Recent reviews by ARYZON

I sat through over 30 minutes of yapping with absolutely zero context on what is happening and how all the philosophy nonsense Lilith is saying has any relevance to current situation.
Dialogue options feel pointless, there are obvious "right" and "wrong" options. With an occasion "none of these options make any sense" moment.

I don't see the point. I am not gonna sit through the whole game in hopes that everything will make sense by the end. There is no indication of that.

This is effectively unplayable solo. You will be resource starved no matter how good you are.
Support and Medic classes have the ability to heal and give ammo to other players. But they cannot do that to themselves. Your health does not regenerate and you have to manually heal yourself when you take damage. You have limited amount of heals.
There are no refill stations and you cannot pick up weapons from the enemies you kill. So you WILL eventually run out of ammo.

The gameplay itself is very poor and plays nothing like the base Delta Force game. You are VERY slow and have VERY limited stammina. Enemies have animation desync and will shoot at you while doing something else such as flinching or moving somewhere. They have wallhacks and random aimbots. They can also sometimes shoot through walls.
They will not drop you instantly on sight but fighting them is no joy.

You will encounter ally soldiers who will not follow you as you go through the mission to clear out enemies. They will fight enemy attackers but they don't seem to do any damage to them. I have not seen an ally solider drop an enemy.

Performance is very bad. Technically playable if you turn down the settings (especially global illumination) but still not good. Visuals are also terrible. Usual UE5 grain and blur from undersampling. Many effects run at what appears to be sub 30 fps and many distant objects are rendered at low res and run at low FPS. And it is very obvious.

Absolutely not recommended.

I don't know what is up with nearly every platformer game having the worst controls imaginable.. in a game that is all about precise movement.
But this one might take the cake as the absolute worst of all of them.

The map is basically designed for you to "barely make it". Ori's jump height is absurdly low, even many simple traversal jumps require you to time it because you will only reach the ledge if you jump exactly at the last possible frame.
You also then have to hold space to jump higher. Which basically means if you press space you barely move at all. And holding space makes you jump the normal height which again is barely enough.

And soon you will encounter wall jumping which either has the most unforgiving timing or is straight up random on whether Ori will actually jump on the wall or will fall to his death. His grip on the wall just seems to be so inconsistent and there will be MANY wall jumping puzzles you need to solve. Each of them filled with spikes and fireballs which will kill you in 1 or 2 hits.

You should not make a game about precise movement and not provide that precise movement to the player. It's unbearable and infuriating.

I am gonna give this one a barely passable rating.
The game unfortunately did not meet my expectations as it's very short and very.. braindead. The difficulty is very artificial and the only realistic skill expression you can have is knowing when to switch to bombs in your arsenal and when to activate the overdrive mode. Enemies will fill the screen with bullets and it's often impossible to avoid damage.

Game takes about 30 minutes to beat if you exclude the visual novel style dialogues which mainly consist of pointless yapping and there is a lot of it. Story is way too dramatic and serves no real purpose. Basically some evil institution being very evil and making evil clones of your best friend. And so you set off on a quest to annihilate everything that moves and rescue her.

Before you start your story mode run or endless mode run you can purchase upgrades which will last for one run with points.
While fighting you move your crosshair with your mouse and your character moves with it. Moving crosshair over an enemy instantly locks on to them and you can then press left click to shoot homing rockets at then. So no real aiming required.

The art is very adorable and is the only strong point here. Aside from the comically short draw distance of the battlefield.

This would've been fine for a free Flash game on the internet but even for 5 bucks I expected at the very least there to be some logic put behind the gameplay.

But you know what, very simple games like these do have their place to exist and I am sure the developers had good intentions behind it considering it's their first game.

This one is my favourite in the Arkham series. Probably to this day the most detailed open world, both visually and the amount of things to do there.
Combat has been refined from previous games, I notice less jank and combo misses. You have more tools than ever to use for your missions be it stealth or combat. And of course you now have access to the batmobile which I absolutely love. It really does feel like a billion dollar tank and it honestly my favorite batmobile design pereiod.

Long story short this is one of the most detailed and polished games out there. There is a video online that is a compilation of easter eggs and that alone is 2 hours long.

Man, nothing better than a soulless cashgrab filled with lootboxes with graphical downgrades so massive it makes Ubisoft blush.
Sorry, I would love to finish at least the main story to properly review the game but by the time I finished the first part of the prologue I died from cringe. See you all in hell.

I don't understand why this game is loved so much. It's very clunky, very slow, very repetitive and filled with bugs. Smokers can grab you through walls across the map. Jockeys can jump the wrong way and still somehow end up on top of you, stunning you and dealing tons of damage. And the tank, well let's just say he goes from doing nothing to 4 shotting your whole team whenever he feels like it.
And the game forces you to walk with your team at all times because it may spawn a special infected right in front of you who will stun you with no way to avoid them (like jockeys or assassins having terribly inconsistent jump hitbox) and it will then be up to your team to shoot him off you.

