Πρόσφατες κριτικές από τον Killah Zillah

The Rating System: Good refers to the obvious positive qualities, the Bad is reserved for nitpicks and gripes that don't necessarily ruin the experience, the Ugly is for the worst parts of the game, meant for serious consideration before purchase.


The Good:

Call of Pripyat has a lot of positives to name, though based mostly on this author's personal taste.

For gameplay, it's a very challenging game, with each bullet or enemy presenting a serious threat, as damage is high, ammo is scarce and repairs are expensive. You cannot easily hoard money in CoP, as the merchants in the game will only buy quality equipment, and equipment that is in top quality is exceedingly rare. Every hit you take makes you bleed, and depending on your armor, will eventually cause you to bleed to death if not handled right away. The game also uses a Resident Evil 4 style inventory system, but with a realistic weight value, restricting you to only a handful of equipment at a time.

The NPC's don't excessively spout greetings and throw unsolicited trivia at you as soon as you walk anywhere near them like in a Bethesda game, they talk to you when they feel like it, or until directly spoken to. This actually makes the game feel more warm and inviting. A colony of people who were rather cold at first, never saying anything until directly spoken to before, become happy to see you and wave as you come in the door with some even asking how you've been, then adding a little disappointed comment when you walk off without saying hi back. What's more, because there's little voice acting in the game, the character's "performances" are up to your imagination, and their dialogue is nice. Each quest you do pays off tremendously, either long term or short term, as each ruble you acquire is valuable, and having friends is even more valuable in the Zone.

The AI is pretty smart, taking cover and using their equipment intelligently. The animal AI is even more impressive to me. As an example, sometimes you see packs of wild dogs play-fighting together, resting by a gas station before the pack leader barks and they begin roaming off again. Oftentimes, you'll find monsters attacking NPC's, and you have a dynamic choice to try and save them - which is hard, but helps you make friends and leads to a convenient trader if you're carrying too many goods, since you can trade with anyone - or let them die for their equipment and deal with the weakened monster yourself.

To summarize, it's a very very very immersive game, where the immersion comes from the gameplay itself. Just don't expect it to be easy, get used to quick saving often. Thankfully the game only needs to load once and it loads quickly.


The Bad:

It's a pretty buggy game at times. On one occasion, I reloaded a quicksave and found one of my friendly follower NPC's crouching over and over and marked as an enemy on my HUD. Every time you reload a save, enemy behavior resets, so sometimes a fight will have a weird cease fire for a couple seconds, letting you get a free kill until they notice you're there again. There's a story, but it's lacking in substance. There's no grand goal to work towards, the game's main questline is about checking out some downed helicopters. Instead, it's all about meeting neat characters, interacting with the world and discovering the hidden lore sprinkled throughout the environment. The game also really doesn't like being alt-tabbed, and will crash with irritating frequency when you do, and you *will* need to alt-tab at some point because of two reasons: 1, the game is VERY stingey with hints on certain quests and you'll find yourself visiting the wiki often, and 2..


The Ugly:

The game has no native functionality with Steam. Even if you do force the game to recognize Steam input (such as opening the shift-tab overlay), the game will take 10x longer to load. The first time I tried loading the game with Steam input on, it took literally 15 minutes to load, when it usually only takes about 10 seconds for me. It also has a VERY obnoxious visual sway effect every time you start moving, and I don't mean a subtle one. The camera sways like a hypnotist's watch, back and forth and back and forth and - etc. It made me so motion sick that I and I had to mod the game to remove the effect, as the console command option I googled up never worked for me.


Final verdict: 8/10

A very exciting, challenging shooter, with a very immersive world and an unengaging main story that requires you to stop, talk to people and take in the environment if you want to learn anything more about it. It had a lot of little problems, but they were either ignorable or were easily fixed. This is my first STALKER game, and I'm glad I picked it to be my introduction to the series. The game is so effectively balanced that every fight is thrilling. It raised the bar on what I considered fun in a first person shooter, and now feel compelled to recreate that same feeling whenever I play a different first person shooter.

It feels like Morrowind crossed with Dark Souls (and I don't mean because it's hard): Combine the eerie, alien atmosphere and silent NPC's of Morrowind, with the thrilling, intelligently designed and perfectly balanced combat of Dark Souls, and you get STALKER. If you don't like a game with an excessive focus on realism or challenge, or a game whose story is mostly told to you by NPC text dumps and through exploring the environment, then you may not like this game as much as I did. Not all games are for all players, and this is a prime example of a game that was designed for a niche audience looking for a very specific kind of experience - again reminding me of Dark Souls.

One final note: You WILL go native for slav culture playing this game. Stay cheeki breeki, stalkers.

The Rating System: Good refers to the obvious positive qualities, the Bad is reserved for nitpicks and gripes that don't necessarily ruin the experience, the Ugly is for the worst parts of the game, meant for serious consideration before purchase.


The Good:

The game banks its success mostly on you laughing at its intentionally childish sense of humor. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, because if Borderlands 2 doesn't make you laugh, it'll quickly wear you down as its sophomoric sense of humor is literally everywhere. Sex jokes, poop jokes, it takes everything that a 12 year old would laugh at and dials it to 11. While the main story wasn't really that great to me beyond getting to know the game's main villain, the DLC is fantastic. The DLC is the real reason you play Borderlands 2. The DLC quests are chock full of interesting environments to explore, new enemies who break the ho-hum feeling the normal game gives you, and loads of silly characters to meet and interact with.

The game has a mechanic that allows for hundreds of thousands of weapon combinations to spawn, and while there is no gun customization, the guns can appear with literally ANY kind of feature or part. A shotgun that shoots explosives with a sniper scope? A burst fire sniper rifle with iron sights? A rapid fire RPG with acid rounds? All can be found in the game with entirely randomized parts, meaning that every gun - even guns you've already seen before - are capable of being different from one another in big ways.

The gameplay is very addictive and fun, giving you frequent upgrades and allowing you to gradually shape your character to your prefered playstyle. You're also able to tweak your character with mini-levels the game calls Badass Ranks, acquired by just playing the game. Kill a certain number of enemies with crits using your favorite gun? Badass rank. Upgrade your inventory? Badass rank. They give very small bonuses, but they add up quickly over time.


The Bad:

Nearly every side quest in this game is lifeless and arbitrary. I do a side quest because I want to see what other interesting things the game has to offer. The tasks they send you on are more often than not, very generic fare such as, "go here and kill X amount of bad guys" or, "go there and gather X amount of junk". The quest givers rarely even give you so much as a thank you for going out of your way to help them. Not only do they lack a fun objective, usually the rewards aren't even worth getting, as by the time you've gotten around to doing these side quests, you're so high leveled that the low level trinkets they reward you with are immediately sold for chump change.

