Fallout 3 Review

Fallout 3 is a First/Third Player RPG Shooter game in an open wasteland scenario. Your goal is to survive the post-apocalyptic world in order to find your father, that left you for no apparent reason. This game marks the comeback of an old favorite franchise, made by the hands of Bethesda, well known for the Elder of Scrolls games.

Let's start with the best in Fallout 3: Perks and VATS.

Perks are unique options you can choose every time you level up. Some of them open unique mechanics for the game, like the Cannibal Perk, which allows you to feed on dead corpses to restore health or the Bloody Mess Perk, which gives a chance that every kill will end up in a violent death animation.

VATS System

VATS stands for Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System. Despite the fancy name it is fairly simple, every creature is made by different members (like legs, arms, torso and head) and all of them have their own health. Depending on your position relative to your target your chance to hit those areas changes. Do enough damage and you cripple the member, unless you do enough damage to kill the creature all together. This system works all the time and you are also subjected to it. On top of it you have a limited amount of actions point that you can use every few seconds to slow time and pick by hand the member you want to shoot at.

The Skills system is very simple, but yet important to how the game operate, as every action success chance is determined by them. We like to divide the skills in two big categories: Combat and Survival. Combat skills affect your direct damage with weapons, like big guns, small guns, melee, etc. Survival skills are abilities that will help you survive the wasteland, like sneaking, medicine, speech, etc. One that we think plays special role in the game is the Repair Skill, because it synergizes well with the equipment duration mechanic. Just like in real life, the more you use an equipment, the faster it will break. But if you have a second piece of that same equipment you can salvage parts and repair the first one. This one skill is the sole responsible for most of the in-game money we made, damage we caused, weight we condensed and blood we kept in our veins.

To wrap up we have to talk about the game core mechanics: Attributes, Karma and Radiation.

Attributes are defined as a simple status page (called S.P.E.C.I.A.L.), and each will raise some skills or other status, like health, max weight or action points (used in VATS). Karma has a special place in the game, as every action you take can be considered either Good or Evil, and the game will keep track of them. If your karma is not neutral you might have special dialog options or even exclusive bonuses with different factions inside the game. Nothing fancy, but adds to the role play.

Enough Radaway for 3k+ radiation

Now being in a post nuclear world wouldn't make sense without radiation, right? Radiation plays a big role in the game plot, but mechanically is very dull. Every food, water or region has radiation somehow, the more you enter in contact with it, the sicker you get. Get sick enough and on top of loosing a couple of SPECIAL points you will die. But for you, as the player, to heal radiation is no big deal, any medic in the world will give you a full treatment or you can just carry an endless supply of radiation pill. It just doesn't really make sense that the world is struggling so much with radiation when there are a seamlessly infinite amount of radiation "cure" just laying around. We would have liked it to be a more severe or restrict system, that instead of killing you, could just make you very weak, like everyone else in the wasteland.

Fallout 3 is a bridge between how games used to be in the 90's and how games started to be after the year 2000. The open world and moral choices that the game offers also add a lot of depth to the story. This game is definitely a must and will give you hours upon hours of gameplay!

Final Score: 10 out of 10.

Half-Life 1 Review

Half-Life 1 is a First Person Shooter game in which your goal is to escape a scientific disaster while fighting your way through hordes of enemies. Released in November 1998, Half-Life 1 raised the standards for the whole game industry. Many of the design principles that are used today, almost two decades later, were set with this game.

For today standards, the game is mechanically very simple, you have about dozen different weapons and you have to beat, shoot, explode or disintegrate your enemies. What makes this game very interesting, even today, is that the whole plot happens as you play. Throughout the game you will face different forms of puzzle that will require different problem solving techniques to successfully reach the end, using no more than jumping, crouching, and one "interact" button.

Despite the simplicity, Half-Life 1 shows that is not the amount of different mechanics that makes an excellent game, but how the mechanics themselves can be weaved together to bring interesting interactions to life.

Final Score: 7 out of 10.
(Were we in 1998, this would easily be a 10.)

Fallout Shelter Review

Fallout Shelter is a simulation game based on the post-nuclear world franchise with the same name, where your goal is to create a "perfect" thriving community, 2000 feet under the surface. It is a very simple game that can be played very casually.

