Recent reviews by ♥ Riley ♥

Boring, Slow and Lazy. I have so many questions.

The gameplay is VERY Generic and the villains are bad because they can be. They literally say "We stole that ♥♥♥♥ fair and square and someone had the audacity to steal it back! Now we're going to have to steal even more from you, but this time we wont be as nice about it". Like, that's comic book levels of villainy. Neither of the twins have any presence. Sure, they use the radio a lot, but other than that they don't have anyone under them that can carry the story along. They're super passive.

I don't understand the writing decisions, everything is "turned up to 11" but feels like it's supposed to be viewed by a toddler. Literally heard one of the enemies say "I'm gonna sew your ass shut so you know you're full of ♥♥♥♥", that's something my dad would say if I told a lie. They threaten children with a hand grenade but it feels fake, no one seems scared, not even the kids. The story writers are trying to paint the Twins as crazy, but they don't really do anything.

You get a random cut scene about the Twin's past, for some reason? There's nothing in the cut scenes either, just stating their father was crazy and so they're that way now...

All story progression is locked behind your base building which is locked behind outposts, which makes everything feel slow. The gunplay is horrible, the new UI to show health is decent but when an enemy can tank 60 headshots without their motocross helmet breaking is ridiculous.

One part of the story you get reminded of Irwin and then he "just so happens" to call you with a deal immediately after? Why couldn't you just have the player find him again and ask for a favor? He owes the player after betting on them in the arena.

The prison is kinda cool and reminds of The Pitt DLC from Fallout 3 but it's super linear and doesn't allow you to do anything special.

I'm genuinely confused at the Mickey and Lou boss fight when you travel back to New Eden. They have the most HP out of any characters in the game, can tank explosion after explosion after headshot after headshot, and no movement on their health bar. I play on the easiest difficulty so I can have a good time, but good god this completely stopped me from continuing the story. It's just not worth the headache.

Even if I wanted to finish the game, I would have to go back and re-liberate every outpost all 3 times, upgrade the home base to max on everything. It's a slog. The gameplay is slow and boring. It's not worth my time.

Did no one play test this game?

If you're on Linux (Steam Deck included) this game will be hell on earth to even run, constant crashes, frame stutters, freezes, and system lock ups galore. Game Load Fix for Linux here You have to want to play this game and for that I am jaded.

The Intro to the story is really interesting and very quickly sets up how bat-sh\*t insane the Peggies are, literally throwing themselves into the blades of your helicopter to bring it down. Then the quintessential FarCry "running from the bad guys" part that resets your character and starts the story.

This game feels like what FarCry 4 wanted to be: The Main villain, "The Father", Joseph Seed is actually intimidating and made out to be a bad guy. The mini-bosses under him, John, Faith and Jacob are moderately compelling and make me want to kill them. The characters and animals you can recruit have personality and backstories.

And they FIXED THE MAP! There's infinitely less points of interest on the map compared to 4 and they're all different colors! Huge improvement.

The gun-play is pretty amazing, the pistols actually do damage, the hand-to-hand combat feels meaty, the snipers have fall off that makes sense, the rifles all have a decent kick and the shotguns... well, they're in the game too. The special weapons are interesting and fun to use.

Gliding is still buggy as sh\*t, I've died to the glider just not opening when I jump off a cliff way too many times. I have trust issues now.

The individual stories for the other Seed Family Members are actually somewhat interesting too. Faith is an abused drug addict with depression and self worth issues. John says Yes a lot. Jacob is a PTSD riddled war vet that couldn't reintegrate back into society. All of them were accepted by Joseph and allowed to help him grow his cult.

I still don't love that I have to rely on random events to progress the story, specifically stopping the vans that are trafficking people. However it does make sense, you have to slowly destabilize the region before they let you attack the leader. It just leads to more down time in the game, just travelling across the map trying to find a random event or a person with a quest icon.

The end of the game is really cool and makes me think back to FarCry 3; where you can sacrifice your friends to become the Warrior, or save them and return home. Except the Nuclear Option is extremely interesting... I understand that it was done so they could test out a post-apocalyptic world in the next game, but you do have to suspend your disbelief a little to think a drug peddling cult leader can set off nuclear warheads. This might be a misunderstanding from me and not paying attention, considering you're in Montana with Dozens of Nuclear Shelters and a handful of silos, but it is odd.

Story, gun play, characters and everything else makes this game good, but thanks to all the bugs and crashes, I wont be playing it again. 2 times for both endings was enough for me to pull my hair out keeping this thing on life support.

7/10 - Maybe again with some improvements.

Far Cry 3 with more drugs.

