A hack and slash game that has you taking control of one of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse, War, in a quest for revenge against those who wronged him. I liked the character designs for the angels, demons and war himself. The game also looks pretty good overall, and the areas are filled with some beautiful scenery. Exploring the world itself is enjoyable, but it would nice if War moved a little faster. Gameplay is mainly hack and slash combat and some puzzle solving. Your main armament is War’s greatsword, Chaos-eater. You have two side weapons to throw in for some additional moves, special abilities and some other tools you can incorporate into your combos. The combat is fun overall. Your attacks feel impactful enough and you have the option of executing weakened enemies with extreme prejudice, and a lot of flair. Great fun, especially when you feel like partaking in more cinematic brutality. You have one execution animation for each enemy, but you will usually encounter a lot of each enemy, which can make looking at the animations boring after some time unfortunately. Your moveset can also feel lacking in terms of variety. Puzzles are interesting enough and are not too difficult to solve mostly, can be a nice change of pace. The game’s plot is not exactly original, can be cheesy sometimes too, but it is enjoyable. War is your usual super serious protagonist, which can have its appeal, and the other characters you meet can be interesting in their own ways. Overall I would recommend this to anyone looking for a good hack and slash game.
A mix of turn-based combat and stealth, you play as a nameless ronin(?) seeking revenge on the corporate executives who killed your father. That's about all the plot the game has to enable your rampant slaughter, which is fine. It’s pretty fun for what it is. Most levels consist of you hacking terminals to get data on your targets, which is a minor action. The actual task is getting to these terminals, usually guarded by progressively difficult arrangements of guards you can either sneak past or kill brutally, you will probably do the latter more. Levels that have you assassinating the targets in question are the same mostly, with an obvious objective. The way you move around by jumping, crawling on walls like you’re Spiderman and of course using a grappling hook is pretty fun. You move in real time when you have not been spotted, but when you are seen by enemies the game becomes turn based. You can either jump to move around or avoid attacks, or attack any nearby enemies. You can unlock more tricks for your roster to keep things interesting too. You also get to feel really cool whenever you escape from the scene of the carnage you cause. The game is on the short side, maybe 4-7 hours long depending on how long you take, which is just short enough to avoid the game from overstaying its welcome, and can be good to play if you are low on free time. Would recommend to anyone looking for a somewhat unconventional action game.
This is a sci-fi first person shooter with supernatural horror elements. You take the role of the Point Man of a special forces organisation known as First Encounter Assault Recon, who is tasked with taking down the rogue commander of a battalion of telepathic replica soldiers. It's a pretty good military themed shooter overall. You've got a nice selection of weapons, and a decent reason to use each of them, which makes it a shame you can only cart around 3 at a time, and good visual and audio feedback makes bloodily gunning down your enemies feel satisfying. Your enemies are typically the soldiers that make up the replica forces, coming in different visual flavours and armed with different weapons, but generally having the same physical characteristics and behaviour as far as I can tell. You've also got the occasional heavily armoured and armed enemy added in to give you an extra challenge to surmount. They do an impressive enough job of not dying too easily, which makes fighting them a generally enjoyable challenge. They also seem to be fond of leaping through windows and over objects with a lot flair, probably just to mock your inability to do so. You've got access to bullet-time, which is a pretty useful tactical option, and just makes things feel cooler really. You can also perform melee attacks such as bicycle kicks, slides and roundhouse kicks, which I found to be situational at best, but landing them can be fun. The game looks pretty nice overall, and also has a nice array of visual effects added in to make firefights feel that much more intense. Environments are well designed and detailed, and your enemies also have multiple cool looking military themed designs. It also has some neat music to go along with your tactical slaughter operations. It is also a horror game I suppose, which means occasional jump scares, and several spoooooky segments spread throughout the game. They generally did not have much of an effect on me, but I appreciated the change of pace sometimes. Nothing much really bothered me, although I disliked the final stretch of the game, which is an escape sequence peppered with ghost-like enemies that are more annoying than they are challenging. I would recommend it to anyone fond of shooters with more of a focus on strategic play and hit and runs tactics.
Hollow Knight is pretty great overall. It utilises a really well done hand drawn art style, with character, enemy and environment designs that are unique and grimly cute. Its ambience and music are also pretty good, lots of tunes to get you hyped for an epic battle, to unsettle you as you trudge through hostile environments, and to just let you take in more serene moments. Overall the game has a somewhat dark and esoteric feel to it. The story of the world is quite intriguing, and is told through pieces of information gleamed from the diverse and interesting characters and by prodding around various points in the world. The full map of the game is large, and the individual areas are diverse in design and theme, and are also connected to each other in interesting ways, if you can find the shortcuts. Exploring the world is a lot of fun overall, usually done by making very good use your movement abilities to traverse platforming segments that range from easily doable to downright sadistic. Being thorough in your exploration can reward you with new or improved abilities, interesting information about the world, useful items and alternate pathways, which is always nice. The combat system is pretty simple, you start with a basic slashing attack with your sword, and can slash in any of four directions, and eventually get some extra abilities added to your arsenal, but battles are typically fast paced and can require good timing, reactions and strategy. The game world is populated with varied enemies that range from barely threatening, to highly lethal, with the most powerful regular enemies having damage, speed and defensive abilities that could even rival some of the bosses. This game has boss fights by the way, quite a few, and most of them are epic fights against powerful foes that will require you to showcase the best of your combat abilities, with the game's great soundtrack assisting in increasing the awe factor of these battles. Add in responsive controls and a smooth movement system, and you've got an overall intense and highly enjoyable combat experience. This game isn't without its flaws sadly, but I found them easy to get over. The world isn't exactly dense with fast travel points, so if you want to revisit specific parts of areas, you're going to need to be ready for a few treks. Can be mitigated somewhat by finding shortcuts, but not completely. The game's checkpoints, which you respawn at after death, can also feel like they're in rather short supply sometimes, particularly in more difficult areas. In any case, I'd recommend this game greatly to anyone, particularly those fond of Metroidvanias and 2D action games.
A immersive simulator. Don your sunglasses and trench-coat and fight against the conspiracies that threaten your nation and the world. The game was never stellar in the graphics department, the voice acting is usually laughable, though it has a pretty great soundtrack at least. The AI and stealth system work well enough, though they have their own quirks. The world portrayed is interesting and learning about it from wherever you can is engaging. It feels like it had a lot of thought put into crafting it. In this world, all (well at least a lot of the major) conspiracies theories are true, and this has all sorts of interesting effects on its plot and how it unfolds. Politics and philosophy that relates to governance are also central to the game's themes, and it's exploration and discussion of such things are intriguing, in spite of how things like the voice acting can be. The game is big on allowing you to solve problems in different ways. The skill system helps drive this, with skills generally dedicated to making you more effective with weapons, and thus allowing more direct assaults against enemies to be more feasible, skills that instead assist with your ability to bypass security, which allows you to find more and more alternate routes, and some in between, that influence your survivability. As your main character is a kind of cyborg, you also have the ability to augment yourself with different abilities, that in turn augment different styles of play. Areas are full of alternative paths, extra resources, exploitable environmental objects and the like, some more well hidden than others. Exploration is exciting and very much encouraged here. The game also acknowledges what actions you decided to take in various places, which makes things even more fascinating. In spite of its flaws it's still a great experience overall, and would highly recommend it to fans of cyberpunk and games that offer an abundance of choice.
