Recent reviews by Dark Blue Monkey

Quite a fun series of games. Definitely worth the price, considering how many hours you get out of the whole series.

I never played ANY console games while Halo was being made, except trying a few now and again at freidns' houses. I still haven't played any FPS games for any length of time on consoles because I just can't stand having to put up with a controller.

I found all of the games (Except 4) really quite easy, even on hard difficulty. I can only assume it's because people played the games with controllers.. Using a Keyboard and Mouse to jump, spin, aim and shoot I actually found that the lowliest weapon (a plasma pistol) was enough to complete almost all of Halos 2 and 3. After a while I didn't even bother with the other weapons, especially in Halo 3 with dual wielding the plasma pistols. With the mouse you can bullseye the enemies across the canyon with the pistols, and just rapidly click to send a hail of gunfire as headshots every time.

The AI is a bit laughable. They made some of the enemies super-cute to cover the occasional mistakes in the AI pathing. It's very funny when they choose a silly path, running into you, then around you, At other times (especially Halo 4), the AI is excellent. The enemies use cover effectively, and will retreat to recharge shields. You have to be very adaptive with your style.

I think it's unfair to rate a game solely on how it plays today. I like to play games which were good in their day... So I've looked at all the games that were contemporary with the 6 in this pack, that I've actually played, and I'll compare them.


Halo: Reach is a prequel, but one of the later made (2010). It was the last made by the original devs, Bungie. It's contemporary with COD:BO, Bioshock 2 and Metro 2033. I really enjoyed Reach, Bungie kicked it up a notch for this one, and (had the game been about twice as long) would have easily stood toe-to-toe with the PC games. Unfortuntely the campaign was really quite short... Unfortunate because it was really very good...

So, Halo is the oldest game, but re-mastered by 353. It's contemporaries are OpFlash, RTCWolfenstein and Ghost Recon. I'd say it holds up relatively well against them, although a lot shorter! It feels quite simple compared to something like OpFlash, but I think it squares up really well against the other FPS games of 2001.

Halo 2 is at the same time as Painkiller, Doom 3, UT2004 and Far Cry. Here, I'd say Halo 2 was lagging behind the PC games somewhat. It was good, but very short.

Halo 3 was at the same time as COD4. Bioshock and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. Halo 3 was pretty good, I'll admit, but it was sooooooo much shorter than any of the other big FPS games out there. Graphics-wise, it was simpler, but gameplay and story, music and VO were up there with the PC games. Wish it had been longer!

With ODST, we're getting pretty modern. Contemporaries are Borderlands, BF1943, L4D2, COD:MW2. I'd say the stand-out feature of ODST were the Voice actors. Some great performances from the actors in this one. The music was... good, but different to other Halo games, less choral, which meant it felt more like a PC game from about 5 years earlier in places. It was crazy short, even playing on hard difficulty. Not bad, but a small lag behind the PC games of the era.

Finally, Halo 4, definitely a great game, although the format is running a little thin at this point. It's contemporary with FarCry 3, Borderlands 2, COD:BO2 and a few others. I'd say the devs really stepped up with this one. Some brilliant sequences, and some new vehicles. They made Halo about as fresh as you can while keeping the same format. A new (sexier) Cortana, more powerful weapons, bigger stakes... I feel that, had Halo 4 been about 3x longer in the single-player campaign, it would have stood toe-to-toe with the PC games of the time... But once again, it was quite short.

So, in summary, I reckon these games were pretty damn good for consoles when they first game out. PC gamers didn't miss much, we had our own games which were longer and more detailed, but that doesn't detract from the fact the games themselves must have been pretty mind-blowing to play on a cheap plastic box, instead of a £1200 PC.

The remake and the boxing up of the games into this single package is REALLY well done. Consistent experience, nice rewards system for people that might want to use it, loading times are incredibly short. A very nice package to play the Halo collection.

I didn't encounter many bugs with the games. Only ODST crashed on me twice, forcing me to jump back into the story by using the 'chapter selector' (otherwise I'd have been bounced back to the beginning). But I was able to play on. None of the other games crashed or showed any glitches whatsoever, even though I was playing on Linux with Proton.

I'm giving this a three-thumbs-up for awesomeness.

Pure poetry. A delight to explore. I really enjoyed the alpha demos, and I'm so happy Matt took the time to create a full product from them. Each area feels unique, and filled with its own challenges.

All of the areas (possibly with the possible exception of the Park) feel exactly as they should... You can almost feel the sand between your toes on Castle Rock beach.

Taught me a lot about how to use my camera as well!

I love old sci-fi.

