Recent reviews by HTTP 763 Under-caffeinated

Welp. I'm a few hours fresh off the final two chapters and...I have some thoughts.

To start: I first encountered this game by browsing Twitter, and seeing the gameplay and the visual style immediately caught my attention. When Lorn's Lure finally released, I jumped in a few days later to explore whatever there was to find here.
As of today, I have beaten the individual chapters with...a laughable number of retries (or 'failed simulations', as the game refers to them) owing to me being kinda rubbish with platformers. Bear this in mind for later parts of the review, but for now, a quick explainer.

You play as an android who finds himself chasing what appears to be an owl formed out of chaotic glitching effects. It usually serves as our guide for where we should go, and we chase it for most of the eight levels we play in this game.
Your journey as the android will take you through numerous different regions in the Megastructure; residential colonies, sewage systems, and other seemingly distraught environments await you as you climb your way up and down, chasing this elusive owl.

These environments are, by and large, my favourite thing in the game. They are extraordinarily massive in scale, but they don't feel so big that they're utterly overwhelming to travel through.
It's a bit like Xenoblade Chronicles , where the world is massive, but your movement speed allows you to move through these places quicker, and after a certain point, these vast landscapes are such that you barely pay it any mind by the time you approach the end of the game, and when you can see the sheer scale of it all in good lighting, it's quite magnificent.

The gameplay is quite easy to explain. Each chapter introduces you to a unique mechanic that opens up your options for traversal. The main thing you'll have with you is your hooks, with which you'll scale vertical rocky walls, but there are other mechanics.
Things like the 'Tic-Tac', jump dashing, grappling hook and so on also feature, giving you stuff to work with whilst you figure out where you're meant to go. There are other things to keep in mind here, but for the most part, these are the mechanics that you use and are introduced to throughout the duration of the game.

As for navigating, this is where things can get weird. The game teaches you right from the off that you're going to fail a bunch trying to make your way through these environments.
There is no obvious way up or down, usually; you have to intuit your way along, and this can sometimes lead to situations where you go a given direction almost by guesswork rather than having something like a ledge you can see.
There are times where I find myself wondering if some things that I'm doing were actually done as the developer intended. Sometimes when I'm going certain places, it feels like I'm playing the game wrong, even if it works out in the end. It's hard to tell.

That said, once you get into a flow state with the mechanics, the navigation and all of that, it's a properly fun experience, and the occasional fall doesn't bother you much at all; not only are the checkpoints usually very forgiving, often putting you back onto the ledge you fell from in the first place, you'll see it as an opportunity to re-assess and try again.
Other times, however, you'll feel at a complete loss on where to go. I can spend minutes at a time looking at where I'm supposed to go. If you're in that flow state, these situations can kill any momentum you had and be really off-putting, which is such a shame to me.

Perhaps the thing I dislike the most about Lorn's Lure , however, are, err...actually, let's throw up some spoiler tags real quick...

OK, so, the third chapter brings you to a sewage system that is exceptionally dark and hard to see. You'll make use of a device that enables you to make flares from the radioactive atmosphere, and these are...not especially effective, as they don't light a lot up, but they'll do in a pinch.
The problem comes towards the end of the chapter, though. You're taught here that you cannot make contact with liquid (you're an android, so I guess you short circuit), but this level tends to have a lot of it around you at any one time.
The killer for me is the very end of the chapter, where you are given a timed challenge to get out of a part of the sewer before you get washed away. It may only be a relatively short section of the level, but it is just...so annoying.

Worse: this timed mechanic returns in the final chapter of the game, making up the lion's share of the level, and you have to play through it with the most obnoxious techno music.
The level design in this chapter is the most 'video-game final level' level design imaginable; it just feels like an obstacle course rather than something that meshes with any other part of the game, and it is also alarmingly disorienting, which I cannot abide by for a platformer.
Whilst there are checkpoints to make it so that you don't feel completely screwed, it is easily the worst part of the game for me. My vision turned green because of it and I felt overloaded by it all, and when the credits rolled, I wasn't glad, just exhausted and tired.

