Great game in the famous Alien vs. Predator universe with incredibly cool gameplay, interesting story, atmosphere, detailed environments, and good multiplayer.
The game offers unique gameplay as one of three characters that are radically different from each other.
When playing as an Alien, the game offers a unique opportunity to go through the entire development cycle of an alien from a Facehugger to an adult Drone by yourselves. Almost any surface for movement becomes available to us. And instilling fear in your victims and killing them with stealth one after another makes you feel like an ideal killing machine.
The Marine campaign will make you feel like a hero in a world of monsters. The main character is strong, fearless, a specialist in all types of equipment and weapons, and looks a bit like Iron Arnie himself. The human gameplay is intense, dynamic, and also very fun, especially when you are given a smart gun or an exoskeleton.
The role of the Predator gives an unforgettable feeling of dominance, being a super hunter at the top of the food chain. A huge number of high-tech gadgets and weapons give a lot of fun and diversify the ways of killing their victims. Panic makes enemies act differently and it's up to you to decide whether to spare unarmed frightened prey with a kind of Predator code or collect a trophy.
Beautifully developed detailed environments with a variety of locations. The player is constantly surrounded by an atmosphere of the unknown, filled with fear and threat.
Incredibly interesting and exciting plot, which tells us the story of the incident and its consequences on the planet LV1201. The storylines of all three characters cross throughout the story. The finale of each campaign will not leave anyone indifferent.
100% this is the best game in the Alien vs Predator series at the moment.

I've always found it interesting how much heated discussion arises from games which are seen as played primarily by those who do not usually play games in the genre it belongs to. The main example that gets thrown around is Persona/SMT or even Pokemon as "JRPGS for people who don't play JRPGS".

On the one hand, I can see some validity to this if the game in question is a watered down, entry point friendly example of the genre but whose players are perceived to never move into the deeper, richer members of the category. There is also the fact that this unwillingness may arise from a perceived difference by those players which turns out to not be true, i.e I like X but not the rest of genre Y because those games have quality Z(X has Z too).

Whatever the case, I think its generally unhelpful and even weird to care about such things for the most part and these arguments are built on a hell of a lot of assumptions about player motivations and knowledge. Anyways, I'm not much of an RTS guy, but I love Total War. Specifically Shogun 2, Medieval 2, Rome 1, and to a lesser extent Three Kingdoms.

I should preface the rest of the review by saying that I have actually played other strategy games but could never really get into them. The closest I ever got was HOI4, but I made the mistake of trying out multiplayer whilst "only" having about 40 hours in the game (which is a rounding error in paradox grand strategy game terms) and was yelled at/forced out of playing as France by a very rude person for apparently picking the wrong focuses (getting factories is not optimal, apparently) which kinda soured me on the game for ever and by extension CK2, EU4 etc which I briefly tried but couldn't really figure out. I played a bit of CIV once but I found it kinda boring.

Total War, provides an experience that cannot really be had anywhere else save for the odd indie competitor, namely real time battles in formations between historical troops. Well, at least not in the way that Total War does it. The real time rendering of individual soldiers, the manual camera, dragging out lines of troops with the mouse, zooming into the enemy general's face as he's finally hit with a concentrated volley of arrows straight to his chest, well, I've yet to see another game that scratched that itch.

Importantly for me, the actual complexity of the non-battle stuff is low, especially this entry in the series. I'm sure the depth of management in EU4 is great, but I'd need 100 hours just to learn enough to comfortably play it. In Total War it boils down to keeping public order high and a steady income. Diplomacy and Tech are there, but they are not particularly complex. Its all about the battles. You and your units and wits against the enemies'.

If there is one major flaw in this and most total war games it would be the AI. Its pretty dumb. Its smarter here than in Medieval 2 at least, but that's not saying much. This is best illustrated by the difficulty settings (easy, normal, hard, very hard, legendary) which mainly give the AI cheats. There is a school of thought which says that this is "cheap" difficulty, but honestly its the only way of making the game interesting. The fact is, after getting to grips with the games' mechanics if you're not playing at least on normal, the enemy will not be able to build an army worthy of an interesting battle. On hard and above each faction will build around 3 stacks and throw them against you, necessesitating skillful use of agents, defensive sieges, ambushes and clever maneouvering to defeat them. Which is sort of the point of the game.

