Deus Ex is one of my favorite games. From its open-ended gameplay, to its intricate narrative, and its transcendent soundtrack, any flaws it has are, to me, superseded by its many qualities. Naturally, any prospect of a direct sequel excited me. The reception for Deus Ex: Invisible War went from rather positive at launch to increasingly negative the past two decades and after giving it an honest chance, it's plain to see why. Despite most of the original staff returning, key creative roles are different (director, lead designer) and it's fairly obvious as Invisible War launched the franchise in an entirely new direction that thankfully future games wouldn't repeat.

The gameplay is the biggest problem here. What made Deus Ex so engrossing on a design level was the unprecedented amount of player choice it offered, even putting a lot of modern games to shame. Invisible War purports to have a similar degree of choice, but it cuts down on it to such an insane degree that it might as well not have any. Levels are much smaller, which vastly limits your approach to completion. You never have anything like the original game's Liberty Island where there are numerous different approaches to completing an area (even though Liberty Island does return) - you'd be lucky to get two choices. Sure, there's a vent or a laser grid that can be disabled, but it's a far, far cry from the original. It also doesn't help that gameplay styles are so severely constricted in this game. Stealth or nonlethal options are so heavily disincentivized by the game's own systems that playing it like a standard first-person shooter is not only more fun but much more effective. In Deus Ex, if you snuck up on an enemy and hit them on the square of their backs, it would be an instant takedown. In Invisible War, this mechanic is gone, so attempting the same will just alert the enemy instead, meaning that headshotting them with the pistol is just easier and more efficient. The stun prod also takes much longer to take down an enemy than in the original, which means, once again, any tactical advantage it once had is practically sapped from it. Another remarkably stupid change is the universal ammo system, which means every gun whether pistol or rocket launcher pulls from the same ammo pool. Not only is this a needless oversimplification that even Xbox players would likely find baffling, but it makes the game more difficult since if you run out of ammo for one gun you run out for all of your guns. The removal of skill points also means that player customization is much simpler and different playstyles are once again discouraged. To Invisible War's credit, though, the biomod system is actually sort of interesting, being entirely modular. This means you can swap augmentations at will provided you have enough biomod canisters, and you're given plenty throughout the entire game to make experimenting viable. It's the only source of playstyle customization the game actually gives you and it's a nice breath of fresh air in a game that otherwise feels like a straightjacket. I also like how the game fixes the only gameplay complaint I had with the original - NPC reactions to player actions. Guards will aggro when you hack ATMs in front of them, and they'll react appropriately to seeing dead bodies on the floor. This is the only real improvement Invisible War has over the original, but it is notable, for what that's worth.

Few games can claim to be as thoroughly researched and well-written as Deus Ex, and Invisible War certainly doesn't fit into that category. Despite one of the writers returning, Invisible War entirely lacks the nuance, believable characters, deeper sociopolitical themes, or effective worldbuilding of the original, throwing in a dash of character assassination into the mix. For starters, one of the best parts of the original was the memos you could read throughout the game, which fleshed out the world to insane degrees while also feeling entirely convincing. Invisible War does technically still have these, but not only do they show up in lesser frequency but they're much less detailed too. It feels like they're there simply for the sake of it. This leads to a level of detachment from Invisible War's world setting and the progress that's been made since the first game. The most infamous decision was making all of the original game's endings simultaneously canonical, which is hacked and pasted together with glue and construction paper, feeling unconvincing and clumsy. None of the original characters are very interesting or memorable, they don't have the charming personalities of Deus Ex's cast nor is there much that sets them apart from one another. For example, Billie Adams is supposed to be your best friend from the academy, but there's no chemistry at all to make this believable. It doesn't help that protagonist Alex D is a bumbling idiot with seemingly zero idea of the world around him. While JC Denton was meant to be a player insert without a defined personality, he still had knowledge of the world around him and his interactions felt more genuine as a result. Alex on the other hand has to ask questions he would already reasonably know, and it feels like it only exists to serve the player, ignoring the ways Deus Ex did it far more intelligently. The most unbelievable part is how Invisible War treats its returning characters. Chad Dumier and Nicolette DuClare were terrorists with good intentions, desiring to overthrow the tyranny of Majestic 12. Like most of Deus Ex's characters, they were highly characterized by ideology. In Invisible War, these two characters now run the modern incarnation of the Illuminati, presumably having changed drastically after the Collapse. Not only does the game seemingly not actually go into any detail as to why these characters developed so drastically, but they might as well be entirely different characters. While peoples' perceptions of the world can definitely change due to major world events, I can't imagine Chad and Nicolette not only doing a 180-degree ideological turn but also rebuilding the entire thing that they lost so many lives fighting against. It's a ridiculous concept and easily my least favorite part of the plot. The game has a faction system that allows Alex to side with a myriad of different groups by doing their specific faction quests, but none of this amounts to anything narratively because the faction you align with (if any) can just be arbitrarily decided by the player at the end of the game, so there's little consequence to your choices.

Deus Ex was a respectable game visually speaking. Its enjoyably low-key cyberpunk aesthetic and solid (if unremarkable for their time) graphics created a visually satisfying game and one that I had no complaints about within that department. Invisible War ups the ante to Unreal Engine 2, but relative to the advancements in technology in the past three years, I find its visual presentation underwhelming. It's not a bad-looking game by any means, there are appealing aspects both in terms of art direction and technology, but I find it mediocre overall. Aesthetically, Invisible War is set far into the future, forgoing the grounded look for a future more in line with Star Trek. While not inherently a problem, the game's aesthetic is this weirdly washed-out, teal, steel corridor look which blends with so many other different sci-fi games. Ion Storm's conception of the future is generic, standard, and uninteresting. It extends to the hardly creative locations (neither are DX1's, but that game isn't going for the same degree of science-fiction) and the uninspired character designs. Hooded religious figures, goggled military men, and tight spandex suits don't inspire much in me. I'm all for developers playing with extreme color palettes, but the game is so washed out without it fitting any thematic purpose, such as a game set in the apocalypse having a similar palette to emphasize desolation. Graphically speaking, Invisible War does feature higher-quality assets and improved tech such as bumpmaps, but they somehow look worse. Characters have wide-eyed stares and mouths which have visible seams when animating. Textures, despite bumpmaps, are far lower quality than the original game and even have visible compression artifacts (almost certainly because of the Xbox's RAM constraints), lacking the detail texture option many Unreal Engine 1 games had. There's practically only one stock character face for each gender/race, and while the original game often had repeat NPCs they at least all looked distinct from one another. Despite the more advanced technology, the game's environments don't feel more detailed than the original's more often than not. Outdoor areas certainly look commendable enough, but all inside areas are bland and sparse. The lighting system looks great, however, and it's clearly something Ion Storm wanted to show off for better or worse. Every light source projects dynamic shadows across the entire area and it's honestly kind of stellar if somewhat over-the-top, reminding me a lot of Doom 3. It's probably why, among other reasons, maps had to be so much smaller to accommodate the Xbox, but I do enjoy looking at it for what that's worth.

