Half-Life: Blue Shift

 


Blue Shift is the final official expansion pack for Half-Life, developed by the now famous Gearbox Software.
Unlike Opposing Force, the difficulty isn't broken. Or maybe I broke my copy of opposing force, but that's another story.

In Blue Shift, you play through the events of half life, instead through the perspective of a security guard working there. It's a great premise and it works quite well going through Black Mesa through another viewpoint, seeing familiar yet distinctly different areas , and sometimes you even see Gordan Freeman through some windows or cameras, its a nice touch and theres a lot of "Oh wow, its that part!" moments.

The level design is for the most part pretty straight forward, starting off slowly and atmospherically by making you showup for a regular day on the job, grabbing your security outfit and sidearm, but then being tasked with going deeper down into the facility to fix various problems and help out the scientists.
Soon, though, you find yourself fighting waves of aliens and eventually the military.

The game is really short, 3 or 4 hours, but unfortunately the level design is hit and miss.
Some levels are pretty great, almost Counter-Strike 1.6 type levels of outside office buildings, trainyards fighting military doing tactical style shooting, underground bases with horror vibes being surprised by headcrabs and aliens, but then there are some times where the objectives are needlessly obtuse and cryptic, sometimes involving obscure amounts of backtracking to find a switch that now works.
Parts like early in the game you have to operate a crane, but tapping the button does nothing. Only after running around in circles for 20 minutes I realized you have to HOLD the button to operate the crane, not tap it.
Another part towards the end of the game has a dynamite rigged up, with a broken line. It turns out you have to push a generic looking barrel and put it in the broken line part of the dynamite, then it 'connects' and actually explodes. Thats so cryptic I'm surprised I even figured it out without looking it up, because it kind of breaks the game rules where random barrels apparently now are mandatory to progress.
Also, that same level, you have to do all sorts of random things involving bad physics like using barrels to create a bridge, and then turning on some switches and having to backtrack 10 minutes through the level to find a switch that suddenly moves a bridge allowing you to progress. This level was terrible and I spent 30 mins just running around in circles trying to figure out what I missed.
Oh yeah and theres also a part ripped straight out of Duke Nukem 3d, with the spinning turbines that kill you in the water, but you have to push some explosive box into it to destroy it.

But then other levels are just nonstop action and progression makes sense, so its really hit and miss at times.

As the game progresses you find out the military are basically rounding up all the scientists and killing them to get rid of any witnesses of Black Mesa, so you're tasked with helping save the scientists, and yourself escaping. You do this by fixing some teleporters which end up teleporting you around to different weird alien planets similar to the ending locations of HL1, its pretty cool to return to these areas and they aren't as bad as the HL1 levels. Exploring this alien planet was pretty interesting and a welcome change of pace.

This is also the Half Life expansion that introduces 'HD Models' and changes the weapon models and sound effects and character models, they look pretty good and help to differentiate this expansion from the base game as well. So a welcome addition.

Overall I definitely enjoyed Blue Shift more than opposing force, mostly because the difficulty was a lot more fair, it wasn't too easy but not too hard, it was just right. The health packs are strategically and resourcefully placed around, with just the right ratio of scarcity to abundance.
But maybe there was some technical glitch in opposing force  that completely broke the AI damage and difficulty, i dont know, it was really bad though.

Blue Shifts occasional pacing issues, with the bullshit cryptic puzzles and backtracking and running around in circles, takes it from potentially being a great game, to just a pretty decent one. If you're just wanting some more HL1 action, you cant really go wrong by playing this expansion.

7/10

Thief (2014)

 

The Thief series is known as being a famous example of the stealth genre perfected, apparently. I've never played any of them, the first one looks pretty daunting and difficult so I've never bothered

I picked up Thief 2014 on sale for a few dollars and have been reluctant to try it for a long time, mostly because stealth genre in general just isn't my thing, but I decided to play through this game anyway because it says its under 10 hours long and its triple A quality so it cant be that bad.

The game does have a refined visual polish about it, the graphics right off the bat can be impressive at times, especially with how immersive it can feel. Just being able to look down and see your legs, watch your character actually pickup objects in the world, the lockpicking and all interactions in the game feel polished and high quality, like true first person view. And the city atmosphere and environments are quite believable and compelling, you really do start to feel like a cloaked thief wandering around in the night, eavesdropping in on people and listening to their conversations, sneaking past and unlocking doors while they're oblivious , etc.

But really, the game still isn't for me.
The bulk of the game is typical stealth formula I just don't find fun
You'll spend most of the game slowly crouching around, turning a corner and hearing some enemy guards talk to each other, so you're basically forced to just sit there and wait until the guards stop having their conversation and their AI decides to start randomly path finding a patrol route, so you can either sneak past or pick them off. Thats the gist of the entire game.  Much of it is spent just standing still and waiting for NPC's to trigger their 'patrol' script so you can progress, frankly its just fucking boring, and I basically hate stealth in genera because of this stuff. A lot of times I just find myself hunched over in my chair, eyes closed, half asleep, waiting for them to move so I can finally progress. Yawn.