Our vault after couple days...

The main challenge is having power, food and water, the resources to keep your vault running. Power is essential for rooms, the more rooms you have, more power you will need. Dwellers, the people in your vault, need food and water to stay alive. The lack of any resource will affect your vault. Shortage of power will shut down rooms, like the ones you produce food at. Scarcity of water or food will make dwellers loose health due to contaminated water and hunger. If in need, you can rush the production of a specific room in order to produce the resource immediately, but in case of failure you will have a disaster to handle.

Each dweller have a set of SPECIAL, attributes that will affect their performance and productivity in specific rooms. SPECIAL stands for Strength (power room), Perception (water room), Endurance (food and water rooms + health), Charisma (radio room), Intelligence (medical room), Agility (food room) and Luck (rushing). Each attribute also improves the odds of survival during wasteland exploring, when you send a dweller out of the vault to look for useful stuff, like weapons and outfits. Fortunately SPECIAL attributes can be trained in training rooms.

The game always provide three objectives that you can aim for. Every time you complete one, you will get a reward and a new objective. We have gathered some data regarding this system that we would like to share, hopefully it will help you decide if it is worth your time and effort.

Unfortunately some mechanics do not scale well later in the game. Sending too many explorers out will require you to spend most of your time clicking endlessly to sell normal items. Which could be solved by having a "sell all" button. Outside invaders gets diminished to the point where they are more of an annoyance than actual danger. And further expanding your vault will only require you to click more constantly to harvest resources, than giving any challenge with planning or management.

Mr. Handyman lines are the best! :)

Despite the limitations of the end-game content, it is the only mobile game to actually catch our attention in a long time. It is free to play and can provide you many hours of entertainment, specially if you give yourself crazy limitations like: All Male/Female Vault, No Weapons, No Training Rooms, No Food, etc. If you are a Fallout fan you should definitely try it out! 

Final Score: 8 out of 10.

Data Collected:
126 Objectives Completed,
20 Lunchboxes awarded from Objectives,
42 Lunchboxes Opened,
8 Legendary Drops,
14 Lunchboxes "last card" were x500 CAPS.
9 Lunchboxes gave two rare rewards,
5 of which were x500 CAPS.

Statistics:
15,9% Chance for an objective reward to be a Lunchbox.
19% Chance for a Lunchbox to award a legendary item.
33% Chance of your rare "last card" to be x500 CAPS.
21% Chance for two rare drops per Lunchbox.
55% Chance of an extra rare drop to be x500 CAPS.

(For those wondering, all legendaries came from the last card, which is always rare or legendary, never from an extra rare reward.)

PS: In case you wonder if those 40 Lunchboxes deal for 20 bucks is worth your money, we NEVER got a Mr. Handy from a Lunchbox, despite people on the internet saying they did.

Our vault "top" section after 110h of gameplay.

Broken Age Review

Broken Age is a point-and-click puzzle game. You will play simultaneously as Vella and Shay, two souls with very different backgrounds and aspirations, but whose stories are more linked than you can imagine. Your goal is to solve the puzzles in order to progress the story.

As a point-and-click game, there is only one interactive mechanic, you move the cursor (and your character) around the scene and interact with objects and NPC's. Most of them only give you snippets of story that you will have to put together in order to solve the puzzles. Some objects can be taken and used to interact with other objects and NPC's in the game. On top of that there is a nice highlight whenever your cursor is over an object that can be interacted with, so you don't have to click on every nail you see until you find something new.

This game has a very interesting story, with great art, animation, music and a LOT of voice over. Every object can be interacted with everything else, we got some good laughs out of crazy situations. The puzzles themselves are not hard, just remember to use your items.

Final Score: 7 out of 10.

The Banner Saga Review

The Banner Saga is a turn-based strategy game with a heavy focus on story telling. Your goal is to survive the travel with as many people in your caravan as possible. What is unique about this game is that every decision you make will have an impact on the plot somehow, forcing you to think twice before picking any option, as not only will you have to live with the consequences to the end, but you will have to adapt your strategies quickly in order to survive. 

