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Retrospective: HD Era of Gaming – The Best and Worst Horror Games

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 09/17/2022

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

We all love a good scare, right? Horror games are some of gaming’s greatest past times. Usually booming in October, horror games from the past and present are played all around the world. The problem is, there just aren’t a lot of them made, and the best ones are far and few between. Usually, this is a great time to dig up old classics rather than trudge through recent crap. While the PS1/PS2 era was the golden age of horror games, the HD era, or the seventh generation of consoles, struggled and was probably the most anemic when it came to horror games, especially the good ones. There’s a reason why some of the rarest and most coveted physical games are horror. It’s the genre that’s been the least explored and not done well enough most of the time. If you can look past clunky controls and awkward gameplay most retro horror games do provide good scares, atmosphere, creepy monsters, and good visuals. I’ve compiled a list of the best and the worst.

The Best

Alice: Madness Returns

American McGee is well known for his dark interpretation of the Alice in Wonderland series. The first game, American McGee’s Alice, was clunky mechanically but was a visual treat. The same goes for the sequel. It’s a gorgeous game with a lot of dark themes dealing with mental illness. The enemies are fantastically designed and the levels themselves are living art. Despite the incredibly repetitive gameplay, this one is a blast to play through.

Silent Hill: Homecoming

A lot of people didn’t like Homecoming due to its more action-oriented combat, but I actually quite liked it. I feel it was the last good Silent Hill game in the series and it still retains the creepy atmosphere and insane creature design. The haunting music is still present as well. While it’s not as tense as the original trilogy, Homecoming does have better combat despite it being the wrong focus here. This was the first game in the series that was part of the jump to the next generation. The next game in the series, Downpour, would be considered the worst in the series, and I personally hated it. These would be the last games in the series to date.

Metro Series

Metro 2033 and Last Light, these were some of the best horror games to grace the seventh generation of consoles. While they played and looked best on PC, the console versions still looked great and did a good job giving us scares. The post-apocalyptic horror series had an intriguing story and tense atmosphere along with crazy creature designs. The final game in the trilogy, Exodus, would be on the next-generation systems and receive mixed reviews.

Shadows of the Damned

While not inherently designed to give you nightmares, Shadows has a lot of horror elements in its design such as creepy enemies and an overall atmosphere of dread. It’s more of a comedy horror title, but it has tons of style that help make swallowing the shallow substance a bit easier. It’s also not very good-looking, on a technical basis, but the art is awesome. Most of Suda 51’s games were one-shots and never saw sequels. SotD never saw high enough sales even if he wanted to do a sequel. To date, it hasn’t seen a remaster, remake, or port.

Condemned Series

Condemned: Criminal Origins really showed us what next-generation visuals could look like. The E3 2006 demo blew me away and it was one of the reasons I got an Xbox 360. This was one of the few games that looked the part and really pushed the industry into a new era of HD visuals. It’s a game that can be replayed many times and you will always have a fun experience. It’s too bad the series is dead because Monolith nailed the atmosphere here. The game is intense with crazy melee combat and incredibly dark and haunting levels. Crazy bums coming out of nowhere breathing and panting and trying to attack you in dark hallways is something else. The sequel, Bloodshot, was great but focused more on combat and less on the atmosphere, so it’s not quite as scary. It was also the nail in the coffin as due to the poor sales of the sequel Sega shuttered the series for good. To date, the series hasn’t seen a remaster, remake, or port of any kind.

Dante’s Inferno

Dante’s Inferno is one of the best hack and slash games ever made, but EA was bound to make sure you didn’t know that. It didn’t get much attention or was considered just another God of War rip-off. While the game was short, it had incredibly responsive and fun combat, an interesting protagonist, and insanely gory and adult-themed levels. It’s just too bad the story wasn’t fleshed out enough. What’s here is a fun 4-5 hour game that you won’t find anywhere else. Sadly, the game’s low sales sealed its fate to have no sequel, caused Visceral to shutter, and hasn’t seen a port, remaster, or remake to date.

