State of Decay

 


State of Decay Was Great… Until ONE Thing Ruined It

State of Decay is almost a great zombie survival game.
It has base building, survivor management, permadeath-style character swapping, cars, looting, and a surprisingly deep open world.
For the first few hours, I thought I had found one of the coolest zombie games I’d missed.

But then the game did something insane: the main missions just stopped appearing.
Not once. Not twice. For hours.
I was driving in circles, doing filler quests, restarting the game, literally waiting for the campaign to continue.

So this is one of the weirdest reviews I’ve done: a game I genuinely liked… that also felt broken by design.




State of Decay is basically Grand theft auto but in  zombie apocalypse. I didnt know thats what I was getting myself into but thats almost what it turned out to be. The game starts off, with no difficulty selection, and not even an intro cutscene or anything. You and a friend are suddenly ambushed by some zombies at a lake. There is an event log, that shows notable events, and even a sort of diary before the game even started, but thats it, not much else story. I actually like the minimal storytelling and getting into the game fast. Before long you arrive at a ranger station and here is where the game shows off its mechanics.

You have a main base, where you can open a menu and upgrade various aspects of it. More on this later, at first theres not much you can do. You have allies who occupy the base with you, and you can interact with them although theres not much you can say or do with them besides asking them to follow you.

This game is largely about roaming an open world, doing randomly generated repeatable side quests, and also doing important main missions when they appear. My first impression of the combat is that it reminded me of Dead Rising, not just the combat but the aspect of saving survivors and having to escort them back to your base. That's not a bad thing, Dead Rising is a great game, so I was excited to see other games with similar mechanics. The melee combat is very simple, you mostly just press a single button to melee attack, although later on I realized if you hold sprint and attack you do a different animation, but still its very basic. The melee is mostly about stunning the enemies before they grab and stun you, so I preferred to use lighter weapons such as blades rather than big two handed weapons. You also have to manage your stamina, when it drains it leaves you very vulnerable, you can also eat food with the press of a button to regain stamina or health. It works well enough, and your melee weapons also have durability and can degrade and break. But if you store them in your stash at the base, you can slowly repair them over time, which is a well designed mechanic since it makes you utilize your different resources.

The graphics are initially  slightly cartoony, but actually still decent looking considering its a 2013 game. Theres lots of tasteful use of color, hazy blue and purple mist and fog and nice colors throughout the game. Theres decent reflections , shadows, and specular effects, and the zombies look threatening enough, although a tad too cartoony. The worst issue is the games not optimized very well, even on any system, to where you can see tons of pop-in especially when driving, as well as stuttering, but its not that big of a deal.

Guns are similarly quite simplistic, ammo is relativiely limited although you can trade for ammo at other survivor bases using the currency known as Influence, you usually only take like 30 to 60 bullets with you at a time as inventory space is limited, which is something I enjoyed.

But the ranger station segment is a short lived prelude, everyone there dies and you quickly head south to the real start of the game.

Then you show up to a base at a church in a small town, its reminiscent of Season 2 of The Walking Dead, the farmyard with Hershell and the pastor. Its a nice mix of inspirations, Dead Rising, The Walking Dead, GTA, and even a bit of The Sims with managing your base and its resources and NPC's. The main NPC who talks to you over the radio and assigns missions is Lily, and you hear from her a lot.

At this part the game is quite freeform. You roam around the town, bringing up the games Map and selecting missions to go towards. Theres no easy way to tell whats a side mission and whats a main mission. But your main base has stats to care about, such as food supplies, ammo reserves, Fuel, medicine, and Construction materials which determine the status of your base signified by a resource bar. NPC's can also become sad or get in disputes, needing to manage them, giving The Sims influence feeling. So doing randomly generated side quests to bring back resources is beneficial and actually satisfying, you can find survivors to take with you and permanently unlock in your base.

Before long you discover the unique and interesting mechanic the game has up its sleeve that sets it apart from most other similar zombie games. Theres a "friend" system, where if you build relations and influence enough with NPC's in your base, you then befriend them and can play as them. You are able to swap in and out of any of your friends whenever you want, they continue going about their life without you, going on runs, you can radio them to come take stuff youve found, all sorts of cool things. Even more exciting is that each survivor has their own set of unique traits and perks, stats, and you can upgrade each of them individually to specialize in different areas. One person can be the dedicated melee guy, the other a skilled sharpshooter that can slow down time with a perk, stuff like that. Some characters even have silly or humorous traits Such as "Loved Reality show trivia" or "Online shopper" with their own joke skills for flavour. This made each NPC feel unique and worth paying attention to, because sadly theres not much dialogue or interaction with them otherwise. The upgrades are basic, the more you do things, the more they level up. Run around a lot, cardio goes up, and thus so does sprint. Melee a lot, and melee goes up. Shoot a lot, guns increase. Then at certain thresholds you get to pick permanent perks and you get to pick a specialization. Some of these perks change the way the game plays, like you can unlock a slow motion ability if your shooting is high enough and you spec into shooting for instance. Its pretty basic stuff, but it again adds things to look forward to and build towards and added another dimension to the game.

But theres more. There is permadeath. If an NPC dies, they are gone for good. This raises the stakes and makes you really care and be locked in as youre playing. Its an engaging and clever design choice that I appreciate, it made the game much more intense and interesting. Although the first time this happened it took me by surprise and made me a bit butthurt cause I didnt know, but I got over it. I only had a single character die the entire game, so its not like its a hard game really, but it has just the right touches to make you care and actually be engrossed in whats happening.

The neat thing is the game forces you to switch between characters too, you cant really just play as one character for the entire game because they get either Tired or Hurt status. The only way to get rid of these debuffs, which ruin your stamina, is to swap to another character and wait for them to go to sleep or go to an infirmary. So youre heavily incentivized to gear up and upgrade multiple characters, it works well but one gripe I have is that pretty much everyone you can befriend always starts off with trash stats, so its a bit contradictory, if you want me to play as these other people, at least let me find some people that start off with decently high combat stats instead of all one stars. The only person I found with good starter stats was the mandatory person you get in the beginning of the game, Maya, she starts off with almost maxed out shooting and a unique shooting perk, so I felt like I had to play as her for most of the game since shes already so good.

The inventory UI, and itemization is also a fun aspect of the game. By default you can only carry 6 slots, and you cant even drop items but instead you must destroy them if you arent putting them in your main stash. You can find different backpacks such as a Large Backpack to increase it to 8 slots. And besides the slots, each item has a corresponding weight, so a big sledgehammer can weigh you down more than a knife, and even if your slots arent full you can still be overencumbered if you carry too high weight. This is another strategic and fun part of the game, balancing out your loadout but also being able to efficiently loot. The UI is okay, its stylized in a unique way, everything has the same color which maybe makes things look a bit too samey, but it works well enough.

As you complete missions, and do various things in the world, you gain Influence. Influence is a sort of currency you spend at bases to trade, as well as taking things out of your own base. When you put things away in the base stash, you get influence. And withdrawing items also costs a certain amount of influence, so its also a balancing act of figuring out where to spend this currency and when to deposit. For instance buying ammo at neighbouring bases costs more than taking it from your main bases stash. All of this comes together to add depth, strategy, and complexity to the game that is much appreciated.

Theres lots of loot and items to find, too. The game has a surprisingly impressive amount of weapon diversity. Theres tons of different melee weapons, and a staggering amount of guns too. Each with their own stats and abilities. Different ammo types corresponding to how powerful a gun may be, similar to real life. You need to carefully decide which type of ammo you will take with it depending on how dangerous you may expect it to get. Although for most of the game I just ended up using this SKS rifle, it used powerful 7.62 rounds, always could find enough ammo, and it had a 10 round magazine with no bolt action so it shot fast enough. I didnt see much point in using automatic rifles since its a resource management game I don't want to just spray and pray. You mostly loot houses, parts of the house glow which are lootable containers, it does a timer that you can speed up if you hold a button at the cost of making more noise and attracting zombies, then you find individual items or you find big container items which you can carry on your back as a rucksack, like materials, food, medical supplies etc, you can load items into cars and then park the car in front of the main base to automatically deposit resources to the base. Each time theres a silly radio message from Lily "Whatcha got?" , and the character always replying in a whimsical manner "Oh you know....Stuff" , which is very dumb, but kinda charming and amusing.

There's cars all over the place, and they get an icon on your minimap. The driving is polished enough, things don't feel too floaty or too arcadey, the driving is solid but at times the physics can be wonky , the game has definite amounts of jank, sometimes you can hit a tiny pebble on the ground and flip the entire car over flying into the air destroying it for instance. But still, lots of car varieties, a surprising amount considering the kind of game it is, Trucks, SUV's, Taxi's, police cars, sports cars, jeeps, and the like. You can even repair vehicles at your base. Theres a funny and satisfying mechanic where you can hold the fire button to open your car door and use it as sort of a weapon, because if you just ram enemies directly with your vehicle it will damage it rapidly, but if you use your car door it doesnt seem to damage the vehicle quite as much, so it creates this entertaining mechanic where you try to carefully position your car to hit the enemies with the door, its the most effective way to mow down zombies in the whole game it felt like.

The game world is decently sized, theres a few main cities, a big spawling countryside that wraps around and connects them, big open farm fields to drive through, its not a massive game like others in the genre, I felt like it was the right size, but theres not really any memorable locations or landmarks, its a lot of the same generic little towns and some highways to connect them. Its alright.

There is a game has a day and night cycle and its very longwinded. Night time seems to last for hours in real life time, and day time feels shorter. Night time is more dangerous it seems too, more zombies and theyre more aggressive. Shooting your gun is often a bad idea because it seems to just instnatly spawn zombies around you no matter what, infact a gripe I have with the game is many times it feels like zombies are just never ending and spawning nonstop in your vicinity rather than you organically stunmbling upon many zombies, they feel like they just keep spawning ontop of you.

Zombies are mostly standard what you would expect, also some Left 4 Dead influence in the different types, you have one that jumps ontop of you called Feral Zombie, you have a big one called the Juggernaut which is very tanky, another one thats fat and explodes with steaming bile, other ones that wear SWAT gear, but thats pretty much eat. Not too great, but not bad, works well enough.

But for the first few hours of the game things were quite enjoyable going around doing little tasks, meet this survivor group here, save this person there and bring them back to your base like Dead Rising, your friend at the church base gets sick and you have to go get medicine for him, the pastor gets sick and dies, you sometimes have infected NPC's that you have to take out back and kill them, its engaging and fun and you want to know what happens next. You meet a nefarious neighboring group called the Wilkersons which are like hillbillies on a farm, and you have a few run ins with the army.

