Recent reviews by Gunship Mark II

Serious Sam 4 is a beautiful, chaotic, humorous, love letter to the community and a fantastic Serious Sam game. This game is a huge improvement over how clunky and sometimes unfun SS3 was, everything from the story, to characters, humor and gunplay is marginally better over previous titles. This is a prime Serious Sam experience with a modern twist in the right places.

Arsenal is pretty vast and guns themselves feel absolutely fantastic - punchy, powerful with great visual and audio feedback. Probably for the first time in the series all weapons stay relevant till the end of the game thanks to how well balanced they are as well as brand new dual wielding mechanics. Every weapon serves its purpose and it's incredibly fun to adapt to flow of combat and switch between guns to see which one will work best in current situation. Monsters now also have weak spots, hitting which makes you deal more damage to them, basically rewarding you for not constantly relying on spray and pray. Most of the weapons now have secondary fire upgrades, which bring even more fun and tactics to the gunplay. It's an incredibly well crafted system overall, I cannot praise how much care and love was put into it.

Levels are quite vast, fun and are always keeping you on your toes thanks to clever enemy spawn placements and scripting. They feel like a mix between Second Encounter, larger levels of SS2 and parts of SS3. Honestly I was quite worried that having bunch of huge open levels will hurt Serious Sam formula, but nope, I shouldn't have been worried at all, it's a great mix that just works, it's fun to explore, look at and shoot enemies on. Levels are full of secrets, Easter eggs and for the first time in the series - additional side missions, which often grant you weapons, weapon upgrades or very useful items. Not all levels are huge open spaces, there's plenty of classic labyrinthian style levels, which are also fun to run around in. Imagine SS3 levels, but actuall good and pleasant to look at.

Not sure what other people might think, but characters and story were pretty great. Characters are memorable, likable, charismatic and very useful as actual companions. They're often gonna be running alongside you assisting in the combat and spewing one-liners, they're also immortal so you absolutely don't have to worry about their well being. Story is well written and full of classic Croteam humor I adore so much, it's hard to explain the narrative, it's like a mix of SS2 insanity while being as grounded as SS3 was, honestly this might be the best story and characters in the whole series. It's just a whole heaps of fun, full of funny moments, quotes and situations.

Music was another aspect I was worried about, I though going into "Hollywood movie" epic direction might make music sound pretty generic, but I've never been so happy to be proven wrong. This is one of the best Damjan Mravunac's works. Fight music is very energetic, full of blood pumping drums and usual Damjan instruments we love so much. Suite/Ambient tracks are often beautiful and atmospheric, a lot of the tracks remind of of Serious Sam 2, which had one of the best OST's in the series.

Visually game looks mostly great, art style is consistent and brand new particle effects are absolutely lovely, new gore system and effects are just joyful to look at. Every explosion and impact is satisfying and tend to provide great visual feedback. Weapon/Monster models look fantastic and have a lot of nice details.

Now I'd like to mention some of the jank in the game. One thing I'm not sure about is cutscene animation quality. I'm not sure if it's part of Croteam signature style/humor, but some animations are laughably bad, it felt like something out of Serious Sam 2, yet it still haven't felt like it was out of place. I feel like it adds to the charm more than anything, since you shouldn't take these games too seriously.
As for not-so-fun jank - performance issues, before first few patches I really struggled to keep this game running stable or even make it stay ~60 fps most of the time ( Ryzen 5 3600, gtx 1060 6gb ), I also often experienced crashes on France levels, thankfully these were fixed in a second patch and you should be doing fine.
End game battle is a bit of a mess and it's not always clear what you're supposed to do without being penalized for trying things, it's technically impressive though.

All in all, this is a fantastic Serious Sam game, It takes all the best parts from the older titles, mixes them together and enhances the end result, it's a definite improvement of classic formula. Overall it was a fun experience and I loved every second of it. I couldn't be more happier with the end result and I wish Croteam only the best in their future endeavours.

Strong recommendation if you're a Serious Sam fan.

