Captain_Chaos

Excellent singleplayer FPS roguelite. Bright and colorful, great music, nasty weapons, busted perk synergies and fun character banter. Actually has a narrative and true ending. I highly recommend the Volt Core for your build. Volt orbs everywhere.

Not everyone liked Metroid Prime 4. Some saw an imperfect retread of past glories, or a blind pursuit of market trends. But I loved it. I loved nearly every minute of playing it. Prime 3 was my favorite entry in the series and the fluidity of movement and combat is still just as strong here, and the general sensibility of puzzles to obtain items in comparison to the 2D games. But this time was different. When I entered the Volt Forge, brought its sprawling manufacturing apparatus online and heard its amazing musical score, the childlike joy I experienced cannot be put into words. Our girl was back. But this time? She had wheels. The Vi-O-La motorcycle was everything to me. A wonderful reminder of my youth playing vehicle-centric action games, a potent weapon, the symbol of what once was good on Viewros. And, quite frankly, if you don't think Samus Aran on a motorcycle is the tightest **** ever then get out of my face. Every game should have a vehicle that you can summon to hand at will, use not only to move but to fight and interact, and perhaps also that reflects its user. Metroid Prime 4 plays buttery smooth, looks great and is awash with a pervasive sense of melancholic beauty. Samus' survivor's curse is once again in full force. I wanted to hate the ending, but it is quintessentially Metroid. Samus stands alone, time and time again, the sole, silent witness to one fallen civilization after another- that without her, would go quietly into the dark, unremarked and unremembered. Metroid Prime 4 is a haunting experience, but I am grateful that I was here to play it.

Seek and Destroy is the western title for a game originally titled Shin Combat Choro Q, and the localized title and especially the coverart do little to tell you what kind of game it actually is. In my younger days, a copy of Seek and Destroy was actively withheld from me by my mom, perhaps because she suspected it was some two-bit imperialist war crime simulator as the cover might suggest. When I actually manage to convince her to give it to me, the game I discovered was not that at all. Shin Combat Choro Q is actually about "Quewar", a world of intelligent, super-deformed talking tanks. Yes, you read that correctly. The story opens with an invasion by the evil Q-Stein Empire of the Kingdom of Proton. The Proton forces have been pushed back to the point of having only one city left: Rivageders, which is where the first level takes place. The player takes the role of Proton's "Special Force Tank", and under the leadership of Major Rodeschild, you must aid the Proton resistance in taking back their cities and fields one by one, as well as that of the friendly neighboring island nation of Nibelia, before taking the fight into Q-Stein for a counteroffensive. The gameplay is that of an arcade style third-person shooter. Though you can rotate your turret independently of your chassis (if you aren't using a fixed-aim self propelled artillery-style vehicle instead) Moving and shooting is much simplified compare to simulation games. When completing a mission, you are taken to an overworld map, where you can see towns to visit (marked with a white-on-blue Proton flag) and locations where your next missions will take place (marked by a red-on-black Q-Stein flag) When visiting towns, you can talk to NPC vehicles, visit the shop and garage, use the arena for duels against AI tanks and minigames, and use the heliports to fast travel to other cities you have already visited, all in the manner of an RPG.

I first played Naval Ops: Commander many years ago and do not remember how I came to own it, but I would say it is one of my favorite titles on the PS2, a console known for its width and depth of available games. This was my first brush with the Kurogane No Houkou series, the existence of which I was unaware of at the time, nor was I aware that only three games from that series were localized for English release. On top of that, Commander is the second of three games in a sub-series and we received neither the first nor the third, which is a bummer. The core gameplay of Commander is a simple top-down arcade shooter about capital-grade naval warships, with a more methodical pace then most arcade shooters, and a few more simulator-oriented features: You can issue formation commands to your escort ships, manage the firing behaviors of your weapons, and location-based damage is a factor. It differs in its perspective from Warship Gunner 1 and 2, which used more of a third-person view and do not have AI escort ships for the player.Commander is set on an alternate Earth with technology ranging from familiar 20th-Century level to science fiction lasers, energy shields and more, in a fashion not unlike the Ace Combat series. The campaign is quite long, with admittedly repetitive mission objectives: destroy enemy fleets or harbors, escort friendly ships, move to specific locations, etc., broken up by boss fights with massive "superships", the highlight of the series as a whole, the smallest of which dwarf player-made ships: rocket-powered super cruisers, twin-hulled bombers, flying saucers, iceberg carriers, ships with huge forward drills and more. Missions reward you with funds and sometimes parts, the former of which you can use to raise your technology levels (Aircraft, Engines, Metallurgy, Weapons and Electronics) and unlock new parts for sale from the Depot screen. That is where the very in-depth customization system comes in. You can create destroyers, cruisers, carriers, battleships and hybrid "battlecarriers" with a dedicated ship designer screen showing you top and side views of your vessel, allowing you to place individual parts to your liking: bridges, boilers, turbines, weapons, electronic subsystems and more, with your current and maximum weight limit, parts limit and top speed updated in real time as you place and move parts. There are large variety of parts, especially weapons, and there is typically more then one setup that will work for a variety of situations, though in general fielding your largest available battleship hull with strong main guns (shifting towards the gatling-style "Special Machine Guns" as they become available) and as much speed as you can get using a large number of boilers and speed-boosting subsystems will work. There are some hidden factors to take into account: Guns will weigh more if placed off the centerline of your vessel, boiler and turbine placement relative to each other affects weight and efficiency, and more. The most I can say against the game is the relatively low quality voice acting, occasionally stilted dialogue, and a soundtrack that is all over the place thematically the electronica-sounding design screen music goes very hard for example, whereas the in-game combat music is much more subdued military style horns and drums. Some players might also feel the campaign drags on too long with not enough gameplay variety, and that's a fair assessment. You will know very quickly if NO:C's gameplay is to your liking, and if you will be comfortable playing 80+ levels of the same. If you enjoy either top-down shooters or games with in-depth vehicle customization, or just enjoy experiencing quirky Japanese PS2 games, Naval Ops: Commander is worth a try. These games also served as an inspiration for an indie game called Waves of Steel, which is on Steam and also worth checking out.

Let me get this out of the way. I enjoy Postal 2. It's genuinely cathartic to play, has a great variety of weapons and areas to explore to find them, and ever-amusing dialogue from radio personality Rick Hunter as the Postal Dude, some of which I've repeated so often that it has become an identifying marker to my friends. It has benefited from continuous updates for over a decade, and now a new expansion. If only some "Triple-A" releases could say the same. The last time I played Postal 2 some years ago I was a much angrier person, and it resonated with me much more strongly. Now it makes me rather uncomfortable. There's shock value, and then there's Postal. It's disgusting, tasteless, and so South Park in it's morality that I'm sure are people out there who genuinely respect the Postal Dude and admire his sociopathic tendancies, wether they make him violent or not. Being hated is a common affliction, after all. Postal 2 is the game that loud-mouthed moral guardians complained about. It was made to mock, among many other things, Joe Lieberman's anti-violent videogame crusade in the 90s against games like Doom and the first Postal. Except that the first Postal, like its spiritual successor, Hatred, really IS a mass murder simulator. Hatred in particular, I hear, was made as a statement against art games and political correctness. Even Postal 2, which frames the Dude's adventure as an otherwise harmless week of daily chores (If you consider on your dad's grave to be harmless), is difficult to get through without killing quite a number of people. At least you can limit it to people who shoot you first. As it is, some of the things you can do to the unsuspecting populace are just plain mean. The trouble is, the game's mere existence is an example of why a lot of people don't take this medium seriously. It's a relic of PC gaming's teenage years. Plenty of games are as, or even more violent without relishing in immaturity for the sake of it. For an example of this done better, go play Bulletstorm, which is more creative both with its combat mechanics and its profanity- though it of course lacks the sandbox nature of Postal. On the other hand, its less likely to make you hate yourself then, say Grand Theft Auto, where, oddly enough, the citizens are actually more pleasant. People forget that the word "correct" is part of the phrase "politically correct". Though I think "morally justifiable" is more accurate. And many of the actions one can take in Postal 2 simply aren't. If you have to preface your game with a warning that not only should you not do these things, but we don't advocate them, maybe you went overboard, eh? I should note here that I dislike most of Grand Theft Auto for the same reasons- well, that and the godawful controls. At least Postal 2 handles well. At some level, I'm playing right into the hands of Running with Scissors with a review like this. They knew exactly what they were doing when they made this game and this kind of negativity only boosted their sales, and It wouldn't have made it on to Steam without a combination of that negative press and fun gameplay, not to mention an unhealthy amount of respect from the **** kiddies and regressionists. I enjoyed playing Postal 2 a second time, but I can't honestly recommend it to anyone without the good judgement not to take it seriously. There are enough people in real life like the Postal Dude that it's become kind of a problem.

If CD Project Red's devteam had been given the opportunity to actually finish this game and not have their higherups lie through their teeth about the game's state of development, planned features and crunch, I believe Cyberpunk 2077 could have been one of the defining games of this generation. As it is, the 1.31 version I played was functional, with a relative minimum of bugs and crashes, though far from zero. It's a game I would have paid for. There's not much I can tell you about the game you haven't already heard. Put short, it's a visually striking title with truly excellent voice acting and facial animations, supported by a reasonably entertaining, if wildly unbalanced combat system that overwhelmingly favors firearms and revolvers in particular, and passable driving physics. It has open-ended character progression if not equal effectiveness of character builds, a robust character creator though not a lot of opportunities to view said character, a lot of nods to the tabletop game's lore and other cyberpunk fiction, a trans character who simply exists as a person without that being a central and exploited aspect of their writing, and honestly some of the coolest vehicle designs I've seen in a game. And of course, Keanu Reeves delights with his portrayal of series mainstay Johnny Silverhand, a complex and compelling character that is at once terrorist and freedom fighter, **** and capable of personal growth. Cherami Leigh, who I knew and loved as Gaige in the Borderlands series, acts her heart out right back as the female version of protagonist V. It is undeniably buggy, however, though perhaps less so from the **** I'd heard about at launch. I saw the occasional floating car, t-posing character, randomly exploding piles of papers and garbage, duplicated civilian models, un-grabbable items (though never an exceptionally rare item) and characters clipping into walls and disappearing, and so on- and yes, these could and did happen in the middle of otherwise poignant scripted scenes. I encountered no issues with corrupted save files however, and only two fatal crashes, both of which I believe were tied to the "Monowire" weapon, specifically when trying to block and counterattack with it. I was warned that the Mantis Blades weapon would also cause crashes, but had no issues with either that or the Gorilla Arms. The enemy AI, especially that of the cops, is indeed laughable, but I can't fairly say that it detracted from my enjoyment. I've also heard an argument that CP77 isn't actually a very good example of cyperpunk as a genre, and I'm not sure I'm educated enough to comment on that. Aesthetically I think it hits the marks, but in terms of its writing, the central narrative is largely about saving one's own skin, though you are given ample opportunities to help or hinder others along the way. There is notably very little the protagonist can do, or even to express an interest in, bettering the quality of life in Night City as a whole, so much as simply trying to survive it, this conflict being central to Johnny Silverhand's character and his past failings. As far as dystopic fiction in general goes however, Night City as presented is a successful artist's rendering of one of the most nightmarish post-capitalist hellscapes I've seen, a place where people are murdered in the dozens by the day, the police are privately-owned, trigger-happy and ultimately lousy at their jobs, proper medical care is restricted to the uber-rich, some people have to eat of garbage cans to survive and corporations act completely outside the bounds of law, tact, morality or common decency. In other words, an environment not far removed from the America we know today- only we don't have the cool and useful cybernetic augmentations to ease our transition into corpo-fascist-induced societal collapse. I'd seen what I'd needed to of Cyberpunk's combat mechanics about 25-30 hours in, but the sheer amount of side content padded the game out far beyond that- I think I was closing in on 100+ hours by the time the credits rolled. It's an immense game, and much like other titles of this nature maybe too much so for it's own good. it's mechanics really don't hold the game up for that long. CP77 has no less then FOUR layers of missions- the central story chain and "side jobs" as in many other games, but then the "gigs" and NCPD contracts, the latter of which offer no story whatsoever and are simply a means of gaining experience and items. and you will need to do nearly every one of these encounters to reach the game's level cap of 50. If you adhere to the admittedly dated and questionable "hour per dollar" metric **** value, CP77 certainly delivers on that score. I can't recommend buying CP77, but I also can't say it isn't worth playing. I can only say it's a shame its publisher did not act in good faith.

