Bright Memorywas an impressive tech demo that was in Steam Early Access a couple of years ago. It had a scantily clad female protagonist (which doesn’t do anything for the game honestly) and a mix of sword and gunplay in the first person which felt fast-paced and punchy. Infinite is the fully released game, and it’s basically a much longer tech demo. You can finish the game in 90 minutes and this leaves nothing for story or character development which is almost non-existent. All I gathered is that there’s a black hole forming near-Earth and you must stop an evil military guy from taking some sort of artifact that will bring Earth back to Feudal Japan? I’m honestly not even sure.
The best part about the game is the gunplay. The swordplay kind of takes a back seat and is only needed in certain situations. You get a standard arsenal of four weapons. Automatic pistol, auto-shotgun, assault rifle, and sniper rifle. Each weapon has an alternate ammo type that’s usually explosive and does massive damage which is best saved for larger enemies and bosses. The weapons feel heavy and punchy, and they are fun to shoot and use. The gunplay was so good that it kept me wanting more from the game. It had a AAA budget quality to it that’s not seen in many indie shooters. The swordplay consists of mashing a single button or launching enemies into the air. There’s a tacked-on afterthought of a skill tree that lets you unlock abilities and upgrade your alternate ammo firepower, but in 90 minutes you upgrade almost everything pretty quickly so it feels trivial.
There is a grapple line for traversing long distances which are scripted, and you can wall run. These ninja acrobatics feels a bit stiff and not as refined as the actual gunplay. In fact, all of the animations feel stiff and like they were hand done. The faces almost don’t animate and thankfully there are less than 10 minutes of total screen time where the camera shows any faces. Your main character, Shelia, is questionable in the sexy department since you hardly ever see her and there are DLC costumes that seem pointless due to the short run time. You can go through the game again on higher difficulties, but I don’t see the point.
The issue with a short game like this is there is no incentive to come back. There are no modes, no multiplayer, and hardly anything to aim for. The visuals in the game are fantastic with great use of ray-tracing, but again the animations are weird. There’s a short scene where you drive a car and it feels really janky and half-baked. Overall, the boss fights are fun, but there are literally only four types of enemies in the whole game so it gets repetitive quickly. At a sale price, this could be a fun evening, but that’s about it.
Gimmicks that use various types of hardware are nothing new since the days of the Wii made that mainstream, but very few games use your camera outside of a home console for gameplay. While it’s wholly gimmicky and can be played with a controller, the game uses your webcam to see your eyes blinking to determine when to change scenes in the game or interact with objects. Not often does the gimmick feel like it’s influencing something important, but when it does it works well.
You play as a boy named Benjamin Brynn floating along the river of death in a boat with a wolf as a ferryman. He’s to be taken to a being in a large tower whom he has to sell his life story so he can pass on and the ferryman can be paid. You start out as a child and you eventually learn your mother is an accountant and failed music composer and wants you to follow in her footsteps. Each scene is full of mostly black with just what you can remember being in view. Sometimes an eye will appear on objects for you to blink at and interact with. When a metronome appears you can blink and jump to the next scene or try to hold your eyes open and see the scene to the end. Most of the time I couldn’t do it (it’s very dry where I’m at here in the summer).
You slowly progress through the story only to find out that you need to retell the story correctly. I won’t spoil anything as to how or why, but the only times the blinking gimmick felt right was when you had to close your eyes to focus on someone talking. With headphones on this is a great effect. The game does a great job detecting your eyes even in low light, and I was using a laptop webcam which isn’t that great. There isn’t much else to this game. It’s an interactive adventure with interesting visuals. The whole game reminded me a lot of That Dragon, Cancer, but I can’t connect to this game as much as it’s shorter and at the time I was expecting my first child so that game hit home quite a bit. A big fear is your child being born with some sort of debilitating disease.
You’ll most likely not really feel the game’s impact until the last 20 minutes when things get really dark and sad. It didn’t make me tear up, but it was really sad for sure. You can finish the game in about 90 minutes, but I did connect with the character to an extent, but not wholly. The scenes rush by too fast and you’re meant to understand the moral of the story more than connect with the characters and get behind their motives and feelings. I feel a game like this misses the mark due to its short run time, but the gimmick would get tiring for more than 90 minutes.
