Recent reviews by BinaryMessiah

I will come right out and admit that I never finished Resident Evil 7. The game was just scary for me, but I plan and go through it now that I have finished this game. Resident Evil Village is the direct sequel of RE7 where you play as Ethan Winters trying to save his daughter Rose that was taken by Mother Miranda. You end up in a strange village full of new evil villains and a bunch of places to explore.

The entire game is played in the first person again, and the game’s settings and scare factor is set right off the bat. You end up in a seemingly abandoned village and eventually you end up running away from Lycans. I don’t want to spoil too much of the story, but giving away details about each area, but I will describe them. You spend a good bit inside the village acquiring your first couple of weapons and learning the layout and controls. As you meet villagers and try and escape the Lycans you end up in Lady Dimitriscu’s castle, one of the only areas that have been shown in great lengths for months leading up to the game’s release. This is where you learn to explore, solve a few puzzles, and understand that the entire game revolves around exploring an area and acquiring a key or item that unlocks the next part. This may involve a mini-boss or onslaughts of enemies.


Lady D’s castle has her three daughters chasing you and they end up becoming mini-bosses. Lady D stalks you through the castle eventually like Mr. X or Nemesis in previous games. You spend too much time in one room she will come through the door in her 9′ glorious beauty. She’s a fantastic character, as all of them in this game are, but sadly there are only two cut-scenes with her and you don’t get to know her well enough before you finish her off and move on to the next area. There are three more areas that end up being the boss’s lairs. A marsh, a machine factory, and an old mansion. Each area is unique and a blast to explore, but the scare factor in this game is kind of weak. The game gets scary only in certain areas and the good majority of the game is just eerie atmosphere, but not so much creepy. Sadly, a lot of the environment is static and enemies don’t respawn so the game feels tenser in areas especially with a lot of enemies around.

There’s a lot of action in this game and it ramps up as the game moves on. Just like Resident Evil 4, you can expand your cache storage and buy weapons from The Duke. He sets up shop in each area you explore and has a central hub that you eventually get to. There are many weapons to buy with some that are upgraded over others. You buy things with Lei which the majority is acquired by selling crystals and gems and various rare treasures. Large enemies, bosses, and mini-bosses all drop these crystals. You can buy upgrades for weapons as well as parts just like in RE4. Duke has some limited ammo and explosives you can buy, but you can also craft items by finding parts laying around everywhere. This includes crafting ammo, explosives, and health. At some points, you must make every shot count, but I never ran out of ammo completely and got myself into a bad situation.


One issue I did have with the game is the confusing level design. You have to backtrack a lot and in some areas, I ran around for 20 or more minutes trying to remember my way back to a particular area because I found the key to move on from there. It got frustrating and the machine factory is an absolute chore to navigate. Nothing but endless hallways and dead-end rooms. Once you do find the key or door you need it’s rather satisfying and there’s a constant sense of progression through the whole game. Bosses aren’t very hard, but they just require you to stay on your toes and learn their patterns and you must aim carefully.

The visuals in RE8 are pretty damn good and they look great on PC. Sadly, the ray-tracing effects are minimal and not worth the halved frame rate even on my RTX 2080 in 1440p. I noticed no difference with it on or off. The lighting looks great and the textures are well detailed and it runs well on any system. However, as I mentioned earlier, the environment is very static and there’s not much interaction or dynamic things to look at. The game is also very linear despite the areas being quite large to explore. It’s just a bunch of twisting hallways and the village isn’t all that big. There are some extra things you can do like shoot all the bobble-head goats, find all the treasures, and defeat optional mini-bosses for treasures, but most people will probably look past all of this. The sound design is amazing with some really creepy sounds both loud and quaint. Being in the large mansion and anticipating something coming around in dead silence was great and Lady D’s castle is haunting. You expect something to come around every corner.


Resident Evil Village is an evolution of the series mixing RE4‘s gameplay and RE7‘s first-person shooter goodness. I do have to say that Ethan Winters sucks as a character and I hate him. He’s horribly written and I wanted to spend more time with the main villains, but alas, here we are. It’s sad we don’t get to see more of Lady D or anyone else for that matter except when you have short encounters with them in their respected areas. RE8 is a lot more accessible than RE7, and many people will probably finish this game. The difficulty is just right, it looks and sounds good, and it’s just a blast to play through. The scare factor is all over the place, the main areas can be labyrinthine in design, and the extra modes after you finish have varied mileage.

