Friday, December 27, 2013

Secret of the Magic Crystals.

So yet another steam challenge down, this time courtesy of my friend Josh, who so graciously got me the next game on the list, Secret of the Magic Crystals.  Link

So this game is essential a take care of your horse simulator, with a story about magic crystals letting you breed special horses, and your uncle being disgraced when no one believed him, cept you start the game with a frigging unicorn who competes in races!  The game is split into a few modes.  We have farm management, horse care, training, crafting and quests.  Your farm has multiple buildings, each of which performs a certain task.  You can craft special potions to heal your horse, magic horseshoes to make it better, feed/take care of it to improve it's health and spirit.  You can also train it on various obstacles courses, which all consist of pressing buttons at certain times to get a high score, which increases your stats.  Finally you can send your horse out on quests and races, which if they win gets you items and money, or have the potential to injure your horse, thus making it so you need to heal them.  Supposedly you can breed horses after awhile, but I did not get a chance to find that part.

So honestly, it's not a terrible game.  There is not much to it overall (up your stats, take care of your horses, fiddle with recipes) and it seems quite easy to just focus on one or two small things, max your horse out and then dominate the races/quests associated with that stats they have.  If you've ever wanted to digitally raise some horses, they have made your game.  With unicorns, and I think Pegasus and some kind of horse that's on fire.

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Unepic

So next game on the list of titles is called Unepic (Link).

This is an early access metrovania style of game.  In layman's terms, this means you travel through a dungeon, collecting various items, keys and powers that allow you to unlock other parts of the dungeon, and make it easier to progress through them.  It also has a rogue like level system,where every level lets you assign points to stats to increase weapons, health, armor and spell power.  As an early access game, not everything is fully implemented yet, so I went into it with that knowledge.

It follows a player of a table top rpg (probably Dungeons and Dragons) as he gets teleported into a castle, where he is trying to figure out where he is, survive the whole dungeon and progress through the game.  You collect various pieces of equipment, including armor, rings, weapons and potions.  They adjust your protection and damage, and you can set them up into hot keys to quickly switch between them in combat.  Weapons have distinct damage too, such as good against armored, living, unliving etc etc.  They seem to have a durability system, but it's only when used against monsters and during my time playing it did not come into play much.

Overall so far it's not too bad of a game.  The jumping seems a little stiff, and I've yet to run into any spells so cannot comment on how they work very well.  It's on sale now on steam, so if your interested in trying out a quick little game, I'd say give it a shot.

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Reach for the sun

So yet another game for today, this time it's the plant simulator reach for the sun Reach for the sun

So this game is somewhat simple.  You select a plant to play as, and have to help it grow.  You do this by clicking on the various parts of the plant (roots and leaves) to collect three separate resources, which are water, nutrients and starch.  As you collect more resources, you can build more roots (more water and nutrients) more leaves (more starch and storage) or build flowers.  The end goal of every level is to build as many flowers as possible and fully get them to bloom.  This is accomplished by feeding them resources to attract bees, which help pollinate them.  Once a plant is pollinated, it takes a final push of resources and then they will fully flower.  For every full flower at the end of the game (it's time based) you get seeds.  Seeds allow you to buy new flowers (they give more seeds but can be harder) or upgrades to your garden, including less insects, more nutrients and water supplies.

So I saw this game one day on steam and decided to pick it up with some of the extra steam bucks I had lying about.  It's a very soothing game, as the music is nice and keeps you focused, and you develop a rhythm of collecting, upgrading and dealing with small nuisances like insects, blight etc. The higher level flowers have more options for growth, but overall it doesn't seem too hard of a game.  If you want something a bit soothing and such though, I'd say give it a shot.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Van Helsing

Time for my second review, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing.

Ven Helsing

So I actually picked this one up a bit ago, but never got around to trying it out fully. It's a diablo style game, but more in line with Titan's quest in terms of leveling/powering up. It follows the standard hack and slash model. You kill monsters, get loot, level up, kill more monsters, wash rinse repeat. The skill system is split into four separate trees. One for melee, one for range, one for passive auras and another for active skills like healing. Along with this you pick your stats, and you have a ghost companion that can be built for tank, dps, support etc.

So it does follow the story of Van Hellsing, if he was a general bad ass monster hunter. You travel through towns, gathering quests and killing monsters by the dozens in encroaching waves of death and destruction. You have two kinds of weapons to use, melee and range. You can freely switch between the two, and setup separate attacks and powers for both. You generate rage by attacking, which allows you to add powers to your attacks (like exploding shells, slowdown etc) and rage can also be used for your auras to give you extra buffs. Spells use mana, you get various potions and item buffs, it's about what you'd expect.

It has some dlc that opens up new class options, like a pure caster or technomancer class. Have not acquired the dlc yet, but one annoying bit about this is even without the dlc, I'm getting items for the classes I've not yet acquired. A tiny bit of an annoyance, but it's there all the same.

If your looking for a decent hack and slash diablo style game, I'd say give this a shot, it's worth the money.

Legend of Dungeon

So that was fast, first game on the list I just played an hour+ of is Legend of Dungeon, by robot Love kitty (Legend of Dungeon)


This is a single player/co-op rogue like game where you and a party of adventurers descend into a randomly generated dungeon to battle monsters, collect treasure and vanquish some monsters along the way. So I gave this one the old college try, and have some thoughts on it.

Overall it's not a terrible game, but I'm not hugely enthralled with it. It's controls are brawler like, where you have to move, dodge and aim your attacks like old school final fight or streets of rage. Your various weapons depends your hit area, attack speed and overall damage you do. Your also able to gain levels via small green exp orbs enemies drop upon death. The controls seem simple enough, my main complaint is with the ui.

Your life, defense, attack gold and exp are in a corner assigned to each player. Your inventory is handled via scrolling through items and selecting which ones you wish to wear/use/equip. This gets confusing after a bit, as your inventory can quickly swell with the random items you pick up along the way. Equipping armor is kind of weird, as you have to rely upon looking at the numbers to determine if they are better or worse. This does not however, let you know if the items have any other effects, you need to rely upon trial and error with the names. This also occurs with the various potions, as they are random every time you play through. Of course once you use one, it doesn't let you know what it does, only small visual queues (like your toon puking up a random color which seems to denote losing points in a stat). Also armors seems to be better, but upon equipping your stats are not what they said it would be, so still unsure how that works exactly.

Overall if you can find this on sale or want a somewhat different rogue style game, it's worth a shot.

Steam Challenge with reviews

So wow this blog has been dead for some time.  To get myself back into it, I'm going to be doing a modified steam challenge.  I'm going to play every game in my steam collection for at least an hour, and then write up a quick summary, thoughts and recommendations for the games I have played.  Let's see if I can do it.