Recent reviews by Doogie2K

This game has absolutely taken my friend group by storm. The drip feed of objectives and new ideas which -- after a brief tutorial -- doesn't rely on handholding is perfect for all us neurodivergent goobers.

I accumulated these 17 hours in like three nights, to give you an idea.

What a breath of fresh air: bright, colourful, speedy, and creative. The weapons, while obviously having some analogues in regular first-person shooters (e.g., the planet-launching claw as a rocket launcher), they all have unique looks and feels, and all have different strengths against different types of enemies that, if you were perhaps more patient and observant than I was, you could really use to your advantage. The game is beautiful (especially once you remember to turn on the pretties, though I was still enjoying the more retro-styled visuals through the first two-thirds), and culminates in some truly mind-♥♥♥♥♥ levels are both a joy to play and a joy to look at. The enemy design -- with each of the seven episodes having a fully unique complement of enemies -- is second to none in the modern retro shooters I've played to date. Hell, even the first-person platforming is fun, and that's rare. (Water bubble swim-platforming is my new favourite thing.)

The screenshots and teaser text try to evoke Heretic, but honestly, Heretic was a boring "Doom clone" in the most pejorative sense: this brings in the very best elements of shooter design from all across the 1990s and modernizes the look and feel with unique and accomplished style. Cannot recommend this highly enough.

I'm kind of annoyed I didn't enjoy this game, quite frankly, because nearly everyone else I know who's into retro shooters absolutely loves it. I just found it dark, muddy, hard to see and unpleasant to look at, and on top of that, it was only sometimes fun to play. At its peak, there were some absolutely stupendous encounters, and the jump pads around certain levels made movement a joy; at its worst (i.e., the point where I said "screw this" and uninstalled), we had the introduction of a stealth mechanic.

I tried several times to get into Dusk. Really, I did. It just did not click with me, and -- a handful of levels aside -- made me wish I was playing Quake instead.

I have mixed feelings about AOE 1 DE. On the one hand, it absolutely looks like you might have wanted it to in your mind's eye 25 years ago when Age of Empires came out, with a (small) number of tweaks to QOL (I think the reseed farms button is new) while still being mostly faithful to the old game. It includes all of the original game, Rise of Rome, and two reworked campaigns from the demo, and all the associated civs for online and comp-stomp play, giving it a fair bit of meat for your money. I got to see a lot of stuff I'd never seen before, experience a lot of stuff I'd never experienced before. Some of the missions here are a ton of fun. (Turning Archimedes' fabled sunlight reflectors defending Syracuse into laser towers for the sake of a video game was inspired.) On the other...it is indeed faithful to the old game, kind of to a fault.

The missions here have been tweaked, remixed, and occasionally rearranged or replaced, but you still have to contend with the limitations of 1997: a low population cap, wonky AI (despite admirable efforts), and a general lack of strategic options compared to AOE 2. This results in the difficulty curve being all over the shop irrespective of which order you play campaigns or missions: one of the hardest missions in the entire game is the first Hittite scenario, which the tutorial campaign subtly points you toward at its conclusion, while the very last Rise of Rome mission chronologically (The Coming of the Huns, here remade to resemble the Catalaunian Fields scenario from AOE 2) becomes piss-easy after dealing with the early Wonder rush.

It's a fun piece of gaming history, and clearly since I saw it through to completion so I didn't *dislike* it. It's just frustrating sometimes when the old mechanics wind up not quite holding up the way your nostalgic brain wants them to.

Unique twist on the Chosen One narrative (at least in my travels), better and more flexible combat than its contemporary, Skyrim, and oozing with potential that, sadly, Curt Schilling's shenanigans never allowed to pass.

And yes, Ellen was right.

What a delightful little logic puzzle game for just a couple of dollars. It starts off with simple examples of each mechanic, then seamlessly increases the difficulty, layers mechanics together, and creates some real challenges by the end of each "chapter." My only wish is that there were more, but it's always better to have fewer, higher-quality puzzles than more mediocre ones; Matthew Brown, the creator of Hexcells, knows this, and Pony seems to know this, too. A must-have for any puzzle game fan.

To quote my fiancee: "PUNCHES! EVERYBODY GETS PUNCHES!!!"

