I've been thinking about Infernal Machine lately and I think my review is a little dry. Part of that is because, despite how many serious problems the game had in the way of glitches and bad dialogue, I actually did kind of enjoy it. So the problem with the review is that I'm trying not to sound overly praising or overly harsh, and that usually causes my reviews to go middle-of-the-road, which tend not to be as entertaining.

One thing that's curious about it is that the dialogue is truly awful at times, and the story is certainly not worthy of being in the same loft as the Indiana Jones movies (yes, I know a lot of people hate Temple of Doom, but I don't, and even if you do, trust me when I say it's not even as "good" as that movie.) However, I really don't want to complain too much about that because it does seem like the designers were more interested in making a game than another Indiana Jones movie, which is definitely a good thing and is most likely the reason I didn't end up hating it.

I'm still only going to give it 2-1/2 stars at the most because of how negligent the playtesting was and also because the final boss is kind of a putz. It's an interesting fight in the same sense that the Black Guardians in Eternal Darkness are interesting because beating him is more like solving a puzzle than surviving a tough action challenge. But once I figured it out, there wasn't much excitement in it. It actually took me a LOT longer and many more tries to figure out how to beat the Quetzalcoatl boss (mainly because I was facing the wall when I rode down the corner platforms and didn't see what was happening - in fact, if you're not looking at the exact moment it happens, meaning if you turn away too soon, you won't know because it happens so fast.)

Crawl won't agree with it, but I'm thinking 3 stars for Eternal Darkness. Haven't even started that review yet, though.