Fuck you Noid and all of your pizza destroying contraptions. what gives you the right to destroy the food made by dominos pizza? what the hell did they ever do to you? or try to target the great italian dish pizza. you outta be ashamed of yourself. All for what? to try and ruin dominos pizza? it’s a big fast food corporation! there’s no way you will ruin them just with a few ruined pizzas. no one will join your side. your attempts of sabatoge will be all for nothing in the end. You’ve wasted years of your life, dressed in a ugly stupid fucking suit, just to destroy mediocre pizzas. Fuck you noid.

This Game Freakin Rocks.

Here’s a personal set list ranking. just career songs no dlc or bonus songs. although that stuff is great as well.

1. my name is jonas
2. cherub rock
3. when you were young
4. one
5. knights of cydonia
6. paint it black
7. bulls on parade
8. even flow
9. number of the beast
10. anarchy in the u.k
11. kool thing
12. raining blood
13. reptilia
14. holiday in cambodia
15. paranoid
16. 3s and 7s
17. before i forget
18. cities on flame with rock and roll
19. sabotage
20. suck my kiss
21. the metal
22. the seeker
23. sunshine of your love
24. black magic woman
25. barracuda
26. cliffs of dover
27. welcome to the jungle
28. the devil went down to georgia
29. story of my life
30. black sunshine
31. rock you like a hurricane
32. cult of personality
33. slow ride
34. helicopter
35. La grange
36. Miss murder
37. rock and roll all nite
38. stricken
39. lay down
40. hit me with your best shot
41. mississippi queen
42. pride and joy
43. schools out
44. talk dirty to me
45. monsters

EDIT: 8/3/22: I don’t 100% agree with this ranking anymore but I don’t feel like changing it lol

Literally the edgiest game I have ever played and I love it so much for that.

A dark disturbing take on the series, twisted metal black is one of the best out of left field turns in video game history. Gone is the colorful dark humor of the first games, now we have a bleak industrial atmosphere and characters that could all get there own horror movie.

I really can’t get enough of this games world and characters. Each member of the roster is incredibly unique and disturbing in their own way. Even from their short arcade mode cutscenes you are able to get a pretty good understanding of each of them.

As I said before all these stories could probably have there own movie yet their brief vague nature kinda leaves more mystery. If your into creepy short horror stories you’ll get a lot out of these cutscenes.

The dark hellish landscapes and the never ending black and gray color pallet greatly benefits the tone as well. Add a soundtrack that sounds like dark ambient mixed with industrial and you have a very strong atmosphere.

Finally the gameplay seems to be the most mixed aspect. it’s like the first two games but a lot faster and way more difficult. This chaotic unforgiving gameplay I think benefits what it’s trying to go for as a whole, yet I can understand why people might be turned off by it. I’d suggest take some time learning the use of each power up, memorize the maps and get used to your drivers controls. It’s certainly a difficult game and takes lots of getting used to but I always liked this approach especially with this game in context. Quite literally feels like you’re fighting to the death in vehicles disguised as death machines.




Sad Depressing Edgy Clown Game
5/5

Extraordinarily frustrating. For much more good than bad in the end, but I really did need to talk with others about it, it was like "i'm going to destroy a pillow" with the feelings I had left in the brain stew.

It's in one way, fucking ridiculously well written. Delilah is talk on "not real" escaped to relationships as well as an explicit message on confronting memories. Henry is a "failure" and "cowardly" who cannot confront the pains around him ultimately thrust to realize he has to go back home and come to terms with life. Other characters, their relationships and stories whether surrounding Henry or being left behind to be found by Henry are also failures, painful retellings of this conflict with specters these people saw as real. It's all set to this sunset painting, this growing sense of longing shared by all involved for a sunrise we will never see come up for us on screen. We're denied even the beautiful, serene sunset as it goes up in smoke.

But on the other hand, there's actually too much catharsis. Too much foreground, really. What I loved most of what I was playing was how these background elements intersected, how I was left to feel that pain and wince in real time rather than when the reins were clearly torn from me. I don't mean to say that the cuts were bad, in fact they were perfect, it's more how this structure intrinsically needed to throw the perspective in someone else's agency for us to look at and realize we can't become the sludge trapped in the park. A lot of potential really is left to the cutting floor by this move, a timeline where we never feel a bit of catharsis by a mystery left unsolved, or one where we watch ourselves fail again by Henry's own hands, etc etc. This is what's extremely thorny to talk about though. Like can you imagine just walking up to a work, and going, "you know this works really well but it'd be better if you actually just flipped the whole structure to lean the other way thank you". Like who asked? It works for me not for you?

But the result, at least on my end, is that I ended up decoupled from Henry and Delilah's story for a good portion because the disconnect from the first hour and a half to the latter hour and a half set me ablaze. The dialogue and delivery was still incredible but my emotional investment was missing, at least mostly. Mercifully the background actually never left, as the finale to Dave left me moving away from my desk and pushing myself into a pillow for a good minute.

It's ironic really. I think the idea that this "huehue should've been a movie" has things so backwards (and also it's just really fucking bankrupt, like i'm not taking you seriously). There's so much here to add to, via additional player agency, without even taking away from the narrative focused on. I ended up exploring the whole map completely unintentionally, on the way and a couple times off the beaten path just to finish what qualifies as "the side story". I ended up fishing for a while too. In the end the release I'm looking for needed more 'play,' albeit, I'm no editor. This story still has volumes to speak for what it is, like I ended up discovering not through my own hands how Henry's parasocial relationship has an even bigger relevance as we are today.

