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A Botched Sequel

This one was particularly tough for me to evaluate, largely due to how controversial of a game it is to begin with. I did not like the first F.E.A.R. title upon my first short time with the game, but I really warmed up to that game, with it serving as a very good Action-FPS in my opinion. I believed that the sequel's main goal would have been to diversify the level environments, provide a slightly stronger and more cohesive story, and preserve the original title's gameplay while refining bits and pieces to it. What the sequel actually accomplished was...a mixed bag to say the least.

Upon starting a new game, I immediately noticed that the surface-level graphical fidelity was improved. Characters were more animated, the voice acting was more plentiful, and there was a stronger emphasis on characterization through movement and expression. While not "top notch", even by 2009 standards, it improved on an otherwise disappointing array of graphical settings that were in the first game. However, the reason I say "surface-level graphics" becomes obvious very quickly - many of the amazing gunplay effects from the first title have been drastically toned down or removed. Bullet holes no longer crack cement on walls, grenades no longer fling objects around the environment, and smoke trails from guns/explosives no longer leave the battlefield looking torn-up, as it should. This was a massive disappointment, since these effects that were present in the first game four years prior were now sliced out of the equation.

The environments also presented a similar facade. Upon fist examination, the environments are easily more varied and colorful than the first game. There are schools to fight through, underground labs, ruined cities, and a nuclear power plant (to name a few). However, the color is still very muted and gray/brown. It's a curse of games from this time period, but everything looks very similar and washed-out, even if the locations are inherently different. Additionally, while the environments are somewhat better looking, the way these levels actually "play" is a drastic step back, in my opinion. The enemy AI still interacts with nodes around the environment, but it all felt like it flowed less cohesively. I never felt like I was flanked by a squad of enemies like in the last game, and this took away a lot of dynamism and tactical feel from each battle. The new environments did little to make up for this drastic loss to the core gameplay interaction between player, AI, and environment/level.

The story is stronger this time around - however, it isn't presented in a very efficient way. Character's are still pretty boring and lack a lot of depth. Most of their deaths will leave you without any reaction other than "Dang, he/she got messed up!". There's no attachment, and while the voice acting is okay, no one is really established as super interesting throughout the plot. As for the plot itself, the bulk of the game's information/detail is locked behind PDA's that you find throughout each level. These contain text files that explain a lot of the core motivations/elements behind each character's motives and actions. Without these files, the game is a bit of a mess on the story side - its still better than F.E.A.R., but it failed to capture my attention. Alma is developed more as a character, but she HERSELF is boiled down to a "jumpscare-machine". Her motivations are only ever explained through minor interactions with the player and exposition lobbied towards the player by other characters. This led to a lack of engagement on my part, and ultimately made me disinterested in many of the plot points and narrative elements. It's a bit better than the first game, but not by a whole lot.

Lastly, I am left with one last question to answer: "Is this game a worthy sequel to F.E.A.R.?" Sadly, I am forced to give a disappointing "No". While some elements of the original game are improved upon (environments, story), the core gameplay has been butchered. The game has turned into a generic FPS, with many of the first titles gameplay elements being drastically altered or outright removed. Melee combat has been ruined, and punches/kicks lack any substantial impact or consistency to their usage. Gunplay feels much worse, with the sound design behind many weapons feeling weaker and damage output for most weapons being reduced. it really seems like all weapons in this game have been weakened substantially, and it leaves the character feeling less powerful. Additionally, the "bullet-time" mechanic feels redundant - in the old game, it made the game a bit easier, but was much more rewarding with the ragdoll physics engine and environmental destruction. Here, it feels pointless! The ragdoll physics are gone, and guns damage the environment far less. I honestly forgot to use this mechanic throughout much of the game due to how useless it ended up being. These changes to gameplay were the primary offenders of this game for me, and left me severely disappointed with the final product.

