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.

Tomb Raider 2013(Nintendo Switch) Review

This might've been the first Tomb Raider game I ever finished. Before I would eventually play the earlier games later on, this was more or less my introduction to the franchise. I've beaten it 3 times now. This being my 3rd playthrough and even with TR being the long running franchise that it is after playing the prior games, I'd still consider this to be one of the better games in the franchise. There's been a fair share of duds this series has produced with the prior one being Underworld and because of that, it had to be rebooted...again. This time however it borrows from different games and media of the time. The tone and idea being similar to Batman Begins. The premise being like Lost and Far Cry 3 while borrowing gameplay ideas and mechanics from Uncharted and Batman Arkham Asylum.

Story of the game is interesting in that this might be the most interesting Lara Croft ever was a character as far as the TR games are concerned. Her arc is one of the more acclaimed aspects of the story where she starts off as scared and helpless but slowly throughout the game she starts to become more confident and more sure of herself after being tested by the hardships the island puts her through. Lara said she wanted to make her mark at the start of the game and she pretty much did. Her arc can surprisingly feel gradual and over the half way mark, she's inspiring fear into her enemies. Lara up before this point was just a generic action movie hero that never really did much of anything to stand out other than being an early popular female game character. She was never the reason why I enjoyed some of the early Core Design games.

The side characters can feel on the underdeveloped side. Roth and Grim being the best. The latter I wished had more scenes due to how cool he was taking out the soldiers before dying. Mathias is more of a weird foil for Lara in that he's how Lara would've ended up if went crazy insane by the island. There are some contrived moments here and there like her not using guns during some story cutscenes. Still the story was surprisingly decent.

The visuals are an interesting point of note because in many ways, this game was the earliest example of visual fidelity in games reaching the point where they won't be outdated in 2-3 years but can still hold up even now. The environments and textures can look sharp even now and the opening shot of Lara getting out of the cave can still be poignant even now.

This now leads to the next point and this can be an issue for many that persists even now that due to TR 2013 being high in visual fiedlity that it is you now have to create ways for the player to know where to go. One way was through the Detective Vision Batman Arkham had and another way was through painting everything interactive in white. This can be very on the nose and also a downgrade from the original game considering in that game, Lara can climb on anything due to it's consistency with the grid based design. Now, it's "it's not white or not a climbable rocky surface, you can't touch it". I don't mind it too much in the moment but it does go to show how much this whole thing persists even now due to the issues high visual fidelity can create.

The exploration borrows from Batman Arkham Asylum with the Island of Yamati being like the Asylum where in points of the story, the setting will loop back inself where you can get different gadgets and upgrades to unlock new parts of the map to get more scrap.

Scrap currency is where this game surpasses the Uncharted series since now, you have a reason to look around every knook and cranny to buy weapon upgrades and get skill points instead of just mindless walking around until the next platforming section.

The action is also an improvement. You can hold all your weapons, there are alt fire modes on each gun, the cover system isn't sticky and is seemless, damage animations feel a lot better and there are more variety in enemies. You got enemies who melee, use shields, throw molotovs, armored enemies and they actively get you out of cover where you have to deal with close and mid range enemies.

You could argue this emphasis on shooting and fighting hitscanners isn't "true" to Tomb Raider but TR2 already did this and was handled worse in that game.

Stealth is in the game and a rather infamous aspect about it is that it's a red herring. You can sneak around but due to the lack of awareness indicators and enemies seemingly able to see you from out of nowhere, stealth becomes a game of slowly picking off enemies until you inevitably get the alert.

The set pieces are a carry over from Uncharted and I just sort of tolerate here even if I always found this sort of thing obnoxious due to how limited interactivity here is. They do have a little more going when you have to time shotgun blasts or climb axe latches.

Overall, TR 2013 was is a very good game in a series I just tolerate to varying degrees. It's one of the franchise's better made games.

