[DustyShinigami]

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge - Special Edition

Positives:

+ 2D graphics and artwork are colourful, detailed, very faithful to the original, better than in the first Special Edition, and fantastic looking. Animations are much better this time around too - some characters have a 3D-like quality to them, such as Rum Rodgers and LeChuck. And apart from Guybrush's new and better hair style, he now has 'idle' animations.
+ Voice acting is top-notch. I found that the voices for each character were spot on. They all had a distinctive personality and quality to them. Praise goes mostly to Dominic Armato (Guybrush), Earl Boen (LeChuck) and Neil Ross (Wally). Like the first Special Edition, I found the added voice acting helped make the game even funnier. And related to the voice acting...
+ As in the first Special Edition, you can switch between the Classic mode and the new updated mode at any time. But now there's an option to enable/disable voice acting in Classic mode.
+ Music and sound effects are great. LucasArts have done a great job in recreating/mimicking Michael Land's score with modern day instruments, musicians and equipment. And although not perfect, the music changes/transitions based on iMUSE are done quite well. This is evident in the PC version more, though.
+ Like the first Special Edition, the hint system makes a return. Not only that, but now there's an option to highlight every object in each scene.
+ Interaction is now similar to The Curse of Monkey Island and Full Throttle. Holding down the left mouse button on an object will bring up a few icons/actions that can be performed. Moving the mouse left/right will allow you to scroll back-and-forth through the available options, and releasing the mouse button will make Guybrush perform that action. I found/find this much better than having to scroll through all the different commands with the mouse wheel, although that can be done as well. The game even supports an Xbox 360 controller as an alternative.
+ Bonus content has been added to this Special Edition. Throughout the course of the game you will unlock artwork/concept art that can be viewed from the main menu. The artwork ranges from original concept art, from the LucasArts archive, to newer concept art from during the making of the game. There's also an option to enable/disable audio commentary from the original creators - Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer. When a prompt appears during certain parts of the game, a piece of commantary will play by pressing the corresponding button on screen. The commentary tracks are funny and insightful.
+ The game itself - the original and the remake - is longer than the original, funnier and has more puzzles to solve, which can be done in any order.

Negatives:

- The remake is missing the intro credits
- Pathfinding is a bit of a pain with direct control
- There are a number of timed puzzles. Thankfully, this issue has been fixed because of the patch for the PC version. There's now a slight increase (a couple of extra seconds) to perform an action on time. Even though this quibble has been fixed, I still get a bit annoyed with LeChuck at the end. When I'm trying to collect the ingredients needed I'm always getting caught by him.

Overall:



Another great Special Edition! Roll on the next one! *hintay of the Tentacle*hint* or *hint*Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis*hint*

[JemyM]

Ankh III: Battle of the Gods
Imagine Monkey Island in 3d and with an egyptian setting and you get the Ankh series. That means a place where everyone is nuts and crazy and despite the ancient setting the references to the modern world is plenty.

Story
In earlier titles we met Assil, the young egyptian lad and his girlfriend Thara. As the game begins they live together and Assil still have the Ankh. Suddenly balls of fire rains down over the landscape. Turns out that every 1000 years there's a battle between Gods about who will be the next ruler. Horus, trapped in the Ankh, needs Assils help to win the battle and hopefully get his body back. Seth, the evil god, have everything in his favour and it's not pleasent if he wins.

This is an adventure game and as a such the game lives on it's story. Sadly to say I personally didn't find the 3rd game as likeable as the others. I might have grown out from it but I remember laughing much more to previous titles than this one.

Engine: Graphics & Sound
Ankh III uses a yesterday 3d engine with some modern effects. Visually it looks like a game from the early 10'ies but with a lot of color sparkled on it. The Animation is clunky, cutscenes are badly animated. While not technically impressing, the artwork itself is excellent with an overly cartoonish feel. The game have an excellent cast of voice actors that do their job well. The music does it's job. Overall Ankh III feels like a decent attempt.