It would be nice if the PC port was any good, though. Invisible War is a notoriously unstable game and even with the practically required Visible Upgrade mod, the game still frequently locked up on me during loading screens. It got to the point where I was quicksaving before exiting even small areas, holding my breath to see if the game would crash "the right way" or not. Seeing as the game handles level loading by deliberately crashing itself and relaunching in the new area every single time (which has the consequence of often running multiple game windows), this leads to moments where the game just crashes and freezes entirely, without loading the new areas. It also has the consequence of making loading screens way longer than they need to be, which feels especially sluggish in a game where areas are so small. There's a lot of veritable technical jank in this game, such as the framerate being uncapped by default yet physics objects speeding up above 100 FPS. The game will run at any framerate your PC can handle, but it never actually feels smooth to play, with a seemingly persistent judder to the experience. The port also lacks basic features, such as anisotropic filtering or key remapping for core gameplay functions. Certain things such as lack of widescreen support are somewhat excusable due to age, but others are just behind what other PC games were offering at the time. That in and of itself wouldn't be horrible had the game not been so unstable.

Deus Ex has, in my opinion, one of the best soundtracks ever featured in a video game. Invisible War takes an entirely new direction, forgoing the original game's focus on melody for an entirely ambient score inspired by Looking Glass Studios' Thief games. It's a major step down, but I can't say it's entirely ineffective either. Alexander Brandon is an incredibly talented composer and even if his work isn't memorable or even particularly creative here, it still capably supports the game's atmospheric needs. The theme for Heron's Loft in Seattle was a highlight, conveying a certain depressive yet comforting tone, reflecting the squalor the tenants lived in. Each area's dedicated themes fit them perfectly fine, and I never once had any complaints tonally. Some of the tracks are even rather relaxing. The direction that Ion Storm went musically wasn't strictly a bad thing, but it lacks memorability and doesn't properly build connections between the player and the environments, despite still being suitably immersive. Games like Resident Evil 7 have largely ambient, unassuming scores that still manage to create a soundscape that blends seamlessly with the environment. Invisible War certainly takes a shot but it doesn't become so immersive that it feels real nor is it melodic enough to cause earworms. A big missed opportunity was to have a dynamic soundtrack like the original game, with dedicated themes for general ambiance, combat, and conversations. The game suffers from a lack of combat music, which makes enemy encounters feel flat and lifeless comparatively. Variety was the spice of life in the original and it's just not here. I did like the inclusion of real-life industrial band Kidneythieves in the game's soundtrack as it did inject some life into what is an otherwise sort of anemic score even if it's kind of embarrassingly emblematic of the game's release year. Brandon at his worst is still Alexander Brandon, it's very competent and works well enough, but I understand his comments about it "not being right for Deus Ex".

Deus Ex: Invisible War is not a downright painful experience. It's hardly awful and on a surface level appears simply, unmemorably mediocre. Peel back the layers and you'll find a game whose systems hardly work, whose mechanics feel as constrained as a straightjacket, whose narrative feels cynical at best and often ridiculous, whose visuals have aged worse than the original, and whose stability is frequently an issue. Although I started the experience thinking that it "wasn't that bad", by the end I was entirely confident in branding Invisible War a downright bad game. While I understand publisher mandates and time constraints ended up hampering development rather significantly, it doesn't change that many strange decisions on Ion Storm's part were entirely unnecessary if not often detrimental. I'm surprised Deus Ex as a franchise even made it past this dud of a game and I'm glad that the next two games would, for their faults, at least return to the spirit of the original that got me invested in the first place.

John Woo's Hard Boiled is a phenomenal action film with masterfully choreographed action sequences, engaging and fun characters, and a unique dreamlike atmosphere. The idea of making a video game sequel to it, then, sounds ridiculous only on a surface level. All of these elements, at least in theory, threaten to make something that's at least interesting. That's exactly where Stranglehold comes in, the self-purported sequel to the seminal action film, developed by Midway Chicago with Woo's blessing and involvement. Does the American developer do the Hong Kong film justice? I don't think so, but that doesn't mean it's entirely worthless either.

Stranglehold's biggest boon is the game design, which allows you to do all kinds of cool moves. Diving, flipping, and even carting around the levels is fun on a primal level and for the most part the level design accommodates for that. It typically doesn't restrict you without some sort of point (there's an entire boss fight where they force you to work around a constrained arena, which is fun) and it's surprisingly challenging. Tequila Time (which is just a fancy name for bullet time), isn't just a get out of jail free card for damage, but an actual mechanic that must be learned. Treating it like a gimmick will result in death more often than not. The special moves are also quite fun, whether it be a berserk mode, a Sniper Elite-style instakill sniper mode, or a screen-clearing bullet dance. The gameplay isn't really anything special, by this point two Max Payne games had released and none of the concepts Stranglehold introduces feel fresh or unique, but they are largely well executed and its hard to complain too much when I'm sliding towards a group of enemies on a food cart. Like other reviewers have mentioned, the game's second level has to be one of the worst pacing killers in gaming history. The first level begins as the perfect tutorial, only for the second level to turn into an extremely tedious, overly long and poorly designed hunt for drug tables that of course, culminates in an overly long, unchallenging, and dull turret section. It's everything that the 7th generation of gaming is often unfairly stereotyped as, brought together into one level. Thankfully after that the rest of the game is largely smooth sailing, but it still suffers from flaws such as difficulty spikes and bullet-sponge boss fights that are largely uninteresting. Nevertheless, it does at least generally capture what it would be like to play through a John Woo film, and it deserves some commendation for that.

While Stranglehold is often quite fun, that's not what makes it a disappointing sequel to Hard Boiled. Rather, Stranglehold on a narrative level feels entirely disconnected from it. That's not to say the game needed to be a direct sequel to the film, but rather that it should have had anything to do with it at all. While you do indeed play as Inspector Tequila and the main antagonist is the father of the film's antagonist, that's where the similarities end. Stranglehold's scenario feels like you could have thrown any character ensemble in and it would be the exact same, just with Chow Yun-fat at the lead. There's none of the fun character dynamics or memorable heroes and villains of the original film and everything feels particularly stock. Viewed on its own terms, it's not exactly exciting either, feeling like any generic action film with no memorable characters, narrative stakes, or creative scenario writing. Yung Gi is sort of a fun character, and Tequila occasionally has some funny quips, but it doesn't carry any of what made Hard Boiled not just fun, but narratively gripping.

