Preplay : Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD

The year is 2000. Blink 182, the Bomfunk MC's and the Bloodhound Gang fill the radiowaves while Johnny Knoxville and his friends set the youth up to no good with their hit show Jackass. I just turned thirteen and I'm sitting in the passenger seat of my dad's car taking in every word of advertisement that's written on the big cardboard box that contains my newest game. After months and months of playing only one level of that game, the day has finally come that I have saved up enough money to buy the full version. I still remember where I bought it. I still remember where we parked. I still remember it being a nice and sunny day and I still remember how I felt while sitting there in that car. This was the day that I bought Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and it's a day I will never forget because that was the very first game I bought with my own savings.

The Tony Hawk series was created in 1999 in response to a worldwide revival of skateboarding culture. For many of my friends it was a way to get to know more about the skaters they saw in Thrasher Magazine and get familiar with names of tricks.

The game wasn't a realistic depiction of what skateboarding is but seemed to capture the feeling you fantasize about while skateboarding. It was a power fantasy more then a simulation. Kids went out on the streets with their skateboards during the day and played THPS when it got dark out. Their love for the sport translated into a deep passion towards the game.

For me the opposite happened and I like to believe that I'm not alone in this. THPS2 is the reason I bought a skateboard. After only a few days of playing the game I started buying skate magazines. A couple of weeks later my regular shoes had been replaced with és sneakers and yet another couple of weeks later I was practicing my ollie in front of my house on my own board. Although I only stand on a skateboard on rare occasion nowadays, I still love the feeling of riding one and I would never have known it if it wasn't for THPS2.

I kept playing the THPS games up till 2003's Tony Hawk's Underground. I still liked that game but somehow the magic was gone. I had grown up and my interests had shifted to different things while the THPS franchise had grown greedier and the downfall had begun. In the course of the years the franchise had lost the ability to embody what skating was all about and instead changed its focus to ridiculous story modes, over the top maps and expensive peripherals.

By the time Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD was announced on the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards show, promising to bring back the best op THPS, THPS2 and THPS3, I had lost all interest in the series and din't even consider picking it up. But only a few months after being released it went on sale on Steam and nostalgia got the better of me. I have played a little bit of it and I remember having a good enough time but I haven't given it enough attention to form a definite opinion. 

I hope the game will be able to bring back some of what I loved about the THPS series when I was younger. I realize a lot of that was formed by zeitgeist and puberty though so I'm not getting my hopes up too high. I know I wont be blown away by this game as I have been by it's predecessors but I do expect it to hit enough of those notes to honor those memories.

I have finished this game by now, read the Postplay here

Not sure what Full Steam Ahead is all about? Read this introductory post and get up to speed

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Postplay : Bad Rats: the Rats' Revenge

As we all know some animals don't get along. Mice and elephants, cats and dogs and Rihanna and Chris Brown are just some examples. Another one is rats and cats.
While humans might have a tendancy to favor the latter, making them the heroes of the internet and giving them all the cheeseburgers, it's understandable that rats' aren't so keen on our four legged overlords, given their tendency to kill and eat them.
In Bad Rats: the Rat's Revenge (BRTRR) by invent4 we get a peak at the rats' side of the fight and learn that it mostly consists of sloppy attempts to kill their enemies one cat at a time.

But let's not jump the gun here. Allow me to explain what BRTRR is.
Bad rats is a physics game in which your goal is to hit a murdering device with a ball. In order to do this you place different rats and objects in the level. Each rat has it's own function. One hits the ball with a bat, another pulls it towards him with a vacuum cleaner and some simply blow up to lift the ball upwards. When the ball reaches the device, it switches on and kills the unfortunate cat standing next to it. These devices vary from chainsaws to microwaves, heavy weights, guns and so on. On occasion the animation associated with killing the cat can be funny but overall it's really goofy and over the top.

The basic premise reminds me of Armadillo Run, a game I played a few years ago and that I absolutely loved. In Armadillo Run you have to get a curled up armadillo into a blue circle and it has to stay within that circle for a couple of seconds. You create a path by building structures out of metal, rope, suspensions and so on. What's great about Armadillo Run is that the physics engine is 100% reliable and after a few levels you've got a good sense of what will work. This allows the game to focus on finding the solution to a problem and makes it easy to implement that solution.

