AKA Clock Tower: Ghost Head

Horrible graphics, story, enemies, voice acting, and generic locations full of constant backtracking. Has you constantly running back and forth from zombie like enemies that you need to hit with melee weapons sitting in set locations or that can be pushed off you if they try to strangle you. This is everything bad about the real Clock Tower 2 but even worse.

Turning into your alter ego and just kicking zombies and beating up possessed enemies is pretty funny though.

The sequel went from the great 2D art of the SNES to ugly early 3D, losing a lot of the atmosphere of the first game but still having some positive elements.

Good replay value, choice of playable characters that change events and character actions in the story, ability to save most characters leading to different endings. There is a lot more dialogue than the first game it is mostly awkward conversations with often poor voice acting, fairly slow text box when exploring as well. There is now faster movement and response to commands than the first game but due to how the enemies work they just no longer seem threatening furthering taking away the horror and atmospheric elements of the previous title.

Great art, atmosphere, and multiple endings and ways certain events can play out.

Point and click mechanic is a little annoying due to some objects only having one spot that it allows you to interact with them making it easy to miss things unless you know that you can interact with it.

It's fairly basic premise but they nailed the art and atmosphere of the location.

The Lamplighters League takes place in the 1930s where a man who was part of a former heroic team, now all dead, attempts to recruit thieves, murderers, renegades, and adventurers for hire to fight against his old group's enemies. Your opponents are three different groups that are attempting to access a mystical tower that will allow their leader to reshape the world in the way that they want. Each week you send three or four agents on a main mission and some of your other agents on side missions where they gain items from safehouses or spend intel to unlock new special missions. Based on your actions, you can lower faction progress level but will typically see two factions coming closer to reaching their goal while slowing the third. As each faction's circular meter fills up they gain new benefits when you fight against them. Completing missions gives you skill points to improve your agents as well as giving you random Undrawn Hand cards, of which each agent can eventually equip three of that give access to new active or passive abilities. These cards can be upgraded over time either by spending Ink that you gain from discarded or replaced cards or by drawing the same ability again and equipping it onto the same skill. The goal is to complete the heist missions needed to steal an object from each faction as well as the missions that give you the keys to accessing the tower before you go onto the game's finale.

Each mission takes place on a fairly small map where you move your agents by themselves or in a group trying to avoid, stealth kill, or engage groups of enemies while trying to complete a main or side objective while also gathering items and supplies. The actual manipulation of your characters in real time here is both pretty basic and somehow never feels good to control, even the way enemy visual cones are handled is odd compared to similar games. A lot of the equipment you find will never be remotely useful and the kind of equipment you can buy is very limited in scope.

The combat can be pretty good as you gain varied characters with their own styles of play that can work together well and be further enhanced by different Undrawn Hand cards. Even the characters that seem to be thought of as much worse than others can work well in certain teams and with certain upgrades and consumables that fit with their unique passive abilities. Problems come from the game doing a horrible job at explaining anything. You have no effective way to look up what status effects do, how long those buffs or debuffs last, what will trigger and who has reaction attacks, some abilities only partially tell you what they do, and many improvements have the usual lazy descriptions with text like greatly improved crit chance/increases accuracy/increases damage/increases ammo capacity/etc without giving you the numbers you want to have in anything but especially in a turn based strategy game. It is constantly trying to mess with the target you are aiming at. I've had it randomly perform actions where it used consumable items that I was at no point even close to selecting. Certain abilities like ones that can knock enemies down are so much more useful than anything else and can lead to the majority of fights being extremely easy.

The randomness preventing you from using the characters you want in a playthrough by limiting who or when you can recruit or making it difficult to get the randomly generated cards at the end of the mission that you actually want to use with a particular character who had to have gone on that mission. The terrible, and far to common in the genre, decision to limit party size to three characters (though 4 can be available in recruitment missions when you find the new character and in some of the main missions) is made even worse in this particular game due to the three types of classes each character can be. You typically want to have one of each of in a party to be able to do the interactions with the environment to find alternate paths and items which even further limits how you are likely to make use of the game's agents. While skill points earned in a mission can be spent on any character you have, the random Undrawn Hand cards have to be equipped, turned into upgrades for copies, or discarded right away and can only be assigned to the characters who participated in a mission. This can make it hard to get what you want, or what is even useful on certain characters, making it worse is that there are a few cards that are pretty much made specifically to fit one or two characters and would be of poor use on the other 10 or 11 (and some that just look to be a poor choice on anyone).

