Recent reviews by ThomasK

So I bought it on Christmas Day, hoping that it would be a great game. I mean, it is - but not everywhere.

I would prefer to leave a neutral review, but at the moment I lean more towards the positive side of things so we're going with that. Ready or Not, however, is Not Ready at the moment; a 1.0 update you would expect to have brilliant AI, convincing scenarios and characters, great storylines. Ready or Not succeeds in the latter, but with the first 2? Yeah, I'm not convinced.

Prior to anything else, I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS GAME TO ANYONE WITH PTSD FROM REAL LIFE SHOOTING INCIDENTS, especially terror attacks or school shootings. Same goes for anyone with trauma from childhood sexual abuse.

My first point of anger with this game comes from Greased Palms - a mission where the LSPD raid a post office. Oh my god, the broken AI began to show here. I was getting shot through tiny little 3cm wide holes in the walls from a good 20 metres away. Four hours that took me to clear - FOUR HOURS. The main problem was aimbotting AI - sometimes they have the aim of a F2P force-a-nature scout in TF2, other times they're a Royal Marines Commando with a sniper rifle and will nail you the millisecond you step around a corner.

Looking back on the game as well, there is just a lack of standard raid that a SWAT team would get involved in. You know the kind - kicking down doors and searching through houses - yes, it sort of has this, but the way suspects just never surrender unless you first choose to shoot them, tase them, PAVA them, throw a flashbang, etc. is weird to me. I understand with the crackheads, ex-soldiers and terrorists - hell, I'm surprised they even allow the terrorist AI to surrender. However, the geezers holding up a petrol station? You'd expect them to give up at the first sign of five heavily armed S.W.A.T. officers kicking in the door and screaming to get on the floor.

Positives - there's plenty of them. Well, performance isn't particularly bad. I have an RTX 2060 and Ryzen 7 4800H in my laptop with 16gb of DDR4 RAM, it runs pretty well most of the time. If you can't cope with anything below 60fps, however, I have some advice: first, grow the hell up; second, watch some South Park to get used to a lower framerate. I get somewhere between 35 and 60fps most of the time, rarely over that with medium graphics. Speaking of graphics - this game is absolutely stunning. I would go as far as to say it is the best looking game I have ever played - although that is subjective, I think Half-Life 2 looks great.

Another positive is variety. I know that I said this game lacks in the more mundane missions, but that might be a good thing. If you want that, hop onto a Garry's Mod RP server or look for mods. Ready or Not is an action game and tactical shooter, most people aren't going to be entertained by searching through bin bags and wardrobes for a tiny SIM card in a drug dealer's house. The missions in this game range from a petrol station being held up, to a Senator's family getting held hostage in a hotel, to a vineyard full of religious extremist cop killers, to a nightclub littered with innocent civilians who were shot dead by terrorists, to a paedophile's mansion in the Hollywood Hills.

The environmental storytelling rivals that of the Half-Life series. You are left to put together the pieces of this almost literal jigsaw puzzle - much like a detective - but it's all up to you. Some people will clear out a nonce's basement and just press F on the objectives, whereas others will take their time to realise the true horrors of everything that happened in that place.

Anyway, I need to conclude this review at some point, get the game if you're a masochist who enjoys suffering, or if you love the vague information being given, and especially if you like tactical shooters.

I can't even log in. Servers have been down for over a day now. DO NOT BUY THIS ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ GAME UNTIL IT'S FIXED.

Well, it's a really good game on your first playthrough. However, about 2 hours into your second playthrough you'll probably lose motivation to play it because it has barely any replay value. This is nothing like the other games in the series- I've played through HL2 about 7, maybe more, times and it's still fun to play. In short, buy HL:A when it's on sale and don't expect to play through it more than about 2 or 3 times before you get bored.

It's possibly the best VR Game on the market, but that doesn't make it fun to replay. Especially the Combine fights, they're boring as ♥♥♥♥. It's like making hgrunts from HL1 have smoother animations and AI, only wayyyyyy easier than that. The bloody grenades the Combine Grunts throw take about a minute to explode - no reward for fast reflexes here. I just cannot recommend this game to anyone outside of Half-Life fans, oh and don't get a Quest 2 just for this one game like I did unless you really are a true Half-Life fan. I want to enjoy it, but I just can't after a first playthough and the euphoria of VR wears off and all of the hunting just pisses me off.

It's Garry's Mod, you know it's good.

This game is extremely good, and is well worth the money.