Finishing the Backlog and Moving Forward

First of all, please accept my apologies for not having posted anything within the past month. I won't go into too much detail but I have had a lot on in my personal life that took away any interest I had in gaming. Only in the past week or so have I found time to rekindle the interest.

I have been spending more time with friends, making new friends, going to the gym, taking classes in meditation, traveling and focusing more on my work. For the first time in a good few months I am feeling good about myself. Surprisingly everything that I have discovered in the past few weeks, I am okay with it all. I have moved on and made new friends out of the experience that I am extremely grateful for.

For a good few weeks I was under the impression that I had a problem, an addiction to gaming. But now I know it wasn't that, I was able to stop anytime I wanted, I chose not to though because I was unhappy, I was using it as an escapism mechanic. After this time out of gaming, I have realized a lot about my self.

I had completed my initial backlog of games a while ago, and I had lost all will to write about it because I was at such a low. The past few updates on this blog were actually from games that I completed a long time ago, and they were posts that I had saved in Draft form so I can post as and when I felt I wanted to.

I am not going to continue to write reviews for all the games I completed from where I left off, as it has been a long time since I played them I don't think it would be fair to write a review purely off memories of a game I played months ago. I will however continue to post updates on games that I play and complete from now on.

I have decided that I will not let my library of games get into such a state as it was before, where I had hundreds of unplayed titles overshadowing me.

These are the games that I have purchased in the past few weeks and I will not be adding to this list until  I have played/completed all of them.

Angvik

Aveyond Lord of Twilight

Castle of Illusion

Castleminer Z

Deadly 30

Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse

Finding Teddy

Guise of the Wolf

Hitman Contracts

Kane and Lynch 2 - Dog Days

Legends of Aethereus

LEGO Batman 2 Lego Marvel Superheroes

Omikron

Payday 2

Rust

Skyborn

Summoner

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified

The LEGO Movie Videogame

The Typing of The Dead: Overkill The Amazing Spider-Man

Back To The Future; The Game - Completed

Back To The Future is a nostalgic fun-filled game, which is more of a movie sequel than a game! The game is a point-and-click adventure with a lot of easy & hard puzzles laid out all over the story. Its nothing exceptional for this genre of game, but is fun to play.

The dialogues are laugh-out-loud funny and very creative. Christopher Lloyd again gives his familiar voice for the Doc and the voice-over for Marty is fine replacement of Michael J Fox, as well! The USP of the game is its story line, the alternate timelines created are funny, bizarre, unpredictable and completely unique, just like its counterparts in the 3 movies!

If you have never seen Back To The Future, you may have trouble to follow what's going on, but its still pretty fun compared to other point-and-click games. If you have seen the trilogy, its a must-play game for you!

Avernum: Escape from the Pit - Completed

Avernum: Escape From the Pit is a turn-based 90s style RPG, and is a throwback to games like Fallout and Baldur's Gate.

This game has a ton of content, with loads of towns, NPCs, quests, items, spells and skills. There are a lot of choices for customizing your party of 4 adventurers. You can choose to specialize each character, or spread out your skill points and make a hybrid type character if you want to.

The story is well written, and there's around 40 hours of total content. Even though the graphics have been updated from the previous version of the game, it still looks like it was made in the 90s. I did like the character sheet artwork though. The music is pretty sparse, only playing during the title screen and during loading screens, but it fits really well with the game.

The ambient sounds in towns play in a loop, which gets a little bit annoying after a while. The pathing during combat is a little weird, and occasionally one of your characters will run in the wrong direction.

The menus system takes a little bit of getting used to, but everything can be accessed with hotkeys, which is pretty nice. This game reminds me a lot of Fallout (only without the great voice acting).

I'd recommend this to anybody who's a fan of that era's RPG games.

Avernum 4, 5 and 6 - Completed

As always Vogel delivers an epic adventure complete with well written, witty dialogue and a devious plot.

Be warned, however, if you're one of those weirdos who demands up to date modern graphics, you'll be sorely disappointed. While I consider Avernum 6 to be more than beautiful, it is, graphically speaking, certainly no Crysis and as far as I'm concerned, that's a GOOD thing!

With a now very well established lore returning fans will no doubt be delighted to see returning characters from previous games making more than just appearances. Players new to the series shouldn't fret, however, for each Avernum game has always been a self-contained story.

A seriously epic series of games that only the hardcore RPGer can actually pull through.

Avadon 2: The Corruption - Completed

The game is very lore heavy and you will love it if you're into that kind of thing. The walls of text can be intimidating at first, but they turn out to be one of the best features in the game. The characters are so much more fleshed out than other games because of the text that describes them.

The combat is balanced and can be very challenging on hard and torment. The graphics are old, but the gameplay and UI are top notch. It's basically like Baldur's Gate on steroids. I love this game!

All Zombies Must Die - Completed

All Zombies Must Die! is a nice twin analog shooter, with a good number of weapons and enemies. The game is packed with some cartoon-style graphics, but the action is too repetitive and there's no online multiplayer to keep things interesting.