Recent reviews by UthersonL

Rather short, especially if you don't take the time to explore and interact with every character. This time around, the weirdness that came in from minute one had me too eager for the answers, so I only investigated characters/interactives that drew my attention. I ended up with playtime of under 100 minutes, and even that included at least a couple of minutes of the game being left idle while I was attending to matters irl. So the episode is even shorter than the main trilogy games, but still offers plenty of the strangeness, silliness and heartbreak you might expect from the series.

One word of caution: you really should play the earlier games (at least the mainline ones) in the series. Not only is the game packed with references to the earlier games, it's also a rather firm finale for the lead duo.

One of my absolute favourite soundtracks, and a stand-out work in a series with consistently great music. My music literacy is basically non-existent, so the best way I can desribe it is a modern combination of faux Victorian and Japanese folk instruments. For some samples (e.g., on YouTube), I'd recommend "Pursuit - A Great Turnabout", "Dance of Deduction (Type C)" or "Gina Lestrade - A Blast from the East End".

The only downside is the price of this soundtrack, especially since it's rarely discounted - and never by much.

A makeover of a legendary point&click adventure game. It ditches the often maligned Director's Cut changes (more mechanical puzzles, extra chapters played as Nico) - though they could make a return in some form later (an alternative new game mode or a separate Nico campaign, perhaps). It felt like a good way of experiencing the story as either a newcomer or a fan of the original game.

It's fine but it feels like more work could - or should - have been done, especially with sound. Voice lines still swing wildly across a broad range of sound quality and volume; I wonder what stopped the AI being employed more effectively here: unwillingness to tamper with the original too much, budget concerns, or potential legal issues arising from re-generating irl performances? Possibly all three.

There are plenty of little imperfections that stand out more with the higher resolution visuals, too, like Duane not moving his lips during some lines, or the toilet brush in Syria now being a more general brush (flat-sided with bristles on one side instead of a round handle with bristles around one end; presumably as a result of AI's misinterpretation of the prompt).

I even ran into a bug of sorts I don't recall having seen in my few playthroughs across the various previous versions of the game: you could be talking and exchanging items with Duane while not facing each other and being at least a good few meters apart.

I was also disappointed the game didn't come with the soundtrack (at least I didn't see it in the library or in the game's folder) and/or a concept art album, as re-releases of great classics often do.

Fun shooter with visceral combat, clear respect for the original film's spirit, plentiful environmental destruction, though somewhat underpolished and with uneven graphics (e.g., great lighting and locations but disappointing facial animations or mishandled depth of field in some conversations) - but still much better than I'd expect from a studio with a mixed track record "milking" a mostly dormant IP. It took me 14 hours to beat to near-100%. It's rather on the easy side (I died once or twice on normal difficulty, and I'm not the type to take the time to work out an efficient/optimal character build, and I rarely used the special skills like dodge, blinding flash, temporary shield etc.).

With the semi-open city sections, sidequests, several skill lines, pistol upgrade circuits, dialogue choices with minor story impact, character opinion, use of skills and missable clues in dialogue, etc., I wish they'd actual gone even further and made the game into an immersive sim lite.

Simple, fun throwback to the first two Colin McRae Rally games. For now at least, the game is very short and very easy. Three hours were enough for me to win all the championships, and I'm far from the most capable player. I loved it, so I'm looking forward to any future additions.

I could grind the existing events for money with which to buy the remaining cars, but I've done enough of that in the two most recent Gran Turismo games to last me a lifetime, so instead I'll just wait for future money-making opportunities.

I can't even finish the cab car tutorial, because the game doesn't acknowledge my completing the power application task. I've given it a couple of tries, one after a basic restart, then again with the expert features on and off in the settings. It didn't help.

Not a good look for the extra expensive rolling-stock-only add-on at a route DLC price. If you permit me a mean comment: apparently the greater attention to detail and series-first implementation of specific systems was diverted from that usually given to the very basic aspects of content.

tl;dr: decent but disappointingly short (about 90 minutes with a few failed attempts), generally easier than the base game, could do with better optimization.

Simply three more missions, but they won't last you long, since they feel much easier than most of the missions in the base game. Even as the scrub that I am, I finished the first and the third mission of this DLC on the first try. The second mission took me all of four tries, but I'm pretty sure I was to blame for the deaths by being reckless.

It ended in a total playtime of about 90 minutes, failed attempts included. So consider whether this price-to-length ratio is acceptable for you, and bear in mind it might be even less if you take the slow, meticulous approach. Also, you may find it too easy if you're a veteran of the base game (possibly starting even back in the Early Access days) that you may very well be since you need to at the very least finish the base game in order to start the DLC.

Back on the topic of blame, what I will not accept the blame for is my low rating on the final mission, since one of my AI officers' idea of resolving a hostage / human shield situation was to fire a shotgun so that it not only killed the suspect - but also tore off the hostage's arm, killing them, too, which takes 200 off your score in penalties on top of denying you the 500 points for completing the rescue objective. I'm sure the incident made for an awkward silence on the ride back and a hasty cover-up in the paperwork.

And since I'm so focused on blame in this review, I will blame the devs for one thing: massive performance dips in places. Oddly enough, they felt the worst in the first mission, which has the smallest, most enclosed spaces with the least obvious graphical flair. It may be that perhaps all the holes in the walls and floors made culling less effective - but that's purely a guess.

The route appears to have not been properly bugfixed (or updated to work well with the changes in physics) in years. The short banking services are the most broken, with banking locos doing seemingly nothing, unachievable gold ratings, momentary wheelspin counting as actual speed (causing score deductions for severe speeding, e.g. claiming you exceeded 100 km/h when your actual speed was in the 40-50 km/h range), etc.

Censorship added post-launch, and spinelessly kept out of patchnotes on top of it. Dishonest, anticonsumer behaviour. It's a shame I'm well past the refund threshold (both in terms of purchase date and playtime)

tl;dr: short and easy but too buggy for comfort.

The game at its core is ...fine. Not great, not terrible. A little weaker than the previous one: The First Cases but also feels more ambitious, with more varied environments than TFC's house in the prologue and a single mansion for the entire rest of the game.

The game overall is short. My playtime of under 7 hours already includes my replaying one chapter to investigate a sequence break I ran into earlier, and replaying the better part of another, lengthy chapter to chase down an achievement I missed in my playthrough for the sake of closure.

Initially, my biggest gripe with the game was the return of utterly awful facial animations from The First Cases; I'd hoped they'd improve this particularly weak link for the sequel. I ran into some annoying bugs before long, however, so I gave the game a few months to patch them out between August last year and now. Nearly three quarters of a year later, the game is still badly in need of thorough polish and bug-squashing. Even today, it doesn't feel fit for release. Whether it was rushed to bail out an ailing publisher or to beat another Poirot game (the film tie-in Murder on the Orient Express) to market by mere weeks, I couldn't say, but it feels like either of those had to have been the case.

What kind of bugs are there? Objectives don't match the tasks required to progress (e.g., you're told to talk to a certain character but all you can say to them is a goodbye, instead you have to find and examine a specific item at a specific spot), interaction hotspots are unmarked/unlabelled, Poirot moves his mouth in some spoken lines that are meant to be his thoughts (with comedic effect, like when he mutters his intention to manipulate his interlocutor right to their face before proceeding to do so), mild sequence breaks (the worst in the penultimate chapter, when talking to a character before developing some photographs through a series of interactions skips the whole process and goes straight to discussing the revelations in the contents of a picture you've yet to produce, robbing you of making some important environmental observations), Poirot struggling to get into position to examine an object or interact with a door, subtitles not matching the spoken line, and plenty more.