Easto
Reverse Collapse was a game I was really looking forward to for a long time, now that it’s finally here I’m happy to say I like it a lot. But no game is absolutely perfect, and RC does have some flaws, which I’ll start with.
Stealth as a mechanic is interesting, the game allows you to use guerrilla hit and run tactics on some maps, or just stealth maps flat out. I really appreciate the variety but stealth in a turn based strategy game built off of AP usage is a little annoying. There will be turns where you can probably move 1 or 2 tiles per turn because being in stealth mode consumes an extra AP, and pretty much every tile that isn’t road just eats away at more AP too. Flat out stealth maps are very trial and error too, working more like puzzles with a single solution. Thankfully a lot of stealth maps can be done loud as well, but they are occasionally mandatory and I always find them a slog.
Secondly I find the balancing to be kind of wacky. Normal difficulty is unbelievably easy compared to challenging. This is because there is optional EXP grinding, but also because it’s just easier to S rank maps so your units will just naturally be higher levels over time. While challenging lacks any EXP maps AND you lose out on parts and EXP if you don’t S rank maps. You eventually just get to a point where your units and items are not strong enough to genuinely fight anymore, and I was forced to bring the difficulty down just to continue. Let it be known I nearly got up to chapter 3 on challenge but the last map was just too much. This balancing issue really comes out during chapter 4, where all my units are just too strong to really have any trouble. The player just slowly gets more and more options to the point where not a lot of problems can’t be fixed in one turn.
This game has a lot of items and they are not made equal, this isn’t too much of a problem on its own, but I do find it a little silly how one note a lot of them are. For example there is a sound emitter you can build to attract zombie enemies, this cannot be used against anything else. Same with the shockwave grenades that move zombies around. I’m glad that these items can be disassembled for parts, but I do think a lot more items could find uses if they thought things out more.
Lastly, I do wish the game had a bit more character interactions. We only really see Mendo and Jefuty interact during those cooking cutscenes. This is fine for the most part and I really like these, but I just wanted a bit more. Jefuty makes comments about how she grew attached to Jevon, Atena and Carl too, but we barely see her do anything but talk business with them. I guess it’s just supposed to be implied that she’s been fighting alongside them forever so she naturally began liking them more.
With those small gripes out of the way, I can get into praising what I really like about the game.
For starters, I love the general gameplay loop. Unlike something like Fire Emblem your cast of units is usually small. You’ll typically only have 3 units at most, with the most you can possible have being 6 at one point. This creates really desperate situations where you are always unbelievably outnumbered and on the brink of being overwhelmed. You need to be clever and a little lucky with placement and item usage. Items are your equalizer, from grenades to automatic turrets, to tear gas, they all do horrible things to the enemies to even the playing field. It’s really satisfying to set traps for the AI for a turn, and then watch like a psychopath with a massive smile as they trip every trap and get themselves killed. Enemy AI is pretty relentless and it seems like every map has constant reinforcements. You’ll wipe out a massive wave, and then two more will spawn. Units themselves are fairly unique and have a massive skill tree, with passives and actives to rely on. I think a couple skills are absolute dogshit, but other ones are way too good to pass up, and turn characters into monsters. Every unit falls into a role.
Mendo: Jack of all trades with strong survivability.
Jeffry: Glass cannon with massive range.
Arena: Agro tank and item spammer.
Jevon: I don’t actually know what to put here but he’s basically the most broken unit ever. Like absolutely unreal it’s so clear why they don’t let you use him too much.
Carl: Supporter and debuffer.
Lige: Melee burst and dodge tank.
These units all have pretty nice diversity in terms of what they do, and every turn you’ll find yourself setting themselves up and settling into their usual roles. I was nervous that things would feel too samey with such a small character roster, but I’m glad I was wrong.
The writing is pretty enjoyable. I do think the technical mumbo jumbo gets a little much sometimes, I’m a long time GFL fan so I don’t mind it, but people new to the series may not feel the same. Characters are all pretty likable and generally pretty rational too. There weren’t really any situations where I thought people were acting annoying or stupid. Enemies seem pretty one note at first, but there is some depth there as you get deeper into the game. I need to praise the tone for this game though, it’s pretty rare these days to play something that takes it’s tone seriously the whole time, never breaking for ironic jokes or whatever at any point. It’s corny to say but the game is very sincere with its premise and story, and it makes a lot of it feel really authentic. A lot of cutscenes have full Japanese voice acting too which definitely helps sell it.
Lastly, the art is top tier, along with the music. I need to praise the menus as well because the HUD is easy to read and quick to use.
Overall I do really like Reverse Collapse: Codename Bakery. Despite the ridiculous name that my friends make fun of every time I bring it up, I thinks Mica continues to craft one of my favorite fictional universes, the wait was absolutely worth it, and I’d encourage anyone to give it a try if they like strategy or GFL.
Just keep in mind this game can be really trial and error at times, play the game on normal first to learn the quirks and the mechanics, as it lets you reset every turn and save whenever you want.
Stealth as a mechanic is interesting, the game allows you to use guerrilla hit and run tactics on some maps, or just stealth maps flat out. I really appreciate the variety but stealth in a turn based strategy game built off of AP usage is a little annoying. There will be turns where you can probably move 1 or 2 tiles per turn because being in stealth mode consumes an extra AP, and pretty much every tile that isn’t road just eats away at more AP too. Flat out stealth maps are very trial and error too, working more like puzzles with a single solution. Thankfully a lot of stealth maps can be done loud as well, but they are occasionally mandatory and I always find them a slog.
Secondly I find the balancing to be kind of wacky. Normal difficulty is unbelievably easy compared to challenging. This is because there is optional EXP grinding, but also because it’s just easier to S rank maps so your units will just naturally be higher levels over time. While challenging lacks any EXP maps AND you lose out on parts and EXP if you don’t S rank maps. You eventually just get to a point where your units and items are not strong enough to genuinely fight anymore, and I was forced to bring the difficulty down just to continue. Let it be known I nearly got up to chapter 3 on challenge but the last map was just too much. This balancing issue really comes out during chapter 4, where all my units are just too strong to really have any trouble. The player just slowly gets more and more options to the point where not a lot of problems can’t be fixed in one turn.
This game has a lot of items and they are not made equal, this isn’t too much of a problem on its own, but I do find it a little silly how one note a lot of them are. For example there is a sound emitter you can build to attract zombie enemies, this cannot be used against anything else. Same with the shockwave grenades that move zombies around. I’m glad that these items can be disassembled for parts, but I do think a lot more items could find uses if they thought things out more.
Lastly, I do wish the game had a bit more character interactions. We only really see Mendo and Jefuty interact during those cooking cutscenes. This is fine for the most part and I really like these, but I just wanted a bit more. Jefuty makes comments about how she grew attached to Jevon, Atena and Carl too, but we barely see her do anything but talk business with them. I guess it’s just supposed to be implied that she’s been fighting alongside them forever so she naturally began liking them more.
With those small gripes out of the way, I can get into praising what I really like about the game.
For starters, I love the general gameplay loop. Unlike something like Fire Emblem your cast of units is usually small. You’ll typically only have 3 units at most, with the most you can possible have being 6 at one point. This creates really desperate situations where you are always unbelievably outnumbered and on the brink of being overwhelmed. You need to be clever and a little lucky with placement and item usage. Items are your equalizer, from grenades to automatic turrets, to tear gas, they all do horrible things to the enemies to even the playing field. It’s really satisfying to set traps for the AI for a turn, and then watch like a psychopath with a massive smile as they trip every trap and get themselves killed. Enemy AI is pretty relentless and it seems like every map has constant reinforcements. You’ll wipe out a massive wave, and then two more will spawn. Units themselves are fairly unique and have a massive skill tree, with passives and actives to rely on. I think a couple skills are absolute dogshit, but other ones are way too good to pass up, and turn characters into monsters. Every unit falls into a role.
Mendo: Jack of all trades with strong survivability.
Jeffry: Glass cannon with massive range.
Arena: Agro tank and item spammer.
Jevon: I don’t actually know what to put here but he’s basically the most broken unit ever. Like absolutely unreal it’s so clear why they don’t let you use him too much.
Carl: Supporter and debuffer.
Lige: Melee burst and dodge tank.
These units all have pretty nice diversity in terms of what they do, and every turn you’ll find yourself setting themselves up and settling into their usual roles. I was nervous that things would feel too samey with such a small character roster, but I’m glad I was wrong.
The writing is pretty enjoyable. I do think the technical mumbo jumbo gets a little much sometimes, I’m a long time GFL fan so I don’t mind it, but people new to the series may not feel the same. Characters are all pretty likable and generally pretty rational too. There weren’t really any situations where I thought people were acting annoying or stupid. Enemies seem pretty one note at first, but there is some depth there as you get deeper into the game. I need to praise the tone for this game though, it’s pretty rare these days to play something that takes it’s tone seriously the whole time, never breaking for ironic jokes or whatever at any point. It’s corny to say but the game is very sincere with its premise and story, and it makes a lot of it feel really authentic. A lot of cutscenes have full Japanese voice acting too which definitely helps sell it.
Lastly, the art is top tier, along with the music. I need to praise the menus as well because the HUD is easy to read and quick to use.
Overall I do really like Reverse Collapse: Codename Bakery. Despite the ridiculous name that my friends make fun of every time I bring it up, I thinks Mica continues to craft one of my favorite fictional universes, the wait was absolutely worth it, and I’d encourage anyone to give it a try if they like strategy or GFL.
Just keep in mind this game can be really trial and error at times, play the game on normal first to learn the quirks and the mechanics, as it lets you reset every turn and save whenever you want.
2023
My God. I wanted to play this game so badly for so long. I thought it was going to be a game where you use your powers to take down legions of soldiers, similar to FEAR.
After playing it, I cannot believe how quickly this game turned into crap. The start was so strong, you break out of containment and kill your captors. The voice acting is loud and intense, characters panic as they search the room for you, screaming out callouts as you brutally blast them all down with incredibly loud and powerful weapons.
Then the supernatural elements began to show more and more. Now I'm shooting weird goop zombies and then some engineered monster that just charges me and does the same attack over and over. This obviously comes from the FEAR inspiration there's just a small problem with that. The horror sections in FEAR are the worst part of the fucking game, why would you crank that element up even higher?
I shit you not, you're randomly transported to the backrooms for no reason, you have to run away from evil black clouds that jumpscare you if you get too close, and tons of other awful horror tropes. Most of this stuff is never really explained that well unless you take 20 minutes to read the logs you find. It's GMod horror map levels of not scary, and I really just rolled my eyes or even uttered a "Oh come on, really?" whenever this shit happened.
Whenever the game throws an enemy at you that isn't human, its the worst fight in the game. They're just bullet sponges that refuse to die or even react to your actions. It doesn't help that most guns do zero damage against anything with armor at all. I was playing on Very Hard and you either kill everything with a shotgun and assault rifle, or you die, simple as that. Explosives are good too but they are rare. Enemies do unreal damage as well, so you're super reliant on using your powers to really get around the battlefield at all. Any time you don't one shot a guy he's probably gonna one shot you instead. As the game progresses enemies get bulkier and better armor, which makes everything such bullshit since you can't even burst them down anymore, yet the game insists on being really stingy with ammo and never really letting you hold onto the good weapons for too long.
