While Wolfenstein 3d was the first FPS, DOOM cemented the FPS into the gaming landscape. Before FPSs were called FPSs, they were called DOOM clones. Then, on September 11th, 2001, idk I guess some stuff happened that day, but more importantly two months later Halo: Combat Evolved released, and the gaming landscape was changed once again. To the viewpoint of many, however, combat was not evolving, but rather devolving. We went from a wide selection of weapons in any given moment to just two at a time. Health, once a vital resource, now regenerates automatically given a short period of time. The quick movement enabled by mouse and keyboard became slower to compensate for the dual analog sticks of controllers. The FPS, once a staple of PC gaming, had to be changed to get it onto consoles. Granted, many of these changes did make for an enjoyable experience for console gamers (hell, I'll still put the Halo 2 battlerifle on my list of best video game weapons of all time), but the PC centric FPS began to fade. Luckily, the PC FPS was not lost to time completely. Like a lich rising from the dead, DOOM 2016 returned more powerful than ever before. Quick, responsive movement, a full array of weapons all a single button press away, and health packs. Guess where those health packs are! They're inside the demons. You want health? You have to go get it. Okay also, brief aside about the glory kills. I know this is one aspect of DOOM & DOOM Eternal that some people don't like. Personally, I love the glory kills. Here's the thing though, many people think the glory kills break the flow of combat, which is why they dislike them, and to an extent I actually agree. That is why of the optional upgrades you have to choose from, every single time I play this game, I always choose the one that speeds up the glory kill animation. I genuinely think this upgrade is invaluable to the experience of the game. I'm almost at my character limit, so to wrap all this up, 100% recommend DOOM.
A lot of what I have played so far, I have really loved. Great gunplay, great atmosphere, there's so much to love here. I tried to get into STALKER ~ 15 years ago, and for as much as I wanted to like it, it never quite clicked. I don't know if it's me being 15 years older now, or STALKER 2 being more "modern", but whatever it is, this game is clicking. I want to play more of this game. I wish I could play more of this game. But I keep running into game breaking bugs. Not crashes, not silly glitches, not things of that nature, but full, "missions are incompletable" bugs. Missions will be rendered fully broken, I'll reload my save, and the same thing happens every time without fail. There've been 3 patches thus far at the time of writing, and I've tested every one, same problem on them all without fail. I even submitted a report to the devs. I described my PC specs, the mission that was breaking, how it was breaking, and I included my save files and analytics data files in the submission. They replied to me, asking what my gamertag was (I'm on PC), asking me when my save files dissapeared/became corrupted (they didn't), and requesting that I submit another report with save files attached (again, my original submission did include both save files and analytics data files). Originally, I was going to hold off on writing a review. But between the game being broken to a degree that I have to check with each patch if I'll actually be able to play the game now, and the copy & paste response from the devs that indicated they didn't even read my bug report, it's all left a bad taste in my mouth. I'm trying my best to be kind to the game. I'm willing to let a lot more slide from a developer making a game on the frontline of the Ukranian/Russian war than I would be from your standard AAA dev. I can forgive crashes, performance issues, etc. But I've reached a point where I cannot progress, and all I can do is wait for another patch, and hope it actually fixes the problem
This is one of those games where going in, the less you know, the better. It has fishing with an RE4 attache case style inventory, and all the fish are different shapes. If that sounds fun to you, 100% check this game out. The vibes are immaculate
If I could split the review score it'd be 5/5 game, 3/5 PC port. It can't do anything higher than 1080p, it has a 59 fps cap (not 60, 59, it's weird), it doesn't like HDR displays, and, at least on my setup, putting it on fullscreen makes the game run sluggishly with a very noticable input delay. I have to set it to windowed and then use an external program to make it borderless. I would absolutely kill for a remaster of this game. Really, it doesn't need much, wouldn't even need to update textures or anything like that, just uncap the framerate, let it render higher than 1080p, give it some proper HDR support and this game would look and feel phenomenal. As it stands, it's an incredible game that doesn't behave as well as I'd like with modern hardware. Certainly not a dealbreaker though. It's the mother of all omlettes, can't fret over every egg, Jack. What you need to know is that this game has Sauce™. It feels good in the hands. It's a game you'll continue playing long after 100%ing it because it just feels good. The parry alone is borderline orgasmic. This game has been out for over a decade and I still regularly revisit it because it's just so fun. Get your hands on it. Play it. You'll quickly see what makes this game so special
