PC, PC Reviews, Reviews, past - by Diortem - March 6, 2010 - 14:38 UTC - Be first to Comment!
Something lurks under this mountain. Something Ancient, and something evil. And it’s your job to figure out what in this blatant clone of Diablo. (Not that this is a bad thing.)
Torchlight starts with your arrival in the mining-town sharing the name of the game. Your reason for arriving is never made clear: Only that a very powerful magic user came before you, and the first entry of his journal the game reads to you talks about some REAL power being here. This power comes at a price that might have been too high, and had he known what it would do to him, he probably would have never even shown up. The mines used to produce precious metals as well as a magical stone called Ember. Used to is the key term, because recently monsters began to pour into the mines from below. Being the good guy you are (or perhaps because you wanted to go down there anyway), it isn’t long before you follow two other adventurers down and begin an adventure that will ultimately pit you against the source of the monsters in an epic battle for the fate of the town, and possibly the world.
When you first start playing, that this game is Diablo 2.0 becomes instantly clear. You will be greeted with a control panel much like Diablo, complete with mana/health gauges and ten slots in which you will place your spells and items, and even start with 4 taken up by health/mana potions and identify/town portal scrolls. In fact the only differences in this panel are that the health/mana are each taking half of one sphere in the center instead of each taking their own on the sides, you do not have a description box for what you are fighting (rather, that is more like Diablo 2 where the game will show that on top as you attack it), and you now have both your left and right mouse button attacks displayed in front of you, as well as an “alt” attack, which by hitting alt, you can swap with your right mouse button on the fly. In short, it takes a lot from Diablo, adds a little of Diablo 2, and improves on both to make for a very adaptive interface to configure and use quickly while in the dungeons. Even the automap returns in almost the same way: you can have it not be there, in the corner like a radar, or in classic overlay, which still remains my personal favorite for these games.
However, not everything is exactly the same. For starters, your belt no longer controls how many slots or what might be waiting as the next item you might choose to use from your 10 slots. Rather, much like World of Warcraft, or many other MMOs, you will choose an item and all of those in your inventory are attached to that button, be it a kind of health/mana potion, a kind of scroll, or even spells/skills you want hot-keyed for quick use. This helps speed up the game to make and make it even better to play.
When you get right down to it though, the ability to place whatever you want in those slots will not be the only thing to remind you of WoW. Graphically, this game shares a lot of the same style and flair as the juggernauted MMO. The 3d rendering and cartoony style will remind you a lot of this, and in a good way. The game has character and charm, and the art will not leave you bored of what you are looking at. On top of this, the game also takes full advantage of this to minimize the power needed to run this game. For giggles, I brought out an old Dell P4 laptop with 1.5 ghz CPU, 512MB RAM, and some old forgotten Intel graphic chipset and installed the game on it. Sure, loading times were long, but the game itself played smooth as butter…. well as smooth as this game runs on anything anyway.
And I do have to bring that up, because this game has one flaw in it’s presentation: The way it loads. Basically, this game takes a “load as it needs” approach to running, which may sound great, until you realize it’s loading all it’s data from a literal zip file in it’s main directory. The results may vary depending on what you run it on and what AV you are using (MSE may not have liked this very much), but anytime anything new showed up, the game would have to pause to load it into memory, disrupting the game for a little bit. Thankfully, these issues are brief and the longer you play that session, the less you run into them, but it is an obvious downside to what otherwise is an absolutely excellent blend of graphical style and performance.
Sound-wise, this game doesn’t fair so badly, either. The music might as well have been ripped right out of the Diablo series…. literally. If you walked into a room with this game idling and the screen turned off, you wouldn’t be able to tell unless you knew before hand the PC it’s on doesn’t have Diablo 1 or 2 installed. Sound effects, are also very pleasing, to boot. Weapons sound about right, all the voices are well acted (and none repeat between enemies… of course few enemies even scream, much less talk, so this isn’t a big issue) and all your major quests include full narration along with the text! That’s right, this clone’s main story is FULLY VOICED. A very nice touch to finish the feel of the game. Course do not expect this kind of detail on any side-quests you take on, but then, a number of those are randomly generated, so to do so would be impossible. (Not to mention some of the later ones that actually are planned have a few bugs, such as a portal that you have to click to the left of to use and voices stop being used altogether… clearly things that are small, but they just did not have time to fix.)
