We’ll start with what is Avernum about. In Avernum you play a group of 4 characters that you create at the beginning of the game. For whatever unknown reason they like many before them have been thrown into a portal to Avernum a cavernous world separated from the surface world. Whatever sins or possibly wrong person you POed you are now stuck in an underground world with no way out in sight. Welcome to Avernum a world of the unwanted. People have been being thrown down here for a long time and have established there own system of survival and your characters must set out to find their place in this new world or maybe a way out.

So that is the gist of the story. You’ll talk to different people get quests and information to lead you farther into Avernum and the secrets that have been left behind. Although the story and the way it works differs greatly from Avadon and most RPGs these days. First since you create your team of 4 from different types or you can even select a custom type to create a team exactly the way you want it. You can chose how they look what their names are and what skills and traits they have. The downside to this is that your characters really have no history or importance individually. You won’t hear anything interesting from them or have any story lines that focus on any individual member of your team. It really is all about your team as a whole.

The game offers you the freedom to attack anyone you would like to. So if you want to attempt to go on a spree you can, although this won’t benefit you in anyway that I can tell. Although it is a good way to get killed pretty quickly as the towns guards come to take you out pretty fast. So give it a shot if you’re daring or just follow the quests and explore the surroundings. Like most RPGs, you will have your kill em all quests, as well as your numerous fetch quests. So many fetch quests you may even feel like stabbing the guy who wants you to fetch some very lame set of objects that may take forever to find on the expansive map. Although unlike Avadon in Avernum pretty much everyone is friendly which is a little strange figuring that these are the people kicked out of the surface world for whatever reason. Prison makes strange bedfellows I guess and Avernum is in a way a very large prison, that offers more freedom than the surface world albeit with a higher mortality rate.

As far as gameplay goes, point and click is the key to it. Much like Avadon in this way, I never really used the keyboard for much of anything. You just point and click then your character moves to that location on the map or if in battle they move as close to there as possible. Selecting spells is easy even if you don’t put them on the quick bar at the bottom. It is just a click on the spell type priest or mage and select the spell you want then click the target. If your character is too far away they will move closer to get the shot off. While there are warrior skills you can learn as well that allow you to deal more damage in a single attack they all have a recoup time denoted by fatigue. Overall the games battle mechanics are simple, straight forward and fairly easy to grasp. All battles are played out where the floor is like a grid of squares that you and your enemies maneuver to gain line of sight or get next to them to pummel them with your weapon.

Leveling is easy to grasp as well, yet can be a bit hard to determine the best route to go with your characters. The first part of leveling is picking which attribute to add a point to; strength, dexterity, intelligence, and endurance. These attributes are all pretty straight forward. Next you will get 2 points to add to your skills, whether it is archery, mage skills or lock picking or any of the  other numerous choices. This is the part that choosing your route becomes very important. How much tool use/lockpick skill do you need in the group or are you going to find a book that requires more points in arcane lore than you already have?  I found myself many a times lacking the skill levels necessary to do what I wanted at the time I found something. Requiring me to go get experience to level up and go back to the object I couldn’t open or use at a later time. The last part of leveling is every two levels you get the chance to choose a new trait to add to your character. These traits seem dependent on both your attributes and skills you have chosen. This is what can give your mage that extra oomph from your warrior you decided to turn into a swordmage. Yep, that is also a trait and I’ll say I was happy to see it.

The things I found lacking was that objects on the ground are very often hard to see. This can make some fetch quests a royal pain. You end up taking a few steps only to check the ground again finding nothing or a rock. The music isn’t bad, but it isn’t grand either. It just sort of blends away and is quite forgettable. The last thing is that your characters have no stories, you don’t get to pick one or give them one in game they simply are and they stay together simply because they came through the portal together. There is no interaction with them and I couldn’t help but feel like they as a whole might as well be just one hero. The last thing I wasn’t to fond of was the reputation system it goes up from completing quests and it helps to open up more quests and get people to talk to you who would otherwise be uninterested in your arrival. While it is an interesting mechanic the encourages you to do the quests it also makes you feel a little constrained into doing things like the fetch quests and other things just to build your reputation.

