Alien: Rogue Incursion Evolved Edition Review

For a what is mainly a AA game that was originally a VR title, Alien Rogue Incursion is a solid time. Sure when compared to similar action horror games like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space Remakes as well Cronos: The New Dawn, it does fall short. However as far as Alien games that are about fighting Xenomorphs and involving space marines are concerned, I do enjoy it more than Alien Fireteam mainly because it's a single player game where you don't need to play with others to get anywhere.

The story surprised me, it isn't amazing but I was more engaged than I thought I would be. I enjoyed Zula and Davis dynamic and the former struggling with whether or not she wants to live. Davis despite being an AI cares for Zula and wants to see her survive her ordeal. Their moment to moment dialogue is engrossing enough in the moment. The game is episodic and it ends on a cliffhanger and it's up to Part 2 to nail the landing but what's here did engage me.

Gameplay is fine enough in the moment and especially for it's short length but if it was any longer, I'd be much harsher.

What Rogue Incursion ultimately boils down to is that you have to complete a series of objectives traveling through the snowy outpost as you get attack by 2 or 3 Xenomorphs every couple of minutes. You are firing and killing xenomorphs with the iconic Pulse Rifle so that novelty alone carries much of the game. What also makes it stand out that it isn't shooting hordes of Xenos like in AVP games, Colonial Marines and Fireteam. You got to use the motion tracker and often anticipate when they will attack you and shoot them before they can hit you. It's more about predicting and acting accordingingly than slaughtering them by the dozen when in your sightline. Combat is also more like RE4 where you get just enough ammo and healing items to go through the level but never too stocked up on. There is no inventory mangement like in older Resident Evil.

It also helps that killing Xenos with the pulse rifle, shotgun, grenades and revolver all feel punchy. They will be spawning a lot so they should feel good. Save points are mostly plentiful and the game never feels over stingy with resources.

You will also backtrack, get new items and open new parts of the map. You will also need to carry items and deliver them parts on the map to continue the story. Much of the novelty of Rogue Incursion in that it's a game that is more like Aliens but it's more about managing resources and backtracking than horde shooting. Remember that scene in Aliens where the marines enter LV-426 and the marines are all frantically checking the motion sensors knowing when the Xenomorphs will come out their hiding spots and shoot them. Rogue Incursion is a whole game based around this.

This is where much of the problems lie however. You fight regular Xenos and fighting the occasional facehugger where the challenge comes from how much your hand can bear the trigger mashing mini game to get them off. It's either fighting Xenos when they spawn in on the map as you explore or a story progressing wave survival section. That's main enemy types you go up against.

When you eventually deliever the distress signal to Amanda Ripley, the game really loses steam and feels padded out. You have to then go do a series of fetch quests have and then have a drawn out section of Zula finally destroying the facehugger inside of her. The game started to geniunely test my patience after a certain point due to how much it feels like it's dragging things out.

I also had two game breaking bugs where I had to reload past saves to then continue on with the story. There are also instances where Zula refuses to reload when I kept pressing the fire button after the clip was empty.

There also carry over of this being a former VR game where you have to motion imputs that are now replaced with QTEs which makes it obvious about it's origins.

A decent fight with the Alien Queen where you have to time the explosive pipes and then shoot her and then the game ends.

Overall, Rogue Incursion has it's issues but the game fortunately ends when I was really starting to get sick of it. I'm hoping Part 2 makes some major improvements since while this game is has decent fundamentals, it's going to need more of a backbone to be more than just a "solid Alien game" where the license carries much of it's quality.

SOCOM: U.S Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo Review

If you want an example of a game that was fascinating for it's time but doesn't really serve much of a purpose now, Socom Fireteam Bravo is just that. Decided to randomly try this out due to my interest in portable spinoff games and this one is interesting in how it served it's purpose well for it's time but loses it's value and novelty decades later and mainly worth checking out due to curosity like I did.

To put it simpily, Fireteam Bravo is SOCOM 3 on the go for the most part. The controls are changed and the vehicle sections are gone but it does a rather remarkable job at translating that game and by extension the single player portion of the series. The story of this very game runs parallel to SOCOM 3 itself giving Fireteam Bravo some authenticity and a sense that this project was taken seriously. The menus, music, feel of the weapons, damage animations, and tone all feels very in line with the it's console counterpart.

For one, the game is a technical marvel. You got the large and wide open maps of SOCOM 3's single player. Draw distance is surprisingly reasonable and there isn't even an overwhelming amount of frame rate drops and slow down. You can zoom in through scoped weapons, crouch, go prone, use squad commands, on the fly weapon switching and close quarters melee takedowns.

The level design and level objectives stay true too. You got room clear outs, hostage rescues, disabling bombs, planting charges, picking up files, taking pictures, and the occasional escourt mission. SOCOM 3's robust map is here too.

There are some differences exclusive to this game like auto lock on shooting and a button to switch between shooting and strafing. There is free aiming but then it's to slowly come to the realization that using auto aiming is objectively the best option and free aim is playing with self imposed restrictions. As a result, shooting becomes montonous game of getting close, holding R and pressing the fire button. You can scoped weapons for long range but why use that when aiming feels very awkward and doing it with the PSP analog nub would've added more preceived challenge and thus rely on the auto aim. The lack of leaning and peak just encourages even more auto aim use.

