Mafia: Definitive Edition

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 10/19/2020
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Xbox One. Leave a comment

Publisher: 2K Games

Developer: Hangar 13

Release Date: 05/19/2020

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $39.99

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I remember Mafia back in the early days of the PS2 era. I also remember not really understanding it because I was 12 years old and probably shouldn’t have been playing a Mafia game. I also remember the game being hard as nails, but that’s about it. 18 years later, Mafia is a classic and a surprising choice for a full-on remake. The game takes you through a story of the 1930s mafia motif as you follow Don Salieri’s family, and particularly, the story of Tommy Angelo. A simple cab driver just happens to be in the right, or wrong, place at the right time and gets inducted into the family. You and your pals Sam and Paulie go through the ebb and flow of a Don losing turf in a fantastical Chicago, Lost Heaven, and trying to gain the turf back from a rival mafia family.

The story and characters are the best part about the game, and honestly, the only reason to stick around. While the game looks and feels like 2020 it’s structured like 2002 still. You see a cut scene, play out a mission, and that repeats about 15 times. The missions are at least varied somewhat from running on foot, long shoot outs, and being a getaway driver. Sometimes there’s stealth involved with sabotage, espionage, and subterfuge. I was entertained throughout the entire game, but I kept feeling like I was playing an old game with a new coat of pain. While the controls works, the animations are fine, the cover shooting is awesome, it just feels like an older game in the way it’s structured. I also felt the large open world of Lost Heaven was wasted as the game is linear in design despite this open city. There’s zero side missions or activities to complete and the open city just acts as a living breathing hub world for you to drive around in during missions. It’s honestly a huge waste as side missions could have been added in.

When it comes to driving the game feels great. There are simulation and arcade types modes with automatic and manual transmissions and you also must drive on the road and follow the rules or get pulled over and cited. This was a super awesome concept back in 2002, but today it feels pointless as you can speed if you don’t see a blue blip on your map nearby. Until I understood that I got pulled over only twice early on and used my speed limiter. Once you figure all of this out the whole “traffic law simulation” gimmick is completely out the window. You can get wanted rating stars and lose the cops like in any open-world crime game as well, but that’s literally it for the world. Shooting feels fine with a decent cover system and peeking over and blind fire all work well, but the shooting feels loose and ancient. It has this wonky feel to it that I can’t quite put my finger on, but it still retains the stench of a 2002 third-person shooter, and while not game-breaking by any means, it’s still noticeable and just feels a bit off. The PS2 era difficulty spikes are also present as more than a few shots will kill you. You can find pills laying around sometimes, but overall you have to use the cover and play whack-a-mole or you will die fast.

My biggest gripe is these difficulty spikes. I will play a few fun missions and then you get thrown a huge shootout level with wave after wave of enemies and I would die numerous times. The same goes for overly long chase scenes. One crash and I would lose my chase and have to start all over again. This is more of that 2002 stench that just lingers in the air around all the 2020 glitz and glamour. Sneaking is fine as well as you can perform takedown moves, and those missions weren’t insanely long and the levels were easy to navigate. This simple mission structure is also a piece of 2002 that Hanger 13 just couldn’t shake. I would have loved a whole new shooting system and some more stuff to do in Lost Heaven. See the issue here lies in absolutely zero reasons to go back. There’s a “free ride” mode but you just drive around doing nothing in the city. Again, that was fun and exciting in 2002 but today it’s a snooze fest. 

Overall, the visuals are fantastic with great lighting effects, animations, and terrific voice acting. Lost Heaven looks like a living breathing world, but you’re just shuffled from mission to mission unfolding a well-written story with likable characters only to have zero reason to go back afterward. With nothing to do inside the open world and having silly collectibles distract you from mission objectives, as well as lingering issues from the original game, there’s just too much 2002 mixing with the 2020 stuff that makes things connect weird. It’s a fun ride the first time around, but after that, there’s no reason to revisit.

