a whirlwind of emotions encased by desolate beauty. not sure why this is a bit embarrassing to me, but new vegas was THE game that got me to appreciate games as much as i do today. new vegas is good, i love that game (probably, i havent played it since i was 15), but fallout 1 is very special to me. the rugged controls and graphics have aged well in its dilapidated world, making each interaction born out of genuine curiosity. piecing together solutions from scrounged bits of ammo or investigative conversations made the quests feel incredibly organic. not one bit of exploration is falsehood. you are truly lost in the wastes and must dig yourself out. new vegas is similar but fallout 1 has you tread across new california to seek guidance or stumble upon what you need. youre told "yea we need a new water chip, good luck," given a handful of supplies, and propelled into a hateful world of dust. the self-autonomy of saving a whole people, a whole community's world, is daunting yet so marvellously enticing. it's almost like youre 'the chosen one' (i know thats fo2's protag, but thats not what i mean here), given an insurmountable task to complete. yet what differs here is that you arent a godlike figure, youre just an average joe that knows nothing about this fucked up world, making each success so much more triumphant. standing over the corpses of raiders and irradiated horrors never felt so good.

granted, combat is obtusely brutal. "You miss. You miss. Raider hit you for 300 fuck-ass damage. FEEL THE PAIN. The scar looks kinda neat though!" if youre specialized less for combat, each encounter feels more like a roll of the dice. especially in the later game, when otherworldly horrors become common foes. it's a gambling addict's wet dream; trying over and over to finally hit it big and win a lootable corpse. not that it's wholly unfair, but at times you will be one shotted. it's unavoidable. lady luck fucking HATES you. but with the right equipment, maybe some companions, and perseverance, you can topple the mightiest of giants. "You hit for 12 damage. You miss. Raider critically misses and shoots themselves in the face for 800 damage!" the cartoonish violence is a dopamine farm. watching a raider liquefy into a puddle or a deathclaw get its head ripped clean off, you want to conquer more and more of this insufferable wasteland.

but nobody plays fallout 1 for the action. nobody, in their right mind, plays fallout for the action. i guess fallout 4 and 76 are the outliers, theyre more of a sandbox than anything. fallout 1 is a good story, one that i struggle to even explain to anybody. the writing is fantastic with funny as hell dialogue, amazing world building, and evil as fuck villains. throw in some sympathetic characters and investigative quests, and youve got a decent summation of a fallout game. yet, what i found most interesting about this games story wasnt the writing, but rather the gameplay that surrounded it. you constantly make treks and inquiries to secure the future of vault 13. what the main quest boils down to is just living through the world like any other survivor. you arent given priority or special treatment, youre a nobody to everybody you meet outside the vault. youve gotta muster up the courage to get any progress done. along the way, you get tidbits of dilemmas and philosophy. adytum's fascistic regulators, the hub's hellish economy, junktown's feud, necropolis' occupation by mutants, the followers of the apocalypse's existence, so much shit that just begs you to ponder. humanity is diverse in beliefs and cruelty. thats really what makes fallout, as a series, so interesting. it's not the world-building or rpg elements (which are really good), but more so the exploration of different beliefs and violence that humans are so good at conjuring. to see the extremes of every side of humanity, to quell or partake in them in a post-apocalypse, makes it so enticing. really that is just fiction in general, but fallouts american setting and premise hone in on real-world parallels, compelling me more to join on its experiment.

while being able to directly interact with the different philosophies, politics, and levels of violence found across the game, fallout 1 has a sort of disconnect to it. from what i remember with new vegas, you are very linked into whichever factions you support and whatnot. yet in this game, you can help all sorts of groups, commit terrible crimes for mob bosses, and yet you can move on. you're a middle man, a contract worker, helping with a very specific task but not a designated member of a group. while being able to join the brotherhood, youre free to leave and, basically, do whatever you want all because youre an outsider. fallout 1s dilemmas and quests feel more like windows into all sorts of walks of life than commitments. this isn't terrible, i just found it very interesting. this isnt also true to every decision. some acts will lock you into a position a group may hate you for, but most of the time you are a passerby. it feels like a road trip in a sense. you explore a dead america and experience its new frail life, allowing you to believe whatever you want to and feel however you want to. pretty much every conversation with a talking head npc and quest npc has the option to provoke violence! fuck getting to know people, i want blood. all the more to show how much of a jack-of-all-trades mediator you are. true to only you and your vault and nothing else. youre paid to do a job, and you leave because you have more pressing matters like saving the world.

