Murdered: Soul Suspect

 

So I got this game for really cheap during some sale around the time I aws into a lot of horror games. It seemed like it had a slight horror vibe but also detective sort of adventure game so I picked it up.

It's a really heavily narrative driven, cutscene kind of game. It starts off where you watch yourself get shot to death by some unknown assailent, then you play as a ghost trying to figure out who killed you and why. The actual gameplay consists of barely anything really, the main mechanics here is it takes place in third person, usually the mechanics are like you're in this room that acts as a main investigation, and you just walk around the room spamming E to pickup/look at clues. Each investigation has a set amount of clues, it says on the bottom left #/# how many clues there are left, so you kinda just walk around picking up stuff in the enviornment. But the thing is, theres no penalty or choices or weight behind any decisions you make. Theres no downside to anything you do. Sometimes it pulls up a menu screen asking you what choice to make, but if you get it wrong, it dosent matter, you just bring the screen up and try again and it even crosses out the previous wrong answer for you. The main thing that kinda makes the game overall boring is that theres no penalty for any of your actions. Nothing has meaning. It really is kind of just a movie game. Theres no real gameplay.

Well, thats not entirely true. Besides the instances where you pickup clues in investigations, you also have segments where you run to the next main location and its like a semi-open world where you walk around all these different NPC's and I guess you can talk to them to do side-objectives but I never bothered to do any of that stuff because I just didn't really care enough because the game doesn't have any meaningful mechanics to warrant caring about anything extra. So besides all that stuff, you sometimes find yourself in these psuedo-stealth sections with these demons walking around, if they spot you, you kinda just have a timer to where you instantly die if you dont find one of these premade Hide sections, I hated all this shit, its so annoying and awful. If you get up behind the AI demon thing, you can hold R to kill it, then it makes you do a quicktime event. The controls are pretty shit it makes you juggle between holding R and also doing these mini-quicktime events and its just annoying and clunky and shitty. The "stealth' sections are just annoying, they hardly add anything to the game, its just a waste of time and frustration. It's not like I want to sit there and wait for the AI to make its rounds, its not challenging or immersive or fun, its just annoying, because the mechanic isn't fun, you just have to do some stupid quicktime event that mixes between pressing Left and Right mouse and some key, and if you fail it then you reload checkpoint. So yeah, the psuedo-stealth sections are just a pain in the ass and thats basically the only real "gameplay" sections you have here. The other gameplay sections consist of just walking around in a circle spamming E to pickup "clues" to "solve" investigations, but it has no meaning because you cant actually fail, its more just padding until the next cutscene.

So what you really get here is like 40 seconds of gameplay, then a 3 minute cutscene, then 40 seconds of gameplay. Rinse repeat.

The graphics are pretty standard fare for the time, theres no impressive lighting or shadows or anything like that, it all kinda comes across as generic and flat to be frank. The whole game is muted and dull, night time and grey. I guess it makes sense you're a ghost, but yeah its not all that interesting, the locations are stuff like city streets, churches, a Mental hospital which I guess was the most interesting part of the game.

Well then, hows the story and narrative? Yeah Im not gonna sit here and review the whole plot, I moreso care about gameplay, but the plot here is slightly engaging enough in a corny, campy way, the main character is this gruff badass Fedora wearing, constantly chainsmoking non-chalant dickhead thats funny enough to listen to, hes trying to figure out who killed him, he meets this teenage girl on his travels and they work together in this whimsical narrative to uncover whats happening. Its not awful, its slightly entertainng and the kind of dumb cliche story to sitdown and watch over the weekend, it ends up turning into this weird 18th century Witch trial thing with little ghost girls and all sorts of shit. It's not awful, but yeah its just average. The voice acting and characters are memorable and decent enough, but when the actual gameplay is meaningless and theres no weight to any of your actions, its kinda just a very average Boring dull game. Thats the main word, the game is kinda just...boring. Well, luckily I beat the entire thing in only 4 hours despite howlongtobeat.com saying the average is 7 hours, so I guess i flew right through it. It wasn't a terrible experience, but I was kinda half asleep the whole time.  The developer that made this game seemed to completely disband and go out of buisness after this game so I guess it wasn't really a home run for them either...

