Recent reviews by Lem

Extremely fun, varied gameplay with many levels of difficulty and a great sense of a greater purpose. It's deceptively basic on the surface, and something that you largely learn about through playing, making it difficult for me really say much other than that it's a great game!

The characters are all super unlikeable, the writing is cringe, and the story is... Well it's okay. It's the standard "get to the vault before the other guys do" Borderlands story-line, only they managed to up the ante and the stakes, which in some ways I do think they did pretty well, especially now after playing Tales From the Borderlands.

Where this game lacks in story, it more than makes up for in gameplay. It can get a bit too easy near the end, with the gun progression being much more exponential than the difficulty progression as the story went along. There are ways to make it difficult again, though, like buffs you can give the enemies as well as multiple difficulty options (though i wouldn't recommend turning all of them on on a first or even second playthrough because they can be way too difficult to be worth the loot).

Overall if you're looking for another dumb fun addition to the Borderlands series with some cool guns, environments, and level designs, this game is pretty great. While I didn't like any of the characters at all (the protagonists included), the other aspects of the game were strong enough for me to stick around and then play more. The game also has an arena feature (I forgot its exact name) where you can recieve extra loot as well for surviving in a shrinking map (kind of like a battle royale against bots type deal, but with a boss at the end). I do wish this mode had more maps, or more to really do in it, but it is still highly entertaining and consistently engaging.

Overall while I think a lot of the wit is gone in this entry to the series, the charm and fun are still there.

There's no beating the classic.

Black Ops was really the peak of Call of Duty for anyone who wasn't just in it for the multiplayer (for them it's probably Modern Warfare). A game so successful in fact that soon Activision may be releasing a sixth sequel some time next year and permanently alternate between Black Ops and Modern Warfare titles. When it came to the campaign and especially the zombies, this game had a magic to it that no other CoD game had ever achieved before or since. This game started off with a bang, adding Kino Der Toten, a spectacular map that worked perfectly with the zombies gameplay, with wide train-able areas, long passageways to escape the hordes, an amazing soundtrack, and so much more that just screamed the fact that Activison was listening, and willing to improve things from the perspective of the people who played the game.

After that we just kept getting great map after great map--maps so good that even 6 years later, they would be staple maps included in the Zombies Chronicles series, a series which of its many maps only included ONE single map which wasn't from this game. Kino may have been a staple, but it's far from the only classic map this game provided: there's the equally brilliant Ascension, the claustrophobic "Five", the exploratory Call of the Dead, the classics from WaW (of course), and the bizarre Shangri-La. I still don't fully stand behind the price that they're charging for this game on Steam, but there's no denying that the game itself is one of if not the essential Call of Duty game, and one that can still be played to this day with its immortal zombies maps--they keep on remastering them for a reason!

I was a bit wary going into Black Ops III. The CoD games all seem like they cost a lot more than they're worth and this one was no exception. For 20 dollars, though, I feel like what you get here is a very good deal: 1 new zombie map (it's over complicated and suffers from many of the same issues the Black Ops II maps suffered from, but it's pretty cool and has a nice aesthetic), 3 of the 4 WaW maps (Der Rise you have to pay separate for), Ascension, Kino Der Toten, Moon, a new Dead Ops Arcade, Shangri-La, and Origins. As someone who primarily plays this game for the zombies, that was a pretty pleasant surprise.

While the new map, like I said, is somewhat over complicated, relying on this weird curse power up and knowing exactly where to use it to get forward, it is a pretty nicely designed map, and I do love the aesthetic. When it comes to the old maps, I think they're re-created here extremely well. The color pallet on Kino Der Toten is a bit ugly, being overly bright and colorful, but it's barely enough to distract from what I think is one of the best designed zombie maps period.

In terms of what they added, I actually ended up loving all the new features, despite them being what I was the most apprehensive about. The gobblegum can be a bit over-powered, though the really strong ones are more rare, and it can give you a nice boost to prevent an entire game from ending from making one dumb mistake. There's also a random perk machine added to these maps where you spend 1500 points to get a random perk-a-cola, which is a concept I really love and calls back to the original luck-based element zombies had. My favorite aspect has to be the level up and progression system, though. Leveling up and unlocking new skins and attachments for my guns simply through playing the game was super fun and felt really rewarding, with tiers both for generally leveling up and for using each of the guns provided.

One of the biggest changes between this and previous games is the guns themselves: there are no bad guns on Black Ops III zombies, only guns you prefer over others. While this does affect the original aspect of challenge zombies had and allows you to get some pretty great guns by just buying them off the wall, the game itself still provides a really neat challenge. The zombies here is nowhere near as challenging as on Black Ops I, but there are a few improvements that come, not only through the leveling up system but through the rounds not dragging on as long as they did, higher spawn rates, and the fact that zombies can now re-spawn in front of you, preventing map long chains leading to long searches for those last few zombies.

There was an issue a while ago of people getting ratted through this game, but I've heard that the issue was patched, and in the tens of online zombies games I've been in, I've never run into it. The worst is just modders who spam with every buff and take some of the fun out of the game, but even they have an aspect of actually playing it.

