2/10. Dreadful. Fucking Dreadful.

My eyes actually hurt now, that's how irritating this was to look at. Nvidia really thought "Ah yes, sharper image + more shadows + overly bright lighting = Better game" like the absolute tools they are.

On top of the nauseating visuals and frame choppiness (I have a 3070 ti so that's ridiculous) this mod introduces actual bugs, most notably, moving platforms just... not doing what they're supposed to do, and falling asleep.

They even think they're being slick and hip with the secret 'Nivida processors sent to Black Mesa and Aperture' easter egg, fuck off. Fuck off with the nvidia cube as well, low-effort advertisement in a shitty mod for a great game you've desecrated.

I can't give it a 1/10 as, at its core, it's still Portal, an incredibly fun atmospheric, comedic puzzle game. Having said that, dear god just play the original Portal, not this RTX horseshit. Pay no heed to the upcoming Half-Life 2 RTX as well, it's likely to be just as shit.

9/10. Now THIS is Half-Life 2's true story predecessor.

If I'm being honest, I respect Half-Life 1, yet I also can't stand it. The controls are slippery, the human models have aged poorly, it has a choppy interface when tabbing out, it's difficulty spikes were incredibly inconsistent, and of course, Xen was just bad.

All of that has been completely overhauled and fixed in Black Mesa, along with a graphical upgrade that puts this roughly halfway between Episode Two and Alyx in terms of how good it looks.

The gunplay, while not quite as tightly attuned as HL2, is very satisfying, with no weapon feeling outright useless (besides maybe the hand thing, never used it) and all having a well defined purpose and potential benefits/drawbacks, as any well dusted FPS should have.

The retcons Black Mesa also makes to fit more in line with Half-Life 2 and the Episodes is also much appreciated, even if I kinda wish we could've seen Kleiner again, given unlike Eli, there would be nothing canonically stopping him from doing so.

Atmosphere and music wise, absolutely top notch. Kelly Bailey's original score is also excellent, but Black Mesa manages to create a score and ambient tracklist that's both unique to itself and faithful to the original.

Finally, there's Xen and the Nihilanth fight. Gorgeous views at the beginning that turn into haunting red and suffocating grays that perfectly demonstrate the cruelty of the Nihilanth and its controllers. Not to mention, being able to save the Vortigaunts and them slowly warming up to you as you ascend closer and closer to their slavemaster is thematically brilliant, and perfectly sets up their gratitude to Freeman in the sequel.

The Nihilanth fight was simply enthralling. After an intense, empowering ascent towards the final portal, where the score just goes all out with making Freeman into THE Freeman, you confront the ruler of the Borderworld in an absolutely sublime final battle that mixes difficulty with intensity, scale, and pure will to fight. By the time the bastard meets his end, I had the wildest "get fucked you slaving, genocidal bastard" smile on my face in ages.

Then of course the Combine comes in and renders this all a bittersweet, hollow victory...

...imma go replay HL2 and the Episodes, it feels appropriate now. Also Crowbar Collective should make Half-Life 3, if Valve can't be bothered, might as well.

10/10.

I thought Wolfenstein The Old Blood and Doom 3 were untouchable in terms of my favorite FPS games... HL2 Episode Two has absolutely trounced both of them and it's not even close.

Tight as hell combat, fair but incredibly challenging combat sections, an incredible story, an immaculate sense of scale, thrilling vehicle sections, paced to perfection, and full of emotional highs.

Fear, badassery, intrigue, anger, stress, elation, and devastation. I felt all of these in droves throughout my 2 playthroughs of this game now. It is unspeakably wonderful, and I am pissed beyond belief that it was the end of the franchise (unless you count Alyx's post-credits scene).

80% of this game is excellent, with some very slight slowdown in the victory mines, but there are two major moments of absolutely unspeakable brilliance in Episode Two. Those being the Vortal Combat and Last Legs sections.

The former has you defending a mortally wounded Alyx Vance from Antlions in large droves with the help of two lively resistance members and a trio of Vortigaunts. The enemy swarm, room design, music and overwhelmingly intense action that follows never fails to give me goosebumps.

And then there's the 'Last Legs' combat section, the final battle of the game... oh my god this might actually be the best climax in any video game ever, not even joking. Red Dead 2 and Mario Galaxy might elicit more feelings out of me, but the unbelievable rush of conviction, stress, and downright shivers this climactic last blowout with the striders and hunters is just immaculate.

The stakes are made explicitly clear in the finale: If the striders destroy the silo, the rocket can't take off and the portal will allow millions upon millions of Combine reinforcements through, and it's game over for everyone. If the rocket is successfully defended and takes off, the Combine portal will shut and they'll be stranded on Earth, ready to be destroyed by the Resistance once and for all.

Following that... the ending... just fucking chilling, frustration-inducing... but all the more devastating. I don't even need a Half-Life 3 outright, an Episode Three for HL2 would be more than sufficient to be completely honest.

Please.

