AstrinSchmidt
1999
I literally spent an entire hour running around the Return to the Cathedral level looking for a singular piece of loot to reach the gold quota. I timed it.
All of the zombie levels are awful and even the 'proper' levels devolve into tedium later on in the game. There is pretty much nothing interesting or noteworthy here beyond the first two levels — the atmosphere is either close to non-existent, or badly handled to the point of absurdity, as with levels such as Return to the Cathedral. I honestly don't understand how the people at Looking Glass messed up this badly, and how people actually enjoy this. For me, the game devolved to knocking everyone out and running around the map looking for loot for literal hours, and just for that huge waste of time, this game gets a shit rating.
All of the zombie levels are awful and even the 'proper' levels devolve into tedium later on in the game. There is pretty much nothing interesting or noteworthy here beyond the first two levels — the atmosphere is either close to non-existent, or badly handled to the point of absurdity, as with levels such as Return to the Cathedral. I honestly don't understand how the people at Looking Glass messed up this badly, and how people actually enjoy this. For me, the game devolved to knocking everyone out and running around the map looking for loot for literal hours, and just for that huge waste of time, this game gets a shit rating.
2016
The gameplay loop just feels boring and unfulfilling, and playing on Ultra Violence, the game offered little to no challenge, even to someone who doesn't really play shooters (being myself).
The soundtrack was really awful, blaring with toneless downtuned guitars and annoying dubstep-esque synths. It sounded really compressed, and prompted me to just turn it off halfway through, greatly enhancing the experience.
The best strategy seemed to be to jump around in circles like a maniac, shooting off all the imps one at a time, before going up the food chain, taking care of progressively bigger foes. Remember how in Serious Sam, if you didn't prioritise targets, you would quickly get surrounded and overwhelmed? Well, not in this game. Here, the demons pretty much can't do anything against you keeping your distance and hopping around in circles. It's quite disappointing.
Bar the music, the sound design is generally quite good. The guns feel punchy to use, the enemies provide feedback for when they are damaged. Combined with the gorgeous graphics, the presentation definitely carries the game.
The level design is pretty much non-existent. It's essentially your standard arena shooter affair. Nothing to say here.
The modding support is great. The inclusion of Snapmap definitely bumps the rating up a star or so.
Overall, the game can be nice for when you want to turn your brain off and click some monsters, and the commjnity-created content is nice, but it really doesn't do much to elevate itself above arena shooters from fifteen-odd years ago. It's a meh game, for sure.
The soundtrack was really awful, blaring with toneless downtuned guitars and annoying dubstep-esque synths. It sounded really compressed, and prompted me to just turn it off halfway through, greatly enhancing the experience.
The best strategy seemed to be to jump around in circles like a maniac, shooting off all the imps one at a time, before going up the food chain, taking care of progressively bigger foes. Remember how in Serious Sam, if you didn't prioritise targets, you would quickly get surrounded and overwhelmed? Well, not in this game. Here, the demons pretty much can't do anything against you keeping your distance and hopping around in circles. It's quite disappointing.
Bar the music, the sound design is generally quite good. The guns feel punchy to use, the enemies provide feedback for when they are damaged. Combined with the gorgeous graphics, the presentation definitely carries the game.
The level design is pretty much non-existent. It's essentially your standard arena shooter affair. Nothing to say here.
The modding support is great. The inclusion of Snapmap definitely bumps the rating up a star or so.
Overall, the game can be nice for when you want to turn your brain off and click some monsters, and the commjnity-created content is nice, but it really doesn't do much to elevate itself above arena shooters from fifteen-odd years ago. It's a meh game, for sure.
2011
I played BFE Devolved in Fusion, and it was actually pretty good.
2012
Made me wish I was asleep instead of awake and playing the game. I am much too stubborn to give up on games unless I get stuck (this game never provided much of a challenge on the normal difficulty) but damn it, I regret spending 20-odd hours on this slog. My advice is, do literally anything other than playing the game, as this is about as engaging as dragging your mouse around your desktop.