It's a shame the same can't be said about BRTRR. Most puzzles are easy enough to see a possible solution as soon as the level is loaded. You place the rats and objects and try out your setup and you get all smug when you see that you're nearly there in just one try. Only the final rat didn't blow up quiet as you envisioned it so you move him a couple of inches and try again. To your surprise the first rat misses it's swing this time and the ball doesn't even get halfway the level. You don't change a thing and try this setup another 15 times, getting 15 different results and eventually the ball hits the chainsaw, the cat dies and a small part of you has died with it. On to the next level!

Sadly enough this is the norm rather than the exception while playing BRTRR and it's easily my number one frustration with the game. Physics engines are dangerous beasts. Even big developers like Bethesda can't prevent a mammoth from flying of now and again. That being said, when your entire game concept revolves around physics you'd better make damn sure they aren't a hindrance to the player.
In a game like BRTRR it isn't important if physics behave 100% accurate to the real world. The crucial part is that you as a player know what you can expect in order to be able to solve levels within those expectations. Part of the fun in games like Armadillo Run or even Line Rider is creating your setup piece by piece, testing it in various phases and making adjustments when needed, knowing that the parts that worked the first time will still work the 100th time assuming that you don't change anything preceding those parts.
After playing a couple of levels of BRTRR however, you expect things to behave random, taking away the temptation to find creative solutions.

On top of that BRTRR suffers from a varied assortment of bugs and mistakes. I'm sure I didn't catch 'em all but allow me to list those that I did.

• I accidentally closed the tutorial and wasn't able to restart it
• After finishing a level, the same level was loaded again
• When finishing the level again, the level I normally had to play was skipped and I went on to the next one
• A level was loaded without the HUD making it impossible to play. I couldn't access the menu using Esc and had to forcefully shutdown the game
• By lack of autosaves I had to replay a bunch of levels following that shutdown
• A wooden board got stuck in the floor making it impossible to complete the level

But there's one bug in particular that I want to give special attention to. Even though  all gameplay happens on a 2D plane, the ball often falls in front of the level for no apparent reason. I can only assume Invent4 made this game in a 3D engine using its default physics engine and has tried to limit that physics engine to a 2D plane. This might also explain why the gameplay is so unreliable.

In terms of graphics I can be brief. BRTRR doesn't look good, but its graphics fulfill their purpose. The game would not be more fun with better graphics. It's obvious BRTRR had to be made with a limited budget and I wouldn't be surprised if most of that budget was wasted on a failed attempt to fix the broken physics.
The low quality graphics aren't the only thing leading to this suspicion. I'm not a native English speaker and I'm sure a lot of what I write on this blog sounds awkward to those who are, but invent4 didn't even take the effort to use a spell checker. When releasing a game in a foreign language the least you can do is ask someone who speaks that language to correct your copy. I realize that this can be a costly affair but there's so little text in BRTRR that I can't imagine it to be too expensive.

I'm sure it's pretty obvious by now what my opinion on the game is. BRTRR is a foul piece of software and you shouldn't buy it, play it or gift it. If you do gift it to someone you are bad and you should feel bad.
Oddly enough I do see some lost potential in the game. Every now and then I got excited when a solution did work out the way I intended it on the first try. I often play games for Full Steam Ahead during lunch break and BRTRR was the first game to drum up a bunch of colleagues around my desk, proving that the basic concept has some merit to it. Saddly enough that's where all praise ends because this game was so poorly put together that invent4 should write a public apology.

You can find my Preplay for Bad Rats: the Rats' Revenge here

Not sure what Full Steam Ahead is all about? Read this introductory post and get up to speed

Next time I'll be playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD

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Preplay : Bad rats: the Rats' Revenge

When I started Full Steam Ahead I let my friends know on Facebook. One of them, Styn, commented the following

You are crazy and you're getting Bad Rats when it's on sale on Steam!

He didn't wait that long though, a few days later I've got an email from Steam saying one of my friends had gifted me this invent4 game and I knew the only reason was to mess with me. Thanks Styn!

While looking at screenshots for this game it's obvious that Bad rats: the Rats' Revenge (BRTRR) is a budget title. It was released in 2009 but the graphical quality looks at least 5 years older. When searching Youtube for some gameplay footage the first link I found was to a video called 'Why do I own... Bad Rats'. Things aren't looking good for BRTRR.

