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This has just enough moving parts to create fast paced strategies but not so many you get a brain lock up in bigger fights. Blasting zombies never gets old thanks to some very pretty effects work and there's a nice lonely, creepy atmosphere to the whole thing. The story and voice acting is forgettable but it gets the job done. I like the rather rare concept here of REALLY scarce resources. You're never quite mining fast enough or have enough personnel to feel entirely secure so it's a desperate (and fun) scramble to relocate soldiers, upgrade buildings, and keep a strong outer perimeter defense as well as keep your lander protected. It's all in the placement of your energy modules and timing of reinforcements as well as cautious spending of materials. Sleek, speedy, pretty. It's everything I wanted :D
This game is continually surprising. Is that a good thing? Your mileage may vary. Nothing is really explained, the interface is awkward, the graphics and physics are janky, the voice acting is B-Tier and the whole thing is like if a game from the 90s tried to recreate Twin Peaks as a third person action/adventure. And I love it. To say 'there is nothing like Deadly Premonition' is not true. There's DNA from Alan Wake, Resident Evil 4, Killer Seven, the whole plot is basically ripped from Twin Peaks from characters to specific concepts. But there is nothing like this unholy mess of ideas blended up into a smoothie out there. This game is so bloody weird you'll just constantly be wondering what is real and more likely what was intentionally confusing and what just broke down. Case in point: random quick time events. Are they annoying? YES, especially when they end in game over, but it was just so unexpected I almost appreciate how gutsy the game can be. For those who think tutorials are from the weak, that a games mechanics should be a mystery to unravel, who want a game with a plot they keep gawking out in disbelief from beginning to end...nothing else matches up. Deadly Premonition is a wondrous disaster you cannot take your eyes off. It didn't crash on me personally but it just feels rickety and slipshod. But not because someone was lazy. This is TOO MANY ideas, not a lack of them. It's like a simulation of someone's dream without the personal experience to have any of the pieces fall completely in place. Bring patience, a sense of adventure, and some damn good coffee.
This is one of the bizarrely rare Vietnam games out there and it's an entertaining grab bag of ambitious ideas! They don't all land perfectly but there's usually some kind of redundancy system to fix any hiccups. Elite Warriors is a combination of tactical mapping out routes with bite-sized missions of various types sprinkled in. First you set your coordinates, set the marching pace, try to avoid patrols, outfit your squad, and then you're dropped into the jungle to take out a VC squad, blow up a construction site, recover a supply drop, assassinate a leader while avoiding civilian collateral...etc. It can seem overwhelming but the tutorials (although a little DIY) cover all the basics. You can even zoom out and control your squad with the mouse if you want to. There's a lot of gear and more importantly a lot of atmosphere. You start feeling the prickle of the heat and rain as you mush through the swaying leaves, giving hushed commands. The A.I for the team is such that they will not just stand around under fire (although you can ask them to 'hold fire' until they're literally getting shot at) so you don't feel like they're not holding up their end in combat. Normally you're just making minor adjustments to behavior, equipment, and positioning if you're paying attention. Fair warning the voice acting is TERRIBLE. The VC are irritating and your squad has limited voice overs, although thankfully the narrator sounds authoritative enough. The gun sound effects are punchy and interestingly there's bullet drop and compensation for distance so this is not fire-and-forget style combat. Basically this is a patient, micro-management type combat simulator. Not every cylinder fires all the time but play through a couple times and you can find out the most efficient way to accomplish your goals and keep the team alive.
