Recent reviews by [VIOLENCE KILLER]GUI

This short review is less about Crysis, the game itself, and more about the lack of effort put into this "remaster."
The original game had its fair share of glitches and nothing was done here to fix them. AI pathing issues like enemies moving back and forth against walls/objects, animation issues like helicopters turning sideways without animation and zipping into a wall and exploding, etc. just stupid things you can laugh at, They aren't as bad during the majority of the game since the way the levels are structured are semi-open with your main objectives being having to interact with/destroy an object, or reach a marker, which means stupid AI behavior can be ignored. However, during the final quarter the game decides to become more cinematic and turns into a linear scripted shooter with aliens where you have to follow npcs, clear waves of enemies or wait for scripted sequences to play out. The game completely falls apart here. Enemies will fall over dead with their AI deactivated when their hp reaches zero, but their full death animations won't play out so they won't register as killed by the game, forcing a checkpoint restart if you're lucky, or having to fully quit and restart the game, or, in the worst case scenario, a full level restart. The final level is especially bad at this, with bugs where the sort-of final boss straight up won't spawn once you reach the end, requiring a full level restart and hoping it fixes itself, or, upon beating it and waiting for the real final boss to show up, hoping a scripted event that leads up to it actually playing correctly and not ending up with the npcs not responding, in which case no amount of checkpoint restarts will fix it, so the level has to be completely restarted and you'll have to hope it fixes itself.
These issues were present in the original release and no attempt was made to fix them here (there's other minor but annoying issues still present too, e.g. vegetation counting as an object so the main character will place c4 on a bush in mid-air instead of throwing it and not being able to pick it back up). This extends to the rest of the remastered trilogy, but the first Crysis is easily the worst and most prone to game ending issues compared to the sequels.

The game itself is decent, though even back in the day it went downhill once you stop fighting human enemies due to the change in game structure from semi-open levels to a linear cinematic shooter like I said before. And even then there's some parts during its better levels where it gets kind of annoying to play, such as some pointlessly big barren areas where most of your time is spent sprinting from one place to another. This is one of those things where the sequels are way better despite being more cramped due to their console-focused design.

In short, get this discounted and, once you reach the final few levels, watch the cutscenes and ending on Youtube. Or don't, since the rest of the franchise never directly follows up on this games ending and it was solved in a tie in comic.

Forgive Me Father is a game that I'm reviewing days after finishing it simply because I completely forgot about it until I saw it again on my recently played list. That more or less sums up my thoughts about it. The only reason I'm writing this is as a future warning.

The game starts out fine. Levels are rather blocky with simple geometry but the comic book graphical style makes them look good and at times, especially later on, there's some neat visual tricks even if the game suffers from "new to game design" traps like the extreme bloom and lighting on everything which at times obstructs switches you're meant to interact with to advance.
The shooting and combat is also alright during these starting sections. Enemy types aren't terribly interesting, with AI being pretty basic "run towards you for melee" and "shoot and move towards you" most of these titles have, but the weapons are fun to shoot and the enemy hit feedback/death animations are fine considering shooting is what you'll be doing for the most part.
Your character also has a bunch of unlockable special abilities which you can unlock by acquiring skill points obtained through killing enemies. For the most part these are rather pointless and the activation animations take so long that you're better off not using them due to how vulnerable you are during them. You can stun enemies with one or do an area of effect attack with another, but once again you can't do anything else while the animations play out before the ability/attack so using them is not recommended even on Medium difficulty (which is what I played on) and I assume anything above that discourages their use even further.
What little story the game has is also serviceable even if the tone is rather disconnected. At first with the mix of horror and action with one liners I thought the game was going for an Evil Dead 2 style tone. And in some ways considering the references to that film it definitely is, but as it with everything else it completely falls apart later on for reasons I'll get into below.


