Recent reviews by TalenTaylor

(Played on Hard, no DLC)
Creating truly interesting enemies in a stealth game might just be an impossible task. Either they are too smart and you aren't given the room to feel like a ninja, or they are dumb as rocks sucking most of the immersion out of the game-play. Desperados is certainly the latter in this situation as it features comically stupid enemies for you to completely bamboozle in one of a dozen ways. It is in the self-awareness of having stupid enemies that Desperados III shines. It's not here to show-off a breathtaking world or build up the characters; it's here to be a playground for you to dismantle even the most robust fortifications with strategy and timing.

You control up to 5 characters in real-time with the ability to pause and set up simultaneous actions. Each character has their own kit with some things being rather obvious, while the rest are nuanced. This period of gradually discovering what each character is capable of lasts for the entire campaign, which on one hand feels quite nice, but on the other hand you may go the entirety of your playthrough not knowing about certain features that weren't expressly taught to you with a tutorial pop-up. Hector can carry two bodies at once? Yeah, found that out well over half-way through.

While I really would have liked to see better storytelling and character development, my only real complaint was the camera. You are in perfect control of it at all times which is nice, but there are many many situations in which no single camera angle gives you all the information you're trying to capture. This frustration is compounded by the fact that your characters can be blocked from moving where you want them because the camera is slightly out of place.

Great stealth gameplay that is lacking a setting and cast to be remembered.

In a world without XCOM 3, this game has satisfied my desire for it for a while longer. Even being born in the shadow of the GOAT, Dark Descent stands on it's own in the tiny genre of tactical-combat/alien-occupation/base-management/perma-death strategy games that most don't even fear to attempt. I'm thankful for those brave enough to give it a shot, and especially so for those who are willing to make the formula their own.

What you have here is more of an XCOM-lite; but that isn't at all a bad thing. Where XCOM would provide you a randomly generated campaign with certain missions being more constructed narrative deployments; Dark Descent is instead entirely made up of these more hand-crafted missions. Each one truly is a joy to play whether you are pressing forward to the main objective, or sniffing out every unassuming corridor in hopes for valuable materials or people in need. It can be easy to spread yourself thin in these sprawling locales, and in a single deployment you may find yourself running low on meds, ammo, or people; this problem is solved by one of my favorite features: being able to return to missions as much as you'd like (in almost all cases). If you didn't manage to complete the main-objective, or simply want to go back in for side-objectives, resources, or just to stir up the hive and get some experience for your fresh recruits; you are welcome to go back as many times until you're satisfied. Getting in, getting out and watching your soldiers grow is deeply satisfying, while upgrading your base of operations is almost non-existent. You could view this as a missed opportunity to flesh out the game more, but honestly it was rather nice to not have to worry about building facilities and instead put all my attention on keeping marines alive and killing aliens as effectively as possible.

The shortcomings of Dark Descent is thankfully a short list, but still enough to leave a lasting impression on my experience. Sometimes enemies can shoot/detect you through walls, sometimes a cutscene prevents you from controlling your units in such a way that they die during the cutscene, sometimes combat music will play on loop long after the action has ended, sometimes the audio sting for being detected will play on loop for no reason. Sometimes units will run in the opposite direction or freeze when given an order. There is certainly more, but nothing truly serious. At their worst, bugs caused me to need to reload a few times.

The truly worst part about the game as a whole comes from the detection system. Quite simply, if an alien detects you, it will alert it's buddies to your location for a moderate duration known as "the hunt". During this time, your marines will become weaker due to stress, and expend resources to either fight off the hunt or evade it. On it's own this mechanic isn't so bad, but it's particulars truly will prevent me from ever returning to play. Namely, the fact that if an alien who was drawn to you by a hunt detects you right as the hunt ends, it will start the hunt over from the beginning of the timer. On top of that, your ability to fully avoid detection is nearly impossible at times, and many options that seem like they would work instead work against you. If you instantly kill an alien while it's asleep? You're hunted. Instantly kill an alien with a landmine? No hunt. Pointblank an alien with a shotgun as it rounds a corner unaware? You're hunted. Place sentry turrets directly outside a nest to spawncamp their numbers? No hunt. Overall it's just inconsistent and senseless and can really ruin the tension and put unecessary strain on your supplies.

Whilst I've been on a strategy-game binge as of late, Alien: Dark Descent fed me a delicious mix of bombastic action, tension and gratifying exploration, while also delivering a good amount of micromanagment without needing to break out any spreadsheets. All said, it was fantastic, and the issues I had with it are hardly a reason to avoid it.

