biosynth8

This game just keeps going on and on. It's the proof that a game can be too well balanced - it keeps the same difficulty up for hours and hours without any challanges.

Great retro shooter, the only downside is the checkpoint-based save system. The developers implemented it somwhere in early access to "add challenge" but it's not the right game for that. There are mods to use a normal quicksave system, though.

The developers are German and think Reh is the female Hirsch. Consequently, everything in the game feels kind of stupid and half-assed. Building and action seems to symbolize rather than show. The easiest example is that you have to build a landing stage in the tiniest pond to enable your workers to fetch water. It takes the beatiful simplicity of a Banished, overthinks it and breaks it completely.

I really tried to like this game, really. The weirdness of the NPCs, the voiceacting, the menues and the sound design are just top notch. The story, however, isn't up to it. And finally the gameplay is just horrible. You have to walk all over the maps, even in corners where you have no reason to go to, just to make objects pop up near to you. If you don't have an item you need for a certain task, you just have to comb every map you've allready been to to see where you missed a spot. There's usually no indication where an object can be found and they are only visible once you walk past them. There's a moral system in the game. It's the kind where you can either be helpful and friendly to everyone or kick puppies - quite literally, since you have a robot dog companion you can be unreasonable emotionally cruel to. I hate moral systems like this, there's just no moral dilemma, just black and white. People tell me that there are also awful minigames, but I never got that far.

I really liked the atmosphere. A very competent Soulslike, earsily better than the Surge. However, it kept messing with my internet connection so I had to stop playing it.

Another Soulsborne-like. From what I gathered up to now it's a toned-down Bloodborne with less violence and an even more convoluted storyline.

Looks like a Blasphemous ripoff, but kind of nice.

I'm going to try this out when it goes on sale.

I wouldn't consider it obscure either. It was the reason to buy a new PC at its day, and the Unreal engines still bear its name. You couldn't be more wrong. I assume you didn't play it back in the day. Some consider it a milestone in term of storytelling and graphics. But while this was impressive, it was really a pinnacle in level- and worldbuilding. The most lasting effect however was its multiplayer mode, especially the competent bots. This was so great that the later installations - Unreal Tournament - just focused on this aspect. Quake III Arena, that you posted a pictue of, came out a whole year later and it tried to copy it. Quite badly, I thought at the time. Duke Nukem 3D is still a sprite-based game. I don't know in which way you mean that this is similar. Sadly, it never had a worthy sequel. Unreal 2 pretty much trashed all the aspects that made Unreal good and is just another bland early 2000s FPS.

Oh, I remember playing this. The best feature where the light effects, they were praised by the magazines. The gameplay... honestly, even at the time I didn't understand what they were trying to achieve. Some kind of street-level Forsaken, probably. But it endend up as a really akward and boring shooter. Maybe I remember it wrong, though. I have to try it again, maybe next week.

Nice game, very metal. I got bored halfway through, though.

I recently read about what a bad game the Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood had become. And I thought back at a game I still mourn for, even though it was allready dead when I first heard about it: Werewolfe: The Apocalypse - The Heart of Gaia. When I found out about this game, probably about 1999, my only source was a Polish video game magazine site I couldn't understand, but it had a lot of sceenshots. It was supposed to be an action RPG in first person, where you -naturally- controlled a werewolf. The little information I could gather was that it was built on the first Unreal engine. There was also some kind of morale system, letting you mutate if you turned to the evil side. Today, there's an almost thirty minute youtube video cut together from all the cutscenes of the game. The maker had the idea of reviving the game as a fan project, but nothing came of it, up to now. Link Do you have similar stories. For some reason, I dreamed of playing this game - litterally and several times.

Hah, both of them drove my brother half insane with their difficulty. I think he broke a keyboard over Myth 2. KKND is really a blast with the FMV scenes. It's on GOG, too. Myth was truly ahead of it's time and there are few games like it, even today.

I think P.A.M.E.L.A. is a really great game, despite being objectivly bad.

I played Just Cause 3 for about two hours now and think I've seen everything ther is to see. This game feels like you start with cheatcodes on. Very boring.

