Call Of Cthulhu: The Dark Corners Of The Earth

Dark Corners of the Earth is probably one of the first and most faithful Call of Cthulhu based games. Its a sort of mix between adventure game inspired by point and click in finding objects and solving puzzles, a first person shooter, and a stealth game.

It has every foundation to be an absolute masterpiece, the graphics are sufficiently creepy and interesting, the writing is really edgy and mature with lots of themes of insanity, mental institutions, weird creepy cults, suicide, 1920s noire grim detective work, all sorts of interesting and memorable characters, a bizarre and interesting starting town where everything has this creepy atmosphere of being a little off, strange myths and rumours around every corner etc..

Every facet of the concept and the atmosphere is amazing. So the game is great, right?

Unfortunately, and its so disappointing to say this, its actually one of the worst games I've ever played - if not THE worst game I've ever completed.

The few things it gets right: The atmosphere, the writing, the amazing unique inventory/status screen and health system where you have this giant location based grid and every piece of your body can be harmed that you must heal with various medical pieces, the ahead of its time realistic gunplay, the lack of HUD, the immersion, all of these things are so cool and unique

But the things it gets wrong make it a miserable, tedious, painful, torturous slog to actually physically play through

What it gets wrong is, well where do I start?  I will be going through and reviewing basically the entire game, every section, because I have it memorized so well, from frustration, that I am able to.

The first quarter of the game finds you drudging through this town with no weapons, going around talking to the town folk, finding items, progressing through this town trying to track down this person. Then it opens up into sections where everyone hates you and is trying to kill you - And you have no way to fight back, so it expects you to use this very mediocre and lazy 'stealth' system to progress. The stealth is so tedious and unfun (and limited mechanically) that I found it easier to just bunnyhop around the shit AI until I could progress.

Then you get to  the infamous hotel escape scene, where you have to escape this hotel jumping across rooftops as they beat down the door shooting and chasing after you

So you must engage in trial and error exercises in patience to figure out the route you have to take. The first 10 attempts you are guaranteed to fail. So you just memorize exactly where to jump, what doors to close, etc etc. This is where the game drastically goes downhill.  The rest of the game is like this, or worse. This is also where you will discover how clumsy the mechanics are, like closing doors will frequently force the player along with it, which is especially frustrating when youre being chased and you knock yourself into the room with the enemy. You can also lock the bolt on doors, which becomes essential, but this is awkward because theres no icon that lets you know when youre able to interact with something, so frequently you will close/open the door when you just want to lock the damn bolt.

From there, the game completely changes tone and gears, and you start finding all sorts of weapons, and it turns into some kind of first person shooter horror adventure game.  However, mechanically its so obtuse and ambiguous that nothing is ever logical, or fun, at all. Almost every single new area or 'objective' you come across I found myself walking in circles for an hour at a time, not knowing what to do, dying over and over for no reason to random 'instant' kill bullshit, and reloading and having to watch the same cutscenes and dialogue pieces over and over.

Well for example, one of the first instances you come across after finding weapons, is this town where theres a guy in a prison you have to free, and a bunch of enemies guarding it. Well since it gives you guns, you figure just shoot the guys and explore the area right?  After exploring the area and not finding out what to do, you come across a bunch of enemies that seemingly never go away. Keep killing, and killing ,and it seems they respawn forever. After shooting about 50 of them I googled it and found out that frequently, enemies in this game will just respawn forever. What the fuck? So I wasted my time shooting enemies for no reason, in an area where I must explore to find progress. Its just inane and tedious time wasting.

It turns out I missed a key item, a Crowbar, which is arbitrarily placed on some staircase, that is extremely easy to miss, so I walked around the whole area , killing respawning enemies, for an hour because of it.

Then you free the guy from prison, but he wants you to open the garage, after you do that, it puts you into the back of a pickup truck where the whole town just shoots at you while you have no defense. Eventually the truck comes to a stop and the driver is like "Ok do something about the truck infront of us" and I failed atleast the first 4 times.

And failing means going back, far, to the last save point, and re-watching cutscenes/diagloue etc. This is a common annoyance. To save, you find these white paint marks on the walls, sometimes they can be 10-15 mins of progress apart, and often times, they have unskippable cutscenes/dialogue between them. Yes you can press backspace to skip some, but not all.

After tediously getting past the truck part, you get to another part in some warehouse, where theres a ton of guys just shooting at you, and you find a Tommy gun. Eventually you get to a part where a cutscene happens, and a ton of guys spawn all around you. Well the first few times, I figured the game gave me this new Tommy gun, So I have to just kill them all right? Well, 20 mins of shooting and struggling later, I actually found out ITS ANOTHER INFINITELY SPAWNING enemy section and youre suppose to just run for it? What the FUCK.

After that, you get to a section where this girl is on a rooftop and she is about to fall? So I search around in a panic a ton, not able to figure out what the FUCK I have to do the save her, I backtrack a bit and save, and guess what? After I load my save, she dies within 20 seconds, every single time. So I ruined that entire section of the game, and had to just let her die. It turns out it was yet another part of the game where you have to somehow know that you need to backtrack 5 mins and wrap around the whole warehouse to save her or some shit. Another 40 mins wasted due to ambiguous awful level/game design. You dont think to backtrack, because the level is laid out in such a way that theres all sorts of boxes/crates stacked all over the place, so it really looks like you need to just climb them, which I was trying to do. Nope, its more illogical than that apparently.

So she died, and the game let me progress. Whatever. Oh yeah, in between all of there are frequent annoying fucking puzzles like this Safe on the wall where you have to look for some ambiguous code in your journal, and figure out how to put it into the safe the right way. It operates like a real safe, or does it? I dont know, you turn the knobs clockwise or counter clockwise, and it never works. I knew what the fucking code was, I just couldnt figure out which way to turn the stupid knobs, I eventually opened it, but it seemed totally random or broken, who the fuck knows, everything about this game is totally glitched or contradictory. Like in his diary for the safe it says to go Clockwise, but you actually have to go Counter-clockwise.

Theres a part with some church bells and this underground section. Wasted probably an hour just interacting with every possible thing in the underground tomb. Theres some book on a table that when you press it, you just look at it, and nothing happens. I figured I had to find something. Turns out you just have to use something in your inventory on it to progress. More boring circle walking time waste unintuitive, confusing shit.

Mixed into all this are admittedly these really awesome and cool instances where you wakeup in a mental hospital and I really like all these sort of segments theyre so gritty and dark that it sets such a cool atmosphere, but it cant come close to making up for the tedium and annoyance of playing the actual game.

So after that whole truck segment, you get to this part outside of a factory where theres an enemy on a turret shooting at you and some detectives. Well guess what? Obviously you have to sneak around the turret, and my first 30 attempts or so were unsuccessful. The levels are laid out in such an illogical and deceiving way that the game will SHOW you this corner that it seems like youre suppose to hide in, theres a guy hiding in it, yet everytime you try to sprint to it - you INSTANTLY die. After trying time, after time, to 'make it' I said fuck it ,and looked it up on youtube. Turns out its not the 'right' piece of cover, and theres another place where you have to crawl under to progress. Ugh. I just hate this shit. The game design is just nonsense. Its nonsense.

Every single new 'objective' to progress is just trial and error, tedious, frustrating "What the fuck" "Where do I go"  "Why am I instantly dying"  "Is it broken?"  " Is this a bug"  "Why isn't it working   - or looking it up and going "What the fuck, that was so stupid, I would have never figured out that stupid shit. That makes no sense"  ETC. Thats the whole game. Thats it. Theres rarely an enjoyable part that feels like you actually did something cool. Its just stupid.

So now you're in this huge factory building and this might be the worst part of the game, its hard to quantify, almost every level in the game is total shit. But this factory just looks so generic and all the rooms indistinguishable, climbing across ladders and shit, its so bad.

Well in this factory you have to 'power the elevator'  And the detective guy tells you "Go use the stairs!"