BioShock Series

Specifically speaking about the first two games, BioShock had a crazy dark atmosphere and some creepy enemies and horror that kind of just oozed everywhere. There was no jump scares or downright frightening scenes, but you always had a sense of dread and fear and that’s really hard to pull off in games. The game was more about psychological horror and isolation and it sure pulled it off mostly the best in the first game. Surprisingly, the entire trilogy was released during this generation and would receive barely passable ports later on as the BioShock Collection.

Dead Space Series

While Dead Space 3 was mostly about the action and less about horror, the first two games were damn scary. I would consider them one of the scariest games I have ever played. Jump scares aside, there was a constant foreboding presence of something lurking around every corner and the Necromorphs are some of the greatest video game enemies of all time. This was peak horror during the HD era. Another trilogy that saw its ending in the same generation cycle. The series would stall here and the first game would receive a remake two generation cycles later.

Deadly Premonition

Deadly Premonition is the perfect game of it’s so bad it’s good. The gameplay is dated and feels like a PS1 game, the graphics are terrible, and the voice acting is awful, but the writing and overall atmosphere the game presents are well done and memorable. It really feels like a PS2 game that was quickly ported over to next-gen consoles without any improvements in mind. It can be scary in the sense that its trippy Japanese horror weirdness will freak you out more than scare you. This is one of the few games you should stomach the terrible design for the weirdness. It’s worth it. It would get a sequel in the next generation, but not look like it and would be poorly received

F.E.A.R. Series

Oh man, this one brings me back. The first game was very scary with crazy The Ring girl vibes that were all the rage in the early 2000s. The gunplay was genuinely solid and you needed a NASA PC to run it back in the day, but forget about understanding the story. The second game had some really scary elements, but was more action-oriented and had less of a mid-2000s PC shooter Half-Life 2 style vibe to it. The third game, well, just isn’t scary at all. Another trilogy that was released all in the same console cycle. While the first game was a port and was released during the PS2/Xbox era, the entire trilogy would never see a remake or remaster.

Resident Evil Series

The Resident Evil series really took off after the previous generation. This generation would see the most action-focused games yet. Resident Evil 5, 6, and Operation Raccoon City were the main releases. There was also an HD port of the 3DS exclusive Revelations as well as Revelations 2 as a sequel. Some would consider this the weakest run the series had only to go back to its roots in the next generation cycle starting with Resident Evil VII. The games also weren’t very scary around this time. They were just too action-focused and didn’t have the nuanced scares and puzzles as before. Revelations would be the only sub-series to feel scary or have any tension at all. Operation Raccoon City would be lauded as the worst game in the series.

The Last of Us

The Last of Us would be considered one of the best horror games ever made. It was wildly praised and made waves throughout the gaming industry receiving awards and praise from all angles. The tense stealth scenes with the Clickers were awesome. These monsters are some of the creepiest and eerie creatures ever made for a horror game. This wasn’t just another zombie game. It would receive a sequel in the following generation as well as some of the most controversial decisions ever for a game. It would also receive a full remake and remaster.

Outlast

Released at the tale end of the HD era of gaming, Outlast never saw a port to consoles until the next generation. It was damn scary. This small indie game made waves and became one of the top streaming games of all time. The tense atmosphere and overall great design, in general, made Outlast terrifying. The sequel would be released several years later on PC and consoles as well as a port of the first game released about a year later.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Amnesia was probably the top-streamed video game of the year in 2010. Game streaming was new and scare reactions reached the charts on YouTube. There hadn’t been many really scary games during this generation. It was all action-focused and multiplayer-focused to generate sales. That’s why this indie game was released on PC only at the time. It had interesting puzzles and enemies you couldn’t fight. It wouldn’t receive a port until many years later and two-generation cycles later. The sequels A Machine for Pigs and Rebirth would be poorly received, and I personally didn’t like them that much either.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Series

The STALKER series wouldn’t sell well at first but would gain a huge cult following. The entire trilogy was released around the mid-life of the HD era and was exclusive to PC. It’s rough around the edges, but a huge following of modders would improve the game and it wouldn’t be until two generations later when a true sequel would be released. The game never saw a port to consoles and for a reason. The engine is already poorly optimized on PC and wouldn’t do well on consoles. It would be a huge undertaking to port the entire trilogy and it would be hard to market.

