Recent reviews by Abelord

Bloodhound is and just tries to be a Painkiller clone. It has detected an empty niche and gone for it, adding nothing new to it and copying pretty much every single aspect. It however doesn't seem to fully understand its source material, and they haven't copied the handcraft and pacing of the original source, and went mostly for the jank of its sequels.

The theme is bland, the shooting is bad, the visuals are uninspired and feel amateurish, and worst of all, the pacing is terrible. Bloodhound has the habit of having you stop you at any uninspired moment in a corridor with a wall of energy in front of your nose just to kill 4 enemies and then doing the same in the next corridor. Has no sense of building interest or the epic of a fight and just thinks that shooting is fun by itself, but unfortunately that wears off in merely minutes.

I can't see myself finishing a game like this when even getting through the first two levels feels incredibly dull regardless of how high they turn the metal music volume and pump the blood. Just adds to the sense of overcrowd in boomer shooters.

Prodeus is, essentially, Brutal Doom made a proper game. The core is there for an awesome game, although there's some minor things to improve. It's an Early Access, so perfectly understandable.

THE GOOD:
· Great aesthetic choice, blend of classic with modern
· Really satisfying weapon feel, just like Brutal Doom or Quake 1.5. Fighting demons is a joy.
· Handcrafted levels, some actually really good. Marksmanship was awesome, with an interesting premise perfectly introduced, and well executed. More of that!
· Straight-to-the-point level editor, wonderful to use.
· Some neat visual options, specially the choice between sprites and poly models.
· Already incredibly stable and solid, with very rare bugs.
· Great level scoring system, with leaderboards and different layers of performance.

STILL TO IMPROVE (EARLY ACCESS):
· Prodeus tries a bit too hard to be like other boomer shooters. Should try to find its own voice. The nostalgia checkbox is already ticked, please bring some new ideas.
· Visually really repetitive. Lacks a lot of sense of environment variety. It's all the same texture set over and over. All gray with primary-colored lights.
· Same with enemies. They're just uninspired reskins of Doom's minions, and so far there's only lesser ones. Doesn't help they're all gray with glowy things (either orange, blue or green), they look a lot less iconic than their inspiration source and in the heat of battle they all merge into a unified blob of polygons and blood.
· Seldom, some terrible level design choices, like presenting some trickier enemies like the winged bat and the exploding tick by surprise in the middle of an enclosed zone, without first giving a chance to show what they can do in a "safer" environment or in a 1v1.
· Some weapons seem to be there just because other shooters have them, but they don't serve much purpose or significantly overlap in functionality with others, like the grenade launcher or the plasma rifle.
· Would be nice to have a 3D model option also for weapons, ammo, props...
· Energy cells shouldn't be the same color as health, mildly confusing.
· Kinda convoluted menu design. Quitting to desktop from in-game requires some odd navigating around. Esc, quit to menu, then Esc twice (?) and then Save & Quit.

Back in the very late 90s there was a mini craze about which FPS games were bound to dethrone Quake, and press articles about the next bunch of gorgeous titles to make our 3Dfx card implode. I remember seeing Requiem in one of those articles and man it looked good. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get it back then, save for playing the demo which was promising though a bit iffy in some areas. The game went completely underground after its launch due to lack of success and was even hard to run in later PCs, so it wasn't until recently that I played through it.

Let me be very clear: I LOOOVE retro shooters from that era. I've played most of them several times, I frequently go back to Quake or Unreal Gold. Requiem is a game I really want to like, I really do. It seemed to have the potential to be an absolute killer. Its strengths are a cool gritty/rusty sci-fi setting mixed with Christian "Heaven and Hell" mythos, and a huge arsenal of weapons and very original powers akin to Jedi Knight. Unfortunately, the game is clearly 6 months to a year short of development. Even getting past the obvious problems due to current PC configurations, the game has a permanent unfinished feel.

The good part is that some of the main weapons are really satisfying to shoot, specially the machinegun and some powers like Bloodboil that will put a nasty grin in your face. It succeeds, specially later in the game, in making you feel like some powerful supernatural asskicker while resurrecting enemies to your small army as they die or turn them into salt, and that feeling tints the best moments of the game. Unfortunately, these are hardly the main tonic of the flat and repetitive progression, and Requiem is constantly hellbent in frustrating you.

