Reviews - jtgibson

After taking a look at my review history and noticing that I was rather cudmudgeonly with the few Desura/IndieRoyale shovelware titles I well and truly hated (rather than the many I merely felt ambivalent about), I figured I needed to add a positive review about one or more of the things I actually like. So here goes!

Shadow of Chernobyl and the sequels are notoriously unstable games, and Lost Alpha DC barely even runs on my Win 7 x64 Ultimate -- I can't even finish the first raid on the bandit factory without a crash within five to ten minutes. By comparison, STALKER Anomaly is remarkably stable (shader issues on AMD hardware excepted), and as a combination of an integrated modpack/total conversion mixed with their own substantive and conscientious overhaul, it is extremely well arranged and produced. The tendency for its developers to be overwhelmingly polite and conscientious doesn't hurt matters any, but it's simply STALKER in its pure and refined form.

The massive number of difficulty sliders and options allows the player to have a more equitable playing field -- or you can make it a patently unfair hardcore slogfest if you'd prefer that -- and the graphical overhaul is utterly fantastic. Per-pixel lighting, something that a massive dev studio like Bethesda Softworks still hasn't managed to perfect, is crisp, accurate, and fast -- even on gaming machines built in 2012. Pair that with a substantial and massive lore friendly expansion of the content, and you have an absolute winner.

I played this on my Android device and on my computer, and I found it equally boring on both.

Yet another tower defence game, which automatically slants me in favour of despising it, but at the very least it is a very technically competent tower defence game with interesting graphics and three dimensional environments, which at least props it above standard two-dimensional tower defence games or tower assault games.

The sound is particularly lacklustre and the gameplay, like any typical TD game, is basically a matter of plopping down turrets as soon as you have enough funds to get them. The entire scenario of "monsters land here and walk along a path lined with guns shooting at them" is of course extraordinarily contrived, but to Cadenza Interactive's credit, their attempt to step outside of the bounds of boring single-pathway tower defence gameplay was realised when they introduced orbital strikes. Fort Condor this is not, but it's still quite good... for a tower defence game.

I was really hoping this was going to be a modernised revamp of, say, Wave Race 64. Unfortunately, the game has some very strange physics and really seems so much effort went into making pretty islands with reflective water that the rest of the game was more or less forgotten. What gives particular emphasis to the strange physics is both the fact that the jetski turns without weight (try a bootlegger turn by pulling back with the down arrow key and pressing the turn key -- now try the same manoeuvre in real life), and that you cannot fall off of your jetski even if you are in mid-air in the middle of a stunt when you land. Oh, and you can phase through the palm trees like they're not even there.

I wanted to like this game, I really did... sadly, there just isn't enough game here to like.

(I won't bother with the DRM issues -- they're acknowledged, it's a dead horse, stop beating it. My review is based solely on the game itself.)

The concept is interesting, but the game really plays like more of a tech demo than a game. It certainly does not capture the frightened feel of being chased through an asteroid belt. It mostly feels like a way to kill time when you're finished drinking your coffee and still need a way to kill 10 minutes.

Abominably annoying. I can't possibly conceive of why people found this game interesting. Perhaps it can only truly be enjoyed ironically, like a look into a schizophrenic brain.