The combat system may seem daunting at first, but it is quite simple. After a couple of fights you will feel like an expert on it, but don't let that discourage you, there is plenty of room to explore different strategies and combinations. The mechanic boils down to two attributes: strength and armor. Strength serves as both health and damage, so as your character gets hit, he does less damage. Armor protects your strength by adding an extra layer of defense, but it can be bypassed by doing less total damage. On top of that you have character turns, movement, positioning, passive and active skills. That is where the most of the strategy will come from, when you are building your party or fighting enemies that have different compositions. For example, archers have long range, do minimal armor damage and have extra damage to enemies whose armors have been destroyed, but they lack enough strength to do damage on heavy armored characters, depending on others do bring them down first.

The other main mechanic on this game is the caravan system. As you travel on foot days goes by pretty quickly, and the more people in your caravan the more resources they will consume. Here is where most of the choices you make during your game will affect you. If you refuse to help a group of people in need, your caravan may lose morale and be less effective in combat, but that might be the difference between starving yourself or having enough food for reaching the nearest town. This is just one example, the game will have many other surprises to you that we would not like to spoil!

The two systems are wrapped by a currency called renown. This currency is acquired by killing enemies in battle and doing "good" deeds. You require renown to buy supplies for your caravan, buy items and level up your characters. That means the more people in your caravan, more supplies will be consumed per day, more renown will be spent buying supplies and less will be left to strengthen your troops. This shared currency balances the game for you. If you are doing well in battle your caravan will grown, preventing you from leveling up your characters, which will make the following combats more difficult. If you perform not as well in combat, people will die and your caravan size will decrease, leaving you more renown to spend on your warriors and, therefore, making the following combats easier.


The Banner Saga is the first part of a trilogy, so the story doesn't end here, leaving a lot to be told. Despite that, the game has amazing art work, good music, a good approach to player failure (after all, you don't win every battle you fight), and a "not going back" approach that enhances the weight of every decision you make, leaving you with a unique feeling of consequence upon your choices.

Final Score: 9 out of 10.

Shadow of Mordor Review

Shadow of Mordor is a third person action RPG game, in which your goal is to revenge your slaughtered family. With a very polished and fluid combat system you will spend most of your time cutting through an endless horde of orcs. But what makes this game unique is the Nemesis System which sure will make you feel like those orcs developed some brains!

The Nemesis System keeps track of your actions toward each named enemy and among themselves, so any orc worth enough to receive a name will have a personality and memory of your actions, as well as the desire to ascend the "orc social ladder". Any time you cross such enemy they will have a different line depending on your previous actions, their personality and their rank in the orc army. Sparing an orc life, threatening him before combat, running away or even if you happened to die by their hands, they sure will make you remember that.

In game mechanics it means that every orc will have a rank in Sauron's Army, a preferred combat method, Strengths and Weaknesses that you can explore. They will also fight against each other to increase in power. Any orc that killed you will have a "Revenge" tag and will award you a minor bonus when killed. There is also a very interesting feature where you will be able to kill whichever enemy killed your friends that also play the game. Despite the minimal rewards, the feeling of revenging your fallen friend does make you feel good. This Nemesis System is so ingrained in the game that as soon as you start playing you will understand how everything spins around this mechanic.

Now, into the action itself! The game has three different combat "styles" characterized by three different weapons: Sword (normal standing combat), Bow (ranged combat) and Dagger (stealth combat). Each of these styles can be further personalized and mixed with runes acquired by killing chieftains and warchiefs.

By completing missions you will be awarded Power Points, that will unlock increased tiers of powers that can be purchased with Ability Points and will make you more dangerous than ever! Ability Points are awarded by earning experience, every orc slain will give you a small amount, but once your body pile starts to stack, you will be getting them in no time at all! You also have six attributes that can be increased by completing missions and optional objectives: health, arrows, focus (how long you can slow time with a drawn arrow), and additional runes for your three weapons. 

A final mechanic that plays a big part in this game is the branding system. With your wrath powers you will be able to turn orcs to your cause, while not giving you direct control over them, they will follow and fight with you until they are dead or dismissed. That also means that if you brand any named orc you will be able to send them to kill other orcs or even turn on previous allied orcs.

