Serious Sam 3: Jewel of Nile (Expansion DLC)

 
Jewel of the Nile is apparently only a 2 hour long expansion pack and it was on sale for a dollar so might as well play it even though I didn't think SS3 was amazing or anything, but maybe the expansion pack has better levels?

It's only got 3 levels so I'll just break them down

The first level starts off on a bad first impression. It's this open square arena type thing with a building in the middle and a bunch of locked doors. You kill a wave of enemies and then....nothing. So we just walked around in circles for like 10-15 minutes trying to figure out wtf to do. Checking every nook and cranny. We eventually went over to the obscure side area in the map and found a stairwell to a basement that lead to a room with a big locked door. Ok so you have to find the key for sure. Another few mins of doing basically nothing and guess what, found a key inside yet another trailer storage container thing. Just why? Why do they design levels like this. What were they thinking? I dont think the cutscenes were working properly in co-op because my partner could see some fly over cutscenes showing him where some keys were ,but I never saw any so it was just a mess. Once we got the key we couldn't even figure out what to do with it and it turns out theres a generic little square altar area where you have to put the key, but it kinda just looks like a unimportant random bench. Really not off to a good start! Well after that stuff is out of the way the pacing got a bit better. atleast

The expansion adds a few new weapons and even brings back enemies from the original games. It brings back those big green guys with 4 arms that shoot green balls from the original game, they look awesome here. New guns added is the Sniper rifle just like from the original game, and the laser gun also from the original game . So its cool that its bringing back classic stuff. But other than that nothing really new.

But yeah I don't know that first level is not too impressive its just flat and yellow and nothing really happens besides walking around and checking every obscure corner for a key and then it spawns waves of enemies. It's all yellow just like the base game, atleast the place is surrounded by water which looks good but why couldn't they make the expansion levels just completely different than the base game? Like take place in Winter time or in the jungle or something you know? its just more of the same yellow shit.

Level 2 starts a lot better, its more of this linear kind of city level at first where it throws you through a gauntlet of all sorts of enemies positioned on rooftops and haryps. You go through city streets and in between ruined buildings and the gameplay is pretty fun for awhile, no bullshit or frills. It's decently challenging and it has a good mix between small enclosed street locations but also big open wide fields. Then the level sort of takes a turn for the worse by making you go inside these multiple different Tombs to complete various puzzles and trials to progress the level. These tombs are more of the same annoying stuff from the base game but atleast this time it adds something different by unique puzzles. One of the puzzle is like a jumping platform thing where you have to flip switches to move the plaforms int othe right places to jump on them, it was kind of fun to figure out during co-op play. Another puzzle is pretty easy, just this water thing where you have to flip the right switches to fill up the water to grab a item. The other puzzle is this giant maze of switches and black stone walls that you have to figure out how to move them around. I personally didn't even touch this because multiple people flipping switches here is just a confusing mess so I kinda just stood around and waited for my co-op partner to figure it out. Not very thrilling gameplay. I appreciate that they were trying to add somthing different than just shooting but meh I think I personally would just prefer constant balls to wall action and well paced well designed levels..


Then the last level is this big open area Dam type level where it throws every possible enemy at you in droves and you have to navigate around the level until coming across a Jetpack. This part is sort of a mess, the sky has a really low invisible wall where you can't fly very high that is inconsistent and changes sometimes, you kinda just fly all over the map trying to figure out where to go. You find this one place that seems really obvious that its where you go, a giant tunnel wall that you open, but it turns out its just an optional secret? That was weird. Well it turns out the actual place where you go is this tiny tucked away valve you have to interact with that opens up a pipe you can walk through. Mind boggling. Took us like 15 mins flying around before we found that. Just very meh level design and pacing, why can't these fucking guys design reasonable levels like they did in The First Encounter?  Well anyway you go through that pipe and it gets rid of  your jetpack and then you actually come across Green land for once, instead of all yellow! that was a nice change of visuals to see.  From there you have the classic 'last level formula' the Sam games always does, giant long linear 'bowling' strips where it throws hordes of enemies at you and its just a war of attrition. This part is fucking hard, you eventually go out into some big open area with old buildings and it spawns all sorts of helipcotors that just fuck you up unless you kill them ASAP as well as throwing hundreds of enemies at you. This part was super intense and me and my coop partner had to have our backs against the walls playing super carefully so we dont  waste all our lives and have to do it all over again, it was kinda fun but also went on forever.

And after all that you come across the last boss which once again is designed like shit, theres no ammo in the area other than boxes of C4. It's a giant version of the Mancubus thing from doom 3, its like they just blew the asset up 600% and edited it a bit. It looks cool but yeah. So you cant really hurt him unless you kinda walk right up to him with C4 and wait for it to show a placing C4 highlight, what the fuck? Who has time to experiment with that when you have limited lives on the line and can fail so easily and have to do the entire 1 hour+ map again? well guess what, of course we failed the fucking map cause the bosses are always designed like shit and it spawns billions of regular enemies and helicoptors that fuck you up if you dont kill the boss within 40 seconds. So we had to redo the whole map, except fuck it we just put it on easiest difficulty and speedran back to the last boss and killed him like a joke.

So yeah its only 3 levels and they're mostly bad or more of the same shit. I don't know why these guys cant really design good maps, the Sam games have everything going for them besides good level design..

6/10

Serious Sam 3 (second playthrough)

 

Croteam took a break from the Serious Sam franchise for almost 10 years after SS2. Finally in 2011 they released Serious Sam 3.  This is yet another tone shift away from 2, gone are the ulra comic book style and clown humor and now its instead more back to the franchise roots like the first games tone and vibe. Even Croteam said Serious Sam 2 wasn't canon and how the serious is supposed to be, so thats why we're back to 'normal' on SS3.

The game is called BFE  'Before First Encounter' because its a prequel of the first game.
The game starts off promising enough, the cutscenes here are more 'serious', as in like the other games of the time, they are kind of trying to do the more military shooter thing. You have cutscenes using military jargon like alpha bravo niner niner, LZ, extraction points, all the typical Call of Duty stuff. So it's like they were trying to fit in with that general trend at the time. Which fine, I don't fault them for it. It just seems like every interation of Serious Sam is trying to 'fit in' with the cool trend of the era, 1 was more Doom inspired, 2 was inspired by Halo in various ways, and 3 is now inspired by Call of Duty.

The dialogue here and cutscenes are pretty decent and down to earth, you have Sam being a more down to earth gruff badass character, more than ever before, hes got cool Sunglasses now , and isn't as over the top as in the second game. They fixed cutscenes in co-op so you get to experience them all without hassle, none of them are too long, Sam cracks some smirk-worthy jokes here and there, overall they're well done and don't detract from the game unlike the overabundance of them in SS2.

They have of course drastically updated the Serious Engine again. Serious Sam 2 used the Serious Engine 2, now, 10 years later, SS3 is using Serious Engine 3.5.  The technological advances are very obvious. First of all, the multiplayer component is much more polished. There are multiple different modes you can select for co-op exeprience, a Standard mode where it just forces you have 3 lives each, and every so many points you can get more lives. Unlike SS2, you don't get lives every 10k points, you get them in different stages. So for example one life at 50k, another 100k, another 500k, another 1mil etc. In this regard, its a much more challenging game than SS2 because you get less lives overall. If all lives are gone, you restart the map from scratch. We initially played on Hard difficulty, but once we realized how scarce the lives were, we bumped it back down to Normal which seemed just about perfect, still challenging and we couldnt get too lazy, but not brutally punishing. We never failed any map except the very last one, which I'll address later, but we were constantly on edge and cooperativng hard to ensure success.

Besides that standard mode, you also have 'Coin-op' which seems like some kind of system where you both share lives, and also have to beat the entire game in one session? Not too sure. Theres also another mode where you can fully customize all the co-op settings, like previous games. I like that theres a separate "Standard" mode which has every forcibly locked in and you cant modify it, so its like the intended developer experience. So polishing up the multiplayer components here is a big boon, also they totally fixed the net code and it runs really smoothly, unlike previous games.

So the game starts off much different than other Serious games. The game has a very obviously more gritty tone than others. You start off in some abandoned apratment complex, with no weapons. The first weapon you find - A sledgehammer. So the game has melee now. I'm not gonna shit talk too much about the melee here because you dont have to use it, but the camera bobbing when swinging this thing is intense and takes a bit to get use to. The melee hit detection isnt all that great and not very satisfying to use, but thankfully you soon get a pistol.

But you see a worrying sign here. Even in the first level, the level design is just confusing and hard to navigate. It's like a maze of concrete walls and buildings that look the same, and to even progress through the first level I had to walk in circles for 10 minutes before I found the pistol. At this point the game is playing more like Call of Duty than some intense horde shooting Sam game ,but soon enough you run over a hill and the classic Kamikazee enemies show up and it's usual buisness. It's weird they choose to start the game off in this way, so slow and hard to navigate. The first level is sort of a doozy, but hopefully, I thought, it was just a slow start?

 Sadly, the game kinda does start off slow just in the way it introduces weapons. Its like the first level you just have melee+pistol, the second level shows you the shotgun, but the shotgun only, the third level shows you the assault rifle, etc, and you just use it the whole time. But by this point, you're almost 2/3 hours into the game, in that same time in other Sam games, you had all sorts of weapons to switch around from, but in this game it introduces everything so slowly so it feels like the pacing is a bit of a slow burn.

The second level takes place inside this dark underground maze, and it starts to look like youre playing a psychological horror game or something, complete with jumpscares and all. But it loses its wow factor soon when yet again, you get into this annoying level design of running in circles in a maze not knowing where to go.

