Purely fun-oriented alien wave shooter that uses spectacle and scale to make up for what it lacks in depth.
+ endearingly stupid dialogue with iconic voice acting (special shoutout to all the incompetent army command transmissions)
+ constant escalating battles giving a rather authentic war impression
+ excellent mindless multiplayer experience
+ hundreds of distinct and powerful weapons
+ fittingly grand soundtrack
- barely passable graphics
- pathetic mobility for three out of four classes
- no progression sync between local and online modes
- no weapon drops for other classes preventing spontaneous switching
- significant mission bloat with repetitive enemies and forgettable objectives

Always love seeing a good coop shooter like this especially how it introduces the player naming their ship and then straight towards the war front for the fight for democracy. The mission selector is one of my favorites to navigate how you just select the planet and mission then presented your destroyer and others accompanying it jumping out of hyperspace (or whatever people call it) along with the other player ship hovering over orbit that shit is always awesome to look at. The gameplay loop is great starting with everyone jumping into each of the pods and crashing down to wreak havoc on Terminids or Automatons. Glad that the bonus objective areas are not only just for xp and such but, are beneficial for the duration of the mission whether having a bonus sample within the area, item locator, or tools to help kill more enemies it's that kind of rewarding system is what makes it fantastic. The progression is good as well choosing what weaponry and stratagems can help fit your build always mixing and matching experimenting with the many options of what works and what doesn't. A couple of downsides I have to mention is the weapon balancing most of them don't feel good enough compared to others so most people would choose the "best gun" leaving less variety, but this can be fixed from weapon balance to make most of them viable would be ideal. The final problem is with this game's constant crashing there always seems to be a big issue every now and then. I think it's a great game to invest in with friends and have some dumb fun to spread democracy!

Good puzzler with below-average narrative. Portal-like narratives always have the tough task of managing the breaks between pure puzzling and story sections. Despite coming before all the games that really made use of that idea, Talos successfully evades it for quite some time, but sooner or later arrives at the same conclusion, in such a jarring fashion that it is very similar to both Portal games and especially Portal Stories: Mel (which came a year later though). There's an argument to be made regarding its early release date; indie puzzle adventures certainly weren't at the point they are today, but really - Qube came three years before that and did a better job at integrating narrative and gameplay, albeit being mediocre and trying less in general.

It just feels like there's no structure, the whole world feels disjointed and very game-like in an unreflected way. Most of the narrative structure is walking between the different, randomly assembled parts of the level and checking on a terminal how the story continues. And the story itself is still interesting, but reading line after line with no effort being spent on making a connection to the tasks you're doing 95% of the time feels boring in a similar way to The Witness. As in Portal, it gets better once you're breaking out of the constant puzzle routine and look behind the curtain, but it stays underwhelming throughout.

Related to both the level design and narrative is the lack of aesthetics, it really just does not look good. It has the same look as Serious Sam 3 but it's much more unacceptable in this slower, more considered environment that's not supposed to be naturalistic. Once again, the parts that aren't the focused puzzle rooms are better but too sparse.

I don't know. It's certainly different, but a safer option like The Turing Test is genuinely better. This narrative feels like an afterthought, leaves you wanting more, but never getting it.

Plagued by instrumental play, you either play at the highest level which is not very high as the content is solved but all sense of community is lost. Game design in 2009 was heavily dependent on community but gamers in 2023 shame you for playing any different than what they read online.

It's a shame you can't enjoy these games how they were designed and are forced by others to put unnecessary addons and scripting languages to get a .1% increase in performance.

Any merits of design or artistry from the game itself is ruined by the abhorrent playerbase. Good luck finding a guild with normal functioning human beings running it.

Also if you think im some casual playing this game here are my logs:
https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/pagle/somtaaw

A bit unfortunate, isn't it. Even though you won't be fazed by its pretty standard fantasy world and story, the basis of collecting stronger items and abilities and zooming through earlier areas without many problems is solid. The main problem is the level design, and it unfortunately affects everything.

The foundation is good: you got multiple large and visually distinct levels, a few hubs, a few teleports, lots of opportunities. But it's all so awkwardly placed that you spend a lot of time traversing the same areas. Even worse, all the areas within a level look the same. I couldn't for the life of me recall any routes or locations which makes navigation actually terrible. This is then aggravated by a bunch of quests that have you revisit old locations to collect or activate things which would be okay in any other game, but here you really turn your brain off; especially because the goals often aren't interesting - open a chest to get a key to access an area to get an even better key to access something we're actually interested in, but you then need to activate three more things (one of which needs four more things to be activated).

It made me think about fantasy as a genre though, because I thought it wasn't my favorite genre anyway, and when Blue Fire started in a castle, with gods, some evil shadowy corruption, magicians, 'you're the chosen one' etc etc, I prepared myself for something thematically uninteresting. I thought that was unfair (it is), but now that I think about it, I don't dislike fantasy as a genre - it's just not an interesting starting point for me. It can certainly be good: either by including more unconventional elements (Bastion, Hades, Wandersong, Everhood) or just having a solid thematic basis apart from it (Final Fantasy, Dreamfall, Everhood again). Blue Fire has neither. Root of the problem is the inconsistent tone, where the main story is about corrupted gods and the death of the entire land, while the inhabitants seem to be mostly just fine, maybe a bit bothered by the monsters. It's so whimsical, but not in a controlled manner like in A Hat in Time. It feels like the world you're traversing has always been this way and it's alright how it is, and your quests are totally separate.

Even if we ignore the lack of thematic depth and level design issues, at its best it would just be a mediocre game about things you've already seen with gameplay you've already experienced. Just play A Hat in Time or Supraland instead.