Alien: Isolation is a first-person survival horror game set in the film franchise of the same name, specifically, 15 years after the events of the first film- and still some decades prior to the second. Broadly speaking it is in the style of the Amnesia games and Outlast, the former I have played before. The player takes the role of Amanda Ripley, daughter of Sigourny Weaver's character Ellen and only mentioned in passing in the films. It was made clear in the director's cut of Aliens that Amanda never saw her mother again. But did she ever even get to know what happened? Isolation seeks to answer that question. Amanda, a Wayland-Yutani employee like her mother, has received word that the flight recorder from the Nostromo, the ship her mother was aboard, has been found and brought to a far-flung space station called Sevastopol. Together with two WY reps, Amanda sets out for the station aboard the freelance ship Torrens. Before Amanda can even set foot on the station things go awry, and as soon as she is aboard, she enters a nightmare on a scale unrivaled by the films. Not only is there a Xenomorph on the loose, the station, having been decommissioned by its failing company Seegson, is already in a steadily declining state of disrepair, and surviving personnel have given to lawlessness and disorder. Critical systems are down, supplies are scarce, people are panicking and shooting anything that moves, outside communication is all but impossible, and the stations creepy, rubber-forehead androids are not doing anything to help, slaved as they are to an unresponsive AI called APOLLO. Using engineering tools, scant weaponry and improvised explosives of various types, Amanda must make her way through the station, engaging or preferably evading threats, in an attempt to reestablish communications, find out what happened to her mother, and maybe get off the station alive. Of any newer adaptations of the Alien franchise, Isolation is far and away the the highest achievement in capturing the zeerust of the original film. This is a future where the internet and the ipod never existed, a future of mechanical keyboards, toggle switches, cathode ray monitors, wired phones, tape deck servers, cassette boomboxes and radio communications, not to mention synthetic jackets and white high-top sneakers. Sevastopol is not only a flying relic of the late 1970s, it's considered a piece of **** in-universe besides, a truck stop at the ass end of known space left behind by a now-long-past boom of interstellar exploration. The primary threat to you in this game, the Xenomorph, cannot be defeated or even effectively combatted. The most you can hope for is to drive it away with flame, and your best option is simply to evade it at all costs- taking alternate routes, using distractions, or even just hiding in lockers and cabinets. A two tiered adaptive AI ensures that the alien "learns" as you progress, making it harder to avoid as the game goes on. And the game does go on, perhaps a bit longer then it needs to. A number of reviews for Isolation complain of padding- the game is tense and thrilling sometimes, but between major events are many moments of slowly creeping through corridors and rooms, using the motion tracker and audio cues to avoid the alien, the androids and the trigger-happy survivors, and sometimes shooting it out with them when no other option presents itself. These encounters are interesting at first, but there end up being a few too many of them. The tension extends itself into places it probably shouldn't. You are almost never safe in Isolation, even while saving your game. There is nothing stopping the alien from dropping down right next to you and eating your face while you're saving, cutting a panel with your torch, hacking a console or keypad or just walking down the stairs to the transit station. It might make you jump out of your pants the first time or the first dozen times, but as you play, die and reload your save for the nth time you will notice an element of randomness to the game- contents of item boxes, enemy placement and movement and so on. The game is deliberately designed to prevent you from getting trapped in an unwinnable scenario, but you're going to die a hell of a lot anyway. Eventually you might turn the difficulty down out of boredom rather then frustration. Where Alien: Isolation succeeds brilliantly in presentation, visual and audio design and film accuracy, it suffers a bit in actual gameplay. It is far from a terrible title, and I suppose it is inherently better then Colonial Marines, through in spite of that game's problems and shady development history I found it a little more entertaining to actually play. It has more in common with Aliens: Infestation on the DS, however, such as finding engineering tools to access new areas. For its flaws however, Isolation was tense and compelling. It is a game worth at least trying.

An affectionate nod to the run and gun shooters of the 90s, more specifically Contra 3, but with a little bit of Ninja Gaiden or Strider thrown in for good measure. It's a little more forgiving then its inspirations, with unlimited continues and fewer bullet traps that result in an unavoidable loss of a life. In a wasted future where humanity is on the verge of being wiped out by the robot overlords, a ragtag group of resistance fighters launch a desperation mission to locate their control core and take it out. As either power blonde Mavra or token friendly robot Doyle, you'll have to shoot, melee, jump and dodge roll your way through six stages of increasing difficulty, including many boss fights of the type that were a hallmark of the genre. Also featured are the jetbike segments also typical of Contra, but also usable mechs in the vein of Metal Slug or Mega Man X. Mavra and Doyle spawn with a basic gun, and can pick up three subweapons, a short-range Wave gun that can be wiggled around to damage enemies at odd angles, a manually detonated Grenade launcher, and a charged Particle beam useful for damaging the stationary bosses. These weapons are lost on death, and much like its forebears, it only takes one hit to kill you. You can stave this off with a shield bot pickup worth two hits, or deft use of the dodge roll, which provides a few invincibility frames. You also have the option of holding a button to lock your movement and enable eight-way aiming, as in Super Metroid or Doom Troopers. Playable with a keyboard but ultimately better handled with a controller, Blazing Chrome offers a few modern niceties, including mid-level checkpoints, a built in save system, and overall difficulty that ranks somewhere well below the controller-snapping, mind-melting frustration that the Contra series is infamous for. You'll probably get a few game overs, but they don't slow you down as much as they did in the old days. There's also the option to play on an Easy mode with additional lives and "support capsules," but disables leaderboard ranking for that run. I have a feeling when I played the game at PAX East 2019 it was set to Easy, as I was able to negotiate the first level with no deaths and had no such luck this time around. The game is not lengthy by any means, but success unlocks a "Hardcore" diffculty that removes the save system and adds limited continues, if you're feeling masochistic. You also receive a "mirror mode" option to flip the stages horizontally, a boss rush mode, and most significantly two additional characters, gratuitous ninja Raijin and cyborg lady Suhaila, who use short range slashing beam attacks and cannot use the subweapons, but can charge up a long range, high damage projectile and use an air dash move. Additional achievements are granted for completing the game mirrored or with the melee characters, so multiple runs are encouraged.

Unlike what sometimes happens when I play a popular game some years after it's release, I do see the appeal of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. One of my last glimpses into an era before Konami utterly sabotaged the Metal Gear series, MGR was something of a "dream team" game: The visual design and deep political and technological musings of Kojima Productions and the gonzo action of Platinum Games. While not a generally a fan of Platinum's brand of button mashing, "get good or go home" approach to combat design, I found MGR much more enjoyable then God Hand or Bayonetta, though in the end I think I preferred Mad World. A little plot for those unfamiliar with the parent franchise- in as much as anyone could hope to summarize Metal Gear's story. You take the role of Jack, aka Raiden, a conflicted former child soldier turned cyborg mercenary, currently in the employ of Maverick, a PMC with a moral code of conduct attempting to help small countries stabilize themselves. Your enemies are the significantly less moral cyborgs of another group, Desperado, seeking to foment conflict in trouble zones around the world. After a job goes bad and Raiden gets the kicked out of him by one Jetstream Sam, a Brazilian ronin with hidden motivations, he gets some upgrades and a chip on his shoulder. Armed with a "high-frequency" blade, he must grapple not only with Desperado's top lieutenants, the "Winds of Destruction", and Jetstream Sam, but his own past as the feared "Jack the Ripper". MGR's controls are easy enough to pick up, even on keyboard, though the camera is incredibly wonky. The game's challenge is learning to block enemy attacks and the timing for parries. Blocking is non-standard in function, requiring you hold a movement button and press attack in the direction of an incoming blow. I never quite got the hang of it and you essentially cannot defeat the final boss without it, forcing me to beat my head against the fight until I learned the timing for the blocks. I kind of face-tanked my way through most of the game via the DLC Medical Body included in the PC version, but you will eventually run out of health kits and have to figure out blocking, especially, I would imagine, on higher difficulties. On easy, an assist function makes blocking easier by eliminating the need to hold the correct direction. Blocking woes aside, the combat is quite fun. Raiden has access to a variety of moves and sub-weapons, as well as the much-loved "Blade Mode" function: Holding left trigger, or left shift, depending, activates a slow motion mode where you can use the mouse or right stick to carve up enemies into possibly hundreds of pieces, though a single cut will often suffice for a kill. And, if it is a weak enemy or a stronger enemy that you have opened for a finisher via a parry or simply beating them down, you will have the opportunity to use "Zandatsu", that is, striking their core and retrieving their repair units, thus replenishing Raiden's health and power, the latter of which is consumed when using Blade Mode. You have the option for stealth kills and even using Metal Gear's famous cardboard boxes to attempt to hide from enemies. To help with this, you can "Augmented Reality" vision mode which allows you to spot enemies and items through walls and plan your approach to an area. On normal you are not really punished for being spotted and having to fight your way out, at least compared to Metal Gear Solid, but you do get a bonus for not triggering alarms and this is probably necessary if you were going for an all "S" rank run. Other items include various grenades, rocket launchers, and health and power kits. While not nearly as long or dialogue-dense as its parent series, MGR is nonetheless dialogue and backstory-heavy for an action game and the "Codec" function is alive and well. Any time during a mission, including boss fights, you can call up your mission control NPCs and converse with them. These conversations may sometimes give hints for defeating bosses, but many of them are simply for flavor: politics, military tactics, food culture, technology, and so on. One character, Courtney, also handles manual saving, though the game frequently autosaves. From the Codec menu you can also access a customization menu to purchase upgrades for Raiden's cybernetics, and a VR mission interface containing various training missions and bonus challenges. Completing these missions awards "BP" currency just as the main story does, which can be used to purchase the aforementioned upgrades. While I cannot say I ever actually got good at it, I nonetheless enjoyed MGR, especially having previously played Metal Gear Solid. If you are familiar with Raiden from the second and fourth games and perhaps was not a fan of him as I was, at least initially, he really comes into his own as a character here. Sneaking was never really his thing anyway.

Indivisible is a unique action RPG that oozes charm, with great art, soundtrack and voice acting, that almost didn't happen. Congratulations Lab Zero and all those who helped them get this far, and thanks, IndieGoGo. As a backer, the game feels well worth the wait and investment. Indivisible is a game with heart. It might be more precisely described as a metroidvania with an active-time party battle system that a friend of mine said was very much like Valkyrie Profile. What I have played thus far is a successful blending of mechanics I've seen in things ranging from Metroid to Paper Mario, and some things that feel truly new, like being temporarily pulled out of a battle with a boss and having to dodge projectiles in real time. While it drags a bit towards the end owing to a lot of backtracking and recycled enemies, It comes together at the end in a big, emotionally moving way. It might not be as heart-tugging as CrossCode, but it is more so then almost anything else I've played this decade. The player takes the role of Ajna, a bullheaded but well-meaning village girl with the power to absorb personages of power into her inner realm and summon them forth to do battle. When her village is attacked by the armies of the domineering Lord Ravannavar, Ajna springs into action, wielding her mother's axe and a chip on her shoulder. Ajna and each of her party members have a certain number of action points that recharge at different speeds, and enemies can attack you at any point during those recharges or when they are full but you are not attacking. You are actually able to, and should, block enemy attacks, with additional damage reduction if you time your block correctly. The game is very simple to play, using inputs that correspond to the WSAD and arrow keys, or the face buttons of a controller. Different characters have different input commands and functions, and it seems like you are encouraged to switch up your composition if fights aren't going your way. Scattered through the game are red gems called Ringsels that can be used to upgrade your offense, enabling up to five attacks per character, and defense, allowing you to not only negate damage on a perfect block but actually heal. Mastering these guards is essential towards the end of the game. You also obtain a large variety of movement abilities throughout the game, obtaining the last and flashiest mere minutes prior to the final boss encounter. Many areas throughout the game test your use of these abilities with hazard courses vaguely reminiscent of Hollow Knight, but not nearly as infuriating, especially since if you die you simply respawn at one of many checkpoints. There are a huge number of party members to find, and while you get about half of them through progressing the story, others have to be sought out and can be missed, most notably the aging gunslinger Latigo, who is not even marked on the map like other optional characters. I would have liked more time to get to know much of the cast, but the story tries to make the best of the time you have with them. The mark **** RPG in my book is whether you are saddened to see the story reach its end, because it feels like saying goodbye to friends.

I recieved NeuroVoider as a gift from a friend and was glad I did. NeuroVoider is a top-down, twin-stick rogue lite shooter somewhat in the vein of games like Starward Rogue and Nuclear Throne, and falls somewhere between them in terms of difficulty, admittedly much closer to Starward. It is the future. You and up to three friends are brains in jars, all that remains of humanity in a world where killer robots spend their days partying to synth music and leaving soda cans everywhere. With the help of cryptic tutorial robot FAT.32, you will acquire a customizable cybernetic shell with a choice of three class abilities, various active and passive skills and two equipped weapons, which consist of machine guns, rockets, grenade launchers, shotguns, flamethrowers and more, with the coveted Mini Nuke likely reigning supreme. You can play on one of three difficulties, and I have managed to complete a run on Arcade, the lowest. Also available are Rogue and Voider. The game has a more deliberate pace then other action roguelikes overall. While combat can be fast and frenetic, it rewards the careful use of precision or high explosive weapons to clear areas ahead of your movement, a run comprises many stages, and you have a choice of three different random layouts with varying size, enemy count and loot amount for each regular stage. Enemies may drop multiple parts, and you can swap these around between levels, compare their stats against each other, upgrade them, sell them, or forge new ones. There is no limit to how many parts you can have in your inventory, and it is rewarding in the long run to choose longer levels with more enemies in order to obtain more parts. Along with a dark yet colorful art style and excellent soundtrack, the tactical depth makes NeuroVoider one of the better rogue lites I have played.

Blasphemous is a successful fusion of Dark Souls and Metroidvania gameplay, while notably lacking several of the features that make the former occasionally irritating to play, specifically the invasion mechanic. It is also an aesthetic masterwork, painting a landscape of stone, sin and acoustic guitars that embodies the darkest aspects of religious fervor. A curse of sins unforgiven lies upon the land of Custodia. Known as the Grievous Miracle, it is guilt made manifest, twisting and warping the fearful masses into murderous and grotesque mockeries of human life. You are the Penitent One, the last survivor of the Brotherhood of the Silent Sorrows. Wielding a sword born of guilt known as Mea Culpa, it is your penance and your mission to cleanse the land of holy terrors. While similar to Hollow Knight and other "melee vanias" in some respects, it is considerably less difficult then the former, though it starts out rough. Mea Culpa has surprising reach, and persistent upgrades are abound throughout the world. Though death can come easily, rather then drop the entirety of your currency, called Tears of Atonement, as in Souls or Hollow Knight, you merely drop a "guilt fragment", which imposes a small penalty to your maximum magic, called Fervor. Successive deaths result in more fragments and Fervor penalties but they can be easily retrieved by returning to the scene of your death, or else you may visit a Confessor Statue and pay a Tears fee to have the guilt removed. There are "Prie Dieu" shrines that perform the save, flask refill and enemy reset functons of Souls' Bonfires, with the warp function instead relegated to dedicated warp rooms a la Symphony of the Night. At the Penitent One's disposal are various holy artifacts. You begin with two Biliary Flasks that perform the function of Souls' Estus Flask, and you can find up to eight more in the world. They must first be brought to a Fountain to be filled, and these fountains can also be used to refill your health and flasks for a Tears fee. Rosary Beads provide passive buffs and up to six can be equipped, though you begin with only two slots and must find Knots and bring them to a certain NPC first. You can also equip up to 3 relics, which provide various traversal abilities in the vein of Samus' suit upgrades. There are Sword Hearts, which provide both a buff and proportionate drawback. Finally, there are active spells, called Prayers, of which only one can be equipped at a time but are usually quite useful. All of the above can be changed on the fly save for Sword Hearts, which can only be changed at a shrine. Also to be found are maximum health and fervor upgrades and Mea Culpa shrines, which when first found upgrade your base damage, and provide additional attacks and upgrades for a Tears fee. While on the shorter side of Metroidvanias and possessing a lot of backtracking if you want to achieve 100% completion, the detailed hand-drawn visuals, atmospheric soundtrack, impressive boss fights and the merciful ability to return to the last shrine you rested at via quitting and reloading your save without progress loss, makes it an enjoyable jaunt throughout. I'd love to see further games set in Blasphemous' universe.

