Recent reviews by Legolas_Katarn

Hollowbody is an early PS1/2 styled survival horror with some very good things about it that would make it a classic of the era it emulates, if not for the areas where it feels more like a demo.

You play as Mica who is entering a dead city that was walled off from the rest of the world, seemingly after some type of biohazard spread and infected the residents. Mica is attempting to locate a missing woman who is implied to be her girlfriend who had joined a team of people entering the area to search for answers about what happened and why no one was ever held accountable for the deaths. As you explore you are attacked by somewhat humanoid creatures, hear a mysterious voice who seems to know you and keep calling on phones that you pass, and you find notes and hear memories about the last moments of people's lives or what went on in the early days with people removed from their homes, armed forces taking over certain areas or shooting people attempting to enter protected zones, and the area finally being bombed. As you find bodies of resident you are given information about their name, date of birth, occupation, cause of death, etc seemingly by a piece of technology that Mica has, but as you move further into the game and start finding bodies of masked workers or security forces those details all show up as classified likely signifying that those responsible for the situation 60 years ago are likely manufacturing a lot of the common technology used by people like Mica. As you explore you not only find old decomposed bodies but what looks to be newer corpses as well. The setting and background story are a positive, though they don't have the time they need or the impact by connecting you as much to the wider world to be as interesting as they could be.

The visuals are good and camera angles are helping to create a moody atmosphere perfectly in line with some of the better early PS2 titles. The sound design is also a highpoint with music, background ambient noise, whispered voices, and an unsettling white noise kind of background sound that fits the atmosphere. As you move through areas shelves might fall, monstrous faces appear in walls, TVs flicker to life, etc. It does a great job capturing that era of gaming. There are multiple areas where many games would take advantage of a jump scare or sudden enemy ambush, while Hollowbody seems more content to just creating a more tense feeling from the thought of something happening while having the environment do a better job at telling a story from what is there. Although, because it never once uses these moments for any kind of threat and due to how weak the enemies are, this is a design choice that can lose its strengths the longer the game goes on. Are they going to spring out from under the sheets, out of the water, out of the closet, out of the confessional, through the window, the answer is always no but with how other games have trained you you'll probably be expecting it even though it would rarely make sense to actually happen.

While I am not someone that usually enjoys puzzles, it is more expected in this type of game and what you find here is often little more just minor fetch quests to find obvious nearby items or combine item A with item B. Some almost to the point of busywork only included because it was to be expected. You combine obvious items to advance and even if something might not be an expected solution your inventory is light enough to just make it easy to try everything when the option to use an item comes up. One area has you pick up some alcohol after you find yourself surrounded by locked rooms and closed shutters only to see a bin full of papers when you leave the room that is next to a sign that says a fire will unlock all doors and you just happen to have started the game with a lighter.

One of the best moments of the game is in the sewers (I think the developer deserves some praise because I don't think I've ever said that before) where your seemingly fragile state of mind starts to become more apparent. You collect items and see things that don't seem to make sense for the setting, looking at the items in your inventory has your character mentions she doesn't remember picking them up, and despite how they are used or not used you end up being taken in more winding routes that shouldn't exist. I may have run into a bug where the machine you use the items you collect on did not fully appear for me and it made the protagonist's thoughts make even less sense and it had me automatically setting objects on invisible things that just had them floating in midair, and if that is a bug I'd be fine with them keeping it in.

There was an update about a month and a half after the game released that added some minor areas, roadblocks, and area separations (I assume there must have been loading or performance issues in some of the larger spaces) and from what I saw watching a playthrough before the update what was added seem like fine if not particularly interesting additions. There was a bit more narrative elements added with a series of objects you can collect, though the way you find them involves backtracking from nearly the end of the game to back to one of the first areas. The game's short length and low number of locations make that less tedious than it would be in some games but collecting those items didn't really add much to the experience.

Enemies are a weak point, with their only being about three types of them. You have the regular enemy, a larger version of it that really isn't more threatening it just takes more damage, and dogs. The enemies are slow and nonthreatening even on the normal difficulty with a very large amount of healing supplies and ammo being available to you. I ended up having over 17 healing items and only had to use one when it wouldn't let me move immediately after loading into an area and I was hit by an enemy it spawned next to me. In total I healed twice because of the situation mentioned, and once when I walked past a car got hit by a dog sitting out of view behind it and knocked into another enemy who his me into another dog. I had a large amount of revolve ammo, most of the shotgun ammo you find in the game, and never actually used the bow and arrow and flamethrower that you can get other than just taking some test shots before reloading a save. When they become more numerous in the second area enemies are so slow and ineffective that not only can you easily run past them in the wide open spaces, but most of the time you could also just walk. Even the dogs can't keep up with your run speed (which sounds like it was increased in outdoor areas in a patch after launch, so that may not always have been true). The enemies don't seem to care much about you most of the time, forgetting you were even there if you move a short distance away. A dog is introduced that I couldn't even tell was an enemy for some time because the lock on function sometimes doesn't visually appear and half the time the dog's AI seemed to have it running in my general direction, passing me, then running back the way it came and off screen. That the monsters aren't stuck to a small area and are more free to roam around could lead to more interesting situations but it mostly just made them all the easier to ignore for me. What is a better part of the enemy design is the screeching, crying, and other sounds they make combined with the radio static you often get when around them adding to the unsettling nature of the locations.