Sadly, I do have one last fault to bring up, though. This game has no multiplayer at all, so if you want to bring a team with you down into the mines of Torchlight, you are just SOL.
Overall, this game is simply amazing, especially for the price. (It launched at $20, and if you can catch it on sale, you can often get it for even less.) If you enjoy Diablo style games, you are doing yourself a disservice to miss this game. This is the game type refined, and it would have scored even higher had it included online gameplay.
Featured Articles, News, PC, PC Reviews, Reviews - by Ascension - February 17, 2010 - 18:01 UTC - Be first to Comment!
Brutal Gamer’s review of Star Trek Online. Full Story
Featured Articles, News, PC, PC Reviews, Reviews - by Zeth - February 12, 2010 - 16:12 UTC - 1 Comment
A BrutalGamer.com review. Full Story
PC, PC Reviews, Reviews, past - by Diortem - February 6, 2010 - 15:09 UTC - Be first to Comment!
Often when a developer releases a game, they want the first thing you say when you start playing to be simple “wow.” They want you to be wowed with the scope, with the music, with the graphics… they just want your first impression to be “wow.” The problem is that you have MANY developers looking to one-up each other at this. So what’s “wow” today is likely going to be “normal” or “meh” the next day. However, in Mass Effect, I think we have a title here that will remain “wow” for a long time.
Mass Effect follows the adventures of Commander Shepard, who through the events within the game, becomes the single most important person in the galaxy and the struggle for the survival of all intelligent life within it. Right off the bat, you will find out Shepard has been nominated to be the galaxy’s first human specter (in case you do not know, specters are agents who do the dirty work for galactic civilization as a whole, but do so outside the law), and your first mission in the game is a test to see if he has what it takes. This also quickly becomes the perfect vehicle to introduce the main antagonist of the game that you will spend the rest of the main missions chasing after.
And missions are exactly how to describe this game. You will travel to various locations and complete missions recorded in your journal by people and things you see/hear/talk to as you see fit and completing the main ones whenever you want to move the core story along. While the game is exceedingly short for an RPG, (my little brother completed the Xbox 360 version of this game in roughly 8 hours), the game offers an insane amount of events going on throughout the galaxy both triggering more of these missions and triggered by your actions during and between them, giving you the impression of a full and busy galaxy. This is why this game continues to be one with a “wow” effect. Add to this the codex entries you will receive explaining the deep, rich, and very complete history and current events of the galaxy, and you will see one of the most complete worlds made for any video game to date. Bioware REALLY made a masterpiece in the worlds you get to play with.
And play you will. The game mechanics are for the most part exceedingly smooth, from conversation to combat, feeling almost completely natural in it’s new home on a keyboard and mouse. I say almost due to the fact that holding down spacebar to open a combat menu mid-combat is not as natural as it could have been. (Just hitting space would have been better.) This is really trivial, however, since the game pauses while you do this, allowing you to breath and think about what you are doing and making even a small amount of awkwardness forgivable.
However, also worth pointing out is an issue with the cover system: you can get stuck on walls, much like the complaints I have heard personally about Gears of War (regardless of version). Overall, it works rather nicely, but but concidering I can speak from experience where the very last boss of the game almost killed me because I got too close to debris I was backing up around and got stuck on it, I would say it is shy of perfect and could probably have used a little bit of work.
Technically, I wish I could be as impressed with this game as I am with the world and overall gameplay. Make no mistake, this game is a port from the 360, and it shows. EVERY issue I had on a technical level seems to stem from this, and settles into exactly 3 issues:
The first, most common, and most trivial issue is graphical pop-in. Almost every time when you first get into a level, you notice the details of the area are VERY low… and the high detail pops in a second later. This is a direct result of the game being a port from the 360. On the console, the idea was to reduce loading times since the game had to load from a disc, letting you get going while the game finished loading. The problem here is, we are on a PC. We are not loading from a CD or DVD. We are loading from a much faster hard drive. It would have been no issue to wait an additional half-second and see everything the instant the game starts the map, not a moment later.