Alien Isolation

Alien Isolation wasn’t technically developed for HD consoles, but mostly for PC and next-generation systems. It came out right as the next generation was coming in and the HD versions were quickly forgotten. Isolation is considered the best game in the Alien series and one of the best horror games of the last couple of decades. It captures the 80s aesthetic of the movies and tells a great story while being terrifying. I still haven’t completed it to this day because of how scary it actually is.

Penumbra Series

The original horror trilogy, Penumbra, was developed by Frictional Games who would later go on to make the Amnesia series. This was released for PC only and never received a console port. It was a less talked about indie series that was loved among horror fans, but indie PC games didn’t receive the same spotlight that they do now. Console gamers didn’t care unless they were ported. Penumbra is a slow-paced, puzzle-focused horror series all about adventure and discovery. It’s creepy, full of psychological horror, and is a must-play for any horror fan.

The Evil Within

While this is stretching it a bit, The Evil Within was mostly meant for next-generation consoles and PC. It played and looked nice on PS3 and Xbox 360, but those weren’t the intended systems. This was Shinji Mikami’s next opus and was definitely creepy and had some good elements, but was too action focused and unbalanced and the story made no sense. Some say that’s the charm of survival horror games. There’s a bit of jank that’s needed. I personally just thought this game was okay despite the amazing monster designs. A sequel would later come out, but not sell as well.

Alan Wake

This is one of my favorite horror games of all time. It has a great story, memorable characters, and a great combat system that plays off of light and darkness. I’ve replayed this game many times and it wasn’t an instant hit for Microsoft. The sales were slow and it wasn’t appreciated until much later. It received a PC port and a recent remaster. It’s a must-play for any horror fan.

Siren: Blood Curse

It was a surprise to see a niche and obscure horror title return to PS3. Siren didn’t sell or review well but is considered a cult classic and part of the classic survival horror era. Blood Curse was a digital-only episodic release that had some great scares and an overall fun adventure. Sadly, only Japan received a physical release.

The Worst

Silent Hill Downpour

Oh man, where do I start? My favorite horror series was butchered with this release. I rented this from GameFly and had to follow a guide through most of the game. It was a confusing convoluted mess and felt like a chore to play. It wasn’t scary, wasn’t fun, and was the worst game in the whole series.

Saw Series

While the movies were quite enjoyable despite their flaws, the games were just awful. They weren’t as gruesome as the movies and played it too safe. Pretty much every bad conventional video game flaw was present here. Awful voice acting, terrible graphics, bad puzzles, and poor level design.

Vampire Rain

Easily considered one of the worst games of the HD era there was no redeeming value in this game. There was nothing you could overlook. There wasn’t any “it’s so bad it’s kind of charming” to this game either. It was just a disaster and an unplayable mess. It wasn’t scary, it felt like it was trying to be several games at once, it looked bad, it played even worse, and wasn’t any fun despite all the hype leading up to release.

Aliens: Colonial Marines

This game needs no introduction. It’s been covered by every “worst of” and “most controversial” video game on YouTube out there. Its history has been extensively documented. From broken AI to awful visuals, and just a completely unfinished and broken game. It’s also considered one of the worst games ever made. It’s a stark contrast to Alien Isolation.

Alone in the Dark

I had the displeasure of actually finishing this game when it came out. I was hoping it was going to be a great reboot of a classic horror series. I followed the developer’s diaries all the way through the release and played it without reading any reviews. The game is pretty bad. It’s one of the worst games of the HD era. It was just an awful chore and a mess of a game. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t scary. It was just plain bad.