I obtained Ashes of the Singularity as a free giveaway from the Humble Store, and was glad I did. I had my eye on it already as a fan of both classic real-time strategy and of one of the developer's previous titles, Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion. A word to the wise, Ashes has the potential to be extremely taxing on your system. I experience regular frame drops during heavy battles of 20 fps or more, though not to a unplayable degree. I have heard the game referred to as "Ashes of the Benchmark." Ashes may be more grounded then Sins, both literally and figuratively, but in its own way is no less grand in scale. Ashes is an old school, build your base and then roll over dudes with a big army kind of RTS, with the basic components taken to their logical extreme. There is seemingly no upper limit to your population size, and battles can comprise hundreds if not thousands of individual units. The smallest available units are classified as "frigates", and others range in size all the way up to powerful dreadnoughts and juggernauts that gain experience levels as the capital ships in Sins do. You can zoom the map out far enough to see a strategic view of its entirety, as in Supreme Commander, and can issue commands to potentially every unit on the map if you desire. Units have simplistic strengths and weaknesses, using the more "modern" model of tactical rock-paper-scissors. In practice, building a mixed force of all available unit types is suitable for any engagement in the campaign. Resource gathering occurs passively, requiring only that you build extractors and generators. Metal and Radioactives are used for units and structures, with the most basic of such requiring only metal, while Quanta is used to increase your population cap, use targeted support powers, and purchase passive upgrades for your entire force, with no need for dedicated research structures. Additionally, the PHC faction use Quanta to increase their available resource storage, the Substrate have no such requirement. As in most RTSs, the resources near your initial base are usually limited and you must acquire more. However, in Ashes, all resource deposits are tied to a network of generators that are protected by weak "creeps" and must first be captured by your forces before you can benefit from the nearby deposits. Additionally, if enemies are able to capture your generators, you lose the income from any that would be cut off from your core structure, the Nexus. In addition to the ability to loop production queues at your unit factories, Ashes possesses a unique army formation mechanic: Simply select a group of units and press V to have them form up on each other. No manual formation management is required, units will automatically sort themselves into an appropriate layout, with dreadnoughts front and center, and non combat vessels in the rear, with the expendable frigates screening the outer edge to take fire for the more valuable cruisers. Perhaps most importantly, you can reinforce your armies directly, queuing up new units while you have the army selected, and this will automatically task available factories to produce the units requested. Additionally, if you have specific cruiser as part of that army for the PHC or use a certain support power for the Substrate, new units can teleport directly from the factories to the army's vicinity and join their formation, enabling you to advance more aggressively then in other games. Ashes is easier to control then the scale of the battles might otherwise suggest, and the enemy AI is smarter then you might suspect, in particular making good use of radar intelligence and sending strike forces where it knows your armies aren't. It's a successful fusing of mechanics from various older games with not a lot missing, though I personally would have liked a "follow cam" button. If I could complain about anything, it would be the forgettable soundtrack and the somewhat disjointed nature of the narrative. More particularly, the hotkey system in Ashes is a tad odd, requiring that you cycle through production options with tab before hitting a corresponding letter key on the left side of the keyboard. In multiplayer I'm sure this could potentially be an issue for some, but in the campaign, any potential human error on your end can be assuaged somewhat by adjusting the game speed, and issuing orders while the game is paused. Overall however Ashes feels like a logical step forward in the evolution of the 90s RTS, a genre that has felt underutilized of late if you haven't known where to look. A solid title.

A neat little FPS Metroidvania romp through an alien and dangerous world of polygons and stark colors. Short but with intriguing lore, And All Would Cry Beware evokes the spirit of going beyond the veil that marks games like The Dig, Axiom Verge, and Remnant: From the Ashes. The player takes the role of an unknown survivor of a ruined future Los Angeles, who ducks into a building in the hopes of evading a "kill gang" only to find that the building belonged to scientists who found a means to travel beyond Earth via portal. Finding a pistol and the means to activate the portal, there seems to be no way to go but through. On the other side is a world we know only as "Xanadu", and the scattered log entries left behind by a previous expedition make more then a few references to the poem by that name. While negotiating Xanadu's tight canyons and cliffs, the player comes across strange and aggressive geometric constructs as well as monstrous bosses that reward the player with bigger and nastier weapons upon defeat. These weapons have unlimited ammo and do not need to be reloaded, requiring the player only to worry about evading attacks. These weapons can also break different kinds of barriers the player could not pass before, the "metroidvania" part of the equation. AAWCB was neat. It's bite-sized length might be seen as a shortcoming by some, but I would say it is just long enough to suit its simplified gameplay. I wouldn't mind playing a sequel were there to be one.

Super Galaxy Squadron is hard, although inconsistently so. That is the thing about it that sticks out the most. Described as a vertical shooter for "human beings" with a "challenging but merciful" difficulty curve, and I have to disagree with that discription. I was able to breeze through most of the game on its middling difficulty, but by contrast, could not defeat the final boss and even on its lowest difficulty setting, said boss killed me multiple times. Thank goodness for checkpoint systems! The game's stronger feature by far is a surprisingly wide variety of playable ships with varying weapons and super attacks, and the ability to switch which one you're using at the start of a new stage. It is also aesthetically pleasing, with quality pixel art, an intense soundtrack and vivid color palette. Also, as a Tyrian 2000 fan and one of the two people mentioned on the store page who'd want a story in a vertical shmup, I appreciate the token effort towards that end in the small cutscenes and pilot bios. I wanted to know a little more about the game's setting, in fact. All told, SGS is highly accessible by the standards of the "bullet hell" genre, and on that basis I can recommend it. However, there are both other shmups and New Blood-published titles that I greatly prefer.

I first played Battlezone 2 many years ago, I believe around the time of its original release. My memory of playing it then is hazy, and I was not very good at it, but I was no doubt thrilled to be playing a sequel to one of my favorite games ever, to this day. In retrospect I suppose I was quite lucky to do so, as the original release was apparently bug-addled and notoriously demanding of PC hardware of that time. Before Crysis, there was BZ2. This version of BZ2 features heavily updated visuals, in particular very nice lighting effects. It's hard to tell looking at Rebellion's version that the game originally came out in 1999. It also features steam workshop support, much like the earlier Battlezone 98 Redux. Gameplay in Battlezone is simple enough, though it would probably feel odd to today's shooter players. You are controlling a hovering tank with conventional FPS keymaps, with the added element of a simple strategic interface that use the number keys, the mouse and spacebar to select units and structures, and issue orders. If your tank is destroyed, you are not necessarily out of the battle- you automatically eject and can then float down and walk the rest of the way back to your base to obtain a fresh vessel. On foot you are armed with a feeble energy rifle that boasts an alternate sniper mode that can, with precise aim, be used to snipe an enemy pilot out of their vehicle, thus making it available to you. The overall flow feels awkward to me now, but I suspect this system allowed for tight, high-level play in whatever multiplayer scene might have existed once. In addition, where you were limited to only ten units of each category at at time with a finite number of pilots as well, in 2 you can create up to ten groups of ten units each, with no pilot limit, allowing for much larger battles where individual losses are not quite as punishing. Still, it is not hard to see why action-strategy games never fully caught on- in my the experience the average shooter player cannot reasonably be expected to employ anything resembling a strategy. I had an amusing experience playing this version where I accidentally discovered that you can freely fire-link different weapon types using the shift key, and now I'm not certain whether this feature was present in the original release. It certainly might have made my life easier back then. I mentioned earlier that BZ2 is significantly easier then the first game. Part of this is the improved friendly unit AI and command interface, but another major factor is the change in how gathering biometal scrap works. The primary of the game's only two resources, the other being power. In the first game there was a finite amount of scrap on the map at the beginning of a level or match, with additional scrap only appearing from destroyed units or structures. In 2, there are biometal "pools" scattered throughout most maps that your scrap harvesters can deploy over, becoming immobile extractors that generate scrap automatically over time. This major change in the underlying economic mechanic of the game put off many players, but makes most campaign missions a matter of simply defending these extractors long enough to build up a sufficient attack force with which to bowl over the enemy base, with the enemy AI only throwing significant attack waves at you in the final few missions. Campaign missions in the first game were severely limited in terms of effective tactical solutions: If you didn't build or move certain things at or to certain locations and times, you were basically screwed, and this is largely not the case in 2 until very late in the campaign. Though it was either streamlined or dumbed-down from the first game, depending on personal interpretation, Battlezone 2 maintained a key aspect of the experience- a combination of emphatic voice acting and written fragments of background information that that told an engrossing story of interstellar discovery, betrayal and intrigue, with a quality soundtrack as well. Whatever the public perception of Battlezone 2 as compared to the first game or otherwise, I consider it a forgotten gem of the late 90s, with a brand of gameplay that has seldom been explored before or since, and I greatly appreciate both these games being made available to a wider audience.

I received Shantae and the Seven Sirens as a gift from a friend and was glad I did. It has all of the color, charm and musicality I've come to expect from the series, with the welcome return of the open-world exploration not seen since Risky's Revenge. It features animated cutscenes beyond just the intro, a series first, which you no doubt have heard were animated by Studio Trigger. There's also some character art by Inti Creates. It is unfortunate that Jake Kaufman was not involved with this game's soundtrack, but I hear he was busy and there's always next time. The game has a few design and technical issues that are oft vented about in the steam forums, though with an undue amount of vitriol. The game is a far cry from the disappointing DLCs for the previous title, further marking them as anomalies in a otherwise consistently fun and chill series. This entry sees our half-genie heroine and friends on a much needed island vacation to meet other half-genies, that quickly goes awry thanks to the unfailing appearance and malfeasance of pirate queen Risky Boots, and a new, mystical threat dwelling beneath the island. You'd think Risky would stop being such a pain in the after having HER repeatedly saved by Shantae, but hey, at least she's consistent. As mentioned above, this fifth iteration marks the return of the Metroid-style map layout last seen in the second game, with a number of interconnected regions and three different hub towns, each with multiple exits and warp rooms. The game is still fairly linear otherwise and compared to its inspirations, with core ability progression taking you from one region to the next in sequence, but with room to backtrack and search for collectibles at pretty much any point up to and including standing outside the final boss's door. However, outside of the dungeons there is no way to track your collected items, and no way of even knowing your overall completion percentage without quitting back to the file select screen. This is a rather glaring omission from any metroidvania, and certainly from a fifth title in a series. Thanks to the map guide here on steam I was able to find everything, but I had to revisit several areas more then I would have liked. Regardless, it was far from impossible to achieve 100% completion. Dance magic returns, but is handled differently then before- traversal abilities are now regulated to dedicated quick button inputs a la Pirate's Curse, with the actual dances now resulting in screen-filling spell effects that can do damage, heal Shantae (and certain other characters and objects) and reveal secrets. Coupled with the series mainstay attack spells such as the orbiting spikeballs, that run of a Zelda-style magic meter, Shantae has more means of attack and healing then ever before, and that's saying something. Shantae 5 is still far to the easy side of metroidvanias and platformers, and though this is a frequent point of complaint against the series, I would kindly ask those people to off and leave me to my enjoyment. Go play Hollow Knight if you want to be punished while collecting things so badly. That's a great game mind you, but I maintain that games being "too easy" is an entitlement problem as compared to games being too hard being an accessibility problem. Any time Wayforward has listened to these types of complaints, the resulting changes have been to the game's detriment. The game runs well for the most part and controls fine on keyboard, in contrast to a lot of platformers. The default control mapping, as in 1/2 Genie Hero, is very similar to the control mapping I used in the typical SNES emulator, a surprising bonus. Unlike the fourth game however, this game is subject to a weird loading issue where it places a strain on my processor and takes just a few seconds longer then it seemingly ought to. It doesn't go above the level of low-grade irritation but it never got any better in that regard. The game also crashes on exit, for what that's worth, and crashed seconds into a new game as well until I verified the steam files. The series' penchant for amusing dialogue, appealing character designs for protagonists, NPCs, enemies and bosses alike, somewhat interesting but not frustrating dungeon mechanics and presentation in boss fights are present and accounted for, and Seven Sirens exceeds 1/2 Genie Hero in overall quality, especially when I take things like Friends to the End and the Costume Pack into account. I feel that Pirate's Curse was still the strongest entry in the series, but Seven Sirens has a level of glam, glitter and visual polish which belies the series' humble Game Boy Color origins, and it was enough fun that I didn't put it down until the credits rolled. Technical and design shortcomings aside, Seven Sirens is every bit the charming cartoon adventure the genre deserves and a sign of even better genie goodness in the future.