I have tried to play this game since it was released numerous times and just couldn’t get into it. After putting 110 hours into the Mass Effect Legendary Edition recently, I decided it was finally time to blow through it. After 40 hours I can say that the game is more enjoyable than I first realized, but also has more flaws than I imagined. Most of the major visual bugs are patched out at this point, but what remains is the core game that can never change or improve without an actual sequel.

I love the premise of Andromeda. The game takes place 600 years after the events of the original trilogy and that’s because a private company sent every species known to Council space out on several arks to the Andromeda galaxy and establish lives on then discovered “golden worlds”. Everyone stays in cryostasis while an illegal AI named SAM watched over all the arks. You play as Ryder who wakes up to the human ark being hit by something called the Scourge. This is a space phenomenon that honestly is never really explored or explained in the game. Strange tendrils reach out and destroy worlds and ships. Your brother also ends up in a coma as his pod was damaged during the incident.

This is where you learn the basic controls and how to interact with the world. The core ideas and gameplay loop of Mass Effect are intact. You can read datapads, talk to people for extra information and story, but in the end, your conversation choices make zero difference in the story. Whoops. I’ll get to that later. Once you finally try to explore the first golden world you realize it’s not. The Scourge changed it somehow and all the golden worlds are no longer habitable. This sense of fear is something I wish the game touched on more. Being lost and stranded in space with no way back home is a really great idea, but they never play upon this much. Once you land not the first planet you learn how to do everything else. Controlling Ryder is a breeze and the character is nimble, has a jetpack to jump around on ledges, can infinite sprint, and the shooting is more akin to standard third-person cover shooter gameplay, but barely.

Let’s go over the combat. Sadly, Mass Effect 3 had more satisfying combat than Andromeda. It plays well, but it’s very generic and just gets the job done. Once again, like in Mass Effect 1, there’s too much loot. Weapon mods, augmentations, armor, armor mods, minerals, random collectibles, etc. This means while each weapon looks unique, they don’t feel too unique. A shotgun feels like a shotgun, an assault rifle feels like an assault rifle. They just picked a center lane or each weapon type and stuck with that. Games like Gears of War have weapons that have their own unique personality. They are almost a character among themselves. At least in Mass Effect 3, the weapons had punch and weight to them, while these do not. The combat is mostly boring and the same enemies repeat forever. You have the kett, Remnant, and the usual raiders. The kett are the main enemy as you are trying to stop the Archon from using this Remnant tech to destroy worlds. More on that later. Then the Remnant is just generic boring robots. Each faction has different enemy types, but the game, in general, is pretty easy and I rarely ever died, even during boss fights.

The biggest change in Andromeda is being able to explore actual planets. There are quite a few here and they are actually really fun to explore. There are many side missions that involve your crew, and there are tasks, but honestly just exploring and doing the main missions was the most fun I had in the game. The open maps feel like major filler and while the worlds look beautiful, and the new vehicle you get is much better to control and it can get upgrades, but no combat, it’s 90% filler. There are tasks you can complete, but most don’t have objective markers so you either have to wander around aimlessly looking for these or use a walkthrough. In the end, most missions don’t give you any rewards at all outside of XP. Unless you are a completionist there is zero reasons to stray outside of the main missions. This is really a bummer and most of Andromeda is just filler with no real rewards or pay-off.

There are also way too many things to keep track of. AVP missions, R&D, buying and selling, modding, unlocking cryo pods teams to bonuses. It’s just too much. AVP missions are pointless as you just send teams out to complete missions for you. There’s a co-op multiplayer section tied in here, but why bother? The rewards out pointless. Andromeda tries to create an economy and ultimately fails as it doesn’t need one. The game is too easy, so most of the weapons are useless. Once you get a level five weapon your good. I had one of each weapon and the mods are nice, they actually do help, but this meant I never needed to buy anything after the second world was finished. I mostly collected too many minerals on missions that I just R&Ded the weapon I wanted and that was it. I needed research points to research the weapon and then I could develop it. I also found most rare weapons as loot. By the time I got the third and fourth world, I stopped caring about all that and ignored it. I just continued to level up. Another thing I don’t like is elemental ammo is now expendable and you need to acquire it as it’s limited. It was hard to keep track of when I was using it as there’s no sound or icon flashing that shows me when it’s gone. The icon just disappears.