Well theres like, 3 or 4 different staircases you can use, so you know what I did? I went up one of them, and found a SAVE POINT, and a button for the elevator, so I figured ok this is what he meant. So I walked around in circles for about 30 minutes trying to figure out what the fuck the button does, how to fix it, etc, turns out I used the wrong stairs, and I was suppose to go use another staircase to progress. Lol. More time wasted for no reason. Boring tediousness. So you go through this whole boring factory climbing ladder after ladder, shooting people, then you hit a button. Ok what did the button do?  So you walk around the whole factory, like 5 times in circles, cant figure out whats new. Oh, theres like a trolley car 'bucket' thing thats now right next to a save point.  
Ok yeah, you just jump onto the trolley car obviously right? Its parked right by the save point, doors open. Try to jump into the cart, invisible wall, fall to death. Try again, invisible wall. Cant seem to FIT INTO THE 'BUCKET'. Try 20 times, CANT MAKE IT.  Google it, oh, its another infamous game breaking bug. the 'Bucket Bug'  Yep. Game is just bugged out and wont let you jump into the bucket for whatever stupid reason. Had to go into my inventory and use some health item, which somehow fixes the glitch, then I could get onto the cart without problem. Another 30 mins wasted because of a game breaking bug

Seeing a pattern yet? This game is so fucking dog shit its shocking. Im so saddened by it, this could of EASILY been a total masterpiece, but the bugs, and level/game design, is horrible, so, so bad.

Surely whatever is next has to be better than all this crap, right? Surely the game can only get better? Well my friends, it actually gets much, much worse.

After drudging through this boring generic factory some more you come across a conveyor belt and meat grinder. You go through, and at the end you get a cutscene where an enemy turns on the conveyor belt sending you straight into the meat grinder. Guess how many times I failed this? Atleast 10. Trial and error. First attempt, I tried to run the opposite way it was sending me, didnt work. Second attempt, I tried to jump around the meat grinders, didnt work. 5 more attempts of doing that, didnt work. Couldn't for the life of me figure out WTF the game wanted me to do. Sending me back to a save point 5 mins earlier  watching the cutscene over and over.
Looked it up - turns out you need to jump and do some platforming shit onto a ledge just above you. Yeah, failed that a few more times as well. Trial and error bullshit. Tediously frustrating crap again.

Then you turn on the elevator and go through more of this samey looking boring factory. Its so long. Its the longest level in the game. It just goes on, and on, and on. This one level is like 4 or 5 hours long lol.

Pretty much immediately after this annoying trial and error meat grinder you come across you first 'boss' fight. Its this giant weird stationary plant thing that swipes at you. It looks cool and impressive yeah, but mechanically its nothing special. You awkwardly go around it and push a few buttons and it sucks it into a hole. This of course, took at least 5 trial and error attempts to figure out the intended path it wanted me to take.

Then you take the elevator, and it sends you back to the main room. Then I find out now is the time where I am suppose to go up those stairs from earlier, and push that button that I previously wasted so much time on. See how the level design just wastes your time and makes you walk in circles? It allows you to access buttons and areas you have no use for yet, just to waste your time.

Now, the factory is rigged to blow up, and you have to go down and investigate some secret room while on a timer before the place explodes. This is one of the worst parts of the game. I failed this part for at least 2 hours.You have like 5 minutes before the place explodes and you die. In that time you have to explore this stupid gold vault, memorize the exact path to go, face another 'boss' plant monster where you have to turn valves which spray air at it making it change course. The level design here is so confusing and awkward with paths that look exactly the same, running in circles over and over,  you have to find some room and jump through the boss's arms like an obstacle course and the controls/physics are so mediocre that its just a frustrating clunky awkward mess. You have to fail at least 10 times in a row to memorize exactly what order and path youre suppose to go and which valves to turn or you run out of time and die.

Even after figuring it all out, I was stuck with a "What do I do now" while the timer was ticking down. You get a wrench, turn the valves to release the gas. Then I just ran in circles trying to figure out wtf I was suppose to do next after I turned the gas on. Well, I got this far multiple times, and failed, not knowing what to do. Looked it up on Youtube - looks like after I do all of that, Im suppose to somehow know that I need to leave, and backtrack, and go find some broken elevator, and press the button, which causes a spark, which explodes the gas, which opens the elevator door? What in the absolute fuck...

The level design is so insanely stupid and unituitive that I found myself just whining and bitching like a baby every single time I dared to play this piece of shit for more than 40 minutes at a time. Its insufferable to play though. Its like physically painful to fucking play this game.

So I turn on the gas, backtrack to the stupid broken elevator, blow it open with the spark from the door, OK finally some progress!!!  The timer is still ticking down, then I come across this weird Cthulhu room puzzle with a gem in the middle. Oh fuck, what the hell? Im on a timer man, I need to get past this or I'll fail and have to do the whole gas valve shit again!

Aaand guess what? First attempt at the Cthulhu room puzzle failed. Ran out of time. Couldn't figure it out. Game over.  Ok, thats 30 mins of progress lost. Back to the stupid gas valve plant monster obstacle course AGAIN.  

Well I got to the Cthulhu puzzle room atleast 5 times and failed. Do you know how  frustrating that is? Playing through an entire 20 minute segment, getting to the end, having like 70 seconds to figure out some random obtuse puzzle or you instantly die and have to do it all again? SHIT game.

Out of fear of wasting my entire fucking life on this one segment, I looked it up on YouTube. And not to my surprise, I didnt even see one of the pillars I was suppose to press, due to panic and limited time. Glad I looked it up or I would have wasted hours doing this part over and over.

Seeing another pattern yet? Timer based segments that are extremely unintive, easy to fail, tedious and frustrating, Ambiguously respawning enemies despite the game feeling like it wants you to shoot people by giving you new guns, nonsensical objectives, horribly annoying level design, random Instant deaths trial and error bullshit..

At the end of the factory level theres some chase sequence where you have to go a specific route crawling through pipes and tunnels, backtracking, and I failed a bunch of times. Eventually you get in an elevator, and at the top of the elevator you have to make some kind of jump, and I failed that a few times too. Fuck.

Ok - we're done with the horrible Factory level. Ok, the game is getting good now. Right?  Right? ....

It transports you to this weird snow level with a bunch of war soldiers going across the ice. Yeah, guess what, first 10 times I fell into the ice. Fun. Off to a good start already. More instant deaths and trial and error segments!

After getting across the ice, you get to this cave with a flamethrower outside, and some weird monster inside. Oh, well this is kinda cool yeah? I go in the cave, the monster blocks the path - Ok, I HAVE to kill the monster.  Shooting at the monster does nothing, he just kind of slowly and timidly walks towards you. Ok, since theres a flamethrower outside that means you have to burn him right? So I get the monsters attention and try to drag him outside - What the fuck, the monster wont go outside. He goes towards the cave exit and then just turns around and walks away. How do I get him to go outside? Why wont he go outside? Why is the AI so awkward and janky? I keep trying to lure him to the doorway atleast 20-30 times and use the flamethrower, but it never burns him!!!! "What do I DO!"  I just keep trying, and trying, and trying to burn him in the doorway, but he never goes far enough.

20 more minutes of this totally fucking stupid part and I say ok, time to look it up on Youtube, this is just stupid. Welp, someone on youtube has the exact same problem. The god damn monster wont leave the cave. Turns out you need to literally be one inch away from the monsters face and slowly creep towards the doorway and drag him right to the edge of the cave, THEN use the flamethrower, THEN and only then does he die and you can progress

I mean...at this point I just lost faith in the game. This is stupid. This is nonsense. This is completely banal and garbage. This game is awful. And I couldn't be more sad about it. I WANT this game to be great, it has every ingredient. But nope. The developers blew the execution. I mean what the fuck is this shit? The monster wont get close enough to the doorway unless I hug his fucking face and hold his hand to the doorway? What is that? Why do I have to struggle with its inane awkward AI for 40 minutes to figure that out? He should just chase me out of the cave. He should just see me, and then run to the exist of the cave, maybe even stick his head out, but nope - he just gets to some invisible barrier, and turns around and forgets about me. Stupid.

See a pattern yet? Every single new objective or obstacle is completely stupid. It doesnt make logical sense. This game is really, really stupid.


Alright, now we're in some cave and a detective is in a jail cell and wants us to find the key. You go through the cave until you come across some huge mansion, which is really cool and Resident Evil style.  For a minute, the game was actually fun. I was using my hunting rifle, shooting enemies, sniping them from windows, going through this badass mansion engaging in combat. but it didnt last long. The game design got in the way, once again.