I do hope there's a dawn for Campo Santo somewhere down the line. They made something truly special here.

The new DLC is good. It shows some glimpses of Doom Eternal's true potential whereas the main campaign was tame in comparison, the same way that Plutonia started going all out with the (new) enemies in Doom 2. Here you start fully upgraded, so there are no RPG systems and trawling through pause menus to fuck with the pacing. You don't get the Crucible either (you left it in the Icon of Simp's head at the end of the base campaign), so now you have to actually engage with Archviles and Tyrants in earnest instead of using your delete button (although the BFG still exists and the Ice Bomb and Lock-on Burst deletes them about as easily, but oh well).

The first level in the DLC, the UAC Oil Rig, is the most straightforward of the bunch, and mostly exists to serve as a warm-up for those who haven't played DE in a while. The encounters here start to ask much more out of you: Cyber-Mancubi start appearing as often as regular Mancubi, Barons start appearing on the regular, Carcasses and Shieldguys feel like they are in every encounter. Superheavies just start appearing even in the small corridors inbetween the arenas. But more importantly, the arenas get a lot more cramped. You don't get as much room to run/dash circles around enemies, environmental hazards such as electrified floors appear more frequently, and heavy demons are able to more effectively pressure you now that you have less space to work with. Hell, the second Marauder fight in this level takes place in a janitor closet. A trend that will be more apparent in the later levels is that the outer rims of the arena now tend to provide less sightlines on the center of the arena (where most of the enemies and fodder are). So whereas in the base campaign you could often peck away at enemies from the outer rims of the arena, now you have to move towards the center if you want to find fodder to GK/Chainsaw and don't want to deal with a surprise Hell Knight around the corner.

There is only one new enemy type introduced in this level (not counting the shark) in the form of the Turret. It's an Ambient Enemy that serves to be a nuisance, but not necessarily in a good way. Much like the Tentacles you can only damage it when it pops up, and it pops down when you hit it/when you're too close to it/when you look at it too long. It takes at least two high-power shots to kill (like a Precision Bolt or a Ballista shot), so you'll inevitably be forced to wait for it to pop back up. The underlying idea behind this design is that because the Turret itself isn't a major threat and because you usually have ten other more threatening demons to worry about, you're better off focusing your attention on them instead of waiting for this lowly Turret to pop back up. But usually you can find a safe moment where you can focus on the Turret, and eventually can do nothing but wait to kill it, which isn't very engaging. It would be nice if there was a way to immediately bait them into popping up, or if they could be instantly destroyed with a Blood Punch regardless of their state.

One rather annoying thing about this level is the underwater swimming sections, which are just a waste of time and involve even less player interaction than the platforming sections. Doomguy's oxygen is suddenly limited now (lol) and you have to get a wetsuit to breathe underwater, which is just a repurposed radsuit. At least the radsuit offered interesting possibilities by creating a limit to how long you could stay on acid floors without taking damage (even though the base campaign never really tried to play more with this idea in big encounters), but the wetsuit has no such flexibility unless underwater combat ever becomes a thing.

The second level, the Blood Swamps, is where shit gets real. First you get these plants everywhere that detonate after a second or two if you get near them, and leave behind some acid on the floor that damages and slows you down; making you stay airborne and move around more. The second is that there's now cloaked Whiplashes and GIANT Tentacles. Whiplashes aren't as threatening as they were at first if you know how to quickswap a little, so cloaking them so they can sneak into your face does help make them more threatening. Giant Tentacles are just scaled-up Tentacles, but it does fill an extra role in the bestiary by being able to prevent you from safely approaching a much larger area. The third is gimmicks, lots of gimmicks. And That's A Good Thing! I've always argued that nuDoom and Eternal should have employed way more gimmicks for their arenas, because it allows arenas to be more distinct. The new Doom games cannot create variety through different monster placement and level layout to the same extent that the old Doom games could, because the enemy AI in the new Dooms is simply too chaotic and unpredictable to create handcrafted levels around without the enemies doing something you never intended. In old Doom the levels had to compensate for the simple AI, and in the new Dooms it's sort of the other way around. Obviously the arenas in the new Doom games aren't literally copypasted. Elements like heavy demon placement, how much fodder demons there are to farm resources off, and the layout of the arena do affect how you play, but not necessarily in a noticeable way. If you can get by in an arena fight using roughly the same strategy of the last arena, it can't help but feel repetitive.

But here you've got gimmicks that affect how you have to strategize on a macro-level. So you get fog that doesn't let you see more than five feet ahead of you, making long-range weapons unreliable and having you try and get the high ground (by Meathook-jumping) so you can see clearly above the fog, all while the high ground is littered with the aforementioned plants. So you get a section that passively damages you unless you stay in the protective bubble of a wolf familiar, all while enemies come from every direction to invade your tiny safe space, especially demons like Shieldguys, Pinkies and Barons that are a massive pain to deal with in close quarters. There is also a section with a Buff Totem that is locked until you kill a buffed Marauder. I honestly wish arenas would more regularly use Buff Totems in this fashion where you are forced to fight buffed enemies, instead of how they're normally used, where on your first try you ignore all the enemies and are looking around the arena to find the damn thing, and on subsequent attempts you just beeline towards wherever the Buff Totem is.