Before the 60's Sci-Fi was a wild land of chrome-plated Tintin-style rocket ships. implausibly comical robots, space engines fueled by iron, by Illudium-Q-36, by thought itself.... We had jumps between stars like folds in space, generation ships, living space ships that were actually trees, or even a 'world' that was a torus of gas orbiting a star filled with flying trees thousands of miles long... Dyson spheres, solar rings.... Truly, the early years of sci-fi were utterly bizarre.

From those early years grew the modern sci-fi of Warp Drives, Hyperdrives, galactic empires, defensive shields and industrial-looking grey space ships coated in pipes, vents and little square greebles...

Moden works of multimedia art based on that really old genre of experimental sci-fi is thin on the ground. You have to look at unuaul 'quirky' films like "Flash Gordon" or "Mars Attacks".

The Invincible comes straight from a brilliant book in the same vein as "Enemy Mine" or "The Martian"... A lone individual with remote help on a bizarre alien planet with inexplicably weird goings-on.... But rather than being modern sci-fi, this harks back to the 1950s vision of what the future would look like. A little like how Fallout does it, an alternative past/future of space exploration where the actual mechanics and the basic phsyics is either shonky or explained badly enough that you can shrug your shoulders and dismiss it.

The visuals are simply astonishing. A wonderful recreation of a dead, arid planet, filled with strange formations and robots..... But it doesn't leave you alone for the whole game.... There's a believable back-story of why you don't have help, which slowly gets told through flashbacks.

All the tech is wonderfully anachronistic... Like data loggers that spit out developed photos rather than being hooked up to a laptop to download... There's even some text in the game where someone is ridiculed for the idea of a digital information storage... Which begs the question of how the robots work..... Core Memory, or paper tape like they had in the 40s? It's all wonderful to speculate how Stansilav Lem envisioned it.

I guess some would call it a 'walking simulator' I'd say it's that, but crossed with a text adventure... There's decision points, and missable data / conversations..... But all of it's wrapped up in a brilliant story with great VO, lovely music and great graphics.

There's a whole bunch of endings. I've found two of them, and I can see how the third one can be accessed, but tbh I can't be bothered wading through all the exposition again... Plus I've now read that all the other endings are accessed via a decision point early in the game that (otherwise) doesn't change the game until the very end.... So I'd basically have to play the entire game again about 3 times to get all the endings.

Therefore, I don't think the game's intended to be re-played to get all the endings... I think you're just supposed to get the ending that suits you.

It's a brilliant game, and since I got it from Humble Bundle, I heartily recommend it. I got 7 hours from it, and there's probably another 2 or 3 to get enough of the alternate endings to say I've 'done it all', but I'm gonna leave it there.

Super adorable little puzzle game. Lovely music, wonderful visuals and clever, easy-going gameplay.

Really enjoyed my time with this little gem. It's a shame it's not better known, honestly. There are so many simple puzzlers on here that it's difficult to play them all, but I'd put this one among my favourites of recent times. Reminds me of "Circuits" and a little of 'Hook'.

I can see that there's more puzzle if I find the 'green stars', but I found the puzzles to get them to be a little tricky, so I gave up without getting all of them. If I had more time I'd totally rinse this game, it's lovely.

Well recommended for a casual, but engaging puzzler.

I don't normally play survival horror games. I tend to find the crafting loop to be quite tedious and quite contrived. "To build this table you need to cut down three trees and catch 7 fish for some reason". I also don't really enjoy 'horror' games so I write this as someone who's more at home with a straight-up shooter like Doom/Quake, or with 'horror-lite' like HalfLife.

Given all the above, you're probably expecting me not to like it. But the opposite is true. I found the sneaking around pretty well done. There are things I'd have changed, sure, and I'll talk about those later, but the bad points of the game are heavily outweighed by the good.

The story is interesting and (while quite distressing at times), very well done. I wasn't quite expecting the twist at the end, and found the last five minutes of the game to be some of the best I've played since Half Life 1.

The music and sound effects are brilliant. With a pair of headphones on, and the lights out, it's wonderful sneaking around in the dark, using the position of the rustling leaves, creaking trees, babbling brooks and lapping waves to find your way around.

The environment is really well done. While it's clearly an older game compared to some of the newer visual spectacles the graphics are very nice, especially when some of the more interesting visual filters are applied. The sun coming down in the evening casts beautiful rays through the trees. In the afternoon, as the wind whips through the trees to let you know the time is getting on, it's fantastic..

