Recent reviews by Henkka

The game is by all accounts very well remastered. I can't find any faults in performance or general playability. I haven't experienced any stuttering or crashes. The only bugs I've encountered have been UI related: the Options menu key remapping showing keyboard keys when I'm using a controller and have selected the "Controller" option before entering the remapping sub-menu. The game also looks good, as good as a remaster of a 12-year-old game can look.

Visually I'm pleased with the game. I'm all for fan service, T&A and sexiness in video games and personally I don't require there to be some great philosophy behind showing some skin. It's absolutely okay to have skimpy clothes and revealing armors in video games without there being some sort of subverting message to justify the choices. And Lollipop Chainsaw certainly offers plenty to look at. It practically revels in it. And I'm there for all of it.

On the other hand, gameplay-wise the game lacks quite a lot. The camera isn't particularly good at following the action. Many times it gets to a point where it bumps against a wall, limiting the field of view. The combat controls are "sticky", some actions feel like Juliet is stuck in completing the animations (non-cancellable animations are a pain in otherwise fast-paced action games).

Sometimes attacks that seem to be meant for single targets affects multiple targets around the intended target. Other attacks that previously did damage in an arc, can suddenly phase through enemies at random, leaving Juliet open for their attacks - which then put Juliet in a stun state that can be escaped only by jumping. Enemies can also cancel Juliet's attacks stunning her while Juliet can't cancel the same attacks that the enemies use. If you have a scenario where both characters start attacking each other at the same time, Juliet will always lose and get stunned.

Combos are sometimes unreliable. You can press the exact same button combinations and sometimes Juliet does the intended combo, sometimes she does another combo and sometimes she just does a set of basic attacks.

Overall, I don't see Lollipop Chainsaw as a very good character action game. It is serviceable and its "score" is elevated by the visuals and the cheesecake. Without the cake, the game would be a lot less memorable and most likely would have reviewed worse during its original release and now.

And as much as I like the cheesecake, I can't recommend the game. If you are here for Juliet in all of her glory, you can find footage of here all over the internet. If you are here for the gameplay, I think you can choose a better option.

I would like to add, though, that none of my criticism is against the developers of the remaster. As far as I know, they excelled on all aspects and delivered a good product. The product's contents just happens to be kinda jank.

Janky melee combat with non-cancellable animations in a horde-melee game featuring split-second counters that can't be initiated during aforementioned non-cancellable melee animations. Also, the ranged weapons feel powerless.

Adeptus Astartes power armor should be able to take more beating than being reduced to nothing after half a second in melee combat with the weakest enemies.

This game massacred all of the power fantasy of being a space marine.

The pulp flavor of the game is great and if you play on the Normal difficulty, it's most likely a really good experience from start to finish.

The first third of the game is great but, at least on the hardest difficulty, towards the last third of the game it becomes a frustrating save-load slog.

The game can spawn two identical enemies in the same encounter where one has laser-tight targeting, hitting you with every bullet while his friend can't hit anything. Sometimes snipers hit maybe 1/5 of their shots while other snipers hit 5/5 shots giving you no time to actually shoot back before you are dead. Enemy sniper seems to have a faster fire rate with the Mauser rifle, doesn't seem to flinch when hit, so a sniper duel is heavily weighted against the player as your view will flinch every time you get shot.

Sometimes the leather-clad assassin ladies hit you like a truck with their Stens, even beyond draw distance and sometimes they don't. There is an infamous spot in the second to last level where you make your way to castle Wolfenstein. The bridge has collapsed and there is a machine gun nest. When you enter it, it will activate two assassins to your left who will hit you with their Stens with impossible accuracy. And their reaction time and damage absorption is so high that unless you cheese them, you will die in the encounter. But if you don't enter the machine gun, the two characters won't spawn at all!

In castle Wolfenstein, just before the final boss, a lot of the enemy soldiers carry the FG-42, are insanely tough due to high damage threshold and make advancing in the level just painfully frustrating. You can quite literally pump a magazine with the MP-40 into one enemy and they might still survive it. And this combined with their insane accuracy makes it even worse.

Technically it's without fault. It looks amazing and sounds equally so.

The gameplay is solid for what it is, an action-adventure with few horror elements here and there.

As a Resident Evil game, however, it is disappointing. The maps are extremely linear, there are hardly any puzzles, basically four where one is such that players have solved it by accident, the second so easy that the game locks you inside the puzzle zone and the answer is in the next room. The third has an error in the writing and the fourth one has the solution on the puzzle itself.

