I had fond memories of playing Metal Gear 2 when it was included in Subsistence. It turns out that almost all of those memories were actually of Ghost Babel for the GBC.[1]

Metal Gear 2 is definitely an improvement from the first. Kojima's cinematic predilections are on full display here, there are far more sophisticated cutscenes and a whole lot more codec dialogue. You can also go prone now!

However, the more "advanced" enemy AI makes MG2 pretty annoying. You have a radar now, but it just shows enemies as dots, not where they're looking like in MGS1. I suppose you're meant to use the binoculars to check every screen before you go in, but let's be honest, that sucks. It also doesn't even matter sometimes because you can go to the next screen and an enemy will immediately walk in from what was 2 screens away and spot you. Once they've spotted you, if you are anywhere onscreen they will see you even if they don't actually have a line of sight. You can go around a corner and crawl under an object and they'll stand on the other side of a wall shooting at you.

The story is better than MG1's, even if it's the first "Evil Dead 2" style sequel/re-make/re-model in this series (Kojima would do it again in MGS1, and then a third time in MGS2, but that time it's ~commentary~ on the fact he's been making the same game over and over! Genius!). There's a Hind D fight, there's an ambush by 4 guys in an elevator, you have to figure out which soldier is a friendly lady by following her into the bathroom, you have to change a damn key by heating and freezing it. It's really pretty absurd.

While Metal Gear 2 plays better than Metal Gear 1, it also amps up the moon-logic, and sometimes it feels straight out of a Sierra adventure game. Okay, sure, I have to get these two eggs, and one hatches into a snake, and when the snake in the inventory lines up over the egg I press the button to throw it away, and the other egg hatches into an owl, and I use the owl near a laser gate to make a guard turn it off and go to sleep. I might as well be looking up racetrack odds in Police Quest to find a safe code or some shit.

I'm sure all of these bizarre solutions are mentioned if you call everyone on the codec on every screen, but others are pure trial-and-error, like the swamp bit. There is no way to see the path you can walk, you just have to walk, and when you sink, go back and try another direction. It's not hard, I didn't die during it, but it was so irritating that I thought less of the game because of it. When I then had to backtrack through all of it, I wanted to break Kojima's back and make him humble.

This all culminates in a boss that is a good idea in theory, but bad in execution, as your final weapon is obscenely slow, with a terrible hitbox. Hitting Big Boss with that thing at the end is like trying to hit a Medusa Head with Simon Belmont moving at one frame per second.

Thank Christ that, 8 years later, Kojima would finally make good on his ambitions. He would complete his Final Draft and make one of the greatest games of all time. Playing this, you'd never think he had the makings of a varsity athlete.

4/10

[1] Good reason for that, it turns out. It used a lot of the same music as MG2, the same radar, and this re-released version used Ghost Babel's codec portraits for Snake and Campbell. Probably some others, too. Ghost Babel is way, way better, though.

What can you say about Metal Gear? It was Metal Gear.

It's certainly an important, influential game, that essentially invented a genre (yes I know about Original Wolfenstein, it's not the same thing, shut up), but it still is not fun to play.

Most of your time is spent cycling through keys, running back and forth offscreen to respawn items (you MUST stay fully stocked or you will not have enough ammo to kill some bosses, including backtracking to get more mines when your carrying capacity is increased later), and going up and down one-way elevators. There's very little actual challenge to the gameplay, and it only gets easier as you progress since you can hold more rations.

The human bosses can all be defeated in seconds by running up to them and blasting them a bunch, while mechanical bosses all require very specific strategies. No, you idiot, you can't use the grenade launcher on THIS armored vehicle. You have to use mines! What were you thinking??? By the way, you're gonna have to use grenades on the next one, mines won't work on it. Missiles won't work either. Just grenades.

Metal Gear 1 is mostly an exercise in wasting the player's time at every turn. I can respect it for its contributions to gaming as a whole, but I damn sure don't have to like it.

2/10

I played this because I heard it was like Case of the Golden Idol. And I don't know what the hell game the Blight Club crew were playing, but this is more Professor Layton than anything.