Map are frequently reused with no changes other than potential faction or enemy variety based on their current threat level. After 15 random missions one map repeated twice and one repeated three times. Even if a mission objective is different this does little to change how the maps play out as a main objective can be as simple as picking something up, killing a certain enemy, or destroying a device before having to move to a small area for extraction (that is, for some reason, located in a place that usually requires you getting through one more large camp of enemies).

Random text events that were added to the game after launch are an improvement to the game. Giving you a text scenario with three options to choose that can benefit you in different ways. They did do a strange thing at times where an option might have a specific agent doing something (possibly something that keeps them busy for the weak possibly just them as flavor text) but the option with an agent can sometimes have the exact same reward as one of the other two options, usually having a specific person could give better results but here it seems like that might have been the case while it was in development but then that was ignored. While the results aren't always that interesting, these events add more flavor to the setting, enemies, and agents while also allowing you to potentially gain items you need or to have another way to manage the threat of one or all three enemy factions giving you a bit more freedom to play the missions you want to play. The additional setting information is also nice because the character conversations between missions and there varied personalities is one of the better parts of the game, as is some of the back and forth that can happen between them during missions.

When you aren't dealing with too much randomness and get into a fight with the characters and abilities you want it can feel like a decent game is there but it falls far short of the developer's previous narrative and exploration elements found in their Shadowrun games and the gameplay mechanics of Battletech while completely failing at the overworld system and a desire for multiple runs that the game seems to be going for. Even the 1930's adventures dealing with mystical cult like enemies was better handled in the game Pathway that also handles multiple quick rougelite style runs with a small team of characters that some elements of this game feel like it might have been aiming for at some point in its development. It has what could have been an interesting setting as well as fun varied characters whose abilities can synergize well if used in certain pairs but handles nearly every system poorly.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1767053132495040916

The Japanese exclusive action platformer that has been said to be the best Spider-Man game on the platform (ignoring the beat em ups). It is, but it's still really bad. The slow and clunk controls allow you to punch, dash, dash attack, jump, jump attack, fire a little web ball shot, crawl, climb on walls or a ceiling, and to hit the trigger buttons to swing left or right from your webs. Movement and attacks feel awkward and slow, stage enemies are both very strange and can typically either be dash attacked through or present on odd target that you can't stunlock so you hit them until they hit you once then you either ignore them and move past or hit them one or two more times to destroy them. It has the usual Spider-Man game problem of being too visually zoomed in to make use of web swinging and to give some awkwardly placed stage hazards and off screen enemies that suddenly appear. Bosses require you to attack in whatever cheap way to discover that allows you to basically ignore their attacks or to stun lock them by knocking them over or backwards repeatedly. Stage design is poor and at times like a small maze (thankfully nowhere near as bad as some of the other games) there just to try to run down the pointless timer. You have some allies that show up in story scenes like Iron Fist, Human Torch, Speedball, etc but they don't do anything mechanically like in Maximum Carnage.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1766965902371947002

A good setting and while it often involves combat it at least doesn't have you fighting the style of threats you should have absolutely no chance against like some other Cthulhu games but the combat is never good enough and it involves too much busywork.

The investigation mechanic is too basic with pixel hunting on the harder difficulties and easily being able to piece things together with the main gimmick being the need to frequently look up records in the library, city hall, police HQ, and newspaper to find the address of people and places. Fast traveling to those locations and walking to the place you discover is where much of the time is spent. It's unfortunate these mechanics weren't better handled with the developers long running series of Sherlock Holmes games.

Cases often give you two or three ways to handle the finale and what side characters live or die but it never actually effects anything that meaningful except maybe a brief vision later or a few different lines. Even choices warning you that it will increase the spread of madness in the city never actually do much of anything. The game is too focused on finding crafting components to make more ammo, main and side quest rewards are ammo and components (sometimes a new gun), skills are mostly based on combat and crafting and there are infected areas of the city with good loot that require you to fight or avoid a lot of enemies (probably spending a lot of the loot you are acquiring anyway) that I just ignored. You have a sanity meter that never really matters, if it gets low enough hallucinations might attack you. The most interesting thing it did was create a hallucination of a fake box that gave me items when I searched it and then vanished.

The lower budget does show through in animations, walk cycles, bugs.

It can be an ok but repetitive playthrough if you like the theme. It did have one of my favorite NPC interactions in a game though https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1765647639973089742

I loved the original Helldivers, but lost almost all interest when I saw this was third-person from imagining all the problems it could have. It has all those problems, and more, but I still loved this.