There is a very clear lack of balacing throughout the whole game, with some towering, miniboss-like enemies requiring barely a rocket to kill while some cannon-fodder wasps require 2 sniper shots. It doesn't help that visual feedback of damage, both done and received, is terrible. Difficulty spikes randomly, sometimes enemies barely do any damage to you, sometimes your health drops to zero in an instant without you knowing why, which sadly trains you into paranoidly checking your health every 2 seconds.

Some powers are clearly useless and there is a lot of overlap in their functionalities, so cool as it may be to make a guy's blood boil, turn them into salt or throw a plague of locusts on them, they have pretty similar effects and their functionality is not always clear anyway. This is clearly the selling point of the game, that could almost have been an action-oriented immersive sim (certainly closer to Bioshock Infinite than Deus Ex, but still) if they had been designed with proper synergies in mind, but they're not. They just get seemingly randomly unlocked, you get used to a couple of very good ones and that's about it. You won't use Heal Other a single time in the game, but you'll find that some bosses oddly force you to use some of them, without any clear explaination as of why.

The narrative is weak at best, with some key moments dowright unfinished and unexplained. Level design is also far from good, with terrible pacing, some really unintuitive areas that you'll travel back and forth a dozen times to find the proper way since the effects or buttons or triggers, the opening of doors etc is not always clear, and the fact that there are a significant amount of useless rooms that add to the confusion. This could be mitigated with an interesting bestiary of enemies, but you'll be seeing the same stuff during the whole time, in some cases with a robot variation of a demon enemy you've already seen, until it concludes with the most forgettable final battle ever.

Requiem is a good concept badly executed, and it's sad because with some good remastering it could end up being a decent weekend fun, and it has some good moments of retro enjoyment. It sucks that I have to make a binary decission to recommend it or not, because to me Requiem is a very clear middle ground. Unfortunately, there are way too many issues to say that at the end of the day I enjoyed it.

Akeytsu is a great yet undeservingly unknown software to cover the great divide from complete newbie to professional. As a character artist I had been struggling to dip my toes into the world of Rigging and Animation since they're always useful skills for my job, to cover stuff from correctly preparing models for animators, to pose them for presentation, implement them for prototyping in engines, or simply watching them move just for fun. Mixamo was way too simple and amateur-looking for me, but I just banged my head against the wall of Maya for quite a long time only to start to grasp the concepts of rigging and animation.

That was until I tried Akeytsu (2017 version). I don't know if if does EVERYTHING Maya does, but if you're at the point of knowing whatever minor details are missing, you're already comfortable in Maya animation anyway, so probably you're not going to re-learn a new software. I assume it's not 100% there if Pixar don't use Akeytsu, but I've seen amazing professional results done with it, so it probably does more than enough for you and me, let's be honest.

What really makes Akeytsu stand out is its ease of use, complemented by neat, simple tutorials in their web, that make the whole process a lot more transparent and newbie-friendly for anyone starting to understand animation and rigging, to the point of being even fun and gratifying as opposed to a grim, tedious technical process. The interface is clean and streamlined, definitely miles better than a program like Maya that's used for a thousand other things rather than being focused on a couple tasks.

If you're a character artist with no will to go full professional into animation, or an indie dev who can't afford Max/Maya and is missing something in Blender, Akeytsu is a really safe purchase. I think they need a lot more attention than they have. It's a focused program, they clearly know their strengths and it might be the best at the niche it covers.

SiN was a nice step forward in the late-90s FPS genre, that has been unfairly treated by time due to a mix of unfortunate reasons.

· It was a somewhat unfinished game, a bit rushed through the finish line, probably to get in time for the Xmas campaign.
· Even though it was a step forward from previous games like Quake II, it just happened to be released at the same time as an unforgettable huge leap forward in the genre, which was Half-Life.

This reasons left SiN damned to oblivion, but now it's a great moment to try a cult classic well deserving your time if you didn't do so in its moment.

