Recent reviews by BinaryMessiah

I absolutely love typing games. Why? Because it’s a skill everyone needs to learn and it’s a unique way to play a game that you can only do on PC. I remember Mario Typing Tutor back in the ’90s and various programs on the Apple II and original iMac back in the early ’90s in school. Then there was Typing of the Dead and Typing of the Dead: Overkill. These games were so much fun and there just doesn’t seem to be enough of them. Epistory is a Zelda like an adventure in which you type for every action. It’s a game I unlike any other and no other typing game does something like this. Rather than an on-rails shooter or just a series of exercises you go on an adventure trying to cleanse the land of evil and darkness. The story doesn’t really make much sense, and there’s not really much of one, but it’s the adventure that counts here.


There’s also not really any characters to get attached to as you are the only one. You are a girl riding a three-tailed fox and whenever you see something flashing like a log, stone, chest, or anything like that you press space and you enter combat mode in which you type the words shown above the item. It’s a lot of fun running around gathering chests, increasing your score count, and in the dungeons solving extra puzzles to collect fragment pieces. While these just unlock art pieces that are mostly meaningless, the game’s adventuring is highly addictive and the challenge slowly increases as the game goes on. When you see bugs on-screen that slowly crawl towards you that’s when you can press space and type the words above them to attack them. In the beginning, it’s rather easy and slow going. Some smaller bugs just have a letter, while larger enemies have larger words. The largest word of them all is actually an optional “arena” with a boss that has something along the lines of a 30 letter word and it was the hardest arena in the game.

That’s not all though. You go around collecting four different elements in these dungeons to progress further in the open world. Fire, ice, wind, and electricity. You can switch between each ability by typing the name such as fire, ice, spark, and wind. These also need to be used in conjunction with strategy and the game’s arenas throw more and more waves at you. Some enemies can only be hurt with a certain element and your upgrades can make combat much easier and is essential to even finishing the game. Even if you can type 100 words per minute, you won’t finish the later arenas without upgrading such as spark which will burn a word on the adjacent enemy, or fire which will burn the next word for that same enemy. This is a great strategy for enemies with long words strung together. It lets you type as little as possible so you can deal with smaller enemies. If there are a lot of small enemies coming at you spark will jump around knocking them out as they only have one or two words each. Wind allows you to blow enemies back and ice will freeze them in place for a second.


You also need these elements to solve puzzles in dungeons, but not every puzzle requires typing. Some require sliding on ice in a certain pattern to press buttons, some require deciphering a code in a certain order. The puzzles are mixed up nicely and the dungeons are all different. One dungeon is full of darkness and you must type a word above a crystal to light up the area for a few seconds to proceed. Each dungeon was a blast and the open world was also really fun to explore with lots of hidden chests and optional arenas. I highly suggest trying to complete the game 100% as you will have a lot of fun, but the game does have some issues.

For one, the map is terrible as you can scroll around the map or hover over something to see description. You can only zoom in on yourself and zoom out all the way. The enemy variety is also atrociously small as the same bugs repeat throughout the entire game and it gets old. Like I mentioned earlier, there’s pretty much no story outside of a woman narrating your adventure is broken up sentences that don’t really add up to much other than feelings of what the girl on the fox might be thinking at that moment. However, I found the visuals to be strikingly gorgeous. Papercraft art similar to Tearaway scatters across the screen with bright vivid colors and a lot of detail. It’s not something I expected but the game never got old to look at.


Overall, Epistory has a great typing adventure mechanic that’s highly addictive with great dungeons, fun puzzles, and challenging arenas. The game looks fantastic with gorgeous papercraft art, but the game is lacking a story and any characters to care about. The overworld map is also mostly useless and hard to navigate and there’s no real reward for finding everything outside of Steam achievements. My biggest gripe is the severe lack of variety in enemies that just repeat for 5-6 hours straight over and over. At least the game provides a fun challenge and uses typing in a game that we haven’t seen before.

