Review: 1953 KGB Unleashed

There were many unusual and bizarre experiments by various nations in the early 20^th century, many may know of Germany’s experiments with the supernatural as highlighted by games such as Wolfenstein. Seeking an edge over the enemy, these experiments ranged from EMP devices to spirit warfare and genetic mutation. 1953 – KGB Unleashed is set around supposed experiments during the escalating Cold War.

Warning! Spoilers ahead! But you already knew that.

 

Although I couldn’t find much genuine information about the experiments, the game is set around a supposed series of real-life experiments conducted by Russian scientists during the 1950’s into the power of telekinesis and ‘spirits’. True or not, the oppressive and cruel nature of these experiments are revealed through various documents.

KGB Unleased is a first-person point-and-click adventure puzzle. Waking up alone in a room with no memory of how you got there, you must find your way out of the strangely deserted underground bunker. It’s the usual ‘amnesiac’ start, but it plays its part to the story well enough. You haven’t forgotten who you are, Gleb Ivanovich Nikolayev, a mechanic/engineer sent to the bunker to repair equipment within the facility. The rest of the details are hazy, but a few memories flicker back as you progress through the bunker.

I’ll be honest, I’m not the biggest fan of point-and-click games, but I do enjoy them on occasion. In KGB Unleashed it’s the usual journey of solving various puzzles and figuring out the meaning of various objects in each room. This game features more of the latter rather than the former. More often than not, I struggled to progress due to the obscurity of some elements, and despite the fact that I agree with the logic of each puzzle and the idea behind it, I believe it could have been far better designed. Many elements were misleading, or failed to emphasise the reason for its use. There are several examples I could give, one of which was a simple switch in a safe which gave no indication of what it did, yet it unlocked a door in another corridor that I did not realise until I had backtracked through most of the game to try and discover its purpose. In another part of the game, you have to descend a trap hole and there is a crate in the hole. Your cursor highlights to indicate there is something you need to do with the crate, but while I spent almost 10 minutes trying to open it, turns out it was actually where you had to put the tape recorder. Confusion like this could have been easily avoided by making the object anything other than a crate; a crate I had to break open not two rooms before.

I almost quit outright in frustration upon the first 10 minutes of starting the game. I don’t know if it was just my settings, but the initial two rooms are dark, so you have to strain your eyes to hardly see anything and the incessant alarm tone became annoying and headache inducing very quickly, beating the puzzles to the punch. The game significantly lacks any Russian undertones, with the main character voiced with an English accent. Aside from some radio stations and a few scraps of propaganda, the game could be set in the USA or England and you wouldn’t notice any difference.

The ending became downright bizarre, ending very abruptly with little resolution. In the last area, you find a glass (hopefully) eyeball which you roll under a door. You can then look through the eyeball as if by magic and somehow that opens the door. Now here is a big spoiler for you, but the game stops, tells you that guy who has been talking to you is dead and then shoos you out the exit. The exit, by the way, is a subway tunnel that somehow goes directly into a bathroom and the wall just disappears after you pick up a subway token. It almost seems as though the developers gave up at this point, or just didn’t know how to end the game. It was an abrupt and confusing ending that severely jarred the experience.

Aside from me failing at puzzles, the game also failed on technical levels in many places. It’s very slow to load, which is very unusual for my high-end PC. It could take as long as ten seconds to load one room, yet I can load Fallout New Vegas with 50+ mods faster. It only had to do this once per room though, which reduced the annoyance, but it’s still unusual for a game of this era. I also had trouble with sluggish cutscenes that left me locked in the cutscene long after the dialouge ceased. There was also no option for subtitles, which was a bit problem for me when there was poor audio quality dialogue and I couldn’t understand what was said, making me miss what may have been important plot points.

The game looked decent, and the mood was set as it should have been, but it felt empty and void of any character. With constant backtracking to and from rooms, I tired from walking the same slow corridors over and over. It became a grind and that’s no fun at all.

An engine that just isn’t up to scratch, inconsistent gameplay and design ruined this game, which showed great potential. Some may enjoy the puzzles, I know some people who will get more satisfaction from games such as these than I do, but the price, the length of only a mere 2 or 3 hours coupled with all the letdowns made KGB Unleashed a great disappointment.

And where was all the Vodka? You can't have Russians without Vodka!

A Card in the Hand

Dungeons and monsters and loot, oh my! Don’t forget the precious loot. You can have all this and more in Blue Manchu’s great interpretation of the Dungeons and Dragons formula with Card Hunter.

So far I have slain only a few Kobolds and am still a mere pipsqueak compared to the great Heroes of Legend, but this flash game is more than mere skull bashing. It puts far more emphasis on strategy with a card-based system forcing you to plan your actions carefully for the best results.

Characters have action cards which you play to have them perform said action, and you draw a new set after the end of each combat round, which occurs when both sides of the combat pass their turn because they’ve got no cards left. What you get is random, you might not draw any movement cards leaving you stuck in a possibly bad position. Do you use your weak attack cards to flush out their defence cards or try to finish them off quickly? Has your ranged Spellcaster ended up in melee combat, perhaps your Priest has a handy card to shift them away? It will take clever use of your actions to keep your party members alive, especially during the harder battles, but the whole system is very well fleshed out, letting luck only determine your options, rather than your actions.

The whole premise is made even more fantastic with a cardboard-cutout style design, making it feel very much like a tabletop game. It comes loaded with effects, despite its flat appearance and so far I’ve found the levelling up characters to be both sensible while allowing a great deal of customisation for your personal tastes.

