Xbox 360

Overlord – 14 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/18/2021

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, Sony Consoles, Xbox 360. Leave a comment

Publisher: Codemasters

Developer: Triumph Studios

Release Date: 06/26/2007

Rating: Teen

MSRP: $59.99

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This is actually my third time trying to finish Overlord believe it or not. I rented this game back when it came out on Xbox 360 and didn’t get very far. A second time on PC, and now my third on PC. This is the furthest I’ve gotten in the game, about 2/3 of the way, but as time goes on the game ages more poorly than the last time I remember it. It was an early next-gen game for Xbox 360 so all eyes were on it and it was graphically impressive. It still looks great today and surprisingly runs amazingly well on PC without needing any fixes, but the game has a lot of issues.

Firstly, the game is incredibly tedious and the game has some very poor level design. There’s no map, no objective marker, and the levels are very linear so even one of these things would have been so helpful. You blindly wander around these areas that all start to look the same trying to finish objectives. Now, the objectives can all be completed in any order for any area. Your main hub is a tower that you can customize and upgrade over time as you complete the game and from here you can fast travel to any level you have visited. The main gameplay mechanic is using the right analog stick and controlling your horde of minions to do your deeds for you such as carry items around and combat. You’re very weak comparatively so entering combat isn’t suggest unless you really need it. Again, not the worst problem.

What really starts to bore me is that sweeping your minions around works well enough minus some control issues when you have a straggler. The game favors the majority of the horde you end up controlling and stragglers sometimes won’t join their brethren making things frustrating. You end up controlling four different minions. Reds, Blues, Greens, and Browns. Browns are your main grunt and do the most combat damage and have the most defense. Blues can enter the water, but can also revive minions. Reds can throw fireballs at a distance and put out fires. Greens can be sneaky and climb up larger enemies and also are immune to gasses and poisons. You end up spending almost half the game acquiring the three hives needed for the minions to open up new areas in each level. I constantly ran into roadblocks requiring me to backtrack and wander around a level until I ran into a new area I hadn’t discovered. When I say the level design is bad, I mean piss poor. There are no memorable landmarks, just linear pathways that loop around, and turning around can literally look like two other directions you came from.

While navigation is a serious chore the use of minions is limited. There are no puzzles to be solved, just destroy everything in their path and make sure you use certain colors for certain enemies if need be. There are boss fights that are quite challenging, but then another major issue cropped up. You must horde and resource orbs to summon these minions, they aren’t free. Certain enemy types will give you different orbs, but Browns are the most needed. I constantly had to go back to a level or two that had easy to mine sheep that gave me yellow orbs. I then had to exit the level and reload for the sheep to respawn just to get enough Browns to defeat a boss. If you’re left in an area with no minions left you’re pretty much screwed. You are never powerful enough to take out tough enemies alone and some bosses can only be defeated by minions. There are mana and health fonts you can sacrifice minions into, but they are far and few between so you really have to watch your health. Minions can loot stuff and find potions to help out a little, and this is the best way to acquire gold in the game to upgrade your weapons and armor.

Once you get used to the controls and gameplay loop you will really start to see how much aimless wandering you do where you aren’t doing anything at all. I had to always keep a mental note of where a certain area was blocked and by what element so I could go back and progress and complete another mission. Progressing was somewhat satisfying but I spent 75% of my playtime wandering around these levels trying to remember where to go and figure out what part I hadn’t discovered yet. Another issue I would run into is not having the right minions so I would then need to backtrack back to a spawn hole and get the right minion, but it doesn’t end there. Let’s say you have 20 Browns, but now need 5 Blues because an object is in water. I would backtrack to a Blue spawn point I remember, but you can’t send back Browns in a Blue spawn point. I then had to back all the way back to the beginning of the area just to send the Browns back. This is stupid and tedious and there is so many quality of life issues that could have improved the game. Let me send back any minion into any spawn point. Also, why spawn points? They’re so far and few between let me just summon them from the ground anywhere. I already have a limited amount based on the orbs I collect.

With that, all said, the game might be worth a look if you really love the humor in games like Fable or from the mid-2000’s fantasy era. I also felt despite the game toting being evil I never felt truly evil. You can save people for rewards or kill them, but it doesn’t seem evil. The game never went above and beyond this so I just felt like a misunderstood good guy the entire way. What? The visuals hold up, the control is cumbersome but doable, and the gameplay is unique, but the constant aimless wandering, lack of a map or compass, and poor level design lead to tedium and make the game just plain boring.