The transition from 'overworld' to 'caves' is nicely done, and there's barely any lag during the 'loading' sequence as you squeeze through cracks. How they can load that much data seamlessly is really impressive. The underground sections are wonderfully done too. I like that you can 'clear out' the caves, but the overground doesn't get cleared.

The crafting is a real bind, though. It's a shame that this is possibly the least balanced part of the game. Especially since there are some lovely things you can build. Let me explain:

When you chop down a tree you get 4 logs. To build a house, you need about 30 logs. if you want to make a nice solid base for it, that's another 30 or so logs. So you're up to 15 trees to build a house. Now, the moment you start chopping trees, the enemies start to take an interest.... By the time you've built your house, you'll find you're being 'visited' all the time. I've tried building my house everywhere from the high snow, to a hidden peninsula, deep in the forest, to a distant lake shore. I'd spend a day watching for any enemy patrols, and ensure it wasn't a high-traffic area. Once I was happy, I'd start chopping. By about the fifth or sixth tree, I'd notice the cannibals... By the tenth or eleventh tree I'm clearing quite a bit of woodland. So I'd finish my house, and within a few nights, there'd be cannibals attacking it. So I'd build a wall. A section of wall takes 5 logs (iirc), and to surround a house with enough space to have some things inside like a drying rack, a few gardens and a rabbit run you need about 10 to 20 sections of wall. Gardens need a few logs.. a bench needs 2 logs... So to make a house, surrounded by a wall, you're clDoing that REALLY catches the attention of the locals, and by the time you've done all that chopping (stopping periodically to find food and drink of course) you're being visited by packs of 6 or more cannibals, all attacking your walls... So you build traps... Which take wood... 9 wood for a single section of defense, and you need 10 to 20 of them... which is another 20 to 40 trees..... You get the picture. By the time you've finished constructing a small house as a base you've needed to level 100+ trees just to form the defenses for it, which is a major clearing operation, and you're now fighting cannibals every night, and sometimes a few times during the day.

The only alternative is to build your house out on an island, or to build a raft/houseboat. Both of these are good options, but ferrying the wood to an island takes AGES, just extending up the gameplay.

If it were me, I'd have a 'starter area' where there were no enemies and lots of wood. Let the player build there whatever they like, but as long as they're there, the story isn't advancing. Maybe there's no food, so the player has to leave the 'safe' area.... Plus they're no closer to rescuing their son... But at least they can indulge in crafting without having the whole thing wrecked every night by cannibal visits.

As many people have pointed out on forums, the best way to play the game is to just avoid all the housing and just build field shelters to save your game. It doesn't attract as much attention, and takes a lot less time.

I finished the game in 38 in-game days (or 83 hours). I feel that was about right. I definitely over-stocked myself for the end-game, but the final boss battle was quite manageable on normal mode...

I'm interested to see what the Sons of the Forest is like, and whether it fixes the crafting issue (i.e. the crafting system is painfully inconvenient and just ends up making more work for you than you intend by attracting unwanted attention)...

Overall, a really good game. I bet it's fun multiplayer. But I'd avoid bothering with crafting any structures larger than the small box cabin, it's not worth it.

Well that was super fun. Everything the demo made me expect from it. Loved the different planets, and the story was nicely done.

The procgen terrain was really varied and insteresting. Loved it.

Absolutely phenomenal achievement. Loved every minute of playing this for over 200 hours. A real sense of achievement throughout, and very little "dead time", wandering about grinding or looking for 'quests' to do.

The whole story is a bit grim, but absolutely fascinating and told with expert craftsmanship. Right the way up to the end, you're left wondering what happened in the end.

I'm wracking my brain trying to find a single thing to dunk on the game and i'm coming up empty. I just can't find a thing to dislike...

So, I wandered into the DLC area early. The DLC is full of "Demonic" level robots, which makes them really hard. It was a wonderful challenge, and added a real frisson of danger wandering around the forests.... By the time I'd finished the DLC, I'd already reached level 50 and the second half of the main game was just an enjoyable romp, practically in 'story mode'.

I played at 'Normal Difficulty'. I'd say that most of the game is achievable by your average player at that level.. There are one or two encounters (mostly optional) that would challenge a player not used to FPS games, and one or two that were really quite challenging until you figure out the 'trick'.

By the end of the game, I had done every quest, got every power-up and every weapon, so the big boss was a pushover.

I look forward to HFW dropping in price a little (and me having another few hundred spare hours!), to see where the story goes next.

Absolutely everything about this game is brilliant, and everyone involved should be lauded as top-tier craft-masters, aces in their field. Music, textures, skyboxes, ambient sounds, environmental FX, weather systems, pathing, modelling, VO, MoCap, weapon design, upgrades design, story, optional tasks, and absolutely standing proud at the head of them all: Level design. Sheer wonder from start to finish.

