Recent reviews by Twisted

Everhood 1 is one of my favorite games of all time. But you know what the worst part of Everhood 1 was? Having to repeat some of the fights again in the second half of the game. Everhood 2 asks the daring question: what if we made the worst part of Everhood 1 the entire game?

The unique, high-quality battles against a charismatic cast? Gone. Instead, Everhood 2 is filled with repetitive encounters, where the same enemies appear again and again. Enter an area? Expect to fight identical battles against the same foes multiple times. In the mines, you fight three hyenas and sharks. Later, they return. Then, near the end of the game, you fight yet another hyena and shark—again. That is five separate battles against the same recycled enemies. And this is just two enemy types; the entire game is structured like this. At one point, the game even forces you to sit still for ten minutes, fighting the same enemy six times in a row. And no, they are not interesting enemies.

Would Everhood 1 have been better if you had to fight three Automated Terror Machines on your way to the club? No. And Everhood 2 is not better for this design choice either. This is absolutely a case where less would have been more. If the game had simply removed random encounters and made each enemy a single, meaningful fight with increased health, it would have dramatically improved the experience. The world and exploration are strong enough to carry the game. It did not need this relentless padding.

And then there is the combat system. Mechanically, it is deeper than Everhood 1 and has a higher skill ceiling. But is it more fun? I would argue no - significantly less so.

Everhood 1 was simple: absorb two attacks of the same color, counter, and slowly chip away at the enemy. In Everhood 2, the most efficient strategy is to absorb 14, 15, or 16 attacks in a row to reach a full-power strike. In some cases, you will want to absorb 30 to 40 attacks just to land a devastating one-hit KO. This can feel satisfying in short bursts, but over time, I realized something: I was no longer paying attention to the battles.

I was so hyper-focused on playing perfectly for minutes at a time that I stopped absorbing the experience itself. I was not watching animations, reading dialogue, or even engaging with the music. I was just grinding out perfect sequences to make the most of the system.

To tell the truth, my favorite part of Everhood 1 was before you got your arm back. Just dodging. It was pure immersion. You, the enemy, and the music. But in Everhood 2, this feeling is constantly interrupted by the need to execute long, fragile attack chains. One of the most interesting boss battles, Lucy, can literally be ended in a single hit before the fight even begins on hard mode.

It is not just that playing perfectly is hard. It is that the punishment for failure is severe and deeply frustrating.
- Absorb the wrong color once? Chain reset.
- Get hit a single time? All stored energy gone.

This turns every battle tedious. Even easier fights become drawn-out slogs because a single mistake sets you back massively.

Would it not have been better if getting hit halved your stored energy instead of deleting it? Or if absorbing the wrong color just didn't work, instead of punishing you? I just finished one of the final bosses, and my only thought was, "That was really annoying to absorb attacks against." Even when I beat a hard boss without dying, if I lost my chain a few times, it was still frustrating. I want to emphasize, this system is flawed in a way that even winning can feel bad.

And then there is the music. When it hits, it hits. But it is hard to ignore that Chris Nordgren stepped back from composing the majority of the soundtrack, and Cazok took over. Unfortunately, I do not think a single Cazok track makes it into my top five Everhood songs. His work often feels generic in a way that Chris’ compositions never did. The result is a step down overall.

The story is where the cracks really start to show. Comparing Everhood 2's story to Everhood 1 almost feels unfair—because Everhood 1 was phenomenal. It was charming, heartfelt, and filled with characters I cared about. It had emotional weight. It made me almost tear up at its highlights.

Everhood 2’s story is an incoherent mess. I can't even begin to give you a synopsis.

Good storytelling is driven by cause and effect. Everhood 1 followed this perfectly:
- The Blue Thief steals your arm, therefore you chase him.
- However, he is working for Gold Pig, who betrays you, therefore you go after him.

Everhood 2? Nothing connects.
- Events happen in no particular order.
- Characters show up, disappear, then show up again without reason.
- There is no real conflict, no meaningful relationships, and no character arcs.
- Villains appear out of nowhere and vanish just as fast.
- I thought a character died, only for them to return without a single acknowledgment.

And then the game just ends. No real resolution, no emotional payoff—just nonsense for the sake of nonsense.

SPOILERS: There is a particularly egregious moment where you return to the world of Everhood 1. I would not have minded revisiting a single area or a single fight. But the entire world? Undoing the entire ending of Everhood 1? It feels borderline disrespectful.