Spyro the Dragon Review

When I played Spyro the Dragon 11 years ago, a large part of me felt completely underwhelmed. I always recall this particular game being remembered so fondly and I couldn't help but be like, "that's it?" Upon playing it now, I do like game more mainly due to the short length and being so light on difficulty that I consider it relaxing to play. Ultimately, Spyro the Dragon is designed to be someone's first game. It did come out in 1998 back when gaming isn't as mainstream and big as it is now. It's target demographic was children and it was the go to 3D platformer series alongside Crash Bandicot especially when that series was about to close out it's trio of platformers. This is a big reason why I had that inital lukewarm reaction I did when I originally played. If you are new to gaming, Spyro could be mind blowing but as someone who's played so many games, it can be rather vanilla. Still for what it is, Sypro is charming.

The good is that the visuals especially in the Reignited Trilogy looks great. Everything looks vibrant, cute and colorful. It felt like it was trying to mimick a classic kids cartoon or medival adventure asethetic and it does a solid job. The characters are quite expressive even it's tone is very much appealing to it's target audience. Where some older dragons would go on and on about their life story and Spyro would be like, "eh don't want to hear it".

Music also does a good job at fitting the atmosphere that the game is going for. Feeling very upbeat and energetic but also giving it's own unique vibe by not being 100% traditional fantasy music.

The story while very simplistic if not outright barebones can personifies the game as a whole a simple adventure where you don't have to think way too much on what's going on. Gnasty Gnorc might just be a plot device or an excuse to get the game going but I can't help but love him for he did what he did because he was called "ugly". It's so pure I can't help but love it.

Gameplay is interesting in that in the moment, it's mostly "fine" and due it's easy difficulty can even be relaxing. Platforming is never too demanding nor does the game ever get too hard. Enemies can be beaten by either using flame breath or charging and it only requires to do the action one time to defeat the enemy. Sometimes there might be another step added to defeat the enemy like charge into an armored enemy to have him fall to his death. Other times you make to flame breath an enemy to get on an platform for a limited but it won't go beyond this. Bosses are pretty much just scripted set pieces or chases. You will find Dragons, Eggs and Gems just by causally going through the levels and to get to the credits isn't too demanding. Add that to you can beat the game in 3 hours on your first run through, Spyro never enters into the realm of monotony because of this.

The most interesting aspect is the structure. Out of all the Spyro games even collectathon platformers by extension, Spyro is a game where you have to play a majority of the levels to get anywhere. This is very poorly communicated. For the to get 50 dragons, 5 Dragon Eggs, and 6000 gems to roll credits but the game never tells you this. You think you need to just get the Dragons but you then need to get the gems, but then you get the gems but you need the eggs but then collect dragons and gems again. This should've been told better to the player. Just tell the player to get both Dragons, Gems and Eggs instead of only collecting one for each world than changing the requirement out of nowhere. Towards the end of the game and getting to the final world, you can just jump straight to Gnasty Gnorc.

The game can have some challenge but that is due to awkward controls. The glide not being very intuititve. When you look across to a wide open gap of the level, you don't know that your glide can make it to the other side until after you do it and the furthur it is, the harder it is to tell you will make it. You could make it or die.

Running isn't the most precise due to how slow the camera is when turning Spyro as he moves. This will mainly be a challenge during the parts where you need to get the Dragon Eggs or chasing Gnasty Gnorc at the end of the game.

Challenge does sort of ramp up towards the end when the Gnorc Commandos show up and you have to kill the enemies in a certain order to get anywhere but this all happens towards the very end of the game and it's almost done by the time they show up. It can feel jarring when the rest of the game was straightforward minus the progression roadblock requirements or how the final boss later was nothing more than a scripted chase.

Overall, I get why I was initially lukewarm but I do enjoy Spyro the Dragon even if it is easy for me to criticize it. Sure, it can essentially be a "casual" game before the term was even coined but there is enough charm here to carry me through it's short length.