Not as intensely gratifying as Shadow Warrior 1, but still pretty good. Much more of a looter shooter smorgasborg of weapons and weapon buffs. The one big change is that elemental weaknesses and resistances play a siginificant role in combat, so there's some fiddly weapon switching involved in the middle of fights. The fights themselves are more prolonged, but with the same swift movement mechanics as the first game. The net effect is that fights feel more like pitched battles, which is pretty fun. The one knock on the game is the same issue that all looter shooters have: there is so much damn loot to sift through. You can ignore it for the most part, letting it stockpile until you want to change a weapon's build. Weapon builds are interesting, although I haven't had to put too much thought into them so far (and I'm playing on hard.) Maybe they matter more in the Super Hard difficulty. idk. There's also just a ton of stuff to do, with a mountain of side quests, each with their own bespoke map. well, quasi-bespoke. I dunno exactly how the procgen works with the maps, but they all feel cohesive enough. One thing that I really like about it is that it uses medium-size chunks to build the maps, so there's this odd sense of deja vu where you'll be in a place that is familiar (because you saw it in some prior level), but the stuff around it is completely different. I do wish that the elemental system mattered more, but as it is the game is a shedload of fun. Kind of dumb fun, but fun.
Still a fantastic and hugely atmospheric game. Looking Glass managed to create a mysterious world where most of what you learn about it comes from taking in the levels and overhearing conversations. It creates this awesome sense of a nighttime world, where a this strange otherness is bleeding into a medieval society. Levels are large and multifaceted, which makes exploring and figuring them out feel really rewarding. Each level is also distinct from the last, where one might be burgling wealthy burger's mansion, another infiltrating a prison that's been built into a mountain, or where you're ripping off a college of magic (which I'm not going to spoil a whit of, but man that whole level has so much awesome high concept one-off elements). I even enjoyed the much-maligned tomb raiding level, which captures entering and exploring a forbidden place of the dead so perfectly. That aside, the gameplay is still the best stealth game I've played. The AI is smart, the way light and shadow are used and rendered creates an excellent sense of place and possibility, and the player's arsenal of tools is perfect. You're given stuff that is eminently helpful, but in such a limited quantity that you need to be careful about how and when they decide to use them. The overall effect is a persistent tension as you knock out lights and thread the needle between patrols, going deeper and deeper into some place you aren't supposed to be, and have little besides your legs to get you out of things if they go sideways.
I've always been fond of this game because the demo was so perfect: it throws you into the life of a petty street criminal bent on revenge, has some minor RPG elements in the form of a store and money, and a lot of swearing. It's 2 hours of gameplay, and you get just enough of it to be like "hot damn, I wonder how this develops." It took me 25 years to follow up on it, and... wow. Never meet your heroes. Here's what I like from the entire rest of the game: I really thought I'd have something to put here. Ok ok, there are a lot of moments where I could see what they were going for, with level design that was supposed to depict decrepit urban spaces, an FPS-action take on rpg mechanics, a gritty story about a bunch of meaty thugs, but none of that stuff gets developed. The levels end up being labyrinthine in their layout and sameness, and claustrophobic in a way that makes walking down a hallway frustrating. Definitely playable (as opposed to SiN, which has levels that are borderline unplayable for how annoying they are), and some areas are visually compelling, but my overall response was "ugh, more?" The RPG stuff with quests and the economy are undercooked, and feel kind of tacked on. They involve some vaguely alternate routes to goals, where you can choose between stealth and gungho action, but the once you aggro one AI, the rest will swarm anyways. So it's really a choice between gungho action now or later. By the middle, it drops all pretense of being anything but a flat-out shooter and just plows on ahead into mayhem. Which is fine, but it's also the least interesting part of the game's design. There are 3 good guns in the arsenal, and switching between them is more about ammo economy & range than anything else. The story ends up being 8 hours of "I still really want revenge." No real characters or stories beyond that. Just a more cleverly disguised version of needing a blue keycard, where the keycard is a car part that someone else turns into a keycard.