L.A. Noire – 9 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/16/2020

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Switch, Xbox 360, Xbox One. Tagged: l.a. noire, la noire, open world, rockstar games, shooter, team bondi, third person shooter, tps. Leave a comment

Publisher: Rockstar Games

Developer: Team Bondi/Rockstar Games

Release Date: 11/14/2017 (XONE/PS4/Switch) 05/17/2011 (X360/PS3) 11/08/2011 (PC)

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $59.99, $49.99 (Switch/PS4/XONE)

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America loves to romanticize the police. Despite the political environment, we are in, the only way we can really satisfy our lust for crime and murder mysteries is to put ourselves in the shoes of the police. L.A. Noire is set in an almost historically accurate 1940’s Los Angeles right after WWII ended. You play as war veteran/detective Cole Phelps in solving a drug mystery and many murder mysteries within.

The game starts out like any typical open-world game by slowly introducing gameplay elements to you before opening the world up. You are Cole as a beat cop who is called to a murder scene. You chase down a suspect, investigate some clues in an alley, and you’re so good at what you do you magically get promoted to a traffic detective. L.A. Noire has a few core elements and it mostly sticks to these throughout the game ad nauseum. The first element is the crime-solving. This is done by picking up various objects in an area, examining them, and moving on. This sounds interesting in theory but 90% of all objects in this game are completely useless and really don’t need to be picked up and examined. There are maybe one or two objects that are puzzle boxes and a couple of documents that require you to tap on certain information. It’s cool the first time you do all of this, but after that, it’s boring and feels pointless. Make the objects I’m holding more interesting or allow Cole to do more than twirl it around.

The next core element is interrogations and this implements Team Bondi’s groundbreaking motion capture technology that actually makes facial animations life like, but in a creepy uncanny valley type of way. Sure, you see neck muscles move, eyebrows twitch, and it all looks nice, but on hardware that couldn’t run the engine very well, these realistic life like faces look odd on low textured and poly counted characters. The whole point of an investigation is to use these facial expressions to determine whether someone is lying or telling the truth and it never works as intended. There is no set to tell that the game gives you to look for, and it always becomes a guessing game or a crap shoot. Most of the time the logic never makes sense based on what the game wants or its hyper-specific. A certain question may seem like selecting Good Cop would be a good idea because that’s what your guts tell you, but instead, you were to accuse the suspect and pick a piece of evidence that you never would have guessed. The interrogations are an awful guessing game and I never felt engaged like the developers wanted.

The next part of L.A. Noire is exploring and gunplay. Fire fights are mundane and feel pretty lifeless. There are a cover system and the weapons shoot, but they all feel the same and there’s no feedback or satisfaction from firing these WWII era weapons. Each fire fight is a whack-a-mole style shooting gallery of enemies popping their heads above cover. When you’re not shooting you’re chasing people or driving around. Driving is one of the worst parts of the game as compared to Rockstar’s other offerings, it feels stiff, slow, and lifeless, and I had no fun driving around the city. Sure, Los Angeles looks pretty good with some great landmarks, but having a piece of a fence bring my car to a complete stop is nonsense. I can ram through a fire hydrant, but a wooden fence will stop my car dead in its tracks. The driving is inconsistent and even car chases are no fun.

There are 40 side missions called “Streets of LA” but these are just various car chases, shooting galleries, or on foot chases and repeat and become stale and annoying. Thankfully there’s a fast travel system that allows your partner to drive to the next destination to skip all the boring driving. I understand this is a realistic game, but Mafia did it much better. There are 95 different cars in the game, but they honestly all drive the same and it just becomes no fun after the first hour of the game is over. There are other side objectives like finding hidden badges, all the landmarks, and trophies but why bother? Anything outside of the story cases is just completely boring and stiff, there’s a layer of polish that’s seriously missing.