I do hope that my grievances with the game don't put too many people off, because at the end of the day, this was the work of a solo developer and a lot of work has gone into it, and some of my issues could just well be due to my not being particularly good at platformers.
They are, however, serious enough that I was genuinely pondering whether I should press the thumbs down button to say I don't recommend this game. I don't think that would be fair, because it's not like this is a bad game, and if I think back on it, I find a lot of stuff I really like about it.
Maybe if there was a middling option, it would better tell my story. On the whole, though, I am closer to liking this game than disliking, but I wish I liked it more than I did. I would also hope that in spite of my criticisms, you folks give the demo a shot at least to see if it might be the sort of game you're interested in.

But yeah...less of that final level, please. That was just...awful.

EDIT 1: I installed the 1.3 patch earlier today, but it did not solve the problem. I'm starting to fear that the only option for me at this point is to change the graphics card, which...is gonna take a while to be doable.

EDIT 2: As it turns out, that patch was version 1.2, not 1.3. This is in spite of how the patch notes and posts prior to that originally said 1.3, whilst the game itself said 1.2. This is...remarkably silly and it shows an impressive lack of communication here.

The original review follows on from here.

So...this is a very reluctant thumbs down, because this is a good game — I enjoy playing it, and it's probably the best-playing rallying game we've had since the venerable Richard Burns Rally — but I have one glaring issue with this game.

During night stages in particular (others have reported the effect also happens in rainy conditions), it's impossible to run a stage as the screen is overwhelmed by black visual artifacts, and none of the settings solve the problem.

Now, I should stress: I am running the game on an NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti, which technically means I'm below specification, generationally. However, the game is still playable at 1080p on the High preset without upscaling (provided that I turn the 'Car Reflections' setting to Ultra Low, because the artifacts also drench car interiors like Anish Kapoor with Vantablack), so really the game is still playable for me, but not in a state I can consider properly acceptible.

I have posted on the EA Answers forum about this, and I discovered that a number of respondents to my post are in a similar boat to me, in that they are using NVIDIA GPUs that make use of the Maxwell architecture (so basically anything 900-series).

As a result, I would hope that The Powers That Be — be they Codemasters, EA, or NVIDIA — devise a fix that would enable us to be able to play the game without the horrible glitchy situation going on in night stages. I'd have been playing for quite a lot longer than this, but my time in the game is curtailed until a fix for this issue comes about.

I'm saying nothing. Get it, and go in blind.

You'll thank me — and everyone else who says to do that — later.

I grew up playing the original Mirror's Edge. It's up there as one of my favourite games, and for as short as it was, it never felt like it ran out of content. It was a beautiful, well-paced game with excellent platforming mechanics and a story that was honestly better than it probably should have been.

Fast-forward to 2016, to the release of Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, and I didn't pick it up. The reviews didn't sell it to me, but I did eventually pick it up on sale after a few years, and now I've given it a shot. All told, there are some things in this game that I do like, but I find myself coming away from a playthrough of this game wanting.

It's a hard reboot of the original game, with the only common threads being that you play as Faith, a Runner, and you live your days running along rooftops and punching rent-a-cops. That's more or less where the similarities end, however; the games diverge right at the start, and throughout the game you notice that things are absolutely not as you remember.

Now, granted. By the time of Catalyst's launch, Mirror's Edge was eight years old. It existed as an anomaly in its own time, a unique form of first-person platforming that few others thought to imitate until the likes of Dying Light appeared. And because of the age gap, it's fair to expect that Catalyst improves on what came before it, and to its credit, it does improve on the original in some aspects.

Traversing a large, open environment with cascading rooftops, making leaps over huge expanses of open air, and the overall style of parkour in this game are great. It's easily the best thing in this game, the sensation of running through the world and even plotting out the quickest and most novel routes to your destination.