A lot of the level design is like this unfortunately, it repeats that underground dark maze thing a few times throughout the game. Other levels are more standard fare Serious Sam gameplay, long stretches of linear outdoor lanes, like bowling alleys, open arena type places where you need to find 4 keys randomly placed around to progress, stuff like that. Overall the level design is really hit and miss. The game is extremely 'brown n bloom' , like this might be the most Yellow looking Sam game yet. Everything is just a yellow hunk of dusk and samey looking buildings, but its not that bad usually.  When you know where to go, and the game has a steady momentum, its pretty damn fun.

When it has momentum going, its fun because the graphics and general engine, gameplay, controls etc are all very polished and in particular the game has a really satisfying gore system now, blood smears all over the place, your gun can get covered in blood, the enemies can get gibbed and blow apart chunks all over the place. The classic roster from the first games is back in full swing here, no more random dozens upon dozens of new enemies like SS2, you have all the classic enemies the Kleers, Kamikazee guys, One eyed mutants, Harpys, Scorpian things with chainguns etc, they're all here and consistently and strategically used. They look better than ever, the model quality here , animations and enemy designs are just top notch. The best in the series so far. The enemies here are really threatening and have very specific mechanics just like the first game, but nothing like SS2. The kleers in this game are no joke, they are super fast and if you accidentally let a few of them bunch up on you , it could be over in seconds. The headless Kamikazee guys were a slouch in SS2, cause they were so slow and lacked initmidation, but here they run super fast, explode in chains, and can fuck you up in a moments notice. The way the enemies look and play in this game is probably the best thing about it. Unfortunately I will note that at times their pathfinding can be total shit and they'll just stop following the player and instead run into a wall endlessly and just wait there until you come find them.  This sucks especially with the Kamikazee guys because you can turn a corner and find 10 of them just running into a wall with bad patfinding code and blow up in your face. Maybe it was some weird network problem , or maybe they just gimped the pathfinding. 

The guns are very modernized and updated too, you have more tactical shooter style guns, similar to other contemporaries. For example instead of a revolver, now you have a Desert Eagle that you can aim down sights, you have a pump action shotgun , and also the classic Double barrel , which seems to even use the same animatiom fron the original games. They work well enough, but still I keep thinking the double barrel leaves something to be desired. For example it cant even one shot most enemies point blank, so its like whats the fuckin point? not sure why they keep making the shotguns so weak in these games. What's kinda crazy is for the assault rifle you now get something that looks straight out of Call of Duty , its a M4 with a Holo sight and you can aim down the sights. Also, you can SPRINT in this game. Yeah. A Serious Sam game where you can Sprint, and Aim down sights. Crazy, isn't it? It actually kinda works believe it or not, but of course it mostly feels like they were just trying to modernize and keep up with contempoaries. The rocket launcher now is really satisfying to use, it has a great animation showing it loading the next rocket. and the physics of it travellingg through the air are really fun. It gibs enemies and turns them into ezxploding mist of gore and blood, great stuff. Theres a few new enemies here, most notably the weird flying witch thing that grabs you and floats you and freezes you into place, that one is really annoying because she keeps becoming invincibile and teleporting around, just generally tedious to fight. Theres a big minotaur guy, hes really cool and impressive visually with fun mechanics like throwing super fast fireballs at you that you have to dodge. Hellish looking creatures, and even one creature that looks and behaves exactly like the Mancubus from Doom which I found pretty funny and blatant ripoff, but fun to fight and scary to look at. Another new enemy is the monkey but these guys are just fucking annoying they keep hopping all over the place and barely fight you just a tedious enemy to deal with. Overall the enemies and weapons are great and some of the best they've ever been.

It's got another feature from modern games where you can run up to any enemy and press E to do an instant animation to kill them. Either by ripping off their head / heart etc. Its not always good to do this, cause you can still take damage. It's kinda weird seeing this feature in a Sam game, but I didnt mind too much. I kinda only did it a few times to see the various animations but overall its only a sidenote for the games gameplay.

The game has 12 levels and,
The first 8 levels or so of the game go by really fast, just a couple hours, and more or less it was a good time, some annoying places where you have to go around looking for 4 keys, and they seem to always be hidden inside some big storage contrainer, not somewhere that looks super important or obvious, so you can spend 10 mins walking around an empty map looking for them. Those levels were relativiely short, like 10-30 mins each. But the last few levels all of a sudden start having insane lengths of like 1 hour - 1 hour 30 each, and start to kinda feel like a slog to get through. Why do they always do this, and make the last few levels so much longer? By the time we had thought the game was almost over, it turned out there was another half dozen hours. More of the same stuff, bug yellow open enviornments, you know typical sam gameplay. Theres some boss fights which were mostly good, giant spaceship you have to shoot a certain place, pretty intense, the giant minotaur guy and the floating witch thing were once bosses but then turned into regular enemies.


It sounds like I'm mostly saying a lot of good things about the game, its just weird because the actual gameplay/engine/enemies/weapons etc are all awesome, its just let down by some super hit and miss level design. Some levels will be pretty fun, but then others will just drag on way too long or have really tedious annoying empty arens where you walk back and forth trying to find that one key or door you missed.

They redo these underground dark temple ideas a few times and they just suck. I love the idea that they were trying to do a more horror twist, but the level design down here is just annoying. Its a maze of shit that all looks the same and sometimes you have to find switches on the wall to progress but it just isnt obvious at all and is a total chore to get through. The last few levels in particular were really starting to drag the game down where once we thought the game was really good, now we're starting to think its just a chore and becoming tedious.

Then we got to the last level and it was kinda the final nail in the coffin for enjoyment. The last level is a hour and a half gigantic slog of huge linear corridors of every enemy possible where they give you boxes of infinite C4 then Rockets  etc and you have to just stand there and tediously blow up waves of enemies for dozens of minutes at a time. its not even hard or challenging it just takes fucking forever and is annoying. By the time you finally get to the last boss arena, guess what? You get instantly annihilated and wiped out in 60 seconds, lose all your lives, and have to do it all over again to even get chance to get back there and figure out WTF to do.

That's because the last boss is designed like shit and makes no sense. The last boss is this giant scorpian monster thingy and to kill it you need to FIND the jetpack, LEARN the jetpack mechanics, FIND these glowing poles, WAIT for boss to go do some animation fighting a worm, and then know to go up to the bosses back and put the poles in his back. What the fuck? It would make sense if they gave you the jetpack 10 mins before the boss, you know, to allow you to learn the mechanics and understand it - but no, they give you the jetpack AT the boss arena, in between spawns of hundreds of fucking enemies,  the jetpack can run out of energy so you have to learn to read the meter on the left of the screen all the while trying to figure out wtf to do without failing and having to waste another hour getting back to the spot. Total shit! Of course we had to look up how to do it online because FUCK getting back there and failing again. 

Side note: The game has Steam achievements, a first of the franchise, and it was fun to try to get some of them, theres even a main menu button for achievements to view them and theyre all quirky fun little things like kill 20 kleers with sledgehammer / kill 5 guys at same time with certain gun / quicktime kill certain enemies x amount of times etc.

So yeah terrible last level/boss, the game has some of the best weapons/enemy roster of the series but its let down by frequent hit and miss level design and some tedious objectives, as well as every level kinda looking the same yellow mess. It's like the first few levels suck and are off to a slow start, the middle levels are pretty fun, and then the last few levels suck and are just boring and too long. Wtf?

6/10

Serious Sam 2 (2nd playthrough)

I had beaten SS2 once before but I think i mindlessly and haphazardly played through it and wrote a half assed review, barely remembering anyhting

I decided to play through it again , this time in co-op, to continue on in playing the whole franchise from scratch

The way co-op works in this game is a bit different than the previous, you have an arcade like Lives system where, by default, you spawn each map with 3 lives and killing enemies /picking up items gives you points, and every 10k points you get a Extra life. If you run out of lives, youre dead and just stare at the ground, until your patner gets an extra life then you can respawn. If you and your partner lose all lives, restart map. Its a pretty cool system , not much complaints there, the co-op by default also has enemies having 50% more health/damage which is fair. We played on Hard difficulty and overall the challenge was just about where it should be.

This game has a serious tone departure from previous games in the series. It's even more extreme cartoony, juvanile, fantastical almost like Disney movie at times. If you look at some of the cutscenes/characters in this game you'd think you're watching a Shrek movie or something, it's that weird. It's not nessesairly a bad thing, its just really strange. What happened? It almost seems like the Publisher was pressuring them to make a certain kind of game, not that Croteam themselves wanted to make it like this. Theres all sorts of jabs and Halo references like the fact that you have a Cortana style assistant that pops up on your HUD and talks to you, and also theres vehicle sections that rip the vehicle ideas straight out of the Halo franchise. It's this weird mishmash of wanting to be really cartoony toned down childish vibe+Halo, it's just a fucking bizarre game. What were they smoking?

I'll get a few technical complaints out of the way:
The first big one is that cutscenes DO NOT work in co-op.
We got around it, though.
We literally pulled up a synctube/cytube website where you can watch videos in sync at the same time with eachother, and we put a link with all SS2 cutscenes, and as we progressed the levels we ALT+TABBED and found which cutscene we should be at, and watched it in the browser. Really stupid that we have to do that, but we weren't gonna miss the cutscenes.

Because theres over 1 hour 30 minutes of cutscenes in this game, unlike previous games they really went heavy on the 'story' and cutscenes.  At the beginning and end of every level is a cutscene, and there are some in the middle but more minor ones just showing the camera fly to a new location or something.

