I get the feeling SR3 is an unfinished game that was patchworked into a functioning product, because the uncanny feeling that a lot of it is practically copy and pasted. The game is surprisingly barebones in that it offers next to nothing unless you're in it for the main plot, as even that has filler missions where you're forced to complete at least one optional side activity of each type. Adding to that feeling, you have this treadmill where you're asked to increase the amount of passive income so that you can become more powerful to overcome the spongey enemies that they throw in mass waves at you. There is no win-win: You either ignore the upgrades and the game becomes near unplayable on harder difficulties, or you lean into it and get rewarded with a dangling carrot where engaging with it is an exercise in tedium. Pick your poison, one type of tedium or the other. To make things worse, the main demographic for this game seems to be six year olds. Everything is tailor made to be as obnoxious as possible, from the awful licensed soundtrack to the W-A-C-K-Y characters and scenarios presented. While I can gel with fantastical moods, there is no grounding here to weave in-between segments with one another, it is full blast. Everything presented is as if a room full of children were the design committee. "The Saints are a gang of celebrities that fight businessmen, TRON, and luchadores, and the police all wear aviators and mustaches, and '80s anime soldiers have a massive airship and-" you get the point. Every little bit of gameplay feels extraneous, and the city is dull and uninteresting. I swear, they built the main urban island in the center and then filled the rest of the map out with copy-pasted suburban housing and industrial lofts. There is no character to the environment. It's like this game exists to sell the franchise out and not add to it. I do not recommend it. It is functional and fun here and there, and that is what keeps it from getting one star.
I got FEAR 2 coming off of playing the first, so here's some advice: If you played FEAR 1, wait a while before playing FEAR 2. Let the fresh scent of FEAR expire a bit. Play something else to get it off your mind. Then play FEAR 2. The distance will soften the blow. FEAR 2 is a good game in isolation. It has some pretty great moments and a decently presented story. I will warn that the first third of the game is not so great, but if you can get past that, it will get better. It's a short game and its Reborn expansion is even shorter. The game plays like one would expect a post-2007 console shooter would play like, which is to say a lot of winding linear corridors. I played on Hard difficulty and it can be cheap and tedious especially if you expect close combat, which isn't really viable. Some weapons stop being useful after a while, like the pistol, SMG, and shotguns, and others are broken when used efficiently, like the sniper rifle. You'll be keeping the AR on hand at all times while keeping the other toys for other special purposes, especially since you can hold four weapons at a time. The game's best set of levels are definitely the school. It is surprisingly well-designed and is the crown jewel of the game. If nothing else, it is worth experiencing. If you like first person shooters and want something that's decent and interesting, I give FEAR 2 a base recommendation. Buy it when it goes on sale. If you have decided to not take my advice, if you love FEAR with all your heart, then 2 will leave you heartbroken. It's not a good sequel. It's a decent enough game, but if you're coming off of one of the greatest games of all time, then it has a long list of negatives. It is less complex in its gameplay loop, is less fun, the narrative may as well be a reboot, the presentation is a net negative despite having pretty good graphics, and the level design kinda sucks. It's worth a few bucks for what it is, but is overall less than the sum of its parts.
This game and its expansions were completed on HARD difficulty and this review will reflect that. Allied Assault is a romp that ends up being a mostly mediocre experience. I found some missions to be greatly enjoyable, but many were also simply slogs with rather frustrating enemy spawns and placements. It doesn't help that certain sections may as well be dead ends if you can't tank the damage, and one egregious section near the end of the game is so frustrating I ended up cheating, as if it were meant for superhuman reflexes and the luckiest RNG you can get. Spearhead is a more balanced but jankier affair. It is shorter but concise in its focus around set pieces that actually tries to wow you while giving much needed QOL updates, such as leaning melee, and allowing multiple weapons in the same slot. However, a few of these set pieces don't really work that well and come off as contrived. Thematically, it is all over the place, which is reflected in the constantly switching arsenals, but if nothing else it is welcome variety. Breakthrough however is the expansion I would recommend as it is the most polished and best of the bunch. It has much more variety and you're doing something differently every five minutes. One big difference is that enemies no longer drop ammo, but as long as you are conscious and not magdumping, this actually feels like an appropriate bit of balancing because it forces you to change your weapons while still scattering ammo around. The game still relies on savescumming though, so it is best practice to hit that F5. Ultimately, I give MoH:AA a 2 out 5, which is below my base recommendation, but I give it a rather tepid one just because there is some good in there. Spearhead is slightly better, but honestly, I would just outright recommend Breakthrough. It is a fun game in its own right and while you can play any game in any order, I'd certainly either leave it as best for last or make sure it is played one way or another.