It is so refreshing to find and RTS city-builder game designed from the ground up to be a single-player experience. So often do I feel that these game's overall quality gets bogged down by the inclusion of PvP and thankfully, Diplomacy understands this well.

I imagine you could have some good fun with the Endless mode straight out of the box, and much of the game seems to be geared towards it, but for me the campaign was the real gem of this title. Across many many levels and branching paths, the campaign does a lot to challenge you by adding just the right amount of spice to the overall "survive for this long" objectives. The early game missions are the vanilla experience; survive for some number of waves of enemies. But just as you start to figure things out, the campaign will hit you with a very steep learning curve when your objectives start changing. The missions that will truly push you are the ones with no time/wave limit, instead you will be attacked non-stop until you complete some other objective. You might need to build ships and a massive army to escape with, you might need to erect a grand monument leveraging the massive amount of resources the construction needs against your need to upgrade your defenses. Other times you'll be asked to leave the safety of your walls between waves to go on the offensive and destroy enemy fortifications. On top of this, the enemies you will face change every 3 missions or so, keeping your strategies for defense from getting stale too quickly.

I tackled my way through the campaign first before trying endless mode, which I must confess is probably a weak point for the game overall. The first 40-60 days of endless are a nice challenge, and putting everything I learned in the campaign to use felt gratifying. Sadly, there is an upper limit to how strong your defenses can be, which is to say, very very strong. As such, starting at 80 days, enemies will periodically gain bonuses to their stats to combat even the most air-tight seal. At this point, enemy difficulty will ramp up, but the grand scale of their waves will not. This leads to days 100-200 being a large amount of downtime, followed by rebuilding everything that was destroyed during the last wave, and eventually succumbing to either insurmountable odds, or boredom. By the end of it, I was praying it would end, as the game isn't really built to support an enjoyable endless mode once you already lined every wall with hilarious amounts of defenses.

It's a shame it has to compete with Monster Hunter or Diplomacy might have been a strong GOTY contender for me (so far as of april). It's a well-crafted strategy games that knows how big it wants to be and executes everything within those walls perfectly without being held back by the inclusion of PvP elements.

Maybe I've just built up callouses to most of what horror games can offer these days, but I can't really say that Rebirth invoked nearly the same level of fear as it's darling predecessor. On top of that, your journey as an individual with literal amnesia doesn't quite weave the mystery to slowly unfold as it was in The Dark Descent, and rather a weak reveal in the final hours that doesn't leave much room to reminisce upon when reflecting on your journey up to that point.

There are only a handful of encounters through the entire story where you are truly in danger; the rest of the game being decent attempts to build suspense, and dimly lit interiors that your character will absolutely lose her mind over if you don't have a light-source to stare lovingly at every 10 seconds. When real danger is near, you'll always know because the hallways, and obvious one-way paths will suddenly become larger environments with the telltale roundabouts and things to hide in/behind that simply aren't present when a monster encounter isn't imminent.

Poor consistency between environments with and without dangerous encounters, the poor mystery that doesn't feel like it invites you truly solve, and a main character who I personally had massive trouble connecting with made Amnesia Rebirth a bit of a let down, but overall I still got plenty of enjoyment out of exploring, puzzle solving, and reading the many lore-entries.

I'd recommend playing it more for the adventure, not for the horror.

Press 'x' to breastfeed was a new one for sure...

I was drawn to this game for the premise. What I'd hope to get was a Survival Horror Road-trip lite-RPG, and I'm glad to say I got what I wanted, and greatly enjoyed my time in Pacific Drive. Even so, there's plenty of issues to pick apart here.

Firstly, the driving. While it does feel quite nice to simply just drive, being able to sit back and enjoy the trip is a rarity as the game entices you to stop every 25 meters to scavenge for resources. Ignoring these plundering opportunities is mostly fine, but you will inevitably realize you are low on a crucial resource that you've been watching pass by in the rear-view. It is the inevitability of needing these resources that also stings a bit in the sense that most of it is available right away, but applications for them are unlocked over time. As a result, the start of the game involves a lot of looting random items you can't possibly know the value of until later, only to find out that you certainly don't need the 500 glass shards you've collected.