Amy

Probably one of the worst games ever made. This was a small indie game that was supposed to be full of suspense and horror, but instead, it’s a chore of a game with awful controls and graphics. The game was also poorly optimized and suffered terrible framerate issues. The story made no sense, and overall, it was just a stupid and lazy game.

Clive Barker’s Jericho

I was so excited about this game, and every time I think about or have to write about it break’s my heart. I absolutely love Clive Barker’s work and had it since I was a young teen. I fawned after the figures from Todd McFarlane and loved the characters in his movies. Undying was also a cult classic. The game was just trying to do too much at once. It had cramped level design, awful performance, dated visuals, and just felt like a chore. The only thing it had going for it was the art design. It’s one of the worst games I’ve ever played and one of the saddest scars of the HD era.

Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 07/29/2022

Posted in: Android, iOS, Mac, Mobile Reviews, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified, Switch. Leave a comment

Publisher: Akapura Games

Developer: Silver Lining Studio

Release Date: 08/25/2021

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We as humans tend to dwell on death and what lies beyond. It’s only natural as we simply don’t know. Behind the Frame explores this concept with an emotional tug-of-war of a story, but you really need to pay attention, and a lot of the story is more between the lines and not what’s really being shown in front of you. There’s a lot of assumption that you know what’s happening when the main character looks shockingly off in the distance based on the previous scene. It’s done fairly well too.

Most of Behind the Frame is puzzle solving. It takes a dark twist halfway through and it surprised me. Your goal is to acquire all five missing colors on your paint palette to finish your painting. To do this each color is locked away behind a chapter puzzle. These got rather complex towards the end, but nothing you can’t figure out without exploring and finding that key item that gives you that “AHA!” moment. Some puzzles are as simple as matching colors on a painting to memorization. Nothing is overly complex and it does eventually come together. The painting itself is a matter of scribbling enough in the empty space and it will auto-fill. Nothing extraordinary there. There are some other small tasks like making food which is as simple and dragging items around.

There isn’t a lot of context on the main character’s life itself through any reading of notes or anything. It’s pretty much learning about her past and her connection with her neighbor. The game has gorgeous anime-Ghibli-inspired art with a few small cut scenes thrown in. I never got tired of looking at the game, but it is confined to mostly her apartment. Every so often you “dive” into a painting, but it’s usually just for story context. There were a few panoramic scenes that were breathtaking. I actually felt like I stepped into a painting myself a few times.

In the end, the game is over in about 90 minutes or less depending on how long it takes you to solve the more complex puzzles in the final chapters. Without having to solve these this game is over in an hour. The story does unfold quite a bit towards the end and without voice acting it gets a lot of emotions across and I have to give the developers credit for that. Most of these short indie games don’t have any meaning behind them. They have some clever gameplay ideas or neat visuals and nothing beyond that. Behind the Frame actually tugged at my heart strings a bit and got me thinking at the end which is more than I can say for 60-hour-long AAA titles. If you want a puzzle-filled emotional evening with great visuals and fun gameplay mechanics then look no further.

Doom 3

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 07/07/2022

Posted in: Android, Mac, Microsoft, Microsoft Consoles, Mobile Reviews, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Retro Consoles, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Unknown, Steam Deck Verification, Switch, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One. Leave a comment

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Developer: Panic Button

Release Date: 07/26/2019

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The original release of Doom 3 was a huge deal. It was a technical marvel with fantastic new lighting effects and textures that could fill the latest GPU and all of your RAM. It split fans due to the slower pace and focus on jump scares (that honestly don’t really work these days anymore) and a bigger focus on the story (if you can call it that). The game retains the same dark visuals and monsters from before, but being the first game in full 3D it had a lot of problems.

