Recent reviews by Ploobie

Twenty years. It has been twenty years since the last time that it was a good time to be a Silent Hill fan. And even 2004's Silent Hill 4 failed to live up to the previous entries in the series. Since 2004, Silent Hill fans have been treated to disappointing release after disappointing release. Origins, Homecoming, Downpour & Book of Memories ranged from trash to mediocre trash. The only game I enjoyed after SH4 was Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, but that game was just a good psychological horror game, and not actually a good Silent Hill game.

Thanks to Bloober and their remake of Silent Hill 2, we Silent Hill fans can finally be happy again. Here's hoping that this is just the start, and that we can get remakes of Silent Hill and Silent Hill 3 as well. I didn't have much faith in Bloober to pull off the remake of SH2, due to Bloober's track record, and the track record of Western developers when making Silent Hill games. But Bloober did an amazing job with this remake, and I now hope that they will be the ones to remake 1 & 3, if that's something that Konami is considering.

What I worried about most is that Bloober wouldn't be able to recapture the same tone & atmosphere as the original game. I'm happy to say that for the most part, they succeeded in recapturing the dreamlike and haunting tone & atmosphere of the original SH2. And I think a huge part of their success was getting Akira Yamaoka back to work on the sound & music.

And if you're wondering what I mean by "for the most part", one of my criticisms of this game is that certain cutscenes were done way better in the original, mostly due to the pacing and the cadence. Whoever directed the voice actors could have done a much better job at utilizing pauses and having the actors use different inflections with their voices. And I much prefer the design of the characters in the original game. And I think that Team Silent was much better at using subtle changes in facial expressions to hint at undertones and subtext. And even though I love a lot of Yamaoka's remixes in this remake, I think most of the original tracks are much more fitting for certain cutscenes. But, the fact that I prefer some art styles & cutscenes in the original doesn't really mean much. I don't expect a perfect copy when it comes to remakes. And realistically, even though Salóme Gunnarsdóttir did a great job as Mary & Maria, there was just no way that she was going to be able to top Monica Horgan's unbelievable performance in the original.

The only other nitpick I have is that I don't like the rain effect that much (just a bunch of ugly white lines filling the screen). And I think that there are too many enemies in the game. It felt like I was getting in a fight in every single new room that I entered, which was way too frequent for a Silent Hill game. Otherwise, I really enjoyed the combat, the additional scenes & extended exploration, and the new puzzles. And thank goodness that they kept the hand-holding to a minimum with this game. I think Maria gave me one slight hint about a puzzle at some point. I hope it's not the case that the hints ramp up if you take longer to solve the puzzles. I can't stand when modern games have characters give hints / solutions to puzzles to the players. The classic Silent Hills were cryptic and had no hand-holding when it came to their challenging puzzles. I still remember solving Silent Hill's piano puzzle in 1999 at 13-years-old (before I had any internet), and the reason that I remember it 25 years later is because of how challenging it was for me and how rewarding it was when I finally figured it out.

In conclusion, this game is more than worth the money if you're a fan of horror games.

This game really makes you feel like Furiosa's sidekick.

I started playing this in May, and I'm just now finishing it in December. As a completionist, I much preferred the smaller & more linear areas in the first two Dragon Age games. I strongly disliked the large & open areas in this game. The reason that this game took me 7 months to complete is that I kept getting burned out with the areas of the game that were a tedious slog. You will spend so much of your time simply walking around and not doing much. They could have made these large open areas more interesting, but instead players are mostly just going to walk around doing very simple puzzles and gathering collectibles (like a boring Ubisoft style open world game).

This game was still very much worth playing, and if I ever decide to play it again, I will definitely be skipping most of the side content. This game could have been a much better experience if it had been condensed. Sometimes less is more.

I'm excited for Dreadwolf, and I'm hoping that it will be a return to a more condensed experience like the first two Dragon Age games. And I'm also hoping that Dreadwolf will be a return to more simplified itemization. I thought the crafting in Inquisition was too much. There were like 300 different crafting recipes, and if you're like me, you didn't want to bother crafting and wasting the really good resources until you had Tier 4 Schematics. So the crafting didn't even come into play for me until the last 10% of the game.

This was already my game of the year, and then they released the amazing Separate Ways DLC - which far surpasses the SW scenario from the original RE4.

I raged, but then I got good. After completing 100% of this game, I now feel like I can beat any game.

I did it all for the Wookie.

This game is a lot better than I thought it would be. Based on what I heard other Resident Evil fans saying over the years, I thought this game would be awful. But I have to say that I enjoyed RE6 more than RE5.

The most pleasant surprise was the length of the game. I thought each campaign would be a lot shorter, but all 4 campaigns are lengthy. However, the game's long length can also be counted as a downside simply because the game has inconsistent quality. Some portions of the game were very memorable and fun, while some portions were quite dull. The game really shined when it wasn't just all about running, having something explode, having the ground fall out from under you, etc. And while there are elements in this game that fans of the classic RE games should enjoy, they feel more like greatest hits being performed by a cover band.

I do prefer the atmosphere and pace of classic Resident Evil games, where you have a lot of slower pace areas to build tension - which results in bigger payoffs when you reach the action-packed sequences. I always loved the relief I felt when I reached a save room with it's calming yet melancholic music. And while those save rooms offered relief, players would also feel dread about what was to come after they left the save room. That feeling is gone in games like RE5 and RE6.

I do have to give two big thumbs up to the combat in RE6. I wasn't even aware how good it actually was until about 10 hours into the game (due to the lack of tutorials). Not only can we finally move while shooting, but we can do quick-shots, and dodge rolls where we can either choose to stay on our feet or lay on the ground and fire at enemies from there.

You can definitely tell the parts of the game where they cut corners and rushed. The game has plenty of janky crap going on, with numerous cheap deaths and such. And Capcom simply didn't offer enough of what Resident Evil fans like me really enjoy, which are challenging puzzles and environments that are fun to explore and interact with. Instead, the majority of this game consists of one corridor after another without much exploring to be done or interactive elements to be found.

The story is forgettable. I liked Jake and Sherry's campaign the most, because I thought that their characters had great chemistry. Although Wesker having a son sounds like some dumb fan fiction type stuff. And I find the story of Ben making a clone of Ada to be ridiculous and pathetic.

I could tell that this would have been a much more fun experience if I had a co-op partner to play with. And the Agent Hunt mode sounds really fun too. But alas, I was only able to play solo on the campaigns and the Mercenaries mode. But at least they improved on the AI partner system from RE5 by simply making it so that you don't have to worry about your AI partner dying.

Overall, I would give this game a solid 7 out of 10.

I can tune a piano but I can't tuna fish.

This is a fun game that lacks originality and substance. The gameplay is the saving grace here, but it's simply an Arkham / Assassin's Creed game with a Lord of the Rings paint job.

The Nemesis system is certainly unique, but I didn't really bother with it due to it being unnecessary. There was no need to farm for the Epic Runes because there's no great challenge in the game. There's no Hard Mode, and players will likely get all upgrades without even bothering much with the Captains and Warchiefs.

And my biggest gripe with this game is that the characters are generic and uninteresting. If you're going to be expanding the world of Tolkien then you need to hire much better writers.

Update: Storming the Black Gate and taking on the Black Hand was underwhelming, and the DLC episodes are very lazy and boring. Overall, this game turned out to be mediocre.

But it was still a fun game. I hope the sequel offers more substance.

This should have won many GOTY awards instead of that stupid ass Last of Us game.