There’s a tendency among gamers to attribute good combat to complicated attack combos that require a lot of practice to execute properly, complex and varied enemies that test the player’s skills and etcetera.

Darkwood has these two attributes, but in a completely different shape. The main character’s main attack is slow, weighty, and reliant on stamina, while enemies have a predictable but powerful attack that will stagger the player if they get hit, and to top it all off there’s the weapon durability system, meaning that even if you defeat a enemy, it will come at the cost of your precious weapon, and as it increasingly becomes clear throughout the game’s length, combat is not always the best option, if anything the game gives you enough tools that serve to avoid combat altogether, and in general engaging in battles are only advised in situations where your only choice is to fight.

Yes, you heard me right, choice.

Because combat is merely a branch of a larger tree, one that reveals Darkwood’s true nature.

It’s a game all about choices and its consequences. Everything the player does is a choice, unconscious or not, and, however minor they seem at the time, will have consequences that may be with you for the rest of the game, and because of that, time becomes a very precious resource, one that the player must always pay attention to, as daytime becomes both the time to move further towards escaping the accursed forest and a preparation phase for whatever strange happening occur at night, and coming into the dawn of the night prepared to survive and fend off against whatever attempts to invade your settlement is rewarded, but one could also use daytime to progress through the tasks logged in your journal at the cost of having a harder time fending off against the abominations at night. And every one action, big or small, done at daytime may determine the rest of the day’s length, using healing items earlier on the day means you’ll have to be more careful at dodging enemies during the night, and missing an attack will lead you to take a good amount of damage, which may lead you to using that one healing item that would’ve been so useful later on, or having to carry healing items and weapons for future combat encounters mean you’ll have to sacrifice carrying resources and vice-versa, and even how you choose your abilities at the oven may change how you approach the game, even a choice between giving a key to the Wolfman or the Musician exists to further drive that point home.

But no other moment accentuate this better than when you are about to leave the forest behind to advance into the swamp, while sacrificing every item that isn’t in your inventory, you’ll have to stop and think about what items would be useful to carry into a potentially more hostile environment than the previous one, and it’s at the swamp where your fate will be determined from that points onwards, and choices you made in the past may (and will) come back to bite you in the ass and will pull the rug out of under you if you played your cards poorly by that point.

I don’t want to spoil too much, but all of this above is what truly makes Darkwood scary. Don’t get me wrong, the atmosphere is incredibly haunting and oppressive, and its horrifyingly unnerving art style presenting a dark forest where the trees meet beings beyond our comprehension, and even the “friendly” denizens look rotten and and almost falling apart, but the terror Darkwood creates on the player is genuinely effective not simply because of the atmosphere, but because that atmosphere is marred into a similarly oppressive and deliberately brutal gameplay loop. It’s Don’t Starve on steroids, it’s Zdzislaw Beksinski meets Shrek and Hoodwinked Robert Eggers, it’s the horror game every other horror game wishes it was.

The forest is unrelentingly cruel, and will fucking eat you alive if you let your guard down, so please, respect the woods.

Whilst Silent Hill 2 is an eerie masterclass in precise unnerving, Silent Hill 4: The Room is an exercise in chaos and instability.

I have a strong feeling Hideo Kojima's now-mythical Silent Hills project would've taken inspiration very much from this title. Not only does the legendary PT owe a great deal to the first person segments in the titular room, but the way in which this game messes with the player would've greatly informed Kojima's incorporation of his games' usual self-awareness (allegedly, Silent Hills would make use of sending messages to the player outside of the game and was intended to 'curse' the Playstation console).
The same cursed quality can be found in the polarising, jagged roughness of The Room. The game feels unfinished, almost dangerous, making virtue of glitching (the 'Braintree' ghost), screen distortion and even stock sounds such as monkeys, tigers and, most uncanny of them all, burping.
The game also consciously tortures the player: the safe room that restores your health becomes cursed with horrific apparitions that can kill you; some enemies can't be killed, forcing you to run away or rush through an important segment; you can pick up certain items which cause bad or strange things to happen, such as moving through the same outdoor space over and over again until you drop the item.
All of these things are truly frustrating but arguably vital - the first Silent Hill is oppresive in atmosphere, whereas the fourth is oppressive in gameplay, giving sense that you have no control over the grim supernatural serial killer story (The Frighteners, anyone?).
I could very well be an apologist for such loathsome gameplay mechanics, but it just wouldn't be the same horror experience if it were any cleaner. Since when did horror have to be clean, anyway?

