I also beat RE2make Claire-A before this but withholding logging that till I go back and do Leon-B.

Anyway. I knew this was much shorter than RE2make and had removed some content from the original PSX title but I was still kinda surprised at how quickly it went. I believe I had around 3h50m~ for the in-game timer and 4.3h on the Steam timer vs closer to 5h in-game for RE2 and 6.8 Steam.

I can't comment on the removed content as I've never played the o.g. Nemesis and only ever consumed it via osmosis or LPs.

I genuinely hated the entirety of the Sewer section of RE2make but the only part I felt similar distaste for or any distaste really was the power plant overrun by bugs and that was fairly short.

Speaking of that part... much like how the first of the recent Tomb Raider reboots is not beating any allegations of guro or ryona fetishizing, the power plant part is not beating any allegations of insect or forced egglaying fetishizing. Holy fuck I've not seen an animation so blatantly horny in a horror game in a goddamn while.

The weapon variety was pretty solid, both pistols were decent (though I tossed the starter permanently into the box once I got the burst-fire one), everything else was useful and the magnum I successfully "oh but what if I need it later"ed into not using.

I didn't use the 3x green herb crafting option often. A nice option but kinda worthless with decent rationing.

I found the dodge more annoying than useful most of the time. I was never able to dodge any zombies but was able to dodge 90% of Nemesis's bullshit which feels off to me.

They also removed the notification for your health lowering and literally every death was because I couldn't tell if I had been knocked into CAUTION or DANGER states. They also removed the knife and grenades' ability to break out of grabs in exchange for a QTE which I'm mixed on.

I like the idea of the point shop to get stuff early to boost NG+.

I can understand the complaints given this was what, $60 on launch? It's too anemic on content to justify that and feels more like a 25-30 dollar expac for RE2make. But for the $7.50 i spent on the 2/3 bundle? not so bad

Also Jill's never looked better damn girl

Played with friends.

It's wild how few of these Left 4 Dead-likes actually work, and Aliens doesn't quite make the cut of those that do.

There's four campaigns (one more if you buy some DLC) that are all pretty dull. They try to mix it up by adding killer synths and mutants from the Prometheus era of the franchise but they just feel underbaked in comparison to the xenomorphs. The missions all have far too similar objectives and they rarely feel different. The part where you shoot cooling rods to stop a ship from leaving was the most interesting the objectives ever got - they're almost all "stand here and fight a hundred waves for X amount of time"

It has the usual unique monster types, mindless guys that run at you, guys that explode, guy that spit acid at you for area denial, guys that jump on you and attack (i swear to fucking god every L4D clone has this guy), guys that...are really strong? The Xenomorph Drone is kind of a brawler with the ability to pin you and he runs away after a bit. The Warrior is...strong? There's a third big guy archetype for xenos but I literally cannot remembe anything about him.

The synths have the usual generic shootmans, guys with shields, guys with gun, guys with sniper rifle, etc. They have armor you have to wear away before you can actually do damage.

Mutants have like..three types. Suicide headcrabs, zombies, and an invisible cat monster that isn't fun to engage at any point.

Some of the cosmetics are rather worthless - a gun decal makes sense in an FPS where the gun is always visible - not so much in a TPS. Most cosmetics are ugly, I think they were going for realistic military guy shit but its boring and unappealing.

There's a mechanic where you slot perks into abilities to change their properties. That's pretty neat - the class I used had rockets as their main ability and using perks to make them into napalm launchers was fun.

The one thing it does to differentiate itself from other L4D types is the challenge card system, which is about the one unique thing about it I genuinely enjoyed. Each player can pick a card which is usually a horrible debuff that will fuck you over but you get increased rewards. The game chooses from the cards selected, and this modifier lasts throuhgougt the mission. Some are cancer (pistol only) some sounded bad but were ultimately nothingburgers (the pursuing synth one sounded scary but he literally stopped spawning after a couple times).

