Recent reviews by ekolis

The concept is pretty cool - you have various "characters" (actually differently colored and shaped rectangles), and you take turns controlling each of them in a platform puzzle setting to get them all to their respective goals - but the execution falls kind of flat. Maybe I'm just not a fan of puzzle games, but I find the game kind of tedious - I wind up performing the same maneuvers over and over again to get the rectangles over obstacle after obstacle. I do like the story though, and how it gives the various rectangles each their own personality!

Surprisingly fun, for such a simple game. It's almost like a rhythm game disguised as a fighting game! It just feels so good to smash mooks literally left and right! I think this would make a great mobile game, by the way...

Fun space shooter with more depth than your traditional arcade shooter - it's halfway between an arcade shooter and a combat flight sim! It's a lot of fun to unleash a Macross Missile Massacre(tm) on your enemies in strike mode! Awesome music, too, and quite challenging, with a variety of unlockable weapons to keep the replay value high. Just wish there wasn't that annoying cutscene before each level...

So imagine if TF2 was all about the weapons, and not about the characters. And you could make your own weapons by mixing and matching a ridiculous number of parts. That's Loadout, and it's a heck of a lot of fun!

The way the weaponcrafting works is, first you choose from one of four chassis for your weapon. Then, depending on which one you chose, you have a variety of parts you can install to modify it - some realistic, some sci-fi, some just plain silly. (I made a weapon which fires little balls of electricity, rapid fire, that shock their target - and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing next to him. And did I mention these little balls of electricity BOUNCE OFF OF WALLS? Yeah, that's how creative you can get.)

The game is free-to-play, but it's definitely not pay-to-win; all the weapon parts are purchased using "blutes", which you earn in-game by playing matches. You even get little bonuses for doing special things like getting a killstreak, which I thought was a nice touch. Now some of the weapon parts are superior to others (especially in the scopes department), but not so much as to be completely overpowering, such that a new player couldn't compete. (My main weapon is currently a rocket launcher which delivers an electric shock in a wide radius. Yeah, I like electric weapons. It has a laser sight which allows the rockets to home in on whatever I'm pointing it at. That might seem overpowered, but the thing is, while I'm guiding a rocket, I can't reload my weapon, so there's a tradeoff to be made there.) All the things you can buy with real-world currency are purely cosmetic features, like alternate costumes for your character. (I do wish there were more than three characters, though; hopefully more will be added in an update!)

The game also has a wicked sense of humor. I absolutely love the hilarious death animations - one of them has your character keel over, then raise his arm and give the attacker a last defiant middle finger! And I'm pretty sure I saw my guy running around with GAPING HOLES in his torso when he was low on health once or twice...

The game has five game modes, though apparently one of them, Annihilation, is recommended only for advanced players, as it basically combines elements of all the other four, and adds some of its own on top, so I haven't tried it yet. One mode is similar to TF2's arena, only it has elements of the coin battles from Super Smash Bros. of all places, as when you kill an opponent, in order to score points you need to take the "blutonium" capsule that he drops. You can take allies' capsules, too; doing so grants you no points, but denies them to the enemy. Another mode has random control points activate on the map, with everyone racing to capture them one by one; whichever team captures the most control points wins. A third mode is a variant on "capture the flag" - only this time the "flag" is a FREAKING HUGE HAMMER that doubles as an instakill melee weapon. You can't attack with your regular weapons when you have the hammer, but do you really NEED to? And the fourth is something I haven't seen in any FPS game before, though admittedly I haven't played all that many. One player on each team is designated the "carrier" (or something, forget what word the game uses), and he must collect blutonium capsules that appear on the map and deposit them at his team's base. The other players must attack the opposing carrier, and defend their own carrier from attack. If the carrier dies, a new one is appointed randomly. All these modes are a lot of fun!

All in all, I really enjoy Loadout, any my only real concern with this game is that I might eventually find some "optimal" weapon configuration once I've unlocked all the parts!

Oh, and did I mention one other awesome thing about this game? So let's say someone's slaughtering you with some sort of super flaming gatling shotgun of death or something. Not that it's all that overpowered, just, hey, that's a really cool weapon, and you haven't unlocked all the parts yet. All you have to do is kill him (or wait for one of your teammates to do so), and then go to where he died, and you'll find the weapon he was carrying. Unlike in TF2, you can actually steal enemies' weapons! You'll only get to use them until you die, but revenge has never tasted so sweet! (It's almost like playing Mega Man!)

What can I say about Civ5? It was horribly slow, even on powerful hardware, at first, and the vanilla game is quite a bit simplified from Civ4. But thankfully, the performance issues have been addressed, and the expansions have made the game complex enough to stand up with the other Civ games. Some of the new game mechanics introduced in BNW are a bit opaque, but thankfully there are plenty of tooltips, and the in-game encyclopedia is quite extensive, so even if information isn't obviously available, you can find it without too much effort.

I especially enjoy the World Congress, introduced in the Brave New World expansion. Similar to the United Nations from Civ4, you can propose and vote on resolutions ranging from adopting a world religion to embargoing a civ to nuclear nonproliferation to even funding cooperative projects like the International Space Station. But the addition of Civ5's city-states takes this mechanic to a whole new level, as each city-state ally gives you additional votes in the World Congress, so maintaining good relations with city-states is vital to making your voice heard.

The graphics in this game aren't as realistic as those in Civ4, but they have a charm all their own. They're sort of a semi-realistic, semi-cel-shaded style, evoking perhaps a painting, similar to the art style of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, or maybe Team Fortress 2. I think they suit the game well, as they have a sort of timeless quality about them - they'll always look classy, even when graphical technology advances and what's considered realistic now looks primitive.

Overall, I'd highly recommend this game to fans of deep turn-based strategy games. Casual gamers will probably be overwhelmed with the myriad units, buildings, and victory conditions, but if you're feeling brave, you could always try the vanilla game, since it's much simpler than the game with the expansions. The initial problems I had with this game have all been sorted out, and it's really fun to play now - I can go for several hours and wonder where all the time went!

I normally like roguelikes, but this one just isn't for me. I think it's the overly long combat animations that kill it for me. I like roguelikes to be playable at my own pace, and I don't like being slowed down by watching repetitive animations every time I melee a monster. I also don't like the insane number of stat and resistance icons, of which I can never remember what any of them are. Normally I'm all for complexity in games, but I think this is a bit much!

This game will be frustrating at first. But if you're patient, it will be a lot of fun!

An excerpt from a blog post[edkolis.blogspot.com] I made regarding Rogue Legacy and similar games:

"In Rogue Legacy, you again start off with pretty much nothing. 100 HP, 100 mana, only a few classes to play as, and no special equipment. Throughout the game, you can find and buy upgrades, which you get to keep even after your character dies and you start a new one (hence the "Legacy" in the title). The game, like Mega Man, is brutally difficult at first, but once you get used to the controls, and upgrade your HP, mana, classes, and equipment, it becomes... well, only moderately difficult. (There's actually an item you can equip that depowers enemies at the cost of reduced gold drops!)

So why do I enjoy these games so much? Is it because I'm a masochist? Well, no, I'm not a masochist. (At least, I don't think I am!) I think it's actually because there's a sense of accomplishment that comes from pressing on and finally defeating the initial challenge of the game, making my character powerful enough to tackle the rest of the game. Then when I get to the grand finale, and the difficulty ramps up again, I can really appreciate how much I've progressed."

Ingenious puzzle platformer with absolutely gorgeous graphics!

Clever starship sim roguelikelike. Learning from your mistakes has never been this fun!

DOTA meets Supreme Commander meets Advance Wars. Yay!