Recent reviews by _duskło

A lot of the lighting has become overblown and far brighter than what the level designers intended in 2004. And I understand that this remix doesn't have to be accurate to the vanilla game, I'm just saying that I find the older game better. Once the novelty of ray-tracing wears off, a lot of these environments are just worse looking for ridiculously more computing power.

Things are made weirder by how the new assets clash with the level geometry. The shiny new materials and models are so detailed as to become weird. They clash with the untouched Half-Life 2 underneath; the geometry is identical. It just feels weird, and it leaves levels looking barren and like someone took a game from 2004 and just slapped some new textures on (I wonder why).

But by far the worst issue is performance. I was playing on an RTX 3070, a card that is almost five years old. In the past, you could get usable framerate and picture quality on a card that was five years old. Today, it seems, only the 1% of PC players are allowed to have somewhat-presentable picture quality. Frankly, unless you have a high-end 40 series card or a 50 series card, don't even think about playing this above the lowest quality settings. The assets were constantly grainy and mushy, despite the fact that I ensured my VRAM wasn't full and that all assets were loaded into memory. And the AI is disgusting. I might be bias against AI, but the artefacts looked horrific. It had that AI "sheen" that you see on Facebook posts, and moving objects left behind what looked like JPEG artefacts or something.

I can imagine many elitists crying "well you have to upgrade eventually" but my point is not that I should be able to play this on max settings on my card. My point is that I should be able to use lower-quality presets without it looking terrible. If anyone tried to convince me to buy a new £500 GPU and used this as an example, I'd laugh at them. More and more it seems that RTX and AI rendering techniques are just gimmicks that lazy developers can exploit for less optimisation work, at the expense of players everywhere.

I do not recommend this at all. Just play the original Half-Life 2. It looks great twenty years later. It has aged better than most of it's contemporaries, and it will age better than this smeary, AI sheen, volumetric-fog-thicker-than-a-tobacco-shop mess.

Still Wakes the Deep is a very good game. I really liked it! And I absolutely recommend it. However, it is not perfect. I think it has some big problems that stop this game from truly reaching its fullest potential.

First, the good. Still Wakes the Deep absolutely nails its characters and setting and choking the player in its oil-slick world. Set on an oil rig in the North Sea, off the coast of Aberdeen (the scariest thing about this game), you play as Cameron "Caz" McLeary, a man running from his problems. Speaking as someone who has lived in Scotland their whole life, I have known a Caz. I've known people who I see represented in this game. Hell, one of them has my surname. If you live in Britain and are aware of its history, then there is a lot to unpack in the game's seventies setting.

There's Trots, the proper seventies trade-unionist, working on the rig. A homage to a better time of worker's rights in the UK; the kind of man who voted Labour, back when the party actually had worker's interests at heart. Then there's Addair. He has a Britain First poster in his room, and the symbol of the National Front. He's a racist piece of ♥♥♥♥. There's Finlay, the only woman on the rig, and our closest friend it feels. The dynamic between Finlay and Caz is so strong and realistic, I felt right at home. Next is Brodie, a hard worker and dear friend who gives his all. And finally, there's Rennick; the self-interested, unforgiving boss of the rig.

Once ♥♥♥♥ goes down, the beautifully haunting gore and viscera and... sinews of whatever you have awoken is able to really evoke a sense of terror and helplessness. Just as colossal and incomprehensible is the sheer size of the rig. Standing impossibly in the sea; a towering hunk of metal and concrete, burning gas in the sky. The game's environment artists have really focused on details, and pushed themselves. The game is simply beautiful. Lastly, I also appreciate the game's further representation of Scotland by actually have the game available in Scottish Gaelic (that's gah-lick, not gae-lick). Such an uncommon sight, but greatly appreciated (even if I can only say hello and introduce myself).

Now, the problems. While the beat-by-beat plot is easy enough to follow, and leads to some tense scenes, the overarching narrative is confusing, and a lot is not explained. There's a theme of running away and of regret, featuring flashbacks of Caz and his wife arguing. But that's about as much attention as this plot gets; a few flashbacks. Then it comes back at the end. It just feels underdeveloped. I feel these themes could have taken the stage a bit more, and have actually been elaborated on further. This problem of underdevelopment goes a bit further.

A character who I won't name dies, and it's a very emotional scene, with a moving performance from Caz's actor. But... it just falls a bit flat. The character who dies means a lot to Caz, and so the reaction is justified in that sense. But to the player, we have a few good moments with them, but that's it. We don't really see them again until their death. The game expects you to care for the death of a character you shared all of five minutes with.