5/10

The Forest

 


The Forest seems like a typical enough mid 2010s survival game that was all the craze with games like DayZ, Rust, and so on. So much so that the first few times I played it, I kinda just spawned in the world, walked around doing nothing, then lost interest or quit because I thought there wasnt much to it. Well, years later I finally came back to the game with a buddy in co-op, because I noticed it was categorized as "Horror" on steam store, as well aside having over 400k reviews.  Thankfully, it isn't the case that its anything like those games, after beating the game I read the devs say they wanted it to be nothing like Rust and DayZ etc and more of a coherent, campaign focused experience.

The game starts off with a great premise, although typical enough. You're a plane passenger with your child, and the plane crashes onto some remote island. In the cutscene, you see some scary guy take your child. Then you wake up in the crashed plane, everyone is gone, with luggage everywhere and an axe to help yourself survive.

From here there is pretty much zero direction. The game is very open ended, thats both a positive and negative. Because initially we had the impression it was some kind of Minecraft survival game, where you need to sit there and just craft and build a base and do all that sorts of stuff. If you press B, you open up a much needed Survival Book that shows you all sorts of things you can craft, Log cabins, Fires, Furnatiure, even weird things that you have no idea what they do like Effigies and a SOS sign. So naturally since the game tells you to look at this stuff, we thought we were just supposed to craft. But it turns out, no, not really. The majority of things you can build here are just for roleplaying, filler, or aesthetic. We found that out soon enough, and then realized the real chunk of the game is actually exploring as much as possible, discovering all of the unique locations on the map.

Because you see you can craft these log cabins, beds, furnitures etc, but it doesn't really have any purpose. The game has a manual save system, where you must build any shelter then you can save or sleep. Well, its quite easy to build a cheap shelter anywhere you want, it only costs a few sticks and rocks. So once we figured this out, we basically abandoned all of the building crafting in favor of building tiny little hits scattered all around the map, acting only as save points - That's all you need. Once we figured this out, the game got more exciting because now it wasn't about just surviving, but exploring and progressing the plot.

Yes, unlike other stupid never-ending early access games of the time, this game actually has a plot, and an ending. Luckily theres a 'To-do' list in your Survival book, that jots down objectives, and crosses them off as you complete them. This is extremely useful. At the start of the game, it just says things like "Find timmy"  "Find the passengers"  but as you explore, you start getting objectives such as "Explore this cave"   "Find a way to breathe underwater"  and right in the middle of the map is this giant sinkhole that tells you "Find a way to get into the sinkhole"  which is one of the biggest plot points and objectives in the game. So although the game has basically zero handholding and direction, atleast you feel like youre making progress by looking at this Todo list and with the knowledge that exploring lets you unlock new objectives.

At first, the island seems rather peaceful. The graphics and sound are very immersive, although its a Unity engine game which can have some bad rep for being asset flips, the graphics quality here and overall polish is quite good. It's got really impressive lighting and shaders and the sound effects of the enviornment and wind and ruffling through your backpack really lets you feel like you're in this world lost and alone.  Though you can sense something sinister is happening apart from how pleasent it may at first seem.

The suspsense at first builds, you can see these weird totems around the map that show signs that something is gone wrong here. Sooner than later you get these insane mutant-like cannibalistic tribes attacking you and stalking you. At first its terrifying and I actually let out a yelp when I saw one. That's because the AI here is pretty damn good and immersive too. The AI isn't your typical game AI where it just constantly attacks you once it spots you - No, the cannibals will stalk you, stare you down, Fake attacking you, they'll run at you, then last minute juke you out and run backwards just to fuck with you and confuse you. Sometimes, even, if you don't back down and simply just stare back at them and hold your ground, they'll respect you and run away. It feels like you're actually dealing with this half animal half human hybrid that has their own individual emotions and reactions. Apparently, even small things like attacking women cannibals infront of the male ones, makes the males even more enranged and aggressive. I read that the developers put in "Fuzzy programming" for the AI, so although theres general rules, they can randomly break them and act completely unpredictable.  Sometimes they wont even attack you at all, and act friendly or indifferent. There's even this item you can find around the map, Red Paint, that covers your character in paint that appears to make the cannibals not hostile to you, or very much less aggressive.

The combat here is pretty standard, you have a stamina meter, and you just click to swing your melee weapon, or you can right click to block. I never found blocking all that useful but that might just be a me issue. The combat is decent enough, it does its job, but its not amazing or anything. You kinda just sprint up to them and swing your axe or weapon, run backwards, wait for them to attack, rinse repeat until dead. But the AI is what really enhances the whole experience and how unpredictable and "lifelike" they can be.

