Not if you play them as an adult with a critical eye - trust me - I know. I've gone back and played a lot of them. But this one? This one does. Unlike the anodyne BOF3, with its paper-thin characters and SNES/subpar-90s-kids-show-plotting that only a JRPG apologist or someone with rose-colored glasses could love, BOF4 is a remarkable piece of work. Really well-translated, excellent characters and world, a genuinely atmospheric world, and a narrative that's consistently engaging and well-paced, even as an adult.
It took me several years to play this game, and when I did I almost bounced off it - it's a game filled with hard skillchecks, and zero respeccing. Which means there are things you simply can't do in a given playthrough, and you are going to have to improvise and explore a bit to work around obstacles that seem to have a single solution. If you're OK with that, this is an atmospheric gem with an incredible world - there are always things in it that will destroy you in a glance, even in the endgame. You will never become a steamroller with maxed stats and infinite resources. It does the Fallout 1 thing better than any other imitator I've seen, but in a world that is its own, and nearly as interesting in its own way as Fallout's was - it's a hard world, and nobody in it loves you. Lovely Mark Morgan-esque OST as well, which really worked for me. Save often, save before spending skill points, and bank skill points until you hit a hard check you want to pass. Do not waste points on non-focus skills for your character. Jack of all trades characters are possible to play but much harder IMO, especially if you aren't intimately familiar with the game already. In my roughly ~15 hour playthrough as a Loremaster, I had maybe 3 combat encounters total. If you do not build a combat-focused character, you will lose combats. If you fight 3 people at once, you will lose.
Finally played to completion after many years of wondering what this game is all about. It reminds me a lot of another 2000s-era game (that Jesper Kyd also worked on) - Hitman: Codename 47. Like that game, it's occasionally confusing and frustrating. Like that game, it's occasionally juvenile, mean-spirited, and silly in the way games from 2000 were. Like that game, it has a tendency to drop you into sprawling environments with multiple objectives and let you figure it out. Like many games from this era, combat actually sucks and the environmental puzzle-solving and platforming are the interesting bits. But it's relatively short, it's weird, it's interesting, and once you get it set up and working and understand what kind of game it's trying to be, it's fun little bit of experimentation with an industrial-grotty aesthetic that is very time-and-place. (Whoever decided to smear over the actually-good Jesper Kyd ambient tracks with Fear Factory was a doofus though, and you can tell not everyone was sold on it - there's an option to turn that off in the menu)
Incredible game. This, for me, is the best city builder of all time. Better than Sim City. This is not a chill game where you make nice little cities. No. It's horrendously complex and obtuse. This is a citybuilder where you will be actively punished for suboptimal city layouts. Where Caesar will make demands of you. Where your citizens will need 5 different things, 2 things will always be going wrong, and you will be in debt. Where your cities will be spiraling into doom cycles and you won't really understand why until you grasp the massive breadth of mechanics. Incredibly addictive. Every map is different. Every map has new challenges, new constraints. Just unmatched.
This one doesn't quite hit the mark for me. It feels like very much like a crappy "realistic environments/edgy tone" Quake TC mod from 1996 with a little bit of latter-day tongue-in-cheek to it - which I guess is the target it's aiming for. I don't find the maps or gameplay to be particularly interesting or inspiring the way I did in AMID EVIL - partially because that game is trying to emulate the pre-Quake "weirdly abstract but flowing levels in a primitive engine because FPS level design is a fledgling art and there are no rules but flow" aesthetic - which I love. This game on the other hand is shooting for the "I am 12 and want to model my bedroom/school/church/neighborhood in Quake but make it TWISTED" era aesthetic/map design which came later - which I love less. So yeah - I don't love the maps, or the aesthetic, and I don't think it quite straddles the line between jokey pastiche and genuine, well-designed, on-its-own-compelling homage to Quake/Blood/Redneck Rampage as well as some do. It's fine - but I would rather play AMID EVIL, I think. Or Quake 1. Or a good Quake 1 TC, like Nehahra or Zerstörer.
The last few years have seen a ton of retro boomer shooters come out - the vast majority of them are simply subpar - they ape better games poorly, missing the soul that made them interesting and fun in the first place. I've played the games the retro shooters are based on, and consequently I'm hard to please. I've played all the classics multiple times, I've played more DOOM megawads than you can shake a stick at - I've seen how people can do creative things in limited FPS engines. AMID EVIL is different from the other retro boomer shooters. AMID EVIL is actually better than most of the classic games it's riffing off of (Heretic, Hexen, Hexen 2, etc). It's easily better and more fun than all of those except Hexen. It manages to have interesting and fun maps, encounter design that works, interesting weapons, good pacing/design - this is not a retro shooter cashing in on aesthetics, this is a game designed by people who are seasoned in design. I'm willing to bet money the developers/designers have mapped for Quake/Doom before, because they actually know how to make maps that are architecturally abstract, visually breathtaking, and interesting to explore - something other retro boomer shooters just can't manage. Highly, highly recommended by someone who has actually (and repeartedly, and recently) played the games that inspired this one.
