This game has wonderful visuals and music and a pretty good story that takes its time to introduce you to the characters. Unfortunately it’s only just a shade more interactive than a walking simulator. It has the look and feel of a stealth game but everything is to planned out and linear it feels like you are just going through the motions to get to the next cut scene. Really it’s just a puzzle game where you need to find the correct order in which to use your tools to get past a locked area.

The novel game-play element is the swarms of rats that move like a procedural liquid. They look cool and play an important role in the story, but you are basically turning on and off lights to clear paths through the swarm or direct them at guards. Only in the last two or three levels does it feel like an actual video game with some player agency. The story is good enough to give this a weak recommend.

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.

I was always under the impression that Unreal games continued to be released over the years, but, apparently, this the only mainline sequel. I can see why they stopped. For starters, this game is well-nigh unplayable if you don’t use a speed hack. The original was a fast and twitchy “boomer” shooter but this one plays like you’re traversing a mayonnaise planet.

Thankfully, increasing player speed is just a matter of editing a .ini file. Unfortunately the game remains pretty forgettable even after the fix. Unreal had a very distinct, otherworldly feel but, for the most part, the sequel is just standard space-marine stuff. It only starts to get close to the feeling of the first game in the final couple of levels: one in which you explore a weird alien structure, and the other that plays around with gravity. The remaining 80 percent of the game is just walking through military bases looking for the artifact contained in each.

There was a concerted effort to inject story and character development through conversations with your shipmates. They each force you to listen to their backstories through unskipable dialogue trees. This is not the best narrative device but it serves its purpose in forcing a tiny bit of drama during the final downer ending.The themes lean hard into the Star Trek II “needs of the many” trope, but seem to forget the whole bit about self-sacrifice. The game ends with you shooting an adversary in stomach all while your low poly character model grins his painted on smile. No chance for redemption. Just Blammo! and walk away.

After playing the travesty that was Daikatana, I needed to remind myself that FPS games from that era could actually be good. I’m pretty sure I played Unreal in the early 2000s. I don’t know if I ever finished it though.

It’s definitely not the most story-rich game but Unreal makes up for it in fast and challenging combat, a large variety of weapons, tricky enemy AI, and visuals that hold up pretty well. This was the first time we ever saw dynamic lighting, reflections, and rippling water. The developers don’t waste any time getting to show you how awesome they were by opening the game with an impressive fly-through of a Na-Pali castle before you even click Start Game.

The levels vary between futuristic interiors, ancient temples, and vast outdoor spaces. The large areas can feel a bit empty but they offer a bit of a break after fighting through dark, tightly-spaced environments, seeking out secret levers and push buttons. There’s a level about an hour into the game that’s just awful with lots of swimming and backtracking that can make even the most dedicated players rage quit, but once you get past that hurdle the game opens up and becomes more manageable and fun. I even went on to play the expansion pack called Return to Na-Pali which puts more effort into telling a story via voice-over recaps at the end of every level.

John Romero has finally made me his bitch and it only cost 97¢. This game was widely panned when it came out and I always thought that it couldn’t possibly have been that bad. Well, I’m sorry to say, Daikatana is not a good game even when considering the context of when it came out. The fact that this shipped after Half-Life and Deus Ex adds even more weight to the case against it.

It was an ambitious game: a first-person shooter with a deep story and sidekick characters to help you along in your quest all played against the backdrop of time-travel and wildly varied environments. What we get are overly-long exposition dump cutscenes, constantly trying to keep your sidekicks from getting stuck on ladders, and, most egregiously, bland FPS shooting mechanics.

Thankfully there is a fan-made patch that helps out with some of the technical problems that still exist and also does away with some of the worst design decisions such as limiting saves based on collecting “save tokens” in the game. If you can make it to the first time-travel jump, it does get somewhat better, but the first episode is absolutely terrible. You are immediately (well after a 10 minute cutscene) dropped into a swamp in which you can be instantly killed by well-camouflaged mosquitos and frogs. I powered through but I can’t say it was worth it.

From the intense non-stop first-person action of demon hordes, to the intense non-stop first-person action of Russian fishmongers! The first Metro game was a just-ok first person shooter with a limited palette of monsters, environments, and, yes, colors.

The second game in the series adds a bit more color and character to the world of post-apocalyptic subway tunnels but never quite hits the mark in terms of game-play. Much of the Metro Last Light borders on being a “walking simulator” as a good chunk of the game is devoted to moving through areas as plot exposition is dumped on the player. Memorable action set-pieces are few and far between.

Apparently you are rewarded for non-lethal kills and interacting with NPCs, but this is not telegraphed at all. I spent most of the stealth portions of the game shooting enemies point blank with a silenced pistol. As a result I got the lesser game ending, but at least I got to off a bunch of commies and neo-Nazis along the way.

I didn’t hate the game, but in the wake of Doom: Eternal I found that there was more to be desired. Mainly, a chainsaw.