This is really an arcade game masquerading as a simulator. My issue with this is that it kinda fails to be either one. In terms of handling it’s closer to the original Sega Rally rather than the Colin McRae games. And the physics feel like something out of 2004.

The game lets you do some minimal tuning, but it’s almost pointless because it doesn’t even tell you anything about the tracks or the vehicles. The tarmac stages are the most fun to play because that’s where this game feels in its element, with high speeds and long drifts.

The career mode is kinda interesting in that it lets you do some minimal visual customization to your car, unlocking new liveries and sponsor decals. But all the other modes are basically the same, the only difference being whether you want to play one race, an event, or a championship.

Visually it can be pretty at times, but there’s this persistent awful blur in the distance, even after you disable depth of field and motion blur. I feel like they were just trying to hide the loading models and shadows, but it doesn’t help really, because the pop-in is still very visible. The stages that take place at sunset or sunrise are way too dark, and the cars aren’t using their lights for some reason. Even the original Colin McRae Rally did this better.

At the end of the day this just feels like a game that’s several years behind. I wish it just dropped the pretense and let you race against opponents and with background music. Because it really has nothing hardcore simulator fans would appreciate. So it ends up being a shoe size that fits no one.

Dirt really feels like a game that was designed to satisfy everyone.

It was probably the most accessible Colin McRae game to date without compromising on complexity. There's a huge amount of QoL improvements, and you can pretty much set the game up to your taste, from a hardcore simulation to an arcade racer. Plus better physics engine allowing for more destructible environments and more realistic collisions, and new disciplines with off-road vehicles. It should really be the best game in the series.

The only issue for me is the way it looks, but it's a huge issue. There's a vignette filter and an over-abundance of bloom. A stylized look like this can work in some games, but not here. It just makes every track look like it's taking place in scorching heat, and kinda makes the entire experience unpleasant. I'd rather play more flawed games that look better.

It's a shame though that we still can't get a mode with background music like the arcade mode in CMR 2.0. In this game there are 3 modes, and they all kinda play the same, which isn't really a bad thing, since the reason for it is that you can customize your experience to an equal amount in each of those modes, but it does make you question why they exist in the first place.

In addition I had a strange issue with controls here. Not gonna blame the game for it, it's probably on my end, but sometimes the car would outright refuse to steer or have like 2-3 second delay to button presses. Not sure what's up with that. I hope I won't have such a problem with the sequels.

Didn't really grab me. I dunno, I might revisit it some day, but unlikely.

While all the core mechanics are fine, I didn't really enjoy anything it brings to the table compared to other RPGs. The combat feels like too much micro-management to me. Then again, you can streamline it, but that feels almost like the game playing itself.

I think the strongest appeal of such RPGs is usually the story and role-playing, which I found kinda lacking here. The game lets you create your own characters, which for me is by far the most fun I had with this game. The customization options are extremely diverse, ranging from race and class to moral alignment, even letting you write your characters' biographies. But what this means in practice is that the game isn't really written to accommodate the type of characters you create, their personality or their backstory. Meaning you're constantly faced with dialogue options that feel out of character for your character. All the dialogues are almost the same, regardless of who you play as. And you're also limited in what you can do story-wise. It's very linear.

That kinda only leaves you with combat and upgrades. And for that aspect I'd rather play something like Diablo, where the gameplay mechanics are designed around combat and thus feel more intuitive.

This review is for the current Steam version of Arkham Asylum.

I am so tired of these dumbass pointless remasters. I was able to run this game on high settings in 2009, but now my laptop is struggling to even run medium settings at a stable framerate. Tf? This is a 15-year-old game! If you wanna remaster something, get a game from the 90s that is hard to run on modern hardware and that probably has complicated controls. Or get a console port from the early 00s, back when PC was treated like a second-class platform. The original release of Arkham Asylum was fine! Last time I checked it still ran with no issues on modern systems! And why wouldn't it? 2009 wasn't that long ago. There are plenty of older games that really require a remaster. Or, if you just absolutely have to remaster this, at least add the ability to launch the original version like they did with Bioshock or the recent Quake remaster. But no, that is too much to ask for apparently. Fuck your nostalgia, play this game with changed graphics and a required online connection! Oh and btw, if you're poor and your cheap laptop can't handle it, fuck you too, we hate poor people here at Warner Bros! Our favorite pastime is to drive around Los Angeles and beat the shit out of homeless people and steal their pennies because that's just how we roll, motherfucker!