The second issue is not quite as common, but a little more of an annoyance…. awkward loading. This seems to come from bringing the RAM limitations of the 360 home, without whatever extra code the 360 had to handle this in the background (I honestly suspect relying on the 3 cores of the 360 CPU was a big part of this, where PCs at the time were still balancing around a single core processor). The results are that randomly the game will drop frame-rate while your hard drive clicks away to load a new chunk of data, sometimes pausing entirely with a “Loading” screen. This was completely unnecessary on the PC, though, just due to the RAM available to the PC gamer. (PC required a Gig of RAM and no card with less then 128 MB of RAM on it’s own, more then doubling the what the 360 has.) They could have easily taken advantage of that, and with a little work, adjusted the on the fly loading to not be so obtrusive. Still, this never annoys for more then a few seconds, and NEVER happened in the heat of the action, so this is a forgivable, if annoying oversight in the porting process.
The third oversight is with sound. Simply put, this game uses accelerated sound by default…. and it sounds nice… in theory. However, it seemed to me it was set for 5.1 surround sound only, which means anyone using this with stereo speakers (like most PC gamers that Im aware of) literally can not hear the speech or sound effects almost at all over the background noises without turning this feature off. First lesson of game developement is to make sure your game runs right in the most common configuration, making this a blatant failure in the process.
Further pressing matters are bugs in the non-accelerated version of the sound. I can not speak for these being in the accelerated or not since I could not use it, but the code running the software version is terrible. If too much is going on that it has to keep track of, it starts to loose sources and stutter the background music/effect. The results are dropped conversations, gunshots, footsteps, and even in two of the bars in the game, the dance music getting stuck repeating the first few notes like a broken MP3. Needless to say, this is VERY annoying, and leaves you thankful that it seems to only be an issue in 3 very specific areas in the game, one of which it goes away as you kill the army of enemies. Keep in mind, this was NOT a slowdown, as the game at all 3 points didn’t drop a frame from the FPS… this was purely a sound issue.
Overall, though, this game is incredible. You are given a huge galaxy with an insane amount of detail which still reacts to your choices very well. The main game is short, but as a plus, this also means there are very few missions you actually must do, leaving you to be free to do pretty much anything you want, or not do anything you don’t want. The choice is yours, which seems to be the core idea Bioware was going for when they made this one. VERY well done!
PC, PC Reviews, Reviews, past - by Diortem - January 23, 2010 - 03:01 UTC - Be first to Comment!
“Do you know where you are? Do you have any regrets? Are you ready?” These three questions are all the warning you get from this game about the horrific things you will witness once you leave the first room. Sit down, get comfy, and be ready for your skin to crawl….
The White Chamber is a point and click horror adventure, in which you play the part of an unnamed young woman, who literally just woke up in a coffin in a dark room. She has no idea how she got there, and you do not even know her name. After a short puzzle about the only other thing in the room, you begin your adventure to figure out where you are, what happened, and how you can get away from a nightmare taking inspirations from both Silent Hill and Event Horizon. This rather simple story-line is very well executed with plenty to do along the way, making for a very enjoyable game, if not one you will find relatively easy and exceedingly short to complete. (I think I did it in under 2 hours.)
When you first look at this game, one word will scream at you: anime. The game looks nice at a native 1024×728, but the main character and the world she inhabits have a blatant anime-feel to them. Do not let this fool you. It will only lull you into a false sense of security until you see your first WTF moment, which will likely make you jump out of your seat, proving the game to have looks that suit it’s needs and atmosphere quite nicely.
The sound effects and music only amplify this. For most of the game, the music is non-existent, leaving you to the ambiance of the computers and machines around you, piping up only when it can drive the tension through the roof, literally baiting you into the next step like an 8 year old meeting a dare. And just as often as not, you will find good reason to dread the conclusion it draws you to.
Control-wise, it is rather simple, however. You left click somewhere to move there, and right click things to use/see them (the game will open a small menu with the two icons when you do this). You also have an inventory which will appear when you move the mouse to the top of the screen, but leave it off the screen until, making for a rather minimal interface that works to enhance the eerie-ness of this title. However, like FPS, there is really little a game of this kind can do to innovate controls on the PC.
