Recent reviews by Ajantis

This is a neutral review.

Binary Domain is a mediocre sci fi shooter/action game where you have to save the world from over zealous AI. So the story is ok. The characters and dialogue are ok but nothing memorable. I liked how you can upgrade not only your gear ( main weapon, resistances, gadgets ) but also the gear of the companions.

It's not precise to define this game as FPS only. It's actually a hybrid between a shooter and an action game (Prince of Persia style). There are parts of the game where it plays like a classic FPS, and parts where you have to pass certain scripted action sequences. The game is non stop action. It never has a dull moment, so yes it's adrenalinic, but it's also frustrating. Why frustrating?

Because this is a console port. Binary Domain was primarily made for XBOX and Playstation, and later for PC. Combat, game mechanics and everything else are clearly optimized for consoles and for a game controler, and NOT for keyboard and mouse. That fact brings many little problems that are frustrating but luckily do not prevent game completion. Examples:
- the key buttons for sprinting and for taking cover is the same. Often when I would have to flee from a difficult enemy the main character would take cover over and over instead of running away from danger. Often it would mean defeat and re-loading.
- the key buttons for the special power and for reloading weapon is the same. That means everytime you want to use your special power the main character reloads the weapon, which consumes ammo very quickly. And ammo is limited of course.
- Some times in the scripted action sequences it wasn't clear what I had to do to pass them. The game didn't make clear enough what buttons to use ( it showed some strange symbols, maybe for game controllers ), so I would often frantically button mash until I would understand what is required of me. So the game mechanics and controls are poor, archaic.
- there is a fight when you are in control of a goliath robot and have to repel enemies that come from all sides. They didn't optimize mouse sensitivity well so it was very slow to turn the cannon 360 degrees. So I had to retry until I was able to find the right sequence of turning left or right in order to kill enemies before they killed me.
Those are just a few examples or how this game is not optimized for a PC.

I liked the game in the beginning, then when you hit midgame it practically becomes a non stop boss fight. Some boss fights are objectively hard and frustrating. They revolve around targetting the only weak spot the bosses have. And since the bosses move around quickly it's not easy to hit those spots ( and minions do spawn contantly ). There was especially one incredibly brutal boss fight that nearly made me quit the game. So I went to youtube to see the only way it can be done.

I also didn't like how the game experiments with voice commands. The companions from time to time ask you questions and the game expects you to answer vocally. But voice recognition wasn't implemented properly. You can switch to key button replies but it also doesn't work well, and you have limited time to answer. If you fail to answer you lose influence with companions, and influence is important story wise. You also lose influence if you accidentally shoot them - and that happened often, not because of my mistakes, but because they would often stand and run between me and the enemies. Also they get angry and decrease "faith" in you randomly if you don't play fights perfectly enough, which annoyed me.

To conclude, it's fun but also full of little frustrating imperfections due to it being a console port. It's also a little ridiculous how they blatantly copied many elements of Mass Effect 1.

Solid adventure game. It's based on the popular novel by Ken Kollet. That alone guarantees the story to be of high quality. Graphics, sound and voice acting are also ok.
This is basically a visual novel. The gameplay consists mostly of dialogue and various choices while at dialogue, and in between there are easy puzzles.
You can influence the story fairly well.
It does a good job at presenting the atmosphere and reality of the middle ages.

It has 3 "books", each with 7 chapters.
With that said, it's also true that some parts are more interesting then others. The interaction animations are slow, and also the story is sluggishly slow in some parts.
There are no subtitles.

I bought this game because it had Overwhelmingly Positive reviews. I can't comprehend why.
It's just an average jump scare horror. In a game where atmosphere and exploration is everything they limit your exploration severely by giving you just a few batteries with short durability, and it's pitch black in many parts of the place ( it's a mental institution where they do dangerous experiments ).
The enemies 1 hit you ( ok I played on hard, but on normal it's not very different ), and to avoid them you have to memorize the floor plans and memorize the pattern of movement of enemies. It's incredibly repetitive, you come to a section and you have to switch some buttons and avoid the psychos who 1 hit you. But in order to do that, you have to memorize the pattern. It's actually a puzzle game in darkness
The main character does not bring with him any weapons nor he picks any. The developers made him unable and unwilling to fight altogether, so he just runs and hides. It's ridiculous.
The story ( an investigative journalist ventures into an abandoned mental institution alone in the night and without any weapons nor backup ) is weak and not realistic.