These new cutscenes and tone shift in the game is just insane. Its the most wacky shit imaginable. Space alien humanoids want Sam's help, the developers voicing a  woman in the highest pitched voice, cutscenes of tribal villages that is supposed to be a parody of African villages or something but its like little blue smurfs, the cutscenes are just bat shit insane i dont know how to explain it. They're sorta entertaining, but also sort of really fucking stupid. The humour can be hit at miss, but most of the time its actually laugh out loud funny how stupid it is. Sam talks a lot and makes a lot of dry jokes, and most of them work and provide a laugh, but there are some moments where its so stupid you dont even know what to make of it. The humour is very "lol so random"  or breaking the fourth wall, or just not giving a fuck. Overall, I dont mind the inclusion of this many cutscenes, but maybe there are just a bit too many.

The cutscenes arent the only thing thats completely overhauled - the entire tone, graphics, weapons, enemy roster is too. As I said before, the game has a very cartoony/disney/childlish look to it, which isn't awful but some of the models can make you be like what the fuck am I playing? Because there are now sometimes friendly AI that run around, give you items, fight with you etc. It's like they just wanted to copy features from other shooters at the time, again, like Halo, just to be able to advertise that they had these features; ex , vehicles, friendly AI, theres even a sort of plasma pistol thats completely useless that you start the game with, its almost like they put that in the game just to be able to screenshot it and compare it to the halo pistol.

The weapons and enemies...
The weapons all got a complete overhaul. Instead of the chaingun, now you have double uzis. Instead of pump action shotgun, its this stupid looking multi barrel thing. There are some new additions, like these plasma style guns but you barely get to use them, there is a homing-bird weapon thats like a rocket that homes in on the target and makes a goofy bird noise - pretty fun. But the worst thing about the weapons is how different they look. They dont look anything like the original game weapons, they look more like something out of Unreal Tournament (which was popular at the time). Theyre all big and bulky and futuristic looking. I don't like it too much, yeah theyre not awful to use, the double barrel shotgun in particular is way better than in the original game and looks alright, but overall the design of the guns leaves much to be desired.

The enemies are pretty much the main thing to talk about in this game.
That's because this game has the most enemy variety I think i've ever seen in a game. Seriously.
The first game had a decent selection of enemies, everyone had their place, everyone had their intended mechanic and way of dealing with them, there wasnt too many or too little.
In this game, almost every single level throws new enemey designs at you. Theres 42(!) levels. It's A LOT of 'unique' enemies. Unfortunately not all of them add much to the game, and many of them are downright stupid and annoying. It very much feels like everything in this game is going for quantity over quality. The 42 levels, the gigantic roster of enemies. It both has pro's and cons. The upside of having such a huge variety of enemies, is that theres always something new to see, the game doesn't feel too boring - the downside is that you lack that consistent, quality, addictive gameplay of having all the enemies mapped out and strategies to deal with them similar to Doom. In this game, its frequently just a clusterfuck. Another downside is visually. Rarely does the enemy variety even mesh together well aesthetically. You'll have a location in like some city street, and youll be fighting Clowns, Witches, Football goblins, Demons from hell, Kungfu people, Giant metal balls, Dinosaur robots, its like what the fuck? Whats the central theme here? Its just a massive clusterfuck. Maybe thats what they were going for (obviously) but its just stupid to look at, and even worse doesn't always play very good.

Ontop of that, they really increased the amount of airborn enemies in this game. In the first game, you really only had the Harpy angel thing to deal with in the air. Now in this game, its like 50% of enemies or more are flying around above your fuckin head, helicoptors, airplanes, jets, witches, all sorts of fucking wacky air creatures. That's not nessesarily a bad thing either, but sometimes it can just be super annoying and tedious waiting for some airplane to fly back and forth across the screen while you wittle it down slowly. It's also kind of annoying having to constantly look up and down up and down shoot the ground enemies shoot the air enemies over and over. Like I said, game frequently just feels like a clusterfuck of ideas without much consistent theme or idea.


There's all sorts of level variety, well there better be with 42 levels. You start off going through jungle and tribal villages, theres this thing where you have to collect 5 Medallions and each one is a different enviornment, kinda like episodes. So you have jungles, winter areas, aztec indoors pyramid areas like first game,  theres a couple levels in episode two where you go through a flat swamp which was pretty boring,  theres this really strange level in the middle of the game where its like youre shrunk going through a garden of giant insects and objects which is just bizarre and it plays goofy clown music the whole time, like what the fuck am I playin? what were they smoking??  later on you go to a Hell area which was pretty cool but has wonky platforming sections , then you go to a china section which was pretty meh , later on in the game you go to some crazy metropolis place with really high skyscrapers that looks really impressive, but the gameplay here is trash because the enemies spawn so slowly you just stand around at the end of gates waiting for them to open.

SO yes, theres a lot of level variety, and THANKFULLY unlike The Second Encounter it barely has any weird gimmicky/novelty trap/platforming sections. Yes, there are some, but theyre few and far between and nowhere near as aggregious as the previous game. You do have a few gimmicky rooms where you have to platform as the level changes around you, and trap stuff, but its not that bad at all.

What is bad is all the vehicle sections. I don't really mind the vehicle sections, its just that theres so many of them. If the game is 10 hours long, maybe 4 hours is spent in vehicles. Just why? I never played a Serious Sam game and thought "you know what, this would be better with vehicle sections".  And I think this is the only game in the franchise that uses them too, so its just weird. Again, its like they were just trying to compete with games like Halo and Unreal Tournament at the time. It's fun the first few times you do it, but after the 20th forced vehicle section that drags and drags and drags on you're like why the fuck am I doing this again.

Theres a few boss fights, and usually it works like they keep regenerating health until you find the object in the enviornment to destroy to prevent it. Not too bad, nothing amazing. Theres one boss in particular that just sucks balls, its this flying dragon and you get jump boots and have to jump around the enviornment looking for rockets for a turret to kill the dragon and it just takes forever to kill him. Another boss is like a giant mech robot thing that it turns out you shouldnt try shooting because he just breaks away and runs to a certain spot, and you have to run to a helicoptor vehicle to beat him. That one was bad, because it took awhile to figure out youre not even supposed to shoot him.

The game does have some really impressive graphics, even for 2005, some levels in the mid part of the game are gigantic outdoors areas with awesome draw distances and stuff. Atleast the game is really colorful, too. 

The music is mostly just annoying and stupid, its a lot of wacky clown carnival music. Yeah maybe its funny and suitable for 15 minutes, but hearing the same wacky clown music for hours on end is just fucking grating.

I'll wrap up the review by saying it's not a terrible game, but its got some big flaws. The biggest one is that while the levels are thankfully really short, which helps the pacing, some of them just do drag on and on with bad spawn placements and sections that last too long where you just wait for them to spawn. Also, it's like half of the levels are just meh, and half of them are pretty good. Out of 42 levels I'd say only 20 are actually something id be like "Oh yeah, that level was good"
A lot of the levels have too many vehicle sections, that drag on for a long time.  The enemies while really varied, have the downside of making the game less consistent in quality. The levels while tons of then, have the downside that a lot of them are just meh or bad / boring. The artstyle and cutscenes, while sometimes hilarious, and colorful to look at,  do eventually make the game really unappealing and like "what the fuck am I playing?" makes you feel childish to even play it. Atleast it doesnt have as many stupid novelty puzzles like TSE. It's almost like for every positive thing I can say about the game, I can say something equally as negative.

6/10

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter

 

 since I really enjoyed The First Encounter, and everyone says The Second Encounter is greater, surely I will just be praising this game as having everything you could want from a Sam sequel, right?

Refer to my previous First Encounter review for the basic overview of the general gameplay mechanics because this is essentially the same game just new maps.

The networking and co-op options have been changed/had additions.
One massive techincal complaint and annoyance is that, they said they "improved the networking" here, but when playing coop with my buddy, everytime we quickload, it takes him 30 seconds to load the connection again. In the first game, it only took like 5 seconds. They butchered that aspect. But its just a technical complaint, no huge influence in the review.

But something that does influence the confusion and my real enjoyment is, by default there is a co-op option called "extra enemies"  and I figured since its on by default I'll just keep it. What this does is it tosses in a bunch of random, high tier enemies on seemingly every map. Like imagine if in Doom 1 , on level 1, it started spawning Baron's of Hell. It just ruins the balance of the game, pacing, and difficulty. On level 2 the game was so fucking hard we just kept dying over and over and over and couldnt figure out why. Turns out it was this option. Turning it to 'extra enemies off' made it seem more as its supposed to. Its just weird that its on by default, and can really ruin a good first impression

Well the first level is pretty good, it shows a difference in enviornments now you have lush green forests. It introduces a new weapon, The Chainsaw, which I didnt use much actually. It also introduces another weapon, the Sniper Rifle which is a good addition to the arsenal you can zoom and and its pinpoint accurate. Lastly, I think in the first level it also introduces the Flame thrower which can be useful mostly in the fact that its another reserve of ammo so you can use it on things like waves of Kleers when you dont wanna waste ammo for chaingun.

As I progressed  to level 2, 3, 4 etc I started to see a few disappointing  patterns:

First of all the difficulty is way higher than the first game, while granted that this is to be expected, the problem is that the difficulty settings suck. Normal is too hard, but the next difficulty down 'Easy' is WAY too easy, you can easily get 200+ health/armor, you get double ammo, barely any enemies spawn etc. We kept jumping back and forth between Normal and Easy to try to enjoy the game, but after hours of frustration and annoyance we just stayed on Easy to get through the game faster.

There is a very obvious philosophy change from the first game and second.
In The First Encounter, its more like doom gameplay where its no frills just get through the level, maybe sometimes pickup a key here and there but thats it. You had those few arenas where its 'survival' waves but they werent most of the game, you had typical doom level design

But in The Second Encounter the general design philosophy seems like isn't first and foremost to make really good level design, but instead to show off as many engine gimmicks and novelty features as possible. They were trying to license out the engine back in this time, so it's like they were trying to make a greatest hits compilation of every possible engine quirk to potential buyers. Unfortunately, its fucking awful. It has way too many traps and platforming. It's like they tried to break the game up to add more than just shooting, which I don't nessesarily have a problem with, but the way they went about it is just so bad. I dont think the other serious sam games has as much gimmicky engine showoff rooms like tse does . it feels like a tech demo instead of actual fun level design.


