Recent reviews by Big Sneeze

Very, very mixed bag but the classes are EXTREMELY FUN and it is a premium $$$ gaming experience on that factor alone, no matter how many criticisms one might come up with, I mean they revived the Tower Shield playstyle after they killed it off around Dark Souls 2/3 and that's just one of the 8 super fun and highly replayable characters available. Is everything else recycled? Sure, but these classes are cracked.

While the game is not a bad purchase overall, I must counter all the brainless hype (I suspect botting in reviews) it's receiving. It is, sadly, not an amazing sequel.

The art design didn't improve so much as just has gotten more busy and it's not that pleasant or interesting to look at. The game now is not ergonomic to view anymore. Many of the new additions to the formula have not had a user experience pass with the visuals. I am often forgetting to trigger monster abilities because there is no visual flair regarding their existence. Room effects and Equipment are just tiny icons that are easy to forget about. The soundtrack this time around has no memorable pieces, unlike MT1 which had some great boss music. It overall feels like the composer bought an electric guitar and proceeded to spam random heavy metal riffs over everything, it is a very uninspired OST. The gameplay is more of the same but with new cards and effects, which is fine. There's some additions to the formula, such as room and equipment cards but they do not necessarily feel thoroughly thought through. Probably my biggest criticism is that the macro design doubled down on the stupid Covenant difficulty modifiers for the 7 people on the planet (and 30 streamers) who play roguelike deck builders in a heavy meta-gaming way like it's their day job and the fun stuff like Mutators still turn off progression and unlocks.

It's overall nothing more or less than a loose encore of Monster Train with completely new cards and a lazy soundtrack. Oh and they added an absolutely braindead plot for clowns.

This is good in the sense that a couple or two good friends can play through this and have fun banter with eachother as you deal with activities and puzzles that fluctuate from simplistic to mildly challenging (at random). It should be noted though that most co-op games have the capacity to do this.

I'd like to make particular mention of the fact that the story of this game is actually really bad and the main characters are pretty much psychopaths. They decide - on a PURE WHIM - that to reverse the spell that turned them into toy dolls, they have to make their daughter cry by tearing apart the sentient toy elephant which is her favorite toy. They proceed to tear her ears and limbs off as she is begging for mercy. It has no effect on the spell. They tortured a magic creature and made their daughter cry. The game makes no mention of it or attempt to chastise the main characters whatsoever.

I highly recommend this game for those who are looking for hidden gems from past eras in gaming. On the surface, there's a unique kart-ish racing game here, with a gimmick most similar to Lego Racers, where you build your own power ups by driving through colored gates in different orders. This in itself is fine, there's a sweet PS1 atmosphere with a very enjoyable soundtrack to accompany it all, and a relatively fun little remote controlled buggy "bouncy" physics to the driving.

However, not all is as it seems. You will find that you can unlock additional buggies. Some are rewards for progressing in the hub by winning races but what about the many others that stay locked? Well I do not want to spoil it completely so that you have a reason to play and find out for yourself, but I recommend taking a trip over into Time Trial mode and exploring the levels. The way you unlock many buggies is really unique and - though I definitely view this with nostalgia glasses - I find it still a deeply fascinating example of game design to this day.

Having to make my brain work together with my girlfriend's brain to haphazardly paint a shared mental picture of an OC DONUT STEAL weird logic switch puzzle the devs made up might have been cute and interesting once, twice, maybe three times, but this is simply not something you should be making the player do over and over and over in all your games it seriously does NOT carry the game for you guys.

Okay, imagine you are placed in solitary confinement and given a Rubik's Cube but you've never seen a Rubik's Cube once in your life. You don't know it's a puzzle that can be solved, you don't know what the solved state looks like, you don't know every row can be rotated on both axis, you don't know that all sides can be made to be one uniform color. You're not allowed to leave your imprisonment until you solve this cube you know nothing about. Now imagine that you also only have one half of the Rubik's Cube and someone locked in a different room has the other half of it and all you two have is a radio to communicate. You both have to work together to solve the Rubik's Cube, without knowing what it even is or being able to see the other person's half.
And then you know when you are working on a Rubik's Cube and you turned like 7 out of the 9 squares on one side Yellow? So close but you ultimately have to mess the surface up and start moving everything around again and make it less orderly before you can get close to the solution again? Imagine that frustration but in co-op, where half the surface is split away and in your partner's hands so you have to verbally communicate back and forth for several minutes to realize you're in an "almost solved but not really" state, and then you BOTH have to frustratingly undo the progress to find the real solution.

This is how the majority of the puzzles work in We Were Here and honestly, it's just not fun. There's no real life applications for the skillsets being demanded of the players, it's a completely unergonomic, anti-human game design. Einstein and Feynman weren't in separate cities when they cracked the atom, and if they would have been, they wouldn't have been prevented from sending eachother pictures or other varied information.
Presenting esoteric, random puzzles that are split between two people who then must communicate the nonsense between eachother until the two people's brains can together paint some semblance of a full picture is simply not a fun or ergonomic or sensible activity it's a complete chore.

The devs need to go back to the drawing board if they intend to continue this franchise because this is just getting too much. The puzzles where you have to describe weird shapes to eachother and come up with things like "this symbol looks like Shrek, press the Shrek button" are cute and fun. Puzzles where both players can see the puzzle are way better, too. There's puzzles that have one player doing most of the work - these are a little boring but even they can stay.

