do as a poor way to control where you are, it would happen randomly while walking anywhere. If it allowed me to back up over the path I just came from, sometimes it would let me go forward. Other times, I would be completely frozen in place and had to restart the day.

I really want to like this game, but for now, it's unplayable for me.

2 days ago, I would have recommended this game wholeheartedly, but the announcement today that they are starting to require third-party sign ins in order to play has killed any enthusiasm I once had.

It's a shame -- they had a really fun game and Sony is ruining it with a short-sighted money grab.

And here I am 2 days later recommending it again!

Lots of fun and the developer keeps adding great features.

I used to play this a lot -- it was one of the games in a pretty frequent rotation for me, but since the most recent major update, it's lost all charm and my playtime has dwindled to nothing.

This used to be a nice casual builder that looked great because of how cities grew organically. The last few updates, however, the developers have fundamentally changed base aspects of the game to make it a more difficult builder. Previously, you could just build for cool factor first, then try and make it work later. It wouldn't always work, but it did often enough to make it fun.

Now, micro has gone way up, as well as the need to make more detailed plans when building. It's still very pretty, but nowhere near as enjoyable as it used to be, where the rule of cool reigned supreme.

It's not a bad game, per se, it's just lost the calm, fun, charm that originally drew me to the game.

I once invaded a primitive plantoid species and forced them into a life of servitude as my houseplants for a millennia.

This seems like it might be one of those games where the story is the star and that deep story is told in subtle ways both by the characters you meet and the environment you interact with, and it certainly tries to do so, but fails miserably.

The first, and most glaring, issue is the terrible translation. While in many games this is not that big of a problem, when a game is trying to tell a story in as few words as possible, the ones they do use need to be on point. These were anything but.

The second issue is how the player character engages in dialogue, by which I mean he doesn't. This is one of those games where you interact with anything that highlights, and when that interaction is a person, you talk to them, but that dialogue is always one sided. You never see what your character is saying, which when combined with the bad translation, makes it hard to understand what is going on. Too much of the story is lost this way.

Finally is the gameplay on the train. The game is set up to give you a large amount of exposition on the train by overhearing the conversations of the passengers while you go about your job of keeping the train running and the passengers healthy and happy. This is a great idea and the concept really reinforces the idea that you're just some guy trying to do his job, not an action hero. But this is the main way for you to get the story, and the minigames required to keep the train running prevent you from being able to see that dialogue.

When you're forced to choose between playing the game and understanding what the hell is going on -- and I literally found myself saying "What the hell is going on?" because of all this -- playing the game wins out, because, hey, you can't progress unless you play the game.

Once you've decided to play these minigames and not hear the (badly translated) story, the quality of gameplay becomes all you have, and this is mediocre at best. The minigames are terribly repetitive and simple, but take a lot of time. The main game is rather good, but becomes rote quite quickly. Nothing novel or clever comes up, no special puzzles appear where you have to figure the right way to take out the enemies, it's just the same "save your ammo, aim for the head, punch if you can" every level. It becomes a slog quite quickly. An easy slog, but a slog nonetheless.

The idea seems like it could have been really great in a Papers, Please sort of way, but gameplay decisions and terrible translation mar the execution. Pass on this one unless you can get it for $5 or less.

I loved Company of Heroes, which is saying a lot be cause I generally don't like RTS games. It was a fun, easily accessible, game that had some scripted events, but largely let you play the game you wanted to play.

Company of Heroes 2 is none of that. I'll be honest -- I couldn't get past mission 3 or 4. Every mission so far has been highly scripted and has The One Way of completing it, it seems. They ease in some of the new concepts (like freezing), but otherwise, they assume you have been playing RTS's non-stop for your whole life as there is little effort to get you used to the interface and style of game play. In addition, in many of the early missions, there are a LOT of troops on screen, but you can only control a few, which adds to the confusion. Maybe they were going for an aesthetic choice with all that, with the whole "chaos of the battlefield" stuff, but it's just not fun.

On top of all that, it is just unforgiving. I play a lot of games and have some RTS experience, despite my dislike for the genre, but if you make one single mistake on your exectution, you lose the mission. I can see something like that when playing on the top difficulty setting and in a later mission, but on mission one at the middle setting? Add in the part that every mission so far was heavily scripted and/or provided you with a (very) limited set of troops and you have a game that does not give you much of a reason to want to play it.

Not recommended. I am already uninstalling it from my computer.

Did you watch the movie Heat and think, "OH MAN, I WANNA DO THAT? Well, not the part where they all get killed, but the rest of it HELLZ YEAH!"

If so, then buy this game right now.

If not, then may I suggest you check out Barbie™ Dreamhouse Party™?

Equal parts saturday morning cartoons, every cheesy 80's action movie ever, Cpl. Hicks, and Far Cry 3 gameplay. Bake in a neon-colored oven for about 10 hours and you have an amazing game.

This game is just long enough and has just enough content that all of the cheesiness never goes stale.

Definitely a buy.

There is no way to describe this game to make it sound fun: you are an immigration official responsible for inspecting immigrants' paperwork before allowing them into the country. The 8-bit graphics, the MIDI sound -- it all seems like it should be a boring game, but the weird part is, the game is strangely compelling.

Using amazingly simple compnents, Papers, Please weaves a brilliant story that draws you in and makes you care about characters you never see, feel for a state that is truly oppressive, and strive to do the best you can at a boring and repetetive job. Add in a branching storyline with 20 different endings depending on your actions, it is well worth the $10 when at full price; at any sort of a discount, it is a crime not to buy it.