Recent reviews by G-What

Placeholder review for the Steam challenge until I have time to write a proper one.

Uneven. A lackluster documentary that struggles to find its focus. I was hoping that this would be an impartial look into the burgeoning competitive gaming community. Instead, it's an hour long commercial for Dota 2. Really only interesting to people that follow the Dota competitive scene. Paradoxically, they will already know this whole story.

Probably the worst gaming experience I have ever had.
This isn't even complaining about the Windows XP era graphics, I can understand those. I'm also not complaining about the terrible amount of bugs, I get that it's a mod off an old game.

What bothers me about the brief time I played this trash is that it's just such a terrible game.
I was instantly turned off by the BS "disclaimer" about this game causing suicide and depression. Exactly how many people could have their lives torn apart over the span of one week? It's such a blatant lie that it really just turns into an insult to anyone that bothered to play this game.

Next, once actually starting the game, I was vexed by the very long cutscene introduction that had nearly no content. The visuals are not exactly next-gen in this game, which does not bother me so much, as I have no issue playing a game that isn't particularly visually impressive if it has fun gameplay. I understand they were trying to set the tone of the game itself, but I don't need to see someone staring out of the window of a train intercut with a boring city to understand that. I could get past the "Emo G-Man" voiceover at the beginning, but at this point it became even more of an insult.

Moving on to the introduction, I became only more disappointed. The opening setpiece where you stumble around in the dark was nothing short of ardous. For those of you that have not yet experienced this trash game, let me set the stage: you are given a camera that you can use the flash on with LMB. Everything is a black void except for large white "X"'s scattered around. You stumble around with the clunky controls and use the flash to reveal what is under each X. Sometimes it's a door, but most of the time it's a cheap jump scare, of a corpse or something. Additionally, many of them don't work unless you are right up on top of them, so there may have been things I didn't get to see. One of them was a door I had to awkwardly crouch-jump through which did not appear correctly, since I wasn't at the exact angle the game demanded. I guess perhaps it may have been a window? I can't be sure since my only point of reference was more X's farther along. I could have stumbled over a pile of dead bodies for all I know.

To end this annoying section, the game makes you stumble a very long way to take a picture of one X in particular, when a poorly-rendered zombie head ghost thing screams at you in another cheap jump scare. That's right, five minutes into the game and they're already resorting to the lame "shock video" tactic that was prevalent on YouTube four or five years ago.

Next, your character randomly wakes up in an alley, and worries aloud that it's getting dark, although this setpiece was clearly late at night. You get a text from your mum about how it's getting dark (?) and you should go home. Then you get to wander around some alleys and a subway station until...

Well I don't know until what. I had out my sick dual-wield knife and phone combo, and when I walked past a door the game kicked me to the title screen. A tooltip jumped up and told me I could sprint by pressing L-Shift, but it would reduce my stamina and I could only do it for a few seconds. Luckily that's the type of emergent gameplay I love, since that hasn't been done to death in every single modern FPS of the last five years.

All of this led me to think that perhaps the title screen disclaimer did have some merit. Playing this garbage will probably make you depressed, perhaps even to the point of suicide. It certainly made me aggressive, although only at the people responsible for this horrible game.

Do yourself a favor, avoid this at all costs. Free is not a good enough price, they should pay you for wasting the hard drive space on this trash.

Fallout: New Vegas is one of my favorite games of all time. The vast game world, numerous choices for the player, absorbing (and reasonably priced) DLC, and dapper soundtrack all blend together for another experience that will change your outlook on gaming in general. Admittedly not everyone's cup of tea, this is a game that you'll either love for the rest of your life or play five minutes and never touch again.
One caveat: Fallout: New Vegas has a reputation for causing a lot of issues when playing. I had no problem myself, but the engine does require quite a bit of hardware to run correctly and if you do not have a good rig it is not worth your time.