The controls for contextual commands can also feel like a game of mashing them until the character does what you want besides reloading or going prone.

Also absent is the series' very intuitive lean and peak cover system or it's very methodical slow movement when tilting the left stick forward.

The hardest part are the randomly timed missions where you need to disable bombs before the time runs out and that can be a hassle due to the contextual interact commands not always doing what you want. The last level can be quite hard due to the upped enemy count chipping away at your health more than any other level before this. It's a level restart if you die but it's only an issue if you play on base hardware. 

It all eventually comes back to what I was saying. This was all very novel and impressive for it's time but now playing it over 20 years later and with the PSP's life cycle long over, what purpose does Fireteam Bravo serve now? Everything here is done better in SOCOM 3, the very game Fireteam Bravo was trying to emulate. There isn't much in the way of any new ideas exclusive to the latter so now without the PSP craze and Sony's marketing gimmick of promosing "console quality" experiences on the go. All you are left with is a game that feels like a worse version of an already existing console game.

Overall, apart of me respects Fireteam Bravo for being such an incredible technical marvel on a system like the PSP but at the time, it's initial novelty and purpose is lost over 20 years after it's release. It's a great example of what sounded great at the time was rather questionable in the long run.

Shadow Complex: Remastered Review

Before indie games became the massive force to be recokoned with. One of the early games that helped play a role in that is Shadow Complex. It was a XBLA exclusive for a while until it eventually came over to PC and Playstation with the Remastered version. This game, Guacamalee and Strider 2014 were the big 3 metroidvanias that I got into that weren't Metroid and Castlevania that made me a fan of the genre. Before AM2R and Samus Returns, this was the closest thing to a new 2D Metroid game post Zero Mission. Shadow Complex is a far better game that borrows from that series than any of the Axiom Verge games. Some of the gameplay ideas found in this game can later be seen in the modern 2D Metroids.

Anyways with that out of the way, I'll first talk about the story and it's not good. There's a terrorist organization that wants to attack San Francisco, the protagonist is a pacifist but still kills many people with no reflection on it, his girlfriend is a double agent or something. It has the hallmarks of dumb action movie that takes itself seriously. The main villain looks like Cobra Commander from G.I Joe. The prologue barely has much of anything to do with the overarching narrative other than be an intense opener to the game. It's bad but not enough to annoy me due to how sparse it all is. When there is the occasional cutscene however it's hard not to groan at the head scratching twists and turns.

The gameplay is the star of the show and it's mostly good when it comes to movement, exploration and moment to moment level design. Combat can be frustrating on anything above easy.

Moving and platforming feels fast, responsive and smooth. Chaining jumps can feel very satisfying. The free aim also feels reliable in the moment being able to freely aim that wasn't just up, down or diagonally in either direction was novel at the time and is well executed here. You'll need it to take out enemies from above, below or at your level. You'll need it to aim grenades, foam and rockets. It rarely felt it got in the way more often than not the physics with grenades did.

Exploration is also handled well. The game get chastised telling where to go but I often prefered not to use map rooms so the objective won't get marked on the mini map. Solving the game's various traversal and environmental puzzles can feel very satisfying in the moment like knowing to active a mine cart to launch yourself to another part of the map or flooding an entire floor of enemies for you to swim past.

The power ups while can be similar to Metroid can look more visually appealling especially the Speed Booster. It feels so satisfying to pull one off due to the visual effects of the animation and the amount of destruction happening as you are crashing into thing. It's like you got access to the speed force. You can also run on water with it too. It also feels great to get foam so you can finally stop relying the grandes' bouncing physics will align to where you want it to land. Double jumps feel great to chain with the wall jump and ledge grab. Being able to swim for unlimited amounts of time can feel great too. It can feel pretty impressive considering this was before indie games and the metroidvania genre would blow up in popularity and before Metroid would get another 2D outing.

There is however a major weak link and that is the combat. It's not terrible but there are strange design quirks. Moment to moment combat is more or less a 2.5D version of the hitscan cover shooters of the 7th gen and the late 00s. So you got hitscan weapons but you also have finite health which is fine but the problem arrives when health drops on normal difficulty feels far too miniscule. Add that with the hitscanners and explosions doing a lot of damage and it's easy to get into a firefight and then die very quickly. Due it being based around cover combat and everything else I mentioned means waiting for enemies to pop up and then shoot them, if you die, you got to do all that tedious waiting again as a result death can feel like, "I got to do all that AGAIN!?" It's often better to get a decent way into the game get some powers and a fair share of XP and then raise back up to normal since on easy, it often feels like I can be playing on autopilot. The scripted melee takedowns do look fantastic and feel great to pull off.

The boss fights are also not very good and almost feel very glitchy. They will attack sometimes, other times they will just stand around you just whail on them with grenades and missiles then you could just randomly get one shotted.

