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It’s no stretch to say that much of Zwei’s charm can be attributed to its outstanding localization. A trope-reliant tale of a vampire princess and her newly christened vassal on a quest to reclaim a stolen birthright, Zwei is far from the most cerebral (or even unpredictable) title in Falcom’s library. It carries a cartoonish sensibility that’s one step above something like the wacky hijinks of Gurumin, but not quite as serious as Ys. As long as I’m making comparisons, Zwei actually reminds me intensely of Brave Fencer Musashi, with a 90s anime vibe that eschews all of the moe pandering that feels omnipresent in modern games of this style.

Zwei’s characters aren’t especially deep, but they’re incredibly charismatic. The best is how each of their bold personalities shines through after only a few lines of dialogue. Roguish hero Ragna feels particularly well-characterized; he’s a rough but good-natured sort of guy, with a toolbox of colorful phrases that help him steal every scene he’s in. Plus, he doesn’t sulk overly long during his requisite “hero discovers a shocking revelation” character arc. Bonus points, my dude. Surprisingly, the game even features an English dub that is astonishingly high-quality considering its status as a niche, PC-exclusive JRPG from 2008. I don’t know how or why they got the budget for it, but I sure ain’t complaining.

Zwei has serious moments, to be sure, but it generally skews goofy. It’s actually stronger for it. Falcom has plenty of other games awash in melodrama, so while the developer clearly has the chops to write complex stories, it’s nice to see them let their hair down with Zwei. Just don’t mistake “silly” for “childish” — Zwei doesn’t avoid darker themes like death and self-doubt so much as it dances around them with a knowing smirk. Its soundtrack contributes to its lighthearted tone; it’s retro, rooted in PSX-era sensibilities, and maybe a tad more comical than Falcom’s usual fare. (But trust that there’s a violin-heavy battle theme in there somewhere.)

The action in Zwei sticks to a predictable loop: watch some cutscenes, dive into a dungeon, fight a boss, and repeat. Of course, just about any video game can be boiled down to the repetition of a few key tasks, but I bring attention to Zwei’s structure because it starts to feel repetitive pretty early on. Dungeons are unfortunately bland and boxy, consisting of hallways connected to rooms connected to hallways. There’s little variation in terms of shape, structure, or mechanics; they only differ aesthetically, and even then, most fall into the typical “elemental dungeon” archetype so common to RPGs.

Combat isn’t especially nuanced, either. Zwei’s namesake is its two-character combat system that enables the player to switch between melee fighter Ragna and spell-slinging Alwen with the press of a button. Ragna gains access to a few customization options for his multi-purpose “Anchor Gear” weapon, and Alwen has a total of seven magic spells, but Zwei’s floaty physics and imprecise targeting prevent it from achieving the tactile feel perfected by Ys. There’s very little strategy required in any dungeon beyond mashing the attack button until enemies die. Bosses are an exception, demanding pattern recognition and skillful execution that make them the most exciting part of playing Zwei.

One of Zwei’s more unusual touches is its non-traditional experience point system. Instead of leveling up by defeating enemies, Ragna and Alwen only gain experience by eating food. Food drops from defeated enemies, however, so it doesn’t feel that different from a standard experience system in practice. Food also restores health, and because some bosses have attacks that feel impossible to reliably dodge, I tended to stockpile my food until the end of every dungeon, leveling several times in the course of each boss encounter. In short, it’s a little weird, but not too weird to make sense of.

Though disappointingly routine in terms of gameplay, Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection is a welcome throwback to early 2000 JRPG aesthetics. There’s a level of polish here that goes beyond what a lot of modern RPGs fail to achieve as a result of their expanded scope. It’s also terribly, almost annoyingly charismatic, so much that I couldn’t believe how quickly I was drawn into its intimate little world.

Maybe it’s the floating islands. I do have a thing for floating islands.

You’ve got your super-realistic Farming Simulator and Real Farming, putting you behind the wheel of branded combine harvesters and tractors, going through all the motions of harvesting your crops. Then there’s the more fantastical titles like Stardew Valley, where mining rare gems deep in a mysterious cave is the true key to success.

And somewhere in the middle of that lies Farm Together, a simplistic yet charming game about planting crops, looking after animals, and growing a wee farm into a harvesting empire. It’s cute and stress-free, and while it has some less than perfect elements, it’s keeping me coming back, evening after evening.

