Recent reviews by Drifter

I'm not a big fan of open world games, finding them too filled with repetitive gameplay mechanics and boring design processes. I don't care I can pick flowers or find tin cans in an area the size of South America. Most of these types of games are written blandly as well. HOWEVER, WItcher 3 gets past these breaking points (just don't treasure hunt on the Skellige seas) by having an AMAZING story, fantastic and unique character interactions and dialogs, incredible animation, side quests that are interesting, and fun and challenging combat mechanics.

Look, Witcher 3 is really one of the best games around. It is likely (since I haven't played them all) THE best open-ish world rpg - surpassing things like Skyrim (what a bland repetitious pile), Fallout 4 (Jesus what a boring place with terrible writing) or Dragon Age Inquisition (Dragon Age, but now with MMO Fetch Quests instead of interesting things) or that cruddy one where you're a hacker in Chicago or something (I mean, Sleeping Dogs and STALKER were great, but come on). If you want to play a large, wonderfully written, compellingly character-driven, logical and well designed open world rpg with (granted, not Dark Souls' - it's more Arkham than DS) fun combat mechanics then The Witcher 3 is the way to go here.

CDPr did such a great job making Witcher 3 gorgeous and fun. I thought Witcher 1 was really good for its time, and WItcher 2 was a fantastic game well worth playing even now, but Witcher 3 stands on the shoulders of giants and midgets alike, leaving it towering over almost any other game, overall.

Meh. Buy it if you must, on the cheap. Annoying baiting at the ending to get you to buy the next season.

Really good story, oddly enough, and superb gameplay with actual challenge make this one of the best Tower Defense games of all time. Just be sure to tune the graphics setting down to about 30% otherwise you won't be able to see anything on screen - too much explosions and random noise.

edit: doing it for the cheevo during the Steam Awards Winter Sale. Nothing's changed. This game is still awesome.

This was really damn good. Everything except the Telltale QTE 'press q a million times' gameplay model. Loved the characters and story and music and humor and emotion and it was just really really good.

Holy damn. This was fantastic.

I thought the music served to enhance the experience.

The writing was interesting and was pretty good, considering the medium.

It's a short experience, probably take you around 25 minutes to read through a playthrough. You'd probably do best to have a few differently styled playthroughs, as it seems to travel down different paths.

As a thing that allows a person to explore different points of view, I'd really recommend at least one playthrough, and leave it up to you to decide if you'd like another.

The dev put together a nice and interesting product here.

This is a really fantastic and interesting 3-d point and click adventure game without any puzzles.

It sounds weird, but it's a really cool story delivery device that has several substories you can discover surrounding your family as well while you explore and come to terms with everything your family has done. It's really good. You kinda feel like a stranger visiting an abandoned house, but instead of 40 years and cobwebs (and probably a serial killer hiding in the fridge) you simply find...life has happened.

Gone Home is a simple game with a really nice depth of detail within the environment and a very well done and unique-to-the-industry story. I enjoyed it a lot. There's no replayability here, so if that's a necessity for you to play a game then go to hell, I guess.

Well, I know there may be a few I-told-you-so's from people, but I went and have played Of Orcs and Men for a few hours now and it's a *VERY BAD* game in every way imaginable except it looks okay. It's been a while since I have felt I've really wasted my money like this. I've tried to be so good with this stuff, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ it's *UPSETTING* me off that I could have given that $7 to another developer and actually enjoyed a game.

I honest to god really enjoyed the Game of Thrones rpg by the guys at Cyanide, so the thought of similar combat didn't bother me at all, and the premise of Orcs&Men seemed pretty interesting. I also figured since it was the same engine at least the gameplay would be cool if at times the writing went Eastern European on me.

Well, the writing is stilted and thoroughly subpar, in terms of horrible, horrible non-stop expository dialog, singularly zero-dimensional characters, and completely uninteresting quest progression/design.

Character development is 'deep' in the sense of there are several different options at any given time, but *I'LL BE DARNED* me if they're all pretty much leading to the same style of play. It all *I'LL BE GOSH DARNED* sucks.

The combat feels really worse than GoT. I'm not sure why. It's very unresponsive and clunky. It could also be the design of the encounters that contributes, which really are utter *VERY BAD*. The level environment layout is literally on rails - a two-lane MOBA level at the best of times. It's a foockin' ginny-bandersnatch.

You 'stealth' your way around to silently kill an enemy or two and then the others notice you and all run at you - at which point strategy devolves into swatting at a cloud of flies. There is 'strategy' involved I guess because I have the option of throwing daggers from a distance and my other dude fighting close-up, which sucks, or having both my dudes fight in-your-face style, which also is incredibly boring.

In summary, the game's *VERY BAD*. I'm a little frustrated and feel like I wasted my money. The game is *VERY BAD*. *I'LL BE GOSH DARNED* you, Cyanide, for letting this happen (I thought they were the ones to develop this, but noooope). But mostly probably *I'LL BE GOSH DARNED* you, you horrible developers Spiders, for smearing your *VERY BAD* *IT'S NOT ME, IT'S YOU* all over this game. Go die in Somalia.