The Longest Journey is actually one of my favorite games of all time. It was one of the first PC games I played as well and what pushed me to get into PC gaming. Adventure games were something that console players couldn’t really get. The rich stories, great voice acting, and detailed characters were something only a PC could really do. The Longest Journey impressed me with all of this and I remember it to this day. It was followed up by Dreamfall that pushed the game into a new generation with 3D models and backgrounds and brought the game to consoles for the first time as well and it was also just as memorable. We now get the final chapters of this story and I have to say I walked away quite satisfied.

You play once again as Zoe Castillo. A woman who is a Dreamer and able to go between the dream world Arcadia and the real world, Stark. You also play as Kian who is in Arcadia. The ex-leader of a racist and fascist human country trying to exterminate all magical creatures. Both characters are strong, likable, and I really got attached to them through their journey. The many characters throughout Dreamfall are great actually and it was a joy to listen to their great voice acting and find out more about them. However, the game does have some pacing issues and I’ll get into that later. There is a lot of politics in the game that reflects real-world issues (more so now more than ever) and the subjects get a bit touchy and might rub some people the wrong way, but I’m glad a game story is actually challenging these issues.


The biggest draw to Dreamfall is the choices you make during key events in each book. These will pause time and you get a limited amount of time to choose a path. The consequences will occur usually later on somewhere and these events are shown with a logo in the top right corner of the screen. This symbol means that current action or event is from a choice you made earlier, but it’s never clear what choices lead to which events, and this is where I will state the choice system is flawed. Later on in the game, the choices kind of a blur and become unclear and seem less impactful. The first two books do a great job of making sure your choices are felt but later on I couldn’t tell anymore.

When it comes to actually playing the game, well, there isn’t much of one. You run around various areas finding objects to use on other objects and talking to people. That’s literally it with very few puzzles. The puzzles are stupidly easy or frustratingly obtuse. My biggest complaint about the entire game would be the areas you explore are static and lifeless. Sure, they seem like they’re full of life the first couple of time you walk through them, but I spent so much time looking at maps to find the next area to go to just wandering by the same group of people, the same icon that lets you hear the character’s inner thoughts about that item and nothing ever changes. I spent the first two books inside the same hub areas for each character it became a drag just to get to the next scene. I would have liked to see more organic changes, more things to looks at and more inner dialog written as you spend a third of the game in these hub areas.


Most of the game is talking and cut scenes, however, and that’s what adventure games are all about. The voice acting is superb, the characters are fun to listen to and learn about, and I felt sucked into this magical world, especially being a fan of the series. However, that’s what this game is made for: fans of the series. If you haven’t played previous games you will most likely be lost and the story won’t mean as much to you. There are constant references to characters meeting in previous games and previous events and they are never explained. The backstory from the main menu is pretty much pointless as well. The world just feels magical and wonderful and it was a good time while I was in it.


The visuals are also pretty good of an adventure game, clearly last-gen, but this did come out in 2014. The facial animations are stiff, but overall it looks nice with great lighting effects and lots of detail everywhere. The game doesn’t seem well optimized though as certain lights will tank the FPS even on high-end hardware, so the engine needs a lot of work. The ending was also not as expected. It was good as in it made sense, but there was no crazy plot twist or anything like that. It came to a slow stop instead of full-speed and making your head spin as a good ending would. But, overall, Dreamfall Chapters is satisfying enough and completes a long-beloved series that will probably never get another game again.

Devil May Cry is a series PlayStation fans hold dear to their hearts as it helped kick start the PS2 and sell many consoles. It was something to brag about, a game that had the action that was only seen in a 2D platformer for slashers and now it’s in full 3D with a new character and an attitude. Thankfully, if this is your first DMC outing there’s a whole movie explaining the events of the first 4 games, and somehow leaving the Ninja Theory DMC reboot completely out of the fold.

