Fluppywhiffle
Postal 2: Paradise Lost is a follow-up to Apocalypse Weekend built on top of Postal 2 as an apology to fans for Postal 3. Postal fans often consider it to be tied with 2 as the best game in the series, with some even referring to it as the “real” Postal 3. I disagree with both of these sentiments. Paradise Lost is very much just more Postal 2. It reuses the entire map from the base game, has most of the same characters, and contains just about every system and mechanic in the base game. The few original mechanics it does have were added into the base game in one of the anniversary patches, which in turn makes it feel like even less of a standalone package. More than anything else, Paradise Lost is an unabashed work of fan service.
But unfortunately for me, even though I’ve played all of these Postal games, I am not a fan of the series. In fact, I’m getting pretty fucking sick of it. Postal 2 is the only one I enjoyed, and everything else ranges from horrendous to mediocre. Paradise Lost is in the mediocre category. It is Postal 2 with an Apocalypse Weekend skin and a reference to Postal 3 that doesn’t do anything interesting. I’ve put off writing about this game for nearly a month and a half because I genuinely cannot think of anything interesting to say about it (and frankly due to irl things too but whatever). I am putting minimum effort into this review because I was already exhausted from both this game and the franchise less than halfway through playing it. Since the game is based around a (rather terrible) story and each day begins at a different area of the map, the general pacing of the game is fucking terrible. It is exhausting to walk across the same ugly, retextured map over and over again for seemingly every chore. I just want to stop thinking about this game because I’ve already said most of my thoughts when I wrote about Postal 2 and 3. Maybe 4 and Brain Damaged will be different. I hope they are. I just want to stop thinking about Apocalypse Weekend and Paradise Lost. They are neither good games, nor interesting to think about. I’m tired of RWS, and I don’t know how they aren’t tired of being known for nothing but Postal. It’s a shitty franchise with 1 game that is remotely engaging and another game that is so bad that it’s entertaining.
I’m sorry this is rushed and repetitive, but I just want to be done with this. I’m not even editing this tbh.
But unfortunately for me, even though I’ve played all of these Postal games, I am not a fan of the series. In fact, I’m getting pretty fucking sick of it. Postal 2 is the only one I enjoyed, and everything else ranges from horrendous to mediocre. Paradise Lost is in the mediocre category. It is Postal 2 with an Apocalypse Weekend skin and a reference to Postal 3 that doesn’t do anything interesting. I’ve put off writing about this game for nearly a month and a half because I genuinely cannot think of anything interesting to say about it (and frankly due to irl things too but whatever). I am putting minimum effort into this review because I was already exhausted from both this game and the franchise less than halfway through playing it. Since the game is based around a (rather terrible) story and each day begins at a different area of the map, the general pacing of the game is fucking terrible. It is exhausting to walk across the same ugly, retextured map over and over again for seemingly every chore. I just want to stop thinking about this game because I’ve already said most of my thoughts when I wrote about Postal 2 and 3. Maybe 4 and Brain Damaged will be different. I hope they are. I just want to stop thinking about Apocalypse Weekend and Paradise Lost. They are neither good games, nor interesting to think about. I’m tired of RWS, and I don’t know how they aren’t tired of being known for nothing but Postal. It’s a shitty franchise with 1 game that is remotely engaging and another game that is so bad that it’s entertaining.
I’m sorry this is rushed and repetitive, but I just want to be done with this. I’m not even editing this tbh.
2011
People often make fun of me for being a loser who “only plays bad games” and has “very questionable taste.” To everyone who says this, I’m gonna bluntly say with 100% certainty that these heinous allegations and scathing remarks are entirely correct and I’ve now completed Postal 3.
It goes without saying that Postal 3 is an awful game on just about every conceivable level. I tend to be pretty forgiving of games that have either gone through development hell or just have their fair share of jank in them. But Postal 3 doesn’t simply cross over the line of jank. It goes beyond the line of bad and into the realm of just being terrible at literally everything it tries to do even when it isn’t broken. The shooting is horrible, the tasks are borderline unplayable, the game looks atrocious, the story is an unconnected series of occurrences, the AI barely works, and some of the cutscenes don’t even trigger correctly. I could do a full dissection of how every mechanic, system, and aspect of Postal 3 is poorly constructed in some way– and I would if enough people wanted me to for some reason– but that would only scratch the surface of why the game is so astoundingly bad. Postal 3 isn’t bad simply because it’s poorly developed, but rather because of the failure of its design.
Before we get into Postal 3’s gameplay, I first want to quickly compare it with some of the aspects that make Postal 2’s work. One of the reasons why that game is so unique is because, despite what some people claim, it isn’t designed to be immoral, but amoral. It doesn’t have a morality system because it’s up to you to approach the world and accomplish the tasks however you see fit. You are the morality system, and regardless of the approach you take, the world still treats you the exact same way.
Postal 3, however, has a morality system in it where you are either good or evil. Depending on how many people you kill and how many of the mission objectives you accomplish, you’ll get a different ending and some slight alterations in some of the levels. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this in concept, but the morality system in Postal 3 neither serves to expand nor refine the experience offered by Postal 2. It essentially reduces your playstyle to a matter of ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ depending on the ending you’re aiming for. Since the game is effectively structured around this half baked system, the moment to moment gameplay is not so much a test of mechanical skill or tactical decision making and more a test of patience and endurance. It’s about completing repetitive tasks to reach a predictable ending rather than using your tools to respond to specific scenarios.
But even without the morality system, Postal 3 doesn’t allow the player to experiment with any of its potentially emergent systems and mechanics. Pretty much every action you perform in the game is either blatantly revealed in a tutorial or assigned to you in a mission. The few exceptions to this are simply taken and bastardised from Postal 2 and, frankly, don’t really contribute much of anything to the gameplay.
Comparatively, Postal 2 only teaches the basics of how your tools work and lets you figure out the rest. The different ways they can be combined together to affect both yourself and the surrounding world are left for the player to organically uncover. And the manner in which the world responds to your actions are just as surprising as the actions themselves. It’s a game about discovery through and through.
It would be one thing if Postal 3 was trying to take the series in a new direction based more around the consequences of the player’s choices instead of mechanical discovery. But it does so by reducing the number of gameplay choices from the previous entries while simultaneously maintaining the same expansive arsenal. As such, most of the weapons are completely redundant and useless unless you’re told to use them for whatever objective you’re railroaded through. And since there aren’t any dialogue trees or RPG elements to speak of, the only way to make any choice in the game is directly through the gameplay itself. So the fact that literally every mechanic and system is poorly constructed and barely functional means that Postal 3 doesn’t work as a standalone package, let alone as a follow-up to Postal 2.
However the thing that puts Postal 3 one tier lower than just ‘bad’ is that, despite its blatant nostalgia for Postal 2, it fundamentally doesn’t understand what made its tone/comedy successful either.
Comedy is the art of manipulating and subverting expectations with the intent of reaching a punchline. Succeeding at that requires a background or context for those expectations, whether it be our understanding of a subject or the broader world. Postal 2 presents a twisted perversion of an average American town in the early 2000s, complete with all the mundanity you’d find in such a place. There are houses, grocery stores, office buildings, parks, restaurants, a police station, a post office, a church, a mall, and more; all of which you can enter and explore to your heart’s desire. When you take all the characters and personality out of the city of Paradise, it is a totally regular town just like any other you’d find scattered across the US, and that serves as the context for all the ridiculous things that happen in the game.
Postal 3, on the other hand, is just absurd, and not in a way that expresses anything of substance. The game isn’t exaggerating or manipulating something to make you laugh, it’s instead retelling jokes and memes you’ve already heard before with none of the context or delivery to earn your laughter. It’s a compilation of references and random punchlines without anything in the way of buildup or subversion. Uwe Boll boxing film critics in real life is funny because it’s completely antithetical to how an artist is expected to respond to criticism. Comparatively, Uwe Boll boxing the nerds in Postal 3 is not funny at all because that’s the expected behaviour of a caricature of Uwe Boll. There is no attempt to adapt it into its world or put a unique spin on the story, it’s essentially just a shoehorned reference that you’re expected to laugh at. This is how the vast majority of the “comedy” in the game functions.
When there isn’t a lazy pop culture reference to ruin, the “jokes” devolve into base-level insults and shock content directed at anyone the writers see fit. Whether it’s women, gay people, animal activists, cops, women, the player, or women, Postal 3 will portray them in the most negative, stereotypically 4Chan-tier light they can. While Postal 2 also makes fun of groups of people (with varying degrees of success), it’s generally entertaining because their goals, beliefs, and protests are made to be as blatantly absurd as possible so that their actions are cartoonishly funny. Postal 3, however, just makes the actual beliefs and people the punchline in all of its shock comedy. The hockey moms attack the strip club at the beginning of the game because they’re against the objectification of women for religious reasons. The cops are revealed to be gay (or something like that) because Randy Jones is the gay cop in the Village People. The nerds attack Uwe Boll because they don’t like his movies. Nearly all of the factions in the game are presented as unreasonable people represented by extremely surface-level stereotypes, and that’s the entire punchline. Most of these jokes come off like they’re written with the intent to “trigger the cucks” rather than actually say something funny or interesting. By attempting to spark outrage, it ultimately elicits eyerolls and sighs. When combined with the poor delivery and hamfisted references, the comedy becomes grating very quickly, which is a fatal flaw for a game based around comedy.
Perhaps this a controversial opinion, and I apologise to the many passionate fans of Postal 3 if it is, but even The Postal Dude has been botched in this game. The vast majority of his one liners and jokes are directly lifted from Postal 2, except they sound a little…uncanny because his performance in 3 is very different.
In previous games, The Dude never tells any jokes to anyone in the world. The things he says are ridiculous and comical, but he is completely self-assured and serious about everything he says and does. No matter how absurd things get, I think the Dude genuinely tries to do the right thing and his quips and one liners are exactly what he’s thinking. For example, when he says: “I suppose it would be more politically correct to shoot the women and minorities first,”
Even though the context of this statement is completely immoral and insane, The Dude is framing it as a reflection on his actions. He’s trying to be courteous of the victims he shoots and ponder the most socially acceptable order in which to shoot them. Of course, the irony of applying rules of social etiquette to the context of mass murder makes this a funny joke outside of the game’s world. However, because depravity is the norm in Postal 2, The Dude is not actually saying a joke at all. He’s saying this to himself as a means of looking out for his fellow man. The Postal Dude isn’t funny because he’s evil or deranged, but rather because he is completely ambivalent to the broader morals of both his own actions and everything around him. No matter how crazy things get, it’s all just an average day for the Postal Dude and the residents of Paradise.
In 3, though, all of The Dude’s lines are very blatantly written as jokes for an audience. Everything he says has this air of superiority that feels almost entirely unearned, and he has this uncaring, snarky attitude that is very much antithetical to previous entries. He’s performing for an audience both in the game and outside of it. However most of his jokes are butchered from other sources, so he just comes across as a cocky idiot who is trying too hard to be witty. Take that aforementioned line from Postal 2– in Postal 3, it is changed to:
“Wait, is it more politically correct to shoot the women and minorities first?”
By posing this as a question, it is framed as something for the audience to respond to. Instead of focusing on the irony of rationalising cartoonish actions based on social norms, the joke is just a crude attempt at making fun of political correctness. The Dude is very obviously saying this as a joke, which is evident by both his sarcastic delivery and the fact that he doesn’t say anything serious for the entirety of the game. And frankly, it’s a bad joke. Regardless of your chosen path, you spend most of the game shooting women and minorities, so it doesn’t even make sense in context. It is either completely tone deaf or just plain hateful. Given the rest of the game, I’ll hazard a guess that it’s probably a mix of the two, with a slightly higher concentration of the former. To put it simply, the Postal Dude in 2 is just like you and me, whereas the Postal Dude in 3 thinks he’s better than everyone else.
If 3’s Dude is meant to be the same one that’s in the previous games, he’s a pitiful shadow of his former self. If he’s meant to be a different interpretation of the character, he doesn’t have enough original material to make him feel distinct. Perhaps in a different game that’s unconnected to the existing world/story of Postal, 3’s Dude would be a good character. But since he’s in a game with an identity crisis, he comes across as a confused– albeit well-performed– attempt to be two different characters at the same time. Overall, he is not a cohesive enough character to be a successful figurehead of a game, which ironically makes him the perfect mascot for Postal 3.
