count_bobby
2016
heavy on (good) aesthetics, satisfying to overcome, but a little too reminiscent of other games that were bolder in vision. it felt like it was on the precipice of being truly great; the music and sound design alone get it most of the way there. I kept thinking more favorably of games like Ico and Out of This World throughout my time with this.
2016
this felt like it could or should have been a story DLC for Yakuza 0. more of the same isn't really a bad thing, considering the superb quality of the previous game, but the overall experience is hamstrung by having less to do, less incentive to do any of it, and the supremely annoying Majima Everywhere mechanic. the penultimate fight is also just an exercise in frustration.
worth playing if you entered the series with Yakuza 0 as I did, but stick to the main story.
worth playing if you entered the series with Yakuza 0 as I did, but stick to the main story.
2010
despite what you may have heard, the similarities to twin peaks are superficial; alan wake's vibe is paperback supernatural thriller mixed with survival horror. the latter is done very effectively, with excellent lighting and sound design, especially for a game from 2010.
the game tells most of its story through pages of a manuscript strewn throughout the environment. it's a familiar mode, but it's more convincingly diegetic here than in other games where you might be reading emails or listening to audio recordings.
the core gameplay is decent once you get the hang of it, but it suffers from the fact that it doesn't develop much over the course of the game. there are just a handful of enemy types and just as many weapons, and the monotony of this becomes apparent long before the final chapter. weapon accuracy isn't rewarded for some reason (headshots seem to deal no more damage than anywhere else), and most of the challenge is based around crowd control and staggering enemies with your flashlight.
frustratingly, the windows version of the game has no option to disable motion blur nor mouse acceleration. i could see the former being a creative choice, but i really hate its inclusion in any game.
the game tells most of its story through pages of a manuscript strewn throughout the environment. it's a familiar mode, but it's more convincingly diegetic here than in other games where you might be reading emails or listening to audio recordings.
the core gameplay is decent once you get the hang of it, but it suffers from the fact that it doesn't develop much over the course of the game. there are just a handful of enemy types and just as many weapons, and the monotony of this becomes apparent long before the final chapter. weapon accuracy isn't rewarded for some reason (headshots seem to deal no more damage than anywhere else), and most of the challenge is based around crowd control and staggering enemies with your flashlight.
frustratingly, the windows version of the game has no option to disable motion blur nor mouse acceleration. i could see the former being a creative choice, but i really hate its inclusion in any game.
1995
Very much an RPG of its time. Simplistic battle system. Boring, often purely functional NPC dialogue. I probably would have enjoyed this a lot more if I had played it closer to its release; it's hard to recommend it to anyone else who's managed to avoid it in the almost 30 years the game has been available.