Fnord

Third update this month! Wow, I’m on fire :P It helps when one of the games was 3 min long, and the other were short. This months theme really gets me to play some varied games, at least. I would not say that the games have been great thus far, but sometimes it’s nice to step out of your comfort zone and play something weird.

Hitman: Sniper Challenge

0.1 hours, no achievements

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It's a 3 min long game. You shoot a person, then you shoot his guards. There's a scoring system, which I guess could create some replay value, but I don't really feel like trying to aim for a high score, particularly as the scoreboard is down.

This game was given out to anyone who pre-ordered Hitman: Absolution, and was also given out during different promotions (which is how I got it), so I was not expecting much, but I thought it would have more than one target.


Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days

3.7 hours, 16 of 59 achievements

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Kane & Lynch 2 is a weird one. The first Kane & Lynch was really poorly received (and was involved in a rather big controversy over at Gamespot, where one person lost his job for giving it a low score). And despite this, they decided to make a sequel. Is the sequel good? Heck no, this is a bad game.

Kane & Lynch 2 is actually rather interesting to play. The game has a very unique aesthetic that it really commits to, even to the detriment of its gameplay. One might even call it a bit artsy in how it handles it (yes, I'm serious). Basically, you're playing more as a camera man, holding a low-quality hand-held camera that followed Lynch around. The screen is a bit blurry, there are visual artifacts and things that would upset a real world cheap camera of the era upsets this one as well (it also has insane camera bobbing, but you can at least turn that off). The game is also very grimy and ugly (intentionally so), which does help sell the idea that you're really a low-life violent criminal who ends up in bad situations that are entirely your own fault for being in.
The actual gameplay is bad. It's a 3rd person shooter, with really poor weapons. The early weapons are so bad that trying to hit something 10 meters away is nigh impossible, which actually makes the early game fights harder than the late game fights, where you have access to better weapons.

The game is really short. At less than 4h, this is the kind of game that you can easily beat in two evenings. Did I mention that this was a full priced game at launch? So they expected you to pay 50€ for a really short game, with an interesting style, and poor gameplay. These days you can pick it up for 1€ on most steam sales. And actually, if you have any interest in the game, I would highly recommend doing so. This game might be bad, but it is at least interesting, and it is worth paying 1€ just to see the unique things this games does.


Air Conflicts: Secret Wars

7.9 hours, 12 of 25 achievements

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Where Kane & Lynch was bad but interesting, Air Conflicts: Secret War is just bland and uninteresting. There's nothing seriously wrong with this game, it's a fully functional arcadey air-combat game where you fly around, shooting down enemies in about 50 very short missions. Everything works, but nothing is particularly exciting, and there's very little one could really say about this game. If you're really itching for an arcadey air combat game, I guess it will scratch that itch, but not much more than that.

One thing that really bugged me about this game is the song that plays when you're in combat. It's used in some other game, and I can't place it. I'm pretty certain it's a main menu theme, and not from the same developer or publisher. So the developers of this game apparently did not make their own music, they just bought it from somewhere else.


Avencast

0.1 hours, no achievements

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Game crashes when I try to start it, with an error message indicating that it's not compatible with my graphics card


Hitogata Happa

0.1 hours, 0 of 14 achievements

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The game stutters, and every time that happens, my gamepad gets unresponsive for a second or two. Which makes the game impossible to play.


Nikopol: Secret of the Immortals

0.5 hours, no achievements

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This game actually works. The problem is that the story is clearly written for those familiar with the source material, which I'm not. It's also very heavy on the pixel hunting. So instead of torturing myself with a game I can't enjoy, I just dropped it.


Midnight Club

0.3 hours, no achievements

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This game technically speaking works, but it has a pretty serious issue: You can't re-bind the controls, and at least the controls it defaulted to with my gamepad are completely bonkers. So I'm dropping this one as well.


adil

That Hitman: Sniper Challenge, I never heard about it but it looks even worst than a demo! That’s quite the accomplishment they did there xD

Fnord

The game is not awful, it introduced the solid sniper mechanics from Hitman: Absolution. It’s just way too short.

adil

I didn’t mean worst as in awful but worst in term of content. 3 min of content, I haven’t heard of an other demo that short!

Fnord

It’s not quite a demo though. It was a pre-order incentive mostly, and you could only get it if you either pre-ordered the game or were lucky enough to snag a key when they made mass giveaways for it.