It culiminates with the final boss where it isn't even a battle but a puzzle boss. Imagine getting all the upgrades and you do is shoot down a background airship where the goal is to activate 3 switches to activate 3 warheads and all you got to do is wait until all 3 of them hit the ship and then final cutscene. You are just overprepared by that point.

Overall, great game in spite of the weak combat.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3(2011) Review

This game is to me the dumb and bombastic game that Modern Warfare 2(2009) is remembered for being. Back when it came out, I avoided it like the plague due to me being so anti CoD by that point. I did finally play it years later and found it to be just there. Upon replaying it a few years ago and doing it again now, I've come to appreciate MW3(2011) as a game so ridiculous that I can't help but admire it in spite of all of it's issues. You can easily write it off as lazy and derivative but the charm comes from the idea of, "let's take everything from Modern Warfare 1 and 2 and amp to the ridiculousness to 11". I could criticize it for being the dumb action movie fare MW2(2009) was but since that game already did the blow, I just stopped caring by this point. Where MW2(2009) had many ludachris and nonsensical moments played with a straight face, MW3(2011) is more of an action film with a novel premise that is underexplored.

The story goes from being unable to decide on being satire or not to feeling like a story with a crazy premise that is window dressing. MW3 does deal with the possible idea of a third World War and it feels poetic considering this franchise started as a WW2 FPS. It's still ultimately just America vs. Russia from the last game and Task Force 141 chasing down Makarov since that plot thread couldn't be tied up in the last game. Speaking of Makarov and he's the driving force of the plot and he's just as poorly written as before. He's a chess master who plays the game on easy mode that is always able to get the drop on everyone within a moments' notice. He is able stage a kidnapping of the Russian president and his daughter, stop not one but TWO traitors during No Russian, he is responsible for the nuke in Modern Warfare 1, was somehow there during Zakahev's botched assassination and saved him, knows that he is going to be assassinated, gets the drop on his assassins and to top it all off he has a personal connection with the player character.

It's crazy that after all this, Task Force 141 and Delta Frost just save the Russian president and his daughter and Makarov never had any contingency plans. After all that retconning and how competent he is, he never had one hidden ace in the hole before getting tracked down in Dubai. Since it's an action movie plot, stories like this need a destestable villain who acts logical and believeable for it to work and Makarov is not that due to the reasons I listed.

I did complain about the story yes and gameplay is still the railroaded level design with the ADS heavy hitscan weapons, duck behind cover, waiting for health to regen and then repeat combat it's been since CoD2(2005).

The most remarkable thing about the game which is the most derided aspect about the campaign is how it reuses scenarios from MW1 and 2. What makes it so remarkable is that the entire time the menality with the asset use is, "let reuse scenarios but make them louder, dumber and more bombastic than before".

One example is, "let's take Crew Expendable but then turn into the boat chase at the end of MW2." Another is "let's take All Ghilled Up but have the sniping sequence end with you bearly surviving an explosion". You got the High Mile Club that ends with the plane crashing and then you got an over the top shootout on the ground. There's a similar looking area to the Gulag from MW2 but place charges with an explosion that helps you escape. Return to Sender has the same asethetic as the middle east levels in Modern Warfare 1 but then you get the snow storm from Cliffhander that is now sandstorm where you are getting shot at by every enemy in the map. There's the Favela from MW2 but later you gun everyone down with a drone.

I find it impressive how MW3 at feels like it is to MW1 what Metal Gear Solid the Twin Snakes is to Metal Gear Solid on Playstation. Take it's more preserved progenitor but retroactively make more like the follow ups. MW3 is so committed to this that I can't help but admire it's conviction in following that logic.

It's not all derivative there are sequences to MW3 like of course the Effiel Tower set piece, the part where you are storming enemies in a parking garage while in a tank, there's also an on the nose mission called "Scored Earth" where you go through just that.

Then it ends with Price and Yuri wearing lots of body armor and using LMGs to kill Makarov in a QTE fist fight where the game had none of those up until that point and it felt jarring when they did pop up since an actual boss would be hard to pull off in a convincing way.

Overall, MW3 is a game that is easy to criticize but I ended up being so charmed by it's commitment to it's "remember this idea but crazier and dumber" and finding ways to be so ridiculous that I can overlook a lot of it's shortcomings. It has many but MW3 feels more committed to it's flanderization and action movie feeling of CoD than MW2 was.

Double Dragon Revive Review

I have never played a Double Dragon game before this but I surprisingly had more enjoyment from this game than I thought I would. Is it as good as Marvel Cosmic Invasion which also came out the same year? No. It is however a solid game in it's own right. At first I thought this was going to be yet another typical yet fun 2D beat em up but there were some surprising innovation that even more modern games don't have.

The story is just kind of there. It does seem very Fist of the North Star inspired with it's character designs and setting. It's fine in the moment and is mainly just there to keep the action going. Nothing was outright terrible or remarkable either. I did find Raymond to be a moderately fun villain to hate since he got a good worf effect before actually beating him later in the game.