A love letter to the community and a labor of love. Despite all the hurdles and struggles during development, Crowbar Collective managed to treat Half-Life community with a great re-imagining of iconic first Half-Life game.

Black Mesa offers slightly different take on Half-Life, while keeping core gameplay and game design aspects ( in some places expanding them ) close to a vanilla game. It's really hard for me to lambaste this game for anything, without sounding too nitpicky, but I'm sure there's some aspects of it some die hard fans had voiced their opinions about.

Black Mesa had a long run, it transitioned from being a top-notch free mod into Valve quality Source Engine game, and despite all odds and thanks to dedicated development team it still keeps evolving to this day. Crowbar Collective deserves all the support they could get for taking such a monstrous task on their shoulders and I sincerely hope this is not the last game/remake from them. I still love to reminiscing on old Black Mesa : Source development videos just to see how much love and effort was put into this project, even at the free mod stage.

I wish Crowbar Collective best of luck in finishing remaining Xen chapters and in their future endeavours.

Thanks for updating workshop functionality!

Often neglected timeless masterpiece and an absolute train wreck of a game. Kept alive by surviving members of TF2 dev team and a tremendous community effort, standing on top of the shoulders of a beautiful character design, ( player to player ) interactions and beautifully written lore, held together by Source Engine Glue™®

It has its ups and downs, but as long as you're not taking it too seriously you are going to enjoy it, I certainly do, even after picking it up after very long breaks.

Valve please update.

A bizarre relic from the forgotten past in which we had to pay for tech demos consisting of cut content from the parent game. What a weird timeline we live in.

I can't help myself, but to adore this game and everything it tries to achieve, despite this game having some major flaws in game design and some PC port quirks.

Good stuff :

Great weapon variety with every weapon having 2 fire modes,
Impressive ( for its time ) environmental destruction,
Funny bad dialog, voice acting and cutscenes with barely functional and outright hilarious facial animations,
Good sound design and soundtrack,
Variety in game locations,
It looks nice, aesthetically,
Immersive atmosphere,
Cheesy story and by the books evil characters.

The Bad :

Can be pain in the butt to run, submarine sections break as well as all cutscenes, unless you lock framerate to 30,
Some enemies are bullet sponges,
There's one hit kill enemies ( mid-end game ),
Some near end game levels are a bit ♥♥♥♥♥ and look like copy paste job,
Boss fights are pure ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥,
Stealth sections are pure ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥,
End game puzzle makes me wanna puch whoever designed it in the ballsack,
It's not always clear where the HECK you have to go, you could easily miss that one small button and wander around like an idiot.
That cutting edge environmental destruction is criminally underutilized, unfortunately.


However, despite all its flaws and quirks I really can't help to love this game with all my heart, if you're a fan of late 90's and early 2000's shooters and don't take games seriously, this probably will be right up your alley, just don't forget to read everything about this game at PC Gaming Wiki. Get it on sale, cause I can't fully recommend this game at full price. PARTY TIME!

Entropy : Zero puts you in a boots ( and a mask ) of an out of ordinary Metrocop with slight Judge Dredd syndrome, badass 'til the end.

It was a great experience overall, weapons were rebalanced, overall difficulty is way up than in vanilla game, I've been playing on Normal difficulty and struggled in some locations, where it felt kinda cheap if you're Run'n'Gun type of player. You can easily be outnumbered and outgunned if you're not careful and patient enough. It's a bit different than your stock standart HL2 mod combat wise. Just take your time and explore around, you may find some cool items. Rushing thorugh will do you no good since world is riddled with all sorts of traps and Rebel outposts if first few chapters.

There's few interesting ideas here and there, like stalker escorting mission with a flashlight mechanic from DOOM3, it was challenging and requires you to be on your guard at all times, don't forget to deploy your little helpers, they help a ton. A good chunk of this game is really dark though, so it's really hard to appreciate the work that got into this mod, fuzzy nightvision type thingie doesn't help that much either. Later chapters looked great and boss fights were fun and very challenging.

I'd say give it a go, you'll loose nothing and it's pretty enjoyable if you're looking for a different type of Half-Life while playing a Half-Life game.