What I can gather from the screenshots is that this is a physics game. My guess is that I'm to get the rats in a certain position in order to kill the unfortunate cat seen in the screenshots. I have played a few physics games in the past with a similar goal and I mostly enjoyed them. I like putting the solution together one piece at a time and creating my very own Rube Goldberg machines.
If the programming is bad and the physics are unreliable though the whole concept falls flat and I'm in for five hours of bugs and physics engine flipouts. Unfortunately my time preparing for this preplay has let me to believe that this will be the case as the only positive reviews I can find for this game appear to be trolls.

In all honesty I'm looking forward to my time with BRTRR in some weird way. I expect it to be an atrocity of a game but that might just make it interesting to see. You can learn a lot from good games but often times you can learn just as much from really bad ones. If by any chance I happen to find some good gameplay hidden deep within the game that would be for the best of course. But I'm a warned man and I know I'm buckling up for a bumpy ride.

I have finished this game by now, read the Postplay here

Not sure what Full Steam Ahead is all about? Read this introductory post and get up to speed

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Full Steam Ahead : We are many

It has been over a month since I started Full Steam Ahead. I had become fed up with my ever increasing Steam backlog and felt the need to do something about it.
By now I've played four games and am ready to finish up a fifth one. I couldn't be more pleased with that result and I'm really enjoying analyzing the games I'm playing.
I would like to thank everyone who has been reading my posts so far and I appreciate the feedback I've been getting over Skype and on the Steamgifts forums.
This kind of response inspires me to continue my project.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said : "There is nothing worth thinking but it has been thought before; we must only try to think it again."
This couldn't be more the case for the basic premise of this blog. Since starting Full Steam Ahead I have met numerous people that are dealing with their Steam backlog in their own way.
With this post I'd like to share some of those projects.

When I posted about Full Steam Ahead on Steamgifts the first comment I got was "Why not join the Backlog Attack group?"
As the name gives away, Backlog Attack is a Steam group with only one goal : getting rid of the Steam Backlog. In order to achieve this each member of the group has to at least play one game a month and write a review about it.
This review is posted as a discussion on the group page in order to start a meaningful conversation about the game. If different people finish the same game, they all add their review to one discussion about that game.
In my opinion this group has three strong points.

• It keeps you stimulated to keep playing even if you're having a hard time with a game
• When sales come around you can go into the discussions and see what games are worth your money
• You meet like minded people

Is asked creator of the group AgeOfArmageddon why he started the group.

The idea originally began as a "30 games in 30 days" forum challenge I had setup for myself .
The idea was to do a quick impression/review for 1 new game every day, with the 30 games chosen by forum members.
Being that it was SteamGifts, I was also giving away a new game with each review.
Unfortunately, being that it was SteamGifts; the thread died out after some time, with people coming to enter the giveaways but no longer commenting at all.
There was a silver lining however; many posts indicated they thought the idea was quite cool, or wish they had done it themselves. One person even copied the thread idea and did his own.
Seeing this as an opportunity; I decided to make a group where I could continue my efforts, but do so in the company of other like-minded individuals.

When I asked what he believes to be the best aspect of the group he answered :

Chronicling my efforts to clear out my old games has been fun; as has reading the reviews of others. I think the best aspect would be the community that has formed around it.
I am often in group chat, and even after a few months; it is generally quite active.
Meeting new and interesting people who share a passion is always a fantastic outcome  of a project like this.

Backlog attack is a closed group though, so you can only get in by means of invitation and AgeOfArmageddon wants to keep it limited to around 100 people. If you're interested in joining though, there's no harm in asking of course.

I've been a big fan of Giant Bomb for years now. I love the site, the content, the crew and the community.
One of the things I like most about the site is that it puts a spotlight on original stuff created by that community. When I went over to the site a few weeks ago I saw this description in one of the community spotlight slots

Steam Completionist, Do you have way too many games in your Steam backlog? Well, Bio2hazard has designed a stylish website to organize, analyze, and destroy that pile of shame.

This immediately caught my attention of course so I went into the forum thread and found that Giant Bomb user Bio2hazard had become inspired by a Reddit post to create an informative and user friendly overview of your steam backlog.
I highly recommend every Steam user to check it out on www.steamcompletionist.net. You simply log on with your Steam credentials and your entire library gets displayed in a very clear way. Once you have indicated which game you have finished you can designate up to five games as 'next to finish'
In addition you can view overall Steam stats, achievement stats and use the page as an alternative to the Steam Library page. Seriously, go check it out!

