ebrl
2001
2024
2001
The Resident Evil Camera™ was already close to intolerable in actual Resident Evil games; sticking with it here is an act of design terrorism. Easy to see why DMC was influential (every other action game boss since then is a riff on Nelo Angelo) and I understand how it was popular (console players have this incredible ability to just put up with absolutely anything out of brand loyalty), but man, you couldn't pay me to play this even back in 2001, the Resident Evil jank is too much.
Finally playing this just before the sequel is released feels like cheating - I'm sorry to everyone who waited for ten years without knowing if they'd ever get their wishes. Can't think of another game that feels so much like going on an adventure, with your pawns always doing their own thing and all the other little details that never feel quite under your full control, which then feeds into the combat that is everything that was promised despite how outlandish those claims sounded from the outside... and even the story, which kind of stays in the background for most of the game, still finds the time to spectacularly stick the landing not once but twice. For all the talk about how it is "unfinished", it's hard to imagine it being even more of what it already is; in its best moments, it feels larger than life in a way that only video games can be, but usually never are, and rarely even aspire to be.
2021
Couldn't get past the first stage after, I don't know, about 20 attempts? I guess this is my "I'm too old for this shit" moment. I also don't have enough room in my desk to make the bizarre reload anywhere near reliable with the way I like to hold my mouse. Anyway, I'm sure it eventually makes a lot of very good points about corporations and capitalism that teenage me would have found very enlightening.
2023
2023
2013
Infuriatingly close to being one of the best and most rewarding games ever made, but deliberately chooses to almost ruin everything by being entirely designed around its economy. That it is still a damn fine game that has been able to keep my attention for the last ten years is, if anything, an extremely cruel joke.
1993
1999
2022
Thats fucking Doom II right there. None of that fancy ass book quoting smile for the Cacowards bullshit. Doomguy pukes, doomguy poops in the dark, doomguy delivers his new born baby in the exit elevator. Fucking hard core rocket launcher in the ass vanilla 1994 fuck it SSG it game time shit. Take it to MAP30. Rockets get shoved in places you don't even remember. We complevel 2 together we intercept overflow together. Doom II is back baby.
2023
Wild to think that there are already Rift Wizard-likes out there, much less one this good; also borrows heavily from DCSS with the race-class-god character creation, from ToME4 with the insane skill trees, and possibly from... Path of Exile, with how these character perks and skills can combine with a variety of build enabling items (and most of the items in Path of Achra are potentially build enabling to some extent) to the point where if you're not deleting the screen by the end of the game you probably screwed up at some point. It does, after all, advertise itself as a "broken build sandbox", which at first makes it sound like it's some super easy power fantasy - and early runs might even give that impression - but you're really going to need to figure out how to put together and pilot these broken builds to survive the higher cycles (optional difficulty increases after each victory, with monsters getting higher stats and the player gaining more levels).
2005
2019
Not a surprise that famous video game hack Hideo Kojima has famous movie hacks Guillermo del Toro and Nicholas Wingdings Refn as guest stars on his latest video game movie - in hindsight I should have dropped it and asked for a refund as soon as their names showed up in the opening credits. Gameplay looked promising but when your reward for a successful delivery is half an hour of the worst TV show on Earth, it's impossible to stay motivated - this was my first Kojima game and after just five hours into it I'm sure it'll also be my last, absolutely cringeworthy garbage. Late 00s webcomic AXE COP had better writing and it was copaganda written by a literal 5-year-old.
2021
Excellent game, but the official discord has become a safe haven for a very well known self-declared white supremacist (not to mention part-time scammer and all around despicable person - if you've been around the DCSS community for a while, you know who it is), moderated by a guy who once went by "Hitler" on Steam. The developer has known about this for a long time and can't take a firmer stance than a generic "don't be jerks". Be warned.