Recent reviews by Cheshire Cat

Through GZDoom witchcraft, the devs have brought you this horrifyingly competent masterpiece of what I'm gonna call F.E.A.R.-type shooters. Not quite a boomer shooter, but not really a modern shooter either. Closer to DOOM (2016) than it is Duke Nukem, y'know?

Genuinely, it'd be hard to believe that this is GZDoom if I hadn't played other games that really strain the engine to its absolute limits to see what it could do, because the sheer amount of interactivity, combat effects and verticality feels way outside the scope of what GZDoom can muster.

Guns all feel fantastic with exception to the SMGs and Sniper/DMR, which I'll get to in my gripes section, and the shotgun is absolutely top 10 of all time. Everything (again, except for the SMG and DMR) sounds chunky, feels powerful and is always useful. Even the starter pistol makes a better sniper than the dedicated sniper weapon, and can two-tap most enemies with headshots. The shotgun in particular though? Genuinely, top 10 of all time. It'll one-tap basically everything at close range, is still useful at medium range and can even blast open destructible walls after an upgrade you can acquire around the middle of Chapter 1, letting you save the intensely satisfying explosives for your foes.

And on the explosive front, it's unbelievably nice to see a game where explosives are, y'know, EXPLOSIVES again. None of that "Grenades that feel like a wet fart with an explosion like a waft of yellow paint" nonsense. These explosives are DESTRUCTIVE, LOUD and extremely LARGE. Environmental interaction plays a big part in this, in that if you huck a frag, it's gonna blow out every window nearby into a shower of glass, kick up a ton of dust and absolutely gib anything in its radius. Even landmines are useful in Selaco, and landmines are NEVER useful in games where you get them.

Seriously, go buy this, it's well worth your cash for gameplay alone.

But okay, the bad;

Firstly, Selaco falls into a bit of a pitfall that games like this tend to have, where there's an overlap of weapon roles in the roster and one of them absolutely falls flat. This being the SMG. It does absolutely nothing of value at all, even remotely. The spread makes it useless at range beyond CQC in which case one would and should just use the shotgun, the fire rate chews through your valuable ammo which is far more valuable for the Assault Rifle since they share a pool, the upgrades are plain worse on the SMG than other weapons, and I fail to see any use for it whatsoever when any other gun would fit any situation where the SMG even MIGHT be useful. It fills no role, yet is seemingly intended to share the same role as the AR, which is a problem many boomshoots or similar genres have, where multiple weapons in the roster are identical in role, but different in stats. The SMG is basically just a bad AR, and both share the same role and even ammo, making me question what the point is for the SMG.

The DMR/Sniper also has a big problem in that it's just... Not useful. Nearly ever. It doesn't do particularly good damage, requires you to stand still next to cover of the right height to get the most out of it, upgrades to do LESS damage in exchange for a not particularly useful "stealth" boost which doesn't appear to actually do anything and lacks a decent ammo pool for such a slow and largely useless weapon. The only time I've ever actually pulled it out on purpose is to kill other snipers, which seem to have only appeared once, then never again, and every time I've pulled it out by accident has been quickly met with mild annoyance and a quick swap to something else as ANYTHING else, even the SMG, is more useful.

Secrets are also... Kind of a problem in Selaco. There's a lot of them, many are sort of difficult to find, and the only ones really worth looking for are the ones with weapon/kit upgrades since the only stuff IN secrets are mostly ammo and weapon parts (upgrade currency), and typically not much of either. Bigger problem though, some of the important ones with upgrades in them are really, really annoying to find, and the one secret-finding concession item, a loose item that beeps when you get close to secrets you haven't found, is difficult to find itself and far too vague to be useful. This becomes more important when you need to backtrack to fill out your upgrades and secrets you missed, since you flatly just aren't going to find them once you've filled the map out, and the secret finder isn't even ON every level, making acquiring one and dragging it around a bit of a chore. There really needs to be a better way to hunt secrets, especially with so many, and with so many being kind of let-downs of just a single pack of ammo or 25 armour pickups.

That's basically it for the bad stuff. Two weapons which are kind of useless and bad and weak, and secrets being a pain in the arse to find, especially when backtracking into areas where enemies don't exist any more, the map is filled and you're relying solely on observation in rooms you've thoroughly obliterated with combat.

TLDR: Buy this. It's worth your money by quite a lot. If you liked F.E.A.R., you'll like this as they're basically the same subgenre of spectacle shooters in the way of gameplay. Combat is extremely fun, enemies are dangerous, weapons (mostly) feel good, levels are large and chock-full of stuff to find. Lots of nods to other games or memes in general and enough content even in early access to keep you occupied for a while.

