Arkham Asylum changed everything for Batman when it comes to his video game career, showing that not only can Batman video games be great for fans, they can also be great games for non-Batman fans. You don't need to know anything about Batman to understand anything in this game, all you need to know is that Batman is the hero and Joker is the villain, simple and straightforward. The story has this basic idea but it remains interesting with how deep the Joker's plan turns out to be as you progress the game, witnessing the dark secrets of Arkham Asylum as you see innocent lives caught in Joker's chaos. The presentation with the atmosphere, graphics, and art style builds up the world in a way that not even later Arkham games were able to capture. Gameplay in Arkham Asylum is split into two styles, FreeFlow Combat and Predator. Combat takes up a good majority of the game and it is satisfying to master. You start off doing at least three punches before Batman can start freeflowing to take down thugs with his martial art skills, from there you can knock enemies onto the ground with each hit. However, thugs always come in numbers so you'll need to play smart by knowing when to do counter-attacks or to evade to maintain your combo. Predator encounters are also great fun, having Batman take on armed thugs who can wipe him out at any second if caught. Early on they don't seem like much as you mainly do just silent takedowns, but as you progress through the game to get more gadgets, you can find ways to lure thugs into traps and even take multiple thugs out at once. The Predator encounters let you be the physical embodiment of fear as thugs grow more terrified with each takedown. This game also features Detective Mode, allowing you to plan out your next attack in Predator encounters and help you explore the asylum for hidden secrets, Batman: Arkham Asylum is amazing, plays well with an Xbox One/Series X controller and at high settings. Still worth playing to this day!
From a glance with in-game screenshots and gameplay trailers, Bogus Detour looks good to play. It has a nice pixel artstyle, the music by Damjan Mravunac is great, and there is a good amount of variety to the level themes and locations. You have plenty of weapons in your arsenal, with classic weapons like the Cannon and new weapons like the Erasergun, which is a powerful railgun that pierces through enemies. With a good amount of weapons to create pixel carnage, what can go wrong? Unfortunately, a lot of things. The first issue you'll notice right away is how slow your movement speed is, an issue that is made worse with how large and long the levels are. It's bad enough you will be looking for keys and secrets, but the slow speed makes combat less enjoyable. To compensate, you have a dodge mechanic that you can use to avoid taking damage, but a lot of the time you'll use it just to move around the levels faster. There is no map to speak of either, so get used to hearing Sam vomiting a lot. Another issue is RPG mechanics, where you kill enemies to get XP and level up to buy yourself upgrades. You can also collect stars in levels which act as upgrade points you can use. The problem is that some upgrades are clearly better than others like faster movement speed and more dodges, while some are just useless or harm you more than anything else. There's an upgrade to do more damage while standing still, who thought this was a good idea? You can't save whenever you want, instead you need to find a checkpoint to save your game. But you also have a limited number of lives to beat a level. You can find more lives in each level, but if you end up losing all your lives, it's back to the start of the level. Losing a ton of progress is never fun. Weirdly enough, you can quit and load a save to get your lives back, so what is the point? With more issues like the minefields and Serious difficulty being stupidly unfair (half health and armor, why), Bogus Detour is just Bogus.
Mobile Forces is a multiplayer FPS game that is a bit of a mix of Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament, featuring military weapons and vehicles blended in with arcadey gameplay. To get straight to the point, while this sounds like an interesting idea (and it is), the execution is rather sloppy as the weapon balance isn't all that great and the maps are way too large for most game modes. Deathmatch modes is so barren and lacking as you'll find yourself walking a lot in hopes to find someone to shoot at, and with objective modes like Capture the Flag, you start to wish the maps were a little more condensed so you don't find yourself using the vehicles as nothing more than a means to reach your destination faster. There aren't any respawn points scattered around the map in team modes, so every time you die you start back all the way at your team's base, which can wear on your patience real quick. There are single-player bots, you can fight them in customizable skirmish matches or the game's Missions mode. You may get some enjoyment out of the skirmish mode even despite the AI being lackluster, but I highly suggest staying away from the Missions mode because it is some of the most frustrating series of bot matches I have played in a multiplayer FPS game. It starts off easy and rather dull, but as you progress through each map, the games get longer and the number of bots you face increase, so half-way through you'll find the bots going hard on defense. As such, you'll have to painstakingly command your bot teammates around just to capture an objective, which the bots will fail miserably at unless it's the Trailer mode or you were just lucky that they didn't screwed up. And all you get for finishing all 88 missions is a website link that isn't even archived. Great. The online multiplayer went down with Gamespy, so unless you're an FPS diehard, I can't recommend this at all, there are far better shooters, both single-player and multiplayer, that you can play for cheap.
The original Doom, Doom II, and Doom 3 are all great games on their own right and each of them still hold up relatively well, so having them all in one package for modern PCs sounds great, right? Yeah actually, just that the BFG Edition is a downgrade in notable areas. No, it's not the censored Wolfenstein levels since it's not like they are anything special. And really, you got a new chapter for Doom 2 with nine amazing levels by Nerve Software, so there is no lost here, if anything, you got a plus. The experience on all three games feels a bit cheapened, having worse lighting where every level is a lot more brighter than their original counterparts. Atmosphere is pretty much thrown out the window as moments when the games go dark feels rare now. Yes, being able to see is important in an FPS game, but Doom wasn't all guns blazing, there were moments of tension as levels can pull of unexpected surprises, so you'll feel that downgrade when you go from playing the originals to the this. Doom 3 suffered the worst changes, and it's pretty easy to notice right away when you see how the game they try to make the game action-packed despite that the original game has an emphasis on horror, even if it wasn't all great. Models look too shiny, the updated textures don't really hide the game's aging graphics, and I don't need to bring up lighting again, if you want to know you can play the game to find out (or watch a video). The change to the flashlight was also something I'm not a fan of. In the original game, you sacrifice your ability to fight back when you pull out your flashlight, creating a sense of dread as you may never know what lurks around the corner. But in the BFG Edition, the flashlight is attached to your armor, breaking chunks of the game as there is no reason to not have the flashlight on. I would recommend the original games if you can/want to get them, but the BFG Edition is still a good deal if you can get it on sale or if you just want more Doom.