Forgive Me Father would be a forgettable but completely serviceable first person shooter if its quality remained like its first half or so, but unfortunately it doesn't and once you start reaching the last couple of levels of its third chapter the quality begins to drop so sharply that by the end of the games' five chapters it has completely fallen apart.
Levels get more visually uninteresting and even more blocky (square brown temples/ruins) and the game starts introducing areas where you transverse narrow paths over instadeath bottomless pits while enemies shoot at you from every direction with no cover. To make matters worse it introduces small flying enemies that shoot projectiles at you, and small flying enemies that shoot projectiles at you and home in on you with suicide explosion attacks once you kill them, then in the final few levels it introduces tiny ground based super fast damage sponge enemies that shoot fast projectiles at you.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the game has platforming sections straight out of an early 2000s shooter. They're extremely few and simple early on, but during these later parts they get increasingly frequent and later on you'll be forced to jump over extremely tiny platforms in pitch black rooms. For added fun this decreased lighting also extends to the combat sections with the later acts of the game making you fight enemies in extremely dark rooms. Sometimes you'll even do every single thing I described above: fighting annoying enemies with no cover or lighting and having to do jumping puzzles all at once. Pro tip: Cheat some of this by increasing the gamma.
The fun doesn't stop there either as the game has no checkpoints or quick saving. You have to manually save at specific points by interacting with an object and if you die you'll have to continue from where you last saved.
These later parts are also when one of your abilities starts becoming actually useful rather than a gimmick, and it's the slow motion one, but using it against all the added fast enemy types in poorly designed areas felt like a crutch rather than the intended use.
Like I said, the story has a mix of horror/action/comedy thing going on but with the way the extremely thin plot develops, you realise that the voice actor for the main character is just poorly directed and a lot of the comedy is unintentional. It's pretty obvious that the people voicing the very thin cast in this title were provided no direction whatsoever and lines are said as is without any context or fitting the situation.
There's some other things I could talk about like the boss fights which are mostly fine and inoffensive except for a swamp boss which seemed to be aping the one from 2004's Painkiller and like a lot of this game made me feel like I had traveled back in time to that era in a bad way.


Like I said, Forgive Me Father could've been a pretty all right yet forgettable title if it had kept up the quality shown during its opening acts - I was having enough fun that during the early parts I was even considering replaying it on a higher difficulty once I finished it -, but the game takes such a nosedive the further it goes on that you're better off not touching it.

I wasn't sure how to start this one other than asking for the millionth time for Steam to add a mixed rating option.
Prodeus is *fine* the guns are loud and fun to shoot and the enemies blow up good with tons of gore.
Prodeus has an excellent level creator where anyone can make their own level and players can have endless content.
Prodeus is a game I would've adored a decade ago during the dark ages of shooters where your only options were 4 hour military shooter campaigns where 3 of those hours consisted of watching people talk in unskippable scripted events and watching them open doors for you. Back when the release of the completely mediocre Rage and Duke Nukem Forever made it clear how bad the genre had gotten. Back when the options for this type of game were Bulletstorm or Hard Reset which while good still left a lot to be desired. Had it come out back then I could've easily seen myself absolutely adoring this game and finishing it in two sittings like I did with Rise of the Triad 2013 and Shadow Warrior 2013, both games which while quaint nowadays with the resurgence of the so called boomer shooter - which was helped by the popularity of the incredible Doom reboot in 2016 - were a breath of fresh air back then.

Prodeus is also a game where half this review is going to be me talking/musing about boomer shooters in general since that's what it made me start thinking about during my playthrough.

I am writing this in 2022 after playing what feels like a billion of these games. Both finished and in early access - Dusk, Ion Fury, Viscerafest, Supplice, Hedon, Forgive me Father, Project Warlock, whatever else I played that slipped out of my mind the moment I finished it (I just remembered Hellbound while writing this and had to recall the name by checking my own reviews due to how forgettable it was).
Like all of these Prodeus wants you to feel like a badass with your manly character taking on thousands of enemies with loud guns and wanting to make you feel awesome about it. And like most of these once you get rid of the over the top gore and bravado compared to modern games you are left with a very shallow experience. The enemy variety in Prodeus isn't terribly interesting - you basically fight mostly the equivalent of the first Doom's monsters for the entirety of its 4 hour campaign. There's the zombie hitscanner equivalents, the imp equivalent, the pinky equivalent, their buffed nightmare counterparts (but blue) and a pseudo-archvile mini-boss. Also a faux-hellknight that shots up a handful of levels from the end and barely poses any threat whatsoever.

