Recent reviews by [SKVR] Clener74

Story wise, this is definitely the most tragic thing I've played in a long time. I've played games that made me feel all kinds of ways, but I'm pretty sure this is the first time I ended up asking myself if anything I ever did ever meant anything.

Be warned! I'll be discussing the game quite freely here. This text is very long and has loads of untagged spoilers; it's not as much of a review as it is my thoughts after finishing it.

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Gameplay and graphics wise, the selection of guns; the upgrades available to guns as well as yourself; the level design; the sound design; they all mesh perfectly together. It was fun trying out loads of different weapon types, because they all could be useful in their own right - this is a lot for me to say considering I normally just try to find a few guns that work in all situations, and stick to that. But here I was actively interested in trying out as many combinations of guns as was possible.

The map's level of detail along with the background music really sets the mood; driving long distances, though it could sometimes get tedious, was often enjoyable as a result. Of course, there are aspects of the game that will bother many - such as the malaria, the guns jamming, and the constant respawn of enemies and how willing they are to chase you on car. But nothing you can't help with mods, to my knowledge. Personally, I just got used to it all, and was able to deal with it accordingly.

This was my first time playing the game all the way to the end. I had played it many times previously but without completing it. So during my run, I noticed the game didn't really have much of a plot. I could play it, leave it for months, then pick it up again with no real need to revise on what I had done last time. The only real progress was how many weapons I had unlocked, how many collectibles I got, and if I had access to the entirety of the map.

At the end, it hit me, this apparent lack of plot was the *point* of the game.

Every mission has in its briefing some grandiose description of its goals, its potential impact on the situation of the factions as well as the country, all the plots and scheming that led up to it, as well as what other plots it could result into...but in the end, what does any of it matter? What really changes?

The answer is, nothing.

No matter what I did, I wasn't really changing anything. Murdering the leadership of either faction, whether it was by request of the opposing leader, by an underling looking to usurp their superiors, or for whatever other reason - in the end someone else took their place and it was basically a matter of how long it would take before I would have to murder the new guy. And a lot of the time this "new guy" would be the very person that gave me the job of killing off the previous leadership.

All the missions I carried out for all of them - all they boiled down to was taking the killings and the destruction a step further for no real gains. Most of the game's missions are really isolated incidents; I complete them and then the next job is something completely unrelated, as though blowing up a whole bridge to crush a weapon supplier along with his base of operations underneath was just par for the course.

And through all these main story missions your "buddies" help you. Buddies that at the end of Act 1 appear to get killed off, without you being able to do anything about it. But then you find out in Act 2, at the very end no less, that they were actually alive, and planning to kill you while they try to run off with a briefcase full of diamonds. So all that chatting and working and helping with each other's business - what did it all mean when, in the end, they just ditch you for the sake of financial gain?

The only thing that really changes through the course of the game is the access you have to weaponry and resources that help you kill faster, quieter, or more creatively. You get skilled at taking people out while reducing the damage you take. Constantly.

When thought of like this, it seems funny that the only one that really could do something actually meaningful, was none other than the Jackal you've set out to kill. The game's whole premise is that you're hired to kill him because he's the "destabilizing influence in the state". You meet him multiple times but you're sick and can't do much. It's only at the endgame that you meet him face to face while healthy. And what do you do? You work with him. Because as you find out, he indeed is quite insane, but his plan makes more sense than that of the factions, and seems like it could actually have some impact for a change.

He's the only one that has shown he can shake things up. But his plan has one very crucial element. It makes a sticking point of ensuring the death of you both.

The Jackal's plan is to make sure that the refugees can leave without being pursued by the factions, so that the country rips itself apart along with all its evils; then they can return and start it over in peace basically. But he recognizes that he, along with you, are part of the problem - "cells of the cancer" that took over the country:

The only ones who die today are the ones who have it coming.

So one has detonate a cache of explosives set up by the Jackal. It's at the foot of an overhanging part of the cliff surrounding the road to the neighboring country. You block the road with debris so that the factions cannot chase the refugees. However, the detonation cord is useless, and so one of you has to go and detonate it manually using a car battery with everything it means.

Whoever's left has to use the briefcase of diamonds as a bribe for the border guards so that they actually carry the refugees to the camps. Then, as the last man standing, he has to take the gun that the Jackal put inside the briefcase...and shoot himself in the head. Otherwise, so long as even one cell remains, everything will simply start over again. It's a glorified suicide pact.

It had to be like this because everyone else is the same in the end. Power hungry. Ready to use you to pull off their schemes then betray you. And as a result you ended up killing them all. Literally. After killing your former "buddies", in one of the two final choices the Jackal gives you, the mission briefing starts like this:

It's done. Everyone's dead. Enemies...friends. Everyone except me and The Jackal.

And the incredible part is that it's true! You really did kill everyone. You're a god! But none of it will matter much unless you also off yourself along with the Jackal as part of his plan. It's not even your own idea. You had to resort to him to make something, anything, of yourself. Isn't that tragic?


