Pandemonium
My review is likely going to be biased - I was too fond of this game fifteen years ago and really too glad to find it here.
That being said, it would still be a very positive review with quite a positive score even if I were stumbling on Pandemonium for the first time.
I’d like to add that I started playing after being scared by other very negative reviews and, as a consequence, I was positively delighted to discover them to be wrong on more than a few points.
Let’s start with the PROs:
- The music. It was the original soundtrack - and you’d better believe I still was able to recognize and hum along more than a piece. I loved it the first time I heard it and I loved it now replaying it on my PC. I’ve had levels playing in the background just to listen to the track.
– Real player with 18.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best 2.5D Singleplayer Games.
Another platforming gem from the PS1 era is Pandemonium! (1996 and brought to you by Crystal Dynamics)
We embark on an adventure caused by the mishaps of Fargus the Joker and Nikki, a young sorceress. She singlehandedly caused the destruction of their local town by casting a spell from a tome. They quest to reach something known as the Wishing Engine to restore the town to its previous condition.
We have ourselves a “not quite 3D” deal, here. The gameplay itself is 2D, but you can expect the “typical for its time” 3D rendering. There’s a wide variety of stages to challenge, here. Fortresses, forests, deserts, mystical temples… (Even sawmills?!?!) and each house their own cast of troublesome foes, acrobatics and platforming scenarios. The music has a very unique fusion going on, as composed by Burke Trieschmann, instilling feelings of adventure and mysticism along the way. (Dungeon Tower… great example.). The controls are simple, but don’t harbour forgiveness for you - precision is the name of the game. Fargus and Nikki each have their own special ability for you to use at your leisure throughout the adventure. Fargus provides an offensive spin, whilst Nikki has the perks of double jumping. You also have the joy of selecting whoever you wish for every level.
– Real player with 2.2 hrs in game
Nancy Drew®: Treasure in the Royal Tower
Now, THIS is a classic Nancy Drew game, one of my absolute favourites in the entire series, better than any of the newer games Her Interactive has been making lately. The story plot is awesome; very entertaining, there’s no dodgy content in here whatsoever (psychicism, witching, seances, curses, a lesbian character, etc., all of which are starting to be introduced into the newer Nancy Drew games), so there’s no problem there, and it also takes you on an interesting journey through history about Marie Antoinette. But there are quite a few other things in this game that I don’t like. It’s not bad enough that it ruins the game, it’s just because this game is one of the older Nancy Drew games, so it lacks some features that have been introduced into the newer ones:
– Real player with 28.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best 2.5D Point & Click Games.
I played ‘Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower’ when it first came out, a couple decades ago. I remember liking the game, and thought it was done well. I tried to play it again 5-8 years ago and had problems. A week ago I bought it here on Steam; NOT part of any bundle. First time (Steam) play-through took me ruffly 9 hours, even knowing the story, to complete. I missed an opportunity to snoop in one of my 4 suspects stuff; so I replayed the game on Steam a second time. Early in the game, you need to find your ski locker number in your hotel room; then between the hours 9am - noon or 2pm -5pm you need to go try to open your ski locker while Jacques is there. Nancy Drew will realize her ski locker code is not working, and immediately needs to chat with Jacques. After you have chatted with Jacques; quizzed him for information, say goodbye, then say Hello to Jacques a second or third time; without leaving his ski office, and he will give Nancy Drew a new locker to try; which belongs to one of the suspects.
– Real player with 16.2 hrs in game
Mega Man 11
After 8 years later we finall have another classic megaman game. And man it doesn’t dissapoint.
Presentation:
The graphics are colorful and nice. I am not one of those people who hate the idea of this game being 8 bit or modern graphics. To me the 8 bit sprties will always look great and age better in the end but that being said this game looks really good. They also took advantage of the higher quality graphics by making stages have a lot of unique nods. I love Blast man’s stage for example thanks to all those billboards in the background.