As for other mutants besides the cannibal tribes, thats where the real horror comes in. As you explore the game and realize that a lot of the progress and content takes place in dark underground caves, you lurk around in the darkness only with your lighter (which is infinite, which I kinda felt weird about because why would you assume your lighter is infinite in such a situation? the consistency of the game design and how much things make sense is a bit hit and miss) but as you explore these caves you find really insane shit like crazy deformed hulking monsters with multiple legs and arms, tiny deformed babies jumping at you and attacking you, all sorts of crazy shit. The first time I went down into a cave and saw one of these things I gasped and it totally annihilated me, great moment.

The way death works in this game is whenever you die, you seem to respawn right back at the plane, as a new passenger, you lose all your items (though I think you can go back to get them) and your survival book goes back to saying Days Survived: 0.  Though, I never let this happen, because whenever I died I simply quit to main menu and loaded my save. Since the game has a manual save system like that, I always made sure to just build a savepoint before anything dangerous or any major progress so I could load later if I died or something like that.

So the bulk of the game is actually just exploring as much of the map as possible, building save points, being attacked by cannibal tribes, and exploring caves. To accomodate all this, the game has an extensive inventory system. You press I and open up a screen that shows all of your items laid out on a tarp, though unlike other games it isn't simply a matter of how much weight you're holding, or how many slots your items are taking up - No, the way the inventory works is that every type of item has its own slot, and you can individually max out as many of those items per slot as it allows. For example, you have a Stick slot, a Rock slot, a Meds slot, a Cloth slot, and so on, and each of these can hold up to a certain amount. I think it works quite well and is a bit unique to how other inventory systems work. It looks cool to open up your inventory and see all your items laid out onto this tarp and you can look at them individually ,usually they have a little tooltip attached to them that can give you a clue of what the item is used for. Though, the system isn't perfect. It can be a bit clunky trying to switch back and forth from your lighter, and different weapons or items. Apparently you can assign hotkeys to different items but I never figured it out, that should tell you how obtuse some of it can be. Something pretty strange is the fact you cant really drop items, like if your co-op friend wants some food or drink you have, you have to put it on a metal tray, then equip the tray  and pass it to him. It's pretty funny but doesn't make much sense. I guess its some kind of technical flaw they didnt want the player to drop items everywhere or something?

Inside the inventory screen you can craft all sorts of things, but I didn't realize how until like halfway through the game. That should tell you how hit and miss some of the explainations for the mechanics are. I found out if you right click items and select them, then hover over them, it will tell you a list of things you can craft with it and the items needed. Stuff like crafting a bow, a new axe, molotovs, a water holder, new armors, etc. I didn't find much of the crafting all too mandatory but often times I did craft a few simple things. I like that it isn't nessesary at all and you can just get by without engaging in much crafting OR base building so its not like a Minecraft kind of game at all, thankfully, it's all optional.

Since it is a survival game, of course you have a food and water meter. These are no joke, the more you sprint and work yourself out, the more they deplete. You have to be constantly opening all the luggae you find cause they can contain snack bars and soda drinks which are very useful to keep your thirst and hunger up. Besides those, of course you can hunt and cook food on fires. But what I realized halfway through the game is also you can cut the limbs off killed enemy cannibals and cook and eat those, too. So for a big chunk of the game I was in turn being a cannibal like my enemies, eating their arms and legs in a weird ironic circle, now I'm just like them. I'm not sure if engaging in cannibalism has any negative effects, but it seemed to do the job just fine. The food and drink system adds immersion to the game and isn't to much of an annoyance unlike other survival games, its fun to ask your friend for food and vice versa, when you start to run down to your last few candy bars its like "Ok who gets it, me or you?" can be funny times.

So we realized to progress the game, you bascially have to find these Caves or unique locations on the map. one standout location on the map is the Yacht, which isn't too hard to spot. Near the costline is a boat you can swim to, inside it you find scary photos of monsters and food and supplies. There are lots of these cannibal villages around the map that usually have victims hung up, mutilated or killed around them. I guess they're plane passengers. One of the todo list objectives is 'Find plane passengers' and usually when you find these human victims, it will say Passenger # found. Can give a eerie sinister feeling to discover all these passengers around the map and how they met their demise to the canniabls. The game is really gorey and has awesome raphics in this department you can find all sorts of twisted different ways the cannibals tortured these passengers, just weird things like shoving phones in their mouth or tennis rackets, it has a lot of enviornmental story telling and exploring everywhere never got dull or boring because theres always something crazy to see or some mini-story that gets told to you.