And just to make things more annoying, the graphics settings are in the launcher. So I have to keep exiting the game just to find a balance between a tolerable performance and decent-looking graphics. Now, I don't remember if that was the case in the original release, it might've been, but I played Arkham Origins in 2021 and the graphics settings were in the game menu. Since you remastered this game, you could've done the same here (again, if that was not already the case).

You know, at the very least you could've called this version "Batman Arkham Asylum Remastered", not "GOTY", because GOTY is usually the same game just with all the expansions and perhaps some new DLC. I bought this thinking I'd get the original game, just with a bunch of extra content. Instead I'll now have to pirate the original version or play this piece of shit on low settings with blurry textures and shit, and get constantly thrown back into the menu whenever the game decides there was a disconnection, because the video game industry just had to milk this cash cow.

You steal things and run for your life. It's like a puzzle platformer, except the platforming is not very fun from a tactile perspective. I dunno how to convey it in words, but basically it doesn't have that floaty feel or the perfect balance in distance between platforms that great platformers tend to have. And when you're being chased, this becomes a real issue. And your pursuers are relentless to an almost cheating degree. Obstacles don't exist for them, and they always know where you are. Honestly, this game gives me anxiety. As a kid I was able to play it probably because my mental health was better. Now I'd rather play games where you can murder people because I wanna murder people.

It starts with a maze 😤

And is strangely designed to punish you for mistakes. I mean, this game is very slow, and the punishment is to make you backtrack more. There are no control settings, so you can't even set up a faster turning speed, and there doesn't seem to be some key combination to make a 180° turn like in survival horror games.

At some point the game clearly expects you to look up, but none of the buttons let you do that and, as I already indicated, there are no control settings.

This game seems to be intentionally frustrating as hell. Also it performs quite poorly.

I genuinely don't get the point of making a single-player Battlefield game and stripping it of everything Battlefield is known for.

This game is so frustrating. It repeatedly throws you into seemingly big open maps that in actuality are filled with invisible walls. On rare occasions the game lets you find a way to flank or circumvent the enemies, but it almost feels like you're not meant to do it. The level design here is actually more linear than in Call of Duty 4 or Medal of Honor 2010. In addition, it's full of extremely scripted missions where you're not allowed any freedom of choice, just like in Modern Warfare 2. Except it also doesn't have the nice visuals, weapon variety or spectacle of the latter.

The only thing that kinda makes it stand out is the physics. It's fun to tear buildings apart with explosives. Other than that, it's a generic military shooter that, btw, doesn't even have a prone function. How do you not have proning in a military shooter in 2010? Delta Force had it in 1998! AND actual big open maps with total freedom of movement. This is just embarrassing.

Also, consider me a killjoy, but I don't think a humorous story is appropriate for a military shooter. Are we supposed to be having fun with these dudebros while they're fulfilling America's imperialist ambitions? I didn't really pay much attention to the actual story (not that it was well-presented), but I had no idea who we were fighting. But I assume it's probably some evil Russians or evil South Americans or evil Middle-Easterners or some shit. Don't get me wrong, I don't expect much more from American military shooters, but at least treat the subject matter with seriousness. This is just plain disrespectful.

Last time I played this must've been like 2004 with my brother. It was his game, and sometimes he wanted a real opponent, so we played hot-seat. I was terrible, I could never really get into racing games, especially simulators.

Thought I've grown since, but nope. It was too hardcore for me then, and it's too hardcore for me now. This is a game for true carheads, I can't understand half the shit it throws at me, and I lose every race.

The physics are amazing though. One of the best collision models I've seen. Different amounts of damage are dealt depending on the speed and the angle. I had some fun crashing into other cars to take them out and get ahead.

LITERALLY the exact same game as the first one.

The only differences are:
1) new tracks (with less visual variety)
2) reskinned menu
3) now motocross and regular racing are split into separate championships.

That is it. Even the soundtrack is the same.

I don't even know how to rate this game because on one hand this means it's as good as the first one (almost, I still prefer the visual variety of the original), on the other hand, if I bought it back in the day, I would've felt robbed. This is like a DLC sold as a full game. If something like this came out today, it would've probably caused an outrage.