Notably, the Shogun 2 AI is quite competent for a secondary reason unrelated to the programming : this is one of the most streamlined total war games. Hence, not only does the player not have to deal with stuff like squalor, civil war mechanics, (religion plays a somewhat minor role compared to Medieval 2 or the Barbarian Invasions expansion) but by extension the AI has fewer things to juggle (and hence fewer things to fuck up).

There are trade offs when streamlining a game of course, and as mentioned in my Medieval 2 review, there are fewer RPG elements with generals having somewat boring skill trees, with the random traits feeling somewhat vestigial and underused. On the other hand, you don't have to worry about sending reinforcements to another province instantly rebelling because of your low authority faction leader, daimyo honour is fairly predictable and fair. Which does not necessarily mean better, but it is nicer in a way that doesn't feel to me as overly forgiving, mainly because loyalty management in Medieval 2 was just boring/tedious.

Agents are also much better, using a rock, paper, scissors type match up between the 3 main types of monks, ninja and metsuke (monk -> metsuke -> ninja -> monk). Loss aversion still makes their unfudged chance of failure annoying and encourages save scumming, but thankfully other agents have a chance to only put the your agent out of commission for a few turns rather than outright elimination, compared to medieval 2, where spies could scout enemy territory completely unmolested, but were all but guaranteed to die if they attempted any infiltration action unless they were max skill. Though by contrast, they made army sabotage incredibly broken (I once genuinely held an entire 3 death stack army which was 1 turn away from crossing into my undefended provinces using an entire squad of elite ninjas long enough for my forces to travel to the front and destroy them in detail).

The battle and campaign narrators are some of the best in the series. In particular the battle narrator does such a good job at bringing across (in his second language, no less) the character of the close advisor to the daimyo, an excitable but kind of kiss-ass aide-de-camp type. All of the lines are iconic, though their popular versions being commonly written in a phonetic engrish is unfortunate, though not surprising, given the depressingly common profile of the historical strategy game player being, well, a chud.

As much as I enjoy Shogun 2, it's the one total war game which I have played the least of in the vanilla form. This is also part of why I thought of writing a review for the game. Shogun 2 is set in the Sengoku Jidai, usually translated as the "warring states period" or alternatively as "the age of the country at war" by Shogun 2, which I kinda prefer, its more literal I think. In this period of around 100 years Japan fractured as the authority of the Ashikaga Shoguns diminished and many small feudal clans fought each other for control of the country. The introduction of guns by the portuguese transformed the way wars were fought, with masses of peasant troops (or ashigaru) equipped with this new weapon being used, as well as other innovations like bamboo palisades etc.

Total War as a series has never let historical accuracy get in the way of its game design philosophy, but in the case of a game like Shogun 2 it undermines the games' appeal, in my view. Matchlocks suck ass in shogun 2. Unlike Medieval 2 were certain techs were time gated, Shogun 2 has a player directed tech tree, hence in order for the timeline to make sense, getting firearms requires contact with christians (i.e the portuguese) or extremely heavy investment to get even the most basica matchlock arquebus troops. In theory, this could work, as the nanban trade port which provides access to guns also converts the population to christianity, which unless you convert your daimyo leads to unrest via religious differences (unless you recruit high level monks to station in the province to cancel out the christian influence). This would be a historically accurate and an interesting trade-off decision between getting power now and dealing with the consequences or waiting to develop them yourself. Unfortunately, matchlocks suck, the matchlock ashigaru are so inferior to their bow equivalents in almost every single battle scenario and take way more of an investment to recruit. Matchlock Samurai are better but not all that much more effective than bow samurai especially given that by the time you've unlocked the tech you're likely finishing the campaign unless you turtle!

Now, I'm no expert. But I do know that guns pretty much supplanted bows in Japan gradually after their introduction. From what I gather, its not that bows are "inferior", they can be fired over hills, they are more accurate, faster to 'reload' and probably have a higher effective range. But they take lots of time and resources to effectively train in their usage, compared to guns, which are slow and inaccurate, cannot be used in rain etc but which can be used to quickly and effectively outfit a massive amount of levies into a fighting force. Not the case in Shogun 2 vanilla, you can train as many bow ashigaru as you want and have a mass skirmishing force to rain death upon your foes for next to nothing. There are a couple gun units worth recruiting, mainly the inaccurately named Portuguese Terços (it means thirds, it was composed of 1/3rd Arquebusiers, 1/3rd Pikemen and 1/3rd Swordsmen, these are just arquebusiers outfitted with swords) but in general the opportunity cost compared to equivalent bow units is just too high. Hell, you're probably better off going full on offense with 0 skirmishers in some cases with armour and charge bonuses.

