Ever since Phantom Fury was announced, I was very excited. I really like the overall look of the game. It's a sort of modern version of the graphics from the year 2000, and the artists have done a good job of creating a visually appealing title.

However, the game itself is sadly very disappointing. It feels like an aimless project that isn't sure what it wants to be. It's like Ion Fury, but without the fun and violent action nor the clever level design. It's very inspired by Half-Life 1 and 2, but without the well crafted narrative structure that makes the adventure engaging. It's like DNF 2001, but without the charm or the humor. It's even a tiny bit like Deus Ex, but without the complex mechanics and systems that make immsim so interesting to explore.

Combat is at best dull, at worst frustrating, especially because of the bullet spongy enemies and the lack of quick saves which sometimes forces you to replay a 5 minutes sequence all over again.
Enemies' AI is shockingly stupid, even for a small indie title. They often get stuck and stop attacking the player.

The developers had fun implementing numerous interactions with the environment. At first, this seems cool, but it quickly ends up feeling pointless and superficial. There's no gameplay purpose, and it's also inconsistent since some buttons can be pressed or objects picked up, but many others are purely decorative. Honestly they should have used the time spent making those interactions to improve the core gameplay instead.

Phantom Fury is a very unfocused game. It is ambitious and tries to do a lot of things (there are even some completely unnecessary vehicle sequences, or HL2-styled physics-based puzzles that seem to be there just for the sake of it), but everything feels half-baked, from the gameplay to the story (what story?). There are also a lot of bugs, such as scripts that don't execute properly and force us to reload the previous checkpoint. The bugs can be fixed, but I don't think the adventure will improve with a few patches.

Usually AAA games make me feel like I'm eating fast food, but Far Cry 6 reminded me of a moldy old frozen pizza I'd forgotten about in the freezer. It's technically a video game, but it's so uninteresting and devoid of any creativity or novelty.
Ubisoft seems to be trying to recapture what people loved about previous episodes. From "you have to burn down a plantation with a flamethrower, listening to fun music" to "there's a false ending that makes you finish the game very early in the adventure", it really does feel desperate.

Giancarlo Esposito is the GOAT, but here the script is poorly written and his character is forgettable.
This was the first Far Cry to feature a real city, which was very exciting on paper, but Esperanza is a huge disappointment. It's a completely dead city that reminds me more of a series of corridors disguised with fake buildings from a movie set. Honestly, this should be considered false advertising, given that Ubisoft was selling urban guerrilla warfare with FC6.

Outdated graphics, animations, mechanics, AI, open world design.. Far Cry really needs a complete reboot at this point because this ain't it.

This 4th Dread X compilation focuses mainly on horror shooters. The number of games included is lower than usual, but each game is long and ambitious, so it feels more like they've focused on quality than quantity.

From best to worst:
The Fruit: 4/5
This is the best game of the collection. It's very ambitious and polished. It has a great atmosphere, good gameplay ideas, and manages to feel like a true survival horror. The mechanics of the manually reloadable rifle and the book of runes are well thought-out. Even the plot, while not revolutionary, has the merit of making the adventure captivating.

Rose of Meat: 4/5
Alright, this one is WEIRD. I thought I'd played a lot of weird games, but this one easily makes the top 3. Is it a good game? Impossible to say, really. But it's so unique and deranged that I can only respect the author. Probably the most divisive game of the lot.

Axis Mundi : 3.5/5
It's a paranormal game inspired by Project Zero/Fatal Frame. You can capture ghosts with a camera. You can also relive the past of the deceased, taking you back in time. The atmosphere is varied and well made. It alternates well between combat, puzzles and exploration. Pretty good overall.

Uktena 64 : 3.5/5
A N64 inspired hunting FPS. Not the most remarkable game, but there's an undeniable charm to the visuals, music and humor.

Black Relic : 3/5
It's the only game that's not a FPS but a TPS. You can tell it's inspired by Resident Evil 4. It's pretty good, but the pixelated visual style is very pronounced, making sometimes confrontations difficult to read. The gameplay is also rigid, with slow reload and pickup animations. I understand that slow movements makes a survival horror more stressful, but in this case it feels more clunky. The Fruit managed to execute that idea much better imo.

The House of Unrest : 2.5/5
Basically first person RE1 with an exorcist. The minimalist atmosphere isn't bad, but it's too easy (ammo is unlimited) and the puzzles aren't interesting.

Seraphixial: 1/5
This one is very bad, I'm sorry. It's really ugly to look at. The gunplay is boring and repetitive. Even the sound effects are laughably bad. Also the only "scares" come from lazy jumpscares.