The presentation is sort of hit or miss, carrying many appealing aspects but once again failing to capture the atmosphere of Hard Boiled. Hard Boiled was a dreamlike, jazz-infused, diffused vision of Hong Kong which Stranglehold completely fails to capture without offering up a unique atmosphere of its own. It feels disappointingly contemporary, not offering any unique elements of the late-2000s. In essence, it lacks atmosphere, but that doesn't mean it always looks totally uninspired. The casino level has some fairly nice art direction across the board but for the most part the rest of the game is mostly generic aesthetically. Grey corridors, bloom-laced beaches, none of which look bad necessarily but fail to make an impression. Graphically speaking I feel Stranglehold is simultaneously quite impressive while also looking very behind the curve. The game looks very flat, and that's because the lighting is quite poor. Areas simply lack proper shadowing and look washed out and lifeless. Facial animation is actually very expressive, but character faces themselves look like potatoes more often than not. Texture quality is often absurdly low and this can really stand out when its stretched across a large wall. I do want to give Stranglehold some slack however, and that's because of its extensive destruction system which allows you to blow every single part of its environments to smithereens. This necessitates environments being fairly detailed, and watching it all fall apart is exciting. It's impressive just how extensive it is and is the closest the game comes to feeling like Hard Boiled. Due to being developed primarily for systems with less than a gigabyte of RAM, I find it somewhat excusable that Midway had to pair back visual fidelity in order to achieve this. Stranglehold certainly isn't a looker, but I'll give it some slack for it's impressive destruction system.

What I don't find excusable is its lackluster PC port. The game only offers you two adjustable graphical options, both being simple toggles for dynamic shadows and decals. The lack of proper visual options or scalability means that toning down visual settings for older computers would result in minimal performance gains, while also meaning you can't crank the visuals up much further than the console versions on more powerful computers. The lack of any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering at all means the game often looks blurry and shimmery without forcing it externally. Hell, the PC port doesn't even properly support widescreen resolutions without a mod, which should tell you all you need to know about its quality. The only good thing is that the framerate is uncapped, which is actually pretty nice, especially when most Unreal Engine 3 games were capped at 62 FPS by default. All of these issues can be fixed fairly easily with mods, but shouldn't have been problems to begin with.

The soundtrack left me wanting as well. Hard Boiled's original score was dominated by jazz and drum machines, and outside of small homages, Stranglehold's score is mostly made up of extremely generic 2000s action game music. I struggle to even describe it because it is fairly generic and unimpressive, failing to build an atmosphere or push the player forwards. The main theme is nice with its Asian flutes and vocals, but that's about all that stood out to me. A huge disappointment considering how important music was to that original film's presentation and characters.

If I'm to be completely forward, Stranglehold is not a good sequel to Hard Boiled. It doesn't understand what made that original film tick in terms of writing, atmosphere, or presentation, seemingly thinking that the film was defined solely by its action. As a standalone third-person shooter though, it's pretty enjoyable in its own right. Aside from a terrible second level, the gameplay might not be special but it is very entertaining and the game is short enough to where it doesn't quite overstay its welcome. The amount of cool moves you can do while tearing everything to shreds in the game's mostly solid levels is well worth the $10 price of admission, especially for fans of John Woo's filmography and style of direction. However, the game lacks atmosphere, its soundtrack is bland, the story is drag-and-drop generic, and it's presentation is somewhat understandably lackluster given its technological goals. It's a fun distraction for a few hours, but it isn't exactly a hidden gem either.

In traditional 90s FPS fashion, the first expansion pack for Monolith Productions' phenomenal shooter Blood was developed by an outside studio. I hesitate to say "outsourced", because Monolith was working on their own expansion at the same time, so it feels like they probably just licensed the rights away. Either way, this was developed by Sunstorm Interactive, who had previously developed the often-bemoaned expansion Duke It Out In D.C. for Duke Nukem 3D, though their later work would be more positively received. Cryptic Passage for Blood is a fairly unambitious expansion that includes little to nothing in terms of new content, lacking the recreations of real-world locations of D.C. or the humorous high concept of Duke Caribbean: Life's a Beach. Sunstorm is simply content to create 10 new levels (and 4 multiplayer levels, though I didn't try those) with mostly stock Blood assets aside from some admittedly pretty cool new textures. These levels are somewhat variant in quality, with the worst one being mediocre and the best one being genuinely great. For the most part, Cryptic Passage is largely solid with a decent amount of creativity in the level design and a workmanlike approach to expansion development. I enjoyed most of the levels even if the expansion largely rides off of the success of Blood's weapon and enemy design, that's really not a bad thing to do at all. I will say, something that does suck is that some of the levels are too puzzle-based, which grinds pacing to a halt and the library is most guilty of this. Player guidance is also a problem as occasionally Sunstorm'll hide progression-related things in areas I struggled to find even with extensive exploration. Despite a couple of bum levels, Cryptic Passage is still a good bit of fun and I do recommend it for fans of Blood. Just make sure to go in knowing its fairly unambitious.

Ion Storm is an infamous development studio, but you can't attribute said infamy to a lack of trying. With some of the industry's best talent at the time, the auter-based studio's output was mixed, to say the least. From vehemently disregarded like John Romero's time-skipping FPS, Daikatana, to the positive-but-ignored reception of Tom Hall's ambitious-Final-Fantasy-like Anachronox, and of course the duology of console-constrained sequels Deus Ex: Invisible War and Thief: Deadly Shadows, only one of Ion Storm's games would manage to be both critically and commercially successful: Deus Ex. Very few games claim to have the influence and popularity that Deus Ex enjoys, much less maintaining that reputation for over two decades. Often hailed as a prophetic harbinger of things to come narratively while celebrated for gameplay that would come to redefine the medium, the game is a mixture of many different elements that come together nearly perfectly. I've played very few games that, despite whatever flaws they may have, feel perfect in the way that Deus Ex does, nor come together so cohesively.

Part of this Ion Storm's approach to level design, one which they'd abandon for future games due to the technical limitations of consoles. Calling Deus Ex an open world game would be stretching the truth, but the game presents you with multiple extensive hub worlds (to the degree that the fanbase struggles exactly to define when a level begins or ends) that are dense in objectives both mandatory and optional. There are no waypoints, no handholding, just mission objectives and clues you can find by exploring the maps. Exploring these maps is fun particularly because of how open ended the mission objectives are. The first level, Liberty Island, is perhaps the pinnacle of open-ended game design. Do you want to storm the front gates, or scale the back of the building and break in? You could always take the route to Harley Filben to get the key, but that route is more dangerous. Once you're inside, do you try to save Gunther, and if you do, do you give him your weapon? These sorts of choices, both mechanically and narratively, allow for the player to tailor their playstyle however they want, because the level design allows for it. Every level contains multiple secret nooks and crannies, sometimes featuring useful goodies, sometimes showing entire secret areas crucial to accomplishing side objectives. The open-ended nature of Deus Ex, something even a lot of modern games struggle with, is part of why the game remains so impressive today. Each playstyle, whether it be lethal, non-lethal, or entirely stealth based is largely equally viable, with multiple augmentations that stem towards benefiting. Sure, it's probably easier to cut down enemies with the one-hit Dragon's Tooth laser sword, but self imposed challenges are encouraged, as the game keeps track of how you play and characters will comment on how violent or stealthy you are. The gameplay mechanics do feel slightly simplistic compared to later immersive sims or even later Deus Ex games, but they're still surprisingly intuitive, fun, and challenging (though the game is really not that hard, even on hard mode). I really like how the early game encourages you to play like a cybernetic Jason Voorhees, lurking in the shadows before leaping out at an unsuspecting foe. You're able to fully customize your ablities from augmentations, to skill point division, to weapon choice, weapon mods, etc. Needless to say, Deus Ex is a game where player freedom matters to an extreme degree, more so than most games, from level design to game mechanics.