Before I finish this review, there’s something I want to address that’s been bothering me. For some reason, I’ve seen a lot of people around the internet say that Postal 3 was not developed by RWS. Some even stated that Postal 3 is bad because they didn’t make it. This is literally not true. RWS wrote, designed, and directed Postal 3. The story, setting, voice acting, much of the visuals, and - yes - even the comedy was all created or overseen by them at the very least. It was co-developed by RWS and Trashmasters. Their name and logo are both in the game, and the store description literally lists “RWS-style humour” as one of its main features. Although the technical implementation and general construction weren’t done by them, and many production mishaps were out of their control, Postal 3 was designed by much of the original team for Postal 1 and 2 (I might talk about this in a future review).
Yes, Akella’s financial problems might have influenced the physical development of the game. Yes, Trashmasters might’ve been an inexperienced team thrown into a project way too ambitious for them. But to say that Postal 3 is bad because RWS didn’t make it is objectively false. Even though they removed their name from part of its Steam Page, RWS is just as much to blame for Postal 3’s shortcomings as Trashmasters and Akella are. To quote the exact words of a wise Mafia 2 fan:
“If the creators get the credit when the game is good, they also get the criticism when the game is bad. You better believe I know what I’m talking about, as I love Persona 5 and I’m a gameplay guy at heart! Also you’d be lucky to own a house!”
The only thing Postal 3 succeeds at is being a faithful follow up to Apocalypse Weekend, which was solely developed by RWS right after Postal 2. If you read my Apocalypse Weekend review, you might’ve noticed that just about all of the issues I have with that game are amplified in this one. In fact, Postal 3 not only takes place directly after it, it makes the police outfit from the beginning of that game a central part of its gameplay. Even if it wasn’t originally supposed to turn out the way it did, I’m almost 97% sure that the morality system that’s so antithetical to Postal’s identity was also RWS’s design.
But you wanna know the worst part of all? I’m even more certain that Postal 3 was developed to curse anyone who dares to attempt to review it. Maybe it’s just my copy of the game that’s cursed, but over the course of writing this review, I’ve had a nearly unbroken chain of bad luck and misfortune. Ever since the day I finished Postal 3 for the first time, I caught a bad case of Covid that put me outta commission for 2 weeks, missed an event I was excited to attend for over a month, had a vacation go horribly wrong, had the worst travel experience in my life, got rejected from at least 5 jobs, had a medication mishap, and recorded footage of the game with no audio. The ultimate fuck you, though, was that after I finished over half of this review, Postal 3 got a giant patch for the first time since its release in 2011 which fixed a bunch of the broken mechanics and cutscenes I had to go through, and even added official fucking mod support. This game cursed me, and I still played the damn thing twice for this review.
And yet, regardless of the physical or mental price I must pay for saying such a thing, I still hold the firm position that Postal 3 is one of the very worst games I’ve ever played and likely among the worst ever made. I hated writing about it and I hate how long it has been a thorn in my side. I hope I never play or look at this game again.
I have no reason to continue playing this series but I must persist, if only to see it through. Somehow, there are 3 more postal games to go. How could they follow up a travesty of this scale? Well, there’s only one way to find out…
It goes without saying that Postal 3 is an awful game on just about every conceivable level. I tend to be pretty forgiving of games that have either gone through development hell or just have their fair share of jank in them. But Postal 3 doesn’t simply cross over the line of jank. It goes beyond the line of bad and into the realm of just being terrible at literally everything it tries to do even when it isn’t broken. The shooting is horrible, the tasks are borderline unplayable, the game looks atrocious, the story is an unconnected series of occurrences, the AI barely works, and some of the cutscenes don’t even trigger correctly. I could do a full dissection of how every mechanic, system, and aspect of Postal 3 is poorly constructed in some way– and I would if enough people wanted me to for some reason– but that would only scratch the surface of why the game is so astoundingly bad. Postal 3 isn’t bad simply because it’s poorly developed, but rather because of the failure of its design.
Before we get into Postal 3’s gameplay, I first want to quickly compare it with some of the aspects that make Postal 2’s work. One of the reasons why that game is so unique is because, despite what some people claim, it isn’t designed to be immoral, but amoral. It doesn’t have a morality system because it’s up to you to approach the world and accomplish the tasks however you see fit. You are the morality system, and regardless of the approach you take, the world still treats you the exact same way.
Postal 3, however, has a morality system in it where you are either good or evil. Depending on how many people you kill and how many of the mission objectives you accomplish, you’ll get a different ending and some slight alterations in some of the levels. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this in concept, but the morality system in Postal 3 neither serves to expand nor refine the experience offered by Postal 2. It essentially reduces your playstyle to a matter of ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ depending on the ending you’re aiming for. Since the game is effectively structured around this half baked system, the moment to moment gameplay is not so much a test of mechanical skill or tactical decision making and more a test of patience and endurance. It’s about completing repetitive tasks to reach a predictable ending rather than using your tools to respond to specific scenarios.
But even without the morality system, Postal 3 doesn’t allow the player to experiment with any of its potentially emergent systems and mechanics. Pretty much every action you perform in the game is either blatantly revealed in a tutorial or assigned to you in a mission. The few exceptions to this are simply taken and bastardised from Postal 2 and, frankly, don’t really contribute much of anything to the gameplay.
Comparatively, Postal 2 only teaches the basics of how your tools work and lets you figure out the rest. The different ways they can be combined together to affect both yourself and the surrounding world are left for the player to organically uncover. And the manner in which the world responds to your actions are just as surprising as the actions themselves. It’s a game about discovery through and through.
It would be one thing if Postal 3 was trying to take the series in a new direction based more around the consequences of the player’s choices instead of mechanical discovery. But it does so by reducing the number of gameplay choices from the previous entries while simultaneously maintaining the same expansive arsenal. As such, most of the weapons are completely redundant and useless unless you’re told to use them for whatever objective you’re railroaded through. And since there aren’t any dialogue trees or RPG elements to speak of, the only way to make any choice in the game is directly through the gameplay itself. So the fact that literally every mechanic and system is poorly constructed and barely functional means that Postal 3 doesn’t work as a standalone package, let alone as a follow-up to Postal 2.
However the thing that puts Postal 3 one tier lower than just ‘bad’ is that, despite its blatant nostalgia for Postal 2, it fundamentally doesn’t understand what made its tone/comedy successful either.
Comedy is the art of manipulating and subverting expectations with the intent of reaching a punchline. Succeeding at that requires a background or context for those expectations, whether it be our understanding of a subject or the broader world. Postal 2 presents a twisted perversion of an average American town in the early 2000s, complete with all the mundanity you’d find in such a place. There are houses, grocery stores, office buildings, parks, restaurants, a police station, a post office, a church, a mall, and more; all of which you can enter and explore to your heart’s desire. When you take all the characters and personality out of the city of Paradise, it is a totally regular town just like any other you’d find scattered across the US, and that serves as the context for all the ridiculous things that happen in the game.
Postal 3, on the other hand, is just absurd, and not in a way that expresses anything of substance. The game isn’t exaggerating or manipulating something to make you laugh, it’s instead retelling jokes and memes you’ve already heard before with none of the context or delivery to earn your laughter. It’s a compilation of references and random punchlines without anything in the way of buildup or subversion. Uwe Boll boxing film critics in real life is funny because it’s completely antithetical to how an artist is expected to respond to criticism. Comparatively, Uwe Boll boxing the nerds in Postal 3 is not funny at all because that’s the expected behaviour of a caricature of Uwe Boll. There is no attempt to adapt it into its world or put a unique spin on the story, it’s essentially just a shoehorned reference that you’re expected to laugh at. This is how the vast majority of the “comedy” in the game functions.
When there isn’t a lazy pop culture reference to ruin, the “jokes” devolve into base-level insults and shock content directed at anyone the writers see fit. Whether it’s women, gay people, animal activists, cops, women, the player, or women, Postal 3 will portray them in the most negative, stereotypically 4Chan-tier light they can. While Postal 2 also makes fun of groups of people (with varying degrees of success), it’s generally entertaining because their goals, beliefs, and protests are made to be as blatantly absurd as possible so that their actions are cartoonishly funny. Postal 3, however, just makes the actual beliefs and people the punchline in all of its shock comedy. The hockey moms attack the strip club at the beginning of the game because they’re against the objectification of women for religious reasons. The cops are revealed to be gay (or something like that) because Randy Jones is the gay cop in the Village People. The nerds attack Uwe Boll because they don’t like his movies. Nearly all of the factions in the game are presented as unreasonable people represented by extremely surface-level stereotypes, and that’s the entire punchline. Most of these jokes come off like they’re written with the intent to “trigger the cucks” rather than actually say something funny or interesting. By attempting to spark outrage, it ultimately elicits eyerolls and sighs. When combined with the poor delivery and hamfisted references, the comedy becomes grating very quickly, which is a fatal flaw for a game based around comedy.
Perhaps this a controversial opinion, and I apologise to the many passionate fans of Postal 3 if it is, but even The Postal Dude has been botched in this game. The vast majority of his one liners and jokes are directly lifted from Postal 2, except they sound a little…uncanny because his performance in 3 is very different.
In previous games, The Dude never tells any jokes to anyone in the world. The things he says are ridiculous and comical, but he is completely self-assured and serious about everything he says and does. No matter how absurd things get, I think the Dude genuinely tries to do the right thing and his quips and one liners are exactly what he’s thinking. For example, when he says: “I suppose it would be more politically correct to shoot the women and minorities first,”
Even though the context of this statement is completely immoral and insane, The Dude is framing it as a reflection on his actions. He’s trying to be courteous of the victims he shoots and ponder the most socially acceptable order in which to shoot them. Of course, the irony of applying rules of social etiquette to the context of mass murder makes this a funny joke outside of the game’s world. However, because depravity is the norm in Postal 2, The Dude is not actually saying a joke at all. He’s saying this to himself as a means of looking out for his fellow man. The Postal Dude isn’t funny because he’s evil or deranged, but rather because he is completely ambivalent to the broader morals of both his own actions and everything around him. No matter how crazy things get, it’s all just an average day for the Postal Dude and the residents of Paradise.
In 3, though, all of The Dude’s lines are very blatantly written as jokes for an audience. Everything he says has this air of superiority that feels almost entirely unearned, and he has this uncaring, snarky attitude that is very much antithetical to previous entries. He’s performing for an audience both in the game and outside of it. However most of his jokes are butchered from other sources, so he just comes across as a cocky idiot who is trying too hard to be witty. Take that aforementioned line from Postal 2– in Postal 3, it is changed to:
“Wait, is it more politically correct to shoot the women and minorities first?”
By posing this as a question, it is framed as something for the audience to respond to. Instead of focusing on the irony of rationalising cartoonish actions based on social norms, the joke is just a crude attempt at making fun of political correctness. The Dude is very obviously saying this as a joke, which is evident by both his sarcastic delivery and the fact that he doesn’t say anything serious for the entirety of the game. And frankly, it’s a bad joke. Regardless of your chosen path, you spend most of the game shooting women and minorities, so it doesn’t even make sense in context. It is either completely tone deaf or just plain hateful. Given the rest of the game, I’ll hazard a guess that it’s probably a mix of the two, with a slightly higher concentration of the former. To put it simply, the Postal Dude in 2 is just like you and me, whereas the Postal Dude in 3 thinks he’s better than everyone else.
If 3’s Dude is meant to be the same one that’s in the previous games, he’s a pitiful shadow of his former self. If he’s meant to be a different interpretation of the character, he doesn’t have enough original material to make him feel distinct. Perhaps in a different game that’s unconnected to the existing world/story of Postal, 3’s Dude would be a good character. But since he’s in a game with an identity crisis, he comes across as a confused– albeit well-performed– attempt to be two different characters at the same time. Overall, he is not a cohesive enough character to be a successful figurehead of a game, which ironically makes him the perfect mascot for Postal 3.
Before I finish this review, there’s something I want to address that’s been bothering me. For some reason, I’ve seen a lot of people around the internet say that Postal 3 was not developed by RWS. Some even stated that Postal 3 is bad because they didn’t make it. This is literally not true. RWS wrote, designed, and directed Postal 3. The story, setting, voice acting, much of the visuals, and - yes - even the comedy was all created or overseen by them at the very least. It was co-developed by RWS and Trashmasters. Their name and logo are both in the game, and the store description literally lists “RWS-style humour” as one of its main features. Although the technical implementation and general construction weren’t done by them, and many production mishaps were out of their control, Postal 3 was designed by much of the original team for Postal 1 and 2 (I might talk about this in a future review).