You don't even start the game with a map, but hopefully sooner than later you find the cave that has it in it. We found that cave a few hours in, I can't remember exactly which one but yeah you explore these caves and they have vital mandatory progress items and weapons, the map being one of them. Once we had the map now it was just a journey to try to read the map and uncover as much of it as possible and find as many caves as possible. So after this point we would just run around circles on the map looking for caves. The map isn't extremely huge either, which works in its favor, you can walk from one side of the map tothe other in about 10 minutes.  I think the game has 10 or so caves and you'll need to explore just about all of them to complete the game, atleast the first time.

So we kept finding these caves and exploring them. They can be extremely elaborate with multiple branching paths, they're all really dark and full of cannibals and crazy mutants too. It gives a real suspenseful horror vibe especially when you can come across more of these plane passengers all mutilated and tortured inside of them too, its just a terrifying setting. Thankfully we didn't get lost or stuck too many times, the enviornmental design is good enough here where it tries to put memorable landmarks in certain places so everything doesn't end up looking the same. Things like campsites, strings of teeth hanging from walls, certain gore scenes, let you know which part of the cave you're in and keeps it from being all the same and helps navigation. Exploring these caves was some of the best parts of the game because it gives you a real sense of dread and horror being stuck down here in the dark , lost and confused with nothing but your lighter that sometimes flicks off (though you can get a flashlight eventually), surrounded by gore and these cannibals and mutants. It's awesome.

Eventually from these caves you find things like a Katana, all sorts of photos and notes and drawings, a VHS camcorder, cassette tapes, video tapes, a Keycard which is mandatory for progress, some scuba gear that lets you swim underwater which is also mandatory, and a climbing axe.

At first we found a cave with yellow ropes on the walls, we werent sure what it meant or how to use it. We thought we had to craft something, couldnt figure it out. So reluctantly googled it, turns out you need a Climbing axe. So we just kept exploring until we found the climbing axe, and yeah eventually found it without having to look it up. You shouldn't have to look up too many things in this game ,which is impressive for how little handholding it does. The major thing that i thought was kinda janky or clumsy was the Sinkhole. So the Sinkhole is this giant chasm in the middle of the map, and the endgame is finding a way to the bottom of it. Well at first, you can go in caves that lead you midway down the sinkhole and its just a dead end. So its like what? Am I suppose to like glitch my way down the wall?  Cause it actually works, you can kinda slide yourself down the mountain wall but that just doesnt seem right, is it? I had to look it up and apparently theres like 20 ways to actually get into the sinkhole, but they all seem like glitches or not 'Canon'. Theres only one real 'canon' intended way to get in there, and its from a cave. Theres a cave that leads you all the way to the bottom, so we found that instead.

Once you have certain items like the Climibing axe, scuba gear, you can get to the bottom of the sinkhole and access the endgame. You climb through a certain cave, make your way to the bottom, after swimming underwater a bunch which is a pretty cool mechanic how at first you couldnt see anything under water and it made you wonder if theres anything down there,  and then you can finally swim underwater and use a flashlight down there. Well you eventually come across this high-tech laboratory at the bottom of the cave (bit cliche isnt it? but still works)  and you use the keycard you found to open the door and walk in.

From here the story unravels and I won't explain it all but you learn a bit about how these people are doing genetic experiments and are intentionally shooting down airplanes to kidnap children and harvest their life force or some shit. The plot is quite fascinating and fun to discover, I like how theres virtually no talking in almost the whole game but the plot unfolds through finding items and watching VHS tapes and enviornmental storytelling, its really atmospheric.

Though unfortunately the last segment of the game really annoyed us because it was like one fumbling mess after another. First of all the segment with Timmy was glitched up and broken for the co-op partner and was a confusing mess because of it, had to watch it on youtube. Then, the last boss is this giant mutant monster thing that has tons of health that makes you engage in really clumsy awkward combat, and to make matters worse, it completely contradicts the entire games mechanics and philosophy by if you die, now you dont actually die, you just wake up outside the boss room and can just die over and over with no penalty. What? doesnt make any fuckin sense. So you kinda just awkwardly try killing this boss, throwing molotvs at it, shooting it with your bow, dying over and over throwing your corpse at it til its dead. Weird, but okay. But then right at the end of the game it presents you with two options. One option is to push a button and intentionally blow up a plane, continuing the cycle, and the other button is to shut it all down. Naturall we chose the second button to stop it, but we missed the fact that the first button shooting down the plane apparently saves Timmy. We missed that fact because the only way you know is a sign pops up "Live sample required" on a screen above Timmy, but we missed it or didn't understand it.

