Recent reviews by Hudson633

Having heard about Marathon when Halo: Combat Evolved arrived on the scene, it was nice to try it for free, but I struggle to feel like it's a good game even when the hardware limitations of the time are appreciated.

The unintuitive controls could have atleast been explained or streamlined in this release - for whatever reason, by default you have to reach over to press TAB to open doors, which is not obvious, and to even see the controls you'd have to "cancel the game in progress" to be allowed to navigate the menus, which means you'd lose any progress if you didn't know how to save the game (done by pressing TAB on certain buttons on the walls, which seem rare). It would have been handy to atleast see the controls as a guide on the Steam overlay, but there weren't any Steam guides for the controls, so I made one myself.

You'd have to use TAB to cycle through the pages of computer terminals to teleport to another location, but I'm not sure why you'd guess that that was a mechanic when aliens are randomly coming at you while you'd be reading the computer screen. How would you even know to interact with the screen in the first place when the controls were such a mess? The game feels crude as the music is absent, and the level design is claustrophobic (and confusing) which looks like it didn't undergo any redesign at all to polish the gameplay. You can toggle between the map and first person view, yet it still felt awkward when it should be fun.

It's the kind of important mangled wreck of something you might see in a museum - not pretty, but definitely a piece of history. Outlaws was better, if only because the map was an overlay and you could save the game on demand.

Butchered from end to end.

It takes ages to scroll through the policies even if you don't stop to read them, and they come up every other time you launch the game. There's a series of ads before you can get to the menu, and (unintuitively) you have to press the back button to get rid of them, because pressing the select button which you'd use to skip the intro screens would open up an advertising link. There's scrolling ads on the menu itself, which pointlessly has a background of people sitting in chairs.

It's frustrating trying to find what you're looking for in the menus even after it forces a menu tutorial, and buttons can send you to the wrong page, which you have to wait to load because "communicating with servers" and pointless transitions, and the menu itself often lags. Menu alerts are difficult to get rid of, and they're about pointless or confusing mechanics like a series of currencies. Alerts annoyingly come back after doing as much as driving one lap.

The F buttons are used for navigation, so you might be taking unwanted screenshots just to get around the menu, and the buttons aren't even labelled. The default T300 controls were wrong.

It has a clutch button to start, but the button isn't labelled, and it's not the clutch pedal, which is only used to scroll down menus. A game-breaking issue is that force-feedback either disappears, or comes back at Gorilla strength - I waited so long for EA to address the FFB issue that there ended up being a spider web on my wheel - they never fixed it, yet there's frustratingly big patches.

I find that you have to carry some revs to avoid understeer and then short-shift out of slow corners. The cars are either on rails or have no grip at all. Automatic ERS sometimes doesn't work. Getting rammed over a corner can give you a penalty for "corner cutting".

You get very little control over season settings. You can't even jump into the racing of a singleplayer season - there's things like "car reveal" which can't be skipped. There's also forced cutscenes and useless tutorials. The "driver acclaim" is horribly unbalanced and meaningless. There's pointless drift events where the car barely drifts. The voicelines are patronizing and often meaningless.

The TT laps won't show your ranking percentage unless the lap uploads and you open the leaderboard menu and press F8, and sometimes the lap doesn't even register. The leaderboard itself sometimes fails to load, and feels pointless when it gets reset. Distracting messages appear multiple times per lap about "rivals".

It makes you wait for minutes at the end of a race before starting the next event, and it won't let you quit, and it doesn't tell you the details of the race like whether starts have a clutch button somewhere, collision settings, tyre wear/temps, yet you only get a few seconds to load a setup, and it doesn't even show you the name of the track when you're picking a setup, and the setups re-order themselves yet you can't move the entries yourself, and the controls to even navigate the menu are not labelled. It might not even put you in the race.

Sometimes sideways cars aren't ghosted. Players can reset to track which dumps the car on the racing line even without ghosting. Sometimes a car ahead will lag and teleport all over the place, essentially forcing you to slow down so you don't crash into them. Unranked races are dirty, and you get time penalties for swerving off track to avoid sideways cars (counts as an illegal overtake). The safety rating backfires when drivers force contact and you get penalties for it. Ranked multiplayer is 18 laps, which is pointless as I watched players getting away with cutting corners. To get into events you'd be forced to go through some training session, but I couldn't even find it.

