Recent reviews by Hyper

Much in the same way that DF2 was just extra content for DF1, Task Force Dagger is just extra content for Land Warrior. It has some of the most unique mission objectives in the series thus far, but otherwise is business as usual. On top of the recoil introduced in Land Warrior, this entry brings about weapon sway, which can be reduced by going prone, and the almost non-existent bullet dropoff from Land Warrior has been reversed so that it’s now even more intense than it was in the original game. While I do think this change was for the better, tracers have also been visually overhauled so that they’re now practically invisible at range, making it quite difficult to eliminate distant targets. I think overall, I’d place this as my second favourite entry to the series. It doesn’t have the same annoying difficulty spike that the middle two games did, but it’s not as visually appealing as the first instalment.

Eh, it’s alright. There are far fewer bugs than in DF2, and gameplay seems pretty much the same as it was in the previous games, only recoil has been added and bullet dropoff/fall damage have both been drastically reduced. More equipment has been added for the player to choose from, but your previous loadout carries over through missions unless you manually choose the recommended loadout on the briefing screen, so I never actually realised there were new options until playing Task Force Dagger. Visually speaking, it makes a ton of what would’ve been considered improvements at the time in terms of both UI and environments, but in the modern day, it just feels more generic compared to the unique look of the previous games. As with the previous game, the last few levels have a sheer difficulty spike in the way of pinpoint-precise enemy accuracy and limited visibility due to fog and time of day, or more accurately, time of night. For this reason, I had to start actively using the quicksave function which I had previously ignored, and by doing so, I learned that the default load button is the same as the Steam screenshot button, which is extremely annoying as you can’t change keybinds mid-game. I can't say whether I prefer it to DF2, but I can say for sure that DF1 is still top-dog.

My opinions on this game are mixed, but my overall impression is that it feels like a rushed sequel. You can now interact with the map to change your approach on the go, and there's some new equipment available for the player to pick from, but for the most part, it’s just more of the original game. The gameplay and visual fidelity are almost identical, although unlike the first game, this one is plagued by rendering errors, frame drops, and random crashes. The AI somehow feels dumber than it did in the original, and I would often encounter enemies trying to shoot me through walls. The implementation of fall damage makes the game seem a bit more realistic, but it also makes it much harder to traverse the voxel-based environments. Final verdict? It’s a fine but ultimately inferior successor, up until the last few levels where a sharp difficulty spike basically guarantees getting onetapped by invisible enemies from across the map.

Pretty fun. It’s kinda like Ghost Recon without the RTS mechanics. The AI isn’t great, and it may be a little simple by today’s standards, but the voxel-based environments are some of the most unique in any shooter I’ve ever played, and the rendering technique used by the engine is likewise is quite distinctive. You don’t get anywhere near as much control over your teammates as you would in other tactical shooters like Ghost Recon or Rainbow Six, but as far as I’m aware, it’s the earliest example of a non-hitscan FPS game having bullet dropoff, which makes for some very fun sniper gameplay. It’s quite possibly my new favourite early tactical-shooter/milsim, and it’s only made me even more excited for Dagger Directive.

Solid game. Very simple, but also very fun, and it can be surprisingly difficult depending on RNG. Runs well on modern hardware, and there’s some degree of replayability due to the random item/NPC placement. Worth the money for sure.

There are many reviews out there which sum up this game quite nicely. It’s got a great retro-futuristic atmosphere, probably the best I’ve seen in any piece of media to date, and the voice acting/soundtrack are both phenomenal, with a couple of exceptions. As the kids might say, it is absolutely dripping swag. The performance ranges from smooth as butter to a peak of 25fps, depending on the level, and there’s no way to disable the god-awful upscaling, but you do get somewhat used to it after awhile. As far as gameplay goes, it’s like if you took Cyberpunk’s braindances (Which in my opinion are probably the worst part of the game by a landslide), then made them infinitely better and got rid of pretty much every other facet of gameplay.

The game’s heavily scripted, so you can’t really do anything your own way; most of the evidence is only accessible after uncovering other pieces of evidence, and the game will walk you through finding every piece needed in a very linear fashion. You need to find pretty much every piece of evidence in order to close the case, and you’ll come to the same conclusion every time as crucial pieces of evidence can’t be missed. Even if you figure out what transpired ten minutes before reaching the end of the level, you’ll still need to follow the path set out by the devs in order to move on.