But sadly the enjoyment at times grinded to a hault. The game has a really baffling and annoying flaw and design choice. Main missions simply do not spawn. Its not like in GTA where you can just drive to some location and constantly do the next main mission. In this game its more like, you go do a main mission, and then theres no more on the map. You have no idea what will trigger the next one or when it will show up. At first this started happening and I wasn't aware of it since its hard to tell whats a main mission or not, so I would just keep doing the same handful of randomly generated copy paste side quests over and over, like go here and take out this zombie, or go there and help this ally, stuff like that. But eventually I realized that the damn main missions are just not spawning.

I started Googling around and it turns out its a very common problem everyone has with this game.  Seems like everyone has moments where they just have no idea how to progress and theyre just aimlessly roaming in circles with nothing happening, either thinking their game is broken or not knowing what to do. Infact early around the games launch, people complained so much that the devs started asking people to send them in their own save file data so they  can analyze it and try to fix the problem. Well now its over a decade later and the same problem exists. The games main missions just feel broken half the time and never appear. What a rediculous issue to have for a game. How do you make a game where your main campaign just doesnt show up? Did they do it on purpose to prevent you from beating the game too fast or what? Either way it totally sucks.

Towards the end of the game it got to the point where I hadn't seen a main mission for hours on end, just twiddling my thumbs, or doing dozens of the same side quests over and over, or even just alt tabbing and leaving the game running waiting for something to happen. I mean what the fuck? I found out that it seemed like if I just quit the game, and then launch it again, I would sometimes instantly get the next main mission to appear. Its just totally broken bullshit. It should not be like a damn miracle just to get the next mission to appear so I can progress the game. Its so sad, I was having fun with the game until this started happening.

At one point you get suggested to move your main base, so you scout around and can move your base almost anywhere you want, which was a cool feature. I just put it down south in the next major city, at some big warehouse complex. This place appeared to give the most possible slots for things to build, like a place to train NPC's, a place to build exta storage, infirmary, sleeping areas, you can even build a library and research center, to do things like craft ammo but I never was able to do that, theres only so much space you have to build stuff. Still its cool how much stuff you can build and upgrade.

But after going down south and progressing further the game really just started to drip feed main missions to you, it got really boring at a point and annoying.
Another gripe is that many of the questlines simply revolve around these other bands of survivors, but they all feel anti-climactic or half assed and do not go anywhere. You have a few missions with these people at a courthouse, a judge and a sherrif, but its only 3 missions and then they just abruptly die and thats it, no one even mentions it or talks about it after, no cutscene, nothing. It just felt pointless and unfinished. There afformentioned Wilkerson missions similarly dont really go anywhere, you go back and forth negotiating with them doing fetch quests then it just wraps up where you either say yes to side with them or not and I said yes, you escort some group to them then leave, if you go back later you find this groups belongings on the ground implying they were killed...and thats it. No cutscene or anything to tie up the storyline , its awkward.

Theres another storyline involving the Grange people, this punk rock girl and her friends, turns out she used to be a prostitute and she was hiding it from her now boyfriend, you can either tell him or not, and if you tell him she ends up dying, and thats also pretty much it. These subplots dont really go anywhere or really offer much to the main story at all, it comes across as almost pointless busywork to try to add SOMETHING to the game, rather disappointing main missions really.

The last group of missions are army related missions and they are similarly underwhelming, half of them arent even missions at all its just going and talking to this guy and thats the entire thing. Only two of them are even notable, one is defending a few soldiers as they blow up a bridge wall, another you go inside this base and raid it which was probably the best mission in the game, another you help them at some farm.

But still, throughout many of these I would have moments where the next main mission would just not spawn, I was livestreaming my playthrough and at times I would just walk away from my computer and do nothing waiting for something to happen, its so bad. Especially the army missions, the last handful of army missions just DID NOT want to spawn for me, it took hours. Eventually after restarting the game over and over, roaming around, doing endless side quests, cleairng infestations that spawn around the map, they miraculously started spawning.

I do the last few army missions, and the final missioon is just a defense mission on a bridge where the guy plants another explosive at a barrier and sacrifices himself as you protect him. Game finished, end credits. Super anticlimactic missions in general that rarely go anywhere and even the ending missions of the game felt very underwhelming. If you try to play after the credits it just takes you back before the last mission. I guess you can keep playing to go find more survivors or fully upgrade your base and find more loot but yeah not much point.

This "Year one survival edition" (also the only edition you can buy nowadays) comes with all DLC. A breakdown mode, which appears to just be a survive as long as possible mode, and another Lifeline mode which is another separate campaign, that I will maybe play one day.

Thats State of Decay. It was fun until the main missions started being a complete chore to even unlock. Its such a crazy design choice, did they intend it to be like this? Why is it like this? The game would of been significantly better if it did not have this issue, but even with it, I still had a decent time overall, it is a unique experience with the base management, playing as any NPC swapping in and out with their own perks and traits, interesting loot, with an open world including lots off vehicles and zombies, saving survivors was fun although the AI can be frustrating - its sad the game somehow managed to shoot its self in the foot and manage to screw it up a bit.

6/10

Watch Dogs: Legion

 

Having finished every game in the series, it was only a matter of time before I got to Legion. I thought the first Watch Dogs was decent and hated Watch Dogs 2, so my expectations were already low. After a brief opening that feels like a discount James Bond mission, Legion reveals its main twist: instead of playing a defined protagonist like Watch Dogs 1 and 2, you recruit and control random NPCs from the city, each with their own perks and traits. It is a novel idea on paper, but the game introduces it clumsily enough that I initially thought I was stuck with my first recruit for much longer than I actually was.

As for the premise, it is the usual Watch Dogs setup of surveillance, corruption, and activist resistance, except this time it takes place in London, which is a fascinating setting for a GTA type game. Although the narrative is told with the same heavy-handed, black-and-white political writing Ubisoft always falls back on. Rather than feeling thoughtful, it mostly feels lazy and eye-roll inducing. You never get the sense Ubisoft is exploring these ideas with any real curiosity. It feels more like the game is lecturing the player than presenting a believable world.

Still its an interesting setting, I just feel like it could be better executed in the hands of a different developer.

The game starts off with a small roster of playable characters, but as you progress, you can recruit just about anyone you see on the street. The reason to recruit more people is becasue the game is designed in such a way where it seems impossible to actually obtain weapons, its just whatever the character happens to spawn with. You kill all sorts of enemies and they drop their guns, but you cant ever pick them up, a departure from how previous games worked. You cant even purcahse guns from shops or anything, its ONLY whatever your team mates have. This is a strange, awkward design because by default most operatives only have these shitty yellow non-lethal stun guns. They work okay, but certainly not something you want to be stuck with the whole game, even just due to lack of variety.

So the main draw, at least for me, to recruit other people is to actually get access to some real weapons. You can hold middle mouse button to view the loadout of random pedestrians, some of them have their own perks and traits, such as stuff like  store discounts, melee damage, rifle damage, more health, hacking speed, and so on. Nothing really drastic stands out as super interesting, except perhaps the fact that you can recruit Lawyers which reduce jail time if you get arrested, and Paramedics which randomly can revive a downed member instead of having to wait the 30 or so minutes it usually takes. But mostly the main thing you care about is their gun. It's a novel idea, to actually recruit different people you can swap in and out of, you can have dozens of them, but overall it turns out to be a gimmick that you barely care about, mostly playing as one or two people the entire game. Shortly into the game I found this british guy that  comes with a silenced MP5, I recruited him and used him for most of the game because it was so uncommon to find anyone else with a decent gun.

Recruting people can be a little annoying, too. You usually have to go on some side quest for them, usually mundane fetch quests, infiltrate this building and hack this computer, go into this building and do this puzzle. Sometimes its multiple of them back to back just to recruit one person, so at a certain point I just got tired of recruting people because its not really worth it anyway since most of them are already worse than the one or two good guys I already had. Its a bit of a let down mechanically, I think the system would of worked better if instead you could recruit people using some currency, instead of constantly having to do side quests. Also, you should be able to at least buy weapons instead of relying on what these operatives spawn with. Sure you can swap out to other weapons, but only the ones you can buy from the upgrade menu, and theres apparently only 4 of them, all yellow colored Toy looking guns. Why cant I just buy an AK47 to unlock permanently and give to anyone I want? I guess its because they really wanted to try to force the player to use all sorts of different people, and the only way they could figure out how to do that is by making obtaining guns impossible.

A bit more into the game I came across this person that spawns with an AK47, and also has a perk that he takes overall reduce damage. Clearly the best guy in the game so far. I used him whenever I could for the rest of the game. The people that spawn with guns are few and far between, so really for the whole game I mostly used the MP5 guy , and then this AK47 guy. The rest of the entire recruting mechanic just fell flat past that. One or two times I used a construction guy that has the ability to spawn this drone you can ride, I used him to reach hard to get areas, but past that there wasnt much more depth to it.

So the main mechanic of the game ends up feeling like more style than substance, sadly. Still, the game world of London is impressively detailed, its again a novel idea to center the game in Europe instead of typical America, so the game does get points for having multiple features and mechanics which are unique.

For the entire game you also have this AI sidekick that talks in your ear called Bagley, which to me felt like Ubisoft trying to go for a kind of Portal Glados or Borderlands Claptrap type companion, overly quirky, whimsical, and silly, for the most part ends up cringy and annoying, with constant dumb jokes. Its like they thought this guy would turn into a beloved mascot but really it comes off as grating more than anything. Sure theres moments here and there where hes almost amusing to listen to but more often than not its irritating.

And the actual bulk of the games missions are , like the previous game, not very exciting. The games main missions have you bouncing from location to location, thankfully there is a fast travel where you can fast travel to many different stations around the map, that you unlock by I think just driving past them for the first time, you cannot fast travel directly to the main mission but often enough theres a fast travel point close by anyway. Then usually every mission has you infiltrating some building and hacking a computer, or doing the same copy paste puzzles over and over. Usually either the Spiderbot segments which are mostly boring, you play as a spider crawling through vents or doing lackluster platforming segments, with some notably annoying segments with unintuitive pacing, just to finally hack into some computer. Or you're doing the same puzzle with the colored grids, shifting the colored lines around until they all match up. Rinse and repeat. In between these two segments you have combat.

