Скорошни рецензии на Skinwalker

CDPR done pulled an ubisoft on everyone with this. It was all smoke and mirrors samurai... smoke and mirrors...

Ah. Destroy All Humans! A gem of a bygone era of PS2s and Xboxs. The game about a little gray man from outer space with one objective, of taking over earth that most of us fondly remember. The original on PS2 hasn't aged very well. It's mechanics are clunky, all the towns look gloomy and its technical achievements are dated. So how does this remake hold up against modern standards for gaming?

It actually holds up surprisingly well when compared against a modern standard for gaming, in spite of its limitations. Now most of you must be thinking "Why is this any good? There's a lot of remakes/remasters/reboots out there that are sleazy nostalgia money grabs with little to offer and often worse than the originals!" And I thought so at first when I saw this, however, this is far from just being a shortcut to our wallets by way of our hearts.

The game has been essentialy rebuilt from the ground up with the unreal 4 engine, as obviously, just slapping on some high quality textures on the PS2 original would not do. The art direction is superb, buildings and props look pretty great, though the NPCs look a little bit weird, a few of them make you wonder if the creator was going for something akin to porcelain dolls. It is forgiveable though, the art is on point for the game and the setting of 1950's America. Speaking of the setting, it is what you'd expect of a game about an alien attacking 1950's earth, most, if not all tropes are there, such as mind reading, mind controlling, desintegrator guns, flying saucers throwing things around. Even the music is a throwback to cheesy science fiction movies, and I must say, it is on point for what you'd expect. This brings me to the second portion of the setting, which is... arguably not so good. Though the game was ladden with humor and it was quite something back in the day, some of the jokes and the humor don't hold up nearly as well as they did back then. It is excuseable, though. My only other big complaint is the aptly named "death ray" on the flying saucer not desintegrating NPCs, just leaving them in a ragdoll state.

Other than quality sound, a great art direction and great ambience overall the game also features several quality of life improvements over the original, such as being able to use weapons, PK and also fly around with the jetpack at the same time. If you remember playing the original, you'll remember how much of a pain it was to choose inbetween all three of those. The game also has added side missions, which are basically abducting people/objects, racing after a runaway drone and trying to collect the DNA it spews out, a rampage mission where you must murder enough of a certain NPC, and armageddon which is basically seeing how much destruction you can dish out in a certain amount of time. "Rampage" is much like "Armageddon" but on a smaller and much more focused scale, and from all side missions, the racing ones were the hardest to get all 3 stars on and arguably, the least enjoyable. Other than that, Crypto also boasts a whopping 60 something upgrades for his powers, saucer and weapons! Better try to maximize your brain harvesting!

Not all is roses however, as the game's main shortcoming is it's lenght. It is very short, like the original, if you were to just blast through the main story missions you'd be done in a few hours, especially since most missions are fairly easy, on top of being of short duration. The second great shortcoming is the lack of co-op. You'd expect this game to have co-op, especially since the sequel on PS2 had co-op and it was a huge blast to play with your friends. Sadly, perhaps, in their efforts to remain as faithful to the original with a little bit of wiggle room, the developers made a mistake by not adding co-op. What could be more fun than exterminating humanity with an anal probe and the company of your best friend? The game also has your standard collectible hunt in the form of furon probes, and well, it is very satisfying to fly around the saucer destroying everything inbetween missions, but the game just lacks things to do when you're done with missions and side missions. It's still fun reading NPC's thoughts but... it doesn't remain super entertaining forever.

Something else that bothered me was that a lot of times while playing this I just felt like I wanted to play the sequel, on PS2 more. Not that it had a lot of things more to offer, but the setting wasn't confined to 1950's America, but it was set on the 1960s and you had missions in San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Siberia and The Moon! Not to mention, Crypto's arsenal was much more robust. The side missions were also far more interesting and varied than in this.

This is by no means a bad game, it is fun and if you played the original and remember it fondly, this is definitely a worthy purchase IF on sale. On full price, well, you are going to get your money's worth out of it, but after hunting all the achievements (also another missed opportunity, why not have one for destroying all buildings in a map? Or hunting down all probes? Or probing X amount of humans?), destroying the same city over and over and over and reading the minds of NPCs for the 10th time, it gets stale and sadly, there isn't much else you can do. The only DLC is a skin pack for crypto, which was given free of charge for people who preordered. The skins are quirky, but it's pricing is a bit steep and nothing of value is lost by not purchasing it.