Just don't. This is not worth your time, money or attention.

Performance is terrible and textures look so low-res that they rival the PS1 for fidelity if they even load properly at all,

Gameplay feels awful and far too stiff,

There's absolutely no variety whatsoever once you've finished the tutorial as almost every single weapon type and enemy type is found in the tutorial,

Armour (clothing) is literally pointless as none of them actually appear to do anything of actual value

Light (agility in-game) weapons are the only ones of value due to the "immobilisation" mechanic demanding repeating hits to get "critical" hits (backstabs, basically), making the entire heavy category pointless

Ranged attacks are worse than useless,

Only the frost elemental damage serves a function as fire and lightning appear to do literally nothing, where frost damage locks enemies in place for big hits and the majority of enemies are vulnerable to it AND you get a reliable way to deal frost damage in the tutorial and another after the first major boss which puts you into melee range,

There's only 8 bosses in the entire game. Only 8, and with each district only taking about 30 minutes to get through even while looking for pickups (most of which are useless items which give you currency), you'll fight the first three (which give you the mobility upgrades) within about three hours,

The story is a mess and has absolutely ZERO catharsis since it's so unbelievably predictable that it could genuinely be a Dora the Explorer episode for how simplistic everything is. The plot thread regarding who/what Aegis is is literally resolved as soon as you achieve the second major objective of the game if you have two braincells to rub together and can do enough critical thinking to make a prediction.

Every historical character you meet in the game is weirdly off-kilter. Somehow at one point, famous abolitionist Lafayette is talking about how he owns slaves and how much profit they make directly to Julien Raimond, a black slave owner who justifies his own ownership of slaves in the same conversation, and the game entirely unironically paints Robespierre as an incorruptible (a laughably bad take) figure of truth, justice and liberty. For a game made by French people, they absolutely do not appear to have any pride for French history if they're getting things THAT wrong. And yeah, yeah, it's an AU where robots exist, but beyond that they're all real people being portrayed, and yet here Spiders are portraying Marie Antoinette as a good person and fully justified in their dismissal of the peasantry rather than a flighty gambling addict so detached from reality that she was LITERALLY a traitor to France.

TLDR: Don't buy this. Even on sale it's not worth your money. I finished it in just over 10 hours, and even THAT was too long for such a waste of developer time and my money. The DLC isn't worth your money either, as it's literally two reskin bosses, two reskin weapons and ONE new gimmick weapon and boss in an area that looks like every other area of the game and STILL doesn't have any catharsis as the bad guy STILL gets away.

A defining game for a console generation. I mean, you know what this is, you know what it's about, you've most likely seen the protagonist(s) before or seen the cute little memes about chirping and how friendly people are.

Just play this again. It's well worth a revisit and only takes a couple hours to finish at least one journey. For a few bucks, well worth the price.

It's so, so terrible. I got this for practically nothing as part of the Humble Monthly and I still feel like I was ripped off.

Get patriotic and defend MANAGED DEMOCRACY with your fellow patriots, using high-calibre, high-explosive orbital ordinance, friends, and a good old-fashioned rifle.

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It's basically everything the first game did, but improved and fixed.

Better classes, new and interesting weapons, more gradual upgrades, slower difficulty curve (though some bosses are HARD spikes), positively gorgeous worlds to explore, excellent world lore for each world, better puzzles and events...

Really, if you can afford this, buy it. It's well worth your money if you like Souls type games.

Voice acting aside (and seriously, yes, it's that bad), Atomic Heart is pretty damn good. Aesthetically pleasing, punchy combat and creative enemies... Plus, it's relatively bug-free for a game out of an Eastern European studio.

Really, the only downsides are voice acting, lack of real need for exploration on the open map, and the irritating way enemies on the open map will be 'repaired' on the spot with no way to halt it.

Don't buy this. Just don't.

I put in 143 hours, completed all the curated content and got all the achievements just to make sure I can safely tell you not to buy this.

The planets are empty wastelands of absolutely nothing, and what DOES exist are the same, repeating points of interest, identical down to the clutter, over and over and over again. The devs responded to another review claiming that "The moon was empty when humans went there for real, so we're totally justified in not making content for our game" which is such a nonsense, cop-out response for refusing to do the work to make a fun game that it's actually laughably stupid.

Having done the research, in terms of content, Starfield is the smallest game ever released by BGS. It has;

About 270 unique locations (including the 118 possible NPC ship interior configurations), almost half of which are repeating POIs found in the procedurally generated planets (which are mostly empty voids that the devs defended as "Not boring"). It has less unique locations to see and find than Fallout 3's before including DLC, a game from 2008, which until now had the smallest number of locations (marked and unmarked) in a BGS game.

