https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/10/01/infliction-extended-cut-review/
Explore a home plagued by tragedy and uncover the heartbreaking secrets hidden within messages, artwork, household objects, and other vestiges of domestic life. Uncover clues and use items to unlock new paths and make discoveries while doing everything possible to avoid the malevolent presence inhabiting the residence. Hide under tables or beneath beds and harness light sources like camera flashes to stun the spirit and momentarily elude its pursuit.
From the first frame of the game, it’s incredibly obvious that Infliction is yet another P.T. clone in the vast tsunami of P.T. clones after the popularity of that demo spiked. And once you know that, you know exactly what to expect from the game. Looping rooms, a ghost woman, and blatantly obvious hints as to what the twist of the game is. I don’t even have to expand on what the game is about because P.T. clones have become such a cliche at this point, like with the the Amnesia and Slenderman: The 8 Pages clones before it. But let’s take a dive into the game anyway, shall we.
Unfortunately, Infliction comes with a lot of small niggling problems. At one point I assumed that I had to move a hospital gurney to get into a vent, since it was clearly in the way of an open vent. But I actually had to move some boxes in another room that were completely covering a vent that I didn’t even know as there until I looked up a walkthrough. The ghosts/monsters/demons that appear throughout the game can’t actually kill you. You either die and respawn, possibly wasting your time with trying to get passed them depending on how you’re doing at the game, or one of them kills you to progress the story.
There have been a few times where merely opening a door knocked me into the wall, disorienting me for a few seconds before I realized what had happened and reorienting myself. I also got stuck in another area where I thought that I had to click the interact button with a pair of doors, but I had to walk through them. I don’t know how the game expected me to suddenly know to push up against the door to open them instead of just pressing the interact button.
Plus the walking speed feels like walking through molasses. I’m not expecting a Olympic sprinter, but being able to walk faster than an arthritic 80 year old would be nice.
All of these tiny problems add up and take what would have been a thoroughly tedious but forgettable experience and make it feel annoying and like you’re wasting your time.
But the game is not without some good qualities, as the game received a huge update to the game called “Inflicted: The Extended Cut” (which is the version that I played). It adds New Game+ that makes the game harder by increasing the amount of times the ghost appears and her difficulty, changes up the puzzles and adds new ones, and even adds another area to explore, and even a chapter select for players to jump into an area and replay it.
It also adds bonus content which includes concept art and videos of unused content that never made it into the game. It’s nice to see some of the behind the scenes stuff for the game, since it’s such a thing for games is a rarity, but even that doesn’t do much for the game.
There is an alternate ending, but I felt no need to go back and play through the game again on New Game+.
This is equivalent to one of those Direct-To-DVD or Made For TV movies that jump on a popular trend, but are poorly made generic. I’m so sick of P.T. inspired games with slow walking, looping rooms, and predictable plot filled with predictable scares. The only good thing that I can say about Inflicted is that I’ve played worse games. I know that’s and incredibly backhanded compliment, but it pretty much sums up my experience with the game.
Explore a home plagued by tragedy and uncover the heartbreaking secrets hidden within messages, artwork, household objects, and other vestiges of domestic life. Uncover clues and use items to unlock new paths and make discoveries while doing everything possible to avoid the malevolent presence inhabiting the residence. Hide under tables or beneath beds and harness light sources like camera flashes to stun the spirit and momentarily elude its pursuit.
From the first frame of the game, it’s incredibly obvious that Infliction is yet another P.T. clone in the vast tsunami of P.T. clones after the popularity of that demo spiked. And once you know that, you know exactly what to expect from the game. Looping rooms, a ghost woman, and blatantly obvious hints as to what the twist of the game is. I don’t even have to expand on what the game is about because P.T. clones have become such a cliche at this point, like with the the Amnesia and Slenderman: The 8 Pages clones before it. But let’s take a dive into the game anyway, shall we.
Unfortunately, Infliction comes with a lot of small niggling problems. At one point I assumed that I had to move a hospital gurney to get into a vent, since it was clearly in the way of an open vent. But I actually had to move some boxes in another room that were completely covering a vent that I didn’t even know as there until I looked up a walkthrough. The ghosts/monsters/demons that appear throughout the game can’t actually kill you. You either die and respawn, possibly wasting your time with trying to get passed them depending on how you’re doing at the game, or one of them kills you to progress the story.
There have been a few times where merely opening a door knocked me into the wall, disorienting me for a few seconds before I realized what had happened and reorienting myself. I also got stuck in another area where I thought that I had to click the interact button with a pair of doors, but I had to walk through them. I don’t know how the game expected me to suddenly know to push up against the door to open them instead of just pressing the interact button.
Plus the walking speed feels like walking through molasses. I’m not expecting a Olympic sprinter, but being able to walk faster than an arthritic 80 year old would be nice.
All of these tiny problems add up and take what would have been a thoroughly tedious but forgettable experience and make it feel annoying and like you’re wasting your time.
But the game is not without some good qualities, as the game received a huge update to the game called “Inflicted: The Extended Cut” (which is the version that I played). It adds New Game+ that makes the game harder by increasing the amount of times the ghost appears and her difficulty, changes up the puzzles and adds new ones, and even adds another area to explore, and even a chapter select for players to jump into an area and replay it.
It also adds bonus content which includes concept art and videos of unused content that never made it into the game. It’s nice to see some of the behind the scenes stuff for the game, since it’s such a thing for games is a rarity, but even that doesn’t do much for the game.
There is an alternate ending, but I felt no need to go back and play through the game again on New Game+.
This is equivalent to one of those Direct-To-DVD or Made For TV movies that jump on a popular trend, but are poorly made generic. I’m so sick of P.T. inspired games with slow walking, looping rooms, and predictable plot filled with predictable scares. The only good thing that I can say about Inflicted is that I’ve played worse games. I know that’s and incredibly backhanded compliment, but it pretty much sums up my experience with the game.
2006
This review contains spoilers
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/mod-corner-poke646-vendetta-half-life-2006-review/
WARNING: This review contains mild spoilers for Poke646, please play the first mod first.
NOTE: This is a review of the Anniversary Edition of this mod.
After the unanimous praise the first Poke464 mod from magazines, websites, and players, the creators decided to return 5 years later to develop and release a sequel. Poke646: Vendetta puts you once again in the shoes of Damien Reeves, now driven by revenge for all of the suffering he had to go through in the original mod and goes after the people who put him in this situation.
This time around, instead of getting messages from Dr. Fuller or reading notes, this time around you’ll be getting all of your information from laptops laying around each area from the Poke646 team members. This way makes it easier to know where to collect 4-digit codes, goals, and plot points from. I guess enough people complained about the first mods that it was changed with this one.
Graphically, this mod is a step up over the last mod. It really seems to push what the engine was capable of at the time. While it’s great to see that the team behind the last mod managed to learn a couple of things, not only is Vendetta shorter than the first mod, it reuses several models and even the odd location from the first mod. It does do enough with these reused locations that it doesn’t bring the mod down in anyway and they’re incredibly brief. Two levels from another well known Valve IP also makes a brief cameo.
Most of the signature weapons return, such as the Pipe, the Pipebomb, the CW-LW Bow Rifle, and the Double Barreled Shotgun. Unfortunately, the two nailguns down return, but instead we get a brand new gun, the PAR-21 Assult Rifle. It’s pretty much the standard Assault Rifle you see in every game, with a high rate of fire and secondary fire that shoots grenades. Yeah, it looks nice, but it doesn’t quite have the personality of a makeshift nailgun weapon does.
Poke646: Vendetta is a step up over the first mod in a lot of ways and is a worthy sequel, even if it’s only half the length of the first one, and just like the first one, this also got an “Anniversary Edition” update to run on the modern version of Half-Life. If you liked the first mod, this is definitely worth checking out.
WARNING: This review contains mild spoilers for Poke646, please play the first mod first.
NOTE: This is a review of the Anniversary Edition of this mod.
After the unanimous praise the first Poke464 mod from magazines, websites, and players, the creators decided to return 5 years later to develop and release a sequel. Poke646: Vendetta puts you once again in the shoes of Damien Reeves, now driven by revenge for all of the suffering he had to go through in the original mod and goes after the people who put him in this situation.
This time around, instead of getting messages from Dr. Fuller or reading notes, this time around you’ll be getting all of your information from laptops laying around each area from the Poke646 team members. This way makes it easier to know where to collect 4-digit codes, goals, and plot points from. I guess enough people complained about the first mods that it was changed with this one.
Graphically, this mod is a step up over the last mod. It really seems to push what the engine was capable of at the time. While it’s great to see that the team behind the last mod managed to learn a couple of things, not only is Vendetta shorter than the first mod, it reuses several models and even the odd location from the first mod. It does do enough with these reused locations that it doesn’t bring the mod down in anyway and they’re incredibly brief. Two levels from another well known Valve IP also makes a brief cameo.
Most of the signature weapons return, such as the Pipe, the Pipebomb, the CW-LW Bow Rifle, and the Double Barreled Shotgun. Unfortunately, the two nailguns down return, but instead we get a brand new gun, the PAR-21 Assult Rifle. It’s pretty much the standard Assault Rifle you see in every game, with a high rate of fire and secondary fire that shoots grenades. Yeah, it looks nice, but it doesn’t quite have the personality of a makeshift nailgun weapon does.
Poke646: Vendetta is a step up over the first mod in a lot of ways and is a worthy sequel, even if it’s only half the length of the first one, and just like the first one, this also got an “Anniversary Edition” update to run on the modern version of Half-Life. If you liked the first mod, this is definitely worth checking out.
2010
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/02/14/dinner-date-pc-review/
Dinner Date was developed and distributed by Stout Games, and was developed by a single person, Jeroen D. Stout, who also voices the protagonist’s subconscious. The only other person involved was Than van Nispen tot Pannerden, which is a mouthful, who specifically did the music for this game.
Dinner Date is an experimental video game told entirely from the protagonists point-of-view, as a man named Julian Luxemburg, as we hear his inner thoughts during a date as he slowly realizes that he’s been stoop up. The only control that the game gives you is interacting with what Julian has set up for his date and the dining room of his apartment. Essentially being in control of his subconsciousness.
You interact with these items by looking around the room and pressing whatever button the item corresponds with. The keys are laid out the same way one of your hands fingers rests on the keyboard, meaning that there isn’t much interactivity. The game lasts about 25 minutes total. There is some reputability in what you pick, but the majority of the content is limited to one playthrough.
Julian is a very unlikable character. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be intentional or not, but it makes playing through the game annoying. All he does is complain about work, thinks about how he wants to get laid, and how he wants to do more cycling. He comes off as incredibly shallow and selfish. If you’ve consoled a friend after they’ve been dumped or stood up, you’re pretty much experienced this game.
The game has a pleasant presentation. Graphically, the game looks pretty nice. Which is surprisingly nice since it was all done by one guy. The soundtrack is nice to listen to and sets the mood.
I can’t recommend Dinner Date. It’s short, has little replayability, and it doesn’t have much depth. Plus the main character is unappealing and I wouldn’t want to spend any time with him. Maybe that was the point, and I could see that argument, but no one outside of a few people wanting to analyze something like this, there’s no reason to go play this.
Dinner Date was developed and distributed by Stout Games, and was developed by a single person, Jeroen D. Stout, who also voices the protagonist’s subconscious. The only other person involved was Than van Nispen tot Pannerden, which is a mouthful, who specifically did the music for this game.
Dinner Date is an experimental video game told entirely from the protagonists point-of-view, as a man named Julian Luxemburg, as we hear his inner thoughts during a date as he slowly realizes that he’s been stoop up. The only control that the game gives you is interacting with what Julian has set up for his date and the dining room of his apartment. Essentially being in control of his subconsciousness.
You interact with these items by looking around the room and pressing whatever button the item corresponds with. The keys are laid out the same way one of your hands fingers rests on the keyboard, meaning that there isn’t much interactivity. The game lasts about 25 minutes total. There is some reputability in what you pick, but the majority of the content is limited to one playthrough.
Julian is a very unlikable character. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be intentional or not, but it makes playing through the game annoying. All he does is complain about work, thinks about how he wants to get laid, and how he wants to do more cycling. He comes off as incredibly shallow and selfish. If you’ve consoled a friend after they’ve been dumped or stood up, you’re pretty much experienced this game.
The game has a pleasant presentation. Graphically, the game looks pretty nice. Which is surprisingly nice since it was all done by one guy. The soundtrack is nice to listen to and sets the mood.
