Recent reviews by Erkor

It's great.

It's great! A quaint game that really immerses you in the art of alchemy, rendered wonderfully in a parchment style that, I think, is outdone by almost no other game that tries to come close to it. Seriously - I love the way this game looks.

Elder Scrolls Online

I think this was the best Half-Life 2™ mod I've ever played.

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If you've played Entropy: Zero, then you'll likely feel right at home here. Entropy: Zero 2 builds upon its predecessor in a lot of ways.

In Entropy: Zero 2, you play as the Bad Cop, now reincarnated as a member of the Transhuman Arm of the Combine Overwatch. As a member of the elusive and dangerous elite forces, you are tasked with the vital objective of finding and apprehending Judith Mossman, who has escaped into the arctic circle on a rebel mission...

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Immediately after you begin the campaign, you are thrust into a flashback of the Bad Cop's time in Civil Protection. While it is short, and largely serves the purpose of worldbuilding, it is some of the best written dialogue I've seen in a mod for a long, long time. The average Half-Life 2 roleplayer will likely contest this, but the vast majority are so unimaginably misguided in their attempt to "recreate a true-to-canon experience of Half-Life 2" that they can't see greatness when it looks right into their faces. The conversations the Bad Cop has with Mop Cop, Doorman Cop, Guncop, and the various other unnamed officers inside the Civil Protection headquarters are amusing, believable, natural, and incredibly well done.

Following this flashback sequence, involving you clearing out a headcrab infestation within the ventilation shafts, you are thrust into the meat and potatoes of the game: Bad Cop — or, perhaps, Bad Elite — awakens inside a Combine holding facility (Nova Prospekt? The architecture lines up, at least!) and is given access to a Gauss Pistol. Subverting the idea of a conventional pistol, this is your stand-in for a melee weapon and a sidearm at the same time. With self-replenishing ammunition, a charged secondary fire, and a primary fire that shoots a slew of bullets, this thing would have won me over it wasn't for the dialogue at the start being so amazingly charming to an avid consumer of Half-Life-adjacent media such as myself.

From this point onwards, Breadman's team consistently throws new twists into the gameplay. Squads are a central feature, and while the mechanics surrounding them are nowhere near as complex as other games such as Star Wars: Republic Commando's, the Combine Soldier AI still springs to life in order to allow for interesting setups. Command your squad to stand by a door, and some of them might be compelled to stack up against the wall like they're about to breach it. Send your squad in, and they'll decimate everything around you. Make them hold at a position while you deal with a long-distance enemy that keeps pinning the rest down. It's great! And it's probably the only mod for a long time afterwards that will even touch squad mechanics! I commend Breadman and co. for that. A lot.

After you are initially gorged with combat, you are thrown into a situation where control is taken from you. With only a suspiciously conversational, sapient turrent called Wilson as your companion, you have to navigate [REDACTED] in order to [DATA EXPUNGED]. Oh, and perhaps I shouldn't tell you about [REDACTED]. You'll catch on.

Wilson and the sequences surrounding him are something I've enjoyed quite a lot, but I've only done one playthrough of the game and neglected putting him into the elevator to the surface at the end of it all. He's charming in the same way any other defective turret is, and ties together the franchises Entropy: Zero 2 bases itself in wonderfully, in my opinion.

After this sequence, however, you are bestowed with some of the most fun environments I've seen in a HL2 mod so far: Think Highway 17 or Sandtraps, but with a giant f!%&ing APC. Yes! An APC! With a gun! And rockets! Lots of them! It's great! It's fast, it's large, it's open, and gives you ample opportunites to mow the resistance down.

In case it isn't obvious, I'm glossing over large parts of the mod because I think you should play it yourself. It's free (at the time of writing), after all! Anyways.

While the gunfighting is indeed very charming, there is an aspect of melee combat I've intentionally overlooked: Kicking. Yes, you can engage the mighty boot of Overwatch directly into the face of headcrabs, zombies, humans, and other soldiers at your leisure. In the case of humans, you can even disarm rebels by kicking them! Kick them once, and they'll switch to a sidearm. Kick them again, and they're harmless... until they find another weapon. Better pick 'em up.

What does a non-threat do, though? They run around, and seek cover. They cower, and they're afraid -- always looking for a weapon to pick up if there is one nearby. You can kill them, but that's kind of mean and I'm pretty sure also a war crime. Consider the alternative: Detainment.

Interact with a rebel after you've disarmed them, and you can detain them. They'll put their hands up, become non-hostile, and lie on the ground. Until you turn away for too long. If they think you've lost their attention, they'll try to doublecross you. Better think fast in situations like that! This has no bearing on combat anyways, but it's a cool little feature that I adore to no end.