Again, though, the "Rubik's Cube split between two isolated players" style needs to be finished or relegated to "Final Boss Puzzle" because they're not fun in the least. I'm not an Eldritch creature training to ascend as an Outer God, give me human puzzles that feel good to do. If they insist on keeping these around, they need to expand players' tools. Give us picture-in-picture view of the other player, or the ability to draw and send the drawings to the other player. I'm sick of describing one half of a complicated logic-switch puzzle with made-up alphabets to my girlfriend who then must describe her half back to me.

It's a mixed bag but overall a completely fine way to play these three classics.
Aesthetically, the vibe of Crash isn't quite right and overall worse, but this has no bearing on the gameplay and the rest of the art direction is fine. The PS1 voice acting cast is simply better but the devs deserve credit for getting the PS2 voice actors back, which do have a cult fanbase.
I'd actually say that Crash Bandicoot 1 feels better to play here than it did in the original PS1 game, as the remake uses a standardized game engine between the three games. It's a remake that isn't perfect but does very little that is wrong.
My biggest criticism is that considering the length the devs went to recreate the game's systems and functions instead of simply porting the original game's code, it's a waste for them to not come up with a few original levels.

In general, it is baffling how in an industry as greedy as this, devs will routinely develop whole suites of creation tools and then not do anything with it anymore after a single game.

Completely unplayable at the moment from a recent patch, you can not get past title screen and nobody on the internet has a workaround as of today. If you see this, play/buy the non-enhanced version instead. There's also a EULA-Roofie fiasco with the entire franchise, but honestly, they are welcome to all my data, let them pretend wasting money and resources to know my browsing history will make them more money (it wont, late stage capitalists are actually extremely bad at economy and waste millions the way you and I breathe air).

Since the game requires a full 4 players to play on the interesting difficulties (or versus) and the general quality of random players is dumpster tier nowadays, I do not think this is much of a good purchase anymore, especially because Vermintide and Darktide are simply better.

The elevator pitch here is:
Take System Shock, one of the first games ever made in the FPS genre and originator of an entire subgenre, and repackage it in modern graphics, changing only the extremely outdated control scheme out with a modern FPS scheme and leaving most everything else regarding gameplay and art style intact.

The result is something that succeeds in the elevator pitch and so is worth your money.
It is not, however, a substantial gaming experience and is suspended purely in the realms of nostalgia and content tourism - sightseeing the past of video gaming in a modern package.

The game design is all very loose, with a lot of things present that do not serve to add any function to the gameplay loop. One of the first things you'll likely learn is that there is really no good reason to hoard a lot of junk to later turn into scrap metal, for example - then, as an extention to such a design, you'll also learn that there is really no need to be hauling a diverse array of weaponry either, as everything will kill the game's enemies all the same.

On that note, the enemies themselves don't ever offer very much excitement. Their biggest feature of note is that the space station's rogue AI, Shodan, can repopulate the level's enemies with some frequency. Respawning enemies are usually unwelcome for my tastes but I find that it doesn't break any fun factor in System Shock. It is lamentable that the sentient and rogue Artificial Intelligence themeing is paired with a very rudimentary enemy AI.

The game's biggest positive is the level design, as it is a sprawling semi-maze, with multiple rooms connecting to multiple other rooms on every floor. Therein lie multiple pockets of Resident Evil "take x item to y location" micro designs worked into the greater macro spread of interconnected rooms. Positional awareness, along with a set of pretty good power puzzles serve as the game's only ability to engage the player's senses, as the combat and gunplay are of a very stock affair.

Lastly, on the visuals. They are too faithful to the original for my liking. The space station is full of goofy neon lights and blocky metal panels. Most areas to be explored simply do not give off any kind of "lived in" sensation, which is - I think - one of the best qualities of the Shock genre. On a related note, the story serves a means to an end but is merely a prologue to the iconic plot of System Shock 2.

Overall, it's a fair purchase and far from the waste of time that millions of other games would be, but it only barely registers as a classic on the technicality of originating something substantial.

Barely a thumbs up.

Final Fantasy II is in an unfortunate state currently. The Pixel Remaster does good work for FF I but is very lackluster for the rest of the titles, such as FF II here. Some quality of life features are good to see and the soundtrack is the best rendition yet by far, making it a valid version to play. The downsides however are the absolutely awful tiny and pixelated sprites for all characters and enemies - seriously, even the GameBoy Advance version has more detailed sprites. There is also a COMPLETE LACK of character portraits and the text is in a small, thin and ugly font size for ants that doesn't fill out the dialogue boxes whatsoever.
In the graphics department, it is a complete and utter case of "What were they thinking???" in almost every department.
The PSP and GBA post-game extra story is also missing. just why...?

Buyer's guide for Final Fantasy II (no perfect solution):
-NES Version: If you want to simply see how the original release looked. Grindy and crude.
-PSP Version: The best graphics, modernized (less grindy) gameplay and access to the extra post-game campaign. However, the soundtrack in this port is pretty weak.
-GBA Version: Same post-game content and gameplay as PSP but a slight downgrade in graphics - though still charming - and a much better soundtrack, if a bit chiptune-y.
-Pixel Remaster: Graphics are completely gutted but by far the strongest soundtrack rendition yet and there are some quality of life features such as map/mini-map, screen resolutions, etc.