Every issue I imagined this game could have and the ones that would likely become even worse at the shift to a third-person perspective, it has. It can be difficult to tell what exactly you can scale in the environment and diving or being hit into certain objects can see you clipping into them and getting stuck. Enemies can get stuck on terrain or fall into the environment (as can your equipment or items you are trying to extract from a mission if someone dies), though this does seem to be happening less now so patches may have been taking care of this issue. Like almost any game with melee attacks your melees and your enemies doesn't always seem to have functional hit detection. Damage is widely inconsistent with a blow doing almost nothing one time killing you another. If the Charger enemy killed you it probably cheated and stun locked and dragged you around with ignoring or preventing your movements. The weapons and call in strategums are even less balanced here then they were in the previous game. Just about any weapon besides one of the three Breaker shotgun variants and one particular explosive ammo rifle feeling so much weaker they can barely compare and of the currently available side arms only the auto pistol is an obvious choice as it does the exact same as the pistol but with more ammo and an option to use single or full auto fire while the revolver takes the usual bad design decision of being practically useless due to not either making it more powerful or making it load with a speedloader as opposed to one bullet at a time. The strategums can have a bit more nuance to them with the right team, communications, and depending on which enemy type you are facing but even with that there are certain call ins that are clearly subpar when compared to what else is offered. It launched with only two enemy factions when the first game had three to begin with, no mechs, and no vehicles. The game has, to be fair at this time barely relevant, microtransactions with currency you can at least slowly earn in game. Over the last few days I haven't had any problems getting into the game from lack of server space but there can still be difficulties in connecting to people, crashes and freezing on loading can still happen.

Even with all of those problems, it has been some of the most fun I've had in a co-op game and even is a fun enough time playing alone. What they have done well they have excelled at in the shift to more face to face gameplay. The environments are beautiful and have a variety of modifiers that can influence them, one of the best additions they can make is a disable UI button for screenshots. The enemies look good, react to being shot in a satisfying visceral way where you can target weak points or individual spots on both the bugs and automatons to disable weapons. The guns tend to be satisfying to shoot (balance issues aside) and while I would usually suggest sticking to third person aiming rather than first it is nice to see the work done for the first person view, weapon sights, and sometimes additional information like seeing a railgun's charge level in the close up view. Using the dive move is responsive and your ability to shoot mid dive and while rolling around on the ground makes for some exciting moments while you're being chased down by enemies. Calling down airstrikes, bombs, orbital lasers, etc is a much more exciting experience with the more personal viewpoint. The humor and satire from the opening cutscene, tutorial, tooltips, and ship upgrade descriptions are well done as is the additional lore from both games like destroying propaganda outposts talking about how the bugs are created and killed as a source for oil and your officers on your ship wondering how the bugs even travel from planet to planet. Even with the much higher player base likely giving the game even more inexperienced players in general, for the most part, the random people I have played with have worked together fairly well, in some cases the best I've seen in a videogame playing with randoms, and your viewpoint and how your strategums are called in makes it fairly easy for good players to avoid friendly fire. The map is quick to pull up and put away and location and enemy pings work well. Mission objectives are fairly straightforward and even the ones that could have lead to some confusion when working with people that aren't talking have added ways to help people work together like sound confirmation cues when a radar is positioned correctly or giving access to a call in bomb to destroy a base that can be used if no one has access to the kind of strategums that can destroy buildings or if the person that does won't use it. There are only two enemy factions so far but fighting against one or the other can feel like an almost entirely different game at times, as can the different planet ecosystems.

The problems seem likely to matter less as time goes on and the game continues to be updated and even when things were at their worst I still greatly enjoy the game.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1763486463981654378

Cute and nicely animated but a bit too simple and the only real difficulty coming from somewhat awkward movement controls hold it back.

Ninja side scrolling action platformer with a cute cartoon aesthetic. You have a basic attack, jump, and dash that will cause you to roll before doing your attack if you try to attack mid run. You can slowly climb up certain walls and jump off of them and when a meter is charged activate a ninja power like having a clone double that follows you and attacks or a circle of fire you can shoot out of yourself. When you or enemies hit each other it often creates a stunned effect instead of damage and when it happens to enemies you can pick them up and throw them. There are four attack types you unlock over time that can be cycled through with their own ranges and arcs that can be better against certain enemies. Varied stages over the nine levels. Good animations and little details for both you and enemies with some nice backgrounds and good use of color.

