Recent reviews by hellshake dys

don't often post steam reviews, but i was really looking forward to mouthwashing and it lived up to all my expectations, so i thought i'd do my part to help spread the good word of it.

mouthwashing is yet another game that reminds me of what remains of edith finch in how it's structured. but this one even more so than that game feels a lot like an interactive movie, not in the until dawn/david cage way but like, very simple puzzles and stuff mainly there to move the narrative forward. i don't mean that in a negative sense as some view the "walking sim" type of game to be, i thought it was executed wonderfully here. the whole thing is also, idk what word you'd use for it for a video game but like, it's directed really nicely. i like the use of odd camera angles and being constantly aware of what you are and aren't looking at to mess with you in all sorts of ways, it's very clever and never dull.

in terms of the narrative itself, it made me think of the movie event horizon. it's significantly less (at least explicitly) violent and gore heavy, and more about leaning into some pretty genuine cosmic and psychological type of horror instead. but it has a very similar framework as that movie still. i'm a big fan of the overall look of the game too. this very, faux-ps1/2 look that a lot of modern horror has tends to look kinda bad and cheap to me, but i think mouthwashing does it well. lands at a good spot that doesn't actually feel like it's just trying to be retro but rather like it's a thing of its own. it compliments all the weird ♥♥♥♥ they throw at you really well too. i also really appreciated the game having the decency to keep it short, and wrap things up in just 2 hours too. it kinda comes back to what i said about this feeling like an interactive movie, it's paced almost exactly like one.

very happy with the game all around. one of the most compelling horror games i've played from recent years, without a doubt. even now 2 months later, i'm still finding myself constantly thinking about it, which i think speaks volumes to how potent of an experience it is.

Hitman 3 might be the most frustrating game I've ever played. What should have been the easiest slam dunk ever is instead a completely erratic mess that repeatedly tries and fails to deviate from the basic Hitman formula. While the Berlin missions delivers on a great spin on things, you then also get stuck with horrid guided setpieces again and again throughout the majority of the missions at various points. The ending stretch of the Chongqing mission made me feel like I was right back to the very worst parts of Absolution again, and it's honestly just baffling to me. I thought we moved past this, but apparently not.

I was hoping and praying that Freelancer would be a good way of trying to reevaluate the game for me after how sore the campaign left me. Instead it's just something that feels deeply emblematic of the problems of the game overall; it doesn't know what it wants to be, or what it wants to do. So it's just trying to do a bit of everything. It's deeply disappointing, because I feel there is something good to be had in there, but I'm just not sure Freelancer mode successfully finds that something.

Ultimately I could have pretty easily looked past most all of these things just for how fantastic of a package of the much better predecessors this still is. Having them all in one place, and at a much smaller filesize now, is a great thing. But unfortunately, the absolutely horrid always online implementation continues to be so insanely intrusive that it pushes me over the edge. Every single damn time I play this game I have one or another problem caused by the server just never being able to actually maintain connection. Whether that's ultimately on my end is one thing, but the fact is that we shouldn't be in a situation where this can happen in the first place. The way IOI have chosen to implement online in all three of these games is completely inexcusable. I used to make excuses for it, I used to tell people it's good enough to look past it. No more.

Wanted nothing more than Until Dawn 2, and that's exactly what I got, and then some. So hell yes I'm satisfied. Loaded with variables for how things can turn out, lord knows I did not get an even close to ideal run, but that's part of the fun. Seeing all my mistakes reflected by the ending was a good feeling. The coop feature is a really welcome addition, though it'd be nice if it had online, but Parsec got the job done more than well.

So yeah, a wonderful little love letter to 80s horror that very much lives up to the things it's calling back to. Very strong recommendation.

Genuine contender for the worst game I've played in my entire life, and I feel actual relief in knowing it's finally dead and soon to be forgotten. Thanks for absolutely nothing Randy.

Been waiting for a great new Castlevania ever since Order of Ecclesia came out 10 years ago, this game was absolutely everything I spent these 10 years waiting for.

Thank you Novectacle and Mangagamer for letting me suffer like this once more.

DO NOT PLAY THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE PLAYED 999 AND VIRTUE'S LAST REWARD ALREADY

Within minutes of starting the game there were several things talked about that relate to the two of them. Unless you have played them, you WILL end up simply confused and lost.

There are few games I've really wanted to love as much as Just Cause 3, and even fewer that are as hard to love.

Just Cause 3 is one of those kind of games in which the developer has absolutely no idea as to why the original game was popular, similar to Saints Row 3 for instance. What it leads to is a lot of changes no one wants that somehow makes it a massively worse game overall. Avalanche handing the game off to their New York based studio as opposed to doing it themselves is likely playing no small part in that.

The game immediately starts off with a scripted sequence in which you stand around on a plane doing... A whole lot of nothing. This in itself sets the tone for all of the missions ahead pretty well. They can all be amounted to one of two tasks; you either have to protect something/someone, or you have to destroy something. It gets incredibly stale incredibly fast, and with them adding a lot of scripted elements into the mix for these too; it also becomes really unfun.