Farm Together starts you out with a fairly small plot and a modest amount of money. There’s a basic tutorial, which will walk you through how to plant and harvest crops, how to sell your produce and how to buy items for your farm. There are tasks to work towards – harvest 20 lettuces; pick 10 apples from trees, that kind of thing. But there’s no overarching goal or end point. Farm Together is simply your playpen. Design your farm however you want it, expanding it as you go along. Your only barrier is how much money you have – and that’s where things get a little tricky.

Despite not having any microtransactions, Farm Together has a lot of elements that make it feel like a typical pay-to-win mobile game. For starters, your crops have real-world timers on them, the most lucrative of which will take two actual days to mature. More than that later. You also have four different types of currency: coins, gems, medals and tickets.

Now, after a good 10 hours or so with the game, I still don’t know what a ticket is used for, and I only have one or two medals. Coins are earned for harvesting crops, and gems are earned for selling produce and completing tasks. Both are important in growing your farm: coins will buy seeds to plant, animals to raise and all the basics you need to keep your farm ticking over. Gems are used to buy decorations and functional structures for your farm, for instance a barn that allows you to expand your crop storage, or stalls that allow you to sell a variety of produce.

It all feels a bit unnecessary, and I can’t help but think that the gems and medals were added with a “premium” currency model in mind. It would have made much more sense to have everything unified with the simple coin. It’s hard to keep track of what actions earn what currency, and since gems are needed to decorate and accessorise your farm – fences, pathways, etc. – it takes some time to earn enough to really feel like you can make your mark.

The real-time crop timers are a hindrance, too. While in the likes of Stardew Valley your crops will mature based on in-game days, in Farm Together you’re at the mercy of actual time. Sure, there are crops you can plant that’ll be ready in 10 minutes, but the earnings are low and it makes for a laborious gameplay loop. Anything worthwhile takes at least several hours, and in some cases, multiple days. You have the option of watering your planets a few times during their growth cycle, each time knocking a small amount of time from its timer, but it’s never enough to really make a difference. It’s hard, then, to sit down with Farm Together for an extended play session. If you build up enough of the various currencies, you may be able to spend a solid hour or two decorating your plot of land. But unless you plan on twiddling your thumbs a lot while you wait for stuff to grow, for the most part, it’s a game you’ll only be able to dip in for short, 20 minute bursts.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, and perhaps that’s exactly how developer Milkstone Studios has intended it to be. But it’s something we’re not used to seeing in console gaming; it’s very much a feature of mobile games, where it’s easier to just log into an app several times a day while going about your business. I don’t know about you, but when I’m sitting down in front of my Xbox One for the evening, I want a game I can get comfortable with for at least an hour or two. Sure, I’ve got into the habit of jumping into Farm Together for a short session before playing anything else, but it’s always a shame to have to turn it off because there’s nothing left to do.

Farm Together also lets you build a house for your character, which you can supposedly decorate and furnish however you like, adding a more Sims-like element to the game. Unlocking a house is laborious, though. You need 15,000 coins to buy a treehouse – which is fairly easy to raise after harvesting a few fields of good crops. But I foolishly assumed that buying it would be it. Oh no, you have to wait for it to be built first. Initially, it had a 24-hour timer. So, returning to the game the next day, I was excited to see what my treehouse would hold. Foiled again; turns out that first 24-hour timer was just to build one quarter of the treehouse, which is frankly ridiculous.

The name Farm Together comes from the game’s online community elements. The idea is that anyone can jump into anyone else’s farm, co-operating with each other on planting and harvesting. It seems like a nice idea in principle, but in all the times I’ve been playing it, I haven’t seen anyone online. The game list remains empty whenever I search, and despite leaving my farm open for anyone to drop in on, it’s never happened. So I can’t comment on the game’s cooperative features. It’s not entirely Milkstone Studios’ fault that not enough people are playing it, but with a name like ‘Farm Together’ it was clearly designed as a key part of the experience. It’s fully playable in single player, but it’s a shame that’s really your only option.