You play as three different characters, Nero, Dante, and V who are hellbent on stopping a demon king from unleashing hell on Earth. Sounds pretty generic, but it’s a solid continuation of the story from a game that’s over 10 years old. It picks up after the events of DMC4 and has a few plot twists that are just decent enough to keep you hooked. However, the story is kind of slow going and it’s not as meaty as games that are currently out, but it’s more for DMC fans really, but as a standalone game it makes no sense. You really have to understand and know the events from previous games to really care as they are not explained.

DMC has always been famous for its thrilling fast-paced combat and Stylish scoring system and they are in full effect here. Each character plays differently with Dante having the most robust and deep combat system. He can switch between four styles like before Gunslinger, Trickster, Swordmaster, and Royal Guard and these four styles must be switched up to keep the style gauge going up. Each style has different attacks and a special attack such as the Trickster style lets Dante dart around and dodge, Royal Guard allows him to block, and Gunslinger unleashes a ton of bullets. My favorite weapon is the new Cavaliere that is basically a motorcycle split in half, yeah a motorcycle. It’s a heavy weapon that’s super slow, but incredibly powerful. I do have to mention that his weirdest weapon is Dr. Faust which is a cowboy hat that he throws that uses up red orbs, but gives red orbs in return if the enemy is hit.

V is definitely different from the other two as he never directly attacks enemies. His three shadow creatures do as he has a bird for projectiles, a Jaguar for melee, and his Devil Trigger is a big creature called Nightmare. V can stand off in the distance attack with the shadows while he reads from the poem Dante’s Inferno and charges his devil gauge which allows him to summon Nightmare. The creatures can’t do a final blow on the enemies so V has to charge in and take the final hit. His levels are honestly easy as if you stay back far enough enemies will leave V alone and his creatures only get knocked out for a bit and can be revived faster if you stand by them.

Nero is probably my least favorite character to play as since his combat is really dumbed down and his Devil Breaker arms feel pretty much useless. They give you a slight edge, but they break so quickly and you run out so quickly that you are reduced to his revolver and sword so I easily felt overwhelmed by enemies and couldn’t do crazy combos like with Dante or even V. I died more using Nero because I felt he just lacked something that the other two had.

Outside of combat, there’s nothing else to do outside of collecting orbs, buying skills, and items and then replaying again with your newfound abilities to get them all. The environments get repetitive and get rather dull towards the end as you are mostly spending time in a creature “tree” called Qliphoth and it’s just endless hallways of red and black and blood and weird tree stuff. There’s not much to look at here and I would like to have seen more varied levels like in previous games. The game is also rather short ending with 20 missions at about 8 hours. The game isn’t nearly as difficult as previous games, but it can get hard and you need to remember boss patterns and master the dodge button to get good scores in each level.

Overall, DMC5 delivers exactly as expected – great combat and interesting characters even if V has no background and is rather dull, but I loved seeing these guys on screen and I only have to scold that weird Michael Jackson dance scene towards the end of the game…yeah it was pretty cringy. There’s no ultrawide support on PC despite the RE Engine supporting it, and there are many bugs still present as I frequently crashed towards the end of the game, but it looks damn good and the voice acting is really great as well. DMC5 is a fantastic action game and fans will love what it has to offer outside of Nero’s lacking combat and the dull repetitive environments.

Deus Ex is an old well-loved franchise and the reboot with Human Revolution was well received despite its many flaws. Mankind Divided is a direct sequel taking place right after the terrorist bombing from the end of the last game, and Adam Jensen is at it again trying to solve murder mysteries, stop more terrorists, and put an end to the hatred against augmented humans. Dealing with racism, discrimination, classism, and many other dystopian issues, Mankind Divided delivers an atmospheric world to explore with great characters.

The gameplay elements from Human Revolution carry over and feel more polished and nuanced, but this game has its own set of issues. Starting with exploration, Mankind Divided has small areas in Prague you can explore and complete side missions and sadly that’s all. You can’t talk to 90% of the characters, and there are only a dozen side missions in the whole game. Prague just feels very cramped and small in scope and the Deus Ex franchise has enough lore and interesting things going on that it could be an open world game. Despite the areas being full of NPCs, open buildings, police walking about, etc., it just feels so empty and lonely. The amount of interaction is so little and there’s no real point exploring anything expect to hack computers to read emails and find ebooks, but even these don’t really give a lot of insight to the surrounding world.

