This is a worthy addition to the Silent Hill series, although much like Resident Evil 4, Silent Hill 4 takes us away from the formula of the first three, although not quite as much as RE4. With that said, Silent Hill 4 is great, I loved it when I first played it and after spending a few hours with this re-release it is bringing back all kinds of memories. I intend to do a full SH playthrough in the near future and can't wait to get this rolling in earnest. Top quality game, excellent atmosphere, classic Silent Hill mind-buggery, you can't go wrong.
This is an enjoyable title, it looks great, has a simple but engrossing storyline, the gameplay is excellent, and the choice of how to play is surprisingly open. My two small complaints would be as follows. 1. There are quite a few loading screens, and many of the quests have you traversing around the ship. A particularly bad one is using the lift in the lobby, this locks you into a small area while travelling up or down, but then you still need to open a door and load into the target area anyway. Either get rid of the lift ride or make that the loading screen. 2. The hacking mini-games are the worst I've seen, there's a mod on Nexus to remove them and I would advise you install it. Aside from these minor issues, the game is fantastic.
The environment is beautiful, the storyline is simple but engrossing, the gameplay is fluid, the whole thing is just an outstanding experience from start to finish. I don't know if I'm just fatigued with modern game developers (money grabbers) or not, but most open world games now are simply linear games but with copy/pasted repetitive mini-encounters between each dynamically loaded "level". A perfect example being most of the Far Cry games, the last in the series being littered with the same checkpoint with the same enemies and the same strategies every, single, time. This is one of the areas that Days Gone shines, of course, it does have filler, but the vast majority of the side-missions are tailored. They are not prefabs that have been spawned around the map with a random rotation, they are purposefully designed around the location, each requiring slightly different strategies. You get around on a bike, you can upgrade the bike to make it quieter, faster, larger fuel tank, more storage etc. Also, you have to maintain the bike, getting it fixed when damaged and topping the fuel up. The fuel situation adds a new level of immersion to travelling because you can fast travel from one location to another, but you use fuel in doing so, so you may have to take a detour to a location with some jerry cans or a fuel station. One of the big technological achievements for this game at the time was the hordes, they are HUGE and the quality of the models and animations is excellent. You cannot take on a horde without planning, finding choke points, setup mines along the route, using the environment (fuel tankers explode). I'm rambling, this is a great game, I've played through on the PlayStation, now I have it on GOG.
I cannot begin to reckon the hours I poured into this game during my early teens. Everything is balanced exceptionally well, from maintaining your castle, defending your walls, to laying siege to that bast**** Wolf's castle. The campaign is fun to play through, but as usual with old school RTS games, the longevity lies in the scenarios and skirmishes. During the skirmish or free-play missions, you can completely turn combat off and focus on the castle management aspect, or go the opposite. The Siege missions are one of my favourite, you can tweak the settings to make them a real challenge. Don't think you can bum rush a castle with a load of mounted knights, they will be cut short by the archers and crossbowmen in no time. This is not a modern RTS (i.e. tower defence game with some makeup on), this is a proper RTS, an old-school style RTS where strategy and planning is key. This is a great game! Some prefer the original Stronghold games, or even Stronghold Crusader over the 2nd instalment, myself, I love them all. RTS's were my bag back in the day, and Crusaders II was the only RTS to get more of my time than C&C Generals: Zero Hour.
Invisible War is an excellent, simple, action RPG title! The problem is that it followed in the footsteps of one of the most significant Immersive-Sims on the PC. Deus Ex was targetted squarely at the hard core sim PC players, complex inventory management (for the day), branching upgrade paths, seemingly endless possibilities for solving each mission. Of course, a niche game doesn't rake in the big bucks, so they genericised it, took away a load of complexity, put the game on rails with the odd siding to give the illusion of choice. Invisible War was built for a wider market, as such, it was wide but not very deep, Deus Ex focussed on a specific objective and market so was narrow but very deep. With that out of the way, this game is still fun if you remove the Deus Ex bit from the title. It is an entertaining cyberpunk stealthy action game with some RPG elements. The storyline is fairly deep if you take the time to read all of the notes lying around.
This game takes the essence of the original, the atmosphere, the isolation, the immersion, and wraps it in modern gameplay systems. Very little of the original game is lost in translation, the devs really need to be given praise for this alone, especially considering the age of the original. There are a couple of minor gripes for me, nothing major, though. Firstly, the weapon selection seemed to remain fixed to melee, pistol and energy weapon for the majority of the game, then towards the end you get everything all at once. Maybe spread the weapons out more but limit the ammo to prevent the OP shotgun from making it easy early on. Secondly, the puzzles took me off guard. I'm ashamed to admit, but I have grown accustomed to the hand-holding puzzles of the modern day, so when faced with the first tricky wiring puzzle I assumed I was missing a "logic probe" because it mentioned one and nothing I tried seemed to work. Shortly after scratching my head, I realised the problem, I needed to move back into the old world, I needed to pull my pants up and figure things out for myself. Once this clicked, I stuck at it and realised I had not noticed the notches around the edge of the discs. The puzzles aren't hard by any means, but they are tricky if you haven't encountered them before. On a plus side, the puzzles are mostly random and spread far enough apart so that they are a break from normal play rather than a "oh look, another move things around to unlock the next area task" Aside from these minor gripes, this game is excellent, I had an absolute blast playing through it.
This game has gotten better and better over the time since release, QOL improvements and tweaks have really made the various mechanics shine. Night City is beautiful, the different areas all have a rich and deep feeling to them, the characters are very well written and voice acted, the combat is slick. I've played through this game three times already, and although I bought the expansion on release I haven't played it yet, I'm waiting for enough time to pass so it all feels new again then I'm going to do another full run. There are very few games that make me care about the various characters and this is one of them. Yeah the game started out bad, really bad, but I don't think this is down to CDPR. Instead the money people wanted to add more money to their already giant pile of money, so as usual pushed for an unfinished product to be released.
Story wise it is very similar to the classic original game, although they have changed and refined a few things, the whole premise of going to an old house to recover a piano from the loft doesn't work when you think about it. With that said, it will bring back all the good memories that your mind has added layer after layer of rose coloured filters onto. The graphics are nice, the environments are very well done, and the characters are decent. The atmosphere in general is top drawer, the art deco aesthetic and gumshoe trope are really appealing. The audio is very well done too, although every SINGLE door slamming shortly after leaving a room gets old. The bad, well it stutters, I'm running a beast of a rig and it stutters a lot. The controls are wonky in a lot of places and leave you frustrated when trying to react quickly during combat. For example, when the character is lazily making a mental note of the groceries he needs to get in for dinner while slowly reloading his weapon with 5 monsters smashing his face off, only for him to not aim at all when done because you happened to hold the aim button in readiness while he was getting a stone out of his shoe before shouldering the weapon. Oh I got stuck in the geometry more time than I can count. Overall though, I enjoyed the game.