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 10/15/2020
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Xbox One. Leave a comment

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Developer: EA DICE

Release Date: 06/07/2016

Rating: Teen

MSRP: $59.99

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Mirror’s Edge is actually one of my favorite games of all time. It didn’t sell well, hence the near-decade hiatus, and a lot of gamers just didn’t get the game. It also had a lot of flaws such as linear level design, a paper-thin story, and awful combat. While Catalyst improves upon a lot of weaknesses from the first game it also never addresses some as well. EA DICE really tried pushing the story further by showing us more of Faith’s past and how she’s tied to the KrugerSec conglomerate that’s brainwashing the entire country. Faith, along with the help of friends, must stop this evil police state and try and free the people. While this is good and all, the problem is that the world itself is sterile, boring, and so are the characters. There’s no reason to really care outside of the somewhat entertaining story missions thrown at us. Icarus, Plastic, Noah, and various other characters just feel like cookie-cutter generic fill-ins for something that could be more.

This also goes for learning about the world. The majority of the game is actually filled with side missions, time trial runs, collecting things, and audio recordings. Here’s the problem with all of this. I just do not care one iota to do any of these. I spent a good ten hours trying to complete every mission as I went on and then I just gave up. I don’t care about this world enough to bother spending more than the 8-10 hours the story missions give me. While the art style is faithful to the original with vibrant reds, blues, whites, and oranges, running around the city on top of Glass just isn’t interesting. I’m glad there’s an open world here rather than linear level design, but if it’s filled with boring filler content just give me a better linear story mode. I don’t want to hack billboards to put my “ghost” on it for other players to see. I don’t want to create my own run trials for others to play. I have never cared less for an open world than in Catalyst. You pretty much see the entire city during the story missions, but after collecting the 100th chip, the 150th blue orb, and finishing at least two dozens of trial runs and side missions I just stopped caring. There’s no real reward for finishing all of these either outside of “drops” you get to customize your ghost for players to see online. 

Here’s something else to consider. I had this game installed on my PC for four years before finally finishing it. I wanted to complete the game as much as possible, but every time I booted it up and saw the dozens and dozens of icons on the maps, finished a few side missions, I turned it off. I have never had a game installed on my PC for that long without making frequent progress. I had a kid, went through three GPU generations, built two whole PCs, became a nurse, moved states, lost my father, and have a second kid on the way. All that happened between release and finishing the game. The world is just plain boring and the story isn’t interesting enough to warrant sticking around for most gamers. I really like Faith, as she’s a well-designed character, but her personality is very one-note and she feels generic as well.

Let’s talk about what you actually can do in the game. The entire appeal of Mirror’s Edge is the parkour system. The first person parkour system is a lot of fun, and honestly the only saving grace for the entire franchise. You can run, jump, slide, double jump, zipline, and propel yourself around the buildings with grace. The new runner’s vision is a must as this is a red line you follow and the objects you need to use turn red. While running around and jumping around buildings is exciting, after 15 hours you grow tired of it sometimes. Only do the story missions provide something new to climb on or new environments to be in as well as scripted events. The controls work for the most part, but it’s the combat that hasn’t improved much and is a real pain. I honestly wish they just nixed combat all together for the series. You can do heavy and light attacks, but also while jumping off walls, off ledges onto enemies, and slide into their legs. If they’re stunned you can do quick three-hit combos, dodge and kick from behind, and all that jazz. It works, but it’s very frustrating when you confront more than two enemies at a time and it’s not fun when you aren’t on the move. Most of the time you can avoid enemies and only a few instances required me to take them down, but combat isn’t fun at all. The guns are gone in this game, but the combat just feels clunky, heavy, slow, and cumbersome. 

That’s pretty all there is in the game. It looks fantastic as it pushed the Nvidia 10xx series cards to their limits when this game came out, and I remember my GTX 970 couldn’t run the game on Hyper settings at 60FPS. It just looks so good, but again very sterile and boring to actually be in. The main missions provide entertaining for about 8-10 hours, but the extra side stuff is a pointless borefest. The parkour system combined with an open world just isn’t interesting enough to justify spending 50+ hours completing everything. Every area pretty much looks the same and the characters are boring and generic and I feel the series needs a complete overhaul if it even gets one. Due to poor sales of this game, we may be seeing the last of Faith. Stay for the story and then don’t bother after that.

Far Cry: New Dawn

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 10/13/2020
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Xbox One. Leave a comment

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Release Date: 02/15/2019

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $39.99

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One of my biggest problems with Far Cry is that it’s too big. Every Ubisoft open-world game has become so large that it’s boring to explore. I’d rather have a smaller area with more interesting things to do. No longer does a large open world impress people these days as it’s nothing new. These games just keep getting larger and larger, but what you do inside has not evolved much. Running around taking out the same outpost 50 times, collecting things, hunting animals, upgrading stuff – it’s just so trite that I just don’t care for it anymore, and Ubisoft is the worst offender out there.