Jumping is more difficult to control than it needs to be. While jumping you move slower than your walk speed, the jump is momentum based so you are unable to maneuver once jumping (odd for a ninja game) and jumping from a near standstill gains you almost no distance. In the early stages you aren't too effects but some of the later stages make the imprecise movement controls more difficult to ignore.

Has a two player mode.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1761908530075066531

An interesting single plane beat em up based on a manga with some unique mechanics that can make it worth a try but never that good due to feeling a bit too slow, somewhat too reliant on iframes, high difficulty, limited enemy and location variety, seeming a bit outdated for a 95 game, and having one playable character.

As an example of what happens over the course of five short stages you start off punching and kicking a biker gang off of their motorcycles as you defend an orphanage with a treasure hidden inside, battle soldiers on a train that keep throwing small food carts at you while your ally walks alongside you briefly shooting at enemies, and fight ninjas on a public streets as random people pass by until the ninjas start disguising themselves as people ripping off disguises of children and old ladies before attacking you.

You have unlimited continues but any deaths will restart the stage you are on requiring you to attack in ways that will likely perfectly counter a type of enemy or rely on defensive moves until you have an opening. Doing nothing has you block attacks that will absorb most of the damage, ducking or crouch walking avoids high attacks, holding up while walking forward puts you in different stance that moves slower but that will automatically do a low jump over low attacks (or food carts). You have one attack button but a variety of moves based on if you attack while moving or still or if you are holding up or down, crouching and attacking will do an uppercut while crouching and holding forward does a leg sweep, you have multiple jumping attacks with the jump button that do more damage and are more useful than in many beat em ups but you can also hit up twice to do a high backflip that you can do a kicking combo with after you land, hitting down twice does a forward dodging roll with some minor iframes that you can launch a kick from, and if knocked down you have different attacks while getting up depending on what directions you hold. Many attacks put enemies into a juggling state where you can continue to hit them before they hit the ground with one solid combo or a combo and a hit or two in mid air often being enough to kill an enemy, but you are vulnerable to this as well and a minor mistake might lose you a large amount of health. Getting near an enemy allows you to throw them and in the options menu you can bind throw to its own button or just have it be the same as the attack button. The ability the game is named after is that as you hit enemies you charge up a meter that when full allows you to hit a button to briefly remove your earing that was holding back your full power, this puts you into a Super Saiyan looking mode where you are surrounded by a gold glow and have your hair change color and stand up (in your portrait at least), you are healed for half your health bar, and you gain much faster speed and sometimes things like lightning bolts or a tornado hitting enemies as you fight. In this mode you do still take the same high damage when you get hit though.

Enemies will drop weapons that you can continue to use but that lose durability when you do a special attack with them or get hit. Swords and blunt objects can add a stronger final blow with further reach to a normal combo or you can hit the weapon button that will launch your character in the direction he is facing for a powerful swing that kills most enemies before he then launches backwards and forwards again. Claws and brass knuckles enhance your attacks but have no special ability but have five durability instead of the usual three. Pistols can be picked up that you can fire in front of, behind you, or that you can roll forward before shooting in front of or behind you. The pistol does a fairly high amount of damage and shots penetrate enemies.

Good soundtrack.

While it is an interesting style it is kind of limited by the source material and mechanics. You needing to know how to react to enemies is likely why the variety tends to be so low and why they tend to be the same with palette swaps on each stage so you know what kind of moves they are going to do and why you tend yo be limited to one enemy on the screen from each side until you defeat both and then one more comes at your from each side again and again. Each stage takes you to a different locations but usually as the scene in each place changes you are just changing to a new identical or nearly identical spot until the stage is finished or as you get a story scene before going back to the gameplay. It's going to be frustrating to make it most of the way through a stage only to take a hit that suddenly sees you take three or four more blows by multiple enemies while in mid air losing you about half your health. Some enemies really like to stay off screen for some added annoyance, worse when it is an enemy type with a gun or ranged attack. It's a beat em up where you only have one character to play as in game that is quickly over (ignoring all the continues it might take).

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1759512095903899936

A mediocre beat em up that takes inspiration from the generic popular early 90s beat em ups and ends up copying or creating even more amateur gameplay decisions while having less content.

