Recent reviews by ♪ 1.2 Turbo | TheTrixxy ♪♫

This was shaping up to be one of the best 20 minute Resident Evil side games with great replay ability. I specifically grabbed RE3make to spend hundreds of hours playing this, the same way I did with Raid Modes from Revelations and other Resi side games in the past. As you can tell by my hours played.. that didn't happen with REsistance.

The 1% of the time the games works, it's awesome.. enjoy those 5 to 20 minutes.. the other 99% broken laggy, sitting in queues all day, can't team up with buddies reliably. It's also missing some, err.. like.. It has practice maps, but in practice mode there is no AI options for survivors, zombies, or masterminds. No other simulation modes, and of course no way to work on character builds and levels without multiplayer, which as noted above is broken and laggy and other problems I won't begin to mention here but are very well detailed in other reviews. It's a pity.

I cannot recommend whether to buy this or not as most people who bought RE3make got this as part of the package anyway, but regarding installing this and giving it trying it, I'll recommend against it until further word from the developers.

A potentially great game ruined by serious technical flaws.

Oef...

Good Music, good art... B.A.D gameplay. Gameplay feels very blocky: move to spot, execute command, long startup and recovery, no dash canceling etc, barely feels like a game. Enemies don't have good telegraphs: Attacks blend in with background elements, stuff is generally hard to see. Inefficient use of buttons. 5/8 buttons dedicated to item management, in a side-scrolling brawler.

If you want a good side-scroll-brawler, fork out for River City Girls, Streets of Rage, Fight'n Rage etc. If you want to support HoloX indi fangames, grab HoloCure and Idol Showdown which are both free as well.

As for this, Holo X Break, rather wait until further developments and/or improvements, or give it a pass completely.

Hidden gem, kusoge royalty.

Simultaneously well made and extremely janky, but very fun.

Many additional modes and Functioning Steam Workshop to extend the funs.

This is indeed, a game.

Buy on Sale..

Note: Skullgirls 2nd Encore has been * for suspected review tampering, both review bombing and developer/influencer manipulation.

Okay, the good

Black Dahlia is hands down one of the most interesting characters added to any fighting game.

A handful of new stage backgrounds with some new music.

UPDATED: The last balance update was.. pretty damn good. Thank you Liam and crew. Game feels a little tighter, some long standing ancient issues have been addressed, and QoL additions breath new life into the older characters.

Marie is pretty cool too.

Thank you.

The 'Not so Good'

UPDATED: Umbrella, and Annie... There has definitely been a stage since their release where these characters have been "a little overcooked" even by SG standards, but the balance team has pulled them in since then. I'm still not a fan of these two but hey.. balance is hard.

To touch on the future of this DLC pass and briefly on some of the current drama, if you're the kind of person to buy a game today and expect to enjoy it in the future ~ hhmmmm, sitting on the fence might be a good idea. External drama should never have an impact on the quality of any game, but unfortunately it does here, as new developers' personal vendettas seep into the way that this game is updated, with the player community taking the brunt of the collateral damage.

GGPO Rollback competition

Years ago I would have been one of the first people to say something like "#playskullgirls it has rollback netcode" but in today's' online FGC landscape with every other fighting game either coming out new with rollback or getting updates for rollback netcode, there is now strong competition for better online experiences out there, especially if you want to distance yourself from the current new developer drama. I myself have ended up playing more Guilty Gear Xrd, and there's a long list of other fighting games out there with rollback, see the Steam curator "Rollback Police". If you're not a FGC fanatic who buys every fighting game under the sun good or bad, and you only have a limited capacity for a decent online fighting game, I would strongly recommend looking around, regardless of how I feel over Skullgirls.

To end...

I still truly love this game and its player community. I am concerned for the future of this game as a material product, as well as the actual community of players who to this day continue to host and run tournament brackets on their own dime, or even those who just play to enjoy the game and can't be bothered with any extended FGC stuff.

I don't want to support shady developers mooching off the good will of the community. If you already own the base game and DLC pass like me.. lol enjoy what you can while you can. If you want to buy this for your friends and family to genuinely enjoy as a material product, sure, that's ok. If you do buy it, buy it on sale.

Squiggly headstones in the comments.

in bullet points...

-Solid Taiko style Rhythm game..

-Good selection of bangers..