Pros:
· Nice character interactions
· More than decent gunplay
· Great level design
· Awesome graphics for the time
· Great sense of variety

Cons:
· Certain contrived areas, scripts and events that don't add too much but make the controls cumbersome, like wonky vehicles and certain script-heavy levels that prove your patience. Stealth horribly done.
· Quite buggy game, although much better than at its release
· The campaign progression flattens throughout the mid section.

With its imperfections, like what happens with Deus Ex or Thief, it's very well worth your time and money, and you should give it a try if you're a sucker for old-school FPSes like I am.

Correct but ultimately bland Mario Kart clone to exploit a beloved IP for kids. It is like a million other "kart racers" ripping off Nintendo's formula. Virtually every power-up is copy-pasted from Mario Kart, the track design is uninspired and the amount scarce, the game is slow and has a nasty habit of throwing on you stuff that makes you even slower. It is a game for kids without much of a quality standard. The game is formulaic and oozes lack of passion. On the positive side, it is colorful and technically correct, and it isn't particularly buggy.

The absurdly good reviews seem to be a concerted effort to bump it up and troll the system.

80 Days is the digital evolution of the "choose your own adventure" books, sprinkled with some nice sense of adventure, none of the frustration, and some resource management.

As Passepartout, you'll have to manage your and Mr. Fogg's journey across the globe in the alloted time (80 days, of course) with a finite set of resources, via decision-making (which city will you travel to? will you wait 2 days until the next train or rent a camel? will you follow that stranger's advice?) in a mostly text format that, rather than cumbersome, becomes like a nice book read. You´ll never have to deal with large walls of text, but instead, the dialogue is well distributed and the relationship between the protagonists keeps it engaging all throughout the journey.

It is a short game, around 2 hours to complete, but the replayability is extremely high, so it is hardly fair to judge its durability on a single run. It is also very fairly priced.

One of those rare mobile games that work just as well on PC and doesn't feel forced or shoehorned. If you want to play something fresh, it is a must-have.

Primero de todo, no dejarse confundir por el nombre. Prey poco tiene que ver con el anterior juego con el mismo título. Sus similitudes apenas son cosméticas, como el setting futurista, la presencia de alienígenas muy superiores, la primera persona y el uso (en éste caso puramente anecdótico) de tecnología de portales. Se podría haber llamado de cualquier otra forma, y probablemente incluso hubiera causado menos confusión. Prey es un juego de Arkane, y como tal, uno puede hacerse una idea inicial de por dónde irán más bien los tiros, nunca mejor dicho. Se trata en realidad de un sucesor espiritual de la saga clásica System Shock, hasta el punto de que cási podría pasar por reboot si se cambiasen algunos puntos de la temática.

¿Qué quiere decir ésto? Prey no es un shooter pasillero al uso, sino un juego en primera persona con altas dosis de simulación sistémica y poco comportamiento scriptado. El jugador es dejado a sus anchas para progresar su personaje y resolver las situaciones de maneras más o menos creativas, siempre con varias soluciones posibles, desde la vía del combate, el sigilo, el hackeo y otras menos obvias, en niveles cerrados pero con multitud de aproximaciones posibles. Es posible que te suene a Deus Ex y no irías muy desencaminado, puesto que ambos beben de la misma escuela de juegos de Looking Glass. Como viene siendo costumbre con los juegos de Arkane (Dishonored, Dark Messiah of M&M, Arx Fatalis...), hay ideas muy frescas en las herramientas para expresar nuestra forma de jugar. En éste caso destacan la pistola de GLOO, útil en situaciones tanto de combate como navegación, y el poder de mimetizar elementos del escenario.

También en la línea de otros juegos de Arkane, lo más cuidado del juego es el setting y el "lore" (más que el guión en sí). Si bien la idea del setting futurista en una nave espacial no es el colmo de la originalidad, como siempre se las han apañado para darle un punto innovador, con el uso sutil y muy elegante del retrofuturismo y unos alienígenas con aspecto y comportamiento bastante distinto a lo que estamos acostumbrados. Ésto hace que un título así donde explorar es una parte sustancial de la experiencia, sea mucho más interesante gracias a una gran consistencia interna en el universo del juego, que hace que leer los mails y ver cada detalle de las localizaciones de la Talos I sea como desenredar una trama detectivesca, e incluso acabado el juego te tentará mirar alguna Wiki con explicaciones de muchos detalles del trasfondo que no son tan obvios a la primera jugada (de nuevo, en la línea de Dishonored).