There's a really crappy weapon attachment system I barely bothered with, most attachments do nothing or just make the guns worse for no reason. Some are just nonsensical and make me think the developers never even played their own game. A minigun machine gun has an attachment that adds knives to the end of all the barrels so you can shread dudes in front of you. Issue is you can’t spin the barrel without shooting so you stick your high caliber machine gun in a dude’s face and he dies to the gunfire before the knives can even do anything. Oh should I mention that all attachments have ridiculously harsh downsides and that one in particular reduces the damage of the gun for no reason? Even though attachments are supposed to be hidden pickups to reward you for exploring? Let’s not even mention the fact that you barely ever hold onto guns for a long time due to ammo issues so there’s basically no point in equipping attachments in the first place.
Side missions are mostly just copy paste with a few small levels that just have you hacking things. These usually involve you being trapped in a small arena while waves of enemies show up. It gets old really fast, and by the later waves you’ll be getting one shot by DMR and shotgun users while you struggle to grab any ammo. Hope you like the low power SMG because it seems to be the only thing enemies carry. Most weapons drop almost no ammo. I think shotgun drops give you.. like 4 shots. Assault rifle drops give you about 12, not even a full mag. I don’t understand the stinginess with ammo, it’s not even easy to swap weapons out during combat since you gotta hold F for like 30 years while you’re being shot at.
There’s also a duel wielding mechanic, use it with the shotgun and nothing else. It’s awful, you chew through ammo and deal the same amount of damage, all the while being unable to control the guns at all.
The boss fights are stupid and the hit detection is spotty for any melee stuff. A boss will swing a sword where you were and you'd still take damage. Late game is pretty reliant on insta killing you for the challenge so you have to play like a boo hoo baby to get anything done. Your powers go from useful tools to the only reason you live ever, they are insane crutches for the horribly balanced difficulty.
And if all of this wasn't bad enough the game was really short too. Only about 5 or so main missions, I remember being really surprised when the final mission began, thinking I barely did anything. The story is mostly nonsense too, I couldn't care about it since the game insists on you stopping to read all this intel you pick up and it’s just filled with technical mumbo jumbo. I don't mind a deep and interesting story but you can't deliver it all through optional logs the player might miss. This is a high octane shooter why do I need my reading glasses every 5 minutes? It’s also so blatantly obvious that they didn’t know where to put a lot of this intel. You’ll find a bunch of it just placed around each other when you’re traveling in between fights. This game doesn’t have the atmosphere to have the quiet time FEAR has between combat segments so I usually just ran through them as fast as I could.
Smaller complaints include the boring map design. Early on arenas are pretty fun, but this disappears fast, hallways and massive rooms with no cover become the norm. Guns are hard to use correctly, with such insane fire rates you can't hit anything unless it's right in front of you. I fucking hate the main base and mission system. This game would have been a lot better if it was a continuous campaign. Once again, if FEAR is such a big inspiration why take the worst aspects and ignore the good parts? The visual noise is unreal. When you shoot at a guy sparks go everywhere, the reticle goes insane, your gun bounces around like your dude's shoulder is jello, and the enemy just freezes up and hardly reacts to the lead entering his body. It's hard to actually tell if you are killing dudes, they seem to just get up after you mag dump them. Stick to the shotgun and explosives and gib them, it's the only way to be sure they're actually dead. Lastly enemy snipers just delete you. Full stop. You're in their sights for a moment and it's over. Very fun and interactive gameplay! I really love how it's impossible to hit anything if it's more than 10 feet away from me!
Trepang2 could have been great, it get's the raw intensity very well. It's just a shame there's so much messy stuff mixed into it all. I hate to say it but I was happy to be done. I really did not like this game near the end.
After playing it, I cannot believe how quickly this game turned into crap. The start was so strong, you break out of containment and kill your captors. The voice acting is loud and intense, characters panic as they search the room for you, screaming out callouts as you brutally blast them all down with incredibly loud and powerful weapons.
Then the supernatural elements began to show more and more. Now I'm shooting weird goop zombies and then some engineered monster that just charges me and does the same attack over and over. This obviously comes from the FEAR inspiration there's just a small problem with that. The horror sections in FEAR are the worst part of the fucking game, why would you crank that element up even higher?
I shit you not, you're randomly transported to the backrooms for no reason, you have to run away from evil black clouds that jumpscare you if you get too close, and tons of other awful horror tropes. Most of this stuff is never really explained that well unless you take 20 minutes to read the logs you find. It's GMod horror map levels of not scary, and I really just rolled my eyes or even uttered a "Oh come on, really?" whenever this shit happened.
Whenever the game throws an enemy at you that isn't human, its the worst fight in the game. They're just bullet sponges that refuse to die or even react to your actions. It doesn't help that most guns do zero damage against anything with armor at all. I was playing on Very Hard and you either kill everything with a shotgun and assault rifle, or you die, simple as that. Explosives are good too but they are rare. Enemies do unreal damage as well, so you're super reliant on using your powers to really get around the battlefield at all. Any time you don't one shot a guy he's probably gonna one shot you instead. As the game progresses enemies get bulkier and better armor, which makes everything such bullshit since you can't even burst them down anymore, yet the game insists on being really stingy with ammo and never really letting you hold onto the good weapons for too long.
There's a really crappy weapon attachment system I barely bothered with, most attachments do nothing or just make the guns worse for no reason. Some are just nonsensical and make me think the developers never even played their own game. A minigun machine gun has an attachment that adds knives to the end of all the barrels so you can shread dudes in front of you. Issue is you can’t spin the barrel without shooting so you stick your high caliber machine gun in a dude’s face and he dies to the gunfire before the knives can even do anything. Oh should I mention that all attachments have ridiculously harsh downsides and that one in particular reduces the damage of the gun for no reason? Even though attachments are supposed to be hidden pickups to reward you for exploring? Let’s not even mention the fact that you barely ever hold onto guns for a long time due to ammo issues so there’s basically no point in equipping attachments in the first place.
Side missions are mostly just copy paste with a few small levels that just have you hacking things. These usually involve you being trapped in a small arena while waves of enemies show up. It gets old really fast, and by the later waves you’ll be getting one shot by DMR and shotgun users while you struggle to grab any ammo. Hope you like the low power SMG because it seems to be the only thing enemies carry. Most weapons drop almost no ammo. I think shotgun drops give you.. like 4 shots. Assault rifle drops give you about 12, not even a full mag. I don’t understand the stinginess with ammo, it’s not even easy to swap weapons out during combat since you gotta hold F for like 30 years while you’re being shot at.
There’s also a duel wielding mechanic, use it with the shotgun and nothing else. It’s awful, you chew through ammo and deal the same amount of damage, all the while being unable to control the guns at all.
The boss fights are stupid and the hit detection is spotty for any melee stuff. A boss will swing a sword where you were and you'd still take damage. Late game is pretty reliant on insta killing you for the challenge so you have to play like a boo hoo baby to get anything done. Your powers go from useful tools to the only reason you live ever, they are insane crutches for the horribly balanced difficulty.
And if all of this wasn't bad enough the game was really short too. Only about 5 or so main missions, I remember being really surprised when the final mission began, thinking I barely did anything. The story is mostly nonsense too, I couldn't care about it since the game insists on you stopping to read all this intel you pick up and it’s just filled with technical mumbo jumbo. I don't mind a deep and interesting story but you can't deliver it all through optional logs the player might miss. This is a high octane shooter why do I need my reading glasses every 5 minutes? It’s also so blatantly obvious that they didn’t know where to put a lot of this intel. You’ll find a bunch of it just placed around each other when you’re traveling in between fights. This game doesn’t have the atmosphere to have the quiet time FEAR has between combat segments so I usually just ran through them as fast as I could.
Smaller complaints include the boring map design. Early on arenas are pretty fun, but this disappears fast, hallways and massive rooms with no cover become the norm. Guns are hard to use correctly, with such insane fire rates you can't hit anything unless it's right in front of you. I fucking hate the main base and mission system. This game would have been a lot better if it was a continuous campaign. Once again, if FEAR is such a big inspiration why take the worst aspects and ignore the good parts? The visual noise is unreal. When you shoot at a guy sparks go everywhere, the reticle goes insane, your gun bounces around like your dude's shoulder is jello, and the enemy just freezes up and hardly reacts to the lead entering his body. It's hard to actually tell if you are killing dudes, they seem to just get up after you mag dump them. Stick to the shotgun and explosives and gib them, it's the only way to be sure they're actually dead. Lastly enemy snipers just delete you. Full stop. You're in their sights for a moment and it's over. Very fun and interactive gameplay! I really love how it's impossible to hit anything if it's more than 10 feet away from me!
Trepang2 could have been great, it get's the raw intensity very well. It's just a shame there's so much messy stuff mixed into it all. I hate to say it but I was happy to be done. I really did not like this game near the end.
2024
After sinking close to 30 hours already I feel confident enough to recommend this game as I think I’ve seen everything outside the hardest difficulty.
Helldivers 2 is everything that makes videos games fun shoved into a nice 40 dollar box. All you need are three other friends and this game shines with the amount of funny and chaotic events going on. It’s so easy to get immersed in the raw excitement of the battlefield. Characters screaming voice lines while wave after wave of gunfire going off, explosions and artillery shelling the life out of anything as well.
The game is about you being dropped into battlefields as you complete objectives in the chaos. These can vary from setting off a missile to rescuing civilians, all the way to things like killing priority enemies or outposts. Despite the lack of mission variety, things never really seem to get old. Each planet seems to have unique generation for the battlefields, and while some can feel kind of similar, background modifications will change the type of enemies that are common, and the usual hazards you’ll have to deal with. I expect them to add more as time goes on to keep the game from getting too repetitive.
Now the shooting feels good. Weapons are loud and powerful, however they also take some knowledge to use correctly. Enemies usually have specific weak points to take them down. I think this aspect makes the early game especially challenging, as many players will just fire with reckless abandon at armored enemies when they should be pacing their shots better. Still I quite like this, hoard shooters rarely demand much more from you other than shooting at anything that moves, the fact that recoil control is very important as well makes for some fairly engaging combat. The reload system makes everything more engaging and brutal too. Each reload completely loses whatever you have in the magazine, encouraging you to fully use up a mag, even to your detriment at times, over a premature reload. This leads to you getting caught with your pants down needing to reload at the worst times, which I really love. Now I can’t praise the stratagems enough, any player being able to call in serious firepower leads to hilarious team killing and amazing visuals where enemy groups are refined into paste before your very eyes. It’s nice that the player has so much agency, the ability to call strikes down whenever and wherever you want, there is never a situation where the game tells you no.
It’s in the details where things really shine though, blood and dirt coats your character the longer you’re alive. Explosions kick up dust that makes the battlefield impossible to traverse after some time. And the way the dialogue is written in this game is hilarious, every voice line uttered by the Helldivers fills me with energy and makes me chuckle.
Helldivers 2 is a blast. After a couple games to get the hang of the difficulty and to figure out how to play, you’ll feel like a total badass as you take out legions of robots and bugs, and then you’ll die. You’ll die so much. But it will be funny. Everything in this game is funny. Orbital bombardment of your friend’s location to kill a bug is funny. Your Helldiver screaming their head off as they blast waves of bots with a machine gun is funny. Flattening an entire bug camp with overwhelming artillery is funny. And all of this is fucking cool too.
