Mismatch found - Papers, Please:

Contraband Police, in its structure and most of its execution, is a clone of Papers, Please. If you liked the former, you will almost certainly have no qualms playing through the entirety of the campaign here.

Not surprisingly, the aspects of the game clearly inspired by PP are where the game shines. The basic puzzle gameplay loop of searching for inconsistencies in prospective entrants is similarly fun in this game, with some expansions that work great, primarily relating to the namesake; contraband. Cutting up car interiors and busting open fake bumpers is a ton of fun, and this alone mixed with PP's gameplay makes at least the core gameplay loop enjoyable. I'm not entirely convinced the devs really understood what made Papers, Please a masterpiece however.

The inclusion of base building, side missions, driving and actual gun combat seem nice in concept, but none are done well enough to really justify anywhere close to the amount of praise of its predecessor. PP's charm comes from the entire atmosphere built around the core loop: The music, the artstyle, the aesthetic, the moral quandaries— all things together that make PP's whole greater than the sum of its parts. Contraband Police, despite being a painfully bland Unity asset homologation, technically does contain a lot of what made PP fantastic. There is 'branching' storyline giving you the option to side with your soviet overlords, or to engage in rebellious sabotage, but it just doesn't have the same gravity to it. I'm honestly not even sure what's wrong with it, but it just feels like something is missing. Maybe its because the lightning in the bottle has diminished, or maybe I just missed it entirely. Either way, my experience in Contraband Police just left me disappointed in what could have been an actually full-fledged spiritual successor to Papers, Please.

Reading this blurb over, I considered scrapping it entirely because of how much I reference Papers, Please (as has everyone else), but I've decided to leave it as is based on the not so subtle fact that the devs are far too closely trying to replicate its effect, and to varying degrees of success. It's not by any means bad (despite being pretty jank) and is absolutely still worth playing, but nothing here is going to surprise or inspire you if you've already experienced its far more accomplished big brother before.

Maybe the most organic exploration game I've ever played. I didn't even find out about the copious amount of radio signals/waypoints until the very end of the game, and I was pretty disappointed when I found out that you needed to do those in order to properly finish the story. It feels like the game was designed around having absolutely zero waypoints (self-made ones notwithstanding) and uses excellent map design and nonverbal storytelling to guide you towards the next objective or points of interest. This is done by several really well planned methods, such as new unlocks like depth upgrades for your vehicles prompting you to use them to reach deeper parts of established caves, keys that are used to unlock areas from different story areas, and enemy types/ attributes and light levels forcing you to approach areas the 'recommended' way. The only thing I came away wanting from Subnautica was more of a reason to spend significant amounts of time building a base, but I'm not really sure that was ever the intention, and I may have just got caught up in it based on my own gaming preferences. Overall a fantastic experience that holds your hand a lot less than I was expecting.

A surprisingly novel way to approach AVP in a game, as the two non-human campaigns (particularly Alien) are actually a decent time. I don't think there's really enough here to justify writing a full review, but if you can play it for a few bucks and you like Aliens/Predator, might as well give it a shot. Can't say anything about multiplayer since its deader than the horse that is Ellen Ripley in Alien Resurrection, but I assume it was pretty unique for its time given the asymmetrical nature of the campaigns.