-Great value for money, both at entry level and a very good "All the music for now and forever" DLC pack (Bonus points if you grab it on sale)

-Streamer safe mode for streamers to avoid pesky DMCA issues.

-Well curated song charts, so that there's something to play at all skill levels.

-Rankings leaderboards for the hardcore to chase or the "how the hell am I top 10 on this chart by accident?" casuals.

-Helpful community on Steam and Discord, with events, updates and error troubleshooting.

And finally,

-Toggle options for artworks and characters (if you or anyone watching isn't mature enough to handle girls or woman).. unlike Skullgirls

The tldr for this review is strong Value for Money

The Castlevania Advance Collection comes with the three GBA Castlevania games - Circle Of The Moon, Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow - as well the SNES Dracula X as a bonus.

The "Collection" itself acts as an emulator of the original games ( including all regional releases of CoTM, HoD, AoS, DX ) allowing for some quality of life additions like save states, pause/rewinds, and additional glossaries and trackers for collectables. There are also separate galleries for artworks and music for all titles included.

Each of the games included behave exactly the way the originals did. All glitches and tricks remain intact along with a few new ones introduced by the nature of the Collection's emulator. The only downside for speedrunners is that the Collection's reset function may be a little slower in execution, but at least you can now say you legitimately own these titles while you continue to grind out runs on previously accepted emulators. Win Win.

As for the actual quality of the games in this collection: While Harmony of Dissonance is often considered to be the weakest game of this batch, it still stands very strong against a lot of other indie Metroidvania titles out there. Remember that is one game in a bundle of four for the price you would have paid for that one indie Metroidvania that might not even be that good.

Again - and to close this review - I have to stress, the Value for money is strong with this one!

In brief, an almost good story, ruined by a bad game.


RECOMMENDATIONS.

First things out the way. Regardless of my recommendation of this game, I wont try stop anyone from playing this. I will however make some suggestions and point out some technical issues right at the top. Firstly, the game is UGLY, even for 2004 standards, so at least find yourself a decent ReShade setting off of Nexus Mods and do some ini tweeks and additional mods for widescreen resolutions and maybe some extra FoV. I also recommend running this game in fullscreen. This game doesn't have any borderless windowed options. You can edit an ini file to force a windowed mode but then the in game mouse cursor position will desync. This game also does the mp4 cutscene video thing every now and then but when it does so it closes the current instance of the active game to play said cutscene then reopens a new instance to pick up the "gameplay" from where it left off. This continuous recreation of new game instances will make it tricky for other applications to track the game, for example OBS game window capture or a third party borderless window application.

The game WILL crash randomly. You WILL Save/Reload a lot. The game does auto save. It does not auto save well and as such I recommend generous use of Hard Saves to lock progress and regular use of F4 (quick saves) every few minutes as failing to do so could see setbacks of hours of "gameplay".

Other enthusiasts of KOTOR2 may also recommend grabbing a "Restored Content" mod, either from the Steam Workshop, or from Nexus Mods. I'd recommend you do whatever needs to be done to make sure your first playthrough of this game is as good as it can be, because when you're done with this, I don't think you'll want to do a second playthrough - unless you're speedrunning.

ACTUAL REVIEW.

The story is okay? KOTOR2 has some takes on the force that I personally found very interesting. Without too many spoilers, your main character is an exiled Jedi who broke the code and took part in an old war and has since been cut off from the force, when all of a sudden events start spiraling to draw them back in. This time the story looks at the galaxy, Jedi, and Sith being their own, sometimes connected entities. It's more an "each person's" story then the old black and white Jedi vs Sith story. Basic Lightside V Darkside stuff is still present but not focused. If you just want to be the "get off my lawn, don't touch my ship" kinda exiled force user who either saves or dooms the galaxy along the way, you can do that.

There are still some problems I have with the writing. Companions are once again present in a KOTOR game and your main character's actions will influence and strengthen bonds or weaken bonds of your party members from romance to hate. Some of this is great. Sadly when it comes to romance, same-gender relationships are not natively present in the game (there are mods for this). Your gender choice will literally lock you out of some game content and even force some unwanted things on you for example NOT being able to flirt with Twi'lek ladies and getting stuck with a crappy doormat DM insert character as companion instead of that other much cooler Handmaiden companion ninja girl. Obviously I can imagine this could have been done intentionally to boost replayability for the sake of comparing the experiences of different playthroughs but that leads into the next problem I have with the writing of KOTOR2...