Yes, Akella’s financial problems might have influenced the physical development of the game. Yes, Trashmasters might’ve been an inexperienced team thrown into a project way too ambitious for them. But to say that Postal 3 is bad because RWS didn’t make it is objectively false. Even though they removed their name from part of its Steam Page, RWS is just as much to blame for Postal 3’s shortcomings as Trashmasters and Akella are. To quote the exact words of a wise Mafia 2 fan:
“If the creators get the credit when the game is good, they also get the criticism when the game is bad. You better believe I know what I’m talking about, as I love Persona 5 and I’m a gameplay guy at heart! Also you’d be lucky to own a house!”
The only thing Postal 3 succeeds at is being a faithful follow up to Apocalypse Weekend, which was solely developed by RWS right after Postal 2. If you read my Apocalypse Weekend review, you might’ve noticed that just about all of the issues I have with that game are amplified in this one. In fact, Postal 3 not only takes place directly after it, it makes the police outfit from the beginning of that game a central part of its gameplay. Even if it wasn’t originally supposed to turn out the way it did, I’m almost 97% sure that the morality system that’s so antithetical to Postal’s identity was also RWS’s design.
But you wanna know the worst part of all? I’m even more certain that Postal 3 was developed to curse anyone who dares to attempt to review it. Maybe it’s just my copy of the game that’s cursed, but over the course of writing this review, I’ve had a nearly unbroken chain of bad luck and misfortune. Ever since the day I finished Postal 3 for the first time, I caught a bad case of Covid that put me outta commission for 2 weeks, missed an event I was excited to attend for over a month, had a vacation go horribly wrong, had the worst travel experience in my life, got rejected from at least 5 jobs, had a medication mishap, and recorded footage of the game with no audio. The ultimate fuck you, though, was that after I finished over half of this review, Postal 3 got a giant patch for the first time since its release in 2011 which fixed a bunch of the broken mechanics and cutscenes I had to go through, and even added official fucking mod support. This game cursed me, and I still played the damn thing twice for this review.
And yet, regardless of the physical or mental price I must pay for saying such a thing, I still hold the firm position that Postal 3 is one of the very worst games I’ve ever played and likely among the worst ever made. I hated writing about it and I hate how long it has been a thorn in my side. I hope I never play or look at this game again.
I have no reason to continue playing this series but I must persist, if only to see it through. Somehow, there are 3 more postal games to go. How could they follow up a travesty of this scale? Well, there’s only one way to find out…
This was clearly the victim of a very troubled development, and while I want to sympathise with RWS, it still doesn’t excuse how this expansion turned out. It honestly would’ve been much better if they just added small areas and normal weekend days to the base game rather than attempting to construct an entirely new town of a similar scale to Paradise.
Apocalypse Weekend is Postal 2 without any of the aspects that make it interesting or enjoyable. The strange A.I. interactions, the deadpan comedy, the sandbox-styled world, the emergent gameplay, all of it is either gone or bastardised. Instead, Apocalypse Weekend is a half-baked, linear corridor shooter with a virtually incomprehensible story and almost none of the charm of the base game.
The shooting is one of the weakest elements of Postal 2, yet for some reason, this expansion is almost entirely based around fighting hordes of boring foes in lacklustre combat arenas. When it’s not wasting time with its combat arenas, it’s wasting time with monotonous czechlist-based objectives (not like Postal 2’s tasks, more like Ubisoft side missions). The content is blatantly unfinished and padded out, and it attempts to cover up that fact by drenching the game in pitiful, edgy ‘comedy’ that it puts under a spotlight. And on the topic of the comedy, Apocalypse Weekend completely does away with anything resembling the sense of discovery and mundane absurdity found in both the gameplay and world of Postal 2. Instead, it utilises random, ‘wacky’ references and ‘craaaazy’ provocation to disguise its complete lack of vision, substance, and successful execution.
The only decent part is when it makes fun of Postal 2’s publisher, and even then, you engage with it in the exact same way as the rest of the game. By all points and metrics, Apocalypse Weekend is a bad game, and not even in a way that is funny or interesting to think or talk about. It’s not even enjoyable or satisfying to write this review.
That being said, I’m certain RWS’s following game will improve on all these flaws. Surely, it’ll be a truly great follow-up to Postal 2.
Apocalypse Weekend is Postal 2 without any of the aspects that make it interesting or enjoyable. The strange A.I. interactions, the deadpan comedy, the sandbox-styled world, the emergent gameplay, all of it is either gone or bastardised. Instead, Apocalypse Weekend is a half-baked, linear corridor shooter with a virtually incomprehensible story and almost none of the charm of the base game.
The shooting is one of the weakest elements of Postal 2, yet for some reason, this expansion is almost entirely based around fighting hordes of boring foes in lacklustre combat arenas. When it’s not wasting time with its combat arenas, it’s wasting time with monotonous czechlist-based objectives (not like Postal 2’s tasks, more like Ubisoft side missions). The content is blatantly unfinished and padded out, and it attempts to cover up that fact by drenching the game in pitiful, edgy ‘comedy’ that it puts under a spotlight. And on the topic of the comedy, Apocalypse Weekend completely does away with anything resembling the sense of discovery and mundane absurdity found in both the gameplay and world of Postal 2. Instead, it utilises random, ‘wacky’ references and ‘craaaazy’ provocation to disguise its complete lack of vision, substance, and successful execution.
The only decent part is when it makes fun of Postal 2’s publisher, and even then, you engage with it in the exact same way as the rest of the game. By all points and metrics, Apocalypse Weekend is a bad game, and not even in a way that is funny or interesting to think or talk about. It’s not even enjoyable or satisfying to write this review.
That being said, I’m certain RWS’s following game will improve on all these flaws. Surely, it’ll be a truly great follow-up to Postal 2.
2003
Postal 2 is a deceptively difficult game for me to articulate my thoughts on since it has left me with a surprising amount to think about. The fact that a game as boring and hollow as Postal 1 (at least based on Redux) was followed up by something as strange and complex as Postal 2 is nothing short of miraculous.
Postal 2 is unique in how its systems and design intertwine with its comedy. When I say comedy, I’m not talking about the juvenile, poorly aged memes or the inclusion of Gary Coleman. In my eyes, that stuff is a byproduct of RWS’s general sense of humour, and while that does indeed contribute to the game’s identity, it’s not what makes it funny or amusing. At the heart of Postal 2 is the contrast between the absurd and the mundane. It’s the fact that in a town as ridiculous and depraved as Paradise, your only goals are to just do everyday chores. It’s the idea that you are a normal person in the city even though you can use cats as silencers on your shotgun. It’s the irony of the “peaceful” pastors excitedly defending the church with firearms. There were several moments in Postal 2 that caused me to laugh out loud, which is a very hard thing to get me to do. And a significant reason why the jokes are often so effective is because they’re frequently played completely straight.
Paradise itself feels a bit like a twisted museum. Around every corner is a different exhibit of slapstick sardonicism. A giant billboard advertising life insurance to kids; a chinese restaurant with a murderous butcher as a chef; a voting booth on the 2nd floor of the restaurant; a marching band walking around a field with elephants; a room decorated with nothing but toilets, there is something weird and absurd to see everywhere you go. Yet, the absurdity of those aforementioned spaces and places is never acknowledged by the game. Most of those areas are completely optional and easily missable. The fact that you can just do most of the assigned chores completely by the books and miss most of these ridiculous “exhibits” makes them even more amusing than they otherwise would be. When coupled with the near complete absence of non-diegetic sound or music to flavour the play experience, Paradise has a surprisingly grounded atmosphere which enhances the act of exploring its derangement.
Exploration and discovery are core to Postal 2’s game design. It can obviously be played as a regular first person shooter; there are dozens of weapons and items that all have different purposes in combat settings. However, the real magic of its mechanics comes from all the unobvious ways they can be combined together, as well as how they interact with the gameplay systems. Using a match on gasoline/petrol will clearly cause it to ignite and burn whatever is caught in the flames– that much is tutorialised– but the fact that your piss can extinguish it is something that can only be learned through experimentation. Catnip can be dropped to attract cats to use as silencers, but if you accidentally smoke it yourself, you will discover that you can slow down time just like in real life. And sure, you can cook and throw a grenade when you’re cornered during a busy firefight, but if you really think outside of the box and experiment with the tools at your disposal, you can easily speed up the process by drop-kicking your explosives into enemies. There are so many ways to combine and mess with the mechanics that you likely won’t find most of them in a single playthrough.
These mechanical options wouldn’t have much value if there weren’t equally diverse responses from the game’s systems. Fortunately, the A.I. systems in Postal 2 are quite reactive to both the player’s actions and the surrounding world. NPCs talk to each other, cops eat donuts you drop (and throw up when you piss on them), people pick up money left on the ground. Even by simply walking around, you will happen upon character interactions that are as peculiar as the town they inhabit. In fact, as I was writing this review, I quickly booted up the game for 5 minutes to double czech something technical. In that short amount of time, I went to a random house for the hell of it. As soon as I opened the door, I was greeted by a man running in circles after his dog while lit on fire. In my entire playthrough, I never saw that interaction before, as it was completely unscripted. Moments like this are commonplace in this game, and they’re a significant part of what makes it feel different from so many other games.
I’ve praised Postal 2 a lot, but it is very far from perfect. The shooting mechanics themselves are very rough around the edges, with their sounds being quite hit or miss and their accuracy leaving a lot to be desired. The weapon accuracy is actually a rather frustrating problem because it’s not the result of recoil that’s hard to handle (there’s no recoil in the game), the crosshair just doesn’t accurately showcase the bullet spread for each gun, so hitting a target often feels like it comes down to random chance. It doesn’t help either that hostile NPCs can spawn directly in front of you, which makes the fights feel overly frantic or mindless depending on how prepared you are for them.
It’s truly a shame that the gunplay is as janky as it is, since the player isn’t pushed nearly enough to think outside the box for most of the chores. While the broader world of Paradise is an open-ended sandbox for depravity, the chores are structurally formulaic and get a bit stale towards the end of the week. In theory, accomplishing mundane tasks injected with unexpected twists can make for an interesting gameplay loop that’s also thematically consistent with the rest of the game. But unfortunately, the twists in Postal 2 generally boil down to being ambushed by crazy mobs wielding weapons. Considering that the most direct way to face these mobs is by shooting back at them, the fact that the guns have so many problems is a big downside, especially since the more interesting, rewarding combat options aren’t taught to the player. There are still some chores that break the formula a bit, and those are generally the most memorable ones, or at least they were to me. However, the repetitive nature of all the other tasks weakens the broader play experience at a base level, and thus puts a lot of pressure on the presentation and comedy to carry the game forward.
And while I’ll defend the self-contained comedy of Postal 2, it goes without saying that RWS’s sense of humour can definitely leave a sour taste in the mouth, especially when their jokes don’t land or run stale. Many of the gags have admittedly not aged terribly well, especially some of the needlessly racist caricatures and the 2003 memes. I believe that aspect of the game is the primary cause of many people writing it off, and with good reason. It follows that RWS aimed to make their second title even more provocative than the first, considering how both the controversy and lawsuit of Postal 1 contributed to its commercial success. Perhaps this approach was effective at grabbing attention back when Postal 2 released, but the cost of making something so blatantly edgy is that it invites people to make judgements of value based on their morals rather than the quality of the content itself.
To this day, many people consider Postal 2 to be a terrible, worthless game largely due to its comedy. There are also some who consider it to be a piece of shovelware. Lots of games are better at some of the things Postal 2 does, but to completely write it off as a lesser version of them is reactionary at best and ignorant at worst. Beneath the crass, prickly exterior lies a genuinely sophisticated sandbox that’s clearly built by a passionate, competent team. If there wasn’t something of value here, people wouldn’t still be talking about it and it wouldn’t still be getting patches, content updates, and merch to this day.
There is truly nothing else quite like Postal 2 and there likely never will be. In both subject matter and design, it is a time capsule of the early 2000s. But beyond that, it has an atmosphere and identity all its own. More than anything though, Postal 2 holds up over 20 years after release because it’s unique in how it combines its systems-driven, emergent gameplay with the twisted presentation of its world to create a playable black comedy.
Postal 2 is unique in how its systems and design intertwine with its comedy. When I say comedy, I’m not talking about the juvenile, poorly aged memes or the inclusion of Gary Coleman. In my eyes, that stuff is a byproduct of RWS’s general sense of humour, and while that does indeed contribute to the game’s identity, it’s not what makes it funny or amusing. At the heart of Postal 2 is the contrast between the absurd and the mundane. It’s the fact that in a town as ridiculous and depraved as Paradise, your only goals are to just do everyday chores. It’s the idea that you are a normal person in the city even though you can use cats as silencers on your shotgun. It’s the irony of the “peaceful” pastors excitedly defending the church with firearms. There were several moments in Postal 2 that caused me to laugh out loud, which is a very hard thing to get me to do. And a significant reason why the jokes are often so effective is because they’re frequently played completely straight.