The game has a very short tutorial that may overwhelm you with many different commands at once, but throughout play you will come across them again in a more friendly fashion. With great cinematographic combat, responsive commands, and wrath powers, this game will sure make you feel like a epic warrior fighting the army of Sauron. The game also approach player failure in a consistent manner that does not break immersion. Unfortunately the DLC's do not add much content and neither increase upon the story mode, being stand alone versions of the game itself with minor tweaks. Despite that, we highly recommend this game to any action and/or Tolkien fan!

Final Score: 10 out of 10.

Clicker Heroes Review

Clicker Heroes is a "Clicker" game in which your goal is to achieve the last room of the "dungeon" (or beat your highest room ever) by killing creatures. Despite being a very simple game, it does require active play to an extent, but the most part of it will be the game open in the background waiting for enough gold to accumulate before you can move on to the next stage, we will explain that soon.

The game loop consists of killing creatures by either clicking on them or waiting for your heroes to do it for you, for which you will be awarded gold, which then will be used to level up your heroes and cause more damage. Once you have enough damage you will be able to kill bosses for Hero Souls(HS), that can be claimed once you reset your progress by Ascending. Each HS improves your damage by 10% or can be used as currency to buy Ancients, statues of great power that will improve your performance by increasing damage, gold dropped, skill cooldown, skill duration and other chances in the game. Every Ancient has their own level that can be permanently increased for more powerful bonuses, some of them have no limit for how much bonus they will provide. You also can equip Relics, artifacts that have been infused with ancient power, so you can boost even further your bonuses.

Every 10 levels that you beat for the first time will give you a special boost called Hero Gild, and this boost can be moved between your different heroes to provide the best damage possible. Unfortunately each boss is roughly two times more difficult than the last one, which means that sooner or later you will achieve a point in the game where you will be forced to either ascend, going back to room level 1, or wait for increasingly long hours until you can level up your heroes enough to kill the boss. It does take much less time to go through the levels again, as you will be much more powerful with the HS you just got, than it would take farming gold on a fixed level to defeat the next boss. This is where the "waiting in the background" comes from, as the more quickly you want to move on, the more constantly you will have to ascend and level up your heroes so you can move on to the next level before being able to push your limit again.

Despite feeling that the ascending mechanic needs improvement compared to idle gold farming, overall the game presents a very singular experience that can be taken as light or as hard as you want. You can click and reset often for a fast paced game or you can just chill and wait until your heroes do the work for you, resetting your progress whenever feels convenient or when you have time to click some more. The game is also free to play, so you can check this emerging "clicking" kind of game with no strings attached.

Final Score: 7 out of 10.

AdVenture Capitalist! Review

AdVenture Capitalist! is, for the lack of a better description, a very simple "Clicker" game in which your goal is to figure out which business of your portfolio will give you the best return over each dollar you invest. The more money you make, the more you can grow your businesses so you can make more money, and then... you get it. Made first for mobile, this is a casual game but due to a "reset" mechanic it can be played quite "actively".

The game has two main mechanics, you must click on the business you want to run and you must manage your profits in order to increase your business. Clicking on a business icon will start a timer before giving you the corresponding profits, while investing your money in the business will make it more profitable by either increasing your profit per iteration or reducing the timer in which your profits will be given. Either way, you are increasing your profit by investing in the business. Every time you reach a milestone you get a nice extra bonus!

Lets be honest though, would you like to spend hours just clicking on the screen? Probably not, and we wouldn't either! That is why this game gives you a very nice and valuable feature in which you can hire a manager to click for you! So instead of having the game open with a macro for clicking on your screen, you can just pay a "digital someone" to do that for you. Not only that, but once you hire a manager he will keep running your businesses even when you are offline! This way you can spend your time making real important decisions, like where to invest your profits! =)

To close the game loop we have a second currency called "Angel Investors." The more money you make the more angel investors you will get and the more angel investors you have the more money you will make. But in order to claim these wonderful angels you will have to start from the beginning. You will loose all your money and current business level, going all back to only 1 lemon stand. Do not worry, because this process is healthy and will make you go much, much further!

Despite it's simplicity and few mechanics, the game has nice art, a clear design and if you are the kind of person that enjoys figuring out optimal play, you will have hours of entertainment. Best of all, it is a free-to-play game, so you should try it, no strings attached! Who knows, maybe you can even get to found a space expedition and take your entrepreneurship to other rocks of the galaxy.

Final Score: 8 out of 10.

