Conspiracy: The Game

Area 51's an interesting one, the story isn't anything spectacular but it is pretty entertaining. With the obvious namesake conspiracy aside, it follows up with some other fun conspiracies in a pretty amusing way. The game definitely starts stronger than it finishes, with things in the beginning being almost horror-esque as you fight these strange alien creatures before it devolves into more plain gunfights vs. enemies with guns. Said gunfights just kind of suck, the shooting enemies can just erase you pretty quickly and fights with large amounts of them can get painful, fast. There's a few boss fights that are, oddly enough, easier than regular combat, and for the most part, unremarkable. The level design is generally pretty good, and it gets especially neat towards the final few levels. I'd be remiss not to touch on the voice acting. David Duchovny voices the main character and does a pretty solid job, he sells the part well. Of course, one of the "highlights" is Marilyn Manson voicing the main alien in the game, he uh, he certainly tries, I can say that much. Overall, I got a few kicks out of playing through it with some of the conspiracy nods, which made up for the relatively average gameplay and some of the more minor gripes I had with the game. Not terrible, not great, but I don't regret playing it.

THPS on rollerblades. It plays pretty similarly to the original run of Tony Hawk games (specifically 3 and 4), open levels with no timer, only a "juice" bar that'll fail you if you run out. The goals are along the same lines, score challenges, trick challenges, photos, etc. The level designs are both the best and worst part of this game. Each level contains closed off areas that you need a key to unlock, but the little (or big) side areas are usually pretty fun and serve as both a good incentive to find the key, and to make the levels themselves more expansive. That said, the level design peaks at the second level and gets a bit iffy from there, though each level does have interactable stuff to change the level or unlock additional areas which is always fun. The goals can get pretty challenging, but you don't need many to unlock a new level so it's not too bad. The gameplay is solid, skating around feels good, combos are relatively easy to string together, all of your air tricks are only on one button but there's the standard 8 direction variations in addition to grinds and manuals. I did have some issues with getting cess slides to work consistently, but that could be owed to my old Xbox controller. Soundtrack is also solid, standard mix of punk and hip-hop and a few ska tracks. Overall pretty fun game, I enjoyed my time with it.

I'm gonna start with the flaws, because they are present and may be a turn off for some, but this game also has a lot going for it I think.

I played on normal, I'll probably do another playthrough on a harder difficulty and make an addendum if it's notable. The game is really easy; aim is more of a general thing rather than precise. Upgrades sort of inevitably route you to splash damage and explosions, which makes pretty much any gun capable of keeping you alive. I died more from platforming than combat, to put it in perspective. It's also pretty short, I just finished the story and am currently at 115 minutes, meaning I could even refund it. I won't though; on to the good.

The game is very stylish, they had an aesthetic they were going for and they nailed it. The animation is good and wears the anime inspiration on its sleeve with references and details. The voice acting (I think there's only 2 VAs for a total of 3 voices) is also pretty enjoyable, good personality. The writing is cheesy (presumably intentionally), I found it amusing enough - even if a little ham-fisted at times. The soundtrack is also fantastic, some bangers in it for sure. While precise aim isn't necessarily needed for the game, it is rewarded in the sense that if you can consistently get headshots, you will NOT run out of time as long as you keep moving. More than that though, the gunplay is very satisfying thanks to the combination of sound effects and meaty feeling guns. Even though normal wasn't especially challenging, I still had a whole lot of fun playing. I'm going to check out the endless mode and also see how harder difficulties fair and may update this, but overall I found the game fun and charming.

Pure fun. The writing is very campy but it takes itself so seriously that you can't help but be engaged in the story, the gameplay feels surprisingly smooth even by modern standards and you have a fun arsenal to complement it. The environments are all fairly interactable, sometimes it's necessary to progress and others it can just net you some spare ammo or pills. There's also a good amount of story tidbits scattered around that you don't need to interact with, but they're usually amusing at the least. This is a game that held up very well and makes for an enjoyable playthrough.

Portal's a hard game for me to give an unbiased opinion on, it's a game I've been replaying on a whim for well over a decade now, I'm quite fond of it. It's not the most challenging puzzle game in the world, just hard enough that you have to rub a few brain cells together at times but the solution's never too hard to grasp. It strikes a perfect blend of ominously dark and humorously witty, with GLaDOS being an iconic character both in voice and personality. To reiterate the "over a decade" part, Portal also holds a special, nostalgic place in my heart so it's hard for me to feel anything but positive about it.

A step up in quality from Homefront, The Revolution improves in some aspects but is still, ultimately, pretty unremarkable. The gunplay feels a little better, but still not especially good as weapons just lack punch and never really feel powerful, even when they are. The open world gameplay loop (collectables, clearing outposts, hacking transceivers) is pretty similar to something like Far Cry. While fun at first, it wears out its welcome very quickly when you realize that it's the bulk of the gameplay. The more central missions that don't revolve around aforementioned loop are fine enough, and they at least provide a semblance of variety. Enemy spawns are pretty horrendous, red zones in particular will have enemies spawning in waves of 6+ and frequently, making a shootout pretty undoable as you'll be outgunned within minutes. Also airships, if one spots you then you end up with the same issue of rapidly spawning large groups of enemies (and there were several instances that I saw enemies spawn literally directly in front of me). That makes the later part of the game devolve into "do something to advance hearts & minds > shoot your way to a hiding spot > hide until they stop looking > repeat ad nauseum". Alternatively, you can just die instead of trying to hide because you aren't really punished for deaths and it's honestly just quicker than trying to hide. One thing I will give the game credit for is visuals, the game looks good and some of the set pieces make for good eye candy. Other than that, even while being a bit better than its predecessor, The Revolution still doesn't do anything well enough to set it apart from any other mediocre shooter.