Gameplay
When the 3d craze set in and adventure companies went 3d, the results were almost aways bad. Many times they tried to use the 3rd person view, moving the character around with WASD like a shooter. Ankh do not do this, instead it carry over the classic point & click interface from older titles, click on the ground with left to move, use the right to interact. When you move into a different section of the same room, the camera switches. I think this is a good choice and it feels ok. My problem however is that it's often difficult to see where you can go to change the camera view. Also, important objects might still be covered by objects in the forefront. In the first part of the game there was an oven behind a chair that had to be clicked trough the chair and could barely be seen. Other times, the room was too dark to distinguish objects that was interactable. Art design have some blame here, I wish that key sections had been lightened up a bit more to make them more obvious. I found myself missing the eyeglass function they had in Secret Files: Tunguska. Puzzlewise there were plenty of puzzles that didn't make too much sense to me.

Final Conclusion
Reading my Ankh II review, I wrote "second game of the series and yet again it's absolutely hilarious". Ankh III is perhaps the end of the series, I wouldn't mind if it is really. I laughed a lot to the first two, but the third... I don't know. I didn't feel as wanting for a sequel as I did at the end of the first and second game. The best thing I can say about it is the voice acting that is still excellent, but that's about it.

[glimmertwin87]

Finally finished the first Discworld game yesterday, started it many times before but always found it too hard.

Voice acting and humour 10/10
But……puzzles that make no sense 5/10

[haptsonir]

Finished Gabriel Knight 3 today. Really well written and an excellent game despite some bad puzzle design. It's one of those games that, if given a honest numerical rating, will come out looking worse than it actually is when played, largely thanks to the tight writing compensating for poor design. Everyone here is probably familiar with it, but so as not to spoil anything I'll just heartily recommend the game if you haven't played it yet.

Onward to GK1 and 2.

[Little Writer]

Finished "Overclocked"!

Man, what an engaging game. I could play through it again immediately! I've heard people being disappointed with the ending, but it looked fine to me. Sure, perhaps not that original (I once wrote a story myself about

Spoiler:

students being brainwashed through subliminal messages on computers

), but it's all very nicely executed with decent graphics and fun gameplay, though handling the recordings does get some getting used to.

[huf]

Finished Machinarium some time ago.

Splendid game, with some challenging puzzles and some not so difficult. The game should have been a tad longer, though.

All in all it left me with a good taste in my mouth and the desire to play more of these types of games.

I recommend it to everyone.

[SamuelGordon]

Finished scratches director's cut and the horrible scratches last visit.

Hated the annoying puzzles, the small unlocked locations, the illogical order of items and eventually the story. To make matters worse, scratches last visit ruins it even more with a cheap adventure add on and conclusion.

Scary? hardly, weird it reminds me of resident evil 1&2 but atleast the locations there were really huge (mansion worthy unlike scratches).

[Fien]

I just finished Sierra's Freddy Pharkas. What a game! I had a great time with it, although the solution to some of the puzzles were too farfetched for me.

Spoiler:

No clue for the snails problem, other than talking to the barman and why would you do that. The church key as a bottle opener? Man, I hardly noticed those pixels! Worst of all was shooting the nitrous oxide from the gazebo of all places, I would never have figured that out in a thousand years.

But everything else was oozing the famous Sierra/Lowe/Mandel quality. Superb voiceacting, two excellent narrators, hilarious writing. Loved the "bloopers" in the credits. It was an eyeopener for me that Gilbert Goodmate apparently got the idea for its funny "bloopers" (the one thing I liked about this mediocre game!) from Freddy Pharkas, including comments about animals injured.

[drunk]

Yesterday I finished "Blade Runner" for the first time (and definitely not for the last time). It's a fantastic game (as great as the film) and I am looking forward to discovering all the different endings.

[Little Writer]

Never got into Freddy Pharkas. I played the demo, but I don't think I finished it. When you meet that woman with the missing mole, that was enough to tell me this wasn't my type of game.