The combat is standard as you would expect, not much different than previous games, but actually a bit worse since the lack of weapon variety. I basically played the entire game using only the MP5 or AK from the two team members with good guns I had. Switching team members is not instant, also, you cant do it while in combat, so even less variety since you dont swap that often. Its a basic third person cover shooter, except at times I found the controls to snap into cover clunky and not accurate. The basic shooting feels okay, with hit markers and different kinds of enemies like heavily armored enemies, regular enemies, and lots of drones. Youre fighting the police government force called Albion, and not really anyone else for the entire game. Theres really not too much to say about the combat, its just so generic its the same youve seen a thousand times already, regenerating health, lots of ammo everywhere, standard but competent cover shooter. The only extra is the use of gadgets but none of them are fun to use or exciting. Its a bunch of different droens, a missle drone, you can use the spiderbot to explode enemies, and a cloak to temporarily go invisible. You can do other novelty things like using hacks to make the enemies gun jam, or hacking their phone to distract them, but thats about it.

The upgrades and unlocks in general are reallly lackluster, like I said theres only 4 guns you can actually unlock and upgrade. All the other unlocks and upgrades are the various drones I just mentioned. Its really quite underwhelming and unimaginative and I think a step down from even previous games.


Of course the game has driving and car chases and police chases as well, as its a standard kind of GTA game. Commonly after missions you get the objective to Escape and you have the police after you so you have to do a basic cop escape, its fine enough. Theres a wanted meter, and you can see the cops on your minimap, just need to evade them and be outside the red bubble for long enough, you can hide in alleyways and stuff like that, its fine. The driving feels good enough, the cars are snappy and most of them are surprisingly fast, I don't have any complaints with the driving mechanics its self, its just that it never really gets utilized in any meaningful way, theres hardly any car missions or driving missions, the only time youre really in a car for any substancial amount of time is like I just said at the end of some missions doing the cop escape. Its not like GTA games where theres full missions dedicated to driving. Which makes the game feel even more monotonous and repetiive, theres a lack of variety in the missions.

There's a few missions in particular that were very annoying because they were so unintuitive in how to progress, a few times the controls really fumbled me up because sometimes you have to press Middle mouse instead of Q  to be able to finally reveal a hidden mandatory puzzle, why does it work like that? Sometimes id just run around in circles for a dozen minutes before I found it, just terrible. Theres really no standout missions, its all just variations of go into a building and do this colored grid puzzle, hack some cameras and find the way to unlock the door, follow the colored lines and hack the door electric box, over and over until the end of the game. The main thing the game has going for it is the London setting, and the novel mechanics of hiring anyone to be a playable character, it was a bit fun to checkout every NPC and see what kind of perks traits and equipment they use, and the story while painfully generic and preachy is at least entertaining at times.

The games last boss is a joke, too. You fight through the head of the militia's complex, get to him, and its just a big drone in an arena where you have to do yet another grid puzzle. Really? Thats all they could come up with? Do yet another puzzle for the last boss except this time youre being shot at? When you complete the puzzle you get a boss fight with the actual guy outside the drone but I literally killed him in under 5 seconds its like what was they point? Why didnt they make him have more health? Hes suited up in big armor it makes no sense.

Theres a short segment after this boss where you do 2 more missions to track down some other evil person whos left over and then you have to go disable the Bigsly AI which is supposed to be this heart tugging painful thing because the devs want the player to reallly be attached to this personality but it did nothing for me. Then the credits roll, and after credits surprise! hes not actually dead. Eyeroll isnt it?

Thats Watch Dogs Legion. I dont think this series has much life in it, its very good conceptually, GTA but what if everyone is owned by technology and megacorporations and such, its just that Ubisoft tends to turn good ideas to slop at a rapid pace. This game doesnt feel or play much different than many other Ubisoft games. It is impressive how you can play as any random NPC, full with their own voice acting and maybe even voice lines? Not sure how its handled but I was amused by swapping between characters and seeing how their personality is different in cutscenes. But now its been 6 years since the last Watch Dogs release so maybe thats all we'll see from this franchise, a bit of a sour note to end on as this game is overall mind numbingly average. At least I finished it in only 2 sessions, its not as long as Watch Dogs 2 , so that helps.

5/10

Atomic Heart

 

I'm always up for playing single player FPS game. Atomic Heart was on my radar for awhile, and without knowing too much about it beyond the Steam page and trailer I finally picked it up.

The games premise is about a futuristic version of the Soviet Union where they have achieved insane technological advancement, where at first glance it may look like they've achieved some kind of utopia but of course its actually a dystopia in disguise. This slowly reveals its self over the games massive hour long intro. You start up the game, and its this fantastical exposition showcasing wondrous visuals, you briefly get to walk around these city streets, although its more like a hallway its so linear, where you can talk to various NPC's and overall just get a vibe of everything. It's a fascinating opening, and the setting is interesting, how technology is so advanced you can learn anything you want just by uploading it into your brain, like if you want to learn piano, or become a scientist, or learn any language, its a click of a button away, then you have lots of cutscenes further slowly unraveling the setup. While it is interesting, it kinda starts to wear out its welcome because by the 40 minute mark I was just looking down at my watch wondering when the actual game would begin, worried this is all just style over substance.

Unfortunately it kinda was. The game is very frontloaded. By that I mean puts all the most interesting and grand spectacles only in the beginning of the game. It tries to impress and woo you with all these amazing introduction scenes, it tries to set you up thinking youre in for this crazy journey, when in reality just a few hours into the game it becomes mundane and nothing like that very rapidly. After the grandiose opening, you quickly are shoved inside some relatively dull factories and laboratories. Never again really in the game do you feel that same sense of wonder and spectacle.

The games a kind of mix between Half Life and Fallout. You have these elaborate bunkers you navigate around, constantly solving puzzles, but also you're looting desks and cabinets constantly, picking up resources for crafting and RPG mechanics. You just hold E and he takes his glove out and starts siphoning all the resources out of the room. You have these saferooms scattered around the levels, with this red locker that talks to you with a female voice being all sexual, which got pretty cringy fast, where you can then upgrade various skill trees and your arsenal. There are also some outdoors segments where you can kind of freeroam, but theyre few and far between with not really much to do anyways. The graphics can be nice to look at, vibrant colors, and the open map segments do look good, but most of the game is spent in underground bunkers and labs with not much to look at, besides soviet decorations.

On paper it sounds like it could be fun, but unfortunately it didn't take long for me to realize Atomic Heart is mostly style over substance, with some really dull design choices and gameplay systems.


First of all the game is very slow to get going. When youre finally playing, you only get a melee weapon, and still youll only play for 40 seconds then get another barrage of cutscenes and dialogue. While it can be interesting, at a certain point its just like, "I wanna start playing" , you know? Finally youre actually playing, and you just have this melee weapon and not much else. The way you unlock other weapons is by randomly finding blueprints for them inside storage boxes. At first I think some weapons are guranteed, like the pistol and shotgun maybe, but past that it seems to be random. Theres an AK, Rocket launcher, Rail gun, Electric pistol, Electric rifle, and a handful of other melee weapons. I didn't even unlock the AK until more than halfway through the game, despite getting AK bullets for hours before that. I was confused by it that I eventually looked up how to get the AK and I found many people saying they beat the entire game and didnt even unlock the AK because its just random. Its dumb. I only unlocked a few weapons in the entire game, AK, Shotgun, Pistol, Electric pistol, and a couple melee weapons. Well I don't really want to play melee that much, its an RPG right? I should be able to pick my playstyle.

Beyond that, the game initially gives you barely any ammo. So you play the first few hours of the game using melee weapons like a fireaxe or eventually I unlocked this machete. Youre just going around fighting these unarmed robots with mustaches that just sprint at you and punch you. Over and over. Past the initial novelty they get dull pretty fast. Like what kind of FPS game just has enemies that punch you and not much else? Some of them have lazer eyes but thats it. The melee is just whatever, you have a charged attack and you can upgrade for more damage and small things like this. Theres an upgrade to give it a spin attack but I found it just worse than the charged one.

You only get enough ammo to kill one or two enemies then youre empty again, at least initially. At first I kind of liked it, had a real resource management vibe. Really caring about your resources. But that feeling soon goes out the window to where it doesnt matter and youre swimming in ammo anyway once you can start crafting ammo. So its like the design is all over the place. The beginniing of the game was mostly boring and slow, and then by the mid point the pacing changes to where you have hundreds of bullets but youre still just fighting mostly the same unarmed enemies it barely makes sense.

The games enemy variety is mostly dull. Like I said you have the unarmed robots, then you have a bunch of flying drone robots, theres a zombie type enemy, that shoots goo across the screen at you, constantly knocking you down on your ass which SUCKS and is terrible design, there are other turrets that can walk around and shoot at you, and then theres another couple robot enemies like this saw blade one and a few more. Thats it. They arent memorable or fun to fight, like shooting metallic objects isnt the most satisfying feeling in an FPS game but even still the enemies here are just boring.

But more than anything, the worst problem with this game is its god awful pacing. Its basically not even a FPS game, its first and foremost a puzzle game. A terrible one at that. Everytime you make an inch of progress, theres another bad puzzle to solve. You finally do some combat and kill 3 enemies, and immediately after is another puzzle. You walk down a new hallway, puzzle. You open a door, puzzle. You try to open a door, puzzle. Seriously its like 50% of this game is copy pasted puzzle solving, 35% is cutscenes or dialogue, and the last 15% is combat. I don't hate puzzles in games, I like puzzles sometimes. I even like full blown puzzle games. But here in Atomic Heart its just bad. Almost every single door you open has this stupid puzzle involving different colored dots that you have to spin around and match them up , like it would be fine a few times, but its like dozens of times you have to do this. Its just exhausting and annoying. Then you constantly have these puzzles with lazer grids where you have to once again spin things around until they match the right color. Then you have other segments where you have to shoot electircal pulses at these batteries on the walls to change platforms around or change bits of the enviornment around, it just goes on and on. Its not even uncommon to have puzzles ONTOP of puzzle. Like you finally open the door and then right inside the next room is another one. Or youre inside a puzzle room shooting the electrical pulses changing the room around and theres another grid puzzle ontop of it. I just got fucking SICK of it and wanted it to stop, but it never did. Very often youll have to open a door, but its gated behind one of these colored dot puzzles, and if an enemy hits you it knocks you off resetting it, which got very annoying.

