The first Cancertown was just fantastic. It told the slow-spiraling downfall of a terminally ill brain cancer patient who has a disease that makes him think he’s already dead. He then slips into Cancertown, a place full of complicated politics between monsters over who controls the town. The second volume tells of the further demise of Vince Morley and the final struggle to get rid of Cancertown or help find another ruler.
You can already tell from the excellent art that Vince is too far gone. His hair is really long; he hasn’t shaved in weeks, and it also looks like he hasn’t bathed in a while. A girl from his apartment continues to bug him and slowly falls in love with him. Vince finds out he can now come in and out of Cancertown freely without crossing points. Sarah ends up in an asylum, and the doctors are curing her. This is causing disorder in Cancertown, and all the players are trying to convince Vince to stay except one: Papercut. She plays a huge role in this series, but there’s a surprise ending, and I love it.
There’s a lot of action and fighting in this one because everyone just starts brawling with each other. Vince’s ambassador skills aren’t working so well, and everyone has had enough, especially since Piecemaker is gone. No one is there to stop them. What we get here is a great conclusion to a very original dark story, and it goes out with a nice bang. The story is still a bit confusing, and even after it was all said and done, I didn’t quite figure some stuff out. Was Vince really diagnosed with a brain tumor, or did his disease tell him he had one? There are a few flashbacks to a psychologist’s visit, but I’m not so sure his disease was making him imagine he had it. Or did he have the brain tumor that was causing the disease? It’s never really clear, but I guess that’s the point.
Cancertown is an amazing comic series, and any horror fan should read it. It’s a deep psychological horror, and the good ones rarely come around. Just be prepared for some deep politics and some unanswered questions.
I love these sick and twisted horror comics, and Cancertown is some of the best I have read. You follow a man named Vince Morley who is diagnosed with a mental disorder where patients feel they are missing organs, are already dead, or are missing limbs. He has a terminal brain tumor (that he calls Baby Meatfist), and he ends up slipping into this world of Cancertown. It all started when he met a homeless and deformed girl on the street. He gave her a blanket because his doctor said he should do nice things before he died. Later, another bum steals her blanket, and he slips into Cancertown. The lore is pretty interesting, but the whole story feels convoluted and confusing until the end.
You are always left in the dark, but there are a lot of politics in Cancertown. Crosshair and Corpsegrinder are two sick players who both want Morley dead. Crosshair uses sentient eyeballs as weapons and pets. Corpsegrinder can grow bigger when people fear him. Later on, you mean the piecemaker and the papercut. Papercut ends up being Morley’s ally, but who she is and where she came from are later told in the second volume. All the characters’ names are very unique, and I love their personalities. You can slowly see Vince fall apart as he finds crossing points and slips back into the real world, usually waking up in places he can’t remember being. He wants to destroy Cancertown and everyone in it, but he wants to save this girl as well.
As you can see, the story is really complicated, and it is. The art is very dark and atmospheric, if a bit messy. There’s a lot of gore and violence in this series, as well as a lot of cursing. I was honestly more disturbed by Vince’s mental state than anything else. To see a terminally ill cancer patient fall apart at the seams is just horrifying. I just wish the story made a bit more sense because, even at the end, I was still a bit confused about what was going on, but you end up forgiving it for the entertaining journey that Vince goes through.
Cancertown is a rare mature comic; it delves into the psyche of the human mind rather than superpowers. I loved watching Vince fall apart, and I was horrified at the same time. The characters are fantastic and so original that you won’t put the comic down. If only the story wasn’t as mixed up and complicated or just told better, but that’s the only issue I can pull from this series.
I honestly love the Cthulhu lore, despite how complex it is. H.P. Lovecraft has a very old writing style, and his stories can induce headaches when trying to follow them. This comic series does a decent job of summing up the mythology and bringing newcomers into this grand and dark lore. The world of Cthulhu is all about deep madness—so deep that our minds can’t even comprehend it. Lovecraft went beyond zombies and the boogie man. He dove into the human psyche, tore it to shreds, and tried gluing it back together. This three-part series sees some scientists from Miskatonic University trying to solve a mystery about an evil cult and mysterious beings snatching people.