90% of our deaths were just some bullshit one shot death trap, like you turn the corner and the floor suddenly becomes slippery ice rink and youre sliding through a hallway full of one shot death traps. Or you have to do some Mario 64 bullshit jumping platforming section where you constantly fall to your death. Stupid level gimmicks like ice skating floors and rotating rooms and swirly walls just random engine tricks. You have all sorts of dumb novelty rooms like

-Bouncing room , where every wall makes you and all the enemies bounce like crazy and it goes on for 20 minutes

- Entire room swirls like crazy and rotates and you have to throw the mouse all over the place fighting enemies, very nausea inducing made me wanna vomit

- Areas where mouse and controls go all crazy and you run into death traps if you dont figure out to stare at a certain place on the map

- Jumping platform rooms where all the enemies fly all over the place like crazy
etc etc

It all just feels like a bad tech demo "lol loook what our engine can do look at all the quirky wacky shit you can do like bounce off the walls!"    instead of having actual good level design. why am i playing indiana jones avoid the traps and mario 64 platforming. TSE is just a bunch of traps and platforming and 'best of' compilation of random engine tricks and gimmicks though like bouncy walls rooms. 'stare at the right part or mouse goes crazy' rooms,   swirly nausea rooms etc
whereas the first one is just more like doom without any gimmicks.


To make matters worse, when youre not doing these dumb gimmicky rooms, the actual levels suck too. All the levels are just some flat location with a 'hub area' then its  a locked door and you have to run around copy pasted buildings looking for 3 keys. Almost every single level. First game actually had good straightforward interesting locations and levels, this one is like the same general idea over and over: Enter level, youre in some hub area with a locked door, you have to take the side rooms, you have to run around giant copy pasted area looking for keys, you find the keys, you unlock the door, then it throws a bunch of dumb engine gimmick rooms at you, platforming sections, and surprise instant death traps at you.  Repeat. . First game has no 'side quests' where you gotta walk around backtracking like a jackass looking for keys, it has a few sections where you need to find keys but its not the main design philosophy.

Oh yeah and the level pacing is ruined in TSE, too.
In the first game, it has bite sized good pacing level lengths of 10-30 mins long, a few longer ones towards the end.
In the second game all the levels are 40 mins-1 hour+ long
Its not segmented out in a way that makes sense each individual level is way too long
they fuckin ruined it.
The shorter length levels made the pacing feel good and doable.

It's unfortunate but thats all I can really say about TSE, its got way too long levels that feel grueling to get through, theyre full of stupid keyhunts in really generic copy past building gigantic landscapes that feel like a chore to navigate through cause you keep walking in circles wasting your time,  then the other half of the game is just a bunch of one hit death traps or stupid novelty rooms, or repeat ideas from the first game like giant long linear level for 'bowling' aka using the cannon to kill enemies that run at you.

There's a few enjoyable levels like that one short spooky graveyad one, the winter level is alright too because it doesnt its more typical and has good graphics, the first level is pretty good, but thats about it. Almost every else is annoying. Yeah it does have some impressive parts, some great graphical archetecture on some locations, that one medevial level with the giant long staircase with enemies coming at you was a cool idea, but the bulk of the levels are just bad. The last level is also pretty terrible and long, its just a long linear strip where enemies run at you, redoing the bowling gimmick idea, then you go into a room with a bunch of jumping platforms where the enemies bounce all over the fuckin place, then you go into a gigantic flat arena with a church where you survive for like 20 minutes, then you get a really easy boss fight and the games over.

It's just so strange to me becasue everywhere you look online and everyone you ask, they all say this game is better than TFE, none of them apparently have any of the complaints I do, I'm like the only person on the planet that thinks TFE is better than TSE. Very strange indeed

5/10

Serious Sam: The First Encounter

 


The Serious Sam franchise has a long history sprawling all the way back to 2001 with The First Encounter

Hot off the heels of Doom, Quake, Half Life,and Duke Nukem with the Build engine we had this little team from Croatia develop their own in-house engine and arena style first person mascot shooter called Serious Sam.

The game is chaulk full of features that even today put other games to shame. Its clear they were passionate about technology and programming because the list is almost endless of all the neat little unique features that are in this game.

For starters its fully co-op and fully customizable.
In other retro shooter games like Doom, Quake, Duke 3d, etc, which DID support co-op out of the box, but in those games the co-op is a gimped and lame experience where you can just constantly respawn and it loses any challenge. However, in Serious Sam you can fully cuztomize the co-op experience to do things like set the amount of Respawns, or even completely disable respawns and rely on manual Saves / quicksaves JUST LIKE single player! Thats an insane feature ive never even seen in any other fps. Who knew you could have a co-op experience play just like single player, quick saves and all? This adds a unique and funny 'mechanic' where you and your partner have to cooperate together to try to determine when the best quicksave point is to reload from.

I played the whole campaign in co-op, with Respawns disabled, relying on Quick-saves just like single player. We first played on difficulty 4/5 to try to compensate for the fact that its coop so we didnt want it to be way easier, but no, a few levels in and yeah its a really challenging game so we put it back to 3/5 and it felt more appropriate.

More features I can mention,
-the graphics settings, customization, options are endless,
-theres a button you can press to pull up a PDF to view every gun/monster/level description etc in the game.
-If you hover over your ally, the hud flashes, showing you his status/equipment.
- You can press H to put the game into a fully functioning, useful third person view
- The game tracks your score indiviudally and also shows a combined score
- Fully customizable co-op , with options to have it so you and your co-op partner each have their own item spawns

I could go on and on about all the different weird quirks and oddities in this engine. This was an era back when 3D gaming wasnt quite figured out, so almost every game was completely different than the next, with its own different standards and conventions. Its not like nowadays where hundreds of games uses the same Unreal engine with the same controls and graphics or whatever. This game is a very big sign of the times, and I think its great and shows something that we kind of missed when we more 'standardized' 3d gaming.

The graphics are also surprisingly very impressive for a 21+ year old game. The textures are surprisingly high res, the models look great especially on the enemies, all the guns are satisfying to use and look and sound great, there is some really nice lighting/specular effects and the game is really colorful and has all sorts of nice exciting effects and pickups. The pickups especially are satisfying to pickup, they glow vividly and make nice sounds, theyre abundant and make it feel fun to collect. The graphics and sense of scale the game has is still unsurpassed by many games, as well as the sheer amount of enemies on screen and the chaos of it all. It definitely still holds up, at times it doesn't even feel like a 21 year old game. I would go as far to say I prefer the graphics in this game to many modern looking FPS games.

Where doom was about this horror, tight packed corridors and clausterphobic hellish enviornments, and Quake was about medevial castles and strange otherworldy areas, Half life about exploring a gigantic underground complex etc, Serious Sam goes the complete other direction - it takes GIGANIC almost 'open world' enviornments that seem to never end, and has incredible draw distances that even today are impressive.

A lot of the visuals and vistas in this game are still amazing. It has you feeling like an ant inside this gigantic playbox for you to mess around in. It has a common theme of making the player feel tiny and insignificant, and then juxtaposing that with all these gigantic visuals and endless swarms of enemies running towards you in the distance. Complete with all the classic sounds such as the headless guy exploding screaming "AAAAA" letting you know exactly where he is, making for a really fun and threatening enemy to have in your presence.

Though, its not to say the game is just an endles stream of entering some giant empty area, and then survivn swarms of enemy. No, while there is some of that, atleast in the first half of the game you have actual developing, progressing level design that where you explore through various temples and outdoor locations, coming across all sorts of scripted events, 'jumpscares', and it slowly and cleverly introduces all of the weapons and enemies to you, one by one.

The first half of the game has a more constant fast paced,discover feel. Where you dont really just stand in one room for 10 minutes, while there is some of that, its more like constantly making your way through the the level more like a Doom or something like that. The 'objectives' are fairly mild, its mostly just finding the right door to progress, or having to pickup a few different key items, or having to press a switch on the wall. Admittedly, there are a few bullshit moments like in the Sewer level where you press Use on a door, and nothing happens, but you really have to swim in some super deep pit and find this tiny button to open the door. I later learned that when it says 'Analyzing' you can open the PDA to view hints, but the fact that I never realized that is kind of a testament to how sort of janky and unstandard all these mechanics are. It takes awhile to get used to, but the mechanics are all unique. But for the most part, atleast in the first half of the game, the level design is great and you keep coming across all sorts of new varieties in sights and sounds, slowly being surprised by all the new guns and enemies it introduces. I found it pretty brilliant and a key example of how to introduce FPS enemies/weapons.

The second half of the game has more of what the series is known for. By that I mean you go into these big, empty open areas, and wave after wave of enemy spawns at you and you just have to survive for sometimes like 5-15 minutes. I don't really hate it, but there are times where it feels like the lesser of the levels. For instance, in the later half of the game theres two levels back to back where you go into this flat village with a generic square copy pasted buildings over and over and thats basically the whole level you just have to go around and find some keys while endless waves of enemies spawn. And the last few levels in particular are kind of just like enter room, survive for 15 minutes, enter next room, survive for 15 mins. Its not bad, but its a noticable departure from the first half of the games constant doom-like level deisgn. I dont nessesarily prefer one or the other, but yeah there were times when the survival waves dragged on a bit.