[Tiocfaidh]

Originally Posted by Little Writer

Never got into Freddy Pharkas. I played the demo, but I don't think I finished it. When you meet that woman with the missing mole, that was enough to tell me this wasn't my type of game.

Didn´t the demo feature exlusive content ?
I´m not sure.

Anyway, I might check it out someday.
Liked most of the Larry games.
Al Lowe is some funny dude !

[DustyShinigami]

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction

Positives:

+ The graphics are great, environments are detailed, it has good use of light and shadow, and good physics.
+ Very good voice acting - especially Michael Ironside as Sam Fisher - and it has good use of sound effects and music. The music is never intrusive and there's some pretty nifty pieces that play at appropriate times. For example, once you've been detected by a large number of enemies, the game will play music that's more faster, tense and exciting. It has a very 'action movie' quality.
+ The story is generally well told and interesting to follow. It still involves politics and terrorism, but it's more Sam's story as he tries to hunt for the people who are responsible for his daughter's death, hunting/evading his former employers, and facing his inner struggles.
+ The gameplay is great fun. Although the old formula has gone, the game's combat and stealth mechanics are a blast. There's still that sense of being a predator and playing cat and mouse with your adversaries. Sam's leash, from Third Echelon, has gone and your free to handle your situations however you want. You can still hide in darkness, which causes the screen to go black and white, whilst picking off enemies from afar or close by. This can either be done with hand-to-hand takedowns, which will give you the option to mark and execute a certain amount of enemies, fire, and Sam will take them out on his own with one headshot after another. You can use enemies as shields, you can take enemies out the standard way by using weapons (preferably with a stealthy silent pistol), you can use gadgets such as: EMP grenades, sticky cameras, proximity mines, frag granades, and even a piece of glass for looking under doors to mark targets. Weapons, and certain gadgets, can be upgraded by completing side challenges and getting points to spend. And finally, there are also environmental hazards, which can be used to your advantage. These, however, can trigger unwanted attention in the form of enemies calling for backup.
+ Multiplayer is good fun too. Hunter is my favourite mode, which can either be played solo or with someone else. The objective is to clear rooms/stages of a certain amount of enemies. Stealth is strongly recommended here. The last thing you want to do is trigger unneccesary attention by getting another 10-15 targets on top of the 10 you originally had to deal with. Other modes include: Last Stand - defending an EMP Warhead from waves of enemies a la Gears of War 2's Horde mode -, Face-off - taking out more enemies than another player before the time runs out -, and a co-op prequel/prologue to the main storyline. All these modes feature 2 new playable characters: Archer and Kestrel - an American and Russian field agent.

Negatives:

- The single player campaign is far too short. Because of the reliance on fast paced action, compared to the older Splinter Cell games, it won't take very long to get through the game.
- Single player suffers from a bit of screen tearing and frame rate drops. Strangle really because, apparently, the game uses an older version of the Unreal Engine and isn't the most graphically amazing game to date.
- Multiplayer suffers from lag quite a bit. It makes those fast paced modes a bit irritating to get through, to be honest.
- Old classic Splinter Cell formula has been done away with.

Overall:



No idea where Ubisoft are going to go from here. They've done away with the classic Splinter Cell gameplay, and Sam is no longer working for Third Echelon anymore. No employer = no missions. And his own personal mission involving his daughter is now complete. Hmmm...

[JemyM]

Dragon Age: Origins
Finishing every quest in the game took me 13 days in total and I have played the game 6-16 hours per day. I think I got the most satisfying ending possible as far as I concern. I played and elven mage who I leveled into buffing/healing magic. I was happy to see this work very well.

Story
If you have played previous games from Bioware, you know what you can expect here. Storytelling share a similar formula to games such as Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect.

As the game begins you get to play one out of six origin stories. Since I was a mage, I got to play a short story in which I was an aspiring mage in a closed school. Mages took the blame when the "blights" were created, so the school is almost a prison, guarded by templars. Blights can be explained as an infectous zombie horde, lead by an archdemon.