So while Avernum is very open world with a large map to explore and a myriad of quests to take, I miss the deeper intrigue you get from other RPGs. While the game is nice and has a very retro feel to it storytelling wise it just didn’t grip me the same way as other RPGs. It does offer a lot of character build choices and plenty of locations to explore, but I could only give it a 3 out of 5. It is a solid game and has more plus than minus when it comes down to it. If you love RPGs and TRPGs give this game a shot if not you will probably be bored pretty quickly.

Hey All, back in May 2011 I reviewed Armada 2526 and it’s Expansion Supernova. Now Armada 2526 and it’s expansion have been bundled together in a nice gold edition and guess what. Thanks to the wonderful folks at Iceberg Interactive, I have 2 boxed copies of the recently released Armada 2526 Gold Edition to give away.

Now this great 4x game with realtime battles is worth the interest of any 4x player or space game lover. So go read my review, then come back and follow these simple directions for your chance at winning a copy of this great game.

To enter the random giveaway you must do the following things

1.  Follow DarkstarMatryx on Twitter
2.  Tweet “@DarkstarMatryx @Iceberg_Int #PCGames I want to win Armada 2526 Gold Ed  http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=516″
3.  Post this tweet on Friday or Saturday March 23rd-24th 2012 CST.
4.  Only one entry per person.

Two winners will be randomly selected from those who enter.  I will contact the winners via Twitter private messages for details on where to mail the product.

THIS GIVEAWAY HAS ENDED.  I WANT TO THANK ALL THAT PARTICIPATED.

Let’s start with the good. It is a 16bit styled RPG that unlike the other two games by Aldorlea Games that I reviewed, “Sylia” and “Dreamscape“. This game focuses more on the traditional and serious aspects of Fantasy RPGs. Don’t get me wrong there is humor in the game, just not to the degree that the other 2 games had. During battles your characters aren’t visible as the enemy stands in front of you. Battles are turn based, you set your team’s attacks and when you’ve set the last characters attacks they will perform them based on their speed while the enemies attack will occur during same phase, much like most standard RPGs.

Another good thing about this game is the story and the characters in it. Nope you won’t be fighting with a team of pets or farm animals this time. It is hero’s, werewolves, skeleton warriors and the like. With a strong story you begin with one group, but soon switch to the characters you will mostly play as the retired heroes Random and his Elven girlfriend Sarah. They come out of a 7 month retirement after having saved the deport and want to see what has happened since they pretty much went off the grid. They have both gotten rather rusty in the 7 months, so they are back to starting from scratch to work up all their skills. As they talk to people and complete quests they meet people who will join your team. The story seemed to drag me into it and I found the writing for it pretty good to boot.

Now there was only 1 thing I didn’t quite like about the game and that was some of the artwork for the villains during battles. Don’t get me wrong the artwork for the character portraits has a nice look to it. As far as the enemies appearance in battle not all of them look sketchy, just some. Overall though this didn’t ruin the game experience or anything near that level. It’s just not as refined as some of the other games they have made.

In the end I rate this game a 4.5 out of 5. It’s solid story, interesting character conversations, and numerous playable characters make this game well worth playing.

There are set events as well as random events. Not to mention adventures you unlock and can choose to take as you go along. In all events/adventures there are usually multiple skills that can allow the successful completion of the mission. Making any mission completable by virtually any type of student. Yes, there are exceptions where you will have none of the skills needed to complete. That is why you make friends.

The game also supports the creating of your own clique and making friends with students then inviting them into your group when they are high enough with you. Once you have a clique going, be careful to not bring in someone the rest of the group doesn’t like. I did this and my group broke in half. The purpose of these friends is that during an adventure you can use them to perform a part that you can’t do. Say you need to perform a musical feat but you have a music skill of 0 or 1 but a friend has an 8, ask them to do it for you and you could beat that part. This is an option you must use wisely since you can’t use them again, at least not in the recent future.

