Recent reviews by рмн

Buy it. Play it.

It's a good remake, though I wouldn't approve some of the overboarding praise in this area.
A Remake does need to be measured with the Original, and most of the Improvements are due to time: It's not 1998 anymore and PC's manage a lot more. The Crowbar Team definitely did a very good job porting old levels into a new engine. But it still has shortcomings, especially in the areas where the Crowbar developers made own choices.

Graphics:
The graphics are a huge improvement, though this is expected from a remake 20 years later. Still, it's top-notch! The familiar scenes are easily recognizable and they do a really good job at connecting player and environment. At some levels, they definitely made it easier to recognize what you actually have to do and/or where you have to go (that's not just a plus! See comment below!).
Still, there are constant crashes on my PC, which may be due to graphics bugs. I can't pinpoint it, but after some cutscenes, the game just shuts down without notice. Right now, I can't finish the game because in Interloper, a bug causes the game to immediately crash after loading a savefile. Guess I'll have to take an older one.

Sound:
While the sound of the old game was revolutionary, this soundtrack matches the awe even considering the newer release. It's a great piece of work, but at the same time a double-edged sword: It takes you out of the game and gives you a rather cinematic feeling. Half-Life is a prime example of immersion due to their refusal of cutscenes, a plausible in-game HUD (HEV-suit) and so on. BM successfully uses these elements and sometimes even improve them (e.g. HUD by HEV-suit is fantastically explained and used). This is how you make a player become Gordon Freeman!
The music used to be very short in HL, and that was important: It was used sparingly and with short soundbits to not throw you out of the game. BM uses whole songs, and while the songs itself are great and represent the situation, they cross the critical point to a cinematic. I'd rather have short bits of the soundtrack and the whole tracks as DLC.

Gameplay:
I think you can't improve the HL gameplay, and at times I angrily thought "This would have never happened in HL!". Prop Overload, invisible edges etc. cause the Source Engine to make crappy decisions, but that's basically a given in it. Prop handling was quite well though, but ladders are completely broken and desperately need a patch. While I accept no fast climb, you can't jump off ladders. If there's a ladder you have to climb and then jump off to a catwalk, it may help to atually jump off the ladder and not just fall down.

Story:
HL (esp. 1 and 2) have impeccable stories if you actually care for them. The casual may just run through halls and ignore the environment, but if you actually care you will realize the world-building wraps around a very carefully chosen story which gives a coherent view on BMRF and their... "collaborators" in government, Marines, Black Ops etc. in HL1. The whole world after the Combine Invasion in HL2 is just marvelous: a dystopian world with both Brave New World and 1984 elements. Considering the time those games were created, I don't think we will see a better job at convoluting Gameplay, Game Environment and Storytelling. Ever.
And this is the point where I would actually see a rather big weakness in BM. While they used several elements in BMRF-Levels to actually augment the narrative we know due to the releases of the HL-series, it became apparent in Xen that creating a Story on their own is another task. I'd like to expand on that in a comment down below due to text limit.

All in all, it’s a good remake with some problems… if your standard is a Valve-made game.

Must have.

This is one for everyone who does not flinch of using weapons in a PC game and thinks your experience does not depend upon graphics. It's hard to value it now, because the whole industry adapted to this title as soon as it came out. This is no exaggeration. Half-Life defined the new normal going into this millennia in basically any concept for and aspect of PC games.

TL;DR: buy it for console or on DVD, don't update anything they ask you to that is not necessary to start the game.

First things first, this is the last Assassins Creed game I played with some joy. I played it upon release and though it already had a few issues, it was a deserving end to the Ezio saga, especially the storytelling is A+ after the illogical Lucy fiasco in Brotherhood. This game nontheless is a protoype of missed opportunities in so many dimensions I will omit at least a handful.


Why not buy a polished, updated version?

The bugs on PC are frustrating and caused me much googling to solve most of them and it is said many console bugs came with updates aswell. I have an Intel iX processor which is known to not mix with this game at all. Namely: Graphic bugs, game crashes (sometimes at a certain FRAME!), in addition there are tremendous gameplay and achievement bugs.

