A balding, unstable, homicidal, drug addicted, emotionally-needy redneck with black outs is forced to work with a fellow robber (with a vulnerable teenage daughter) who betrayed his friends and stole heist money ... Sound familiar? Kane & Lynch was so utterly ignored, that no one even noticed Rockstar ripped off this game's plot when they made GTA V. But I digress. Kane and Lynch starts strong, however, the last few chapters are extremely awful. The cover system never works smoothly, squad mechanics add nothing, and checkpoints are ineptly placed. Weapons notably have little accuracy. It gets worse. Aiming causes the FOV to zoom in to a sickening 40 degrees, making close-quarter gunfights in low light a confused blur. That is, when the protagonist's head isn't blocking the reticle. The big choice in the end is so poorly delineated, I accidentally got the wrong option because I wasn't sure how to choose the one I actually wanted. That said, it's not a terrible game, as people claim, just an amateurish one. Contrary to popular belief, IO Interactive has always been an overrated developer who struggled with shooting mechanics and responsive third-person movement. The first Hitman games and Freedom Fighters aged pretty horribly. And unlike those games, Kane and Lynch's story is surprisingly good, it just isn't told competently--another recurring issue with IO. This game has a lot of wasted potential, sadly.
Soldier of Fortune is one of very few games from its era that aged well. Combat is still visceral, missions never drag on too long, and levels flow well. This game wisely disregarded the mind-numbing mazes and switch/key scavenger hunts of Doom and Unreal. Thank god, for that. The mechanics are suprisingly deep for a 22-year-old shooter. Seven years before Modern Warfare, this game perfected the modern-military FPS genre. It was one of the first games with bindable items and customizable loadouts. The full-body dismemberment was so impressive, it's essentially the exact same system you see in RDR 2. Enemies dynamically react to damage, covering gunshots (or bloody stumps). You can even try to play non-lethal and shoot weapons out of enemies' hands to get them to surrender. Though the weapons are so fun, you will probably blast everything instead. But shoot too many civilians, and it's mission over. It's old, so of course it has the standard old-school problems, too. You need to download a widescreen patch, ladders are annoying, sound effects might cut off, and running this over 60 frames might break the physics. For those too young to remember, there was indeed a time when Raven Software was innovative, Activision cared about games, and the FPS genre was king. Boss fights?, Well, they sucked then just as much as they suck in 2022.
I love the art style and story but the movement is unbearable. There's no sprint or strafe, so basic walking or avoiding lunging enemies attacks is incredibly awkward. You can dodge roll in third person but that makes shooting clumsy. You will be constantly switching back and forth from first to third. Also, this game evidently has this mechanic where the screen will blur uncontrollably. Really irritating. In addition, it will occasionally corrupt your save files and force you to restart or sign out to terminate the game. Happened to me about three times in less than an hour of gameplay. If you can tolerate some really bad console controls and glitchy gameplay, it's not awful. But I would reluctantly have to advise you to avoid this. If you just want story, it is certainly more interesting than Resident Evil games. I feel like this game badly needs a remaster. Love to see Night Dive give it an overhaul.
Even worse than the original. I can see why they gave this away for free. Last Light is a run-of-the-mill, linear game padded out with invisible walls, terrible stealth, and tedious gameplay. The gasmask mechanic might be the worst FPS feature since Far Cry 2's bs malaria plot device. The game will constantly force you play rapidly instead of methodically since you constantly have to worry about your air running out. Which isn't an issue as stealth is worthless anyway. You can try to switch off lights or shoot light bulbs, but, in large groups, it never works long. When enemies go into alert, everyone knows exactly where you are and lob grenades at you, an instant death. So, it's quicker to simply cheese the game and go for headshots or exploit the asinine AI. Hardcore mode is made all the more annoying as there is no manual save, requiring you to replay the entire arena a couple times just to waste your time. And that's not even the worse part. The game has horrible pacing. You rush through the game only to have to sit through hours of unskippable exposition or crawling through a pipe or following a really slow NPC. Sweet lord, is there a lot of cinematics. I don't exaggerate when I say half of this game is filler content.