Furthermore, Rennick, the big bad, isn't all that big. He is set up in the game's coda as this big threat, and you really start to worry. But his death is so uneventful. You see him about three times in the whole game, and the rest of his presence is through dialogue. I was really expecting a scarier finale with him, but that simply didn't happen. And I guess that's due to the game's walking-sim nature.

While I appreciate walking-sims, I can't help but feel the game could have been improved with some player defence. A better finale could have been done if, for example, we had an Alien: Isolation style flamethrower, or a deterrent of that nature. We could actually fend off Rennick while completing another task and ending him. I dunno.

All in all, Still Wakes the Deep is a five to six hour experience, with immense levels of world-building and polish, for £26.99 as of writing. It has some issues, but overall, I would seriously recommend it. Especially given its price. In a world where games with gigantic budgets are asking for gigantic prices, Still Wakes the Deep is a prime example of bang-for-your-buck indie titles putting the triple A industry to shame. You will not regret buying and playing this game.

People don't play a game three times across a week and half unless it's very good... or they have a problem. Alien: Isolation is the best thing to release under the Alien IP since the original film from 1979. That's right, I personally place this above the film sequel Aliens because this game is just that good. As someone who has been wholly overcome by a passion for all things Alien, this game serves as a delicious and satisfying meal of horror and H.R. Giger designed psychosexual xenomorph terror, worthy of standing shoulder to shoulder with the original film and its sequel.

The art direction is cast iron and never falters; every environment has that 70s retro-futurism look. The rooms and corridors of Sevastopol station are full of company standardisation of doors, vents, electronics, and signage. Everything looks and feels as though its mass-produced and simply welded all together, and not bespoke. The station is utilitarian in all its features, but still has a sliver of charm and personality owed to its survivors who were once just simple residents. Despite this distinct and unnerving artstyle, Sevastopol rarely bores the eyes with samey imagery. Every area is unique and beautiful; Alien: Isolation's graphics have aged wonderfully. I remember watching it on YouTube when it had just came out and thinking it was the closest a video game had ever came to looking real. But nowadays you can tell its aged slightly, what with the kinda fake looking humans and the odd jagged edge or just-to-matte looking surface. Regardless, its beautiful.

Every mission leads the player in a linear direction but Sevastopol is more like the ship from System Shock 2. The player, for most of the game, can really go anywhere apart from story-important zones. Theres a lot to loot but its a constant conflict between risk and reward as nobody really wants to be dying and loading their save a million times for some items. This forces you to be conservative and take what you need, avoiding unnecessary risks. However this doesn't go far enough, and I found items to be far too common to keep me on my toes. The Nightmare difficulty fixed that, and is my favourite difficulty to play on. The game's main loop is getting the player from point story beat A to point story beat B and so on, all while filling that journey with roadblocks and optional exploration. This can feel rather samey after multiple playthroughs, which means there isn't much replayability unless you're as fascinated as I am. But it's the challenges when passing these roadblocks that makes the game fun and scary. The Alien is not a novelty, its a perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. And its a smart wee ♥♥♥♥♥♥. It learns from the player as the game progresses, meaning each encounter gets harder. The more you hide under objects like gurneys or tables, the more it will check under them. The more you hide in cabinets or lockers, the more it will investigate them. This forces you to stay original in how you deal with each encounter, and discourages cop-out strategies that lower the difficulty and increase potential boredom. The AI controlled androids are much the same but pose less of a lethal threat.

There is way more I could (and maybe should write about) but frankly, if my over-enthusiasm hasn't already persuaded you, then you have a heart of grey sludge and hate fun. Play this game! The things I didn't write about; the story, the weapons, the combat, the craftables, the logs, the terminals, the Nostromo logs, these are all fascinating but I don't want to spoil it. All I've done here is say the game is sexy, and that the Alien is scary. Play this game!

HROT (or Slavic Quake as it's know in retro FPS circles) is an excellent little Quake style shooter. Running on it's on engine (written in Pascal which couldn't have been fun), it nails the atmosphere, visual artefacts and general vibe of the engine John Carmack wrote back in 1996 down to a tee. Unlike retro shooters before HROT that used shaders to make Unity look old, this is the real deal. It's hard to convey just how beautifully old this feels, you just need to play it.

The movement in HROT however is a little weak. Walking around is okay but the jumping is pretty clunky and hard to pull off. There's one secret that I just couldn't reach because of the weak jumping which felt a little unfair to me. I also felt that the game was a little too easy on Normal which admittedly can be remedied by picking a higher difficulty but at the moment I feel it could still challenge new players a little more.

The enemies are great I feel! Their designs are fantastic and utterly inspired! The humanoid enemies walk around with their Soviet gas masks and trench coats and leave you wondering if they're even alive in there. The enemies telegraph their attacks well and communicate damage well. Nothing to complain about there!