Is this a good remake? Yes, yes it is. Hopefully this will be enough of a commercial success to warrant a remake of the sequel, which as most people who played both games remember, had a lot more to offer and was a lot more fun, despite being more of the same.

So... This is basically a game where you fly around in a hoverbike, dodging bullets, shooting enemeis and shooting the clothes off of anime women. If things go right you'll be able to beat the boss and shoot off ALL of the clothes, revealing anime tiddies. It's that simple, there isn't much to it. A surprising amount of effort was put into this, as the art is pretty good, the music is actually pretty soothing. Overall, it is a fun game, you can expect to get some enjoyment out of it for its price. Maybe some laughs. There isn't much more to it.

TL;DR: Overall, the game is good. Not game of the year or must buy good, but it is good. If you're a big terminator fan it is a must play, but by all means get it on sale, for the game is a tad overpriced for its amount and quality of content.

This is the terminator game we have been waiting for a while. Well, maybe not THE game, but definitely a must play if you're a fan of the terminator universe. Different from previous terminator games, this is cannon, it is set before the events of the first movie and it gives us a glimpse at the post judgment day wasteland created by Skynet in a bid to destroy humanity.

Graphically wise, the game is... well, decent. Some things look better than others, but some textures are downright ugly to look at when you're up close to them, and believe me, you will be close to them a lot while trying to sneak past terminators or trying to hide from them. With that said, the color palette in this game is heavily limited. During daytime hours you will see lots of gray, black, perhaps some rusty brown tones and a few others but that's it. During the night it's various shades of gray, black, some blue. These are all broken up by the eventual red and violet plasma fired either by terminators or you.

Now for the sound. Oh boy, this game does sound RIGHT. The sound effects are taken from the movie and once you get those plasma rifles it is ever so satisfying to shoot them. They sound crispy and oh so sexy. The music really does set the atmosphere how it should be, wether you're sneaking about and scavenging to the sound of strong winds with a rather calm tone or frantically trying to hide or run away from terminators in a very tense, heart wrenching track. The developers did a very good job with the sound. The only problem are there voices. Boy, they hired an uninspired cast to do the voice acting, and even the character's faces and lip syncing are subpar. It's a small detail, but for a bunch of ragtag humans trying to flesh out a living in this post apocalyptic world, they sure are pretty apathetic.

As for mechanics, it is pretty basic. You have a crafting system which is quite simple, altough it doesn't show you when you're crafting how many resources you have of each. A leveling system with a skill tree that is rather lackluster at best. The gunplay is pretty satisfying, and altough most enemeis are rather spongy, by the late game they're not much of a threat. You can upgrade plasma weaponry with chips taken from defeated enemeis, which is a nice touch but nothing to write home about. In short, the gameplay is functional and there's no big rodeos with weird mechanics or RNG or anything like that. It's a game, it works.

The AI is rather... well, stupid, for a mechanical hivemind bent on destroying humanity. Most enemeis are quite easy to cheese or hide from. Then again, they're machines, not humans so maybe that is somewhat passable. They will however see you from afar and will come investigate. They're smart enough to listen to you also, but it's not usually too hard to outrun them seeing as they're quite slow. They make up for this by having a lot of raw firepower.

The game's history is... passable. It's nothing to write home about. It's there, you know it's there, but it is rather forgettable. I wouldn't play this for the history or recommend it if you're looking for a deep plot that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

It's a decent experience if you're a fan of terminator games and you're looking for something easy to pick up and play, especially if you're more of a singleplayer type person. The atmosphere is good and you will have some very unsettling moments such as trying to hide from a T800 that is busting down a door to come after you, or frantically trying to find cover from a T47's missile barrage of a flyby from a HK aircraft. There's not much to the history, the graphics are decent and the gunplay is satisfactory. If it is on sale and you're a terminator fan, buy it, otherwise the game is overpriced.

