"Games weren't really better, I was just able to enjoy games which weren't particularly good." Sure enough, there's plenty of actually good old games, but these aren't some of those games. I played the first two as a teen and nostalgia brought me to them again. I was surprised how poor and short they both are. They're very low fidelity and require you notice tiny details. In one instance, you literally need to click on a smudge in the middle of very dark rubble. The only solution to find that spot is to hover over every pixel, or consult a guide. The second one also has a few save corrupting bugs that can halt your progress, requiring you to restart the whole playthrough. I found two as a teen, and third during my recent play. The third game started out very promising. I genuinely liked it and plan to finish it eventually. Unfortunately, it has no respect for your time and employs actual chores masquerading as puzzles. Find out the blood type of several samples, but not get told how to tell them apart - that forces you to test previous samples as well. There's no puzzle in that, it's just busywork. Type in a long string of text using an on-screen keyboard with wonky mouse movement (this is the point I gave up). That's literally not a puzzle, you just click on things on the screen for a very long time. When it comes to some of the tougher puzzles in this game, it's easy to get intimidated and think they're just way too brainy, but then you realize that they're really just poorly designed - there's usually many different ways such puzzles could be constructed with the clues remaining the exact same and sometimes you're required to make absurd leaps of logic. Solving these sorts of puzzles isn't rewarding. And then there's typical adventure game nonsense that will make you groan, like using battery acid on the hinges to open the door.
Summary: A great game when it's on sale. Having enjoyed the previous game is not a guarantee you'll like this one. There's a lot of good humour and character interaction, but it's also the most interesting part of the game and much of the rest is poorly done. There's no denying SW2 was trying to capitalise on Borderlands' success. Everything that's supposed to make the core game more interesting is making it worse. Details would be lengthy writing. The RPG elements are not done well, to the point of being annoying. There's no sense of a coherent world. You're teleporting to where you need to be. Not an open world game, but it's using gameplay and story progression mechanics which you'd expect from one. That could have been justified by having amazing shooting galleries, but the level design is bad. Enemies aren't doing the game any favours either. There's few types and they're either reskinned, or upgraded. Objectives are very repetitive and for that reason I skipped the bounties. Aside from the main story, there are trivia which you collect throughout the game. There's a ton of them and most are interesting. The question is whether the game gets you invested enough to actually read them. Characters are great and I wanted to see their story unfold. Unfortunately, the game is not delivering the story effectively and character development seems forced. The best parts of the game are interactions between characters and the protagonist, and to be completely honest, it was the only thing that kept me going. By the end of the game, I was not enjoying the gameplay very much, I was skipping any enemies I could, and all I wanted was to see how it all turns out. *****MILD SPOILERS AHEAD**** And it did not turn out good. The ending is a cliffhanger, and a rather confusing one at that. I lost much respected for the developers. It's just not something you do unless you have a guaranteed plan to deliver more content immediately, and today it's safe to say they didn't.
Sometimes you need those 30 minutes of no complex thoughts and simplistic fun, yet you don't like leaving the game "in the middle of something". Painkiller provides. The game is well optimized and runs nicely even on crappy office laptops. Definitely install on SSD, if you have one. Better loading times. The graphics are dated but the cartoony style remedies that. The game is still very enjoyable even today. The gameplay is simple and the pacing a little too obvious, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. Painkiller is a checkpoint based shooter making an effort to implement comfortable pacing. At the time of it's release, this was uncommon and not everyone liked it. The idea is that if you're experiencing constant nonstop action for too long, you'll simply get used to it and won't get the desired "kick" out of it. You enter an area and action music starts playing - you're in combat mode. Your goal is to kill all the monsters and collect their souls. Once you're finished with the area, you get a sound cue and a change of music. Now you're free to roam the area, look for ammo and secrets, and enter the next area when you're ready. This type of pacing is used to this day, although more recent games do a better job of implementing it. In some cases, there are so many enemies in an area you're wishing for the combat to end. In other cases, you will enter combat mode only to kill 1-5 enemies. Each level keeps a stat of how many enemies you've killed, how many souls you've collected, how many secrets, ammo crates, coins etc. you've found, how many objects you've destroyed, and more. And of course, you're free to try to 100% each and every level. Although you have to unlock levels in a given order, you can play whichever one you please later. Painkiller begs to be replayed over and over. What puts the game down in my eyes are the enemies. There are only a few basic types, and most enemies are a variation of another enemy. Some enemies are outright reskins.
