Star Wars: Outlaws Review

This was a game I was constantly hearing bad or lukewarm things about at launch and how it isn't exactly a "great" game. I wouldn't consider it SW Outlaws to be great but for the most part, I do consider it to be an decent enough and generally compentently designed if nothing remarkable game like a lot of the modern Ubisoft games I played outside of the recent Prince of Persia the Lost Crown. Considering how much questionable content the SW franchise has produced in recent times, I'm just happy I got some enjoyment out of this at all. When it comes to SW games, I consider Outlaws to be somewhere in the middle rather than "good" or "bad".

I'll start with the story and it's just, "okay" more than anything, it's not really terrible or remarkable. Just somewhere in the middle just like the rest of the game. My big issue is that Kay Vass doesn't really grow as a character that much in the middle portions of the game since the missions on each planet can be completed in a random order so most of the game is spent building the crew for the big heist and Kay herself never really goes through any big stuggles or disagreements. ND-5 is a decent character, is well acted and has some decent interactions but since he and Jaylen are the only things connecting all 3 of the main questlines together, I don't think enough legwork was done between ND-5 and Kay to make me want to see them win and succeed. I would've liked some more disagreements and hostility between the two instead of Kay being so "okay" with everything.

Jaylen is a solid character, I do like how he tries to keep calm and make the best of every setback that comes to him, and he comes off as being a decent manipulator, even if one late twist was really obvious due to his character design.

The rest of the characters are also just "okay" and nothing special, this is probably in large part due to Kay not interacting with them that much after their main questline on each planet wrapping up. They pretty much disappear from the story after you recruit them.

It's a decent story overall, it's easy to tell that it's just trying to be a fun heist story rather than something deep and meaningful which I don't mind.

The gameplay is mostly on "it's decent enough" side. There is one thing that will make or break the game for many people and that is the heavy reliance on stealth gameplay especially in the early hours and late hours. I wouldn't call the stealth gameplay in Outlaws "bad" by any means but it's not amazing or stand out either.

I say the stealth is decent because you get much of the essentials to be effective at sneaking like a crouch button, guards don't instantly spot you when they get a glimpse of your body, a whistle, a distraction, and the best part all though it can vary is that when you alert one enemy seconds after being spotted which helps make much of it's stealth gameplay bearable.

However this can vary since the AI can be very twitchy in spots. Sometimes guards can spot you from afar and at other times knocking out guards seconds after they spot you do notice the hivemind, and at times guards can hear me knocking out other guards even it is a distance apart and sometimes they won't, it's this inconsistencies like this that bugs me. This makes the last few stealth sections towards the end of the game feel like a game of luck at times.

The rest of the game consist of your usual fare, there's cover shooting, driving vehicles, and ship combat. None of these things are done suberbly well but have enough polish in them to atleast feel decently stimulating.

Shooting can feel quite challenging in the early game since your base pistol does such little damage but once you get rapid fire plasma, power blaster upgrade, get some upgrades to take more damage and hold more health packs, shooting mostly becomes pretty easy to manage unless if there is an overwhelming amount of enemies thrown at you which can happen during some Imperial base missions. I do love the first configuration for your power blaster since it is very similar to the Spartan Laser from Halo which is a high damage weapon that is projectile and takes quite a little time to charge up. I love the Spartan Laser so it's to something like that in this game. Two handed guns which you can't take with you outside of the combat arenas you find them can take out many of the basic infantry units in the game. Grenade launcher enemies are pretty annoying especially in cramped rooms.

The vehicle combat is borderline non existent since all you have to fight back is the Splinter Cell Conviction mark and execute to fight back, enemies are easy to get away from so I don't mind.

Ship combat is there more than anything, it's just there to complete the idea of the power fantasy of having an "open galaxy" game. Dog fighting generally doesn't involve much skill but I don't mind since I'm not good at fligth games.

Overall, SW Outlaws is an okay if nothing special game like much of modern Ubi's efforts.

Atomic Heart Review

Atomic Heart is a game I recall hearing about around the time it came out, it looked pretty cool but I've seen people both praise and detract it. I held off playing it because I thought I wouldn't enjoy it but I did ended up enjoying it, the game has it's issues but it's a game I can say I mostly enjoyed.

I'll begin with the story and the game makes it clear that it's a story driven game, the interesting part is that it was supposed to be a movie but it got turned into a game. I'd say the story is mostly pretty interesting but it has some major problems when it comes to themes and when it comes to making me think, I'll give the game credit for having me reflect on various ideas in the moment like the idea of giving control to someone who seems to act like they have humanity's best interests and the conversations P-3 has with Charles does a good job at making the delivery of it's themes and ideas feel organic within the gameplay and on top of this, much of the story is very direct and you don't need to read notes or listen to the audio logs to get what is going on within the story so I comend the game for all of this despite mostly playing games for gameplay.

