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.