People sure love playing as the bad guy, huh?

(Spoiler Warning)
I tend to really enjoy game mods in Source, something about how they play always scratches a good itch for me and I can tend to put up with a mediocre experience due to that. Entropy: Zero fits that spot to a tee, it's an alright HL2:E2 mod that functions and has some neat ideas but is pretty unremarkable

The tone is probably the strongest part of the game, I think it does a good job at imitating HL2's vibe despite being the story being on the opposite foot. Instead of the misery of the world having a tinge of hope due to Gordon's appearance, you're the one removing any and all hope the rebels could have had. It's really effective when clearing out the streets at the beginning where you see the rebel call-outs in a different light, and I found the most effective use to be the stealth section: you hear the rebels all chatting about how they'll go on after the war in their compound with hacked turrets. Once you sneak to the final room, you can revert the hack, leading to every turret firing for a single second causing the entire area to go dead silent. Something about that really stuck with me and I was expecting more of that throughout the game

Instead the rest of the game was mostly focused on slogging through the underground and citadel with boring puzzles and a lot of searching for the right item/place to use an item. None of the puzzles were engaging and they all felt like artificial reasons to lock the player from progressing forward instead of being more diegetic like the ones in the Half-Life games. I did shockingly find the escort section to be enjoyable, the pace at which enemies were sent at you combined with the size of the area and the speed of the escort target made it so I felt like I was constantly doing something without being overwhelmed

And then comes the two boss fights after all that, both sucking major ass. Both have issues where it's hard to tell whether the damage you're doing is affecting the boss and both bugged out on me multiple times, with the first refusing to go to the next area in its first phase and the second not taking any damage in its final phase (I had quite a few bugs throughout the brief hour and a half I spent but those two were the worst).

It's fortunate the weapons aren't the issue at least, they're more or less the same to base HL2 except they feel a bit more potent overall and the modified AR2 feels amazing. I played on the hardest difficulty but never felt like I was having too much trouble, they give you plenty of ammo and health/shield throughout the game but not too much of an excess so reckless players can still easily die. I think the only issue that comes up relating to this is the few sections with endlessly spawning enemies aren't very fun since there isn't much risk if you carefully position yourself

Entropy: Zero is an alright hour and a half to two hour experience that won't amaze you but won't enrage you. Honestly I played the game just because I wanted to play the sequel, but I'd say it was somewhat worth my time (especially because it's free)

Like everybody else’s review, this is gonna be a wall of text

With every Suda game I play, I question more and more why I continue playing them. Before playing TSC, I had played Killer7, the three main No More Heroes games, and Killer is Dead with it being the only game I came out of with a fully positive feeling. I find Suda’s writing style to be obtuse, esoteric, and obnoxious for the sake of being obnoxious. I don’t feel like he writes compelling characters as most just have a single gimmick they stick to for the entire story or their characterization feels like a mishmash of other characters from media he likes (he’s stated he’s inspired by everything he likes). I feel the worlds he writes tend to not live up to their potential, feeling like he either wasn’t able to finish all the background writing or he thought he did but there’s a lot missing. His newer works also feel masturbatory, he never stops referencing his old works and how freaking awesome! they are, which is funny to me because I think almost all of them aren’t very good

I was really hesitant to play The Silver Case. My friend @Kungfugloves spent weeks shouting about how insane and amazing it is, how “it doesn’t feel like a human wrote it” and how everything feels super unique and interesting. The thing is I hate visual novels. I do not find them engaging, I put gameplay and story on an equal pedestal and visual novels tend to be stripped of the former. As stated, I also do not like Suda’s writing and this is nothing but that. He tried to ease me in by saying one of the campaigns was written by someone else so I’d at least like that one. He bought it for me despite me telling him not to and so I bit the bullet and tried my hardest to go into it with an open mind

