Recent reviews by Marco!

nobody is going to read this but:

im glad they removed the planning phase from R6. its absolute dogwater and its antithetical to the good aspects of R6.



also early siege was the best R6 ever was.

Serves as a sequel to Wolfenstein.

Thing is - nobody asked for a sequel to Wolfenstein lol.

There's some interesting ideas. But it's all very half baked. If you want to play peekaboo with hitscanners, play Blood or any COD game.

This game almost fools you into thinking it's good.

Almost.

The production values and presentation are great. The soundtrack itself for the opening level and fantastic animations and feedback from killing opponents is great for an FPS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdjnLVlBy2w&list=PL8jAjXrsbGIA4HTDVfbjX0FFKgWP7T8L9&index=3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KtLbjDK59o

Just look at this. It's beautiful. But there's an almost obvious feeling that sunk into me. When I played this on an emulator and replayed it again here. A bit of remembrance why I only finished the first level started to sink in.

It's boring. Every combat situation can be resolved by just side stepping projectiles or enemies with telegraphed attacks.

Oh yeah. The levels. They're called mazes. It's more sub levels split up by teleporters and the most banal objective design in existence. Cuze the N64 wasn't gonna support one big massive one.

Every sub level boils down to:

Hallway, right angle hallway, wide open area (box or circle arena) repeat AD NAUSEAM. The objectives? Fetch me 1243143241324 keys, prisoners, mcguffins, and McDonalds scattered about. Barely above Wolfenstein here. Probably worse since Wolfenstein stages were actual levels. What I don't understand is missing one of your objectives doesn't fail you back to the beginning of the level. You just have to search every nook and cranny to repeat it with all your current gear. It's like they just want you to do labor. Not actually have you experience a challenge for your failure. Doom 64 had better puzzle like levels with keys to find. Golden Eye 64 had way better objective design with interesting fail states. This game just wastes your time while being BOOOOORING.


400000000000000/100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Technically impressive and visually dazzling. Easily pushes the boundaries of VR in a sea of tech demos.

Also, kind of boring too.

Much like HL2, Alyx took the initiative of front loading the intro of the game as the best part. By the time you get progressively deeper into the end of the game. The game finally picks up, throws tons of enemies at you with cool set pieces, and then it just ends. The mid-section is just meandering about, sifting through garbage, and occasionally being more mechanically advanced than a rail shooter.

I mean it has some advancements over the prior HL titles. Enemies are a bit more reactive when shot at as opposed to barely flinching in like HL1/2 despite being mag dumped with submachine gun. It’s cool they managed to get on par with Doom 1 in terms of how the shooting feels. But this game is never really demanding to the player in combat, you can hold a corner and solo the entire game with your Colt .45. The shotgun and plasma gun feel situational. Two of the only three guns in the game don’t feel particularly useful. The enemy AI is persistently less aggressive in comparison with HL2.

You’re just rummaging about in industrial areas and places taken over by some xeno-infestation. Doing some boring ass puzzle solving. A fungus infected guy named ‘Jeff’ stood out as a highlight. But if you played any prior game with stealth segments and a shift in tone to horror, you know this game was outplayed and done by them. Thief Gold, Thief: Deadly Shadows, and TLOU come to mind.

Ya remember Boneworks? Supposedly, the devs were proposing a new HL title. What if they had a budget and they worked on HL: Alyx instead with Valve’s input? It would probably have been a better game.

This game carries itself on novelty. That novelty being the first AAA VR game done by competent devs. But afterwards, it just felt like you consumed air. It’s bewildering this game is held on a pedestal. It is because all the other VR games are boring hogshit tech demos that never go anywhere? I’d say yes.

6/10.

You're an amalgamation of gadgets, flesh, and an assortment of weapons that shreds everything and everyone at 50 MPH in vertigo inducing levels.

This is basically Sonic Adventure meets Doom Eternal and it's being completely ignored for some reason. It's legit some of the most fun I had in a while in a SP FPS and I even forgive all the jank attached to it. Because you're basically grapple hooking, chainsaw legging, animation canceling, slowing down time, and shooting missiles out your anus while giving the finger to your enemies with combat that never seems to come to a grinding halt like so many shooters.

