X-Com Enforcer may feel like sacrilege to hardcore fans of the strategy games but in this day and age, it doesn't do any harm to anyone, especially since the series eventually went back to its roots in recent years. This game is fun. Pure and simple. It doesn't offer anything deep or complex but it is just pure, relentless third-person chaos. The body count easily racks up to hundreds per level, and it just feels satisfying to blow some steam off like that. It's a similar vibe to what you'd get while playing a Serious Sam game, only on a smaller scale and with a different tone. The game benefits from being built on the Unreal engine, which lends itself to fairly smooth controls that never feel like you have to wrestle with your character or get stuck on level geometry. I never experienced any serious bugs or crashes either so it feels pretty well-polished too, and with just a few seconds of tweaking in the .ini file, you can comfortably play this in full HD widescreen on modern systems. The only time when things got annoying was when I was ganged up on by a horde of enemies and it felt like being stuck in a mosh pit. The game is fairly easy, though, so it never caused me to lose too much health, and once I upgraded health pickups to max level, it became almost trivial. And that's probably its biggest issue because all you do here is blast your way through waves of aliens and beat levels at breakneck speed, rarely ever encountering any serious resistance outside of an occasional boss fight that serves more as a doorstop than a satisfying challenge. And while this may be fun at first, it's probably for the better that you can beat this game in about 5-6 hours. Any longer than that and it would get really tedious. Thankfully it offers a wide variety of enemy types and a decent unlockable system, so these things save it from mediocrity and raise it to a slightly above-average 90s shooter that's fun to play if you just want to unwind and have a bit of a nostalgia trip.
Worth checking out for the sheer novelty of its visual design and lore. You just don't get games that are this weird and abstract anymore. The gameplay can get a bit trial-and-error, especially in the later levels, and it will usually take more than one try to get through a mission but if a couple of retries aren't enough to break your resolve then it ultimately ends up being a pretty fun game. And one that also has a few interesting gameplay features to offer, so it's not just a brainless third-person shooter. It will take some thinking and timing to figure out how to complete certain objectives.
The biggest problem with the first game was the melee combat, which felt very stiff and awkward, so the sequel instead made the melee combat the main focus of the gameplay and tries to imitate other games that were popular at the time. Think Prince of Persia, Soul Reaver, or Devil May Cry. The problem is that its execution in Bloodrayne 2 is just terrible, with buggy hit detection, annoying camera, janky animations, and frustrating difficulty. Not only that but pretty much every other aspect of the game is also broken to some degree. Especially platforming, where you will frequently fail jumps because of the poor collision detection or because you fell through the level geometry and into the void. The updated visuals and even more extreme (albeit comical) gore are a minor positive but the game just isn't fun to play at all. I finished it once many years ago and I can still remember that it was an extremely frustrating ordeal. So when I attempted to replay it recently, thinking that I might gain a different perspective after so many years, I just gave up after the first few levels once it became clear that it wasn't just me, and the game really was as bad as I remembered.
Ah, no matter, at least I can adjust my previous score, where I guess I was a bit too lenient. It's one of those early 2000s games that piqued my 14-year-old self's interest mostly because it had boobs in it and you could rip Nazis apart with cool-looking arm blades. And honestly, that's like the only thing this game has going for it. Whoever came up with this idea was a genius because the main character's design is definitely eye-catching and the blood-soaked, Nazi-killing premise pretty much guaranteed that this is going to sell like hotcakes. But let's be real - the gameplay itself is pretty janky and not very good. Melee attacks and character animations feel stiff, shooting doesn't require any skill because it's all auto-aiming, and the platforming just plain sucks. Some sections of the game are also beyond frustrating unless you play it on easy. So, bottom line, it's neither a good brawler nor a particularly good shooter, and again, the only thing that kinda keeps you playing is the sheer, cathartic mayhem and nudity. And yet, somehow it always works because whenever I reinstall this thing, I will play it until I get bored of dying, but instead of deleting it from hard drive, I'll just put on some cheats and keep playing anyway. I honestly don't need the challenge with this type of game because the difficulty options are just broken and picking between Easy and Medium is like picking between "your grandma can play this" and "you will toss your computer out the window". And let me tell you, I never even bothered trying the Hard mode and I don't care. None of that matters though because if the game's premise sounds like something you'd be into then you've already decided whether you're gonna play it or not. And I guess there are worse games that you could be playing...