This is not the game I imagined it would be by the slightest. It's incredibly over rated in my opinion.
Terrible!! Luckily I got a refund. This is a strong recommendation against this game.

This is a no-brainer, of course I will recommend ME:Legendary Edition to everyone.
From an investment point of view = I bought this title on sale for 4.50 dollars. ME:LE consists of 3 games: ME1, ME2 and ME3, which are long games, and also you get all the 40 DLC's that comprise both story and gear expansions. So for 4.50 dollars I had fun 200 hours.

The Mass Effect trilogy is surely among the best 10 RPG franchises of all time. Believe it or not, I didn't play this games until the start of December 2024 and in the next 30 days I was blown away, couldn't put it down until the end. It's very entertaining and addictive.

In short, when talking generally about the gaming aspects, I can only say that everything is excellent: story, graphics ( completely remastered for LE ), sound and gameplay.

This game is special, it really takes you on an emotional ride and lets you invest emotionally into the characters, events and places. I didn't think I would be so invested into this game, and it's difficult to pinpoint what exactly is that stands out most: is it the fact that you are a commander of a space ship who travels around the galaxy to solve everybody's problems? ( and you feel like the captain in the Star Trek movies ), is it the incredible scale of exploring you can do ( hundreds of planets to explore, scan or read about ), is it the characters who are very well written, each with a unique story and personality, is it the incredible amount of choice making you are allowed to make that changes the course of the story?

The only thing that sucks ( and it really sucks ) is the ending of the trilogy. It's really bad and doesn't give emotional closure, and doesn't show properly what happens to the characters nor alien species. Also, in my opinion the story relies too much on the conflict organic life forms vs artificial life forms. It has a presumption that Artificial Intelligence is something essential to all alien species in their evolution. It has a presumption that AI in every possible timeline and galactic cycles will develop into very sentient and intelligent beings who are a significant threat to all races in the galaxy. It doesn't even remotely think of the possibility of refusing AI altogether and returning to nature and spirituality - which is IMO the only solution to the problems presented in ME. So, the story is a little materialistic, but of course, it's not realistic to hope for any spirituality or higher truths in a sci-fi game. But at the same time, I agree with this game about the threat Artificial Intelligence poses to all life and to humanity.

There are dozens of forums and reddit discussions where people have been debating all aspects of this game ( story, characters.....) for years, and still today people are discussing this game, the controversial ending etc....There are people who make a new playthrough every year, because they miss this game too much! Those are just a few examples that shows a possible buyer the scale of importance of this game and how much people got attached to it.

This is a neutral review.

This game is not a bad game, it's an average Hack and Slash RPG. When you analyze it superficially, it has decent graphics, soundtrack, gameplay and story. It's polished. It's entertaining, but only until midgame when it becomes a chore.

But, there were things I didn't like.
1) If you didn't buy the DLCs, you can pick only 1 class! the bounty hunter. I'm a gamer since the 80's and never in my life have I seen a RPG that limits you to 1 class in the vanilla version. This is, in my opinion, unacceptable.

2) The story could be better.
- In the game you are not the famous Abraham Van Helsing, but his son. Abraham got a call to help the region of Borgovia, but for some reason he wasn't avaiable, so he sends his son, who is the main character.
- You have only 1 companion in the game and it's the ghost of a woman. That ghost fights with you but it doesn't make any sense that a ghost fights against material creatures. Also she is practically useless in battle. The story is about the war between Borgovia's aristocracy and technocracy. The story forces you to take the side of the aristocracy ( and to even be ally with a vampire?! ). It would have been better if you could take the side of some people's liberation movement against both the aristocracy and the technocracy.

3) It has long loading times.