2016
A decent enough game, though you should lower your expectations. It's an open-world-esque looter-shooter, with all the missions taking place across a few (somewhat) large, open levels. If you're expecting it to be absolutely anything like the original Shadow Warrior, definitely skip it, as this is nothing like a classic shooter.
Once I got past the initial shock, I found a decently fun arena shooter style game, with a cheesy story which I couldn't really understand because I never played the first reboot title, weapons which would provide a good punch had it not been for the bullet sponge-y nature of the enemies, decently large levels with some nice visuals, and an overall solid experience. Generally speaking, this is not my kind of game, but it is hard to fault it, as it seems to have been handled well, within the scope of what the developers seem to have been going for.
(Copied from Steam)
Once I got past the initial shock, I found a decently fun arena shooter style game, with a cheesy story which I couldn't really understand because I never played the first reboot title, weapons which would provide a good punch had it not been for the bullet sponge-y nature of the enemies, decently large levels with some nice visuals, and an overall solid experience. Generally speaking, this is not my kind of game, but it is hard to fault it, as it seems to have been handled well, within the scope of what the developers seem to have been going for.
(Copied from Steam)
2013
I've beaten the tutorial campaigns, and a bit of my own campaign. First impressions? The seem to have streamlined the fun out of the game. You can't build armies, capture settlements, build diplomatic relationships, or do anything without tons of micromanagement and heavy punishment for doing anything interesting. I literally can't even begin the campaign without running into a wall (my strategy is generally to stack tons of cheap units on all my starting settlements and attack everything around me right at the start; You can't do that in this game). Overall, I could see how the game would have unique mechanics and balance of its own, but as for myself, I just can't play it.
2021
This review contains spoilers
This is more of a mixed review, as I feel that the game doesn't really reach its full potential with the experience it delivers. I'll try to focus on what the game is, rather than what it isn't, but it's hard for me not to feel frustrated with how unrewarding the game ended up feeling compared to what I feel it could have been. Let's break the experience down to its elements, starting from the elephant in the room:
The Aesthetics:
The game frankly looks and sounds pretty awful. It is obvious from the start that the game world represents a dark, dystopian cyberpunk society where everything is awful, human life has no value, and looking at things hurts your eyes. The soundtrack gives a similar feeling, where bar a few tracks which can invoke some emotion in you, most of the music sounds unpleasant to the ears, comprising of simple melodies constructed from painful-sounding chiptune synthesiser sounds. Overall, the aesthetics work well for the overall tone of the game, but end up feeling less surreal and dreamlike and more painful to experience, so the aesthetics aren't going to make me come back to the game. In short, they are bad on purpose, but that does not make them good, and I would say that hurting the experience to deliver the overall message (more on that later) wasn't really worth it, as it just makes the game unpleasant to play.
The Gameplay:
The gameplay just feels confused, leading to the "mixed" impression I have of the game. It has all the elements of an Immersive Sim, but seemingly none of the fun; I normally go for pure stealth in games, but this game barely has a stealth system, where alternative paths lend you close to enemies ready to spot you, and a lack of a light system and patrol patterns means that the best way to deal with enemies is with instant headshots, which already takes away from the ImSim spirit, and it only leads to a slippery slope of forgoing sneaking entirely and simply headshotting enemies before they can spot you, which seems to be the meta. One augmentation which helps with this is the invisibility suit, which makes you invisible up to a certain distance. This means that you can conceivably sneak around headshotting people without getting hitscanned across the map, which is pretty much a requirement to beat the game with relative ease.
The other option is going guns-blazing, which can be fun if you're into that kind of stuff, and the movement mechanics do lend themselves well to evading enemies. However, you still run the risk of being hitscanned across the map, and the result ends up being the same as if you had attempted to sneak around and headshot people.
The augmentations expand on the gameplay, but none of them really change it much, except for one: the Grappendix. This thing is broken, and kind of ruins the game. I had fun traversing levels with super-kickjumps before I got it, but that was quickly rendered pointless as this thing basically turned me into a demigod, allowing me to ignore enemies. I feel that it doesn't led itself well to an ImSim-style game, since it encourages you to ignore the kitchen sink and just throw your dishes straight in the toilet.