Play it now. This shooter is filled to the brim with excess; yet somehow doesn't feel bloated in the slightest. That's quite a feat in this landscape.

balls

Kouin N is probably the most underrated futa artist out there. I just love how the guy manages to capture cute faces, meaty bodies, large tits, body hair, and vile pen0rs, wraps them all into one package for the perfect human being, and puts these girls in situations where they often ravage each other or get ravaged by vile beasts. He’s great at nailing short stacks, tall girls, and slightly chubby ones. He managed to keep nuanced details most twitter artists just completely skip over, veiny dongs, wrinkled ball sacks, slight traces of sweat and dirt, amazing areolas with slight kinks to the nipples, and hairy anuses. Most Twatter artists just draw pleb balloon animals with exaggerated sexual characteristics and call it a day. Kiss-Kiss☆Bang-Bang is probably one of the best pieces of hentai out there, you should definitely check out.























. . . Oh. You were expecting a game review, right? This game is probably the worst fugging boomer shooter I’ve played. I explicitly had a migraine growing within the first 15 minutes that managed to accelerate as the game went on. For a 40k game, on aesthetics alone, this is maybe the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ worst I’ve seen. Sprites with 3 frames of animations, filler soundtrack, and a total lack of exaggerated hammy but impactful sound design that usually permeates these games. For gameplay related crap, this is like a student project being sold to you. I think I gave the HROT dev too much crap. This is like NuDoom, but none of the enemy design, the physics are very floaty like Halo, and the arena segments drag on forever. It has the personality of a wet paper bag. It feels like the dev got very bored of his idea but proceeded to go on with it since he got Game Workshop’s blessing to make a 40k game. I mean it’s essentially free money, right? I was stupid enough to buy it.

-100000000000000000/1000. Absolute ass.

This is a spiritual successor to Fallout 1/2 that manages to be better in every way outside of writing, story, and setting.

Combat goes something like this:

There's 16 acid mutant dogs or some BS that stuns you.
Your turn:
Chance to hit for 76%
Miss
Miss
Miss
Miss
Enemy turn:
You have been stunned, crippled, poisoned, ensnared, intimidated, dazed, your dog killed, all your anime porn sent to your parents, and the enemy crits you for 476 damage.

Spend the next 4 hours save scumming the same fight.

I can vouch for one thing HROT does well, most enemies utilize projectiles over hitscan so you can skillfully avoid their attacks and they have noticeable stun states, so you mechanically get feedback from shooting at them and have some basic utility in interrupting their attacks. These should be the cornerstone mechanics of most FPS.

That’s about it for praise.

On the other hand, this game takes influence from Quake. Possibly the most 3/5 bland 90s FPS you can play. More notable for being turned into some meme mouse trainer with later sequels and being a hotbed for mods. Whatever aesthetic advantages that Quake had are completely gone here; most of HROT’s levels are brown corridors. The entire game’s color palette is drab dark browns. I’ve played Cruelty Squad and I think this game managed to look even more ugly somehow. It’s hogshit brown everywhere, the enemies, weapons, and levels. The only bit of color that seems to deviate from being brown is some light-colored cans of fish for pickups or whatever. I think you can take random screenshots of the many corridors with crates and industrial garbage strewn about and you can barely tell the levels apart:

https://imgur.com/a/HmTcmMF

Quake had SOME color variation, Jesus.

Supposedly, it’s intended to make the atmosphere depressing or something. Take notes from Quake here. It only helps when you have other aspects to amplify it. Most of the game’s sound effects are juvenile and lacking in impact. It’s mostly composed of underwhelming gun sounds, wimpy voice effects, and farts. Compare this to the Ranger’s pain screams, Trent Reznor’s OST, or anything in Quake. Try to tell me it’s not a straight downgrade. When you juxtapose underwhelming, comical sounds with underwhelming, dejected environments. You get literal fecal matter smeared everywhere.

I do not get why Eastern Europeans tell me how the West has lost its ‘beEAtY and TrAditiON’ and put out stuff like THIS. It’s repulsive on first contact by using the ugliest color scheme in the world and 98% of the game’s color palette. Even Exhumed has better color variation and it takes place in Egypt, literally a desert.

The game’s mechanics are bog standard for these throwbacks. I have given praise where it is due, but I fail to find anything of interest here. Some of the enemies straight copy pastes from Quake. You have some variation of the Ogre from Quake but he makes fart sounds when he struts about, fantastic. There is the teleporting wizard guy from Hexen 2, but now he has an AK or something. The levels consist of brown corridors with brown crates and brown industrial equipment, maybe some brown or gun steel colored buildings here and there.

