Recent reviews by Gordon Freeman

It's been 9 years.

9 years since this beautiful mess was deployed into the world.

The story remains unconcluded and unsatisfying, with a breadth of post-game content being cut right before release. The shoehorned online functionality is the worst in the series' surprisingly long history with multiplayer, bar Survive. The writing is sloppy and retcon-heavy, with the core themes being the weakest of any mainline Metal Gear. Battle Gear is neutered in the final release. Even the hidden nuclear armistice objective was disabled post-launch, leaving the game more unfinished than the day it came out.

Yet, despite that crippling head wound, this game soldiers on, still having the most fluid gameplay in the franchise to date (though Delta might dethrone it in the near future). The controls are the best in the franchise, the gadgets the most in-depth (with even the basic cardboard box having more gameplay options than you could ever imagine), and the early missions are incredibly well-made (even if the mission structure becomes much weaker towards the end). Even if the game could've been so much better, what's there is still a solid release, and an absolute joy to play.

Better than S&Box.

Pretty damn bad if you enjoy anything DOOM related. Buy DOOM (2016) instead. Or hell, buy the 1993 original and the 1996 sequel, or even 2003's DOOM 3, and enjoy thousands of mods on fantastic open-sourced engines that can run on (quite literally) anything.

By buying this game, you support:

- Studios not adequately paying their overworked composer (whose music is the sole positive selling point of this game). Screw Marty Stratton, and may Mick Gordon never have to interact with him or anyone else behind that travesty again.

- The abolition of the genre-defining basic multiplayer features that this very franchise popularized (there's no deathmatch, co-op, or anything. Just the FPS-MOBA hybrid "BATTLEMODE", a horrible gamemode that all of maybe 5 people play).

- Grindy battlepasses for almost entirely singleplayer games, or even games in general (which is a system they've long since abandoned anyways, in the hopes that people just buy the DLC packs for their horrible recolored and gaudy skins).

- Purple goop that neuters your mobility, among other annoying ass parkour-puzzle elements. In fact, pretty much half of it is annoying platforming. In a DOOM game.

- 24 maximum upgraded limit for shotgun shells. Keep in mind that, unless you focus on upgrading your ammo, you're not even going to see that much. In an FPS game, that's disgraceful. In a DOOM game, that's downright heresy.

- Practically no ammo pickups in a DOOM game, the only way to get ammo back is by using a regenerating chainsaw to create ADHD-pleasing rainbow-colored ammo-fountains.

- Quickswapping like a monkey with brain diseases to actually play the game at high-difficulties.

- The parading of a once-great franchise's corpse as the face of something it never was and never should be.

- Stupid story that doesn't mesh well with the type of game they were making at all. Even if you wanted a deep story from a DOOM game, this edgy Warhammer 40K fanfic sucks.

- Bethesda, Bethesda net account integration, and Microsoft. All of them can go straight to hell to be disemboweled and feasted upon by legions of Barons of Hell for centuries.


This game has some strong paid Bethesda shills fanboys, but believe me when I say this: it is NOT worth it if you don't think you'd be one of them. I'm sure they're grinding their teeth and preparing to spam "skill issue" already, as they do whenever anyone throws shade at this mediocre mess.

While the atrocious filter was offputting at first, the game was actually surprisingly fun with friends. The creatures arrive quite suddenly, but with enough atmospheric buildup that they can genuinely get some adrenaline pumping. In-game voicechat system works well, radio system also works well (though, you should at the very least deafen on an external chat platform if using one, it ruins a lot of the tension of knowing whether or not someone's dead, for example). The Company itself is a bit too cartoonishly evil and nonsensical for no reason for my personal taste, but the actual game more than makes up for it (plus, I must admit the airlock cutscene is still pretty cool, regardless of how much it actually makes sense).

Kicked ass in 1998, kicks ass now. Sells for a fraction of a modern AAA shooter, and has a lengthy campaign and immense mod support. It runs on almost anything, and is simply good fun. Multiplayer is easier than ever, as with the new update, you can simply invite friends to play deathmatch. Soundtrack is awesome in its own right. If you aren't considering buying it alone, buy it in the Valve Complete Pack on-sale. But no matter what price you get it at, you'll get your money's worth.

We had a good thing, you stupid ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥! We had factions, we had maps, we had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork! You could have shut your mouth, released community skins, and made as much money as you ever needed! It was perfect! But no! You just had to blow it up! You, and your engine and your subtick! You just had to be the man! If you'd done your job, known your place, we'd all be fine right now!

- Mike Ehrmantraut, Season 5, Episode 7, "Say My Name"

my favorite part was when alex knoll's self-insert said "if you mod it" and made a mod that removed his ability to write a coherent story with decent level design. it was so good that jimmy wong descended from the sky and said "you're not allowed any closer" and halted development on minor update patch #3 for ~9 months (and counting, out of the planned ~2-year support).

at least wyckoff's soundtrack still popped off, labjams (the soundtrack) is probably a more worthwhile purchase than the game itself. the community's also been a mixed bag, with some actually decent mods coming out (in spite of the restrictive SDK and lack of native scripting support), but there's also some really godawful mods made by children you have to sift through on mod.io as well. fusion (the multiplayer mod) is a must-have, and should've honestly been base-game. a singleplayer sandbox is hardly all that fun, and this is a sandbox first and foremost.

i really wish steam had a mixed review option, because this isn't an awful game, just a really really mediocre/mixed game that has a community of mostly unintelligible and unintelligent quest 2 standalone users. i do know that slz has some genuinely really great talent, and is capable of some absolutely phenominal stuff, but bonelab is really a showcase of both the best and worst SLZ can do. i'm still cautiously optimistic for their future projects.

game sucks

I wouldn't play this arm-flailing death trap if I was paid to do so. Awful community (comprised of Quest users below the age of 10 whose vocabulary is mostly slurs), physically painful graphics, and a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane developer who believes that other developers should be taking inspiration from his unfun gimmicky locomotion system (and that VR FPS games are bad).

Oh, and now it's a paid experience for 1/3 the price of Half-Life Alyx. Or 2/3 the price of BONEWORKS, an infinitely better "physical" VR game.

"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain"

I wasn't sure if I liked this game before the real-world drama went down. It was a short, but sweet VR experience that was well praised for the uniqueness of its gimmick. However, even at the time, the game was very lacking in all forms of content, and very much was a relic of the 2017 "teleport only" fad. It was still an enjoyable experience nonetheless.

Things since then, though, have changed much. The game's plot used to be a word of warning against mind-controlling megacorps forcing people to do questionable things. However, SUPERHOT Team have become the very thing they set out to destroy. They've removed the scenes that told this storyline, forcibly, so that they could sell their games more easily on the very platforms they were warning us about.

This wasn't a mental-health decision (despite SUPERHOT Team's claims that it is), since only an idiot who can't tell reality from fiction would ever be depressed by the scenes. This was done to lower the age rating of the game to sell easily on the Facebook (Oculus Quest) and Chinese marketplaces. Facebook and the CCP are some of the most infamous when it comes to brainwashing through media, and to represent SUPERHOT Team's wishes to support them, they've removed all content that could be considered critical of them that they could.

What we're left with is a game with no content, no meaning, and no justification for its existence. Sure, it's decent fun the first time around, but you'll only end up with a few hours of playtime based on that. Post-game, this will always end up collecting dust in your library. It already was an overrated game considering the shortage of actual content, but now it's entirely worthy of a boycott.

To any member of SUPERHOT Team, if you by some miracle end up reading this review (though I know you likely are tuning out all criticism entirely), I have two words for you:
♥♥♥♥ you.