GameSessions is a digital distribution platform that encourages trying before buying. Their platform allows you to download and play full games for a limited time trial. If you are happy with the games, you can buy Steam keys from them.
The best thing about GameSessions is they seem to have regular game giveaways. Be wary as it is not as simple as getting a DRM-free download or a Steam Key. Here is what you need to know.
A GameSessions giveaway allows you to play a game without a time limit. However, the game is tied to your GameSessions account and it is a GameSessions version of the game.
Being a GameSessions version means two things:
1) Multiplayer systems that uses Steam or other platforms does not work in a GameSessions game.
2) A special game launcher is used to start the game and this launcher requires an “always-on” connection to the GameSessions servers. If the server connection is severed, the game stops. Note, I did manage to play for a couple of minutes after an Internet connection drop-out.
A special installer must downloaded to download the game. The installer cannot resume downloads if it is closed. So, if you need to reboot or the PC crashes, the download will have to start from scratch. The installer can pause and resume downloads if it is kept open.
A GameSessions tray applet/icon/thing loads when Windows boots and there is no option to stop this. If you don’t want it taking up space unnecessarily, you must disable the startup manually in the Task Manager. Regardless of the tray thing, there is always a GameSessions Hub Service that loads. I think this is required for installed games to run. To start a game without the tray icon, just run the shortcut installed on the Desktop or the Start Menu.
When playing a game, sometimes a little message pops-up in the bottom right corner. So far, I have only seen GameSessions messages, but I guess it could display ads too.
When you exit a game, a window pops-up advertising for GameSessions.
If you can tolerate all of the above, then GameSessions makes for another fine way to acquire free games.
Trying out games is not bad either, but it is not all pros and no cons over having a demo version of a game. Some games cannot be trialled properly within the given time limit and some demos are smaller to download. It is still an option though and can be handy.
Assassinate targets around the world in any way you see fit. Then try to do better by completing challenges, escalations and contracts involving different objectives and methods. HITMAN 2 is like a playground for the wannabe assassin inside your soul.
Pros
The main reason this review is titled HITMAN 2 and not HITMAN is because you can play all the story missions you own in HITMAN with HITMAN 2. This means you get to use some nifty new stuff that was not in HITMAN.
HITMAN 2’s “try before you buy” incentive is even better than HITMAN’s. The first mission, Hawke’s Bay can now be played for free in HITMAN 2. A full tutorial plus one complete mission! There is no reason not to try HITMAN 2 for free… Alright there is one reason. Not a good idea if your PC is not powerful enough to run it.
Each mission outside of the prologue takes place in a big open-world map. HITMAN 2 is as much about exploring as it is about stealth and assassinations. There are so many places to explore, which opens up numerous paths to follow and allowing many different actions to be performed. It is up to you to figure out how to string together all you have learnt, to reach and assassinate your targets. Difficult? yes, but also great fun with lots to discover.
If the game is not difficult enough, there is a whole range of gameplay options for turning off hints/guides/aides. Turning them off gives a more immersive experience, so I am sure some people will like having these options. Make sure to set the gameplay options to default before playing the tutorial or else you may not be able to perform some of the actions they tell you to.
HITMAN’s graphics were excellent. HITMAN 2 looks even better. The world is incredibly detailed and everything and everyone in it looks great. I cannot run the game at full specs on my PC, but it still looks excellent.
There is a lot of replayability in the form of bonus missions, challenges, escalations and contracts. Bonus missions are self explanatory. Challenges are basically guides for different tasks to do during story missions. As you complete them you get rewarded, sometimes with experience points and sometimes with equipment. Escalations are missions that increase in difficulty each time you complete them. The difficulty increase is in the form of more conditions to fulfill. Contracts are missions made by other people. The contract creator determines who the targets are and what conditions must be met to complete the mission. They all use the same maps as the story mission, but they are different enough to make things very interesting.
Since HITMAN, they have added an easier casual difficulty. As they say in the description, “You experiment and have fun. Toy with targets, blow things up and take chances. This is about making a general mess, running and hiding to see what happens. And then doing it all over again.”. Wonderful for people like me who are more like Agent 86 than Agent 47.
