Recent reviews by Infinite_Data

After many years of not caring about this game and its tumultuous life cycle, I've finally picked it up and given it a fair shake. At the price you can get it for now, I suppose the real answer to "would you recommend it?" has to be "sure, why not?". There are some very pretty things to look at here and it's clear that a lot of impressive work has gone into the technical and artistic side of EABF2; it is genuinely one of the greatest compendiums of SW reference material. I can only wish all that effort had been spent on a better game.

First things first, it's difficult to even judge EABF2 fairly, since it had two major hindrances right out of the gate - the first being its ridiculous launch, which has been discussed to death and is no longer relevant, as there are no microtransactions left, leaving behind only a husk of the absurd monetisation scheme in the form of meaningless rewards you can't use anymore, since most cosmetic items are unlocked by default. The other handicap is that being part of the then-current movies' marketing, a third of its content is focused on subject matter most people would rather forget about.

But putting aside these issues, what's the actual game like? "Pretty bad" would be my answer. It's quite impressive how DICE took a proven formula and added so much misguided fluff on top of it that the fun factor has been completely smothered under all of it. Conquest/supremacy, the only gamemode that really matters, was ruined by extending it with painfully tedious ship sections that, if failed, force you to play the whole round again until someone eventually wins. The game is built around unlockable abilities that you have to grind for - another remnant of the old monetisation, I would assume - which pointlessly handicap new players and don't actually offer interesting alternative playstyles, as they're mostly just direct upgrades. The battle point system is a joke, taking another simple concept and trying to make it more sophisticated only to end up with a situation where getting enough points to play as heroes is easy, but getting to actually pick them is nearly impossible, as once someone beats you at clicking around in the menus, they'll just hoard the heroes for the entire match, since DICE also ruined how heroes work - replacing the health system where your life can only be refilled with kills with one where not only is there no penalty for doing nothing, but you actually get regenerating health - there is something thoroughly depressing about seeing Darth Vader hiding behind some crates waiting for his life bar to go up. Half of the available classes feel the same, having only one proper weapon which is usually just a slight variation of the standard blaster, and no amount of hit markers, damage sounds and frantic numbers on your screen can hide the fact that the combat feels limp and unsatisfying. And on top of all that, it seems like the majority of maps are just random terrain (how many maps are just a boring forest?), lacking any real gameplay design or recognisable landmarks (the Hoth map doesn't have Echo Base? Really?).

The old Battlefronts, in my eyes, had two main strengths: the first being simple, but fun gameplay built on clear and well thought-out systems. On this front, EABF2 fails completely, overcomplicating things and draining all fun from the gameplay. The other strength was the "Star Wars toybox" aspect - visiting a variety of familiar locations, driving your favourite vehicles and so on. At this, EABF2 fares better - a fair few things were made with meticulous attention of detail. And yet major heroes are missing (and Maul fights for the Empire?...), the map selection is mediocre and vehicles are now a separate class, so you can't have fun moments like having your friend man the turret of your ship or sneaking into the enemy base to steal their tanks. Ironically, the big failures could have been forgivable, if not for all the smaller ones in between them - little things like the fact that space battles have you spawn in the middle of nowhere instead of actually running to your vehicles in your capital ship's hangar. Bad design can be overlooked, but a pure lack of joy cannot. If there ever is another Battlefront game, I sincerely hope it is nothing like this.

Although I already considered BF2 one of the best Star Wars games, I was always slightly disappointed by it, having played Renegade Squadron first - which, despite obviously being an inferior game as a PSP exclusive, actually made some very worthy additions to the formula in the form of Expanded Universe planets, more ships (including space heroes), a customisable loadout system that I really loved, and a far superior version of Galactic Conquest, my favourite mode. And that's not even taking into account the content from BF1 that didn't make it into the second game. The lack of all these things prevented me from truly recognising BF2 as the ultimate Battlefront game until now.

But, having finally given a fair chance to EA's take on the franchise... yeah, this is the Battlefront game. If you haven't played any of them, don't bother with DICE's misguided, confused interpretation of the formula or Aspyr's worthless ports. Despite 20 years having passed since this game's release, somehow, everyone who's touched the franchise since has only made it worse. BF2 might be a little simplistic in its gameplay, maybe a little too focused on marketing for Episode 3... but it just doesn't get better than this. It absolutely could, but so far it has not.