Despite all my praise I do have small issues with the game. Not enough to really criticize for, as many of these problems can be fixed with small patches. Weapon balancing is a joke, some weapons are straight upgrades or have features the game never really lists. I don’t mind weapons being strong, the real issue is how weak some of them are. The regular pistol is completely overshadowed by the machine pistol for example. Their damage differences are so negligible there’s not a single reason to ever use the pistol ever again. Then there’s the issue of weak stratagem calls like the laser canon or certain artillery assists. Many of these can be better if they have features tweaked, like a tighter spread, faster deployment, or better armor piercing. Armor is a weird one, some armor have special features that give you more grenades or stims, some augment your limb health or let you throw grenades farther. These bonuses are not made equal, and having more equipment is going to be the better option pretty much every time. Lastly some expensive upgrades feel pretty underwhelming. The ship upgrades are meant to augment your gameplay and make things you use better, but these upgrades are really not made equal, and people usually just skip the final upgrades because they’re so expensive and grant pretty much nothing.
Even with those complaints, the devs seem cool and definitely want this game to succeed. I can’t wait to see what upcoming updates will bring to it.
Play Helldivers 2 and become a hero to super earth, or die trying. Co-op shooters are pretty prevalent these days but this game has something going on that a lot of others lack. There’s an energy to it all, where you and your friends are constantly panicking and laughing as you deal with the overwhelming threats thrown at you.
Helldivers 2 is everything that makes videos games fun shoved into a nice 40 dollar box. All you need are three other friends and this game shines with the amount of funny and chaotic events going on. It’s so easy to get immersed in the raw excitement of the battlefield. Characters screaming voice lines while wave after wave of gunfire going off, explosions and artillery shelling the life out of anything as well.
The game is about you being dropped into battlefields as you complete objectives in the chaos. These can vary from setting off a missile to rescuing civilians, all the way to things like killing priority enemies or outposts. Despite the lack of mission variety, things never really seem to get old. Each planet seems to have unique generation for the battlefields, and while some can feel kind of similar, background modifications will change the type of enemies that are common, and the usual hazards you’ll have to deal with. I expect them to add more as time goes on to keep the game from getting too repetitive.
Now the shooting feels good. Weapons are loud and powerful, however they also take some knowledge to use correctly. Enemies usually have specific weak points to take them down. I think this aspect makes the early game especially challenging, as many players will just fire with reckless abandon at armored enemies when they should be pacing their shots better. Still I quite like this, hoard shooters rarely demand much more from you other than shooting at anything that moves, the fact that recoil control is very important as well makes for some fairly engaging combat. The reload system makes everything more engaging and brutal too. Each reload completely loses whatever you have in the magazine, encouraging you to fully use up a mag, even to your detriment at times, over a premature reload. This leads to you getting caught with your pants down needing to reload at the worst times, which I really love. Now I can’t praise the stratagems enough, any player being able to call in serious firepower leads to hilarious team killing and amazing visuals where enemy groups are refined into paste before your very eyes. It’s nice that the player has so much agency, the ability to call strikes down whenever and wherever you want, there is never a situation where the game tells you no.
It’s in the details where things really shine though, blood and dirt coats your character the longer you’re alive. Explosions kick up dust that makes the battlefield impossible to traverse after some time. And the way the dialogue is written in this game is hilarious, every voice line uttered by the Helldivers fills me with energy and makes me chuckle.
Helldivers 2 is a blast. After a couple games to get the hang of the difficulty and to figure out how to play, you’ll feel like a total badass as you take out legions of robots and bugs, and then you’ll die. You’ll die so much. But it will be funny. Everything in this game is funny. Orbital bombardment of your friend’s location to kill a bug is funny. Your Helldiver screaming their head off as they blast waves of bots with a machine gun is funny. Flattening an entire bug camp with overwhelming artillery is funny. And all of this is fucking cool too.
Despite all my praise I do have small issues with the game. Not enough to really criticize for, as many of these problems can be fixed with small patches. Weapon balancing is a joke, some weapons are straight upgrades or have features the game never really lists. I don’t mind weapons being strong, the real issue is how weak some of them are. The regular pistol is completely overshadowed by the machine pistol for example. Their damage differences are so negligible there’s not a single reason to ever use the pistol ever again. Then there’s the issue of weak stratagem calls like the laser canon or certain artillery assists. Many of these can be better if they have features tweaked, like a tighter spread, faster deployment, or better armor piercing. Armor is a weird one, some armor have special features that give you more grenades or stims, some augment your limb health or let you throw grenades farther. These bonuses are not made equal, and having more equipment is going to be the better option pretty much every time. Lastly some expensive upgrades feel pretty underwhelming. The ship upgrades are meant to augment your gameplay and make things you use better, but these upgrades are really not made equal, and people usually just skip the final upgrades because they’re so expensive and grant pretty much nothing.
Even with those complaints, the devs seem cool and definitely want this game to succeed. I can’t wait to see what upcoming updates will bring to it.
Play Helldivers 2 and become a hero to super earth, or die trying. Co-op shooters are pretty prevalent these days but this game has something going on that a lot of others lack. There’s an energy to it all, where you and your friends are constantly panicking and laughing as you deal with the overwhelming threats thrown at you.
2021
Halo Infinite is a game with incredibly high points to suck you in, and incredibly low points to remind you why you stopped playing in the first place.
I’ll be discussing both multiplayer and campaign.
Firstly I need to praise the general design of the game. Spartans and the Covenant have never looked this good. The design philosophy of many halo games were shoved together in the best way. Elites for example maintain their iconic appearance from the earlier Halo games, but they stand tall and dodge nimbly like an Elite from Halo Reach. Many enemies are at their best. Brutes finally feel unique and interesting to fight, with variants that snipe you, charge you and melee you with their bare hands, and everything else in between.
After what Halo went through with 4 and 5, it’s nice to see the designs return to tradition in the strongest way possible. Things look like what they’re supposed to.
Secondly a lot of guns feel really good. The sound design and animations are excellent, guns feel great to shoot, they have punch and sound powerful. Even the assault rifle and sidekick are ridiculously capable guns. Even if the weapon sandbox can be lacking a bit, a lot of typical mainstays seem to be missing, and their counterparts don’t really do much to fill the role for them.
The regular shotgun, the Spartan laser, the magnum, flame thrower, SMG, etc. it’s weird that these weapons are missing. Many of them are fan favorites and have very important roles in the sandbox. The bulldog doesn’t compare to the regular shotgun at all for example. No one shot kill potential, so the energy sword always beats it now, and you can’t really have those silly multi kills with it like you could with the OG shotgun.
Now the campaign is open world. This is bad. Halo maps were all about being big but they were hand crafted for the cinematic angle. Music cues would play when you do specific things or get to specific points, animations would play when you enter rooms or destroy things, and massive set pieces are crafted for you to fight in. This is all gone in Infinite. Instead you will go to a set base and fight there, things feel more like firefight than a Halo mission. Sure there is some story going on in the background but it’s genuinely kind of bad. Don’t get me wrong killing legions of aliens is fun but it really does get kinda bland after a while, especially since the game’s difficulty is questionable. Outside of insta kills you never really get bursted down or blown up by enemy focus. The AI is smart but not very aggressive. Leading to a lot of situations where you’re running circles around them while they struggle to even land a hit. There are also the bounty hunting missions where you fight unique enemies, issue is a lot of them don’t really have more health so you enter a mission area and just immediately one tap the enemy grunt that’s apparently supposed to be a super dangerous boss. Everything just kinda feels a little lame when the charm of a grappling hook and cool looking enemies wear off. Open world is a plague that ruins every game series it touches, and that continues here.
Now the multiplayer is generally pretty fun. I’m far from the best at it but I do have a pretty good time generally. My biggest gripes mostly lie in the gun balancing. Time to kill seems to be wildly inconsistent. At the same time, many guns feel like they take the same amount of time to kill enemies. This sounds ridiculous I know but I have examples. The heatwave and bulldog both require 3 shots to kill in most situations. The assault rifle can rip someone to shreds while they attempt to kill you with the pitiful joke that is the commando. The sidekick can drop someone very easily with headshots but body shots do pretty much nothing. The sniper in this game just feels so awful I’m not even sure why, shock rifle too. Plasma Pistol and Ravager are genuinely awful I don’t know what they’re thinking with either of those guns.
I want to like a lot of these guns more, they sound great and have nice animations, they’re just ridiculously unreliable and annoying to use. Which is bad since the default starting items like the AR and the sidekick are so competent it’s actually hard to justify dropping them sometimes.
Quick side note but I hate all the vehicles in this game. They completely ruined how vehicle destruction works and made a lot of them feel ridiculously weak for balance purposes. The warthog turret takes hours to kill someone but doesn’t have any spread for the most part. Bad trade. The chopper’s guns aren’t explosive at all anymore. The Scorpion feels like it blows up if someone looks at it funny. And the new mechanic of vehicles going into critical mode before blowing up is so stupid. Firstly it just denies players the satisfaction of blowing things up. Spartan Lasering a filled warthog in halo reach was like popping a Christmas cracker, the medals and violent explosion was so satisfying and that’s completely gone now. Vehicles just feel inherently too tanky at points too, and don’t really show visible damage like they did in older games. Such a ridiculous downgrade after all Reach and Halo 3 did to make vehicles amazing to use and blow up.
Lastly. The micro transactions. Like what the fuck? I know things have slowly gotten better but this game will always be bad due to this stupid store reliance. Reach had a perfect model for unlocks but no no now that the game is free to play they need to be sure you can’t have shit without spending more money. I understand this is probably due to Microsoft’s meddling, but I nearly faint seeing my favorite helmets or an armor coating that I like being sold for 25 dollars plus tax.
Halo Infinite is a disappointment more than anything. Because the framework is there. This could have been Halo’s grand return, and it was at first. But the cracks are impossible to ignore, and I’ll always be frustrated with how this game was handled.
I’ll be discussing both multiplayer and campaign.
Firstly I need to praise the general design of the game. Spartans and the Covenant have never looked this good. The design philosophy of many halo games were shoved together in the best way. Elites for example maintain their iconic appearance from the earlier Halo games, but they stand tall and dodge nimbly like an Elite from Halo Reach. Many enemies are at their best. Brutes finally feel unique and interesting to fight, with variants that snipe you, charge you and melee you with their bare hands, and everything else in between.
After what Halo went through with 4 and 5, it’s nice to see the designs return to tradition in the strongest way possible. Things look like what they’re supposed to.
Secondly a lot of guns feel really good. The sound design and animations are excellent, guns feel great to shoot, they have punch and sound powerful. Even the assault rifle and sidekick are ridiculously capable guns. Even if the weapon sandbox can be lacking a bit, a lot of typical mainstays seem to be missing, and their counterparts don’t really do much to fill the role for them.
The regular shotgun, the Spartan laser, the magnum, flame thrower, SMG, etc. it’s weird that these weapons are missing. Many of them are fan favorites and have very important roles in the sandbox. The bulldog doesn’t compare to the regular shotgun at all for example. No one shot kill potential, so the energy sword always beats it now, and you can’t really have those silly multi kills with it like you could with the OG shotgun.
