Recent reviews by Drinjanin

At the first glance it has excellent graphics, excellent models, excellent visuals and spot on sound effects. Everyhting regarding the visuals and sound effects is tight. The game is extremely well optimized for the PC. It contains variety of formula teams, wide variety of choice of races, lots of gameplay types like season and quick race. Basically the overall impression and presentation is great. It has support for both keyboard controllers and has bindible control options for both keyboards and controllers. It will recognise your random controller, it doesn't have to be that that of Xbox. I did not encounter any bugs during my gameplay time. I feel like the handling of the formulas should be a bit more smooth. The annoying part is that the player gets penalised when he/she commits a collision or if the NPC drivers collide into him/her.

I personally prefer racing games with cars, where the customisation is available, and where I do not have to drive 15 laps like in this game. I am not fan of formulas, but for the people who are into it, this is a game for them.

I give it a thumbs up.

This is a game like Nokia's Snake, but Android edition. The game itself is aimed towards kids. Now, is it good enough for kids themselves? The gameplay consists of navigating caterpillar, known as Millie, through the maze and eat the balls, so it can grow bigger. But, there are parts of the maze, which can not fit the Millie as it grows big. So, the gameplay is spiced up with some cracked walls that can be torn down. In order to do that, a player needs to visually discover the cracked walls, and pick up the hammer, which is a collectable item, that can be used to bash them. However, collectables have a timer, and if the player doesn't notice the cracked walls, the timer might expire, so upon the encounter with a cracked wall, it can be already too late. The game has scores rewarded with three stars for maximum points, so, in order to beat the highest score possible, it is necessary to eat all balls. But the repetition, due to the technical flaw of the collectable hammer is frustrating. The hammer should not have the timer, instead it should be used whenever a player finds a use for it. Other collectable is a pair of shoes, which give the movement boost. There a scissors as well, but I forgot what is their purpose. There is a minigame instance, where Millie has a dream of flying an airplane. In those levels, which are also rated with three stars, a player needs to follow the pattern required by the level, and draw shapes with the trail of airplane's smoke. Sounds like a simple thing to do, but it is not, because the handling of the plane is terrible. It can not make sharp turns. So, for example, in order to draw a pattern of heart with the smoky trail, the bottom pointy part of the heart's shape can't be drawn, since the airplane can't make sharp turns. What happens if you want three stars? You can't obtain them. I personally didn't manage to score a single star on the airplane minigame. So, ♥♥♥♥ this ♥♥♥♥.

Not recommended.

A promise of a Real Time Strategy game, which could have challenged some big Turn Based and Real Time Strategy games out there. After years of waiting for the early access to end, this is what we got:

Let me start with the good stuff. The voice acting of the game’s narrator is good.

Everything else is overall McDonald’s junk food quality.
Constant annoying pauses - cinematic pauses and dialogue pauses during the start of the gameplay. Unit animations look clunky, and the art style of the armour and weapons resembles the likes of low fantasy setting, rather than historically accurate one. Yet, the developers insist on the historical accuracy in presentation of their game. User interface is way too much minimalistic, and therefore lacking in functionality and content. Minimap’s field of view display has an ugly design, where the area of vision cone looks like a weird liquid drop with two sharp ends on each side, rather than industry’s standard, which displays it in a trapezium shape. The marked areas of the point of interest on the minimap were hand-drawn in Microsoft’s Paint program. There is no collision detection between civilians and buildings, who walk around the cities, which breaks the immersion. Surely, the buildings, which look like soviet blocks of the medieval era, piled like rock formations in the cities, don’t help either. Add to that the units, which climb on the siege towers, and float in the air once they reach the top of the siege tower. Yeah, it looks pretty bad, and leaves a bad impression of the lazy developers. The optimisation is poor, which results in abysmal graphics quality and low frame rates, despite running it on specifications above the minimal requirement. Alt-tabbing the game lowers the texture quality in-game.

So, years of waiting for the early access to end, and we got this. It was not worth the wait for the overall experience a player gets. And no, nobody cares how many people developers had in their team. They still charge significant amount of money for this game after all these years, and they could have afforded to hire more. Not that they could have, but should have done it.
As a cherry on the top, they moved to other game projects, while this one was left unpolished.
Do not buy it. Do not tolerate this kind of behaviour, and do not show support for lazy people.

An ordinary Action and Adventure game made for mobile phones, with a good port for Widnows. For the gameplay mouse is used as a simulation of the finger you would normally use to activate the hammocks on the mobile phone, which serves as slings, in order to launch the monkey to hit and collect bananas. It gets boring rapidly. It is not a bad game, and since there is no rating in between recommended or not recommended, I will give it the "not recommended". This game deserves a rating of 3/5. Buy it at a discount, for the achievements.

