Recent reviews by InsanityCat

A MUST BUY for anyone who likes Battletech/Mech Warrior. Especially if you like the table top game. I cannot recommend the modding community enough, Roguetech is downright impressive.

This game is surprisingly deep when it comes to the mechanics.
HOWEVER...
It doesn't tell you any of that. I heavily recommend after you play about an hour of this to look into one of the guides to see what is going on behind the curtain.

Gajin appears to be doing right by following the roadmap they set out. I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt (even when I really shouldn't...) and flip my review.

I love this game. I hope Gajin realizes that malice was never the point of the review bombing, every review was left out of love for the game.

This game makes me want to cry.

It's fantastic.

edit:
Took me 50 hours, but;
The pure ecstasy of actually beating the game was amazing. Even if felt kind of like a stomp after the second boss. My nerves were on fire, i had to take a 2 hour break before I could come back.

I love metal max as a series and I must say, I am extremely biased when I write this...

This game is very clunky and the story is... kind of all over the place and hard to follow. I have read that the story has been chopped up quite a bit when it was remade, I had never played the original so I have no idea how much that is.

However, the gameplay has been incredibly fun and I hope that this game still meets some success as I really want more metal max games to come out on steam and have english translations.

This game is pretty great! I've been very desperate for a good fire emblem like game and this has fufilled that desperation ten fold.
I really enjoyed the writing for the most part. I loved how the characters were written with very obvious flaws and... up until a point I was really wondering what was going to happen.

EDIT: The gameplay is very much worth it, but the story falls short in the end.
I have now beat the game. I hated the ending. The game does something that I personally hate and it wrenches away player agency. I understand what they were going for, but I just didn't like it.
Also, ♥♥♥♥ you for that ending. First you wrench away player agency in the previous chapters and then give me a choice? Never before had this game had choices that could be made in this way and to suddenly shoehorn the choice of "good ending" and "bad ending" in at the last moment is just a dumb way to do it.
Doesn't look like there's a new game + option either, blegh

There's a few issues with the UI being very clunky to navigate with mouse, but it's good enough.
However, I really wish it was a little harder to WAIT units when you're manuevering them around to get good shots in.
I also noticed that it's very easy to accidentally click the map while trying to play fast and pull up the menu instead of clicking a unit. I wish you could only open the menu in battle with RIGHT CLICK so i wouldn't LEFT CLICK a pixel above a unit trying to select them.

This game is extermely janky. It's not worth the stated price.

The cutscenes are written poorly and animated even worse. The animations in the cutscenes are extremely cartoonish and it doesn't fit the style or what the people are saying (in fact, I use subtitles and I noticed that the subtitles did not match what characters said a few times, sometimes it made more sense, sometimes less.)

While the whole game looks alright texture wise and I always found myself examining the areas I was in, the actual character models and enemy models are somewhat poor.... While this could be ignored, it's very hard to since all of the characters are animated very very poorly. Zombies are animated the worst which I think is done on purpose to make them hard to headshot. However, the worst thing about the zombies is that it is impossible to tell when they die. There is no immediate visual feedback to the fact that you have killed an enemy (except for sometimes with Sam for obvious reasons.)

The gameplay is awkward at best. The most awkward thing about it is the melee. At any point you can kind of bash an enemy to push them away and if you hit them twice, they fall over letting you run along. However, melee will sometimes fail to connect and you just get hit.

The worst aspect about the gameplay is that manipulating yourself takes a solid second and the keyboard controls are awkward. If you want to open your inventory it takes a solid second for your inventory to actually open. This makes managing your inventory only viable in safe situations. The worst part about this is you cannot cancel your inventory until it fully opens, so if you accidentally open your inventory in a fight, be prepared to take a hit.

If you reload your gun, your movement speed will be locked to whatever your previous movement speed was until you are finished reloading your gun. This means if you are aiming at something and hit reload, your movement speed will be locked to the slowed down aiming movement speed until you have reloaded, making it very difficult to dodge while reloading and making it awkward as hell.

