Waiting for Duviri: The Seventh Set

Thinking of post titles tired me out, so here's just a random set I've played.

Redout - Enhanced Edition

A futuristic racing game using hover cars with race tracks that resemble roller coaster rides. Yes, you can go fast, customize your rides and the groovy tunes will get your heart racing. There's also a health bar because crashing into things makes you take damage and ultimately EXPLODE! I'm not really into racing games, but purely because you can explode in this one makes it different for me. Not that you die mind you, explode and you respawn after wasting precious seconds.

Severed Steel

If you want to go faster than a hover car, play this FPS where you are a one armed girl who can't reload guns- so expect to throw those as soon as their clip empties - but she can double jump, slide in mid air, wall run and slow down time to evade bullets. In fact she goes so fast that most of the time you'll be wondering WTF is going on followed by the game over screen when you accidentally ran into those bullets. Sigh. Needs more save points.

Ancient Enemy

After being defeated by the bad guy, the main character awakes and... plays cards to try remember what happened. Plays cards to open chests. Plays cards to fight enemies. It is ridiculous. Worse, the card game is solitaire but you can put the next number up or down. The card color removed from the board helps power your abilities so... five red cards lets you swing your knife for example. Irritating system, more so in that a bad hand will kill you. Maybe that's the true Ancient Enemy?

Adios

You can't quit the mafia but you can certainly suicide by mafia. That's the main lesson in this interactive story which has good voice acting and a decent short story going for it. Unfortunately it feels like the designers opted to try make it a not-so-short story by adding too much fluff. Did we really need to meet the protege or have seven attempts at catching a fish before getting to the clearly lamp shaded conclusion? Nope. I think these fellas need to checkout Dead Horizon (renamed to Dead Horizon: Origins) which takes all of five minutes to play but is still a better example of a short story done right. It's free on Steam!

Unrailed

In this cooperative voxel game, there is a slow moving train and players must rush to lumber and mine to clear the path ahead of it AND to use those very resources to continue the rail road track the train is on by using the auto-production facilities aboard it. Since the train also overheats, catches fire and prevents you from using that - you must also constantly pour buckets of water (which you must refill) to keep it cooled down. If the train runs out of track: game over. An excellent idea for a game, but alas I could not find any one playing it - and its a bit sad when its just single player.

Warhammer 40K: Mechanicus

The Adeptus Mechanicus, the hardcore R&D branch of the Space Marines, have stumbled onto a Necron (robot people) tomb world and you are in charge of looting and cataloging as much tech as you can before the entire tomb wakes up. This portion of the game feels very poor, as you move room to room and basically do a choose your own adventure thing with art quality that even I can do and SO MUCH reading as the Adepti are very talkative yet SP3AK//HARD just to make it annoying. The XCOM style combat is the best bit, though there's a strange mechanic that you must gain cognition points (by scanning enemies, watching allies get attacked, or walking beside hieroglyphic pillars) to be able to take extra actions or indeed, fire particular weapons. All up it feels like clumsy (or hasty) design.

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

It is the Edo period in Japan and you have an eagle eye view to control a small band of ninjas who each have unique abilities and are very deadly so long as no one is looking at them. There is no "pause" to the clock so you'll need to be quick and time your actions well which makes this a sort of strategy puzzler but it has two huge turn offs for me. One, your group is stupid. "Let's all reconvene at that roof top past all those bad guys to talk about what we heard, instead of the one we are on right now" is freaking poor writing and worse, these must be the NOISIEST ninjas who ever lived - saying a line or grunting loudly every time you click somewhere. So freaking annoying. The Aika's choice gives more of the same, but opens by spoiling the entire original game.