Thank you for an interesting, enjoyable and different experience, Breadman <3

A fantastic, often overlooked gem of a game, and an okay remaster. Played through whole campaign again, What's new :

• Lighting,sometimes subtle, sometimes very noticable and gorgeous looking, game doesn't look flat in quite a few scenes anymore, overall great upgrade.
  
  
• Mesh/Level edits, that area where you get sniper rifle for a first time, those background structures are not a texture anymore, they're real models, this applies to quite a few open areas, where distant objects look a lot better, even scenery props and models have somewhat updated look to them. Same goes for level clutter, there's more of it.
  
  
• Better shadow quality, more shadow casting light sources,
  
  
• Color correction,
  
  
• Some sort of neat looking HDR implementation,
  
  
• Per-object motion blur, or something close to it,
  
  
• Better/hi-res texture work, blood decals don't look like someone sharted them onto photoshop anymore and overall world/character texture detail look great,
  
  
• Possibly the most recent version of Unreal Engine 3.5/UDK, not UE4, but oh well, it's still holds up and looks very pretty even to this day.

• Configurable FPS cap up to 240fps,
  
• FOV slider up to 100 degrees,
  
• No ♥♥♥♥♥♥ black bars when using ultra widescreen or uncommon resolutions,
  
• You can enable/disable mouse smoothing without needing to dig into .ini files,
  
• Few options for playing with a gamepad, autoaim, auto lock ( don't ),
  
• End game mode ( overkill mode ), where you have all weapons unlocked from the start + carry all weapons at once + if you complete all skillshots for weapon it has unlimited ammunition ( can be toggled ), dream came true if you ask me.

• Few new multiplayer/echo/coop maps,
  
  
• Somewhat cheaply made Duke Nuken DLC - Grayson Hunt replacement for some "unholy cash-in on dead franchise" reason, just let Duke die whilst he's still a hero, or at least be bothered to re-do his facial mocap and care to edit/reshoot audo lines of other characters, because they're still calling him Gray. Don't get me wrong, I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love Duke, even DNF, but seeing Duke playing out of character in a lot of scenes and getting not enough attention to justify the price hurts my rotten soul, Jesus Christ Gearbox, what are you doing.

Very few graphical options, you can't tweak AA, or enable/disable motion blur, configure shadow details, probably going to be fixed soon.Initial price, 50$ or your regional equivalent.

Conclusion :

It pains me to say this, since I am a huge People Can Fly fan, but if you're having a debate where you are torn between buying and not buying this remaster then just get it on sale, where it's -30-40% off or close to it. It's all really comes to price, that's the main "no-no" factor for a lot of people. For current price ( 50$ or your regional equivalent ) it is hard to recommend for someone, who's already played the ♥♥♥♥ out of Bulletstorm. So, unless you're a die hard Bulletstorm fan and desperate Duke Nukem fan like me, or if you just want to replay this game with better visuals and features + support People Can Fly, don't buy it at full price.

Because of the reasons above and because I am a huge ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ looser who really enjoyed this remaster I do recommend this game, as long as you've read my conclusion and you really into new stuff and visuals like me.

Suddenly appeared in my library, was very surprised.

Even at the first and fast glance it's already pretty obvious that this is the defenitive version of Serious Sam games.
Basically, they've decided to merge and update all the recent Serious Sam titles, HD and VR, into one pipeline ( Like Valve did with Half-Life 2 and episodes with SteamPipe update ), where they can update and enhance everything at the same time, without having a need to jump around from old to a new version of an engine. You'll get Serious Sam HD/Second Ecounter HD + Serious Sam 3 ( and VR games ) on the latest version of Serious Engine, which includes a support for several API's ( DX11, OpenGL, Vulkan ), better visuals, better menus, even more configurations, bugfixes, smooth transition between SSHD and SS3 without having to reload game, updated/fixed models/meshes/animations/sounds/textures and all of this is for free, as long as you own any of the games which are listed in description.