Cyberpunk-themed, Fifth Element inspired shooter where you fly around a futuristic-looking city in a hovercar and complete random missions sounds pretty good on paper. And overall it is... somewhat. While the controls and gameplay generally feel good and it's pretty fun to shoot the bad guys, swerve around the skyscrapers, and dodge traffic, it does get old pretty fast. There's just not enough variety between missions, and on top of that, the game does a really poor job at explaining what the player is supposed to be doing. Maybe it's one of those old games where you really had to read the instructions manual before playing because I eventually accepted defeat and looked up some tutorials online. And yes, I know, I am an idiot - why didn't I look up the manual, so conveniently provided by GoG, right? Anyway, after those confusing initial minutes of the game, I didn't really stick around for long because as I said, after about an hour or two it seemed like I saw everything that it had to offer. So if you don't mind the lack of variety, it's not terrible.
I never had a chance to play it as a kid so this was the first time I ever picked it up and honestly, it's super fun even without the nostalgia factor that I'm sure many people today have for this game. It's not really about deep storytelling or complex gameplay - it's a game where you pilot a giant robot and blow sh*t up - and you blow it up good. The sense of scale doesn't really feel right and the robot you control is just too nimble and fast to really feel appropriate for the scale the game is presenting, but that's not a problem at all. It's more like playing with action figures with stacks of books imitating the buildings so it does kinda require you to use that childlike imagination a little. Bottom line is that the action is fun, tight, and exhilarating and that's what matters the most in this type of game. I don't know if it's possible to have nostalgia for something that you never played before, but I guess this game does just that. And it's probably because it's so very emblematic of the times in which it was made. Those low-poly graphics, distinctly 90s sci-fi aesthetic, simplistic plot, and a big focus on high-octane action... Robots, dystopian future, techno music, and that classic third-person shooting style that was all but gone by the time when over-the-shoulder games like Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War took over the market. All of this makes Slave Zero feel like the game that you swear you've seen somewhere as a kid, and because of that, it's still great to pick up and play, even if you never did it before. I would have given it a max rating if it wasn't for the technical issues. I had to download an external patch to get the DirectX mode to run so that I could enable the fancy graphical effects, and the game refuses to run in fullscreen so I had to play it in a window. Plus there's a weird issue with dynamic lightning where too much of it in the scene makes the framerate chug like hell.
While the original Soldier of Fortune was very much a run'n'gun shooter, with its realistic military theme being more of a gimmick, Soldier of Fortune II attempts to tackle this disconnect between the theme and gameplay by being a much more grounded and realistic experience. Sadly, I don't think that Raven managed to pull this one off. To be quite honest, this might be the only title out of the entire developer's portfolio that I not only dislike but genuinely hate at times. Some of the design decisions are pretty ridiculous and take the concept of realism way too far. For example, whenever you pick up an automatic weapon, then you're better off switching it to semi-auto because the amount of recoil and spread in a full auto mode is so over the top that you'd think John Mullins has arthritis. Isn't this game about a veteran mercenary? It really makes the gunplay feel dodgy when your badass hero can't even handle a burst from a machine gun without spraying bullets all over the place. You'll also spend most of the game leaning from behind corners and trying to pick off dudes at a distance because trying to advance at even a slightly faster pace will get you killed in no time, plus the enemies have a tendency to chuck grenades at you with accuracy of a clairvoyant. I only finished this game once before but the jungle level is usually the moment that breaks me whenever I try to give the campaign another go. It's just terrible. And don't even get me started on stealth mechanics, it's basically trial-and-error and isn't fun at all. Story-wise I don't think the game is terribly interesting either. The concept shows promise at first but the in-between-mission sections where you have to sit through uninspired dialogue scenes or explore the non-combat areas are very boring and go on for far too long. The first game always dropped you right into the action and any filler that was there was brief and purposeful but in this game, I was really struggling to care.