Sixteen years is a long time to wait for a sequel. Was Jets n Guns 2 worth that wait? Some say no, but I'm happy we got a sequel at all to one of the finest PC shmups ever made. Almost everything that made the original great can be found here, with a number of quality of life improvements and even 2 player coop! Having purchased the first game three different times, you can imagine my excitement when I discovered the existence of the sequel. For those unfamiliar, the Jets n Guns games are side-scrolling shooters made in the vein of the lesser-known 90s DOS and Amiga shmups, with Tyrian, Project X and Walker cited as specific influences by the developer. I was also reminded of Raptor: Call of the Shadows. Like Tyrian or Raptor, the player's ship can withstand multiple hits and can be further fortified with various defensive upgrades as well as a wide variety of primary guns, missiles, bombs, and other gear. New to this game are activated abilities running of an "antimatter" mana bar, and gun-enhancing "GEM" devices that alter their combat behaviors, including one that allows you to aim one manually with the mouse, a la the 1996 platform shooter Abuse. Properly configured, your ship is the most dangerous thing in any level- at least until you get to higher difficulties. I don't know where Japanese shmups get the materials for their flimsy one-hit-death space fighters, but they ought to have a word with their supplier. The ships of Jets n Guns can take a licking and keep on ticking. One notable shortcoming of JnG2 is actually in the story. Also like Tyrian, the first Jets n Guns went out of its way to describe its rusted and zany future setting with comic strips and flavor text for every weapon and item. It told the story **** ex-Federal Space Hero called back from a working, mercenary retirement to find and stop the caddish, unfair attack of evil stellar bastard Xoxx from annihilating the universe, a feat he appeared to succeed in doing, at least until the amended events of the game's "Gold Edition" rerelease. The story of 2 is far thinner, told only through small mission briefing descriptions. This time, you are attempting to fight off an extradimensional invasion of evil "Necrodroids." There is no mention of the events of the first game or any of its characters, or even any indication of whether or not the Federal Hero of this story is the same person as the first. I couldn't help but find that rather disappointing, as I love it when there's some plot in my action games. At the very least, we have proof that our efforts to stop Xoxx were not in vain. JnG 2 is also extremely short in comparison to JnG Gold's mark of nearly 40 levels, though as before you can continuously loop through New Game Plus runs with ascending difficulty. This is also somewhat disappointing, but again, from the sounds of things the game almost didn't happen at all. If the game weren't so damn fun I'd be much more annoyed. And that's JnG 2's strong suite, as in the first. It's just pure, explosive fun action, with depth of gameplay coming from trying out the huge variety of weapons and upgrades. At least at the lower difficulties there is no apparent meta, and you are free to experiment as you wish, aided by the fact that the sell price of any item is equal to the purchase price, as in the first game, so you in essence have a pool of cash to redistribute as you see fit. A new addition to this game is a mission select screen. Where in the first game you played one mission after the next in sequence with no ability to replay levels outside of looping through new game plus, in this game you can select, play and replay missions at your leisure. On casual mode you keep any new cash earned through replays, while on normal mode only your highest score is counted, so you only get the cash difference between your previous and new top score, as in the first game. If playing on a coop profile, your total cash is shared between players, so you must strike a balance as to who gets what equipment. There is also a hardcore mode option, a la Diablo and its descendants: If you die, that's it: Profile over. Not my kind of thing, for sure. Aesthetically speaking, Jets n Guns 2 is every bit the sequel one could want. The player ship's default appearance is a bulky, dieselpunk-esque combination of a space fighter and a WW2 fighterplane, looking like something Mr. Torgue or 40k's Orks might have designed, and can now be customized with different parts and paintjobs, including the cockpit of the iconic R-Type fighter, as well as parts more closely resembling the titular craft of Raptor. Perhaps most importantly, chipmetal band Machiane Supremacy returned to once again score the game, complete with an updated mix of the first game's amazing shop menu music. I got JnG 2 when it was still in early access, bundled with JnG Gold at a very modest price. If you are a fan of shmups at all I strongly suggest you give it a try.

I am a long time fan of Borderlands, since I saw the Game Informer cover story back in 2007. I played hours on end both alone and with friends in every entry in the series and it was almost always a hit with everyone I played it with. Its combination of Diablo-style loot and skill trees with Halo-style shooting and physics is a winning combination what I percieve to be largely minor design problems, and in all honestly, 3 is no exception. I was there at PAX East 2019 when Gearbox had their big presentation to announce the game, and did nice things like show Battleborn fan art and have cosplayers come up on stage. I should have suspected something when they conspicuously failed to announce what store the game would be available from. Borderlands 3 is a lot of fun, but I cannot in good conscience tell you to pay money for it. The why is a number of things that are varying degrees of heinous. The first, of course, is because of the Epic store and their shady exclusivity deals, which more then once have been used to bait-and-switch customers and kickstarter backers. I've been playing Epic games all my life and the skeezy, CCP-money backed Epic Games of today resembles nothing of the company that once developed and published titles like Unreal Tournament, Jazz Jackrabbit and Tyrian 2000. They don't even resemble the company that developed Gears of War. If the issue had been that alone, however, I would have simply waited out the year and then whatever time it would take for BL3 to be severely discounted on Steam. But there is more. Anyone familiar with Gearbox has a lot to say about them, not all of it productive: How much of a "disappointment" Duke Nukem Forever was, how "bad" Battleborn was. **** of course, though their treatment of Duke since has not been stellar, and Troy Baker's statement about their refusal to participate in unions, and so on. The real issue is their grandstanding CEO, Randy Pitchford. Even if I had enjoyed some of Randy's past antics and stage magic tricks, his persistently bizarre public behavior and repeated allegations leveled against him of things like possession of child porn, siphoning 12 million bucks from the company and even assaulting Claptrap's original VA, David Eddings on top of denying him pay, are rather difficult to gloss over. It's difficult to say what's true and what isn't. But you combine that with the Epic business and publisher 2K Games' less then stellar track record, such as supposedly sending private investigators to a Youtuber's house for "breaking our policies, leaking confidential information about our product, and infringing our copyrights", they said, and you get a pretty ugly picture overall. By the time of this writing i'm sure tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people ignored all of this and gleefully shelled out the full asking price for BL3, maybe even from the Epic Store, but I will not. If you people keep paying money to get shafted, they will keep doing it. Instead, I suggest you pick up a used copy of the game for consoles or find, shall we say, alternative means of acquiring BL3, because beneath the executive **** price model, crashes, unlikable villains and flat jokes is a mechanical evolution of the series that I'm sure, for at least some of the people who did real work at Gearbox, is something they wanted to be proud of. Hopefully they got the pay they deserved for it, but I don't think Randy, 2K Games, Tim Sweeny or Xi Jinpeng for that matter deserve one red cent of your money for this or anything else anymore. The game offers a number of quality of life improvements, like the ability to fast travel from any location instead of specific warp points, a feature that really ought to have been in the series from the first. Driving controls were much improved as well, with a better sense of weight and physics. Movement is improved, the mantling mechanic is a great addition. There are number of outstanding issues attributable to its origins as a console game, such as there still being only four weapon slots, but I guess things like that are never going to change. Like I said at the beginning, minor issues in the scope of things. The game generally runs well, with smooth framerate and reasonable load times, though I did occasionally encounter game-crashing fatal errors. I wanted to tell people to buy Borderlands 3, but I can't. Still, if you have the opportunity to play it, whether or not you've played the previous games, it is a pretty good time. That is why I am giving it a Four and not a big fat Zero. I even tried to leave a Steam review after the free week and was not able to. There is a reasonable explanation for why that is, but it doesn't look right regardless.

Calling Overload a spiritual successor to Descent almost doesn't cut it. It essentially IS Descent 4 in all but name, and honestly is more faithful to the first two games then the third one was. I would expect little else from the co-founders of Parallax Software getting a team together to create a game celebrating Descent's anniversary. For those who were too young or otherwise missed out on Descent, the gameplay of Overload is simple in design: You are the pilot of a small, but heavily armed spacecraft, exploring a series of zero-gravity mining bases infested with killer robots. You must find keys, destroy the mine's reactor and then race to the exit door before time runs out. Simple. You can move in any direction, leading to the subgenre's nickname of "6DOF", or six degrees of freedom, shooter. Many games of this type are more traditional space combat sims, lacking the Doom-esque level design that characterizes games like the aformentioned, Forsaken and Neon SXZ, with Sublevel Zero being a rogue-lite take on the concept. This time the setting is limited to the moons of Saturn in a series of mining and research bases belonging to a group called Cronus Frontier, in the year 2118. Cronus' parent company, Juno Offworld, has recieved a series of distress calls from Cronus and has dispatched you, a gunship pilot aboard the transport ship Iberia, to investigate. I would go so far as to say that Overload is better then its predecessors, refining the formula to a higher degree in a variety of ways. The basic feel of moving and shooting has improved greatly, with an ease and slickness not present in Descent. Auto-leveling relative to the level's axis's is more subtle, with none of the sudden rotational jerks you would get in Descent. An upgrade system has been added, allowing you to improve the weapons you prefer to use, such as the Cyclone gatling-laser or the Crusher shotgun in my case. This upgrade system was the focus of one complaint I read in a steam review, wherin the issue was that the points for said upgrades are mostly hidden in secret areas, and cannot be returned for if they were missed in an earlier level in the campaign. Said secrets on the whole are easier to locate- secret doors are typically obvious in appearance and are also revealed on the map when a new room is entered- they are not indicated as such, but one quickly learns to investigate conspicuous, 1-block square protrusions from otherwise flush room walls on the map. You could also just use a guide, though some would prefer not to constantly alt-tab out of a running game to view a guide as I did. One aspect that has been drastically downsized is the guidebot. As in Descent 2 and 3, you have a small guide robot, this time a holographic construct, that can be deployed to guide you through the level to your next objective. It cannot locate secrets for you, but in the earlier games it could be asked to find nearby enemies, items, or hostages. The hologuide in Overload cannot be given specific instructions- it will only take you to the next primary objective in sequence. At least the hostages, now in cryotubes, are marked on the map, which is easier to read then it used to be. You can also still place markers, though only one at at time, but they are now visible through level architecture so you can use it as a quick reference point when flying about. Another unexpected aspect is Overload's writing- the Descent games, in typical 90s action fashion, had very little plot or backstory, at least until the third game. Overload's levels are prefaced with briefings from the Iberia's onboard AI, Mara, and peppered with past audio logs and real-time transmissions from Mara that help you piece together why the mining robots went haywire and surviving staff are locked up in cryogenic escape pods. It has a few interesting twists that the genre-savvy might see coming, but it was compelling enough, with good enough voice acting, that I wanted to see how it concluded. There has been discourse lately of the importance or lack thereof ****, or at least fun, story in videogames, and I am firmly in the former camp, regardless of what John Carmack has to say on the subject. There is a lack of visual variety in the level design as compared to Descent, but it's not something that really bothered me while I was playing. The overall layouts are far easier to navigate however. No doubt a treat for veterans of Descent and other 90s shooters, I believe Overload also has something to offer for fresh players, offering a tight, explosive FPS experience in keeping with both its forebears and the recent resurgence of the design sensibilities of that decade. Descent 2 was one of my favorite games as a kid, moreso then Doom or Quake, and Overload feels like the best kind of trip down memory lane.

If you like cooperative FPSs, spamming emotes, voxel graphics and a color palette and soundtrack that reminds one vaguely of the Descent games, you might like Deep Rock Galactic, an up-to-four-player coop FPS about dwarven asteroid miners and their daily grind. The titular interstellar mining concern has just hit upon the richest source of ore in the galaxy: a pisshole of a rock called Hoxxes IV. The only problem? It's infested with territorial alien bugs- crawling Glyphids, flying Macteras, rolling Q'ronar and more. So grab a beer, pickaxe, gun and some friends, hold on to your beard, and prepare to dive. Just watch out for those damned Bulk Detonators. Someone described it as a mix of Minecrafts' digging and Left 4 Dead's shooting, and while that is a crude comparison, it's not inaccurate. Of note, Deep Rock does not use iron sight aiming at all. Right Mouse is instead used to swing your pickaxe, used for both digging and as a melee attack. The closest thing to a sniping weapon in the game, the M1000 Classic, instead uses a charged shot mechanic. Given that fights are often up close or at odd angles, and your enemies' propensity for crawling on walls or flying, the combat might remind one of the early Quake games, albeit with reloading and a sprint mechanic. DRG has four character classes, a range of mission types and procedurally-generated level layouts across many different biomes, with many enemy types, environmental hazards and gameplay mutators to keep things interesting. Missions have three possible levels each of length and cave complexity. Mission types include excavating teal Morkite ore the dwarves (maybe) use to make dark ale, repairing broken "MULE" mining robots and then defending a damaged escape pod, gathering blue Aquarq crystals and returning them to a fortified mine head, eliminating fearsome Glyphid Dreadnoughts, or gathering alien eggs for who knows what (It might be omelettes). Along the way, you can find red Nitra ore, which can be exchanged for supply drops to replenish your limited ammo and equipment, gold for a cash bonus, and various other color-coded minerals used to purchase upgrades to your gear. Some are found in surface deposits, while others are buried just below the surface, with telltale surface indicators. Each player can carry only a limited amount of ore on their person, but you can deposit it into the robotic mule MOLL-E, or "Molly", who follows you about most missions. You may also deposit ore into the escape pod or minehead if either is present. Normally Molly hangs about, but you can call her to a targeted location by pressing C. At the end of the mission you are awarded credits and XP for your chosen class, with a "hazard bonus" applied based on your chosen difficulty level, 1-5. Hazard 5 must be unlocked first. Classes are satisfyingly varied and I switch mine between missions frequently. They include the fast-tunneling Driller who also packs a flamethrower, pistol and satchel charges, an Engineer with a platform deployer, sentry guns, semi-auto shotgun and grenade launcher, a Gunner who backs up his minigun with a large-bore revolver, zipline deployer and shield generator, and a Scout with an assault rifle, sawed-off shotgun, grappling hook and flare launcher. Each also has an additional primary and secondary weapon that can be unlocked through leveling and completing "weapon license" assignments. Some classes are more useful in some situations then others: I recommend bringing a flamethrower-equipped Driller to any Elimination mission for example, as he can quickly burn through a Dreadnought's regenerating armor. However, each class is viable and solo-capable. Should you choose to go solo, you have the option of being accompanied by the friendly and lively hoverdrone "Bosco", who can mine, shine light on indicated areas, and engage enemies with a machine gun and, once upgraded, a manually-requested rocket strike. He can even revive you and return your salutes! There's also the possibility you might encounter the armed mule robot BET-C, or "Betsy". Initally hostile due to infesting polyps on her hull, you can shoot these off and then repair her to have her join your team, turning her heavy guns and grenade launcher on the bugs. Leveling your characters also increases an overall account level, which unlocks various cosmetic alterations to your dwarves' appearance for purchase, with things like a Warhammer-style Slayer mohawk, enormous Dr. Robotnik-esque handlebar mustache, Hagrid hair and a helmet reminiscent of Dune 2's Sardaukar troops. DRG has a surprising degree of depth, flavor and light-hearted humor. It reminds me of the better co-op shooters of the past decade, and I heartily recommend it. It benefits from speedy load times and smooth gameplay, slick controls, frequent updates. Rock and Stone, brothers.