– Real player with 60.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best 2.5D Singleplayer Games.
Very good game.
The greatest thing about this game is how gameplay feels.
It plays just as tight and as responsive as classic 8-bit MM games, but while having very fluid and great looking animations at the same time. It shows that a lot of work went into this to get the best of both world.
They learnt from the past not to repeat the same mistakes: in MM8 they added more frames to all anims just because they could, the result felt sluggish. In MM7 the low FOV made everything worse than it should be, but here with a widescreen ratio we end up with good looking characters and enemies of a reasonable size without hindering gameplay.
– Real player with 55.4 hrs in game
Nancy Drew®: The Creature of Kapu Cave
This is the only nancy drew game i have played so far. Some puzzles in the game made no sense and others you had to die a million times to figure out. The Plot seems to lack a few things but it was okay..they couldve added more. sadly the villian characters stood out like a soar thumb. if it had built more into the story line and characters it wouldve been better. Making Characters more mysterious and harder to read, adding puzzles that acually had hints, better ways to buy/ find items (took forever to find certain things). what i hated the most was listeing to the characters lines, there is no skip option for that so everything i already read had to be spoken again and agian. The only reason i like this game is because its point and click. other than thats its a super easy game with stupid problem solving puzzles that are easy as fuck or just impossibe without a walkthrough. 2 outta 5. if you like point and click puzzle games try it out. it may have flaws but surprisingly out of all the stress it put me ethrough i still enjoyed playing.
– Real player with 10.5 hrs in game
I really wish I hadn’t bought this. I absolutely love the Nancy Drew games, and I grew up on Maui, so I thought “Hey, I love Her Interactive, they haven’t let me down before, and I miss Maui and my family, it’d be nice to have a little reminder of home. This’ll be perfect for me, right?!”. But, no. I was wrong. So wrong.
I had actually bought a physical copy of this game when it first came out. However, I was still in Maui at that time, and I had a bunch of other ND titles I still hadn’t played yet, so it got put off. And eventually I moved, one of the discs got lost somewhere along the way, and I couldn’t play it. Recently, I got some birthday money, I found that the ND games were starting to be put on STEAM, and I thought “Oh, perfect! I’ll FINALLY be able to play it!!” But the hype was short-lived. The searching for shells, the fishing, making necklaces, etc. were nice and calming, but they got boring and tedious very fast. ND characters are usually all so vibrant, varied, and interesting, so at first I thought these ones would be the same, especially with the interesting concept introduced at the very beginning of doing stuff, getting novelty money, doing more stuff, and repeat. I mean, it wasn’t the most fun, but it was an interesting concept at least.
– Real player with 8.0 hrs in game
Nancy Drew®: Secrets Can Kill REMASTERED
Unimportant little Rant:
People really want to find any flaw they can with the Nancy Drew series. I have been playing this game series since I was about 5. I’m 20 now. I love the clunky art style, and like 12 fps you get when scrolling around, it’s charming more so than ugly. It gives me a feeling of going back to 2007 and playing these kinds of games all over again, when I couldn’t just find a review or guide to it and beat it in half an hour, but actually had to use the in-game books and phone for clues and help. I guess as younger and younger people start to play this series, they might not fully appreciate it, much like I don’t think I could fully appreciate an N64 game. With that being said, I hope whatever your opinion on the series, you will try to rate it based on the time it came out and not now. It obviously is littered with problems if you think about it from a 2021 perspective, but if you could imagine yourself back in the 2000s, this game was one of the better series coming out for the point-and-click adventure genre at the time. Now you have much better story games like LIS and most of Telltale Games' series, but the Nancy Drew games to me still retain that old flair and charm of early 2000’s point and clicks.
