Recent reviews by Nobah

Awesome action-stealth-adventure game. Truly feels like you're playing a real Indiana Jones movie (one of the good ones).

Keeps crashing on all cutscenes and there doesn't seem to be a fix. Unplayable.

One of the best turn-based tactics games out there and easily a contender for the best game of the year.
On top of having amazingly deep and complex gameplay through a ton of different abilities and synergies between them, and greatly designed levels, the characters and dialogue are also superb. It's not often that a game can make me laugh out loud just with a witty writing.

Great sequel to HITMAN (2016). Basically more of exactly the same which is a good thing if you liked previous entry. Great new missions. Extra credit for the suburbs mission, which brings back warm memories from the Hitman Blood Money's suburbs mission.

Slight demerit for not being able to bring the previous game's save into this one. The previous game's missions are also in this one so some of the gear is locked behind them and you have to replay them to unlock said gear for HITMAN 2. This can be a bit tedious if you already spent dozens of hours finishing every task and unlocking all gear on in HITMAN (2016).

Regardless, awesome game. Hoping for more of this in the future.

Pinnacle of FPS gaming and enjoyable storytelling.

Absolutely worst Splinter Cell game ever made. Don't waste your time or money on this one.

- No shadows. In a stealth game. Most of the time you have no way of knowing if which patch on the room is hidden and which is not. There's some fixes suggested for this but the one's I tried didn't seem to work. Or maybe they did and didn't make any difference, who knows.
- UI is too heavily simplified: Visibility meter is gone and is replaced with idiotic LED/Dot/whatever which simply shows that you're either hidden/not hidden/under attack. ALSO, no sound meter so no idea how much sound you're making.
- Grabbing enemies into the chockehold randomly doesn't seem to work.
- All of the Night Vision Goggles view modes, especially the basic night vision mode, are so unclear and almost painful to look at that they're completely useless. Because there's no shadows and everything is evenly lit, it's actually easier to see around without any of the goggles.
- Autosaves don't actually seem to save the game.
- Can't name manual saves and even though they're timestamped, they're in completely random order. Makes jumping back to a much earlier point in the game annoying guesswork.
- Loading saves has about 1/3 chance to crash the game.
- If it doesn't crash on save load, then it just randomly crashes whenever it feels like it.
- Sam gets constantly stuck on every corner in the game. Especially on furniture. Makes moving around pretty difficult when you need to constantly avoid touching any walls or furniture.
- The computer access UI is infuriatingly annoying. Once you Esc out from an email, you have to wait forever for the needlessly animated menu to properly load before you can press Esc again (twice) to exit the computer screen thing. If you're too quick and don't let the UI load, pressing Esc opens pause menu for some reason.
- Bunch of other annoying stuff I can't remember now.

It's a shame that this is such a horrible game. They really had some cool ideas on this one. The JBA Base missions are pretty cool: You have time limit in which you can choose to do a bunch of tasks for both, the JBA (terrorists) and NSA in whatever order you like. You can move around pretty freely, but some areas are restricted and you don't want to be caught snooping around there. These missions brought up very nice feeling of pressure and uncertainty and can really make the player feel like they're undercover. But that's pretty much the only positive thing in this game.

Final verdict: Avoid.

Simply put one of the best games I've ever played.

I don't want to say anything about the story in order to not spoil it.

Brothers is a perfect example how you use game mechanics and interaction to tell a story. It doesn't need long cutscenes or talking heads spewing exposition or such. Its characters don't even speak in any understandable language and they still perfectly convey emotion and intentions to the player. It's basically a brilliant execution of a movie in the medium games provide.

Go play it now.

The last battle is extremely poorly thought out. Electrified floor actively restricts your movement in a game where you don't have absolute control over your character's movement during battle. This constantly causes Catwoman to take damake when she attacks random enemy you weren't trying to attack. Also she every now and then runs into lasers during her attack streak.

All if this would be somewhat bearable if the game didn't take a damn decade to reload the battle and force feed Riddler's smirking face to the screen after every failed attempt.

The final battle alone makes this DLC not worth anyone's time when there's tons of better games out there.

REVISED REVIEW:
I feel it's only fair towards the devs behind Hitman to revise my review of the game.

The main flaw, bugs (bodies getting stuck and NPCs seeing through walls) and random crashes have completely disappeared (at least for me personally). The game overall runs brilliantly apart from very rare random frame drops (running on 2x GTX 970).

Full Season One now boasts a handful of levels which do open world just right. The levels are large enough to allow you nice bit of exploration and lots of ways to kill your targets, as well as lots of ways to screw up hilariously. But at the same time, they aren't too big so there's no vast empty areas to just wander through or meaningless trinkets or chest to collect. Every place has a meaning and a purpose. All levels are also sprawling with NPCs making them feel like truly living breathing places.

Between main storyline targets, various pre-planned ways to kill them, bunch of additional side objectives/achievments/tasks/whateveryoudcallthem, player made extra missions and elusive targets, HITMAN offers a ton of stuff to do. Granted, lots of it is wandering around the same levels doing stuff in different ways, so if repetition isn't your thing, look elsewhere. Personally, once the game started working flawlessly, I found perfecting my runthrough of levels and doing all tasks in them to be lots of fun.

I get why Elusive Targets are frowned upon by many, and I admit I personally don't like that I can't play them whenever I want. Nowadays I have much less time to play so I miss most of them. But I do understand the idea behind them and do think that it's pretty cool. Only being available for a short window of time and only getting one attempt at each of them makes you feel like a real assassin. You need to use all the tricks in your sleeve and your knowledge and mastery of the levels to do it right on the first try. Or you could just shoot the target in the head and run away. It's up to you.

HITMAN is definitely one of the best releases of 2016. I still think that Blood Money is the best in the series, but now only by very narrow margin.

If you like Hitman series, this should be a definite buy.


ORIGINAL REVIEW:
Gives promise of a great and proper Hitman game with large levels that have tons of ways to assassinate your targets.

Sadly however, it's a broken mess. Not necessarily completely unplayable but will constantly screw up your mission with various game breaking bugs and glitches:
Crashes randomly without any clear reason.
Bodies get stuck on floor, walls, and furniture effectively preventing hiding them.
NPCs randomly see bodies and crimes through walls and from impossibly far away.

Edit: Hitman Blood Money is still easily the best in series. I highly recommend that instead if you haven't played it and want to pull off some assassinations.