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"I can't play this game through again, for the sixth time, can I?"

That was the question that entered my head in early April 2023. Sure, this FPS-with-AI-squad members is very rough around the edges these days and graphically at least, shows its age clearly. The dynamic abilities of many FPS games since Republic Commando leave this feeling a bit shallow in terms of input control and varied gameplay - especially when more modern iterations of FPSs appear less scripted.

However, the feeling of being part of a squad during your missions has yet to be bettered for me. Sure, the dialogue and events are pretty linear - but they are well presented and spoken in a manner that makes them compelling and believable. Perhaps the closest match to this would be the camaraderie seen between the squad members during the campaign in Battlefield : Bad Company 2 - but I'd still say that Republic Commando pips it to the winning post.

If you can obtain it for cheap and have a PC that's more powerful than a mere calculator - then I'd highly recommend picking up Republic Commando. You don't necessarily have to be a fan of the Star Wars universe, but it does help - more from the lore, setting and background perspectives.

It maybe fairly short - but it's a great ride through some iconic Star Wars set pieces. Indulge yourself in this great FPS game and I defy you not to have smirk or laugh with the dialogue from the characters.

A solid 8/10.

When a DOOM-clone outDOOM's DOOM.

Back to basics frantic blasting. Far, far better than any of the recent DOOM reboot titles.

I put a lot more hours into this when it was purely on Origin, and it's a fantastic example of the Battlefield legacy.

Perhaps as close to the halcyon days of BF1942/BF2 and BF2142 before the series started to digress into silliness. Give me a gun, a throwable and maybe one or two skills and point me at the enemy. A shame that the four kit buttons are a bit ropey when using K&M as they are definitely setup for the gamepad brigade - but that's a small issue overall.

Unfortunately, multiplayer appears to be dead and the single player aspect is limited to skirmishes against the AI and some preset missions - that you can either attempt solo or team up with a Steam friend to fight alongside. However, those can still be a lot of fun from a 'pick-up & shoot' perspective, when the mood takes you.

Strangely, this is MUCH superior to the follow up Battlefront II - which I felt 'cumbersome' compared to this and bizarrely appeared to use more system resources and not look as good overall.

Buy this on the cheap - just for some occasional skirmish action. Even after 7+ years post release - there is little else as intimidating as taking cover within a snow trench from the approaching clunk-stomp noise of an AT-AT. Emotive stuff and a lot of fun because of it. Suppressing rebel scum or taking valiant shots against the oppressive Empire has never been so good...

A perfect example of how to follow-up on a previous title - even if this is not really a true successor in name.

The former golf title by HB Studios (The Golf Club 2019) was a lesson in frustration, some enjoyment and the occasional rage quit. The key issue here was the control mechanism. In its three main stages of golf swings - driving was a bit hit and miss, good chipping and short approach shots were as likely as winning the lottery two weeks on the run. And putting - forget it if the hole was further than 20ft away.

The PGA Tour 2021 makes the process SO much more easier now for players who simply want a relaxing round of golf. It's still easy to make mistakes that can cost your scorecard dearly. But at the lower difficulties you're now facing a moderate challenge - rather than the sadistic, brutal and illogical pummelling that The Golf Club 2019 gave you before.

The aesthetics are very pleasing on the eye - paired with the excellent choice of audio that appears to be a HB Studio default. The music in particular is worth mentioning here. Somebody at HB Studios has got a good ear for tunes, more so as they introduced Ulrich Schnauss to me way back in 2009 with another golf game on the Sony PSP - this time with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10. That said, I still can't get used to a iron club being referred to as an 'eye-ron' compared to an 'eye-on'!

Simply put, if you got your fingers burnt with The Golf Club 2019 and vowed never to put yourself through the mental hell of arcane golf mechanics sprinkled with a LOT of luck - give the PGA Tour 2K21 a try. It retains (and improves) upon the vast majority of features within the previous game and gives us a text-book example of how to evolve a title into a much more superior and enjoyable game.

A definite 8/10.

Very occasionally, a game defines a genre. More than that however, it pulls you into the story, the surroundings and the character that you're portraying. Batman Arkham Asylum does exactly that - and very well indeed.

I'd already purchased Arkham Asylum many years ago, but never really jumped headlong into it. My biggest issue centred around being an indoctrinated K&M player and a gamepad offering was always a clunky, sluggish and frustrating method of control. I tried Arkham Asylum with the K&M, but the camera mode in particular made the immersion into the game feel broken in some way. The game got started and shelved, started and shelved for many times over.

Recently however, I wanted to pickup this twelve-year old game and give it another try. I forced myself to stick with the gamepad control method and thankfully, accuracy was never a required trait. The controls started to make sense - the flow of the combat combos began to feel more natural and above all, it was fun.

