Recent reviews by fw190a8

After playing 1979 Revolution: Black Friday I was looking forward to seeing more of what Iran has to offer. This was a terrible disappointment.

The game's graphics are very much stuck in the past, with poor textures, poor lighting effects, and very poor models and animation. The menus look awful and are hard to use.

The main gripe is that this game has such poor translations that it's hard to understand. It needs a proper translator to go through all the on-screen text, and make sorely needed improvements. It's not like the text needs to be perfect, but this is so far off the scale that it's funny for about a minute, then makes for a really poor experience.

The setting for the game, the 1953 overthrow of democratically elected Mosaddegh for Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, is almost perfect for a game: it's little known outside the Middle East, and reeks of UK and US involvement in foreign politics.

Unfortunately, this game is quite a disservice to this period of history, and is almost unplayable. It's such a shame because where else can you play a video game centred around the events of the 1953 Iranian coup?

A return to the classic XCOM formula. Where the newer XCOM games have dumbed down and simplified the gameplay, this is the true sequel to those games.

While Loadout is a decent enough attempt at a free-to-play shooter, and some have described the business model as "fair", preventing people from buying better guns with real cash, it suffers from one very large problem: pretty much everyone in the game already has better stuff than you.

There are a million ways to customise your weapon, or a billion. Maybe it's a trillion. Problem is, very few of these are very useful, and it's impossible to deal enough damage to kill another player who has been playing for more than a few days. Nearly every other player in the game has massively powerful one-hit-to-kill guns, so unless you can sneak up and inflict a lot of damage very quickly, you're out of luck.

The question really is: what's the incentive to play when you start at the bottom and you're outclassed at every stage of the game? The game makes no perceivable effort to matchmake you with others of similar progression, so almost every game involves dying repeatedly to players with much more powerful weapons, regardless of your own skill.

This is a real waste of potential in what could have been a rather enjoyable game. Perhaps with a fair matchmaking system or some kind of points-buy weapon system, newer players would have more of a chance, and might actually have some fun instead of being endlessly frustrated.

Mario Kart on PC, with real car licenses!

An excellent re-invention of the FPS puzzler with less shooting and more atmosphere.