With all this said, I played most of shogun 2 with rebalancing packs to make arquebuses easier to get and more effective. Unfortunately the new mod loader has fucked with their compatibility and they haven't been worked on in years. For a while I always thought that the reason why the infamous Kisho Ninja bug was left unfixed to not make mods stop working, but apparently not. I also suspected that maybe there must be something more to it that I was not privy of, I mean, gamers as a whole have a habit of not fully grasping the complexities of game development at times. I can now say, after making a mod for shogun 2 to replace those that no longer work, that no, the fix took literally 5 seconds to fix, changing the 2 ammo into 20 ammo for the "superior" Hattori and Tokugawa Kisho Ninja (regular kisho ninja have 15 ammo). The experience of making a mod was a new one for me, but I'm kicking myself that I didn't start earlier because its pretty easy; at least for unit rebalancing packs and the like. I also learned a few things about the inner workings of the game, why random traits are picked up so rarely (the conditions are super long its like IF X and Y OR Z And W...), how historical battles are internally called NapoleonBattles presumably due to the the warscape engine being made for Empire and Napoleon total war and that effective range is determined by projectile type and not units.

My personal rebalancing is to make bow units have more expensive upkeep but lower upfront cost, take 2 turns instead of 1 to recruit, have fewer men than matchlock ashigaru which have had their range slightly increased and added effective range based armour penetration as well as made matchlocks available basically from turn 2. That way bows are still viable and useful, but there is a trade off versus matchlocks. It's not been the most elegant solution, I've found that whilst making the matchlock research available early, ideally I should have changed the priority that AI puts into research because they basically don't recruit matchlocks because seemingly they are following a script which obviously assumes that the node required to recruit firearm units is lower in the tree. It also might have been nice to implement the historically accurate link between guns and christianity and make converting to christianity actually worth it (and irl many daimyos converted to get access to gunpowder) but unless you play as a Kyushu clan you're basically really unlikely to get contact with christians until you've basically beaten the game. If I knew how, I might make homegrown matchlock samurai/ashigaru require not only the tech and buildings but previous contact with the portuguese, like IRL how Tanegashima got a blacksmith to reverse engineer a portuguese arquebus he had purchased.

Shogun 2 remains a highly replayable total war game. As mentioned previously, the AI is surprisingly competent compared to older entries and the Realm Divide mechanic ensures there is fun to be had even towards the end of the campaign, as all of Japan will essentially declare war on you and will even be clever enough to send a seaborne invasion force to catch you by surprise. I really enjoy the ending cutscene depicting your daimyo(and new shogun) having a statue made out of them and showing said statue in the modern day, still standing in testament of his glory and power; though depicting the future in which the shogunate has long since been abolished and most clans are merely ceremonial vestiges of said period might illustrate the opposite point (look upon my works ye mighty, and despair) lmao.

I made a list a few days ago inspired by this game, where I tried to collect my favourite instances of non narrative based games with good/enjoyable writing. I absolutely adore the flavour text in medieval 2, the barks when clicking units, the battle narrator, they are all so infused with earnestness and the vibes the game is trying to convey I have a goofy smile when Im playing this game the whole way through.

It's not just that every single unit of the game be it agents, generals, army and navy units etc have numerous voice lines all in mostly appropriate national accents and dispositions based on their personality and relationship with your leader ; which is great of course, but its also that in conjunction with the games' trait system.

Checking out an enemy spanish general with high chivalry : "We seek an honourable engagement"
Sending your diplomat as an egyptian faction to negotiate a peace treaty : "Of course, mighty sultan".
These are small things, but small things are what life and game design is about a lot of the time. Slightly modified from Rome Total War, every general has 4 skills and several traits based on their actions, their upbringing (i.e if their dad was a god of the battlefield they are more likely to start out as a decent commander) and some random chance. I love the flavour text for each of the skill levels, just like every other bit of text in this game its so fun. One of the traits is chivalry/dread. Basically how noble the character is. High Chivalry gives you buffs to morale and High Dread debuffs to enemy morale, which even out so you want to have high one or the other instead of trying to be in the middle.

