We all have those special games that mean a lot to us- games that really stuck with us, were memorable, resonated emotionally, and absolutely deserved a sequel, but didn't sell well enough or were otherwise too weird to break out of obscurity. We got just one visit to that world and, though we treasure it, we can never explore beyond it. I'm so, so glad that Psychonauts didn't end up being one of those. All these years later, the game is still fresh in my mind, and jumping back in feels like I never left. It's an absolute joy to see this story continue, to explore new mental landscapes, and to revisit old characters and meet new ones just as compelling. The gameplay has changed very little from the first game, with the addition of new psi powers and enemies and smoother, more responsive controls, and it's still fun to explore and find all the collectibles- a task made easier this time around with the addition of simple checkmarks for areas you've cleaned out, so you can concentrate your search in the right place. The graphics are beautifully updated, with incredible attention to detail, and the plot remains faithful to the original while feeling like a natural progression and raising the stakes and tension. Best of all, it captures the mood of the original- that perfect mix of surreal, unpredictable weirdness and humor, with a deeper, darker, slightly disturbing side lurking beneath it all. It did have a few minor issues- maybe it's just me, but despite the areas being larger, the world felt somehow smaller and more limited. Maximum rank can only be achieved after absolutely everything has been discovered and the game has concluded, making the reward useless as there's no incentive to revisit old empty regions and no new battles to fight. And while there were some great emotional moments, none of them seemed to hit as hard as the original. But for a game to be this faithful to everything that made the original great after so long is just amazing. Worth every cent.
The Tomb Raider games are very much of their time- the graphics are jagged and grainy Playstation-era primitiveness, Lara Croft is thoughtlessly sexualized and kind of a terrible person who guns down endangered species and anyone who gets between her and her goal, even innocent security guards, the constant globe-trotting in the series has a very 90s Carmen Sandiego feel, and of course the aged controls involve slowly rotating Lara as though driving a tank and making leaps of faith because the bad camera angles prevent you from seeing what's immediately in front of or below you. But once you adjust to the controls, it's easy to get immersed in the games all the same, because they were and are just plain fun despite all their foibles. It's still thrilling to explore abandoned tombs and temples (or, later in the series, more diverse locations like sunken ships, secret government labs and the London underground), and the graphics are still good enough to evoke a sense of mystery, awe and intrigue as you navigate larger-than-life archaeological wonders, evading deadly traps and always on the watch for an attack from a vicious snake or supernatural guardian. Lara's extreme peril, where a single slip of the thumb or miscalculated jump angle means instant death, is a lot less frustrating on this PC version, where you can save at any time rather than only at fixed checkpoints, leaving you free to seek out secret areas without losing all your progress. There are a few bugs I ran into- sometimes the game would just randomly skip a cutscene, leading to the next level where, say, Lara is imprisoned in a cell with no indication of how it happened, and sometimes the graphics in a level would be all muddy and black, forcing a reload to correct them. I'd also highly recommend using an app called Tomb Raider Mouse Helper, which lets you use the mouse to look around and vastly improves the experience. But don't write these games off just because of their age, they still hold up!
I'd heard that Anachronox was an absolutely amazing game. What it actually is is very unique and special, but poorly aged and with a lot of flaws that bog it down. The game world is very well thought out and the characters are great and have loads of personality. By the end, your party will include a cranky old archaeologist, a cute toy robot, an assassin/exotic dancer, a brilliant scientist, a depressed comic book superhero, and even an entire planet that has voted by committee to shrink itself down and travel with you. Even Fatima, the cursor you use to navigate the game's menus and pick up items, is a fully developed character with her own tragic backstory and inner life. You'll travel from world to world, never quite knowing what the game will throw at you next. Despite all of those positives, the game is, as someone said below, TEDIOUS. I started the game 4 years ago and only finished it tonight because I kept taking long breaks, unable to stay engaged due to the muddy graphics, constant backtracking, glacial combat, obscure secrets and somewhat dull and repetitive environments. Thank god the game has a dedicated fast-forward button to speed things up in some places. The game's humor is very hit or miss, and can be a little tiresome, as well as at odds with the few parts of the story that try to be serious. The magic system is very poorly explained in the game and hard to figure out- how do these bugs work, what does leveling them up do? Some of the spells like fire or freeze are pretty self-explanatory, but what the hell is a spell called, for example, "WinkyTornado Harmonic" supposed to be? It's also riddled with bugs (not the magic ones)- randomly deleting photos you take to complete a sidequest, respawning items that are supposed to be one-time only, and a few crash-to-desktops. This is a game that would benefit immensely from a sequel or remake to bring it up to modern standards while providing more of the story and characters that make it worthwhile.
