Recent reviews by adams_apple

Worst Doom game ever, and a perfect example why bullet hells don't work in FPS. ♥♥♥♥ this game.

On the one hand, you're going to hear a lot of things about this game being a lazy sequel and a shameless clone of Arkham City, and most of them are probably true. The city covers the same districts, uses the same gadgets and combat tactics, and even some of the same buildings that you've already seen in the last game.

On the other hand, even the worst Arkham game is still better than most other games. The freeflow combat system is back in all of its glory, except that now enemies will attack you much more frequently and with less warning. Part of me is grateful for the realism and added challenge of thugs not just idly standing around waiting for Batman to palm strike them, yet another part of me is frustrated in not possessing the same dominion in mob suppression and crowd control with carefully linked combos that made the previous game fights so enthralling. It was less about Batman trying not to have his clock cleaned, but more about keeping everybody whipped with seamless variety and finesse. Arkham Origins still does this, but you will have to work a lot harder to get it.

The predator system hasn't really changed at all, and at this point is starting to feel tiresome. There aren't really any new takedowns for Batman to use, except one related to a particular new gadget. The levels are also dull and poorly laid out, presenting very few opportunities to set well-placed traps in strategic locations. The explosive gel in particular has taken a big hit. The gel takedown apparently only works when it feels like it. Half the time the explosion will knock the guys on the ground with stars over their heads for a few seconds before they get back up, with the whole room now aware of your presence. And once you get the proximity upgrade, that stuff goes off whether you want it to or not, even if a guard casually strolls by while you are still spraying it.

Collectibles have again returned courtesy of the Riddler, or "Enigma" as he is currently known, although his distinguished Riddler Trophies have been replaced with generic glowing green squares. These "data packs," which contain extortion data on some of Gotham's highest criminals, are encrypted and dispersed throughout the city and must be unlocked by solving simple gadget puzzles. He has also installed wireless network relay devices scattered at street level in plain view, which Batman must destroy by, brace yourselves, throwing a batarang at them. Well played, Edward.

Except Batman isn't looking to use Enigma's data to expose corruption the city -- he's actually trying to stop Enigma from doing so because apparently it's morally wrong when Edward does it, or that whistle-blowing on dirty cops, mobsters, and politicians will bring more harm than it alleviates. Don't ask me how, this is never explained.

This should now bring us to the game's sketchy story. Batman is in his early years, his existence just shy of a mythic folk tale. Corruption runs thicker than blood all the way through the police force, all of whom are dressed in SWAT gear and for some reason carry no side arms. Gotham City is under a lockdown on Christmas Eve due to a winter storm, but maybe it's more likely a ruse for the Gotham police to easily arrest the gangs. Or maybe the GCPD are so corrupt that they wish to collude with them uninhibited.

The setting looks to be a total reboot to the series, so if you're expecting a prequel or a prelude to the events in Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, you can put those expectations to rest. You start off with most of the same gadgets and upgrades you acquired in Arkham City, despite being about 8 years in the past. Your detective vision is as state-of-the-art as ever, so much that it can run a virtual forensics software that reconstructs murder scenes based on a few scuff marks and blood stains. I did like the CSI: Gotham portions of the game as a new detective-style concept, but most of it is done by simply "Press A to Think."

The pre-Arkham city is somehow less alive and more packed with criminals despite not being a sanctioned inmate internment camp. At least the prison had political prisoners, helicopters, and other non combatants. In this city there are so many criminals that you can leap anywhere off a clock tower and land knuckle first on a class-A felon. Most of the enemies you will fight are either in someone's gang, or police officers who are so corrupt that they are, for all intents in purposes, criminals themselves and therefore fair game for Batman (although he does show them more restraint). The police fight with the same AI and weapons as their street thug counterparts. There is nobody else on the street: no innocent bystanders, no homeless people, no emergency vehicles, and no snow plows? All of this makes a once expansive and versatile game engine feel claustrophobic and narrow in scope.

The combat scenarios are fun but get very repetitive. The enemies fight you in groups no smaller than 5, and are so densely populated that you can't help but alert the NEXT group of bad guys on the other side of the fence before the fight ends. The rooftops are no safe haven either, as more gang members patrol listlessly with their assault rifles, waiting to be stealthily subdued in a full nelson under Batman's mighty armpit. Funny how the guard patrols never notice you until you land right in front of them, but two guys talking to each other on street level will spot you instantly.