The biggest gamechanger so far is the Spirit. It's the Summoner from nuDoom, except now it possesses enemies, which: gives them massive damage resistances, makes them immune to any kind of faltering or Ice Bombs, buffs their movement and attack speed, and removes their weak points. What's great about Spirits is how they allow the entire enemy roster to be recontextualized into essentially new enemies. Possessed Arachnotrons force you to deal with their turret and make you rely more on the arena layout to break line of sight and avoid having to play Touhou with it. Possessed Hell Knights and Barons of Hell will simply deal unavoidable damage if you do not keep your distance at all times. Possessed Tyrants and Pain Elementals are the closest thing DE has to a Chaingunner. Fighting these makes you realize just how easy you had it up until now by being able to control enemies with falters and destroying their weak points, so enemies that can ignore all of your bullshit really pushes you to improve your fundamentals, and allows other nuisance enemies like Carcasses and Shieldguys to be even more relevant threats.

The only way to kill a Spirit is to kill its host and then lock it down with the Microwave Beam. If you don't kill it in time, it will possess another nearby enemy and make you go through the same dance all over again. Having an enemy only be killable with one weapon is particular is certainly controversial, especially if it's the weapon that most considered to be the worst in the game, but I think in this case it is a net positive and not just a matter of color-coding to force variety. While you use the Microwave Beam you are slowed down, which makes you extra vulnerable to enemies around you--especially melee-focused enemies. This forces you to ask whether finishing off the possessed demon in this time and position is a good idea, and whether you shouldn't first create a situation where you can take care of the Spirit without getting interrupted. The other aspect is that it makes you be more mindful of your cell ammo in particular, because by the time the Spirit pops up you want to have enough juice in the can to take care of it in one cycle before it possesses something else and makes you go through the whole dance again. So now you have to be more careful about using the Ballista in your quickswap combos. These dynamics wouldn't be as present if you could just shoot down the Spirit with any weapon while being able to move freely and not having to worry as much about ammo. Paradoxically, limiting you to one weapon in this case results in more interesting gameplay than if you could use anything.

However, I do have one issue with this implementation of Spirits, which is that it puts a ceiling on how many possessed enemies you could reasonably deal with at once. Enemies being able to spawn pre-possessed allows for way more variation in level design, but because you have to make yourself vulnerable with the Microwave Beam to kill the Spirits, you can only have so many possessed enemies at once before things become bullshit overwhelming, whereas without the need to microwave Spirits the level designers could be a lot more flexible in this regard. And because you can only have so many Spirits at once, you probably don't want to waste them on fodder demons, even though there is some potential in having to fight larger groups of possessed fodder demons.

The third level, The Holt, is less overtly gimmicky, but it still has enough in terms of unorthodox surprises and set-ups to keep things fresh, such as an arena interspersed with pylons that damage you if you touch them, an arena where the floor is lava and you're surrounded by flying enemies, and a fight against a possessed Tyrant which is a MAJOR pain since you only get 1 (one) respawning fodder enemy to work with. That's a common theme with The Holt, where a large part of the difficulty stems that there's way less fodder spawns for you to farm resources off, as opposed to the UAC Oil Rig where fodder would often clump together for you to easily ignite and detonate into a flaming ball of +100 armor. It means you can't rely on your generic fallback strategies as much and have to be more mindful of doing unnecessarily risky shit. The lack of fodder to Chainsaw for ammo is compensated for with the presence of Makyr Drones. Speaking of, on launch shooting their head wouldn't drop any health, but only ammo. But id later "fixed" this to drop both. I find this unfortunate, because it does away with the dynamics of 'do I headshot them for ammo or do I set up a Glory Kill for health' and keeping them alive as floating ammo packs for when you really need it, whereas in a level with a draught of fodder and health items, going for a Makyr Drone's head is not even a question.

This level also introduces the Blood Makyr, which is basically a Turret that can fly around, except it fires damaging AoE zones that also slow you down, so it's more of a relevant threat. It's invulnerable to everything until it attacks, so damaging it again involves more waiting. At least it dies in one shot to the head instead of two. Like I said before, I could tolerate them more if there was a way to sidestep their immunity by playing proactively, such as being able to bait them into dropping their guard (f.e. by deploying a mod that slows you down like Mobile Turret or Auto-Fire and then quickswapping to a weapon that can oneshot them) or by hitting them with a fully charged Destroyer Blade or something. That said, I do like having a supporting enemy that you simply cannot swat away in the middle of a fight while there's more threatening enemies around. I just wish dealing with it wasn't largely outside the player's control.

The boss fight against Samur is the best in the game, the best in the franchise, and honestly one of the best of the genre (an admittedly low bar), for it is one of the few FPS bosses I can describe with full confidence as being truly... average. What makes it so average is that it actually tests you on your mastery over the core gameplay instead of forcing a different and more limited playstyle on you at the eleventh hour. So the boss fight heavily relies on spawning in regular demons to pressure you from multiple directions and lock you in, and the boss actually challenges your aim by constantly zipping around every which way. The constant teleporting also has the added benefit on making the Lock-on Burst unreliable, so you can't rely on that crutch for this fight. This is in stark contrast to the Khan Makyr fight where you could just spam Lock-on Burst or your other favourite weapon at a static target, the waiting game that is the Gladiator fight, or the clusterfuck that is the Icon of Sin. That said, the first three phases of the fight are a total doozy.

The first phase doesn't have many heavy adds (or many adds at all) to keep you on your toes, and Samur isn't that big of a threat himself with his easily avoidable projectile spread, so you can get away with just focusing down Samur for most of the fight. Samur does spawn Eyes that move in a fixed path and deal damage if you're nearby, which are neat and make focusing down Samur a bit more complicated, but unfortunately he only spawns these when you get him down to about 50% health, so you won't notice their presence that much for this phase. The second phase has Samur become invincible and make you fight a Possessed Mancubus and Hell Knight at once, but this phase is hamstrung by the fact that there's a pillar in the middle of the arena which you can use to break line of sight between you and the Possessed Mancubus while you go deal with the Possessed Hell Knight first, so you're not even really fighting both at once. The third phase certainly has the setup to be good, the problem is that the Cacodemons don't spawn in at a fast enough rate/high enough amount to really put pressure on the limited amount of space you now have.