When I bought this game on GOG, I bought mostly out of nostalgia. I thought, hey, remember Just Cause? It was a pretty decent game. I played and beat it three times, first on the original Xbox, then on 360, and just now on PC. I never properly bought and kept a copy of the game, but I can see why. Something happened. I don't know if it's the PC version or if it was always... that. It did not age well. I'll get the good out of the way first. The graphics looked pretty good and I'm still impressed that some of the effects are all the way back in 2006. The trees especially look gorgeous. Some of the vistas look great, and the soundtrack is bopping when it plays very occasionally. The game is otherwise a jank piece of trash. It is VERY frustrating to play to the point where I was rushing to finish it as a side of effect of irritation at it. The game starts off fine enough, it's simple and easy, but the farther you go in the more it starts to crack. Between the wonky controls, the auto aim that gets in the way, the repetitive and simple environments and missions, the AI just spawning en masse. The game ends up being unfun. The sandbox isn't fun, the gameplay loop isn't fun, the presentation is muddy. The endearing simplicity of it comes to a fault, and it just ends up acting as a tech demo for its large environments and decent graphics. And I say decent. As said, some of it is downright beautiful, but presentation leaves something to be desired. The prerendered cutscenes are ugly as sin, the women look like creepy blow-up sex dolls whose clothes keep clipping through their bodies, but then so do the men. The story isn't even worth talking about, it's such a joke. I do not recommend this game beyond a curiosity purchase. It is functional, but I can see why it was left on the wayside and why I never kept a copy of this game. This is an okay game by 2006 standards and maybe I would give it 3 stars if it were better, but it is just simply too flawed for its own good.
WH40k Space Marine is a very good marriage of third person shooter and hack n slash, and I would recommend the game on that fact alone. The weapons feel great, being a big bulky dude that shoots big bulky guns and swings big bulky swords feels big and bulky, and it is topped off with appropriate amounts of violence that puts chest hair to work. The graphics are great, the sound is fantastic, and the combat fun. However, it is also very linear and on the shorter end. There are hidden collectibles, but it's more exposition that ties the okay story together. The combat is great but ends up being same-y after a while. There's not much that changes up, and honestly, the cutscenes are nice but they constantly interrupt the flow of the game. There's a few gimmick sections, but they're gimmicks. The boss fights are also terrible since they're just gauntlets of enemies. The game's emphasis on melee combat also kind of falls apart when you realize that you can headshot enemies fairly easily with the right loadout, and as the game gets harder, I started to lean on it more and more as being swarmed is a good way to see a game over screen. If you just want a fun romp in the Warhammer 40k universe as a casual fan, I say play this game. If you're not a fan at all and just want to crack some skulls, it's still a good time. I don't think you need to know anything about WH40k in order to enjoy it, but having some passing knowledge is a nice bonus to get what's going on. I think I figured out what the game was going for with its protagonist, but unfortunately the game never got a sequel and probably never will. I bought the game at $10 when it released on GOG, but seeing it at $40 makes me not recommend it at that price. $10 is a fancy sandwich, a drink, and a small bag of chips. That feels like an appropriate price for this game and it being four times that for a ten year old game that's short and linear is just SEGA price gouging at that point.
Heard good things about SWAT 4, so I bought a copy to see for myself, and I must say the only disappointing thing about it is there's not enough of it. That's not to say there aren't flaws, but I'll get to that down the line. The game discourages playing it like a typical shooter. Unless you're playing on Easy difficulty, you will be penalized and unable to complete missions if you decide to light up everyone holding a gun. You need a minimum of 50 on Normal, and 25 points extra every difficulty above that. However, the only thing failing you on Easy is allowing hostages to die or allowing bombs to go off, or dying, which is easy because enemies will hit more often than not, and you only have so much health. It's not the prettiest, but the graphics are clean and detailed, and I get a laugh just reading all the posters they put in the game. The levels feel lived in and tell a narrative if you pay attention. I find the aesthetics of the game appealing, and honestly it feels half like a horror game when it comes to how grounded everything is. The levels are little sandboxes that depending on the level usually have you go in a spiral to clear out the floors, or otherwise are a series of sprawling corridors where one door can lead to different part of the level. Aside from some parts of levels, it's never an A to B linear road. The thing keeping this from being a 5 star review is that it has a few stinking flaws. For one, your squad is kinda stupid, and will often get wiped for lining up. The physics bugs also make it so that when suspects do surrender, their weapons will clip through the floor, disallowing a perfect score. And the rules of lethal engagement basically put you in harm's way. The game penalizes you for shooting dudes if they aren't actively threatening you, but that includes aiming their gun at you. I have been shot dead and failed a level too many times because a guy opening a door was a quick or the dead situation.
I remember hearing about this game back in the day but honestly had forgotten about it until I saw it was on sale. I like its 3D camera system that uses WASD and wish more games had adopted it before the RTS genre went into stasis. The game's campaign is pretty fun, but on Normal difficulty at least, it wasn't very challenging which bleeds into the bot skirmishes where I was winning most of my games once I figured out optimal strategies. I wish the Soviet missions were more fleshed out, and while half of them are pretty good, I feel the other half were very gimmicky, which leads to my other point that the strategy portion is, well, this is best described as real time tactics. The strategy portion is very downscaled what with the lack of base building and tech trees, focused around a small number of units supported by a various assortment of bomb-the-crap-out-of-everything support powers. The story itself is pretty good and well presented, however on my PC, the in-engine cutscenes had a low framerate whereas the game itself never really ran poorly, and only hitched in the bot skirmishes with loads of explosions happening. Overall, I had a good time with the game and recommend it as a pretty good light RTS/Tactics game. Even though I beat the game, I still come back for the bot matches, which if you don't know, the CD key portion can be cancelled out and you can play on a local server. And the Soviet missions are integrated into the campaign, so if you're confused as to why it starts off that way, it's only one mission from going into the American side.