Changing weapons is strange. When you select a different weapon it takes a good long second for your character to pull that weapon out and you cannot cancel this. If you select the shotgun by accident, you have to pull the shotgun out before you can switch to your pistol again.

Another awkward thing about the gameplay is that damage feels random at best, sometimes it takes 2 headshots to down a zombie, sometimes it takes 7. Even while running around as many enemies as I could, I still felt always pressured for ammo and not in the good way. I never wanted to fight at all and sometimes the game forces you to fight.

Despite all of this, the gameplay seems alright... Until you get to chapter 5...
Chapter 5. Oh my god. Chapter 5. There is a boss fight in Chapter 5 and it is probably the worst bossfight ever. There are explosive barrels you are supposed to shoot to damage the boss a bit, you get infinte pistol ammo.. Simple enough it seems. Except it's not. IF you are at all too close to the barrels, you die instantly when they blow. How close is too close? don't know. There is no easy way to tell. Another thing about this boss is that you can't shoot it to death, you have to knock it down in the center of the arena and activate a trap to deal real damage it seems, except the boss will not be knocked down if you don't use the explosives to damage them first. It's a massive pain in the ass with how the boss moves and acts and is purely unfun. Not only that... this boss comes back later and you have to do a quick time events to open doors, sounds simple enough? it's not, because then the boss will start to run at you. If the boss catches you here, you die instantly. There are again, explosive barrels to shoot to slow them down, except then you also have to wait on an elevator to leave. Chapter 5 is set up in the most infuriating way possible.
I stopped here, I just can't stand this chapter.

I don't understand how this came to be... It almost felt like the stars were aligning when Doom Eternal was announced but now that it's out and I can put my hands to demon skulls....

I hate it.

DOOM has always been about finding your own way through a horde. In every every previous installment of DOOM the game gives you tools of the trade of death and they are yours to use how you feel like it. In DOOM 2016, I never use the grenades, I hardly use the chainsaw or BFG, and weapons I didn't want to use could be put aside.
However, in Eternal... I feel like I'm literally being forced to play this game in some "perfect" way that the designers "envisioned" and I simply hate it.

Edit:
After a considerable amount of more time in the game, some of the issues I have encountered are dulled.

But, I have a lot more to say. I still cannot recommend this game.

The map design is poor. The best maps are the slayer gate maps as they are proper balanced arena encounters. The first playthrough on any map will leave you dazed and confused about where to go and what you're supposed to do. The platforming in this game is put together in such a way that you will walk into a room and have to stop and take up to a full minute to figure out where you have to go. The green glow in objects and terrain is barely enough direction to keep you going. I find myself slamming the tab key far too much to look at the automap just to orient myself in the messy maps. Longer if you are trying to find the secrets which often are put into the level in such strange and confusing ways and often you'll find them on the path forward which always leaves me confused. I never feel like i'm actually exploring the levels.

On top of the map design being poor, Doomguy has far too little traction near ledges. I find myself sliding off of them into pits far too often when i'm walking near them. Ledges also have far too poor hit detection when it comes to doomuy latching on them. I'm always confused if a ledge is supposed to be latched onto or not.

The difficulty of this game is entirely arbitrary. I play through this on Ultra Violence and I find that there are only some things that catch me up. Marauders are one specific thing that always are a pain in the ass. There is only ONE way you can take Marauders and it sucks. When I first encountered them I figured I could use the rocket launcher's remote detonate to ♥♥♥♥ them over but no. You're supposed to super shotgun dual them. They are another hard stop to the flow of this game. I think they're shield needs to be just removed. They are not a challenging enemy, they are an annoying enemy.

This game's tendency to be balanced around "fodder" enemies to keep you supplied also makes things more annoying. Marauders specifically often take far more ammo than you have for the ONE gun you can fight them with... which is why you'll always find fodder enemies constantly spawning around them. The design of this game strangles the player.

The game is best if you play an overhaul mod.

This game is what inspired me to buy VR. Easily the greastest VR game with an absolutely fantastic developer. You're the best Anton! If you have VR and don't have this game, get it. There's endless amount of content here.