Lastly, we come to the story and characters. Nearly every character is completely unlikeable in the sense that they are just plain boring. Cole Phelps is a goodie-two-shoes who can do no wrong and has zero character flaws which make him very unlikable. His partners on the four desks you work are also just as poorly written. I hated them, but not because they were written so well that I wanted to hate them. They were just so average and too Mary Sue. One partner was just a lazy asshole cop and never budged from that stereotype, another was just corrupt, and the issue is that there was no development. No back story into any of these characters and Phelps’ flashbacks to WWII did nothing to make you care for him as he acted just as stubborn and perfect as he did as a cop. For the game being a noire there is zero character build-up or any reason to care. The overarching story doesn’t actually pick up speed until the last few cases, as each and every case drones on and on and is exactly the same as the last just in different orders. I never once felt interested or attached to any one case. Give me fewer cases and build-up the victims within so I can feel like the boring twists are worthwhile.

And that’s where I conclude with L.A. Noire. It’s just “okay”. Each of the many cases feels rudimentary in the end and mundane and I felt like I was just checking off boxes (literally) and had no reason to care for the first or last murder case. The driving is painfully stiff and slow and despite 1940’s Los Angeles looking nice it’s stale and boring with nothing going on inside. You can’t even shop for clothes or go buy weapons. It’s just a giant hub world to get from point A to B. Streets of L.A. side missions are just randomized gameplay loops of chasing, shooting, and driving with neither of the three being particularly interesting in their own right. So, is L.A. Noire worth playing? Sure, it’s a fun game and some of the cases are decent and I did want to see what happened to Phelps in the end, but just barely. After getting so far in the game I felt like I had to finish it hoping it would pick up in the next case. The game plays and looks great on Switch, but has performance issues and bugs that required game restarts. The framerate can dip into single digits in certain spots, but it’s still very playable.

Halo: Reach – 10 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 02/23/2020

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, Xbox 360, Xbox One. Tagged: 343 industries, 343i, first person shooter, fps, halo, Microsoft, pc, reach, the master chief collection, windows, xbox, xbox one. Leave a comment

Publisher: Xbox Game Studios

Developer: 343 Industries

Release Date: 12/03/2019, 09/14/2010 (X360)

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $19.99

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It was a brave move to move the Halo franchise away from Master Chief’s point of view. After the success of ODST, Bungie continued this move with a prequel to the original game and how Cortana was discovered. You play as a ragtag team of elite soldiers and you play as Noble Six. The funny thing about Noble Six is that he is basically a nobody, and you witness the deaths and heroisms of your fellow squad mates and search for the last hope of humanity.

The game plays and feels exactly like Halo 3 which is a good thing. The game has many of the same weapons and power-ups as Halo 3 as well. The game has a decent length of 9 levels and the progression is well done. Each level takes place in a new area so I never felt bored like I did in ODST. From outdoor areas with sweeping vistas to tight and controller corridors. The game is fast paced, hectic, and a lot of fun. I felt it was less difficult than previous games and much more balanced. I was able to quickly get a feel for my favorite weapons and the ebb and flow of the gunplay and enemies.

Again, the same enemies in Halo 3 exist here with the introduction of the Brutes from Halo 3, they make for a formidable foe and some of the toughest in the game. There are a few flying creatures, and I found there was less vehicle combat in this game than any others in the series. Most of the game is on foot and there’s nothing wrong with that. Most objectives will require you to activate or defend something and this is typical for FPS games back in the day, but it never felt old. Halo has this magical formula of great AI, enemy balance, and knowing when and where to use each weapon. You know what situations calls for which weapons and when you see the weapon you go for it, and when the situation flips you know when to drop it and go for another. I know in tight corridors I want a shotgun so I drop the pistol and pick up an energy rifle as a scoped weapon is useless. When I run out of ammo I know there is an alien equivalent lying around which is great.

Reach just really isn’t much different than Halo 3 or any game before or after it. It’s a solid game with one of the better campaigns in the series, and the multiplayer is rock solid. With this being a spin-off you’re expected to see asset flips and familiar gameplay, but shift from Master Chief is what makes it feel a little fresh. With the update for The Master Chief Collection, the game has better visuals, runs at 60+ FPS, and supports ultrawide screens, mice, keyboards, and current generation hardware. It looks dated, but clean and feels like a modern shooter does on PC. I didn’t run into any crashes or major glitches so its a solid port.