There's also unlockable abilities which due to how the game handles unlocks feel like an afterthought. The game has both a double jump and dash which you can buy from its shop in the hub level once you've bought enough of the weapons you can purchase using special currency found mostly in secrets, but since these are optional and players might never get them they're completely wasted. You'll never really need that double jump for anything since the levels were made without it in mind, you'll never need that dash in combat either since the enemy AI is extremely simple even having played the game on Hard - mostly standing in place to shoot or running towards you (or sometimes the AI glitching and doing nothing or walking past you).

While the act of shooting is very fun, the arsenal is also so-so with half the guns being straight up power upgrades rendering the rest pointless the further you get into the game, with the middle act being especially egregious because the buffed enemies you fight during it make using anything that isn't the plasma rifle, super shotgun and grenade launcher a waste of time. Even when you go back to fighting the "standard" enemies there isn't much of a point in using the weaker weapons, some which slow down your movement or require frequent reloading. Using them to conserve ammo isn't an option either as most weapons share ammo pools, eg. pistol, chaingun and smgs, shotgun and super shotgun, grenade launcher and rocket launcher, etc.
There's one thing of note in that way later in the game there's a gimmick weapon that can melt ice but this gimmick is relegated to the level you get it only, after that you'll probably forget about it as it's too slow at killing enemies and you're better off using anything else.

Prodeus' biggest achievement is that its entire campaign was made in its own level editor and this is also its biggest issue. Since these types of in-game user friendly editors usually can't handle complex geometry too well you can expect most levels to be extremely rectangular or square rooms, so the entire thing feels like a giant advertisement for it.
The campaign also kind of ends. After 4 hours of shooting the same basic enemy types you fought in the first hour the game it throws a boss at you in a small room then kicks you back to the hub with a text message about how the story will continue, as if after years of being in early access the developer though that was good enough and decided to release the game and add more content later - as of this writing there's blank space for more official campaigns in the main menu.

Like I said, Prodeus is fine and fun in a basic way, but once you get past the flashy presentation there's nothing interesting here. The developers of these types of games love classics like Doom and Duke Nukem and also Doom 2016's focus on aggression so they've made these games that celebrate over the top machismo with tons of blood (also from looking at some of Prodeus' art, weapon and enemy design the developer also really likes Killzone), but none of the interesting enemy variety, behavior, weapon balance and (usually) interesting level design from those titles is present in any of these and Prodeus is no exception. You point at dumb enemies and click the shoot button then they die with no skill required. It's entertaining, but at the same time rather than spending money on this or most of these titles anyone's time is better spent buying a copy of Doom 2, downloading gzDoom and playing the thousands of incredible wads made by the talented community which play better than what felt like replaying the original Doom with a Brutal/gore mod.

Having spent time with Ace Combat 7 on both PS4 and PC it's a game that at best I can describe as self sabotaging and feeling at its worst like the most annoying design decisions of the 360/PS3 era mixed in with the most annoying of the PS4/XboxOne generation just for good measure.
Let's start with the good: the soundtrack is great. People (even those who haven't played the game) adore it and for good reason. The characters, at least those who don't get unceremoniously killed off or vanish from the plot, also provide some entertaining banter, the storyline is also Western action movie shlock mixed in with Japanese sentimentalism which owns. MGS-style "this is why countries shouldn't exist" ruminations abound. The gameplay at its core is also fun too - dogfighting and blowing things up is fun.

