What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Sumez]

Owlboy was ok. I was very impressed with it as I was playing it, but it didn't really leave any lasting impressions.

[soprano1]

Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions (3DS)
It's nice, never played the original beyond the Star Fields. Will entertain me until Pokemon USM comes out.

I have also been sporadically playing the most recent PC versions of the PSOne trilogy of Final Fantasy games, some comments on them:
7: The open mouths are funny as hell. Not much to point out besides the "improved" graphics.
8: Had to use a music mod to replace the shitty MIDI music, now it sounds good. Some problems with NPCs not moving correctly (Julia plays piano with her mind, apparently). SFX sounds are too quiet, but meh.
9: Port of the mobile version, so some controls are shit. Graphics look really good now, though! Had to change some files around to stop the game from crashing, and added a mod to change some things that annoyed me.

[Khan]

Dark souls 3

Getting my ass whooped in pvp

[Mischief Maker]

My full review of Overgrowth just went up at Caltrops.

[gbaplayer]

15 hours into YS VIII at the moment. Great game.

[Blinge]

Finally, finally playing Bloodborne.

oh my goddddd
*cums ferociously*

[Durandal]

I was rather excited to learn of the existence of Ruiner, mostly because I have a bias for anything cyberpunk (I even liked the crappy Syndicate reboot), and because the gameplay trailers gave me the feeling that this was going to be a no-frills attached kino action adventure where the narrative was integral to the gameplay and the gameplay is as pure as it can be.

So after finishing the game twice on Hard, I'm rather confused at many things the game did end up doing. While I did have some joy when I was zipping around smashing enemies from behind their puny defences in one single Chain Dash sequence, I couldn't read the intentions behind many of the game's decisions.

I find always being able to respect your entire skill tree questionable. You can respec your entire skill tree at any time, the intention probably being to experiment around with abilities until you find something that suits you. I was surprised to find you can even unspec Dashing, even though it's absolutely central to the game and I can't imagine trying to play the game without being able to dash, so I gotta ask why such an essential ability is presented as an optional upgrade in the first place. The idea of being able to choose between upgrades kind of falls flat when not picking one puts you at a massive disadvantage, especially considering its low cost.

Being able to respec your entire skill tree at any time also leads to some meta strategies which I believe aren't entirely intended. For example, at any time in the game you can remove points from a skill you aren't currently using and put them in Supply Drop in order to get one weapon you really like or which is really powerful, only to unspec Supply Drop and put the points back into the skill you have before.

It's incredibly obvious with the active abilities slotted to SPACE, Q and SHIFT. Only one ability can be bound to each of those buttons, yet there are multiple abilities slotted to one of the aforementioned buttons and you can only use one of the abilities in the given slot. You can switch the ability per slot using the radial menu, but a more efficient solution would be to simply unspec the ability you don't intend to use and put the free points into another ability you want to use in the same slot, or put it elsewhere. Basically, if you put points into two abilities occupying the same slot, you're wasting points. The points in the ability you aren't currently using aren't being utilized at all, so you're better off putting them in a passive ability like bonus health or durability. The only thing you really gain from speccing into more than one ability in the same hotkey slot is convenience while switching between them, but pausing, going to the upgrades screen and respeccing doesn't take all that much time either. Moreover, there's not a whole lot of reason why you shouldn't be able to use Barrier and Overload simultaneously, or Ghost Hack and the healing ability. They don't seem to conflict in any major way or create some massively OP combo besides sharing the same hotkey slot.

Since you can always respec into an entirely different build at any time, the idea of having to choose between abilities is weak since with a decent number of points you can already be anything at any time. You can't have everything unlocked at any time, but you don't really need every single upgrade the game gives you at any time either. It begs the question why you don't already have every ability available to you from the start, or at least gradually introduced to you in a (non-)linear fashion (it already kinda does, given that some upgrades are unlocked depending on your level). Just being able to switch between all abilities at any time would be more convenient. You can already unlock access to every ability to do the same, but like I said before that'd be just a waste of points. At least that way the radial menu would have more of a reason to justify itself. However, that wouldn't change having to unspec points to put them into additional upgrades for the abilities depending on which you intend to currently use.

I don't understand why the upgrades themselves need to exist and have the game not be balanced around what you're guaranteed to have and are expected to use. It's not like 'builds' are really a thing in the traditional sense here in Ruiner, the skill tree is way too limited for any kind of variety, being able to respec means you don't really need to plan ahead or stick to anything, and most people as guaranteed to put several points into the dash, stat, and weapon skill trees anyways which can constitute a good 60% of all allocated skill points. It'd be more interesting if each skill tree has branches of its own where you can only pick one ability out of the two branches, each one facilitating a different playstyle because you can't have both branches active at once.

I'm sure that the whole experimentation idea behind being able to respec your build at any time would work just fine if you 'found' the abilities over time. It worked just fine for older games where you could be over carrying ten weapons at a time without having to pause the game to upgrade some things every 10 minutes. You experimented with what you got, not with what you constantly need to disable and enable in the menu. Your energy is limited anyways, it's not like having access to all abilities at once will make you more OP than you can already make yourself.


I find the ranking system questionable. From what I experienced, the gist of it is to kill enemies ASAP and not die. The latter is a given, but it means you can't get an S+ rank if you restart a checkpoint through dying even once. Alright, I thought, the idea is to clear levels in one go without dying. So when I die, I only need to restart the whole level. Levels in Ruiner aren't particularly long, so I don't have any particular problem with that. 'I've S-ranked all of Metal Gear Rising Revengeance on Revengeance difficulty, so I've seen worse', I thought before trying to do the same in Ruiner. However, restarting the level means you have to go through everything again. And when I say everything, that includes:

• Dialogue sections you'll always find yourself mashing E through (holding E doesn't work)
• 40-second long unskippable Superloop sequences (I counted!)
• Skippable cutscenes
• 30-second long unskippable elevator rides where you do absolutely nothing but listen to dialogue delivered in real-time (instead of the usual text segments?)
• Target introduction cutscenes
• Unskippable in-game mini-cutscenes
• Hold E to unlock barrier using fat man (what happened to the hacking minigame?)

People might have complained about the walking segments in Furi, but in Speedrun Mode all the fat was cut out so you never had to bother with it again. You'd think that during playtesting of Ruiner that having to suffer through all the story stuff over and over in the pursuit of a full S+ rank clear would be considered incredibly annoying and obtrusive, if the game was ever tested for full S+ rank clears to begin with. Is it intentional or something? On one hand there's not even an achievement for trying to get an S+ rank (I don't particularly care about cheevos, but them existing is usually a sign by the developers that you have something to achieve in the game), on the other hand the time requirements for an S+ rank is tight enough that it's quite likely to just get a S rank instead of a S+ even if you put in some effort. That, and the penalties that dying has on your rank varies depending on the section of the level, with dying in harder sections not having as much of a serious effect on your ranking. The death penalties and time requirements are clearly tailored for each fight, but the act of trying to get the highest ranking is combined with tons of unnecessary fluff that's just frustrating to sit through and gives off the impression that the game is not designed around being intensively replayed.

For all I know, the ranking system could be partially cosmetic, as if to grade your peformance but making it ridiculously convoluted to actually reach the highest level. The level select screen doesn't even track the highest rankings you have achieved for each level and the inbetween arenas. Speaking of cosmetic, does the combo meter serve a gameplay purpose? Does it affect your ranking? Because I've found it doesn't really do anything, nor is the game really built around killing all enemies in an area in one continuous 18x sweep. For starters, there is often too much dead time between enemies spawning in the arena, so even if you already decimated an entire enemy wave, it frequently takes too long for the next wave to spawn, during which your combo meter has already reset. On top of that, enemies tend to lean more on the spongier side, so you can't really keep up your combo when it can take too long to kill a single enemy reliably. Just increasing the time limit after which the combo meter resets wouldn't be a completely efficient solutions, a better solution would be to spawn in enemies faster, or make the animations which plays when they enter the arena shorter. The final Overload upgrade does increase damage depending on your combo meter, but because of the aforementioned spawning rhythm (and the upgrade being unlockable only lategame at which point enemies tend to have more HP and dash/teleport around the whole place) I don't find that it really sees a lot of use.

If you were seriously meant to chase ranks, then I believe that the rigorous process of restarting the entire level after many deaths would be made much less frustrating to replay by smoothing it out of any narrative interruptions. I'm not necessarily asking for a speedrun mode, but being able to just move from arena to arena without any interruptions while most of the dialogue is delivered through some chatbox on the upper right of your HUD without pausing the game would do a lot to not break the flow of the game. And having enemies jump into the arena faster, and doing away with the unnecessary elevator rides and superloop sequences. It's cool for your first time, but after your nth retry it will start to grate on you. It'd be interesting if your maximum combo chain would also be factored into post-arena ranking, if it was actually maintainable.


I find the ability balance questionable. For starters there's the obvious Shield Ram Stun which can stun enemies for a good three seconds during which you can do anything to them, while doing so tends to be cheaper than using stun nades. There's a significant energy cost when you actually ram an enemy with a shield so this strategy can't be abused in longer arenas, but bosses can get entirely trivialized with this strategy given that they tend to drop health and energy every time you deal a certain amount of damage, while energy is also frequently dropped through incoming drones or Vampires. The intricacies involved beyond learning the ins and outs of a boss are completely nullified when you've got an ability that prevents them from doing anything. Ram them, whack them three times with the Armor Breaker, maybe quickly respec into Overload and Charge Attack to deal massive damage. Works on anything with two legs. I believe the base energy drain upkeep cost (not talking about shield ram costs here) for the shield was balanced enough that it didn't require another upgrade reducing the energy cost, let alone two. Random karma drops for killing enemies with shield ram seems like such a weird little bonus to add given that the resulting karma drops are minimal and would make you waste a lot of energy just trying to pull it off. Somehow you can also stun enemies by ramming into them even if you ram right into their active shield? Kind of defeats the point of enemies having shields...

The deployable barrier is alright, it keeps out ranged enemies and slows down melee enemies. I don't have really a lot to say about this one, though I never felt like using it often because I liked the other powers better. The slow effect on deployment is certainly useful for preventing enemies to even aim at you. I do like that slowdown is activated when your barrier is destroyed to give you time to properly respond. Ghost Hack is definitely on the OP side. Enemies being hacked stop moving for some reason and also briefly stop shooting, I don't really know why that is. However, what makes this ability OP is not having a buddy on your side. It's that whenever you have a puppet on your side, all the enemies in the arena will prioritize your puppet first instead of you. What this means is that you can freely go around killing enemies without them even noticing or even bothering to aim at you, even though you can get caught in the crossfire. Forget Shield ramming, having enemies not shoot at you at all is an even more overpowered defense. Coupled with the upgrades which increase puppet health and life duration, it's like a smartbomb going off for way too long. I'm surprised people aren't abusing this more often for the arenas, given that Ghost Hack does not work on bosses.

Supply Drone is such a weird duck because of the always-respec skill tree like I mentioned before. There's all this dangerous stuff on the floor I can use to kill people, but after a brief trip to the skill tree I can call in a drone which contains any weapon I prefer to use the most. The cooldown makes it unspammable during combat, but outside combat you don't really have to worry getting killed before you can even get your hands on your favourite weapon. Then you can put the points you put into Supply Drone into weapon durability upgrades, so your new Armor Breaker will last longer. Again, it makes you wonder why it isn't a permanent ability, since you unlock Supply Drone fairly early on and only need to put two spare points in to have any weapon you could ever need.

Curiously enough, there's also a random chance for weapons dropped by Supply Drones to have a purple/orange outline which gives them more ammo/durability, much like what you create using Weapon Grinders. RNG has its uses to make things feel less static, but I don't see the point of this. Supply Drone can also be upgraded to come down faster and deal more damage on impact, after which it can kill anything beneath it (including you). Even heavy Exosuit guys died to a full-on supply drone strike. It sounds OP, but as it is on a separate cooldown it can't really be spammed, and despite the 'instant delivery' upgrade it still takes a second or two to come down, and it's hard to get enemies to stay on top of the supply drone marker, so it's not really all that useful. Another curiosity is that the Fox Blade isn't available for selection in the Supply Drone weapon menu. The Fox Blade isn't particularly rare or OP or anything, so it seems rather strange that it's not available for selection at all. I don't mean that the weapon icon for the Fox Blade is there in the menu but greyed out like other weapons you haven't picked up yet, I mean the icon isn't there at all.

Overload I'm fairly okay with and is the one I stuck with the most because it wasn't blatantly overpowered like the rest and was more of an augmentation of the base dash 'n strike gameplay by just making you move faster and having you deal more damage, which I felt was only fair to use given the bulletspongy nature of the bosses, especially in the initial version. More importantly it lets me kill things quickly instead of just safely, which in turn nets me a higher ranking. Overload + full Momentum + Armor Breaker would oneshot most enemies on Hard, whereas Overload + Charge Attack + Armor Breaker deals so much damage against enemies and bosses if you can land one right, it's borderline ridiculous. After the update it would shred over half the healthbar of minibosses when pulled off correctly. I suppose that's overpowered in a sense, though I'd rather attribute that to Charge Attack rather than Overload. More on that later.

I don't have much of a problem with Grid Converter. It restores health at the cost of energy and vice versa if you upgrade it. The conversion rates seem fairly balanced to me, and the passive health regen upgrade is nice if you don't know what else to spend it on without the regeneration being ridiculous. Though I felt like I got by on health and energy drops just fine and didn't really need to use this ability.