Thankfully, the game has a forgiving quicksave system, where you can quicksave anytime you're not in combat or an enemy is aware of you. So naturally I would smash the damn quicksave button any time I made even an inch of progress, cause there's no way in hell I'm being sent back and having to wait another 40 seconds for the NPC to finish their conversation I already heard and then start patrolling.

The game throws all sorts of tools you can use, mostly just different sorts of bow arrows, but I never really used any of it, it all felt just gimmicky and pointless, like 'water arrows' to shoot out torches to give yourself darkness,  standard arrows to kill people with, blunt arrows to destroy objects, stuff like that. The thing is the arrows that actually kill enemies are in such short supply that I never found a real opportunity to even use them, I just ignored it mostly.
What the combat does consist of, is mostly just sneaking behind a guard , waiting for the 'Press LB to takedown' prompt to appear, then watching an animation of you killing the guard for 10 seconds. Repeat. More often than not, however, the animation will take so long that another guard will walk up to you by the time you're done. And you also typically have to make sure to hold X and drag the corpse away or you'll get spotted.
Oh yeah, the keyboard and mouse controls are confusing as hell and clunky and just aren't good. Plug in a controller and use that and it works much better.  The first time I played the game for 2 hours, i dropped it for months afterwards, cause the controls were just so awkward and fumbly and nothing made sense, then when I came back i plugged in a controller and It was more intuitive.

But still, the controls in general are hit and miss and kind of stupid.
Like how there's a 'focus' system which highlights things in the environment you can interact with (which is incredibly useful)  and also helps you in combat depending on the upgrades you get, like slowing down time, or giving you more 1 press buttons to takedown enemies

However, this 'focus' system has a weird quirk, in that you have to use an enemy to fill the gauge up so it lasts longer, but the thing is even when the gauge runs out you can still tap the button to briefly highlight things in the environment.  Which is the main use of the mechanic, to be able to highlight items in the environment that are required to progress.
So you find yourself in a position where you dont actually want to use items to fill the gauge, because you would be constantly wasting it whenever you just want to highlight objects in the environment. Its utterly bizarre they didnt have two separate buttons, one for highlighting objects, and one for using the entire gauge. Maybe that exists but im unaware, but that just goes to show how unintuitive and clunky some of the mechanics overall can be.
So I spent most of the game with 0% focus gauge, spamming the focus button to briefly be able to see objects in the enviorment that I needed to use to progress, instead of using the system the way its intended I guess. Either way it doesn't seem like a particularly enjoyable or fun mechanic, using it to try to aid you in 'combat' is also clunky as hell, you unlock more 'press X to kill' takedown abilities, but half the time you try to use it you realize you dont have enough gauge and you end up taking damage anyway.

So besides sneaking behind guards and pressing a button to take them out, you can also engage in free melee combat. By swinging around a blackjack in typical first person action. This is goofy and awkward and stupid, and the first quarter of the game I couldn't even figure out how to use the damn thing cause the game does such a poor job explaining that you have to go to this certain spot on the map and talk to a black market guy that sells you items and upgrades, only when you buy the blackjack from him can you actually press RB to use the melee.
The game also uses a sort of Assassins Creed kind of control system, where you hold LT to sprint , and your character automatically makes jumps and climbs walls depending on context, this can be decent, but also at times can be fumbling and frustrating.

So once you go and buy the Blackjack, now you can actually attack enemies whenever you want. And how this works doesn't play very well
You basically just tap the melee button and you sort of hone in on the enemy from up to a dozen feet away, you can also tap a button to dodge enemy attacks. So it becomes this goofy game of waiting for the enemy to swing his weapon, tapping dodge which has an extremely forgiving timing window, then your character is almost guaranteed to dodge the attack,  then you tap the melee button and you zoom into the enemy doing damage or he blocks. Repeat until death, which can take a lot of hits if you haven't upgraded your blackjack damage. (Which is about the only upgrade I actually cared to try to get)

It's not very good and obviously its not suppose to be a combat game, but I wasn't having much fun with the boring stealth mechanics so I tried to upgrade my health and blackjack damage at the blackmarket shop as much as possible so I would at least have a chance of engaging in some action packed combat, it worked OK and I was able to finally start taking out enemies without having to constantly wait for their stupid patrol scripts to trigger, but still I couldn't just walk in and use melee on everyone, it only works up to 2 guards, anymore than that and you're screwed. Also the enemy animations are pretty crap and the hitboxes are super inconsistent and buggy.