Paradise itself feels a bit like a twisted museum. Around every corner is a different exhibit of slapstick sardonicism. A giant billboard advertising life insurance to kids; a chinese restaurant with a murderous butcher as a chef; a voting booth on the 2nd floor of the restaurant; a marching band walking around a field with elephants; a room decorated with nothing but toilets, there is something weird and absurd to see everywhere you go. Yet, the absurdity of those aforementioned spaces and places is never acknowledged by the game. Most of those areas are completely optional and easily missable. The fact that you can just do most of the assigned chores completely by the books and miss most of these ridiculous “exhibits” makes them even more amusing than they otherwise would be. When coupled with the near complete absence of non-diegetic sound or music to flavour the play experience, Paradise has a surprisingly grounded atmosphere which enhances the act of exploring its derangement.
Exploration and discovery are core to Postal 2’s game design. It can obviously be played as a regular first person shooter; there are dozens of weapons and items that all have different purposes in combat settings. However, the real magic of its mechanics comes from all the unobvious ways they can be combined together, as well as how they interact with the gameplay systems. Using a match on gasoline/petrol will clearly cause it to ignite and burn whatever is caught in the flames– that much is tutorialised– but the fact that your piss can extinguish it is something that can only be learned through experimentation. Catnip can be dropped to attract cats to use as silencers, but if you accidentally smoke it yourself, you will discover that you can slow down time just like in real life. And sure, you can cook and throw a grenade when you’re cornered during a busy firefight, but if you really think outside of the box and experiment with the tools at your disposal, you can easily speed up the process by drop-kicking your explosives into enemies. There are so many ways to combine and mess with the mechanics that you likely won’t find most of them in a single playthrough.
These mechanical options wouldn’t have much value if there weren’t equally diverse responses from the game’s systems. Fortunately, the A.I. systems in Postal 2 are quite reactive to both the player’s actions and the surrounding world. NPCs talk to each other, cops eat donuts you drop (and throw up when you piss on them), people pick up money left on the ground. Even by simply walking around, you will happen upon character interactions that are as peculiar as the town they inhabit. In fact, as I was writing this review, I quickly booted up the game for 5 minutes to double czech something technical. In that short amount of time, I went to a random house for the hell of it. As soon as I opened the door, I was greeted by a man running in circles after his dog while lit on fire. In my entire playthrough, I never saw that interaction before, as it was completely unscripted. Moments like this are commonplace in this game, and they’re a significant part of what makes it feel different from so many other games.
I’ve praised Postal 2 a lot, but it is very far from perfect. The shooting mechanics themselves are very rough around the edges, with their sounds being quite hit or miss and their accuracy leaving a lot to be desired. The weapon accuracy is actually a rather frustrating problem because it’s not the result of recoil that’s hard to handle (there’s no recoil in the game), the crosshair just doesn’t accurately showcase the bullet spread for each gun, so hitting a target often feels like it comes down to random chance. It doesn’t help either that hostile NPCs can spawn directly in front of you, which makes the fights feel overly frantic or mindless depending on how prepared you are for them.
It’s truly a shame that the gunplay is as janky as it is, since the player isn’t pushed nearly enough to think outside the box for most of the chores. While the broader world of Paradise is an open-ended sandbox for depravity, the chores are structurally formulaic and get a bit stale towards the end of the week. In theory, accomplishing mundane tasks injected with unexpected twists can make for an interesting gameplay loop that’s also thematically consistent with the rest of the game. But unfortunately, the twists in Postal 2 generally boil down to being ambushed by crazy mobs wielding weapons. Considering that the most direct way to face these mobs is by shooting back at them, the fact that the guns have so many problems is a big downside, especially since the more interesting, rewarding combat options aren’t taught to the player. There are still some chores that break the formula a bit, and those are generally the most memorable ones, or at least they were to me. However, the repetitive nature of all the other tasks weakens the broader play experience at a base level, and thus puts a lot of pressure on the presentation and comedy to carry the game forward.
And while I’ll defend the self-contained comedy of Postal 2, it goes without saying that RWS’s sense of humour can definitely leave a sour taste in the mouth, especially when their jokes don’t land or run stale. Many of the gags have admittedly not aged terribly well, especially some of the needlessly racist caricatures and the 2003 memes. I believe that aspect of the game is the primary cause of many people writing it off, and with good reason. It follows that RWS aimed to make their second title even more provocative than the first, considering how both the controversy and lawsuit of Postal 1 contributed to its commercial success. Perhaps this approach was effective at grabbing attention back when Postal 2 released, but the cost of making something so blatantly edgy is that it invites people to make judgements of value based on their morals rather than the quality of the content itself.
To this day, many people consider Postal 2 to be a terrible, worthless game largely due to its comedy. There are also some who consider it to be a piece of shovelware. Lots of games are better at some of the things Postal 2 does, but to completely write it off as a lesser version of them is reactionary at best and ignorant at worst. Beneath the crass, prickly exterior lies a genuinely sophisticated sandbox that’s clearly built by a passionate, competent team. If there wasn’t something of value here, people wouldn’t still be talking about it and it wouldn’t still be getting patches, content updates, and merch to this day.
There is truly nothing else quite like Postal 2 and there likely never will be. In both subject matter and design, it is a time capsule of the early 2000s. But beyond that, it has an atmosphere and identity all its own. More than anything though, Postal 2 holds up over 20 years after release because it’s unique in how it combines its systems-driven, emergent gameplay with the twisted presentation of its world to create a playable black comedy.
2016
I could forgive this game's barebones combat, lack of music/soundscape, monotonous levels, pitiful enemy variety, and uninspired graphical style if it had something funny or interesting to say. Unfortunately, the only thing of note that Postal Redux has to offer is poorly executed shock comedy. One might argue that it also attempts to tell a provocative tale of delusion that commentates on the desensitisation of video game violence, but I think that's giving this game too much credit. It's a simple run and gun game where the only gimmick is its blatant edginess. When you're underpowered for the first few levels, it's a tedious slog. When you have all the weapons towards the end of the game, it's just mindless monotony. While I enjoyed the 2nd half more than the first, it's pretty much just because of the inherent catharsis that arises from shooting people in a video game with adequately executed kinesthetics. On a technical level, Postal Redux is fine. It loads longer than I'd like it to, but I ran into very few bugs. I enjoyed the top-down levels the most, but that's probably because I just enjoy that camera perspective. Other than that, there's really not much else I can praise about this game
And before anyone gets on my case about being "filtered" by the "comedy," I have absolutely no issues or reservations with edgy shock comedy. When executed well, I think it can be really funny. The problem in this case is that there is no buildup or purpose behind any of the one liners or scenarios in the game. It's basically just paint thrown on a wall. And besides, I fully completed every level in the game. But the only reason I did this was because someone gifted it to me along with the entire Postal franchise, so I felt obligated to finish it, and I will do the same for all the other games. I hope they aren't as dull as this one was.
And before anyone gets on my case about being "filtered" by the "comedy," I have absolutely no issues or reservations with edgy shock comedy. When executed well, I think it can be really funny. The problem in this case is that there is no buildup or purpose behind any of the one liners or scenarios in the game. It's basically just paint thrown on a wall. And besides, I fully completed every level in the game. But the only reason I did this was because someone gifted it to me along with the entire Postal franchise, so I felt obligated to finish it, and I will do the same for all the other games. I hope they aren't as dull as this one was.
2018
It's a perfectly acceptable shooter that has some solid moments. It's not gonna stick with me for very long, but Dusk is definitely a quality title. It does kinda suffer a bit from rather parabolic pacing, which is to say that its quality peaks in the 2nd episode, takes awhile to become interesting, and falls off a bit at the end. Overall though, it really doesn't feel that formulaic, and it kept me engaged all the way through. Also it has some pretty solid atmosphere at times, so that's a plus.
At the end of the day, it's better than Duke Nukem Forever.
At the end of the day, it's better than Duke Nukem Forever.
Hollow Knight is an excellent budget title that could serve as the framework for a truly special game. The scale of its world and its contents is simply astonishing, and the universe it all takes place in is certainly a fascinating one. Hallownest feels like the remnants of a once-thriving, underground kingdom. No matter where you go, you catch glimpses of its former glory buried beneath the scars of tragedies and conflicts that have long since passed. You walk through the fractured remnants of a society slowly being reclaimed by its broken ecosystem. The atmosphere is perpetually tinged with a nigh-palpable moroseness, but it's not so overwhelming that it blends all the different areas together.
Every biome is visually distinct from each other, and they all tell self-contained stories about the different corners and communities of Hallownest. It is no secret that Hollow Knight's greatest aspect is its world design. Even a contrarian dickass like myself cannot deny that the world design is anything short of fantastic, and I think that it's worthy of all the praise it has received. It's hard to make a game's world feel truly sprawling-- even big budget titles struggle with that-- but Hollow Knight's map feels like it goes on forever in every direction. It's not just that the map's filled with wide, empty levels with nothing to do, there's a lot to do just about everywhere. Every biome is packed with things to discover, and even if you miss some of those things, just seeing how the different levels and biomes connect together is certainly one the biggest motivators for playing the game. There's always something else to do, there's always something you haven't seen yet. A lot of love went into both building this game’s world, and making it interesting to explore.
The most impressive thing to me, though, is not its world, but rather the amount of art that’s in it. The game was made by a core team of 3 people (4 if you count the composer/sound designer), but only one person made the entirety of the art and animations. For context, there are over 150 enemies and bosses in the game, many of which have multiple unique states and poses, and one guy designed and animated all of them on top of drawing all the characters, art assets, environmental assets, visual effects, UI assets, and more. I don’t usually like giving all the credit to one person in a team, but Ari Gibson is an absolute fucking beast of an artist, and I strongly believe that his work is a key factor of why Hollow Knight captured the hearts of many. In fact, his art is what initially made Hollow Knight interesting to me. Every part of the game is filled with beautiful, screenshot-worthy material, and every screenshot shows off an enthralling universe just begging to be explored. It’s a game that obviously wants to be played; a notion that’s echoed by its incredibly low price of entry.
I’d heard nothing but praise for the game since the day of its release. I’d seen dozens of people fall in love with it. In fact, I sat next to someone who played it every day during class on her macbook. Even without the sound, I could see she was enthralled by it. At the very least, it seemed like something I'd enjoy, too. So years later, when it finally came time for me to play Hollow Knight, I wanted to give the game the best chance I possibly could to shine. I approached the game with a completely open mind and made it my mission to focus on how playing it made me feel.
However, the more I played the game, the more my priorities shifted. No longer was I “giving the game a chance,” I made it my mission to see everything it had to offer. I was determined to do the ultimate playthrough of Hollow Knight, in which I would refuse to get an ending until I memorised the entirety of Hallownest, completed everything in the game, mastered the mechanics, and accomplished absurd personal challenges.
For 9 months, I basically played nothing except for Hollow Knight. I amassed 165 hours of playtime and saw nearly everything in the game. But here's the catch– to this day, I have only done a single playthrough and have not gotten a single ending. I haven’t finished the game, and I do not ever plan to.
Before I continue, I want to explain why my playtime is so absurd. Hollow Knight is definitely a big, nonlinear game, but when you’re as immensely stubborn as I am, it becomes even longer than it was intended to be. Backtracking is a significant part of progressing through it, but the most interesting parts of the game for me were the moments I was meant to turn away from.
For example, I spent a long-ass time beating the Colosseum while vastly underlevelled. I’d say I spent nearly ⅓ of my playtime doing so because it pushed me to master the mechanics and required my undivided effort to beat the challenges. Yes, it was a serious time sink that was easily avoidable, and sure, I may have had to motivate myself to play it at times, but even though I wasn’t exploring Hallownest, I was learning how to use my arsenal to its full ability. The different layouts and enemy encounters in the Colosseum were not just interesting to discover as I progressed, they were intriguing to engage with and discover how to most effectively beat. So even though it took me a long time to beat, I didn’t regret a single second I spent there and never once lost my patience.
It’s places like the Colosseum that demonstrate the best of what Hollow Knight has to offer, gameplay-wise. When the player is pushed to improve their skill by pushing back against the friction of the world, it legitimises their actions in the world. Those moments of triumph made me feel like I was progressing just as much, if not more than when I was simply exploring the map.
There’s proper brilliance embedded throughout Hollow Knight, but its limitations hold it back from being something I’d consider to be a truly great game. It’s obviously impressive that Team Cherry was able to create something so massive out of a very simple framework, but by aiming to make the largest map possible with incredibly simple core mechanics, those peaks in gameplay are divided by increasingly large valleys of mediocre filler.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the world design is lacking or anything like that, obviously the levels are fantastically arranged. However the excellent world design is brought down by the parabolic gameplay pacing and lacklustre level design.