While these problems feel minuscule at most, I will say that even on hard mode, the game feels like it gives you too many passes. You can hack the computers of important NPCs in positions of power from the very first time you find one with the appropriate skills, aside from some annoyed remarks, no one ever tries to stop you. You can just do obviously concerning things in front of NPCs who would, in future Deus Ex games, become aggro'ed instead of just standing there. This isn't a serious flaw by any means, but it's one of the few moments where player freedom seemingly means lack of player consequences, and I think the game would be more challenging in a beneficial way had that been implemented. I also find the shipyards level pitifully boring and somewhat frustrating to navigate due to the level design taking a sharp drop off, but it's mediocre at worst and ultimately not a long section of the game. Area 51 has some interesting ideas but feels like a similar drop.

Although Deus Ex's gameplay was praised and is highly influential to this day, it's the narrative that people usually connect with the most in the modern day. Deus Ex has a reputation for being near prophetic; an early 2000s prediction into the plights we currently face as a society. Deus Ex is not exactly unique in this regard - many writers from this era made many similar predictions - but it is one of the few video games of this era, even nowadays, to be so thoroughly well-researched with care and effort to make sure the very real facts that line its fictional plot have some basis in reality. The game's scenario writing is intricately plotted, somehow making the ridiculous high concept of "what if a ton of conspiracy theories were entirely true" able to be taken entirely seriously, and even when it's corny it doesn't remotely detract from the experience. While most of the characters aren't particularly deep, they feel very realistic within Deus Ex's world setting, and my allies and enemies alike are burnt into my mind as some of gaming's most iconic. Speaking of the world setting, it's so ridiculously well-defined and written that it feels hyperreal at points. The Unatco bulletin boards feel exactly like something I'd see on the news or any government entity's social media page. It's fleshed out to the point where the writers wrote fake excerpts of in-universe novels that convey much of the game's themes (and even included excerpts of real-life books too, which is beyond cool). The game is also highly politically intelligent, and while I don't always agree with all of Spector's sentiments here, I can't argue that the majority of Deus Ex's political theories aren't well-reasoned or thought out. Every character has their own ideologies and, if the player chooses, they can ask them more and even engage in debates with a few characters, which can lead to interesting revelations. On top of all of this, the game manages to be a globe-trotting adventure with a narrative filled with tension and intrigue, and I was hooked from beginning to end. The endings are a bit polarizing among fans but I like how all of them are unquestionably negative and there's not really a "good choice" among them. I do think they're a bit abrupt and end pretty inconclusively - I would have liked to see the results of your actions. Favorite quote: "God was the dream of a good government".

Although Deus Ex fits pretty squarely into the cyberpunk genre, aesthetically it's a fairly grounded representation. Outside of patrol bots scouting the streets, the majority of the time it looks like something you'd be able to go outside and see for yourself. Focusing largely on downtrodden, poor areas, the most extravagant you'll ever see is Hong Kong, which even so is only livelier due to the different style of lighting. Deus Ex is a game plunged into eternal nocturne, with well-lit areas exclusively reserved for indoor areas and this does a great job of making the player feel small, lost in the game's nighttime atmosphere. The disregarding of past technology (conveyed thematically in Gunther and Navarre, whose mechanical augmentations are outclassed by JC's nanoaugs) as tech gets both more efficient and inaccessible leads to a future that seemingly has regressed in many ways. The character designs are quintessentially early 2000s, with JC heavily resembling Blade and characters such as Navarre looking straight out of the leather-clad Matrix. It's easy to look back on designs with a condescending "its of its time" tone, but I do genuinely think they look distinctive and cool. Graphically speaking, Deus Ex isn't exactly a stunner even for 2000, with its large environments being blocky and sparsely detailed, which I find excusable due to the difficulties of rendering large outdoor environments on PCs where the recommended amount of RAM was 128 megabytes. Animations are somewhat stiff (especially player animations, which to be fair, are rarely seen) and character models aren't exactly extremely detailed, but the game manages to convey its aesthetic through this anyways. That's not saying the game looks bad by any means, overall it still looks quite solid by the standards of the time, and areas like Hong Kong really showcase how beautiful the game can look at points with its bright colors and greater detail due to a more condensed environment. I also think the game has a fairly unique approach to facial animations which do look a lot more realistic than the puppet-flaps of Half-Life or the complete absence of System Shock 2. Ultimately, I do not think the low-key aesthetic exactly demands an extravagant visual presentation, but what they managed to accomplish on Unreal was quite solid, if slightly behind its peers in ways that are often excusable.

Full transparency, I've been obsessively listening to Deus Ex's score for weeks now since beating the game. Lead primarily by composers Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos and building off of their similarly excellent work on Unreal, I feel the need to compare the game's soundtrack to Ennio Morricone's score to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, not because it sounds similar even in the slightest but rather because it has a similar feeling of transcendence. A lot of games go for a more low-key ambient style when trying to approach atmosphere and while there's nothing wrong with that, Deus Ex's emphasis on melody over soundscape distinguishes it and feels very distinctive in comparison. The amount of effort put into making sure each area has a dedicated theme (as well as sub themes for conversations, combat, special rooms, etc.) begins to get a little absurd and there's a ton of variety in not only tracks but musical style. From the angelic vocals in New York City to the Asian themed composition and rhythmic bass in Hong Kong to the screaming alarms of Paris' combat theme to the utter emptiness of the Hong Kong canals, there's something new every time while still tying together into a unified sound and cohesive tone. I can't say I'm a huge fan of the game's club/bar music but that's fine, because they still fit exactly what I'd expect in a club or bar, so I consider it effective nonetheless. Deus Ex's soundtrack is also somewhat dynamic, as the aforementioned tracks do switch up depending on whether you're in combat or talking to NPCs, but its not nearly as in-depth as something like System Shock. Still, the variety is much appreciated. It's a near perfect soundtrack that I struggle to find a single poor aspect of. It melds with the game's presentation perfectly and the fact that it's homaged by future games in the series proves that the music is part of what has stayed with people over the following decades.