I've put a lot of hours into this game, and that's because I generally enjoy its singleplayer elements - it's not nearly as good as I'd hoped it would be, but it's fine enough, and the basic premise is so appealing to me that I can overlook the game's many shortcomings.

But FH4 is designed to be a largely multiplayer game, and this is where things fall apart. Perhaps this is due to its age, but the whole multiplayer component is just atrocious. I don't think the way it's designed in general is very good to begin with, but good luck even getting to experience that properly - every race is a 50-50 chance of getting softlocked on one of the game's numerous showcase/result screens and having all your progress undone. The netcode is visibly falling apart in front of your eyes most of the time. And in their infinite wisdom, Microsoft decided there's no need to include an option to mute other players, so if someone in your lobby leaves their mic on, have fun listening to their kids screeching in a foreign language for the next 15 minutes.

If you don't mind a lot of repetition and very vaguely defined progress - as well as an arguably small map - in your open world racing game, you can have plenty of fun here. Alone. If you're thinking of buying this game for the online aspect, my advice is... just don't. If this were a full-fledged singleplayer game like Burnout Paradise, I'd recommend it.

Having played several Sonic games from various eras, this one has by far made the best impression on me. It's a curious case, too, because its adherence to the past is both its greatest strength and its biggest flaw.

On one hand, Generations adds very little to the franchise. Everything, including the gameplay, stages, music, characters and so on is lifted from previous games, sometimes with surprising accuracy to the original source. It's hard to deny, however, that Generations treats all this "borrowed" content with utmost reverence; while this may be a controversial opinion to some, I personally think that the levels from the games I have played are done better here than in their original form. Although I'd also say that, staying true to the originals, the stages taken from later games definitely feel more contrived and janky and just overall less fun - thankfully, I didn't find any of them to be less than acceptable (looking at you, Planet Wisp Act 1), and the level design in the earlier stages is straight up masterful.

Praising Generations for its music and visual design feels a bit weird, since all it does is essentially take old creations and polish them up to fit its own style, but it does so with great success. The remixed songs sound fantastic, the stages maintain their theme while adding the expected extra details of a then-modern game - it really is a "best of" mix done right. And on the topic of music, the inclusion of a bunch of classic songs ripped straight from the old games in the form of unlockable stage themes (which you can pick to replace the standard theme in any level) really adds a lot when you're playing through the surprisingly numerous challenges.

The biggest criticism I have of the gameplay is the skill system - an interesting idea, but executed really poorly, primarily because you rarely ever even get to use your skills, as they're only available in the main stages, so the whole system feels unnecessarily complex for how little it adds. Aside from that, if you're a fan of the 3D Sonic games, you may be disappointed with just how little 3D gameplay there is in Generations - even though the "modern" stages make up half of the game, many of them feature extensive 2D sections. It's pretty clear which gameplay style Sonic Team were more comfortable with.

Other than a few annoying challenges (which are entirely optional, though I would recommend playing them, as otherwise you'll be missing out on... probably most of the game's content), there really isn't much to complain about here. Generations stays away from innovation and focuses on just doing what's been done in the past the best it can, and the result is a Sonic experience that feels more polished, thought out and just downright better than anything I've seen from the franchise elsewhere. As for the quality of this PC version, it leaves a little to be desired - the framerate unfortunately likes to tank occasionally and although a keyboard is fully supported and feels really good to use, the game always displays Xbox controls, which can get a little confusing when you have a new mechanic thrown at you suddenly. The online rankings also don't seem to work anymore, but you can still get the online-related achievements (at least at the time of writing this review).

Overall, if there's one Sonic game you should play, in my opinion, it's probably this one. But Omochao can't be murdered violently, so maybe it's a 0/10 after all...

