Recent reviews by DogKisser2000

I dragged my ass through every second of this game - the annoyingly and at points incomprehensibly written story, the game that goes on and on about everything except the things I need to be good at it, how it wasn't all that accomodating towards people who haven't played spectacle fighters before. But a lot of that can be attributed to 2013 design mindset of game design and I don't like being negative towards a game I spent fifteen hours of my life actively finishing, so I will say the combat is lovely (even if it left me a bit in the dark as to how to do perfect parries) and leave it at that. It's fine. If you like spectacle fighters it's good. If you don't like spectacle fighters and you have people urging you to finish it like I had, give it a try anyway, but only if they are willing to go on this journey with you. There's no point going on a journey that you won't enjoy if you can't find anyone to tell it to.

Project Warlock 2 is a game that is in the vein of Project Warlock, in that every time I boot the game up I have to do a chore with my graphics settings so I can have the game play on the settings I want it to play on.

The first Project Warlock had an insanely annoying problem where I had to go into the options menu to pull the game out of the vertical phone screen mode resolution it kept shifting the window into for some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ reason EVERY TIME IT TRANSITIONED LEVELS. And despite that, I beat the game, because I liked it that much.

To its credit, PW2 fixes this problem only to have a less annoying one on tap. But it also arrives at a time where I'm just feeling burnt out on boomer shooter style games, and what's on offer here isn't really changing my mind. The levels and gunplay are fine, but the systems supporting those two have some kind of annoying flaw around them. Upgrades made me agonize whether I had picked the right option or not since I had no real way of telling until I got experience with them in the field (I'll give this one to you for free - in Episode One, take the Akimbo upgrade where you don't have to reload to keep shooting with the Harvester, and you'll have a combo that will instantly eliminate the larger, spongey enemies almost instantly. Just make sure you have enough shells.).

The stats system makes a return, but instead of having an interesting system for roleplay, I just dumped almost all of my stat points into extra HP and ammo capacity. I found myself getting trapped in levels because I was able to hop up on props and buildings and get places where I shouldn't go, sometimes by accident. The tightly designed corridors are mostly replaced with wide open arenas filled with monsters that are just undistinct enough, which leaves me unsure if I'm fighting the skeleton that's going to rush me with the rest of the horde or the one that's going to hit me with a hitscan buckshot blast. There's also an NPC Human character that runs around in the levels getting shot by a monster or deciding to try and make out with a poorly defined bonfire, and every time one of them bites the dust the game spawns an extra enemy to punish you for not keeping them alive. Arena monster placement puts monsters directly in front and behind you when you do something like pick up a key or trigger the arena fight, and there is no faster way to get me to stop playing by being in a tense situation, realizing I'm down to a fraction of health because there were seven or eight fodder monsters taking huge bites out of my ass without me realizing it.

I only got as far as Chapter 1 and a third of the way into Chapter 2, but I saw enough to realize this game lost the juice, pulling a bunch of unnecessary things out of its bag of tricks instead of letting the game focus on the things it does best. It's built like a very uneven deck. If I were inspecting Project Warlock 2: The Deck, I would fail it.

BLENDO'S BACK BAYBEE. I'M GOING TO FLUSH HEADS DOWN TOILETS

AI generated box cover art with the stench of Unity asset flipping. This is as much a game as calling a box of saltines dinner.

ATOM RPG Trudograd is a more refined version of the post-apocalyptic Soviet Union Fallout that was introduced in ATOM RPG - which I liked, but I felt like I got through only by the skin of my teeth (that and because I discovered if I close a door in front of my opponents, they have to scramble to reopen it to shoot me).

If I had to make a comparison about how I feel about ATOM RPG compared to Trudograd, I would call ATOM RPG a demo tape from a new band recorded with nothing but four people and a DIY attitude, while Trudograd is a more focused effort, where they have an actual engineer and some experience under their belts. It's a marked improvement over the first game, which had some good writing but also had a lot of empty environments from random encounters.

The storytelling and environment are wonderful, and there's been some great pains in regards to storytelling to allow players to opt out of combat scenarios (spec your character accordingly, of course). I think the thing I enjoyed most about this game was just wandering around the city and finding quests to do - there was definitely no shortage of those and even the less exciting ones were a treat. A lot of thought went into the construction of these quests (one achievement involves doing a side quest that comes out of a regular storyline quest to completion, then going back and killing the entire faction that gave you that quest). It's wonderful storytelling that feels like it comes from a tabletop game!

However (and this is not a big however, because you might not see these until you're about hour thirty into the game), there's some spots of the game that just feel plain underdeveloped. Seventh Heaven is one of them - I was expecting it to be, from looking at the loading screen art, to be like an American strip mall, but in reality it's one NPC that begs you for money and two governmental NPCs guarded by a few people in combat armor).
Combat still feels a little underdeveloped (it's fun enough, but it's missing something that the guns and knives and fists don't really provide, and I couldn't quite put my finger on it.)