To summarize, a large majority of the content is very boring with almost no fanfare or worthwhile reward to make you feel satisfied for doing it, they're mostly there just to level up off of.

I strongly dislike how there are NO hitscan guns in the game. A life time of FPS games and general gun knowledge tells me that a bullet should be traveling faster than my human eye can percieve, so I always aim directly at my target rather than leading it slightly, causing a ton of really frustrating misses. To add to that, if your gun doesn't have a holosight, the iron sights on anything but pistols are also weirdly off, requiring you to aim the iron sight a good 1 or 2 inches BELOW where you want the shot to go. They're practically useless for aiming with, you're mostly just going to have to get used to aiming with a vague idea of where the center of your screen is.


The Ugly:

The game locks off the ability to turn up the difficulty, yet keeps the enemy and loot levels static, meaning that the game becomes numbingly boring after a certain point just because nothing can threaten you anymore and rewards become worthless. The only way to raise difficulty is to beat the game and reset everything back to the start, but even then the enemy and loot levels are only RAISED, not scaled. To have them actually stay consistently challenging and rewarding, you have to beat the game TWICE. This kind of arbitrary locking off of challenge until you've ground through the game over and over makes the game absolutely unworthy of beating more than once. Once you've beaten it, you've seen everything the game has to offer and you're only going through the motions with the same overpowered character again, crushing all opposition in the same boring fashion all for the chance of finally having a decent challenge later. It ruins this game's lastability. You can't even select a new character with a higher difficulty, it just starts you off on Normal if you pick a different character, forcing you to then make THEM beat the entire game twice.

It makes NO sense, and exists only to pad out the playtime. Either make the enemies scale with my level like every other modern RPG has learned to do, or allow me to select the higher difficulty options for all future playthroughs after beating the game once. Doing neither just wastes my time and forces me into repetition just so I can squeeze one more drop of blood from the same stone.


Final verdict: 6/10

Fun for a while, with a really enjoyable off-beat sense of humor, but the game's shelf life is very short compared to other RPG's as stagnation sets in due to a lack of proper difficulty and reward scaling. You will plateau around level 35, as the game sadly loses steam. Enemies and loot become less challenging and less rewarding, while requiring exceeding amounts of grinding to ever see an improvement in either.

The Rating System: Good refers to the obvious positive qualities, the Bad is reserved for nitpicks and gripes that don't necessarily ruin the experience, the Ugly is for the worst parts of the game, meant for serious consideration before purchase.


The Good:

The game plays very smoothly, it has excellent optimization with plenty of options. The controls are simple and easy to understand once you find their hidden, "optional" keys. For example the, "switch between primary and secondary" action isn't bound to anything by default. Until I found it, I would panic constantly as I was forced to go through a weapon juggling routine every time I needed to switch between secondary and primary, which led to several deaths just from that alone. I hit my stride once I found it and the other options like it. If the controls aren't agreeing with you, take a long hard look at the options menu, there's likely something there to help. It's good that they didn't go one way or the other and made these things optional, but the more intuitive options should be on by default, or at least something you can choose between in the tutorial map.

Something I like is how the game rewards you with slight XP and cash bonuses for your performance, but your performance is not linked only to your kill/death ratio. You can top score your team by focusing primarily on the objective, resupplying with ammo, healing and reviving teammates, there's loads of ways you can be a valuable player on the team besides purely killing.

The weapons and gear are comfortable and behave how you would expect, and all 13 classes have a special ability that can be tide turningly effective if used properly. The gameplay itself consists of your standard FPS multiplayer fare, but the rounds are very short and loud, the kind of thing that feels exhausting after only 30 minutes just because there's so much going on. It's like potato chips versus a pizza: One requires you to stop on occasion to get up and grab another slice, allowing you time to enjoy it as well as notice how full you're getting from it. The other is sweet and all in one handful, meant to be eaten quickly one after the other until you've eaten the entire bag and feel slightly sick. That's a praise and a criticism at the same time, as it's definitely fun, but it's a very repeatitive and exhausting kind of fun. It's great in short bursts, like Ruffles cool ranch.


The Bad:

Dirty Bomb is flawed fun, with some things that get in the way. I find the main menu interface to be cluttered and confusing, a mess to the eyes that takes a long time to figure out, with too many redundant menus. It takes a lot of messing with menus just to change a single loadout card for example, when that process could be much quicker and simplified.

It's true what they say, you're going to get your ass kicked when you first start playing, but a part of why that is, is because players who've spent the most money or the most time can have 3 passive upgrades that give big advantages such as bonus health after dying, bonus movement speed, bonus melee damage, etc. While it's possible to get these things for yourself via hours and hours of grinding or with real money, it's very unforgiving to new players who don't have a single passive upgrade and just the two starter classes to play.


The Ugly:

I really dislike the card system it uses. If I get a really good upgrade with an ugly skin, I'm forced to use it anyway or be at a disadvantage. If I want to only use one of the weapons on the upgrade card but not the other, too bad. You can only use the game's pre-made loadouts, there is absolutely no creativity allowed with this system. The prices on these cards are outrageous at that, 5,000 credits or 3 dollars for a single card! Imagine without random item drops or trading, where you HAD to buy individual weaponry. It's nice that you can at least buy a specific card, but it's still a very restrictive system that requires weeks of grinding (all while being outgunned in every match you're in), because of the cost. You either get to spend your weeks of credits on a new loadout, or save for a month just to unlock a new character to play.

On that note..

The game has plenty of random crate drops, but because of how expensive classes are, chances are likely that it's not even for a class you have. You only get 2 classes out of the 13 class roster to start. They range from 30,000 - 50,000 ingame credits, or 10 bucks a pop. This is a LOT to ask for something that should be accessable from the start to help level the playing field for new players just trying to find what they're good at, and yet another reason why new players have such a short lifespan. It's hard to learn what a class does when you can so rarely have access to them. They could fix most of the game's balance issues by removing class purchasing entirely, making the skinless cards dirt cheap, making cards only drop for classes you have, or introducing Steam trading and community market support.

I'm unsure if this is really something to count against the game itself, but I would want to know something like this before purchasing a game, so I'll include it incase you do too. The Dirty Bomb community has a LOT of negative, quarrelsome and stereotypically rude players in it, the kind that people who aren't "gamers" tend to think of when they hear that phrase, who go into temper tantrums and spit homophobic slurs every four seconds. There's a client side mute function, but it's very weird. You hold Tab to show the scoreboard, then press left click to make your mouse pointer show, then select a player's name off the scoreboard to mute them. There's also vote kicking, but nobody ever seems to vote kick the rude players. Thankfully the devs are working on the game often enough that that may become a non-issue in the future.