Very surprised by so many negative reviews of this game. For me, it ran perfectly well- there was some sound stuttering when I first started, but this went away on its own and never came back. No bugs, no crashing, achievements worked, everything was very smooth and fluid. The voice acting wasn't mind-blowing but it wasn't bad by any stretch of the imagination, and the gameplay was engaging enough to carry me through. There is absolutely no way any reasonable person would rate this game 1 star. The only valid complaint I've seen are the long, unskippable intro videos, which really are annoying. The game is a sequel to Metro 2033, though I got it during a GOG giveaway and have never played the first one. You won't be missing anything plot-wise, as the game's setting is quite immersive and provides all the details you could ask for. The game mechanics are pretty fun- in most areas, you can either stick to the shadows and pick off your enemies by sneaking up behind them or shooting them with a silencer, or just go in guns blazing and use cover, machine guns and explosives to take them out. On the surface, it becomes more survival-oriented as you fight off vicious mutants and scrounge for air filters to extend the time you can remain exposed to the irradiated wasteland. There's a good variety of customizable guns and throwing weapons, and despite the entire game taking place in underground tunnels and apocalyptic ruins, every area manages to be distinct and have its own unique character. The included DLC missions are surprisingly fun too, with the exception of Tower, which is just frustrating, and Anna, which is so short you'll wonder why they bothered. The boss fights are also good, with the exception of one near the end, where you need to shoot weak spots on a tank, but ONLY with a particular gun for some reason. This frustration, along with the intro videos, knock off a star. I got this game for free, but if you weren't so lucky it's worth picking up during a sale.
Jedi Knight was very impressive when it first came out, a time when expanded universe novels and games were essentially the only Star Wars stuff out there besides the original movie trilogy. The plot is a little bare bones and a bunch of villains just appear with almost no backstory, but the live action cutscenes are still great, even if the acting is slightly off and the CGI elements are very obviously not part of the scene. The worst thing about JK is the in-game graphics, which have ugly, grainy textures and jagged polygons, similar to an early Playstation game. I highly recommend getting the Jedi Knight Remastered mod, easily installed via a simple exe, to bring the graphics up to a more bearable standard, closer to Jedi Knight 2. There are a few other flaws as well, such as cumbersome, hard-to-use and often ineffective Force powers, mines that immediately blow up in your face if you use their primary fire mode, and a heavy reliance on a lightsaber combat system that manages to be incredibly simple yet almost impossible to reliably attack or defend yourself with. But overall, it's a fun ride with great level design and deep immersion into the Star Wars universe. The Mysteries of the Sith expansion goes a little deeper into the expanded universe lore, has even more complex level design (sometimes a little too much, you'll be searching a few rooms for several minutes just to find where to go next), and a few new weapons and powers. It's essentially more of the same (minus the live action cutscenes), but exploring new planets and seeing even more cool Star Wars tech, a lot of which has continuity with other games such as TIE Fighter or Shadows of the Empire. The final levels are an unfairly difficult slog through endless lightsaber battles, but at least manage to be atmospheric, and cheat codes are easy to find if you just want to get through the game. If you use a graphics mod, this title holds up really well and is highly recommended.
Elite Force 2 is a step down from the first game in almost every way. The celebrity voice cast is gone, leaving only Tuvok, who rarely shows up, and Picard, who is given mostly very dull, generic lines that don't make full use of his established character. A few of the Hazard Team from the original game are back, but it almost doesn't matter- the feeling of working as part of a team is gone, because in almost every mission Munro's companions are either injured and beamed away within seconds or he becomes almost instantly and repeatedly separated from them. There pretty much is no Hazard Team, it's just Munro against the world. It's also disappointing that Munro MUST be male now, after being able to play as a woman in the first game. The plot is all right but lacks the intrigue and impressive level designs of the first game- it all feels a bit simplistic and childish, and you'll be running through very similar-looking ancient alien facilities over and over, fighting the same four or five monster bugs, with only a few humanoids for variety. There are a couple parts that are slightly interesting, on a Klingon space station and undercover as a Romulan, but they don't hold a candle to the scavenger base in the first game. The combat is tedious, with massive amounts of hit points substituted for strategy and weapons that feel bland and lackluster. The graphics are definitely improved, with expressive faces and more detail, but in my opinion the newer style uniforms are ugly, the Enterprise E lacks the charm of Voyager, and the game's obsession with obnoxiously obscure and unrewarding secrets does nothing for me. It feels less like an episode of Star Trek and more like the dumbed-down action movie version of Star Trek seen in the later Next Generation sequels. It might be worth playing once, but if you chose not to, you wouldn't be missing all that much.