Go through this huge mansion , kill everyone, and now once again, I'm walking in circles. "What do I do?"   Go through every room multiple times, interact with every object.  I go and check the blocked off staircase. He says "The stairs are blocked off"   Oh ok, the stairs are blocked. I guess I should explore some more. I walk around in circles for an hour, cant figure out what to do. Just cant. Im frustrated again. I cant progress. Look it up on Youtube.... You literally just have to jump over the blockade on the stairs. What? Really?  The entire game has been teaching me that once something is blocked off, you must find another path, or find some object, or press some button,  or theres invisible walls, but No, now, all of a sudden, when something is blocked off, Im suppose to know to just jump over it?  Holy shit... More boring, tedious, time wasted, doing NOTHING.

You eventually find the keys, free the detective from the jail, and he helps you go underground the mansion. Now you're at another 'boss' fight Its a couple mages at some altar shooting magic at you and a gust of wind which prevents you from moving. Guess how many times I failed this one? A lot. You have to like, either awkwardly move your character past the gust of wind and dodge some magic balls, or really accurately snipe the guys with your rifle, either way it took a few attempts and didnt feel all that cool or rewarding, just stupid.

After the boss, theres some insane puzzle with 3 statues and  a bunch of weird symbols, and some buttons on the back of the statues. I tried my best for an hour to figure this one out, I really did. It never made any sense. I never figured out how to do it. I ended up just looking up the pattern, and even then I still couldnt make sense of it. Dont know, dont care anymore, the puzzles are not fun or rewarding. More time wasted for no point. Tedious pacing.

Alright, the mansion is over with. Now is probably the most memorable and coolest part of the game, but maybe one of the most enraging.

The boat level.
Well this part is really cool, and Cthulhian. A boat in the middle of the ocean, some weird mystical creatures lurking in the depths below. Ominous and spooky. Great atmosphere, good setting. You go through this boat and soon enough you have these weird lizard monsters on deck and you need to shoot them and protect the deck guys. Decent enough, and dare I say almost enjoyable. A few times you get sent to find a med kit and some ammo for the captain, nothing awful or frustrating, easy enough segment.

Then, you get to a segment where the boat has massive waves sent at it, and you have to use a cannon/scope for some reason. I use the cannon scope, and I dont get it. What am I suppose to see here? I get on the cannon scope, and I cant see anything? Its just kind of blank?  Then another massive wave hits, and you take damage. This just loops, forever. You get on the scope, cant see anything, then a massive wave hits. Eventually I found out you can hold onto a rail when the waves hit to not take damage, but still, the cannon scope is just blank! WTF do I do!!??  After 30 mins, I look it up on Youtube...

Guess what? Another completely glitched/broken segment. When you use the cannon scope, its not suppose to be invisible. Youre suppose to see some lights on the shore, some mages you need to shoot. In the Steam version, the shaders are just broken, you cant see them. I had to go on the internet and download some shader fix just to get past this segment. I mean, its just shit. Its just horribly broken waste of time bullshit.

Finally I get past this segment, then you have to progress through the underside of the boat. You follow the crew members around, then you watch the captain kill himself, kind of cool.

Then you get to some part where theres steam which blocks the path which kills you. I find out I have to turn a valve to turn off the steam, but then ANOTHER timer based insta-kill segment. The ship explodes once you turn on the valve, and you die within 20 seconds. So I spend 30 minutes walking all over the place trying to figure out what the fuck I have to do to avoid dying after turning the valve. Nothing I do works. Die, die, die again. Instant killed to a timer. What do I do? I cant figure it out. Youtube time.  Turns out, right next to the valve is this furnace door that you need to close -

I would have never discovered this, because the mechanic in the game to interact with the environment is horrible. It doesn't show you a hand icon, or anything that tells you something is able to be interacted with. And when you look at the furnace door, it turns the valve. I even tried previously to close the furnace door, but when I look at it, it would just turn the valve. Well you need to know to position yourself in such a way where you 'use' the furnace door, not the valve, but theres no actual indication that the furnace door is even able to be interacted with, and its positioned so close the valve that if you tried but didnt know, that it most likely would just turn the valve.
So another case of shit mechanics which work against you, nonsense game design, time wasting, garbage.

I mean literally, every single obstacle of progress is a complete slog and pain to figure out and get through. Its unbelievable. I was in awe playing the entire game, like "I cant believe every single new segment is THIS annoying and convoluted and frustrating. It just KEEPS happening. EVERY TIME"  

Like
"Can there not be ONE segment that is actually fun and intuitive to get through? Does it always have to be so fucking stupid? I dont feel challenged or like im struggling against any sort of difficulty, Im just struggling to horrible game design or glitches or bugs"

And I mean, after I figure out to close the furnace its still not over. You go and get some welding pack, but then I walk around in circles trying to figure out what to do with it. Eventually figured it out, but fuck man, why is the pacing so god damn consistently annoying? Some of the worst pacing in any game, ever.

Alright, now is an awesome part, atleast visually. The boat boss Dagon.
You go out onto the deck, and this giant ocean creature shows up. You jump on the cannon and shoot him in the face, but you can only shoot him when hes on the front of the deck. Which took me about 5 deaths to figure out. Then it became a game of "Ok, how do I lure him to the front of the deck"

So an initially awesome part turned into yet again a janky awkward chore of trying to figure out how to exploit the fucking AI to go to the front of the boat so I can actually shoot him. I tried sitting in the back and letting him go through his animations, nope, I tried running around the deck, nope he would kick my ass. Turns out I have to basically just stand in the front of the boat and then he always shows up at the front, then I can jump on the cannon and shoot him, rinse repeat, boss over. Still took a bunch of attempts, also had to look it up. Could have been awesome, but once again was just annoying.

You kill the boss, then youre shipwrecked somewhere. Is the game almost over yet? Ive been playing for like 13 hours at this point. I cant take this shit anymore, I'm so ready for this to end.

You're at this like weird little rocky island level where you have some timer based puzzle with a button that highlights a path and you have to place some gems, this objective I actually solved without much frustration or outside help, not so bad. Then you get into some cave base with a gigantic hole and air coming from it. Ok what do I do here? Do I jump into the hole? Looks like sure death, but theres nowhere else to go. Do I trust the game to be consistent enough that Im suppose to jump in the hole? I'll probably die, this game is so stupid and inconsistent I wouldnt be surprised - But yeah, I jumped in the hole and thats what you had to do. Surprisingly.

Now I'm at the end segment of the game, this underwater mystical base. 'Air filled tunnels'

This is some underground cavern with admittedly a really cool sight, you look out a window and see a submarine going around (who is that?) and fish, and some crazy architecture, kinda reminds me of Bioshock or something.

Then you see some enemies, and your player character says something like "better stay quiet, I have better chance that way"  But fuck stealth, its so minimal in this game no thanks, you shoot a few guys, then progress a bit and get taken prisoner. Pretty sure you get taken prisoner no matter what.

You wakeup in a cell with a grate on the floor, a chisel nearby, obvious what you have to do.
It leads to another cell, with that sea creature monster from the boat mission in shackled up in it. Well the first few times I just ran into the cell,. and got caught every time and got killed instantly. I thought wtf, this is extremely stupid. After 5 attempts or so apparently you need to WAIT a minute for a scripted event to happen where a guard goes into the cell, then leaves, THEN you can go up into the cell...really stupid. Theres no indication or anything you should wait, its just awkward, again.

From there you have a stealth section where you gotta sneak by some guards and theres all sorts of paths and doors you can go, i eventually just managed to kind of run past all of it and hit a savepoint so whatever, but theres just so many possible paths you can go that its another trial segment. I ended up going down to some waterfall place that was blocked off and I needed some item, so had to backtrack.

Then you come across some hole in the ground and fall through - Another boss fight

Since I still had no weapons, theres this mage boss that casts gusts of wind to suck you in, and hurts you, and you have no weapons or anything so I just ran around looking for wtf im suppose to do. I was thinking "Did I miss the part where I get my weapons back? What do I do? Is my game broken"  - Its hard to tell if the game is fucked up or if this is suppose to happen, kind of a major problem!