Even the main character comments about how tedious and repetitive it is, like even the devs know it sucks, so why the fuck is there so many of them? Did they first put them in the game and do the voice acting later, and they realized they kinda screwed up so they at least had to make the main charater acknoweldge it? ITs just baffling design. Who the hell thinks this is fun?


Most of the time its the same copy pasted puzzle with a slightly different solution. The few times you get some unique one-off puzzles they're also quite bad, the first bit of the game youre just going around in this boring looking factory collecting canisters and moving this glowing yellow ball around to different sockets, theres a really stupid puzzle later on with musical tubes where its so unintutiive what youre supposed to do mechanically, turns out youre supposed to grab the object and then push it around while moving your characer around, that was NOT obvious at all because the damn thing looked like a static thing built into the enviornment, theres only like, one or two puzzles in the entire game that was not miserable, maybe the one with the farm animals was okay matching up them with the screens, and the other physics based one where youre spinning this mini landblock around guiding a ball to the hole. At one point in the game theres a door that needs a code and theres dead bodies laying around that can talk, and they try to tell you hints to decipher what to do, but by this point I was just sick of the constant riddles and puzzles, it was just one after another for hours, I just looked the damn solution up, I'm not doing it anymore.  The pacing just sucks. It feels like they knew their combat wasn't that great, and they had to put in something else to pad out the games length so they put in all these copy pasted puzzles. Its again, badly designed.


So the main gameplay loop is going around some indoors bunker, collecting canisters , or objects to progress through to the next room, killing a couple enemies then doing a puzzle, finding these safe rooms where you can upgrade, and rinse and repeat until you finally arrive to one of the open world segments. The open world segments are pretty underwhelming. It looks decent enough, but theres no real incentive to do anything in it. The only things to do is these optional bunkers that just will unlock some weapon attachment, that seemed to be pretty much all there is to it. But the game barely has combat anyway so not like I was hurting for more weapon attachments. You can even get in these red cars and drive, but the driving is quite annoying because its not like a true open world game, the roads are tiny and tight, with clutter all over them, so you can hardly drive without constantly smacking into barriers and the world is small anyway, its not like a Far Cry or GTA game, you can traverse the whole map in like 90 seconds, its just whatever. You only get to interact with the open world segments like, 3 times in the entire game anyway. You go through the objectives and only a few times do you arrive back at the surface. It feels like a linear game, with a few moments of slightly opening up, but its kinda pointless when it happens anyway. Its another weird design choice. Its like they couldnt decide what they wanted to be so they just tried to do everything, and half-ass everything.


As for the games RPG mechanics and upgrades, they're okay. Its not like a game with tons of player freedom and builds and variety, its not like a Fallout game. You can unlock everything in one playthrough and even by halfway through the game youve already maxed out all the things you care about anyway. First youre going around collecting resources by siphoning things with your glove, you hold the button and it automatically does it for yuo when youre near lootable containers. This quickly turns iinto just holding down the button anytime you enter a room and mindlessly collecting everything in it, without really even looking at what youre picking up. It all becomes meaningless and trivial fast. Metal parts, sillicon, electronic parts, organic stuff, its all whatever, you never really care about individual pieces since you get so much of it anyway you just end up crafting and then when you have no resources you go back and start mindlessly collecting stuff again. It feels half baked. Sure theres something satisfying about collecting all sorts of random junk, seeing your screen filled with popups, but the novelty wears off fast and turns into just going through the motions. Its not like you can ever loot any unique items or equipment, theres nothing you can really equip, its all random crafting components.

Then, at the red upgrade machinees you have two options, player perks and weapons.  Your weapons have different attachments, with different levels for each one, some offer more accuracy, faster reload, etc. Some attachments are only unlocked through doing open world stuff like I mentiond earlier. Mostly I just got the attachments that increase damage, you can also get these cannister attachment to add elemental damage to your gun like fire, ice, etc, these were okay but make your guns look a bit stupid with the can hanging off it. Its a small nitpick, but as soon as you start upgrading your weapon they start to look ugly...

There is also a straoge and inventory management component, you can only carry so much stuff with you, health items, ammo, weapons, all take different amounts of storage slots which I thought was neat. Like shotgun shells for example come in bundles of 18 , so you have a real choice when you try to carry lots of ammo with you. Still it falls flat and doesnt amount to end up mattering much because its not like youre gonna carry with you much besides health and ammo anyway. You eventually upgrade your storage space so much that it further doesnt matter. Again, its like they cant decide what kind of game theyre going for. You can dismantle items to turn them into components, which I did mostly to craft ammo. At a certain point you just dismantle basically anything that isnt health or ammo, even other types of ammo youre not using, to then craft ammo for the gun you want to use. It then became incredibly easy to consistently make myself hundreds of bullets for whatever gun I want. For example using the Shotgun, well why do I want weak pistol bullets? So instead of carrying a pistol with me, I'd just dismantle all pistol bullets to then turn them into more shotgun bullets. This meant that at some point I was just carrying with me one gun at a time and a melee weapon, because any other weapon I'd rather just dismantle its ammo into a different kind of ammo I'd rather use. It almost encourages you to only use one weapon. Another awkward design that didnt end up working out so well. There is another type of weapon that uses electricity, that slowly recharges, and I used this for a bit when my ammo was low, but its a pretty lame playstyle that I didnt love and only used it when I had to.

As for health, well the entire game I'd always have at least 10 full heals on me at any given time, the entire combat started off resource starved resorting to clunky melee, but then it quickly became incredibly trivial where I had almost infinite health and healing items, as well as an almost unlimited amount of ammo. Its not like these saferoom crafting rooms are rare either, you find them nonstop. Again, clumsy design all over the place. The balancing is non-existent.

Then the other branch of the upgrades is the character perks. Here you have various different trees. These cost a different resource, that you get by killing enemies mostly I believe. Theres the character tree which has passive overall bufs, like movement speed, increased health, take less damage, more inventory space, stuff like that. I rapidly maxed out this whole tree. Seemed like a no brainer. The other trees are for your various glove abilities. Stuff like shooting a freeze pulse out of your glove, or shooting these white globs out of your glove that coats the enemies that allows them to take more elemental damage, theres a telekenesis ability that lets you pickup enemies and slam them down, stuff like that. I toyed around with these for a bit, but like the combat was already so mindless and easy just blasting everything with either my shotgun or eventually AK that these didnt really add much for me. The freeze one felt pretty underwhelming, the glob ability felt like a novelty gimmick, and the other stuff was similarly not too enticing. Theres another tree that gives you more energy generation for those energy weapons, but really its overall bland and nothing innovative or memorable.

At least the writing and overall plot of the game IS interesting enough to save it from being a complete slog. The narrative is engaging enough, you have this talking glove for the whole game and its like this humanoid AI thing trapped inside of it that becomes your friendly companion, you have this Granny Zina that sometimes pops up which is kinda goofy but amusing, you have these cutscene segments with powerful officials and this tension back and forth about Communism and improving humanity using super technology and making everyone complacent unified slaves,living in like a dream-simulation virtual reality world like the matrix, sure it was fun enough to watch. But thats what I mean again. The coolest parts of the game have nothing to do with...the actual game, its all style over substance. Its not like the plot is amazing or anything, its just relativiely the most interesting part of the whole experience. You have these sexualized female robots, like the ones in the games promo art, but they kinda only appear like, two or three times in the whole game, there is of course a puzzle involving them, making them pose in different ways to match up with a shadow, theres a weird but neat cutscene with them how they turn some body into a weird goo monster, theres a boss fight with them and thats about it. The narrative takes twists and turns, with some betrayal, espionage, and mystery surrounding your main character and how his memory was wiped, I mean its kinda typical and generic but it works okay enough. Mostly the world is the most engaging part, but unfortunately you dont really get to interact with many aspects of the actual world, most of the game is , like I said, spent indoors.

But the writing has problems too, like the main character. He's this weird mix of this like macho sounding American, but also being a complacent lapdog for his master. His writing is often kinda cringy too. Like why does he keep saying "Crispy critters" . What? Were the devs sitting around at some like, corporate office round table trying to brainstorm some quirky catchphrase and the best they could come up with is "Crispy critters" constantly. I don't get it. It comes off as force and corny. He swears constantly and it also comes off as a bit forced and wacky, trying to make him seem gruff and badass or whatever. I don't know, the game really is just a lot of hit and miss design.


There's really not much more to the game. There's not too many actually amazing gameplay segments. There's a sort of amusing part where you need to get on a train but the robot butler says you need a ticket which had some amusing dialogue. Mostly what comes to mind after the fact is annoying puzzles. This big segment involving a tram car switching the railroads around, or the handful of pretty awful platforming segments, the platforming is of course jank and half cooked, theres a handful of random dream sequences where youre suddenly roaming around collecting apples in some fantasy land like an arcade game, or other goofy whimsical dream segments where youre in some fuzzy suit, just wacky stuff. Sure it broke up some of the monotony but its really just more filler. Theres this one horrible segment inside this facility with battery shit on the walls you need to constantly shock and shift the room around doing constant puzzles, just a terrible slog.

The game has a couple boss fights, and yeah they're bad. What makes them bad is suddenly theyre massively immune to certain types of damage. Mostly anything ranged. What this means, is for the whole game youve spent upgrading your ranged weapons, and suddenly you get to a boss and its like Nope, you NEED to used some shitty melee weapon and tediously run in circles charging up your attack over, and over, and over, taking off tiny chunks of his health for like 20 minutes. It becomes repetitive, boring, and tedious, rather than some exciting boss fight. Every single boss was like this. I understand they have strengths and weaknesses, you can hold Alt to analyze them, but it always just amounted to using some shitty melee weapon and doing this stuff. Even when the game should be fun, they somehow manage to fuck it up. How is this game so poorly designed? I don't understand how people playtested this and signed off on it being enjoyable. I guess the coolest boss in the game is the one in the whale arena, but again, it turned into this tedious melee romp. They even repeat some of these bosses multiple times, like the Plyusch, after I defeated him i was like phew, so glad thats over with. He came back as a regular enemy multiple more times which was equally as tedious and exhausting each time.