It says that decisions matter, but as far as I can tell, there’re only one or two options which actually affect the ending. Every other choice you make just unlocks lines of dialogue you’re able to use during specific conversations. Either that or there’s some kind of paragon/renegade system, in which case it’s more determined by getting x amount of points towards whichever ending you want and less about individual actions.

On the topic of endings, I didn’t find either of them to be particularly satisfying. In the bad ending, which seems to be the one most people get on their first try, the game pretty much just skips directly to the credits without giving any sort of closure. In the good ending, the explanation you’re given essentially disregards everything you’ve done in the story up until that point. It kinda felt like the writers either didn’t know how to bring everything together in the end or ran out of time/money and had to come up with something on the spot. Either way, it’s like that one photorealistic horse drawing where the final bit is done by a toddler. It’s not the worst ending out there, but it’s far from the ending this game deserved.

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TL;DR - It’s a linear walking sim with a pretty solid yet somewhat muddled story absolutely drenched head-to-toe in vibes.

A lot of the negative reviews for this game seem to be about the lack of content introduced in the full release. I didn’t own it during early access, so I went in without any context of how the game was before, and you know what? This thing is pretty dang good. It’s one of the greatest immersive sims I’ve played to date, and as far as detective games go, it’s the best thing since L.A. Noire. Depending on what you’re looking to get out of the experience, some might even consider it superior. There are a few bugs, some of which are gamebreaking, and I encountered many technical issues throughout my playthrough, although I think the vast majority of them stemmed from my PC moreso than the actual game. For the most part, it’s in a very playable state. This is one of those special games which reminds you how fun the medium can be, and it had a grip on me that I haven’t felt from any game in a long time.

I thought that the game kinda sucked at first. Even at such a cheap price point, I didn't feel it was worth paying for, but it also wasn't the worst thing out there. Then I got to the final level, at which point I realised that it was actually complete trash all along.

The combat is clunky at best, and the rest of the game is certainly nothing to write home about. It ends with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ survival arena, which probably would've been fine if it weren't for the fact that the game stutters every time a new wave spawns. I think I'm pretty good at shooters, I've had friends tell me that I'm pretty good at shooters, and the leaderboards in shooting games tell me that I'm pretty good at shooters. But this arena? This arena took me almost an hour and a half of attempts just to survive the two minutes required to beat it. For the record, the rest of the game took about forty minutes to complete. It's a tiny, somewhat cluttered space with completely random item spawns, where the giant enemy hitboxes cause body blocking even after death, the tiny item hitboxes make them easy to walk past, and all of my best runs were thanks to a bug where I spawned with four meds and five pistol mags, which I have no clue how to replicate. I did roll back to the 1.2 update just to see if it was any easier, and it definitely was, so maybe the dev forgot to rebalance after the patch? Either way, it was still the worst part of the game by far and I absolutely despise it.

I think that, at least for future projects, the dev should turn his attention towards Quake Engine or GZDOOM. They're both free to develop in as long as you adhere to the release guidelines, and it would've tremendously improved the storage size and overall performance without really affecting the visual style or the gameplay.

Eh, it’s alright. I’ve seen a substantial amount of people describe this game as ‘Sniper Elite but on acid’, and I’m just gonna come right out and say that those people have no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ idea what they’re talking about. The only similarity to Sniper Elite is that the camera follows your bullets, which any braindead idiot can figure out ten seconds into watching the trailer.

Movement is restricted to clockwise and counter-clockwise rotations around the perimeter of the map, and NPC pathing is heavily scripted, so the solutions to each level are somewhat limited. You also only get one shot per level, which you then control using some kind of telekinesis, so the game’s more about coming up with and then executing a plan of action rather than improvising or being tactical; something which is explicitly stated three seperate times on the store page. Said page also states that the game has ‘light stealth’, which is just a straight-up lie. There’s never any risk to your character, and the only way you can fail a mission is if your bullet hits something other than a cultist. Due to the nature of the game, there’s also no bullet penetration, so multikills are unfortunately impossible.

The entire game is coated in a layer of artificial sharpening, which cant’t be disabled, and despite being fairly well polished, it still suffers from hitbox issues and has a tendency to crash. You eventually unlock the ability to change bullet trajectory mid-shot, but you don’t get full control over the z-axis, so often I would send a bullet up into the sky and then have to reset the level because I wasn’t able to re-aim it anywhere near the remaining targets. This feels like more of an oversight than anything else, but it’s still one of the few problems that I feel needs to be addressed.