And because of all this I very much had my mind blown by the game. It left me feeling a sense of hopelessness, that the game required almost no words to generate. I say this much about the whole matter because I don't know if I've experienced a game like this before. I can mention Silent Hill with its symbolism through level design, enemy design, and specific actions you can take throughout the story. But the very gameplay of FC2 is the message. I think that's the one thing that has given me the great impression I have of it.

This game is an experience unlike any other. It has a good story, does a wonderful job of telling it, and has fantastic characters - which, all things considered, are pretty realistic for the game. At the end of the day they're all teenagers and a couple kids trying to survive in the worst high school in existence, even if in most cases the school has already distorted their personalities.

One of the things I love the most about Bully is the fact it gives enough relevance to the big majority of the cast. Jimmy focuses on 1 clique per chapter, and the missions bring attention to most characters on an individual level. The game does a very good job of not making other students just look like the "kids you gotta beat up to progress". It explores the interactions between cliques and individual students to a satisfying level in my opinion. How it focuses on the social side of things more than it does on the violence is a master move.

Every clique feels unique and with a strong, prevalent identity, yet members all have personalities of their own with their own thoughts and behavior. The characters are something Bully holds over most GTA games.

School classes are also used as good means to make things easier. To name a few, Chemistry gives you the ability to make weapons in your room, English gives you better comebacks and apology lines for use with authority figures, and Geography gives you the locations of one set of collectibles with each class you complete. This includes transistors, very important items to get if you don't want to suffer during fights.

The way the story progresses across the chapters is natural and easy to follow, and makes a lot of sense as well. Jimmy as a protagonist is perfectly fit for the game, just as is the main antagonist, who basically embodies the aggressive, volatile nature of the entire academy.

My only issue with Bully as a whole? The fighting. To be frank, Bully is too easy. Most students, even in boss fights, are not that aggressive and fail to block attacks most of the time, save for notable exceptions. And even if they block, you can just charge your next attack to break their guard. I'm not even mentioning the moves Jimmy learns from the Hobo during training missions; save for the Uppercut and the 5-hit Combo, the rest of the extra moves are all unblockable. Breaking out of grabs or grapple moves is also as easy as pressing one button.

The fact that health values are low for everyone save for cases like Russell, Bif and Damon doesn't help either. The only characters that have similarly high health bars are Derby and Edgar who are restricted to boss fights.
Only time this game could be difficult fight-wise is when you're fighting too many people at once and it includes either of the first three mentioned.

Other than that, it is near-perfect. It has its small amount of glitches but none of them are a bother in my view. I've seen people complaining about being unable to run it, but should you find out you're able to play this without issues then I encourage you to go all the way.
There are also lots of mods for it out there, natural for a Rockstar game. Which is why I have over 1000 hours in it.

Make sure you get the 60FPS mod to enhance the experience; you're gonna have to use the default, 30FPS .exe file for certain missions, but outside those, the modded file is a first choice!

I love BlazBlue as a whole, and I really want to like this, but the way the Steam version of CS plays is almost depressing. It's even less stable than CT for me. Trying to play the game seriously is an exercise in masochism, because due to the constant frame drops, the game either reads your inputs too fast - you could jump back and your character would sometimes instantly do a backwards air dash, despite you not actually inputting back twice - or doesn't read them at all.
It feels like you're playing with constant bouts of input lag.

Characters that particularly rely on proper timing suffer the most out of all. To name one example, doing something as basic as confirming into Hazama's 2C/3C off casual, stray 5C hits is hard. Unless you're fully certain 5C itself is going to hit or be blocked, even something as simple as that requires constant focus on getting the timing right due to the unstable framerate.

In my case, I tend to play a lot of Unlimited Mars on CP and here, and unlimited characters naturally won't forgive you any of these errors the game forces you to make. Playing Unlimited Mars in this game made me salty like I hadn't been in a while, haha. Just that for the wrong reasons.

TL;DR: if you plan to get this game, it better be for the story mode. The fighting itself will just make you move back to either CP or CF, save for those whose computers are able to make up for the game's performance faults, if that's possible.

Fun, and with very fast-paced gameplay. Enjoyable regardless of how much time a day you have to play it. Graphics are very flexible (they can go from looking very realistic to looking like Quake), and overall the game is simply entertaining, it gives you good times. The only things that really annoy me are the default animations for each weapon, which look pretty...rough, as if they were taken straight from 1.6 without any editing (e.g smoothing the animations).

However the game does make up for it with the fact that it's very easy to mod. Once you put in it custom skins or maps of your liking, you're golden! It can give you an even better experience. CS:S is not just a realistic FPS; it can be everything, and you are the one who decides what the game should become with all the kind of mods that exist for it. For example, I'm even using a mod that turns all of the grenades into Rubik's cubes!

I recommend it.