The fourth phase is when things actually start getting good. It's a repeat of the first phase, except now you have lasers slowly combing over the arena to give you a macro-level threat to keep in mind, there's a constantly respawning Blood Makyr to complicate things further, and the new layout of the arena is more vertical in a way that no longer gives you a clear oversight over the whole arena, which makes getting a line of sight on a speedy Samur way more difficult. Because of the raised platforms you also have less space to deal with Samur's attacks without falling to the bottom where the Blood Makyr and the rest of the adds are. The fifth phase now has you deal with a Possessed Pain Elemental and Possessed Dread Knight on top of a Blood Makyr, which is something that cost me a good half hour to beat. You really have to try this without crutches like superweapons or the Lock-on Burst to appreciate how intense this phase can get. A Possessed Pain Elemental is ridiculously accurate while the Dread Knight is being ridiculously aggressive, and all the while you're trying to find an opportunity where you can take care of the Spirit without the other Possessed enemy interfering. It really shows the potential of having to deal with multiple Possessed enemies, but I suppose we'll see more of that in TAG2.

I suppose having to predominantly fight minions in a boss fight instead of the boss itself may not be thematically satisfying, but for a game that's all about fighting multiple enemies at once it is only logical to incorporate this into your boss design. That said, I would have preferred there to be one last phase where you fight against Samur himself instead of more minions.

Overall, the DLC was great and highlights that there's still plenty of potential to be had in Doom Eternal's formula. I'm looking forward to TAG 2.

TAG2 itself is an anti-climax that represents a concerning change in direction for the Doom reboot series, which hits harder given how on-track id Software already was with Eternal and TAG1. I am also fully aware of its troubled six-month development cycle where both TAG1 and 2 had to be out within a year of Eternal’s release to fulfill legal obligations, whose production schedule did not originally account for blizzards and power outages striking Texas (where id Software’s offices are located), and a whole freaking pandemic. I am not particularly upset that TAG2 feels rushed or that most of its new enemies are reskins (if anything, I think more games should be willing to reskin and reuse enemies), but what concerns me the most is its new gameplay direction, one which would have persisted even without the world breaking down. To properly understand why this is concerning, and considering parts of the base game and TAG1 have been changed with the release of TAG2, it is necessary to go back to the previous entries and establish some context.

With TAG1, the core players were pretty satisfied with its intensity and challenge, but the consensus amongst casual players (according to Doom Eternal director Hugo Martin) was that TAG1 was too intense pacing-wise, and thus exhausting to play even on lower difficulty settings. Here I disagree; TAG1 definitely does not run at 200% at all times. When breaking the structure of TAG1 down, there are still many downtime segments in the form of platforming segments, minor puzzles, minor combat encounters, story segments, or (quite frankly overlong) underwater swimming sections inbetween all the major arenas. The difficulty has definitely escalated, but the escalation is necessary to avoid running the risk of only repeating the ‘white belt’ encounters of the base game that the player has already proven their mastery over.

I believe the real culprit here is that most casual players were also returning players who had grown rusty in the six months between the base game’s and TAG1’s launch. Considering TAG1 starts off with several Cyber-Mancubi and Barons and no warm-up and it only escalates from there, it can make the entire DLC campaign feel overwhelming when you have yet to remember how everything worked; something that might not have been a problem if you had only just finished the base game. This is where in retrospect I believe that TAG1 would have been better off if it was balanced around a shotgun start and finding all your old weapons again, instead of balancing around your full loadout. This would allow returning casual players to get a quick crash course on all your old abilities and weapons over the course of a level or two instead of having to remember everything at once, and it would also allow for some interesting encounter design for returning core players as well where you’d have to face off against enemies without the weapons you would normally use against against them (like dealing with Shieldguys without a Plasma Rifle, or Whiplashes without Lock-on Rockets, or a Tyrant without any of your power weapons). The Super Gore Nest Master Level already features a Shotgun Start mode, so this shouldn’t have been technically impossible. And, while I personally don’t see any value in this type of argument but know that many others do, you can also cite historical precedent as a justification for taking your weapons away by pointing out that Doom 1 would also take away all your weapons at the start of each episode. Nevertheless, id Software declared the pacing guilty, and so decided to correct this in TAG2.

Rather than balancing the learning curve around one playthrough like with the base game and TAG1, for TAG2 id Software decided to take the Platinum approach to difficulty. In short, the first playthrough is an extended tutorial meant to keep casual players invested by introducing something new every 30 minutes while forgetting about the last thing, whereas the second playthrough in the form of the (yet to be released at the time of writing) Master Levels is the ‘real’ game where aforementioned new elements are combined with each other and pre-existing elements to actually test your mastery over them. In the context of a game like Doom Eternal that’s not designed around being replayed repeatedly to get a decent grasp of the gameplay (like with a roguelite or an arcade game), this approach is terrible because of the following reasons:

Firstly, it defeats the point of having difficulty settings that you can switch between on the fly. When you select Hurt Me Plenty difficulty, you expect a comfortable breeze, and not something as demanding as TAG1 was. When you select Nightmare difficulty, you expect to be pushed into using all of the game’s systems. TAG2 on Nightmare absolutely does not do that, because most TAG2 arenas are intensity-wise on par with Arc Complex in the base game, except in Arc Complex you did not have all weapons/upgrades yet, whereas in TAG2 you are fully upgraded and then some (see: Hammer). Even if the Master Levels were already out, you would still have to trudge through 3 hours of white belt encounters on Nightmare before you can actually get to the Good Stuff, because in DE you cannot access Master Levels unless you complete the regular levels first. Using cheats to skip the regular levels for the Master Levels wouldn’t be ideal either, because regardless of skill level you still need the time and space to learn TAG2’s new gameplay elements, and Master Levels are the worst place to learn them considering MLs are designed around you already having a full grasp of them.