Well theres a knife on the table and it turns out you have to grab the knife and stab him to death, this is about as fucking awkward and shit as it sounds. After failing a few times I basically exploited the AI by hiding behind a table and waiting for him to finish his animation a few times and stab him in between.

After this, you get your guns back, and you backtrack through the entire underground complex but this time just shooting everyone.

Now it turns into yet another big 'Wheres waldo'  hunt where you go around the entire complex multiple times, running in circles, trying to figure out what items you missed or what doors you didnt go through. Just awful pacing/level design in general really, because of the fact I missed a green gem stuck in a rock, near the waterfall. Yeah, I was suppose to see some hidden green gem stuck inside of a rock in a dark corner of the map, when theres a million other little similar objects in the game world that you cant interact with - But nope, I was suppose to know that one gem in a rock I need to interact with to progress, using a Hammer found in some prison cell after feeding a monster some poisonous food. Fucking stupid, again. Found it out only after running in circles and youtubing it , by the way.

After this you enter some laboratory and see some cool human experiment where he begs you to kill him, eventually climb up some vines, fall into some cavern and find this huge item on the ground, I had no idea what it was at first, I picked it up, and it didnt show up in my inventory. Only about 15 minutes later I discovered i picked up some crazy laser gun with infinite ammo, because theres no sort of pickup notification or anything.. Ok then.

This next part is really stupid. So at this point, again I had no idea what to do. You do all that shit, and you seemingly dont make any progress. You have this laser gun, but the area you got it in just wraps around back to the same complex. At this point I just walk in circles for another hour trying to use the laser gun on every possible thing but nothing works. I remember that blocked off cave by the waterfall from earlier with all the facehugging things, so I go back there and try shooting it. Nothing happens. Im shooting the blocked off passage over and over and nothing happens. So after many minutes of trying,  I look it up again in frustration. Yeah, You're suppose to shoot exactly what Im shooting, its just not working. Im not shooting it 'specific' enough. I still dont know how to do it. I just ended up shooting the passage more and more until eventually it worked. Really bad.


Then you get to a part where youre climbing and platforming across rocks and oh yeah have I mentioned yet how the fall damage in this game is extremely annoying and even jumping 2 feet you break your fucking leg and move to a crawl and have to bandage yourself? Yeah, thats a thing. So youre climbing across these rocks and you screen spazzes the fuck out while you go 'insane' with all sorts of vision effects which are just awful and nauseating, then youre at another 'boss' fight which is two giant eel things that blow wind at you and try to knock you off the cliff

Well the first few attempts I naturally just went right to the top of the cliff, and couldnt climb higher until I killed them.  So I sat in this open area trying to shoot my stupid laser cannon at these things and they would always kill me because I had no cover. Thats the place where you naturally end up at everytime, the game forces you into a panic with the level falling apart, so naturally you rush to the top as soon as possible. Well NOPE, you need to know to NOT go to the top, and instead WAIT AS THE LEVEL IS FALLING APART(?) at the bottom, so when the bosses arrive, you actually have some cover...STUPID. Its just totally contradictory and retarded. When the level is falling apart you dont think "oh I better stop and wait at the bottom" FUCKing shit design.

This took a bunch of attempts to figure out, trial and error BS as usual.
So you take cover and shoot your stupid cannon at these bosses (which admittedly look really cool and scary)  a bunch of times until they die and you climb up to the last section of the game, finally.



Now you're at the 'last boss' this giant monster with tits hiding behind some bubble shield. It spawns some monsters from the boat which are easy enough to kill, you go up and hit a switch which make some water flow...then I got stuck. Theres a gong downstairs, and when you hit it, it makes monsters spawn. If you interact with the gong, the player is like "if I hit it hard enough it should be deafening"  So I shoot it as hard as possible with my laser gun and nothing happens. So I keep struggling to figure out WTF to do for like 30 minutes, eventually look it up

Yeah you need to just stand FACE FIRST into the fucking gong or it doesnt work. STUPID again. I was standing slightly too far away from the gong so nothing happened lul.
You shoot the gong, your ears start ringing, then you stand in the middle of some platform and transform into a monster and can jump high to hit some switches, then you shoot the water and the boss dies? I dont know, its pretty fucking stupid. You dont even fight a boss, its just some monster that sits there looking cool.

Now the game is just about over!
All you have to do now is sprint to the end of the game, but the level is now on another timer where the whole level is collapsing and falling apart. You just have to run to the end, should only take about 45 seconds right?

No.

After about 40 attempts, it is Impossible to make it to the end of the game without the notorious Instant death timer bullshit. Attempt after attempt, I would always die in the exact same spot. The first attempt I had no idea what to do, I thought you had to jump in that weird portal thing in the sky, nah just death
The next few attempts, I found the door you have to go through, but i would always die instantly

After 30 mins of failure i looked it up. What do you know, ANOTHER game breaking bug...RIGHT AT THE END OF THE FUCKING GAME!!

Its literally impossible to finish the game on the Steam version, the physics/timer code on the PC version is broken and you character simply does not move fast enough to actually make it to the end of the level before dying. I tried all sorts of stupid shit like making my resolution 800x600, capping framerate at 30fps, nothing worked. I had to go online and download some patch and apply a 'double character movement fix' and I finally made it to the end of the fucking game and saw the end credits. If thats not the shit nugget on top of the vomit cake I dont know what is.  I mean, just amazing. Shocking. jaw droppingly bad.

And even the ending is pretty disappointing, you get teleported and start talking all friendly to some alien creature, you wakeup in a mental hospital and hang yourself with a suicide note (that was cool I guess) then end credits. I dont really get it, but whatever. Also I dont even think Cthulhu is in the game, ever, at any point. Is he? I never saw him. Kinda weak.

TLDR Conclusion:

This game had so much potential, SO much. A would-be masterpiece. Basically all of the levels are interesting in their own right, except the factory could be shorter, it has a lot of variety in levels, the actual combat is decent enough, the immersion and atmosphere is amazing, before the segments get annoying,  but yeah as you can see the objectives and tedium and overall nonsense is just too much to bare.

This is one game that could desperately use a remaster, This could be 8/10 if it was remastered and addressed some of these crucial flaws, and maybe had a bit more hints in the environment to help the player out, but right now, as it stands, the Steam version...its one of the worst games ever, maybe the worst, I dont know. I cant really think of a game that has put me through so much stress , annoyance, and frustration than this over the duration of the 16 hours I spent with it. 

Some of the mechanics are cool at first, like the insanity thing, but then it dawns on you the contradiction of wanting to be a first person shooter, while simultaneously anytime you actually look at your enemy your screen goes through all sorts of fucking effects and nauseating shit that its just too much. I mean who thinks "Lets have a first person shooter but half the time your screen has a Windows Movie Maker dizzy filter on top of it" Its just not fun, at all. It was pretty hilarious and notable that if you do become too insane by looking at an enemy for too long, eventually if youre holding a gun, the player will forcefully put it to his head and kill yourself with a game over. It only happened once, but it was one of the few entertaining moments where I genuinely smirked.

Apparently the PC version was ported by a single person, and it was developed first and foremost for Xbox, well the PC version is definitely a broken piece of shit thats for sure, but even if all the bugs were fixed I don't think it would be a great or even good  game, the core issue is the actual game design and inane objectives, timer based instant death bullshit, trial and error crap constantly, annoying shit puzzles, etc..  

3/10

Far Cry: New Dawn

 Looks like I've beaten almost every mainline Far Cry game by now. Only ones I havn't finished are Primal and Blood dragon. Well they all operate on the same foundations so whats different this time?

Luckily this one is co-op, sometimes Far Cry games arent. So thats a big determining factor in my motivation to play it. This time , In New Dawn it takes place after the events of FC5 and you're in this big multicolored land playing on the side of some kind of rebel forces to conquer this oppressive rival gang, or something.