I write some SOLUTIONS that mostly worked for me (or are said to have worked for others) to be able to even finish the game:
1. Delete file systemdetection.dll (sometimes systemdetection_(NUMBER).dll) in your game folder, that is PARTITION: -> ... -> steam -> steamapps -> common -> Assassin's Creed Revelations. This removes the FLICKERING BUG and is an official solution by Ubisoft (YES, instead of removing it from their file list if you synchronize game and system files or cut all ties to ingame requests they rather see you delete it manually)
2. There is a very well-known bug which causes your game to crash at a certain frame (YES, as in frame after a mission checkpoint) in missions. A frequent location for this is one of Altair's memories (Escape from Masyaf) and the killing of the compagnion of Manuel Palaiologos, Shahkulu. Ironically, this happens with modern processors as their multi-core processing is apparently not supported by ACR. The workaround is easy to execute, but very nasty: You have to disable the possibility for multiple cores to work. How do you do this? By putting your game on one (!!) single core. In Windows, you achieve this by Ctrl-Alt-Del -> Details -> ACRSP -> Set affinity (?) -> Uncheck all boxes but one (e.g. CPU0). To see why this is nasty, reutrn to the game. I tried using less cores (but still more than one), but it didn't work for me. Maybe the sun shines on you instead, so give it a try. Return to all cores after the scene where the game crashed. Some said they had to finish the whole mission but IIRC I could return to full core allocation just after the scene and had no further issues.
3. In some Piri Reis missions your bomb cursor locks onto some stuff it shouldn't, but you cannot change the trajectory of your bomb to the intended target. In that case, enhance your sensitivity of the mouse and/or wobble around with your mouse as fast as you can. After some tries, this usually un-locks the target. Luckily, I didn't encounter this bug at a mission where you have to throw them quickly as it would have been a lottery. It seems this stems from a too high set limit in acceleration to unlock automatically, so maybe just low-sens players will experience this.
4. There is a WELL KNOWN ISSUE (recognize the motive?) with achievements in this game. At least 3 achievments are said to be not synchronized between game and Uplay (or Ubisoft Connect as it is now called). That is at least the "Capped" achievement, as I witness it first-hand. Ingame they tend to be unlockable but you cannot see them in your Account as unlocked. Apparently there is neither a check-up for the ingame value of the achievement in Ubisoft Connect nor even an ingame-script to update the value if changed ingame, as I was online when I succeeded (twice!)! This is programming 101 (if-request) and a fix for that could have been done within 10 minutes after noticing.
5. Even funnier is that an early "update" managed to make it seemingly impossible to finish the bomb sidequests, as one quest is to forge any bomb effect at least twice. Believe me, I tried everything I read on the internet yet still no success. Some say you should complete it ASAP (Sequence 3, Mission 5), as it only becomes impossible when you finish a certain sequence. If it is true or not I can't tell as I witnessed this bug after I finished the whole game (again). Yet so it's impossible for me to get a true 100% synch.
6. Even WORSE then not being able to finish something is finishing it, but not get recognized with it. Remeber the "Capped"-Bug from 4? Well the last additional DNA sequence basically is the traditional "get all treasures/flags/viewpoints/yadda". I finished all of them as the single DNA molecules are listed as "100%" (filled square), yet the WHOLE sequence is listed as "incomplete" (empty square). I have no idea how that is even possible to glitch. It is again just a simple if-request, consisting of 2 lines (if DNA molecule S1,...,S5 are synchronized, then set the whole sequence as synchronized)! This is utterly comedic even for someone who only had programming in basic math lectures in college.

Think this is all? Think again... There are several more issues like
* Sound bugs (infinite loops of SFX, which really enerved me at one point as it was a siging loop which I thought was supposed to go throughout the whole game). You get them away by restarting the game.
* AI bugs (especially with allies it can be painful but also opponents who need to be killed for the next checkpoint running away into the sunset while chasing them causes desynchronization as you left your spot). You can only solve them by restarting the mission or sometimes the whole game, e.g. if the recruit peasants sidequests does not wait for you to arrive to trigger.
* Absurd errors in damage calculation (like if an opponent is on the edge of some apron, he may not be harmed by anything at all, sometimes rendering the whole platoon invincible). Ignore or restart mission.
* Prop bugs. Ignore
* invisible walls all around the world which didn't cause an out of world experience for me but pinpoint the sloppy work. Ignore.

It looks like this game was released without any serious beta testing. Ironically when the game was released I did not notice so many errors and I'm quite positive I would have noticed them back then. So maybe the "fixes" this game has experienced over the years made the game actually worse. And some of them seem to be really sloppy work that should not occur with simple scripts and triggers, e.g. waymarks and movement limitation for opponents or automatic double-elimination when close enough to two opponents (YES, with a double-blade it still often is a coinflip if you kill both opponents or just one. That was not an issue in the other Ezio games for me).

After all that, why do I still recommend this game (though I would most likely sign all the negative feedback published)? Because this game is story-wise impeccable. If you had the other games, the great storytelling will let you see above all these egregious mistakes the programmers did. In it culminate both the Ezio and the Altair saga in a wonderful athmospheric soundtrack by Jesper Kyd et al. I would LOVE to see a worthy remake of this game, as the Ezio Collection seems to be a simple port and not a true remake, but well... Ubisoft dropped the ball so many times I am not positive on that. Maybe in some distant future an independant publisher gets the chance to fix what Ubisoft has broken.

