Recent reviews by ic

There are games, where advertisement or reviews about them are promising emotional journey and how you’ll get attached to the characters, but after playing the game, you only get small part of those feelings or maybe none at all ? Well this game is different story.


Game looks colorful and bright, it’s something I was not expecting. It runs great with no bugs, crashes or frame rate drops to mention. Music is excellent and ambient sound in general, builds a great atmosphere.
YES, headphones are required!!!

I will not write about story or plot, because game is fairly short and you need to experience it yourself, but the main idea is that you're going trough family’s struggle of fighting with cancer. This journey starts up simple, but at the times becomes quite powerful, at one point I wanted to quit the game, because it was a bit heavy on emotional side.
As someone, who works in chidren hospital, I got to meet kids with cancer, and seeing them, knowing their health condition and prognosis, or seeing how slowly they become worse, makes you feel sad and desperate, but playing this game, and seeing it from perspective of family and relatives is whole new look and even more grim one.

As you know, this interactive experience is not for everyone, but I would strongly recommend you to spend these couple hours with it. It’s a powerful journey, maybe too dark at times, but it’s worth it. One of the best indie titles of this year.

At this point everyone knows what the Bioshock is, what are the game’s mechanics, story line, setting and so on. But how’s the remastered version?

So the game looks a bit better, textures are sharper, lightning is improved, particle and water effects are prettier, but in general there is no major upgrade here. I mainly played the game in 2 hour sessions, so in some sessions it run great with no problems to speak of, and sometimes it crushed like 10 times or more during these sessions, so I had to save game each 5 minutes, and it really took me out of experience. Game runs on Unreal Engine 3, so it has it’s signature problem – random texture pop-ins, they are not as severe as you would see in older tittles like Singularity, but still they persist and are happening quite often.

Great addition to the game are films about creating and developing Bioshock, which are scattered around the world as collectibles. Also when you have finished the game, you gain accesses to the Museum of Bioshock, where you can see some ideas which were in development, but never made in to the original game.

So to sum it up, game is a graphical upgrade, but nothing impressive, game is unstable, and from what I’ve read on Steam’s review section, it runs even worse for some people. I would not recommend this version for people who are new to the franchise, but if it gets more stable and playable, it would be a nice revisit for those who enjoy the franchise.

One day I was craving some open world, GTA type game-play, but browsing trough different catalogs, I couldn’t find anything to suit my needs, and when I almost gave up on my cravings, I found this gem in my steam’s library. Also since Mafia 3 is out right now, it would be right time to dive into this title, and to remember what this franchise is all about.

The story takes place in fictional city named Empire Bay. You’re playing as young man called Vito Scalleta, whose just been back from action in World war II. As Vito returns, he’s starting to look for a job, but soon he realizes, that doing regular job, won’t be enough to support his family and fulfilling his material needs, so trough his old friend Joe, Vito gets in to doing some illegal activities, and starts his way up into world of underground crime scene. Story is split up in two parts, first one being winter of 1945 and second is summer of 1951. Each one has unique elements for current time period, like cars, clothes style, music and so on. Main plot it-self, is well written and has some great moments and characters, but nothing out of the box. If you watched some gangster or crime movies, TV shows or been in to other media of such kind, a lot of things you’ll find familiar. Same goes with characters some are quite interesting, funny and quite likable, while others are one-dimensional cliches. Story has some cool plot-twists and even couple a bit emotional moments. I personally really enjoyed it, and it’s one of the best stories in last-gen games of such type.

On ultra settings, Mafia II run quite well, however there were moments were frame-rate dropped below 30 and stayed that way for couple minutes for no particular reason. Trough my play-trough, game crushed a couple times and I also encounter couple game breaking bugs, so I had to restart some levels from begging. In the visual side of things, game looks great to this date, the draw distances are huge, lightning and environmental effects look great even 6 years later. Character models and animations look believable and lip-sinking also is done well, and environment has some angle of destructibility. Only thing to complain about, are textures, up close, a lot of them look quite ugly and low-res. I also enjoyed sound design, the voice acting is well done, cars and weapons sound great and there are enough ambient sounds to feel it more like a real city. Also you can not mention the license soundtrack, which is just awesome.