However there is just one major flaw with the story and that is the main character P-3, I've seen a good number of people share their immese dislike for the character but the thing is, I don't think he's a bad character on paper since I've spoken to and aruged with many people over the years who speaks exactly like he does. The kind of guy who is overly rude, sure of himself, is absolutely convinced they are right despite how much evidence to the contrary has been shown and puts way too much faith in one person or thing just even though that faith is ultimately misplaced and it's clear they are being used.

I've seen many act like him, and it's not this that annoys me, it's more so that the story shows very little interactions and shows so little of the backstory between him and Scehenov, the story rarely if ever shows why P-3 puts so much trust in him. There's not many interactions between the two and most of the story is spent with Charles. There's rarely if ever any kind manipulative sympathy shown by Scehenov making P-3's lack of professionalism towards everyone seem all the more forced and irrational.

Another issue is that the twist happens too late in the game to be impactful, it has the Metal Gear Solid 2 problem where a big twist that happens late in the game is too hard to sync in because of it's late reveal, the characters have no time to reflect and slowly change because by the time it is revealed, the game is almost at an end.

I still think the story isn't "bad" by any means but if these issues I mentioned was somehow fixed, I would probably like P-3 more, maybe not as much as Legacy of Kain's Raziel but someone I would geniunely find interesting especially for an FPS protagonist. The fact that Atomic Heart's story has me talking about it for so much of my review does speak a lot for how much I found it interesting, I tend to mostly talk about gameplay.

Speaking of that, it's mostly just "fine". The game is very much an FPS game in the vein of something like Bioshock, there's a homage to it late game and the Facility the game takes place is somewhat similar to Rapture, there's powers for the player to use like a shock ability, upgrades, lots of hacking mini games, exploration and looting and so on. I do however prefer Atomic Heart's gameplay since death isn't a slap on the wrist due to the fact that there is no Vita Chambers and I find combat to provide a more satisfying kick to it especially when fighting the biological mutants.

Combat at first is a little challenging since you have some weaker weapons and ammo is low, I had to use frostbite and telekinesis a lot but I eventually just primarily used the shock ability since it becomes deadly late game, you also get weapons like the Dominator which has unlimited ammo but slowly recharges upon energy depletion, but the axe is still pretty reliable even later parts of the game, I used the shotgun on tougher enemies and bosses and once I found the blueprints for Klash, the game became even easier since I had so much ammo lying around for that before obtaining the gun.

You can also craft healing items and ammo in the locker and you get lots of resources by looking around, so you will rarely run out of ammo or healing items.

Enemy variety pretty much loses steam after a few hours since they all get introduced in the first few hours.

I did play on easy, but the combat with how a staggering animation would activate every time P-3 got hit just annoyed me and made combat less fun, and how enemies can be spongey especially in large numbers could make an "okay" combat system possibly aggrevating so I never bothered to raise the difficulty.

There are some annoying padding and fetch quests but the waypoints made them bearable.

Overall, worth checking out if you enjoy games like this.

Sly Cooper and the Thievous Raccoonus Review

Sly 1 is a weird game even back when I first played the game, I know I preffered 2 but not sure I liked it over 3, replaying it again in 2021, Sly 1 is probably my least favorite game in the series. Having it played the PS5 version recently, I appreciate Theivious Raccoonous more than I did before, however the game does have it's flaws but I still think it's charming.

If you play the PS5 version, it mostly runs fine all though there are some weird crash issues where during the Ms. Ruby fight I rewinded a little too much and it caused the game to freeze up, I loaded the game from the save state and rewind refused to work but loaded it from the in game menu and it worked again. You may encounter this so be warned.

That out of the way, by far the weakest aspect of Sly 1 for me is the story, it's weird considering if you have seen Sly Cooper discourse on the internet, it tends to be the most discussed part of the franchise but for me, I just found the story to be interesting for a platformer story more than anything. It's super charming in that it looks like a typical mascot platformer for children and it has adult themes but it never gets overly indulgent with the latter. It's also nice that the game gives you context and a backstory reveal for the various villains the Cooper gang is about to steal from, it feels natural within the story and the cutscenes aren't overly long.

However, I do have some major issues with the story, if you look past the charming presentation, the actual story is kind of lacking. Bentley and Sly are overly hostile towards each other despite the fact that they have been friends for a while, this gets phased out the more it goes on but it can get grating. Murray is barely given anything to do outside of being cowardly and getting the team in trouble but the devs have to make him seem useful by conviently having the keys for Sly to progress.

Most of the interesting parts like Carmalita getting kidnapped and Bentley questioning why Sly would help her and Carmelita joining Sly are the most interesting parts of the plot. There isn't many twists and turns anything that doesn't revolve around, "Cooper gang steals X".

Clockwork is a weak villain who's motivations are too vague and all of his character is revealed towards the end of the game before Sly defeats him.

It's the framework for something interesting but on it's own, it's just okay.