Now the kicker is going on adventures, making friends, studying, training skills, and going to classes all must be juggled in your weekly schedule. Skip too many classes and you will get a detention. While you may learn new skills in detention from the teacher that you may not have learned otherwise it does take up future time slots. Get into too much trouble and you could be forced to lose part of your Saturdays.

All of this makes for a great game in my eyes. You do need to like reading, because that is what you will be doing  constantly in this game. The game is great for the casual gamer, the reader, and has a lot of little things for more in-depth and serious play. While most choices may not seem to matter for the outcome of this game finishing certain adventures in this game is said to have an effect on future games. Yes you will be able to carry over your first year students into the next game, or start new ones. This one features plenty of free DLC and updates including adding new familiars to the base game as well as adventures and events.

Overall this game is a fantastic text game with plenty of paths and choices creating a rich story for any character you create and has great replay value. With so many adventures and random events your sure to see new things each time you play. Not to mention so many different spells and actions that become available throughout your play.

I can’t stress enough how much I liked this game. I give it a 5 out of 5 personally, but I know this game will be hard for action gamers to really get into.

Defenders of Ardania is all about protecting your kingdom as well as assisting others in protecting theirs. The key aspect to the game is it isn’t all about placing your towers. You are playing both sides in this TD game as you build towers you will also be sending out troops to take out the enemies castle. Battles are not always one on one, sometimes you have partners and sometimes they do. Another big change is that you can not place your towers wherever you want. You can even place some in the pathway to force enemy troops to go around them. All this and  your buying troops to send down the path to destroy your enemies castle.

Another interesting limitation to placing your towers is that they can only be built within 4 squares of another of your towers. So to control the field you need to build your towers fast and cross the field to get the best positioning as soon as possible. This can give you a huge advantage over your opponent. Although they may take the time to build the better blocking route to prevent your success and holding the key points may not seem as important if they manage that. Between the 3 races, there are multiple towers to build each with their own advantages and disadvantages.

Sending out your troops is your only way to victory though. You must take out the enemies fortress or it will only be a matter of time before they take out yours. Either that or you will be at a stand still. This almost occurred with me when I made a clumsy and heavily mistake filled tower placement layout at the beginning of the stage. This can drastically alter the route both your troops and the computers will be forced to take. Also much like any good tower defense game there are multiple types of units you have the ability to send out in waves. Further into the game you will gain access to more troop types as well as the ability to send out more waves in a row without having to wait.

One of the last big things about the game is the use of magic. You can use resources to cast spells of different types.  The first spell you gain access to is to repair the damage to your castle. This is a spell that can be extremely useful. Other spells destroy towers or units. This brings a lot of real time action to the match.

With a myriad of tower types, troop types, and spells the battles are quite interesting. I especially like how only some troops will attack enemy troops or enemy towers, this adds a great degree of thought when it comes to hiring your next set of troops. Not only that but that they become better the more you use them and eventually a hero troop will be purchasable for that troop type. These guys are nearly unstoppable.

Where this game truly looks to shine is in multiplayer. I was unable to test this theory though. It is set up to be a great TD multiplayer experience.  Something I believe many tower defense players really are looking for.

This game has been released for the IPad. PC and console releases are planned but no release date has been announced to my knowledge.

From what I’ve played I give this a 4 out of 5 especially if the multiplayer holds to the single player aspects. I just can’t wait to see myself getting crushed by the TD fanatics out there.

An interesting aspect that adds some difficulty to the game is the lack of a healing item inventory. Within the dreams you will find food of all sorts that will heal your party. Certain characters more than others depending on the food type. The true kicker is once you pick it up it is used immediately and removed from the map. So you need to use them sparingly and make sure it is the right item for the character needing healed most. There is a bit of a safety net as far as healing goes. You can use a fairy that appears near where you start, at a cost. If she heals your party the dreamworlds will react and make the game more difficult. So using her can be more headache than help.