I don't expect much from writing in these but it fails to deliver there too. While L4D and Vermintide know what to do (focus on character banter), this decides to have a really dull story about marines and Weyland-Yutani and the xenomorphs and zzzzzzz......

The marines you play are personalityless ciphers and the dialogue is all over radio. The radio dialogue is written like a copy of a copy of Aliens, all meathead no substance. Cameron's marines were meatheads and not terribly deep but he knows what he's doing and how to play into and out of cliche. This is all cliche, all meathead. There's nothing remotely engaging or surprising there. If you look at the fact Weyland-Yutani is involved in the plot and the X-Files black goo is involved too .... you already know what's happening, what will happen, etc.

Some'a the music wasn't bad, I liked the guy on flute going ham during the jungle mission.

On discount with friends, sure. Otherwise pass, especially if you have L4D or Vermintide unless the Aliens branding makes you go feral

Played up thru the current update (ends after the castle boss).

It's a very well done modernization of the King's Field/Shadow Tower style of FROM Software games. As Shadow Tower Abyss proved, dual analog goes a hell of a long way to making them more palatable.

My quibbles currently involve some of the levels being a bit hard to parse. The temple, sewers, and catacombs are the main culprits here. My smooth brain contains marbles and they clatter around and make it hard for me to figure out where to go sometimes. The temple is pitch-black, the sewers all look the same, and the catacombs are also dark and samey so the marbles roll around alot.

I will say those are the only areas I have issues with. The temple and catacombs are cool aside from me getting lost.

There are some holes in teh game's balancing. The spell to place a ball of fire down is ridiculously strong (it lasts 45 seconds??????? even 20 seconds would be OP) as is the ice trap spell (a boss I fought melted because I hit him three times with it). I know I missed gear but I only ever found 1 ice and 1 poison element weapons and both were pretty underwhelming. Other elements get better representation but hopefully later updates will rectify that.

I found the secret challenge tower, and found it overall easy. It has some cool unique enemies that I'd love to see in main areas in later updates, and the reward is well-worth the ascent.

The music is great as well, ranging from some early game tracks that I can't imagine not being King's Field 4 inspired to uncomfortable ambiance ala Silent Hill to catchy triphop. Some of the tracks were composed by certified Good Youtube Boy Thorhighheels so hells yea. (I also saw on Youtube an earlier update had a track straight-up using KF4 and Evergrace samples and while nice....yea better not use it to be safe)

I think the one thing I'm most looking forward to is seeing what zones end up being mandatory and what ends up 100% optional. I'll probably wait for the final update and write a new review based off that

Was really split between 3.5 and 4 stars and I chose 4. The parts that work work really damn well and the parts that don't...really don't.

Some of the bosses are more annoying than fun (Leviathan), others get pretty pathetic once you figure out their tricks (Abzu). The ones I liked the most were the 1-on-1 duels - Roche, Reno, Rufus, etc. Rufus might be my favorite fight in the game, something about the movesets and the way the mechanics work in it is just really fun.

The combat itself is pretty fun. Each character feels distinct, and each weapon for them has some kind of use albeit some are much more niche than others. I'm not really sure I'd ever use the Nail Bat or Barret's melee weapons but I appreciate they exist.

The ATB gauge solves the problem a lot of action JRPGs have where you can just slam back potions or food and not worry about HP ever. It does get slightly annoying when the AI sometimes just doesn't seem to ever build ATB for some reason.

It also solves the Souls dilemma of "why block when dodge is better" by making certain attacks basically undodgeable and also by letting you build ATB with blocks.

The stagger bar is nothing new - variations on it have been in JRPGs for years (since FFXIII at the very very least) but making it deeper by having enemies get unbalanced with certain actions and let you build stagger by exploiting this.

I'd say the weakest bits of combat are Aerith and Barret. Aerith feels like a peashooter and she's kinda worthless against magic resistant enemies or guys with Manaward. Barret isn't bad but his gameplay is so safe and uninteresting it's not engaging or fulfilling to play him.