So the main reason you explore these worlds is to establish a base and to clear each world’s hazardous conditions by activating three Remnant monoliths and then the vault. The monoliths sometimes require you to solve a sudoku-type puzzle using glyphs. Yep, I sighed at that too. At least it’s a real puzzle, but why do we need these? They just slowed the game down and some are insanely difficult. Once you get into the vault you activate consoles to get a path to the purifier console then run out as the gas chases you. You do this about six or seven times and it gets more boring as you complete each one. One thing I did like was seeing each race and how they fit into the Andromeda Initiative. It really feels like a reboot of the series while keeping the core of it intact, sometimes too intact.

That leads me to the main reason why most people felt so engrossed in the original trilogy: The choices. The dialogue is now split up into five emotions and the binary moral system is gone, but each choice doesn’t really do anything. The only thing you can really control is who you form a relationship with. There is so much dialog and so many choices, but they mean nothing in the end and that is one of the major problems with the game itself. I enjoyed the story itself, and the personalities and politics of the races remained intact and were in full force here, but my character was probably better off just not having any dialog choices. That would have been a bold new move rather than keep a system that is hollow in the end. And essentially that’s what Andromeda is. A bunch of systems from the trilogy that is either just there because it’s familiar and don’t do anything new, or is just there for no particular reason. This leads me to the Galaxy Map. BioWare just can’t get it right, even four games later. Sure, you are actually on a map this time and can zoom across the system and it’s pretty cool for the first few times, then you want to skip it after that. It’s slow and uninteresting after a while, and there’s no reason to explore most planets outside of reading their description. Sometimes you can launch a probe when Suvi announces an anomaly, but that’s it. So while the map is visually more impressive, it’s still pointless.

The visuals are outstanding as the game uses EA’s Frostbite engine, but the game is horribly optimized. Frame drops happened mostly in cut scenes and in random areas. Sometimes dropping into single digits.

The changes made for this release are nice, but a lot of effort felt only half-baked. You can now sprint anywhere in Mass Effect 1 and 2, but only for a few seconds, so why bother at all? The visuals are greatly improved in all three games, but a total remake would have been better. Why not take what Mass Effect 3 improves on and change these over into the other two games? Get rid of the MAKO levels entirely in ME1 and just drop me down into the side missions from the planet. Allow me to collect resources in some other as it’s only used to gain credits anyways. The Galaxy Map should have also been changed in ME1. While driving around the map wouldn’t benefit much it would at least fit into the rest of the game. Some might say it doesn’t leave the game as original as possible, but these features are widely unliked by fans.

Combat could have also been changed over from Mass Effect 3 into both games. While ME1 is more of a traditional RPG in terms of loot, why not scrap it entirely? There’s a lot of design questions to this game as it mostly feels like just a visuals overhaul and that’s it. At least the game runs well on modern systems and consoles and that’s what mostly counts. This also would have given the developers an opportunity to redo the ending of the series completely. Take the fan feedback from the last decade and use that to rebuild a better ending.

I love post-apocalyptic anything. Just the curiosity of wondering what would happen when a man is on the brink of extinction is morbid yet fascinating. Beautiful Desolation takes the isometric point and click of yore and brings it to life with over 40 fully voiced and wonderfully designed characters and a time warping story. The game starts out with you, Mark Leslie, arguing with his wife about someone whose emotional mess you have to clean up. Suddenly a giant object slams into the ground from the sky and brings about the apocalypse with machines. You are now trying to find a way to figure out what the Penrose, the giant object, is and how to stop it from changing the world. The only issue is that doesn’t go as planned and you are warped an unknown amount of years into the future and must stop factions from fighting and chose between groups of characters.

Choices mostly matter before the ending of the game. There are several groups of characters, some warring with each other, and some just single characters that don’t offer any rewards, and you must decide what happens to them all. You fly around an overhead map in your Buffalo transport and objectives are obtained by talking to characters. Each area is small and linear and there’s usually only one person to talk to in each area. The characters are really well done and the style of the game feels like a mid-90’s Fallout with pre-rendered animations in a box and the text appears below it. The characters look amazing from robots to weird fleshy things to plants and various lifeforms. There’s tons of imagination in this game and even the environments look amazing. However, there’s not much else when it comes to exploring.

