Recent reviews by Alpaps

I AM DRATULA

I lika to builda da bridges and da buildings and pour CONCRETE everywhere : D

Home Invasion, releasing in mid 2024, is Void Interactive's first DLC to their game Ready or Not. Its aight.

Taking place during a major hurricane soon after the events of the Main Campaign, Los Suenos is in even more chaos than it normally is. Home Invasion includes Three new Level in a loosely connected story.

The first level Dorms takes place in an abandoned college Dorm that's been over taken by Homeless residents and drug users, the building has been under LSPD's radar for a good while now but due to the rise of homeless refugees running to shelter due to the hurricane, the police department felt right to clear it out and arrest reportedly dangerous individuals hiding inside.

Overall the map is C tier in my opinion. Its an alright map, there's nothing amazing to note about it and it plays decently. I will say it utilizes the maneuverability of the tweakers well with crawl spaces and cracks in walls for their to traverse. The Map also tends to run like ♥♥♥♥ even now.

The second level is Narcos, it takes place in an all too familiar neighborhood of 213 Park Homes. Except we aren't raiding houses filled with meth labs. Instead we're here to rescue an informant who has been compromised by the gang he was spying on: The Los Locos Del Pacificos, who used the chaos from the Hurricane to nab our Informant from his safehouse. Being the level with the most square footage in this DLC, you find yourself bouncing from house to house looking for the hopefully alive informant who is randomly kept around the level, taking out gang members as you traverse.

This level imo is B tier, maybe A tier. It has a unique layout and a beautiful presentation, its a fun (though at times confusing) map to play and traverse. Its imo the best mission in this DLC.

The Third and final level in the Home Invasion DLC is Lawmaker. The LSPD received word from a private security company that a panic room alarm was triggered, specifically from a house located at '155 Playa Vista Lane'. The LSPD figured out that admist the chaos of the Hurricane, a group of Eco-Terrorists broke into the building with the Family & Staff still inside. Your job is to gain entry, secure the family and their safety, and neutrilize any threats that may be present.

Lawmaker in my humble opinion is B tier, the set design and world building is fantastic and bring an interesting and topical faction into the midst of many in this game. The United Planet Front are a new addition to Ready or Not and appear in both Lawmaker and a future Dark Water DLC level. But man, this weirdly enough is like one of the easiest levels in the entire game. Enemies are usually spread too thin to be much of a threat and don't have the accuracy to back themselves up. Even so the precense of this faction and the home owner build up to one of the missions in Dark Water. Through-out the map you'll learn how this family can afford such a huge mansion. The breadwinner of the house hold is a major Oil Lobbyist, which is the reason for the UPF invading their home.

This DLC also introduces new Cosmetics for users who buy it, and they add some essentials that tbh feel like should be in the main game. Overall this is a solid DLC, though its hard to overlook the jankiness of its release, especially with its half hazard transition to Unreal Engine 5.

7/10

This game stinks honestly, I was surprised to find out I don't like playing it at all. The gameplay is weirdly enough the clunkiest in the entire series, even with yakuza 3 existing. If I could I'd give this game a sideways thumb, its generally a mid game thats carried by its moral and Character-Writing

The Story is also genuinely boring. I know a common theme with Yakuza games is that the actual plot takes a backseat to Character Writing and Development, but this is a little extreme. Yakuza 4's story is just bad but 5's is just a snoozefest. The only thing that carries it is the fantastic characters surrounding it. The inclusion of Shinada single handedly made me actually like this game and carried me into actually wanting to finish it. Shinada & the common theme of a life's dream was beautiful, actually carried this game heavy.

It look like more than a year to actually coming around to finishing it. I started in Jan 2024 and finished Feb 2025. I'm extremely happy to have finally finished off the Remastered Trilogy of games because I have almost zero intention of replaying any of them anytime soon. Yakuza 3 may have had my favorite story in the entire series but the dated gameplay is too much. Yakuza 4 has fantastic gameplay especially with the addition of Tanimura but Saejima's section is a suicide-inducing snoozefest. Also the story is hot garbage with the worst plot-twist in the entire series, which once again is carried by amazing character-writing.

Either way, Shinada is handsome and awesome and cool and epic and aweomse sauce and cool and epic and coawem awesome anegi njaejae igjah raa r ar

She Murkoffs my Trials 'till I Outlast

At the time of review, I've [STORY SPOILER] The SIRCAA Lab has exploded and all Noontide residents have returned into their brainwashed/monolithian state (Around 40 hours in) So far the story, gameplay, writing, and atmosphere are beautiful. This review is purely about the overall performance of the game and the rocky release.