I waited to review these games until I beat all of them and in the meantime spent months in-between mostly to avoid burning out, so I may have forgotten some aspects of the first two titles. The base game I give 5 stars and wholeheartedly recommend. My only complaint is that it can be a bit easy despite putting it on hard or the third difficulty. I barely had to use the slow-mo mechanic, but getting into gunfights in this game is something I wish more games would put effort into. I had no problem running the game, only getting few dips here and there. It is a gorgeous game to boot. It's well paced even if it the last few sections kind of drag on a bit. Basically think Half-Life clone that's actually good. Extraction Point is also very good, if a bit short, but that's expansions for you. It builds off the game and actually gives much needed level variety, and is much harder to boot, and tops off the story satisfactorily. Its biggest flaw however is that it is not optimized for 1080p, isn't actually a default option and I had to go into the files to force into 1080p, and my PC could barely just chug along certain sections. It's not a great PC. Perseus Mandate on the other hand is basically just more FEAR. I'd give it 2 stars if I had to review it as a standalone product, but bundled with the rest it's alright if mediocre. I didn't hear good things about it so while it starts off bad, a boring ugly mess, it actually gets better in the latter half. Story is fanfic levels of bad and I'm not surprised it's not canon despite the cliffhanger, not that FEAR goes on to be better as a whole anyway. Overall, it's a great game, a great expansion, and a mediocre expansion that starts off bad but then actually gets better.
I write this review as a World War II enthusiast, and I must say, I know video games can and will take creative liberties based on their limitations as software, but this game, oh boy, I don't even know where to start. While I understand the premise is a fictionalized tale, not unlike a movie, I have to say if it were loosely based on anything, and I assure you World War II is a well-documented event that lasted several years, they took some wildly fictitious turns with the source material. While the Nazis, curse them in hell, may have been interested in some sick and twisted things, I have extreme doubts they employed scantily clad women as elite guards, had access to such an excessive amount of FG 42s, released ghosts and animated corpses with ghost powers from their crypts, created monstrous robo-cyborgs with electroshock capabilities, and while The Greatest Generation is named as such for good reason, I also doubt the capabilities of just one man alone are enough to survive a great deal of lead going through his body, and I doubt the Nazi engineers developed and placed everywhere bags of medicine with hyper metabolic properties that cures wounds. Of all the World War II video games I've played in my life, this is up there with the most unrealistic. --- Joking aside, I actually found returning to this game kind of disappointing. I know it's a 2001 game, but I found the gameplay loop repetitive in terms of pure action. Enemy variations are not interesting, since 80-90% of everything you fight is a machine gunner. The stealth sections help break up the pacing, but nothing compelling. The story is messily conjoined, starting with one narrative then being put on hold until the last act, while the second takes up the majority of the game. Best Wolfenstein? Yeah right. I got it running at 1080p without using unofficial patches by just using the console, it would always crash on a few level loads, but lowering the resolution fixed this.
So I figured buying this game as a stress test for my PC at 5 buckaroos would be a steal. Unfortunately, it was so engaging I beat it in a few days of on and off play, much like how FEAR gripped me. In order to actually play it at 1080p, I had to throw everything on medium, which yeah, it was mostly sub-30fps, but I'm so used to that I didn't even care, as long as it didn't stutter horribly. This was fine up until the final fight where my PC didn't much care for all the moving polygons and particle effects. The game itself is rather fun in its own right. I always appreciate a sandbox approach when a game allows it, and this is no exception. I'll detail some other thoughts I had on the game. 1. The only useful gun is the fake Kalashnikov and maybe the gauss gun. The SCAR doesn't get enough ammo until the end to make it appreciable, the SMG sucks, I almost never used the shotgun, the sniper rifle isn't reliable or given out freely enough to overcome that, and the pistols while fun are only good as backups. So the weapon that is reasonably powerful and accurate with plenty of ammo? The AK. 2. Armor is almost useless. I played on Delta and let me tell you, some of the enemies are tougher and more accurate than you. I found it easier to cloak and not getting hit than to rely on 5 guys shooting at me 5 times, which is a shame because I deliberately got into fights because they were fun. This isn't me complaining about the game being hard, just more the balance sways away from getting into shootouts. 3. I found the lack of a map editor dismaying. It didn't come with the GOG files, and doing a search basically said it was straight up no longer available. A shame because back then I dreamed of messing around with it, but now it's digital dust. 4. Pro-tip: Switch between cloak and speed. Cloaking basically makes you invincible, and speed makes your walking speed arena shooter levels, which doesn't eat your energy as long as you aren't sprinting.