Overall, this is one creepy game. It will make you nervous. It will make you uncomfortable, and it will keep you coming back till you see the conclusion. If you are a fan of horror titles that actually ARE scary, pick this up…. Do not hesitate. Open a new browser and follow a link below: Studio Trophis made this game as free-ware, so you have nothing to lose trying this out.
Downloads:
Studio Trophis’ site: Latest version (1.7 as I write this) is here, but hosted by FileFront
FilePlanet: Version 1.3, for those who would rather use Fileplanet over FileFront.
PC, PC Reviews, Reviews, past - by Diortem - January 16, 2010 - 13:31 UTC - Be first to Comment!
Ah, the Blood Ravens… they’ve been gone a long long time. It almost seemed like Relic had forgotten about the chapter they revealed to us when Dawn of War launched in 2004. It’s time to change that. The Blood Ravens stand once more!
In Dawn of War 2, you are a Commander in the Blood Ravens who has been sent to assist and take command of the efforts to push back an Ork war-band that is running rampant around your home sub-quadrant. Starting with trying to figure out who is enraging these orks on a mass scale, the story quickly becomes far more complicated, introducing players hinted at during the opening video.
This game is NOT a standard RTS, and this becomes appearant very early on. You will never build a structure, and you will never be given the option to amass a huge army to do your Imperial bidding. Instead, you will have 5 squads (and yourself) to equip as you feel best for the mission at hand.
You will then pick up to 3 squads to join you in the action below for what has been described (quite accurately) as a Diablo-esque RTS: You are controlling a small team of 4 squads. Each squad contains a leader who will level up with time on the ground and can perform special moves, sometimes leading the squad into the attack. If your leader dies, you can send another squad to to revive him and continue the fight… the others in the squad are not so lucky.
Not that you will lose them for keeps, however. If you can get a squad with missing members to a structure you have taken, you can bring a new recruit down to take his place, refilling your ranks for the next attempt at whatever killed the last one… be it beacons JUST for this, or more special structures that will also give you more advantages in later battles for taking them now. (For example, some buildings have a direct relation to how many times you can use certain special abilities in combat.)
You will have to select each mission before you play, which due to the day-based mechanic, will play a large roll in how the game will progress. Everyday you are given a single deployment (although you can earn additional deployments for playing very well), and when you are done your “turn” the day will progress, along with events around the sub-quadrant and how long you have left until optional missions will disappear.
Your missions themselves will generally fall into 3 catagories:
- Defending a structure you have previously took during another mission.
- Attacking a special enemy and everyone else in the way.
- Securing specific structures from the enemy.
Of course story missions do not stay so simple, often blending these objectives inways you will not see until you are in the think of it, keeping you on your toes.
Graphically, I can’t say anything bad about this game. RTS games are not known for highly detailed sprites or background. Instead, it’s more common to use the power of the machine to show more on the field, letting the fights be as impressive in scale as possible. Not so in this game. The battlefields are absolutley gorgeous, from the lushious jungles, to the run-down hive worlds, to the alien infested lands of both. Further more, the land does change according to what is going on, so be ready to be amazed. The sprites themselves look great from any distance too, revealing some really high detail work.
However, this does come at a price. It was never bad enough to hurt gameplay, but when the action got it’s most intense, there was some stuttering, and this was especially true for tyrandis, who almost never show up outside of a literal swarm.
This game also has a lot to boast in the audio department… the voice acting is absolutely amazing, and delivers the personalities of each of your 6 leader characters perfectly, not to mention the random chatter of the enemies: absolutely full of character. The sound effects are not bad either, as swords swinging, explosions, and all the colorful weapons of the Warhammer 40K universe deliver what sounds about right for each.
Music, however, is one place the game does not seem to offer much variety on. There is a theme song to your mission/squad select/equip screens. I didn’t really notice any music that stood out in the game itself, but this could well have been either drowned out by the gunfire or so ambient I honestly didn’t notice it. Either way, Im not so sure it was a bad choice… it’s really easy to get into the battle before you this way.
Overall, this game is something completely new for the RTS genre, something new and something really really good. Most genres of games seem to become more complacent as of late, and seeing how especially true this is for RTS titles, it’s more then a breath of fresh air to see something like this fly so well. If you are a fan of RTS games, PC gaming, or Diablo-style games, pick this one up. It will be a fun change of pace. If all of the above are your thing, why haven’t you bought it yet? You are doing yourself a disservice to not have it now.