I remember when the demo for SiN came out and it could barely run on my computer. It took something like 2 minutes to load the level, and on top of that it chugged like a mofo. Nevertheless, my young 14 year old self walked away thinking "wow, that was pretty cool! I wonder if I'll ever be able to run it." Well, it's been 26 years and I basically have a super computer now, so I started dusting off some of the old dreams and seeing what I missed out on. I guess I'm just glad I didn't drop a $50 on it, way back when. What this game has going for it is enormous ambition. There are vehicles, a ton of guns, a lot of interactivity (at least early on), and a huge variety in the level design. You go from a bank, to a construction site, to a dam, to a waste treatment plant, to an underwater base, to a jungle, to a secret laboratory, and that's just the stuff I remember. You even get turned into a mutant at one point and have to do this mutant combat thing. There's a firing range mini game, branching levels, on and on and on. It's very much an attempt to bring the blockbuster sense of possibility that Build engine games had into the 3D era, and it's hard to not be kind of impressed that they were doing all of this stuff in 1997. The downside is that the gameplay itself is extremely tedious. The levels just stretch on and on, the driving is difficult to control, the interactivity is distracting when you're just trying to figure out what switch or item you need to fiddle with to progress, the guns are uninteresting and the combat is bland, and the monster thing ended up being more of a hassle than anything else. I played it early this year and I'm not sure if I even beat it! I think I got to a point where I thought I was about to beat it and then another 6 levels showed up, and I realized that this game was never going to get fun, and that there were other old demos and dreams that I was more excited to follow up on. My advice: avoid unless you're doing idTech2 research.
I played for about 2 hours before giving up. It's like Subnautica is space, which is cool, but I got the sense that the designers ran into a brick wall at a certain point and gave up on finding gameplay solutions to gameplay problems. The overarching issue for me is the constant jokes, which barely keep their head above "monkey cheese fart" levels of desperation. If you've ever met someone whose inability to let a moment of silence pass and frantic need to be liked have combined to cause them to recite one of a million rote jokes they got from a joke book, then you have met this game. It's exhausting and unfunny and sucks all the air out of the room. This sensibility bleeds over into the design, where they game has you build at least one milestone building that requires a lot of resources, but does absolutely nothing. The thing is even called something like Pointless Station of Gatekeeping. Unreal. If the game is going to be self-aware enough to lampoon the survival-crafting genre, but not enough to either escape its conventions or improve upon them, then it's just insulting both its audience and creators. It's a sensibility that pervades the rest of the game. Jokes are made about how one crafted tool is pointless but exists because the animator didn't want to do a more complex animation for its base material (scissors on a stick vs just scissors). The tedium of having only uhhh 30? 60? 90? seconds to explore the vacuum before going back to the single available airpocket to craft or store resources is made worse by a constant stream of boneheaded jokes from your AI assistant. I quit after about 2 hours of this endless haranguing, leaving the player character to his own devices in favor of something less inherently stupid. In other words, I was literally annoyed to DEATH. Which I'll concede is a feat, of sorts. But who dedicates several years of their life making something and then goes out of their way to shit on both themselves and their audience?
The game is almost entirely red herring. The setup is a fiction, the narrative is about 80% unrelated to the denouement, and the denouement itself left me feeling like I was being jerked around. As it is, the story it's actually telling is threadbare because the game's entire setup demands that it doesn't delve too deeply into the characters or to the reality of what's going on, lest it give away the twist too early. And the twist itself makes the entire preceding story and its ultimate tragedy feel treacly and manipulative. Yeah yeah, the kid has an imagination; so what? Who is this kid outside of being imaginitive and ***SPOILERS SKIP THE GIBBERISH IF YOU HATE BEING SPOILED***sheydhshagdkfdeadjsudhaxbtjappdjrnfjsk jqkj fujshdjdiw. If they'd comitted to just telling the story in a more straightforward manner and exploring the characters more, it probably would've turned out better. As-is, it's mopey and bad YA fiction.
Great pixel art depicting a really wretched narrative. Don't get me wrong, the dialogue and writing are all fine and amusing, but I could not stand the plot at all. The player is railroaded into a hallucination-based narrative that doesn't really do much with itself besides insinuate that what you're doing doesn't matter, because the game is on rails and you're just the cowcatcher shoving errant bovine puzzles out of the plot's way. Another game based in Silent Hill 2's lineage that has trouble riding the line between putting the player in another's shoes and bamboozling them with some dingdong's ill-defined, science-fiction-influenced mental breakdown. I mean, what is it about mental illness that attracts young writers? Truly one of the most difficult things to address in a way that doesn't make an audience wonder why they are still listening to the crazy guy at the bus stop. What is anyone supposed to get out of any of this besides 1) being crazy sucks, and 2) scientists can get up to the darndest things. It's a game that dares to ask: what if there was a science machine that made people lose their god damn MINDS??? And it pretty much plays out like you would expect it to. But hey, it's ok for a first effort. It's aesthetically tight, and there are interesting threads buried under all of the cruft; threads that I think a writer (or team) less distracted by gimmicks and more comfortable with exploring themes could do a lot with. It's a game that has something to say about America, or technology, or the ethical boundaries of research vis-a-vis military funding, or something; just not a lot. The team is from Dnipro, Ukraine, so maybe it's all an allegory for what's going on over there, but then...do that instead. Why set it in New Hampshire? That's not even where Boston is, where a company like this would actually exist. Augh. I have to stop thinking about this.