Last, but not least – the game-play. Well some say that this game is considered open-world. I would disagree. Mafia II is as open world, as Fable is RPG game. So yeah, you have this city, which is a descent size. But besides story, there's not much to do, you can visit gun shops or clothing stores, you can go to restaurants or bars to have some meals, and you have some side activities, like stealing cars to earn extra cash, and that’s where the open-world aspect ends. Since it’s a gangster themed game, you’ll be doing a lot of melee fighting and shooting. Melee aspect of the combat is done OK, but could be done better, all the melee-combat is just fist-fights and there are no melee weapons like baseball bat in first game. Shooting is pretty much cover-based, like it’s done in ''Gears of war'' or ''Spec-ops - The line'' and so on. It works great, weapons handle better than first game, and there are a lot more of them. Also the weapon management is improved. There are different types of pistols, rifles, sub-machines guns and explosives to choose. Only thing I didn’t like about shooting, is that it’s removed while driving, you’ll sometimes have someone in your car who will handle it, but you can’t do it yourself. And that brings me up to the last major element – cars. Cars in this game are still a bit clunky and sluggish to drive. But you can tune them up so they become faster and more easier to handle, also you can tune their appearance, and as you enter in to early 50’s the cars get better in every way. This game makes you focus on more “Drive safely” approach. Because police will chase you for speeding or hitting other cars. So quite often you’ll be driving by the rules, not to screw up the mission progress.

So to sum it up, game has some cool story, but it might be better and maybe element of choice could make it even more interesting. Gun-play and combat in general is done well and really improved over to the previous title. Car handling is more realistic, and makes you remember that your driving cars, from more than half-century ago. Game looks great to this date, but has some technical issues, that might not become pleasant. Overall the game is major improvement over first game, but it would be nice, if some game-play elements were left from first title. So yeah game is good, but some things could be done better. 9/10.

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I often feel like hipster about certain things in life. One such things are WW2 FPS games. While everyone yells and screams on the internet that we have enough of those, I've on the other hand been dreaming about HD remaster of MOH – Allied Assault on Frostbite engine or some new COD returning to Europe’s battlegrounds of 1940’s. Buying this game, after reading all the reviews , I thought that it shouldn’t be that bad, but it really is...

You are playing as Robert Hawkins, an american journalist, who covers different resistance's actions in Nazi occupied Europe. Story mainly takes place in Warsaw, during city’s uprising against German army, however trough some flashbacks game will take you to the various locations around Europe like France or Norway. So in the terms of different levels, game has some variety to offer in it's 7-9 hours campaign. You’ll be fighting in the streets of Warsaw, snowy mountains of Norway, french countryside and so on. Story isn’t anything original and breath taking, its quite boring and filled with cliches, but we don’t play these games for story, right ?
This tittle also has multiplayer with some modes like Death-match and Team Death-match in it, but it’s practically dead, I could find server to play maybe 3 times, and it didn’t last more than one round.

For me the game runs fine, I had almost constant 60 FPS and game crushed once trough my play trough. HOWEVER, this title is quite populated with bugs and glitches, nothing really game breaking, but it takes you out of experience quite often. They may vary from something like it’s sometimes hard to define what is true light source in the level, sound sometimes has this weird glitch when you can’t detect from which side its coming and if the source is in some place or out in the open, and the list just continuous.

Enemy Front runs on CRYENGINE, so it looks pretty good, but nothing amazing, something like 7/10, however the game is really bright and colorful, not brown and grey like most WW2 shooters out there, and it truly shows, I really enjoyed walking around some levels especially in the french country side. One thing I really liked was the music, and how it changes from whats going on in the game, also loading screens are pretty cool, but they are rendered in really low resolution, something like 360p as well as the cut-scenes and another thing that ruins cut-scenes is lip-sinking, it’s mostly of, maybe its design for polish language or something, but it doesn’t work well with the English at all.
Last thing I didn’t cover is the game-play, and well it’s mixed bag, since the game runs on CRYENGINE, it barrows something from Crysis games, like focusing more on stealth, marking enemies with binoculars and so on, however stealth is a bit broken in this game, sometimes it works quite good and at the other times it’s just a mess, but since AI soldiers are quite stupid, you can give-up on stealth all-together and you’ll be just fine, only in this way, the game will become more boring. One thing I Liked about game, that it introduces some new weapons from polish army like “Lightning” – the polish sub-machine gun or WZ.28, and some other new weapons, which I didn’t see in WW2 games. The sniping mechanic in the game is just weird, it’s a “Sniper Elite V2” rip-off and just doesn’t fit in such game.

