Last month we took a look at the Epic Games store’s freebies, but they’re not the only ones looking to curry our favour. Amazon are also looking to grab our love, attention and disposable income. It’s not free, of course, you’ll have to be an Amazon Prime subscriber to pick these up, but I expect I’m not the only one who has a subscription for the delivery and video services and thinks of the games as a “free” added value, at least when I remember that they exist at all.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today we’re examining if Jeffy B’s Evil Empire are giving away games that are worth your time.
It’s a bit messier to determine what qualifies, as most games are claimable for three months or so across the Good Old Games, Epic and Legacy games stores as well as Amazon’s own store and streaming service, Luna. That’s also ignoring the rotating selection of streamable games such as Alan Wake 2, which given its hardware requirements isn’t a bad way to play it.
I took this screenshot at the start of March, and that’s 20 games alone before we include the ones releasing over the month. So, if you’ve been sleeping on this and have a Prime subscription, give it a look, there’s bound to be something you like just by the law of averages.
I’ve picked a few of the games that looked the most interesting to me and given them a once over, so join me in actually using all these computers we’ve been building for their intended purpose for a change.
Alan Wake 2
Oh, go on them, let’s also test out the Luna streaming service while we’re here by playing Alan Wake 2. I might be an outlier but for me the first game was Remedy’s weakest. It had a great atmosphere, sure, but the appeal of shining a flashlight on a goon then shooting them over and over and over ran out of appeal after the fourth hour.
Here we are then, with the sequel released 13 years later, and now folded into the Control universe of oddities and weirdness, and I did like Control quite a bit, so my hopes are raised.
I’ve only tinkered around the edges with Xbox and NVidia’s games streaming services, and never at premium tiers so I can only tell you my general impression of them is that they work okay for the right style of game, but take so damn long to connect to a server that the desire to play them has often faded away before I get to press start – particularly if understandably on NVidia’s free tier.
On a decent connection, Luna takes maybe a minute and a half to get connected and start up the game, which from memory was better or at least the same as the Xbox service, although I suppose that’s quite variable. It did once seemingly glitch out and leave me waiting apparently first in line in a queue for five minutes, at which point I got bored, tried again and it loaded straight up, so it’s by no means perfect.
As for the gameplay, I’m fairly impressed. Alan Wake 2 is a really good-looking game, and there’s only a very occasional moment where the heavy use of darkness gives whatever video compression is used a problem. That’s also seemingly only in cutscenes, so that may even be a stylistic choice. I notice one instance of the audio being desynced by a fraction of a second, but that ultimately fixed itself quickly.
Given that this isn’t a frantic twitch shooter, there’s no real issue with the controls and while by its very nature there must be some lag, it’s not noticeable. Maybe not having access to the game to play it on native hardware is skewing my perception, but the best thing I can say about the Luna streaming service is that bar a few minor oddities and quibbles, I soon forgot I was playing it on streaming and just got on with playing it.
For the record, the main oddity was there seems to be no way to invert mouse look, but you can invert controller look, so gamepad controls it is, and while I understand the reasons for limiting the streaming resolution to 1080p, it’s annoying not to have an ultrawide resolution available to better suit my monitor.
As for the game itself, while you could reductively say the main gameplay loop, or at least the combat side of it, is essentially the same shine flashlight on goons and shoot them of the 13-year-old original, this sequel is dressed up so much better. While the investigations that your FBI agents and the titular author undertake, with their mind palaces and early Resident Evil weird items as keys gating progression and whatnot are not exactly redefining the genre, it’s really effective set dressing and worldbuilding for this weird, er, world that Remedy have been, er, building out.
If you’re more into mechanics than narrative, this probably is not the game for you. Its main appeal is the supernatural oddness of the central story, which if you’ll pardon the cop out would take far too long to try and relate and wouldn’t make sense outside of the context of the game anyway. Suffice to say that the leads have to stop a dark presence from manifesting in what we laughingly call reality, although admittedly I’m not sure why that ultimately necessitated a bunch of little puzzles and flashlight assisted shooting galleries, but that’s the game, deal with it.
The one thing it nails is atmosphere, so much so I can even forgive the occasional jump scare that it throws at you. There’s some really great voice acting work, and the live action footage makes suffering through those FMV games on the Mega CD worth it. Remedy’s always been masters of this media within media stuff going back to the first Max Payne, and seeing it all fold back into each other in this mind-bending Bureau of Control somehow feels like the natural evolution of it. I’m very much here for it.