Into the Breach is a simpler game in concept than its predecessor, FTL, but it is the perfect example of a developer actually learning from past experiences. While it still has everything that was great in FTL - impressive replayability, a wonderful soundtrack (by the same composer) and fairly extensive customisation to fit your gameplay style, as well as incentives to switch it up - it also smooths out a lot of its predecessor's rougher edges. Whereas FTL could feel unfairly difficult and having a good run wrecked by sheer bad luck was a common occurrence, in ITB every failure I've ever experienced felt justified and even the highest difficulty is still perfectly reasonable. The ability to keep pilots between runs and a more varied selection of achievements also mean that even failed playthroughs are rarely a waste of time. And while the gameplay is relatively simple, it is the good kind of simple - each level feels more like a mini-puzzle with multiple solutions, despite technically being just random iterations of the same formula.

Obviously, I'm writing this review for the sake of the Steam Awards badge - however, it is worth noting that I genuinely believe ITB deserves a nomination. Many developers ask you to nominate their re-released old games etc. for the "Labour of Love" award, yet this is the only recent case I can think of where a years-old game received a big, completely free update that added a ton of new content (again, very much like the Advanced Edition of FTL). I would have easily recommended ITB back when it was new and it's only become a better deal over time.

Underworld's Steam reviews are far less positive than those of the previous two games and while I think that's fair, I also believe it's important to make it clear that this is not because Underworld is a bad game - it's because it is a great game that's, unfortunately, broken beyond belief.

Underworld is supposed to be roughly the same as Legend (which was excellent) in terms of gameplay, but for some reason, nothing works the way it should here. Lara's movement, in particular, is astonishingly buggy - getting stuck on thin air or phasing through solid rock are constant occurrences; sometimes, Lara will just refuse to perform an action that's supposed to be possible. Inputs are lost, Lara twitches and teleports around, doing the same thing twice can yield different results. On top of the broken movement, the camera likes to actively prevent you from seeing where you're supposed to go or fail to snap to fixed positions in time. The fluid Legend controls are still there at the core, but handling your movement reliably is impossible.

This is a terrible shame, because if you can get past the busted controls/camera/physics, TRU is actually an excellent game. It takes everything Legend did right and combines it with some of the best TR level design I've seen so far. The levels are big and open and let the player explore at their own pace; the puzzles all make sense, but pose a decent challenge and figuring out how to use Lara's expansive move set to navigate the environment feels really satisfying. The overall presentation is very solid, with good pacing of action and a fairly diverse set of gorgeous locations. The plot might be a bit out there as it tries (with questionable levels of success) to tie Legend and Anniversary together into one big narrative, but the vast majority of the game is pure, cutscene-free gameplay, so it doesn't really matter. In general, Underworld feels less linear and scripted than Legend - and there isn't a single QTE to be found anywhere.

All of these improvements over its predecessors could have made Underworld my favourite game in the franchise, but it's hard to look past its flaws when you have to replay a section because Lara had a seizure climbing a ledge and dropped into an endless abyss. If you're prepared to wrestle with the controls and accept an occasional unfair death, there really is a great game in here - it's just buried under an impenetrable pile of pure jank.

They didn't cut the adhesive gel.

Furi is, gameplay-wise, not a bad game. I would call it, with some exceptions (like the dodge mechanic, the weird counter timing or the seemingly malevolent fixed camera), rather good overall. The melee combat, while certainly not close to the best I've seen, feels quite satisfying and the twin-stick shooter sections are pretty much exactly what you'd expect. Unfortunately, Furi also does what I think is the worst thing a game can possibly do - it wastes your time. If you don't mind that - and that's a big "if" - I'd say give it a try, but I'm about to go into why I don't think this game really deserves it.

Furi is structured as a series of duels with a number of bosses. Each boss is divided into multiple stages which usually alternate between bullet hell sections and melee fights (the later duels have far less focus on melee combat, sometimes dropping it almost entirely). Between the fights, you walk very slowly through what amounts to unskippable cutscenes as the narrator bombards you with what little story the game has to offer (curiously, there are also real cutscenes that are skippable). And here is the game's real problem: you only get checkpoints between fights. In other words, if you die at any point throughout a fight, be prepared to replay up to, say, about 15 minutes of gameplay. And since this is a game mostly about pattern memorisation (which is to be expected from a melee/bullet hell hybrid) with unforgiving difficulty (in later fights, some enemy attacks are literal one-hit-kills), unless you are a true expert at this kind of gameplay already, you are going to be replaying huge chunks of Furi. Get ready to see the same animations, hear the same handful of voicelines, repeat the same patterns of attacks potentially dozens of times.