Deus Ex is not a perfect game, it's somewhat too easy and there are one or two somewhat questionable levels, but it's one of those games where each of its core elements come together so cohesively that it's hard to find serious fault. It's open-ended level design, emphasis on real and genuine player choice mechanically and narratively, nuanced and complicated storytelling, well-researched political themes, low-key aesthetic and transcendent soundtrack make it an absolutely magical game that feels like no other. I don't care if its "dated" or that it can be somewhat of a pain to get working on modern PCs, it's a game that regularly goes on sale for less than a dollar and should be at the very top of anyone's to play list.

By 2019, the Resident Evil franchise was in a pretty good place. After struggling with its identity for nearly a decade, Capcom's excellent survival horror game Resident Evil 7: Biohazard put the franchise back on the map in the eyes of many horror fans, winning numerous accolades and selling over 12 million copies. It's only natural, then, that after rebooting the series with an original title Capcom would return to the familiar: in this case, a remake of the similarly excellent Resident Evil 2, perhaps the pinnacle of 90s survival horror. In my eyes, the Resident Evil 2 remake doesn't even come close to replacing the original, but I don't think any sane developer should have attempted to in the first place. Instead, it acts as a late-2010s complement to it, offering a modernized interpretation of the game with a drastically different vision yet still capturing similar feelings of tension and atmosphere as the original did. Resident Evil 2 remake carves its own path while respecting the source material, becoming an instant survival horror classic.

Part of why Resident Evil 2 succeeds as well as it does is due to the game design. In this case, Capcom truly understood what made the original survival horror titles so compelling on a gameplay level. Playing on the hardcore difficulty mode proved to be a thoroughly rewarding experience that could often be highly difficult yet never once felt like it was pushing me beyond my capabilities, nor like it was asking more than it provided. While the tank controls and fixed camera angles of the original game are long gone, the game makes up for the difficulty those could provide with new challenges, such as location-based damage and the need to properly align and aim your shots. Player movement feels perfect, giving you just enough delay and weight to make the player feel vulnerable but just enough responsiveness and speed to make maneuvering around monsters a skill to master, and mastering said skill is highly satisfying. A major improvement is the difficulty, something that was sorely lacking in the original, being oddly easy for a survival horror game. Enemies are highly dangerous and even a single zombie represents a major threat, which is the main reason why RE2R remains such a tense and stressful experience. I've had many otherwise perfectly planned runs ruined when I forgot to account for a stray zombie shambling around. Mr. X has been a massive point of contention among fans, with some deriding the stress he brings, though I consider him to be a massive gameplay revelation on the same tier as the crimson heads from the remake of Resident Evil 1. He fundamentally changes how you play the game and forces you to be stealthy, as gunshots, slammed doors, or even running can alert him to your position. I didn't find him unbearably difficult, in fact, I got a hang of him fairly quickly, but I can't discount the incredible amount of stress he adds to the experience, and this kind of stress is exactly what I want in a game of this genre. The RPD is a sprawling puzzle box that, as any good RE game should, feels impenetrably labyrinthine at the beginning but eventually expands and opens up as the player learns to best plan routes and unlocks new areas. Later areas such as the underground and the laboratory aren't nearly as expansive but are certainly unnerving in their own right. I also really appreciate the addition of lickers being blind, once again forcing stealth which can become additionally tense to avoid if you have Mr. X in pursuit. RE2R is a game that demands the player keep track of every move they make and it's a level of player immersion that I highly respect and wish more games accomplished. On a mechanical level, this might be a perfect survival horror game.

Resident Evil 2 isn't perfect overall, however, and while the game's flaws struggle to feel little more than marginal, they are at least moderate hindrances that prevent it from getting a perfect score from me. There's a lot of online controversy about how the game handles the dual scenarios, with many arguing they're exactly like one another. I disagree, after playing Leon A to Claire B, I found that both campaigns are reasonably different to make them both worth playing and largely felt in line with how the originals handled it. However, I was disappointed that most of the boss fights were the same, with only one or two appearing only in one campaign as opposed to the original which had a lot more variance. William Birkin G2 is a fairly disappointing fight, relying heavily on the arena's gimmick and the maneuverability you have in that fight is probably too limited, though if you conserved your ammo he won't be too difficult even on hardcore. I also disliked the G-Adults as enemies. Their large stature already makes them difficult to avoid, especially with their propensity to grab and poison the player, but considering how they almost always appear in groups it can lead to being stunlocked. At one point I had to basically daisy chain R/G/B herb combos to get by five of them in a row. These are relatively minor and fleeting issues, but they were noticeably frustrating when they did occur.

One aspect that I think has improved somewhat from the original is the writing and how the game conveys its narrative. The original game has a great scenario and, for its time, was executed fairly well. Sure, the voice acting was melodramatic and campy, but the unnerving worldbuilding and engaging character dynamics carried the story. What the remake adds to the experience feels more natural. Part of this is due to great performances from everyone involved, but part of this is due to some very solid writing. The scenario is for the most part the same, but the characters, while mostly flat are engaging to watch and written convincingly and realistically. The dialog conveys the characters' personalities extremely well - Leon S. Kennedy's scrappy naivety and Claire Redfield's motherly nature as they both transform into survivalists and face horror with heroism. Certain supporting characters like Marvin Branagh and Chief Irons went from having relatively small roles in the original game to being fleshed out fairly dramatically, with Marvin's final scene perhaps the most tragic in the game. Irons embodies "dirty old man with a position of power" incredibly well and the memos that describe his taxidermy hobby are appropriately squeamish. I will say the memos aren't nearly as memorable as they were in the original and while they certainly serve their purpose, none of them really stood out to me other than those relating to Irons. It feels like they exist solely to give puzzle hints or point out mechanics for the most part, unlike the original (or even RE7) where they felt more natural. They still do a perfectly serviceable job of filling out the game's world setting, don't get me wrong, I just wish they were a little more ambitious in this department.

The original RE2 was a visual stunner for a late '90s console game, with its detailed pre-rendered backgrounds and cinematic (albeit quickly outdated) CGI cutscenes. RE2R hits a similar relative bar of quality, looking largely incredible and raising the bar from the already nearly photorealistic RE7. The moment you step into the reimagined RPD, the insane amount of detail the game packs into every environment is awesome to behold. Even nowadays, there are still plenty of AAA games that don't have environments nearly as dense and well-constructed as RE2R, and everything has a highly realistic sense of place. It all feels lived in and I was never unconvinced that this was indeed a place people regularly worked in. RE2R is a game that absolutely revels in details, such as the rain pitter-pattering on Leon/Claire's outfits and the realistic wetness materials. The lighting and use of darkness help to replicate a similar level of fear that fixed camera angles did. The game has some of the most lifelike human faces I've ever seen, with breathtakingly expressive facial animation and lip sync, the only exception being non-cutscene facial animation which is wooden (which isn't the biggest deal, as you'll largely be facing away from their faces when playing). The animation work is superb, with character movement having a surprising amount of different animations based on the environment, and I never thought I'd be impressed by running down a set of stairs. The game's gore and dismemberment system is disgusting and detailed, allowing for a wide variety of ways to blast apart zombies. The next-gen update implements a few different types of ray tracing which, while behind the curve technologically and a tad pixellated and smeary even on max settings, still improves upon the game's original screen-space reflections pretty heavily. It's plain to see that RE2R isn't a game that was designed with ray tracing in mind, but it still improves pretty heavily on the original presentation, if only due to removing the game's bad SSR implementation. Texture quality is probably slightly worse than RE7 but the difference really doesn't matter due to the third-person camera. The only real problem is, once again, the game's anti-aliasing, which is once again either too blurry or not effective enough. I ended up just sticking with SMAA due to the additional sharpness it provides but aliasing was a constantly present visual issue and the game's FXAA/TAA implementation is simply too smeary for my tastes. The game does support high-fidelity upscaling for additional performance but it practically murders image quality, as they used the earliest version of FSR instead of the more modern versions.