Once the origin/tutorial is completed you earn your generic title (compare with Bhaalspawn, Shardbearer, Shepherd etc), this time it's "Warden". A Grey Warden is a kind of heroic band who specialize in opposing the blights as they pop up.

In many ways Dragon Age is a very traditional fantasy story, probably inspired by the Lord of the Rings. Your main quest is to gather an army to lead against the horde, gathering the mages, the dwarfs, the elves and the humans. Of course there's a lot of sidequests on top of that, as always the allies you take with you each have a story of their own.

Each section of Dragon Age is well written. Considering the length of it, some parts could have leaned only on it's written content, sparing long sections of fighting/looting. Some areas felt a bit too drawn out for my taste, but once I got trough and back to the story, the game became interesting again. That said, I didn't think the overarching plot were the best I have seen from Bioware, but the origins felt fresh. Sadly they aren't going to use those in DA2.

Engine: Graphics & Sound
One who played Neverwinter Nights can definitely recognize the engine. This is very much Neverwinter Nights 2, although with new map sections. Also optimized for 5 year old consoles, it isn't graphically up to par with modern PC games. Still, graphics isn't everything and the artdesign that went into amazing areas like the Dwarven City or stuff like armor was quite amazing. Also there were two graphical improvements I noted from NWN2, first traps can actually be seen now, they are more than red boxes on the ground. Also there are death animations for the bosses. Especially when fighting large opponents you can see one of the characters jumping up on top of an opponent, slaying it.

DA:O on PC supports both 3rd person (like Mass Effect, Gothic, Risen, Divinity II etc) and Isometric (like Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights 2 etc). I used both. Isometric was a must to be able to properly control area spells, but I used 3rd person in cities to see distances.

There are a lot of gore in DA:O. While fighting you see your characters getting more and more splattered with red. Interesting touch.

If I have any concerns, it's that wizard hats are butt-ugly. I sometimes optioned to not have them since they look so bad. I might even have preferred your traditional cone-hat with stars and moons upon it over what's in the game now. I also thought the selection of wizard robes was rather poor. I only found about 5-6 robes throughout the entire game, most look the same with only color variation.

Like NWN, DA:O isn't optimized for higher resolutions. I play the game in 2048x1536 but had to use a mod that resize things like the inventory window and fonts. Unfortunate I couldn't find a mod capable of sizing the minimap or portraits.

Audio is as expected, rather good. Voice acting is excellent, although sometimes NPC voices are overused. I could actually hear when I met an NPC over a Companion since I recognized the voice actor who made the NPC's.

As usual in modern games it was rare to get catched by the music, but one combat music catched my ear. The music in the Dwarven City definitely reminded me about Lord of the Rings.

Gameplay
One who played Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale or Neverwinter Nights will recognize themselves in DA:O. There aren't that much that have changed, which is a good thing. You have an inventory with a paper-doll with twelve slots (two for alternate weapon), a party inventory similar to KOTOR, a toolbar at the bottom of the screen where you can put all your shortcuts to spells and inventory, your party portraits and health in the top left, a minimap in the top right etc.

DA:O is a tactic rpg, so there are a lot of talents, skills, items, stats etc to boost and a lot of things can happen in a fight that you need to keep track of. I was very happy when my buffer/healer got a "Tactic Achivement", which you get from your party killing 250 foes while you deal no damage yourself. This was the way DA:O told me "play your character you want to play". Sometimes you have to face opponents on your own, but I managed to handle most of these situations, even if having very few damaging spells.

Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, spells aren't a "suite", meaning you have unlimited spellcasting as long as you have mana. When a spell is casted, a timer begins to tick and the icon is darkened. It lits up again when you can cast it again. This worked well so you do not need to rest.

