Recent reviews by Red McCloud

As a VERY, VERY, VERY long-time fan of the series, from playing SoC in 2007 ON RELEASE until now... this just doesn't feel right. This game feels disgustingly underbaked at the moment, like a skeleton that only has enough meat to walk and do rudimentary things, but not well. And it HAS to do those things well, or else it's just a shambling mess.
...and where is A-Life 2.0? It was removed from the Steam page before release for 'marketing purposes' but it seems more and more now that they actually entirely gave up on implementing it in the first place.
Why is everything spawning on the other side of hills, or behind me when I'm not looking?
Why can I never encounter anyone who isn't within spitting distance that isn't inside a base?
Why are the mutants absolutely comical bullet sponges?
Why do all the enemies in an area instantly spot you the moment you silently kill one guy, if they haven't already magically spotted you and are laser-beaming you through foliage because crouching does little to nothing to conceal you?
What's going on here?
Get out of here, Stalker, and wait a few months for some patches, if those can even fix this game's fundamental Cyberpunk-level issues. 14 years, guys, I understand the invasion has happened, but if it was this bad and y'all decided to ship it anyways... come on.

I want to peel Jimmy apart like an ape on fentanyl.

Bland, boring, and pointless; Starfield is a exercise in aimless wandering to the point that, there isn't much to say. The visuals are intensely dull, the characters, especially the companions, completely two-dimensional, and the copy-paste planets with their, oh, 20 or so preset locations show their entire hand in the first five hours; I gave it 25 more just to be fair.
The biggest annoyance seems to be Bethesda support's insistence that 'you're just playing it wrong' according to some of the other negative Steam reviews. No, Bethesda, the fact that at least 8 of those 20 hours was me just f*cking walking to the same exact copy pasted locations over and over again is not playing it wrong, it's the ONLY WAY TO PLAY. Skyrim had at least horses, but in the far-flung future of Starfield... I guess they uninvented cars.
Wait for patches, if they'll even fix any of the core issues.

the

Thoroughly average, missing crucial features, and a step down from VT2 in most ways.
Come back in a year, if there’s still a game to come back to.

great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl

if you like silent hill, resident evil, cosmic horror, anything horror related... play this game

If you are gonna play only one 'boomer shooter', make it Hedon. It's a game birthed from NSFW orc and goblin pinups that morphed into a hybrid of the design philosophy of Hexen, Doom, and Unreal (including some actual tracks from Unreal as well, courtesy of the excellent Alexander Brandon himself) that somehow ends up being an incredibly unique and fantastic experience through fusing of all those aformentioned games.
The levels are linear but based around true exploration instead of 'see red door, find red key, see blue door, find blue key' ad infinitum, requiring you to actually think and complete puzzles, many of which in Bloodrite are spread across multiple maps and really hammer home the feeling of connecting the dots and being Smarterer than the average orc.
There's not much I can say without spoiling the magic that makes up Hedon, and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is there a lot of it. So I recommend you try the demo first to see if it's your style, and then buy the game anyways because there is a LOT more to see.
But I will say this:
Bloodrite is THREE TIMES AS LONG as the initial release, retroactively renamed Crystal Heart.
For that entire massive duration, it will leave you hooked and wanting more.
Great job, Zan_HedonDev, really. This game is as close to perfect as someone can get with a boomer shooter, and I am so happy it's Hedon.

There's a squad and it's cruel.

Welcome back, Chief.

The be blunt, Amnesia: Rebirth is a terrible sequel and simply not scary at all. It feels more like another A Machine for Pigs than a proper sequel, with more focus on the story and voice acting than actual horror and survival elements, and the entire game suffers as a result. Gone is the chilling 'you can get attacked anywhere' atmosphere, replaced with frequent cheap jumpscares, scripted short monster sequences, and literally zero punishment for 'dying' as... you simply cannot die, and if you 'die' enough, the game just pushes you forward.
However, the environments are stunning, some of the puzzles are quite clever, and the expansion of the Amnesia universe is quite nice as some questions raised in TDD are finally answered, but these few positives are dragged down by the many, many poor design choices.
If you came here expecting Soma's deep philosophical existential terror, or TDD's nail-biting tension and harrowing management of supplies and randomized enemy encounters, you will be sorely disappointed, just as I was.