Now the campaign is open world. This is bad. Halo maps were all about being big but they were hand crafted for the cinematic angle. Music cues would play when you do specific things or get to specific points, animations would play when you enter rooms or destroy things, and massive set pieces are crafted for you to fight in. This is all gone in Infinite. Instead you will go to a set base and fight there, things feel more like firefight than a Halo mission. Sure there is some story going on in the background but it’s genuinely kind of bad. Don’t get me wrong killing legions of aliens is fun but it really does get kinda bland after a while, especially since the game’s difficulty is questionable. Outside of insta kills you never really get bursted down or blown up by enemy focus. The AI is smart but not very aggressive. Leading to a lot of situations where you’re running circles around them while they struggle to even land a hit. There are also the bounty hunting missions where you fight unique enemies, issue is a lot of them don’t really have more health so you enter a mission area and just immediately one tap the enemy grunt that’s apparently supposed to be a super dangerous boss. Everything just kinda feels a little lame when the charm of a grappling hook and cool looking enemies wear off. Open world is a plague that ruins every game series it touches, and that continues here.
Now the multiplayer is generally pretty fun. I’m far from the best at it but I do have a pretty good time generally. My biggest gripes mostly lie in the gun balancing. Time to kill seems to be wildly inconsistent. At the same time, many guns feel like they take the same amount of time to kill enemies. This sounds ridiculous I know but I have examples. The heatwave and bulldog both require 3 shots to kill in most situations. The assault rifle can rip someone to shreds while they attempt to kill you with the pitiful joke that is the commando. The sidekick can drop someone very easily with headshots but body shots do pretty much nothing. The sniper in this game just feels so awful I’m not even sure why, shock rifle too. Plasma Pistol and Ravager are genuinely awful I don’t know what they’re thinking with either of those guns.
I want to like a lot of these guns more, they sound great and have nice animations, they’re just ridiculously unreliable and annoying to use. Which is bad since the default starting items like the AR and the sidekick are so competent it’s actually hard to justify dropping them sometimes.
Quick side note but I hate all the vehicles in this game. They completely ruined how vehicle destruction works and made a lot of them feel ridiculously weak for balance purposes. The warthog turret takes hours to kill someone but doesn’t have any spread for the most part. Bad trade. The chopper’s guns aren’t explosive at all anymore. The Scorpion feels like it blows up if someone looks at it funny. And the new mechanic of vehicles going into critical mode before blowing up is so stupid. Firstly it just denies players the satisfaction of blowing things up. Spartan Lasering a filled warthog in halo reach was like popping a Christmas cracker, the medals and violent explosion was so satisfying and that’s completely gone now. Vehicles just feel inherently too tanky at points too, and don’t really show visible damage like they did in older games. Such a ridiculous downgrade after all Reach and Halo 3 did to make vehicles amazing to use and blow up.
Lastly. The micro transactions. Like what the fuck? I know things have slowly gotten better but this game will always be bad due to this stupid store reliance. Reach had a perfect model for unlocks but no no now that the game is free to play they need to be sure you can’t have shit without spending more money. I understand this is probably due to Microsoft’s meddling, but I nearly faint seeing my favorite helmets or an armor coating that I like being sold for 25 dollars plus tax.
Halo Infinite is a disappointment more than anything. Because the framework is there. This could have been Halo’s grand return, and it was at first. But the cracks are impossible to ignore, and I’ll always be frustrated with how this game was handled.
2013
This review will not be touching online at all. Never really played it and never really will.
I recently went back to this game a couple months ago, wanting to replay it and mess around a little bit. I’ve played the story mode multiple times, I remember every story beat, every mission, yet I genuinely couldn’t finish the game no matter how hard I tried.
The story mode starts strong, Franklin and Michael are both really fun protagonists, but everything slows down to a crawl when you’re forced to be Trevor for a while.
I can’t stress this enough, a significant part of the game’s narrative is reliant on you liking Trevor, if you don’t, a lot of it falls apart immediately. Now to sell Trevor for you he’s a violent maniac addicted to a shitload of drugs who tries to play the moral high ground. He eats people too I think.
This is just nonsensical, the whole game is everyone shitting on Michael for ditching Trevor and trying to protect his family, even to the point that Michael gets all apologetic near the end of the game and in the post game. But what did he do wrong? Both of his crime partners were dangerous idiots, he had a family to take care of. Everything he did makes complete sense lol.
Yet the game frames it as him being a snake or some shit, even though we’re told that the police were already on them and they were probably all going to die anyway. Trevor is just mad he and Michael didn’t drown in their own blood killing police officers for like five thousand dollars each.
Franklin is just there too. It’s sad how he is pretty much pushed to the side when Trevor is back in the picture. The game is too focused on the stupid drama between Michael and him. Grown ass men who are hardened criminals essentially having high schooler level beef. Shit is embarrassing.
I remember a lot of the writing holding up a lot better in the past but these days it’s a pretty mixed bag. I think rockstar genuinely tries way too hard to make every character unlikable in some way. I know it’s all part of the mystical “commentary” they’re trying to do but Michael’s entire family is unbearable and I’d kill them for sport (in game) if I could.
Only real highlights are Lamar, Lester, Franklin, Michael and maybe Davey. Every other person is pretty much annoying. They just scream and say the dumbest shit. Prime example is the paparazzi guy you do missions for as Franklin. Or pretty much every single character Trevor works with. I don’t understand how people get in a room together and decide on the worst character traits possible. Older GTA games had tons of weird NPCs don’t get me wrong, but they had a competence and likability to them that’s really absent in this game.
Gameplay wise there really isn’t that much to say, I do like how there is a “go ragdoll” button, but the shooting is bland, guns sound weak and feel like they do so little damage. Cars can be fun to drive but can also be awful depending on the model. Trevor’s signature truck is so awful to drive it should be illegal to force me into that thing.
I think the worst part is that there really isn’t anything to do other than the story. I understand that’s probably where most of the money went but the world feels incredibly small and boring when you beat the game or just want to do something other than driving to point A, kill everything, drive to point B, listen to Michael self deprecate AGAIN. It just gets repetitive so fast and there’s no break from it all.
For a first playthrough I’d say GTA 5 is pretty good. It’s fairly reliant on you feeling a certain way though, or else the story gets incredibly frustrating super fast.
I recently went back to this game a couple months ago, wanting to replay it and mess around a little bit. I’ve played the story mode multiple times, I remember every story beat, every mission, yet I genuinely couldn’t finish the game no matter how hard I tried.
The story mode starts strong, Franklin and Michael are both really fun protagonists, but everything slows down to a crawl when you’re forced to be Trevor for a while.
I can’t stress this enough, a significant part of the game’s narrative is reliant on you liking Trevor, if you don’t, a lot of it falls apart immediately. Now to sell Trevor for you he’s a violent maniac addicted to a shitload of drugs who tries to play the moral high ground. He eats people too I think.
This is just nonsensical, the whole game is everyone shitting on Michael for ditching Trevor and trying to protect his family, even to the point that Michael gets all apologetic near the end of the game and in the post game. But what did he do wrong? Both of his crime partners were dangerous idiots, he had a family to take care of. Everything he did makes complete sense lol.
Yet the game frames it as him being a snake or some shit, even though we’re told that the police were already on them and they were probably all going to die anyway. Trevor is just mad he and Michael didn’t drown in their own blood killing police officers for like five thousand dollars each.
Franklin is just there too. It’s sad how he is pretty much pushed to the side when Trevor is back in the picture. The game is too focused on the stupid drama between Michael and him. Grown ass men who are hardened criminals essentially having high schooler level beef. Shit is embarrassing.
I remember a lot of the writing holding up a lot better in the past but these days it’s a pretty mixed bag. I think rockstar genuinely tries way too hard to make every character unlikable in some way. I know it’s all part of the mystical “commentary” they’re trying to do but Michael’s entire family is unbearable and I’d kill them for sport (in game) if I could.
Only real highlights are Lamar, Lester, Franklin, Michael and maybe Davey. Every other person is pretty much annoying. They just scream and say the dumbest shit. Prime example is the paparazzi guy you do missions for as Franklin. Or pretty much every single character Trevor works with. I don’t understand how people get in a room together and decide on the worst character traits possible. Older GTA games had tons of weird NPCs don’t get me wrong, but they had a competence and likability to them that’s really absent in this game.
Gameplay wise there really isn’t that much to say, I do like how there is a “go ragdoll” button, but the shooting is bland, guns sound weak and feel like they do so little damage. Cars can be fun to drive but can also be awful depending on the model. Trevor’s signature truck is so awful to drive it should be illegal to force me into that thing.
I think the worst part is that there really isn’t anything to do other than the story. I understand that’s probably where most of the money went but the world feels incredibly small and boring when you beat the game or just want to do something other than driving to point A, kill everything, drive to point B, listen to Michael self deprecate AGAIN. It just gets repetitive so fast and there’s no break from it all.
For a first playthrough I’d say GTA 5 is pretty good. It’s fairly reliant on you feeling a certain way though, or else the story gets incredibly frustrating super fast.
2017
Prey is a game with a lot of good qualities wrapped up in a sadly mediocre bow.
Firstly, I’ll praise a couple things I really like, the narrative for one takes a while to really come together into something great, but once it does near the end, I do think the payoff is really good. This is an Arkane game so the random worldbuilding and extras you can find scattered around to enhance the narrative really do this game justice. Every computer has some random email that breathes character into the unfortunate soul that used to work there.
Secondly the world design is stellar. Traversing the ship and finding random science labs filled with tons of freaky looking equipment, or stumbling into state of the art medical bays or surprisingly cozy resting areas give Prey a surprising amount of variety, and as the game goes on you learn new ways to traverse these rooms.
Lastly, I will always praise player freedom in a game like this. You are able to use anything at your disposal to complete objectives or get around easier. There are times where I did things and was genuinely unsure if what I did was intended by the developers or not, but I didn’t run into any bugs nor did I soft lock the game by any means so it’s nice the devs planned around different play styles and options. There’s a part in the middle of the game where you can just leave the station and get an ending early, I like that a lot too. The recycle system is also cool. It’s a pretty unique crafting system that relies on these massive machines that you feed random items you find. The machine then breaks these items down to their base material, and you then use those to craft items. It’s really cool to use things like recycle grenades, which instantly recycle all objects and enemies in their AOE.
Ok time for the stinky bad stuff. Limited weapons. I was pretty much using the pistol and shotgun the whole game. I understand that these weapons are upgradable and supposed to last you until the endgame but I never found ANYTHING as appealing as those two guns. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if combat wasn’t so viable, but it really is after the early game.
Early game is probably the hardest part of this entire thing. You are not equipped to deal with most enemies outside of basic mimics, so sneaking around is way more important. Once you get some upgrades and better gear though, every encounter is just, run up to thing, shoot thing until it dies. Don’t get me wrong, you can stealth if you really want to, but there isn’t much of a point, you’re bulkier and deal a lot more damage, plus ammo is fairly plentiful and easy to acquire. I wish the game kept that sense of fear you had for enemies, all the suspense is just completely gone and it feels like it happens way too early.
Now, enemy variety is pretty bad. There are only around 7 or so regular enemies with a couple special ones that show up at certain points. A lot of them are very easy to deal with, only really being tricky thanks to occasional outside interference, which sadly isn’t really used enough in the game in my opinion.
Lastly let’s talk about the special powers you can get in this game. Early on you have the option to essentially gain powers the monsters have. This is a pretty big choice in the narrative, however you really don’t feel that in the gameplay. If the developers really wanted the choice to be a difficult one, they should have put more downsides on the powers, instead it’s just asking you if you want to have more fun or less. The only downside I can think of is that the base’s defenses will attack you if you got too much alien stuff in your head. But these are typically stationary defenses you can get around easily.