Upon completion, I can say my time with F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin was very "meh". I went in hoping for refinement upon the original game's formula, and instead was met with strange design decisions and drastic cutbacks on the first game's strengths. I would Not Recommend checking this one out if you were a huge fan of the first game - it essentially transformed the formula into a generic shooter. It's not "horrible", but it really ain't special in any way either.


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Rev Up Those Fryers, Cause I'm Sure Hungry For One "KFC Dating Simulator"

In 2019, KFC sponsored a game that aimed to be a dating simulator revolving around Colonel Sanders being the main love interest - yes, this is a real thing. What is more surprising, however, is that is was a fairly enjoyable experience full of charm and humor. A colorful cast of characters (and a few pretty original ones) populate the game's 2-3 hour runtime, and there is a decent story to be experienced here. However, despite the tongue-in-cheek humor, this game does have some flaws that prevent it from being a more solid experience.

First, the positives - the game is really goofy, and runs with that sentiment throughout its length. The scenarios presented are random and hilarious, and the characters all have a quirky nature to them that allows them to be easily integrated to the plot. Additionally, the art style is pretty good looking! The environments, while a bit limited due to the length of the game's story, are actually fairly detailed. While some areas are much more detailed than others (the Colonel's home is by far the most detailed area compared to the rest), the backgrounds avoided reusing assets from other games. The sound design is also really great, with characters making noises at perfect moments for comedic effect.

Next, the "meh" stuff - I wish the story went on a bit longer in order to give some more background to the school and characters. The game only takes place over three days, and it doesn't really give enough time for the player to become attached to any person. Yes I know, the game isn't "supposed" to take itself seriously, but in this regard I feel the game could have transcended into something else entirely. Additionally, the choice system could have been a bit more interactive and implemented in a more meaningful nature. Most of the choices end up in a fail state, unless the correct choice is made. It makes the game very linear, which is fine, but the strength of the game's plot is its biggest weakness.

The bad - at the end of the day, this is just a generic dating simulator with a bit of KFC spice added in. Its by no means "bland", but its likely never worth a replay, and will leave you feeling as if you played a slightly dressed-up dating simulator. This is a genre that I am not the biggest fan of, and I really rely on the plot and characters to carry a lot of the load in order to get me through the mostly non-interactive gameplay. This game failed to capitalize on its unique blend of quirky product-placement and goofy charm - I really thought this could've been a great game had there been a more involved plot-line + character system.

Overall, I think its a very unique game, but one that lacks a lot of substance. I can Recommend it, and it's definitely worth checking out for the absurdity of the situations and the humor in the game, but the game's story and lack of true depth for many characters may leave you wanting. I personally felt that it could have been a few hours longer, focusing more on the different characters, building up the lore behind the cooking academy, and even polishing up the choice systems. Hell, a cooking mini-game where you make KFC dishes would have worked wonders here! Alas, its still a game I appreciate - not only for its existence, but for being able to put a smile on my face. That's how you know something has flavor.

Now can we PLEASE get a fast food harem game?


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A Fairly Generic And Monotonous Space-Themed Platformer

Moon Raider takes a lot of retro elements from older platformers and attempts to blend them together with a neat looking visual aesthetic. Unfortunately, the game suffers from incredible monotony and painful level design that left me, a huge platformer fan, unimpressed.

The best thing going for this game is its visuals. There is a cute pixel-theme going on here with a nice variety of color, with many blinking lights and effects occurring on the screen. At times, it is nice to look at. However, there seems to be a stark difference in the FPS for the player sprite compared with the background visuals, which made my eyes strain a bit when playing the game. I'm unsure as to if the game itself runs at different FPS for separate locations (unlikely), or if there is something going on with the visual settings mixed with the parallax scrolling of the background environments, but it was very distracting for most of my time with the game. Unfortunate since this was the game's strongest piece.

The music is okay, but fails to vary form stage to stage very well. It doesn't really form its own identity, and just seems like another space-themed song that could be found in any other platformer game such as this. Nothing was very memorable nor fun enough to stick to my ears. it wasn't awful, but it surely won't raise anyone's eyebrows with intrigue.

