The ur-ARPG, the first big "realtime Rogue", and it's still solid. Some might argue the Crusader games or other isometric action games got there first, but Diablo set the blueprint for the next several decades of real time hack n' slash games. The aesthetic is solid even if the visuals are dated and assets limited, the music remains a brilliant background, and it remains good fun just bashing monsters and looting before returning to town. It does show its age in the constant clicking to attack, manually sorted inventory, and the fact you need a spell that costs mana to highlight items on the ground... but the core gameplay is just so simple and solid that it doesn't matter. Kill, loot, return to town, maybe do a sidequest... until you beat Diablo and the cycle of Terror starts anew.
The game that took all the good stuff about Doom and Quake, packed it into a campaign with kickass multiplayer, and proceeded to show every other FPS how to get the fundamentals right for nearly 30 years now. If you enjoy FPS games, you should havfe it already. If you don't enjoy FPS games, maybe you'll enjoy Quake 2 - but it's a quintessentially Boomer Shooter game. The remake/remaster comes with some nice addons too, new levels, the N64 maps as a campaign. Plenty of good stuff for returning and new players.
Graphics looks amazing in parts, but also has that Ue fuzz in others. Locked to 60FPS. Sound and level design so far really make me feel like I'm clomping my way through a run-down city, solving problems and occasionally busting heads. Lots of slowly exploring the city (all the better to show off the graphics with), collecting clues or finding evidence, with the story sequences carrying a fair bit of the action. Lots of tiny moral dilemmas and choices, little bits of flavour text, overheard conversations. It's not fully into immersive sim territory but it's definitely edging into the territory. Gunplay is fun and visceral, lots of explosions and over the top gore and being a metal tank of a man mowing down bad guys. Health is restored with a flask type system (OCP charges) which you can pick up, or at certain interactable points with the right points into the skill tree. Skill tree is where a fair amount of the replayability comes from as it's both combat and non-combat skills, which affect options in dialogue, what you can unlock or hack, how easily you spot hidden objects... and also let you slow down time, emit shockwaves, and of course dash. Specialising is usually better but it's flexible enough to let you play generalist. Controls are simple enough and mostly FPS standard, no jump but no fall damage either so lots of downward verticality in missions or climbing ladders to find stuff then walk off a roof. Mouse movement does seem very twitchy but sensitivity options are available to help. As far as the plot and writing goes, it's about drug dealing criminals gone terrorist and the Man Inside the Machine, with the side quests offering a fair bit of entertainment in the delivery or characters. It all feels like the sort of work Robocop would be doing, although I'm no hardcore follower of the franchise. Overall greatly enjoying, pulls me in to helping just one more citizen, and I enjoy clanking around delivering justice through overwhelming force too.
Crimsonland is one of those top down shoot 'em up games from the Reflexive Arcade and Popcap days which occupied hours for a lot of people. The core gameplay is simple - WASD to move, mouse to aim, and left click to fire. Occasionally, you may even want to press R to reload. Or use a controller if you want with this new version. Avoid getting touched by enemies or their projectiles. There are two main modes - quest which unlocks new weapons and perks for the character. Synergy is pretty important and there's a lot of perk/weapon combos to go for. Although some perks are almost mandatory to do well in the second mode which is... Endless wave survival. Gets more frantic as it goes on but with the right perks and powerups... you can survive and slaughter endless hordes of aliens in the process, for a time. Good game, alien shooting classic, do recommend.
If you're not a purist fan of MW3 or MW4, you don't want to deal with the online aspect of MWO, and just want some good dumb mech action, hard to go wrong with MW5 really. Runs fairly well on moderate hardware these days too, although I wouldn't try it with onboard by choice. Plenty of moddability, and plenty of mods, to expand on any of the cracks you might see in the base game - AI can be made smarter, loadouts can become more detailed and varied, any lore mech missing is probably modded in somewhere, you name it. If it goes on special certainly worth a buy.