It was great to see proper dialogue again, not the dialogue wheel they had in Mass Effect. At the bottom of the screen, dialogue options are shown, and you get to pick what you wish to say. This make dialogues unique for every situation and sometimes there are alternatives that have subtle differences that still feels better for how you choose to play your character. There are no black & white morality system in DA:O which is great. You can pick dialogue options based on how you feel in the situation and it will probably effect the outcome of that situation, but you do not need to chase orange or blue points like in KOTOR or Mass Effect. Some attributes, like cunning, and skills like coercion, unlock additional dialogue options, so two players with different characters might have different ways to get past an encounter.

Final Conclusion
DA:O is a game for intellectuals. Story, great companions, tactical combat, heavy system to learn etc is precisely the stuff that got me to enjoy RPG's in the first place. It was great to see and play this game compared to Jade Empire and Mass Effect that had the story and great writing, but tremendously poor actual gameplay.

[Little Writer]

Ravenhearst.

I never played a HOG before. I thought I would hate it. Ended up becoming close to obsessed with finding the objects! Hated the picture pieces, though. The door locks were ingenious. Reminded me a bit of those old Incredible Machine games. Some object names I still don't know what they are. Like "half moon"? And I never did see any lions.

[JemyM]

Dragon Age: Golems of Amgarrak
Golems of Amgarrak is a DLC for Dragon Age in which you can import your character or create a new one. If you beat it you will get a few items on your character in the main campaign or in the expansion (Awakening).

Story
You are called by a dwarf who ask you to explore an underground settlement in search for a lost group of dwarfs (including his brother). The dwarf is a dualwielding rogue who joins your party. With him he have a tame Ronto (rhino-like creature) that acts as the party's tank.

Since the DLC is fairly short and set in the same single area, there's not much of storybuilding here. In the beginning the DLC is quite spooky, but then it becomes more about finding your way through a labyrinth, beating very difficult challenges. None of the NPC's you meet are that deep or interesting.

Gameplay
GoA adds a few new game elements to the module. The Ronto get his own little portrait, sitting up-right from the rogue who summoned him. Unfortunately, when the Rogue go down, so do his Ronto. I found this to be a bit annoying, since you might want to use the rogue as fighter, but he go down very quickly and take his tank with him. Also the Ronto takes up too much space in the often narrow pathways, meaning it gets stuck most of the time. Once I even managed to summon the Ronto inside a wall.

Much of GoA means jumping back and forth between differently colored dimensions, but in every corner you can expect a tough combat. Before you get your entire party, this was tremendously difficult for my imported level 23 mage. You do get a respec tome if you want it though.

You get your second companion just around the corner where you begin the DLC, a golem. This golem is interestingly a mage/spirit healer. If you find a few upgrades for him he can cast both group heal and revive and hurl lightning as well. He do not level like other characters though, you have to find upgrades for him.

You should import a character that have a couple of runes with him/her to make the DLC easier. You can attach runes on anvils scattered around the module and they can be replaced if you like. Since you cannot reimport your character back to the main campaign, feel free to be wasteful. This is too bad, since there were plenty of good items in the module, including top healing items or runes.

Reward
There are a couple of achievements to be unlocked in GoA. If you beat the DLC you get a few items on your character in the main campaign or in the expansion. Unfortunately you cannot import your character from GoA to Awakening, probably because one of the items that can be found in GoA is earned by beating GoA on high difficulty. There are also a couple of achievements to be found.

Final Conclusions
If you want a DLC for a Bioware game, grab Overlord for Mass Effect 2. That said, I would place this DLC on an above average scale, even if it's nowhere near as well done as Overlord. If you want a tough challenge and have a couple of hours to spare, feel free to try it out.

