john romero pulls up to this shit like a maestro. john romero pulls up to this shit like doom's his dimepiece and it's club night. john romero pulls up to this shit like he's been touched by the hand of God. anybody - and i mean anybody - who says that sigil isn't the best episode of doom is lying through their filthy fucking teeth. the level of complete ownage on display is rivaled only by the gnarliest of total conversions. the fact that it's sitting .3 below the base game (as of this review) and not being lauded over is nothing short of dumbfounding, dawg. i want anyone who disagrees with me to show me a smarter doom level than abaddon's void*.

the audacity of this romero, to map his enemy encounters and ammo stashes (and light sources!) like a survival horror title. either you grind out those secrets or you play sigil like it's resident evil with no inventory. enemy prioritization here is more important in half these levels than perfect hatred on ultraviolence. even with the secrets (which i found about half of) i was forced to run away from many enemies, rather than spill their guts. those baron of hell placements are perfect hatred pure evil. glorious, glorious Evil.

speaking of glorious, the music. Lord have mercy on my soul, these are the most killerest of tunes! i'm of course talking about the james paddock soundtrack that comes with the freeware version as filtered through my lovely timbres of heaven 3.4 soundfont. the buckethead soundtrack is... fine. i will take james' absolute mastery of midi rock over it any day. there is no truer joy than knowing that sigil's soundtrack sounds good through opl3 emulation. doom's soundtrack has always sounded like dogwater in opl3, but james... he gets it. he really gets it. if you won't play the wad, at least do yourself the favor of listening to its soundtrack.

it only took 25 years, but the truly ultimate doom episode that thy flesh consumed was promised to be is here. my hat is off and my knees are bruised. john romero has made me his bitch.

= (i maybe* prefer slough of despair, though i don't respect it nearly as much. )

(Demo abandoned)

What the fuck are we doing? How the hell did Dark Souls 3 become the template for action games?

"Oh, it's the potential for good levels!" But what would good level design even look like in this context? Dark Souls 1 has a simple combat system that doesn't rely on large open spaces without obstacles. This way the player can be trusted to defend themselves in most terrain, which in turn enables designs like Blighttown, Sen's Fortress, New Londo Ruins, etc. where enemies can meaningfully interact with the level geometry. One can argue how consistently applied or successful this was in practice, but there is a solid design goal there that's still visible even up to Elden Ring (as scattershot as that game is).

As you make combat systems and enemy AI more complex though, generally you'll have to start making the simplifying assumptions of plenty of open space and no blocking terrain, which in turn restricts your level design capabilities. This is fine if you build the game accordingly, i.e. most of the classic linear action games. But Dark Souls 3 likes do not actually seem to be aware of this and so have dragged along huge amounts of bloat sections (Stellar Blade: swimming, keypads, climbing) so they can continue to pretend that the spaces between fights have any relation to the actual mechanics.

Similarly constructed arguments can also be made for the following Souls systems, which I will leave as an exercise to the reader: items, camera, pacing, leveling.

So I guess the whole point of these games is to grit your teeth so that you can experience the combat system? But is the combat really all that interesting? The camera limits how many aggressive enemies you can reasonably handle at once, and not being able to hitstun enemies with normal attacks pushes you into hit and run defensive play, which in turn pushes you to abuse the simplistic, timing-based parrying and iframe systems that all these games are cursed with. Why bother when you can just play Nioh 2, which commits all the soulslike sins above but at least has actually interesting resource management, accessible hitstun, deep weapon movesets, and so on. Why play any of these games at all when you can play Monster Hunter where the defensive, commitment driven style that soulslikes are known for is a hundred times better executed?

This whole subgenre is a complete dead-end design wise and doesn't look to be getting better anytime soon. What a mess.

Absolutely perfect game from start to finish. After playing Returns I can clearly see that it walked so that Dread could run. Dread takes all of the best aspects in the previous games along with refining all the issues of the previous games and combined them to create this masterpiece. Every area is super memorable and fun to explore; the gameplay flow is just seamless and that makes returning to previous areas feel natural and not like a chore. The abundant number of boss fights is incredible and they're all super fun to fight against. They also added so much enemy and boss variety which was a problem that I had with Returns. The EMMIs are leagues above the SA-X in Fusion when it comes to gameplay due to their unscripted nature and forcing you to be skillful in avoiding them until you have the means to destroy them.

Lastly I wanna talk about the story and Samus' character in this game. While this game is much more focused on the gameplay (as the previous games mostly were as well), there isn't an insane amount of story content, which is fine. Instead we get major story reveals throughout the game which unveil a ton of cool lore and story that ties the previous stories together. Overall, this made Samus' character the most interesting she has been in the 2D series, and she didn't need to utter a single word for me to feel that way about her.

Dread is easily the best 2D Metroid, and probably the best 2D platformer I've played so far. It expands on everything the previous games had set up for it, and refines all the issues to create the most smooth gameplay experience in the series.

Genuinely the most disappointing game I've ever played. It promises so many things in the trailer but so little comes to fruition.
The gameplay is probably the best aspect of this entry, and it's not even that good. It's fun for a couple hours but starts to become repetitive and mindless. Having the game alter between two protagonists is also really annoying because you have to keep switching out your equipment.
The characters do not get any development, except for Chitose. Not the party nor the main antagonists, which are also just really boring and generic. They're barely present in the story and don't have any interesting dynamics with the cast, and the plot is as good as the antagonists.
Lastly, the ending is another beast of its own. I didn't think it was possible to write an ending worse than LAD7's but here we are. To keep it as spoiler free as possible: if you were interested in this game for the satisfying conclusion it promised, you'll be as disappointed as I was because there is no conclusion.
Everything is just kind of brushed off because RGG wanted to play it safe.

I do not recommend this game. It is seriously not worth the time or money and I regret falling for the hype and buying it day 1.