Recent reviews by jbfink

I"ve been playing FPSs since I found the alpha version of Wolfenstein 3D on wuarchive.wustl.edu and, while I haven"t played absolutely every FPS ever released I"ve played a lot. I can safely say that Severed Steel is one of the absolute best I"ve ever played. I extremely rarely play online games, so I really value that there"s an FPS that is single-player only and doesn"t, say, *really* want to be an MMO or what-have-you and has a short single-player campaign thrown together badly. This game is light on story, heavy on gameplay -- just how I tend to like things -- *heaps* of replayability due to the Rogue Steel, Firefight, and New Game+ modes, and is just... really, really fun. It"s so good.

I"m recommending this, but it"s not a strong recommend. Picked it up during a monster Steam sale -- I think for like 90% off or something -- and it was definitely worth the ~$3CAD but probably not the full price of >$20.

Sir (or Madam), You Are Being Hunted is a sandbox first-person stealth game set in a vaguely Edwardian time period where you, the protagonist, get stranded on a series of islands and are hunted by murderous robots. Your goal -- to travel to each island (five in all) and acquire pieces of a machine to transport you to safety. All the while, you have to mind your hunger and scavenge for items like food, bullets, weapons, and alarm clocks. The islands are procedurally generated with each game with a choice of one of five biome types. I really like the procedural islands; each biome is different and they feel natural and well thought out. On the default setting, the game starts with a few robot hunters and, as you collect more pieces, ramps up the difficulty until finding those last pieces becomes seriously difficult.

The good and the bad (caveat: I haven"t finished the game yet because of the serious difficulty mentioned above):

Good:
Procedural generation: I"m a sucker for it, my favourite game genre of all time is roguelikes, and this is roguelike-y in random generation of the islands, the buildings and the enemies.

Stealth: this game is at heart very stealth oriented, inasmuch as even if you do find weapons going in with guns blazing, even on the lower levels, is not a winning strategy. Bullets are scarce, weapons are scarce, and there are way more of the enemy than there is of you. It"s entirely possible to play the game without shooting any weapon at all, which I find refreshing.

Graphics: I game on Linux, which okay, I"m already at a disadvantage, and I game with a low-endish business model Thinkpad, which again, problematic, but the game is smooth as anything on my machine and still is graphically nice to look at. Well, "nice" in that the game is simulating a depressing English countryside, so colours are muted and browns, grays, dull greens abound, but that"s ok.

Sound: Surprisingly this game is *very* sound oriented. Don"t try to play without having your sound on; you"ll get clobbered. You"ll need to hear the robots approaching -- each type has a distinctive sound -- in order to avoid them. There"s an option in the game to turn on an indicator, which puts a little Metal Gear Solid-ish "!", "?" above the robots" heads to gauge how aware they are of you, and this is *invaluable* - at least if you"re playing the game without headphones -- but even so you"ll have to listen hard to survive.

Repeatability: There are *lots* of options to tune the robots appearances and numbers. I haven"t messed with this yet as I want to finish the game on the default, but it"s great to have something beyond "Easy, Medium, Hard" for difficulty.

Gender: It"s a small thing, but the fact that you can pick your gender is a good one. More games should do this.

Bad:
Stealth: hey wait, didn"t I just put stealth in the "good"? Yeah. But in this game you spend a *lot* of time crouched in reeds or ducking behind buildings while all the while your vitality trickles to zero. This does present a nice amount of tension to the game, but the islands are *big* muthas and finding the pieces without the piece detector is hard enough; trying to find them blind is *really* hard. And when you"ve spent hours combing an island to find that last piece, while all the while the *hordes* of robots that populate the endgame are shooting you, trapping you in bear traps, running you over with rocket horses, and biting your foot it gets real frustrating real fast.

Sound: I have a mild hearing disability and I don"t particularly like games that are super dependent on sound, so I sort of resent the fact that I *have* to have sound turned on in this one. Not sure how it would work without it though.

Items: The primary way one gets ahold of things is by searching buildings for them, and there are a *lot* of junk items you can"t actually do anything with. I would love an option to turn off junk items because it"s annoying to go to a door and just find bones. You can"t do anything with junk -- not even throw it as a distraction -- so I"m not sure why the designers included the junk items in the game at all. As far as I can see, they serve no purpose beyond annoying window dressing.

Buildings: The buildings look great, but you can"t go inside them. They exist solely as a cache for (mostly) junk items. The game would be improved greatly if you could enter a building and peek out a window, or have, say, fixed items to heal damage, like beds or something. Instead they"re basically giant crates.

I"d say, eh, three and half stars out of five to four stars out of five depending on your tolerance for frustration in the difficult endgame.

Oddly relaxing, until suddenly it isn"t. Why won"t those damn triangle people stay home, you ask. And who asked the... what, pentagon?? octagon??? people to live way the hell out in Sainte-Dorothee? I don"t think you really deserve subway service,

What I"d love to see is real time maps of various real-world subway stations but marked up in the Mini Metro graphical style. I could probably watch that all day.