This is the kind of game you got when your grandma hears you want the latest racing game but doesn't know you meant Need For Speed: Underground. It's not bad, but it definitely feels like a product of it's age and I don't think it's aged quite as gracefully as the games it's ripping off. Looks like a 2004 game, plays like a 2004 game, it's a good way to spend some time but there are significantly better racing fixes out there for the time and since then.
At the time Dungeon Siege came out, I even remember the gaming mag reviews, having characters retexture when putting on new equipment and moving "seamlessly" between areas with only the occasional elevator loading screen was considered pretty darn nifty. A full 3D action RPG of any stripe was still fairly novel at the time. But what really sells it is that it bridges a gap between the action RPG, single hero formula of Diablo and the more pause heavy, tactical RPGs like Baldur's Gate. In the end it's mowing down hordes of enemies to pick up loot to buy better gear to mow down more enemies. But it pulls it off well and with up to 8 party members, you have an extreme variety in build options and playstyles and formations. The commands and formations and AI squad behaviour isn't perfect, but it's solid enough to keep things under control. Long story short, it's old but gold, and it's a perfect way to spend an easily paused hour or two of relaxed gaming time. Plays fairly nice with modern systems too although you may want to edit the INI for widescreen.
Clunky, yet strangely compelling. One of those games which doesn't just encourage but kinda forces you to cheese through. Your characters are fragile and enemy wizards or high level monsters will destroy them without a fair degree of kiting or aggro management. Particularly early game ogres and trolls.
Some people will insist UT99 is the best, I might even be one of them, but UT2004 was the biggest, and the one that stuck in most people's memory. IT's hard to say whether UT2003 could be considered a beta for 2k4, or whether 2k4 could be considered the definitive standalone expansion of 2k3, but either way they took what people liked and iterated on it to create... an icon of the FPS genre, and in a sense you could say it marks the turning point after which arena shooters started declining overall. New game modes, a clean, visually pleasing art style and graphical design, vehicular mayhem, a wide roster of bots and bot difficulties and skins to customise to your game, mutators for even more customisation, a modding scene still active to this day for even MORE customisation, a good selection of maps expanded by the community choice release... which you can also download more of for YOU GUESSED IT BABY MORE CUSTOMISATION. It's got pretty much every hallmark of a really good, multiplayer FPS along with enough challenge for solo players to enjoy a good botmatch, and an unreal degree of malleability for folks to tweak it as they will. IF Epic hadn't flubbed UT3, IF Epic hadn't decided the new UT was less important than Fortnite, then surely there would have been a bigger, better UT out by now. They didn't... but at least UT2k4 is still there, and still manages to both play and look fairly solid by modern standards. Also it's just fun to crank up the graphics settings to hear the good old "HOLY SHIT" - and still get 2000FPS only bottlenecked by being single threaded and maxing out a CPU core.
Others have already made their feelings known on the skirmish and multiplayer access matter so, putting that aside - how is it? If we're talking just the campaigns, the main game and it's DLCs are all fairly entertaining, mostly linear missions revolving around squad tactics. The base building and general unit production side of things isn't a focus so much as equipping and levelling up your heroes, who each command a squad of troops in their particular discipline. There's a ton of different items, and a decent amount of flexibility in how you can build your army to fit your style. The 40k "atmosphere" is strong and everything looks and feels pretty true to the setting. Graphically and soundwise, still holds up pretty well. Explosions go boom, textures aren't too blurry unless you get up close, and there's a satisfying number of bright lights and flying parts. The story is pretty much what you'd expect from 40k of the time, and while the characters and voice acting aren't going to win awards nor is it bad enough to make meme history with METAL BAWKSES. Overall, a solid pickup if you enjoy the campaigns. Not as memorable as Dawn of War 1, but a sight better than it's successor. Certainly worth a pickup if it's on special. If you choose not to buy it on principle because of the backend requirements for multiplayer, I got nothing to change your mind. It's this or Steam.
