Another Batch

I played some more games from my SteamGifts backlog:

Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box
Why is it that most racing games made after the early 00’s have crap controls? There’s a lot I enjoyed about Burnout Paradise, like the tracks, the game modes and the music, but I feel like it’s all offset by the lackluster controls. Similar to other racing games where drift is a significant part of the gameplay, cars in Burnout Paradise feel like they’re gliding on the road, not driving on it.

Audiosurf
I wish Audiosurf had less of an emphasis on avoiding blocks, as I find that mechanic distracts from the rhythm in a lot of songs. Another downside is the game plays local files only, you can’t stream from Spotify/Soundcloud/whatever, which is how I usually listen to music nowadays, but luckily I still had some local music to play, and I had quite a bit of fun with Audiosurf.

Poker Night at the Inventory
Da, iz gud game.

Over The Hills And Far Away
A short and sweet visual novel set during the American War of Independence.

Shan Gui
Ignoring the real-life drama around it, I really enjoyed Shan Gui, and it was the perfect game to cheer me up after the previous visual novel I played.

Wall of Shame

These are games I didn’t play much of, either because I’ve gotten sick of them or for other reasons:

Numba Deluxe
I was hoping for this to be a math game, but it’s actually just a simple puzzle game where you arrange numbers in various sequences.

Takedown: Red Sabre
A generic Rainbow Six clone.

Insurgency
The game would drop the fps to unplayable levels shortly after loading a map. I’ve searched about the issue online, but haven’t found a solution.

Killing Floor
The worst game on this list, by far. People used to rave about Killing Floor, often comparing it to Left 4 Dead, and I don’t know what those people were smoking, but I think even having the two titles in the same sentence is absurd. It looks terrible, there’s a bug that turns the audio into 8-bit chiptunes, and the levels and enemies are a messy hodge podge devoid of coherence or creativity.

And with that, there’s only one game left to play from my SteamGifts backlog: Guns of Icarus Online. I don’t even know if the game still has a playerbase. Maybe others have it in their backlog as well? One way or another, I’m getting my Steam trading cards..