About halfway through the game it starts trying to be this horror game where you go into a mental asylum or something and there's a bunch of monsters there that YOU CANT DAMAGE so you have to sneak past them. The change of tone was appreciated, but it just felt so out of place. Its like they suddenly wanted the game to be Amnesia, but the random tone change was so jarring and felt 'phoned in' to capitalize on some trend in gaming at the time.
It's almost like I would have preferred the entire game to have this sort of horror tone, but oh well.

But yeah, these monster enemies you cant kill are just a slog. Its even more crouching around in dark corners waiting for their patrol scrips so you can ever so slowly creep by, mashing quicksave every few inches, and when they suddenly decide to spot you, either running as fast as possible towards the objective marker, or just reloading and trying again. Its not great.


The story starts off kind of compelling for the first half of the game, the whole grimdark Victorian tone, being in a hub-world city semi-open world Victorian streets and plagues and the sort is a good setting, but towards the end of the game it starts throwing in a bunch of mystical, paranormal, magical, corny cliche damsel in distress love story that it all falls apart and quickly becomes a forgettable lame trope. Not much else to say. There's hardly any characters to speak of, just the main character which is a typical edgelord, but hes entertaining enough, and this obese 'sidekick' guy you
interact with here and there, that helps you out or gives you side-quests that give you gold to help unlocking stuff.

That's the other mechanic, gold.
When going about the environments you can pickup all sorts of random things that instantly give you gold, which at first I had no idea what the point was, because the game does a poor job explaining that there's an upgrade system, and where the shops are.
But yeah you go around grabbing stuff for gold, and there's special challenges you can do per level that give you more gold, like doing so many takedowns, not being spotted, etc. At the end of a chapter it gives you a 'completion' screen where it goes over what you did and awards you gold, its sort of fun but I didn't really care too much about upgrades or anything, only one point I went out of my way to do a side quest to get a bit more gold so I could unlock more melee damage upgrade, but that's it. Oh, and doing that sidequest was a pain in the ass and took almost 2 hours of walking around in circles running all across the hub-world city trying to follow quest markers, wasn't fun.

So that's all there is to Thief 2014, really.
It's a stealth game, I don't like the genre, and this hasn't made me like it any more.
The graphics and immersion and atmosphere can be compelling, some of the campy cutscenes and dialogue can be entertaining, the gameplay at times can be sort of fun, but overall its pretty boring and has more dull moments than good ones, with confused awkward mechanics and controls.

5/10

Neverending Nightmares

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Neverending Nightmares is a short little 2D-ish horror game. I finally installed it after its been sitting on my steam library for years, because I noticed it says its only about 1-2 hours long.
The thing thats unique and striking about this game is the handrawn pencil style graphics.
This actually works quite well and has a certain charm and unique quality to it.
The graphics are definitely the most interesting part of the experience, a lot of stencil shading and clever drawing tricks to portray light and darkness is a nice touch.

The game follows a very simplistic and minimalistic pathway and gameplay.
You're a young boy/man that wakes up from bed and continue to experience nightmares.
You walk around this house, presumably trying to escape the nightmare.
You'll find the typical tropes, weird dolls that smile at you, blood on the walls, dark basements that suddenly kill you.
Theres not that many items to find in the game, or puzzles to solve or anything really.
Sometimes you'll need to grab a candle and walk around with it to progress, or another time you need to grab an axe to break a door, but theres really not much collecting or puzzles to solve.
 Mostly, the gameplay consists of walking through corridors, looking at anything with a color which means it can be interacted with because otherwise the game is in black and white, and going through doors - often times doors that lead to rooms with nothing in them, then trying to find the right door to progress.
Sometimes, youll come across monsters that kill you. Thankfully, if you die, you always awake in a room nearby to try again.
Theres only a few types of enemies, a giant beast where you have to run away and hide in a closet, a mental patient that sprints at you and kills you, took me awhile to figure out that hes blind and reacts only to sound so you cant sprint (had to google it actually) , and another monster of a girl that drags a knife on the ground, you just walk away then walk back and shes gone.  
The game does have some pretty edgy grim moments which I appreciated, like women hanging and dismembered corpses with babies ripped out of them and other weird stuff.

The game has some entertaining moments and enemies and some OK atmosphere and scares, but sadly it has a few crucial flaws that make it not an amazing experience.

- The gameplay is frankly very shallow and minimal, theres not really much to do besides run through corridors over and over. Theres only 2 buttons, interact and sprint. No items to collect or much things to see, only locations are a house, then a short cemetery/forest. then mental asylum.