The pacing, or atleast how the levels are split up can be a little strange at times. For example, most of the levels are 10-20 minutes long, but one level in particular in the seocnd half of the game is so big it almost takes like 2 hours long. Kinda weird and exausting, it would of been better if that level was split up more into bite sized sections.

There's a great marriage between all the enemy types and the weapon types. There is both a huge variety of weapons and enemies.
The weapons you have stuff like dual pistols, tommy gun, chaingun, rocket launcher, plasma gun, cannon gun, shotgun, double barrel etc.

What's really cool about the guns is that even when you get a 'upgrade' like the Double barrel from the regulr shotgun, or the Chaingun from the tommy gun - the first gun isn't irrelevant. You can still carry all guns, and there are many situations where instead of using Double barrel youll want to use regular, because its faster and has more range. Or times when youd rather use Tommy gun, than chaingun, because the chaingun has a slower spinup time, and the tommy gun conserves more ammo.

And this is a game where depending on what type of enemy youre fighting, youll be constantly swapping between guns. So its not this like mindless romp of just using the same gun and holding down fire for the whole game - No, youll need to constantly memorize all the different numbers 12345678 of different guns, and constantly swapping between them according to the situation. Like oh, theres waves of the fast skeleton monsters? Switch to fast laser gun - Oh shit, theres a bunch of the charging bulls? Switch to the cannonball gun and take them out like bowling balls - Oh shit, theres waves of the screaming headless guys? Quick takeout the chaingun and kill them fast - Oh theres a lot of enemies in one cluster? Quick use the rocket launcher. Youll be doing this CONSTANTLY every 5-15 seconds its a constant juggle of switching guns according to enemies and thats what makes the gunplay so satisfying and thrilling, they really nailed the symmetry between weapons and enemy types here, its like a perfect evolution of the Doom monster concept.

Speaking of enemy types, theres a lot. And they're all vastly different, not just simple reskins. They all look crazy and memorable , from the regular grunt deformed gunner humanoid guys, the headless suicide bombers screaming at you, the fast running skeleton monsters, the charging bulls that satisfyingly roll over when killed - to the more gigantic monsters such as these weird dinosaur things with chainguns, these weird alien monsters with Hitscanning bullet shooting guns that can shred you apart, and even more gigantic monsters like some guys that look just like Diablo himself from diablo 2. Its pretty awesome and its like as the game progresses, they just keep throwing new enemies at you.

The difficulty is perfect too, like i said I was playing co-op, but using quicksaves and no respawns just like single player. So anytime either of us died, we'd quicksave just like solo. And the game can make you feel safe one moment with 100 health/armor, but if you put your guard down you can get melted fast. So its a super intense action eyes-peeled game and it works perfect for co-op  especially with the quicksave aspect. You can even see your friends health/armor so if you find pickups youre constantly shouting to your friend to come get the pickups and to cover me etc, its really fun.

There are times when the game is almost too challenging, where we died over and over, but it never got frustrating or really stupid, it just seemed like the mark of a good game and a case of us needing to become more skilled as players.

Now the games not perfect, it is pretty damn buggy and janky granted it being a 20+ year old game. The co-op isnt perfect, sometimes you get some glitches which kinda hinder progress but nothing game breaking, sometimes you get disconnects, but the complaints are mostly just techincal problems, nothing nitpicking at the core game, except maybe the default controls being slightly insane like Alt to reload,  and Mouse2 opening PDA but also apparently also being 'Use' which I never figured out until halfway through the game and had to manually bind a 'Use' key myself. There were times when I thought the game was 9/10 or even approaching 10/10 but nah, the second half of the game kinda has worse level deisgn and too many arena wave sections, some hit and miss level design, overall kinda buggyness, and some other small nitpicks like the can game kinda be fatiguing after a few hours because of how intense it is.

There's not much to speak of about story, its just youre a typical early 90s/2000s macho badass to save the world, Like Duke Nukem, sam has light hearted humour and occasionally says One liners, but its nothing as iconic as Duke. There is really nothing to say of story, theres no cutscenes, or very few of them. 

It also has a pretty great soundtrack, especially the first few levels some of those ambient tracks are great. It's got a lot of variation in the music which really helps the 'atmosphere' at times.

The last boss is particularly insane because at one point you look behind you, and there is a gigantic monster taking up your whole screen you really do feel like an ant in comparison, then you have this huge battle fighting him and waves of enemies, running for pickups. But he wont ever die until you actually run to the other side of the arena and go into a temple, where you fight him inside his like UFO base.  Then you have to jump around these pads through some hoops to start a laser blast sequence, and place him inside the laser to win the game. There's a goofy comical ending cutscene skit where sam is using a Payphone from the alien ship making dumb jokes, and the games over. the humour is pretty stupid, but its never cringe, its enderaing. But yeah its a damn good game, and probably better than those 'HD Remakes' . I played them and beat the HD ones, but this original version just has a lot more charm to it.

8/10

Strange Brigade

 

Strange Brigade is yet another co-op game by Rebellion. The makers of Sniper Elite, Zombie army etc. They keep making all these co-op games, thats not a complaint atleast its more stuff to play

Strange Brigade is a lot of the same forumula of their other games, except this time the twist is that youre playing as like some team of archeologists doing Indiana Jones type expeditions to find treasure or some shit. Right off the bat I gotta say the story and writing and dialogue is just awful, the Narrator in particular constantly is yapping in your ear some really corny stupid "So whimsical! XD"  nonsense in your ear. Luckily theres an option to mostly turn off the narrator dialogue but I suffered through the first couple levels with it on and damn it really takes the immersion out of the game cause hes so stupid.

The game has 12 levels where you and your buddy play through this campaign , the beginning of every level starts almost the exact same. A cutscene of your team sitting inside a Blimp, talking about some bullshit that i couldnt care about, then parachuting in.

The levels are mostly about going through a linear path, walking into a arena, then having to survive for up to 5 minutes as waves of enemies spawn, then you have to go do a puzzle which there is only a few that get copy pasted/repeated over and over. That's the general cycle of the game.

But atleast the combat is fun right?
Well, not really.
You see, this is basically just a reskin of other Rebellion games like Zombie Army. Instead this time, instead of killing zombies, you're basically killing Mummies and other kinds of egyptian melee creatures.

The combat is underwhelming because most of the time, you just stand there spamming bullets without even having to move. Because all the enemies for the most part walk extremely slowly towards you and not much else happens. Sometimes it will throw different kinds of enemies at you, but they dont really function that different. You have skeletons, scorpians, skeletons with armor, and Minotaurs. Theres all sorts of different variations, but they dont feel much different and most of them still walk extremely slowly. Most of them are melee only, but there are times where they spit at you or throw melee objects at you but its nothing to exciting.

So unfortunately the combat is mostly pretty boring actually. It's too slow paced , and the AI doesn't really do anything too exciting. They all happen to be bullet sponges too so you kinda just stand around and shoot in circles for 5 minutes.

There are other mechanics like every so often you can press E to use your amulet which kills a wave of enemies, but other than that its the typical third person controls.

But unfortunately the controls suck, for example, by default Shift throws a grenade. Really stupid. Also, you cant sprint manually, you just sprint automatically after holding W for long enough. You also cant shoot without aiming down your gun, the controls just dont feel great. It has Spacebar to roll and dodge like Dark Souls or something, and I even think it gives invinciiblity frames, so you spend a lot of time just spamming Roll constantly but it just feels cheap and stupid.

Graphically the game is hit or miss too. The game is very much Brown n Bloom where most of the enviornments is just dull overly saturated, overly constrated Yellow landscapes. The color grading/brightness in the game just seems messed up cause it looks washed out and over exposed. Even without it, the graphics don't look all that impressive. Like they're not bad, but something is off. The general tone and artstyle as well is pretty lame , especially with the narrator and the whole game tries to take a comicbook goofy undertone but I just found it offputting.

The game has a really half assed weapon upgrade system and weapon unlocks
So as you kill enemies and go around the levels, you collect gold, you use gold to buy new guns after each mission. But the thing is, since this is basically a reskin of Sniper Elite/Zombie Army, why would you want to use Rifles? I dont want it to play exactly like those games, so of course I want to use different guns like machine guns and stuff. Well the proble mis theres barely any selection of guns. The game has like 5 machine guns, if that, a few shotguns, and a few rifles. And to make matters worse, they cost insane amounts of gold that you can really only unlock 2/3 of them per ENTIRE playthrough. Thats right, I was only able to unlock like two guns for the entire playthrough.

Ontop of it, the guns feel shitty. Like the machine guns shoot extremely slowly it just feels off. Now, you can 'upgrade' weapons, and to do so, you need 'Gems'. The problem is, gems apparently only spawn randomly in chests, mostly after doing optimal puzzles. Now, the issue is, more than halfway through the game and We didnt find a single one of these fucking gems, so just bad RNG or what? The general item system is terrible and not rewarding. Towards the end of the game we finally found a few gems and got a few upgrades, but it didnt even feel that differnet or worth it. Very meh.

So like I said previosuly the game has really annoying pacing issues. What I mean is its never just like GOGOGO its like Go, stop, go, stop, go , stop. By stop I mean, you finish killing enemies, then you have to mindlessly look around the enviornment for 10 mins looking for some stupid blue orb to shoot, or do some bad puzzle. The game has serious trouble keeping momentum, to where it starts to be annoying and feel like  a chore. Sure, some of the puzzles are kinda entertaining, like connecting the pipes or shooting the correct order, but they get copy pasted so much or they're so tedious that it just ruins the pacing.
And ontop of it, when you do get combat, its also kinda mindless where the enemies are so slow and so abundant, you kinda just stand still spamming bullets for 10 mins without any real threat.

The game has a few boss fights, but its kinda just the same big Minotaur guy over and over where you just shoot a few blue parts on him, then hold Mouse1 until hes dead. Its a welcome change of pace, but not incredible or anything.