It's a mediocre (not bad, but not really good, either) shooter not worth playing unless it’s on some sort of big sale - even if you have money to burn. I say that because there are a slew of more mechanically complex or otherwise more interesting shooters out there. Bulletstorm is one I had much more fun with.

There are two things that make this game worth checking out, the Environmental Art – which is designed to ‘pop’ and look great (and it does) – and the Really Cool Animations of Elizabeth (your story guide throughout the game). Those two things alone mean you should give this game a shot.

The environment is pretty darn unique looking and I really enjoyed walking through it all and checking it out. Everything feels exaggerated and larger than life and is super colorful. However, the actual gameplay involved with the walking around tends to just be a ♥♥♥♥ load of forced backtracking and pop-up enemy wave arenas.

Elizabeth is not a good character; she’s a pretty, pretty princess, innocent and naive delicate flower type of person. She’s not a companion, kinda thankfully (few npc companions in games are done well), but an interact-able environmental set piece (invincible and untouchable). However, she’s REALLY well animated and voiced, so she’s super cool to watch, most of the time. It would have been nice to have her be a well-developed and well written character, though.

The combat was pretty boring, but gave you something to click on, I guess, so there you go. I do have to say that there were two or three set pieces (out of more than that) where you had to use a skyhook that was done really well. They were multi-leveled beasts and had more to do than just stupidly shooting at A.I. deficient baddies. Literally everything else related to the combat was pretty basic, with an attempt to gussy them up with a better paint job. You could still tell; there are not enough foundation creams or glittery bits to cover that level of mediocrity.

The story was a pretty cool thing. It wasn’t good, but there were some cool parts to it and some really dumb, bad parts as well. It held my interest through it all, even though there were many parts that were either almost offensively poorly done or just completely lacked characterization. It felt like the writers had a big giant awesome initial brainstorm and put up all sorts of cool ♥♥♥♥ up on a wall (along with some really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ ideas they didn’t bother sifting out), but didn’t bother making any cohesive elements to attach anything together with. It was a real shame. As the game was getting played I had a weird little half-grimace stuck on my face whenever I started thinking about what was going on story-wise.

So yeah, play it or don’t. Just please, it’s not worth the $20 or $30 it sells for now when there are so many other games that are deserving of that $20 or $30. It may have cost a lot to produce, but you still ended up with a pretty blah overall game.

Its good certainly outweigh its negatives, but the negatives are pretty glaring at times.

Visually, I think this game holds up to Bioshock Infinite - I'd actually say better to be honest (except it's not as bright and designed to 'pop' like Infinite). Unfortunately, I think the artists and level designers couldn't/didn’t (differences in gameplay, I’d guess) take advantage of its environment the way Infinite did, so, sadly, you may not notice it.

This is such a gorgeous looking game when you are able to actually take it all in.

The story and plot are interesting but the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ writing and dialog runs the gamut of quality, being either kinda annoying to times where I grimaced and thought 'this is really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ drawn out – I can’t believe they’re doing all of this expository dialog, just SPEAK NORMALLY you weirdoes,' to other times when it was actually sort of nice. But throughout it all you could always see where the devs WANTED to go with it and the intention was always good. So enjoy the plot, but let the story/dialog wash over you when it starts to feel overbearing.

I wouldn’t call the main character, Nilin, a particularly great female character lead, but there were some nice instances where she did grow as a character as a result of her actions, and was also emotionally considerate of other people. It just gets lost sometimes under the weight of the verbose expository dialog. As a general rule actually, had the writers integrated the numbing Shakespearean soliloquies and monologues into actual conversation, all of the characters would have been much more interesting and effective.

The main way to interact with the game was the combat, and it was decent enough, but it grew annoying very quickly during the last two chapters (of eight total) because you could only chain combos together with the same opponent (the opposite of what you can do in Batman, where so long as you aren’t hit you can chain multiple enemies into the same attack combo); there were often so many bad guys that each time you dodged to avoid getting hit you had to begin your combos again, starting with the weakest attacks – this made the combat very drawn out and felt like it was taking for-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥-ever. It wasn't challenging at that point anymore, just boring. Earlier in the game there was less of each wave of enemies, so it was more challenging. There was a good spread of enemy types, and you had to fight several types concurrently, so that was quite nice, usually.

The Uncharted-esque environment traversal worked, and without the direction indicator directing you to your next point you’d end up lost because the environment wasn't built to guide you, it was built to be a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sexy beast. So there's an element of hand holding, but I never found it annoying, oddly enough.

The Memory remixes were pretty darn cool - you invaded the movie-scene-like memory of a person and made slight alterations to play out over the course of the memory and basically let the butterfly cause the hurricane - but woefully underutilized. If they had quit the combat silliness near the end and given you another six or seven remixes to do it'd have been ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ grand. Grand, I say.

All in all I'd still recommend the game, with the caveat that you actually take the time to actually LOOK at the environment you're traveling through. It's a mostly fun game that's absolutely stunning to see and, for the most part, fun to play. I think Deus Ex had better characters and story, and managed to hit more consistent highs in terms of writing quality, but Remember Me blew it out of the water Future Dystopia Cyberpunk-wise.

You should pick it up and play at some point.