Actually, that might be unfair to Layton. While this game does have a kickass style, a cross between Suda51 and Cosmo D, most of the puzzles in here are less "brain-teasers" and more "note-taking simulators". As much as I would get pissed off at Layton's "I haff tvelve metchsteek" bullshit at times, at least they did often require lateral thinking. Here, in almost all cases where I couldn't figure something out, it was simply because I hadn't found the document that tells you exactly what you're supposed to do.

Maybe 25% of the puzzles in here are interesting, while the rest are inputting 1 of 3 dates in different ways. Wow, this time it's upside down! Now you do it in roman numerals! Hot dog! There are some cool bits in here, like parts where you debug fake PS1 games to find codes, but even those are undercut by how you're once again told exactly what to do by a piece of paper. I found a couple of those bugs before I even got the instructions, and that felt cool. It didn't matter, though, because there's something on the instructions you need anyway.

Even so, wandering the mansion and solving puzzles was pretty enjoyable. Unfortunately, midway through the game they decided to make you wander through a fuckin maze. You have to go through it multiple times in different forms, and then enemies that are like the SH4 ghosts start spawning in the "real" world. That would be bad enough, but you HAVE TO LET THEM CATCH YOU. After a character warns you they'll kill you. It turns out they just give you a little quiz, and if you fail that you'll die. That's not what I was told!! Oh, and you have to let them grab you 9 times and then they stop spawning. Anyway, whenever one spawns you can book it to the save station near the entrance, where I guess they can't follow you. So I had to do that every time.

Speaking of, the movement is nnnnnot great. The game is controlled solely by directional input and one button. Lorelei likes to get hung up on corners, and around halfway through the game you can get the ability to use espresso machines scattered around that speed her up. Except she doesn't get that much faster, it triggers an unskippable scene every time you use them, they're often out of the way, and when you drink too much you have to detour to the bathroom in the basement. So it's probably a zero-sum game overall, but it's also telling that they felt this was a necessary mechanic to include.

The single button can be a problem too, as it's also used to open your menu. So if you want to check your map or previous documents you've found, you gotta move away from any object you're near. It's not a huge deal (though why there's no dedicated map button, at least, I have no idea) but it's needlessly annoying, an inconvenience there solely for the novelty of only using one button. Who the hell cares.

All of this is in service of a story that veers between total nonsense and the most predictable thing you've ever seen. I guess Renzo's complete non-sequiturs are meant to make things seem more mysterious, because they sure aren't funny, and end up making him sound like a Monkey Cheese Randumb 2008 vbulletin user. Meanwhile, you're never gonna guess who the old lady with glowing eyes is!

6/10

The Sand Land resurgence is upon us! Originally a short, one volume manga, it was my favorite Toriyama work, and I felt it was woefully underappreciated for most of my life. Now, we have a new movie as well as a new TV series, and the latter is what this game is (mostly) based on.

Going into it, I assumed it would be nothing but vehicular combat. To my surprise, and a little bit of dismay, Sand Land starts out with a whole lot of on-foot stuff. You have combat, which isn't good, and stealth, which reminded me a lot of Lupin III and the Treasure of the Sorcerer King. Make of that what you will.

Thankfully, you do eventually get in a tank, and from that point it's about 95% vehicle combat. And it's fun! You get a wide variety of vehicles you can build and customize, and they fall into roughly 5 categories (Tank, Walker, Bike, Hovercraft, Mech), with each having their own use. Hovercrafts are good for large bodies of water or quicksand, bikes are the fastest, and mechs can move crates around to find hidden stuff. You can swap between vehicles instantly anywhere, too, which is nice. In combat, you're pretty much always going to be using the tank, or the walker if you're indoors.

Speaking of indoors, the interior dungeons are the weakest point. While the open wastelands are fun to traverse and explore, the dungeons have a lot of copy-pasted rooms that feel tedious to navigate. Specifically, when running around some of those in the walker mech, it felt a whole lot like Mega Man Legends (derogatory).