New Dawn is a direct sequel to Far Cry 5 in which you play as a nobody who has come across Hope County in it’s isolated post-nuclear world of Montana on a train of survivors and get ambushed by the sisters Lou and Mickey. These are the antagonists of the game, and while they have a great personality and hit that Far Cry villain meter just right, their screen time is cut down to just a few scenes. The entire game is basically Far Cry 5, but more post-apocalyptic this time around. If you played that game nothing has changed here outside of a new ranking and looting system that is forced upon the player to even progress in the story. It’s something that drove me insane through the entire game and I always hit a progress wall because I had to stop and grind for material to unlock the next weapon bench level which then unlocked the next weapon level but to craft those weapons I had to grind for different material. I mean, Christ! Do you see what I mean?

The game is broken down into four different levels with the highest being an Elite rank. The enemies are ranked and are only immune to weapons of that rank as well. This is the stupidest system they could have done to try and make the game more interesting. I can use level two weapons on level three enemies but I will die and dump tons of ammo into them and I can’t carry enough even with my full ammo perks. The entire game can really only be played one way, to be honest. The main material to upgrade your main outpost, Prosperity, is ethanol. This is acquired by liberating outposts. Oh jeez, liberating outposts? I wonder where I’ve done that before. Once you liberate the outpost you get ethanol and some bonus if you don’t set off alarms or aren’t detected. I believe there are about a dozen outposts in the game, but the redundancy doesn’t end there. Once you liberate all the outposts you need to re-liberate them! Yeah, what?! This is to put that rank system into play and let you take it on with the next level of enemies. Then you get even more ethanol and the process repeats. You can’t even progress to chapter two without upgrading all the stations at least once which requires liberating all outposts. You can steal ethanol trucks, but it’s not enough to bother with.

Once you finally progress some you are at least using level two weapons and I stuck with this for most of the game. However, I hit a wall at the end of the game as I couldn’t finish a mission without elite weapons. To do this I had to re-liberate a few outposts, upgrade the station, then grind for materials to get at least one elite weapon. To do this I had to do expedition missions that are so boring and annoying especially without a real co-op partner to get circuit boards that are needed for most elite weapons. That wasn’t enough though! I needed to hunt the elite animal for its skin too! Just…the walls never ended and it was just one after another after another. In between these walls, there’s really nothing to do outside of collecting materials all over the place. That’s literally it. The game is a borefest outside of the mildly entertaining story mode as I did enjoy seeing the villains on the screen including Joseph Seed.

The game map is also just too damn big. It’s smaller than Far Cry 5, but everything is spread so far apart that driving is a must, but I never even bothered flying anywhere as you have to grind to unlock flying vehicles. I feel like all the work I did in Far Cry 5 was reset after playing this game. The entertaining parts of Far Cry 5 are absent like the Arcade mode and the stuntman levels. There are a few side missions here to acquire allies, but they are mostly uninteresting. After I got just enough stuff to finish the game I felt there was no point in continuing. The entire game is built around grinding to progress in the story, but once that’s done what’s the point of finding everything? You can unlock perks for stealth kills, and various other things that are mostly useless like faster cooldown on mounted weapons…really? What’s the point of that? The game relies way too much on this material system to build up everything without it ever meaning anything after the story is finished.

Overall, New Dawn is worse than Far Cry 5 but taking out all the fun and wrapping the game around a grinding material hunting fest and smacking you will progression walls constantly. The map is too large and empty, there aren’t really any modes or things to do outside of looting materials, and the only really entertaining parts of the game don’t get much screen time. This feels like the most useless Far Cry game to date as if it never existed anyone would miss it. Even if you did play Far Cry 5 there’s no reason to even play this outside of sheer boredom. The shooting is still solid like always, the visuals are amazing, but that means nothing when it’s inside of a boring empty world that forces the player to play the game a certain way then give them the finger when the game is completely over.

