Ulasan terkini oleh Reenee

When reviewing very old titles such as SiN, it's usually a good approach to get within the mindset of how games were developed back then.

However...

SiN was not released in a good state. Despite the efforts of the original developers back all those years ago and Nightdive's more recent intervention, SiN still has issues that persist and make themselves encountered quite frequently:


If your character is up against a sloped surface, there's a decent chance here and there that your character will inexplicably slide against these surfaces. Depending on how unlucky you are, you will take damage, ranging from minor, very major, or just outright die.

And since we're on the matter of inexplicable damage, doors or just any rotating surface in general is also likely to cause inconvenience. You're not as likely to die but you could still end up damaged or get trapped in the geometry. Needless to say, quicksave is your best friend in SiN (mapped to F6 as of this writing; F9 is quickload).


A good FPS weapon is satisfying to use in its handling and feedback. Being quite familiar with Quake and Unreal myself, SiN's weapons don't quite do it. Personally, the most problematic weapon here is the Assault Rifle; not only does it somehow not line up with the crosshair, it feels like you're using a garden hose to defeat enemies. It's annoying having to get used to this weapon.

The performance of these weapons also wildly vary. Sometimes they'll kill an enemy in a few shots, other times many. If hitting limbs is a factor, I'm not sure but I do know headshots are in play here. I actually found myself falling back to the starting pistol for much of the game simply because it's pinpoint accurate, it's hitscan, and enemies actually died pretty quick from it. Even the shotgun is a gamble to use compared to the pistol.

I also have to specifically call out the sniper rifle here because the devs somehow managed to make using one absolutely miserable. How? Simple: simply switching to the weapon causes it to play a needlessly long animation where the gun is setting up its motorized scope, leaving you impatient and vulnerable. Unfortunately, switching OUT of the weapon also plays this animation in reverse. Unbelievable.


An unfortunate, evident sign of jank. The enemies move fast and turn on a dime, making them unpredictable and forcing you to expend more ammo than necessary. This is squarely on the devs as id software managed to make the enemies of Quake have weight and move in believable manners.


I actually bothered to investigate this a little bit. So SiN is running on a modified Quake 2 engine. At a few points, you have to climb up a ladder to reach the surface of an area to proceed but sometimes there's an enemy behind where you're emerging from. Naturally, you'd want to stay on the ladder, a bit out of view to minimize getting shot but also being able to shoot the enemy.

Except if you simply look away from the ladder, you'll fall right off of it.

As it turns out, this is a quirk of the Quake 2 engine and other games using the Q2 engine like Kingpin and Soldier of Fortune. I'm guessing the devs noticed this particular behavior because you'd either get frustrated trying to look behind you or sigh in defeat and run out to either tank the damage or find cover. Regardless, it's unfair.

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I don't mind at all that the game plays out like a corny 90's action flick, it's just disappointing all these issues prevailed all these years even with the intervention of Nightdive. I know SiN Reloaded is coming at some point but unless all these problems are fixed, I'll have to pass on that as well. I did not play the Wages of SiN expansion either, I had my fill with the base game. I do not recommend SiN Gold, unless there's patches to address the aforementioned problems.

The deckbuilder roguelike so good, it's worth buying twice: on PC and on mobile. It's addictive, runs can be quick, and lends itself well to portable play, especially on Steam Deck.

Literally just won a run to validate this review.

This game was sitting in my backlog for years and now that I've finally decided to give it a go, it ends up crashing constantly. Any attempts to fix the problem do not resolve the crashes.

Fix your garbage, Ubisoft.

Another one of these "I gave it a Yes rating but don't wholly endorse this game" type of review.

Looking beyond Boti's great visuals is, rather disappointingly, just an okay platformer. Not terrible, just lacking depth and on the easy side of things. This is a kid-friendly platformer so any of you looking for something on the level of Crash, Sonic or A Hat in Time should look elsewhere. It's good enough for beginners to 3D platfomers though.

