Recent reviews by ɠųąཞɖıąŋ ąŋɠɛƖ!

I'd love to review this game positively but despite being a graphically unintensive and comparably primitive title, the application fails to load on my Core i5/ 16 GB RAM/ 780m iMac -- a machine with literally ten times the hardware required. The game is simply a badly coded piece of trashware. I'd recommend buying it for the iPad instead but since they don't seem to care about their Mac users, I recommend you just skip this mess all-together.

Definitely avoid.

2/10. (And only because it didn't damage my OS install.)

**Addendum**

I find it bemusing and suspicious that some posters have downvoted my harsh review anonymously. What kind of score should I have given the a game that will not run on my system? Should I be happy to simply buy a Steam thumbnail? The game was offered on Steam for Mac and it's a comparatively primitive game compared to most other titles. If the developers weren't prepared to make a game that would run effectively on a platform, they shouldn't offer it. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the downvotes were smurfed/issued by the game developer themselves or some irrational fanboys.

(mini-review)

An enjoyable game if you can get it for cheap, the title has good graphics, solid controls and a nice variety of enemies and locales. True, this game isn't survival horror in any sense of the word and focuses instead on absurd levels of action. The game can be a bit difficult at times and repetitious as you replay areas to obtain the correct combination of key presses. The story is a complete waste and the game's cooperative AI isn't worth a whit. The game lacks serious replayability but if you can play through it cooperatively, it's a great experience that can generate good laughs, panic and fun.

Recommended.

8/10.

(mini-review)

(Note: I have over 40 hours of gameplay on the iOS version of this game.). Lili is a great little puzzle/search game in the stylistic vein of Mario and Zelda. It is very well coded and dripping with consumate cuteness. The game won't appease shooter fans or players that want zombies and gore but for an indie game, at $10, this game is a gem. I finished it on iOS, liked the game so much, that I bought a second copy for my PC.

Worth a look.

7/10.

(mini-review)

A beautifully sombre and gripping piece of independent art that forces the player to make harsh choices in a war-ravaged, unrepentant landscape. Lovingly designed and well-executed, the game is nonetheless extremely difficult both in morality and gameplay, forcing players to choose between eating, keeping warm and remaining safe. Created by 11 Bit, famed for their award-winning iOS titles like Anomaly and Anomaly 2, This War of Mine reminds us that gaming can not only be a sophisticated and cerebral affair but a profoundly mature and saddening experience. My only complaints are the brutal difficulty, the lack of replayability and comparatively high price.

In fact, I'd probably have purchased this game on iOS for its lower mobile price had the release dates coincided.

Recommended.

8/10.

(mini-review)

Forget Left 4 Dead. This game is by far the most atmospheric, rich and sumptuously attractive zombie game on the market, bar none. If you want to play a zombie adventure that oozes all the tropes of zombie survival in one action-packed package, Deadlight is the title to pick up. While packed with a variety of puzzles that will test your cleverness and dedication to boot, it's the truly twisted and delicious plot twist at the end, and all the hidden unlocks that will make this title one to remember.

Recommended.

8/10

Running this game has been a complete hassle. Buying from Valve directly has been an even bigger one. I'm going to endeavor to monitor/review my Steam purchases in the future precisely for the lacking service provided all around.

Firstly, we should be begin with the game. It's Janus incarnate. On the one hand, you have
one of the buggiest, most frustratingly badly coded and DRMed game in existence. It wouldn't boot at all, for the first 3 days after I had purchased it. Worse, even TRYING to run it meant I had to reboot the entire machine(it would give a common response - a black screen wherein nothing - not even CTRL-ALT-DEL or CRTL-ALT-ESC would work). There are literally thousands of posters online complaining about the game, all over Ubisoft and Steam forums from black screens, to complete computing meltdowns, and corrupted saves. The game has tendencies to just stop working and you need to run Ubisoft's bastardized Origin-wannabe "Uplay"(more like Utrash) when you need to play at all and you must connect to "Conflux" if you wish to play online.

All the fixes are convoluted and none seem to work. Edit your profile. No, delete your profile. Redownload Uplay. No, disable Uplay. No, disable Steam. No restart the game. No redownload the game. No, verify the game cache. Ok, now do them all again THREE times. No luck. We're sorry you have to keep restarting your computer from scratch each time. ;_; No luck? Ok, try to upgrade your drivers. Ok, try to reset your network, and now reset the admin privs on all the folders. Ok, now reset your Steam client blob file. Ok, now try to swap out the game exe with a modded version. Whoops, broke the game? Ok, well, no biggie, it's only been 8 hours of work. Remember you got this game for a bargain!