Customization of your vehicles is pretty good, but I feel like you could have a better variety of weapons. There are probably 3-4 main variants of each of them, and then tiers of rarity determining their power. What's REALLY annoying is that if you find a good part, you can't equip it until your vehicle's base level is high enough, and the materials to level that up are story-gated. As I was trucking around the wasteland, I was finding cool guns that I wouldn't be able to equip until I had beaten the final boss. It ends up discouraging exploration, though at least there aren't many hard barriers, and the game is very generous with fast-travel points.

By completing sidequests, you also improve your home base town of Spino, and I'm a sucker for this kind of thing. Getting more people to move in and transforming it from a bombed-out husk into a vibrant, bustling village full of weirdos activates the primate neurons in my brain.

There is a LOT to do in this game, by the way. Too much, I would say! I thought I was almost done with the game... And then it turns out there's a SECOND MAP. I think everything that happens over there is from the show, which I haven't watched, but the game also introduces some Game-Original Characters, who always stick out like a sore thumb. They don't look like Toriyama designs at all. That's especially funny since the random NPCs do, just using the standard Dragon Quest mix-and-match method.

Anyway, the story is good. It's massively expanded from the original manga, of course, but it has some nice (if predictable) twists and didn't really drag at any point. The voice acting is mostly good, though Beelz has some lines where he says things with the wrong inflection. That's not on the actor, though, that's the voice director's responsibility. The sidequests are okay. Many of them are fetchquests, but thanks to the copious fast-travel points they aren't a hassle.

I would say all of this adds up to a solid 7/10, but... You've already seen the score. And it's that way for one particular reason.

Nobody. Ever. Shuts. The. Fuck. UP.

EVER!

While tooling around the world, there is CONSTANT chatter from your team, and they repeat the same conversations OVER, and OVER, and OVER. Sometimes immediately after finishing a conversation they'll just say the same thing again. "Hey, what would you do if you saw a tough enemy?" "Maybe these ruins were a playground!" "Who's the second-strongest demon in Demon Village?" I love the characters of Sand Land but oh my god I wanted to twist Beelzebub's head off his neck, or maybe crack his noggin on the floor like the Hulkster did to the Other Belz.

I have to believe this is a bug. There's no way they intended for characters to remind you to use your goddamn map every 10 minutes. It's probably an error that Beelz says "we could get up there if we had a bot that can jump" when you already have one, and have been using it for 20 hours. I hope it's a bug. It is so supremely irritating that, by itself, I have to drop this 2 points. If this ever gets patched, let me know in the comments, and I'll revise this accordingly. Considering there have been zero updates since release, I don't have high hopes.

In the meantime, this is one of the best Podcast Games out there. Get some, uhhh, Marc Maron in your ears and blast bandits while he asks Andrew Dice Clay if they have beef, I guess. Maybe someday we'll get an open-world Cowa! or Dr. Slump game.

5/10


PROTIP: Do NOT use your team skill points on skills that are useless or you don't want (Thief's sabotage ability, Rao's stun gun, etc), even if you have a surplus of points, because about 3/4 into the game you get Ann's skill tree and she has some of the best skills in the game (free vehicle repair on a minute cooldown, for example). It's worth saving points to unlock all of those immediately.

80s/early 90s anime is one of my favorite things, so a game trying to capture that look, combined with old-school shooter action, immediately caught my interest. Unfortunate, then, that it only half-commits to that aesthetic, while also being yet another Procedurally Generated Roguelike Slop-fest.

In Mullet Mad Jack, you run through floor after floor of the same rooms over and over, occasionally punctuated by a boss fight, while listening to some of the worst humor since High on Life. Do you like references? We've got Demolition Man, we've got Bane-posting, we've got RE4 Merchant lines that I forgot to screencap and I don't want to re-install the game!

The core concept is that you have 10 seconds to live, and killing enemies adds to your timer. This is because you're on a livestream and dopamine etc etc yadda yadda The Horrors of Capitalism because it's 2024 and everyone thinks they're fuckin Paul Verhoeven now by stomping this already well-trod ground into De Planet Corrrrre.