As its original press advertised, so much more than a Resident Evil clone.
Whilst Resident Evil was a milestone in survival horror, Silent Hill opened a whole new rusty window of opportunities for scary games.
Perhaps there's a little nostalgia for the nuanced PS1 graphics but the look of the game is incredibly distinct, setting the standard for its many sequels. Unlike in Silent Hill 2's many sad, empty spaces, the original game always feels moments away from danger and never feels safe.
The snowy town of thick fog and the pitch black voids with rustic grate flooring, alongside Akira Yamaoka's iconic sound design are key to one of the most oppressive atmospheres in any game ever.
Whilst the monsters are interesting in design, it does feel like they improve in the next few sequels, but I'd choose fighting fleshy pterodactyls over zombies any day.
Silent Hill is one of the most iconic horror franchises in popular gaming culture, although sadly due more to the likes of Pyramid Head and major aspects of the sequels. For this reason, it should be reiterated that the original holds up and is still one of the best games not only in its franchise but of all time.

A game like this shouldn't be this fun and exciting. Yeah, the plot and characters are super forgettable, the combat is not as flashy and smooth as Bayonetta or even Nier Automata, and the world feels kind of shallow. But for a game made by a Korean mobile game studio, a term I never put in the same breath as quality, this was a very good first try.

Seeing that there will be an eventual sequel, I hope they will improve many aspects of the game and maybe add some character to the world that it desperately needs. It needs to find it's own unique identity than just simply being a clone of other games that are better.

Jugablemente, me parece un juego muy bueno. El combate es entretenido y funciona bastante bien, aunque a la larga se hace un poco pesado por cómo funciona el mundo abierto. Que las dos zonas abiertas sean dos desiertos prácticamente idénticos es una idea de bombero y es un coñazo moverse por ellos recogiendo cientos de coleccionables.

La banda sonora es muy repetitiva, sobre todo por el abuso de coros en los temas. La historia es MUY predecible, básicamente la misma historia scifi de siempre con humanos, monstruos y robots, con los mismos giros de guion y las mismas "preocupaciones". El plataformeo falla bastante, donde he muerto la mayoría de veces.

Las fases en los dos Levoire están bastante chulas, con un enfoque un poco más survival horror, salvando la gran distancia. El tramo final está muy guapo también. Además, el NG+ aporta cosas y vale la pena volver a jugarlo para seguir mejorando y potenciando a EVE.

Tiene muchas cosas que pulir en una secuela, pero en lo más importante, la jugabilidad, funciona muy bien.

I cannae believe so many folk are treating such an ok game as some big line in the culture war sand. If they took a few minutes away from signing petitions and replying to every Sony tweet with their hashtag, and actually bought the thing they'd see that no amount of skin can save this from being just very fine.

Flat shallow characters, messy predictable story, repetitive combat. This game has it all!

Fights are mostly just waiting for the enemy to do something so you can parry it and do a burst attack. There are combos, but you almost never get to do full ones because the enemy is starting its next swing and your only options are block, parry, or dodge. Good luck with that last one, because the dodge is dogshit. It's supposed to be for moving away from unblockable attacks, but the timing for it just feels off. This is made painfully worse when more than one enemy is targeting you, and your Souls instincts kick in looking for i-frames that aren't there.

Boss fights and music mostly rip though, so it has that going for it.