At least at a certain point I could craft so much ammo for my AK like 1000 bullets that I could just hold down the mouse button and whittle down some of the bosses health anyway, still took ages. The last area has you talking to the granny and make a decision to turn on your leader or not, I chose to turn on him cause it was obvious he was trying to turn the whole world into a blue pilled simulation kind of thing, then the last boss is these two lady robots, it wasnt a terrible fight, probably the best boss in the game, but maybe thats just because by this point I had so much bullets I could ignore their resistance just not use the bad melee. Beat the last boss on my first try, end credits, seemed like the bad ending, but whatever.

After the end credits if you press Continue it takes you back to the last boss. But you can free roam if you press Return to Facility. But what are you gonna do? Roam around and unlock weapon attachments? Why? Doesnt really make sense.

There is amusingly a New Game +, no thanks.

Thats Atomic Heart. On the surface it looks like it could be a good game, but unfortunately its all style over substance, with nonstop crappy puzzles, medicore combat and rpg mechanics, and hit and miss writing. At least the game is short, I beat it in only 10 hours. Its not an absolutely terrible game, but its not a good one either. Mostly saved by some of its interesting world design and some entertaining cutscenes.

5/10

Them and Us

 




Them and Us is one of the strangest classic survival horror throwbacks I’ve played in a while. On one hand, it absolutely nails that old-school Resident Evil feeling with fixed cameras, limited saves, creepy exploration, and resource management. On the other hand, it also makes some really bizarre decisions with fantasy portals, awkward pacing, and some mechanics that feel half-baked. But somehow, despite all that, I still ended up liking it a lot.

In recent years there have been quite a few of these new Survival Horror games inspired by the classics. Love to see it actually. Daymare, Tormented Souls, Alisa, and now the most recent one I've played through, Them and Us. I'm a big fan of classic 90s survival horror games like the original Residnet Evil trillogy, Silent Hill, and others. Always interested in more of that kind of fixed angle, resource management gameplay.

The game starts and to my total surprise theres many different camera modes and gameplay control modes, all which completely changes many aspects of the game. You can play Fixed Camera mode with Tank Controls, which is the default. But you can also play First Person mode with alternate FPS controls. You can even play Over the Shoulder mode , like modern Resident Evil titles. It's really cool to see all the different ways to play the game and its impressive they went through the effort to include all that. Although I of course picked Fixed Camera, Tank Controls - classic style. It is the default, and I think the fixed camera adds a lot to the atmosphere and tension to Survivval horror games.

There is also a difficulty selection but thats more straight forward. Easy, normal, and Hard.  "Normal" says for those who wants a basic survival horror experience which sounded good for me so thats what I went with. I think there is also a Professional Mode which unlocks after you beat the game.


There is a brief intro cutscene going over the premise of the game, youre a woman named Alicia and youve been in a mental hospital for allegedly something you didnt do. She also used to work as a medic. She has a daughter who has a disease and something ambiguous happened to her and you don't know where she is. The cutscene is strangely in this comic book style, which I don't really love but I understand its probably just a budget thing.

Then the game starts and before long the main character wakes up in a old creepy mansion bedroom and shes not sure where she is. First impressions are really promising. There is of course an inventory screen, and I rather like how theyve done it, with the portrait, the health meter, its all stylized and cool looking. By default you only have 4 equipment slots which is an interesting design choice, I mean in Resident Evil 1 when you play as Chris you only get 6 so that took that idea even further (at least for the first bit, you get more slots later). Then you have other inventory segments like Files to re-read things youve picked up, and something called Memories which lets you look back at core story progression points as you play through the game.

As expected the game features a Combine system in the inventory just like classic games in the genre, there are no Herbs but instead bandages and Oinments. You can combine small bandages with medium bandages to make Large, and you can also apply Ointment to bandages for I guess more of a health boost. Its a decent enough system, the Ointment stacks and has a percent which is interesting, but I didn't feel like it added too much to the game overall. Really I ended up with so many health items I didn't know what to do with them all, by the end of the game I had dozens of full heals I think they maybe went a bit overboard with how many heals you get, its fine but it took some of the dread away. Maybe I'm just good at these kinds of games now though.

You also use the combine mechanic on many key items and progression items, and usually its intuitive so its a decent mechanic all around.

From there its a typical romp through an old dillapitated mansion, and its quite atmospheric and dreadful (in a good way). Great sound design with atmospheric noises, wind blowing, dogs crying in the distance, zombies moaning out of sight, really sets in to unnerve you as you move through the fixed camera segments always not sure whats just beyond the camera.

It's also an interesting twist how they start you off in a random place inside the mansion rather than in the front hall of the mansion like Resident Evil 1, this makes you feel a bit more dissoriented and even more apprehensive about what to expect since you barely know where you're at in the mansion, I thought that was a neat touch to add to the suspense.

The first segment of the game is even more tense because you don't even get a gun until quite a bit into the game. You just have a knife, and you even start off in Danger health until you find some healing items. This leads to many intense moments up against the first batch of zombies, they slowly shamble towards you , and  the tank controls work well enough, it controls as you would expect in the classic formula, even with a helpful quickturn ability, the controls work good and suit the dreadful atmosphere the game is trying to go for. At times in the early game youre virtually forced to knife some zombies to death which basically results in almost guaranteed health loss, trading health as a resource for zombie kills in areas you keep coming back to. I actually kind of like how its a slow burn to get some real firepower and how underpowered and helpless you feel in the beginning, it has a steady pace and it finally feels satisfying and rewarding when you get that pistol and its bold of the developers to start off the character so defenseless and vulnerable.

Of course the mansion has tons of locked off areas, usually gated behind keys such as Venus key, Neptune Key, Moon key, and so on, which further adds to the wonder of the situation and when you finally find a new key I found myself excited to see where it led, it didnt feel linear it felt like a real connected expansion mansion.

The enemies early on are mostly just slow classic Romero zombies which I really enjoy, they're creepy, haunting, with good animations, models textures and sounds, its not cartoony at all its grim and visceral. You have decision making which zombies to waste ammo on, such as ones that are in areas you frequently travel around,  or choose to run past certain zombies in other areas you may only be at once or twice so its not like its just a shoot every enemy action game. The controls and animations work well in situations to try to manipulate the zombies into certain patterns and then run past them, it feels well tuned and balanced right. Theres a courtyard section that has some dogs , another classic threat, which similarly are well designed and suit their purpose of introducing fast moving "oh shit" moments.

The save system is very odd, a mix of classic and modern at least by default. You of course come across safe rooms, and usually instead of safe room music there are vinyl record players you can interact with. The way you save the game is by using limited use Vinyl records. Thats a clever and fun twist on the classic save system instead of ink ribbons and typewriters. You even find all sorts of different vinyls, each pieces of classical music from Bach, Beethoven, even Erik Satie among many others. When you save using one of these vinytls, it then changes the music for that room until you use another record. Nice touch. Its amusing coming across all these different vinyls and keeps you wondering what classic song you'll find next. The limited saves are great, I think its a mandatory component of Survival Horror to have limited saves, it really makes you care about your characters life and items, you dont want to just play carelessly and it really emphasizes the survival aspect, you dont want to die and go all the way back to some long ago segment, and even saving is a precious resource which helps make the experience that much more immersive. However in Them and Us on the default settings, there is also an Auto-save function but you never really know when to expect it. For the first few hours, I think I've only seen it once. But later on into the game is happens commonly. Its actually a nice mix of the stress of limited saves, but also having these auto saves on crucial moments like before boss fights or things that could otherwise kill the player because they walked into a room they werent prepared for. The only downside with this system is sometimes you can consume a Vinyl save item, and then 2 minutes later trigger an auto-save which feels bad. Still, its handled well enough. I believe on higher difficulty there is no auto-save at all, which is great too.

However maybe the strangest part of the game is the storage system. Or apparent lack-thereof. You come across a handful of saferooms, but none of them have a storage box like classic games in the genre. Instead, it seems like youre expected to just drop your items on the ground, because unlike classic games, which lacked a drop feature, you CAN drop items in this game. This is handled excellently though, because whenever you drop an item it marks it on your map so you cant ever really lose or forget where it was, and also highlights it in the game work so even if its behind an object in the fixed camera you can still see through it. So what I end up doing is dropping items at saferoom A, and dropping other items at Saferoom B, kind of annoying that you couldnt easily get them across saferooms unlike a Storage box, however there is a shocking twist that comes up later where I will talk about this more.


You traverse through the beginning mansion, and its as you would expect, gothic looking, creepy, full of famous classical paintings which are always fun to look at , and  some memorable rooms and locations. Theres a big library, with evidence about this creepy cult who takes over the mansion, strange paintings and things clearly inspired by Nosferatu which is awesome to see, the game has great influences and references.  There are all sorts of display cases and here is where you find the Handgun. You need to do a light puzzle to solve it, by climbing up top and tipping a statue ontop of it. Nice RE1 Reference, but with a twist. My only maybe gripe with this room is theres SO much stuff to examine and look at that the actual key progression points become blurred and easy to gloss over, still the mansion has a good air of mystique about it which kept exploring feel fascinating and exciting.

Eventually you go through the main dining room, which looks classic and feels like another reference, which the game is full of, then to the mansions Main hall and its quite regal and grand looking area and is memorable. Level design is well done and it doesn't feel repetitive, each new area is interesting and feels like something fresh and keeps you wondering whats around each corner.

There is even a map screen which is very helpful, maybe too helpful, it even highlights which doors to use next say if you just picked up a key it will then flash a door red. I found myself glancing at this map screen very often as the game progressed because there does tend to be quite a lot of backtracking later in the game, something which I don't mind as its a staple of the genre and makes the game less liner and more like an actual locational puzzle to explore and solve.

Early on you do some light puzzle solving, like adjusting clocks going back and forth getting various key items medallions and switches. Outside of the mansion is this big sprawling courtyard segment, this is actually perhaps the biggest part of the game. Much of the game is spent travelling back and forth in these outdoor segments, possibly too much time as it does start to drag here and there with everything looking the same after awhile but it's fine because you end up returning to the mansion anyway.

The most surprising part of the game is that it starts introducing all sorts of strange fantasy elements, which I'm not so fond of. These blue portals open up in various spots around the game world. almost like Diablo 2 portals, and you go inside and its this magical safe room but this time there IS a storage box where you can actually store items and even access these items across portals! So as I said previously about the shocking twist with the lack of storage boxes, this is it. Its weird they don't exist in any of the non-portal saferooms, questionable design choice really. Something else very interesting is inside these blue portal saferooms also -  a fancy magic box you can interact with where you can even pickup ANY dropped item ANYWHERE in the game.