The syndicate has kidnapped the sister of a woman they attempt to blackmail who instead attempts to rescue her with two friends. Each of the three characters has a similar moveset but with different combos. You have an attack, jump attack, super move escape attack that knocks enemies away and gives you brief invulnerability but takes away health unless you charge up a super meter by hitting enemies, dash, dash attack, grabble attacks and throws, up and down dodge by hitting either direction twice, attack that aims behind you or does a more powerful forward attack if used while advancing, and a special move that can also be used for an alternate dashing attack, and the more unique attack to hit enemies when they are knocked down. There is a button to block, maybe one out of every 10 games has a well functioning block feature and this is not one of them as it is too slow and limited in how it can be used to be of much use even more so because you will likely end up getting hit from behind eventually anyway. It is nice that they did bind the block button to a trigger as well as the behind attack and the super moves to the shoulder buttons as that ends up being a faster and easier way to use them then to hold B or hitting button combinations. Your attack variety is fine for a simpler beat em up in this style but each characters feels too similar.

You play through six short stages without much variety in your enemies, nothing particularly interesting about the locations or artstyle, and some of the worst and easiest bosses I've seen in the genre. There are some hit detection issues where it won't look like some attacks should be able to hit you but will, a lot of enemies can start a move that makes them invulnerable. You don't react fast enough to alternate between hitting enemies on both sides of you making you have to rely on the super move to get out of danger. Many enemies have an attack they do while they are getting up that limits the use of your attack to hit downed enemies. You can find a few melee weapons like a pipe, sword, and some wooden object that all handle in the same way and shorter range knife, these aren't interesting or that fun to use but I have to give them credit for making the knife do a decent amount of damage when a lot of games in the genre tend to make picking up feel like a handicap. On a first playthrough there are stage hazard warnings that give you no meaningful information for what you should do to avoid a threat. A warning flash might mean some barrels are going to be thrown at you from the side of the screen, a fast moving hook that may or may not seek your location (I couldn't really tell in three playthroughs) coming towards you, explosives being thrown in two places from up above, or a falling large crate that is about to land on you and will take up a good part of the screen.

You can unlock a boss rush and survival mode but these do nothing to give the game more life. The bosses aren't fun to fight and survival mode just sets you on the first screen of the game and sends generic enemies at you while dropping the occasional healing item or weapon.

The soundtrack is good.

It's like a Streets of Rage 2 that doesn't feel as good to play and with less content and character variety and while it can be an ok playthrough there are a lot better beat em ups out there now even ones that go for a similar 90s style feel that make this hard to recommend.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1759067225875726559

Entertaining but unpolished alternate history turn based strategy game focused around WWII but with vampires, werewolves, zombies, witches, Frankenstein, Van Helsing, Jack the Ripper, alchemists, and the occult. Starts off simple until you start unlocking more powers, characters, and equipment that you can pick up and the battles start becoming more dangerous when death can permanently lose you characters and proper management of abilities and explosives to destroy tanks become necessary. Has a variety of overwatch and movement style commands as well different abilities and weapons and items that can be equipped to characters. It's a very unusual turn based game with large maps where a mistake can easily lead to a character getting killed, an odd camera, and some strange mechanics but I did enjoy my time with it back around the time of release.

An interesting adventure game that also includes side scrolling shooting scenes and a time wasting flight simulator that has high production values for the time though it is lacking in the over the top Sierra Entertainment style deaths with the at times random deaths here often giving you no more than text.

Tex Murphy is a detective working in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco in the year 2033. He is hired by Sylvia Linsky to look into her father's recent death that was declared a suicide, she both believes it to be murder and wants his life insurance policy to pay out the money that was denied her. You are given a few leads and have to choose where to begin with the case taking you around California and Nevada as you investigate the fascist Law and Order political party and their backers that were involved with Linsky and other scientists working on a mind control project.

You enter a flying speeder that you pilot to different landing locations to access areas or to meet people. These flight sim moments are a complete waste of time, there is nothing to do but fly, you are unable to crash, and there is basically nothing to see or hear while flying. What you can do to make it more bearable is to enter auto pilot navigation coordinates so the speeder flies itself, allowing you to go do something else while the game does this and making the inclusion of these moments even more questionable outside of some badly thought out piracy protection due to your early coordinates being in the game's manual. The speeder is also where you can save your game or contact two people through your video phone that you might be able to get additional information from.

