Recent reviews by abacus

Call of Juarez is a reasonably competent narrative-shooter, but is brought down significantly by cryptic level design and questionable game mechanics. The campaign alternates between two characters: a gunslinger (Ray) with armor, and a sneaky guy with a bow. Ray’s missions are almost always non-stop gunfights, and thankfully, the gunplay is excellent. All bullets and other projectiles are simulated rather than hitscan, and enemies react to being shot meaningfully, unable to shoot back while they clutch their wounds or ragdoll into death. Exclusively available to Ray is the ability to slow down time while drawing two revolvers, as well as body armor which completely deflects damage taken to the chest. If the campaign was just 100% Ray, I would 100% recommend Call of Juarez.

Unfortunately, the other half of the campaign is played as the sneaky guy (Billy), and it's in his missions where the game’s cracks start to show. He dies quickly in fights due to having no armor, though you can mow enemies down with your bow and arrow in slo-mo. Fighting as Billy is not as fun as Ray, but his sections do force you to change your tactics and they make the campaign feel less monotonous. What makes many of Billy’s missions a chore are the addition of forced stealth and platforming sections. There isn’t any indication to the player of how visible they are to an enemy besides when they are invisible from hiding in a bush. As a result, stealth sections often serve as veritable road bumps in your campaign progress as you try again and again to sneak past characters. The parkour sections have similar issues- they take too long, and make use of mechanics which are too obtuse to intuitively grasp, completely annihilating any sense of pacing being built as you restart again and again.

Call of Juarez is an absolute blast when it chooses to be. It can also be incredibly frustrating and unforgiving, but both the good and bad sides of the game manage to balance eachother out enough to deliver an excellent first-person shooter experience even in 2024. My recommendation for this game is a soft one- if you’re looking for a shooter that tries to mix up the action-shooter formula in its own unique way, I can’t recommend Call of Juarez enough. But for those who are looking for a more polished experience, it’s a bit of a hard sell.

They don't make 'em like they used to. Supreme Commander has some of the largest simulated battles in all of RTS history, with hundreds of sea, air, and land units at your disposal. With three different factions, each having a full-length campaign of multi-hour long missions, there's a lot of content to enjoy and even after multiple playthroughs I'm still learning new strategies for tackling the harder difficulties.

Each faction is unique in both looks and gameplay; the UEF have high-HP units that can soak up and dish out a lot of damage, the Aeon are supreme in range and can hover over water but are lacking in armor until the mid to late-game, and the Cybran have inferior firepower and armor in exchange for stealth capabilities and cheaper units. This all culminates into a surprisingly balanced experience where dealing with each faction requires a different strategy, with numerous paths to victory available.

However, there are some places where Supreme Commander falls short. The path-finding can be very frustrating at times, although this is more forgivable considering its age and the number of units that can move simultaneously. As a result, intense micro is much more difficult here than in other RTS games- your units simply can’t move that fast. Another issue I had with this game is that the campaign missions have sudden ramps in difficulty, which can lead to a quick defeat if you don’t already know what’s coming next. These missions are hours long, so if you haven’t saved, you have to restart from the beginning.

Overall, Supreme Commander is a gem of a game, still unmatched by modern attempts to recreate its glory. The amount of content and mastery of gameplay design more than make up for its drawbacks. I simply can’t recommend the game enough.

As a lifelong Halo fan, it might be dishonest for me to review a series for which I owe so much nostalgia to. But, after replaying each game in the collection, I feel like I can make a critical recommendation for people thinking about buying this.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection is by all means a valuable bundle. Each of these games released at a retail price of $50 - $60, and many of them hold their ground to modern titles today. For those looking to dissect each Halo game and see what all the fuss was about in the ‘360 days, look no further than this store page and buy the whole bundle.

If you are looking to save some money or you’re too unsure to buy into the whole collection, I’d recommend Halo: Reach and Halo 2: Anniversary. Halo: Reach has the most refined iteration of Halo’s gameplay loop with one of the most grounded and thoughtful campaigns in the entire series, and Halo 2: Anniversary is by far the most ambitious, with large, cinematic set-pieces and lavishly remastered cutscenes. If you find yourself loving either of these games, you’ll also be in a great position to play the others in the series.

This wasn't the Fallout I wanted, but, it was the one I found myself in.