So overall, even if I might have wanted a bit more mechanical evolution from the decade plus original, particularly given that Control was so much better in that regard, this is much more about the narrative, atmosphere and characters, and it’s doing such a good job with those elements it seems churlish to complain about the rest. If you have access to it and a suitable internet connection, it’s well worth giving it a bash. You won’t even have to wait to download it.
Around The World: Travel To Brazil – CE
Bit of a change of pace now, and, well, let me explain myself before you judge me too harshly given what you’re looking at just now. One of these hidden object games normally get released every month, and I’ve always looked at them and wondered who on earth plays them. But back in the days where people went to actual physical shops and bought actual physical media, there would always be carousels filled with these types of super casual hidden object and light puzzle stuff, so clearly the market has always been there.
I thought I’d finally try one, seeing as Around the World: Travel to Brazil was available for free. And dear god just look at it. In fact, first of all listen to it:
This required a quick restart to clear up that audiophonic torture – seriously one of this game’s eclectic and completely unsuited to the location mix of easy listening classical and twangy guitar nonsense at a time is quite enough, thanks. Also, is it a bad sign that the developer’s logo belongs on a 90’s era clip art CD?
But what about the game itself? Well, it’s exactly what you’d expect. There’s a list of items that we need to find and click on to remove them from this barely composited visual mess, with the game’s gimmick being that the base layer is a variety of locations around Brazil, with little info bytes about them available. It’s minimally educational!
That central gameplay loop, if you want to call it that, is the vast bulk of it, dressed up a couple of different ways such as the simple word list being replaced with some slight brain teasers, and there’s the odd mini-puzzle between scenes, but all in all it’s pretty much just what you’d expect from a game like this.
As snarky as I’m being, in the hopes of being minimally entertaining, I played way more that this than I needed to get this video capture, and then played for another hour after that. There’s something mildly therapeutic about gradually cleaning up this damn mess, and I suppose it’s ultimately scratching the same itch that a lot of those janky job simulators like House Flipper scratch.
I just can’t shake the feeling that it’s a waste of time. I mean, that’s obviously unfair, I think the vast majority of games are just there to pass the time, and have been since games were invented by Benjamin Games back in caveman times. This is no different than playing solitaire with a physical deck of cards.
But at their best games can engage you in ways that other media like movies or books cannot, because of your involvement in the shaping of the narrative and so on, and there’s obviously none of that here.
When people say games aren’t art, or just a complete waste of time, I wonder if games like this and, I dunno, Minesweeper are all they’ve been exposed to. If that’s the case they might have a point.
Anyway, as ugly and ultimately pointless as Travel to Brazil is, it’s doing what it says it’s going to do so I can’t really bash it for not being my preferred cup of tea. I mean, I’m almost certainly never going to play this or anything like this ever again, but I concede there’s worse ways to pass the time. If this is the sort of thing you like, then this is one of that thing that you like. As could be said about any game. This is why I’m not a professional. At any rate, if you want my opinion, I’ve already given it, ugly and ultimately pointless. Let’s move on.
Meganoid
Meganoid rang a vague bell when I saw it listed, and it turns out that’s because I bought it for my iPhone back in 2018 for £2. Well, I think today’s version is a remaster, and it’s kinda sorta free, so I’m not going to get too bent out of shape about it, particularly as I’m happy to see even older, classic PC games getting a bit of a spotlight on them through Luna, like Captain Blood or the gold box SSI Dungeons and Dragons RPGs recently made available.
As for Meganoid, the description makes it sound like a sci-fi, pixel art Spelunky. And well, it is. If you know Spelunky, no further description is required, but I suppose I should cater to those who don’t know it.
This is a roguelike platformer, where you start off at the top of a playfield and must navigate through enemies, spike traps, lasers and missiles to reach the bottom, where you’ll be transported to the top of the next playfield, and so on. The ultimate goal apparently being to traverse the ship to fix a hull breach, by means unknown.
You’ll pick up powerups to help you on the way, such as demo charges to destroy walls, weapons to deal with the assorted critters, or single use platforms to help navigate the levels. And you’ll fail to do it over and over, as a characteristic of these games are brutal difficulty. I’ve still on seen the end of Spelunky and I’ve played it on and off for the best part of two decades.
This will not be the case with Meganoid, which has failed to grab me in the same way. It’s not a badly put together game, it’s perfectly functional, but there doesn’t seem to be any soul injected into it.
Something that vague needs some back up, and I’m not sure I can exactly provide you with the paperwork, but here goes. The setting is by itself a bit cold and clinical, and that’s reflected in the character designs that are a little too small to have any particular personality. It’s not helped by the sound design, where there’s no music as you play, just ambient clanking and dripping.