This drastically changes how you play the game. Now, anytime you find an item, you can just immediately drop it and you know that the next time you find a portal room you can then instantly transfer it over and store it away safely. I'm not sure how I feel about this, its almost cheap and tacky in a way. It makes it so you just start picking up every single item no matter what, and then dropping it immediately if you dont need it asap. Would of been nice to retain some of that tension of the feeling of having to leave items behind and come back for them later, thats gone now.

The strangest part of all is with this magic item cube, it seems like transfering dropped items is supposed to cost some currency called SE. Spiritual Essence. Except, the ENTIRE game every single ground item always costed me 0 spiritual essence. Whats the point then? The only other thing to spend this currency on are like, 3 locked weapons and some super expensive optional key. The entire game I saw zero purpose for this Spiritual Essence currency, which you obtain by defeating certain enemies. A very baffling mechanic which I don't really get at all. It actually would have been cool if there was some decision making involved in choosing to transfer over ground items if it actually did cost resources, why is it always 0? Does it only cost resources on the highest difficulty? I think thats a mistake and a design flaw, personally, even on Normal it should have costed  something.

Still, its fun to find these portal rooms and the ability to magically grab any dropped item is unique for sure.

Other areas in the game feature a cemetery with a bunch of crypts and catacombs which are creepy and has cult ritual stuff going on which further adds intrigue to the plot.

Theres a sort of castle ruin segment where you go into the sewers and do the first boss fight I guess youd call it where it introduces new enemies, these monsters that come out of orange portals. By this point youve found the Shotgun which is great and satisfying, and makes quick work of this miniboss. After this, as you run around , probably the most bullshit part of the game is these monsters can just spawn right ontop of it from these orange portals almost always making you take damage which feels cheap and unfair. Still, the shotgun kills them in 2 shots, first one stuns them. You have to then drop some holy water on them to permanently kill them, an item that is limited use with a % but I never came close to running out since you can refill it quite commonly. I guess this is another reference to Resident evil 1 remake and having to light Crimson Heads on fire after killing them, but in this game its nowhere near as intense. Something about these enemies spawning ontop of you just annoyed me the whole game.

The worst segment in the game is when you go through this portal from the sewers and its this floating otherworld, a fantasy segment. Thats where you get the Divine holy water item, but worst of all are the puzzles here involving very cryptic dials matching up symbols, and then another puzzle with these triangles which I just found the whole segment to be obtuse and downright tedious and annoying so I eventually had to look up the solutions. Maybe I missed something, I don't know but I didn't like that segment. I don't really love much of the fantasy elements at all really, it feels a bit out of place. I get its all about this cult, but still it felt a bit cartoony rather than horrific.

The funniest parts of the game is that for a few brief segments you find another guy called Paul who acts as your sidekick, but hes so few and far between its like whats the point? Theres a cutscene in the ruins where you chat with him and hes a detective, he gives you a belt to hold more slots (you also get a backpack earlier, in total bringing your inventory to 8 slots) , then shortly after this you play a segment as paul which is amusingly in first person. Youre just in his detective office looking around for clues and case files while listening to the radio, thats it, thats the whole segment. Its just funny its in first person. Thats pretty much the last you see of this second character until the very end of the game. Felt a bit shoehorned in honestly.


After this its a lot of backtracking around the gardens and greenhouses, you come across this other boss that shows up repeatedly called the Gravekeeper which is exciting and fun, you go to a bunch of these cabins in the outback woods find a Bow gun, here a got a bit stuck because there are these magical stones you need to interact with but I could not interact with it because I had missed some item somewhere, a note with special symbols, I had to look up where to find this unfortunately and that was a bit tedious.

Then the main goal from this part of the game is to find like 6 Medallions to put into a building in the graveyard to open up some crypt. So its a lot of backtracking from here, still I found it engaging and theres even a sewage system which is basically a fast travel between various parts of the game, although I felt like the sewage area could have had some more memorable landmarks to differenciate the different tunnels because I ended up accidentally going in circles since each tunnel almost looks the same which I found annnoying.

At this point you unlock a building in the gravyard and progress through the catacombs back to an elevator which leads back to the mansion
Then you do Mansion part 2, just like Resident Evil 1.

Resident Evil 1 has Hunters in Mansion part 2,  and in this game its Cultists. A nice twist.
Areas that were previously unlocked are now locked, some areas are now suddenly unlocked, and new segments of the mansion open up to explore.
It all comes together to make a cohesive and exciting experience almost keeping you on the edge of your seat the whole time. It was fun to go back and forth finding all the new doors I can open now, and finding keys to finally uncover what some of these doors led to.

The cultists are threatening and fun too, they can throw axes at you, mumble spooky languages while walking towards you, they have a lot more health than zombies so it involves decision making which gun to use on them, usually the shotgun or Bow gun works okay too, there are some fun puzzles in this mansion such as a number puzzle with statues, maybe the only gripe with this segment is there really is a lot of backtracking and it gets pretty confusing. Like the front mansion door is locked now and you have to go back outside through a side courtyard entrance and I missed having to use the Imitation Lion head and that took me through a loop for awhile.

You even have to basically go through almsot the entire outdoors segment again as Outdoors part 2, its like replaying the whole game again respinned. Its maybe a bit too much and bit repetitive, but this is admittedly a nitpick, I honestly cant find too much to complain about with this game besides the odd fantasy elements and excessive backtracking and some bad puzzles.

At least in the Outdoors part 2 segments, there is that Gravekeeper boss that appears and chases you around a few more times which was quite fun.

Eventually after getting all the medallions going through Mansion part 2, Outdoors part 2, you go through a swamp area and find a cabin with your daughter locked in a cage. It amusingly gives you like 1 minute to find a key to save her while you get attacked from outside, almost like the beginning area from Resident Evil 4, another reference. Its not really enough time to find the key, it should of been 2 minutes but thats where the auto-save comes in.

Not long after this you have another funny segment with the other friendly Paul character - this time its a full blown survival action segment. You play as him in Fixed Camera angle, in a little set village, you have two revolvers and theres just ammo everywhere as you get swarmed by all enemies in the game for like 5 minutes all you have to really do is just survive, its a funny little segment, I guess they needed some excuse to pop him back into the gameplay.

Then theres the final area of the game, you take a boat to some island and the most intuitive route is to go straight ahead and theres a helicoptor, of course the helicoptor is what you wanna do right? The paul guy is there and asks if youll go with  him. I naturally say yeah obviously. Turns out this is the VERY BAD ending, like he just arrests you and you end up taking your own life. Ouch. At least I saved before hand so I loaded my save and found out you can find a note and then go back to the boat and it unlocks a whole other big castle segment which is like the coolest area of the game. This is a straight up Nosferatu dracula castle, you go into the cathedral and see the big bad cult leader boss guy and fight your way through his castle, its awesome. Its pretty straight forward and not too long winded, find a few key items unlock an elevator, you find the room that the magic box has been taking you to all along which was cool to find, and then you get the final actual boss battle. Its just funny this whole area is kinda hidden and a bit unintuitive to get through. To think some people missed it is just sad.

The last boss is very similar to other Resident Evil boss fights, especially the Resident Evil 1 fight. Its a big hulking tyrant guy, I just blasted him with my shotgun and Explosive bow rounds and just like RE1 the ally (Paul) shows up and throws a big rocket launcher type gun to you to finish the boss off with. This gets end credits , and this is the Good ending. Theres other endings I didn't see also, but this seemed to be the canon one because you survive the ordeal, paul doesnt turn you in and instead helps you, and you even get your daughter back who turns out was under the spell of the cult.

So thats Them and Us. I think its a pretty damn underrated game. Only has 1000 reviews on steam, and Recent reviews are even mixed. Why dont people like this game? I thought it was actually kind of awesome. The locations are well done, the mansion is atmospheric and memorable, theres a lot of variety in enemies and areas, it has tons of classic callbacks and it perfectly sets that 90s Survival Horror vibe with good Fixed camera angles and controls, theres a bunch of Replayability , theres New game +, you can unlock lots of costumes, theres other areas only avalible in New game + , other mysteries to discover and secrets to unlock, Its a good game! I'm surprised its not more well known. I get that its indie and it doesn't feel as quite polished and high quality as bigger budget games, but once you get past the initial impression of slight jank it really pays off.

8/10

Ghostrunner

 


Ghostrunner might be one of the most annoying games I’ve ever forced myself to finish. You die in one hit, every enemy seems designed to kill you instantly, and instead of feeling like you’re improving, it turns into memorizing the same 20-second sections over and over again. By the time it was over, I wished I hadn’t even bothered.

I knew very little about Ghostrunner before playing it. Just took a quick glance at it on Steam, saw its 3D, it has lots of reviews, its a single player campaign, its first person, so I eventually got it for cheap.

Starting up the game and looking at the menu options and once again its clear its an Unreal engine game, been playing a lot of those recently.
The game then starts up without much of an introduction, a short voiceline and youre instantly playing, which is great.
There's a short tutorial teaching you the basics of movement, its basically a 3D platformer game where  you move fast, can run along walls, dodge, slide, all that stuff.
The wall riding is handled sort of automatic, you just jump at a wall and he starts running at it for you, dont need to press any buttons.

But before long the game reveals the twists it has up its sleeves which separates it from most other games. Its the fact that you die in a single bullet. You only have 1 health. So the gimmick of the game is that its hard. At first you might think this is a fun novelty, this could set it apart and make it something interesting. But it quickly becomes apparently just how downright annoying this is.

You go through level after level, of almost the exact same looking factory setting, doing platforming sections jumping across walls, at one point you get a grappling hook which is admittedly fun to use zipping around, although the platforming controls are less than amazing, especialy the dodge ability controls janky as hell, you try to dodge to the sides but often he dodges forwards getting you killed, because holding shift ONLY while in the air makes it go into slow motion you can then dodge left and right away from bullets but it acts differently on the ground, its just a clusterfuck really. Then after a platforming segment you usually come to a room filled with enemies with set spawn points. You usually have to kill every single enemy in the room to progress to the next room. What ends up happening is more often than not a tedious slog of trial and error bullshit until youve memorized every single enemy placement and memorized down to the millosecond of when their bullets will travel across the screen, it gets old fast.