Despite that one problem, RE2R looks absolutely phenomenal on a technical level, but how does it compare artistically? All of the returning monsters are beautifully realized. From the zombies being the perfect showcase of the overly-detailed gore system, to the crimson naked muscle of the lickers, to the extremely detailed and beautifully animated G-Birkins, the monster designs are perhaps definitive interpretations of classic RE beasts. They gave Mr. X's design much more personality with his little fedora, his melted wax face, and dead glowing white eyes. The only designs I dislike are the G-Adults who don't look nearly as grotesque as prior games. In a more polarizing move, the game's color palette is fairly muted, avoiding strong contrast in favor of lighter black levels and a generally teal grading. In HDR especially this looks rather striking, giving the game a diffused look. It resembles horror films of the 1980s, especially those directed by John Carpenter and it's a look I really dig. I understand why there are mods that give the game a more conventionally modern look but I love how it looks right out of the box, personally. The modernized look of the characters is great, looking significantly more realistic than before, with goofy aspects of the original designs toned down or remote. If you are like me and miss Leon's goofy shoulder pads or Claire's strange wedgie pants, they can be acquired via DLC if you want.

The only glaring problem with this game on a technical level is that performance is highly variable. While RE7 had some strange dips to 40 FPS seemingly randomly, RE2R trades that for a framerate that varies heavily depending on the room. While the game, for the most part, runs pretty decently, there are core areas where I find performance unacceptable. The game's many tight corridors and smaller rooms run extremely smoothly at 100-120 FPS in native 1440p on maximum settings, but stepping out into the main hall immediately drops the framerate to 50 FPS or below. There are a few different rooms that have similarly egregious drops, but for the most part, I just didn't like the game going from 120 FPS down to 70 FPS so rapidly. G-Sync helped this feel less jittery but a game that is nearly half a decade old, with ray tracing less advanced than its contemporaries, should not be running this way on hardware that is newer than it. I don't mean to give off the impression that the game consistently performs terribly, in fact there are large stretches of the game I'd say performed great, but it happens too much to be ignorable.

Another point of contention has been the soundtrack, largely led by series veteran Shusaku Uchiyama but featuring contributions from a number of composers. RE2R went in a similar musical direction to RE7, with the game's original score largely being ambient and quietly mixed. Although the original game's score is iconic and difficult to match in memorability (which the remake's score does not, unfortunately), I do think that RE2R's score sounds largely very good and complements the game's atmosphere very well. The game's subtle use of musical queues gives it a low-key feel and I won't lie, the generally subdued nature of the score did make the game feel more realistic than the original. The score has an airy feeling, which makes areas like the RPD main hall feel gigantic and expansive. I enjoyed the electronic parts of the soundtrack, which feel crunchy and nostalgic. I could imagine portions like that appearing in a PSX game. The orchestral themes, such as Collapse and Last Judgment sound fantastic, taking elements from legendary film composers such as James Horner, with the anxious strings and urgently pounding brass pushing me into anxiety like no other. Like RE7, I felt that the subdued nature of the soundtrack did lend it a realistic atmosphere where the music could often be confused with the game's sound effects, but I don't think it's as effective as it was in RE7 for one reason: consistency. Although like RE7, RE2R's score is largely supposed to blend into the environments seamlessly, it's not nearly as present and certain tracks that should be universal constants simply are not. I feel that certain rooms, such as the RPD main hall or the various save rooms should constantly have their ambient themes playing, but they only play a handful of times and no more. This does rob the game of some of its atmosphere, as I think the musical association with key areas in a game with a ton of backtracking is fairly important. Despite the lack of consistency, it's still a very solid and often effective score that I enjoyed both in-game and on its own, even if it lacks the memorability of the iconic 1998 score.

Resident Evil 2 remake doesn't replace the original game. Very few, if any, remakes do. Nor does it supersede it. Rather, the game matches many of the original game's qualities, but in different ways that feel both refreshingly modern and nostalgically classic. The near-perfect survival horror game design, anxiety-inducing horror, fine-tuned difficulty, improved storytelling, highly detailed visuals, and rock-solid atmosphere nearly make me forget about a handful of the game's somewhat annoying sections. It does certain things better than the original, and it does certain things worse, so it's really a give or take on which game I prefer. An immediate modern classic, Resident Evil 2 is the game that should be held as a benchmark for all survival horror games going forward.

Evacuation is one of those Half-Life 2 mods that desperately wants to be a modern AAA first-person shooter. From the weapon limit, to the ADS, to the view bob and sprinting animations, the opening turret section, and even Resident Evil 4 remake-style yellow paint on key items, the mod tries its hardest to appear flashy, modern, and professional. None of these are necessarily bad traits, but playing through Evacuation, you very quickly understand that these aspects are surface-level and aesthetic only. At its core, it is just another HL2 mod. Nothing unique is attempted in terms of level design, and oftentimes the levels can be downright poor. The mod takes place entirely within a forest which means player railroading can often be confusing, with things like fallen tree trunks simply looking like parts of the environment but being required for progression and traversal. Enemy encounters aren't very interesting and there aren't any "wow" moments like you'd see in HL2 community classics. It feels like moving from arena to arena without regard for Half-Life's famous sense of progression. Some of the puzzles feel pretty obtuse, such as having to search for a full gas canister in an encampment full of gas canisters to power a generator. It's all serviceable but not very interesting, and there are plenty of other, better HL2 mods that take up far less space on your hard drive (11 gigabytes!).

At least it looks nice visually, with nice amber lighting giving the forest an attractive autumn look and nice details such as leaves falling from the trees making the experience more atmospheric. However, I did seemingly run into a frequent lighting bug where the color correction/ambient light in a scene would flicker rapidly between tones depending on where the camera was facing. The original soundtrack was a nice surprise to hear and it compliments the game just fine with its ambient, electronic tone but compositionally isn't that interesting on its own. I still do want to praise the dev team for including a free .flac album on their Steam page for individual listening, though.