I had my faction leader slowly become more and more dreaded which made battles easier but also made me so invested in him, like I was almost roleplaying an evil tyrannical ruler. Eventually he got the epithet "the malevolent" and that was so funny to me, like yeah Sultan Miswar the Malevolent, woe betide he who forgets his name. "A Man so malevolent he considers honour and virtue foolish weaknesses". Still not quite as good as "A stuffed olive has more importance than this man - it could choke someone important and change history." for minimum influence characters in rome 1.

It's funny, for a long time I considered Shogun 2 the more solid game, and to a certain extent that is true, though more accurately its the more streamlined game. See, future total war games did away with these traits (though I havent played any other future games other than three kingdoms after rome 2) and simply had a standard sort of upgrade tree. This is "better" design by conventional standards but there is a charm that it lacks in my view.

Whilst having high chivalry and high dread are similar in its battle effects, high chivalry is preferrable because it leads to higher population growth in cities which is really important. The key is that whilst a lot of the traits have various levels of randomness and predictability (a general who's stuck in the boonies doing nothing will get pretty poor traits generally, whereas if you put one to oversee a city with a big mining complex it might gain "mining knowledge" etc) the actions for chivalry and dread are almost entirely the result of the player. Unlike Rome 1, enemies are captured when defeated during a rout, meaning after each battle one may choose to either ransom them for money (neutral, but if rejected you will have to execute them), release them (good obviously but can you afford to keep letting the enemy go?) and execute them all (bad, but you are rid of them). Similarly one of the strongest units in medieval 2 is your own general's cavalry bodyguard, which in rome 1 could be used to singlehandedly win battles through cycle charging. However constantly doing this in Medieval 2 will lead to "winning first" which gives more dread to your general, incentivising you to "fight honourably" to get those bonuses.

So it leads to a nice mix of roleplaying and decision making on whether or not to be ruthless and efficient or saintly and risk having to work twice as hard. Similarly the semi randomness of the other traits imo reach a nice balance between keeping you on your toes, not relying entirely upon one guy who will turn out to become a drunkard. Now, this system bears some resemblance to both the chaos system of Dishonored and the general traits systems of games like darkest dungeon, but why is it then that I hate the former and wouldnt touch the latter because I know I would also hate it? Well, for one thing its the intensity of it. Medieval 2 is not exactly a challenging game so being fucked by the algorithm or accidentally letting your idiot son become an asshole by leaving him in some backwater town doesn't feel soul crushing. The other being, in relation to something like dishonored, that it feels to me as an actual choice to play the game in one of two ways rather than the game throwing a fit that Im using the tools it keeps giving me. Also that I actually enjoy M2TW and hate stealth games generally.

Also inherited from rome total war is a nice system wherein a trait is initially positive but if let progress becomes negative. For e.g in Rome 1 a general could get the trait social drinker, +1 command. Essentially having a healthy appreciation for booze made him more liked by his men, but could eventually become day drinker - 1 command or even drunkard - 2 command etc. Lots of traits follow this model and I quite enjoy its implementation, even if its hard to avoid the traits progressing into the negative side eventually.

There is a lot more that could be said about M2TW, its historical accuracy is far from perfect but much better than "ptolemaic egypt having a bronze age army with motherfucking chariots" - Rome Total War 1. The interactions with religion are interesting, like how European countries are constantly being threatened with excommunication for fighting each other by the pope who will call crusades to try to unify them into spreading the faith whereas as a muslim country as long as you have a high faith imam you can call a holy war whenever (except if one has already been called recently), which is a nice reflection of the centralization and lack thereof of the two religions respectively.

Like in Rome 1 you might as well only ever recruit troops in one city or two to maximize bonuses and the retraining and various troop types are kind of an ass even if I get their function in slowing down conquest when moving into less developed territory.

Anyways, for the most part I really just want to again highlight the writing which is my biggest source of joy playing this game. I love the battle advisor, some of thse lines go so hard : (muslim battle advisor) "All praise to allah! This is a most crushing victory! Your name will live in marble and our foes' in sand!" (mediterranean battle advisor) "We are blessed! The enemy general is dead! We have sent the idiot to hell" "Our King has run from the field! I pray victory does not run after him, may the Lord have mercy on his soul". Etc etc.

Just goes to show, good writing is always good to have even if your games' story is going to be almost entirely told through emergent gameplay and player actions.

For my money, CAVE have 4 standout titles. Ketsui, Dodonpachi DaiOuJou, Mushi Futari and Progear. The former 3 are incredibly tightly designed, traditional-ish bullet hells. Progear, on the other hand, is more of an experimental mess of cool shit put in a development hell washing machine, that somehow came out as a rad tie-dye T-shirt.