Except I didn't. It wasn't a bargain Valve because by the time I finally figured out that I had to reconfigure my firewall AND swap the patched version of the Uplay EXE while MANUALLY editing my registry and manually applying the 2.1.1 patch to get it to work...I had already pumped enough man hours into the game to make the entire ordeal anything but a "bargain". In fact, Valve, by my calculations you owe me about 600 dollars, American, for my tech services.

Steam "support" consisted of some canned forum "fixes" which did nothing but aggravate my registry and insult my intelligence (restart your machine/update your drivers/maybe your computer can't run it/is your computer plugged in?). Gg, Valve. Obviously you're not Apple when it comes to customer service, customer satisfaction or customer support. Noted. After exactly one set of posted exchanges on the support line, the tech support closed my ticket and basically denied my refund.

I guess I had no hope but to make it work. And I finally did. What I found is a maddingly well-made game. A veritable diamond in the rough. Good mechanics. Excellent combat animations. Tons of tactical variety. Effective and attractive graphics and tons of replayability await anyone that finally gets the game to work. Look, it's not Heroes of Might and Magic 3. That was a strategy masterpiece. But this is a damned good game, with great cinematics and a rousing score once it actually, you know, RUNS.

Overall, I'm glad I got it to work. Unfortunately, I learned a lot about Ubisoft, Valve and my own technical skills in this entire tiring ordeal. Two reviews:

If you can't get it to work and Valve gives you the cold shoulder:

Avoid this game.

2/10.

If you can get the game to work and you can actually enjoy it:

Recommended.

7.5/10.

(mini-review)

I had high-hopes for this shooter, by the makers of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Instead, what I got was a game that was a complete failure from the get-go. Despite running on the Doom 3 engine (idTech 4), the game was a slow, stuttery, unstable mess. Graphical glitches abounded, with many ATi users reporting scan lines across their screen and sub-par performance to boot(I can attest to these glitches as I experienced both). Rather than fix the problem, Splash Damage tried to bury any evidence of complaints and only responded/fixed the majority of the issues after the potentially fun multiplayer component withered on the vine. The game is fixed now but no one plays it and no one ever will.

Splash Damage lost all credibility with me. Developers, when will you learn that responsible ownership for mistakes will always gain you more respect that a brazen money-grab? Good luck making minigames.

Avoid this game.

4/10.

***Reviewed Score***

Vindictus used to be a free-to-play, Korean/asian-aesthetic MMO with dynamic animations and skill-based combat. The game had its share of lolly-dress up but the biggest allure was the combat that relied on split-second timing, dodges, combos and the like. The game basically played almost like a dumbed down 3rd person brawler, it was exciting and it looked the part. However, over the last 3 years the game has gone nothing but downhill.

So what happened? Greed happened. As Vindictus had less and less traffic, the game became more and more transparent and shallow in its pay-to-win model. Where originally skill mattered the most and payment only bought you *some* aesthetic bonuses, now the loftiest game heights are populated by about 1,000 Sultan offspring whales that routinely pay thousands of dollars a month to play the game. The game is completely pay to win and if you download this game, understand right off the bat that no matter how much you grind, you will always be behind someone that spent a few grand on this game. Period. I'll get into that in a minute.

The level system is completely broken. The game never had an enormous community but now, because the game servers are all shut down and populated on 3 small farms, expect to level your first 60 or so levels alone. How empty is the game? Well all the creatures and bosses have been nerfed from levels 1-80 to encourage solo play because Nexon and Devcat realized that players were unable to proceed without help. ( Well almost all the bosses that is, because Devcat didn't do a very good job and forgot to nerf the load requirements for the dragon raid battles that still mandate 8-16 players, despite being soloable in the mirror quests. ) For veteran players, this presents an interesting dichotomy when you level new characters and realize that all the dramatic, tense battles are now just common place speed bumps in a never-ending procession towards max level phat loot.

The process of obtaining expensive, custom items is absolutely broken. Weapons & armor now have a maximum level of 20. Except that your chances of reaching 20 are literally one in a million. Not figuratively...mathematically, literally one in a million. Weapons in particular jump dramatically in effectiveness the higher the enhancement level. Ironically, your weapon can fail during an enhancement and may be destroyed upon such an enhancement failure. Nexon and Devcat understand that crushing fact and, contrary to past game mechanics, the weapon's level now contributes approximately 80% of your total damage, with the other 20% comprised of skills, tactics, personal ability and achievements. A fantastic player that is equipped with +10 gear will be embarrassed by a complete joke player with +20 gear because, in fact, the joke player's attack will be THREE TIMES HIGHER due to those 10 additional weapon levels.

