dropko 最近的评测

Regardless of the price, even free, it's just a tiny, meaningless quest.
Can be done in 5 minutes or so.
"Useful" if you are going for the kills achievement.

In this game we play as Colt, a man waking up at a beach without any memory or recollection, knowing nothing of his past nor what is he doing in that place.

Very quickly we are introduced to the center stage mechanic. Colt is trapped in this island called Blackreef, where some scientific anomaly is causing each day to repeat itself endlessly in a loop. At the end of each day, everything that happened resets, and even death is rewound.
This has been perpetuated by the rulers of this place, the Visionaries, which see this as a sort of attempt at eternal life. Each day is problem-free life that can be lived and exploited to the maximum, with no regret or mistake as the next day everything just starts over. They invite individuals, the Eternalists, to enjoy the pleasures of eternal life with them. However, because they also forget every day after the loop reset, they also don't learn and don't become better enemies or anything. This ties into the principles of the loop, so when we overhear their dialog we understand how their life is also meaningless, without care, fear or desire to change.
Colt wants nothing to do with this, of course, so also very quickly he is given the solution: every Visionary must be killed within a single day loop. Then he can break the cycle. Colt can, for reasons explained, retain his memory between loops, and also finds a way to infuse his items so he can also keep them. Any item not infused with a material called Residuum is not persisted between loops. All of this is told very very early on and this is the given premise.

As you progress, you will obviously unravel the story of Blackreef, Colt, what happened, who you are, etc., the typical. Even if the story could have been mildly interesting, it doesn't get in the way either, it's passable and missable.

Blackreef is split in 4 locations and every day is split in 4 sections. In order to kill all seven visionaries we must visit the locations at particular times of day. Both visionaries and locations will have some differences and events occurring at specific times of day, so for some Visionary to become killable at afternoon, for instance, some things have to be triggered in the morning. This is nice and appears to be telling you that the game has a lot of exploration and attempts at identifying patterns to exploit, with the stages presenting many degrees of freedom to take down the Visionaries, kinda like Hitman. But no.

The game throws you directly these "leads", which are essentially hand holding missions that you just have to follow individually with specific instructions of what to do and when. You will follow these leads as the missions that they are. There is not much creativity present, you will go to some area at some time of day and do X. And then go to another area at another time and do Y, and so forth. Eventually, after doing all the missions, you can complete the game. The game is therefore a linear succession of corridor-missions across only 4 corridors/maps. To try and break the repetition, the maps do change slightly and you enter them from different points every time but it does get obviously repetitive. Every time a map exits, the time of day passes, and after 4 maps the day is complete, the loop resets, and you start another day. The whole thing is sadly repetitive in this way.

You can clear the maps by being stealthy or by being aggressive, and there's a dozen weapon types in total, with obvious focus for agressive types. Both weapons and Cold himselt can be equipped with some upgrades, naturally. The most innovative difference here that brings some variation to the combat are the Slabs, some powers given by prosthetics dropped by the Visionaries that can allow you to do things like push enemies, go invisible, teleport, get buffed, etc. Does add some nice variation to combat and exploration, and they can themselves be upgraded for additional effects.

There is also a sort of "invasion" system if you play online where you can both invade or be invaded by other players in the form of another relevant character, which will be AI if you play offline. Does add some dynamic as well to the hunt and there are some good rewards if you best the invasion.

Surprisingly, despite the obvious repetion, the game is fun to play because it was so smoothly implemented. The maps are small and tight, after a while of knowing how to move around and with a good gear you can do the map and clear the loop relatively fast and feeling cool. It "feels" good to play, but sadly, it also feel like a buch of chores because of how predetermined your progression is. It feels quite mechanical. Also your character and your main antagonist are extremely uninsteresting, and the Visionaries are basically fillers without any connection to other characters.

Even if it is fun to play, and that lasted me for around 30h, the game's core principle of loop repetitiveness is not even its major flaw. Uninteresting characters and a fake promise of freedom turn it into an uninspired corridor-driven mission system throughout.

I don't really recommend it.