The Illusion of Choice. There are many situations in the writing of KOTOR2 where the player is presented with multiple options for a situation only for the outcome to be the same with the only real difference being a handful of darkside or lightside points. For example, villains you spare now will be killed by their superiors later, Potential allies will betray you and force your hand etc, and personally the amount of times my main character has said "I don't want to fight you" and ended up fighting and killing anyway is.. meh. Basically if the overarching narrative needs the story to go somewhere, then the story is going there regardless of your decisions. I'd rather not be given the choice in the first place. But remember this is also a video game, so if the narrative of the story wants you to play through a certain gameplay set piece, that also means that no matter what fake choices you make, you'll probably still have to do those set pieces anyway. Game also drags along and is guilty of yak shaving in a lot of places (basically doing a thing to do another thing to do another thing I forgot, but its very important that I shave this yak right now)

The gameplay sucks. I really cannot be subtle about this. First some technical things. This is D&D command and pause style RPG similar to the Bioware RPGs like the first Kotor, Icewindale, Baldurs Gate etc, but it's nowhere near as good in execution. The controls for this game look as though they were designed for console handling first with the more standard PC mouse control schemes as a second. Lol you have tank control movement, without reverse lol, and trying to click on objects and other NPCs gets a bit tricky when things are in close proximity to each other. Overall It feels very clunky and, imprecise. Like, you will literally fail to open boxes right in front of you because your character isn't at the right angle and you cant make the correct three point turn in the room to align with said box correctly, kinda clunky. The combat itself is also frustrating without the ability move and position correctly due to the movement issues above, and even though you SHOULD be able to pause and set commands to various party members to then unpause and watch your commands play out gloriously, party members kinda drop their command queues as you switch between them which can make combat encounters extremely frustrating if you need some clutch teamwork or just don't want party members to walk straight into certain death. Yes there are AI sets you can assign to party members but they are mostly useless in this regard. Oh yeah and it's based on D&D style dice rolls with huge extremes, so random thugs could go from 1 damage blaster scuffs to huge 50 damage game ending snipe shots, and likewise your carefully planned tactical attacks and combos could end up getting saved or scuffing for 1 damage nothings failing you that way too. Also unlike real D&D where the world and story continues after death, this is a video game and if you fail you must try again. So quicksave often because combat sucks. And I'm definitely not saying by extension that ALL D&D based rpgs suck, there is just something with KOTOR2 that makes the D&Dness suck hard here.

Otherwise the only real enjoyable "gameplay" in KOTOR2 is probably running between NPCs and companions to push the narrative forward through dialogue by which point this game could have been a visual novel.

In closing playing through this was a pain. The main story was just good enough to get me through that pain. But I wouldn't replay this game for the alternate story options and stuff that these kind of RPGs are known for. It just not worth the extra pain.

KOTOR2 came out in December of 2004, Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines came out before this in November of the same year, and even though that game is also a buggy crashing mess that required a fan patch to run properly today, VTMB is still an RPG cult classic masterpiece. Guild Wars would come out in 2005. So there are definitely a lot of good old western RPG options. As for Star Wars I'd lean more to the Jedi Knights series or Republic Commando.

Also KOTOR1 exists and its ok.. but yeah KOTOR2 sucks...

If you must buy this, buy it on sale for less then the price of a beer.

I am normally not a Visual Novel kinda person.. and I usually write long in depth reviews. I'm breaking that trend here.

This is the best game.. nothing more needs to be said..

TLDR: Actual good functioning stealth game..

Firstly, gotta get this out of the way: I "received this product for free" as a result of Fanatical purchase bonus. ie I bought something else and Fanatical was like "hey.. you buy here often, pick one of these 8 games" of which Shadwen looked pretty cool so.. yeah...

Shadwen.. yay!! Its a stealth game! It does all stealth game things, and like, even though when stealth sections pop up in other games they can often be annoying and frustrating, when those exact things pop up here in Shadwen they're.. perfectly fine.. like.. this game was built for stealth 100% ! The main campaign is also an escort mission from start to finish, and that's.. surprisingly fine. For the majority you take control of Shadwen and sneak your way from the city outskirts all the way to the Royal Throne Room (trust me I'm not spoiling, they'll tell you this blatantly in the first 5mins ) while the little thief girl tags along.