Some things I didn't enjoy: there are these late-game vehicle segments where, for no good reason, said vehicles have terrible handling. What good is it to deviate from the main gameplay for a bit if you're not going to let the player have good controls, especially when there's collectibles to get? And speaking of, the total amount of major collectibles can't be seen if you're within a level, instead only in the hub world.

Probably the biggest issue that'll turn off people is the fact each of the eight levels, on average, last FORTY MINUTES. That's a seriously tall order to ask of anyone, and I don't really know what will happen if you tried to quit and resume mid-level, if that's possible. And no, you can't speed through a level because you have to collect chips so they can be exchanged at certain points to deploy what's needed to progress through the level. The amount required can vary from 150 to 700 and you can't carry over your chips from other levels either.

Some optimization issues drag down performance in more demanding areas and a handful of bugs presented themselves:

- None of the game's achievements ever registered. And this seems to be a longstanding issue by the looks of other reviews.
- Most of the game's bugs stem from trying to navigate the interface, especially within your personal room in the hub world. I had to move my mouse and click a bit before the game would accept inputs from my controller. It's also troublesome to have the game save the actual graphics settings you want; watch that framerate cap.
- Probably the most telling sign of things is the game's pause menu has a dedicated "Unstuck" button. Yeah, apparently there's an actual likelihood for clipping into something and getting trapped. In my case, however, I deliberately fell off one of the game's sliding tracks and Boti ended up falling forever. Thankfully the Unstuck button put me back in the level.

Lastly, while the story is quite forgettable, I can't help but want to bring up how it doesn't make sense. In short: this game takes place across the various components of a computer, populated by all sorts of techy-looking characters. The plot follows the disappearance and ultimate plan of the Task Manager, an aged remnant from when the computer was comprised of far less powerful components yet still capable of doing its job.

The Task Manager deliberately sabotages the computer's various parts so it can regress into a simpler, weaker state. So what's the response to this from one of your talkative partners? You didn't ask permission. That's it. What about, I don't know, don't fear the future?

(As an aside, I'll give the devs a kudos for signing on Gianni Matragano so he could do his Columbo impression.)

A decently challenging puzzle platformer/metroidvania. It's nothing terribly difficult so, for the most part, you're not going to wrack your brain trying to get through game. However, there are issues:

• Color change mechanic is not properly explained.
  
• Game doesn't track lesser collectibles like Orbs and Tears. Major game progression items are recorded but the game is padding its play time by having you backtrack a bit much to rediscover these things.
  
• The penultimate dungeon (Eydie's Keep) and a secret area contain the most frustrating hazard in the game: insta-kill spikes. That, in combination with a gravity flipping mechanic and several jumps where there's barely room for error means having to repeatedly traverse small portions of the area over and over again from the last save point. I get you want to increase the difficulty since it's a late-game area but I think it would have been more reasonable to simply have these spikes deal double damage and warp you to the last safe platform just to make things bearable. Also guilty of needlessly padding the game time.
  
• Adding on to the frustrations of Eydie's Keep are three minibosses whose vulnerability also isn't clearly explained. I'll save you the trouble: it's when they're transitioning from floor to ceiling or vice versa. No other enemy or major boss does this. It doesn't help this miniboss has a deceptively large hitbox and moves and acts quicker than Zoe can react so you wouldn't think to attack during the aforementioned transition because it's so quick.
  
• Not that I'm playing the game for the plot but it was never addressed why Zoe (the protagonist) was brought over to this land or explaining the sudden change from 8-bit to 16-bit visuals at the end of Alwa's Awakening.

Issues aside, it's a decent game to try out if you want something on the short side or something to play between games. Not totally necessary to play the prequel but this does build upon the mechanics so it's probably best to play Alwa's Awakening beforehand if you can.

Runs good on Steam Deck too.

