Nedávné recenze uživatele TheUnbeholden

My opinion.

The audience for contagion is and always was limited:
Players today are use to tripping over ammo/health, auto save/quick save features and a minimap. Challenge frustrates/bores these types of gamers. Not saying we are all this way but there certainly is a percentage of this type. I have heard many people complain, especially on barlow and biotech escape, that the game sucks because they are not being spoon fed where to go next. Contagion involves some degree of thought and their are a number of people in this world that are unable and unwilling to use their minds.

A trolls paradise:
The escape game mode is one of if not the most popular game mode... and its a trolls paradise. From TKers, to Griefers, to Trolls. This completely ruins a new players experience and in many cases pushes seasoned players away also. While vote kick would be a bad solution its a very poor excuse not to have addressed this problem. There are system that could be built to improve this aspect. Even a "report player" option from in game would do a great deal to improve this situation... yet, here we are YEARS later and nothing has been done. The devs wont even put the current precepts for reporting a troll into an easy to create thread and sticky that thread so the community has the knowledge and tools to police itself.

No friends allowed:
Playing with your friends in an online co-op game should have been a major consideration but players are forced to jump though port forwarding hoops to play exclusively with their friends. This becomes an even bigger problem when a seasoned player tries to introduce a new player to the game and has no place to do it. Mix in a bit of trolling and its hard to get friends and family excited about this title. Yet again this is a problem that is just now, supposedly, being addressed after YEARS of stagnation.

Poor Server Diversity
There once was a time when we had map and game mode specific servers. If you wanted to play the police station on escape hard all night long you could do that on one of the hundreds of official servers. At the time I repeatedly asked for a Biotech-Escape-Server (if even just one) I was ignored and now we have even less server diversity than we had in the past. Hundreds of servers with only slight variations.

Poor Stability
On both the client side and the server side this build of the game is NOT stable. Too often you get into a great game with a bunch of great players only to crash yourself or have the server crash and dump everyone. Depending on time invested at that point many players just sign off in frustration. This has been reported over and over again without any official recognition of the issue.

Bugs, Bugs and more bugs.
Not only are their a number of bugs... they are never addressed. With the new DLC 6 months ago there are now more bugs than ever.
-Holiday content 6 months after Christmas
-Poor zombie pathing, stuck zombies and dead spots
-Zombies that AOE attack when agroing doors.
-Zombie that hurt you through doors and
-Doors that insta explode if a opened on a zombie?
-Doors that get stuck partway
-Sights/accessories that disappear from the Remington shotgun
-Shotguns that ghost fire 2 rounds when only actually shooting one projectile.
-Hang on round restart bug on some of the escape maps
-Bleeding ceilings
-Doors that are not able to be interacted with for seemingly no reason.
-Zombies that starve to death once they get stuck
-Textures and Assets that don't load correctly
Now we were told that after the DLC we would return to regular updates which many of us interpreted to mean regular patches like way back in the day. This position is now said to mean regular updates as in posts but even that is not being done. GW was introduced to this community as the new voice of monochrome. He promised to update us regularly on the progress the team is making and as of today has not made a single post on progress. He is either bad at his job or their is no progress to report. Monochrome wont confirm one or the other.

Bad or Lacking Mechanics
-Gun bashing is worthless, it should be used as a way to either pin a single zombie or to try and keep 2 or 3 zombies at bay hoping hoping to kill a 4th before it reaches you or have players kill them while your the bait. Instead it serves to merely annoy a zombie before it hits you.
-Zombies do not have weapon-specific deaths, so you don't have satisfying finishers on enemies when you use a shotgun or use certain melee weapons, They just sort of faint in slowmo after headshots.
-Zombies do not try and bite you. They don't grab you, instead they just flail at you hopelessly until you die. It would have been good for a NMRiH style struggle to get a zombie off you in time, the more injured you are the more difficult it would be for a tense surprise encounter.

And that leaves me to the final problem. Broken promises, twisted words, and possible lies. No one knows why contagion is not being worked on other than the developers. Its clear we are not returning to regular updates. No progress is being reported and many of us suspect they have broken their assurance that the development of Project Ageless will not affect the development of contagion. People do not like being disrespected in this manner and it has created a very negative community. One can only make positive suggestions and be ignored so many times before they just go on the attack. This feeling in the community is also driving players away.

