You see these type of “spot the difference” games dont work when sasuga unreal engine farts out visual and audio glitches onto my screen. “Has this room always been this bright? Has the rolling trolley always been silent?” Well these are going to be the most subtle anomalies you’ll come across, and they’re not even intentional. Also thanks for a ‘game over screen’ that is functionally identical to just failing the loop?
Idk, it’s not as bad as my review makes it out to be, but I cant type without sounding mad after playing an unreal engine game.
P.S. the unreal engine info’s source is that i made it the fuck up

Very fun and well written and atmospheric, but man that shooting feels so heavy and sluggish, and maps are not fun to slowly walk through back and forth as you complete your objectives. The imps were almost completely useless for me, they either got killed immediately when I needed help, or blocked the way, or in the case of the gunner, shot me in the back or just shot the wall next to me.

The good though, the Darkness and Jackie are performed brilliantly, and the story is genuinely pretty good for a shooter. The game has a lot of surprises I did not expect. I am always a fan of an actual dial-able phone in games (like Silent Hill Shattered Memories) and I thought the little things they did with the subway and taking the train and asking for directions, and following signs made the world feel more alive. Shame that when you get above ground, there is not really much to interact with.

I know some of my issues with shooting and general combat get improved in the 2nd game, but I think I remember that the city is not as interesting to interact with and unfortunately I do remember that the game is very short. A shame we will probably never have the third game to cap off the story of Jackie. Jackie and Adam Jensen are peas in a pod that way, I suppose.

Finally, yes I did watch all of To Kill a Mockingbird in Jenny's apartment. She fell asleep before the opening credits even ended. Talk about a terrible film-watching partner.

Dark Days: This is a really lousy experience. Essentially an “escape the room” game with a monster in some of the areas, Dark Days fails to deliver both interesting puzzles and tense scares, and its narrative suffers the classic pitfalls of indie-tier junk.

It opens with a jumpscare, not the most clever but certainly an effective one, as a monster in your front seat lunges at you while you're driving. Jade, your rambling character, pulls over at a motel and shenanigans begin, including introducing a monster who attacks when you “stare” at her. It's a fine concept, but this gal is WAY too sensitive because just having her on screen for an instant is enough to prompt her wrath. It's not very hard to manipulate, though; when you hear her breathing, you can just clam up and wait her out if you want. She'll go away and you can get back to looking for fuses or keys or whatever. You can also just look at walls and strafe when you know she's behind you. By her second encounter she was already no longer frightening to me.

That's the whole game: find the item(s) to escape the room while the monster waits for a reason to kill you, then repeat that a dozen-or-so times. Jade will be speaking to herself the entire game (and cannot be fast forwarded), awkwardly saying nothing to the men speaking to her at various points, and you'll learn a story about some cursed place in the desert and how Jade's wife is sickly. Is it interesting? Absolutely not, my brain was completely off for this game, and my subconscious/muscle memory still managed to get through this mess in under two hours. I love when the bad games are brief.

I won't spoil it, though I sort of will, when I say it ends in exactly the manner you'd think an indie game would. Apparently this game supports VR and I could see the horror working out better there, but even then it's so brief with zero replay value, what's the point? It's cheap, but it's not worth it at all.

I do not recommend Dark Days. It's a waste of time and hard drive space.

Really impressed right off the bat - Stop Dead has a killer aesthetic, great feeling parkour (which is good, cos if you stop moving at any point you will die). For those Mirror’s Edge sickos out there looking for their next fix - though in truth is more predicated on its on the fly combat puzzles. You force pull weapons, objects, RED BARRELS toward you, then dish them out strategically against the much stronger, more numerous baddies.

You will die, over and over, best to just accept it as part of its rhythm. Initially struggled with this, the cool self made set pieces are a destination not the journey. Short, distinct levels and scenarios - could be a race to the finish, could be a wave survival - the basic ingredients work whatever their configuration. At time of writing it is in Early Access, which presumably amounts to a few more levels being still in the pipeline. The only real telltale in my experience is how it almost completely eschews context & narrative framing - neither a strength or a weakness, honestly - it just is what it is, a perfect pick up title (specially on Steam Deck). Stop Dead only got on my radar because of a PC Gamer winter sale reccomendation list, and thank fuck for that - passing on the good will here 🤌

[pre 1.0 release review]
The game is 100% doable solo, even Program X.
Definitely better for those who want to focus more on gameplay.
Multiplayer is either too chaotic or too easy, while running solo lets you have more freedom and control of the match.
Definitely feels pointless after the first few reborns you do, since nothing changes besides cosmetics.

