Recente recensies door Pan Filuta

I convinced my grandma to buy me this game when I was 9. At the time, it was revolutionary because you could decapitate zombies with a pitchfork and play football with their head. Thanks based grandma, better than LEGO.

Joking aside, replaying this after 20 years as a polished remaster, I'm shaking my head that we've never been able to recapture the greatness of these old shooters. The complex level design, hilarious cynical anti-hero, amazingly produced sound effects, creepy atmosphere, all comes together in such a unique package that's just pure joy to play through after a long day. This is a relic from times past, a game that would never be allowed to be made in 2021 - at least not mainstream. Kotaku would go insane. Blood is up there next to Doom and Quake as one of the best FPS ever made. But what mostly sets it apart is its unapologetic dark humour and horror aesthetic. If you haven't played it, you don't know how fun games can be - when investors and blue-haired game reviewers are taken out of the equation.

I really need to pinpoint the sound design - there's something hypnotic about the gun effects, emptying dual-wielded Tommy Gun into your 1000th cultist - who's screaming at you in some weird Latin inspired language - while this music plays in the background: https://youtu.be/RVMZzOkIfQ0. Seriously, the Tommy Gun and also the sawed-off shotgun in Blood have got to be some of my favourite weapons across all FPS ever made just because of their sound.

get your free propaganda today

What was that? You said you loved Quake 1, Heretic and Hexen? And that it's been too ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ long?
And then, I'm sure I heard you right, you said, you miss those times with pure condensed fun unapologetic atmospheric over-the-top no-BS old school games and you wish they still made those.
Well I'm glad you said all that, because, oh boy... have I got the thing for you...

If Dark Souls, Gothic and Witcher had a pleasant bukkake gang bang with a Japanese mom and no protection, thereby producing a little bastard

No one knows who's the daddy, the mug points to all of them, and a grand sense of adventure was inherited as well

Ever wanted to be an astronaut, a soldier, a scientist or a paranoid crazy person? Well come right in - System Shock 3 has it all.

No doubt heavily inspired by that Red Dwarf episode, you'll enjoy getting attacked repeatedly by a coffee mug and strangled by a sausage.

System Shock 3 is one of those games where you cannot be sure what's behind the corner. You'll have plenty of tense moments, consisting mainly of smacking everything with a wrench. You'll smack plants, chairs, rolls of toilet paper, you'll even get to smack suspiciously lying fruit. It's exciting.

If that doesn't sell you on this game, I don't know what will - System Shock 3 is everything I could have wanted and more. A worthy successor and a real immersive sim.

As tradition would have it, Bethesda completely screwed up the marketing for Arkane Studios - this game could have been big. Due to low sales, we probably won't ever get a System Shock 4. But don't get discouraged by that. I promise you lots of masochistic enjoyment and sweaty underwear. Buy it and terrorize your brain a bit. The nightmares will be worth it. As a bonus, you might even start feeling an itch to clean your apartment... for some reason, all those cups and other random items start looking very scary...

Well well... the trilogy is finished. "But it's the first game!" - correct, and I played it last. And here's why you should too.

This is the order in which I played the games in:
1) SR Dragonfall Director's Cut (human decker)
2) SR Hong Kong Extended Edition (human street samurai / shaman)
3) SR Returns (elf decker)

And this is also my final ranking. Dragonfall being absolutely amazing, Hong Kong shortly lagging behind it due to overwhelming verbosity (which is great in the 2nd half, however a bit annoying in the beginning before you get invested in the story and the characters). And then we have Returns.

Shadowrun Returns is split in 2 acts. I would say the first act is actually great. The second half however visibly loses steam and devolves into a slightly underwhelming ending. This game is quite obviously a proof of concept, which had to pave the way for the following masterpiece.

For this reason I recommend playing it last - I enjoyed it very much, but chances are I wouldn't have played the whole trilogy had I started with Returns. Dragonfall, on the other hand, made me completely obsessed, so much I started Hong Kong on the very same day I finished it.

And now - I'm thinking of getting a SNES emulator to try the 1993 Shadowrun. Yeah, this whole thing got me good. Play it, chummer.

This... is a f*cking NOVEL.

And a great one at that.

I must admit, it took me a while until I warmed up to the game. After work, the last thing I want to do is read 50 pages of text.

At first, I thought Hong Kong couldn't even hold a candle to Dragonfall. The beginning was very slow, characters seemed uninteresting, music didn't catch my ear. But - they were just getting started...

I can say now, after finally finishing this Hemingway of a game, I have rarely played anything where I'd become so invested in the characters and their stories. Amazingly written and deep, philosophical even. Post-run debates with Racter and Gaichu were my favourite and quite thought-provoking. Gobbet is really funny. Duncan is an as*hole.

I do think Dragonfall had a better atmosphere - in large part probably due to its soundtrack. However, the two games are quite hard to compare. In case I didn't make my point clear yet, Hong Kong is very text-heavy, almost like a text-based game. You spend more time reading (and, unless you're an English major, looking up words in a vocabulary) than shooting. The atmosphere is quite mystical and oppressive. On the other hand, Dragonfall had masterful writing delivered in much shorter pieces, and very strong characters with not such a depth to them. It felt much closer to a cyberpunk XCOM. And somehow, all of this kinda makes sense, given the setting of both games. You'll be able to talk your way through much of corporate-run Hong Kong - as opposed to the anarchic "Wild West" society of Dragonfall's Flux State Berlin, where it's not a bad idea to shoot before you think.

If you thought this review was too verbose, do not buy this game. Otherwise you might just enjoy it - I recommend you put all your points in Charisma and enjoy sweet-talking your way out of impossible situations. That way, you can get more of the amazing writing and less of the somewhat frustrating combat.

It's incredible, go play it.

What? You need to know more?
Well imagine you take Fallout 2 and Deus Ex, put them on top of each other and start moving them in a funny way until you see butterflies and one of them gets pregnant.
When the kid is born, make sure to get professor Planescape Torment for hardcore lessons in writing, daily.
Then to hell with it, the little bastard got too smart and also they keep yapping about anarchy and hacking, send them to a bootcamp. They'll get trained by drill sergeant XCOM.
When the kid returns home, they have PTSD and so they start getting high as kite everyday and seeing elves and dragons and sh*t...

I can't remember the last time I finished a 50-hour game in a week or so. I couldn't even sleep. And now I have a new epic soundtrack for coding, so I can start catching up with all the damn piles of work. Thanks.

Short, beautiful, tragic. Just like life. This is what they mean when they say "games can be art too".

Brothers was one of TotalBiscuit's favourite games and on his recommendation I bought it about 5 years ago. I finally got to it through my library and I enjoyed every second. Thank you TB, you're missed. But even after you're gone, your influence still has an impact on our lives.

A bit janky, granted it might just not be my cup of tea, although I do love movement based games. You might catch a whiff of Q3 Defrag and a little bit of Mirror's Edge spice here and there, but wrapped in a weird artsy indie walking simulator kind of package, with incredibly annoying characters. If I could, I would put my thumbs inside the eyes of those dumb blue Avatar aliens and squeeze all life out of them. Recommended if you're in elementary school or have an empty backlog. Not bad per se, but eh, time's a-wastin'.