When I was a kid, there were always games my parents didn't want me to play. Some they judged on their actual content, but Blood was not one of those. The title alone was enough. Another quality Build Engine title of the 90s in distinguished company, Blood was one of the earliest ventures of Monolith Productions, who would go on to create F.E.A.R. and Condemned, the former of which is perhaps my favorite singleplayer FPS, a least of the '00s. They are probably best known now for the Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor games. The player takes the role of undead gunslinger Caleb, once cast down by his master, the dark god Tchernobog, now arisen to exact his revenge. Armed with an arsenal ranging from mundane shotguns and tommy guns to aerosol flamethrowers, napalm launchers, Tesla cannons and even a voodoo doll, Caleb must negotiate haunted mansions, dark forests, dank dungeons and several more unique locales, such as a train, a carnival, a riverboat and a... shopping mall? Why not. These areas frequently reference classic horror films and literature, such as a hotel inspired by The Shining. Leave Caleb standing around long enough and he might start singing old showtunes or musicals to himself. Blood has a glib, macabre personality to it that makes it quite unique, thanks in no small part to the voice talents of Stephan Weyte. Listen for him in the Gloomwood demo, available now! Blood possesses a more direct map design then one might expect, with an overall ease of navigation I don't recall experiencing in most other games of those days. Maybe I just got better at not getting lost, who knows. This compilation rerelease by Nightdive Studios, rebuilt in their in-house KEX Engine, I believe represents my first time playing the game its entirety. It includes the Cryptic Passage and Plasma Pak expansions, with shiny new full 3D mouselook option, without that disorienting vertex warping the Build Engine had originally. I vaguely recall playing the old DOS version of the base game at some point in the past, but it's possible I only ever played the shareware. Although E3M1 felt familiar. Fans of Blood are no doubt familiar with the game's long history of intellectual property entanglements, notably resulting in its source code not being released, even to this day, despite the same having been done for Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior. The problem, as always, appears to be capitalism. Fresh Supply is noted for its unfortunate lack of updates and some outstanding minor bugs, but as of this writing the game is entirely functional and playable from start to finish. At the price I got it for from Fanatical, its an outright steal, and well worth its ordinary price. If you are experiencing Blood essentially anew like myself, Fresh Supply has what your veins need. You could always check Fresh Supply out on **** as well, where the original "One Unit: Whole Blood" DOS version is included as a free download.

I tried the demo for Wet a while back and was impressed, but didn't get around to playing it until recently when I borrowed it from a friend. A grindhouse-flavored tale of assassin Rubi Malone and her quest for vengeance against a powerful drug syndicate, where Wet often suffers in trial-and-error platforming segments and a few too many quicktime events, it makes up for in highly enjoyable gunplay that reminds one of Max Payne, and a signature trashy-exploitation-film style, with a soundtrack comprised of rocka/psychobilly bands I don't recognize and quality voice work, that makes the game more memorable then it might have been otherwise. Interestingly enough, the opening two chapters, the same presented in the demo, are some of the best parts of the game. As you get into the midgame, the action often stalls as you miss jump after jump, and some of the last few gunfights are a tad unbalanced against you. I highly advise fully upgrading your health and the bullet damage of at least your pistols and shotguns before the campaign's end- which by the way, was extremely unsatisfying. I feel like if someone could take Rubi, her twin revolvers, sword, and the whole Tarentino/Rodreiguez aesthetic and put her in a more mechanically competent game, they'd have a real winner on their hands.

Monster Hunter: World is my first real foray into the franchise after poking at demos for the older 3DS games prior. I'm sure I'm not the only one with that background, but I can say that World on the whole feels like an attempt to get more people into the series. MHW's premise is rather thin for a game of its scale. This is not in of itself a bad thing, but as a lore-hound I might have appreciated a little more fluff. Mechanically speaking however the game is significantly more complex, with more keyboard binds, at least as far as I can remember, then any game I have played in the past 15 years, with the possible exception of Sins of a Solar Empire: a 4X space strategy game. That MHW is an action game with this many binds is impressive, if at times kind of annoying. I would also regard it as strangely akin to Axiom Verge in that having tried both mouse and keyboard versus controller, neither is 100% comfortable for me to use and I find myself wishing I had an extra hand, or at least a few more neurons. You may wish the same when attempting to ascertain the breadth of content in MHW: There are fourteen different types of weapons to use, some melee, some ranged, some simple and others tactically complex, multiple environments to hunt in, a few dozen monster types with varying strengths and weaknesses and tables of dropped crafting materials, many, many items to pick up, craft, an arm-mounted "slinger" that can fire various types of found ammo and use and at least two different sets of armor and one of each weapon type to make for each monster, with the Iceborne expansion adding an entirely new "grapple claw" mechanic, more moves for the weapons and of course, a lot more monsters and gear to craft. In the vein of many Japanese games I have played in the past: The EDF series, Sengoku Basara, Navel Ops, and others: There is a staggering amount of stuff to do, find and make. MHW is, in a word, dense. If nothing else, you will get your money's worth in hours played by far, if the game is your bag. When hunting alone or with one other player, and I do recommend at least one other player, you have the option of being accompanied by a helpful cat-like creature called a Palico, who can use a selection of unique support items, gather materials, distract the monster for you, and generally be nice to have around. When playing with three or four players however, the Palicos stay behind to enforce the 4-player party size limit. And now the meat of it: The combat in MHW is certainly more accessible then earlier iterations of the franchise, but gameplay overall is notably clunkier and rigid when compared to contemporary titles, especially western ones. It took some hours for me to adjust to the various oddities of the game's design and hurdles of progression, not the least of which is your extremely limited defense and damage at the game's outset- you will regularly die in early quests and any quest thereafter you are not properly geared for, as player skill will not save you from getting one shot by a powerful attack, thus wasting one of your team's precious limited respawns per assigned quest, costing you time, money and patience. Gear levels aside, as I mentioned earlier I've never been able to reach a real level of comfort with any control setup for MHW. Mouse and keyboard simply has too many separate binds to be usable within a reasonable frame of response time, not helped by a complete remap of the default binds accompanying the infamously delayed-for-pc Iceborne expansion, and locking character movement to eight cardinal directions versus the more nuanced directional control of an analog stick. Controller makes character movement and certain melee attacks and other inputs easier to perform, but hopelessly complicates aiming any projectile weapon or the grapple claw. And both control setups must contend with what I felt, at least initially, was a labyrinthine, archaic menu system and curiously unresponsive quick-use wheel. Aside from any of this, there is also the issue of the disparity in design quality between armors for the two available genders. Whatever your personal feelings on skimpy armor designs for female characters, there is simply a marked lack of quality and design creativity for the female armors. All that being said, MHW is nonetheless fun, perhaps inexplicably so at times. It's loud and colorful, with easily understandable icons, recognizable outlines for monsters, weapons and armors, reasonable load times, and it's very easy for friends to link up and do hunts together. Combat can be satisfying when all factors line up sufficiently, especially the mounting mechanic and grapple claw techniques. The map and guidance system is fairly robust. Above all, a bulk of my online friends have the game, and it is always in my experience better to play games of this nature with friends. Whatever its flaws, and there are many, MHW manages to be an entertaining and addicting experience.

2/13/2012: I made the mistake of buying this game before it was free. Underneath the amusing fake batmen vs. joker fanboys window dressing, GCI is a poor clone of an already poor franchise: Call of Duty, with the added annoyance of cheap gadgets to make it easier to get cheap kills. I recommend playing pretty much anything else. It had items that might be fun in a better game, like a grappling hook and double jump boots, and is far more vertical then CoD, requiring you to battle for control of rooftops and the skies. However, it has a crippling player count (Six versus six, AT MAXIMUM) and very few people seem to have bought it anyway. It also has some glaring balance issues, endemic to the CoD generation of shooters, such as the clear superiority of certain items and perks over others, one-hit-kill sniper rifles (headshots optional), rocket launchers with ridiculously generous ammo counts and so on. Add to this mix only three multiplayer gametypes, the cursed consolization that is Matchmaking and a tiny number of maps, and you have a game that is barely worth the already low price. You're better off playing Space Marine.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is something special. It's beautiful, grandiose and emotionally gripping, but in my opinion, not actually a very good videogame. I will elaborate. A tale of the far future different from most, with strong and continuing moral and environmental lessons to teach, Horizon is the story of Aloy, a willful redhead with piercing eyes and a magnetic personality. Outcast from her tribe since birth, she has had to prove herself to everyone around her for entire life, testing herself not only against the traditions of her tribe, but a dangerous wilderness filled with hostile, animalistic robots. And, controls permitting, she does, and then some. It's just that game fights you for her success at almost every turn. Before I talk about Horizon's true strength, I need to talk about its weaknesses. Where Horizon stumbles is always in its mechanics, and, admittedly, in its odd facial animations. Some of these are small annoyances: the limited inventory space compared to the sheer volume of pickups, or the drop rates on certain resources. Or the fact that it relies on a crafting system at all, as it is about as much a survival game as Mad Max is: which is to say, not really. Some of the problems are a bit bigger, such as the circle button being used for both backing out of menus and dodge-rolling: perhaps off the nearest steep precipice, something that happened to me at least four separate times and killed me each time. Or the oddly temperamental target tracking on melee attacks. Or the incredibly janky and nigh-useless mount controls making so that you are better off navigating on foot. Setting aside my personal dislike for archery as a game mechanic, there is a fundamental disconnect between what the player is capable of versus what the enemies do. You will constantly get hit by enemies, as the dodge and sprint are insufficient to evade them. Enemies will also frequently interupt your arrow draws, knocking you all over the place and keeping you always on the retreat. You are given a variety of weapons other then a simple bow, including such technological marvels as a slingshot, as well as some actually interesting devices such as a burst-fire auto-crossbow and tripwire launcher. Each of these has specialist ammo types, some of which seem to encourage direct combat, but for at least the first half of this dense title you are seemingly discouraged from direct combat with the enemies for the simple fact that they will beat you in to the ground, over and over, with no mercy invulnerability, forcing you to mainline healing items just to stay in the fight, with the occasional exception of the lackluster human enemies that can be dealt with just by arrowing them in the head for the most part. The intent seems to have been to use ambush tactics and fight creatively, but the longer I played, the more I wished I just had some kind of gun so i could tear through the enemies and get back to the interesting part of the game: the story. I can say this because there are rare occasions that they DO give you a gun, allowing you a few precious seconds of glorious automatic fire or explosions before the weapon inevitably exhausts its magazine, forcing you to revert to plinking killer robots with goddamn twigs. It became so tedious that I even lowered the difficulty from normal. I'm not one for playing on "screw you" difficulties, but a game should not be so frustrating on normal. Even when they give you some flashy elemental launchers with good damage and status in the Frozen Wilds expansion, they saddle them with astronomical resource costs compared to the vanilla weapons. I nearly exhausted my supply of chillwater, a resource used for ice-based ammunition, built up over the course of the entire playthrough, just dealing with the especially superfluous "Kill all the Fireclaws" quest tacked on to the end of Frozen Wilds' main questline. Overall, the longer i played, the more I wished that Guerilla had taken lessons from their own past, and had combat similar to say, Killzone 2. Nonetheless, I soldiered on through the bulk of its content, largely because of its aesthetic quality. Horizon is a very pretty game, make no mistake. The landscapes and character designs are some of the best I've seen in any game, in fact. But where Horizon truly shines is its story: it has a quality of voice work, storytelling, atmosphere and world-building that combined creates a narrative and setting strong enough to carry the lackluster gameplay through to an emotionally charged conclusion that quite literally left me in tears. If Horizon were a film, it would have been a damn good one. I can't give Horizon a green rating, but it is worthy of note regardless. I recommend checking out a "let's play" of it at least.

I normally do not play games like SOMA, but it caught my interest some time ago while I'd been watching a Let's Play of it. On principle I wouldn't think I'd enjoy a game where the player is defenseless against the enemies, but SOMA is so well-presented and so creepy that It's excusable. Compared to the earlier Amnesia: The Dark Descent, it's clear Frictional Games has learned a lot as they've worked on this blend of horror and puzzle solving that characterizes their lineup. A Canadian man goes in for a brain scan one day, only to suddenly find himself transported far away and into a living nightmare, a crumbling undersea research base overgrown by techno-organic growths. SOMA is a game that asks difficult questions about what it means to be human, and saddles the player not with punishment or reward for their decisions but merely to reflect on them. It offers a particularly unpleasant take on the idea of transferring a consciousness from one body to another. SOMA flows much better then Dark Descent, and is more akin to Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, as it does away with inventory management in favor **** emphasis on narrative and psychological and existential horror. It retains the use of puzzles and using stealth to evade monsters as basic mechanics, but these are secondary to the experience of the game's bleak, chilling setting and you have the option of playing on a "Safe" mode where the monsters do not actively seek to harm you. SOMA impressed me overall and I'd be willing to play similar games in the future.

