Jackie Chan Stuntmaster Review

This was a game I never even heard of for the longest time, I just randomly heard of it because it was one of Radical Entertainment's first games and it was a 3D melee brawler on the PS1 or at least that's what I thought of going in. In reality, Stuntmaster isn't really a 3D beat em up, it's more a 3D platformer in the vein of Crash Bandicot with beat em up sections.

The story and presentation is pretty charming, there isn't much of one and there isn't many cutscenes but what cutscenes there are pretty charming with how exaggerated everything looks and how it seems like they to combine real life with a cartoony art style. I kind of wished there was more of a story and cutscene here since I like how goofy the presentation the game has in the occasional cutscenes that popped up.

The melee combat is kind of okay, I wouldn't really call it outright bad since much of the game I was able to play without using cheats. First things I noticed right away was the geniune lack of invicibility frames and how there are no crowd control attacks, so if you try to take on 3 enemies attacking you at once, it might as well be a game over. However, Stuntmaster much to my surprise has a dedicated dodge button, and while you can't cancel out of a combo, I did spend much of my time, doing the various punching and kicking combos and then dodging after completing them, it was often a game of taking enemies out one at a time rather than fighting groups head on. Weapons also came in handy but they can be a little imprecise to hit enemies with since the combos for them can be a 50-50 guessing game of me landing a hit or Jackie getting hit and then dropping the weapon.

The bosses are surprisingly some of the better on the PS1, they aren't the most amazing, but they have far more going on than survival horror, Tomb Raider or various shooter bosses on the same system, since each one has their own gimmick and you have to wait for the right time to hit and them while you dodge their attacks. It's kind of on par with Crash, Spyro and MGS1 bosses. There's only a few of them though.

However combat doesn't really change all that much, you don't get any new abilties, combos and combat remains the same for pretty much all of the game, I was starting to bored of it so I pretty much used an infinite health cheat towards the end of the game. There is stuff like environmental hazards and how you and even your enemies can fall off various stages but it serves to be more annoying than fun, it can be amusing to see enemies fall to their death but it happening to you just makes it more frustrating than anything, and the game has lengthy load times on top of a lives system so I just abused the save states on emulator.

This is where I get into my next major negative, the platforming is very much like Crash Bandicot, the problem with this is that everything Stuntmaster does with it's platforming, Crash does better. For one you get to see Crash's shadow when platforming and there isn't anything like this in the latter on top of this, if I want to play Crash Bandicot, I'd go play Crash. There is one impressive subway setpiece and it's pretty cool the first time but it gets reused so much that the whole thing gets tiresome and turns into diminishing returns due to how often it pops up in the sewer level.

If you like the 3D beat em up sections, the platforming is just going to annoy you, if you like the platforming, the beat em up sections will annoy you, I wonder who this game is even for at times because of this.

The final big issue is that levels just go on for too long. Usually in a platformer, levels tend to go by very quickly depending on how good you are but combined this with the beat em up sections and this pretty much make the levels feel longer even though all of them are less than 15 minutes since beat em up gameplay in most if not every game tend to be lengthy and like I said before neither platforming or beat em up gameplay is enchanced by each other.

Overall, I wanted Jackie Chan Stuntmaster to be a hidden game and even possibly being a 3D beat em up that predates the first Devil May Cry and Onimusha games that is actually pretty good and it wasn't. I wouldn't call the game terrible but it all in all it just feels incredibly confused in terms of game design.

Resident Evil: Survivor Review

I had borderline zero expectations going into this game, I heard for years that it was "awful", not very well made and a terrible game but to much to my surprise, I had a decent enough time with it, is it a great game? No. As a whole RE Gun Survivor was a B grade weekend rental spinoff game. I was expecting myself to absolutely loathe it but instead it turned out to be a moderate amount of fun.

The best way of describing Gun Survivor is that it is to RE7 what RE Dead Aim is to RE4.

Gun Survivor in a lot of ways is esstentially a first person shooter, meets light gun shooter with elements of a surivival horror game.

A big point of contention regarding Gun Suvivor is the controls, it uses traditional tank controls while it being in first person, if you dislike tank controls, you are pretty much going to dislike this game right away but if you are accustomed and used to tank controls this is easy enough to get used to.

However a big issue with the game is more so the camera and how this part of resembles more of a light gun shooter. Every time you get hit in Gun Suvivor, the camera tracks and follows the enemy that hits you. This is fine for one or two enemies but when there are more than 2-3, and especially when they are attack you from your left and right flank, it can get disorienting getting hit by one enemy then the camera tracks to it, you shoot it, get hit, camera tracks him and shoot that enemy. I really think either the game could've had 2-3 enemies on screen or just not have enemies that attack you from your left and right side.

