Overlord

For some reason my initial review of this game was lost, but this is one of those games that is well worth putting in the effort to write about it one more time.

Overlord is one of the funniest games that came out this year.
It puts you in the Armour with the spiked helmet of the evil overlord that commands a horde of minions to do your evil bidding.
And evil should be taken with a pinch of salt because you can be a damn *good* evil master.

Your horde is spawned from spawning pits that use up a specific kind of life force for each type of minion.
The further into the game you get the more minions you can control at once. You also gain access to other tribes of minions, each with their own skills, strengths and weaknesses.

Using these servants in the right way at the right place is key to solving puzzles and getting further into the story.
Luckily there is also a good deal of optional stuff one can do. This both adds replay value as well as help to keep the level of frustration at the harder puzzles down to a minimum.

Another aspect of your minions is that they can/will equip items and weapons. And that can lead to rather amusing things. Obviously minions with good weapons can do more damage than those with just the standard gear they were spawned in.
And when you as their master are low on health or magic power you can always sacrifice them at special altars to regain these energies.
There is one other use for your minions, but I'm not going to go into that here.

Here we have a title that is a good mix between graphics, gameplay and humour.

The controls are solid and there is good support for gamepads on the PC.
You play trough the levels with ease and hardly ever get annoyed at the controls.

You hardly ever get annoyed at horrible camera angles and the graphics as said are solid.

Even on a low end machine I used for testing it played quite well with medium quality settings. And when I say quite well I mean that unless things get insanely hectic onscreen there was no slow down.

The character design is downright funny and the spoof factor is obvious.
This game doesn't take itself very seriously and pokes fun at several well known fantasy titles. Especially the lord Of The Rings series.

Sound is good, there is funny dialogue and good voice acting. there is a large enough VA cast so the annoying 50 people talking with the same voice problem doesn't happen. or at least not in a way that bugged me.

Get it, buy it, play it. Also worth looking at if you enjoyed pikmin.

Timeshift

Timeshift is one of those games that was delayed for so long a lot of people had forgotten about it or lost interest. (Duke Nukem Forever anyone?)
When playing this game it is important to realise that this is more or less a rework of the old concept. They more or less dumped the original game and built a new game on a new engine with the same name and general theme.

In that context Timeshift is a rather fun game to play. It has a nice combination of puzzles, usually based on obstacles that need to be overcome by playing with time. And good old fashioned action. And it has to be said you can do some fun things in combat. You could compare it to prince of Persia sands of time, although this game does not offer you the same options when it comes to preventing your own death. In POP you control time and your character also is effected by some of these changes. Such as when you fall into a pit full of spikes you can rewind time to avoid a spiky end.

In this game however your suit lets you manipulate time but your character is protected from these changes. So we can forget about undoing damage taken or saving our asses when dropping to our doom.

 Of course you still have the fun option to slow or stop time, walk up behind an enemy soldier and then unfreeze time to hear them shout in surprise over your popping up out of thin air right behind them.
There are also some clever uses of these abilities in puzzles such as walking on water or trough flames when time is stopped.

Graphics are decent, don’t expect anything high end and you won’t be disappointed. There is a decent variety in enemies and locations. And the interaction with the world is not great but better than in quite a few other games.

Sound wise this game is quite good. Enemies can be heard coming and there is plenty to overhear. When you are ducking for cover it’s nice when you can hear if you’ll be attacked from the left or the right etc.

Story, well that’s where this game falls a tad short. There is a lot there to suggest and hint at a far better worked out and more involved story/plot. But that sadly never made it into this rehash of the game. Even so there is enough there to still be decent and get the job done.

All in all I’d say this game is worth playing. Although maybe worth a wait till it gets priced down a bit.

hellgate London

Right, now here we have another one of those games that isn’t really sure what it wants to be.

It wants to hang out with online rpgs, but it certainly is in no way or form a MMORPG. It offers no real decent LAN so for parties or a little co op with your friends this isn’t the game. And then all this is based upon a mix of Diablo, PSO and anarchy online.

Gameplay wise it’s not bad, it offers decent controls, pretty range of options and character classes. Although the experience and levelling system is somewhat chaotic.

The story to me was extremely boring and badly told. So much so in fact that after a while I stopped reading the in-game text.
 It says something about this game that you can usually simply click trough all the dialogues and then go and kill whatever it is you are supposed to slaughter.
On some quests you are given an item and that usually means right clicking on said item after killing a marked baddy to do something or other that you won’t see happen.
The most interesting quest I came across was one where I had to equip a special helmet with a lamp built in so I could navigate my character trough an otherwise pitch black level.