Trying a Valve Index to go with my Thrustmaster T300 - it flashbangs you before leaving you stuck on the splash screen; the controls and audio didn't work.

The game sometimes fails to launch, doesn't want to minimize, and can get stuck loading without being able to cancel the loading. The framerate is inconsistent - on a decent PC with low graphics settings I barely get 30 FPS in some races even when there's no other cars around, which makes it too chaotic to take it seriously as a competitive game, especially with the lap-destroying stutters. Despite winning races in both singleplayer and multiplayer, my "trophy cabinet" was empty, and none carry over from previous games - I couldn't even find a stats page. The camera view often randomly changes between races, and the game didn't work with Shadowplay.

The audio is poor (particularly the spectator audio). There's a weird audio setting called "Play victory radio calls" which is on by default and causes you to hear the screams of the dead at the end of the race.

The most passionate SimRacers I've known have been Cypriots, but Cyprus doesn't exist on the in-game map. Despite being an expensive game, some content is locked, such as EA Play "member-only content". The achievements look meaningless. There's a "drive of the day" screen that you can't skip, which was awarded to me just for entering my first race. Something about a show room pops up while you're driving which is a pointless distraction while you're trying to focus.

The game is largely copy-pasted from the previous one (evident by the 'Renault Driver Academy' having to be renamed to 'Alpine Driver Academy') which both feel like glitchy console ports. For a motorsport that's a lot about history and stats, the game feels empty - it's devoid of any classic cars or tracks, which is especially disappointing when the newer tracks are just narrow concrete roads with blind corners and no identity, and the earlier games have been killed off.

You had to pay more just to not get locked out of the game for the first 3 days, and then within weeks of release the expensive version (originally £79.99) was made cheaper than the regular version (originally £59.99) - how were any buyers supposed to feel like they got value for money, especially with the microtransactions?

There's a schedule for "double xp events", and every week there was time-limited content (which was reportedly broken) with titles like "Don't miss your June rewards" which is sickeningly blatant FOMO spammed to the game news.

Why is it prohibited to promote a league for the game within its dedicated discussion area, even when no financial transactions are involved? Meanwhile, they can inundate the Steam Library with advertisements disguised as game news, such as advertising EA Play and creating FOMO for the next game, like "Last Chance: Get the Early F1 24 Pre-Order Offer!"

Hoping not to encounter the notorious savegame corruption in singleplayer is about as enjoyable as the chaotic multiplayer. I'm left tinkering with time trials, but even that's still awkward with the FFB issues. The push for selling driver cosmetics are meaningless when the game has no longevity - the games are released late in the year, and the remaining playerbase at end of the season will inevitably be split by another game until this ones ends up being axed.

A gaming relic.

Multiplayer didn't work, and I can't even find an option for a skirmish mode, so this just seems to have singleplayer missions. The missions guide you through an easy learning curve, although they might have obscurely specific ways to complete them, and it doesn't seem to save your progress, so after finishing a mission you have to go through the cutscene for the next one and then save the game.

Some of the CGI cutscenes were terrible, as they didn't relate to the story (or even the mission) but the technology was relatively new at the time, so it didn't matter if it was basic - it was just fun to watch them. I also felt it was fun to tinker with an RTS game based on modern warfare with a pinch of sci-fi, although there's some awkwardness to it.

The gameplay is a bit claustrophobic as your units are surrounded by the fog of war and have next to no visibility, and buildings have to be built against eachother. The poor unit pathing has your units run into danger, so they take a lot of micromanagement (and potentially keeping the gamespeed low to do all that clicking). The remastered version has a better resolution and a skirmish mode I think, although I got this version fairly cheap in a bundle, which has merit as a raw piece of gaming history.

One of the only good and polished RTS games.

It was a form of art to make RTS gameplay both accessible and deep, whilst designing so many memorable units across 3 factions. I remember playing skirmishes on LAN, and many on singleplayer, although the campaign wasn't on the same level as Red Alert. The World Builder looks functional at a glance, but multiplayer didn't work for me in this version.

