Recent reviews by SamuraiDan

Nights is a game that truly has no equal. if I were to attempt to describe it, it would be something along the lines of "arcade racing game mixed with sonic the hedgehog by way of dream sequences with a dash of collectathon". that might sound weird, and it is. but it's the kind of weird that leads to a highly enjoyable and memorable experience.

in Nights you play as titular character NiGHTS, as he does loop de loops around a "track" that changes after completing your main objective, which is to collect enough blue balls to break open a cage. do this four times and then fight a boss. this formula never has a chance to get repetitive for a few reasons.

first reason being that the game is quite short. just to "clear" the game only takes two hours. the game's length comes more from attempting to A-rank every stage, which is no small endeavor. it takes a great understanding of the game's mechanics (which are quite unique) to get anything higher than a C.

those unique mechanics are another reason things never get stale. contrary to every other game I've played, in Nights you want to complete the objective then keep going, not crossing the finish line until the last second. bonus time gives you more points and only occurs after the cage has been opened. you can even fly right over the top of the finish line so you can continue looping without changing tracks and making progress. there's way more than I can cover here, but suffice to say it's a game that's only simple on the surface.

finally the sheer variety of the levels on display will keep you satiated. grass green hills, winter wonderlands, aquatic waterworlds, bouncy castles, and more. the core gameplay stays the same for the most part, although there are some sections that are a little different, like a snowmobile in the winter level that can only go forward can't loop. but the theming change-up really does help keep everything feeling fresh.

nights is a game that clearly had a lot of time, love, and effort put into it and if it's considered the last hurrah of the arcade game then at least that era ended on a high note. heavily recommended.

I am putting a massive caveat and disclaimer onto this recommendation:

I recommend this game as an artsy indie game that's ultimately a fun time waster with a weak start.
it has simplistic mechanics, monotonous gameplay, and only occasional moments of genuine fun, but it's also well put together with high presentation values and no technical hiccups to speak of.

I do NOT recommend it as the end-all be-all super amazing omega game that the people of 2012 hyped this game up as. my first experience was a sour note because of that weird wave of "best game ever made" comments that happened back then. especially since the first half of it is kind of weak thanks to how often you traverse giant mounds of nothing but sand.

the ending sequence is satisfying enough though I feel the story is so vague that the ending could have been literally anything as long as it was fun to play. and thankfully it is, if only because it removes the restrictions of the game that had been making everything a bit of a slog till that point.

tl;dr it's not bad but it's not really *great* either, it's just good. worth the money, I guess, but don't go in with the super expectations I had. it's just another indie game.

finnish game studio frozenbyte has never been a big company. their greatest success commercially being the trine series, which isn't saying much sales wise. all this is to say shadowgrounds is clearly a budget title made for budget sales, and it shows.

a heavily dated engine, passionless voice acting more like to lull to sleep than rouse to action, a weird camera that's kind of headache inducing, completely missable weapons (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, except I'm not sure they were supposed to be missable), and more. so why am I recommending this game?

well, the long and short of it is this game's heart is in the right place. it has a decent amount of enemy variety, weapons have a few unique ideas despite most being bog standard, the combat can be tons of fun when thrown into more difficult situations (which is unfortunately rare).

all of this game's problems that aren't on a technical level stem from a lack of personality. it is, under the hood, a good-ish game wanting to be a great one. if the characters had more character and the enemy movement and weaponry had more weight I'd be giving it a glowing recommendation despite it's flaws, instead all I can do is warn you about them.

thankfully it seems to understand this and does not overstay its welcome with useless padding. the pacing is such that you'll finish the game right about the time where you start thinking everything's getting stale. six hours ended up being a perfect length.

if you're hankering for some top-down sci-fi alien busting action and you've already played alien breed and alien swarm to death, this is another good option. just don't expect anything unique or memorable and you will have a fun time.

I just finished up second encounter, but the store page for that no longer exists. so instead, I'll write up my review on the original (which I played some time ago in full) then tack on my thoughts about TSE at the end.

in 1992, four high school kids from croatia wanted to make their own video game and formed a company called Croteam to do so. the problem was, they didn't have the kind of money necessary to license out a big game engine like Idtech or unreal. at the time there was no unity equivalent. so they did what any aspiring 90's game programmer would do and made their own. enter the Serious Engine. The serious engine is mostly known for being the first 3D engine that could render hundreds of fully polygonal 3D enemies on screen at once while maintaining decent performance.

serious sam was made specifically to show off this feature, and as a result relies on enemy number moreso than anything else. why put ten enemies in an arena when you can put a hundred? the level design was more flat and linear than say, doom, essentially being a series of rooms that you clear the enemies from.

this game is also known for its weapon system. garnering a huge and satisfying variety including a chaingun, shotgun, laser gun, cannon, and more. and you'll need them all, trust me. the actual variety of enemies on display is staggering even without the sheer number of them on screen at once. headless gunners, bulls, skeleton werewolf kleers, vaguely human gnars, it's amazing how many kinds of enemies there are even in just the first encounter.