SHORT: To me, all Assassins Creed Game up to Revelations should be considered for a Videogame Hall of Fame. Up until today when I have some free weeks I play them chronologically.
____________

I remember Assassins Creed II being criticized very harshly when it initially was presented - the historical Assassins were not operating in the 15th century so it looked like a desperate attempt to create an Assassins Creed franchise by randomly travelling through the eras, constructing an infinite timespan of fights between Assassins and Templars. And they basically did.
But Assassins Creed II should not be reduced to that. Assassins Creed I had an open ending in the present storyline and left potential in the Altair storyline (which was used in Assassins Creed Revelations) which basically went more into the scope with the Ezio Saga. It may have been important to find a new era to keep the game fresh and not seem like a sequel. And boy did they not disappoint.

Assassins Creed I was considered a breakthrough in gameplay mechanics, especially being open-world in big cities and landscape without constant reloading while still managing to work on modest PC's when it was released. ACII builds upon that, and though there are not much notable eye-catching upgrades in gameplay, it can be considered a big brother of the first game, as it finally allows swimming and adds more kinds of missions (which was the biggest critique on ACI: having repetitive missions). To me, they rather added quantity instead quality of missions, but that is a nuance (I'd rather see different environments and opponent behaviours than having 8 repetitive game modes instead of 6). I think they upgraded that nicely in the next Ezio games though (e.g. the "Assassination" missions in ACB).
The graphics (considering time of release) impress again like in ACI, especially with repeating the "one world one load"-concept, renewing the world constantly without loading screens if not engaged in missions. The ambiente also is marvelling, offering immersion into the renaissance life. They also included a ridiculous database for historic cities like Florence, Monteriggioni and Venezia. Just for that work, they should be lauded and it was continued in the next games aswell.

The Story plays in Italy of the 15th century, beginning with the (historical) event of the Pazzi conspiracy against the Medici in Firenze, or rather the build-up to it and ends with (historical) Pope Alexander XI. So again, they were "inspired by historical events", as the intro suggests.
The story of Ezio (past timeline) is coherent, though it is linear (which makes sense as you RELIVE a life). In comparison to ACI, the past, but also present story is way more black and white, with the main progtagonist of ACII (Ezio) obviously being a prototype protagonist, though having realistic deficies due to his young age, which was thematized in the next games and the Templars being way more villainous. Desmond (protagonist of prestent timeline) also evolves into a fighter for justice and freedom,
As a contrast: in ACI Altair initially was not truly likeable (he broke all 3 rules of Assassins in the first mission) and the further you progressed in the game, the more you asked yourself if he was on the good or the bad side (though Altair did aswell). And Desmond was not interested in being an Assassin at all. Though I heard a many people calling ACI "confusing", so it may have been done to please the audience in having people to easily like and dislike. So in that regard, I consider ACII to be the regressing, or rather ACI standing out. In detail though, it offers plenty of great moments, especially with Leonardo da Vinci and a thief called Rosa (whose voice actor died shortly after the release of the game, which resulted in a modified story in ACB) and the story is very catchy. In the present timeline, not much happens if you ignore the presentation of "your" assassin squad, though they keep to be relevant the next games. The "Bleeding effect" gives a great option to connect present and past timeline(s), as Desmond "learns" from his ancestors while being in the Animus (the device to relive the ancestors memories).

You can easily play 20+ hours in this game, building up an economy and collecting weapons/art so if you need a game to get a (long) weekend by, this absolutely should be on your list, as you can quickly accomplish all missions and quit the game, or complete sidequests in of after the main story. In general, as written above, the Ezio and Altair-Saga are must-have to me. For people who don't want the much story and more action there's more than enough weaponries to master to get the ultimate killstreak (though ACB may offer more options in that). It's also a game that can easily be replayed at a later time and still offer much fun and new insights, especially if you play the other games aswell.

Just as hinted all over this review, I'd suggest buying ACI to ACIII (Steam-Sale?) and playing chronologically to get into the whole game concept and the Desmond-Storyline, even though there is a brief intro summarizing the story of ACI: ACI was a revolution of gaming and in itself is a great weekend for many kinds of gamers: Binge-Player, Exploration gamers, Storyline-freaks, you name it. I think most people may also like ACIII, though I never liked the concept so I stayed with watching Walkthroughs.

This game is a wonderful "open-world" Jump'n'Run. Short speaking: instead of "jumping" per se you are in the outter space, you you bascially turn upside down everytime. he "open-World" is not that open, but unlike Mario games you have a big, big stage instead of many small levels.

