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Recent reviews by ɠųąཞɖıąŋ ąŋɠɛƖ!

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Showing 31-40 of 199 entries
5 people found this review helpful
10.1 hrs on record
Layers of Fear 2023 draws many parallels with the painter protagonist of the original Layers of Fear. In the original 2016 game, a painter loses his mind after his wife is caught in a terrible accident and he finds that the dashing of his harmonious home life impairs his ability to reach the same artistic heights he was able to achieve prior to the terrible event. Much in the same way Bloober team has been trapped in a prison of its own design, incarcerated by in own initial success and each subsequent failure. Since the release of Layers of Fear 2016, Bloober team has released the intellectually interesting but deeply flawed Observer, the flat and pretentious Layers of Fear 2, and the wholly derivative and underwhelming Blair Witch.

What was supposed to be a return to form and a coming home with a remake of Layers of Fear, instead devolves into a desperate, stabbing attempt at Bloober team reinventing the Layers of Fear mythos into something it is not and, in the process, undermining its already tenuous position as a premiere horror game developer. In short, Layers of Fear 2023 isn't worth purchasing if you already bought, played, finished and enjoyed Layers of Fear 2016. The game consists of five chapters of varying length and quality and a short, broken, unsatisfying ending. The first chapter, the Painter's Story, is simply a reinvention of the original Layers of Fear 2016 game, with a new graphics engine, better lighting effects but, oddly, only equivalent graphics presentation.

The game demands a slew of graphics technologies and graphics engine features that preempt gamers from running the title on moderately older hardware, but the title hardly looks better than its almost decade-old predecessor, built on Unity. The story and game play have certainly changed in places, although, often, for the worse. New chase scenes have been added that don't fit with the original game paradigm and the game doesn't really add new, cogent scares. This is unfortunate since Layers of Fear 2016 was excellent and the Painter's Story is the only effectively scary and atmospheric chapter within Layers of Fear 2023. Ultimately, if you've played Layers of Fear 2016, there's really nothing new here of value for returning players. If you're a new player, you're better off getting the original for half the money.

The other four chapters are parade of failed experiments, or intellectually lazy exploits that barely have any scares between all the combined portions. One chapter, the Daughter's Story is an hour-long side tale about the Painter's grown daughter, voiced badly by a wooden voice actress and possessed of a long, introspective walking simulator with exactly 0 scares. The next chapter is the Musician's Story, which is a 2-hour long tale about the Painter's wife during her mental deterioration and eventual suicide. The story, written for wine moms, deals with post-part-em depression, the feelings of inadequacy the wife felt after the accident and her growing feelings of animosity towards her husband as he tried to hold their family together, respond to her needs and focus on his tenuously successful career. Neither of the chapters add any real scares and only the Daughter's Story does much to alter the context of the Painter's Story.

The last two chapters include the Actor's Story and the Writer's Story. Actor's Story is a re-imagining of Layers of Fear 2 and it perfectly encompasses how Bloober team have misguidedly "lost the script" about what makes a good horror game. While Layers of Fear 2016 had a simple, effective, creepily atmospheric every-man premise: "A painter loses his mind after his wife is disfigured and burned horribly. His failure at his craft furthers his progression towards insanity and he eventually experiences a series of harrowing psycho-supernatural events as he feebly attempts to make amends for his mistakes", Layers of Fear 2 instead adds siblings on a ship, actors, secret societies, living mannequins, psychosis, hypnotism and about half a dozen other mismatched concepts that fall flatly on their face. Worse is that the Actor's Tale, while sometimes atmospheric only has 2-3, chase driven scares, as the game flounders about, pretending to be an Amnesia mod.

Layers of Fear 2 was a totally "skippable" title and the chapter 4 addition to Layers of Fear 2023 is no different. The walking simulator is strange and sometimes unsettling but hardly harrowing. The game lacks good scares or a cogent, seminal tale that most people can identify with, like its predecessor's grappling with the fear of losing one's mind. In short, if the Painter's Story is Layers of Fear, then the Daughter's Story can best be categorized as Layers of Therapy and the Musician's Story can be identified as Layers of Grief. The Actor's Story is at best Layers of Strange or Layers of Bizarre. None of them add to the fear felt in the first chapter, despite accounting for 2/3 of the game's play time.

