The story of B:I is convoluted and pretentious, with a lot of unnecessary side plots and padding. This makes the game feel too long. Every time you think you are near the end of the game, it throws you another bone to chase. The racism macguffin feels too safe and gets ditched entirely halfway, making it seem pointless. They give you the illusion of choice, by forcing you to choose between things, but in reality it doesn't change anything to the storyline. You just get a different voice line. The game also is way more linear than the previous two games and sometimes feels like your in a shooting gallery. Your sidekick Elizabeth, a real Mary Sue, is invincible and is just there to provide you with cash, salts and ammo, or open locked doors. 'Need money?' and 'Here Booker, catch!' are some of her most used phrases. On the other hand the shooting is great and some of the weapons are great fun, like the hailstorm and volley gun. The enemies are kinda dumb though and mostly just run at you in a straight line. The new Big Daddy, the Handyman, is very annoying to fight, because they can jump on you from 500 meters away. Murder of Crows (to distract them) and a lot of bullets take care of them in a flash. Songbird is also very underused, which is disappointing as it showed a lot of promise. The game now has vigors which act the same as plasmids. Some are directly taken from the previous games, but there are new and fun ones, like Bucking Bronco. The graphics are great and colorful, and the voice work is stellar throughout. Infinite - like Bioshock 1 and 2 - also has an amazing soundtrack. All in all, B:I is a disappointing game, despite having the best combat of the three. The game feels too long and the story is pretentious drivel. Should you play it? I'd say yes, but only buy it when it's on sale.
In this DLC to D2 you play as Billie Lurk, who went looking for master assassin Daud. To no one's surprise she has finally found him, but the Knife of Dunwall has been reduced to a fragile old man who is about to croak. He asks Billie to find a rare knife that was used in a ritual that made the Outsider a god, so they can kill him with it. It's a better story than D2, but it doesn't make any sense. Daud blaming the Outsider for all his misfortune is such BS and Billie blindly following him after 15 years of absence is hard to believe. Arkane's really grasping at straws here. Billie has Void powers, but isn't marked by the Outsider, so they've done away with finding runes. There's also no chaos system this time, so don't worry about your playstyle. It doesn't matter if you kill or spare everyone. Your supernatural skills come from bone charms now and gear upgrades can still be bought in the black market shops. Billies Void powers are a letdown: Displace is another Blink, but requires an extra click to teleport. Foresight is like Dark Vision, where you can mark enemies and items in spirit form. Semblance is like Possession, where you can impersonate someone. The mana bar replenishes itself now, so there's no need to hoard those Addermire potions anymore. Side missions make a welcome return in the form of contracts. D2 didn't really have any, apart from finding a body for Mindy Blanchard, so they are fun little distractions from the main goal. The maps are a mixed bag: One Last Fight serves as a tutorial. Follow the Ink lets you explore the Upper Cyria District and is a fun map. The Bank Job recycles the previous map, but now you get to explore the inside of the bank too. The Stolen Archive recycles part of The Royal Conservatory map from D2. They saved the best for last; A Hole in the World lets you finally explore the Void. All in all D: DotO still is moderately enjoyable, but Arkane really needs to up their game.
This should be right up my alley, since I love 90's first person shooters like Quake, Heretic and Hexen, games that definitely inspired Amid Evil. It does a lot of things right, but also a lot of things wrong. The graphics are pretty nice and the soundtrack by wunderkind Andrew Hulschult is great. The levels are big, contain some well hidden secrets and have plenty of variation between them. But Amid Evil never discovers what makes those games that it takes inspiration from tick. It's like an amateur trying to make Gordon Ramsay's Beef Wellington for the first time. It might look like Ramsay's wellington, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. The weapons are weak, the hitscan enemies are spongy and the level design is all over the place. Episode 5 'The Forges' for example relies too much on platforming gimmicks, which results in a lot of trial and error. Starting over for the 20th time because you miss a timed platform is no fun whatsoever and screws with the pacing. Shooting only ever feels good and powerful when you active Soul mode (think Heretic and Hexen's Tome of Power), but it drains far too quickly. The boss fights usually involve a lot of circle strafing around a large arena and are way too easy to defeat. For some reason they've done away with fall and drown damage too, which is a stupid decision and takes away from the challenge. Amid Evil is only fun when you play it in moderation. After a few hours - when the nostalgia factor wears off - you will start to see all the warts the game tries to hide from you. Playing Amid Evil made me want to boot up Quake, Heretic and Hexen, so I guess that's a plus too? Anyway, don't believe the hype.
