Recent reviews by COma

A remaster done right on all sides.
Everything was rebuild from the ground up and it looks and feels excellent. The improvements go beyond the visuals and there's a lot more dialogue and world building thrown in to give a lot more insight to the events surrounding Tommy or living through the Prohibition.

git gud at parrying

awesome racing platformer

After dozens of grey-shooters, crawling through corridor after corridor, spending hundreds of hours going through thick woods looking for that mysterious cave, driving lighting fast avoiding traffic and winning races, finding all hidden packages in a lifelike openworld or just killing Diablo for the dozenth time you might need a game to unwrinkle your forehead (actually, you might need to close you PC/console and go outside).

A long time ago I played this game on Kongregate called "Upgrade everything". It was a cool game where you could upgrade everything including the menu/graphics/sounds and so on and it seemed like a very nice and appealing gameplay idea. Going Loud Studios took this idea and back in 2013 when DLC's were creeping into most of our games released this little gem.

You are the good guy and have to save the princess from the Bad Guy (that's his name). The game is a 2d-platformer where you have to get coins. But your progress is coming to a stop pretty soon since you have to get the DLC required to go further. And then the other ... and the other. The DLC wary from horse armor (wink-wink Bethesda) to the ability to go left, sound and so on. I can't say more without spoiling much of the game. The sad part is that the game is way too short. I went through it while my girlfriend took a shower. But it's a lot of fun in a very small package and it contains a lot of popculture references.

Being the game that it is I cannot say much more about it, only that it was the best 2-3 euros I spent in a while and it will make your day.

What do you expect when you see a name like Ron Gilbert attached to a game ? Tons of laughs and Monkey Island-like puzzles. But what if the game is a hack'n'slash and not an adventure game ? Well ... humor can be added anywhere and puzzles find a warm place in any game that you put them in.

Taking place in a twisted fantasy setting filled with unicorns, crossbreeds like the KangaMoo (mama cow met papa kangaroo or vice versa), the game introduces the protagonist, Deathspank who is tasked with findind The Artifact. Throw in some missing ophrans, a generic antagonist and you can kinda sum up the plot of this game.

While the story might seem a bit thin, it's packed with humor and hilarious references (you will also find out what retired World of Warcraft orcs do to pass time or other heroes struggling to finish their last quest). The dialog, item-naming, descriptions and quest log are filled with references and puns that will make you chuckle at least once every two minutes. Quests and sidequests are as varied as you would expect from a hack&slash; you mainly have to kill X monsters of Y sort, collect items or clear out another cave for the same guy. Although some of the sides might seem repetitive, they add some play time to this funny, short game. I spent around 10 hours with it, doing everything it had to offer.

I really liked the presentation of the game, the map basically rolling as a globe while you progress and the scenery, NPC’s etc seem like 2d cardboard cuts popping up. Being a hack'n'slash you would expect a lot of items generated and difficult choices like "should I lose 20% healing per kill for 5 % extra gold and + 21 agility ?” but the game has you covered with a AutoEquip function to automatically put on the newer/better items you found. The combat is as you would expect, you click ... Deathspank strikes. You can switch anytime between two selections of two weapons (one for every mouse click) so you’ll be able to choose between 4 pain inducing devices at any time. One really small annoyance though is that when you change between the 2 sets, the actual models don’t update untill you actually attack something. But I see the reason for this. Being a console game first, the 4 weapons where mapped to different buttons and you wouldn’t get to do any actual switching. Of course many weapons have special properties like elemental damage and you have a “Juice meter” that fills up as Deathspank murders the scenery. When it’s full you can unleash special attacks on some weapons. Later in the game you come across various runes that tell you how to combine weapons to do more damage. I wish I could tell you more about the runes but I never used them.

The problem with the game is not that it's not complex, but given the fact that the death penalty is putting you a few feet back, and taking some of your gold (which you need only in one quest at the beginning or to buy potions), I just didn't care about dying. So, in the later half of the game, I was running around, killing what I could, dying and coming back and so on. I could've bought invisibility potions but again, didn't need them. While potions heal you instantly, you can also eat pizza or fries while running around the monsters attacking you.

Although it might have some flaws and almost no replay value, Deathspank delivers more than enough humor for its price.

Only one thing to say .... the AI is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ joke.
I leave half my army to "defend" my base while attacking .... and when I look back they're being shot and just sitting there singing what a wonderfull word ... ffs !!!

As awesome as I hoped. It improves on and fixes most of it's predecesoor's shortcomings.

After losing the Gothic franchise to JoWood, Pyranha Bytes had to start work on a new project and started making what they know best .. an open world RPG. And so Risen made it's way to our hard-drives and consoles. Set in a new world, with a new Nameless Hero the story starts on a ship which is under attack from ... something. You play as one of the survivors, washed up on the shores of a near island. From there on it's up to you to save the world obviously.

They seem to have used the same engine (a bit more polished, and it runs much smoother) like Gothic 3 only the island is set in a more tropical environment with thick forests you wouldn't go into. The land is run by three factions and you can choose to join one of them each coming with their pros and cons. You will be welcomed by the monastery for some brain-washing (or so they say ... didn't quite play it the monastery way) and some weed-smuggling, by the Town to keep order or by Don Esteban to retake the town for him. It doesn't quite matter which one you help ... cause, apart for some quests the outcome of it is the same. It is a bit funny how these three factions seem copy/pasted from Gothic 2 ... and maybe Gothic 1 (seeing how one of them lives in the swamp). That might be the major flaw with Risen after all ... it feels too much like the Gothic series ... in many ways ...

The island is much smaller then many of the lands Piranha Bytes has thrown at us ... or at least that's how it felt to me. But despite its size, it's filled with stuff to explore. Caves, ancient structures (some are explorable only after certain quests ...), mountains to climb or levitate from one to another and treasures to dig. About the levitate part I have to mention a big FAIL (not relevant to the review). I went through a cave and reached an exit on the top of a mountain. I could see a heap of gold, a sword and some other things on another mountain. I checked my inventory and saw that I only have 1 levitation spell. I decided to use it to get on the other side see what's there and if it was worth it I'd reload, buy another scroll and come back. Of course the sword was a bit better then mine so I did all mentioned above. Half an hour later with the sword in my hands I levitated back and continued my adventure. Then I realized the painful truth. I could've just teleported from there. Major fail.

Ok, back to the game ... and to the teleporters ... once you get at a certain chapter, some *spoiler* will spawn all over the land and some of them will be carrying teleporter stones. Yes we saw them till now. The thing is .. that there are too many in my opinion. You will get a teleporter stone for almost every road junction there is. Until your first teleport you will have to walk. The view is nice and the things that want to bite your head off are deadly. The fighting system has improved a lot since Gothic 3. At points it might be the same button-mashing ... until your first human opponent. There I learned to block and believe me it is very useful. Also at first you only have a 3-hit max combo (or something of the sort) but if you level up a type of weapon (the one you will use most of the game of course) you will unlock longer combos and special attacks or the ability to wield two-handers with one-hand.

Well, in the end I'll have to say that Risen is a pretty solid RPG that every fan of the genre should play. Although it resembles some of the developers last games in some ways, it still has a unique feeling, great graphics, a awesome atmosphere, some good characters and that feeling of loneliness and fear to go into a forest at night we missed.