Secondly, you basically have to run through the same content twice to get the ‘full’ experience, and even then it’s not a given that people will even bother playing the Master Levels. Amongst the majority of gamers, “beating” a singleplayer game usually involves playing once up to the credits roll, unless each playthrough promises new content (like in roguelikes and whatnot). Having to replay the same content but remixed once or twice until you get to the Fun Zone will feel to most like uninspired padding, who will just drop the game out of boredom before they get to the Fun Zone. The base game deftly avoided this and successfully appealed to both casual and core gamers by showing you the majority of its content and making you experience the depths of the gameplay--i.e. the Fun Zone, over the course of one playthrough no matter what difficulty setting you picked. Master Levels were for those who were already satisfied with the base game but wanted even more. Only after getting hooked to the gameplay will make people feel like playing remixed content; the actual hook was not in the Master Levels themselves. Meanwhile if you want to experience what it’s like doing Meathook platforming or fighting the new enemy types in a situation that actually makes you think about what you’re doing, then you’re going to have to slog through this 3-hour long pseudo-tutorial before you can even get to that point.

Thirdly, changing direction like this in what’s probably the final piece of official DE story content is the worst place to do it in. Most of the people who will play TAG2 are most likely those who already managed to get through the base game and TAG1 and liked it for what it was and wanted more, so suddenly hitting the metaphorical brakes with TAG2 feels incredibly out of place, what with its tendency for simple fodder-only enemy waves. Narratively this also creates a massive whiplash, where you finally arrive at the True Big Bad’s Lair, but it’s mostly populated by these Demonic Troopers that explode if you so much as hit them with the Meathook, so your archnemesis ends up feeling underwhelming and like a bit of a joke.

Fourthly, I hear TAG2 is supposed to be a ‘victory lap’ or a ‘power fantasy’, but that is, quite frankly, cope. A power fantasy only works when you have something worthy to exercise your awesome power against. Whenever you’d pick up a power-up like the Quad Damage in a game like Quake 1 (or just Doom Eternal itself), it would throw a greater amount of enemies at you that would normally be bullshit to deal with without the power-up. It feels good because now you’ve got the power to pull one over the foes that have been making your entire life miserable up until now. Being given a power-up and the game throwing even less enemies at you than before is not a power fantasy, but an anticlimax. Being given a full loadout and an overpowered hammer that can stun groups of enemies, and then have the only opposition you face be on par with what you faced in the middle part of the base game, is an anticlimax. And as far as I can tell, TAG2 isn’t trying to be anticlimactic for narrative reasons that could possibly justify this direction in gameplay.

There is also another issue that plagues TAG2’s pacing, one which would persist even without the aforementioned changed in direction--namely: You’re introducing five new enemy types (Riot Soldiers, Cursed Prowlers, Screechers, Armored Barons, Stone Imps, I’m not counting the Demonic Troopers LOL), a new equipment item in the form of the Hammer, and Meathook platforming in a DLC consisting of three levels (or looking at Immora, it’s more accurate to say two-and-a-half). Where are you going to find the time and space to let the player get acquainted with all these new gameplay elements, while also delivering a climax gameplay-wise that’s befitting of the last piece of official main story content?

Well, you don’t.

Save for the Hammer, every new element in TAG2 is tragically underutilized. New enemies like the Armored Barons and Stone Imps tend to largely appear by themselves and are rarely accompanied by other Heavy demons, whereas the new support demons like Screechers and Cursed Prowlers are only used in relatively low-intensity encounters, and almost never in something major. Having new enemies appear by themselves or with only minor support makes sense for when you encounter them for the first time and have yet to learn how they work, but that’s about the only capacity said demons appear in. Meanwhile the actual major encounters in TAG2 barely use the new demons at all. Meathook platforming is also mostly used to traverse large gaps, but almost never in combat. When it is used in combat, it’s usually as a single Meathook point above a largely flat and sparsely populated arena that already has tons of space to move around in. I can only imagine this all being a consequence of the “we’ll properly flesh this stuff out later in the Master Levels” philosophy.

You really shouldn’t be introducing too many new things at the very end of the game, as it gives you very little space to flesh out said elements. The base game stopped introducing new enemies and weapons after Taras Nabad (bosses and Makyr Drones excluded), and dedicated the remaining four levels to realizing its own potential by combining the existing enemies in different ways to create more demanding but also more unique encounters. TAG1 did introduce Spirits in its second level and Blood Makyrs in its third and final level, but TAG1 got more mileage out of both enemies individually than all new enemies in TAG2 combined, on account of not having to juggle a dozen new elements at once. It also helped that everyone knew that TAG2 was on the horizon, and that we might see even more interesting usage of the TAG1 enemies there (we didn’t). If we knew there was a TAG3 coming, then I wouldn’t be writing this paragraph.