This reboot is similar to games like Painkiller and Serious Sam, where enemies rush towards you from all sides in fairly big areas. It does not have much to do with the old 3D Realms Shadow Warrior, where Lo Wang was an ass kicking, dirty old man. The game is very focused on sword combat, because the guns are severely underpowered and kinda useless. Luckily slicing and dicing your way through yokai looking freaks and Zilla's henchmen is tons of fun. You have several skill trees which give you special moves and stuff like more health, shields etc. Lo Wang is a bit of a pompous a-hole, but has some nice quips like the original game. Every level has a couple of secrets, with throwbacks to the original game. The graphics still look colorful and pretty, despite showing its age. There are a lot of nice bamboo forests and Asia-inspired playgrounds ready to be soaked with the blood of your enemies. The soundtrack is pretty good too, despite it not being that memorable. What I don't like is the artificial difficulty. The developers seem to think that throwing waves of enemies at you is challenging. The further you progress, the more waves you have to defeat. They also did this in Hard Reset, so I guess they didn't learn. Also, all the chaos can become overwhelming when you slice and dice your way through hundreds of enemies at the same time. Another nitpick is that the special moves are triggered by a combination of buttons, which are hard to remember when you are in combat and being attacked from all sides. You simply do not have the time to remember a certain button combination and you can easily trigger the wrong special move, as the combinations are so similar to eachother. The boss battles are annoying, because it all comes to down to hitting certain glowing parts of their body, which can only be hit if you use the worthless shooting weapons. All in all it's a fun game that gets worse the further your progress.
Dishonored and it's Daud DLC is in my top 10 all time favorite games, but I can't put my finger on it why this sequel doesn't grab me as much as the first game. The Good: The graphics are more detailed and the soundtrack - once again done by the late Daniel Licht - is amazing. You can play as Corvo or Emily, who each have their own set of skills & powers, and there's a New Game+ where you can switch characters, but keep all the powers. You can also play the game refusing The Outsider's mark, which makes it a lot more punishing. This time they gave Corvo a voice and several famous Hollywood actors also lend their voice to important characters. The Bad: - The story. It's basically a badly written reboot of the first game. Having Delilah as the main antagonist also makes Daud's efforts in the D1 DLC's seem pointless. - Despite the detailed graphics everything looks cluttered, dark and desaturated. The two main colors are brown and gray. The vibrant colors of the first game are nowhere to be seen. D2 also traded the remarkable watercolor graphics in for a more realistic look. - The maps are too big. D1 had fairly small linear hubs which you could traverse any way you saw fit. D2 on the other hand has hubs with a lot of big empty spaces that are basically just padding. The much revered Clockwork Mansion - which is a technical marvel - is so big and confusing I found it a real slog to get through. - They changed the voice actor for The Outsider! I miss Billy Lush's otherworldly voice. The new guy is okay, but according to Lush Arkane Studio never bothered to give him a call... The Ugly: - This game is still riddled with bugs. I've experienced several CTD's playing the game. One minute your playing the game and all of a sudden you're staring at your desktop. No error message, no nothing. Especially the Royal Conservatory is a notoriously bug riddled map. Probably because D2 uses the new Void Engine, a customised id Tech 5 core, which used a lot of memory.
Full Throttle is probably one of the easiest LucasArts adventure games, but that doesn't spoil the fun whatsoever. Okay, the story isn't the most original, but the game has great graphics and an amazing soundtrack by Peter McConnell, with help from biker rockband The Gone Jackals. I still get goosebumps every time I hear 'Legacy', which is an enormously catchy rock song. Look it up on Youtube, kids! The puzzles are logical and not infuriatingly obtuse like the ones in Sam & Max and Day of the Tentacle. The voice actor who voices our hero Ben is phenomenal and Mark Hamill also voices several characters. The only complaints I have is the Road Rash-esque mini game, which just involves a lot of button mashing, and that the game is a bit on the short side.