Traveling to a location can lead to a few different kinds of events. You can go somewhere where you just meet a person who is represented in a picture with their dialogue underneath where you can type in questions to ask them or attempt to bribe or threaten them if they refuse to give you information. You might enter an area where you just get a full screen of text detailing your investigation or a minor character you meet. You might enter a side scrolling shooting section where you fight an infinite number of enemies and pass the section by advancing all the way to the right twice while crouching to avoid bullets and shooting enemies in your path. These short and passable for the PC at the time sections are made worse by you actually being able to run out of bullets and possibly needing to pawn items or make money hunting bounties (with a nav coordinate and combat encounter) in order to get money to pay for more ammo and to pay for bribes. In these conversations you are trying to find out new information and keywords that might work in other conversations or to gain access to new navigation codes for unexplored locations. The final type of area you can access is an actual location where the game appears more like a more common style of adventure game, only you have no point and click interface and your choices aren't handled by typing text either. Instead you select locations given to you that have interactable objects with you then choosing a few different options for how you want to interact look, get, move, open, on/off, and taste (typically just to lead to jokes or possibly a sudden ways to kill yourself).

For 1989 the game looks good with some nice background and digitized photos of actors when you get into conversations with the game's characters. The Real Sound also gives you moments of short but good quality voiced lines. Music variety is limit to one track but it is good and the sound effects are also of high quality for the time when they play.

Its a good adventure game with good production for the time that has some of the humor the later FMV games in the series are known for and a game that would have been even better if it just stuck to the one genre without generic bad (and out of place) 80s PC shooting scenes and a flight simulator that seems designed more to put you to sleep and to make sure you are keeping track of navigation codes then to entertain you.

The game was somewhat remade in Tex Murphy: Overseer but the framing was as Tex telling the story of an early case with some plot elements changed.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1757921208736292881

The Grey Knights of the The Baleful Edict have just finished a lengthy campaign against the forces of Khorne that has lead to the death of their commander, many of their number, and caused heavy damage to the ship. The Grey Knights being a chapter focused on the hunting of daemons and being unique amoung Space Marine chapters due to their secretive nature, close ties with the inquisition, and because every member of the Grey Knights is a powerful psyker. You are chosen as the new commander by the purifier Ectar who is confined to the ship as part of a punishment duty while the Adeptus Mechanicus Dominus Lunete makes the case that the best thing to do is to return home for repairs and replenishment. While on route the ship is intercepted by Inquisitor Kartha Vakir that tasks you with helping her to stop the forces of Nurgle by combating a sector wide plague known as The Bloom. You will have missions appear on planets randomly with you needing to reach the planet to deploy a squad of four characters to stop the spread of plague on that planet. As you play you can repair and upgrade parts of your ship for bonuses, have the Inquisitor research bonuses you can give your knights in battle or complete plot important goals, recruit new knights, and gain more powerful equipment by spending earned requisition points from completed missions and bonus objectives. Random events with different options to how you deal with them and their benefits or consequences appear on the sector map. Many of these events involve having you trying to appease the demands of Grand Master Vardan Kai who is dealing with other threats being dealt with by other groups of Grey Knights, most amusing about these is that sometimes even doing well will lead to him asking you to donate supplies or temporarily give troops to other areas since you seem to be doing so well with your threat.

Combat is turn based and similar in style to XCOM where you move around the map and can run into patrolling or stationary squads of enemies that once encountered will take actions like finding cover, entering overwatch, or buffing each others while your own characters have their action points refunded and get a chance to react before the enemy can attack. Every character has three action points that can be used to shoot, move, move and melee, throw a grenade, reload, move and interact with the environment, make use of a unit's class abilities, etc. Attacks always hit but with further ranges lowering gun damage combined with light and heavy cover and armor that regenerates each turn your attacks can be prevented from doing damage. Because every Grey Knight has access to psychic powers they also have starting willpower that they can spend to enhance their abilities, regaining a point of willpower when they get a kill or when certain conditions are met. One of the more used mechanics is that melee weapon and some ranged weapon critical hits will not only do more damage but allow you to remove or damage body parts of enemies limiting their actions or doing further damage. Most enemies are given a stun value and after taking enough stun damage are able to be executed with a melee attack that gives every Grey Knight an additional action point.