Towards the end of the game the difficulty starts to ramp up, naturaly, but what that means is basically you just get gigantic swarms of enemies like hundreds at once where you just enter these Survival arenas for 10 minutes at a time as it throws all sorts of minotaurs and stuff at you. Yeah its kinda more entertaining and challenging, but still it just drags on and gets tedious. By the end of the game I was just begging for it to be over, getting upset when I realized there was a few more missions. Not a good sign

The game isnt overall terrible, its a co-op game you can play with a buddy, its a shooter game, its got decent graphics, but the overall corny forced whimsical tone, the annoying dialogue and generic characters, the incredibly meh boring combat, the bad weapon system, the bad boring AI and objectives just make it not a great game by any means. Probably one of the worst games in the Rebellion co-op series, id much rather play Zombie army or Sniper elite series. This one feels like a lazy reskin

5/10

Scourge: Outbreak

 

Scourge: Outbreak is a little known game from 2014. But really its from 2010, because it originally came out as 'The Scourge Project' which was planned to have episodic releases, but after the first two episodes it got such bad reception that they stopped, and then in 2014 repackaged it as Scourge: Outbreak with the last two episodes.
So theres four acts in total now.

The expectations going in were very low. I expected a terrible, low quality, low budget 4/10 game. It's a complete clone of Gears of War, its got all the same control scheme, snap to cover, blind firing, the whole nine yards. Its got a few differences from Gears that make it stand out though. For instance, it does have a psuedo underlying RPG stat system, where everytime you get a kill you get a satisfying text pop on screen above the enemy like +25 ranged kill XP etc, then when you kill enough you 'rank up' your weapon category/co-op category and various other things and unlock perks. Admittedly, all this stuff kinda just happens under the hood  without you ever really noticing or having any agency over it, you kinda just automatically 'rank up' and get new perks or do more damage or have more health I guess, its not involved at all and you barely notice but it is kinda satisfying getting experience per kill and seeing the rank ups.

It also has a sort of class based Ability thing going on. Where you get to choose from a few different characters, each with their own ability. But frankly these never mattered at all to me or my co-op partner. We never even ever really figured out what the hell our abilities are, and mostly found them completely pointless. In a way, I kinda like that. I just wanted a third person shooter, not something that demands you use all sorts of magical gimmicks. Atleast its in the game if you want to fuck with it, but if not, it doesnt matter much at all.

So the game is just a low budget Gears clone, but you know what, its actually really damn fun! No seriously, I am surprised too. I was fully expecting to hate this game, but the more I played the less bad things I had to say about it.

It's a fully co-op campaign, you and your buddy can just jump in with seamless matchmaking, easy to use and join eachother. You know how in Call of Duty it will say 'Checkpoint' every so often? Well in this game, every single time you get a 'Checkpoint' it actually logs it as a 'level' on the main menu. So if you ever quit to menu or get disconnected, you can join eachother again right at the most recent checkpoint. It's pretty good and it doesn't really waste your time much at all. Although, the game can be buggy and be really rough around the edges. Such as one time where the objective just broken and we couldnt progress. And sometimes seemingly if you 'reload previous checkpoint' it will actually randomly progress you to the next checkpoint!? very bizarre, but it only happened like once or twice.

The actual core gameplay is just fun and satisfying. The enemy AI in particular is actually really impressive. They're super aggressive and tactical, will frequently try to flank you, constantly throw nades at you to get you out of cover, and sometimes just run straight up to your face with a fucking shotgun and try to screw you over. It's fun. The AI reminds me of FEAR or something at times. We played on the Medium difficulty and it felt perfect. The game isnt a pushover at all, it keeps you on your toes, you can die super fast if you arent careful, and its got the typical co-op help your friend up revive system so theres a lot of moments where youll be yelling for your friend for help admist the chaos. There's all sorts of enemy variation, generic soldiers, then you start fighting these mutants and aliens, then later on theres a bunch of variations of the soldiers with different colors and levels of health etc. It's constantly throwing new stuff at you and changing up the pacing. Having to defeat helicopters with grenades, and boss fights all sorts of stuff

When you play co-op with a buddy, you have two AI teammates as well. So its technically a 4 player coop game. The friendly AI is decent, but sometimes can be a real pain in the ass not catching up properly or just hanging behind randomly. Luckily, theres 'auto regroup' when you get to the next progress section, which I appreciated.

The game runs on Unreal Engine 3, which was so very common around 2007-2015 I think. but it works well here, it makes some of the lighting and shaders be particularly impressive at times. I actually found some of the environments and locations in this game to have really impressive lighting and effects even compared to some modern games. One thing I thought was really cool in particular was the Glass graphics and effects, how you can shoot each individual tiny piece of glass from windows. Things like that arent even common in modern games for some reason.

So the game is a high octane adrenaline, almost tactical co-op third person cover shooter like Gears of War.

The way the weapons work kind of remind me like Halo or something. You just have weapon pickups around the map, with ammo caches scattered around as your main way to restock your ammo. Each weapon has its own unique identity and memorable name, like Firefly (full auto assault rifle) Reaper (3 round burst rifle),  Manticore (rocket launcher)  Barracuda (shotgun)  and so on.

But the way the weapons and ammo pickups work is that the developer intentionally places ammo and weapons around in places that they want you to use them. Like for example some sections youll be indoors, up against mutants, and it will suddenly start giving you a lot of Shotguns and shotgun ammo, but not so much assault rifle ammo, showing to you they intend you to use the shotgun on this section. Other sections wont spawn as many shotguns, but will have lots of 3 round burst assault rifles etc. And the cool thing is, you can find your favorite 2 weapons and keep them even between checkpoints. You can carry the same gun for the whole game if you want, I think.

The weapons also have a sort of attachment system, but only if you find them that way. So you can see weapons on the ground that say things like Reaper (ACC) , or Reaper (DMG)  meaning this particular gun has more accuracy or damage, they have dot sights and lasers and stuff attached to them. It's not a huge detail, but its a minor thing that makes you keep wanting to check out any possible guns laying around, so it prevents weapons from being overly boring you always want to find a 'upgrade'.

There's satisfying hitmarkers when you shoot enemies which really helps the combat feedback.

I like how minimal all the mechanics in the game are, you dont have to spend pointless amount of time fucking around in menu's or leveling up stats or playing around with attachments, you just pick up shit and go. Or shoot shit and level up. It's all pretty satisfying.

The graphics and animations in particular are obviously gonna be rough around the edges. It's clearly a low budget game, but low budget doesnt mean low effort. I think they tried their best with what they had, and put some care into the game. But things like the sprint animation in particular, some of the faces and face models, can just look super janky and laughably bad. It kinda adds to the charm for me, though.

The story is pretty much as generic as it gets, basically something like alien species taking over humanity through some disease or genetic mutation blah blah. It does its job, it also has really  campy voice acting and cutscenes that arent even bad or cringy, its just you know what youre in for and you laugh at it along the way. Some of the voice acting in particular can just be downright hilarious with how ridiculous they sound, especially the main Stonewall character putting on a super tryhard gruff voice. Some of the cutscenes actually look cool though, especially the horror inspired ones.

Level variety is varied enough, you got indoors metallic places then you go from outdoors green fields, Snow mountains, inside these crazy alien lairs that look like something out of Aliens. Its got a lot of deathmatch Arena style places where you have to fight which kinda makes it feel like a Gears of war multiplayer match at times, its kinda cool.

If I had to give my main complaints its that
-I woulda preferred if the weapons were more realistic than all sort of plasma based laser gun things, mostly.

-The enemy health can just be really weird at times. Like sometimes they'll be easy to kill, and other times they'll be insanely bullet sponge and take 4 magazines to take down. Towards the end of the game the enemies start to get extremely bullet sponge, its not too awful cause I appreciate the challenge, but it just is kinda weird how extreme it gets.

-There's a few boss fights, they're mostly pretty acceptable and a good change of pace, but some of them can be really lame or just kinda glitchy and the boss stands around doing not all that much (like the giant monster thing, although he has a cool looking model, ive seen much worse stupid looking bosses in triple A hundreds million dollar budget games)

-Allied AI can be kinda stupid at times

- Some of the objectives can be kinda confusing what it wants you to do such as the times when you need to kill enemies and pickup their DNA to progress cause sometimes you think its just bugged when it isnt

-HUD could be better, its kinda hard to spot where your co-op partner is at times

- Sometimes like the mutant sections you can still get hitmarkers even on corpses which makes it confusing

Thats kinda it for the major complaints though

When this game came out it everyone hated it, majorly negative reviews, no one showed it any appreciation. I think it must of been like Gears was still all the craze back then, and people were still playing Multiplayer Gears, so they figured why the hell would they play this knockoff? But I don't know, if you just want to play a decent third person co-op campaign shooter with a friend, and you want something kinda short cause the game is only about 6 hours long, you cant really go wrong with this one. I like how it's also like sub-genre Horror, its got a bunch of moments where its really horror inspired in the level design and with the mutants too. It's just good campy fun, it has the right amount of challenge, its not mindlessly piss easy you actually have to work together and have skill. Not a bad game at all, I kinda wish there was a sequel! In my mind, it's a hidden gem.

7/10

Saints Row: Gat out of Hell

 

 

 

The Saints Row franchise took a nose dive for me, personally, after the second game. It started trying to lose its identity as another simple GTA clone and go into its own wacky "so randumb" crazy humour type thing.

Gat out of Hell is pretty much the columination of such things, I've seen from the series, so far.

The premise, or whatever its supposed to be, is you get sent to hell to basically "Punch satan in the face" and save the day or some bullshit. The game is extremely short and minimal in plot and story, it has CO-OP campaign, so in CO-OP one person plays as Johnny Gat and the other plays as some woman who i dont even know the name of or care.