This game is annoying. There are 700,000 markers through out the game and they're ALL ****ING YELLOW. They couldn't, not even for just the main story missions, change the color to something that DOESN'T blend in with the green on the map! LEVELING IS LOCKED BEHIND MISSIONS. I don't actually have an issue with that, I just wish the game was made in a way that you WANTED to do those missions. Okay anyways, the rest of the game is meh.

Through out the game you get toyed with and "antagonized" by Pagan Min, but even when you kill his partners he doesn't do anything but flick you in the forehead and call you a bad boy. F*ck sake, he's not even homophobic, he pokes fun at Ajay in the first mission where you choose between Amita and Sabal and says he doesn't care.

The game isn't nearly as rewarding as Far Cry 3. You get drugged more often, you get to take out more of the Main Enemy's partners and you get to fight more demons. You even get to choose if Pagan Min lives or dies. Reading the books helps to inform your position on this, the Journals left by your father and your mother's notes.

I feel legitimately bad for Noore, her situation is so similar to the Protagonist from Far Cry 3, but she couldn't come back from it. When Far Cry 3 ends you get to choose between your family and the island you're supposed to inherit, and if you choose your family, it says "Even after all this, I'm still in here somewhere.", Noore couldn't find that piece of herself anymore. Her family was actually dead and she just couldn't wrap her head around all those horrible things she did to make sure she got them back. Instead of being rewarded for her service, she's left broken and alone, it legitimately breaks my heart.

The decisions between Amita and Sabal for which way to steer Kyrat's future are legitimately head scratching. Each one makes good choices to an extent, Amita is looking towards the future in the long-term, Sabal is looking towards the future for the people. Sabal's appeal would make sense if Ajay wasn't a white-washed as ♥♥♥♥ 26 year old. He was born in Kyrat, sure, but he moved to the USA when he was like 2 years old. Realistically, does he want the responsibility of not only controlling, but actually RULING an entire country? I think the game does a good job of summing this up if you let Pagan Min live, he calls you out on your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and reflects about his own life. "Are you the Ajay that came to this country to spread his mother's ashes, or are you the madman that killed my men and dismantled my country? Not like it matters, it's all yours anyways."

The decision to kill the leaders of the Golden Path doesn't seem to do anything, but it does hit really hard when you do pull the trigger. The Music mutes when you enter the cut scene and when you pull the trigger the sound of the gunshot is louder than normal. (I chose to kill Sabal the first time, because why would I want to scar this little artist by sacrificing people in front of her?)

The Shangri-la missions are cool. I enjoyed the storytelling and stylization, especially the bodies frozen in time. All of the missions, except the final fight with the bird, were good, fun, fair and balanced. The last mission, even on Gay Baby Mode (easiest difficulty) if you missed an attack on the bird's mouth it just spawns in HOARDS of enemies that chip away at your health and if you try to defend yourself at all you miss the timing on the bird attacks and it spawns MORE enemies.

Longinus is a super interesting character, I loved not only the way he's written, but also the way he's acted and designed. He's a religious fanatic who truly believes in what he does. He's a little forgettable considering you only need to do 3 missions for him before you end the game.

Yogi and Reggie are really funny and a really fun way to incorporate the "you're about to get drugged" without making it feel forced. They can definitely be a little annoying, especially because of how quickly you can do their missions and it's just "get drugged" spammed 3-4 times while running across the country and killing more random enemies (basically the GTA V alien mission from that dude's weed, every time).

There's just too much. You have to: find 55 Masks of Yalung, burn 150 Propaganda Posters, find 20 Lost Letters, Spin 40 Mani Wheels, find 20 Mohan Ghale Journals, liberate 24 Outposts, capture 4 Fortresses, complete 9 Kyrat Fashion Weeks, skin like 19 different animals more than once. More is not better, it's bloat and it confuses the player of where to go and what is important. I still have no idea what picking leaves does, I never figured out how to make a syringe and I never used any other than healing.

The first half of the game is Sooo long and Sooo boring. There's no direction of where to go and what to do, you have no motivation to do anything, but it does let you just run around and Just Cause some Mayham. You get into the game, you liberate as many towers and outposts as you can, and you hope a mission from Amita, Sabal, Longinus, or Yogi and Reggie.

Later you do get to see Willis from the previous game, which is a cool tie in. He kicks you out of a plane and betrays you, so he's just as annoying as the first game.

Killing Yuma is the most underwhelming quest in the entire game. She is literally the last boss in the game before you get to take over Pagan's Castle, and it's lazy. She drugs you, tries to seduce you with the whole tits out for Harambe thing and then "tries to kill you" by letting a demon strangle you. You get to recreate the fight your dad did against Kalinag, so that's cool, but you just have to hit him a few times and perform a takedown. You kill him and then when you wake up and she's just dead.

