Recent reviews by Marlech

Many people buy this game thinking they're buying a System Shock or a Deus Ex. Maybe a Borderlands or a STALKER. This is an incorrect assumption to make. It's true that EYE features many RPG elements. It has dialogue, branching paths, levels, inventory management, stores and side-missions. But this is all plays second fiddle to what EYE is really aiming for. It's not a Deus Ex as much as it is a Serious Sam. It's not a Borderlands as much as it is a Painkiller. I really cannot emphasize this enough, it's my belief that the majority of the complaints directed towards EYE stem from a false presupposition of what this game is trying to be. That is not the players fault though, because EYE doesn't exactly make these things clear.

EYE is a mess.

Unless you are a Dwarf Fortress player, EYE is likely to be the biggest, messiest game you are ever likely to see. Right off the bat it gives you a character creation screen which makes absolutely no sense to anyone beginning the game without first googling what in the hell you are looking at. The dialogue is either intentionally vague, bizarre and most of the time incomprehensible. You will be thrown into a world which appears to have some sort of lore and backstory but you'll be lucky if you ever understand a tenth of what is going on. When the game presents you with the tutorial level, many aspects of that tutorial will need tutorials themselves, and you will be confronted with a library of tutorial videos on how certain game mechanics work. Your body can be hacked and destroyed by doors and ATMs. Sometimes huge monsters will appear in the level and fire rockets in directions you didn't even know existed and you have to kill it. Sometimes you'll be tasked to kill a high ranking enemy and he will zip about the game shooting and cloaking tanking hits like nothing else. This game is primarily single-player, but you can have 64-player coop. You can buy spells and augmentations and guns and big hammers all with a currency called Brozouf which you seem to endlessly gain in areas where you are doing something for some reason for someone. EYE is a deranged and twisted mess of Syndicate, Neuromancer, Warhammer 40k and the entire personal drug stash of Hunter S. Thompson. And you know what? It's amazing.

There is no messing around with regenerating health, cover or killcams. You can go in fast and furious or heavy like robocop. The guns feel like they should. There is real impact when you shoot something. Enemies will go flying across the screen. You can teleport into people and laugh as they explode. You can hit people in the face with giant hammers and watch as they bounce off the walls. You can hack people. You can force push four-armed creatures into radioactive goo. You can block bullets with swords. This game can be anything you want, but above all it is satisfying.

If you get this game, it's imperative that you know what you getting into. If you want a cyberpunk dystopia with thought provoking dialogue and choices that mean something, I don't advise you to get this game. If you want a crazy FPS that is a completely unapologetic mess that explains nothing but offers everything then I would strongly recommend this game.

This is a game where you get to pick your favourite wife and make political decisions. The dialogue is clever and the characters are fun. The political decisions are interesting and there are multiple branching paths. Beyond that, there isn't very much to say. It's quite fun to play, even if at the end of the day the good parts amount to what is essentially a VN with many choices.

PS: This game is supposed to be an RTS too but the RTS part sucks and it is better to auto-resolve the battles so you can get back to your fun characters

PPS: You get to play as a dragon with a jetpack in the RTS parts though and that's pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool

Dust: An Elysian Tail is a game where you play a humanoid rabbit in a turquoise outfit running around killing things with a talking meat cleaver and an orange companions who is essentially a slightly less annoying version of Navi from LoZ: OoT. It's called an Elysian "Tail" instead of "Tale" because it's a furry game. Now, details:

Dust's gameplay is similar to Vanillaware games like Dragon's Crown or Muramasa. You go through a 2d level hitting things until they die. Unlike those games however, Dust's gameplay is incredibly simplistic. I wasn't kidding when I said all you do is hit things until they die. The "advanced move list" consists of 8 whopping combos. In addition to that there are 3 types of special attack that can use to endlessly stunlock most enemies. This ultimately doesn't even matter however, since after leveling your attack stat twice you will kill everything on the level in two standard attacks anyway, and I played on the hardest difficulty.

The game has a parry system in place which gives quite a lot of leeway and you will often find yourself parrying simply by spamming attack. There is a dodge ability that has good distance and will phase through enemies, all complete with i-frames. It's actually quite easy to avoid getting hit at all since most enemies will be interrupted and stunned momentarily by both standard and special attacks. The problem comes with a basic failure in design. All special effects and some environment setpieces are placed in front of enemies and the character, leaving you effectively blind. On the highest difficulty in a new area, you will most likely from one attack before leveling up. It's not uncommon to have an enemy attack you from behind an environment or special effect when you didn't even know it was there. When you dodge to either side and immediately attack, your character does a dash back about half the distance you originally dodged, often putting you right back in the face of the enemy you just dodged away from. Enemies are essentially just reskins of eachother. Some of the behave in a different way than others, but they are all countered in exactly the same way: hitting the attack button over and over.