MDE is in a Yakuza Kiwami sort of situation: it's polished up to modern standards but the gameplay is still rooted to how it was back in 2002. This is a rather simple and linear game that you're pretty much going to play for the story and nothing more. While I consider the story in Mafia 2 to be more compelling, at least this should only take you around 10-ish hours. And yes, the racecar handling is improved but that doesn't mean much when EVERY car handles at different levels of trash since it was the 1930's.

As an aside, I happen to write this out while the Mafia trilogy bundle is on sale for 15 bucks. This isn't unique to Steam and I looked up that it's cheaper elsewhere by nearly two dollars (Humble Bundle, Fanatical) so I'd say that's a good sweet spot to grab all three.

And don't forget to trash the launcher, get rid of the intro logo movie (AFTER launching the game at least once), and run the game from its installation folder.

Indefensible feature regressions, shamelessly blatant and greedy monetization. The suits at WB need their wallets to be beaten further.

While I'm here, if you're going to have your characters have skins based on a property, have some VARIETY. The Matrix has several characters of note but the devs could only come up with the digital raining code for everybody. Where's Neo? Morpheus? Trinity? Woman in Red, Architect or Keymaker? Even the Spoon Kid is worthy of a skin.

Yakuza 3 sits just above the borderline that splits this game between "recommended" and "not recommended".

Although it released just about three years after the launch of the PlayStation 3, this was still early enough in that console's life cycle where it was evident developers were still trying to get a hang of the PS3's infamous system architecture. While Yakuza 3 isn't necessarily buggy, it is quite unrefined and raw. It's especially disappointing to see this when you've just come out of Yakuza Kiwami 2, which was running on that absolutely gorgeous Dragon Engine.

It's been a while since I last played so I'll try to recall what stuck out to me:


First off, Kiryu shouldn't be able to spin on a dime when roaming the overworld. Basically, nothing feels like it has weight: heat Moves lack a sense of impact. Hitting with objects doesn't feel satisfying. Things just move at a brisk pace in an unsatisfying manner.

In fact, this also extends to the game's golf minigame: the ball moves as though there is intense gravity, with no attempt at some sense of realistic physics. Which leads me to...


Assuming you've played the Yakuza games in a chronological order to this point, then you'll surely have played the variety of minigames playable in each. Here, unfortunately, things just feel sloppy and rushed: karaoke doesn't seem to respond to your input appropriately, the unique Boxcelios arcade game is too simple to be enjoyable, and even standbys like baseball, bowling, and pool were frustrating.

It goes without saying the iteration of cabaret club featured here and in Yakuza 4 is the absolute worst. Thankfully they figured out how to make it fun but unfortunately, this is where it started. Ignore it.


Look, I don't have any issue with the inclusion of the orphans and having the creators wanting to focus on them but two whole chapters were dedicated to them, one of which was right before the game's finale. It should have all been relegated way back earlier in the game while not taking anywhere near as long. Yes, we're supposed to know Kiryu is a responsible caretaker but don't drag it out.

• There's over one hundred substories! That's way too much.
  
• Awful level up system.
  
• Enemies block all the time. Yes, the warnings were true. Fortunately, this can be mitigated through grinding trainers for skills.
  
• Collecting locker keys is really annoying.

This is the bitter truth of the matter: regardless of the game's litany of technical and design issues, we have to let it all slide. Again, this was made early on for a console that was difficult to work with. The jump from PS2 to PS3 was also a big technological leap so the devs were likely trying to find footing and figure out what to do with the series at this point, which is what I think why the game turned out the way it ultimately did.


Making this review comes at an interesting point of time: it was just over two weeks ago that the series director made the curious comment that a Kiwami 3 seems likely to happen in the future. That would be most welcome just for all the quality of life improvements it would come with.

Should you wait for this potential remake or even outright skip Yakuza 3? While Yakuza 3 does build upon what happened in prior games, anything of major consequence that occurred in 3 isn't followed up in Yakuza 4.

Yakuza 4 is a soft reboot of sorts: some lesser events/details from the series are touched upon but overall, Y4 starts off with something new, storywise. I think you could just skip 3 but if you're willing to rush through the main story and sidestories, then get Y3 on sale.