Basically Dying Light is Dead Island with parkour, with a little bit of Just Cause thrown in there as well. It copies the same game mechanics and also the same annoying features. Enemies in DL are basically reskins of zombies from DI and weapons break just as easily. The story in Dead Island made more sense; In Dying Light you're basically an errand boy for everyone until the end of the game: "Bring me this item that's on the other side of the map and then run back to me to collect your shitty reward.". Looting stuff is a boring grind, especially since everything resets each day. You will end up with a lot of useless items clogging up your inventory. When it works, the parkour is great fun and chopping off zombie heads will never get old. A well executed dropkick sends the zombies flying meters away. The grappling hook will get you up to high places you couldn't reach before. The boss fights suck though and the game doesn't allow you to approach a mission the way you want. Exploring the map is fun, the missions are not. The graphics are still pretty good and the soundtrack kicks ass. The guy who did the voice for our hero is excellent. Night time is especially scary, when the real dangerous zombies (Volatiles) come out to play. The worst enemies you'll encounter are Virals. These are the same zombies as the Infected in Dead Island. I would've enjoyed the game more if there weren't so many of them. Later in the game you'll have to defend yourself from whole mobs of Infected, which get tiresome really fast. You can't run away either because they'll outrun you with ease. You get two big maps to explore (and a small linear one), but after The Slums I was pretty much done with the game. Too bad I was only halfway there. You do exactly the same things in Old Town: Go there, check this, collect that. Yawn! Dying Light is an okay game, but it also makes all the same mistakes as its predecessor.
Prey is what you would get if they took Bioshock into space. The graphics are good (not great) and the music by Mick Gordon is excellent. Prey also has an interesting story that develops the further you get into the game. It even has some sort of big reveal, like Bioshock. I haven't gotten so far yet, but I know it exists. It also suffers from the same problems the first Bioshock has: The combat is terrible and switching between weapons gets annoying really fast. The GOO gun is your main weapon, but you'll have to switch between this and your trusty wrench or shotgun to deal some real damage. There's also a lot of backtracking, because you are in a giant spaceship and you have to follow clues what happened there exactly. So half of the game you are hunting down keycards and missing persons, while trying to evade the shape shifting Typhon enemies. The audio mixing in Prey is seriously effed up: Voices are ear poppingly loud, while the effects are barely hearable. Using the audio sliders does nothing. Supposedly this is some sort of audio bug Arkane's never been bothered to fix. There are a couple of fixes for this online though, but for a game that relies on audio so much this is unacceptable. I enjoy playing it so far, but like Bioshock, it's a bit overrated in my opinion. Prey also has absolutely nothing to do with the game from 2006, so don't get your hopes up that this is some sort of reboot or sequel. It's not.
My least favourite of the three. I'm a hardcore S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fan, but it's hard to recommend this. In this prequel we follow a merc named Scar who has been hired by a faction called Clear Sky to find Strelok, the main character from Shadow of Chernobyl. He went to the heart of the zone and triggered a huge blowout. Scar needs to stop him from trying it again. The positives: + Great graphics + Haunting sfx and soundtrack + New hubs and changed old ones + Still very atmospheric + Very challenging gameplay + Mechanics can repair and upgrade your gear + Extremely moddable The negatives: - Bugs, bugs, bugs - Needs the Sky Reclamation Project mod to be playable - Broken faction wars - The Zone is overpopulated - Sometimes feels like a Call of Duty game - Bleeding requires multiple bandages - Bandits grenade spam - Enemies carrying crap weapons but have pinpoint accuracy - Food is not necessary anymore - Artifact hunting is a chore - No iron sights - Not getting your money back after being robbed - Very linear after Limansk - Cop out ending All in all, Clear Sky is the weakest game in the trilogy and only recommendable to the hardcore S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans. All others should just go straight from Shadow of Chernobyl to Call of Pripyat. I'm very surprised some people rate this as their favourite S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game. My guess is they love frantic shooters like Call of Duty too, but that's not what S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is supposed to be. 5.5/10