The game knows its tedious bullshit, evidenced by the fact that you get checkpoints VERY frequently.  Every 20 seconds you get a checkpoint.  Every single time you make an inch of progress, youre expected to die 50+ times and replay the last 20 second segment over and over and over until you memorized it and finally get past it by a stroke of luck. Its very tedious game design, I don't understand how its supposed to be fun. I don't mind hard games, but I enjoy hard games when it feels fair and it feels like I have to develop as a player and understand the game, this game does not feel like that, it feels like youre just expected to die dozens of times on each new checkpoint, its like, imagine playing a Call of Duty game on VETERAN mode, except you dont have a gun, and even worse you die in 1 single bullet. Does that sound fun? Its not.

Its not so much that you only have one health, its that everyting combined with that fact feels like obnoxious game design more than overcoming genuine challenge and developing player skill. Take the fact that many times you cannot kill enemies unless you go around the arena and destroy these stupid blue orbs floating on the walls. What the hell is this shit? Its so arbitrary and goofy. So youre running across walls trying to track down these dumb blue orbs, trying to not get randomly one shot, because since its a first person game you can barely ever see where you're getting shot from so you frequently just die out of thin air with no idea why, it just all comes together to be a frustrating annoying experience more than anything. You have to platform around the areans, but even the platforming controls suck you freuqently are accidentally bouncing off the wrong walls, grabbing onto the wrong ledge, randomly flying across the screen in places you dont want to, it just sucks. I quickly began to hate this game.

The game incentivzes you to keep running and never stop, because the longer youre running the faster you move, which means its harder for the enemies to hit you. I actually like this mechanic, and it was kind of satisfying building up speed, but it never really reaches any full potential because the controls are so janky. One moment you'll vault over a wall and you will barely launch in the air, but the next time youll do it and youll be sent flying across the screen. The physics are so inconsistent and random that it all just falls apart.


You have various abilities you get as you progress through the game, first is Blink, which snaps you to an enemy and instantly kills them, however these abilities have a massive cooldown. The next ability is Tempest, which shoots like a gust of air that knocks enemies down. Then you have Surge towards the end of the game, this is finally a ranged attack, where you shoot out a blast towards an enemy, finally around the end of the game you get Overlord which lets you mindcontrol an enemy who then fights against other enemies for a short duration. Although I didnt find the abilities exciting or even useful at all, I mostly just used Blink the whole game because at least Its guaranteed a kill, the Tempest ability is almost a worse blink because you can sometimes miss, and its not that often youre attacking multiple enemies anyway, Surge was very useful for certain segments but you get it late, and Overlord you only have for around an hour before the game ends anyway, although it is useful.

You randomly unlock upgrades, I guess completing levels, the upgrades work  by opening a menu and playing Tetris to assort different pieces into your upgrade slots, its dumb too. Why do I have to play tetris to equip upgrades? It just wastes time, whats the point? The upgrades are kind of interesting, stuff like get a second dash, further distance on the abilities, theres upgrades you can get that makes it so you can smack bullets back at enemies which was kinda useful for a bit, but trying to get the timing right more than often just gets you killed so I quickly just said screw it and stopped using it. Other useful upgrades is the ability to put a highlight around enemies, and even through walls, which can be helpful. But really at a certain point I realized all I care about is making my cooldown on using my ability faster, and guess what? The less upgrades you use, the faster your cooldown is! So at that point I pretty much stopped using upgrades all together just so my cooldown can be faster. The only upgrade I used for the bulk of the game then was the one that also further sped up cooldown. What a dumb design choice. Put all these upgrades in the game and now I dont even want to use them because I'd rather just have my cooldown come back faster, this game is just designed poorly and makes no sense.

If youre not doing mostly bad platforming sections or bad combat sections in factories, then commonly between levels you go into this cyberspace matrix area which have bad puzzles. Why are there these random shitty matrix segments? They suck too. Its either you have to jump around on some platforms as if its Super Mario Sunshine without the FLUDD pack, or its really really stupid puzzles, flicking some switches to connect a grid, or navigating your way around rooms with walls you have to walk through, or going around collecting these glowing orbs to open a locked door (these segments SUCKED),  Why is everything about this game just so fucking bad? It didnt take long for me to be sighing and moaning constantly playing this stupid shit, I really did not enjoy this game. I cant think of really anyhting I actually like about this game besides maybe the grappling hook, not even killing enemies feels satisfying everything dies in one hit it just doesnt feel that impactful or fun.


Theres not much of a story or cutscenes in the whole game, instead the entire game you just have people talking in your ear, one man and one woman, the woman acts as a sort of sympathetic sidekick while the man acts as a probable nefarious ally guiding you along. Thats about all there is to the story. Youre some kind of cyborg created in a lab from cells to go on secret missions or some shit, I didnt really care.

Thats pretty much the entire game, you go through sterile boring generic metalic factory enviornemnts , or a few times some city roof levels, youre platforming around hookshotting, gliding along walls avoiding traps and hazards usually the walls can shoot out electrified pulses, saw blades, stuff liike that, its like Super Meat Boy 3D or some crap, you get to arena segments where you usually have to kill every enemy, the types of enemies are regular soldiers that shoot at you with pistols, theres a machine gun soldier which has a reload window, theres these melee enemies that jump across the screen at you, theres ninja enemies that charge at you and slice you with a blade, the only way to kill them is to wait until they charge then attack parrying them and stunning them, then theres flying ship enemies you can jump onto to disable, there are mech enemies that shoot that giant pulse wave, and so on. Like I said, the enemies seem to just be designed to be as irritating as possible, expecting you to die many times until you fully memorized their exact patterns, its almost like an NES game but more grueling, at least in NES games you have more health, like even Ninja Gaiden NES you have more than 1 health.

I think the game only has two boss fights, one of them where you get in a sword battle and thankfully it wasnt too hard, it was actually eaiser than most of the game which was totally odd. I failed maybe twice. You just have to time your attacks at the same time the boss moves the blade. The other boss fight is the last boss which what do you know is some complete inane dog shit, you have to play Jump Rope with the boss swinging her metal arms around, whats next? Hop Skotch boss fight? What a stupid fucking game. Of course this took me like 50 deaths to figure out WTF I was supposed to do, which is the nature of the game. Then you realize you have to stand in certain spots so the boss hits these metal boxes and breaks them, then the floor starts exploding with electric pulses and at one point the ENTIRE arena is covered and I couldnt figure out what to do, 50 deaths later I realize the top segment is suddenly no longer electric and I can hookshot onto it, another couple dozen deaths and rinse repeat I beat the last boss, End credits, thank fuck thats ovver.
But overall the game is just uneventful and a slog really.

The only other mechanic the game has really is at times in the levels you can pickup these powerups, be it slow motion to run past some wind turbine, or shurikens where you can finally throw and kill enemies, but these are on a timer until you have to go back and pick them up again. It didnt add much to the game, they didnt come up that often, and they were just another random obstacle in your way to keep you from progressing, the shuriken one was not that useful and did not popup very often, its like the devs know if you give the player any ounce of power the game becomes trivial so they do this nonsense timed powerup thing to keep you from not dying 50 times per encounter, once again it sucks.

At one point I got sick of the repetition so I just stood still and waited for my damn Surge ability to recharge, pop out of a corner and take down one single enemy, a mech, or whatever, then run back in cover and just wait for my cooldown over and over and keep ranged attacking enemies just to progress without having to repeat the same checkpoint over and over. Thats how boring and stupid of a playstyle I arrived at. There was a few turret segments where instead of the stupid deathfest I just did this and waited for my ranged attack to keep recharging and took out the turrets from far away. Dumb game design.

I dont like how every level is inside the same boring like, Unreal Engine stock asset pack factory set, or you have a few levels that are inside this city of city rooftops but it still feels ike youre enclosed in a factory really,  I don't like the music how it sounds like the entire game youre inside a bad obnoxious rave party droning on and on, I dont like the stupid one hit deaths, I dont like the dumb puzzles in the matrix areas in between levels, I dont like the people rattling in your ear constantly, I dont like the premise of how you just have a sword as your only weapon , I dont like the enemies, it seems like their only purpose is to be as irritating as possible with all the different "GOTCHA" designs, like enemies that leap across the screen and one hit you (that you can barely ever see, because again, its first person), or the mech enemies that shoot giant waves that go across your entire screen that pretty much obliterate you no matter where you are, I dont like the platforming sections with the shit controls, I don't like the dumb gimmicky upgrades having to play Tetris just to equip upgrades, I don't like the graphics which although its an Unreal Engine 4 game the assets just seem slightly cartoony , generic sterile and not very impressive.

The game is often glitchy and broken, too.  The indicator for where the enemy is attacking you from makes no sense often, it will say theres an enemy behind you but theres not. The objective marker/description is often broken and makes no sense, at one point I had the same objective text for like 5 levels and it was pointing to a senseless place.


I livestreamed the whole playthrough of this game and pretty much the entire time I was just whining and complaining, it wasn't fun at all, just painfully annoying and tedious. I was just constantly waiting for it to be over. It never got better, I never felt like I was getting better or 'figuring out' the game, I just always thought it sucked. Like if you skim throughout my entire playthrough everything just looks the same the whole time and I'm probably complaining every step of the way. How does this game have a very positive rating on Steam? How do people like this? What is there to enjoy? I dont get it. What else can I say? I'm struggling to think of the positives, the one thing that would be positive is the movement but even that feels janky like the controls would frequently not do what I wanted bouncing off surfaces, I guess the one thing I can compliment is I appreciate the game for trying something different, for having a gimmick and unique twist, the one hit death thing and the trial and error memorizing enemies, I like that its trying to be difficult and interesting, but I just think the execution is pure frustration with zero reward or satisfaction for overcoming its annoyances. At least I beat the game in one session in around 7 hours, but even then it felt like a drag and should of ended sooner.

3/10

Necromunda: Hired Gun

 

Necromunda Hired Gun is a first person shooter set in the Warhammer universe. I don't know too much about Warhammer but I do know a bit about first person shooters. It was developed by the same developers as E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy, a game I kinda liked when it came out, so theres that. The Steam page and basic information its a standard single player campaign, and I will basically play any FPS game with a campaign so I eventually picked this game up.


Starting off it gives a few brief cutscenes setting the premise that youre as the name suggests, a mercenary hired to do various tasks. You surprisingly get to select a character, and theres lots of them. Its unclear if choosing a character changes the story in any way, there are males and females so I'm guessing it at least would change the voice acting. I suspect its the story no matter what character you choose, though. I just picked the guy thats on the box art.