4) The skill system is well made but like in all similar games, you have limited skill points and you can fully level up only a limited amount of skills ( you will end up having just a few active and a few passive skills ). Like in all Hack and Slash RPGs, you have to be very careful what to level up, some builds will be efficient, some will not. You have to research beforerhand if you want to beat the game.

5) The game consists of a gazillion of battles against large packs of strong enemies. All enemies are grouped in large packs, and when you trigger 1 enemy in 1 pack, all the other members of the pack will charge at you like the blood lusted orcs from Warcraft 2. So combat for me (Bounty Hunter being the only class) de facto consisted of kiting enemies, which means firing and retreating, firing and retreating until you can thin the horde and finish the few remaining enemies. 28 hours of doing just that! Also it was frustrating to die always at the same manner: when a large pack of monsters surrounded me, I was blocked, and the health quickly fell down to 0 due to being overwhelmed. It was always the same thing. Luckily, the penalty for death is only a percentage of money you have, and it can be 0 if you agree to respawn in the town base.
For ranged characters the game does not give you a precise way of targeting, so it's hard to target the enemy you want, and it's even hard to point to the way you want to move when there are many monsters around you because the game would target a monster instead of targeting the ground to move out.

6) You can't manually save. The game saves automatically. So basically it's just 1 save file. That means you can fail quests, withouth the possibility of loading and retrying. Luckily, I failed only 1 side quest. I also didn't like that sometimes you find some some mysterious items/suspstanses you can eat. Some times they permanently give you bonuses to attributes, and some times they take away something permanently. There is no way of knowing what the consequences will be. For example, I ate something and it took away 50% of poison resistance permanently. And you can't load.

7) The game has 3 chapters. At the beginning it was quite interesting and fun, with interesting quests and side quests. To me it's clear they invested most of their creative energy to produce Chapter 1. Chapter 2 and 3 are not as interesting, they are rather dull story wise and quest wise. At a point in Chapter 3 I was really bored and couldn't wait to finish the game. It's like they either run out of ideas mid way or started rushing the game. The ending is a cliffhanger, because they want you to buy Van Helsing 2 and 3.

8) There is a tower defence mini game there is very poorly implemented. The only thing you can do after beating the game - scenarios - consist of doing the same maps against the same monsters - only super charged with extra health and damage. That was poorly implemented as well.

I played at hard difficulty, so somebody could ask me why I didn't play at normal if I found the combat tedious. Well, I'm an experienced RPG player so I often like to play such games at hard difficulty for the extra challenge. I read in the forums that even at normal the game is quite challenging, so there is no big difference. I was able to beat the game at hard, it's just that it was very tedious.

Again, it's not a bad game, it's ok. Players who like this genre might enjoy it. One thing is sure thou, there are much better Hack and Slash RPGs out there.

It's a very outdated game, made primarily for consoles in the 80's/90's.
From time to time I like to give a chance to such retro games but nowadays with so many new and quality games it has little purpose.

There are major flaws like being ultra short, having a low quality story with a silly cartoon like antagonist, having a very small video resolution which means a little area for your character to maneuver - which results in lots of unavoidable damage ( you don't have a way to escape the bullets ).
In the 80's and 90's there were console games, and most of them were difficult, so they forced you to spend/insert lots of coins in order to beat them. This game is reminiscent of that mechanic.
Luckily, this game has unlimited lives, so you beating the game is guaranteed.
There are 8 to chose, each with their unique weapons, but some are way more efficient then others.
Also - you can't fire and turn/move at the same time. You first have to turn, and then fire - that's a very obsolete and frustrating mechanic.

Barbearian is a solid "hack and slash" - "beat'em'up" game. It also has a touch of old arcade games.
I liked the graphics. The story and sound are mediocre.

The forte of this game is the gameplay. It's a simple, entertaining, addictive, straightforward skill based game.
Good variety of enemies, you upgrade your char and your soldiers with money, you collect powerups and special weapons.

