Coming from Butcher after playing it's de facto successor Carrion is a miserable experience. And that's saying something, because Carrion itself is not a good game. But in it's light, Butcher feels so, so weak. It's a game that relies almost entirely on an aesthetic it's successor both replicates and improves upon. And for me, that just makes me look at the gameplay of Butcher more intently, and dang, this sucks.
Essentially, Butcher sells itself as a kinda hotline miami-y, kinda doom-ish blend in a 2d platformer with free aiming, and its awful. It's not quite as bad as the comparable my friend pedro, but its thoroughly uninteresting and by the time you've finished the first level the game is already out of tricks. Whilst on a basic level it's quite similar to some game's i've liked - frankly, young me put way too much time into Armor Mayhem - There's fuck all depth and the lethality is so high on both your and the enemes side it just turns into peaking out behind cover constantly.
This ties in particularly badly with the game's other core problem - it's difficulty. Despite the game doing its absolute darndest to try and seem tough and cool, it's really not. It's mostly just kind of annoying. Enemy AI is so weak and your weapons are so powerful that you can pretty easily just murder everything if you take your time and dont overextend. At the same time, if you do, you die stupid quickly.
It's just kinda lame. The game's vibe seems to encourage high aggression, but ultimately the really bad difficulty balance encourages very conservative, boring play, and rewards you with a full level restart if you dare to try to have fun. Whatever you do, there's nothing like movement tech or really oddball weapons to master anyway, and the console versions have un-removable lock-on aiming, so have fun corner peeking i guess.
To be slightly fair, the aesthetic does work here. Butcher is remarkably grim, as one cyborg's rampage to murder the rest of mankind should be. Whilst the effects arent as great as they become in carrion, and the character sprite's are bizzarely tiny for no good reason, its thick and outright nasty throughout. It's also arguable this grimdank vibe works much better here than in Carrion, which whilst also grim is also aimed a bit more sympathetically to the creature. Its only real problem in Butcher is that it has like, 3 shades of brown on offer for every sprite in the game and when human sprites are so small it's very easy to lose track of them. Kind of crucial for a game which requires fast reflexes. Also god help you if you decide to turn on the CRT filter included. May as well smear vaseline all over your monitor.
Maybe if i'd played this in 2016 on release i'd have seen some value in it, but at least now, six years later, it feels like a game that offers basically nothing of value, that's own schtick has been thoroughly superceeded and that game itself is only decent at best. It's far from an ireedemable game, but also throuroughly not worth bothering with.
Essentially, Butcher sells itself as a kinda hotline miami-y, kinda doom-ish blend in a 2d platformer with free aiming, and its awful. It's not quite as bad as the comparable my friend pedro, but its thoroughly uninteresting and by the time you've finished the first level the game is already out of tricks. Whilst on a basic level it's quite similar to some game's i've liked - frankly, young me put way too much time into Armor Mayhem - There's fuck all depth and the lethality is so high on both your and the enemes side it just turns into peaking out behind cover constantly.
This ties in particularly badly with the game's other core problem - it's difficulty. Despite the game doing its absolute darndest to try and seem tough and cool, it's really not. It's mostly just kind of annoying. Enemy AI is so weak and your weapons are so powerful that you can pretty easily just murder everything if you take your time and dont overextend. At the same time, if you do, you die stupid quickly.
It's just kinda lame. The game's vibe seems to encourage high aggression, but ultimately the really bad difficulty balance encourages very conservative, boring play, and rewards you with a full level restart if you dare to try to have fun. Whatever you do, there's nothing like movement tech or really oddball weapons to master anyway, and the console versions have un-removable lock-on aiming, so have fun corner peeking i guess.
To be slightly fair, the aesthetic does work here. Butcher is remarkably grim, as one cyborg's rampage to murder the rest of mankind should be. Whilst the effects arent as great as they become in carrion, and the character sprite's are bizzarely tiny for no good reason, its thick and outright nasty throughout. It's also arguable this grimdank vibe works much better here than in Carrion, which whilst also grim is also aimed a bit more sympathetically to the creature. Its only real problem in Butcher is that it has like, 3 shades of brown on offer for every sprite in the game and when human sprites are so small it's very easy to lose track of them. Kind of crucial for a game which requires fast reflexes. Also god help you if you decide to turn on the CRT filter included. May as well smear vaseline all over your monitor.
Maybe if i'd played this in 2016 on release i'd have seen some value in it, but at least now, six years later, it feels like a game that offers basically nothing of value, that's own schtick has been thoroughly superceeded and that game itself is only decent at best. It's far from an ireedemable game, but also throuroughly not worth bothering with.