Fallout 4 can be a fun at times, but there's some terrible bugs and a WHOLE lot of railroading with the main quest, no pun intended. There's no other word that better describes this game than mediocre. Sure, I enjoyed bashing raiders with the super sledge when they weren't animation-cancelling me with melee attacks every second. The problem with this game is that the role-playing element is missing. No matter who your character is, what they do, or what their values are, you will ALWAYS be a parent looking for their child when it comes to anything related to the main quest. Seriously? What if I want to be a dead-beat cannibal? Nope, sorry, you want to go find your son and get revenge on the man that took him. Brahmin. ♥♥♥♥.

Wildlands is an open-world third-person stealth shooter which rewards players who take advantage of their freedom in the sandbox it provides. While the experience is let down somewhat by bad writing and a lack of mission variety, Wildlands is still a good time, particularly with friends.

The core of Wildlands’ gameplay is a lot of fun. Every mission can be done in a variety of ways, and there is some room for creativity and exploiting the hell out of the AI. For example, have a mission where you have to assassinate someone? No need to fight your way into a heavily defended compound! Just steal a helicopter and snipe them from 1000m away with a minigun. Raiding a convoy? Start a miles-long traffic jam by blowing up a few cars on the road and just stroll up to the trapped drivers and gun them down cartel-style. If you’re sick of trying, you can just get the grenade launcher skill and turn every vehicle in the game into a one-hit kill, including helicopters and tanks. When you get four human players involved in this chaotic sandbox of stealth and murder with vehicles and drones, Wildlands is an utter joy to play.

Single-player isn’t terrible, but you miss out on a lot of the fun that can be had with other people. It also means you have to face the cheesy dialogue by yourself, which actually increases by a factor of two when playing solo. When playing alone, you get three AI teammates which are supposed to replace the void left in the game by the absence of any human players. They are surprisingly useful, but they also frequently talk at the player in reaction to what is happening around them. Are you hopping in a car? Well, you’re going to have to hear “You never let me drive anymore. Just because of that ‘one time’?” again for the millionth time. It’s not a major issue, but if you’re playing entirely by yourself the dialogue can become distracting.

Other than that, this game is suffering from a severe case of content inflation. After you’ve completed the first 10% of the game, you’ve essentially experienced everything Wildlands has to offer. Sure, there are some unique story missions and geographically interesting regions which spice things up slightly, but in my 40 hours of rushing to the story’s conclusion, about 35 of them boiled down to doing the same six mission types over and over again.

While the story is captivating at first, it loses momentum significantly as it drags on across hours of copy-paste missions, culminating in one of the most ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ endings to a game I’ve ever witnessed. The whole game, you track down and kill or capture various leaders of the cartel, building up to the point where you can take out the boss of the cartel, El Sueno. Unlike every other mission in the game, the last mission where you track down El Sueno ends with a cutscene where an NPC kills him instead (or arrests him if you get the ‘good’ 100% ending.)

All in all, Wildlands is good fun, but you should definitely only get this game if it’s on sale and you can get a couple friends together for a weekend to take part in the chaos. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a rich single-player open-world experience, take a pass on this one. You’ll be dodging a bullet, and your wallet will too.

MechWarrior is at its best when you’re fighting other ‘mechs, testing your own build against theirs and either succeeding and moving on to the next challenge or going back to the drawing board to rebuild. This loop is missing from MechWarrior 5 for one key reason: poor AI, both for enemies and yourself.

Mechs in MechWarrior each have their own role. Ideally, you would figure out the best combination of different roles for completing different missions. The reality is that roles are a worthless consideration because your AI teammates are only capable of four behaviors: attacking a single target, moving to a specific location, holding their fire, and following you. Many mechs in the game make use of long range missiles at the expense of extra armor, intended to be used as snipers. If you order the AI to attack enemies in one of these mechs, they will automatically charge to a pre-set range of not very far and begin circling the enemy, and die like a ♥♥♥♥♥.

This behavior is problematic because the enemy AI’s numbers are inflated to make up for their lack of intelligence. Not too far into the game, you will often have to go up against 5 times the tonnage of your own team because otherwise you’d always win. But, because your AI are also incapable of doing anything except for charge and circle, it becomes virtually impossible to beat missions outside of using exploits or getting lucky.