This is more or less where the good things end. The game's biggest issue is that the mission design is atrocious in every way. Sometimes it'll be just boring and make you ask yourself "Why?" like a 5 minute long segment where you have to slowly fly between red blips in your radar - unsurprisingly this involves looking at that for the majority of that part of the mission rather than actually the rest of the screen.
The rest is a constant through the game in that it feels designed to frustrate you and make you waste your time. There will be a mission where halfway through it there will be a dust storm and you'll have to shoot down two dozen trucks while your radar keeps losing track of them on and off, all while enemies above keep pelting you with missiles so you have to keep flying around to dodge them while you keep losing track of the trucks *and* there is a timer without checkpoints, so if that runs out or you die you have to do it all over again wasting 10 minutes of progress.
There's defense missions where you have to defend a specific target where like a lot of the game the difficulty comes from trial and error, this time having to know ahead of time where enemies spawn and hoping the game's poor auto target priority (after destroying an enemy, will it point me to the closest one or the one on halfway through the map? Who knows.) won't screw you over and trip you up making you fail the mission. Once again, there's no checkpoints either so if you fail them that's 10-20 minutes gone.
There's also missions where the game wants you to achieve a specific number of points by blowing up targets, which is where another problem the game has pops up which is you having to take a wild guess at which plane *and* special missile type the game wants you to use for these missions since the timing is extremely strict and there's no checkpoints - get ready to lose 20 minutes of progress even if you were barely 1000 points away from completing the objective. If wasting your time replaying a mission with another plane and special missile type wasn't enough you can also buy planes and special weapons by spending in-game currency, which is awarded only by completing missions and even then it might not be enough to buy the types of planes and weapons the game wants you to have by that point, so your only option is to go back and replay previous missions. There's no way to change difficulty either once you start the campaign unless you start over, so that's not an option. Of course, you can happily pay for the Season Pass which gives you a handful of extremely overpowered planes with overpowered special weapons *and* a large number of default standard missiles if you want to save time.
Sometimes when the game wants to get really obnoxious it'll try to pull multiple of these things in the same mission too. For example, in the sandstorm trucks mission, this part comes after a generic destruction part halfway through the level. There's a specific special weapon that makes destroying the trucks way easier, since some of them are clusters, but if you don't know about this section beforehand your best bet is to quit out, go back in with the specific changes and replay the entire thing from the beginning.
All this is where the game feels like something out of the 360/PS3 era, that super scripted school of thought (COD/Uncharted to give popular examples) where you better guess what the developers were thinking and follow that script, or else go do it all over again. The grinding is something where it starts to resemble a modern game - this is a 6 hour game that knows it and making you go back to replay previous missions to get better planes and weapons, alongside the trial and error mission design is how it artificially extends itself to a 15-20 one. This isn't Sekiro or a Souls game, you aren't learning how to get better at any point, just buying things that the game expects you to have started it with, either by wasting your time replaying previous levels for in-game money or just straight up forking out real money for DLC planes.

There's other issues too, small but they add up to everything else. The tutorial texts only show up once the first time then never again, all this with a small yellow font *while* you're playing the game. Once they disappear they never return - not even when replaying missions and there isn't an option in the menus to check them again either. There's also things the game never tells you - did you know you can hold triangle/Y while locking onto something so the camera pulls into their location? The game never tells you this.

There's other things too that I'm forgetting but after like 20 hours with Ace Combat 7 my summed up one word opinion/review of it is: Annoying. You never get better at the game, you just memorize the script it wants you follow and also hope you've guessed the upgrades it wants you to have by that point in time. Just watch the cutscenes on Youtube and use the money to buy the soundtrack instead.

Shadow Warrior 3 is a good but strange sequel. Ostensibly it wants to go back to basics and channel the original reboot, Shadow Warrior (2013), which was a linear arena shooter instead of its Borderlands/Diablo looter shooter inspired sequel. However, everything from its art design, music, pacing and writing make it feel like a soft reboot.