These kinds of people - as is often the case - are NOT the majority and if you don't think this applies to you, then it probably doesn't. That being said, there is certainly a large enough pool of these kinds of players to make it worth warning about. This problem may stem from both the high skill requirement it takes to survive a second in this game, as well as the fact that failure results in very few credits. When a round can average about 600 credits out of 50,000 for just one new class to play, there's going to be a lot of pressure to succeed.


Final Verdict: 5/10

Functionally fun gameplay marred by its awkward user interface, abundance of hyper aggressive players, needlessly expensive loadout system with all but 2 of its 13 classes locked behind paywalls. It's fun enough to recommend, but it's not for everyone, and very hard to get into. I don't mind spending money on TF2 for its user friendly design, and the fact that the only things you "have" to spend money on are cosmetic. Things like classes should be free, or at least very cheap or unlockable through normal play. Pay to win is an ugly term, and it's hopping right up to that line when players with WAY more money or time to put into the game, get way more basic gameplay options than the standard 2 classes with only 1 strict loadout a piece.

The Rating System: Good refers to the obvious positive qualities, the Bad is reserved for nitpicks and gripes that don't necessarily ruin the experience, the Ugly is for the worst parts of the game, meant for serious consideration before purchase.


The Good:

Broforce is a game, like Hotline Miami, that banks on its cool factor to draw you in. You play as recognizable pop culture icons, each having wildly varying abilities, such as the Terminator, John Rambo, and Neo from The Matrix. If crossovers are something you like, this game has it in spades, with numerous references everywhere. You can tell the developers had a blast making the game, and love their chosen subject matter just as much as their audience. A game BY action movie fans, FOR action movie fans. Gameplay is built around very simple to understand, intuitive mechanics: You've got a basic attack, a special ability and a punch button. You start with a random character, your only goal is to reach the end and kill a non-threatening demon or tough boss, and terrain can be broken by shooting or punching it. However, the true meat of this experience comes from how unpredictable the game is. Sometimes you're forced to tunnel under the enemy for a surprise attack. Sometimes you have to shape the terrain into a set of stairs or platforms to pass an area because an explosion happened that you weren't expecting. The biggest element of randomness comes from the characters themselves. You spawn with a randomly selected character, and since you never know who you're going to get, you're constantly forced to radically alter playstyle and re-evaluate the level on a moment to moment basis every time you die. You may be given a character with a massively powerful weapon that knocks you back when you use it, you might be given a super fast character that's tricky to control, you might be given one with no ranged attack at all and relies entirely on traps, melee or grenade throws. Despite how that sounds, it's challenging, but never overwhelming and certainly never complicated. This mechanic makes the game stay fresh even when you've beaten it time and time again, as no two playthroughs are exactly the same.

BroForce is random by design, intending to give you the most gut busting "what the crap was that?!" moments it can, and the mere fact that you're playing as action movie stars in such a cartoonishly over the top world with such easily accessable pick-up-and-play simplicity make it a hilarious burst of fun for an hour or two.


The Bad

The screen is zoomed out just a little too much, making it difficult to tell who's who when you're playing with a friend. There's a couple of characters that have flaws that make certain parts of the game unfinishable until you can get a different one. For example, Highlander is extremely slow, which means that if you're stuck with him on a part that requires you to move quickly - such as if an unkillable boss monster is chasing you - then you must simply die and hope for a faster character to be chosen when you respawn. The game has plenty of levels, the level design is fine, but the game itself has long strings of levels where there are few completely new enemies or hazards to play with, and because of the inherant simplicity, that can make the game boring for some people. While it doesn't bother this author in the slightest, the constant overuse of the phrase "bro", may irritate some players after a while, and its constant ridiculousness could wear you out. It really isn't a game that's meant to be played for very long.


The Ugly:

The bugs are its biggest downfall. On the final boss in particular, I had actually succeeded against him several times, but for whatever reason the.. for the purpose of avoiding spoilers, "cutscene" wouldn't happen, making the camera freeze until I paused and restarted the entire level over. On semi-rare occasions, the level wouldn't load properly and entire sections of the map would be missing, making it unplayable until I closed the program and restarted it. Another major failing is a lack of tutorial. If you aren't familiar with the characters you're playing as, then their abilities will likely be completely foreign to you, and you'll be wondering what the hell you're supposed to be doing with them or why they're behaving so differently. Take Leon the Professional for example. His punch button isn't a punch at all. It teleports you in any direction, even through single block walls, and he's the only character who's like that. His special ability is to mark enemies for an off screen sniper to kill, the only one that does that too. I've never seen the movie this character is from, and as such, was left very frustrated at first when I lept down to try and punch an enemy only to appear down below the floor and into a bottomless pit, or tried to use their special ability infront of a super enemy and end up getting killed as the sniper wasn't able to finish them off fast enough. You can easily adapt and learn each character's abilities, but as I said, this could be easily remedied with a light tutorial when introducing the character.

Finally, it all boils down to this: Its greatest strength, its ease of play and simplicity, can also be its biggest failing for certain people. This is an arcade game at its heart, if you're looking for a fulfilling experience that'll allow you to dump hours upon hours into it (ex: Fallout), or some in-depth strategic gameplay (ex: Team Fortress 2), you should know that this may not be your game. If you just want to blow up some bad guys using satisfying methods that're almost entirely up to your own imagination, laughing at the constant movie references while high fiving your friends, then give it a try.


Final Verdict: 7/10

The occasional bugs are often enough to take a couple points off and the flaws in some of the characters bring it down an additional point, but were these issues patched and balanced out in future updates, I'd have nothing at all against the game. As my Mark of the Ninja review implies, I love games that offer you a simple goal, gives you the tools you need and leaves how you complete that goal almost entirely up to you. That's a big part of why I like this game so much, but it's the ridiculous dialed-up-to-eleven charm and hilarious unpredictability that make the game well worth the already cheap price in my opinion.

I also adore its theme song. \m/-

My shortest review, and it'll be like this on purpose.

Those of you who've read my reviews (few, but I appreciate those few <3 ) know how much I love going into detail about everything, being honest with every single negative thing I could find with a game. I have so much I want to say, but it'd be simply gushing about the game, praising it excessively, and that's almost what drove me away from the game. I'll keep it brief.