Being a helpless victim simulator doesn't make it a good Horror game. Navigating through the dark with a camera's nightvision and occasional scare jumps doesn't make it a good Horror game either. Being unarmed, helpless victim doesn't make it a good game at all. It only makes it a frustrating experience overall. Protagonist can't take a single bat in order to defend himself. Games like this need weapons, and with an atmosphere like this it could build up the tension to add more to the overall experience. Add to that limited ammo resources, and that would make things a lot more engaging. Playing game for hours with a camera in the hand is so boring. Oh, but the environment provides a plenty of the batteries specifically for the protagonist's camera model. How convenient. Games like The Suffering, The Suffering - Ties That Bind and Half-Life allow the use of weapons, and do not lose quality horror experience. Heck, The Whistleblower DLC has a ghost as the enemy, which insta-killed me. Developers should know by now that ghost that are not of solid matter should not be featured in games like these. Especially if they insta-kill the player. It is a game over. There is no win against such types of the enemies. No storyline can justify it. It totally breaks the immersion to have an enemy like that in a Horror game, where the protagonist enters experimental laboratories and similar facilites. This is not the ARPG like Titan Quest - Anniversary Edition, Grim Dawn or Torchlight, where a ghost is nothing more than another enemy type. And no, playing it with the lights switched off, being alone in a room, and with the headphones on doesn't make it any better.

Avoid it. Try out The Suffering, The Suffering - Ties That Bind and Half-Life instead. Those are the real Horror games.

Even though this game started on Android platform, it is ported very well, better than the Ubisoft's PC ports, and even though in its nature it is short, it still provides hours of fun. It is a Turn Based Strategy, with hexagonal movements. It has three difficulty levels for more challenge and more hours of gameplay.

This game doesn't provide any dialogue options, nor can the story be affected, altered, defined, nor shaped through any player actions. What it provides is a choice of mercenaries that can be recruited for combat, and the items that the player want to equip.

It works like this: some fancy hero wants to save the day from an evil king, as it usually goes, and on his way he recruits units to help him out. Some join as a reward for freeing them, some for assisting them, while others be recruited for coin. The dumbest part here is that the hero itself doesn't participate in the fights. The protagonist is just a manager, while the antagonist does participate in the fighting. In my opinion he should have been featured as a hero fighter.

The following are available unit types: peasants, pathfinders (dual-wield rangers/rouges), archers, healers, footmen (sword and shield), arbalesters (crossbowmen) and knights (two-handed). Unit types have unit stacks, which are represented with numbers and a health bar. The higher the number the more soldiers the unit has. As the helth points drop, units get killed, and the numbers decrease. Each unit is visually represented by a single soldier. Each unit has a star value, which is there to provide some insight in the power of the unit, and to impose the limit of 15 stars a warband can have. This way the developers have established the balancing of the game, and the unit limits. The maximum number of units is 5 at any given time, but it can be smaller if the player wants to recruit more of the unit types with the higher star ranking. it supposed to be like the higher the star rating of the unit, the better and stronger the unit. But, I will explain what is the problem here in the continuation of the review.

The player navigates on the linear, semi-open world map, and picks the fights, recruits units and buys the equipment. After every battle the player receives the experience points and gold coins. Gold reward will be diminished for every unit lost during the fights. The higher the casualties the less of the reward player receives. During the fights, gold can be dropped by the enemies, and some battles have gold chests on the map. Interacting with the chest during the battle counts as an action, and the unit which has opened the chest can not attack. The equipment items are few in numbers and are expensive. They provide the bonuses for spirit, attack, physical defense and magical defense, as well as specialised damage bonuses for certain unit types. That way the player can role-play the warband. Those are a hat/helmet, cape/chest armour, belt and a weapon.

Battles are turn-based. Units have limited moves on the hexagons. Their movement speed depends on the unit type per se. Pathfinders can traverse the largest distance, while footmen are some of the slowest in the game, thus traverse shorter distances. Except for the peasants, every other unit has one special attack, which, once used, will take couple of turns to recharge. Also, there are special magical powers that player can use, for the cost of the rage points. Each hit received fills the rage bar. Special powers can be used to buff the defenses of the unit, attack the enemy units, and so on. Units, besides their special attacks have their pros and cons, which the player must learn how to use to his/her advantage. For example, archers are ranged units, but if they shoot from the longer range their attacks are weaker. The ideal option is to place them two hexagons away from the target. But, in that case they become too exposed, and considering they are the archers, they are squishier than other units, so they can suffer lots of casualties by the melee opponents. If the enemy unit gets placed one hexagon in front of them, they can not do their ranged attacks, but have to either switch to weak melee attack or to step away and then shoot. Arbalesters, which are crossbowmen, can shoot from the furthest corner of the map, and harm the targets better than the archers. The further away from the target they are, the harder they hit. Those are examples of how the player must develop strategy starting from the arranging the layout, or should I say the formation of the units, before the battle starts and then, covering the ranged units with the melee units, flaking the enemy units, locking the enemy ranged units, and so on. Peasants are the only unit without special abilities, but if the player has chosen the equipment which boosts the damage of all units, they can critically hit hard certain unit types, which makes up for their lack of the special ability. Also, they are the cheapest and the most numerous unit in the game.