What’s even weirder is that TAG2 already provides a solution for there not being enough time and space to play around with all the new elements, in the form Escalation Encounters. Casual players that prefer having an uninterruptible flow can simply ignore the optional and more intense second wave, whereas core players can get the challenge they crave and see aforementioned new elements being used to more interesting extents. This is also why it’s so unfortunate that Escalation Encounters aren’t used that much (only three times in TAG2), and that even then the second waves barely use any of the new TAG2 enemies.

As for the new enemies on their own; some are good, some are undercooked. The Screecher is a great addition, as it makes you be extra careful with where you shoot and how you use your AoE weapons if you don’t want to unintentionally buff all surrounding enemies and screw yourself over. The only qualm I have about this buff is that on top of buffing enemy attack and movement speed (á la Buff Totems), it also buffs enemy damage resistance. This isn’t a problem in TAG2 itself, since most Screecher encounters don’t have Superheavy demons as support, but for larger encounters in possible future (custom) Master Levels where several Superheavies are involved, accidentally getting a group of Superheavies Screecher-buffed would basically cause a massive death spiral, at which point you might as well reload your save. It’s for this reason that, just like with the Marauder, the Screecher doesn’t scale upwards well; the level designer needs to put a damper on the heavier demons when using the Screecher so things won’t spiral into absurdly difficult territory, which limits how the Screecher can be used. I believe that forgoing the damage resistance buff would make the Screecher more flexible in this regard.

The Cursed Prowler is another such enemy which introduces an interesting and unique dynamic that works well within TAG2’s levels, but wouldn’t scale upwards well in future Master Levels. Being cursed with limited mobility and having to seek out and Blood Punch a moving target that keeps running away from you is great, as it makes you improvise using a more limited toolset in the same way that the Screecher makes you reconsider how to use AoE weaponry. The problem is that this dynamic can only occur so long as the Cursed Prowler hits you. This means that an arena that holds back on enemy spawns to account for the possibility of being cursed runs the risk of being too boneless if you kill the Cursed Prowler without getting cursed, whereas an arena that doesn’t hold back at all is liable to turn into a death spiral if you do get cursed, and basically makes memorizing Cursed Prowler spawns a requirement. This is a similar problem that Buff Totems faced in the base game, where you were better off memorizing Buff Totem spawns and beelining towards them instead of dealing with the buffed enemies, which TAG1 got around by locking Buff Totems away from you and forcing you to deal with buffed enemies. Similarly, Cursed Prowlers would work better if being cursed was an inevitability (like being automatically cursed whenever a Cursed Prowler spawns, with this being telegraphed well in advance). This would make dealing with the status effect more predictable if you know when it’s coming, but this predictability should also allow designers to create encounters that are better tailored around being cursed, instead of having to design encounters around simultaneously being cursed and not being cursed. Even with that in mind, being unable to dash while cursed means you’re basically screwed against enemies like Tyrants, Doom Hunters, or Whiplashes where you absolutely must dash in order to avoid their attacks (the Meathook also works as a means to quickly GTFO, but it has its own cooldown), so to better allow for encounters where you end up being cursed against enemies like that without it becoming complete bullshit, it would be better to create some leeway by having dashes just recharge relatively slowly when you are cursed.

On another note, I also wish being cursed didn’t automatically give you a BP charge to always prepare you for killing the Cursed Prowler, and would actually deplete your BP gauge to begin with. Part of the dynamic of being cursed involves having to suddenly adapt to a limited moveset, and having to find other enemies to GK for BP’s while cursed (instead of immediately beelining towards the Crowler) could have played a great part in that.

The Armored Baron is a great albeit underutilized addition. It’s basically the Marauder Done Right; instead of only being able to wait for the Baron to give you an opening to disable its shields (like with the Marauder/Blood Makyr), you can also force an opening by shooting it with the Plasma Rifle and its mods, which also makes the Heat Blast somewhat useful for once because of its burst plasma damage. Instead of the Armored Baron being a non-factor that you only deal with after clearing out all other heavy demons (like with the Marauder), you do want to prioritize parrying/dodging its morning star attacks when they occur, because their range and accuracy is massive. The Armored Baron also occupies a different niche from the Blood Makyr where instead of being able to insta-kill it during its vulnerability window in one shot, you need to commit more time and ammo to kill it while it’s vulnerable. This is why the Armored Baron works best in pairs or together with other (super)heavy demons; other demons get in the way of you easily being able to burst down an Armored Baron while it’s vulnerable, while the Armored Baron still demands top priority when it does its morning star attack. This is also why it’s unfortunate that Armored Barons are rarely used in this capacity. On another note, I wish the vulnerability window for the morning star attacks was made a bit smaller, so you’d have a reason to actually go destroy the Armored Baron’s armor the hard way when things are getting too intense for you to easily focus on parrying the morning star.

The Riot Soldiers are supposed to be like the Doom 2 Chaingunners, but here they are just undercooked no matter how you want to try and use them. Their fast low-damage projectiles are too inaccurate to pose any threat whatsoever, and their indestructible shields are easily circumvented with only one Remote Detonation or Sticky Bomb. Riot Soldiers could work as a long-range harassment unit, where they bully you with nigh-unavoidable chip damage into breaking line of sight or prioritizing them first, but this could only work if they could actually reliably hit you and if they weren’t so simple to kill from long-range with explosive splash damage. The Challenge Restored mod has the right idea here where Riot Soldiers have increased projectile speeds, and take way less damage from explosive weapons, with the intent of using explosives to setup falters and finishing them off with another weapon. That way instead of quickly being able to delete Riot Soldiers from any range, you need to commit dealing with Riot Soldiers either by waiting for your explosives to detonate and falter them so you can finish them off at any range, or by simply moving around their shields.

