Recent reviews by borderline

Despite having a pretty great time with the opening hours of the game, I can't really recommend it. It really starts to get very repetitive and dry, with some really cheap and frustrating tricks employed to artificially slow down your progress.

Every time you step into a new area, it's the same cycle. Every enemy is now barely damaged by your weapons. Your gear disintegrates in a few hits. There is no way to mitigate this; there is no character progression, and gear progression is locked behind exploration. You -have- to explore this new area, to unlock the blueprints for the gear you need to.. explore. It feels bad. You finally build up to a shiny new set of armour and weapons, and then you move on to a new area and.. you're back to being underpowered.

It doesn't help that enemies tend to appear in small numbers (1 or 2 often) but then once you engage them, others just literally spawn in around and behind you. Playing solo, you're often just totally overwhelmed, within seconds. You may see one lone orc and think you can take him, only for five more to spawn in the moment you engage. That is straight up lousy game design. You're punishing the player, even when they're being careful.

Hunger and stamina get extremely annoying after a while, it feels like you can play for about ten minutes before you have to return to base to sleep. You can barely mine one ore vein before your character is exhausted, and your stamina is capped so low you can barely function. AFAIK, while you can bring rations etc, you can't mitigate that exhaustion. When the game says it's time to stop and go home, you just have to stop exploring and backtrack.

I'm confused at what Return to Moria wanted to be; you mine ore, you craft, you build bases etc but it's also split into defined areas and feels like a structured adventure? Gear degrades very fast, but can't be field repaired, so you need to either backtrack or carry around a repair station ready to drop at all times.

I was enjoying the game, but I stumbled into a new area and fought one (new, higher level I guess) orc who took forever to kill and broke all my gear, and I just.. turned it off. It's like being able to see the code. I could just see the flow chart. It felt pointless to keep going.

Not terrible, but I think in dire need of a rethink. Feels confused and like it wasn't playtested enough. It's not enough to just have these mechanics, they have to harmonise.

For me, Rogue Incursion delivered. I've been pretty disappointed with Aliens games since.. forever, as they tend to be decent but coated in caveats. This wasn't perfect, but the complaints I had really didn't trash the experience. They're just things I'd like tweaked, or made optional.

The atmosphere was fantastic, especially pulling out the motion tracker to scan the area, while still holding your rifle off-hand. Interacting with everything physically really grounds you in the experience. I had to play it in bursts of an hour to two hours purely because I'd get too tense and anxious and start messing up controls.

I'm a massive fan of how the environment is connected and continuous. You backtrack, you go back through previous areas, you're mostly free to wander. It feels like one persistent space which is fantastic. It's exactly what I've wanted in an Aliens game for a long time, a sense of exploring a proper space, not just set piece corridors.

Even on the easier difficulty, a xenomorph can kill you incredibly fast and easily. You're always one screw up away from death, which keeps the tension high all the time. They move fast, along walls and ceilings, and can leap quite far. You just simply cannot let you guard down, or disregard a xenomorph. If you don't track it, and aren't ready for it, you're just dead. It's great, exactly what you want in an Alien game. It should never be a trivial enemy.

I wasn't a fan of the physical 3D body, mostly as it didn't line up with my meatspace body and that caused a bunch of recurring issues. The most irritating was a constant metal chafing/colliding noise whenever I'd raise my gun up to check the tracker. It was hard to remain immersed when I had to keep holding my arm out far to clear the intersection. The character would also knock stuff out of the way or kick stuff that I wasn't intending to, and at least initially I struggled to see my items since the chest of the character physically blocked my sightline. You can tweak that, though.

I started to notice a pretty obvious pattern to the game in the later half, which did somewhat ruin my enjoyment. I stopped exploring because I could time xenomorph appearances and predict them with pretty good accuracy. The game would just throw two at me, then wait a minute, throw two more. They weren't roaming or stalking, they'd just enter the area and head straight for me. Ammo is limited and finite, it doesn't respawn (at least outside of save rooms) so I started to get too paranoid about using up all my ammo exploring. Especially if exploring didn't yield enough ammo to make up the loss.

