This is the Police Review

This is the Police is a mostly story based game in which the player takes control of a police department as Jack Boyd, chief of police and on the path to an unwanted early retirement.
You will uncover intrigue, mafia plots, a serial killer, and many criminals trying to hide from the law during a playthrough, interspaced with regular calls for the police to respond to.
As it is a mostly story based game, the mood and setting is excellent, with perfectly fitting music. excellent voice acting and a story that makes you want to keep going through the days to see how things go and what will come of them. As such I would recommend playing it blind, and without prior knowledge of the plot past the basics. The story does not disappoint, though you will have to accept that the game is telling you a story, rather than giving you a sandbox or deep gameplay experience if you are to enjoy it.

During your 180 days before retirement, you will be able to deal with the mafia, sketchy business owners asking for some questionably legal help, and the regular crimes happening in the city of Freeburg. All this while you are given a motivation of collecting half a million. A number you will likely have to do some less moral things to achieve.
Most of the gameplay is simple. I can not call it great, but it certainly isn't bad either. You dispatch officers to calls and occasionally get a multiple choice about how they should proceed while at the scene. While these are some of the more interesting, the results of a call are always one of a few options. The criminal can escape or be captured, the cops can get killed or survive, and a bystander can be killed or survive. There is nothing in between, it's dead or alive without any injuries or details on how many civilians got killed.
Further, there is an investigation minigame, in which your detectives find photo frames and you have to personally arrange them in the right order to unlock the next step- An arrest of whoever did it. I've found this personally to be incredibly difficult, with vague frames and sometimes missing information. This is sadly to the point where I have now stopped playing the game as I can not solve investigations without help from someone else. While I applaud the idea of this puzzle, I personally just can not enjoy it.

A disappointment was the gang and mafia system, which appears at a glance to be an interesting net of people to comb through, but in truth is just a straight line up to the top where if you fail once, the entire gang becomes off limits to you and you can't continue an investigation or try to arrest them. At a glance there is depth to the gameplay, but this illusion is quickly dispelled once you play.

In short, This is the Police is a great game if you accept it for what it is. A story-driven game with some basic gameplay to hold you over in between story segments, not a police simulator and certainly not a detective game. You hire the detectives, you don't go out with them. It is priced appropriately, and well worth what it asks as a good story and overall pleasant experience.

Bounty Train Review

I don't usually review early access(2016-7-19), but for Bounty Train, I figured I may as well

Bounty Train is a game about running a train through the not-so-wild eastern coast of the USA right in during the civil war, trading in the cities and ferrying small amounts of passengers around. It has several ways to make money, and plenty more ways to lose it. But in the end every part of it works great on its own, but is still not really working together as a single whole game just yet.

You can trade, you can customise your train with carriages and historical locomotives, you can do combat when the bandits try to take your money, you can level up, and you can have a chase scene almost straight from a western. It is already entertaining and a pleasant experience, with the base gameplay being solid and simple enough to understand even for someone new to the game. At the same time it allows you enough control to remain interesting after you learn the basics.

The graphics and sound are pleasant, with the world map being a well made stylised view. That is where my first complaint lies. Specifically, with the transition between your train view to the world map. Every single time you do this you get a loading screen, which slows down the game by a lot as anyone who doesn't know US geography will need to go check the world map every time they see a place name to see where it is, and even those who do know will need to check it regularly to see if there is an indian camp or army position at the track they plan to take. This is quite harsh on the flow of the game, especially if you need to switch back and forth multiple time before actually moving your train.

Other negatives are balance issues. As it is early access, I'm not weighing them as much since they are mainly numbers that need tweaking, or things in need of more explaining. For example, the ability to escape from bandits is fun to have, with the chase being interesting and very good at engaging you as you have to control your train. But what it doesn't say is that you have only old trains, and you are not going to go fast enough to escape from anything at all unless you've left most of your wagons at the station. Any train that has enough cargo to make a profit is better off just stopping and shooting the bandits until they stop coming, simply because of the weight of your cargo slowing you down enough to make escape impossible.
At a similar note, often you do not get a chance to escape at all. When the army engages you(Which they will, both north and south will en up hating you for no particular reason other than you existing) you are only given the option to attack them, with no way to escape until time on their barricade runs out. The barricade they have lasts long enough for them to completely destroy your train before you can move on, which will feel like the game just said "Okay, you encounter this event. You lose", rather than it being your fault for your loss until the late game where you can defend against a small army group.