On the other hand, boss fights are also made ludicrously easy. With the exception of the very last one, you will be only fighting one enemy. You can walk from side to side spamming homing special attacks and the boss will be stunlocked and unable to do anything. There is a limiting factor on special attacks, and that's the energy bar. Problem with this is that the energy bar is refilled by hitting enemies. If your special attacks are hitting enemies then it barely goes down fast enough to even justify its existence at all.

The story was clearly intended to be a large part of the game, but I couldn't get into it. The villain is made to look like a pretty caring, down to earth guy in every cutscene you see him in and not once do you even get to hear his motivation for his murdering thousands of people, only that he did it. It's incredibly poor characterization to have a supposedly evil and monstrous villain only to not have him even have any motivation or explanation for it at all. The characters are pretty generic and soulless and at the point in the game where the character makes a completely unironic "I am the sword of justice" speech I just had to laugh.

Overall the game is pretty average. I can understand this however. From what the credits seem to say basically all of the game was made by one person apart from the music. I can sympathize, but I can't recommend the game. Unless you're a furry, then I guess you might enjoy it more than I did.

Bulletstorm was a game that was designed with one intention: To make fun of CoD and its clones that saturate the industry. When every game was released with a multiplayer mode like Bioshock 2 or Mass Effect 3. When every multiplayer FPS that came out had killstreak features and killcams and prepubescent children screaming at you, when every FPS campaign was gruff men doing manly things with each character trying to one-up the next in displays of overplayed machismo the likes of which have never been seen since the Expendables, one game came out to challenge that trend and that game was Bulletstorm. The way Bulletstorm does this is actually pretty simple: It plays exactly like the games it's trying to mock.

Shoulder high walls dot the landscape in increasingly convenient places. You are limited to holding 4 weapons at a time (admittedly much better than the usual 2). If you take too much damage your screen turns shades of red and "TAKE COVER" appears in front of your face, even on the highest difficulty in the last half hour of the game does it still remind you of mechanics that you learned about in the first five minutes. Ditto with the game warning you that you need to reload your gun. These things themselves are not necessarily a problem, except when combined with the fact that enemy weapons are hitscan based instead of projectile. You are given next to no opportunity to dodge what hits you which effectively forces you into cover. The problem with games like Bulletstorm, RAGE and others that advertise themselves under the "classic FPS" category is that this runs completely contrary to how classic FPS functioned. In a game like DOOM, Quake or Unreal enemies used melee attacks or projectile weapons. They were usually slower than the player and the player had an arsenal of weapons, projectile and hitscan with which to fight back with. It was a design that encouraged quick movement and staying on your feet, whereas Bulletstorm does the complete opposite.

You can see this reflected even on small levels. When firing the sniper rifle you don't simply fire a shot and move on. You fire a shot and the camera follows the bullet, then there is a segment usually about 4-8 seconds long where you guide the bullet where you want it to go. During this your character remains perfectly stationary and invincible to outside threats. When you go around a corner or duck beneath a barrier the enemies will make no attempt to follow or flank you if they have guns, instead opting to simply shoot at the wall. The leash, and in game whip weapon used to grab people and pull them towards you has a huge auto-aim assist that basically guarantees a grab by pointing out into the screen and pressing the button.

The game's currency works on a system called "skillshots" where you get rewarded more points for more creative ways of killing things. The skillshot criteria is decided purely by the developer however, and a lot of them amount to no more than simply kicking things into various environmental hazards. Not a problem in and of itself, but in harder difficulties you spend much of the game kicking things over and over to maximize points so you can rearm yourself. This isn't such a bad thing however, since kicking things is great fun that should be in more games and the gunplay in this isn't particularly great either. My problem with this system is that it doesn't encourage creativity, it stifles it. By restricting the player to what the developer says is creative, it limits what the player is feasibly able to do. A game like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (which also has a heavy emphasis on kicking) or even Dishonored has many different and creative ways of taking care of enemies and it leaves the player completely on their own to discover them. Bulletstorm does not.

The environments in Bulletstorm look beautiful... When you're standing on a cliff gazing at a wonderful panoramic view. When you actually make your way down and into the thick of it you find the vibrant colours become considerably more dulled. The blues turn into concrete greys. The browns are, well, brown. I would say that there is considerably more colour than the average FPS release, but not of a particularly considerable level. It doesn't really have an artstyle to speak of and the areas range from "post-apocalyptic city" to "underground prison". There is that brief moment of satisfaction when you reach a new area and the game does a good job of showing you a nice landscape before you plunge down into the sea of monotone colours.

All in all I don't really have a problem with any of these things by themselves. They're not what I look for in a game, but if someone wants to play them, go for it. The problem is how this game was marketed. If you're looking for a classic FPS, then you should look elsewhere. Elsewhere like ten years ago elsewhere.

Side note: I've heard that the game was originally planned to play a lot more like Serious Sam but EA wanted them to play more like a generic shooter to sell more. Not sure if it's true or not. Does that sound counter-intuitive to you? Welcome to EA.