Amanda Ripley, daugther of Ellen Ripley, is part of the Torrens spaceship crew, it sent to the space station Sevastopol to collect the Flight Recorder of the Nostromo, Ellen Ripley's ship from the first Alien movie.

On arrival, the Torrens finds the Sevastopol in such a terrible shape that normal docking is impossible and a manual docking involving a space walk is required. Of course, it goes immediately bad and Amanda barely makes it, by herself, into the Sevastopol, and this is where the game actually starts.

Even if she does quickly obtain the Flight Recorder, doesn't take too long to understand that something isn't right with the Sevastopol. The station has fires everywhere, bodies scattered, and the androids are hostile. Soon enough, she has her first encounter with the Alien.

What follows is a long escape of cat and mouse between Amanda, the Alien, androids and some surviving scattered crew, across many interconnected areas of the spaceship while trying to piece it together and finding a way to safely return to the Torrens amidst the Sevastopol's imminent collapse.

The game puts itself as a "survival horror" genre, not only because of its obvious themes of running away from a scary monster, but also by the means of which this is implemented. What this means is that you are faced against an enemy that you cannot kill, cannot outrun, and will appear frequently from the ceiling or from the walls to surprise you. The most you can do it scare it off with fire or try to lure if out of the way with some cobbled tools (like flares, smokes, noise) or hiding somewhere until it walks off. Also, and this is where the biggest fear lies, you cannot save anywhere except some very specific spots which are often spread afar. So it's one part evading the alien, and the other part looking for these save spots.

So the "world" itself, the Sevastopol, is incredibly made. It's enormous, has so many distinct areas, and every area has so many rooms, corridors, open areas, vents, ladders, and everything is richly detailed not only in diversity but also in complexity. They certainly did a fantastic job in creating these environments, there's detail everywhere, from the walls to the offices, to the stuff laying around on the desks and the panels and instruments and random decoration. And of course a lot of places to hide in/under/around. Scattered around there are random scrap items that Amanda can use to combine and craft new tools to use, like bombs, molotovs or medkits.

However, and this is probably a fault with the engine or how it was used (or chosen to be used), there is still plenty of light around and not that scared-with-a-flashlight-circle going around feel. So an improved lighting is something that would have greatly benefited the setting.

Traversing this world has of course its own dangers. Moving makes noise. Running makes a lot of noise. Firearms and other items make tremendous noise. Even breathing and using your motion sensor creates noise perceptible at close distances (like when hiding in a closet). And of course the Alien has heightened senses and will actively hunt or sniff you out if you make more noise, which means you are mostly crouch-walking around to make less noise. Now, the Alien AI received great praise, especially in the highest difficulty, where it will better look for you and hunt you and find you in your hiding spots and give up less easily and be scared off less easily, identifying your hiding patterns and what not. I played on Normal (there are two other of higher and two other of lower difficulty) and the Alien was an off-and-on issue. Its appeareance is sometimes scripted and other times it just roams free in a level and you have to outsmart it and use some decoys to control its movement to go opposed to where you want to be. There are a couple levels, at least in Normal, where this has more relevance. However, at some point, you will acquire the Flamethrower and the Alien will mostly become a nuisance, you can fend it off for a few seconds before it returns. If you control this with crouching/running and map out the levels from the save points to see where you want to go, you can certainly optimize the paths and reduce danger while managing your flamethrower charge.

The Alien itself is a towering figure, but it was too anthropomorphized. It walks around standing like a border control guard, and when it sees you it just runs forward mid-speed to allow you to react somehow. Doesn't have that very fast wall or ceiling crawling that I believe would give it a creepier feel. At least when it does capture you there's a handful of cool "finishing" animations.

The game does do a good pace balance job by having levels with more or less Alien appearance and alternate that with other dangers, like Androids and Humans. Your firearms and items are effective against them, but will also generate noise to attract the Alien. However in some cases the alien is completely gone for the level and the game just throws at you these other enemies with their own defenses and capabilities that you have to work around. Of course they can be killed and outrun, unlike the alien, so they're a lower problem comparatively but in most instances, attacking generates noise and we know how that goes. So yeah, on a hindsight, if you want the actual challenge and have the time, from what I read this should be played on highest difficulty to have the better experience; in the end, playing Normal didn't feel _that_ much of a challenge, it was actually manageable and the Alien on Normal is many times "collaborative".