Prey’s strength comes from its narrative and writing. Though it’s a game I’ve had trouble replaying now that I’m aware of all the twists and turns. The gameplay is serviceable with some good and bad ideas, but the biggest problem always just comes down to the fact that they didn’t do enough to keep it fresh the whole way through. Still, I would recommend playing it, just to experience the story if anything.
Firstly, I’ll praise a couple things I really like, the narrative for one takes a while to really come together into something great, but once it does near the end, I do think the payoff is really good. This is an Arkane game so the random worldbuilding and extras you can find scattered around to enhance the narrative really do this game justice. Every computer has some random email that breathes character into the unfortunate soul that used to work there.
Secondly the world design is stellar. Traversing the ship and finding random science labs filled with tons of freaky looking equipment, or stumbling into state of the art medical bays or surprisingly cozy resting areas give Prey a surprising amount of variety, and as the game goes on you learn new ways to traverse these rooms.
Lastly, I will always praise player freedom in a game like this. You are able to use anything at your disposal to complete objectives or get around easier. There are times where I did things and was genuinely unsure if what I did was intended by the developers or not, but I didn’t run into any bugs nor did I soft lock the game by any means so it’s nice the devs planned around different play styles and options. There’s a part in the middle of the game where you can just leave the station and get an ending early, I like that a lot too. The recycle system is also cool. It’s a pretty unique crafting system that relies on these massive machines that you feed random items you find. The machine then breaks these items down to their base material, and you then use those to craft items. It’s really cool to use things like recycle grenades, which instantly recycle all objects and enemies in their AOE.
Ok time for the stinky bad stuff. Limited weapons. I was pretty much using the pistol and shotgun the whole game. I understand that these weapons are upgradable and supposed to last you until the endgame but I never found ANYTHING as appealing as those two guns. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if combat wasn’t so viable, but it really is after the early game.
Early game is probably the hardest part of this entire thing. You are not equipped to deal with most enemies outside of basic mimics, so sneaking around is way more important. Once you get some upgrades and better gear though, every encounter is just, run up to thing, shoot thing until it dies. Don’t get me wrong, you can stealth if you really want to, but there isn’t much of a point, you’re bulkier and deal a lot more damage, plus ammo is fairly plentiful and easy to acquire. I wish the game kept that sense of fear you had for enemies, all the suspense is just completely gone and it feels like it happens way too early.
Now, enemy variety is pretty bad. There are only around 7 or so regular enemies with a couple special ones that show up at certain points. A lot of them are very easy to deal with, only really being tricky thanks to occasional outside interference, which sadly isn’t really used enough in the game in my opinion.
Lastly let’s talk about the special powers you can get in this game. Early on you have the option to essentially gain powers the monsters have. This is a pretty big choice in the narrative, however you really don’t feel that in the gameplay. If the developers really wanted the choice to be a difficult one, they should have put more downsides on the powers, instead it’s just asking you if you want to have more fun or less. The only downside I can think of is that the base’s defenses will attack you if you got too much alien stuff in your head. But these are typically stationary defenses you can get around easily.
Prey’s strength comes from its narrative and writing. Though it’s a game I’ve had trouble replaying now that I’m aware of all the twists and turns. The gameplay is serviceable with some good and bad ideas, but the biggest problem always just comes down to the fact that they didn’t do enough to keep it fresh the whole way through. Still, I would recommend playing it, just to experience the story if anything.
2023
Lethal Company continues the long tradition of proving that proximity voice chat is the greatest thing ever invented and makes any game good instantly.
You play as some employee that goes to random moons to find scrap. You gotta work with your friends to do this but watch out for all the monsters!!!!
For real though, the monster variety is really fun, each of them have a way to deal with them, either by killing, trapping, or avoiding them. You learn through trial and error but I can say with genuine confidence it is really fun to fail in this. I was usually laughing my ass off or smiling the stupidest grin ever when I bit the dust.
Lethal Company is simple. It's possible I'm sucking it's dick too much, but it's great to see a game that can just succeed and make a bazillion dollars without a battle pass, without costing 70 dollars, and without taking up nearly 150 GBs on my hard drive. It's nice and simple fun, hop in with your friends, mod it to hell and back, and enjoy.
Give me more games like this.
You play as some employee that goes to random moons to find scrap. You gotta work with your friends to do this but watch out for all the monsters!!!!
For real though, the monster variety is really fun, each of them have a way to deal with them, either by killing, trapping, or avoiding them. You learn through trial and error but I can say with genuine confidence it is really fun to fail in this. I was usually laughing my ass off or smiling the stupidest grin ever when I bit the dust.
Lethal Company is simple. It's possible I'm sucking it's dick too much, but it's great to see a game that can just succeed and make a bazillion dollars without a battle pass, without costing 70 dollars, and without taking up nearly 150 GBs on my hard drive. It's nice and simple fun, hop in with your friends, mod it to hell and back, and enjoy.
Give me more games like this.
2019
Arknights is probably the best gacha game I've played purely in terms of production value and player retention. It has avoided many of the pitfalls that other games fell into over the years, and I've been pretty into it ever since the global server came out.
I find Arknights pretty hard to review because the game is always being updated and changed, and to really review it I need to generalize a lot. Bear with that.
What I love about Arknights more than anything is the character designs. Due to the game's world, Terra, being wildly diverse and taking a lot from our world, many playable characters and NPCs have tons of awesome designs that scratch every type of itch someone may have. You like streetwear? Done. You like knights? Done. You like officer worker mercenaries? Done. A design will eventually catch someone's eye.
The storyline. Note, I actually kind of hate the game's main story, where Arknights really shines is in it's side events that flesh out side characters and the world as a whole. These things are long. Like REALLY long. It's insane how much story they cram into some of these, it's even more insane that they're all written so well. Of course, some miss the mark or have their issues, but I've been satisfied with them generally, there are very few event stories I genuinely regret reading. This extends to character writing and world building, since characters come from all walks of life, tons of tropes and character personalities are there. The variety is very nice, and most characters have some complexity to them.
Third, the gameplay. Arknights is very unique, it's a tower defense gacha. The characters you roll are essentially towers that you place, letting their AI do the rest with you activating skills or placing down other units. The game does have a small powercreep issue, and many of the lower rarity characters lose their niche pretty easily. Thoguh I'd say Arknights is better than most gachas, broken units don't seem to shatter the game too much overall. (There are a few exceptions to this.)
Lastly the music. MMmmmm. That's some good shit. Go to Youtube right now and listen to some of it. The variety continues here, music matching where in Terra an event or battle is taking place, or maybe it's just gonna be some sick ass electronic music, who cares it's all fire.
Now, some criticism. The challenge content in this game is getting a little ridiculous. I understand challenge is in the name, but I generally don't like how Arknights handles difficulty longterm. Just stacking more HP or damage onto enemies without much else. There also have been some seriously scummy practices done by the devs, which is expected from gachas, but Arknights used to carry itself much better, now we get limited time units all the time, and a lot of harder content essentially demands the most OP units or a video walkthrough just to find any success. Lastly I mentioned this before but I do not like the main story. Mostly a personal thing but I find it annoying because I always love the side events so much.
Overall, Arknights is probably one of the most important games to me. It's art style and storytelling is unreal to me, and I do think it has wider appeal outside of gacha losers like me. I got many of my friends to try the game and they all liked it a lot.
I don't recommend gachas easily, but please try Arknights. It's free, do not spend any fucking money on it.
I find Arknights pretty hard to review because the game is always being updated and changed, and to really review it I need to generalize a lot. Bear with that.
What I love about Arknights more than anything is the character designs. Due to the game's world, Terra, being wildly diverse and taking a lot from our world, many playable characters and NPCs have tons of awesome designs that scratch every type of itch someone may have. You like streetwear? Done. You like knights? Done. You like officer worker mercenaries? Done. A design will eventually catch someone's eye.
The storyline. Note, I actually kind of hate the game's main story, where Arknights really shines is in it's side events that flesh out side characters and the world as a whole. These things are long. Like REALLY long. It's insane how much story they cram into some of these, it's even more insane that they're all written so well. Of course, some miss the mark or have their issues, but I've been satisfied with them generally, there are very few event stories I genuinely regret reading. This extends to character writing and world building, since characters come from all walks of life, tons of tropes and character personalities are there. The variety is very nice, and most characters have some complexity to them.
Third, the gameplay. Arknights is very unique, it's a tower defense gacha. The characters you roll are essentially towers that you place, letting their AI do the rest with you activating skills or placing down other units. The game does have a small powercreep issue, and many of the lower rarity characters lose their niche pretty easily. Thoguh I'd say Arknights is better than most gachas, broken units don't seem to shatter the game too much overall. (There are a few exceptions to this.)
Lastly the music. MMmmmm. That's some good shit. Go to Youtube right now and listen to some of it. The variety continues here, music matching where in Terra an event or battle is taking place, or maybe it's just gonna be some sick ass electronic music, who cares it's all fire.
Now, some criticism. The challenge content in this game is getting a little ridiculous. I understand challenge is in the name, but I generally don't like how Arknights handles difficulty longterm. Just stacking more HP or damage onto enemies without much else. There also have been some seriously scummy practices done by the devs, which is expected from gachas, but Arknights used to carry itself much better, now we get limited time units all the time, and a lot of harder content essentially demands the most OP units or a video walkthrough just to find any success. Lastly I mentioned this before but I do not like the main story. Mostly a personal thing but I find it annoying because I always love the side events so much.
Overall, Arknights is probably one of the most important games to me. It's art style and storytelling is unreal to me, and I do think it has wider appeal outside of gacha losers like me. I got many of my friends to try the game and they all liked it a lot.
I don't recommend gachas easily, but please try Arknights. It's free, do not spend any fucking money on it.
This is the hardest game to recommend but I would get this on sale if possible. The core gameplay is really fun, kicking dudes around and throwing boxes at them is amazing. I can't stress enough how much fun combat is against humanoid enemies.
You can kick dudes off ledges, into spike racks, and other hazards, you can even kick them into each other. It's a first person swordfighting game where you use the environment way more than any other weapon.
Sadly the game has other types of enemies where these mechanics are basically nonexistent. And to make matters worse, there's a fucking story there too. It's so stupid and generic I really did try to just ignore it, pretend this game is just about some dude that kicks a bunch of dudes into spikes and call it a day.
Also be prepared for crashes, this is an old ass source engine game not made by Valve, so the game will slowly begin to fall apart more and more as time goes on. Near the end I was crashing around every 25 minutes or so.
The game's balancing is awful too. Magic is so hard to use correctly, it's always just better to rely on your sword. Game also goes on way too long, and things get kinda old after the 40 trillionth kick.
Still despite all of that, you can get this on sale for like 5 bucks sometimes, and it's enjoyable enough. Buy this if you love kicking dudes around, funny ragdolls, and completely ignoring the garbage ass story.
You can kick dudes off ledges, into spike racks, and other hazards, you can even kick them into each other. It's a first person swordfighting game where you use the environment way more than any other weapon.
Sadly the game has other types of enemies where these mechanics are basically nonexistent. And to make matters worse, there's a fucking story there too. It's so stupid and generic I really did try to just ignore it, pretend this game is just about some dude that kicks a bunch of dudes into spikes and call it a day.