Tifa, inversely, might be one of the funnest characters to play in an action JRPG. Her Concentration buffs that give her new strong attacks, the multiple martial arts skills that can all flow together into stupidly fun strings? Hell ye. I will say standard enemies die a little too fast to do anything cool with her and bosses are not designed to actually let her do anything either.

The story, naturally, expands on basically everything from the Midgar chapters of the original. Some are very welcome - the chapter hanging out with Jessie and gang for one, they really needed to be more than the redshirts they were in the o.g. - while others are...woof. Thinking of the train graveyard chapter (complete and utter filler; the fact Tifa and Aerith have three cutscenes devoted to them having the SAME DISCUSSION ABOUT DON CORNEO AND SHINRA is huge proof of that) and - most frustratingly - the stuff in the penultimate chapter involving Hojo's experiments. The pacing is outright murdered in that section.

The much debated changes I'm more positive on after seeing them in action. It is kind of dumb they advertised this as a perfect jumping on point and then throw tons of things without context out there. Thinking especially of Cait Sith's cameo where all of a sudden during this "end of second act downturn" scene a Sonic OC appears with terrifying realistic fur and wordlessly laments the current events before never being seen again. I forgot Cait Sith existed and did a double take at that scene.

One minor flashbang of discovery I had was looking up Kyrie and finding out they pulled her from a dogdamn Advent Children prequel novel. Wild shit huh.

I'm curious to see where it goes from here. I have a few inklings of ideas but I'm not going to go all in on any of them.

e: I did not play (much of) INTERMISSION. I played a bit, Yuffie is fun and her moogle hoodie is cute but I'm a little burned out on the gameplay.

it took three playthroughs for me to be able to beat this lol. first time i bailed on genichiro, second time i bailed on the sword saint. now i have defeated the sword saint with the hardest-to-get ending.

some of the minibosses are difficult because only because it has about 10 other dudes in the arena, and others are difficult only because the room you're in is 2x2 and the camera is intended for a minimum of 8x8 room size.

the feeling of triumphing over a boss might be the strongest in a FROM game. the feeling of obliterating a boss in one try is beautiful.

if anything my big complaint about the combat is when there's dust being kicked up and you see the Perilous symbol appear but the enemy is behind the dust cloud so you have to pick one of three reactions and pray.

another minor problem is you have to unlock the mikiri counter. i feel like a move like that shouldn't be locked in the first place.

i think the folding screen monkeys might be the best gimmick fight in a FROM game. it's so clever and fun and if you know what you're doing it's over quick.

the mist noble, conversely, might be the funniest FROM fight because it's the biggest troll fight in gaming since Mysterio in spider-man 2.

the musical score is probably the weakest in one of their games in a while. i swear there was only one battle theme and while the music isn't bad i didn't find many tracks memorable.

currently debating continuing my NG+ run to do Shura ending or not


i will say i dont get the "jUsT mAsH LB" critiques. i experimented with that and i died or got fucked up every time. maybe try being better at games idk

A step to the side and then two steps back from Nioh.

Tons of features that were in Nioh 1 were removed seemingly at random (and patched back in). It took nearly a MONTH to get the ability to choose to go back to the hub village after a story mission. Before you had to wait for the level load, the cutscene load, then another level load followed by running to the first flag and leaving the level for another load screen. Terrible idea, thankfully fixed now.

What is a good idea is how they fixed the loot problem. You only need to worry about star rankings and affixed martial arts. Changing affixes on gear is now done thru the use of jewels to actually pick what you want instead of wasting time and money to pray that the game rolls the affix you want.

The martial arts skills are a bit more tricky since each weapon type seems to have a handful of possible martial arts attack. Some are better than others, and unique set weapons have unique skills.

The shift away from regenerating Ki with ki pulses to Positive Qi (landing attacks and successful deflects) and Negative Qi (wiffing deflects, blocking attacks, taking damage, using magic, using martial arts abilities and your heavy attack) is... interesting. Magic always eats a huge amount of bar no matter what but it is nice to have huge positve Qi and use magic with no real loss.

the morale system feels like stranger of paradise's MP system but not complete garbage. you aren't heavily penalized for daring to die this time.