For now I'm going to leave my review negative as the performance and stability is abysmal, but its to be expected of Stalker, no STALKER game has had a stable launch. I am in no way taking shots at GSC and I'm going to be extremely patient as they roll out patches and fixes, but the god awful optimization is too much for me to recommend to people with anywhere near lower than high-tier rigs. There is no reason for a game to run at an average 60-70 fps on medium with both DLSS and Frame Generation turned on.

So far amazing game, just a real rocky start, give GSC sometime and it'll be fixed right up.

Unity Asset flip game that was fun for a few months around launch, then got boring quick as the game itself never changed or got anymore interesting than it was 4 years ago. No matter how many updates they made it never made it anymore interesting. Get chased and hide while you get violently breathed on.

A much needed and deserving remake of the original Mafia game. Tommy Angelo back in the flesh with a new look. Though like all the Mafia games made by Hanger 13 (i.e. Mafia 3 and the DE remasters), it's incredibly jank and feels unfinished in some places, really feels like it needs more work on the gameplay side of things. Though they still did a great job with casting, the voice work in this game is fantastic. Tommy, Sam, and Paulie's voice actors did an amazing job portraying their characters, it had me hooked even though I've played the original. Even with all it's faults I still very much enjoyed playing the game. It's not anywhere near the likes of Mafia 2, can't top that, but it's a good remake and some of Hanger 13's best work in the Mafia franchise.

Highly recommend getting it on a sale, you won't regret it.

As I rewrite this review for the third time, I'm realizing I don't have the energy to write down all my thoughts I have about this game, and there's a lot . This has slowly but surely become one of my favorite games of all time for a numerous amount of reasons, starting from a flawed, but caring development team - to some of its unmatched atmosphere and art design.

I've been patiently waiting, watching, and observing this game get built from the ground up ever since the original reveal trailer almost as decade ago. Its been rebuilt, and remade, and redesigned so many times, but its always kept its unique style. While I wasn't a part of the cool kids club of the Supporter Edition buyers due to lack of funds during that period. I would of purchased it in an instant if I could still.

Void Interactive's decade of work has paid off massively as they've created the best tactical SWAT shooter within the past two decades (since SWAT 4 which released in 2005). While it started as a successor to SWAT 4, it quickly grew into its own thing while still embracing some traditions from its ancestors.

Its uniquely dark and almost cinematic style has quickly made itself known throughout the years, even catching wind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game journalists trying to shut it down (cough cough Kotaku cough cough). Throughout the game theres always a sense of a foreboding chill creeping down your spine with its haunting and beautiful soundtrack. Oh boy I can talk about the soundtrack for hooouuuurrsss, days maybe. I've found myself talking about it to friends on multiple occasions (don't worry I'm fun at parties). The soundtrack rarely makes you feel bad-ass or heroic, instead making you feel a deep sense of dread, or a somber sadness as you witness the horrors of the crumpling city of Los Suenous. Accompanied by world building that somehow puts SWAT 4 to shame at times, Even 300 hours in I'm still finding new clues and hints throughout the various levels and even the ever-changing police station.

Not including the two DLCs, Ready or Not's main campaign has 5 (8 if you include the Two DLCS) various story lines that slowly unfold throughout the missions:

- The War

- The Exploited

- The Left Behind

- The Decaying City

- The Abducted

While each story line has multiple missions connected to them, they aren't all in order. The story's missions are scattered between each other. One mission you'll be fighting the city's rampant drug problem, the next you'll be discovering a warm trail to a potential human trafficking ring. Be warned as this game does not hold back on its visuals and themes, they're as disgusting as they are real.

The game has a wide range of weapons, equipment, and tacticals at your disposal, allowing for many different changes and levels of experimentation to your arsenal. With that there's an in-depth character customization system with different shirts, pants, belts, vests/rigs, shoes, gloves, wrist accessories, glasses, NVGs, Gas Masks, and specialized tattoos (God I love playing dress-up). Most of these are rewards for beating the various levels with good letter-grades. There's even more customization if you play Co-oP with others, as you can chose the various (there are so many) swat models you'll encounter throughout your story mode, you also get to pick between 13 different voices (my personal favorite addition).

If there's any Digital-Photographers or cinema-nerds out there's looking at this game. You're in luck as there's even a replay system to look over your previously played matches with a free-cam, tonemapping and color values, and even FOV & depth-of-field sliders. Perfect for getting those awesome art pieces and shots for a cool edit.

I could go more in-depth about this game but as of writing this its 2 AM and I guarantee people stopped reading 3 paragraphs ago. This is truly a once in a life time game made by extremely passionate developers, and its only getting better from here.

Please support Void Interactive and purchase Ready or Not, you probably wont regret it.

(Haven't Finished the Game)

I am 119 hours into my first playthrough and I have to say so far this is one of the best games I have ever played period. The world, the writing, the characters, the gameplay are all amazing. Imo deserved GOTY 2023.