So how does weapon leveling work? Weapons have a 100% chance of enhancement for levels 1-5. Yeah, that's it. Beyond that, the chances decline to 75, then 50, then 40 and 33 and eventually below that. Should the weapon fail an enhancement at any point, the weapon has a 50% (or higher) chance of being destroyed. Since probabilities are multiplicative, your chances of getting a 15 or 16, much less a 19 or 20 are almost lottery level remote. Combine this joke with enchantments that you can place on armor and weapons that also confer bonuses (that work pretty much the same way) and it's easy to see someone have to build legions of weapons just to get one to a decent level. Oh but there's a shortcut. Nexon/Devcat will sell you a rune, that will work approximately 50% of the time, for 14 USD that will prevent the weapon from being consumed. Of course the rune is also consumed during this process.

Do you want a +15 piece of equipment? Prepare to spend HUNDREDS of dollars per ITEM. A weapon could easily run you a thousand dollars and to many of the whales playing this game, that's perfectly reasononable. Or simply contact one of many hackers. However, if you're like the 99% of the population without mental health issues, the proposition of spending 10s of thousands of dollars on a game you don't even own is absolutely preposterous. Aesthetic items like undergarments, which make certain armors look good, are also sold for money. You'll see an armor advertisement but it will only look that way for you if you spend 20 USD getting a pair of black underwear for your male or female character. Don't care about how your character looks but want to change your name 20 levels in? 20 bucks. Want to particiapte in events? 30 bucks. Basically the game gives you a ghost town to play in and you play with your Barbie, by taking out a mortgage to give her a boob job and new shoes.

(I'm not kidding, nice shoes cost about 20 dollars).

Classes of course are imbalanced. Some classes, like Hurk and Karok have built in moves that do little damage but confer temporary invincibility. So you can spam those simple, boring moves up against giant, thrashing bosses over and over and over. Other classes like Evie or Kai simply pepper an enemy with a storm of arrows at range, risking very little. But let's take some classes like Lann. They have zero invincibility inately. Yes, slipdash (dodge) confers ghost-like invincibility but the move has to be timed during a .3 second window (no, the decimal isn't an accident), while Karoks and Hurk get incibility automatically. The result? Some classes do way more damage than others and are far easier to play than others to boot. Did I mention that loot is dropped for the top 3 players in any quest/raid? So the rich get richer. Did I also mention that players will get kicked unless they have whale-level gear on their lollies? Yeah that happens too.

So let's recap. Leveling any item literally takes 1-million levels of probability (.75x.75x.75......x.25/0 through 15 levels...do the math, don't take my word for it). But Nexon will sell you temporary, fallible runes for 14 bucks that will prevent losses (but not ensure success). Classes are imbalanced. The game is a ghost town with the main town only showing life (as whales show off their characters 24x7 without ever grinding/raiding...why would they...they buy everything in cash). Oh and the community is often toxic. Still the game is fun right? It looks good! It is fun. It does look good. When it runs.

As of an update last year however, the game's graphic engine was modified. Instead of running on vanilla Source 1.5, basically the same engine L4D 2 runs on, which needs only toaster-level hardware to run, they altered the models and textures without quite grasping what they were doing. As a result, they broke the game. Frame rates for most players were chopped in half and, despite legions of complaints, Nexon and Devcat don't care. How bad of a botch job did they make? Well, to put it in perspective, the max framerate for the game was 60 fps. I used to run the game at 2560x1440, max settings at a rock solid 60 fps. Now? Now I can drop the resolution and settings all the way down to 1920x1080 and low settings and I'll still only produce 30 fps with constant dips into the teens. Great job Nexon! But remember, most of the whales playing this game spend thousands of dollars on this game, so having a 1080 Ti to play a 2010 MMO is perfectly reasonable.

I'm not salty. I'm a 2250 hour player (850 hours on sep client) that has spent over 500 dollars in this game and loved this game at one point. I have numerous max level characters with good gear. But their technical incompetence and blatant greed have taken a game that was enjoyable and relegated it to a Tinder for rich 17 year old incels and for that, I have to warn as many prospective gamers as possible.

Avoid this game.

3/10.

(mini-review)

The closest thing to Blood 3. If you enjoyed Monolith's Blood series, Condemned and thought the tactical shooting in F.E.A.R. warranted a cooperative experience, then this game is for you. Inspired enemies, great graphics, and a truly gluttonously morbid universe welcome any gamer that purchases this title. The co-op alone will make the game worthwhile, especially when factoring in two different character play styles between Pointman and Paxton Fettel. In a world where everyone is evil or insane, F.E.A.R. is your best weapon!

Recommended.

8/10.