I made my way through the story and finished it just yesterday with a reported 71% completion. And here's another quality of the game - your attitude and approach to it. Aside from the core story line, there are many areas of the map to try and locate Riddler's trophies. There are combat challenges should you wish to pursue them. There are character bios to find - along with inmate tapes of captives within Arkham Asylum - both of which help to flesh-out the encounters that you have. There is also a full suite of kit to unlock, of which I was three items short by the end. Which avenue you take is entirely up to you and your own form of priority list.

To say that Arkham Asylum is someway past a decade old is still surprising. The voice acting is superb as is the combat where stealthy approaches can simply be negated for all-out brawling. Again, the choice is yours. The mechanics and underlying narration of the game's progress could still hold up well against many modern counterparts.

The final plus I would say for Arkham Asylum is the fact that some very talented fans out there offer free improvements to the game via the Steam Workshop. One that I installed was a complete HD textures overhaul and the ability to now make the game run at 144hz. Arkham Asylum in turn looked significantly better and made it more of a reason that you should return to it, or pickup the game for the first time in 2022.

Arkham Asylum was a thoroughly enjoyable experience from start to finish. Some parts easy, others I had to retry several times to get past - but nothing was impossible or baffling in how to proceed. I'd argue that you don't even have know much about the lore of Batman, Gotham and some of the main characters that reside within the city and its surrounding. That helps, but certainly don't let that put you off trying it anyway.

A very strong 9/10 from me. So much so that less that twenty-four hours after completing it, I had installed and started the next instalment - Batman Arkham City. Here's hoping that it's just as good, if not better than Arkham Asylum.

Perhaps the most infuriating golf-swing mechanic I've yet come across - in all my years of playing golf games, dating back to the Atari 2600. If self-inflicted BDSM was ever a PC game - this would be it.

So much is based on 'feel' than actual numbers. Distance gaps between club selections make accurate travel very tricky to judge. Change a club, then step back to your previous choice and the shot type also changes. I now have a Punch shot rather than a Flop. Why? Laughable contour calculations for long-range putting - just hit it and hope.

I went on the practice swing just then and got different results. On about two of the ten swings, I got Perfect/Perfect - the remainder just seemed a lottery of fast, slow, perfect and very slow.

I then did a further ten swings simply watching my own thumb action on the left stick. Perhaps if I had camera eyes that could detect 1,000th of a second differences, I would clearly see distinctions between each swing. There are differences to the game (clearly) - yet to me I'm doing a pretty good job at being consistent.

And herein is the issue. There are simply too many factors based on the back and forward swing. You need to judge power - say only to a 75% power shot. So you swing not all the way back, but in doing so, run the risk of recording a slow shot. Press forward too quickly and off to the left it goes. Too slow and it's off to the right like a TRON light bike.

It simply doesn't work accurately enough to feel any confidence in what your next shot is likely to do. There should be alternative control methods other than this - I'd even prefer the archaic and decades-old three-click function than the RNG that we have here.

If your controller input device was in the shape of an actual club, it would end up being bent and snapped in a fit of rage - just like in real life golf.

On that basis - I would happily buy again and recommend. Like being a moth heading towards the flame - you still haven't learnt from last time and are happy to get your wings singed (yet again)

I really had high hope for this. The old classic 'DOOM formula' has long since disappeared as a genre - even the later iterations of DOOM titles are pale, over-complicated and hollow experiences of the original games, where suddenly ammo management was priority No.1.

The Serious Sam franchise seemed to shake the majority of these issues and focused on the mayhem of hundreds of enemies being mowed down by Sam's arsenal. It was silly, over-the-top and above all, a lot of fun. Now in it's fourth release, I was a little disappointed by the quality of the visuals. The backdrops and scenery were great, but the remainder a lot less so. Item pop-in was clearly visible at a close-by distance and many of the cut-scenes featuring the game engine were jerky and horribly optimised. Weirdly, there's next-to-no slow-down when the action gets hectic, so why the engine wasn't more streamlined on the less demanding sections is puzzling.

So, the campaign starts out in the usual fare. Shoot - kill - destroy. All good and occasionally with a backup team of NPCs that are as useful as a squad of Star Wars stormtroopers trying to shoot a barn door at twenty paces. Thankfully, your weapons make light work of most enemies, so you can ignore the 'assists' for the most part.

After a few hours however, the monotony starts to creep in. The same waves of enemies in a different setting yet again appearing for you to wipe out. What started out as a five-course meal that you had high expectations for, soon becomes a chore - you're about halfway through your mains course and with a long way to go yet.

