Recent reviews by WHiTE ZombE

A point-and-click adventure game starring a fiesty private gumshoe named Petra set in re-imagined Kingdom of Oz. Many characters from the canonical adventures written by L. Frank Baum make an appearance, and their interpretations in this game are decent. Each character has their own voice, personality, back story (inspired or taken from the books) and motives, although you only get a little taste of what they are like in this world.

The animation of the characters is passable, the voice acting is mostly decent, although the quality of the audio is iffy at times. Also, there is no actual full screen mode, just a boxed screen. As far as gameplay goes, it's all very straight forward and you won't likely find yourself getting lost often or for very long. It's a shame as the story is pretty engrossing. More challenging gameplay or mind puzzles would have made the game much more enjoyable (I'm not saying it wasn't!) There are also hidden "items" in the world that unlock sketches and concept art, but they aren't difficult to find and you don't have to go out of your way to find them.

I haven't completed the game, but I'm already more than halfway done. Looks like this game tops off at around 5 or 6 hours. There are no branching paths, so there is little to no replayability. I won't give away anything, but what I figured would be a standard private eye story set in the land of Oz actually transformed into something slighly more greater.

So, should you buy it? $9.99 is a bit pricey for me to say yes, and the only reason I got this game was because of a Steam sale. It wasn't in a bundle, but the premise and price at the time were enough to persuade me to buy.

Wait for a price reduction and you'll have a fun and interesting way to kill an afternoon.

I'd heard a lot of great things about Monaco so I decided to pick this game up.

From what I can tell, it's a 2D heist game with a lot of stealth elements thrown in for good measure. Sadly, it seems like I may have decided to jump on the bandwagon a bit too late - looks like everyone's already gotten off. The online community for this game seems to be zero with a serious lack of diehards. Playing this game by yourself can only be fun for so long.

I'd recommend getting this game only if you know for certain that you will have other people to play with.

A game that started out with a unique idea and tons of potential has unceremoniously died and faded away from existence.

Initially, creating your own blocky 3D weapon and assigning its attributes is a fun exercise in experimentation. You can create the standard assault rifles, sniper rifles, rocket launchers, etc., but you can also create something fun like a machine gun with explosive rounds. Once your weapon is looked over and accepted by the community (which can take from a day to whenever, depending on the whim of the community), you can join one of the servers and blow someone to blocky hell with it. Sounds fun, right?

Trust me, it's not as fun as you think it is.

While modifying and tweaking with weapons parameters can be intriguing for an hour or two, it just doesn't go much deeper than that. You can't change projectiles or projectile colors, projectile behavior, weapon sounds, or anything else to give your weapon its own personality. Thankfully, the game does balance the weapons attributes so you can't create a fully automatic sniper rifle with zero recoil and earth-shattering rounds.

While you can create your own arenas for you and your friends to play in, as of right now, no one is playing this game. You might find a few diehards in game, but rarely will you be able to bring the mayhem online.

So should you get it? If a sale ever brings the price down to around $2.00 I'd say go for it. There are a ton of better games out there that are worth the $15.00 price that this game is asking.

+Pros+
Voxel-based graphics
Easy to create custom weapons
Tried and true game modes
You can share your creations

-Cons-
Non-existent user base
Voxel-based graphics
Not-so-easy to create in-game crosshairs
Fairly bland gameplay

FTL is a great little game, combining starship management and satisfying battles with a bit of light exploration and RPG-esque elements. The design and art style could be described as very simple, but that doesn't detract from how much fun this game is.

If you like light rogue-like games or have ever wanted to command a starship ala Star Trek, this game is for you.