- The biggest flaw that almost ruins any enjoyment of the game - The SPRINT is abysmal. Your character is CONSTANTLY making an obviously loud stupid gasping out of breath noise, like you play as some debilitated nerdy guy with chronic asthma, seriously if you try to run at all, your guy will start moaning and panting for like 30 seconds straight, and if you hold it for even slightly too long he just stops moving to catch breath for so long. I think they tried to penalize you for sprinting to try to pad out the game length cause they know its so short and not much to it, but even if they toned down the breathing sounds it would have been more tolerable. But it almost ruins any atmosphere the game has to hear your guy constantly moaning out of breath even though you only ran for 3 seconds.

That's really all there is to the game, I beat it in 90 minutes, its not too frustrating or bad to get through or anything, but its nothing exciting gameplay wise either.
The plot was kind of entertaining to try to guess and figure out whats going on, stuff about guilt and broken family, like speculating that you keep having nightmares with creepy dolls and dead girls because you killed your sister or something, in the end it just turned out that your daughter died and youre struggling to cope or something.
Its notable for its unique and charming handrawn graphic style, but other than that its a pretty basic, simplistic, almost Adobe-Flash esque little game, with some really obnoxious breathing sound effects.

6/10

DreadOut: Keepers of the Dark

 

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The first Dreadout game was an 'OK' typical style horror item collection game, this 'Keepers of the Dark' is a stand-alone 'dlc' where you dont have to own the original game to play it.

I installed it because I checked and its apparently only about 3 hours long.
But unfortunately it took me twice that, and that's not a good thing.
The game plops you into a hallway with doors on each side numbered 101-108
Each of these doors has two candles, indicating that theres two objectives to complete per level
The first level I tried, was some very annoying underwhelming tunnel maze sewer, so I left that one quickly to not ruin my first impression
The next level was some almost identical swampy water place where you go around in circles with some ghost chasing you. I awkardly figured out the terrible controls to start taking photos of it with my camera, then eventually I came to some boss fight arena with a giant head witch girl screaming at me knocking me over every 10 seconds.
So the game tries to do more action boss battle style gameplay instead of run around and collect items, but it doesn't work well at all

The game simply just doesnt have solid mechanics enough to justify attempting to be more action oriented.

This first 'boss' fight was a big sign of things to come
After awkwardly clumsily trying to dodge the bosses attacks, dying, going to some purgatory black void room and then respawning at the boss arena over and over. I finally killed it and progressed.

While some of the monsters and visuals can be cool and have interesting model designs and the atmosphere can be creepy in a dark room, the charade quickly falls apart once you realize how stupid the gameplay is.
That one level where a weird little doll follows you around was pretty interesting and neat, but eventually you get bored of walking in circles, and realize you have to come back later
Well you come back later with some item, and then you have another scene with a bunch of dancing ghosts, and its extremely unclear what you have to do. This game is full of trial and error bullshit where you have to die over and over again until you figure out what it wants from you. It sucks.
For the dancing ghosts part, you have to basically OBJECTIVE:SURVIVE. And just run around in circles until the song runs out. Its extremely janky and awkward and stupid.
 
So yeah, the objectives are extremely stupid and vauge at times.
Like the times you have to look at the corners of your screen to look at different colored 'vignettes' to give hints of what to do. Like having to walk around until the screen turns 'reddish' and that means theres an in invisible item in the arena you have to take a picture of to progress. Sound fun? yeah its not, its really tedious and obnoxiously boring.
The most egregious example of the game sucking, that took me probably an hour to finally complete
Is this village level where theres a small ghost girl that wants to play hide and seek, and then gives you an invisible timer to find her.
If the timer runs out, you get a jump scare, but the level doesn't end. So you can just keep walking around in circles for hours but never make any progress
You actually have to exit the stage (go back to main menu) and then go back in, to be able to try again.
The first time this happened, I had no idea thats what was expected of me, so I ran around in circles for 30 mins until I googled it and realized my suspision was correct, you have to exit to main menu then try again.

So after exiting to menu and going back to attempt the hide and seek part again, I managed to find the girl once, but then she goes to hide again and you have to find her again
The insane stupid problem is that she hides in extremely obscure unintuitive places. And everytime the 'timer' runs out - you have to exit to main menu and go back to the level to try again
So yeah, I failed this over and over and over for an hour or more, eventually looked it up, and STILL couldnt find her for another 25 mins.
Not to mention the game frequently just glitches out and the objectives bug

Theres another level that has two moronic 'boss fights'
A giant horse that follows you around where you awkwardly have to 'dodge' it and snap photos at it over and over until it dies
Then this INSANE boss called 'Zook' that  hides in the grass and instantly one hit kills you if you get 'too close' So for 40 mins I would slowly creep around and then BAM! instant one hit death.
So naturally having no fucking clue whats going on / what to do, I had to look this up too. Turns out you need to creep around incredibly slowly and try to listen to the music to tell you where he is, and then snap a photo of him to complete the stage.. ugh..