It's a step down from Turok 2 pretty much across the board. The levels are empty, flat, and uninteresting to look at. Where Turok 2 had a different theme/locale for every level, in Turok 3 it's almost all just gray boring interiors.

In Turok 2 the enemies all were really threatening looking, the look of some of them was legitimately scary, especially when I was younger, and the Oblivion level's final cutscene tease built a lot of anticipation for me, especially knowing the next game was to be about fighting them. In this game, the monsters are really lame and cartoony looking. Like with big dumb eyes big round character models. In Turok 2, the enemies were varied, the Dinosoids were so cool, and fun to fight. Every level had something new to throw at you. The bosses were all varied with freaky alien looks that could under your skin. But in Turok 3, the first boss is a police car with monster teeth. Woah. I'm literally shaking as I type this. It's so spooky.

And then there's the weapons. All the guns feel worse. ALL the guns. Got a favorite gun from Turok 2? It's worse. Firestorm canon? That thing was a beast, hold the trigger down and just let loose, and it sounded and looked amazing.  Well now it looks like a standard minigun and feels so meh to shoot. How about the Grenade Launcher?? Man that thing was a beast, blowing up enemies and clearing out rooms? Now the grenades will NEVER hit your enemies because they bounce so much more than before, and most of the time will just come flying back and hit you. The Mag 60 is worse, the Tek Bow is worse, the Cerebral Bore is worse. Even the nuke, EVEN THE NUKE is FUCKING USELESS!

Not to mention someone had the bright idea to split the arsenal between the two characters. So Danielle gets a bunch of dogshit weapons, while Joseph's are ever so SLIGHTLY better. And I don't know why they split the character at all, since clearly Danielle was meant to be the main character. Even when you pick Joseph, Danielle is in all the cutscenes, and the little bit of the story is ABOUT her. Why did they bother? JUST MAKE IT ABOUT HER. Better to have one good campaign focused on one character, than 2 mid campaigns so they can pretend this game has more content than it actually does.

Enemy placements are also somehow worse. In Turok 2, enemies were set in the levels and you could memorize all the places they were in your run and just have a blast shooting what was coming around the corner. In Turok 3, enemies almost ALWAYS know where you are before you know where they are, AND they can shoot you through walls and floors. Many is the time that you will walk into a new area, immediately shots start ringing out and before you have a chance to look around, you're hit, the screen is red, you start to turn, and BAM, you're dead. Repeat ad nauseum. It's more than a little annoying. Not to mention, in Turok 3, they decided that enemies should just respawn. Like they do in turok 1, but much much MUCH worse. Imagine, you walk into a room, you kill the 2 enemies inside of it. You walk down the hall, and you get shot from behind so you turn around, enemies are now spawning out of that room that you JUST CLEARED and now you're dead. So fucking cheap. Bullshit. You can literally see enemies spawn in front of you, it's so lame.

The second this game has mouselook, there will be no more challenge. There are so few enemies in the game, the only way they have any chance is to get the drop on you, with your awful N64 controller giving you no help in dispatching them. With a mouse and keyboard? I can't imagine even the hardest mode would be an issue. The only thing that ever gave me trouble in this game was caused by N64 framerates. And then I watched a friend play through it on an emulator, and that wasn't an issue for him, so if you play that way, you will have almost no difficulty or challenge with this game.

Now that I've beaten the game, surely tomorrow Nightdive will announce a PC port, just to piss me off. It's surprising an updated port hasn't happened yet, considering this game is stuck on Nintendo 64. It's a fate worse than death, really. And now that I've played it, I'm starting to think they pretty much came to wonder what I wonder now. Would it even be worth it? There's so little meat in the game. It's an empty feeling game. Will this even be worth the price of admission? It's such a letdown compared to the first two. There's really nowhere for them to go with it.

I liked the idea of going with the story, with adding voice acting and more emphasis on plot and cutscenes, but what was happening in the story wasn't too interesting, and the game just isnt long enough for a deep story.

There were very few times that I had actual fun playing this game, which is a shame. Turok 2 is one of my favorite shooters and to know the same love and care wasn't given to its sequel is a genuine disappointment after all these years. Playing this finally, and knowing how bad Evolution is, it's really no wonder they thought the only way to save the franchise was a reboot that was nothing like the original games. But even that didn't work.

R.I.P. Turok.