Everything about this game is really boring and cliched. You fly around the galaxy collecting pieces of magical McGuffin for some old general type who's not at all going to betray you towards the end, and occasionally you take a break to talk with your stock character crewmates: - a scantly dressed hottie with huge cleavage and a chip on her shoulder - a cigarette chomping gruff war vet with a gravelly voice and a dark past - plucky alien comic relief who just doesn't understand human expressions (hilarity ensues) This all goes on for about 9 hours while you're trying not to slip into a coma because the combat is completely inane, your character moves as slow as molasses, and pretty much everything else about this game is cliched and boring. It's like the developers were going out of their way to tick off every box on the list of uninspired late 90s/early 2000s sci-fi shooter tropes. At least the visuals are nice for 2003, and mechanically it's functional. Some weapons even have a nice punch to them so if you don't mind the generic nature of it all then it's at least playable, I guess... Honestly, whenever I think back on this game, I usually wonder why I haven't played it more back in the day because I keep remembering that it had this cool-looking assault rifle and some of the visuals were nice. But then I reinstall it and it doesn't take me very long to remember why it sucked. This is definitely one of those games that you may remember more fondly but it's best not to revisit unless you really wanna ruin those memories.
I tried to give this game a chance many times over the years. Together with Aquanox 1 it was my very first purchase on GOG but I never really got past the first few missions. I'll be posting the same review for both games because they're extremely similar to each other, both in gameplay, as well as with how the single player campaign is constructed. The first thing that struck me about them is how much goddamned dialogue you have to sit through in between each mission. Sometimes it felt like it could go on for 10-15 minutes at a time, which is a huge issue if the missions themselves are extremely brief. It also wouldn't be such a hassle if it wasn't for the fact that the story isn't terribly interesting and the voice acting is just... bad. If you feel like you just want to click through all this yapping then playing the game feels all the more pointless, to be honest. And the missions? Well, they range from bland and formulaic to just tedious and confusing. As I mentioned, many of them are very short so the overall impression the game is giving me is utter boredom. When I fire up a shooter, I just wanna shoot stuff, and there's not much of that going on in this game, at least within the first few hours of the campaign. Finally, I'm just not feeling it when it comes to controls and combat. It doesn't really feel like you're steering a submarine, it's more like flying a spaceship and shooting other spaceships, except there's some plankton floating around instead of space dust. Rather disappointing. Overall, neither of these games were very satisfying to me and despite my best efforts, I just couldn't get into them.
I just don't get it. There are so many different directions you could go with a story set in W40k franchise but every single videogame insists on telling the same boring plot about a psyker or an inquisitor who betrays the Space Marines in the middle of an alien invasion and summons the forces of Chaos by the time third act kicks in. Except this time it's even a bigger cop-out because you're not playing as a Space Marine. You're a Fire Warrior of the T'au empire and I guess you could call it an interesting twist, since you're experiencing the invasion from a perspective of a xeno but it ultimately ends up being the same exact plot as any other W40k game. The lack of creativity in the writing is astounding. But anyway, the gameplay itself isn't particularly stellar, and the game is not very polished so its janky nature will become very obvious within the first few minutes of playing. But it never gets really tedious or infuriating and some of the weapons are actually pretty fun to use. I guess it strikes the balance between janky and fun, to the point where it could be called a guilty pleasure especially if you're a fan of the Warhammer 40k universe. It certainly retains some of the elements which are faithful to the source material. Like, for example, when you first pick up a bolter, it's not just some automatic machine gun - in the small hands of a T'au warrior this thing actually looks and feels like a big-ass gun that fires bullets the size of a rocket. When it comes to W40k licensed shooters, nowadays your best choice is the excellent Space Marine from 2011 but if you find yourself really starved for an action game set in this universe, Fire Warrior is also a fairly solid recommendation.