Another balance issue is the weaponry, some of them are just plain better than others, and when the bandits attacking you have these stronger guns and you don't, you do not have a good chance. What is worse is that you can not loot their weaponry; Loot is randomly generated after combat is already over.

While Bounty Train has a lot of potential, it is still unfinished as the Early Access tag says. Even then it is certainly worth keeping an eye on for when they tweak the gameplay and finish adding the rest of it. The price is a bit steep for what is in it at this point, but there is a promise for more, and if you are sceptical about that then there will be a sale for it at some point.

Evil Genius Review

Evil Genius is an excellent, if old game that is not without its flaws. Players are the Evil Genius, leader of the evil organisation that is planning world domination. The evil genius builds their evil lair, on their evil island. He brings in evil minions to do nefarious deeds and generally just manages the organisation's island lair. And he's evil.

You begin by building your base, designing corridors and rooms and placing the neccesary furniture in them. A place for work, a place to let minions relax and recover, a power plant. And then you gradually unlock more rooms and more items, expanding more and more until you've outgrown the small first island. But that will be a while.
During your growth, you're going to deal with agents of the forces of good, investigating your base for wrongdoing, and sabotaging, stealing, or outright assualting you. And for you to defeat them there are varying kinds of traps, misdirection, and just plainly having them taken care of by a minion with a gun(Or indeed, multiple minions)

The basic gameplay is solid, and while it has a few annoyances in the minion and agent AI, it is still very enjoyable. Base building tickles all the right spots for those who want to be creative, and managing your evil base is even immersive in some ways a

The graphics may be a little out of date, but they are still perfectly fine in most cases. It is true that characters viewed up close don't look as shiny as they may be able to with today's graphics, but when zoomed out and inspecting your lair you will not notice much of this, with an artstyle that matches the game's theme. It remains even today a nice sight to see the corridors and rooms with your minions walking around in them.

Sound design is well done, with the music being the best fit for the theme that I could imagine. All other sounds are very much what one expects of them, clean and clear so you can tell what's going on, and the only sound that becomes annoying is your blaring alarm. When you're dealing with a base under attack, you're going to want to keep the alarm on. But your ears will want it off after a while because it is loud and repetitive. More reason to finish off those intruders then!

The game happens to also be laden with humour, as after all, you are a cartoon style villain of sufficient evilness, I highly recommend taking a look at interogations and reading the fluff text of your nefarious deeds on the world screen, almost every part of the game fits seamlessly into the others, with a unified theme that never seems to fail or fall apart except for technical reasons.

But then, there are issues too. As there are always issues with games that will lessen your enjoyment. Luckily for Evil Genius, these issues are few. Specifically, they are twofold, though other flaws exist.
Super agents, and the AI.
The AI is the simplest to find, and simplest to complain about. It is incredibly simple, and even without resistance it will not go deep into your base, or pose a threat to your evil genius avatar. A little planning and you will always be safe, though you may lose all your minions as they too don't think about things. You will see a horde of minions happily run into an attacking army to repair the door that is being broken down, or to use a fire extinquisher on an item that is still being actively attacked.
The agent AI is not much better. For the 'forces of good' they are remarkably bloodthirsty, with some super agents and soldiers shooting everything that moves on sight. They will enter a hotel and shoot all the valets, bomb the tourists' bedrooms, and declare their mission a success. They will destroy a cardboard target and explode the pressure plate triggering it, then get injured by their own explosion and go on alert because they took damage. The AI is, sadly, incredibly simple and completely incapable of making sense or anything resembling planning.
That said, it is still functional, though the killing spree and indiscriminate destruction these agents cause will be most annoying as you can not tell a few highly trained minions to sit back, thus almost guarranteeing that you will be spending the next 30 minutes recovering from AI sillyness. And recovering is a slow thing, as everything is expensive, and income is low.