Among other criticisms - it's stuck in 4:3, and you lose audio if you minimize. You can't seem to deselect a unit, and left-clicking itself is unreliable. Matches require heavy micromanagement to make sure that your units returns fire, particularly as the AI likes to cheese out one-way obstacles and awkward 3D terrain. There's a stealth unit that can one-shot almost anything, and of-course the AI buys it and micromanages it all around the map.

Infantry are almost as expensive as tanks, which makes them feel pointless against AI because the AI just micromanages their vehicles to run over your infantry. The amount of micromanagement it takes to kill enemy infantry is frustrating, because missiles need to be aimed manually to hit them if they're moving, and it takes countless hits to kill infantry with tank shells or missiles - if you try to run them over then you have to stop all your units from firing explosives at them otherwise the splash damage kills your vehicles. It wouldn't be so bad if the AI didn't sometimes spam infantry, and for all infantry guns to be as powerful as tanks...

You can't see much due to the low camera, aspect ratio, and fog of war, so it can be tedious to build defences while your builder is getting shot by an enemy off-screen. Your building plan can get destroyed by even a single bullet, and you don't get a refund. It's also tedious trying to track down every last building in the fog of war when you've clearly won the match, especially when buildings can randomly become invulnerable to small rockets.

Still - considering that Microsoft are trying to sell an unfixed version Age of Empires III for £29.99, it's not a bad deal to get this in the (12 game) Command & Conquer collection for £9.68. Both AOE3 and Generals were the last greats of the RTS genre before publishers strayed from the market by producing shallow games that had pointlessly realistic graphics (losing the charm and depth of the early RTS games). The Zero Hour expansion polished the gameplay by adding abilities to the UI, so that could also be worth a look, as long as you don't mind the fact that EA were too lazy to even patch the games for 16:9.

Apex Legends has a steep learning curve, which I felt little motivation to climb.

The glitchy tutorial doesn't explain the inventory system, item functions, upgrades, or characters/abilities - you'd have to learn everything the hard way, which is a grind considering that you run around for ages before then having a few seconds of combat to get a feel for the mechanics/meta, and then queue for another match to run around again (barely having learnt anything of the game each time). Ammo types are identified by colour, but there's different types of green ammunition, so it doesn't feel intuitive. I think I'd have been better off watching YouTube tutorials about the game, which would still have been a bit pointless considering that some characters appear to be locked.

Beyond the overcooked mechanics, the sci-fi art style felt tacky, and you can't do something as basic as change toggle-run to hold-to-run. Glancing at the placement at the end of the match, it might say that your squad placed 4th, but it didn't say how many squads there were, so it's not easy to tell if 4th was a comparatively good or bad result. The game is laced with fear-of-missing-out mechanics, like "earn one each day" and time limited XP boosts, and even spamming the Steam library with stuff like "Don't miss your February rewards". It's free to play, but so is PubG (which I enjoyed more than this).

Without checking the description of this DLC again after installing it I doubt I'd notice the included items in-game because there's only four features. I had to write down the name of the DLC and search for it on the Steam Store search box otherwise I couldn't find it due to the fact that the game is overcooked with 75 DLC products.

One of the features wrongly describes floral fashion as "modern" (unless the game was set in the 1920's). I tried to use one of the items, but the in-game cost of it (the Wishing Well) is ridiculous at $7,775. I felt like it would have been pointless not to use the item, so I bought it to try it (almost bankrupting my sim), but all the item did was temporarily prevent my sim from gaining skill levels.

It felt like an underwhelming waste of money in-game (losing $1,555 when selling it back), which doesn't help give the DLC any sense of value for money at £8.99. I got it for free, but couldn't recommend buying it. Rather than making overpriced microtransactions, maybe they should have put the effort into patching the game so that it could run even if your internet connection drops out.

Where the original Sims was a relaxing experience, this one keeps poking you with poorly designed mechanics.

The menu sounds are jarring, and the music is forgettable. Clicking "new game" makes the screen blindingly white before it eventually gets into a confusing character creation tutorial - the green indicator crystal here is now called a "plumbob." There's a mechanic called "aspirations" but this isn't explained. The neighbourhood view is tacky. There's a confirm button to buy a plot of land, but practically no indication that you've selected one. The game gives you $5k for learning the camera controls, which breaks immersion because this money obviously came from nowhere.