The AI is very believable. Security guards act like security guards and will try to find you and flank your position if they know where you are. Ordinary people will sometimes be stunned in their place and other times panic and run off.
The audio is top-notch. The dynamic music mixes together very well and adds to the atmosphere of your current situation. All the sound effects sound realistic. The speech for everyone I have heard so far, sound natural.
Cons
An “always-on” connection is required to play the game properly, even for single-player. There is a privacy policy that must be agreed to for this always-on connection. Without a connection the score leaderboards and the mission mastery lists cannot be seen, and the challenges cannot be accessed or completed if you do continue playing. They say that this always-on connection is for a whole host of reasons including the prevention of cheating. You want to stop people from cheating to get a high score, fine. But why prevent challenges and mastery from being available offline? They could have made an independent clone of the challenges and mastery for offline mode. For most people, I guess this is not that big an issue. Alas! My Internet connection is too flaky and it makes me annoyed every time the message pops-up saying I was disconnected and should not continue. Just like any multiplayer game I guess.
Other Points
To get the HITMAN Legacy stuff in HITMAN 2, you must play HITMAN 2 in online mode then exit the game to let Steam install the Legacy stuff DLCs.
HITMAN 2 is a points game. Although the game does not restrict you on who you can kill or how you go about assassinating the main targets, you do lose points for killing non-targets. The cleaner you are at doing the job, the higher points you are awarded. Kill too many people and your score will be zero. I do wish they went into the negative just to see how badly I performed.
There is a story in there somewhere. I have been having so much fun just messing around that I have only completed two story missions. Not enough to figure out what is going on.
There is some content that is in HITMAN but is missing from HITMAN 2. The good news is, the developers appear to be converting the extra content to HITMAN 2. I do hope all the extras get converted. If not, I’ll just have to return to HITMAN.
Biases
I was playing HITMAN when HITMAN 2 was released. I was messing around so much that I only just completed Mission One – The Showstopper, Paris when my download for HITMAN 2 – Prologue finished. After trying out HITMAN 2, it was clear that I might as well play the HITMAN missions in HITMAN 2.
This is more of a “HITMAN 2 with HITMAN content” review rather than of HITMAN 2 good and proper. I do not have any HITMAN 2 content outside of the prologue missions, so I don’t know what the new content is really like.
HITMAN was the first Hitman game I played, followed very closely by HITMAN 2. Or should I say HITMAN 1.5?
The only stealth games I have played before HITMAN were Metal Gear Solid 2 and The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. So far, I have thoroughly enjoyed all the mentioned stealth games.
Play as Indiana Jones through Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade in one of the most fun ways possible, with LEGO! Build, destroy and whip your way through the scenes from the movies and have a good laugh at the funny LEGO antics.
Pros
Most of the iconic scenes from the movies are in the game. They have been modified to make the game fun to play and funnier, but they are still easily recognisable.
Hear the music from the movies! The quality is not as good as the movies, but good enough for LEGO Indiana Jones to run around. I am not sure whether all the music is taken from the movies or whether there are some original compositions as well. It does not matter though, as all of it sounds great.
There is a lot of different things you can do. There is the usual LEGO building and destroying as well as collecting studs to unlock stuff. Then there is the fighting, digging, driving, fixing, screaming, blowing up stuff, solving simple puzzles, throwing all sorts of objects and of course using Indy’s famous whip. Everything you would expect from Indy and company.
For the intrepid explorer, there are plenty of hidden areas, artefacts to find and more things to unlock.
It is not Monkey Island, but LEGO Indy makes me laugh every time I play, even when I know what is going to happen.
Feeling stuck? Vent your frustration by breaking everything. More often than not, this will reveal the solution to progress the game. Satisfaction and progression at the same time.
Cons
The cutscenes cannot be skipped. Even though they are entertaining, I have had to repeat levels a few times and watching the same cutscene over and over is just a waste of time. Cutscenes only play in story mode, so repeating a level in free roam mode is not an issue.