As for the super agents, I won't spoil them. But I will say the complete anticlimax that is the final super agent is a shame. Instead of an interesting ability like the other agents, the only thing this one has is boosted stats and an interface screw. The best way to deal with his ability is to pause the game and fix what he messed up, which can take a while with bigger bases, and manually set everything back to normal.

In the end, there is a lot I can say about Evil Genius, but even with its flaws it remains a very solid game capable of hours of enjoyment, unique and interesting with all the right things to make you feel like you are, indeed, the evil genius.
s you get to be the big boss cartoon villain for a change. It provides you with every tool you may need to feel like you're in charge, with systems that are neither too complex, nor too simple to enjoy.

 No pictures this time because it's near impossible to add them, instead, here's a link to a few of the things
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198002567771/screenshots/?appid=3720

Space Food Truck Review

Space Food Truck is a game about traveling the universe cooking food and staying alive. This is as is usual with games something that involves a lot of risks and dangers. That said, it is doable on a first try if you're somewhat experienced with risk-management games.

You play as a crew of four, each with their own job on the ship. The engineer to repair and upgrade the ship, the chef to cook the ingredients, the scientist to research, and the captain to pilot the ship. You can be one of these in multiplayer, or all four in singleplayer. Either way, you're going to have to work together to get through things safely. With that said, it's not actually that hard, at least on normal difficulty. It's very forgiving and you can handle most things just fine unless you've messed up your card deck building.

Speaking of which, you handle your options through a card based system, with cards being your available actions and the fuel to use on these actions. In some cases litterally, with the captain's card to move the ship taking cards with power points to fill up the FTL engine. At the end of your turn, you have to buy a new card to add to your deck. As such, it is important to find ways to trim your deck, or you will be left with useless or lesser quality cards. Several ways to do this exist, and as such you can usually keep your deck under control.

Then there is the actual cooking. Gather ingredients, have the chef cook them up and then deliver the dish to its destination. It seems easy, but it can get a bit more complex. Some ingredients are much more rare, some need to be unlocked by the scientist. And then you have to actually get them cooking too, which again costs you time to find the right cards. After some time though, it begins to feel like everything is the same.

After some time though, it begins to feel like everything is the same. Very few things will ever change and in one or two playthroughs you will have likely seen everything it has to offer. You can stabilise safely and last almost endlessly as long as you have the right cards and did your deck work right. Science becomes mostly useless after they finish researching, and engineering turns into 'play all your cards to fix everything, end turn'. Especially if you play multiplayer, it may begin to feel like your turn is automated where the rest of the crew actually does things.

With a fitting graphical style, simple but functional animations, and what I would definitely say is above average humour with simple but not unthinking or boring gameplay, Space Food Truck rounds out to be a decent game with some replayability troubles. While I would certainly recommend it if it were half price, 20 euro is pretty steep for what you get out of it.

Turmoil Review

Getting right to it, Turmoil is a time-constrained pipe building optimisation puzzle game. Your main goal, and main problems will resolve around getting all the oil in a level out of the ground and sold within one year. It does what it does and it does it fairly well. The pipe building is intuitive(Simply drag the mouse to where you want it), and everything makes sense. Oil only flows as fast as the smallest pipe, thus you need to make sure you don't have a bottleneck in your system. And if you pump oil up faster than you can carry it away then you spill it, incurring a fine. The game explains mechanics well and there are enough upgrades and level varieties where it does not become a chore or too similar to other levels.

A solid foundation, improved upon by hazards such as rocks and natural gas which can be used for profit as well, with the right upgrades, or just by adding it to your regular oil pipes so the pressure brings the oil up faster. As before, you may spill some if you bring oil up too fast, so be careful about what you drill.
To further the gameplay there is a solid campaign that last just long enough to be a good experience without overstaying its welcome. You need to buy the upgrades, lease land you think has a good amount of oil in it, and compete with 3 AI players trying the same. Eventually leading to auctions for shares which allow you to win the campaign once you have a majority share. Even if you are not into optimising things, the base gameplay is well enough and the game forgiving enough that you can get away with a profit just drilling for oil, though you may have difficulty making large profit margins.

Turmoil is a simple but solid game, build on a good concept with good execution at a competitive price. If you're looking for a few days worth of entertainment, Turmoil is a good choice at a good price.

