Recent reviews by Borreh

"We have C&C at home"

It's a fine but flawed 7/10 game, still it's the best and most polished RTS we've got in years. Everything it tries to do C&C did better two decades ago. But there's no C&C around anymore, sadly.

Tempest Rising tries too damn hard to be that franchise without understanding what made C&C great in the first place. Lots of questionable gameplay, style, visual and narrative decisions that just constantly annoy me at a level that's negligible enough to still find the game fun but severe enough to keep on facepalming every now and then from features cloned from 20 year old games but implemented worse than in those titles.

However, I can't deny it's the most fun I've had with an RTS in a long time, and the first proper "C&C-style" one since I don't know when (not counting some extremely obscure indies).

I can only hope that for the next game the developers will actualy try to make a good title from the ground up instead of mindlessly aping a cult franchise. I've seen this sentiment thrown around on various social channels and I agree - There is absolutely nothing iconic about Tempest Rising and it seriously hampers the experience. Everything about it screams "Remember this thing? This is it here again, only slightly different and a little bit worse, but you have no alternative, do you?". Heck, you can tell which song rips off which C&C track for a good portion of the soundtrack. It just feels soulless at times, like a game who's primary driving force was "get people longing for C&C to buy it" and nothing else.

I'm quite apalled at a game riding on nostalgia bait alone like this, but I can't deny it's (mostly) a fun romp. Just don't play Tempest Rising looking for the future of RTS. I don't know where it is, but certainly not here.

It's by far my favourite city builder. It has an astonishing mixture of charm, heart, beauty and clever gameplay. The pure freedom and fun of creating naturalistic cities and custom buildings is something that instantly made me feel grid-based citybuilders are outdated.

I also love the tempo of gameplay: It's slow enough for the game to be relaxing and fun, but at the same time there's enough pressure to make me constantly focused on short and long term goals and keep me engaged. "Leisure stress" is the best way to describe it.

Lastly, what deserves a seperate paragraph: It has an absolutely astonishing soundtrack. It's just... Beautiful. I've enjoyed my fair share of semi-authentic medieval folk from various underground music scenes (some more goth or political than others) but some of the tracks from Foundation top even that. It's just worth playing for the OST alone.

Stupid, fun, outrageous, with an absolutely horrible zoomer aesthetic and way more polish and effort put into the gameplay than anyone would expect. I doubt it has staying power unless you're a sweathead, but free is a solid price for a couple dozen hours of silly fun as long as you don't take it seriously.

Extremely solid shooter all around, and the game BF2042 should have been. It's not spectacular nor revolutionary, but with enough fun, content and depth to provide solid fun for a couple dozen hours.

Beautiful, weird, charming, unique. Has a really special vibe that's truly fascinating to behold.

Gem in the rough.

An extremely fun and interesting game that well outstays its' welcome. Genuinely excellent for the vast majority of time as long as you ignore the obnoxious invisible walls - Which are a huge deal in a game that promotes lick-the-walls type of exploration - but later chapters, especialy the final one, feel bloated and rushed, with increasingly cheap and uninteresting bossfights after the first half of the game where every single duel felt like the ultimate showdown.

The graphics are, on a technical level, really excellent, beautiful and "next gen", but from an artistic approach, the game suffers from a severe lack of visualy interesting levels. Sure, they *are* beautiful in detail, but miss "hero shots", well-composed vistas and at times feel like they're almost proceduraly generated. Couple that with simple signposting issues - e.g. no clear visual distinction between ground that is walkable and ground that is not, so the level boundaries just feel arbitrary - and it starts to look like an amazing game done by people with excellent technical pedigree but suffering from a severe lack of experience and unrefined design sensibilities.

However, said lack of experience makes them do things no sane developer would do, and it's all the better for the game. There's loads of hidden content that every "normal" developer would put straight on player's path, including a hidden hub level with additional secret NPCs that provide you with multiple new game progression mechanics you'd miss otherwise.

It's insane to have this as an optional thing stashed away behind a questline in the middle of the game - And I loved it. It's the type of rules-breaking, rock'n'roll altitude western AAA often lack.

In other words, this is a game that has some severe flaws, but more than makes up for them with excellence in some areas (the combat! the music!) and pure, undiluted SOUL.

But dear God, did it drag on near the end.

As a side note: Unless you know Journey to the West, you won't understand almost anything of the narrative. Knowledge of that text is mandatory because the game doesn't explain almost anything about its' setting and mythos.

I didn't get almost anything of it and it was awesome. Being dragged into a world you have no idea about but presented with such cinematic flair, epicness and reverence felt almost endearing. Who knows, maybe I'll read the book and then replay the game just to understand the story better.

Anger Foot is a case in point of "this could have been an email, but I don't mind it"; what could have been a simple gimmick-based title that lasts for 2 hours of fun and then ends without leaving much of an impression is instead elevated into a surprisingly coherent, engaging, full-blown shooter. And a damn clever one at that.

The game just keeps on expanding, reinventing itself, non stop throwing new tricks at you until the very end. Scripted sequences, new and surprising environments, toilet jokes, narrative interludes, gameplay-altering perks, inventive bossfights, vehicle sections, supreme selection of designer footwear, this and much more.