I can’t recommend Dinner Date. It’s short, has little replayability, and it doesn’t have much depth. Plus the main character is unappealing and I wouldn’t want to spend any time with him. Maybe that was the point, and I could see that argument, but no one outside of a few people wanting to analyze something like this, there’s no reason to go play this.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/mod-corner-mi-new-dawn-2005-max-payne-2-the-fall-of-max-payne-review/
Throughout the history of video games, there have been a metric fuckton of video games based on films. From infamous companies like LJN flooding the market on the NES/SNES, to the terrible budget games you’d see on the Wii and PC, and numerous cheaply made ad-filled “games” taking up the Android and Apple online stores. There are hundreds of them, and 90% of them are trash pumped out either in time to meet the movies release date or just to have a brands name slapped onto a product. So the 2005 Max Payne 2 mod, M:I – New Dawn, being one of the better ones despite being a fan made project is depressing.
Mission: Impossible – New Dawn, or M:I – New Dawn for short, is a mod for Max Payne 2, that was released in 2005. M:I – New dawn tells it’s own story, but it’s pretty obviously based on the Mission: Impossible films starring Tom Cruise that were incredibly popular at the time.
After an F-16 crashed over Utah, everything looks like an accident at first, but as the wreck is recovered, it is discovered that the pilot is gone, and the new generation of warhead that was on the F-16 is gone with him. Ethan Hunt is sent in to figure out where the man and warhead have disappeared to, and prevent said warhead from getting into the wrong hands. Soon, Ethan finds himself in the middle of something bigger than he first thought and has no one he can trust or turn to. The plot is pretty much a generic early 2000’s action movie, but it’s good enough to get the mod going and keep you paying attention.
For the most part, the gameplay is the same as Max Payne 2, but the character does have an ability called Gun Kata. Take from another mod called House of Mirrors, based on the film Equilibrium, which is where the ability comes from, and is that movies excuse to have slick action scenes by combining guns and martial arts. You have to go out of you way to select it and it only work on the dual MP5Ks, so there really isn’t a reason to use it.
My only real complaint is some of the level design, such as one area in a level having you run towards enemies shooting at you so you can get to a subway station, which comes across as counter-intuitive. This only happens once in the entire mod, so it’s not that big of a problem. Also, for some reason, sometimes the dialogue of a cutscene will play even though you skipped the cutscene. It seems like it happens when you skip a cutscene too quickly, but it happens at random.
M:I – New Dawn is about 2 hours at most, depending on player skill and difficulty, so it won’t take much longer than an afternoon. Plus it’s a free quality mod, so it’s not going to cost you anything other than your time.
Throughout the history of video games, there have been a metric fuckton of video games based on films. From infamous companies like LJN flooding the market on the NES/SNES, to the terrible budget games you’d see on the Wii and PC, and numerous cheaply made ad-filled “games” taking up the Android and Apple online stores. There are hundreds of them, and 90% of them are trash pumped out either in time to meet the movies release date or just to have a brands name slapped onto a product. So the 2005 Max Payne 2 mod, M:I – New Dawn, being one of the better ones despite being a fan made project is depressing.
Mission: Impossible – New Dawn, or M:I – New Dawn for short, is a mod for Max Payne 2, that was released in 2005. M:I – New dawn tells it’s own story, but it’s pretty obviously based on the Mission: Impossible films starring Tom Cruise that were incredibly popular at the time.
After an F-16 crashed over Utah, everything looks like an accident at first, but as the wreck is recovered, it is discovered that the pilot is gone, and the new generation of warhead that was on the F-16 is gone with him. Ethan Hunt is sent in to figure out where the man and warhead have disappeared to, and prevent said warhead from getting into the wrong hands. Soon, Ethan finds himself in the middle of something bigger than he first thought and has no one he can trust or turn to. The plot is pretty much a generic early 2000’s action movie, but it’s good enough to get the mod going and keep you paying attention.
For the most part, the gameplay is the same as Max Payne 2, but the character does have an ability called Gun Kata. Take from another mod called House of Mirrors, based on the film Equilibrium, which is where the ability comes from, and is that movies excuse to have slick action scenes by combining guns and martial arts. You have to go out of you way to select it and it only work on the dual MP5Ks, so there really isn’t a reason to use it.
My only real complaint is some of the level design, such as one area in a level having you run towards enemies shooting at you so you can get to a subway station, which comes across as counter-intuitive. This only happens once in the entire mod, so it’s not that big of a problem. Also, for some reason, sometimes the dialogue of a cutscene will play even though you skipped the cutscene. It seems like it happens when you skip a cutscene too quickly, but it happens at random.
M:I – New Dawn is about 2 hours at most, depending on player skill and difficulty, so it won’t take much longer than an afternoon. Plus it’s a free quality mod, so it’s not going to cost you anything other than your time.
2017
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2020/07/05/press-x-to-not-die/
You wake up to find your town in chaos. Everyone has gone crazy and is just attacking each other! Your friend gives you a cryptic message before he is killed. The secret to survival– Press X to not die!
Looking at the trailer and reading the description for this game, it’s pretty obvious that this game is pretty much a one joke game, and if you’re not into that joke, you’re definitely not going to be into this game.
I will give the game some credit, there is some replayability here. The game has multiple difficulties, which has the button combinations that you have to press be more complex the higher the difficulty. The game also has multiple dialogue choices throughout out the game, meaning that even though the game only has ~35 minutes of footage tops, the game requires at least a second play through to see most of it. Plus there are neat extras such as behind the scenes images, bloopers, and a “1994 Mode” that pixelated the screen to look like a mid-90s game, even if it’s not accurate.
There’s even a “Special Edition” DLC pack for the Steam version that comes with a prototype for the game that is a proof of concept with stuffed toys. While the whole experience is incredibly limited in what it has to offer, there was some effort and thought put into this game.
It’s obvious that the people behind this game were having fun making it, and it comes across. But when it comes down to it, you’re essentially watching a group of friends having fun making a dumb game with dumb jokes.
If the title or even the trailer don’t peak your interest, don’t even bother checking it out. If it weren’t for the fact that this game cost 75 cents when I bought it, which was the price while it was on sale at the time. Unfortunately, I don’t know if I can recommend it. Not unless you like similar “gimmick” games such as “Goat Simulator” or “Mother Simulator”.
You wake up to find your town in chaos. Everyone has gone crazy and is just attacking each other! Your friend gives you a cryptic message before he is killed. The secret to survival– Press X to not die!
Looking at the trailer and reading the description for this game, it’s pretty obvious that this game is pretty much a one joke game, and if you’re not into that joke, you’re definitely not going to be into this game.
I will give the game some credit, there is some replayability here. The game has multiple difficulties, which has the button combinations that you have to press be more complex the higher the difficulty. The game also has multiple dialogue choices throughout out the game, meaning that even though the game only has ~35 minutes of footage tops, the game requires at least a second play through to see most of it. Plus there are neat extras such as behind the scenes images, bloopers, and a “1994 Mode” that pixelated the screen to look like a mid-90s game, even if it’s not accurate.
There’s even a “Special Edition” DLC pack for the Steam version that comes with a prototype for the game that is a proof of concept with stuffed toys. While the whole experience is incredibly limited in what it has to offer, there was some effort and thought put into this game.
It’s obvious that the people behind this game were having fun making it, and it comes across. But when it comes down to it, you’re essentially watching a group of friends having fun making a dumb game with dumb jokes.
If the title or even the trailer don’t peak your interest, don’t even bother checking it out. If it weren’t for the fact that this game cost 75 cents when I bought it, which was the price while it was on sale at the time. Unfortunately, I don’t know if I can recommend it. Not unless you like similar “gimmick” games such as “Goat Simulator” or “Mother Simulator”.
2019
Layers of Fear 2 is a first person psychological horror game that follows a Hollywood actor who heeds the call of an enigmatic director to take on the lead role in a film shot aboard an ocean liner. Along the way you explore the story of a girl named Lily and her little brother James as they try to hide on the boat and escape from it’s crew.
Initially, Layers of Fear 2 seems to take the gameplay concepts and presintation from the first and refine them, but it doubles down on everything that made the first game tedious.
The gameplay mechanic of opening doors by having to turn their handles manually, like the first game had and had taken from Amnesia back when that game was all the rage, but it’s made worse by the fact that some sections now have you rushing to try and get away from a creature chasing you, just like Amnesia. It worked in Amnesia because that game gave you ample space to get away from creatures most of the time, but in Layers of Fear 2, it just feels clunky because every space is a small space that can lead you to easily be caught by the monster the first time since it often takes you by surprise.
Layers of Fear 2 also brings a whole host of new neat graphical tricks that give it a distinct visual flair from the first game, but since the game is much longer than the first one, even the new visuals get tiresome by the end of the game.
The game actually references several popular and well known films, shorts, and music videos. But instead of just having those references be either brief scenes, shout-outs, or simple references in the form of a poster or as a brief visual gag, they’re just lifted wholesale. These movies include Metropolis (1927), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and The Shining (198), short film A Trip to the Moon (1902), short film and music video Rubber Johnny (2005), and a whole section dedicated to the movie Se7en (Seven) (1995).
They’re so blatant that you don’t even have to have seen some those films to know what they’re referencing.
The only compliment that I can give this game is that it has actor Tony Todd, who plays the titular director of the game, and I can’t get enough of Tony Todd and his amazing voice.
The best way that I can describe Layers of Fear 2 is that it’s more of the same from the first game, just with a new coat of paint. And while that might be appealing to fans of the first game, it still has little to offer beyond a few neat visual tricks buried deep within a tedious gameplay loop and mediocre story.
Initially, Layers of Fear 2 seems to take the gameplay concepts and presintation from the first and refine them, but it doubles down on everything that made the first game tedious.
The gameplay mechanic of opening doors by having to turn their handles manually, like the first game had and had taken from Amnesia back when that game was all the rage, but it’s made worse by the fact that some sections now have you rushing to try and get away from a creature chasing you, just like Amnesia. It worked in Amnesia because that game gave you ample space to get away from creatures most of the time, but in Layers of Fear 2, it just feels clunky because every space is a small space that can lead you to easily be caught by the monster the first time since it often takes you by surprise.
Layers of Fear 2 also brings a whole host of new neat graphical tricks that give it a distinct visual flair from the first game, but since the game is much longer than the first one, even the new visuals get tiresome by the end of the game.
The game actually references several popular and well known films, shorts, and music videos. But instead of just having those references be either brief scenes, shout-outs, or simple references in the form of a poster or as a brief visual gag, they’re just lifted wholesale. These movies include Metropolis (1927), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and The Shining (198), short film A Trip to the Moon (1902), short film and music video Rubber Johnny (2005), and a whole section dedicated to the movie Se7en (Seven) (1995).
They’re so blatant that you don’t even have to have seen some those films to know what they’re referencing.
The only compliment that I can give this game is that it has actor Tony Todd, who plays the titular director of the game, and I can’t get enough of Tony Todd and his amazing voice.
The best way that I can describe Layers of Fear 2 is that it’s more of the same from the first game, just with a new coat of paint. And while that might be appealing to fans of the first game, it still has little to offer beyond a few neat visual tricks buried deep within a tedious gameplay loop and mediocre story.
2016
This review contains spoilers
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/10/10/spoilers-obscuritas-pc-2016-review/
When Sarah inherits her great-uncle’s old country house, she has no idea about the dark secret she has stumbled upon and into what obscure world it will take her to.
There isn’t really too much more to the premise beyond that, or there shouldn’t be, but we’ll get to the plot later. But let’s get into the gameplay first.
Unfortunately, the game also has those dreaded game mechanics that every horror game at the time had, collecting batteries and notes. Apparently in this universe, the batteries only have 2 minutes worth of charge to them for some reason. And when the flashlight is running out of power, it flickers, making having it on annoying. Do we really still have to have this mechanic in horror games? I feel like Outlast did the whole batteries thing the best.
Although, you don’t have to dig through ever draw in a dresser to find notes like other games such as every other Amnesia: The Dark Descent clone, as there are very few of them and they’re always on a table and highlight when you look at them.
But weirdly, there are also matchboxes that you can collect to light candles, along with flicking a light switch on if you’re in the mansion to light up whatever room you’re in. Why have all three of these mechanics at once? Why not have the lights in the mansion stop working, forcing you to use the flashlight and candles? It would at least make sense as to why the game has all three mechanics.