Everything is wackier now, if SW2013 and SW2 were inspired by action films then 3 is a comic book/cartoon. The art style is much more colorful and vibrant with more exaggerated enemy designs and unrealistic level geometry, the music too goes from hollywood blockbuster to what I can best describe as Asian hip hop, the story itself has much flashier traditional cinematics with plenty of slapstick gags instead of an uninterrupted first person pov. The structure is perhaps the most interesting thing about it: while SW2013 and SW2 were different games they were both 12-15 hour affairs. Shadow Warrior 3 even on Hard shouldn't take anyone experienced with this type of game more than 6 hours tops. The reason here is because there's no fat whatsoever. As I said this eschews most things from SW2 - the procedurally generated open levels, loot, side quests, etc. etc. in favor of going back to the linear structure of SW2013. Even so this game manages to be even more linear because the pacing borrows heavily from Doom Eternal and goes into overdrive. Unlike nuDoom and a lot of other modern games there's a grand total of only two upgrade currencies here - one for weapons where each has 3 tiers of upgrades which are very minor upgrades such as "carry more ammo" "slow down when aiming" and the other are character upgrades which are equally minor such as "melee attack cooldown is faster" and "explosive barrels do more damage." Unlike SW2013 there's no new powers or anything to unlock here. The Chi powers from previous games have been severly downgraded and you only have a Chi blast here to push enemies away or into environmental traps . There's also even less weapons here than in SW2013 - only 6 main guns and your katana with the rest of your arsenal coming from temporary pickups (more on that below.)
The game doesn't want you wasting your time exploring or looking at menus. The closest thing I can think to this type of pacing is PlatinumGames' Vanquish (2011). You're moving from combat arena to combat arena and the game's narrative is constantly pushing you forward. You'll move from combat room to combat room and in between those you'll do some very simple platforming.

This might make it sound like I'm being negative on the game but what is there is largely very well crafted because they knew what they wanted to focus on which is the combat as that's what you'll be mostly doing during those handful of hours. Like I said this borrows a lot from Doom Eternal and puts its own twist on some things. You can shoot enemies so they drop health, or you can slash them with your katana for ammo. There's execution moves similar to nuDoom, but unlike that you have to fill a gauge first and the bigger the enemy the more gauges it consumes. Once you do you press a button near any enemy to kill it immediately regardless of health and right after you get a temporal weapon/power-up from whichever enemy you killed such as dual miniguns, a drill or an ice grenade among others. The combat *is* the game and while it's not anywhere as deep and challenging as Doom Eternal the enemy hit reactions, weapon animations, sounds, etc. are superb and make it a joy to play due to how hectic everything is. Props goes to the game's soundtrack which as I wrote above seems to be Asian hip hop. Maybe? Either way, it's really good and not the kind of music you hear often in video games. Once again for the third time in the rebooted franchise the main menu theme is excellent.

In a way it's for the best that this franchise got rid of so much. Having done a replay of Shadow Warrior 2013 and 2 around 3's announcment in 2020 I had forgotten how much the environments repeat themselves in those 13 hours, and how many pointless weapons/powers there are. This goes back to what I said about SW3: for better or worse this is a 5 hour game that knows exactly when to end and every feature it has is useful and there for a reason.

At the same time this *is* a 5 hour game with almost no replaybility. Once you finish it that's it. Maybe they'll update it like SW2013, SW2 and almost every other game nowadays to include more content, but right now there's no New Game+, no extras, no nothing. You finish it once and like a game from the PS3/360 era that's it, baby.
The game is also somewhat glitchy. I saw enemies, especially the bigger ones, randomly get stuck on geometry and stop responding. AI behavior is also weird with the game seemingly not hiding very well how it works - you'll be chased by enemies close to you but if there's others very far away you'll see them on the other side of the combat arena doing nothing but staring at you. I don't know if this is intended behavior or more AI glitches but it got very noticeable after a while.
Platforming sections can be really annoying sometimes, especially anything involving moving platforms where Lo Wang simply won't grab/fall on to the object and just slide off. There is a level where you have to stay on top of a moving platform and near the end get off, wall run, jump then grapple to it and the grappling would just lead me to the platform but then push me off. It got me killed twice then on the second try the platform was so close to the level exit trigger that as the death animation started it played the level end cinematic and it sent me to the next one.
The difficulty too is easy even on Hard, this feels like one of those "Hard on a controller" titles. If you aren't it's a breeze outside the final boss which has poorly telegraphed attacks and some of them clip inside your character doing double damage, and if you die at any point you have to start the whole fight over. There's also a final platforming section at the end where thankfully while it doesn't seem to kill you if you mess it up I had a lot of trouble getting the wall running to trigger and I was worried I'd have to restart from a checkpoint and maybe have to do the whole final boss over again, though thankfully it managed to fix itself.