The Rating System: Good refers to the obvious positive qualities, the Bad is reserved for nitpicks and gripes that don't necessarily ruin the experience, the Ugly is for the worst parts of the game, meant for serious consideration before purchase.


The Good:

Its music is perfectly executed, it goes quiet when the game needs to give you a moment to take in what's happening, it gives tension to scenes just as you'd expect, and it's very memorable. The 8-bit art style doesn't hinder it whatsoever with me, it actually led to a ton of really well designed and very fun puzzles. The gameplay is sugar simple, easily accessible to any and all, challenging in all the right ways and throwing new ways to tackle each individual enemy in the game at you to keep the game fresh. It never once felt eclecticly designed, despite how often the "combat" would vary between enemy encounters.

The story is very simple surface-wise, but grows richer and deeper the longer you play. The game's true ending moved me to tears.

Every single speaking entity in this game is its own character, with its own likes, dislikes and goals. I wish I could give them all a big hug, and will miss them as I move on to other games.


The Bad:

I guess sometimes the savepoints are weirdly placed, but I think it was intentional, like giving you 5 different save points in the final rooms of the game was a way to heighten tension.


The Ugly:

Not. A. Single. Thing. Maybe you don't like the 8-bit art style, maybe you don't like the idea of bullet shooter gameplay mixed with RPG stats, but I truly believe that everyone could enjoy this game if it's given a chance, should they ignore how often it's been talked about in recent media (like I did, I was sick of hearing the name Undertale by the time I got around to playing it and just wanted to see what the fuss was about).


Final Verdict: 10/10

I award perfect scores to games that aren't necessarily flawless, but whose flaws never take away from the experience or make you wish to stop playing. This is one of those games. I wish I could have played it as a kid, I wish I could go back in time and tell myself to jump on the bandwagon and try it earlier, I wish I could wipe my memory and replay it a couple dozen times more to re-experience the whimsy, the fear, the laughter and the tears this game brought me. It's rare when I find a game that evokes such emotion from me, and I'm so thankful I gave this its fair chance.

Please, I'm begging anyone who reads my review.. give it a fair shot. It's not like FNaF or some other gimmicky fad-game, the love and care that was put into this game has EARNED its popularity, and I'm happy to call myself a fan of Undertale.

The Rating System: Good refers to the obvious positive qualities, the Bad is reserved for nitpicks and gripes that don't necessarily ruin the experience, the Ugly is for the worst parts of the game, meant for serious consideration before purchase.


The Good:

There's plenty good in the game, but I admit that most of it is aesthetic and story related rather than gameplay related. Its story is ten times deeper, with way way more content than the previous game. The characters are actually characters now, given personalities, backstories and purpose to their existance beyond a vehicle to act out power fantasies with. They all have motivations and goals, some good, some bad, and it leaves a lot open to your interpretation rather than framing the story in a way that is trying to force you to think a certain way of its characters ("this character is the bad guy because the bad guy music is playing and they talk in a mean voice", for a simple example). Its story is its main selling point, and if you were left hungry for more lore based on the first game - like myself - then Hotline Miami 2 will satisfy you completely. Very few questions are left unanswered here, and all loose ends are tied up in one way or another.

Its music, in my admittedly 90's biased opinion, is excellent. I consider it a major step up from HLM1, where the music wasn't really based on the decade beyond it being sythesized music. I also just happen to have a soft spot for the decade I grew up in, the music is almost nostalgic to me, with its accoustic guitars and pop sounds. There's also more music to hear in general, and almost all of it seems to fit within its period and scenes.

The environment's depth is easier to read. Bath tubs no longer block shots for example. The crashes are completely gone, not a single one throughout my many hours of play. Hitboxes in general are improved, the physics feel more natural to play with now - a hard thing to describe, but that's something I noticed immediately as I switched between games.


The Bad:

If combos were something you enjoyed in the previous game, they're a nightmarish chore here. Once you've beaten this game on Hard mode, you'll feel like God-emperor of Hotline Miami 1, as by comparison its better gameplay makes it piss-easy. Lets start on why:

Melee finishers now have a long pause between swings, no longer can you hammer the attack button to quickly finish someone off in a satisfying spray of gore. It used to be a fast paced and fun mechanic that the game rewarded you significantly for with bonus points and combo time extensions, now it's a laborious task with no gameplay benefit at all. Combine that slow execution speed with the REMOVAL of the aforementioned extended combo time entirely and melee finishers are completely worthless for combo chaining. This makes the knife the only truly useful melee weapon in the game for this reason alone, as it only takes a single brief slice to perform an execution.

This isn't always the case, but certain maps punish suicidal behavior by design, which is the opposite of what both games obviously still try to encourage from you. The biggest issue is its reliance on random pathing AI, which I'll expand upon in The Bad. Sometimes they'll throw every kind of enemy in one room at once, forcing you to carefully pick them off because each type of enemy has a specific weakness that the others lack (some can only be killed by melee, some can only be killed by ranged, some zoom towards you in an instant, etc). You're often forced to break the suicidal habits the game has been teaching you to slow down, let the enemy get into a better position and then attack, letting the chain die and create frustration even in victory.


The Ugly:

THE BUGS. I can't imagine why this game is so much more buggy than the first, considering the gameplay hasn't changed a bit. Enemies will get caught on corners and walls all the time, spinning in place. Doors will be open, but still block yours - and even the enemy's - swings and shots until one of you move away from it to die. You could be swinging your bat back and forth right over a dog's head and it won't feel a thing, giving it an unfair win as it slowly pounces upon you in your moment of confusion. It's more noticable in hard, but because of these weird collision bugs, enemies can sometimes wallhack their shots or pounces into you from angles they couldn't have possibly gotten you from. Trying to pick up weapons from the floor is ALSO buggy for some reason. In HLM1, picking up a weapon was simple: The closest one was always picked up. Here, it's anyone's guess. You'll stand over a shotgun while an enemy who requires bullet damage charges at you, despirately trying to pick it up while your character picks up a knife two feet away. The game is absolutely soul numbingly irritating because of all these bugs, causing repeated deaths for no other reason than the game simply deciding to stop being playable for a brief moment.