This might sound like the game is terrible but here is the thing that makes Gun Surivivor a solid game, the game just knows how to pace out it's ammo and healing items. Every time you took a lot of damage, after a few rooms, you will eventually get some herbs and a first aid spray, every time there are some tougher enemies you got to fight the game will spawn some shotgun, grenade launcher and magnum rounds.

On top of all this, you can run past many of the enemies in it's more open rooms on top of the base pistol having infinite ammo making a decent fallback weapon to kill weaker enemies with. I often combined tactics of running away and shooting enemies.

There is also survival horror elements like collecting certain key items to progress furthur into the various levels of the game. This is nothing too complex but it does do a decent enough job at translating the older RE forumla into the context of a first person game much like what RE7 would do much later. The levels are small enough to have a good idea of which item is needed to progress.

Towards the end of the game I did act like a total moron and used up all my powerful weapons on weaker enemies and didn't save my grenade launcher for the actual final boss on the helicoptor launch pad, this was me being an idiot and I did resort to cheating to beat it but this is more my fault.

The game is also about 2 hours long so many of the issues I do have with it isn't too aggrevating due it's brevity.

However one big negative is that the voice acting is pretty bad and not a funny bad like the original RE. Some parts of it can be funny but it isn't on the level of the original game. It's more on the lines of just dull bad.

The continue system also isn't the greatest, I bypass it with emulator save states but at the same time, you only get a few lives and ran out and it's back to the start of the game, stuff like this is why I'm glad I emulate most of the old games I play.

Overall, RE Gun Survivor much like Dino Stalker wasn't the bad game that I was lead to believe for so many years, is it a amazing? No but at the same time, I played far worse games than this. Go into it with super low expectations and you might have some fun with this game like I did.

Assassin's Creed: Rogue Review

AC Rogue was a game I played almost 10 years ago and I didn't think very highly of it even at the time and playing it again around the time of release hasn't improved my opinion on it. I was very antagonistic towards the franchise around that time and I thought me being a bit softer on it now might improve my opinion on this particular game, turns out it didn't. I mainly just played it because it came with the AC Rogue Collection on Nintendo Switch.

Speaking of the Nintendo Switch version, I can't speak for it on other systems, but compared to Black Flag's Switch port, Rogue's isn't very good, there is constant stuttering and even frame rate drops from time to time and the game even crashed on me at one point. I don't know if the remaster is better on other systems but Switch isn't the ideal way to play.

Anyways as for the game itself, I would never consider Rogue to be an awful game, I've played a couple of bad games over the years despite not being a connaisseur of them, however I can say that I'm that for painfully average games and AC Rogue is very much that.

The story is a bit on the messy side, I wouldn't consider to be absolutely terrible but not good either, but as a whole I'd say it gets more wrong than right. Shay Cormac is an okay character since he talks and sounds like a guy who wants to do the right thing and the mission in Portugal does a decent enough job at making the player the feel the weight of Shay's actions while the character himself is slowly horrified by everything he did, this part of the story was handled pretty well or how Shay is pretty conflicted in general in how he doesn't want to kill any of his former Assassin friends minus him constantly saying, "I make my own luck" so many times, this part of the story I think is okay.

The rest of the story besides Shay's character is very messy. The Assassins in this game are portrayed as bloodthirsty power hungry maniacs doing whatever it takes to win against the Templars, this isn't terrible on it's own but the story doesn't really make clear whether or not if the Assassins are on the losing side of the war and would do whatever it takes to win.

The characters are pretty underdeveloped and not enough is done to make me attached to them, this could be attributed to the short length but the interactions never really do a good job at establishing multiple ideas or have anything "pop" out that makes me want to feel conflicted about eventually killing them. Characters introduced in AC3 and 4 like Adewale, Achilles and Haytham Kenway don't really have much to do or any interesting subplots, they just feel like they are "there". It's just hard to picture Adewale going full heel after AC4 and the story does a poor job at making it feel believeable too. Then there is just other prequel related issues like how Achilles never even telling Connor about Shay in AC3.

I've complained about the story but the gameplay is also once again on the painfully average side.

One thing I'll give Rogue over AC4 is that the number of tailing missions has been noticeably reduced and I'm very thankful for that, the missions in general have far more variety to them than AC4 did which is nice.

The problem is that everything introduced in this game, AC3 and 4 already did, I wouldn't mind this if Rogue just did the, "you played AC4, now let's just add to it" but it doesn't there's still multiple tutorials teaching AC players stuff he already knows and it still does stuff that AC4 already did, if you played it you pretty much know what to expect.