The gameplay and level design are decidedly where the game takes a nosedive in quality. The gameplay is very similar to the original Mega-Man , except there is not a variety of powers that you can use to your advantage. All you get is a very bland and crummy blaster that is unrewarding to use. There are some health and energy powerups to collect, but they don't make any of the combat sections exciting. The game's movement is also pretty floaty and unprecise, and there aren't many interesting platforming challenges that shake up level design or provide any thematic highlights. The levels are incredibly similar, save for a few sections of lava or lasers, but enemies and bosses failed to make a lasting impact on me. Most enemies follow boring movement/attack patterns that are easy to manipulate, yet the game counters this by putting instant-death traps around the levels in increasing frequency. After a while, the game just got stale and I grew tired of even playing it after less than an hour.

Also, there really isn't any semblance of a real story here, contrary to other reviews. It boils down to - "oh no your mom is dying, go to the moon and kill aliens and get some collectibles to save her please!" It's very tacked-on and honestly didn't need to be there at all, since as far as I know the game didn't add anything noteworthy during my gameplay time. I assume there's some ending cutscene that adds a bit more, but that really isn't a story at the end of the day. If anything, its a very poor one at that.

In conclusion, I think this game needs a lot of work in order to justify its $15 price point. There is very limited gameplay and story to experience here, and there's nothing that really differentiates this one from the rest of the platformers pouring onto Steam right now. I would Not Recommend picking this title up unless there are some huge updates/reworks put into the gameplay/story.


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Simple, Mindless Murder...

POSTAL must have been a very controversial game back in 1998 when it released, because it still remains a very disturbing and violent game. There is a heap of dark and demonic imagery paired with a jarring, industrial-focused soundtrack that will have player's heads pumping with blood. The gameplay revolves around "purging" areas of people, which essentially boils down to killing innocent civilians and armed police/military (a.k.a. "going postal"). While playing, I definitely felt a sense of wrongdoing despite me achieving the goals the game set out for me to complete, which is definitely an interesting thing that the game achieves.

However, I also found this game to be incredibly repetitive and boring after not even an hour of playtime. The game frontloads all of its weapons to you very early on, and none of the weapons really pack any real "punch". Enemy AI is abysmal, level design becomes similar as the game progresses, and there is a lack of any real story during its short 2+ hour runtime.

The game plays like a standard twin-stick shooter, with the player swapping between weapons/grenades on the fly. While my playthrough was extremely easy to complete, I wouldn't want to play again on a harder difficulty since the combat became boring for me. With a friend, the game gets marginally better, but it also takes away a bit of the "accomplishment" of single-handedly eradicating an entire town full of people.

Also, while the visuals are dark and gloomy (which fits the game's theme), they don't look very eye catching, and many things blend together. This makes many levels feel indistinct from one another, and made the short playthrough feel much longer in the worst of ways.

Despite its many flaws, Postal can still provide a player some fun for a cheap price. Its a nice game to turn your brain off to, though sometimes it feels like its too simplistic for its own good. I can Recommend it to someone looking for a short power-tripping experience where morality is of no question, but it plays like your everyday twin-stick shooter regardless.


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An Underwhelming Yet Serviceable Expansion

The second and final expansion for F.E.A.R. had a lot of potential for both adding to the story of the franchise as well as expanding on the combat in a unique or thoughtful way. However, instead of trying something new, this expansion delivers next to no original content for the series up to this point, a few decent but boring weapons, and takes a huge step back in terms of quality of combat, horror, and graphical fidelity.

The first thing every player will notice right out of the gate is the awful texture work done for this game. Many buildings, streets, floors, and walls are extremely plain, looking completely out of place in a laughable way. While this doesn't directly affect the gameplay in any major way, it definitely made the experience much less interesting to go through, which is especially rough considering that the environments are one of the weakest aspects of the original game and its first expansion. A much better effort should have been put into making the game look nice, especially with this coming out two years after the base game's release.