Outside of combat, the interactions you have with the greater world and the factions you work for have little consequence. The world map DOES change, but not due to any kind of player action. The story is uninspired filler and is more used as a way to bridge scripted missions together than to encourage you to keep playing. Speaking of missions, there are about 5 or 6 types that get repeated, and they all effectively boil down to defending a circle, destroying a mech, or destroying buildings. It gets old, fast.

Presentation-wise, it’s mostly good. The sound effects for the mechs are weighty and powerful. The models for all of the units are impeccably detailed, even changing to reflect battle damage which you can inspect closely after each mission. Level textures are usually high resolution, and the character models look good… except for Fahad, your repairman, who’s missing some polygons on his head.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3223687308
Case of the missing polygons ^

As far as I know, MechWarrior 5 is the ONLY first-person mech sim on Steam that has come out in the last 30 years, besides its free-to-play predecessor MechWarrior Online. As someone who has been searching for this kind of game for years, I cannot recommend MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries to anyone. On the surface, it is a very promising game, but it fails to deliver at its most important aspect and then buries that aspect underneath a tacked-on career mode. I really wanted to learn to like this game, but after picking it up again and giving it another go, I just wish I hadn’t.

Beyond the Frontier offers an interesting first look into the X universe, but is really more a proof of concept than it is an enjoyable experience. While the presentation (for a late '90s game) is rather captivating, the gameplay itself is clunky and underdeveloped.

Regarding performance. This game will not allow you to play in certain resolutions such as 1440p and has strange UI scaling if you change the resolution beyond the default setting. Performance-wise the game is solid and I managed to keep a stable 120fps throughout my near 50 hours of play, though this would drop to a jarring 30 whenever I had to interact with other characters, something that happens a lot in this game. The audio has some compression though not as bad as some other period games, but mixing issues and cuts occurred infrequently during cutscenes and other bits of dialogue.

Onto the presentation side of things, the art designs for the ships were mostly distinct and other than in a few cases really sold the scale of the universe being populated by five different alien races. The musical direction here is also pretty good, gives off deep-sea exploration vibes which really start to kick in as you explore neighboring sectors in the first few hours. One more thing to mention is that the CG for the aliens is amazing- there is a grotesqueness to every single creature you meet that makes the effort of exploring the universe all the more rewarding.

I'm not sure I would say Beyond the Frontier is for everyone, though. The first few hours involve tedious grinding for money, sped up by a ship upgrade that effectively lets you speed-hack the game temporarily in exchange for control of your ship. Everything, from travel to trade, and even combat, takes a good amount of time to accomplish. The game records how many hours you would've spent without the time dilation machine, and for me that number was beyond 100. In order to speed these things up you need lots of money, and this is the primary failure of the game's design.

The main way to make money is to build factories that sell goods for you while you ♥♥♥♥ around and do better things with your time, not like there's much else to do. The map is ginormous and traveling from one side to another can take up to an hour or more without upgrades. This isn't much of a problem at first since the game is trying to convey a sense of embarking on a great journey, but when it asks you to make the same trek back-to-back so you can talk to a single NPC, it gets old fast. You also can't remotely retrieve money from your factories, you have to fly back to the sector you built them in and land directly on each and every station to collect your cash.

Player convenience, or rather a lack of it, is X: Beyond the Frontier's greatest flaw. It is a chore to play, and this is summed up perfectly by the end section of the very last quest in the game. I won't say what it is, but I will criticize it as an incredibly padded mission for what was clearly supposed to be an exciting conclusion.

I won't spoil the story but I'll just say that I really just played this game so I'd have some context for the later X games, and I was left very disappointed by what this had to offer. If you're interested in the beginning of the X story line I'd suggest reading the official novel Farnham's Legend instead- it'll save you from a headache and free up time for the hopefully much better X2!

Bladestorm is not really as much of a beat-em-up as it is a racing game. At first, the game makes you think that you'll have to carefully pick your units and spend your research points (which you use to level up) strategically to maintain a well-balanced army. The tutorial shows you that the different unit types have hard strengths and weaknesses, like that horses are weak to spearmen. There is a huge unit roster to choose from, and you can even switch between units on the fly in battle.

This is, however, ultimately a pointless feature. The game is so unbalanced that you can really play as any single unit, and as long as you put all of your experience points into that type, you will never, ever lose a fight. In my 31 hours of playtime of which was spent in the "Hundred Years War" campaign, I only retreated once, which is the 'fail state' in Bladestorm. The true difficulty of the game has nothing to do with what is initially presented. Rather, Bladestorm is a game which is honest to its own name: you play as a storm. Literally.