Overall, Before Your Eyes is a charming game with a lot of heart and a fun gimmick that works well when it wants to. It’s a very short game and doesn’t let you really connect with the characters enough. It’s forgettable in the end, and not as memorable as some other short adventure titles I’ve played in the past, but it’s fun and worth a look.
Growing up, I wasn’t into Star Trek, and I also didn’t have a gaming PC. The computer we had for the family was for website development and it didn’t run any type of 3D applications well. PC gaming was pretty much out of my mind until the mid-2000s, but I also passed this up on PS2. I just felt Star Trek was a boring grown-up show and didn’t care at all. I now love the series and have caught up to halfway through the Voyager series so the characters and flow of the story actually made sense to me.
You play as a brand new Hazard Team thrown together by Tuvok to surgically strike enemy ships. The Voyager gets stuck in space and can’t repair itself or warp out due to something dampening its engines. It’s your job to find out what this is. It plays out just like a Star Trek episode. There is great voice acting from the show’s cast which is really nice. There are a fair amount of cut scenes, but of course, this isn’t anything stellar or memorable. It’s interesting enough to get you through the five hours it takes to finish the campaign and that’s all.
What is nice is the Star Trek experience is here. Weapons that feel like they fit in the universe, you get to explore parts of the ship, and it’s nice to see a 3D interactive world of something you see on TV a lot. Missions are varied thanks to the environments that change up. Sadly, there are no worlds you are plopped down in. Just lots of different types of ships and a few different enemy types. These range from Klingons that we all know to new original species just for this game. This is a typical id Tech 3 shooter with nothing special to it. Enemy AI is pretty dumb and the game is extremely linear. There are no puzzles or thrills. Just blast your way past wave after wave to get to the next cut scene.
There are two different types of ammo types. You pick up ammo crystals for one and regular blue energy for the other. There are nine different weapons in the game including your phaser which has unlimited ammo and does the least amount of damage. The weapons, while original and cool looking, aren’t anything special and their alt-fire modes are pretty bland. I understand this was the early days of shooters, but Half-Life proved you can have a small arsenal and make them have weight and feel unique. It got to the point that I just stuck to two different weapons at all times because the enemies are just bullet sponges. They swarm you head-on and don’t take cover or dodge or strafe. I could stand in one corner and just knock them all out and advance to the next room. The game is fairly easy because of this.
There are only two boss fights in this game and they are both pushovers because you can exploit their dumb AI. Throughout most of the game you have AI companions that do a decent job killing everything, but they usually just stand around and can’t die anyway. There is a single stealth section that felt completely pointless as the AI is so dumb you can walk right behind them and they won’t notice you. Gameplay-wise there’s literally nothing else. Just lots of elevator switches and control panels to press.
Visually the game looks the part artistically. You won’t mistake this for another game, but the graphics themselves are obviously really dated and didn’t look the best even when it was released. However, you know what you’re getting into with a two-decade-old game. It still looks clean and there is a lot of detail in making this look and feel like Star Trek. It’s worth a short play-through on a late-night gaming session, but it’s mostly forgettable.
I’m not the biggest Postal fan as I didn’t grow up with it. With Postal 4being another turd in the series, I can easily say this is the best game in the whole series despite being a spin-off. It takes the meta-humor, gore, and whacky character designs of the main series, puts them into a Doom clone, and does it quite well. You are put into the shoes of the main protagonist who falls asleep on this couch and end up playing the levels of his nightmares. There are plenty of locales, fun weapons, and tons of enemies.
You start the game out like you do in the main games. You are in a lively neighborhood and go, postal because your TV is broken. The game ramps up the difficulty quite nicely as this first level has simple enemies like redneck shotgun MAGA hat-wearing enemies, dogs, and innocent people to slaughter. These people give you Wal-Mart bags that give you health. Later on, you run into floating fat enemies that chuck McDonald’s burgers and cups at you. Mind you they don’t use the actual names in the game, but you can easily tell what they’re making fun of.
Later levels bring on various enemies and there are three main bosses in the game. There are three different campaigns to play in. You eventually go through the desert, asylum, sewer, forest, and swap levels to eventually get to the F4 Expo campaign to take on Leon Dusk (har har) and his space program. Each level consists of mostly linear hallways to shoot through but there are many blocked doors that require certain items or colored keys. Finding these can sometimes be a bit of a pain as the levels can be quite long and labyrinthine and the level design overall isn’t the best among these Doom clones. I honestly felt a lot of the time that the pacing was off with arenas being way too large for the loadout you get (you frequently lose your entire arsenal and have to gain it back again) and it can sometimes feel overwhelming just in terms of getting your bearings. The enemy designs are well done as you know what enemies are weak against what types of weapons. You have enemies that mob you, strong enemies that stand back, and some with long-range weapons.