The last chapter has gamers playing as a writer who lost her son and made a deal with dark powers by writing tales of misery and woe. The tales are revealed to include all the prior chapters of the Layers of Fear IP. This is a bit of letdown as Bloober Team retroactively undoes the impact of the Painter's Story to instead shove a short, minimally scary tale about Foxy Cleopatra and her dead offspring, into the center stage. Worse still is that the chapter squanders a great setting (an abandoned lighthouse) and lacks any real ending, leaving players on an unsatisfying cliffhanger that feels insulting after Bloober team shamelessly repackaged its two prior Layers of Fear titles with a scant 3.5 hours of new, scare-free experiences.

In short, Layers of Fear 2023 is a complete failure and the onus is on Bloober team to salvage its reputation. It is currently developing Silent Hill and my sincere hope is that they sidestep all the pitfalls they keep stepping into, including story pretention, extreme abstraction, cultural narratives and general focus on experimentation over solid, tried-and-true horror creation techniques. If you've played Layers of Fear 2016, you should save your money. If you've never played the original Layers of Fear 2016, you should buy that instead of this title. It'll probably be half the price. I gave this game a positive review but only because I have an unsettling feeling that Bloober team will eventually de-list the original Layers of Fear 2016 game and we'll all be left with only this pale reproduction.

In that eventuality, I recommend playing through the Painter's Story and maybe the Daughter's Story and then quickly uninstalling. A let down. Silent Hill is their last chance...

Worth a look.

7/10.
Posted 26 September, 2024. Last edited 19 April.
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35 people found this review helpful
2
556.2 hrs on record
Division 2 is a third-person action-oriented looter shooter based loosely on the Tom Clancy universe of spy and operations novels. The game takes place after a viral attack on the U.S. that plunges the nation into martial law and total chaos. You take control of an agent of the Division, a super-secret organization with impossibly advanced technologies, tasked with curbing dangerous elements that are trying to conduct a coup of the U.S. government. The game proceeds through a long, often-nonsensical campaign of betrayal, spy-versus-spy warfare, double, triple, and quadruple-agent activities. You'll combat other rogue Division agents, shadowy organizations like Black Tusk and more home-grown, violent threats like gangs and cults. Along the way, you'll select a class with different abilities and grind for a variety of performance-oriented and cosmetic loot.

On the surface, one could compare Division 2 best to a Grand Theft Auto V-Borderlands 3 mashup love child. If that sounds like an intriguing proposition, you should find a lot to like in the Division 2. The game contains a variety of modes, including campaign (both single player and co-op), as well as operational missions (both single player and co-op), competitive multiplayer and Dark Zone events that can also lead to confrontations with other human opponents. Throughout the duration of the game, you'll be able to explore and wage battle in Washington D.C., New York City, as well as ancillary areas. The variety of classes ensure that you have a myriad of options available. Do you want to be a stealthy, lethal sniper, or a blundering shotgun-brandishing juggernaut? Are you packing a precise, withering assault rifle, or are you employing ammunition, grenades and a wealth of futuristic drones and technologies to waste enemies? The choices are almost endless. With six different classes and a variety of branching talents and abilities, creating a unique and synergistic "build" that works for you is one of the key components of the game.

Good builds will be crucial as you face tiers of difficulties and enemies that can range from cannon-fodder, to unstoppable menaces. At times, teamwork will be essential to the success of a mission. Enemies and caches drop all kinds of currencies and loot that themselves are graded based on rarity and power. Much like Diablo or Borderlands, you'll find yourself grinding difficult missions or coordinating attacks against powerful enemies to pop the right weapon or armor set that you need to continue to amass power or develop/fine-tune your build. Gun play is positively sublime. Weapons feel unique, punchy and satisfying and the cover-mechanics are precise, intuitive and exact. Mantling and movement are addictive and once in the thick of combat, the 30-second killing loop of game play is as good as any you'll find in any of its contemporaries. With the Division 2, it's truly the game play that will keep you coming back for more.

Graphics are competently presented, with achingly beautiful, detail-rich environments, excellent weapon/armor sets and character designs. Faces could use some work but since you're often wearing a mask, that point is of small concern. The game has full weather systems and diurnal cycles, which only improves the already palpable atmosphere and the ambient sound is icing on the cake. Music is satisfactory and voice over work is adequate. Most importantly, the game's physics engine steals the show, with realistic shattering glass, exploding vehicle tires, and moving/shifting debris strewn about a massive world. All of these systems work on a predominantly stable game, that is both attractive and performant. The game game ran on my Radeon VII at 4K High Settings at approximately 55-60 fps. Crashes are very infrequent.