9/10. What an Amazing, underrated, gem of a game, and easily the best of the Star Fox series.

The excellent combat of the Arwing, Landmaster and Wingman sections, and the... decent combat on-foot makes for an all-round great time, with a bit of a time, the somewhat unusual controls become more than manageable even for that last section.

In addition, the worldbuilding, character-work, and stakes provided by this game blow all of the repeated Andross War storylines out of the water several times over, as you fight to stop an insidious hivemind known as the Aparoids from consuming the entire Galaxy. Andross's dark charisma might've been enjoyable, but the soulless, cold, and mostly mute Aparoids provide an eldritch-level threat that I rarely get from a video game.

Only minor issues I have are how the Wolfen managed to follow Star Fox into the Aparoid planet even after the shields closed, a decent chunk of the music is just remixed Star Fox 64 tunes (though the original tracks in this game are absolutely incredible) and I do kind of wish they had committed to killing off Pepper and Peppy.

In the end, this is, in my opinion the best on-rails shooter, the best Star Fox game, the best GameCube game, and the best game with a toad always getting shot at.

If you have a GameCube I would highly recommend giving it a go.

6/10.

So... I like this game, as I tend to enjoy most Backrooms media, though it has things pulling me in opposite directions.

I wanna stress this is an early access game, and I very much have that in mind when reviewing it and doing so with the hopes it can turn out as good as it possibly can.

The first chase scene spilling over into that balancing section was excellent, and had my heart pounding as well as creating a purpose for me to quickly use the balancing/peeking mechanism, I like that.

I also really like how the entities and levels are designed, they feel significantly faithful to the Backrooms lore while shedding a lot of the PG crap that came with the 'mainstreamification' of the lore itself.

I also am very excited to try it out with friends and my sister at a later time, since we're all quite invested in the lore.

However... there's a lot holding it back. I'll start with the minor stuff. auto-equipping picked up items is a bit annoying, as I'd rather put them in my inventory and take them out if I need to. Also the inventory itself and the way you move/use items is a bit odd and could use some retooling.

The more severe downsides however, come from the unavoidable nature of some of the entities. Hiding from them, at least as far as I can tell, is not possible, and your character also runs very slowly, to the point of barely outpacing the entities. While running from danger your stamina isn't capped, but when it is capped, it is very very low, and not very good.

The sanity meter is also not very well defined and could use some extra numeric clarification as to where your sanity is at.

Apart from that, it's also just slightly janky and glitchy, most notably with the keypad in Level 1, it took a few tries for my clicks to register on the buttons.

Promising beginnings, and I may amend my score to a 7/10 depending on how fun the multiplayer is, and given that the game seems designed around it, that seems likely.

3/10.

A good idea on paper, but once I realized none of the scares were actual threats, and were honestly just pretty generic screamers, the novelty wore off fast. Also, talking too loud gets you killed... that's not very fun. Screaming I can get, but this is just silly.

With some fine tuning it could be decent, but this is just sad on its own.

So... I've heard far many people repeat the same phrase over and over again.

"Doom 3 is a good game but a bad Doom Game" followed usually about how 2016 and Eternal revived the series... well, I'm sick of that, and I wanna set the record as straight as I can.

Doom 3 is excellent, and a criminally underrated gem that stands as the best game in the series, rivaled only by 64.

The pacing, yes, is slower... but the game is only as slow as people make it out to be in the first few levels. It gets faster and faster as the game progresses, and the focus of both the action and horror elements turns from quiet and tense to chaotic and anxiety-inducing.

The story is much more well-rounded than people give the game credit for, and despite the strange decision to not have subtitles, the worldbuilding and the glimpses the PDA files give us into the lives of dozens of people working on Mars is remarkable, and it doesn't require several weird, esoteric cutscenes to do this (looking at you Eternal).

The weapons in this game are the best they've ever been. They feel legit, but also powerful. Now every shot feels impactful and important, and the exact angle your shots hit at mean the difference between life and death. It's not just "run around frantically and shoot" like in the other games, THIS is how you do a shooter where hell is invading, where you need to plan things carefully, and act quickly in tandem with that planning, rather than just winging it.

I will speak of three negatives I do have with this game. The whip enemies are extremely overpowered and annoying, sometimes things aren't as clear as they should be on where you need to go, and there could've been much more music than just the title and a few ambient tracks.

That being said, this game is a perfect summation of what Doom can be, you're not some god-like slayer who is invincible and the Demons run away from him. You're an average Marine fighting to save humanity and put hell in its place. When you win, it feels like a genuine triumph over impossible odds, rather than just a given.

Also, despite coming out in 2004... this genuinely looks better than the reboot duology, I'm not kidding. The technology and lights are prettier or whatever in the new games, but Doom 3's visuals are gonna stick with me for years to come, while I've already forgotten nearly everything about Eternal.

This game is intense, terrifying, extremely well paced, challenging but fair, interesting, and above all else, fun as fuck, because THIS is peak Doom.

9/10.