Recent reviews by Herr Gamer

♥♥♥♥'s still buggy as hell. Sucks ass. Do not buy. Argh.

When a medium manages to transport me to a different world entirely, that's when I feel my time has been utterly, unquestionably well-spent. This is one of those times.

A Short Hike is a game jam-packed with charming characters, beautiful art direction, and dynamic music that makes you feel warm inside. It reinvigorates a childhood feeling of wonder, one which you'd be confronted with when playing games like The Legend of Zelda for the first time, slowly discovering its world's many creative twists and turns.
Yet, much unlike The Legend of Zelda, A Short Hike strips away the nuisances, the conflicts, the health bar and the bizarre puzzles. Instead, it leaves you with just a quaint island to explore: Small, yet never empty.
Every corner of this island has so much character that it's impossible not to build familarity. Entering an previously visited area of the island resurfaces memories of past adventures - the journey to the top of the island's mountain is a distinctly peaceful, yet never boring experience. It's the sort of game that you simply get lost in, the outside world forgotten, going on tiny adventures.

And tiny they are: With a total gameplay value of 3-4 hours, you're never stuck with one impression, one "quest" line (if you can call it that) for long.
And yet, I feel this small size is essential to the experience, to the presentation. Were the island any larger, it would lose its familiarity, its unique character and its feeling that there's more content hiding behind every corner. Truthfully, by the end of your playthrough (if you play it as thoroughly as me), you'll know the island like the back of your hand.
But that's no problem, because this is what gave it its special place in my heart.

There aren't a lot of quality 3D platformer around anymore. The rare ones that do pop up are exclusive to consoles (Nintendo's specifically) and the others tend to be underveloped and unimaginative.

I'm glad to tell you that A Hat In Time has (outside of the second chapter) no part in that. It's the happy, well thought out 3D platformer I didn't know I've been yearning for so long. It gives me back the nostalgia of playing a variety of Super Mario titles on handheld consoles while improving on almost all aspects of these.

Despite being made by previously unknown developers, A Hat In Time can easily compete with the greats of the genre: Super Mario Galaxy, Odyssey, Sunshine... It incorporates elements of all of them, gives them a backing story, charming characters and a beautifully designed world and makes the game and all-around delightful experience that I would easily recommend to anyone looking for anything of the sort.

I'm very glad to say this too, as well as to hear that A Hat In Time has been an economical success. We've been going through an awful drought of 3D platformers on PC and I'm excited to see what this Team may come up with in the future!

This ♥♥♥♥ is trippy as ♥♥♥♥ and it's beautiful.

This right here is one of the few games I always return to, no matter what. With its little brother American Truck Simulator it is the podcast game to get.
Whenever I've got some really interesting podcasts to listen to, but no suitable games I want to play, I end up turning to either Euro- or American Truck Simulator.
While Euro Truck Simulator has some major flaws, most importantly its constantly repeating scenery, road and intersections which suck out most of the character from each region (A flaw fixed in both the Scandinavia DLC and American Truck Simulator). Other flaws include bad graphical quality and absolutely horrendous Anti-Aliasing, which gets especially annoying considering the often long, straight highways.

It may seem basic and boring, but I urge you to try it out at least once to see if it's your thing, it's definitely worth it. There's a demo which limits you to about 10 hours of play which should be able to give you a fairly good impression on the game and whether or not it's something that interests you.

Tower Unite is in a disastrous state at the moment. There are tons of bugs and glitches as well as continously crashing servers, each patch that gets released brings in at least 5 new problems. While it definitely is fun when it does work, the amounts of times it works compared to the amounts of times it doesn't is absolutely horrendous.

Get it in a month or two, possibly when it goes on sale.

Factorio is a game about crashing on an exotic planet and trying to craft materials for your way back home. Now, this may seem familiar and, fairly so, quite boring, but Factorio puts a nice spin on it:
In order to progress, you need to automate pretty much everything. The goal of your entire factory will be to create (4 different kinds of) science packs in order to progress in the tech tree, get new technologies which make your factory significantly more efficient and, eventually, reach the point at which you'll be able to launch rockets into space, in an effort to get back to your home planet.
Making science packs requires sophisticated chains of production, the ability to think ahead and a LOT of trial and error. On your journey to be able to unlock all tech, you'll also stumble upon some unfriendly fellas which will, if angered, start attacking your base. The more you anger them, the more pollution of yours reaches their base, the stronger they will get, so it's not a bad idea to prepare for this BEFORE they get too strong, you do this by either destroying their bases, building good enough defenses or simply not producing any pollution and going on greener ways.
All in all, Factorio has been in development for over 3 years now, being regularly updated by the developers. Before releasing the Steam version they have been hard at work at polishing and optimizing the game, so you can be pretty sure this won't be like your run-of-the-mill laggy, unfinished and bugged out Early Access game. Regular updates also contribute to the game staying bug-free while still adding content.

All in all, this is an inherently great game and I would recommend it to anyone remotely interested into the idea, as long as they're willing to commit a lot of time and effort into learning the game and how to make a working base.

My personal GOTY 2015.

GOTY 2016

I'd love to recommend and praise this game for its tactical gameplay and new approach to tactical Multiplayer Shooters, but in its current state, I just can not possibly do that.

Ubisoft has, once again, shown us that it can not be trusted. Ranging from simple ragdoll glitches, getting stuck in places to game crashes and the constant struggle of being able to join a game without getting kicked out of it by the game or not getting connected to it in the first place, this game has it all! Ubisoft delivers when it comes to buggy game releases that may even be classified as being unplayable.

And, if all these issues, which have existed since the very first open-beta of this game, weren't enough, it also has microtransactions. There's basically two currencies, like ones you'd find in free mobile games. One of them is obtained by playing (Renown) and one of them is obtained by paying (R6 Credits). Now, besides it being a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ buisness practice to put microtransactions into a 60€ game, it isn't implemented like it would be in any decent game, that being that you can choose between buying things with Renown or R6 Credits. No, there's a clear line Ubisoft has drawn here, Operators and modifications for guns are bought through Renown and weapon skins as well as Renown-Boosters and the Season Pass (which also gives you a "premium membership" to R6:S) can be obtained through R6 Credits.
And, if all this wasn't enough, the prices are absolutely horrendous. A 1 day Renown Booster, which makes it so that you earn 50% more Renown per round, is worth the equivilant of 2.50€. And you better use it at a time at which the servers are in a good shape, because otherwise you'll easily find yourself in a situation in which you just spent 2.50€ without being able to make good use of them because the servers constantly kick you out of the game before being able to claim the Renown reward, you get stuck in matchmaking or you even get stuck during the loading screens. (Happened to me way too many times)

So, in summary, once these issues have been fixed, this should make for a really good game if you can cope with the addition of slight micro-transactions. Since I haven't seen what the premium membership does or what the DLCs will be like, I can't quite tell you if, in a month or two, the game will be worth playing, since Ubisoft may just decide to go in a Payday 2 esque route and make overpowered Operators if you are able to spare the coin.