A final note in this almost entirely spoiler-free* review: The voice modulation si ON POINT! I'd love to get my hands on it myself, although I doubt that'll ever be made public (please breadman read this). Hearing the personality ooze out of a civil protection officer in that prologue made me smile, laugh, and sigh wistfully because I'd never get those kinds of interactions dynamically if I were to try the godforsaken art of roleplaying on a Half-Life 2 RP server again.

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This is a spoiler.

I think the Bad Cop's clone has a bit of a weird thing going on with the modulation. I'm sure it's intentional, but I don't like it that much myself. That's more personal taste than anything else, and I didn't find the game unplayable as a consequence, but the thought was always there when I heard him talk. No big deal, though. :)

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Yeah, no, that's it. I think this is one of the best custom campaign-based HL2 mods I've ever seen. Amazing work. Good job. Get this and play it now.

it's

Good game. Ultimately what they've advertised and hyped up is largely different, but the game itself is great.

The combat and systems in the game are very soulslike, on their basic level:

• The combat seems heavily inspired by Sekiro; being methodical and precise, but not necessarily slow. Enemies block and parry attacks if they combat you in mêlée and may break your guard or use unblockable attacks. Parrying is usually better than dodging and your block meter only has a finite amount of stamina before your guard shatters.
  
• Force powers are largely utilitarian outside of combat; they enhance the combat but do not supplant it as they do in games like The Force Unleashed. You cannot force-grip a group of enemies and throw them over the eddge (although you can do this with single enemies) but you can use them as body-shields. You have a limited, perhaps a bit too limited, pool of force energy.
  
• To save the game and recuperate lost stimpacks and resources, you rest at a meditation point -- an analogue to bonfires in every way but name and appearance. Resting respawns enemies, as well.
  
• The aforementioned stimpacks are analogues to Estus or similar, as well.

Is all of this bad? No! Not at all. In fact, it's a good thing if it's done well -- and I believe it is done well.

It's just not The Force Unleashed without the Mountain Dew™ elements.

edit: Also the story is 12 hours long.

Recommended.

very nice shooter from id software with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of gore and a pretty nice mapping tool

HITMAN™ as a game is quite refreshing in my eyes. It has improved upon its predecessor, Absolution, and in turn took elements from older games, namely Blood Money to please fans and give a greater gameplay experience.

In turn, you are able to explore your level, choose how you want to kill, how you want to look and how you want to approach your target, or targets. You can choose from a great variety of weapons inside a level, ranging from screwdrivers to lethal syringes, fire axes, various pistols and even rifles and shotguns in some cases.

The only level in the intro pack is the Showstopper level, which is disappointing, but already nice in its own right. The graphics in this game are stunning, of course, and despite people disliking 47's new appearance, I'm content with it as it doesn't necessarily matter.

Do you remember how he looked like in Hitman: Silent Assassin™? It was an abomination. An inflatable balloon, more like.

You can as always disguise yourself, and instead of an action bar to choose your weapons from, it returns to the weapon wheel in a Blood Money style fashion.

The episodic model is overall disappointing if not annoying, but I can safely say that under the circumstances of the company, it's understandable. IO Interactive had lost a lot of money and needed to make some in turn to avoid being closed down or laid off by Square Enix, and the game itself seems very promising as well.

However, not every game is perfect. HITMAN™ suffers from various performance problems, even on my machine, lowering my FPS to >30 in crowds, specifically in the Paris level. I hope IO makes an optimization patch in the near future.

The gameplay can be tedious as well, as sometimes the characters make one cycle onto an area that can be used to kill them, I.E. the showstage in Paris, only to never return or return in perhaps 10-20 minutes.

However, I think the game should still be played assuming you can do so. I suggest you have a good machine, as older machines probably lag like sin.

also the always online sucks but cant fix it myself

still nice game

Huh...? I barely even remember playing this. Maybe I should try it again...

Prospekt is an interesting beast. When I first wrote this review I was-- Holy $&@%, 2016!? Yeah, this absolutely needs another look.

In any case, after seeing my own review in a youtube video, I felt a strange pressure in the back of my head to go look at Prospekt again. Needless to say, with the wisdom of about six years added on to my thoroughly more-wrinkled brain, I can absolutely conclude that I was far, far too harsh about it beforehand. I'm sure the creator of Prospekt won't see this edited version, but at the very least I feel an apology is necessary. Some of the wording there was just flat out crude. Sorry about that. 17-year-old me wasn't particularly good with formulating things.

Anyways:

Prospekt is an interesting beast. Being made by a single developer, the work alone is, in hindsight, quite astonishing. The level design, while rough in places, feels suitably "half-life", even if certain aspects (e.g. a certain Hunter mini-boss) felt just a bit stilted with the ammunition given to the player just beforehand -- although you could just as quickly ascribe that to seasoned player ingenuity instead.