The humor in this game is a bit different from the main entries as it stays meta and makes fun of current global issues. Coronavirus (it’s literally a boss), various memes like Elon Musk, the toilet paper shortage, and various one-liners that poke fun at what’s been going on for the last five years globally. No racism, sexism, chauvinism, or anything like that is needed to be a fun game. The game pokes fun at things rather than promoting them. Anyone saying “Twitter will end this game” is just creating fake outrage. It’s funny no matter who you are and isn’t offensive. The developers got with the times and actually had to make an effort to be humorous. What a crazy idea right?
With that aside, the game does get really repetitive after the first campaign is over. Previous enemies cycle in, the same 8 weapons can only do so much, and most of them are pretty basic weapons, but a few are unique like the Pussy Blower that shoots cats out and you can recall them to do damage on the way back. Most other weapons are just clever or funny renditions of normal weapons with alt-fire modes. You do get items to use such as slowing down time, refilling a weapon’s ammo, and refilling health, and you also get a piss button. Peeing on things is useless unless you have fire or nitrogen bottles to burn or freeze enemies with your pee. Yeah, it’s pretty funny. There is also an Akimbo item which is probably the most valuable in the game.
Overall,Brain Damaged has excellent art direction and retro visuals that harken back to the 64-bit era of games like Quake II and Unreal Tournament. The controls are great, the game is fast-paced, the weapons and enemy designs are awesome, there is varied level design, and the humor is actually funny and not offensive just to be offensive. There are plenty of nods to video games, gaming culture, and world events from the last five years that everyone can relate to. If you can get past the repetitious design and so-so-level design problems then you will have a great 5-6 hours on your hands.
This is going to be a “normal” hardware review. I know people like tons of graphs, comparisons, and benchmarks, but I don’t have the extra PCs for this to be time-efficient, and other sites do this better. You will get here a “gamers” review based on the experience of using the card for two weeks.
Installing the GPU was as simple as it gets these days. This card only requires two 8-pin power connectors while some others require three. I did initially install this with a 750W PSU (Thermaltake Toughpower Gold RGB to be exact) and at first, it worked pretty okay for a few days. More on that later. It fits in a mid-size tower just fine. I put this inside of a Corsair 680X and it just barely cleared. There’s maybe 1 or 2mm between it and the front fans. My RTX 2080 was a bit smaller it seems, but this card is quite the beast. It takes up two rear slots (like most cards do these days) and has more Display Port connectors than HDMI which is needed for anything with a super high refresh rate and high resolution. I’m running two monitors. One 1080p 280Hz and one at 3440×1440 120Hz, however, to use G-Sync I have them both capped 3FPS lower than their max refresh rate. I didn’t have any issues upon boot. I did use DDU uninstaller on my 2080 driver and shut the PC down, and I disabled automatic Windows driver updates. So, upon boot, I installed a fresh 3080ti driver and I had zero issues.
This architecture, Ampere, is not very overclocking friendly. This particular third-party card comes overclocked from the factory (1710Mhz compared so stock 1665Mhz) so gains using MSI Afterburner’s OC Scanner yielded negligible results that would warrant more heat from the card. As it is, this GPU is power locked so you can’t increase it past 100% power so that leaves little room for anything else. With my 750W PSU, I was getting shutdowns in almost every game that pushed the card, so while it will use a bit more power than the stock card, my PSU didn’t like this. Even without overclocks, I was still getting shutdowns in certain games so I had to run out and get an 850W PSU. I have an Intel i7-8700 and 9 RGB fans plus a cooling pump, 3 M.2 drives, 2 2.5″ SSDs, and tons of USB devices (which are all RGB) so there’s quite a bit of extra draw outside of the CPU and GPU TDP combo. With a more powerful CPU that has 100+W of TPD, I doubt 750W would work even without lots of RGB, drives, and devices connected. I can’t test this thoroughly, but in my experience this just makes sense. The shutdowns stopped after the extra 100W was added.