When I say that the level design is lacklustre, I do NOT mean the levels are poorly constructed. There isn’t a level I can think of off the top of my head with poor construction or readability (actually I technically thought of one of the levels with Loodles in them, but that’s not really worth mentioning, I say as I make mention of it). Most of them are adequately put together and relatively enjoyable to beat the first time you see them. The issue, however, is that, as I stated earlier, Hollow Knight is heavily based around backtracking, which means you will venture through most of these levels many different times. One of the most difficult aspects of designing a game like this is making levels that are interesting or enjoyable to play through multiple times, and Hollow Knight does not have many levels that are like that.
The vast majority of them are made up of the same floating platforms, spike pits, walkways, and enemy placements in slightly different arrangements. There is generally only one way to venture through them without much in the way of variation, save for the occasional shortcut or biome-specific obstacle. Although the traversal options change with the acquisition of new movement abilities, the levels themselves stay largely the same as the first time they’re discovered. The player is tested on exactly the same things regardless of how skilled or experienced they are with the mechanics. While there are some changes and rewards for backtracking through the map, they are generally incidental in nature and do little to breathe new life into the levels. For lack of better phrasing, there comes a point where Hallownest stops feeling like a world, and the moment that happens, Hollow Knight becomes a large grocery list.
See, at first it takes a while for the game to open up and become interesting from a gameplay perspective. But once it does, you really embrace that feeling of discovery, of seeing new things within this ever expanding world. Unfortunately, once you reach the endgame, that sense of discovery begins to fall off. The destinations stop being worth the journeys you have to take because you have already encountered the exact same obstacles on your previous journeys. Once you become familiar with Hallownest, you inevitably lose the feeling of excitement in its mysteries. The pursuits become mindless. You end up having to trek through the same simple levels, just to see what else is there, even if the things aren’t worth seeing. There is always something else to do, there is always something you haven’t seen, but the distance to the reward becomes further as the reward itself becomes ever smaller.
Once you’ve seen most of what Hollow Knight has to offer, it is no longer intriguing to traverse its world. You begin just chasing places for the mere sake of chasing places, and you inevitably run out of steam and motivation with that pursuit. That was the trap I fell into. At a certain point, I was just playing the game just so I could say I had completed everything, and not because I was getting anything out of it. The thrill of adventure and discovery had long since turned into a slog since the contents of the game itself was ultimately stretched way too thin.
I want to love Hollow Knight, I really do. I put so much time into it and tried as hard as I could to do so. Some would even say I tried too hard. There is a lot to love about the game and I applaud Team Cherry for what they managed to achieve with it. I certainly wouldn’t want to be in their shoes right now, given both the immense amount of hype people have for Silksong and the fact that they have to make a follow up to a game like Hollow Knight. I, myself, am looking forward to seeing how they evolve with the release of their next game. But as for Hollow Knight itself, I’m glad that I played it, but I certainly don’t have any desire to revisit it.
But nah, in conclusion, bad game by lazy dev. By the way, why do people like the OST so much, it’s really not that special smh.
Every biome is visually distinct from each other, and they all tell self-contained stories about the different corners and communities of Hallownest. It is no secret that Hollow Knight's greatest aspect is its world design. Even a contrarian dickass like myself cannot deny that the world design is anything short of fantastic, and I think that it's worthy of all the praise it has received. It's hard to make a game's world feel truly sprawling-- even big budget titles struggle with that-- but Hollow Knight's map feels like it goes on forever in every direction. It's not just that the map's filled with wide, empty levels with nothing to do, there's a lot to do just about everywhere. Every biome is packed with things to discover, and even if you miss some of those things, just seeing how the different levels and biomes connect together is certainly one the biggest motivators for playing the game. There's always something else to do, there's always something you haven't seen yet. A lot of love went into both building this game’s world, and making it interesting to explore.
The most impressive thing to me, though, is not its world, but rather the amount of art that’s in it. The game was made by a core team of 3 people (4 if you count the composer/sound designer), but only one person made the entirety of the art and animations. For context, there are over 150 enemies and bosses in the game, many of which have multiple unique states and poses, and one guy designed and animated all of them on top of drawing all the characters, art assets, environmental assets, visual effects, UI assets, and more. I don’t usually like giving all the credit to one person in a team, but Ari Gibson is an absolute fucking beast of an artist, and I strongly believe that his work is a key factor of why Hollow Knight captured the hearts of many. In fact, his art is what initially made Hollow Knight interesting to me. Every part of the game is filled with beautiful, screenshot-worthy material, and every screenshot shows off an enthralling universe just begging to be explored. It’s a game that obviously wants to be played; a notion that’s echoed by its incredibly low price of entry.
I’d heard nothing but praise for the game since the day of its release. I’d seen dozens of people fall in love with it. In fact, I sat next to someone who played it every day during class on her macbook. Even without the sound, I could see she was enthralled by it. At the very least, it seemed like something I'd enjoy, too. So years later, when it finally came time for me to play Hollow Knight, I wanted to give the game the best chance I possibly could to shine. I approached the game with a completely open mind and made it my mission to focus on how playing it made me feel.
However, the more I played the game, the more my priorities shifted. No longer was I “giving the game a chance,” I made it my mission to see everything it had to offer. I was determined to do the ultimate playthrough of Hollow Knight, in which I would refuse to get an ending until I memorised the entirety of Hallownest, completed everything in the game, mastered the mechanics, and accomplished absurd personal challenges.
For 9 months, I basically played nothing except for Hollow Knight. I amassed 165 hours of playtime and saw nearly everything in the game. But here's the catch– to this day, I have only done a single playthrough and have not gotten a single ending. I haven’t finished the game, and I do not ever plan to.
Before I continue, I want to explain why my playtime is so absurd. Hollow Knight is definitely a big, nonlinear game, but when you’re as immensely stubborn as I am, it becomes even longer than it was intended to be. Backtracking is a significant part of progressing through it, but the most interesting parts of the game for me were the moments I was meant to turn away from.
For example, I spent a long-ass time beating the Colosseum while vastly underlevelled. I’d say I spent nearly ⅓ of my playtime doing so because it pushed me to master the mechanics and required my undivided effort to beat the challenges. Yes, it was a serious time sink that was easily avoidable, and sure, I may have had to motivate myself to play it at times, but even though I wasn’t exploring Hallownest, I was learning how to use my arsenal to its full ability. The different layouts and enemy encounters in the Colosseum were not just interesting to discover as I progressed, they were intriguing to engage with and discover how to most effectively beat. So even though it took me a long time to beat, I didn’t regret a single second I spent there and never once lost my patience.
It’s places like the Colosseum that demonstrate the best of what Hollow Knight has to offer, gameplay-wise. When the player is pushed to improve their skill by pushing back against the friction of the world, it legitimises their actions in the world. Those moments of triumph made me feel like I was progressing just as much, if not more than when I was simply exploring the map.
There’s proper brilliance embedded throughout Hollow Knight, but its limitations hold it back from being something I’d consider to be a truly great game. It’s obviously impressive that Team Cherry was able to create something so massive out of a very simple framework, but by aiming to make the largest map possible with incredibly simple core mechanics, those peaks in gameplay are divided by increasingly large valleys of mediocre filler.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the world design is lacking or anything like that, obviously the levels are fantastically arranged. However the excellent world design is brought down by the parabolic gameplay pacing and lacklustre level design.
When I say that the level design is lacklustre, I do NOT mean the levels are poorly constructed. There isn’t a level I can think of off the top of my head with poor construction or readability (actually I technically thought of one of the levels with Loodles in them, but that’s not really worth mentioning, I say as I make mention of it). Most of them are adequately put together and relatively enjoyable to beat the first time you see them. The issue, however, is that, as I stated earlier, Hollow Knight is heavily based around backtracking, which means you will venture through most of these levels many different times. One of the most difficult aspects of designing a game like this is making levels that are interesting or enjoyable to play through multiple times, and Hollow Knight does not have many levels that are like that.
The vast majority of them are made up of the same floating platforms, spike pits, walkways, and enemy placements in slightly different arrangements. There is generally only one way to venture through them without much in the way of variation, save for the occasional shortcut or biome-specific obstacle. Although the traversal options change with the acquisition of new movement abilities, the levels themselves stay largely the same as the first time they’re discovered. The player is tested on exactly the same things regardless of how skilled or experienced they are with the mechanics. While there are some changes and rewards for backtracking through the map, they are generally incidental in nature and do little to breathe new life into the levels. For lack of better phrasing, there comes a point where Hallownest stops feeling like a world, and the moment that happens, Hollow Knight becomes a large grocery list.
See, at first it takes a while for the game to open up and become interesting from a gameplay perspective. But once it does, you really embrace that feeling of discovery, of seeing new things within this ever expanding world. Unfortunately, once you reach the endgame, that sense of discovery begins to fall off. The destinations stop being worth the journeys you have to take because you have already encountered the exact same obstacles on your previous journeys. Once you become familiar with Hallownest, you inevitably lose the feeling of excitement in its mysteries. The pursuits become mindless. You end up having to trek through the same simple levels, just to see what else is there, even if the things aren’t worth seeing. There is always something else to do, there is always something you haven’t seen, but the distance to the reward becomes further as the reward itself becomes ever smaller.
Once you’ve seen most of what Hollow Knight has to offer, it is no longer intriguing to traverse its world. You begin just chasing places for the mere sake of chasing places, and you inevitably run out of steam and motivation with that pursuit. That was the trap I fell into. At a certain point, I was just playing the game just so I could say I had completed everything, and not because I was getting anything out of it. The thrill of adventure and discovery had long since turned into a slog since the contents of the game itself was ultimately stretched way too thin.
I want to love Hollow Knight, I really do. I put so much time into it and tried as hard as I could to do so. Some would even say I tried too hard. There is a lot to love about the game and I applaud Team Cherry for what they managed to achieve with it. I certainly wouldn’t want to be in their shoes right now, given both the immense amount of hype people have for Silksong and the fact that they have to make a follow up to a game like Hollow Knight. I, myself, am looking forward to seeing how they evolve with the release of their next game. But as for Hollow Knight itself, I’m glad that I played it, but I certainly don’t have any desire to revisit it.
But nah, in conclusion, bad game by lazy dev. By the way, why do people like the OST so much, it’s really not that special smh.
[Sorry this is a bit late]
Homefront: The Revolution gets way more fucking hate than it deserves. Given the amount of people who are likely gonna play through it just so they can play Timesplitters again, I feel it's my duty to defend the game from those who are going to hate on it for being something that it isn't, as well those who accused it of being something worse than it is.
It is NOT a Far Cry game even though it shares design elements with the series. It is NOT a AAA game even though it looks like one. It is definitely NOT a piece of imperialist propaganda about how Koreans are bad. It absolutely is NOT a Timesplitters game in any way, shape, form, or reason. And I can assure that it’s neither a Call of Duty nor Crysis game.
Homefront: The Revolution is a rugged, semi-open world game about being a guerrilla fighter for a revolution. It was developed by a medium-sized team on a medium sized budget, and it shows. It may not be a particularly polished game, and yes, there is a fair bit of jank throughout the whole thing, but that's something to be expected from a game of this scale built across such a tumultuous development cycle (we'll get to this a little later).
There are 3 different types of maps that all have slightly different styles of gameplay. Green Zones are linear set pieces, Yellow Zones are smaller-scale ghettos, and Red Zones are effectively like war zones. The set pieces might be where the game is at its weakest because the mechanics themselves are not exactly designed for that kind of gameplay. The enemy AI is not all that great and the stealth is kinda lacklustre, as well. The Red Zones are home to the more action oriented gameplay, where you’ve gotta defend ally outposts, liberate enemy outposts, and try not to get spotted by the evil, flying zeppelins. The Yellow Zones are perhaps the most interesting part of the game, though, because you are tasked with leading an uprising against the ‘oppressive regime’ in urban districts by convincing the citizens to riot against the KPA. You are initially pushed to take a subtler, more stealth-based approach in order to raise the citizens’ hearts and minds enough for them to vandalise the streets. It’s not that easy for me to explain how this works, but a lot of the time, it genuinely feels like you are responsible for a social movement in which you and the people of the district take back your streets from the oppressors. It is super interesting stuff. There are many different types of gameplay crammed into this whole package, and as such, the missions often feel a bit repetitive since they typically resort to czechlist-based design. Y’know, liberate this many outposts, defend against that many enemies, strip these many posters off the walls; that type of stuff. Ironically enough, I’m not saying that this type of design is anything revolutionary, despite the nature of the game it’s in, but it is often very solid in terms of its execution, especially in the Yellow Zones.