So basically, the "alternate" ending is bullshit and doesnt actually end the game. It makes you run all the way back to the yacht, grab a keycard, run all the way back to the cave, just to get some optional cube item thing that does nothing but is fun to play with, theres no end credits, no achievement. nothing. This is the "Free roam" mode. What I think happened is the game only had one ending for a long time, actually ending the game not letting you play anymore, and people complained so they added in a second alternate ending letting you keep playing. Well the design here is clumsy and they should have tucked the alt ending away somewhere harder to find because basically for a first play through you shouldnt press it.

If you press the 'canon' shoot down the plane button, the game actually immediately ends, you get a ending cutscene, which is completely off-tone almost like a humouros talk show appearance where apparently you get off the island and are some famous book author now? its really stupid and seemed like a joke, like what?  but yeah then end credits roll, achivement, and kicks you back to main menu. Okay, fair enough, but the whole alternate ending button just led to total confusion, fucked us around and wasted 2 hours extra of our time for no reason. So yeah the entire like last 5% of the game is pretty annoying and clunky. It's cool in concept and visuals, it can just be annoying to play atleast the first time.

So thats The Forest, whenever you hear the term "Survival Horror"  this game is actually survival horror in the strictest sense. To top it off, its fully co-op. One last note on the co-op, its a typical co-op system, you can help your buddy when he "dies" he falls to the ground you can pick him up. Other than that you can see his nametag on screen at all times so if you ever get lost you can just run to his nametag. So the co-op system works good enough. So yeah its just a good atmospheric immersive co-op horror game.

8/10

Tom Clancy's The Division 2

     

 

 

Sadly I can't remember a whole lot about Division 1, and I apparently never even wrote a review for it - but  I remember having a good time with it, being impressed at the graphics and tactical gameplay. The winter setting was comfy too. Now, years later, I finally got Division 2 because it got released on Steam.

The setting this time isn't in some apocalyptic winter New York but instead Summery, washed over, trashed Washington DC. It's a completely different setting, I think I actually prefer the winter landscapes of the first game but it makes sense they did something different. Well, to be more precise, I think I prefer the outdoors sections of the first game, but the Indoors sections of Divsiion 2 are probably way better. That's because the level design on display here is frequently just amazing with tons of highly detailed interiors and interesting locations like Museums, all sorts of iconic historical DC buildings, labs, etc. Frequently while going through the main mission interiors I would stop and just admire all the details and just be blown away at especially the lighting and graphics. The actual pacing of the missions is just great too, theres no "Where the fuck do I go?" moments, and all the levels and interiors just mesh together to keep you on a consistent train of action and seeing new interesting sights and locations and encounters.

The Division 2 is a very 'thick' game. I mean its very mechanically dense, complex, and packed full of features. It would probably take hundreds of hours to see everything it has to offer, even though you can be finished with the main campaign in around 35 hours. It's a looter shooter/action RPG lite/gears of war style cover shooter. It has 30 character levels, you get experience just by killing enemies and looting and completing missions, and each one of these level ups you feel the difference. The game has tons of loot, you will constantly be picking up new guns, which have about a dozen different categories each from Assault rifles (full auto), Rifles (single shot/3 round burst style),  Snipers (usually bolt action), Shotguns, Submachine guns, and so on. Ontop of juggling all these gun pickups, you also have armor pickups from Backpacks, Knee pads, Masks, Chest pieces, Holsters and so on. Not only is there all these different pieces of loot, but like Diablo, they all have different tiers, signified by color. So it starts off at like Grey color then goes up to brown, green, blue, purple, yellow being best etc.

Now, one complaint I will say is that the UI overall is pretty much a clusterfuck and is really overwhelming. The entire UI design, the Map system, I don't really like it all that much. It doesnt look too awful visually, but the way its laid out and its just a clusterfuck of information and even 30 hours into the game I still didnt quite get used to it and still is hard to figure out. Like for example on the top right it will say Armor, but then on the bottom left theres your actual Total armor value, but equipping a item with higher armor value than what you have, soemtimes doesnt even increase your overall armor value so its like multiple pieces of gear can have multiple armor values and it isnt even shown on the top right number. It can be a bit of a mess.