For a long time this game would constantly crash or not open at all, but thanks to some kind of update we're back in business! This game is simple to learn but has a ton of depth. The one divisive issue I see, beyond the fact that this IS a very classic looking RTS game with crunched but charming graphics, is that the speed is on FAST without any adjustment possible I could find. Everything works and in fact there's systems here like custom pathfinding commands and unit stances I wish were in more games. Within seconds you can command a unit to go scouting but come back if it takes damage, or harass enemies by shooting them a few times before running away, or just stand and fight to the death. Cue times are seconds long. Resources are gathered like lightning. And fights are over in a couple action packed blinks of an eye. This aint Star Craft where units line up and fire twenty or thirty shots. You can clear out a base in the time it takes to read this sentence with the right team...or get wiped out just as fast. But it's still great fun. Several levels of tutorial are nice and concise. When the worst you can say about a game is that it's almost too fast and that the two groups have almost no difference between them but both campaigns are lengthy and diverse, it's not a bad RTS at all. Play if you felt Total Anhiliation was WAY too slow and you always wanted the opportunity to make and save patrol paths you could assign to units and squads.
I like the CONCEPT of a lot of classic games rather than the games themselves because modern advances like mouse compatibility, hovering tool tips, min-maps...they've spoiled me. Thankfully there's a middle ground between the complexity and challenge of the past and the convenience of the future! I personally love dungeon crawlers and this one is easy to get into but has a lot of options and although it does punish you for failure it has a unique mechanic of your next 'persona' character being able to improve upon the last by willing equipment and bonuses to the next one in line. This game rewards you for playing, rewards you for replaying, and even rewards you for losing since you can get permanent benefits if you sacrifice a certain amount of characters through their expeditions. The aesthetic is right up my alley. There's a bit of generic fantasy here with spells and melee weapons and armor but there's also a grungy nightmarish look to the demonic monsters and the creepy locales which is much more interesting than dwarves and elves and dragons all over again. It's the kind of drop in and play, navigate, weigh equipment, plan on character progression, groan as a run of bad luck brings one adventure to an end, cheer when you learn a secret spell or advance a level and kick a tough demon in the tail section. Simple but with breadth. Generic, but with a twist. It is NOT a cake walk but that makes it feel all the more rewarding.
Spiders is a company not lacking in ambition but sometimes lacking in programming polish. I've loved all their games from Mars War Logs to Greedfall and I'm also a staunch fan of a similar studio Piranha Bytes who made the Gothic series. Both game companies have difficult but rewarding games, expansive and unique lore, immersive detail, and fully voice acted casts. Bound by Flame feels like if Spiders had tried to make a Piranha Bytes style game down the gritty (sometimes goofily so) dialogue laden with harsh language, the cobbled-together jury-rig fantasy look where nobody is a knight in shining armor but usually all mercenaries in stained cloaks and mismatching mail. Combat is much more fluid and less dependent on timing as it might be in Piranha Bytes. Some enemies are so powerful you are expected to have jacked up your skills and improved your equipment before you can be expected to beat them. Luckily auto saves happen at the beginning of nearly every encounter, NPCS don't die but are knocked unconscious until the last enemy of an encounter is defeated, there is no durability mechanic (wail away), you can slow time in the selection menu like in War Logs to use powerful spells and bombs or direct companions...it's all very much in favor of the player but never a pushover. The map is GREAT! Shows all the paths immediately, can be superimposed on the screen, and quest markers are not only indicated but NPCS are highlighted who are related to the quest. You're never at a loss for things to do and you're seldom lost in general. The flip side of this is you CANNOT JUMP. It's a pain, but it does make for easy level transitions where you have to climb up a cliff to leave a map or drop down an elevation. The missing star is do to the generic and kind of empty story. It's almost so bad it's good, but the voice acting is decent anyway and there's lots of lore even if it sounds cliche. Not a bad action RPG! Just a few hiccups.
