Twisted Metal(2012) Review

Twisted Metal 2012 or PS3, this game is a weird one. I played the game 9 years ago back in 2014 on PS Now and I didn't like it very much then I played it again 2022 and still couldn't beat it but after the release of the show and since Sony didn't provide a modern and updated new entry in the series, I decided to play TM 2012 yet again, and shockingly, I was able to beat it and get to the end credits, and even more shockingly, I think this is one of the best games in the series and is one of my favorite PS3 exclusives, I will admit the game has some issues particularly with some of the difficulty spikes in the campaign but overall, this game was mostly a joy for me to play.

I'll start with the good and by addressing the elephant in the room, the single player campaign in particular the way it's structured. In TM 2012, you don't play as a wide array of drivers with their own vehicle and endings like in the previous games instead you play as three drivers and you get to choose a wide variety of vechicles for most of the missions. This may sound like questionable design but what I like this campaign structure is that trying to get to the end and roll credits takes a lot longer than doing one driver route in the previous games. On top of that, I love that this game had mid campaign cutscenes like Black and the there is more of an overarching plot by comparison to the previous games where each driver went the fighting game arcade mode route where every character had their own ending which are all isolated incidents rather than having a larger interconnected story while I get why games like this are designed this way, it's hard to really make myself beat all the characters routes and be exposed to the same enviroments and bosses over and over really starting to slowly make me dislike the repetition of the asset reuse. Plus the live action cutscenes in TM 2012 have a decent production value to them and it beats the original PS1 TM's text crawl endings.

This new structure allows to at least make it feel like I am slowly going through a fully fledged campaign rather than forcing myself to get all the character endings and hope I don't get burned out by the before mentioned heavy asset reuse and going through an hour or two of gameplay to get an ending that lasts less than 5 minutes.

Another thing that helps the campaign feel more fleshed out and this is also a big point of contention for TM 2012 is the attempt at variety from the usual free for all deathmatch fares. In TM 2012, there is different game types outside of that like endurance, fighting "Juggernauts" where they keep spawning more contestants until you take out the former, fighting in a constantly moving arena or you will take damage, racing, and different takes on free for all like traps or changes in the map. For a guy who likes it when games try to use their base mechanics but change up the situation and context in which the mechanics are used, TM 2012's campaign felt like it was made for me.

Most of these are hits and the only ones especially the moving arenas, and the endurance matches since they all involve the core gameplay of attacking other vehicles by getting pick ups and using special but adds a different spin on things than just trying to simiply destroy the other enemy. I am not a big fan of is the races and the later "Juggernaut" battles. Most of the attempts at situational depth does a good job of not having every objective be the same deathmatch which works since the campaign overall is much longer to get to the "end".

I also like about this campaign that is also more "accessible" to newcomers and while it can be offputting that the AI has a knack for coming after the player alot, the game also balances this out by having most levels giving you a garage to switch vehicles, health pickups being showing on rader and during gameplay, driver kills, and letting your switch between most vehicles during gameplay or before you get into a level.

The game has an amazing soundtrack that fits the game extremely well both licensed and original music both do a great job at fitting the game and enhancing the action. The licensed metal music and the original metal and techno tracks all sound great and does a good job at immersing the player in the action rather than just have battles be nothing but awkward SFX the whole time. The annoucer voice sounds great and is up there with the Halo multiplayer one when it comes to listening to them saying their lines. He does have a knack for telling you the obvious like "find health" even though you could already tell by looking at your health bar, but it's not a super big issue. I do like that he tells you that your special is refilled which is a nice way of reminding the player that you can use them instead of cycling through everything and then seeing your special just so happens to refill. 

Final positive is that the gamefeel, polish and feedback is the best the series has ever been, every hit, the vehicle handling during the battles, and the explosions and "driver kills" all feel awesome. The blood splatter when running over a driver does a good job at provining a satisfying stimulation as well as serving a gameplay purpose by rewarding the player with health. 