Stun nades did get nerfed with Update #1 by having their energy cost doubled, which I do believe was a step in the right direction. The stun duration of stun nades on bosses is also halved (maybe even less), so it's a complete waste of energy stun nade bosses. Shield ramming will stun bosses for a slightly longer time at a cheaper cost, but in any case stun nades are more suitable for stunning groups whereas shield ramming is good for stunning single targets if you compare the energy costs. That said I'm not too fond of an ability which lets you temporarily nullify all challenge the enemies around you can pose. It doesn't really make you better at the game when you can just rely on it to give you a safety window with the press of a button. It's just a crutch. Enemies got all these cool attack and unique challenges to pose, but here's this ability which just says LOLNO. For example, even though Overload boosts your offensive power, you can't just blindly whack everything in one hit without getting hit. Also, the description lists the energy reduction upgrade for the Stun Grenade to reduce its energy cost -50%, when in reality it only reduces -12.5 per use, meaning it reduces Stun Grenade cost only by 25%.

Frag Grenades feel kind of useless unless you spam them excessively together with Overload, but at that point you're just wasting energy. The damage on them is laughable, especially on Hard later on in the game, even if upgraded. Dashing behind enemies to whack 'em instead of repeatedly blasting someone with an AoE fireball seems to be a more efficient tactic. Raw damage output seems like a boring thing for an ability when there's plenty of other more efficient means of dealing damage. I feel like this could see more use if it knocked back enemies or sucked them in towards the point of impact like a gravity grenade. Just throwing some things out there. In any case I didn't find any cool strategies to use with this one.

While you can always slow down time by holding down RMB, you can't attack while doing so, so Slow Motion is the solution to that conundrum. Now you can always react to everything. Though the low energy drain when upgraded is a bit silly. When I activate SlowMo and aim with some hard-to-land-a-shot-with weapon like the Raijin or Lancer, I can deal some ridiculous constant damage while always being able to react to incoming shots. The drain is not too massive and energy drops are usally not too far away, so here's another winning strategy.

Charge Attack is also one I'm not too sure what to think about. Like I said before, Overload + Armor Breaker + Charge Attack can wipe out squads coming in through dropships in no time, including heavy exomercs. The damage between a Whirlwind and a normal hit is also ridiculous. It takes about twelve hits with an Armor Breaker to open up an Angel, but with a single Whirlwind without Overload, that Angel will open up within two seconds at a miniscule fraction of the durability cost. A Whirlwind connecting to an enemy will only drain one durability point from your melee weapon while doing tenfold the damage. The message seems clear, use Whirlwinds whenever you can if you are wielding a two-handed weapon, else you're being inefficient. Thankfully, using Charge Attacks drains 25 energy, so you can't constantly spam it. I do like using it, but when it takes only two Whirlwinds together with Overload and Armor Breaker to kill a boss, I get the feeling I'm just breaking the game, which is the same feeling I got when stunlocking a boss to death with shield ram. I honestly wouldn't mind a damage nerf or increased durability cost here.

Another inconsistency is being unable to Chain Dash while charging up a Charge Attack. Since markers are placed with LMB and performing a Charge Attack is done by releasing LMB once charged, trying to do so will initiate the Charge Attack before you've initiated your dash. I don't know whether this is intentional or not, since it just seems like an input conflict to me. You're still able to dash manually while having a charge attack charged up, and I don't really get the thought process behind not being able to long dash around while readying your charge attack.

The Dash skill tree contains the interesting skill Momentum, which increases damage depending on your dash length. Which is a cool thing, you gotta use dashing in combination with melee for higher damage output. Unfortunately your Momentum isn't maintained during a chaindash, only the distance of your current dash is factored in for Momentum. I think that's kind of a shame because Momentum could also encourage Chain Dashing more since I feel like I'm just dashing once behind enemies to hit them all the time. The damage scaling with Momentum would have to be decreased if chain dashing were to be factored in though.

I do have to note that the limited dash points don't really matter beyond preventing chain dashing from being abused in Slow Motion only and to add a slight delay between manual dashes once you're overheating for having used too many dashes. It cools down way too fast, even without the reduced dash cooldown upgrade, so there's nothing really stopping you from performing continuous single aimed long dashes. It's not like you need to Chain Dash all the time either. On top of that, Overload can be upgraded to not take up dash charges at all! You can always dash somewhere and you're never really punished for spamming dash as overheating only takes less than half a second. That said, if you spam manual dash and want to Chain Dash you'll most likely have to do with less markers for your Chain Dash, so that is one thing to keep in mind, though I don't really find myself using more than three markers at once. It being spammable isn't all that of a big deal since you aren't truly invincible while dashing and will only take 60% reduced damage with the upgrade (I can tolerate dashing with no i-frames).

It begs the question why dash charges even need to be a limited resource beyond constituting the upper limit of placable dash markers. It doesn't really make me think 'I better not dash too often or I won't be able to dash later on' because the dash charges will regenerate quickly anyways. A more sensible solution would be to let you allow dash around manually for an unlimited amount of time (you'll have to stop to attack every now and then and it doesn't make you completely invulnerable either) while keeping the dash limit for the Chain Dash only. Because that's what it practically amounts to. Another would be to reduce dash charge regeneration speed to a noticeable extent and award the player a free dash charge whenever he kills an enemy so he can keep a combo going, and punishing gleeful dash spamming by having to wait until all your dash charges are regenerated if you manage to overheat.

Your weapons can be upgraded to last longer and to have more ammo. Which I don't think was really necessary. Part of the fun in Hotline Miami for example was having to improvise with the weapons at your disposal instead of sticking to your favourite weapon throughout the whole game through the use of Supply Drone. Setting the Supply Drone aside, I think having ammo/durability upgrades demeans the weapons already placed in the levels in favor of sticking to which guns you love most and forcing you to experiment. As it stood I wrecked my way throughout the game with the Armor Breaker because I loved that thing so much. The Supply Drone already kind of nullifies the need for weapon durability upgrades anyways, since you can always call in a new one at the cost of your weapon breaking somewhat faster. Melee weapons tend to last long enough without any upgrades and the ammo upgrades for firearm is not all that noticeable anyways.

There's way too many conflicting upgrades in the skill tree, and not all abilities are equally worth using. I think the whole push for always-respec skill trees and an 'experiment how you see fit' mentality has produced something incoherent where the game is not really balanced around each ability, making some upgrades and abilities feel comparatively useless. Especially when shield and stuns reign supreme. If your abilities were treated as a core part of your moveset and the game expected you to use all of them in order to survive or rank high, then they'd have to be balanced by necessity. As it stands it feels like some random abilities were thought up and added into the game if they sounded cool enough, with no real concern for balance beyond some cool synergies.

Enemy waves and arenas need to be more diverse. Alright, you've got mines, you've got kamikaze bombers, you've got heavy weapon guys, you've got Vampires, you've got melee enemies and you've got molotov bombers. So why, with all these enemy types, are enemy waves so homogenous? You don't need to pad out the game with crappy elevator rides and Superloop sequences when there's still untapped potential present in the game. You could have waves with two Vampires and heavy weapons guys spawning in at once. You could be fighting off a normal enemy waves with constantly spawning mines. The exomerc squad was a great idea. When they were introduced, you had to fight a melee enemy, the Heavy from TF2, and some agile guy with a gun. This line-up forced you to prioritize your targets if you wanted to last longer, and got you a bit more involved in the combat. Then the waves after that sent for some reason less diverse waves after you. What's up with that?

When the game sends waves of suiciders after you, it only does so separately from all other enemies, meaning you almost never fight a suicider and another enemy type at the same time save for the first wave when you encounter the Harpies for the first time. That's a waste. Take a look at Serious Sam and the impact of a Headless Kamikaze in your line of thinking when you're holding off a massive wave of enemies. Vampires are also not used nearly as much as they should be. They're a great concept and a great fit for Ruiner, but they are so rarely used, and sometimes rather poorly, like the two Vampires at the start of the wave right after the elevator ride in the (second?) Hanza level where you wait 5 seconds for one Vampire to spawn, which you can kill immediately with three whacks of Nerve, and 5 seconds more for the second Vampire to spawn which you can also kill in three whacks, and only THEN do the Triads start spawning. To put things in perspective, imagine dying frequently and having to restart the wave, and having to sit through the initial Vampire spawns of the wave over and over which anyone can do in their sleep. It's poor wave design. These 15 seconds of filler can be just cut out.

Some enemies are capable of throwing grenades which set the ground on fire and prevent you from walking through it without taking damage. But as it stands the enemies that do barely make any real use of it. I barely even notice grenades being thrown because I'm usually standing on the other side of the arena when they do. If you ask me, enemies capable of throwing grenades should do so more often and in greater quantity like minibosses who are able to throw three grenades at once. If I have to deal with an enemy type who is constantly throwing grenades everywhere and limiting my free space, then that enemy becomes an immediate threat. A threat I can prioritize. And an unique enemy type to boot! While the only special thing about straw hat Creeps is that they throw Molotovs, their Molotovs are barely noticeable. So if you want to make them stand out as a separate enemy type, make sure that their role on the battlefield has an actual impact on your playstyle and decision-making process.

Sometimes cannon fodder can be a great addition to a fight. You don't need to build up each wave with a bunch of weak guys and a bunch of strong guys, why not mix together a whole bunch of weak guys with some strong guys more often? Especially during the Triad fights I feel better use can be made of this. The Angel fights are an excellent example of this and some of my favourite parts of the game. You have a high HP target you need to whack so three out of seven cores are ejected each time its HP reaches zero, each of which you need to destroy within a time span before they get recalled to the Angel. Not only do you have to be constantly on the move to destroy the cores, but enemies are also constantly spawning in, making life hard for you to destroy the cores and to deal damage to the Angel. There's multiple layers involved to these fights, from target prioritization, to movement, and to the constantly spawning enemies posing a persistent threat and encouraging you to speedkill. Just more Angel fights are something I wouldn't mind seeing at all, I'd love seeing an arena where you need to destroy two Angels at once actually.

A lot of the enemies use abilities you can use and use weapons you can use. But not all of them do, which I think is a shame because it would have allowed for some interesting gameplay opportunities. We never see an enemy which can put up a deployable barrier to protect his own allies. We never see enemies with shields trying to ram YOU. We never see enemies using Overload against YOU. We never see enemies charging up a Focused Slash in order to slow down YOU. We never see enemies trying to hack YOU (being hacked doesn't need to result in death). We don't see enemies using the Grid Converter to heal themselves or their allies. It's a shame that some more interesting opportunities are only relegated to mini-bosses, such as only mini-bosses being able to use Whirlwind attacks and only one mini-bosses using the Raijin against you even though I think it's a fun weapon to dodge from and would have been more interesting if normal enemies were able to wield it. Same goes for the Predator rifle as well.

Some arenas actually provide an unique environmental challenge, like the turret rooms where you need to dodge bullets for a limited amount of time or the one arena where the walls damage you if you run into them. Yet they only feel like one-off concepts that are never built upon, which I feel is a damn shame. An arena where you need to kill enemies while a turret is constantly aiming towards you would be interesting, and I would have loved seeing arenas with laser walls that move WITH enemies you have to kill aside from mines and suiciders. Another thing to note are helicopter spotlights which move over the arena in fixed directions and constantly shoot at you if you get in the spotlight (though the area when they start shooting you is bigger than the spotlight suggests), forcing you to move around. Yet they mostly come up when there are no enemies in the arena, while they would have been much better executed if you had to keep helicopter spotlights in mind WHILE going around killing enemies as usual. Instead of spotlights moving in predetermined times and directions, they could actually try to slowly follow you and force you to move around the arena. You could have more than one spotlight at once as has already been done in the game, as they both limit your playing field until you kill the current wave. Arenas having more to them than enemies spawning in waves does A LOT to make arenas feel fresh and exciting, you only need to build on these concepts more.

There's a lot more that can be done by mixing different enemy types together in different amounts, and to reuse some environmental hazards unique to some arenas more often in more interesting ways. One of my biggest gripes with Doom 4, a game with a similar arena fighting structure, is that the arenas themselves tend to not pose any danger to you. It's only the enemies that ever pose a threat to you, but without the enemies all the arenas are just all the same with different layouts. Ruiner also tends to suffer from it, but it does show some signs of being capable to do more than that, and I wish it would expand on those ideas. Furthermore too many of the enemy waves are a bit too homogenous, and I would really appreciate it if the enemy line-up was a bit more diverse.

The boss fights are questionable. When I can simply walk up (or dash up) to the boss and constantly whack him with my pipe into a constant stunlock until he either dashes away (after which I dash towards him again) or decides to shoot me, during which he somehow tends to miss me when I'm right up his face, 'questionable' is the most suitable word to describe them indeed. This is only really the case for the first few bosses like Matayama, Jurek and Donvius, and also some of the later mini-bosses. This doesn't work on melee bosses and some of the more 'special' ones, obviously. I shouldn't be able to mash attack and keep the boss in a perpetual stunlock loop, that's just silly and robs them of any challenge they would have normally posed me.