For the first half of the game, you’re solving puzzles that your great-uncle has left for you to prove that you’re a worthy heir. It’s slightly silly, but there wouldn’t be much of a game otherwise, and there have been sillier plots and executions of a story. But at some point the game begins introducing puzzles with traps that can kill you. After you move from the house to the greenhouse, there is a trial-and-error maze with traps that can kill you if you go the wrong way. That’s not much of a test for if someone is a worthy heir if they can be killed by simply picking wrong. That’s one hell of a way to ramp up the stakes.
The greenhouse soon leads to an underground maze, which is just as dark and grey as the house (or is it the other way around?), which involves you solving a puzzle involving pressure plates and large rock statues. So this puzzles involves a tiny 80 pound woman lugging giant statues around that must weight at least a few hundred pounds. I guess she must have been really working out.
To be fair, I never had any problems solving the puzzles throughout the game. They all make logical sense to some extent. Some other levels have you finding items, like keys for doors or items to use on other items such as fuses or gears.
And thankfully the character talks to herself when either something happens or you come across something that you should be paying attention to so that you know what’s going on, which is more than I can say for a lot of bad games that have puzzle solving. Although, there are still a few moments where the character should have said something out loud as a hint to what is going on.
And while I’m giving out compliments, you can actually see your own body if you look down, even if it’s only when I’m running around, and you can see your shadow, which is another thing that a lot of first person games don’t do. But I feel like I’m grasping at straws here.
But to bring the review back down, there are still a few problems, like sometimes there are multiple doors in a level that claim that they require a key, but there is only one key and you have to go to each individual door to figure out if the key goes to it, filling the game out with more pointless busy work
Also, there is no way to manually save the game. There are checkpoints scattered throughout the levels, but these aren’t saves, they’re just so that if you die or fail, you can load back to a certain point of the level and just try over again. If you quit the game, you have to start the level all over again. It made me dread coming back to the game if I had to quit for whatever reason.
Graphically, the game is mediocre at best. Everything is so grey and flat. Also, I don’t have a beast of a machine, but I’ve been able to play more resource intensive games at higher framerates, or at least similar framerates than this game. It’s roughly 30fps when the graphics settings are set to high and everything is on, and just over 60fps when everything is on low and turned off. I’m no graphics snob, but there is no reason that a game that looks like this should be running this badly.
And it’s not like I’m the only one to have this complaint, as there are a few people with similar complaints on the Steam forums.
It also doesn’t help that the game is pretty dark for it’s entirety, needing me to constantly have the flashlight constantly on. I know it’s supposed to be a horror game, but even when I have the flashlight on, lit some candles, and have the lights in the room on, it still looks pretty dark. I had to turn up the brightness all the way in the options just to see anything and not strain my eyes.
Which makes it even hard to find objects in a room, and there have been times where I’ve accidentally walked passed something that I was trying to find. Thankfully all items highlight when you’ve moused over them, but it’s annoying.
The store page also claims that the game has a “fear recognition mechanic”, which is PR speak for “this game has jump scares and spooky things happening randomly throughout the game depending on how you’re playing”. How this is supposed to work is that the game will randomly pick ‘scary moments’ and just play them randomly throughout the game, much like the insanity system from Eternal Darkness (2002).
I’m pretty sure that the game plays the same scares at the same points no matter what you do. And frankly, I didn’t feel like playing the game multiple times or spending hours trying to replay a level to see if it worked. The game was a tedious slog the first time.
Random scares include phones randomly ringing as you walk passed them, a clock alarm going off, piano keys being pressed by an unseen force, a statue head moving to look at you, a fly appearing to crawl across your screen, a ghostly apparition appearing at the end of a hallway, sometimes exploding when you get closer, bleeding walls, and shadows of something disappearing around a corner, only for nothing to be there. It even plays some creepy noises to make you think that there is something else following you.
All of these scares happen over and over again, it’s just gets so repetitive. And I’m pretty sure that some of the ghostly shadows are of medical equipment. So spooky.
And the thing is, I’ve spent over 1000 words talking about this game and I haven’t even talked about the plot yet. I know that I briefly mentioned the premise, but the plot is another thing into itself.
WARNING: SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT.
At some point you discover that your great-uncle has a portal in his personal underground labyrinth, and once you figure out how to operate it, it takes you to another dimension. I think? I’m honestly surprised that the plot turned out to be something other than a haunted house with puzzles in it. And the death trap puzzles and the portal that looks like a Stargate is just what happens in the first third of the game.
And this is where the game starts to go off track.
The portal takes you to a house in a field in what looks to be the middle of the mountains, and you have to enter what you think is the basement, only to randomly enter an asylum located under the house, which has an area where you have to dodge spinning blades on moving poles. And this is where it becomes blatantly obvious that the developers clearly tried to stitch together the pre-made assets that they bought off the Unity store. And it doesn’t work.
Soon you come across a whole theme parks worth of levels. I’m being serious here. You come across a Roller-coaster that you have to turn on and remove a log off the tracks, otherwise you die while riding it, then a fun house with flashing lights, a hall of mirrors, and clown jump scares, then a Ferris Wheel that has a brief section with bumper cars that move when you don’t look at them, before moving onto a haunted house with mannequins that only spin in place or disappear instead of moving when you don’t look at them.
Later sections ruin the atmosphere and consistency that the game is trying to have. One area is an homage to the film Cube (1997), one of the creepy dolls looks exactly like Jeff Dunham’s Grandpa character, and there’s even a stupid giant skull that you would see in a cheesy pirate movie from the 50s or a 90’s children’s game show. There’s even a scare that is a balloon coming out of a bathroom sink that’s just an homage to the 1990 version of Stephen King’s IT.
The middle of the game also introduces patrolling monster dogs that can kill you in one shot, are transparent and hard to see, only made harder to see by how dark the game is. Thankfully they have a per-determined patrolling route so you can avoid them. But they aren’t exactly the best of enemies, since half the time I accidentally walked right through them or passed them without realizing it because they didn’t spot you.
At some point I even learned that I could just slowly walk behind them and they won’t notice me.
I don’t even know why these creatures are here, as they just make the game take longer. At east with the puzzles, you can take your time to complete them. The animals just add an extra layer of frustration to the game. And there is a brief moment before the monster dog kills you where the monster dog stops making sound, making you think that you lost the dog, only for the dog to instantly kill you, making that whole experience that much more annoying.
My biggest problem with the game is the amount of levels. I know that variety is the spice of life, but there is such a thing as too much spice.
At some point you have to go through a maze.. At this point in the game I gave up and looked for help to get through the maze. There are hints on how to get through it posted by the developer on the Steam forums, so it’s not like I’m the only one who had trouble here. And one trap was so confusing on how it worked. Plus mazes are always some of the worst levels in a video game. At least the developer prevents backtracking and getting lost to a certain extent by cutting off previous parts of the maze by having walls appear. I was still confused by the maze though.
The last level has you backtracking slightly into the level that came before it, or at least part of it despite the fact that the game hasn’t done that before. I was so confused as to what was going on until I realized what the game was doing.
Another level has you going through a cave that contains a pool of water that makes your character walk so slow that I thought that I was going in the wrong direction and that this was the games way of telling me to not go that way.
And to top it all off, there is a level of the game where you just walk for a while before finding a key in a small house that opens a nearby gate. And that is what the whole level is. The walking to the house was so long that the game has to put a checkpoint after the walk before you get to the house so if you die to the monster dog, you don’t start the whole level again. Why is this level here?
That’s the worst thing about this game. Half of the time I was questioning why something was in the game. Half the levels could have easily been cut out and the game would have lost nothing.
This game is one of the worst that I’ve played. It’s execution is tedious and annoying at the best of times, and that’s me being polite. If it wasn’t for the fact that I bought this for incredibly cheap on a sale and made this review, I wouldn’t have given this game the time of day. Especially when there are better games out there for free.
When Sarah inherits her great-uncle’s old country house, she has no idea about the dark secret she has stumbled upon and into what obscure world it will take her to.
There isn’t really too much more to the premise beyond that, or there shouldn’t be, but we’ll get to the plot later. But let’s get into the gameplay first.
Unfortunately, the game also has those dreaded game mechanics that every horror game at the time had, collecting batteries and notes. Apparently in this universe, the batteries only have 2 minutes worth of charge to them for some reason. And when the flashlight is running out of power, it flickers, making having it on annoying. Do we really still have to have this mechanic in horror games? I feel like Outlast did the whole batteries thing the best.
Although, you don’t have to dig through ever draw in a dresser to find notes like other games such as every other Amnesia: The Dark Descent clone, as there are very few of them and they’re always on a table and highlight when you look at them.
But weirdly, there are also matchboxes that you can collect to light candles, along with flicking a light switch on if you’re in the mansion to light up whatever room you’re in. Why have all three of these mechanics at once? Why not have the lights in the mansion stop working, forcing you to use the flashlight and candles? It would at least make sense as to why the game has all three mechanics.
For the first half of the game, you’re solving puzzles that your great-uncle has left for you to prove that you’re a worthy heir. It’s slightly silly, but there wouldn’t be much of a game otherwise, and there have been sillier plots and executions of a story. But at some point the game begins introducing puzzles with traps that can kill you. After you move from the house to the greenhouse, there is a trial-and-error maze with traps that can kill you if you go the wrong way. That’s not much of a test for if someone is a worthy heir if they can be killed by simply picking wrong. That’s one hell of a way to ramp up the stakes.
The greenhouse soon leads to an underground maze, which is just as dark and grey as the house (or is it the other way around?), which involves you solving a puzzle involving pressure plates and large rock statues. So this puzzles involves a tiny 80 pound woman lugging giant statues around that must weight at least a few hundred pounds. I guess she must have been really working out.
To be fair, I never had any problems solving the puzzles throughout the game. They all make logical sense to some extent. Some other levels have you finding items, like keys for doors or items to use on other items such as fuses or gears.
And thankfully the character talks to herself when either something happens or you come across something that you should be paying attention to so that you know what’s going on, which is more than I can say for a lot of bad games that have puzzle solving. Although, there are still a few moments where the character should have said something out loud as a hint to what is going on.
And while I’m giving out compliments, you can actually see your own body if you look down, even if it’s only when I’m running around, and you can see your shadow, which is another thing that a lot of first person games don’t do. But I feel like I’m grasping at straws here.
But to bring the review back down, there are still a few problems, like sometimes there are multiple doors in a level that claim that they require a key, but there is only one key and you have to go to each individual door to figure out if the key goes to it, filling the game out with more pointless busy work
Also, there is no way to manually save the game. There are checkpoints scattered throughout the levels, but these aren’t saves, they’re just so that if you die or fail, you can load back to a certain point of the level and just try over again. If you quit the game, you have to start the level all over again. It made me dread coming back to the game if I had to quit for whatever reason.
Graphically, the game is mediocre at best. Everything is so grey and flat. Also, I don’t have a beast of a machine, but I’ve been able to play more resource intensive games at higher framerates, or at least similar framerates than this game. It’s roughly 30fps when the graphics settings are set to high and everything is on, and just over 60fps when everything is on low and turned off. I’m no graphics snob, but there is no reason that a game that looks like this should be running this badly.
And it’s not like I’m the only one to have this complaint, as there are a few people with similar complaints on the Steam forums.
It also doesn’t help that the game is pretty dark for it’s entirety, needing me to constantly have the flashlight constantly on. I know it’s supposed to be a horror game, but even when I have the flashlight on, lit some candles, and have the lights in the room on, it still looks pretty dark. I had to turn up the brightness all the way in the options just to see anything and not strain my eyes.
Which makes it even hard to find objects in a room, and there have been times where I’ve accidentally walked passed something that I was trying to find. Thankfully all items highlight when you’ve moused over them, but it’s annoying.
The store page also claims that the game has a “fear recognition mechanic”, which is PR speak for “this game has jump scares and spooky things happening randomly throughout the game depending on how you’re playing”. How this is supposed to work is that the game will randomly pick ‘scary moments’ and just play them randomly throughout the game, much like the insanity system from Eternal Darkness (2002).
I’m pretty sure that the game plays the same scares at the same points no matter what you do. And frankly, I didn’t feel like playing the game multiple times or spending hours trying to replay a level to see if it worked. The game was a tedious slog the first time.
Random scares include phones randomly ringing as you walk passed them, a clock alarm going off, piano keys being pressed by an unseen force, a statue head moving to look at you, a fly appearing to crawl across your screen, a ghostly apparition appearing at the end of a hallway, sometimes exploding when you get closer, bleeding walls, and shadows of something disappearing around a corner, only for nothing to be there. It even plays some creepy noises to make you think that there is something else following you.