I don’t have much else to say other than it’s a good Halo game. The ending is solid, albeit sad, and sets you up for the main trilogy. I loved Halo 3 so being able to get back into that era of Halo was great, and the upgrades make this a no-brainer for any Halo or FPS fan. If you don’t like Halo this game will not change your mind at all as it’s about a rudimentary for the series as it gets, and the story is a little on the light side compared to other games in the series. I didn’t care for any of the characters, and if you aren’t familiar with the future timeline it won’t make much sense to you.

King’s Quest: The Complete Collection

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 11/27/2019

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Xbox 360, Xbox One. Tagged: activision, adventure, king's quest, sierra entertainment, the complete collection. Leave a comment

Publisher: Sierra Games

Developer: The Odd Gentleman

Release Date: 07/28/2015

Rating: Everyone 10+

MSRP: $39.99

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King’s Quest is one of the oldest gaming franchises as it dates back to the 8-bit gaming era on IBM PCs and Commadore 64, but it’s not very well known being a PC exclusive series. It also hasn’t been updated in a couple decades, so to see Sierra themselves publish this franchise got people excited, but King’s Quest landed in an era when The Walking Dead and Telltale Games way of doing adventure games reigned supreme. King’s Quest is a retelling of the life of King Graham and his family and his struggle to rebuild the kingdom of Daventry.

Chapter 1 starts out great with Graham trying to take down a dragon and steal a magic mirror. Graham’s past adventures are told through older Graham telling them to his granddaughter voiced by Christopher Lloyd. The typical adventure game stuff happens with walking around, talking to people, examining objects, trying to figure out which objects go where to progress, and the occasional button tapping and switch pulling. Chapter 1 has an action-oriented beginning segment and then the rest is set in Daventry with lots of backtracking and object hunting which I am not a fan of. I prefer The Walking Dead style of adventure games in which you walk around the immediate area, discover a few things, and have dialog choices and lots of scripted gameplay. Even games like Life is Strange does the exploration just right. I feel King’s Quest relies on this too heavily and it drags the game down in later chapters.

Once you get to Daventry you have to complete a series of trials to become King and you meet pretty much every main character in the game. I found the humor to be nice if not cheesy, the voice acting was great and the art style is decent, but the graphics are seriously dated. I also found some of the object hunting very vague and hard to figure out what to do and this was present through every chapter. I also didn’t like how you couldn’t skip dialog and cut scenes in the first chapter only. Outside of the constant backtracking through Daventry, the game is well balanced and fun. There are a few logic puzzles thrown in for good measure too.

Chapter 2 is where things fall flat with just a giant cave area to explore and you must rescue some of the characters, but it’s not explained that you can lose all the characters for the rest of the game if you don’t do things in a certain order. The object hunting vagueness is never more annoying than in Chapter 2 with the entire chapter completion relying on this solely. I could never figure out what objects were supposed to do what and go where and sometimes I flat out missed objects. You are supposed to sleep every day and each day the characters lose health. I didn’t know this until after day 3 and I lost two characters. Eventually, I found out I did everything completely wrong and was left with one character and the rest are out of the story throughout the entire game. It’s very unfair and difficult and wasn’t really all that fun.

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Chapter 3 is probably the best as it feels more like other adventure games. A little bit of object hunting, but mostly story and action sequences. It was really fun and the story at this point was picking up and felt faster paced. Then when Chapter 4 hit it slowed completely down with nothing but puzzles. There are about 20 or so puzzles in this chapter and some are easy and some just make zero sense no matter how you look at it. It was better than object hunting as this chapter had the least amount of that including backtracking. Chapter 5 mixes everything up as the story concludes but you go back to exploring the same Daventry as Chapter 1 all over again and it’s just so tedious and boring. The ending consists of insanely difficult logic puzzles, a few are fun, but most of them make no sense. Then the game ends with an object hunting epilogue chapter that is also a chore fest.

King’s Quest just couldn’t pick one style of gameplay. One chapter is object hunting heavy, while another is all story and action, and the next is all puzzles. It’s very disorienting and makes the game feel like a chore to play despite the interesting characters and fun stories. I loved hearing Christopher Lloyd speak and there were a few nice plot twists, but nothing too crazy. The story is forgettable for sure but has a nice conclusion that doesn’t have a cliffhanger. But who is this game for? King’s Quest fans for sure, and maybe adventure game fans, but fans of just modern adventure games might be turned off by the old school shortcomings of this game.