But as for the others, asides from the mini-bosses there are only three 'big' bosses: Nerve, TrafficKing, and Mother Heart. Nerve is fairly challenging because you're required to bait him into attacking and and attack him when he's unlikely to attack you again, while his Whirlwind attack is neatly telegraphed and needs to be avoided. However I'm not a huge fan of his molotov rain attack because you can't do anything but dash around incoming molotovs and wait it out. Once you know how to avoid damage here, you can always do it, after which this attack becomes a waste of time because you can't attack Nerve during the molotov rain. If you're going to have an attack where the boss flat out disappears and you can only avoid the incoming attacks while doing nothing else, make it short. Sadly no boss has different phases where each phase changes the boss' attack pattern. It's not a huge deal if the boss fight only lasts about 20-40 seconds, but often you want to change things up so that it feels like you're making progress.

TrafficKing is more of a puzzle boss, and I loathe puzzle bosses on principle. Puzzle bosses are more about figuring out the specific quirk of the boss, like how to deal damage to it, and not really about testing the skills you have learned throughout the game. This is partially through for TrafficKing's first phase where you're running away from him and have to dash around properly if you don't want to die, but beyond that it's figuring out that shooting the four pylons will stun TrafficKing and disable his shield, after which you can deal some actual damage to him. Strangely enough he seems to be unable to hit you if you stand right beneath him (which might be the result of the pylon stunning him, IDK), which turns the whole fight into a piece of cake, and that is rather silly. It would have been more interesting if TrafficKing had more means to prevent you from shooting the pylons such as grenades, but instead he only has his mounted minigun he can't aim jack with.

The Mother Heart is actually one of the better fights in the game. Even though it is at its core the same as the Mother fights (which involve long-dashing through giant lasers like you were skipping rope as you shoot at the core while she isn't shooting the laser, which was kind of easy once you realised how to deal with it) with an actually even less threatening laser because its turning speed is lower, but it made the brilliant addition of having Hosts constantly spawn in the arena trying to whack you, while they could be wiped out in one blow using Mother Heart's laser. So not only are you trying to stand in front trying to get a good angle to shoot at Mother Heart given that there's a rotating barrier around the core you need to shoot around, you also need to take in account the swarms of Hosts encroaching on your position. The laser tracks you. and you also want the laser to wipe out all the Hosts behind you so you can shoot Mother Heart more safely. The only weird part about this boss is that Hosts spawn in through Angels which are indestructible even if they flash red when you shoot them. Some of us will spend some time trying to destroy those Angels until we figure out we're better off just shooting Mother. It'd be more clear if the Angels wouldn't flash at all or if they were out of reach.

Later on, you also encounter the Heavy Cyborgs. By god, the Heavy Cyborgs. You need balls the size of Jupiter to recycle the same boss five times in a row and then another two times (on top of the Mother fight being recycled twice, thrice if you count Mother Heart). Whatever changes their reappearences bring are too minimal to be even felt. The first time you encounter the Heavy Cyborg he has a basic moveset where he does some leaping groundpounds and powerful melee swipes, so no biggy. The second time his moveset is upgraded with a double fireball projectile attack and a kind of charge attack, depending on what weapon you have equipped. But that just seems silly, because he will charge if you are holding a one-handed weapon, but if you hold a two-handed weapon (or a firearm) he will throw fireballs. Where's the logic in that? Wouldn't it make more sense to attack depending on your proximity to him? Why would wielding a 1H or 2H weapon have to make such a huge difference for this boss?

The fireball attack is some bull, because its hitbox is way bigger than the visuals suggest. Even though I was dashing away from the fireballs I was still somehow incurring damage, and I don't think it's the camera perspective screwing me over either. The charge attack is more easily avoidable for that matter since you can long-dash out of the way. For boss fights (or mini-bosses, who the hell knows), these guys do have a ridiculous amount of HP, and their ferocity in close quarters makes firearm a more suitable option, yet the firearms tend to take a rather long time to kill him.

The King Cyborg fight is pretty much three Heavy Cyborg fights in a row, even though it is the same guy whose health bar gets refilled twice once you drain it to 0. His attacks don't change with his second or third phase, it really is as if you were fighting three Heavy Cyborgs in a row, and I can't underline how cheap that feels. The only thing that changes from the first phase to the second and third is that in the first he will drop health and energy if you deal a certain amount of damage, whereas for later phases you just have to make do with drones dropping two energy drops. I remember being out of ammo and low on health while constantly circlestrafing the guy, doing peanut damage with the Ruiner during his second phase. Eventually he gives in, but then it turned out he had ANOTHER phase which is just the same thing over again. The worst part is that the game ends with this arena fight against every single enemy type in the game over waves, but the last thing you fight is yet another Heavy Cyborg with no strings attached. No special final boss, but just this guy again. Super anti-climax. All this KILL BOSS flashing on your screen and BOSS is KILL in a cutscene? We don't even get to hear Paranesian Circle playing to the end either.

But the human-sized bosses do suffer from the aforementioned problem of stunlocking (through shield ramming). Any challenge they were supposed to pose are completely nullified by the fact that you can completely prevent them from shooting to begin with. Reducing stun duration on bosses with Stun Grenades and Shield Ramming is one step, but the game actually had the solution for the stunlocking problem all along. What makes the Matayama and Mother Heart fights so different from the rest? There you're not only fighting the boss, but also the constantly spawning grunts.

The beat 'em ups of yore also had a similar problem. Often you'd encounter boss enemies with special movesets you had to learn to avoid and best, but you could stunlock most of them once you learned how their AI worked. In that case boss fights were nothing more but having to do one thing over and over to keep the boss stunlocked. So what did the developers do? They added constantly respawning grunts during boss fights, who would jab you from behind and swarm you if you tried to stunlock the boss. After all, it's not a beat HIM up, but a beat THEM up. Not to mention, crowd control is an essential skill for beat 'em ups, so of course bosses would have to test you on that as well.

That's part of what made the Matayama fight so intense, on top of the blaring intense music and the time limit (seriously, why is it only used here and at the very end? I would have loved seeing this being used more often). Of course the grunts can be downed in one or two whacks and Matayama himself can be whacked to death given that you only need to dash up his face and spam attack as he shoots OVER you, but for the first boss he set a great example of what to expect. Unfortunately not a lot in the game did live up to that moment.

But really, having constantly spawning grunts during boss fights (wherever applicable) would do a lot to increase the tension and to prevent stunlocking, on top of bosses having different phases. It'd make you use chain dashing more often so you can kill grunts alongside dealing damage to the boss, stunlocking would be hard to execute consistently, and speedkilling is encouraged even further as killing the boss will end the fight.

What's up with some of the later enemies in the game? The way the game progresses is that you fight Creeps in the first act, who are unable to dash and will just run at you or shoot you from a distance, no big deal there. In the Hanza act, you will have Hanza dogs dashing around a little, so you need to take in account where they are going to dash if you are going to attack them, which makes the fights a bit more dynamic. Later on we get Triads whose cannon fodder will always dash twice if they get near you, and some of the stronger ones are able to teleport. Not dash, but teleport. Why? Why not just have them dash longer distances over the screen? It wouldn't be a big deal if they tried to teleport behind me or towards any of my flanks, but their preferred destination is to teleport off-screen, not necessarily behind me. The sound design isn't good enough to tell what direction they just teleported towards, making me look all over the damn place to see where they even teleported.

As if to rub it in, a silhouette is left behind when they teleport which slowly disappears while the teleportation itself occurs almost instantaneously. My strategy against these guys was to just force them to teleport first, after which I could dash up to them and whack them dead because it seems their teleport has a cooldown unless by some stroke of luck I kill them dead on my first strike. But otherwise all I'm doing is waiting for them to get 'over it' so I can finally kill them. I don't know why Triad assassins can't just do a long dash with a visible tracer effect making it clear where they dashed towards. Their teleport is too disorienting to keep track of. It also makes Chain Dashing moot, because when you're holding RMB you can see the direction an enemy is going to dash towards and plan accordingly, whereas this is not the case at all with teleport, and then they're usually out of range for you to Chain Dash towards.

Something new the Triads introduce are these enemies with an orange-like wave around them which acts as a regenerating shield. The game never explains to you what it is (why can't the journal list attack patterns and charisteristics for enemies instead of only lore?), but I've found it to be a rechargeable shield similar to Halo which you need to punch your way through first. Apparently it also nullifies stun grenades, but I've never tested that. After that we get the Exomercs which I liked, when they actually appeared in squads of a gunman, meleeman, and Heavy. Unfortunately they also inherited the Triad's teleport. Then we get the Harpies, which... I don't know what makes them different from the rest aside from the fact that their damage output is comparatively ridiculous, especially when you compare it to the Creeps. Even if you upgraded your health to 200, they can remove it within a second. I guess they're just a narrative excuse so suiciders can be featured again after you made the Creeps your friends, but I don't know what the special role of these guys is. There's also the hosts, but I don't count them.

The way enemies use Shield feels rather cheap. Instead of telegraphing that they're going to pull up their shield or putting up a shield in preparation when you're aiming at them, there's what feels like a random chance for an enemy to raise his shield (if he has one) and reflect your shots back at you. It's not a huge deal when you're circlestrafing and your bullets are only whizzing past you, but trying to load a shotgun blast directly into an enemy's face only to be met with a shield and be filled with your own shotgun pellets yourself feels like bullshit because there's no clear method of being able to predict whether an enemy will put up a shield aside from teleporting behind him.

And what's up with the Virtuality Farms? The parking garage had this excellent sense of pacing as you moved from fight to fight with minimal downtime, the Hanza Compound constantly introduced new things even if the narrative segments drew it out a little. But then you get to the Virtuality Farms, and you get the feeling that the game is trying to pad itself out as much as possible. First off you need to perform these unskippable Superloop sequences where you hold E for about twenty seconds, and wait ANOTHER twenty seconds to see yourself going really fast. This cannot be skipped, and it is repeated an additional three times later on. It gets old even faster than you go on the Superloop, and it is completely unnecessary. I don't get why so many barriers need to be put up that only TrafficKing can unlock, solely to justify his existence for hovering around me. The Hold E to torture shtick gets old rather fast. At least you could get fast over the hacking minigame, but here it's just pointless because it doesn't add anything to the gameplay.

And then you also get 40-second long elevator rides where for once people talk to you in real-time instead of through dialogue screens, but all you do is stand there and listen. It's incredibly dissonant compared to the previous acts where you were always moving forwards (mostly) and you weren't 30 seconds away from killing things, but here you get the feeling that the running time was being padded out as much as possible so people feel less swindled for having spent money on a short game, especially when you have to suffer through an identical elevator ride later on AGAIN. Good thing that you're planning some extra free story DLC to lengthen the campaign, so in the future you won't need all this padding anymore.

Then for some reason the game turns into your run-of-the-mill zombie slaughter simulator where you're given dozens of flamethrowers to mindlessly burn your way through waves of braindead Hosts who only walk up towards you and slash you.

What?

No really, what? At first the game built itself around quick thinking, nimble enemies, and dashing around everywhere, and all of a sudden the gameplay becomes a matter of holding LMB to burn zombies and Angels? How does that make any sense from a pacing standpoint? I get that you need some kind of downtime where you can take it bit easy in levels, like what those Suicider-only waves are supposed to be, but pitting you against enemies you can even kill if you have your brain turned off isn't the way to go. It'd be interesting if these Hosts were mixed together with other enemies like Harpies, like I mentioned before, that way they would pose an interesting threat, but on their own there's no challenge to them. You know when Hosts do become an actual threat to the player? When your attention is focused on other enemies besides Hosts like in the Mother Heart fight.

The Virtuality Farm levels are a case of narrative taking precedence over gameplay, and there the decline becomes palpable. Playing through it once is kinda iffy, but repeatedly replaying it becomes a nightmare. One aspect of good action games is that they have decent replay value because the action isn't always too far away, diluting that with narrative interruptions everywhere breaks the flow and pulls you out of the zone.

So if I had to sum it all up:

• Always-respec skill tree could be replaced by obtaining all abilities over the course of the campaign, whereas all upgrades can go out of the window in favor of properly balancing the game around the particular quirks of the abilities, or providing multiple upgrade trees for each ability
• Ranking requirements should be listed (how well do I need to perform to get an A or S-rank?)
• Descriptions for difficulty settings should list what they actually change
• Crap like superloop rides and elevator rides needs to be cleaned up from the levels
• Unimportant dialogue screen dialogue can be relegated to real-time text pop-ups
• Anything that pauses the game to play a cutscene should be skippable
• Enemy waves can be diversified a lot more with more enemy types being used at once
• Arena hazards can be utilized to a greater extent and even be combined
• More bosses should feature grunts constantly spawning in to prevent stunlocking
• Hacked enemies shouldn't attract the attention of every enemy from you
• Enemies should get in the arena faster
• The base energy costs for abilities are fine as they are without upgrades
• Whirlwind could use a nerf
• Bosses could use more attack phases
• There could be more enemy types who use more of the abilities you have
• Dashing charges could recharge more slowly
• Recycled bosses should be noticeably different compared to their previous reincarnations
• Enemies should telegraph raising up their shield or do so in anticipation rather than reaction
• Karma pick-ups from boxes should be sucked up directly by you instead of having to wait for them to bounce on the ground
• Time limit should be used more often, preferably with less time awarded per kill
• Triads and derivatives should teleport within your field of view instead of outside the screen, or more preferably long dash instead of teleport
• Harpies should have more to them compared to previous enemies than dealing more damage
• Virtuality Farm levels need a complete overhaul
• 'dash up to a boss and repeatedly whack him as he's unable to do anything' shouldn't be a viable strategy
• Heavy Cyborg fireball attack has a bigger hitbox than the visuals do suggest
• Add a REAL final boss
• Camera perspective makes it hard to judge enemy hitboxes, hovering your crosshair over enemies doesn't always mean your bullets will hit them even if the enemy in question is standing still

I absolutely adore the presentation and soundtrack, but I feel the gameplay is a diamond in the rough buried ten feet underground. Basically, more like Matayama and Mother Heart, less like King Cyborg and TrafficKing. More like Hanza and Parking Garage, less like Virtuality Farms. And less unskippable crap getting in the way of gameplay. Nobody likes unskippable cutscenes, even if you have to hold down a single button for a period of time.