I Am Dead

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 10/11/2020
Posted in: Mac, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, Switch. Leave a comment

Publisher: Annapurna Interactive

Developer: Hollow Ponds

Release Date: 10/08/2020

Rating: N/A

MSRP: $17.99

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I Am Dead is a curious object hunting game about a ghost of a museum curator. That may sound boring on paper, but it’s quite charming and the mini-stories within are nice enough to keep the game moving along. You discover you have died, of what is unknown, and you can see through objects like a ghost or “slice” objects. This is a game all about a no-clip camera! It’s pretty cool at first as you can push the camera through an object to see what’s lying or hiding underneath. This is 100% a hidden object game with a larger budget is. The goal of the game is to find a spirit that can take over quieting the island of Shimerston as the volcano is about to erupt. You slowly learn of the island legend and the 5 main characters you need to try and convince to do the job.

There are 5 objects to find in each level. You spin around an area with smaller areas to click on and then the object hunting begins. To know what you are hunting you click on characters with bubbles as you will recall their memory and the main object they are talking about in that memory is what you will hunt. The stories are the most charming part of the game. They are super short but well written and during these stories rotate some sort of weird globe to focus the picture into view. It’s pointless, but it’s something to do during all the talking. Once you know what object you need to find is you will get a hint if that object is in the area you clicked on by the icon popping up on the screen. It was never too difficult to figure out what the items were, but the optional Grenkins objects are a lot tougher. This is a side puzzle that requires you to rotate a certain object like a shadow game so only part of the camera clips through and it looks like the icon. If the Grenkin object is what you clicked on Sparky, your canine companion will bark so you aren’t aimlessly rotating every object. There are additional tougher objects to hunt if you can find the secret list. These are tiny objects hidden inside others such as toys or bugs and you only get descriptive hints as to what they might be. 

To be honest, the game shows you all it can do in the first ten minutes, and outside of hunting for the main items, I collected Grenkins for two levels and stopped. It was just too much to endlessly rotate and hunt objects forever as the main story was already asking for a lot. If you really love the gameplay mechanic here then it’s for you, but after so long I tired of it and wanted to see the story progress. There is literally nothing else to do in the game outside of object hunting as that is the sole mechanic. At least the areas are all varied and no single object was the same. You can finish the main story in about 4 hours, but if you collect everything you might be here for over 10. The visuals are quite charming with a flat pastel color and low poly objects. It has a unique look and each item is surprisingly detailed both inside and out. There are hundreds of objects to examine and it’s quite impressive that the developers went through all that effort. The voice acting is also quite good and it helps seal the aesthetics. 

Overall, I Am Dead is a fun object hunting game for a few hours, but the story, in the end, doesn’t wow you or have a twist ending. It’s pretty predictable and the extra puzzles aren’t worth your time as there is no reward outside of just doing them. The visuals are charming and there is a lot of detail put into the objects you examine, but the entire game shows everything it can do in the first ten minutes and never evolves beyond that. If there was something more to this game outside of just clipping through objects for 4 hours until I find what I need I would stay longer, but this game is mostly for object hunting fanatics.

Epistory: Typing Chronicles

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 10/11/2020
Posted in: Mac, PC Reviews. Leave a comment

Publisher: Fishing Cactus

Developer: Fishing Cactus

Release Date: 09/30/2015

Rating: N/A

MSRP: $14.99

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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.

Star Wars: Squadrons

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 10/08/2020
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Xbox One. Leave a comment

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Developer: Motive Studio

Release Date: 10/01/2020

Rating: Teen

MSRP: $39.99

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X-Wing vs Tie Fighter is a PC flight classic. It was chaotic, a great mix between sim and arcade gameplay, and was a blast to play and you felt like real Star Wars pilots. Squadrons try to re-capture this lightning in a bottle by letting you play as both New Republic and Empire pilots. You fly in Vanguard Squadron for the New Republic and Titan Squadron for the Empire. You play as an unnamed pilot in each squadron and the story is set between movies VI and VII after the battle on Endor. The New Republic is trying to build a new starship and they needed Empirical parts for it while an Empirical captain is trying to stop them and wipe them out. The characters are interesting and well written and the story is rather tense with a constant tug-of-war on who keeps getting the advantage. While you’re playing as one side you don’t know what’s happening on the other and won’t find out until you switch back after a few missions, it’s really intense and I loved it.

That’s not to say the story is memorable or anything, but it’s a good start as I’m sure more of these games are to come. Once you create your pilot, which is a rather basic, you jump into the base of either side and this is where things differ from other Star Wars games. You stand still and can only spin the camera around and click on contextual items. Outside of inspecting your ship, you can talk to the other squad members optionally which gives you insight as to what’s going on in the war and a more detailed context of what is just going on in the Star Wars universe. The voice acting is great and each character had a great personality, but still nothing super memorable. Once you get your briefing and select your craft you head on out. The first time you start up you are launched out into space in real-time and it’s exhilarating. Flying never gets old and it’s a shame the story is only 14 missions long. Each side has the same controls, but the Empire ships have more firepower and the Rebel ships have more shielding.