What happens when you take a redneck on a go-kart vacation in Egypt, mummify him, and force him to shoot his way through a horde of nasty monsters in a procedurally-generated pyramid to earn the favor of the gods? The result is Immortal Redneck, an admitedly oddly-named Rogue-Lite FPS that combines several of the best aspects of games to come before it, and is a praiseworthy first foray by its dev into non-mobile gaming. Take the brisk movement, combat and diverse loadouts of Ziggurat, combine it with the money-based persistent progression of Rogue Legacy, and sprinkle it with the bizarre sensibilities of Serious Sam and you have a recipe for a pretty good time. The game has a staggering variety of weapons, most of them useful, and a choice of character classes in the form of choosing an Egyptian god's favor. Each has a distinct starting selection of weapons, an active skill and starting perk. Some of them have more obvious strengths, such sa Sekhmet's health bonuses and Hathor's gold bonuses, but none of them are useless- Even Ammit, whose skill of removing some of your max health in exchange for additional health gained from kills, I initaly deemed useless given the high damage enemies do to you. Ammit was then the god I defeated the final boss with, thanks to her deceptively powerful "Bat's Nest" weapon, which is otherwise awkward to use. Uniquely among rogueish games I've played of late, Redneck has three seperate dungeons in the form of pyramids with distinct interior decor from one another, as opposed to a single labyrinth of varied tilesets. Each pyramid has seven floors, with the third and final floors thereof having a unique boss. These bosses are fixed, meaning through successive attempts you might memorize their attack patterns. They must be completed in sequence, with the second and third pyramids bringing a very sharp spike in difficulty- not just in enemy health and attack damge percentages, but introducing more complex room layouts, new enemy types, more difficult challenge rooms and spawning fewer and fewer health, ammo and perk scroll drops from enemies with each floor. When I first purchased Immortal Redneck I had no idea just how long it would take to finally reach the end of the third pyramid. Wether you get lucky, get good or just get enough gold to upgrade yourself, Immortal Redneck will give you your money's worth in sheer time investment. It is indeed difficult, but in such a way that I did not find particularly irritating in the long run. You may find yourself needing to step away from the game for a bit though.

While by all means a competently executed platformer with great hand-drawn artwork, this Wii iteration of Wario Land lacks a certain charm compared to Wario Land 4, and simply isn't as fun to play as that, or Wario World. The level challenges offered no draw for me, and I simply puttered on through the levels to the end of the story without wishing to strain myself unlocking all the extras, an admittedly common sentiment from me. I can't call it a bad game, but it's not a great one.

More like Lack Ops. I played the Beta for this game prior to its release, as i've done with each CoD, out of morbid curiosity and to confirm them as being not worth a purchase. Like each CoD before it since which ever the last good one was (which varies depending on who you ask, I'm going to say CoD 4, tentatively), it's a rehash of the same tired whack-a-mole gameplay that characterizes each installment, on the same old jury-rigged Quake 3 engine, the same awful netcode, with I'm sure what will be the same obnoxiously overpriced map packs, and the same sour taste it leaves in your mouth. And yet, each manages to be even worse then the preceding game each time, in this case by taking the already used and abused "character shooter" setup, providing even more ways to die to something you didn't see coming, and injecting, of all the half-baked dimwittery, a "battle royale" mode. They even had the unmitigated gall to not even bother adding a singleplayer campaign, the only part of CoD that was ever any real fun. Oh and for the diuretic icing on the **** sundae, there's microtransactions. And if the betas for WW2, Black Ops 3 and this game were any indication, the downward spiral persists to this day. The one for Infinite Warfare didn't even work. One of these days CoD will get so bad it will actually lose Activision a a lot of money, and then we can put this undead franchise back in the ground where it belongs. Treyarch got to make good games, once. Anybody remember Die by the Sword?

It's a better game then the first ZX, but I still prefer the early X games, and for that matter the Metroid series. The fast travel is a welcome addition, though still not fully properly integrated. Being able to transform into bosses outright is an interesting addition, and I like some of the character designs, especially Ashe. However, I found the overtly anime-esque art style and dialogue a bit off-putting, as well as the odd voice work. Still, it's a pretty good game- if you enjoy the 3DS's controls. If you're all fingers and thumbs like me, you might find the game a bit physically trying.

I was pretty fond of the first Destiny, though it took me some time to warm up to it and there are things about it I never liked, most notably the scummy way they handled the Taken King release and the exceedingly awkward controls on PS3. It had a pretty great soundtrack though. The thing is, what I like about Destiny 2 is pretty much entirely the fact that it has a PC version. Aiming and shooting feels appropriately smooth and responsive, and load times are much improved. Past that, If i didn't have friends who play it I probably would have abandoned it already. As it is, I received the game and first expansion from a friend and haven't spent one red cent on it. Said friend is also the sort of person that aggressively defends every aspect **** they like, even one with such an obvious myriad of flaws as this one. Here's the ugly details. For every thing they sort of improved, there's ten boneheaded things at every level of this game's design, more then I could possibly fit here. Every time I play I discover something new and even more stupid. I can't say I find its low user review score here on Metacritic surprising. There's so much that I'm just going to summarize. Pros - Primary weapons were improved considerably. They're now, well. PRIMARIES. As in, your main weapon, the thing you get kills with. I've heard complaints about this on reddit, but I like what they did with them. Especially the Vigilance Wing. - Less compartmentalization of content. Story and side missions are now properly integrated into the exploration zones. - Many more color options for gear. - Auto rifles were buffed. This was badly needed. Cons. Where do I even begin? - Though it's hardly terrible, the plot is still very thin, even for an FPS. It's at least more focused and coherent then the first game, but it's written a little too plainly, making Cayde's silliness feel a little too on-point. The extensive background, in particular the obscure literary references offered by some of the Exotic lores, suggests an epic of science-fantasy, grand adventure and the power of friendship. What we get is little more then an episode of a cartoon- admittedly, one that might run on Toonami. - On that note, they make even less use of their own lore then the first game did, if that's at all possible. I've never seen a series so afraid to revel in its own worldbuilding. - Twelve players in the first game's Crucible PVP was bad enough. But eight? I am so tired of this trend of steadily shrinking player counts in versus games. If I wanted to duel players I'd play a game that has a dual mode. This small team crap is boring. Combined with the disparity in effectiveness between many of the guns, god awful map design and complete lack of any kind of skill bracketing in the matchmaking, you will lose a majority of matches, sometimes to such crushing odds that the match will end early out of pity. Also, it shamelessly rips its gametypes from Call of Duty and Counter-Strike. - Why the hell is it only on ****? Did Gabe Newell crap in Bobby Kotick's corn flakes? - Also, matchmaking. It's as dumb now as when it was first implemented in Halo 2. It has no place in a PC release. - Handcannons were nerfed. This was NOT badly needed. At least not where PVE is concerned. - Where the hell is the Last Word? Why ommit any Exotics from the first game at all? - You're likely not to get a Sparrow until after you've completed the man story. That's asinine. - The Warlock Glide is completely screwed up compared to the first game. I'm not sure what they did wrong but it frequently does not get you to where you need to go. - The ledge grab maneuver would be a welcome addition- if it worked 100% of the time. As it is, it's rather finickey. - Individual Strikes are no longer accessible from the Director or for that matter from the exploration zones as they should be. Instead, there's only the Strike Playlist. This strikes me as more odd then annoying, but still. - In order to increment the Rat King quest, someone else on your team needs to have the quest or the weapon. This isn't mentioned anywhere. -The ships still don't do anything. They should do SOMETHING, I mean, come on. - Three players is still a weird party size. This rule of three thing they have is a bit much. - The NPCs at the tower are much more spread out then they were in the first game. You waste a lot of time running around. - The Prometheus Lens. Good lord, what were they thinking? If you don't know what I'm talking about, It was a horrendously overpowered laser weapon made available by Xur the first weekend after Curse of Osiris released. that made it so that if you weren't using it, you were guaranteed to lose crucible matches. And even if you WERE, you'd probably still lose, because almost everyone else was using one. It was then nerfed to the point where no one used it anymore. - Shaders are now single-use consumables. What? - Shadowshot is still next to useless.

A fun little vertical shooter that I got on the cheap. The fact that you can't steer the truck is a bit odd, but it does force you to learn when to shoot and when to boost. It could stand to be a little easier, but I guess that wouldn't be in keeping with its old-school arcade feel- complete with convincingly twangy Sega Genesis-style music!

Darkest Dungeon is a rare treasure **** that defies the outwardly unappealing nature of some of its mechanics. I initially passed it up because I am not normally a fan of turn-based games, especially dungeon crawlers. I do like roguelikes, though. DD has a level of quality and design that elevates it far above other dungeon crawlers, but is also among the meaner roguelikes out there, and ultimately, the survival of your characters may be left to chance. I somewhat dreaded the prospect of playing a game where my heroes can, and to hear it told, WILL die, though you do have the rare opportunity to resurrect them. I was nonetheless inspired to play it based on what else I'd heard, and I am damn glad I did. It has a truly masterful and haunting score and sound design, a great, heavily-lined art style and my favorite sort of dark fantasy setting, a huge and diverse cast of character classes and a truly awesome narrator in Wayne June, who I discovered is known for his narrations of Lovecraft and Poe, making him perfect for DD's tale of an ancient, eldritch horror unleashed beneath the manor house of a once-prominent nobleman. You play the role of this nobleman's heir, implored by him to return to their estate, claim the family fortune, and stop the clutching shadows before they can spread. To that end, you can hire a colorful cast of misfit rogues, pilgrims, mercenaries, outcasts and weirdos to send in to the four major areas surrounding the Hamlet, your base of operations. Parties of four venture into the Ruins, Weald, Warrens or Coves in search of treasure and the horrific bosses. Interestingly, you may enter the final, titular dungeon from the very beginning... but as I understand it, doing so with an inexperienced party will go about as well as you might expect. I'd love to go into greater detail about the classes here but that would greatly pad out the length of this review. They're worth reading up on- a lot of them don't function entirely as you might expect. My personal favorite would have to be the Grave Robber: With her throwing knives and mixed bag of dirty tricks, she can perform well in a variety of parties and from virtually any combat position. Combat is very simple to pick up but mastering it will take many hours, though it uses relatively small and easy-to-quickly-analyze damage numbers. There are also a lot of custom classes and other mods out there, and it is also a simple matter to go in to the game's files and manipulate them using a text editor if you so desire, though doing so may seriously disrupt the game balance, if you're a purist about it. The deciding factor for me getting the game was a major update that added "Radiant Mode", which, while not actually making the game's combat easier, instead shortens what was often described as major mid-to-late game grind, increasing gold and xp gains, and shortening the number of runs necessary to face a dungeon's bosses. I highly advise against going into Darkest Dungeon blind, even though that seems to have been the intention. There is an extensive array of guides available both on steam and elsewhere. Moreso then even other dungeon crawlers, Darkest Dungeon is tactically and strategically complex, and not understanding things like party composition and positioning, skill setups, crowd control and damage over time effects, enemy composition and abilities, proper allocation of provisions, weaknesses and resistances, and prioritizing character and town upgrades will likely lead to party wipes and empty coffers. Your only saving grace is that hiring new heroes is always free, and you get more of them at once by upgrading your Stagecoach. If you are not as concerned as me about losing people (you monster), Darkest Dungeon is one of the better RPG titles of the past decade or so, and absolutely worth purchasing. Just be advised that it is no cakewalk. Also check out it's excellent expansion, The Crimson Court, which adds a new dungeon area, a new character class, and "Districts", new structures to build at your town that provide persistent buffs and benefits.

A refreshing take on the ARPG genre with more emphasis on the action, letting you do things like wall jump and combo moves, and experimenting with different weapon and ability setups. Stylish east-european gothic setting similar to that of The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, and Vran himself is voiced by the same guy who voices Geralt in the Witcher series. However, it suffers from a lot of problems in its execution and what seems like an unintentional slip of the experience into something much more similar to a traditional ARPG where you struggle to keep your health up and find good gear.

There's been a lot said about Mass Effect: Andromeda already. You've probably heard the basics: The vistas are pretty, the combat has been totally overhauled and much improved, you have a car again, and the facial animations are indeed, quite wonky. Also, there are breasts. It's clear from this game what the strengths and shortcomings of the Frostbite engine are- and it's obvious it was not designed with character-driven RPGs in mind. The fact that it was made by Bioware's "B Team" is also evident. If you missed the boat on the trilogy, here's the basics. You take the roll of one of the Ryder twins, members of the "Andromeda Initiative", a joint coalition of various Milky Way species to journey to and colonize the Andromeda galaxy, our closest neighbor in the universe. Naturally, things go pear shaped almost as soon as you wake from cryo after the 600-some-odd year journey through dark space. This distant sequel cleaves itself immediately from the events of the trilogy, hoping to make a fresh start as the colonists do. At the same time, it tries to evoke the spirit of the first game- a classical space opera of exploration, discovery and adventure. While that spirit can be felt, the reality of the game feels a bit hollow. My main gripe with the game is its sheer, padded length. The game is filled to the brim with unskippable cutscenes, fetch quests and the same dreary scanning for minerals and anomalies that has plagued the series since its inception. I played it for almost seventy goddamn hours and it really drags after the first thirty. I'm grateful for the explosive finale, or it might not have felt at all worth it. I had a similar issue with games like Mad Max, Kingdoms of Amalur, Metal Gear Solid V and especially Skyrim: There's too much to do and not enough of it feels worthwhile. The story feels a bit lacking as well: When your previous entry literally had the fate **** in the balance, a simple tale of colonization doesn't have nearly the same punch. I can't blame the team for things like this. Even with all the problems Mass Effect 3 had, there was simply no way to make a satisfying followup. And I think there was something to be said for the linear gameplay of both 2 and 3. Also, I kind of liked the Quarians. Their absence from the game almost in its entirety, only getting a brief mention in the epilogue was felt. But you've heard all this crap already. Let me talk about what I liked about Andromeda. I loved the car. The Nomad is as close to the Mako as I suspect we'd be permitted to get. It doesn't quite measure up, but it sure as hell looks cooler, and the environments were designed with it in mind- and that was not always the case in the first game. I loved the combat. It's fast and punchy, with the welcome addition of jump jets totally changing the dynamic from the comparatively stiff and clunky third game. This extends readily to the cooperative multiplayer, easily the game's best offering. While it retains the tired "booster pack" system of 3's coop, the drop tables are at least improved in such as way as to give you access to better characters and weapons early on. Also, while the combat in multiplayer is on the whole more challenging then 3, encouraging you to take advantage of your newfound speed and jump/dodge capability, the difference between bronze, silver and gold difficulties is less drastic. The combat is good enough that it carried me through to the end of an otherwise boring playthrough. And I liked a lot of the characters. Mind you, Liam is as boring as Jacob, unsurprising given that they had the same writer. But Cora could easily have been worse, as could Peebee and Vetra. Drack was a huge hit, as with any of the krogan, who I think have the lion's share of quality lines and story, in this and the trilogy. But the real breakout hit was Jaal, and you can tell he was likely the dev team's favorite- the token local Andromeda boy, a smooth talker, sniper and user of the ever popular Shadow Strike. The banter between your squadmates and your ship's crew is deep and varied, and often poignant or at least amusing. They're a good bunch and I was happy to have them. At the end of the day, Andromeda could have been a great game, though I argue that it was at least a good one. It's fault is its parentage- EA's talent for continually shooting themselves in the foot and running their own franchises into the ground is evident. The fact that there will be no singieplayer DLC is almost unheard of- and not a good indicator of the game's success. I hear they will even go so far as to resolve the obvious cliffhanger of the Quarian Ark in a comic book or something of the like. I wish the best to Bioware in the future, and other developers at EA's mercy. I know they're capable of more. I just pray they get the chance to show it.