The first thing you will notice is that this release has no visual upgrades outside of some texture filtering and anti-aliasing and slightly better lighting. The textures still look muddy and the models are still low-poly. With this being the third official release of this game I’m surprised more work hasn’t been done to it. You play as a marine who is stationed on Mars when things suddenly go wrong. The first couple of levels is probably the best since they slowly introduce the gameplay to you and have better-designed levels. Zombies emerge from the dark, and your flashlight is a lifeline. It does have a short battery but recharges within seconds.

The main issue with Doom 3 is its much slower pace in every part of the game. The movement is slow (you have adrenaline that’s used for limited sprinting which is annoying), and the weapons reload slowly (why is there reloading anyway?). Not to mention the weapons just plain suck. The pistol is useless outside of the first couple of levels. I never touched it after this. The machine gun is useless in later levels, and everything else just feels slow. Enemies feel slow as well. The environments are also cramped with too many enemies spawning at once and I constantly backed into walls and got stuck in corners trying to get away. Very rarely does the game ever feel like a classic Doom game with more open areas.

The level design is also terrible. The game is way too long as it is and it’s just boring hallways after hallway finding PDA access cards, running back and forth activating switches, and trying to open doors. nearly eight grueling hours of this. It felt like a chore after the first two. Eventually, you do get to Hell, but it’s such a short level with a boss fight at the end, but it still suffered from cramped areas and nothing new except a couple of enemies that finally show up such as the Hell Knight and Arch-Vile which are some of the toughest enemies in the game. I mostly stuck to the strategy of using guns that shot the fastest such as the Cell machine gun being the most powerful with the chaingun being second. I used the shotgun through most of the mid-section of the game until I got the cell rifle.

There are a few boss fights in the game that all play out the same, and in the end, the entire game is just one long boring chore. It’s fun at first, but if you are a veteran of classic Doom games then most of you may just shut this off early. This is my third play-through of this game and it’s less enjoyable each time. I originally played this on Xbox, and then PC, and then dabbled in it a bit on Xbox 360 and never finished it. Now I completed it on Switch.

Speaking of the Switch the game plays fine, but there is some slow down in the larger areas and it doesn’t always stay at 60FPS. In handheld mode, the game runs fine as well, and you have the option to turn off flashlight shadows to help, but overall it’s great to just have another FPS on the Switch. These don’t come around often. Included is the Resurrection of Evil expansion which I already finished once on Xbox and a new Lost Mission short campaign which I will get around to eventually. It’s nice that there’s some new content. Overall, this could have easily been a remake from the ground up or a mode that made it feel faster-paced like the classic games. If you are itching for a mid-2000s FPS game then go ahead. Don’t come into this thinking it’s like the newer Doom reboots. This game was a specific era of id Software at its lowest point (Quake 4, Rage)

Before Your Eyes

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 06/24/2022

Posted in: Android, iOS, Mac, Mobile Reviews, PC Reviews, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification. Leave a comment

Publisher: Skybound LLC

Developer: GoodbyeWorld Games

Release Date: 04/08/2021

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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.

Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force – 22 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 06/20/2022

Posted in: Mac, PC Reviews, PlayStation 2, Sony. Leave a comment

Publisher: Activision

Developer: Raven Software

Release Date: 09/20/2000

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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.

Postal: Brain Damaged

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 06/16/2022

Posted in: Mac, Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Unknown, Steam Deck Verification, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S. Leave a comment

Publisher: Running With Scissors

Developer: Hyperstrange

Release Date: 06/09/2022

Also Available On

I’m not the biggest Postal fan as I didn’t grow up with it. With Postal 4 being 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.

Shadow Warrior 2 – 6 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 06/05/2022

Posted in: Mac, Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified, Xbox One. Leave a comment

Publisher: Devolver Digital

Developer: Flying Wild Hog

Release Date: 10/13/2016

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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 throwing 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 of a woman’s soul who gets 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 are 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 to 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 this leads to more useless filler such as weapons 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 leveled ones and got rid of the rest. It honestly never mattered. Some enemies are immune 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 the insane amount of weapons. There are different styles that match each area such as a 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 my arsenal out 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 and 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 gib 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.