First off, the atmosphere hits right on the head. Right from the start, you get an eerie feeling. The first issue is a back story that one of the characters tells. It’s about how he came across the cult for the first time. A man named Noyes is actually a puppet behind the strange monsters who have burrowed under old New England. The comics flow pretty well, but with only three issues, not much can come of it. There’s no strange plot twist, but at least there are some creepy scenes and a bit of gore. The art style does a good enough job; it’s all done with colored pencil, so it’s a bit strange coming from the marker and other mediums used in comics. The characters are forgettable due to the short length, but the ending is pretty creepy.
The story is a bit more on the realistic side than the pure fantasy that the series stuck to in the later comics (Fall of Cthulhu). I honestly wish they went the more fantastical way, but seeing this in a more realistic sense makes it a bit more believable. The monsters are drawn just as Lovecraft intended, and they look horrendous. This little mini-adventure is fun while it lasts, but forgettable in the end.
Metro 2033 was one of the most atmospheric shooters in the past decade. It had an excellent story, great characters, and solid shooting action. It just wasn’t paced very well, and the stealth sections nearly ruined the game. That has all been fixed in Last Light; this is one of the best shooter and horror games to come out in a long time.
You play, once again, as Artyom. Set in the post-apocalyptic Russian underground metro system, the creatures, radiation, and violent storms have driven everyone underground. Life isn’t so simple. After Artyom launched the missiles on the Dark One’s nest, the war against the communists is getting more heated. The only way to stop this war is to find the last surviving Dark One and use it against President Moskvin to stop the war from destroying the last humans on Earth.
The game is more about Artyom’s journey than the overarching story. The game is broken up into underground sections, stealth, top-side sections, boss fights, on-rails stuff, and then safe cities. The atmosphere in this game is just phenomenal. Never in a shooter—in a long time anyway—have I felt actually afraid. When you’re underground in these dark, decrepit tunnels and you’re hearing strange sounds all around, you get really scared. These sections last for minutes rather than seconds, like most shooters. They let you marinate in this dark, frightening atmosphere. Sometimes your flashlight won’t work, and you just have to use your lighter to see. The monsters are terrifying because they look so close to what they once were—just mutated. This plays out through the entire game, and it’s very tense.
You can carry three weapons with you at all times. They are all great weapons to shoot because some of them are kind of slapped together with parts. The Bastard is an interesting side-loading machine gun; it gets jammed often, and you have to be careful. Ammo is scarce, and you must make sure you save your military-grade bullets to buy ammo and better weapons along with attachments. Once you get to a city, it’s like a breath of fresh air. After being in such a scary situation, you are so relieved to see civilization. There are some throwable objects at your disposal, like bombs, incendiary flares, knives for stealth, and then you have med syringes. You get night vision goggles later on, and you have to use your charger to keep your flashlight and goggles powered on. When you’re on the surface, you must wear a mask, and you need to find filters to continue breathing. Artyom can also wipe his mask when things get blurred out. This is a fantastic mechanic—a wipe mask button—and it just adds to the feeling of survival. If you get hit too much, your mask breaks and you can’t breathe.
While I stuck with mostly the same guns throughout the game, you always feel slightly underpowered. The monsters are vicious and dangerous, and you can’t take them all on at once. Sometimes stealth is the best option, and it’s so much better. AI doesn’t detect you a mile away, and you can stealth kill easily with your throwing knives or from behind. The levels are laid out much better, and you get a sense of accomplishment when you get through a level for the first time. The pacing is fantastic, and I just couldn’t put the controller down; it was that good.
The graphics are some of the best out there. On consoles, it actually ruins the atmosphere because a lot of stuff is taken out due to the underpowered hardware. On PC, the game jumps to life with mind-blowing lighting effects, super-high-resolution textures, and various other things that actually severely downgrade the experience on consoles. Last Light is one of those games where graphics are a huge part of the experience. The lighting, textures, depth of field, all that stuff makes the game just come to life. You have to play it to experience it. I honestly have to say that you won’t get the same experience on consoles as you will on PCs. If you buy the PC version, you also get the Metro 2033 eBook for free.