It's helped by very smooth movement; the actual gameplay here has genuinely improved somewhat over the original game. Granted, there are a few minor annoyances, but the original wasn't exactly irritation-free, and in this case they went with a few improvements that made traversal a lot more open to the player and expanding on what you can do with Faith's skillset.

Graphically, as well, it is a very crisp and clean looking game. Even in environments that aren't built yet, things look good and give off the feeling - even if it's a somewhat superficial one - that the world is lived in. There are plenty of people around, although not many of them do much of anything unless they happen to be interactable at the point you encounter them.

My main issue with the graphics, though, is the architecture. A lot of it feels a bit extreme, and whilst I do enjoy some games with unique and expressive architecture, this sometimes feels like it oversteps the mark. Mirror's Edge managed to avoid that trap for the most part, whereas Catalyst flung itself headlong into this idea of huge towers of glass instead of concrete. I'm not a fan of it in its entirety, but I don't necessarily mind it. At the very least, each region has its own aesthetic to help give you an idea of the class of people that reside there, if any at all.

And this is where my praise for the game ends, more or less. Here, we go into a few of the issues I have. For a start, the game is chock full of missions that you can do, and...they're all cookie-cutter. They're Deliveries, they're Time Trials, they're ones where you evade the rent-a-cops and they're ones where you progress the story and the flow is not varied enough to make things interesting for long enough to care.

The payoff for doing the missions is mostly that you can unlock new upgrades. Yep, this was released in a time where upgrade systems were en vogue and infected many single-player games like a pox. Playing Catalyst after playing the original jarred me when it came to upgrading, because it made me realise this game was designed to make you improve your character, rather than improve yourself. There's no such upgrading in the original Mirror's Edge; the Faith you started with is the Faith you ended the game with, and it's all the better for it.

And on that note, let's talk combat. Of all my misgivings with this game, combat is among the highest, because it's simultaneously overcomplicated yet underdeveloped, a truly terrible combination. Combat feels sluggish and mushy, the feedback is pretty poor, and although it sounds satisfying to be beating up hired goons for scrip, all told it feels like someone tried to make a first-person Batman: Arkham game but forgot that the combat in those games had a fluidity to it. This is as fluid as an ice cube.

Speaking of ice cubes, the cast of characters is...disappointing. The Faith I grew up with is not the Faith in this game, and it saddens me deeply, because whilst the Faith in this game has determination to see things through to their end, Catalyst Faith also has a bitterness and arrogance that make her so much less endearing than in the original. This isn't the confident, cocky yet affable and empathetic Faith from the original; Catalyst Faith is, to put it kindly, not very good as characters go.

Other characters are scarcely much better, either. Although there is some development for some of the characters like Icarus, there are others like Rebecca who become almost insufferable. In fact, of all the characters in this game, the two I actually care enough to like are Dogen - the guy who you owe a huge debt to - and Plastic - the hacker girl who has just as much of a lack of social awareness as I do. Dogen is a character the game frames as not someone you're meant to like, but at the very least, he puts people in their place. Plastic's quirky personality carries her. Everyone else is either bland soup or just repugnant.

And the story...suffice it to say, it's one of my bigger gripes with this game. Ordinarily, I tend not to care for story in games; I'm one of those people who say the gameplay trumps the story in almost every single case, and in this case, if I were playing this game for the story, I would be sorely disappointed.

Many of the events feels somewhat contrived, like a solution to a problem pops out of thin air. The game surprises you with things that just happen with not much explanation behind them and...I'm expected to think this is good storytelling? On top of that, without spoiling what happens exactly, the ending tried to tie up a loose end or two, but all in all, the ending was an immense disappointment that I cannot in good conscience say this game is worth playing for its story.

Mirror's Edge: Catalyst has some good things to it. The improvements to the gameplay from the original are there, and traversing Glass is quite thrilling, and the game does give you plenty to do; if you're a completionist, there's a lot to complete here. But the gameplay also has some downsides to it, even on its own and not compared to the original. The characters and story are also a serious downgrade, in my opinion.