The gameplay in Sly 1 is interesting in that it has first installment weirdness but in an interesting way.

Gameplay is esstentially Crash Bandicot Warped but framed as a stealth game. It's a platformer with a stealth theme, no this is not what I would consider a "stealth game" but using making a platformer that is themed around not being seen is an interesting concept since stealth games and platformers in some ways shares similar ideas.

The game is at it's best is when it's focused on avoiding enemy sightlines, lasers, and search lights. As much as I scoff at the idea of a contextual cover system to hide from enemies it is mostly done well here since there will always be parts to use it to avoid enemies with flashlights. One really nice thing about the game is that when caught by a search light or laser, it isn't a game over, Sly is given a second chance where the lasers will move faster and will instantly kill him upon touching it and you can decactivate this by destroying an alarm bell.

Another good thing about the gameplay is that most the abilties Sly gets after beating bosses gets actively used in the level design in the following level, cloaking being a bit of the exception.

This is something I wished the game leaned into since not all enemies are going to be unaware of your presence which is why I scoff at Sly being considered a full on stealth game. The Crash Bandicot enemies who only appear in front you and attack in one direction pretty much sap away the stealth fantasy of being someone who is efficient at being unnoticed. Another thing that ruins the stealth fantasy is that the guards who have sightlines will be alerted to you by seconds before you take them out from behind which also takes away from the fantasy since the whole point is to remain unnoticed.

Some other issues is that the mini games while most of them aren't bad, they can get in the way of what is a solid foundation for a platformer like this, you enjoy the platforming? Now do a mini game you don't want to do.

Bosses are mostly fine but Ms. Ruby is particularly bad since her boss is a rhythm game that doesn't even use the base game's mechanics.

The platforming also isn't the most polished since sometimes I press the circle button contextual actions and they work or sometimes they don't it makes the final Clockwork fight a massive drag since now you have to be precise with these circle button actions.

Overall, Sly 1 is a good game even with many of my issues but I really wished it leaned into it's more interesting ideas. It's still a game worth playing.

Killing Time: Resurrected Review

I have never even heard of this game before Nightdive Studios announced they were remastering it, I thought it was going to be a POed situation where it was going to a remaster of an obscure 90s console FPS where the initial game wasn't well made at all. To my surprise, Killing Time turned out to be a solid game. It isn't going to light your world on fire but at the same time, the fact that the game came out in 1995 and features design that would pop in Resident Evil and Quake 2. It also has a decently told narrative that doesn't get in the way of the game. It has more story than Doom and Quake but doesn't use narrative as a means to drive the gameplay as much as Half Life did.

The best way of describing Killing Time is that what if you got older Doom's gunplay with the Egyptian motif and item collecting of Powerslave, with Resident Evil's mansion but with Quake 2's zone based level progression? You get this game.

The gunplay is pretty solid all though some weapons like the pistol and tommy gun can sound weak at first, the sound of the tommy gun started to grow on me, the shotgun is decently powerful, and there is the flamethrower. You will mainly be using the shotgun, tommy gun and flamethrower.

What I also love about the gunplay is that enemies react to getting shot and they make groaning sounds while getting hit and some enemies make a *smack* sound when killed and it's satisfying to hear every time. It sounds weird that I'm praising a game for this but not every game does what I'm saying and it tells me the devs of Killing Time understand what makes shooting in any game satisfying.

There is some innovations to Killing Time that never appeared in the FPS genre again like how red health orbs damage you upon picking them up which while novel mainly just revolves around waiting few seconds before moving on forward.

One thing that does make Killing Time innovating is the level design it's basically Resident Evil meets Quake 2 meets Powerslave. You have the big overarching mansion and it's outside areas and key collecting that opens certain doors of RE, with areas being seperated into different level zones like Quake 2 and you need to collect items in order to get to the final boss like Powerslave.

The story is also pretty decently presented...if you choose to watch the optional cutscenes scattered throughout the levels, I intially didn't but I slowly started to and its a well made story considering the time the game was made in. The live action cutscenes are moderately well acted too.

This is where I lean towards the negatives, much of it is due to the level design, and while it is ambitous, it's suffers from being the first of it's kind problem since it is cutting edge, it also means it has problems games released later would avoid.

Two big issues is that knowing where to go requires a walkthrough half the time and the excessive down time and they are interconnected. Trying to figure out where to go on your own can be very confusing on top of even somewhat ruining the game for later sections. It's never made clear where the player is supposed to be going since there is no clear order to beat the levels. I'm not asking for the game to hold my hand but knowing what keys works on each door is a guessing game and this leads to excessive down time of looking all over the map to figure out which keys work with each door. The map isn't very helpful since it's like many 90s FPS in game maps but I can excuse it in those games since the maps in them were small and aren't overly sprawling.

This can also lead to the aforementioned excessive down time, for example, I killed most of the enemies in the outdoors areas because I didn't know where the next level in the walkthrough I was following was supposed to be. As a result, by the end of the game, when making my treks to the final few areas a lot of it was downtime with nothing happening.