Still on the cat-and-mouse game, the audio department is truly stellar. Not only the environmental sounds are great to give a more "alive" station, but the constant indicative sound of the Alien proximity crawling above the ceiling and inside the walls, through the vents, stepping hard on the floor, you can really hear it coming and going around even without the motion sensor, there's great positioning awareness, especially with headphones. Music, it's the thrill style you'd find in any movie, it will even change of course in volume and style when danger is around, which serves as another indicative clue.

So we've got a great level and environment design, a great enemy with systems well built to approach it (in items, audio and environments), an interesting tool crafting system, and the whole cool Alien setting. I don't think the game feels as "horror" as it may sound, I think the biggest horror is not finding the next save spot for many minutes and risking having to play everything again, and this is also reduced in my opinion because of the combination of lighting and Alien movement. It didn't feel too difficult either most likely because in Normal, the Alien isn't too persistent and there is enough Flamethrower fuel around to fend off the Alien in most mistakes you might do.

In general this was a great experience nonetheless and I do recommend it.

Chorus is a ~20h sci-fi third person space fighter/shooter game.

In this universe, a cult known as "The Circle" and led by the "Prophet" figure, was once revered by the galaxy as fostering unity and the providers of the path to Chorus, a kind of "perfect harmony" enlightenment state that every human thrives for. But at some point the cult began enforcing the path to chorus through autoritarian rule, demanding submission and conversion to all. The forceful offer of peaceful harmony removed freedom. Through force, they rule the galaxy with a series of fanatic zealots.

To achieve this dominance, the Circle counts on agressive miltitary and specially gifted pilots, the Elders. These pilots have special psychic powers, the Rites, gifted by the Faceless to help exercise the Circle's rule. One of which is our own character, Nara, actually one of the Prophet's greatest fighters. She is ordered to conduct the destruction of a planet and the death of a billion people as part of the Circle's plan, which she performs, but the experience actually traumatizes her and she immediately defects the Circle and forfeits her Rites.

The game starts seven years after this event, where she lives as a scavenger trying to stay away from her own guilt, but the Circle finds her and forces her to deal with her past life. This is where the game starts and where Nara's redemption arc begins, joining the Resistance and fighting back to the Circle and the Faceless. She will retake her sentient ship, Forsa, which is a sort of Michael Knight's KITT, being an actual participant in the game and relevant to the character and story. As they gather allies and prepare to rally against the final enemy, she must find her Rites to regain her past power that will help her in her mission.

The story in a general sense is nothing new but I could appreciate its come to life. Most of what I said is given in the initial cinematic and in the first hours of gameplay, but from there the story proceeds without any standounts, and this becomes a small issue with the storytelling's pace. The game has a central "quest" that has the obvious outcome, but is also riddled with many sidequests that, albeit intersting to understand all the different factions and characters the game has, also kill a lot of the momentum, and they're plenty and lengthy, dwarfind the main quest. There are very high things at stake but we're often wandering around to do nothing quests. Also the storytelling can be confusing at times since the delivery is with random episodes over ship comms that have not the most interesting delivery, it's as if it's a ship society.

So the majority of the gameplay is flying through galaxy systems, there's half a dozen of them and each has around a dozen quests besides the main one and some collectibles to find. Each of these systems has a very broad area to fly around, sometimes a bit too broad as we're going from landmark to landmark looking for the next quest (many have to be "sensed" in order for them to appear on the map). So broad that many times we're literally flying in space between them which sort of kills the pacing as well.

Now, about flying. Flying is SUPER GOOD and SUPER SMOOTH. It is without a doubt extremely enjoying to manouver the aircraft in every direction, especially with a controller. Even flying from A to B, as far as it can be, is better just because of how nice it is to move around, even with a fast power boost.