You have a few different ranged weapons to use which all tend to feel, sound, and look weak when connecting with an enemy. You hold the lock on button and shoot until they fall down. The melee system is a bit better than what is usually found in the genre from the time it is borrowing from. Chaining melee attacks...

Full Review: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Kennan/review/2148074/
Name in game: https://bsky.app/profile/kennanw.bsky.social/post/3lc7zibtj222o

A good remaster of a game that was more impressive for its time but hasn't aged as well as some other early FPS titles, or the later games in this series.

Dark Forces is a nearly 30 year old FPS that takes place before and after A New Hope. Former imperial officer turned mercenary Kyle Katarn takes on tasks to steal the plans for the Death Star and to destroy the Empire's new Dark Trooper project.

The remaster does a good job updating the stage and cutscene visuals, gives the old blurry or muddy look more details that couldn't be as easily noticed before (and allowing me to play a game that would have had me become ill from motion sickness if I tried to play it anytime in the last 15 years). It doesn't do anything to the music, but I found the lower quality of the more traditional Star Wars themes to be more interesting than just having the common repeated Star Wars music you've heard many times before.

For weapons you have a punch attack that can do a decent amount of damage but is rarely a practical option unless you find a lone melee enemy or find someone alone with their back turned. Kyle's pistol does not have the charged shot alternate fire function found in later games but it does fire a single accurate shot that can make it useful at mid or long range. The rifle uses the same ammo as the pistol but fires full auto while being less accurate and using two ammo for every shot. Thermal detonators are grenades that you can charge the distance thrown by holding the attack button and depending on primary or alternate fire can be thrown to explode on impact or rolled and set to detonate after a delay. The repeater fires at a rate in between the pistol and rifle while also having the pistol's accuracy, it also has an alternate fire to shoot three shots in a triangular style that can make it the closest thing you have to a shotgun. The fusion cutter is somewhat similar to the later bowcaster weapon shooting higher damaging green colored shots, the primary fire shoots one of three barrels being slightly slower to fire and for the shot to travel but doing more damaging than the repeater while the alternate fire shoots all four barrels at once for large enemies or crowd control. Mines can be set to detonate after a delay or when something is near them. The mortar gun acts like a grenade launcher and is basically a faster and potentially safer method of using thermal detonators. The concussion rifle is more unusual, firing at a rate slower than the pistol but where the shot lands does a higher damaging AoE attack, though the somewhat auto aim mechanics of the games, height issues further effecting that auto aim, and being able to hit yourself can make it more difficult to use. For some reason the actual shot of the rifle is also invisible until it hits making using it less enjoyable in general. The assault cannon can fire both fast and damaging but slower moving plasma shots or a missile with the alternate fire mode.

Enemy variety is a bit low and you aren't going to get the more gruesome Doom style deaths with blood and mangled bodies but they do visibly react to being shot and give combat lines when they engage you. The earlier missions are mostly just going to be Imperial officers, stormtroopers, and naval troopers whose main difference is that amount of health. Eventually you run into a few different kind of droid enemies like the interrogator droid that can shoot and do direct health damage at close range, probe droids that explode when shot down, the little marksman training droid Luke practiced with that is small and hard to hit but only does 1 damage when it hits you, and ceiling or wall mounted turrets. Alien enemies like grenade throwing Gran, melee equipped Gamorreans, and concussion rifle wielding Trandoshans eventually show up as well as prototype and finished dark trooper enemies.

Outdoor environments aren't at a place where they look very good or even make any sense for the environment and while indoor sections can look better in some cases by copying classic Star Wars film style locations there is the hidden main path design more common at the time where a tiny little staircase might be in the back corner of a room and around a wall that can make the levels more difficult to navigate than they need to be (the improved visuals of the remaster probably make it more easier to spot where to go). The more auto aim nature of where you shots are going combined with some weapons just not shooting straight by design usually works fine but can become more of an issue once height or windows get involved and it keeps firing to low to hit targets, enemy death animations still tend to treat enemies as alive for a short time that can both make them a target of your auto aim while also preventing you from walking through them or picking up ammo for a short time. While the weapons are all usable and effective in their own ways, most of the guns just don't feel, sound, or look that interesting. There's a focus in some levels of puzzle based switches to flip in the correct order, minor mazes combined with what can just be naturally confusing level design even with a good map you can overlay over your vision, or minor platforming sections that never felt great with the game's speed and how it sometimes seemed to jump perfectly and sometimes seemed to jump after a slight delay. Killing an officer might give you a keycode that you have to lookup in your PDA that shows you a three digit symbol code to enter into three computers to progress, kind of different at the time but really amounts to busywork instead of just being an auto use keycard.