The time limit, however, means you have to always be moving forward. This also means the level "design", such as it is, can't be too complex. It's really just a series of hallways, some bigger than others, and they didn't even bother to make very many of them. You'll see the same very distinct rooms countless times, often several floors in a row. This, combined with how easy the game is on Normal (the Easy difficulty is named "I want a boomer shooter," as some weird dig at boomer shooters... But this game was easier than any boomer shooter I think I've ever played) mean you're just mindlessly blasting and holding Forward. Lasers are the most intimidating obstacle in the game, because they do a ton of damage, but you can also get an upgrade that halves that.

About the upgrades: You can pick from 3 every floor, and after 10 floors they reset except for your weapon (the weapons also appear in the upgrade screen). Just always make sure you get the shotgun, +max time, and increased chances for ricochets and enemies exploding. Those are really all you need, and you can cruise through. I never used any of the other weapons.

After yawning my way through 80 floors, I was surprised when the game just... Ended. I had assumed it would be 100, but I can't say I was sad that I wouldn't have to trudge through 20 more floors of rooms that I had already seen approximately 65 times so far. Then, to end things on a really great note, you have a final boss fight where your health is represented by a "badass-o-meter" and the last line is the same joke as the end of the Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks Dragnet movie.

2/10 - One grace point because sometimes there's stuff in here that looks pretty neat, even though other times it looks like art from a spinoff Meet N Fuck game.

PS: If you want something similar to this (as in, the game Mullet Mad Jack ripped off wholesale), I recommend checking out Post Void, which is 3 dollars at full price and also looks way cooler.

I stumbled across Asmodev's Steam page a couple of months ago, and thought their games looked... Unique. During a sale, a bundle of most of their games was like 5 dollars, so I took the plunge. I do love supporting indie developers, and let me tell you, it don't get much more indie than this!

Infernal Radiation, Asmodev's first game, is an action-bullet hell-rhythm-RPG, where you go around exorcising demons via two-button combat. You can attack and block, with a cooldown, and timing this so you block the enemy's projectiles and counter-attack is the name of the game. Of course, if you hit either of them before you're supposed to, it makes an Atari noise and locks you out of an action for a brief period, to keep you from button mashing.

These fights are pretty entertaining once you get the hang of it, but the RPG elements cause a problem here: rather than being tuned for a specific rhythm, being able to put points in cooldown reduction, attack power, etc makes things sloppy, like your block running out before the enemy's salvo of projectiles has actually completed, meaning you need to block again, and then you might not have time to attack before their next attack starts. Or, if you aren't putting any points into reducing their speed, you simply will never have time to attack at all. Once defeated, enemies are gone, so you can't grind them for XP, though you do get XP for each attack landed, and you keep it after a death. So you can continue banging your head against a boss to get some progress, but there's no respec function so it's very possible to completely fuck yourself over with bad skill point allocation.

There are quite a few strange decisions like that. You can get holy water of various types, which can reduce the enemy's mana, make your attacks cause more damage, or poison them. You want the poison one. That's the only one worth using, because it gives you free damage and bypasses the enemy's shields (sometimes they can only be damaged once you have a certain combo level, and poison ignores that).

There are also incenses and prayers you can buy. Incenses, though seeming like consumables, are actually permanent buffs. There is only one vendor who sells the best incenses, near the end of the game, and so once you get to the last boss and have money for them, you'll have to walk back to her. Not a long trek, but a weird decision.

Prayers activate certain effects when their words have been spoken during battle. As far as I can tell, this is random. Both incenses and prayers can be sold back for the same amount you paid for them, so you can experiment freely. This makes it even weirder that you can't respec skill points.

The story is... Interesting. You're on an island where a nuclear generator blew up, and that radiation has apparently empowered the forces of satan to possess everybody on the island. You eventually discover the source of the explosion, which is maybe the single most bizarre part of the game (and that's saying something), but at the end I'm not sure what most of this was actually about. The dialogue consisting entirely of broken English didn't help, but you can still get the gist of what people are saying.

Infernal Radiation took me about 2 hours to beat, and it can often be had for One Doler on sale. You can do a lot worse. It intrigued me enough to continue my journey through the Asmodev Gameography.

5/10

After enjoying my time with Outcast 2, I decided to give the first game another shot, as I never finished it when I tried it several years ago.