Featured Articles, News, PC, PC Reviews, Reviews, past - by Jeff - December 16, 2009 - 15:59 UTC - 1 Comment
The expansion that is not an expansion. Full Story
PC, PC Reviews, Reviews, past - by Diortem - December 13, 2009 - 23:17 UTC - Be first to Comment!
Come play…. it’s time to release your inner *******….. have fun…. *evil laughter with lightning in the background*
In this game, you will play the roll of Ceville, an evil tyrannical king who’s purest joy in life is to make others miserable. Sadly, payback is a *****, as the game starts with your people and even your own guards turning on you and attacking your castle! During your escape, you will find out who traitor that caused all this is, and your new life mission will be to get revenge on the “vile villain.”
Sadly, the story in general is slow and you will wish Ceville was more into kicking ass then undermining later in the game. However, live for the moment, and you will be laughing as often as not.
This is a point-and-click adventure, with a very sadistic sense of humor during which you will control 3 different characters at different times, each of which will have puzzles that apply their personalities to to the way you have to think about it to win, making for some serious challenge and requiring you stop and think often… but most of the time, you will be playing as Ceville, and the way to win, will be to be the biggest ******* to everyone else you can, sometimes doing things you would never have thought of.
However, to assist in the relatively high difficulty some parts of this game have, there is a very minor hint system/improvement to the point-and-click formula. When you hold down the space bar, you will get to see a text title over everything you can interact with color coded to show how you can (look, use, talk, ect.) interact with it… and it shows according to what you have selected from your inventory (if you have anything selected). This is a very nice touch in that getting stuck no longer means the game becomes nothing more then a hidden object game… a very nice improvement for the entire genre.
Graphics and sound, however, I can have very little praise for. The game looks beautiful for the most part, but between minor framrate issues (do not ask me why, the game does not look that complicated, and for comparison, I run Crysis Warhead at the same resolution without a hiccup), shadow-work for objects that clearly go through things (as well as sprites for a video or two), and even some objects that it’s obvious they moved it later and then didnt change the location you click on, it’s obvious this game is not very polished at all. Sound also suffers from issues of the same nature, between the audio not matching the subtitles at times, and even cutting out (as if they cut their English version short on a few lines by accident). This game is budget, and while they spent it wisely around the gameplay and puzzles, things do suffer for it.
OVERALL: I would be lying if I told you this game wasn’t entertaining, but I would also be lying if I told you this game was great. It’s a good title, and if you like this kind of game, it’s worth buying. If you are even neutral to Point and Click games, you may be better off going to find something a little more finished for your tastes.
Featured Articles, PC, PC Reviews, Reviews - by Mike - December 13, 2009 - 13:46 UTC - 1 Comment
Brutal Gamer looks to disrupt some Nazi plans.
Full Story
Featured Articles, News, PC, PC Reviews, Reviews - by Zeth - December 10, 2009 - 19:00 UTC - 1 Comment
A BrutalGamer.com review of Rise of the Pirate God.
When we last left Guybrush things were not looking so great for our hap-hazard hero. Now Telltale unleash the final entry in this season of Tales of Monkey Island and it’s a belter! This time out it is going to be almost impossible to discuss this title without referencing the previous titles and giving some plot points away – sorry guys it’s just the way it is – you have been warned.
So at the climactic finale to the last episode Guybrush is double crossed by his newest chum LeChuck. Run through and left dying in the arms of his wife Elaine it looks like the end for Mighty Pirate ™ Guybrush Threepwood. So starts the beginning of Guybrush’s fiercest battle yet, he must come back from the underworld, reclaim his rotting mortal shell, free his wife Elaine and defeat LeChuck once and for all. You start the episode in your grave in a excellent zombie movie pastiche as you break through the ground and your ghostly hand rises above the surface. You must work out what has happened to you and your Plunder-Bunny (wife Elaine fact-fans) and get back to the business of twatting LeChuck.