I suppose the idea is to build the atmosphere, but for me it’s at the expense of the driving the gameplay experience. You can tell this is the case, because there’s a power up that can be intermittently found that turns a soundtrack on, and it instantly makes the game much more enjoyable. The game’s really shooting itself in the foot with this, a really baffling choice.
I can’t give you much more than that surface level take on the game, because I just do not find it compelling enough to play. It’s Spelunky, but less interesting in every way. And I already have another Spelunky that’s less interesting in every way, and it’s called Spelunky 2.
I vaguely recall enjoying this more on the iPhone all those years ago, probably because it was as close as I could get on the platform at the time. However, in the far-flung future of Space Year 2026, this doesn’t hold any appeal.
I feel I’m giving this short shrift, as it’s a competent enough game but I just have no desire to invest any more time into it than the two hours or so I already have. Another game on my “not bad, just not interesting pile”.
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw
If you’re an old geezer like me who has been into gaming since being a young geezer, you probably had a lot of fun with big hitting space combat games like the Wing Commander and X-Wing series. They’ve being nothing like as prevalent in the modern gaming eras, so it’s good to get a hold of Rebel Galaxy Outlaw.
It’s perhaps closest in gameplay and ethos to the Elite series more than anything, although the art direction feels a bit more like early Wing Commander. While there is an overarching quest chain to track down the killer of your husband, it very quickly ramps into fights you’re unlikely to win with the starting ship and weaponry. So, you’ll need to earn money to upgrade by taking a bunch of simple, repeatable side missions, or breaking free of the tyranny of mission boards and taking up a career in piracy, trading or asteroid mining to earn the cash for upgrades.
Somehow, I’ve been having enough fun prattling about and poking the edges of the sandbox that I’m not concerned that there’s not a huge amount of variety in the combat encounters. While it features a lot of the mechanics from those games of yesteryear, either in combat like balancing your power outputs between shields, weapons and engines, deploying missile countermeasures, or in commerce, with market prices fluctuating between locations and different rarities of mined resources available, I don’t think there’s anything here that wasn’t done decades ago.
I suppose there’s a bit more life at the space stations, where alongside the trading, upgrades and repairs, you can visit a saloon either to pump the barman for information on the location of pirates with bounties on their heads or gamble on dice or play a quick game of pool, all of which is a nice occasional break but sort of tangential to the proper gameplay mechanics.
Of course, I don’t really know what other mechanics could be added in, so maybe I should just shut up. But I wasn’t the one making a new game in this arena, it seems reasonable to expect any revisiting of this genre to give more than a lick of paint to the existing formula.
At any rate, even though I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all of the tricks and mechanics this game has in store for me after about five hours, and probably had done after two hours to be honest, I look forward to returning to this for at least the same again after I dig my flight stick out of storage. Controlling with a mouse and keyboard is possible but a little clunky, and for whatever reason my old Bluetooth controller is acting up, so hopefully that will make this a little more immersive.
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw hasn’t exactly blown me away, but it’s a solid game that I look forward to completing and that’s nothing to be sniffed at. If you have access to it and either a nostalgic memory of the classic games, or a touch of curiosity about the olden times, this is well worth firing up.
Total War: ATTILA
Amazon’s doled out a good few of the Total War series, and essentially at random I’m taking a look at Total War: Atilla. Total War is, of course, a very long running series, to the point that the earliest entries are actually old enough for it to be reasonable to remaster them, rather than a cynical cash grab, he said, pointing at Sony. However, so far the closest I’ve come to actually playing them has been running benchmarks in Warhammer III, so this seems like a good excuse to dive in.
Of course, I’m only diving in at the shallow end, leading to an immediate faceplant. This style of game has full campaign playthroughs measuring in hundreds of hours. The handful of hours I’ve had to spend with it so far aren’t even clearing the tutorial. I’m not intending for my coverage of any of these games to be anything more than a first impressions, but even so this is like licking an icecube to sample an iceberg.
This is set in the dying days of the Roman Empire and the start of the Middle Ages, kicking off just before our titular bad boy Attilda Hunnybear shows up to monster the divided Empires, and everyone else the Huns run through on the way.
It’s very much what I understand to be the classic Total War formula, with the grand strategy maps to control the production of the provinces under your control, raise armies and so on, with those armies battling on tactical maps of plains or towns or whatever.
I’m very much not able to give you chapter and verse on where this sits in the Total War hierarchy, what with this being the first one I’ve tried to play. And if I’m being honest with myself, it’s was a fairly half-hearted attempt at trying to play.
