Modern PC Gaming

The high end PC gaming market began with the Alienware computer. These systems while highly priced, offered gamers a top of the line system that could play the latest PC games at the highest settings. Since then the PC gaming market exploded until more games became playable on older systems, that and the saturation of the market. Here you will find more modern PC game reviews that required these higher end systems.

Modern PC Gaming

Darkspore

My overall impression of the game is mixed. On one hand, the combat is crisp and fun, especially when you’re cooperating with friends. The abilities are satisfyingly destructive and the heroes that I played all felt unique. It’s like playing league of legends in action RPG flavor, in that you only have a handful of spells available at one time, but a ton of different characters to choose from. There’s a good mix of enemy types with various special abilities you’ll need to adjust to. On the other hand, there are aspects of the game that worry me.

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Modern PC Gaming

Wasteland 2 Review

Every location and they way you interact with the people in those locations affects the world in a large or limited way, depending on how relevant they are to the storyline of the game. Much like Fallout 2, this game is also filled with easter eggs, pop culture jokes, and inside jokes. Exploration is encouraged as the game will reward you with rare items which usually don’t seem useful but they may be useful to a character that you might meet after 10-20 hours of gameplay later. It’s this kind of depth that makes Wasteland 2 as enjoyable as playing all the RPGs I mentioned previously.

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Modern PC Gaming

The Night of the Rabbit

These are not a technical achievement by any means, but sometimes visuals simply resonate with you. The art style here is bright, colorful and shows incredible style and detail. The animations are quite good, especially for the lead character Jerry Hazelnut, a twelve year boy reaching the end of his summer. It is not going to tax out anyone’s video cards, and that is a good thing in this instance as I was able to just settle in on my laptop and run it very smoothly from my bedroom.

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Modern PC Gaming

Game of Thrones

The story is excellent. Fans of the series will not be disappointed on that front. Both of your main characters are well-written and very different protagonists who have very distinct roles in this twisting story. At first their paths are completely disparate, but by the time you reach the last portions of the game, they are interwoven very nicely. There is also a good deal of freedom of choice and some of these decisions do nothing more than change conversation branches, but most seem to have some tangible impact on things like whether or not a character will be around to talk to later in the game.

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Modern PC Gaming

Metro: Last Light

This is a dark game and definitely not for the young gamers, with the ‘M’ rating truly being earned. Killing bad guys with a gun is your typical shooter fare, but taking someone out stealthily gives many different variations of executions with your knife. These are all brutal, but some can seem extra disturbing. Plunging a knife downward into the back of a bad guys neck, knowing you just severed his spinal cord, is a pretty effective way to take someone out, but very graphic in nature.

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Modern PC Gaming

Frozen Synapse

Essentially you are in command of a number of soldiers, who have different weapon types. You move them to specific locations, set them up with options like hiding behind shorter barriers, guarding windows or trying to control intersections by positioning and aiming them. You make these choices without knowing what your opponent has planned. Then both sides ‘go’ and move through their commands, and the sides engage in firefights if they call into each others’ cones of vision.

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Modern PC Gaming

TRINE 2

The graphics for the game are some of the best looking graphics for a downloadable title to date. The level details and landscapes are crafted to make the game strikingly beautiful. Puzzle and level design give you the sense that much thought was given to their creation. Some puzzles can be solved in different ways, and it is the level of detail that adds to this design. A few glitches here and there may force you to restart a checkpoint or two, but it’s not a game breaker to say the least.

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Modern PC Gaming

War of the Roses

Swinging a weapon though, can be a slightly awkward affair. You press the mouse button to swing and then swipe your mouse to swing your weapon in that direction. It works well enough when you get used to it, and these combat mechanics are touched on in the tutorial. That said, I think that this could have been handled in interesting fashion with say, a second analog stick on a game controller as well.

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Modern PC Gaming

Elven Legacy

One returning feature I am not particularly a fan of is the time-based gold/silver/bronze system, where you have a certain number of turns to meet your objective, and it seems like gold in several of these is virtually impossible. When you try to rush to complete objectives, you tend to lose more units and overlook things you might have found if you took the time to scour the map a bit, which is a shame. Still, the rewards for gold completion are usually quite nice – solid gold earning, usually a free troop and it unlocks a parallel mission that does not really affect the outcome, but is interesting all the same.

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Modern PC Gaming

Dungeons

Do you know what one of my favorite feelings in all of gaming is? Sure, there are a handful of correct answers here – like an emotionally satisfying story, finding an Easter egg, beating a friend in multiplayer and becoming lost in a graphically amazing moment are all among them. However, I really, really love stumbling onto a great game that I had low to moderate expectations for. Dungeons unfortunately is not one of those feeling-inducing games.

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Modern PC Gaming

The Wolf Among Us

This is a story driven game that uses its surroundings and language to give the gamer a true feel for each character they encounter. While episode one is a little on the short side, it’s still long enough to introduce several key characters, and even re-writes one well known childhood story. That’s not a bad thing either. The story will give you many choices, and will remember each answer you give. Characters will take note of your responses, and their future interactions will reflect your previous approach to the game.

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Modern PC Gaming

Rage

In each city there will be a shop of sorts where you can purchase upgrades and ammunition. All of the strange items you may find along your way can be sold at these shops. Be careful what you sell though, as some of these items can be used to make helpful items. While shoes can’t be used for anything other than cash, there are plenty of other things that can be used to make useful items. A bunch of rags can be used along with some antiseptic for a nice little health boost, and those are always handy.

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Modern PC Gaming

Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

Jedi Academy captures the excitement of lightsaber combat perfectly and not to far into the game allows the player to select between single, dual or a staff lightsaber. The problem with Jedi Outcast was the amount of tedious levels you had to play before you got your lightsaber, in this game you have it from the start and can customize it to your liking. I tend to favor dual lightsabers in green and purple, I have no idea why. After completing the single player I was actually surprised when I logged into multiplayer to find servers still running and being played online.

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Modern PC Gaming

The Walking Dead Episode 1: A New Day

For the most part my complaints with the game are few. There were a few audio stutters and blips during the dialogue, but it wasn’t consistent enough to really hinder my experience. However one of the most glaring issues wasn’t technical at all. There is a section of the game where a character doesn’t know how to put batteries into a radio, or what kind of batteries it could possibly ever need. This really serves to undermine the believability of that character and to shatter the player’s suspension of disbelief. This wouldn’t have been something to point out in a bad game, but The Walking Dead is otherwise intelligent and well conceived.

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Modern PC Gaming

Warhammer 40k: Fire Warrior

The problems with Fire Warrior, you see, are firmly rooted in its dirty console past. The game sports an incredibly annoying auto-save/checkpoints feature that forces you to replay levels again and again (only to be killed seconds before beating them), has pretty clumsy controls, very poor AI, astonishingly few tweaking options and an obviously tacked-on online multiplayer side. Then, it doesn’t even try to add anything new to the genre and its sole innovation is a rather failed copy of HALO’s shield system. And don’t get me started on the extreme linearity of the thing or the truly archaic need to collect color-coded keys…

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Modern PC Gaming

Homefront

Though Homefront is not really an adaptation to the interactive medium of writer John Milius’ previous work (Apocalypse Now, Red Dawn), you can see their ehem influence throughout the game’s story and setting. The world is intricately and brutally realized and I was itching to join the fight. In short order, my bus was rammed by a Resistance cell in order to secure me, the all-important pilot, for their mission. Unfortunately, the the game’s mechanics immediately got in my way.

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