All of these scares happen over and over again, it’s just gets so repetitive. And I’m pretty sure that some of the ghostly shadows are of medical equipment. So spooky.
And the thing is, I’ve spent over 1000 words talking about this game and I haven’t even talked about the plot yet. I know that I briefly mentioned the premise, but the plot is another thing into itself.
WARNING: SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT.
At some point you discover that your great-uncle has a portal in his personal underground labyrinth, and once you figure out how to operate it, it takes you to another dimension. I think? I’m honestly surprised that the plot turned out to be something other than a haunted house with puzzles in it. And the death trap puzzles and the portal that looks like a Stargate is just what happens in the first third of the game.
And this is where the game starts to go off track.
The portal takes you to a house in a field in what looks to be the middle of the mountains, and you have to enter what you think is the basement, only to randomly enter an asylum located under the house, which has an area where you have to dodge spinning blades on moving poles. And this is where it becomes blatantly obvious that the developers clearly tried to stitch together the pre-made assets that they bought off the Unity store. And it doesn’t work.
Soon you come across a whole theme parks worth of levels. I’m being serious here. You come across a Roller-coaster that you have to turn on and remove a log off the tracks, otherwise you die while riding it, then a fun house with flashing lights, a hall of mirrors, and clown jump scares, then a Ferris Wheel that has a brief section with bumper cars that move when you don’t look at them, before moving onto a haunted house with mannequins that only spin in place or disappear instead of moving when you don’t look at them.
Later sections ruin the atmosphere and consistency that the game is trying to have. One area is an homage to the film Cube (1997), one of the creepy dolls looks exactly like Jeff Dunham’s Grandpa character, and there’s even a stupid giant skull that you would see in a cheesy pirate movie from the 50s or a 90’s children’s game show. There’s even a scare that is a balloon coming out of a bathroom sink that’s just an homage to the 1990 version of Stephen King’s IT.
The middle of the game also introduces patrolling monster dogs that can kill you in one shot, are transparent and hard to see, only made harder to see by how dark the game is. Thankfully they have a per-determined patrolling route so you can avoid them. But they aren’t exactly the best of enemies, since half the time I accidentally walked right through them or passed them without realizing it because they didn’t spot you.
At some point I even learned that I could just slowly walk behind them and they won’t notice me.
I don’t even know why these creatures are here, as they just make the game take longer. At east with the puzzles, you can take your time to complete them. The animals just add an extra layer of frustration to the game. And there is a brief moment before the monster dog kills you where the monster dog stops making sound, making you think that you lost the dog, only for the dog to instantly kill you, making that whole experience that much more annoying.
My biggest problem with the game is the amount of levels. I know that variety is the spice of life, but there is such a thing as too much spice.
At some point you have to go through a maze.. At this point in the game I gave up and looked for help to get through the maze. There are hints on how to get through it posted by the developer on the Steam forums, so it’s not like I’m the only one who had trouble here. And one trap was so confusing on how it worked. Plus mazes are always some of the worst levels in a video game. At least the developer prevents backtracking and getting lost to a certain extent by cutting off previous parts of the maze by having walls appear. I was still confused by the maze though.
The last level has you backtracking slightly into the level that came before it, or at least part of it despite the fact that the game hasn’t done that before. I was so confused as to what was going on until I realized what the game was doing.
Another level has you going through a cave that contains a pool of water that makes your character walk so slow that I thought that I was going in the wrong direction and that this was the games way of telling me to not go that way.
And to top it all off, there is a level of the game where you just walk for a while before finding a key in a small house that opens a nearby gate. And that is what the whole level is. The walking to the house was so long that the game has to put a checkpoint after the walk before you get to the house so if you die to the monster dog, you don’t start the whole level again. Why is this level here?
That’s the worst thing about this game. Half of the time I was questioning why something was in the game. Half the levels could have easily been cut out and the game would have lost nothing.
This game is one of the worst that I’ve played. It’s execution is tedious and annoying at the best of times, and that’s me being polite. If it wasn’t for the fact that I bought this for incredibly cheap on a sale and made this review, I wouldn’t have given this game the time of day. Especially when there are better games out there for free.
2008
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/mod-corner-7th-serpent-crossfire-genesis-max-payne-2-the-fall-of-max-payne-review/
Two years after the release of 7th Serpent: Crossfire got released for Max Payne, 7th Serpent: Genesis came out.
In Genesis, you play as Vincent Pretro, the 7th prototype of the Serpent Industries serpent agent program, on a mission with Abraham O’Conner, the 3rd prototype, as they infiltrate the H.A.B.I.T. Conference center to assassinate the Chairman of the H.A.B.I.T. Organization at their meeting, after destroying the security server to make sure you’re not identified.
Like the first mod, Genesis is pretty short. It doesn’t have the larger scale of the first game or the length, being only about 30 minutes long, but what’s there is still pretty solid highly polished level design. There isn’t much to elaborate on since it’s so short and talking about anything would spoil it, but it is worth checking out like the first mod.
And just like the first one, the second team couldn’t get everything they wanted into the mod, so they just released what they had. It seems a bit unfortunate, since the team behind the 7th Serpent mods clearly had a universe in mind, but just couldn’t fully realize it, considering how much backstory there was in the manuals.
Both mods are great glimpse into what could have been, and you can complete both of them in an afternoon too. 7th Serpent and 7th Serpent: Genesis are both worth checking out.
Two years after the release of 7th Serpent: Crossfire got released for Max Payne, 7th Serpent: Genesis came out.
In Genesis, you play as Vincent Pretro, the 7th prototype of the Serpent Industries serpent agent program, on a mission with Abraham O’Conner, the 3rd prototype, as they infiltrate the H.A.B.I.T. Conference center to assassinate the Chairman of the H.A.B.I.T. Organization at their meeting, after destroying the security server to make sure you’re not identified.
Like the first mod, Genesis is pretty short. It doesn’t have the larger scale of the first game or the length, being only about 30 minutes long, but what’s there is still pretty solid highly polished level design. There isn’t much to elaborate on since it’s so short and talking about anything would spoil it, but it is worth checking out like the first mod.
And just like the first one, the second team couldn’t get everything they wanted into the mod, so they just released what they had. It seems a bit unfortunate, since the team behind the 7th Serpent mods clearly had a universe in mind, but just couldn’t fully realize it, considering how much backstory there was in the manuals.
Both mods are great glimpse into what could have been, and you can complete both of them in an afternoon too. 7th Serpent and 7th Serpent: Genesis are both worth checking out.
2002
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/01/06/antz-extreme-racing-2002-ps2-xbox-pc-review/
Someone out there thought it was a good idea to release an Antz game in 2002, a whopping 4 years after the movie came out.
If it isn’t obvious from the title and box art, Antz Extreme Racing is a kart racing game based on the film Antz. Original idea, I know. Now you might be asking yourself, “Why are you reviewing a shitty 18 year old video game based on a movie that people only talk about when someone goes ‘Hey, do you remember Antz?'” I have a lot of free time, and very little in the way of dignity.
And to make matters worse, it doesn’t even take advantage of the large time span between the films theatrical release and the game’s release date by having a more polished game. If this was rushed out to come out as the same time as the theatrical or even VHS release for the film, the game being a kart racer would make a lot more sense, or at least a more more excusable as to how and why it ended up the way it did, but somehow this game ended up on the XBOX and PS2, 4 years and a whole console generation later.
It’s not the worst looking game that I’ve seen on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox and the characters do look like their movie counterparts, despite their faces having the exact same facial expression the whole game. Plus it carries of the art style of the movie well enough. But that feels like I’m reaching for compliments when I’m talking about the graphics, which I am.
I’m going to make a comparison to another obvious cash grab, “Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding”, to make a point. That game is literally just the gameplay from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 but with a Disney and Pixar coat of paint to promote the movies that were big at the time. But the team that developed the game clearly knew that they were making a game that was just a promotional tool, so they jumped on the back on the gameplay of another game to do the heavy work for them, and it ended up being a competent game despite the fact that it was obviously an advertisement. Antz Extreme Racing doesn’t even do that and ends up being a lazily put together cash grab that’s somehow late to promoting it’s own film.
Antz Extreme racing doesn’t even have voice clips from the movie for it’s characters. Not even sound-alikes, something which even Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding did. When you’re getting one-upped by Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding, it’s time to call it quits.
And unlike the game that it’s trying to ape off of, Mario Kart, Antz didn’t exactly have a lot of characters to pick from, and it’s pretty obvious from the fact that the game has 6 total characters to pick from, with 4 of them being unlockables. And what’s annoying is that the game doesn’t even have the two wasp characters from the movie, which could have added some more variety and visual flair, and at least would have padded out the roster to an acceptable amount, despite the fact that one of them is even on the cover of the game. As a result, the game is filled with samey looking characters. And to bring up Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding again, that game has characters with a variety of visually different looking characters, even the ones from the same movie. I would have even loved to see someone like Barbados as an unlockable character.
And to top it all off, the driving is pretty bad. The one thing that had to be good, and it ended up being awful. Everything feels so slippery. It’s unnecessarily difficult to turn corners. And if you collide with something, it can accidentally turn you around, and the slippery controls make it hard to get back in the right direction. Half the time I had to restart a race because I got so turned around. To compound the problem, some of the tracks have incredibly tight turns, meaning that you’re either going to find yourself driving off the track or hitting a wall and finding yourself a few positions behind where you were.
And yes, I know it’s the game and not me because even the AI has trouble with the driving at times. I know this is a game aimed at kids, and they don’t have high expectations, but I feel like something as simple as a kart racer shouldn’t have controls this bad.
The game at least tries to have some variety in it’s gameplay by having multiple different types of races. But for some reason, the game changes the controls depending of the type of race you pick. The first type of race is using the standard kart vehicle. The second type of race has you running on foot. The final type of race, which is a time trial where you have to make it through flag gates without missing them five times, with every time you miss them, the game adds time to your total time at the end of the race.
But for some reason, the developers thought it was a good idea to completely switch up the controls depending on the race. If you’re driving a vehicle, you use the right trigger to accelerate, but if you’re running on foot, or “snowboarding”, you have to use up on the D-Pad to accelerate. I have absolutely no idea why the developers decided to do this. Why not just make the controls the same across the board. It’s not like each race is so drastically different from each other that it needed to be changed.
Which is annoying, because there are some neat course designs, such as a course where a giant kid is stomping around and you having to avoid his feet. If I didn’t have to worry about constantly crashing due to the slippery controls, I could have enjoyed this game at least to some degree, even if only for it being a Mario Kart knockoff.
Each racer has their own career, which is being generous to call it a career. While there is a lot of overlap with the tracks in between the racers, but the tracks usually try to have something different going on, such as different weather like sunshine or fog, or reverse it. While it does it’s best to try and break up the monotony, it all still feels very samey. Even the racers cars show some level of creativity, such as either a kart being made out of rubbish left on the ground by people or is a bug that they ride.
However, the game’s final race is the the exact same with every single racer, where you race another one of the racers up a mound in the middle of the ant hill. This final track even has platforming, which is made doubly worse with the fact that you’re constantly doing tight turns, on top of the slippery driving. Surprisingly, it’s one of the easier races, and I always beat it on the second or third try at most.
And just like every other Mario Kart clone, there are several power ups that you can collect during a race. There are the usual power-ups where you can leave something on the track for a racer to accidentally hit, or something to fire at another racer. The worst power-up is the speed power-up, which is just completely useless. Not because it doesn’t give you a decent boost, but because just how poorly the driving is. By the time you could have used it, you’ve probably accidentally picked up another power-up that’s more useful.
The game does come with some unlockables, all of which are located under the “Secrets” menu.
The best one is “Infinite Missiles”. Which at least makes the races slightly more fun, but just barely. Another one is “Time Change”, which just turns the current track that you’re playing from day to night. I don't know why this isn't just an option when picking tracks outside of the "campaign".
There’s also “Wobble Cam”, which turns the camera 360 degrees in the direction that you’re turning, “Freaky Vision”, which just makes the screen blurrier, and “Speedy Play”, which makes the race faster, making it more difficult to turn. All three make the game more unplayable. But hey, it's neat that they're here.