As far as easy-going farming simulators go, Farm Together has a lot of potential. It’s surprisingly nice looking, and it’s easy enough to get to grips with. There are no overly complex controls, and the freedom to design your farm exactly how you’d like is a great touch. It’s just unfortunate that the game is held back by some frankly baffling design choices. It feels like it was designed with microtransactions in mind, with real-world timers and multiple forms of currency making little sense on a console game. It’s also a shame that the key facet of the game – the ability to farm together – is pretty much impossible thanks to the low player base.

If it wasn’t for its mobile gaming elements, Farm Together would be easy to recommend. As it is, it’s a fun game to play in short bursts, but there’s no overlooking its bewildering design choices.

Indie horror games are some of the best around, normally tackling subjects that are deemed too unsafe for most AAA studios to broach. In 2Dark, developer Gloomywood takes on one of the hardest topics there is: child abduction and murder. But it doesn’t quite hit the mark, partly due to its tone never quite feeling right. Partly because it’s not quite the game you’re expecting.

At the beginning we’re introduced to the main character, Mr Smith, on holiday with his wife and two children. They’re camping in the woods, and to give Mr Smith a moment to put up the tent in peace, Mrs Smith takes the children off to gather some firewood. A grave mistake, as it turns out. Sure enough, screams ring out in the forest and Mr Smith (seriously now, I’m already sick of writing that unimaginative name) discovers his wife’s decapitated corpse in the darkness of the woods, and is forced to watch his children driven away in the back of a van.

Cut to seven years later, and our protagonist has been forced to leave his job as a detective, having assaulted suspected child abusers, and he has become obsessed with finding any of these disgusting monsters in the city of Gloomywood. Never abandoning the hope that his children are still alive, out there somewhere in this place that has more horrendous crime than Gotham City.

This work is done from his home, a place that, much like Gotham City’s favourite crimefighter, has a secret room – one that can only be opened by putting a fake book on a specific shelving unit. This is where the ex-detective stores the evidence he finds at the various crime scenes he now investigates as a vigilante. This is also a neat little trick that 2Dark uses to teach the player how to use the inventory system, but that’s the only intuitive thing about said system. Instead of merely having the book in your inventory, you have to physically equip it every time you approach the shelf to open the secret door. Annoyingly, this applies to any key picked up throughout the game too, and you can only equip it in your weapon hand, meaning you can’t hold a key and a gun or melee weapon at the same time. Yet this guy was apparently trusted with a firearm, during his time on the force.

Now that he’s a vigilante, Mr Smith has to rely on the local news to find his targets, before gathering evidence of their crimes, and potentially discovering new criminals connected to each child abduction case. On the wall in his secret room resides a map of Gloomywood, onto which photos of suspects will be pinned as they’re discovered. This map acts as your portal to each level.

As you might expect from a game called 2Dark, the lighting is often scarce. The visual style is quite cool, to be honest, with a low resolution, almost PSOne look to the characters that inhabit Gloomywood. The whole game looks like a mixture of 2D and 3D, viewed from a kind of top-down perspective, with a nice lighting system that makes every shadow really pop on screen, meaning that light sources are absolutely essential. But in a game based primarily around stealth, smart usage of light is also important.

That’s where the perception of 2Dark is a little off. The artwork and visual style suggest that it’s a horror game – hell, its opening scene in the forest suggests that too – but it’s closer to Hitman than anything else. Only, nowhere near that quality. And the game doesn’t actually tell you this, which brings me to my next point: the tutorial is extremely poor. Other than the clever way of teaching you how to use key items, with the fake book in Mr Smith’s home, the game basically throws up screens full of text about almost every system in the game. Instead of having the player run through various scenarios to dynamically teach us how to deal with individual gameplay mechanics, an info dump is used and it makes it easy to miss important things. It’s frustrating to have to go into the “help” section of the pause menu, to refresh your memory on things that would likely be second nature, had the game intelligently taught us how to play.

To be fair to developer Gloomywood, the gameplay is actually quite good once you’ve gotten a grasp on things. The aim is to rescue any captive children at the current location, and to find evidence of the criminal activity there. But how you get to that end point is up to you. Do you go in and murder every baddie, or use the environment to take down the boss, or silently rescue every child and allow the gathered evidence to condemn the criminals to justice? Chances are, you’ll fancy your chances at the silent idea, before realising that it’s not really designed well enough for that, and you’ll inevitably resort to murdering everybody. Then, after the missions end, you discover that there are consequences to your actions. This leads to replay value, at least.