The Stone Imps seem like a lazy way to get you to use the Full-Auto, but they do pose an interesting dynamic (if they’re not used only by themselves). So here you’ve got an ubiquitous fodder demon that cannot be killed using regular means. While Full-Auto does easily kill them, Full-Auto is also a mod that requires commitment in terms of deployment time and reduced movement speed when using it, so if you had to fight Stone Imps alongside heavier demons intruding on your personal space, then using only Full-Auto would be much less of a dominant solution. You also can’t easily choose to ignore Stone Imps until you take out all the bigger demons first, because Stone Imps have this homing spinball attack that’s tricky to avoid. Their damage vulnerability to the Hammer is also a neat idea in that you can expend a valuable Hammer charge to easily get rid of them in one shot. At least this would be a cool dynamic if getting Hammer charges wasn’t so easy, but more on that later. I do wish that the Stone Imp also had a damage vulnerability for other high-commitment options such as the Mobile Turret, Microwave Beam and Destroyer Blade, so you have a bit more freedom in deciding how exactly you are going to commit to dealing with Stone Imps.

Lastly, TAG2 introduces the Hammer. The Hammer is your replacement for the Crucible, and is a way more interesting tool that should’ve replaced both the Crucible and Chainsaw from the get go. The Chainsaw simply isn’t very interesting to use; with one press of a button you insta-kill an enemy for ammo, and the dynamic of being left vulnerable after a Chainsaw kill often doesn’t get capitalized on by the enemies (except for Mancubi and Possessed enemies), and even then can be mitigated by deploying the Chaingun Shield right after the kill animation ends. Meanwhile there is more depth to how you can use the Hammer as a tool to regain ammo, as a tool to stun enemies, or just to clear out fodder (kind of like DOOM (2016)’s Chainsaw dynamic of “do I save fuel to insta-kill a Baron, or do I want ammo now”, except the Hammer takes a less insane approach that doesn’t involve insta-killing any enemy with no effort). Enemies hit by the Hammer shockwave drop ammo, so the more enemies you hit at once, the more ammo you get. But you can also opt to forgo maximizing ammo gains to use it more offensively by stunning (super)heavy demons or using it to increase the vulnerability windows on enemies like the Armored Barons and Marauders, or enemies that are resistant to everything except the Hammer like the Stone Imp.

This is all great, but in practice the Hammer is way overpowered (especially once upgraded), and needs to be tuned down by a whole lot. The ammo gained per hit demon is large enough that grouping enemies together on purpose isn’t something you would really consider doing, which on top of already having the Chainsaw means that ammo will never be an issue ever. Hammering enemies that are already frozen with an Ice Bomb or set alight with the Flame Belch further multiplies the health/armor gains to absurd levels. The absurd upgraded stun duration on enemies hit by the Hammer, on top of the debuff that makes hammered enemies take bonus damage, means that you can kill most (super)heavies in one cycle (if you know how to quickswap), and is already obscenely OP on its own. Yes, it lets you very easily one-cycle Marauders which is based because they’re a trash enemy type, but that is honestly just a band-aid fix. Furthermore, the Hammer is also quite spammable because you only need to destroy two weak points or do two Glory Kills to recharge it (sidenote: having something fill up based on destroying weak points is great because it gives you a reason to bother shooting off the Revenant shoulder cannons), and even then TAG2 levels tend to litter arenas with Hammer charge pick-ups that make using the Hammer with its sheer power a brainless option. I want to use the Hammer, but its sheer power makes other parts of Eternal’s resource gathering and faltering dynamic too redundant. The Ice Bomb/Frag Grenades are about as or less powerful than the Hammer, but they’re also less spammable because of their lengthier cooldowns, and so end up being less useful on their own unless combined with the Hammer. In short, the Hammer needs nerfs nerfs nerfs--to the resources you gain from it, to the degree it stuns enemies, and to how frequently you can use it. As it is right now, it’s only suitably tuned for slaughter map-tier encounters, and way too strong for anything below that.

Finally, there’s the Dark Lord fight, which is bad. It’s basically a Super Marauder, except the Gladiator boss fight was already a Super Marauder, so the Dark Lord doesn’t get any points for originality. It’s also a much worse Super Marauder fight in every conceivable way. The biggest one is that it’s just terrible at pressuring you and testing your mobility. Most of his attacks can be avoided by simply circlestrafing or circledashing in the case of his shield bash, which you can do because the arena for the fight is ridiculously large and flat, and the Dark Lord has no fast ranged options that actually lead your movement. Compare this to the Gladiator who could snipe you with his morning stars, his shield projectile, his jumping rope attack, or by just rushing you and smacking you up close, or how the DOOM (2016) bosses would have more ranged attacks that indiscriminately covered the whole arena.

In terms of offense, the fight doesn’t fare much better. Whereas you could deal some chip damage to the Gladiator instead of having to only wait to parry its attacks, the Dark Lord gets straight up healed when you attack it when its eyes don’t flash green, even when it whiffs a melee attack (?!?!). This means there is absolutely no choice but to wait for that green flash to come, and whether the Dark Lord will do the one attack where he does flash green is very much up to RNG. Once you stagger him it’s a matter of optimizing how much damage you get out of the vulnerability time window by using the Hammer to extend the window and equipment to deal more damage, but in this context that’s not an interesting dynamic on its own. Since the fight is mostly a 1v1, applying a close-to-optimal quickswap combo becomes the dominant strategy, which is also one that isn’t that difficult to execute if you have set up some reasonable keybindings. Here the solution is obvious, is easy to execute, and must be repeated several times (for a minimum of two times for each of the five phases) with no reason to change it up, so it becomes boring. What wouldn’t have been boring if you had to find a way to deal the most damage possible while other demons kept trying to interrupt you--much like how fighting Armored Barons should ideally play out. Now depending on the situation you need to shift your priorities between doing sick combos and dealing with other demons. Charging the Hammer so you can deal extra damage is also a shallow dynamic in this fight, where instead of having to set up Glory Kills or target weak points on other demons, the enemies that the Dark Lord summons will straight-up drop Hammer charges on any kind of death, meaning there is no real choices to be had between prioritizing enemies for resources and prioritizing the Dark Lord to deal damage (and even then you can easily Meathook towards any of the static Zombies at the edge of the arena for a free Glory Kill/Chainsaw Kill).