Overall, King’s Quest is a fun 10-hour romp through Medieval times and following the goofy King Graham and co. through their adventures is fun while it lasts. The game suffers from poor pacing, indecisive gameplay choices, dated visuals, and some incredibly vague puzzles. With the small price tag these days, this is a fun weekend play through if you want something to veg out on or play with someone by your side. I would have wished the dialog choices had more meaning as most of them are pointless no matter what you chose and there is no real way to sway to the story outside of Chapter 2’s character starving mechanic. I enjoyed King’s Quest, but there’s just so much more it could have been.

South Park: The Stick of Truth – 5 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 09/22/2019

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Switch, Xbox 360, Xbox One. Tagged: adventure, obsidian, rpg, south park, the stick of truth, ubisoft. Leave a comment

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Obsidian Entertainment

Release Date: 03/04/2014 (PS3, PC, X360) 03/13/2018 (PS4, XONE), 09/25/2018 (NS)

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $59.99

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Good ‘ol South Park. One of the granddaddies of television backlash. Before Family Guy was South Park. An adult cartoon featuring four children living in a rural town of South Park, Colorado who run into various antics and adventures. The series is still ongoing and started in 1997. I remember fondly as a kid not being allowed to watch the show unless my parents watched it first, and if it wasn’t too graphic, we could watch a re-run. The Stick of Truth is a turn-based RPG with roots from the show and features the same humor as well.

You play as The New Kid, or Sir Douchebag despite Cartman ignoring whatever you name your character, which is hilarious. You’re a voiceless protagonist that is swept into the children’s D&D game of The Stick of Truth. There are two factions fighting over it, the Elves and the Knights. Your goal is to continuously get the Stick back from the various people who steal it and it leads to one crazy adventure. Throughout the game, you also have to recruit two factions that are the girls and Goths. This leads to various interesting areas like a UFO where everyone is getting anally probed, to shrinking down to a gnome and battling on the bed your parents are having sex on to crawling into Mr. Slave’s anus and fighting through his intestines. Yeah, it has over the top humor that will offend most and is one of the most graphic games I have ever played, but that’s not a bad thing.

Outside of wandering around the town of South Park discovering the few side quests there are, you can shoot things down and bash open things to find a hidden treasure. Just like any RPG, you have armor, weapons, consumables, and cosmetic items. The weapons and armor come in steadily and I was always happy to have a new weapon that let me hit harder. Depending on the class you choose it will affect what weapons are available in the game as you can only find weapons for that class. There are fast travel points, which are a lifesaver. You have four different abilities you acquire throughout the game such as shoot, buddy commands, shrinking, and using your anal probe to teleport. These are all context-sensitive so you can only use them when you’re allowed, but they give a sense of discovery as you can access parts of the game later on that were blocked before. Your magic consists of…farting. Yes, you fart for magic and you have four magic attacks you learn. Dragonshout, Cup-a-Spell, Nagasaki, and the Sneaky Squeaker. These sound downright hilarious and absurd, but who still don’t laugh at fart jokes?

Combat is where the meat of the game is and it’s flawed for sure, but works. You can only have one other person in your party, but the enemies can come at you as large as groups of six. A strategy is key here, especially during boss fights, as you need to balance consumables, magic, power attacks, abilities, and what your partner is capable of. It’s good to know that the Nazi Zombies can’t be grossed out, but are only weak to bleeding. You can hit them all you want, but you will only do 1 point of damage until their bleeding effects stack up. It’s not too hard to figure out and I only died a couple of times through the whole game. Any RPG fan will be able to dive in and understand right away. The combat is surprisingly deep, but these mystery buffs can frustrate some.

The game is also not particularly long-running at 8 hours if you just finish the main quests. It’s a fun story with awesome humor and tons of references to South Park episodes and geek culture. South Park isn’t afraid to be bold and do what it does best. The jabs at right-wing politics are especially funny as well as name brand references and various other things. South Park’s characters have always been memorable and stand the test of time. This is by far the best South Park game ever made and it captures the show perfectly. Of course, the game isn’t for everyone as some of the humor may come off as childish, crude, brash, or just downright offensive, which is fine. Everyone’s sense of humor is different, but that doesn’t stop this from being a bad game. It may be too simple at times, with combat that can drag on too long, but a lot of love and effort was put into this by the guys who made Fallout 2, New Vegas, and Divinity: Original Sin. I can’t complain there.