and its all for not. a futile endeavor where youre gloriously praised and thanked. youve accumulated powerful equipment and skills, but you never could return to your old life. a fatalistic ending to shatter your pride and fill in the cracks with a bleak despair. ultimately, it was the impact you had on peoples lives, not the grand goals that vault 13's overseer bestowed upon you, that had any significance. seeing how your actions shaped the land, whether you brought prosperity or ruin, the stops you made on the way mattered more than the destination. revel in the fruits of good deeds, or wallow in crippling societal collapse.

you deserve rest. youre a hero to some and a cretin to others. but you must leave. never come back.

i love this game, cant you tell by the rambling?

this may be shocking, but ive somehow avoided a good chunk of the discourse surrounding this game since its release. so when i say that i had low expectations, that negativity mostly stems from the numbing experience that was the first game. but also because of my bottomless ire for neil druckmann. druckmann is a wannabe, constantly wanting to live up to the names of sam lake, hideo kojima, and shinji mikami. in pursuing fame, the fake auteur clutches onto the medium of video games with pitiful fingers. although he and naughty dog catch a lot of flak, the developers deserve credit for their hard work. the game looks outstanding, feels great to play, has some sick art, and has a neat scavenging gameplay loop. but as a director, druckmann deserves all the shit i and other people throw at him. the story's plot is alright, and there are also some good tidbits (ellie's missing fingers at the end was a great touch). however, the gross romanticization of misery and inspiration for the story throws all the good under the bus. the game wants you to feel bad. it wants you to feel bile in your throat, dried blood on your gamer hands, and an uncomfortable twist in your stomach. violence is cruel, revenge is cruel, but to have players succumb to it for 20+ hours paired with the discord of satisfyingly explosive headshots, the last of us part 2 fails to evoke those feelings outside of cutscenes. it fails so badly that dogs are introduced to the combat as a cheap attempt to guilt the player. which is so odd when the story is already geared for emotional compulsion.

the characters you play as are bad people. they are selfish, violent, and vengeful. they have little to no redeeming qualities outside of helping those they care for. and that's the point. i don't understand the bashing of the protagonists for being unlikeable. they're anti-heroes; you're not supposed to like them, but you root for them because of something they've done that shows some glimmer of humanity. that's probably the one saving grace of the masturbatory playtime (inflated by how almost disrespectfully long cutscenes can get). but even then, the game's idf propaganda. one half, it's a venture into a foreign land for blood. the second half, it's a disgusting dehumanization of the palestinian people. druckmann's gone on record citing the lynching of 2 idf reservists as a major inspiration to the story for this game. and it shows because it's so clearly written from a zionist's point of view. "wow look how barbaric and violent these religious zealots are. theyre so transphobic and misogynist! the wolves (IDF stand-in) are normal people; look how cool they are with their militarist regime!" at times it tries to show that the wolves (WLF) aren't as good as they seem, but it's never fairly compared to the seraphites. it's so excessively biased, only making the WLF a full-on enemy in abby's story when she wants to be her own person. it's never a complete decry of the WLF, but it's always a condemnation of the seraphites. at least the game's version of the idf are just as much of a warmonger lol.

if i could strip away the politics and my ingrained distaste for the game's creator, the game is just mid. it's a run-of-the-mill AAA third-person shooter blockbuster. it looks next gen but it plays like Sony's stuck in 2009. there's nothing special going on here. It's the first game with some new guns, skills, and enemies. the level design is improved, but the visual clutter of photorealism sometimes detracts from the enjoyability of exploration. the story did not deserve the gut-twisting and palm-sweating reactions of its players. this game did not deserve to be heralded as the future of video games. neil druckmann did not fucking deserve to be awarded as a legendary "innovator" of games for directing the same game he did 7 years prior. if this is what AAA games are expected to become, i'll just continue digging into my hole of indies and classics. developers are being abused, neglected, and vacuumed into obscurity just to put out something to fulfill the dreams of the vainglorious. the games industry is fucked.