[soprano1]

Holy shit, Ed Oscuro's record has been beaten!

[iconoclast]

Ninja Gaiden Black is now playable on Xbox One. It runs at native 1080p (4k on Xbone X) so it looks better than ever. I spent all day playing through it and the emulation seems almost perfect to me. The only problems I remember were some audio glitches, and the depth of field/haze effect in the magma cave looked a little pixelated. Maybe it won't be as great by the time I'm done with Master Ninja and Mission Mode, but so far so good. It's still one of the best games ever made.

Some screenshots I took:



who would have thought MS would be the last ones to care about backwards compatiblity

[lilmanjs]

GRID 2
All the cars seem to want to drift as if we are in a fast and furious movie. Quite annoying! Does this get better as you play?

[Ruldra]

How do people rate Sonic CD? Got a free steam key a few days ago and gave it a try yesterday. All I could think was: "Holy shit the level design is terrible".

[Sumez]

Yeahh.. it's not too memorable.

[Squire Grooktook]

How do people rate Sonic CD? Got a free steam key a few days ago and gave it a try yesterday. All I could think was: "Holy shit the level design is terrible".

So, just like all Sonic games?

[mamboFoxtrot]

Eh, the other Sonic games are usually more hit-and-miss than uniformly bad.
CD is worse than usual, though, because of the time travel gimmick and the whole "find and destroy the robot generators in the past for good ending" thing as an alternative to the Special Stages/Time Stones. So, the levels are all really vertical and maze-esque. It's like a collect-a-thon platformer, but there's only one thing to collect, so most of the level design just seems to be there for the sake of being there (I don't think there is ever a reason to deliberately travel to the future).
The color scheme is also so ridiculous that at times I literally wasn't sure what I was looking at. I ran into an enemy once thinking it was a background flower.

Pretty sure the majority of praise for Sonic CD is just a) the soundtrack (Mostly the JP/EU version), b) the two really good animated cutscenes, and c) super peel-out move is kinda cool I guess. Maybe some love for the puzzle-bosses, too.
Weirdly enough it's the only 2D Sonic game other than Advance 2 to give you more screen space to react to things when you're going fast, even though you'll probably never actually get to do that when first playing the game.

[Shelcoof]

How do people rate Sonic CD? Got a free steam key a few days ago and gave it a try yesterday. All I could think was: "Holy shit the level design is terrible".

lol I felt the same way when I played Sonic CD for the very first time. This was ages back but I was a kid couldn't afford a Sega CD and when I finally got to play... I was like wtf... Sonic 2 was better lol

[BrianC]

The problem with Sonic CD is that it's one of those games where levels are big to show off the CD technology, but has no real reason to explore the levels.

[Mischief Maker]

Just snatched up Space Pirates and Zombies 2. I'm liking it a lot better than the first game so far. There seems to be a lot of options and choices for how to customize your mothership for different playstyles.

[jepjepjep]

Maybe I'm just a weirdo, but Sonic CD is my favorite. I find most 2D Sonic games are just "hold right to go fast" but Sonic CD is designed for exploration. You have to explore to find the machine locations, and you have to find areas that you can keep enough speed to time-travel, which gets tricky in some of the stages. The past time posts are limited in number, so there's a tension as to whether or not you can keep your speed or you end up burning them. It's a thinking man's Sonic game if there is such a thing.

[Xyga]

Sonic CD is great for a long visual/musical trip, the point is to travel in the past of each level and change the bad future level to good future. You get the good ending like this but you can skip all that and just gather all the emeralds instead. How long is your run will depend on that choice, you can also do both btw.

In terms of Sonic-esque style it is an emphasis and refinement of Sonic 1, quite beautiful and great sounding IMHO. Not much else to add regarding the level design aside from the time travel thing, it is indeed not meant for tight platforming gameplay as it rarely asks for any effort besides the special stages, even less so than Sonic 1 actually. It's mainly a journey, that's why progress is saved (cleared zone) in the Sega CD memory.
I've alway seen it as a game made for the fans of S1. Sonic Mania borrows A LOT from CD's aesthetics and that's why it looks good.

Never ever play the US version which had most if not all music tracks replaced with generic American tv show/ad pop shit.

[BrianC]

Never ever play the US version which had most if not all music tracks replaced with generic American tv show/ad pop shit.

While I prefer the JP soundtrack, I didn't find the US one to be bad. Not all the tracks were changed. The music for the past was kept the same. Richard Jacques is British.

[Sumez]

Yeah, the US version's soundtrack is actually pretty nice, even if not as good as the original.

[Xyga]

Matter of taste then, to me while the original JP soundtrack fits the game to perfection as part of its very DNA, the US one sounds completely alien, with it it's not the same game. Well...

[Sumez]

Don't get me wrong, it's not like I would play the game without the original soundtrack.

[Austin]

Sonic CD has always been a divisive game and it's still interesting to hear peoples' opinions today. Myself personally, I prefer the OST of the US release. I do enjoy the Japanese OST (and it's great stuff), but I really like the vibe of the US version. Very spacey, ambient and even melancholic throughout much of it. As a result I get absorbed into the environments and attached to the game more than I do with any other classic Sonic game.

As far as the gameplay itself, it's definitely geared more towards exploration than simply blazing through like you could with the other Genesis/MD titles. That said, you still have a lot of choice and flexibility, and optimizing fast routes can be really interesting if you want to focus on that. The game even tracks your times in the Time Trial mode and saves it to memory, which was a first for the series.

I appreciate the added layers thanks to the time travel mechanic. It was a completely unnecessary addition, but it's nice they went through the effort to provide some added replay value.

[dunpeal2064]

I also prefer the US OST, probably because I grew up with it. The game is okay. Its weird to me that it gets the "You don't just hold right" cred when 3&K just destroy it in this department, offering more satisfying exploration and a much fuller game imo.

In fact, I think Sonic 2 and Sonic CD are the only original games where hold right to win could even apply, but CD gives you the option to either fast it up, or explore a bit, which is its biggest strength. It controls funky though, highly recommend the newer version, which handles more like Sonic 2 (And iirc was done by the guys that ended up making Sonic Mania). Still worth playing for sure, but probably my least favorite MD Sonic (not counting the weird games).

[Durandal]

I finished The Mummy: Demastered by WayForward (Shantae, Alien: Infestation, Contra 4), which is apparently a movie tie-in to The Mummy reboot. I've never seen the reboot, and I heard it sucks, though the game has very little story to speak of anyways beyond there being a mummy. The game is a Metroidvania where you play as some joe (or a bunch of joes) working for some special forces organization trying to prevent The Mummy from summoning a death god and destroying the world or something, The Mummy being waifu-material in the promo art but only a bunch of pixels in-game spouting generic villain dialogue. Pity.

The moment-to-moment gameplay in Demastered is more centered around finding the right angle to shoot the enemies. You're given a button at the start which locks you in place and lets you shoot in all eight directions, with enemy types being rather erratic in their movement. Enemy types include rats crawling on walls, spiders crawling on walls who drop on top of you if you get under them, randomly spawning bats and birds who fly from one end to the screem to another, bigger spiders, and so on. Steam users have taken to calling this a 'Controidvania', which I think is a rather fitting label. The focus lies more on the action than the exploration in this game if you ask me. Almost to the point where I'm wondering why this couldn't just be a run 'n gun since the exploration game is weak.

You start off with a peashooter with infinite ammo, but you can find a bunch of other weapons which are on the whole more effective at killing things, but run on a limited ammo supply. So you'll usually end up using your peashooter unless it's safer to quickly kill a certain enemy with a certain weapon, as ammo drops are plentiful anyways. You get a bunch of explosives which can break open barricades and kill some bigger enemies good, though bigger enemies rarely appear and your peashooter will usually do fine job of killing everything else. The other weapons you find are an assault rifle, which is decent, a shotgun, which is pretty fucking useless given its limited five-foot range, a flamethrower, which kills things VERY good, a harpoon launcher, which is incredibly useful for hit 'n run attacks and has tons of ammo to boot, a rocket launcher, which kills any regular enemy it hits in one shot, and a plasma rifle, which locks onto enemies automatically while dealing tons of damage with a relaxed ammo consumption and trivializes the entire endgame. Needless to say, the weapons you find later on are obviously much more useful.

There are ammo rooms where you find missile tanks which upgrade your maximum ammo capacity for your weapons and explosives, and can also always return to refill all your ammo. You can also change your weapons there, though there's no real need to use anything but the harpoon launcher and flamethrower, the rocket launcher for bosses, and the plasma rifle for the rest of the game when you find it. The harpoon launcher can one-shot skeletons, skulls, boomerang guys and everything beneath while having tons of spare ammo, so I always stuck to it. The flamethrower can kill a lot of things, though the game rarely got serious to the point where I really needed it, unless I had to complete some speedbooster puzzles with randomly spawning enemies in your path. Basically the weapon balance is all over the damn place. This also extends to the explosives. You have grenades, incediary grenades, and C4, but you'll always stick to the C4 because it can blow open steel and wooden barricades, whereas the others can only blow up wooden ones. And since you'll mostly be facing steel barricades later on... do the math. There's no real point to changing your weapon here unless you're preparing for a bossfight.

You play as a regular joe because you are a regular joe from a regiment of regular joes. Whenever you die, you are zombified, and you assume the role of the next regular joe from the last save point. At that point you need to kill your former zombified self with your peashooter in order to get all your upgrades and weapons back. On paper this sounds like a cool concept, but there are several other factors which make this feel like a last-minute gimmick. For starters, the only way to replenish your full health is to find an energy tank, the only other way is to grind enemies for health. If you die and kill your former self, you'll only get about half of your total health back. You won't get all your ammo back either. For that you need to run from the save room to your former self to another ammo room, and then back to the boss who just killed you. But your health will never be at 100%, that's a fact that you have to live with, contrary to all game instincts where you want to be at a full 100% before taking on a boss.

It would be even sillier if dying and then killing your old self would bring back all your health and ammo, which would make dying to get all your health back a more viable strategy than living on. Another would be to savescum, but the game autosaves when you die so that's not really an option. But I think the problem lies more with the game thoughtlessly copying the health drop system of Metroid instead of coming up with something fitting or something new. Enemies drop ammo, enemies drop small orbs which heal 5 HP, enemies drop bigger orbs which heal 20HP, you already know it all. The game does increase the drop chance of health items when you are on low health, effectively maintaining your total health around 50% if you kill everything in your path without taking too much damage.

I have no idea why health drops even have to be tied to RNG, especially with no reliable means of full health recovery aside from the rare health pack. It will only get people's instincts telling them to farm, and it comes off like Demastered is designed around one-stretch permadeath speedruns, even though there are no other modes or elements to suggest it's meant to be played like that (beyond a brief mention of GDQ in the special thanks section of the credits). You basically want to avoid players optimizing the fun out of the game, so I'm curious what the thought process was behind some of the design decisions which would result in these obvious consequences.

Thankfully I could get through Demastered without having to farm at all, because everything after the second boss is ezpz and I managed to mostly tank my way through without dying afterwards a single time. Because as everybody knows, all Metroidvanias must have a ridiculous amount of total health so there's more energy tanks to place around as secrets and to offset the fact that the combat system might suck by letting you just tank through it. The combat in Demastered doesn't suck at all, so giving you shit tons of health around the mid-game was completely unnecessary. The second boss was precisely challenging because it was actually demanding on your reflexes and you couldn't find a whole lot of energy tanks before the fight. All the bosses after that are mostly tank city. Imagine how much the game would be better off if the health system didn't simply copy Super Metroid which in turn allowed farming with low yield and gave you more health than necessary. I guess it's silly to complain about farming even when you completed the game without doing so at all, though the fact that you can farm with no better alternatives like save rooms replenishing health and nothing in the game discouraging you from doing so beyond less-yielding returns screams OVERSIGHT to me.

Bosses lie too far on the bulletsponge side of things, and have barely any phases to speak off, beyond the final and technically the second boss. Your other weapons deal more damage than your peashooter, so the obvious train of thought here is that by finding more missile tanks for your weapons and thus exploring more thoroughly, the bosses will also become easier to deal with. Can't say I'm a huge fan of that approach though, since the bosses will still remain bulletspongy even if you can kill them somewhat faster. Most bosses attack with simple spread patterns of fireballs, which is why the quick-dodge nature of the second boss is my favourite out of the game, on top of actually incorporating a movement upgrade in the fight whereas all the other bosses don't do so at all. The final boss is also kind of cool, which starts off with Princess Ahmanet going Dracula on your ass and randomly either teleporting behind you or throwing her dagger at you and randomly summoning regular monsters later on. Too bad most bosses don't really have that degree of RNG to them. It's all too static.

