It's kinda funny to imagine the stuff that takes place during the gameplay actually happening in an episode of Voyager because it would make it one of the bloodiest pieces of television of all time, and the main characters would seem like they came from a mirror universe with the amount of carnage that they commit over the course of the game. I guess making a first person frag-fest instead of a more thoughtful adventure game was a more bankable choice considering the genre's popularity at the time, but regardless, it's just fun to think about and it's not a jab at the game's quality anyway. The developers still made concentrated effort to emphasize the storytelling aspect and properly immerse you in this setting, which really does feel like you're on the set and playing out a role in an episode of Star Trek. The fact that all of the members of the original cast make an appearance to voice their respective characters adds to the immersion as well. All the shooting an mayhem is simply a bit of a ludonarrative dissonance that doesn't exactly align with the show's ideals but serves as a fun diversion in between the plot dumps. As for the gameplay, this is definitely an early 2000s Quake engine FPS action at its finest, and Raven Software doing what they did best at the time by delivering an extremely fun shooting game. Thanks to the clever story setup, there's enough variety in enemy and level designs to keep things fresh as time goes on, the controls and character movement are tight, precise, and satisfying as you would expect from a game made by this studio, and there's enough light puzzling and platforming to pass the time in between shooting galleries in a satisfying way. All that goodness served on one of the finest FPS engines at the time, with all its audio and visual bells and whistles that still hold up to this day with a very unique, timeless aesthetic to it. It's a great game and I heartily recommend it to any Star Trek or FPS fan.
If the original Xbox version was still available on the Microsoft Store, I would've chosen it over the PC version, which is messy and workarounds aren't very simple. Firstly, there's the baffling decision to force the gameplay into a letterbox format. Why was this even a thing? Widescreen monitors weren't exactly the norm in 2003. It must have been some misguided artistic choice, but in my opinion, it doesn't look very good and it's just distracting. Even if you manage to force a widescreen resolution, the black bars won't budge unless you mess around with the hex editor. Another thing is wonky mouse support or ear-splitting sound mixing that sounds like your speakers are about to explode but there aren't any fixes for that as far as I know. As for the game itself, it's not half bad, but it feels like the developers either rushed it due to time and budget constraints or simply didn't think things through. A&D was made by the same guys behind Giants: Citizen Kabuto, and it does bear a resemblance as a spiritual successor. However, it feels stripped down to the bone, offering only one playable character, even though it feels like others should've been playable as well. Or, at the very least, a co-op mode should've been included but that is also mysteriously absent. It's mostly just mindless running and gunning which, interestingly enough, is completely bloodless even though the characters frequently comment about flying guts that aren't there, so I see it as yet another feature that was cut for some reason. It's sorely lacking the variety that could have made the gameplay more engaging. It gets the job done, but after a while, you find yourself zoning out and becoming numb to all the chaos. That's why Giants had multiple factions to play as and a strategic element to spice things up. On the bright side, the story does its job, and the humor, while not everyone's cup of tea, did manage to elicit a few chuckles. The soundtrack is also pretty unique.
Honestly, the only thing I really need to say about this game is that I used to have to get into fights with my then-16-year-old sister because she was hogging my computer all the time, playing through Soldier of Fortune's campaign on repeat. Let that sink in for a moment. If that doesn't sell you on trying out this game then I don't know what will. And before you get on my back for suggesting that girls aren't gamers or whatever, you really need to understand what kind of a teenager my sister was. She was literally the last person you'd suspect to be into this type of game at that age. Hell, she was never really into gaming at all and once she got over SoF, I don't think she ever picked up another game ever again. And I guess it's entirely possible that what grabbed her attention was the fact that you could shoot dudes in a dick and they would react to it in a believable way. But my personal takeaway from this little anecdote is that Soldier of Fortune is just so much fun that literally anyone will find it enjoyable.
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.