Most of the game is just fine to good mechanically for the time with the more unique elements like the multi floor environments not doing as much mechanically apart from further adding to the chances of getting lost. Seeing some of the Star Wars characters and expanded narrative of the Death Star plans isn't as interesting 30 years later and after a constant influx of Star Wars content and reboots over that time and even if it were there isn't much here narratively except for Boba Fett showing up to be an embarrassment like what became common outside of books, Jabba trying to kill you, and Vader commenting on events between some missions. It's a short game played over 14 stages where a lot of that time can be figuring out where to go or just getting from place to place and occasionally running back to your ship in the starting area after your objective is complete.

Going to be more for those with an interest in games from its time, it's not going to do much for those looking to just play a great well remembered FPS and what was updated in the remaster isn't going to change that.

Screenshots: https://bsky.app/profile/kennanw.bsky.social/post/3lc2gwwnnv22f

Solid beat em up that is animated well and makes use of dashes, guards, air juggles, and icons above enemies to give warning of attack types to allow you you to fight effectively.

For your actions you have a normal melee combo, dash by double tapping or with a button press that also allows you to dash up and down, guard and counter after a successful block, grab that can allow for a melee combo or throw, a jump that is less effective for dodging and more for continued aerial combos, and a special meter that allows for two different ground and one aerial special attack that you can use for damage or to get out of an enemy attack combo. The game controls well and your characters are fast and responsive enough to switch between enemies on both sides of you or to do a quick guard or dash in between blows. Your best source of damage is often to finish off most of a regular combo before grabbing the enemy and finishing off that combo to launch them into the air where you can then combo them again (and possibly again with a aerial combo). You can find melee weapons and guns that can be used for more damage and knockdown or that can be thrown at enemies and can pick up some large objects like barrels that do heavier damage when thrown at enemies. Using your special attacks can break you out of enemy combos and holds and using a special or a throw from a grab gives you brief invincibility to avoid enemy attacks. There are three starting and two unlockable characters that have different damage, resistance, speed, and special strength with their own combos and attack types. The difference between them is enough to make them feel different though not to the extent where some games have character differences where you can almost feel like you're playing a different game when you change to a new one.

When you finish a stage you are given two choices that might lead to one of two possible stages to go to next and that will eventually give you one of three final stages for the game's ending. Each ending will have a unique boss fight and possibly unique enemy types to that stage, while taking certain paths might see you not even running into certain types of normal enemies. There is nothing particularly interesting about the narrative or character dialogue but the enemy variety comes with multiple types with different attack patterns to learn. Some enemies might drain health, some attack right away and avoid hit stun shortly after getting up, some make use of ranged attacks, some sidestep and attack from behind if you attempt to grab them, some grab you and drain health, etc and as a warning for the type of enemy you are facing or for certain stronger attacks icons will appear over an enemy's head letting you know to dodge or block a charging or grab attack or that you should move away from the enemy you just knocked down. Bosses change up their attack patterns a bit around the mid point of a fight and can start to require you to use dashes and blocks to more effectively fight them.

Solid classic style beat em up that doesn't do anything particularly good sound, music, or narrative wise but has good, responsive, and well animated enough combat to be worth a look.

Screenshots: https://bsky.app/profile/kennanw.bsky.social/post/3lbohogqfzs22

Veil of the Witch is a fairly feature complete early access tactical turn based roguelite, and spin off of the first game, that narratively takes place a few years after Lost Eidolons and features some returning characters including some whose fate had been ambiguous. While there is obviously some elements that need to be finished and a few to improve on, its a very solid start for an early access title with a good battle system and characters that are fun to use in combat.

Each run will see you taking the main character and up to four of eight possible companions across three different areas that each end in a boss fight. Each segment allows you to choose between two to three paths that will show you the likely reward type to gain (or show a random outcome) and if the choice involves a battle or not. You can take paths to find different items to enhance characters and the shop you run into on runs in your home base or focus on, find randomized relics that can give you positive passive abilities or ones with a mixture of benefits and drawbacks, run into ally side characters that have their own storylines and join for the next two battles, run into events that raise character partnership levels that give you bonuses when close to each other in battle, collect money and find a shop to spend that money in, find a campsite to other rest and heal or gain an upgrade for a skill, etc. Many of these areas can end up giving you a choice or multiple choices where depending on what you choose or if one of your companions is able to interact with the event you can roll a 12 sided die for various possible outcomes. It is also possible for some relics to lead to certain locations not otherwise available.

The game uses a similar battle system to the first game but with the more cinematic army battling backgrounds removed from the fight to instead just feature a faster paced and more common style where animations are character out on the map itself. This is a system where each character has two types of weapons equipped (light/elemental/dark magic tome, two handed sword, two handed axe, axe and shield, spear and shield, shortbow, longbow, two swords, sword and shield, etc) and is wearing one of three kinds of armor (cloth, leather, or plate). All weapon and skill attacks hit but a unit's accuracy and guard stats can effect the total damage done as can defending, having a shield, or certain types of weapons being better against certain kinds of armor. Magic has its own side effects where it can leave targets stunned, on fire, frozen, etc and using the right kind of magic on a certain type of terrain can create additional effects with water slowing wet characters, lightning doing more damage to wet characters or doing chain attacks on water, fire detonating poison clouds but doing less damage to wet enemies, etc.

