Recent reviews by John Dhu

Took the original and translated/expanded it beautifully. GOTY contender, high recommendation for lovers of third person shooters, co op games, starship troopers, and DEMOCRACY.

PSA: Set SSAA to Off, enable V-sync, and most of all DISABLE advanced physx. You're welcome.

'ate bugs
'ate drones
'ate pointy eared leaf-lovers

luv me beer
luv me pick
luv rock and stone.

simple as.

Contra is a game that helped me Up during my younger years. It is Up there with the greatest of old school side scrolling action games. Don't be Down on yourself if you're having a difficult time. Getting good at Contra means getting Down with pattern memorization and fast reflexes. It's Left many kids in a Right state of rage and Left many others Right out of quarters if you're playing the arcade version. With practice, dedication and patience, anyone can Be A great Contra player, no matter when they Start playing.

The best kind of dumb fun. As advertised, consume in small bursts for best results.

WARNING: This product will cause you to involuntarily channel Bruce Lee and Kenshiro, emitting repeated loud, high pitched "WACHAW!" sounds. This will likely cause anyone nearby to question your mental state.

The exact sounds I made when someone asked me about this game: "Iheheheh, iheee, ihihit's so STUPID! I LOVE IT!"

This game has aged like milk.

Lousy voice acting, lousy animation, and most importantly:

ATROCIOUS gunplay. What's the most important part of an FPS? Solid gunplay. These things sound like toys and are about as accurate as the news is these days. Baker sways back and forth like a drunken sailor even from a knee. If my front sight post is over a target, I'd say there's about a 20% chance I'll connect. "bUt tHE rEcOIl iS REalIsTiC!" Bullspit. (god I hate steam censorship) I own an M1, Baker reacts to shooting the thing like its a gottamn anti-tank rifle. Play Day of Infamy or any of the old CoD games and it's night and day. I could end the review there, it's a shooting game where you can't shoot well, and when you shoot it isn't fun. Done and dusted. But I'll be a bit more diligent.

I appreciate that this is based on a true story and I appreciate the sacrifices of the people that actually went through it. I WANT to like this. Band of Brothers is classic TV and this game REALLY wants to be BoB, so bad it's actually kinda painful. The voice acting is awful, I don't buy for a second that anyone speaking is actually in this situation.

The tactical elements are great in theory, mediocre in practice. I appreciate that it's all streamlined and intuitive but all I could think about was how much I'd rather be playing something like SWAT 4. It's kind of hard to use the actual tactics of the time when the first missions only give you half your squad. How am I supposed to suppress and flank with 4 guys? Maybe I could split the team and have 3 lay down fire and 1 come with me, but the game is TOO simple for that. The game wants to present itself like a tactical sandbox but the way forward is always one strict corridor to another area with some scattered cover.

Maybe it gets better later but I just couldn't be bothered when the actual act of playing was so unenjoyable. I can appreciate that this game has a fond place in a lot of people's memories, but without the nostalgia goggles it's an atrocious shooter, and an overall mediocre game.

Okay, so a Terminator movie dropped this year that had James Cameron and Linda Hamilton on the project, and it sucked. Then a Terminator game from the guys that made Rambo dropped, and it's pretty damn good. What the hell is this timeline?

A tad clunky, voice acting and character animation leaves something to be desired. And the best Terminator game we've had in years. Atmosphere, set design and easter eggs that all speak to a dev team that has watched the first two movies (the only really good ones) religiously. 40 might be a bit steep for the amount of content on offer, but for the love and care put into it, and just to show that a dev can get better if they try, I'd reach into my wallet if you're a Terminator fan.

MW2, the game that many fans of older entries in the series thought killed it for good...and it's the first one I ever played. *sigh*, time to don some juggernaught armor, I'll need it to deal with this much salt.

Is it as good as its predecessor? No, but that's due largely to the fact that COD4 was breaking new ground. It brought the military shooter to a mass market for the first time. It created the idea of the blockbuster video game. How exactly do you follow that? Short answer, go over the top.

COD4 is Die Hard, MW2 is Hard Boiled. The scenario is ludicrous, the set pieces are hilarious and it's all backed by a Hans Zimmer soundtrack. This is an interactive action movie, leave your brain at the door and shoot some bad guys. The missions in this game exist to provide a fun shooting gallery strung together by a plot that technically continues from the previous game, but tone wise is far less grounded. This pattern continued into the third game but that's a story for another steam review.