Sometimes the camera angle makes it difficult to judge how to jump or get over certain obstacles. Or maybe it is just me since I am bad at platformers.
I encountered one progress killing bug in the last level of Temple of Doom. On the bridge fighting Mr Heart-Extractor, some guards are supposed to appear with swords for you to take to chop the ropes. I played for 30 minutes and quit because no swords appeared. A quick search revealed that this is indeed a bug and one way to work around it is to change the game’s screen resolution to 800×600. A big thank you to BrickRaiders for the solution. Note that I would not consider my machine as a “less powerful PC”, but I still encountered this bug.
Between 01 March 2019 and 27 October 2019, an update for Windows 10 or my graphics driver (or both) caused resolution problems for LEGO Indy. I usually play at 1920 x 1080 but have changed resolutions without any issues. Changing to 800 x 600 to address the above-mentioned bug worked painlessly. Now, the game would keep minimising on most resolutions, including 800 x 600. Thankfully, 1920 x 1080 still works. An interesting workaround is to automatically hide the Windows 10 Taskbar.
The resolution can also be set by manually editing the settings file C:UsersAppDataLocalLucasArtsLEGOIndianaJonespcconfig.txt. Just change the “ScreenWidth”, “ScreenHeight”, “WindowWidth” and “WindowHeight” numbers to the resolution you want to use.
A strange side effect of this resolution display problem is that the progress killing bug mentioned above, changed. I have no problems getting swords anymore. Unfortunately, there is a new small problem where the character gets stuck trying to run on to the bridge from the sides. It is minor and not game breaking, but it is still a problem. On the plus side, there is no need to change the resolution to 800 x 600 anymore.
Other Points
The game is very simple to pick up and play. The difficulty is also quite easy, probably helped by the fact that you cannot die as such. Overall, this makes for an easy platformer that even I can reach the end. After that, there is still quite a challenge for those that seek to find and unlock all the secrets.
The Last Crusade starts off in Venice where Indy searches for the tomb of Sir Richard. There is a level with young Indy, but it must be unlocked first.
Biases
A decade ago, I played LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy alongside LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures on the PlayStation 2. Both games were fun, but I enjoyed LEGO Indy just a bit more.
I have completed the story mode for all three movies. Time to find all the secrets.
I never got to try out the drop in/out co-op mode.
This is my current PC. Just need a post where all the info is in one place for other articles to refer to. I wonder how many times I will say “this is my current PC” as time passes.
Here is a list of all the games that I have played (which means it works) on this Windows 10 PC.
Lifted from the pages of an ancient tome penned by the heroes Jackson and Livingstone, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is a role-playing reading journey of monsters, magic and traps. Choose your hero, enter the mountain and may your stamina never fail.
Pros
Where the book only has dice rolling combat, this game adds an extra layer of strategy with a grid and turn-based combat system. The battleground varies depending on location and the character you have chosen determines how you can attack on the grid. Different opponents have different attack types as well, so you must figure out the best way to attack. The enemy AI is not the best, but the fights are difficult enough.
For those that love the fights, there is gauntlet mode where the reading text is reduced to allow the player to focus on fighting. The characters allowed in gauntlet mode are not the same as story mode so that takes a bit of fun and variety out of it.
The game looks very nice. It does not have state of the art graphics, but the whole figurine hopping around a toylike play area looks very nice to me.
The music is good. Nothing spectacular, but does add nicely to the game’s atmosphere and it sounds better than the music of Fighting Fantasy Legends.
Despite the short main quest, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain has different characters to choose from. Each character has different statistics, skills and sub-quests. All this combined with the multiple pathways through the mountain gives the game a good amount of variety.
Cons
Only ONE game can be played at ONE time. I hated this in Fighting Fantasy Legends and I hate this now in The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Why must they prevent players from playing multiple games simultaneously?
There are not enough shortcut keys! Sometimes the space bar can be used to continue, but that is it. Everything else must be clicked on with the mouse.