Assassin’s Creed II – 13 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/23/2022

Posted in: Mac, Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Unsupported, Steam Deck Verification, Switch, Xbox 360, Xbox One. Leave a comment

Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal/Virtuos

Release Date: 2/17/2022

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Assassin’s Creed II is by far one of the biggest sequels in video game history. When it came out everyone was blown away by the scope and ambition put into this game. It made the first game feel like a concept demo. It felt like just the core of the first game was present and so much was built on top of that game. The world was five times as big, there were new mission types, cinematic story missions, and tons of overall additions and improvements, however, the game did suffer on its own for various reasons.

This game starts the epic saga of Ezio Auditore De Firenze. One of the most iconic video game characters of all time. It was a surprise that Ubisoft scrapped Altair and his story so quickly, but we are greeted with 15th century Italy and various historical characters that appeared during that time such as Catarina Sforza, and Leonardo Di Vinci, and Machiavelli. The story itself is fairly easy to follow and has a few twists, but most of all have a really surprising ending. Ezio works his way up as an assassin knocking down templars to retrieve the Apple of Eden and keep it from the templar’s hands. The main villain, Rodrigo Borgia, is a nasty snake and overall all the characters are well written and I wound up really liking most of them.

First off, the overall way you maneuver has been improved slightly, but more things have been added. While you can swan dive into haystacks and climb ladders, the entire game has been built with parkour free-running in mind. You can climb every building and stay off the streets by staying on the rooftops. Overall, the system was impressive back in the day, but it has a lot of quality of life issues. The overall parkouring feels too sticky. Ezio will jump around like a rabbit sometimes so fine-tuning your turns is difficult to forget any type of mid-jump changes. Once you get close to a wall or object Ezio will climb and quick button presses just aren’t responsive. I would start climbing a wall and then try to tap the descent button, but instead, he would just fall to the ground. Other instances had guards chasing me while I was trying to round a corner and Ezio would cling to the wall and get stuck or jump onto the wall or object nearby instead. This can get incredibly frustrating as the system just doesn’t allow fine tuning or sudden changes.

That’s not to say the parkour system is bad. When you have a good line of sight it works well or you just want to climb broadly over a building. There were other instances in which precise jumping became a chore during Assassins Tomb missions. There is a fast walk button and holding down the run button together allows Ezio to scale things quickly. If you are holding that run button after each jump Ezio will just go in that direction whether there’s something to grab on to or not. For small jumps across beams, I had to let go of the run button after each jump to re-align myself for the next jump. Quickly parkouring around just isn’t possible due to this finicky system.

Some other frustrations stem from combat. Firstly, the system is mostly the same as the first game as it can be easy due to the whole system being a parry-fest. You can whack away at enemies, but instead, just hold the block button and parry when enemies strike and it’s a one-hit-kill city. Once I acquired my wrist blades I didn’t even use my sword anymore and never once used my secondary dagger weapons. This is a flaw in the combat itself and needs serious overhauling. It makes open combat boring and sometimes too easy. What is challenging, and annoying, is trying to lose guards and become anonymous. Sure you can blend into crowds, benches, and haystacks, and you can now hire prostitutes or mercenaries to distract guards and get them off your tail, but the combat plus finicky parkour system makes losing guards incredibly frustrating. You have to lose their line of sight by rounding corners or jumping off buildings and if you can get far enough away it will create a search radius. You can hide in that radius or continue escaping. There is an anonymity meter and once it’s solid red every guard will recognize you and it’s a frustrating mess of finding a town crier to bribe and take 50% of the meter away.