As they level up characters will be able to choose between two different rolled stat increases or new skills and the skills that each character starts with and that they can learn combined with weapon and armor upgrades that can unlock their own passive and active skills leads to a variety of ways a character can be played and how well they can work together. The total number of abilities is limited enough where you won't find endless possible interesting combinations but the more focused set of skills and the ability to spend in game currency found on each run to reroll skill and stat options has made it so I've never gone through a run disappointed in any characters final skillset. The randomness could certainly have ended with some being favored but I've never seen anyone end up as a barely usable mismatched mess of conflicting abilities and stats. One of the first characters you get might seem much better suited as nothing but a healer based on her starting skills and stats but if you choose to upgrade her sword and shield and gain certain passive abilities she can end up a decent damage dealer who heals everyone and gains a large shield every time she does damage while also having access to a lunging AoE lightning strike ability that turns her into a mixture of a damage dealer tank and healer.

The battles themselves are currently a bit limited in number for multiple replay but what is there does show a variety of different scenarios. Some scenarios allow you to fight a large number of enemies or choose to retreat, you might need to move to stay ahead of poison, make use of balistas to help you stop a large number of advancing monsters, find your usual enemies being attacked by monsters or the undead and have a choice to ally with them or fight both groups, etc. Some of these battles can use a bit more to them, they might have variation in enemy type and strength depending on what chapter the scenario is found on but some different variations in what happens or spawn locations would be nice and some are just too simple such as ones where you are just fighting some small spawns of generic non-threatening enemies while you open a few treasure chests scattered around.

Between runs you can access a town where an alter can unlock permanent passive upgrades for weapon and armor types or bonuses for positive events on your runs. You can access conversations between your character and your companions. Rune resources can be spent to promote you and each of your companions twice that gives minor stat bonuses while also upgrading a base skill and unlocking three new skills to acquire each time. When you reach a level three partnership with an ally you can also change your main character's class into a slightly altered version of that companion's class where you can end up with a new possible mixture of abilities and main weapons.

Currently on the negative side, the actual narrative and ally events seem to be the most unfinished and there isn't quite enough content variety for the length of multiple runs through the game. Completing the chapter three boss fight just tells you the journey isn't over and takes you back to your base. When you meet an ally it seems like they should do more as while they do have a storyline they often seem to say that they are specifically looking to do something that should lead to a unique battle scenario that never actually happens and instead they just join for two fights then have a conversation before leaving until you find the same character in a new run to continue the story. When some of your stat ups are going to come down from a choice between one of two options it really highlights how impractical it is to ever want to choose to raise critical defense or magic resistance you aren't likely to get hit by crits or magic anywhere near as much so just prioritizing damage or just having more physical defense or total health always makes more sense. The game has the problem some roguelite have where many of the possible reward options are things for progression back at your home base between runs (partnership rank ups, shop upgrade items, class promotion items, and sacred embers to unlock passive stat and effect bonuses) but eventually you aren't going to need those things and getting them does nothing for the run you are currently doing where usually in other games the events with them or type of bonus it is might at least effect something currently. I would also say the game is very easy because I always prioritized getting those home base upgrade items even on my first playthrough and so far I have completed all five of my runs with the only challenge really being the second boss on my first playthrough because I didn't know he could hit and apply status effects to multiple characters standing in a line. You can end up with...

Full Review: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Kennan/review/2124941/
Lost Eidolons Review: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Kennan/review/801437/
Screenshots: https://bsky.app/profile/kennanw.bsky.social/post/3lbmi6hppss2q
https://youtu.be/hFNEc4j-uhQ?si=ZifxtNN5rg6-QWHy

A strategic game of Russian Roulette with a shotgun against an otherworldly opponent. Short but good atmosphere and use of items for different strategies and a recently added multiplayer mode.

The match takes place over three rounds where both you and the "dealer" have an amount of health with you brought back when hit by blood transfusions or defibrillators. The first round has you both at three health where getting shot removes one, you are shown how many live and black rounds are being loaded into the shotgun and have to choose to fire at the dealer or yourself which will pass the dealers turn if you shoot a blank when aiming at yourself. Hitting the dealer or yourself with a live round gives them the next turn. Winning that first rounds moves you to the next segment where your life increases and items are added into the mix for both you and the dealer with them pulled randomly out of a box and set to your left and right side, able to be used at anytime during your turn. Items can range from healing items like cigarettes that give one life or expired medicine that can heal for two or damage you for one, handcuffs that prevent your opponent from acting by making them skip their next turn, adrenaline that lets you steal an item from your opponent if you use it right away, a knife that saws off the barrel of the gun making it do two damage for the next turn, and a variety of items to help you guess correctly if the shotgun has a live round or blank loaded. You can combine what you know about what was loaded into the gun and what was left with items that allow you to do things like remove the current shell, examine what is currently loaded, swap the type of shell currently loaded, or a phone call that tells you what is going to be loaded in the future.

Some have mentioned the occasional issue with the dealer AI going through multiple items where they should know what is currently loaded before aiming the gun at their own head and shooting themself, but I thought that just added to the atmosphere and horror theme of the dealer. Completing the game once unlocks a double or nothing mode where you can enter into a new round to increase your final winnings.