Homefront: The Revolution also has a really interesting weapon customisation system that’s similar to the ones found in the Crysis franchise. You can change your various weapon parts in order to gain different abilities from them. For just about every weapon, you can modify the grip, fire rate, ammo type, ironsight, and more things that I’m probably forgetting because it’s been over 2 years since I’ve played it and my memory is probably failing me. What I do remember is that it made the gunplay feel quite tactile and variable in a way that I haven’t seen in all that many games. It’s actually surprisingly well done for what it is.
On the topic of weapons, I feel that it’s necessary to talk about the gunplay itself in a little more detail because it’s one of the more misunderstood aspects of the game. As I said before, this is a game where you play as a guerilla fighter in the midst of a revolution. You are not a soldier. You are not a marksman. You aren’t a trained fighter. Hell, your character probably hasn’t even used a gun outside of the first moments of the game. You are merely someone who is fighting for a cause that they believe in, and this is reflected through the kinesthetics of the game.
Weapons aren’t precise like in Call of Duty or TimeSplitters, they are unwieldy and cumbersome to use. Guns have a ridiculous amount of recoil and bullet spread that may turn some players off from the game. You are underpowered compared to the KPA around you, and can only take a few shots before dying since they have stronger weapons than you do. However, they also wear bulletproof vests and body armour that can withstand a lot of your shots, especially on higher difficulties. If you look at the KPA’s weapons, you’ll notice that they are futuristic machines built with aerodynamic angles at mechanical precision, whereas your weapons are essentially just a bunch of worn-down, rusty parts that are clumsily held together with tape and rubber bands. The individual parts clash with each other in every way except for their ‘battle scars’ and, especially towards the beginning of the game, they reload rather slowly, too. Handling them is opposite of refined, but once you get used to them, they certainly pack a punch and a half. These barely held together pieces of machinery rattle and clamber with every shot, and keychains with faded flags on them violently jostle with every movement. Yes, the weapons feel cumbersome to use, especially at the beginning, but that’s the point. You are part of a revolution, you are fighting for what you believe in. You are not fighting because you can, but rather because you have to. Your weapons are as strong as your will to use them.
The gunplay progresses in parallel to the revolution. You start out fighting with what you’re given, and you end up fighting with what you’ve got. At the beginning, you’re shooting bullets from a clumsy shotgun, but towards the end, you’re shooting fireworks into crowds of KPA-gents. Sure, those fireworks are needlessly bombastic and overly celebratory and excessively patriotic. They’re honestly quite silly, but that doesn’t matter because they are effective nonetheless. When your voice has been suppressed, it doesn’t matter how stupid you look or sound. I mean, if your voice was taken, what would you do to get it back?
I know I’m starting to preach, but it’s because it genuinely makes me upset that people point at this game’s cutscenes and writing and laugh it off as just another shitty video game story with nothing going for it. I won’t deny that the writing is not all that great in the grand scheme of things, but the stuff that’s there says more about the topic at hand than basically any other game I’ve seen or heard of, let alone played. There are plenty of games that have ‘guerilla fighting’ and ‘revolutions’ in them (Just Cause 3, Far Cry 3-5, Watch Dogs 2, 1979 Revolution: Black Friday), but frankly, they aren’t terribly well-written either. It’s frustrating that Homefront: The Revolution’s introduction is as poor as it is, because when you stop laughing at how it initially “sounds” and listen to what it actually “says” beyond the introductory cutscenes, there is genuinely quite a lot of content to unpack. In fact, I’d argue that Homefront: The Revolution explores the very concept of revolutions and examines why people take part in them much more than most other games. Why does a pacifist take part in a war, what do people gain by joining an opposing force, at what point does violence detract from a movement-- these are just some of the questions and topics that are brought to light when you play through it. You will find notes from individuals who became KPA-gents discussing why they joined the force. You will learn the effects that an oppressive regime has on different people, as well as how they deal with it. You will learn the consequences of being part of the revolution. There is a lot to learn and read and listen to and see, and no, it’s not particularly subtle about any of it, but it’s absolutely not shallow in terms of its narrative and thematic content. I mean, tell me another game that actively explores the concept of revolutions to the extent that this one does. (Actually, don’t do that because then it’ll be yet another game on my seemingly endless backlog and I’ll feel fuckin terrible about myself lol.)
Even if you don’t like the writing itself, if you just look at the game, you will see that the environments tell more stories than any of the cutscenes or dialogue possibly can. You will walk through the battered remains of a city scarred by an invasive force. You will venture through the sickly result of a chemical atrocity. You will see slums filled with trash constricted by giant, cement walls that are plastered with propaganda and retaliatory graffiti. As you walk through city streets infested with the bright red screens and fluorescent lights of the KPA, you might notice that trash from the alleys has seeped into the pavement. Military fortresses invade the streets like tumours, and yet sofas sit in front of them in silent protest. The more thoroughly you observe the maps, the more you are rewarded with silent stories. Those aforementioned sofas may present an interesting vignette, but if you carefully observe the alleys in prior yellow zones and notice the tired civilians sitting on similar-looking couches in their garages, that simple piece of furniture becomes a narrative device that exemplifies the growing tensions between the people on the streets and those in power. All the nuance that is missing from the written story is more than prevalent in the world. I’m not just talking about the graffiti and propaganda, but rather the city beneath it. The sofa is just one example that I happen to remember; but these kinds of subtle stories are everywhere in Homefront: The Revolution.
Rather than discussing and breaking down more of those moments, though, I feel that it’s necessary to address something at the surface. Just because the “enemy” in this fictional game is Korea and the “protagonist” is the “US”, does not make this a statement against Korea and/or for the US. It is NOT a piece of imperialist propaganda, it is a story about taking part in a revolution and the effect it has on the people involved. The primary reason that Korea and the US are in this game is because their conflict is the remnant of the previous one in the franchise it softly rebooted. The KPA happens to be an oppressive force, and the revolutionists happen to be American, but these roles could’ve been filled by anyone and the narrative would be virtually identical. Hell, the roles could be switched around and it’ll still convey THE SAME THING. The game criticises both parties. Yes, it could be more critical of them, and yes, it sometimes conveys some dissonant messages--especially in its ending sequence--, but I’d argue that the game does NOT choose explicit heroes or villains, even if it may seem like it from the surface. Of course, this doesn’t invalidate the possibility that some of the creative choices were sensationalistic in nature, but that doesn’t make it a work of propaganda, let alone imperialist.
I know I’ve stressed it a lot, but this is a game about revolutions through and through. It’s about the costs and benefits of fighting against overwhelming odds for something you truly believe in. Even the game’s development parallels its subject matter. You see, it can be argued that Homefront: The Revolution is essentially the product of metaphorical guerilla fighters. Over the course of its 5 year development cycle, both the team and the game itself lived through the closure of two studios, the bankruptcy of their original publisher, the financial mismanagement of their second publisher, the ruthless deadlines of their third publisher, and the fluctuation in both size and scale of the game and its dev team. What started out as a simple, linear follow up to the first Homefront became a full open-world game, yet partway through its already troubled development, over ⅓ of the team had to leave the studio because the publisher wasn’t paying them. Several other devs--including the director himself-- quite literally went on strike after being denied the pay they were rightfully promised. Even after the studio was bought out and rebranded, and the devs were getting paid again, they were still making the same game at the same scale as before, but with ⅔ of the people they had before. It was already an ambitious game for a team of roughly 150 people to make, but then only 100 people had to take on that same workload across the same time. Yes, corners had to be cut; it’s no longer a full open world game, but even after a delay of almost an entire year, Homefront: The Revolution launched in an unplayable, unfinished state, and was bombed by both critics and consumers.
As of now, the game has a metascore of 49. Pretty much everyone hated the game. Both Dambuster Studio and Deep Silver had every reason to quit, but they didn’t. They spent the following year fixing the game, removing the vast majority of the game breaking bugs. Obviously, they missed a few of them, but enough of them were fixed to make the game playable, and they didn’t stop there. 2 expansions were released--I didn’t play either of them, but I’ve heard that they’re even better than the base game. The devs even added in a fully featured co-op mode with its own story and missions and support for up to 4 players.
I’m not saying that Homefront: The Revolution is this perfect, brilliant game that everyone must play. What I am saying is that the developers quite literally lived through the events of this game, they literally protested for it. Even though it was at the brink of extinction for years, it exists because the people who made it genuinely believed in the project. Homefront: The Revolution is the product of passionate developers who put nearly 6 years of work into something they truly cared about.
I’ve read comments from people who have proclaimed that Homefront: The Revolution would’ve been a hit if it were made by a different developer. This is just not the case. No other developer would’ve believed in the project nearly as much as Dambuster, and no other developer could’ve made this game. When you look at the world that the team has managed to create, the amount of thought and care that has gone into realising even its smallest details is nothing short of inspiring. . In some way that I cannot properly articulate, I believe in everything this game shows me. There is an unquestionable sincerity and genuineness that emanates from its every pixel. Sure, some of its aspects are poorly executed and corners were obviously cut, but the content that’s there has so much life and effort that I cannot help but love it.
With more development time and less development turmoil, I am certain that Dambuster could create something that people truly adore. If they went deeper into the intricacies of the world, fleshed out the characters and the AI, and added a little bit more variety to the mission design, a truly special and directly thought-provoking game would emerge. But as it stands now, the stuff that is present does NOT deserve the hate and vitriol it gets because this is, without question, a product of passion. That is something that cannot be said for many other games that have a metascore higher than 49 (cough cough Sniper Ghost Warrior 3).
If anything I’ve said in this enormous rant sounds interesting to you, please consider giving this game a chance. If more people gave this game a chance, at the very least, we would’ve gotten to play the Timesplitters 2 port sooner. Yeah, it’s always been in the fucking game, it has always been playable, and people would’ve known that if they actually played Homefront: The Revolution instead of laughing it off
Homefront: The Revolution gets way more fucking hate than it deserves. Given the amount of people who are likely gonna play through it just so they can play Timesplitters again, I feel it's my duty to defend the game from those who are going to hate on it for being something that it isn't, as well those who accused it of being something worse than it is.
It is NOT a Far Cry game even though it shares design elements with the series. It is NOT a AAA game even though it looks like one. It is definitely NOT a piece of imperialist propaganda about how Koreans are bad. It absolutely is NOT a Timesplitters game in any way, shape, form, or reason. And I can assure that it’s neither a Call of Duty nor Crysis game.
Homefront: The Revolution is a rugged, semi-open world game about being a guerrilla fighter for a revolution. It was developed by a medium-sized team on a medium sized budget, and it shows. It may not be a particularly polished game, and yes, there is a fair bit of jank throughout the whole thing, but that's something to be expected from a game of this scale built across such a tumultuous development cycle (we'll get to this a little later).
There are 3 different types of maps that all have slightly different styles of gameplay. Green Zones are linear set pieces, Yellow Zones are smaller-scale ghettos, and Red Zones are effectively like war zones. The set pieces might be where the game is at its weakest because the mechanics themselves are not exactly designed for that kind of gameplay. The enemy AI is not all that great and the stealth is kinda lacklustre, as well. The Red Zones are home to the more action oriented gameplay, where you’ve gotta defend ally outposts, liberate enemy outposts, and try not to get spotted by the evil, flying zeppelins. The Yellow Zones are perhaps the most interesting part of the game, though, because you are tasked with leading an uprising against the ‘oppressive regime’ in urban districts by convincing the citizens to riot against the KPA. You are initially pushed to take a subtler, more stealth-based approach in order to raise the citizens’ hearts and minds enough for them to vandalise the streets. It’s not that easy for me to explain how this works, but a lot of the time, it genuinely feels like you are responsible for a social movement in which you and the people of the district take back your streets from the oppressors. It is super interesting stuff. There are many different types of gameplay crammed into this whole package, and as such, the missions often feel a bit repetitive since they typically resort to czechlist-based design. Y’know, liberate this many outposts, defend against that many enemies, strip these many posters off the walls; that type of stuff. Ironically enough, I’m not saying that this type of design is anything revolutionary, despite the nature of the game it’s in, but it is often very solid in terms of its execution, especially in the Yellow Zones.
Homefront: The Revolution also has a really interesting weapon customisation system that’s similar to the ones found in the Crysis franchise. You can change your various weapon parts in order to gain different abilities from them. For just about every weapon, you can modify the grip, fire rate, ammo type, ironsight, and more things that I’m probably forgetting because it’s been over 2 years since I’ve played it and my memory is probably failing me. What I do remember is that it made the gunplay feel quite tactile and variable in a way that I haven’t seen in all that many games. It’s actually surprisingly well done for what it is.