It's really fun and satisfying constantly getting all this new loot though, youll kill enemies and frequently, but not often, youll see a big glow fall out of them and it can be a random piece of gear. It was almost always fun to pick this stuff up and then go take cover somewhere and see what kinda thing you got. Theres a lot of excitement in constantly switching up guns, seeing how all the different categories handle, and equipping all sorts of different armors, it keeps the game really fresh and picking up loot is meaningful because you actually care because the guns are so well done and fun to use.

That's another thing, the actual gunplay feels really refined and complex. The crosshair for each gun category is different and it even shows you a little dot in the middle bouncing around emulating where your bullets are going, its just fun to control and play with the guns. Assault rifles mechnically work differently than SMG's, theres a different crosshair, and the way the gun feedback and crosshair bounces around works different for each category so its a lot of fun experimenting and constantly swapping out weapons finding what works at the current time. Not only that, but theres also a wide variety of weapon attachments you can unlock which further increases the stats and abilities of your guns. It doesnt increase the base damage, but it increases things like Accuracy, recoil, magazine sizes etc. To get these attachments, you mainly complete side missions, or visit these different encampments around the map and do 'Projects' which is a series of side missions you complete, as well as donating random materials you collect around the map, then it usually gives you a Blueprint you can use back at the main games base, which is the Whitehouse amazingly enough. So you can spend a lot of time going back and forth to the Whitehouse main base, unlocking all sorts of attachments and getting new equipment.

This is where you can unlock your Skills and Perks. So theres two different menus here, you have Skills which is like 8 different abilities you can equip two of. These are largely uninteresting and feels like shoehorned into the game. Stuff like Drones, a pulse ability that highlights enemies, a turret you can drop, a toxic grenade launcher thing, a Hive which is this device you lay down that heals you within a certain radius, stuff like that. These are pretty dull and dont really add much to the game, usually in gunfights you kinda just press Q and E and you use your abilites and then just reuse them whenever it goes away.

Since I played the whole game co-op, I had two abilities, and my buddy had another 2 abilities, so between both of us we experienced atleast half of what they had to offer. You can get skill points which allow you to slightly change how these things work, for example instead of the Drone shooting at enemies ,it instead heals your team mates, little stuff like that. I found these 'upgrades' largely insignificant because its not even upgrades its more like sidegrades.

Then, you have another menu for Perks. These are like passive boosts, and theyre even more marginal and barely noticable. Small stuff like unlocking a few attachments, letting you carry more inventory, getting more experience on headshots, small things like that. So I guess another complaint I can make about the game is the whole skill/perks system seems really uninteresting and dull and not that exciting to engage with. You even unlock so many perk points that by halfway through the game you've already unlocked everything useful from the menu so the rest of the game its just sitting there doing nothing while you have dozens of points left, weird.

The way the main campaign works is you look at the Map and look for Main Missions, then you can see a corresponding reccomended level for each mission. Usually if youre anything more than 2 levels under the mission level, you'll get annihilated. You can even roam to certain areas of the map where the enemies are much higher level than you, and you will just constantly get one shot, so yeah its definitely a stat based RPG kind of game.

So what ends up happening is if you have a bunch of Main missions where you're under levelled, you'll frequently go around doing all sorts of Side missons. They arent really side missions, because you basically have to do a lot of them to have the intended smooth progression without slamming your head against a wall cause youre so weak all the time. Luckily, the side missions are pretty good. Theres a variety of different kinds of side missions that get repeated, Hsotage rescue, territory where it involves going into a territory , you can see on the map all sorts of different zones that are owned by rival factions, you go into these zones and capture them back. Its pretty simple, you just defeat a wave then defend as they counter attack. The open world is pretty organic in the way that you can just randomly walk around the map and youll constantly run into little encounters that work as side missions. But also you have these more unique side missions that almost feel like main missions because they have you going into unique locations with their own plots and unique objectives and theyre almost as good as the main missions because of the variety of locations and encounters you find yourself in. Frequently when you finish these side missions it will unlock a supply room for you to go into and open up a crate which grants random loot which is usually better than what you have so its just satisfying completing these and finding cool new gears.


The HUD does a good job showing you where your objectives are, in the top left of the screen you can see a list of nearby activities even if you have nothing selected, and if you select a mission on the map it even gives you a line to follow to get there.