There are eight classes in the base game with each being able to reach level nine, each level gives you two ability points that you can spend on different ability trees that branch out from the center with one tree below, one above, and three to your left and right sides. Abilities can give a unit access to new or additional weapons and equipment or can give a variety of passive, active, and auto abilities as well as passive bonuses for them or active ones that comes into play when you enhance them with willpower. With certain builds classes can focus on fast movement/teleportation and melee, long range and support fire, AoE attacks, throwing grenades, healing or buffing other units, and one gives you access to a more powerful psyker in the form of a Librarian. Different power armor, terminator armor, guns, and melee weapons have their own passive effects and sometimes new abilities tied to them and can be further upgraded over time and each character can equip active equipment like grenades and servo skulls or passive items that will enhance their abilities.

While it is a good game, Chaos Gate can start to overstay its welcome for a variety of reasons. On top of just being a fairly long game, even with the four new assassin DLC classes and the DLC techmarine and Dreadnaught you will reach a point fairly early on where you have every class maxed out and due to the random nature of the game are waiting/hoping to get the right character class drops to try out the four advanced classes. There are some more interesting environments like ones with you in an active battle going on outside of your immediate area and a mission type where you get some allied guardsmen but due to the way the game is designed the environments rarely do much to effect the gameplay. With hit chance gone and replaced with most ranged weapons just having fairly short max ranges (and often even shorter with further out ranges of a weapon decreasing damage making cover negate attacks you end up likely playing with your characters fairly close together or making frequent use of teleports, AoE attacks, charge moves, cover destroying equipment, etc that often makes the terrain of a map not really matter even without getting into the often lacking of verticality to the majority of maps. The randomness of the game with missions appearing in locations that might put you at a big disadvantage or not being able to unlock the equipment or class that you want because of the mission reward options being randomized can also lead to issues where you are unable to try out certain classes for a long period of time. The melee focused or AoE damage characters are typically the stronger units as single target guns tend to just not do as much and even the environmental attacks that seem powerful early on start to fall off in damage and availability quickly. Minimizing the game occasionally seemed to cause some severe slowdown when brought back up or caused camera issues that were fixed with a restart.

Those issues aside, it is a solid game that fits the setting well.

DLC Reviews

Castellan Champion Upgrade Pack: This adds a text event where Garran Crowe joins you. Giving you access to a purifier class unit who has specialized in the melee side of the class, he comes with his own unique equipment and has unlimited resilience making him unable to be permanently killed. With him coming at max level and the four advance classes that the purifier is a part of being a random mission reward he is nice to just have with this also allowing you to focus a new purifier down a path focused on the incinerator. The problem with him is that he doesn't have a unique ability that can be useful like other characters can have and you are unable to change his equipment that can become weak over time.. His armor gives him fairly low health and no armor value and his equipment is limited to grenades which can be good for a purifier but you might want to focus on equipment that improves his melee skill or if you really wanted to focus on grenades you would have wanted to put him in armor that allows for additional and stronger grenade options. He's too limited to remain that useful for long and doesn't offer anything unique enough to be worth paying for by himself. It doesn't help that max leveled purifier is probably the most useless class to have ever skill unlocked in since, unlike most of the classes, it is based around using three different weapons that you can only use one of at a time and Crowe specifically lacks the ability to switch even if you wanted him too.

Duty Eternal: Gives you access to some new mission types, the new techmarine class, the ability to recruit and field a dreadnaught in certain missions as well as an extra unit in the final mission, and an option to recapture a frigate that can eventually be repaired to join your fleet. The techmarine is an interesting class who can take up to four servitors with him of six different possible types. They will automatically follow you when you move and can be activated as an ability where you can freely move them before activating their own ability which can be a plasma cannon AoE and knockback, overwatch, support fire, melee attack that destroys armor, incapacitating an enemy, or taunting enemies. The techmarine isn't as strong as some other classes but their servitors have their own HP and can serve as meat shields, you can repair or give armor to them or enhance their damage, you can get an auto ability to regain action points used to activate them, and can make them self destruct to act as a powerful large AoE grenade while also giving a buff to the others when one dies. The dreadnaught is a bit more limited in when you can use it but it can be equipped with a variety of weapons that can make it more of a long range fire support platform, a close range damage or stun doing melee attacker, or focus on wider AoE attacks against multiple enemies. The frigate you gain is a nice feature that allows you send it off to complete missions for you by assigning your characters to it and choosing to deploy it at one of the available planets. This can allow you to avoid doing missions you don't want to, do a mission that was too far away to reach, level up underused units or send out your better ones while you level up weaker ones yourself, and allows you to gain the base rewards for completing the mission. This does come fairly late into the campaign though. None of the new mission types are that different or interesting but it's worth it for the new unit types if you are interested in them.

