Vinrafel Gaming

An ancient and dark force force whispers in your mind. Gather the Elder Shards and retake the land for the dark voice. Sundered is a metroidvania, rouge-like game where the player is to decide whether to embrace the old ways or permanently cement the power of the human faction. While the game is quite enjoyable overall, it does not live up to the metroidvania title. The gameplay is fundamentally a hack and slash platformer with a semi-rouge-like map. The player explores a dungeon that has two design levels to it. The first is the overall structure. Large rooms connect to one another with some of these rooms containing bosses, upgrades, or other important points. This layout does not have any rouge-like features to it as it remains the same across each death. On the other hand, the second design level does change. Each of the constant large rooms is actually composed of many smaller rooms that interlock to create the terrain that the player actually traverses. Every time the pla...

Humanity has taken to the stars and now it is your job to build a colony that will sustain them. Aven Colony is the latest game from the publisher, Team17. It is a city-builder game that follows the general style of the Tropico games. While the concept of a sci-fi city-builder seems good on the outset, there are many issues that stop Aven Colony from seriously engaging the player. First let’s look at the gameplay. Aven Colony focuses on resource based gameplay as opposed to some of the layout based gameplay that can be seen in games like Sim City and Cities: Skylines . The player manages food, water, and energy to sustain their many colonists. Basic resources such as iron or wheat can be further processed into secondary goods that may then be used to produce even more valuable items. In this way, the resource management of Aven Colony mirrors the systems that can be seen in the Tropico series. Outside of the colony building, there are threats that have to be dealt with su...