Recent reviews by SandTrout

Can't play it. It constantly crashes in the first 5 minutes.

This game is the true sequel to the original Alien. I love Aliens, but Isolation is atmospheric, truely scarry, and probably the most suspenseful game I've ever played.

Great CRPG with decent character writing and interesting deviations in the plot, depending on your choices.

The biggest issue from my perspective is the mechanics aren't super intuative. That's not to say they're bad, as they are certainly interesting in how they are different, it just takes some getting used to.

The graphics also aren't up to modern AAA standards, but that's to be expected, and I don't think the game suffers significantly from this.

Further refinements on the mechanics, with significant improvements in Decking. Also, at risk of a spoiler, always bring the "cockroach" on your missions if you have lots of etiquettes. It's comedy gold.

The writing of the main plot and characters is solid as ever, but I think Dragonfall beats Hong Kong in terms of the characters, as they just seemed more engaging to me. That's more credit to Dragonfall than criticism of Hong Kong.

Again, lots of mods are out and about that are worth playing, so this game will get you many, many hours of engaging play beyond the campaign.

One criticism I do have is the Extended Content is relatively weakly written, by the standards of these games. While it does follow fairly directly from the events of the main campaign, the story feels "small" after playing through the main campaign. Past games have your character get progressively deeper and exposing progressively more disturbing events over the course of the plot. That works wonderfully. The extended content story just seems petty compared to the main campaign. Still worth playing, though.

Out of the 3 shadowrun games that have been released in this series as of this review, I think this one has the best characters. Both your team and the antagonists generally come accross as real people with different personalities and motivations for their actions, with only a peppering of psychotic-evil characters you feel no sympathy for.

Additionally, the developers have refined their mechanics from Shadowrun Returns: Dead Man's Switch and improved gameplay significantly, especially the cover system.

This game, like it's predicessor, is mostly linear in terms of plot (not really a bad thing in my opinion, just a thing to be aware of), but usually with various means of completing individual runs, and lots of options for avoiding combat.

A fun game with an engaging story. Though the main plotline is perhaps a bit bog-standard to start with, it does have enough twists to make it be both personal, and a bit grand.

The controls are solid enough for the type of game it is, and there are a ton of story mods already available.

My main advice is to do everything you think you need to do before leaving a zone. The game is a bit on the liner side plot-wise, but each of the runs gives you some options on how to deal with them, including several that you can complete without combat.

This game comes across to me as incomplete. The format and powers imply an isometic ARPG, but it's stingyness with ammo and lack of a "merchant" mechanic imply that you should be playing a stealth survival game, but even then, the stealth mechanics, while present, are not robust. The contol scheme isn't especially forgiving of the ARPG combat style either, and the camera is obnoxiously limited.

It might be worth the price on a heavy sale, but it is unfortunately not even worth its base price IMO.

Do not buy this game for PC. The developers apparently dont realize that PC games use these things called "keyboards" these days. All of the tutorials for the controls use XBox controler button icons and you're left with no clue what the hell they're supposed to correlate to with mouse or keyboard.

This is unacceptable and I'm looking for either a mod that fixes this BS or a refund.