Recent reviews by Lethal Placebo

Haven't had a game's story crawl inside my brain like this since Signalis. Phenomenal.

It's MGS3. On PC. Finally.

I probably know what you're thinking. "Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory meets Hotline Miami!" That's what I thought too. I think this game is good but there are quite a few things that hold it back from being great, and the elements it borrows from both Splinter Cell and Hotline Miami don't quite mesh together as well as one would hope. I played the game on the "True" difficulty.

The mechanics are based around light and sound. You have variable movement speed which you can adjust with the scroll wheel on the mouse (sound familiar?). You also have a sprint key which makes you move at full speed no matter what, which is a good setup. This game also incorporates a menu interaction system, again like Chaos Theory. Unlike Chaos Theory, this version of the menu system gets in the way far, far too much. CT required you to hold down a key to enter the menu, whereas the menu in Intravenous activates the moment you get close to an object that you can interact with. The problem is that this overrides your movement control with the scroll wheel, leaving you stuck at whatever speed you're moving unless you decide to use the sprint key or move away. Not great in a game where you want very tight movement control.

Then there are the guards. Guards in stealth games generally have a degree of predictability to them. It's necessary for the player to be able to "outsmart" them. Standard guard paths in Intravenous tend to follow this, but they also seem to be semi-random. Sometimes guards won't take the same route when you reload a save. If guards bump into each other, they can rotate erratically, causing you to be spotted if you thought you had an opening. Get an alert and every guard, no matter the level, has extreme accuracy and twitch reactions. It's also a bit inconsistent as to whether other guards will also be alerted and from how far away they will be alerted. But the guards work hand-in-hand with the game's other biggest enemy: the doors.

The doors in this game are at times more difficult to deal with than the guards. Sometimes you can't bash doors open when a body is next to it, sometimes you can. You can't shoot through doors, but guards can not only shoot through them, but phase right through them if they need to. Some rooms, especially bathrooms, are actually too small for you to close the door when you're inside them. Many hallways in the game become blocked if you open the door and don't close it. Speaking of closing doors, an action that should be so simple is yet another annoyance. The range from which you can open and close doors is pretty specific, the problem is that when trying to close doors if you're even a centimeter too close, the door will just bounce off of you and stay open. Once again, not something you want to encounter in a game where precise movement is really important.

Then there's the sound, perhaps one of the biggest issues the game has. The game does a pretty poor job of communicating how much sound the player is making relative to the environment around them and the enemies. The sound in Chaos Theory was so rich that you could really get a feel for how fast you could move at a given moment without alerting a guard. Intravenous has the same sound meter that tells you how much sound you are making as well as how much ambient noise there is, but the actual sound in the game is not good enough for you intuit which sounds are louder or quieter, resulting in a strange disconnect. Then there's the fact that walls just don't seem to matter at all when it comes to most actions. You can be outside a building, the enemy behind multiple walls, shoot a guy with a silenced pistol outside the building, and the person inside will still hear it.

The stealth is still satisfying, despite the fact that you don't get to use the light-based mechanics as much as you'd hope. Chaos Theory had plenty of moments to really stretch the light and dark system to its limits. There's no way to press yourself up against walls in Intravenous and hallways are just too cramped for you to use absolute darkness to slip by, since enemies just bump into you and get alerted. This mostly results in turning off the lights, hiding in another room, waiting for a guard to go turn the lights back on while you slip away. Or knock them out, whatever floats your boat.

It's still good, just be ready to deal with a lot of rough edges and mechanics that aren't quite as refined as the games its influenced by.

A remake of a beloved classic in which every single aspect is made worse. Yes that includes the visuals.

In terms of level design and structure, everything is re-scoped to be bigger and take longer. At first it's very interesting to see all the old areas re-imagined, but the effect quickly wears off and wandering through all the extra space quickly becomes a slog. It's like the developers of this game didn't understand the meaning of brevity and decided that longer equals better. The entire game is made worse because of this idea, but no place more so than its final segment, Xen. Now roughly 5 times longer than the original, it drags on and on forcing you to repeat the same tasks over and over in exchange for crumbs of progress in an environment that loses its luster within the first 5 minutes.

Combat was messed with and made worse as well. Most of your weapons carry less ammo than they did in the original, both in their magazines as well as in reserve. But enemies themselves weren't tweaked, and if anything were made spongier. Don't be confused by this game's naming scheme's for its difficulties, the "Black Mesa" difficulty is supposed to be the analogue to the original game's "Normal" difficulties, which are the difficulties I played on each game respectively. Compound this with the fact that guards can move and shoot now. The fact that they couldn't do this in the original Half-Life give it very much a cat-and-mouse type feel, where it still very much felt like you could avoid damage. Now enemies constantly pelt you with damage, have too much health, and their callouts were made seemingly worse. Aliens are spongier now and you have less ammo, so you'll find yourself constantly reloading and interrupting the action, rather than being able to flow smoothly from gun to gun like in the original. Grenade physics are also terrible and screw you over most of the time rather than doing anything interesting for the gameplay. You can tell these environments were not made for the idea that your grenades can roll down surfaces.

Now, visuals. They're absolutely garish. Yes, that includes Xen. The original Half-Life (and its sequel) very much feels like it has a cohesive art direction. Sure the visuals are dated, but the art shines through and everything is easily identifiable. Black Mesa claims to want to integrate ideas from Half-Life 2, but doesn't exactly carry over that game's art style. Instead it has a style all its own with colors that clash and constantly fight for your attention onscreen. At times it looks almost as if the color palette was chosen to be as ugly as possible. When everything on the screen is fighting for your attention, finding where to go can be the all-too-frequent exercise in frustration.

The art may be terrible, but the textures themselves are at least high quality. But they aren't so high quality that this game should run as bad as it does. On a GTX 1080, this game should not be dipping below 60 FPS at max settings (I did not touch the "experimental" video settings listed in the options). But it does. A lot. Even lowering things to high at 1440p still didn't solve the issue. If there actually is something cutting edge about the visuals with this game, it sure isn't shining through. Nothing about the textures, lighting, or models looks particularly exemplary in 2021. Terribly optimized, like you'd find in an amateur Source mod.

This is not a replacement for the original Half-Life and it never will be.

Short, sweet, and poignant.

Adios is broken up into "scenes," each one being a conversation, either between you and the Hitman or you and yourself. You can often choose which of these scenes to interact with first. At first the animations for the Hitman were a bit offputting, but the writing, acting, and atmosphere make it fade into the background after 15 minutes or so.

Each scene is surprisingly interactive, and there are certain points in the conversations where your actions can interrupt or slightly change the flow of conversation.

I encountered a few small bugs here and there, but never anything too distracting. Unfortunately the game didn't run very well for me, despite my machine vastly outpacing the system requirements. But the game doesn't really require any twitch reflexes, so it was easy enough to deal with.

Play it.