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Battlefield 3
Battlefield 3
Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence
Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence
Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening - Special Edition
Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening - Special Edition
Assassin's Creed II
Assassin's Creed II
Need for Speed: Most Wanted - Black Edition
Need for Speed: Most Wanted - Black Edition

357

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175

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Lost Judgment
Lost Judgment

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Judgment

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Steelrising
Steelrising

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Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown
Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown

Feb 14

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It is what it is…

Kidnapped Girl is a short little visual novel that will take you half an hour or so to see in its entirety. The story concept is pretty decent but let down by a lack of experience on the writer’s part. As a result, the game fails to handle its subject matter in a meaningful or even original way.

I don’t want to be too harsh on what is clearly just some dude’s passion project but the writing is sloppy. Exposition of character backstories in particular is handled in a heavy-handed manner, though one could argue that it was an inevitability given the short length. There are also some aspects and specific scenes that some people would only describe as edgy and/or problematic. The English translation could also use some additional passes but it’s readable enough.

The art was actually pretty decent, especially for a doujin project. I appreciate that the backgrounds were actually drawn by someone and not just pictures with a Photoshop filter over them.

At the end of the day, you get what you pay for; it’s free, doesn’t take up much of your time and doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not. Take it or leave it as you will. Just be warned: if you already hate what’s in the game’s description, the execution will not convince you otherwise.

P.S. I hope you degenerates — who are reading this and seriously considering playing Kidnapped Girl on your own time — appreciate the fact that someone bothered to write an actual review on this. Other reviews weren’t exactly informative so I hope that risking losing whatever non-existent respect my peers on Backloggd had for me was worth it.

This review contains spoilers

Kane and Lynch: Dead Men? More like getting canned, lynched and dead brain cells after playing this game!

I should start this review by letting you know that I’ve gone through Kane and Lynch franchise backwards having already played the sequel K&L 2: Dog Shit™ prior to this game. As you might guess - I don’t think very fondly of it. You can find my full thoughts on the sequel here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/DarkDante14/review/299070/

Now, why would I go out of my way to play the K&L: Dead Men if my experience with the sequel was so negative? Simply put - I wanted to see where it all started. I want to make it clear that I didn’t go into this game with the intention of hating it, quite the opposite, in fact. I gave it the most benefit of doubt humanly possible. SURELY it can’t be as bad as Dog Days? SURELY the first game must have been good enough that it warranted a sequel. After all, Dog Days is quite notorious and the reception for Dead Men was generally more positive, albeit still somewhat mixed from what I’ve seen. Oh, how wrong I was…

A fair warning that this review WILL contain spoilers, including explicit details about the ending.

I’ll start with the positives, since it won't take long. Unlike K&L2, the initial story set-up and character motivations in Dead Men actually are somewhat decent for a typical crime drama. While nothing original, I, at the very least, didn’t find the story to be nonsensical drivel, unlike the sequel.

Another positive aspect is the soundtrack. One of the game’s composers is Jesper Kyd, who’s best known for his work on the earlier entries in both Hitman and Assassin’s Creed franchises. Kyd has a very particular style and his dark, suspenseful and melancholic arrangements go together quite well with games about murders.

Easily the most redeeming aspect in this otherwise incompetent slog is the level design. The levels are quite varied in their locations, type and scale. Rather than being stuck in your typical rectangle shaped shooting galleries that look and feel artificial, Dead Men’s environments actually feel like a believable part of the world. From a densely packed nightclub, a skyscraper office building and streets of Tokyo to a military compound in the middle of jungle. It’s a globetrotting adventure and levels do a great job of reflecting that. The design itself - from shoot-out sightlines, verticality, cover placement and general flow of direction was also mostly solid with a couple of exceptions.

Now that the pleasantries are out of the way, let’s get down to the meat of the matter.

This game fucking sucks.

