Recent reviews by grim_reefer

TL:DR- I strongly recommend this game to anyone new to the series, especially if you've played the prior remakes of RE2 and RE3. They are great remakes, but they did have their shortcomings. This is also a great remake, and it, too, has it's own shortcomings, which for the most part are minor within the campaign. Nitpicks really, I'm just THAT autistic or whatever. 9.5/10 overall.

The campaign is phenomenal. For the most part, it really does feel like a retelling of the old version, just more fleshed out. Luis has more depth and lore to his character this time around, Ashley is much less of a hindrance and we even get to see some nice character development as the story goes on. It's subtle, but noticeable. Some things are gone, like the dreaded QTEs of old, and some of the creepier stuff regarding other character's interactions with Ashley (for those of you unaware, she's like, 15). The pacing, the music, the graphics, the boss fights, it's just all killer, no filler, with some neat expansions on some of the old stuff we remember, like the merchant side quests. Oh, if only I could end this review here and give it a 10/10. Alas, here we are.

Some of the things that were lost in the old version I, for one, sorely, sorely miss. In the old days, the graphics were gray and brown, but crucially, distinct. Spinels and velvet blues glinted in dark caves and narrow castle corridors, enemies were easily seen, and, with the right know-how, could be dispatched quickly or at least avoided by a player who knew what they were doing. In this game, they just don't give a ♥♥♥♥. My first playthrough was on Hardcore, since that's what the game recommended for longtime RE4 vets. Oh, what a mistake I made. Enemies were spongy, and tanky, the old, precise aiming system has been neutered in favor of a crosshair with bloom that has the audacity to EXPLODE to full inaccuracy should you dare tweak your aim by one pixel- in a game that demands quick flicks and precise aiming of enemy weak points to conserve precious ammo which, at least on hardcore, is just as scarce in this game as it was in the older titles. Even halfway through the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ island, which is just nuts. Oh, but they added some crouch-stealth. Is it useful to conserve ammo, though? Not really. You can only sneak in a few key places, and apart from a fraction of those, you can't 100% stealth anything. If I could have leaned more into stealth, it wouldn't be a problem. If hitting enemy weakpoints did what the ♥♥♥♥ it was supposed to do without me having to wait for the bloom to go away (which, at that point, the hordes would already be right up my nose) it would also be fine. "Oh, I'll just use my knife to conserve ammo!" My sweet summer child, it has durability now, and the only one who can repair it is the merchant. Why? ♥♥♥♥ you, that's why.

The problems with the combat are most easily recognizable, and by far the most frustrating, in The Mercenaries, a game mode centered entirely around combat. The pure, radioactive Bullshittium is concentrated, distilled into it's essence, and given to the hapless player as a suppository. Enemies slow down or straight up run away when they're in your line of sight- when you turn your back to reposition or grab items around the map or on the ground, they rubberband like they're 2nd place in a mediocre cart racing game, or simply emerge from the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Æther right out of your vision cone to grab you and ♥♥♥♥ up your kill chain. Any semblance of it being skill based is gone, and gone too is the fun of getting good. You can be good and still get your buttcheeks handed to you, and map knowledge and awareness of enemy movements is also thrown out of the window. If prior mercenaries were like Castlevania, this game is Castlevania 2. Frustrating and tedious for it's own sake, baked into the code to force you to die to ♥♥♥♥ you knew was coming but got stun lock mollywopped into anyways, and for what? To inflate the playtime? For the life of me, I simply don't know. The old combat was predictable, some would say, yes, but that also made it RELIABLE. You could do something, like shoot a kneecap or a face, and get the desired effect. To a degree, you can still do that, but the addition of bloom just compounds frustrations, and increases annoying unavoidable deaths exponentially. Fantastic in the campaign, which has a much more strong emphasis on horror, but absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in a game mode which is anything but.

Also, the new voice talent rocks in general, but I find their direction kind of questionable. I understand the talent pool for videogame voice acting is limited, but you seriously couldn't find... A guy with a deep voice for Krauser? I know an act like Jim Ward's is hard to top, but for all the gravelly, gruff videogame voices there have been, it just seems kind of odd. You seriously couldn't ask your guy playing Wesker (Craig Burnatowski) to talk through his nose? A splash of midatlantic snobbery was too much? I dunno a damn thing about the sort of work that goes into voice acting, so maybe I'm just talking out of my ass here. Anyways, I'm sure they all did their best. Moving on...