The only big innovations are ice bergs during naval combat, stalker enemies, the ability to throw fire from the back of the ship and your ships being able to be boarded. The ice bergs and enemy ship boarding are nice additions all though the ice berg only felt useful once and the enemies boarding your ships came in handy late game. Speaking of which, just be warned, the game never explicity states it, but you will need to grind and upgrade your ship to beat the penultimate mission since you have to might two really powerful ships and if you never upgraded the ship before that point, you are in for a hard time, luckily the requirements are steep and the game autosaves the resoruces you pick up and you retain them even after death but your milage may vary.

The stalker enemies are more annoying than anything, at first it was interesting since it was AC's multiplayer being repurposed for single player and I wouldn't mind a whole game revolving around this but all they really do is just get in your way. They pop up during some of the main missions and all they really do is pop when you want to complete a specific objective, want to kill or protect some guys? Track down the stalkers, kill them, then proceed. It's a good idea on paper but just feels half baked especially when all they do is impeed progress.

Overall, AC Rogue was a painfully average game 10 years ago and it's painfully average now, play out of curosity.

Timesplitters: Future Perfect Review(updated)

Timesplitters Future Perfect was a game I played back in around 2016 when I was trying to complete all the PS2 games I bought back at a local Flea Market back in 2012. I replayed on emulator back in 2022 and now it's been added to the PS Premium Classics section and I decided to play the game for a 3rd time and I had a blast playing it yet again sure the shooting mechanics might not be the deepest of all time but if you want to play that has charm and is great fun to play moment to moment, then you really can't go wrong with Future Perfect.

The sound design and damage animations were already great but the addition of blood splatter when enemies get shot makes the combat even more satisfying so while the much of the shooting might consist of you fighting hitscan machine gun enemies, the act of shooting and hitting them just feels so graitfying that it can feel very stimulating in the moment. I just love unloading an entire round of bullets on to an enemy and seeing all the exaggerated animations and blood splatter.

There is an actual overarching plot this time and it's surprisingly well written for an fps, the character interactions are funny and Cortez in general feels like he is a parody of the badass space marine protagonist that is so often seen in FPS games. It also makes repeating sections of levels compelling since it's tied to the story and it's interesting play out events you already experienced since they were a mystery and you get to eventually play it out.

The OST is still pretty good, but not as good as TS2's. I also like how there are more checkpoints and that health is actually properly spaced out throughout all the levels. I can actually play this game on Normal difficulty.

The additions of dedicated grenade throw and a melee attack button are an obvious inspiration from the Halo series, grenade throwing gets some good use with you throwing them to defeat some tankier enemies, it's especially useful during the late game when robots gets introduced or to thin out some of the enemies when the enemy count starts to get higher.

Two massive improvements over TS2 is that there is a dedicated targeting ridicule now so lining up my shots and getting headshots doesn't feel like a game of luck and snipers work properly.

Now, the issues, first, Anya's commentary while can be funny, it can also be very grating in that she can point out the balant obvious and the game can be very hand holdy in general comapred to TS2. The Gravity Gun like arm thing barely gets enough use and felt like it didn't need to be in the game at all. It's good for getting the occasional secret armor and health pick up but that's about it. I wish there were some more secnarios with it.

The vehicle sections while decent, does feel like they were kind of borrowing from Halo for the sake of it since there are probably about 2-3 vehicle sections the whole game, they are "okay" but like the Gravity Gun arm glove, I would've liked some more situations featuring them.

The titular Timesplitters are irritating to fight since their projectiles always home in on you and they keep darting around the map and they take an insane amount of damage to kill, the penultimate sniping section might be the hardest part of the game due to how weak your sniper rifle is and how big of damage sponges the Timesplitters can be.

This might not be an issue depending on your point of view, but the game's campaign feels like it adopted the Half Life approach rather than TS2's Goldeneye and Perfect Dark inspired objective system. So the single player can feel more scripted and linear when compared to TS2's approach of, "here's the level and do the objectives in mostly whatever order you want". I might prefer the Half Life style since the objective system sort of feel like it's wasting when you just miss one objective and then look around just to beat the level.

At the same time, having played TS2 again, while TS3 has the issue with the one off mechanics due to the nature of the idea of time hopping, the various themes and mechanics going on for two rather than one, certain ideas can feel like you get to play around with them by comparison. The energy gun in one of the later levels at the very least gets introduced to you and you get to play around with it more to destroy shields and contraptations by comparison to TS2 where stuff like environmental objects being used for level progression or puzzles only happens once. The warm hole sections in TS3 pop up enough that not only adds to the story but it feels moderately fleshed out due to it being a recourring theme in the levels even the flamethrower in the Haunted House mission feels like I'm encouraged to use to save ammo with it plus the level itself being longer where if this was TS2, the level would be short and on top of being a one off.

Overall, TS3 is still a really good game that I enjoy yet again for a 3rd time, it just nails the moment to moment gameplay while also having a good story.

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.