Now as I said, Bio2hazard was inspired by a reddit post.
This was a post by Reddit user Multitasker dealing with the exact same thing as I was.
He started finishing games and posting his findings on reddit.
If you have a minute, give the page a read. There's some good reading on there.

If you are dealing with your Steam Backlog in a specific way yourself, please let me know in the comments. I'm always glad to meet more like-minded people and perhaps I'll make another post like this if I can find more interesting backlog projects.

Not sure what Full Steam Ahead is all about? Read this introductory post and get up to speed

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Postplay : Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45

22 June 1941.
The Germans wrecked our wire network to undermine our communications. Ninety-nine German divisions, including fourteen panzer divisions, have deployed against us from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
From now on we refer to those regions as the Western and Southwestern Fronts. In addition to the ground troops the Luftwaffe has attacked several airfields, destroying much of our air fleet.
I have received my orders a few minutes ago. I'm to go to the Western Front in an attempt to stop the Germans before they can reach our capital.
Many say our attempt will be futile, but I simply can't stand idle by while our country is under attack.

Despite the fact that I have put five hours into Tripwire Interactive's Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 (ROO4145), I had to get that bit of back story from Wikipedia because not a single bit of story is included in the game. The only single player mode available is practice which is nothing more than the multiplayer mode with bots instead of humans. Remember when I said "I would love to try the multiplayer" in my preplay for this game? Well that's for the best because that's all there is to play.

Everybody knows that practice makes perfect, so in lack of a tutorial I got my feet wet in the practice mode. I randomly picked a team and went for the first class in the list. After spending some time adjusting the controls I arrived in an open field, standing next to some tanks. I was sure those tanks were just there for decoration so I looked around, spotted a town and started my hike towards it.
It was here that I first blew up. I couldn't have told anyone what had happened as all of a sudden I was flying through the air. It was suddenly clear that the tanks weren't there for decoration.
The rest of that first session included me trying to enter a tank but failing because I wasn't the right class. Trying to shoot the other tanks but failing because I needed to deploy my weapon but couldn't figure out how to. Trying to stay alive but failing because attempting to take down tanks with a handgun isn't a good plan of action as it turns out.

Practice wasn't doing me any good so I decided to jump into multiplayer. The first thing I saw upon spawning were tanks, tanks everywhere. This entire game seemed to only consist of chaos. Everyone was running around, randomly shooting at team mates or driving tanks through rivers without any clear purpose. I tried to join in on the fun and even made my first few kills during this match, but after ten minutes I had seen enough for one evening and shut down the game. When I noticed that it had only been 48 minutes since I started playing, I wondered how I would be able to play four more hours of this.

When I returned to ROO4145 the next day I went back into practice, determined to figure out what was what. Again I chose a map at random and to my surprise there wasn't a tank in sight. Instead I found myself on a hillside overlooking the area and soon I spotted enemy movement towards my position. I went into iron sight, took a second to track my enemy and went for the shot. I could see the man falling to his knees in the distance.
During the rest of this session I tried different maps and classes and things started to make a lot more sense. As long as I didn't stumble onto a tank filled map I was even having a decent amount of fun going against these bots. There wasn't a lot of challenge but handling the weapons in ROO4145 is fun on it's own. Everything handles very methodically making a missed shot something that matters. When you're using a rifle you have to prepare the gun after every shot before you can shoot again. I've put myself in a vulnerable position more than once because I instinctively reloaded my weapon after making a kill. When a reload is due, your best choice is to go into hiding because reloading your gun can take quite some time. This slow paced gameplay forces you to be careful and creates a feeling of tension that is surely one of the strong holds of this game.

Now that I was used to handling the weapons, I had to go back online. I joined a game that was taking place on a tankless map. The first thing I noticed was that I recognized a lot of the player names from practice mode. Turns out that even online most rooms are filled up with bots. This didn't take anything away from the fact that I was having fun though.
But whenever I got to a tank map, and there's quite a few of those, frustration took the upper hand. Even after figuring out how to get in a tank, operating it wasn't all that satisfying and the only thing the tanks add to the game play is a lot of imbalance. On these maps there's only a few classes that really have a chance of making an impact on the match. Other classes have no choice but to wait until they blow up. Perhaps if the maps were better adjusted towards this by creating corridors for these classes, allowing them to fight man to man and to surprise enemies from behind, it wouldn't be as much of an issue but unfortunately that's not the case.