Now the bad, the difficulty spikes particularly with bosses, races and Juggernaut battles can be pretty bad. The races can be cheesed with Crimson Fury and his forgiving handling in fact, I can even say his handling regarding how well he can drift is more forgiving than many racing games. The final race with the Sweet Bot all though you might need to do a couple of restarts and memorize the track as well as learn the controls of the Sweet Bot in order for you to get past this. The big issue with the final race in Dollface's campaign is the the vehicle physics are just too unforgiving with how you need to do super precise jumps since you make the jump and then move so fast that you will fall off and then be in last place and missing a jump or falling off might as well be a restart from the begginning.  

Juggernaut in Dollface's campaign can be with helicoptor known as "Talon". It can be a good vehicle to cheese the later parts of the game in general since he can fly and every other vehicle are strictly land based but don't let that fool you Ghost Town Gulch is a hard level since the map is very small and the Juggernauts can rip your health in half very quickly and they can be quite the damage sponges, just remember to use the Special and try to avoid getting into it's path way too much and pick up the mega guns and with enough patience, it's beatable. 

The bosses are pretty decent for this kind of game but can be frustrating since they poorly explain themselves. The Brothers Grim is easy enough. Iron Maiden however can be bad regarding this. There is multiple steps in the first few phase to damaging and it never tells you to destroy the red limo and then launch the hostage and then fire a nuke at the Dollface mech, figuring this out can be quite difficult since barely hints at this when fighting her.

The final boss in particular is solid and has enough going on to have it be more than just spam pickups and specials while doing hit and run tactics. The first phase is that but later on you fight in a pinball machine of sorts and you have more than enough opportunities to recover health and you can summon explosive clowns to help you destroy the Sweetooth face mask, and the timing window to launch yourself at him is forgiving enough too. Then you go through a death trap gaunlet that will admittedly take a few tries to get past and the final battle is pretty good and a solid challenge without being super challenging provided if you knew how to use the Talon vehicle before reaching this point. The magnet can also be very finicky but that's my only major gripe outside of that. 

Luckily there are mid boss checkpoints and what could be very rage inducing moments is allievated. Once you figure them out, they are decently entertaining fights and have far more going for them than say a lot of FPS bosses do.

Overall, TM 2012 is a very good game, but there are difficulty spikes along the way, and their might be frustrating moments that might make you want to rage quit but just remember to look up some walkthroughs and tips from time to time like every game with difficulty spikes. It's easily one of my favorite games in the series. 

Twisted Metal(1995) Review

Not a bad game and can be enjoyable but I can't help but find it to be rough around the edges in a lot of aspects. The handling of the vehicles is decent enough and there is a good feedback to the action. My big issue with the game overall is the difficulty in that it's easy to for you to get to low health while trying to widdle down the health of one or two cars and your only means of recovering health is using healing pads which have a limited use even with save states and rewind, the game was starting to become tedious to play with the amount of times I would rewind to lower the amount of damage I was taking and trying my hardest to finally lower the health of the other cars so I can eliminate them.

Fighting one or three cars is fine but anything beyond three is where the tedium sets in since it's basically a battle of hit and run tactics and hoping your pickups and specials land so you can lower the enemy's health fast enough and also hope you take as little damage as possible and minimize the use of the healing pads as much as you can. I really did wish there was more ways to recover health outside of the healing pads in the game since that could've helped make the battles less of monotonous hit and run and spamming pick ups and specials and pleading that you land direct hits while not taking much damage yourself. On top of this while the vehicle handling works and aiming works well for one or three opponents trying to be precise with driving and using your pick ups and specials while hitting enemies and making sure to make quick getaways to avoid damage was very cumbersome. Black is also designed this way when not using cheats but the vehicle handling and the more forgiving aiming made that game feel beatable by comparison.

I eventually gave up and started to use cheats since the cars had so much health, healing yourself is incredibly limited and the game seems to require you to fail multiple times just to finally beat the levels and I just didn't have the patience for that. The endings for the character is a big reason why I never played with more of the characters outside of Sweetooth since all the endings are basically text crawls making it even harder to get invested in me getting more of the endings since all them are designed in the exact same way and I would rather just Youtube search them.

Not a bad game and there is some fun to be had, but I can see why I was never really into this game when I first played, and I only played because I got it for free from downloading the PS3 version of the game years ago. There is a solid foundation here, but later games improved on the formula big time.

Resident Evil Death Island Review

The movie surpassed my super low expectations I had for it, the movie isn't geniunely good at all but it's not the garbage I was expecting it to be either. It's middle of the road and I am surprised it accomplished that much.

