Recent reviews by UsAndRufus

P O L I C E G E T D O W N O N T H E G R O U N D

Expectation: Base building + Diablo + Vampires? Cool!

Reality: servers randomly turn off and delete all your progress, dumb anxiety mechanics where your base gets destroyed if you take a break for too long, and you have to spend lots of time grinding for loot (which your minions should be doing) rather than cool vampire ♥♥♥♥.

Playing offline with durability mechanics turned off could work? But the game doesn't indicate that you may have 7h of progress wiped for no reason.

Weird West is trying to be both an immersive sim and a twin-stick shooter. It fails at both of those objectives.

The twin-stick shooting is passable at best. Something feels odd about the control scheme on both M+K and controller. The fighting is fine, but it would really be better as pauseable real-time or turn-based. It feels like it was developed with either of these and then halfway through development they changed to twin-stick to try and get a console audience. It's so fast-paced that you rarely get to plan or use any of your powers.

The immersive-sim aspect suffers from the fast-paced combat. Sure, I could kick the lantern into the oil spill, but it's quicker to just shoot people. The powers are interesting, but again most of them are hard to use in the moment.

Out of combat, there is an okay RPG with a boring plot, and random encounters.

I was hoping for Dishonored meets Desperados, and I kind of got that, just the worst bits of both games. Play either of those games for a better experience.

Not CK3's best. Takes you out of the map and into a weird other space for sub-par events. The free update with culture divergence was more impactful.

CK3's best DLC. Adds a load of fun content to Scandinavia, Northern Europe, and Britain. Recommended.

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This game is like someone reached into my brain and made it just for me. Folk horror? Check. Spooky synth soundtrack? Check. Victorian Derbyshire? Check. LucasArts'-style gameplay with plenty of references? Check. Pixel art that is well done and not hokey? Check.

There is much to love in this game. The cutscenes in particular stand out. I'm not sure I've ever seen a pixel art game with cutscenes as good as this. The storytelling is ace. A lot of is told through mood, and that's really how this genre wins.

Some of the puzzles are a little obtuse and the ending is a bit fragmented, but overall it's a fantastic game. Recommended.

This game takes its lvl3 stack filter inserters, jams them into your brain, and yanks out the goop. You may die an early death, but it will be a fun one.

Deathloop is Arkane's best game yet. They've finally learned how to polish their best ideas and remove their worst. And they've cracked one of the hardest problems in open-play games: how do you give the player freedom without making them feel like they're missing out on the choices they chose not to take? Answer: get them to replay the same 4 levels repeatedly.

Replaying the same 4 levels might sound boring, but it's really not. Between time-of-day and setup variations, there's getting up to 20 versions of each level. And replaying the levels is _fun_. Want to upgrade a power (bizarrely called "Slabs")? Re-assassinate a target! Want to open that locked door? Come back in the evening! There are only a few times it gets annoying - there's a few puzzles you have to do repeatedly that are quite boring, and the possibility of getting stuck doing one thing per loop. But when you have multiple goals all winding through a loop? It's fantastic.

Arkane really polished what they're good at: unique gun and power design. Some powers make a return from Dishonored and Prey, but there's quite a few new ones. Loud and quiet playstyles are equally viable, which is more than can be said for their previous games.

Playing as Julianna is really fun too. It's basically schadenfreude, the game mode. Would you like to ruin someone's day? You bet I do.

It's not really a roguelike or a speedrunner - it feels more like a traditional plot-driven game with a fun twist. I think this is mostly because there are quests with checkpoints for all the main goals (killing Visionaries and getting loot). If I had to compare it to something, I'd say it's Arkane does Hitman.

Finally, the pacing is a little off in places, and the ending is a bit abrupt, but this game is great. Really great. Highly recommend, unreservedly.

Dishonored continues to be a good series of games that doesn't understand what it should be.

The first game suffered from all the cool powers being combat powers, when the morality system and achievements wanted you to not engage in combat. Emily's powers in this game address this, but the rest of the game hasn't really caught up. The game wants to be a toybox where you get to play with powers, but it doesn't do this very well. Dealing with chaos is never really fun on a stealth playthrough - you either sweat out a very difficult fight and risk pushing the scales into a chaotic playthrough, or you reload the game. You'll reload a lot.

The reliance on reloads kills the tension. For instance, there's a fun mission where you get to choose which faction to help. Wow, a moral choice that isn't shoehorned into the system! Except the best course of action is to kill one target and see what happens, then reload and kill the other. No real choice as you see both. Why did I do this? Because the game encourages it as the way to play the game. So often, rather than scouting an area out, you can just sprint in, check it out, then reload. This makes some of the powers not very useful. The game makes suboptimal fun the optimal way to play.

The levels have a weird cadence to them. That clockwork mansion level that was hyped up as the peak of the game? It's okay. The clockwork isn't very interesting - it's mostly glorified doors and lifts, along with very difficult to kill robots who see you a whole room away and can't be taken down by stealth. The "inpenetrable maze" is a basic button pressing exercise with a robot in there. The final level and the duke's mansion are also disappointing. Add to that that half the levels are boring street sections full of chores rather than the actual level. There's so much busywork that you're supposed to do. Find all the runes! Collect all the gold! I just don't really care about that, but feel compelled to do it because it's how the game wants you to play it.

The best mission in the game is instead the time travel mansion. I think it's telling that the best level is the one where you don't have any of your powers, and instead you have to use two very closely linked powers that the whole level is designed around. I think I'd prefer that to be the way the game is done - this level is the teleport-y one, this level is the possession one, etc. On one of the final loading screens, the game told me about a potential power combo that I hadn't used and was now too late to try. Why hide that from the player in a loading screen text that most people won't see? It's a cool mechanic, use it.

The game has all these clever ideas but keeps them locked away for you to find. This isn't a puzzle game where you learn a mechanic and then have that amazing connection moment when you work out the final puzzle. No, the game says "play it how you want!" when in reality there are only a few good ways to play it. There are some great moments and great levels, but only if you stay within the narrow confines that the game puts you in.

6/10

Oh yeah and Emily is a very annoying character. "How dare the duke abuse his people!!!" - girl he was doing that like last week before you got dethroned and you didn't care, don't get all friend of the working class on me.