Recent reviews by almos

I didn't expect this to turn into a card game tournament.

It's a nice adventure game based on an interesting idea, and the card game is also solid. It's worth checking out the bad ending too, it completes the story with some clues on past events.

BTW it's not mentioned in the game, but Sumire means Violet.

This is a great remake of Half-Life 1. It recreates the entire game faithfully with modern graphics, and some nice additions, like expanded environments, more varied scientist and guard characters with additional dialogues, and upgraded enemy AI. If you want to play HL1, but can't stand the dated graphics, try this one.

Okay, then why the downvote?

Xen, mostly. Xen was the worst part of HL1, but at least it was short. Here it's much longer, and much more annoying. At first it's a mysterious, magical wonderland, which it should be, but then it just keeps going on and on for too long. And then Gonarch's lair comes, which is now an incredibly long and tiring chase sequence. And after that, Interloper comes, and it has been turned into a Vortigaunt ghetto. The alien tech in HL1 was based on organics, crystals and magic beams, here it's just rusty machines. Even the aliens themselves have been changed: instead of hardened carapace, the Alien Grunts now wear chainmail armor with WW2-style stahlhelm. A significant development effort went into upgrading the design of the Xen part, and it all just became a lot worse.

My other major complaint about the game are the achievements that were inspired by Half-Life 2 Episode 2. Unlike in EP2, where squishing the Antlion grubs was a reasonable pest control, here Gordon has to kill the Protozoans, which are completely harmless, so it's just a senseless genocide.

In EP2 taking the garden gnome to the rocket is a prank that fits into the game world. Here, there are two items that can be carried to the end of the game: a purple hat and an opened pizza box. Neither of them make any sense within the game, and the payoff is just a silly gag. Carrying these items is also PITA, because there are significantly more points of no return than in the original HL1. Almost every door locks behind you, and if you are an idiot like me who insists on carrying both items, you need several backup saves. Plus, if you thought climbing ladders while carrying an item was the worst part, just wait until you get to the teleporters in Lambda Complex and the air ducts in Interloper. This whole deal feels like a middle finger towards achievement hunters.

There were some other minor annoyances too. The flashlight creates weird shadows, because it seems to be attached to Gordon's hip (even though the HEV suit model has it on the chest), and when crouching it's at ankle height. There is a cyanogen capsule that can be carried (third item!) to the Gonarch fight, but it is found on a cluttered desk in a dark room, with no indication that it's important. Another game design failure in the Gonarch chapter is that interacting with the missing researchers gives no feedback, you have to turn on closed captioning to see "Retinal Scanner Used".

They've also changed the final boss fight. The arena became more dynamic, which is good, but now the boss doesn't fly, and Gordon can't jump into its head to finish it with the crowbar. I didn't like the GMan in the outro either, he talks like he is desperately holding back a shart.

Finally, the Linux "support". Due to instability and major graphics corruptions, I had to switch to the Windows version via Proton. Did they even test it before release?

I've been deceived. There are absolutely no dogs in this game. Not even at the food stalls.

Aside from that, this is a solid GTA-like game with kung-fu fights, gun fights, c0ck fights, pork buns, car chases, detective investigations, dates with girls, mahjong it's just poker with tiles, armored van hijackings, karaoke, and home decoration. It feels exactly like a Hong-Kong action movie. The story is a bit short, but it's intense and full of intrigue and revenge. Unfortunately, there is no endgame, because none of the side activities can be replayed.

The city is also somewhat lackluster. It looks really good, but it's the most restrictive of all GTA-like games. Everything is fenced off, and huge areas of the city are inaccessible. Also, there are very few indoor areas, and not much verticality in a city of skyscrapers.

There are several small things that the developers could have fixed in this Definitive Edition to improve the QoL of game tremendously. For example, having more than 4 save slots (fortunately the two major DLC stories have their own save slots). Or showing type of the vehicle upon entering one. Or the ability to permanently set the color of the vehicles in the garage. Or fixing the random track selection of the radio: the stations always like to play the same 2-3 songs even though each of them have around 20 in their repertoire. Sadly, these will never happen, because the game didn't meet the insane sales expectation of Square Enix, and they disbanded the studio.

Do I need to say anything? Just pick up your crowbar and go!

This game is a badly designed, badly written, buggy, glitchy, low-effort mess that looks like it was released 10 years ago, and plays like it was released 20 years ago. It's fun to jump around on alien worlds, but the more you play the worse it gets. The exploration is repetitive, the world is shallow, the quests have antiquated game mechanics and most of them are half-finished, the dialogues are boring, the companions are bland, the NG+ is a slap in your face, and you'd better hope you don't run into a game-breaking glitch. Like all Bethesda titles, it's easy to sink a lot of hours into it (I did), but this game doesn't respect your time investment.