Overall, Last Light is one of the most intense and frightening shooters made in the past decade; nothing comes close. The sheer terror you feel when Artyom is breathing heavily in his mask, blood and mud are dripping down your mask, and your watch says you only have 90 seconds of filter life left. Mutants are after you, and if you panic and run to find filters, then you have to turn and face them. With the destroyed world around you, you are constantly reminded that this was once a habitable place. You walk through buses and planes with skeletons in the seats and apartment buildings with ghosts that haunt them. Anyone who wants to feel survival horror, don’t play Resident Evil or Silent Hill; Last Light is your one-way ticket.
Dead Space is one of my favorite franchises of all time. The first game was the most memorable with its deformed and twisted monsters, a very deep and intriguing plot, and revolutionary HUD that was very minimal. Dead Space 2 was more of the same, but not enough new to make it memorable. It also had so-called multiplayer, which was fun for a few hours but quickly got boring. Dead Space 3 is here with a co-op and a new more open design. Is it better than DS2? In a way.
The story is pretty epic and is told on a larger scale now. You are no longer stuck on a derelict ship or space colony. You start out on Earth in your run-down apartment, where we find out Isaac has turned himself into a depressive bum. Ellie has recently left Isaac for another man, but they soon get brought back together to save humanity once again. A crazy man named Danik is trying to find a way to bring humanity to “ascension” and “rebirth” by wanting the Necromorphs to destroy everything. You and a team cast off to the Marker homeworld to stop all this once and for all. The problem here is that the game is stretched out so much that the story is hard to follow during the first half. Cutscenes are too far apart, and so little is told because it is saved for the end. The story is a bit disappointing, and the ending doesn’t have the wow factor that it should. You just finish it and think, “That’s it?” It’s one of those trilogy endings.
The gameplay is pretty much the same and untouched. Things feel a bit more smooth and streamlined, but nothing has changed there. The first big change you will notice is that you can create your own weapons. A crafting system has been implemented where you get loot off of dead bodies to craft various items. You can build weapons from blueprints or build your own. You start out with a frame, then add an upper tool, a lower tool, and a tip for each tool. After that, you can add chips that increase the gun’s stats more than two support modules, such as more ammo, stasis-coated bullets, and various other things. This is really awesome and allows you to combine your favorite weapons. Stick a flamethrower under your shotgun. How about a blade gun under your plasma gun? Do whatever you want. The problem here is that you can only carry two weapons now. This really sucked. I guess they thought that each gun had two weapons, so it really was four. It doesn’t really work that way. It also takes a really long time to gather enough materials to craft anything. I couldn’t really do much until I was nearly halfway through the game. This is to encourage people to spend money on microtransactions and sucker them into buying materials. Taking advantage of impatient gamers isn’t a nice thing to do, but what can you expect from a greedy corporation like EA?
The crafting system is similar to your suit because you can gather materials to upgrade them, like air capacity, stasis, telekinesis, health, and armor. Another major addition is side missions. There are only seven of them in the game, but three additional ones are added for co-op only. I found these side missions boring because they were all the same. Go through the same identical compound, killing hordes of Necromorphs, to find a chest of stuff. The stuff isn’t even that good. The loot packs don’t give you much, so these side missions were disappointing. At least the main missions are fun and varied, with some fun scripted events. You can set out scavenger bots to help find loot if you want, but that’s just a distraction rather than a mission. I felt EA really tried too hard with this game. Instead of making the game memorable like the first one with scares, they just make it completely action-based and stretch out the world.
The first half consists of you floating around several ships in space, trying to find information and various other things. Humans are a new enemy in this game and are a nice change of pace, but the same old Necromorphs pop up. Sure, they are cool, but there weren’t enough new ones. By the end of the game, I was so sick of these damn things. I honestly don’t want to see another Necromorph again, not because they’re scary but because I’m tired of seeing them. The game just isn’t as scary as it used to be. In the beginning, it felt a bit eerie, but after that, it was just the same hordes of monsters coming at you. Once you are done being in space, you crash land on an icy planet, which is the “homeworld,” but things just feel the same here too.