The scenery is great, one minute your in Egypt’s desert then the next minute you could be in London at night while it rains, or a mouse cave full of cheese. All this adds to not only the atmosphere, but the freedom of the game. Between the cute jokes, character banter and ever shifting atmosphere things always feel fresh and interesting. The story may seem to fade out at points, but your still roped in to seeing what the next dreamscape will be like or who/what will be the next character or danger you’ll face.

This RPG may seem a little bit too cute for some, but that doesn’t make it easy. Even if you put it on the easier modes. With tons playtime hours of adventuring it’s also not your quick indie RPG romp. You’ll be setting aside a fair amount of time to uncover the mystery of the dreamscape and what your boyfriend was so afraid of.

I never felt to lost in any particular dungeon, nor did I find it impossibly complex to advance through things. I give this RPG a 4 out of 5 for the interesting story and area layout, not to mention the diverse worlds you enter as well as it’s old school game play, and the hours of playtime you will get out of it.

So how is Anomaly played? It’s a point and click game for the most part. You use the mouse pretty much exclusively, which makes it pretty easy to get used to, that in no way means it makes it easy though. Although the game does walk you through all the steps to playing, very nicely. So what are the basics. You scroll back to enter tactical mode from here you will be able to change the route in which your military caravan is going to travel. This is very important throughout the game as paths become blocked by dangerous material that would damage or destroy your units or new towers appear that you hadn’t accounted for. Scroll forward to go back into the active mode. Left click somewhere and the commanding officer (You) will run to that location. Right click somewhere and it brings up a ring of 4 possible abilities. At first you won’t have all four.  Click on the one you want and the commanding officer will run there and use that ability.

You can lose during a stage by all units being destroyed or failing some objective. Stages do have checkpoints and when you reach one you can continue from that point or the beginning of the stage depending on how well you were doing when you made it to that check point will answer that question. I know I had a few points where it was better to start the stage over than to continue beaten and battered at a checkpoint right before I failed.

The game has a decent storyline to explain out why you are taking part in the next mission. It does well to keep the flow of the game going. The voice acting isn’t bad, I liked it to be honest. The music and sound effects are nice and the games visuals are good, and I don’t mean good for a tower defense game. The game has some real polish to it and is not what I expect from most indie games.

As an add on there are two bonus modes available to unlock after you have completed that section in the game. An online scoreboard has you competing for the best rank as well as medals for each stage to show you what you did well at and what they believe you could have done better at. The only thing I can see being a downside to this game is that it isn’t multiplayer. For me this wasn’t an issue, it’s a great game and it stands on its own with just single player.

I give this game a 4 out of 5 only because tower defense is a niche genre. I can’t say this game is for everyone but, it is really worth your time to check it out.

So what is the deal with Minecraft? Well, it’s pretty simple. First, the game is really easy to play. It has 2 modes of play with a third mode of play coming out in the next edition. The two modes are creative and survival with a hardcore survival mode coming out in 1.9, 1.8.1 is the current official release at this moment. Creative mode is just you building whatever your heart desires in a landscape of random layouts. Although, you can create the same map over and over again by using a map generation key. The second mode is survival mode which is as it sounds survival is the key with all the fun of creative mode, except with the challenge of monsters and having to obtain the materials to survive and build. The third mode, hardcore survival will have the same thing as survival mode except upon death the world is deleted so there is no trying again with what you may have done.

Keeping the game simple enough for just about anyone to grasp the game uses blocks for pretty much everything. So as you wander around these block based worlds what you want to do is pretty much up to you. A common theme to sandbox games, except in Minecraft there are no bosses to hunt down no real objectives. Creative mode is just as it says. It gives you access to all the blocks in the game without limit. So if you don’t like to fight or have to survive you can build like it’s a virtual Lego wonderland. Really who doesn’t have fond memories of playing with blocks.

