Recent reviews by ExileNZ

YOU CAN BODYSLAM A HELICOPTER.

That's the review.

Go play it.

A surprisingly intricate and well-made game, and hard as balls when you crank the difficulty up.
A huge arsenal of weapons and upgrades make you feel like a killing machine as you plough your way through the Citadel, but the enemies will remind you that you're only made of squishy flesh yourself - you have a MAXIMUM of 30 health, so every bullet hurts.
Not for the faint of heart - every kill can get super gory and you're killing anime waifus instead of monsters.

My only disappointment with Ys Origin is that it was my first Ys game and nothing has matched it since.
Don't get me wrong, I like the others well enough, but Origin was a fantastic setup for the rest of the series.
It helps that the characters play very differently and their stories all tell us different things about the world and the people in it - this game got me more invested in them than the rest put together.

Dagon was the first Lovecraft story I ever read, and it's marked me more than any other.

This little point-and-click game is, by design, incredibly restrictive but also a near-perfect retelling of Lovecraft's narrative. It also does a good job of reminding us how much freedom we really have in other games, when the story here really is railroaded.

If you want to play the detective there are other games (and other Lovecraft games) out there, but if you want a short and beautiful look at the story that started it all, look no further than Dagon.

Scorn is, as it turns out, appropriately named.
Part H.R. Giger, part splatterhouse, and part I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, Scorn sets out to tell a simple story whose horizons expand as you play but which is told surprisingly well without a single word of dialogue. This of course means you get most of it through environmental story telling, but also through a certain amount of body horror.

Scorn is slow-paced, unfairly hard at times, mean-spirited and frequently disgusting, but it has a strange beauty to it which I'm glad I got to experience.

The store page says to explore and soak up the ambience, and they are not kidding - this game is a *mood*.

Or actually several moods. It may also be an analogy for someone losing their mind? Look, the imagery is pretty vivid but it's not very explicit about what the message is, so just run around and soak up the atmosphere, because that's what this game does best.

It also has a few fun Easter eggs, some of which may be metaphors for depression, but that just comes with the territory.

The game took me about six hours to complete and I don't feel any of that time was wasted, though some levels are definitely a test of patience.

The game is presently free, and definitely worth at least a try at that price.

Severed Steel is something I've been on board with with since the demo. The premise is simple, the dev is cool and the gameplay is tight - mostly.

Something unique to my current version is a number of occasions where weapons and abilities simply haven't fired, and in a game this heavily tied to twitch reponses that's often a death sentence. It could just be a problem with my mouse driver but I haven't noticed it elsewhere.

In any case, I still give this game a hearty recommend, since I've still made it to the last level and what a variety of levels there is! Some of it is more story related, some of it is weird and creepy (START. THE. RELAXATION. PROCESS.) and some of it is just balls-to-the-wall weird fun which requires no justification. There's train levels, scaling buildings, a disco fight, a giant mech boss and a garden hedge maze you can burn through with a flame-thrower.

At the very least, grab the demo, give it a whirl, and blow up some walls to the dulcet tones of that bangin' soundtrack.

"What if Warframe was a 2D platformer?"

Sold.

Technically a sequel to the books, I gladly recommend this game with one caveat : the early game is LONG.
The prologue is fine, the first village is a great introduction to the world and the people in it, then they send you to a big city for more or less the rest of the game. The city itself is fine and the story keeps a good pace after that.
But before that, you have to get inside, and that single chapter is about as long as the rest of the game put together.
In one chapter you explore the entire countryside surrounding the city, plus the nearby swamp, plus a famous lake, plus a bunch of other places, and that would be fine if any of it was optional, but you HAVE to grind your way through every last area (with loading zones aplenty but no fast travel) so you can solve ten quests to get ten magic keys to open a stupid door so you can get inside the city.
Not the door to the city, mind, just "a door" in the middle of the swamp, so you can make the story progress and THEN go into the city.
If you can get past that one excruciating hurdle then the rest of the game is a blast. It plays well on the moral ambiguity and it more forces you to make choices you can live with, rather than the "right" ones. The story itself is easy enough to follow but it has some interesting twists and turns without overdoing it. There are apparently even some choices which carry over into Witcher 2, though your choice of romantic partner isn't one of them (is it going to be Triss, or is it going to be Whatshername Neverseenagain? You decide)
People moan about the combat system but honestly it's fine. Can you hit a different button for light enemies, heavy enemies and crowds of weak mobs? Then you'll be fine.

Having finally got around to playing Black Mesa, I now understand when people say "Play it AFTER the original, not INSTEAD of the original". For the most part it is indeed a larger and prettier version of Half-Life, but some parts feel... not quite right...
I have no complaints about the new alien architecture (old Xen was always the weakest link in the original) but some of the changes within Black Mesa itself have fundamentally changed the gameplay of certain levels. More importantly, in most areas the enemies know where you are at all times and don't even pretend otherwise. I was able to clear out an entire topside encounter by triggering a tank and then sneaking around underneith the battlefield - the tank never stopped firing, so as its turret followed my every movement underground it wiped out all the soldiers on the way past. That was a fairly unique example but the soldiers frequently yell "I think I got him!" when you think you're sneaking up on them, and it's pretty jarring.

All that said, there are some really awesome ideas in here, mostly well-executed, and the soundtrack has some pretty exceptional pieces, especially once you get to Xen.

Sadly it does feel a little drawn out, and while the original was a relatively tight and polished experience, Black Mesa still has a few too many sections that feel like they drag on too long. To be fair though, quite a few of the parts in the original that dragged on too long or just felt wrong have been removed, usually replaced by something more creative or in some cases extremely streamlined. The wonky pit under the Tentacle that kills you on the toss of a coin? Gone. The endless tripmine puzzles topside? There's just the one now. The rather underwhelming final boss fight? Replaced or rather transformed into some really quite "whelming".

Overall, definitely worth your time as an homage to the original. It probably won't replace it, but it's clear a lot of love went into this and I'm curious to see what this team could come up with if they worked on their own IP.