There's not a lot to the game but it has good atmosphere and style and the gameplay works well.

Screenshots: https://bsky.app/profile/kennanw.bsky.social/post/3lb7xuiwd3k2e

Manages to combine visceral combat that makes you feel like a near unstoppable tank while also successfully showing the pathos of the character and the dark comedy of the setting.

When I first started the game and some of the first lines spoken were from a man whose name was subtitled as pessimist talking about how everything is going to get worse in the city and another man subtitled as realist said things are already as bad as they can be I knew this was going to do a good job with the setting, and when I shot my first enemy in the groin for a unique instant critical hit death animation I knew the combat would likely be good as well.

Rogue City is an FPS with some minor immersive sim elements. Combat involves you using RoboCop's standard Auto 9 sidearm that can eventually be customized with different motherboards to allow for different fire rates and abilities, being able to grab and throw enemies and objects, punch enemies, or make use of rechargeable abilities like stunning flash bang style shockwaves, a quick forward dash, a shield mode to reduce incoming damage, and a fast charging slow motion bullet time mode. You can make use of enemy weapons in the other weapon slot you have open but most of them are much less useful than your base weapon that also has infinite ammo, and once you start upgrading it even heavy machine guns start to be a poor comparison. Your built in sensors give you information on enemy locations and highlight hazards like grenades. One shot head or groin shots tend to be the most effective and can come with a variety of death animations and final lines from your enemies. Between the more set piece enemy packed areas you will also explore the police station and downtown Detroit where you can make different conversation choices with side characters and complete more involved side quests or minor activities like ticketing a car with a parking violation or choosing to ticket or offer a warning for minor offenses you catch people involved in.

Completing objectives, killing enemies, finding notes and evidence items, and your final mission rating summary all give experience that can be used to upgrade different skills. Each skill has a passive or active bonus that you gain at levels 2, 6, and 10 as well as a passive bonus that increases as you rank the skill up. These range from skills like Psychology and Deduction that can make it easier to influence others or increase your experience gains while also giving you more conversations options in certain situations, skills like Focus that gives you the bullet time skill and improves it length of use, Scanning improves your enemy detection range while also highlighting areas in the environment you can shoot to bounce bullets off of to hit enemies for high damage, or skills like Engineering that make your upgrades to your Auto 9 more effective, give you some hacking and conversations options, and allow you to perform a quick forward dash.

The plot involves RoboCop and the police clashing with OCP as well as a well funded antagonist related to the first film's villain who works with a variety of gangs and mercenary units whose masterplans seem to involve RoboCop in some way while being in stressful situations creates memory glitches for Robocop that influence how he views his past life as Alex Murphy and what he sees himself as now. Your interactions with side activities and characters can also influence the public perception of RoboCop and the fates and futures of side characters in the game's ending.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py9SDgNC-po
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCVpCpAVA_4
Screenshots: https://bsky.app/profile/kennanw.bsky.social/post/3lb4csq7gdk2m

A massive improvement compared to the first game, though still with some elements that stopped it from being as interesting setting wise or fun combat wise as it could have been.

Remnant 2 is a single player or co-op third person action game where you make use of a primary, secondary, and melee weapon along with your i-frame dodge roll to fight through partially randomly generated locations in three different world with each world having one of two (or three with DLC) storylines and different possible side locations rolled for each campaign. Guns can also have set or craftable swappable mods attached to them that allows you to activate a sub mode with a large variety of different abilities. You start the game as one of a few different base classes but are able to add a secondary class over time and can eventually unlock additional classes that become available from the start if you create a new character. Each class has one passive skill that is given if it is your main class, four passive skills unlocked over time, and one of three equipable active skills that can give you a wide variety of abilities depending on the class used. You have a good variety of builds thanks to a large amount of weapons, armor, and equipment to find, being able to equip four different rings, an amulet, and a relic (typically used for various types of direct healing) combined with being able to rank up different traits that can make your character stronger in areas important to your build, favorite weapon types, or class skills. Armor is the less interesting part of the game, you will both find less armor types than anything else and all that tends to do is give you different defense values for damage and elemental attacks with heavier armor giving you slower and more stamina heavy dodge rolls, though becoming as heavy as possible gives you a slow flop down to the ground that can do damage to nearby enemies as you crush them under your weight.

Outside of combat you can visit a safe zone with other people where you can upgrade your equipment or buy and craft items, weapon mods, or different character class options. Different areas can also have a variety of different puzzle elements or hidden locations that can grant you new equipment and items, with some of them needing you to pay attention to the environment or to read a variety of notes and journals found while exploring to get information or hints that you need. The variation in how the game rolls a campaign world is also further expanded on by giving you multiple ways to complete certain side quests, different characters you can give different items to or give them items in different ways to unlock different rewards, world bosses can have two ways to defeat them or alternate forms of a fight you can access that reward you with different drops when defeated giving even further replay value even if you end up with the same main storyline that you have seen previously. Some conversations or rewards might even change if you talk to or kill a boss while wearing a certain piece of armor or if the last hit is done with a particular weapon tied to them.