When you land in an area you will most likely find things that need to be used or find things that need something to be used with. Sometimes a character might need an item, or they might need you to solve a large issue that decides the fate of their race or faction. The issue here is that objectives are so obtuse and cryptic and you can easily miss an option to solve a large problem. For example, you need to ultimately find three items to restart the array to let you back on the Penrose to go home. One item needed is Red Mercury. There are two ways to obtain this and depending on your choices once will always be cut off. There is also one route that lets you fight a few bosses via a weird arcade game. You need tokens to put combatants in this machine. You need at least three tokens to even bother and that’s never explained. To get these tokens you must choose one of three outcomes for a few factions, or the fourth outcome gives you Red Mercury for the array. I wound up missing two of these and only got two tokens in the game so the item I needed from the final boss for the arcade game to get Red Mercury was cut off.

This long string of outcomes that are hidden is a little unfair. I also accidentally decided a fate without even knowing that option would do that and I wasn’t given a second chance. I decided the fate of two factions early on and wound up doing the opposite because I didn’t realize clicking a certain option would launch that decision and it was too late. There are also some items that need to be bought to progress and you need credits that are exchanged for gold. To acquire gold you need to find them hidden in certain areas by just wandering around. This was also something never explained and for a while, I couldn’t figure out how to get credits. There are also some bogus items that you can waste credits on, so I’m not sure if you can end up not finishing the game because you have found all the gold and don’t have enough credits. There’s only so much gold in the game and there’s not much.

One of my biggest gripes is needing to talk to certain characters before something would advance. Icons on the map flash if there is a new dialog for a character, but that’s if you have already done something to trigger that. It won’t flash for items not discovered or anything like that. I had to use a walkthrough through most of the game because there were times I felt l made progress and the next character would give me zero hints on where to go next. Some objectives I could figure out alone, but 90% needed a walkthrough. Just because the game looks mid-90’s doesn’t mean it needs to play like it. It still didn’t stop me from looking forward to the next area and character to talk to as they are so unique and interesting.

Overall, Beautiful Desolation is a well-written and very stylized post-apocalyptic adventure game with lots of nostalgic feelings of the mid-’90s. However, the insane amount of cryptic and obtuse objectives makes the game very frustrating without a guide. I also didn’t like how often you would start feeling like you’re making progress and then get stopped dead at every turn with the only option is to wander around every area until you notice something you missed, and as the game progresses that can take forever. You end up unlocking over 50 areas towards the end and going back to them all is insane. I love the voice acting, the art style, and the story itself, but it’s so unfair and stops you dead in your tracks at every turn. Progress is incredibly grindy here and not to mention the major decisions in the game can easily be missed or skipped over.

This is exactly how you do a game series reboot right. I wish I could end my review on that, but I need to tell you why. Tomb Raider suffered through a few mediocre games during the first run of the series during the late 90’s-early 2000’s. The first reboot did well for the series by maturing Lara and giving us better controls and a more cinematic experience. Now comes Tomb Raider in 2013, a fantastic game that shows the more human side of Lara. The game starts out with you and a science crew on a ship on the way to an archeological site, but things go awry when Lara decides to head to the Dragon’s Triangle off the coast of Japan. A mysterious storm destroys the boat and Lara and team are stranded on this island. There is a mysterious cult trying to sacrifice people to a sun goddess to end these storms. Lara has to deal with this if she wants of course.

What makes Tomb Raider so memorable is the struggle she goes through while surviving. She is nearly raped, suffers tremendous injuries and has to cope with herself in dealing with the fact that she has to kill to survive. She is not comfortable with this at first and really struggles to pull the trigger. This adds layers of depth to her character that weren’t seen before. Not only is her personality more memorable, but her looks have changed. No longer is Lara wearing the short shorts and tight shirt with her huge bust. She has been knocked down a few cup sizes and is much younger, straight out of college in fact. It’s hard to really describe her more than this, you have to play the game to really connect.

The gameplay in Tomb Raider has completely changed, but yes there is platforming and gunplay. Both are tight and very well crafted. Gunplay consists of using scraps to create a pistol, bow, machine gun, and shotgun. That’s it. As you progress and find salvage in crates and dead bodies you can upgrade these to look like and feel like better weapons. There are many upgrades that increase damage and accuracy as well as adding new ammo types. Lara’s animations are very well done and realistic and this falls into combat. She scrambles around and ducks behind cover, the guns feel great to shoot and you can see how inexperienced Lara is, she’s not a Navy SEAL or commando. Unlike other games like this, her stumbling animations don’t interfere with the game at all. You can still move around, you can dodge, and there’s even some melee thrown in. As you upgrade your skills (done at various campfires throughout the game) you can dodge and through quick time events can do some pretty gruesome kills.

