Recent reviews by Autrizzm

Difficult to recommend right now. Something about the game just feels wrong, even as someone who played Tribes: Ascend casually before. Speed is fun, but skiing and shooting just don't feel very crisp -- it's hard to shake the feeling that this is a bad game wearing Tribes's skin.

Yakuza Kiwami is a remake of the first Yakuza game. It’s an open-world, minigame-packed beat-em-up where you get to play as a goody-two-shoes Yakuza. It’s a cool comfort game — it’s fun bashing through hordes of goons and solving heavy problems with your fists. The minigames are also a lot of fun, and there’s a creature comfort to blowing your money on fancy food and bars. However, it’s let down by slow, unskippable cutscenes that take themselves way too seriously, and the Murakami-esque little girl character. Combat is also a bit of a question-mark for me. After playing Fromsoft games, it’s difficult to ignore how scuffed the difficulty curve of the game is. Downtown, you are constantly harassed by trash mobs that you can button-mash through, while harder enemies are rare, but require appropriate use of your moveset — a moveset that you have to grind to acquire pieces of. This creates an unpleasant juxtaposition of feeling like you can mindlessly plow through most enemies but must grind to deal with the harder ones, neither of which feel like they’re driven by player skill. In the end, I dumped most of my skill points into health and damage, leaning on HP regeneration powerups and cheesy amounts of kiting to get through most of the boss fights. I would have more patience for this if the game felt better, but enough parts of the game felt dated that I just wanted to get it over with and move on.

Overall, it’s a fun piece of history but the more modern entries are probably a better bet.

A solid boomer shooter, especially on higher difficulties (my first playthrough was on Ultraviolence). Doom is about frantically keeping up momentum and switching to the right tool for the job: With 8 weapons (each with 2 unlockable alternate fire modes), 3 types of grenades, the BFG, your chainsaw, and your bare hands, you always have a choice to make.

The sci-fi-base-taken-over-by-hell aesthetic is also on point, backed up by Mick Gordon's dynamic soundtrack. That rare attention to detail is vital to the vibe of the game, and makes for a seamless score that keeps up with the lulls and crescendos of your fights.

My one gripe is how much of the game's progression (weapon upgrade points, weapon mastery, rune upgrades) is locked behind contrived secrets and challenges. Considering how well the rest of the game flows, it's unfortunate how arbitrary and flow-breaking most of these things are. I can forgive things like mega healths / big armors / OG Doom levers being tucked away in weird but memorable spots -- part of a Nightmare difficulty run just becomes knowing what's where. But the progression challenges are annoying, encouraging you to farm encounters for safe setups for their contrived conditions.

A pretty, contemplative hunting game. I think this is a good hunting/tracking game, but I also think I don't like hunting deer very much.

I think this game gave me RSI

Hey, it's Worms. It's classic. Good in 4 player matches. I don't like playing this with 3, however.

This game oozes with cyberpunk style but doesn't stick the landing. That mask is so cool that showing up in the trailer the way it did probably single-handedly sold me on the game. But combat rewards incessant, almost aimless dashing over all other playstyles, which robs fights of their weight. It's also unclear what the game is trying to say about society, although that's honestly a minor gripe for a game this combat-focused.

An extremely solid modern bullet-hell shooter with co-op support. Everything is well done from the hammed-up music and dialogue to the spritework and patterns. This was my introduction to the genre and I still look back fondly on putting this up on the projectors in college.

An improvement over Deus Ex: Human Revolution graphically and mechanically, but not narratively. Like most cyberpunk games, Mankind Divided struggles with its politics -- what is it trying to say? Usually, the problem is that Cyberpunk games run with a high school-level understanding of the world or just passively avoid engaging with their themes. Impressively, MD doesn't actually get far enough for you to be able to watch it do either, because it trips over itself with confusing mixed messages like the notorious "Aug Rights Matter", which even ChatGPT would probably raise an eyebrow at. It's so bad that I can fix that one here and now: Stock Lives Matter. All of the oppression nonsense in the plot would actually be consistent if it's people who can afford augmentations dunking on the rest of society, with the sh*t cherry on top being that they get dunked on by the puppet-masters themselves with, I dunno, a Deus Ex classic like another virus or something (Eidos hire me). As one final flourish, the sh*t cherry on top for us is that the story just ends on an abrupt cliffhanger that was meant to segue into the next game (which was never made).

Also, skip Breach mode -- it was a lame minimum-effort attempt to turn MD into a live service game that isn't only unfun, but actually wears out the game's mechanics to the point where I got sick of the game for a while after clearing it for the achievements, even with a strategy for minimizing the amount of time I spent in it.

But do I love the game anyways? Yeah, I do. Despite all of this nonsense, this world is even more fleshed out than Cyberpunk's at times, a game that came out four years later. It's fundamentally fun to burglarize military bases. It's fundamentally fun to Adam Jensen all over hapless troops with surprise military-grade everything when you finally mess up. It's fundamentally fun to read people's emails. My eyes lit up when I punched 0451 for the first time. THIS IS A CYBERPUNK IMMERSIVE SIM bayBEE. The mechanics and the environment are like HR's, but newer and better.

So I'm still out here wishing I had an Errolson Hugh trenchcoat. And I hope they make another one.

Advance Wars style combat but with a puzzly roguelite twist. Into the Breach might have the best turn-based combat of any game I've ever played.