Metal Gear Cry: Sigma ... I mean Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

A brief on how this game is: First I want you to find someone you know, hug them ... feels good doesn't it? Now they have to kick you in the groin for a good 10 minutes every hour roughly. That's the difficulty scale in this game. It goes from the easy to kill standard cyborgs to three gekkos, two armored cyborgs with RPG's and a heavily armored soldier with a power hammer. That's just on Normal. If you find this challenging you can always gear it down to easy, which the difficulty scale is between cutting butter with a hot knife to cutting a cake. This doesn't make it a bad game necessarily.

When you think of the Metal Gear series what do you think about? How Hideo Kojima can vomit on a page and turn it into some sort of semi-coherent game that almost everyone loves? David Hayter? Plot twists crazier than a M. Knight Shamalon movie? Repressed memories and anti-war pro technology undertones? Well you can throw most of that out the window because Kojima pretty much threw a concept at Platinum Games and he was there just to make sure the story was intact.

Again, all of this does not make this a bad game, it's just the black sheep of the Metal Gear series. The plot is very tame and doesn't have any twists. However, this story does delve into the psyche of Raiden. If you don't like Raiden then I can't really help you with this game, but you can play it with Raiden wearing a Mariachi outfit!

So with the plot and odd difficulty curve out of the way, lets actually get into the gameplay. If you'd played Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden you will feel right at home. This is the epidemy of ball-grinding run around and either wreck shit or get your ass handed to you. The upside is, the amount of damage you take doesn't effect your score, unless you take none ... then you get a bonus. I found this game to be very fun and in several occasions pretty intense, which is a rare for me.

The only problem I have with it are the QTE's (Quick Time Events). They are what get you into a mode where you can destroy their armor and cut them to pieces and in many occasions kill bosses or sub-bosses. In several occasions you can just attack them and skip the QTE's but int he dire moments you NEED to so the QTE's. And if you fail and you don't have a health upgrade or a heal it will straight up kill you. In some cases that doesn't matter, your still straight up dead. And the final boss had a part where you have to cut up something he throws at you and the cuts have to be exact which is a pain in the dick. The last gripe I have about the game is its parry system.

There isn't a block button, you need to stop attacking, press the attack button and the direction of the attack simultaneously. If you were in the middle of an attack then you can't block or run away or even cancel the attack, and you are getting something in your face. If its a boss, there is a good chance that you are getting dead ... and don't even get me started on the second boss that can throw his body parts at you.

Oh and one more thing. In case you can't tell the enemy is about to attack, there is a glowing visual queue and there are two of those. The red kind you can block or try to stop with a power attack. then there is the yellow kind that you can either run away from or try to do a power attack to stop, but if you try to stop it and fail, you are getting wrecked.

Besides the QTE's, which shouldn't even exist anymore, these battle mechanics are bad, in fact they add to the difficulty ... except the fact that you can't block or cancel in the middle of an attack. I found the fighting can be seamless and the fighting can easily go from one attack to another, unless you get stuck in a yellow move. This game is really fun once you understand how the enemies attack and you get your bearings.

Now with all that out of the way, the story is short. Like really short. I beat the story mode on Normal in 7 hours. Granted there was like 4 hours of just me dying and 2 hours of that specific cut thing on the final boss. However there is quite a bit of replay value in it. There are certain officers arms you need to cut off, hidden MIB's (Men In Boxes), Data tags you need to find, completing the games in certain ways to get titles, finding/completing and gold staring VR missions and upgrading all of your weapons and stats.

If you're playing this game for the story, like you would do with most Metal Gear games, then this is a rent. If your playing this game for the sake of unlocking everything, like I do with all of them, then this game is for you.

This hair tearing, ball grinding, masochistic, murder mayhem game is definitely worth the play. It's fighting mechanics can take awhile to get to, the story is interesting but not as corkscrewed as others, the QTE's are a pain in the ass and the story mode is short but has many hidden things. All in all I really enjoyed this game.