Now if you thought just the game part of the missions was bad enough, you thought wrong, because there's still the atrociously bad story to take into account too. All the writing is just plain not funny or engaging in the slightest, and I think Mario might be one of the most obnoxiously written characters I've yet to encounter in a video game. He is the closest I've seen a video game come to making it's very own Jar-Jar Binks. Constantly in your face since the developers were oh so certain you would love him, and constantly incredibly unfunny. Thankfully, at least the developers themselves must have realized how awful their writing is, because they did have the decency to make it incredibly easy to just skip all cutscenes.

That's enough for just the missions, as for the rest of the game and more specifically the gameplay it's something of a mixed but mostly bad bag. I will begin by saying that I really enjoy using the wingsuit to move around, it was a needed addition that does the game well. If the wingsuit itself was the welcome addition to the game, then the gear mod upgrade system is most definitely the unwelcome one. In an attempt to copy a lot of other modern games, they added a system for upgrading your tools to get a lot of basic abilities. All it leads to is removing the sense of freedom that Just Cause 2 had, in which you were always capable of doing everything at any given point. Rico himself feels like he controls a bit more heavily, and the camera tends to be just a lot too zoomed in, too. All in all, the gameplay just completely lacks the freedom which Just Cause 2 had. Which is, again, an example of the developers completely failing to understand anything about what made it good.

On first glance, the map and the activities around it seem a lot more interesting, but soon you realize there's not actually a whole lot to them. They are all pretty same-y and quickly stop being fun. Activities almost all amount to you needing to fly/drive through rings or destroy some stuff. Probably the only creative ones are the ones for upgrading the tether, in which you use the tether to attach a ball to your car then drive it around collecting rocks. Yet the gear mod system I mentioned earlier is directly tied to them and how you do in them, so you have no choice but to continue doing them in order to get the most out of your various gadgets. These activities are also how they try to compensate for the much, much smaller map than that of Just Cause 2, but with how monotone they quickly get it just does not work at all. The settlements themselves are a bit more fleshed out than those of Just Cause 2, but the amount of fleshing out does in no way compensate for just how much less content there is.

Oh and on a quick footnote, the PC port itself is absolutely horrendous as well. Terrible performance on systems that should run it just fine, and memory leak issues causing frequent crashes. It's an absolute joke of a PC port and it makes me sick that it's been out this long without them having done much to fix it.

In conclusion, or a tl;dr for those not interested in this wall of text. Just Cause 3 is an incredibly disappointing game both as a sequel to Just Cause 2 and as a game of its own. It does very little right, and very much wrong. I can't possibly recommend it to anyone at all, even less at the price they are currently asking for it. It's just not even remotely worth it.

Paid mods weren't okay when Bethesda did them, and they still aren't okay when TaleWorlds do them.

Akiba's Trip is an amusing and definitely very unique game. The name of the game itself is a clever little pun alluding to the main feature of it; stripping! In the game you take the role of the nameless main character (whom becomes fully customizable in subsequent playthroughs at least) that by certain events is forced to start fighting vampires across Akihabara, and what better way of doing so than undressing them to expose their skin to the sunlight?

"Simple" is the best word for describing the combat, it's largely reduced to three different buttons which make you attack head, body or legs. In attacking said part of the body you will cause damage to the piece of clothing they are wearing on that part of their body. Once you've attacked that part enough you can either hold down the button to initiate a strip or keep attacking it until you destroy that piece of clothing. Despite it's simplicity, the combat is still very customizable in that there's a quite frankly ridiculous number of items you can equip to use as weapons. Anything from posters to electric guitars to water guns. A lot like Dead Rising, except there's more of an RPG element to it where you can upgrade your weapons to become stronger.

Sadly the combat is also the weakest point of the game. Because of how simple it is, a lot of fights can quickly become very tedious or just straight up obnoxious. In addition to the 3 basic attacks of each weapon, every weapon also has an unblockable attack. Several enemies in a tight area harassing you with the unblockable attacks can be a very frustrating experience.

Another problem with the game is that the PC port is far from the best. As the developers are a couple of Japanese dudes who have never before made a game for the PC, you can probably imagine that problems cropped up. Trying to get the game working can for many people by like trying to navigate a maze. Constantly having to change around between seemingly trivial settings to find the one that will hopefully make the game run. Fortunately the refund feature exists now for people who can't get it working at all, but worth giving a thought to in case you'd rather not have to refund something.

The story of the game is by no means anything to write home about, but it's fairly entertaining and many of the dialogue choices in the game made me audibly laugh on various occasions. There's several endings to aim for and the game loans itself very well to being replayed, much like Way of the Samurai 4 for instance. If you're a weeaboo like me then I think the jokes will most likely hit it home with you too. Both story and combat are full of anime and manga references to really drive it in who the game is mainly aiming for.

The areas of the game are all either very small or very narrow, a side effect of the game originally being made with the intention of running on a PS Vita. This in turn goes back to the problem I mentioned earlier with the combat where you can easily get gangbanged if the enemy is feeling extra cheeky. The positive of this is that at least it makes it very easy to find the plethora or stores across town fast, and it makes finding quest givers for the many and varied side quests a very easy task.

Akiba's Trip is a heavily flawed game, but it's an entertaining one none the less. It has a certain charm to it which can easily keep one playing for a long time. It's also a pretty great dressup simulator if you're into that.
Would I call it a good game? Probably not.
Would I call it a fun game? Absolutely.
Would I recommend it? Yes, I would, as it's a game I think is best experienced yourself, just due to how very unique it is.