The game just suffers from fatigue at this point. Fans will enjoy this game for sure, but you long for a good scare or something to really change. There is a lot of backtracking towards the end of the game, with you running back and forth through the same area several times. It is almost like the developers ran out of ideas towards the end. I would have loved a shorter, more solid campaign, but what is here is fun. The graphics look good on PC, but the textures still stink. Up-close shots really show that this is a console port. There are some nicer lighting effects, but they are subtle. Even an older rig can handle this game maxed out.
Should you buy this game? If you are a hardcore fan, sure, but I just suggest waiting for a price drop. When you finish this 15-hour campaign, you will be slightly disappointed. Sure, it’s fun and all, and crafting weapons is neat, but the scare factor that people expect when they play a Dead Space game is nearly gone.
Doom may be the father of first-person shooters, but like the eldest man, you can’t teach it new tricks (or were those old dogs?). I was really excited about this compilation because I expect a nice HD upgrade to Doom 3 and a lot of cool extras, but nothing like that exists. Instead, we get all three Dooms just thrown together, with 3D capabilities for Doom 3. What a waste of money and time. This is pretty much for people who have never touched Doom before, but if you have played them all, just skip this. I will talk about each Doom game separately, so here we go!
Doom 3
I didn’t have a high-end PC when this was released, so I got stuck with the Xbox version. It wasn’t all that great then, and it still isn’t. The game is very straightforward, linear, and lacks the fast pace of older Dooms. There’s barely a story holding all this together, and one of the biggest issues with the last two games plagues this one: confusing levels. I can’t tell you how many times I got lost in this game because every hallway looks the same. The guns are boring to shoot, and the graphics today look terrible with really low-resolution textures, bad lighting effects, and cheap scares. The game doesn’t even capture the sick and twisted satanic cult stuff from previous games. There’s a lot of keycard finding and door opening like in the last game, so is it even worth playing? Sure, the first time through is a bit fun, but if you played this once, don’t bother again. BFG includes the Resurrection of Evil expansion, which is just more of the same, but at least the environments are a bit different. There’s also no one playing online, so you can pretty much forget that feature.
Doom
I had more fun with the older Dooms than I did with the younger ones, mainly because I had never played them before. The pace is really fast, and it just looks more interesting and is more fun to play. New gamers may be put off by the 2D graphics or the fact that you don’t aim up and down; just point at the character and shoot. The biggest issue with this series is the stupid keycard finding and switch finding. The levels are laid out so poorly that you always get lost for longer than you should. The best levels were the ones that didn’t have switches or keycards. There is also a very small enemy variety, which makes shooting boring after a while, and Doom has three expansions to play through. Each expansion looks different but is utterly the same, with nothing new added. This is a classic game, though, and should be played by every FPS fan out there.
Doom II
Not much has changed from the original except for a couple new enemies and different levels. Doom II was shorter-lived than the first game, with only one expansion, but contained 21 levels. Doom II is still worth a playthrough because it is mindless shooting that is fast-paced and just entertaining. These games are meant to be played in short bursts, not hours at a time, or you will get bored.
As it stands, BFG Edition is really disappointing, with no upgrades or extras. I at least expected Doom 3 to be upgraded to HD with a cleanup job, but none of that exists. Why id was so lazy with this is beyond me, but they have been pretty lazy lately (the terrible Quake 4 and Rage are examples). I do not recommend buying this if you have played any Doom before. This is for people who have never touched a Doom game and are interested. For the low price point, it is a good bargain, but fans will be sorely disappointed.
Silent Hill has had a rough patch, and I thought Book of Memories would change this. The game seems really great at first, and I like the idea of the series branching off for the first time into a different genre. The dungeon crawling path works well for the series, but it is poorly executed here. The first few levels are fun, but later on, they repeat the same way over and over again. The game doesn’t feel much like Silent Hill at all except visually, and I promise you there isn’t a single scare in the whole game.