I'm on the fence about the saving system. For the most part, it worked okay. The gaps between save rooms worked; if I screwed up and died (which happened a lot) I didn't lose too much progress. It felt like there was a consequence, but not a harsh punishment. A few times, I really did lose a chunk of progress, and it's just a net negative to have to redo a portion of game several times. All the tension goes, you rush, you get frustrated, generally speaking the experience is soured. It does auto-save in a few key moments to bank progress, but I would've liked more of that. If you do something story significant, it should auto-save before a big encounter.

Some minor praises; I love that they kept it focused on what we're all here for -- the Alien. You don't fight human mercenaries, or synthetics. I always found those parts to be the worst elements of previous games, and was very happy to not have to cover-shoot at grunts. There aren't any wacky alternate xenomorph types that spit or whatever either. This might sound like a negative but for me it was a HUGE positive. It works so much better without being overloaded by what feels like action figure fodder.

I'm really looking forward to the sequel, I didn't know at the time it was a part one of two and I feel like maybe that decision was made -after- I'd wishlisted the game but honestly? It's not a bother. My first playthrough was 13 hours and I feel very satisfied. It was a cliffhanger, yes, but very much a sequel set up. It didn't feel like half a game or story at all.

One very minor gripe to throw in at the end; I don't like the Pulse Rifle model. If this can get workshop support that'd be amazing, because I'd love to replace it with a version that looks closer to the legendary original design. It's just all a bit off, and uncanny. Angles and widths. It was a bit of a disappointment since it's such a hugely iconic weapon. Bit like getting your lightsabers wrong.

Recommend, with a fairly huge asterisk currently.

As a tank builder, it's fantastic. It's fun enough figuring out how to get what you want out of the vehicle, tweaking, moving, testing out different setups. It's genuinely enjoyable just going through the trial-and-error of it all. Really impressive, and very entertaining.

As a game? It's still way, way too early. You're just driving out onto featureless terrain to fire at AI. No concealment, cover, or anything that would allow you to flank or move in closer. You're always outnumbered and the enemy seems to always have the edge. There's a variety of damage you can take but really, it all means the same thing -- restart. It really feels more like a technical test for the vehicle you just made, than a game currently.

I'm worried that the actual game part is an after-thought to a tank builder here, but hopefully I'm proven wrong. Development is still ongoing, and I look forward to everything that comes next. Pick it up if you know you'll enjoy building things, and trying them out. If you want a game, wait a while longer.

Honestly, one of the best games I've played in a while. Perfectly paced, challenging while being clear and fair, and addictive. I wanted to keep replaying levels, to get better, and push my rank up. I wanted to hit that perfect run, not for any in-game reward, but just because it felt amazing.

Felt very deliberately designed, and lean, with the fat trimmed off. There's no bloat, missions don't outstay their welcome, it's all juice no grind. I've only played one of the four mission sets offered, but even if I'd played all the missions, I'd still highly recommend it. I can see myself coming back to replay this over and over.

I felt more engaged writing this review than I did in ~15 hours of giving this game a chance.

The word "slop" is thrown around a lot these days, but Fallout 76 is the very definition of inoffensive, sterile, commercial slop. It's like going home, and finding out your favourite spot is now a Starbucks.

It's a treadmill of banal, meaningless content that just serves to pass time. You're not being challenged. You're not even thinking. Nothing is a threat, everything is level scaled. I never once died to an enemy. I rarely even had to heal. You fight enemies, to make number go up. You pick up litter, to build stuff, to make number go up. It's a pointless cyclical ritual.

It's so diluted it's insulting. Things that were unlocked by default in Fallout 4, in crafting and settlement building, are now chopped off and thrown into loot tables for you to (very slowly) find. Everything is a grind, everything is tedious. It feels like that's the entire point of the game, too.

It's an incredibly static and lifeless game. Everything happened before you got there. All of the stories I found, were the same flavour of "my boss is a ♥♥♥♥" that was tired back in Fallout 3. It's uninteresting. Why should I care? These people are all dead and the world ended. Throw me into a story that's actively happening. Let me shape it. That's Fallout.