The formula for these levels goes like this, you have the impression it’s nonlinear (it’s not unless you sequence break or something) because it has some slight exploration that leads to locked doors. The progression of these levels boils down to you going around corners, finding a locked door, ‘oh gee I better take the only other path available to find the key’, get the key after killing some enemies, and the alternate path leads back to the locked door/small hub repeat ad nauseum 50 times over. It’s literally the same crap you saw in Quake but it lacks any verticality or Romero-esque design to it. No level gimmicks like Dusk with tornadoes destroying the map or HL cinematic sequences to stop the insufferable blandness. If you're going to make progression completely linear, why not just take inspiration from HL, cut the BS, and just funnel players into the action? Maybe it changes up in later levels or something. I can barely get past the first few as is. The game honestly never feels as open as Build game or System Shock, where it feels like a place, and you can explore/play at your own leisure.

Go play Cultic, Hedon, Dusk, Ultra Kill, Ion Fury, or basically anything else. Quake blows, by the way, more liek Half Baked.

40/100 half bakes. It even manages to evoke Quake's tech demo feeling, but arguably way worse.

The pluses of Borderlands 1&2:

I don't think there was any notable open world coop FPS at the time with seamless vehicle combat. The closest parallels are maybe some moments in Halo 1.

The negatives about Borderlands:

Every hogshit looter shooter FPSRPG cancer stems back to this primarily. You've got spongy dumb enemies that barely require any coordination to take down. The only way to take them down faster is to be leveled and have a better gun. Everything about the combat seems frustrating. Bullet velocity is very low, enemies seem to transition from standing still to moving instantaneously, and certain mooks require multiple headshots to take down due to absurd weapon scaling at times. There are times when combat seems to come to a grinding halt and slam your head against a wall till you die.

This is encouraged, they managed to dumb down the genre as a whole since the only penalty on death is a slight money loss. You just respawn with all progression maintained.

So coop sessions go like this:

You encounter higher level enemies that you will slowly whittle down overleveled enemies as the game comes to a halt. Idiots will proceed to die and respawn and run in again.

"uh guys maybe we should try going somewhere else?"
"no"

Rinse and repeat.

As for da loot, I never understood the obsession with Diablo loot. Most of the stat modifiers here are extremely dull, add pointless inventory management that detracts from the action game experience, and most of them are fairly identical in performance. Maybe you should just design a few weapons that fill niches and roles? You know the tried and true tradition for FPS? Ultimately, this stuff has ruined action games for the worse and it's not going anywhere at this point.

It sucks.

Taking inspiration from ARPGs, you get character abilities and skill trees. The skill trees boil down to stat modifiers and you get ONE ability that generally boils down to being an "I win" button. Compare this to Diablo's multiple abilities that had to be combed to get results, Bioshock's, or etc. Like how do you manage to set an already low bar . . . lower?

There's also the grafics. It's a cartoony, cell shaded style that takes inspiration from Mad Max. Now I think most of the character design in this game sux. Weird proportions, everybody looks like a dumb hick or incredibly sexualized (in a not-so-good way), and animations in cutscenes are weird and stilted with characters being barely expressive in their animations. It's supposed to be "punk" or something I guess. As for the environment, I don't think there's a single place that stands out. The original had it where there was TRASH EVERYWHERE to signify the game's quality. The second has less trash. I guess that works out a bit better. Compare this to TF2, a game with 1960s super spy fiction with more expressive characters (I mean that technically too) or the Wind Waker's gorgeous cell shading with highly expressive animations that embody a cartoonish style. How do you manage to look worse than a Gamecube game?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOo4JzBn7wU

This character introduction conveys everything wrong with this game's visuals. Tiny Tina is absolutely ugly (they gave a 13-year nasolabial folds lol). The animation is wooden, and the facial expressions are lacking.


The soundtrack originally got praise for this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_n18lovbss
You better believe that's the peak lol. The rest is the usual Jesper Kyd phoned-in stuff.

The writing was generally praised for its comical tone. Breaking the 4th wall at times, having lots of quips, and bouts of personality compared to the relatively serious shooters at the time. But for the most part, there are pretty notable lines from enemy chatter. But the main characters barely have anything to say. And none of this writing is really conveyed through the actual game itself. There's maybe some goofy quest here and there. But for the most part, it's crawling through a bland dungeon to kill the same enemies that respawn a set number of times from some tent or door. Compare this to Bulletstorm, a game with a comical tone to it, you do outlandish ♥♥♥♥ like shoot dudes in the anus till they ♥♥♥♥ out their guts, have a flare gun that launches people into the stratosphere till they explode into fireworks, or control an RC dinosaur to destroy ♥♥♥♥. Or Conker's Bad Fur Day which has you fighting singing poo monsters or strutting through multiple movie parodies. Borderlands is the Full Sail University quality of "how 2 design a video game sequence" done in the most cynical manner. The writing does not convey the actual game in any manner.

Just junk. A nasty tumor that managed to ruin video games with this crap. It's influence is never going away now.