As you are a regular joe, and meant to feel like a grunt, you are not going to find some super special upgrades which give you a new suit or let you fly. The movement upgrades you find are rather basic and more natural. You can find a sprint which increases your jump distance the longer you run, with some secrets built around this idea, and another upgrade which lets you cling on to ceilings, though you can't glide along the ceiling as if you had a Spider Ball. The ceiling grab is surprisingly useful for letting you get a good angle on enemies in ways which aren't originally apparent, and some platforming sections do use it to a decent extent. I particularly like how natural these upgrades feel. There are no special obstacles in the game which obviously signpost that you're supposed to use this ability, it's like a natural extension of your moveset.

Beyond that there's also the usual, like increased jump height and being able to move underwater. There's also optional upgrades like no knockback on damage, increased armor, increased damage, and a phase dash which lets you dash through enemies. The dash unnecessarily clunky though, with too many wind-up and recovery frames which I feel are rather unnecessary. The fun part is that you get to dash in all eight directions as well, though this being an optional upgrade unlocked right before you unlock the final zone, there's not a whole lot of use for it. If you sprint at max speed and dash, you will perform a Shinespark which lets you dash through everything, walls, enemies, and so on. There's only like two or three opportunities where you can Shinespark for some extra bandoleers and health packs, and none of them require you to Shinespark vertically either, which feels like a missed opportunity. The map in Demastered doesn't allow for a lot of secrets through vertical exploration.

I feel like this should've been a run 'n gun instead of a Metroidvania, that way the moveset could probably be utilized to a more interesting extent. It doesn't help that like I said before that the exploration game is rather weak. You'll only make two backtracking trips throughout the entire map, it's after you find C4 and after you find underwater movement/phase dash. The Clock Tower zone looks like it was ripped straight out of CV3 with its turning gears and is the closest in the game to being an actual stage as its platforming challenges are tight and there's nothing in it to backtrack for. It is also the most challenging and most fun zone because of all the platforming challenge. You can find some collectibles in the form of Relics of which there are 50 spread throughout the map, but from what I've gathered, gathering all 50 doesn't really do anything other than giving you an achievement. Which is lousy.

Another thing which strongly bothers me is how bland the game feels. While the sprite art is excellent and the music is catchy, everything else in the game has next to no identity. The story is absolutely cookie cutter stuff which plays the 'go defeat the evil undead wizard and prevent him from summoning the evil undead god' plot completely straight with no interesting twists or turns. The dialogue delivered to you by Princess Ahmanet before fighting a boss is barebones generic villain stuff (which you can't even skip), and the intro or ending aren't particularly satisfying either. It's just a straightforward acknowledgement that you must go save the world and that you have saved the world. Most bosses are featureless big monsters, save for the Clock Tower boss which has a cool background at the very least. The detailed backgrounds do lend some atmosphere to the game, but don't carry it by a long shot. All this coupled with no real innovation (save for the ZombiU death mechanic which only comes off as a gimmick) makes for a rather forgettable game. I'm sure I've seen that desert London in Portrait of Ruin though...

There's not a lot of replay value to speak of here, with no alternative modes, difficulty settings or a map filled with tons of secrets. On my first run of six hours I managed to get 99% map completion, on top of obtaining all health tanks, missile tanks, and upgrades. Only one square of the map I've missed and some relics which I didn't very much care to look for. I don't even play Metroidvanias that much, yet I've managed to found most of what the game had to offer. That's kinda barebones, but so tend to be most of WayForward's licensed games. Get The Mummy: Demastered if you want an alright Metroidvania for an alright evening.

[Durandal]

I've finished Wolfenstein: The New Colossus on I am Death Incarnate so I could tell you

Spoiler

to not play the game on Death Incarnate (or at all). I was actually kind of optimistic about this game. Not because of the narrative or promise of cool setpieces or anything, but because of the new enemy types shown in gameplay trailers, with all of them moving away from the overbearing hitscan enemies of Wolfenstein: The New Order (not Colossus, but ORDER). These new enemies included a robot rapidly dashing about and shooting actual projectiles at you, or robot-dogs running around charging up clearly telegraphed explosive shots, or big Nazi Übersoldaten with big-ass telegraphed lasers that can melt the cover you're covering behind. Unfortunately these new enemy types can never quite live up to their strengths and end up being a waste of space because of reasons I'll list later on. Which kind of left me with nothing else to look forward to in this game, as everything else the game does is the same as TNO, yet somehow worse.

There's nothing much new on the gameplay front. One new thing you can do is dual-wield different types of weapons to suit the situation more, which is a nice addition, but the problem with this is that with M&K switching weapons is incredibly cumbersome. So you press one of the number keys to select what weapon you want in your right hand, and then you press X to dual-wield the weapon you are currently holding. When dual-wielding, you can press the number keys to switch the weapon in your right hand, while your current left-hand weapon goes unchanged. The problem is there's no single button press to switch the weapon you're holding in your left hand. If you want to change what you're wielding in the left hand, you need to un-dual-wield, select what weapon you want to carry, then dual-wield again. This problem could have been solved through the easy use of key combinations, like numkey to switch weapons in your right hand and V+numkey to switch weapons in your left hand. Alas.

The other method is to bring up the weapon wheel which lets you select what you're wielding in the left hand. The problem is that the weapon wheel is also terribly cumbersome to use with M&K. Controlling the cursor in the wheel feels like a bad twin-stick shooter. When moving your mouse across the center of the wheel, controlling the cursor feels incredibly imprecise when this problem could have been solved by extending the weapon selection areas in the weapon wheel towards the center rather than leaving the center empty. That works for analog controls, but is poor with M&K. What makes it worse that if you want to select what to wield in your left hand, you need to move the cursor to a smaller-selection-zone-than-it-should-be to open up another weapon wheel and only THEN select what weapon you want in your left hand. The weapon wheel method sucks, but the keyboard method is made unnecessarily worse by the fact that weapon switching speeds are egregious. You're wasting too much time un-dual-wielding and switching weapons during fight than you really ought to be. At no point did I think the weapon switching was smooth, and to make matters worse there's not even an upgrade to make switching faster like in TNO.

There is now some form of auto-pickup. You don't need to pick up all helmets manually anymore, which is a slight improvement. However, your auto-pickup radius is ridiculously small and will often miss items, as you can only automatically pick-up weapons beneath your feet. If it's on a table or under a chair, you need to pick it up manually by pressing E. Some ammo drops by fallen enemies just won't get automatically picked up even though there is an interaction prompt on the screen right there to pick up that ammo. It's very inconsistent and as a result you'll probably prefer manually picking things up. I still don't know why it's so hard to get something as basic as automatically picking up items in a first-person shooter right. If you fuck up thrice in a row then there must be a special reason for why you just can't do it the conventional way.

Another thing to note is that for the first half of the game your maximum health is 50 HP, and you can overcharge it by picking up additional healthkits to get it up to 200. In TNO this used to be kind of alright since you usually had around 100 HP max, but here you're constantly picking up medkits because there's practically no reason not to, which makes the lack of a proper auto-pickup even more aggravating. The whole medkit system works rather badly for Wolfenstein to begin with. Medkit systems in first-person shooters usually emphasize long-term health management, where they go coupled with limited medkits in the level you're in and harder-to-avoid enemy attacks slowly chipping away at your health. TNC doesn't do that, the Nazis here are highly lethal and can reduce your armor and health to nothing within seconds if you look at them too long. Even hitscan enemies in older games weren't as ruthless with their RoF or their damage output.

With all this damage you're bound to take, running around constantly at low health and no medkits everywhere is bound to get players frustrated. So what did MachineGames do? Place medkits and armor everywhere. Outside fights you're always very likely to find enough stuff to get yourself back to 100%. It can only become a problem during fights that you're desperately searching for a medkit. However, the element of long-term health management becomes completely nullified when item placement is incredibly abundant. This way you avoid the pitfalls of regenerating health, but can't really make use of the strengths of medkits. Moreover, with the high damage output of enemies where you're bound to die quickly, and the means of avoiding damage (when the levels allow you to play in styles other than stealth and popamole) being rather inconsistent, it can cause more frustration than well-intended challenge.
But F.E.A.R. already solved this problem by letting you carry a limited amount of medkits with you which you could use at any time while not having medkits around every corner, still shifting health management to a long-term mode and offsetting the frustration of high-lethality hitscan combat somewhat if you managed to activate a medkit in time. Of course, armor also wasn't as frequently placed in F.E.A.R. so it felt kind of comforting to have a little more protection with you, as in F.E.A.R. you're not used to armor being everywhere.

TNC also introduces a near lack of damage feedback, where if you take damage your camera shakes a little and that's it. If you get hit from behind or from the sides the camera shakes opposite of the respective direction, but beyond that it's hard to tell you're actually taking damage from the front or whether the Nazis are just missing you. I'm not asking for jam on my screen when I get hit, but there's barely an audible grunt, noticeable screen effect or anything else to indicate I'm being shot at other than my HP and armor value decreasing. One moment it's on 100 and the next thing you know it's completely empty. It feels like there's no difference between taking a little and a lot of damage, which can cause you to judge the current situation wrongly.

There are some new moves to BJ's arsenal. BJ can now perform a ground pound, which is incredibly clunky, pointless, slow, motion-sickness inducing, and just useless aside from breaking boxes. It's used briefly in the first levels where you can pound your way through grates on the floor to get to lower levels faster, but it's completely useless beside that. Knives are now replaced with axes, which are the meme weapons for this installment, like the pipes were in TOB. You can now perform Glory Kills like in nuDoom just by meleeing enemies when you're standing close to them, but you're given no invincibility frames during the animation and it just leaves you incredibly vulnerable when shooting the nazi would have been faster and safer. If you melee from the right angle you can whack nazis with the axe and kill them instantly anyways without being slowed down, so I really gotta ask what the hell the point of copying Glory Kills is. You don't get anything for doing it. The executions are definitely snappy, that axe cuts through nazis like a hot knife through butter. There's still that useless slide move which is too short and limits your movement too much, but it gives me the placebo effect that enemies are more likely to miss me when I slide, so maybe it actually does.

You also get three new contraptions of which you can choose one later in the game. One lets you shrink (kind of) so you can crawl through even smaller spaces, but the only reason to pick this is if you want to play stealthily, though I don't know why you would play TNC if you want stealth. The second are a bunch of stilts which increase your height and lets you peek OVER cover. Is kind of useless since you can already lean left and right, and you have to do the manual vault move to climb on anything which makes the levels still very vertically restrictive even with the stilts. The third lets you ram through walls and enemies, and is definitely cooler. The problem with it is that it's kind of cumbersome as running into something slightly staggers you and slows you down instead of continuing your bulldozer rampage. Ramming into enemies sometimes kills them at full health, sometimes it just knocks them down and you have to kill them manually. But it's definitely the coolest contraption of all. Unfortunately you only get these mid-game, so the levels before that aren't built around these contraptions at all. Which is a shame, because I think having the game be built around the ramming upgrade would be very cool.

You get six weapons this time around, which I think is slightly more than in TNO, with the sixth weapon depending on which timeline you chose. The pistol is eh. When dual-wielded it pales in DPS to the Sturmgewehr and in RoF to the Maschinenpistol. It can be upgraded to fire Magnum rounds which deal more damage, though I've never really noticed it having a noticeable impact, so the pistol is only any good for being silenced. The Maschinenpistol is a SMG which is decent at medium-range and can be upgraded to fire nailgun rounds which deal more damage but travel slower, which is a reasonable trade-off. Though I've never used it that much. The reason being is that most guns pale in comparison to the Sturmgewehr, which is what you will be using the most. When upgraded with the scope which lets you deal more damage with it at the cost of it being single-fire and upgrading it with armor piercing rounds which makes it ridiculously OP against mechanical enemies, your standard grunts can go down in two to four shots, with most things above being killable within two-three seconds. It's ridiculous.

Another thing to consider that hipfire with dual-wielded Sturmgewehren in scope mode might as well be 99% accurate (there is actually no reason for ironsights to even exist in this game or any kind of zoom, save for using the scope on the Sturmgewehr). With a ridiculous amount of DPS, ridiculous accuracy, plentiful ammo placement, and an upgrade which bypasses mechanical enemy armor, these are hands down the best weapons in the game. You really don't need to use anything else because with two of 'em you can deal with any situation in the game (unless you're playing stealthily), which begs the question why you even need other weapons.

There are still some other weapons in the game. The shotguns make a return. Bouncing pellets is now a fixed upgrade rather than a separate ammo type, which I think is an improvement. It has a new mode which lets you fire three shells at a time at the cost of a slower RoF, which I think is a good one. It's a bit overkill for regular mooks but it kills armored guys good when applied up close. They're not terribly effective in open spaces (especially when compared to double ARs), which is unfortunate because shotguns are the most fun guns to use. You also get a revolver-shaped mini-rocket launcher, but it ends up being rather useless in the presence of the almighty ARs as there's not a lot in the game that warrants a rocket to the face to begin with, especially not when double ARs can kill it faster than rockets can. There's your signature weapon depending on what timeline you picked. If you saved Wyatt, you get a silent sticky grenade launcher which can be used to silently stick enemies with explosives and have them go boom all at once, though I didn't use it all that much. The other is the LKW which acts like a sniper of some sorts, but with the double ARs you don't need to. The weapon balance is fucked, mate.

You also get more heavy weapons to play around with, like a kind of minigun and a kind of laser gun and a kind of grenade launcher and a kind of BFG. However they all slow you down immensely and get you killed by enemy fire unless incoming enemies are funneled through a corridor where you don't need to worry about enemies flanking you, so unless all the enemies aren't within a 45 degree cone of your barrel, you're the one who's going to get killed faster.