So far I haven't said anything about the writing because this is where the game is at its weirdest. It's impossible to continue here without getting into some very minor spoilers which have been already shown in trailers: Hoji is back after dying in SW2013. Even with how butchered SW2's writing was compared to the original title I was glad they didn't undo the emotional impact of the first game's narrative and ending. This isn't the case here. He is revived in a very abrupt way early on because people liked his dynamic with Lo Wang then things just sort of go back to how they used to be in SW2013 as if he had only died five minutes ago instead of an entire game ago. This game really, really wants to solve SW2's bizare ending and cap off this very loose trilogy of games and it does so but in a very rushed way. Things just sorta happen in this game and major things that happened at the end of SW2 get completely ignored. I had way more written here but the Steam character limit hit I s2g gabe.

I think in the end my overall thoughts on Shadow Warrior 3 is that despite everything it's the best in the trilogy due to how good the combat is, but at the same time I kind of miss how grandiose Shadow Warrior 2013 was despite its bloat with its 12-15 hour length making it feel like a journey. Like SW2 this should be taken as its own thing in a rebooted franchise where each title reimagines itself. Do you like Doom Eternal? Do you wish it were shorter, more focused even if it's not as deep? Then you'll probably like this. Anyone else is better off watching gameplay see if this is what they're into and even so maybe waiting for a price drop.

Outriders is the ultimate trash food video game. You can almost imagine its developer, People Can Fly (of Painkiller, Bulletstorm and Gears of War Judgment fame) begging Square Enix years ago to give them the funding to do it by throwing every buzzword they could think of. It's an action cover shooter like Gears of War. That's popular and sold tons, right? You're also encouraged to be aggressive like in the Doom reboot! That's popular and sold tons, right? There's loot and co-op like in Destiny. That's popular and sold tons, right? There's character classes, one which lets you flash teleport next to people and shotgun them in the face, just like Mass Effect! That's popular and sold tons, right? And talking about Mass Effect, our game borrows heavily from the same sci-fi tropes and aesthetics as that popular game. Please, give us the funding, we need to keep our studio afloat.

The game plays and feels like it entered a wormhole in 2013/early 2014 and was thrown out in 2021. The level design being the most obvious. There's barely any interesting environment design here, it's mostly rectangular rooms with chest high walls for you and/or the enemies to hide behind and the only thing that changes is their color. During the games 30+ hour duration you'll see Forest Area, Ice Area, Desert Area, City Area. Every chapter in the game begins with you setting camp at a location which is the main hub area and from there you get the choice to go through a bunch of different corridors that lead to story quests/side quests which are a series of combat rooms. It's hard to explain how *dated* the way the design of the environments in this game feels with linear corridors separating medium sized areas, like it was a title that came out near the end of the 360/PS3 generation and had to keep those hardware constraints in mind. People Can Fly's last game before this was Gears of War Judgment in 2013 and that's a clear influence in this game from the combat, to the art style down to the enemy design. At best it feels like playing an early 2014 cross-gen PS360/PS4XboxOne title.

It also has no idea what it wants to be. The developers insist it's not a service game, but you have to be online to play it. The combat encourages aggression, but higher difficulty tiers turn enemies into health sponges that deal a lot of damage and encourage frequently hiding behind cover. The game makes a point of saying that you are ~The Last Outrider~ and acting like you're always fighting on your own, but co-op is heavily encouraged as the way to play the game. It wants to be an epic story driven campaign, but no one cares about story in that type of game, so the characters are extremely simple and the cutscenes brief. It has plenty of loot with flashy late-game weapons and armor, but no one to show it to unless you're into randomly matchmaking with two other randoms/friends.

The writing also feels like it came out of that last gen early/mid 2000s era with everyone being Gritty and Full of 'tude. It tries to go for a sort of Robocop/Starship Troopers dark satire of people never learning from the past and it gets laughably obvious about it later on, but nothing about the setting or characters is interesting enough to warrant getting invested. The plot spins on its wheels coming up with reasons to send you to another location for looting and shooting so every location is basically a mini-TV show season where characters get introduced only to disappear or get killed as soon as they appear. Your main character, who is slightly customizable in the sense that you can choose their gender, skin color and from a handful of preset hairstyles/faces, has the personality of a plank and the rest of the cast isn't much better. Jakub and Zahedi, your two consistent companion characters, are the only somewhat entertaining characters even if they are stereotypes, but they're surrounded by dozens upon dozens of cutscenes of dull exposition.