Last thing that was on my to do list for this game was playing with a friend. Steam user and personal friend Imp had bought the recent Tripwire Humble Bundle including ROO4145 and joined me during my last hours with the game.
As with most multiplayer games it was more fun playing alongside someone you know. Especially the tank handling improves a lot when playing with a friend. In order to operate a tank in ROO4145 you have to have at least two players to do any damage. One player steers the tank while the other operates the gun. We had some fun trying to get the hang of this cooperation but didn't manage to score a kill.

While playing together we tried to jump around from server to server in between matches to get as much different experiences as we could. Our problem was that even though ROO4145 was part of the recent Humble Bundle there weren't a lot of people playing the game. Most servers were empty or filled with bots and the few that were populated had high ping resulting in laggy game play. This left us with three or four servers to cycle through. From those servers two were dedicated to tank maps and one was serving a big open map where everyone was throwing grenades at random resulting in pure chaos, leaving only one server to actually play the game and have fun.

This game is sold on Steam for €9,99. In my opinion that's a high price for a multiplayer only game with a small playerbase. If you already own the game and you have some friends to join you I would give it a go. There is some fun to be had, but not enough to play for hours on end by yourself.
The best way to play this game might be in an office space, playing LAN matches during lunch break. I can see how the proximity of the others players might result in a lot of fun. Being able to practice the different systems of the game with the same group of people for some time could really bring out the best that ROO4145 has to offer without the frustrating chaos and randomness that's going on in the online mode.

You can find my Preplay for Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 here

Not sure what Full Steam Ahead is all about? Read this introductory post and get up to speed

Next time I'll be playing Bad Rats

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Preplay : Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45

Steam user WhiteGuy gave me a guest pass for Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 (ROO4145).
This meant I had 10 days to enjoy this WW2 FPS by Tripwire Interactive.
I was however still finishing up another post for Full Steam Ahead, leaving me only 7 days to hit my five hour mark.

I expect ROO4145 to resemble games as Call of Duty 1 and 2 or the early Medal of Honor games in that I think the action will be slower paced and more methodical than modern shooters.
I suspect it will take some time getting used to this slower kind of gameplay again but I have fond memories of those older shooters so I'm looking forward to my time with ROO4145 and I hope it will invoke some of the same enjoyment.

I would call myself a mediocre FPS player, so I'm curious to see how far into the Single Player I'll get within five hours. I suspect the campaign to be longer than five hours as the focus for most FPS games weren't on multiplayer back in 2006 when this game was released.
I've heard good things about the Red Orchestra multiplayer from a number of friends though and I would love to try it with them.

So overall I'm excited to play this game. Letting go of recent conventions will take some time I'm sure, but I'm hoping that nostalgia will help me bridge that gap. If not, there should at least be some fun to be had in the multiplayer mode and with this game being on Humble Bundle not too long ago I suspect enough people will be playing it to find some quality online matches.

I have finished this game by now, read the Postplay here

Not sure what Full Steam Ahead is all about? Read this introductory post and get up to speed

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Postplay : Blocks that matter

On June 6 1984 Alexey Pajitnov changed the world of video games forever by releasing Tetris. From that moment on blocks would always matter in my favorite form of entertainment, something that developer Swing swing submarine wants to celebrate with their 2011 release Blocks that matter (BTM).

It was up to me to find out if this celebration has turned out to be a party.

BTM is charming right from the get-go. The art is simple but effective and the story is delivered with a good sense of humor. Video game fans will pick up on a lot of references both in graphics (a lot of Minecraft influences) and in dialog. It is clear that Swing swing submarine is genuinely passionate about games and that this one is their attempt to put them on a pedestal.

The story starts with a classic video game premise, someone has been kidnapped and it's up to the hero to overcome a series of obstacles in order to save his loved ones. For once it isn't a lovely princess or an innocent child that's in need of rescue though. The game opens with the kidnapping of the game's developers and the only one who can save them is their own creation: Tetrobot. They manage to communicate with their little friend and guide him in their direction and towards upgrades needed to perform the task at hand while 'The Boss' tries to stop that from happening.