Controls are slowly unlocked and dished out over the first few missions, but it’s the same all around. You can shift power between engines, lasers, and shields (shields if they are equipped) to allow more speed or firepower. This is essential as you will constantly flip between these as well as diverting more power to either engines or weapons when you are the Empire. Sometimes when you destroy capital ships you want to go slower with more power, but fighting Tie Fighters, Reapers, Bombers, A-Wings, etc. will require more finesse and speed.  The steering feels rather smooth and each ship feels different. Either slow or long or even zippy, the ships are well designed. Shooting something down is rather satisfying as there is a button to flip between enemies and once you track them the system can lock on for missiles or you can shoot them down with lasers. The system will tell you if you are out of range and you can’t just lay down fire forever. There are meters for refilling everything from lasers, missiles, repair kits, scatter flares, etc. You can call in for refills, but this also has a refill meter. It’s a delicate balance of using your resources wisely and this is where the simulator part comes in. The arcade part is the instant lock-on, the less obtuse flight controls, and not doing insane stuff like pre-flight checks, fuel, etc.

While I’d love a full-on simulator version of this game, what we get is fine as the balance is nicely done. I just wish the mission was more varied. I know the game is about shooting things down, but rarely did anything new come up outside of shoot these things down. It was fun attacking a giant Star Destroyer or the Starhawk itself that loomed overhead and felt like a planet. Targeting ship systems was fun and even flying inside one here and there was also a blast, but most of the game is just shooting small ships down and it got old after awhile. I wanted more scripted events or something as I can shoot down small ships all day in multiplayer. The final two missions were also a serious pain as you need specific weapons and ships to complete certain objectives and I constantly died until I figured it out, and they dragged on far too long, but the rest of the missions were entertaining the first time around. The ambiance is also very Star Wars-y with chatter and banter during flights, iconic ship sounds, blasters, explosions, and great music.

The game also looks amazing. The character models are detailed, the ship cockpits look like they were ripped right out of the movies with a lot of glowing lights, and strange shapes, but I would love to walk around the base more and just have more variety in missions. The four or five ships per side were fine, you can change the load-outs for various items like ion blasters to knock down shields faster, various engines and hulls that sacrifice one aspect to gain another such as acceleration, maneuverability, shield recharge time, etc. and there are a lot of options which mostly becomes useful in multiplayer. I feel like what we got was just part of a huge design doc and a lot of stuff got cut. I wanted a grander story, maybe some missions where you fly inside a planet and not just in space, more interior levels, and more scripted events. The space battles look great with giant asteroids, huge planets in the background, and beautiful space backdrops, but I wanted more.

The multiplayer is something that I felt wasn’t fun for too long. Unless you master the controls and a specific ship you’re going to die a lot. There are dogfights and missions that have you taking down larger ships and working together. I found the dog fights were boring after some time, but the bigger battles were a lot more entertaining, but I still don’t see this game having longevity in the multiplayer department for very long. Overall, the game plays, looks, and sounds great but feels like it wants to be more of a simulator than an arcade game sometimes, then in others more arcade. It needs to either balance these out better next time or pick one. I wanted more mission variety, a more epic story, and the ability to walk around the shipyards. What’s here is fantastic, and should be played by flight game fans or Star Wars fans.

Blair Witch

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 10/04/2020
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Switch, Xbox One. Leave a comment

Publisher: Bloober Team

Developer: Bloober Team

Release Date: 08/30/2019

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $29.99

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The Blair Witch Project was a movie that scared the living crap out of me as a child and is still scary to this day. The mockumentary style film was done very well and was so convincing my own mother thought the movie was real lost footage for the longest time. The iconic effigy of the stickman, the child handprints, standing in the corner, the cabin in the woods with the basement, all of it is in this game. You play as Ellis Lynch who is a sheriff in the town where the Black Hills Forest lies. You are trying to find a lost or kidnapped boy named Peter Shannon. Ellis ends up fighting his own demons and becoming another victim of the Witch and the forest.