On the topic of weapons, I feel that it’s necessary to talk about the gunplay itself in a little more detail because it’s one of the more misunderstood aspects of the game. As I said before, this is a game where you play as a guerilla fighter in the midst of a revolution. You are not a soldier. You are not a marksman. You aren’t a trained fighter. Hell, your character probably hasn’t even used a gun outside of the first moments of the game. You are merely someone who is fighting for a cause that they believe in, and this is reflected through the kinesthetics of the game.
Weapons aren’t precise like in Call of Duty or TimeSplitters, they are unwieldy and cumbersome to use. Guns have a ridiculous amount of recoil and bullet spread that may turn some players off from the game. You are underpowered compared to the KPA around you, and can only take a few shots before dying since they have stronger weapons than you do. However, they also wear bulletproof vests and body armour that can withstand a lot of your shots, especially on higher difficulties. If you look at the KPA’s weapons, you’ll notice that they are futuristic machines built with aerodynamic angles at mechanical precision, whereas your weapons are essentially just a bunch of worn-down, rusty parts that are clumsily held together with tape and rubber bands. The individual parts clash with each other in every way except for their ‘battle scars’ and, especially towards the beginning of the game, they reload rather slowly, too. Handling them is opposite of refined, but once you get used to them, they certainly pack a punch and a half. These barely held together pieces of machinery rattle and clamber with every shot, and keychains with faded flags on them violently jostle with every movement. Yes, the weapons feel cumbersome to use, especially at the beginning, but that’s the point. You are part of a revolution, you are fighting for what you believe in. You are not fighting because you can, but rather because you have to. Your weapons are as strong as your will to use them.
The gunplay progresses in parallel to the revolution. You start out fighting with what you’re given, and you end up fighting with what you’ve got. At the beginning, you’re shooting bullets from a clumsy shotgun, but towards the end, you’re shooting fireworks into crowds of KPA-gents. Sure, those fireworks are needlessly bombastic and overly celebratory and excessively patriotic. They’re honestly quite silly, but that doesn’t matter because they are effective nonetheless. When your voice has been suppressed, it doesn’t matter how stupid you look or sound. I mean, if your voice was taken, what would you do to get it back?
I know I’m starting to preach, but it’s because it genuinely makes me upset that people point at this game’s cutscenes and writing and laugh it off as just another shitty video game story with nothing going for it. I won’t deny that the writing is not all that great in the grand scheme of things, but the stuff that’s there says more about the topic at hand than basically any other game I’ve seen or heard of, let alone played. There are plenty of games that have ‘guerilla fighting’ and ‘revolutions’ in them (Just Cause 3, Far Cry 3-5, Watch Dogs 2, 1979 Revolution: Black Friday), but frankly, they aren’t terribly well-written either. It’s frustrating that Homefront: The Revolution’s introduction is as poor as it is, because when you stop laughing at how it initially “sounds” and listen to what it actually “says” beyond the introductory cutscenes, there is genuinely quite a lot of content to unpack. In fact, I’d argue that Homefront: The Revolution explores the very concept of revolutions and examines why people take part in them much more than most other games. Why does a pacifist take part in a war, what do people gain by joining an opposing force, at what point does violence detract from a movement-- these are just some of the questions and topics that are brought to light when you play through it. You will find notes from individuals who became KPA-gents discussing why they joined the force. You will learn the effects that an oppressive regime has on different people, as well as how they deal with it. You will learn the consequences of being part of the revolution. There is a lot to learn and read and listen to and see, and no, it’s not particularly subtle about any of it, but it’s absolutely not shallow in terms of its narrative and thematic content. I mean, tell me another game that actively explores the concept of revolutions to the extent that this one does. (Actually, don’t do that because then it’ll be yet another game on my seemingly endless backlog and I’ll feel fuckin terrible about myself lol.)
Even if you don’t like the writing itself, if you just look at the game, you will see that the environments tell more stories than any of the cutscenes or dialogue possibly can. You will walk through the battered remains of a city scarred by an invasive force. You will venture through the sickly result of a chemical atrocity. You will see slums filled with trash constricted by giant, cement walls that are plastered with propaganda and retaliatory graffiti. As you walk through city streets infested with the bright red screens and fluorescent lights of the KPA, you might notice that trash from the alleys has seeped into the pavement. Military fortresses invade the streets like tumours, and yet sofas sit in front of them in silent protest. The more thoroughly you observe the maps, the more you are rewarded with silent stories. Those aforementioned sofas may present an interesting vignette, but if you carefully observe the alleys in prior yellow zones and notice the tired civilians sitting on similar-looking couches in their garages, that simple piece of furniture becomes a narrative device that exemplifies the growing tensions between the people on the streets and those in power. All the nuance that is missing from the written story is more than prevalent in the world. I’m not just talking about the graffiti and propaganda, but rather the city beneath it. The sofa is just one example that I happen to remember; but these kinds of subtle stories are everywhere in Homefront: The Revolution.
Rather than discussing and breaking down more of those moments, though, I feel that it’s necessary to address something at the surface. Just because the “enemy” in this fictional game is Korea and the “protagonist” is the “US”, does not make this a statement against Korea and/or for the US. It is NOT a piece of imperialist propaganda, it is a story about taking part in a revolution and the effect it has on the people involved. The primary reason that Korea and the US are in this game is because their conflict is the remnant of the previous one in the franchise it softly rebooted. The KPA happens to be an oppressive force, and the revolutionists happen to be American, but these roles could’ve been filled by anyone and the narrative would be virtually identical. Hell, the roles could be switched around and it’ll still convey THE SAME THING. The game criticises both parties. Yes, it could be more critical of them, and yes, it sometimes conveys some dissonant messages--especially in its ending sequence--, but I’d argue that the game does NOT choose explicit heroes or villains, even if it may seem like it from the surface. Of course, this doesn’t invalidate the possibility that some of the creative choices were sensationalistic in nature, but that doesn’t make it a work of propaganda, let alone imperialist.
I know I’ve stressed it a lot, but this is a game about revolutions through and through. It’s about the costs and benefits of fighting against overwhelming odds for something you truly believe in. Even the game’s development parallels its subject matter. You see, it can be argued that Homefront: The Revolution is essentially the product of metaphorical guerilla fighters. Over the course of its 5 year development cycle, both the team and the game itself lived through the closure of two studios, the bankruptcy of their original publisher, the financial mismanagement of their second publisher, the ruthless deadlines of their third publisher, and the fluctuation in both size and scale of the game and its dev team. What started out as a simple, linear follow up to the first Homefront became a full open-world game, yet partway through its already troubled development, over ⅓ of the team had to leave the studio because the publisher wasn’t paying them. Several other devs--including the director himself-- quite literally went on strike after being denied the pay they were rightfully promised. Even after the studio was bought out and rebranded, and the devs were getting paid again, they were still making the same game at the same scale as before, but with ⅔ of the people they had before. It was already an ambitious game for a team of roughly 150 people to make, but then only 100 people had to take on that same workload across the same time. Yes, corners had to be cut; it’s no longer a full open world game, but even after a delay of almost an entire year, Homefront: The Revolution launched in an unplayable, unfinished state, and was bombed by both critics and consumers.
As of now, the game has a metascore of 49. Pretty much everyone hated the game. Both Dambuster Studio and Deep Silver had every reason to quit, but they didn’t. They spent the following year fixing the game, removing the vast majority of the game breaking bugs. Obviously, they missed a few of them, but enough of them were fixed to make the game playable, and they didn’t stop there. 2 expansions were released--I didn’t play either of them, but I’ve heard that they’re even better than the base game. The devs even added in a fully featured co-op mode with its own story and missions and support for up to 4 players.
I’m not saying that Homefront: The Revolution is this perfect, brilliant game that everyone must play. What I am saying is that the developers quite literally lived through the events of this game, they literally protested for it. Even though it was at the brink of extinction for years, it exists because the people who made it genuinely believed in the project. Homefront: The Revolution is the product of passionate developers who put nearly 6 years of work into something they truly cared about.
I’ve read comments from people who have proclaimed that Homefront: The Revolution would’ve been a hit if it were made by a different developer. This is just not the case. No other developer would’ve believed in the project nearly as much as Dambuster, and no other developer could’ve made this game. When you look at the world that the team has managed to create, the amount of thought and care that has gone into realising even its smallest details is nothing short of inspiring. . In some way that I cannot properly articulate, I believe in everything this game shows me. There is an unquestionable sincerity and genuineness that emanates from its every pixel. Sure, some of its aspects are poorly executed and corners were obviously cut, but the content that’s there has so much life and effort that I cannot help but love it.
With more development time and less development turmoil, I am certain that Dambuster could create something that people truly adore. If they went deeper into the intricacies of the world, fleshed out the characters and the AI, and added a little bit more variety to the mission design, a truly special and directly thought-provoking game would emerge. But as it stands now, the stuff that is present does NOT deserve the hate and vitriol it gets because this is, without question, a product of passion. That is something that cannot be said for many other games that have a metascore higher than 49 (cough cough Sniper Ghost Warrior 3).
If anything I’ve said in this enormous rant sounds interesting to you, please consider giving this game a chance. If more people gave this game a chance, at the very least, we would’ve gotten to play the Timesplitters 2 port sooner. Yeah, it’s always been in the fucking game, it has always been playable, and people would’ve known that if they actually played Homefront: The Revolution instead of laughing it off
2019
This is basically just a bunch of pretty pictures with minimalistic interactions for like 60-80 mins, but fuck, those are some really nice looking pictures with clever interactions.
2017
Gorogoa is a multifaceted allegory presented in the form of a puzzle game. Upon reflection, it's one of the most personal games I've ever played. Because of this, I'm gonna get a bit more personal than usual.
I'll be honest, I'm not at a good place in my life these days. Every time I wake up, I dread what is to come as I think about what I've failed at. My dream in life is to become an independent game developer and make at least 2 video games can truly be proud of. If I cannot make 2 games, then at the very least I wanna make 1. I intend to follow this dream in my spare time until I truly have the stability to fully pursue it. Yet, it seems like the stability I need is becoming an endless pursuit in and of itself. I know how to get to my ultimate goal, but my brain will simply not let me finish anything. In order to articulate myself effectively, I need to write, yet thanks to my brain, writing is quite literally like self harm.
My brain is a giant mountain of Polaroid photos and each Polaroid picture has individual thoughts and ideas and sometimes single words. Everything is sort of extremely interconnected and related to each other in some way, but there is no order to anything. Surrounding this mountain of Polaroid photos are several megaphones and loudspeakers that all have different perspectives on anything that I think. Whenever I put together a sentence or articulate myself, I have to climb up and go through this mountain of Polaroid photos and put them together in the correct order. And it takes a long time to do this because it’s a giant disorganized mass, and I have to do that for every single thing that I think or write.
This isn’t helped by the loudspeakers, because they are always going off about everything at the same time. One of these speakers is talking about what I’m trying to say, another one is screaming about what I have written down, another is talking about all the damn Polaroid photos, another one comes up with a joke, another one is always criticizing every single thing that I write. And that’s one of the loudest ones, actually, because I can never see what I’m doing because of it. I automatically think of counterarguments to everything I write before I've even written anything. The combination of all of this makes it as though I have some sort of writing dysphoria or dysmorphia, for want of a better term. This term may or may not exist, but it is the only way I can think about it.
I've spent the better part of a year--potentially even 5 years depending on how you look at it-- writing pages and pages of scripts. No matter what, I seem to be unable to finish them. The first 4 reviews I've published on Backloggd (after the Extinction one) were written before I published them. They are the first drafts for a series I originally called Reverys. I have 8 of these drafts, and the ones on backloggd are the earliest ones. They are the ones I am least proud of for the most part, but I'm going back through them and finishing them one by one. I am stuck on the Bound By Flame one.
I intend to make a living by learning about games, until I am able to make a living by making games. I have tonnes of learning differences and challenges, so I hope that by making videos, I can also demonstrate a different, more kinesthetic manner of learning to those who do not learn well in traditional academic settings. I know that isn't a dream, it can be a reality, but the gelatinous disability that I call my brain keeps me grounded. I'm constantly chasing a lighthouse, but the lighthouse becomes the sun, and the sun consumes the sky until it is covered by the clouds of my mind. I have things to offer the world, I have things to prove to myself, nothing is ever good enough. I write random shite on Backloggd that almost nobody sees, and even less people care about. It's not as though I've ever looked for attention, I just wanna be satisfied with what I make. People tell me that I'm a writer sometimes, but don't want to be one and I never wanted to be. I just spend so much fucking time writing because I'm trying to make something I'm proud of, but I cannot even do the bare minimum task. Even the smallest things become monumental tasks that spiral outta control before I even realise it. I'm not a writer, I'm just trapped in my fucking head.