Everything goes back to this sort of central hub zone called Prosperity. This is a sort of different and unique mechanic to the Far Cry franchise, in this game you have a main base that you can collect resouces in order to work towards further upgrading and progressing your base. Unfortunately, only the Host can actually interact with this mechanic and upgrades, while the co op partner just twiddles his thumbs and collects all sorts of resouces for basically no reason.  Atleast in this game the co-op partner can actually upgrade his weapons, unlike FC5, where the partner couldn't even purchase weapons/upgrades.

So you have this hub base, and it needs all sorts of upgrades. Things like a health station, which increases your max health, a Cartography station which allows you to see resources on your map, a Garage which is used to purchase new vehicles/helicoptors, a Weapon bench, which is used to buy better tiers of weapons.

The main way you upgrade your base is by 'Ethonal" which you can only get by conquering enemy outposts. The game kind of does a poor job at explaining any of this to you, and it doesn't even really introduce any outposts to you. We didnt figure it out for the first few hours, and had to google exactly how to get ethonal. But after that, we found it pretty enjoyable to just freeroam around the map and look for outposts to destroy in order to work towards getting upgrades.

However, the only real motivation we had for upgrades was
1) Unlock a helicoptor ASAP.  If it was anything like previous games, then land vehicles become completely pointless as soon as you have access to the much faster air travel
2) Unlock the higher tier weapons, for obvious reasons.

So the way the weapons work is its in tiers, there are 4 tiers, by default you are on tier 1. For the first 6 hours or so of the game we would just use the default starter weapons as it kind of felt pointless to waste resouces on anything but the absolute highest tier of weapon.So we would go around the map conquering outposts to eventually unlock the highest tier of weapons.
 
 And the combat in Far Cry: New Dawn is largely unchanged from previous games, except in this game it sort of feels a much more emphesis on RPG mechanics and sort of 'stat' based combat. For example, there are various 'tiers' of enemies. There are your default easy guys, then theres guys with purple/yellow healthbars which mean theyre much harder 'elites'. And good luck killing these guys with basic tier 1 weapons. This and the fact that all enemies have healthbars, and you can see damage numbers now when you damage them, made the game feel much more RPG/stat oreientated than previous games.  This is both a pro/con as it does encouage you to work towards getting higher tier weapons and keeps it exciting to unlock new things, but its also a con in that it feels kind of cheap in the sense that skill doesnt matter as much , only if you put in the grind to get better weapons.

So for the first half of the game it included a lot of slowly walking around to objectives becuase we lacked basic transportation, doing a lot of side missions and outposts to unlock helicoptor/good weapons, and doing some straight forward but enjoyable main story missions that included a lot of invading enemy bases and killing them mostly.

After we unlocked a helicoptor the game became a breeze, to collect all the resouces became much easier and we quickly after unlocked the highest tier weapons, effectievly reducing all previous tiers worthless. This is also a problem, most of the weapons in the game are rendered pointless as soon as you unlock the highest tier. And unfortunately the weapons in general arent that exciting or enticing to use anyway, they all look like strapped together DIY  stupid shit and none of them really were that appealing to be honest.

Then as soon as we entered the last half of the game a message showed up 'Part II" and from this point on it was all down hill. It introduces the religious cult leader guy from FC5, and that really did not seem promising. Once the excitement of needing ot go around doing side missions for resources was complete, we no longer had any real motiviation to do any more side missions (which were admittedly the highlight of the game)  - Also, the Steam version completely lacks achievements for whatever reason, so that further just killed any motivation to do anymore side quests.  Well once all of that was done and over with, the second part of the campaign was pretty horrible. I counted 6 or 7 missions in a row after the first part of the game, where we didnt even use our weapons. Anything from completely tedious banal shit like driving down a river in a boat, having to do awful puzzles where you allign some visuals to progress, to being shoved in some generic gladiator arena doing fist fights, to more gimmicky shit like a round arena destruction derby, to other missions where you just get teleported to..ANOTHER arena where you just shoot at a bear with arrows... The second half of the game is seriously weak and all of the missions SUCK. Like, actually all of them. Every single main story mission after the first half was just totally boring and you barely even get to shoot anyone with all the weapons we aquired. Theres a prison mission where, guess what, another mission where you dont even have your guns, and you kind of sneak around awkwardly to sneak out or something, then eventually pickup some enemy weapons. I mean it was kind of interesting, but the fact that its like the 8th mission in a row that takes your guns away was like mindblowingly stupid.

The story is some completely boring attempt to continue the story of FC5, which I thought was horrible and boring/uninteresting, all of the cutscenes are boring and mockable, the characters totally forgettable and generic, even the main villians which is a staple for FC, are extremely trite and no depth. Two sisters who are just "Bad guys" thats it. Theres no moral grey area or anything. Its just "Oh look, two hoodlum sisters that do bad things like stab people in the throat in front of you and kill people for fun!"  its just totally stupid and a total let down compared to even previous FC villians.

The game does have brilliant graphics, techincally. I mean they definitely went overboard with all the pink flowers EVERYWHERE it looks totally unnatural, but if you get past that, then techincally there are a lot of breathtaking vistas and draw distances to soak in. Many times you can look out on the horizon and it seems photo-realistic, it is a very polished AAA game, I just feel the art design its self is totally lacking stylistically and is not appealing. Theres some like tattoo-esque grafitti all over the place, everything is pink and purple, it just leaves a bad tacky taste in my mouth. Like they hired some amateur wanna be tattoo artist on the developer team and made him design the whole game.

Also the driving is pretty hilarious its way too forgiving you can just drive offroad through millions of trees and rocks without any penalty you vehicle barely takes damage, its not really good or bad it just looks funny. But once you get helicoptor you wont care about driving anymore.

Funny enough, everything BESIDES the main story is the best part about New Dawn. There is an extra side activity called 'Expeditions' where it transports you to various scenarios where you must go inside an enemy base and find a package, then escape to the getaway, we found these really fun and cool to do. They are the only way to aquire Circuit Boards which is what you need to unlock the best weapons, also the game didn't explain this at all anywhere, so another failure of game design. We had to look up how to aquire Circuit boards, the game doesnt tell you. But yeah, those, and the outposts, were really fun. And we almost considered doing all of them, but then the lack of achievements ruined it.

The actual gunplay is decent and enjoyable enough, despite the lack of variety of actually viable weapons because of the awkward psuedo-RPG tier system, the graphics are great except for some artistic desicions, as a co-op experience its pretty great to just fly around with your buddy and collect all sorts of resouces, but sadly as soon as you return to the campaign- ESPCIALLY the second half of the game, it all falls apart and becomes totally shitty and lame with really boring main missions where you barely even engage in combat. Too many sections where youre forced to just follow around the same cliche generic "Sooo crazy" religious cult leader from FC5, just walking around listening to his dialogue, then doing some half assed gimicky mission, repeat til end credits. Also, its a really easy game without much struggle ever, on the default difficulty. Even the last boss was just two of those girl villians and they just looked like typical elites, took them out after 2 tries. Then the last last boss, was just some joke of a PS1 looking monkey that we killed first try.
I don't know if we'll ever get a fantastic Far cry campaign, so far all of them have had the groundwork to be amazing, but the awful design choices at Ubisoft always find some way to ruin it. Atleast this game is better than FC5, because it wasnt constantly taking control away, and the side quests were more enjoyable, but its just an OK co-op experience

 

6/10

Half-Life: Opposing Force

  

Going into Half Life: Opposing Force I figured it would just be a nifty little spinoff 'expansion' of half life 1 and wouldnt give me much trouble or pain. Something strange to note is that this isn't developed by Valve, but rather Gearbox

In Opposing Force you play the role as the military being sent into Black Mesa after Gordan, this is a cool and clever premise and a good excuse to re-use original locations and levels but in a new way. Much of the game you will revisit familliar, but tweaked or expanded areas of Half Life , this is both a pro and a con, on one hand it is cool to revisit familliar areas through a different point of view, it also does feel a bit too samey, like "i've already beaten this game" .

Opposing Force largely feels the same as HL1, you have some new weapons like the Desert eagle, Sniper rifle, Some weird alien weapons etc. But youll mostly stick to the standard weapons from first game.

Opposing Force has more of an emphesis on AI team mates, frequently youll come across sections where there are other military guys you can ask to follow you around / require their help to open doors and such. These guys become almost required to keep alive because unfortunately this game has a massive flaw:

The difficulty spikes are totally insane, and this is honestly one of the hardest FPS games ive ever played. There is only 3 difficulties, Easy, medium, hard. I chose medium.