Looking at the buy menu - the item descriptions all have forced humour, and the layout of the icons has been pointlessly changed, which is frustrating as the search function only works half the time. The classic 4:3 TV is wrongly in 16:9, and I'm not sure how I feel about the landline being cut. The train set is missing. There's a job for "interstellar smuggler" which dunks any sense of immersion in the bin (the original career titles might have been wacky, but they weren't flippant).

Prompts interrupt the gameplay, and they're often confusing or broken, like the vague quests that pop up every few seconds but don't even have a list of tasks, and the option to disable them doesn't work. There's prompts about sims "liking" things, but this isn't explained. The depth of the original was in the creative freedom it offered, as you could focus on whatever ambition you wanted, but now you're distracted from it with endless prompts (if not constantly nudged down a linear gameplay path).

No progress has been made on the animations in almost a quarter of a century - some of it is outright twitchy. A tedious level of realism was added to the game in places, which had otherwise been a simple but fun formula - trying to pick which food to eat is a nightmare - is my character supposed to have allergies and be vegan? The bookshelf mechanic is bloated as you now have to pick through the category and series of books, and some either glitch out, or seem to become useless once read, which is not marked, so you'd (tediously) have to remember which books your sim has read.

The programming is funky, with sims washing up dishes in the bathroom sink rather than the kitchen sink (even after setting the kitchen sink as the kitchen sink), and eating meals on a couch with the TV off rather than going to the dining table (which was closer to the kitchen), and (when they've finished reading) walking away from a bookshelf to leave books in random places. Sims will even walk away from their bed to sleep on a cheap couch.

Some of the buttons are blurry, and the English is poor in places. The base game is bloated at 21 GB, and then (despite getting it on Steam) it also wants to download EA/Origin and force you to use it. The blinding pure white screen comes back every time you want to minimize the game. Meaningless achievements appear in-game, but Steam doesn't show any of them.

There's DLC adverts caked all over the menu, which is understandable for a free game, but it also throws prompts at you about DLC. The game pressures you to post about gameplay on social media like Facebook and XTwitter. The Steam library gets spammed with meaningless "news" posts about The Sims 4 that just describe gameplay mechanics that aren't new.

It was free, but I'd rather have paid for a good game than played a bad one. The quality didn't live up to the original, which made me wish I was playing the original instead, but it's not available, so what's the point of this version? Because they want people to buy the £1,000+ of glitchy DLC?

One of the most misplaced instalments of a gaming franchise.

The game has to be launched through a web browser regardless of whether you want to do singleplayer or multiplayer. There's a pointless splash screen that just looks like a loading screen because the "press enter" text is delayed and there's a loading icon that goes on endlessly. The animated menu background is butchered here as a bright overblown (distracting) montage, in comparison to the subtle background of Battlefield 2. Even the useless hint prompts have animated backgrounds. The default audio and video settings are a mess, and the text looks pixelated even in the correct resolution. The audio itself is pretty bad, if not jarring. Some animations are broken, and the gun sounds don't always work. The quit button obnoxiously plays a cutscene, and the game forces Origin/EA to open (which has popups).

The campaign triggers are pretty bad - you have to be in an exact spot to progress, and text prompts come up far too often. You can't seem to save the campaign manually, so you have to rely on checkpoints, but the campaign can get stuck loading, so you're forced to restart the game and go back to a checkpoint. The story felt edgy and incoherent, and the mechanics are too divorced from Battlefield - why would there be stealth sections in a Battlefield game - why would a customer that enjoyed Battlefield 1942 be expected to enjoy Battlefield Hardline when it was a completely different experience? It's gone from manning fully controllable and repairable aircraft carriers complete with pilotable landing boats and aircraft which provided player expression in huge multiplayer battles, to a linear singleplayer undercover police campaign.

What's the point and the appeal of playing a character that commits police brutality? There's invisible walls. Characters at a distance sometimes appear to be missing their eyelids. The world-building is poor, with copy/pasted graffiti looking pixelated (and sometimes stretched) compared to the rest of the texture around it, and posters being recycled so often that you see the same ones multiple times in the same room. Your AI teammate is useless because they don't cover anything even when they're standing alongside you, and the enemies ignore your teammate and just focus on you - blasting you the exact moment they get line of sight.