Loved this game TO BITS.

Phenomenal! Absolute master class in environmental design and storytelling through horror and tension.

I'm not typically into "Zombie" games all that much, I'm usually to be found playing Sci-Fi FPS. But I saw some good reviews of Dying Light and thought I'd give it a try. I went in expecting shambling zombies and simply collecting crafting materials to build bases.

I couldn't have been more wrong. The daytime is when all the main action occurs, while the nighttime is what separates the kids from the adults. You can run back to base and sleep away the night before it hits, or you can try to get some work done in the dark and pick up a few extra XP.

The city is just gorgeously design. The 'zombies' as well are fantastically modelled.

I didn't realise it was quite so story-driven. The internet tells me the game is completable in 27 hours, and now that I've finished it I can totally see that. I, however, took over 70 hours by exploring all over the place, doing loads of side-quests and playing through the Hellraid DLC.

This is the most fun I've had in a zombie game since Dead Island. It's a gory topic, and definitely not for kids!

I didn't play it with other humans since I tend to find other humans to be generally unpleasant online. Single-player, this game rocks. The parkour is breathtaking. Playing at night escaping the worst of the Zombies, leaping from roof to roof while things try to claw your ankles.... There's nothing quite like it.

Loved it! got all the possible endings. Absolutely not what I expected at all. It felt a little like The Outer Wilds, the figuring-out-what-needs-to-be-done.

I didn't know what to expect, and ended up ignoring it in my library for too long. I should have played it earlier, what a brilliant game. I do love an FPS which requires you to figure out a puzzle. Sometimes you just want to have an option where you just grab someone and say "LOOK, stop messing around and tell me what's going on!!", but in this game, everyone tells you exactly what's going on right from the get-go, and yet it STILL remains a puzzle to be solved!

Excellent writing, and very good puzzle / mechanics design. I look forward to seeing what this studio does next.

Graphics are looking a smidge dated here and there by this point in time, especially the facial animations. But that doesn't really detract from the game much, or at all.

The music's great, the environments and FX are wonderful. Everything about the game is just a brilliant puzzle to solve.

I absolutely ADORE this game. It's a wonderfully satisfying little game. So simple in concept, and yet so beautifully and playfully executed, with heart, warmth and variety right the way to the end.

If you've played A-Train, Railroad Tycoon 1, 2 or 3, Railroads! or any of the dozens of clones of those games, you'll know the premise: Get people and goods from A-to-B using trains as economically and efficiently as possible.

However, where RRT and its clones have a very simplistic view of "economically", this game really jumbles things up to make you think twice before connecting two stations to each other. Sometimes leaving the money-maker to the end is what you have to do!

There are three or four general strategies that will win you each level, but executing those strategies is unique to each one, and the puzzling-it-out is what the game is all about.

There are the usual producers-manufacturers-consumers and you connect them in a chain. However, they're not laid out in a line, or even conveniently. You need to look carefully, and maybe start out by connecting the producer to the consumer, and then finally hook up the manufacturer to create the chain all at once.

You see, you get a bonus for the number of requirements you satisfy at once. a 5% bonus for each additional requirement. So if you need to connect A to B, B to C, D to E and E to F, then you can do them one at a time to get 280 points. Or you can connect A to C, C to E and B to F... Then finally connect E to F and all of a sudden, they will ALL be interconnected at once, and you get your 280 points + an extra 25%.

That extra 25% can give you a little breathing room to make longer tracks, or it can unlock more cards to give you more of the map to explore.... So while you can usually miss a few combos (if you're feeling lazy), it does help to get them if you want to go for the two level awards. Each level gives you a monetary award for finishing with lots of cash, and a bespoke objective, like building at least 4 bridges, etc.

There are some who give this a thumbs-down because the game 'unlocks' things as you go. They want everything unlocked from the get-go. They are missing one of the key points of the game. You earn points to unlock those cards which can reveal more of the map. If you find a novel solution, you unlock more cards and can plan the level better. But if you're lazy, it'll take time to unlock the cards and you'll not do so well at the end. It feels annoying at first, but it keeps your solutions tight and focused to unlock the map and better achieve the objectives.

The music is lovely, the graphics are gorgeous, the achievements are almost always achievable on your first try of a level. There's only a few levels that need to have their solutions re-worked to optimise them. I found almost all the achievements pretty simple to get, but it didn't stop me trying my hardest to get them with style!

I love this game!!!!!