Now, why I described it as a trash food video game and why I sunk 30 hours into it as of this writing? Because the shooting is fun and that's what you'll be doing plenty of in this game. I paid roughly $35 for this game taking into account regional pricing on Steam, and playing solo that remained consistently fun despite a couple of infuriating difficulty spikes. The gun feedback is satisfying and so were the powers in the class I chose despite every single thing in this game being as generic as it gets.

Before and while writing this I felt like maybe I was being too harsh on this game since it's "fun" in a very lizard brain way like I mentioned above, but really the whole thing is disappointing considering the studio that made it. Painkiller was great during release when every game was going the Half-Life route and so was Bulletstorm during the peak of the military shooter era. This just feels like the studio behind those games giving up because those titles weren't huge sellers and going for the most run of the mill marketable thing they could think of. The act of shooting guns in this shooting game is entertaining as I previously mentioned, but there's so many games like the new Doom and Wolfenstein titles that do that and more better. Same with the co-op shlooter aspect, you're better off playing Destiny 2 where there's much more content and actually people to show off your shiny cosmetics to. Like I said at the beginning, this is a trash food video game that aims low and you shouldn't be spending more than $20-30 tops on this when there's better options out there.

An FMV Choose Your Own Adventure title with some good performances and an interesting story. It can be finished within two hours, but there's enough branching paths that it encourages replays to see every alternate scene and ending. There's some issues with the controls in that they're kinda awkward when interacting with objects since it's hard to tell when the game wants you to drag your mouse, where to drag it or whether it just wants you to click on something, but outside one part near the end it thankfully never happens in a timed section so it's usually not a big deal. What I thought was a bummer is that the endings have the same issue every single game of this type has where it's about the journey and not the destination: there's so many story permutations that almost every ending cinematic is 20 seconds long with a black background afterward with five lines of text saying what happened after. This is one of those things where the interactive aspect of the game works against it. It's also rather glitchy - of the 3 playthroughs I've done so far the game has crashed randomly near the end of each, and it has also crashed when exiting the game after finishing it each time. Collectible achievements that require multiple playthroughs are also straight up broken and won't unlock even if you've gotten everything. Still though, I liked it and wouldn't mind a hypothetical Erica 2: This Time She's Even Sadder.

An all right point and click game that was originally released exclusively for the Xbox One in 2014. As a result it makes heavy use of the Kinect which was included with that console "back in the day." Since that's not possible in a PC port it got reworked into mouse controls (controller is also possible like the original release), which robs it of some of its novelty and makes the action gesture/QTE sections way easier than they originally were. Still though, this isn't a game that you play for the gameplay but for SWERY's (Deadly Premonition, JJ Macfield and the Island of Memories) solid character writing and off-beat humor. It's unfortunate that due to him leaving Access Games due to health reasons the series was never completed - this is just a prologue and two episodes and it ends with a pretty big cliffhanger. Even so, SWERY's weirdness and charming characters shine through so it's easily worth a playthrough even if by the end of it you'll be like David Young and want to change the past so the series was actually finished.

A completely pointless 2 hour long VR take on the current Wolfenstein franchise which liberally reuses assets from Wolfenstein II/Youngblood with almost nothing (if anything) original. If you like the frantic combat in those games that has you zipping between cover and deciding when to go all out guns blazing you won't find any of this here. Instead you control three extremely slow machines, which can be summed up as "medium/big health sponge shootbang robots and tiny fragile stealth robot" through three separate 20 minute long levels which consist of extremely narrow corridors with movement so restricted that the whole thing comes across as an on rails FMV title from the early/mid 90s. All these robots have only two attacks each (or one in the case of the stealth robot) plus a special one for when you're surrounded which will never happen because the AI is terrible. This culminates with a level where you switch between all 3 before having a very brief wave defense where you get to fire some actual guns at enemies with AI pathing so bad that they spend more time trying to figure out how to reach you than shooting at you.

