Análises recentes de Rusty

SHE KNOWS MY NAME SHEKNOWSMYNAMESHEKNOWSMYNAMEMYNAMEeErr0r ….

Hi! ♥

You’re best going into this game completely blind, so I won’t spoil any of it here. Suffice to say I’m someone who doesn’t enjoy anime, visual novels or dating sims, but I’d still recommend this gamePL a̛̤Y WITH ME. It might defy your expectations and even make you think a little. I’m sure we'll you’ll have a lot of fun!! ♥♥

Opposing Force was an expansion pack for the original Half-Life that let you experience the incident at Black Mesa through the eyes of one of Gordon Freeman’s antagonists. This is a great concept for a game and one that it’s nice to see in the Half-Life 2 universe, even if it’s not developed by Valve. Playing as the combine in city 10 is the big draw here and the design of the maps is great for a mod.

This is well worth experiencing if you’re a Half-Life 2 fan and are nostalgic for the world, or if you like the concept, but I warn you…. it’s hard. Really hard.

I dropped the difficulty down to normal and enemies still had amazing accuracy from distance and I was often killed before even seeing who’d shot at me. I think the difficulty needs to be reduced to make this a more enjoyable experience as it nearly put me off carrying on, as did a rather obtuse puzzle. The game also has an unobtrusive but effective soundtrack, similar to Valve’s games.

So WB Games did their best to put me off with a tiered release, pre-order bonuses and sodding microtransactions in a single player game. It’s hard to overlook and I wouldn’t blame anyone for boycotting the title, although it would be a shame in my opinion, especially if you enjoyed the first.

Shadow of War does what a good sequel should do, by fixing the things that didn’t work and improving on those that did. One of my biggest issues with Shadow of Mordor was in the lacklustre environments and SoW improves this no end by creating more interesting and varied locations to run, climb, jump and stab in. The wonderful nemesis system has also been enhanced with the orcs given more character and variation in abilities, making fighting them even more fun. There are also a number of scripted orcs and the new conquest system which is fun and adds more depth.

There are a few problems other than the loot boxes, one being the usual map full of side missions that can start to grate (an arkham-creed staple) and another being the surprisingly narrow fov that can make fighting in close quarters difficult. I’m also not too enamoured with the two ‘token’ good characters but the story is entertaining enough and other than that it’s just nit-picks. I’m not at the end game yet so have no idea if the rumours of grind are true, but I wouldn’t be surprised because so far I have had no compulsion to purchase a loot box.

Having now finished this title I’m torn on whether to recommend it or not. I think the deciding factor has to be on whether or not this works as a horror game and as a worthy ‘sequel’ to Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

A Machine for Pigs is dripping with atmosphere thanks to its moody visuals, creepy setting, intriguing story and haunting music. The sound effects in general are pretty great, with the groans, clanks and hisses, coming from the titular machine and the piercing screams of the pig men.

This would seem to fulfil the criteria of a successful Amnesia sequel but AMFP lacks gameplay and tension. There are so few encounters with monsters in this brief game that you rarely feel tense and when they do appear they do not affect the player in the same way they did in Amnesia: TDD. You can brazenly stare at them which breaks the magic. Dying to them will also just drop you straight back into the game, removing any threat they possess and any feeling of panic.

The game also quickly becomes a series of linear walkways so you can listen to The Chinese Room tell their story, without being interrupted by irritating things like gameplay and pant wetting terror. It’s a shame, because for my first ‘walking simulator’ experience this wasn’t bad. It’s just not what I wanted from the franchise.

If a professional games journalist with 18 years of experience is finding Cuphead difficult, how is a mere mortal like me meant to cope? Not very well is the answer, at least once I reached world two. The difficulty spike here is a little unforgiving and will put some people off permanently, but the beauty of the game is still undeniable, especially when in motion.

There are a lot of reviews calling this is a Clash Royale clone and after looking at screenshots, I’d have to agree. The one and only map in Brawl of Ages looks very similar to the one in Clash Royale, although the visuals are a little better here. I can only assume the gameplay is similar in both games too, just with different cards. BoA is like a tower defense game crossed with a ccg, without the depth of either. There are also long loading times and I could only get one game mode to work (at least it’s not pay to win).