Graphically this time out things are much tighter. Although our review copy was a little dark in places (the lighting was yet to be finalised) each scene is well constructed and the whole land of limbo vibe is pitched just right. As is the time spent aboard LeChuck’s ship of the damned later in the game. A lot of characters from the first four episodes appear once more in this one and offer a great sense of continuity. Favourites like Winslow, Bug-eye and LeFlay all crop up from time to time and there is a lot more exposition and back story to the characters this time out. The plastic edge I have bemoaned in the past does not rear it’s ugly head so things stay pleasant and well defined throughout. One complaint would be that there are only a handful of locations this time out, some more variety would of been good.
Sonically the game hits the mark once more with top line voice acting and fantastic musical scores. Little can be faulted audio wise in this game apart from a rather sparse use of spot effects that has been evident in past episodes but just seems to of gathered weight as a criticism since they started. The voice cast do a great job of bringing life to the dialogue which is relatively sharp but devoid of many actual laugh out loud moments. That’s not to say the game is without great wit and charm because it never produces anything less than great whimsy – it just still has not reached the same level of guffaw that the original titles managed.
Longevity seems to of been increased for this final episode. Most previous episodes ran at aroun 3 – 5 hours and mostly added longevity with frustrating puzzles. This episode weighs in at around 5 but this is due to a serious amount of back tracking which at times sees you travelling to one location at one end of the game “map” and then back to the other to do a single tastk, then sending you back whence you came. You will be happily doing this for an hour or two before it really strikes you that Rise of the Pirate God only has about eight locations. The puzzles have been tweaked a little but they mostly amount to walking around collecting half a dozen items and then using them in the crossroads section of the game.
Final Thoughts
This is a great ending to a fantastic first season for Guybrush and the gang. The finale cinematics setup some potential sequels and also manage to round things up in a satisfactory way – all be it all a little convenient. The fine chaps at Telltale have proven that they can make good use of the Monkey Island license I just hope they can take the series beyond it’s origins now. These were all great and a recommended buy singularly or as a set – I just hope that Telltale pull out all the stops to update the series when it (hopefully) returns next year. So for now, if you have yet to pick up these episodes do yourself a favour and make an early Xmas pressie of the series. If you have followed Guybrush’s adventures from the start you won’t be disappointed with this conclusion to a great season.
News, PC, PC Reviews, Reviews - by Lumwoz - November 19, 2009 - 19:26 UTC - 1 Comment
With Football Manager 2009 being voted the greatest football game of all time, Sports Interactive had their work cut out for them as the new season closed in.
Last year’s effort was hugely hyped as the popular football manager simulator had a big makeover but the focus of FM 2010 seems to be much more of a “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach. All the appeal of previous games has been retained while the most notable change has been the overhaul of the navigation system which seems alien at first but you will soon become used to it after the first few hours of game play. The navigation sidebar that fans have become accustomed to has made way for a tab system which makes moving around clearer, less cluttered and is far less intimidating for newcomers.
The mind boggling depth that FM is famed for often takes time for a new comer to get to grips with. But the new navigation system coupled with the new tactics creator seems to be taking strides towards opening up the franchise to a more mainstream audience. The tactics creator previously was a array of sliders which left the player struggling to see how alterations were affecting things on the pitch but now managers can pick their formations but then also decide how each player plays in that role. For example, a central midfielder can either play defensively, push up to attack, support the strikers, hold the ball up and the list goes on. When organising your team as a whole you can select an overall philosophy and style of play such as counter attacking, overload, controlled or all-out-attack along with others.
During matches there is now the nifty options to shout instructions to your team from the dugout such as shoot on sight, keep position or defend better which can be toggled on or off as you wish. Also on match days there is a better, more accessible performance feedback system to let you know how your team is doing through match statistics and assistant manager feedback to show you what your team is doing well and where your tactics may require some tweaking.
In terms of visuals the menus have been refined and the 3D match engine has been made smoother, while it is far from breath taking it does not need to be.
Final Thoughts
While Football manager 2010 is not a revolutionary step forward for the series it is an updated version of a massively successful title and is not to be sniffed at. It will please fans and is showing signs of furthering its appeal to a wider audience. The same engine backed by the dazzling depth of the database still beats at the heart of this game and will satisfy a season’s worth of FM cravings until next year.