Stealth works quite well in 2Dark, with L2 allowing you to sneak around. Those deep shadows come in handy here; good hiding spots when NPCs come wandering by, but obviously you’ll be in a bit of a pickle if they’re carrying a flashlight. That said, the consequences of being seen aren’t always that bad. During one mission in a hospice, I was spotted by a guard carrying a nightstick, but I basically got him to follow me outside before shooting him. Because we were away from any people, the sound didn’t carry far enough to alert anyone nearby, and I was free to continue on.

Enemies carrying guns, however, are a different story altogether. And the boss enemies are just bullet sponges, even worse than the regular enemies. Combat is very awkward, possibly to dissuade players from simply ignoring the stealth portion of the game, or possibly just because it’s not very good. The point remains that 2Dark is intended to be a stealth game, so full combat isn’t necessarily meant to be easy, but it should still work well enough and it just doesn’t. And, for some reason, there is no option to take out guards without killing them. Sneaking up behind someone with a crowbar or other blunt weapon, just results in their death, not to mention copious amounts of blood pooling underneath their bodies. Weirdly though, despite the attention to detail of persistent bloody footprints or drag marks, NPCs simply don’t notice them.

The AI certainly isn’t particularly intelligent in 2Dark, as you might have guessed. It does at least react to sound, so stomping around at running speed will cause NPCs to investigate where the sound originated from, which can actually be used to set up an ambush or get someone out of the way, allowing you to sneak around them more easily. When enemies do see you, they either shoot on sight (naturally) or run directly at you until they either catch and murder you, or you put them down yourself. But, like Hitman, there are sometimes other ways around the AI and your objectives. While not as comprehensive and open as IO Interactive’s games, 2Dark offers level-specific alternatives to combat/stealth, from disguises to unique ways to stop a boss in their tracks. It makes you stop and think about how to proceed, as long as you’re patient enough.

Patience really is required, too. Some levels can take upwards of an hour to complete, and that’s not taking into account pacifist runs or making sure you save every single child in the level. Weirdly, gathering evidence is the most important part of each level, not saving children. And that’s a big problem with 2Dark: it doesn’t treat the subject matter with respect at all. It only punishes you if you accidentally kill a child yourself, but if one is murdered by a psychopath through your inaction (or ineptitude), it just means you won’t get a little “objective complete” checkmark at the end of the level. It never really feels like a serious game, more like a daft slasher film from the Eighties.

The recession period of the real-time strategy game nears an end. Over the next several months, you should be able to sink your collective resource gatherers into a host of highly anticipated real-time strategy games, including Total Annihilation: Kingdoms and Command & Conquer 2: Tiberian Sun. But how has the real-time strategy game changed during the genre's extended absence? Warzone 2100, from Eidos Interactive and Pumpkin Studios, marks a slight deviation from the formula, emphasizing action over strategy and combat over base micromanagement. Impressive in some areas yet lacking in others, Warzone 2100's highly navigable 3D engine, unique campaign structure, and multiplayer gameplay should please most real-time strategy fans.

In the year 2085, the system designed to protect North America from nuclear warfare malfunctions. Instead of defending against an assault, the NASDA satellite system launches a first attack against the major cities around the world, and targeted countries soon retaliate against North America with their own set of missiles. Fast-forward to 2100 - a group of survivors form The Project to search for pre-collapse technologies. As a commander heading up the effort, you'll realize over the course of the game's three campaigns that you aren't alone in the search for old technology.

Like most real-time strategy games, Warzone 2100 follows a basic formula: Gather resources, construct your base, and then engage enemy defenses. Although the formula remains intact, there are several twists. Warzone 2100 eschews the art of resource management for the most part, particularly in the single-player campaign. Gone is the need to create dozens of resource gatherers, like Command & Conquer's harvesters or Starcraft's SCVs. And you won't have to concentrate on multiple moneymaking endeavors. Just one commodity exists in the future: oil. Locate the oil source, construct an oil derrick and a power station, and the "money" begins pouring in. Trucks, the chief builders in the game, serve simply for building base structures and repairing them.