It was difficult to get any sense of immersion if you're left wondering "why is this a Battlefield game? Why did they call it Battlefield?" The word Battlefield is a franchise - not a development team or publishing company. What makes this a Battlefield game? Because it was made by the makers of Battlefield? Were the people that worked on 1942 and Desert Combat still at the studio by the time Hardline came along? Their style of work certainly doesn't appear in the game, so I can't see why fans of what Battlefield used to be are supposed to be happy about this apparently random change of direction in game design. Is it a coincidence that the likes of PAYDAY 2 spiked in popularity in 2013, so it looks like EA just wanted a slice of that market by rushing this out for 2015? At any rate, what the original Battlefield fans enjoyed has been abandoned in these Battlefield 3 clones where the large vehicles (with smooth physics) are gone and every shot is a tracer.

Online play felt underwhelming, if not confusing, involving claustrophobic fighting, often in a maze of rooms with an awkward amount of grenade spam. The skybox on one map was so poor it looked like a mod, and the map had birds flying into the ground. Sniper rifles felt useless, which is weird when one of the four classes is a sniper. There was rampant spawnkilling, and the fall damage felt broken, as you can die while stepping off a rock, and parachutes barely work. Melee also seemed glitchy. There's meaningless awards for every other kill, as opposed to the Battlefield 2 awards which had a sense of achievement. The destructible environment is a step back even from Bad Company 2. I saw a player riding around in a sofa as if it was a car.

It practically takes two SMG magazines to kill someone, which would be frustrating even without the constant lack of ammunition. Even a .50cal machinegun feels like a peashooter, as characters survive multiple hits from .50 bullets. The over-balanced gunplay is at odds with the implementation of vehicles, as a minigun-armed chopper protected by bullet-proof cockpit windows easily kills you, while at best you're armed with a single-shot 40mm grenade launcher that you can't seem to resupply - and even if god guided the arc of your grenade to hit a chopper, it's not a one-hit kill.

At peak time on a Saturday there was one server, and it wasn't even half full. There's no point in playing as a new player because nearly all the items and weapons are locked, and it's a horrible grind to unlock even one item - it's not only boring to be stuck with one weapon, but it feels unfair that every time you're killed it's by a gun you can't use. It's also annoying that there's a steep learning curve of so many items, attachments, quirks, squads, and confusing objectives/mechanics, and it feels like you're letting your teammates down when you're sorting through it all rather than fighting. There's an annoying death screen where ESC doesn't work, so you can't even look through all the weapons and gadgets during the respawn timer (which would be disappointing anyway, because it's all locked). The server chat and automatic "admin" messages spam the screen which obscure the respawn and loadout menu, which doesn't help in trying to understand the game. You can't even change settings when the round ends. The fact that you'd have to grind for the content or have to pay £39.99 for a "DLC" microtransaction to unlock things buries any sense of value for money, and reportedly that "DLC" doesn't even work. Even if the unlocks did work, it looks like it would be a pay-to-win advantage.

The game is a quirky experience, but I think the Battlefield series should have stuck to the brand DNA where the customers appreciated a mixture of well designed infantry and vehicle combat with decent physics in large maps, rather than this aggressive (and pointless) hybrid attempt to move into other markets like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and PAYDAY (abandoning the focus on the mechanics that popularised the Battlefield series along the way). Once again - graphics were the only consideration, and the performance is potentially undermined by having to run a browser in the background. The game certainly lacks polish (considering that a large studio shipped it with poor quality in so many places). The idea that this game is worth £34.99 is baffling, especially as it's been out for 8 years - surely they should drop the price of this gimmick of a game and unlock the weapons so that multiplayer doesn't collapse for the few customers that were willing to give it a chance.

A bit too awkward.

This mod commits the classic Virtual Reality sin of the menu being behind you and not letting you see it - in this case you can't turn around when in the menu, so it was impossible to start the campaign in VR when the Valve Index loses tracking unless you have lighthouses in opposing positions (mine were at an angle, leaving a deadzone).

After using desktop mode to get the campaign started and then switching back to VR - for whatever reason Gordon Freeman is now 8ft tall even when I press the recalibrate option (and had sorted out the SteamVR end of things beforehand), so I had to turn to another program to offset the height (another classic VR game sin).