The difficulty curve is just nuts. The game is piss easy for awhile, as you fight the standard enemies like zombies, alien dogs, mutated alien monsters etc.. but about halfway through the game it introduces these 'Black ops' enemies, which also include these female assassins, and holy fuck these guys are INSANE. I dont know if my game was glitching out or what, but they were huge bullet sponges that needed an entire mag dumped into them, while they had pinpoint perfect accuracy and would annihilate my health in seconds. For basically the entire game, I was always under 50 health. You come across health maybe once every 15 minutes, and you lose all of it the moment you come across one of these fucking enemies. Its so frustrating. I would crawl around frequently with under 20 health just trying to exploit the AI, keep my team mates alive, get lucky headshots, etc. Extremely hard.

These black ops soldiers are so tough that almost all of your weapns are worthless. They require 2 rockets to kill, and since they shoot you so fast, you need to guide your rockets so it takes too long and not viable. Machine gun doesnt do enough damage since theyre bullet sponges they take you out faster than you can take them out. They have perfect accuracy so you NEED to use a weapn that kills them in as little time as possible. This basically forces you to use either Desert Eagle, Sniper Rifle, Spam grenades like crazy, or M60, although its too inaccurate to really work.

I dont know, these guys ruined the game basically. A large chunk of the game is spent encountering these guys and it got so bad that I basically was forced to manually save every single time I killed one just to progress. Its not even so much challenging or difficult, its just unfair. It feels broken, theyre bullet sponges, and your weapons are fucking worthless, coupled with never finding health for 10+ minutes at a time its just a total chore to try to progress through this game.

So after these guys, you frequently have all sorts of jumping puzzles , and since you always have low health, falling from just a tiny height can take off as much as 20+ health. Frequently I would fall a couple feet and die instantly while trying to complete jumping puzzles. Ontop of this, theres often horrible physics where you gotta climb ropes and swing around, with low health, its just awful. Also theres a bunch of puzzles that involve pushing boxes around using a really shit physics system that is just totally clumsy and tedious which is annoying as well.

So many times I would have to drop down to progress, but actually not have enough health to take the fall damage, so id die over and over trying to figure out how to go where im suppoe to go without taking fall damage, its just a poorly designed game.

When you do find health stations, they dont even heal you fully, so even when  I finally found health it only put me up to maybe 70 if i was lucky. Then every box I came across you gotta bust to hope for health, after doing this for minutes on end, you come across one enemy who instantly puts you back to down to 20, or even 10 health, where you remain for another 10 mins. Then it puts you into this loop of dying over and over and over, quickload, quicksave, kill 1 enemy, quick save. Etc. So fucking tedious and frustrating.

The funny part is as soon as youre not fighting these Black ops guys the game is pretty easy again, all the other monsters are farily easy or properly designed. Hard to understand how they fucked this up.

Sometimes you come across these 'boss' puzzles where you gotta wander around this arena pushing switches while avoiding boss attacks, this became really nothing other than trial/error die/reload spam over and over until I found the proper route. Not that thrilling, but atleast a change of pace.


So the bulk of the game is: Go underground through famillir HL1 levels, sometimes find some new locations which are cool and interesting to discover, go around this underground facility doing annoying puzzles with rediculous fall damage, killing some cool monsters, eventually coming across sections with Black ops enemies which are near imposible to get through, eventually find these Above ground sections which are a good change of pace, fight through more insanely hard enemies, go back underground etc.

I am really confused, if I watch gameplay of this game on youtube, the player takes WAY less damage than I do. I dont really understand, was my game broken the whole time or what? People on youtube barely take any damage, whereas me I would go from 100 health to 20 health in seconds. What the fuck? This game is just broken or some shit.

Oh yeah, a HORRIBLE flaw with this game is that its frequently dark as fuck, and theres no flashlight - but Nightvision, and when you turn on nightvision, YOUR CROSSHAIR DISAPPERS, so ontop of everything I said previously, you also cant see SHIT and if you want to turn on nightvision, your god damn crosshair disappears and you cant even aim properly. What the fuck? That alone made this game so frustrating god damn.  Theres these sections where its pitch black and youre crawling through a tunnel full of these gigantic alien monsters that shoot instant death lasers at you, holy shit that was so annoying.

Eventually you get to an end boss which is some giant stationary monster which is little more than a two way turret. The boss shoots some beams at you, you hop on some turrets and hit the glowing spots, repeat a few times, game over. Gman shows up says some of his usual stuff about employment, you get stuck in purgatory forever etc etc.

Despite how cool it was to revisit some of the HL1 levels from a different POV, unfortunately the difficulty spike/curve and some really bad design choices made this one of the most frustrating and tedious 3 hour campaigns ive ever had to sit through. There were moments where I was dying literally every 10-15 seconds for a dozen minutes on end. So, so annoying.

4/10

Fallout

 Having finished every Fallout game and overall being a fan of the series I always was hesitant to visit the origins of the series. I finally got around to completing Fallout 1


Off the bat everything about the game is a true Computer Role Playing Game, from the beginning you are welcomed with a character creation screen and a spreadsheet of stats to choose from, being familliar with the 3D games a lot of this stuff I was aware of such as Small guns, big guns, Energy weapons, Speech, everything is here. If you go in blind without searching things its easy to get hungup on certain mechanics or just flat out miss major parts of the game. Every mechanic and function of the game is so obtuse and obscure its easy for everything to fly over your head.

For example, while choosing my stats I opted to go a typical Small guns, average intelligence, typical wastelander. I figured since I wont be using Melee much, that i'd put my Strength at only 3. Nothing in the descriptions made this sound lke it would be a horrible idea. But halfway through the game I realized that every single weapon has a 'Str' requirement to properly weild them, and most of the weapons I had been using need 5-6 str. Since I was at 3 str, that means I got penalized for improperly weidling my weapons, and I had a huge accuracy penalty. Now, unlike later 3d fallout games, its basically impossible to raise your core stats after you make your character, except a few minor items. So I had to wait until getting Power armor, which gave me +3 str, to fix my initial wrongdoing.

More on the stats, this is a turn based RPG, where everything you do operates under these dotted ticks. This is influenced by your Agility, so I figured it was a no brainer to max out Agility so I had the most amount of moves possible in a turn. This was a pretty good idea and worked out intuitively the way I thought it would, allowing me to have more shots per turn, and ability to heal myself more often etc.

When you level up, what happens is your health gets increased, and you raise your 'Skills'  these are your Small guns, science, repair, Speech, First aid etc. Every 3 levels you are able to choose a new perk, which if youre familliar with 3d fallouts is the same concept. They usually have pros and cons,  but I didnt find it to be a big deal in this game, EXCEPT, you know I said things can fly over your head? Well I chose a perk called 'Fast shot' in the beginning, and the descriptor didn't sound that big of a deal, however, quarterway into the game I realized this perk actually REMOVED my ability to go into 'Vats' mode where you can target individual limbs, eyes, head, etc. So I couldnt even experience that entire mechanic because of a perk choice I made in the beginning of the game, it didnt even warn me it would remove this ability...

Thats enough about skills, you quickly come to feel the obtuse and oldschool game design moments after picking the game up. Everything feels so rigid and controls so awkwardly. Even after 20 hours I will admit the controls are not good. Everything operates on a hex based grid movement, and theres multiple buttons for switching from Moving to interacting to looting and all of it feels a jumbled clunky mess and it never really gets better. Made worse by the fact that the camera doesnt even follow you as you move across the map, so frequently your character will get lost as youre trying to see whats on screen, having to press a button to recenter to your character.  The graphics and artstyle themself do have a  good charm to them, and the classic fallout wit is perfected on the original game here, but the clunky awkward movement and mechanics never really do feel better. The inventory visuals UI is fantastic though  but its just not that intuitive to use. You can recruit companions  to follow you around, and you can use them as mules for your items  - but it never made since why you have to 'Pickpocket' them just to give them items, you can also Barter with them, and it never felt like the game had a proper 'manage companion' inventory mechanic, it was a bit of a mess.