Gameplay seem like your typical 2D beat em up but there's some cool innovation here like contextual area of effect attacks like an slam from jumping off a wall or swinging from poles. You even got Sleeping Dogs' contextual environmental takedowns if you grab an enemy. A quick environmental weapon that is in the background to attack with as well as enemies being able to bounch into walls. There is a special move meter where if filled up you can do a dual button contextual melee takedown. Enemies can be attacked while they are down, some needing to be finish off this way. That is also partnered in with modern 2D beat em up mechanics like a dodge button.

I wasn't expect any of this ideas to be in this game and sparked my enjoyed greatly because of it. Partner that with no limited continues, not doing an overwhelming amount of content upon death and getting active health refils and pick ups and it's easy to see why a game like this caught me by surprise.

There are some issues however. One since pick up, drop weapon, hitting downed enemy, and using contextual area of effect attacks are all mapped to R2, there are times where I want to hit a downed enemy but dropped the weapon I was currently holding instead.

Mandatory platforming sections can be very insufferable since I didn't come here for that however thanks to the aforementioned checkpoints and not redoing lots of content I can put up with this.

The bosses range from being doable in one try to being very aggrevating. A lot of the bosses can be pushovers but then you got Williams where he dart around the map and you have to dodge the flame bursts as he is moving around meaning you have to watch two things at once while the dodging the aforementioned hazard you could get hit by Williams dodging or vice versa. Most bosses after are easy but Raymond is a difficulty spike and is hard on easy too.

He can regenerate his health when you get him at critical and he will slowly chip away at yours with clones and critical attacks. Fighting him is a long battle of attrition. I was only able to beat him because I had two finishing area of effect attacks lined up when he got to critical. I'm especially glad there are no limited continues here.

Overall, I was expecting Double Dragon Revive to be a typical yet enjoyable beat em up but I ended up having more fun with it than I initially thought I would.

Bioshock: Infinite(Nintendo Switch) Review

This is my favorite Bioshock game but it is hard to deny the problems it has. There of course the narrative issues that are well known with it. I can look past those but the gameplay while being the best in the series has issues I'm noticing more this time around. Playing Infinite now knowing the behind the scenes as well as the interviews at the time, a part of me is impressed that they were able to salvage the game into something fun and enjoyable shooter from the 7th gen.

The story of course is a rather divisive if not outright derided part of the game depending on which circle of the internet you are in at the moment. I don't particularly think it's outright repulsive. The voice acting and moment to moment dialogue with Elizebeth and Booker are fine in the moment and they are the heart of the story. Since that part is handled decently, I can overlook the big narrative shortcomings like the premise of an FPS protagonist being framed as an everyman who is constantly in debt. The pointless Vox Populi sub plot that almost makes the story enter in the realm of "too bleak, stop caring". Ignoring all that, it's nothing more than padding since Daisy Fitzroy is going to die anyway and the whole point was to avoid unnessescary killing to get the airship back. There of course the pointless and bizzare time travel story that was ultimately a multiverse story and the latter is nothing more than relativism as a narrative device.

The absolutely ridiculous twist and Booker and Comstock somehow being the same person. It's easy to tear into the story during it's big moments but in video games, what matters to me is the journey. Bioshock Infinite nails that part down even if a lot of the way the story is told can borrow heavily from the Half Life series particularly the 2nd game. However, what worked in HL works here too like never breaking from the first person perspective, the moment to moment dialogue being enjoyable and always giving a player a sense of purpose of what do to. Infinite does have a talking protagonist which is above Gordon Freeman in HL. He also actively interacts with the campanion Elizebeth. One huge aspect of the game that works is Infinite is Elizebeth during gameplay.

As far as campanion npcs that are with you during combat. Elizebeth might be the best of all time. She always helps you in the right moment. At critical health? She might throw you a medkit. Low on salts? She'll give a pack to replenish. She might give you a decent amount of money. She'll open tears to give an advantage during combat. Tear for medkits, one for a powerful weapon, maybe another for a gun turret, or spawn a decoy. If you ever wanted Yorda from ICO to do more than just help open doors for you Elizebeth feels like a geniune evolution over that.

There is also other improvements over past games. Shooting feels better with better sound effects for weapons and guns like shotguns and hand canons can rip apart the heads of enemies. Levels can be have quite a bit verticality with the skylines. Landing an attack from launching from a hook feels gratifying. The addition of a regenerating shield gives the player a quick buffer before the finite health gets chipped away. It's also nice to use vigors as a quick way to stun or use as crowd control to do damage or as a quick way to retreat.

With all that said, there are some noticeable problems. It's easy to feel it's elements from past games and "immersive sim" DNA here. It is very much a traditional FPS particularly similar to CoD and Halo with the weapon limit of both, snappy ADS gameplay of the former, with the melee and shield of the latter but you have an upgrade system even though you can hold two guns. Since weapon use is based on weapon scavenging in the moment, upgrading and favoring certain weapons feels out of place.

Many of the vigors are the same which all mainly just consist of staggering enemies or area of effect stagger with no damage. It's often easy to stick to shock jock.