The voice acting -- well, I'm not sure if it's been given another pass over, but I certainly don't agree with what I said in the past. While there is a certain hoarse throatiness to the Vortigaunts, I wouldn't call that a bad thing at all. I've come to ascribe "Akama"-ness (see the old review below) as a positive characteristic in Vortigaunts: It makes them sound weary, old, wizened, and -- frankly -- powerful.

While I might not be a large fan of the Combine voice-over replacements, I understand the change: Consistency is key, and hearing one voice come from Combine terminals and another from soldiers when both are intended to be the same will ultimately lead to confusion. I must appreciate the effort, especially considering I've tried and failed over the course of the last five or so years to recapture the lightning in a bottle that Valve had with the voice changer they utilized.

Talking about the voice acting, though, I absolutely and wholeheartedly adored it when it came to the wonderful flashback soundbytes peppered throughout the campaign. It's genuinely endearing, and the dialogue as a whole is written incredibly well and naturally.

It is ever so slightly a shame to see the grayscale HEV hands remain, but I've come to understand the difficulty in working with the Source Engine all too well. Even though some mods or fan games might have completely unique viewmodels, doing all that kind of work completely alone is daunting at best and mind-melting at worst. Still, considering the player's role as Adrian Shepard, it would have been a nice touch.

Perhaps a chunk of my weird holes in remembering this game is because it feels like the entire game has had a serious, bottom-to-top level design change. At only one or two points did I feel like I remembered something from my first playthrough, and I genuinely don't know if it's because I forgot everything or because the developer had redesigned the entire campaign from the ground up.

Besides a few bugs here and there (a lift that can get stuck; a few odd pauses or level transitions in elevators), the campaign is paced well, of good difficulty -- I found it rather challenging even on Normal difficulty -- and with a few puzzles that genuinely make you think for a moment. In some places, however, it does fall apart a little. Particularly near the start, where the player disables a set of thumpers: The color correction that comes with the game makes it difficult to see what's on the Combine monitor in the outpost, and that subsequently might make it a bit difficult to find out where to go next. This happened to me, at least.

Anyways...

• Passionate voicea cting
  
• Pretty good level design
  
• Pretty challenging gameplay & a few good puzzles
  
• Nice pacing

• Pretty short runtime (~1h30m at my pace; admittedly, rushed through the game)
  
• Occasional, slightly questionable level design
  
• Like, one or two bugs in one or two levels. I'm struggling to come up with actual bad points here. Seriously.

Not to mention, the price of the game is 4,99€ now. I can't not recommend it at that price. It's a single dev's work, it's quick, it's alright. Is it great? Eh. I can't be the judge of that. Is it worth five euros? Yes.

Originally posted by erkor:

Original review below.

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This is in all honesty nothing but a monetized mod for HL2.

It lacks in depth. The game, which I speeded through admittedly, took me 82 minutes. An hour and 22 minutes. One of the things I can appreciate in this game is the skins of the Combine soldiers, the level design in the later levels (Specifically past Xen) and the voice acting in the flashbacks.

The Vortigaunts sound like a half-hearted job at replicating Akama from WoW, and sound horribly wheezy. The Combine Soldiers have a strange filter that is nowhere close to the one in HL2, it makes me wonder why he even bothered to add the new ones. They sound like Super-Battle-Droids from Republic Commando, in all honesty. On top of that, some of the gameplay even on Normal is straight up unforgiving.

The Xen chapter, which is I believe a single level, looks quite bad. It is a combination of three to five asteroids that float about in empty space, along with horribly transluscent crystals attached to unexplained Combine apparatuses.

The particle effects, however, are outright beautiful, admittedly.

The viewmodel hands, which should naturally be new, are the same. Nothing different sans the color, which is just desaturated.

There are no new weapons in this game. All of them are the same. There are no new models for the weapons, nor any replacements.

There are no new mechanics in this game either, the only redeeming factor for this point is the end battle, which is pretty satisfying from my standpoint.

To sum up:

Pros

• +Good level design and attention to detail in the later levels, specifically the Combine base
  
• +Somewhat engaging final battle
  
• +Beautiful Particle Effects
  
• +Alright Flashback cutscenes

Cons

• -Poor level design in most other areas, some even seems to be pulled and retouched from HL2
  
• -Downright too challenging at times, either due to a lack of ammo or health, or too many enemies
  
• -Poor voice-acting in some cases (Vortigaunts)
  
• -Poor sound design in others(Combine Soldier voices, Overwatch(Why is it male??!?!?!))
  
• -Horribly short playtime for a $10 game

I do not recommend this game unless it is on sale, and even then am I reluctant.

very good game to vent anger, impressive gore mechanics (all characters are voxel-based)
i recommend to all friends 10/10