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter – 13 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/03/2019

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 2, Sony Consoles, Xbox, Xbox 360. Tagged: advanced warfighter, first person shooter, fps, ghost recon, grin, military, red storm, shooter, tom clancy's, ubisoft. Leave a comment

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Grin

Release Date: 05/03/2006

Rating: Teen

MSRP: $59.99

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Ghost Recon has always been a part of my childhood as it was one of my dad’s favorite games. While we only had the inferior PS2 versions, they were kind of fun to play and really challenging. The slow pace of crawling through enemy territory and deciding the best way to take them all out without dying after 3 shots could sometimes be quite rewarding especially since this is what the series was popular for. GRAW carries this over on the PC version specifically while the Xbox 360 version is faster paced. I personally think this is a much inferior version and the slower pace feels dated and boring.

After so many Ghost Recon games, it was exciting to get a new game in the series on the brink of brand new technology. While the PC version sure looks great, it uses a slightly different engine and is in a first person perspective rather than third like the Xbox 360 version. Everything just feels completely different such as enemies not staying tagged with the orange diamonds and this became a real big problem. You get a drone in this game but it’s tied to a tactical map rather than viewing it in real-time overhead. You can use basic commands to send squad members to an area and take out enemies, but you’re so blind and the angle of the camera for the map is really strange and distorts your perspective. Many times my men died because I didn’t know what was ahead and unless you play at a snail’s pace you’re going to die a lot.

That also goes for your character. Two or three shots and your dead and the checkpoints are so infrequent and spread apart that it leads to many frustrations. The PC version should have a manul quick save feature and it doesn’t. The character walks like a geriatric on a crutch or sprints as fast as a turtle. The maps are bland and void of any type of action or ambiance. Just plain walls, silos, warehouses, and blown up cars. Once I did get a few bad guys tagged I would send my guys out, but stray too far and the tags disappear which is really pointless. Just on the training map alone, I died maybe 6 or 7 times because it’s just so hard to see what’s coming up in a large open map. I need something like, I don’t know, my drone’s tags to stay up and I see where every bad guy is and either skip some or avoid certain areas.

At least giving commands is rather simple as using the mouse wheel or number row tells your guys to stop, follow, attack, or carry out commands set on the map. However, the AI is weird as sometimes my guys would pop people I never even saw and then not engage on tagged targets I told them to attack. They would just stand there and stare and sometimes get shot up and tell me that the target isn’t reachable. With all of this combined, this makes for a buggy and frustrating mess of a game that doesn’t exist on the Xbox 360 version. The snail’s pace alone isn’t fun and is boring and bland and takes away all the character and amazing pace of the console version. Why Ubisoft tried to make the PC slower is beyond me as I wanted the 360 version just with better visuals maybe? Even the art style is completely different despite most of the maps and missions being the same.

Overall, GRAW on PC is a huge let down as Ubisoft thinks we want a slower more boring game? It feels more like Rainbow Six than Ghost Recon and carries with it too many of the issues from past Ghost Recon games. Get rid of the slow pace and animations, make the AI better, and stop making up crawl around a massive map trying to pick off-targets. It’s just not fun at all. Some people may love this, such as those who actually like boring tactical shooters that play at a crawl, but GRAW on PC just doesn’t cut it and shouldn’t exist when a superior version exists on Xbox 360.

Too Human – 11 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 08/01/2019

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, Xbox 360. Tagged: action, hack and slash, Microsoft, silicon knights, too human, Xbox 360. Leave a comment

Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

Developer: Silicon Knights

Release Date: 08/19/2008

Rating: Teen

MSRP: $59.99

Available Exclusively On

What do you do with one of the most infamously bad games of the seventh generation consoles? Well, you play it of course! Why would play such a masochistic game? For curiosities sake which is why most people play terrible games anyways. Too Human is a hack and slash style game comprised of Norse mythology and mostly a lot of problems.

You play as the Norse god Baldur whose purpose in this game is completely unclear as the story is lost, pointless, and full of so many plot holes I lost count. Something about trying to find out about the death of his wife and the Aesir trying to kill Loki and they literally never explain why. With the game only having four chapters and 6 hours long there’s not enough time to establish a good story and characters. Now, before I go on a long rant about what’s bad about this game, as there’s more bad than good, let’s at least talk about what actually is good. For starters, the combat system is an interesting idea with the right analog stick being used for attacks kind of like a twin-stick shooter, the issue with this is you have to rely on a completely brain dead camera with presets that never really work. It’s unresponsive, sluggish, and the number of combo attacks can be counted on one hand. Aerial combat is out of the question as timing pop-ups is nearly impossible, but that’s still not the worst problem. Gun combat works well enough and you have to rely on it quite a bit because the melee combat is mostly broken, but more on that later still.