I remember watching my friend play this a few months prior to my playthrough and genuinely getting a headache from the UI and backgrounds. I didn't have as much of an issue with it this time around but I do think they're waaaay too busy and a lot of them seem like they're trying to be cryptic and weird for the sake of it. I also found the music to be largely uninteresting, very little of it being downright bad but there isn't a single song that ever stuck out to me and I couldn't even hum a single tune from the game if you stuck a gun to my head

But how did I feel by the end? I think “underwhelmed and frustrated” is probably the best descriptor. The story wasn’t nearly as complex or interesting as I was led to believe. I did have the context that the original release was 1999, but at the same time none of the concepts or story beats felt original to that time period. I’d definitely seen police procedurals of a similar nature as a child with my grandparents that followed a lot of the same beats. Mental clones had been done before in comics and manga well before this. Manic obsessions with serial killers had been a phenomenon for ages.

This game also plays like complete and utter shit. I go into further detail about it in Placebo later in this review but I cannot understate how little I enjoyed the simple act of playing this game. The little exploration you do isn't interesting and takes ages. The puzzles aren't interesting, fun, or engaging, searching every nook and cranny for what you can interact with is actively shit. I cannot and straight up refuse to understand anyone who says that playing this is a good time

The chapter I was most disappointed by was Parade, which my friend described as being “actually crazy, there’s explosions and kidnappings, it’s insane”. Those were present, sure, but the presentation of the game didn’t do the former any good and the latter felt like any other political kidnapping in any other media, topped off with Suda’s esoteric writing that I hate (I know the conclusion is very much easy to understand but the way it’s presented prior to the reveal really rubbed me the wrong way). Runner up goes to Spectrum which felt like an insane waste of time from beginning to end and Lunatics which doesn’t add anything except a miserable conclusion for the five fans of Moonlight Syndrome

I enjoyed Placebo more than Transmitter for the sole reason that the mundane life Tokio lived was more compelling to me than the police procedural of Transmitter. Seeing Tokio’s life descend and him slowly lose his mind as it becomes less clear what’s real and what isn’t was interesting and despite how much more fantastical parts of it were than Transmitter, the grounded tone felt less miserable than Transmitter. I did feel the gameplay was more frustrating though due to the constant back and forth of the three interactables in the room, not telling you which you should do first so you have to constantly trial and error which leads to reading the same lines over and over. I’m told this is a holdover from the original PS1 version but I feel they could have just cut out that spot in the room by the bed if they wanted to

The only other character I ended up liking by the end was Kusabi. I say this because he was easily my least favorite character for a lot of the game. Most of his dialogue early on felt like it was written around the profanity instead of the profanity being written in after, it felt like Suda just discovered the words “fuck”, “shit,” and “goddamn”. I do think he gets some nice development as the game goes on and he effectively becomes the protagonist due to how intertwined he is in everything, but I feel the way he’s more or less dropped at the very end (and how he’s used in the future games now that I’ve played them) is a major misstep

I understand TSC. I get what it’s trying to say. I don’t think it’s an interesting story, I don’t think anything it does is new, I feel it expects the player to never have even considered anything it says throughout its runtime which feels like an insult to the player’s intelligence. I do think the world of the 24 wards is really interesting and had me intrigued the whole time. This game’s world seems downright miserable to live in and the things they hint toward really had me itching for more, but unfortunately instead of any interesting developments I spent the final chapter going up and down ten buildings for some lore that easily could have been consolidated to a drastic degree. Maybe if I liked visual novels more I might have given this a higher score but I don't think that's the case

Most of the criticism I’m writing comes from during and after the playthrough but now that I’ve gone through Flower, Sun, and Rain (terrible) and MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY The 25th Ward (amazing), this game’s flaws mean much more to me because I can see what was possible in this world that has been created and how the establishing framework placed down in this game could have been so much better. I do think it’s interesting how prescient the writing is when it comes to the way government corruption and terrorism are presented, but I don’t think this game is very good in any way honestly

At least it got me to play The 25th Ward