Quality: 4/5 - mostly enjoyable. 3/5 if you're more picky. I've had some noticeable framerate dips in some places, but other than that the game runs smoothly and looks beautiful. The gameplay variety is lacking and some things could be better, but the core is nice if you take it for what it is. The game is tagged as metroidvania roguelike, but what it actually is is a bullet hell platformer with some progression and exploration. The main challenge of the game is in surviving and grinding out waves of varied enemies that attack you from all sides. Each wave consists of multiple types of enemies with a horde of each type. The attack types and other perks of the enemies create interesting challenges. Exploration follows the metroidvania formula, but the environments are boring and samey, and finding a way from area to area is never a puzzle. When you explore certain areas, you trigger a wave. If you stay loo long in one place, you get attacked by a wave. And then another wave. And then another... It's not a game of slow methodical exploration. You need to keep moving and killing enemies. Like in a bullet hell. There's a progression tree, with skills/perks that give you bonuses to stats, but it is more about your own skill and precision in combat. You need to constantly dodge and attack at the same time, and avoid making mistakes and getting hit. Just like in a bullet hell. The movement is not as fluent as it could be, but it serves the gameplay well enough. It allows you to move around fast and fluently enough to avoid getting ganged up on and to be able to attack enemies where you want it. It's not about methodical positioning, defensive play or spectacular combos. You need to move fast, make decisions quickly, maintain good situational awareness and take care of multiple things simultaneously. There are no items or ranged attacks, only sword + a powerful "finisher". Sword attacks have simple combos. You can attack in the air, and they do suspend the fall.
5/5 - Time destroyer I'm basing this review on my memory of this game as I played back when it was new. Though it definitely was a time destroyer anyway. And it probably still is, since I haven't seen any of this game's unique features in any other game. One such feature is its physics simulation, specifically destruction physics. The engine utilizes the turn-based nature of the gameplay to take its sweet time computing every explosion or a bullet hit in unprecedented amount of detail. You can literally destroy every building brick by brick. Literally brick by brick. When you compromise structural integrity of a part of a building, that part will collapse in a way that follows the detailed physics model. So you'll have to be careful with explosives and powerful weapons in shoddy buildings. When a grenade explodes, the shock wave and the destruction it causes propagates with a finite speed, so the order and the way things get destroyed by an explosion is determined by a physical simulation also, which may one day determine the life or death of one of your characters. Another unique feature is it interrupt mechanic. The combat is turn-based with action points, as is standard for TBS/RPG. Suppose it's guy's A turn. He moves and gets into the line of sight (and fire) of a guy B before A could notice B. If B has AP left and the initiatives roll favorably, A gets stopped in the exact state he was at the moment and B gets to spend his APs. What it means, for example, is that you can't get out of cover, shoot at the enemy and get back in cover safely before your turn is over, like you do in most other TBS. When you get your guy out of cover, he may get interrupted and being shot at. This mechanic also solves many other similar time warping problems of turn based combat. Also, great RPG system, weapon variety, good combat system in general, the ability to hear (and shoot) characters through walls, knock down, critical injury system (hearing loss, etc). I'm out of characters.
The amount of times I was killed from outside the screen... This shouldn't be happening in a Hotline Miami game. And they also seem to have added some more input lag. The movement and aiming seems sluggish and less precise compared to the original. I actually installed the HM1 to compare, which accidentally resulted in me spending about 2 hours playing it. The old one, especially the "original" version, with black bars and incurable screen tearing, feels much smoother. I can actually register a bat swing visually, instead of dialing an attack and interpolating the hitbox and the duration of the swing. Not to mention how fun are the frantic shootout in tight spaces compared to "shift" crawling of the HM2.