Then you have difficulty selection, 4 of them, the last difficulty says its "Impossible". I just choose 'Normal' mode.

Then there is a short tutorial segment showing you the movement controls, dashing, wall running, sliding, the controls are fluid and fun to use the movement especially is smooth and fun to slide around.
You have a dog companion with you in the game, who you can spawnn with a button press, he then exists for a short duration and also highlights enemies around you, then after a duration goes away and goes on a cooldown.

It's clearly inspired by new Doom games like Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal. You can Takedown enemies which goes into a short animation and you are invincible during it. When taking down enemies you get health back, also when you kill enemies in a short distance you get health, I think you get more health the closer you are to enemies too. Other than that its a fairly standard FPS game, except its not really a cover based shooter its more an arena shooter jumping all around sliding and moving constantly rather than standing still in one spot. You can aim down sights and carry many weapons, like 6 weapons I think. You're mostly going up against human enemies ogre type enemies, dogs, and different kinds of sort of mutated humans. Sometimes there are these mech enemies you have to kill that are quite bullet spongey but at least change up the combat.

The game has pretty cool cutscene instances where some new group will show up or some new enemy will be introduced and it kinda looks epic and hype.

After the first short level segment you arrive at the games main hub, Misery's End. This is a place you'll go back to after every mission. Here you can buy upgrades , talk to a few different NPC's , and select the next mission. Its a nice place to return to, and it helps break up the games pacing into clearly defined segments and also gives you something to look forward to, to go back and buy upgrades and new weapons and attachments.

From there, the game has 13 total main missions. Which does not take too long to finish if thats all you're doing. I beat the whole game in one sitting, 5 hours. From the mission select screen, you can also select side missions, but they seem to just be segmented areas of the main missions with generated fetch quests, I didn't really bother since all doing them accomplishes is getting you some more money to buy upgrades but I never felt short on cash ever.

The bulk of the games missions take place inside factories or industrial type settings, lots of vertical climbing and platforming segments, which at times can be a bit annoying to navigate and also get boring to look at. Theres not really any very memorable standout moments all of the enviornemnts tend to blend into eachother. There are some more cave type levels, a train level, but thats about it. The missions could of used some more highlight moments or different exciting areas because it starts to get a little stale but its not a huge complaint.

Of course most of what you'll be doing is shooting. The combat has highs annd lows. While the movement is fun, with smooth controls and lots of different abilities, such as at one point in the game you unlock a grappling hook which is quite fun to use zipping around the game, although it seems very arbitary where it will let you hook, some surfaces for seemingly no reason wont let you hook onto them - but the combat can sometimes be a mixed bag. It often feels spammy, with some bullet sponge enemies, and the takedown mechanic in particular is just very janky. Since the main way to get health back is by killing enemies, and the closer you are the more health you get (I Think) , it means at one point I realized the best thing to do is to just constantly spam the takedown button and run towards enemies because many bullet sponge enemies will be instantly taken down at 50% health and you can chain back to back takedowns which you are invincible during those animations. This makes the combat feel quite cheap and gimmicky, and even worse is that the takedown animations are more often than not broken than working. Floating enemies, animations playing in the wrong spot, suddenly clipping abruptly back to normal, the takedowns are just a mess. They try to be over the top and flashy but they do not have the polish to back it up. I don't even really like the Takedowns from modern Doom anyway, its not really to do these constant kinda quicktime actions watching short cutscenes constantly.

Also the way the death system works is odd. If you die, you can still revive 3 times a level (or more) with these Stim items. I never once in the entire playthrough actually died 3 times and ran out of Stims. I don't know what happens. Do you just fail the entire mission and have to do it all over again? I mean I guess thats kinda cool and high stakes high tension gameplay but it just never got challenging enough to where I cared. Maybe I should have highered the difficulty, I don't know. The game was quite easy. I died like, twice the entire time.

Besides that, I didn't really find that many of the guns that fun to use. Sure theres a lot of different guns, and theres even a sort of loot system where you can find different tier guns with different colors, some of them saying +1 or +2, you can buy guns and attachments back at the main hub, but many of them felt weak or not fun to use. I tried this pump action shotgun which seemed totally worthless, I tried a few different pistols which were equally bad, I mostly just used this yellow assault rifle the entire game, an item I bought very early on. It was +1 and thats about it. Carried me through the whole game. Besides that gun, I used this plasma gun but it barely had any ammo ever still it felt okay. Besides those two guns I never found other guns that satisfying. There was a Sniper rifle I tried, but it kinda felt worthless since this isnt really the kind of game you can stand around and zoom in scoping enemies. Still, I like that the game has so many weapons, has a weapon store, and even tried to incorporate some more RPG mechanics with its store and even finding chests around the game to pickup loot, but the weapons themselves were kinda lackluster at least from what I used.

The other kinds of items and loot are varied, you can walk around the levels opening chests picking up all sorts of stuff like Charms, different body armors, rings, and other. At the end of each mission it gives you a screen showing you all the loot you found and which ones you want to keep, you only have so many slots to fill up. The rest of the items you dont take will be sold automatically. The loot is quite basic, though, its just like equip one body armor that has a +armor stat, equip 2 rings, usually with like, +5hps or % crit, equip a charm to your gun with a small buff to find more money, stuff like that. Its not all very significant at all. It almost just feels like its all pointless and is only put into the game just so the game can say it has RPG mechanics, its all kinda shoehorned and undercooked. Sure it made the game a bit more interesting, its just not very fleshed out, and by the end of the game I never had anything I cared about and none of it really mattered anyway. The different weapon tiers have a slightly noticable impact, like going from +0 to +2 purple gun I felt more damage but thats about it.

You can add attachments to your guns but I didnt really bother for most of the game either, at one point I customized my main yellow assault rifle and just started at the DMG number and put on attachments until it went up, wasnt much more to it than that and I didnt really notice much of a difference anyway. The implant upgrades are probably the most impactful part of the things you can purchase. You go to the surgeon doctor at the main hub and there you can put implants in various parts of your body; Arms, legs, head, lumen, etc. Although honestly I still didnt find too many of these to be appealing. Mostly what I gravitated towards was simply upgrading my legs for faster movement speed which was immediately noticable and significant. Then I just started to get whatever increased health, and increasing the amount of health you get when killing nearby enemies. Then I started to upgrade the R.Field which is basically your armor shield. By this point the game was almost over. The other stuf you can get are various abilities like Slow motion ability, a shockwave blast, lower recoil when wallrunning, shooting different things from your hands, this perfect aim thing which I guess automatically shoots enemies for you (which I didnt wanna use), and other kind of novelty gimmicky abilites. Honeslty I didnt really use any of the abilities at all, I just upgraded my health, shield, and movement speed and thats kinda it. The abilities again just feel like they were thrown in there jsut to say its in the game, they arent needed. You can even upgrade your dog, who also has multiple ability trees, but I didnt even bother the entire game. Maybe that was a mistake on my part, but it just wasnt interesting enough to care about and the game was easy anyway. Around the end of the game I quickly glanced at the dog tree and it was just stuff like lower cooldown and more dog health and speed, etc.  I hardly used this dog for most of the playthrough and didnt even realize it highlit enemies until halfway through the game, just didnt really find him that necessary although its a neat little addition.


That's pretty much the bulk of the game. You enter a mission, run towards the objectives usually turning some wheel or opening doors, reaching some area or killing enemies, beat the mission, select loot, go back to main hub and buy upgrades. Its kinda annoying how after every mission it makes you talk to multiple NPC's and the dialogue is very drawn out and just boring to me, the story is just dull and I quickly stopped giving a shit about what anyone was saying. Maybe its because I'm not well versed in Warhammer lore, but these characterrs and the stuff they were saying was all in one ear out the other for me and it started to sound convuluted and just dull. I started skipping and skimming through conversations only a few hours into the game and just wanted them to stop talking. Theres a bartender lady which was kinda interesting to talk to but even she got dull pretty quick too. The main NPC you talk to looks like some guy straight of some japanese manga which was also kinda offputting and he talks all pretentious I couldn't really care.


Some of the missions are really hit and miss though. Some are fairly standard and decently enjoyable, clear out rooms, survive assault, take down a boss, but others have stupid inane objectives like going around picking up fuses multiple times searching empty rooms for them to put into some generator, which repeats throughout multiple different levels. Other levels have you start off infront of a big locked door doing nothing but walking around a big empty room trying to open the door, like why? Its just a waste of time. This other level introduces this cool Alien type monster but they only exist for like 10 minutes and never show up ever again? That was disappointing.

Really though after a certain point it all starts to blend into eachother and I'm just going through the motions. There are at least a handful of boss fights, usually just against some other human enemy that acts all cocky and badass and is a bullet sponge so you go in circles mag dumping them for a minute or two, the ogre enemies especially are kinda funny and amusing they almost look like Shrek or something. After like halfway through the game I started to just run past many enemies instead of fighting them all and it worked since the movement is so robust, you can just grapple past waves of enemies slide past them, you get double jump etc, so many segments of the game you can just run right past which is a bit awkward. The game is just all around a bit janky, not surprising since its the EYE Divine Cybermancy devs, multiple times I got stuck inside walls, broken animations, or just enemy AI glitching out.

Much of the game was just spent holding down mouse button 1 on my assault rifle dumping hundreds of bullets into enemies, the gunplay feels satisfying enough, with hit markers letting you know when you shoot enemies, but the level design like I said can just be a bit dull. Though the whole Warhammer atmosphere and setting is kinda badass, the music is rocking metal music the whole time which again feels really Doom inspired.

The last two missions you get captured and cant go back to the main hub so theres only 11 missions where you get to really interact with the main hub and upgrades system, theres a few boss fights towards the end that were a bit challenging and fun, then you get to the last boss this lady inside some kinda cathedral arena who shoots green gas where you cant really see shit which was a bit stupid, the anime guy congratulates you and you go back to the main base and surprise he puts out a hit on you and the game ends - end credits. You can play after beating the campaign, theres not much to do besides those (I think) randomly generated side fetch quests.

So thats Necromunda Hired Gun, maybe one of the most painfully average games I ever played. It does some things right, the movement is fun, the combat can be satisfying enough, it shoehorns in some lackluster RPG mechanics and upgrades, but the actual level design and campaign and story just isnt very engrossing and not memorable coupled with all the jank. Its a decent playthrough for a weekend but beyond that its unlikely to stay in your head for very long.

6/10