alas, im but a measly gamer... i dont know what's right for gaming. hail druckmann, the savior of the medium! we've truly found gaming's citizen kane! finally, our hobby is legitimized in the world of art!!1! miss me with that bullshit. im going back to silent hill 3 or some other good stuff.

OTXO is a fun time, but as far as roguelites go, it's absurdly excessive. 40 straight levels of thundering gunshots and hordes of enemies, by the time you get halfway through it your wrist is gonna need a break from all the lightning quick turns youll be making. it took me 2 hours to complete the game, and i think that's a long time for a run to last. some bosses feel very samey, but overall it's just too relentless to enjoy a full 2 hours of non-stop action. especially when i cant adjust my mouse sensitivity (the oddest choice ever, what the fuck). hotline miami is the first thing to come to mind when looking at this game, and that's a fair comparison. top-down shooter, combos, and punishing combat, the two games are almost family. however, otxo lacks the methodical tactician mindset of approaching a hotline miami level where you solve encounters through continuous trial and error. otxo is very much the opposite. you think on the fly. you have no room for error because death means a complete restart due to the nature of the genre. the little planning you can make is to hold chokepoints to lure groups of enemies into a kill room. otherwise, youll be rushing into a room. hell-brazen with lead to spit out into the poor souls inside, turning them into pools of blood. otxo is a real fucking nice looking game, i dig the monochromatic art style. yet it's also too noisy. so much blends in together that it can be hard to find a gun on the ground, notice an enemy that's still alive, or, at times, even figure out where you are on the screen. but visual clutter aside, the biggest problem is progression. unlocking new weapons and perks feels almost right. buffs in this game are liquors you can buy from a bartender and saleswoman, they give you various attributes and effects that can be really good (e.g. dodging bullets refills slow-mo meter) or useless (e.g. kicking enemy bullets refills slow-mo meter). this was well implemented, it's nothing crazy and is a system found in many games. put money into unlocking new perks for future runs, yadda yadda. however, new weapons are locked behind an rng encounter. sometimes, when moving between levels, you enter a combat-free room with readable lore (which is alright, but I still dunno whats going on. I'm just guessing it's some allegory for purgatory) and a gachapon machine. the gacha machine is where you cough up some bucks to unlock a new gun, if youre lucky. see, sometimes, instead of a shiny new mac 10, you could get a little funkopop. so not only do you need to get lucky to get into the room, but you also need to hope to get a new gun instead of some plastic crap that gamers love. I mean, it's not entirely terrible. collectibles are neat, but cmon man, the gacha room was already a chance encounter. don't add more variables to possibly unlocking new guns!! because of this, i only got about 5 new guns out of the many possible others. not gonna completely complain, i got to kill the final boss with a lever action shotgun, but i really wish i got to see the complete arsenal and liquor cabinet. this game is not that hard. you can cheese it fairly easily with certain liquors and strats. I beat the game on my 4th attempt; I must be some super gamer, though, let's just say that. difficulty is very subjective, but once i found the ideal strat for clearing rooms and got the right perks, i breezed through level after level. bosses werent even a problem for the most part. they have well-choreographed attacks but are also quite easy to dodge. Only 2 of the bosses actually scared me by getting me to impossibly low health, thankfully one of them is the final boss. my point here though is that i first-timed every single boss encounter, dying to my own fumbles in previous levels. again, it could just be my hotline miami veteran skills kicking in, but it felt that i should've been grinding this game longer to then finally face the last boss.