Survival mode has monsters also known as mobs that come out at night to kill you, whether you come out of your shelter to face them or not is entirely up to you. That is unless you didn’t build a shelter before your first night. In survival mode you craft materials, tools, weapons, and armor to face the threats of the night, caves or just hunting for food. As of 1.8.1 you actually need to eat regularly to survive. You can build small farms of wheat, sugarcane, and watermelons to aid in your survival or hunt for cows, pigs, and chickens. You can even go fishing if you build a fishing pole. It is all up to you. Mine as much as you want or just explore the huge map that is built for you. You can build a portal to enter a lava filled dimension called the Nether if you want a change of scenery.

With the next version of the game looking to add more structures to the Nether realm, another dimension called the End, NPCs that spawn in little villages, and an potion table, Minecraft is continuing to expand and add more with each update. It’s hard to find yourself bored in this game, but if you do there is a large modding community for Minecraft that adds all sorts of new and different options to the game. Giving you a virtually endless array of possibilities.

Not to mention there are tons of servers with different mods or just standard play of creative or survival mod out there to allow for a great multiplayer experience. Some might require you to install certain mods, but many just require you to talk to the person running it via IRC or forum emails.

By itself I would say Minecraft easily is a 5 out of 5, with decent replay value. With the mods though it has an inexhaustible level of replay value. I’d say one of it’s biggest downfalls is the silence that comes fairly often.

Now as I said I wanted to talk of a few mods that I find extremely enriching to the game.

MAtmos – This mod is a simple sound mod that adds nature sounds and wind sound as well as a number of other sounds that may seem unnecessary, but truly does bring a lot of life to this game. It also solves the silence issue when the music isn’t playing. Hearing the wind blow when on a hillside or mountain or the little birdie sounds of the forest. It’s a great mod that doesn’t change the game by adding tools or blocks just cleans up the silence.

Dr Zhark’s Creatures – This mod adds a ton of mobs to your game. From hostile mobs, water mobs, animal mobs and hunter animal mobs. You want cats in the game along wolves or foxes and bears, maybe sharks or even a dangerous ogre then this is the mod for you. It adds a large quantity of mobs to the game with a gui that makes it easy to customize the rarity, in its most recent version it even has the ability to edit the rarity of the standard mobs of the game. If you are looking to add more animals to the game or even more nasty monsters this mod offers both. I would say it is a must have for anyone looking for more life in their Minecraft world.

Humans+ – This mod adds a number of NPC factions to your world. If you feel a bit lonely wandering around this mod might be what it takes to solve that one. It adds, Knights and Samurai, Hunters, Assassins, Elves, Bandits, Desert Bandits, Pirates, and Peasants and a few other factions. All your actions involving these NPCs effects how different factions may see you. Kill a bunch of hunters and the bandits may fight with you since you crossed over to the evil side. Kill a bunch of animals in front of the elves and you can be sure they will attack you. This mod adds quite a bit of people running around in the wild trying to kill you and each other, but it does make things interesting. It’s biggest issue seems to be that in general the knights almost always attempt to kill you so it never seems viable to side with them. Although it is fun hacking down other people instead of a bunch of creepers and spiders all the time.

The next two mods I will talk about aren’t really done but can and do work well enough.

Twilight Forest – No it has nothing to do with the Stephenie Meyers book about vampires. The Twilight Forest is a dimension mod, which means it adds another dimension much like going to the Nether. Twilight Forest is a dimension of perpetual twilight. In other wards both monster and animal mobs can spawn at all times. So you are never really safe. What really makes this world worth exploring is that you are in a huge forest canopy with trees taller than some mountains in Minecraft. The ground is lower so you won’t be able to dig as deep but you don’t need to hills have ores and tons of monster mobs that defend them. There are Hedge Mazes, and Ice Walls, and currently one courtyard with the Naga as a boss for the mod. You can choose whether you want to take it one or not. Even if you don’t climbing to the top of the tree canopy is quite a site and makes for a very interesting world to visit. This is a great mod with a lot of potential.