Execution Force: Adds four new classes to the game that aren't part of a normal space marine deployment, instead giving you assassins from four of the the Officio Assassinorum temples. You have access to a Vindicare, Eversor, Culexus, and Callidus character with most of them having skills that are on cooldowns that recharge faster when they get kills as opposed to using willpower for psychic abilities like the Grey Knights. Each has a very unique playstyle compared to the other classes and while the Culexus isn't as powerful as some of the other options they can also be useful. The Vindicare gives you a long range unit that can get additional actions from movement and pistol kills while getting frequent part destroying hits with their sniper rifle. The Eversor has a high amount of health and ability to gain high armor unlike the other assassins but their abilities drain their own health while kills can refill it, they are fast, durable, easily gain bonus action points, and are one of the best units in the game. The Culexus starts with no willpower but gains it as they get kills or as other units use their willpower, they can attack through walls and have a draining melee attack. They have the ability to close reinforcement portals before they open but the random placement of portals and their lack of speed, a teleport ability, and that being limited to one range rarely makes the skill see use. The Callidus can play in a completely unique way with an ability to disguise herself as an enemy with some skills being able t o kill units while hidden and a gun and sword that bypasses armor with the gun firing in a wide arc and having the option to immobilize enemy groups before they even enter combat. The new enemy and equipment types are good additions, but the ship boarding missions are terrible and are frequently worse result wise than using different options when encountering an enemy fleet. A mostly very good addition to the game that allows you to just ignore the bad part while adding some needed variety to the game.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1754384957533995342

With inspiration taken from Majora's Mask where the world changes as time goes on and eventually leads to an event that will reset everything. Take the 20 minutes you have in each run to explore space and nearby planets to discover the history behind an old race, find the other travelers from your own planet, and discover why the universe keeps ending and resetting and if you can stop it or find a way for the universe and yourself to move on. Inventive locations and sights hiding a good mystery through open exploration. Excellent music and design choices connecting the music to the world and gameplay. One of the best adventure games available.

Some nice artwork and music with weak story, repetitive gameplay, and developers seemingly trying to use the cover of the 80s setting to showcase their own racist ideas while doing little to take advantage of the setting, even with opening text about taking inspiration from aspects of 80s TV that doesn't fit the game at all. I saw some Miami Vice, and I wish this was a game about going after Reb Brown's vengeance fueled biker gang.

You play as a former detective demoted to a beat cop after it is believed that he stole a senator's diamonds during a shootout at his house. Every day you are given tickets to write and possibly other tasks to perform as well as a side job you can take for the Italian mob or a black gang faction while also trying to follow the main story plotlines and running into other side events scheduled for that day. The daily tasks structure typically allows you to easily complete everything in each day except for the mafia and gang jobs that you might want to ignore or handle in different ways to balance your reputation with them and the police, cop reputation is easy to increase just by doing your tasks but activities can frequently lower the other factions reputation or might have you losing rep with one to gain with the other. One of your main police tasks a day might have you writing 5, 10, 12, etc tickets and by the days end I've typically written 20-30+ and done every main and side activity I wanted to. There is a lack of variety to everything that you are doing 90% of the time outside of story or sidequest events as all the calls to chase a criminal or tagger are identical, there is almost no variety to conversations when you write people tickets. This becomes stranger when you can take bribed and the undercover agents looking to report you for corruption always say the exact same thing so you can know which bribes it is ok to take. The main loop of writing tickets, chasing a couple criminals a day, and making an awkward mix of running and walking to maintain stamina feels like it would belong well in a more artistic project exploring the drudgery of life and work.

Portrays itself as representing a more culturally offensive 80s police film/show period but it clearly portrays black characters with much more frequent racism, as caricatures eating watermelon outside their apartment's, and as the violent criminals that you are typically running down to arrest and the only ones you are shooting as well as being much more likely to refer to every race by the most offensive terms while the white Italian mobsters are called greaseballs and meatball suckers. The cops you work with are all portrayed as on the take, racists, misogynists, as constantly harassing other cops or people, with no other characteristics making a fairly dull story worse as no one is remotely likable or interesting and it typically feels like it was written by the kind of people in their 20-30s idolizing made up versions of shows like All In the Family where they would want a modern version where Archie Bunker is the hero.

Two of the possible endings has you raising your reputation enough to join the mob or gang. though I don't really know how a fairly high profile cop and non Italian white guy just joins the mob or an all black gang typically committing low level street crimes and radio thefts.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1752188487854698635