The game starts out easy enough and scare-free. You get introduced to the game mechanics and the walking simulator begins. Within the first 20 minutes, the first scares start, and you are already lost in the forest. Through the entire game, you have a canine companion named Bullet who is used to sniff out clues when you find items in the forest to progress further to find Peter. You get a few tools such as an older camcorder, a flashlight, a cell phone, and a walkie-talkie. These are all used in the game for scares and jumps and they’re used really well. You can hail Bullet and call him towards you or have him seek to find the next area to explore, but this stops about halfway through the game. A weird “combat” mechanic is introduced and only used a few times by shining your flashlight on ghosts/demons that run around and circle you. Bullet will growl in their direction and if you don’t flash them to death quickly they will kill you. It’s only used a few times and I felt it was scary the first time then underwhelming thereafter.

Most of the game is comprised of walking around collecting photos, breaking effigies, and finding tapes. The camcorder is well used here as it is both a gameplay tool and used for story purposes. Red tapes allow you to manipulate time by rewinding events so they open passages or leave items around Ellis. It’s not super hard to figure out as each clip is less than 20 seconds and it’s very obvious what the game wants you to pause on. The blue tapes just add story context, but the camera is used later in the game as a way to see hidden objects such as trails and enemies as your flashlight eventually becomes useless. The game isn’t an open world, but the areas are large and you will spend each section solving some sort of puzzle, but exploring the game is downright frightening. Bloober did a phenomenal job scaring you with real terror and fright. They use the unknown for a fear factor and you never know what’s lurking in the woods. You feel isolated, alone, scared, and for the longest time, I didn’t’ want to play the game as I was really scared. One scene in the middle of the game has Ellis trying to clear a path in a sawmill and running around the area in the dark with the only lights that make you feel safe, even for a few seconds, die on you and go out makes the terror that much better. 

However, as the story progressed I didn’t understand what was going on at all. There were scenes where Ellis was having flashbacks of war, but it never stated he was in one, at least not that I remembered. He’s obviously struggling with depression and PTSD as he’s constantly fighting with his wife on the phone and has a record of going crazy. I just never understood how the forest worked, or how the Blair Witch was incorporated into all of this. It’s obvious the 90’s film’s influence is present with a campsite that has the tent the crew used in the film with the flannel shirt, the cabin at the end of the game is almost a spitting image and is the scariest part of the game, but this section drags on way too long lasting 45 minutes. I was running down endless hallways with my camera and the story pretty much stopped here. I didn’t learn anything new about Ellis or the Witch or what is going on. It was just random events that we already know and jump scares. Having to creep around parts of the house to avoid enemies was scary, and using the phone’s messages to tell you not to look up or writing that said look away was sending chills up my spine, but this endless rat’s maze is one of Bloobers largest problems in their design. Both Observer and Layers of Fear suffered the endless hallway syndrome with no story progression and random events. 

When it was all said and done the game has an amazing atmosphere and should be played during October or a sleepover or something. It’s very entertaining and the puzzles are very light and there are tons of scares here for most people. I would have liked a better story, stronger characters, and more explanation of the Witch, the forest, and the entire legend overall. The game is very short ending in about 4 hours and there are zero reasons to go back outside of scaring new friends. The game looks really good with great lighting effects, but it has an overall stiffness to it that I didn’t like. Bullet’s AI is dumb as dirt as it actually broke my game a few times requiring restarts as he couldn’t find a certain path or would blip out of existence and break the game. The game is also horribly optimized and runs poorly on PC even with high-end hardware. There is also no ultrawide screen support. Overall, the game is a fun and scary afternoon, but don’t expect a good story or anything like that.

Serious Sam 4

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 10/01/2020
Posted in: Mac, Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Xbox One. Leave a comment

Publisher: Devolver Digital

Developer: Croteam

Release Date: 09/24/2020

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $39.99

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Serious Sam has never been my favorite FPS and there’s a single reason for that. The game is incredibly repetitive and every campaign overstays its welcome and I’m bored before the game is even over. The entire appeal of Serious Sam is to shoot everything that moves and massive waves of enemies, and I mean massive. More enemies than any other shooter would dare throw at you and that’s part of the game’s challenge and incredibly frustrating difficulty. Even on easy, Serious Sam 4 was tough and I died numerous times. I had to switch to easy on the fifth level because I just wasn’t making progress. Serious Sam 4 also lacks in story and character, and many other things, but we’ll get there.