Transistor Review

Transistor is an isometric action RPG in which your goal is to revenge your friend's death by deleting The Camerata, a group of four people that cares about nothing but their own agenda. This game has a unique combat system that is guaranteed to keep you hooked with the many possibilities it presents.

The combat mechanic is essentially very simple, each enemy has their unique pattern and you have to bring their health down before they do the same with yours. What this game excels at is how you do this. You have four active skills at any given time, but you will have sixteen different functions (abilities) to choose from. On top of that, each active skill can have up to two upgrade slots, which means you can use two other functions to enhance the skill power and functionality. Some basic math will show you that each active skill has up to 240 combinations!! Don't worry, the numbers seem daunting, but in reality the system is very easy to understand once you start playing with it. You won't be able to use all that power and versatility until later in the game when you will already have a good understanding and practice experience with the system.

You also have four other passive slots, in which you can use your functions to give passive bonuses to your character. These bonuses might come very handy depending on your build or even your play-style.

Speaking of play-style, you have two major ways of fighting The Process (your enemies). You can either stop time and plan a limited amount of actions with the Turn() mechanic, which will make your active skills locked for a couple seconds but allows you to perform a set amount of pre-planned actions in hyper-speed, or you can specialize in real-time combat and use everything you have got at will. Still regarding play-style, there are some special "equipment" called Limiters. Once equipped they will provide you experience with boosts by giving your game a disadvantage. It could be something as simple as The Process doing double damage, or something very troublesome as reducing the memory you have available to install functions. The worse the disadvantage is, the more experience you will be given. One tip tough, you can replay the game as many times as you want and keep your progress through game plays. We do not recommend using all limiters in your first time around as this will make combat quite a challenge!

One last thing we would like to mention regarding the game mechanics is how it deals with failure. Once your character has it's life points depleted you will loose one of your installed functions by Overloading. Which means you will lose the access to that skill until you reach the next save point. If you have four functions installed you can "die" four times. Once you run out of functions you will have to load the last game saved.

Although the combat system is the most relevant mechanic in the game, there are many other little things that just add to the overall experience. On top of it all, Transistor has stunning art work and an outstanding soundtrack, as well designed as their mechanics, we highly recommend this title!

Final Score: 10 out of 10.

Grand Theft Auto V Online Review

This is a complementary review for GTA V due to the strong appeal of being able to play, for the very first time, this famous and long franchise with your friends! The online mode uses the same map from the single player, the weapons, cars and skills systems (except the special skills) also remains the same, but the online mode has some remarkable differences that makes it a very different experience.

In the online mode you will have the whole world map to hang out and wreck havoc with your friends: you can steal and sell most cars for money, you can rob convenience stores for some fast cash, you can kill other players and steal their money, or even join people in all kinds of customized instantiated matches such as team death match, wave survival, car race and heists (just to mention the most common ones). Also, thanks to Rockstar Content Creator, you will find some amazing fan made content that will provide you with many and many hours of additional game play. A quick search online will award you some very popular modes.

Unfortunately weapons are limited by your level (and cash), and despite been able to find the best cars in the streets, you won't be able to store or modify them until you make an actual honest purchase of the vehicle, which is also limited by how much cash you have. This is one of the biggest differences in how the money system has a strong presence in the online mode compared to the single player. But the system itself is not the issue, how it was balanced is what makes it quite disappointing. Everything you do will have

some sort of effect in your bank account. And believe us, it goes down way faster than it goes up! With the exception of heists, all matches reward you cash based on your level and how many players you defeated, which means that in the very beginning, when you need cash the most, it will be the hardest to make. We recommend going straight for the first heist, as it is fairly easy and can give you enough money to at least buy some weapons and a reasonable car (not super though).

Wandering around and just having fun in the world will take you financially nowhere in a reasonable time. Actually, this kind of play will involve a lot of ammunition, armor, repair and death tolls that will rapidly reduce your available cash while providing you with none in return. It feels like Rockstar did not want you to do these kind of things while being able to progress through the online experience. The only viable way to make enough money in order to afford the best items in the game is to complete heists repeatedly or to win matches against other players. If you can't consistently win matches, have no friends to play with, or if you are just having a bad connection, you can use our tested and approved solo-boring-semi-AFK-farm to make some cash in a private match by yourself. You can find it on the very end of this post, after the final score.