And finally, there is “Select-a-car”. This one has to be the most confusingly implemented extra. Instead of bringing up a menu where you can select a car like any other racer with cars that you can unlock during the Career Mode, you have to unlock the “Select-a-car” mode. And instead of letting you pick a car like any other racer, when you pick one of the races in the Single Player mode, you have to hit up or down on the D-Pad to select the vehicle race order, which instead of just changing the car, you get switched to whichever place the other racer was.
This is so poorly implemented that I had no idea what I was doing the first time I tried it.
Surprisingly, the game came out on the PC, PlayStation 2, and XBOX, but not the Gamecube. Maybe the developers knew that it couldn’t compete with the Mario Kart franchise, so they didn’t even try. But it still came out on the same consoles that several Crash Team Racing games came out on, so there were still better kart games that came out on those platforms. But it still got a Gameboy Advance port, and that version was alright, so there’s that.
Hilariously, the game can be played in four-player split-screen multiplayer. I want to know what kid tried to convince their friends to play Antz Extreme Racing over literally any other racing or party game. There has to be that one kid, right?
Antz Extreme Racing might not be the worst licensed video game, as low as that bar is, but that doesn’t stop it from being yet another bad licensed video game in the every growing pile of bad licenced video games. This wasn’t even the best licensed kart game at the time, with Mickey’s Speedway USA being released on the Nintendo 64 the year before, and Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway coming out the same year on the Gameboy Advance. Even the GBA got a version of this game which was at least a step up over this game.
Imagine being third place to a Mickey Mouse and Shrek.
If there’s a moral to this review, it’s don’t waste your time playing awful video games that no one has heard of. You only have so much time to live, go out and do something with your life.
Someone out there thought it was a good idea to release an Antz game in 2002, a whopping 4 years after the movie came out.
If it isn’t obvious from the title and box art, Antz Extreme Racing is a kart racing game based on the film Antz. Original idea, I know. Now you might be asking yourself, “Why are you reviewing a shitty 18 year old video game based on a movie that people only talk about when someone goes ‘Hey, do you remember Antz?'” I have a lot of free time, and very little in the way of dignity.
And to make matters worse, it doesn’t even take advantage of the large time span between the films theatrical release and the game’s release date by having a more polished game. If this was rushed out to come out as the same time as the theatrical or even VHS release for the film, the game being a kart racer would make a lot more sense, or at least a more more excusable as to how and why it ended up the way it did, but somehow this game ended up on the XBOX and PS2, 4 years and a whole console generation later.
It’s not the worst looking game that I’ve seen on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox and the characters do look like their movie counterparts, despite their faces having the exact same facial expression the whole game. Plus it carries of the art style of the movie well enough. But that feels like I’m reaching for compliments when I’m talking about the graphics, which I am.
I’m going to make a comparison to another obvious cash grab, “Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding”, to make a point. That game is literally just the gameplay from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 but with a Disney and Pixar coat of paint to promote the movies that were big at the time. But the team that developed the game clearly knew that they were making a game that was just a promotional tool, so they jumped on the back on the gameplay of another game to do the heavy work for them, and it ended up being a competent game despite the fact that it was obviously an advertisement. Antz Extreme Racing doesn’t even do that and ends up being a lazily put together cash grab that’s somehow late to promoting it’s own film.
Antz Extreme racing doesn’t even have voice clips from the movie for it’s characters. Not even sound-alikes, something which even Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding did. When you’re getting one-upped by Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding, it’s time to call it quits.
And unlike the game that it’s trying to ape off of, Mario Kart, Antz didn’t exactly have a lot of characters to pick from, and it’s pretty obvious from the fact that the game has 6 total characters to pick from, with 4 of them being unlockables. And what’s annoying is that the game doesn’t even have the two wasp characters from the movie, which could have added some more variety and visual flair, and at least would have padded out the roster to an acceptable amount, despite the fact that one of them is even on the cover of the game. As a result, the game is filled with samey looking characters. And to bring up Disney’s Extreme Skateboarding again, that game has characters with a variety of visually different looking characters, even the ones from the same movie. I would have even loved to see someone like Barbados as an unlockable character.
And to top it all off, the driving is pretty bad. The one thing that had to be good, and it ended up being awful. Everything feels so slippery. It’s unnecessarily difficult to turn corners. And if you collide with something, it can accidentally turn you around, and the slippery controls make it hard to get back in the right direction. Half the time I had to restart a race because I got so turned around. To compound the problem, some of the tracks have incredibly tight turns, meaning that you’re either going to find yourself driving off the track or hitting a wall and finding yourself a few positions behind where you were.
And yes, I know it’s the game and not me because even the AI has trouble with the driving at times. I know this is a game aimed at kids, and they don’t have high expectations, but I feel like something as simple as a kart racer shouldn’t have controls this bad.
The game at least tries to have some variety in it’s gameplay by having multiple different types of races. But for some reason, the game changes the controls depending of the type of race you pick. The first type of race is using the standard kart vehicle. The second type of race has you running on foot. The final type of race, which is a time trial where you have to make it through flag gates without missing them five times, with every time you miss them, the game adds time to your total time at the end of the race.
But for some reason, the developers thought it was a good idea to completely switch up the controls depending on the race. If you’re driving a vehicle, you use the right trigger to accelerate, but if you’re running on foot, or “snowboarding”, you have to use up on the D-Pad to accelerate. I have absolutely no idea why the developers decided to do this. Why not just make the controls the same across the board. It’s not like each race is so drastically different from each other that it needed to be changed.
Which is annoying, because there are some neat course designs, such as a course where a giant kid is stomping around and you having to avoid his feet. If I didn’t have to worry about constantly crashing due to the slippery controls, I could have enjoyed this game at least to some degree, even if only for it being a Mario Kart knockoff.
Each racer has their own career, which is being generous to call it a career. While there is a lot of overlap with the tracks in between the racers, but the tracks usually try to have something different going on, such as different weather like sunshine or fog, or reverse it. While it does it’s best to try and break up the monotony, it all still feels very samey. Even the racers cars show some level of creativity, such as either a kart being made out of rubbish left on the ground by people or is a bug that they ride.
However, the game’s final race is the the exact same with every single racer, where you race another one of the racers up a mound in the middle of the ant hill. This final track even has platforming, which is made doubly worse with the fact that you’re constantly doing tight turns, on top of the slippery driving. Surprisingly, it’s one of the easier races, and I always beat it on the second or third try at most.
And just like every other Mario Kart clone, there are several power ups that you can collect during a race. There are the usual power-ups where you can leave something on the track for a racer to accidentally hit, or something to fire at another racer. The worst power-up is the speed power-up, which is just completely useless. Not because it doesn’t give you a decent boost, but because just how poorly the driving is. By the time you could have used it, you’ve probably accidentally picked up another power-up that’s more useful.
The game does come with some unlockables, all of which are located under the “Secrets” menu.
The best one is “Infinite Missiles”. Which at least makes the races slightly more fun, but just barely. Another one is “Time Change”, which just turns the current track that you’re playing from day to night. I don't know why this isn't just an option when picking tracks outside of the "campaign".
There’s also “Wobble Cam”, which turns the camera 360 degrees in the direction that you’re turning, “Freaky Vision”, which just makes the screen blurrier, and “Speedy Play”, which makes the race faster, making it more difficult to turn. All three make the game more unplayable. But hey, it's neat that they're here.
And finally, there is “Select-a-car”. This one has to be the most confusingly implemented extra. Instead of bringing up a menu where you can select a car like any other racer with cars that you can unlock during the Career Mode, you have to unlock the “Select-a-car” mode. And instead of letting you pick a car like any other racer, when you pick one of the races in the Single Player mode, you have to hit up or down on the D-Pad to select the vehicle race order, which instead of just changing the car, you get switched to whichever place the other racer was.
This is so poorly implemented that I had no idea what I was doing the first time I tried it.
Surprisingly, the game came out on the PC, PlayStation 2, and XBOX, but not the Gamecube. Maybe the developers knew that it couldn’t compete with the Mario Kart franchise, so they didn’t even try. But it still came out on the same consoles that several Crash Team Racing games came out on, so there were still better kart games that came out on those platforms. But it still got a Gameboy Advance port, and that version was alright, so there’s that.
Hilariously, the game can be played in four-player split-screen multiplayer. I want to know what kid tried to convince their friends to play Antz Extreme Racing over literally any other racing or party game. There has to be that one kid, right?
Antz Extreme Racing might not be the worst licensed video game, as low as that bar is, but that doesn’t stop it from being yet another bad licensed video game in the every growing pile of bad licenced video games. This wasn’t even the best licensed kart game at the time, with Mickey’s Speedway USA being released on the Nintendo 64 the year before, and Shrek: Swamp Kart Speedway coming out the same year on the Gameboy Advance. Even the GBA got a version of this game which was at least a step up over this game.
Imagine being third place to a Mickey Mouse and Shrek.
If there’s a moral to this review, it’s don’t waste your time playing awful video games that no one has heard of. You only have so much time to live, go out and do something with your life.
2018
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/01/26/stone-2018-pc-review/
Self-described as an “Hip-Hop Stoner Noir”, the story begins with the titular character Stone, a hungover koala detective, finding out that his lover, Alex, has been kidnapped. Stone then spends the next few days desperately looking for Alex, trying to make sure nothing bad has happened to him.
STONE is pretty short, taking roughly 90 minutes to play, and no more than 2 hours at the absolute most. It’s hard to talk about anything in depth without spoiling the game due to how short it is, but I’ll try.
For most of the game, you go around town and ask everyone you know if they know anything about Alex’s whereabouts. This is done through using a map screen made up of roughly 4 or 5 locations at most, but the game ends up being pretty linear for the most part, being pretty obvious where you have to go next, making it kinda redundant. If you’re even confused as to where you should go, there are only three locations that you’ll ever end up going to anyway and you end up talking to the same three characters over and over until you’ve found a clue about where Alex might be, only for you to repeat the whole process the next day.
However, the when you’re interacting with people, you do get a few dialogue options that allow for some minor replayablity, but it’s very basic.
And for some reason, there is no run button, or even to speed up the character at all. I know that there are only 4 locations in the whole game, they’re all small, and the game is pretty short, but a run button would have been nice to have it.
The game is not without it’s merits. It’s art style is nice. While it is a bit simple, but it is relatively nice to look at. The game also has a cinema you can go to on the map screen where you can watch old black-and-white Australian shorts from the early days of cinema, but point stuff like this out feels like I’m grasping for straws to say something positive about the game.
Unfortunately, Stone is an underwhelming game in a lot of aspects, and I hate to say that because it’s rare to have a decent Australian themed game where Australia is the main focus. With the underwhelming plot and incredibly slow pace, it’s hard to recommend this to anyone.
Sure, it might gain a cult status down the line for a few people who like the Australian aesthetic or the game’s odd and unique characters and plot, but it’s a lukewarm recommend from me even with the most optimistic outlook.
Self-described as an “Hip-Hop Stoner Noir”, the story begins with the titular character Stone, a hungover koala detective, finding out that his lover, Alex, has been kidnapped. Stone then spends the next few days desperately looking for Alex, trying to make sure nothing bad has happened to him.
STONE is pretty short, taking roughly 90 minutes to play, and no more than 2 hours at the absolute most. It’s hard to talk about anything in depth without spoiling the game due to how short it is, but I’ll try.
For most of the game, you go around town and ask everyone you know if they know anything about Alex’s whereabouts. This is done through using a map screen made up of roughly 4 or 5 locations at most, but the game ends up being pretty linear for the most part, being pretty obvious where you have to go next, making it kinda redundant. If you’re even confused as to where you should go, there are only three locations that you’ll ever end up going to anyway and you end up talking to the same three characters over and over until you’ve found a clue about where Alex might be, only for you to repeat the whole process the next day.
However, the when you’re interacting with people, you do get a few dialogue options that allow for some minor replayablity, but it’s very basic.
And for some reason, there is no run button, or even to speed up the character at all. I know that there are only 4 locations in the whole game, they’re all small, and the game is pretty short, but a run button would have been nice to have it.
The game is not without it’s merits. It’s art style is nice. While it is a bit simple, but it is relatively nice to look at. The game also has a cinema you can go to on the map screen where you can watch old black-and-white Australian shorts from the early days of cinema, but point stuff like this out feels like I’m grasping for straws to say something positive about the game.
Unfortunately, Stone is an underwhelming game in a lot of aspects, and I hate to say that because it’s rare to have a decent Australian themed game where Australia is the main focus. With the underwhelming plot and incredibly slow pace, it’s hard to recommend this to anyone.