Now there could be other reasons for this. The PSU could have been dying (it’s about 5 years old), there could have been some capacitors going out, and the PSU could have been designed to just not like sudden spikes so close to the wattage limit. I’m not sure, and I can’t test this out properly, but for anyone else having this issue or buying this card think about upgrading your PSU as well. Hardware-wise these were the only issues I had. Now for temps, I’m getting around 48c at idle and full blast gaming with ray-tracing on I never pass 65c. I also don’t have my fans at full blast either. The fans on the GPU seem to do a great job and it runs cooler than my RTX 2080 which would get into the low 70s, but it does have a higher idle temp. My ambient temperature is rather mild all year round maybe around 50F or 10C and during testing, I did have outside temp increases due to summer coming along to around 75F or 23C and it still ran in the mid-60s. This might change if temps get blisteringly hot.
As for gaming. Yeah, this is what the 2000 series should have been. The second-generation RT cores make a huge difference. The 2080 couldn’t do ray-tracing for squat outside of 1080p and even then it was iffy. The 3080ti can do 2K ray-tracing maxed out and get above 60FPS with no sweat. Contro, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Quake II RTX, Amid Evil, and a few others went close to 100FPS at 2K. Other games like Dying Light 2, Metro Exodus,Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and Cyberpunk 2077 still dipped under 60 or stayed right at 60. Cyberpunk 2077 was probably the worst performing ray-tracing-wise. Non-ray-traced games fly on this thing and only Fallout 76 dipped below 60FPS, but that’s because it’s an unoptimized piece of crap so it doesn’t count (it’s still a fun game these days, but seriously screw the Gambryo AKA The Creation Engine engine to Hell and back). Games like Horizon: Zero Dawn Complete Edition, God of War, Far Cry 6, Days Gone, and Borderlands 3 all ran well above 60 shooting past 100 in some cases at 2K.
I can tell you that many of those games didn’t hit 60FPS maxed out in on the 2080 which is stupid. However, it now comes down to price. I paid below MSRP for my card. I waited until the supply came back up as I refuse to pay scalpers a dime. I got mine for $1,149. That’s the price of two next-gen consoles or a low-end gaming PC alone. These prices are insane, and I only paid them because I can afford to, but 5 years ago it never would have happened. There are many who are priced out of these better cards. Is it worth the difference from the 3080 or even the 3070? It depends on how you game. If ray-tracing is super important to you or gaming above 1080p then yes, this is what you should be getting. If you just have a 1080p monitor then smaller cards would be fine. If you want higher frames then this would be a great buy, but again I don’t have the fancy charts and graphs like other sites do. This is just one PC gamer’s opinion and experience compared to the previous generation. I think it’s worth the purchase, but that doesn’t mean I like the price by the way, but if you paid the $2,000+ for scalping prices shame on you and I don’t have one ounce of pity.
RGB-wise, the card is sad. It just has a small logo in the corner that lights up and can easily be blocked by power cables. Gigabyte has terrible software and hasn’t been updated or revamped in almost 10 years. Their software is basically a terrible clone of what MSI Afterburner can do. There’s a silent mode you can switch to, but I don’t see the point in this. You do need it to change the RGB colors of the card, and it just barely works. So shame on Gigabyte for never updating their terrible software.
Shadow Warrior has been a series that’s just all over the place. The first game in this new reboot was really great. well-balanced weapons, enemies, and great visuals. The second game took a nose dive, adding too much to the game, and Shadow Warrior 3 strips it too far back. Flying Wild Hog just can’t find a good balance for this series. This can almost be a reboot within the trilogy itself. It’s nothing like the first two games at all. It feels more arcade-like. Gone are all the pointless upgrades, chi abilities, and huge arsenals of weapons. The series takes a cue from the first game by giving us a set of six weapons, just a simple chi-blast (that ends up mostly being useless), and more story than ever before.
Lo Wang has hit rock bottom and has lost his ninja mojo because a giant ice dragon god defeated him. The story is told mostly through pre-rendered cutscenes and banter from Lo Wang, Hoji, and Zilla. The cast is really small this time around, and also gone are the hub world and open-level mission structure. This game is incredibly linear and only consists of two gameplay loops. Combat arenas and tons of platforming This consists of grapple swinging, wall running, and jump dashes across chasms. It’s pretty fun if it’s too simple and overused. Some levels are over half of just this. The levels are pretty nice, with a fun new cartoon-like art style that pretty much just sticks with ancient Japanese architecture and demons. With the weapons cut back to just six, you get a varied arsenal and can really get to know them. Yes, there are upgrades, but each weapon gets three upgrades, which adds a menial upgrade to each weapon. The first upgrade increases all ammo by a little bit, and the second upgrade adds some sort of elemental upgrade, while the third is usually the best, but you won’t ever access the third upgrade by the end of the game. It’s just too short.
