Recent reviews by Des

While initially fun, the game started feeling tedious during the second run through the existing 3 acts of the campaign on the "cruel" difficulty, which frankly felt easier than the normal difficulty. The character progression in the game is very unfulfilling as you're entirely on the mercy of RNG to upgrade your skills and otherwise just have a boring passive tree. Most of the loot is useless and if you want to do any respeccing of your passives you need to be constantly hauling items to vendors for gold with a tiny inventory. You can of course trade for the equipment you need, but then you just end up spending hours browsing the trading site and not actually playing the game. With your traded gear, the game can become too easy and make the loot feel even more useless.

I made it to the endgame part and it just felt like more of the same killing of basic trash mobs in large procedurally generated maps trying to find the few rare monsters you need to kill to complete the map, which honestly isn't fun when there is nothing rewarding about it. It's just a slow slog to level up and fill up the passive tree while hoping for RNG gods to give you items for skill upgrades, trading for better gear and to drop items needed to access trials for ascendancy points.

I didn't like PoE1 and while this is better, it's still not great and the core mechanics of character progression are just tedious and frustrating. Maybe my choice of going for a minion build made the game less fun, but there is nothing in the game to make me want to create a new character anytime soon.

The best game of its kind!

Excellent ARPG. It has many different classes, great gameplay, interesting lore and quite a few secret quests to find. The developer has added lots of new content for free to the game with the latest update as recently as September, which is over 4 years after the release.

The game also works great on Linux through Proton/SteamPlay.

Short but good point-and-click adventure. The game is very pythonesque and the animation style resembles the Monty Python a lot too. I found the puzzles pretty straightforward and despite being stuck for a while at one point, the game has new dialogue options for the relevant characters that made it clear how to progress.

Highly recommended if you liked The Four Things and also if you like point-and-click games in general. The Linux version worked perfectly as well.

Good game and fun with friends, less so with randoms, who are often pretty toxic. With the announcement of ending Linux support I cannot recommend it. Also the microtransactions are way overpriced. 11€ for a different colored car.

It's a very adequate jigsaw puzzle game. My main gripe is only being able to put pieces in their right place and not being able to connect the pieces together outside those specific locations. It's the biggest flaw that the game has, but it's something I personally can live with. The menu UI is absolute garbage as well but the puzzle building UI doesn't get in your way.

If you like jigsaw puzzles, this is one of the better puzzle games on Steam and you get quite many free puzzles. It also works well on Linux through SteamPlay (Proton).

Easily one of the best puzzle games on Steam. Unlike some reviewers have said, all of the puzzles can be solved by logic only and there is no need to guess.

The hand-crafted puzzles are more challenging than the randomly generated puzzles, which is somewhat unfortunate especially as you quickly start to notice certain patterns repeating in the generated puzzles. Despite that the randomly generated puzzles are fun and you can always play fan created levels for extra challenge.

The game in a nutshell is texas hold 'em poker played against 4 characters from various video games and comics. The game does have some problems though, of which the most noticeable is the low amount of dialogue the characters have. After having played the game for about 40 minutes the same lines will start repeating, which gets a bit annoying but luckily it can be skipped. The dialogue is pretty funny the first time you hear it but not on the second time and the other times after that.

I often felt that the game should have progressed faster since you often have to wait for your turn while hearing the same dialogue over and over again. I might just be a bit impatient, but I would have liked the game more if it had a button to skip the AI's turns.

The game is quite fun in short bursts but gets quite boring if played for too long. Unless you like poker a lot.

RF: Guerrilla is an open world action game set in Mars, which is controlled by the Earth Defense Force. The main character joins the Red Faction resistance after the introduction/tutorial level and the goal of the game is to free Mars from the tyranny of EDF.

Gameplay is pretty standard 3rd-person shooter, but the twist is the destructible environment. The ground isn't destructible but all buildings etc. can be destroyed. There are also vehicles to drive around, but most of them are quite slow and not that fun to drive around in. The story progresses through missions, which aren't very long or even that innovative. There are also several side missions available, but they repeat the same pattern and get tedious very quickly. The story isn't very good either.

Difficulty-wise the game is kinda hard, because you die quite quickly even on normal and it takes some time for the health to regen. However, you could just go to a vehicle for a few seconds, which regens your health quite quickly. You also run out of ammo for the weapons very quickly and then you have to pick up one of the enemies' weapons or resort to the melee weapon. Alternatively you could go to an ammo crate, but those are sparsely scattered around the world and they don't even have that much ammo in them.

There is a small upgrade system in the game, which can be used to buy a few new weapons and then some upgrades to them. The "currency" in the game is salvage, which can be obtained by destroying EDF buildings, completing missions or by mining ore deposits.

I would imagine that people, who like to roam around the world and just do random stuff, would enjoy the game more, but I don't really enjoy doing that so I didn't have that much fun playing the game. The game is best played in short bursts, because there isn't much to do in the game unless you really like destroying virtual buildings.

I finished the game in about 13 hours and I did about 45 of the 104 side missions the game has. The main story doesn't take that long to beat, but you must do some side missions for each area before the final story mission for the area unlocks.

It's just an average open world action game that isn't much fun to play. It also has GFWL, which can cause problems for some people. No longer has GFWL.

Machinarium is a point-and-click adventure game that's mostly carried by its art style, because the actual gameplay is not very good. Unless the object you want to pick up is in the character's reach, there's no indication that the object is even something you can pick up. Not sure if it's because the game is made with Flash.

The puzzles were mostly logical although some of them had a trial-and-error aspect. Hardest part of the puzzles was actually finding the items needed. There were a few quite challenging puzzles too. The game has an in-game walkthrough, but it requires you to play a mini-game every time you want to access it. Also the NPCs give some hints about the needed items when you "talk" to them.

I found the story to be uninteresting even though it's told without words and is open for interpretation. Basically you're shown thought bubbles, which show a "flashback" of an event that happened. The story just didn't feel any fresh and it didn't make me care for the characters at all. Quite many people seem to find the plot great, which I find weird, because the plot is very generic. You can find similar plots in many other games as well as in many movies.

I probably belong in the minority with my opinion about this game as I now think that it's overrated. It has a pretty nice art style and fairly good puzzles, but it still has somewhat clunky mechanics and a bland story. In my opinion Machinarium is just an average game and nothing more. I also managed to delete my save twice by using CCleaner, which cleared Flash cache.