With those two major things out of the way that leaves content itself. The sad thing about all this new content is that it’s meaningless in the end. There are no rewards for any of it except for achievements or completion’s sake. There are 73 viewpoints to find which are actually fun as most of these are climbing puzzles on their own. Now it does still feel like overkill as each viewpoint only reveals the surrounding buildings and not much else. I felt there were just too many. There are races, assassin contracts, courier missions, and fights. These are boring and pointless and just there to add in filler. You can really tell this is where the Ubisoft plague of too much crap to do in a game starts. The only rewarding side content is The Truth puzzles. There are 20 hidden glyphs throughout the game and finding them will grant you puzzles to solve. These get increasingly hard, absurdly hard in fact, in which the clues become obtuse and impossible to decipher. However, what’s revealed is a cool video.

The story missions themselves are mostly varied with various tasks such as assassinations, tailing, fights, horseback riding, and the occasional scripted mission. I really liked the story and characters enough to stick around and wound up completing all viewpoints, The Truth puzzles, and finding all the codex pages which max out your health. I do need to mention the various gadgets you get which are mostly useless. Poison darts can make enemies go berserk and attack each other, but you also have smoke bombs, throwing knives, a pistol, and that’s about it. I mostly used the throwing knives to take out rooftop guards and smoke bombs were great to get away from large groups of enemies to become anonymous. In fact, they’re required to reduce frustration.

The visual upgrade for The Ezio Collection is minimal. There aren’t any actual improvements outside of some draw distance gain, anti-aliasing, and texture filtering. The lighting is slightly improved as well, but not by much. The game runs incredibly well through with no slowdown, but I did run into a few crashes and glitches. I wish we got a full remaster or remake, but what’s here is fine. It’s crazy how well this plays so many years later and just shows how far ahead the game was at the time. There are a lot of quality-of-life improvements that need to be done and most of the core mechanics have frustrations you will need to forgive or workaround, but the story and characters are worth sticking around for. There is also a lot of bloated side content that has no meaning or rewards including fully upgrading your villa which literally just generates more income and isn’t used for anything besides dying armor, buying weapons, and armor itself. The assassin and templar tombs are a lot of fun as well.

Norco

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/04/2022

Posted in: Mac, PC Reviews, Steam Deck Unknown, Steam Deck Verification. Leave a comment

Publisher: Raw Fury

Developer: Geography of Robots

Release Date: 03/24/2022

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Adventure games seem to be making a comeback which is a great thing. My fondest memories of PC games are adventure games with The Longest Journey being my favorite of all time. They are basically interactive novels with visuals, and sometimes voice acting, to help illustrate the story. Norco is one of the better modern adventure games of late but still fails in a few spots.

The story itself has moments of clarity, but like most text-heavy adventure games of late, it becomes a convoluted mess with few characters to care about and a disappointing ending. You play as two different characters – a mother and a daughter. You play as the mother, Catherine, in the past playing events that lead up to the present daughter’s events. The daughter is chasing her mother’s ghosts and trying to recover belongings that a corporation took from her. These belongings are supposed to have answers as to why this corporation targeted your family. The whole game is set in a 20-minutes-into-the-future borderline post-apocalyptic New Orleans. There isn’t too much world-building, but a lot of poetic metaphoric dialogue that a lot of games right now think is clever and interesting, but just compounds the fact that a more normal cohesive story is what makes adventure games memorable.

There are a few moments where you might enter a combat mini-game, but these are far and few between and it seems almost impossible to fail these. Various typical adventure game elements are lightly sprinkled throughout like inventory items, backtracking, and code memorization, but surprisingly no puzzles really. A lot of important clues and context will be shown in green during dialog and talking to your party can give you hints which is helpful. I rarely couldn’t figure out where to go. The explorable areas are just still images that you can move your mouse around and click on things to interact with. The entire game is from a first-person perspective. There is a small mini-map in the corner that lets you click around to various “rooms” you’ve unlocked and then there’s a larger map to jump around to the main areas.

