Unchained (PC) Review

 

Today we are taking a look at Unchained, the F2P Horror Game on Steam. It is easily confused with Unchained, the F2P FPS Game on Steam, which actually looks even more interesting than the Horror one.

Anyway, the Horror Game Unchained has a potentially interesting AI feature. The game actually involves your Computer settings and Desktop into the gameplay. Some say the game interacting with your Desktop is the real Horror. I indeed have to agree. The first time this happened, I actually got quite spooked.

The game is essentially split into two sides. The one side is talking with the AI and using your PC settings to interact with it. The other part is more classic Horror Walking Simulator gameplay we know from most smaller Horror Games. This part, however, was also a bit underwhelming. The Horror elements are mostly audio-based. There isn’t really anything to interact with or look at. The sound effects are pretty decent, though.

The ending of Unchained also feels both pointless and rushed. Just as you thought the game was actually going to start now, it abruptly ends. The ending could have been a good plot point to go on from, but Unchained doesn’t do anything with it and just gives up. It nearly seems like the developer lost interest halfway through and just released the game as is.  

Unchained only has 1 linear ending and features no Steam Achievements.

 

Result:

Unchained had an interesting premise with the AI feature, but sadly doesn’t do anything with it. Once you think the feature might now actually interact with you in a meaningful way, the game already ends. The classic Horror gameplay in Unchained is not strong enough to save the game. Unchained has left a lot of potential unused. It might be worth a look to some Horror fans for the AI feature, but the game is ultimately rather mediocre and left me disappointed.

 

4.5/10

AAA Dynamic Scenes (PS5/PS4) Review

 

I have previously been checking out the Slide Puzzle Games ‘Slide N’ Go’, ‘Avatar Island’ and ‘Splash of Color’ as well as the more classic Puzzle Games ‘HIQ Ace’ and ‘HIQ Ace Unlimited’. Today we are looking at another more classic Puzzle Game called ‘AAA Dynamic Scenes’.

This game has exactly one feature that makes it stand out from other classic Puzzle Games: the name-giving ‘Dynamic Pictures’.

Other Puzzle Games all have static images. This means the background images of the puzzles are constantly the same. With Dynamic Pictures this is different. The image itself isn’t moving around in the background, but the content on the image is. That being said, it’s not like the picture would continuously change around and become unrecognizable after a while. The majority of the content on display stays the same, but you get elements like birds flying throughout the picture, clouds moving around or neon lighting signs flashing brightly. Additionally, you will see weather going on and hear the wind howling or rain falling down while you place the pieces.

This is a really cool element, that freshens things up. You can, for example, struggle to place a specific puzzle piece, but then you suddenly see a bird passing by on this piece and a second later you see it on another puzzle piece, which you actually have already positioned. Based on this, you now have an idea on where the other piece belongs. This is something you don’t get to experience in any of the other Picture Puzzle Games.

AAA Dynamic Scenes feature only 1 Gamemode, which is your classic Puzzle Picture placement. There are 3 difficulties, but those only change the size of the puzzle. The only way to bring in some variety is the Rotation feature. With this feature activated, you not only have to guess the right position of a puzzle piece, but also the right angle for placement. Like most Picture Puzzle Games, AAA Dynamic Scenes also supports a Preview Feature. In this game, it is nearly a bit too generous, however. While in most other games the preview image replaces the placed pieces till it is deactivated to give you just an idea of how the finished image should look like, in AAA Dynamic Scenes the Preview image is being put over the placed pieces and makes it really easy to complete it.

The biggest downside of this game is, in my opinion, certainly the lack of content. The free base game only features 3 pictures for free. This is the lowest amount of any Picture Puzzle Game I have ever played and unfortunately makes the game go stale after a while. I understand that dynamic pictures require more effort to produce, but this amount is simply too low. 42 additional pictures can be purchased for 2 Euro each (That’s expensive!), in small combination packages or with the “All Scenes” DLC for 20 Euro, which includes all of them.