The removal of learning new moves really sucks because your weapons will basically always feel the same unless you switch weapon types.

the writing somehow got worse between nioh and this. it was never good but now it's like a slog. it might be because i don't have much experience with three kingdoms history. i know about the three dudes who fought the yellow turbans. i know not to pursue lu bu. i know cao cao is either the hugest asshole or the coolest dude depending on the story.

the story is actually just nioh 1 and 2. again. big civil war. evil magician man who is evil spreads evil red magic shit to corrupt people and summon demons.

i managed to beat all the story and sub missions, a surprise since both niohs had some utter cancer missions. the checkpoints between wave spawns during wave-based missions is welcome. the three-on-one boss fight can suck a giant cock tho. fuck team ninja's obsession with that shit.

overall it isn't bad but it cannot match Nioh 2. it might not even match Nioh 1, tbqh. its definitely no Stranger of Paradise because nobody in this is as fun a character as Jack. Jack fucking rules.

I really wanted to like this but after about 7 hours I gave up. Dull, uninteresting and deriative writing (I have a hunch the devs love the Ivalice setting because this game owes so goddamn much to it). Dungeons and areas with nothing to them of note - no gimmicks, almost zero chests with worthwhile loot. There's also several areas with genuinely dreadful conveyance where the path ahead was a doorway facing the characters but not the camera with the only hint being a hard-to-read bump in the wall. Put a light shaft coming out of the doorway at least, even if it doesn't lead to a bright area.

The combat is designed around some smart ideas - fast party swaps mid-battle, your HP and TP regen to full after each battle so you aren't managing resources too hard. However to counteract this each battle takes anywhere from 5x to 10x as long as they should, with some enemies have gimmicks that aren't well-conveyed. The boss battles weren't that bad, mostly just throwing attacks out in specific patterns. It's just once again they last too fucking long and aren't really that challenging, just a boring slog.

You "level up" by getting grimoire points after certain boss fights which unlock skills. Which then feeds into how long the regular battles feel - you're wasting all this time and your reward isn't XP to feel stronger. You get SP to upgrade your skills - 3 points at a time most of the time, and skills need 200 points to upgrade at minimum. The cost lowers the more you use it (very slowly) so basically all they did was remove a grind people cry about and trick them into accepting a worse grind.

You have a reward board to give you items based on things you do which is neat enough. There's also a system ripped straight from Final Fantasy XII where certain loot items give you special deals at merchants.



At least the pixel art is nice.

Boring, unremarkable story populating by interchangeable goons; boring shoots held up by the Darkness powers. Typical Ps3/60-era shooter design (corridors and 1 second sprinting). The cel-shaded aesthetics and Mike Patton do the majority of the heavy lifting.

Also just quit the game at the credits, the hook for the sequel that checks notes definitely never happened is an albatross around the neck of an already lackluster story.

I will say the L2-to-pump skill for shotguns is pretty dope. More vidya shotguns need that.

When I played this on PS4, I ended up stopping after the first DLC mission. And now, I'm in the same position because nothing is more annoying in a game like this than DLC that buys into its own self-hype about difficulty.

Speaking of difficulty, this time I had basically zero difficulty because poison bombs and blinding bombs are stupid strong and even very strong enemies can't deal with them.

I've never agreed with the common complaints about bad level design (bad? No, at worst serviceable) or the enemy reuse (if your baddy roster is strong enough you don't need hundreds of unique guys).

I will say the final level is pretty bad having just replayed. The first 2/3rds are swarming with high-tier monsters, balanced by having two companions. But then your companions have the intelligence of a seal with brain trauma and will trap you on ladders or push you off thin walkways because they're too goddamn stupid to walk forward.

