Maker no mistake: This is not THE Silent Hill 2 game everyone raves about to this day. This 2024 DEI-make capsules everything WRONG with 2020's industry. The gameplay is yet another Over-Shoulder action slop a la SH:HC / TLOU / RE4R, focusing too much on combat, destroying the brilliant camera-work and player guidance the originals had. Demake also adds tons of generic "open world" and "cinematic" busywork that plague modern triple-A games. The Unreal Engine 5 means that you need an RTX4000 series card to get even 30fps at 1080p. While using DLSS, ruining your eye sight either with the TAA smear, or noisy, runny dithering. No in-betweens. The character design sucks, everyone looks like a stiff alien. The characters' roles, behavior and overall attitude are also much more 1-dimensional and flat, because you cannot have good points on a "villain", and a game about "sex and death" cannot actually show sexy characters. This also extends to literal censorshipping of PH's actions. He's now just SH Movie's "Executioner"! The voice acting is just as bad as in the 2010's HD Collection. Monotonous and destroys the character nuance and emotion. The new OST is over-produced the same Square-Enix's ruined Final Fantasy X-X2's HD remasters' music; too many added layers of instruments muddling the melody and the early 00's punk-rock vibes, replacing it with something akin to a big band cover. The use of said soundtrack is also way worse, with less thought put into the mixing: why does the PH's appearance noise start playing randomly when exploring the streets before the Apartments?? What's the point of the radio if it's constantly covered by the dynamic soundtrack blasting with max volume if you come across a foe? The in-game and cutscene cinematography is all around inferior to the 2001 original, possessing all the telltale signs of the post-2010s' "MCU" tropes. Finally, the 70 dollar price tag ain't enough, as they shill the "ebinn meme hat DLC" to the Twitch audiences.
I was ignorant and avoided the Yakuza (RGG) franchise for many, many years. I probably thought it to be like a "Japanese GTA" or something. Then I got Y0 gifted to me. Boy, was I wrong! It's hard to find real faults in Yakuza Zero. The gameplay is super satisfying and varied, art and audio drop-dead gorgeous, and the story is actually damn intriguing and emotional. One moment you may be laughing your butt off, beating up tough-guy criminal scum on the streets and wasting your well deserved loot money by playing retro arcade classics. The other second you're tangled in a sinister crime drama, where the line between good and evil is blurry. One might be overwhelmed by the amount of content Y0 provides, but have no fear: if any of the stuff ever starts feeling boring or overstaying its welcome, you can indeed just back away and roam around, do something totally different for as long as you feel comfortable with! The world of Yakuza is not some grand open world, but rather densely packed, cute and small one. For total newbies, Y0 is a stellar starting point if you're interested giving the series a shot. For the old-time fans, Zero provides a well crafted backstory for the series' two main characters, and a well deserved "soft reboot", fleshing out some of the past characters and giving Kiryu a breather from the tumor known as Haruka. Expect A LOT of fan service none the less, though!
The term "rough diamond" describes the STALKER series well. After numerous postpones and ultimately even content cuts, the first STALKER game was released in fairly broken shape in late 00s. However thanks to the helpful developers and the passion of the numerous fans, the game got soon fixed into stable form, and nowadays it has gotten two sequels and numerous big fan-made mods. On DX9 & higher lighting-modes these games look stunning, and the dynamic A-Life AI keeps Zone "alive" 24/7. Throw the difficulty to max, disable crosshair, and jump into the mysterious and deadly world of STALKER! See more info at : http://pastebin.com/FUPEbLiv Don't give up in the beginning! The starting gear kinda sucks and first area is... a bit boring for some. So what ARE the STALKER games then? -First-Person- survival -shooter games. -Open-ended world with some pre-determined, scripted sections. Changing weather and day/night cycles. -Your character needs to eat, and getting hit may cause varying levels of bleeding. 1 shot may kill at best. -Focus on FPS gameplay, with physics-affected bullet trajectories, multiple ammo types and upgrading options for all guns. -Some RPG-like elements, such as weight-limited inventory and resistance statistics. No leveling-up or collecting EXP, it's all real-time action! -Loosely based on the Russian "Roadside Picnic" -novel, and the "Stalker" movie based on it. The games take place in the area known as the Zone, which is more twisted version of the real-life Zone of Alienation, the closed area around the exploded Chernobyl Nuclear Powerplant in Ukraine. Unexplainable stuff starts happening in the area, it gets closed down by military. Few nutcases start breaking in to the place and smuggle out artifacts with logic defying effects, which eventually causes a "gold rush" into the area. These people illegally infiltrating the Zone become dubbed as STALKERS, short for Scavengers - Trespassers - Adventurers - Loners - Killers - Explorers - Robbers.