Weapon upgrades have been kind of changed. Instead of finding special upgrades for your weapons as the campaign progressed and maintaining that sense of progression and knowing what to build the levels around, you now find generic weapon upgrade kits which let you apply any kind of three selectable upgrades for each weapon. Using this the developers could sprinkle upgrades around as a means to make exploration more meaningful as you can place a worthless collectible as a secret for exploration so often, but I think it kind of demeans the progression. For player freedom it's good so stealthy players can slap on silencers ASAP, but upgrading your stuff feels less special as a result.

The perk system from TNO is still in place, where you upgrade skills by doing certain things instead of finding upgrade points, and it's made even more inconsequential here. The upgrades in question are boring crap like increased mag size, increased max item capacity, +5% faster crouch speed, +5% faster health regeneration, and a whole bunch of other boring crap. I wonder why the hell they couldn't make some things like slower overcharge deflation or faster crouch movement speed a base ability instead of an unlockable upgrade. I never liked this upgrade system since it just enhanced existing playstyles instead of allowing new ones or expanding existing ones, like what the Contraptions did. It just adds a bunch of distracting rudimentary challenges you need to follow to further optimize yourself. It doesn't really add anything to the game and you could easily do without it without losing anything, possibly replacing it with something better. It's less convoluted than TNO's system which hid some essential abilities behind the challenges which for some reason couldn't be available to you from the start, but the new one is just so inconsequential and feels like it's another symptom of AAA developers just having to have some kind of RPG elements because replay value and all those other memes.

TNC is also still sticking to that 'play however you want' meme even though the main draw of the game is clearly supposed to be one-gun-in-each-hand over the top shooting action instead of ye olde basic press-crouch-to-enter-stealth-mode-and-perform-takedowns-from-behind stealth gameplay which has nothing on actual stealth games. Most people didn't bother with the stealth in Metal Gear Rising either unless they wanted to take the easy way out. Despite this the game still seems to clearly nudge you into playing stealthily whenever you can because playing stealthily is easier than killing everything with respawning enemies coming from everywhere. It sure would have saved me some time if I didn't take everything head-on, but I wanted to see how far I could take the game by being full-on aggressive. On Death Incarnate, it was rather painful. I know it's optional to play stealthily... but why? Focus your efforts into making something coherent instead. This ain't Deus Ex.

Which brings us to the new enemies I mentioned in the first paragraph, and why they're complete wasted potential. While they're an improvement over the dick-ass bulletsponge Übersoldaten in TNO and their bullshit ass hitscan weaponry and complete resistance against hitstun, the new enemies are more fair in their attacks, yet go down so easily that the role they're supposed to have during combat can never be truly fulfilled. How do they go down so quickly? Grab two fully upgraded ARs, shoot them in any part of the body ten to fifteen times or so, and they're dead within seconds. What a waste.
The new Übersoldaten even have a weak spot on their back which you can shoot for bonus damage, but the ARs work wonders against Übersoldaten from the front to the point where you don't even have to take advantage of the weakspots! There's even a mini-boss type of enemy which fires a barrage of rockets at you, but you can cheese it by standing behind a piece of cover blocking the line of sight just enough so you can unload your two ARs into its arms or torso while it is unable to get a lock on you. The dogs also make a more dangerous return with them dragging you to the floor and rendering you temporarily immobile, which is doubly annoying when they're running right around the corner and bite you before you know what's going on.

Another problem which prevents the new enemy from reaching their potential is a simple but core one, namely that they always go accompanied by hitscan Nazi grunts. Hitscan Nazi grunts who, on Death Incarnate, have ridiculous accuracy over long ranges and can reduce your health to zero within two seconds when they get a shot at you and reduce your armor to zero practically whenever they fire at you. In the old Doom you'd always prioritize the zombie guys because they're hitscan and you'd usually have enough cover and opportunity to take them out without taking damage, but the zombies didn't fucking annihilate all of your HP if you were in their line of sight for longer than 2 seconds. So even if there's this big guy firing big-ass slow lasers at you, you have to put him at the backburner because there's a fucking human-sized nazi grunt, some Fritz who recently enlisted in the Macht, with a fucking standard-issue pistol pointed towards you, so of course the big-ass death machine should be ignored for the moment.

What we have here is two different types of enemies who belong in different types of levels. The hitscan enemies would work better in enclosed levels with a lot of corners and side-routes everywhere so you can break line of sight and flank nazis without having to worry about the hitscan, whereas the new enemies would work better in more open levels where you'd have more room to dodge their attacks, if they were more numerous and didn't die as quickly. Instead we get an awkward mix of both, where mechanical enemies are just a minor hindrance you need to fix with your double ARs before moving on with the rest. Unfortunately the level design on the whole barely even managed to reach TNO's or TOB's heights, for heights they had whenever they had enough common sense to put you in a small arena-maze where you could get up close to encroaching nazis without having to play it like a popamole, kind of like in F.E.A.R. Some levels have crawlspaces dedicated for stealth, some have secrets, but nothing feels particularly outstanding.

Meanwhile TNC likes to play the more open-ended level type of game, with several nazis in front of you forcing you to pop in and out of cover as if it were CoD or some shit. TNC tends to take TNO's Commander mechanic a bit too far. Basically whenever an alarm is raised before you kill the commander, reinforcements will keep spawning in seemingly random positions in the level until you killed the Commander. There's always a radar on-screen which determines how far away you are from the Commander, however it cannot make the distinction whether a Commander is above or beneath me in the level, costing me precious time trying to figure that one out. Levels in TNC can be quite vertical at times, but in a rather bad way. Suppose you're on the bottom floor making your way through loudly and raising the alarm in the process, this will prompt the Nazis in the first and second floor to usually take a route where they go behind my back even though at times the faster way is to my front. I don't think this is a conscious course of action on the AI's part, because normally the AI never really attempts to flank you, not even on Death Incarnate. I can mind attacks from the left and right, but not from behind, especially not with enemies randomly spawning in in ways I cannot predict.

Commanders just appear way too fucking often and are not that engaging. Often you're better off rushing through as if you were speedrunning the game, and kill the commander on your way through, which kind of works with the ram upgrade and a shotgun in each hand, unfortunately you still can't fire while sprinting. I miss stuff like the hospital shootout in TOB or the submarine engine room fight in TNO, damnit. Randomly spawning hitscan enemies you can't see spawning in is bad for the soul.

An important distinction should be made that while the Nazis you encounter are very lethal (on Death Incarnate), they are also very dumb. They hide in cover for longer than necessary, they only use grenades if you stay in the same place for a certain amount of time instead of aggressively, they don't make an attempt to preserve their own life when you're shooting at them from a crawlspace, they can't tell a friend of theirs is being executed right next to them, and they think that walking right into a corridor filled with dead Nazis where you're still busy slaughtering incoming nazis before they can react is a good idea. The reaction times for Nazis is thankfully not instantaneous, meaning a safer course of action is to funnel Nazis into a corridor or doorway where you're right around the corner putting lead in their heads before they can tell what's going on. Which is silly. There are AIs in several other games who recognize the player trying to pull such a stunt, and then respond in kind with grenades. The Nazis may say they're trying to flank you, but ironically a lot of levels don't even allow them to flank you, nor will they seriously attempt to. Their moronic behaviour should be more apparent on lower difficulties when you don't have to worry about getting killed as much.

Another thing to point out is that if we were to look at how the ruthless of efficiency of the Nazi forces in gameplay were to relate to the Nazi threat the narrative sets up, we'd come to the conclusion that the Nazis are all a bunch of useless fucking idiots who somehow managed to conquer the whole world but are dumb as a ton of bricks and mostly act as cannon fodder, yet when the story dictates it they're supposed to be a serious threat, which just creates this disconnect between gameplay and story. But not even the story is really consistent about average Nazi intelligence, at times they're practically Sturmtroopers, at others they're just regular joes fighting for their Vaterland, and at others they're ruthless homicidal maniacs.

I'm starting to think that idTech 6 handles sound rather poorly, or is handled by incompetents, because even after nuDoom TNC does a ridiculous poor job when it comes to positional sound design or sound design in general, especially where sound mixing is concerned. Weapon firing sounds are too silent, enemies make no footstep sounds to give you an idea where they are (and they still have the gall to unintentionally sneak up behind you), enemy-player callouts are minimal in combat, and you can't really pinpoint the origin of a sound because of how noisy everything is. The only things that stand out in the audio-mix are the screaming of Commanders over the mic, some other characters talking over the mic, heavy weapons being fired, and some telegraphed attacks being charged. Past that you're practically deaf and no other sound stands out, which is subpar compared to the sound design in F.E.A.R. where shit not only sounded satisfying, but was actually kind of helpful.

Mick Gordon returns to compose for TNC, and I have trouble calling this the OST anything above noticeable. The combat tracks aren't played as often as they should be, and they all tend to blend together, if they aren't the same song to begin with. The badass new Wolfenstein theme only makes its return in the main menu, whereas past that it's never used in-game unlike in TNO where a remixed version was played in the last mission of the game. Aside from Changeover Day (which is more of a joke song played in promo material), I don't think there's a song for a particular section of the game anybody would go out of their way to look up and find out what it was. I think that Mick Gordon should mix his game up soon before he starts getting stale. His style he pioneered in TNO and nuDoom hasn't really advanced or been used to any kind of interesting extent here in TNC, so he's gotta step his game up sooner or later.

There's also that story thingie in the game. You once again take up the role of BJ Blasckozwicz, nazi-killer extraordinaire, who directly after the events of the first game finds himself near death after assassinating General Deathshead from the previous game. You remember which guy you actually rescued at the start of TNO, and for some reason you also start to experience flashbacks of your childhood memories. Memories which involve your dad beating your mom, and your dad forcing you to shoot your dog in order to teach you a life lesson. You're not really given much of an option, you can't continue and your dad will repeat the same line over and over if you do nothing instead of pulling the trigger.

Then you wake up from a coma (again) and find yourself in an U-boat you captured in the previous game, which also happens to be under assault by Nazis (just like in the previous game). However your injuries have left you unable to move your legs, so the only way to move forward is to, wait for it... ride around in a wheelchair. Did you just mention wheelchairs? Yes, that's right, you get to ride around in a wheelchair. Dude, are you fucking serious about the wheelchair? Yes, you get to ride a fucking wheelchair. Fucking wheelchairs. Wheelchairs. WHEELCHAIRS. WHEEEEEEEELCHAAAAAIRS. HOTWHEELS. IT'S A MOTHER FUCKING WHEELCHAIR. THIS GAME HAS A SEAT WITH WHEELS YOU CAN DRIVE AROUND WITH. DID YOU HEAR ABOUT WHEELCHAIR? VROOM VROOM CHUGGA CHUGGA VROOM VROOM. I CANNOT BELIEVE THERE IS A WHEELCHAIR. HOTWHEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
The wheelchair mission lasts about ten minutes.

A bit later an unskippable in-game cutscene ensues where General Engels from the first game captures you and forces you to watch as she decapitates Caroline, that one leader chick from the first game. It feels to me like they tried to emulate the Deathshead forced kill choice scene from the first game where your friends were pinned down and you were forced to choose which one of them to have killed and turned into an experiment by Deathshead. In this case the game does a rather poor job at making us care for this supposedly important character. In TNC she briefly kind of appears twice in the intro with most her plot relevance being situated in TNO, but it never hurts for a sequel to give us a reminder of why we should care. There's probably a sadder reason why it had to be her to die, namely so you can get to her Da'at Yichud exoskeleton suit and get your body moving properly again. Probably to compensate for not establishing Caroline's importance at the beginning, they have BJ talk to himself very often as if he were talking to Caroline in heaven. That's some patchwork writing there.

Some scuffle happens when General Engels' fat daughter rebels after Caroline has her suit and head forcefully taken off, so you can equip the Da'at Yichud suit and get your legs moving again.
The Da'at Yichud suit, which I'll call the Jewsuit because it just rolls off the tongue better (seriously, try saying it out loud a few times), lets your broken body move again, and raises your maximum armor cap to 200 while your maximum HP remains at 50 HP to emphasizes you're a broken man being recycled to live a bit longer in a tin suit. However it's no Nanosuit despite its cool appearance, so there's no cool abilities attached to it. Even though Caroline used it to take out several nazis at once bare-handed, all it lets you do is move again.

A shootout ensues, General Engel escapes, and you escape back to the submarine. The submarine itself has been turned into a resistance base where everyone from the Kreisau Circle has taken up camp. Inbetween objectives when you're milling about doing chores, you can listen in to some conversations of other characters. Some of these can be entertaining, most of them I skipped because they were on the long side. Your submarine might as well be called Noah Ark's, given that it contains a Pole, a Jew, an Italian, a Frenchwoman, a Spaniard, a Japanese, a Swede, an African, African-Americans, a Scot, a Czechoslovak, a pig, a Fin, a German, and a Hungarian, most which tend to make their nationality clear by interjecting a few words of their native language while speaking English. The Fin even wants to make a sauna on the submarine. Though they all don't come in pairs. The existence of Italy and Japan is acknowledged here, but Italy's and Japan's involvement as Axis powers are still largely ignored, probably because it'd be too much of a sensitive issue to punch in the face.