You can play Card Hunter for free, only account registration is required, here. There also isn’t much in the way of gimmicks yet (ie, microtransactions or advertisements), but they are there, but not imposing, which is nice.

Mobile Review: The Room

I went and did it. I actually paid for a mobile game. I always considered buying a mobile app to be a risky venture, mostly because of all the cheap ripoffs. Free apps usually nag you with ads, but I can get past that, they need to make money somehow after all. I always knew the notion of buying a game should mean that I got the whole game, and wouldn't be held back by micro-transactions and have ads waved in my face every few minutes. So this was my first app purchase, and it was fantastic.

The Room is a sequence of exploratory puzzle-boxes, each new box is found inside the box before, but a complicated series of mechanisms and secrets stand between you and the depths of the rabbit hole. It gets a whole lot trippy when you obtain the eyepiece; an unusual device that can perceive the unperceivable, to view holes in our dimension. Just when you thought the puzzle boxes were hard enough, added dimensional puzzles are just more mind-numbing clubs to whack your brain.

With that said, the puzzles are not ridiculously vague and all are both logical (the ones well within dimensional limits anyway) and all can be solved when you follow the sequence. The hardest point is usually when you start, but they solved this with the eyepiece revealing a fingerprint or other marking to hint you where to begin. Eventually, things start to get disturbing as dimensions begin bleeding into each other, and while not leaving you on a cliffhanger, the game will be continued in a second part. Despite the shoestring story, it is still effective enough to provide some sort of purpose that doesn't hurt the immersion of the game. You are following a man who perhaps ventured too far down the rabbit hole, in the hopes you don't end up lost like him.

On the tech side, I have a Galaxy S2, not the latest I know, but it still a damn good piece of hardware. The game looked amazing and had fantastic 3D rendered graphics. Even when zoomed in on a part of the puzzle box, it was still impressive quality for a mobile game. The clicks, whirrs and groans of the puzzle box are all very well done and provide a hearty feeling of satisfaction.

The Room, while not too easy, it doesn't frustrate, which I like in a puzzle game. It was shorter than I expected unfortunately, but the reasonable price of a dollar feels balanced for what you get. And you get a very impressive game that is going to at least chew up a few hours and give your brain that little bit of a bashing.

Review: Waking Mars

There have been many movies and games that have depicted life on mars. Some perhaps less alive and some from another dimension, but they all took place on mars nonetheless. I suppose when it comes to alien life, Mars is our next port of call, at least in our solar system. Since we’ve already looked on the moon, the Red Planet is the next most habitable planet that we can hope to find anything on. We’re still decades away from the technology to get there in any reasonable time, but Waking Mars depicts a ‘what-if’ scenario of the possible not-to-distant future of 2097 (but when haven't we said that before?).

With evidence of alien life discovered, a team is dispatched to venture into the depths of a massive cave system to make first contact. Deep inside, the explorers discover a developing alien ecosystem that has lain dormant for countless millennia. With the aid of a nifty jetpack you must navigate to the depths of the caves to find out the source of the alien growth.

Originally designed as an iOS game, Waking Mars received a PC release late last year. The side-scrolling puzzle platformer makes navigating the rocky caverns easier with a jetpack and requires that you carefully develop the alien ecosystem to your own needs to increase the biomass and open plant barricades. While you won’t be blasting everything in sight, that doesn’t mean you’re safe from danger. Some of the local flora is not as safe as you might expect and environmental hazards are your biggest threats. You’ll collect seeds and manipulate the growth of the environment by planting them in particular spots of fertile soil. The game slowly introduces additional plant-life that you can breed and further increase biomass. By the end, you learn the secrets of the ecosystem and why it’s here in the first place.

I don’t play very many space gardening simulators these days, my green thumb has been itching for some extra-terrestrial agriculture. The premise itself is simple enough, but requires some deep thought to actually master, which was quite enjoyable. The slow introduction of various new tools to solve those deeper problems was perfectly paced, though it would have been better to not introduce you to rooms that you couldn’t solve easily without said tools. I spent a good portion of my time fighting an uphill battle in a room I thought I was supposed to have passed to continue the game. The problem with an ecosystem simulator, is that it does just what a good ecosystem should, operate without you, sometimes to its own detriment. I had several rooms that would actually start killing off the ecosystem I had very carefully and painstakingly developed.

The progression of the story also became very confused at some point, with the first half of the game being a linear journey; it suddenly throws branching paths and optional quests into the mix. At that point, you can just head straight towards the exit, but miss out on some of the most important aspects of the story, which seemed a shame. It relies on you to have a genuine curiosity to find out the truth and with it having built a decent story up until that point it feels like the game is giving up on itself. A real shame, because the game does so well up to that point. The characters are well voiced, though their dialogue occasionally breaks the mood. The AI character ART was also an interesting addition to provide support during your exploration, but after a while it was grating and annoying and seemed to grow worse as the game went on. Occasionally the characters begin talking in scientific terms, and in the early game they do well to simplify it so you can understand, but by end game you’d need to be a space alien botanist to understand what they are talking about. Does that job even exist yet?

I definitely applaud the game for its unique idea and implementation, but the rest of the game pales in comparison. Considering the game was developed for mobile, the graphics are smart, but simple in design. It reminds me of paper cut-outs, similar to ‘And Yet It Moves’, but just trying much harder to not look that way. I got seven hours out of Waking Mars, which is pretty decent for a $10 game and although the rest of the game is pretty lackluster, the concept was new and enjoyable to experience.