Despite its aspirations, Evacuation just isn't a very interesting mod. The level design is bland, player railroading is problematic, and it lacks key elements of originality or experimentation. At least the presentation is nice when it's working as intended.

Hexcraft: Harlequin Fair is a game that, for most, will probably feel entirely unapproachable, with its total disregard for linearity, lack of player guidance, and esoteric objectives. These are all by design and those willing to delve deeper into Oleander Garden's lonely, isolated vision of Toronto will be rewarded with a game as complex as it is short and sweet.

Harlequin Fair consists of traveling to different areas of Toronto, discovering hidden dungeons and esoteric items, and figuring out where to use them. That sounds all good until you realize you're not the only person gunning for these items. The NPCs you'll find throughout the game have their own agencies and objectives, including the items you need. Oftentimes, you'll have to interact with NPCs to discover where certain other NPCs have traveled to, or any rumors they've heard. This is your only hint as to their whereabouts and discovering how to progress. Uncovering this veritable puzzle box you've found yourself in is often confusing and requires a lot of player experimentation and guesswork, not only in terms of its mechanics but also in terms of exploration and NPC interaction. This can make Harlequin Fair often confusing and frustrating, but there's nothing more satisfying than unraveling one of its many mysteries. It's all surprisingly complex and nuanced, and while there's only a handful of hub worlds, you'll certainly be searching for a long time, trying to make meaning of everything. Finding new spells, weapons, and combat abilities to increase your power means that you can get riskier as the game goes on, and going from meekly creeping around Toronto to being able to disintegrate other characters into red mist is immensely enjoyable. One of the most memorable moments was when I was exploring a dungeon and an NPC who wanted one of my items got the drop on me. I didn't expect it at all and it opened my eyes to just how autonomous the neutral characters truly are.

There are only three real complaints I have, being the combat, lack of quality-of-life features, and to a lesser degree, NPC interaction. Combat is certainly not the main draw of Harlequin Fair and by all means it's perfectly competent, but most of the time it feels like a "numbers go up" kind of experience which, while not inherently a bad thing does mean that enemy encounters frankly rely less on your skillset and more on whatever you're wearing. Guns have bad feedback, the shotgun is practically a useless weapon (I found better weapons far before I ever found the shotgun), and enemies don't have much AI other than charging at you. It's fine as is but I would have appreciated something more engaging. As for quality of life, it could use some polish. Saving kicks the player back to the main menu, there are no adjustable options other than key rebinding, and swapping spells on the fly takes too long to be viable in an active combat scenario. Finally, for all the emphasis the game puts on characters, the ways you can actually interact with them one-on-one are sort of limited to asking them a few questions. I'm not asking to glean anything from them, considering the dialog is often as esoteric as the game itself, but rather I wish I could learn more of their eccentricities. All of these are ultimately minor issues, but they were notable to me.

Harlequin Fair's presentation is also notable. The version of Toronto you explore is dingy, brown, and oddly medieval. The game has a low-fi aesthetic with low polygon counts, sprite-based characters, and a soundscape that largely focuses on natural ambiance with minimal music. Random stores will have grainy number stations playing over the radio, environments have downright bizarre decorations at points and the audio design is often hauntingly effective. The game feels lonely and isolating despite featuring towns populated by people. It's consistently unnerving and during my first play session, I was fairly spooked, though that did subside once I discovered how simplistically the enemies behave. Vivian is a player-insert silent protagonist and therefore you can choose whether she mostly guns down zombies and evil warlocks or turns a shopkeeper into a gory mess with a well-timed spell just to steal 50 bucks from a cash register. Playing her as a weird goblin hermit adds to this sense of isolation, and when few of the other characters are right in the head, it makes the world of Harlequin Fair a downright bizarre one, and perhaps the game's second-best asset.

Hexcraft: Harlequin Fair is an absolutely bizarre find that I would never have discovered had it not been recommended to me. Its unique approach to non-linear gameplay is going to alienate if not enrage some, but I found it engrossing in a way I've never seen before. Is it perfect? No, combat could feel better and the game is a bit rough around the edges, but nothing quite feels like Harlequin Fair. If you have the stomach to figure out its unique design and engross yourself in its uncomfortable world, you'll be rewarded with a great game. We need more developers willing to take risks like this.

I believe that video games don't need to be "fun" in the traditional sense to be worthwhile pieces of art. There are plenty of games that I like that while I may not necessarily be enamored with their game design, I still find them to be very good if not great experiences. The Graveyard is a game I've been hearing about for years, and it's been continuously mocked as pretentious and lazy. I'm somewhat under the impression that the general public is always going to have this reaction to super "artsy" pieces of media regardless of quality, so I did want to give the game a legitimate shot.

Unfortunately, The Graveyard is exactly that: pretentious and lazy. While the gameplay is indeed incredulously simple, you just walk an old lady down to a bench and walk her back, the game somehow manages to be lazy with this, too. When it comes to artsier pieces of media, if I don't understand what it means, I ask myself what I can at least take away from it, whether it be interesting visuals or some sort of emotion. I felt nothing here. The art direction and overall visual presentation are dull and uninspired, the sound design is minimal, and the whole thing screams "put together in a weekend". The song she listens to is sort of cool and conveys the themes well enough, but I'd rather have listened to it on Spotify than made the trek to the bench for it. The supposedly uppity attitude from developer Tale of Tales makes me feel less charitable about the whole affair. Also, those trees have to be some of the worst I've ever seen in a game.

If you're going to make an art project, at least don't pretend that people "expect to be spoonfed" when they don't like it.

Admirable message but doesn't translate into a very fun game. While the game's message is conveyed through gameplay quite well (something I think all rhetoric games should do) the actual gameplay isn't very interesting and as the game goes on there's no change to the formula to make it more interesting other than an escalating difficulty. I played it for seven minutes for a class and it serves its rhetorical purpose well enough, but maybe with more variety, it could be a pretty cool web or mobile game to pick up and play frequently.

Mibibli's Quest is a game my buddy has been trying to get me to play for as long as I remember. Ever since I was 12 years old I heard nothing about its virtues and it became a massive inside joke within my friend group. One year he even jokingly dressed up as Mibibli for a Halloween party we threw. So, naturally, when he and I started our game exchange, the first thing I recommended was the enigmatic Mega Man-like.