My last gripe is the weapons. They feel fine and as long as you ration your ammo, you should be good on that front. But the weapon sounds and introductions are the weakest link in this whole game. They sound far too delicate and weak, some more oomf in their sound would be excellent! As for the introductions, I felt that at the moment I got a new weapon, it wasn't too bad... but later on I'd forget I even had some very powerful weapons and I feel that stronger and more memorable introductions could fix this. However, If this is just me being dumb and everyone else got on hunky dory then I guess I'll just shut up :P

HROT is a little short for the price but that will change! Its in early access and has more chapters coming! So I'd 100% recommend you buy this! You won't regret it!

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Fingerbones is a short horror thriller that I think everyone should try! You enter an abandoned shelter with the orange hue of the golden hour beaming through the boarded windows. There are many notes housed in this shelter for you to find.

These notes are the opinions of a deluded, divorced psychopath during an apocalypse. The notes carry the narrative of the game with the environment laying down the bass line of mood to the game. They are well written and are great at both conveying and evoking emotion.

It's free, it's about 20 minutes long, try it and hopefully enjoy it!

Fibrillation HD is one of the best games I have ever accidentally come across. I was wandering through the baron, dry and not very fruitful lists of the Steam Bargain Bin (Games under £4) as I had £4 to spend. I added to my wish-list games that looked interesting. I added a fair few and then overlooked them. I only bought this game because It was one of the most interesting looking. And, long story short, it did not disappoint.

I downloaded this game, expecting to feel an urge in the first few minutes to refund it. I started a new game. I was greeted to a large pillar of stone building itself up in the middle of a dessert, accelerating when I moved and slowing down when I stayed still. But no matter how I moved, it built itself. I was instantly hooked. I stepped into a portal and was taken to the games second destination. I instantly felt the feelings of the environment I had transported in too, cold and depressed. This game tells a narrative through the environment. The large open, baron spaces make you feel isolated in a world grander than you. A world so big and secret that it makes you feel as if it is conservatively keeping its inner mechanisms from you for your own safety.

I walked onward, finding a lantern in a room full of them. I made my way through until I came across a floating and flashing ghostly looking portal that took me to the next level. The second chapter (this games uses chapters instead of levels) shows a basic mechanic that you will throughout the whole game. You collect orange cubes that can be used to open doors through out the game. You also encounter the first enemy with an Aztek appearance that will definitely scare you. And if you venture will also find a monster with a similar description. This is as complex as the mechanics get. This would normally been seen as bad, as their is not much but the game makes up for this in its locations.

You see many locations that look like something out a Patrick Ness book. Locations large in scale with a mystical unknown atmosphere. An excellent example is a long set of straight stairs in a large, concrete chasm with an abyss in all axes. You wander through the empty space between to massive concrete walls, with pipes and burst pipes and Aztec statues with heads that follow you. The empty space looks like the alley way of these walls. With this said, they are great at consistently keeping you on track and you never feel lost.

Along the way you will find many secret areas, some of which, housing a secret code. If you write all the codes down and enter them in the password bar on the chapter select, you will no be disappointed to say the least. So as not to spoil the game, I want go into this anymore. The secret areas usually (but not exclusively) house a bright blue orb. These orbs are important for one of the game's three endings. You can usually find these as their is normally a path of dark-blue particles leading to them. I suggest collecting these for a full experience. All this gives the game more goals for you and a fair bit of replay value.

The game is about an hour and a half if you get don't get all the orbs. Collecting them all and all the achievements (which I did) will give about two more hours of game-play. I only had one minor gripe with this game and it was the stamina bar. Running will empty it far too quickly, it is the length of the whole screen, it refills much slower if you walk while it is refilling and you lantern uses it up. Also, the speed of the player, whether it be walking or running, was pretty slow and far too loose. Whether this was intentional or not, I feel it detracts from the game as it can feel a but cheap at times. This concludes my gripes with the game.

All in all, Fibrillation HD is one of the most, if not the most under-rated game I have ever played. For £2 you get what feels like a triple-A but short game. Lots of love was obviously put into the game to make it what it is. I would advise buying it as soon as possible.

Thank you for reading and buy this game!

What can I say about The Ultimate DOOM that hasn't already been said? Well, that's what you're going to find out! After playing through all three episodes of the original DOOM and the extra episode in The Ultimate DOOM, I can say with relative confidence that it holds up even today.

It's important to mention that I played 3/4ths of this game on the "Ultra-Violence" difficulty and 1/4 on "Hey, not too rough!" (I will get into that) and I played it completely through on the DOS version (the Steam version of all 90s DOOM games are ran on DOS Box, a DOS emulator) for the first time.