The story is paper-thin, in which a man or woman (you get to create a character with a very weak customizer) gets a strange book for their birthday from the mailman seen in the last terrible game, Downpour. It is full of memories, and you decide to go inside and change them. That is pretty much it. The story is barely delivered through notes and scattered audio clips. Silent Hill is known for good stories that are at least confusing but not boring. This one is boring and uninteresting.
The game has a top-down perspective, and you run around levels, opening rooms and completing challenges to find puzzle pieces. Silent Hill is known for puzzles, but these are pretty lame (more on that later). You are safe in the hallways, and each room is random. That is probably the most fun part of this game. What’s in the next room? Some need keys to open, which are found on red-highlighted objects. When your flashlight is on, these objects you can search through are highlighted, and they contain things like ammo, medkits, weapons, keys, and repair tools.
The whole point of the game is to run around, smacking down everything in sight, but this is where the game mainly fails. The weapons are nods to pretty much everything seen in a past game, like the steel pipe, wood plank, fire axe, revolver, sledgehammer, and a few original weapons. The issue here is that they can break very quickly. This made the game extremely tough because enemies are really hard to take down. Even after leveling myself up a lot, I never did much damage. Using repair tools can come in handy, but they are hard to find, and you can’t hold many of them. You can upgrade your backpack more, but this requires a lot of memory residue, which is also hard to come by. Saving up this currency is even tougher because you will be spending it on medical kits and repair tools 90% of the time. See what I mean? This is all a vicious cycle that never ends.
There are RPG elements that allow you to equip relics that increase stats. Leveling up takes forever and doesn’t seem to do any good. The combat itself is boring and stiff. You just mash an attack button until everything dies. The lock-on button is handy for ranged weapons, but blocking didn’t really do much good for me. I felt the combat system should be more refined and intuitive for a dungeon crawler. Maybe add some spell casting? I can’t tell you how tired I was of the game by Zone 11. I just called it quits. One redeeming quality of the combat is the fun boss fights every three zones. You have to use strategy and discover their weaknesses, but why can’t regular enemies be like this? Most enemies are from previous games, and very few are new. I just felt the developers didn’t know what direction to go in—Silent Hill survival horror or dungeon crawler?
It really shows in all the flaws in the game. The puzzles are the same three that repeat over and over. Event rooms are confusing, with zero clues on what to do. Even the karma bar seems useless because picking up enemies’ blood (depending on whether it is light, blood, or steel) will move your karma bar around. It seems pretty pointless, actually. The only way to really enjoy this game is to co-op with up to four players, because the game is really hard. Not to mention the fact that if you die before saving a spot in each level, you have to do it all over again, which is not fun.
Book of Memories has some nice graphics for the Vita; nothing special though. There are no scares to be had, and the same track loops over and over again. The story is uninteresting, the character creator is weak, the combat difficulty is all over the place, the combat system is boring and stiff, and many other elements wrapped in the game just feel wrong and half-baked. I love the idea of a dungeon crawler in this series, but please pick one side or the other. Also, make it scary next time.
Now that we are almost done with this series, I am sad that the next one will be it. Episode 4 sees the gang trying to get on a boat and out of Savannah, Georgia, but things don’t go as planned. There are a bunch of new characters this time around, but most are hard to care for because they make brief appearances. By this point, most or a little of your gang will be with you, but this episode is mainly lacking the suspenseful choices like in the last one. We get bigger areas to explore, a little more action, and finally, a ton of zombies.
The series has been lacking any zombies lately and has just dealt with internal turmoil, but Episode 4 skirts this and brings the gang back to realizing that the zombies are the real threat here. There’s a strange calm before the storm within the group; the conversations are tense and borderline everyone going postal on each other. I found that there was a lack of gameplay here and that it focused more on delivering a story, but that is ok in this series. There is more action with some zombie shooting, action-oriented puzzles, and larger areas to explore. I sat through the whole episode in one go because it was so intense and entertaining. You always want to know what is going to happen next.
The new characters are hard to really like except Molly because of her shady personality. The new guys are brief and seem pretty generic. I really don’t care for Christa or Omid, who we met at the end of the last episode. Christa is selfish, and Omid is boring and just seems useless. What grows even more are the characters you have right now from the original group. Clementine and Lee’s relationship really blossoms here, and their trust will be tested.