The combat is also noticeably more bland in this entry. There are less areas where enemies can pull off interesting tactical maneuvers against the player, leading to very bland fights that rely on sticking your body in and out of cover repeatedly. The dynamic nature of the previous entries is mostly lost in a lot of the levels, which is a huge shame because it is what the first game shined at. The visual effects are still intact, making every firefight extremely theatrical, but the lack of quality textures leaves much to be desired.

The horror is also very poor in this title. There are a multitude of cheesy jumpscares that only a toddler would freak out at, with a VERY small handful being effective. The death scenes for some characters are also pretty bad, save for one during the final third of the game that was pretty interesting to witness. There are many extended horror sequences that are a part of the game now as well, which lead to extremely boring sections of the game that have irritating enemies to kill. The base game had a good balance of horror and action, but the action was always much better than the horror. This time around, the developers didn't get the memo.

The weapons are plentiful, but some players may grow tired of the arsenal. The new weapons added in this expansion are just "okay", but aren't nearly as effective as older weapons. Unfortunately, those weapons fell very boring to use after 15+ hours of F.E.A.R. content.

Other than this set of flaws, the nature of the game is still intact. The new enemies are pretty similar to the base game's, minus the cool voices those dudes had before. The entire experience is diluted this time though, so many players may not feel like finishing the experience due to a lack of meaningful content. The story is still pretty bad, and starts to take a turn for the worse once the convoluted "Origin" piece is added to the franchises' lore.

Overall, I can still Recommend this expansion if you're really craving some more F.E.A.R. , but you won't walk away very impressed with this one. There should have been more effort in not only maintaining the quality of the original's experience, but with adding interesting and compelling designs that would make this expansion fresh for fans. All that remains is an "alright" experience, one that some players may choose to forget.


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An Absolutely Terrible Video Game That Will Have You Praying Your Antivirus Is Effective

I cannot really describe in any effective way how terrible this game is. Yes, it is made for an Asian market, but it is littered with microtransactions, ugly UI, layers of menus, and has horrific gameplay. This is genuinely a piece of garbage that should be removed from Steam. I believe I lost a chunk of my brain from the mix of awful gameplay and extremely high volume.

Don't even bother downloading. Obviously a Not Recommend .


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Dead. Game.

There was nobody online when I booted up the game, and the peak player count of all time was less than 100. The peak player count for that day was 10. This game is completely dead and not worth purchasing. I will Not Recommend playing or purchasing it at all...

...or just buy it for the memes?


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A Game With A Legacy - And Flaws

Fallout has a reputation as a memorable and exciting new take on the RPG genre. With its dark, depressing, yet strangely humorous world and rugged angle at player choice and impact, as well as its countless amounts of dialogue freedom of direction (for the most part), it does stand out clearly from many more limited titles of the time. However, other aspects of this game have aged poorly, or maybe never were that good to begin with, which puts a damper on what would have been a truly fantastic title with what it does correctly.

The poor stands out from the jump - the combat. This system of turn-based combat is incredibly slow, cumbersome, and unsatisfying to interact with. It seems the system is based around true randomness a la the modern XCOM titles, and thus there are many cases early on where you'll miss point-blank attacks despite holding a weapon you're skilled with. To top it off, the turns are slow between characters, thus you end up in a sluggish battle for what feels like ages far too often. I was really bummed out to engage in combat honestly, since every time it would turn into a slog that I just wished would end sooner.

To add insult to injury, this game contains an old-school, non-automatic save system where you essentially have to save-scum everywhere in order to progress. Now I'm not a hater of this system in particular, rather I just find it to not fit with the incredibly slow pacing of this title. While going through a long dialogue exchange only to get blasted out of nowhere by saying the wrong thing "is" immersive, it creates a barrier of fun for me with the gameplay.