The multiplayer is okay. I never went too deeply into it, but it has some pretty cool Titan Fall-esque movements like wall running and triple jumping and a pretty neat operator system, each with their own special abilities. The campaign is the only aspect I can really complain about. It is cool that it has a leveling up and progression system of its own, and I do really like how that's incorporated into the difficulty and people's online scores (and how it gives you some in-game exclusive stuff like Dead Ops Arcade II and a few skins), BUT--and this is a very big but--it's very poorly optimized for the PC, and unless you turn your graphics pretty much all the way down (even if you have a super beefy computer), it will run like absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and often freeze or crash on you. This problem does somewhat persist throughout all the game modes, and you will probably experience many freezes and lag skips, but it's usually not too bad. Campaign is the only mode where I would go so far as to say these things are game breaking or even noticeable.

There's just enough new content here to make the experience feel fresh, even as someone whose spent a collective 120 hours on the originals of the first 2 games in the series without so much to overwhelm or feel forced.

It does have its air share of issues, like ME1 still having its point of no return at Ilios without really telling you, and the game in general being littered with touch detection errors, causing you to get stuck in small corners, walls, or behind objects, effectively forcing you to load an old save/autosave to continue. Despite its bugs, the game still runs great and looks great as well. It's odd how they all didn't get the same extent of a makeover, but this preserves that same feeling of how cool it was going from ME1 to ME2 seeing how great and improved everything was.

Beyond those things about this version of the games is the games themselves. One of the greatest video game trilogies of all time in one package, all remastered with saves easily transferable, it's impossible not to give this thing my highest praise and recommendation. With the sales on this game and the sheer amount of content and how great it is overall, it's worth the full $60, let alone the amounts its been on sale for.

I'm glad I just got this with the full game for 4 bucks. 3 dollars for 1 tomb is already a bit much to ask, and it's made worse by the fact that the tomb completely broke on me when I tried to play it. In order to progress, you have to jump on to a fallen airplane, but whenever I try to get on top of it, my character just flops around. Looking at the comments, it doesn't seem like I'll be able to reverse this bug either. So an overly-priced 1 tomb dlc that irreversibly breaks on you... I don't know what they were thinking with this one.

It's an alright game all around. The gameplay is fun and engaging, and the difficulty ramps up in a way that both isn't too slow but that feels fair throughout. There are a variety of weapons and weapon types with cool effects and methods of reloading. My only real complaint is that the story tries to be way too serious for the bad ass character it tries to use that makes the storytelling seem clunky and the emotions forced beyond a few cool moments. If you can get past that, it's a pretty good, challenging game overall.

Spent 20+ hours leveling up just to have the game freeze and my save file corrupted with all of the guides on how to recover it online either being false, or speaking of files that don't exist anywhere with the game. The game itself is really fun, but having to constantly be alert to make sure your save information isn't just wiped is aggravating.

For me and I feel a lot of people I talk to, Bioshock 2 has always been the odd one out in the series. The 7.4 hours I have on this version at the time of me writing this review are the several times I've tried to play through this game, made some progress, but ultimately never actually finished the game for whatever reason. I played through the game with the remastered version, which looks absolutely beautiful but is honestly hard to recommend over this version because the port is a lot less stable, and on some segments of the game, you'll find yourself having to quick save as much as every 30 seconds to make sure you don't lose progress and can actually make it forward without the game crashing (though I believe when you buy one version of the game, you get both). Both versions of this game can also be fairly difficult to mod, so if you come to the series with that interest, you may be disappointed.

As you may already be able to tell, you play as one of the big daddies in the game, which presents with it a different way to play the game that is ultimately somewhat foreign if you decide to pick this up right after playing the first Bioshock. It feels weirdly clunky and slow paced (despite not being all that different once you get used to the minor differences in gameplay). It is a bit of an adjustment from the first game, but beyond this, the gameplay is pretty identical and still super fun (and most of the differences start to go away once you get movement perks like Sports Boost). You soon realize that just because you are a hulking big daddy, you aren't a tank, and much of this game, even on normal mode, has the difficulty to even the score. I'd probably say this is actually the most difficult of the three games, especially through early to mid game where you find yourself having to conserve ammo more often (as you progress later into the game you start finding the money to have a pretty consistent supply despite having a $600 [or $800 if you use the research camera, which works the same way it does in the first game] money cap).

Once you actually get into it, though, this is another spectacular entry into the series that, while ultimately not super different from its predecessor as far as gameplay is concerned, offers a new and interesting continuation of the first Bioshock game that feels less like a revisit of Rapture for the sake of it and more like its own, self-contained game and experience. It is a shorter game than the other two entries in the series, the entire game being beatable in around 8 to 10 hours, but that doesn't make it any less worth picking up.

I'd always thought people were just being picky when they said something was a "bad port". Never have I been so unpleasantly surprised. This game is a pain to get working and to set up, all of the time I have logged onto the game was time spent trying to get the game to work to absolutely no avail. Should you seriously want to play this game, you'd be better off buying the PS3 or XBox 360 versions as those are what the game was obviously made for (granted other game stores might rip you off and still charge relatively outrageous prices for such an old game, I know GameStop does).