There's something I want to make clear right off the bat: despite being referred to as a remake, Second Contact is really a remaster, while the Outcast 1.1 "remaster" was really just a port playable on modern systems. Second Contact features a (quite nice!) new coat of paint, but underneath it, this is still the same game, with a couple of minor improvements. The audio is the same, obvious from its heavy compression and use of stock sound effects (enemies make That Aargh Sound when they get shot), movement and targeting is clunky, and sometimes the increased draw distance can let you see things that you weren't meant to see.

Looking at Outcast from a modern perspective, however, there's a lot to admire. It's more of an adventure game than an action game at its heart, as most of NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE's time is spent talking to the native aliens and solving their problems, in an effort to free them from the tyrannical rule of the evil Fae Rhan. Rather than having objectives marked on the map, you operate based on landmarks and asking the locals for directions. This seems like it would be tedious, but the areas aren't nearly as large as they seem. Except for traveling between areas, as some of the portal placements are... Suspect. The worst one is how there's only one way to get to Okaar, and it involves going to a different area first, and then slowly swimming your ass over to an island with the portal. And you have to get back the same way.

Your main objective, apart from collecting the Plot Devices to get back to Earth, is convincing the locals to stop supplying Fae Rhan's soldiers with food, money, and weapons, thus weakening them when you have to fight them. The combat is, to put it lightly, total ass, and not difficult at all. The hardest thing is not running out of ammo, as the enemies are massive bullet sponges until you weaken them later. On the bright side, the vast majority of enemies do not respawn when killed, but this also means that by the time you've done all the work to cripple their efficacy... They're pretty much all dead. This weakening, by the way, apparently does not apply to the enemies in the final fight. Before this fight, your weapons have been removed, along with all of your ammo. Before this showdown, you are given your weapons back along with an amount of ammo apparently determined by how many sidequests you've done. With around 75% of them finished, I got, uhhh, like 60 bullets for the machine gun and maybe 10 shots for my laser rifle. Cool. Thankfully, the boss seems to have the same one-shot weakness to the flamethrower that the regular enemies have.

Other than the combat, the main issue is that a few of the puzzles are insanely obtuse. This isn't unique to Outcast, and if anything only proves that it's really a point-and-click adventure game with some combat bolted on. The organ puzzle would not be out of place in a King's Quest game, and the temple puzzle early on is a great example of pre-Gamefaqs games just straight-up telling you the wrong thing to do, because they gotta sell strategy guides and/or keep people from beating them in one weekend. Sometimes key objects are also very difficult to see, which can be worse due to the increased environmental density in Second Contact. The aforementioned organ puzzle is a prime example of that, where the pipe near the dragon-thing was damn near invisible. Items you can pick up are sometimes highlighted by the HUD, but sometimes they aren't. Oh well!

Despite these issues, Outcast interested me enough to see it through to the end. There was a lot of ambition here, and while it doesn't really come together, especially when played in The Year of Our Gorb 2024, I can appreciate what they were trying to do. My feelings on this game are almost a complete mirror of my thoughts on the second: The dialogue is actually much better than the sequel, with Slade being way more of a smarmy asshole, while the sequel's combat is miles better than the first's. The sequel does not have the pixel hunt puzzles of the first, but it has more generic quests in general. Maybe Outcast 3, if it ever gets made, will hit the perfect middle ground.

6/10

When I started up Outcast: A New Beginning, I thought it was another remake of Outcast, the 1999 game beloved by those of us who still think of weird stucco-like peaks when we hear the word "voxels". I thought it was strange that they were doing another remake after Outcast: Second Contact (not to be confused with the remaster Outcast 1.1), but hey, we might be getting a second remake of Resident Evil 1 in the next few years. It turns out that A New Beginning is, in fact, a sequel, and it was originally titled Outcast 2 before being changed, presumably because they figured most people would not want to do homework by playing a 15-year old game.

I was under this impression until a few hours into the game, because early on, it sure seems like a remake. In short, Outcast is the closest thing to a Benjamin Sisko Simulator, wherein you play as a human guy on an alien planet, blessed by its extradimensional gods and designated as their divine savior. The general beats appeared the same, and I saw areas that looked like places in the first game. Eventually, it shows its hand and makes it very clear that this is some time after the first game, but your character, NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE, FROM THE MEAN STREETS OF CINCINNATI, has had his memories erased.