Overall, the gameplay feels confused, as the obvious best strategy is to exterminate everyone on your path to the target, and then kill the target with a headshot. It's easy, assuming you use the invisibility suit and headshot everyone on sight, and the game doesn't feel like it rewards creaivity much. I really feel like introducing more varied stealth mechanics could massively increase the fun factor of the game (just look at Deus Ex and Thief for inspiration: Guard movement patterns, voice lines to let you know where they are, levels which encourage using your powers to solve problems, rather than ♥♥♥♥ around, like it's a sandbox). Overall, it's decent, but I feel that it could be much more.
The Deep
This is definitely the hardest, and probably most controversial part of the game for me to talk about, but it's also what I feel is the most important aspect going in. For some background, I'm generally pretty pretentious, and put gameplay pretty low on the weighing when it comes to what I consider to be an "excellent" game, and what I consider to be a "good" game. Games like Dark Souls, OFF, The Void, and STALKER are all excellent games in my books, because I feel that they achieve the goal of using their elements to create storytelling beyond the possibilities of any non-interactive medium, and all left me with strong feelings of longing, sadness, existentialism, and everything in-between.
With that said, this game clearly attempts to deliver a message to the player, but I feel that it ends up falling somewhat short of its potential. The world of Cruelty Squad is, well, cruel. It's an assault on the senses; The environments don't make sense, the stories behind the missions range from satirical to ridiculous and nonsensical, the enemies are either abstract or (attempt to be) terrifying, and the entire game feels unpleasant to the core. This sends a message to the player: This is a cyberpunk world you absolutely do not want to live in, which is a great starting point. Unfortunately, I feel that the game doesn't really develop much beyond that.
The intro cutscene establishes the protagonist as a depressed mess after being fired from his hired assassin gig, It's pretty obvious that his job is the only thing which gives him fulfillment, and he shows no real emotion when he is hired by Cruelty Squad to do what he does best. What follows is his journey across bizarre levels assassinating people for increasingly bad reasons until it all devolves into a fever dream and culminates into the first ending, which is an assault on the senses and doesn't really make any sense within the context of the game.
The first ending essentially just shows that the player character has failed to achieve fulfillment through his journey. The reason I feel that this is not effective is that, as the player, I don't know this character. I was just going through the levels, enduring the assault on the senses, trying to have fun, and I feel no more or less fulfilled than I did at the start. The game shows me the world through the lens of a person I only really got to know in a trailer as well as the intro of the game, and I do not identify with it at all. It simply makes me go "So... was that the ending?"
This problem is only further highlighted by the fact that the "ending" does not end the game at all, and you still have much secret stuff to unpack and two more endings to experience before the game truly ends. What this essentially tells me as the player is that life in this world is pointless and I shouldn't really care about achieving anything, which I take to heart as I look to guides to unlocking the six levels remaining in the game. The other endings don't provide much closure, and overall, the message of the game seems quite clear: a globalised, profit-driven society controlled by money and technology will lead to the eradication of happiness, and life will have no purpose other than suffering and cruelty. This is fair, but it all culminates in your interactions with the world boiling down to the player feeling that there is no catharsis to be found, which makes the experience feel hollow which, in my eyes, is not a good goal to strive towards.
Cruelty Squad should be treated as a sandbox designed to allow you to mess around with the mechanics, laugh at the satirical dialogue, and maybe hunt for secrets. It is a game to be experienced, and not enjoyed. Of course, you could always find something more if you were to play it yourself, and by all means, do. Just don't expect that the 97% rating would mean that it's necessarily a game that you would enjoy, and be prepared for horrible hitscan and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ AOE attacks in corridors to bring you true PUNISHMENT.