This transports nicely to the king of the game, the combat. Pratically all missions will involve dogfighting and thankfully manouvering the ship is never in the way. Aside from the butter smooth movement, we have dodge/roll and a "drift" movement, which is literally it, allowing to cut corners and circle around in much tighter angles. It can be a bit weird at first as it requires some boost to work but it's AWESOME to use. Can't really explain without using it but it elevates the manouverability in dogfighting a LOT, and the combat frenzy favours its use heavily, it really breaks the mold of these games where you feel you are literally going in circles chasing enemies.

Combat is aditionally granted extra options with Nora's Rites. With these gifts and her sentient ship, she is able to teletransport behind enemies, grab and throw ships, shock them, spear through them... there's literally so many ways to go and approach combat besides basic weaponry that it never gets old, it's ALWAYS awesome and with so much creative depth.

About weaponry, there are three types: cannons, lasers and rockets and thankfully, the weapon variety does feel diverse. Enemies will have their typical shields for your laser weapons and will have armor for your missile weapons. Each of these types has half a dozen variants and they do feel different, and some have special effects and weapon set bonuses.

For upgrades, however, none of these extras to equip and alter the ship, like adittional speed, damage to certain weapon types, stronger hull, none of this feels very interesting to play with. The inconvenient part is that so many of these upgrades are behind optional quests that you many times wouldnt want to do, but feel you must so you can obtain that extra weapon or upgrade. Also the upgrades do not quantify their benefits, they will only say "higher speed" or "higher damage" instead of providing "+20% of this", which I believe is highly preferrable.

Between rites and weapons, at some point with so many tools and options you feel an unstoppable ninja space force tearing through everything!

Graphically speaking it's fantastic, there's a great sense of awe in the broad space lanscapes, the fields, the cities, feels fantastic to traverse through everything. The ships could be much more interesting, though, their designs are not too diverse and not too creative for the most part.

Negatively, I didn't like the game's pacing. I would appreciate if the sense of urgency and the things at stake were more palpable, many side missions feel like regular random stuff that breaks the immersion of the major story arc. Also there isn't teleporting between sections in the map and many times you have to wander around the map looking for missions (you have to activate a Rite of senses to find new missions) and often you wander literal minutes. Even if flying is fantastic, for longer periods of gaming it can feel tedious. Also you can only save between missions and some are long, so you either finish or abort it, which is also a needless stress for a more casual approach to the game.

The main character, Nora, is faced with constant guilt and regret, and this is very frequently part of her monologues and dialogs with her ship for random silence-fillers to show you how internally broken she is. To add to the background explanation there are some "memory" collectibles you can find in the map that tell you a bit more of the times before the game. There are actually quite a few of them and some are even mandatory, and when obtaining them the game becomes slow and you can't move as well, so you have listen to the thing all the way through. This is important to understand how our character relates with the Circle, and the other game factions see the Circle and other Elders, but this feels too much and too frequent, Nora and Forsa will too often talk to each other (but surprisingly this dialog is incredibly varied, repetition is not a thing!). Can't say that the main character is therefore very likable and approachable with so much complaining.

All things considered, I really enjoy the game due to its strengths in movement, combat and visuals, which are key to these games, that manage to outshine the underwhelming game pace, storytelling and ship upgrade systems.

Nobody Wants to Die is a highly narrative game set in a futuristic, cyberpunk noire detective styled set some centuries into the future. Immortality is now a thing, technology allows one's self and memories to be transferred into another body, effectively living forever. You will pay for your "body subscription" and failing to do so will turn your body eligible to be "occupied" by others.
Of course this is an expensive access so the rich live carelessly forever and everone else gets exploited, creating massive society inequalities and troubles. Not all bodies are equal, some bodies have higher "quality" and most available bodies for "middle class" are junkies and other misfits.

Transfer occurs by using a material called "ichorite" that downloads, stores and uploades your memories between bodies. Once occupying different bodies, some "sync" sessions need to occur periodially because the transfer is not always clean and memory gaps and overlaps exist that need to be arranged. Failing to do so can cause madness.