Painkiller is a game that I've attempted to beat many times, and I can confidently say I've played through at least 80% of this game, but could never push myself to complete it. I think I've always wanted to like it because there are many reasons to, but at its core it's just an extremely basic and poorly thought-out shooter.

I remember when Serious Sam came out, most people called it a Doom-clone, which couldn't be further from the truth. Then Painkiller came out and people were comparing it to Serious Sam. I suppose because both games feature big crowds of enemies. But there's a major difference here.

Serious Sam often places you in big and open environments that sometimes have buildings or other obstacles laid out in a manner that lets you maneuver and strategize. It also gives you diverse rosters of enemies and weapons, each of which perform different functions. Certain weapons are more effective against certain enemies, which incentivizes you to constantly switch between weapons to target enemies that might be more dangerous or closer to you at that point in time. There is a lot of complexity to Serious Sam, which I feel often flies over people's heads (maybe even the developers' heads sometimes).

Painkiller has none of that. Most enemies function the same, the roster of weapons is very small and, aside from range, there's no significant difference between most of them. You have your shotgun, your rifle equivalent (nailgun) and your machinegun/grenade launcher. The rest are just variations. Each room functions as a tiny arena that you're locked in with respawning enemies. In most cases enemies spawn from 1-3 same places and you can easily just stand there and shoot at the same spot. Or find a place they have trouble getting to, let them congregate there and do the same. The entire gameplay is dead simple.

That being said, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't fun. Mainly due to the physics. But of course after a while you get tired of doing the same crap over and over again. The devs tried to spice things up with atrocious boss battles, which only make it worse.

I have to give this game props for how it came across in 2004 though. It was one of the best-looking games of the year, and ragdoll physics at the time were still a new and exciting thing. In addition, it has a pretty cool art-design, especially with some very creatively-designed (from a visual standpoint) enemies.

But in the end it's more of an artifact of the era. It was getting rave reviews at the time, and you can kinda see why, but in retrospect it's clear that the graphics were one of the major contributing factors to this. Whereas, when it comes to the gameplay, you can do much better within the same genre.

P.S. Forgot to point out: this Black Edition includes the first expansion, Battle Out of Hell, and it's terrible. It has some creative locations and designs, but gameplay-wise it's noticeably worse than the original game.

I remember when I came across the original GunZ, it was kinda unique for the time. An online third-person shooter/hack-n-slash game with MMO elements and Matrix-style acrobatics. I know everybody loved that game for the broken and exploitable mechanics in PvP, but I really enjoyed the PvE missions as well. I could never really get the hang of the broken mechanics, but I tried! I remember one girl teaching me to do those, asking me "how many buttons do you have on your mice?" and me going "What do you mean? 3 of course" and her going "hm, that's bad". I didn't even know mice could have more at the time.

For the sequel, it seems, the devs were trying to accommodate people like me by getting rid of the broken mechanics. I mean, I never really wanted them gone, but okay. I remember playing this for 20 minutes on release lol. I still had that logged in Steam with the "last played" date being 2014.

But the truth is by 2014 nobody was amazed by an MMO-esque online shooter or by the combination of melee and range combat. Practically every game's multiplayer became MMO-esque by then. Call of Duty and Battlefield were dominating that space.

It's kinda incredible that you can still play the PvE missions in this game, but not sure why you'd want to! As a single-player game this is just horrendous. In fact by the 2014 standards I think the gameplay here is VERY outdated. They just send hordes of dumb enemies at you that are easy to mow down. This was okay for a mid-2000s hybrid MMO-ish game, but by 2014 it's kinda unacceptable. And the art-design, which I really liked in the original, is very unpleasant to me here. It's very anime with lots of oversaturated toxic colors.

For fun though, try turning off the anti-aliasing. This is probably the only game where anti-aliasing means "all the visual effects invented post 2002". Because it makes the game look like those videos that make Doom 3 run on Windows 98.

Very generic linear story-driven TPS with a bad story and a stupid voice gimmick.

It keeps pestering you with dialogue options that don't matter. You can reply to most questions with "Damn", "God Damn" or "Shit", which I don't even know what these responses are supposed to mean in yes-or-no questions, but it's pretty funny. I wish the protagonist was voiced though.

