Recent reviews by DJ Paradroid

Only Prey could have taken the pedigree of watershed games, thrown them into the Recycler, and ended up with a handful of balls.

Unfortunately I cannot forgive the game.

While it's charming and does a lot RIGHT as far as a Rogue-ish survival goes it works well.
Where it fails is somewhere simple. If RNJesus decides you've visited places in the wrong order you CAN NOT FINISH THE GAME.

This happened to me while I was streaming their game and saying how much I enjoyed it.
This is a known bug.

So if they refuse to fix a game-breaking issue then their game is not worth supporting, regardless of how well it shines otherwise.
Sorry, Toge.

So there's a lot of people tearing Fallout 4 to shreds, and many have legitimate grievances but hear me out.

When you strip away the dialogue and the bugs and the empty promises, at its core, this is still a Fallout game. The focus is the world and setting - exploring varous wastelands and getting a sense of tone. People complain about the characters being weak and poorly written, but I've personally only ever cared about the character that is "The World of Fallout". And while the main storyline may not be as catchy as the previous two games, it has meant that I was much less likely to power through the game and complete it in under six hours and enjoy the post-apocalyptic scenery.

So is this game for you? Perhaps not. It's very easy to hate. It's that cool new car but it turns out it only turns left and there's no auxillary input. It's that new puppy at Christmas but all it does is eat your power cables and piss in your cereal. But beyond that, it's still Fallout. Perhaps the community will patch the dialogue, the performance woes, the crafting, the settlements, the COD-like gunplay and all their other problems with it and make this turd shine.

I'll be out in the wasteland trying to find an alien ship or those elusive X-01 legs I'm missing. You don't have to be an idiot to enjoy the game.

It might help though.

There's a fine art to developing a game that can illicit feelings of real rage towards your nearest and dearest friends and ChargeShot has managed to distill it its most potent form. The only regret we had after playing was that there weren't another two people present to push it to new levels of psychological torture.

ChargeShot hits all the right buttons and is an easy inclusion into any list of 'games to set up at house parties'. Simple to pick up and nigh impossible to master.

Almost perfect game for a long-time South Park fan.

The quick-fix censorship they slapped on the game to be allowed classification locally completely ruins the pacing at the start of the end of the first act. Handled with a little more artistry the same effect could have been done without denying us the experience. It's niggling, but it just corrupted the flow of a solid game.

I hope they go back to it and give us a more polished censored version.

Eh. It took half an hour and while it had cute moments, I certainly can't justify calling it either an adventure or a game. This is to a short film festival what a game is to a feature presentation.

Probably not worth the megs.

There's a pretty severe proviso on this game.

You may need to spend a smidge money. Not to buy cards, but to buy card slots. You can win a lot of the in-game currency, and once your decks are strong enough you can get more. Events allow you access to even more, but if you don't have enough slots you can't capitalise on the randomness of the card drops. They've set a week's lifetime on any card drop before it decays, so if you're willing to lose cards while you farm the currency then don't spend a cent.

It's not a bad game by any means, but it takes a lot to get off the ground and start winning successively and consecutively. If you're a bit timerich and waiting on some new releases not the worst thing you could play. But don't spend more than $20 on it.

Risk of Rain just managed to squeeze in this year in my G(s)OTY2014s. Each play is a pressure-filled rogue-like romp where every second and every decision may be what finally undoes your run. As the difficulty ramps up you must decide whether to spend more time chancing the RNG to get the gear required to continue or push through until you finally reach the end. It's like Binding of Isaac if someone had a gun to your head and kept removing keyboard keys as you play.

With ten classes and three difficulties it has plenty of legs and is just hard enough. You may walk away from it but you'll keep coming back if rogue-likes are your thing. It suffers slightly from Unlock Syndrome, but it's very completable.

Certainly one of the best Indie titles this year. And there's been a lot of them.

Too many.

Roguelike. Space. The platform any Star Trek game should have been built on.

I would buy FTL again if it led to another title pretty much identical to FTL.