i seemed to have been quite negative in this review, and that's mostly because i'm fairly disappointed by a game i was really excited to get into. overall, it's not bad; it's a good time if you ever felt the itch for a hotline miami esque roguelite, but don't go into this to expect the same awe of the hotline miami games. however, i still believe it's a quality game. the combat is satisfyingly explosive, quenching any thirst for explosive 2D ultraviolence. good game if you want a quick roguelite.

cultic is a fantastic retreading of the boomer shooter formula. many a 90s FPS fan will take one look at cultic and instantly think of blood (1997). they wouldn't be wrong, but blood is just a small influence on its enemies, combat, and arsenal. I mean, it's got cultists and napalm. what cultic takes more inspiration from is the explosive nature of the build engine, yet streamlines the interactivity of the famous games made on that engine. it's still quite interactive, but most of the time, you'll only interact with readable notes and doors (thankfully, you can flush the toilets). however, if anything, resident evil 4 is cultic's biggest inspiration. from the absurdity to the stylish combat to the uncomfortably heat-inducing horror, cultic is taking resident evil 4 into the boomer shooter formula. you can shoot axes out of the air, throw dynamite and shoot it, grab an enemy's dynamite to throw back, and combo weapon swapping with slow-mo into a tornado of hellfire, all while offering intricate arenas to maneuver and explore. for the billions of retro 90s throwback shooters saturating the market these days, cultic is a phenomenal execution of the genre's pioneers while also offering cathartic modern twists. sucks that it's unfinished. very eager to play the next game or episode or whatever the weird release structure is called.

I can't imagine playing this with randoms since its objective-based gameplay loop requires immensely dedicated teamwork and coordination. with friends, it's a blast. the chaotic haze of brass, explosions, and crumbling walls is really thrilling. but it's so lacking in content, and honestly, unbalanced (not in a fun way) that I can't be bothered to return to this unless some friends reeeeeally want to play it. plus, this game is doing that thing that so many new mainstream competitive pvp games do where they really want to cash in on being an esports title. i dont dig that at all. sweats will always exist. I don't care about those types of players because I play Quake Live every once in a while, and that's practically the only demographic remaining in that game. what i mean is where a game devotes itself into becoming a hit with the esports scene, balancing a meta just for the digital athletes that aren't as important as the majority of the playerbase.

oh, also, the announcers suck. much of the aesthetic of this game is "how do you do fellow kids" type shit, and I find a lot of the art bland, although it's quite good-looking fidelity-wise.

neat take on a puzzle game while providing some nice satire. puzzle games are expectantly a zen genre, putting players in a thoughtful mood to come up with solutions or alternatives. yet sebil engineering says fuck that and throws a hell horde of never-ending cars and buses to disrupt that expectation. remaining calm, seeing the answer through the sea of chaos, sebil engineering is about making the most of silly, fucked up situations and i love it for that. at the end of the day, this is american infrastructure at its finest. the civil engineer is an underappreciated role, risking their life in the indifferent world of commuting. good game!!!

bit unrelated but idk why this is still marked tbd on here. it's not an early access game and from what i know the dev's released the game and is just continuing to update it.

robocop fans are eating so fucking good this year. with the 5 hour making-of documentary released and now a pristinely faithful game, i can say that teyon made the true robocop 3 that the fans deserved. robocop 3 isn't a horrendous movie but it's depressingly far detached from the original it's supposed to build off of. less violent, less satirical, less paul verhoeven-isms, it's almost so sad that i wouldnt recommend it, but it has such a goofy ending it's worth watching if youre a robocop fan. trust me, robo3 is schlocky to all hell and can get so bad that it becomes good. also otomo was tragically underused since hes a cool monster, shoutout phil tippett. robocop 3 aside, what i meant to bring up was that rogue city is more robocop than one of the actual 3 robocop movies. its gore matches and surpasses the original movie's squibs, it's absurdly ironic, and, buddy, these Poles fucking love paul verhoeven. shoutout Poland, been enjoying lotsa games outta there from what i can remember. the hud, the lovely sluggish movement, the explosive gunshots of the auto-9, the gorgeous model recreations, the fantastically rebuilt detroit (even though robocop was filmed in texas), and Peter fucking Weller is BACK as Robo. it's more than a love letter to the IP, it's almost a rebirth with how well-executed everything was. like i feel that more people could get into Robocop just from the first level of this game.