Once you get into a mission the combat is actually rather versatile. You can go completely stealth using silenced weapons and takedowns, or augment yourself for combat with powerful melee moves, more health, shields, and more. I went the hacker/stealth route upgrading all my hacking augs and bio cell meter for stealth shields and extra takedowns. Every area has multiple routes to get to the goal by either shooting through all the enemies, hacking your way around turrets, cameras, and security, or just taking everyone down one by one and sneaking through vents. It’s rather satisfying to find your own path and I rarely had issues in which I didn’t know how to get to a particular area. The shooting is rather satisfying as well, but sadly the game is designed to use very little of it. I never used anything outside of my silenced pistol despite holding on to 4 different weapons through the entire game. You can pick up grenades, software to help hacking, and various healing items, but I never really needed most of it.

Outside of shooting, cover mechanics, and various combat abilities, there’s nothing else to the game. The story and characters are interesting enough to keep you going, but it’s mostly forgettable. The overall terrorist plotline is done to death in other games, and I’d rather know more about the surrounding world and how the people live day to day in this dystopian police-state world. That interested me more than anything Adam and his cohorts were working on. I honestly enjoyed the side missions more than the main storyline which is odd for a video game in general. There are some persuasion dialog mini-games where you must sway a character in your favor, but it’s easy and the outcomes don’t really affect the overall story.

Thankfully, Mankind Divided is for both action fans and stealth fans despite the game being built for stealth gameplay. There are no bosses this time around and the game has a lot of technical issues. At launch, the game was nearly unplayable for most people, and now after many patches, the engine is incredibly unoptimized with even two video card generations later, the engine struggles to stay at 60FPS with load times for menus even! MSAA is nearly impossible to enable with frames dipping into single digits, there’s a lot of chugging when turning the camera as well. On anything but the latest GPUs you’re not going to enjoy this game at all and it will murder your system. The game looks really good though with good lighting, high-res textures, and great character models.

Overall, Mankind Divided expands on its predecessor, but not on the overall series. More interactive areas would have been great, bigger areas to explore and more side missions, and even more insight to the day to day lives of the citizens in Prague. With a terribly optimized engine, and the fun factor of combat and stealth varying from satisfying to incredibly frustrating within minutes of each other, Deus Ex just needs a reboot before coming back. The story is enough to keep you moving along, but it’s nothing memorable.

The Batman Arkham series is probably the best superhero video game series ever created. Arkham Asylum really paved new ground for action games in general from the narrative, combat, and puzzle solving aspects, to even stealth mechanics. Arkham City built an open world on top of this with crazy Riddler puzzles, many side missions, and a deeper more exciting world to explore, so where could the game go from there? A prequel of course, and after Arkham City series fatigue started to settle in as it was a long tough game.

So, here we are with Arkham Origins, the Batman game no one wanted or asked for. It’s also not developed by Rocksteady so a lot of people became weary of the game including the original voice actors being replaced by younger sounding ones. This game is set only a couple of years after Batman becomes who he is and hasn’t met The Joker yet, Gotham PD has labeled him as a wanted criminal, and Bruce Wayne is young and full of anger. It’s nice to see Batman become a little more flawed and feel more fragile than before, but it doesn’t last long and I really wanted more depth to these younger characters.

Origins is kind of open world and is more like a snippet copied and pasted straight out of City which I felt was too safe. The world is devoid of life, kind of boring to explore, and there’s not much to do outside of a few side missions and solving tower puzzles to unlock fast travel locations, which is also kind of pointless. The meat of the game is the story missions and they are quite a bit of fun here and there. As I stated earlier, the game plays it too safe, so the memorable cinematic moments from previous games are pretty much gone. You literally go from one room to the next jumping around, beating up bad guys, do the occasionally flawed stealth mission, and then a boss fight.