Resident Evil avoids this by having the game spawn Hunters when making the return trip to the Mansion after a story milestone. Quake 2 doesn't have you spend the entire game in one zone and then you move on to another part of the Strogg homeworld. Killing Time doesn't do either of these as a result, it makes all the down time trekking all the more tedious especially in a game that is about killing enemies.

Final negative is that the final section is pretty bad, you need to destroy 6 macguffins across the mansion map in order to get to the final boss while getting chased by a stalker monster, but you need a guide to effectively find the macguffins on a first time playthrough since the multicolored doors could mean anything all of this is happening while constantly be attacked by a stalker monster which makes me want to use a walkthrough that much more.

To top is all off, the final boss is super easy with the amount of items you collected through the game.

Overall, Killing Time is a solid and ambitous game for something I never heard of and it generally holds up well

Silent Hill(1999) Review

Silent Hill is a game I really do have a massive soft spot for, it's one of the first PS1 games I ever finished beating it on the PSP through the PS1 Classics section on PS3 over a decade ago. I decided to replay the first 3 SH games since the remake of 2 has recently came out and I'm begginning everything with the game that started it all.

SH1 is a strange came to return to after playing games like the Resident Evil PS1 games, Signalis and Tormented Souls. Everything about the way SH1 is designed feels like it was made for people who aren't very familar with survival horror games and found the RE games to be way too hard. The combat gives you as many resources and gives you a little too many of them like Crow Country does.

I'm not sure if this is due to normal difficulty of SH1 feeling too easy but I always assumed that the purpose of normal difficulty is supposed to be balanced between easy and normal but the start of SH1, I had so many handgun bullets and healing items that I almost thought I was going crazy and played on easy mode, just to find out I did beat it on normal.

Then there is so many other things that made it feel like SH was a game made for people who found RE difficult. You have a stomp button that can kill an enemies in one hit when they are down with bullets, enemies on screen are never going to appear in more than 3, no inventory management, most bosses go down in a couple of shots, a radio telling you where enemies are, guns having longer clips before reloading, enemies being easy to run away from in the overworld unless in tight spaces, and Harry taking a good amount of damage before getting a game over. This is also not including the ability to move while shooting, enemies moving slower and acting less aggresively by comparison to RE enemies on top of some enemies like the nurses having a long wind up and telegraph before they even attack you.

I don't think this a bad thing to be a more "casualized" version of Resident Evil but after playing a number of games in the genre over the years, SH1's pushover normal difficulty can stand out to me a good deal.

I do like that SH1 has a pretty reliable melee combat system you can use, I even tried to fight enemies using melee and the hammer is a shockingly effective weapon but since you will be rolling in ammo so much I hardly felt I needed to use it. Tormented Souls would do something like this and I argue melee combat gets more use since in that you need to use it to damage a downed enemy and using that to save ammo where in SH1, melee just feels optional.

The level design in SH1 also isn't as good as RE since in older RE, every door that you find can be opened containing items you will need or lore details where in the former there is a lot of doors that will never open and could've just been a wall textures instead. I really got to wonder what even is the purpose of adding those doors there if they don't lead to anything.

I thought there was going to be lots of puzzles but there were probably 3-4 at the most.

The map system is pretty well designed, it gives you more to work with than RE and especially Tormented Souls' map which does make the last level an even bigger pain since there is so many doors and floors and now there isn't a map anymore.

The good ending is locked behind a "side quest". Which is very annoying since it catches first time players off guard, it did for me when I first beat SH1. 

That was a lot of me criticizing the game, I do enjoy SH1.

The best things about the game is by far the story, atmosphere and music.

The story is presented in an interesting way, the game gives you just enough information to go by to have a clue what is going on but it doesn't really spoon food you either. There isn't even a whole lot of notes for you to read, much of the game's storytelling is environmental. The characters also good too, the voice acting might come off as stiff but I argue the voice direction feels intentional since it adds to how confused as all hell everyone sounds regarding the situation. I enjoy Harry's determination to save his daughter, it contrasts very well with how Dahlia is related to her daughter by blood but only views her as a tool for her cult rituals while Harry not being related by blood geniunely cares about Cheryl, he also shows a caring side and can even be scared too.

Environmental design can look pretty creepy and Otherworld can be pretty unsettling, I normally don't get scared by games but I do got to give the Otherworld design credit for how dark it is and with monsters running around. I do get somewhat unsettled walking alone in the dark and Otherworld does moderately capture that feeling.

Soundtrack is fantastic, the SH series has some of my favorite music and tunes in gaming and SH1 has some amazing ones the opening FMV song, Claw Finger, and Cafe Rest are my favorite songs in the game.

Overall, if you haven't played many survival horror games, my criticisms towards SH1 might not even apply to you but there is a solid game here if you can get past how easy it can be.

Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag Review

I'm not a big Assassin's Creed fan, I stopped caring for the series around somewhere in the mid 2010s due to my taste in games slowly changing and the series just absolutely refusing to make true on it's idea of being a "social stealth" game after so many games being made. I did however finish watching the TV show Black Sails and I was in the mood for a pirate game on top of me having some fond memories of AC4 due to it being the first PS4 game I played when I chose to be an early adopter of the system and it kind of helped me during my depression I had in 2013.

With that out of the way, what are my thoughts? This might be the last AC game I play where I choose to play it because I am geniunely interested and not because there is no other game I could play instead and need something to play for the moment since AC4 is just an "okay" game.

Some good I'll get out of the way is that the story is pretty good, I don't like the AC overarching story with the modern day stuff but I do like the stories involving the ancestors I prefer the series when it tries to have more complex characters and themes like AC1 and Unity and 4 I'm happy to say is one of those games. I like Edward Kennway's journey in how he starts off as someone who is selfish and only cares about himself to slowly becoming someone drops the notion that material gain is not what you need to live a happy life. The other characters are decently fleshed out and the Templars do a good job at making the player and by extension Edward doubt what he is doing. The decline of piracy and how the Templars is manipulating characters like Hornigold to join their side is done well done. As well as Edward driving away the people he cared because of his greed and how he doubts the Assassins and their Creed but slowly accepts it.

It's a solid story overall.

However the gameplay is where most my gripes with AC4 comes with. It's by no means "terrible" but it's one of those games that does multiple things and doesn't do any of them super well and the game design as a whole feels super confused.

To expand on my latter point, I always heard this was a "good pirate game but bad AC game", I don't get how this is the case. The pirate aspect of the game is mainly relegated to side missions and outside of getting reals and materials like metal and wood to upgrade the ship like heavy canons, hull, ram and mortal which you can do in about a few hours, you rarely need to pillage and plunder anything. You rarely need to upgrade Edward either.

What you will mainly be doing in AC4 is lots of stealth, some naval combat here and there, some on foot combat and parkour. None of these things are very fleshed out or well made.

Speaking stealth there is A LOT of tailing missions in the game, this is a common criticism for the game but there is too much stealth for a game where you play as a pirate. The stealth is slightly improved like more tall grass, a blow pipe, and a whistle. It's still not really the bare minimum. There is no crouch button, wall hugging is contextual, the whistle only works when it feels like it and on top of this, stealth only feels viable when there is lots of tall grass, if there isn't lots of stalking zones then stealth in AC4 without being spotted is a game of luck. The rooftops are filled with snipers and during the tailing missions the blow pipe isn't ideal since you need to aim while yout target is moving. Stealth kills do look nice, I'll give it that.

On foot and ship combat are both pretty basic stuff, on foot combat is basically just mashing the attack button with occasionally breaking someone's defense and pressing counter, enemies never change from the basic soldiers you fight in the early hours. The hard parts is having the game doing what you want since I could try to break someone defense or roll out of an axe attack and the timing for the counter is either too lenient or feels spotty. You also get some pistols but you rarely if ever need to use them. I'll give the combat credit is the kill animations look nice.

Ship combat is fun at first but after doing some upgrades and especially adding upgrades like heavy canons, mortar, swivel and hull becomes a game of getting up close, spam heavy canons, firing swivels and fire mortars at far away enemies rinse and repeat.

Boarding is an interesting concept until you realize that other ships can't attack you and enemies can't board you. While interesting it feels half baked.

The parkour is as always isn't very good and going back to AC parkour pre Unity can feel awkward with the lack of a button to press to climb up and no button press to go down. In AC4, holding sprint pretty much means you will climb everything as well as sprint so it leads to moments where I want to run but will climb instead or Edward just straight up refuses to climb.

Overall, AC4 has a solid and well told story with just "okay" gameplay, I can't picture myself playing again for a 3rd time and my opinions would change.

Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babel Review

Before I start this review off, I'm going to say that I don't like the MSX Metal Gear games at all and I found them to be bad if not terrible games. With that said, Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babel turned out to be a pretty decent surprise, I was expecting to play Ghost Babel for a few minutes or maybe an hour or two and then drop it, but to my surprise I actually got to the end of the game. This game is to me for the people who enjoy Metal Gear 2.

The game most certainly does feel like a Metal Gear game when you start it up, you have a pretty lengthy opening cutscene before you even get to start a new game. I'm also well aware that Ghost Babel is non canon and isn't part of the official Metal Gear timeline. With all that said, I did find the story to be decent if nothing special, I don't think it's as good as Metal Gear Solid on the Playstation but the writing in GB isn't as irritatingly ineptly written as the games after MGS1. You at least know a decent bit about the villains before they die even if they do the MGS1 thing of having long winded monologues before they die, all though unlike MGS1, they don't survive more than one encounter against Snake and they don't actively get in the way as much either. I did know more about the villains in Ghost Babel by comparison to say the Cobra Unit in MGS3, it isn't a high standard but it goes to show how much I don't care for MG's story post MGS2 at the most.