In a way, it's probable this game was never going to live up to my expectations. As I said, Mirror's Edge is one of my favourite games of all time. But even at that, even if I wasn't expecting this game to supplant the original, I was still expecting it to be truly enjoyable, and...I don't think it is. Mirror's Edge: Catalyst tried to be more than what it needed to be, and it also tried to be something it wasn't.

I would only recommend this game if you wanted to just run around in Glass without a care in the world. It's fun in that regard. If you wanted to play the game for its story...you're looking at the wrong game.

I initially wasn't going to buy this. Not strictly because I didn't want to play the game - I absolutely did. My main concern, however, came down to having the space to play it, which is why I was apprehensive about buying it. My interest in how this game looked, however, overwhelmed me and I ended up buying this game in the end.

And I'm absolutely glad that I did.

Half-Life: Alyx features you playing as the titular daughter of Eli Vance, Alyx. You and your father get captured by the Combine in a raid, and whilst the Combine still have your father, you're released by your father's companion Russell by causing an accident. You meet up with him, and he gives you a mission - go into the Quarantine Zone, and make your way to the huge floating mass called the Vault.
You'll navigate environments such as an underground train station, a hotel, a distillery, and a zoo, to get to the Vault, which hides some sort of superweapon...but what could the Combine be keeping behind floating lock and key?

Now, this game is VR exclusive. Valve has basically given modders licence to make the game playable with a keyboard and mouse, and...I have a feeling that when they do, the game will feel almost unnatural to play, because the game was designed first and foremost for VR.
Half-Life: Alyx works with my Oculus Rift, and will work on just about any SteamVR-compatible headset. If, however, you're not interested in the VR side of things, you might be in the wrong place.

The control in this game is very slick and natural, and it seems fairly simplistic, but that is entirely by design. The game was supposed to feature a crowbar (because why wouldn't it?), but melee combat could have proved quite dangerous for this sort of application, and I'm thankful it doesn't really feature it.
You get access to three different weapons throughout the game: a pistol, a shotgun, and a submachine gun. All of these are handled in one hand, and can be upgraded at stations throughout the game with the use of resin, which you pick up throughout the environment.
These upgrades consist primarily of some quality of life improvements, such as reflex and laser sights, increased capacities, and even a grenade launcher for the shotgun, which can prove quite useful in particularly stressful combat encounters.

You can also pick up a lot of ammo around the place and store it in your over-the-shoulder backpack, and that brings me onto reloading. In most first person shooters, reloading is heavily abstracted; you press a button, and your character reloads your gun, and in many games - including Half-Life games of old - you end up with just the full magazine and no round that's already chambered.
In Alyx, you have to release the magazine or open the weapon up, and reach over your shoulder to grab another mag or shells, and you insert it into the gun. You then have to ♥♥♥♥ the gun if you're reloading an empty weapon, and all of these actions - although simplified somewhat to make it easier for your average player to come to grips with - is pretty natural, and can be come pretty quickly by the end of the game.
It also forces the likes of me - someone who reloads pretty much immediately after each kill in any FPS game I play - out of a nasty habit by making your backpack only store full magazines. If you release a magazine with one or two rounds still in it, that's on you, but that's a couple rounds being wasted. And don't ♥♥♥♥ a weapon after it's been loaded if you like to not waste ammo.

If there was one thing I noticed, however, it's that the game gave you just enough ammunition early on to get by, but towards the end with three different weapons decked out with all sorts of mods, you can become something of a glass cannon, which, whilst I'm not entirely opposed to that, seems partly antithetical to the game's atmosphere early on.
With regards to the atmosphere, this game knows how to set one well and truly. When things get rampant, the music swells up and becomes more complex, whilst in situations where you're trying to simply navigate an environment, you're listening more to ambient sounds and music with the occasional bite of tension ready to spring out and hit you.
The game's sound design, as well, is very commendable. The game uses a lot of distinct sounds, and owing to the VR nature of this game, you know what to react to when you hear something. Sometimes it's nothing in particular, but other times it can be something rather spooky.

