2019
Played a few hours this with a friend, given it was free on Epic the other week and we were both morbidly curious, it’s not bad but boy does it have some rough edges versus 2, you can really feel the turnover in the team and the technology between it and its predecessors.
Little papercuts like the game dropping items (class mods) nobody in the party can actually use for hours on end, despite the unlock seemingly not being possible at those items’ level requirement.
At vendors, you can’t push the “sell junk” button from the buy screen like in BL2, you have to enter the sell screen to do so, despite it not doing anything at all on the buy screen.
The inventory UI is more complicated, harder to read, and just overall harder to use, but the loot drops seem even more numerous than prior games.
Audio log placement is the sloppiest it’s ever been, placing audio logs right in the middle of “follow the npc” sequences, resulting in the choice between picking them up (and having them immediately and repeatedly interrupted by dialogue from the NPC you’re following) or ignoring them and backtracking. Not that you care about them, but they’re there and the X button needs pushing. Grr!
For some reason a significant portion of audio logs have absolutely no subtitles, and the subtitles also sometimes just display the some stale or incorrect line repeatedly. In the second level of the game all the dialogue was captioned as some line from Torgue, a character who hadn’t even appeared yet.
UPDATE: what a mess of a game, real slog to the end here. I'm glad I got it for free because I think I'd have been very disappointed for full retail price. Cackled at the absurdity of the choice as the ending theme started playing.
Little papercuts like the game dropping items (class mods) nobody in the party can actually use for hours on end, despite the unlock seemingly not being possible at those items’ level requirement.
At vendors, you can’t push the “sell junk” button from the buy screen like in BL2, you have to enter the sell screen to do so, despite it not doing anything at all on the buy screen.
The inventory UI is more complicated, harder to read, and just overall harder to use, but the loot drops seem even more numerous than prior games.
Audio log placement is the sloppiest it’s ever been, placing audio logs right in the middle of “follow the npc” sequences, resulting in the choice between picking them up (and having them immediately and repeatedly interrupted by dialogue from the NPC you’re following) or ignoring them and backtracking. Not that you care about them, but they’re there and the X button needs pushing. Grr!
For some reason a significant portion of audio logs have absolutely no subtitles, and the subtitles also sometimes just display the some stale or incorrect line repeatedly. In the second level of the game all the dialogue was captioned as some line from Torgue, a character who hadn’t even appeared yet.
UPDATE: what a mess of a game, real slog to the end here. I'm glad I got it for free because I think I'd have been very disappointed for full retail price. Cackled at the absurdity of the choice as the ending theme started playing.
2010
refunded because it doesn't actually have full controller support on PC 🙈
The pinnacle of portable Need for Speed
2009
Uninspiring, cut-down and effectively pointless, they streamlined the wrong bits of Gran Turismo and there's not much worthy of your attention left
1998
You can really feel the shared DNA between this and R: Racing Evolution, so much of the energy of this and the way it wants to tell its story is clearly followed up and expanded upon in R: Racing, despite the years between
2020
aesthetically fantastic, love it, and it’s got big things to say and it says them well, but I feel like a little flavour text in the beginning of the game (hell, the first ~25 seconds of the launch trailer would do a lot here) or between levels would’ve bound it together more for me (why am I delivering parcels? what does that have to do with taking photos? the answers are in articles about the game, but seemingly not in the game)
I wish the scavenger hunt type gameplay didn’t have the timer, as that seems counter to the concept of methodically lining up aesthetically pleasing shots - for a game boasting giving the player creative control it feels odd
I wish the scavenger hunt type gameplay didn’t have the timer, as that seems counter to the concept of methodically lining up aesthetically pleasing shots - for a game boasting giving the player creative control it feels odd
Borderlands 2's gunfeel remains excellent even now, and Assault on Dragon Keep may be some of the most tolerable writing the game managed in its lifetime
A few weird difficulty spikes soured this a little for me, but overall it was a lot of fun, and I ended up shredding pretty hard by the end
A few weird difficulty spikes soured this a little for me, but overall it was a lot of fun, and I ended up shredding pretty hard by the end
2011
Dire
2021
Honestly another incredible demonstration of how free-to-play gacha mechanics just become obviously ghoulish when stripped of the payment.
You can feel how much the only consideration this game gave to being funded by Apple Arcade was to delete the payment function, and that means instead you're left with a lot of waiting around, and a difficulty curve hell-bent on making you "spend" to upgrade your team.
Ultimately, it's yet another Trek game which considers combat the primary function of an away team, and is worse off for it. Despite minor considerations given to the idea of characters having different skills and specialities, it's really mostly combat by volume.