The side characters are okay, they are at least somewhat more involved than the support team of MGS3 all though most of their involvement in the story happens at the end.

If anything I can give points to the story is that for a portable game especially for a portable system that couldn't even do 3D graphics or have voice acting, the narrative is at least decent presented with well drawn still images and it did a good enough job at keeping me interested while never reaching the heights of MGS1.

The gameplay however is where Ghost Babel in a number of ways surpasses the console MGs while also being worse in some other ways. I'll start with the good.

In terms of moment to moment sneaking, GB is far better than the MSX games since for one you can actually hug walls to hide from enemies and enemies for the most part tend to get off your tail after being seen without being overly relentless unlike MG2.

Some improvements over MGS1 and 2 is that you actually have to pay attention to the environment where in the former you could just look at the radar screen the whole game and never suffer any consequences. In GB enemy sightlines are visible on radar and you can't see everything in front of you. Unlike MGS2-4, you don't have a tranq pistol with infinite range partnered with first person mode so you can walk into every room and headshot every guard before you even have to engage with the stealth and this is GB on easy no less. Unlike MGS3 and 4, Snake isn't that great at close quarters combat either meaning you have to avoid where in MGS3 anything outside of European Extreme means I can just CQC slam my way out. 

The bosses are also pretty easy but require slightly more thought since there is not first person aiming. 

One major improvement over MGS1 however is that many of the one off mechanics in that game actively pop up in Ghost Babel. Examples include electric floors that you need to remote missiles to destroy switches on, lasers detectable by smoke and thermal goggles, walls destroyed with C4, trap doors, toxic gas rooms, loud floors that alert guards to your presence upon running on them and mines get used far more than in MGS1.

On top of this GB has some ideas of it's own like electrified water, swimming stealth, foilage, guards that get up after a few seconds of being punched and even dark rooms that you can only progress through by using thermal goggles. Some of these I wish were in the game more like foilage and swimming stealth but you can chock this up to me wishing the game having more outdoors levels all though that means more dog enemies which is probably a good thing since trying to avoid them without having a silenced pistol equipped and shooting them is hard to do. I can't for the life of me figure out how to completely avoid them without getting spotted.

This leads me to a major negative that prevents me saying this game is amazing and that is the progression, it's hard to tell where to go for much of the game and even by exploring the rooms, it's hard to tell where to go and which part continues the story, your support team gives you vague hints too and might provide dialogue that don't give you the direction you need. Some parts can be obtuse too. Like how some doors aren't even textured telling you can go into them or with the C4 wall breaking sections none of the walls are textured with a crack telling you that you plat C4 on them.

There is also a part where you need to plant C4 on 4 parts of the map but they are randomized on each playthrough making a walkthrough useless.

The last mission however is great and the pathfing issues become less prevelant since there is less rooms to keep track of and since it's a small base, finding the true path becomes less of a large process of elimination. 

Overall, GB is a good game and worth checking out. I'd say check it out even if you are lukewarm on Metal Gear as a whole like I am. 

Slave Zero X Thoughts and Rant

I really wanted to enjoy Slave Zero X, call it a lesser known game of 2024 and say, "you should check this out if you like beat em ups of any kind" but I can't. I've seen many reviews particularly on Steam where they criticized the game as hardcore Devil May Cry and Guilty Gear fans but I'm going to try to approach this review as someone who has played a number of action games and games as a whole over the years.

There is so much wrong with the game and there is SOME moments of fun to be had so much of the game's combat mechanics feel inept, the way they are presented to you is poorly done, the campaign is structure is just lacking and the game as a whole is super unstable.

Slave Zero X on consoles and PC as of now seems to run really poorly. On PS5, I encountered very frequent crashing on Zone 2 where you fight the flame sword mini boss for the first time, got 2 infinite load screens of death and also a crash where the game showed some kind of error could of it's own and then I got booted out of the game. The game has been out for months and it still hasn't gotten patched enough where the game feels like a stable experience.

With that out of the way, there's other issues with Slave Zero X outside of how unstable it is, first of all the tutorial really sucks, it is so amateurish, you don't even get a tutorial where you play out the moves and learn them as you go, instead the game just has a bunch of screens telling you what each button and what each mechanic does and gives you barely much of an understanding how combat works. Here's an idea to fix this, Shou and Isamu are friends so why not put them in a sparring match teaching the player how the combat mechanics work? This seems to be a decent way to teach the player how to engage with it's combat mechanics.

Here's another big issue with Slave Zero X, it's a game inspired by fighting games and Devil May Cry and guess what? You have no move list by pressing the start menu. I'm not the kind of guy who looks into a move list but considering there's attacks I would probably want to know like the Burst EX move, I won't know unless I look it up online.