Tale of Kingdoms – This mod is fairly new to the scene, but just fantastic. If you play and want to build a castle, but at the same time you want to spend your time mining and killing. Then this mod is for you. It immediately adds a guild that you join where you learn what it takes to be a king. This is pretty much done by slaughtering enemy mobs with your fellow guild-mates. Once you’ve earned enough you can take a builder out somewhere of your choosing and tell him to build there. He will build the out castle wall and request Cobblestone and wood to build more buildings. The castle can be upgraded to tier two currently and it does take some time to acquire the materials to build the buildings, mainly the wood that is. Once you hit tier two you can hire guardsmen for your castle, but even before that you can hire guilds men as body guards. You can also sell many of the Items you may find useless to the guild or shop once you build one and use the money from those items as well as the critters you kill to purchase better tools, weapons, armor and just about anything else. This gives you a lot more freedom to play the game as you like, while giving you an optional goal. Although this mod isn’t completed and an Enemy kingdom is planned in future releases as it stands now it is a lot of fun and adds a whole new feel to the game.  Worth taking a look at if you are even a little interested in modding your Minecraft.

All of those mods are compatible with each other in 1.8.1 without any issues that I have seen and create a very hectic and dangerous landscape, but it sure is a lot of fun. Don’t limit yourself to these mods check out others as well. These mods and many more can all be found at http://www.minecraftforum.net/

The game plays off the jokes you might expect of trailer park life. The main character seems to have no real job or ambitions except the next girl, pretty much the cliche of the trailer park guy. When your hit with the mystery that you have to solve, you will do this through talking and finding items to use and give to others to get them to talk to you. This game is very simple and to say more about the plot would be a bit to easy to give it away.

Needless to say the artwork is nice, as well as the voice acting. So enjoy the pretty pictures and silly jokes while you can. The game ends far to quickly with it being easy to get through in 20 to 30 minutes. Nothing you search for is hard to find and all the puzzles are pretty simple.

Overall, I was left wanting more of both the game and a challenge. I thought maybe if I made some alternate choices or answers in the game it would add some re-playability. It didn’t, no matter what answers or choices you make they all lead to the same results, one way or another.

So sadly I could only give this game a 2 out of 5 and hope they either make a longer more challenging point and click mystery or make another Starchon.

Now what makes this game stand out is the honor system. Everything you want to do will come down to money and/or honor. If you have a neighbor that you want to get rid of but he has never attacked you, to do it your going to have to pay honor.  If your honor is too low you may be asked to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) in order to restore some sense of honor to your remaining clan. This is especially important because if the clan leader you are playing dies by any means, you will take the role of the clan’s successor. In Sengoku you will arrange marriages for your children with the children of other clan leaders to forge bonds as well as create a proper succession. All while attempting to keep your honor high enough to do the things you need or want to accomplish.

With everything from choosing a clan religion to hiring ninjas to perform acts you don’t want to be credited for Sengoku has a lot to offer. Once you get the hang of what is happening on how to perform these tasks yourself, you can find that there is a great deal of strategy in this game. Although this may take a few rough starts where you feel completely helpless and overwhelmed with the options and controls. The menu system isn’t the easiest thing to maneuver and I make a strong recommendation to reading the manual and watching the video below for assistance in getting a grasp of the game.

While the game plays with time constantly passing and you taking your actions in real time. This can become problematic so you can speed up or slow down and even pause time. This allows you to set up a number of actions all at once as well as take a look around at what is going on throughout the rest of Japan. If it wasn’t for the ability to pause time to issue out commands I am sure I would have completely drowned in the interface.

I will say that Sengoku is not about great graphics. You don’t go down to the battlefield to control your troops in battle, so if that is what you want in a game you will be disappointed here. From my experience graphics are not what makes a great strategy game. So if you can get a handle on the menu system and ignore the fact that this isn’t the best visual experience, you will be in for a different style of war and strategy.

In the end I highly recommend this game to serious strategy gamers. I give it a 4 out of 5, but I think the casual gamer may struggle with this one, I did at first. Don’t give up though and once it all starts clicking this game is really fun.

Sengoku comes out on Sept 13th 2011 for $29.99 you can get it from gamersgate.com

The Demo can be found Here