I should open this review by saying I grew up with a PC, not a console, so my first experience with Megaman games was the official Windows port of the first Megaman X. All my favorite platformers have been on PC, everything from Abuse to the Shantae series to Rogue Stormers. For me, a controller just doesn't do the job well enough, and my performance suffers for it. I'm just not very good at Megaman games- but a keyboard lets me pretend that I am. In the case of ZX, it was a borrow from a friend, so I played it on my 3DS XL. There's a lot I like about the game: The similarity of movement and combat to the early X games, the nods to the Zero series, the Metroid-esque, open-ended map and mission structure, the bright and vibrant colors, and of course, the ability to play as Zero- if only by proxy. But there's a lot I didn't like, and mostly that's problems with my hands and with the weight and awkwardness of the console, leading to issues like my thumb slipping off the control nub. As a result, I had to play the game on easy to get anywhere in a timely fashion, a fact I'd apologize for but at this point, I simply don't have the time to waste dying to the same bosses repeatedly. But where the actual game is concerned, I didn't much like how flagrantly animesque the character designs and plot have become, nor did I at all like how absolutely useless the map system was. Also, a "return to HQ" ability would have been real nice. ZX is by no means a bad game, but It wasn't totally enjoyable for me to play. That should not at all dissuade anyone reading this from looking into it, especially if you've enjoyed the other core Megaman games.

Prey has been on my radar since it was first announced, and I was skeptical given that this was fresh off the cancellation of Prey 2, and this game has only superficial similarity to the 2007 game. I'm actually still a bit irked that this game has the same name, when It could have been called pretty much anything else and been just as good. Regardless, the recent PC demo release and half-off sale convinced me to try and then buy the game, and I have to say I'm impressed. This is probably the best major studio release I've played this year and certainly of the same caliber as the Bioshock series, with which it shares a lineage of exploration-based progression, or what Warren Spector nondescriptively called "interactive sims", descended from the oft-discussed System Shock. It's even set on a space station, and its "neo-deco" aesthetic reminds one strongly of the first 2 Bioshocks. In the 1950s, Soviet cosmonauts encounter and are killed by a hostile alien lifeform- the Typhon. In a panic, the Soviet government reaches out to the US and they work together to build a space station, the Kletka, openly for peaceful purposes but secretly to contain and study the Typhon, but after an outbreak in the 80s, the station was shut down. Thereafter, its bought up by a corporation called Transtar, with the intent of continuing said research. Fast forward to 2032. You are Morgan Yu, a scientist working on the station, now called Talos 1, and the Typhon have escaped containment once again- but this time, things are much, much worse. If you've played any of the games I mentioned before, or Deus Ex, or even Dishonored, Arkane's earlier success, You'll know what to expect, and you'll get something arguably better. Especially where Dishonored is concerned. The stealth mechanics of this game are so much improved from Dishonored that you'd scarcely think they were developed by the same studio. As an FPS, Prey handles extremely well. Controls are responsive, most actions are intuitive and the game's systems are explained very naturally. Load times are fairly speedy as well. You can even lean around corners! The double jumping can get a little wonky at times, though, the booster is very squirreley. From the beginning of the game, you are free to wander much of Talos 1, including wandering about its exterior in zero-g, though it takes some time for the station to open up completely. You begin with a humble pipe wrench with which to to fend off the game's most basic enemy- the Mimic, a spidery, shadowy creepy-crawler that, as the name suggests, can disguise itself as mundane objects to fool you into coming too close. But very quickly you will begin to encounter larger, more dangerous Typhon types, many with deadly psionic abilities, and your first few battles will introduce you to the fact that while Prey is easy to pick up, it's not exactly a cakewalk. Enemies are not altogether numerous, but they are very dangerous. Early on, even the Mimics can nip you to death quickly, and they're hard to pin down- they'll dodge, they'll run away and disguise themselves, and generally avoid coming at you head on. The larger enemies, such as the humanoid Phantoms, are more aggressive, and will blast you with their powers as they close the distance. Even in the endgame, if you don't pay attention to your health and suit durability, you might be looking at a game over screen sooner then you realize. Like its predecessors, Prey is not a run-and-gun boomfest but a game of exploration, resource conservation and using creative, or at least cunning and mean, solutions to problems. It's both a lengthy and dense experience and took me well over thirty hours to complete, and I was intensely interested for the duration, but I do have a few complaints. There are some quest-breaking bugs. I've heard about more of them then I encountered, but one of them caused the "Treasure Map" side quest to break completely, meaning I missed out on a particuarly powerful suit chipset. It also has some issues with its sound design and lighting. Certain audio effects and voices can be extremely loud one instant, only for you to turn a corner and have them cut off completely, with no gradation between. Also, more so then even a lot of other first-person survival games, the difference between the light and dark areas in some levels is so stark that I completely missed some items and stumbled across them by accident later. Also, the flashlight is honestly too bright, blotting everything in your vision with its glare. I fiddled with the brightness setting multiple times over the course of my run and never got it where I wanted it. It could be an issue with my monitor, which is a bit dark to begin with, but who knows. Regardless, it hits a lot of notes for me both in its writing and its gameplay, and struck me afterwards as spiritually similar to Metroid Prime. I encourage anyone who enjoys FPS or survival games to try the demo.

One of the great forgotten gems of the SNES library, now available officially for the first time on PC, with two new characters, two new levels, remastered soundtrack and updated visuals. In a time where a SNES cartridge of this game could set you back a few hundred dollars and there are virtually no games in the "gallery shooter" genre on PC otherwise, Wild Guns is both a quality purchase and highly unique. A tale of bandits, bounty hunters and revenge, Wild Guns is a classic Western yarn- in space! with automatic weapons and giant robots! Taking cues from everything from spaghetti westerns to Space Adventure Cobra, Wild Guns has a signature visual style you'll rarely find elsewhere. The controls in this game can take some acclimation. Moving moves both your character and the crosshair. When playing the original two characters, Clint and Annie, firing locks your position but still allows you to move the crosshair. You can jump, dodge, throw a stun lasso to disable enemies, and use a screen-clearing "smart bomb" style attack. This also goes for the new characters, Doris and Bullet, with some variations- Doris comes with her own supply of grenades and doesn't use any of the weapon powerups that drop. She can charge up and throw up to seven grenades at once. She can also perform a ground pound to damage nearby enemies and destroy bullets. Bullet is very different, as he's... well, he's a dog. He has an attack drone that follows him around and does the shooting for him, which means he can move and shoot at the same time- whats more, the drone has a lock-on radius around the regular reticule. He can also use the weapon powerups. Together, these make Bullet a more beginner-friendly character, whereas Doris is aimed at more experienced players. The problem with this release that I can see is that there are no continues in the cooperative mode, whereas you have unlimited continues in single player. Regardless, this is a pretty great game.

It's difficult to believe Cliffy B was behind this mediocre game, maybe he should have brought a few more people from Epic. It's more Overwatch or Black Ops III then Unreal Tournament and suffers gravely for it. I can't speak for changes to the game since Closed Beta, but what I played was not encouraging. Low time-to-kill, unbalanced classes, uninspired character design and boring maps. You might want to pass this one up until it goes free or whatever.

I got around to trying Fallout 4 with the recent free weekend and was pleasantly surprised. I am enjoying it much more then either Fallout 3 or Skyrim, for different sets of reasons. Is it "Skyrim with guns"? Yes, very much so. However, the general feel of the game is much better for me. It suffers from a similar but lesser degree of bloat and mid-game drag, being entirely too long and inconsistently paced for much of my 80+ hours. The load times factored into this considerably, but it runs more smoothly then any Bethesda game I've played before, and it's nice to hear my character talk. I got lucky in most cases as regards to bugs, though an issue loading saves near the very end of the game caused me a bit of a scare. You are the "Sole Survivor," an inhabitant of the Vault 111 fallout shelter who flees the onset of nuclear armageddon in 2077, only to awaken 200 years later, with their spouse murdered and infant son missing. So begins a desperate search through the wasteland known as the Commonwealth, consisting of the ruins of Boston and its environs. In your search you inevitably become a central figure in the lives of many of this region's citizens, and ultimately a war for its control and answers to world-shaking questions: What measure is a non-human? Where do you stand on the scale between freedom and security? What are you willing to do not only to survive, but to thrive, to win? The game is not only open-ended but very morally gray, and whether your choices were right or not is left up to your own interpretation. This is a stark contrast to Fallout 3, which at least from where I was standing concerned a benevolent chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel waging a war for freedom against the totalitarian Enclave. People say the conversations in this game are a little too Mass Effect, but I think it works just fine. It's also sometimes a lot easier to tell at a glance what your character is actually going to say, barring the wildcard "Sarcastic" responses. The companion system is entertaining but far less sophisticated then most other RPGs, with limited dialogue opportunities and wildly varying combat effectiveness for each character. I found myself quite partial to Curie, whose excessive adorability, gifts of Stimpaks, devotion to scientific progress and surprising fighting ability endeared her to me quickly. The shooting, particularly when using VATS, is enjoyable, especially when your Luck perks sucessfully proc, and there is a satisfying array of guns of all types and calibers, which can be customized to your liking. However, coming from something like Borderlands, Battleborn or Killing Floor 2, the combat overall feels a bit stiff and clunky, and it still seems like you are required to use VATS to succeed in at least some fights, as in Fallout 3. The game's difficulty can also feel a tad erratic- you can tear through a number of engagements before unceremoniously being disintegrated by a nuclear Fat Man shell, which apparently warranted its own achievement. I can't help but love that there is actually a use for all the junk you find lying around in these sorts of games. I find it amusing you're given Power Armor virtually from the get go, though maintaining it seems to be a much more involved process. You're not only encouraged to grab everything you can find, but rewarded with experience points for using it to craft modifications for your gear and upgrade friendly towns with new stuff- at last, the packrat in me finds vindication. The series seems to be gradually approaching the status of a functional FPS, though that is a far cry from its original form and I am left to wonder. It's a competently executed FPS/RPG, especially compared to its immediate predecessor, but is it really Fallout? That, I regret to say, is not my place to judge.

The greatest MMO ever made, and they shut it down after just one year. All any MMO ever needed was real-time action combat. The fact that was in cars was just icing on the cake. And they killed it. Gods damn NC Soft straight to hell.

The weakest add-on to Borderlands 2 and probably in the series overall. I love Sir Hammerlock as a character, but his DLC's gameplay is full of grindy collection sidequests and annoying level design. There are some interesting new enemies, as well as the returning Drifters from the Secret Armory add-on of the first game. I personally enjoy the idea of having airboats- but they constantly get stuck on level architecture worse then the base game's cars do and are just a pain overall to use. I cannot recommend Big Game Hunt on it's own merits, though it being included in the GOTY edition isn't the end of the world.

Dex is a free-roaming cyberpunk action-adventure, a bit like Deus Ex in 2D- and it's the only 2D game I can recall that has a fast-travel system, a welcome convenience when carrying out the many, many sidequests, which account for the majority of the game's content. You take the role of a seemingly average blue-haired, latent street samurai, Dex, living in the urban mess known as Harbor Prime. Like many a cyberpunk protagonist, she suddenly finds herself wanted by armed thugs working for mysterious corpro-government interests. Fleeing for her life into the streets, Dex meets an assortment of colorful characters and must acquire various gear and eventually cyborg implants to stay alive and ahead of the game. Flexible character progression allows for melee, gunfighting, hacking, persuasion and cyborg enhancements like super-jumps and cloaking. It's got passable music, excellent spritework, pretty good voicework, and notably, a free DLC that adds extremely useful alternate outfits, most notably the Armagear Invisisuit, which allows you to stay cloaked indefinately provided you do not reveal yourself by attacking or interacting with objects. There's lots of people to talk to and items to find, and in true RPG fashion, most NPCs have problems that they need some peppy go-getting hero to deal with. Doing most, or all of these, as well as finding Memory Chip items, can see you reaching the level cap before the game's end, or at least being able to max out two of the six-tier skill trees: Endurance, Melee, Ranged and Hacking. The rest of the skills have only two tiers: Charisma, Augmented Reality and Barter. Endurance in particular is valuable because investing in it not only increases your health but also the maximum number of cybermods you can install, all of which have more dramatic effects then your skills. The persuasion mechanic is more opaque then in other games, even Deus Ex; Human Revolution, and there's really no way to know which dialogue option will result in success. I recommend saving before conversations- and pretty much anything else, as manual saving is an option. Dex is a game with a lot of choices to make, both in character progression and in dialogue, and three possible endings. My advice is to ask people a lot of questions, and explore the environment thorughly, especially once you aquire the high-jump legs. Often times you can discover new things and get more info, and money, out of a lot of the NPCs. And, as always, save, save, save, and if you don't like how things turn out, reload and try again. In this manner, and with some helpful guides, I was able to obtain all of Dex's achievements, one of the few games in which I could do so. But that says as much about the game as it does about me- Most of Dex's achievements are very obtainable if you know what you're doing. None of them are particularly tedious or grindy. It makes the entire experience feel better put together. Dex is one of the better cyberpunk games out there, maybe one of the better action RPGs, and it is well worth your time to check out the demo and see for yourself.

