Beaten: Reconstruction Zero: I Miss the Sunrise (on 6/3/13)

System: PC
Status: Beaten

Reconstruction Zero is one of those games I randomly found while looking for good free RPGs. It really doesn't play like any RPG I can think of, and it deserves a good look if you are at all interested in interesting or unique RPGs. The story of the game itself is quite good, and I won't go into any detail on it beyond that for fear of spoiling anything. To put it quickly, the game manages to craft a wholly unique world and setting to house the great gameplay, and a story that really doesn't lend itself to many cliches.

The gameplay itself takes place in a sort of strategy RPG setup. You command fleets of various ships (all of them characters you recruit throughout the story), and arrange them in small groups to perform objectives on a larger map. When in combat, you have a few abilities based on the race of the character, as well as having it be important how close/far away you are from enemy ships (and allowing you to 'push' the field of battle to prevent turtling). Each ship is equipped with various pieces of equipment, such as guns and protective assets, which you design yourself through the games crafting feature. As such, the setup of your ships will change dynamically, allowing you to adjust them for new encounters or new tactics you devise. Each ship has three health bars (as seen in the above image). If any of them is gone, the ship is destroyed. At the same time, every weapon in the game drains one of those life bars for their own attacks, and does damage to one of the lifebars on the enemy ship with a certain damage type. As such, its nearly impossible to create a perfect defense for anything, and a lot of the game revolves around having a wide variety of weapons to make sure you take advantage of enemies weaknesses.

The game is very tactical, and it takes some getting used to, but you never truly feel the game is unfair. With the exception of some special events, I was able to figure out what needed to be done, reconfigure my ships, and get it done. It is certainly an RPG everyone should at least try, especially since its free.

I finished the game, but have some alternate endings and optional bosses to defeat.

Beaten: Sid Meier's Civilization V (on 7/23/13)

System: PC
Status: Beaten

Civilization is one of those giants of gaming...that I've never had the privilege of actually playing until recently. To be fair, I wasn't much of a PC gamer in my youth, since my PC tended to be pretty low end, and console games were a much more consistent factor (didn't have to worry about the games running properly on those).

Civilization V for me personally, is a great game that I tend to get lost in for hours. I have put innumerable hours into this game, playing different Civs, different difficulties, trying for various achievements and the like. Even when I set it to the fastest game speed (which I always do), it will easily chew up a whole afternoon on its own. I only recently got the two expansion packs, which added whole new dimensions to the game. I can honestly say if you own Civ V, you need to get the expansions despite the price. It is more than worth it for the amount of extra gameplay they add to the base game. There really isn't much more to say about the game that others haven't, I can't compare it to previous games since I haven't played them, I just know this one is extremely addicting.

I have beaten it numerous times on various difficulties, though I am now just working my way up past the 'normal' range. I still have plenty of scenarios and other things to do to 'complete' this.

Beaten: Zombie Driver (7/7/13/)

System: PC
Status: Beaten

Zombie driver is a strange little game, but I found it quite fun, once I got used to the camera style making me a bit ill. In all the game modes, you drive a car around a city, running over zombies while trying to reach certain objectives. It is very arcade-y in execution, which isn't a bad thing. It is quite fun to play for short stretches, and isn't too frustrating in any particular aspect.

The game helps the variety by having three game modes. Story, which has your character going through a fairly short campaign, rescuing civilians from places and doing side objectives to get new cars. It isn't too difficult, though the rarity of healing items makes some parts a bit frustrating as you really can't avoid damage from zombies at times. The only part I really struggled with was the last mission, where you have to race at blinding speed through the city with a time limit. It was very easy to make small mistakes and have to start over.

The small mistakes at  high speed problem also applies to Blood Race, which makes the mode itself a bit more difficult than it needs to be. It is very easy to get stuck on a piece of scenery and have to spend precious seconds backing out and around to get back in the race. Blood race mode has more than just racing though, though the other events are basically 'Go fast because of X', such as 'Go fast because you have a bomb on your car'. Overall though its still a fun mode to play, just might be a bit frustrating for me to ace it for completion.

The last mode is slaughter, which basically gives you a circular arena and zombies to kill. Each wave you finish upgrades your car or weapons. Not too difficult, other than the exploding zombies, which like other modes, can take a huge chunk from your health if you run them over (you are supposed to run right beside them, so they explode after you're gone). Again, the mode is very short, so any frustrations are temporary.

I finished the story mode, and need to finish and complete both Blood Race and Slaughter modes, along with some achieves from the story mode itself.

Beaten: Endless Space (on 6/29/13)

System: PC
Status: Beaten

Endless Space is a 4X game that I found last summer on sale on Steam, and while not the most ingenious or innovative game of the genre, it holds its own at least in my opinion, as an interesting diversion when I'm in a Civilization mood, but don't actually want to play Civ.

The same basics apply of course for any 4X game, you select how big your play field will be, how many players/AI, pick your race and what victory conditions you want, and then go. The game itself is set around various planetary systems that you work to colonize, building colony ships to get to new systems while exploring and finding your opponents on the map. On each planetary system, you will gain population, which will produce science, construction, money and food (FIDS is the in-game shorthand), which is used to help other aspects of your empire.This is generally improved upon by creating improvements in each system, which boost one aspect or another, though all of them having upkeep in the money department. Unfortunately, since you are supposed to rapidly expand as with any 4X game, this means a lot of the time you spend on each turn is building advancements in all the new solar systems to improve their output, so you spend a lot of time tabbing between systems, making sure they have all the upgrades they need (and remembering why you didn't make a certain improvement in a system, since in some cases an improvement would be terrible given the cost vs gain).