It establishes itself that it's a dumb action movie from the first 10 minutes with how Leon finds the truck holding a vital character minutes after being told about his relevance to the plot and getting into a dumb motorcycle chase and highway fist fight later, if you can't accept the first 10 minutes of the movie and then you might as well shut it off. I can go on about the dumb crap in the movie, and some of it that bugged me was how they established a virus that acts like FOXDIE from MGS and how it's basically kryptonite for RE characters, which is a funny way of creating stakes and tension for the movie since it needs to seperate the team and make sure Rebecca and Jill play their roles in the story somehow.

A big issue however is the that villain is basically Obito Uchiha garbage levels of writing where he wants to destroy the world because he was forced to kill his friend. Give me a fucking break, and so much of his character is expressed through endless amounts of excessive monologuing most of it is during the middle point of the movie. His backstory is just too much of a boring sob story to even make me care and his characterization being expressed through monologuing doesn't help.

Some nitpicks as a "fan" of the games is that it's rather silly to see characters struggle against typical zombies when they have beaten them over 9000 times by now and it's also rather amusing to see Lickers get killed by one shot to the head with no use of a shotgun or high powered weapons considering in REmake 2 they take over 3 shotgun rounds to kill and the REmake games were the ones being refrenced in earlier in the movie.

Good things about the movie is that Jill is handled decently and is the best character in the movie. Her character is decently foreshadowed as being the "underdog" lone wolf of the team is decently contextualized within the first 20 minutes. I also like some of the nods to the games like RE5 and 6 which kind of does a good job at creating some degree of a continuity in a franchise as messy as RE's. Rebecca's role I also kind of liked since it does a good at making her establish her role as the medic of the team and the action was decent and wasn't wannabe John Wick like Vendetta was.

The ending climax with the super sayian hulk wannabe boss fight was hilariously over the top. It's basically an over the top climax boss fight you'd find in an RE game particularly the third person over the shoulder games.

Overall, for an RE movie it wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be especially considering how much RE content has been produced as of late. Still, not "good" but at the very least tolerable.

Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara Review

For a game I randomly found out was coming out soon and a game that I got because it was on a discount on PS Plus at that, it turned out to be a solid and enjoyable "blind buy".

The game isn't going to reinvent the wheel and if you played a 3D platformer especially something like Super Mario 3D World or Sackboy a Big Adventure, you will probably be familar with many of the platforming challenges and gimmicks the game throws at you.

To this game's credit unlike the above mentioned games, you don't need to secret hunt and get them while playing the main levels to unlock more of the main story. The game is pretty short if you don't try to 100% it and find and all the content and do all the platforming levels in the sole purpose of just getting to the end of the stage. I feel like the game's relatively cheap price and how short it is makes a game that is worth checking out if you want a quick and relaxing game to play. Map pieces are easy to come across after beating all the levels and the boss on that island, you may need to "backtrack" to unlock more of the "main" island but I only had to do this twice.

The game comes with a "relaxed" mode but if you played a platformer of any kind before, this mode is unnesscary since the game is pretty easy to anyone who has some experience with the genre, well any that requires you to actually position, and successful land jumps as opposed to playing games with automated platforming like Uncharted and Assassin's Creed or many AAA games released in the 7th and 8th gen.

While many of the ideas and gimmicks the game features you have seen before like ground pounding switches, speed challenges while the camera is moving in one direction, chase sequences, slight puzzle solving involving orbs, underwater 2D levels, disappearing platforms, platforms that disapperar and reappear depending on when you jump, spike traps and falling platforms. As well as level themes like ice, fire and water levels. Everything that the game has you've seen before, to the game's credit it executes these ideas with a solid amount of polish and the controls are mostly fine to the point where jumping around and avoiding traps and doing all the above mentioned things feels has a solid enough challenge to the point where it doesn't seem like the game is playing itself and it's too brainlessly easy.