Regardless of the level of stop-and-go you're at on any given run, the one thing that will always slow you down is the main challenge of Pacific Drive; Anomalies. Whether it is one of different colored stationary circles of "don't go in there", a giant tornado flinging everything into the air, or sentient balls of scrap looking to smash in your windshield; anomalies are everywhere and represent your antagonist all along your drive. It is these enemies that initially give the whole game a potent horror vibe, but it starts to really fall apart once you "solve" each anomaly. It's no surprise that a good rule of thumb is to simply not drive your car full speed into them. Though, some anomalies are less interested in sitting completely still in hopes that you are a terrible driver, and will instead chase you down to brutally murder you... okay well not brutally murder you, but they might attach themselves to your car causing slight damage, or even steal something of yours and throw it somewhere a whole 50ft away. If you can't tell, I was majorly disappointed with how big of a threat anomalies would truly be. When you don't hit them with your car, or repel them with an early game upgrade that deflects them, that leaves only a small handful of 'RNG' anomalies which can do some serious harm, but only very rarely do they actually hit you. Despite their lack of potency, there were still a good few moments where I got got pretty good by their mischief. Namely one experience where an anomaly which impairs your steering, forced me to drive directly into a tower of electrical death, and then straight off a cliff and into a
puddle of acid.

Between hopefully fruitful trips on the road, you are teleported back to the very beginning, to a remote gas station/auto-shop where you can refuel, recharge, repair, and upgrade you and your car to better survive the next journey. This is easily the game's greatest failing in my eyes as only about 20% of all upgrades truly feel like upgrades. What ends up happening with most components of your car is that one type of part ends up clearly better than the others which causes a huge amount of the upgrade trees to become obsolete. There are several variations of doors, bumpers, and panels for resisting various elemental damage types, but radiation remains the deadliest throughout the entire story. In the same respect, getting your hands on 4 'Off-Road' tires comes very early and easily outclasses the other 5 variations. The greatest offenders in the upgrade tree are actually the most potent. Early on you gain access to a shield you can briefly turn on to deflect quite literally every single threat in the game that isn't stationary or rng based. And further down the road you get an additional shield that from what I could tell; simply makes you invincible to everything as long as you have battery power. Throw on a few backup batteries, throw even more in your trunk, turn on the shield and suddenly you are unstoppable with very little down-side.

Ultimately, it really is fun to drive, avoid anomalies, upgrade for the road ahead, and follow the story to it's end. I just would have enjoyed more in-your-face threats, balanced upgrades, and longer stretches of road to cruise on.

Wonderful game with a few baffling design choices.

Exploration and combat are at the heart of the enjoyment for the game, and luckily there is plenty of both. Sadly, the number of truly interesting discoveries to be made is a bitter-sweet flavor i came to enjoy... What I mean is that while a vast majority of the world is fairly one-note; the absence of intrigue makes it all the more special when you do find something extraordinary.

The physical world is quite perilous to navigate, and as such I enjoyed plotting my routes from A to B while setting off to complete quests or explore undiscovered regions of the map. Along the way you are beset by enemies every step of the way; an aspect id enjoy far more if the variety of enemies was more fleshed out. Instead you'll wander the road fighting various recolors of the same 5-6 enemy types, punctuated by the occasional "big boy" enemy. These "big boy"s are where the game truly shines for me. Everything you do whether it be acquiring new gear, leveling up, advancing your skills; feels like the lead up to these larger fights where winning comes from knowledge of the creature, the terrain, and the use of your skills. These mini-boss fights do wonders to interrupt the monotony of running to-and-from or fighting your 12th group of goblins in the course of one hour.

Among all that I loved about my play-through, there are a few things that still sting, knowing they could have been polished to a greater shine. Among those issues is the lack of Vocations. You start off with a selection of 4, afterwards, an early quest unlocks 2 more. And just like that, you've unlocked all the vocations that your pawns can use. While there are a few others that you'll unlock along your journey, you'll be forced to keep them for yourself, and never will see any pawns utilizing their unique kits. Among these player-exclusive vocations are 2 solid choices for a well-balanced combat experience, one vocation which is entirely support-based, and one final one which allows you to piece-meal equip skills from any of the other vocations combined. . While the last one is perhaps not well-suited to an NPC ally, the others would have made great additions to filling out your ranks with many new combinations.

The only other complaint I'd voice as loud as my praises is that despite the major gap between the original game and the sequel, the quality of dynamic companions has not come far. Almost like it is now a staple of the series, your party will chirp up every so often with the same line of dialogue you've heard dozens of times before. Outside of the yapping, your party members will also throw themselves from the tops of cliffs, refuse to engage in combat, and get stuck running in place on rough terrains. Thankfully, there are some wonderful moments where the AI understands the assignment perfectly, and you watch a battle against a powerful creature go your way only because each member of your party was effectively collaborating with the whole.

Ultimately, I loved playing DD2, and even after a somewhat lengthy campaign, I am genuinely sad that there isn't more to enjoy. The lukewarm reception of the game makes me feel like Capcom won't prioritize a sequel or even DLC, so assuming I'm correct, I'll have to be happy with what I got out of the game. Which to put it simply, was one of the better RPGs I've played in a long time.