What is impressive is the sheer amount of enemies on the maps, especially when you enter the second half of the story. It fabricates some epic brawls and a hectic, adrenalinic experience.
It's challenging. There is only 1 difficulty mode but you can modify it nicely with the damage received - meter. Frankly, after a while I lowered it to 75% damage received, and in some boss fights to 50% damage recieved. But it's ok, I saw some people playing on you tube with 10% damage received, so I'm satisfied with how I managed to beat the game.

This game was clearly inspired by the popular title "Don't Starve".
It's a very solid crafting - survival game.
I liked the story, it's deep and connected to the esoteric world. The developers clearly have read some books.
I also liked the colourful graphics - the open-world map is divided into sections. Each section has it's unique monsters, ingredients to scavenge, challenged to overcome.
The most important element of this game is crafting: there is a myriad of items to craft. All the items degrade and turn to ash with time so you continuously have to re-create them or repair them.
But in order to do that you have to continuously hunt monsters and gather ingredients from the environment.
A matter of fact is - this game is very challenging. It is based on tiers of difficulty and on a continuous progression to more powerful monsters and environment challenges. To survive that you will have to craft more powerful and more complex items: weapons, armor, a great number of food products that heal you and brings you boosts for combat and resistances.
As said, the map is divided into sections - for example earth, ice, fire, poison, electricity, darkness...etc.
Each section required it's specific weapons and armor to survive. But you will continuously need to go back to each sections for various ingredients, so you will have to carry an enormous amount of ingredients and chose what to do next and what is the best path to complete the next quest (quests are based on scavenging and crafting of course). I would always find my inventory too small for all the items. Luckily there are storage places.

It's difficult to explain how complex this game is. I can attempt to convey how hectic this game is with how I often felt like while playing this game: "oh, next I have to craft item x, so I have to gather item a,b,c,d, but in order to craft item a I need product e,g,h,j. But in order to craft item g I need item n,m,o....etc....etc....Oh but I also need to go back to ice world and craft item p.. so I need this and this. So for ice world I need this resistances and weapons, but when I go to electricity world I need that. Oh, again I need to craft this, and again that".
Combat is minimalistic and based on crafting, but also on skill, especially when you fight the monsters late game.
But, it is all very satisfying and rewarding when you perceive that you are progressing the quests/story and becoming stronger, and of course, when you finish the game.

So, this game is definitely not for everyone. It requires patience, planning and repetitive "work", which is to say grinding.

However, when my experience with a game is so addictive and satisfying in the end, I always recommend such games. Fans of the crafting and survival genre will be delighted with Smoke and Sacrifice.

From the small amount of time I have played, this seems like a very glitchy game with many technical issues. I had some problems launching and also the game freezes and crashes randomly.
It's clearly a game not optimized for all PC specifications but only for some of them.
Also it's a multiplayer only game and it's difficult to find servers/matches to play.
Enough said. Refund.

This is a neutral review.

Well I surely expected much, much more from this game.
Ryse: Son of Rome is basically like playing the movie Gladiator. The story is very similar.
You know the gaming genre: on-rail shooter? Well, this is an on-rail action game, in the sense that it's basically a number of action sequences one after the other, with some running in between.
I thought that it would be something like a hack and slash RPG, where you have an actual map to explore and some freedom, with quests to do but no no, this is something similar to the Prince of Persia series - action parkour ( and even more minimalistic then the Assassin Creed games ).
It's completely linear. It's basically a kombo game.
The combat is 100% based on various kombos and timing, nothing else.
Ok, even like that I had a good amount of fun, but I expected a much more epic and serious experience.

The game is incredibly short. The combat is based not only on the sword melee but also you take charge of a testudo formation, you use the ballista and you launch some spears occasionally.
But it's all very sporadic and short.
After the campain there are some multiplayer scenarios but no body is online to play them, so you can't count on that content.
Weird and minimalistic leveling up system.
The only thing that stands up is the graphics, which is truly excellent.
Buy if you want to experience a short extract from the life of a centurion. I'ts not a bad game. The story is ok ( it has an interesting twist regarding the identity of the main character ), the production value is high with well done cutscenes and actors doing the dialogues, it's just that it feels more like a tech demo. It should be 2 or 3 times longer to be considered a complete game.