During combat arenas, you can run around and blast enemies away, but each unique enemy has a finisher. This is a Mortal Kombat-style Fatality, but it gives you a temporary weapon you can use to devastate enemies. This is a really neat system and the best part of the game. You need to fill your meter, as each enemy type requires a certain amount of chunks of your meter. Some weapons vary from melee, explosives, giant machine guns, or a passive portal that sucks everyone into one spot. There’s still not as much of a strategic element to the weapons and enemies in a game like DOOM, but it’s way better than the last game. At least I know what enemies die fastest with what weapon, and smaller enemies can just be hacked away with a sword. It’s faster-paced, and even though the shooting doesn’t have the weight of the last two games, this really feels more arcade-like. It’s like how Ninja Gaiden 3 was compared to the first two games. more arcade-like, more cinematic, and simplistic, but still fun.
That’s all there is to this game. You just platform your way to the next arena, where there are maybe five or so on each level. There are only two boss fights in the entire game, so it does get repetitive super quick, and there just aren’t a lot of enemy types either. The game can be finished in about 4–5 hours. I finished it in two sittings. Each level looks pretty good, despite the visuals not being mind-blowing or anything on a technical scale. The departure from the RPG stuff from the last game makes this one more enjoyable. This game felt like popcorn. I enjoyed it while it was there, but I won’t think about it tomorrow. It’s great as a cheap sale and a weekend gore fest. Lo Wang’s jokes are still pretty lame, but the writing is a bit better than the last game as well. I did get a couple of chuckles out. At this point, the series needs another complete reboot with maybe a different developer.
The first Shadow Warrior was a lot of mindless fun that brought back the craziness of the original DOS game. It did a good job with great visuals, crazy monster designs, cool weapons, and that fast-paced feeling of classic FPS action. Shadow Warrior 2 really sets the series back by trying to do too much and not doing any of it very well. First off, the story is just stupid and pointless. You are once again doing jobs for the Chinese mafia, and you end up stuck in some sort of family drama about a woman’s soul getting trapped in your head, and you must reunite her with her body. It’s pretty dumb and uninteresting, including the barely passable voice acting and lame jokes.
After DOOM came out in 2016, it set the standard pretty high for rebooting classic 90s FPS games. Shadow Warrior 2 misses the mark in almost every way. One thing it does get right is the awesome monster and enemy designs and cool levels, as well as plenty of interesting weapons, but less is more, and Shadow Warrior 2 doesn’t implement this practice. For starters, the game is incredibly repetitive and poorly balanced. You repeat the same themed levels just to meet different objectives. A couple of levels were literally repeated twice over, and I just hated it. There are three different themes at play here. There’s Hell with demons and monsters, the real world with assassins and ninjas, and then a weird cyber world with robots, drones, and mechs. The monster designs are pretty awesome, but there’s no strategy for each enemy like in DOOM. In that game, you know what weapons work well against each enemy and can strategize on the fly, but here you just empty all your weapons as fast as you can, starting with the most powerful.
I really hate this, as it leads to more useless filler, such as weapon upgrades. These are just mindless stats that boost weapons, and there’s no strategy here either. There are so many of them, and I literally just equipped the highest-level ones and got rid of the rest. It honestly never mattered. Some enemies are immune to or weak to certain elements, but I didn’t bother with this either. I’m not going to sit and sort through dozens upon dozens of upgrades for different enemy types. DOOM did this right with just a couple of weapon upgrades per weapon, and you knew how you wanted to use these. Less is more. Then there are just an insane amount of weapons. There are different styles that match each area, such as demon, real-world, and cyber weapons. Sure, they look cool, but they all mostly felt the same. They had no personality or uniqueness to them. I just picked the most powerful ones and spaced out my arsenal with one of each type. Then there are the pointless powers. I rarely ever used these, as I was so busy mowing down enemies and trying not to get killed. They’re not even useful. spikes to hold a single enemy down, and it doesn’t work on larger enemies? Invisibility? Why?