In essence, I think Furi would be a perfectly worthwhile game if it didn't have its difficulty artificially skyrocketed by an unreasonable distribution of checkpoints. I do think, however, that it is quite easy to guess why this decision was made - there is very little game in this game. A walkthrough on YouTube puts Furi's real length at about 2 hours - and that's including all the long sections where nothing happens and you can just press a key to have the game play itself. So I think it's not unreasonable to assume that rather than being a legitimate gameplay-driven decision, the cruel save system was implemented to pad the game's laughable playtime as much as possible. And don't think Furi plays fair, either - the final sections of most boss fights seem specifically designed to kill you unless you've already played them and things like being respawned in the middle of an enemy attack or having to hide behind off-screen cover that might not even be there at the time are not uncommon. The earlier fights also use QTEs that are both extremely tedious and sometimes seemingly random in their outcome.

And while this is relatively unimportant, I'd also like to point out that on a technical level, Furi is rather subpar. While the overall look of the game may be appealing depending on personal preferences, I found it very distracting how models perpetually clip through themselves and everything is bathed in a terrible blurry haze that cannot be disabled, as far as I can tell. The game is also incredibly adamant that you should play it with a gamepad, but that's actually not that much of an issue - in case you do want to play it with a keyboard and mouse (which may very well be preferable for the shooting mechanics), the only problem you'll face is that you can only move in 8 directions due to the fixed camera, so the dodging will feel even more awkward.

In summary, Furi would be a fine - perhaps even genuinely good - game in my eyes if it didn't go out of its way, more than any other game I have ever played, to waste my time. If you're the type of person who enjoys playing the same thing over and over again, you may very well enjoy your time with Furi as well - but despite having completed several difficult games (including ones that do require countless repeated attempts, llike TrackMania titles), I gave up on Furi towards the end, since I came to the conclusion that this game simply doesn't have anything in it to justify putting so much effort into beating it, especially when it seems so determined to waste as much of my time as possible. One last thing I should mention is that there is, in fact, an easy mode - which I admittedly haven't tried - designed to let players experience the story without the fights presenting a challenge. However, I am absolutely convinced that the game's 2-hour-long story, which I found to be rather unengaging and delivered in a remarkably mundane manner, does not justify purchasing Furi just to experience its narrative.

This game somehow makes Hitman: Absolution seem good in comparison.

Carmageddon is an amazing, unique game and one of my all-time favourites. For that alone, I have to recommend it. That being said, the version being offered here is frankly quite terrible.

You get to choose between software mode and 3dfx mode. Software mode is visually outdated even by 1997 standards, so most people will play the 3dfx version. Both options run in DOSBox - and while I think there are good DOSBox ports out there, this is not one of them. The menus and cinematics tend to be completely broken. With some config modifications, you can get the 3dfx version to run in a decent resolution (and without stretching) and improve the terrible sprite pop-in, but I've been unable to fix the framerate in any way - and it is awful. These are "only" technical issues, but they're serious enough that I can't honestly recommend playing this specific version of the game.

The real issue here is that Carmageddon is not abandonware by any means. Just a few years ago, Stainless Games released Carmageddon: Max Damage - a reimagining of the original game which is not nearly faithful enough to be considered a replacement in my opinion. The Max Pack on sale here even has Steam trading cards, so the developers clearly acknowledge its existence, yet they've made no attempt to actually make it a version of the game worth selling on Steam. Most annoyingly, there actually exists a version of Carmageddon that not only runs perfectly but also includes countless little fixes and improvements, essentially making it the ultimate way to play the game - and it's the Android/iOS port. That version is practically perfect, with only the fatal flaw of being mobile-exclusive (meaning that if you want to play it, you'll probably have to use the worst controls imaginable). It also doesn't include the Splat Pack expansion at all.

What we really need is a PC port of the Android/iOS version, with the Splat Pack added as well. Alternatively, if the source code was released to the public, I'm sure some dedicated fans would soon create a proper source port. As things are now, though, Carmageddon is an incredible game that you can't really play properly on modern hardware and you probably won't be happy with the version on offer here.