All in all, we're left with an experience that does not by any means replace the original in terms of charm, atmosphere, or the tightness and fluidity of it's combat, but rather, proudly stands alongside it's predecessor, as a perhaps more easily accessible adaptation of a widely beloved classic that expands upon the same world and characters with a greater emphasis on atmosphere and horror.

Also, you can get more fish now throughout the campaign, and that's wonderful. But also also, the submachineguns suck for the most part and you barely ever get any ammo for them, which double sucks. What triple sucks is how all my complaints about the combat tie into the merchant minigames. Hope you like replaying the same damn thing ad nauseam, knowing that if they had just given you a damn laser, you'd have smoked it in two or three tries!

Hopefully, these issues are ironed out by the time they remake RE5, and maybe even RE6. A man can dream.

You ever wish Powder Game had a campaign mode? Well, be careful what you wish for. As lovingly crafted and gorgeous as this game is, it'll kick your ass as quick as you can press "New Game" if you underestimate it.

“The excellence of the soul is understanding; for the man who understands is conscious, devoted, and already godlike.” -Hermes Trismegistus

This is like a huge, comprehensive version of Interactive Buddy, except the ragdolls are definitely not your buddies. Great game to play while you're deciding what else to play, and Workshop support is always a plus.

Any board game, any tabletop RPG, any card game you can think of, think of it now. Isn't it a hassle getting people to come together for a nice DnD session, or a good ol' fashioned game of Chess, especially these days? How about Poker or Blackjack, or any other game you can think of? Well, with Tabletop simulator, those concerns are a thing of the past. On top of that, with all the workshop content available, you can play games you might not have even heard of yet. Example: My partner wanted to get me into Betrayal in the House on the Hill. He has the board with him and everything, all in great condition, oh, but shoot, he's halfway across the country. Sucks, right? No sweat, thanks to Tabletop Simulator. We play that and other games often now, constrained only by the stability of our internet connections.

I mean, if you have a special hatred for the games mankind played before the advent of the transistor, I guess this won't do you any good. Otherwise? I rate it as worth a purchase, especially on sale. Don't get me wrong, Tabletop Simulator's got as much content as mankind has imagination, but twenty dollars might be steep for some.

Ironsight gives you a choice:

A: Buy Black Ops 2 for sixty dollars, not counting DLC which raises the price considerably.

B: Play Ironsight for free.

There's not even Pay To Win in this game. There are paid skins for guns, but that's about it.

My only complaint is that it's a little jank right now but the devs are working hard on it, the netcode and matchmaking could use some work, but honestly, COD has suffered from the same issues in the past. It's still suffering from bad SBMM now, and Cold War's expensive as all heck.

Highly recommended.

This is, indeed, exactly what it looks like. Scroll to the bottom for TL;DR

Pros:

-Good art that succeeds at it's intended purpose
-Passable music
-The writing is okay.

Cons:

-I take it back, the writing is actually kind of all over the place. One thing that happens is that the main love interest jacks off to a picture of his dead mother. Why couldn't they have just said they had been separated during his move to the countryside and he misses her very very much? Why is this written off as just "weird"? Honestly, this is up there with THAT scene in Stephen King's book "It" after they've defeated Pennywise in terms of both how weird it is, how uncomfortable it is to read, let alone ponder, and how unnecessary it's inclusion in the plotline is. Except the latter took a good long while, and the same feeling is achieved with just a sentence here, so in a way, it's kind of an achievement.
-With roughly an hour and a half in the game, I have already found gotten most of the in game content, achievements, and completed the main story.
-The dialog is poorly paced outside of the main plotline, making it feel stiff and, at times, absurd- not in the fun way, in the "uncanny valley" way.
-Compounding this problem, the voice acting itself is not up to par and I turned it off within the first five minutes of gameplay. I know this game wasn't pushing the whole "games as art" thing, I didn't come in expecting execution on par with that of William Shakespeare or Tom Clancy, but holy ♥♥♥♥. Turn it off immediately unless Princess Zelda's voice (as portrayed in the Phillips CD-i games) is what excites you. And don't even get me started on "Ed". Holy smokes.

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Even with the promised (but as of yet unseen) free DLCs that promise to expand the content already on offer, and even with the admittedly low price point as compared to other Adult titles on offer on Steam, I genuinely find it hard to recommend this game, which is unfortunate, because as it stands, this game could be a lot better if only what was on offer here had been executed better.

And the fact that this is an adult themed title is really no excuse. A good portion of the PC-98 catalogue (a Japanese computer from the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 1980's) is host to games that did so much more with so much less- the works of the artist known as "Viper", as well as the early entries in the "Rance" video game series, to name but a few. Hell, Rance was/is an excellent RPG series in it's own right, which is another thing to mention- having adult themes is not an excuse for a game being lacking in content or gameplay, but I digress.