FTL: Faster Than Light

FTL or Faster Than Light, is another indie game on steam. Currently on sale for 4.99 from the original 9.99. FLT is the first game that Subset games has put up on Steam. If you haven't heard of Subset games before that's because they just started out with FTL as their flagship game. However the brains behind this game Mathew Davis and Justin Ma where some of the key designers behind Bioshock Two. (May not have been a good game, but looked beautiful)

 FTL is about a ship captain, his ship and his crew in their attempt to escape the Rebels and to try to take down the flagship of the Rebels to defend the Federation. The game play is very simple, once you understand what you are doing. First you pick the ship you want to play, originally you only get one. Next you pick which layout of the ship you want, originally you only get one. Now after this you are placed into a randomly generated part of the universe, which is split into several different systems. In these systems are randomly placed Mass Relays that have random occurrence in them. These random occurrences can be anything from absolutely nothing, to a trader, to a battle.

Now if you don't know what a Mass Relay is, you obviously haven't played Mass Effect and you therefore live in a cave somewhere in the Middle East ... hello Al Qaeda, a Mass Relay is a station, generally near a planet of a colony, that can be connected to any other Mass Relay that allows a ship to accurately move from location to location using their Faster Then Light engine, you know hyper drive or what ever old science fiction movies called it.

Now in doing certain things you can unlock other ship, achievements and other layouts for the ships. These ships each have something special that is different from the original ship. Now during the actual game you can fight other ships or try to help other ships to get some scrap metal. This scrap metal is used to  upgrade your ship or buy attachments or modifications for your ship. These mods and upgrades get wiped when you die or start over but if you can stay alive long enough you can get some pretty cool mods, like an arm that helps you get more scrap.

Now this may seem like a lot, but once you get into it, it is a very simple game with much to do. It's worth is sale price and definitely worth its original price. So if you got the money and a few minutes to a few hours to burn this game is fun and worth your time.

Don't Starve (Open Beta 2012 Finished Product 2013) Klei Entertainment

This game is currently in open beta and on sale in the Chrome market and on Steam. Get it. Seriously ... right now ... get it ... I'll wait.

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Did you get it? Good.

Now Don't Starve is a sort of mix between Minecraft, Tim Buton and Bear Grylls. That is literally the best way to describe this game and if you aren't intrigued then you are doing life wrong. Anyway, neutral perspective and all that stuff.

Lets try this again. Don't Starve is what would happen if Tim Burton made Minecraft and Bear Grylls was his reason for making the game. Since the game is in Open Beta there is still much that needs to be done to the game, so this is more of a review of what has happened. Once the game is released I will do another short review.

When you start out you play as a character named "Wilson" who has found himself in a strange place he doesn't know and needs to survive. Currently there are 3 meters and a dial you need to worry about. The three meters are Hunger, which if you reach to zero you starve to death ... surprisingly, Health, which again if this reaches zero you die, and finally Sanity, when this reaches to a certain point you start to see things that aren't there and certain neutral monsters turn into nightmare creatures, once it reaches to another point they are no long neutral and you start seeing more things that aren't there. The dial represents what day it is, what world you are made it to and what time it is.

Now that you know what each of these metes and the dial do, none of this is mentioned in the game you need to either find this out in the game or at the games website ... or I suppose here, you can play the game and not die ... or starve. After you have your bearings you need to get your supplies like twigs, grass, loose stone, flint and berries. Then you make your axe and pickaxe to get wood logs and more stones, possibly gold. From there you make a science machine and be able to make more things. From there its just looking through the things you can make and try to make a plan and build them.

Now where this game differs from Minecraft is its almost nothing like Minecraft, however this game is one of the only games even similar to it. You need to mine things to build things and survive. However in Minecraft you build to survive in Don't Starve you need to survive a few days before you can even come close to building a base. The base values of the two are the only common parallels, after that Don't Starve is a unique game with an interesting art style.

Surviving for a certain number of days gives you xp, you receive this xp after you die or find your way into the new world. As of right now, xp only gives you new characters. Most of these characters have interesting and unique powers. (One of these is the amazing power to have no power!) These characters can change how you play the game and how you prioritize your survival.

Is that everything? I think I covered everything ... who knows (WARNING: EDITS EMINENT)

In Conclusion: Trying not to sound biased at all but, this game is very much worth your time if you want a very challenging build/survival game. As its currently only in beta its on sale and if you buy it on steam you get a gift copy. So remember when playing: Don't Starve, Don't Die, Don't Go Crazy and Don't Be Afraid of the Dark ... just kidding, be afraid of the dark ... be very afraid of the dark.

EDIT: The ability to make your own mods and more easily add other peoples mods has been implemented. The ability to have multi-player is not in the foreseen future by the devs, but several attempts have been made by the modding community to have a good multiplayer mod. Keep your eyes peeled.