Like I said in The Bad, the random AI pathing breaks this game's fun factor almost entirely. An enemy who is immune to any kind of damage within your area can path away from the areas they spawned in (which are always full of their actual weakness, the level design's good in that regard) over into your area, where you have no chance of fighting them, or even wander out of doors into you when you're executing someone, unable to fight back. If an enemy was given the "roam" AI pattern, they can truly go anywhere they want, any time they want. Most people complain about the level design, but I see a lot of thought in it. I just wish they didn't allow the AI to roam so far, it'd let that good design shine through. As it stands, the cheap game overs because an enemy decided to walk over from (literally) half the map away into you ruins that good map design and cripples ones enjoyment of the game. For this reason, it's not actually a hard game, it's an unpredictable game. Because of this excessively random AI pathing, a lot of the time your combo chain - or mere survival - is simply up to the fickle whims of the game's code rather than 100% based on your own twitchy timing, planning and skill. Combined with all the bugs in the environment, the worthlessness of melee finishers and the AI pathing, it often becomes a mess that slows the pace of the game down and plays against every instinct you've aquired while playing, giving endless frustration to both combo junkies and new players just trying to survive. Its random elements are a difficulty supplement, there's (almost) no skill involved in these moments, where nothing could have been done to prevent them. ♥♥♥♥ just happens in Hotline Miami 2, and in a way that actually fits the overall downer tone of the story. For all I know, the bugs are intentional just to make the player's efforts feel as apocalyptically pointless as its heroes' are.


Final Verdict: 5/10

Its story, more appropriately themed music and stellar presentation hold it up. However, because its gameplay is so bugged or frustrating to deal with due to the AI pathing, I cannot rate it above "average". Were the gameplay intentionally secondary to the story, something like The Wolf Among Us or another visual novel type of "game", I would rate it much higher. As it stands, 80% of your playtime is going to be in the game itself, and the game itself is very flawed. If most of your time within it is unpleasant, then I cannot recommend it. It's like an exaggerated version of its predecessor: More flash, more bang, more awesome music, but also more bugs, more inconsistent AI patterns and more irritation based on even more random stuff you couldn't possibly have accounted for. To sum it all up, it's Hotline Miami (x2), for better or worse.

Play it if you want to know more about the lore, or if you're an absolute masochist and enjoy the feeling of your blood pressure rising. Otherwise, I'd recommend passing on Hotline Miami 2.

The Rating System: Good refers to the obvious positive qualities, the Bad is reserved for nitpicks and gripes that don't necessarily ruin the experience, the Ugly is for the worst parts of the game, meant for serious consideration before purchase.


The Good:

Who hasn't wanted to talk about this game once they've played it? What can be said that hasn't already been said? This part of the review will be difficult to write, but I'll do my best. Hotline Miami's gameplay isn't very original by itself. It's a perspective brawler, how many other games can wear that hat? But Hotline Miami is much more brutal than others of the genre, and it relishes in that fact. Every sound effect and visceral spray of blood is deliciously satisfying. This is a game of superlatives that banks on its coolness to carry it. Even its creators poke fun at how its gameplay is all style and satisfaction over any real substance. "Was any of it worth it?" "Didn't you at least have fun?" The gameplay is extremely unforgiving of any mistakes, and if you love challenges as much as me, that will only entice you. If you take the game's own advice and stop being scared of dying, getting into the mindset of a remorseless killer rather than a careful planner, you'll find success coming a lot quicker and easier - yes, easier. The game will become a lot more fun if you stop trying to treat it like other games and indulge in as much suicidal behavior as you can. You have to deprogram the mentality that you are valuable or you'll find many repeat deaths. If you cease to care if you die, you'll have fewer deaths and generally less frustration with them. Once you hit your stride, you may become as addicted as Jacket himself to the act of senseless killing. It's a heavy drug, so try not to overdose. Its stylish presentation and pulse pounding gameplay is worth the already relatively cheap price in my opinion.

The story is thin, but has just enough interesting moments and plot elements that it never becomes boring, it simply leaves a lot up to interpretation. If you like speculative fiction, Hotline Miami may satisfy that part of your tastes too. It takes place in a reality where Russia won the Cold War, about a man who recieves mysterious messages on his answering machine that tell him to murder the Russian mafia living among us. I won't give any more spoilers about the game, as to say more would be pretty much summarizing the game's entire, scant amount of story outside of simply exploring the mind of the player character, Jacket. The top down perspective and retro aesthetic are wonderfully over the top, but there are problems and limitations with it that I'll get into later. If you like the 80's and all its bravado, from cheesy Arnold Shwarzenegger power fantasy movies to gore filled horror ala Friday the 13th, this is a must own as the atmosphere is so thick with synthesizers and blood that you'll almost choke on it.

It would almost be a crime to talk about Hotline Miami and neglect mentioning its soundtrack. The music is perfectly implemented, and I'm probably reading too much into it, but I feel that every track has its purpose. Bright and exciting when in combat, seeming to imply that the only time the player character feels alive is when he's murdering, but the second it's over the music turns ominous and unsettling, symbolic of how the horror of what he has done has sunk in for our "protagonist" and all he wants to do now is run away. The post-mission results screen's music is hauntingly soothing, growing more upbeat the further away he gets from the crime scene, showing how relaxed he's becoming again. The track at the start of each job is otherworldly and jarringly different from the rest of the game. I believe that it's symbolic of him "giving in" to his dark urges as he gets another reason from his phone to kill again, grim yet satisfying like a drug addict getting their next fix. He always had this addiction, and the gentle pushing from anonymous messages on his answering machine is all the excuse he needs to indulge that addiction.


The Bad:

The top down perspective and 8-bit art design can make it difficult to interpret the environment correctly, leading to a lot of deaths on that alone. You'll often find it hard to tell what's solid, what's cover and what's low enough to the ground to be shot over (for example, bath tubs provide cover, but pool tables do not). I'd often get killed trying to take cover behind something that isn't actually cover, and all of this is due to the limitations of a top down perspective. There's many secrets in the game, some of which are literally pixels worth of size that get lost in the intentionally undetailed 8-bit environments, but thankfully these aren't required to be found in order to beat the game. The AI, if you are playing carefully, is very unpredictable. Sometimes they'll wander out of rooms they were previously walking in circles within, sometimes they'll just snap-aim at you, while other times taking a full 2 seconds to realize you're near. If you're trying to take this game slow, it will become a teeth grinding chore to beat. Combine that unpredictability with the fact that any damage you take will instantly kill you and you will initially find yourself tip-toeing through the game's stages, which the game will actually punish you for. In order to acquire new abilities and gear, you have to earn a high score, and the game will detract from your score for playing it safely. You must play this game the way IT wants to be played, rather than the other way around. Taking your time gives few unlocks, and the game will even give you sarcastic ratings like, "Playstyle: Coward". Hotline Miami is like a party-loving bro friend: A magnetic personality and amazing fun to be around, but you're going to have to put up with a lot of its obnoxious habits and demands to prove your worth through suicidal challenges ("UPSIDE-DOWN BEER CHUGGING! WOO!").