Yakuza 3 isn't unplayable, it's just got problems and not as enjoyable to play through.

I'm just here to get the badge but I will say it isn't Starfield and that's quite nice.

This one rather annoys me as I was looking forward to playing this after playing the demo through Next Fest.

Mago is, unfortunately, a nice looking and sounding 2D platformer that is brought down by its design issues.

The game has a "show, don't tell" approach with its mechanics. That's well and good but it doesn't do a good job at *explaining* what things are. Here's some of the inconveniences you'll run into:

-There's a double jump but it only works after bouncing off an enemy's head.

-You have a limit on how many gems you can carry, which is your currency. While you can improve your capacity, the game never tells you how much more you can carry.

-At the end of every area, there's a tower. On your first visit, you'll see a game show type of wheel and a character you pay. What happens when you interact with this character? You are immediately thrown into a timed six-stage randomized gauntlet. Yeah, a heads-up would have been nice.

Those are annoying. Now let's get into what's genuinely frustrating and tedious:

-I've come to dread seeing those gauntlet towers because, if RNGesus hates you, you'll end up doing them a minimum of SIX TIMES because three of the six prizes you can earn are heart containers and a major collectible. The other prizes consist of the gem currency and one of the vouchers for a costume. Besides the tedium of running the gauntlet over and over because you didn't get one of the better prizes, if you don't realize there's a cap on how many gems you can carry, you can actually LOSE the gems you've won outright because you were already at the cap.

-The tedium of going through the gauntlets will set in VERY early because you have so little health early on. This coupled with the fact that you're probably still getting used to the controls (which are rather floaty), the only instruction on your task is a picture (again, a bit of text doesn't hurt, devs) and you need to spend your gems to attempt a gauntlet run in the first place, you will end up frustrated.

-Mago is surprisingly stingy with its checkpoints, which is strange because it costs gems to use them. While you do have infinite lives, having to redo such large chunks of the level just adds on to the tedium even more. It makes no sense since you'll always be getting more gems to earn than spend. Oh, and once again the lack of instruction occurs here as you won't know a checkpoint is a checkpoint until you actually use it.

-This is more of a lesser bug: there are secret areas denoted by a blue fairy sort of creature. Sometimes they're visible but other times they're not though they have an audio cue that is based on your proximity to them. Well, you'd want to lower the music volume a bit to hear them better, right? If you do that, you run into a bug that's present at this time: lowering the music volume also lowers the volume of these secret cues. If you turn up the volume when you're in proximity then turn it off, you'll still get the cue... for that area. Move on to the next secret area and the cue is once again gone. Thankfully, there's also some visual cues and some rather easy guesswork to reveal hidden areas.

-Halfway through, you'll fight the game's antagonist for the first time and he's got a second phase that suddenly turns the game into a shoot-'em-up. Again, no instruction makes this frustrating: no explanation of the controls and mechanics, no obvious indication the boss has regenerating health. (This also goes for the other levels where you have a new form to play with.) And if you don't damage the boss correctly, he'll regenerate that health within a second. On top of all of that, the game reduces you to four health containers, regardless if you have more.

-Enemies have a strict hitbox where you must hit them squarely on their top. If you're even a bit diagonal, you'll take damage. You'll also take contact damage if you touch a stunned enemy.

-Your status/inventory screen explains nothing. 7 hours in, I've collected a bunch of these blue orbs in every level and I don't even know what they're called or what they're for. I see the wands I've bought but no explanation of their effects. I see the gem bag but no idea what my maximum carry capacity is. Lastly, the list of levels only shows numbers, not their names. It can't be stressed enough how much this game just isn't explaining anything to you.

-My patience ultimately ran out when I had to do the game's shadow clone levels. Much like what you'd see in Mario games from the past years, you're chased by a clone that does your exact movements but with a short delay. Except it's a one hit kill, mercy invincibility won't help you, there's no checkpoints, and you still have to deal with the game's annoyances and frustrations.