This episode is just a mishmash of everything from the past ones: lots of zombies, action, large areas, new characters, and tense conversations, but nothing very serious. What has stayed the same throughout is the constant, intense atmosphere that makes you stay in the game, and you never want to quit until it’s over. This is my favorite adventure series of all time. The game puts you in control just enough to make you feel like you made all the important choices. The game has been built up to the climax, and the cliffhanger ending here is so abrupt and so sudden that you just hang your end, knowing you have to wait another month or two for the last episode. This is just like a good TV series, but better.
Silent Hill has been one of my favorite series of all time. I remember renting this as a kid and being so scared that I couldn’t finish it. The last great game was Origins, which truly brought the game back to its roots on the PSP and PS2. Homecoming was a surprisingly good entry into the next generation, but Downpour is an utter disaster. The team claimed they were going to bring the series back to its roots and redeem the series. They only made the series worse with so many things going wrong that I can’t believe this game made it onto store shelves. Is there anything good about it? Sure, if you are a hardcore fan, you will probably play it anyway, but it will leave a nasty taste in your mouth. If you have never played the series before, stay far away from this and pick up any other game in the series.
You play as a prisoner named Murphy Pendleton who gets into a shady deal to kill the supposed killer of his son. Murphy has been charged with the murder, but for some reason, he is being transferred. Upon this transfer, the bus crashes, and only you and one female officer survive. So far, the game seems fine. You wander around a bit until you start finding clues on how to progress. Once you get out of the first area and into the “free-roaming world,” that’s when things really fall apart.
Silent Hill is meant to be a linear story where you search a building and figure out what to do. The team tried putting in “side quests” here that are just absurdly cryptic and nearly impossible to solve without some sort of walkthrough. Even with a walkthrough, I gave up on a few because the world you wander around is no fun to navigate! They put a convenient subway system into fast travel, but you need to do one of these hair-brained side quests to unlock the routes! Who’s brilliant idea was that? One side quest called “Shadow Play” has Murphy trying to find several different trinkets in cardboard boxes throughout town. In this huge, confusing mess, how am I supposed to find tiny little trinkets in cardboard boxes? Then you have to figure out where to put them, and then you have to use your UV light to get the shadow they cast just right. Then you use those clues to find a place to get stupid loot like pistol bullets or an axe. Not worth it.
The game is littered with these pointless and meaningless side quests that are nigh impossible to figure out. Even the main parts of the story are hard because these areas are huge, vast, and confusing to navigate; even the traditional Silent Hill map system doesn’t work. In fact, the puzzles are even more confusing and broken. Sometimes they won’t activate or are so cryptic and confusing that you just give up on them. The only fun parts are the Otherworld sections, but even these have their problems.
In the Otherworld, you engage in chase sequences running from some sort of void that is never explained. Usually, you are running in labyrinthine paths that are confusing and will make you die often. Solving puzzles in the Otherworld is fun because they are like other Silent Hill games and the only puzzles that are. There’s some interesting art being used here, but in the rest of the game, it is not Silent Hill-ish at all. In fact, I’m ashamed to call this a Silent Hill game.
To make things even worse, the combat is absolutely horrible. It makes exploring Silent Hill harder and makes you want to just quit the game. No matter how much you swing your weapon, you will always have a hard time hitting these boring, non-scary monsters. All four of them. That’s right. There are just four monster types in the whole game. The monsters always move faster than you, and they can block. Their attacks are frustrating, and blocking doesn’t do any good. Once you start swinging after a block, they dodge and just hit you over and over again. The combat is clunky and frustrating, and there are way too many enemies thrown at you at once. It doesn’t help that when it rains, the enemy count is higher, and they are harder to kill and do more damage. Firearms are scarce as they are, but even an axe breaks after a few swings.