The combat system is really starting to feel stale here, while it’s really good, bouncing from baddie to baddie and stringing up combos and do instant counters, it just feels too repetitive. You can use your gadgets to get an advantage, but just mashing the attack button and countering works just fine so the gadgets felt kind of useless and I never felt in such dire straits that I was clinging to pixels of health and barely getting out of fights. The stealth areas also feel stale as swinging around the tops of gargoyles and waiting for the right moment to swoop in on an enemy, take them down, and scramble back up is a tiring formula, and again, using Bat gadgets felt kind of useless as no matter what you use the enemies are alerted and their patrol patterns are disrupted making it a cat and mouse game of open opportunities.

I also felt the stealth arenas just weren’t set up as nicely as previous games and lacked something unique about each area. Even the level design is kind of whatever with recycle content from previous games and absolutely nothing new to make this game stand out from the rest. I lost interest in finding data packs in each level, and the overall atmosphere of the game just feels dusty and dried out here.

Let’s talk about bugs and glitches. Even after all this time, there are bugs that caused my PC to completely crash requiring a hard reset, texture glitches that require game configuration file edits, and FPS drops out the wazoo even on a top of the line PC. It’s unacceptable and the game almost became unplayable. The game also looks dated using City’s engine, but somehow not as good looking. Textures are blurry in spots, and the animations are a little wonky here and there. The entire game just doesn’t feel as polished as the last two.

That’s not to say Origins is a bad game, it’s just unnecessary. Stuck between console generation cycles, and being released too soon after City was just a huge mistake. The story is interesting enough to keep playing, but it doesn’t stand out and just feels like a massive expansion to City rather than a prequel.

I always come back to Alan Wake every few years because it’s just such a good game. Great combat, storytelling, varied gameplay, well-written characters, and overall solid experience. Almost a decade after the original release I went ahead and played through the PC version again and it’s helped up surprisingly well. Despite its graphical age, it feels like it could have been released yesterday.

You play as Alan Wake who is a writer that takes a vacation to the Pacific Northwest in Washington and stays at a cabin in Cauldron Lake. Alan has a scuffle with his wife and wakes up not really himself or anything around him for the matter. Without spoiling too much, the story revolves around darkness and always wondering whether what’s happening to Alan is real or it’s all in his head as you will see major story landings in which this question comes up. Even at the end of the game this is never really answered, and maybe it’s best to leave the player guessing a little.

The story is well told and might take a couple of playthroughs to get everything, but it does keep you pushing through the 6-hour story until the end. Characters such as Barry, Alice, Sherriff Wheeler, and even the doctors and radio station host are all just so well written and memorable. Other story tidbits include finding manuscript pages, watching live-action episodes of “Night Springs” clearly inspired by “The Twilight Zone” and radio station bits by finding radios. It’s nice to see the story unfold outside of cutscenes and it really gives you an insight to what’s going out in Bright Falls outside of what Alan is doing. The whole premise of Alan Wake feels special to me as I originally played this living in Southern California and not really caring where it was set. Almost ten years later I now live in the PNW just outside Snoqualiamie, WA where the setting was inspired. It’s awesome to personally experience this setting and then coming back to the game, I appreciated it so much more.

The main gameplay element here is your flashlight and guns. Light is a huge role in this game as the story is centered around it and your flashlight is a weapon. You can boost the flashlights beam and a circle will get smaller on enemies and once the circle is gone, and you beamed away from the darkness, they become vulnerable and can be shot with the gun. There are easy and hard enemies, a few fast ones, and inanimate objects become enemies later on in the game such as boss fights with harvesters, cranes, trucks, and barrels. It’s interesting how the combat is designed and you have to be afraid of everything around you, even birds! The use of the flashlight and guns is just so well done with great controls and the guns feel satisfying to shoot. You always have to be on your toes and every gunfight is never the same with limited ammo, no flashlight, and then some times tons of ammo to make you feel powerful. There are even lights in the environment you can use to take the Taken down such as spotlights, floodlights, and headlights on cars in the few driving sequences.