In conclusion, as a result of trying to cram in too many new things in a small mission pack and trying to expedite properly utilizing said things to subsequent playthroughs, TAG2 ends up primarily feeling like wasted potential, and I would have genuinely preferred if it introduces less and polished what little it did introduce, than to wave all these cool concepts in our faces and do nothing with it. While introducing as many new elements as possible is great for future Master Levels both official and unofficial, vanilla TAG2 ends up suffering because of it, and vanilla TAG2 is what most people are going to be playing. I do hope that in the future id Software goes back to the base game’s approach to the learning curve, instead of TAG1’s approach of assuming the player is still completely familiar with all systems, or TAG2’s obsession with flow and increasing the intensity only very gradually over the course of its campaign.

“An American tragedy. An odyssey of debt, of grief, of broken promises, of hope. A painful, melancholic fable composed of fables and more fables, spreading out and weaving in and out of itself. A dream ebbing back and forth between memory and fantasy. A plea for you to care about something.”

...This was my original review for Kentucky Route Zero. I still think it’s a good description. But on consideration, I feel as though I need to be bold and say it: Kentucky Route Zero is not only one of my favorite games, but one of my favorite things ever made.

This is not an assessment of quality. I am not telling you what to feel. I am telling you how I feel. And Kentucky Route Zero makes me feel a way.

I specifically say “Favorite Thing”, because Kentucky Route Zero doesn’t affect me like a game. When I think about many of my favorite games, I often think of them as games. They are full of mechanics, of challenges, of systems. That’s certainly not all games are, and games can be many things, but in the capacity that they affect me, enchant me, or fascinate me, it is often within this vague category of “game”. But Kentucky Route Zero is different. To call it “my favorite game” and leave it at that misses something. It’s certainly a game, but it doesn’t make me feel the way games usually make me feel. First and foremost, Kentucky Route Zero is a story. It’s unlike most. The main body of this story is a game, but it’s also a multimedia saga. There’s something quintessential permeating my experience of Kentucky Route Zero that transcends that category.

It is a hauntological melancholy. It conjures a world more like a memory than a reality. Kentucky Route Zero tells the story of people who seem familiar but you’ve never met, with jobs that were never really secure, in situations that could never happen, in a version of Kentucky that has never existed. Magical realism constructs a vision not of reality, but of memory, of a sensate fabric that you swear could have been but never was. Americana is a mythic entity made visible, standing in front of me within Kentucky Route Zero, and it’s on its last breaths.

It’s a hopeful story. That doesn’t mean it’s happy. The world around you is a wasteland. Everyone is dying. Everyone is suffering. Everything is weighed down by debt, pulled deep down into pools of darkness. To live is to work, work, and die. But there are other ways to live. There always have been. Should we move on? I think the answer is clear. But that doesn’t make the pain go away. We have to be willing to feel both grief and hope in the same breath.

All of its blemishes are dismissable. Fleeting problems with UI, incidentally clunky writing, weird mechanical tangents, overwhelming scope, these melt away when I take a moment to remember what Kentucky Route Zero is and feel the frisson travel up and down my skin. I'm trying to not be too longwinded here, but it's hard. I can't get into specifics. So I wax poetic instead. I could write thousands of words on every minute I spent with Kentucky Route Zero and still feel like I was forgetting to say something. It is a multitudinous masterpiece, refracting and reflecting endlessly, timelessly, quietly.

Kentucky Route Zero is one of my favorite things.

With talk of theme park ride games as of late, it's a great timing that of all the games I am the most excited to play, that I finally get working for me to play, it's this one. Quite literally a christian apocrypha story made manifest into powerful rainbow atmospheric audiovisual pleasure, never really missing a cohesive beat from vista to vista.

And also difficult to gush over in the same light, as pretty much every screenshot is a painting in its own justice, and is pretty much the entire appeal. The story and combat, while supportive and have honestly great bedrock foundation, are treated in a rather ancillary fashion in comparison. Really the game could've done with less of the combat, or at least refine the systems to better match the experience as a whole (more like Chapter 6, which literally does this, or modify the weapons for different modes in general!) because otherwise there's far too many of the same encounter that brings a good amount of it down. The ending itself is also rather anticlimactic, albeit sensible for the structure of where things were going. Hell, you could argue that it ending on a rather softer note makes sense for it, and tbh I'm also willing to take it simply because it implies that the queer relationship between these two lovebirds is far more important than one fallen angel :3. Even still, I felt a rather strong wanting for it to go full Bayonetta/TW101 finale with it. But honestly a lot of this was probably a budgetary issue, which makes the end experience all the more dumbfounding.

I also chose this after re-evaluating my principles and understandings of why I love the things I do, and what I pursue. And El Shaddai definitely offered me a strong, wide-eyed grin the whole way through, to affirm that yeah, video games are p cool actually.