Sure, it might gain a cult status down the line for a few people who like the Australian aesthetic or the game’s odd and unique characters and plot, but it’s a lukewarm recommend from me even with the most optimistic outlook.
2017
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/01/12/late-shift-2016-review/
You would think that in the age of high definition quality video and more money to spend developing games, that the few FMV (Full Motion Video) games that show up would have the same level of bizarre creativity that they did in the 90’s when CD’s became the hot new item. But it feels like that each and every FMV game is just taking advantage of the fact that they could copy movies and television to create something that just feels like anything else you could stream or rent online, which is a shame.
Our main protagonist is Matt, a college student who is working as a parking lot attendant as one night, he finds himself dragged into the criminal world of London when he is forced to work with a group of armed robbers looking to steal a valuable item that has gone up for auction. He ends up befriending one of the members of the group, a woman named May-Ling.
As a movie, Late Shift looks like your standard film. It doesn’t look terrible, but there’s nothing amazing to look at. It’s all well shot for what it is. The plot is bare bones, and it kinda has to be so the “choose-your-own-adventure” style choice system wouldn’t get too complicated. There isn’t any real gameplay to speak of. Every now and again a choice will pop up giving you 2 to 3 options to choose from that progress the game. Depending on your choices, this will lead to one of several endings.
Let’s face it, if this was just released as a movie, it wouldn’t do too well. It’s too by the numbers in terms of acting, plot, and everything else. It would be that film that would appear every now and again in someones “Recommended For You” feed on their streaming service of choice but not a lot of people would click on.
I don’t hate Late Shift. But when I can go back to the gold era of FMV’s and get something crazy, weird, and out there even if it’s a so-bad-it’s-good. And considering that some of those games even had other things, like actual gameplay in between the FMV, such as puzzles and action, the FMV felt more like a neat bonus, or hindrance on who you ask, rather than the focus of the game. And considering that the TV series Black Mirror has come out with it’s own choose-your-own-adventure with “Bandersnatch”, Late Shift can’t really hold a candle. Unfortunately, all this game does is fall into mediocrity, only to be forgotten hours after playing it.
You would think that in the age of high definition quality video and more money to spend developing games, that the few FMV (Full Motion Video) games that show up would have the same level of bizarre creativity that they did in the 90’s when CD’s became the hot new item. But it feels like that each and every FMV game is just taking advantage of the fact that they could copy movies and television to create something that just feels like anything else you could stream or rent online, which is a shame.
Our main protagonist is Matt, a college student who is working as a parking lot attendant as one night, he finds himself dragged into the criminal world of London when he is forced to work with a group of armed robbers looking to steal a valuable item that has gone up for auction. He ends up befriending one of the members of the group, a woman named May-Ling.
As a movie, Late Shift looks like your standard film. It doesn’t look terrible, but there’s nothing amazing to look at. It’s all well shot for what it is. The plot is bare bones, and it kinda has to be so the “choose-your-own-adventure” style choice system wouldn’t get too complicated. There isn’t any real gameplay to speak of. Every now and again a choice will pop up giving you 2 to 3 options to choose from that progress the game. Depending on your choices, this will lead to one of several endings.
Let’s face it, if this was just released as a movie, it wouldn’t do too well. It’s too by the numbers in terms of acting, plot, and everything else. It would be that film that would appear every now and again in someones “Recommended For You” feed on their streaming service of choice but not a lot of people would click on.
I don’t hate Late Shift. But when I can go back to the gold era of FMV’s and get something crazy, weird, and out there even if it’s a so-bad-it’s-good. And considering that some of those games even had other things, like actual gameplay in between the FMV, such as puzzles and action, the FMV felt more like a neat bonus, or hindrance on who you ask, rather than the focus of the game. And considering that the TV series Black Mirror has come out with it’s own choose-your-own-adventure with “Bandersnatch”, Late Shift can’t really hold a candle. Unfortunately, all this game does is fall into mediocrity, only to be forgotten hours after playing it.
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/11/17/soldier-of-fortune-payback-pc-ps3-360-review/
If you’re one of the few who has ever wondered what ever happened to the Soldier of Fortune franchise, your question has been answered in the most disappointing way possible. It’s sad to see a series go from reasonably high profile for time it was released to bargain bin trash in 5 years. The previous entries I reviewed here and here.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback was developed by Cauldron LTD, which put out the mediocre and forgettable game Chaser, which I previously reviewed, as well as going on to make a bunch of Cabela hunting games and a couple of games for the History Channel, and was published by Activision Value, which was the Activision subsidiary that put out budget title games, which is already a great sign for Payback’s quality.
Payback’s story has very little to do with the previous installments other than the fact that you play as a gun for hire. John Mullins, both the character and real life person, are nowhere to be found in the game itself or the development of the game. Instead, Payback’s main character is freelance mercenary Thomas Mason, a name so forgettable that I had to copy and paste it just so I wouldn’t forget it in the 3 seconds I had to look up from the plot description to type it in.
When the game starts, we find Mason on a routine escort mission shortly before it goes tits up, as the other freelancer who you were on the mission with suddenly kills the person you were sent in to extract, and also turns on you. I also forgot this other characters name, as I did with every other character in the game.
None of the characters have much of a personality, all of them being incredibly cliched, and all of which you’ve seen done a million times in a million other things and done a million times better. The only other character you spend a decent amount of time with other than the one you play as is Cassandra Dekker, which is only slightly less generic than Thomas Mason. She briefs you between missions, updating you on your mission goals.
The story is completely forgettable. I don’t know if I would say that it rips off Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but both were published by Activision, with Payback coming out a little over a week after Modern Warfare, so I have to assume that when Modern Warfare was being made, Payback was rushed out the door as a budget title to ape off Call of Duty, but for those who couldn’t afford it but still wanted to play something like it.
It’s so much like the modern military era of games that plagued the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generaion of consoles that when I search for Soldier of Fortune: Payback, it just recommends those games to me when I search for Soldier of Fortune: Payback in Google. I know this is technically a spoiler, but the game ends on a terrible cliched plot twist and cliffhanger. I don’t know if someone behind the scenes was expecting this game to do well, but I do wish I had that optimism.
The series defining series returns, being able to blow limbs and heads off of the enemies. This feature is mildly amusing, especially in the sea of games that were starting to become lazily cinematic and linear at this time. I guess it would be enough to sell a budget game, but at this point in video games, it’s not really impressive. And it doesn’t really help that the last two games from 5 or more years ago did it better.
This was apparently enough to get the game censored in Australia and banned in Germany. Which is extra hilarious in retrospect, because Australia got an R18+ rating a few years later in 2013 and the game would have totally passed with that rating, and the fact that it’s not even that realistic to begin with, which begs the question of how it even got banned to begin with. But I doubt that Activision would be bothered to re-release it in Australia, but it can be bought on GOG.
However, the series second (unofficial) feature makes a return, with the enemies that are unfairly accurate. Apparently, this is a series staple. But unlike the first two games, I’m assuming that this has to do with the fact that this game cost nothing to make and had to be rushed out the door rather than a group of people allegedly (by me) hating their audience.
It also doesn’t help that the game features several boss fights where the boss is just a bullet sponge, and the boss just looks like one of the regular bad guys. When mixed with the unfair difficulty, these fights just come across as way to difficult. On top of that, the game spawns in enemies when your fighting said bosses. Prepare to trial and error your way through these sections for about 45 minutes to an hour per boss battle. Who knows, you might luck out and manage to get the boss stuck and kill them in a minute or two.
Also, like every FPS from this time period, it comes with regenerating health, so health packs and armor are no longer needed. I can’t really complain since I never really liked the health packs and armor from the last games. It helps streamline the game, making it quicker. Also, they finally made the G key throw grenades. It took a while for that to finally happen, but better late than never.
For some reason, enemies can grab you and turn you around to face them. The only thing that this did the first time this happened was confuse the fuck out of me when it happened. I guess it was to confused the player for a moment and add extra difficulty, but since the rest of the game is unfairly difficult, and this was just annoying, this really feels like an unnecessary gameplay feature.
Another good feature that this game has is the option to choose your load out of weapons before going into a mission. There’s a pretty decent selection guns, including several smaller firearms that can be dual wielded except for two. A couple of them come with an optional silencer, which are pretty useless. There a bunch of SMGs, two of which can be dual wielded, and they all come with optional scopes and silencers.
There are several assault rifles, and these guns come with the most optional add-ons, including various scopes, one having an optional silencer, another having a hand grip, and even one that has an attachable grenade launcher, which not only makes it the best and most effective addition, but it’s incredibly fun firing it into a group of people and watching their bodies, body parts, and blood fly around a room as the physics do their thing. There are also 4 shotguns, and one comes with an optional scope. I don’t know why a shotgun needs a scope, but OK.
On the more destructive side, there is a grenade launcher and rocket launcher. And just like the attachable grenade launcher for one of the assault rifles, running into a room and having random arms, legs, and torso shaped pieces strewn across the room is pretty fun.
Most of these guns feel exactly the same. They don’t have much recoil, but at least their as accurate as the enemy guns are. Finally, there is the selection of grenades, which include a hand grenade, a smoke grenade, and the Phosphorous Grenade, which is exclusive to the multiplayer. Since nobody is playing the multiplayer anymore, you’re probably never going to use this.
But for some bizarre unknown reason, a lot of these guns are exclusive to the console versions of Payback, and are only accessible on the PC through mods for the game. I don’t know why this is the case. I assume that the PC version was an afterthought and these guns had to be cut due to not being able to be finished in time. But thankfully they’re still in the game’s files.
Graphically, the game is OK look, but lacking in some areas. It has the browns you’d come to expect from “realistic” FPS games from that era. The game was actually developed on Cauldron’s in-house engine, much like Chaser, called the CloakNT engine.
Like the previous games, the game goes globe hopping, but this time all of the locations look a lot more samey because it the overuse of the brown filter. You have the deserts of Al Qa’im and Eshkashem, and the jungles of Mogaung, to not so interesting locations, like a brothel, a garage, and a night club. Aside from the mostly browns and muted greens, there are lots of samey looking building interiors. It really is a step down from the last two games.
Surprisingly, the game came with multiplayer, and on launch, it was actually mildly active. it came with the standard game modes that you would expect, such as Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag, but there were two other game modes, such as Demolition, which was a lot like Counter-Strike in that one team tries to plant a bomb, and the other team tries to prevent them from doing that, and Infiltration, in which one team has to get into the other team’s base to steal a briefcase and leave without the other team stopping them.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback is actually OK for a $5 – $10 bargain bin game, but I can’t recommend this to a whole lot of people, yet again, for it’s bullshit difficulty, now made worse by the fact it’s nowhere near as polished as the last two games. And the only ones who would be interested in this are fans of the Soldier of Fortune franchise and more obscure First Person Shooter fans who are morbidly curious.
If you’re one of the few who has ever wondered what ever happened to the Soldier of Fortune franchise, your question has been answered in the most disappointing way possible. It’s sad to see a series go from reasonably high profile for time it was released to bargain bin trash in 5 years. The previous entries I reviewed here and here.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback was developed by Cauldron LTD, which put out the mediocre and forgettable game Chaser, which I previously reviewed, as well as going on to make a bunch of Cabela hunting games and a couple of games for the History Channel, and was published by Activision Value, which was the Activision subsidiary that put out budget title games, which is already a great sign for Payback’s quality.
Payback’s story has very little to do with the previous installments other than the fact that you play as a gun for hire. John Mullins, both the character and real life person, are nowhere to be found in the game itself or the development of the game. Instead, Payback’s main character is freelance mercenary Thomas Mason, a name so forgettable that I had to copy and paste it just so I wouldn’t forget it in the 3 seconds I had to look up from the plot description to type it in.
When the game starts, we find Mason on a routine escort mission shortly before it goes tits up, as the other freelancer who you were on the mission with suddenly kills the person you were sent in to extract, and also turns on you. I also forgot this other characters name, as I did with every other character in the game.
None of the characters have much of a personality, all of them being incredibly cliched, and all of which you’ve seen done a million times in a million other things and done a million times better. The only other character you spend a decent amount of time with other than the one you play as is Cassandra Dekker, which is only slightly less generic than Thomas Mason. She briefs you between missions, updating you on your mission goals.
The story is completely forgettable. I don’t know if I would say that it rips off Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but both were published by Activision, with Payback coming out a little over a week after Modern Warfare, so I have to assume that when Modern Warfare was being made, Payback was rushed out the door as a budget title to ape off Call of Duty, but for those who couldn’t afford it but still wanted to play something like it.