The Division 2 does have its fair share of flaws. The game's plot is quite frankly forgettable nonsense and the enemies can feel as complete bullet sponges at higher difficulties. Difficulties can be quite unforgiving at times and some builds and weapons are completely imbalanced/overpowered. This imbalance can encourage a community of players to often behave in toxic ways and lead to unnecessary discord. Leveling your character to amass the resources and gear necessary to try different builds is glacially slow and the grind is nauseating. In some ways, the Division 2 feels like an MMO once you proceed to the end game and the title is definitely not designed for adults with limited time on their hands. With a limited player base of about 3500 players as of September 2024, some gear and loot is locked behind missions and events that are impossible to staff or complete, meaning that late-coming players are locked out of the best loot in the game.

All in all, however, Division 2 is a fun game and well worth the 7-20 dollars USD during a Steam sale. Grab some friends, pop in, shoot up the joint and leave happy. Not bad for a game that I got for free with my Radeon VII.

Recommended.

8.5/10.
Posted 24 August, 2024. Last edited 19 April.
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1 person found this review helpful
0.8 hrs on record
(mini-review).

A predominantly inaccessible, derivative mess that pretentiously thinks that a badly written Star Trek Voyager episode is the height of cerebral science fiction. The game shows its best features in the trailer, with good facial animations, only to provide perhaps the most God-awful running, mantling and shooting animations I've seen in a third person shooter in the better part of a decade. Coupled with a story that only dropped one relevant tidbit of plot in almost an hour of game play and a stream of cheap, off-the-shelf bug-worm alien foes and you start to wonder what the developer was even going for, when they assembled this title. Creature designs look like they were obtained wholesale from an online store and the combat is nothing to write home about. I was looking for the escape menu before the end of the hour. At least it runs, I guess.

It's Stray Souls...in space. Avoid this game.

4.5/10.
Posted 11 August, 2024. Last edited 19 April.
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5 people found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
8.8 hrs on record
Battlefield Hardline represents a daring departure from traditional Battlefield experiences. Developed by Visceral, makers of Dead Space, the game deals with an urban story set against a depressing, near-future metropolitan backdrop. The game follows the exploits of Nicholas Mendoza, a Cuban American Miami detective that fled the despotic regime with his single mother. He is plunged into a war zone backed by reckless police officers, and surrounded by violent warring drug gangs. Nicholas is quickly betrayed, framed for corruption and incarcerated for three years.

The premise, while unoriginal, is compelling and the cut scenes and the character interactions are quite effective. Hardline has a variety of objectives, including infiltration, assassination, arrest, theft and pure run-and-gun game play. The game is also comprised of a variety of thrilling set pieces, with some that truly push the story to frenetic high points. Hardline is bolstered by great voice acting, excellent music and decent sound effects.

Characters demonstrate predominantly good chemistry and charisma. Character notes abound as a protagonist and antagonist argue about simple things like rice and beans. At times, the game feels really authentic with its adherence to its Miami-soaked identity and the Cuban American population. At times however, the game quickly devolves into a flaccid, predictable, propagandist jab at Second Amendment rights and right leaning individuals. This is unfortunate because most of the game story, while unoriginal, is tight and well assembled. Well, up until the point that you're left flailing desperately during a pointlessly unfulfilling cliffhanger ending.

While the graphics are predominantly well presented, Hardline has an annoying habit of slipping to 2009-quality graphics all too frequently. You're just as likely to be wowed by stunning Miami vistas or wonderfully animated character faces, as you are to be repulsed by janky human animations and pathetic vehicle traversal. This flaw could be forgiven if the game ran beautifully but the truth is that the game is extremely unstable and badly packaged. Much like other Battlefield titles, Hardline initiates from a launched browser page which feels positively primitive by today's standards.

Additionally, Hardline crashed for me 2-3 times during the duration of the extremely short 8 hour campaign. Worse still is that many enemies clipped through walls and floors, allowing them to attack me with impunity and immunity, while I could do nothing to respond. Such a common glitch wouldn't be an issue on an easier difficulty, but harder difficulty enemies can drop you in a few shots, resulting in the loss of hours of game play. The biggest technical issues aren't glitch-related however. The largest issues are clearly game play related.