As for the graphics in this game, I think they're pretty good. I played the game on an Oculus Rift, and although there seems to be an inherent sort of blurriness to the whole thing - one that makes me wish I never really bought this particular headset, to be honest - the game's visuals do seem pretty crisp and detailed, especially considering this is in VR.
The environmental detail, as well, is simply incredible. There's a lot of clutter around, much of it physical, and some of the clutter can be of an astrobiological nature as well. The detail in the clutter is simply incredible for this sort of application.

I should probably discuss some of the dangers in this game, both enemies and environmental. The game has a few similar enemies to that in Half-Life 2, but with a bit more variety in some of them.
Naturally, you have the good old headcrab and headcrab zombie, but you also have the poison headcrabs, and a new headcrab variant, which has a carapace which makes it immune to damage from gunshots except for underneath it. Zombies can also sometimes have weak points, which - when shot often enough - will burst and kill them. It doesn't often take the headcrab along, though, so you may still have to deal with the pesky things.
As far as the Combine are concerned, you have your usual grunts, as well as engineer types that can release Manhacks - those infernal things made all the more terrifying in VR - as well as heavy machine gunners, and even heavy riflemen which can deal a heavily-damaging shot to you and kill you with ease.

Environmental dangers can consist of barnacles - a not-too-uncommon menace in this game. Being stuck to the ceiling makes them an easy target, but you walk into one, and you're going up in the world...and not in the way you want.
Aside from barnacles, you'll occasionally see what appear to be explosive polyps which - when they pop - can do damage to you. It's also possible to die by misadventure if you mistakenly move in such a way that you fall down a hole.
There are also some sort of spore-producing creatures within the alien goop which can cause you Alyx to cough, but you can cover your mouth or wear a gas mask to make sure that doesn't happen. This is something that comes in very important for a later chapter, but for the sake of not spoiling the situation, I'll avoid detailing it.

There is also a hacking minigame. Well, there's multiple of them. Throughout the game, you can hack munitions cabinets, upgrade stations and tripmines with the use of your multi-tool. These minigames may require you to connect pairs of given symbols, or cross certain points using lasers to unlock access to stuff. It's pretty simple, but again - it makes good use of what everyone knows works in VR.
Another use for the multi-tool is to reroute electrical wiring. Running your multi-tool against a wall can show an electrical current, and turning some nodes can enable you to unlock different areas. They really thought about it all here.

If there was one thing I would love, it's something of an expansion of this idea in another game. I'm firmly invested in this now, and I hope Valve can make some more games like this.
I want to write more, but my speciality is long-form, and the review system doesn't like that. I wholeheartedly recommend this game. If you have a VR headset, play this game; it is incredible. I may follow this review up some time later to give more detail, but for now, that's my verdict. Play it. PLAY IT. YABBA. MY ICING.

/!\ THIS REVIEW IS ABOUT THIS BEING A REMASTER, NOT HOW GOOD THE GAME ITSELF IS /!\

Oh dear......dear oh sodding dear...

I was hoping this game had improved after its initial release in September 2016. Unfortunately, however, I was mistaken.

I recently did a Let's Play of the original BioShock, and had initially considered using the Remaster for the Let's Play. However, that hope was dashed when I played for an hour, got about halfway through the Medical Pavilion, and crashed upon attempting to save.

And by that, I mean...what happens is:
> Start the level.
> Play through a fair chunk of the level (got to where you get the shotgun).
> Decided to save the game.
> The game crashes back to desktop and fails to save the game.