Somewhere along the way you realize the story that's a joke is actually fun and engaging and somehow kinda' moody, and you start to get "into it", with the hectic action, awful but lovable cast of characters, dark, vulgar but somehow witty humour, all along to an insane gabber soundtrack pulsing at the forefront, you just feel the *vibe* this game has going for it. Loud, obnoxious and purposeful, Anger Foot is probably one of the most fleshed out and *atmospheric* first person shooters I've played since years.

It's like urinating in a public toilet and sharing a joke with the guy taking a piss next urinal over and fifteen minutes of pissing later you're discussing your favourite 70's slasher movies and obscure death metal bands and you realize you've just met an insanely cool guy.

That's what Anger Foot is all about. Taking a long, satisfying piss and enjoying every second of it. That, and the gabber techno.

And drugs.

Game of the year.

Insanely good. In something of a trend started last week by my playthrough of Anger Foot, "this could have been an email, but you wrote an essay, and an excellent one at that". In other words: What could have been a simple gimmick indie that's fun and gone in one hour is turned upside down by excellent production value, which includes: great direction, engaging narrative, amazing atmosphere and voice acting. I couldn't believe how much stuff *goes on* in this game and by the end it felt like taking part in a conspiration-themed deep state thriller and not playing a puzzle solver, and that's despite spending most of the time (*most*) staring at computer screens.

I guess my only complaint is that the story is *only* good and you can see some twists coming from a mile away, but it more than makes up for that with excellent characters and being, well, engaging on a surprising level. The Operator is also not as open-ended as it seems to be, and could use a few more notable decisions or alternate endings.

Give this a go, there's much more to this title than meets the eye. Heck, if nothing else comes up this can be my personal GOTY.

A slow and immersive shooter in this day and age? I must be dreaming!

Selaco is like a baby of Doom 3 and FEAR that takes the best things out of both of those titles; It features great atmosphere and immersive exploration of the former, but with intense, tactical combat of the latter (albeit without the bullet time - So far, at least). Then it's all dressed up with stylish visuals, great gunplay, metroidvania-style semi-open world, and with Sonic music put on top of that.

It's not a horror game, but it can be spooky, and don't be fooled by the engine, as with a focus on slow exploration, atmosphere and deadly, tactical combat it's much closer to "millenial shooters" like Half-Life, Alien vs Predator 2, FEAR etc., rather than anything resembling Quake, Doom or Duke Nukem; it just, at a glance, looks like a boomer shooter.

So far a definitive highlight of the year and I can't wait to see what more it has in store.

So, after 21 years of waiting, and a week after a hyper optimistic early impressions review, I finished the campaign.

Yeah.

I'll start by saying this game is *way* over hated, there's extremely solid foundation here, and in no way does it deserve a negative review. The gameplay was streamlined and feels good, pathfinding issues aside, even if it could use some balancing and more nuance. The visuals, audio, heck, even the probably most *clicky* interface I ever saw in a game thus far, are top-tier. This game offers spectacle like nothing out there. There is pure, undilluted *passion* here, like few games out there, but it's *horribly* bogged down by some questionable high-level decisions. Starting with the story.

And at first, I even liked it! Sure, it's *different* in tone, being closer to character-driven space operas rather than Homeworld 1's mythological epic, but it gave enough of nuance and homage to the original games I didn't mind it.

However, by the halfway point, the story just begun to... Collapse on itself, for the lack of a better term. I don't mind the shift in focus, I think it's actualy filled with really interesting ideas, but the screnario itself, the way those themes are delivered, the direction - Good grief. It feels like an overambitious fanfic written by a terminally online screenwriting student who was raised solely on Netflix shows, and only the bad ones specificaly. So much ideas appear and are dropped, so much stuff is left without context, so many events just... Are pure nonsense.

In the final mission the villain was screaming in anger, demanding the protagonists to explain what even are they attempting to do, and I was there with her, sharing her anger and confusion every step of the way. I also, absolutely, did not understand what was the point and reason for anything at that particullar moment. What is going on? Why are we doing this? What is the logic? When did this become revealed as a plot point? Why not do it in any other, simpler way?

Being a franchise built primarily around storytelling, it really weights down the enjoyment of the game. Even more painful is that the campaign, on a pure mission design side, is really neat. Sure, I'd like some side missions, more mystery, more weight to certain actions (like researching new techs which in this game just magicaly *appears* out of the blue; it is explained but it is also anti-climactic); But overall, I had fun playing it. It's not *that* short, and some levels are quite striking (like the ice shelf mission, or the asteroid field); It's a shame they are connected by tweets of an overexcited 19-year old who just got accepted to a literature class at university that are masquerading as a narrative.

Other than that, the game is a few patches away from being a very solid RTS. In skirmish and wargames it needs more gameplay nuance, more balancing, more depth, but this all can be done with updates. The foundation is extremely strong, even if currently the only viable tactic is spammimg. But hey, C&C3 was also pure spam at release, but subsequent patches and the expansion pack turned it around into the best multiplayer in that franchise - And that potential was always in there, just needed fine-tuning.

There is a tease for a DLC at the end of the campaign, so I hope BBI will brave the ocean of negativity surrounding this game and push it towards greatness, because I still believe it can become a great game and a worthy follow-up - It just needs some patches and a fan-pleasing story DLC. It's doable and I'm counting on BBI to deliver. There is real passion in this game, and it'd be a shame to see it squandered.