So yeah thats the general progression of the game, theres 30 character levels, once you reach level 20 or so you do a series of these Strongholds which are basically just giant main missions that take a lot longer than regular ones where you invande giant fortresses killing dozens of enemies and bosses, then at level 30 theres a final stronghold (which was actually really easy) and then the main campaign is over. After this, it starts to unlock all sorts of extra end game content, pvp stuff, and even more missions and entire new territory system, but thats endgame stuff, it's really cool this game is so packed full of content but I'm just here to play the main campaign.

The enemies arent all that varied, you basically have generic soldeir type guys, then you have these guys with purple healthbars that are even stronger, then you have Yellow guys that are bosses, theyre usually wearing big suits of armor and having miniguns and stuff, I think thats basically it for the enemies. I'm fine with it being minimal like that, and the way the different tiers work, and their AI, it seemed just right and the overall balance of the game seemed perfect. You can die real quick if you play stupid, or dont properly upgrade your gear, but also you can stomp the enemies if youre well coordinated with your co-op partner too.

My overall thoughts of the game is the graphics are incredible and add so much to the experience, often I would just turn off the lights in my room and be immersed in the games lighting and atmosphere, I love the tactical vibe with all the gear and equipment and the loot is really satisfying constantly finding new things to equip and play with, the main missions have you going into interesting unique locations, the overall story and plot largely escaped me, something about the world being into disarray after a pandemic and rival factions fighting eachother, thats about all I got. but thats all I need, the premise its self is really good and the fact that its kinda realistic is also immersive too. None of the actual characters or NPC's stood out at all, so I guess that coulda been better, though. Also, while the open world main streets is packed with detail and immersion, I still prefer the feeling of the wintery New York in the first game, its just a more interesting setting I think.  

So yeah its basically a perfect co-op shooter if youre into that third person gears of war type cover shooter with slight rpg mechancis and loot. Probably the best lootershooter i've played thus far, this shows Borderlands how its done. The game also reminds me of a continuation of Rainbow Six Vegas series, which I really wanted more of. The game is so dense mechanically and packed with content its hard to stop writing about it but this will have to do.

8/10
 

Zombie Army 4: Dead War

Rebellion has for awhile now been making sequels upon sequels of the same similar game. First it was the Sniper Elite series, which they made a handful of games. Then, it was the spinoff Zombie Army series which is basically the same game, just more close quarters and now with zombies. But after that, they made another spin off of a spin off, Strange Brigade, which was basically the same thing as Zombie Army but more wackier and cartoony. Well now we're at Zombie Army 4 so let's see whats new this time:

The very first thing I noticed is that it seems to have gotten a bit of an engine upgrade, its using the similar engine version as Strange Brigade and Sniper Elite 4, so things look more polished and better graphics than previous games. But then the real first thing that stood out is the weapon unlocks system/DLC. The game really only has 3 primary weapons, and 3 secondary weapons. That's it. For primaries its got sniper rifles: M1 Garand, Gewer 43, and Mosin Nagant. Yes, that's it. You have them all unlocked at the beginning of the game, you'll be using one of these 3 primaries for the whole game. The fucked up part? Theres like another 12+ DLC guns. But it really seems like all these extra DLC guns were actually developed alongside all the rest, but last minute they realized they could just make them all DLC and make more money. Really lame. Like imagine in Doom you could only use the Shotgun or Chaingun, and last minute they cut all the other guns and sold them as DLC instead. Just stupid. Then you have the secondary guns, you have two machine guns: Mp44, and Thompson, then you have a shotgun. That's it. Theres no unlocking guns as you play the game. The other sad part is once you choose a gun, you're basically forced to use it for the entire campaign, because the guns have upgrade trees and the upgrade kits are limited, so once you start upgrading a gun, it would be really stupid to drop it and switch to another non-upgraded gun. So they basically force you to use one gun for the entire campaign. Yeah, it kinda starts to make the whole experience a bit lackluster and repetitive.  

It's got this notable and sort of satisfying Challenge system where you can do all sorts of challenges like get 200 headshots, or kill them in weird ways, apparently these challenges are directly attached to the perks system where you do certain challenges it like tiers up the perks but overall its more like a sidenote or novelty more than anything that really impacts the game in a very meaningful way.

