Cygon

This Alien franchise game once again follows the usual recipe and repeats the same mistakes: Step 1: having aliens that actually sneak, hide and ambush you is ruled out as either too technically challenging, too frustrating for players or not following the mainstream recipe and thus too risky. Step 2: now tons of dumb, weak aliens are beelining towards players making loud screeching noises. Can't keep doing this for 10 maps straight, so the alien zoo comes back: armored aliens, spitting aliens, runner aliens, exploding aliens... Sprinkle with XP system and unlockable items. Voila, generic coop shooter. I wish they'd mix **** and Alien: Isolation instead. And rather than invent a dozen alien variations, invent new anti-alien devices that marines need to use. How about a new kind of scanner that is unwieldy but has to be very methodically used to locate hidden aliens in corridors (or undetected aliens will ambush), and having to use this scanner with extra probes in larger rooms to stay away from hidden aliens until a kill zone is closed off and set up because otherwise the odds are terrible... Basically, anything but another generic coop shooter with the dreaded alien zoo in it. But that's what we got. It may still be fun for players just looking to play another coop shooter with a different theme. And I guess this standard coop shooter recipe sells well, so maybe there's at least the chance for an interesting Alien game to follow in its footsteps.

I'm really disappointed. DooM 2016 was a fantastic game. It had great pacing and enabled a variety of tactics - positioning, crowd management, ammo conservation and deciding how to deal with each group of enemies anew. All this while telling a great story, through exploration of humanity's failed ambitions on Mars. You really felt like the lone outsider who ignores all plans and advice because he's seen it all before. DooM Eternal feels uninspired and like it barely avoided becoming a generic loot shooter. Right upon launching the game, you find out that you'll either sign up for **** or the game won't let you play. After all, you need to claim your "rewards" check out how you're now the Super Amazinglicious Slayer Level 159 with special weapon skin number #34 or whatever :-( Behind that is a very repetitive and gimmicky arena shooter. For some reason the DooM slayer now has an unexplained "sanctuary" from which he launches "missions" and some voice is telling him what to do (and he actually complies...) Gameplay-wise, you'll find that you can only carry enough ammo to defeat 4-5 low-level enemies and that the game is utterly overloaded with gimmicks. Poor Doom Slayer can hardly walk 100 steps without having to watch a cutscene, grab a weapon mod, collectible, new punching skill, new special ability, stat upgrade etc. And swinging around on poles, grabbing onto walls? Doesn't really work for this game. I'm loosing the will to continue playing... I've already got a flamer (R), chainsaw (C), fist (E) / blood fist (E) that the game continuously forces me to use to get ammo/health. I wonder how many more "moves" remain to be dumped on me (certainly wall running and grappling hook are still out there) that get in the way of enjoying the game.

A machine for pigs does have entertainment value. I played the game from end to end (all 3.5 hours of it) and it was interesting to make guesses as to what's actually going on and getting more and more clues. However, that about sums up the game. You can leave your light on from start to finish if you wish and there's no inventory. The scare factor is 0/10 (the game features about 4 or 5 enemy encounters, but they're just anthropomorphic pigs with bad pathfinding, so when one appears in front of you, you lead them in a circle and continue (which is one of the problems: the game is almost entirely a linear walk through rooms, it never locks you in the dark with something scary or such). All puzzles are object fetching (reaching their highpoint when you have to fetch two things instead of one). I don't regret this buy, but it is more of a playable fan-fiction story inspired by Amnesia than anything else. "The Dark Descent" was much smarter about how it tried to invoke fear (eg. the water chase, the wine cellar, the vivisection room) and it had clever puzzles. Frictional Games should have taken this game from "The Chinese Room" in its current state and then built their own scares and puzzles into it because what I see could have been an excellent foundation for a real Amnesia 2.

Seeing this game mentioned as an insider's tip several times and reading about how you could build your own settlements, I decided to try it for myself, hoping that it would surprise me with depth or atmosphere. No such luck: The graphics look like a patchwork gallery of placeholder art. I wouldn't mind SNES-style graphics or cartoon characters at all, but in this case, nothing fits together and it looks like the artist had taken random 3D models and rendered them into sprites for the characters, photographed some trees and painted some houses in Photoshop. As I tried to ignore the off-putting graphics patchwork, I looked for interesting gameplay. Again, the game had nothing at all to offer. Run around, kill ever-repeating randomly placed enemies. Sometimes you encounter buildings, which you can enter. Inside, several stories with rooms full of more the same enemies. Five houses later, having shot the same few enemies in dozens of randomly-generated rooms, all you can think is: "Kill. Me. Now." So where is the game's motivation? Is it the story? Nope, there is none. You can't even complete the game as you'll walk over one randomly generated world or boredom after the next forever. Leveling? Nothing motivating here, just a simplistic, uninteresting number play. Building settlements? Oh great, more pointless houses to spent time walking around in. After giving this game several hours of my time, which have all been spent in utter boredom, I asked myself why I'm doing this for the final time and I just shrugged and deleted it. It's not even horrible enough to leave a bad taste... it's only empty, pointless and forgettable.