I was one of the few advocates for the innovative experiment that was Shadowman back in the day. A few bad ports and technology outpaced by ambition gave it a bad reputation, but a fierce cult following. And now it's back and it's the correct kind of remaster at last! None of the internals were messed with beyond tweaks to make it run and look better. No censorship I could see. There's some hiccups but to be fair they were there in the original game too (some weird animation glitches I recognized really didn't need to be ported). But it looks GREAT in higher def and kept the character and dark atmosphere that made this game a classic. Also THEY MADE A LESS ANNOYING SPIRIT GUN SOUND! I'm amazed they bothered to do that, but I'm very grateful! Now I can blast away without it sounding like a rusty trombone. I'm docking one star for the sake of fairness because this is a TOUGH game, and not always for incredibly fair reasons. Sometimes you'll get lost, get frustrated, feel you should be able to get somewhere you can't yet because you haven't got a power up from later in the game. Monsters are tough, numerous, and hit-scan. Levels are labyrinthine and need pin point accurate jumps sometimes. Luckily death is seldom a big deal. You'll get sent back a fair bit but usually you'll quickly get back to where you were and with patience and persistence you will be rewarded with diverse locations, great voice acting, and crazy supernatural comic book insanity you couldn't get anywhere by the 90s. If you don't mind a grim, grim game check in. Watch a couple walkthroughs and read an online manual or two if you get stuck. It's a little rough around the edges still, but they were kept because the people making this believed in the original vision and kept it solid. Come on slowpoke.
GTA may have more activities, Assassin's Creed prettier buildings, Crackdown more destruction... But NOTHING, not even other Mafia games in my opinion, beat this game for story and characterization. I keep coming back year after year just to hang out with the characters, follow the story, watch how meticulously the game has been designed to support that story. You recognize characters you'll see later showing up as younger people in earlier cutscenes. You follow from inception to ascension the Mafioso Vito in a way few other games manage, from his first gun to his fancy apartment. The game transitions through multiple times in history, all of which feel distinct. This kind of game doesn't skimp of details of individual citizens, model types of cars, buildings under construction in one era finished in another. The music changes. The weather and speech patterns change. Characters remember your actions and comment on your decisions. Snow melts and leaves foot prints. Bullet holes remain in surfaces and dead bodies don't fade. It's all very rich and realistic. Is it the best open world game? No. It's fairly linear. There's very few choices to make for cosmetics or customization, although you can purchase outfits and jack any vehicle in the game. I didn't find many glitches myself and the controls were tight enough to respond nicely to my commands. Nothing beats this game for atmosphere. If you want a Mafia experience, THIS is the one to dive into. This is like a movie you play. Great story, great characters, lots of creative action and even something to say. Maybe it's my nostalgia for this game but buying it again to play it years later hasn't diminished the way I feel. This is the best Mafia game even in it's own series if only because I felt like I was living a mafia film in a way no game before or since has provided.
This is one of the best and most criminally underrated open world games out there. Mad Max isn't just a veneer here on an open world game: this is THE Mad Max experience. You scavenge. You fight wars on the road. You go mad. The world is massive and thankfully quite beautiful in a desolate way, swapping pure desert for a dried ocean which allows for wondrous coral pillars and whale bones in addition to typical ruins and ranges. You're constantly updating your car, your gear, building up bases to improve your odds. There's a lot of side activities like racing and exploration to take up the slack between the absurdly long mission based campaign. Just when you figure you've finished a giant portion of the map Max moves his sights to an entirely different chunk of the world, but you can return to your old haunts if you want to anytime. There is fast travel so if you liberate an outpost or a look out you can zap to a fair few places to avoid the driving. But the driving itself is tight and fun and this has THE best car combat of any game. Fire has a very nifty and unique visual effect in this game where the closer you get to it the louder the roaring becomes and the landscape around you is bathed in red. You can practically feel the heat. You WILL eventually get tired of the loop and the options to do things run out of variety, but by that time you'll have spent hours tooling around, looking for scrap, blowing up raider bases, uncovering artifacts. It's a very responsive and satisfying and authentic feeling homage to a great film series as well as borrowing and refining open world gameplay and adding touches of it's own that just wouldn't work in any other game (one shot kill items make sense in Mad Max, not so much in Batman games). It's cheap, it's big, it's fun. Much more than MEDIOCRE