Another nail in the coffin for how fucking shit this game is,
Is this stage with a blind monster
You go around the stage trying to see what this weird blind monster wants, he swipes at you and walks around being kinda unthreatening
You go around collecting items, then eventually back around and try to kill him
I managed to acftually figure out that you have to wait until he shows an eyeball from his throat, then try to take a picture of it.

So I kept doing that, I was taking the picture of the correct spot, I was getting the yellow circles notification that it was doing damage, but I spent 30 mins just taking photo after photo of him , but he wouldnt die.

So once again, fucking clueless,  I just googled it.
Turns out if you miss A FUCKING PIECE OF PAPER NOTE then he wont die.
So you literally have to find a piece of paper, then magically he'll start to take damage, even though previously it looks like you were doing damage to him
What?
Everything about this game is unpolished, buggy, low budget, nonsensical, moronic, time wasting and annoying.
It quickly lost all of its scare/horror and quickly became an annoying stupid chore of trying to figure out wtf the game expects of me to progress.

Theres basically only ONE enjoyable level in the game, its this place full of mannequins where its pretty obvious and straightforward what you have to do, just go around and take pictures of this lady whos obsessed with being beautiful, and then once you do that theres just another monster that you have to find what the real one is instead of mannequins.
Every other level in the game was full of bullshit obscure crap objectives that are just annoying to try to figure out, mostly just running around in circles over and over and over again, being bored, and frustrated, and just wanting to progress.

It doesn't help that the game only has a few controls. but they somehow managed to fuck them up as well. The controls are awful. If you hold the camera button, it keeps going up and down. The button layout is stupid, and the inventory is literally the worst inventory ive ever seen in my life. Nothing makes sense.

What else to say? there are a few moments where yeah the models are cool, theres some creepy sound effects and funny jumpscares, some of the levels can be immersive and the camera flashlight can be engaging in a horror sense, but the actual gameplay is awful and frustrating and the game design is terrible.

Like another example, it will allow you to needlessly go all the way to the other side of the map, just to discover a giant awkward empty arena, only to realize you need to go back to the beginning of the level and kill some specific monster first, THEN when you go back to the arena, theres another awkward shitty 'boss' fight that you have to do, but the game just doesnt have proper mechanics to justify 'action' segments.  Like why couldnt they put a lock on the arena door and make it more obvious that you need to turn around to find a key? The game design is just shit.

When I almost had every candle blown out from all the levels, so almost all objectives complete, a giant door in the main hallway opened and it took me to the 'last boss' which is..surprise, another sewer. So I went through all that, saw the end credits, but still I noticed there was still 2 candles left. Well it turns out i got the 'fake' ending and theres another ending if you get all the objectives. Well if I didnt google it then I basically would have never figured it out, cause you can only get the 'true ending' if you find every single note in the game, and I missed a single one. So I looked up where the final note was, but it wasnt where the guide said it was, so I dont know, fuck it. Game sucks. legit one of the most annoying stupid games ive ever played. I thought it would be a painless , short, silly horror game to play for an evening or two, but it turned into twice the length I thought it was, consisting of mostly running around in circles and engaging in goofy shit janky 'combat' sections and weak jumpscares, yeah even the jumpscares didnt scare me, it was more like "lol that was stupid"

3/10

Viking: Battle For Asgard

 

Viking: Battle For Midgard is a sort of obscure niche game that came out in 2008 and I played it around that time, think I thought it was a decent campy button masher third person combat game so I decided to do another play through of it now in 2022

The first thing that strikes you is that it feels a little rough around the edges
While first impressions arent bad per se, its a mixed bag.
In that some of the animations look stiff, and especially some elements of the UI look a little uncared for, such as the default windows text fonts in places.
But still, it shows promise.
The graphics are decent enough, notably the sprawling long waves of water that surround the islands you explore, it does have a nice touch of atmosphere to it with the sound effects and the way the water graphics look.

There are two difficulties it presents you with
Normal & Hard
I choose normal, because fuck playing this on hardest difficulty.

You quickly discover the main core of the gameplay in Viking:
It gives you three main islands,
then you open up the map and look at the Objective icons, you then set a marker on one of them in any order you wish, and slowly walk towards it and do what it requires.
You complete all of these objective icons, and then you unlock the final big battle for the island, which consists of huge amounts of NPC's on the screen, both friendly AI and enemy, which is pretty visually impressive the sheer number of AI on the screen.

In the final big battle of each island, it consists of killing the 'Shamans' which endlessly respawn enemies, you kill them by attacking these magical swords that surround them.  
Or the big battle the other objective is to kill Giant trolls.

Each of the 3 islands have this exact same pattern and repetitive gameplay cycle. And even the big battles at the end of each island dont really differ that much.
The game is incredibly repetiive and to be frank pretty shallow.