It is, however, still immensely funny how the first final boss, whose return has been described as the worst possible outcome...just says "nah I'm done with you nerds" and peaces out because actually he doesn't give a shit

a lot of people seem mixed or down on this but i genuinely had a fun time with it.

the aesthetics of modern day exorcists in shibuya battling demons and evil spirits do a lot of heavy lifting tho.

the plot is anemic, sluggish, and easy to predict but the climax feels right. however, there's never a sense of tension or urgency - a common problem in open world games - mostly because. it never feels like the plot is particularly driven. it just kind of ambles around.

there's a good amount of side questing to be had - some are tutorials for some collectibles, some are neat asides in cool j-horror adjacent areas or ideas, some are multi-part mini-narratives. i would've liked a second half to the youtuber girl since the dialogue jokes about it tho...

the combat isn't bad but it has a distinct problem. namely, you have four main weapons - wind, water, and fire spells; and your bow. each fits a specific niche (workhouse/rapid-fire, wide AOE, piercing/AOE, precision). however, you can charge the attacks which makes them feel far too similar since you're either incentivized to charge (wind spell getting more projectiles for free) or required (bow).

there's also talismans which aid stealth and combat but the useful combat ones are pricey and the decoy talisman sometimes just...doesn't work.

the creature design is inventive and unsettling, with my favorite being the headless students. it's a striking image, and them doing dropkicks or roundhouse kicks to your face or using protractors as projectiles are cute.

i cannot imagine 100%ing this game and not wanting to die afterwards. the primary collectible are floating stacks of souls ripped from their bodies, typically averaging around 90-200 spirits per stack.

there are 240,000 spirits to collect. no thanks.

i did however, collect all the magatama, pray at all the jizo statues, and meet all the tanuki. these are a lot easier to grab as you can donate money to shrines to mark tanuki & jizo on the map (this even spoils what the tanuki is disguised as). i'd say the jizo are the highest priority collectible (they give you extra casts for your spells) and everything else is varying degrees of necessary.

played on steam deck so I can't particularly comment on the PC port fully. there were some significant performance dips in the final sequence as well as some chugging in the inside areas(???).

if you're tired or leery of open world games with many checklists this isn't something I can recommend. or if you want a gripping story. it is however, an interesting concept & setting and if that can carry a game for ya? go for it.

between this and hi fi rush I'm beginning to get a real appreciation for tango gameworks - i hope it carries over to the evil within, which I just picked up.

AWE stands for Altered World Event. It also stands for ALAN WAKE EXPANSION. Wow!!!

The darkness and light mechanics are ported over nicely from Alan Wake, and while we don't see much of Alan it's still nice to see him. The new gun mod is fun to mess with, especially when you start combining it with the telekinesis ability.

Kinda sucks this expansion got a whole-ass weapon and Foundation only got area-specific abilties.

Also the ending really was just "wink alan wake 2 wink" huh

Always visually striking and full of weird, charming files to read. The gameplay has some problems (the Shield power I never found useful, the weapon modes are hit and miss) but it never feels bad or awkward.

The story convolutes itself into corners that never seem to be backed out of and it...doesn't really have much of an ending.

EDIT: tacked on 2 hours to playtime after realizing I missed side quests while cleaning up during DLC

Corvo's really bad at his job, huh?

The options available at any one time are pretty impressive. Sometimes it's a tad handholdy- the party mission basically gave me everything I needed to know just from interacting with two characters standing 10 fast apart. Other times it feels like it wants to waste my time (Golden Cat non-lethal route).

It's a shame people obsess over pacifist runs. It isn't terribly hard to manage low chaos even with a lot of murders (I had high chaos up until the party, and then it was pretty easy to avoid increasing the chaos level).

Figuring out creative solutions in the game's puzzle box is usually fun enough to make up for the overall weak narrative and thin characters. The lore is probably the most interesting part of the writing, a lot of neat ideas and well thought out world-building.

My biggest problem is a few levels felt overlong and then the last two levels are crazy short in comparison.