There are hardly any route-planning because of its extremely linear design. You might think that the castle (the first section of the game) is a sprawling area with multiple routes and ways to go but in reality there is only one way to go which loops back to the beginning as you collect all the necessary items on this one set path. The next two areas are entirely linear and the last area, the factory, is perhaps the most sprawling of the four but even it is on the low end of openness what comes to the best RE maps.

As an action game it is fine, it does what it sets out to do but as a shooter it is still quite low on the board. As a horror game it is spooky few times but overall it doesn't have that oppressing Resident Evil atmosphere and due to the abundance of items and carrying capacity it lacks almost entirely the "survival" part of the survival horror. You'll never run out of ammo nor do you really need to conserve it either.

The story is nonsensical and the entire premise hangs on Chris not telling Ethan a few crucial things that he never needed to keep from him, a major flaw in character writing. The writers made Chris Redfield a moron in order to make their story possible which means that the plot of RE:Village is "a stupid plot".

Yet another game of "it gets good in 50, 100, 150 hours". I don't get it why do these games need to shove dozens and dozens of hours of sub-par content at the player and not allow them to get to the good stuff from the get-go. Fetch quests for faceless, one note characters, multitude of unnecessary activities and features upon features that do nothing but bloat the already bloated experience.

It's the same old game design tropes, same 20-year-old gameplay but in a nicer package. And it doesn't respect your time. How is it that even after two decades of MMOs being mainstream they still can't get it good? I don't want to spend hours upon hours fighting few random enemies every once in a while, while at the same time doing quests that are braindead back and forth running chores.

The voice acting is bad. The character models are out-of-place and dilute whatever is left of the atmosphere (like that K-Pop star looking priest in the beginning, dude who looks barely in his early 20's). Yeah, you've been searching these lost ruins your entire life? What, both seconds?

If you cut all the unnecessary card stuff, and the seed collectibles and the slog that is the beginning gameplay, it could be fun 20-hour Action-Clicker but to find the actual meat of the game you need to wade through mundane, low effort, low entertainment content that you forget the moment you step into the next equally forgettable area.

And the camera is kinda abysmal as well. It's a total ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to fight a large boss monster with 10-15 other players because half of the time you are not even sure which attacks are other players' and which are the boss'. It's difficult to keep track of what is happening in such a battle because the boss can be so big that it takes the majority of the screen even on farthest zoom level and it just isn't fun. And the feedback is kinda bad when taking damage so you can just suddenly die without even realizing that your health has dropped to dangerous levels.

TL;DR:
Another game with paper-thin content that "gets good at X amount of hours" padded with unnecessary features, collectibles and such to hide the fact that the content is barely "content". A game that doesn't respect your time and has lame loot to boot.

The Orville Interactive Fan Experience is great!

As of writing this, I've only played it during one evening so far but I have to say that it is quite fascinating to be able to walk around the USS Orville, visit the different sections of the ship from the bridge to Engineering, Medical and the shuttle hangar. It looks exactly like the ship in the show, every room faithfully recreated like they are on the show and what we have seen so far.

I'm excited for the future prospects of the project, eagerly waiting for the chance to play as a Xelayan and further customize my character and see more of the ship.

This game is great for RPing The Orville, if you manage to find a like-minded crew.

(I'll update the review when new features are added.)

I really don't know what to write about XCOM: Enemy Unknown. One one hand it is a great tactical strategy game with some cool features, on the other hand it seems to be either unintentionally broken or designed so horribly that it basically makes the turn-based gameplay pointless.

Visually XCOM is great, mostly. The designs, weapons, armors, vehicles and bases in addition to most of the aliens are really nice looking and have variety to them. The human characters, mainly the male soldiers are rather unnerving in appearance. The female soldiers are mostly ok and the story characters work well. The music sets the mood and there are some good standout pieces (especially the "Ready for battle" song).

Now, I know that the franchise is a meat grinder of sorts, fighting tooth and nail to win one battle at a time with the ever-looming threat of making that one bad call and getting a TPK even on a regular search and destroy mission. And I am fine with that.

1. Not being able to choose the class of your soldiers when they start ranking up. You would think this is an OK feature and perhaps if it worked well enough it would be. Now it is completely random (or at least I haven't found out how to affect it through my own actions): I started a new game, played the first few missions and leveled up my squad only to find out that 2 of them became snipers, one went to become a heavy and another an assault class. Ok, so early in the game that is not a big problem but when I bought an additional squad member position to my team and picked the next rookie to go on a mission things went from "silly team composition" to "how does this even work": I now had 3 snipers in my team in addition to the heavy and assault. A basic abduction mission is easy to handle even with an uneven team but when I have to race against time to save civilians of disarm a bomb and three of my squad members can't move and shoot/overwatch at a low level is a big problem. Sure, I could have picked other rookies and started to level them up but once you play few missions and every perk you gain when leveling up is of great importance, you rather choose the ones you have as high level as possible to ensure that a TPK doesn't happen. Especially since the panic levels increase fast in the first hours of the game.