This is a piece of "interactive" fiction. I'm not sure how much interactive it really is. Judging by the way it plays, not much. I'm not actually against this kind of thing in general, but this one also doesn't play well. The whole premise of the game is that you are a government worker in some surveillance/security program (think NSA) amidst a series of terrorist attacks. The gameplay consists of you looking through a series of pages, public or hacked, and conversation logs, looking for automatically highlighted pieces of data called "datachunks" (no relation to SCTP DATA chunks). Out of those datachunks you have to choose the relevant ones and add them to the "profile" of people under investigation, clicking away the super important opinion of your annoying boss on every chunk you add. Every chunk, every bit of data you add, however insignificant, NO LESS THAN A FEW PER PAGE, EACH ONE TRIGGERS A RESPONSE FROM YOUR BOSS CONSISTING OF MULTIPLE DIALOGUE PAGES, AND YOU HAVE TO MANUALLY CLICK AWAY EVERY !!! SINGLE !!! ONE OF THEM. And those responses usually consist of the boss's personal subjective opinions, including, ironically enough, his complaints that you add "irrelevant" data to the profile. Despite that you can't tell which data is going to be relevant beforehand. The only chunks you don't add are bogus and misleading chunks. Quite soon I was hoping that the terrorists would blow his office already. Would be a good ending in my view. Another "great" mechanic is conflicting chunks. When a set of chunks conflict each other, you can only add one. And since you can't remove chunks from the profile, you can't undo or redo the choice. At one point, there were 2 conflicting chunks. In one, a club member A proposed to organize an event at location 1; in another, a club member B proposed to organize an event at location 2. No commitments were made, only suggestions. Why the hell they were conflicting, I have no clue. The game's authors can't into logic apparently.
3/5 -- conditionally enjoyable The game is a pure racer. No story, no visual customization, no nonsense. There is tuning, so it's not THAT bare bones. The races are "demolition derby style", although in fact it's just a Finnish national sport of rally cross with beat up cars. The tracks are dirt or mixed dirt+asphalt, always quite bumpy. They are usually littered with obstacles, ranging from simple cones to excavators. Collisions with those objects produce different results, but usually negative, although apparently it also gives you nitrous. The graphics look nice, it aged well. The handling is simple, but challenging. Destruction model is superb (not realistic, but very satisfying). The main downside of this game is that if you actually want to race and win, the game is too random. All the bumps and obstacles can easily destabilize your car. The AI is aggressive and reckless. The game is not designed for clean races, it is designed for smashing cars. And that, although a great fun, is a special kind of fun. You need to be in a mood for it. Or be a kid. Smashing cars is always fun when you're kid.
The "puzzles" are completely arbitrary. "Pixel hunting" cubed. A piece can be hidden in some obscure part of a 3d world or require a random sequence of actions to find. And before any fanboys claim I didn't get the mechanics, I'm not talking about finding the crank, I'm talking about finding the entrance to mines or the pickaxe in the mines. To find all the pieces, you either have to dump hours into the "game" simply walking around and trying random things, or you have to think the exact same way as the developers did. Usually, even with the most hardcore classic point-n-click games I didn't have to look at a walkthrough more than 3 times, and even then I usually saw that the puzzle could've been solved if I'd been more patient. This game has about 10 puzzles with 5 pieces each. Compared to classic point-n-click, that's almost nothing. I "solved" 4 of them and stopped playing on the 5th. 3 of them I solved myself, and only 2 of them didn't feel like complete random bullshit. One of those "puzzles" wasn't actually a puzzle, but it gave a piece of the story, so I count it as one. Another, the portal puzzle, I wouldn't even have figured out that it was a puzzle, let alone how to solve it, if I didn't look into a walkthrough. The last puzzle required me to enter the mines first, and as I said before, the entrance is well hidden, without any cue about its whereabouts or even that there is a hidden entrance. This problem is made worse by the distances in the game and how much you need to walk around. Never have I wished so much for a "toggle run" button in a game that doesn't have it. The game looks pretty though. It is slow and sluggish, but pretty. If you like walking simulators, it is definitely one, and apparently a good one. No idea what attracts some people to walking simulators in the first place, but a lot of those people apparently rate this game highly.