Movement controls are lost if the left hand is turned off, and rotation is lost if the right is turned off - which contrasts heavily to other games that automatically merge controls when only one hand is detected so that you can play on one hand if needed (Valve Index users would often have to play one-handed while going through the RMA process). Even if it was possible to manually map a VR controller, it's a nightmare to have to do it yourself.

Within seconds I had phased through an object and seemed to lose most of my HP from the adventure. The flashlight didn't work. The game tells you to use a crowbar to break boxes before it even gives you a crowbar, and at one point it says "please move back" when you need to move forward. To say that the ladders are awkward would be an understatement.

The pistol felt uncomfortable to point (using ironsights), although the angle of the barrel wasn't inaccurate to the Valve Index grip, but fortunately they added an optional laser sight. Half the shots felt like blanks though, which means you quickly run out of ammo. The shotgun needing two hands was awkward to fight and move with (trying to dodge enemy attacks whilst also shooting with limited ammo). Any deaths would lose you progress, and it would be tedious to quicksave constantly.

Even with some of the assists turned on, the fighting was such a chore with the controls that I gave up with it; the flow of the PC version is lost here. In terms of visuals though - even if it wasn't on the level of Half-Life Alyx, it's a beautiful game in VR - the forest environment is a nice break from City 17, and the tunnels have moody lighting, so it might atleast be worth a try.

One of the worst paintball games.

The menu music makes the game feel like a joke, and unfortunately it loops. The menu shows a GG emblem which is the same as the GGEZ graffiti in Counter-Strike. I assume that you'd have to go through microtransactions to get more markers, which would make it a pay to win game, but it's hard to tell how the shop works when it doesn't let you access it unless you grinded gameplay with the starter kit. The only marker it let me use was the "Tripplordd 86" which looks suspiciously like a Tippmann 98. The least that could be done in a game selling digital markers is to have them properly licensed.

The "CASUAL" mode is described: "ENJOY WITH YOUR FRIENDS" but confusingly it doesn't require friends to play - it just lets you create an "EVENT" or try to join a quick match. Going into a quick match - I briefly found one player, but they disconnected, so it was me and some broken bots that couldn't be shot. Sometimes it lets you start a match with one to five bots if no players are found, but this doesn't always work, and you can't pick the map. Creating an "event" can involve 9 bots and lets you pick the map, although the bots can't be added if the mode is capture the flag or demolition.

There's a "COMPETITIVE" mode but it's only available for "DISTINGUISHED" players. If there was a system to progress towards being "distinguished" then I couldn't tell what progress I'd made. The default region was wrong, and there's a deafening series of beeps when a match is starting. Characters yell nonsense when they're hit.

There's no crosshair, and right-click just swaps the marker from one side of the screen to the other, so you'd be judging where your shots were going based on where the barrel was pointed, which is what some players do in real life, except it doesn't work here because the shots don't line up with the direction the barrel is pointed. I'm not sure about the physics - the amount of drop on the paintballs feels exaggerated, and why is there recoil? Paintballs break 100% of the time, and every splat looks the same - there's no immersive detail.

It's difficult to see the paint beyond a few feet, and one map is awkwardly dark, and another has yellow inflatables (making the default yellow paint practically invisible), and another has a graphics issue making everything white. There's only one woodsball map and it's tiny and has invisible walls, and the spawnkilling on it is terrible. The only other maps are a couple of speedball ones - why is this game 7 GB when there's barely anything in it?

Splats don't even appear beyond close range. The hopper refill effect is pretty bad, and you can run out of paintballs in casual mode. Bots are constantly spawnkilling when the match isn't round-based. It's difficult to tell which team you're on - your gloves have no colour, and on the scoreboard you're either on the pink or yellow team, while the jerseys are either red or blue. You get points for headshots, which runs against the common safety rule that "headshots don't count."

There's a prompt that comes up demanding that you join a Discord group, which you can only dismiss by clicking a button that reads "I'M ALREADY IN". There's FOMO in the form of daily missions to "CLAIM ALL THE REWARDS YOU CAN", which seem broken. The achievements don't feel like achievements. The program doesn't want to minimize. Confusingly the game on the Steam Store search list is noted as being "free" but on the Store page for the game itself it's listed for £8.50.

Greg Hastings' Tournament Paintball and the Digital Paintball mod for Half-Life were infinitely better than this. There's a market in the paintball scene for a good game, and criticism for a bad one that just tries to claw money from it.