This is an interesting way of onboarding new players, as NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE is just as clueless about what's going on as you are. And you will be, because the Talan, native inhabitants of Adelpha, LOVE to talk to you about anything on their mind. They constantly use words of their language and, though there is a glossary you can pop up by pulling a trigger during conversations, for quite a while you'll just be going with the flow. Sure, the dolo-tai guardians got reverted before they could activate the daoka and now their haagen-dasz is in sankra. Whatever, dude.

This barrage of nonsense, along with the game's very strange tone (veering wildly between sardonic humor, outright silliness, and sincere sci-fi), doesn't make a good first impression. I was pretty iffy on it for a while, but eventually you unlock the two things that make the game really fun: Traversal options and weapon modules. You have a jetpack that can be upgraded, both to let you zoom around at high speeds and great height, and a Just Cause-style wingsuit to cover greater distances over the air. Your guns, a pistol and rifle, can both be customized with various modules that either alter stats or completely change their method of operation. Think Gunstar Heroes for the best comparison. Turn your pistol into a shotgun that heals when it kills enemies, or turn your rifle into a sniper rifle that attaches mines to enemies it shoots. You also unlock various melee moves that I didn't use much, but make it clear that somebody involved in this game's development really liked Vanquish.

So playing the game is fun, but what do you actually DO in Outcast? Talk to aliens, mostly. Your main goal for the majority of the game is freeing the 7 villages on this big-ass map from human control, so you do missions for them that often intersect. This place needs booze from this other place, and the booze village needs bombs from the desert village, and so on. It becomes a pretty interesting interconnected ecosystem, and many parts of it can be done out of order or without being directed to do so. I was just putzing around temples collecting tablets for no real reason, and then when I got to the mission that required them, NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE was just like "oh yeah I already have that." This sort of Emergent Questing can break sometimes, as I occasionally had a character talking about something that wasn't currently happening, but it's novel.

Outcast 2's biggest downfall is the shift in focus into an Open World Map Vomit game. I'm sure it's to make it more accessible to Gamers in general, but I don't think they're going to be getting a lot of new people in the door with this game's $70 price tag. The first game was a pretty unique action-adventure game, where you mostly focused on crippling the enemy's supply lines and weakening them, rather than powering yourself up, so 2 being dumbed-down is kind of a bummer. The quality of the activities in the game are variable: clearing bases and outposts are fine, because the combat is fun. Opening Essence Shrines to upgrade your max health is okay, as they have you follow a little ball around and the traversal is fun. Orym Trails, which are mostly the same thing, suck ass because there are 50 of them and they only give you a paltry amount of upgrade resource. Gork Eruptions are also fine, you just kill a few enemies near the Gork and then you collect the Gork to feed to The Gork. He's a weird guy in a cage, don't worry about it.

Outcast 2's SECOND biggest downfall is the performance. I would have rated this higher if not for the huge amount of glitches I saw during my playtime, as well as massive framerate problems. Within a few minutes, I switched to the 30fps mode because it was running anywhere between 30 and 60, with zero consistency, and it actually started to make me feel sick. The game also seems to have a memory leak or something, because during extended sessions it would start hitching more and more frequently, eventually hitching every time I jumped. Restarting the game fixed this, but yikes. Other glitches were all over the place, usually audio-related, but sometimes bouncy plants would be un-bounceable, making certain platforming challenges impossible. These were all fixed by just reloading a save, and you can save anywhere, so it wasn't a big deal. But this was on XSX, so I would say unless you have a really good PC that can brute force it into running well (because I doubt it's properly optimized on PC either) it's probably best to wait until the PS5 Pro comes out and play it there.

Your enjoyment of Outcast 2 will depend on how much you can tolerate this specific brand of jank. Personally, I don't mind it. It's not like Bethesda jank, where they're just too lazy to fix their shit that's been broken for decades. These are small, scrappy teams doing their best to realize their vision. Does this mean there are like 3 total models for the aliens, and some of them are voiced by the same people with comical "Witness Protection" pitch-shifting effects? Hell yes.