76 is a terrible multiplayer game, on top of all this. You don't share quests, so everyone is playing their own game, just in a shared space. If you see other people, most of the time you just ignore them. They can't hurt you, or really help you, outside of just dropping you a bunch of free items you really don't need anyway.

I could go on, but this game doesn't deserve it. It's dull, tedious, and soulless. You could pick up 2-3 indie games for this price that were made by people with passion and heart, that would be a way better use of your limited time on this Earth.

If you really need to kill time this bad, idk man learn a skill. Get an instrument.

It's an insanely fun pick-and-play kind of game, it's not a huge time commitment which is a plus for me, need more games in my library I can just boot up for an hour and have fun.

The whip is insanely satisfying, kinda feels like you're bullying the enemies at a certain point which is the kind of vibe I adore. Sweep the legs, knock the sword out of their hand, whip their head to stun them, push them into spike pits, into other projectiles etc it's just really enjoyable seeing all these mechanics play off each other.

The art is incredible, I love this setting and this style, it manages to feel unique and grounded at the same time. I'm very picky when it comes to fantasy, I have a huge aversion to over designed stuff with tons of spikes and glow etc so something like this with a consistent aesthetic just calls to me.

It's the kind of game I grew up with, it's not littered with systems and currencies, there's no eternal treadmill of content. You get a solid game that's fun and complete, and doesn't try to be your next hobby. It's happy to entertain you until you move on to the next game.

I'd love to see/play a sequel one day, would just love more of this

Mediocre game but a fantastic setting, it's a genuine shame it's so repetitive and shallow.

It doesn't really make a lot of sense. You're a journalist, but your first mission is to murder cops. NPC's randomly attack each other for no discernible reason, without consequence, and steal from each other but. If you're just walking around you get jumped by cops? A character will tell you, over radio, to go find essentially a phone booth so they can call you.. but they're already calling you..

You can only jump if you possess one specific character, who can jump. Some characters have basically much worse versions of abilities others have? Some characters feel entirely pointless, like you can only possess them because hey they're in the level so why not.

Nonsensical stuff aside, it's just a lot of going back and forth to do missions that at best, are on the level of randomly generated content. Go here, blow up an NPC. Go there, collect item just hovering. It doesn't do anything interesting with the setting, it feels like they made the setting and then ran out of time and/or ideas.

I didn't play this game growing up so I have no nostalgia for it, and coming at it in 2025 it's a hard no. Just look up the art, and maybe some gameplay footage, and leave it be.

I left feeling pretty underwhelmed, especially after playing the remake of 2. It's not that it's a bad game, it's just not up to the standard set only a year prior in terms of execution and content.

That said, I'd still recommend it purely as a standalone game, because it's still fun. With the huge caveat that I picked it up on sale, in a bundle, so I'm not approaching it as a full-priced game.

An awful lot of 3 is just absent. Whole areas are gone, and what isn't cut is abridged beyond recognition. Nemesis perhaps got it the worst, after the first few encounters being relegated to scripted cinematic moments and the occasional boss fight. What wasn't cut, but instead remixed, I like a lot. I just really would've liked to see the whole game get that treatment, instead of huge chunks just being cut out.

I don't strictly understand some of the changes either, like the removal of sub-weapons, defence items, and how aiming for the legs just doesn't seem effective now. Though Jill's dodge is actually usable now, which is a massive plus, and I like that a perfectly timed dodge opens a window for counter-attack.

It's a bit too focused on being "cinematic" for my tastes, with tons of scripted explosions and destruction, etc. As a result, it doesn't feel like a game I want to replay any time soon. There's not really any room to do things different, and given there are no alternate scenarios or bonus modes.. this really feels noticeably shorter and lighter than the previous game.

Where 2R has Claire & Leon, A & B, plus 4th Survivor, plus Ghost Survivors, 3R just has one scenario. It would be balanced out if Jill's scenario was longer, and richer, but it's the same length as one of Claire or Leon's.

