Recent reviews by Cxero

i got the toothpaste ending

what

So no head?

i just stepped in a puddle of cat vomit

jank as all hell, not even the fanmade patches can keep it under control. but nonetheless an experience i will never forget. some of the best writing in the business with killer voice acting to boot. a one-of-a-kind experience. a damn shame there aren't more urban fantasy FPS/RPGs like it.

Pretty fun co-op game with a very responsive development team. Really good example of a game with a lot of complex tactics while still being accessible to new players.

The game is designed really smartly never to overwhelm you with choice — for example, you can find character upgrades, but rather than choosing from a massive list like in some games, you are only given 3 options at a time. And there is very little filler or padding when it comes to your choices. Every different upgrade, weapon, or item is substantially different from the alternative.

Just keep your expectations reasonable. This is still a game made by a small studio being sold for a fraction of what most mainstream games go for. That being said, I think it's well worth the money if you enjoy co-op horde shooters.

dead rising is a deeply flawed game, but i hold it dear to my heart for being a unique experience with a special commitment to its core ideas that transforms ordinary decisions into nail-biting choices. everything you do is recontextualized by a world that doesn't wait for you. if you mess up, people will die and your mission might fail.

unfortunately, this game is so idiosyncratic as to be obtuse at times, and the experience is riddled with questionable design and bad AI. there is a severely declining difficulty curve — many early bosses are super difficult and practically demand the use of the New Game+ to survive. furthermore, it's shameful that the survivors aren't much smarter than the shambling undead — but the escort missions are totally optional, if you can bring yourself to abandon all these poor people. and the only way to complete certain quests on time is to know what's coming beforehand and prepare yourself accordingly. i suggest that, on first playthrough, that you only focus on rescuing survivors or story missions, not both.

fortunately, the game has incredible replay value and much of the fun comes from getting intimately familiar with the game, which is rewarded in spades. by the time you're finishing up your first playthrough, you might find that you can navigate the wilamette mall better than your own neighborhood. i think this intimacy between the game and the player is a big part of why dead rising is such memorable cult classic — to say nothing of the atmosphere, memorable characters and the viscerally thrilling gameplay. it's a true classic.

this is perhaps the least immersive VR game i've ever played. i appreciate the effort but it's... bad.

a fully-physical body sounds great, but it rarely matches up with the real thing and it readily bugs out. upisnotjump can explain it better than i ever could. fully-physical enemies fail to impress because they stumble around like atrophied drunkards. joystick movement has this nauseating accelleration and climbing violently shakes the camera around enough to make even seasoned VR veterans sick. if you think climbing in boneworks feels anything like the real thing then you desperately need to go outside. kerry davis was right - a detailed simulation can be less immersive than just taking a shortcut.

there are only a handful of enemy types. the gun selection is underwhelming. H2H weapons are only really useful as an amusing alternative, because they are unrealistically sluggish and lag behind your real hands. the campaign is long, but the levels aren't fun and clearly weren't playtested a whole lot, since it can take an hour to complete a mission but they didn't add checkpoints until the game shipped and customers started complaining about it. there is very little in the way of story and the graphics aren't much to look at. simple graphics can be okay in vr — budget cuts looks great, and i felt immersed while playing — but you need to have good art design, and boneworks does not.

i was really excited for this game but it managed to let me down in every conceivable way. where half-life: alyx effortlessly transcended the limitations of current-gen vr, boneworks stumbles into a wall and clips through the level geometry. if this really turns out to be the "future of VR," then i'm going to toss my headset into a dumpster.

Described by game critics as "Budget Skyrim" and "the Dark Souls of Walking Simulators," this Ukranian cult classic from 1998 is, without a doubt, one of the video games ever made.

Huh, that wasn't so bad. A short experience, but I had fun.

They did some neat things with backtracking, and the levels looked really nice — and they used some effects that aren't in the regular GoldSrc engine, so I can see why they made this a mod instead of a level pack. However, There were some bad enemy placements, some of the levels were cramped... and there was even a brief cutscene in the middle, which was a little jarring from what I've come to expect from Half-Life. The story was dumb — most video game stories are — and the final boss was goofy, but it's over quick. No big deal, because this was a fun little distraction that costs nothing.

I guess it goes to show you that the gamers are a bunch of entitled brats. When someone gives you something for free that they made in their free time, you rip it to shreds and tear the author's head off. Grow up