Having received the game for free, I didn't really know what to expect. I did know there was mature content involved and didn't know how to unlock it, though there are steam guides which will point you in the right direction. Other than the adult contet "H mode" as the game calls it, it is a mix of bejeweled/candy where clearing blocks will either heal you, increase your fever, do a physical or a magical attack. Obviously cleaing more blocks gives you more powerful attacks. Other than that you earn gold, upgrades your stats, get some new skills and so it goes. It's somewhat of an interactive-ish novel but not really. You advance by clearing stages where you do battle with different characters by playing bejeweled, basically.

The art is easy on the eyes and it is very well done, and so is the soundtrack, it is quite pleasing to hear. I wouldn't say you should go out and buy it just for the adult content, it is a fun game, and getting those super combos going is quite nice, but there isn't a whole lot to it. The base game gives you 3 characters to play against and progress the history, the others are locked behind DLC, which is free, by the way. My only complaint is that the english translation feels a bit sloppy and typos and confusing writing aren't too hard to find but nothing that makes the experience infuriating or confusing.

There isn't much else to say, I'd say it is worth it for the asking price, it's simple, straightforward and you can see there was quite a bit of effort put into it.

EDIT 1: Added that the DLC for the other characters is free.

The juggernaut edition has quite a few improvements to the game. Mainly graphical improvements, most notably lightning and a foliages, as well as some texture work. Soundwise, the game also received some care, and a few new music tracks. There is a new map, Providence Ridge, focused on a small lumber town in the american mid-west.
The game is fun, and it seems most issues with multiplayer not working have been more or less solved, I've only lost connection twice in a few hours worth of games. Throughout the months the developers have added some new content, fixed some bugs and made some improvements that were requested by the community, and they don't show any signs of stopping. My only issue is that unless you have a microsoft account logged into your computer, should your internet connection go down, you'd be locked out of the game, since you'd have to log into a valid account to play the game. Other than that, it's pretty good.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the next big game from From Software, creators of Dark Souls and Bloodborne. Set in medieval Japan, you're a shinobi, on a quest to honor your code, to always look after your master no matter the circumstances. Graphically, the game is very impressive, the enviorments of the game do look like a war torn castle in the sengoku period, the animations are very well detailed. Different from Souls games, the game places much more emphasis on verticality. Rather than on a Dark Souls game where you could see things far and wide and if you could see it, you could probably get to it, the game requires you to keep looking up and down to find new paths to explore, new places to search and go on adventuring.
Sound-wise, the ambient tracks are great, the sounds of swords clashing and samurai grunting as you cut them down are very, very well made. Not to mention the music played during major battles with bosses.
However, that's most of the good things. Gamewise, the game punishes you far too often, far too hard and far too much for it to be enjoyable. Sure there is not much difficulty in cutting down most sort of enemeis, especially lowly samurai, but the mini-bosses are quite annoying, let alone the main bosses. Different from souls games, you can't just attack attack and attack until every enemy is in pieces right in front of you, you need to block, dodge, jump and most importantly deflect enemy attacks.
But how do you deflect attacks? By blocking at the moment a strike lands. On most enemeis this is not a problem, but when you get to bosses and mini bosses this becomes a problem since your blocking needs to be frame perfect in order to deflect the attack and MAYBE just give you a microscopic opening to swing your sword and inflict some damage on the enemy.
"OH but there's posture and vitality, if you want to beat the bosses you need to break posture!" Sure, okay, break posture and the enemy will be vulnerable to a deathblow, taking away one healthbar, no matter how full it is, but the problem is that most bosses not only recover posture quickly, they have a whole lot of it, so unless you have frame perfect reflexes the entire time, you'll find yourself draining vitality first rather than breaking posture. And then you have to do it all over again. On top of that, a lot of enemeis, especially bosses are twice your size and it is not all clear which attacks you can block, which ones you can deflect and which ones you absolutely must avoid or take damage.
Oh and when you die, you lose half of your money and half of the experience you've gathered.
The game is good, but it tries too hard at being challenging, often punishing you too much, too fast and too often for it to be enjoyable and for you to be able to actually learn something from your mistakes.