The combat itself is serviceable but not really fun - once you land a good character combo, like Bones and Riker, it's pretty much going to play out identically each round of combat.
You can feel how much the only consideration this game gave to being funded by Apple Arcade was to delete the payment function, and that means instead you're left with a lot of waiting around, and a difficulty curve hell-bent on making you "spend" to upgrade your team.
Ultimately, it's yet another Trek game which considers combat the primary function of an away team, and is worse off for it. Despite minor considerations given to the idea of characters having different skills and specialities, it's really mostly combat by volume.
The combat itself is serviceable but not really fun - once you land a good character combo, like Bones and Riker, it's pretty much going to play out identically each round of combat.
2008
a game so uneven and rough in places it makes the polish and confidence in tone of 3 look like an absolute miracle
the PC version probably makes it feel worse than intended, I saw a huge number of crashes to desktop on that journey, but either way it’s a pretty drab looking game which doesn’t read very well at all, revels in an uncomfortable amount of brutality, and whose jokes rarely land
the PC version probably makes it feel worse than intended, I saw a huge number of crashes to desktop on that journey, but either way it’s a pretty drab looking game which doesn’t read very well at all, revels in an uncomfortable amount of brutality, and whose jokes rarely land
This review contains spoilers
The detour back to GTA1/2 gameplay feel was welcome / the women all getting killed off for no reason wasn’t.
The plot is extremely disjointed and, frankly, boring. I was shocked to discover that Chinatown Wars was critically praised, and was seemingly the second highest-rated PSP game on aggregate, despite the extremely rough story???
Ling Shan (that's her in purple and holding a sword on the right of the box art) has more variations of her outfit in marketing materials than times she appears in the game, one of which she is unceremoniously killed off in. A refrigerated prop, plain and simple, shot right after teaching you combat mechanics, only to die offscreen and never return.
Ling Shan is one of only three prominent women characters in the game, two of whom die for no apparent reason other than as explanations for not having any more missions for the player.
It’s lazy, shitty, deeply misogynistic writing in a game with enough boring male characters you can’t tell some of them apart. Do better. 🖕🏼
The plot is extremely disjointed and, frankly, boring. I was shocked to discover that Chinatown Wars was critically praised, and was seemingly the second highest-rated PSP game on aggregate, despite the extremely rough story???
Ling Shan (that's her in purple and holding a sword on the right of the box art) has more variations of her outfit in marketing materials than times she appears in the game, one of which she is unceremoniously killed off in. A refrigerated prop, plain and simple, shot right after teaching you combat mechanics, only to die offscreen and never return.
Ling Shan is one of only three prominent women characters in the game, two of whom die for no apparent reason other than as explanations for not having any more missions for the player.
It’s lazy, shitty, deeply misogynistic writing in a game with enough boring male characters you can’t tell some of them apart. Do better. 🖕🏼
2021
all I can think about as I dismiss endless deceitful mobile game ads is the labour conditions of the cats in my care
2010
Didn’t really land for me, not sure if it’s the cloud stream latency or what but I felt held back by the controls
2021
the new VR mode is broken in an absolutely delightful way and I cannot wait to play more
2017
solid racing game which stops just shy of greatness because none of the tracks are in any way memorable - they’ve gone for a generated-from-prefab-blocks type of track system, which does mean you can generate your own custom ones (though you can’t manually edit individual segments, just influence the parameters of the generation algorithm) and they’re equally convincing versus the predefined ones, but there’s nothing to distinguish them
there’s a real deep state of focus you enter where you’re just focused on the road ahead and listening to your co-driver’s course notes, and that’s fun in and of itself, but there’s no track you’d ever go “damn, I want to improve my time on that one” because they’re all so completely indistinguishable
there have been games which did this kind of track generation before - I played hundreds of hours of V-Rally 2 as a kid - but I still remember those tracks; SS01 Australia is burned into my brain like it’s the route to the local shops and I’m hungry - something doesn’t quite stick to your brain with the ones in Dirt 4
excellent fun with a good wheel, but I wish it were more interested in the tracks as a place, rather than just an immediately-discardable result of an algorithm's execution
there’s a real deep state of focus you enter where you’re just focused on the road ahead and listening to your co-driver’s course notes, and that’s fun in and of itself, but there’s no track you’d ever go “damn, I want to improve my time on that one” because they’re all so completely indistinguishable
there have been games which did this kind of track generation before - I played hundreds of hours of V-Rally 2 as a kid - but I still remember those tracks; SS01 Australia is burned into my brain like it’s the route to the local shops and I’m hungry - something doesn’t quite stick to your brain with the ones in Dirt 4
excellent fun with a good wheel, but I wish it were more interested in the tracks as a place, rather than just an immediately-discardable result of an algorithm's execution