The checkpoint system is also very inconsistent, I'm already against any game adopting the NES and Arcade philosophy of redoing lots of content upon death but Slave Zero X is very inconsistent regarding this. Some levels have checkpoints while others don't. Some parts of the game checkpoints on the bosses and other parts of the game have you fight waves of enemies before you can fight the mini bosses again, and mini bosses and destroy your health bar pretty quickly. The amount of enemy waves you have to fight before getting to the hard part just makes me feel like the game is wasting my time before the game is getting me to the part that is causing me to get the game overs.

You also never get any new weapons, moves or abilties throughout the whole game, which can make the game feel more monotonous since getting new abilities and or something new is the exciting part of single player action games of any kind, yet Slave Zero just gives you the same toolset the whole game. Which now leads me to my next point.

The mini bosses are a pain in the ass, and they have ridiculous amounts of HP while you die very quickly by them and dispatching many of them pretty much revolves around the same thing: getting lucky. New weapons and abilties could possibly make you more proficient at killing them but killing them revolves around the same tactics, spam ordenace on smaller groups and hopefully hit them and the mini boss at the same time, and hope you can keep wailing on the mini boss as their shield are down so you don't have to fight them. The hammer user mini boss deserves a special reward for being one of the most annoying enemies in a game I have ever fought, he has a grabbing fetish, and there is no way to actively avoid his grab attacks. You can't attack him to stop, you can't dodge out the grab and jumping is too unreliable.

The kicker to all this and this is what made me quit the game is that you have to fight these mini bosses while seemingly infinitely respawning hitscanners are attacking you towards the end of the game. So if the mini bosses aren't eating away large chunks of health, the hitscanners will slowly cut away at your health.

There is also the fact that you get no inviciblity frames upon getting hit which means regular mobs can kill you by juggling you to death. Dodging I'm not sure gives you consistent I frame either.

With all this said, there is an interesting concept here. The idea of playing a beat em up where juggling and crowd control is the name of the game is a cool if even innovating but due to the reasons I mentioned, it feels like a half baked idea. It's trying to beat a beat em up and a fighting game and isn't that great at it.

Overall, Slave Zero X was something I waned to enjoy but there are so many other 2D beat em ups from this era alone you could be playing instead.

House of the Dead Overkill(Playstation 3) Review

I'm not that big of a rail/light gun shooter player, I've played a couple and I do enjoy them but they just feel like quick one and done kind of games, I do like Dead Space Extraction with that said. I played the House of the Dead remake that came out a few years ago and I didn't think much of it and I randomly saw House of the Dead Overkill on PS3 at a convention for a somewhat hefty asking price but I decided to buy it anyway.

With all that said, I didn't play HOTD Overkill with a Playstation Move controller which probably does hurt the enjoyment I could be getting from the game all though in all honesty the hard part playing the game with a PS3 controller are the bosses more so than the railing shooting enemy guanlets.

The gameplay is pretty fun, the AMS Magnum starting weapon felt pretty good to use, it sounded loud and powerful and killing enemies with it fely stimulating. I mainly used that and upgraded it since buying extra weapons felt like it had a steep asking price and it can be annoying watching characters hold different guns in a cutscene but you mainly used the AMS Magnum. That and it could be me playing on a PS3 controller but I could never find enough money in the levels to afford new guns or me moving the stick fast enough to pick up the random pieces of cash lying in the levels, the same can be said for getting health packs too.

I'm not even sure you can get a hard game over since I never got one and I was using analog stick aiming even when the bosses were really challenging with said analog stick aiming.

I'll talk about the bosses since the easiest one with analog stick aiming was the first and maybe the final boss, the latter is easy since you have a powerful chaingun that is more powerful than the Ars Magnum pistol and can do a lot of damage to the blue health bars.

This is where the challenge of many of the bosses past the first one comes from, with a Move, mouse or Wii Mote, this probably isn't too hard but with a controller, the hard part comes from depleting the blue boss attack health bar in time so you can damage them and prevent yourself from losing health. If you don't deplete this blue health bar in time, it regenerates, you lose health and you have to do the bosses patterns all over again and then the blue boss attack health bar pops up again. These parts are the hardest sections of the game with analog aiming. They are doable but if you are one of those people who want to play with a high score on the PS3 version without a Move controller, be warned.

Another small gripe is that my finger got tired a good number of times mashing the R1 button and the bosses does require you to have a fast trigger finger which can make the blue health bar depleting even more of an annoyance.

However, one thing about HOTD Overkill I do really like and this is surprising since I don't value it as much as some other people in the gaming community: the story. No, the story isn't going to be some deep thought provoking masterpiece, but it is really entertaining and fun to watch unfold. What carries much of it is the banter between Issac Washington and Agent G, the former is one of the funniest characters in a video game I have ever seen, if you ever watched the Boondocks animated series, Issac talks like one of the side characters from that series. His voice actor delivers his high strung profanity filled dialogue with absolute conviction and it's just super fun to watch him go crazy over the top and play off Agent G. The other characters besides Issac and Agent G are decent with Clement being a standout in how much of a crazy over the top seemingly Norman Bates inspired character he is. His voice actor also does a good enough job too.