There are a few bugs in the game that rears their ugly heads randomly. In the eleven hours I have played so far, I have encountered one blank screen that required the task manager to kill the process and two instances of no options appearing to progress the game. When the options failed to appear, the only thing I could do was start a new game. Quitting and resuming the game would just continue the game at the point of having no options.
Other Points
There is a lot of reading, much like reading a book which is not surprising. There is a lot more reading in this than in Fighting Fantasy Legends.
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain has some plot points which are identical to the Firetop section of Fighting Fantasy Legends. The rest of the game, I can only guess, are greater details taken directly from the book.
The game has four starting characters to choose from. As you win battles in the game, souls are gained to be used to unlock other playable characters. At the time of writing, there is a total of fifteen characters in the main game and another three in a DLC.
For people that want to cheat there is a free read mode. This mode allows you to automatically win battles, choose options that are usually locked for your given situation and resurrect unlimited times. The downside of free read mode is souls are not gained from winning battles.
This may or may not be considered to be cheating, but during dice rolling it is possible to press ‘space’ to shake the dice some more. There is a time limit of about one second before the dice stops where you cannot shake them, so it is a bit tricky to try and rig the numbers.
There are artworks that look like they were taken directly from the pages of the book The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. They can be clicked on to display between full colour and outline versions.
Biases
I have read one Fighting Fantasy book many years ago. Cannot remember which one or even what the story was about. I do remember losing every try and eventually just skipped the dice rolling and read through to the end. It was clear I could not finish it properly before requiring to return the book. The journey was enjoyable, despite the losing.
Eleven hours of game time and out of the four characters I have tried, I have only managed to complete the main quest with one character. The game is hard, like a certain book I read many years ago.
I like Fighting Fantasy Legends and have completed it on the easiest difficulty. I have not completed all the side quests though.
The game rankings is alive again. With that comes the game comparer as well. They are ugly and not the simplest to use, but all the functionality is there.
All my old game reviews must be restored before the thumbnails and links can work. Then I have to figure out how to integrate it with WordPress properly and make it easier to use.
Fighting Fantasy is a series of single-player role-playing gamebooks created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. The first volume in the series was published in paperback by Puffin in 1982.
The series distinguished itself by mixing Choose Your Own Adventure-style storytelling with a dice-based role-playing element included within the books themselves, the caption on many of the covers claiming each title was an adventure “in which YOU are the hero!”
Fighting Fantasy Legends is a role-playing game based on three books from the Fighting Fantasy series, namely The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, City of Thieves and Citadel of Chaos.
Pros
Being based on books, it is not surprising that the story is pretty good. Each book has its own area, but the game has modified the story to force you to explore other areas in order to complete any one area. Although good, it is still not as good as the likes of Baldur’s Gate.
The music is good. There are only a handful of tracks, so they repeat a lot, but it never got annoying for me.
The game feels more like an RPG than the books by allowing you to gain experience and level up. There are no complex statistics or skills to manage. The only things you can upgrade are skill dice and luck dice. Even your stamina (health) does not increase with levels. Upgrading your dice means adding an extra symbol to one of your dice, up to the maximum of three per die. It may not look like much but it does make a noticeable difference when you throw those dice. This simple dice upgrade system actually gives a good sense of progression.
Cons
The game is very short. It only took me eight hours to complete the three main quests on the easiest difficulty level of adventurer and this was playing with hardcore hero mode(ie permadeath). I died and restarted twice and still finished the game in this short time. The higher difficulty levels must be unlocked by completing the easier difficulty levels, so you cannot even prolong the game by starting on higher difficulty levels.
Progress is automatically saved and there is only one game that can be saved. Every time you start a new game, your previous progress is deleted.
I wish there were more shortcut keys. Except for the space bar to “OK” some of the text and roll dice, all other options must be clicked on with the mouse. It would quicker to have 1,2,3 placed next to the options for selection or something similar.
There is not much in the way of replay value. Yes, the higher difficulty levels are more challenging and you can configure your character differently to try out different strategies. Unfortunately, the story remains the same and the random events feel the same as well.