i was gonna buy alan wake 2 but since i dont want to give epic games any of my money, i gladly bought teyon's robocop FPS after having enjoyed my time with their terminator game. their terminator game was clunky and rough around the edges, had some design i wasnt a big fan of, but good god was it a terminator game. from music to visuals to worldbuilding, their terminator game was exactly like another film entry in the franchise. robocop rogue city follows suit. it's all so beautifully grimey. rain running off bricks, damp asphalt streets, dilapidated apartments, oh we're in hyper-decayed detroit baby. thankfully, for a UE5 game, it actually has some style to it. it doesn't have that off-putting tech demo aura to its visuals, something i sometimes felt with the system shock remake (that game is still quite good looking though dont get me wrong). rogue city is somehow probably the best use of UE5 that ive ever seen. everything is photorealistic yet stylish to fit robocop's aesthetic. the human models are bit too fake at times, especially with their almost stiff animations (which were perfect for robo so im not talking about him). the environments thankfully take up more screenspace and focus in the game as they're phenomenal. every piece of rubble, debris, and bit of destroyed wall is wonderfully included before and after you annihilate a room. the music is great, especially the rendition of the robocop theme which followed the first film instead of pulling a robocop 2 and doing its own thing. hearing those strings as i marched through halls and gunning down punks is so fucking empowering. it was almost sickening being the literal fist of the law, almost like being a jingoist chopper gunner spraying hellfire into a jungle. granted that was hyperbolic but the power of the robocop theme man, i cant understate it, i'd love to hear that shit as i shot down a nationalist from their huey. gunshots are explosive, but youll be hearing the auto-9's bursts more than anything. weapons aren't that interesting in rogue city. your auto-9 has infinite ammo and can be upgraded, so its your go to. the guns you can pick up are superfluous with the exception of the explosive weapons. the grenade launcher, rocket launcher, and cobra rifle are all great fun and useful to deal with groups and armored enemies. but even then, get your auto-9 to full auto and pierce armor and youre good to go.

rogue city isn't really anything remarkable as an FPS. it's slow and not too varied. you meet pretty much every enemy in the first 2-3 levels and the only noteworthy ones are the bosses. you'll be exploding heads, organic or metal, for the entirety of the game with the same gun. enemies amount to dudes with different guns, snipers and grenadiers are the most dangerous ones (suicide bombers would be noteworthy but they only appeared once in the game lol). mowing them down with the auto-9 though kinda just makes up for how uniform the enemy roster is. it's beyond satisfying to obliterate a room in trying to kill just 3 guys. in the year where the supposed f.e.a.r. successor, trepang2, was released i would not have guessed that a robocop game did f.e.a.r.'s explosive gunfights and tight combat encounters better. though to be fair the combat doesn't really reach anything spectacular until youve put some points into the skill trees, specifically the slow-mo ability and ricochet ability. these two abilities singlehandedly made combat more enjoyable by taking the power fantasy to monolithic heights. finally, i can recreate one of the best parts of robocop 2. initially i wasnt a big fan of the skills trees, still am a bit iffy on them. as they currently stand, its a bit lame that these fun abilities (sometimes even necessary on higher difficulties) are locked behind an exp system, but player progression is always cool. i feel that it wouldve been better if teyon dug deeper into the immersive sim itch that im assuming influenced development. this is far from an imsim, it's a full blown shooter, but it holds elements of deus ex exploration and investigation in its small hub world of downtown detroit. cobbling together solutions from either questioning a witness or getting all the clues from the environment was always a neat albeit not too complex experience since many of these extra choices are relegated to skill checks. this minor 2+2=4 but so does 1+3 way of allowing one or two other ways of progressing a side quest brought up these side activities by a lot and i just wished rogue city delved more into that alongside its "important" dialogue.