Seriously, though. Every time we play this local multi with my friends, we get all shouty and giggly and rowdy. I don't think any of us really "get" the controls. I'm not sure if you can. I'm not sure it matters in an case. It's been a hit at all my parties, and that's good enough for me.

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is a prequel to the excellent Wolfenstein: The New Order, set days before the latter game's opening sequence, and is a standalone game done in the style of the mission-pack expansions of yesteryear. Unlike The New Order, which told a surprisingly strong story and built a well-conceived nightmare alternate history, The Old Blood has only a thin story arc stringing a series of missions together. The plot of this game isn't actually all that important - something about an old German king and the power to raise zombies under an ancient church, not unlike Return to Castle Wolfenstein, come to think of it - but it does a sufficient job of driving you forward from one Nazi-murder scenario to the next. The shooting is the star, and feels much like The New Order did, albeit without the bizarre cool future-tech that defined a lot of the action in that game. You do, however, get to pilot a loader mech with machine guns on it, so on balance, I think it works out.

The Old Blood is an entertaining romp, and I do recommend playing it, because it's a fun way to murder a whole bushel of Nazis, zombies, and Nazi zombies. It's just not essential like The New Order is.

By all rights, this game shouldn't have worked as well as it did, but here we are, one expandalone and one imminent sequel later, and Wolfenstein is a relevant franchise for the first time in nearly 15 years.

Part of what worked is, of course, the gameplay, a mix of old-school run-and-gun with more modern mechanics. You have your stealth, you have your skill unlocks, your collectibles, and so forth. But you can also drop from a ceiling vent, dual-wielding assault rifles, and rapidly mow down eight Nazi soldiers in the tight corridor of a U-boat like some alternate-1960 Terminator. Some of the collectibles you find around the world even help flesh out and humanize the bizarre world you've been dropped into, from letters home to alternate versions of familiar early-60s hits. There's even secret passages with Nazi-pilfered gold in them, an homage to the DOS classic that continues to surface in the modern Wolfenstein games despite the sheer anachronism of it.

But I think what really sets The New Order apart is its story, along with the aforementioned worldbuilding. Somehow, Machine Games have managed to thread the needle, combining the horrifyingly casual cruelty of Naziism with the sort of absurd sci-fi premise that would be impossible to take seriously if not for how straight-faced the game and characters are about it. On the one hand, you have an alternate 1960 in which the Nazis have conquered the Earth with giant robots, super soldiers in suits of armor, and a moon base complete with laser pistols, all thanks to technology stolen from an ancient, secret sect of techno-Jews. No, really, that's the best way I can describe them. On the other hand, there is an entire level set in a labour camp with a sadistic doctor nicknamed "The Knife," because he likes to torture prisoners with his knife until they bleed out or he gets bored, then casually dump them into a human abbatoir underneath his command post. And that's to say nothing of what happens to the guy you can't save at the beginning. Yeesh. The tone manages to be serious without being maudlin - though BJ's narration can occasionally be a touch overwrought - and there are moments of good humour peppered throughout, thanks in part to the side characters who populate your hidden base. There even manages to be a somewhat believable romantic link between BJ and his former nurse, who turns out to be a fair bit more than she seems.

Even if you don't have an affinity for the classic Wolfenstein games of yesteryear - even if you were put off by the flawed gem that was Raven's 2009 effort - this is a game you absolutely need to check out, if FPSes are at all your thing. At this point, it's no longer the surprise it was at release three-plus years ago, but it's still a rare, and thus worthwhile, experience.

Even after almost 20 years, the original UT remains a satisfying run-and-gun arena shooter with a ton of quirky weapons and interesting levels. There's no questioning it's harder on the eyes than its competitor from the era, Quake III, but it also had more gameplay modes, more features, and better bots than Quake III did, which is why it captured my attention in a way the admittedly purer shooting experience of Quake III never did. In addition to the bots, UT also had the better campaign mode, if for no other reason than the aforementioned variety.

The sequels certainly each had their merits - who doesn't love running people over with the absurd vehicles in 2004? - but the 1999 original will always hold a place in my heart, both for nostalgic and earnestly-held gameplay reasons.