Black Mesa – Remake Wonder

Black Mesa started as a free mod back in 2012, unfortunately, I have no experience with the game from that time. Black Mesa didn’t enter my gaming radar until it reached Steam in the form of Early Access, and while I wasn’t immediately impressed, nor interested exactly – I’m glad my outlook changed. Because, as it turned out, the updated version of the legendary game Half-Life is damn good! While I only have admiration for the GoldSrc engine (all those hours in Day of Defeat, and Counter-Strike), it is getting a bit long in the tooth. The Source engine, from Half-Life 2, which Black Mesa uses is technically old too, but it does feel and look more modern, especially since Valve still updates it with new features.

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Quantum Break – You Got Time?

Decided to replay one of my favorite, semi-recent AAA-gaming releases – because the last time I played it, the engine the game runs on almost broke my old computer. Now, I’m on a new fresh one – so I thought it was time to play through this science-fiction time-travel epic in full graphical glory, and maximized FPS.

Let us continue on that note. The visuals, all these years later, are still absolutely fantastic beyond just having high-quality textures. With that I mean, lighting, location design, structures, and models, in general, make the game come alive. It just looks great, and realistic, yet, has this slight futuristic corporate vibe to it that is common in near-future settings – a bit similar to the modern Deus Ex games. Unfortunately, even now when I have “up-scaling” turned off, some areas are still looking blurry, which is disappointing. Otherwise, the game runs well on my new rig, but, unfortunately, I get drastic FPS drop in scene-transfers, and when cut-scenes change to gameplay. I don’t know why that is. It’s not too bad I guess, but still an annoyance since it happens fairly often. I assume it’s an issue with the engine, because CONTROL, a more recently released Remedy game, shares the same engine, and I didn’t have these kinds of issues here. The only thing I can assume from this is that the engine got better optimized between the games. Nonetheless, the game looks remarkable still, and will not disappoint on a modern computer with a good GPU.

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SKALD: Against the Black Priory – C-64 retro RPG prologue

Demos – how I both love & hate this concept. It’s always nice to get to try the game you are looking forward to, but if it’s good, you are in for a brutal time of waiting since you know what you will be getting and being held backed from. SKALD is one of these games. While I grew up during the popularity of Commodore 64 – I don’t have much of a connection to it beyond playing the random game on its system at a friends house. So, this graphical throwback is not doing much for me from a nostalgic standpoint, regardless I do think the graphics look charming without having the needed nostalgia glasses.

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Alpha Polaris – The Crevasse of Madness

We might have to amputate that hand, miss

Alpha Polaris is a point & click adventure game from the Finnish studio Turmoil Games, their first, and unfortunately only game. From what I remember reading about them, they had no idea of the work they took on when creating this game. They thought it was going to be a relatively easy thing, but as it turned out making games is a tough job. This regrettably led to Turmoil Games disbanding (from what I know!), and while Alpha Polaris is a fine piece of entertainment it does fall apart a bit at the end, as in it comes a bit fast. Even so, I find it an awesome tale, and as it is known, adventure games live or die depending on the setting and story.

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Hell Let Loose – What could have been?

German combined attack! Shame, everybody died though

While Hell Let Loose is not a bad game per se, I can’t help to think – what could have been? Going way back to their Kickstarter, and pre-early access release on Steam, this game showed so much promise! It was going to be the ultimate WW2 tactical multiplayer shooter, taking notes from all other similar games before them, and expanding on it. It was going to be huge, with you, and your team required to work together, securing zones for precious resources to be able to call in the heavy stuff – like tanks, and artillery. Some of this remains in the game to this day, of course, but it’s just a shadow of what was proposed. 90% of the players don’t care and don’t know about this function, and to be fair it usually doesn’t really affect the game in public matches since in the end it’s not required to win.

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