Hardline hangs its hat on the ability to approach missions in a variety of ways, including run-and-gun, sabotage, sniping and stealth. Unfortunately, the game's AI is shockingly obtuse and will often fail to realize that an ally has been killed a scant 3 feet away from you. Worse still, is that in an attempt to ameliorate this issue, Visceral gave the enemies telescopic x-ray vision. Enemies will enter rooms shooting at you as they come in, despite not possibly knowing where you are standing. While AI will miss obvious tampering points in the game, often they'll spot you, in cover, a kilometer away and are all able to hone in on you unfairly. This makes the game in higher difficulties, frustrating at best.

The worst part of all, however, is that the shooting play is compromised. This is both shocking coming from a developer like Visceral and with a title attached to the Battlefield moniker. On dozens of occasions, I'd shoot an enemy in the head with a pistol at a range of 8-20 feet and the enemy would fail to perish. Hitboxes are notoriously unreliable and even center-mass shotgun blasts fail to dispose of t-shirt wearing mooks. Meanwhile, a simple bonk on the head with the butt of your gun is an auto erase on an enemy. This kind of weak, flaccid, unreliable shooting play undermines the biggest draw from Hardline which is action-oriented first person shooting.

That said, despite a nigh-dead multiplayer scene, dearth of mods and DLCs and a brief sub-10 hour campaign, Hardline is still capable of providing a good time, especially at its sale price of $6 USD. That's cheaper than modern movies, most of which suck quite hardily, anyways.

Hardline can offer a few hours of Miami Vice fun for those that are fans of the genre.

Worth a look.

7/10.
Posted 9 August, 2024. Last edited 19 April.
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1 person found this review helpful
3.0 hrs on record
(mini-review.)

A quick stream of consciousness review: Murky but realistic graphics. Decent soundtrack. Stylized character interactions reminiscent of the original (Need For Speed) NFS Most Wanted. Handling is sluggish. Collection of cars is moderate but not breathtaking. The game lacks urgency and impetus to crawl out of your starting 4 banger. Most damning is the always-online game status that prioritizes player interaction over game play and that constantly seems to be serviced in a game that could probably run on a 4th generation Intel Core i5. Pure NFS filler.

Not worth the time. There are better games available.

6/10.
Posted 4 August, 2024. Last edited 19 April.
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3 people found this review helpful
15.1 hrs on record
(mini-review).

Even after years of proceeding racing games, NFS Payback is a gorgeous title with loads of style and a detailed and vibrant city. Unfortunately the game is marred by terrible handling, awful writing and the presence of loot boxes. The game offers game breaking under-steer with a reliance of drifting to drive properly: (i.e.: Kid driving). I miss the days when NFS was about driving freedom and using different cars for different types of driving.

Pro-Tip EA: If your racing game is predicated on smashing into barriers and cop cars in a 2 million dollar car, some of the urgency and rush of actually, you know, driving properly are diminished. If I wanted to smash into things constantly, I'd play bumper cars.

Not worth the time. There are better games available.

6.5/10.
Posted 4 August, 2024. Last edited 19 April.
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1 person found this review helpful
59.1 hrs on record (58.8 hrs at review time)
(mini-review).

It's not Baldur's Gate 3 and the writing can seem amateurish at times. Teammates are unnecessarily hateful towards you and each other. Exposition dumps are an unfortunately common occurrence. Graphics are nice but nothing to write home about, Voice acting is good and music is serviceable. Features and game play vacillate between well-executed and wholly masochistic. Systems are overly complex for their own sake. Ship battles are fun but often unfair. Character skills and choices overlap and only few builds ever feel fearsome or powerful. However, as a turn-based isometric RPG set in the Warhammer 40K universe, it scratches an itch and the game is reasonably stable and performant.

It won't set the world on fire but it's comfort food for WH 40K geeks.

Recommended.

7.5/10.
Posted 3 August, 2024. Last edited 19 April.
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3 people found this review helpful
1.5 hrs on record
(mini-review).

Did you ever want to play the Division 2, with worse graphics, worse movement/combat animations and an even more preposterous, worse story about secret organizations run by mustache-twirling bad guys? Did you ever tell yourself that you needed to be bombarded with even more inane missions on game start-up? Did you ever tell yourself that nothing made a game more tense than seeing an online-only hub with 187 versions of yourself running around? Did you ever think to yourself than having a running animation that looks like a bout of the Hershey squirts was the alpha tier of manliness? Boy, do I have a game for you. It's called....