Our own character, a detective, is himself a "replanted" character. We start the game coming out from some unspecified accident where the policie chief sends us to investigate a murder of one of the major figures in the immorality tech business and require us to cover-up for the high profile incident. We are assigned a "side kick", another replanted police officer that will help us throughout the game, always seeing and hearing via an earpiece.

As the investigation unfolds, we will naturally dive deep into a whole conspiracy and corruption net of intrigue, with many characters and twists. The gameplay centers heavily in investiging, rebuilding crime scenes, finding evidences and elaborating the case and hypothesis. The game is mostly this repeatedly throught 3 or 4 sections connected with other random acts with deeper character description.

The plot, the themes, the investigation maze itself and the whole noir setting are the stars of the show, and the two main actors are incredibly well voice acted, absolutely top, and the dynamic between them very well played. All areas are very richly detailed. Sound and music are also incredibly in-setting, it's super cinema feel.

The crime scene rebuild is pretty cool. The main tool is a sort of time-lapse device that can rebuild an animated 3d visual representatin of a crime using parts of the evidencies found in the scene, allowing it, once assembled, to view the whole thing as it's happening. Xrays, UV lamps are also used as auxiliary devices.

On the downside, some of these research sections feel like they drag a little too long until the whole scene sets itself up. The whole process is very scripted and you can't progress without finding one specific thing, so there isn't something you can miss that prevents the investigation to process correctly. Also when assembling clues to form an hypothesis, there is really only one way forward, you can't conclude or incriminate poorly. So there is a lot of hand holding throughout the whole thing, you can't go wrong. There are some parts of the game where it seems that "choices matter" and the game says "character will remember this" but, apart from a single final decision, nothing appears to deviate too much out of the single path. This means that you basically have one playthrough. As a whole, since there is no action or meaningful agency, we are essentially playing through a scripted "corridor of scenes", almost like a movie.

Regardless of the shortcomings, Nobody Wants to Die has an incredible world and story to immerse yourself in and a mystery that, albeit predictable to some extent, is a joy to uncover.

Fort Solis is a short (~4h) "sci-fi thriller" game with a "cinematic storytelling" style. It plays very much like Firewatch, albeit in third person, but now we're an engineer on Mars.

So the premise is that our main character, a maintenance engineer stationed somewhere in Mars, receives a distress call from another nearby station, Fort Solis. But on arrival, the station is dead silent. Noone is there, nothing is going on, nobody responds, doors are closed. Something clearly went wrong.

And here starts the "walking simulator" part. We need to figure out, through video recordings, audio logs, letters, etc., what actually happened. Just like Firewatch, during our "research", a friendly engineer is on the other side of the line constantly talking and keeping some dynamic for the gameplay.

Even though the idea is fine and the setting is fine and the sort of "play a movie" kind of style is fine, the implementation is lackluster. Graphically it is great thanks to UE5, but controls and movevement are incredibly and extremely clunky. It's not good to control the character at all. And probably because of that and to mask the issue, the character was not allowed to run, he either walks or walks very slightly faster. And this not only gets in the way very frenquently, but also feels to artificially extend gameplay due to the slowness of progression in corridors, as it would otherwise be probably complete in a couple of hours.

Being a narrative game, the story is core but it feels like it is going into some crazy direction, as we start to have an idea of what actually happened, but then seems to never meet the expectations and actually becomes sort of a let down.

Characters are in fact interesting in their roles and their decisions, and the voice acting is actually quite good, but the game feels like it underdelivers as a whole due to its shortcomings on story and controls.

I wouldn't recommend.

Jusant is a beautifully simple game.

The whole game is, in its essence, nearly just about climbing a tower.
You climb it holding on to the ledges, to rocks, to handles, even little creatures, and ocasionally swinging across or jumping to reach the next spot. Progress is looking up and looking for the next spot.
The whole thing is pretty chill. There are no dialogs, no NPCs, no chance of death, just climb.

So what's so special about it?