There also seems to be this notion that the final level has some sort of massive difficulty spike. I really don’t know where that idea came from. It didn’t even crack my top three, and it was actually one of my favourite levels overall.

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To paraphrase a couple of other players, this is basically Connect The Dots meets SUPERHOT, with the story and aesthetics of Mandy. If you’re buying it because someone told you it was like Sniper Elite, you can go ahead and tell them to ♥♥♥♥ right off. It’s worth noting that I was able to finish the game with all of the achievements in about four hours, but if you’re one of those people who care about price:length ratio, there is some degree of sandbox content offered by the leaderboards for each individual level.

Awesome game, but this is by far the worst version of it to exist by a landslide. Some of the major selling points for this release include “widescreen support”, which is also available in the other two versions of the game, and visual upgrades such as antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. While these upgrades are undoubtedly welcome additions, the game somehow still looks inferior to the PS2 release, and by extension the original PC release. The reason I put “widescreen support” in quotes is because enabling widescreen forces the UI and geometry to stretch, even with dgVoodoo installed, which is exactly what it did in the original release. The PS2 version, on the other hand, has actual widescreen support without any geometry warping, and there's a hack available to achieve the same effect on the original PC release, so this is technically the only version of the game which doesn’t have true widescreen support. Playing in widescreen on this version also seems to change the lighting for whatever reason, so you’re better of playing in 4:3 regardless. What baffles me the most is that the screenshots on the store page have actual widescreen support like the PS2 version, plus the added benefit of UI scaling, but if you go and watch any gameplay video on Youtube or look at the screenshots in the community hub, everyone else has stretched out graphics just like I did, so… What’s going on there, Rebellion?

Content wise, this is pretty much identical to the PS2 release. Most of the stealth/puzzle sections have been removed, and as such, it’s much more action-oriented than the original game was. That said, it’s also far less immersive, and about half the length of the original at best. Many cutscenes and NPC interactions have been removed, so the plot is far weaker, and although optional mission objectives have been added to make the game feel a little less linear, the dialogue indicating that you’ve received one has been cut from this version, so it’s easy to miss them unless you’re constantly watching the top of the screen for a notification or spamming the info button. Quicksaves have been removed, but you can now make hardsaves at message terminals, which in my eyes makes up for the lost immersion just a teensy little bit, and many settings for both controls and visuals are no longer available, somewhat restricting accessibility. A lack of headbobbing makes the gameplay feel slow and stiff whilst further ruining the immersion, and one of the core weapons has been altered so that it’s no longer any fun to use. On the topic of weapons, ammo drops seem to be far more scarce in this version, so you can’t just use your favourite gun the entire game, and this is the only port which doesn’t include multiplayer (Not that the multiplayer looked any good, anyway). The game could also do with some sort of level select so that players can go back and complete secondary objectives they might’ve missed or try to raise their individual mission scores without having to replay the whole game. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get my save past 96% before the final boss, and there’s no way to save after, so if he gives the last 4%, that’s a bit of an annoying oversight.

It’s not all bad, though. The bosses and mini bosses are a great addition, even with the limited quantity found throughout the game, and they make the ending feel much less rushed than it did in the original. That said, the final boss is still super overpowered, maybe even moreso than he was in the PS2 version. There are other ‘important’ NPCs who can also be killed to complete side objectives, but they’re pretty much just regular enemies, sometimes with a line of dialogue, most of whom also existed in the original game. A reworked inventory system makes it so that you no longer have to drop weapons in order to pick others up, and whilst landmines still exist in some capacity, almost all of them have been removed, the ones that remain being far more visible and easier to avoid. Gas has also been reworked so that it just inverts your controls instead of causing sickening screen shake, although they’ve also added some horrendous screen shake to level nine in order to compensate for the loss. On top of that, the elevator bug from the first game has technically been fixed, but it’s only because the elevator doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s got buttons for going up and down, but due to the linear nature of the reworked levels, I never found myself going back down, so I don’t know if that button even works.

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If you want the best Iron Storm experience, buy the original. It’s better than both World War Zero ports, not to mention cheaper. If you want the best World War Zero experience, you’re better off just emulating the PS2 version. It may have a few rendering errors, but rest assured that I encountered the same rendering errors playing on real hardware.