That's not the biggest complaint of SS4 however. That honour falls on the shoulders of the trigger points - the invisible lines where the game starts the next set of enemy waves in your direction. So badly has this been incorporated into the game, that some you hardly notice, others are tricky and a few are simply impossible at your current level of saved game. Indeed a menu option even appears to ask you if you wish to load an even older save to reassess the current hopelessness - that, or alter the difficulty to make it easier.

What compounds these very difficult-to-impossible sections is that often its simply a trial and error run using different weapons combos in order to succeed. There's literally zero tactical thought - I'll do this bit, run here, then strafe fire in that direction. Nope. Can you hurl enough volume of effective fire down range to wipe out all those that are charging you? Yes - then you may proceed. No - then die...... again, and again and again.

Sometimes ammo isn't even the issue - you simply do not have the rate of fire to keep them at bay. You can't outrun a number of enemies, so back-peddling and firing continuously doesn't work and the power-ups are so few and far between as to be almost forgetful. Made even more frustrating when there are enemies both in the sky and on the ground - you can't 'flick' between the two horizons often or quick enough.

There have been some glimpses of genuine fun - where you want to progress and make it to the next level. But all too often, the same generic enemies that we've seen in previous titles make a reappearance. Do you finish the game and think back to yourself that that "....was great - what a game!" Not likely..... more along the lines of "...thankfully, that's all over."

4/10

Edit - dropped it by another point. At the final boss level and am now in a broken game loop where I simply don't have enough health to evade the torrent of homing fire at me AND get to the mech. Was this game even play-tested?

I'd recommend this game, with the understanding of one single caveat. Read the online narratives for character building or else you will get nowhere and like myself, have a main character that is useful for little else than being a pack mule.

It's simply no good jumping into this game thinking that a half-orc will make a decent barbarian or an elf a well-rounder ranger. There are so many additional levels of character creation which the game itself unfortunately does a poor job of assisting you with.

It looks very polished and plays well. The regular need for resting ironically becomes tiring for the player to sit through. Worst (and I'll admit that this is likely to be a result of my poor character choices) is with the combat. I don't believe that in my 29th year of playing RPGs on the PC platform, that I have ever come across such a binary level of opposition. Either you absolutely pummel the enemies into a bloody mess, or effectively watch your team be massacred by an enemy that you have no understanding or appreciation for until its too late and you're dead. "Is a were-rat a pushover or a difficult enemy to face off against?" Turns out that my team just discovered that it was the latter.

Ranged combat, certainly at lower levels of proficiency is INFURIATING. Almost to the point that I'd suggest not even having a ranged character in your team. Even if by blind luck, your archer hits the enemy - chances are they would have done more damage if the arrow had been a potato.

I've seen enough of the game to see some glimpses of design genius poking through. The quality and passion of the production are clearly there to appreciate - but you have to commit (and submit) to the unyielding game mechanics that more often than not, you learn from the hard way.

If you're after a deep and immersive RPG that rewards the player for effort - this might well suit you very well indeed. If you're after a casual hack 'n slash with a bit of background story - then stay clear.

Great retro, side scrolling action. Good graphics, perfectly suiting those of the era - along with solid and purposeful sound effects.

Having grown up on the coin-op machines that this game clearly pays homage to, a lot of the references makes sense and are perfectly in vibe of what it is trying to achieve. If I were to have a small gripe, it would be the clearance of the character's jump arc, compared to the height of the enemies - especially in boss fights. Literally a pixel of your foot hits them and that's a chunk of your health gone right there.

I enjoyed the boss fights so far, but you do end up on a precision-repeat course where at times having to replay them is a grind - not a challenge. More than once I've come off the game having lost a boss fight for the third or fourth time in a row - not in frustration, but just through the thought of having to do all that whittling down of their health again.

Aside from that, it's nigh-on perfect and I would definitely purchase a sequel if one was ever released.

Quite possibly, the most rage-inducing game I have on my Steam account. But of course, I keep going back to it.

Having been brought up on 2D scrolling shooters, this was a no-brainer for me. However, there are some misgivings about the design. The reliance on stars dropped by killed enemies to pickup, often masks the incoming fire from the enemies beneath. When you're trying to complete the level without being hit, this can get very annoying - more so when a bonus completion requirement is to collect 100% of the stars.

As the game ramps in difficulty, the requirement for special weapons no longer becomes a luxury, but a necessity - even as early as Stage 4 on the Insane difficulty sees previously straight-forward enemies becoming bullet sponges. It is possible to literally be hemmed into a corner with absolutely nowhere to go.

That said, it's a great looking and for the most part, very playable game. A fair bit 'grindy' - you'll find yourself repeating the same level again and again for the elusive stars and level completion to unlock the next stage. But overall, well worth playing.

A good 7/10.