The tone is also very over the top and doesn't take itself very seriously and I normally never use the "not taking itself seriously" as a get of a jail free card, but outside of the story shoving in a werid amount of incest subplots, the story just knows that it is stupid over the top stuff. It's clear from the start that the story is just insane absurdity.

Overall, HOTD Overkill is a solid time, and you might get even more enjoyment out of it with a mouse or motion controller. I do think the story is up there with Dead Space Extraction when it comes to be an engaging for an on rails shooter but for different reasons. The PS3 version of the game can be a little too steep for my tastes so definetely get the PC version which seems to be the easiest way to play the game.  

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero Review

I wasn't even planning to get this game anytime soon or not as soon as I did. I hated the Sand Land game so much that Sparking Zero came out around the same time I played that and I decided, "well let's play the better game based on a franchise by Akria Toriyama" so as a result, I bought Sparking Zero at full price rather than the discount I was originally going to get it on. With that all out of the way, how was it?

It's "good" but buying it for the single player and story mode at the current price point, I'm not so sure is a good idea, I know Sparking Zero's big appeal was the multiplayer but the story mode isn't really that great. I'd say it's a step down from the story modes in the very series Sparking Zero is trying to revive minus Tenkaichi 1. Before I get started on the story mode, I'll start talking about the gameplay.

This is very much a Tenkaichi game, of course it is, that's Sparking Zero's biggest draw, and as a guy who played those games a lot as a kid, and only replayed the 3rd game around 2 years ago, I felt right at home with everything, Sparking Zero is very much the modernized Tenkaichi game that many people wanted. You want a Tenkaichi game with a new look and covers the modern Dragon Ball content than look no furthur. No more need to mod Tenkaichi 3 anymore, I guess.

Even playing Sparking Zero, it's going to have it's detractors especially those that play more traditional fighting games, the game's mechanics have a lot more going for it than many other similar arena anime fighters. Naruto Storm for example can generally feel pretty mindless a lot of the time since the back and forth in Storm is basically landing the first hit and hoping you got the substitution jutsu meter lined up to break out of the combo string and maybe having an ultimate jutsu lined up.

Sparking Zero on the other hand gives you more, you got Z counters, high and low blocks, parries, sparking mode, charge attacks, dashes as well there being a distance game where you can use ki blasts and energy attacks to prevent your opponent from powering up or if you suck at close quarters combat like me, you can try to constantly play the distance game. There is beam struggles and clashes to account for to.

There are issues Sparking Zero has like Z counter timing and parrying for every character being the same and many of the attacks can be boiled down to energy beams and rushing melee attacks and a lot of the combos for the characters are just square, triangle, square, or square, square, triangle, but as far as this style of fighter is concerned, Dragon Ball Sparking Zero has more going it for it than many of it's contemporaries.

However the single player is where SZ drops the ball for me. By no means is it, "bad" and it does a decent enough job at being a bear minimum single player but at the same time, the "what ifs" don't amount to much since the story decisions pop up too few and far between.

Much of the character routes outside of Goku don't have much effort put into them. It's decently presented even if it could be of a higher standard since some scenes are still images with voices and other are full on cutscenes.

The biggest problem is the other characters' routes outside of Goku have large chunks of story missing for them. Vegeta has no Super content, Gohan has Sayain and Namek Sagas skipped over, Piccolo goes up to the Androids, Future Trunks only covers Goku Black, and the villain routes felt like they were tacked on. The whole thing feels like Dragon Universe from Budokai 3 and I'm not sure SZ does a good job capturing that since at least DU covers every major character's fight throughout the series. All the main fights with Jiren, Goku Black and Frieza are covered but it didn't seem they needed to be there since those characters popped in one saga and Frieza was gone for so long of DB until Super. It also doesn't even include the fact that all the routes have the Universe 6 saga skipped over. Doing anything past Goku's campaign felt like a chore.

Another major aspect of the story mode that isn't really that great is the difficulty, and no it's not the Great Ape Vegeta fight, it's the amount of times the story mode has the boss rush handicap matches and how canon ending requirements for some characters requires you to wait for dialogue before finishing off an enemy. The amount of the former can really annoy me since it's the only way SZ adds difficulty. You wil have a hard time fighting one opponent, then another character with lots of health appears, and you may have to fight 4-5 characters at once.

As a result, I mainly just played a distance game, spammed charged up energy attacks and special moves to win. It felt like I was just cheesing because I had to since the AI is relentless when it comes to close quarters fighting. It didn't feel like the game wanted me to play the "fun" way.

Overall, SZ is a good game, but if you aren't playing online, wait for a discount for the single player content.