Covert Action Review

Originally posted on 28 May 2016.

Author: Xenus Icelon

Covert Action is a game almost as old as I am, and it has aged very well.
Players begin play as special agent Max Remington of the CIA and their goal is to stop nefarious terrorist plots from happening. To do this the game offers a few clues and the tools to find out more about the plot currently in motion. 

These tools come in the form of four minigames. A combat/stealth hybrid, a driving game, a cipher, and an electronics game. If you find yourself incapable of figuring out the plot one way, you can go through things with an other minigame. This coupled with plentiful options for clues such as local informants means that you will never truly be stuck. But with time of the essence, you will need to decide on how to spend your time, as with every move you make time progresses and the plot continues.
That said, all plots are doable in about an hour each if you don't purposefully delay them.

A big part of the game is figuring out this plot, and finding a way to get into it and disrupt it. You may not always know the hideout of your enemy, you may not always have the evidence to arrest someone who you know is involved. And there are red herrings out there. You need to think things through before acting, figure out where you want to go and when or you will just plain not be able to stop the plot. It's a bit of thought to figure these things out, but it is very satisfying when you get it right.

The minigames are more like one large game, and three minigames. Due to how important the combat/stealth game is you will find yourself doing it often. Everything the other games do, you can get done by the combat minigame as well. You can find clues, messages, make arrests, and do what the other games can not- Find insider info and incriminating evidence to turn an enemy agent into a double agent.
As the most important, or at least most used of the minigames it is also the most fleshed out. You can hide crouched behind desks, sofas, and a whole lot of other furniture, or even standing up behind a file cabinet. Once you have downed an opponent you can take their uniform and disguise yourself, so that other guards don't shoot you on sight. The disguise will work as long as you have your back to the guard - they'll figure out something is up if they see an unfamiliar face. The stealth system in this old gem is a lot more complex than one would at first expect, and once the alarm goes off the combat is again pretty good. You can use cover to avoid being seen by your enemies as you flank them, throw three different kinds of grenades, shoot, and if you run into an enemy you defeat them in personal combat at the cost of one wound.

The goal of this minigame can be whatever you're after. You can go in for an arrest, or you can go in looking for clues. Bringing a camera allows you to take pictures of their sensitive documents(And whatever they hide in the bathroom), while a safe cracking kit lets you open floor safes for insider information. They have a computer system as well, where you can search for information if you can manage to find or guess the password.
For the driving game, I've only found one use. Making an arrest while driving, which can be much easier than going into the hideout. You are also at times followed when driving away, landing you in the driving game where you need to drive to the CIA office in town or get ambushed by armed men.
The cipher game lets you decipher messages you've found, giving you the evidence needed to arrest someone as being a certain participant in the plot. They also help in telling you who, what, and where.
The electronics game lets you wiretap a hideout, giving you information and notifying you of messages they send out. It also lets you put a tracker on a car.


Good design ages well, and it shows. All these minigames work together to make for a great game, four minigames with a single overarching almost puzzle-like game that lets you work your brain to figure things out. Then feel great about yourself for stopping a plot and arresting everyone involved, getting a trip to the casino and having a well deserved vacation. Or you know, you could bumble around for a while and then your failure sends the country spiralling into chaos.

I know I certainly deserved this time off!

On levels in roleplaying games

or

Why “The Legend of Zelda” is the best RPG series I’ve ever played

Introduction

The first roleplaying game in the modern sense of the word is Gary Gygax’s and Dave Anderson’s “Dungeons & Dragons”, based on the wargame “Chainmail”. It allowed players to explore mysterious dungeons, slay horrible monsters and get exciting rewards for doing so. The system included classes, levels, equipment and various other things. Since the first edition of the game (currently on its fifth edition), a whole genre has emerged. Things have changed – not every RPG has classes, not all of them feature equipment in the usual sense of the word. However, one thing is necessary for a game to be generally viewed as an RPG or as having RPG elements – the player character’s advancement and customisation through experience points he gains over the course of the game. It is about this that I want to talk today.

Thesis

Advancement and customisation based on experience points are detrimental to a single-player RPG’s ability to engage the player.