The story progresses in the form of little medevial style storybooks complete with whimsical narration, and quirky extremely cringe and unfunny humour and dialogue. The writing is just awful, nothing is charming or hits where its supposed to. It's just dumb and the overall tone of the game can only appeal to what I suppose must be 12 year olds. It's artistically devoid of merit , for me atleast.

You eventually even get some what feels like 10+ minute long segment where the characters break out into musical song and dance and sing to the camera incessantly. It's painful, and multiple times I had to just walk out of the room to do something else, anything else, than to endure how bad it was.

Enough talk about the awful writing and cutscenes, the gameplay is almost as bad.

There are literally NO main missions. Thats right, the entire game is nothing more than copy pasted 'activity' side missions over, and over, and over. You have a 'satan' meter, and you have to do random side activites and missions to fill the bar. Once the bar is full, you unlock the last mission in the middle of the map, go there, do a really terrible generic extremely easy boss fight against Satan. Then the game is over. Thats it.

 I don't even know what to say. The game is just fucking awful. One of the worst coop games I ever played.

It's got all sort sof shoe-horned in , gimmicky 'abilities' and AWFUL controls. Instead of driving cars, you have wings and a flying ability. But the controls are just terrible and clunky as fuck and not fun to use at all. You have a stamina meter, and when it runs out you stop flying, but you also have to steer with the mouse and press Spacebar to flap your wings or some shit, it just does not control nice.

Other than flying, you have super sprinting ability where you run faster than cars and its all just too stupid. Frequently the controls will annoy you where youre inside buildings and you want to just sprint regularly, but youll be running turbo speed like a jackass its just stupid.

The combat is very dull and mindless and boring, all the guns look like very stupid turbo bright light Nerf guns or something, you even have retarded guns like Chair guns where your character sits in a chair and has miniguns on the side. Its awful. None of the guns are fun to use or stand out, its just all crap.

You can upgrade the guns to do more damage and shit, but theyre all so unappealing I could hardly give a shit beyond the bare minimum of just fully upgrading the LMG type thing.

The combat is extremely easy, the enenemies constantly drop health so you can just constnatly refill your health. Its bad.

The animations/AI are god awful , the enemies just drive in circles or drive into walls, mindlessly run at you mindlessly run into walls, terrible aimations and bad rubber banding online play. Very crap game.

Like I said theres literally no main missions so all you do is go around the map picking random copy pasted side activities like "Survive the waves of enemies'  or "Fly through the hoops" like its fucking Superman64.  or "Capture all the points"   or  "Fly around and collect enemies like popping balloons"  Thats the entire game. Theres nothing else. They all suck and arent fun. To top it off. one of them doesnt even work in coop. The 'insurance fraud' one where you have to ragdoll around and stack damage,  just doesnt work in coop. It freezes the connection and fails everytime. Luckily you can just leave, and let player1 do it. But still. The game is so half assed and lazy, its obvious no soul or attention went into it.

Even the map im pretty sure is just a lazy reskin of the SR3 map to have some hell theme and hellish locations.

Ultimately i dont really have anything good to say about the game, maybe just the fact its a short 4 hour coop campaign and its a shooter game so its not too hard to get through, but other than that the writing, story, cutscenes, lack of main missions, copy paste side quests, shit AI, shit artstyle, shit characters, shit everything . just shit.

3/10

Aliens: Fireteam Elite

 

Previously I played games like Alien Isolation which is singleplayer horror, and Aliens Colonial Marines which is a attempt at FPS coop game that failed miserably. Aliens: Fireteam Elite is another attempt at co-op game in the franchise, this time its third person

The game is a third person action shooter. Its got controls sort of like Gears of War, you can press a button to snap into cover, although theres barely any point to it, you carry two guns, one on your back and one main. Theres a space button to dodge roll, it plays like a standard third person shooter.

The way the game works is it drops you into a 'hub world' first, which is some sort of marine space base. You can go around and talk to the NPC's there, but im not sure if theres actually any point besides flavour text? because you can just hit Tab and access most of the same stuff instantly anyway. I'm seeing a trend in these modern games with the hub world setups.  There is a shop you can go to to buy new weapons,attachments, and 'perks' but other than that the hub world is pretty pointless.

So the first thing I noticed is that the game sort of has RPG mechanics. When presented with a difficulty selection, we saw various difficulties and one in particular stoodout. It said something like

"The True Experience. This is the way the game is meant to be played. etc etc etc. Reccomended Combat level: 500"

So naturally of course we wanted to play that difficulty, right? Well sadly its kinda not that simple. What it really seems to mean, is first you have to 'level up' a bunch, get new gear, raise your 'combat level' which basically just means accumulating upgrades to where it kind of estimates how powerful you are, THEN you should try the difficulty. Why?

Well because we originally tried playing on the difficulty but it was just a mess. The first 2 levels took way longer than they should, something was just off. Not to mention if you fail a mission, theres no checkpoints you have to do the entire thing over again. And missions can be upwards of an hour long, so that wasnt helping at all. The game was kind of fun being this challenging, but we knew something was off and it wasnt actually meant to be like this from the get-go.

So we dropped it down to the Normal difficulty that more matched with our 'combat level' and from there we could actually progress the game at a steady pace.

The game has 4 'Acts' but really theres 12 levels total.

The bulk of the gameplay consists of running through hallways and military buildings, then coming to a room where you press a switch/button/object, then you get a swarm of aliens for like 3 minutes while you have to survive, kill them, then repeat. Most of the objectives are like that. There isnt much variety at all in the objectives.

I will say that the first 'Act' wasn't all that good. Very generic looking sci-fi space base levels, metal hallways, levels that just look like youre inside a metal box. Very repetetive level design. This went on for like 3 or 4 hours. After it ended though, the game started to become more impressive.

In act 2, you start to see more of the Alien species taking over the natural land. More caves, grassy fields, outdoors areas, and stuff like that. It really opens up from there. I dont know why they choose such a boring intro  set of levels. That's another thing, the pacing of the levels and difficulty is just a mess. Like, the first half of the game has some really hard moments, but then randomly here and there you'll have piss easy levels where they throw new enemies at you that are way easier than the previous. Like that one level in Act 4 where they introduce zombies and its like the easiest level in the game. It's just poor and weird pacing. Like some of the more impressive levels should of been the starting ones, why would they put the worst levels first?

Towards the last quarter/end of the game they start to throw in some robot humanoid type enemies that shoot at you, so you finally get a chance to use the cover system. It's not bad, I was initially worried the game wouldnt have much enemy variety but it does. It has typical small aliens, then its got big queen types that grab you and make you do quick time events, its Green spitter type aliens that shoot projectiles at you, its got the Robot enemies with guns, its got zombies, and of course Facehuggers but they only really showup towards the end. The enemy variety isn't a real problem.

But what is a real problem is kind of like I said previously, the objectives, lack of variety, and repetition. Like almost every single encounter is just surviving in a room arena for a few mins and then proceed to next. Its not awful they just could of been more creative.

About the perks and upgrades and RPG mechanics.
None of it is well done.
It tries to be like a modern Hero shooter where you have like 8 different classes you can choose.

 Stuff like Doctor, Gunner, Regular soldier etc. But none of it really has impact or fun to explore. Because the class you play as determines what Weapon slots you can use. So for example the Regular soldier gets Rifle and Shotgun class, but the Doctor only gets Pistol and Rifle. I tried playing the Doctor class for awhile, but the healing mechanic was super convuluted and didnt make sense. You have this like healing pack device that has to be recharged by picking up and using medkits on it or something, but I could never figure out how it worked. And the portable healing station thing didnt actually seem all that good to giveup the other bonuses from the regular default Soldier guy. So we both ended up just playing the default soldier guy that has Assault rifle/Shotgun for the whole game while ignoring the rest of classes because they werent interesting.

Then as you 'level up' or something, you can open your perk loadout and swap in different perks as different areas unlock, like Tetris or some shit, but it just wasnt interesting or intuitive at all. The perks are just lame shit like reload slightly faster or do more damage with grenades. I don't know, we barely touched it. It's like they dont intend you to mess with any of this stuff until you already beat the game once, THEN go back and play through on the higher "intended difficulty" which is so sad, the game would be so much better without any of this shoehorned RPG stuff and just let us pick the higher difficulty from the get go, just balanced around player skill not this upgrade BS.

And besides these upgrades, you can go to a shop in between missions and buy new guns, but again none of them are any good or interesting. I tried buying a few rifles and shotguns but they were just worse than the default weapons. Also, the game kind of punishes you for even swapping and trying new weapons, because the more you use a certain weapon, the more it levels up. So you'll be playing 5 levels in a row with the default Shotgun, then if you want to swap to a new one, its level zero and is worse than the default shotgun. It's just stupid. Why punish the player for trying new weapons?

Another annoying thing is you cant pickup weapons or change out weapons mid mission. Theres no such thing as a checkpoint armoury or 'safehouse' or anything where mid-mission you can change weaps. So when you lock in your two weapons, youre gonna be using it for 1+ hour.

The sound design overall is pretty attrocious , I dont know what they were smoking over there. The music is awful, its just constantly out of place loud farting trombones and  trumpets it just sounds goofy and stupid, not horror at all just out of place. I had to turn it almost completely down at a certain point it was ruining the game. The NPC dialogue at first isnt so bad, but about halfway in the game they never fucking shutup yammering in your ear just talking nonsense and they sound completely deadpan like some guy in a studio reading off a script. The gun sounds are just strange too, especially the assault rifle sound effect. Is it supposed to sound like that? I know it sounds a certain way in the movie, but it just sounds fucked here , like they ripped a low bitrate lo-fi sample directly from the movie and never even bothered to EQ it. Strange. Atleast the shotgun sounds satisfying, so I used that the whole game basically.