I have a very specific complaint here, and it won't apply to everyone, but I know I'm not the only one. When I press a button, I want the thing to happen. I don't want it to happen after holding the button down for a second. I don't want it to happen after holding the button down for half a second. I want it to happen when I press the button. Feeling is something very much unique to video games. Latency is not a concern when reading a book. This game feels awful to me to play, because every single interaction prompt is press and hold. Want to pick something up? Press and hold. Want to interact with this story prompt? Press and hold. Want to craft something? Press and hold two different buttons at the same time. Everything you tell the game to do, it waits a moment to make sure before it actually does it. I've seen a lot of gameplay of this game. What I watched looked good. It looked promising. It looked like a game I wanted to play. Then once I got my hands on the controls, my first reaction was "this feels awful". I have gone through the settings, there is no way to change this in game. I cannot find a mod to fix this either. This is incredibly dissapointing because of how small this is. This is something that (I assume) could be fixed by a single dev at Bend in an afternoon. But how a game feels is important. I don't want to play a game that feels so sluggish and unresponsive. And I'm not holding my breath for a fix to a 4 year old game And hey, if you read all that and are thinking to yourself "I don't give a shit about that", more power to you. Hope you have more fun with it than I did. Outside of that, it seems like a solid enough game
Title says it all, basically. Game was heavily designed with COOP in mind, and this version doesn't have COOP. That takes this game from "sure, I'll pick it up for $5 and play it maybe once for 20 minutes" to "you have to be a brain-dead moron to buy this version of the game". Hell, in retrospect I think we can all agree that the call to push FEAR in a COOP direction was a bad one. If FEAR 3, wait no sorry, F3AR was designed as a single player game and had COOP slapped onto the side of it, and that was then removed, it'd still be a dick move by WB, but the core of the game would still be there. The core of this game is COOP, that that's the game they made, that's the game they're selling, except the COOP game they're selling here on GOG has had to COOP removed. If you buy the game here on GOG, the core of the game will have been deliberately withheld from you. Don't waste your money. If it is important to you to play this game, find a friend and sail the high seas together. Drink up me hearties, yo ho If this game gets review bombed off the platform in embarrasment like Hitman was, I would not say it was undeserved (though with both cases, would've been best if GOG just got the full game DRM free. I really love the new hitman trilogy, it's a shame they released it on GOG the way they did)
First and foremost, this review is specifically for people like me that love the Ranger Hardcore mode and won't play Metro any other way. Here's the thing, this DLC is completely broken on the RH mode. As you may know, for some reason, someone thought it would be a fantastic idea to completely remove manual saving from Exodus' RH mode. Because of this, you must rely entirely on the game's checkpoint system. The checkpoint system in the base game was already pretty bad, but in this DLC it's much worse. If you are playing on RH, you can and will lose hours of progress on death, and will have to do everything you just did over again. And if you get to that same combat encounter and die again (which you probably will, it is RH after all), guess what? Several hours of progress, gone. Here's the thing, I don't mind if I die a lot. In fact, it's what I signed up for. I really enjoy how impactful RH can be, when one stray bullet to the skull is all it takes. I like that. It's specifically what I play the Metro games for (that and the fully diegetic HUD, which is also only available in RH). What I don't like is that after finding an abondoned building, slowly making my way through it, finding resources and equipment, fighting off mutants with the little ammo I have, hastily crafting medpacks and ammo to keep myself alive, and finally making it back out of the building, having gathered what I need ready to move on, I cannot save my game. And this is such an easy issue to fix, manual saving is in the game, just don't turn it off in the RH mode. But this game is nearly 3 years old at time of writing, they haven't fixed it yet, so I doubt they ever will, and it's such a shame. I wish I could love this game. I want to love this game, but I just can't. Naturally, if you do not play on RH, you won't have this issue, and hopefully you'll enjoy this DLC. However, if you do play on RH, don't even bother. The checkpoint problems make this a waste of time and a waste of money.
There's a lot of quotes from reviewers under the "reviews and accolades" section. Thought I should include another. "It feels like this whole game, all three of these whole games smushed into one, may never, ever get old. This could be a timeless classic people will still want to play 20 years from now. But, it's still tied to the internet, and it shouldn't be. I don't see why all this mission XP and progression can't be tied to a local save file, an neither does everyone else. This [trilogy] represents almost a decade of the employees' lives in an effort to push the envelope of an entire medium forward, and a lot of its magic is going to go away when, not if, the servers eventually go down... The only saving grace is if the developers choose to reverse the one cloud hanging over Hitman's head. The one and only negative thing about the new Hitman games is that they'll still randomly disconnect from a server that never needed to be there at all, and will not be there at some point in the tumultuous future we're in store for." - Super Bunnyhop, Hitman: World of Assassination trilogy I was overjoyed to see an email in my inbox telling me that Hitman was now on GOG. And I was subsequently heartbroken to see that the online requirements were still in the game. While it does say "Story and bonus missions can be played offline." in the disclaimer, this statement is either negligently or deliberately misinforming. While you can technically play the missions, the missions are meant to be played multiple times. Each time you unlock new entry points, new item drop locations, new equipment to use. And all of that is tied to the internet. It's almost like saying "yes, you can have a steak if you're not connected to the internet, but you're not allowed to choose how it's cooked and you can only take one bite." I love this game. I love this whole trilogy. And it's such a tragedy that such a good game has this server of Damocles hanging over it.