The game, however, is extremely linear and you rarely get to stray off the beaten path. These are only seen in the car sequences where you can stop at a house or two to find collectibles and then continue on. Despite this, the heavily scripted events are fun and there’s so much variety and the pacing is spot on. Going from chaotic dark forests to a New York apartment and then the psych ward and even a cafe is a nice touch. It let you breathe.

Overall, Alan Wake is one of the best games during the Xbox 360 generation with fantastic character dialogue, an interesting story, and fun gunplay with variety in level design and great pacing. The PC version adds DirectX 10 lighting and features such as ultra-widescreen support, FOV slider, slightly better textures, and character models. Overall though, the textures still look really muddy, even during its release, and there’s obvious LOD and draw distance issues with pop in that the PC didn’t need to experience.

I never played the first game, but Distraint 2 caught my eye due to the visuals and atmosphere it portrayed. You play as a man who is faced with severe depression from the guilt of evicting tenants from their living spaces. While this is his job he can’t take the guilt anymore and tries to commit suicide. You then play the split second that flashes through your head before doing so to regain hope and fight the darkness within. It’s a touching story and really shows people the process of grieving and depression and helps spread the message that mental health is a serious issue.


The game is played on a 2D plane and puzzle-solving. The puzzles are light and simple with the most complicated being a slider puzzle (which I despise) but overall the puzzles aren’t tough. There is a lot of finding this object and place it in the right spot, but the three chapters are short and it’s hard to get lost. You move from room to room just discovering what can be examined or talked to and then remembering where that piece goes. The game’s enjoyment is mostly in atmosphere and horror. Every so often a Creature of Fear will appear and you must hide until it passes. The sounds are eerie and the visuals are a treat.


There’s honestly not much game here. With each chapter there is a lot of dialogs to move the story forward, there’s a small green orb to save your progress, and then you just move from room to room to find all the objects to move on to the next chapter. At least the areas didn’t overstay their welcome and it was some labyrinthine complicated mess that some 2D horror games end up being. Each room was easy to remember and was distinct so once I found an object I had that “A-Ha!” moment of where it would go. It’s pretty satisfying and the game pushes you through at a steady clip not being too slow in any one spot.


The visuals are a mix of 8-bit pixelation, lots of grainy filters, eerie music and sounds, and a lot of camera tricks and overall just a foreboding sense of dread. The game pulls this off well and it was rather intense through most of the game will little reprieve in between. The problem is the game is about 2 hours long and there’s no gameplay really. I love these “walking simulators” that tell great stories, but rarely have they been done well and are memorable. If you have a short run time and there’s no game really you are totally relying on characters, story, and atmosphere and if those aren’t out of this world it won’t impress most people. While the game itself and message were fine, I didn’t care about the characters and pretty much forgot about the game after turning it off.

Man, where do I begin? Call of Duty was one of my favorite franchises growing up, and Modern Warfare helped kickstart FPS games into a new cinematic next-generation universe. That Pripyat level in the first Modern Warfare still sticks with me to this day. After MW2 the series took a steep downhill slide and hasn’t stopped since. Here we are with Black Ops III, a futuristic military shooter that is a far cry from what the original Black Ops was, which was absolutely fantastic. You play as a squad of black op cybernetic soldiers who are trying to stop an all-powerful AI from destroying the world. See, the whole world is completely infused with tech that can read people’s minds and know our every move. The CIA has several operations around the world to keep this in check, but it all goes wrong one day. The actual concept is interesting and could have gone somewhere, but instead, we dredge through a sewer of boring, mediocre, and lame campaign levels that drag on way too long and overstay their welcome.