So combat is pretty mindless, there’s no strategy here, and the story is pretty silly and pointless. This leads to the fact that you get side quests and trials. I didn’t even bother with these. The game starts feeling like a chore less than halfway through the game. The thing is, I started this game back when it came out and shelved it for years because it was just so boring and monotonous after the first few missions. I had it installed on my PC this entire time, and I finally just plowed through the story in about 7 hours, and I didn’t have a lot of fun. Sure, sometimes when you get the right weapon and kill a group of enemies, it’s pretty satisfying. The bosses are pretty cool and felt good to take down, but these are little bites in a giant cake that just don’t taste very good. The developers should have stuck with a more linear design and fewer weapons and upgrades. Other than that, the visuals are really good, and the art style is great.
inFamous 2 is the perfect example of improving upon every aspect of a prequel without adding anything new to evolve the series. It seems Sucker Punch focused so much on what seems to be what they wanted the first game to really be—given more time—and yeah. It really feels like what the first game should have been. The improvements are noticeable right off the bat when you take control of Cole. The camera is closer to him, and it bobs and shakes, and the visuals are greatly improved. This is one of the best-looking PS3 games to date, but more so on a technical scale—more on that later. Thanks to motion capture and a better actor for Cole, the story and characters have greatly improved. He’s actually quite likeable, and the cast is pretty entertaining to see on screen thanks to the frequent cut scenes.
The writing is also better. I actually got a few chuckles out of me, and the subtle inflections in the voice acting all add character and weight to the story, which is also better. It picks up right where the first game left off; in fact, you’re leaving Empire City while you watch its destruction. The beast hinted at in the first game is the main goal here, and it adds a sense of urgency and dread to the whole story. Your main goal is to find more blast cores to give Cole more power to detonate an RFI to save New Marais from the plague seen in the first game. The Beast is destroying all human life as he moves down the Eastern Seaboard, but why he is would be a spoiler. It takes forever, but the game does have a satisfying ending and concludes the series as a whole. However, the whole morality thing just isn’t nailed down yet. It’s still very binary, and you now have two female characters—Nix and Kuo—who try to sway you in either direction, but this attempt at organic morality shifting like in Mass Effect just doesn’t work. It’s basically the angel and devil on either shoulder, and in the end, your choices don’t matter outside of specific cut scenes and missions you might see or play. The ending choice determines the ending, and even if you played well through the whole game, you could choose the evil ending, which is really disappointing and weird.
Outside of the much-improved characters and story, the overall game loop is identical. You run around completing the same type of side quests as before and gain back territory from three different factions. This became just as monotonous and tiring as the first game did, despite slightly less annoying mission types. However, Cole’s ability tree is completely meaningless in this game, as you need to unlock powers before you can buy them. Even if you have the option to buy them, it’s grayed out, and you always have enough XP to buy these abilities, as most of the passive ones are just acquired through the story. So, one backstep is the ability tree, for sure. It just feels pointless to have an XP system.
Combat is improved mostly with melee. You know, get a stick to beat enemies up with, and there are cinematic finishing moves to go along with it. You will do a lot of melee combat in this game when someone is up close, but your other abilities are also improved, and some are added. Cole’s overall combat feels improved with better animations and effects. Various new abilities include a missile, triple grenade, pulse blast with gravity negation, and also ice abilities, which tie into the story, but I felt these were pretty useless. I guess there are only so many lightning abilities you can have without delving into other types. If you venture into the evil path, you get a different ability type, which is maybe some weird evil mist-type power? It’s hard to say exactly what it is, as it’s not an element. I mostly stuck to Cole’s abilities and eventually found a loud out I preferred and stuck to it.
Parkour hasn’t changed much, with Cole magnetizing to ledges a little too much still, and New Marais is still a pain to get around. There are two light rails you can speed around, but they aren’t connected, which makes no sense, and the other two areas don’t have any means of traveling quickly, so there is still no fast travel. New Marais as a whole is just as lifeless as Empire City, with nothing to do in it. In fact, it’s exactly the same. Just more pedestrians and animations added, and that’s it. It’s still a colorless, lifeless, drab, and gray open world for an excuse to do side quests, find dead drops, and find blast shards. It feels better designed for this type of game, but overall, it’s not much better.