Just in case you didn't have enough excuse to indiscriminitely beat people senseless, you can now respond to APBs for crimes on the street, just to give you more excuses to snap limbs. What's strange about this is sometimes the perpetrators are in fact fellow Gotham police officers. I have to say it's an inspiring display of integrity of a notoriously dirty police force to report their own crimes, but if there are no citizens out and about, then who's calling 911? And who do the dispatchers expect is going to respond?

The villains in the story are well represented and true to their archetypes from the comic and film universes. Bane, for example, is as tenacious and cunning as he is brutishly strong, with the former mirroring his film adaptation and the latter from the comics. The Mad Hatter makes another completely random appearance, this time taking Batman into Wonderland. It's creative and pretty, but too short and too much a novelty to count.

The Joker, however, completely stands out as the truly definitive version of himself. Standing in for Mark Hamill who retired from Arkham City, Troy Baker is a phenomenal second choice. He is a dead ringer for Hamill's joker, and most untrained ears (and even many trained ones) would not be able to tell them apart. The script and dialog are much better as well. The Joker that we saw in the previous Arkham games was essentially the reckless cartoon villain that we've seen in the animated series. While he was ostensibly dangerous in Arkham Asylum and City and had a significant body count to his name, he seemed too much of a goofball to be a criminal mastermind. The writers kept using little anecdotes to remind us that he was a psychopath and therefore capable of real harm. In Arkham Origins, the Joker lets his actions speak for themselves, and really knows how to get things done. He's meaner, more theatrical and razor-witted, and his carefree disregard for the lives of anyone including his own makes him all the more chaotic and downright frightening.

What you should take from this is a recommendation if you love the Arkham games and need your Batman fix. If you're looking for something fresh and new, wait for Rocksteady's Arkham Knight.

This was a tough call to make. I wanted to like Max Payne 3, but it just really did not want to be liked. The good news is, at the core, the gameplay is actually pretty good... when you get to play it, but more on that in a bit. The combat is true to the John Woo style of the series. The game is also considerably more difficult than Max Payne 2, but not as much as Max Payne 1, which is a happy medium. It's a bit heavily cover-based, but you do have the shootdodge at your disposal to mix things up.

Unfortunately, you will spend the majority of your gaming hours locked in sequence after sequence of unskippable AND unquittable cutscenes which smugly display the text "still loading" when you try to skip them, despite the fact that it has clearly been 5 minutes or more. If you try to press escape, the cutscene will just pause. Once the gameplay actually begins and you start to have fun, the instant the last guy is killed you are forced to watch a 30 second cutscene of Max opening a door or vaulting a ledge, or something else you could have easily done yourself. It often doesn't even allow you time to search the room for guns, painkillers, or collectibles. When you do get the opportunity to scavenge the room after a battle, you cannot backtrack to the previous room (which is always inexplicably locked behind you) and you are CONSTANTLY nagged every five seconds to proceed forward, either by one of Max's allies or Max himself. He'll say to himself, "I had no time to admire the scenery, I had to move forward," as if he's in a rush to finish his own story. I suppose he needs to make time for more compelling details in his storytelling such as "there was a security door across the hall" or some contextual remark on every bottle of pills that he finds.

The general flow of the game, as you may have guessed, between all the cutscenes is just shooting gallery after shooting gallery. In many a cutscene you have the dubious privilege of watching Max bumble his way into a room, alerting the entire mob, and spoiling what would have been a perfectly good sneak attack. And after the game spends most of its time yanking you forward against your will, in other chapters you will be forced to slowly walk or stagger drunk or wounded through the level for ten minutes, unable to actually do anything useful. It absolutely refuses to let you play at your own pace.

But that's just the story mode -- if you want to just shoot stuff in combat scenarios without all the talky talk then surely Arcade mode is where it's at... right? Ehhh, no. The only difference Arcade mode has is that it removes the *skippable* cutscenes from the game, which there weren't that many of to begin with. Wonderful. And it gives you a score at the end of the chapter, with none of the instant gratification the game so callously denies you.

An extremely complex strategy game that sucks you in with its mesmerizing depth and unregulated pacing. It may seem overwhelming at first but you will find yourself glued to this game for hours while surrendering former real-world provisions such as food and sleep. The only major shortcoming this game has is the AI, which is often irrational at best and stupid at worst. The game clearly favors war over diplomacy, but regardless there is more than enough strategy to last you for hundreds of hours.