rogue city's story is good but flawed. it's borderline copaganda, but i find it hard to call that since this is like an ideal world if cops really were altruistic selfless good guys and it was solely an evil capitalist conglomerate that was against the community. eh rogue city probably just is more pro-cop than it is critical of the police, but im coping since i love robocop so much. that isn't to say that it's sucking a fat hog, many times in the game you get to choose to help others or let them go even if it's against the law. dont give a kid a $100 fine for tagging a wall or let god's drunkest soldier enjoy his stupor, there are little moments that show policing can be humane if done by the right person. then there's bigger moments like helping a journalist expose how delta city is actually forcing people into homelessness, being a whistleblower for the good of the people rather than a company executive or a judge. however, teyon had a different focus on this game's main story. what rogue city instead decided to succeed in was robocop's humanity. alex murphy is dead, legally and literally, but his spirit lives on in his reanimated corpse entombed by steel and circuits and struggles to understand itself in its violated state. exploring who alex murphy was and who robocop is are the big servings of meat this game gives the player and it does so wonderfully and cheesily that it seriously just hurt me when i remembered this wasn't robocop 3. the heart strings were pulled ngl. what i was mostly surprised by was how tiresome it felt to be bombarded by every person asking if i really did think alex murphy was still alive. like man leave me alone, murphy is right here kicking ass, get that through your thick skull. enemies at the end of the auto-9's barrel but also outside of battle with their sour remarks or disparagements. when it all came together at the end, it honestly felt triumphant to see murphy feel comfortable in his bulletproof shell and remaining skin. the people rooted for robo and i unintentionally joined in after not expecting to be so invested in the character development for an FPS game. aside from that, the best part of the writing is the comedy. it's absurd, it's stupid, it's nonchalant, overall a lovely time. ads about getting your family cremated and the ashes sent into space, ed-209 still trips on stairs, OCP is full of suits with sticks up their asses, and you can shoot enemies in the nuts. wonderful.

overall a fantastic shooter. strip away the robocop and it becomes another AA FPS game with minor RPG elements. however, even if it wasn't a robocop game, it's competent and fun. genuinely, robocop fan or not, the shooting and combat are so destructive it's impossible to not enjoy it. it feels so good to play a shooter where it's arcadey but not hyperactively trying to make me jump around an arena or punishing me for being aggressive for realism's sake. i like a good in between every once in a while, a good shooter doesn't always have to be titanfall 2 or utrakill or tarkov. maybe play rogue city above normal if youre familiar with FPSs (i played on hard), but this game gets so much right it's hard for it to do wrong by you. quite possibly goty material, fucking primo ultraviolence. i'd buy that for a dollar! x50

saw some people say that teyon should make an 'escape from new york' game. i agree with this sentiment but would like to propose john woo's 'a better tomorrow' as an alternative, or big trouble in little china if we're gonna stick to just american action flicks. judge dredd would be neat too. so many adaptations to beg for.

zortch is magnificently simple. satisfyingly tuned guns and movement paired with engaging labyrinthine levels engrossed by N64 visuals are such a treat. it's all so wonderful. the dev put in so much joy into zortch and playing it is an exercise in evoking it. admittedly it's not very hard, or at least on 'warrior' difficulty, as the game buries you in ammo and health pickups. but the exploration and combat encounters are just so fun. kicking enemies to knock them off their feet, lobbing dynamite to gib a whole mob, crawling through vents to uncover secrets, it's a kitbash of turok violence, quake anxiety, and half-life investigation. it's unfathomably underpriced for $5. zortch is undervalued for how good it is despite its short playtime.