Calling it a Mega Man-like does the game a disservice I feel. I've been a massive fan of that franchise since I was roughly eight years old in 2011, and Mibibli's Quest thoroughly carves its own path, taking the right lessons from Capcom's Blue Bomber while separating itself. The game has a ton of great ideas nearly pouring out of its ears. Each stage has some new gimmick; whether it be a Dance Dance Revolution-themed rhythm section, a train level, a horizontal shoot-em-up, a level that you play backward, or deliberately anticlimactic boss fights makes Mibibli's Quest a surreal and often subversive experience in a way that entirely lacks pretention. There's even a fighting game bit that is hilarious. The game is quite difficult (I played on Mibibli mode) and often like throwing yourself against a wall until you achieve total mastery but while the game can sometimes be a bit overly difficult I can't call it unfair in any meaningful way. Every challenge can be overcome with mastery and that's not everyone's thing, but for me, it became immensely rewarding. The game follows Mega Man's mechanic of gaining new abilities from defeating bosses, but instead of weapons sometimes you'll even get new mechanics such as double jumping. Each weapon is very useful except for the shield-equivalent, which is too slow to have any practical use outside of select situations. The level design is often inventive and creative and I can't think of situations that were too annoying. It's a game that plays very well and plays with expectations, and while it can feel insurmountable it definitely isn't, especially if you're familiar with Mega Man.

Visually speaking Mibibli's Quest is difficult to evaluate. On one hand, there are plenty of """retro throwback""" games that have more detailed spritework and more fluid animations. Mibibli's Quest isn't necessarily impressive in that regard, but it has almost a Dadaist approach to art direction that is often impressive. NPCs are typically drawn in a Microsoft Paint style, pixels can often be incorrectly sized, et cetera, but it adds to a certain surrealist feeling that the game is aware of and uses to its fullest extent. Enemy designs often feel pulled out of Resni's ass, just random creative designs with little care for cohesion or consistency but that's sort of the point. It gives the game a certain vibe that's enjoyably gonzo. This is also evident in the soundtrack which while typically percussion-heavy 8-bit style music can often break out of that into drum-and-bass or even somewhat haunted, distorted ambiance. While I don't think it necessarily reaches the high peak of a lot of Mega Man soundtracks, Resni has a good ear for catchy chord progressions and an attractive 8-bit flair that makes it pleasant to listen to.

Mibibli's Quest was a surprise. With its creative and inventive gameplay, presentation, and vibe, it really does stand as one of the most unique platformers I've ever played. While it's perhaps overly difficult, the fun and raw originality show through the more you persevere, and beating it will feel like a monumental accomplishment. If you find it too difficult, there's no shame in playing on a lower-difficulty and I highly recommend it to fans of platformers, or anyone looking for a truly unique indie experience.

This War of Mine initially makes a strong impression - survivors fending for their lives, foraging supplies, food, and even staving off attackers not in a zombie scenario or post-apocalyptic hellscape, but in a realistic civil war in the fictional country of Pogoren. I don't believe such a scenario had been tackled before, at least not as famously, as in this game, so I was immediately interested. At first, the game had me entirely hooked, I was playing multiple multi-hour sessions at a time, and despite some initial troubles, I got into the swing of things pretty quickly. Managing my characters was fun and challenging at first. However, as time went on, I ended up realizing how shallow the game truly was both mechanically and thematically. Although the game attempts to show the true horrors of the civilian perspective of war, you don't see a whole lot and the moral choices you have to make end up losing their emotional effect pretty quickly. As it turns out, the mechanically advantageous choices are all the immoral ones, and on repeat attempts, there's practically no reason to go for anything else other than some self-imposed limitation. The game is, unfortunately, lacking in variety: the trader always has the same supplies, multiple runs will have the same areas to scavenge with no differences (there is some variance, but largely it's the same areas), you'll always have a cold front or a crime wave, et cetera. Once you've played maybe, six attempts, you've seen it all, and the game doesn't offer much more. The stealth, combat, and scavenging mechanics are all fairly basic and offer little depth. Even when it comes to the anti-war themes the game tries to push, it can't help but feel unbelievably surface-level and spoonfed to the player. The worldbuilding memos the player finds are too impersonal, and the character interactions are so threadbare that it becomes difficult to care.

At least the presentation isn't bad, the game is clearly low-budget but it has at times fairly striking art direction. The grim, almost monochrome, paper sketch style fits the tone very well and at the very least makes the game look as grim as it wishes it was. Asset quality is fairly low, but when compared to how pulled back the camera is, this is hard to notice even at high resolutions. Environments are surprisingly detailed and seem to tell better stories than the actual writing does. My only real complaint is the lack of anti-aliasing, which can make the game look overly cheap at points. The soundtrack is well-produced and can be suitably atmospheric, but I can't help but feel it's too overbearing and "epic" sounding for the kind of intimate stories this game wants to tell.

This War of Mine clearly has fans, but I didn't want to see the entire game through. While it was quite addictive at first, the simplicity of the gameplay and themes did not grab my attention for more than 15 hours. At least the art style is kind of nice.

End of Zoe is perhaps the best of Capcom's post-launch support for Resident Evil 7, being much more substantial in terms of original content than all of the others, which while decent mostly consisted of reused assets repurposed in different contexts. End of Zoe does feel entirely at odds with RE7's tone, but it carves its own path while still weirdly enough expanding on its world setting. EoZ features an almost entirely melee combat system which while not particularly deep is still fun to pull off within its short runtime. Joe Baker as a protagonist does come entirely out of nowhere but his ignorance and his determination to save Zoe are immediately endearing. The game consists of primarily new environments meaning it's the first of RE7's DLC to feel truly fresh. The boss fights are also really fun, especially the two against the swamp man, whose abilities rival your own, and the second fight especially feels like a brutal fight to the death. It still manages to feel enough like RE7 in some ways, like keeping some degree of stealth and atmosphere despite the more goofy tone. The only real flaws I can think of are that the alligators are fairly annoying as enemies, as they practically instakill you when you get too close. It's easy to overcome but it can lead to a few cheap deaths. Nevertheless, its fairly clear to me that End of Zoe is the part of RE7's DLC that shines the brightest, and is therefore the easiest to recommend.

Banned Footage Vol. 2 is the second part of Capcom's post-launch support for Resident Evil 7, and I'll admit to it being a fairly significant improvement over Vol. 1, which I wasn't a massive fan of. 21 is easily the best part of the DLC, with it keeping the oppressive, Texas Chain Saw Massacre-esque atmosphere of the base game and giving us more of Lucas, who was one of the game's best antagonists. The actual card game is fairly fun, though it is unfair by design, so it's especially rewarding when you use the game's own rules against Lucas and beat him at his own game. Daughters is a walking simulator (and I don't mean that pejoratively) that fills in the blankets as to how Eveline got ahold of the Baker family. It's short and fairly unexciting, but it is nice to have additional gaps filled into the story, and I like how the Bakers changing from their old selves into demented monsters happens near-instantly, showing the true terror of Eveline's powers if she were used as a weapon. Jack's Birthday Party is a lot of fun as well, consisting of a goofy arcade mode with a charming 1920s aesthetic where you search a handful of levels for food to feed Jack. I actually had a lot of fun with JBP's aesthetic and gameplay, but unfortunately, I find since half of the levels are just harder versions of the other half, it doesn't have the staying power I'd like to see. BFV2 is certainly an improvement over BFV1, and I find it easier to recommend this one at its chosen price point.