The gameplay feels very much like puzzle solving as you observe guard positions, patrols, room layouts, usable objects, grappling points and plot your paths through map after map. The guard AI reacts very well to things that disturb them causing them to investigate noises, darting shadows, and report the discovery of fallen comrades and raise alert levels etc, and when they catch you failure will be instant and swift. But that's ok! Because now I can talk about the one of best mechanics of this game and the main reason why this stealth game shines above most other stealth sections in other games.

Time only moves, when you move, or when you actively wait (yes there is a "wait" button). If for whatever reason you think you may have made a mistake, you can also rewind time (oh yes, there is a "rewind" button too) and when you do fail you always have the option to simply rewind to a point of your choosing before the pivotal incident that lead to your failure. With this time control mechanic you will rarely have to reload a level or a checkpoint and start a set piece over. It definitely kept me in a mindset where I was more focused on learning and solving each set piece, rather then just "whoops, I messed up, start again" - overall giving the game more flow.

Also grappling hook.. I talked a lot about puzzle solving. Spook the guards, cause mass chaos and destruction, swing across rooms and drop the "Death From Above". Kill everything from start to finish, or ghost through the whole game without a trace leaving nothing but an unbelievable spook story for that one random guard's family. When this game is played well, it looks really satisfying and awesome.

Frozenbyte did well with this. GGs.

PS: I "recommended" this only on the basis of, I may be an idiot. Oh and Laura Bailey one-liners. Please read ahead so you know what you're getting into should you decide to play.

wow.. I have fond-ish memories of this game from like 15 years ago.. and that is where I should have left it, but alas, here I am in 2021 talking about Bloodrayne 2: Terminal Cut.

Pros:

Laura Bailey yay.
Rayne's powers are well expanded from Bloodrayne1, and can lead to some cool moments.
Costumes yay.
Oh yeah and cheat codes return! look 'em up on googles and stuff.

Problems:

Okay, so unlike BR1 where the player has near full camera control, BR2 has a set camera that follows Rayne and pans to notable objects etc in addition to "some" camera control, and these two things conflict with each other VIOLENTLY. Like, have you ever had a bag thrown over your head then been led into a room and been spun around as soon as the bag is removed? That's what playing BR2 is like. You'll be minding your own business only to have the camera snap in circles and leave you severely disorientated. Anything that's bad in this game is made exponentially worse by this camera issue. It's worthy of an EPILEPSY warning. Also your movement is tied to the camera so... ... ... oquiheouehaodoafhoweuf.. fun times...

Controls are.. if you play this on KB/M you'll fair better, but on pad.. ouch. This game will use every single button on your dualshock or Xpad and it wont use them very well. Get ready to get comfortable using both DPad and both sticks very well. Now buttons can be remapped so that's not so much of an issue. The main star of the control issues revolves around Rayne's targeting system. This targeting system SUCKS and will actively attempt to kill you. It frequently targets the most inconvenient "item" in the area, and combine that with the way the camera(s) work, you'll be in for a lot of pain. You will be fighting a sub-boss, target them with intent to dodge around them, then have the camera spin and whiplash you because you targeted a barrel across the room instead, then do flip directly towards the sub-boss instead, and get bodied.

The gameplay is, meh.. The first two levels are, "yay its Rayne again in another BR game with stuffs", and then they introduce the (warning: this game is very VIOLENT) puzzle solving stuffs, and it's novel for the first few sections. Then it becomes a highly repetitive gameplay loop of run to a place, but its locked or something is in the way "oh no, how do we solve this?" and trust me its the same solution every single time of throw the meat at the thing because video games and stuff. So stuff gets old fast and the game goes from "yay BR2" to wasting your time, which means more time spent dealing with the game's camera system.

To conclude: Straight up, this game is ass, it's a meme. If you're going to dive into it you're only doing that for some of Laura Bailey's best career one-liners. Apart from that this is an experience. Actual contender for worst game ever. Pour one out for the BloodRayne IP, that they may have more cool things in the future.

BloodRayne 1 is janky AF, but it's playable. BloodRayne Betrayal also exists. Go play those instead.

PS: This game shall from this moment forth remain uninstalled in my steam library.