I like the conecept because it's a mixture of classic Jump'n'Run with some puzzle-esque elements. You don't always know where you have to go or what to do, so sometimes you need fast reactions, the next hurdle you have to coordinate your movement simultaneously. The next may be a frustrating long passage you have to try over and over and over again, but when you beat it, you fell like the man (you actually are). All in all, you can solve the game with all extras in aout 20 hours.

So in short this Jump'n'Run game has a nice concept, a "special" soundtrack (i like it) and a few hours of fun. If it's below 5€, it's worth a try if you like Jump'n'Runs. If it's below 3€, you cannot do too much wrong.

Out of the GTA saga this one stuck with me. A friend of mine "forced" me to buy it to play the story and SA:MP. Though the latter didn't hold on very long I still love playing the storyline.


The game itself may not be the newest, but I'm no graphics addict. You understand every model/prop/entity in this game, so I'm completely fine.

The storyline is addictive. You get thrown in the cold water and slowly but surely make your way from a buster to an OG. Maybe I should sue Rockstar for copying my life #jk.

The open world is fueled with supplementary content in a way I have only witnessed in Half-Life. The creators really went into detail with this game. You can easily spend 150 hours playing this game and still explore new minigames/sidestories.

Last but not least: The radio contains in my eyes the best choice of music and funny moderators. Sadly, some of the songs in the original game do not play in this version. But well, this won't make this game bad. For everyone is a channel to listen to. And if necessary, you just make your own radio channel.

For that low price and hype around the newer GTA's this game should def. get a bit more love. I played Vice City and GTA III and didn't like the games. San Andreas immediately addicted me, and for a low price it's a can't-do-anything-wrong-buy.

It's not really a game for me to play "competitively", as I can't find any orientation after the first levels (many portals, gravity-switchs, side-switchs, bouncers and so on in a very short amount of time). It's just too quick and messy for my slow brain...

BUT!!
This is a great concept and was done really well. I highly recommend at least trying it (demo/friend) to see if you like the game and be aware that the first levels should be considered "super-easy++++". If you enjoy working on the same puzzle over and over and over to finally beat it, and have a faible for "beats" (yeah, a weak joke) as many levels invite you to play/jump a beat, this game should addict to you.


On my behalf, I just download the easy parcours and have a lot of fun playing them (even some levels declared as "easy" are not easy at all). In the difficult tracks you have to train a lot I guess and need an A+ performance to complete it. But it's a game which has few success moments, but as you clearly see what you accomplished, you feel way better than in the easy puzzle games nowadays. You should just check if this is a puzzle you enjoy solving.

Great Nostalgia, as I played the original game ~2000 when I was a kid. If you already played this game, you can't do much wrong buying it again, it contains both campaigns (The Shattered Kingdom [TSK] & The Peasants Rebellion [TPR]) which should take ~50hrs of raw speedrunning if you still know the concept of the game.

There is a problem though: This is NOT the original game from 2000! It's a remake with a hell of new bugs and changes (esp. if you played TSK and didn't own the Gold Edition)


Some things I noticed:
Opposite AI is waaaaaay worse than the original game (only TSK). E.g. senseless re-adjusting of the forces which is an invitation to lure them out with an archer without much trouble. They once didn't attack for 30 seconds after my archer hit them and just ran one by one in their death. Then the next army and so on. I killed about 50 Units and didn't lose a single Platoon of guys.

It's not just more buggy, the AI seems to be more passive than it used to be. I remembered some TSK missions - in Mission 4, they used to have a really vicious timing-attack pressuring a small opening in the mountains if you stood too passive and just tried to eco. The chevalry didn't even move a single feet/hoof in this remake. So lets say you have very much time just building your economy, which you didn't have in the original game and made it kinda tricky to balance economy and army.

Another (quite annoying) bug is that - if you build the Town Hall - mercenaries kinda freeze the game (EDIT: Vehicle Workshop does aswell). Commands are delayed by ~5 seconds, which can cause big frustration in a combat. So I recommend playing TSK missions without building the mercenary camp, though the units are in some mission very useful.

On the other hand, they didn't fix a giant bug concerning siege: if you click in a good rhythm at a building to attack, you need about 50% of the time to destroy it. I found it out by accident in the old game and it's a really abusive thing, especially with the dumb AI that does not move its units for a long time. In one mission i just sneaked a platoon behind the lines and used that - If you split your original forces the mission would have needed maybe 10 minutes instead of 2 hours.


Now while this may sound really bad, you can still play the game and have lots of fun. But you have to be your own judge: If you abuse the mistakes in the game it's a boring, buggy Settlers-spin-off. If you play honest some missions still are kinda tricky. The story is great, the games brings many old feelings and the music still is nice (though not the same as in the original game, which I liked more).


For under 5€ definetely a must-have!