When you beat the game (or before if you want) you can continue exploring the areas you have already seen as you have been or you can reroll the campaign to get the other storylines in each world as well as new locations and options for quest rewards. If you are playing with friends who aren't around or you haven't finished a campaign, or you just want to look for a certain piece of equipment you know about you can also use the adventure mode to roll up one world separate from your campaign where you can attempt to find the items you want as it will allow you the chance to get most of the alternate items that way while also allowing you to play on a different difficulty than the one your current campaign is set to.

Compared to the first game, everything is better. Better variety, weapon feel, actually getting interesting equipment faster, the visuals of the environments and the lore of a setting is more interesting, your varied options to end different quests, classes are more interesting, and you have better customization. There are a few things that stop the game from being great to me though. Difficulty settings and having allies in co-op is basically just doing the most boring changes of making things have more health and do more damage rather than altering numbers, abilities, attack types, or anything interesting that also goes to your campaign re-rolls, you are just going to be seeing the same enemies (different bosses or boss forms aside). The actual enemy variety is fairly small, and types are separated between worlds as well as sections of worlds so you never have too many combinations of different things that can be fighting you at once in interesting ways. The areas can look big and interesting but there can often be too limited in enemy number where there is a lot more of moving from place to place as opposed to fighting or interacting with anything, with many of the enemy groups you do find being little more than simple few in number trash mobs that offer no challenge. I really only found the Bloodborne and fey like area of the game to be visually and interesting enemy wise, with probably the best use of secrets I saw (at least in the world state I had), while the more corrupted forest area was more of a middle ground for me, and the science fiction Alien/Prometheus style setting I finished in just had nothing comparatively interesting exploration or enemy wise with just about every enemy I encountered being pretty dull to actually fight. The final linear world before the end boss is just a short straight shot through mostly very unthreatening enemies before what I found to be a dull if visually different boss fight before the game just kind of stops. The last thing it doesn't do very well is that while the lore you can discover in one of the three main worlds and characters there might have interesting elements to them, the main story and characters are completely forgettable and your character specifically is just an annoyance that would be much better off as a silent protagonist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEaHbrR48tM
Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1855396722127847767

An enjoyable digital adaptation of the tabletop deck building card game, released in a poorly handled state but the later Obsidian version makes it much easier to get into.

Pathfinder Adventures is a card game where 1-6 characters, with each character typically based on one of the iconic Pathfinder characters that represents a particular class, play through a series of games with cards and scenarios based on the adventure paths that have been written for the TRPG. As the digital version of the game didn't do particularly well there is only one of the adventure paths represented, The Rise of the Runelords. Even with only one of the main adventures implemented it still offers a good amount of content, the main adventure has a prologue with three different scenarios and six different parts of the main adventure each with five scenarios. Each scenario has three difficulties that can change base and random additional rules for the scenario while adding new elements on higher difficulties that aren't present on the easier settings. There are 11 base characters to represent the original 11 classes in Pathfinder as well as characters that are DLC or in the Obsidian addition that add four new unique characters. The Obsidian version of the game also gives the 11 base characters three different options for their class that can give minor ability or passive skill changes. One of those three options turns the character into a goblin version of themselves with a new passive skill, those versions being more suited to be played in another DLC Rise of the Goblins that takes the first scenario of the Rise of the Runelords adventure but has you playing it from the goblin perspective. Both adventure paths also have a separate DLC that adds five new scenarios and some new cards. Based on the characters you take into a scenario there can be different conversations before and after the game and based on which character meets the villain of the match.

Each of the game's character has a list of skills that represent the base Pathfinder characteristics of strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom and charisma. How good they are at each one is based on the dice value they have assigned to it being D4, D6, D8, D10, or D12. Whenever they have to perform a test they roll that die to try to match or surpass the value needed. Some skills have subskills like melee for strength, survival for wisdom, diplomacy for charisma, a class based stat to represent spell casting ability, etc that can give them a higher chance to complete a more focused call for a skill test and as you play through the scenarios characters unlock points to spend with each skill being able to be given a +1 to up to a +4 value every time you roll for it. Characters have passive and active powers based on their class that influences how many cards can be in their hand and special ways that they can interact with certain cards. As you play through the game you can choose new abilities and eventually choose between two different types of class archetypes to promote into that unlock different skill trees. The last thing every character has is their card list that makes up what their deck can hold, each character has a different amount of weapon, spell, armor, item, ally, and blessing cards that have to go into their deck at the start of the match that also represent their life points. As characters improve you can add to the numbers of certain card types that go into your deck giving you more deck health and access to more card variety.

