Recent reviews by mariadb_bin

it's aight

A fantastic western experience told as stories by an old man in a bar.

Revolutionizing Lightsaber combat in the Star Wars franchise, Jedi Outcast is a worthy sequel to Dark Forces II, although the plot isn't quite as good.

Look, I don't know about the multiplayer or zombies. In general I'm not a huge fan of either parts when it comes to COD. But the campaign is probably the best in the franchise and that alone is well worth playing. I wouldn't recommend for a full $60 if MP & zombies is dead like I've heard, but I HIGHLY recommend on sale for a fairly good story about the future of warfare.

If you like high quality wallpapers and a fairly good rendering engine with little background resource usage, just buy it.

Rest in peace AP, you were a great story, but by god did you suck to play.

Absolutely brilliant

Ooookay, so let's first start off with the weird: there are World of Tanks ads all over this game and I have zero clue why. Not like a little reference, I mean posters EVERYWHERE.
Performance: For me it ran fine (as it should on an R7-1700 + GTX1080 build), but according to other reviews I'm an outlier.

Left Alive is a single-player survival shooter. Therefore, you'd expect encountering enemies is highly discouraged, right? Well there's at least one encounter forced on you in the first chapter, with a second in the second. Past that? I don't know, because the game throws about 12 enemies at you in a hallway with no ammo (because it's a survival shooter, of course), instantly alerts them because cutscene, and gives you no other route out of the building. In less than two hours, the game has completely abandoned its design goals in favor of a rather clunky third-person shooter, without even taking the time to adjust you to it. Oh I'm sorry, before placing you against these enemies they give you an SMG. Don't mind that you have about two magazines and each enemy takes about 15 rounds to kill because exoskeletons.

Twitch highlight posted at the bottom to showcase the problems I have with this game. I will update this review in an hour or so to include a Twitch highlight from my stream that showcases every issue I have described. I would refund this game if I could, but I unfortunately bought it from GMG. Luckily for me, it wasn't full-price.

TL;DR: this game feels like the developers wanted it to be Metal Gear Solid, but combined between them they have about 45 minutes playing the end of Survive.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/390874602

This was my first video game. Ever. It takes some effort to get running right, but even 16 years later I still play this game to experience it again. And if you can't get it to run, just ask, I have a whole copy archived so that setup is a breeze.

Having purchased this game a day before release, and having played it till post-game with some really fun people, I can say this about it:

It had a decent, if not Kojima-quality story, and some actually very good improvements to the gameplay, as well as graphical improvements in the FOX Engine, such as better depth of field effects and slightly improved hair rendering. The game was fun and engaging despite slowing down a bit midway through the campaign, but the beginning and end were a blast.
The survival takes a bit to start running on its own, and I feel like it was actually very well done, because you had to balance exploration and progression with resource-finding, which became less and less of a chore as you progressed, which actually felt really good.
The melee system was expanded and given more weapons than just the combat knife, and a proper flow was introduced. The animations and different perks of using different types of weapon were amazing and using a small, fast machete was just as satisfying in its own way as smashing a small group with a sledgehammer. Dodging was introduced and it was a good and necessary mechanic.
Proper netcode was made and multiplayer, unlike in MGO3, is actually tolerable and not a complete joke. Granted, there is still no anti-cheat, so of course some bad apples just break the game for everyone else.
This all being said, as many improvements and effort as you can tell the team *did* put into it, the largest flaw with this game is that post-game content is so limited to the same three things that there is zero point in playing after completing the end. Just defeat the Lord of Dust, smile, and move on. All of the post-game content includes: co-op drill digs, singleplayer base digs, and co-op hostage rescues. That's it. And all the rewards are... more stuff to keep doing it? And this would be an okay TD if it weren't that everything progresses in realtime, not in-game time. So at this point, having not played the game in close to a year, if I were to reinstall it and continue my save, my entire base would be dead, meaning Konami expects all its players to be on at all times.

Overall, I'd give it an honest 6/10. It has some great points, but what flaws it has, run deep.