Combat involves rolling dice, but other than the first round, there is nothing to do except continually click OK to roll the dice until the fight has finished. There should be an auto fight option to speed things up.
Other Points
The combat in the game is different from the books. The game has swapped the six-sided dice for a whole bunch of custom dice with symbols on them. At the start, every dice only has one symbol on one side and rolling the symbol means you get one point for that roll.
The whole top-down view and animations remind me of the old action game Gauntlet. I don’t know why. Fighting Fantasy Legends moves quite slow whereas Gauntlet is a fast action game.
For a game that is based on books, there is not as much reading as I expected.
Fighting Fantasy Legends is an RPG, but movement is restricted to choices provided by the narrative. This is one aspect where the game is just like the books. More often than not, you will move forward and cannot move back. Having said that, when you reach the “end” of an area, you will have to start that area again to explore previously missed opportunities.
There are three characters to choose from, but it does not make much difference to the game. The most noticeable difference is just having a different character image. Other than that I have only seen one location where the event slightly changed based on your character.
Biases
I have only read one Fighting Fantasy book and that was in the 90s. I cannot remember the story or even the title of the book. I do remember not being able to level up in the book, but it was still good fun, even with the constant dying and restarting.
I have completed the game on the easiest difficulty of Adventurer, but I have not completed all the side quests.
Rolling reviews are not working. Each thought can be added to an overall review quickly, but sometimes there are multiple points that must go together. Unfortunately, these points can be thought up at different times and this simply disrupts the flow of already posted thoughts. After two games, it is back to the normal review process.
Medal of Honor Pacific Assault = MOHAA in the Pacific. The game was released 14 years ago. I played it 7 years ago. It has been given away for free on origin.com a few times. I thought, why not load it up and blast through it again. Sadly, the only thing new I have to say about MOHPA is that it has some problems running on my newer PC.
Release Date:
November 2004.
Pros:
Everything that made MOHAA so much fun is also in Pacific Assault. Graphics are better. Story presentation has improved with a narrated story, better cutscenes and a character with a name. Sound and music are about the same as MOHAA which is great. Fixed guns and on-rails shooting are present just enough to make the game fun without getting too boring. Of course the first-person experience has also improved with more things that can be done.
Similar to Call of Pripyat, there are options to turn off the HUD and crosshairs for a more difficult, but more immersive game.
If you get incapacitated you can bandage your wound and call for a corpsman to heal you. They do not always make it to you, so life and death depends on where you are and where your mates are. There is also a limit to the number of times you can be healed.
To accompany the cutscenes there are nice archival video footages from history. The pre-rendered and game engine cutscenes are already good, but the full motion video sequences makes it even better.
There are supplemental documentary type videos about the USMC, The Pacific War and the game.
There is also a pop-up facts feature which when turned on, displays snippets of facts as you play. It can be quite distracting, but at the same time it can be interesting.
On the harder difficulty levels, the game feels very realistic. A couple of hits and you are down. You can bleed to death. It reminded me of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. somewhat.
Cons:
There is a problem with viewing pop-up facts with pause. Sometimes during a cutscene, the game would just pause for no reason without any pop-up facts. The continue key for pop-up dismissal also would not work. I had to press pause on the keyboard to continue and the cutscene would get skipped. I am not sure if this problem was present in older PCs as I have only noticed it on my current Windows 10 PC.
The game does not run smoothly on my newer Windows 10 PC. Every 2-3 minutes the game would pause for about 1 second and the HDD light would be on. I definitely did not have this problem on my older Windows 7 PC.
Sometimes the CTRL and ALT keys would stop responding. A quick fix is to ALT-Tab out of the game and then back in. These are the default keys for crouch lower and aim through iron sights/scope.
Cutscenes do not display properly in wide screen. The main game playing part displays OK.
Invisible walls are in most first-person shooters, but in Pacific Assault it is extra annoying. Trying to hide among the trees is made extra difficult because the invisible walls are so close to the main path.
Other Points:
Medal of Honor Pacific Assault is a very linear FPS, much like MOHAA before it.