Also be prepared for crashes, this is an old ass source engine game not made by Valve, so the game will slowly begin to fall apart more and more as time goes on. Near the end I was crashing around every 25 minutes or so.
The game's balancing is awful too. Magic is so hard to use correctly, it's always just better to rely on your sword. Game also goes on way too long, and things get kinda old after the 40 trillionth kick.
Still despite all of that, you can get this on sale for like 5 bucks sometimes, and it's enjoyable enough. Buy this if you love kicking dudes around, funny ragdolls, and completely ignoring the garbage ass story.
2019
Borderlands 3 doesn’t seem so bad at first. It’s a bit like that small scab on your leg. You pay it little mind, pick it a little bit but for the most part everything is okay.
But as time goes on that scab gets worse and worse, and by the end of it you’re in the hospital having your whole leg amputated.
Maybe that’s a little extreme but I can’t think of a better way to sum up my feelings with this game. Though I need to make it clear, any positive opinions I had were strictly gameplay related. The movement, shooting, and skills feel amazing in this game. Guns are loud, have stylish animations, there’s a lot more variety to the randomization of guns too, with many more unique shapes and all that. You can vault up ledges now (fucking finally) and slide, which automatically makes every game better. Of course these mechanics will get kind of old as things go on. Sliding up to an enemy and blasting them in the face with a shotgun somehow does get old actually.
Borderlands 3 has the best iteration of the skill trees as well. Giving you three separate trees to focus on and level up, each tree is tied to unique ability the character has, so you don’t need to play around your ability as much as you have another to utilize.
It ends there though. Nothing else in this review will have any praise whatsoever.
Firstly, mission structure is still exactly the same as it was in borderlands 1. Go to place, fight generic enemies, listen to agonizing dialogue over the radio along the way. Repeat this a bazillion times on like 4 different planets using the same 3 guns you found on the second one since they’re legendary weapons that do boatloads of damage for no reason. Beat a boss fight effortlessly and open the vault to find blue and green rarity weapons, listen to EVEN more annoying dialogue as you attempt to do side quests or just drive around a little. It all just wears you down and eventually you start hating it, only playing to see the end. You’ll essentially hold yourself hostage thinking “yeah I think I’m getting close to the end” but it just keeps going, the storyline plot points get worse and worse, and the dialogue somehow manages to make you wince just a little bit more every time one of the goobers this game calls characters opens their stupid mouth.
If you lose the ability to read and hear, this game is probably amazing, but alas.. my superior brain makes this a miserable slog. Don’t play this unless you have 3 friends to play with you. Even then maybe don’t play this anyway, it’s not worth it.
But as time goes on that scab gets worse and worse, and by the end of it you’re in the hospital having your whole leg amputated.
Maybe that’s a little extreme but I can’t think of a better way to sum up my feelings with this game. Though I need to make it clear, any positive opinions I had were strictly gameplay related. The movement, shooting, and skills feel amazing in this game. Guns are loud, have stylish animations, there’s a lot more variety to the randomization of guns too, with many more unique shapes and all that. You can vault up ledges now (fucking finally) and slide, which automatically makes every game better. Of course these mechanics will get kind of old as things go on. Sliding up to an enemy and blasting them in the face with a shotgun somehow does get old actually.
Borderlands 3 has the best iteration of the skill trees as well. Giving you three separate trees to focus on and level up, each tree is tied to unique ability the character has, so you don’t need to play around your ability as much as you have another to utilize.
It ends there though. Nothing else in this review will have any praise whatsoever.
Firstly, mission structure is still exactly the same as it was in borderlands 1. Go to place, fight generic enemies, listen to agonizing dialogue over the radio along the way. Repeat this a bazillion times on like 4 different planets using the same 3 guns you found on the second one since they’re legendary weapons that do boatloads of damage for no reason. Beat a boss fight effortlessly and open the vault to find blue and green rarity weapons, listen to EVEN more annoying dialogue as you attempt to do side quests or just drive around a little. It all just wears you down and eventually you start hating it, only playing to see the end. You’ll essentially hold yourself hostage thinking “yeah I think I’m getting close to the end” but it just keeps going, the storyline plot points get worse and worse, and the dialogue somehow manages to make you wince just a little bit more every time one of the goobers this game calls characters opens their stupid mouth.
If you lose the ability to read and hear, this game is probably amazing, but alas.. my superior brain makes this a miserable slog. Don’t play this unless you have 3 friends to play with you. Even then maybe don’t play this anyway, it’s not worth it.
2000
Deus Ex is truly a product of its time. I know that term gets thrown around a lot these days but this time it’s actually the case. A game like this couldn’t be made today, it just isn’t possible.
To be blunt, Deus Ex’s storyline is essentially a cyberpunk hellscape where every single conspiracy theory about higher powers and government overreach on an unprecedented scale are actually true and actively happening. The game’s story goes through many twists and turns as more of the conspiracy is unraveled before you.
While I think this is objectively one of the best games ever made, I do think that really comes down to the dialogue and writing, along with the art design. As much as I love Deus Ex, I can see that it’s gameplay is a little outdated.
Let’s get that out of the way now. Most of the game is about walking around open hubs and talking to people. There are main objectives and small things you can do on the side for bonus equipment or money. This is the best part of the gameplay, as the world is detailed, fun to explore, and filled with tons of NPCs that either give you interesting information that helps flesh out the world, or say the most ridiculous, batshit stuff possible to keep you entertained.
Now it’s time to discuss combat and stealth, these are the aspects that I believe are the weakest. Deus Ex lacks a lot of modern tools that make stealth combat more satisfying and fun, this mostly comes down to responsiveness and a general lack of understanding as to how stealth even works. It’s hard to tell if you’re ever truly concealed sometimes, and enemies will just immediately agro if you are noticed. With practice the mechanics can be learned and understood but this takes time, and a gameplay style shouldn’t be this difficult to grasp.
Next is combat. Deus Ex has a massive array of weapons, both lethal and nonlethal. What I really love is that a lot of weapons are tools, not just for killing. The GEP gun for example is a rocket launcher that is honestly way more useful for things like opening doors over any actual combat. Combat itself is very simple, you aim your implements of destruction at the target and click until they die. Weapons work differently and have their own funny quirks to them, like the sniper rifle being completely accurate while noscoping, or being able to use LAMs to climb walls. Enemy variety is.. honestly pretty bad. The AI isn’t very good either, they will mostly just circle around you and fire until they die. There are a couple combat robots in the game as well, though they are ridiculously annoying to deal with, and also incredibly easy to disable so there’s really no reason to engage with them. My biggest issue with the combat is how stale it gets. Most enemies will die from a single headshot as long as you’re leveling skills. Many weapons also seem fairly redundant or awfully balanced, never pick up a shotgun in this game. A lot of the tool tips and in game descriptions are just flat out incorrect too, listing incorrect damage numbers or mechanics that literally do not actually work.
Deus Ex is very open ended, and characters will say different things to you depending on how you play. Most tasks can be completely stealthily or loudly, and never require you to actually kill anyone if you don’t want to. This makes the game very replayable, and a good player that knows what to do can really speed through the game.
Lastly let’s talk about the upgrade system. There are skills and augments. Skills can be upgraded with skill points you acquire by completing objectives, finding secrets, and generally exploring. They improve your ability to use objects and generally interact with the world. Some of these skills are useless, and I think the game drip feeds you skill points too much instead of giving the player more to work with. Skill levels can really decide your build and what items you choose to use, so I wish the game gave the points more constantly and in a higher amount. Things like Swimming and Environmental skills are absolutely useless while weapon skills and things that let you get more value out hacking devices are incredibly useful.
Now, augments. These are found in the world or given as rewards for completing certain objectives. They are not made equal and some are just outright complete garbage because of how situational they are. Augments have a feature where you can only have one assigned to an F key and every key has two augments to choose from. I get the idea behind this, it’s supposed to give the player the choice to build the character however they want. In reality this just makes it way more annoying because you will often see two good augments or two trash augments since they will usually be similar to each other, and picking one just locks you out of the other. This feature would be perfect if you could simply select augments and equip them to the F key of your choice, because some of the keys are pretty annoying press while you’re trying to move or shoot.
Lastly lastly this game starts to REALLY fall off near the end. It devolves into constant combat and little to no character exchanges. The hub worlds are much more linear and are moreso combat gauntlets with occasional puzzles or secrets. The storyline will keep you going, but it’s really a slog near the end.
Despite my complaints about the gameplay I really do love Deus Ex, the storyline is interesting, fun, and keeps a good pace. Gameplay can feel a tad stale especially near the end, but there are always fun mechanics thrown in you can abuse to make things a bit more interesting. The game is an absolute meme, and an absolute masterpiece.
To be blunt, Deus Ex’s storyline is essentially a cyberpunk hellscape where every single conspiracy theory about higher powers and government overreach on an unprecedented scale are actually true and actively happening. The game’s story goes through many twists and turns as more of the conspiracy is unraveled before you.
While I think this is objectively one of the best games ever made, I do think that really comes down to the dialogue and writing, along with the art design. As much as I love Deus Ex, I can see that it’s gameplay is a little outdated.
Let’s get that out of the way now. Most of the game is about walking around open hubs and talking to people. There are main objectives and small things you can do on the side for bonus equipment or money. This is the best part of the gameplay, as the world is detailed, fun to explore, and filled with tons of NPCs that either give you interesting information that helps flesh out the world, or say the most ridiculous, batshit stuff possible to keep you entertained.
Now it’s time to discuss combat and stealth, these are the aspects that I believe are the weakest. Deus Ex lacks a lot of modern tools that make stealth combat more satisfying and fun, this mostly comes down to responsiveness and a general lack of understanding as to how stealth even works. It’s hard to tell if you’re ever truly concealed sometimes, and enemies will just immediately agro if you are noticed. With practice the mechanics can be learned and understood but this takes time, and a gameplay style shouldn’t be this difficult to grasp.
Next is combat. Deus Ex has a massive array of weapons, both lethal and nonlethal. What I really love is that a lot of weapons are tools, not just for killing. The GEP gun for example is a rocket launcher that is honestly way more useful for things like opening doors over any actual combat. Combat itself is very simple, you aim your implements of destruction at the target and click until they die. Weapons work differently and have their own funny quirks to them, like the sniper rifle being completely accurate while noscoping, or being able to use LAMs to climb walls. Enemy variety is.. honestly pretty bad. The AI isn’t very good either, they will mostly just circle around you and fire until they die. There are a couple combat robots in the game as well, though they are ridiculously annoying to deal with, and also incredibly easy to disable so there’s really no reason to engage with them. My biggest issue with the combat is how stale it gets. Most enemies will die from a single headshot as long as you’re leveling skills. Many weapons also seem fairly redundant or awfully balanced, never pick up a shotgun in this game. A lot of the tool tips and in game descriptions are just flat out incorrect too, listing incorrect damage numbers or mechanics that literally do not actually work.
Deus Ex is very open ended, and characters will say different things to you depending on how you play. Most tasks can be completely stealthily or loudly, and never require you to actually kill anyone if you don’t want to. This makes the game very replayable, and a good player that knows what to do can really speed through the game.
Lastly let’s talk about the upgrade system. There are skills and augments. Skills can be upgraded with skill points you acquire by completing objectives, finding secrets, and generally exploring. They improve your ability to use objects and generally interact with the world. Some of these skills are useless, and I think the game drip feeds you skill points too much instead of giving the player more to work with. Skill levels can really decide your build and what items you choose to use, so I wish the game gave the points more constantly and in a higher amount. Things like Swimming and Environmental skills are absolutely useless while weapon skills and things that let you get more value out hacking devices are incredibly useful.