This is a game I cannot relate to because I've never had a job let alone one that has almost zero prospect of promotion, reached an age without a proper education and lacking in any real means of asserting yourself and gaining stable employment, or with the notion of co-workers that you like and dislike but admire in different ways, and you interact with on a daily basis but they don't truly know you, and will more likely not will be layed off or quit at any moment leaving you even more alienated than before. Being my own individual with my own personality in a society that wants people to conform to the needs of your boss & 9-5 jobs whose contract implicitly states that any grounds the employer deems fit to fire is a legitimate reason. Sometimes its just the state of the industry, structural unemployment or declining economic growth. It seems to me like its an issue of a lack of jobs that gives rise to more temp work as well as politics having a major influence on the business world like the government is preventing many industries from needing to adapt, and expect citizens to do the adapting instead... but thats not my focus here. And yet the game strucks a cord with me. I get the feeling of alienation because we don't need to get to really know people in order to get by in whatever role we choose. On the other side we got domestic lives where our senses are getting overwhelmed by the amount of books to read, media to consume and the limitless potential of sharing thoughts with others on the internet. We can get stuck in endless self reflection and time sinks. For some people the hoplessness that comes from all of that can become overwhelming and for some the hopelessnes can become persistent and realistic given their future prospects. I think if there is a way out of this its to realize before its really too late (suicide) that your not alone and there is always time to learn something new, meet new people and go different places to get a feel for what its like to really live & change how you live, day by day. If you don't then it slowly eats away at you, boiling underneath the surface until you finally decide that life is meaningless and dying is the only way to free yourself from your own prison.

+Thought provoking
+Minimal but I like the art style, does exactly what it needs to
-Not very interactive
-Can be depressing if your in a very similiar situation

-Basically I got the same vibe others did, the game borrows alot from splinter cell. A QTE melee event that goes a little too fast on higher difficulties which makes me not want to melee an enemy without a weapon & 'mark and execute' slow mo kill from the Splinter Cell Conviction. I don't need such theatrics.

-Forgettable music

-Level design, the levels are for some reason very linear for the most part. By the time I start getting into it there is a load screen (although its fast), it breaks immersion for areas to be split off like this with one way to get to them, and it renders everything you did prior consequence free. ie suspicious guards, dead bodies, blood splatters, blown disguise etc

-Lack of subtlety, there is no option to turn of lights, close doors, and way too many areas to dispose corpses off.

-Equipment, or lack there of. You can't carry more than one type of pistol or throwable weapon. There is no equipment selection, no map and combined with mostly very linear levels it makes for a tactically dead game. You just sort of improvise as you go, I get that was sort of the case before but there is no choice but to play that way this time & it alot less interesting when you have so little routes to take in such cramped levels.

+They put in a proper cover system, I don't rely on it but its a little easier to move in and out of corner and move between cover. I don't want to pop out of cover to pick off guys one by one because that to me is more of a 'soldier' type of gameplay but I appreciate the choice to.

+I liked the story for the most part to be honest, I don't get why people seem to think Hitman is emotionless, hes shown emotion before its just never gotten in the way of his ability to perform. ie he can turn it off at the first sign of danger. He also never displays fear as someone made for killing would. The way he talks to the child though put me off at first, he got a fathery instinct pretty quickly.

+But generally speaking the controls are easier because you don't have to use everything with the one activate button. They separate 'disguises', 'drag corpse' & 'human shield', you can always do your hand to hand attack even when you have a melee weapons equiped.
+Cut scenes & Patrick Bateson

+The visuals, perhaps they could have spent more time refining the maps, ie make them larger and add more routes with atleast a few more assassinations instead of dumping 18+ possible assassinations into so few missions. They went overboard on providing replayability only to put way to much focus on other kinds of missions that I don't find anywhere near as interesting, the "jason bourne' comparison comes to mind of being on the run rather than being the predator. I liked some of it but mostly it felt odd to see the game lose its edge, comparisons to previous games are inevitable, afterall Hitman series is unique and Bloodmoney set the bar so high.

What do I think overall?