Get used to it, baby, this is all we're gonna have soon.

7/10

This was a weird era for shooters. They had progressed past the "boomer shooter" template, but in the wake of Half-Life, many developers didn't really know what to do if they wanted to create something focused purely on action. Returning to monke was viewed as unacceptable -- we're living in a Three-Dimensional World now, soldier, the People demand a Cinematic Experience. As a result, many shooters from 2000-2006 feel like they're being pulled between two extremes and tearing apart in the process. In a pre-CoD2 time, a select few games managed to straddle this dichotomy (F.E.A.R. is one such example, Return to Castle Wolfenstein another) but the vast majority are worse off because of this. Black is one of them.

Described as "gun porn" by the developers, in one of the earliest recorded examples of "Extreme Cringe," Black was meant to show off the Power of Firearms, make you feel like a God with an AK-47, raining destruction against any of those who dare stand in your way. In practice, it's an underwhelming shooter with worse gunplay than Goldeneye, except it makes you look at the guns a lot. Yes, it has detailed reloading animations. It also released in 2006, when this wasn't really impressive anymore. It's not the developers' fault that this came out couple of months after CoD2, a better game in (almost) every single respect... But it sure doesn't help. They want you to look at these guns. They REQUIRE that you look at the guns. Every time you switch weapons, you chamber a round for no reason. Every time you reload, an incredibly obnoxious depth-of-field effect obscures the rest of the screen (I think this game in particular is the reason I hate DoF and turn it off whenever possible).

Despite this, the guns. Feel. WEAK. Enemies can take an ungodly amount of damage before dying, which is probably why every gun's magazine holds about double the amount of ammo that it should. You can riddle a guy with bullets like he's Kenny and you're ED-209, and he'll eventually go down after expending half of your AK's 60-round mag. You have grenades, but your character has a wrist that would get you called slurs in PE. The prevailing tactic seems to be to shoot the copious red barrels and other explosive objects strewn around, rather than shooting at the enemies themselves. Those explosives, and the destructible environmental elements, also dry up pretty quickly into the meager 4 hour campaign. The game is also completely bloodless, adding to the lack of impact, which is extra strange. It feels like it's a T rated game in every respect except for guys yelling the Fuck Word on your radio.

The controls also suck, of course. It has a bizarre control scheme, naturally, because that wasn't standardized yet, but at least it's fully customizable. The strangest part is that you have "cycle weapon forward/backward" buttons despite only being able to hold 2 at a time anyway. The aiming is as bad as you would expect from a console shooter of this era where you click the right stick to zoom in (not ADS). It's easy to talk shit about Left Trigger, Right Trigger controls, but it's vastly superior to this crap that we were dealing with in the Before Times.

The one thing I will praise in Black is the audio. It's the sole saving grace. The guns do sound loud as shit, and the music (from Chris Tilton and Michael Giacchino, composer for Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow and director of Werewolf by Night) is excellent. Until BF Bad Company came along, this was the best guns had ever sounded in a video game. So they had that crown for 2 years.

After this, Criterion went back to making racing games, which they're actually good at. Developers of Black went over to Codemasters and made a spiritual sequel, Bodycount. I remember it being pretty average, which is at least better than Black. Contemporary reviews loved this game. I never understood why. At least now I was able to get some enjoyment from the ridiculously pretentious opening cutscene, which is simply credits in the lower left of a black screen.

If you have a hankering to play a mid-2000s shooter with a focus on bombastic gunplay and a prominently-featured SPAS-12, make the right decision:

Play F.E.A.R.

2/10

I've had Solar Ash sitting here installed on my xbox for probably... 2 years? Even though I liked the look of it, I didn't feel motivated to play it, as it's a sequel (? prequel?) to Hyper Light Drifter. I also liked the look of HLD, but it was an absolute snooze to play... And yet I was idly sifting through my installed games, saw this, and looked it up on HowLongToBeat. Yes, I'll play a 6 hour game!

