Medal of Honor Pacific Assault doesn't have as fond a reception as Allied Assault did, which is a shame as Pacific Assault does a lot of things well. The weapons handle well, the attention to detail is immense, and it has a large degree of authenticity in spite of the more game-y elements. The use of the squad Corpsman as the primary way to replenish health was a nice way of letting the player understand the importance of the squad rather than just shooting. The squad mechanics are fairly basic, and there are a few bugs and glitches here or there, mainly pertaining to some weird hitbox issues and animations, that show a slight lack of polish, but all of that doesn't detract from the feeling of actually being a Marine Raider fighting in the Pacific Theater of World War 2, and it's probably the best single player shooter that tackles this subject matter. As an aside, pick up the GOG version over the Origin version, as you require a DRM free version to properly customize resolution and change FOV.
Base Doom 3 is great. It's one of the most immersive games I've ever played. The premise of Doom was always cool, with a mix of Sci Fi and the supernatural. The fact that Doom 3 took that premise and added a large amount of worldbuilding to make the world feel alive was fantastic. The game had lore on everything from demons to an ancient Martian civilization to the new kinds of technology the UAC were experimenting. The atmosphere is also killer, with fantastic lighting and gorgeous sound effects. The shooting is also great. There's a large variety of weapons and enemies. Each level usually has some new thing to show, whether it's a new weapon, new demon, new scenario etc. The game is also mostly based around dodging projectiles or melee, with hitscan enemies being infrequent. This makes skillful movement even more rewarding. But why is the BFG Edition meh, though? Well a few things: 1. The lighting has been tweaked to be much brighter, which hurt the atmosphere. It's not totally ruined, but significantly less intimidating as before. 2. Too much ammo. Doom 3 vanilla cleverly hid ammo in secret areas, encouraging the player to explore. By flooding the levels with ammo, BFG Edition has rendered exploration nearly pointless, as you can't pick up any secret ammo you find anyways. 3. Lesser mod support. Doom 3 BFG Edition was built on half id Tech 4, half id Tech 5, meaning any mods made directly for Doom 3 vanilla likely won't work. There are mods for BFG Edition, including ports for the most popular mods, but it still is lacking compared to vanilla. 4. Shoulder mounted flashlight. Yes, I know some people like it more because you can see and shoot at the same time, but the original game was designed around this and felt much more tense. Plus, relying on silhouettes and flashing fireballs made for more intense fights. That's most of the reasons why BFG Edition is meh. Hopefully GOG gets the vanilla version sometime, hopefully as a free addon to BFG Edition owners.
This game is amazing. It's got great gunplay, great atmosphere, great weapons, and some of the best team AI I've ever played with. It's amazing how much more useful my squadmates in Quake IV are compared to the utter uselessness that is Elizabeth in Bioshock Infinite. Couldn't recommend this game enough. Buy it, play it, cherish it.
Seriously, everything that was great about Shadow Warrior 2013, the swordplay, the humor, the enemy variety, the over the top gore, the movement, were all vastly improved from the previous game. The movement ability lets you soar across the map with dashing, as well as quickly moving out of the way of attacks, and the swordplay's controls were improved to be much less clunky and landing special attacks is much easier. Gunplay is definitely secondary to the swordplay, which is fine as swordplay is where the reboot Shadow Warrior series in general shines. Definitely the greatest first person swordplay system ever made. The humor is good as ever, with Lo Wang's smartass comments contrasting nicely with everyone else and in an age where Duke Nukem is saddled with Gearbox Software, the wisecracking badass is always welcome. Of course, the actual Diablo/Borderlands style upgrade system doesn't really help the game. While the menu isn't too clunky once you make use of the junk system, allowing you to shove anything you're not using into a separate menu and making upgrading far less tedious, it's still annoying that everything is RNG based rather than allowing you to prioritize upgrades. Nevertheless, the rest of the game is still great enough that this doesn't detract too much from the game, and it rivals the awesome 2016 version of Doom as one of the greatest FPS released this year.