The game is played by creating a party of 1-6 characters, you can swap out characters between scenarios and go back to old scenarios to play them again with the same or different characters and to try them on high unlocked difficulties. A scenario will have a unique rule tied to it or interaction going on that can change depending on the difficulty, each scenario gets a number of locations that increase based on the number of characters in your party. A location is given a deck of 10 cards that can include enemies, spells (arcane and divine), weapons, armor, items, barriers and traps, and blessing, 1 villain or henchmen card that might be unique to a scenario are also randomly shuffled into each deck. The goal is to clear a location by going through a deck or defeating the villain or henchmen and then closing the location by completing a certain skill role attached to the location or performing a task attached to it. The goal of the majority of the scenarios is to find and defeat the one villain card by defeating the card while having closed all the other locations so they have nowhere to escape and move to. To make that easier, if you find a villain card each character who is still on an active location that is still open can attempt to perform the test to temporarily close their area and even if the villain escapes you can automatically close the spot they were in. Scenarios have a certain number of turns they must be completed in, every turn from a character lowers the counter by one and they have one action where they can explore the location by drawing the top card of the location deck and they are able to move to another location at the start or end of their turn. To have the time you need to explore you can discard most ally cards and blessing cards that could otherwise by used to improve your rolls to give yourself one or multiple additional explore actions. Your deck also acts as a characters life and they will die if they are unable to draw a full hand of cards at the end of their turn or when forced to draw from another action, cards might have you shuffle or recharge them when used to put them back in your deck, reveal them where you can keep that card in hand after use, discard them where they go away unless they can be brought back by skills or healing, bury them where there is much more limited ways to get the card back in the scenario, or banish them where they are removed from your deck completely unless found and acquired again. When you run into equipment, blessing, or ally cards passing a skill check associated with the card will add that card to your hand and save the card to be used by them or another character again in future games.

When you first play the game it can be both limiting and sort of odd as a Pathfinder game, typically a party based game where people are together because here you usually want one character at each location who is going to be good at interacting with certain types of cards that are shown to be in the deck and who have the skill and stats needed to shut down the location. As you get more cards and abilities though you have a much wider skill set with many of the characters where cards they might have or abilities they have can help other characters that are at other locations. You also get more reliable ways to search and interact with location decks like having spells, items, abilities, or sometimes even armor effects that can allow you to search and manipulate the decks and where cards are moved in it. Every character has their own unique skills and are fun to play as with some having huge bonuses when making use of animal ally cards, one being better at locations on their own and being able to avoid enemy encounters, one being able to use strong weapon abilities without discarding the cards, one having guaranteed reuse of any spells they cast, one having no access to blessing cards that are often used to support their or allies skill roles but instead having a large hand and spell variety and spell drawing ability, etc. The one somewhat exception being the Barbarian character Amiri (who was also probably the worst Pathfinder Kingmaker party member unless you really changed up her class build and weapon focus), she isn't bad but she does very little of use unless you play on the hardest difficulty where...

Full Review: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Kennan/review/2082325/

A 40K set combination of "boomer" shooter and Doom Eternal with good movement and weapon feel and a good art style though with a variety of more minor problems and AI and stage design issues that stop it from being great.

Boltgun often feels closer to Doom Eternal than to the older "boomer" style shooters I often saw it compared to with its arena style battles sections (or purge sections), the allowed amount of verticality, long range engagements you can find yourself in, movement speed, some enemies dropping health and armor when killed, and with a weapon strength and armor toughness system that makes certain weapons much more effective against specific targets giving you a system where you try to use the gun best suited for the enemy type to a greater extent than you would otherwise have to.

The plot has you going up against cultists, Chaos Space Marines, and the demon forces of Nurgle and Tzeentch. The game might play in a way that surprises people who know less about the setting and thought the Space Marine character would be slow and tanky only to find themselves playing as an extremely agile character who can sprint in all directions even with a heavy weapon, takes massive leaps when you jump and can pull themselves up ledges, and who can take a lot of damage very quickly if you aren't careful. Dodging and keeping enemies at range is often what you will be doing as they can have strong melee or AoE attacks, and your own weapons or the environment can have AoE attacks that will easily damage you and your enemy. Holding down sprint or leaving it toggled on is how I played the game 99% of the time and making use of jumps and quick direction changes was the only way to avoid a lot of attacks, even more so with how well enemies will shoot to lead into the direction of your current movements. There are times when it can feel more like playing a bullet-hell shmup as well as an FPS.

The difficulty modes seem to effect things like the damage you take and enemy number or what spawns without making changes to your weapon strength or enemy toughness levels. If you start at a low difficulty and raise it later replay the game on a higher setting this does allow you to get used to enemies and what weapons work best in certain situations as it isn't weakening them on the lower levels.

For being the first gun you get the Boltgun is a fairly satisfying and potentially powerful weapon as you find the hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) secrets in a level that often give it damage and ammo capacity upgrades. The shotgun, heavy boltgun, multi-melta (DLC chapter or turn all gun option on only), gravity gun, and rocket launcher (DLC chapter or turn all gun option on only) are also all very satisfying to use, though even some of the squishier looking enemies tend to have a higher toughness than the shotgun's low power and with many of the weaker enemies dying in one or two shots of the boltgun I probably found the shotgun less useful than the other weapons despite how satisfying it feels to use. Though even trying to use the shotgun on a more armored target has the visual effect that shows your attack mostly just bouncing off to let you know it didn't work well on top of the information given with the enemy health-bar and toughness rating.

The sound design makes the weapons more enjoyable to use and while not every stage is that interesting of a location the art style and use of color makes things easy to read, stand out, and often pleasing to look at.