El juego es muy gratificante si te va éste tipo de experiencia, pero no es perfecto ni mucho menos. Algunos diseños de enemigos resultan bastante cansinos, el sistema de usar máquinas de reciclaje y fabricación pronto resulta monótono y falto de profundidad, el constante backtracking puede llegar a resultar irritante (especialmente dados los tiempos de carga) y más de una vez te irás por el camino equivocado hacia tu objetivo dado lo confuso de la navegación entre zonas de la nave.

En cualquier caso, que lo perfecto no sea enemigo de lo bueno: Prey se disfruta enormemente si ese tipo de simulación con altas dosis de RPG es lo tuyo. El diseño de los mimics hará que más de una vez saltes de la silla con sustos puramente sistémicos (pocos pueden decir eso aparte de Alien Isolation), y por momentos te verás a tí mismo apuntando a cada cenicero como un paranoico, o sinténdote un genio por cómo has resuelto un problema de una forma totalmente creativa.

Prey es el juego que ha hecho que el próximo juego de Arkane me lo compre a ciegas, gracias a la forma en que están recuperando una forma de hacer juegos cási perdida en pro de títulos lineales y altamente scriptados, con narrativa y situaciones prefabricadas y gameplay homeopático. Definitivamente no es para todo el mundo, y si buscas un shooter frenético y más compacto es probable que no te convenza, pero si has disfrutado en el pasado de juegos como Bioshock, Deus Ex o Dishonored, dudo que te decepcione.

Fun and funny, but often repetitive and rough around the edges. Shadow Warrior is, in broad strokes, a worthy successor of the 1997 game and a looking glass on how to approach reboots of classics, by keeping the essence without being enslaved by the details. A recommendable game that, however, is obviously underbudgeted for its desired scope, and the game drags for a bit too long without adding anything new to the gameplay.

Neither the character progression is enough to instill a sense of variety, nor any new mechanics or interesting enemy types keep coming after a while, so around half-way through the game you have seen all it has to offer short of new environments and a couple dialogues that will make you chuckle. It just keeps prolonguing itself. That doesn't change the fact that the combat is satisfactory, so if you can get past some of the tedium, you'll find yourself grinning at your carnage quite often.

If judged by a "B-Movie" kind of lens instead of the AAA budgets that generally accompany the genre, it's a worthy buy, just avoid full price and wait for a sale. If Flying Wild Hog learn from their mistakes, they can end up making awesome games, and I'd love to see other classics revived by them (did anyone say "Blood"?). If they become too comfortable in their niche, well, expect irregular results like this Shadow Warrior.

Quake is one of those games that, despite its flaws, has stood the test of time like few others. id made an incredible job of using their limitations to their advantage. The combat is much more close quarters than his cousin Doom due to polycount restrictions, resulting in a much more oppresive experience and tactical interplay between enemy and level design that keeps the game varied without any need for character progression. The monochrome palette flourishes in its lower Middle Age / Lovecraftian setting, evoking a sense of gloom and pestilence that never allows you to be comfortable in any place. Even the dated visuals add to a sense of charm.

Do not miss the chance to play it up to decent current standards with the Quakespasm/Fitzquake engine, and great mods like Arcane Dimensions.

PROS: A precious blend of atmosphere and fast-paced combat and pure unadulterated fun, stuffed with secrets and power-ups in the best 1990s game tradition.

CONS: The mouse controls are the part that has stood worst the test of time, and would really benefit from a revamp (can be modded though). If you can't use 3D acceleration, the highest resolutions run the game at truly unplayable framerates.

8/10

Buy it whether you played in its day or not, for a timeless piece of History.

If one game needs a Doom-like reboot by id Software, is this one.