July report

Hello Assassins!

Beaten

• Broken Sword 5 - the Serpent's Curse
  

  9 hours playtime

  35 of 35 achievements

• GemCraft - Chasing Shadows
  

  67 hours playtime

  418 of 419 achievements

• CONSORTIUM
  

  20 hours playtime

  39 of 39 achievements

• Alan Wake's American Nightmare
  

  9 hours playtime

  12 of 12 achievements

• Headlander
  

  12 hours playtime

  31 of 31 achievements

• Quantum Conundrum
  

  11 hours playtime

  14 of 25 achievements

• Stronghold Crusader 2
  

  46 hours playtime

  45 of 81 achievements

• Jotun
  

  13 hours playtime

  33 of 36 achievements

• System Shock 2
  

  18 hours playtime

  no achievements

Broken Sword 5 - the Serpent’s Curse: pretty good point & click, everything is on point. I haven’t played other Broken Sword games but that did not stop me from enjoying this one.
GemCraft - Chasing Shadows: really great Tower Defense game. There are 9 gem types with different abilities that you can mix together and put on towers or traps. You can adjust difficulty to your liking and on many maps you can draw your own maze. The only bad thing here, is that at about half of the game you can start using strategy that will allow you to beat the game easily. And that it lags horribly when there are a couple thousand monsters on the screen.
CONSORTIUM: interesting game with pretty ok sci-fi story and a bit of 4th wall breaking. Tons of dialog options, though I think that most of your choices will just change how the characters speak with you, without impacting the story significantly. This also causes that getting all achievements is really painful, especially that you cannot skip dialogs. Single playthrough takes about 4-5 hours, apparently this is a first part of trilogy so it ends with a cliffhanger.
Alan Wake’s American Nightmare: not as good as the original, I think it is a bit worse than DLCs for Alan Wake but still it is quite good. There is more focus on killing the Taken in this title so there is a lot of gun types and tons of ammo everywhere.
Headlander: alright metroidvania with a bit of humor.
Quantum Conundrum: really fun puzzle game with a lot of humor and cartoonish art style. Unfortunately there are achievements for beating rooms in a given time which I hate…
Stronghold Crusader 2*: similar gameplay to original Stronghold Crusader with some improvements (like automatic buying/selling goods) but also some things are definitely worse (you cannot zoom out to see bigger part of map; no moats), some annoying bugs (like soldiers stuck in walls) and DLCs that seem pretty expensive for what they provide.
Jotun: I did not expect much but artwork is really nice, music is great and dialogs in Norwegian (I think) create really great atmosphere. About 5-6 hours for playthrough, and it is not very difficult, but achievements are quite challenging and Valhalla mode seem to be really hard.
System Shock 2*: awesome game and huge improvement from first System Shock. Graphics are a bit dated but the gameplay is really fun (for reference, Bioshock gameplay is basically a dumbed down version of System Shock). The last two fights where a bit of a letdown but overall I do recommend to play this classic.

* - SG win

Current status

Won on SG status