For the first hour you'll be required to speedrun before an invisible timer counts down and you die of malaria... or your game crashes. Far Cry 2 makes an awful first impression. Something tells me Ubisoft spent all their time on the destructible environment. The game has some cool aspects: blood diamonds as currency, the buddy system, different ways to resolve a assigned task, and a weapon degradation system. The atmosphere is admittedly incredible. But it's let down by boring missions, bad mission scripting, and an obnoxiously large map that you need to criss cross constantly, each checkpoint filled with respawning guards. Something as simple as running is unpleasant, as the sprinting animation makes the screen blur and shake like you are suffering a seizure. For the last hour I played I had a screen prompt alerting me that I had left a hostile area. That prompt would not disappear even after I reinstalled the game, my save files evidently corrupted. The jank and inane busywork reminds me of STALKER. However, the gunfighting actually works in FC 2, so maybe a better comparison would be to call this game a shabbier version of Rage.
I hate to give smaller developers bad reviews, but Brigador is not fun to play. The controls are frustrating to figure out and really never runs smoothly. It's also impossible to see your aiming reticle since it is tiny and camouflages into the colorful background. That's a problem because you occasionally lose track which is the front and back of your mech. So instead of weaving between cover, strafing enemies, you'll more often be slamming into walls and spinning in circles trying to orient yourself because the environment is littered with obstructions to get caught on. A few of the mechs are so clunky they make the game even less fun and can't even strafe. Postal and Diablo figured this out like twenty years ago. I don't why this game struggles with fluid isometric movement. Level design is monotonous, flat, and uninspired. I guess there's a story, but it's not like you will even notice since there are no voice actors nor cinematics to give any personality to this.
Serious Sam is a pure FPS game from the golden era of gaming before we got auto-regenerating health or unskippable, painfully pretentious cutscenes by devs. Weapons feel good and the enemy design is decent. And it runs okay as you go into the files and switch the resolution, though it still seemed to stutter for some reason and the sound was so terrible at times I thought my headphones were malfunctioning. It's good at what it does, but it's not my type of game. I've never been a fan of circle-strafing, enemies spawning in front my face, waves, tiny monster swarms, or running backwards. So the gameplay was pretty annoying. But if that's your thing, you'll probably enjoy it.
Loved this series back in the day, but this is way too janky for me to really enjoy now no matter my nostalgia. Perhaps modern games like Mad Max have ruined me. The steering is pretty bad in this game and the graphics are terrible even for the time it came out.
As a long-time Postal fan I have a lot of nostalgia for this series. To get half of the jokes you'll probably need to play the first one. It's a fun, politically incorrect, if stupid, game. Nostalgia aside, Postal 2 feels cheap. Enemies have pinpoint accuracy while you struggle to hit them once at the same distance. At harder difficulties the game is just annoying. (Despite what the game tells you, do not play on "Hestonworld difficulty") There is one mission with a maze and a respawning enemy just to add to the rage. I can't stress this enough, the shooting mechanics are atrocious, just barely playable. And the game get tedious as you run back and forth over the map over and over again.
Garbage. Hardcore fans hate this installment of the Hitman franchise. And that's saying a lot considering how they put up with the first three games which were buggy and clunky. As an action game, Absolution is pathetic. As a stealth game, it fails miserably. Whoever thought the "Instinct" mode was a good idea deserves to be fired. The whole game is built around it, all but forcing you to use it to get past guards without them spotting you since the levels are linear with narrow hallways. The disguise system in this franchise has never really made sense. In other stealth games when you play sloppy and shoot enemies you can't wear their bloody with bullet marked clothes as a disguise. Apparently not in the Hitman games. There's also an infantile aim-bot ability and x-ray vision, but those are at least optional. And god, is this game janky. Simply selecting and grabbing items sitting on a table can be time-consuming and difficult. Also, the camera zooms in so far that sometimes there's a sickening 40 degree FOV. In the middle of a gunfight I literally had the brim of my cowboy hat blocking half the screen so I was firing blindly at multiple attackers. If I paid money I probably wouldn't have laughed at it. Melee combat is somehow worse. Instead of simply letting you throw punches, parry or block you are entered into a forced QTE mode where you spam a couple of random buttons a few dozen times. Yup, Absolution hasn't dated well. I only played this two hours and had it crash. Even on an objective, technical level it's a piece of junk. I can't possibly think of any reason why anyone should play this.
