Release date: 2009

'Brütal Legend' is a third person open world game with some minor RTS elements. You play as the roadie Eddie who gets thrown into a fantasy world, heavily inspired by Heavy Metal. Eddie helps to fight the demons, which oppress the humans living in this world.

The game is full of references to heavy metal. Metal icons like Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy Kilmister and others appear in the game as NPCs. A plethora of heavy metal songs are featured as the soundtrack of the game and I'm sure there are a lot of references which I probably missed because I'm no expert for heavy metal. As I enjoy listening to heavy metal from time to time I thoroughly enjoyed the general theme of the game. While that's of course the major appeal of the game, I sadly think it's about the only one as well.

The game features an okay-ish, but very linear and quite short story. Similarly it has okay-ish, but very repetitive gameplay. While there are a lot of good ideas and funny incorporations of metal into a fantasy world, this does not translate into the gameplay itself. This is especially true for the smaller RTS parts: They are always very similar and on top of that they just don't really work that well. It's quite hard to get your units to do what you want them to do. Another big letdown is the complete absence of a fast travel system and remember that this is an open world game! Therefore you spend a lot of time driving from A to B for some tiny collectible or mission. At least you get to listen to great music in the meantime.

Achievements: Most are quite easy to obtain, the collectibles are a lot but later in the game you get kind of a radar to show you where they are. Since the game's fairly easy, make sure to start the game on Brütal difficulty right away to get all difficulty related achievements in one playthrough. The achievements I am missing are MP or best be done in MP.

Verdict: I cannot recommend the game for story or gameplay. These are okay, but you'll find much better games in this regard. The metal theme however make this game quite unique and if you like metal, I can give a recommendation to try it out.

Release date: 2009

A point-and-click adventure game from Daedalic. The story is nice and there are some funny and witty dialogues in the game. Kind of a spoiler: It features a big twist at the end, which I didn't see coming in the slightest. I don't mind the twist, but I was left wondering whether that was really necessary.

However, I wasn't enjoying the game too much. It had some really hard and absurd puzzles in it, which I couldn't solve by myself more often than I liked. So I relied heavily on a walkthrough at times. I'm however not the most proficient point-and-click player, so you might have an easier time.

Note that I played the game in German, so the following paragraph might not be true for the english version. I normally play everything in English, but since the original version is in German, I went for my native language as an exception. The biggest criticism I have is concerning the voice-acting. The dialogues were probably spoken and recorded separately sentence by sentence. Unfortunately, one then forgot to insert pauses between the sentences. In any case, they now merge seamlessly into one another, which in part leads to the first consonant or vowel being swallowed up in the following sentence. And that definitely makes everything sound very artificial. It was almost unbearable to listen to. Also there were many comma and some spelling mistakes in the subtitles. Maybe that's nit-picking but I don't think this should be the case for a good product.

Achievements: All are obtainable in a single playthrough. There is one achievement for skipping all puzzle mini-games though and separate ones for doing them. So save before you do them, solve them to get the corresponding achievement, load your previous save and skip them.

Verdict: While not really bad, I think there are much better games of the genre.

Release date: 2010

The Disciples franchise is a series of turn-based strategy games, very akin to 'Heroes of Might and Magic'. And by akin I mean basically exactly the same. Only in much worse. There are quite a few things wrong with this game, I only want to point out some:

There are almost no hotkeys. You have to do everything with your mouse. The savegames are sorted alphabetically, so it really makes it hard to spot your most recent save sometimes. And the automatically generated names for your saves are too long to be fully displayed so that you really end up guessing which is the correct save… ugh!

Achievements: The achievements are a mess. 10 are marked as broken on AStats and another 6 I could not get to unlock even by following a step-by-step guide. If you care about your AGC, don't start the game. (Even if you don't, don't start the game).

Verdict: Just don't…