Now, augments. These are found in the world or given as rewards for completing certain objectives. They are not made equal and some are just outright complete garbage because of how situational they are. Augments have a feature where you can only have one assigned to an F key and every key has two augments to choose from. I get the idea behind this, it’s supposed to give the player the choice to build the character however they want. In reality this just makes it way more annoying because you will often see two good augments or two trash augments since they will usually be similar to each other, and picking one just locks you out of the other. This feature would be perfect if you could simply select augments and equip them to the F key of your choice, because some of the keys are pretty annoying press while you’re trying to move or shoot.
Lastly lastly this game starts to REALLY fall off near the end. It devolves into constant combat and little to no character exchanges. The hub worlds are much more linear and are moreso combat gauntlets with occasional puzzles or secrets. The storyline will keep you going, but it’s really a slog near the end.
Despite my complaints about the gameplay I really do love Deus Ex, the storyline is interesting, fun, and keeps a good pace. Gameplay can feel a tad stale especially near the end, but there are always fun mechanics thrown in you can abuse to make things a bit more interesting. The game is an absolute meme, and an absolute masterpiece.
2009
It’s literally the perfect co-op game. You can do so much for your teammates, you can screw them over, you can save them, you can go nuts with an auto shotgun and murder them.
I guess the zombie killing part is good too, tons of enemy variation and AI that can be pretty cruel at times.
Oh and the voice acting and dialogue is top of the line, this game has that Valve dialogue charm where every character exchange is full of charm and is a joy to listen to. You really get attached to the survivors and every stay voice line is a fun glimpse into their character.
The gameplay is snappy. It’s hard to describe but it really just allows a good player to be good. You can coordinate with your team and avoid taking pretty much any damage. There’s a good variety of weapons as well that are all fun to use. Zombies blow up into bits or fall to pieces when you hit them with heavy caliber firearms.
The game utilizes amazing sound design and musical cues to warn players and to keep them listening. Each special has their little theme that plays whenever they spawn or are creeping around.
The steam workshop brings this game up from a 4.5 to a 5, no question. You want Coach to be Master Chief? Now he is. You want all the weapons to use reloads ripped from Modern Warfare 2? Now they are. You want custom campaigns that are either masterpieces or balanced so horribly you will have a blast going through them? It’s all there
Play this. Please. Play this with me. I will literally play this whenever it’s the best game ever made.
I guess the zombie killing part is good too, tons of enemy variation and AI that can be pretty cruel at times.
Oh and the voice acting and dialogue is top of the line, this game has that Valve dialogue charm where every character exchange is full of charm and is a joy to listen to. You really get attached to the survivors and every stay voice line is a fun glimpse into their character.
The gameplay is snappy. It’s hard to describe but it really just allows a good player to be good. You can coordinate with your team and avoid taking pretty much any damage. There’s a good variety of weapons as well that are all fun to use. Zombies blow up into bits or fall to pieces when you hit them with heavy caliber firearms.
The game utilizes amazing sound design and musical cues to warn players and to keep them listening. Each special has their little theme that plays whenever they spawn or are creeping around.
The steam workshop brings this game up from a 4.5 to a 5, no question. You want Coach to be Master Chief? Now he is. You want all the weapons to use reloads ripped from Modern Warfare 2? Now they are. You want custom campaigns that are either masterpieces or balanced so horribly you will have a blast going through them? It’s all there
Play this. Please. Play this with me. I will literally play this whenever it’s the best game ever made.
2016
I didn’t get around to playing Dishonored 2 for years, finally getting the opportunity to play the game a few years back, I remember walking away a tad disappointed. As time has gone on my disappointment has only gotten more extreme.
As usual, the art style is stellar, it’s cliche to say you can look anywhere and see a painting, but it really is the truth here, and the newer sunnier environments really show off how beautiful the game’s art style can be in the warm glow of a setting sun.
Gameplay is pretty much identical to the last game, though you now have two characters to play as, and both characters have new tools at their disposal as well.
Corvo is the same as the last game, same powers and everything, while Emily has a completely new set of abilities.
Firstly, I didn’t like a lot of Emily’s spells. They felt like gimmicky rehashes of Corvo’s abilities, which would be fine on their own but, to be honest I just find them all incredibly clunky and not much fun to use. This probably just comes down to playstyles but I found myself almost exclusively playing Corvo, who sadly doesn’t get ANY new abilities or additions.
Bone charms are randomized now. This is terrible, you get so many useless ones that do absolutely nothing for you, OR you get tons of useful ones. This is because you can craft new bone charms that are more powerful but to be honest I didn’t really bother with this mechanic, it requires you to break charms down to make new ones and you need to invest resources into it I really didn’t want to bother with. Charms were a good way to scale Corvo as the game went on and were really great rewards when you went out of your way to find them. Half the time in Dishonored 2 I’d track one down and receive “you heal more from food” for the 50th fucking time.
This is borderline nitpicky but the charm in this game is really lacking. Guards are way more boring this time around, not funny or interesting to listen to when they have dialogue, and most of it just frames them as hilariously evil idiots. Guards felt much more human in the last game, it was a real disappointing step down after how great they were. I will say I loved the Overseers at least, they had cool designs and great voice lines.
Map design was much more ambitious, sometimes to the detriment of the gameplay. I think this game was at its worst when you’re traveling the streets. The way guards are positioned and the general layout just makes them kind of a slog to explore. The smaller areas like the inside of Jindosh’s mansion or the hospital island are built much better meanwhile, and are the best parts of the game.
I have to complain about the witches and the Jindosh robots now. Witches are stupid and I hate them, they have annoying dialogue and tons of random mechanics that you really only figure out through trial and error like their bone dogs, or learning exactly where they’re sitting and teleporting. Guards that teleport are always an awful idea. The robots meanwhile seem very intimidating at first, but they can actually be taken down super easily, even if you’re doing a pacifist playthrough. Obviously killing a robot doesn’t count but it only bugs me so much because the game completely lacks enemies you can’t deal with nonlethaly, like the tall boys from the first game.
Speaking of nonlethal, they made it WAY easier. You can drop knock out, knock out enemies facing you if you catch them off guard, and these alone make things way easier. These are quality of life changes so I understand WHY they were done, but I still think they made things too easy. Perhaps drop knock outs shouldn’t work on alert enemies, or maybe they shouldn’t be silent take downs, I’m not sure but it’s ridiculous. Dishonored 1 nonlethal was all about getting behind enemies to choke them out, OR ignoring enemies and sneaking around them, now enemies are hardly a pain to deal with.
Lastly, I do not like where the story went, but this isn’t the fault of Dishonored 2 alone, Daud’s DLCs from the first game started this witch crap, this game was just where it all ended. The main villains in this game sucked and I did not care about any of the assassination targets. None of them had any decent buildup or presence.
Overall, Dishonored 2 is more of the first game with some cleaned up mechanics. I’m a bit of an old head and do not like some of these changes, but that is just me. Some people may have a lot of fun with Emily or may love the story. I dunno, it’s just not for me I guess.
As usual, the art style is stellar, it’s cliche to say you can look anywhere and see a painting, but it really is the truth here, and the newer sunnier environments really show off how beautiful the game’s art style can be in the warm glow of a setting sun.
Gameplay is pretty much identical to the last game, though you now have two characters to play as, and both characters have new tools at their disposal as well.
Corvo is the same as the last game, same powers and everything, while Emily has a completely new set of abilities.
Firstly, I didn’t like a lot of Emily’s spells. They felt like gimmicky rehashes of Corvo’s abilities, which would be fine on their own but, to be honest I just find them all incredibly clunky and not much fun to use. This probably just comes down to playstyles but I found myself almost exclusively playing Corvo, who sadly doesn’t get ANY new abilities or additions.
Bone charms are randomized now. This is terrible, you get so many useless ones that do absolutely nothing for you, OR you get tons of useful ones. This is because you can craft new bone charms that are more powerful but to be honest I didn’t really bother with this mechanic, it requires you to break charms down to make new ones and you need to invest resources into it I really didn’t want to bother with. Charms were a good way to scale Corvo as the game went on and were really great rewards when you went out of your way to find them. Half the time in Dishonored 2 I’d track one down and receive “you heal more from food” for the 50th fucking time.
This is borderline nitpicky but the charm in this game is really lacking. Guards are way more boring this time around, not funny or interesting to listen to when they have dialogue, and most of it just frames them as hilariously evil idiots. Guards felt much more human in the last game, it was a real disappointing step down after how great they were. I will say I loved the Overseers at least, they had cool designs and great voice lines.
Map design was much more ambitious, sometimes to the detriment of the gameplay. I think this game was at its worst when you’re traveling the streets. The way guards are positioned and the general layout just makes them kind of a slog to explore. The smaller areas like the inside of Jindosh’s mansion or the hospital island are built much better meanwhile, and are the best parts of the game.
I have to complain about the witches and the Jindosh robots now. Witches are stupid and I hate them, they have annoying dialogue and tons of random mechanics that you really only figure out through trial and error like their bone dogs, or learning exactly where they’re sitting and teleporting. Guards that teleport are always an awful idea. The robots meanwhile seem very intimidating at first, but they can actually be taken down super easily, even if you’re doing a pacifist playthrough. Obviously killing a robot doesn’t count but it only bugs me so much because the game completely lacks enemies you can’t deal with nonlethaly, like the tall boys from the first game.
Speaking of nonlethal, they made it WAY easier. You can drop knock out, knock out enemies facing you if you catch them off guard, and these alone make things way easier. These are quality of life changes so I understand WHY they were done, but I still think they made things too easy. Perhaps drop knock outs shouldn’t work on alert enemies, or maybe they shouldn’t be silent take downs, I’m not sure but it’s ridiculous. Dishonored 1 nonlethal was all about getting behind enemies to choke them out, OR ignoring enemies and sneaking around them, now enemies are hardly a pain to deal with.
Lastly, I do not like where the story went, but this isn’t the fault of Dishonored 2 alone, Daud’s DLCs from the first game started this witch crap, this game was just where it all ended. The main villains in this game sucked and I did not care about any of the assassination targets. None of them had any decent buildup or presence.
Overall, Dishonored 2 is more of the first game with some cleaned up mechanics. I’m a bit of an old head and do not like some of these changes, but that is just me. Some people may have a lot of fun with Emily or may love the story. I dunno, it’s just not for me I guess.
2012
A good stealth game with a fairly predictable but well told storyline to match. Dishonored has long been one of my favorite games but I don’t think it has stood the test of time in my eyes.
Where the art direction and level design is very strong, along with the freedom most levels give you to tackle your objective, I do think the game drops the ball a bit in terms of gameplay.
Firstly, Dishonored is built around the mechanic of you being lethal or pacifist essentially, killing people makes the world worse so it’s good to avoid it if you want a better ending. It’s a tad disappointing that so many tools are pretty much nonexistent if you are playing nonlethal though. Grenades, guns, springrazors, incendiary crossbow bolts, sword upgrades, as well as interesting powers aren’t really reasonable to use if you aren’t going to be killing.
On one hand this does make sense, since a big aspect of the nonlethal route is that it’s about restraint, being reasonable and level headed in a time where many would resort to violence. At the same time this creates issues in the game where you basically run out of things to buy or spend runes on when you’re not even halfway through the game.