Honestly, it feels like Everhood 2 is the first game, and Everhood 1 is the sequel that fixed everything. Everhood 1 learned from all the mistakes that Everhood 2 made. There is not a single moment in Everhood 2 that comes close to fighting Zigg for the first time, battling the Dev Gnomes, the emotional weight of killing Blue Thief and then fighting Rasta Beast, or discovering the Light Being.

Maybe the biggest issue with Everhood 2 is not that it is a bad game. It is that it will always live in the shadow of its better, older brother.

I've developed a game in RPGMaker MV and published it on Steam too! So I think I'm fairly qualified to tell you this: Run, run, and never look back. Because RPGMaker MV is a nightmare.

It is so inept, so incompetent, that it leaves me bewildered and frustrated. This software is outdated, poorly optimized, full of overpriced DLC, and the bare minimum in provided tools and effort. It's insane that there isn't readily available competition to sweep it off its feet. If it weren't for the absolutely incredible scripting community, this engine wouldn't even be viable for game development.

I can't even list every issue I've had over the years: memory leaks, extremely challenging-to-troubleshoot crashes, and no way to effectively input or edit batches of text. But I can point to a few that represent the product as a whole. In RPGMakerMV, you can't resize the windows. I repeat: You can't RESIZE the windows. Text and events without word wrapping spill straight off the side, making even basic text editing such an awful slog that experienced developers have literally started coding dialogue outside the game in JavaScript and writing scripts to call to the dialogue when needed. This problem is the core of RPGMaker; it pretends to be basic and accessible while actually being extremely unforgiving and complicated if you want to do anything outside of its boundaries. The amount of creativity or third-party scripts required to create even simple systems like a skill tree is absurd. And this is really a problem when the base product contains a complete and utter lack of quality of life features.

It loves to present this idea that it's 'simple,' and all you need to do is press a bunch of buttons and check boxes, but that design philosophy ends up both so inherently bloated with multi-page lists of ambiguous options while also being limiting because it's extremely challenging to break outside of that framework without extensive JavaScript knowledge.

RPGMaker MV is at its best when you're doing the bare minimum and making an extremely simple game. But all the famous RPGMaker games, Omori, Fear and Hunger, and Karryn's Prison, have significant amounts of external JavaScript coding to make them work. As much as I respect it, at that point, for your own sanity, just use a better engine.

One of my favourite games of all time. Other games wish they were half as cool as some of the individual battles in Everhood.

Clearly, a lot of love and passion went into the visuals, but the developers of Nightmare Kart had no idea how to actually translate that into a functional game.

Before I go off on this game, I want to lay out some of its best points: It looks gorgeous, the driving is tight and feels great, I love the way the weapons lock on, the cutscenes are all fantastic, and some are genuinely funny.

Unfortunately, none of the matters when the core loop of the game is completely broken. The biggest problem is that the enemy's AI doesn't work. Not even a little. It's not unusual to see your AI opponents getting stuck, bashing into walls repeatedly, or just generally doing absolutely nothing during a race. This leaves the game feeling a little hollow as you lap stuck opponents, and due to the game giving weaker items the better you're doing, I think I played the entire game without seeing several fun items.

Later in the game, there is a boss encounter with "Nicholas, Host of the Nightmare," which clearly showcases the developer's lack of expertise in game design. The boss battle immediately provides you with misleading information about how to beat it by having the boss make an immediate right turn when it should, according to the rules of the rest of the fight, continue onward. You'll understand what I mean if you play. It's an aimless, confusing mess, with no attempt on the developer's part to design the level and its encounters in a way that is intuitive. 

Finally, the final level needs to be unlocked with a 50/50 coin flip option. If you select the incorrect option, it'll send you back to the start of the game. I'm not kidding; you will need to reload a save or complete the entire game again.

There are many other smaller mistakes the game makes:
- All the buttons in the game are console, making you play a guessing game during the tutorial to figure out how to do anything.
- Let me know if you ever figure out how to do a start boost, because it seems unintuitive as heck.
- The timer doesn't count correctly in seconds.
- Sometimes when the blood echo counter says +1,000, it won't actually add 1,000; it'll instead be set to 1,000. 
These sound like petty things to point out, but to me, these are just more symptoms of an inexperienced developer in way over their head.

This game gets to be "Overwhelmingly Positive" because it's free, but I'm confident the game would be "Mixed" to "Negative" if it cost even $5.

It had the best story and writing in gaming when I first played it many years ago.