The game plays exactly like every other CoD since MW1. You run and gun your way through waves of enemies that are as dumb as dirt and you face unbalanced difficulty spikes and repeat about a million times. I have to point out that I really hate the new weapon system in this game. You can no longer pick up guns from enemies but instead run into mobile armories where you can swap your loadout. This is a campaign and not multiplayer. I want to pick up weapons from enemies and keep things constantly mixed up. Several times through one level I would need a shotgun or sniper rifle but was screwed because I couldn’t get to an armory. I can’t predict what’s going to happen next so this is a huge mistake and I really hated it.

Second, the enemies are as boring as ever with generic robots and super soldiers. You get the occasional mobile armor, but that’s about it. It’s so boring I just shrugged because I knew this was coming from a game like this. I mentioned the terrible weapon systems, but let’s talk about how terrible the actual weapons are. For one, there’s a small amount for a CoD game, and they all feel the same. Sure you have shotguns and assault rifles and pistols, but they just feel the same. They seem to have no weight, no bearing, and no personality. It’s futuristic shotgun A and futuristic assault rifle F. There are no real world weapons anymore and it’s just a bore fest due to a lack of personality. The entire game has zero personality or originality. It all feels like endless metal corridors and hallways and concrete. At least the first Black Ops felt original and had some personality and weight to it.


To make the game feel more like multiplayer you get dumped into a central hub after every level and can change your loadout, unlock weapons with fabrication kits, and customize your weapons. There’s a new concept introduced called cyber cores which are powers that you can use against enemies. I found these almost nearly worthless as the game offers no opportunities to changes to the standard CoD gameplay to implement this. It just felt like something tacked on to say, “Hey! We did something different! SEE?!” which I didn’t fall for. The only useful power was stunning multiple robots at once, but that’s about it. For most of the campaign, I forgot these powers were even there. I just ran around shooting everything in sight like every other CoD. I wish the series would stop pretending to be sophisticated and complicated when really it’s a dumbed down snoozefest with no personality. It has been years since CoD has put its own fingerprint on the FPS genre and this game doesn’t do it any favors.

I hated the campaign, but the multiplayer was at least fun for awhile. It’s still the same old CoD MP that we’ve grown to either somehow still tolerate or completely hate. However, Black Ops III is much more grindy than any other CoD game and I gave up after around level 5. Even in single player, it takes many levels before you can purchase decent weapons and load outs. It’s part of the reason why the game gets so boring so quickly, the fast unlocks of the past are gone and it feels almost free to play which is a damn shame.

Graphics wise, it’s nothing impressive except for how powerful of a PC you need to run something that shouldn’t push high-end systems. With the GTX 970 I used I had to turn down settings and still got massive slow down. It wasn’t until I used an overclocked 1070 that I got steady FPS with everything maxed out, and even then sometimes the game dropped down to 40 FPS for no apparent reason. The game is poorly optimized, has awful glitches that still exist after all the patches, and just doesn’t look all that original or impressive.


Overall, I can’t really recommend this game except for the hardcore CoD players, and fans of only the older games will hate this. The weapon system sucks, the campaign is boring, lame, tedious, full of glitches, and the unlocks are a grind fest. There’s so much wrong with Black Ops III that it took me over one year to finish the campaign. It’s just boring and not fun to play as there are plenty of other great shooters out there. I’d rather play Half-Life 2 for the 20th time or the Crysis trilogy than spend one more minute in this game. Now, that’s not to say I hate it to death, as the multiplayer can be pretty fun with new modes and playable heroes that at a little depth, but it’s not enough to save the core gameplay. Zombie mode is the final saving grace as it still provides entertainment, but like multiplayer it will only last so long with boring guns to use and average visuals.

Well, here it is. One of the most anticipated games of the decade. BioShock was a masterpiece that raised the bar for storytelling in games as well as graphics and atmosphere. The underwater city of Rapture was loved by most gamers and became an instant classic. Infinite raises the bar yet again, and I have to say that this is one of the most beautiful and well-made games I have ever played, but even beautiful things have flaws.

