Dusk is one of the first boomer shooters I ever touched. The day I purchased it was a watershed moment that defines my taste in shooters to this day. These two statements aren't connected. I purchased Dusk in a double pack with Ultrakill. After a couple of hours of enjoying the former, I decided to try out the other game I bought that day. I never looked back. It's hard to say I gave Dusk a proper shake, and I had nothing but fond memories of the few hours I saw, so I thought I'd finally get around to seeing what I missed.

Imagine my surprise when I was bored to tears by the first act, a real Darkest Dungeon. Its gorgeous Gothic horror atmosphere, genuinely uneasy in its constant industrial scraping and thumping, is in service of nothing. I'd imagine my fond memories of this section have more to do with my first time b-hopping at Mach 10 speeds because I have no other explanation for how I didn't see the flat open areas and dull labyrinths for what they are. Lame as hell. Then, to compliment the overcooked levels, I found a swathe of oddly unexciting weapons (They fucked up the rocket jump! A cardinal sin) and a critical mass of great-looking but mostly unthreatening enemies. It's never unfun to blast through these zones at top speed with these weapons, I am biologically presupposed to enjoy this (and the addition of boss fights helps break up the pace a little). I've just seen all of its gimmicks done much better in the years since I first saw them.

This got even worse with the first half of episode 2, at which point I started to wonder if I'd been the victim of some kind of psychological attack, tricking me into remembering this as a fun game. Until the labs. I won't spoil where the game goes from the second half of episode 2 on, but it gets much headier, much weirder and much pulpier than I'd expected. I loved it. Genuinely, unabashedly. The level design (while retaining some fundamentally dumb idiosyncracies) got better, the enemies got better, the powerups started being fun, a whole new world opened up before me.

But when we get down to brass tacks, Quake's neo-gothic funhouse is unquestionably more appealing than this game's portentous sludge. Dusk is pulling too much from its predecessors and offering little in return. It's such a shame it takes so long to find its footing. By the back half the decision to take the material so deathly seriously starts paying serious dividends. The ending is euphoric in its pulp indulgence. But the good comes far too late and at the expense of its first half. Many boomer shooter aficionados have and will rightly drop this after its terrible opening act. Who can blame them, all they'll see is a bland copycat desperately smashing its influences together. Even if it eventually carves its niche, I find it hard to argue with that assessment.

Yet another ramshackle entry in my favourite vacuous multimedia void. Star Wars is as Star Wars does, and Star Wars has been a comically oversized iron ball shackled to its own ankle for at least 25 years now. Attempts to branch out from the established formula are at once reviled and fundamentally incapable of shifting the needle in certain areas. Here we (theoretically) have a slightly more serious adventure indebted as much to Indiana Jones as any prior entry in this series. You may assume this new avenue will lend us a new take on the source material. Ha, must be your first rodeo. This is bogged down by a dirge of 'lore,' by constantly epic sub-Williams orchestral music that does not fit but must be here because, you know, Star Wars does that, and by a sudden last act turn towards the deathly-serious 'oops-where-did-my-protagonist's-personality-go' morally unambiguous light vs dark storytelling that legally must be the conclusion. Once again the infinite possibilities of space are limited to all too familiar futuristic industry, deserts, forests (a mercifully visually pleasant distraction) and ice caves. 80% of the narrative is retracing the steps of what someone more interesting and important than you already did. It's Star Wars, baby! It's how every single piece of media in this franchise (except for the one people yell about in YouTube comment sections) has been this century! It's fucking exhausting!

Even while I'm actively trying to stuff my baggage into the overhead locker (never enough space), the plane cabin is busy exploding into a fiery mess. EA's Star Wars games are all flagrant rush jobs, with this game's sequel releasing in a state best described as immoral. I think that game's lack of functionality at launch has eclipsed the fact this is no achievement in optimisation either. Constant popping, consistent frame drops, uncanny idle poses and animations, you'd think this was a Pokemon game running on the switch! It's not disastrous, but a great deal of surface-level polish is missing from this game, even with however many patches and a (god-awful) PS5 port separating us from launch. Half the fun of this experience was watching my PS5 fighting tooth and nail to get this thing to load. Sure, the graphics are 'good.' But the art direction is so artless, and the faces still sit far too comfortably within the uncanny valley for me to think this big of a performance sacrifice was worth it.

Then there's the gameplay, an arranged marriage between Uncharted's snore-worthy climbing sequences and Sekiro-lite combat/level design. Neither party is happy in the relationship. After about 2 years, Uncharted elopes to Eastern Europe, cutting all ties with family and friends, never to be heard from again. Briefly, I was happier this way. For a lot of the game, the Souls-isms of the fights were a welcome reprieve from mediocre platforming and inane puzzles. Sure, the system falls apart the second you fight multiple melee characters at once. Sure, Respawn's incredibly successful endeavour to capture the actual weightlessness of a lightsaber has made the combat floaty and unsatisfying. Even Bad Dark Souls is better than OK Uncharted. But once the combat was all there was, it had nothing to look good next to.