Now this title's main two flaws are pretty bad in my book, but it has a lot to like as well. The world is rich and immersive, with a stunning ambient soundtrack and multiple great vocal performances for the sparse characters that end up actually speaking. The lore is awesome, and as a fan of the newer Fallout games it seems like this was even stronger back in the older titles. Most importantly though is the story, which plays out in an incredibly rich and creative way. It's a really memorable experience for this stuff alone...but unfortunately there's still gameplay to get through.

The difficulty of combat is also a big problem. While I understand the complaints of the newer games with their easier takes on gunfights and consequence, I feel the older games went too far in the opposite direction. It "does" add to the role-playing aspect, but it also makes me groan whenever I get trapped in a situation where I either forgot to save or lost too much health due to wonky combat luck. Thus, a repeat of sections ends up being required, and it feels like a chore more than anything.

I really hope that if a new title is released, the developers take a look at what the original title did with its atmosphere, story, lore, worldbuilding, and creativity with characters and setting. I do think there should be a return to this style of game as well, but with many quality-of-life additions. This game just ended up far too frustrating and slow paced, and I never found myself wanting to play it much. I can respect it for what it provided and how it changed the RPG genre, but I damn well can't attempt to play it anymore (this was my third or fourth time attempting to really get into it).


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One Stressful Cooperative Experience

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a fairly unique cooperative game. Each player has role - one who is the bomb defuser (interacting with the many modules on a bomb), and one who reads from the manual (interpreting and communicating information for each module). There is a nice variety of modules that are introduced, and some nice challenges thrown at both players throughout the course of the game.

The visuals are basic but clean (and most importantly, clear). This allows for the bomb defuser to easily identify the next module that he/she decides to tackle. Besides the bomb itself though, there really isn't much to look at/interact with in the game.

The music is pretty simple and only really occurs in the main menu and in the background (subtle during early parts of the round, loud during the later parts). There are lots of sounds for the many parts of the bomb, which adds to the stress and chaos of the game, but it doesn't ever become a cacophony of noises that distract the player (unless certain elements of the game world like an alarm clock or "needy modules" start to go off).

The controls are super simple and involve only a few mouses clicks. Everything was very responsive and easy to navigate in game. However, there are some issues when it comes to the manual and the theme of the game itself...

I played this game with my girlfriend and we had a lot of fun, but we found ourselves constantly frustrated with the game as well. This had to do with the hard-to-decipher bomb manual that each player must learn. Some tasks are easy, but some are much more involved, and these take a while to get used to. During this period, you'll lose over and over again, which can get really annoying. the times that we did finally beat a stage or figure out a module tended to be overshadowed by the journey to understand each concept, and this diluted our experience a fair bit. The bomb manual is also hard to navigate through a file itself, and even some minor workarounds led us to still have frustrating moments.

While the game is definitely fun for the most part and very unique, I think many players might find the game to get old around the end of the fourth level set, since you are finally done learning each bomb module for the most part. Only those really looking for a challenge would want to continue, since I think the gameplay gets a bit stale and the puzzles get more and more annoying to work with. I think if there were more minigames are something to unlock besides more levels, it would be much more interesting to try and get through more of the game.

Overall, I can Recommend this game. Its a very solid title that delivers a very unique cooperative challenge/experience, and there is a good amount of challenging content for those willing to put up with a bit of repetitive gameplay. The game's intrinsic learning curve and challenge was both a pleasure and pain to experience, but the lack of meaningful late game content or unlockables, as well as the ratio of frustation to fun, kept my rating from rising any higher when it was all said and done. It's definitely worth checking out, but I wouldn't expect more than a handful of hours before both players get a bit tired of the mechanics.


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A Dead Game That Had No Fun Times To Be Had

I tried this title out hoping it would be as fun as Half-Life 2: Deathmatch , but I was sorely mistaken. There was really only one somewhat active server, and it only had less than five players. The shooting felt poor (attributed to Half-Life: Source itself), and the hit detection was extremely spotty. Nothing remarkable can really be said about this game, other than that its really old, really unpopulated, and really bad.


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