Oh, and this is without a doubt the pettiest thing I can gripe about, but half the achievements have blatant grammar and spelling mistakes. Please proofread your stuff, fellas. Hotline Miami has achieved cult classic status and is a gaming phenomenon, treat it like one.


The Ugly:

Dear Christmas will this game crash on you. It will crash and crash and crash, and after so many deaths and time spent on even one stage, you may feel the urge to take a baseball bat to your computer in frustration. If you're running on Widows 8.1 like me, try going into the game's installation folder and right clicking on HotlineMiami.exe, then setting its compatibility settings to Windows XP Service Pack 3. It'll crash a lot less, but using the Steam overlay (shift-tab) will sometimes make the game crash too.


Final Verdict: 6/10

Despite me harshly criticizing it and despite that cold score above, I actually am somewhat addicted to Hotline Miami. I come back to it again and again, I want to indulge in every bit of lore and fan art I can find on it, and can't wait to try its sequel to find some answers to the questions the first game left for me. However, the issues I find with it are so glaring and hard to deal with that I admit that my love of it is probably a symptom of gaming Stockholm Syndrome. It's absolutely not for everyone. The skull-breaking difficulty combined with frequent crashes and half-random AI is enough in my mind to justify warning readers that it might not be for them. If you aren't into the game's atmosphere and retro NES level difficulty isn't something that appeals to you, maybe pass on Hotline Miami. That being said, I still believe that said flair and atmosphere are worth the price on their own, and for that reason I can still recommend it.

Please help me. I'm in an abusive relationship with this game.

The Rating System: Good refers to the obvious positive qualities, the Bad is reserved for nitpicks and gripes that don't necessarily ruin the experience, the Ugly is for the worst parts of the game, meant for serious consideration before purchase.


The Good:

The gameplay is very unique. You're given a large map with hazards, enemies and tools, and 90% of the time, the way you complete the objective is completely up to you. Freedom is the name of the game here. You're given two items of your choice, a grappling hook and infinite throwing darts, but never do you feel overpowered. The darts are non-lethal, useful for distracting enemies or disabling certain map related objects like power lines. There are unlockable suits for your ninja that change your playstyle drastically. Some take away killing items (such as spiked caltrop traps) in favor of extra distraction items (like smoke bombs and fire crackers). Some take away your sword, giving you a non-lethal takedown attack, but disable unrealistic abilities like bullet time and looking through walls. These suits can shake up the gameplay significantly even once you get bored of it, or further enhance whatever chosen playstyle you've picked.

The level design is extremely well done, every map feels different and grants you as many options as your imagination can cook up for how to beat the enemies, or even AVOID them. That's right, you don't even have to kill anyone if you don't want to, and you get major bonuses for it rather than act like a stereotypical Hollywood ninja and go on a slaughter fest - though you still CAN, you'd then have to cleverly hide the body, or pose it in a manner that frightens other enemies in order to make up the lost points from the no-kill bonus. At the end of each level, you're graded based on score, number of optional objectives completed (which are fun, understandable and in no way a sidetracking chore), and number of secrets found. These grades give you points to spend on new techniques, such as one that lets you pull enemies through doors or down manholes for a silent insta-kill, or one that lets you string up dead guards to lamp posts to scare their friends, which is both useful and sadistically funny. The aforementioned scrolls are the game's way of livening up the world outside of cutscenes, giving little mini-backstories to characters and enriching the lore. There's also a hidden challenge scroll in every level, taking you to a room sans enemies with a very smartly designed puzzle to complete using the game's mechanics. These were so much fun for me that I searched like a rabid dog for each and every one of the challenge scrolls. I absolutely love the gameplay and level design of Mark of the Ninja.

The game's style and cutscenes remind me a lot of Samurai Jack, giving me an almost nostalgic feeling. The animation is smooth and stylish, matching the sort of cartoon story perfectly. Though there's mature themes here and there, the cutscenes and action within the gameplay itself are all just over the top enough that you can still take it seiously. It hits the same kind of balance of Samurai Jack between over the top action and serious theming that I can see this fitting right at home on a late night Cartoon Network special. The voice acting is quite good, very fitting and enjoyable, it's just such a shame that they weren't given very many scenes to flesh out their characters somewhat, which I will cover in the Ugly below. The music is memorable and perfectly timed with your actions within the game. Though they often reuse tracks, they're very well made and fitting tracks, so you'll likely never feel tired of any given one. It does its job effectively, complementing rather than distracting.


The Bad:

Some of the unlockable abilities in the game are of questionable use, such as a spin-kick that knocks out guards who have spotted you. Unless you're playing on Normal difficulty, guards will insta-kill you before you can perform it. You're also likely to restart when you've been spotted, as having a guard raise the alarm takes a heavy tax on your score of -800 points, punishing you harshly for making mistakes. If you're trying to aquire more techniques and tools, the reset button becomes your heavily abused friend very quickly, as you'll rather be reset a minute or two back than sacrifice precious upgrade points. The game's intentionally dark style often makes it hard to distinguish your character from the background, especially if you're wearing black colored suits. I've sometimes had to reset simply because I lost track of my character and wandered into a guard, against a hazard that gave too much noise, or into the light causing me to get spotted. These moments can be remedied by turning up the ingame brightness or wearing brighter colored suits, but the former defeats the aesthetic they were going for and the latter could potentially limit your playstyle, since as said before, each non-default suit has a weakness along with a buff, making the standard ninja costume the most balanced of them all. The story, despite the praises I sung in the Good, is mostly window dressing that can be glossed completely over in favor of the gameplay. The cutscenes never last more than three or four minutes, which is likely due to Indie developer budgets (as well as not wanting to distract the player from their game for too long, but I digress).


The Ugly:

I never found any flaws that ruined the game, but this section is meant for flaws big enough to consider before purchase, and there are a couple worth mentioning. The game uses a checkpoint system: Pass over a given spot, game saves for you to return to it at any time. This is nice, but the placement is odd at times. Sometimes it'd save one place after another, while on rare occasions I could be reset a good 10 to 15 minutes of progress because I died or got spotted, which gets very frustrating in the later missions. The game is fun enough that it never became a deal breaker for me or caused me to quit in frustration, but it's worth mentioning as one of the game's "major" flaws.