All guns have terrible accuracy, there are no hit markers and zombie's damage reactions are also inconsistent so you are left guessing half the time if you are even hitting anything. Guns are based on real life weapons but have entirely wrong properties like the M16 having 50 bullets in it's mag and sniper rifles firing faster than you are being able to pull the handle to reload them.
Atmosphere is non existent, this game has the worst sound mixing I have heard in any game period, graphics are bad even for it's time and the maps range from grey/brown city streets to green/brown swamps.

The only reason I have so many hours in L4D is due to me playing around with mods and trying several times to play it with my friends to try and find out what's so fun about it. But I could not. I don't get it. I have played plenty of other horde shooters similar to this and they were all better.
Why is left 4 dead loved so much?

Very well-made software that has tons of options, supports any configuration and allows you to create your own animated wallpapers. Worth every penny.

1 step forward and 3 steps back.

Ghostrunner 1 was a fantastic novel idea that was also quite well executed. Straightforward high skill and high risk gameplay with a couple of quirks that need to be ironed out for it to be a perfect game.
For Ghostrunner 2, the devs decided to not address any of the issues and instead add unnecessary bloat to the game and still somehow end up making it shorter than GR1 while also making it feel unbearably tedious to play.

One thing they did fix is the stuttering. Game now properly compiles shaders on launch and I only encountered a very handful of hitches which did not hurt my gameplay. But as it is a trend with modern gaming, the graphics got worse and performance nosedived as well. So if you won't be stuttering this time, you will sure as hell get lower FPS. Especially in the outdoors levels where it can straight up be 1/3rd of what it is in the tower levels.

Speaking of the outside. Do you want to be immersed in the bright neon cyberpunk dystopia that was so well made in GR1? Well tough luck buddy as this time you will be spending most of the game either in a desert wasteland outside the tower or in some weird monochrome metal mega structures (and no it doesn't look as cool as it sounds). With the lighting so terrible you will be double checking your game settings.

So gameplay then. You have a stamina bar now which used up by dashes and blocking. You can dash about 4 times immediately without upgrades. You can hold right click to block bullets. You can still time left click to block single bullets as well but for one, that mechanic is even more broken than in GR1, and for 2, the deflect augment doesn't work on it. So if you want to deflect, you HAVE to press right click to enter the block mode and that pissed me off.
You have a lot more energy now too, allowing you to use abilities more often. Augment puzzle is gone and is replaced by a generic system where you gather chips to increase your augment capacity and then buy augments at the station to put them in empty spaces.

So why is all of this bad? For one that is the pacing and the size of the levels. Most levels are now obnoxiously huge. To the point that in an arena getting to an enemy can legit feel like a chore. I also believe there is only 1 or 2 new enemies. The bike sections are way worse than they look in trailers. That thing is an uncontrollable mess that does not even let you use your mouse to look around. The bike levels are also way longer than they need to be. With the worst offender being a level that took me 48 minutes to beat (no not because I kept dying, but because it took THAT long to drive to all 3 locations, do some parkouring there and press the button). And it genuinenly *felt* like I was stuck there for at least 2 hours.
The Cybervoid does return and this time it features combat in there. Which becomes quicky very annoying as it is very hard to see anything in the Cybervoid. Also it has inconsistent color scheme where some orange things such as pipes and rails cannot be used until you turn them blue.. but then you get other orange things which can be used.

Story is so bad I won't even bother discussing it. GR1 may not have had excellent story but at least it set a good foundation for worldbuilding and had some interesting points. GR2 story and places you visit honestly remove any immersion that the first game had.

TLDR:
Play the first game.

This is a remaster of the original Painkiller in Unreal Engine 3 with 2/3 of the game locked behind paid DLC. The graphical improvements aren't that massive but the performance cost is.

Sound is much worse with no way to enable HRTF surround sound which was amazing in the original. Animation quality is worse, game is even easier than before and you can beat it in about 5 hours on first playthrough. The levels that are available in the base game are repackaged in different order. The story is unbearably cringe and nonsensical with some of the worst voice acting I have seen in a while.

You get access to the BooH DLC weapons and a new weapon called Soulcatcher which can pull dropped souls to you and fires piercing disks with primary fire. Collecting enough souls and firing a disc at an enemy will turn them to your side (he will suicide if there are no more enemies present on the map).
I do like it but ultimately it's nowhere near enough to compensate for everything else that this "HD" version does worse than the original.

Just go play the original.