So to sum it up, game has some cool ideas and design choices, but execution at the times is just awful, game also has annoying bugs and glitches, boring story, half-broken game-play and almost none-existing multiplayer. I would only recommend this title for 5 euros or less, and if you are WW2 junkie like me, who needs some fresh stuff to kill Nazis with. For everyone else - just avoid this title.


I gave it 5.5.
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Crysis Warhead - When the expansion pack is way cooler than the original game.

Game runs on the same engine as original Crysis, so again you have great visuals, huge draw distances and so on, but Crytek Budapest did some improvements as well, like better optimization and so this title isn’t as resources heavy as the original game, but don’t get me wrong, you still need at least a good mid-range rig to run it on ultra settings. Developers also did improve the texture quality and lightning effects.
However game still runs like nightmare on 64-bit systems, and that's a shame, so you’ll have constant crashes, random FPS drops and so on.

You now play as Sergeant Michael "Psycho" Sykes, who were your teammate in original game, but unlike Nomad from Crysis, Psycho is voiced and has some character to him, maybe his lines and behavior is a cliche, but still I had a great fun filling his shoes. Psycho story-line is a parallel of Nomads from the original game, and he goes on to hunt North-Korean officer Lee, who's in charge of evacuating a mystical container which might have a nuclear warhead in it.
Gameplay is pretty much the same what you expect from Crysis, however, game escalates pretty quickly, you acquire most powerful weapons early in the game and combining it with Nano-suit's abilities you feel like unstoppable Juggernaut of death, and to be honest, that's just so much fun to play. Maybe if the game was bit longer it would outstay it’s welcome, but for campaign that is about 8 hours long, it was perfect. Standalone expansion also introduces some new weapons like dual wielding fully automatic pistols and granade launcher, new vehicles as well as some new enemy types.

In the end, I really enjoyed Crysis Warhead, it’s a definite improvement in every way, but the technical problems and Crytech’s attitude to fix them for new’er systems just pisses me of. Again minus technical side, the game would be 9.0, but for current state – it’s 7.0 maximum.

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I was watching Linus tech tips video, about how new hardware runs original Crysis, so I bought a copy for myself to see how my today’s rig is able to handle this 2007 PC hardware killer and I was disappointed, but not because of my PC.

Game runs on CRYENGINE 2, which for the time could do a lot of amazing things and it shows in the game. Massive vegetation, huge draw distance, great texture detail, stunning shaders and so on. While I was playing this game, it never felt and looked like something from 2007, it felt like it was released about 3 years ago, and probably with some HD textures and improved lightning mods, the title will look like it was released last year. Levels are huge and there's a variety of them, you’ll be traveling through beaches, jungle, swamps, caves, alien space ships, frozen forests etc. and because maps are quite big the objectives can be completed in in some variety of ways.

Story takes you on a islands in Pacific ocean where a group of american archaeologists gets into trouble with North-Korea's armed forces. You are member of elite forces group which are dropped on the islands to find out what happen with the archaeologists. You are quipped with so called Nano-suit which have special abilities like boosting up your strength, speed or makes you invisible for several seconds. Also you'll have variety of weapons and vehicles at your disposal. Game starts slow, with you crawling trough the jungle and eventually stepping in to some armed military group, but gradually escalates in to full fledged military conflict involving heavy weapons and machinery. Some call this game spiritual successor to original Far Cry and in some way and form this game definitely is.

Game is fun as hell, story maybe is weak and nothing original, but I had a lot of fun playing this game. So where is my disappointment ?
Well, the game runs terribly on 64-bit systems, it constantly crashes, sometimes I had 2 hours session with no problems what so ever, but than there was sessions were game crushed like each two minutes. Frame rate is all over the place, sometimes you'll have stable 60 fps, and sometimes game drops to 2-3 fps when there is not much happening on the screen. And not to mention that you'll have to do some research and work to make the game work in the first place.

So to sum it up game is beautiful and fun when it runs well, and when it doesn’t it just frustrates you, so ignoring all the technical problems it would probably be something like 8.5, but for what it is now it’s nothing more than 6.5...
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Some may compare this title to “Dear Esther”, but this comparison is a bit off.