The AI for your team mates have vastly improved since MOHAA. They do not do all the work for you, but at least they learnt not to stand out in the open to get shot.
Your team mates are invulnerable. They will get shot and go down, but they never die. I am unsure whether to flag this as a bad thing or a good thing, because at the higher difficulty settings, you really need their help.
There is a tutorial which is appropriately placed in the bootcamp level, but it comes after the prologue level. It is good that the tutorial teaches everything, but you have to get past the prologue first.
In one level, you pilot a plane. The flight model is very simple so flying with keyboard and mouse is manageable. Being an IL-2 fan though, I found the whole sequence a waste of time and wished I could skip it. Others may find it more fun as it does add something different to the whole running on the ground and shooting.
Biases:
Reviewed version 1.2, Director’s Edition of the game.
The online servers have been taken down and I have not had the opportunity to try Pacific Assault on LAN. So, I have no idea what mutiplayer is like.
I completed the game on hard difficulty. Strange thing is I was only given the completion medal for medium difficulty. I do wonder whether this medal downgrade was due to my changing the settings to turn off the HUD.
I really liked Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, so it’s no surprise that I like Pacific Assault as well.
I also really liked S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl, Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat.
DRM:
Uses SafeDisc.
A serial code must be entered when installing the game.
The Disc must be in the drive to play the game.
Patches:
1.2 – Patches version 1.0 to 1.2. Set check point saves in version 1.0 works after patching to 1.2, but any in between check point saves get reverted back to the previous check point save.
Minimum Requirements (as stated in the readme.txt):
Windows XP or Windows 2000
1.5 GHz Intel Pentium IV or AMD Athlon processor
512 MB RAM
3D video card with 64+ MB video memory which fully supports DirectX 8.1
At least 3.0 GB free space on your hard drive for Standard Edition, and 4.5 GB free space for Director’s Edition.
Computer Played On:
Windows 7 64 bit.
Intel Core i5 2.3GHz
4GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M 1GB RAM
Conexant SmartAudio with egg speakers or earphones.
Graphics settings are set to whatever I feel comfortable with playing on this PC. They are usually not set to the highest settings. All screenshots are taken with my settings.
Handy Tips:
To skip the intro ads for Intel, THX and EA, create a new shortcut using mohpa.exe, then add +set cl_playintro 0 +set ui_skip_eamovie 1 +set ui_skip_titlescreen 1 to the shortcut. Found this from here.
Space Hulk: Deathwing is a Warhammer 40,000 first-person shooter that puts you in the shoes of a Space Marine donning Terminator armour. March through narrow passages as well as grand hallways as you shoot, burn, slice and smash your way through a space hulk infested with Genestealers.
Pros
The Special Missions section is the single-player skirmish version of randomly generated missions available in multiplayer mode. On the plus side, it does add something extra to do if you have finished the single-player campaign or you just feel like hammering xenos outside of the campaign. Your exploits also contribute to getting upgrades for multiplayer. Unfortunately, there are many minuses to how the Special Missions section was implemented (see cons).
I have completed all 9 chapters in the single-player campaign and I reckon the story was quite interesting. I guess it should not be a surprise since the developers got Gav Thorpe to work the plot. Although good, it did feel a bit short. Maybe expecting Horus Rising was too much as it was more like The Wolf of Ash and Fire.
The best way to introduce the story is to watch the introduction video.
The sounds are awesome. The guns sound powerful. Whacking with your fist or sword gives a very satisfying contact sound, even when hitting walls or railings. The ambient sounds and that of the Genestealers also sound awesome.
Although the Space Marines do not speak much, what little speech the game has, does sound very good.
The graphics are Warhammer 40,000 wonderful. Your fellow battle-brothers, the enemies, the space hulk interior, the details on weapons, the exploding sparks from your Power Fist when you pound a Genestealer into oblivion – everything in the game looks awesome.