Also the main hub of the compilation is an adventure game inspired by The Thing. Nice atmosphere and it's overall enjoyable. However, the main character is particularly annoying, with voice lines that remind me of Wolfenstein Youngblood.

From best to worst:
The Pony Factory : 3.5/5
David sure likes Doom 3 huh. It's simple but the atmosphere is very good.

Summer Night : 3.5/5
Really love the simplicity of it. It's minimalistic yet spooky.

Shatter : 3.5/5
Shame this one is so short because I adore the atmosphere.

Mr. Bucket Told Me To : 3/5
Solid art direction for a small game, also love the music. It's not perfect but it's still one of the most memorable games in the collection imo.

Hand of Doom : 3/5
It's a pretty charming attempt at recreating the mood of the early first person RPG. I didn't have an incredible time with it either but it's pretty good.

Outsiders : 2.5/5
For something that was made in 7 days, this looks impressive (even though it's probably a lot of asset packs). Looking for very small objects everywhere ends up becoming annoying though.

Don't Go Out : 2.5/5
I don't have a strong opinion on this one. I like the Clock Tower reference with the music but that's about it.

The Pay is Nice : 2/5
Interesting pitch, however it's a bit ugly and the ending is very abrupt even for a teaser.

Carthanc : 1.5/5
The idea of exploring an ancient temple like this is cool, but every challenges are awful platforming sequences.

Rotgut : 0.5/5
This one is utter garbage.

Chasing Static is a small horror game with a particularly charming visual style. It's clearly inspired by Silent Hill, with great PS1-ish graphics, set in a moody British village.
The sound design and the voice acting are also good.

Unfortunately, the rest is a bit underwhelming. There's no real exploration, except that you have to walk in circles using a special device to catch anomalies. There's no combat, no puzzles, not even a sense of fear or danger. The whole game boils down to "find an item to get to another area to find another item" and so on.

It's mainly a narrative experience that can be finished in one session (around 2-3 hours). The story is not very interesting and rather confusing. It's hard to get attached to the main character, since you don't know anything about him, and he doesn't get any development during the adventure except at the beginning and end.

It's a real shame, because the atmosphere is once again very good. I'd still applaud the effort since it's made by a single developer. I hope that their next project, Hollowbody, will keep the qualities of Chasing Static and correct the flaws, so we can have a really good horror game.

We waited 3 years for this?
This is a very poorly done remaster. In term of the visuals, it does the bare minimum. The characters' textures are not that bad, but otherwise everything was just upscaled with an AI and 3d models were not redone. They didn't even fix the wobbles on the character models.

And worst of all are the ugly visual effects. Lamps have gigantic lens flare, which is clearly a bug. There's no way the developers thought it looked good. Neon signs have horrible blooms, characters have a large ambient occlusion outline around them, etc.
And it also runs very poorly. The framerate constantly dips below 30FPS in certain areas. A game from 1999!

There are also a lot of bugs. Suspiciously long loading times, braindead AI, broken physics, overlapping music, janky animations...

This was one of the retro FPS releases I was most looking forward to, what a disappointment..

PS: The rating is obviously for the quality of the remaster itself, not Kingpin LoC as a game.

SPRAWL is a very good Cyberpunk FPS that starts off promisingly, but unfortunately runs out of steam along the way.
The game offers satisfying movement and action, with incredible art direction inspired by Japanese Cyberpunk aesthetics and a neat DnB soundtrack.
The first half of the game is absolutely gorgeous, and parkouring across the rooftops of Hong Kong-ish cityscape while shooting in slow motion like Max Payne is super cool. Sadly, we're limited to 3 weapons and about 4 enemies to fight.
The second half offers a greater variety of weapons and enemies. Unfortunately, it's the art style that takes a hit, and we start to progress more and more through repetitive industrial facilities that don't feel as memorable as the city part of the game. The level design loses some of its cleverness, and the game just throws hordes of bullet-spongy enemies at us.

I'd still recommend the game if you like Cyberpunk and action-packed FPSs. When the game achieves its peaks (around E1M3-M5) it's one of the most fun I had recently.

I'm glad I'm not a hardcore Payday 2 player, because I'd be really disappointed if this was the sequel I'd been waiting 10 years for.
Server issues aside, the game isn't even that bad imo. I like the stealth system and the gunplay is pretty good too. The graphics aren't extraordinary, but New York looks pretty cool.
That said, none of the levels are memorable. The title as a whole is bland, as if it had lost some of its edge and identity. It feels more like an imitation of Payday 2 than a true sequel.