With that said, the game improves upon many things like story, characters, animations, graphics, combat, and better quest design, but it still feels like the first game in the end. There isn’t anything really new here outside of some new enemies and mini-boss encounters. New Marais itself is a lifeless, dull city with the same exact things to do as in the first game. I did enjoy this game more, but after a few hours in the honeymoon phase, you realize you’re playing the same game.
I passed on inFamous back when it came out for many reasons. Open-world games were being pushed hard in the late 2000s, and none of them were unique or interesting to explore. It was an excuse to add filler and repetitive missions, and most of them just felt lifeless and empty. inFamous is no exception, but it’s not a bad game. Very few games could capture a fun open world like Grand Theft Auto or Assassin’s Creed, but at least Sucker Punch tried. The protagonist is a typical bald, generic white male character with no personality. Cole McGrath is not a likeable character in this game, and he and all the others are entirely forgettable. cookie-cutter dialog to just barely get the story across. There’s no actual personality put into any of the characters. The voice acting isn’t bad; it’s just not personable. The game focuses on a good vs. evil aspect, as this is supposed to be an original superhero game, but it’s binary. There’s nothing organic about it, and it feels completely forced. Save the citizens by healing them or leaving them be; help a citizen fight off attackers or steal their shards and let them die. It’s a contrived concept that was done to death at the time, and the game doesn’t have the depth of, let’s say, Mass Effect to allow a natural progression of good or evil.
A poorly implemented morality system aside, the game does do action and combat well. Your main power is a lightning bolt that you can shoot like a machine gun at enemies. This plays out like a third-person shooter and feels pretty good. Over time, Cole gains more powers via underground generators that end up becoming pretty repetitive missions. You are in a dark sewer with various platforms, and it’s just a training ground for using the new ability you acquired. Various abilities include a missile, shield, ground pound, force blast, sniper blast, and a few others. They are quite useful and feel good to use, too. You do have an energy meter that requires recharging via anything that stores electricity. Walk up to a car, lamp post, electrical box, AC unit, etc., and you can absorb its power. Each item has different amounts of stored energy, but this will also heal you.
Enemies come in the form of more genericness. Boring dudes wearing gas masks, trash bags, or red jackets all use machine guns or rocket launchers. There’s an occasional heavy enemy that’s a bit more unique, but there are three factions in the game—one on each island—and there are just variations of the same type. What gets frustrating about the combat is that sometimes there are just too many enemies thrown at you. This can become especially annoying during missions in which you have to protect something and said object gets damaged super fast. You have to really be accurate with your aim, make sure an energy source is nearby, and utilize more area of effect powers first. Later on, you get a massive lightning storm ability that can be controlled with the six-axis motion, and that’s useful for massive groups or vehicles. So, there isn’t too much strategy needed, but just in making sure you don’t die by prioritizing large groups first.
There really aren’t any boss fights in the game outside of maybe three, including the end boss. There are about 40 main missions, and most are rotated mission types. Protect this object, destroy this group of enemies, escort this person, destroy these vehicles, climb this large structure, etc. Side missions make up the bulk of the game and reward you with XP for leveling up your powers, but it’s the same recycled stuff, and there are so damn many of them. My God, there are at least 30 on each island. These are all the same 8–10 types of missions, similar to the main missions recycled ad nauseum. You’re either protecting something, killing something, or escorting something, and it’s fine at first, but if you want to unlock trophies, this will test your resolve. I did end up finishing all the side quests and most of the dead drops.
You can upgrade your energy meter by adding blips by finding blast shards, but these are spread out randomly, and there’s no way to track them. Dead drops are tracked via pinging on your radar and aren’t too hard to find, but this leads me to the biggest quality of life issues. There’s no fast travel. Running around in this boring and lifeless world is bad enough, but it can take five or more minutes to get from one island to the next. You can ride power lines, but they are broken up and don’t all connect around the islands. This means running around on foot, but when I say lifeless, I mean it. Pedestrians just wander around doing nothing and are just animations filling the world. Cars just drive in straight lines and don’t react to you. They just stop on a dime if you walk past them. The world is gray and brown and dull to look at, despite how decent the visuals are on a technical level. There are no buildings to enter, no shops, and nothing that can be destroyed. It’s a very static world.