Moving the focus away from the - some would argue - tedious micromanagement of resource gathering makes room for Warzone 2100's extensive research tech tree and unit design. Instead of dishing out generic tanks, jeeps, and planes, Warzone 2100 permits you to design units based on whichever chassis, wheels, weapons, and special abilities have been researched. For instance, perhaps you need a small, fast, reconnaissance unit; just open up the design menu, select the various components, then begin construction at a factory. Once the weaker units become obsolete (as you're sure to eventually research better components), you can delete the design and even recycle the old units for the new and improved variety. Unit types include tanks, hovercraft, VTOLs (aircraft), and cyborg infantry, and weapons such as rockets, mortars, machine guns, cannons, and cluster bombs can be fitted to the designs. Although the box touts over 2,000 different unit design combinations, the actual number seems more limited. For instance, tanks have five different body styles on which you can affix several different tracks and weaponry, leaving you with five similar tanks (though the more-powerful body styles receive the better weapon choices). The artificial intelligence of units is impressive, though most of the positive effects rely on various interface options. Units can be ordered to retreat when damaged, fire at long range, or attach themselves to sensor towers to attack enemies within range. Additionally, units gain experience based on the number of kills; a unit with more experience will fire more accurately and withstand more punishment. A glance at the game manual reveals that if a unit manages to amass 512 kills, it will achieve hero status. Although that figure seems absurd, there are so many enemy units in Warzone 2100 (and you'll build plenty yourself), that a high kill count isn't necessarily out of reach. Another nice touch in Warzone 2100 is unit autonomy. A repair bot will commence repairs on any nearby damaged unit without being handheld through the process. Despite their intelligence, units can't seem to get from point A to point B correctly each time, and Warzone 2100 features some moderate unit-pathfinding frustrations.

Warzone 2100's best feature is the 3D engine - it looks great, with detailed terrain and weather effects, and it's extremely fast, especially when coupled with a Direct3D-supported 3D accelerator (the software mode is understandably less appealing). In a visual style quite close to Cavedog's Total Annihilation, the battlefield comes alive with rolling terrain, elevated plateaus, deep valleys, and more than enough colorful weapon and explosion effects. Video clips play in between and even during missions, providing the lowdown on the task ahead. To complement the excellent 3D engine is an easy-to-use and highly configurable interface. Keyboard commands can be completely remapped, a handy feature considering how freely you can maneuver the floating camera.

As mentioned before, the single-player game emphasizes action over construction, and this is reflected in the campaign structure. Instead of building a brand-new base for each mission, your belongings, including units and experience points, are carried over to subsequent missions within that campaign. Not only does this put an emphasis on defensive structures, of which there are plenty, but it encourages you to keep experienced units alive. Most players will welcome the unique mission structure, but the concept isn't without a few problems. The majority of missions include the dreaded timer, a potential annoyance when objectives change midmission. The timer becomes most irritating, though, in the "kill everything that moves" missions, when an occasional pesky enemy tank hides meekly in the corner of the map. Also, the single-player game starts off quite slow with the first 12 or 13 missions being little more than the "destroy the enemy base" variety. Fortunately, the interest level picks up in the second and third campaign, offering new terrain sets, a few new mission goals, and different explosive toys to play with.

Although Warzone 2100 slips a bit in the single-player game, the multiplayer experience takes in the slack. The usual gamut of protocols are supported (LAN, modem, TCP/IP Internet as well as Mplayer), and Warzone 2100 offers several game options like unit restrictions, initial base layout, teams, alliances, and a number of computer opponents. A single-player skirmish mode is also included for multiplayer practice. The multiplayer game builds on Warzone 2100's key concepts, specifically how to manage your research-output-to-unit-construction ratio and puts resource gathering and base construction more on the forefront.

After the dust has settled, Warzone 2100 will be remembered most for its elaborate interface and beautiful 3D engine. The single-player game, while including some innovative features, starts slowly and never really reaches an engaging level. Multiplayer, however, should interest most, particularly real-time strategy fans who prefer action-oriented gameplay over resource gathering and micromanagement. Promises of additional maps and units from the designers, coupled with the extensive multiplayer features, make for a real-time strategy game that, while not the pinnacle of its genre, is still worth a look.

Great jokes - 10/10.