-Mild Spoiler for your own good-
I am extremely sad to know that some people play through the game without ever discovering the significant amount of content somewhat hidden near the end. So if you do play DD2, make sure you save at an Inn often, and don't choose to start NG+ if you aren't sure you've seen what I'm talking about, otherwise your save and your chance to go back and experience it will be gone. Saying any more would be a significant spoiler.

Dave wakes up to a cutscene. Once that's done he goes diving to get a cutscene. Swim around until you find a lever, which starts a cutscene to zoom in on the lever so you know it's important.
"I wonder what could happen if I were to pull this lever?" Dave proclaims to himself...
*Dave's phone rings*
"Dave it's me, your corespondent on all things lever-related. As it turns out, actuating this device may open up the path to a new region!"
*Dave gasps*
"So pulling levers can open doors, huh? I'll need to remember that" Dave thinks to himself confidently.
Dave pulls the lever, beginning a cutscene of a large stone door opening. Dave enters the door to start a cutscene of the new area he just found.

This game will not let you just play, and it is absolutely miserable to try. Everything has to be a phonecall where Dave gets his hand held by one of the three dozens side characters... Everything has to be a slow panning cutscene that focuses on the objective present in this area... Everything has to be told to you directly in a character dialogue. And everything has to be a new mini-game complete with it's own tutorial pop-up and dialogue dump.

I'm so disappointed by this game because underneath all the hand-holding, visual novels, and the minigames straight off of a 2007 ipod touch; Dave the Diver is pretty fun when you are in control.

I was roughly 2-3 hours from beating the main story when I gave up. The last two sessions I played were only because I knew I was closing in on the end and wanted to put it to bed. But I'm putting it to bed now. Dave the Diver is the most freshly sourced, and perfectly prepared fish sitting on a bed of over-cooked, under-seasoned, mushy garbage rice and I don't think I'll be eating any more.

I was on the fence about letting this go over the 2hr mark. Here is why I was pushed towards dropping it.
-The battlefield is visually very interesting, with each played getting their own wedge/slice in front of them. The only thing these wedges really do is determine who is attacked by enemies. To me it feels like this particular mechanic should influence the gameplay a lot more.
-The music is such a mood-killer. In a genre that is usually accompanied by fantasy-styled triumphant tunes, Hellcard just plays haunting dungeon sounds most of the time.
-My biggest concern is this Back2Games project the company is working on. When you launch Hellcard, you don't go straight to the game, instead you go to a display of the 7 games under the company's banner. At the time of this review, two are available, with the 3rd asking to be wishlisted. To me this gives off the feeling that the developers are speedrunning game development and that Hellcard along with the rest of the games in this series will not receive proper care during or after their launch.

Ultimately, I may go back to Hellcard, but only once it dips down to a ~$7.50 sale. There is just so much better gaming to be had from $15 (current sale price).

The worst game you could possibly devote 100+ hours to.

Monster Hunter has been my favorite game series since I first started playing nearly a dozen entries ago and while each of said entries has truly brought something special and long-lived/living to the series, Rise is mostly made up of the frankenstein'd body parts of the last 3 generations of monhun without really providing much of anything I'd like to see become a staple in the series.

I love Rise, but the pace that has been set for this entry has quickly turned me off from playing as extensively as I have in previous titles. Traversal is FAST, recovering from being hit is FAST, farming effectively infinite amounts of the best item crafting materials is FAST, tracking the monster is FAST. I respect the efforts to streamline aspects of Monster Hunter, but the gas pedal is being pressed too hard here.

The inclusion of the "wire fall" has also been a major contender in not 'making the game easier', but 'making the game dumber'. Being able to effortlessly recover from taking a hit honestly felt great early on, and it sets the pace of just how quickly you can misplay and re-enter the fight. But this free get-out-of-jail-free card makes Rise a bit of a bore after numerous hours. I can be struck for 95% of my health, get lit on fire, and I can be up on my feet with a max potion in my tummy long before the monster can even consider attacking me a second time. A lot of these circumstances were addressed decently with the release of Sunbreak, which many monsters adopting extra moves involving multiple quick hitting attacks, but this doesn't really counter wire-fall, as much as delay how quickly you use it after getting hit.

My final complaint is that Rise (and Sunbreak by extension) doesn't feature many truly interesting monsters to fight, beyond typical wyverns and the usual cast, there is only a tiny handful of 'unusual' monsters who really stand out. Maybe World spoiled me in this regard, but I can't help but feel bored by the cast put forth for Rise.

Overall I still loved Rise, it is a 'good' entry in the series and I would never not recommend it to someone for the things I have to complain about it. Palamutes are cool.