and the reason you need so many weapons to combat them is due to how uniquely they all act. shotguns or pistols are best for headless gunners, who stay back and shoot from afar but are very low on health. gnars rush you but are a bit beefier, shotguns work best against them. a single rocket can take down the walking laser-shooting tanks.

switching weapons frequently, managing your ammo, prioritizing your targets efficiently, clearing each spot room by room, it all adds up to a gameplay loop vaguely reminiscent of SMASH TV, but in first person.

there are a few problems, some of which were addressed by The Second Encounter. first of all, the random difficulty spikes. Kleer alley is harder than anything else in the game, even the final boss. TSE adds powerups and some new weapons that help immensely in this regard, but it doesn't iron out all the kinks.

environments are flat and static. I'll admit I never thought about it while playing TFE, but the walls and floors are never part of the combat. in TSE they make greater use of things like moving floors and bounce pads. sometimes for the worse, admittedly, but it adds much needed variety to how combat encounters play out.

some of TSE's new weapons would also be a hearty addition to backport to TFE. the flamethrower alone would make that one frog boss fight infinitely more manageable. and the sniper rifle was their answer to just how cheap "scorpions on rooftops" can be.

finally, the ending. it's lackluster in both, but at least TFE's final boss felt like a final boss. TSE's feels like more like there was supposed to be another chapter, then there just wasn't.

highly recommend both games if you're a fan of arcadey shooting and can put up with some weird difficulty choices. also, online co-op. it has that and it's fun.

what do you get when you mix the mechanics of third person shooters with kaiju films from japan and B movie horror films, dashed with massive explosions and extreme gameplay variety? you get the EDF series. EDF has been going on for a long time, and each entry brings in new improvements and additions to the formula, but the formula itself never changes.

bugs show up. the bugs are massive. you have guns. the guns make big explosions. clear the map of every enemy and move on to next map. that is the core of the EDF games, and 4.1 is no different. what makes this one stand out is in just how well made the overall experience is. previous EDF games could be described, lovingly, as "jank". framerate dips, weird clipping issues, all the calling cards of low budget console games circa 2007. thankfully most of the problems have been ironed out in this incarnation.

what's left is a buffet of chaos and destruction that sees you leveling city blocks, fighting off multiple distinct kinds of giant insects and giant robots, and dashing around like a madman to pick up the crates that enemies drop that reward you with a bigger health pool and more weapons at the end of a mission.

make no mistake, while I say "giant insects and giant robots", that doesn't mean the enemies are generic in any way. ants are numerous and very mobile, but easy to take down quickly. wasps can fly but come in smaller numbers. some of the flying robots have homing lasers. the enemy variety on display is tremendous and goes a long way to making the ~100 odd missions feel fresh all the way till the end.

the four classes on display are also distinct and well made, refined over several console generations of releases. wing diver is hyper mobile but extremely fragile, ranger is your all rounder who's good at everything but great at nothing, air raider is a co-op specific class who can call in vehicles and air strikes, and fencer is an extremely strong class that is the hardest to play.

no individual class falls by the way side, and even ranger can tackle the highest difficulty solo with the right gear and tactics. and tackle it you might, considering how the game's progression works.
you can simply play to the last mission and call it quits, but EDF has a leveling system where higher difficulties give you higher level weapons that let you tackle higher difficulties. it's very similar to a simplified diablo.

that gives the game a lot of staying power. add that to the ability to play online with friends and this game is a slam dunk. very easy to recommend. some people might say EDF5 is better but that amounts to a few small (but very welcome) QOL changes. both are absolutely worth playing.

this game's style and presentation are off the charts, and a lot of its ideas are either fresh and inventive or wonderfully lampshaded. its main gimmick is used well, and the platforming sections are well done too. it has some of the best boss fights I've had the pleasure of attempting and the ending is satisfying. this is one of the best free games I've played!

I was a big fan of the original blake stone when I played it. I thought the additions to the engine and the presentation and polish put into it made it leagues above it's predecessor wolfenstein, which was already a fine game. so then, why do I not recommend this game, when it's mostly more of the same? well... what few additions there are either detract from the experience or add nothing new whatsoever.

the minimap is far smaller to help accomodate a "powerup" that only lets you zoom further in, not out, which is not helpful considering how claustrophobic the minimap is by default. there are invisible shadow enemies that are neat in theory, but in practice don't do nearly enough to alert you to their presence. I get that's the point but it goes too far. the explosive weapons now blow up ammo as well, and while that's a neat touch presentation wise it just means I never used them until the final boss and one hairy situation near the very end.

the game is not even half the length of aliens of stone. it's too short, even for an older DOS game. it felt like an expansion pack that someone decided should be made into a "sequel". there's also a weird problem with difficulty scaling in this game, the early game has the same tier of enemies but less ammo and weaker weapons. I was blasting through later levels and trudging through the starting ones.

if the original blake stone didn't exist, I'd have no problem recommending this. but as it stands there's really no reason to get this over the original. you won't regret playing it if you buy it as a pack-in, but there really is no reason to recommend this over aliens of gold.