Certain weapons like handcanons, snipers and shotguns feel great especially the shotgun's spread, machine guns of any kind feels takes too many shots and feel pathetic to use. Carbine fairing the best of the bunch.

You have an explorable hub areas but you will never need to backtrack except for defeating Lady Comstock's ghost towards the end of the game. The final shootout has a protect mission with Songbird where there is an actual fail state instead of losing money and respawning with everything remaining the same. It can feel very out of place. Songbird was also slower to react in the Switch version which didn't help.

Handymen are almost never fun to fight since all they do is rush your position and keep shoving you into corners until you lose your health and respawn. It's a battle of widdling down yours or their health first.

Overall, with all this said, Bioshock Infinite is a game I do enjoy in the moment but I'm starting to see more of it's cracks upon playing it the 3rd time

Bleach: Rebirth of Souls(Playstation 5) Review

Years ago I asked, where was a Dragon Ball Kakarot and a Naruto Storm series for Bleach? I wanted to go through the story without having to go through the terrible pacing that the anime adaptations of the aforementioned series had and didn't feel like reading the source material. I eventually finished the original anime run before it's cancellation months before this very game would come out. Talk about ill timing. I did try it out of sheer curosity considering I do like everything up until the Soul Society arc and strongly dislike everything after. I thought that the many drawn out, pointless and boring henchmen fights of the Arancar arc would be more tolerable as gameplay since it's now less than 3 minute fights rather watching them play out. More or less, I got what I wanted. There's no Fullbring arc but I strongly dislike that so much that this game leaving it out felt like a sigh of relief.

The core gameplay however is where unfortunately is where Rebirth of Souls strongly suffers. It plays worse than any of the Dragon Ball arena fighters and any of CyberConnect's anime licensed games. Movement feels stiff in that the characters can't can't run, they only move by stepping so the act of zoning and closing the distance feels very cumbersome. You won't be moving at very fast speeds by comparison to say Dragon Ball Sparking Zero. Your main way of closing the distance is using a teleport attack by pressing one of the triggers and x. You can't power up like in DB games and there isn't a substitution jutsu cooldown like Naruto Storm.

Your main means of using special attacks is by hitting your opponents. This yet another very awkward quirk of the fighting. You can't do a combo unless if the strike is hitting your enemy so if you strike and you aren't touching someone, it will just be an awkward slash and no follow up move can be done. There's 3 attack buttons when all you really need is 2 since it follows 3D action game logic of chaining light and heavy attacks.

There's also a live system during fights which sort of works like finishing off enemies with your supers like in Playstation All Stars and the enemy having two health bars instead of rounds like in the Injustice games. It doesn't really add much other than mashing the right trigger like a madman when the enemy is at critical.

To end off everything, you have two seperate buttons for guarding and guard breaking when all you needed to do was have one. Have it be mapped to L1 and if you time the block animation correctly, you can do a parry. You know like most parry systems in a game.

Due all of this I eventually lowered to casual mode when facing off against Ikkaku as Ichigo. Luckily causal mode was accomdating enough to see the game through to the end minus one fight with Byayuka where his jobber arancar enemy kept teleporting around making him hard to hit.

After all this, I'm sort of soft on the game mainly due it's story mode. It's more or less the story of the anime with a mostly weaker soundtrack, it's non superpowered characters and most of Shinji's Vizorded gang adapted out and the anime filler arcs removed. Oh but this game does have it's own share of filler weirdly like Dragon Ball Kakarot all though not as charming like in the latter. Grimmjow's fate was bizarrely altered and directed like Guldo's death in Kakarot.

This is where everything loops back in of itself despite Rebirth of Souls' weak gameplay, it's a solid way of reliving the series outside of the aforementioned changes. I enjoyed going through the first two arcs especially Soul Society. Aarancar arc is much more bearable due to the lengthy henchmen battles being reduced to less than 3 minute gameplay sequences especially thanks to that easy mode. The game is mostly cutscenes as expected considering my Kakarot and Storm comparisons but this is what I came to this title for and I got it when I heard of how faithful it was.

It was fun to go to relive going through Ichigo's backstory and how he could've been a more interesting character than he ended up being. It was great to relive Soul Society and reminded me that the series could've been well written. It was so much fun mocking and ridiculing the Arancar arc for all it's problems and writing shortcomings in a "video game story that is a complete trainwreck" kind of way.

Overall, I already knew going in that the game played awkwardly and was below standard gameplay wise of your usual arena fighter adaptation but it was the Dragon Ball Kakarot and Naruto Storm that I asked for. I'm more surprised that it even exists at all.

Painkiller(2025)(Playstation 5) Review

One of the most "why" reboots ever created and that is saying something considering this is Painkiller. The thing is that it's not even a terrible game. It's sort of in the realm of something like Robocop 2014, sure everything after the first entry is varying degrees of sub par and on paper maybe a continuity reboot is sound idea but as a whole doesn't have much going for it. It's truly strange that at one point Painkiller kept the idea of "boomer shooters" alive in the 00s along with Serious Sam has now become derivative and suffers from an identity crisis.