So for example, on the starter island, as you walk around to these objective icons on your map, it usually brings you to something like "Free the captive prisoners from this encampment" so you go there and kill the enemies around the prisoners, then you spam B to open the prisoner cell and free them.  
Then, theres a main captain guy that you talk to. He'll usually tell you to do some fetch quest like walk half across the map and pickup something like a jar of honey or something stupid for him.
The problem is, this same sort of exact same fetch quest gets repeated like 100 times.
It's always like you go to some camp, free the prisoner, talk to the main guy, go do a fetch quest involving nothing but talking to NPC's, then walking back.

This is especially egregiously annoying because this game , as far as im concerned, has a really annoying 'flaw'
The character movement speed is stupidly slow, theres no sprint button, or fast travel on command.
You can fast travel, but only at select waypoints.
Most of this game is spent holding the analog stick Up while you wait for your guy to traverse 10 minutes across big barren empty fields to get to the next objective or NPC fetch quest.
I think they made the movement speed so slow on purpose to try to pointlessly pad out the length of the game to hide the fact that its so shallow and without much content.

So thats really all the game consists of.
Theres a few 'archetype' objectives, but they just get repeated over and over again, until end credits.
Other examples of  objectives it likes to repeat is :
'go clear out this watchtower'  
 go get the dragon amulet'  
'go free the prisoners'  
'Press X to warp here and do an Ambush instance where you get put in a linear arena and just mash buttons until everyone is dead"

There are some really counter intuitive and stupid parts like having to do these big stupid 'stealth' sections to sneak around one of the main fortresses, before the final big battles, and sneaking all the way in and grabbing some item, and sneaking out. This was so unobvious and awkward the first time cause it seemed like the game just wanted me to run straight into the fortress by myself and expected me to killl 1000 enemies by myself, but no, you have to find a side area or broken wall to enter, and then try to do this clumsy stealthing around and avoidng detection, which is about as awful and underdeveloped as it sounds.
This game does have 'stealth' but its just pure shit.
It happens automatically, your character will just randomly put his weapons away and start crouching around
It's just bad
Luckily you dont really have to do it all that often, but those sections where it wants you to sneak into the giant fortress by yourself to grab some item really sucked.

It's not that big of a deal but the game can feel really repetetive and dull, especially coupled with the slow movement speed and no fast travel
Infact, frequently i'd just throw myself off a cliff to die, because its faster than walking back to the nearest waypoint.

Also, I said the game was rough around the edges?  yeah, theres no 'game over' or 'you died' screen,  you just die and it instantly warps you to a waypoint without any notice, its jarring.

So the game is a 2008, action 'adventure' quasi open-world non linear game, where it has three islands, one after another (but you cant travel in between them, the islands happen linearly) where you complete the same handful of objectives (in whatever order you want)  and  then do the same repeat 'big battle' at the end.
Is it fun?
Kind of.

The combat is obviously the main draw here, because theres really not much point to 'explore'
There's no special gear you can find, or experience or level ups, or RPG mechanics really.
There is a shop where you can buy permanent health upgrades, theres a Arena where you learn new button combo fighting game style moves, and you can buy 3 different styles of magic, but thats it, so since theres no point to really explore, the main draw is the combat or the story (the story is very forgettable and medicore)
Learning new moves at the arena wasn't that interesting or big of a deal, I mostly ignored it for a lot of the game because I felt my moves were already good enough and it was just more pointless padding that tries to make the game seem more deep than it really is.

The combat is sort of Assassin's Creed / Batman arkham style button masher. With tons of quick time events.
The controls are OK, for the most part.
There is no targeting system, instead, your character just sort of locks in on whoever he thinks hes looking at, which can be incredibly frustrating when you're surrounded by 10 mobs and you want to hit one in particular, but the damn player keeps attacking the wrong one.
But besides that, it's sort of fun.
Mostly because there is a satisfying gore system, where you hack off limbs and heads go flying with big mists of blood sprays and twirls and meaty sound effects.

It's the standard X for heavy attack, A for fast attack kind of combat, but then you can hold Left bumper where it activates additional button combos and moves you can do, where you sort of get 'ammo' and different moves cost different amounts of 'ammo' indicated by the icons on the top left of the screen.

Generally, I found myself either holding LB the entire time and spamming buttons so the player keeps doing random combos, which confuse and overwhelmn the enemy AI, or choosing the strongest single button combo I had, usually double or tripple X button, doing 3 fast attacks to gain 'ammo', then pressing LB+XXX to do the strong attack, which breaks shields usually. And thats the whole combat cycle.