All things considered, I enjoyed the game, but good god was it annoying to play. Just tell me where to go and who to kill, I don't like searching the map for 10 minutes. - 7/10

I died a lot.

The cutest horror game I've ever played.
I was scared enough to jump 2-3 times through out the entire story and loved it. The puzzles and horror elements are amazingly designed and perfectly implemented.
The puzzles were Fantastic! I had one or two issues where the misdirects actually good enough to make me focus on it before I realized and switched.
I don't wanna ruin the story for anyone, but I HIGHLY recommend it, it only takes like 3.5 hours to complete (considering I'm an idiot).
9/10 - I will be going for the rest of the achievements. (am very much looking forward to Part 2)

This game is phenomenal. They get so much right and very little wrong. On the technical side, there are a few issues, but the story is fantastic. I would absolutely love having more flash-backs, but what little we get feeds so much into the story. I had so much fun playing hide and seek with the Alien, accidentally played on Ultra Hard mode (I didn't use any of the buildables until the last 3 levels).
Playing for 16 hours was absolutely awesome, plenty of time for the story to naturally evolve and not feel rushed in any way, also not too long to drone on.
The puzzles were awesomely fun and had great ways to interact with the alien. There was only 1 puzzle/level the entire time that I hated playing the game.
8.5/10 - It's older, but DEFINITELY a goody.

I gotta say just, amazing game, can't wait for Chapter 3. I see a lot of reviews from people getting mad that they had to pay twice once Chapter 2 came out and Chapter 1 went F2P. All I can say is, unlucky.
The game itself is amazing; Fun, Great puzzles, lotta glitches, has some genuinely scary moments in it. Art is awesome and clean, they actually thought about the stupidity of players and added back-doors to get to the beginning of a level if you forget to do something.
I had a lot more issues in Chapter 1 than Chapter 2; crashes, glitched the game into a soft-lock, puzzles not functioning correctly. Only had 1 soft-lock in Chapter 2, so they've definitely done their due-diligence in fixing these issues.

8/10 - Feels like a scary version of Portal

I spent nearly 14 hours playing though this game on the easiest difficulty, and I can comfortably say this is a DarkSouls game.

The difficulty is so inconsistent, it's not funny. The first few levels are easy enough, it starts off difficult because you don't know how to play and progressively gets easier, until you trigger the next level and it swaps, getting harder and harder until you're on to the next. This cycle continues until the last few levels where even on the easiest difficulty it feels like you have to be an expert just to progress. Not to mention how the walls don't matter. It completely breaks the stealth by allowing the enemies to see you through tents, doors and other things that realistically they shouldn't be able to. They also have insanely good hearing, making it near impossible to sneak up to and plan anything. The difficulty is very VERY inconsistent, each level scaling to whatever the Developers felt right, multiplied by the god-like AI.

The map design is very weird, but definitely one of the best parts of the game, at least in the beginning. The first few levels start off easy enough, forcing you to adapt and grow to understand where to go, how to take out enemies, and what to do to get to the end. The later levels feel like a mess of cobbled together ideas tossed together to get a finished product. It runs in to the cliché that almost all games from the early 2000s do with the last few levels being covering up with lava, to hide the rush job. They're still very solid even at this point with smooth land, straight forward objectives and easy to follow pathing.

The characters are about as good as a game from 2004 can get. The main character Jack is definitely a "Die Hard" John McClane type of 'hero', someone who doesn't want to be there, and doesn't want to do what he does, but does it anyways. Dr. Krieger is decently well written with motivation and reason. Doyle is definitely a main character, being well written in to the story and the whole reason anything gets done. Valerie is probably the worst character, she can be unlikable at times and very unhelpful, often times standing in the way or screaming over your shoulder without actually doing anything. Or, if you're unlucky like I was, she would shoot a guard you're trying to sneak passed. As for their voice acting, it's passable. They sound about as good as you would expect with some lines sticking out and feeling jagged, but the majority only staying with you for the moment you need.

The cutscenes are long, drawn out, and rough. They tell a story but not in an attractive way. They are by far the exposition dump of the game, with immense amounts of chit chat between the characters. They definitely simulate the style of the time with green-screen explosions over top of the game footage and no real destruction, the female protagonist being overly sexualized, and forcing your character in to a position that you probably wouldn't have gotten in to yourself.

The story is very odd; there is no real beginning to it, you just get thrown in and told what's going on, but not how or why. The level progression is very complimentary, smooth, and fill in the gaps nicely with the cutscenes. As the story evolves it does make a lot of sense, not stranding you with questions on why something is happening. It's very cut and dry.