Speaking of companions, the game has a brutal difficulty curve, but in reverse. In the beginning of the game its brutally hard as you have no items, very low health pool, no companions, and its easy to veer off somewhere random and just get obliterated. But - as you discover you can recruit up to 4 companions, the game instantly gets much easier (atleast in the beginning to middle) as now you basically have 4x the firepower.  The downside though, is that theres no way to revive your companions, so youll find yourself savescumming constantly and reloading your save as soon as any companion dies, because its just not worth losing them. This becomes a common thing. Doing the same fight over and over and over, just because your companions have horrible AI, you cant tell them to retreat, or control them, and they will just blindly run head first up to an obviously way stronger enemy and just stand there and let themselves get obliterated. Then you have to reload, and hope this time you have better luck. It became a strategy to try to position my player character to tank the damage instead of the companions, as I could atlaest manage myself better.

Well the problem is kind of like I said, the game is super hard in the beginning few hours, then towards the middle/end it becomes super easy. Once you have multiple companions all stocked up with sniper rifles / strong weapons, and especially when you get the power armor and plasma rifle ,you just obliterate anything in your path mostly. You cant give your companions armor, so you will still deal with the pitfall of them dying in one or two hits to super strong enemies, atleast towards the end, by this point you can get rid of them and still annihilate all your foes easily. The difficulty just felt really strange and backwards in general.

The game has a huge variety of weapons and items to find and looting and finding all sorts of new weapons was really fun and enjoyable, but it wasnt until halfway through the game I learned how to even determine how much damage weapons even do so I was just kind of winging it. I focused on Small guns, then towards the game had a bunch of stat points and went into Energy guns as ammo was then abundant for them.


Well what is the actual story, missions, objectives, quests like? Well, incredibly vauge and slightly frustraing. The premise is amazing, your vault is running out of water, so you have to leave the vault and find a water chip. Thats it. Thats all you have to go on. Then it throws you onto this overworld map where youre a tiny little dot and you travel around "open world" style, where it will randomly stop you, Pokemon encounter style with random events. this was a fascinating mechanic and a brilliant way to handle early open world gaming.
But yes, thats where the directions start. You will go to locations/towns, and just aimlessly wander around talking to every NPC you can find, doing 'side quests' for them. The tricky thing about quests in this game, is theres no quest log. Theres no way to actually determine what the fuck you have to do. You do have a screen that tells you vauge notions of a quest in an area, like incredibly vauge, but you cant read any quest log or further details. And most of the 'quests' in the game dont even get jotted down on that screen.

So you'll go from location to location talking to tons of NPC's, they'll give you ambiguous hints, and if you forget what they said, or didnt pay attention, they sometimes wont even repeat it to you. You can easily find yourself wandering around the same location for hours on end searching every single corner, talking to every NPC multiple times, exausting all possible dialogue options, just to try to figure out how to advance a 'quest'  Sometimes its immersive and enjoyable, but more often than not its just a frustrating "What the fuck do I do" slog. To make matters worse, the first half of the game is on a Timer, if you dont find the water chip within a few hours, you permanently fail the game and ruin your save file. Because of this, savescumming is a MUST and you will be constantly saving in multiple different slots because it is easy to irreversibly ruin your save.

Even talking to NPC's its very easy to say something that seems tame and inoffensive, can cause them to permanently not want to talk to you and ruin quest lines. So you find yourself saving before almost every interaction and reloading when something really bad happens. Its just how its designed.

In the first half, I had only 5 days left to get the waterchip. Which means I permanently failed the main quest, luckily you can talk to someone in a city to repeat the timer a second time, so I did that. Eventually, I found someone that told me where I might find the waterchip, so I went there. However, I wasted too much time, and an area that was suppose to be inhabited by simple easy ghouls ,were now inhabited by the hardest enemies in the game - Super mutants, who basically kill me and all my companions in one hit, so now the game punished me even harder for taking too long. So at this point I had to rethink how I was going to proceed.

This caused me to have to go around to every location I could find, and talking to every NPC to obtain 'quests' to desperately try to level up and more importantly find stronger weapons and Armor, specifically Power armor, as when I was googling how to increase my afformentioned low strength unable to properly weild weapons, I found that power armor is one of the only ways. So I had to make it my top priority on obtaining power armor.

All of this took me through many interesting and exciting locations and interactions, taking jobs from a mercenary company to kill merchants and his wife, going to a cathedral and slaughtering the leader, going inside huge nuclear bomb holes full of radiation to find a holotape for the Brotherhood initiation required for power armor, etc. But honestly many of these things I had to aid myself with google, there are so many times and parts in this game where I just knew if I didnt google things I would be mindlessly walking around for hours and hours making ZERO progress, I couldnt accept it. I would guess maybe 40% of the game I had to google.

So many times the game felt like it would glitch out or just make no sense with NPC interactions and quests. Trying to recruit my companion, for example, had me go through this long quest line of fighting against the greedy town owner or joining him, well at the beginning I went to talk to him and ended up taking a job for him, then I later found out the potential companion wouldnt join me because he doesnt me want working for the greedy man, so I went back and killed him, but nothing changed. No one would even recognize I had killed the guy and the game basically broke or just didnt progress past that for these quest lines.  If you dont do things in a very specific order, the NPCs will no longer notice or react. This happens frequently. So the companion says "youre working with him, I wont join you"  So instead of killing, you have to instead go work for the other merchant, and complete his guest, THEN the companion will finally recognize that youre no longer working for him.

Things like this are frequent and just dont make sense. You would think if I kill the fucking guy that it would convince you that I'm infact not working for him, but nope, the NPC's dont even notice. And keep talking about him as if hes still alive. You can tell the programming is limited and outdated in this regard, things like this happen often. And this is what I mean by I just had to google things, because the game does such a poor job making sense otherwise.

After I had gathered up my companions, did some 'quests' to get better loot, did the Brotherhood quest line and finally got Power armor to fix my str issue and more defense, the game as I said had become super easy. By this point I had bascally infinite ammo, I bought every health kit in the game, I had no problem staying alive, just became a game of trying to keep my stupid companions alive, then I could go and obtain the waterchip by killing the super mutants easily enough.

After this, you're into the halfway/end game and you no longer have a timer. Then you can go around and try to complete all 'side quests' which I did. You know how I keep saying the game does such a poor job of making sense at all with the quests? I have VERY good proof of this.

I had obtained a quest that said "Find the child spy of the Followers"  So for hours, I had walked around multiple cities, talking to every NPC, searching how to complete this quest. Telling myself "I wont google it, surely I can figure it out, surely"

I found nothing. I could not figure it out
I eventually gave in, and googled it.
Guess what?
It's literally unbeatable.
The quest was not fully programmed.
The quest literally was not fully implemented.
You obtain a quest in your quest log thats not even possible for anyone to complete, ever. It wasnt programmed in.

The wiki entry for this quest literally says:

"The traitor was either removed from the final version of the game or never implemented, effectively rendering the quest impossible to complete"
"Find Children spy in the Followers is one of the unimplemented side quests from Fallout"

I mean this was unfathomable. Why are there quests in my quest log that are impossible to complete? Why did it give me the impression that it was a legit quest? Why did I waste hours honestly trying to finish it only to discover this? This is a token to the broken and SLOPPY design of the game overall. Thats a perfect word for it. Fallout 1 is SLOPPILY designed. Things rarely  make sense, and if you try to complete things in slightly an unexpected order, NPC's just break basically.

Desite all of this bullshit, I still enjoyed it a lot. Theres so much interesting dialogue and characters, one of my favorite is the Children of the apocalypse towards the end of the game. That entire cult is so fascinating and fun to explore, really amazing atmosphere and dark haunting music and visuals and characters.

But now even that location had bullshit nonsensical design. It would tell me "Just obtain this item, show it to the guard, and go upstairs, no one will hurt you"

So I did.
Except they shot at me anyway.
They were suppose to not shoot me.
I couldnt figure out how to avoid them shooting me.
Once again, I had to google.
Turns out you cant have any companions, or they shoot at you.
So I dismissed my companions, all except one
I have a dog companion, you cant dismiss the dog
So the game forced me to permanently kill my own companion just to properly progress without these cult members shooting me. Just awkward. It feels like maybe you werent suppose to get this far with him? I dont know, it just felt wrong. Nowhere in the game did it say "you cant bring companions up" The game is an awkward mess most of the time.

