Lars Westergren

Excellent production values, but bog standard survival-horror game plot. Great fun to play, but for me, not fun enough to play through a second time with the real back-story logs unlocked (why this mechanic? Afraid players will be scared away by yucky words?)

Also - yet another game that rips off (oops, sorry, pays homage to) the PC classic System Shock 2!

Better than the first game. This time there are more "real adventure game" style puzzles (unlike the first one where all quests but one or two could be solved by "kill everything in sight until object you are searching for is dropped"). Only one puzzle is a bit annoying (concerning bolts and their dimensions). The sparse dialogue feedback for that quest, combined with the basic inventory system which never before have required you to look at item descriptions, made me think the quest was bugged.

Five out of five for the music (by Jeff Tymoschuk, who is becoming my favourite musician for games and films) and the sound effects, which add a lot to the atmosphere. The graphics and the locations remain very charming. Variety and design of enemies and supporting characters are a little better this time too I think. Hopefully we have seen the last of the fruit-f's now though.

The number one thing on my wishing list for the next game, it is that they improve the console jRPG inspired combat system. It was ok for the first game, if a bit repetitive, but now it is REALLY starting to feel old as you wade through an endless stream of high HP enemies. There is very little strategy to the fights apart from finding out a particular enemy's weakness, only the boss fights are any challenge.

For the next game they really should add another dimension of difficulty, such as the ability to move around on a 2d grid (enabling strategies like combined flanking attacks, cover, area damage, and so on), or use of different stances, or something else. Anything to break the monotony of you and enemies exchanging the same attacks over and over until you can do a overkill.

Fun, but I got tired of it surprisingly quickly.

Very atmospheric resource management strategy game.

This action-adventure game is one of my all-time favourites. Incredibly graphics (for the time), atmospheric music, and a great 50s monster movie plot, heavily inspired by "Them".

Text based adventure game with a sense of humor. I played this many many years ago so I don't remember much, but it was one of the first adventure games where you couldn't die. This was great, it encouraged experimenting and exploring. I recall the puzzles being just challenging enough. I made it almost to the end.

I was positively surprised by this title. Bought it for practically nothing during the summer games draught. Eye-roll inducing dialogue at the start of the game unfortunately, and too many stereotypical badass US marines for my taste.

Anyway, the free-form gameplay is very fun, the level design is nice, and the graphics are gorgeous. The plot borrows perhaps a little too much from Halo and Half-Life 2 though (especially the female scientist whats-her-name who looks and sounds a lot like Alyx Vance).

Overall a fun game, but has some flaws. For instance, on more difficult settings some levels are completely impossible. As an example, on the first level of the "demon" chapter, you are a renegade demon prince who is chased by Godfrey, the hero you controlled on the previous level, the concluding level of the "Griffin empire" chapter.

Godfrey has troops 100 times stronger than yours, so if he catches you the game is over. If you gave him high levels of "logistics" skill on the previous level he can now move twice as fast as you over the map, so no matter how smart you play there is no way he can't catch up to you. In order to progress through the game, you will have to go back to the start of the previous level and replay the whole thing, without giving Godfrey "logistics" this time. Not fun.

I have also had quite a few game breaking bugs where script triggers don't fire. One level is over when you defeat an invading hero. But the invader never shows up on the map!

On the plus side, they are still releasing patches (the last one removed the need to have the DVD in while you play, yay!) so by the time you read this these niggles may be fixed.

Oh, and the less said about the dialogues and voice acting, the better. :)

This game is a mixed bag on the PC unfortunately. The graphics are amazing, at places photo-realistic, and the artwork is great despite a general drabness ("realistic means gray and brown"). I especially liked the mines levels with the water running along the rock walls, and the eerie glow from below. But the plot and characters (the most important part of a game to me) are pretty dumb. They are supposed to be dumb of course, "Predator" style "I don't have TIME to bleed" macho over the top action, but I didn't like it anyway - if you are going to pull that off you still need some depth or at least a sly sense of humor. Just because you are making a genre film/game doesn't mean you should follow a formula, and this game has every tired action movie cliche you've ever seen. Camera slowly panning up, enormous monster roaring at the screen so the camera shakes and spittle flies, yeah yeah, very scary.

Once I got over that though, the bang-bang gameplay was highly entertaining. It is nice that it is not just a twitch game - you need to use strategy like taking cover, flanking, grenades, and figuring out the weak spot of the Locusts (hint - not the head) to survive encounters. Though I haven't tried it, I'm sure co-op play with a friend through the campaign is fantastic. But the GamesForWindows Live integration is what knocks this down from a 4 to a 2 out of 5 for me (and that is being generous).

First you have to give up a lot of privacy information - mail, name, adress, birthdate, phone - just to get an account. And you MUST have an account to be able to save the game in single campaign, otherwise you must play through a whole chapter in one sitting. And forget this is a PC, there is only one save slot per player profile, and you must be online to load the saved game. Steam (for all its flaws) gives added convenience and content, and once the game is validated you can play offline. Here you are forced to jump through hoops so that Microsoft can report inflated membership numbers for their service.

Secondly, if you lose your online connection and don't notice (or forget) hours of gameplay can be lost, you have to do the same levels again next time you play.

Thirdly, LIVE is bugged. I had played through 75% of the game on hardcore when it crashed just as it was saving a checkpoint. And now my save is completely gone. I would have to restart the whole game from scratch. Forget it. Play Bioshock instead for a beautiful and original shooter with more brains, or FEAR if you are into brutality.

Entertaining, but like most "next gen" games, massively overhyped. Too much focus on flashy graphics and not enough role playing. Also not enough depth of plot and emotions for my taste. More inspiration from books and less from Hollywood next time, Bioware. Please?