It wants to be a coop game but it also has elements of having a traditional FPS campaign. The "raids" you do are basically traditional levels. You even have grapple hooks, dashes and double jumping. There's bosses and enemy waves too. Many of this an be found in new Doom.

The weirdest part is when playing Painkiller 2025 in the moment and it's just you mowing down endless hordes of enemies with original game's array of quirky weapons like the Stake Gun, Shotgun, and Electrodriver with visercal damage animations and seeing countless enemies die to the raw power of them, it can be pretty enjoyable. Unfortunately the game has a two weapon limit and has currency based unlock system so now playing around with the weapons you enjoy or deem suitable is locked off and you got to keep playing the same levels to get them.

There are aspects that can get in the way of that like doing objectives on each Biome like holding blood canister and killing enemies around it to power it, throwing soul canisters to have soul eaters move, or standing still in a circle to kill enemies to power up some pillars on top of the awful boss fights and it can get in the way of enjoyment. These were meant to be played with a partner and are too challenging on normal difficulty solo. Losing all your lives is a complete level restart by the way. You get little money upon death and are better off not buying Tarrot Cards since you'll need to work with your team which bot AI can't keep up with to get anywhere.

Then I play on easy and more issues after the moment to moment shooting crop up. The levels are more beatable solo but you get rewarded so little. You got to beat multiple biomes just to unlock new guns and one run alone through the campaign you can get one new weapon at the most. To add to all this there is only 9 levels in the base "campaign".

Add to all this that the game has no real ending and just Azazel saying, "go play the game some more" and at this point, I wondered, "why what was the point?"

If you want a boomer shooter go play the recent Dooms. The Dark Ages recently came out. Metal Eden came out this year so you can go play that. Want a coop shooter? Go play Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2. If you don't mind playing older games, just go play the original 2004 game through the Black Edition.

Overall, everything about this Painkiller game makes me ask "why?" It's not even a terrible game and can be pretty fun but everything about it is so misguided and lacking outside of moment to moment combat.

Dead to Rights: Reckoning Review

I don't like using the term "guilty pleasure". I really don't but this game really comes off as that. I can see why it got the lukewarm reviews that it did but in spite of all of that, I respect it so much for it's purity and solid gameplay. I'd even go as far as to say I prefer it over the first two console games because of the aforementioned purity.

Yes, there is no doubt about it, the game was a quickly put together rush job to cash in off the hype of the PSP. It can be beaten in less than 2 hours, the story is an excuse plot and that said story has cutscenes that are put together like a fan made mod.

With all that said, there is fun to be had here. I tend to view it more like an arcade game under the guise of a 3rd person shooter. Levels are linear, you get markers that tell you where to go to activate the next wave, you rack up points and all you do is kill enemies, nothing else.

What I especially like that unlike the first two games, there is no mini games or awkward beat em up sections, you mainly just shoot your way through everything. It doesn't have as much going mechanically as Retribution but nothing as obnoxiously stumping and difficult like the drowning mini game in DTR1.

When it comes to translating the gameplay of the first two games, it's shockingly faithful. Sure you have no camera control but the auto aim is very generous and you can cycle between targets too where in DTR1 you where locked in place when shoot dodging. Of course slo mo is in the game. There is no reloading all you have is a clip on each gun you can fire. Shadow can be sent in to get a quick kill and even damage bosses. You can also shoot dodge and stay on the ground like in Max Payne 2. There is also disarming but my personal favorite is that you can a chain shoot dodge into a disarm. I never thought a game like this would even have this kind of bizarre mehanical depth but here we are. It always feels satisfying to pull off and I always did whenever given the chance.

Add to all this the quick pacing of levels, a forgiving checkpoint system, the game reasonably spreading out health packs and armor on top of everything I mentioned and this is why I enjoy it despite it's obvious shortcomings.

The only big problems are that enemies can still damage you while doing a disarm and that the final level can be a huge difficulty spike due to fighting enemies and a damage sponge boss before the next checkpoint. I also wished sending Shadow on the L trigger rather than being crouch since you won't even doing it that much in the campaign.

Overall, in spite of the lukewarm reception going in, Dead to Rights Reckoning turned out to be one of the more fun portable spin offs I went out of my way to trying out.

The Precinct Review

I looked into this game because on paper a concept like this hasn't really been explored in gaming. There are games where you play as cops like Max Payne and Dead to Rights but the protagonists in them are loose canon cops who stopped following protocal. Sleeping Dogs has you play as undercover cop. The idea of any game let alone an open world game where you play as a police officer who follows the procedure sounded like a fascinating premise.

As a whole, it is easy to bash The Precinct for being undercooked but at the same time due to this concept being so underexplored in gaming I'm willing to be lienient in some respects.

The one major aspect that is certainly half baked is the story. It is rather impressive that the game has a lot of voice acting that is well acted and the moment to moment dialogue is "fine" but that's the thing it's superficial. I'm glad your player character Nick Cordell isn't a silent protagonist but he still can come off as an empty slate with not much character or agency. The plot is where everything really suffers. The start of the game brings up Cordell's father and how the police chief deeply regrets it and there's overarching conspiracy and well, it is what I brought up. Most of the game is you going after gang members and criminals that are completely unrelated to the conspiracy and then the final chapter of the game remembers there was one. There's is no sense of progression hardship or Nick putting clues together, it's all just suddenly revealed at the end and the game is pretty much almost done by then.