Well first it plays very well mechanically. You control the climb (this was a controller experience) by having each hand tied to a controller trigger. So LT and RT to select the specific hand to grab, and use pad/joystick to the proceed in that direction. With a good rythm you can climb quite fast! You never fall to your death because the game always has safety spots to hold your safety cable and does that automatically everytime you start a climb. So the core purpose of climbing feels very smooth.

Then it presents itself without telling you much and then doing the non-intrusive environmental storytelling. There is a lot of learn about the events of the game in scattered letters and with environmental storytelling. Even if can be almost a filler, it's still interesting. The game tells of a civilization that inhabited this tower, and at some point the sun stopped revolving (or the world stopped rotating) and with that came scarcity of water and food, and the population had to adapt, evolve, evade. You learn from the letters of ordinary inhabitants left to eachother and telling about how they are dealing with it, their struggles, every day life, and moving up the tower. During the events of the game, though, everyone has already disappeared.

The levels are very rich and filled with detail, content and soul, does seem convincing that it was once inhabited. World interaction is small, though. You interact only with the climbing handles and with a companion of yours, a little creature, that can shout to the world and trigger some events, like flowers to grow and reveal new passages. While the game is mostly about going up, there are multiple areas at plateaus that you can explore to go deeper into the mountain and find collectibles, see the living and working areas of the people, open shortcuts, etc.

There are half a dozen chapters, level diversity is not too high, and the whole game is around 4 hours, which is about right considering the climb is relatively slow paced and could become repetitive considering that if you are not invested in the events, then it's just run and go (up). Music and sound are also low-key and non-intrusive.

If you'd appreciate this more chill "climbing simulator" style you will have a nice time with Jusant, but if looking for some kind of challenge of climbing or a more active game, this is not the one.

the world has been taken by the Calamity and we, a nobody, must save it!

we get an old zelda style map to traverse with dungeons, there's guilds, npcs, sellers, etc.
we are a mage that has the ability to assume many forms, of which we start with one and keep unlocking more as we progress their level that unlock the subsequent, in a kind of tree.
there are like 12 forms or something, as distinct as a rat, a dragon, a robot and a ghost.
some require more than form progressed enough to unlock the following. no new form is stronger than any other, they're all distinct and unique.
each form has 1 unique active skill and 3 other for their class that unlock with level progression.
beyond their own "active" skills, and there's some "passives" that can be earned or purchased. active and passive can all be upgraded 3 or 4 levels with incremental benefits. all skills are highly creative in what they do!
the cool part is that after a while, we can equip our character with the skills from any other class, and also equip 3 passives. this can lead into some crazy builds that synergize well equipping mixed skills from all classes.

but the best part is that the character progression (which goes from tier F up to S) is highly tied to skill usage and doing builds from mixed classes to reach those goals.
like "kill 100 baddies using poisoned rockets after being damaged by your minions". minions are from the mage, rockets from the robot and poison from the rat. stuff like that.
and there are enough of these for every character that are very well sized in so that you can keep completing them while upgrading and unlocking characters and these "challenges" will hold up to the very end of the game.
so you can enjoy the whole game completing these all the way.

very chill, very fun.

Tiny sandboxy thing.

Two modes:
1) free construction, no limits, just make a pretty island
2) "record mode". deploy buildings worth of certain points that get accumulated. make use of building synergies to earn more points. after some points earned, new sets of buildinds are unlocked. after a larger number of points achieved, move on to another different island and repeat.

synergies and building placement need to be very well thought of because running out of points and not being able to progress further is actually quite frequent. i made it to island 3 or 4, there's achievement for 30 islands, so can progress further.

not exactly what it appears to be. the idea is nice but it is quite repetitive, you can suddenly be halted from any progress due to lack of points, and there's only like 30 building types.

if you're playing for the free mode and the cosy experience, it's really nice. the "record mode" is interesting but it's too "tight" in its progress systems without many options to balance challenge and fun.

A short (<3h) and entertaining point and click adventure.

A captured little girl find herself in the castle dungeon and must escape avoiding the guards and the evil wizard, solving puzzles with her wits.

Sounds like taken from a children's book and, from a certain point of view, could be?

Simple story, lovely execution, lots of charm, beautiful art, animation, humour.