The way you progress is by drilling or breaking certain blocks in the environment. Once a block is destroyed it is stored in your inventory and by going into puzzle mode you are able to place them somewhere else. In order to place blocks however, you have to form a tetrimino and at least one of the blocks has to touch a solid object. If eight or more blocks form a line you can destroy that line while in puzzle mode.

These mechanics are a clever and refreshing mix of minecraft and tetris concepts that at the very least have a lot of potential for creative puzzles.

The puzzle mode is simple enough but it does take some getting used to. Numerous times I wanted to scroll through my block types but instead cancelled my building action or closed the mode entirely. This is of course mainly my own fault for not being attentive enough, but I believe the awkward keyboard layout that was chosen for this mode is at fault as well.

Besides the drilling and breaking of blocks, Tetrobot is also able to run and jump. The controls are tight enough to support decent platforming but the game never truly takes advantage of this, so navigating the levels isn't where the fun is at.

As most puzzle games BTM shines most while solving the puzzles. You try different approaches, take a few moments to observe the problem and when you finally do solve it you get a feeling of satisfaction that lasts until you hit the next road block. 

Performing the steps to actually execute the solution is mostly just a way to get to the next puzzle and shouldn't hold you back. It is here that BTM makes a crucial mistake in my opinion. Most levels consist of multiple puzzles following one another. More often than not puzzle one has no connection to puzzle two, puzzle two has no connection to puzzle three and so on. If you get stuck on puzzle four however, BTM resets the entire level making you go through the motions of the previous puzzles again. As said before, once a puzzle has been solved having to repeat it is nothing more than frustrating. Adding to this problem is the fact that you can get stuck very easily. One misplaced block is often all it takes for you to be doomed to start over.

This changes the way you play the game. Instead of experimenting with the puzzles, you spend a lot of time just staring at the screen, trying different approaches in your head before you make a move. When you do make a move and you realize you are stuck yet again all the fun gets drown out of the game very quickly.

This problem could have easily been solved by adding checkpoints after solving a particular part of a level that has no influence on what's to come, as many other puzzle games do. It just baffles met that the developers chose not to do this. 

At the risk of sounding whiny, this lack of checkpoints has turned my experience with a game that I would have enjoyed otherwise, mostly sour. I have a hard time forgiving a game that makes me repeat actions that aren't fun over and over again without any good justification other than to drag out the length of the game.

When my five hours were over I decided I had to at least have a look at the level editor before writing my postplay, as well as try out some of the community levels.
I can be short in regards to the editor. I opened it, looked at it, poked around a bit and closed it in confusion. I'm sure it is fully functional and not all too difficult if you're willing to spend some time figuring out what's what, but I wasn't willing to, so I can't get into any specifics about it.
As for the community levels, this might be one of the strong suits of the game. There's a voting system in place very similar to the one implemented on Reddit or Imgur. If you like a level you can upvote it, if you hate a level you can downvote it. This results in a neatly sorted list of most popular levels.
The couple of levels I played were fun and focused on the strong parts of the game. Although you still have to restart a level when you stuff up, a lot of these community levels seem to be better designed to prevent this from happening than the ones in the campaign itself.

So where does that leave things? BTM has made it real difficult for me to make up my mind about whether I like it or not. The game definitely has many things going for it and has exceeded my expectations in almost al regards, but the lack of checkpoints has gotten me frustrated enough to quit the game on more than one occasion. I am genuinely interested to see where the story goes and what gameplay elements the game has in store further down the campaign, but I just can't say for certain if I'll ever find the motivation to see it through till the end.

If you have this game in your library, be sure to check it out. It's definitely worth a shot and maybe you'll be better equipped to cope with the level resets or to avoid getting stuck than I am.
For those who don't own the game, I think it's worth the €4,99 it's going for on Steam considering the length of the game (I'm only 33% through the campaign at five hours in) and the quality of the story and art.
Be warned though, during the course of the game you will most probably love it and hate it all at the same time.

You can find my Preplay for Blocks that matter here

Not sure what Full Steam Ahead is all about? Read this introductory post and get up to speed

Next time I'll be playing Red Orchestra Ostfront 1941-45

Read more »