The last two boss fights of this game are the only challenges it has to offer. They are also complete horse shit. These tiny lightsaber-wielding nobodies have 1 billion attacks with random switch-ups, and in the final boss's case, no visual clarity to their moves at all. I chuckled to myself throughout most of the game whenever the bosses turned red in combat, "What a lazy way to add variance to boss movesets" I foolishly thought. Then the final boss arena was lit in a muddled orange. Couldn't see when she was red, and couldn't tell what attacks were unblockable without tons of trial and error. Not a fun time trying to sight-read the differences between each of the hundreds of identical lightsaber combos with varying follow-ups, let me tell you. But the end of the game has to be regular losers fighting with glowsticks, it can't be something cinematic. That's not Star Wars! Just another way in which this game is hamstrung by its property.

So. Why any stars at all? Great question. Against all odds, I found some stuff to latch onto. Amidst a swarm of oddly unconvincing original SW OCs ("Zeffo"? What are you trying to pull here?) are some major highs. Greezy Money! Probably others! Mostly Greez!

The lightsaber customisation is a genuinely delightful system, green-blade-gang all day, and Cal Custard over here is a blank enough leading man that I find some value in this as a kind of Jedi power fantasy. I'm a child of Star Wars, much as I hate to admit it, and there are intermittent moments here that make my concrete heart twinge with something resembling childlike joy. It's just not enough to hang an entire game off.

Respawn seems like a studio with real human beings who care about games working for them (how else can you explain the absurd amount of endearing background Stormtrooper dialogue), but I'm yet to enjoy anything I've played from them. Yes, even that one. Yes, I am fun at parties.

I was a kid who knew nothing about football, or really most sports, so exaggerated video game versions of sports like this and NBA Hang Time were perfect. I remember how cool it was that I could make my own plays, and I created a play called "No Touchdown For You" that scatted defenders around the field in set locations instead of tracking individual opponents. I was unstoppable. Imagine my disappointment when I got older and found out that this was not representative of real football and that someone else already invented this type of play I made up and it's just called 'Zone Defense"

*Note I haven't done ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING yet but I've done most of the secret levels save for House and Trauma Loop and thats just because they require a fuckton of grinding for money and idk when if I'll ever get it done.

Yeah this game is really fuckin good and I wish I wasn't such a jackass about it years ago.

When a game looks like cruelty squad you're essentially fighting an uphill battle with me, and it didn't help this came out next to a lot of other low effort cashgrab "retro indie boomer shooters!!!" that would fill the weaker sections of Realms Deep streams didn't help one bit. From what I saw this game was just a giant ironic shitpost somehow masquerading as some stupid fake deep "we live in a society" bullshit.

Not the case at all.

Cruelty Squad is unconventional. Very unconventional. But it rides the line so thin that almost everything is still readable, and the gameplay behind all that is addicting as shit.

The game is objectively ugly on purpose. But everything on the hud is still readable and you can easily understand what's going on. Yes, I'll admit some of the bright colors did get to me and gave me a headache after a bit at points but again it surprisingly didn't bug me as much over time.

If I were to describe this game, it would be "first person hitman with deus ex powers for schizos". You have targets on your hud, and you're tasked with killing them. How? Doesn't matter, just get it done. With a few exceptions Cruelty Squad's levels are exactly what make imsims so special, and the powers and weapons you obtain are just the cherry on top. It's funny, this game has a lot of stealth elements, but at the same time I wouldn't even totally call it a stealth game with how many points you'll probably just end up gunning people down. But you gotta go a certain way about it. You can't just play this like a doom game, you gotta be precise, take cover when it matters, go for headshots. It's incredibly satisfying and the short completion times for each levels help encourage replayability all the more.

My only real complaints if anything is that noticing enemies can be a bit hard I feel sometimes? At least in crowded areas where so many people look the same so that got annoying sometimes. The last level also felt really obtuse and bad for the sake of it. That was entirely the point I'm sure but it just felt like a slog to get through.

Finally not sure if it's like this for anyone else but this game has some weird performance degradion over time for me, at least on my system (GTX 3060). Like, when I'll boot the game up, everything is a rock solid 60+ like it should be, but usually after like 9 level loads/retries the framerate dips into the 40s and I don't know why. I THINK its because the game is still trying to process stats of NPCs after their death on top of things like the stock markets? But I don't know, maybe this is just a me issue or something.

Other then that this has to be one of the most fun indie fpses I've played this year and I'm really upset at myself I didn't try it sooner. If you're still turned off because of the visuals or fans like I was, at least give it a try with an open mind. In terms of raw gameplay, this is a must-play for imsim fans as far as I'm concerned.