The real joy of Bladestorm has nothing to do with the combat. It's flying across the map at Mach 10, capturing over 20 towns and castles in less than 5 minutes, all while listening to the outstanding choir soundtrack by Jamie Christopherson. While it does mean that nearly 90% of the game's mechanics don't really have any meaning, the absolute dopamine rush this game provides each round makes up for its disappointments as far as actual depth goes. It's fun if you let it be fun.

I do have some real gripes with Bladestorm, though. This mostly pertains to the first campaign, "Hundred Years War," which you will be spending the bulk of your time playing. The game introduces characters from the war who you fight alongside with, and they are all fully voice acted. And the voice acting is bad- so bad it's good, and then bad again. Every mission, you'll hear your companions compliment or berate you depending on their personalities, and while it's funny as hell the first couple cutscenes, it completely wears out its welcome by the 50th level, with over 100 more to go. My second problem with the game is that it's ridiculously padded, and the ending is not worth the effort to see. You might as well grind up to level 60 or 70 and just skip the rest of the campaign.

Bladestorm's padding is the worst kind of padding in games. It forces you to play hundreds of levels, during which nothing about the battlefields ever actually changes. No characters die, factions can't get pushed out of zones, your gameplay will have absolutely zero effect on gameplay except for a two-prompt question at around the 70% completion point which asks what side you want to help win. It's simply not worth it.

Luckily, Bladestorm has the subtitle "Nightmare." The nightmare campaign is much smaller, but condensed in a way which gives the player a more concentrated and all-around better experience. It also has some new battle music which is a joy to listen to. Don't get your hopes up when you hear that there are fantasy monsters in the campaign, though. The gameplay of running around on horseback like a hypersonic missile still stands here.

All in all, I have to recommend Bladestorm: Nightmare for the fun it gave me. Also, I bought the game for $15, which was a fair price for what the game truly is in both quantity and quality. This game is definitely not worth any more than $30, and it stuns me to think that Koei Tecmo is charging a full $60 for a 7 year old console port. Get this game on sale only.

Anyhow, here's the TLDR:

Gameplay: Play as an experimental fighter jet in an anime RPG depiction of the hundred year's war. Pick sword horseman as 'current squad,' maximize speed skill and buy mobility pennons and you will undoubtedly have a good time.

Story: Terrible, but funny, but also padded beyond belief and not really worth anyone's time.

Music: The music in this game makes it worth recommending on its own, albeit within the experience it provides.

Final Verdict: A soft recommendation. As a fast paced medieval-themed racing game, it's fantastic. As the beat-em-up RPG it is advertised to be, its shallow mechanics, poor balancing, and complete joke of a story leave something to be desired.

I hope this review helped you decide whether or not to buy Bladestorm: Nightmare, and encourage you to leave a comment or rating if it did.

Murder Miners is a multiplayer first-person shooter with sandbox mechanics. A classic gem ported from the Xbox 360’s indie game development program, Murder Miners is a fusion between Halo and Minecraft with an infection mode that can be extremely entertaining with friends. Murder Miners does feature a single player mode where you can either build maps or fight endless waves of zombies, but the meat of the game is in its multiplayer. The gunplay is nothing special, but Murder Miner’s destructible terrain creates an interesting dynamic that not even the likes of modern AAA games have managed to grasp. With a group of friends, Murder Miners is a magical multiplayer shooter experience.

While Murder Miner’s multiplayer community is virtually dead outside of community-run events scheduled once every two weeks, the price is so affordable that I’d recommend buying a copy for yourself and friends if you’re looking for a fun in-and-out shooter.

Blockland is a multiplayer sandbox game with high moddability. While it does offer a single player mode that allows you to build and play short mini-games, the real fun of Blockland is in its multiplayer. The game is very similar to other multiplayer sandbox games such as Roblox or Garry’s Mod in how the servers typically run community-made game modes rather than what is offered in the base package. Blockland’s reliance on multiplayer is its main downfall, however, as the community has become incredibly small years since its release.

Unless you’ve got an intolerable itch for lego brick building games, it’d be best not to buy Blockland, with or without a sale. While it does possess the powerful charm of computer games from the early 2000s through its graphics and interface, its lack of substance and online community leaves much to be desired.