It’s so much like the modern military era of games that plagued the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generaion of consoles that when I search for Soldier of Fortune: Payback, it just recommends those games to me when I search for Soldier of Fortune: Payback in Google. I know this is technically a spoiler, but the game ends on a terrible cliched plot twist and cliffhanger. I don’t know if someone behind the scenes was expecting this game to do well, but I do wish I had that optimism.
The series defining series returns, being able to blow limbs and heads off of the enemies. This feature is mildly amusing, especially in the sea of games that were starting to become lazily cinematic and linear at this time. I guess it would be enough to sell a budget game, but at this point in video games, it’s not really impressive. And it doesn’t really help that the last two games from 5 or more years ago did it better.
This was apparently enough to get the game censored in Australia and banned in Germany. Which is extra hilarious in retrospect, because Australia got an R18+ rating a few years later in 2013 and the game would have totally passed with that rating, and the fact that it’s not even that realistic to begin with, which begs the question of how it even got banned to begin with. But I doubt that Activision would be bothered to re-release it in Australia, but it can be bought on GOG.
However, the series second (unofficial) feature makes a return, with the enemies that are unfairly accurate. Apparently, this is a series staple. But unlike the first two games, I’m assuming that this has to do with the fact that this game cost nothing to make and had to be rushed out the door rather than a group of people allegedly (by me) hating their audience.
It also doesn’t help that the game features several boss fights where the boss is just a bullet sponge, and the boss just looks like one of the regular bad guys. When mixed with the unfair difficulty, these fights just come across as way to difficult. On top of that, the game spawns in enemies when your fighting said bosses. Prepare to trial and error your way through these sections for about 45 minutes to an hour per boss battle. Who knows, you might luck out and manage to get the boss stuck and kill them in a minute or two.
Also, like every FPS from this time period, it comes with regenerating health, so health packs and armor are no longer needed. I can’t really complain since I never really liked the health packs and armor from the last games. It helps streamline the game, making it quicker. Also, they finally made the G key throw grenades. It took a while for that to finally happen, but better late than never.
For some reason, enemies can grab you and turn you around to face them. The only thing that this did the first time this happened was confuse the fuck out of me when it happened. I guess it was to confused the player for a moment and add extra difficulty, but since the rest of the game is unfairly difficult, and this was just annoying, this really feels like an unnecessary gameplay feature.
Another good feature that this game has is the option to choose your load out of weapons before going into a mission. There’s a pretty decent selection guns, including several smaller firearms that can be dual wielded except for two. A couple of them come with an optional silencer, which are pretty useless. There a bunch of SMGs, two of which can be dual wielded, and they all come with optional scopes and silencers.
There are several assault rifles, and these guns come with the most optional add-ons, including various scopes, one having an optional silencer, another having a hand grip, and even one that has an attachable grenade launcher, which not only makes it the best and most effective addition, but it’s incredibly fun firing it into a group of people and watching their bodies, body parts, and blood fly around a room as the physics do their thing. There are also 4 shotguns, and one comes with an optional scope. I don’t know why a shotgun needs a scope, but OK.
On the more destructive side, there is a grenade launcher and rocket launcher. And just like the attachable grenade launcher for one of the assault rifles, running into a room and having random arms, legs, and torso shaped pieces strewn across the room is pretty fun.
Most of these guns feel exactly the same. They don’t have much recoil, but at least their as accurate as the enemy guns are. Finally, there is the selection of grenades, which include a hand grenade, a smoke grenade, and the Phosphorous Grenade, which is exclusive to the multiplayer. Since nobody is playing the multiplayer anymore, you’re probably never going to use this.
But for some bizarre unknown reason, a lot of these guns are exclusive to the console versions of Payback, and are only accessible on the PC through mods for the game. I don’t know why this is the case. I assume that the PC version was an afterthought and these guns had to be cut due to not being able to be finished in time. But thankfully they’re still in the game’s files.
Graphically, the game is OK look, but lacking in some areas. It has the browns you’d come to expect from “realistic” FPS games from that era. The game was actually developed on Cauldron’s in-house engine, much like Chaser, called the CloakNT engine.
Like the previous games, the game goes globe hopping, but this time all of the locations look a lot more samey because it the overuse of the brown filter. You have the deserts of Al Qa’im and Eshkashem, and the jungles of Mogaung, to not so interesting locations, like a brothel, a garage, and a night club. Aside from the mostly browns and muted greens, there are lots of samey looking building interiors. It really is a step down from the last two games.
Surprisingly, the game came with multiplayer, and on launch, it was actually mildly active. it came with the standard game modes that you would expect, such as Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag, but there were two other game modes, such as Demolition, which was a lot like Counter-Strike in that one team tries to plant a bomb, and the other team tries to prevent them from doing that, and Infiltration, in which one team has to get into the other team’s base to steal a briefcase and leave without the other team stopping them.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback is actually OK for a $5 – $10 bargain bin game, but I can’t recommend this to a whole lot of people, yet again, for it’s bullshit difficulty, now made worse by the fact it’s nowhere near as polished as the last two games. And the only ones who would be interested in this are fans of the Soldier of Fortune franchise and more obscure First Person Shooter fans who are morbidly curious.
2015
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/10/
Speed dating is not my thing. Being forced into getting to know someone enough to start a possible relationship with them in a couple of minutes sounds frustrating, Pugs however are one of my things. So maybe speed dating a pug will convince me that speed dating as a whole isn’t so bad.
Hot Date was released on PC, MAC, and Linux on the 28th of May, 2013, and was later released on the iOS on the 16th of December. It was entirely designed by one man, George Batchelor, except for the soundtrack, which was by Levi Pack.
The game is so simple that there isn’t even a main menu, you just jump right into the gameplay. The game starts just as you sit down at a speed dating event, and you’re sitting right across from a pug. You start up a conversation by picking from a list of greetings, and soon you’re going down a rabbit hole of asking a weird series of questions.
From them, the game is seeing what amusing answers you’ll get. Each date is pretty short, which is to be expected, so it’ll take several playthroughs to see all, if not most of the content. The game takes 30 to 45 minutes to see all of the content. So it’s playable in an afternoon or a couple of lunchbreaks, and is worth checking out on a rainy day.
Even though there isn’t much here, I’d say check it out. The PC, Max, and Linux versions of the game are pay what you want, but i recommend throwing in a dollar or two to the creators. The iOS version however requires money upfront, and costs $1.99USD/1.49.
Speed dating is not my thing. Being forced into getting to know someone enough to start a possible relationship with them in a couple of minutes sounds frustrating, Pugs however are one of my things. So maybe speed dating a pug will convince me that speed dating as a whole isn’t so bad.
Hot Date was released on PC, MAC, and Linux on the 28th of May, 2013, and was later released on the iOS on the 16th of December. It was entirely designed by one man, George Batchelor, except for the soundtrack, which was by Levi Pack.
The game is so simple that there isn’t even a main menu, you just jump right into the gameplay. The game starts just as you sit down at a speed dating event, and you’re sitting right across from a pug. You start up a conversation by picking from a list of greetings, and soon you’re going down a rabbit hole of asking a weird series of questions.
From them, the game is seeing what amusing answers you’ll get. Each date is pretty short, which is to be expected, so it’ll take several playthroughs to see all, if not most of the content. The game takes 30 to 45 minutes to see all of the content. So it’s playable in an afternoon or a couple of lunchbreaks, and is worth checking out on a rainy day.
Even though there isn’t much here, I’d say check it out. The PC, Max, and Linux versions of the game are pay what you want, but i recommend throwing in a dollar or two to the creators. The iOS version however requires money upfront, and costs $1.99USD/1.49.
2020
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/03/14/relicta-2020-pc-ps4-xbone-stadia-review/
The game is set in 2120 aboard a station on the moon where an artifact known as the Relicta has been discovered, and scientific experiments are being done in secret to discover what properties it holds. You play as Dr. Angelica Patel – a physicist on the Chandara base, who is testing a new device that allows the use to manipulate gravity and magnetism.
The moon base is soon involved in an accident involving the Relicta, separating all of the members of the crew, including Kira, Angelica’s daughter. Angelica finds herself having to save the rest of the crew at the base, all while having to worry about the Relica and the secrets that it holds.
There is quite a bit of story here that I can’t include here, but I don’t want to ruin a lot of it by revealing too much, but just be warned that this is a dialogue heavy puzzle game.
Relicta is a first-person physics-based puzzle game where the main gameplay mechanic is using magnetism and gravity to solve all of it’s puzzles. While Relicta is obviously a portal clone, there are also comparisons that can be made to Magrunner: Dark Pulse, which also heavily uses magnets for it’s puzzles and is another Portal clone. But Relicta is more involved with it’s magnetic puzzles.
The puzzles of Relicta focus around magnetic cubes where you can switch between a negative and positive charge, indicated by them turning either red or blue, or having no charge at all, which is controlled with the gloves that your character has as part of her suit.
Puzzles contain the obvious game mechanics, such as making the cubes attract or repel each other, and using them on pressure plates to open up doors or turn off conveniently colored energy fields, purple only allowing the player to go through, green only allowing cubes, and yellow preventing both from coming through.
But like I mentioned earlier, the cubes have an anti-gravity field too. Sometimes you’ll have to use the cubes to activate a button that is located on a wall or the ceiling, or guide them through a level using magnetic places located on walls, some of which you can change yourself, and even ride them to get to the location that you need to be at.
Unfortunately, there were a few times where I was stuck solving a puzzle, only to find out that the game had introduced a new mechanic that I had no idea was there and I had to eventually cave in and look up a walkthrough just to figure out what I had to do. After that, the puzzles weren’t too bad, it’s just the initial not knowing what to do that was frustrating.
This makes the game more tedious that it should be. Some sort of audio cue indicating what I should do would have been helpful, whether it something coming from what I’m supposed to be paying attention to, or have my character briefly mention something after a while of being stuck in a certain area. I had no clue what the game wanted me to look at, and it took me way too long to figure out a piece of the puzzle.
There were even a few instances where I was looking for one of the magnetic boxes required to finish a puzzle only to find out that it was somewhere that I didn’t think to look. Some slight telegraphing would have significantly improved this game.
Also, the length in between autosaves is a little too long. There have been times where I was half way through a puzzle, had to close the game for whatever reason, and come back to it and have to spend 5 minutes catching up to where I was last just so I could continue. Even if the game didn’t include more autosaves, I would have loved the option for a manual save, but I don’t know if there was a technical reason it couldn’t have been included or it was just the way that the developers designed the game.
These few minor changes would have made the game a much smoother experience.
Also, some of the dialogue is a bit awkward, such as one character calling another an “Orbi-Boomer” and having sarcasm for every other line, for at least the first half of the game, or having PDAs and dialogue filled with references to other media. The game is aware of the kind of story that it wrote for itself in the latter half, It gets a little tedious after awhile, especially with how self-aware it is.
The visuals are pretty solid, even it’s pretty obvious that areas are designed to be more like rooms than actual locations. It is nice to see off into the distance beyond the areas that you’re in and seeing some nice looking locations, which there is a variety off.
As you’re solving puzzles and trying to figure out what is going on, you have to move in between domes, which contain a range of biomes of Earth-based terrains, which range from a large dense forest and nice blue sky, to snowy wasteland with icy caves, and even a seemingly endless desert. This does a lot to separate itself from something like Portal, instead of having dull tech filled room after room, you have another vista to look at, which is only separated by a few moments of the sci-fi aesthetic of a moon base.
The games visuals are so nice that it comes with a photo mode, where you can take photos of the surrounding environment, and the photo mode comes with Instagram like filters, so you can have fun customizing your pictures to your hearts content. This is one of those features that you wonder why it isn’t in more games with nice looking art styles and graphics.
Relicta is quite a lengthy game, and I feel like that being a good or a bad thing is going to be up to the player. Some might want more of the game, but there just wasn’t enough variety in the gameplay and by the end of the game I was getting a little exhausted. If you’re going to play, maybe take a few breaks while playing and go do something else.
Despite a lot of my complaints with Relicta and the fact that it’s not a game that I would go immediately to with recommending first person puzzle games, there is still something to be enjoyed here. And anyone who is looking for their fix of something that only a Portal-like game can fill, it’s certainly worth checking out, but unfortunately, it’s a lukewarm recommendation from me.
