Dusk: Dusk was pretty loudly recommended to me by Steam frequently for years since its Early Access release and I finally gave it a go after seeing a nice discount and news of an HD upgrade. It's a good game, but ultimately I wasn't all too impressed.

I think my favorite thing about Dusk was that, from a level design perspective, it certainly tries to keep you guessing. You'll pass through a variety of sights, starting with the swamps and foundries and ending up in Escher-inspired labs and Hellish atria. There are the classic Doom-like levels with a couple colored key cards, some hallways and some rooms/areas clearly designed for shootouts, and then there are “narrative” levels that'll remind you of a faster paced Max Payne nightmare sequence: pretty on rails and maybe too much voice over work in the background, but it is never enough to really annoy you.
Problem is I don't think it's enough to ever really excite you, either. The intro is cool, with you just starting in a basement while three chainsaw-wielding psychos try to murder you and you fight back with dual sickles; an interesting melee weapon choice. But after this intro? It's pretty stock stuff.
Don't expect to learn anything about a plot except for two text dumps between the next chapters. I don't need a plot in a game which is focused on the gameplay, but that just means the gameplay has to be tighter than my uncle's grip in the garage that one summer, and I don't think it was. It never hit the highs of any good Doom game and isn't really all that clever, either.

Maybe it's partially the weapons, they're just not that good. The sword is overpowered, especially with its charge attack when you have 100+ health; the dual pistols quickly become completely worthless; the akimbo shotguns and super shotgun can burn through ammo very fast and have a low ammo cap (though the akimbo shotties were very fun); the machine gun is boring and so close to sounding punchy enough but not quite; the hunting rifle is fun, but like the shotguns has a low ammo capacity and not very practical in most of the close quarters areas; the crossbow is the hunting rifle but weaker/faster; and finally the riveter and mortar are very strong but almost identical to one another and probably should just be combined into one explosive weapon, or just lose the mortar entirely.

It has all the staples you'd expect with secret areas inside secrets areas, rooms that turn into enemy-spawning ambushes when you pick up a key, and lame bosses who don't know when to die. Fortunately, there's only one area in the game where you're stuck and deal with wave after wave of enemies, having you kill about 230 of them. A worse developer would have thrown in one of these per chapter, I'm happy restraint was shown because I was done after the one time.

So the gameplay is the game. Is it good? It's fine. I don't think you'll see anything in Dusk you haven't seen elsewhere, but that's not necessarily the worst thing as long as it's done well (see: Lies of P). Unfortunately, I don't think this is done that well. I'm certainly happy I got it on discount, especially since the HD upgrade looks terrible and its saves don't work with the original game, which I ended up sticking with. The worse graphics are better, who woulda thought.
I can see myself coming back to Dusk some day for a little bit o' murder, but no day soon.

I sorta recommend Dusk, but never at full price.

Never played older X-COMs, but this one I found insufferable.

First of all, I think it looks ugly and sounds very generic. Second of all, it acts like it's some kinda cinematic experience, while having no sense of good pacing and delivering all information through simple talking heads. Third of all, the controls are very unintuitive, there's no free camera rotation, mouse wheel changes elevation for some reason instead of zooming in/out, and the zoom keeps resetting after each turn. Plus I hate these tacked-on "cinematic" close-ups for simple actions that you're gonna be doing thousands of times. They get old really quickly.

The actual combat seems fine, but it didn't really strike me as anything special. It's your standard, run-of-the-mill turn-based combat. It is kinda cool how you can change elevation and enter buses and shit like that. But it's also the kind of game where you can be hiding behind a stone wall and somehow get hit by the enemy, or approach the enemy, shoot them point-blank and miss. This kinda immediately ruins all the immersion they're so desperately trying to create with that "cinematic" bullshit.

Me when a game is full of references:
just NAMING something ISN'T a JOKE !!!!! PICK up a PEN and start WRITING actual CONTENT !!!!! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

me when every single reference is about something i really like:
oh my god... 😊😊😊 they like that... 😊😊😊 i also like that 😊😊😊.... can't wait to see an interview later talking about some minor details I may have missed 😊😊😊... videogames are art this is so cool... 😊😊😊

Yet another game that has a native Linux port that runs worse than the Windows version through Wine. Had pretty bad screen-tearing in the Linux version that couldn't be fixed with VSync.

I was excited to revisit Prey because I did remember this game having a great intro, but for some reason I never made it far. Another reason for excitement was that it's a game based on a 3D Realms concept that had been abandoned in the late 90s and picked up again in the early 2000s. It's always interesting to see how old school paradigms adapt in modern times. For example, Doom 3 and Quake 4, which are both developed on the same engine, imo present a great marriage of the two.

To my surprise Prey does not play like an old school shooter at all. In terms of its gameplay it most resembles Half-Life. You spend most of the time solving mini-puzzles that help you unlock the path forward. The actual combat is very slow and methodical. You die very quick, so it is encouraged to hide and snipe enemies. Your main assault rifle is pretty weak, but has a sniping mode, which kinda sends the message. It is very easy to run out of ammo too, so you cannot play this like you would play Doom or Quake.

In addition to your weapons, you have a special power, which allows you to leave your body and attack enemies or overcome obstacles as a spirit self. You'd think there's a huge potential with something like this, but you can't really successfully utilize it in combat because your real body is standing right there (receiving damage), and you can rarely find a place where you can leave it unguarded. Also you don't really have a lot of ammo as a spirit, and just like your human form, you die quick.