While gunplay is tight and fun, exploring is just as important. This island is massive and you can go anywhere, there are no limits. Fast traveling via camps really helps, but there’s a reason for moving around everywhere: collecting hidden items. These range from relics, GPS caches, documents etc. There are hidden tombs found throughout the game that hold area maps for these items. These tombs consist of cleverly made physics puzzles that are really fun to complete. You get rewards like art and 3D models to view. The whole game just has an amazing atmosphere and is just so much fun to explore.

On top of all the climbing around you get a climbing axe which is an important tool for climbing and combat. Your bow is used for shooting ropes across valleys and canyons to pull items to solve puzzles, break doors, and access to new areas. The whole exploring ideal in this game is just fantastic and really fun. I did have to think about how to get to new areas and actually try to navigate and experiment, that’ good game design. There is a Survival Instinct ability that highlights map markers, objectives, and when you unlock the skill, you can see items through walls.

The story itself is a bit confusing, the whole spiritual thing is a bit unbelievable in such a realistic world like this, but that is what Tomb Raider is known for. Lara is the main character here and what she goes through was the main story for me. I loved every second of the story. The voice acting is awesome and the graphics look amazing, some of the best on PC yet. The new DirectX 11 features like Tessellation and the new TressFX technology applied to Lara’s hair look nice, but there were a lot of bugs and glitches for Nvidia users during launch (they are now fixed). You will need a monster rig to play this game on highest settings.

The multiplayer was tacked on late in development and is pretty boring. The combat was designed for cinematic gameplay, not multiplayer. It feels just like it does in the story, but it just doesn’t suit multiplayer well. I played all of three rounds and got bored of the game. Some people may like it, but there are better multiplayer shooters out there.

Overall, Tomb Raider is one of my favorite games of all time and is really memorable. The voice acting is solid, and Lara’s new personality makes her more human and more relatable. The graphics are outstanding and the gunplay and exploring mechanics are fun and very cinematic.

Lara Croft’s adventure since 2013 has been amazing. The reboot was one of the best in the game industry in the last decade and it turned a sexy heroine full of corny stories and janky gameplay into an open world complex trilogy. Shadow of the Tomb Raider continues Lara’s saga against Trinity and Doctor Dominguez trying to basically destroy the world.

The game opens up with an epic prologue just like the last two games and we see how hardened Lara has become since the last game. The entire game is about Lara and Jonah trying to find something called The Box which is a Mayan object that can stop the world from ending. It’s a little more complicated than that, but the story is much better than Rise’s story. At least we get more glimpses of Lara’s past and some advancements of her character like we saw in the first game.

However, I feel the story is a little more unbelievable than the first game. Instead of just trying to survive and escape an island, she’s doing some crazy Hollywood stunts that are totally unbelievable like running along debris in a flood. It made me shake my head, but I kept pushing on as it was exciting but feels like a total departure from the first game’s atmosphere and ideas. The world also isn’t large and open like the last two games. Instead, it’s broken up into smaller parts that can be fast traveled to with the largest part being Paititi city which is a pain to navigate, to be honest. I didn’t like this change very much and as I played through the first third of game I was waiting for it to open up into the big open world like the last two games, it just felt more cramped and claustrophobic. I also got bored exploring some of these areas trying to find all the secrets. It’s just not as exciting or varied as the last games.

That’s not to say the world here is bad. The new jungle theme is a nice departure and feels organic, is highly detailed, and features some new combat ideas. Lara is in full commando mode as she can cover herself in mud, hide in trees and vines along walls and take people down. She looks badass doing it and the combat is much more refined here, but some of the other ideas from the last games almost feel pointless here. All of her upgrades and crafting don’t really fit in here much as the game’s focus isn’t so much on survival. There are various upgrades for different ammo types, longer breathing, and not having to press the action button she does long jumps. Some upgrades are repeats, and I never used any of the special ammo as there isn’t as much combat in this game as the previous two, it’s mostly restricted to the story missions. You can craft outfit pieces that grant different passive abilities, but again, these felt pointless as there isn’t much combat in the game and it’s highly focused around stealth.