I wasn't a huge fan of the original BASS, though I did enjoy it. It felt like it had a lot of missed potential and was just too short and shallow. This unlikely sequel gives me all I could have hoped for, and in many ways is a worthy successor to the original. The mix of serious plot and humor is very familiar, the characters are true to the originals or are lively new additions, and the gameplay is much improved over the original's doing stuff without any clear reason beyond seeing a puzzle that needs solving, then getting stuck because the game expects you to use a random item on something without knowing why. I didn't use the built-in hint system at all, but the game itself gives you more than enough idea what you need to do next. The puzzles aren't very hard but are enjoyable to solve, and there's loads of amusing dialogue and interesting backstory- the world feels very immersive and consistent. The first game, despite the humor, had a very grim, filthy, even bloody tone overall, and this one feels much lighter, but much of this is justified by the plot, and the many parts of the game that call back to the original at least feel like they could have come from that game, even if they're now out of context. I did miss some of that grittiness, but it's not impossible to believe that Union City has changed dramatically as a result of the player's actions in the first game, and that all the darkness is of a very different, subtler flavor this time around- taking it any further than they did would have made the villain's motives implausible for various reasons. The game looks magnificent, with bright, colorful, detailed animated-style rendering, a well-designed game world, expressive characters and some breathtaking vistas of the city. It doesn't have very much replay value, as is typical for adventure games, but it's amazing a sequel was made at all after so long, let alone a good one. Is it too much to hope that a third game may one day exist?
I'm a big fan of both Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu mythos, but this game falls pretty flat. The low production values constantly prevent immersion, as the character animations are jerky, misaligned and off-putting, the environments are somewhat dull and empty, and the voice acting is fairly bad, aside from Holmes and Watson, who are passable. The puzzles vary wildly in difficulty, from simply picking up an object and using it somewhere else to decoding a very difficult cipher, and often you'll require items that are easy to miss because they blend into the background. For the most part they feel like busywork and most often lack the satisfying feel that you get from solving a puzzle in other adventure games. There are also a lot of parts where you can't use an object yet until something else arbitrary happens, despite there being no logical reason, such as a lemon tree that protects you from mosquitos... but you can only pick the lemons AFTER you use it as a weight in another puzzle, leave, then come back later. Watson is portrayed as a bit dimwitted, something I was never fond of, and the plot, while understandable, is a bit convoluted and not very engaging. This remastered edition adds a third-person perspective, a terrible addition that only slows the game down more and makes the controls more awkward, and I recommend switching to first-person and staying there. In the game's defense, the parts set in Louisiana manage to generate some atmosphere, the few areas where Holmes encounters the cult manage to be somewhat creepy and disturbing (the trees that seem to sway on their own were a nice detail), there's one surprising twist, and they don't completely botch the source material. But with so many other mystery and Lovecraft games out there now, this one has very little to offer in comparison, and is probably not worth your time.
Kind of funny to find Christopher Lloyd playing the villain of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and the hero of this game, which is so similar in concept. I had low expectations going in, and found it to be better than expected. The humor is sometimes decent, tolerable at worst, and generally entertaining, though not hilarious. It has some good lines though, and even a couple jokes that got an actual laugh out of me, as well as some fun references like the robot whose bottom half looks like a Dalek, whose item that you need to steal is a plunger! Drew Blanc and his sidekick Flux are both pretty lovable, and the rest of the characters are voiced by an impressive cast of big-name actors who bring lots of life and personality to their roles, even if the characters are in general somewhat underdeveloped. Nobody is phoning it in here, and they do the best they possibly can with what they're given. The toons mostly have fairly distinct, memorable designs, especially Miss Fortune, who seems like she could easily have been pulled right out of an actual animated film. The puzzles are just about right- I was able to solve the whole game with no hints, but I did get stuck on a couple for a while, so it wasn't trivially easy. If you like adventure games of the era, this one holds up well. If you hate the very concept of adventure gaming, as some earlier reviewers inexplicably seem to... perhaps not, unless you're REALLY into cartoons. I'm not a huge fan of cartoons or the whole Roger Rabbit concept, but I found it decently entertaining and worth playing through.
Graphics-wise, the game consists almost entirely of a simple, fairly self-explanatory user interface laid over a 2D topographical map. Waypoints are represented by triangles and creatures by clusters of dots, and the rest is text descriptions and your imagination filling in the gaps. If you don't like reading you definitely won't have the patience to get far in this game, but if you enjoy text adventures you'll probably find it a pleasant experience and doggedly seek out samples of aquatic life to learn more about this alien ecosystem for the sake of satisfying your own curiosity. It's a fairly short game without a lot of depth- no pun intended- but is immersive and relaxing and manages to convey a sense of atmosphere via the movement of the dot-creatures and a shifting of palette colors in different environments, in addition to the well-written text descriptions. There's a slight survival element, as you have to keep track of your power and oxygen levels, but they are easy to replenish and a drone is standing by to haul you back to base in most situations. This does lead to one minor gripe about the game, though, as reading gradually-appearing text descriptions is rather stressful when you're in an environment that is rapidly draining your oxygen gauge in real time, forcing you to rush through those sections without looking closely at what's around you. Being thorough in your explorations rewards you with the one visual representation of the alien life you find, sketches made by your scientist partner in the game, but these are a bit underwhelming since the majority of the creatures are fungal stalks or blobby jellyfish-type things. Still, these small flaws aside, it's a decent game to occupy a few hours if you're in the mood for an exploration-focused, mellow adventure.