AAA Dynamic Scenes features 24 Playstation Trophies, including a Platinum and 7 Gold Trophies. Unlocking the Platinum, however, does require some effort. You have to, for example, place 1000 puzzle pieces in a row without an error (I recommend Playstation Cloud saves for this), place and rotate 5000 pieces in total and complete 10 hard Puzzles. It should take around 8-10 hours to complete the game. Since the game features both a PS4 and PS5 version, there are even two Platinum trophies to be earned, but there is no autopop between versions. The game might be worth a look for Trophy hunters, if you either really like Puzzle Games or you have a lot of patience. I strongly recommend not attempting to complete it in one setting, however. Instead, I would suggest completing 2-3 puzzles per day over a span of a couple of weeks. This is much more enjoyable and lets you maintain your sanity.

 

Result:

AAA Dynamic Scenes is a strong addition to the Picture Puzzle Game genre. The Dynamic Pictures feature is a game changer. It vitalizes the otherwise more rigid format. It is certainly one of the most fun Picture Puzzle Games I have ever played. Unfortunately, the amount of content of the free version is devastatingly low. After a short while, you will know the 3 puzzles inside out despite the dynamic element and the possibility of rotation. This negatively affects the score, but I would still recommend the game to Picture Puzzle enthusiasts.

 

6.8/10

Hawked (PS5) Review

 

Hawked was an Extraction Shooter from My.Games, who also published games like Warface or Allods Online. The big twist of Hawked was its focus on PVE and in particular Treasure Hunting. You could say it was the Indiana Jones version of Extraction Shooters.

While in most Extraction Shooters you are only focused on collecting weapons and gear that you extract and sell after the match, in Hawked there was a big emphasis on exploring jungle ruins and solving puzzles instead. This is also what made the game stand out in the Extraction Shooter genre. Most of the puzzles were switch and lever puzzles, but there were also some combat challenges. Players needed to solve 3-5 puzzles to unlock glyphs around the map, which would allow you to retrieve a final artifact from a treasury. You then had to escort the artifact to an extraction site while other players were hunting you and trying to steal the artifact for themselves. During Season 3 of the live service, they removed the treasury and from now on hid the artifacts in a final Boss Dungeon instead.

The dungeons weren’t bad, but I always preferred the race to the extraction points instead. Extraction points still existed but became nearly obsolete now. Hawked was always an extraction shooter with a bigger emphasis on PVE than most games, but this change moved Hawked even further into that direction. I do like PVE, but I also believe a strong reason for this decision was the small playerbase of Hawked. During the Open Beta in late 2023 Hawked still had decent player numbers, but even in the first months after launch in early 2024 there was already a severe lack of players present. I encountered much fewer enemy teams during the matches and sometimes my own squads didn’t fill up anymore. It is nearly surprising that the game managed to last another 2,5 years before the inevitable server shutdown.

The lack of players definitely influenced the experience. Where previously you had to hurry up while solving the glyph puzzles, so that other teams didn’t get the chance to third party you and where you constantly had to look over your shoulder while trying to extract the artifact, this all changed without the human competition. While I enjoyed the intensity of these moments, it’s fair to point out that Hawked always had a smaller focus on this pure survival feeling than many other extraction shooters do. Apart from the PVE and Puzzle focus, the colorful comic-book art style probably contributed to this as well. Games like Hunt Showdown or Escape from Tarkov are dark in tone and visuals, while Hawked is a very vibrant game instead. That’s also why a lot of people referred to it as the Fortnite of Extraction Shooters.

There honestly isn’t all that much to say about the gameplay. Hawked was a third-person shooter and both gunplay and movement felt at least competent. If I had to choose, I would clearly give the edge to the movement, however. Sprinting, sliding and climbing animations were very fluent. There were special grappling and rope-swinging opportunities and you could use a hovering board for traversal on water. The gunplay was pretty decent as well, but weaker than in the best extraction shooters. Weapons could have used more impact and sometimes the hit registration just felt a bit off. Nothing too major, but nobody would have been drawn to Hawked because of the gunplay alone.