Alongside other previous failed attempts at properly playing other Grand Strategy games like Stellaris or Hearts of Iron, the thought of investing many hours into understanding the battle strategies, the game mechanics, the unit strengths and weaknesses, the best ways to optimise food production and research and all that is something more aspirational than something I’m actually capable of.
I’m sure I could get the hang of it, if I was able to carve out the appropriate number of hours required to properly study and understand the game, but the last thing I want to do after getting home from work is to do more work, and that’s what these games feel like to me, at least for now. My tastes and free time might change down the line at some point in the future, but I am currently drowning in the level of depth that there is to this series.
As such, I won’t subject you to any further reckons from someone that’s not got the experience for those reckons to mean anything. It seems I enjoy watching experts play Total War a lot more than I enjoy playing it myself, but I can see why it’s so absorbing to many people. It seems I’m after simpler thrills. Which brings me to…
Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep: A Wonderlands One-shot
Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep: A Wonderlands One-shot, which as I understand it is essentially a standalone release of a well-regarded Borderlands 2 DLC, which I thought might make it more digestible for a first impressions review rather than the full fat Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, also available this month. I’ve played a few hours of the first Borderlands at some point in the dim and distant past but never really got into it, so this seems like a good excuse to give it a proper crack of the whip.
This is framed as the cast of Vault Hunting misfits and miscreants playing a dungeons and dragons-esque tabletop game which translates into you picking a class of character and looter shooting your way across what I understand to be a fantasy reskin of some Borderlands 2 areas. As such you’ll now be taking on Orcs, Spiders, Dwarves and so on across a quest to rescue a queen from a suspiciously Handsome Jack shaped sorcerer.
Now, there’s certainly a lot that I like here. Visually I think this is stunning. I’ve always had a soft spot for this cel shaded aesthetic, and while there could be a little more variety in the enemy’s character design, those that we have are really well done.
Part of the reason, as far as I can remember, that I bounced off the first game was that I did not find it as funny as it found itself, but happily Assault of Dragon Keep seems much more sharply written and with much more likeable characters. Maybe all it’s really done is put that annoying little Claptrap geezer on a tighter leash, but turns out that’s enough to greatly improve it. And when my only technical issue is getting stuck on the odd bit of level geometry, I’m not going to get too hung up on that aspect. Unlike the game character, I guess.
Unfortunately, my main problem with it is, well, the actual game. For a game predicated entirely on finding a wide variety of weapons and firing them indiscriminately, managing them is at best boring, and worst a distraction from the game, and using them is strangely unimpactful.
While I didn’t hate my time with Assault on Dragon Keep, it wasn’t anything like as much fun as it threatened to be. An awful lot of it seemed to be opening endless chests to keep my ammo supplies topped up, and maybe I’m missing something but there’s not really much strategy to consider with this set of enemies and this level design. I’m sure the blurb alongside my character class of Commando talked about controlling the battlefield but the only tool you are given is to plop down an automated turret to throw out more dps.
There’s lots and lots of guns kicking around, but even those at the more extreme end of the ranges with elemental damage and the like there’s no reactivity on the enemy side that I could see, so all that means is that most of them will continue running directly towards you and it will take slightly more or less time for their HP to be depleted as they do so. And as they scale in level along with you, which determines the power level of the weapons you find, ultimately it balances out to every encounter feeling much the same for the entirely of the game. It makes everything a bit samey and bland, and that’s disappointing given how much I like the rest of the set dressing.
I just don’t think I’m a looter shooter type of person, so take this with a grain of salt. If this is the sort of thing you like, then this appears, by general internet acclaim, to be a pretty good example of it. So, the rest of this short rant was really my problems with the genre rather that this game in particular. Feel free to disregard me and make your own mind up. I’m not the boss of you. Not yet, anyway.
As I record this, Amazon Prime costs £9 a month, which gets you the delivery perks, and at least some of the video and music services in addition to the gaming portion. You can distribute that nine quid cost amongst these services however you like, and it’s still going to give you a pretty negligible cost per game. So, just like the actually free Epic Games giveaways, what you’ll have to question is whether these games are worth your time or not.
I cannot answer that for you, of course. Much as I love you dearly, I don’t actually know your tastes. I’m just a video. However, I can say that even though there was mixed results across the sample we’ve went through, there’s such a wide range of games available that, crucially, will remain in your libraries to play even if your Prime subscription lapses that I think there’s a good argument for subscribing for one month in every four, which if you time it right should let you grab them all.
So, was pointing out that you should at least look at the games Amazon are slinging your way really worth an entire video, or was it just an excuse to play some games rather than run benchmarks? You may very well think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.
If you have any questions or want further details please leave a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.