Ghost Recon Wildlands.

Oh and what about this game? This game sucks, even at $5.

Avoid this game.

4.5/10.
Posted 1 August, 2024. Last edited 19 April.
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5 people found this review helpful
10.0 hrs on record
I love dinosaurs. I studied paleontology in college. I also worked and interned at the largest theme park purveyor in the world. I have played several other theme park games and I've have dreamed of building my own theme park. Jurassic Park Evolution was destined to be a dream come true. Instead, after playing Jurassic Park Evolution, what I've found is an economy simulator with some dinosaur window dressing placed hastily on top.

Jurassic Park Evolution (JPE) is a beautiful, relatively performant game, that allows you to build and operate a dinosaur sanctuary/theme park. The dinosaurs are gloriously realized and the game has a variety of campaigns, dinosaurs, park customizations and objectives to fulfill. You can lead fossil digs, create security response protocols, deal with adverse weather conditions and choose various islands for your park. You can even assume first-person control of dinosaur teams. From a value and content perspective, JPE has a lot to offer.

Unfortunately, despite a large variety of options, beautiful environments, tons of lovingly crafted dinosaurs and a slew of activities to participate in, JPE also has several key weaknesses to undermine its core gameplay. JPE, while performant and attractive, devolves over time and its camera controls can often spin out of control during the most crucial moments. At times, nothing but a game restart will repair the issue, even after years of community reporting. Additionally, despite a variety of objectives and activities, JPE suffers from a relatively moderate amount of theme park customization cosmetics. I've played iOS dinosaur theme park games with more customizations than JPE.

JPE's greatest weakness however, is its rigidity and unwillingness to allow players to experience the game on their own terms. The JPE sandbox mode, wherein you immediately jump in and design a theme park, can only be accessed after you navigate through a 10-15 hour tract of operations that can only be likened to the world's longest tutorial. Do you want to just design a theme park and add dinosaurs? Too bad! Optimize your t-shirt prices first! Click through dozens of menus as you antiseptically lead "fossil digs" over and over and over until you grind a triceratops to 100% genetic completion. Once you reach 4 stars, we'll let you try your hand at a nerfed, shriveled, partially-complete sandbox mode.

Even once you've unlocked sandbox mode, you still have to keep grinding, dealing with electricity mini-games, economics mini-games and fossil hoop jumping, until you can move your sandbox to a new island that adds new dinosaurs, structures and cosmetics options. This game is less a dinosaur theme park simulator and more a menu-driven economics game with some dinosaurs used as carrots. The most stupefying implications of these choices quickly come when you realize that the dinosaurs and environments are walled behind rote, boring, repetitive activities that are added to the game for no other reason than to serve as some sick, fetishistic power trip by the developers.

Jurassic Park Evolution is probably the biggest let down of a theme park game I've ever played. It's also one of the least accessible dinosaur games ever. If you're an accountant that wants to be hired by a dinosaur theme park and see dinosaurs once in a blue moon, then this game might be for you. For everyone else, I doubt you'll have the requisite 20 hour patience to unlock most of the sand boxed content.

Not worth the time. There are better games available.

6.5/10.
Posted 28 July, 2024. Last edited 19 April.
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2 people found this review helpful
2.5 hrs on record
(mini-review).

This sometimes-pretty throwback shooter feels like a K-Mart or Xiaomi knockoff of a regular AAA shooter. Some good, punchy weapons, and decent traversal mechanics are completely undone by a nonsensical story, lifeless, linear maps, prefab-looking assets and atrocious AI (As an aside, why try to employ stealth with such dumb AI?). The most damning elements of the game stem from truly unfair fights where enemies just spawn a foot behind you (literally) and can one-shot you on higher difficulties. Keep moving? No problem, except when the enemies accidentally spawn *inside* you and break your play-through, forcing you to start over. Compound all of this inconvenience with incessant bugs, crashes to desktop and a 4-hour run time and you start to ask yourself why anyone would buy this game for over $5.

This would've been a great mod...for a game in 2008. Avoid unless you can get it at $5 or less.

Not worth the time. There are better games available.

6/10.
Posted 7 July, 2024. Last edited 19 April.
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Showing 31-40 of 199 entries