I don't mean to be too hard on the devs. I am no voice actor. I am no programmer. And I am certainly no illustrator. All I do is play games, not make them, and I don't mean to understate what an absolute pain the ass it is to develop games, even "easier" ones to produce such as VNs. But that all being said, I've played enough games to tell you that I've seen better, even in this niche, much maligned genre. Hell, there are visual novels with explicit adult themes that transcend their genre, and succeed even as stories (dare I say art!) in their own right, such as Saya no Uta ("Song of Saya"). Again, I digress!

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TL;DR

At the end of the day, this game falls short of both perfection and failure. It's not even "so bad it's good". It suffers the worst fate that art can suffer outside of censorship, and that fate, dear reader, is mediocrity, which is sadly the standard for most adult themed content, and especially most adult themed games, and ESPECIALLY western adult themed games, though thankfully that is starting to change. I can't recommend this game in good faith, not because you can't find worse, but because you can do so, so much better. The best value you can get out of this game is gifting it to your friend when it's on sale as a joke, as a sort of digital equivalent to a cheap tenga egg or a lollipop crafted in the shape of male anatomy, except one's enjoyment of those would at least last longer and have fewer problems taking one out of the experience.

This isn't just one of the best Fallout games of all time, it's one of the best video games of all time, bar none. Mods are not necessary, but they are highly recommended. As with Skyrim, there are some mods for this game that add completely new questlines that meet or even exceed the quality of the baseline game. Seriously, whenever you get this game, check out the Someguy series by someguy2000 on Nexus. Autumn Leaves is also excellent.

You may also want to install certain performance mods to patch certain bugs and to help your game run better. Crashes are not frequent enough to be too bad, but the more mods you add, the more unstable the game may be. On top of that, there are also graphical mods, because, let's be real, the game is over ten years old and certainly shows it's age at times (not that it looked all that stunning on release!)

The DLC are all excellent as well.
The Ultimate bundle regularly goes on sale for 3-6 bucks, you really can't get better value than that, and, on sale or not, I recommend buying the Ultimate bundle.

Sandstorm is an odd game. It demands that you play fast and aggressive, but also slowly and deliberately. It rewards tactics and 'tism alike, and is not a game suitable for those with high blood pressure and people who get mad at videogames. I'll say one thing, for all the cool stuff in the game, like being able to shoot the hinges off doors, or bullet drop, and so on, you'll very rarely actually have to account for those things, which is a damn shame. It's not a milsim, it's not a W+M1 sort of game, and it's not a twitch shooter. It's a sort of frankenstein's monster of a game that will reward all those approaches, given that they are applied at the proper moment in a match.

If I had one complaint, it's that variety in game modes is kinda lacking. There are a lot of modes that slightly vary what you need to do to win, but they mostly boil down to "kill 'em 'till they stop coming" or "stand in a place until your team owns it". Night maps are nice, but they do little to significantly alter the overall flow of the game, with the exception of a certain PvE mode that pits you against hordes of suicide bombers. A sort of high stakes, defensive take on Ambush would be nice. Small teams, with limited (or perhaps no) respawns, scouring various buildings until they find the VIP and take him out/capture him, perhaps, but I'm just spitballing here. If nothing else, such a mode might give C4/IEDs a proper use beyond lobbing them for lack of a grenade. You're certainly not taking out any technicals with those. Hell, having Ambush itself would be nice on it's own, too. I dunno.

Sandstorm can't be recommended as a milsim, or as a casual run and gun, or as something straddling the line between those two like Battlefield. It's not ARMA 3, and it's certainly not Modern Warfare. But if you're willing to grit your teeth and get your ass handed to you until you cry for momma and/or git gud, you'll understand why I can't recommend this game enough.

As an aside:

Maybe find a way to reimplement the Ambush mode? C'mon, all the cool stuff that can be done with what you've built, and we have:

1: I Can't Believe It's Not Team Deathmatch (Competitive)

2: I Can't Believe It's Not Domination

3: PvE with minor twists

4: Push

5: Skirmish (Asymmetrical Push with vehicles sometimes maybe)

Addendum:

Outpost is a neat addition, I'm not gonna lie, as are the hardcore variants, but I still pine for the days of Ambush.

Maybe there was a nicer way to say that, but goodness knows I'm not the only one thinking it.

Remember:

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I've played in years!