If I had known that this was essentially Shadow of the Colossus + Outer Wilds + Rail grinding, I wouldn't have taken this long to try it. That's a recipe for Larry bait! You put that shit under a cardboard box being held up by a stick, and I'm gonna be trapped within 20 seconds!

The gameplay loop is pretty simple: You wander around little hubs, destroying goop by hitting weak points in quick succession, and each one killed reveals a weak point on a big monster roaming around the area. Once you've killed all the goops, you can kill the colossus. You grapple onto them and do the same thing, hitting the designated spots on the way to their main weak point, and if you're too slow you have to restart. On occasion this can be frustrating, mostly due to the camera whipping around like a maniac while zoomed out about 400 miles away from your character. It usually works fine. You don't have much wiggle room in most cases, but there's no real penalty for getting knocked off, as areas are full of health pickups. There are also small enemies scattered around, which are never more than minor annoyances. This is fine, I guess, as it avoids the Prince of Persia Problem™ for the most part.

A really weird mechanic that I don't quite understand is how you pick up Plasma throughout the game, which is used to increase your max health. Your max health also decreases by 1 every time you beat a colossus, for story reasons. By the halfway point, I had a huge stock of plasma so after every boss I just had to top up to max health again. It's kinda just strange busywork, and I'm not sure what the point of it is. It would make sense if you could use the plasma to upgrade other abilities or something, but nah, just max health. Alright.

Anyway, if you're doing to do a riff on SotC it's important to nail the Vibes. Solar Ash got it. While it doesn't feature the same desperate loneliness and total lack of anything approaching humanity as SotC, it's much more similar to a Souls game. Your character is part of a crew that was sent to collapse a black hole that's threatening a nearby planet, and everyone here is either dead or insane. Interactions with NPCs range from tragic to darkly comic, but all of them are pitiable in their own ways. The end "twist" can be seen coming from about... 5 minutes into the game, but who cares, it all looks cool.

8/10

I would say that this has me looking forward to Hyper Light Breaker, but upon further research I have found that it is apparently going to be a roguelike. So, uh... I'll always have Solar Ash.

Mercenaries holds a certain vaunted status among a very particular group of people. Remembered for its bombast and freedom, exemplified by its subtitle "Playground of Destruction," its main claim to fame was being able to call in vehicles, weapons, and airstrikes wherever you are. Helldivers 2 owes a lot to Mercenaries in that respect.

However, the part nobody wants to talk about is how obscenely dull the game is otherwise. Missions are the most boring "go here, plant C4, defend this point" slop imaginable, to the point where they almost feel like they were procedurally generated. Side activities are populated almost entirely by checkpoint "races." Environments are shockingly barren, gunplay feels bad, and it features the most insane crosshair placement I've seen in any game that doesn't have "Halo" in its title. This game feels like it was made by aliens. The dialogue is unnatural and the controls are completely batshit (you also drive vehicles by pressing A to accelerate and X to brake).

The thing is, you could look at all of this stuff, and how it's an original Xbox/PS2 game, and think, "oh, it's just a very early open world game."

This came out in 2005.

TWO THOUSAND AND FIVE. The same year Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory came out. Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay had been out for a year. For more apples-to-apples comparisons, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction also released in 2005, and GTA San Andreas had come out a few months earlier. The Xbox 360 would arrive in November of 2005. This is just straight-up embarrassing.

Mercenaries did have one interesting concept, with the "Deck of 52" system. There were 52 enemies that were "high value targets" and could be captured to get extra money. It was sort of the precursor to the Nemesis system from the Mordor games, in a way, but most of them don't really stand out, and they're essentially just another collectible.

The legacy of Mercenaries, or at least the idealized version of what it represented, would thankfully be carried on by the Just Cause series, the worst entry in which is still far more fun to play than this. There was a Mercenaries 2, released in 2008, and I remember liking it. It was completely busted, and got a lot of flack for that, but I still remember it being much more enjoyable than the first game's utter slog.

3/10

thank you phil spencor for letting me play this shit game in 4k resolution on my x box series x you are a great man dedicated gtoo game presvertaion and i like thatyou wor e a bttletoads shirtgbnnnnn