The levels are very well designed. Although not open-world, they are quite large and you have to figure out how to move through the space hulk maze to get to your objectives. It is not all narrow corridors either. There are big halls, engine rooms and everything else you would expect inside derelict ships of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
Cons
The game tends to randomly crash to desktop with fatal errors when playing campaign missions. This happens both in single-player and multiplayer. I have not encountered the error with special missions yet. Playing roughly half campaign missions and half special missions, the crashes have happened around once every ten hours of game time. It would be interesting to see if the game crashes roughly every five hours if I only played campaign missions.
Multiplayer is a lot of fun… if you can find someone else online. Even on weekends, there are very few people playing online.
It also doesn’t help that multiplayer games do not have drop in/drop out AI replacements like Payday 2. I am sure more people would host multiplayer games if the AI buddies start with you when no other humans are around. Right now, it is just you, alone, by yourself until another human joins your game.
Another minus is you only get 2 AI buddies so your team is short by 1 member compared to playing multiplayer. Your AI buddies also work identically to the ones in the single-player campaign which severely limits how you can arm and use them. It does not make sense to me why the AI apothecary only has limited heal uses AND can only heal 1 person at a time when a human apothecary has unlimited uses with a cool-down timer and can heal an area as well as individuals.
According to the Steam timer, I have only played 17 hours and I have already finished the single-player campaign. I did play on the easiest difficulty of disciple and although I was not exploring or relic hunting, I was not rushing through the game either. This 17 hours also included dying quite a bit, playing a few multiplayer games and some special missions as well. There is no denying, the single-player campaign is very short.
Sometimes special HUD overlays get stuck permanently. The perk/buff is no longer in effect, but the overlay just stays on the screen. It will only disappear if you quit to the main menu. The extra stuck clutter is most annoying when you have just started a multiplayer game.
There is the bug where sometimes when a chapter is completed, the speech would stop working. Restarting the game would fix the problem, but it is still annoying.
Other Points
You cannot see your own feet! Space Hulk: Deathwing is one FPS that has a good excuse for not being able to see your own feet. The game is like a Space Marine in Terminator armour simulator. The armour is so big that it is constantly blocking your view of things.
I had to think long and hard as to whether to put the team-mates AI as a con. In the end, I decided not to place it as a con. It is true that your AI team-mates are not autonomous for most things. So, healing anyone automatically is out. Opening, closing and sealing doors are also out. One thing that they are very good at is killing xenos, at least on the easier difficulty levels. The other thing they are good at is following your orders. Order the apothecary to heal and he will. Order the heavy weapon specialist to seal a door and he will. Order your troops to move back from the horde (ie go to a position) and they will. Although not the smartest teammates in the world, I do think they are one up on the AI of Payday 2.
Within the game, the single-player campaign story is presented via mission briefings, audio dialogue, ships’ logs and psychic vision scenes. Most of the time is spent walking around and beating the bones out of Tyranids though, so if you are after a strong progressing narrative, Space Hulk: Deathwing is NOT for you.
Character upgrades in the single-player campaign are attained by performing certain actions in the game like finding relics, making melee or psychic kills and hacking stuff. At the end of a chapter, you are given fervour points to upgrade your abilities.
In multiplayer and special missions, upgrading is completely different. When you complete or fail missions, experience is awarded. Get enough experience and you level up. Upon levelling up you get renown and a random freebie to upgrade your character. Upgrades can also be bought with the renown you earn.
To change the difficulty level of special missions, you must first start the special mission of your choice. Once in the arming area of the mission, you can press ESC and go to the options menu to change the difficulty.
Ammo is unlimited. It is a good thing too as the hordes of Genestealers just keep coming. The real challenge comes in the form of when to reload your weapon or to use a different attack type.
There are no manual saves for the single-player campaign. Your progress is saved at checkpoints which include activation of the Psygate. In a way, the Psygate activation can be used as a manual save, but there are only a limited number of activations available for each chapter of the campaign. Only your last 9 saves can be reloaded. Your progress is also saved at the end of each chapter.
I found it strange that there is a purchasable soundtrack for Space Hulk: Deathwing. I have not heard any music in the game! It amazed me that the game has such a strong Warhammer 40,000 atmosphere, all without music.
Here is a list of all the games that I have played (which means it works) on this Windows 10 PC.