Fletcher Lomax is the most interesting character but he's just kind of there. He does some crimes, you follow his trail then arrest him. That's it. He never messes with anyone in The Precinct.

There is an interesting subversion where Kelly who is a cop on the verge of retirement who doesn't die at the end continues his work as a cop but this never goes anywhere to be interesting.

Gameplay fares a little better but the structure can be weird and at times detrimental. You can do different kinds of shifts like on foot, vehicle, and helicoter. Thing is, you are better off doing on foot since that progresses the story faster. You'll find more evidence for constantly arresting people on foot than by vehicle or helicopter. You can loot corpses during random shootouts to find more evidence. You'll be rolling in XP doing this anyway.

With all of this criticism I made, I found the game to have a rather relaxing and chill atmosphere with the synth wave music and how there can be long stretches of time before shootouts with criminals or car chases even happen. A lot of the time robberies, muggings, drug trafficking, and assaults are going on so while the gameplay can be one note, the world is dynamic enough that it never gets dull. It sort of in it's own way resembles police work or jobs that involve using physical force but with long stretches of nothing happen.

During car chases you have to send other vehicles and wait a decent while until you can actually fire from your car. It's also more about keeping rogue npcs alive rather than killing them. Apart of me is also glad that during car chases, you can see what's in front of you and it doesn't use the top camera for these parts.

The idea of being able to search npc and check for their criminal record or if they have contraband or illegal goods is rather amusing. You can give tickets to any car in the world. You can even check for npcs affliated with gangs depending on the clothes they wear.

Shooting is also pretty clunky and unintutive. Shotguns feel awful to use at close range and the AK-47 feels better to use at close range than a video game shotgun. It does kind of add to atmosphere since shootouts aren't supposed to have unwearly often. These sequences along with car chases happen a lot during story missions while both can be clunky you aren't redoing too much content upon death due to it checkpoints being frequent.

Overall, The Precinct was a decent attempt at a game where it's premise hasn't been done very often. I'm willing to be softer at it's semi realized execution.

Yakuza 0: Director's Cut Review

Yakuza is a strange series for me. I didn't begin with 0 like many, I started with the first game on PS2 a few years prior to the series getting big thanks to that game. What makes it such so strange that despite me playing so many of the games and invested so much time into the franchise, I don't really view with super high reverance. It's like the gaming equivilant of being that decent show that comes on and the episode is over or some action movie and I'm like, "yeah I suppose I had fun but I'm done now". It's rather bizarre because of the subject matter of the series deals with. With Yakuza 0, it's a well presented and entertaining story in the moment but it never really goes beyond being superfically entertaining. It also doesn't help that learning about the story changes made in this Director's Cut makes look back on it with less fondness and how the story is becoming a parody of itself. A very unfunny one.

Anyways, I got this Director's Cut due it to coming with an english dub since I might as well have a new experience with the story that already has a lot of characters talking and exposition dumping. It's very well acted but it's been that way since Judgment's dubs. The much maligned voice actor for Kazuma Kiryu isn't too bad here and fits the younger rendition of the character pretty well. The rest of the cast does a good job too especially Mathew Mercer as Majima.

The story itself minus the retcons and pointless scenes added in is good in the moment. The story avoids contrived writing and if it does come off that way, the writing will address it. For example when Kashiwagi mocks Kiryu and Nishki for not reading the newspaper when there was a murder in the Empty Lot at the start.

Many of the characters are written well in the moment. Majima of course being a stand out with how he handled that one annoying customer at the Cabaret Club. It also has an awesome moment in the series will he uses his newly obtained civilian status to finally start making his attack on Kuze.

The villains like Kuze, Shibusawa and Awano are solid and are decently destable but have some admirable traits to round them. Kuze especially pointing out that Kazama brainwashed him was amusing that I wish went to places.

While the story is well written in the moment, it's when you peel everything back is when the cracks show.

This is where it leads to the negatives on the story. It's theme exploration on it's own can be rather hollow when looking past the well presented story. Kiryu never really goes through any personal growth and is mainly the same character he was in the numbered games. There is some narrative heavy lifting for Nishki. Kashiwagi and Yumi especially do not get this. It's rather silly that the latter character is the fulcrum of the first game's plot and she's just conviently written out of the story. Despite being a prequel, it feels like you need to watch supplementary material to understand why Kazuma goes so far out of his way to help Kazama. It just makes the twist with him in the first game come off as all the more sinister.

Majima is while entertaining is where the theme exploration is hollow. It's something I've come to dislike about the series and the retcons this version of 0 makes this more evident. Yakuza 0 is about Majima slowly becoming mad but he never does anything morally ambigous or deplorable himself. Nishitani does more of that than Majima does and the former you don't play as. RGG wants their protagonists to be "the good guys" or a Marvel and DC hero but the very premise of the franchise itself deals with the criminal underworld. These characters aren't supposed to be the good guys in the traditional sense.