As for the cons, the fact that the hero is not participating in the fights, but is only visually representing the warband on the world map, does not leave a convincing impression that he is in to get the evil king. The fact that he is just a mere unit manager, and not a hero who would lead the charge in the battles, takes away from the story itself, especially at the end of the game, where he stands triumphant over the evil king, as depicted in the cutscenes. The balancing is the main issue of the game that matters. For example, healers are utterly useless. Their attack damage is the lowest of all units in the game, including the enemies, yet in order to heal, they have to use their special ability. The healing spell is so weak, that the health regained is not relevant, compared to the enemy's damage output, which can smite couple of units in one hit. Yet healers heal 18 life at most, which is not enough to heal one allied unit for the full health bar. Once a player uses the healing spell, the healer can not attack, nor make any other action. And the worst yet is that a healer can only cast healing spell twice per battle, and the cooldown takes around three turns. Having them in the warband is a waste of turns, and they can only serve as a meat canon, but not for long either, as they are the squishiest unit in the game. There is one more mage unit type in the game, elementalists, the strong mage type worth being in the warband, but that unit is not available in the story mode by the stupid choice the developers have made. They are only available in the second mode of the game called survival mode, where players compete for the highscore. Another problem are the knights, which come last to join the hero. If they join the last, they are the strongest melee unit one would think. Especially since they have the 5 star rating, the highest star rating in the game, accompanied only by the arbalesters. The problem with them is that their damage output is inferior to peasants and pathfinders, units available right at the beginning of the game. Their special ability is an area of effect ground slam, which deals unimpressive damage.

All in all, it is a fun little game, and deserves the rating of 4/5. It is not special, but it can provide hours of fun even after one beats the game on all three difficulties.

Fortified is one of those games that was unfortunate to be abandoned by its developers prior to receiving the final touches, that would make the game excellent. And I have to state this at the very beginning, as that is the thing that bugs me so much, and prevents me from recommending this game to anyone.

Fortified is a mix of Shooter and Tower Defense genres, and it works amazing like that. It has nice retro 50’s US American style artwork, and is set in a universe where the USA has been invaded by the alien metal machines. The player has weapons and lethal accessories, both with modifiers, at his disposal, to carefully adapt to the enemy types present on the map, and to plan out the tactics for the each map individually.

Before the start, player can choose the set of weapons and accessories, and select their modifiers, to meet his tactical needs for beating those maps. With every beaten wave of the enemies, the player gets rewarded with dollars, that can be used to buy the pre-selected accessories, which the player has chosen prior to starting the map. With each successfully beaten map the player gets rewarded with points to invest in unlocking new weapons and accessories as well as their modifiers.

There are four characters in the game, each one with its set of weapons and accessories that can be used against the alien metal machines. Depending on the character, they can choose between shotgun, Thompson, bazooka, TNT launcher, freezing pistol, and so on. Most of these weapons are shared between the characters themselves, but a single character does not have the access to choose from all of the weapons available. One hero gets to choose two weapons from a set of the weapons specific to him or her. Accessories range from lethal weapons like cannons, turrets, flame throwers, and soldiers, to non-lethal tools for support, like magnets, trampolines, damage boosters, and so on. In addition to this, every character has a special attack, that can be triggered when the special bar meter gets filled by killing the alien metal machines. All of that makes each playable character different from one another.

The alien metal machines vary from small, but numerous trash mob, to map bosses. Each enemy has a certain gimmick, and the player will have to work around that. There are two type of the enemies: aerial and grounded. Each maps brings something new, so players do have to constantly change the tactics.

There are single player mode and multiplayer mode. The co-op can be played with four people in total. There are three difficulty levels, and two game modes: standard mode and invasion mode. Standard mode has enemies coming from various parts of the map, while the invasion mode is more straight forward… literally, as the enemies come straight in front of the player from one direction only. The difficulty additionally increases with more players on the map.

The goal of this Tower Defense part is to protect a rocket, which the alien metal machines are trying to destroy. Every map is the same thing – protect the rocket, and sometimes more than a one, so it gets tricky.