I remember when I was on the verge of failing school again, Jason Roberts was developing his game, and he was among the many indie devs whose journey pushed me to keep moving forward. I knew he was a software engineer who left his job to make something he could be proud of. I knew he had the ability to draw and code. I knew he was gonna release his game and it was gonna be something good. I was walking up the stairs in the cold the day before Gorogoa released, reading about Jason Roberts and his journey to releasing his game. I pre-downloaded the game on my phone, and the next evening, I played through it in my bed until after the middle of the night. It was fantastic, albeit a little short. Playing through it further cemented my dreams of making games. I miss those days of inspiration, if I'm honest. Those days seem to be getting farther and farther away. I don't know what to do about it. I don't know what to do.
I look at what I've written and I hate what I see, and then I look in the mirror and I hate what I see. But then I look up at the sky and the sun is out again. I wish people could see what I see because then it wouldn't seem like an unattainable dream. I will keep following the sun. I must get to Gorogoa.
I'll be honest, I'm not at a good place in my life these days. Every time I wake up, I dread what is to come as I think about what I've failed at. My dream in life is to become an independent game developer and make at least 2 video games can truly be proud of. If I cannot make 2 games, then at the very least I wanna make 1. I intend to follow this dream in my spare time until I truly have the stability to fully pursue it. Yet, it seems like the stability I need is becoming an endless pursuit in and of itself. I know how to get to my ultimate goal, but my brain will simply not let me finish anything. In order to articulate myself effectively, I need to write, yet thanks to my brain, writing is quite literally like self harm.
My brain is a giant mountain of Polaroid photos and each Polaroid picture has individual thoughts and ideas and sometimes single words. Everything is sort of extremely interconnected and related to each other in some way, but there is no order to anything. Surrounding this mountain of Polaroid photos are several megaphones and loudspeakers that all have different perspectives on anything that I think. Whenever I put together a sentence or articulate myself, I have to climb up and go through this mountain of Polaroid photos and put them together in the correct order. And it takes a long time to do this because it’s a giant disorganized mass, and I have to do that for every single thing that I think or write.
This isn’t helped by the loudspeakers, because they are always going off about everything at the same time. One of these speakers is talking about what I’m trying to say, another one is screaming about what I have written down, another is talking about all the damn Polaroid photos, another one comes up with a joke, another one is always criticizing every single thing that I write. And that’s one of the loudest ones, actually, because I can never see what I’m doing because of it. I automatically think of counterarguments to everything I write before I've even written anything. The combination of all of this makes it as though I have some sort of writing dysphoria or dysmorphia, for want of a better term. This term may or may not exist, but it is the only way I can think about it.
I've spent the better part of a year--potentially even 5 years depending on how you look at it-- writing pages and pages of scripts. No matter what, I seem to be unable to finish them. The first 4 reviews I've published on Backloggd (after the Extinction one) were written before I published them. They are the first drafts for a series I originally called Reverys. I have 8 of these drafts, and the ones on backloggd are the earliest ones. They are the ones I am least proud of for the most part, but I'm going back through them and finishing them one by one. I am stuck on the Bound By Flame one.
I intend to make a living by learning about games, until I am able to make a living by making games. I have tonnes of learning differences and challenges, so I hope that by making videos, I can also demonstrate a different, more kinesthetic manner of learning to those who do not learn well in traditional academic settings. I know that isn't a dream, it can be a reality, but the gelatinous disability that I call my brain keeps me grounded. I'm constantly chasing a lighthouse, but the lighthouse becomes the sun, and the sun consumes the sky until it is covered by the clouds of my mind. I have things to offer the world, I have things to prove to myself, nothing is ever good enough. I write random shite on Backloggd that almost nobody sees, and even less people care about. It's not as though I've ever looked for attention, I just wanna be satisfied with what I make. People tell me that I'm a writer sometimes, but don't want to be one and I never wanted to be. I just spend so much fucking time writing because I'm trying to make something I'm proud of, but I cannot even do the bare minimum task. Even the smallest things become monumental tasks that spiral outta control before I even realise it. I'm not a writer, I'm just trapped in my fucking head.
I remember when I was on the verge of failing school again, Jason Roberts was developing his game, and he was among the many indie devs whose journey pushed me to keep moving forward. I knew he was a software engineer who left his job to make something he could be proud of. I knew he had the ability to draw and code. I knew he was gonna release his game and it was gonna be something good. I was walking up the stairs in the cold the day before Gorogoa released, reading about Jason Roberts and his journey to releasing his game. I pre-downloaded the game on my phone, and the next evening, I played through it in my bed until after the middle of the night. It was fantastic, albeit a little short. Playing through it further cemented my dreams of making games. I miss those days of inspiration, if I'm honest. Those days seem to be getting farther and farther away. I don't know what to do about it. I don't know what to do.
I look at what I've written and I hate what I see, and then I look in the mirror and I hate what I see. But then I look up at the sky and the sun is out again. I wish people could see what I see because then it wouldn't seem like an unattainable dream. I will keep following the sun. I must get to Gorogoa.
1996
I'm including Pokemon Red as a stand-in for every single game in the franchise except for the ones that I've played and forgot the name of because they are literally all the same game with different names. The thing about these games is that I simply don't understand the fucking appeal of them. Turn based combat might not be inherently terrible on its own, but when you don't make any attempt to make the encounters interesting or streamlined in basically any way, it just becomes a tedious interaction with a temperamental interface. That is pokemon's combat. The enemies are not remotely varied or interesting enough to carry the game. The goal of pokemon is to "catch them all," but how does that differ from collecting STD's? The answer is that at least it's fun to catch STDs, whereas the pokemon games is just dealing with the paperwork. The fact of the matter is, the encounters are all grinding with no substance behind it, and when that's combined with the infuriatingly high encounter rate, it's just poorly designed in my eyes. Since they just add more grinding with each iteration, I have absolutely no reason to play any of the pokemon games more than I already have.
2007
This game makes me angry to no end because it doesn't have a single shred of humility. Actually, that's understating it. If this game were a person, I bet that would like to draw nude self-portraits with glittery pens. I bet that it frames these pictures on the walls of its home. On its birthday, it probably wears a ribbon and a crown to let everyone around them know that they should celebrate its very existence. I bet that it's a nude model because it likes it when people draw their figure. I bet that it would masturbate to its own reflection every time it looked at itself in the mirror, and then when it finishes, the first 5 seconds of this song plays. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJjYlFAFnoA
Serious version:
Think it has some neat level gimmicks, but I cannot stand how much it shoehorns a false sense of whimsy into its every pore. it feels like the game is in awe with itself a lot of the time, and it frustrates me to no end.
[I will expand on this a bit in an hour.]
Serious version:
Think it has some neat level gimmicks, but I cannot stand how much it shoehorns a false sense of whimsy into its every pore. it feels like the game is in awe with itself a lot of the time, and it frustrates me to no end.
[I will expand on this a bit in an hour.]
2013
So like picture this:
You are sitting beneath an old piano in your grandmother's dingy basement. The ground is rather dirty--you can feel it with your hands-- but the lighting is subpar so you cannot see it. Upstairs, your brother is practicing piano with his piano teacher, who also happens to be your grandmother. As you sit beneath that creaky, old piano on the dusty floor in the dingy basement, you look over towards your binder and shudder at the thought of straining your eyes trying to do your maths homework. You immediately turn the other way and notice a bunch of old records. You've seen these records before, all of them are by people who died long before you were born, except for Nick Cave. As soon as you remember Nick Cave, you feel just as dusty as the floor you're sitting on, so you look the other way. Your eyes have adjusted at this point, so now you can see the stick horse in the back corner. You haven't ever noticed this stick horse before, so you attempt to stand up and walk over to get a closer look, but you hit your head on the piano you forgot you were sitting beneath. It lets out a quiet groan, and you do the same. After quickly recovering from your collision, you wonder when the piano was last tuned; when will it wake from its slumber? You worry that you might've hit the piano a little too hard because you notice that your brother stopped playing the one upstairs. As you tilt your ear toward the basement staircase, you notice that you can see the floor a little bit clearer. It is a sickly shade of beige, although it's not clear whether or not the tiles actually look like that. Suddenly, you hear the basement door open. You have no idea who it is, but you feel incredibly uneasy. Is it your brother? Is it the teacher? Is it...is it grandma? Is it your parents? You hear someone's foot meet the first creaking step and your heart starts to race. What do you do...
screeeech
You remember that you're supposed to be doing your maths homework.
creeeaaak
You haven't even started it.
screeaaak
Do run over and open your binder?
Screeeech
No wait, your binder is zipped up, they'll hear you!
Skreeek
Do you delay?
Creeeaaak
Well maybe it's-
skreeeaaak
Do you hide?
screech
Oh god.
Creak
You are panic-
Skreak
You will be-
Creak
Why are you still under the piano?!
stomp
They've reached the bottom of the staircase. The footsteps stop for a moment; you hold your breath. The silence is maddening. You look towards the sliding door and you notice that the evening has slipped away. Suddenly, the footsteps begin again....and they're getting louder...
You close your eyes.
...and louder...
You start to shudder.
...and LOUDER...
You put your head on your knees.
...until they stop right in front of you. You fear what will happen next.
In this scenario, Anodyne is the stick horse. I don't have much else to say about it.
You are sitting beneath an old piano in your grandmother's dingy basement. The ground is rather dirty--you can feel it with your hands-- but the lighting is subpar so you cannot see it. Upstairs, your brother is practicing piano with his piano teacher, who also happens to be your grandmother. As you sit beneath that creaky, old piano on the dusty floor in the dingy basement, you look over towards your binder and shudder at the thought of straining your eyes trying to do your maths homework. You immediately turn the other way and notice a bunch of old records. You've seen these records before, all of them are by people who died long before you were born, except for Nick Cave. As soon as you remember Nick Cave, you feel just as dusty as the floor you're sitting on, so you look the other way. Your eyes have adjusted at this point, so now you can see the stick horse in the back corner. You haven't ever noticed this stick horse before, so you attempt to stand up and walk over to get a closer look, but you hit your head on the piano you forgot you were sitting beneath. It lets out a quiet groan, and you do the same. After quickly recovering from your collision, you wonder when the piano was last tuned; when will it wake from its slumber? You worry that you might've hit the piano a little too hard because you notice that your brother stopped playing the one upstairs. As you tilt your ear toward the basement staircase, you notice that you can see the floor a little bit clearer. It is a sickly shade of beige, although it's not clear whether or not the tiles actually look like that. Suddenly, you hear the basement door open. You have no idea who it is, but you feel incredibly uneasy. Is it your brother? Is it the teacher? Is it...is it grandma? Is it your parents? You hear someone's foot meet the first creaking step and your heart starts to race. What do you do...
screeeech
You remember that you're supposed to be doing your maths homework.
creeeaaak
You haven't even started it.
screeaaak
Do run over and open your binder?
Screeeech
No wait, your binder is zipped up, they'll hear you!
Skreeek
Do you delay?
Creeeaaak
Well maybe it's-
skreeeaaak
Do you hide?
screech
Oh god.
Creak
You are panic-
Skreak
You will be-
Creak
Why are you still under the piano?!
stomp
They've reached the bottom of the staircase. The footsteps stop for a moment; you hold your breath. The silence is maddening. You look towards the sliding door and you notice that the evening has slipped away. Suddenly, the footsteps begin again....and they're getting louder...
You close your eyes.
...and louder...
You start to shudder.
...and LOUDER...
You put your head on your knees.
...until they stop right in front of you. You fear what will happen next.
In this scenario, Anodyne is the stick horse. I don't have much else to say about it.
2018
My memory of Darksiders 3 is a little foggy because I tried to block as much of it out of my mind as possible. It was a mind numbing experience largely due to the fact that I attempted to power through it as quickly as possible. This was exhausting for several reasons, but in retrospect, the main reason was probably because, more so than just about any other game I've played, it is a complete and total husk of itself. It doesn't have a single shred of personality, yet it attempts to make up for this by wearing the sodden skin of its inspirations like a cheaply made Halloween costume. Darksiders 3 attempts to combine the body of a Souls game with the voice of Darksiders, yet more often than not, it fails to realise either one of those ambitions.
The hardest thing about this game is trying to think of a single personality trait for it.