The story itself is quite short coming in at about 4-5 hours if you skip all the side stuff. It also didn’t feel as epic or as impactful as the last two games. While Rise’s written story was pretty bland it had some great gameplay set pieces throughout the entire story and this game only has a few. I don’t want to bash on the game making it sound awful, but it’s just trying to evolve while towing stuff from the first game with it and it feels like extra baggage. I really enjoyed Shadow and wanted to get all the side stuff and had fun solving the puzzles and climbing around the gorgeous areas, but it just didn’t have as big of an impact on me as the first game did. I loved seeing Lara again as her character is fantastic, but it’s all more of the same and feels very safe.

As it stands, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a safe sequel that’s shorter and tries to cut corners and do less while dragging to gameplay ideas for a larger than life world with it that just don’t fit in. The combat has been greatly improved, but there isn’t much of it, the story is short despite being a better story than the last game, and the large open world is basically gone. What we get is a mix of the last two games with some new ideas here for a new game. It’s a culmination of the best that all three had to offer but just not enough of it. The graphics are out of the world amazing with beautiful animations and voice work, but it’s just not enough to make it the king of the action-adventure genre again.

Serious Sam is one of the original old school shooters where you just shot everything on sight. Forget about the story, gameplay, cinematic events, or anything else. Serious Sam is one of the less popular FPS series which is shadowed by Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem. BFE doesn’t really do anything new, or add anything new, except a spiffy new engine which is seriously wasted. The game is repetitive, lacks any awesome guns (except a couple), and the same handful of enemies thousands of times over. BFE is mainly for newcomers because only the super hardcore fans will truly enjoy this (if that).


The story is paper-thin with Sam trying to stop an alien invasion, that’s it. This is the prequel to First Encounter, but who really cares? The game tries to be a bit different by starting off slow with a sledgehammer and introducing awesome melee attacks to show off the new engine. You acquire a pistol then the shotgun, then more guns as the game goes on. There are dozens of secret areas everywhere (I couldn’t find a single one for some reason). You shoot thousands of enemies throughout the game but in extremely difficult waves that can be in the hundreds.

I honestly felt that my arsenal was underwhelmed by these vast amounts of enemies the game throws at you. The most effective weapons were the cannon, C4, and Devastator, but the ammo for those are pretty rare (except C4). All the rest were pretty useless except the minigun which was good at reducing crowds in a wide area but ate up ammo quick. I can’t tell you how boring the game got by the end and it will really test your endurance. I played on the Easy setting and still got my ass kicked sometimes. For the hell of it, I tried it on the hardest difficulty and it was impossible. I couldn’t get past the third level it was that hard. By the last level, you are thrown probably a few thousand enemies with wave after wave that takes you about 45 minutes to chew through. The waves get so big that I backpedaled half the level to get some breathing rooms in some areas.


When it comes to looks BFE is impressive for a DirectX 9 game. This is the most customizable PC game ever made when it comes to graphics options. There are options here I have never even heard of! There are about 45 options, but when you max the game out it looks amazing, but it sadly wasted on a bland and boring art style. Everything is brown and dead with nothing interesting to look at. Halfway through the game I couldn’t take it anymore but finished it anyway. I do have to say that I am disappointed that Sam’s macho quips that aren’t as funny this time around as previous games. They just seem stale and are pretty mellow, oh well.

Multiplayer is where BFE shines, but no one is playing online. During my entire week of playing the campaign, I logged in at different times of the day and night and maybe got 1 or 2 people playing if I was lucky. The server list is almost always empty which is sad. This is a game that you will have to get buddies to go LAN on. When I did get a tiny game going it was addictive and felt very old school with fast movement, lots of jumping and twitch reaction shooting. There are some neat modes, but I never got to play most of them because this game is nearly abandoned despite Croteam releasing a patch about 2 weeks ago.


I can only recommend this to hardcore FPS fans and hardcore fans of past Sam games. The campaign is nothing special and gets incredibly boring and monotonous halfway through, not to mention freaking tough as nails. The weapon arsenal is disappointing and there are only a handful of different enemies. There isn’t enough new here to make it a true sequel, but the game looks damn good. For the low price it is worth a fun play through, but don’t expect tons of people to be playing online.

