After one of the most amazing months in gaming history, December was bound to disappoint. However few would have expected the month of gifts, holidays and enormous profits to be this meager. In truth there haven’t really been any impressive releases this past month, as publishers seemed to take a brief respite from their hail of quality games. As such you’ll find this entry to be particularly short for a Most Impressive PC Games list, but it does feature a couple of decent games that happened to be released in December 2007.

Many new games are released every month, but which of these games are the ones worth buying? That’s what I’ll help you find out, in this monthly recurring series of Most Impressive PC Games. So when a new month begins, be certain to head on over to The Game Drone for a quick rundown of the latest and greatest titles, including links to game demos - where available - so you can give them a try for yourself!

Jack Keane

An adventure game developed by German studio Deck 13, Jack Keane is a game that promises some of that good old adventuring gameplay… and partly delivers on it. Interestingly it’s being distributed exclusively via direct download service gamersgate - and seems to do a fair few things right. The graphics are quite decent and it’s cartoony looking characters and beautiful backdrops tend to give the game an air of lightheartedness sort of like those good old Monkey Island games. Meanwhile the story manages to remain entertaining throughout the whole ride and the puzzles are challenging for a change.

Unfortunately Jack Keane is not perfect and has it share of flaws as well. In a game as lighthearted as Jack Keane looks to be, you’d expect some good jokes, but this is - mostly - not the case. Meanwhile some of the puzzles are Monkey Island-ish absurd and the voice acting tends to get dragged down by bad performances of some of the voice actor cast, even if parts of it are pretty good. All in all, Jack Keane looks to be a decent adventure game if you’re a fan of the genre, but not exactly an instant classic.

Download the German demo, here. (437 MB)

SunAge

This game is one that oldschool strategy fans might have been keeping their eyes on. It’s been in development for many years, but now it’s finally finished! So what is SunAge? Basically it’s an oldschool futuristic 2D RTS. However contrary to what you might expect, the visuals are actually pretty good. Gameplay is fast and furious, with familiar oldschool gameplay and some nice twists and turns, like dual attack modes for every unit.

Unfortunately it’s just a tad too oldschool. The controls in particular are a serious letdown, by introducing annoyances like having to first select the target and then move your units towards them to get them to close in and start firing, or only being able to select units of the same kind. So while the gameplay may be fun for a while if you want to play an oldschool RTS… there really isn’t any reason to play SunAge over a genuine older RTS.

Shadowgrounds: Survivor

This isometric shooter pits you as a marine fighting off an invasion of aliens on Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter. It features decent graphics and plenty of things to go boom… and weapons to make things go boom of course! Audiovisually Shadowgrounds: Survivor is a pretty impressive game for a topdown shooter, but it suffer quite a bit in the replayability department due to a lack of multiplayer support and a very short singleplayer campaign. That said, it is the highest rated game of these three, so it’s bound to be a fun experience for however short it might last! Besides you can always fire up same-PC co-op with some controllers and have a fun little go at that…

Download it’s predecessor’s demo, here. (383 MB)

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