Here is where my previous comment about fleshing out the characters comes into play: The game's very short on actual content beyond what you as the player decide to do (things like no-kill runs, completionist runs, slaughter-runs, player based things like that). It has about 12 levels and 1 additional level if you buy the game's only DLC, which is good for its price of 15 bucks for the game and its DLC, but I really enjoyed the story despite how thin it was and craved for more. The main character's movement can be sticky at times, where you'll be despirately trying to hop off of a wall and end up jumping onto another one, or where you're trying to climb down a ledge and you end up slipping off of it into a guard's field of vision. It hampers the flow in corridors and vents, and can sometimes cause a restart. A lot of actions are mapped to the B button (I don't recall what it is on the keyboard, I never used it). Sometimes I'd be trying to pick up a corpse off of the floor to drag it into a hiding place before anyone notices and I'd end up repeatedly ducking into a cover spot, wasting time and causing someone to eventually come over to investigate. It was pretty annoying, but again, not something I believe really breaks the game enough to stop playing it.


Final verdict: 10/10

I award perfect scores for games that aren't flawless, but whose flaws never take away from how fun the game is, or make you wish to stop playing. Nothing is flawless afterall, and Mark of the Ninja is so much fun that despite its short content, you'll be playing for hours and hours, finding new ways to approach its objectives and enemies, experimenting with playstyles and drinking in that nostalgic Cartoon Network aesthetic. I absolutely adore this game and cannot recommend it enough.

This review has been UPDATED, current as of May 2016. Payday 2 changes significantly very often, compared to other games.


The Rating System: Good refers to the obvious positive qualities, the Bad is reserved for nitpicks and gripes that don't necessarily ruin the experience, the Ugly is for the worst parts of the game, meant for serious consideration before purchase.


The Good:

There is much good to be said about Payday 2. Though it borrows a lot of elements from other games, it does so skillfully. It brings in the deep and natural stealth of Metal Gear Solid, the restorative health and headshot based combat of classic Halo, and the specialized class building of many RPG's. You've got your healer, your damage dealer, your utility, stealth and all-arounder classes, but unlike most class based systems, you aren't forced to pick only one and stick with it. You are free to pick and mix abilities however you wish, allowing for literally any playstyle you can imagine. Want to be a shotgun medic? That's doable. Hate bulky suits but don't want to be useless in a high difficulty setting? Try out the Dodge perks. Something that I personally adore is the Perk Deck system. Hate the grind for XP? Now you can turn what were once meaningless numbers inbetween levels into SETS of entirely new abilities, each XP point being converted into perk deck points to spend on enhancing your skills even further.

Weapon customization has a plethora of options, but few of them add anything significant that change how the gun is "meant" to function. For a singular example, the most damage you can add to a majority of the weaponry is 8 points, usually at the cost of more than half of its accuracy. Since most guns in the game have between 40 and 80 damage, an extra 8 points doesn't really add anything, especially since 40 points is all it takes to kill most enemies with a single headshot. For this reason, weapon customization is restrictive, but very understandable for most players, as it's less about making your gun specialized and more about directly upgrading it, usually its stability and accuracy as those stats have the most abundant mods with the most significant changes (between 4 and 12 points on average).

The game has weapon skins, like TF2 and CS:GO. Unlike TF2 or CS:GO, crate keys can be found for free very rarely after any heist you finish, something that neither game can boast about. Even if you don't want the skins (for yourself or as a concept), the extra two dollars for nothing more than sheer luck is likely enough to make most people satisfied with their existance. The skins themselves are pretty creative for the most part, some are grounded in reality while others are Nerf level wacky. There's probably something there you'll like, and most aren't very expensive.

The game's heists, its main reason for playing, are very varied and a majority are pretty fun. Some favor doing it in stealth, some have no stealth at all, a couple are only stealth, you're able to pick pretty much anything depending on your prefered playstyle or mood. The locations are interesting, sometimes you'll be jumping out of a cargo plane in mid-air, sometimes you're robbing a Las Vegas casino, sometimes you're breaking into armored cars during an earthquake in Los Angeles. There's drivable vehicles, but for some reason they heavily restricted your ability to look around in them, only able to look an inch or two in any direction while driving. The vehicles themselves are also hit and miss, prone to desync and bugging out, but are otherwise fun and useful.

For end-game content, once you reach the max level of 100, you are unable to purchase further perks until you go Infamous. Going Infamous (this game's version of Call of Duty's Prestige feature) burns away all of your money and perk points, but by repeatedly doing it, lowers the cost of perks and gives XP bonuses, increasing the max amount of perks you can potentially buy each time you reach those coveted ranks of Infamy. Those who have reached rank V (5), are generally very powerful as they have been playing for so long that they not only have the know-how, but the sheer amount of high level perks to carry most teams. Infamy also grants special masks and customization options such as glowing effects and paint patterns. The aforementioned Perk Deck system, as well as all the weaponry and masks you had bought, are retained upon burning your cash and perk points, giving you a head start on gathering your strength all over again. Once you're at that point, it doesn't feel like too much of a slog to reach 100 again, especially with the prospect of becoming stronger every time you do it.

If character customization appeals to you, give mask editing shot, there's literally hundreds of different masks to choose from and equal hundreds of patterns, material types and color combinations to unlock and use to further make your criminal stand out from the crowd. They aren't all clown masks either!

And finally, practically any problem you may have with the game, even its weapon stats and skins, can be patched away by the game's amazing mod support and modding community. There really is no end to the customization possibilities in Payday 2, and that is its biggest selling point.


The Bad:

The missions sometimes repeat sections of maps. Firestarter uses the same map as Bank Job in its latter half for example. Though each map allows you to play it however you want, they mostly play out very similarly. It can get a little tiring after a while, and the longer jobs take up to an hour alone just to see the end reward. Sometimes your filter settings don't apply when you're searching for specific jobs, and the glitches are something to behold. You may see a guard float away into the sky, sometimes you'll get spotted on a stealth mission through walls, you may even be hit by a cop's taser through a wall. They aren't frequent enough to harm the experience, but it can be very aggrivating.


The Ugly:

The game is incredibly unforgiving on low end PC's. Some computers are unable to run it in a playable state and require extensive, manual modification of the game's rendering settings, as the game has very few in-game options for reducing computer stress. The second worst problem with the game is its willingness to crash. It crashes fairly often, and seemingly at the worst times. Connection issues are also abundant. It can take between one minute to five to finally get into a game, and even then your connection may simply drop out at any time without reason. If being unable to connect to others is too much of a problem, you can still host your own games offline, but this costs a fair amount of in-game money to do. It's highly recommended to play with friends when starting out.