(Review copied from Steam)
The Aesthetics:
The game frankly looks and sounds pretty awful. It is obvious from the start that the game world represents a dark, dystopian cyberpunk society where everything is awful, human life has no value, and looking at things hurts your eyes. The soundtrack gives a similar feeling, where bar a few tracks which can invoke some emotion in you, most of the music sounds unpleasant to the ears, comprising of simple melodies constructed from painful-sounding chiptune synthesiser sounds. Overall, the aesthetics work well for the overall tone of the game, but end up feeling less surreal and dreamlike and more painful to experience, so the aesthetics aren't going to make me come back to the game. In short, they are bad on purpose, but that does not make them good, and I would say that hurting the experience to deliver the overall message (more on that later) wasn't really worth it, as it just makes the game unpleasant to play.
The Gameplay:
The gameplay just feels confused, leading to the "mixed" impression I have of the game. It has all the elements of an Immersive Sim, but seemingly none of the fun; I normally go for pure stealth in games, but this game barely has a stealth system, where alternative paths lend you close to enemies ready to spot you, and a lack of a light system and patrol patterns means that the best way to deal with enemies is with instant headshots, which already takes away from the ImSim spirit, and it only leads to a slippery slope of forgoing sneaking entirely and simply headshotting enemies before they can spot you, which seems to be the meta. One augmentation which helps with this is the invisibility suit, which makes you invisible up to a certain distance. This means that you can conceivably sneak around headshotting people without getting hitscanned across the map, which is pretty much a requirement to beat the game with relative ease.
The other option is going guns-blazing, which can be fun if you're into that kind of stuff, and the movement mechanics do lend themselves well to evading enemies. However, you still run the risk of being hitscanned across the map, and the result ends up being the same as if you had attempted to sneak around and headshot people.
The augmentations expand on the gameplay, but none of them really change it much, except for one: the Grappendix. This thing is broken, and kind of ruins the game. I had fun traversing levels with super-kickjumps before I got it, but that was quickly rendered pointless as this thing basically turned me into a demigod, allowing me to ignore enemies. I feel that it doesn't led itself well to an ImSim-style game, since it encourages you to ignore the kitchen sink and just throw your dishes straight in the toilet.
Overall, the gameplay feels confused, as the obvious best strategy is to exterminate everyone on your path to the target, and then kill the target with a headshot. It's easy, assuming you use the invisibility suit and headshot everyone on sight, and the game doesn't feel like it rewards creaivity much. I really feel like introducing more varied stealth mechanics could massively increase the fun factor of the game (just look at Deus Ex and Thief for inspiration: Guard movement patterns, voice lines to let you know where they are, levels which encourage using your powers to solve problems, rather than ♥♥♥♥ around, like it's a sandbox). Overall, it's decent, but I feel that it could be much more.
The Deep
This is definitely the hardest, and probably most controversial part of the game for me to talk about, but it's also what I feel is the most important aspect going in. For some background, I'm generally pretty pretentious, and put gameplay pretty low on the weighing when it comes to what I consider to be an "excellent" game, and what I consider to be a "good" game. Games like Dark Souls, OFF, The Void, and STALKER are all excellent games in my books, because I feel that they achieve the goal of using their elements to create storytelling beyond the possibilities of any non-interactive medium, and all left me with strong feelings of longing, sadness, existentialism, and everything in-between.
With that said, this game clearly attempts to deliver a message to the player, but I feel that it ends up falling somewhat short of its potential. The world of Cruelty Squad is, well, cruel. It's an assault on the senses; The environments don't make sense, the stories behind the missions range from satirical to ridiculous and nonsensical, the enemies are either abstract or (attempt to be) terrifying, and the entire game feels unpleasant to the core. This sends a message to the player: This is a cyberpunk world you absolutely do not want to live in, which is a great starting point. Unfortunately, I feel that the game doesn't really develop much beyond that.
The intro cutscene establishes the protagonist as a depressed mess after being fired from his hired assassin gig, It's pretty obvious that his job is the only thing which gives him fulfillment, and he shows no real emotion when he is hired by Cruelty Squad to do what he does best. What follows is his journey across bizarre levels assassinating people for increasingly bad reasons until it all devolves into a fever dream and culminates into the first ending, which is an assault on the senses and doesn't really make any sense within the context of the game.
