Recent reviews by Michael Lemmons

I can't really recommend this game. Yeah it looks beautiful, and the cars are detailed, and there is the basis of a really fun game, but the tracks are very short, and you quickly hit that point where you either have to pay or wait in order to proceed.

yeah I know, "what do you want for free?", but this review is just my experience. Take from it what you want.

Okay, so I've been playing this game for a couple of months, and it is *ridiculously* fun. All the minigames just feel right for what you're trying to do, the controls feel good, building and decorating your home is *bar none* the best I've seen in a game, and I love the stories that unravel as you get to know the NPCs!

If I had any criticism it's that the cash shop feels *way* too pricy. I know that S6 needs to be able to pay for upkeep for the game and such, but the rate from Palcoins to dollars feels like about a US cent each, and a lot of items cost upwards to 1500-2000 coins each ($15-$20!) Yes, they are just cosmetics, but I just wish there was better ways to support the dev. I don't want to toss down $20 and get *one* outfit!

At the end of the day, though, that's relatively minor, and the positives *far* outweigh that negative. I am absolutely hooked and I can't wait to see what's next!

I want to like this game. I really do! I played through the original Bard's Tale trilogy, defeated Mangar in his tower, reforged the Destiny Wand and beat Lagoth Zanta, returned to the burned remains of Skara Brae and shed tears over the fallen heroes of old, then traversed the seven realms to finally take the fight to the Mad God Tarjan himself.

So a fourth Bard's Tale game is right up my alley! The story is excellent and engaging, and the combat is fun and intuitive. All the little details really help to want to love this game, like how the ruins of old Skara Brae more or less use the well-known map of Skara Brae as a reference, and Sinister Street! Being able to go BEYOND Skara Brae! All the little lore touches; it's a love letter to old-skool gamers like myself.

I really WANT to like this game and recommend it, but I can't due to one tremendous game-breaking bug. If anything happens to your system while you're autosaving it will corrupt your save file. Most games get around this by having multiple saves, but somehow this corrupts your ENTIRE save line, forcing you to start from scratch. It's frustrating in the extreme to put in hours of work and see it vanish in a puff,

If they are able to fix this issue, I'll gladly change my reviuew, because the game itself is VERY good, but at this point I can't in good conscience recommend it.

Anyone who knows me knows I'm a sucker for survival sandbox games. This just may be the finest I've ever played. Inside of the first few tutorial missions you have a motorcycle to cruise around with. Quite soon after that, you've got a hovercraft of your own design. Hovercrafts, "Small" space craft, truly gargantuan capital ships... all capable of being built from the ground-up. Or if you have concerns with trying to custom-build a ship, go to the Workshop.

Do you have a favorite sci-fi spacecraft? Chances are someone recreated it there, whether it's a Colonial Viper, the Serenity, the Millenium Falcon, or the NCC-1701-D Enterprise. You could spend hours just in the Creative Editor geeking out over these replica spacecraft without even touching the main game, but you'd be missing out.

Eleon is constantly updating and adding new resources and bugfixes, so it is still a living, evolving game. Long story short: it's insanely fun, and well worth the $20 price tag. Give it a shot!

I picked this up on a lark, when it was on sale. I'm glad I did! It is amazingly fun, and I'd advise it to anyone looking for something good, fun, and challenging. A lot of people are comparing this to Judge Dredd. Fluff-wise, it's kinda fair, since your character is "Judge, Jury, Executioner" and all that fun stuff, but crunch-wise, it feels closer to the old Crusader games.

There are a few things that have turned people off to the game, and I'll go over them here:

The progression is locked behind "medals"; level-by-level achievements for completing the levels in certain ways, like not killing any civilians, not breaking anything (ASTOUNDINGLY hard), or not being spotted. My advice if you are trying to do this would be to go after the medals oe at a time. Some of them have a nice synergy where you can get more than one in a single run-through easy. Others, not so much. The cyberware that helps with one medal won't help much on another.

A second sticking point is that there's not a whole lot of story. The overarching plot basically boiling down to "get rid of this one particular gang" and the story mostly being told as a radio voiceover played with a spinning graphic image. Yeah, if this were a bigger budget game from a bigger studio, there would probably be a huge, expensive cutscene showing gangers breaking into places and causing mayhem or whatnot, but IMO the resources were better put to making the game more fun. Plus, those cutscenes are usually only watched once, then skipped entirely every other time (the radio messages are skippable, FYI. No unskppable cutscenes in this game).

So if you're looking for a fun, easy in-and-out game, then give it a try! You might be pleasantly surprised.

I've had this game for too damned long without doing a proper review. I got this game pretty early in its dev cycle, and with every update it just gets more and more fun. It's one of those games I keep coming back to. Tons of weapons and tools and... quite frankly, toys to play with. Kill mobs with swords, a whip, aluminum baseball bats, bottle rockets, party snaps, firecrackers, a blunderbuss, a heavy duty laser cannon...

Definitely a game with a sense of humor. IMO, it's a bargain at twice the price.

7 Days to Die is a Survival Sandbox game, with all that entials. It has variable difficulty depending on how you configure your worlds, but at its default, it can be surprisingly difficult. You'll spend most of the game where the best weapon you'll use is a rock tied to a stick, not because you can't find anything better, but because you don't want to risk it! Youir first exposure to a firearm may be a random piece of a gun you won't know how to assemble. Eventually, you'll get your home base pretty well secured, and may even have a full, functioning firearm!

That will be around night 7, where you find out why the game is titled that that. Every 7th night, a HORDE of zombies will come from everywhere to kill you. If you're not careful, they will destroy everything you've accomplished until that point. If you're successful at fighting them off, you'll feel like a zombie hunting God of War.

7 Days to Die is as difficult as you want it to be, but is one of the more satisfying games I've played to date.

The Fall is arguably one of the best sci-fi short stories I've ever played. It's a great perspective; definitely a breath of fresh air from the "I'm a Space Marine, and we kill everything!" gameplay you find everywhere else.

Admittedly, you can easily beat this game in less than 4 hours, but don't let that deter you. It really is a great story.

What this is, when you get right down to it, is a physics engine for realistically playing various games. From there, the community has made this basically every tabletop game. This is best played with several friends or family members. It'd probably be best to buy as a 4-pack and give out the extras to people you'd like to play with.

The wife and I use this to play Clue even though we live in the same house and actually own a physical copy of Clue. Why? Cleanup is just closing the game, and the cat can't swat about the pieces.

I cannot advise this enough for anyone who just wants something light and low-stress to do while chatting with friends an/or family. It's worth it at full price, and doubly so on sale.

This is a fun little dorflike city builder. As with most of these, you start with 7 people (In this game, they're "hearthlings") and from there, you need to set up for food, shelter, resources, and defense. So far so same, right? The two largest twists on this one are how you can set up the housing (completely planning out a building, instead of either a hole in the wall or a prefab structure), and the animation style.

I'm trying to find a good descriptor for the animation style, and I keep coming back to "cute". It's not the word I'm looking for, but it does indeed match, in my opinion. I feel emotionally vested in these hearthlings in a way I don't really get from the likes of Gnomoria, Towns, or even Dwarf Fortress, and I honestly feel it's the way they're animated. When goblins are charging into your town and you see your farmers scatter from their fields and cower, it makes you want to protect them. The victories feel more visceral when your footman is taking a giant stone hammer to the goblins instead of just getting lines of damage text.

That is the best way I can really put it right there. If you're looking to just build a town, then there are hundreds of other games that do the same thing. If you want to take care of your citizens, check this one out.