I would say that the DOS version is the best version of this game to play, and that is coming from someone with hundreds of hours of DOOM 2 map building experience and about half as much of that on popular source-ports such as "GZDoom" and "ZDoom". Some of the more versed about DOOM people reading this may disagree, I mean, the source ports have better audio, graphics options, resolutions and mods!? And the DOS version is super low resolution and with very old midi audio. The reason I believe the DOS version is better is because it was what DOOM was developed for. Simple as that. And that isn't me being a super big fanboy, I honestly found the DOS version to have a higher standard of gameplay through out with many more tight and genuinely somewhat scary or tense moments. The lighting is much better and provides a dark atmosphere that the source ports don't give out of the box. But this you can fix. What the DOS version has on-top overall that a source-port cannot do is the lower standard graphics. It sounds counter-intuitive but the lower standard graphics work well with the lighting to make a more tense atmosphere as well as feeling nice and retro if you're into that.

Now there is a little option box before Steam launches the game. The options are "Play The Ultimate DOOM" and "Play The Ultimate DOOM with classic controls". PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT USE THE CLASSIC CONTROLS! They are so awful! It's a wonder how people played DOOM with mouse and keyboard in the beginning! One little session with the classic controls and you'll see why they are so bad! Now the non-classic option will set the controls to have the typical WASD PC FPS controls but to interact you use the space-bar which is actually really cool and somewhat satisfying (also, don't worry, you can't jump so the space-bar has no better use). Now the mouse is a weird case...

When booting up the game, you can move the mouse up and down to select the different menu options. You must do this! If you're first interaction with the game at all is with the keyboard, then anytime you use the mouse it will lock up and freeze. If your first interaction with the game is with the mouse then this is fixed. Another annoying thing is the range of mouse sensitivity, or rather, the lack of range. The maximum is still really kinda slow (although I did adapt to it well) and any attempted to increase it in the ".cfg" file just broke the game. But the biggest problem by far is that the mouse also works as a joy-stick. This means that if you move the mouse up or down, you will move forwards and backwards. This is very annoying!

If it moves, shoot it. If it's still moving, shoot it until it isn't. That's it for the most part. There are coloured keycards that open the door with the corresponding colour and then later in the game, in the hell levels, these are replaced with skulls that do the same function. That's it. Literally. That. Is. It. Most of the variations and changes in the gameplay are things in the level. Such as teleports and buttons and such. And most levels are built to challenge you and add more to the basic, consistent features. This works much better than you'd imagine. The blind-rage fueled carnage with the level-unique and consistent features make for an engaging and fun experience for the most part.

DOOM's level design is... a mixed bag. All the levels are pretty big and have a good length (heh heh heh) at the start but later into the game, you will find many mazes and a lack of flow. Sometimes the game just doesn't show you in anyway at all what to do and where to go. The first episode isn't like this at all. The flow is excellent and you always know where to go and what to do but later in the game, it's almost as if the game knows what it wants from you and gets angry when you don't follow it even though it doesn't tell you what to do at all! All in all the later levels are still fun and unique but have a annoying lack of flow. The only exception to this are the episodes "Knee-Deep in the Dead" and "Thy Flesh Consumed".

The enemies in difficulty range from the "The Former Human" to the "Spider Mastermind". The first being a zombie that carries a big looking machine gun that actually sounds like your pistol and does the same amount of damage and the second being a big cyborg-spider who can kill you in just 3 to 5 seconds with his mega souped up chain-gun! The common enemies you'll see a lot are "Former Sargents" who have shotguns and can be damning if they get you point-blank, "Imps" who are spiky, brown fire ball-shouting daemons who scratch you as a mele-attack, "Lost Souls" who are floating skulls who are very annoying but weak, "Daemons" who are pink, tiger sounding dog-like enemies and "Spectres" who are the same but invisible. These guys are the common map filler. The more difficult ones are the "Cacodemons" who are flying, blue fire-ball spitting tomatoes and the "Barons of Hell" who fire green fire balls at you and have a lot of health and are kinda like mini-bosses. The actual bosses are the "Cyberdeamon" and the "Spider Mastermind" with the later being the final boss. All in all the enemies are fun and balanced!

DOOM's Impact on the FPS genre and gaming industry as a whole is massive. Without it, action games would not be how they are and games might have only started becoming 3D instead of 2D much later into the 90s. Future FPS's would take a lot from DOOM and develop upon it to make better and more mould-breaking games. Games such as Half-Life and BioShock would simply not exist without it, aswell as many other FPS games.

It's just under a fiver, you get a lot of bang for your buck, you'd be mad to pass this up. And if you're just gonna play a source-port, then buy this anyway for the crucial ".wad" file to support the creators. In the end, buy it and most likely enjoy!

Cya!