It doesn’t help that the game just isn’t scary. There are a few moments that made me jump, but just a few. The enemy designs are stupid and lame (all of them are humanoid), and the atmosphere doesn’t hit home. The legendary music is even missing here with repeated sound effects. The graphics are ugly and outdated; this really looked like a good Xbox 1 game. The story isn’t even that great, with some plot holes and stupid endings. There are framerate issues that abound, and the auto-save is unfair and will drop you back to a spot where you have to do entire levels over again.
Overall, Downpour is a complete disaster, and any Silent Hill fan will act like this game never existed. This is the worst Silent Hill game ever made, and it is just chock full of problems with very few redeeming qualities. The Otherworld parts are fun, but there are only four of them, and they aren’t that long. There’s a cool end boss, but other than that, this is nothing like a Silent Hill game should be.
During the first 10 minutes of the game, the first thing you will think is, “WTF?” There’s nothing else to describe this game full of childish, mature humor and sickly, twisted ideas. That’s not to say that it’s bad. Most of the humor in the game is actually so childish and gross that you can’t help but laugh. Some stuff is downright hilarious, such as Johnson’s Boner Gun. Before I get into any detail, I have to say the story is pretty entertaining if it is straightforward and simple. You play Garcia Hotspur, who is a Mexican demon hunter and has a demon accompanying him in the form of a floating skull named Johnson. I didn’t really care much for Garcia because he is a typical potty-mouthed action hero, but I found Johnson to be the steal of the show. He’s a posh British demon that uses clean cuss words and is a stark contrast to Garcia, which makes him more likable and hilarious to listen to. Garcia is trying to get his stolen girlfriend, Paula, back from the demon lord Fleming, and of course, you follow him into the depths of Hell.
That’s about it, as far as the story goes. There’s a small twist at the very end after the credits, but after you see it, you won’t be surprised it happened. The main attraction is the banter between Garcia and Johnson and the stories you read throughout the game. Some of these made me bust up because they were so funny. Other than the story, I have to say that I really love the guns in this game. The creators force you to use all three, but they are upgraded so much that they feel like whole new guns throughout the game. Boner is your pistol, Teether is your machine gun, and the Skullblaster is your shotgun. These can be upgraded by finding blue gems from bosses. Boner turns into Hot Boner, which can set explosive mines; Teether can get a homing upgrade; and Skullblaster will eventually get an upgrade to create giant bombs. You can find red gems throughout to upgrade your weapons and health. Garcia guzzles down alcohol to heal himself because, apparently, alcohol keeps you alive in Hell.
The game works around a light vs. dark gameplay idea, and it works well. When you are surrounded by darkness, your health depletes, and you need to shoot a goat candelabra to return the light. Yeah, it’s weird, and that’s only the beginning. Gate keys consist of shoving strawberries, eyes, and brains into creepy baby faces that are guarding the gate. One level even has you walking over a giant, naked Paula. The game never stops delivering weirdness, and that’s exactly what makes this game so fun, because hey, it’s a Suda 51 game; what do you expect?
There are a few puzzles thrown in that can be fun because they are straightforward. I didn’t even need a walkthrough to get through this game. Even the boss fights use light and darkness to be beaten. In the darkness, you can only see the weak spots of enemies, so you have to quickly shoot them because you will die. This sounds frustrating, but it’s not. You get a darkness shield that depletes before your health starts going down. The enemy design is pretty crazy but repetitive. I got tired of shooting the same demons all the time. The whole game overall is repetitive in nature because it uses the same few elements mixed around a lot. My least favorite idea was the 2D shooting levels. These were frustrating and felt like pointless filler. There’s a fun boss fight at the end of the third level, but I could have gone without these.
After you beat the 8-hour game, there’s no reason to go back. There are no multiplayer or extra modes, which is a shame. I guess if you want to collect all the red gems, you can, but why bother? This is a fun weekend rental or cheap bargain bin purchase, and nothing more. If it weren’t for the repetition set throughout and those pointless 2D levels, I would have liked this a lot more. Garcia is a hard character to like, and the story is simple and straightforward. Overall, though, this is a solid game and highly entertaining. Just be warned that mature content isn’t for everyone.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yeah, it's pretty damn awful. Notoriously one of the worst games on the PSP. A 4 was actually being generous.…