The characters however are like interacting with cardboard. Everyone is so basic. They're saying words that sound important, but there's so little there beneath it in both the acting or body language. Adam has to be the worst of these. The man feels like a placeholder model and voice through the whole game. It's wild that's he's one of the main cast. They're all desperately trying to get you to care about a story that feels vague, but by accident. Not some kind of "Oh the secrets are being kept from you" thing, but like they forgot to give us necessary info because they know it all since they're the ones making the game. I burst out laughing at the end when some daft stuff happens and a character just goes "What are you talking about?" as this person walks away without saying anything. It's exactly how I felt in the moment.

I'm convinced this whole thing could have worked better as more of a boss rush with bits of story or travel in-between à la Furi. I didn't feel like I was connecting wih the people or what was going on when I was trekking across empty desert doing fetch quests where every one ends with finding a corpse with an attached dying message. It's a poor man's Nier Automata, and that doesn't do it any favours in a world where I've come to resent a game I loved because it's done cross-overs with fucking everything and I'm sick of seeing 2B. THEY MADE ME SICK OF SEEING A NICE BIG ARSE!

To be fair, I did not play this very long. I was expecting it to be extremely corporate and predatory, which it is. What I did not expect was for it to be very poorly made, which it also is. It crashed within the first 30 minutes. Character models are unreadable, homogenous blobs. Action animations look incredibly stiff and artificial. Environments are drab gray smears. The cutscenes... oh my god the cutscenes are SO UNBELIEVABLY SLOW. The characters are so torpid they make Geralt of Riviera look like Sonic the Hedgehog. It's like they inserted a 5 second pause before every line to give it dramatic weight. The actual result is that this action game simply has no energy; the whole thing seems like it's on the verge of a heroin overdose. Combine that with all the on-screen movement consisting of these blobby characters shuffling randomly back and forth, and the writing and voice acting being bottom of the barrel bad, and this whole package looks incredibly amateurish.

Making this some kind of MMO is a weird choice too. What is gained by taking away my ability to pause the game? How is my experience enhanced by seeing "xXxHOTBABESLAYERxXx" running in circles around my armor vendor? Maybe it's just a nod to Sartre; hell really is other people.

I don’t think it's too much of a stretch to say that Diablo invented the loot box. You kill a monster and something might pop out; it might be incredible or it might be total trash. When such tension was novel it was exciting and addictive. Now every live service game has embraced this mechanic as a means of padding out a game's playtime. A regular playthrough of Dark Souls might see you walk away with, what, 30 or 40 cool weapons? A playthrough of any given Diablo, though, will have you looting literally thousands of weapons, each with a minuscule chance of being cool. One of these models perfectly slots into a live service game's carefully calibrated withholding of joy. Too little and you get frustrated, too much and you get bored and/or consume the content too quickly. With the "Shop" tab prominently on display in the main menu, this feels less like a game and more like a mail-order catalog.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I have enjoyed these games in the past, but this really does feel like Diablo in its inevitable final form: a corporate IP with no soul, fashioned into a treadmill of monetizable nonsense (like $65 mounts!). Content mash, to be drip fed forever.

As someone who enjoyed Ion Fury and Ion Fury: Aftershock, I was really excited at the reveal of Phantom Fury. It captures the visuals of a late 90s/early 2000s FPS. Regardless of what I have to say about it later, it absolutely nailed its graphical style.

I played the Phantom Fury demo in anticipation and in the nicest way possible, I would be fucking embarrassed if I was the one to release a demo in that state. I was hoping that they would delay the game to iron out its glaring issues and a lot of people felt the same way, then they announced that the game would be released 6 months later. From there I went in with very low expectations.

Phantom Fury is a skinwalker taking the identity of Half-Life 1 and 2 alongside the early builds of Duke Nukem Forever. With its nostalgic visuals, it hides such a blatantly unfinished, buggy and half-assed game inside that's trying to lure you in based on its looks, vibes and its John Blade cameo, because kids these days totally know what SiN is and who this John Blade guy is when he only appears for 30 seconds. While I don't agree with people calling Phantom Fury the new generation Blood 2 (because I would gladly replay this over Blood 2 any day of the week), if people are making those comparisons, you've seriously fucked up.

