Recent reviews by rubyeye

The Marvellous Miss Take has the allure of a great Caper Story set in London, where you play as the beautiful Sophia Take, a thief reclaiming her aunt's art collection. You stealthfully try to take back your aunt's masterpieces from a number of galleries utilizing quick strategy, an array of high-tech gadgets and the special skills of your fellow bandits, Harry and Daisy. Each level provides a range of challenging security from guard dogs, to lasers, and infrared cameras, requiring masterful forethought in planning your heist. Each character has a number of achievements to unlock based on specific art pieces collected or how fast you finish the level. When it comes to trying to beat the clock, it can be frustrating at times because the random path of the guards almost seem like they know where you are, leaving you no choice but to run and hide or start again.

Part of the fun with this game comes from figuring out the fastest way to loot an area without drawing too much attention. While you can scroll around a level to a limited diameter from your character, having a separate free ranging camera to look over each gallery before you loot the place, is remarkably absent. Sure you can see the entire layout of each building before you start the mission; however the angle is skewed and somewhat difficult to see all the key areas. Like a real heist, we should be able to scan each floor and note where each treasure piece and security is located in order to plan our course of action as efficiently as possible.


The story of 'Miss Take' is enhanced with jazzy music, stylish animation and a colorful palette. The narration is bookmarked with humorous newspaper headlines about your antics and simple text boxes spoken between your characters and patrons. Given the setting, it would have been great to hear these characters actually speak with an English accent. It would have literally breathed some personality into these characters and brought the game to life.

Gameplay itself is deceptively simple, using point-and-click mouse controls to run, walk, distract and throw objects. Crouching is done automatically when you sneak behind tables and pillars. There is an option to use Keyboard controls but there is no indication of what those keys are, and no way to rebind them. The latest update added an Action Camera function, the (C) key, to zoom-in on your character during gameplay. Unfortunately this is nothing more than a close-up still frame for screen capturing; you cannot play while in this view. While the official trailer shows clips of Sophia walking around at this lower camera angle, it's bewildering why this new feature locks the game as it would have added a whole new dimension and replay value.


Despite some of these minor qualms, The Marvellous Miss Take is a refreshingly fun and unique ‘take’ on the stealth action genre. You’ll spend hours sneaking your way through a minefield of puzzling obstacles, reclaim your aunt’s “stolen” masterpieces, and do it all over again just to beat your previous time.

XCOM: Long War (1.1 mod) by Loriendal is an unofficial, or semi-official, expansion to the original Long War mod by Pavonis Interactive. It provides a great deal of updates, bug fixes, balance patches and more than a few QoL features courtesy of additional mods packaged together. Now that I have finally experienced Long War for myself, I can definitively say…“This is XCOM, baby!!”

There’s no point to playing vanilla anymore. Long War really feels like the final evolutionary form of what Jake Solomon and his team at Firaxis Games set out to create with this new reboot of XCOM. Extensive changes to the game drastically shift your focus from strictly research / tactical combat to resource management and airforce superiority. This shift makes every campaign far more engaging and a hell of a lot more challenging. Understandable since the aliens are now also in a race to harvest materials and upgrade their soldiers. Things can quickly spiral out of control if you lose too many satellites, can’t gather enough Meld, have too many wounded or fatigued soldiers, or simply can’t keep up with the sheer volume of UFO sightings. While the basic grind is still the same, the core mechanics – alien research, tactical combat, resource gathering, item building, soldier upgrades, satellite coverage – are more dependent on you strategically balancing each one successfully to defend Earth.

Veteran players looking for a more challenging XCOM experience (beyond Impossible Ironman) will find it in Long War, especially with the Squadron Unleashed mod by szmind which greatly enhances the air game. This redesign of the air combat system transforms the arcade style of shooting down alien crafts one-by-one into a fully decked out Airforce, complete with pilot and ship upgrades. Now we have to contend with launching squadrons of fighters against multiple escorts of UFOs, decide which combat stance to take (DEF / BAL / AGG) and at what distance to approach. Early game is very frustrating because of the constant shuffling of extra ships to replace damaged ones, due to the incredibly long repair times. However, once the associated Foundry projects are researched, and your pilots gain more experience, things become more manageable.

For everything new Long War offers, I was disappointed the Temple Ship assault at the very end was identical to vanilla. Since it is a scripted linear battle, I guess there wasn’t much that could have been done with it. Had I known, I could have ended my campaign months earlier. But I wanted to experience everything Long War has to offer for my first playthrough. Regardless, the greatest thing about this mod is the flexibility you have to adjust every variable you can think of. This is why XCOM is still a fun game to play, even more than a decade later.

_________________________________


<< Original Review >>

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is the first computer game I have played for over a decade, and it has been addictively fun! The variety of strategies involved in combat and research adds a great deal of replay value. In addition, the cool graphics, camera angles, unit customizations and difficulty levels make each playthough feel challenging. In spite of the number of glitches and graphic errors I would still highly recommend this game to anyone looking for a really unique gaming experience.


XCOM: Enemy Within adds a new dimension of replay value to XCOM:EU, with the addition of MEC units, gene modifications, new alien threats, enemy factions, maps, missions, weapons and Second Wave options. This is not simply another DLC, but an Expansion in the truest sense of the word. Enemy Within literally expands the boundaries of the XCOM universe, giving players much more variety and choices in protecting the earth from invasion. The inclusion of MELD has significantly changed how to approach strategic combat. No longer can you creep along, hunkering down behind cover until you uncover aliens. Players learn to adapt a more aggressive approach, in order to recover the much needed resource to augment your soldiers for Genetic Modification or as MEC troopers. This makes for a much faster gameplay on the battlefield. Difficulty has also increased significantly on “Classic” and “Impossible”, providing a greater challenge for veteran players. Like the original XCOM, this game also has its share of “bugs” primarily with crashing and freezing on the load screen. However, in spite of this, XCOM: Enemy Within is such a profound addition that fans of the game will find plenty to enjoy.