If you're going to play with keyboard and mouse, be warned, the controls are rather clunky. You can rebind most of the keys, though, at some points the same key does multiple functions and you either have to tap or hold them, though the game fails at telling you exactly how long to hold them or when to tap them properly, resulting in frustration, especially with the character performing actions you did not intend to.

If you can get over the clunky controls, the game runs pretty well performance wise. The story isn't something to write home about, but it is pretty interesting seeing the main character's development and the many conflicts he faces. This isn't a GTA clone and guns are an exception, most of the time you'll be beating up people with martial arts or sometimes crowbars, batons, knives, meat cleavers in what can only be described as a throwback to the 60 - 70s martial arts movies. The animations for this are flawlessly done.

Overall, the game is fun, though the map feels very small and limited to those who have played GTA games or any other open world game. If it is on sale, get it. It might be dated with its mechanics and some of the graphics, but it is worth playing.

Sunless skies, while not a direct sequel to Sunless Sea, it very much its spritiual predecessor. Though set in the same gothic, vitorian era universe, where london was stolen from the real world by bats and dropped into an underground sea in the first game, in Sunless Skies, the british crown, always yearning to extend the reach of its power, took to the skies and raised london from the murky depths, away from the zee, and into the cold expanse of the high wilderness.

The game improves on a lot of things when compared to Sunless Sea. The first and most noticeable thing is that it isn't as unforgiving as the first one. The game gives you an option for a merciful and a legacy mode. In merciful mode, there's always the autosave feature to fall back to, should you met your untimely demise. Legacy mode means permadeath. If your captain dies, there is nothing you can do but to carry on his legacy with his heir and whatever it is you inherit, be it a locomotive, the contents of his bank, and whatever profits the previous captain's affiliations yielded.

The combat in game is vastly improved when compared to sunless sea, as you now have much more direct control over it, having to aim the guns yourself by manouvering your space travelling train and firing the guns carefully so as to not overheat and leave you defenseless. There's a good deal of enemeis, be them other sky farers, monsters, marauders.

Altough I particularly prefered the writing in the first game (this one is not without mistakes), it is very please. The game does a good job of conveying a story briefly, yet, concisely, allowing you to clearly picture it in your imagination, while also leaving enough room for your imagination to run around.

Pretty much, the combat, the trading of cargo are secondary to the exploration and story of the game, the attempt of overcoming that sheer horror of the unknown, of what lurks ahead. Terror plays a good part in this game, and let's just say that flying around with a ship full of terrified crewman for a while is not good. The game lets you know this by the number of events that happen when you crew is terrorized. Be it an encounter with with a frozen corpse smacking against your engine and leaving the crew terrified, or a broken window that lets in the light of the stars, threatening to take your and your crewmen into a slow, painful slide into star madness.

The graphics are very good, the art style really does a good job of underscoring the gothic, mysterious and even gloomy backdrop of the story of the game. The soundtrack is also top notch quality, be it when you are exploring a gloomy part of the high wilderness, or a jolly tune filling your engine as you slowly but surely come close to home. The weapons also sound very satysfying, with cannons belling out a loud roar when you fire them, and the sound of screeching metal being torn apart when combat is over.

Overall, sunless skies improves many of the shortcomings of Sunless Sea, while managing to still retain its gloomy, fatalistic atmosphere throughout the game. It is not a game for those without patience, or the will to try again and again and yet again when you are met with failure.

A bunch of space dwarves square off against all sorts of bugs and hazards to mine precious ores.

That is basically what the game is, and honestly, it does it pretty good. It is a LOT of fun to play co-op with 4 people, especially when huge waves of bugs come about. If you have no friends to play with or lack an internet connection, the gave supplies you with a bot that will not only aid you in combat, and mining, but will also revive you and attack specific targets. And guess what, the AI controlling it is super!.

The enviorments are very well done, each with its quirks, such as lightning crystals that will fry you, radiation crystals, dense jungle that will not let you see anything, blizzards that might just freeze you, magma... The enviorment itself ends up being one of the main enemeis, even though there's giant armored bugs that explode into a cloud of acid.

Graphic wise, the voxel-y style suits this game very well and the lightning is just breathtaking!

This is one of the few early access games that even though is not finished, has it's bugs (both as enemeis and as "features"), is in a sufficiently playable state, receives good support from the developers, and is actually going places!