Sound wise it’s not bad, but not great either. Whatever happened to writing a decent score and hiring some artist to do a few songs for your game?
The voices are nearly nonexistent. That is to say there is hardly any speech in this game at all. Your character does not speak, NPCs only say some general comment whenever you talk to them which has nothing to do with the actual topic of conversation. The merchants all have some unique phrases but those get old after a while. The cast is however way too small. Here we once again have countless characters using the same voice and quite often the same randomly generated greeting.

I have to say that for a game of this size The lack of proper voiceovers for at the very least the main story quests is just silly. Although I suspect that the high level of profanity might have had something to do with that.
 Even so to go purely test based apart from the few cutscenes makes little sense. And I have to say that those sequences aren’t all that impressive apart from a decent intro.

Graphics are decent although the outside levels do not look realistic. You can half the time look trough buildings, and the whole thing gives a feeling that you’re walking through one of those old school Hollywood sets. You know, where all the buildings are just fronts held up by supports at the back?

Enemies are decent but get a bit boring. They level up as you do, and that means you keep seeing more or less the same monsters in slightly different incarnations. Usually just a bit bigger and harder to kill. There are some original mobs so it isn’t too bad. However, personally I would have been a bit more creative. When it comes to hellspawn, and demons. There is such a large variaty available.

However this game should not have been released yet. I’s horrible. This is a buggy monster straight from the coding hells. The installer is bugged, the launcher has quirks. Trying to update this monster can drive you batty in all new and not so interesting ways.

First you need to download the web installer package. That’s where the trouble begins because at the time I’m typing this only the European server works, sometimes. You can forget about copying the links to these files into your download manager because the update servers do not in fact support resumes on downloads. Quite impressive in a bad way.
 Do not even think this is the end of your troubles. Because after all this hassle you need to run said web installer, and that tries to download the actual patch files from the same dubious, hard to reach, non resume supporting servers.

Even after applying this insanely hard to get patch, hellgate london is still as bugged as can be. Monsters you need to kill to complete quests spawn or warp into walls or floors, quest items are dropped but can’t be picked up. Game stutter and slowdowns even on high end machines

Gears Of War

Another fine example of console ports at their worst.
This PC port of Gears Of War is even more buggy and messed up, than it's xbox counterpart. (That in itself belongs in the how not to do it section of console game making.)
Random crashes, hangs and errors galore. The game is so utterly unstable here that it is near impossible to really play it.
After going over the readme file one cannot help but wonder why with so many known issues this game was released. It would have made far more sense to delay things a bit, and work out the kinks.
When you know that your game has possible issues with both Nvidia AND ATI cards, several Samsung DVD drives (including mine.) and several other things that should have been a clue you need to do some extra work.

One side effect is that crashes once in a while make the game not register the last checkpoint you've reached. So having to replay even bigger parts of the chapter/level to get back to the point where it all went boom is quite possible.
The port itself is also extremely poorly done. That is to say that this game lacks the features and options PC gamers tend to expect. After installation you are given one shortcut and that is to start the game. No documentation, no links to web based resources, not even a manual or an uninstall shortcut. These files exist, but it would have been a no trouble at all to create a little sub folder with shortcuts for quick access.
There is also no configuration tool, that is to say it is not possible to configure the game and it’s settings before loading it. You also have no simple way to force Gears Of War to load in a safe mode.
Lacking both these tools makes trouble shooting a lot harder and needlessly so.

The game itself has its charm, the acting isn’t bad, the graphics aren’t either.
Gameplay is quite decent be it geared towards gamepads. In that respect it’s a bit dualistic. On the one hand you have a lot of dodging and running that is a lot easier to do with a pad than your keyboard. On the other hand when it comes to aiming and shooting nothing beats a real gaming mouse.
What I personally would have liked to see was some more control over your team. Something like the options you find in Star Wars: Republic Commando or Clive Barker’s: Jericho. You don’t really miss it but it would have been nice. As it is now I hardly ever used the team commands.

Sounds and music wise it’s not bad either, although sometimes the ambient music is a tad off. You’ll hear the typical ominous bit of music that usually means something is about to happen, but nothing does. So after a while you start to ignore it.
This game also lacks proper surround sounds, don’t expect to be able to hear your enemies position or rely on your ears to know when something is sneaking up/waiting for you.
That’s a real shame with so many pc gamers having at least 5.1 or 7.1 surround systems hooked up to their rigs. And this title has an atmosphere that offers a lot of options for impressive audio.

For now all I can say about this game is: wait. If you want to play it do yourself a huge favour and sit back until some patches are released. The random crashes will ruin the experience for you.