The combat itself is...more detailed than civilization, given that you can choose actions which have various rock-paper-scissors bonuses versus other actions, but it tends to only really matter when your military is very close in strength. You can actually custom create every ship your civilization makes, but most of the time you will make one or two designs, and just upgrade them as you get new technology. Nothing really heavily changes the ship designs later, other than the occasional space saving technology which you might need to slide in as it isn't an upgrade. In a long-term war with any other player, the combat gets very repetitive, as the AI will tend to send swarms of ships at you, even though they know they will lose.

The tech tree of the game is very deep and well laid out...which unfortunately means jack-all, since you don't really have any true choices in the tech trees. Each race starts with a basic tech already learned, which might save you a few turns learning it, and has certain special techs they learn higher up in the tree that give unique advantages. The trees are split into science (mostly new material discovery), war (duh), exploration (lets you colonize new planet types), and management (lets you have bigger fleets and lots of new improvements). However, there really isn't any strategy to your research or any true decisions to be made. No matter what strategy you are using, you need to research all the trees about equally. Choosing what to research first may give you a brief advantage in a certain area, and if you go deep in a tree you might get a heavy advantage with it, but the cost to your other research will cost you more in the long term. For example, if you are planning to conquer the galaxy you might think you need to research the war tree above all...which will bite you. You need to research management to field more than a few ships in a fleet and keep your people happy, and you need to research science to get materials that make those shiny new weapons, and you should research exploration to let your fleets move faster and give you more planets to work with. Spending 6 turns on a new war tech when you have a bunch of technologies that would only take one turn or less is a serious mistake.

Other than those quibbles, the game is fun, though probably decidedly average in the grand scheme of things. I tend to only boot it up when I want something Civ-like,  but don't want to play Civ.

Finished with normal AI, need to work my way up the AI difficulties.

Beaten: Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (on 6/27/13)

System: PC
Status: Beaten

Unfortunately I don't have a lot to say about Episode 2. Not just because I finished it over a year ago, but because nothing about it really sticks out in the mind, other than the fact that it kept the story going for a bit more than the last episode. If you aren't interested in the continuing adventures of Gordon Freeman, episode 2 is basically the same game as episode 1 and Half-life 2, physics based shooting, aliens, rather smart AI for the human parts, and some decent set pieces that are fun/frustrating depending.

Really, no part of the game sticks out a lot in my memory, other than the last set piece, where you are defending the rocket installation from hordes of giant walkers that you can only destroy with bomb devices you attach to them. I must royally suck at this, or it was insanely hard compared to the rest of the game, because I found this part furiously frustrating, and had to crank the difficulty all the way down due to constantly being torn apart by all the mechs little friends. If I go through the game again, I'll likely need to look up what I was doing wrong, because it shouldn't have been that difficult.

Finished it on the easiest difficulty, so to complete would have to crank it up some, along with completing various achieves and challenges.

Beaten: Portal 2 (on 6/24/13)

System: PC
Status: Beaten (on 6/24/13)

Portal is one of my favorite puzzle games, for the sheer basic mechanics and taking the puzzles as far as they can go with those mechanics. Portal 2 really doesn't change the mechanics much, other than adding some gels at about the midpoint of the game that add new dimensions to the physics puzzles. However, Portal 2 definitely focuses more on the story aspects, where the first was pretty limited to voice overs, 2...still does voice overs, but its  more in depth, with many voice actors and more of the same dark humor.

Overall, the game is better and somewhat worse than the first game. The new gels add new dimensions to the physics puzzles, but in the end it really doesn't change the dynamics too much, and in the end, they are kind of forgettable. The story is definately the best part of the game over the original, but with a longer plot, the game does start to drag a bit, and some of the puzzles end up being a bit unintuitive, a problem I never had with the original.

Still, the gripes with the game are nitpicking, overall it is amazingly fun to play and I highly recommend anyone who can to do so.

I finished the main story, which leaves the co-op things, and small achievements in the game itself.

Completed: Borderlands (on 6/22/13)

System: PC
Status: Completed (on 6/22/13)

Borderlands is certainly a well reviewed and looked at franchise, so I doubt anything I say will be too new to people looking into it. On the surface, it certainly fills a niche that feels like it needs to be filled, an FPS RPG with randomly generated/dropped guns and equipment. The game fills that niche very well, and the game has a very unique sense of humor to it. It does an extremely good job at characterization of the world of Pandora, and I tended to mostly play through just to see what the next crazy thing to happen was.

Where the game does tend to slow down is the combat itself is very samey for most of the game. No matter what upgrades or new skills you get, they tend to not change the basic game mechanics very  much. You'll run up to an area of huts and houses, enemies will spawn from doors or be standing around, and you'll find cover, trying to get headshots for criticals or using your class skill to do extra damage, and the enemies will die. The strategies the enemies use change a bit, mostly when you get to the Crimson Lance enemies, or in the expansions, but most of the time you're fighting bandits, and everything tends to go the same way. You're not relying on your own skills too much though, as a huge factor is what gear you get in random drops, and sometimes you'll be scraping by on a too-low level gun, or find one that is so much better than your others that you'll only be using that gun for a long damn time.

Still, that was a long paragraph that basically boiled down to me as "I needed to take breaks from the game at times." It is still an amazingly fun game, it just tends to wear on you a bit when you go from place to place shooting the same guys. The personality of the game goes a long way to alleviating the annoyances.

The game and all of its expansions are completed, finished on second run. Don't have all the achievements, but many of them require multiplayer on the old Gamespy network, so...no dice there.