The annoying thing is, I'm very much used to playing thought the game without having to save the game normally unless I want to stop for a bit. Playing through for the first time upon the release of the remaster, I felt an overwhelming sense of disappointment and anger towards this game after completing the Farmer's Market (an admittedly not too long area, but still has quite a lot in it if you venture off the beaten path, much like everywhere else in Rapture), only for the game to crash and vomit me back to desktop, only for it to demand I replay the Farmer's Market again.

And aside from the saving issues, it doesn't really look a whole lot different short of the addition of tons of starfish for some reason, there are occasional, and I experienced a few shader glitches here and there.

A note to the developers of this remaster:
A remaster is supposed to improve the game, not make it worse.
As developers of a remaster, you failed in your quest to improve the game after its initial release nearly ten years ago. The only remaster collection I can consider to be worse than this is the Silent Hill HD Collection, simply because at least in those games, absolutely everything is made worse, whilst the developers of this collection at least made the attempt to include new features like an FOV slider.
But if your game somehow runs worse than the original version......you messed up somewhere something fierce.

As a game in its own right, I recommend BioShock.
As a remaster of a great game, I cannot recommend BioShock Remastered. At least, on PC.
If you want to play the BioShock games, you might find the originals somewhere on key reseller sites, but the only versions on Steam now are the Remasters.

You are essentially left with three options:

• Buy the remasters on Steam and deal with a game that runs worse and breaks down more than an old Morris Marina;
  
• Buy the base games on a key reseller site somewhere and avoid the problem of crashing upon attempting to save, or;
  
• Buy the remasters...on console.

Whilst I cannot personally vouch for how the remasters play on console, a friend of mine is quite pleased with the performance of the games on console. Fair enough I suppose.
However, since I have not played them on console, I cannot guarantee they are as good as he said, and since his judgement refers specifically to the console release, it does not sway my own judgement of the PC release of the remasters.

As I said earlier, as a remaster, on PC at least, this is nothing short of a failure. Don't consider buying the PC release of the remaster collection for £40. It's a botch job of a remaster that only serves to make the source material worse.

Buy it.
Print the manual.
Read it and read it and read it.
Play the game.
Read the manual again.
Get amazingly confused at parts of it.
Listen to Kraftwerk while playing this.

10/10 Would program again.

An utterly incredibly well detailed reimagining of the original Alien movie in the form of a game, putting you at the forefront of an alien attack with no guarantee of survival.
Your only option? To hide from the creature, distract it, perhaps deter it...but if it catches sight of you...well, let's just say it doesn't really end well for you.
The only real issue with this game is that it tends to lose steam near the end of the game, which feels like it should have been an hour shorter than it actually was, especially considering the payoff was...not exactly great, to be honest.
However, the last bit aside, it is still a wonderfully constructed game deserving of the name of the most horrifying thing in space - Alien.

It's flashy, it's fast-paced, and it's incredibly stylistic.

This is a game that shows off what the Unreal Engine can do, and it shows it off so well. It looks amazing, and it runs really well on PC, which is amazing considering it's a Capcom game on PC.

The gameplay is fluid, quick and easy to grasp. It's easier than the original quadrilogy, but at the same time, if you didn't like how ferociously difficult the original games were, then I'd say this was a more than viable alternative.

Some people draw negative opinions about the story and the characters. Begrudgingly, I kinda have to agree with them. The ending isn't particularly satisfying, Dante is a douche (even though he develops into a proper character not too long after), and overall, it leaves a lot to be desired.

In absolutely no way do I think the game is bad. It's great, in fact. By comparison to the old DMC games? No, not really. But is it terrible? Not even remotely close. It's fun, flashy, stylish and to me, that's all it needed to be.

One of the darkest and most visceral games I have played. It's also pretty rage inducing, but you feel so godly when you ultimately beat each level.
In regards to how visceral it is...forget Dead Space. Forget Silent Hill. Forget Gears of War. This game is so much more bloody than any of those games to the point where it becomes a good version of Splatterhouse.
It's a great game, and really worth the low £6.99 asking price. Buy it now!