Every character is unlikeable or cliched. You can give out tactical commands, but they don't matter because the game is so linear and simple. You're basically just blasting through tunnels of enemies with occasional cutscenes, scripted sequences and boss fights (which are atrocious). The art design is very plain, the music is forgettable. There's a tacked-on upgrade system which is needlessly complicated (who wants to play tetris when choosing upgrades?), so I simply ignored it.

The AI companions are so stupid and annoying, they constantly get in your line of fire or push you out of your cover, or die and need rescuing. On this one boss fight, one of them died and the other one was like "do you wanna help him?" and I was like "No", and she was like "well, I can't!", only to change her opinion a few seconds later, when I already exposed myself to try and save that idiot, and go "do you want me to help him?", and I was like "yeah!", and she was like "ugh, alright". As a result we all got murdered. Brilliant.

The lowest form of horror in my opinion is one that relies on the sense of self-preservation, startlement and shock value. And that's precisely the type of horror presented in Condemned. Some of it was true for F.E.A.R. too, but due to the outstanding gameplay you kinda wanted to forgive that. At first I thought Condemned has a F.E.A.R. complex of "great combat, bad horror", but within 70 minutes I realized that this wasn't the case.

The combat starts off very impressive. It's difficult to pull-off a good melee combat in first-person, and Condemned is probably one of the better examples of it. And the enemy AI seems very advanced at first, almost like it's playing mind-games with you. But soon you realize that the combat doesn't really have any more tricks up its sleeve, and gets boring very quickly. Plus some issues with it become apparent. For example, it's clear that head-shots deal more damage, but it's almost impossible to have any precision in a fight. You aim at the head and end up hitting air above it. It's almost a happy coincidence when they do happen.

As for the AI, it becomes obvious that the perceived "mind-games" are all scripted, while the real AI is extremely dumb. They like hiding behind corners, and that's basically their only tactic. Which is very annoying because sometimes you KNOW the enemy is hiding there, but there's pretty much no way to avoid being hit. One time an enemy ambushed me, and after I took a couple of steps back, he decided to hide behind that same corner again like I didn't see him.

Furthermore the level design reveals itself to be extremely linear. Sometimes there's like two paths to the same room, but they usually only differ in what pointless items they're gonna have, and it's usually conduits. And these diversions are so brief that you end up exploring both paths anyway. Then there are these special doors that require a special weapon to open, and it's always somewhere around the corner. So there's basically no consequence for picking one weapon over the other, because you're always gonna find the one weapon you need when the situation arises.

Needless to say, guns are almost useless here. Most times you find them with about 3 bullets inside, which isn't worth trading an axe or a sledgehammer for them. I don't really mind having less ammo in a game like this, but what really bugs me is the in-game reason (or lack thereof) for why you can't carry extra clips. Because you carry an entire forensics lab worth of tools on you, but there's no place for an extra clip?

Speaking of the forensics, they're just busywork here. They're not some fun gameplay mechanic. They're usually just "pull out a tool, point it at something and left-click". Most games that feature forensics have this problem, but here there's so much emphasis on it that it becomes really annoying really fast.

And the final nail in the coffin for me is the movement speed. It's very slow, and you wanna hold down the sprint button the entire time, but then you keep running out of stamina. I dunno why they decided this was a good idea. Being slow does not add to horror or suspense. It just makes you feel handicapped. If the goal of the game was to make you feel handicapped, I'd understand, but you're supposed to beat the shit out of hundreds of junkies, so I don't really get it.

All that being said, the core combat is really well-done. I think, if they made it a bit more complex and let you move faster, this could really develop into a fun first-person brawler. The potential is definitely there.

Gameplay-wise this is behind even the first Colin McRae Rally. For a simulator it's just lacking any depth, and the handling is tolerable at best. For some reason it lets you choose real drivers like that makes any difference, but won't let you tune the cars.

The menus are very poorly designed, there's hardly any settings there, you can't even look up controls. When you select "Single Rally", you need to select a location first to see an image of it (if you wanna at least get an idea of the weather, cause the game won't tell you), but then if you don't like it and press circle, it drops you all the way back to the main menu.

Graphically, although it's pretty decent from the technical standpoint, it's drenched in brown and grey colors, making it just unpleasant to look at. And the soundtrack came off more annoying to me than anything else, although I suppose some people will enjoy it.

That being said, it's a tolerable racer. Like, if you have nothing else to play, this is good enough to fuck around and kill some time.