The writing and story, another high point on the current take of the franchise, is non-existent. There's a grand total of one character, a minor NPC from Youngblood/The New Colossus, that talks to you throughout the game, and another that contacts you through cheeky text messages, but beyond that there's absolutely nothing else going on. Nothing is added to the lore or anything happens beyond your mute blank slate character having to blow up a building and accomplishing that. Even the 2017 Wolfenstein II tie-in comic that no one ever read is more relevant to the franchise than anything here. BJ Blazkowicz doesn't even appear despite him narrating the trailer for this game back when it was announced, so you can't even count on Brian Bloom spouting some depressing monologues about human nature to distract you from how trite the rest of the game is.

The other thing which makes up what feels like half the game is completely pointless sequences where your character sits on a chair while the characters mentioned above drone on and on. There's a lot of this despite the game being so short. After these you're usually given some useless task like pulling a lever to rotate a robot or remove a fuse and replace it with a new one before they start talking again while you sit there twiddling your thumbs. None of this is immersive or interesting at all and makes the game feel like even more of a disjointed tech demo.

The entire thing in general feels like a proof of concept put together by a dozen people then presented to Bethesda/Zenimax who decided to release the entire thing as is as a paid product. The worst case of this is the very end of the game where after the wave sequence the credits abruptly start to roll after a handful of lines of dialogue as you remain in the same room while nothing happens. I waited through the entire 10 minute credit scroll thinking something was going to happen but no, the game remains there in the empty level and expects you to go to the menu and quit as if it were an 80s console game waiting for you to switch the console off.

I paid $7 for this and despite loving this franchise and having sunk hundreds of hours into the new Wolfensteins this is an absolute waste and only worth it if you're like me and need to consume everything Wolfenstein related. If you aren't a *Wolfenfreak* stay far away from this.

Hellbound is a game that follows in the footsteps of titles such as Dusk, Amid Evil, Ion Fury and whichever similar game released in the last few years – it wants to be a throwback to 90s shooters, it's even there in the cover and the game telling you in the splash screen that it's for hardcore players and might be too hard for casuals. However, unlike those titles that use games from yesteryear as inspiration, Hellbound is a game bereft of creativity that really, really, really wants to be the original 1993 Doom with a small touch of Doom 2016's lore (you're the baddest dude around). Enemy variety is scarce with maybe 5 types at best ranging from melee/shotgunner/chaingunner/rocket launcher zombie demon enemies that look the same other than their color, to imp counterparts that throw fireballs at you, to pinky rip-offs that run up to you to do melee damage and are the only slightly dangerous enemies in the game because each hit takes off around 80hp for some reason.
Weapons are equally dull, having two completely pointless melee options, one being a club which straight up shouldn't be there because you'll never use it, a basic starting rifle, a shotgun/super shotgun combo, a chaingun and a rocket launcher with a grenade launcher alternate firing mode. They all work exactly as they should and feel fun enough to use due to the over the top gore.
While the game at times has some nice vistas, it never strays from Hell Cave or Hell Temple environments. Level design is extremely basic, with plenty of big barren spaces with no distinguishing characteristics and, channeling the worst of older shooters, sometimes annoying jumping puzzles over small platforms and switch hunting, the later which only exists to make what is already a 2 hour game into a 3 hour one as you'll be activating a switch only to roam the level searching for the door that opened that will lead you to another switch to activate something somewhere else. Once you're done with 7 levels of this, you're treated to a boss battle and an ending that in any similar game would be the end of the first episode/chapter, but that's it for this one.

If you haven't figured it out by now, there isn't much to say about Hellbound beyond the fact that it's an extremely run of the mill shooter. If the titles I mentioned in the first sentence had been released back in the 90s they would be talked about the same way Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Blood and Quake are – ranging from pretty good to absolute classics. Hellbound despite being functional and really wanting you to have fun with it would join the endless list of generic titles that you see in a “forgotten 90s FPSes” article in a gaming site somewhere. At around 7 bucks, this is a game that you only buy and play if you're like me and really like the FPS genre to the point where you'll check out any budget or niche title where you spend most of your time doing shootmans and will have fun since it's serviceable at that. If you aren't that type of person though, don't waste your time and go replay the original Doom instead.