Its scores low on the 'planning' element without larger maps and your own in-game map display, too much emphasis on 'unlocking abilities', ie perks (hint to the developers, they do not fit this type of game). Scores middle on the 'staging accidents/assassination and map design'. Scores high on 'style' & 'cinematics' but that isn't the core of Hitman. I would rate it 8/10 as a game in its own right, and perhaps 1 point lower as a Hitman game for its unusual choice of focus in gameplay design and some elements that don't work well for Hitman, like adding in instinct to overcome the useless disguises and too many non-assassination small linear levels. I prefer not to recommend to fans because of expecations the series has set up. As a story it delivers some great cutscenes, with impressive visuals that run well on older machines..

Its hard to recommend this game. As much as I like Max Payne, I'm willing to admit that the only reason why I enjoyed the game is because of the gameplay, and whatever connection I had to the protagnist was because of what I knew of him from previous games.

+Gameplay. Bullet time seems to run out quicker forcing you to use the cover system in many instances. Some may think its not as run-and-gun but I found it made you think more tactically, choosing when to use what kind tactic. Using cover and picking enemies off, jumping out guns blazing or dodging and shooting if you can take out the last few. The damage on enemies makes them respond realistically, and I also like the melee attacks and how Max holds his secondary weapon in his left hand, also I appreciate separating the shoot dodge and roll (eventhough its awkward trying to go into cover after rolling). You fight enemies with armored vests early on so your in for a challenge.

+The Showdown mechanic, where a shot that would have killed you instead drains out all your bullet time to go slow motion giving you a chance to kill the enemy before you die. If you kill him your saved. It feels odd to rely on this to avoid death. However it ends up turning into a clumsy attempt at trying to cover the issue of headshots killing you, so you end up relying on the Showdown mechanic to much.

+- A change that some may appreciate and many probably won't, is the limit to 2 dual wielding weapons and 1 secondary (two-handed gun). I never like limiting weapon use but given that the game is taking a more realistic route I don't mind so much mainly because dual wielding is what its all about.

+Visuals, the city is beautiful, physics and destruction to the things you shoot at. Its not noir anymore, and the comic book style cutscenes have been replaced with these discoloured or zoomed in shots in regular cutscenes, with occasional popouts of words said kinda of like everything has happened already and Max is only seeing fragments of memories. I liked it but I think it was overused a bit. As was the amount of cutscenes.

Aspects of the gameplay that came close to ruining the game:
-Headshots kill you (relying on the showdown mechanic to save you)
-Very few guns
-Shoot Dodge uses to much bullet time, making its use limited to when your out of bullet time or if its the last few enemies

-Max's Character, hes all brooding, nihilistic old bastard. He spends almost all of his dialogue complaining, self hatred & seems to have a death wish. While it does seem like Max as a character with no one he cares about left alive, seems like a natural evolution, what made the series work before was not just his cynicism and metaphors, it was the fact he was a good guy underneath all that.. having something to fight for.

Nihilists on the other hand are self absorbed (which I'm alright with) but they also complain alot. We hate having to listen them go on, unless its something they keep inside of themselves.
Not just that, but alot of people can't relate to the whole drinking problem thing. What exacerbates the problem is we never get to see him try and see the lighter side of things. It make sense to me that after losing everyone he cares about and killing so many, he would no longer be able to live like a normal person but theres not even a single moment where he enjoys himself. We need a silver lining at the end of it all to make it worth caring about all the strife he goes through.

A change of scenery, a new pair of bad guys, but it just seems like hes doomed to repeat history. Never being able to be normal again, and no one left alive that can slap some sense into him to set his priorities straight. The exception of Bravura, but him and Max weren't exactly in the best of terms.

- The only reason why I enjoyed the game is because of the gameplay, and whatever connection I had to the protagonist was because of what I knew of him from previous games & the voice actors attempt to add personality to a otherwise bland story & characters, alot of dailogue to explain rather dreary moments, uninteresting "clues", characters we know not little about.

-Max's looks. If they thought Max is your every man that the look could appeal to, they chose the wrong game and he doesn't really look like Bruce Willis yet they gave him that look half way into the game.
Max speaks in metaphors and is way to cynical to be your average man.

If you go into the game not expecting a Max Payne sequel, I see it as a continuation of Max's life, different developer starting a new story (and not a very good one), then you might enjoy it if you don't mind the negatives & love the gameplay alone.

Alien Swarm is a free game, its a fun little top down view of a futuristic marine who kills aliens... its played co-op with 4 people. Its a little short but still fun while it lasts, and unlocking all the weapons/items is something to add some replay value along with the harder difficulty levels. I would say atleast play it once.