You play as Sam Stone, a badass dude who shoots everything that moves. The game starts off with a giant battle with thousands of characters on screen. I mean thousands. It’s something I have never seen in a game before and it’s amazing to mow down these endless hordes, but the impressiveness ends there. The game starts at the end and then you jump forward at the beginning. Nowhere else is there any amount of enemies like this outside of maybe 100 on-screen at once. I wanted to see these thousands on the screen that the game kept advertising, but only at the beginning and very end battles do you see this. How disappointing. The game does up the ante as you progress with the final level having you mow down a few thousand but in smaller waves. That’s literally all there is to the game. There are a couple of mech sections which are awesome, and a few driving sections which are lame and boring, but they’re there. It’s not nearly enough to break up the 8-10 hours of monotonous shooting, however.

The arsenal of weapons Sam gets is actually quite entertaining especially when you get skill points and can unlock dual-wielding. The skill tree is actually rather useful and I enjoyed what I unlocked. Duel-wielding is the only way you may get through the game, to be honest. Guns like the Cannonball, Electric gun, rocket launcher, grenade launcher, the Devastator, and double-barrel shotgun are just a few that you will switch between depending on what calls for them. A horde of smaller enemies may require more rounds so the mini-gun is one of the most useful in the game. Yes, you can duel-wield mini-guns and it’s a blast. Have a horde of larger enemies? Throw the cannons at them and watch them explode. Now, this was fine and all, but there’s a huge issue I take with locking most weapons away as side objectives. This includes items such as the mini-nuke, black hole, gas grenade, and various boosters. I finally got over that and did all the side objectives I ran into, but then you get to a level where the weapons are all taken away from you and you have to re-acquire them by doing more side objectives?! What?! It’s absurd and not fun. I just went through all this effort and the developers seemed to have done this to somehow extend playtime? It doesn’t end there as they do it a THIRD time! It’s incredibly frustrating and by the final level, you don’t even get all the items and weapons back that could be useful.

Let’s talk about level design. It’s awful. The game has not evolved a single iota since its inception and other games of the era such as Doom, Zelda, Mario, and various other series have evolved with the times but Serious Sam just can not. The levels feel haphazardly designed with random buildings, terrible open maps in which you drive a vehicle through for no apparent reason except to waste time and bore you to death. It doesn’t help that the game is trying to tell the story of an alien named Mental trying to take over Earth, but the characters are so unlikeable and the dialog is eye-rolling and misses the mark every time. The heroes harp on one-liners for a third of the game and it ends up being the main focus of banter between them. I love the humor in shooters, Doom 2016 did it very well, but this isn’t it. The writers just drop the ball or can’t land a joke, and when they do they don’t run with it. There are subtle things in the game that were kind of funny like when Sam asks a less-than-funny Russian soldier where the battle is and he just points his finger in a direction and there was dead silence. That’s funny! But then they gave Sam a lame one-liner and ruined the follow-up. Sometimes less is more and the writers clearer don’t see this. Not even breaking the fourth wall kind of humor is present. Like it’s almost there, but not quite. None of the writing just ever makes sense or seems pointless.

Let’s talk about visuals as Serious Sam has always pushed PCs with impressive engines. While SS4 does push PCs to their limits, and beyond, the game isn’t well optimized. The game would drop down to 30FPS during cut scenes, and then there would be massive texture pop-in every time the camera changed angles. The game eats up VRAM like crazy and yes, there are a ton of graphics options and even some for controls, motion sickness, and a bunch others that need to be standard in PC games, but no matter how much I fiddled with the options I could never get a steady framerate. I would dip into the 40s in large cities, but the battle with thousands of enemies on screen I got 80FPS? Then in large open areas with just trees, I would bounce between 70 and 60 with every step. The game looks fantastic and is impressive, but it’s also boring and sterile. The game looks real and maybe too real, but for the silly zaniness of aliens and monsters, the game just looks boring. The environments mostly never change and everything is just white buildings, boring trees, boring open maps, and the occasional cramped hallway. Outside of all the shooting, there’s literally nothing else to do and every single battle is exactly the same. You wind up seeing all the enemies by chapter 5 and there’s nothing new except a few new weapons down the pipeline. This is what Serious Sam is, which is shooting massive hordes of aliens, but the developers need to find a way to evolve this. Sam has the potential of being a funny character, but the writing isn’t there and the game just lacks character.