– Real player with 29.0 hrs in game
ABSOLUTELY RECOMMENDED! :) :) :) :) For those who love playing Nancy Drew games, you are going to love this one, because it’s much better than the majority of the older Nancy Drew games. If you read 2 reviews I’ve made on 2 of the older Nancy Drew games (Treasure in the Royal Tower and The Final Scene), and read the problems that are in both of them, none of those problems are even in this one, because it’s actually a remake, that’s why it’s called remastered, it’s a newer and improved version of the original ‘Secrets Can Kill’ one that was made in the 1980s, so it has the feel of the older games, with a better story than the majority of ones in the newer games lately, but has the features of the newer ones, like:
– Real player with 28.1 hrs in game
NiGHTS Into Dreams
I will never shut up about NiGHTS, so if writing this review will allow me to talk about it, I’m going to!
First off, if you love any of SEGA’s classics and have heard a lot about NiGHTS but you’re not sure if you’ll like it, I would HIGHLY recommend you give it a go. This game is really cheap on Steam these days, which makes sense because game itself is 20+ years old so by today’s standards is ‘worth less’, I guess. However, if even eight dollars (or however much it may be in your country, for US it 8 dollars which is pretty inexpensive) seems like a lot to you to be paying for a game released in 1996 that you’re not even sure if good… IT GOES ON SALE SO OFTEN. I literally got my copy of the game for like, $2 I think? And trust me when I say it’s worth much more than just that. You’re getting a really fun, arcade experience that’s very light on PC usage for almost free. Definitely a wise choice, if you’re looking for something like that.
– Real player with 24.5 hrs in game
This is definitely a recommendation, but a bit of a cautious one at that.
NiGHTS Into Dreams is one of those classic titles from the 90’s that had a cult following well after its release. I remember the Wii sequel unveiling hyping people up-a small number of people, but a number of people nonetheless. Significant enough to note on this review, at least.
NiGHTS Into Dreams is also one of those 90’s games that was trying to figure out how to make 3D gameworlds work. Just two years prior to NiGHTS the team responsible for developing it (Sonic Team) released Sonic 3&K. Originally intended to be a 2D game, the team switched to 3D and was more or less at a loss as to how to effectively make an experience that was enjoyable and easy to grasp and handle. They even made a new controller for the Sega Saturn to effectively control the character in the game. It was really just a standard pad with an analogue stick-something the original saturn controller lacked-which goes to show you how new the entire concept of 3D was at the time.
– Real player with 19.0 hrs in game
FrightShow Fighter
The unique hand drawn visuals are creepy, and cute. The gameplay is similar to a 16-bit era Street Fighter wanna be, in a good way. Although characters are either gimped or broken, playing the game is fun, and with rebalancing and reconfiguring of the inputs (which are on the way) this game and it’s kooky cast of characters could be a great entry level fighter. If you’re looking for Street Fighter, Tekken, or Guilty Gear level of complex gameplay systems… slow down buddy, this game was made for tablet. But it’s still vert fun to play!
– Real player with 20.2 hrs in game
An excellent fighter, with awesome music. Controls may be a bit difficult for some to wrap their heads around, but once you get acustemed to them the game becomes a whole lot easier. Great to play with friends!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbG6BhIBu0Q
– Real player with 4.7 hrs in game
Nancy Drew®: Message in a Haunted Mansion
I remember why I don’t like these early games. Between the weird characters, old graphics, and dull plot it does little to excite. Worst of all, I found myself having to call for help every other second because the gameplay is so arbitrary. It is mostly a guessing game, and I still have no idea if I did everything I was supposed to. I know I missed the seance, which caused me to worry that I was going to have to restart the whole game, but I managed to finish it. My interactions with Abby were just non-existent. Also, the dumbest second chance in the series has to be Louis realizing you snooped through his stuff simply by you saying you saw a phrase in a book. It could be any book Mr. Guilty. Overall, I wish I had just saved the $3 and ignored this game.
– Real player with 16.4 hrs in game
The second Nancy Drew game I’m (re)playing and the third in the series, although I don’t think I ever played this one before.