Once you have dark vision, blink, and possession leveled up, there really isn’t any other power you should be bothering with. Same with getting the silent shoe upgrades and maybe the crossbow zoom if you can justify it. Gold and runes become useless pretty fast, and that progression being so minimal for one route is a little lame to me, even if it was intentional.
Other than that one gripe, I think Dishonored really shines in its worldbuilding and NPCs. People love the guards from this game because they’re hilarious, well voice acted, and say the same shit over and over.
And the attention to detail is wonderful, I think it’s what really grabs anyone when they’re playing this game. I remember just sneaking around listening to the heart voice lines when I hovered over random NPCs.
The game’s morality meter, the “chaos” system, also does a lot more than you’d initially think. Increasing the number of guards, weepers, river crusts, and even changes the tone slightly by making the weather worse or the skies darker. Friendly NPCs respond to you differently depending on how you play too.
My gripe with this is that it’s essentially a difficulty slider as well, which means nonlethal never really gets HARD. There are way less guards at posts, which is annoying to me because I would WANT nonlethal to essentially be the hard mode.
Other than my issues Dishonored 1 is an amazing game and it is probably the only good Dishonored game because it’s the only one without fucking witches and tells an easily digestible story about some dude named Corvo who gets a boo boo on his hand and saves (or ruins) the empire.
Where the art direction and level design is very strong, along with the freedom most levels give you to tackle your objective, I do think the game drops the ball a bit in terms of gameplay.
Firstly, Dishonored is built around the mechanic of you being lethal or pacifist essentially, killing people makes the world worse so it’s good to avoid it if you want a better ending. It’s a tad disappointing that so many tools are pretty much nonexistent if you are playing nonlethal though. Grenades, guns, springrazors, incendiary crossbow bolts, sword upgrades, as well as interesting powers aren’t really reasonable to use if you aren’t going to be killing.
On one hand this does make sense, since a big aspect of the nonlethal route is that it’s about restraint, being reasonable and level headed in a time where many would resort to violence. At the same time this creates issues in the game where you basically run out of things to buy or spend runes on when you’re not even halfway through the game.
Once you have dark vision, blink, and possession leveled up, there really isn’t any other power you should be bothering with. Same with getting the silent shoe upgrades and maybe the crossbow zoom if you can justify it. Gold and runes become useless pretty fast, and that progression being so minimal for one route is a little lame to me, even if it was intentional.
Other than that one gripe, I think Dishonored really shines in its worldbuilding and NPCs. People love the guards from this game because they’re hilarious, well voice acted, and say the same shit over and over.
And the attention to detail is wonderful, I think it’s what really grabs anyone when they’re playing this game. I remember just sneaking around listening to the heart voice lines when I hovered over random NPCs.
The game’s morality meter, the “chaos” system, also does a lot more than you’d initially think. Increasing the number of guards, weepers, river crusts, and even changes the tone slightly by making the weather worse or the skies darker. Friendly NPCs respond to you differently depending on how you play too.
My gripe with this is that it’s essentially a difficulty slider as well, which means nonlethal never really gets HARD. There are way less guards at posts, which is annoying to me because I would WANT nonlethal to essentially be the hard mode.
Other than my issues Dishonored 1 is an amazing game and it is probably the only good Dishonored game because it’s the only one without fucking witches and tells an easily digestible story about some dude named Corvo who gets a boo boo on his hand and saves (or ruins) the empire.
2023
As a huge fan of the original I was skeptical that I’d enjoy this remake, especially since I wasn’t a huge fan of how RE2R and RE3R played, the games really changed atmosphere a lot and I was nervous a lot was going to be dropped in this remake.
Thankfully, Capcom seems to have learned from a lot of their mistakes. RE4 Remake is a content rich, and action packed game that, just like the original, is filled with fun set pieces and arenas to run through, and the action never really seems to slow down until it’s all over.
Firstly I’ll praise what I really like. The story has been enhanced in many ways, I never had a problem with Ashley in the old game despite seeing a lot of complaints online, but she’s definitely a much more likable character in this game. Secondly Luis’s changes make him an even more enjoyable character in many ways, though I’ll fully admit I do miss a lot of his more cheesy one liners. The balancing for this game seems a lot tighter too, and maybe it’s just because I’ve played the original a billion times but this game is much harder too. Which I think is a good thing, as many bosses and hard areas in the OG can be easily cheesed with rocket launchers or certain safe spots.
Now that’s a lot of praise, I know, however I probably have even more to complain about.
The shooting is awful. Coming from the original which always had such fun and snappy interactive shooting, where enemies would recoil differently depending on where you shoot. Leg shots to trip them, head shots to stagger them, etc. The remake has elements of this but add things like weapon bloom, and recoil to make shot placement a bit more random, which is awful for a game that requires such precise shooting. In many cases this really isn’t TOO much of an issue but sometimes it can really fuck you over. This issue is much more prevalent in the early game where Leon’s pistol feels like a fucking airsoft gun that doesn’t even make enemies react as bullets and pumped into them.
Secondly, as I just said enemies don’t always react to shots. Now I’m not sure if it’s random or if there’s some damage threshold but this is a huge issue in the early game. You will be rushed by a bunch of villagers and headshots won’t really do anything to slow them down. Enemies being tanky isn’t a problem on it’s own, but they are also faster and more aggressive, and the game loves dangling ammo just out of your reach all the time. I don’t have any idea why they would make ammo less plentiful while boosting the amount of enemies and how much health they have. I suppose they wanted to increase the survival aspect and encourage crafting but all it really did was make me never use anything other than a pistol and shotgun because what was the point? All other ammo was too rare or too expensive to craft, and sometimes wasn’t even more effective.
Thirdly, all the bosses were gutted. Not really in terms of difficulty at all, many of them are better fights. I mean more-so their character and presence. You don’t have Sadler taunting you occasionally, no Salazar making fun of you and having a goofy back and forth with Leon. Even if their background lore was enhanced, they lose a lot of screen-time and I think that’s a huge shame.
Fourthly, the knife. I’ve seen heavy praise for the parry mechanic of the knife and I quite like that aspect, although knife durability and all that shit is so stupid. It becomes less of an issue as you upgrade your knife and find the merchant more often, but in the early game and especially long treks, your knife breaks and then you have nothing. No way to parry, no way to save ammo, which was the entire fucking point of the knife in earlier games. Instead the logic is “I better keep pumping handgun rounds into this guy, don’t want to damage my knife”. I understand it’s supposed to be a fail safe when enemies get too close, but it breaks so easily, you need it to finish off certain enemies too, which only makes it break even faster.
Lastly, and this is by far my biggest complaint, the stupid charms from the shooting range being RNG each new file is absolutely insane. These should be secrets you unlock throughout the game that scale with how far you are. Instead I roll shit like “eggs heal more” while I see other people getting charms that increase their handgun ammo drops and stuff. The game would have been better off without these stupid perks, balanced tighter and everything. Instead you need to roll the right charms or you just.. don’t get to use certain weapons as much, or move as fast, or heal more. It can make the game much easier for people out of blind luck while pretty much screwing over others.
That’s about all I have to say. Despite all my hefty complaints I do quite like this game for what it is. I am so glad it is very distinct and didn’t try too hard to be identical to the original. It allows both games to exist together without one necessarily trumping the other.
Despite the more controlled gameplay and more of a realistic approach that I’m not a huge fan of, I’d highly recommend RE4 Remake if you like survival horror games with heavy action and occasional B-movie cheese thrown in.
Thankfully, Capcom seems to have learned from a lot of their mistakes. RE4 Remake is a content rich, and action packed game that, just like the original, is filled with fun set pieces and arenas to run through, and the action never really seems to slow down until it’s all over.
Firstly I’ll praise what I really like. The story has been enhanced in many ways, I never had a problem with Ashley in the old game despite seeing a lot of complaints online, but she’s definitely a much more likable character in this game. Secondly Luis’s changes make him an even more enjoyable character in many ways, though I’ll fully admit I do miss a lot of his more cheesy one liners. The balancing for this game seems a lot tighter too, and maybe it’s just because I’ve played the original a billion times but this game is much harder too. Which I think is a good thing, as many bosses and hard areas in the OG can be easily cheesed with rocket launchers or certain safe spots.
Now that’s a lot of praise, I know, however I probably have even more to complain about.
The shooting is awful. Coming from the original which always had such fun and snappy interactive shooting, where enemies would recoil differently depending on where you shoot. Leg shots to trip them, head shots to stagger them, etc. The remake has elements of this but add things like weapon bloom, and recoil to make shot placement a bit more random, which is awful for a game that requires such precise shooting. In many cases this really isn’t TOO much of an issue but sometimes it can really fuck you over. This issue is much more prevalent in the early game where Leon’s pistol feels like a fucking airsoft gun that doesn’t even make enemies react as bullets and pumped into them.
Secondly, as I just said enemies don’t always react to shots. Now I’m not sure if it’s random or if there’s some damage threshold but this is a huge issue in the early game. You will be rushed by a bunch of villagers and headshots won’t really do anything to slow them down. Enemies being tanky isn’t a problem on it’s own, but they are also faster and more aggressive, and the game loves dangling ammo just out of your reach all the time. I don’t have any idea why they would make ammo less plentiful while boosting the amount of enemies and how much health they have. I suppose they wanted to increase the survival aspect and encourage crafting but all it really did was make me never use anything other than a pistol and shotgun because what was the point? All other ammo was too rare or too expensive to craft, and sometimes wasn’t even more effective.
Thirdly, all the bosses were gutted. Not really in terms of difficulty at all, many of them are better fights. I mean more-so their character and presence. You don’t have Sadler taunting you occasionally, no Salazar making fun of you and having a goofy back and forth with Leon. Even if their background lore was enhanced, they lose a lot of screen-time and I think that’s a huge shame.
Fourthly, the knife. I’ve seen heavy praise for the parry mechanic of the knife and I quite like that aspect, although knife durability and all that shit is so stupid. It becomes less of an issue as you upgrade your knife and find the merchant more often, but in the early game and especially long treks, your knife breaks and then you have nothing. No way to parry, no way to save ammo, which was the entire fucking point of the knife in earlier games. Instead the logic is “I better keep pumping handgun rounds into this guy, don’t want to damage my knife”. I understand it’s supposed to be a fail safe when enemies get too close, but it breaks so easily, you need it to finish off certain enemies too, which only makes it break even faster.
Lastly, and this is by far my biggest complaint, the stupid charms from the shooting range being RNG each new file is absolutely insane. These should be secrets you unlock throughout the game that scale with how far you are. Instead I roll shit like “eggs heal more” while I see other people getting charms that increase their handgun ammo drops and stuff. The game would have been better off without these stupid perks, balanced tighter and everything. Instead you need to roll the right charms or you just.. don’t get to use certain weapons as much, or move as fast, or heal more. It can make the game much easier for people out of blind luck while pretty much screwing over others.
That’s about all I have to say. Despite all my hefty complaints I do quite like this game for what it is. I am so glad it is very distinct and didn’t try too hard to be identical to the original. It allows both games to exist together without one necessarily trumping the other.
Despite the more controlled gameplay and more of a realistic approach that I’m not a huge fan of, I’d highly recommend RE4 Remake if you like survival horror games with heavy action and occasional B-movie cheese thrown in.