On the positive side, it's at least still fun to play, and visually gorgeous. I wasn't particularly precious about Jill, so the changes to her character here didn't bother me. I liked the dynamic between her and Carlos. She felt independent, headstrong, jaded after the Mansion incident and the struggle for accountability afterwards.

It's definitely worth a play, and if you haven't played the original RE3 you'll probably enjoy it more as you have no knowledge of what's missing.

I played the original through twice before starting this, and I was really consistently impressed with what was familiar, and what felt fresh. All of the important stuff is still there, but it's been adjusted, expanded, sometimes re-interpreted. Remake doesn't feel accurate honestly, they really did go back to the drawing board on a lot of elements. You feel it most in areas like the sewers, and in characters like Annette Birkin (who really strongly benefited from a rewrite, I feel).

The presentation here is absolutely incredible, though it's a much darker and colder atmosphere than the original. The storytelling was top notch, the writing and delivery in particular just felt like a stellar reinterpretation of the original. Especially stood next to the original, it feels incomparable. They really took advantage of all the tools and technology that have become available since 1998 and the difference is incredible.

I did find the game itself somewhat frustrating at first, due in part to a hidden adaptive difficulty mechanic that doesn't just make the game easier if you're struggling, but harder if you're doing well. I also struggled with what seemed to be the intended way to play; conserve ammo to such a degree that you should take hits just to avoid using ammo. Run away, bait enemy attacks, basically avoid conflict as much as possible.

It's a matter of taste, of course, it just didn't end up being for me. You put a bunch of cool weapons in my hand, and I want to use them.

I love that a lot of the classic weapons are here; Leon's obscure West German pistol, the M-79, the Desert Eagle etc. They're all beautifully rendered and animated, in particular I just love how characters hold long weapons while walking around, and how there's an actual sling when they're in reserve! When you damage enemies it's visceral and raw; you can blow limbs off, split heads, blow chunks out of an enemy. It's intense.

It's a shame though that most weapons feel pretty weak. Handguns are pretty bad even at taking out legs, usually requiring 3-4 shots on a stumbling target to drop them. The shotgun doesn't reliably break heads, even at point blank range. Automatics are pitiful. That's one area where I'd say the original is still better; shooting stuff in classic RE2 still feels much more satisfying. Guns just never felt powerful enough to me (magnum excluded).

Like I said though it's down to taste and expectations, you should know going in this is a horror game first and not an action game first like 4, 5 and definitely 6. It's an incredible game -- a really compelling version of the Resident Evil 2 story.

Not only a prime example of survival horror, but a prime example of how to do a remake.

It still looks incredible, despite the resolution of the backgrounds showing some age. The way each angle is framed and lit, it's just gorgeous. They use the fixed camera angles to great effect a lot of the time, normally to create mood and atmosphere, but some times to setup reveals or surprises. You just can't do that with a free camera and I grew to love the fixed angles very quickly.

It didn't take long at all to get used to the controls, and I think the slower movement & action is really a positive. It's genuinely refreshing to slow down, soak in the atmosphere, and explore a location freely. You're not led around by the nose, the game isn't throwing stuff at you constantly to keep your attention. It's not afraid to be quiet for a while, and build tension. It can feel a little obtuse at times, but figuring stuff out for yourself is so much more satisfying.

I love the sense of permanence the game has. You shoot a zombie, it's still lying on the floor when you come back later. Items are fixed and finite. Occasionally, the game will refresh the mansion with new enemies, but it's always an event. Something happens to trigger it. You never backtrack and find a room repopulated. It's very deliberate and carefully orchestrated.

I won't go into spoilers, but, I loved how grounded things felt. There's none of the wacky stuff from later Resident Evil games. The mansion feels like a mansion, and subsequent areas feel like real places, not fantastical or overly sci-fi. There's no grotesque, shocking stuff here really either, it's all pretty safe for people (like me) who don't like gore and would walk away if it got too visceral.

Honestly I could gush about this game for a lot longer, I strongly recommend it. I didn't play the original Resident Evil on PS1, and I didn't play this when it released, but even as someone completely new to this style of game, I had a blast. It's fantastic.