Well I can say the ending quests of the game are by far the greatest characters and moments. The plot and writing becomes super interesting and dark, the last 'villian' is great and morally ambiguous, leaving you to have many interesting decisions.

The endgame is basically going to two major bases and destroying them both. One is a cult church built ontop an underground facility, the other a supermutant headquarters. I will say the church is much more interesting, as the final boss is crazy, and extremely hard, but by this point in the game I had 80 health kits and a Turbo plasma rifle so I managed to get by. The other military base wasnt much of a challenge I felt pretty overpowered, but however the vauge and ambiguous awkward objectives once again reared its head.

For one thing, I recrutied the brotherhood of steel help me with the final military base, they show up outside it, kill a few guards, then thats it. They wont follow me inside. They say "Come on, lets go!" and they wont go inside. Apparently they only exist to help you kill the first 3 guards and arent programmed to walk inside with you? I dont fucking get it. Why is the game is NONSENSICAL and awkward. Whats the point of going through so much shit just to have the brotherhood help you, and they wont even follow you inside? Of course, i also googled this. And nothing. Just werent programmed to go inside? Ok then, pointless.  Then, after going through the whole military base awkwardly using 'repair' skill on some force fields to get by, I get to the end of the base where theres just a bunch of out of order elevators and computers, but everytime I try to use the computers nothing happens. Of course, I also googled this after 20 mins of walking around aimlessly. Turns out I have to use 'science' on one of the computers, and trigger a self destruct? Ok, I did that, strolled to the top of the base, then the game basically ended. End credits.

Well I really enjoyed how they handled the early open world exploration with the overview map, I really enjoyed all the items and various locations, the atmosphere is amazing and the writing is probably the best in the series, the artstyle is fantastic and the graphics are great, albeit at the original 640x480 resolution, because higher resolutions make everything tiny. the characters are interesting for the most part, and the whole game has this morally grey point of view where youre never quite sure whos good and whos bad. The turn based combat is pretty enjoyable, but the game is deeply flawed with horrible companion AI, horribly vauge nonsensical objectives and awkward janky broken scripting, frustratingly ambiguous methods to progress, deeply backwards difficulty curve, clunky and awkward controls that you never really get use to, etc.. Its still a 7/10, only because of how much I appreciate the atmosphere and graphics, and the true oldschool CRPG feel. I found myself thinking about the game for hours even when I wasnt playing it, and I played it for 12 hours straight over a weekend, so that must say something. I even think about replaying it with all of my knowledge to see how much of a breeze it would be the second time around

7/10

Doom64

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Doom64 is an anomoly in the doom franchise. For one thing it is exclusive to N64, and another its not develoepd by Id but instead Midway.

Well it got ported to PC on steam recently so I figured its time to officially try it out properly.

The controls are minimal and near perfect in classic Doom style. You can't look up and down, and aiming is automatic and minimal , i have always appreciated the minimalism of doom controls its just a perfect formula. One annoying thing about controls (using controller) Is switching to different weapons. You have to scroll through weapons slowly and it doesnt even say the text on the screen of what weapon youre about to scroll to, this could have been better. The artstyle in this game is very unique and cool looking. The enemies have this super memorable clay look and animation to them, the enemy designs are terrifying and badass and seeing the classic doom monsters recreated in this artstyle was really neat. You have almost all of the iconic doom monsters which need no introduction.
 
It also stands out for its music or lack thereof. When you think of Doom you think blood pumping exciting heavy metal, but in Doom64 the soundtrack is truly haunting creepy ambience and hellish soundscapes. You hear babies crying, people moaning in the distance, spooky keyboard drones, I loved the music and found it set a perfect atmosphere and felt like the True doom 3 horror game.

The difficulty was just perfect. I put it on the second hardest difficulty and found it to be extremely challenging at times, but only rarely felt bullshit. You play carefully and every monster encounter feels threatening and satisfying. The minimalist mechanics and shooting are easy to pickup but hard to master which makes it all the better. All of the guns serve a purpose and knowing when to swap back and forth is amazing.Like putting away your rocket launcher when those flying skulls are in your face or you risk blowing yourself up. The double barrel shotgun is amazing in its simplicity as well. The sound effect is super chunky and satisfying and the bullet particles spray all over the place and can mow down a group of enemies . The animation is oldschool charm the way it reloads.

When I said the rare times the difficulty was bullshit it would be like, getting to the end of a level, standing on a platform in the wrong place, and finding yourself lowered into a pit of lava that you cant escape from. Without any warning, you now have to play the whole level again (if youre not savescumming)
A few other times, youll fall into this pitch black pit, spamming the walls ttrying to escape, without finding anything, having to youtube it, and realizing theres a totally bullshit invisible path alongside the wall you gotta climb up.  This is more level design annoyances than real difficulty though.

The real star of Doom are the levels and how well theyre designed. Well Doom64 levels are pretty great for the most part. Although, for the first quarter of the game they are rather a bad first impression. The first quarter is some kinda rather bland warehouse complexes with not very impressive visuals, brown walls, and tedious switch hunting. But after the first quarter the levels really open up and you dive into hell and find all these amazing hellish medevial castles, arenas, boss fights, blood red skies and some really clever level design. Theres even a throwback to some classic Doom levels in the arena where you must survive style maps.

The game has 28 maps and maybe only 5 of them were not so great or more annoying than good.
Only a few times are the levels super unintuitive and bullshit, in these times it is things like walking in circles for 10 minutes having no idea what to do, only to find out for the first time and only time in the game, you have to SHOOT a switch on the wall. This only happens once or twice, and is totally a bullshit random niche thing that you have no idea you can do. A few other times, the walls will suddenly start crushing you without warning and no way to anticipate it. A few other times you have these trap rooms that shoot missles at you that are pretty annoying. Sometimes youll press a switch and have no idea what it does, only to have to jump down, and go back in the same room you hit the switch, where it opened another wall. Just kinda awkward design.

But besides those few annoyances the level design is really good. It is mostly kind of medevial castles more similar to things youd find in Quake or something, but they are really fun to navigate. Its not like Doom 2 where half of the game is a total tedious slog doing awful platforming vertical levels insane labryinth keyhunts. No,  its rather straight forward, but complex enough to be consistently challenging and exciting.

The way the levels are designed is not like previous doom games, in previous doom games you could kind of get away with circle strafing in a big area and easily kill all enemies, or sit in a doorway and wait for them to walk to you. Well in doom64 it feels a lot more linear at times, and A LOT more enemies at once. Youll be in a tiny cramped corridor with 50 enemies all around you and you need to act fast. You cant 'cheese' your way through any of the game, all of it is intense adrenaline pumping action. Theres always enough exciting pickups and items to find to keep your health and armor high so you never feel like its totally unfair.

I appreciate how dark and grim the whole tone of the game is from the music, atmosphere, hellish medevial level names, etc. Theres a handful of really stellar levels I wouldn't mind playing again and again. Maybe one day i'll even come back and 100% the game with achievements. Apparently theres a weapon where you can find various upgrades for it throughout the game but I never found any of the upgrades just the weapon.

The boss fights are super intense and more exciting than in previous doom games, in previous doom games they were a joke and you can easily exploit their AI, in doom64 theyre more of a threat and you have to actively be on your toes. The last boss in particular is insanely hard . The first time I did it I wasted all my ammo on the previous monster spawning phase, and just got destroyed at the boss. The next time, I saved my BFG ammo and carefully killed the enemies, and when the boss spawned I avoided a few of his homing missles and put some BFG into him and killed him rather fast. Overall, Doom64 is a great challenge, with mostly good/great levels with a few annoying level design choices, great artsyle and sound design, perfect minimalist arcade style mechanics..I think this game is the perfect game to play in short bursts, like 2-3 levels at a time. Its one of the best games i have found to quickly jump in and play for 20-30 minutes then quit again for awhile. I basically beat the whole game like this. Its perfect for short burst arcade style gaming.

8/10