This might turn some people away I do like how checkpoints restore your health upon them being activated which is can be both reliving and confusing at the same time, reliving in that it gives you more of a fighting chance when doing the levels and confusing because since I am accustumed to platformers of any kind giving me the same amount of health when activating a checkpoint, I always assumed I have 1 hp after taking 1 or 2 out the 3 total hp I have rather than having my health restored upon activation. I welcome this but it can be confusing another difficulty "tweak" I like compared to other platformers is when you do a puzzle or get keys in to progress it remembers what you did after you died, this may be considered too easy but considering how impatient I am now and how I especially dislike doing the same puzzles after dying I do like that you can just continue on with the level upon completing it once since now you aren't doing a tedious rethread of old ground by solving a puzzle you already know how to do.

Jumping around, avoiding a death and getting one of the game's level tokens for getting one of the time milestones does a have a decent amount of satisfaction to it. The levels have a lot going on due to above mentioned gameplay gimmicks so even though the levels are short, the levels themselves have a lot happening in them and they all get remixed, or reused enough to the point where the game never gets one note for the 4 hours it lasts.

My only big gripe with the game is that your base "run" speed is way too slow and your sprint speed when you hold sqaure should've been the default movement speed when you move the left anlog stick. Your default movement speed is just way too slow for my tastes and especially when the game requires you to be much faster and precise during it's "harder" platforming challenges. It's easy to get used to but it can get annoying sometimes.

Another issue is that the "final boss" is basically a chase and not an actual fight and the squid you fight before him felt more like a final boss compared to him.

For those who want a hardcore challenge out their platformers will have to look elsewhere since the game is generally easy, if you don't mind easy but satisfying platformers to play then this is worth checking out.

High on Life Review

For a guy who knows nothing about Rick and Morty and it's creator, I found this to be a decent and enjoyable time, was it worth paying full price especially considering I bought it on PS5 and got it because I liked how the game looked? Probably not, is it a good game to get on a sale or "free" on Games Pass, definately. I mainly got the game because somehow a single player AAA FPS title with no open world or online elements actually got made in today's day and age, and that was enough to make me check it out.

On to the game itself, best way of describing it is that what if Oddworld a Stranger's Wrath, Halo, New Doom were blended together? You basically get this game. You have the the elements of your weapons being "alive" and the bounty system of Stranger's Wrath, the regen health, enemy line up and reloading of Halo and the fast movement, hold all your weapons and "glory kills" of New Doom.

Moment to moment combat is solid and enjoyable with decent weapon feedback for firing your gun and decent damage animations when you kill your enemies, even though the combat itself lacks depth due to reasons I will go more into later, the act of causing carnage was handled well enough to make me see the game through to the end but at the same time the game just has one major issue that prevents combat from anything more than "decent fun" and that is the enemy roster. The game basically uses the Halo enemy roster where so many of the enemies use guns and they strafe side to side while occasionally shooting projecticles at you and you also have the series' trademark regen health, where enemies come in different sizes like small, medium and large, the issue is that unlike Halo where you have a two weapon limit and ammo had to either be collected or swapped entirely, in High on Life, all the guns have unlimited ammo where the only drawback is that you have to reload. Partner that with New Doom glory kill system and many of the battles consist of me using Gus upclose and then getting a scripted melee kill.

Also unlike Halo, certain guns don't have a high damage to flesh and shields, and since High on Life doesn't have this and let's you carry all your guns, this means nothing stops you from spamming Gus' shotgun blasts and you can take more damage than you can in Halo so basically combat is just fire, fire, reload, melee kill, get shot, occascionally take damage, and then wait for health to regen. Since so many of the enemies are like this, I had no reason to use no other gun than Gus.

A Doom Eternal style system where enemies are weaker to certain guns could've greatly have enhanced the basic combat the game has since it complements the fact that guns have unlimited ammo and you can hold all of them.

To this game's credit, the game does break up the pace with platforming and some occasional puzzle solving which does help break up combat and prevents the game from being way too monotonous. The game could've used some of the gun abilities a lot more like Sweezy's alt fire and the magnet boots.

Also, the game also felt like it was running out of money when the Blim City invasion happened because then you are going back to old levels that are barely any different from each other.

Another credit to the game that the bosses while easy are more creative and have better geniune challenge than a lot of FPS bosses especially before the days of Doom 2016, you got to at the very least dodge attacks and recognize patterns instead of spamming your strongest weapon and tank hits and then win.