It continues to impress me IO Interactive - a studio which made great games before and after the Kane and Lynch entries somehow managed to make not just one but TWO incompetent third-person shooters released during the heyday of the genre (2007 and 2010). How could they possibly screw up the shooting mechanics, you know, THE most important aspect of the genre, THIS badly? The game uses an antiquated way of handling aiming. Rather than your bullets actually going where you’re aiming with the crosshair, they simply spread around randomly. Unless you’re shooting a worn-out rifle with badly adjusted sights, the first bullet should always go directly where your aim is. Missing shots should only be a factor after the recoil kicks in, should you fail to adjust to it.  Well, that’s not how Kane and Lynch works. Instead, the first 3–4 bullets will always go around the cross-hair in a somewhat random pattern before a single bullet goes even near where you intended.

This sucked in Dog Days and it sucked here. Arguably even more so here given the scale of the environments. The level design itself might be good, but it’s ruined by simply having an enemy positioned more than 10 meters away from the player.

I cannot stress enough how much this artificial baked-in bullet spread RUINS the entire game. It never stops being an issue. People who say that it “adds to the realism” clearly have never seen a gun in real life, or heck - have even the most basic cursory understanding of how modern projectile weapons work. The way guns behave in Kane and Lynch simply goes against common sense and physics of this world.

Next issue is the AI system. The game features an AI partner system with the ability to issue commands to them but I never really felt like I had to engage with it. That is, until half-way through the game where the unique levels are abruptly exchanged for your typical brown modern military setting. This is the turning point when the game went from bad to worse. You are forced, yes - forced to have a squad of blind, deaf and braindead AI squadmates who, I swear, are trying to get you and themselves killed. By the way, if they die it’s a game over for you. Having to baby sit these incompetent chuckle fucks made the game 10 times harder and 100 times more infuriating. I would have much rather dealt with the entire army of enemies on my own.

The only way of getting past this miserable part is to slowly and meticulously clear out the enemies while continuously yelling at your mentally handicapped squadmates to sit in a corner somewhere out of sight, out of mind. HOWEVER, this very same level features the most ruthless enemies in the entire game and a helicopter that can basically just one-shot you dead. Essentially, if you get unlucky and accidentally get in the line of fire of either the passing chopper or an enemy machine gunner - your squadmates might be too far to revive you in time and you will die faster than you can slam a fist through your monitor.

I’m at the age where I’ve generally mellowed out and don’t really get angry at video games anymore but this game made me yell, swear and bash my table like I was 13 years old again. The word “infuriating” does not even begin to describe the sheer anger I felt towards this poor joke of a game.

So how does this train wreck end? With multiple-choice endings, of course. There’s two to be exact and they both suck. You get a simple choice - after rescuing Kane’s daughter from the main villains, you can either leave your braindead squadmates to die in the middle of the jungle and get in a chopper with your daughter while Lynch is screeching at you for being a traitor bitch OR you can play an additional level and go on a rescue mission. The choice here is obvious - ROLL THE CREDITS AND TURN THIS SHIT OFF! This is how I felt at that moment and jokes aside, after seeing how much worse the “good” ending was, I am convinced that I made the better choice initially.

The common practice in video game design dictates that players who put in the extra effort and/or do additional content should be rewarded with a more satisfying conclusion to the story.

Kane and Lynch on the other hand, is just “built different”. If you choose to actually go through a yet another tedious level, you essentially get spat on as not only Kane fails to save a single soul, his daughter that you just spent the entire game rescuing ends up dying. Thus, it was all for nothing, once again making the “traitor” choice a more satisfying one.

Listen, I get it. The writers of Kane and Lynch keep trying to emphasize how there are no “lived happily ever after” endings. The world is a horrible place and K&L universe even more so. But the way it’s handled is poorly done, essentially betraying the player's expectations and not in a compelling or clever way. Writing a subversive crime drama is not easy, I get that, but the writers behind both Dead Men and Dog Days are simply not as good as they presumably think they are. Perhaps it’s the trash gameplay that sours my opinion of the story, but after playing both Dog Days and Dead Men, it’s clear to me that the writers of both games are simply incapable of creating a truly mature story besides throwing some gratuitous end edgy scenes sprinkled with a load of obscenities.