For a game that came out in 2004, it holds up as well as Half-Life.

From beginning to end this game took me two and a half hours.
It is one of the best short stories I've ever played. The Narration is adorable and compliments the story in one of my favorite ways. Although the character design could be improved, it does match the aesthetic of the game. The story and the gameplay work side by side and are paced perfectly. With a great story that perfectly translates to the gameplay. The level design is absolutely beautiful and the visuals compliment it almost too well. The platforming and movement are so fluid and ever so slightly challenging, it’s probably the most fun movement I’ve seen since TitanFall 2.

What was once a revolutionary game, with amazing graphics, a great story and fantastic puzzles is now a depreciated mess. We’ve had 20 years of games come out after this, and with that much hindsight I can say with a straight face, this game is not as good as people make it out to be.

Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way first, guns. The gun play is fantastic but shows it’s age, the animations are overly exaggerated and the damage doesn’t always make sense. The shotgun and assault rifle feel very underwhelming and inconsistent, sometimes needing more bullets to kill enemies than the base pistol. The distance you can throw grenades feels very short but the damage they deal seems adequate. The only weapon I actually find overpowered is the revolver; when your pistol can one shot an enemy that would normally take 4-6 rifle shots, it may be a little broken.

The beginning of the game, while possibly being great when it first came out, now feels drawn out and extremely annoying. If you don’t pay attention to the minute details of the markings on the walls, even getting your H.E.V suit and starting the game can be confusing. The dialogue of the game takes far to long to get the point across, and makes the game move at a snails pace.

With the dialogue the way it is, it causes a major problem. The story is already a convoluted and confusing mess, unless you listen to absolutely every second of dialogue; and listening to the dialogue takes annoying amounts of time causing the story to stall, and become dull. There’s a lot of the story that isn’t elaborated on and confuses me; like why the military instantly starts shooting you when the last thing you were told was that they were on their way to save you.

The textures of this game did not age well at all, and nor did the lighting. A lot of the poor textures add to the difficulty of some puzzles. The bad lighting only really hurts the maneuverability of vents which doesn’t amount to a lot, but when it does you can really notice it. A lot of the puzzles are easy enough to solve, only a few causing me to spend more than a few minutes on them. I did get stuck at multiple points in the game due to poor checkpoints, the game not saving on chapters or loading screens, and pure stupidity on my part.

Getting through the puzzles and into the actual story, it is excruciatingly long. It took me over 10 hours, from start to finish to complete the game (on easy, mind you). When the military starts to intervene they kinda just forget to tell you what to do from there on out, and make you figure it out yourself. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind having to figure out what to do next, or where to go next, but in this game it gets really annoying.

There’s a section with a giant fan in the Chapter Blast Pit, that is probably what tripped me up the most, causing me to have to completely restart the game. It’s nowhere near obvious enough as to what you’re supposed to do, having multiple platforms that make you think you’re supposed to go through them instead of straight up. There’s also a fall in the same chapter; where a large pipe that you’re walking through collapses and is near impossible to beat if you have less than 100 HP.

As you’re making your way top side in the Chapter Apprehension, for some reason there are ninja’s? This is never elaborated on, it’s just out of nowhere and completely baffling. This leads into a confusing laser level that literally finished itself for me; the door opened extremely early without me having to finish the puzzle, causing me to waste time on said laser puzzle. Once outside I got stuck with 1 hp against multiple military personnel causing nearly a half-an-hour of frustrated Quick Saving and Quick Loading. In the later game before Xen there’s an Overpowered tank that took me a few minutes to get around. That coupled with the lack of health packs is a real detriment to how fun it is, not to mention the snipers that can some how shoot you from around a corner.

After entering Xen I got lost for about 20 minutes because of how un-obvious the way to progress was. I played through the ending as normal in a nice cycle of; getting lost for a while before progressing.

After finally getting to the Nihilanth I quickly destroyed all the Crystals needed before getting stuck in an almost endless 40 minute loop of; attack, show brain thing, die to stray laser beam. OVER AND OVER AGAIN for 40 minutes.

Half-Life is not a fun game, it is definitely a mentally challenging game. It sits in this weird Limbo in my mind, because I enjoyed it more than Half-Life 2, but it holds absolutely no candle to it’s sister series Portal. I will not criticize all the bugs, or the textures because the game is 20 years old, but I do not think this game is worthy of the 96 that it has on Metacritic. It’s story is odd, and feels like an after thought, having possibly made levels before thinking about how they line up, or join together. In saying this, I am excited for Black Mesa and plan to play it.

7/10 – Now that I’ve beat it, I probably won’t play it again.