You will need to know this: The game takes an awful long time to load the map. That happens because the game is downloading a lot of information about all the players in the match, i.e. the more players in the map, the more it takes to load. This has serious implications when you are trying to get yourself into matchmaking, as any problem/alteration/disconnect will force you to load the main map again. This is extremely problematic in heists, as if someone leaves the match (either by quitting or disconnecting) all players will be forced to load the main map before being able to start a matchmaking from scratch. And that also means that all the time you just spent getting those people together will be lost. One way we found to avoid this intense loading (and time wasting) is to create a private online session, this way every time you get thrown out of a match you won't have to download other people's information and will be able to quickly join another matchmaking queue.

We definitely got disappointed with the fact that most game modes happen in a instantiated version of the map instead of being in the actual game lobby, that makes the online world feel like a hub where people are just hanging out before been matchmaked for a custom game. If you have a couple of friends to play with you will be able to reduce most of the down sides of GTA V online mode while fully enjoying the game as it was meant. Unfortunately that is not the reality for most people, but with some sacrifice, and hopefully by making some companions online, you will be able to enjoy the game more than staring at the loading screen.

Final Score (online only): 8 out of 10.

Tested and approved Solo-Boring-Semi-AFK-Farm:

First thing is to change your settings so no one will get in your match and ruin your farm.

Step 1) Go into the Menu > Online tab > settings > change Matchmaking to "Closed".

Now let's create our own match.

Step 2) Go into the Menu > Online tab > Job > Play Job > Rockstar Created > Races > select Criminal Records race.

Step 3) Change the number of laps to 2 and you are ready to start.

Feel free to change any other setting you'd like, this is a great opportunity to try the most different vehicles in the game.

Step 4) Once the race starts, make the 1 lap and stop just before completing the second, and final, lap. Just leave your character waiting (make sure you move every 4~5 min so you don't get kicked out for inactivity).

Step 5) Wait until your clock hits 08:00.00 minutes and then just complete the final lap.

Once the match ends hit the "Repplay" option and you'll go straight to step 3, except the laps will be already set to 2, so you will be good to go.

Pro tip: You can wander around the map and explore the world while you wait for the 8min gate, we recommend Criminal Records race because it takes no more than 1 min to complete both laps, which minimizes your driving time while still giving a decent profit. If you find a better race, please let us know and we will update and credit you for the findings.

Grand Theft Auto V Review

GTA V is a 3D open world action game in which your goal is to make the one big criminal master hit... Or just screw around in this virtual world. What makes GTA franchise unique is that Rockstar give you an endless array of scenarios and opportunities to act upon, from fancy weapons to super sport cars, you can always find something to have fun with.

In this review we will focus entirely on the single player mode, but considering the huge appeal of playing such game in an online environment, we will be making a second, complementary, review focused on the online experience and how it differs from the single player.

Lets start by the basics, weapon system! You will have an enormous arsenal to lay waste on those who oppose your intentions. Knives, pistols, sub-machine guns, assault rifles, snipers, shotguns, grenades, mines... What about a machine gun? Fan of the old explosive bazuca? And you wont have to ever worry about carrying too much. As a hero(?) you will carry all weapons with a very considerable amount of ammunition at all times! That is what we call a true driving force. On top of that you will also be able to customize your weapons with gadgets and upgrades, like silencer, extended magazines, scopes, dyes, etc. You also don't need to waste your time trying to figure out what is the best weapon for a job, with a simple status bar you will be able to see every weapon attribute and chose what best suits your needs right there.

Vehicles! In GTA V vehicles are much more than just motorcycles and cars! You will have access to helicopters, airplanes, tanks, boats and the cool old bicycle. Each one is a "family", and the best cars are in the "Super" category, allowing for easy sorting. Any car you have can be further customized with a pretty much endless array of options in the nearest mechanic, wheels, spoilers, lights, neon, color, engine, just to mention a few... Some cars even have special features only available to them! The car system is pretty much a world in itself that you can enjoy many hours on, and if you are not into it, just get a "super car" and live the dream, baby!