So you're bascially using one or two guns the whole game, and the gunplay for these feels pretty good, I like the hitmarkers and gore, it feels impactful and has a lot of feedback that makes it feel fun to shoot, its got all those complex Sniper Elite mechanics with holding your breath for more accuracy, Kill cams when you get really nice shots (which barely ever happen, because the game is so close quarters)  but it's also got these awkward shoehorned in abilities that never really made much sense, you can swap your Perks in and out at the beginning of every level, these give you some passive upgrades but it all feels so uninspired and forced in, none of it felt very substantive difference it was more just busy work and they just put it in the game because its like.. "modern games need skill trees and perks, right guys?"  The weapon upgrade system is really trivial too, its just a tiny little tree that gives marginal upgrades like reload speed and some weird explosive damage system that was hard to figure out, at one point you can unlock "vampire scope" which says it gives you health on "critical hits" - which you'd think means headshots, but no, not really. Never really figured out how it works, that whole system seemed convuluted and didn't make any sense.  The game also has a bad grenade mechanic where you can hold all sorts of different explosives, but the way the grenade inventory system works sucks and youll frequently find yourself trying to throw a grenade but you accidentally start putting down a tripmine and your character is dragging around a tripmine while youre being swarmed by zombies. The games got inconsistent and annoying controls sometimes with a lot of "Hold E to open/use"  but then other times it will be "Tap E"  and you frequently can fuck this up and feels really janky and clunky, especially when trying to revive your team mate.


How's the actual campaign and levels though?
It starts off quite promising, it mechanically feels more complex and involved than previous games in the series. For example you have all sorts of abilities and perks now, the UI is very complex theres all sorts of shit all over the screen, press space to use some melee ability, it's got a pretty satisfying combo system where in big numbers and colors it tells you what your combo multiplier is, on the right side of the screen it details what kind of kills you're getting and scores you - all that stuff is fun and satisfying. Graphically it can be technically impressive too, nice complex lighting , dark visuals and misty atmosphere, the atmosphere is mostly good and immersive except for the music... the soundtrack is this baffling mix of groovy techno and whimsical jungle melodies or something, it doesn't really match the mood of the game and more often than not just detracted from the experience and made it feel cheap and stupid.  None of the levels really stand out that much, it all blurs together as this dark hazy, black and white green tinged big stretch. Typical places like boat yards, trainyards, sewers, villages, nothing really standout.

But yeah the first few hours of the game are promising, its got a fully fledged co-op campaign which of course I played with a buddy, so you spend the first few hours going through these detailed levels with hordes of zombies and everything seems good. But sooner than later some problems start to crop up. For instance the objectives start to be really repetitive, annoying, and predictable. The game basically only has 4 objectives:
1. Walk into arena - Survvie.   
2. Pickup object, drag it to location, defend it
3. Get on the boat/refuel boat
4. Escape

Seriously that's like 90% of the game. They just couldn't be very creative with the variation of tasks you're required to do. Overall the game has a problem with frequently being kind of...boring. It's boring in the aforementioned lack of weapon variety, its boring in that the enemies are frequently not very engaging, like most of the enemies on screen are just filler generic zombie mobs that barely threaten you as you stand still and mindlessly take them out, its boring in the objectives are just uninspired and repetitive, its boring in that the level design and color palette overall is frequently just very grey, green, and black - while the game may be technically  graphically impressive, sometimes the art design and color palette is just drab and dull to look at. Other examples of the artstyle being hit and miss is the use of satanic symbols and actual zombie designs are pretty awesome, the environmental storytelling and corpses on spikes and stuff like that is creepy and cool to look at, but the UI and onscreen prompts almost makes it feel like I'm playing a mobile phone game or something the way the UI looks, especially at the end of level reward screens.   

The game isn't that hard, and its very forgiving when you fail the mission, usually you respawn at a checkpoint right where you left off. Your character has a rank and as you rank up to various points like 5, 15, 20, 30 etc you unlock new perk slots, so its kind of fun seeing your guy level up I guess.

I do appreciate how the game has a sort of Left 4 Dead episodic format, with saferooms acting as the level separators, it makes the pacing feel bite sized and manageable. At least its got a wacky sense of humour, like you fight Hitler himself a few times, and the last time you fight him hes in this gigantic gigtank and its kind of an epic boss fight, then the game ends with you killing hitler and beating his face in or something. The story is complete nonsense but its just dumb campy fun in like B horror movie way I guess.
The game could of been better if it had a better arsenal, better upgrade system, more varied objectives, more memorable level design etc. It suffers from similar problems that Strange Brigade had, just this game has a way better tone, but it has the same similar gameplay letdowns and has many things in common, even down to the environmental traps is like straight out of Strange Brigade. But as it stands its just a decent co-op campaign to play with a friend for a few days.

6/10