Returning to it years later, it's still the best story and writing in gaming.

I imagine when I return to it again and again over the next few decades, it'll still be the best.

After four playthroughs, I can comfortably say that this is one of the best horror games I've played. Frictional Games used everything they learnt from Amnesia TDD, Justine and other games like Alien Isolation to craft one of the most effective and interesting horror experiences.

I can sit here and say I wish it was longer or had more replayability- I can comfortably beat the game in less than thirty minutes at this point- but for its price and what it was trying to do, Amnesia: The Bunker doesn't miss.

What I Want more than anything for the future of this game is a mode with a randomized map and randomized objectives. Some interesting game modifiers like having a larger bunker or two monsters could go a long way to turn this from a 6 hour single experience for most players to an infinitely replayable and revisitable lifetime experience.

Resident Evil 5 is the first Resident Evil game I ever played, fresh on my PS3. I loved this game and played it back and forth multiple times, unlocking all the best weapons and even doing some speedrunning to unlock the infinite ammo RPG.

Unfortunately, it's not 2009 anymore. Fresh off my playthroughs of RE8, RE4: Remake, and RE4: Original, I decided to dive headfirst into RE5, and... I can't finish it. This game just doesn't provide a quality experience that's worth my time anymore.

Let me emphasize something. In March/April, I played through RE4 Remake, then RE4 Original, and then did an entire play-through of RE4 Remake again. They're longer games than RE5, but I STILL couldn't bring myself to beat RE5. I'm a fan of these games; I'm not here to tell you that I don't like the arcadey-shooty action, but I am here to tell you that this is probably the worst RE game, with 6 not considered because I haven't played that one.

Let's begin with the gameplay in particular; despite being a sequel to RE4, it somehow feels clunkier. Weapons like the shotgun lack their weight and wide spread from RE4, and melee attacks are much worse at crowd control, making it much easier for enemies to frame trap you in the animation and hit you immediately afterwards. The inventory is frustratingly limited, with 19 slots shared between two players, but you can't drop items; weapons and ammo take up entire slots, so you'll have at least 12 slots dedicated to weapons and ammo. Leaving only six slots for consumables or additional ammo slots. Not to mention you can't drop items, so the manic trading and fiddling you'll have to do just to get a red and green herb into one person's inventory so they can combine them is ridiculous. If you want to wear armor or hold grenades, That's another slot, too.

Your AI companion may be the dumbest AI companion in gaming; Sheva has literally stood there and stared at me throughout the entire dying state before. There were three times where I fought entire boss encounters and she didn't fire a single bullet, and she would often ignore combo melee attacks at crucial times. The AI is also hard countered by the chainsaw boss' rampage, causing me to get two game overs in a row despite not getting hit a single time in either boss attempt, and due to adaptive difficulty, the game was suddenly dumbed down on the third attempt, and I don't enjoy that at all. They're also just not coded very well, so often they would cancel their action to loot a nearby object, or they'd refuse to use the right weapon for the job, instead prioritizing always using the pistol. I had to force them to run out of pistol ammo just so they would use some of their 40 rifle ammo, only for them to start aggressively picking up every handgun ammo drop in the level.

Level design feels very uninspired, Instead of set pieces it feels like a lot of similar, boxy rooms filled with a horde of enemies that funnel in from one direction. Later on it becomes a cover shooter with gun zombies, yeah, seriously. This game somehow feels like a slog to play, even if it's quite short. My 7 hours of playtime were broken up over about 5 play sessions over weeks because there was never a hook to keep me playing or excited compared to past RE titles. A few highlight areas are the marshlands and the pitch-black mine, but such set pieces are few and far between, and are brought down by incredibly boring puzzle sections like the mirror puzzle in the ruins.

The game also heavily features on-rails turret segments and QTEs, and... they're not great. Particularly the QTE bindings, how am I supposed to quickly press F + V when my fingers are on WASD? RE4 may have had QTEs but they weren't overly aggressive and had better bindings than this.