My experiences with the Souls series have run the gamut. After a disastrous experience with Dark Souls II almost put me off the entire franchise, a gamble on the third game paid off. As I understood it, III inherited some of its gameplay and mechanics from Bloodborne, a title I had initially overlooked given its PS4 exclusive status, meaning I would have no one to play coop with and no reason to resubscribe to Sony's money-grubbing. After a good experience with Dark Souls III and seeing an amusingly high number of Bloodborne cosplayers at Otakon 2016, I was inspired to get my hands on the title, and I'm glad I did. Almost everything about Bloodborne appealed to me. I believe it to be the best title in the series, though I cannot be certain having not played Demon's Souls or the first Dark Souls. Bloodborne trades the straight dark fantasy of its parent franchise for a victorian gothic-inspired setting, its knight's armors for leather coats and tricornes, the plain old swords for “trick” weapons with alternate functions, the arrows and magic for black-powder firearms, the undead for horrific, blood-addled mutants and its castles of dead kings for a doomed city at the mercy of cosmic-induced nightmares, all of which I found preferable for a long list of reasons. As a fan of leather, gunplay, creepy atmosphere, unnecessarily cool weapons (like the Threaded Cane, a weapon I loved so and found so versatile that I used it for my entire playthrough) and lovecraftian horror, Bloodborne was a treat for my aesthetic sensibilities. It also was a better fit mechanically for me, eschewing blocking almost entirely and instead forcing me to fight aggressively and in particular, master the art of stunning enemies with my gun to inflict the oh-so-satisfying visceral attacks, the key to success in a majority of engagements. I also enjoyed the rally mechanic, which allows the player to recover health they have just lost if they attack quickly enough. Lacking a Plus subscription, I was forced to face the terrors of Yharnam alone, a prospect I initially dreaded but eventually found agreeable, as it did away with what I feel is the series weakest and most aggravating mechanic: With no online connection, I could not be invaded and have my campaign play interrupted by some insufferable tryhard. And thanks to a post-release patch, I was able to summon NPC hunters for certain boss fights anyway. I could complain about the difficulty, but one does not play a Souls game for an easy experience, I suppose. There were some rather cheap deaths to be had, such as to the ridiculous Cainhurst NPC faced as part of Eileen the Crow's questline, who I was forced to cheese using poison knives, molotovs and whatever else I had on hand. A certain top-hatted, scythe-wielding hunter boss also posed some difficulty, making the final boss seem almost laughably easy by comparison. Oh, and the goddamn Winter Lanterns. Those things are straight up **** The biggest complaint I have is a obvious one. Where is the goddamned PC version? The quest for console exclusives continues to unimpress. I can only imagine how much more enjoyment I'd have gotten out of this game had I assistance from the crew of friends I negotiated Dark Souls III with, but alas, fun doesn't seem to be considered profitable. And neither is money itself, apparently, as I'm sure a PC version of this game would have seen considerable sales.

Don't believe the reviews. STRAFE has enormous potential. As a kickstarter backer, I can't say I didn't get what I paid for. I can't speak for the optimization issues, as the game runs fine for me, but they have a solid foundation for future balancing. As mentioned elsewhere, it pushes the "Game of 1996" look for all its worth and aesthetically, the game absolutely **** and has a pretty kickass soundtrack besides, I'm glad I sprung for that reward tier and am looking forward to getting my music. The guns feel effective and varied. My particular favorite is the disc launcher mode for the railgun, which calls to mind the Ripjack of Unreal fame. Enemies are as dumb as you'd expect from a game meant to be 21 years old, gibs fly everywhere and the "Murderzone" mode is pretty great as well, a wave survival mode with persistent upgrades unlocked when you reach certain point milestones. It is also immensely satisfying to successfully complete a run. I noticed by the time I had reached the forth zone that I had started trembling. STRAFE successfully captures the intensity of the 90s shooter, even if it doesn't 100% play like one. That being said, STRAFE goes so hard for capturing the feel of a 90s fps that it incorporates things I really DIDN'T like about them, namely, the blistering difficulty. You also have to look for keycards, but it's immensely downplayed from the old days. Quake 1 was hard, let's not kid ourselves. Mixing that style of gunplay with roguelike level generation should be a no-brainer, but in practice it makes the game harder then it needs to be: Quake wasn't stingy with health, armor and ammo pickups because you absolutely needed them all to succeed. STRAFE, being a roguelike, is by nature incredibly stingy with drops and punishes you for even incidental damage taken, which is incredibly hard to avoid in a game like this. It looks and feels like Quake, but you can't PLAY it like Quake and expect to get very far. Instead, you have to exploit the intentionally stupid AI and funnel enemies into killzones, making it feel more like Half-Life, only considerably less forgiving. You also have to reload, which if nothing else requires you to be a bit pickier with your shots. I am forced to lump STRAFE in the same category of roguelikes as CTHON, Sublevel Zero and Enter the Gungeon, where punishing difficulty is supposed to be an advertised feature instead of a drawback. It's a little more fair then Gungeon, though. I have to go once again on record that I don't dislike hard games outright: Bloodborne, Devil May Cry and of course, Quake are among my favorite games. but I don't believe in using difficulty in place of content, and I think STRAFE suffers from that a bit. You should absolutely give it a try you're at all curious, as it's still an infinitely better purchase then any "Triple A" shooters. I just think it could have used some kind of progression system a la UNLOVED or Immortal Redneck, which, I admit, might sound blasphemous to a fan of 90s shooters or 90s games in general. Or at least a difficulty selector. I mean, Quake had one of those.

It's a shame Alan Wake is longer available for retail or online purchase, due to "expiring music licenses" (Thanks capitalism!) It's easily in the same class as any other Remedy title, and honestly, it's probably in a class above. What would be an inferior third-person shooter to their previous series, the Max Payne games, is instead a thrilling tale of cinematic suspense and character development. I am sorry I never looked into the series before now. It features great pacing, quality voice acting, passably good driving sections, and if nothing else, really satisfyingly loud gun **** facial animations haven't aged well these past years, but that's hardly a major shortcoming. You take the role of the titular character, a crime fiction writer from NYC with possibly the worst case of writer's block on record. Wake has come to Bright Falls, Washington with his photographer wife Alice on vacation, in an attempt to clear his head, but within hours finds his wife missing, his car wrecked, the cabin he was to stay in vanished without a trace and a week's time gone by with no memory of such to speak of. What's worse, a malign force now stalks him through the night, wielding the shadows themselves as its weapon. The light is your friend in Alan Wake, and there is precious little of it to go around. As in Left 4 Dead and many other games, light sources often mark your path, and many of them not only function as checkpoints but quickly replenish your otherwise painfully slow to regenerate health. Your enemies are shielded by darkness itself, and only your trusty flashlight can strip their defense before you go for the kill, using the sorts of guns you'd find lying around a rural community: police revolvers, hunting shotguns and rifles. Also at your disposal are two kinds of flares and flashbangs, with one kind of flare being fired from a flare gun and acting in essence as a grenade launcher. Mechanically, the game is fairly formulaic: You move from checkpoint to checkpoint, blasting bad guys and pushing the occasional switch or button to open a door or something that might as well be a door. But your enemies are dangerous enough, and the characters believable enough, that you forget you are going through the motions of an oughts-era console shooter- and yes, I know it orignally released in 2010. The episodic format of the game greatly helps with the pacing, and it has some really great twists, especially in the bonus episodes: however you think the plot might turn out when you begin, it will likely defy your expectations. It also ends up being a lot harder then it initially feels, even on the easiest difficulty you will have a lot of near misses and ****, and this I recommend for a first play through- Alan Wake actually suffers from some balancing problems and it's a little to easy to get completely overwhelmed in the blink of an eye and ruthlessly beat to death. The dodge move is essentially broken, largely working only when it wants to, and your sprint duration is extremely limited, ensuring that you will rarely have the opportunity to avoid a fight. On the other hand, you are often given more supplies then you think you need- this is because you actually need all of it, so don't be afraid to use a flashbang or flare whenever you are cornered, as you are likely to find more. If you did not have the good fortune to get this game before it was pulled from the Steam store, I highly encourage you to dig up a used Xbox 360 copy or secondhand key if you can find one, as it is definitely worth your time.

Alan Wake's American Nightmare is a stand-alone followup to the events of the DLC episodes of the original game. Too big for a DLC but not quite a sequel, its more of an expansion. Nightmare features what feels like quadruple the available weapons, faster flashlight energy regeneration, more responsive controls and more action-oriented encounters. There are some who decry Nightmare as of inferior quality to the base game, and while it does offer an explanation for why its the same three levels repeated three times with differences only in dialogue and enemy placement, that's still obvious repetition. Regardless of this, it really does play a lot better mechanically. It includes the obligatory wave survival mode for those inclined. It also offers an incentive for tracking down the manuscript pages beyond backstory, as they are required to access lockboxes containing new weapons- however, I found the most useful weapon to be the crossbow, accessible on the third level and found simply hanging on a tree, no manuscript pages necessary. A harder cap is placed on your flares and flashbangs, but ammunition is much more plentiful to account for the more frequent enemies encountered, as well as newer, tougher enemies. We find a slightly older Alan, now in plaid work shirt and jeans instead of his stuffy tweed jacket, and much more experienced in facing the shadows that haunt him. Trapped in a Twilight Zone version of a Arizona highway-side town, Alan faces a cruel doppleganger called Mr. Scratch who claims to be everything he was too weak to be, but is really just a huge **** the manifestations of Alan's feelings of inadequacy as a writer and a husband. He has the opportunity to help a few people on the way. American Nightmare is a good play, but it will make little sense to anyone who has not played the first game from a story standpoint. If you have the opportunity to play the first game I strongly recommend doing so before playing American Nightmare.

Axiom Verge is at its heart a love letter to Super Metroid, and you've probably read that sentence a dozen times already. However, like the best "retro" games, it takes some creative liberties with its source material and does things that devs in the 90s probably would not have thought of, and If they had, the tech level wouldn't have been able to keep up. It also has a level of mystery and worldbuilding unrivaled in the genre. First, I have to address some personal issues I had with the controls. Axiom Verge handles well enough to be quite playable, but it also rather noticeably doesn't handle as well as Super Metroid or other games of the era, or even some of its own contemporaries: the Shantae games have much more fluid movement, for example. I found myself switching between the keyboard and an Xbox 360 controller on the fly depending on what I was doing, not wholly comfortable using either. In particular, aiming and firing felt much more natural on the controller, but grappling was far easier using the keyboard, thanks to what might be the shortest and most awkward grapple in gaming. It's like nobody but me played the 2009 Bionic Commando remake. It also has curiously easy boss fights for the genre, especially considering how dangerous some of the regular enemies are. That probably isn't a fair assessment of it, considering it was developed by one guy, unlike any of the other titles I just mentioned. With that in mind, Axiom Verge is an impressive work. It has a staggering variety of weapons that reads like a greatest hits list of shmup weaponry, everything from a basic linear projectile to a three-way spread, enemy-tracking lightning, R-Type-style curving lasers, Castlevania's fire vials, Ninja Gaiden's windmill stars, projectiles that bounce or travel along the ground, continuous-fire lasers, an ice-shard spreadfire weapon and more. Where Verge really shines is in its setting. You are Trace, a nerdy laser scientist who, following an accident at his lab, awakens in a bizarre, otherworldy place filled with fantastic things that want him dead. Like the many dead worlds Samus Aran has set foot upon, what happened to the world of Axiom Verge happened long ago. But this is different. You are not a power-armored, alien DNA-infused super-warrior. You are a dazed and confused everyman lost in a nightmare. You are treading among the bones of giants and the game's foreboding, H.R. Giger-esque artwork and eerie soundtrack heavily reinforces this. It reminds me vaguely of Xargon, an old Epic Games platformer from 1993. A central theme of the game, without going into too much detail, is the idea that things are not always as they appear. As one reviewer put it, you think you know how Verge will end, but you don't. It may not even make very much sense to you when it does, so I suggest you hunt down those notes and pay very close attention to their wording. The game makes clever use of "glitchy" textures to represent areas of the world where reality has gone a bit fuzzy, when it is being re-written. What would indicate an error in any other game is a feature here, a potential gateway to elsewhere. With enough items, the world opens up in ways you probably woudn't have anticipated going in- where the journey of many other platformer protagonists would end, Trace's is only beginning. The esotericism of its backstory is even reflected in gameplay- some items are so well hidden that there is no possible way to discern their location without literally shooting and probing every wall with every ability, a questionable design choice, I'd say, but easily remedied by a guide and quite in keeping with the games' overall feel. There are even "secret" worlds whose placement and contents are randomized in each playthrough, that are implied to exist outside of the reality of most of the game- to the point where items found within do not count towards your completion percentage! If you are as big a fan of Metroidvania as I am, then you owe it to yourself to play Axiom Verge, but even more so if you appreciate quality aesthetic design in games and the ability of them to put you in a unfamiliar and uncomfortable reality. Verge will remain in my consciousness for a very long time.

So far I am enjoying Orcs Must Die 2 greatly. It is a huge improvement over what was already a great first game, and the cooperative play is a great addition. Having played Unchained prior to this title, I can say they should take a few more elements from this entry.