Recent reviews by Rewhan

TL;DR - If ever you wanted to play "Paul Verhoeven Presents: Starship Troopers - The Video Game" you're never gonna get closer than this.

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Gameplay goes like this: you are an elite soldier in the hyper-nationalist Super-Earth Armed Forces known as a Helldiver. You get shot down to the planet's surface in a rocket, then call down extra gear, squad-members, and bombardments with more rockets. Aiming is usually third-person, but there is a menu option to switch to first-person while using ADS.

Once you find the 'right' difficulty level (there's like nine of them) combat should feel fast, frantic, and very 'by-the-skin-of-your-teeth'. Less 'did you see that?' and more 'I can't believe I got away with that'.

Respawning is controlled by your teammates (or automatic but only if you're all dead) and players are (usually) quick to revive their squaddies, if only out of the pure self-interest of protection.

The missions themselves usually require you to go to a place and push a button that does a thing that takes about two minutes to accomplish, while fighting off waves of Terminids (bugs) or Automatons (robots) oftentimes with smaller secondary objectives scattered throughout the map.

Friendly fire IS an issue, but is more a source of hilarious accidental slapstick than a form of griefing, as most players seem to be more interested in shooting bugs than their squadmates.

New weapons, bombardments, and stationary defences unlock through levelling up, spending Requisition Tickets (free currency), Science Samples (a kind of 'rare' currency, for lack of a better term, that you find on the surface of planets) and Super-Credits, the premium currency.

Which means yes, there IS a cash shop, but I've been earning Free Super-Credits at a pretty decent pace just by finding crashed escape-pods during missions, and haven't invested a dime beyond the initial purchase price.

Despite some folks completely missing the point, I assure you, much like the movie I compared it to at the top of the review, the tone of this game is EXTREMELY satirical. Your commander is called 'The Democracy Officer', and television ads for products like 'Eagle Sweat Cologne' playing aboard your spaceship, a Super-Destroyer named The [NOUN] of [ADJECTIVE] - The Fist of Audacity, for example. (The game lets you pick from two very long lists of appropriately hyper-aggressive options)

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The only negatives I'll give it at the moment is that it does have a tendency to crash and lock up from time to time, but the devs are VERY aware of the game's issues, and are quick to address them. At time of writing, the issue seems to be tied to specific, Electricity-Based Weapons at the moment, so as long as you avoid using those for a few weeks, you (should) be golden... Even if can't really do anything about your squad-mates using them except to leave the mission and hopefully find another.

Some controls are not made very obvious, either - I was about fifteen hours into the game before somebody told me holding RELOAD lets you change the firing mode, flashlight mode, and sight distance. Map pinging is also not very intuitive, requiring you to open it, hold RMB, move to where you're marking, and THEN left-click.

In short, I think the good VASTLY outweighs the bad, and even then most of the 'bad' will be resolved in short order.

In the intervening period between The Walking Dead Season One ending, and Season 2 beginning, Telltale Games took it upon themselves to produce a game of similarly 'heavy' subject matter, in a more fantastic light.

The Wolf Among Us is a film-noire type adventure game, where your actions within the story depend largely on what you pick up, who you decide to help, and in what order you do these things. Action scenes (like a Bar Fight with none other than GRENDEL himself!) are dictated through a series of generously-paced quicktime events, usually prompting you to duck or lunge in a particular direction, or else grab / hit / throw a particular object within arm's reach.

If you think that because this game is based largely upon faerie-tales, that it might be "a lil' bit twee", then you are dead wrong. Mr. Toad is a chain-smoking slumlord; your coworker is a flying monkey with a severe alcholism problem. Your boss is nervous, greedy little pervert by the name of Ichabod Crane.

Oh, and a hooker is decapitated and left on your doorstep within ten minutes of the game's start.

If you loved The Walking Dead for its ability to tell an engaging story with interesting characters, and aren't particularly hung up on the idea that a game must have elaborate mechanics to be a 'game', then by god, buy this Season while its cheap!

My only problem with it is perhaps its price point; paying thirty bucks up front when only one chapter of a five part game is available seems... a bit much. Perhaps the option to buy the game in installments should've been implemented, for those of us still on-the-fence about buying it.

Oh, and one last thing... You think this fairy tale has a happy ending?

"Fuhgeddit Bigby; it's Fabletown."