[Madskull]

Finished Monkey Island 2: Lechuck's Revenge

Goodies:
-Perfect remake of the 1991 original game
-Excellent hand-painted backgrounds
-Epic music score
-An easy way to switch between the remake and the original game
-Extraordinary sense of humor
-Brilliant voice acting
-Anyone familiar with the Monkey Island Franchise shall be pleased with it
-Implemented original soundtracks
-Many secrets and easter eggs
-Memorable characters
-Story is well written but treads at an inconsistent pace
-A perfect example of what a remake should look like
-Introduced one of my favorite villains ever (not Lechuck)

Baddies:
-The story starts fast, then shifts to painfully slow and then rushes to the ending
-One or two puzzles that don't make sense
-Changed interface didn't quite do it for me
-Pretty frustrating last part
-Confusing ending (at least it would be if you didn't look at MI3)

Final Verdict: 8/10

[JemyM]

Dragon Age: Awakening
The expansion to Dragon Age: Origins.

Story
Half a year has passed since Dragon Age: Origins. THE Warden (imported character) or a new Grey Warden, enters Vigil's Keep, just to find it overrun with darkspawn. After liberating the keep, it becomes the base of operations for exploring the region for clues on a new type of enemy; a sapient darkspawn.

Like in Origins, you get a couple of main quests that each lead you to a distinct area. These areas might be taken in any order. Each place has it's own story and it's own secrets that are fairly well done.

Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal and Neverwinter Nights II: Mask of the Betrayer were direct sequels, Awakening not so. How Awakening and Origins are connected is only loosely revealed. Sure, you might meet some companions again but the first dialogue with one of them almost sounded like he didn't recognize you at all. Awakening is really a story in it's own, and it's far from as epic as Origins. However, it takes the darkspawns into a new interesting direction which I look forward to see more of in Dragon Age 2.

The new companions were all well done. You are likely to grow to like at least some of them.

Engine: Graphics & Sound
While Awakening keeps a similar engine to Origins, I have to mention the improvement in area design. Each of the major areas have a very distinct look from one another. Each area really look new and unique with some really good at design. Origins that look a bit pale and generic in comparison. It even made me stop at one place to take a screenshot.

Gameplay
Like I said in the story, Awakening is more about upgrading than adventuring. You go out in the surrounding areas, then you return to the keep. Between main missions you do political choices, such if you shall protect cities or farmlands with your guards. You can improve castle walls, build exceptional items with the blacksmith (Wade returns from Origins), and help the trade to improve.

With an imported character, expect to be able to go from level 20+ to 30+. There are a couple of new specializations added. The ones I tried was pretty nice. I played as a Mage, and like the first game I begun as a buffer. However, I soon ended up as an extremely damaging mage, despite not spending points in the traditional spells (lightning, fire, ice). You gain two new Arcane branches, one that creates damagedealing fields, which just felt like a manasink to me. The other adds more interesting abilities like resetting spelltimers.

Keeper sounded silly to me first, but once I got used to it, it became the battlespell of choice. It summon branches around you, but immobilizes you. Once there, you can upgrade it to damage nearby foes, drain their health to add to your own, or launch heavy damaging spikes into everyone inside. How damaging? It gave me Heavy Hitter as a mage. The only thing still standing after one such strike was yellow foes.

Battlemage contains damagedealing fields which I didn't care much for, but Stoic gives you mana when you take damage (when you need mana the most) and Hand of Winter was a heavy damaging burst of ice that freeze people around you.

Other specializations was the Legionary Scout that improves fighter-style rogues and Guardian which is a dedicated warrior-tank.

Even if you import your character with a ton of gold, expect items in Awakening to cost A LOT. Good then to know that almost everything you loot will give you a soverigns.

Bugs
Yes. Awakening suffers from some huge bugs. First noticeable bug is that companion approval is usually bugged. In many places you get 100 approval right of the bat, while you have to go slow with others. One companion stayed neutral despite having 100 approval, another ended up at "love" while the companion didn't seem to love my PC at all. Then you have companion quests that simply wont happen or won't complete if you do things in an unintended order.

Another nasty bug that caused me 3 hours of distress to fix with the toolset, is when the PC is supposed to lose the inventory and get it back. If you use bonus equipment from the DLC's, you won't get your items back at all, unless you hack your savegame.

Another bug was a frozen Animated Dead in a place where one shouldn't be. Non party characters ended up attacking it, but it was unkillable. After several replays I finally got past this one. I believe it happened because a NPC tried to play dead on a stair, which ends up bugging him.

