Recent reviews by Protocol7

I threw a box at a guy and it knocked him out.

Probably not that dissimilar to what happens in an Amazon warehouse, just with more sci-fi and Hideo Kojima.

runs good, looks good, kicking demon ass feels good, you don't immediately implode if you don't move around like you're on crack ala doom eternal, think this is my fave of the three recent DOOMs but they're all goated

Doesn't really break the mold in context of 4X gameplay. But that's fine for me. It's visually impressive, has enough dials and whatnot to tweak your experience like you'd expect of a 4X game, plenty of customization with empires/etc which making empires is certainly part of the appeal of some 4X games like this and Stellaris for me.

The tactical part is interesting but can be skipped if you so choose. If you do skip it, you do miss out on one of the things that makes this series interesting, but it's also not really mandatory, in my opinion. The more interesting stuff comes from the overworld, which there are several "realms" I guess, which are all unique and present some kind of challenge, but because of procedural generation and the aforementioned dials and whatnot to tweak, there's still tons of replayability.

Also it doesn't cook my PC which is a plus

There's a lot more to juggle in Eternal than Doom 2016 during moment to moment gameplay, and I think that contributes to its difficulty. At least, I played 2016 and then Eternal right after, on the same mid-level difficulty, and Eternal is proving to be more difficult. Not impossible, I've unlocked the Unmaykr and I'm almost through Urdak, but it's tested all of my gaming abilities up until this point for sure. I wouldn't be able to play the harder difficulties, nothing but respect to the folks who can pull that off.

All that said, I still think Eternal is the better game to 2016. (They're both some of the best shooters in recent history.) Better fidelity, most of the weapons feel stronger or at least equivalent to their 2016 counterpart. Enemy variety is really good and there are more interesting heavy demons in Eternal. I enjoy the platforming stuff but I always enjoyed platforming in general.

i ate a man in 5501

rogue: genesiyeah 👍

idk what the complaints are about, it's a perfectly good RPG, great graphics, good gameplay, cromulent characters and storytelling. it was never going to move the needle the way some people apparently expected

have played on and off since it came out in 2013 - in fact I have founder status - and there's still so much content left.

there's a lot to digest but it's overall so good. core gameplay is a fantastic 3rd person action game

storytelling can be hard to follow at times, but it's generally all very high quality

graphics and everything still holds up remarkably well (though probably has been gussied up as time has gone on)

couple annoying bugs here or there, but nothing game breaking

game ruined by crossplay feature that has introduced a new wave of trolls that abuse the vote kick functionality to boot players from co-op games for "AFK" despite them literally being physically present in the game and active in voice/text chat

not that the game is worth playing anymore with the myriad of server issues that have been getting worse and worse

441 hours down the drain. bummer because the co-op community used to be really chill.

another decent game ruined by clueless developers that don't know what they're doing

so after finishing the game I still really can't recommend it, which sucks because I'm a big fan of the original trilogy, and in this one, there's really good parts. that said...

First thing I want to get out of the way is Unreal Engine 5. What a piece of crap. Epic Games should be ashamed. It looks nice but in our infinite quest for fidelity, we're left with games that don't run well on top of the line hardware, even with all off the fancy bandaids like DSLR and Frame Generation. Don't get me wrong, I finished the game and it was obviously not unplayable, but it was rougher than it should have been for a PC with a 13th gen i9, 64GB of DDR5 RAM, and a RTX 4090. Yeah, Intel sucks and all that, but only UE5 titles struggle this way with this PC.

Next, the gameplay; it's a lot better in a lot of ways than the original games, but it's also worse; enemy spawning is frankly out of control. I never had issues with money, ammo, or gear, but the relentless onslaught of 3-packs of bloodsuckers and patrols of enemy stalkers that seemingly spawn out of thin air really wear on you. And that's not to even say about the AI's laser aim. I was sprinting in a direction perpendicular to an enemy, full blast, without encumbrance, on the lowest difficulty, and an AI still nailed at least 6 consecutive shots on me. Like, that AI is the frickin' terminator in terms of accuracy. And it doesn't change with range, so if an enemy sees you in the night, they'll start taking potshots at a distance, and you can hardly see where to return fire. Better to pop an energy drink and run.

Some mutants need better tuning, the pseudodogs already got a pass but they still spawned like 30+ phantoms if you'd let them. Bloodsuckers are annoying, and I thought they were supposed to be rare in lore, but they seem to spawn everywhere in 3-packs, have annoying ass CC, and seem to serve as a means to keep your shotgun ammunition levels in check.

Level design varies from bad to great. The good parts were really good, some of the laboratory/industrial levels felt almost like Half-Life in terms of design. Other parts like the Swamps were so bad that I almost didn't want to play the game anymore. On top of having countless enemies, the sequence leading up to the Clear Sky base with the chimera and the incoming emission is just agonizing. I think there are maybe better ways to add additional pressure to the player on their way to the base, particularly when the actual area is designed such that going into the water limits your movement so much that they clearly don't want you doing that at all, even if it looks shallow.

That's to say nothing of the bugs, one of which I had to use the UETools mod to noclip through a wall to talk to an NPC that spawned on the wrong side of a door they were supposed to unlock after some dialogue. Without this I would have been completely soft locked, and that's just the worst one I can recall off the top of my head. Like, I absolutely respect the ambition, and it's decent, even good at parts, but the bad parts are just really, really rough that I think the game would have benefited from a few months more of development.

I finished it out of owing it to myself as a fan of the original trilogy, but they have a ways to go until the game is really '"ready." Fans of the series should enjoy what's here, but others may find it too rough.