Phantom Fury wants to be Half-life 1 and 2 so badly, its got all the set pieces like a jeep section, except the jeep is a Halo Warthog that controls like a drunken ice skater, with instances of cars shooting at you with rockets like in the Water Hazard chapter. Its got helicopter fights like in Surface Tension, except they don't work here because the AI is beyond stupid. You can replicate Half-Life's set pieces all you like, it's not a substitute for good level design. It's like the game is jangling keys at you trying to jog your nostalgia for a much better game while you play this slog. The levels range from desert region to tech-base and that's all there is to it. I get that the game is trying to invoke that feeling again, but it's 2024, we don't need all these physics-based puzzles in here like the technology for that stuff hasn't been around for 20 years. The level structure constantly goes through an identity crisis. Phantom Fury can't decide whether it wants to be a linear narrative experience, or a classic key hunt with excessive backtracking through the same looking hallways that you will get lost in because there is no sense of direction. Maybe instead of adding in all those quirky environmental interactions so you hopefully tug at people's nostalgia, you instead devoted that time into some better level design.

Onto the combat, it's so weightless like in the demo. Yeah they added in proper gibbing but nothing packs a punch, the automatic weapons feel like staplers and the shotguns feel like a gentle sneeze. The bowling bombs are so unreliable and bounced off enemies most of the time that I ended up never using them towards the end, the Motherflakker reloads too slowly for it to be useful as a crowd clearing weapon, the Ion Bow feels like a shell of its former self and instead of its very useful alt-fire, RMB is now for aiming down the sights like in Half-Life because why? Once again the Loverboy got the most use out of me, even if its lock on alt-fire feels slower, less snappy and has this annoying bug where it can lock on to props such as laptops. Seriously, how does this shit even make it into the final product? You can buy weapon mods for some of your guns. Yes, only a few weapons have purchasable mods. It's like they never finished the full weapon mod line-up. The weapons that do get mods though either have two or only one and it just feels unfinished. Am I supposed to believe that the standard shotgun was only gonna come with ONE weapon mod whereas that foam gun I never used came with two, and the fucking Ion Bow gets NO mods?

Enemies barely flinch or react to getting shot and when they die, they just ragdoll awkwardly. I'm not talking Painkiller ragdolls where enemies are sent flying across arenas in a satisfying way, I'm talking Source engine ragdolls that collapse onto themselves when you unfreeze them with the physics gun in Gmod. Enemies are on the spongey side and the game's way of making them difficult is to just send 20 of them bunched up in your direction, tanking your frame rate in the process. It also doesn't help that the AI is dumb as shit. Sometimes they take cover in the open, most of the time they get stuck on level geometry, and a frighteningly common occurrence were enemies just stand around doing nothing as if I'm not even there. I played this game on Hard and it felt so inconsistent. Sometimes the game would just freely give you health, armour and ammo for an hour for really basic fights, then it'll pull some insane resource conservation shit onto you during the tougher fights.

The story is laughably bad. Why is Shelly siding with the GDF again? They're acting like nothing happened in Aftershock. The Colonel just becomes a twist villain as he betrays you out of nowhere and after killing him, you have to fight ANOTHER FUCKING TWIST VILLAIN that comes way out of left-field and makes no sense. The game tries really hard to make you feel bad for Shelly, but it doesn't work when you hamfist her "tragic" past and trauma to the player and then she gets over it in a single anti-climatic cutscene.

I can't believe I paid $32 fucking Australian dollars for this unfocused, undercooked mess. I fucking gave Slipgate Ironworks and modern day 3D Realms my hard-earned money for this shit. I got Wrath: Aeon of Ruin and Graven from a cheap bundle and finished their early access campaigns ages ago and I'm terrified on what those games have become on their full releases when I eventually replay them.

I do not recommend Phantom Fury and to 3D Realms/Slipgate Ironworks, you guys gotta pull your shit together, because acting all pissy and childish towards reviewers in private who rightfully criticised your unfinished product that you gave out early copies for is not gonna fix this. Don't bite the hands that feed you.