This section tells the history of the world of 18+ MEMORY

18+ MEMORY - is a classic memory game where you will have to do levels as quick as you can. After every level done you will be able to enjoy sexually explicit pictures of really beautiful girls. In this game you will be able to dive in the world of irrestrainable pleasure and joy .
Good luck!

All characters appearing in this game are over 18 years of age.

KEY FEATURES:
- 20 Exciting Levels
- Beautiful Artworks
- Nice Music
-Memory Pumping

It’s late the fall season and that means that Halloween is a big thing, but while the costumes, candy and decorations come out en masse, it’s rare you ever see a video game centered on the holiday outside of some limited-time special events. That’s a big part of what makes FunCom’s Hide and Shriek so interesting. Now holiday-themed games do exist and they have a sketchy history of being gimmicky messes at best, but while Hide and Shriek is a jump-scare ridden game with a simple premise, there’s enough here to give it some depth beneath its holiday charm, as long as you can find a friend that’s willing to play it with you and engage all the way.

The premise of Hide and Shriek is undeniably mischievous. You and your fellow player are sorcerer students of two competing magical schools. Every Halloween the students of these rival institutions have contests to see who the better tricksters are. They cast invisibility on themselves and run around the school after hours trying to collect orbs and sneak them back to pedestals for points. The catch is that if they know where the other student is, they can do a shriek attack to scare the living day lights out of their opponent. To help them with this, there are numerous runes scattered throughout the school that allow the students to cast various spells such firing a fireball or arming a door with a trap that will blow the opener back with a wind blast when touched.

Hide and Shriek is entirely a two player in both public and private matches. One player starts on red side while the other starts on blue and the goal is to search the school for the aforementioned orbs inside cupboards, lockers and desks and try to rush them back to your color’s pedestal before your opponent can stop you with a timely scare or trap. Games last 10 minutes and each orb retrieved nets 10,000 points with various points awarded for tricking your opponent or scaring them with a shriek. However, the game can also end prematurely if you shriek scare your opponent three times. The rules are simple, but the game is deceptively strategic.

For instance, how do you find your opponent to scare them? Observation. You can’t see them, but you can see and hear doors they open or close. Moreover, many spells will signal an opponent’s presence or reveal them outright if they stumble through your cleverly placed magic. Spells are really the best way to get an edge. At the beginning of each game, five runes are revealed for play and each on its own has a specific effect. However, you can collect multiple runes to fuse them and cast various new spells. For instance, one rune might cast a fireball, but combine it with a rune that will reveal nearby traps and you can craft a spell trap that will mark enemies with a sticky bell if they trigger it. Experimenting with what each combination of runes makes is pretty fun and using them effectively against your opponent is key to moving orbs safely or stunning them for a shriek scare. Moreover, once you use a spell, it gets permanently marked down in a grimoire where you can easily refer to study which spells do what.

The shriek scares are downright bloodcurdling too. Before each game you have the opportunity to customize a familiar that will represent your shriek. There are various unlockable scares, ranging from a skull, to a scarecrow, to dead faced masks of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in honor of the election year, and each head has various cosmetic unlockables that can be gained to customize your shriek familiar to your liking. This equates to what your opponents see when they get blasted by your shriek scare, which plays out much like a jump scare akin to the game over screens in Five Nights at Freddy’s. Coming up with your own personal terrifying visage is part of the fun and there’s a lot that becomes available as you continue to play games and level up.

The limitations of Hide and Shriek lie in just how focused it is on the main experience and players properly engaging with it. There’s no single-player content here. Despite the fact that experimentation in an active game is part of the mystery, it also would have been beneficial to at least have a training ground where players could fiddle with the game’s various magic; perhaps once we unlocked the spell in our grimoire. Moreover, there is only one arena in the game, and complex though it may be, this game seems like it would benefit from a variety of maps. Certainly with the classroom aesthetic, one could play around with magic sports complexes, neighborhoods or even some large haunted house. The game does itself a service by changing up where orbs and runes are randomly every game, but variety in arenas would help the game to stave off stagnancy.

The only other problem with Hide and Shriek lies entirely in how much players are willing to engage. It’s a scary game for sure, but we certainly noticed that a game could get pretty dull if players weren’t actively going after one another. The fact is that once you get a couple orbs, you can play defensive and just wait out the clock, camping a room and waiting for the other player to try to figure something out. There’s plenty the game offers to help players balance each other, but one can easily run a game by collecting a few orbs quickly, setting up a series of traps to keep the other player from doing anything about it and just camping a spot till they trip a trap. It’s the kind of game where if you’re not ready and running from the get-go, you might have a hard time.