There is a lot of loot in this game and some of it is quite good as well as blueprints you can pick up to create the most powerful armor in the game. Each armor piece has a unique look and that was at least nice, but it’s lost in the pile of crap this game has. Let’s also talk about these Cyberspace sections that are 100% completely useless and have no meaning in the game. You will find a well here and there that connects you to a vibrant and foilage-lush “cyberspace” which is used for only one purpose and that’s to waste your time. In these tiny rooms, all you do is push open a door or lift something to open up something in the “real world”. Why bother? Why can’t I just do it in the real-world? The cyberspace is also never explained as to why it even exists or its purpose. Some times the cyberspace would only hold a treasure spire that had health orbs. All of that for just a couple of health obs. It’s one of the most pointless features in a game I have ever seen.

Let’s get back to combat. I can’t think of any more positive things for this game. While a right stick oriented combat system could work it just doesn’t here. The fundamentals of hack and slash Diablo-style combat are just completely broken. Outside of the easiest enemies that die in one hit you can never get your combat momentum up enough to make large combos. Anything above those one-hit enemies requires a dozen hits for starters all the way up to enemies that require parts of their bodies to be targeted and taken down. This becomes a problem when you’re swarmed with enemies with zero hit feedback and you have to take each one down one at a time. You could pop them all up into the air, but taking them down this way takes forever as air combat is practically useless as explained earlier. Sometimes the animations don’t connect, sometimes Baldur just stands in one spot spinning his weapon around despite me telling him to move. This leads to the largest issue of the entire game, death after death. I died 127 times in 6 hours and this causes a long death animation to play out in which a Valkyrie comes down from the sky and picks you up…just to restart in the same spot, but nothing else resets. What’s the point of death then? I died on the final boss maybe 30+ times and each time I went through a 30-45 second death animation just to spawn in the same spot. It’s absolutely frustrating and has no purpose.

When it comes to leveling up and upgrading that’s also pointless. You get skill points to spend, but the tree is so useless and poorly designed that you must unlock a previous item before getting to the next. It’s just one line straight down and you can’t skip around really. Each skill can hold 10 points and it needs 5 before moving onto the next one. I only got to level 27 before the game ended so there’s not enough time to unlock all the skills. No matter how much I leveled up or how good my armor or weapons were I took the same amount of damage and dealt the same amount of damage. Never did I surpass a certain enemy and only take 2 hits instead of 7 after acquiring a much more powerful weapon. Enemies level up with you so that same enemy from level 2 takes the same amount of hits at level 20. Speaking of enemies they are repetitive, dull, brainless, and repeat hundreds of times ad nauseum. It’s a bore-fest.

To wrap all of this up, the entire game is just broken, frustrating, and boring. Audio constantly cuts out and the death animation song bit gets stuck through the whole game. During the final boss fight, I had zero audio except Baldur’s grunts and that death song repeating randomly and cutting out. The level design is abysmal at best with bland generic corridors literally copied and pasted through a level. There’s no variation or break in the patterns. Bosses are laughably easy or frustratingly difficult such as the last boss in the game. 90 minutes to kill her just because of how little my level 27 hammer did against her. I literally shaved pixels off with each hit and it’s broken up into four stages. Even if you exclude the 10 minutes worth of death animations, it still takes way too long because of the poor difficulty balancing. Let’s also not forget the awful characters, poor dialog, and a story that makes about as much sense as a car with square wheels.

Even the game runs poorly with massive frame drops in the menus no less, and muddy textures. There’s hardly anything redeeming about this game except that you can play co-op and share the misery with a friend. Too Human died for a good reason and remains my least favorite Xbox 360 exclusive to date. Do yourself a favor and play something much better.