never finished perseus mandate before, so i thought it was about time to do so. PM is the lowest the first F.E.A.R. can get, full of depressingly bland lighting, boring skirmishes, and weak additions. LithTech lighting is some of the greatest to be found in a game from its time and even today. Pitch-black silhouettes of enemies and deep voids accent the surfaces of F.E.A.R. to create an impeccable atmosphere. fighting in the shadows, exploring vents in a vacuum, and witnessing horrors in the dark, the stark lighting is great in the base game. timegate studios, for some reason, thought that the game should just have global illumination turned to 11, making nighttime outdoors combat incredibly drab. no muzzle flashes to light up dark corners or flashlights to cut through shadows, just plain ol', evenly lit arenas for 90% of the game. the arenas dont make it any better. many of them are boring single-floor, open rooms with boxes as the only cover. gone are the anxiously close-quarters gunfights of the original F.E.A.R. as most encounters are quick skirmishes across large rooms and halls. the verticality of the original made it even tenser when fighting enemies as they could flank from above or take a long winding path for a surprise attack. enemies in PM can barely surprise you. the new enemies arent even that interesting. the mercs are the same thing as the clone soldiers, so they're basically clones of clones. the quick ninja mercs are too tanky and quick to be entertaining fights, made worse by their usually terrible arenas. the new monster enemies are neat, made better by the area they're introduced in. that's probably the highlight of the expansion, the underground area where the invisible beasts kill your buddy chen. timegate remembered about the great lighting and puts it to great use while also putting f.e.a.r. in a new locale. it's a nerve-wracking level where you tiptoe and obsess over your flashlight battery. but good things always end and you get thrust back into the grinder of boring to decent fights. the new weapons arent even that exciting with a 'new' assault rifle (it has a scope?!?! woah..), a weaker railgun equivalent, a kinda sick grenade launcher, and a neat laser beam rifle. the placeable turret isnt really worth mentioning. Its only value is that it can distract enemies. the highs reached f.e.a.r.'s baseline, with great horror visuals and atmosphere on occasion. however, the lows were so low and more common, just dragging the expansion into a pitiful crater. it does scratch the f.e.a.r. gameplay loop at times, but it's not wholly worth getting into unless you're a big f.e.a.r.-head, which is the only reason i even decided to play it after hearing it was disappointing. a middle-of-the-road expansion, so replay f.e.a.r.

so grossly uninspired and disappointingly a waste of talent. the art style, enemy designs, and music (for the most part) sit atop a mound of rotting garbage bags housed in a dumpster painted to look like fallout 4 and bioshock infinite. i shit you not, theres a part in the game where youre in an elevator, and outside its glass, you see an underwater facility to which the protag makes a bioshock reference by saying, "this is some kinda rapture!" plus the music sounds so similar to the bioshock rapture reveal lol. incessantly grabbing onto every bit of incomprehensibly mundane litter to craft upgrades is mind-numbing which then gets exacerbated by its lifeless open world. exploration is something you want to avoid. empty rooms, ongoing hordes of enemies, pathetic traversal, major hallmarks of terrible open world design. halfway through the game, i didnt know you could drive cars and that joyful discovery was immediately soured by enemy corpses bringing my car to an instant trudge. the loot doesnt even justify the poor exploration. i did some of the "polygon" facility dungeon things and decided i didnt want to waste my time anymore with them after the third or fourth one. even though these dungeons, and the majority of story missions, have the best level design to offer in atomic heart, they are still just so boring. especially with a story so sporadic, so schizophrenic, there is almost nothing to get invested in. it's supposed to be this sorta story where the protagonist is being gaslighted by everybody he meets. it's supposed to make the player think about their mysterious origin and who may actually be the villain. in reality i just had no fucking idea what was going on. not sure if it was just a misfortunately poorly translated english script, but so much shit felt redundant, out of left field, or the equivalent of water going up your nose. combat is almost okay. melee is suprisingly alright, gunplay is nice, enemies are annoying as fuck though. especially that red nerve monster guy, pusschy or whatever. the enemies just jump all over the place and knock you down sometimes. manageable in small numbers, annoying when theres like 4 of them and then you get stuck on a prop or geometry.

just such a fucking sad experience more than anything. i honestly wished this was a fake video game instead of actually being playable. i think the one moment that mightve broken me the most was when the song "The Alien" from the soundtrack of Annihilation (2018) began playing in a 'pivotal' moment, and chickens began spawning around me. ironically, the positive with this game is that it's so bad that it's helping me love video games again because i dont want anybody to ever make something like this again.