Note: here, “ability to engage the player” is used instead of a more vague and subjective “fun”. If I mention “fun” later on, it means that thing.

Argument

Let us look at a typical open-world RPG (don’t worry, we’ll consider linear RPGs as well). It is divided into various areas and tasks (quests, monster lairs you have to clear out, treasure caches you have to find, etc). Each of those is assigned a level or level range – in the starting village you’ll encounter rats and can find an iron sword; at the Mountain of Gods you’ll find demon-spawn hydras and after completing a long series of quests will get the Infinity Spear. It gives the player a sense of progression, but at the same time serves as a barrier between the player and most of the game’s content. Not being able to access harder areas is fine, the real problem lies with cutting off “outdated” areas.

Remember that village you started in? No reason to go back to that secret stash you’ve missed, it contains a minor healing potion which you have hundreds by now. The bandit fort that was a huge challenge while you were still on the track of the Lich Queen? Would’ve been nice to clear then, the Bow of Undead Slaying was a pretty great treasure for its level. Now you’ll just waste your time to make yet another area devoid of life by clicking through enemies that can’t possibly present a challenge to you. And even if you’re going the completionist route and doing all the level 30 quests before starting the level 31 ones, you’ll notice that after doing about a half of the level 30 ones you’ll already be miles ahead of them, because the game designer has to balance the game around you doing only the bare minimum.

And if the rewards and challenges are based on your level (see: “The Elder Scrolls” series), then what is the point of it? If at my level 1 the rats in the cellar were just regular rats, and when I reach level 50 they turn into angelic dire rats of death, then why did I even bother leveling? If that stash contains an iron sword at level 1 and a fiery sword of poison at level 20, then shouldn’t I postpone opening it until I reach the maximum level for maximum rewards? Not to mention it makes the world seem lifeless, revolving only around the player.

One thing levels and experience points do help with is the sense of character progression and the ability to customise him – when you level, you can choose which stats to improve, which stats to get, think about your further progression. Such a system makes implementing vertical (directly improving your already existing abilities) and horizontal (getting new abilities with power on par with the old ones) progression quite easy, but it is definitely not necessary. “Wolfenstein: The New Order”, for example, let the character improve through finding hidden objects (bonuses to maximum health and armour) and completing specific tasks (new abilities and improvements to old ones).

On that note, “The Legend of Zelda” series, while not usually classified as an RPG series, does the job of giving a sense of progression extremely well. Abilities and upgrades in that game are tied to story progression, exploration and mini-games. You delve into a deep cavern to grab a heart piece (which is always a prize, even when you have almost all of them), you win the race to get a bigger coin bag, and if you ever get stuck – you know you don’t need to grind, you just need to progress along the story to get a new ability that allows you into previously inaccessible areas. It does all that and engages the player without ever using experience points or the like.

A game that is heavily inspired by “The Legend of Zelda” – “Darksiders” – has shown the distinction between level-based and not level-based quite nicely, when its second installment added an “RPG” system as the biggest new feature. The result? “Darksiders II” is bigger, prettier, but ultimately more corridor-like. When coming back to old places for newly-available or missed upgrades, you just run past the enemies (that are too low-level to harm or challenge you) instead of, well, playing the game. When getting new treasure, you’ll often go “Oh, these scythes are worse than those I already have. Oh well.” And the game suffers for it. It becomes a slog where the first part was a fun and rather quick diversion.

And as for the linear RPGs I’ve promised to mention? The state of affairs is even worse there. You either have the opportunity to grind – in which case you’ll often be either ahead or behind the level the designer “intended” you to have at this point – or you don’t, in which case why even bother with experience? Could’ve just made it like “you’re getting an upgrade after beating this boss” like most games.

Conclusion

Experience is a holy cow that desperately needs butchering. It works in pen-and-paper games – because there the game master watches from behind the curtains, adjusting challenges, story and prizes as necessary to make the players feel like they’re in a living world, to feel like they’re being rewarded for their efforts –, but is not at home in videogames, where the player’s getting a finished product that doesn’t have the development team bundled inside the box. Look at “The Legend of Zelda”. Imagine what an actual RPG – with character choices, namely – would be like if it had that game’s systems. Wouldn’t that be great?