The main sorta gimmick of this game is the gravity-defying sections, where you either run along walkways on ceilings and walls or shoot buttons to flip the room on its sides. These are pretty cool at first, but they rarely serve much of a purpose. And due to the combat in general being not very fun, they end up not really making much of a difference. For example, when you're traversing walkways, you can hardly allow yourself to run around and dodge attacks, because the walkways are thin, and you can't jump on them. And the enemies will often spawn like 30 meters away, so the best solution is usually to whip out your assault rifle and snipe them while standing in the same place. It's not very exciting. I did once kill a few enemies by flipping the room, but I feel like the devs designed that moment this way. There are also portals, which this game was meant to pioneer in the late 90s, but again they serve little purpose other than being cool-looking doors.

Not a huge fan of the weapons here either. From what I gathered in my 3 hours of gameplay, other than the weak assault-rifle, you get pretty standard grenades, a machine gun (with a grenade launcher as alt-fire), and this one gun that transforms into either a plasma rifle, a flamethrower-like freezer, or a rail gun. The problem with the transforming gun is that you can only have one of these "modes" at a time, meaning you can never properly adapt to different situations. I mean the rail gun mode works against everything, but you quickly run out of ammo. You end up using the weak assault rifle the most, and it's just not fun.

The story here starts off pretty cool, but then doesn't really progress much. And it's mostly just exposition. Just like in Half-Life you spend most of your time in silence, but every now then the game stops you and delivers a new chunk of exposition. Pretty boring tbh, which is a shame, because the premise is so fucking cool. Playing as a Native American, you have to fight against foreign invaders who come with superior technology. There's so much potential for a colonialism metaphor here, which (at least in the time I played) was not very utilized. There is a theme of rediscovering your roots, but it's not being explored beyond gameplay necessities.

I also find the game's aesthetics and tone to be a bit dissonant. Clearly, the game wants you to treat it seriously (which is evident by the amount of gruesome violence and lack of humor), but its depiction of aliens is more in line with soft sci-fi like Star Trek. In fact, again, they remind me of aliens in Half-Life, who always failed to elicit any emotion from me. They're just different-looking creatures, neither scary nor interesting. They could just as well be humans and animals. And this is really how the whole setting ends up feeling. It's pretty generic.

I think I could overlook a lot of this game's flaws, if I liked the core gameplay. But I've never been a huge fan of Half-Life, and this game feels exactly like Half-Life, except it's set on a spaceship and has some gravity-defying architecture. I'd even say there's nothing particularly wrong with this game, it's just not my cup of tea. I like Half-Life, but could never understand why people consider it one of the greatest games of all time. Even as a kid, I always found Half-Life to be a little boring, and that's exactly how I feel about Prey. Now I know why I could never make it far in this game.

Looks and sounds great/authentic, but that's about the best you can say for it.

First and probably least importantly, calling this "Alien Trilogy" as though it is an adaptation of the films is extremely funny. At best, it gestures towards them, lazily and incompetently. This isn't really a problem with the game as a game, per se, but just more of a headscratcher/pet peeve for me. It does Aliens first and even struggles with that one - you know, the one that's essentially been the basis for a significant percentage of all video games ever made? If you can't manage to make ten FPS levels out of big Jim Cameron's "ALIEN$" without having the player fight infested humans and androids or having them blow up contraband cargo containers for some reason, I'm sorry, but try fucking harder.

Anyway, one of the bigger problems is that it is just boring. Quite straightforward, structure-wise, and that's especially disappointing given how good the Marine campaign from ALIEN VS. PREDATOR on Jag just was. And this has actual movies to go off of! But nah, it's just normal-ass levels where you have to get the exit. There are other stated objectives you're supposed to do along the way, but they are completely optional for some reason, so who cares? And there's very little grace to the enemy placement or level design. Just rooms and halls and packs of enemies. Buttons to press to make elevators go. Yawn!

This would probably be fine if the FPS fundamentals were in place, but they aren't. Some accomodation should be made for this being a pre-GOLDENEYE console shooter, I guess, but the aiming and the shooting and the hit detection just suck. For the non-shotgun weapons, your bullets are actually modeled and fly through the air about as fast as a Nerf dart, meaning you end up having to lead enemies than are any more than two feet in front of you. You're also shooting down at the floor most of the time for some reason, I guess to be able to hit face huggers by default? I dunno, it just doesn't feel good.

Given the great graphics and atmosphere, making this a bog-standard corridor shooter is a waste, and especially given the conceit that it's supposed to be capturing what made the movies special. Do better!

Elex, or perhaps more accurately called: Gothic 7 (but with sci-fi tech this time) is Piranha Bytes 7th (yes 7th) attempt at recreating their cult classic Gothic. Does Elex surpass their previous attempt in the Risen Series? Does it meet or even surpass the heights reached in the Gothic games?

Short answer: no. Long answer: Hahahahahhaah no.

Elex suffers from all of the problems that Piranha Bytes' games did before it. Terrible combat, lacklustre writing, bad voice acting, boring main character, uninteresting side characters... if it was a problem in the previous games you can count on it being a problem in Elex.

Then what exactly does Elex do right? What's the point in playing this game? Well honestly for most Elex should be a hard skip. The few things these games do well simply won't make up for the glaring issues that these games have.

But -and this is a big but- if you are someone who for whatever god forsaken reason is into Piranha Bytes games; someone who has played the Gothics and the Risens and has found themselves wanting more, then Elex is exactly that.

Piranha Bytes games are kind of like crack cocaine. You know it's not great for you, but there's simply nothing else that can give you the same high. It's the type of stuff that has you scratching your arms and legs nervously while you're waiting for your next hit.

Piranha Bytes are drug dealers.

3.5/5