The “Vanishing of Ethan Carter” is First person exploration game, which takes part in a beautiful and interesting world of Red Creek Valley. The visuals are done quite well, the views are truly breath taking and technically the game is well made with no bugs, glitches, FPS drops what so ever.

Like I wrote, game looks beautiful, great lighting and texture quality. In my play-trough I used to stop and watch the views a lot. Also the art direction, in game music and world design helps the game to be a more immersive experience. Game is stable and technically almost perfect, also there are no loading times which is quite impressive for such a big world. However I played the redux version, so take that for notice.

You are detective Paul Prospero, who is looking for missing boy called Ethan Carter. On the story you will encounter some challenging and not so challenging puzzles, will see some paranormal activities and visit some beautifully crafted places. In the opening scenes game writes that it will not hold your hand and it doesn't. Game never really explains it self, so I found myself in second third of the game realizing, that I didn’t finish a lot of puzzles which reveal the story, however developers predicted such situations, so the world is made in such way that you can easily back track a lot of stuff, without reloading or taking long walks to the places you’ve missed. World isn’t linear, you can visit places and do objectives in order you discover them. Narrative also brings up some great quotes which leaves you thinking.

My only complain with this wonderful interactive adventure is, that it could be a bit longer, maybe for 2-3 hours, because I wanted to explore and see more of Red Creek Valley. The game took me about 4 hours to complete and it’s definitely worth its price.

I gave it 9.0
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First of all, this isn't a review, this is more like first impressions blog.

So I wanted my yearly fix of AC and got this game on winter sale, since AC unity is broken right now and I've mastered all the other entries. And I regret spending each cent on this tittle. Why ? I'll explain down below.

First of all textures and modeling looks ok, something between AC2 and AC3. However environment looks empty, it lacks additional decorations, stuff like bushes, grass, flowers etc. Animations are also weird and glitchy. Aveline moves a bit weird, lip-sinking often is off, in a fight weapons go past enemies and so on. Also there are reasonable number of bugs in general which often will make you stuck in environment or not allow you to progress the current mission, so you must restart the game all over. Autosaves sometimes don't work even if the icon shows that they happened, and there is just so much more I could mention.
And the sound design ? It's a mess as well, voice acting is nothing impressive with over the top french accent and unmemorable music.

Last thing i didn't cover, is the game-play.
Game is really easy with free run being just too forgiving. However it filled with bugs as well, especially in wilderness. Combat is the same AC stuff, but here guards are more less likely to detect you and i found they are not that much around in environment as well.
There are some new mechanics, which are poorly implemented and are waste of time.

So to sum it up. You should avoid this tittle even if you are die-hard AC fan like I am. Game is glitchy and buggy. Gameplay is boring. World and characters are poorly designed. the list just continuous.

From what I played, I won't give it more than 4.5/10 !!!
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This title i a bit overrated, however Starbreeze studios proved once again, that they can make a really cool tittle.

Game runs on unreal engine, so it has random texture pop-ins. It looks really great and has no problems running on older hardwares. Title is really colorful and art direction reminds me of first fable, which is a good thing! Each level has a different setting so you be traveling trough forests, underground ruins, snowy costs etc. Soundtrack fits the game really well and builds up the atmosphere!

Story however is nothing original, you play as two brothers who are searching for a magical cure, to help your sick father. On the road you travel trough various interesting places meeting some magical creatures like titans and ogres. Game is linear with some side stuff to do, to earn achievements.

Gameplay focuses on you controlling two brothers at the time. You do some puzzles and platforming stuff, which often involves both brothers. Each brother has its own abilities and the way how they interact with the world. Controls feel a bit weird in beginning, but after short time you get used to them, they are quite responsive. However its much better when you play the game with controller.

So game itself is an interesting idea, with well thought out setting, however its recommended that you use controller, game is fairly short, it took me about 2 hours without all the achievements. And i would like to say that its not for everyone.

I gave it 8.5!
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Simple and what may be called primitive game but does it job really well.

Graphics are really simple, as well are mechanics and controls, but they work really good doesn't matters if you use controller or keyboard. Gameplay its self is fun and challenging.

Game features really cool 8-bit soundtrack which stays in your head for sometime, story does its job really well. I only wish game had more color.