Final Verdict: 7/10

With few new ideas of its own but a seamless blending of endless customization options and awesome modding community, it's hard to get bored of Payday 2 despite the criticisms I made against it. It's oddly immersive, and the completion of every job feels amazingly satisfying as not one of those numbers you rack up aren't going to be put to use by you at some point. I just wish its weapon customization allowed more creativity rather than direct upgrading, which it actually used to do. I still recommend it, and if your computer isn't strong enough to handle it, I also recommend the Lower Shadow Map mod for it, which you can find here.

http://gtm.you1.cn/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=183841516

This is from the perspective of someone who has played the Xbox version first, and the PC version second. The Good of this port is the same for the Xbox version, and I will review it as an action game, not a horror game. It is clearly not meant to be scary, but to be fun and make you feel awesome for breaking through all that it can throw at you. If you are unable to accept that Resident Evil is no longer meant to frighten you, you will likely hate this game for straying so far from its roots and reputation for scares. If you are able to look past the reputation of Resident Evil, read on.


The Good: (what to consider when purchasing)

Resident Evil has never had such tight, fluid controls. The new movement and dodge mechanics make you feel like a badass, tucking and sliding out of the way in real time, through your own skill rather than a contextual quick time event as it used to be. Reversal attacks add a layer of cool that no other entry in the series before it has had. You're now able to turn the flow of combat from hectic run-and-gunning into a scene straight out of a kung-fu B movie, rewarding you for your quick reflexes and giving you much needed breathing room when the enemies swarm you. What could be more awesome than grabbing a leaping zombie out of the air and stomping on it before whipping around, kicking another so hard it spins backwards on its heels, then slamming it into the ground with a DDT from behind? Probably while doing it as classic Resident Evil characters, which this game thoughtfully provides.

The gameplay varies between campaigns, as you would expect. Leon's focuses more on melee combat than the rest due to scarce ammunition and the zombies' resistance to bullet damage. Expect to be punished harshly for not getting your reversal timing down, as zombies behave unpredictably; Leaping at random, tripping over their own feet, lunging from the floor to pull you down with them, etc. Chris' campaign is full on testosterone infused action, hardly a dull moment to be found and plenty of fun enemy types to encounter and learn the weaknesses of. J'avo are much more predictable than the zombies, but are able to use ranged weaponry, making combat much more reliant on cover. Ada's campaign is a little more like the Resident Evil we recognize, with more puzzles and being rewarded for avoiding enemy contact, though obviously that's not possible most of the time as this is still an action game. Jake's campaign is a mix of the three, combining the over-the-top melee combat of Leon's campaign, the cover based shooting of Chris' and the enemy avoidance of Ada's. It works well, though can be a bit schitzophrenic as you would be required to change playstyle often.

The game has a wealth of content because of these four campaigns, and if playtime is something you consider when buying a game, you'd get your money's worth here for the sheer amount of it all. It's not Skyrim levels of vast, but for the type of game it was aiming to be, it certainly could have been a lot less. *cough-cough-OperationRaccoonCity-cough*


The Bad: (nitpicks and gripes)

While all that's well and good, there are moments where the camera will suddenly yank away from your perspective and focus on something in the background, but still have combat continue around you. This leaves you helpless as enemies are allowed to swarm in closer, or your precious ammo is wasted as you start shooting at a door that just opened because the game insisted on pulling the camera away to show it to you. Though the gameplay is varied between the campaigns, all of them begin to lose steam half way through. Leon's campaign recycles boss fights to the Nth degree, so much so that you may get frustrated as you have to repeat the same fights over and over with little to no variation between them. Past chapter 3, Chris' campaign just throws more and more enemies at you in the despirate attempt to heighten tension more than it had the previous chapters, though because there's nothing really different from them it just feels like an annoying slog. There is a moment where you take control of a jump jet, but it never happens again and it's over in about five minutes. Jake's campaign remains the freshest the longest, with cheesy car chases and one liners that put a smile on my face, but his final chapter reuses a fair amount elements from Chris' campaign. That's to be expected though, as Chris and Jake are meant to meet here, but they still feel a little too similar at times. Ada's later chapters recycle a lot of the same scenes from the other three chapters with minor tweaks here and there, so you end up feeling as though you're going through the motions, tying loose ends rather than playing as a seperate character.


The Ugly: (the game's major failings)

The PC version's load times and compatibility issues with most computers and hardware make it unquestionably inferior to the console versions upon which the game was built off of. It can take anywhere from 8 minutes to 15 minutes just to reach the main menu even on a good computer, while far more graphically intense games zoom past it, which is completely inexcusable in this day and age. It absolutely cripples this port's lastability by comparison, and though infrequent, the occasional crash will make that 8 - 15 minute wait between startups feel all the more brutal. That the game has been out this long for PC and still has these issues is a shameful neglect of its players who are already wary of this game's reputation for being so unlike any other Resident Evil. There isn't even a chat box to use and communicate with the rare person who joins your game, so if you don't have a mic, you're left with only the character's generic "thanks!" or "look out!" commands. It's no wonder the PC multiplayer lobbies of this port are ghost towns when it takes so long to load and your ability to communicate is being harshly limited without such a basic feature. Imagine having no way to explain a monster's weakness while your partner continues to get hurt by it, not noticing what the monster is doing and soaking up resources for it. It would be very frustrating, naturally.


Final Verdict: (CONSOLE version) 7/10

Resident Evil 6 is a very functional, varied game full of cheese that'll give you many hours of brainless fun. If you go into it with the same mindset that you would when approaching a John Woo action movie, you'll have a blast. It's silly, but it seems to be fully aware of that, and just tries to do its own thing.

However, and I cannot stress this enough, play the console versions.

Were it not for the load time, the occasional crash wouldn't be such a big deal and would have remained merely in the Bad, but when combined it makes the experience of playing the PC version not worth the awesome collaboration with Valve's own Left 4 Dead 2 gang and the inclusion of the 250+ enemy minigame, No Mercy mode. Were it not for the lack of a chat box, newbies wouldn't be such an annoyance, but without the ability to explain a bosses weakness or where to go, they simply slow down your game rather than help you in any way that your AI partner couldn't do better than them. It all contributes to the game's lonely multiplayer scene, with more than a third of the game's content going purpetually unplayed (nobody plays Mercenaries, No Mercy, Agent Hunt, or even the other campaigns, just Leon's). It seems unlikely at this stage, but I hope dearly that Capcom fixes the unforgivable startup times, as well as the compatibility issues for many common brands of graphics card. Until then, I recommend Resident Evil 6 as a whole, but not this version of it. There is no excuse for missing basic PC gaming features and 8 - 15 minute load times in the modern era of gaming. Shameful display.