Chapters can be fairly long but you are able to save or quick save wherever you are so you don't have to replay an entire level if you are killed. Some of the stages can become confusing to navigate but the game was eventually patches where a button press causes your servo skull companion to lay out a course for you that shows you where to go by drawing an easy to follow path along the floor (less easy to follow in some areas due to it not being able to be shown on certain environments or when verticality comes up).

There is a taunt button that, while I don't believe it causes any effects on your enemies, does allow your character to shout a Warhammery line of dialogue and there is a very large number of recorded taunts for him to yell that were entertaining to use if nothing else.

For all that it does well, there are a lot of things I thought it did poorly or that were just odd decisions.

When you get to purge arena style fights with waves of enemies spawning some of these locations are large enough where I had trouble getting the last remaining enemies of a wave or at the end of a segment to either come to me or for me to track them down to move on. A few of these areas, more so in the DLC chapter, also tended to just run me almost completely out of ammo in everything. When enemy does become scarce than you can run into issues where some of the enemies and weapons capture that powerful feel of the guns and visceral feel of them but then some enemies like the Chaos Marines and the higher health demons can just feel like bullet sponges that can both feel like a bit of a chore to whittle down their health bars and they tend to have less satisfying deaths compared to charging through or using the shotgun against weaker targets.

There are tiny 2 health and armor pickups everywhere that are often doing little to help you and that start to take away from the visual design of the game. They are both tedious to collect, become easy to ignore, and if playing on the two more difficult settings you might well find yourself losing 100-200 health/armor with one bad move which just makes it all the more annoying that they weren't just replaced with more of the larger health and armor pickups or some new middle ground between them. Grenades also start to have a similar feel where you can only hold two frag grenades and one krak grenade but they are just scattered all over the place, often both types sitting together, frequently with another set almost right next to each other. Ammo is scattered around and you might need or just find yourself backtracking or running circles around an area picking up everything to get ready for or to rearm after a purge section and it would be nice to just have a faster less tedious way to rearm instead of needing to take the time to do that.

Due to the size of some of the maps and arena sections it is often very possible and the best strategy to just stay still sniping enemies from afar that can do little or nothing in response or to just back up into a corner as enemies slowly funnel into your sights as they all reach you at different times and can often seem to get stuck on walls or each other. Some enemies seem to be in areas that they aren't allowed to leave in larger sections, and in arena sections even though enemies can follow you you are often so much faster and have access to the verticality of your jumps that it is easy to outpace them in many situations and to shoot them as they try to reach you again.

The chainsword and charge are somewhat odd offensive tools I never got the hang of. The charge soon can't even do enough damage to defeat some humanoid enemies, and while the chainsword can do damage and lunge you at foes to temporarily stun lock them it can easily get you into trouble when you try to use it on or near an enemy with a shotgun or explosive weapon that you couldn't identify in that half second before you made the decision to use it. I'm not going to say the chainsword is bad, as even on hard I did use it by itself to kill the first Lord of Change boss in a few seconds but I never found it or the charge that useful...

Full Review: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Kennan/review/2013874/
Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1845254900973961690

Good at times but it gives too many meaningless choices that take away from what could be better writing and the choices do nothing interesting plot wise or with your abilities.

Coteries of New York is a visual novel where you start out by choosing between three characters who get a different short intro but after they basically all behave the same way apart from a brief later meeting with someone from your past. You are a newly turned vampire that spends each night following a short and linear main story that your actions do not allow you to alter or branch from and a series of side stories with different characters that you can choose to interact with one or two each night before needing to rest for the day. Some of these are just side stories but four characters are ones you are looking to add to your Coterie, a group of vampires together for the same goal or who at least trust each other enough to protect one another. Some of these side characters are enjoyable to interact with and your time with the Prince's Sheriff or the Nosferatu detective D'Angelo is often the game at its best. The artwork for the characters and backgrounds is good enough, nothing too interesting and frequently reused though.

The problem is that none of your choices really matter or effect anything, other than removing plot from your playthrough. While each of the three playable characters is part of a different clan, all this leads to is minor differences in what vampire disciplines they can use, and these abilities, while completely different, are essentially used interchangeably just giving you access to the one your character has that in the same situation would be one that another character has if you were playing as them. You need to feed to keep access to your abilities but this is more of an afterthought and if you don't feed you might find the "beast" taking over and waking up to a drained corpse, which would think might effect things but doesn't. There is one ending to the game and while who you get to join your Coterie will see you getting a brief moment of help from two of them, this is a quick thing that does not change no matter who helps you, and if you didn't gain the trust of any character you will just be helped by someone else. Each playthrough will allow you to fully complete about 2/3 of all the events and it really might as well have just allowed you to do everything since the story wouldn't change anyway. Because you can't diverge from the main plot no matter how stupid you act your choices don't really matter because something will just happen to get events on track anyway, it would honestly have been better to just have no options except for brief moments to instead just have the writers able to focus on more content and better character development, the same with character selection where they really might as well have just had one main characters.

The ending seems to be considered the worst part of the game for a lot of people and if it was able to give more closure or bring more people into it if it was a better and more linear narrative it could have been a solid story in the setting. As it is it has some good moments but is lacking in almost every area to keep it from being anything great, but it can make for a decent short playthrough if you enjoy the setting.

Screenshots: https://x.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1843512735222640654