It takes place in San Francisco, but you spend the whole time in a Victorian mansion that a friend of a the Drew family’s housekeeper is trying to renovate to turn into a B&B. Something I like about the Nancy Drew games is how they try to incorporate the history and culture of a place. This one features a bit of Wild West/Gold Rush history (with made-up characters for the game) along with the influence of Chinese immigrants. In fact, get a notebook out if you play this, because a game-long puzzle has you collecting Chinese characters (which the game told me are called hanzi) that you will need to be able to distinguish. My Chinese handwriting is way better than my handwriting with the latin alphabet, but I also spent like 10x the time and effort.
– Real player with 9.9 hrs in game
Nancy Drew®: The Silent Spy
Overall, I’d give this one a 7.5/10! I liked the story and the puzzles were a good level of difficulty, perhaps it was on the medium side. Some of the characters were great, some were alright. The setting of this game was a good one as well, however there weren’t that many places to explore. I’m glad that the “chore” type stuff in this one was super minimal - barely there at all. I also liked that most of the resources you needed were with you most of the time.
One of the weaker points to this one was that there was a lot of repetition in the conversations with the characters. I think Nancy asked the same questions like 10 times. But because I liked most of the characters enough, it was not unbearable, and you can skip through them. It also felt like a relatively short game compared to some others.
– Real player with 14.6 hrs in game
Scotland. Secret agent themed brain teasers. Scotland. Archery. Need I say more?
Seriously, if you are a long time Nancy Drew game fan, this one hits all the marks, not to mention it’s a rare and responsibly told foray into Nancy’s canon and they do such a good job with the story. The game flows well and there always seem to be something to do, even in lulls
(of which there were few). It has a good range of puzzles, ranging from fun, to medium to challenging (for me these are always the ones where you simply use association and intuition to put the clues together, and ultimately solve it using trial and error). Be warned there is a lot of text/letters to read and lots of dialogue.
– Real player with 10.5 hrs in game
Nancy Drew®: Warnings at Waverly Academy
Ah, Nancy Drew…these games were my childhood. My younger brother and I would play these games over and over again when we were kids. I received two of them for my ninth birthday, and from then on, we were hooked on mystery solving! Our teamwork always made the gameplay shorter, but we always had so much fun together! When I told my brother that I had purchased another one, he was very excited and agreed to help me with this one. I’m currently a student at an all-women’s college, and he’s getting ready to go to college in September, so I figured it would be good to compare my school to the school in the game while teaching him some of the basics of college life. (Okay, this particular academy isn’t really college, it’s a boarding school, but still…)
– Real player with 31.1 hrs in game
Most Nancy Drew fans say that this game is one of the best in the series. I’m not one of them. Every single character is unlikable in some way, and not in the good ‘written that way on purpose’ sort of way. I can tolerate a lot of bad stuff from a game for the sake of good characters, but they’re all awful. ‘Rachel’ is fine (if you ignore that your only interactions with then are focused entirely on doing her homework) but was so focused on her work that you never got a sense of her personality. That’s the nicest thing I can say about her. Corine is nosy and manipulative, Leela is a boring and single-minded minigame machine, Mel is a tryhard edgelord whose popularity with the fanbase baffles me, and Izzy is written to be ‘the unlikable one’ in a world where all the other girls are so awful that she has to be over-the-top to stand out as the one who is INTENDED to be awful. The albino squirrel who stole my MacGuffin was my favorite. I only played this a second time through because everyone insisted it was great, and I wondered if I was wrong. I wasn’t. At one point, I spent half an hour making fake sandwiches in the school’s cafeteria, because I would rather do that than spend time with any of the characters. If you like chores and catty drama, this is the game for you. I love this series overall, but for me, this one ranks at the very bottom, along with Midnight in Salem, The Shattered Medallion, and Creature of Kapu Cave. However, I’ve been told that I’m one of only a few who thinks this, so maybe give it a try.
– Real player with 17.7 hrs in game