Do you guys remember the first Elder Scrolls game? In Arena you could wander around the entire continent of Tamriel, but the hundreds of towns and dungeons were all copy-paste of each other, and the land in-between was an endless repetition of the same tiles. Starfield is built similarly. You find the same buildings with the same enemies in the same spots, with the same props, the same notes, same everything. On every single planet and moon.

They say you are the first to discover things on unknown worlds, but there is human activity everywhere. And by "human activity" I mean abandoned bases and mines and factories every few hundred meters apart, with no roads or any infrastructure between them. Everything is just scattered around randomly in a desert. Even the major towns feel like they were air-dropped there and not built for human settlement. For example, New Atlantis is a city center without a city: it has a central park, one row of buildings around it, and then the wilderness. It also has an undercity slums (the Well), but why? There is a huge empty landscape to expand to. Weird.

The other settlements are even worse. Akila is a medieval ghetto, Neon is just a shopping mall (why isn't this the capital of Freestar?), Cydonia is one big room that is both an iron mine and a residential area, Paradiso is one hotel building in the middle of nothing, the Den space station is just a bar and a police station, and so on. Is this all humanity could build in 300 years?

The entire lore of this world is underwhelming. Does Bethesda even have writers? Or quest designers? I thought the era of "go there, fetch an item or talk to a guy, then come back for a reward" was long over. Have people at Bethesda seen any RPG that came out in the last two decades? Even these primitive fetch quests are half-finished most of the time, with absolute lowest-effort writing, lazy outcomes, plus the optional steps and the dialog choices don't matter. What the heck were they developing for 8 years? The "fetch me one beer from another planet" quest? The "mine 10 iron to help the miners with their quota" quest? The "find lost items in the hotel" quest? The "convince the escaped worker to come back" quest? These are your typical activities in the game. Boring, low-effort, unimaginative fillers.

I could go on and rant about a lot of other f**ked up things in this game, but the review is already too long, so I'll make it brief. The user interface is trash. The landmark/snowglobe system on Earth is stupid. Distances are weird: you must spend a lot of time hiking, but you can fast travel to explored locations even across star systems. Mining is useless, because you don't know what resources you'll need, you can buy them in shops for cheap, and you can't even sell them, because the shops have no cash. Space combat is as bare-bones as possible and unbalanced. The whole spaceship business, and the implications of artificial gravity and FTL are not thought out properly (both in lore and in gameplay). There is no telecommunication in this medieval universe: no newspapers, no TV, no radio, no telephone, no Internet, there's just a loudspeaker on the town square that tells the news. BTW the player is the only field reporter of the news agency.

The environment conditions on planets are simulated to some degree, but they've scrapped the survival mechanics, and the remaining mess feels strange, for example you can get lung disease from dust storms on Mars while wearing a space suit. If it's possible to walk around on the surface of Venus and Titan, then why can't we land on gas giants? It wouldn't be more unrealistic. And why is the ambient temperature the same on the entire planet? How difficult would it have been to implement a local temperature dependent on latitude, altitude, biome type, or day/night?

What do the programmers even do at Bethesda? They've been using this engine since Morrowind, and it still has absolutely basic bugs, like item models don't load in the inventory screen, physics objects fall through the ground, NPCs spawn in the corner of the map instead of their designated position, companions lose their equipment bonuses etc. Even when the game works as intended it's just shoddy: NPCs either stand still or wander randomly (where is the RadiantAI??), companions have pathfinding issues, enemies just crouch behind cover etc. After 8 years of development.

Neither the graphics quality nor the scale of the game warrant the high system requirements and the frequent loading screens, plus the loading times are excessive even with an SSD. Some say the Creation engine just can't handle such a space game, but during the 8 years of development a big studio like Bethesda could have re-written the engine from scratch. Twice.

When the negative reviews started pouring in, how did Bethesda react to the criticism? Like you would expect a billion dollar company owned by a trillion dollar company do: more marketing, and arrogant posts on Xitter. They seem to be unable to fix the bugs, and unwilling to fix the playability issues. This is why they deserve all the flak they get.

I have learned the ways of the SNéK.

This game is super racist. You play as a little white girl hiding from a big black dude strolling around stark naked, raping everybody with his huge tail.





But seriously, this is an excellent stealth survival game that perfectly captures the look and feel of the first Alien movie: the interior designs, the sounds, the tech of the 1970s retro-futurism, all perfect. Even bits of the eerie soundtrack of the movie are used to set the mood.

It's an eight year old game, but it still looks great, the entire Sevastopol station is nicely detailed. Except that there are no bathrooms anywhere, I'm sure Ripley would have been glad to visit one after some scenes. Also, the air ducts were obviously designed for traversal instead of air circulation.

Crawling around, hiding behind stuff, tracking the alien by its footsteps, planning the route to the next cover, throwing objects for distractions, trying to reach the next save station, it's all highly intense. The alien is unpredictable, relentless, and terrifying, even though it's not as "alien" as in the movies: it doesn't crawl on the ceiling, and leaves the dead bodies behind. Also, if you've played any of the Aliens vs. Predator games as the alien, you know it would be impossible to hide from it under a desk.

