Diehard Dungeon - Game Review - Rogue-like 6/10

     You enter a small hallway with a chest in the center of the room. You open the chest to find you have zero to three slot machine rolls which dictates what extra skills you may have when going in to the dungeon just beyond the door at the end of the hall. You approach the door and notice you seem to have a pet chest following you; picking up anything of value for you nearby. Determined to escape with your life, you enter the Diehard Dungeon.

     I've been meaning to review this game for some time now; I've been putting it off because I've wanted to complete all the achievements. Unfortunately, some of the achievements require a lot of grinding and good luck to get certain combinations of things in a level to even allow you to progress on these grinding achievements. Now, achievements don't make or break a game. They just provide goals to give reasons to play a game again and again even if the game isn't actually very good.

     Diehard Dungeon isn't a TERRIBLE game; it's good. Just... good. I don't find it to be a great game. I think part of that is because I'm a mouse-and-keyboard type of gamer and the controls seem to be a little better suited for a controller. So the controls seem to be a little bit clunky to me, but they're still workable. You're bound to have difficulties early on until you get the hang of things and then for the most part, you should be able to avoid everything and win nearly every time... depending on the items you get. At no point are you guaranteed to get an item. Every time to find a chest, you may get up to three rolls, or you may get zero. Once you find out how many rolls you get, it becomes like a jackpot machine. You have to match three of the same picture to get an item, but there's no skill to it at all; you get whatever the roll decides to give you. Then there are tokens that you randomly get throughout the game either by winning or picking up hearts when at full health, or by randomly being dropped during battle with the enemies.

     You have two options for combat; you may swing your sword which can be charged up for a circular attack, or you may shoot your gun which knocks enemies back, then explodes with another knock-back. The combat works, though in my opinion it can be a little dry. There are times when using your sword is obviously better, but using your gun is so much safer in nearly every situation so long as you're able to dodge properly. There are some traps on each floor which you have to avoid which are either pressure plates that shoot arrows or javelins at you, or spinning blades that randomly roam around the room (which sometimes also shoot arrows at you).

     This game isn't bad. I just don't think it's great. The achievements kept me playing longer than I had wanted to because I was determined to complete them all, but now I've lost interest and think it's time to move on. If you like rogue-like games, this one may interest you, but for me this game will be getting 6/10 for rogue-like games.

Have a great day everybody! ^_^

~ Kyle Welykholowa

=== PC Game Review -- Hero of the Kingdom - Point and Click Puzzle - 10/10 ===

     Hero of the Kingdom is a casual point and click indie game for $7 on Steam. For a dollar per hour value, it lasted a little over seven hours which is right where I think a game should be priced. I don't play a lot of point and click games, so I took a chance on this one and was pleasantly surprised.

     This is one of my favourite types of art-styles to look at, so I thought this game was absolutely beautiful the whole way through. The music was enjoyable to listen to all throughout. The gameplay was simple and crisp. You get energy by resting, then use that energy as a resource to complete other tasks.

     One of my favourite parts of this game was as it introduced new things to you through tasks, you would be able to go back through previous areas and find things such as mushrooms or boxes hidden in the scenes. It was really quite fun to look through everything and complete the achievements, read the story, and play through this sweet little game.

     To anybody who enjoys a nice casual game, or a rest from their competitive games for a while, I definitely recommend this game. As usual, if you can get this on sale, it's even more worth the price.

     For me, this point and click game is a 10/10.

~ Kyle

Banished - Game Review - 7/10

     This game, I have put so many hours into. Partly because I'm a perfectionist and I don't like to leave a game without 100% of the achievements finished, but also because this game is a nice city-builder.

     My first instinct is to call it "casual". I'm not actually sure if that's accurate or not. I mean, you aren't really playing against anything besides the elements, and basic human survival. The goal of the game is to make a settlement/village/town/city/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. You don't have to worry about being attacked by anything besides tornadoes and fires. It's just you and your people. As long as you make sure they have enough food and supplies, they're good to go.

     So in terms of a city-builder, this is a really fun game. Even though you don't have to play "against" anything, and don't have any specific goal besides making a city and keeping your people alive... this game captures enough attention to keep me playing it even when there's only one achievement left to get... that takes FOREVER I might add.

     The only thing about this game I can REALLY harp on is the fact that it slows down a ton as your population increases. I assume it's a problem with having to render/calculate every one of the sprites in the game. Figuring out what each and every one of them have to do, because they all have their own lives. I would imagine the more powerful your computer, the better the game would run at higher populations. Now, I have a pretty beefy machine... and my game starts to crap out around 200 population. I've searched for fixes for this kind of thing and unfortunately haven't really come across anything. I'm pretty sure it's just the way the game is made/encoded.

     Now, saying that. I do highly recommend this game. I have found it very interesting to learn how to take care of my people. If you're into tackling achievements, then that's what really makes this game worth it's money is the time you have to take to figure out how to get those elusive achievements.



     I'm going to give this game 7/10 for a city-builder. I haven't played many of them, but this one caught my eye. It could be better, but it's not bad at all.

~ Kyle