The retcons like with Lee, Biliken, and the loan shark at the start of the game makes it even sillier. It makes the Tojo Clan retroactively written to be a bunch of inept children who are incompentent at taking out people who cross them.

Gameplay is "fine". The combat as Kiryu can be rather stiff. Rush style feels fast but it's attacks do little damage and there's no heat moves you can do in the moment. Beast style is the most fun since Kiryu will grab neaby weapons and hitting people with weapons can feel satisfying.

Majima's combat fares a lot better. Breaker style is remiscent of the fighting style Eddie Gordo uses in Tekken and it's so much fun to watch him dance around and juggle enemies while he's doing it.

Slugger style can be fun to see him wack people with the bad and I love using the numbchucks move. It always felt awesome to land.

Combat does however get less enjoyable to melee weapon and firearms since they can stagger both Kiryu and Majima like crazy. No joke the hardest part of 0 is when there is a straight line on a ship and on the other end are hitscanners who do a lot of damage and stagger him when their shots land. It was just tanking hits until I got close to them.

Overall, I do enjoy Y0 but it's also easy to be critical on it when I want to.

Call of Duty: World at War(Playstation 3) Review

This might be the CoD campaign I have the biggest soft spot for. I've beaten this one more than any other. It's also the first CoD game I ever finished and probably the game I spent the most amount of time with over the years. After playing so many CoD games and WW2 titles by extension, I still enjoy World at War. Yes, at the time the game wasn't game changing enough nor was it enough to put an end to the WW2 game fatigue that permeated the decade it came out. If you look at WaW in isolation, it's a solid and well made game that did everything the WW2 CoDs up until that point did but with the most polish and precision.

The best way of describing WaW's entire campaign is that it's esstentially all the WW2 CoDs and by extension Medal of Honor but now darker and ediger. Everything is bloodier, gorier, and much more brutal than before.

This leans into the gunplay which is the most visercal the series ever felt up until that point. Limbs will go flying off when hitting them with heavy machine guns, headshots will have enemies' heads up right out, grenade explosions will have limbs and torsos fly off, characters will slowly die and react horrifically to be burnt alive.

It's also the loudest and punchiest these WW2 guns have felt. I still have the weapon sounds of the M1 Grande, MP40, Browning 40, Russian SMG and Tompson still in my head. It was also nice that you can reload the M1 this time around.

I do like how there is a radar here that keeps tracks of enemies nearby enemies on the map. Some can say it's not really immersive but at least I can keep track of me being in an enemy's sightlines.

The campaign in the specific have the Japanese sniping you in the trees, bonzai charges and hiding in the grass to get the drop on you or how every Pacific mission starts with the Americans getting ambushed. This contrasts with the Russian campaign where you start off as a small force that slowly becomes one that overwhelms the Nazi reigme. Not even a flooding of a subway can stop you.

Soundtrack is some of the best in the series and really fits the battles going on and the cutscenes too. It could be me playing the game so many times but there are games I've played multiple times that I don't even remember the OST as much compared to this game.

This all contributes to the atmosphere this time around and even with series underlying premise of a group of soldiers working together to take down an overwhelming force. Due to the very nature of how brutal the campaign is, it reinforces just how many scarifices the soldiers and your squad had to go through to get as far as you did or how just how overwhelming off odds that the player went through to get to the end of the game.

The Russian campaigns tend to be the high point of the Infinity Ward WW2 CoD games but it starts off even more so in a memorable way with the player and Reznov hiding under a bunch of corpses evading Nazi patrols.

It's rather poetic that the final level ends with the Russian flag being hosted up since this was the final WW2 CoD game released for a long while so it felt like a triumphant note to end on.

Since the beggining of the series, CoD campaigns always tried to capture the feel of being in an epic war movie and I'd say when you combine all this together when also added with the presentation and level pacing of the previously released CoD4, it creates a feel and atmosphere that the emulates those movies and scenes perfectly.

While being the best CoD campaign of the WW2 variety, there are some problems. Grenades are all over the place, it is so easy to randomly getting killed by walking into a grenade right when it explodes or be at critical health wait for health to regen have to run away at critical and then get shot down. It was joked for a while being called "Grenades at War" and this will have to be content with even no normal difficulty.

The QTEs for the dogs and bonzai attacks can feel like RNG and luck at times. I'm sure you could get it down but the infrequency makes the timing hard to really get down.

Even with the radar from time to time, it is easy to get gunned down from enemies from far away who have line of sight on you.

Since this is a WW2 CoD game that means there is a high chance of an air ship turret mission and this is one of the better ones due to the music. It really gets blood pumping even if it is just an on rails sequence where all you do is shoot down ships and planes as the screen is auto scrolling.

You can also randomly get killed to accidentally not following the game's script like getting close to the path of where a tank moves or having scripted enemy spawn as you are running forward.

Overall, in spite of it's problems and there might be a bias here but this CoD campaign is one of the more memorable ones to me. It does have it's problems but it's short length and quick rapid fire pacing never makes them utterly unbearable.