Hawked featured a large and beautiful Jungle map. It was a lot of fun to explore that map and to search for the glyph chambers and temples. Since the map was huge, you would only get to experience a certain part of it every match, which helped to keep things fresh for a while.

Hawked also had an underwater base as a hub area, where players could relax outside of matches. You could access different settings or functions, similar to many other games, but you could also talk there with NPCs to gather some equipment or progress some background story via cutscenes. While I do think it’s a positive part of the presentation that they included some kind of overarching narrative, it was very bland and forgettable and players who ignored it haven’t really missed out on anything.

In the beginning Hawked only featured regular monsters in the form of reptilians called ‘The Disciples’. Season 2 would add robotic aliens in the form of the ‘The Vektr’, while Season 3 provided us with new corrupted mutants. Each of these factions also had different gamemode queues to face them. I am not entirely sure if it was a good idea to divide the small playerbase even further with additional queues, but what do I know… The gamemodes to play against the Vektr and corrupted enemies were, btw, also paid DLC till the shutdown announcement of Hawked.

This feels like a good moment to also talk about P2W aspects in Hawked. While Hawked was not the most P2W game in the Extraction Shooter genre, it still had some really annoying elements. Players with an active Hawked subscription, called Grail+, not only progressed faster, but they also got an additional sub-exclusive loadout slot. Season 2 and Season 3, furthermore, introduced some of the best gear and abilities in the game and locked them behind a DLC paywall. Players could also pay to skip the grind for gear and boosters. Non paying players could get there too, but it required much longer time to become competitive. At least players in Hawked could never lose their once-unlocked weapons and gear, so there were no purchasable insurances, like in many other Extraction games.

 

Result:

The Treasure Hunting focus gave Hawked a unique position inside the Extraction Shooter genre. It was a good game and fun for a couple of hours, but it’s also fair to say that Hawked never achieved greatness. The best moments were when you got caught in between solving puzzles, extracting artifacts and fighting off other squads. The game, however, suffered from a lack of players pretty early on, which only sped up its downfall. The art style was controversial, the gunplay nothing special and the story was very shallow and forgettable. P2W aspects like a subscription-exclusive gear slot or gear locked behind paywalls prevented the game from ever attempting a comeback. I liked Hawked, but I also understand why it didn’t succeed in a highly competitive market.

 

7/10

Airship (PC) Review

 

Airship is a relatively new Game Creation Platform on Steam, which practically nobody has ever heard of. That’s not a good sign, but I can’t say I am blaming anybody. This already starts with the name of the game. ‘Airship’ is as generic as it gets and I wouldn’t even associate that title with a videogame.

As its main selling point, Airship offers the ‘Bed Wars 2’ Gamemode, which it claims is the official sequel to the popular Bed Wars Game in Minecraft and Roblox. I was originally a bit surprised by this claim since Bed Wars on Minecraft or Roblox had millions of players, while Airship 2 had less than 10.000 total mobile downloads and usually below 10 simultaneous players on Steam. But it turns out, Easy.gg is actually the developer of both the original Roblox version and the sequel.

Bed Wars 2 plays the same as the original, just with a new engine. Each player starts on his own island with a bed that he needs to protect. By looting of resources, players can create weapons and objects to reach and attack the other players islands. A player that loses his bed also loses the match. The last remaining player wins. Bed Wars 2 is fine to play, but it doesn’t feel like an improvement over the original versions of Bed Wars 1. The main difference, however, is, that you often can’t even start a match in Bed Wars 2 or only get 1-2 opponents, since Airship is so unknown.