Grim dawn is a game that oozes polish and atmosphere. the developers have outdone themselves creating a world of grime and despair that you tear your way through with wild abandon. the excellent animations, voice acting, and art direction are complemented extremely well by the game's excellent design.

the difficulty curve is so fine tuned I was able to tell exactly when I hit mid-game and end-game by how tough the mobs of enemies were getting. there is also, of course, plenty of theory-crafting builds on the table as any good ARPG has. classes really only determine your starting stats, as any class can hold any weapon with the right points put into strength or spirit or whatever the requisite stat is.

the real meat of the classes comes from the weapon variety. swords, maces, staves, axes, crossbows, pistols, rifles... you name it. armor is no slouch either, with each piece being visible on your character and having varied stats that make custom builds a lot of fun.

all of this would be for naught if the game was sluggish or unsatisfying to play. fortunately I'm happy to say that the actual feel of the game is basically perfect. every hit is impactful, enemies provide good feedback, there's never anything that feels unfair or unclear, and the sign posting of things like optional difficult dungeons is done extremely well.

speaking of, exploration is another thing this game did right. you'll get plenty of handholding for the main quest, but there's a lot of quests you'll miss completely if you don't go out of your way to fill up the map. there was an entire questline I completed that was missable if I hadn't rescued a stray cult prisoner near the beginning of the game.

all of the individual parts are extremely well made and each comes together to form a great whole. I am confident in saying this is one of the best action RPGs, and possibly one of the best games, ever made. in time this will go down alongside diablo 2 and doom as genre defining classics, I'm sure of it.

this game has problems. enemies keep respawning (which is not a fun system for a linear platformer-shooter), a lot of late-game enemies feel almost impossible to dodge which feels unfair, the lives system is bizarre and despite all that the game is way too easy on anything below hard thanks to just how plentiful resources are if you're even remotely exploring.

that all being said... I loved my time with it. the weapons are unique and interesting, and for the most part all of them stay relevant throughout the campaign thanks to the resource management aspects. the normal shotgun is completely superceded by the auto shotty, but aside from that you'll end up using your whole arsenal pretty consistently.

the platforming aspects are good, for the most part, though I can't help but feel that later levels (cough cough treetop village) are a bit too reliant on instant kill pits. which extra suck thanks to how lives work in this game. sure, you don't lose all your progress when you die but you do lose all your armor and extra health. that's only relevant when you die to a bottomless pit, if you die to an enemy then you're not going to have any of that anyway, but *all* of my deaths were to bottomless pits except for one enemy in the very last level. thankfully turok's air control is quite tight, so it's only occasionally an issue when they go overboard with it.

the enemy variety is also off the charts. robots, dinosaurs, shamans, lizard men, lizard men riding dinosaurs, giant mechs, and more! you even fight cars at one point. and while there is the occasional reskin (robots are just the natives but tougher), there's enough base variety among the enemies that it gets away with that.

the only other problem I have is that occasionally the key locations are a bit too obtuse. there was one in level 5 where I had to hit a switch that was half-way across the map from the actual key... fortunately most of them aren't that bad, but the ones that are stand out because searching for them added probably an extra hour to my playtime. otherwise, exploration is done extremely well. I can only count about four or five times total where the reward for exploring an area felt underwhelming.

all that is to say, highly recommended, so long as you're a fan of exploration and can put up with a somewhat frustrating encounter design relying on enemy respawns.

I usually don't review games I haven't played, but this game uses uplay and since i refuse to sign up for yet another DRM based data harvesting tool I can't play the game I payed for. buy it somewhere drm free if you must, but not here, avoid this version like the plague it is. I feel ashamed I ever spent money on this, it's like finding out I paid someone for painting my house an obnoxious color without my knowledge or approval.

edit: I have since played the game through methods that are legal in france and I'm on the end game island. I usually wait till the end to put my review up, but I don't think they can change my mind with anything new at this point. this game really, really doesn't respect the player's time in the slightest. every fetch quest, every kill quest, every unskippable cutscene, every quest that forces you to use a certain weapon, every quest that railroads you into using stealth, it all adds up to a feeling that these people wanted you to play a diet version of an actual freedom-giving open world game. it's like they desperately wanted to everyone to play the game the same way in a fashion similar to linear games, but people with their head screwed on straight kept forcibly taking them back onto the path of letting people play how they want.

also again I'm reiterating the cutscenes are unskippable. there's a mod for that now but still, it's an unforgivable sin in my eyes that it needs a mod to fix that in the first place. there's a good game underneath all these horrible design decisions, but for me as an experienced gamer it just feels like I'm playing a version of mercenaries 2 that's bogged down by modern design trends that don't respect the player's time or intelligence and are designed to pad play times instead of give you more content.

maybe, *hopefully*, the sequels are better but I'm reluctant to try the rest. I'm extra angry I paid for this game now, what the hell was the internet doing getting so hyped over this back in 2012?