Recent reviews by The Selfish Meme

I think it was my first game of this genre and it was fun to play a couple of times. The story is kinda missing some details but still it was interesting.

However, if you want to see all endings/get all achievements there are no shortcuts like skipping previously watched scenes or making several save slots. Unless you want to mess with manual save backups and stuff like that.

The MAJOR drawback for me is that the game doesn't support 21:9 displays even though all the scenes were shot in this format! So what I get is black stripes on EACH side of the screen (I suppose 16:9 owners only get stripes at the top and bottom). Like, really?

As you can see from my hours, I like this game.

But I only like it because of the strategy mode and the tactical battles are just a burden. I try to not use auto-resolve because it often gives you much more casualties than if you actually play the battle.

So, why I don't like the battles - the soldiers are incredibly dumb. And I'm not talking about people with muskets just standing in front of each other shooing one shot per minute - maybe that's historically accurate. But in this game they really act weird so you have to micromanage to avoid a disaster - friendly fire is a common thing. Just some examples - you send a missle cavalry unit after a routing enemy (which doesn't resist), but they happen to shoot themselves so you lose like 15-20 men out of 45 for nothing. Or a cannon shoots a canister shot right at your own infantry unit killing like 40 men and making them flee. Or those cannons shooting canister even when the enemy is not in range (you have to manually switch the ammo type). When you tell a cannon to cease fire, it will shoot 1-2 more times, in some cases leading to deaths of your soldiers.

Sieges are even more frustrating. For example, you capture a wall and your soldiers stand on it looking directly at the enemies inside the city. You think it's a good way to shoot them? Nah, no shooting will take place unless you come down. Also, even when you capture a castle gate, it often doesn't let your people through so they just stand near the closed gate doing nothing.

Sea battles are quite nice, though. And the battle music! It makes them not so painful, after all.

Anyway, in terms of good stuff, the strategy mode is quite enjoyable. There are three regions, Europe and the colonies in America and India. If you play a long campaign, it's perfectly possible to capture everything in the game, unlike, say Europa Universalis where you have to try really hard. And the game is not overcomplicated. The diplomacy is pretty simple, so is trade (I don't really understand how trade works but it still brings money). There are techs, buildings, hiring of units, agents like missionaries and rakes, so there is plenty to do but it doesn't give me headaches like EU4 (I used to play it a lot but then it got too complex and I don't have time for that anymore).

The graphics are pretty outdated and the interface is too small in higher resolutions with no scaling, keep that in mind. So a new version of Empire would have been nice.

I've tried a couple of other 'city building + surival' games but they were kinda meh. With Frostpunk it was different, I loved the game since my first 'A New Home' scenario and I'm still enjoing it after 136 hours. I will probably play 100-200 hours more before moving on. There are several scenarios with different game rules and an endless mode with like a dozen of maps.

I think the game has just the right amount of complexity in terms of building types, resources and stuff like that. It's not boring but you are not overwhelmed with 20 food types or complex resource production chains. The game is pretty easy to learn, just make sure you pick Easy or Normal at first. But if you want a challenge later on, Extreme is waiting for you :D

Graphics are good, but I'd say that it's sometimes hard to find a specific building on the screen when you've built a lot of them, because many of them look alike and the smoke from your steam buildings is covering some parts of the screen :)

I really like the music, especially the one played at the end of a playthrough while you watch a replay of what you've done.

DLC-wise make sure you get The Last Autumn, it adds quite a lot to the game. The other ones are not that good.

I really like the base game but this DLC is crap so far.

They broke the outpost shipments somehow. Not only a food shipment disappeared on me in the new scenario (which could save 15 starving citizents), the outposts in New Home are now broken, too.

Don't buy until they fix the bugs, at least. But the new scenario seems lame anyway.

If you haven't played other Half-Life games, this is not a place to start. If you have, Blue Shift doesn't really have anything to offer even to huge fans of the series.

Gameplay-wise it's a VERY short version of Half-Life with 2, max 3 hours to complete. There are no new enemies or weapons and you only get to use half of the original game's arsenal. The levels are 'new' but all composed from the pieces you already saw in HL, so it feels the same.

There isn't really any story here. You see Freeman a couple of times and some NPCs tell you about the stuff you already know from the original game. This is not an RPG so playing as Barney is the same, except you can't use HEV chargers and have to find kevlar vests and helmets instead.

Graphics-wise it's a very old game. After seeing Xen levels in Black Mesa I wanted to cry looking at the ugly mess in this one. Generally I don't mind old graphics when the game is good, and if Black Mesa didn't exist, I could still play 'vanilla' Half-Life, but Blue Shift is just not worth it.

There are also some technical issues. Each time when I load a save Calhoon starts shooting the weapon infinitely until i press LMB. And the game only starts after the second attempt. At first launch nothing happens, I have to kill the game process in Task Manager and start again.

And yeah, if you have a 21:9 display, you better still play at 16:9 with black sides, because the 21:9 resolutions here just make the game zoomed in and you lose some of the visibility.

Initially I bought it to enjoy the multiplayer with better graphics. I was totally disappointed because there are not many people in MP, it lags often and everything is so different from the original Half-Life.

But then I decided to try the campaign and it was totally worth it. The game looks really cool, especially Xen levels (but there are FPS drops). If you've never played HL1, it's a good chance to get familiar with it without being shocked by the ugly graphics. And if you liked HL1, it's basically the same story and game with better graphics and physics - what's not to like? :)

Some features are nice but the carbon emissions mechanic is really unbalanced. In the year 1650 the sea level rises and I have a diplomatic favor penalty just because of discovering coal first and building a couple of coal power plants. Like, really?

Climate change should be a late game event, and the congress penalties should be realistic, not automatic when other civs don't even know about coal or power plants.

I liked the intro (it was really weird). That's it.

I'm not sure what's wrong with the controls in this game, but I couldn't do ANYTHING except walking around the ball (katamari) with my keyboard. Then I thought, maybe a gamepad will work better (it works fine in other games). Hell no! I still could only walk around the ball in one direction. It didn't roll no matter what I pressed.

The game also starts in a pretty small window and I didn't see a way to make it fullscreen (Ctrl + Enter didn't help).

I'm not sure why people are so enthusiastic about this game, I don't mind a challenge but not when I can't even control the character.

Refund requested.

It's a nice puzzle game. I like all three Hexcells games but this one also has a random map generator. Of course those random-based levels are less interesting and generally easier but still you can play the game infinetely if you want :)

Well, I can't say it's totally bad, and those racoons are cute, but the game is really too short. Takes 2, 3 hours max to complete including all the achievements, and a good part of that time is cutscenes/talking and not actual gameplay.

I quite enjoyed playing hole.io on my phone. Here the basic idea is the same, you consume stuff with a moving hole which increases all the time to consume larger objects. A major drawback is the smallness of levels. I think most of them have less than 50 objects to consume and there is nothing like hole.io experience where you destroy a whole city eating skycrapers, dozens of cars, etc. Here you just eat some small pieces, then some medium ones and then finish with like 1-2 houses, that's it. They've added some puzzles but none of them are hard. And there are no competing holes, only you.

The characters talk too much in my opinion, and it's just silly stuff with lots of 'wow' and 'lol', I can't say the story has much value here. If you click it through you won't lose anything.

So, to sum up: graphics are nice, the gameplay idea is good but it needs more content. The story is a waste of time. The game would be much better with some kind of a sandbox mode with hundreds and thousands of objects to play around with.

Buy if you are looking for a short one-time experience (preferably on sale, of course).