The first ending essentially just shows that the player character has failed to achieve fulfillment through his journey. The reason I feel that this is not effective is that, as the player, I don't know this character. I was just going through the levels, enduring the assault on the senses, trying to have fun, and I feel no more or less fulfilled than I did at the start. The game shows me the world through the lens of a person I only really got to know in a trailer as well as the intro of the game, and I do not identify with it at all. It simply makes me go "So... was that the ending?"
This problem is only further highlighted by the fact that the "ending" does not end the game at all, and you still have much secret stuff to unpack and two more endings to experience before the game truly ends. What this essentially tells me as the player is that life in this world is pointless and I shouldn't really care about achieving anything, which I take to heart as I look to guides to unlocking the six levels remaining in the game. The other endings don't provide much closure, and overall, the message of the game seems quite clear: a globalised, profit-driven society controlled by money and technology will lead to the eradication of happiness, and life will have no purpose other than suffering and cruelty. This is fair, but it all culminates in your interactions with the world boiling down to the player feeling that there is no catharsis to be found, which makes the experience feel hollow which, in my eyes, is not a good goal to strive towards.
Cruelty Squad should be treated as a sandbox designed to allow you to mess around with the mechanics, laugh at the satirical dialogue, and maybe hunt for secrets. It is a game to be experienced, and not enjoyed. Of course, you could always find something more if you were to play it yourself, and by all means, do. Just don't expect that the 97% rating would mean that it's necessarily a game that you would enjoy, and be prepared for horrible hitscan and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ AOE attacks in corridors to bring you true PUNISHMENT.
(Review copied from Steam)
2019
Focuses on survival mechanics and seems to make the setting more conventional. As a fan of the first game, this one seems to go in the entirely wrong direction. Performance sucks, too, running worse on minimum setting than Classic HD on my 1070Ti. Maybe I'll try it again one day, but as is, I have many more promising games to play.
This game lacks the fun factor present in the original game -- the cover system chokes the feeling of freedom the player is supposed to get in immersive sim games, the dialogues boil down to cookie-cut minigames, where you get two ways to do them successfully (Including the social augmentation) and many more ways to fuck up and get a worse outcome.
The game feels like it drags on, despite having taken me considerably less time than the original game. This is probably due to how the game is structured to accommodate for multiple rigid playstyles, and my gameplay, which generally boils down to going through an area without taking anyone down or being seen, and then immediately running through the next area with invisibility on just to troll the game, often ends up feeling like a wasted opportunity, because the game seems to shove into your face how you could do things "better."
Overall, I am not impressed, and I much prefer the original Deus Ex. Perhaps I'm just as grumpy old man who doesn't want to get with the times.
(Copied from Steam)
The game feels like it drags on, despite having taken me considerably less time than the original game. This is probably due to how the game is structured to accommodate for multiple rigid playstyles, and my gameplay, which generally boils down to going through an area without taking anyone down or being seen, and then immediately running through the next area with invisibility on just to troll the game, often ends up feeling like a wasted opportunity, because the game seems to shove into your face how you could do things "better."
Overall, I am not impressed, and I much prefer the original Deus Ex. Perhaps I'm just as grumpy old man who doesn't want to get with the times.
(Copied from Steam)
2004
Best Hitman game I've played so far.
- Extremely addictive and satisfying
- Doesn't have any of the nonsense that plagued Silent Assassin.
- Has an amazing soundtrack that actually won a BAFTA
- 47 never visits Japan
10/10. I can't recommend this game enough, and I might be addicted.
(Copied from Steam)
- Extremely addictive and satisfying
- Doesn't have any of the nonsense that plagued Silent Assassin.
- Has an amazing soundtrack that actually won a BAFTA
- 47 never visits Japan
10/10. I can't recommend this game enough, and I might be addicted.
(Copied from Steam)
This review contains spoilers
No.