196 quests TOTAL, which is only 5 more than Fallout 3's 191 quests in the base game.

Only 53 weapon types, not including the uniques, wherein only about 5 of them have unique models, since the uniques are literally just "Weapon but specific traits" which are able to be found through regular looting, don't scale to the player's level and are visually identical to the base version of the gun. This is exactly the same as Fallout 3's base game weapon count EXCEPT that Fallout 3 had a number of fully unique unique weapons (as well as just "weapon but with different stats").

Only 4 companions, again, the smallest number of any BGS game, and their companion quests are shorter than any other to date.

Less customisation, and more restricted customisation for weapons and armour than Fallout 4.

Less cosmetic items (glasses, hats, etc...) AND you can't loot an NPC's clothing since all the loot is randomised and not what they visibly have on them. If they were wearing a hat, for example, their loot will not actually contain that hat.

The same lead designer and writer that thoroughly RUINED Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Skyrim and Fallout 76's stories and most of the writing.

Just don't buy this. It's a waste of your time, my time, your money and my money. Bethesda basically just dropped a turd, wrapped it in tinfoil, spray painted it gold and pretended it was fine art. It's not just an insult to fans of the studio, but also an active waste of space on your SSD since the game can't even run properly on an HDD.

Don't buy this. Spend your money elsewhere. Seriously, don't even get this on sale, it's not worth it.

Honestly, seriously, just play this game. You absolutely won't regret it.

Even people who dislike horror games will like this one, as it's JUST the right amount of goofy and funny to make the scary parts a bit softer while not diminishing the scares.

Plus, the soundtrack, ambience and design of the monsters and their stories is just, mwah, perfect. Really, a truly excellent little indie game, and one I really hope gets a sequel to follow up on some of its plot threads and themes.

Genuinely speaking here, Red Dead Redemption 2 is not the golden boy of gaming like so many proclaim it is. The story isn't particularly good or amazing, with characters making nonsensical decisions, Arthur doing things entirely without cause and obvious plot twists and points to keep the plot running in the direction it needs to go in to have what little impact it does.

The gameplay is worse. Much worse. In the name of "realism" and "immersion" nearly every single action the player needs to take over and over and over for the 30-odd hours of story missions, let alone the potentially hundreds of hours of miscellaneous (and very limited) side activities.

A ten second gunfight with more than 10 enemies takes ten times the time spent in gameplay simply looting corpses due to the game having forcing an animation for each and every body the character can path to. Ditto hunting, ditto looting a room or using a shop.

God forbid you want to craft or cook anything, because the game simply insists that Arthur cook and craft items one at a time. Stab the meat onto his knife (instead of using the portable grill in his camp kit), hold it over the flame for 5-ish seconds, then sit there gormlessly until you tell him to put it in his satchel or eat it. To put in perspective, it takes nearly 5 whole minutes to fill the player's supply of craftable-only split-point bullets since each of the up to 200 rounds must be crafted one by one.

The side content is STAGGERINGLY limited compared to how the game was hyped up. You have exactly 3 gambling minigames (all of which are extremely slow and have extended animations for each and every action), treasure hunting (which operates the same as the previous game and is simply "Find place, repeat up to twice, get pitiful amount of useless money), hunting (don't even get me started, it's atrocious and an extreme timewaster with little reward save satchels and stat boosts), fishing (which is probably the worst fishing minigame I have ever played in any game ever, with nonsensical rules, awkward buttons and no tangible rewards except money which is mostly useless), sidequests (the worst of which are the longest, of course. Can't have an interesting one at all that lasts longer than three reappearances) and... That's it.

There is functionally no benefit to crime as the bandanna does LITERALLY NOTHING to prevent gaining a bounty during a crime (even if you're out in the middle of nowhere with no witnesses) and the only actual crimes you can commit are stickups or murder when you don't have a specific mission. Walk into a building or hold someone up at gunpoint. Sometimes it's a carriage, sometimes it's a bank teller, but the actual method never changes and you can never actually rob a train or bank or even just non-generic NPCs outside of a mission.

This not an amazing game. It's not a great game. It's, at BEST, a decent game. Truly, RDR2 is realism to the point of tedium with the sole intent to be as slow and boring as possible. Props to you if you enjoy it, but I truly cannot recommend it to anyone who doesn't have the patience for a slow game that doesn't have the payoff in story OR gameplay to justify its brutal, glacial pacing and gameplay.