The beginning of the game is just breathtaking and spectacular. Probably my favorite opening to any game. I honestly can’t explain much about the story because everything would be a spoiler. All I can say is that you are a man named Booker DeWitt who needs to bring back a girl from the floating city of Columbia named Elizabeth. If he brings her back he can wipe away his debt (from gambling). The story progresses into a huge twist ending and fully cuts you loose and doesn’t quite answer every question. The ending will shock you and even made my jaw drop. It’s a beautiful ending that is going to have gamers talking about it for years to come.

BioShock’s story is also told through the journey. There are no pre-rendered cutscenes or anything to break the flow. A lot of the story is told through hidden journals like in previous games. There’s a lot of similarities to older BioShock games, but everything is improved upon. The combat system still uses the gun and magic attacks, however, you get Vigor this time around. They are replenished with Salts that you find instead of Eve Hypos. Honestly, the Vigor’s don’t seem as useful as the Plasmids did. I pretty much stuck with a couple through the whole game because there are so many guns that these end up being more useful. Crow’s Trap is one of my favorites. You send angry crows at enemies to pick and stun them, or you can lay traps. My most favorite was the shock Vigor. It can stun enemies, but later on, it can chain across enemies and their heads pop. There’s one for fire, Bronco lets you throw enemies into the air, there’s a tentacle one that pulls enemies towards you, there’s also one that allows you to charge enemies and cause damage. They sound neat, they look neat in action, but the combat is more fast paced and challenging than previous games.

The guns feel so great to shoot in this game. There’s pistols, sniper rifles, shotguns, and the typical ones in shooters. Hail Fire and Volley Gun shoot grenades, there’s an M1 Carbine, a repeater, and various others. Honestly, I wish there more unique weapons like in older BioShocks, but at least they feel good to shoot and there are plenty of them. I didn’t really need to resort to Vigor unless I had a lot of people after me or had large enemies to deal with.

Speaking of enemies, the ones in Infinite are some of the most imaginative since BioShock 1. There are various human enemies, but the Patriots and Handymen are awesome. There are also various creatures and some fun boss fights as well. I just wish there was a larger variety. There are different reskins of these enemies, but I really just wanted more to shoot at. The Patriots have Chain Guns that are hard to bring down but are weak in the back. Handymen are rarely encountered but they are giant lumbering beasts and are bosses on their own. Infinite gives you more exploration options during combat. Using the Skyline is so fun and magical. You can slow down, reverse, and hop down wherever you want. You can shoot from these skylines, so it adds a tactical element the series needed. You even get a better melee weapon that has gruesome finishing kills that will make you cringe.

Combat is just very solid in Infinite, but by the end of the game it started feeling repetitive and all that kept me going was the story and new places to explore. Infinite has a lot of secrets that need to be opened with lockpicks that you can find. You can equip Gear that adds attributes and you can upgrade weapons via stations around Columbia like you did in BioShock. You can also upgrade your Vigors which is nice, there are a lot of upgrades and you won’t get them all in one playthrough.


When it comes to visuals, Infinite is one of the most beautiful and original games ever made…ever. On PC the DirectX 11 upgrade looks fantastic, the lighting is amazing, and the art style the team went for will blow your mind. I spent the first few hours just staring at everything because of how beautiful it looked. The pacing is spot-on, and the story makes you care about all the characters, or hate them. Ken Levine and his team are masters of their art and it’s proven here. This may even be his opus, but only time will tell. There’s nothing out there like Infinite, this is probably one of the few shooters in years that has tried to use the genre for what it’s good for. There’s no multiplayer, but you don’t need it. I also wish there were visual upgrades to the weapons like in BioShock 1, but those are minor gripes. Honestly, it’s hard to complain about this game other than the lack of enemy variety, Vigors feel underpowered, and there are no visual upgrades on weapons. The story is fantastic and gripping, this game will hopefully live on to be one of the best ever made.

It's been a long road, but the developers are really trying here! Fantastic game.