There is a reason why Kane and Lynch franchise is dead and forgotten and quite frankly, it should remain that way.

The superior adaptation of Quantum of Solace.

If you’re familiar with the main version of Quantum of Solace which came out on the 7th generation platforms (PS3, 360, PC), you’ll know the title as a poor man’s Call of Duty made in the very engine that powered the aforementioned popular first-person shooter series.

Well, that is not the case with the PlayStation 2 version. Developed by Eurocom rather than Treyarch who worked on the main version, the PS2 title is a third-person stealth action game which, in my opinion, fits the James Bond series better. The game features a good mix of stealth, shooting and set-piece segments.

Stealth gameplay, while nothing outstanding, is competent enough with decent level design backing it up. The levels themselves are rather linear but it never feels like a detriment. Aside from some mandatory stealth-only sections, the game actually allows you to choose your own approach. That said, while you can certainly simply shoot your way through the stages, it is clear that the game was primarily designed with stealth in mind due to how stingy the game can get with ammo (more on this later).

This is not your standard third-person shooter. Gunplay and aiming mechanics are a bit untraditional and feel somewhat reminiscent of classic Splinter Cell titles, though not nearly as punishing or polished. You have two shooting modes: free aim and "precise mode". The free aim is for the more hectic and faster-paced moments, while the precision mode allows you to take more precise and deliberate shots with the aiming reticle slowly narrowing down while you’re not moving it. It may feel clunky at first, but once you get used to it, it becomes a rather enjoyable aspect of the game.

Featuring only 11 levels rather than 15 compared to its next-gen counterpart, the PS2 version is rather short, clocking in at around 4 hours. The game cuts out some of the levels featured in the PS3 version while adding a couple new stages of its own. You can probably finish this in around 3 hours if you avoid unnecessary deaths or it might take you five due to some sections being quite challenging. The levels themselves are also fairly short clocking in on average between 15-30 minutes. That said, it’s not a bad thing as it doesn’t overstay its welcome and the game has good pacing on top of that.

Unfortunately, this game came out during the dreaded quick-time event (QTE) era and some of the game’s frustrating moments stem from just that. Thankfully, they are used sparingly but one of the boss fights can only be completed by passing a rather strict set of QTEs, failing which you must re-do a part of the boss fight, which would be annoying enough in any game and is only made worse by the limited ammo.

The ammo system is clearly very deliberately designed - not quite topping the player off like normal TPS games do, but rather drip-feeding ammo in a way that ensures that you can always make progress while simultaneously making it clear that every shot - every bullet counts. This goes back to my original point about the PS2 version being more of a stealth-action game rather than your typical third-person shooter that many wiki articles seem to insinuate. It makes the game more tense and thoughtful than your average tie-in game. While the first half of the game is more stealth based, by the time you reach the end you’ll be expected to have gotten used to the game’s shooting mechanics and your reflexes and skills will be put to a test during the game's climax.

For the most part the ammo system works really well - enemies will always drop bullets ensuring you get rewarded for kills enabling you to progress further. Some sections will also feature renewable weapon pick-ups to ensure that you can progress past some of the set-pieces and boss fights will feature infinitely respawning ads that serve as cannon fodder ammo drops. The last boss is actually somewhat problematic in that regard with the infinite ads simultaneously being both a blessing and a curse given how much they spam grenades. On the bright side, boss fights are actually far more interesting than in the PS3 version and I’d have to say that is the case with all levels in general.

Luckily, the game features a rather generous checkpoint system and you can save your progress at every checkpoint making it the perfect game to play if you're limited on your gaming time due to work or other obligations.

Overall, I had fun with both incarnations of Quantum of Solace tie-in but the PS2 version is definitely the more interesting game to play, having more substantial thought put behind its game design.

If you’re interested in my thoughts on Treyarch’s version, you can find my Backlogged review here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/DarkDante14/review/582868/