Overall, the game is fun for a while but also lacks multiplayer and co-op which are musts for this series and they are missing. After you beat the campaign there is no point in replaying as there’s no new game plus or anything like that. The game has interesting monsters, but the game looks sterile and boring with no life, boring open maps, lame characters, and writing that always misses the mark. The engine is poorly optimized and you constantly have to re-acquire your arsenal throughout the game. I just don’t think anyone is missing anything by not playing this game. It’s intense during the firefights, but there’s a whole lot of nothing in between and that’s where the game needs to change.

Beyond a Steel Sky

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 09/29/2020
Posted in: iOS, Mac, Mobile Reviews, PC Reviews. Leave a comment

Published: Revolution Software

Developer: Revolution Software

Release Date: 06/25/2020

Rating: N/A

MSRP: $27.99

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Adventure games are always hit or miss. The fundamental thing that needs to be focused on is characters and story as that’s the main reason why people play these games. It takes away the action and gameplay so you can enjoy an interactive story. This has been done really well and, sadly, really badly more times than anyone can count. Beyond a Steel Sky is the long-awaited sequel to Beneath a Steel Sky which released in 1994. It wasn’t very well known and most people know it today as “that free game that GOG.com gave away when you opened an account” for the longest time. Beyond a Steel Sky has the potential for greatness, but it falls flat in many ways and I’ll explain.

You play as Robert Foster who was the main protagonist in the first game. You are living your life in the Gap, which is a Nomad town basically, and someone’s kid named Milo gets kidnapped by a walking mechanical dog thing. Yeah, there’s no context here and you are literally told to care about someone and risk your life who has zero backstory. A chapter or two inside the Gap where Foster was living would have built that up, but instead, we jump right into heading into Union City which is the dystopian town from the first game. Here you are introduced to controls and game mechanics which aren’t any different from other adventure games. You find objects that go into other objects and click on stuff. The only difference is a cool gadget which is a hack tool, but even that isn’t lived up to its potential like I thought it would. It shows various devices with a puzzle-like grid and you can swap stuff around to make these devices do different things. Of course, one puzzle piece from action for that device must fit, but the issue here is that each device has a different type of puzzle piece and if you are in proximity to multiple devices the game purposefully makes those pieces different so you can’t swap whatever you want around. Instead, this is mostly reserved for main mission puzzles.

As you progress through the story there’s always a sense of why? Why am I doing this? The characters are one-dimensional and just don’t have good writing. The dialog is very dry and unimportant and there’s no reason to explore the world. I even wound up finishing the game with items in my inventory I never even used so what’s the purpose? The writing is just awful or passable at best and the voice acting is so spotty. Even Foster sometimes sounds like he’s reading from a high-school play and sometimes he nails the line. It’s so inconsistent it drove me insane. Once you eventually team up with the cities’ AI, Joey from the first game, the story then turns from saving kidnapped children to taking down the entire city council? I don’t understand why the narrative has this tug-of-war and that’s not even mentioning the fact that this beautifully created world is never explored. This game could have been something like Beyond Good & Evil with a great city to explore, but instead, we only see a few mundane and boring areas with this huge beautiful backdrop that I wanted to explore more of. Beyond a Steel Sky does a great job of creating an atmospheric and lived-in world, but this isn’t how you explore that world.

The most entertaining part of the game was exploring the MINOS cyber world which had a Vaporwave/Cyberpunk aesthetic and collecting the various programs to progress was fun, but again, the puzzles had zero challenge. The entire game just has you matching items to others and it’s very obvious and there’s zero challenge throughout the entire game. There’s even a hint system that basically tells you where to go, and while that’s a good thing, it doesn’t make you work for the hints either. I also think this game would have done better as a multi-part series or just something that isn’t an adventure game as there’s so much missed potential around every corner.

Overall, Beyond a Steel Sky builds a great atmosphere and a wonderful city to explore, but you can’t explore it. The story doesn’t know what it wants to do and the characters are one-dimensional with dry dialog and humor that lands wrong. The puzzles aren’t challenging and even just simply exploring the game is boring. I wanted to care about everything in the game, but it’s hard to when the developers only pushed their world a little bit instead of shaking it and letting the fruit fall.

Distraint 2

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 09/27/2020
Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Switch, Xbox One. Leave a comment

Publisher: Jesse Makkoken

Developer: Jesse Makkoken

Release Date: 11/13/2018

MSRP: $8.99

Rating: N/A

Also Available On

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.