Anotr is the Arcane Shield. It's graphics tear up models during cutscenes, which looks quite bad. They should have disabled spell effects while talking.

It seems no real effort have been made to fix these bugs either. I haven't seen any patch, even if someone would be neccessary to make this one a quality game.

Final Conclusion
Awakening is a mixed bag. If it hadn't been for the bugs, I say it's a decent story of it's own, but it doesn't feel like a real sequel, more like an attempt to expand without anything to build on. It progress the story about the darkspawn for Dragon Age 2 more than "what happened with the Warden". Still, I will probably have fond memories about some of the new companions.

[SamandMax]

Got Kane & Lynch 2 yesterday, finished it today. The single player campaign takes about 4 hours to beat, which is extremely short, but it seems like the right length for what they were attempting to do. The entire game is presented as if it was filmed with a handheld camera and it's just pure chaos from the beginning to end, one of the most frantic and intentionally disorienting action games I've ever played. The gameplay is simple and repetitive - the entire game consists of the same shootouts over and over again - but the crazed, fast paced way it's all presented makes it something unique.

[JemyM]

I bet you saw it coming... Leilana's Song. The only thing I could do in Dragon Age now is to chase achievements, or play future DLC's. I have finished everything else there is to the game, except for Darkspawn Chronicles which I intend to save until later. With only 12 days left of summer I guess it's time for another game.


Dragon Age: Leliana's Song
A Download Content bonus campaign focused on the history of Leliana the Bard, one of the companions in Dragon Age: Origins.

Story
Leliana's Song is a prequel to Dragon Age: Origins, dealing with the events that later had it's climax in Leiliana's Companion Quest in Dragon Age: Origins. Unlike Origins and Awakening, LS is completely linear, even more so than Golems of Amgarrak. You pass through 8 areas in a sequence, telling a continous story. Since the future have already been written by Origins you do not have much choice in changing what happens, you are just there to experience the ride. Unlike Origins/Awakening Leiliana's dialogue is fully voice acted, and just like in Mass Effect she never say what the dialogue option seems to indicate.

With Leilana you have a dwarven tank and an elven wizard. The three companions speak to eachother all the time, commenting on everything that happens, much more frequent than in Awakenings and Origins. I guess they couldn't have done this in the larger adventures since it would require too much work and resources, but it was a nice touch.

Short as it was, I liked the story. It was sometimes emotional. It clearly made me decide what to do with a certain NPC if I ever replay Origins.

Engine: Graphics & Sound
Not much to say here. Doesn't really look as good as Awakening, more like reused content from Origins. When NPC's are introduced you get a short flashy screen with the NPC's face, name and some bloodsplatter. This was a nice touch, I wish they could used a similar one in the other expansions. I like how Leilana and her boss have this alternate dialect that makes them sound foreign (which they are).

Gameplay
LS is like playing a light version of Origins. You have a very basic party with a low level mage, a rogue and a warrior. There are shops in which you can update equipment, there are interactible objects you can click on to get codexes etc.

Since your characters are low level you have to use them to their max. Some opponents, like a red boss in the first map, is almost impossible unless you use a really good strategy. If you enjoy challenges, feel free to try LS out.

Final Conclusion
If you loved Leilana or if you enjoy a few hours of challenging gameplay, check it out.

[Fantasysci5]

Machinarium-I have mixed feelings about this game. The characters were awesome, from the bullies to our main lovable guy. I love that even though they don't talk, they express a lot of emotion, like the flashbacks he has if you leave the game for awhile. His little squeeks are adorable, and I really fell in love with all of them really.

On the other hand, I hated how many 'mini' games there were, that required shooting, etc. The Galaga-like remake, the spiders to get a hint...it really took some of the fun away from me, and I ended up dreading them. The shooter one near the end in the robot's head was actually okay, but I just felt there were too many mini games that took the enjoyment away for me.