2. Me see evil; me no shoot evil. I have come to learn that unless you have a 100% chance to hit a target, you will more than likely miss. It doesn't matter if the percentage is at 90; out of 10 shots with 90% probability to hit the target, your soldiers will hit maybe, just maybe, half of them. Even if the target is standing in an adjacent square. And what is absolutely baffling to me is that your soldier can stand only one square away from the enemy unit that is standing in the open and your soldier's hit percentage is only 65.

I witnessed a case where 4 of my soldiers were surrounding a Muton (the big green hulk) that was hiding behind a one square sized cover (an alien artefact that needed to be salvaged so no rocket launchers). The soldiers were positioned so that only one of them wasn't flanking the enemy unit aka the cover was between them. The other three soldiers were one square away from it, flanking from the sides and behind with no cover )this would mean a red shield if it was a player controlled soldier). It took all four of them to bring down the Muton that had already lost half of its HP. Two of my soldiers, the one not flanking and one of the flanking soldiers missed and the rest to managed to hit and kill the Muton. Now, if this was to happen the other way around, 4 enemy units surrounding one of the soldiers, the soldier would have been killed instantly, no misses. It is as if the aliens have a naturally better chance at every shot they take, no matter how good my soldiers' gear is.

Also, when an alien like a sectoid is half the map away from my soldier (that would have maybe 10-15% chance to hit the sectoid if it was the soldier's turn) and the sectoid not only hits my soldier who is behind a cover and deals critical damage, I call BS. It seems that when the distance grows, the likelyhood for my soldiers to hit the target diminishes, fairly quickly I might add (which in itself is logical). However, it seems that no matter how far the enemies are, they are more than likely to hit you, no matter the elevation difference. Also the "higher elevation boost" for soldiers, especially snipers is ridiculous. I have only once seen it give any advantage and that was when the sniper was only few squares away from the enemy unit that wasn't behind cover and even then with the S.C.O.P.E. the hit probability didn't rise to more than 80%.

3. Bullet trajectory. A minor but most irritating and definitely a design flaw in the game is the way bullets, plasma, lasers and whatnot fly when someone is shot. If the game calculates the hit/miss before the actual animation is shown, it would be nice to not see bullets or other death rays to hit a target and then see "Missed" in the notification. I mean, how hard is it to program the animations to "miss" when the statistics state that the shot missed the target? It is really confusing to see my soldier take hit from a volley of plasma and then get "Missed" when I was already mentally prepared to see the soldier die. It is just bad design.

4. Statistical cover and visual cover. Sometimes it seems that no matter how well in cover you are, you get hit. I don't fully know how the cover works, perhaps full cover is nothing more than "a crit denier": you take hit but don't get hit with a crit, similar to "hunker down". Sometimes the bullets and whatnot seem to hit the environment, sometimes they travel straight through it and hit the target. It is rather difficult to place a sniper in a good position to overwatch when you can't tell for certain if a wall is just there for level design purpose or if it is actually a wall/cover. One time my sniper was in a place I never would have expected for him to be able to shoot anybody but surely enough he just calmly stood up and shot an enemy unit through a couple square thick spaceship wall.

5. No free aim. This might seem a pointless nitpick but I think that removing the possibility to shoot other than just visible aliens is a silly thing. The game has destructible environments, the rocket launchers and grenades have free aim and there are features in the maps that can become environmental hazards for both the XCOM and the aliens.

6. Overwatch works some of the time. The idea of overwatch is important if one wants to survive the missions and more than once it has saved my squad. However, I find it ridiculous that every soldier shoots at the same time if a target comes into their field of view. Once I had 3 soldiers, 2 assaults and a sniper take a shot at a single target: the assault with a plasma rifle slaughtered the target, the second assault and sniper therefore shot at nothing remarking "I've missed the target" which is funny since the target was already rendered into atoms. Oh, and most times, if the target isn't less than 5 squares from the soldiers, they are more than likely to miss, even if the target is in the open.

7. Enemy movement on my turn. How this feature got through the QA is beyond me. How can you make a turn-based strategy game when the enemy units always get a freebie when you spot them? Wouldn't it be more logical that they move around the map even when you have not yet spotted them instead of creeping in one spot and then scattering around like cockroaches when you finally spot them? I find it immensely bad design that they can move to a cover and then take a full turn after the player has completed their turn. Many more times than I want to remember, I have spent my actions covering my units while assuming the enemy coming from the darkness only to spot them with my last soldier and see them reposition themselves flanking me and then have a turn to TPK my team.