I have to come right out of the gate and say Rage is probably one of the most disappointing games I have played all year. With all the hype about the amazing and revolutionary graphics engine and weapon system that id Software (the inventors of first person shooters) has made, you would think they would fall through. The game completely is a 180 of what id Software said the game would be like. The first thing you will notice is the enormous amount of bugs and game breaking glitches, especially for ATI card users. The graphics will literally be completely distorted, or the entire game will be blue. How do you fix this? Extract a file from the graphics driver update and put it in the Rage folder. Or you can fiddle around with Catalyst Control Center, or how about the game not even running right unless you have it open? This is completely absurd and should not be like this upon release. I spent a total of four hours fixing this damn game so I could just play it. So you’re probably asking is it worth it?


Well, the shooting is solid and that’s a fact. id knows what they are doing and the guns are great and super fun to use. You can upgrade them at stores in towns, and use various ammo types because the enemies do need different approaches. This is by no means a straight up stand in one area and shoots everything. You will die quickly so use what you have available to your advantage. Guns like the assault rifle use regular steel rounds and felt rite rounds which are more expensive but more powerful. The shotgun can use buckshot, but also pulse rounds and pop rockets which act like explosive shells. You get a rocket launcher, sniper rifle, and a pistol that shoots four different types of ammo. There’s a decent amount of guns in the game and you slowly unlock them as the game goes on.

Shooting enemies are fun because each weapon packs a punch and feels good to shoot. Enemies have great animations and fight worth a damn so the game isn’t too easy. There are even some pretty fun boss fights as well. The enemy variety is pretty low, however, you get maybe five different kinds through the whole game with some just swapping out outfits such as different bandit groups. The whole point of Rage is to run around in the world and explore dungeons to complete various mission types. The dungeons are varied and have a lot of loot in them to engineer items such as bandages, wing stick (boomerangs that are instant kills!), sentry bots, RC cars that explode, ammo, grenades, and a whole slew of things you can build in your menu while you’re on the field. This can be really fun and encourage exploring every corner for junk to sell or use.


Now you’re probably wondering how the game is like an open world? While the game has a great art style and feels a lot like Fallout that it is trying to copy it isn’t in any way. The game has a nice post-apocalyptic art style and has some great designs and pulls of atmosphere, but it falls short because the game has a false sense of freedom. The outdoor areas must be driven (more on car combat later) and cannot be traversed by foot because for one it will take forever, and to the other cars will kill you instantly almost. The world has a lot of “hallways” that you can drive in that lead to each dungeon, but by no means is it a free open world like Fallout at all.

This tends to be very depressing because you can see all this great open land, but it’s barren and closed off by cliffs and walls around you. I mean there are only three towns in the whole game, and they are spread out in two different areas that you have to load between. There is a nice amount of side missions as well as races which involve the over-hyped car combat. You drive your car, which controls very well, and does various races to earn certificates to upgrade your vehicle so you can survive out in the “wasteland”. The combat is fine and all but mainly serves as just a way to get to your missions in the “open world” because car combat out here is far and few between.

I also had a problem connecting to characters because you don’t talk to them much and they really just give you missions. I also had a problem connecting to the story because while it has potential, it falls short with a terrible and lame ending, plus it just ends abruptly with a poor final mission with no boss fight. Some of the side missions are probably more interesting than the main missions. Overall you’re looking at a 15-hour campaign even if you complete every side mission. I also have to mention that the graphics look good, but there are better-looking games out there thanks to Rage’s weird low-resolution texture problem, but there are some really nice lighting effects throughout.


Overall Rage is a buggy, broken technical mess that most people will just give up on. However, the game has solid shooting, excellent weapon design, and engineering stuff is really fun. The false sense of freedom and so-so car combat really bring the game down to just a mediocre experience that will not leave an imprint like Doom or Quake did all those years ago. Sorry id but try, try again.

With P.T. only being a demo it sure did imprint itself into the horror genre. Games since have been trying to copy its experience, but is this such a bad thing? I think not as P.T. showed us what we have forgotten, the overall scare factor and how the atmosphere can do that. You don’t need cheesy monsters, jump scares, or even great visuals. The Just plain old atmosphere can do the job just fine. Layers of Fear is an indie horror game that is probably one the most insane I have played in a long time. The game did have a forlorn and eerie atmosphere, but just visual trip it gives you is just mind blowing.