This is a brilliant move from Croteam to not let down those, who doesn't own VR to get the latest engine/content updates for HD Serious Sam and SS3. Thank you Croteam <3

Now can we have an HD version of Serious Sam 2, please? c:

A fantastic utility to convert your lame desktop into something amazing, using videos, gifs, scenes, and even games as a desktop background/wallpaper. CPU friendly, extended list of options, made by someone who knows what he's doing.

Huge selection of stuff in workshop section, though 90% of it is infested with weebs, little animu girls with huge tits in panties, little animu girls with barely covered lude body parts, animu cosplays, animu music videos, waifus and meme gifs. gotta dig through garbago fellas. God help those sad, sad peoples o>

11/10, 1 point extra for my own study in researching the amount of weebs on steam.

This is my second review, first one, 2015 budget pc salt edition is here :

( http://pastebin.com/ATqLf79t )

***
If you want to hear something else, but performance report, here's an amazing review by
Gondamar : http://steamproxy.net/id/gondamar/recommended/225540/
***


TL;DR version :

If you liked previous 2 games, own a decent gaming build, then buy XL version of this if it's on sale. You can try to get this game if you have less powerful rig, but only at your own risk and ability to refund it if any problems arise. Here's my "recomended specs" :
( i5-i7 4th gen and up ) ,
Over 8gb of ram ( 12-16 ),
Decent gpu ( with over 2gb of vram ).

If it still runs bad ( that is uncommon, but possible ) : refund it.

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=810184859

Full :

Welp, this game came a long way since it's release, not a performace wise mind you, but with amount of content and a cool stuff you get from XL edition. New storylines, new guns, new vehicles, new missions, new islands, jetpack, it's all good fun, especially if you get it on sale ( which i do recommend ).

While it's all well and good, this game runs abysmal on budgets gaming systems ( and sometimes on real gaming pc's ). It took me a substantial upgrade to finally and truly enjoy this game. I had this game on day one ( and then got a refund ), and apart from initial graphical glitches it ran absolutely horrible, stuttered every 2 seconds, slowed down time, skipped frames.

My old sytem was :

AMD Athlon x4 860k @3.8Ghz
r9 380 2gb
8gb of DDR3 Ram at 1866Mhz.

Whatever system specs page says is a bull, you cannot run this game smoothly at 8gb of ram. After relatively short amount of time game will get well over 8gb of ram, for me it's ~9.1gb of ram ( with nothing but steam running on background ) after 10 minutes of play. Here's some data from MSI Afterburner ( RivaTuner ) :

http://i.imgur.com/r3SNr1b.jpg

You can see that game chews up almost 9gb of ram after just a few minutes of playtime, and it will get worse, ~10gb after few hours if you travel a lot. Not only that, but CPU load is 100% on all 4 cores at relatively empty area with nothing going on.

Same goes for VRAM, i've tested this game on my old r9 380, it plays well, but again, after some time game will chew up more than 2gb of vram even at 768p.

Next one is CPU requirement. This game is brutal when it comes to CPU, i own no game that loads up CPU to 100% at most of the times ( even gta 5 doesn't do that ), except Cities : Skylines, which is a huge city simulator. But i can see why that is. There's a lot of going on in this game, a lot of realtime physics simulations, AI, huge detailed explosions and other particle effects, physics based destruction, all of that is really hard to pull off. So make sure you have decent CPU to handle it all. I might suggest that my CPU ( i5 4570s ) might be a little bit too weak in super complex exploding action situations, consider it as a minimum when you pick up this game.

As for GPU, well, it's hard to tell, just make sure you have something decent and have over 2gb of vram, it doesn't matter AMD or Nvidia, though Nvidia cards run this game better.

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=810183677

Oh, yeah, game is very fun too, if you liked previous game you'll like this one too quite a bit. Even though unlocking upgrades system will drive you mad at first.

Hope this helped, if you ever pick this game up, then have fun c:

***
If you want to hear something else, but performance report, here's an amazing review by
Gondamar : http://steamproxy.net/id/gondamar/recommended/225540/
***
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=811858986