Senaste recensioner av Norris the Nonce Slayer

An unpolished, entertainment-deficient blob that plays like it was originally made as a low-budget PS3 game. Missing any form of distinguishing traits to feel excited about returning to beyond the large hordes, which are still nothing special given it's not even fun to shoot them with your wimpy, boring weapons. If you're looking for a co-op zombie shooter, L4D2 holds up far better. If you're just looking for the largest zombie hordes possible, Days Gone offers comparable amounts of zombies to mow through alongside being a far better-controlling and better-designed game overall. WWZ, on the other hand, is not at all worth your time.

More required cooperation, more varied playstyles, and better gunplay than Left 4 Dead 2, coming from someone who considers L4D2 one of his favourite games. Gameplay is just buttery smooth in general and the whole thing is a great time with a coordinated team. If you're looking to boot up some zombie killing with randos and have a more casual time, L4D2 is definitely still the better option, but in terms of a need to plan ahead and leave no resource unused, Back 4 Blood is a major step up, and significantly more tense overall.

I'll probably flesh out my review in the future, but for now this is a very strong recommendation for those into strong teamplay.

Cute basement baby

Yakuza 0 has been my first experience with the series, and I have to say I've been blown away by the tremendous writing and overall personality of the game. The main narrative is the definition of compelling, with brilliant cutscenes you'll never want to skip, even when they stretch to 20-25 minutes (arguably the best cutscenes). I find myself wholly engrossed by Kiryu and Majima's stories, and the twisting gang conspiracies that pin them down as underdog heroes. It's some of the best storytelling I've ever seen in a game.

The side quests, though, are on a whole nother level. Seldom, if ever, do you get such a bevy of substories all as hilarious and downright wholesome as what you'll see here. Whether you're reuniting a young boy with his estranged father through the joy of playing a videogame together, helping arrange a marriage through a crossword puzzle, teaching a punk band to properly fit their personas, or teaching a dominatrix to be appropriately aggressive and assertive, the variety is remarkable and extremely consistent in quality. I leave every side quest with a huge grin on my face, and find myself laughing or "awww"ing every time. It speaks volumes to the quality of these stories when, in spite of the relatively slight reward you receive, you're always wishing for more out of the characters and scenarios.

Combat is great, of course, as the game's main gameplay focus, albeit fairly easy, even on Hard. This isn't much of a concern as it allows for a finer balance between challenges and the exceptional story, which I'd argue is the true crux of the game. Mini games galore here as well, with lots of silly and entertaining ways to spend your free time, from disco to karaoke, pool to batting cages.

The game's chock full of great stuff, and not a single minute ever feels wasted. It's just highlight after highlight with zero fat inbetween. Very highly recommended.

The most varied, colourful, and technically deep installment in the series, and consequently my favourite. Make no mistake, there's a number of issues in this installment, predominantly hitboxes and the Emerald Herald's iconic "Bearer of the seek seek lest". Boss fights are generally stunningly easy with the right build- powerstanced +10 large clubs will decimate nearly everything with a few L2s- but SOTFS's decision to alter invasions to trigger even while hollow make certain areas like Shrine of Amana a pure hell.

There's no better Souls game for online options, however, and the breadth of content here is more vast than any other as well. You'll find the greatest freedom in viable builds right here, which makes it significantly more replayable than 1, 3, or Bloodborne. And best of all, its locales vary in colour scheme, tone, and concept significantly more than any other installment, with a generally warmer yet still imposing atmosphere.

After 200+ hours on PS3 and a 53-hour return here on PC, this definitely still stands as my preferred option when it comes to a Souls game.

Ugly, dated in design, fairly generic and full of badly-executed camp, Vanquish sits alongside The Evil Within as another miss from Shinji Mikami. While its booster-sprint and bullet time mechanics are cool enough, they don't serve as great motivators to sit through the rest of what is an otherwise unremarkable spectacle fighter/TPS hybrid. I got about halfway through its slim 6-hour runtime and already feel worn out on its tired formula of cover-shooting, slow-mo and quicktime events. Definitely a product of its time and while it may have stood out in 2010, it does not hold up today, unlike Mikami's own REmake and RE4.

Definitely a classic for a reason, albeit amidst all its innovations and great design choices, there are the occasional glimmers of the disasters that would arise later in Mikami's career with the hot garbage that was The Evil Within. It's a ton of fun, but the projectile enemies and quicktime events, while manageable, are really frustrating at points, especially the latter on this PC version. Beyond that, PC with mouse and keyboard is by far the best way to play this game.

Dead Space is truly one of the greatest games of not only the 2000s, but of all time. While the PC port requires some user-end tweaks to be truly playable, these are simple and require no more than five minutes. Once you're past that, this is the best possible version of the game you can get your hands on.

Though Dead Space 2 is an immense improvement in terms of smoothness of movement and satisfaction of gunplay, this first installment is the finest of the series in terms of a foreboding, aggressive, wholly unwelcoming atmosphere. It's incredibly confident and competent for a studio's first original work, with its art direction and worldbuilding fully realized from the get-go. Nothing original can be said about the game's audio and level design at this point, but it's always worth mentioning just how magnificent it truly is.

The game can get difficult on its hardest difficulty, as well. Like, *really* difficult at points. Much of this comes down to its psychological components- the unsettling sounds and incarnations of the necromorphs, paired with the horrifyingly corrupted and maimed environments, create moments of deep-set panic and disturbance. The developers were quite clever with their enemy encounters, as well- all too often you'll be given the distraction of a legless, seemingly harmless necromorph in front of you, serving as bait that allows the fully-intact necromorph behind you to make its move. This is a game about environmental awareness, and the devs do a stellar job in manipulating the player's focus and level of assuredness.

With piles of brilliant iconography, settings, lore, and creepy moments, Dead Space has plenty to offer for any fans of sci-fi horror, and is one of the undisputed greats in the genre, even beyond the scope of the video game medium.

This one time, me and my buddy Keith got really into Left 4 Dead 2. Well Keith, he's one of those dopamine junkies, y'know? Like them guys who ride the bulls at the rodeo. He'd probably cut off his nuts if it gave him a thrill. Well anyway, he got reeeeaaalllll addicted to the game. He figured if it always felt good beating a chapter, then he should just keep doing it, you know? Didn't leave his room for three months straight, not even to piss. Neighbors three blocks down were complaining about the smell of unwashed manchild and bottled urine.

BL3 sports nauseating dialogue and online connectivity, but the game is miles above the prior installments in every way that matters: loot, quality of life, and especially combat. For the first time since initially jumping into the original back at release, the series truly entices me with its formula of loot and shoot. Guns feel absolutely fantastic to use and experiment with, and the revolving door nature of your arsenal allows the gameplay to feel consistently fresh. BL2 lacked on this front, with weapons providing none of the absorptive feedback you'd hope for, and the pacing of combat overall feeling sluggish and unsavory. This massive improvement was an unexpected one, but the one that allows BL3 to not only stand alongside a lot of other FPS games, but even excel most in tandem with its other features.

I've only begun scratching the surface of the game, but it's been a blast already, so I feel obliged to recommend it.