Essentially the best we could've asked for, and a great swan song for the series. The gameplay feels smoother and more consistent than ever, it looks great, the character customization is decent, the soundtrack is a solid mix of old and new. It's also looking like a promising platform for the future, with impressive mods like THPSPro bringing a bunch of levels from the unremastered games in. It's just tragic VV didn't get to follow through with 3+4 before Blizzard effectively killed them with a merge and put them to work slaving away on Diablo IV.

I can only pray on Bobby Kotick's downfall.

Halo 2 took everything that CE did well, and made it even better. It's an improvement in basically every way; better gameplay, better story, better environments, better ambiance, better weapons, more and better characters, and they're more fleshed out (even cannon fodder like enemies and marines have more character to them), etc. The difficulty is amped a bit, it's just hard enough at times that reaching the end of a mission that killed you a dozen times over is more gratifying than anything. Overall, the Halo 2 campaign (also) holds up very well, and it's a fun ride the whole way through. I'm glad I managed to stay spoiler free of it for so long.

If FEAR 2 was Call of Duty's influence being felt, FEAR 3 is that influence being on full display. The gunplay still pales in comparison to the original FEAR, but it feels better than FEAR 2's limp combat, though removing health kits in favor of regen removes what little resource management there was. Damage also makes you flinch now which is just immensely annoying, alongside new enemies that are also just kind of annoying - though one type seems interesting when you first encounter them, the novelty wears off quickly. Zombies (but not by name) are another new addition which was just kind of stupid frankly, very pointless. There's a story but it's not even worth mentioning. Graphically the game looks pretty okay, it's not as cartoony as 2 (good), but it's also not as imposing as the original (bad). There's a few decent spooky scenes but nothing to write home about, and some of the level design is neat. Giving Point Man a face was a pretty terrible choice, at least there was some mystique as a faceless badass but now he just looks like a generic brooding action character.

Overall pretty unremarkable, there's an option to play as Paxton apparently but I didn't care enough to bother replaying any of the levels, maybe in the future. Also the ending song was an incredibly corny choice.

Half-Life still holds up quite well for its age. The gameplay and gunplay are solid, the action is fast-paced and downright chaotic at times which is fun. The story's good, the atmosphere's great, the music's great. I had some gripes with it, enemies being spawned directly in front of you is pretty annoying, grunts are a special kind of obnoxious, occasional spontaneous death stuff. The end levels were a bit dubious, I'm not a fan of the fast-paced combat on paper-thin platforms, but other than that still pretty fun the entire way through.

Phenomenal ending to the trilogy. Part of it is nostalgia from nearly two decades ago, but the game still holds up very well. The campaign is incredibly engaging the whole way through and keeps you playing at every turn. With the prior games already being great, everything now is just more polish on top of what already felt fantastic to begin with. As is typical with Halo thus far, the atmosphere's great (helped by the fantastic music much like the past two), the set pieces and level design are beautiful, the combat's tight and fun, it's an amazing experience overall and the type of game that leaves you itching for more.

Keeping with the trend of evolving in each entry, Underground is the first Tony Hawk game to introduce a story, and a surprisingly good one at that. It's nothing spectacular, but I think it's fair to say it's a lot more competent than anyone was expecting of a skateboarding game. The gameplay feels smoother than ever and is, once again, complemented with more new mechanics like getting off your board and wallplants, and some smaller things as well. It also added some more polarizing things like the vehicle missions that, even as a kid, felt out of place in the game, but there's only one per level so it isn't too bad. Complete with one of the most annoying video game villains of all time, THUG is still a very fun game to this day.

I was going to give it a slightly higher rating but the ending was so bad that it singlehandedly took that last point away, FEAR 2 is a demonstration of how to do everything wrong in a sequel. The story sucks, the characters mostly suck (Stokes is okay, the most likable character doesn't get a personality until the literal end of the game), the gunplay is a massive downgrade, leaning is gone which is one of the stupidest decisions I've ever seen, there's very little tension at any point in the game (there was exactly one horror-esque scene that really drew me in, everything else was just cheap jump scares, blink and you miss it appearances, or entirely unengaging due to said lack of tension). They added a sprint for some reason and it's useless, you barely go faster and stamina drains so quickly that it's basically pointless to use, audio seems to be massively buggy (glass shattering makes no noise, explosions make no noise, gunfire's often silent which makes finding where you're being shot from a pain), at one point I encountered the "sound acceleration error" that quite literally removed all sound until it randomly fixed itself on a new launch. It suffers from the same poor choice that Perseus Mandate made with combat just being so constant it becomes a drag, enemies seem to die slower than ever, and enemies that made for tense encounters in the past are spammed so much that they might as well be generic fodder.

The only good things I can say about FEAR 2 are that the writing was actually kinda funny at times, and while the gunplay is significantly worse than it was in FEAR + expansions, it's still a bit above average even while feeling completely gimped. This is a very hard game to recommend, even as someone that likes FEAR enough to be forcing myself through parts that I'm thoroughly not enjoying.