There is a few different enemies, but they all kind of look the same grey looking grunt demon thing.
Some of them have shields which can be broken by using certain button combos, other ones have a sword that are super annoying because you cant break their shield and they keep blocking with their sword, and theres another assassin type enemy that jumps on you and makes you wiggle your stick like to shake him off. Sometimes you get a few bigger type enemies, where you have to utilize the awkward dodge mechanic by pressing Left trigger + Y, attack them a bunch, then wait for the Quick Time event prompt to kill them, But really the variety is pretty run of the mill.

The only other enemy is these Giant Trolls, where the first time you see it , you think its an exclusive boss fight. But you quickly realize its just a lame Quick time event enemy that while looks visually impressive, is a push over and time waster that they just keep throwing in and repeating to make the battles feel more artifically epic.
And yes, these trolls are frequently repeated on the 'big battle' ending of each island.

So, more about these 'big ending battles' of each island.
After you complete all the objectives , then you can open your map to go to the main final fortress of each island. Then it teleports you to this big epic battlefield, where your dragons are flying around, and it tells you to "Kill all the shamans" usually.
There are more of either the Quick-time event Troll enemy types you can kill, or the bigger enemy types where you dodge them a few times and wait for the quicktime, if you choose to kill these type of enemies, you get 'Dragon runes' where you can press Select to open up a screen where you can choose a few select spots to tell a dragon to go and do an airstrike.
This usually just helps to speed up the battles because instead of having to awkwardly run through 500 enemies and try to kill the shaman (main objective) yourself, you can call in an airstrike on it.

Because trying to walk up and kill the shaman yourself can sometimes be really stupid and frustrating, mostly by how clumsy the lack of targeting system is.
Because you have to attack these glowing swords on the ground to kill the shaman, but if you are surrounded by enemies, its very difficult to actually get your character to attack the swords instead of the enemies.

And literally thats all it is usually. You kill the 2 shamans, you get a cutscene that goes deeper into the fortress, then bam, 'Kill three more shamans!"  repeat this process 2-4 times and then it teleports you to the Next Island, where you cant return to the previous, and do it all over again but in a different terrain.

Island one and two are pretty similar green grassy mountain areas, then island 3 is the snow area. Pretty generic level design, nothing really memorable or stands out, theres a few generic caves you have to go into, no location really stands out except towards the end some giant furnace place.


A few times when trying to progress through the game I found myself lost without direction, it would tell me to go to some place, but it would look impossible to get to by looking at the map.
This happened at one of the final caves 'bring the herbs here to burn them' and it happened again in a few other places. It could have done a better job either explaining how to get to certain locations, or making the map less confusing to look at.

So TL:DR is the game any good?


Pro's

- Can have some good atmosphere and graphics at times can be cool like some areas surrounded by big water waves and viking ships and such

- Combat can be a mindless enjoyable button masher with gore flying all over the place

- Game isn't very confusing or hard, its decent to play and just turn your brain off and mash buttons and kill monsters

- It's pretty short, 3 or 4 sessions, 10 hours long

- Some funny corny campy viking story with Freya and Hel but nothing to really write about, just typical unimaginative deritive stuff. But some of the cutscenes are funny.

- Graphics can be impressive, like some of the big enemy designs like the Trolls, too bad its mostly bullshit quicktime event stuff.

- Sort of open world you can just walk around and do the game however you want, but this might actually be a con because maybe a more linear streamlined experience would be better

- Lots of AI on screen feels like a cool epic battle 


Cons

- Game length does feel padded by characters movement speed being sluggish and walking back and forth over and over doing stupid fetch quests talking to NPC's for no real reason.

- Is pretty shallow, no real depth, no reason to explore or care about anything, the magic system felt pointless and I barely used it, its just a dumb button masher, the 'learning new moves at the arena' feature doesn't really matter just felt like they had to add more shit to the game to make it seem less dumb, but its a facade

- Rough around the edges, not to mention the PC port is pretty crap and only supports 30fps, but i didnt care

-  Extremely repetivie, if you've played it for 4 hours youve basically seen the entire game, really. Even the last boss is just a recycled Troll that you've killed 20 times by now.

- Combat can be clunky and frustrating, no lockon

- Stealth system is wacky

- Tons of bullshit boring quicktime events


6/10

XIII

 

XIII is a game developed by a little know company known as Southend Interactive, who never really made anything else of note besides this game.
This is a standard level based first person shooter where you go from point A to point B to progress through the game. Usually it has some objectives here and there that you have to do such as the typical finding keys or destroying certain things. However (unfortunately) a large part of the game isn't spent doing shooting action, but rather slow tedious stealth crawling about, which i'll go into more detail later.

What sets this game apart from its contemporaries is its artstyle and graphics. The game is very old, from 2003, but unlike some other games from the era, it still holds up graphically, thanks to its unique comic book artstyle. I think this is the game where other games like Team Fortress 2 and Borderlands got its inspiration from. Take one look at the game and you can tell its doing something different. It has a 'cell-shaded' based approach where everything has a black outline like a comic book, it works quite well.