Despite being themed around a holiday, Hide and Shriek is surprisingly fun and offers some amusing layers. Jump scares and shock horror aside, it’s really the runes that make this game much more fun than it first appears. They add various depths of strategy to the game to make it sort of like a weird game of Halloween cat and mouse. That said, the shrieks most definitely do their job. We can probably deal without having a cheap Hillary or Trump mask screaming at us, but then again, it didn’t stop us from amusement when we managed to catch our opponent with our personal shriek scare. Hide and Shriek is limited in its scope, but that tunnel vision focus on what it wants to accomplish might just be what makes it worth playing.

This is just an honest non-biased review of the game after giving it a try and debating if this is a fps worth trying out. These are some of the issues I came across. Obviously this game is a work in progress. The rest of the review is down below.

1. Pistol class is extremely unrealistic and overpowered. The pistol has the same range as a sniper with accuracy just as good. The pistol also has damage that rivals even a shotgun. Basically it is a hand held sniper with the power of a shotgun. No pistol should ever be this powerful while still maintaining the accuracy of a sniper rifle. (Pistols should be offhand weapons, I dont understand why you would make a main class with a pistol)
   
2. Getting killed even though you are around the wall... The shots seem to still hit you even though you ran behind the wall, or the shots are lagging/delayed and the shot does not hit you until you already passed the corner.
   
3. Spawn points... While some are not as bad as others, some are just plain broken.... Spawning on top of an enemy base, spawning in the same spot multiple times (while enemies spawn in more convenient locations), Spawning very far away from a check point or flag, while the enemy spawns next to your flag...
   
4. Runs speed and lack of sprint and jumping physics.... The lack of a sprint button is disappointing, causing you to spam jump if you want to move fast as some classes... Some classes are stuck on sprint while other have no option to sprint... The jump mechanics are very off, some classes jumping crazy distance while some not even able to jump on places other classes can easily reach.
   
5. Lack of knife/hand to hand combat and lack of grenades. Grenades should be limited like in other shooting games. The lack of these is very disappointing. Also lack of offhand weapons but this is minor.
   
6. Getting no KR from custom games... Custom games are a great feature because you can make the game however you want (including making run speed/jump more balanced). However the only way you can get KR is by playing regular games meaning your forced to play with the unrealistic and unbalanced way that the game currently is....

All in all I think this game could be alot better with much more work, but as for now I will stick to a more polished shooting game. Hope this game keeps being developed and it turns out good because atm it is lackluster, but with some work could be a very good simple browser based fps.

Golf With Your Friends is a game that does exactly what it says on the tin. This is minigolf, and… you can play it with your friends!

The minigolf here is really as simple as it gets. You simply decide the direction you want to hit the ball, set the power you wish to hit it at, and then let fly with a single tap of a button. There’s no analogue stick flicking or timing-based triple tap systems that you might find in other golfing games, making this instantly accessible and allowing for some of the game’s crazier elements.

Up to twelve players can play at once, but perhaps the craziest thing about the game is that you don’t have to play Golf With Your Friends with your friends. It actually has full support for golfing on your own, with family members, friends of friends, work colleagues, passing acquaintances and even complete strangers. Let’s just call them friends you haven’t met yet. The quick play option will bundle you and a motley crew of unknowns into classic mini-golf on one of the game’s 11 courses, everyone going all at once, but keeping a lid on any potential mischief by having no player collisions by default and fairly tight time limits on each hole.

As well as a server browser where you can hop into custom games that might delve into GWYF’s modified rules and modes. These include swapping holes for hoops to jump through – making things maddeningly more difficult – or for goals and strafing goalies while you now strike at a hockey puck. Then there’s the Party Mode, throwing a handful of chaotic power ups into the mix for you to pick up and curse your rivals with. There’s nothing quite like hitting a randomiser that turns everyone into odd shapes as they’re trying desperately to navigate through a level, or cunningly holding onto a freeze ability until you need to stop yourself rolling off a ledge. All of these modes can then be customised to different shot and time limits, collisions, ball spin and more, and you can play with your own rules in both open and closed lobbies.