We get sent down to exterminate the Nazi's in the basement of the submarine who've been surviving there for 5 months because people forgot to check the basement because they thought it didn't exist (lol?), and some time later again we go down the basement again to pick up a nuke we also supposedly had lying in the basement all along (LOL?). The idea is to start a revolution, so we get to visit a nuked NYC and experience post-traumatic Fallout 3 flashbacks with its copious amounts of rubble. Everyone here wears hazmats, but our Jewsuit protects us from radiation and gas, so we're good. You meet up with Samuel L. Jackson's ma and wacky alien conspiracy meme man, as you hightail it out of there. Even though the story is wank, I have to say the acting is top notch, and so are the facial animations.

Depending on who you saved, your cutscenes will contain either Wyatt or Fergus. Wyatt is nervous about having to step into Caroline's shoes as leader, though all he does for the entire duration of the game is use drugs and get high loudly over the microphone, wasting everyone's time in the process as he becomes little more than a joke character. Fergus gets a new robot arm which is trying to kill him, while constantly getting up in arms about Mrs. Jackson, though not being as much of a joke character.

The plan is to put a nuke inside the reactor of Area 52 where all the nazi head honchos are, so you can wipe them all out in one go, and maybe some civilians too. There is something questionable about leaving a nuke inside a nuclear reactor for safekeeping and then being to somehow detonate it several kilometers away on the surface with your dinky remote, but I don't think we're supposed to ask questions. So to get there we need to infiltrate a suburban American city under the disguise of a fireman while there's a Nazi parade going on, and everybody is cheering! This is one of the rare moments where TNC actually makes use of its alternate history setting. I actually took it very slowly and tried to listen in on most of the conversations because America living under a Nazi regime is an interesting aspect to explore and one we somehow don't see much of in the game. We hear everybody is practicing their German for Changeover Day when everybody will shift from speaking English to German. Everybody is aching to see the newest German kino. Slavery is cool again. People are ratting others out for favors with the nazis. The KKK is walking around in broad daylight. Seems like living under the Nazi regime isn't all that bad, unless you're not white, that is.

You make your way to ancient alien meme man's diner (how the hell does he manage to keep a legit diner up and running when the first time we met him he was locked up in the top of a tower building of the irradiated NYC wastes, which civilians shouldn't be able to normally access? does he make regular trips back and forth?) as Kommandant Milschschake barges in for his milkshake and reenacts the implied interrogation scene from the first game without any of the interactivity or tension before promptly getting shot in the head. Under the diner there's a tunnel leading to an underground Nazi base (with a lit fucking exit the Nazis should've very clearly noticed during construction of the base) which has a rocket train leading to Area 52. Dead nazis ensue. You insert the nuke, hightail it on your motorcycle, but decide to give your old home a visit so you can get that one wedding ring.

Unfortunately your dad had the same idea that, since you were close, you might be coming for a visit to the old abandoned house. After some 'non-linear' storytelling (Gone Home eat your heart out) you explore your house a little, find the weapon upgrade in your basement (lol?) and go to your old bedroom where you find your father waiting for you. He tells you that he sent your ma away to a concentration camp and calls you a failure of a son given that he never intended to raise a killer and a terrorist. So you brutally execute him. Unfortunately your old abandoned home still happened to have a working telephone line (lol?) so the Nazis sent their Ausmerzer to drag the whole thing into the sky. BJ isn't a very smart person, so his first idea is to detach the claws holding the house a hundred feet from the ground, which after doing so send you crashing towards the floor and get you captured by General Engel.

Your dumb captured ass gets presented in front of public television for bonus humiliation, before briefly getting thrown in the slammer. Ancient alien meme man comes to you as his lawyer in an attempt to have you escape, detailing the whole plan of escape without considering the possibility that the room you two are in might be bugged, so he just gets killed before he can execute his master plan in an admittedly somewhat hilarious scene which then somehow turns into a femdom scene once General Engel steps in. Your ass gets the übersentence, but you're BJ Blastkowich so you just rip open your shackles and engage a shootout in the courtroom which is without a doubt the worst level in the game.

This one deserves its own paragraph. In the courtroom fight you start off with no weapons aside from the SMG you just picked up (which isn't suitable for long-range engagements), and are stuck beneath five guys behind you on one side and a whole regiment of incoming nazis on the other side. There's no other option for you here other than to hide behind cover and pick off nazis little by little. The guys behind you can be solved with a grenade, if you can get to the grenades without getting shot, that is. The incoming nazis will be shooting at you from the balcony and from turret emplacements near the entrance, with useful supplies being scattered all over the place you can't get to without tanking a bullet. But especially on Death Incarnate this is like playing Super Meat Boy where you can't set a single foot outside without getting almost shot to death. If you manage to survive long enough, the courtroom side gates will open where you can run outside and make it a whole lot easier on yourself because all Nazis will just follow you like a duckling follows his mother. One phase it's about getting shot from every possible angle, which goes against the style of every other level in the game where you at least had SOME leeway in breaking line of fire while moving around, the other it's just funneling nazis into the meat grinder again because it is the safest and most efficient solution given how many there are out there and because the AI is braindead. They won't try to throw nades or try to flank you for doing that shit, they just keep on coming like Lemmings. This might as well have been a level ripped straight out of CoD and nobody would have noticed. For all the peeking you're supposed to do in this fight, the hitboxes for some of the level geometry is fucked too. For some reason when you're peeking around one of the courthouse room seats aiming at the head of a nazi on the turret, you'll be shooting invisible walls instead, which is just ridiculous.

To rub it in your face even more, everything the courthouse level was just your imagination, so you didn't just break free and kill everything. Back to reality. You get the übersentence, you get a public execution by General Engel herself, you get decapitated in first person. You fucking die. The End.

Technically a severed head will be alive for a couple of seconds or minute, so the rest of your resistance buddies manage to catch your head using a drone before it would fall into a massive pit of fire, and then kind of keep you alive by feeding your brain oxygen in a tank, just like in Futurama. Thankfully every facet of this out-there plan just so happened to work out. Your pals also inform you that Caroline had a spare vat-grown Nazi body lying around in your basement she stole one day from the Nazis (LOL?), which would never see much use until someone conveniently got his head chopped clean off which could in turn be transplanted to this unused body. They even have the monkey-cat thing huffing around on your tank to tell you 'we did foreshadow the head transplant after all :^)'. It's not so much that I have a problem with believing the idea of someone getting his head chopped off, being put in a safe state within the nick of time, and the head being transplanted on a new body, but that it is a cop-out to what was being established before.

At the start of the game it was revealed that BJ's kidneys were failing and that he did not have long to live. The suit would keep him alive a bit longer, but it was more of a patchwork solution. He'd have to deal with the fact of telling Anya that she might have to raise their kids alone, a fact he'd soon come to accept. So when his imminent death is just thrown directly out of the window because of a deus ex machina, it begs the question what the hell the point was of the whole dying thing. It's like that one comedic take on the classical train departure scene where Mr. in the train looking out of the window and Mrs. on the perron are wishing eachother goodbye, as Mrs. runs after the train once it departs, but in this case the train departure is delayed because of technical issues, so after wishing eachother tons of farewells they're now awkwardly just standing there after expecting the train to depart and weakly turn away from eachother. That's pretty much the only way I can describe someone's imminent death being made out to be a huge deal only for it to be written out of existence as it never happened. The whole plotline is straight up dropped.

I have no idea why they chose a fresh nazi übersoldat body in particular to pilfer, as the only thing they could really do with it is put it in the fridge. Supposedly Caroline stole it, but I have no idea what she would intend to do with it, let alone trying to splice her head on a male body, which would just be awkward for everyone involved later on. Supposedly these plot holes are supposed to be explained through background notes and lore stuff you find by ruffling through everybody's diaries, because apparently explaining these plot holes away wasn't deemed that important because apparently you're just expected to take this shit at face value. When you ask Anya about the garage shootout with the nazis when meme man's rescue plan failed, Anya just tells you to 'not worry about it'. For what kind of cretin is this shit being written for?

Maybe most of the plot holes would make more sense if I read all the lore, but the problem is that there's so fucking much of it. Everywhere you look there's some piece of lore in the form of newspaper clippings or postcards, most of them being a waste of your time. When you put that many lore pieces with many of them having nothing of interest or importance to say in a game not paced around analyzing every little thing, how the fuck am I expected to read all of this shit? Lore material is used for expanding the world through supplementary material. You don't need to read a book to understand what's going on in a game like Halo. Hiding vital pieces of characterization or motivation of major characters in little snippets is just a hack's way of doing things when the main cutscenes fail to adequately explain everything. Plot holes in the main story shouldn't be explained away in supplementary material unless you're bound to get your hands on that material, especially not in this kind of game. We're not even told why the hell Engel even received a promotion to general after the fuck-up under her command that was Belica in TNO.

BJ also hands Set one of those Da'at Yichud doodads ancient alien meme man gave him before dying, which Set treats with extreme importance. Supposedly the thing is a doorknob to some Da'at Yichud vault of some kind, but we don't know, and we won't know until the sequel. Through several cutscenes we are constantly given the impression that that thing is very very important, but we won't know until next game, so why the hell is our time being wasted with this crap? All this plotline serves to do is to set up a MacGuffin for the sequel, but it is done beforehand so we can't accuse the writers of pulling things out of their ass. Even so, it is done very cheaply. We know it'll be important, but we are not told why. Knock it off with that crap.

Mrs. Jackson sends you back to the DC Wasteland for no real reason other than to obtain some document of which we never know the importance of, as the only real purpose of this mission is to pad out the game. After that we're supposed to find some resistance leader named Horton in order to bolster our forces, after which we are sent to New Orleans where we suffer post-traumatic Fallout 4 flashbacks. Again with the downtrodden urban areas? A bunch of dead nazis later we find the guy, and after a couple of drinks Horton and BJ end up in an argument about Horton and his bolshevist pals avoiding the draft because they didn't feel like fighting the war for the bourgeoisie in Wall Street, with BJ blaming them for not fighting back in time to prevent the Nazis from rolling over America which brought them to their current situation. So it kind of ends up being a 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' kind of alliance.

Horton gives you one of those big robothunds to put up a distraction for the Nazis while Horton and his crew are escaping. When riding the dog you can set everything on fire with one of the better representations of flamethrowers in videogames I've seen, and only the dog takes damage when you're riding it, so you're safe. On Death Incarnate it just takes way too much damage than it should, the enemies are too bloody ruthless on it for what I suppose should've been a roflstomp section where you're just burning your way through. Once it dies you need to go all the way down on foot. The dog being a big and slow thing does not get a lot of maneuverability against hitscan enemies unless you're playing the funnel game. You can heal the dog by picking up armor from fallen foes, but even when riding a giant dog the auto-pickup radius is still unbelievably finnicky. Often I found that I had to scout ahead on foot and kill the nazis waiting ahead so my dog could pass unharmed without tanking a zillion bullets.

This section works better on lower difficulties, which is surely what the game is actually balanced around. I'm convinced the thought process for Death Incarnate was to increase enemy AI parameters to obscene amounts and just let players deal with it instead of properly testing and balancing the game around it. At least NIGHTMARE difficulty in nuDoom was somewhat fair, especially compared to this dreck. Yet MachineGames had the gall to backport the permadeath ULTRA-NIGHTMARE mode from nuDoom as well under the name of 'Mein Leben!', where you have to play through Death Incarnate without dying. Now ULTRA-NIGHTMARE was actually possible, whereas Mein Leben is only possible through copious amount of stealth and crouchwalking and funneling nazis around corners. It's possible to win Mein Leben, through the least fun of way of playing. Compare that to where you had to be at peak performance in nuDoom on ULTRA-NIGHTMARE. You can't just add superhard difficulty modes for bonus hardcore points and make the most viable way of playing the game on that difficulty without constantly dying the most passive and boring-to-watch way possible. I hate to use nuDoom as a standard for anything, but when you're clearly just ripping off/backporting shit from nuDoom with even less regard to consistency, you're only outing yourself as more of a clueless chucklefuck than the flukes over at id.

Horton doesn't actually do anything in this game, the story could have proceeded just fine without him as he does absolutely nothing of consequence or even help. We just haul his ass out of his New Orleans in this game so he can actually do something important in the sequel. Wouldn't it then be a better idea to rescue him in the sequel or have him be actually integral to the plot?

BJ and pals escape the incoming Ausmerzer's grasp by firing a nuke over New Orleans to propel themsleves away using the shockwave of the blast, killing all remaining nazis and non-nazis in New Orleans. Good job, BJ. Truly you are a hero of the people. It's not like the small ragtag band Horton brought with himself to the submarine could have been all of the survivors in New Orleans. After that you're supposed to get the codes for the Ausmerzer's control system, however these are locked away all the way over in fucking Venus. So the idea is that you're going to pose as an actor auditioning for the role of a movie depicting the madness of Terror-Billy which is being shot on Venus, and infiltrate the base from there. Hold the fuck on, haven't I heard this before? Haven't we traveled all the way up to the Moon in TNO under disguise to get some sekrit codes too?