Because Progear, both by the standards of the day and even now, is an almost unique bullet hell. It's horizontal for one, something rare to see for this kind of shmup in the first place, but the true difference comes in it's heavy focus on it's core bullet cancelling mechanic.

Essentially, when bullets are caught up in enemy explosions, they're deleted in Progear. The more bullets you delete in one explosion gives you more points, and then the ability to switch shot type and cause bullets cancelling to cancel other bullets themselves, turning them into precious jewel point items instead - all for huge scoring benefit. It's a frankly, unintuitive, weird system that is awkward as hell to explain and get your head around - especially without the flyers in the original arcade kits that explain it, and without paying attention to the attract mode demos - but when it clicks, dear lord does it click.

CAVE are specialists at making satisfying scoring systems, but Progear's "Jeweling" goes further than any of their others, forming the whole basis for playing the game at any decent level - cancelling huge waves of bullets to gain screenspace to move into, timing enemy kills, streaming enemies to make lines of bullets that lead to full screen cancels. It has such a fantastic flow to it, and gives the game a really unique edge.

This system, along with CAVE experimenting with the weird and wonderful horizontal realm, also leads to Progear having some of my favourite bullet patterns of any STG. Progear's bullets are often fired in weird trajectories and acceleration - partially so they cover up the enemies that fire them for a period - and often behave like snooker balls hit with backspin. Its a totally unique style of bullet pattern for bullet hell, and I am personally a huge fan of it. It all adds up to a system with a great balance of Micro and Macro dodging, where control of the screenspace is a huge factor.

And all of this is contained within a fantastic steampunk setting from frequent CAVE collaborator Junya Inoue. Without getting too into it, it's essentially a lot like a doomer version of Ghibli's Castle in the Sky, and whilst obviously there's only so much you can do with that in a 20 minute long STG, the whole thing provides a great melancholic vibe (gotta love a game that starts with mass infanticide), a fantastic aesthetic that contrasts well with all the bullet rain, and establishes a feeling of desperation that works well with the game system. Inoue in general is one of those artists that gets so into the aesthetic they create that manages to impart a feel of a larger, realised world even in the tiny amount of content in the game itself, and its a huge contributor to why I like this game so much.

The failings of Progear are there - as I said before, it's messy. The scoring system ive been gushing about so much kinda falls apart when played for world records due to it's absurdly powerful max bomb bonus. The rough development cycle with the underpowered Hardware also really shows in the final product - the arcade version of the soundtrack uses crunchy kinda awful samples that make half the songs sound kinda shite, there's a lot of sprite reuse (particularly in the final level), and the slowdown, a hallmark of CAVE's shooters, is incredibly severe. It's still arguably the best looking game on the CPS2 (the same hardware that powers Street Fighter 2), but its pretty obvious CAVE were hamstrung by some combination of Capcom and their Hardware. It's telling they didn't work together again and Capcom were intent on keeping Progear in their Vaults for the better part of 20 years.

And it's a real shame they did. Progear has become one of their least well known games partially due to a complete lack of porting, revisons/arrange modes or a successor. That leaves Progear as CAVE's most unique masterpiece. There's a scant one game that feels like it - Battle Traverse. And for me, one of the kindest things I can say about that game is that it reminds me of Progear. I wish more did.


If you want to try out the game, I reccomend MAME, where it runs very accurately - despite being a CPS2 game, Final Burn Alpha doesnt work well for it - You will also need a rom for QSound. You're best off playing the JP version, as the American release cuts out some voice acting and makes some questionable gameplay changes - it is easier, but that can be adjusted in the service mode of the JP version regardless. And make sure you flip the setting that binds FULL AUTO to button 3 - it will save your fingers. Enjoy!

There is no point having a billion ships without a good playgroud for them. RTF3 is maybe the final nail in the coffin that Granzella will never be to Irem what Cave is to Toaplan.

Kazuma Kujo was a lead on R-Type Delta, Metal Slug and In the Hunt and how he's te auteur of what is now two full game's worth of stages which are so poorly paced and full of blatant issues that wouldn't pass muster in game jam.

The RTF2/3 project in general has always felt a bit misguided but this final update (because yes, that's basically all this is, thank you misleading marketing, doesnt even come with all the DLC) is proof that the caretakers of what is possibly the best well known STG series haven't got a fucking clue.