The best part about the game is the art and abstract character design. There is some weird imagery here and I really enjoyed the pixel art. The entire game gives off a great sense of atmosphere and foreboding helplessness. You meet weird characters, an occult, strange objects, and overall the game just pulls off a great sci-fi setting, but just the setting. As the game progresses the entire reason why you’re doing any of this is lost and it just devolves into just abstract poetry and makes no sense. Sometimes things seemed normal and there was decent character building, but it just wasn’t enough to push it to that top-tier adventure game level. I still didn’t care about anyone in the game enough as right when things seemed to pick up the game dropped the ball with more abstract poetry, weird imagery, and unanswered questions.

Overall, Norco has great art and super weird characters and settings, but the overall story is just a convoluted mess that devolves into poetic abstractness that seems to be plaguing adventure titles today. I love fantastical stories, but please make them make sense. Poetry isn’t making your game more clever, deep, or interesting. It just takes away from a cohesive narrative and likable characters.

Kentucky Route Zero – 9 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/02/2022

Posted in: Linux, Mac, Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Verification, Steam Deck Verified, Switch, Xbox One. Leave a comment

Publisher: Annapurna Interactive

Developer: Cardboard Computer

Release Date: 02/22/2013

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I love adventure games, especially ones that do something interesting or unique for the genre. Mostly I love adventure games with fantastical stories and great characters. Graphics usually comes last with these kinds of games. Kentucky Route Zero does have an interesting art style and is signature for Annapurna, but it doesn’t really add anything to the game either. The first couple of acts of the game start out well enough and are easy to follow, but the game’s story quickly devolves into visual novel-level walls of text and pointless stories that lead to nowhere.

You play as an antique shop delivery driver who needs to make one last delivery before the shop closes to 5 Dogwood Drive. You start out at a gas station on a highway and a strange man tells you about taking “the Zero” out to the address. You soon meet an electronics repair woman and end up seeing strange stuff on a TV. You follow clues to get the Zero and this is where act two leads you. Once in act two, the game’s pace stays sharp and breezy. There’s nothing to really play here as you mostly just click around leading the characters to icons to read more dialogue and text. There are no puzzles, combat, scripted events, etc. This is a straight-up borderline text adventure. Once you hit act three things slow way down and then there are the pointless interval chapters in between each act. One chapter was 30 minutes of nearly endless boring dialogue that didn’t add to the main story at all. It was painful to read it all and I actually read novels in real life regularly. It’s dry and dull and not interesting in the slightest.

Each act has several scenes and they are usually rather short. Once you click on each icon and read all the dialogue you will advance to the next scene. There are at least a lot of locales and the visuals are striking in some scenes. There’s little spoken dialogue, but I actually quite liked the songs here. They were very sad and helped set the tone of the entire game. This also isn’t a horror adventure either. It’s just super weird and I wish I could have followed the story or cared about any of the characters. If the dialogue wasn’t so damn boring I would care more. In some areas, I straight up just skipped through the dialogue because it was either really abstract and poetic that didn’t add anything to what was going on or just super uninteresting. Many people will probably shut the game off after act two as that’s when things really slow down and drag.

I want to say that the ending was worth all the hours of reading, but it wasn’t. It made no sense to me and the entire trip to the address almost felt like it was an afterthought. I would say I don’t want to spoil anything, but there’s not much here to spoil. There’s so much character and world-building that the actual adventure is eventually forgotten about and said world-building is dull. There are a lot of slice-of-life moments talking about real-life personal situations from the past and then there will be some sort of narrative poetic thing for a while and back to two random characters talking about how much they like a certain food. Normally this is great, but in this game, it doesn’t add anything as I have to already care about the characters to want to read this stuff.

Overall, Route Zero starts out great and quickly drags on into a dull and uninteresting visual novel with interesting visuals. There isn’t a satisfying ending and the intervals between acts are pointless and dull. There is zero gameplay involved and mountains of text to click through. This would normally be fine if the actual characters and scenes were interesting. Some may like the abstractness of some of the writing while most others will fall asleep.