Score: 3

"Tutorial needs to be a real tutorial"

submission: Armored Corps: Deluxe

date: December 21, 2009

I am never a fan of games where the tutorial isn't actually a tutorial. You can't actually play with the controls until you are in battle, and then you can't get help walking through the controls. I also hate WASD games that do not also accept direction arrows as an alternate. Just too many fussy controls and not enough of a playground to get to learn how to use them to be enjoyable. Sorry.

Score: 6

"Eh... Ok."

submission: World of Pain RPG: C3

date: December 8, 2009

A couple of good things:
%u2022 Depth of play is decent. There are a lot of levels, equipment and so on.
%u2022 Pretty simple interface.
%u2022 Graphics are fairly good. Not "Wow!" but nice.

Now for the not-so-good stuff.
%u2022 The music is annoying after the first five seconds.
%u2022 The quest log does not tell you where you really have to go (what person do you need to turn the quest into), so you can fill up your log with a lot of quests you can't figure out where or how to complete. You should be able to pop open a window to see who gave you the quest, who you need to turn it in to, and so on.
%u2022 Magic seems very, very feeble compared to the simpler combat options, such as getting a nice sword. Other than "heal," I didn't use magic much at all.
%u2022 A heck of a lot of "grinding" is necessary to level your character. Always good for chewing up hours, but also gets annoying.

For all that is wrong with the game, there's definitely some good basic game play here. I gave it 6 of 10. Fix the music, and make the quest log more friendly, and you can get to 8 of 10 easily.

Score: 3

"Makes no sense"

submission: Dawn of the Hulker

date: December 6, 2009

I can kind of get what the game was supposed to be about, but it made no sense. The font is hard to read. The instructions are minimal. The music is intrusive and way too short of a loop to be enjoyable. The game commands are confusing and opaque.