Unfortunately, this only applies to half of the game, where the alien actually appears. In the other half the main enemies to sneak around are androids, which is much less fun. Also, there are situations where you have to kill the androids, and they are bullet sponges, especially the raincoat variants, which are also immune to EMP.

At first the game looks like it will be a metroidvania, but the progression is dictated by the story, not by gaining new tools for opening various locked doors. Those tool upgrades are mainly there to prevent you from picking up some collectibles, so if you're a completionist, you'll have to do a lot of backtracking in later missions. You also have to backtrack for some blueprint upgrades for the craftable items, and some of these upgrades are only accessible when the item is no longer useful (e.g. EMPv3). Weird.

One of the collectibles is a series of audio logs from the Nostromo, voiced by the original cast of Alien. This piqued my interest, but they turned out to be the most mundane pre-flight checks. The other major disappointment was the derelict ship, where there is nothing to explore.

The story itself is good, it's a series of disaster control attempts by a capable but underequipped lead character. There were some weak points, like the kidnapping near the end, and the sequelbait ending. I don't understand why Samuels wants to help Ripley so much, either.

Despite its flaws, this is one of the best Alien games out there, an absolute must-play for any fan of the franchise. Bonus point for the excellent Linux port, it runs perfectly on the "unsupported" AMD drivers. Minus point for only including one challenge map in the base game, all the rest are DLC for some extra cash grab, and the two Nostromo missions are not even in the season pass.

At first glance this is a poor man's GTA clone, but SR2 does quite a few things better than GTA4 (they were released roughly at the same time). In the GTA series you unlock the world by progressing through the story, while in SR2 you unlock the story by playing around in the open-world sandbox. It's more fun this way. The side activities are also way better. Would you rather play bowling with Roman, or ride a flaming quad and hit every pedestrian?

SR2 doesn't suffer from the cinematic mission design of Rockstar either. In the GTA series the missions are fully scripted: you have to perform very specific actions at very specific locations in order to pass the mission, like follow the damn train, CJ. Here you get more vague goals, like stop a convoy or eliminate the marked enemies. With any weapon, any vehicle, any method you like. Sure, you don't get the same "I'm in a movie" feeling, but it's a much better fit for a sandbox game. Nor does SR2 suffer from the overuse of the desaturate filter that turns GTA4 into almost greyscale.

In the GTA series collecting vehicles is pointless, because missions spawn new cars for you, and the one you arrived with typically disappears. In fact, the only way to make sure you keep a vehicle is to never get it out of the garage. In Saints Row if you put a vehicle in the hammerspace of your garage, you can't lose it. Even if you leave it somewhere or wreck it, you can always spawn a new instance. Is this less realistic? Yes. Is this more fun? Yes. In SR2 I went everywhere in my favorite cars, while in GTA I went everywhere in random clunkers.

This episode is widely considered to be the pinnacle of the Saints Row series, and rightly so. The story is over-the-top craziness, but it still manages to have a few well directed dramatic moments, while in later installments they went for full-on insanity and cartoon violence. Stilwater is a much more varied and interesting city than Steelport, and it has a dynamic day-night cycle, which they forgot to implement in their new game engine for SR3. The clothing options are also more diverse in SR2 than in SR3 or SR4, even if you buy their dozen cosmetic DLC packs.

The game is not perfect, of course. For example, driving is not very enjoyable due to the simplistic vehicle physics, and it's impossible to romance Johnny Gat.

Play this game on XBox if you can. The PC port runs as poorly as Cyberpunk 2077, and the DLCs were never ported to PC, so a few plot threads remain unresolved in the end. Don't play the Linux port, because it runs even worse, and the radio channels are bugged.

I'm trying to escape from the huge area-of-effect of the attack from the boss with my slow moving character, but an obstacle randomly spawns right in front of me. "You have failed to impress the gods!"

The beautiful artwork, music, and narration are completely ruined by the awful combat system. Shame.

DOTT is the best of the classic LucasArts adventure games. It's a blend of the nerdy humor of Dave Grossman, the subtle hints of Tim Schafer, the wild artwork of Peter Chan, and all the magic of the legendary LucasArts team. This game has all the good stuff, like mad scientists, tentacles, time travel, IRS agents, bowling, and much more. Now it's beautifully redrawn in high resolution, with remastered audio, and developer's commentary. The only reminder that this is a 30 year old game is the low frame rate of the animations.

Like the original DOTT, this remaster also contains a fully playable Maniac Mansion, but it's just the VGA version without any remastering. MM was the first point-and-click adventure game, the namesake of the SCUMM engine, and the first game to have "cut scenes". MM is an ancient game, but it's still fun to play, and it has multiple different endings depending on which kids you bring along. Beware: it's easy to get into an unwinnable state in multiple different ways, for example by using the paint remover on anything other than the intended target.