Platform: PC

Kill Knight takes the tried-and-true mechanics of an intense twin-stick shooter and seeks to complicate them with melee attacks and weapon reloading. The controls here are very difficult to get a handle on. It makes use of all four trigger buttons to shoot, reload, dash, fire your secondary weapon, and trigger your magic attack. On top of that you have a melee attack that is assigned to one of the face buttons. It took me hours to finally get comfortable with everything.

However, once I got going it really hooked me in. The fighting is the right level of difficulty where each death feels like you could have avoided it if you had just been paying better attention. There are also a number of challenges that keep replaying the levels interesting, and they eventually reward you with more powerful and intense weaponry.

It doesn’t quite rise to the brilliance of Robotron: 2084 or Geometry Wars but it comes close.

It’s a fishing sim with an H. P. Lovecraft twist. During the day you take your boat out, catch fish, and sell them for money to upgrade your gear. At night you need to stay near light or various horrific creatures will emerge from the depths and attack you. Your best bet is to dock and rest until morning then wake up and repeat the process. It feels like one of those cozy games that brain-dead zoomers enjoy but with just enough of an edge to it to make it seem more deep than it really is.

The dark lore is not terribly interesting, or at least it’s not presented in a way that captured my fancy. I was surprisingly engaged by the fishing parts of the game. The act of fishing is mostly just simple timing-based mini-games. Any upgrades you buy just give you access to more of the same. The game would have been much better if your skill at beating the mini-games actually determined the quality of your catch. That would have given some real purpose to the upgrades. As it is, capturing your 1000th fish is the same challenge as the very first one you caught.

In the end, this is just relaxing but mindless item collection. I enjoyed it but it could have been so much more.

Dead Island 2 is surprisingly good and it’s a vast improvement over the original game. Much of the open-world aspirations have been chucked aside and you’re limited to a group of ten or so tightly designed regions. The primary focus here is mastering melee combat and building a tableaux of effective weapons. I really enjoyed the gory combat. Also, there are just enough secrets and collectables quests to push players towards exploration without it becoming a chore.

The story is kind of basic and amounts to the obvious, “how can we get ourselves out of here” plot, but it’s told through interactions with an assortment of goofy, narcissistic characters that have managed to survive the outbreak. Despite the grim backdrop, it’s filled with humor and a touch of satire. It’s least interesting bits are the sci-fi puppet-masters plot line that is there to set the stage for any future sequels.

My only big complaint is that player deaths tend to come out of nowhere just as you’ve almost made a big boss kill. Then they require you go back and fight the encounter again but your inventory and heath kits are not restored. It’s that same Bioshock style respawn that I didn’t like in Dead Island part one. It feels simultaneously unfair but also too eager to soften the consequences of failure.

You play as John Marston, a reformed cowboy outlaw whose family is being held hostage in order to get him to kill his old gang partners. There’s not much more to it than that. Kill the first guy and then there’s another boss to hunt down. This all plays out in a massive open-world with tons of desert scruff to explore.

The problem I have with the Rockstar Games’ open-world formula is that, despite the freedom you are given, you are pinned into playing the missions exactly as designed. This is as opposed to a game like Fallout where you can approach obstacles with violence, stealth or intelligence. In essence, this is a middling movie western story in which you perform tasks just to see the next cutscene.

While there is an “honor” system, the story almost demands you play as the good guy. I was less inclined to just instigate mayhem like I would in GTA. Even though you are forced to align with obviously corrupt characters and kill peasants, etc., you remain the virtuous hero trying to save his family.

Yet, despite all my criticisms, I enjoyed the various shootouts and the simple bullet-time gun mechanics. The world is big and beautiful and exactly the environment you’d see in a classic western. Much of the side challenges amount to collectable quests or gambling simulations. Each is fun for a while, but I didn’t have the time or energy to go through the game 100%. I’m wondering if the sequel offers more depth.

Stranglehold is the video game sequel to John Woo’s Hard-boiled. What it actually is is a Max Payne clone. That’s not all that bad because Max Payne’s bullet-time mechanic was one of the most fun innovations in gaming and it was itself a rip-off of everything John Woo. What’s missing is the themes of brotherhood and honor that permeated all of Woo’s gun-fu masterpieces. Instead we get a forgettable “rescue the damsel in distress” plot. That said, the action mechanics were enough to hold me through the relatively short single player campaign.

There have been quite a few attempts to create isometric style action shooter games and they always come up lacking. Despite their horrible controls, the Crusader games seem to be about the best anyone can do. Alien Breed Impact fails mainly because it’s just so repetitive and dull. It’s the same thing over and over. The same enemies. The same dark corridors. The same “quests.” There needs to be more of a sense of exploration and discovery. As it is it’s just barely more interactive than a walking simulator with an occasional swarm of bugs to kill.

This is yet another 90s throwback shooter that certainly captures the low poly look of Quake. It also has the Demonic/Lovecraftian theming of Doom. But something about it just didn’t work for me. I think it’s a combination of the same-y design from level to level, and the way all the weapons don’t feel like they have any “oompf.” I know that’s not a terribly specific criticism but it all comes down to feel. I think the older shooters that I am nostalgic for were from before Quake or after Half-Life. Dusk occupies that awkward “we’re just starting to figure out 3-D graphics” phase of FPS development that was sandwiched between those two landmark games.

I am not sure what the full story is behind Shelly Harrison. Apparently this is the character’s third game in a series in which each game seem to be made by a different developer. Ion Fury was a near-masterpiece. This one also is going for a retro-shooter feel but it’s aiming more towards the ’00s for inspiration. It’s fully 3-D but uses pixelated textures and simple models. The aesthetic is great but the game play is quite a bit slower than Ion Fury and much less insane.

I spent most of this game sneaking around trying to play the entire thing without killing anyone. In the process I think I missed out on much of the customization mechanics that the series is known for. There are entire branches of the augmentation tech tree that I never even thought to turn on. I focused most of my skill points on hacking and seeing enemies through walls and that seemed to be enough to knock-out every enemy on the map. I don’t know. Even though I enjoyed it, it feels kind of broken.

There’s a another convoluted Deus Ex plot that tries to push the idea that augmented humans are the victims of racism. It doesn’t really make sense because every bad thing that happens in the plot is perpetrated by an augmented human. This tends to justify the whole, “we think augs are evil” ideology you are supposed to be fighting against.

The game feels a lot bigger than it actually is. The graphics are lovely and the city of Prague is filled with details. Unfortunately, there isn’t much to do outside of the main missions and maybe half-a-dozen side quests.

I have been wanting to play this game for more than a decade ever since its demo appeared out of nowhere over a decade ago. A small, unknown company made a old-school FPS that looked just as good as the triple-A titles that where being released at the time. The company would eventually go on to release the excellent Shadow Warrior reboot games, all of which feature the same pure-shooter mechanics with a de-emphasis of story.

Hard Reset is all about shooting everything in sight including the various electrified and explosive wall decorations that fill the levels. It’s fast, fun, and dumb and doesn’t overstay its welcome. At this point I’m going to compare every FPS I play with Doom: Eternal. Hard Reset doesn’t quite match that game’s near-perfect game play but it does a good job getting that 90s shooter feel without having to lean in on a trendy, cliché 90s retro art style.