The last level is really disappointing, you think its gonna be a boss fight but guess what, you just go to a platform, hit a switch, and survive for 100 seconds. Then you do it again, 5 times. Then you run to a elevator, then the game ends. Wtf? no boss fight? You even see a cutscene of a big alien queen but dont fight it? Why?

So the game clearly has some flaws, but just the actual core gameplay, and the fact that its co-op does help a ton. The actual core of aliens swarming at you while you and your buddy try to survive can be really thrilling at times. The graphics are pretty impressive, it does have a decent amount of content to play through over a weekend or something, its not overly long about 12 hours length. Despite the repetitive objectives, pointless RPG mechanics, disappointing weapon system, etc its still a fun game. The graphics can have some really impressive moments and vistas like when you go outside for the first time, the aliens are pretty well done overall in terms of animation and design, although gameplay wise they can be a bullet sponge. Theres a lot of things the game could of done better but for just playing a third person shooter game over the weekend with a buddy, its not bad.

6/10

Back 4 Blood

 

 Fans of the Left 4 Dead franchise were waiting something like 10 years to hear what was next from the developer Turtle Rock Studio's, or if there would be a L4D3. Turtle Rock went on to have failures such as Evolve and other mostly irrelevant titles. But eventually they actually 'revived' the L4D series, except now its called Back 4 Blood. Why it's not just L4D3 I'm not sure, it must be some legal reason because maybe Valve still holds the rights or something like that, but either way Back 4 Blood released in 2021 and is basically a straight continuation of the L4D Formula.

Back 4 Blood has many of the concepts known from L4D, but with many twists and modern typical spins. You have the basic idea of gathering a team of 4 players, moving through levels and completing objectives as you go. You have the famous/classic Safe room idea where at certain points in the level you go into safe rooms which act like a checkpoint between progress spots. There's a "store" inside these where you can buy basic equipment like Health/ammo/armor and minor upgrades at times like Weapon attachments healthkits etc. Its got the typical ideas from left 4 dead like the various zombie types, like Hunters, stalkers, tanks ETC. They're basically all here in Back 4 Blood just with different names and spin offs.

The game has four acts, and four difficulties.
Right off the bat you'll notice things are different in this game, and take more of a modern turn for the worse, probably.

When reading the descriptions of the difficulties, it says things that talk about "Cards" and some difficulties only reccomend you play them "If you fully upgrade your cards and fully understand them"

So yeah, this game is basically one of these modern 'Hero shooters' like Overwatch, Rainbow six Siege, Apex Legends, and games of that nature. Unfortunately I fucking hate those kind of games and hero shooters in general, where you pick each individual character who has unique abilities like its some kind of MOBA or RPG or something. In Back 4 Blood it isn't quite as pronounced , you have a roster of a dozen or so characters all with minor differences like some characters find more ammo, others heal more, others can slightly reduce enemy damage. I didnt even notice that characters had differences until about quarter way through the game, its not a huge deal I don't think.

However what is pretty important is the Cards system.
You can build 'Decks' like its fucking Yugioh or pokemon or something.
So everytime you complete missions you get deck points or whatever, then at the end of each act you go back to the Hub world where you can purcahse random Cards from this Card store and then you have like 100 cards to choose from and you can make them into a Custom Deck .

Your deck can only hold 15 cards at once.
So you go through the store spending your points buying cards that give you buffs like Reload speed, More health, more damage, Sprint better, stuff like that. Most of the cards are just barely marginally noticable upgrades, but some of them are game changers. The actual game changing cards seem few and far between, stuff like Can carry Two primaries, No movement penalty for backwards/strafe, Crouching while shooting doesnt hurt teammates (IMPORTANT) , and so on.

Now the really strange part is you can only actually change/customize decks BEFORE or AFTER each act. This is really odd and bad because some acts can be HOURS long.  So you can basically only customize your buffs like, FOUR times total in the entire game, because theres only four acts.

So everytime you start an act, it locks you into a 'Run' and you lock your deck in for the entire 'Run'. Apparently you can cancel a Run at anytime, and return to the latest safehouse you found, but I wasn't sure if there were any negatives to  doing this, so I didnt want to do it just to be able to customize my deck mid act.

Yeah, the way its all structured and organized is a mess, unintuitive, its pretty bad. Why cant I just choose my cards at safehouses? Why is there even a 'Card' system? I Didn't need it, why is this a Hero shooter? All these modern trendy game design 'features' DO NOT really make it a more enjoyable game, its just layers upon layers of bullshit that just kind of get in the way and feel like tacky gimmicks to make the game seem more deep than it really is.  I mean i guess it was kind of satisfying trying to choose which upgrades to get, and looking forward after each act to buy more cards, but at the same time it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth because the game would probably just have better pacing and be better without it.

The overall interface is clunky and doesn't explain much about the game. Trying to navigate the horde of menus sucks, and you cant even see an aggregate list of your total boosts from cards. The game does a poor job of even explaining any of this shit to you, it kinda just throws it all at you. We had to google some stuff to even figure out what it was, like the 'Trauma' system where you'll apparently loose all your Max health and suddenly be at 30 max health , turns out the only way to regain all your health proper is to use First aid stations on walls and equip 'Trauma resistance' cards. Its kinda a mess.

So once you get past all that shit, all the modern trends shoehorned into the L4D experience, you are acutally left with some pretty decent gameplay components. If you decide to play through the whole game in Co-op with your friend, it will randomly choose 2 bots that play with you. And for the most part the bots are fine, I didn't complain much about them until the very last act, which I'll talk about later.

But yeah the actual gunplay and combat is pretty satisfying. We beat the game on difficulty 2/4 'Veteran'. You have a kind of dynamic hitmarker whenever you shoot/kill zombies that feels kinda fun, theres a ton of different guns that you can aquire and get attachments for, all that randomly spawn around the world inside boxes and crates and such. You can buy 'Tool kits' from the safehouse store and find secret doors that require it and inside those rooms you usually find cool new guns to use. Theres a sort of like Diablo style loot system with the guns I never really understand, where the different weapons can have different 'tiers' and colors like White being worst, yellow being Rare and Purple being best or some shit. I never really noticed that it mattered much. But what I did notice mattering is the attachments. They do things like 50% more reload speed, more run speed aim down sights, Weakspot damage, and so on. It was pretty enjoyable gettin new attachments and constantly finding new guns and swapping around playing with them , shooting zombies and stuff.

I will say that the overall zombie designs and animations are kinda worse than Left 4 Dead actually. They're kinda glitchy and stiff , their blood and guts don't really look as good as it did in L4D, not sure if I'm just misremembering or what but  I wasnt exactly blown away with the overal zombie animations and gore. Whenever you crouch you get this unique 'Gangsta' animation when you shoot your gun where you kind of turn it to the side and spray with it, its kinda enjoyable and feels cool.

So out of the Four acts , really you only have 3 real campaigns. The last act is just one level and is basically a big boss fight.

The first act is by far the longest, took like 5 hours. It has like 30 something levels it felt like. The actual locations and enviornmental variety was decent it never felt too boring or repeatative in that way. All sorts of apocalyptic places and interesting locations . Though one annoyance is some of the objectives and 'boss fights' repeat way too much. Like theres one objective where you have to go around and follow these multiple yellow tentacles to find the source and blow it up. This objective keeps popping up over the entire course of the game many times, it just gets old and stupid like couldnt they make each level more unique? Theres also this one 'boss fight' of this giant guy that you keep fighting over and over what feels like 20 times it kinda gets old. Other than that the actual level design and objectives are decent, its still intense and exciting seeing the safe house in the distance and a giant horde in the way spawning at you trying to get there in one piece.

I will say that the last 'act' is awful, its just one mission of like 3 boss fights. The final boss fight is just some gigantic guy running through a tunnel and you have to destroy all his weak spots in like 3 minutes. If anyone gets too close to his hitbox, he just one hits you instantly. This sucks because the bots are retarded and constantly walk into his hotbox and get one hit and ruin the whole thing. Also it constantly spawns hordes and you have to scramble around trying to find and shoot his weakspots before time runs out. The first 6 times we failed because we either kept walking into his one hit location ,or the bots fucked us over, or we couldnt find the weakspots. On the last attempt, for whatever reason, it actually highlighted all the weakspots in red glow, no clue why it did that, glitch or some shit? Either way that 'act' was terrible.

Speaking of hordes, theres this new horde mechanic where theres an icon on the top right tha ttells you when a horde is going to spawn, not sure how it works but it was atleast an interesting mechani to keep an eye on that kind of gives you some information what to expect and when the hordes will come.

The overall tone and 'soul' of the game is pretty lame as well. By that I mean the story/dialogue/characters, all that shit sucks. None of the characters are interesting, all the dialogue is stupid, theres hardly any story not that you can even hear any of the speaking between all the shit going on. Theres like 20 options of Subtitles in the main menu but apparently I couldnt figure out how to just enable basic NPC subtitles. Pretty stupid. By the characters and dialogue sucking I mean its just extremely generic archetypes without any real personality. The story is incredibly basic like "Uhhh save humanity and kill zombies to make safe spaces" Doesn't matter its just whatever.

Overall the game is atleast a welcome addition to any Co-op library. It would probably suck to play it alone, but with a friend its atleast more similar Left 4 dead kind of content, so that alone is worth picking it up on sale. Theres a ton of guns to play with, you and your buddy can just go in and slay zombies for a weekend and see end credits after a few sessions. Its like 15 hours long tops. The card/hero system is incredibly questionable and mostly lame , But if youre just looking to play some coop shooter with a buddy it's not too bad for a weekend or something.

7/10