Frontlines: Fuel of War – Nostradamus Edition

I used to play Frontlines: Fuel of War by the now-defunct developer Kaos Studios on the good old Xbox 360 because my PC was crap at the time. It was a hell of a game, the multiplayer was awesome, the setting cool, and the weapons interesting and deadly. I would even consider it better than the Battlefield series. It was an entertaining game with great gameplay that was ahead of its time in more than one aspect when it comes to multiplayer. Unfortunately, it didn’t take off, much to my dismay, and since then the genre has fallen off a cliff in my opinion.

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Warbanners – Welcome to Difficultville

This is a weird one. I do enjoy the basics of Warbanners, I find the graphics fine, and the mechanics for the most part intriguing, however, the difficulty is just out of this world. I can appreciate that fact to a certain degree, but the older I get, the less time I have to go full autismo mode like in my younger days. With this, I mean the time it takes for a game to go from challenging to tear-out-your-hair frustrating. This usually ends up with me banging my head against a wall, until the one and only perfect strategy forms. My tolerance for that kind of gameplay is almost gone nowadays. There is a subset of gamers that love this kind of Stalingrad -esque difficulty in their games, and I salute them. Crasleen Games surely has made something for them to dig into, but for the rest of us mere mortals…

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BROK the InvestiGator – Gator eats Gator World

Point & click and the beat ’em up genre combined, two genres that should never cross, like the beams in Ghost Busters. What is next, horror and comedy? Oh wait, that is a thing. Unlike that unholy meld, Brok the Investigator does the blending fairly well, which adds some gameplay to the otherwise pretty static adventure gaming. However, it’s not all happy sunshine, but COWCAT almost succeeded!

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Dreams in the Witch House – Rat Trouble

The computer LED lights are on full blast

Another day, another Lovecraft-inspired game. However, the difference from other games that tries similar things, is that Dreams in the Witch House actually succeeds at what it tries to do. It got nice atmosphere that feels like it could be part of Lovecraft mythos, and it got interesting gameplay to boot – beyond the traditional point & click stuff. I played the demo last year and was impressed with the game then already, so it makes me happy the full title retains the feeling I got from the demo. Atom Brain Games created something truly special here, and now we can only hope that they continue on this track for the future. But enough of that, what about the story, and how does it play?

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Iron Marines – Copper Bullets

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.

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