Recent reviews by thoma5nator

Recieved this off a FFXIV friend for my birthday, thanks General Kenobi!

After playing through SM1 recently, I decided to dive right into SM2, and oh my god is the upgrade real.

it's visually arresting, and a LOT of thought has been put into the game to find ways to tie its core tenents closer to the gameplay and tie the systems closer together. sm1 did the glory kill mechanic before doom 2013 did but doom 2013 perfected the mechanic by making you invincible during them, for good reason. sm2 follows doom 2013's footsteps in that regard while also making its own moves by incorporating some of the way sm1 played while upgrading everything about it

the result is a game that is more than the sum of its parts, and this is just the campaign! i've had a couple of rock'n'roll moments near the end of the first mission so you definitely want your head on a swivel but if you respect the basics you'll do great. I hear the co-op 'Operations' are even *better*, so I can't wait to complete the campaign and jump in

fun fun fun fun fun, with a super fun surface level plot given gravitas by the actors involved, though Mark Strong keeps a constant sotto voce that really goes against the absolute hell going on around you
never really rises to the power fantasy one wants when playing a space marine game, but the combat puzzle is actually pretty fun, requiring some positioning and resource management. this pre-dates doom 2013 so the glory kills aren't invulnerable, which really makes things 'damned if you do, damned if you don't', though the Rage mechanic feels made just right where it's not a crutch but it's there when you need it.
looks just right for a 2011 game as well, runs well, pre-borderless windowed but oh well.

glad I finally beat this so I can play SM2

hawk turok and shotgun blast on that thang

Hopefully I can strike to the heart of WB on this one.

Suicide Squad did not flop because it was bad. Suicide Squad flopped because it was stuffed to the brim with FOMO, battle passes and live service woo. The game was great. The stuff around it made me want to put my fingers in my ears and kick rocks.

(okay, gotta hand it to the arkham batman assassination bit. that ♥♥♥♥ sucks)

Bear with me. There's that image from Persona 4 where Kanji says "It's pretty impressive that you put so many ingredients into a dish and it came out tasting like nothing."

That's modern game development in a nutshell, and more to the point that's what Gotham Knights feels like so far.

They've got the Arkham combat, but they fail to understand how it works. Fundamentally, it's a problem with the 'glory kills', in that they don't have invulnerability during them, which they should, because that belies that they put thought into the game. But they didn't so you're not. The enemy factions are sauceless, too, it's full of the same woman in tracksuit bottoms dishing out the same tired lines. I got it for humble bundle price, and that's about right for it.

EDIT: "I don't know much, but I'll tell youuuu". WRONG. WRONG. WRONG. GOTHAM IS NEW YORK! IT'S YA! "I'LL TELL YA!" DID NOBODY USE THEIR BRAINS TO MAKE THIS ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ GAME!?

I had to applaud Capcom for getting a fully fledged Monster Hunter experience working on the Switch, one that never felt like it was running into that system's restrictions. It was 30fps, yes, but the premium feel of the graphics and the immense care taken to preserve the series identity at low framerates felt like true bliss. After Pokke Village, Kamura Village has felt like a second home to me - after all, where else do you get ara-ara dragon-girl otonari onee-sans that sing in heavenly voices as you go about your hunter duties?

Porting it to PC and other more powerful pieces of hardware just seals the deal on why Rise is so damn good. Free running feels a little clunky but sells the ninja power fantasy. Wirebugs do insane things for traversal, and the Switch Skills feel like fun evolutions to the battle system. Wyvern Riding felt gimmicky, then I remembered the age old adage of 'two big monsters fighting is the most fun thing 4-year-old you probably thought of happening and now you can make it happen'. Each weapon still feels like its own perfectly optimisable moveset and the grinding gameplay is polished to a mirror shine. Sheerly unignorable.

While your greatest competition is falling over itself to drop L's everywhere, clone everything about it, then do absolutely nothing that it did wrong. So long as Marvel can continue to keep predatory monetization and FOMO out of this thoroughly enjoyable hero shooter, it's worth your time.

so far: fine port of the vita original, I didn't get to the endgame in the vita original unfortunately so I can't comment intelligently on it
In english the TTS voice is not so much 'creepy' as it is 'distracting', but you can restore the original Japanese TTS to remedy this.

Seems other people are having crashing problems. I'm throwing power at this one, which you shouldn't need to since it's a gosh dang Vita game.

mission: freedom fighters
location: colorado, USA
everyone: sounds like Barry, 33 from the pub

insane social stealth action from the masters. all my time has been spent in the gamepass version. just wish buying the damn game wasn't rocket science

100% completed all cheevos in under two hours.

will i refund it? let me answer your question with another question: do you think I'm a narc?