You play as a crippled painter in the early 20th century who is trying to complete his masterpiece. The game starts out just fine while you wander around an old mansion opening drawers and finding pieces of text that help tell the story. Layers of Fear’s only goal is that you walk through doors. You will open more doors than you would like to in a video game. Once you get through your first door and into the main hub, which is your painting room, things go crazy. The game is very linear where you walk room to room and enjoy a visual acid trip that never stops or gives you breaks. As you think there’s no way out you will turn around and a painting will pop up behind you and start melting. Turn around again and the room changes or a ghost appears in your vision. What kept me going was that I wanted to know what was in the next room. It was like a funhouse but scary. Each room was always different and I never felt bored or that I wanted the game to stop. There are six major pieces you need to collect to finish the game and each one is themed. For example, one piece is a finger and you slowly build up the story on how you took that finger. It doesn’t tell you directly, but through crazy visual cues and clues you can figure out what happened.


The game is also a bit of a collect-a-thon as you can open drawers and search around each room for clues and allows you to unlock achievements. There are actually three different endings, but I can’t quite understand how to get them. There are no choices in the game, but maybe taking different paths? Each area is so linear that there’s only one way to really go so figuring out what ending you get is a huge mystery. There also isn’t much thinking in this game, there were maybe 3 or 4 puzzles and they required almost no skill to work out. I feel there should have been more puzzles, but that would have slowed down the pace of the game. You literally run around opening door after door and experiencing the next visual freak out like a roller coaster ride. There are also no enemies to run or hide from. The only ghosts that appear in the game are supposed to get you as it’s part of the story.

The visuals are fantastic as the game has amazing lighting effects, tense atmosphere, and there’s so much detail and so many different objects everywhere. The way some of the set pieces play out is pretty insane and required a lot of care and detail. The visual effects alone from warping, shifting, melting, and various other effects are pretty amazing as you don’t see many of these in games. All this was done with the Unity engine was is also pretty impressive. The audio in this game is quite amazing with a lot of variety and each sound effect put into the right place at the right time.


Overall, Layers of Fear is well worth a playthrough and it’s quite scary and you never want to stop. The great pacing, visuals, and amazing roller coaster ride of effects is something you don’t see in games very often. If you’re tired of cheesy horror gimmicks of most indie games then look no further. This game may be short, but it’s got a lot of soul and heart for what it is.

I couldn’t even begin to tell you what the story of Garshasp is about. With a weird name like that you would think the story would be crazy. It’s crazy in a way that you can’t even follow it, and the game isn’t even long enough to flesh out a good story. All I know is a guy with a weird name killed the brother of Garshasp and you’re trying to kill him. The narrator pops in sometimes, but he sounds boring and you can just forget the story.


With a God of War like clone like Garshasp, you would think puzzles and combat are top-tier. They actually aren’t very good at all. The combat is challenging and requires strategy, but the controls are unresponsive and the moves lack any impact. You have light and heavy attacks and you can combo them, but there isn’t any form of magic or long distance combat. The enemies are pretty dumb and either wail on you or just stand there and pause before hitting you. There are quick time events like in God of War, but the camera just zooms out a bit and the actions repeat for a lot of the enemies.


When it comes to puzzles and platforming there really aren’t any puzzles. Platforming is challenging especially these wall sliding segments that make you slide around parts of the wall that can hurt you. They get tough mainly because they go on forever. There’s a lot of switch pulling, turnstile pushing, and there are even health and experience orbs that you pull apart to acquire God of War style. You can upgrade your weapon, but not like you think. You just gain experience and you automatically unlock new moves. There are only two weapons in the game, but the Dragon Mace isn’t gained until the last 30 minutes of the game (yeah what’s the point?). The game has a nice end boss fight, but overall you can beat the whole game in less than 3 hours. Wait, what?!! 3 hours?! Yes, it’s like a sample of a game, but if you can get it on a super cheap Steam sale it’s worth maybe $3-5.


Overall Garshasp has a lot of bugs like when climbing ledges he will just shimmy around unless you hit the up button (or analog sticks have more problems) just right. He’ll hang on objects that require checkpoint restarts, lots of collision detection problems, and other minor quips that add up to make the game even less fun. Why should you even bother? It’s decent and the art style is nice to look at and the monsters are pretty awesome, but the graphics overall look pretty bad and kind of like plastic (remember Conan?). If you can find this at a super cheap price go ahead if you are an action-adventure lover otherwise pass.