Yeah okay, I'm starting to see a pattern here. We've got the 'BJ wakes up from a coma during a nazi assault as he proceeds to move around with difficulty and kill everything in his path' plot beat with the asylum level and WHEEEEEELCHAAAAAIRS, the 'main protagonist forces you to watch as he executes one of your friends right in front of you' plot beat with Deathshead and General Engel at the start, the 'nazi commander subtly interrogates you while you're wearing a disguise' plot beat with Engel in TNO and Kommandant Erdbeermilsch, and the 'infiltrate offworld Nazi colony under disguise to obtain secret codes' plot beat with the Moon and Venus. It's not even done in a smart way where it's done in an established cycle, but more in a lazy way where they're trying to recreate the highs of the previous game by simply doing it again, except worse. The asylum level gave you a much better sense of being a fish fresh out of water. Engel doesn't even force you to make a tough decision even though she does suggest it. Milkshake interrogation is mostly irrelevant and doesn't set up any character, whereas it served as an introduction for Engel in TNO. Venus just looks like drab compared to the Moon in TNO (save for some cool-looking interior areas), especially when you're walking on the surface (which given the air pressure on Venus shouldn't even be possible) which looks like it was ripped straight out of nuDoom, and nuDoom wasn't terribly aesthetically pleasing to begin with.

Back to the story, as we're about to get comfy in our seat talking to other actors, someone very special barges into the room, namely our best pal Adolf Hitler! He doesn't look so good though, I wonder if he's okay. He's also the one overseeing the production of this movie after all, still trying to continue his legacy as an artist. I don't know how he managed to survive after he got shot to pieces in his mech suit, but apparently he just did and probably forgot about it. Old age and paranoia must've gotten to him, because he's claiming he was the one who captured BJ rather than General Engel. He's also seeing Jews everywhere, which probably isn't too far from the truth since BJ is sitting inside the room. Nonetheless he accuses the actor sitting next to you of being a Jew for addressing Mister Hitler wrongly, whereas the actor responds by saying he's only from Arizona, whereas Hitler responds by shooting him in the head. Hitler then decides to take a load off by urinating blood and vomiting on the floor. I get that he's supposed to be a decrepit hollow husk of a man, but you don't need to go into toilet humor territory when the scene did a good job at getting the message across without body fluids.

Hitler then forces you at gunpoint to read the lines you just had practiced and wrote on your hand as a cheatsheet, though all the lines are wiped and hard to make out. If you mess up, you die. Otherwise BJ proceeds to read the correct lines in the most flat way possible. Whereas the guy next to you does a perfect job at it. Hitler even commends the guy next to you for understanding the psyche of Terror-Billy much better than you do. It's about time to rehearse a fight scene, but Hitler is tired and takes a little nap on the floor. One other actor tries to wrestle the gun from a Nazi soldier in this scene, but only gets a nosebleed in return. Hitler shoots him for doing such a poor job.

It's your turn now. You can actually kick Hitler in the head and kill him dead while he's still lying asleep, though the room you're in is filled to the brim with Nazi soldiers and war machines, so if you try to kill him you'll get an inevitable game over no matter what you do. Don't know what all the hubbub about this game being a commentary on the current state of America is when you can't even kill Hitler. They probably wanted to keep him around for the sequel. Then BJ breaks cover and brutally executes the nazi for no real reason. This brutal display of violence luckily speaks directly to Hitler's heart, and he gives you the job as the actor for BJ Blackowitz immediately while killing off the other remaining actor.

This somehow manages to be the high point of the game given that it actually manages to be somewhat humorous in context while also being disturbing at the same time. Hitler here is like the old grandpa who used to be a war hero back in the day, but now everyone else tries to coax him into the attic because nobody really wants to put him out of his misery, as he decides to come down the stairs and everyone has to pretend to like him because it's tradition. Kind of reminds me of that old guy Vlad had hanging around in his attic in Max Payne 2. It manages to avoid the rampant tonal inconsistency of the rest of the game (toilet humor aside) where you have a raving demented madman waving around his gun like he owns the place, but in a way he does so everyone just puts up with it. It's not improbable, nor does it break the atmosphere for cheap laughs. The insanity is actually acknowledged here.

You then get inside the base and wreak some havoc using a gun you smuggled in (so much for Nazi security standards), and take a walk on the Venus surface. Shooting on the surface of Venus doesn't differ at all from how you do it normally. The only thing that changes is having to refill the coolant supply of your suit every minute if you don't wish to burn to a crisp. It's more tedious than anything. Coolant refill stations are everywhere, so you're never really in danger of running low on coolant. The animation for refilling your suit takes longer than it really needs to. Other than that you just blast on like normal.
I'd also like to point out that the UI in this game is a big downgrade stylistically. The UI of TOB/TNO had a neat font which fit in with the rest of the game as the same font was used a lot everywhere, whereas for TNC they went for the minimalism meme, so everything is a transparent gray and nothing stands out anymore. They also need to keep putting in reminders to remind you that you haven't looked at these incredibly basic tutorials in the menu. Just go away, I already know how to move!

BJ then steals the codes (he is an expert at operating Nazi computers) and hijacks an UFO back to the Earth (he is an expert at operating Nazi vehicles for space travel). The writers must've forgotten in the process of copying the Moon scene from TNO that a journey from Venus to Earth would probably take MONTHS, though this doesn't seem to be acknowledged anywhere. Anyways, your friends in the submarine throw a surprise birthday party for you, and everyone gets plastered. You then either go looking for a suicidal Wyatt or Fergus' robot arm. Now that everything is in place, the plan is to hijack General Engel's Ausmerzer using the codes you found on Venus while she's giving a public interview live on television about how she executed the greatest terrorist who ever lived. The Ausmerzer manages to be one of the better levels in the game because of the lack of wide open spaces and side routes during fights, so at least that's a positive.

What's not so positive is the final boss at the end of the Ausmerzer. Yes, this is also the final level. The 'final boss' are two upgraded versions of the übersoldaten you encountered throughout the game who can fire a BFG, are larger, and have more health to boot. But in terms of behavior they're just the same as the regular übersoldat. So you kill them the same way: standing a good distance away and unloading your double ARs at them until they explode. They can dash a good distance towards you, but so can you run away from them. What a lousy final boss this is. And Mick Gordon still can't compose a fitting track for a final boss fight. There is zero sense of climax to this fight with no (emotional) build-up, especially when compared to the Deathshead fight in TNO which was mostly a puzzle boss (puzzle bosses being shit by design when they aren't in a puzzle game, because they only challenge you to solve some arbitrary puzzle to win instead of challenging you on the skills you learned throughout the game). On paper this fight is better designed, as you have multiple high-priority targets to contend with while you have to deal with randomly spawning Nazi grunts, but again two ARs turn this fight into a massive joke. I have no idea whether they were referencing the Bruiser Brothers at the end of Knee-deep in the Dead, but they did a poor job regardless. Besides, you don't want your final boss to be a reference to only the first episode of Doom.

You enter the bridge, after which a ridiculous cutscene ensues where BJ finds himself ambushed by a force of Nazis who were hiding behind the door. But at the same time Anya runs past them (they didn't notice her?), throws three grenades in their direction (all unpinned at the same time), body tackles you on the floor (somebody please think of the babies), before the grenades explode and create a shower of blood and guts (it just keeps raining men!), as Anya takes off her burning jacket to fire at the surviving robot dog with a gun in each hand and in her half-naked, pregnant, blood-covered glory, punctuated by the exploding dogbot (wat). This made the paternal instincts in even a loveless virgin like me cringe at such carelessness with the babies. Doctors tend to recommend against firing a weapon while pregnant because the vibrations of the recoil might induce early childbirth, let alone the negative effects her stress under combat is causing for the embryos. When someone is handling something so fragile, you can't help but cringe when they don't seem to care about properly handling the fragile wares. I get that they want to set her up as a badass of some kind, but they really didn't have to, especially not in a way like this. I know that pregnant women technically can be useful in the line of fire, it's just not a very smart thing to do.

You hack the Ausmerzer with ze codes, and it's yours now. Which only leaves one thing. The team heads to the broadcasting station where General Engel is being interviewed on live TV. So you make a public reappearance by publicly and violently executing General Engel with an axe. Plop goes her eye. Maybe I'd care a little more if it were more personal like it was with Deathshead, whereas Engel just was this mook following me around who also executed Caroline, the latter being handled poorly in terms of making the player care. So after that whole TV segment where you and your team are being made out to be violent terrorists, you commit an act of violent terror on live TV, in front of people who probably regard you as just a violent terrorist. Mrs. Jackson/Horton or Wyatt, depending on whether you saved Fergus or Wyatt, then tell the American people to rise up against the Nazi oppressors, that the time for sitting idly by has passed and that it's time for a revolution. Then the credits roll as the cheesiest possible song starts playing.

I don't think the revolution will come though. From what little we've seen of America under Nazi rule, the people (or at least the white people), seem to be living comfortably, with the only complaint apparently being that the food sucks. I don't think they're in a mood to grab their guns and start shooting Nazis in the middle of the street just because this guy who was made out to be the most violent and dangerous terrorist to have ever lived told you to. There remains the question of how he came back to life after receiving a public execution, but TNC doesn't touch on that point. So the minorities who are already actively being oppressed will most likely be fighting back, but I think most of them already were. That just leaves the slaves, which are only mentioned off-hand and are never seen.

That was a crappy ending though. TNC clearly suffers from the middle-child syndrome of trilogies where the first has the advantage of justifying its own existence by setting up the world and the characters, whereas the second often only exists to set up things that will get resolved in the third and final part, making the second on its own feel rather weak. There is no real sense of closure to TNC unlike with TNO. You don't even get to see the thing you were working for towards in TNC (the revolution), whereas TNO could work as a stand-alone story about killing General Deathshead. If you're going for this kind of set-up where things only really get in motion with the final part, then you should at least end the second part on some personal note or with a sense of accomplishment at the very least. TNC feels like it ended at the halfway point of a bigger game.

After that you're warped back to the submarine, where Mrs. Jackson tells you that the revolution really is going on in the background, even though you don't get to see it all. Really, just trust her. Buy the DLC to see how it turns out. After that you're only left with a bunch of side-missions where you get to assassinate a bunch of random Nazi commanders. All these missions reuse the levels from the main game, so you're not gonna see something new here. The enemy placement might be a little different, but in the grand scale it doesn't feel like it really matters. Sometimes you'll play through levels in reverse, even though this feels like a cheap way to make the levels feels somewhat fresh when some levels clearly aren't built around being played in reverse.

For example, when you trigger an alarm, a Commander will always retreat to the same position in the back of the level where he can be safe. However, if you were to reverse the direction from where you start the level and where you must go next, the Commander safety position remains the same even though it is not logical at all given the circumstances. So you might get Commanders retreating to positions right next to you as a result of these levels being reused with zero effort involved, which makes zero sense. YOU SHOULD ALL BE RUNNING AWAY FROM ME.

You can go complete all those side-missions, but I don't think it will unlock anything of interest. You can also go collectible hunting, if you're some kind of completionist. The game tends to clock around nine hours, which can be longer on Death Incarnate because of all the deaths, and a bit shorter if you skip all the cutscenes. There's not a whole lot of replay value, as the timeline choice at the start of the game only gives you a different weapon which you won't use all that often and an altered set of cutscenes.

That's The New Colossus for you. The gameplay turned out to be a dig bissapointment, even though I'm probably the only one to really get his hopes up about it. The difficulty here is mostly the bad kind of difficulty. I'm not sure what the deal is with the story. I'm told that this is just an over the top story which is not meant to be taken seriously, even though there are several story segments in the game which are played completely straight with no humor behind it or whatsoever, so I can't believe that at all. I'm sure if you told the writer that this is just a fun story which is not meant to be taken seriously, he'd probably awkwardly nod in false agreement, as most writers do when their drama is considered a good comedy. The two different tones are only detrimental to eachother. When it tries to be funny, it feels out of place and sometimes disturbing given how gory it can get. When it tries to be serious, the impact is lessened because you're expecting something more light-hearted. Only rarely does it really manage to strike a balance, but overall it comes off as not knowing what it wants to be. And then it ends on a poor note too. What's more unfortunate is that the alternate history aspect just feels wasted here too. Don't waste your time on this unless you're curious about how the story pans out or to learn what happens when you awkwardly try to force old-school elements in a shooter which is overtly modern.

Even as a political commentary this game comes off as a political cartoon you'd find in a highschool newspaper. There's nothing of insight to be found or learned here, aside from violence being the solution to everything. I think everyone knows that one already. It's not even that related to current-day events, yet we have people who treat this game as some kind of stress relief with nazis as their target. There's cheaper and better stress relief on the market than The New Colossus. I'd say The New Order/The Old Blood was better than this crap.

And we still don't know the involvement of Imperial Japan in this new Reich. Quit beating around the bush MachineGames, I want my fucking nazi mechs damnit

[Leandro]

I'm almost finishing Metroid Fusion, and I found the game surprisingly good, I thought it would be way below Super Metroid and Zero Mission, but it's surprisingly very consistent to these games quality

[ryu]

Fusion is great despite it's lack of freedom. However all the unskippable text gets really annoying on subsequent playthroughs.

I finally beat The Evil Within last weekend. Almost gave up a few times. I like most aspects of it, and mostly enjoyed it too. But some sections were too much and being unexperienced with shooting games I had a very hard time. It doesn't take much to see why the game's so polarizing.
Not sure I want to give the sequel a chance. Started playing the DLC but dropped it quickly because stealth horror isn't my thing.

[Mischief Maker]

I just got the Sons of Cadia expansion for Sanctus Reach.

It's much better than the previous expansion. I think the Imperial Guard shines in a turn-based environment with its super-specialized units.

I grinned like a psychopath when a squad of those goddamn bullet-sponge ork nobs was chewed up in a single round by my gatling cannon punisher tank.