All the other games in Airship besides Bed Wars 2 are pretty terrible. They all have a very scuffed and cheap feeling. This is probably also based on the fact, that Airship has so few players and none of them are talented game developers. You can’t blame those players for not creating masterpieces on their first tries, but not a single one of those games was actually worth trying out. Some of those games are multiplayer based and some singleplayer experiences. But as I already said, none of them are worth playing. There are no other players to play with and the gameplay is really awful in all of them.

One of the few things worth praising in Airship are the settings. They offer a lot of customizability for visuals, sound and controls. Airship sadly, however, doesn’t offer any controller support, which was surprising, given the otherwise strong customizability.

Apart from two moments, the game always had a pretty dead playerbase, which is devastating for a Game Creation Platform. Usually there are less than 10 people online. Airship also doesn’t offer any Steam Achievements.

 

Result:

Airship is a totally forgettable Game Creation Platform, which will probably soon disappear. The only thing it has to offer is Bed Wars 2 and even that isn’t better than the original Bed Wars. All the other games in Airship are abysmal and could, without insult, be labeled as trash. There are rarely enough players for a Bed Wars 2 match present and none in any of the other games. Bed Wars fans should stick with the original and everyone else should certainly avoid this game.

 

3/10

 

Update:

Something in the game must have broken, since Bed Wars 2 has been removed from public lobbies. Most of the other games have been removed as well and the remaining games all display error messages when trying to access them. Currently Airship is therefore not even playable at all.

Real Cake Maker (PS4) Review

 

Real Cake Maker is the newest Shovelware Game in the Playstation 5/4 F2P section. It was developed by Qubic Games, which in the last couple of months released a bunch of free Playstation Games. Some of them, like Puzzle Galaxy or Cup Heroes, were actually quite good. Qubic Games, however, also has a bit of a reputation for publishing huge amounts of Shovelware Games on Nintendo Switch. Real Cake Maker is without a doubt part of the latter group. It’s one of the worst games I have played in a while.

After doing some research, I found out that Real Cake Maker apparently already released in 2016 as a mobile game. Why they released this 10 years later with no improvements on the Playstation Store will probably forever stay a mystery.

You play as a little girl, who is baking cakes for animals, babies and other children. The gameplay of this baking activity is simply abysmal. You occasionally move the analog stick in a circle, press the X-Button, wait for the cake to cook itself, before you put some sweets on top of it and feed it to your customers via analog stick movement. Yikes!

I know what some people will say: “This is a children’s game. You shouldn’t be so critical with the gameplay.” I am sorry, but I have to disagree. No child deserves to be tortured with shovelware crap like this. Moving your analog stick in a circle and occasionally pressing a button is not gameplay. Every interactive movie game has 10 times more actual gameplay. This is just nothing and having to watch the slow cooking animation is pure torture.

But wait, you can also have a cooking party, where you can feed 3 participants simultaneously. Oh god… And there is also a small coloring book activity that is completely disjointed from the rest of the game and was apparently ripped straight out of one of Qubic Games other games called ‘Coloring Book’.

The visuals of Real Cake Maker look like something from a 15-year-old crappy phone game, certainly not a PS5 or PS4 game. The developers put no effort into this.

But there are, of course, multiple purchasable DLC. Only 3 Cake recipes are available for free, but you can buy a dozen more in the Playstation Store, plus 100 additional skins… Jesus Christ…

The game features one of the easiest Platinum trophies you could imagine and 11 additional gold trophies. So it might be worth a look for trophy hunters, but the platinum takes around 30 minutes to unlock and I certainly regret spending any time on this trash game to review it, but maybe I can at least warn a couple of people before trying this out.

 

Result:

Real Cake Maker is abysmal shovelware trash and I don’t think it’s a game suited for children either. Any child, who is old enough to understand what is going on on the screen, will be underwhelmed by this and any kid younger than that should either not play videogames yet or watch their parents play something better. There are many good games also perfectly suited for a younger audience. There is no need to torture anybody with shovelware like this.

 

1/10