Other mechanics include a phone! No, really, you have a smart phone in game to spend some time on! It has its own internet (with a lot of crap, funny and interesting stuff), camera (you CAN take selfies in game!), friends to call and hang out with. You have two stock market investing system, one affected by (or said to be) in game actions and the second by Rockstar, don't expect anything robust, but it is a nice feature to play with. Unfortunately we were not able to measure player impact in such markets, maybe it end up not been significant at all. Please let us know if you have devised a way of making millions by laying chaos and destruction (or any other mean).

Another very interesting mechanic in this game is the characters skills and special skills. They give a sense of improvement and "over power mode" without feeling like a chore to play the game. The more you run, shoot, punch people, etc, the more you will increase the skill (up to the limit), and the better you skill the better you perform at the specific task. For example, with a higher flying skill the more control of the aircraft we will have and the easier it will be to perform stunts. And how do we get better at it? Just fly around! Don't look at it with bad eyes, you do not have to have a high skill to perform something efficiently. Having a high shooting skill wont make a difference if you can't hit your target in the first place, the same is valid for controlling a car in high speed, if you are an experienced driver you can expect to have full control of your vehicle even with minimal in game skill. We like to look at this system as a nice measure for how much time we spend in each activity... As you can see, we have not done much more than driving with Franklin. Which reminds us of special skills! You will be able to slow down time while driving, on foot and - our favorite - go into a rampage mode, where you get increased damage, a massive damage reduction, and a crazy looking screen effect! Franklin have the driving skill, hence our preference to use him as designated driver.

On top of all that you can find plenty of side quests, real estate to buy and profit from, mini-games to play (like a shooting range, yoga class, tennis, golf), radio to listen (with a drag-and-drop customized music/radio if you'd like) and a plethora of challenges (car races, parachuting, deliveries, target assassinations, among others). You can also replay any previous mission without having to play all the game over. Despite the characters always been digging a way of making money, money itself doesn't play much in the single player experience. Yes, you can buy many things with it, but most of those things can be acquired (and kept) by other means. And that is consolidated by the fact that your main infinite income loop, as a player, is from real state you buy and perform missions to, or the stock market investments that you make, while getting some huge bonuses from missions. That is a different story in the online version and we will cover that when the time comes.
The game world is enormous with some really nice landmarks to enjoy, just like real life you will have a GPS to guide you through the winding streets of Los Santos and, just like real life, not always through the best path. A good final touch to the immersion is that your character will struck random dialogues with NPC's all around, which helps to give that livid feeling that you are actually part of the world.

Overall GTA V have a great plot, great experience, the more robust your computer the more realistic the graphics will look, the more people will be on the streets, the more cars will be around, but you don't need any of that to enjoy the game. And this game can provide you with many, many hours of entertainment.

Final score: 10 out of 10.

Rogue Legacy Review

Rogue Legacy is 2D plataformer in the style of Castlevania and Metroid Prime. Your goal is to cure the king from an illness and, hopefully, heir the throne. What makes this game unique is that you don't play as one character, but as a family, generation after generation and every child have their own traits and skills. Once a new child take arms and goes into the castle, the castle is randomly generated (also know as procedurally generated). Yes, sounds weird, but do not worry, we will explain how this work in more details.

Once the game starts you are "just" a knight and there you go into the castle that holds the cure for your king. Killing creatures and destroying objects gives you gold that can be used to buy equipment (sword, chest armor, boots, cape, helm and gloves), buy runes (every equipment have 1 rune slot) and to build your Manor. The more you spend in construction, the bigger your family manor, and more powerful your linage is: stronger skills, more HP, mana, damage, lesser cool downs, etc. This is the main loop of the game, kill creatures, get gold, get more powerful, repeat.

The moment you die, your character goes into history and you have to choose between 3 of your current children to keep your legacy. Each character is unique, having very creative and interesting traits, as being colorblind, dwarf, giant, old, fast, afraid of chickens (our favorite), etc. Other than your standard sword, each character will have a class, wizard, paladin, miner, among many others that you will open as you invest enough in your manor, each one have a skill that might be just what you are looking for.

Every creature has a defined pattern that you can learn and explore to improve your fighting techniques, and as you go deep into the castle, the more numerous, diverse and strong this creatures will get, and the more difficult and crazy their pattern will be. If you come to defeat the final boss you will be given a New Game +, where you will receive bonus to gold drops and harder creatures. This can go on as much as you like, but be warned, once you defeat the final boss there is NO way back! (Yes, New Game +50 exists, you can find it on youtube!)