And its not just how it looks either, these comic book style art plays a big role in the gameplay too. For instance, when enemies are walking around, you can 'see' their footsteps, by a big comic text popping out of them saying "Tap, tap, tap' as they walk around this text shows up in 3D space to help locate them.
As well as when you get headshots or certain events happen, a comic panel will pop up on your screen highlighting the events. It's a nice touch, and makes it feel like you're inside of an actual comic book.

The gun models look pretty good and are well animated for the era, they feel pretty good to use and have a certain skill to utilizing them properly. The recoil and shooting reminds me a bit of Counter-Strike, where you have to shoot in small bursts to hit accurately, and guns have specific 'spray patterns'. I also think if you stand still and crouch, you're more accurate too,but I'm not sure.
There's the standard arsenal of weapons, pistols, m4, shotgun, etc.
They all have certain use cases and theres good variety of situations to use them.
The magnum pistol in particular is very effective in its accuracy and ease of getting headshots.

The level design takes you on a plethora of locations and adventures, many modern type offices and facilites, banks, military complexes, snowy outposts, deserts, hospitals, and a military silo base which reminds me of locations from Half-life or even Goldeneye.
Infact, a lot of the game shares similarities with Half-Life and Goldeneye. Many levels and objectives remind me of Goldeneye, the objective based gameplay, the Spy Espionage angle, the music especially, and one level in particular that is very similar to the Control level from goldeneye.
It has levels similar to Half-life with the underground sprawling complexes, as well.

Another thing thats unique to this game, for the time period, is the fact that theres no Quick Saves. It uses a modern style autosave system where you must progress to certain points and get checkpoints.
I actually like this approach, especially in a game this old, as I feel like quicksaving is far too easy to 'cheat' the game.
I like the stress and suspense of actually really having to try, or else I lose progerss and have to re-do the past 2 minutes.
Sometimes, it can be extremely annoying (Mostly the stealth sections) but overall the lack of a Quick-save actually helps the game.

Another thing thats quite entertaning about this game is that it has quite a few Boss fights. These are also sort of unique, in that they have health bars and usually a big arena to go around to try to duke it out. Pretty fun and a nice addition. Sometimes they are quite bullshit in their 'aimbot' hitscan shooting though.

Unfortunately, the major thing that drained my enjoyment of this game is that maybe half of the game (or more) is spent doing this awful stupid silly stealth missions where you crawl around picking up chairs and random objects and hitting guards in the back of the head and then dragging their bodies around to hide them.
You slowly crawl around, find guards, have to wait for their stupid scripted dialogue to end in order to actually put them into position where you can take them out or avoid then, then you do all the effort of sneaking around, and then some guard (or camera) spots you from a mile away, screams "Alert!!" and then you instantly fail 5 seconds later because I got spotted.

In the last half of the game, it seems like almost all of the game is these awful stealth missions.
When I said the lack of quicksaves was good, I generally mean it for the suspenseful shooting action
But in the context of these stealth missions, it becomes extremely grueling fast.
Because you have to constantly keep sitting around and waiting for the enemies to finish their lines of dialogue or wait for their scripted events to stop, over and over and over.
One mission in particular was insanely stupid the 'SSH' base level, where you crawl around and then have to avoid being spotted by cameras and guards, then you get to a point where you have to use a gadget to listen in on some important guy, but the objective and conditions are so vauge and unintuitive that I kept failing over and over without really knowing why.

At one point you start to get  four, five, six stealth missions in a row and its just like, what the fuck? this isn't what I came here for.
It wouldn't even be that bad if the stealth parts were more enjoyable, but they're not. It just feels like filler and I find myself just waiting for it to be over to go back to the shooting. Very disappointing in an otherwise pretty fun game.

So other than that, you have the story which is a sort of spy amnesia espionage where your  character is some secret agent that forgets his memory and you team up with some government officials to do whatever they say and figure out some mystery or something. Its fine for what it is, it works to support a decent narrative, but its nothing you'll remember in a week or two.
There's some pretty funny cutscenes and campy voiceacting too, which I enjoyed.
And its funny how the game ends on a cliffhanger twist, with a big "To be continued..." then credits. But the game sold so poorly, and no one really cared, that the plans for a sequel were cancelled. So thats the legacy of XIII.
There is a recent 'remake' of this game, but apparently its so awful that no one should bother touching it and is a complete mockery of the original, so thats that.

Overall the game would have been much more enjoyable without the plethora of shitty stealth sections, potentially an 8/10, but as it stands now I probably have to put it quite a bit lower..as I'm not sure if I would be that thrilled to replay this game in the future, knowing that a significant portion of it is gameplay that I just dont enjoy.

6/10