2019
While it starts off pretty neat and adventurous, it quickly devolves to tedium as you realise that death has no real impact, and enemies are terrible damage sponges (it feels like I'm playing SL1 +0 despite not doing anything special).
While I do think I'll be returning to the game at some point, the truth is, I feel like I've already experienced Outward in all its glory.
(Note: I joined the mage academy faction from the start of the game, not realising that it was actually DLC. That might be why all the enemies were so tough. Still, it was a bit of fun killing bandits which by far outclass me. Getting a friend to run around baiting enemies in split screen so that I could use my SL1 +0 skills to face them one-on-one was helpful).
While I do think I'll be returning to the game at some point, the truth is, I feel like I've already experienced Outward in all its glory.
(Note: I joined the mage academy faction from the start of the game, not realising that it was actually DLC. That might be why all the enemies were so tough. Still, it was a bit of fun killing bandits which by far outclass me. Getting a friend to run around baiting enemies in split screen so that I could use my SL1 +0 skills to face them one-on-one was helpful).
2009
This game tales a few steps back from Gothic 3, in a good way, and brings a small, hand-crafted open world akin to the ones seen in Gothic 1 and 2. This time around, Piranha Bytes shake things up by introducing a legitimately great combat system into the game, and populating the game world with dungeons to fight your way through. Most of these dungeons, except the story-important endgame ones, are open to the player from Chapter 1, leading to the new Nameless Hero being able to get rich and powerful before even joining a faction.
Personal opinion: I like the combat system, and I enjoy dungeon crawlers such as the King's Field series and the last quarter of Arx Fatalis, and get bored by long dialogues such as what is seen in The Witcher 3 or in the first chapters of any Gothic game. As such, I definitely like this game, probably more than Gothic II, but if you think you would not enjoy an easier, more combat-oriented game (though, I have to say, this may be my favourite combat system in an RPG) then you might want to give this one a pass.
All in all, if you've enjoyed any of Piranha Bytes' games, I would recommend you to at least try this one out, as it retains the spirit of what makes the games great whilst providing a more focused experience, even if it is focused on dungeon crawling and combat, rather than character stories and dialogue.
(Copied from Steam)
Personal opinion: I like the combat system, and I enjoy dungeon crawlers such as the King's Field series and the last quarter of Arx Fatalis, and get bored by long dialogues such as what is seen in The Witcher 3 or in the first chapters of any Gothic game. As such, I definitely like this game, probably more than Gothic II, but if you think you would not enjoy an easier, more combat-oriented game (though, I have to say, this may be my favourite combat system in an RPG) then you might want to give this one a pass.
All in all, if you've enjoyed any of Piranha Bytes' games, I would recommend you to at least try this one out, as it retains the spirit of what makes the games great whilst providing a more focused experience, even if it is focused on dungeon crawling and combat, rather than character stories and dialogue.
(Copied from Steam)
2003
A decent game, with varied weaponry and some decent comedic potential in the different situations the player could find themselves in. Apocalypse Weekend was pretty awful, though.
Overall, if you're not afraid of gratuitous violence and offensive stereotypes, this game can be comfortably beaten within four hours (excluding Apocalypse Weekend) and is well worth experiencing, if only for the absurdity of it.
(Copied from Steam)
Overall, if you're not afraid of gratuitous violence and offensive stereotypes, this game can be comfortably beaten within four hours (excluding Apocalypse Weekend) and is well worth experiencing, if only for the absurdity of it.
(Copied from Steam)
Truly wonderful action/simulation game. I have only played vanilla, but even then, the fun never seems to end. Wonderful combat mechanics, a well-implemented dynamic political landscape, easy to learn, hard to master gameplay. There is nothing not to recommend. 10/10 fun.
Also, there's supposed to be multiplayer or something, but there were no lobbies in Southeast Asia, and I generally stick to singleplayer. I dunno.
(Copied from Steam)
Also, there's supposed to be multiplayer or something, but there were no lobbies in Southeast Asia, and I generally stick to singleplayer. I dunno.
(Copied from Steam)