Best Of

Orbital Racer(1.72 hours): Won a few races and picked up a few sponsors but not going to play it to much since it is a bit annoying/cheap. Flying around makes me think they simply ripped their environments from Shattered Horizon because the Venus space station and Asteroid race field looks A LOT like several things from that game and it is super weird to catch a shape and immediately think of Shattered Horizon. The game itself is a checkpoint space flying game with dmg and weapons. Using mouse and keyboard you can just point the ship and press W, Pyros dream. Since it does take into account energy you have sharp turns and some curving you need to do to be efficient but by the 7th race I was going against hard CPUs and the only thing screwing me over were EMP missiles. This is the real reason I am not going to try all of the courses, the freaking EMP mines and missiles. Mines you can fly around but for missiles you have to launch flares and the flares have a 25% success rate. You can either wait for an incoming missile message or just hold down the flare button and fly the entire race. The issue is when you are racing and close to each other missiles will have a 100% hit chance so flares are not very useful. Just getting out in front and laying on the speed is the only thing that seems to be very useful in the game. Visuals are pretty good for a small release as you get particle effects, light changes, reflections, and some interesting HUD and course markers. If you bought the Ukraine pack you should have a key for this and I think it is worth 45 minutes of play just to see what it looks like. Wish there was LAN or multiplayer built in because it would be a fun party style game for an hour with friends as you play bumper cars on a track.

Games Completed: 180
Time: 12 weeks 78.42 hours

Back 4 Blood(52.3 hours): This game was meant to be a spiritual successor to L4D as the company who made it is the one behind the L4D series. The zombies are a generic virus based 'ridden' creature and the survivors are immune from infection. All of the elements are there: survivors that are stereotypes, safe rooms, minimal plot, melee and shootie weapons, special infected, and 4 acts with segments to break it up. A new component are cards. This is for the ridden and the players so you get variation on the obstacles you have to face every play through but your cards are from a 15 card deck you build after unlocking cards. Here is where things go off for me because there are about 5 cards you have to have in your deck to be effective and survive in the game so quickly you feel handicapped as you can only pick a new card after getting to a new safe room and you spend half an act getting your base cards. Now to continue on the theme of variation weapons have attachments you get randomly and weapons are random drops but attachments are not transferable so if you get a gold early on but the base gun is white you will lose that gold component when you finally find a blue or purple gun and seems stupid. The computer appears to always have an advantage in regards to the variation. Aiming is very tight and things play well enough but it just doesn't feel great and at only 50 hours the game seems played out to me.

Games Completed: 179
Time: 12 weeks 77.7 hours