The story and writing is okay, it was the game's selling point but I found the story decent but I did wish the guns and enemies would shut up since the talk way too much. The game does try too hard to be funny at times but the overall story is okay I did like characters like Gene and the main story moments between all the guns and their banter. It's nothing special but it is engaging enough for an FPS story.

Overall, High on Life was a decent time even if I feel like a couple of change and refinements could make a game I highly reccomend as a standalone game rather than a solid Game Pass "freebie".

Demonic Supremacy Review

I know me talking about this game at all probably won't mean much considering the fact that as of now it has no HLTB page, most people probably "beat" the game through the level skip cheat and got the all the trophies and achievements that way and how it's basically an indie game that released with little to no fanfare to the point where you can barely find any reviews on it, and it pains me to say this since I want to enjoy any game I go but this game was just so bad on so many levels.

People often compare this game to Doom when in reality, it is basically just an bargain bin indie knockoff of People Can Fly's Painkiller. It has the "hell" theme and asethetic, the metal music, the rewards you can unlock when you find money throughout the levels to unlock special abitlities, the enemies, levels and weapons look like stuff straight out of Painkiller, if you ever wanted a low a budget knock off of Painkiller this game is as close you will get to that.

I will admit, 50 levels for less than $20 is rather impressive when you play it at first. But then the more I played the game, it's basically the same recycled enemies, levels, asthetics, and gameplay for the whole thing. Basically this is the game what people like to bash Serious Sam for being. SS introduces new enemies, new weapons, and have you progress throughout the entire level and go through arena after arena and then you slowly make it to the end making the level completion feel like a journey where Demonic Supremacy has standalone arenas with resused level design and asthetics with cramped level design and for some of the levels you knowing exactly where enemies will spawn from, and just hold the fire button and watch them die and they spawn, this pretty much feels like FPS level design that is a pisstake.

Sure the game might seem to have more mechanically going on like the game giving you a shout attack and a dash, but the dash gives a white swipe on the screen whenever you use it making it hard to tell where you are on the arena when using it and the arenas are already too small to begin with. The shout was mostly useless since it rarely killed that many enemies.

The "BFG" style weapon felt awkward to use since it took forever to charge up and would hardly ever fire so I stopped using after a point since the greande launcher was more effective.

The weapons sounds and damage animations are nothing special and do very little to make me want to beat the game properly.

I started to play with cheats since the cramped arenas were, repetitive enemies and levels were starting to annoy me and I wanted to beat the game with some degree of "honor" and not use the level select cheat to get all the trophies but I gave up and eventually used the cheat to "beat" the game.

The game may look kind of appealing especially with it's less than $20 price tag but stay far away from or just use the level skip cheat to get the Platinum Trophy after all looking up trophy data for the game and everyone one of them has a "common" on it where most games would have say "rare" the more you go down. I wonder why that is...

Metroid Prime Remastered Review

Metroid Prime even playing the game years after I beat it through an emulator is still the engaging and enjoyable game that it was all those years ago. To this day, the game is still the well designed 3D metroidvania as it was when it first released. Not many games after or since have the feel of that MP does. 

The first thing I want to adress is the whole "first person adventure" the game gets labelled as. I disagree with this term pretty strongly and it's just nebulous at best, many games can be labelled from stuff like Half Life 2 all the way to Portal as well. What this game really is a metroidvania established by games like Castlevania SOTN and Super Metroid and is put forth in the third dimension. 

Everything that you can find in a metroidvania game in 2D can be found here, an interconnected world with shortcuts, powerups to pick up that makes world traversal easier the more you play, pickups you can find scattered throughout the world like health and missiles, double jumps, and a grappling hook much like the one found in Super Metroid. What is impressive about MP is how it translates everything to the third dimension. 

Sure the world design isn't as seemless as stuff you find in 2D games in the genre but the whole feeling of getting lost, barely scrapping by going through and traversing the world and then unlocking more of the powerups and making the world feel like an ocean that is much easier to swim in is what the gameplay of MP consists primarily of. 

The game gives you an excellent feeling of discovery when you go through Tallon Overworld and then find the Chozo Ruins, reach a roadblock there and then backtrack to Tallon Overworld to find Magmoor Caverns and then find more of the powerups there and more of the world slowly gets unlocked. 