I'd also like to bring some attention to the story and cut scenes, which are a massive step down from the original RE4. With low video and audio quality, some of these cutscenes are just shockingly bad, and not in a campy, fun way.
When the protagonists are being morons and refusing to shoot a war criminal, Irving, that has killed thousands of people, who's vulnerable and right in front of them, I'm left a little confused and frustrated. I've shot people so many people during gameplay, why am I giving this guy an opportunity? Then when they're dying, Chris even feels sympathetic for them afterwards, sympathetic for a man that catalysed the deaths of 1,000s with potentially billions next. It leaves me in complete disbelief at the low quality of the writing.
Chris is a personality black hole in this one, but Sheva is honestly a good character even if her design is pushing it in terms of being too sexualized over practical function. I liked Wesker, but with every year that passes, his entire character archetype only ages worse. The game is fortunate that it's just self-aware enough to not be cringe. It's also a story about how colonialism is bad while using a lot of racist tropes, such as implying the tribals are savages or giving them generic Native American war cries. The fact that there isn't a bigger emphasis on how the Africans that were used as a test bed for this zombie outbreak are the real victims in this kind of situation makes the story collapse into itself. And while I appreciate that's not really what RE5 is going for, it still went places it really didn't need to, mostly out of ignorance.

I can see how this game could be fun if you have a friend you can bounce off of; I really do, but everything is more fun with friends, and as a single-player experience, I can't begin to recommend this.

I'd give the original RE4 a 9/10, but RE5 is more like a 5 or 6/10.
And this rating makes sense, RE4 was built with a lot of time and care. It had so much talent and loved poured into it that not even the remake over a decade later can best it in every area. RE5 was likely made with tighter time constraints with fewer of the talented staff that worked on RE4. Sorry if I've mentioned RE4 a lot in this review, but it's important to recognise how similar these two games are, but how a lot of insidious changes can make or break a game.

I hope they don't remake this.

One of my favourite Triple-A releases in the modern era of gaming. Endless replayable fun in one of the most engaging combat and war sandboxes in perhaps all of gaming. It's a unique experience you can't get from any other game, and there's a reason I've replayed the entire game from start to finish three separate times over the six years it's been released.

And to take this even further, it's also set in the world of The Lord of the Rings, which gives it an added edge in terms of lore and intrigue. While the main story itself is nothing special; it's closer to fan fiction than anything else, the game is self-aware and doesn't waste your time. It knows that the story is just a vehicle to contextualise the game play, and it does this excellently with many surprisingly compelling characters. This game just wouldn't be as fun if it tried to tell a long, serious, cinematic story.

My only criticisms of the game are:
The initially scummy microtransactions WB Games forced into the experience, along with some especially mediocre DLC, Fortunately, the microtransactions have been completely removed, and instead all the benefits you could have gotten from that system are given out with an in-game economy with plentiful currency, so you never feel like you have to grind even on the hardest difficulty.
The game definitely isn't balanced or designed around "Gravewalker" or "Brutal" levels of difficulty, with enemies often attacking you during animations such as the captain intros or captain "fleeing/enraged" cutaways, causing you to immediately take significant damage, and getting one shot by captains in this difficulty isn't unusual. This also happens often; sometimes you could be executing an enemy and another orc is swinging at you during the i-frames of the animation, and you get frame-trapped into taking a hit afterwards.
Gravewalker/Brutal also makes stealth more difficult, making some of the stealth challenges in-game nearly impossible. This clearly wasn't tested.
Enemies can also be bizarrely aggressive sometimes, in ways that can feel inconsistent. Some enemies will unnaturally leap and lock onto Talion from great distances while they're attacking, particularly if they're enraged. This doesn't match their steps, causing them to unnaturally float or leap towards you in a manner that looks janky, unnatural and always catches me off guard. Also, when approaching enemies in stealth, enemies are supposed to be briefly surprised, giving you a chance to perform a stealth attack in this brief reprieve window. For some reason, this just doesn't work if there seems to be an arbitrary number of orcs, like three or more, spotting you simultaneously, causing you to just stumble around like a goof because you can't attack from stealth- which I'm not a huge fan of, and takes some getting used to.
Sometimes this brief surprise window doesn't happen at all, and the enemy instantly locks onto you with a quick attack that comes out in 0.1–0.2 seconds. This type of hit often gets me the most because even if it can be countered, it's so quick and unexpected that I can't react fast enough.

Overall, Brutal and Gravewalker difficulty are still fun; you just really have to go into it with the perspective that the game is actively not being fair, and you should absolutely not play fair either. This does create a problem where you're encouraged to cheese encounters and only use the absolute strongest methods like Shadow Strike Pull or summoning a Graug, especially when the stakes are high. Playing like this isn't necessarily the most fun, though, so I recommend your first playthrough be on Nemesis difficulty; it's definitely a much better balanced experience with less severe consequences for the game's janky moments.

One of the best games ever made, and it almost all comes from the phenomenal writing.

I like it a lot