Alan Wake – 7 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 07/17/2019

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, Xbox 360. Tagged: alan wake, horror, Microsoft, remedy, scary, third person shooter, tps. Leave a comment

Publisher: Remedy Entertainment/Microsoft Game Studios

Developer: Remedy Entertainment/Nordic Studios

Release Date: 02/16/2012 (PC), 05/18/2010 (X360)

MSRP: $29.99 (PC), $59.99 (X360)

Rating: Teen

Also Available On

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thrustmaster TH8A Shifter Add-On

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 03/18/2019

Posted in: Editor's Choice, Hardware, Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Xbox 360, Xbox One. Tagged: 7 gear shifter, add-on, gear shifter, h pattern, shifter, th8a, thrustmaster, wheel shifter. Leave a comment

Manufacturer: Thrustmaster

Release Date: 04/22/2016

MSRP: $169.99

If you’re going to have a racing wheel, especially one as expensive as the T300 RS-GT Edition, then you need a shifter add-on. For people who really don’t care about shifting, it’s fine, but enthusiasts are really missing out on half of the experience. Shifting adds a whole new layer of challenge and control to racing games like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.

The shifter is much bigger than I thought, and heavier, being made of 90% metal and using something called the H.E.A.R.T. system so it feels and acts like a real car shifter. The box comes with a DIN to DIN and DIN to USB cable. This is actually really important as PC requires DIN to USB as most games won’t recognize the shifter plugged into the back of the wheel. That’s mainly reserved for consoles. You also get an optional sequential plate for those who want to shift but not use the H pattern. You can also change the plate by rotating it 180 degrees and even tighter the stick itself to make it looser or tight based on your preference. There’s so much more to this shifter than I anticipated and it impressed me every step of the way.

I opted to make the shifter as tight as it could go as it felt more like a newer car and gave me better feedback as to where I was at. After installing the drivers and making sure everything worked I booted up Forza Motorsport 7 and the shifter was recognized right away. Even without using the clutch, the shifter added a new dimension to my racing that I have never experienced before. It took a while to get the timing down, but I noticed a new depth of difficulty to these games that weren’t present before and that’s learning the shift timing of your vehicles and where to shift correctly on the track. This may scare some people away, but it actually improved my lap times and my first place wins went way up because the shifter forced me to learn the track rather than just memorize where all the turns were.

Having it clamped to my desk next to my wheel is sure made this already bulky setup pretty monstrous, but it feels so good to play and I can’t go back to racing with a controller on simulators anymore. I spent hours racing and it sucked me into the game, even more, when I would get bored after a half dozen races or so. This is the way these games are meant to be played, and thankfully this shifter is compatible with any wheel because it’s USB and connects seperately from the wheel. The DIN to DIN connections makes it compatible with other wheels that had add-on DIN ports so it’s widely universal.

My only gripe is that adjusting the tension on the stick isn’t easy and I nearly stripped the screw doing it. The manual says you can do two full turns but in reality, it was a half a turn from completely loose to tight. The screw is pretty deep and at an angle, so it’s very hard to get to and damaging the screw the way I did means after so long it won’t be adjustable anymore, so make sure you get it to a setting you like and leave it.

Overall, the TH8A shifter add-on is a must have, and while it costs more than most cheaper wheels alone, it adds a layer of experience and enjoyment that you can’t get with just the wheel itself. If you ever wanted to dive into a more enthusiast experience and you have either a cheap or expensive wheel consider this add-on and you won’t regret it.

F.E.A.R. 2: Reborn – 9 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 12/23/2018

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, Sony Consoles, Xbox 360. Tagged: 2, alma, dlc, f.e.a.r., first person shooter, fps, horror, reborn, scary, shooter. Leave a comment

Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Developer: Monolith Productions

Release Date: 08/27/2009

Rating: Mature

MSRP: $9.99

Also Available On

I never really got around to this DLC and I was not missing out on anything. The DLC is about 1 hour long and you play as a Replica soldier who gets called to Paxton Fettel (I’m not sure if it’s a prison cell or just his soul in the epicenter of the nuclear blast from the first game) and have to blow through your own kind to get to him.

The game mainly consists of the large firefights that are actually quite tough (I died a few times here) with tons of enemies, mechs, and even a turret sequence thrown in. The game starts you out in a mech and you go from there. It’s a short rollercoaster of every element created for F.E.A.R. 2 and it’s fun while it lasts, but a disappointing DLC as it adds nothing new to the game, even playing as a Replica doesn’t change the gameplay one bit.