I just found it on myabandonware, too: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/biosys-f2f

I really loved this game when it came out. It's dumb and the graphics weren't good back in the day either. But the splatter effects, the gun choices and the action in general were really satisfying.

Archangel... I still have the box right here. I thought it was absolutely silly as a kid and stopped playing at the part in Berlin. At that point you get guns and the gunplay is horrible. You can't hit enemies that are too close, because the bullets appear behind them then. Other than that I only remeber that it was a very tedious but not very difficult game with horrible voiceacting and a bland story. Arx Fatalis is on GOG too and runs fine. It's a decent game with some flaws. The magic system is a bit of a pain as it only works when you are very accurate with drawing the runes. It's also very linear, but it doesn't tell you that! You are absolutely able to do quests in the wrong order and end up at a dead end after multiple hours of playing. This doesn't mean you have to restart the game, though - but you may be forced to walk all the way back almost to the start and later back again.

I completed it. I tried to get everything out of it because I just refused to believe there was nothing behind it at all. I felt a bit cheated. They give you half a novel of backstory to read before playing and then you don't even get a decent ending - no matter which ending you choose. As for exploration: Maybe if the map would have been a quater of the size it was in the game, I would have been less disappointed. Because after playing through that amount, I realized that there was no real reward for exploration. I still went everywhere, just to see nothing. I think this game can be summed up with one word: basic. Basic AI, basic map, basic enemies, basic story. The gunplay and general combat (if you don't count the very basic squad mechanics) , as well es the sound design (if you don't count the very basic music) however are really good. They lured me in and kept me going. I would have loved that in a more fleshed out game. I've read other people's reviews saying that in the end it felt as if they had missed part of the game. That's spot on, I think.

Meh. It works, the gameplay is challenging and the worldbuilding is interesting. The problem is that the pacing is horrible and the graphics are so generic and uninteresting. The same goes for the fighting system in general. I might give it another try one day.

I didn't get through the tutorials as they bored me to tears. That never happened to me before.

This game can be summed up in one word: Dull. There's just no point to it. You know the story isn't going to get anywhere from the beginning - it's a Lovecraft game and they tend to be one trick ponies. The gameplay tries to trick you into believing that you're actually doing something, with simple puzzles and RPG-elements. But they are all window dressings, facades only.

Still not out yet, is it? I know that feeling, I preordered the first Stalker back then.

The ten hours felt extremely long to me, since there's content for about four.

I played the game again after more than twenty years and finally completed it. It has a nice, short ending cinematic. It really made me wonder whether there are different endings nobody has discovered yet. I'm sure it was planned, but never implemented. It holds up better than I thought, just like most Myst-clones do. The controls are very simple, everything is smooth, no cluckyness like in most action games of the 90s. It took me a bit longer to complete as I thought because there are actually many different solutions to the technical problems and I chose the ones that take longer. Furthermore there's just so much stuff to do that is completely useless. There's for example a huge amount of survival equipment you'll probably never need. Come to think, I don't know how I managed to die that much in the game as a kid. It's very lenient with food and water intake, the liquids can also be completely satisfied by food with high water content. In this playthrough I only died when trying to die. Though, of course, you can easily die from spider bites, malaria or poisonings if you don't manage to reach the medical lab early in the game. Sadly, the scene when you are shot was as buggy in this version as in the one I had as a kid. I couldn't read the obituary of that either. That's a shame, since it was one of the main reasons why I wanted to play this game again: To see all the different obituaries and the one you get after being murdered by Devlin's lackeys is totally different from the ones you get when you get yourself killed. One that note: Is it possible that Sam Devlin is supposed to be Steve Bannon? People from the original Biosphere 2 project worked on the game and Biosphere 2 was aquired by Bannon after it had failed so miserably. All in all, it would be a great game for a remake as it allready ticks many boxes of a modern survival game. Just add crafting and base building and you are good to go. The technosphere management could also be expanded, as it is easily one of the best parts of the game - keeping everything running, look after the health of the plants, managing the different water and air tanks... And there are allready unkillable enemies that - kind of - pursue you. Of course, nobody is mad enough to do something like this. But hey, one can dream - and a biosphere management game really would be the game of my dreams.