In short, if you're looking for a Fallout-style CRPG that has some solid storytelling behind it and marries the apocalypse with nostalgia for Soviet culture (with your assorted post-apocalypse weirdos, of course), I solidly recommend it! Not only that, I'm curious to see what Swordhaven's going to be like as well - ATOM Team's been getting better and better with each game they release.

I think I love this more than the original Amid Evil. Solid atmospheric landscapes full of monsters that need a killing - and the Voidsplitter is just an utterly satisfying '♥♥♥♥ off' BFG weapon (especially useful on the shield monsters that pop up later in the campaign - ammo's generous enough too, and it's just absolutely satisfying as ♥♥♥♥ to shred a horde of monsters with it). It's also a great way to show what the developers implemented between the game's initial release in 2019 to 2023. This and the original Amid Evil will keep you in hog heaven for a while!

Finally, the experience of being yelled at to shut up and then subsequently banned on a forum, encapsulated in this wonderful video game.

This is simultaneously the dumbest and most awe-inspiring game I've ever played. A five hour ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ based off of an old cartoon series on Youtube, the kind of game that on the surface is extremely slapdash and crass (but the joke is on the developers, I love having all of my senses assaulted and I love pissing directly into the power sockets and also I love holding my breath to the point where I lose consciousness and slam my head into my desk), but it's very much a measured, curated slapdash and crass that puts all the focus on how stupid it all looks and crams a ton of gags into it while also staying out of the player's way to let them enjoy the combat and poo jokes. There is apparently a Part 2 coming where you get to go to Sheffie, which is probably some kind of dog. British ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. This is my 2024 game of the year so far.

I think this iteration of System Shock is always how I've wanted the first game to be.

System Shock 2 was a game I played all the way back in 1999, and that was a game that married horror with RPG mechanics and FPS combat in a way that seared itself into my mind. Thoroughly creepy and compelling, I ran through the corridors of the Von Braun, desperately searching for ammo and bags of chips to replenish my health, terrified of what was around the next corner while trying to figure out how the ♥♥♥♥ I'm going to get off this ship.

Then I tried System Shock and I had no idea what I was looking at. What was this interface? What was going on here? Why were these pedal bin robots attacking me? I tried, oh how I tried, to get around this hurdle, but every time I just could not. Even with all the enhanced editions and stuff.

It took close to seven years, but the remake of System Shock is finally here. It's stellar. I finally see what I had missed out on. The glory of Citadel Station is kept (almost) intact, and playing this game was an intense joy. Even though I got bullied more than once via ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ deaths, but I can't really say it isn't System Shock without a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ death or two.

Of course, there are some influences from System Shock 2, namely messing with the props on set to turn them into cash to buy ammo and weapon mods for your guns, but I'm not going to say no to tweaking the original game itself to smooth over some of its flaws. Besides, it's a nice form of revenge, taking everything from a TriOp executive's office and stuffing it down the recycling chute to get some coins for a weapon mod. What do they care? They're dead. Or a cyborg that you're gonna have to shoot anyway.

It's not all fun and happy memories here. The game still has some remnants of its initial design, namely the puzzles that require you to have to write things down - levels are large and if you don't have a good memory for level structure, it's easy to get lost. And although bugs were at a minimum on my playthrough, I personally encountered one that was infuriating - I was unable to place waypoints at spots on the map so I could remember where items were. During my playthrough, this was patched up, and I came to find that there were 40 different waypoints where I tried to put them down. The hotfix also, regrettably, made it impossible for a friend of mine to play the game.

So if you're a sucker for old FPS/RPG stuff like I am and you've always wondered what System Shock would be like through the lens of one of the best computer game renovators in the business, look no further. It's an astounding game and I'm happy I got to play it.

It's got promise, for sure. But it feels like it is missing something - after four hours in this game playing the base game and the town builder that you make a town with all the stuff you sell from the dungeons, it feels like I haven't really started the game and already I feel like I'm stuck in a rut. I had no idea whether to sell the awesome sword I had in the dungeon or if I could just bring it with me to the next run, but I ended up accidentally giving it to a town character (there's twelve of them and I have to visit every one of them to find the person to give the quest item (which I KNOW is a quest item despite no markers saying otherwise or where to deliver it) so that I could unlock the next floor of the dungeon). The main problem with this game that there's a bunch of little interface issues and things to unlock before the game gets good, but what I played through didn't really 'sell' the game for me. I dunno. I don't think it's bad, but maybe wait for another content update or something.