With that said, inFamous is only worth playing if you feel you need to start the series or want an older open-world game to play. The controls are great, and the gameplay itself is solid, but many quality of life improvements would have been nice and a more fun world to be in. The story feels too binary and, in itself, isn’t anything interesting or memorable. The characters are lifeless and generic, and the quests get repetitive and annoyingly hard quickly. That doesn’t mean the game is bad; it just needs lots of improvements in the sequel. Cole’s powers are fun to use, and the parkour and overall combat gameplay work well. There are too many side quests; it’s hard to find blast shards.
I love Lovecraftian horror, but video games have really struggled to bring these myths to life. Most of the games get the atmosphere and monster design down but can’t nail a good gameplay loop or decent story. By far the best game for this is still Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. While its gameplay is clunky, it has great storytelling that’s somewhat memorable. The Sinking City does a great job nailing the twisted town of Oakmont with great visuals, but that’s about it. No single gameplay element or loop comes together to create anything interesting or worthwhile enough to make you want to stick around outside of the main story.
Unlike most other Lovecraftian games, this one doesn’t take place in Innsmouth, but it is mentioned that many are fleeing from that town. You play Charles Reed, who is a private eye investigator searching to end his visions. That’s about it, as far as the entire story goes. You bounce around from case-to-case-solving problems of townsfolk in the form of favors to get one step closer to where you need to go. This is where things start falling apart. Not a single character is interesting, including Reed; the dialogue is drab and boring despite the voice work being pretty decent. There are small little stories for each case you can unravel, but I didn’t care about any of them. I just wanted to progress further and hoped there was some cool twist, but that never came.
When you are inside investigation areas, you can examine items and look at objects. There are key evidence items to progress the story and bonus items to complete all evidence for achievements. This is mostly uninteresting, and there are dozens and dozens of these with you just wandering and looking at everything to find any object you can examine. Once you examine everything, you are given clues to advance the case, but nothing is marked on your map for you. You are given a district and then cross streets and have to pin that yourself. I found this kind of interesting until I found out that all of the main story cases are almost always right near fast travel points.
Speaking of fast travel, it’s so necessary because the town of Oakmont is boring and lifeless. Sure, there are people wandering around, but they are just animations to fill space. They don’t make any sound or have any dialog, and there are no stores or anything like that. It’s just linear streets that look pretty broken up with water-logged streets that require a motorboat to navigate. Some areas are sectioned off as infested areas full of monsters and aren’t worth going into for any reason outside of a few side cases that require it.
That gets us into combat, which is another half-baked idea. The game is trying to be a survival horror game by making ammo scarce, but you can craft ammo and health! Sure, but you will literally be scrounging bullets, and some areas have tons of monsters. I got lucky, but usually went down to my last bullet, and aiming carefully is a must. There are five different weapons, including throwables and traps, but honestly, you just start with your weakest gun and work your way up until you’re spent. There’s no strategy to this, all the weapons feel the same and don’t have any weight to them, and there is no cover system. Like any Lovecraftian game, there is a sanity meter, and as this drops, you hallucinate wylebeasts, and they will attack you unless you take psych meds.
There are some underwater levels in which you walk around in a diving suit and avoid hot air vents and a couple of monsters, but it’s slow-paced and even duller as they are all pretty much the same, just with different layouts and an excuse to maybe add filler. You can shoot a harpoon gun to slow the monsters down, but there was no challenge in these six or so underwater areas. There’s a single boss fight, and you occasionally attack humans, which are easy but usually come in large numbers. Part of the appeal of this game is story choice. Choosing who lives and dies doesn’t really affect much except what endings you can choose, which are uninteresting and unfulfilling.
There’s literally nothing else to do in the game. I desperately just tried to find all the fast travel points. I don’t understand making this open-world if it’s so boring and uninteresting to explore and feels so lifeless. The same loop of investigating cases, fighting some monsters, fast-traveling around to the next case, and listening to the dialog is so dull, and I only kept playing because of my love for the lore. If you don’t care about Lovecraftian mythos, then I wouldn’t even bother with this game. I also didn’t bother with any side cases, as the main story takes around 12 hours and drained me. I couldn’t spend another minute in this game.
Overall, The Sinking City is another barely passable Lovecraft-inspired game that gets the atmosphere and looks right but can’t nail any gameplay elements. While none of them are broken or bad, they are just boring and could have been greatly expanded upon. The main story doesn’t really go anywhere; there are no interesting characters, the dialogue is drab, and the bullet scrounging gets tiring because of the number of monsters that get thrown at you. Not to mention
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