Despite my negativity, I would like to see it’s developer ‘Mighty Polygon’ continue just to see something more polished from them.
The game is set in 2120 aboard a station on the moon where an artifact known as the Relicta has been discovered, and scientific experiments are being done in secret to discover what properties it holds. You play as Dr. Angelica Patel – a physicist on the Chandara base, who is testing a new device that allows the use to manipulate gravity and magnetism.
The moon base is soon involved in an accident involving the Relicta, separating all of the members of the crew, including Kira, Angelica’s daughter. Angelica finds herself having to save the rest of the crew at the base, all while having to worry about the Relica and the secrets that it holds.
There is quite a bit of story here that I can’t include here, but I don’t want to ruin a lot of it by revealing too much, but just be warned that this is a dialogue heavy puzzle game.
Relicta is a first-person physics-based puzzle game where the main gameplay mechanic is using magnetism and gravity to solve all of it’s puzzles. While Relicta is obviously a portal clone, there are also comparisons that can be made to Magrunner: Dark Pulse, which also heavily uses magnets for it’s puzzles and is another Portal clone. But Relicta is more involved with it’s magnetic puzzles.
The puzzles of Relicta focus around magnetic cubes where you can switch between a negative and positive charge, indicated by them turning either red or blue, or having no charge at all, which is controlled with the gloves that your character has as part of her suit.
Puzzles contain the obvious game mechanics, such as making the cubes attract or repel each other, and using them on pressure plates to open up doors or turn off conveniently colored energy fields, purple only allowing the player to go through, green only allowing cubes, and yellow preventing both from coming through.
But like I mentioned earlier, the cubes have an anti-gravity field too. Sometimes you’ll have to use the cubes to activate a button that is located on a wall or the ceiling, or guide them through a level using magnetic places located on walls, some of which you can change yourself, and even ride them to get to the location that you need to be at.
Unfortunately, there were a few times where I was stuck solving a puzzle, only to find out that the game had introduced a new mechanic that I had no idea was there and I had to eventually cave in and look up a walkthrough just to figure out what I had to do. After that, the puzzles weren’t too bad, it’s just the initial not knowing what to do that was frustrating.
This makes the game more tedious that it should be. Some sort of audio cue indicating what I should do would have been helpful, whether it something coming from what I’m supposed to be paying attention to, or have my character briefly mention something after a while of being stuck in a certain area. I had no clue what the game wanted me to look at, and it took me way too long to figure out a piece of the puzzle.
There were even a few instances where I was looking for one of the magnetic boxes required to finish a puzzle only to find out that it was somewhere that I didn’t think to look. Some slight telegraphing would have significantly improved this game.
Also, the length in between autosaves is a little too long. There have been times where I was half way through a puzzle, had to close the game for whatever reason, and come back to it and have to spend 5 minutes catching up to where I was last just so I could continue. Even if the game didn’t include more autosaves, I would have loved the option for a manual save, but I don’t know if there was a technical reason it couldn’t have been included or it was just the way that the developers designed the game.
These few minor changes would have made the game a much smoother experience.
Also, some of the dialogue is a bit awkward, such as one character calling another an “Orbi-Boomer” and having sarcasm for every other line, for at least the first half of the game, or having PDAs and dialogue filled with references to other media. The game is aware of the kind of story that it wrote for itself in the latter half, It gets a little tedious after awhile, especially with how self-aware it is.
The visuals are pretty solid, even it’s pretty obvious that areas are designed to be more like rooms than actual locations. It is nice to see off into the distance beyond the areas that you’re in and seeing some nice looking locations, which there is a variety off.
As you’re solving puzzles and trying to figure out what is going on, you have to move in between domes, which contain a range of biomes of Earth-based terrains, which range from a large dense forest and nice blue sky, to snowy wasteland with icy caves, and even a seemingly endless desert. This does a lot to separate itself from something like Portal, instead of having dull tech filled room after room, you have another vista to look at, which is only separated by a few moments of the sci-fi aesthetic of a moon base.
The games visuals are so nice that it comes with a photo mode, where you can take photos of the surrounding environment, and the photo mode comes with Instagram like filters, so you can have fun customizing your pictures to your hearts content. This is one of those features that you wonder why it isn’t in more games with nice looking art styles and graphics.
Relicta is quite a lengthy game, and I feel like that being a good or a bad thing is going to be up to the player. Some might want more of the game, but there just wasn’t enough variety in the gameplay and by the end of the game I was getting a little exhausted. If you’re going to play, maybe take a few breaks while playing and go do something else.
Despite a lot of my complaints with Relicta and the fact that it’s not a game that I would go immediately to with recommending first person puzzle games, there is still something to be enjoyed here. And anyone who is looking for their fix of something that only a Portal-like game can fill, it’s certainly worth checking out, but unfortunately, it’s a lukewarm recommendation from me.
Despite my negativity, I would like to see it’s developer ‘Mighty Polygon’ continue just to see something more polished from them.
2015
Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/10/10/mod-corner-paranoia-2-saviour-half-life-2015-review/
NOTE: There are slight spoilers for the first game.
Surprisingly, 8 years after the first Paranoia, a sequel was released, this time developed by a team called KPLabs exclusively for the Xasd3D engine, a reverse engineered version of the GoldSRC engine, meaning it didn’t need the original Half-Life to run.
Set three weeks after the events of the first game, the charter you played in the first Paranoia wakes up in a military hospital and finds it deserted. After briefly running around the hospital, the game cuts back to three weeks ago, two hours after the first game ended, the Spetsnaz troops are informed of the creatures breaking out the main laboratory and spreading across the lower labs.
The troops are ordered to do a clean-up and eliminate the monsters. After restocking on ammo, the Major and his team enter the lower labs, and eventually reach KROT-1 where the command has made a decision to have the laboratory destroyed. However, the infection of the virus has moved from the mutants to ordinary people, transforming them into Zombies. Soon, the virus escapes the laboratory and starts making it’s way into way Russia.
I had to find that out via a wiki since the game never really communicates this to the player all that well, but it lines up well enough to the story that it makes sense. Either way, the story is cliched and campy enough that it’s not much of an issue.
This time around, the game looks pretty fantastic. You can barely tell it’s the GoldSRC engine unless you’re looking pretty hard. It even comes with a few new bells and whistles such as new water and glass effects, all of which looks pretty decent for the engine that it’s on.
All of the gameplay mechanics from the first one make their way over to this game. Iron sights, painkillers you can carry around, being able to pick up ammo from bodies, having a ballistics helmet that can protect you a bit more in combat. Even the gas mask gets some actual use this time. This time around, the game has a lot less ammo. Not enough that it was anger inducing, but the game was definitely going for a more survival horror attempt this time around.
A few problems from the first game seem to persist. Every now and again I’m not allowed to go through a door unless every friendly NPC is in position, making a second play though a bit tedious in places. And this time around, every now and again I can’t pass one of the companion AI. Which wouldn’t be as annoying as it is if the companion AI didn’t give you shit for either getting in their way or standing still for half a second too long.
The game is a lot more slow in a few places, and I suspect that this is why this game/mod isn’t as popular as the first game. A period of the game is looking for research documents that are located around a level and you can’t continue unless you find them all. This is pretty tedious since some of the documents blend into certain parts of the level, even when you know what your looking for. The checkpoints throughout the game are also pretty far apart, so quicksaving is a must.
Paranoia 2 seems to be a little more buggy than the first one. Whenever the game is loading, it’ll seem like it’s about to crash, but it’ll load the game anyway. I have had a crash or two as well. It was never really a big deal, but it’s something to watch out for.
In the middle of the game is a boss battle, and on the easiest difficulty of the game you just fire your gun into it as you run backwards for barely 6 or 7 seconds. I was surprised that it was over so quick that I died from a few zombies entering the room because I took a moment to go “What, was that it?”
Looking at some footage on Youtube, you’re supposed to kill it by leading up under one of the giant pistons and pulling the switch, crushing the monster under said piston. I don’t know if my game was glitched or the team behind this mod expected that the player would immediately get that you’re supposed to crush it with one of the pistons and never expected someone to unload an entire magazine or clip into it, even on the easiest mode.
Enemies are incredibly accurate, and the game has a tendency to have enemies surprise you when you enter a new room an aren’t expecting it, resulting in an immediate death upon entering certain environments. Sometimes it can take you 3 or 4 deaths before you get your bearing and you know where the enemies are. Maybe you have to slowly go through the level like you have military training, but it happens just often enough and so unexpected that I doubt that.
Is Paranoia 2 as bad as fans of the first one lead on. No, not really. But is it any good? And the answer to that is a bit complicated. It’s crashed enough that I don’t know how much i can recommend this to people, which really bring the whole game down, and if it didn’t crash as much as it does, I could have give in a more warm reception.
NOTE: There are slight spoilers for the first game.
Surprisingly, 8 years after the first Paranoia, a sequel was released, this time developed by a team called KPLabs exclusively for the Xasd3D engine, a reverse engineered version of the GoldSRC engine, meaning it didn’t need the original Half-Life to run.
Set three weeks after the events of the first game, the charter you played in the first Paranoia wakes up in a military hospital and finds it deserted. After briefly running around the hospital, the game cuts back to three weeks ago, two hours after the first game ended, the Spetsnaz troops are informed of the creatures breaking out the main laboratory and spreading across the lower labs.
The troops are ordered to do a clean-up and eliminate the monsters. After restocking on ammo, the Major and his team enter the lower labs, and eventually reach KROT-1 where the command has made a decision to have the laboratory destroyed. However, the infection of the virus has moved from the mutants to ordinary people, transforming them into Zombies. Soon, the virus escapes the laboratory and starts making it’s way into way Russia.
I had to find that out via a wiki since the game never really communicates this to the player all that well, but it lines up well enough to the story that it makes sense. Either way, the story is cliched and campy enough that it’s not much of an issue.
This time around, the game looks pretty fantastic. You can barely tell it’s the GoldSRC engine unless you’re looking pretty hard. It even comes with a few new bells and whistles such as new water and glass effects, all of which looks pretty decent for the engine that it’s on.
All of the gameplay mechanics from the first one make their way over to this game. Iron sights, painkillers you can carry around, being able to pick up ammo from bodies, having a ballistics helmet that can protect you a bit more in combat. Even the gas mask gets some actual use this time. This time around, the game has a lot less ammo. Not enough that it was anger inducing, but the game was definitely going for a more survival horror attempt this time around.
A few problems from the first game seem to persist. Every now and again I’m not allowed to go through a door unless every friendly NPC is in position, making a second play though a bit tedious in places. And this time around, every now and again I can’t pass one of the companion AI. Which wouldn’t be as annoying as it is if the companion AI didn’t give you shit for either getting in their way or standing still for half a second too long.
The game is a lot more slow in a few places, and I suspect that this is why this game/mod isn’t as popular as the first game. A period of the game is looking for research documents that are located around a level and you can’t continue unless you find them all. This is pretty tedious since some of the documents blend into certain parts of the level, even when you know what your looking for. The checkpoints throughout the game are also pretty far apart, so quicksaving is a must.
Paranoia 2 seems to be a little more buggy than the first one. Whenever the game is loading, it’ll seem like it’s about to crash, but it’ll load the game anyway. I have had a crash or two as well. It was never really a big deal, but it’s something to watch out for.
In the middle of the game is a boss battle, and on the easiest difficulty of the game you just fire your gun into it as you run backwards for barely 6 or 7 seconds. I was surprised that it was over so quick that I died from a few zombies entering the room because I took a moment to go “What, was that it?”
Looking at some footage on Youtube, you’re supposed to kill it by leading up under one of the giant pistons and pulling the switch, crushing the monster under said piston. I don’t know if my game was glitched or the team behind this mod expected that the player would immediately get that you’re supposed to crush it with one of the pistons and never expected someone to unload an entire magazine or clip into it, even on the easiest mode.
Enemies are incredibly accurate, and the game has a tendency to have enemies surprise you when you enter a new room an aren’t expecting it, resulting in an immediate death upon entering certain environments. Sometimes it can take you 3 or 4 deaths before you get your bearing and you know where the enemies are. Maybe you have to slowly go through the level like you have military training, but it happens just often enough and so unexpected that I doubt that.
Is Paranoia 2 as bad as fans of the first one lead on. No, not really. But is it any good? And the answer to that is a bit complicated. It’s crashed enough that I don’t know how much i can recommend this to people, which really bring the whole game down, and if it didn’t crash as much as it does, I could have give in a more warm reception.