In that regard we considered the combat system to have a risk vs reward balance a little bit off. Even when you reach the maximum manor construction, have the best equipment and the most overpowered class, the creatures will scale much, much further than you. If you risk killing the majority of them you will be receiving tremendous, if not fatal, amounts of damage, and the castle is very scarce in recovery items. After a certain point, killing the regular creatures provide a tinny reward compared to how hard can be to tackle the challenge. The game DOES have an infinite power buff that you can farm, but such buff does NOT scale with the New Game + version, meaning that a +5 HP in New Game +1 might worth a lot if a creature gives you 30 dmg, but not when they do 500!

This leads to the "end game" effect you can find in the higher levels of New Game + difficulties: only a couple of builds are viable and the player just rush for bosses, leaving behind all the creative alternatives, as they become tremendously underpowered. We believe that this could be solved by either scaling the equipment and permanent bonuses with the New Game + version, which would allow players that are not up to such challenge to have a little bit of room to make mistakes or allowing the player to re-visit any level of New Game +, where he would be allowed to feel powerful and work their way to increased status without having to constantly die.

Overall Rogue Legacy is a very entertaining game that can provide you with many hours of fun, with nice art and music (we really liked the music!). The game also provides some "easter eggs" we found to be very entertaining and enlightening, as they tell a little bit of the history about the developers and the studio. Last but not least, we also praise the creative approach to which the developers took, in order to keep the continuity of the story telling, adapting player failure to an adventure of great proportions.

Final Score: 9 out of 10.

Alan Wake Review

Alan Wake is a third person action shooter game with a little bit of horror story where your wife is taken by the shadows and your goal is to save her from darkness. The unique mechanic in this game is a very interesting approach to light/darkness contrast, in the possession of a flashlight you have to break your enemies "shadow shields" with the focus of your beam before being able to injure them with regular guns, which can make some very intense battles when you are very outnumbered. Unfortunately the light/darkness mechanic doesn't go too far from there, which we consider a waste, making the game pretty much the same thing from the first 30 minutes to the very end.

Considering you are a puny human that can not withstand more than a couple of hits, you have to rely on a cinematographic dodge to escape imminent blows, as well as a very familiar arsenal that you come across to ditch out damage if you so choose.

The game itself is very linear, made in a way to resemble a TV series with different episodes break down, the music and the plot are very good and definitely worth a mention.

Final Score: 7 out of 10.

New Game: Mekanical Eye!

Hi!

This is the very first post of Mekanical Eye, a blog dedicated to reviewing single-player PC games, both triple A and Indie developed. We strive to bring a fair review without pouring too much of our own thoughts, as to prevent the most bias as possible. Our focus will be on the game mechanics and we will never, ever, make a review without having played a game to very end, thus insuring that we fully understand how each mechanic add to the game experience. At this moment we will be making one review per month at the bare minimum, which means that there will be months with two, three or maybe even more reviews, but you will never go more than a month without a new game review. We will also defeat as many words as possible to keep the reviews short and filled with loot for you, our playe... readers!
As you join us in this adventure, let us take this opportunity to tell you a little bit about the core inside the Mekanical Eye:

My name is Diego "Wolf Fivousix" and I have been into games my whole life, I am a self taught programmer and avid hardcore player (hardcore as in play a lot, not as in hardcore games). Some of my favorite games are Guild Wars, Borderlands, TES: Skyrim, Ultima Online, Portal, and Bioshock. I am also a big fan of chocolate and will gladly accept any if you have to spare. Enough about me, back to Eye.

We are also setting up a Mekanical Eye pubilc Steam Group, where you will be able to read all the reviews and have a better environment to discuss with other members of the community if you so desire. The following months will bring a lot of changes to both the blog and the steam group, as we design the appropriate layout and images. We would like to finish with our motto which we believe consolidates very well our essence:

We believe that a game greatest potential lies on the experience it has to provide, and in order to truly understand the experience we have to go through it, from the beginning to the end, and only then we can fairly review how the different mechanics come together to make this amazing art a reality.

by Mekanical Eye

Thank you for your time and welcome to Mekanical Eye!