The course designs get progressively weirder, starting off in a standard wooded area, jumping to a haunted mansion, then a space station, a sci-fi volcano, all the way through to a Worms course thanks to Team17 publishing the game. The laws of gravity are defied, there’s spectral ramps that you can temporarily make solid, boost pads and explosives, and you’re never quite sure what’s around the corner… unless you use the free look camera to preview a hole’s layout, that is.

The number of environments is great, but you get the feeling that quality and effort varies from one to another. Each course almost feels like it was created by a different team, and even within a course, there’s difficulty spikes. At the very least, it feels like nobody went back to revamp the first courses that appeared when the game first launched into Early Access.

The flat textures and dull lighting are not the best advert for the Unity engine (which is actually capable of great lighting effects!), nor is the pop-in during the flyover and stutter when a course title card is revealed, even on Xbox One X. A handful of funky geometry and shadowing issues have persisted through Early Access to release.

That leads us to a golf game’s biggest sin: inconsistency. While the game plays a good game of minigolf the vast majority of the time, you’ll almost certainly encounter some kind of inexplicable bounce or rebound at least once a course. Mostly this seems to be down to geometry reacting badly when you overhit, but when you’re then reset to your previous position, any camera angle changes you’ve made while in motion are retained, disorienting you and making minor adjustments or tweaks to your shot more difficult. The free cam that lets you preview the course also has the curse of adjusting your shot power and spin (if you have that enabled) when you return to the ball, and there’s regular instances where you get zoomed all the way in because your ball is a bit too close to a wall.

Oh, you’ll also want to do yourself a favour and turn the maddeningly repetitive music down or off.

Golf With Your Friends has all the rage-inducing charms of minigolf to savour while playing with your chums. With plenty of varied courses to play through and some good variations, there's a lot of fun to be had, even if the game often feels inconsistent and unpolished.

Golf It!, as you would expect, is a game about minigolf. It comes with four single-player levels, a level creator, and the ability to play with friends or others over the internet.

Golf it! has no plot. There is no story, no characters, no achievements, and nothing but you and your skills. The object is to try and get as low a score as possible in a game of minigolf. As such, the game has three core features: Single-player mode, which features four levels, comprised of 18 holes each. The multiplayer, which allows you to play with friends or random people over the internet and the level-creation, which allows you to use preset features and combine them into your unique golf course.

If you thought that graphics and audio wouldn't be relevant in a game about golf, you'd be forgiven...but you'd also be wrong. The game has a variety of themed courses, including underwater caves, icy snow-filled lands, teleportation devices, and more. It's graphics create a pleasant atmosphere for these varying levels and become downright immersive at points. The graphics are cartoon-styled, bright, and colorful, but the game also features some advanced features, like a changing day-night cycle. You won't get exquisite rendering, but the graphics are more than enough to add to the overall effect of the game. They do an excellent job of creating a fun, playful atmosphere.

You control the direction and strength of your swings with your mouse or keyboard, using in-game obstacles, ramps, walls, and more to try and get the ball in the hole. Unfortunately, reviewers noted that there were real challenges with controlling the direction of their shots, as specific movements made it difficult to control the accuracy. In a game about golf, this presents a real problem. Furthermore, the camera would sometimes disappear behind obstacles, inhibiting your ability to zoom and blocking your ability to take a good shot. Fortunately, the multiplayer mode is reliable, creating a challenging experience for anyone who plays that enhances replayability and ensures they will never run into an identical twice. Additionally, the ability to create your own maps and then use those maps in multiplayer adds a real treat. Reviewers did note that the mapmaker could be difficult to understand. The lack of a tutorial made taking advantage of some of its more advanced features more challenging.

The game is available for download on Steam ($8.99), where it is still listed as an Early Access game. Since Golf It! is still in Early Access, it's highly possible that additional features will be added. Indeed, updates were posted by the developers as recently as November 2019, so it's clear that the game is still a work in progress. Fortunately, this game is highly replayable. Its four levels contain eighteen holes each, meaning that you have 92 holes to play. You can have hours of fun trying to master each level, thanks to the varying challenges found on every hole. Furthermore, the ability to design courses, download courses off of Steam, and then play those courses against others ensures that you can use this game for days and never play the same level twice.