A fun and frantic nostalgia trip with a great 80’s synth score, Half-Life C.A.G.E.D. is reminiscent of Far Cry Blood Dragon in tone. I only wish it wasn’t front loaded with first person jumping and water puzzles, as they were the worst parts of the original Half-Life. The pace and difficulty might also take some getting used to if you play a lot of modern shooters.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this was a mobile port (as I did) of yet another Clash of Clans type game, but it’s actually a port of a critically panned PS4 game. It features all the things you’ve come to expect from those games, such as simplistic base building, troop upgrades, star ratings, poor optimisation, grind and strategic combat that involves little more than dropping units onto a map. I’ll give it credit for not having energy or waiting times, but it does have micro transactions which look pay to win in nature. I’m a little perplexed by the positive reviews because this is as dull as all the other clash clones, it just looks slightly nicer, as you can see in my first impressions video.
https://youtu.be/oD8mlVhcRn0

Many consider this the worst game in the Souls series, perhaps because its development team did not consist of some prominent members from the original Darks Souls game. Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin lacks some of the atmosphere and quality level design that’s evident in the Miyazaki led titles. Having said that, I still rate this title highly; it’s as good as DS3, feeling more original in some ways and featuring better combat.

(TL;DR - DS2: SotFS is more unfair than it's siblings and the bosses are the weakest in quality)

What I thought I’d do in this review is to elaborate on something I disliked and talked about briefly in my video, now that I’ve played through the entire game; and that’s the DS mantra of ‘hard but fair’. Most deaths in DS are your own fault (bar the odd camera issue which still aren’t sorted in DS3), they’re player error. DS2 more than any other Souls game feels unfair and it happens numerous times throughout the game, most notably in boss encounters. This is because you feel like you’ve lost to a boss through no error of your own, but because the developers have cheated.

This is the case for a number of bosses in DS2: SotFS but a prime example for me was the ruin sentinels boss, where you face three enemies. The Souls games are designed primarily as one on one fighters, so facing multiple bosses can be incredibly difficult as you concentrate on killing them all, whilst simultaneously avoiding damage. The developers pull this trick numerous times but with the ruin sentinels I felt like I’d hit a wall that I couldn’t get past. I had this feeling in DS once and never in DS3 (it has an active community), which isn’t because they’re easy, but because they provided tools to help struggling players.

That help comes in the form of summons, both AI and real people. Released in 2015, DS2 now has a small community and for most bosses the only help you get is from the AI, which sucks. Low HP and poor intelligence makes them little more than a distraction, which works amazingly well on solo bosses if you’re ranged, but is terrible for team bosses as they die quickly and leave you with a group of boosted bosses. Many of the DS2 bosses feel designed for co-op, so you’d think they’d have developed better AI to help players. This will become a real problem when the community is none existent as players might just give up if they can’t find a competent human summon to help them.

Scholar of the First sin tries to fix this by adding some God tier summons (love you Bradley), but they show up infrequently and are almost too overpowered. DS avoided this problem by having decent AI and DS3 has an active community and the AI summons work quite well too.

A final note about this unfairness is the run-up to these tough bosses. You often have to run down a linear path past tough enemies that can injure you on the way there. This is hard just for the sake of being hard, it’s not enjoyable and there’s no sense of achievement. The shortcut run up to ruin sentinels boss involves jumping through a door that inexplicably opens out to thin air. This just makes the game frustrating and there are more moments like this in DS2 than in any other DS game.

Hovering over the dislike button turned it cyan which gave me flashbacks and must have freaked me out enough to click on recommend instead, which is definitely blue. I think. I'm pretty sure that big thumbs up is cyan though, but I can't be 100% sure. Now I'm having trouble sleeping....

This might work better on mobiles but I had a laugh and broke my brain a little. This game also made me sound like a clichéd but incredibly boring porn star, so there's that. The soundtrack is also nice.