Ehhh, not sure about this one.
To start with the positives, I think the new weapons are generally fun. I especially like the Tesla traps that electrocute enemies, even if they are hard to place since they take a lot of times to start.
Also, the final boss is a completely new enemy, which is always cooler than the Reckoning which recycled the boss from Quake II.

But I don't really like the level design of this expansion. First, I don't know why they thought it was a good idea to put turrets on the walls and ceilings of every room! It got really annoying towards the end.
New enemies often have too many health, and they have a nasty tendency to spawn right behind you.
Also the secondary objectives have way too much steps in general. Every levels are like "You have to power up the nuclear reactor, but first you have to cut the power of the lasers, but for that you have to empty the gas tank, but for that you have to find a keycard so you can..." ENOUGH ALREADY!! Is this Quake II or Dead Space?

Apart from the mine levels in the beginning, every levels are basically more of the same brown industrial environments we already saw in Quake II. It's not a terrible expansion but it's kinda dispensable imo.

Thanks to the Quake II remaster, I played the Reckoning for the first time, and I quite enjoyed it.
It doesn't offer anything really crazy - it's pretty much the same as the base game. But I like the level design approach, which gives a more realistic and immersive dimension to the environments than Quake II in some aspects. From what I understand, the same team will later make Return to Castle Wolfenstein, one of my favorite retro FPS, which may explain why I like the feeling of those levels.

The expansion also offers some nice new weapons (including a trap that turns enemies into meat cubes that act as heals, which is a lot of fun to use). There are also some new enemies, but it's a shame that most of them are just new skins of the original game's enemies.

In terms of the atmosphere, it's a mixed bag. The nature levels are almost reminiscent of Turok, which is refreshingly different from the base game. The section on the moon base is also well done. It's a level in space that actually feels like Quake II (unlike Quake II 64, which is also set in space but is so colorful that it no longer feels like Quake at all).
On the other hand, there are lots of levels in sewers and box-filled warehouses, which is a shame.

All in all, this is a substantial and enjoyable expansion that I'd recommend.

PS: also as a fun fact, this was apparently one of the first games Viktor Antonov, the art director of Half-Life 2 and Dishonored, worked on.

Ghostwire Tokyo has a lot of potential. It's an original IP set in modern day Tokyo, but with an emphasis on yokai, ghosts and other Japanese urban legends. The Shibuya district is well represented, probably one of the best representations of Tokyo in a video game, after the Yakuza series.
It's full of cool visuals and interesting/strange decisions that make the game very unique.

It's all the more baffling that the game's design itself is extremely bland. It feels like a Japanese studio tried very, very hard to make the most tedious and forgettable Ubisoft game, with lots of collectibles, boring side quests and other filler activities.
The combat is also pretty bad. They're never really fun or challenging, and tend to drag on and on. Towards the end, I was actively avoiding enemies, simply because I didn't want to engage in combat.
The story is also rather forgettable, and I found the main character uncharismatic.

I think if you like the idea of exploring a virtual Tokyo and are interested in Japanese culture in general, this is a game worth trying. But the overall open-world design and the game design make it much harder to recommend, which is a shame because the art direction is too good for this game.

Boltgun is mostly enjoyable, but I'm not sure why the boomer shooter community talks about it like it's the second coming of Christ.
I do love the aesthetics of the game. Some levels are very beautiful to look at, with huge, impressive structures and well-chosen colors/lighting.
The gore is also great, and the weapons are fun to use. So there is definitely a solid action game here.

But there are plenty of problems too. Mainly level design and pacing. The levels lack clever and unique situations, and most of the time it just throws the player into the middle of ok-ish arenas with a ton of enemies that spawn constantly. It ends up becoming quite repetitive (especially towards the end of the game, when even the visuals start to repeat themselves).
The developers seem to have forgotten that the strength of old-school FPS was not only the action, but also the cleverness of the level design.

The bosses are particularly bad. They have no unique strategy, and are just annoying bullet sponges. And they are recycled many, many times throughout the adventure. The last boss is a total slog. It's not even hard, it just drags on and on.

Also this is a nitpick, but Boltgun doesn't seem to know the meaning of "secret". At first, I was glad that the game had secrets like old-school FPS. But in this game, all the bonus items in the most obvious places are considered "secrets", which is a strange decision.

For any Warhammer 40K fans who also want to have a fun and gory FPS, Boltgun is certainly a game to try. But if you're looking for a fresh and unique boomer shooter that tries something new, this is probably not the right game.