In my never-failing wisdom, I thought it was time to try out David Cage’s Heavy Rain on Steam. Now, I wouldn’t say it’s an entirely bad game, but if you have a heavy allergy to quick-time events, stay far away! The overload of this mechanic will probably kill within a few nanoseconds. I’m immune thanks to my passion for adventure games with a moody story. The problem with Heavy Rain, for my part is the extremely slow pacing, the fractured story with plot-holes, and the absolute lack of any challenging puzzles.
The one big thing Terminator: Resistance got over Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance is that it’s set in the original Terminator movie timeline. That means it has the cool aesthetics from the Cameron films. John Connor is still kicking around and is leading the resistance in the future war against the silver Terminators, who look as menacing as ever. Sadly, beyond the cool visuals, this game is somewhat of a pain to play and in general a disappointment. I would also consider it highly overrated, seeing as it sits at a ninety-one approval rating on Steam. I can understand the appeal, and I too was into it at the beginning, but the whole experience is filled with awkward design decisions that in the end completely sink the title.
Iron Marines is both a casual and a hardcore experience at the same time. Yes, I know, it sounds weird, but it really is. The presentation and everything around that screams welcome to casual Ville – stay a while for an easy time. However, if you play on “hard” (which I did) the experience is anything less. The developers behind the game are Ironhide Game Studio and are known for their awesome series of tower defense game series Kingdom Rush. This is their first venture into the RTS genre, and it’s not a bad first try, but it comes with some frustration. I had a good time in general, especially for only 5 bucks spent on it, but I think the last area of the campaign was a mistake. As it usually goes, later areas are harder and require more from you, and I got nothing against that. However, the devs made the game harder through frustration, that in my opinion ruins the fun of playing an RTS – to actually kill stuff. You see, instead of making the enemies harder, now each dead unit heals another, and it has the effect of being the worst case of HP bloat I have ever seen – particularly going from one campaign section to another… It was like night and day, and it drained all the fun I was having in one go.
Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones is a Lovecraft-inspired RPG by the developers Cultic Games. I have completed this game once before when it was released back in 2019, but I got into a Lovecraft mood and remembered I had this game. But after spending about 10 hours in Arkham again, stuff is coming back to me why I didn’t like the game that much. It’s not all bad, though, it’s just a major disappointment for what could have been something good.
Rain of Reflections is a point & click adventure game with combat in turn-based mode. It was released by the Swedish developer studio Lionbite Games back in 2019. It was supposed to be a three-chapter thing, but thanks to low interest, the game got unfortunately abandoned. So we only got chapter one, which of course has the game ending on a major unresolved cliffhanger. I have owned this title for a while now, I think I got it for one euro or something ridiculous like that, and I thought it might be time to give it a go regardless of the finished status. I’m not regretting that decision, the only regrettable thing here is that it wasn’t completed.
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