It sounds like fun, and it is, but then the bad parts kick in – the game suffers from balancing issues. Some accessories and weapons need buffs, as they are utterly useless. Cash rewards between the waves get smaller with higher difficulty. The problem is, there are many cases where the player can be short for just 50 dollars to buy a single accessory, that costs, say 450 dollars, and precisely that accessory could give him the edge for beating the maps. So, the money reward system needs to be rebalanced, more in favour of the players. Due to this, beating the maps solo on the highest difficulty is impossible, unless you follow the viable build guides… but what is the fun of playing the game one way, if there are so many options in the game. There are some broken achievements: for example, beating the invasion mode up to level 20 will not unlock.

The developers should have used the opportunity to address these issues when the game was given away via Humble Bundle. That way, they could have increased the player base, and who knows, maybe could have made some extra revenue from the potential future buyers. I have contacted them, and their response was something along this line that ‘they are aware that the game has the issues. It was their first game, and they were not happy with it. At that time they were working on another game called Foxhole, so they could not fix Fortified. They have never received so much interest in the game prior to Humble Bundle giveaway, and the sudden interest was surprising to them.’ Well, that is what the giveaways are for, to promote the games, duh.

Sadly, I can not recommend it.

Kalypso’s Fifteen Years Of Shame

This is not the first, nor the last abandoned game published by Kalypso. Just read the reviews for other games, and you will find out how many of them were left unfinished or were never properly patched.
Tropico 5 has not been patched properly. Getting in touch with Kalypso staff was impossible, as they tend to avoid all means of communication with them, regardless of the platform. Because of that, I will only review the game-breaking bugs the game has:

1.) There is a game-breaking bug, which occurs when the uprising starts, the military buildings vecome targeted with the marks above them as usual, the crowd keeps running in the streets with the arms, but they do not have the uprisers' marker above them. The military gets grouped in front of the targeted buildings prepared to defend them, but they do not attack the uprisers, because the uprisers have not been properly marked and identified by the game, and they do not attack the buildings nor the army. This makes the sandbox mode impossible to be played long term, with constitution options other than democracy, because the democracy constitution option doesn’t allow the uprisings. Thus, roleplaying a totalitarian or police state is impossible, as the uprising can not end. It is not possible to build military buildings during this time, as the uprising is in progress, but it is not functional, because of the bug, thus it remains endless.

2.) In a normal cast scenario, after the uprising has been over, there are buildings which remain empty due to the population loss. The problem is that those buildings do not get repopulated by other people, who get into the work force, and have the wealth required to live inside of them. Instead, the player is forced to demolish those bugged buildings, and build the new ones, so the population can start moving in. It is a waste of money, a waste of time as the construction workers become occupied rebuilding the same residential buildings over and over again and it creates unnecessary traffic jams. It makes sandbox mode unplayable in the long run.

3.) The tourism cap in the game leaves lots of hotels empty. Thus, relying more on the tourism is impossible, as the tourism cap is fixed, and can not be increased by taking the measures to ensure the bigger tourist interest.

4.) The oil refinery in the sea does not get removed sometimes once the oil deposit has been depleted, thus making the scenery look uglier.

Point And Click genre has never been my thing, except for the Neighbours From Hell series. Odysseus Kosmos didn't do anything for me to change that.

The game is about a guy in the explorer space ship, who has to fix various broken machines. It is that exciting.

Not recommended.

A tragedy of all multiplayer-only games, which were developed and published by small studios and companies is that they will meet their end sooner or later. Such is the case with the Guns Of Icarus Online. Guns Of Icarus Online is an ambitious game made in Unity engine. Probably the most ambitious game made in that engine, which serves as a cheap way for the developers to create games ranging from very bad to mediocre. Guns Of Icarus Online feels like it has the development quality and polish above the typical Unity games. The attention to details, design, polish, soundtracks, game mechanics, unique setting, everything is on par with development studios with much higher budget and engines in the likes of Cryengine and Unreal. Everything about this game is top-notch, except for one thing - the game is dead. It has been dead more than two years. For more than two years have I been trying to join a multiplayer game. In the meantime the game has received both the update and the free upgrade known as the Guns Of Icarus - Alliance. Sadly, it did not increase the player base, nor has it made the existing one to stay for long. The only way to experience what the game has to offer is via tutorial, as the game doesn't have the single player modes. It is all about online PVP and PVE, sadly. It is such a waste to have a game like this, with the amazing flying ships designs, art style, soundtracks, the unique setting of the game, the unique approach to the aerial combat and team cooperation. It is such a waste, since it can not be played with bots.

I probably could have said more about it, but I never got to experience it in multiplayer, which is the essence of the game. The game is dead. Let it rest in peace. Only an update, which could introduce the gameplay with bots could save it.