When I got to Phendrana Drifts and hearing the melody that accompanied it was a somber and majestic feeling felt as great now as it did when I played it all those years ago. The soundtrack in the game is easily the best in the series of Metroid, it fits the game so well, and helps the wonder you have from exploration like the Tallon Overworld theme and before mentioned Phendrana Drifts. I did get stuck a few times but luckily it wasn't often, I did play with hints on and it probably wasn't the "right" way to play but at the same time, 90% of the time I had a general gist of where to go before the hint system activated.

The game also adds some since immersive touches to the first person perspective like alien blood getting on her visor that needs to be wiped off, her refection getting shown when light bounces off her visor, and seeing Samus' hand reach out when using the grappling hook. 

I might as well discuss what I dislike about the game, the combat isn't very good or at least the feeling of combat isn't that great. This might be the part where you could compare it to first person shooters but honestly compared to FPS games of the era like Soldier of Fortune, FEAR, and Return to Castle Wolfestein, the damage animations and feedback for hitting enemies aren't as cathartic as you get with the above mentioned games. It gets the job done, but if you play Metroid Prime primarily as an FPS game it might "disappointing" going into the game as that. The combat is mainly supposed to show off how far you have gotten through the exploration of the world and getting powerups to show off how enemies that were once a challenge are now very easy to defeat. To the MP's credit, it does have decent boss fights for a game set in first person that had shooting in it. The bosses in MP at least require more to do to defeat them than, "spam strongest weapon and then win". You got attacks to dodge and attack patterns to recognize, and they have a puzzle element to them where you got to figure out how to damage them. The only boss that was really frustrating was the Ridley boss since his charge attack's telegraph could've been handled a lot better, since in order for me to dodge his charage, I have to do jump behind seconds before the telegrah is even done to effectively move out of the way. 

Other issues with the game is how first time players can find the quirks later in the game to be "offputting". For example the infamous Phazon Mines sections has no save point of any kind during at least 30 minutes of the level. While playing it now, it might be my favorite portion of the game since it does a good job at making the player switch between the various beam types and it actively gives you decent exploration bits with some morph ball puzzles, and a hefty amount of platforming. The section where you got the Thermal Visor I found to be much more challenging since enemies where hitting you from all sides and it was harder to see where enemies were attacking you. On top of that the spiderbots blocking the door on the way back to the early part of the level after getting visor would kill me easily due to it being a cramped space where you would hit me and drain my health causing me to restart. 

At the same time, I can see why the Phazon Mines would annoy a first time player, you need to fight two mini bosses, and a lot of challenging enemies and get past a 30 minute section before you even have to save. This remaster did very little to even allevate the issue. Maybe adding an aditional save point, maybe adding an autosave, or at the very least give the player a warning before going into mines to get more energy tanks and missile upgrades before going can at the very least make this less of an issue for first timers.

Another big issue is the fetch quest later in the game, this can catch first time players off guard if they are playing it blind. It sure did when I first played it. While I get what Retro was trying to do in concept where it's basically the player going through lots of exploration with all the collected power ups, the execution isn't that great. If you know to collect Chozo Artifacts before you beat the Omega Pirate then the blow could be lessened but still tedious nontheless. Where you will be going on the beaten path and then constantly have to remind myself, "did I get the Chozo Artifact along the way?" It slows down the pace of the game and after beating the Omega Pirate, I just wanted the game to wrap up already since I conquered the game's biggest challenges, now with the Artifact Hunt, the only thing being tested is my patience and how long I can look for them without a guide before giving up so I can get to the end faster. 

Other smaller issues include the grappling hook being finicky and the morph ball controls can be less than tight when moving around tight corners but this only seems to be issues that would really annoy me if I tried to 100% the game. 

Overall, Metroid Prime is a very good game back in 2002 and is a very good game today. I wish there were more 3D metroidvanias being released now. It's one of the most faithful transitions to 3D you can find for any series and genre of game. The Remastered version's controls aren't as good as the Wii's but at the same time, they are decent enough especially considering this is the easiest version of the game you can find as of right now. Just be warned, if you are playing this game for the first time there are some late game "quirks" that can turn you away from beating it but bear with it and you can find a very unique game that combines the first person person perspective, shooting, platforming and exploration better than many games.