Sound design is a step up and a step down from the previous game. Much like BLACK from the previous generation, satisfaction and gun porn was emphasized over realism, fitting the new more tongue in cheek tone nicely in my opinion.

Level design is excellent, with a few unfortunate smudges. There are a few times when you are charged with proceeding through an alley of doods that just will not stop coming until you move up, but to move up you need to get them out of the way. This leads to gridlock for quite a while as you scoot forward, pick a few off, duck back to rub the jam off your face and then repeat as they've all respawned. That being said, it is more than possible to complete the game for any shooter fan without more than a handful of "Oh come ON!" moments.

As above, keep in mind this was my first forray into the series, so I do very much have my nostalgia beer goggles on. My highschool afternoons were filled with 4 player splitscreen games of free for all on my old 360, and I maxed out my level on XBL. The big thing that people seem to miss is that this is not a military shooter, it's a military THEMED arena shooter. Time to kill is short, run and gun tactics are encouraged, it's all about those RPG elements of leveling up to get more gear to play around with. This was a game from before the formula got stale and was the first to introduce customizeable killstreaks. The online is on the deader side these days but there's a great way around that.

Google "i w 4 x". It's a fan rebuild of the multiplayer portion that sports a whole bunch of servers, LAN play, increased field of view and mods. If you don't feel like dealing with the modern server, just download a bot mod and populate a listen server for some of that old fashioned COD, smack talk included if you run the bot mod I do. Be forewarned the program WILL break the singleplayer mode, so you'll have to delete and redownload the game if you want to play the campaign or Spec Ops again.

TL;DR: It is braindead, thrilling, satisfying, and scratches all the itches of someone who just wants to play a movie made by John Woo and Micheal Bay, and remains one of the most beloved video games in my collection.

Rage is the kind of game that really makes me wish steam had a "Meh" option. Rage isn't good enough for me to recommend it, but it isn't bad enough for me to condemn it and in a way that's worse than it being bad.

Rage is the video game equivalent of eating a bowl of plain oatmeal. It'll sate your appetite...barely, and eat up your time but you'd be hard pressed to remember to much about the experience afterwards and not exactly champing at the bit to try it again. This game has been staring at me from my "Haven't Beaten" category in my library for a long time now, and 9 or so hours in I just can't bring myself to actually finish it.

SO WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT ANYWAY?
Technically speaking not all that much. It wouldn't surprise me to find out this game was meant as a tech demo for the Id Tech 5 engine it runs on that they decided to release to make a quick buck. It's a linear FPS that pretends to be open world by adding in passable vehicle usage.

The shooting is acceptable, but the combat puts me to sleep for one simple reason: There are two enemies in the game. Yeah they say different voice lines and have different skins but really, there are only two. A ranged unit that fires at you from cover and occassionally throws a grenade and a melee berserker that runs straight at you and buries his head as far into your chest as possible. There are boss varients of these enemies, but I don't count them. Maybe there's some kind of shake up towards the end of the game but after nine hours of just fighting the same two chuckleheads over and over it would be too little too late. Yay, multiple ammo types, whoopdedoo, Bioshock did it better.

The setting and story are as generic as you can get for the post apocalyptic sub-genre. For frak's sake, the two oppoising factions are called "The Authority" and "The Resistance." It almost reads like a deconstruction/parody of post apocalyptic fiction, but like, a bad one. The kind the 14 year old edge lord in your high school english class writes and thinks he's being deep and profound.

AND NOW IT'S GETTING A SEQUEL...
For some reason. Why Bethesda and Id decided this soggy cardboard cut out of a shooter deserved a second run is beyond me, let alone one deserving of a live Andrew WK performace of Read to Die.

/WARNING/ EXTREME DIGRESSION INCOMING /WARNING/
I love Andrew WK, I love Ready to Die. Why, OH WHY did they decide to hype Rage ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 2 with that performance over Doom Eternal!? It's like someone made a typo on the E3 plans and sent him to the wrong place!

/DIGRESSION COMPLETE/

It's gonna take something mighty impressive to get me to show up for more. I learned long ago not to count my chickens before they hatch, but for now you can color me skeptical.

TL;DR: It's a boring FPS that made me wish I was playing Doom 2016, Mad Max or Fallout the whole time I was playing, and more offensively a waste of a John Goodman performance. I recommend it as a sleep aid, but very little else.