Recent reviews by |PeleQ|

EmergeNYC has been around for quite some time, and unfortunately it was not enough for the developer to finish his creation, and by the looks of things - this project will never be finished.
I'll be referring to EmergeNYC as "game" very loosely here, just for the sake of simplicity.

First off, I'll start with saying that the idea for a game was there, it had a lot of really interesting functions and other ideas implemented, and the general idea of a combination of a TPP/FPP and an RTS emergency simulator game in a semi-open, sizeable city sounds like an incredibly fun game.
Looking at it, despite the ugly Unity jank and horrible UI design, the game actually presents itself fairly interesting and very, very complex, with all those different gadgets that we get to use here that real life firefighters use, and that which we don't get to see very often in other similar games.

Unfortunately, the developer has never learned the value of quality over quantity. New meaningless features kept getting added into the game, introducing new issues. Yes, new firetrucks and Q-sirens are cool, but not when the game is suffering desperately from unacceptable optimisation issues, among other things, especially while looking this dense.
The house fires look cool, but with the amount of either particles or (more likely) the amount of little things breaking down in the fire, like all the walls being damaged, the furniture and ceilings - they all technically collapse bit by bit, you can hear them crumble, along with my broken heart when I had to willingly torture my CPU with calculating and literally choking it with all this rubbish. I have a Ryzen 7 5800x for crying out loud, how am I at times stuck at around 20 fps? I sh*t you not - Cyberpunk 2077 worked better for me on release, and that's saying something. Would the game suffer if you opted-in for a more performance friendly solution for your destruction?

Now, onto the bugs... Obviously, the physics here are beyond fu***d - you'll of course witness huge trucks making flips amongst the skyscrapers because, well - you did drive onto this curb funny, what did you expect? Your character falls under the map, of course. Your camera gets randomly stuck midair, and your controls stop responding, so you have to restart your game. AI units sometimes just don't feel like responding to a call, wonder if these guys ever heard of a bystander effect? Kinda scary when it happens to emergency personnel. Right, some missing textures and walls and floors you get to walk through, a classic as old as time, cars just disappearing into thin air after *anything* collides with them, UI sometimes just completely disappearing, forcing you to once again restart the game.
Top it with incomplete features, like - oh idk, whole police force that you get to use, but they don't really have anything to do? No PD calls, can't even redirect traffic for the FD.

Overall, this feels like a dev tool, where one would be testing things - not a full-on video game, especially not for that price.
Oh, but the best part yet - the guy behind this turd of a game, has since completely abandoned it, figured that since nobody wants to buy his game that would sit on their HDD's and do nothing and not get updated ever - he'd rather leave this behind on a "back burner" (as the dev himself said) and work on another abomination, because it no longer pays the bills.

This product is a borderline scam, and I urge you to not spend your money on it, or on his next title, and the one that comes after he abandons the next one, just completely avoid this guy, and the money - just donate it to a shelter or some charity instead, or idk, get some greasy food, treat yourself or a loved one, anything but this

Kicked the door out of it's frame, for some reason it fell back on me, killing me instantly. Got the achievement to "kill an enemy with a door" tho ;P

The dev team is an absolute Godsend, seriously.

The game itself still remains incredibly fun to this day after all this time, keeps getting updated, receiving new content, changes, fixes and improvements.


There's a few games similar to Phasmophobia, which take a slightly different approach, but Phasmophobia still remains at the top, we do however appreciate more ghost hunting games regardless.

Much love to the dev team <3

Not going to lie, Condemned Criminal Origins is that game which completely fu***d me up when I played it when I was too young to play it. To this day it remains a classic, one that everybody who likes horror should experience.

Since I played it for the first time all those years ago (you know, back when CD's were a thing) the AI and combat animations as well as fluidity were the things that impressed me the most.
It's the way the AI behaves here really makes it stand out. Of course hand to hand combat is really fun here with all different weapons having their pros and cons, with their durability as well as limited supply of ammunition for the little amount of firearms you actually find here makes you juggle weapons a lot more. In hand to hand combat you can of course attack, but also block - and so do your enemies, so the combat is definitely very solid here, oh and it feels really good too, being well complimented by very juicy audio feedback as well as the animations making each hit feel very forceful.
The latter is what furthermore adds to the combat, I think it's really cool how you can hit a dude in the face with a pipe, he turns away from you, holding his knees, making you think he's vulnerable now, just for him to suddenly turn around swinging at you. It feels good, impactful and like a struggle (a good kind).

What adds to the already good combat is that sometimes enemies may accidentally attack each other when swinging at you, and when that happens - they will turn against each other, which really adds to the feeling you're fighting a bunch of unpredictable psychos.
What's more - the previously mentioned fluidity of combat - you may disarm your opponent, and when that happens, they won't just stand around either, they will run away and look for a new weapon, sometimes even just rip a whole electrical cord right off the wall, right in front of you, kill all the lights in the process, and proceed to beat you up with it!
The enemies may attempt to ambush you as well, either by hiding behind a wall or a column, sometimes even trying to blend in certain spaces, waiting for you to cross and then either jump at you when you do, or try and come at you from behind. What a great AI!
There's also a very solid amount of variety in enemies, each of them looking different, sounding different, preferring different weaponry or even fighting differently altogether.

All this AI talk, but let's not forget this is a horror game (the AI just really adds to it, though) and let me tell you - this game made me fear basements, crawling things, lockers, mannequins, mirrors...

This game is a wild ride and I'm all in for it!

This is a great game, and I'll miss it...

Mods still keep it alive to a degree (those who know will know) but the OG game is dead, and it was a pain to see it go the direction it went. First the updates stopped due to the lawsuit which effectively halted all the support for the game, then cheaters started roaming in nearly every game, and if not that then russian kids would team up with the killer and ruin the fun for everybody else, and now they pulled the game off the store and soon will be pulling a plug from the servers. I'm sad to see this game go.

Goodbye Friday the 13th: The Game, you were good <3

This game has you hooked on...

*Ekhem*
Anyway, with that out of the way...

Despite a lot of people holding the opinion (often out of spite or anger) that Dead by Daylight is a s**t game, it really isn't. Perhaps it isn't in the best place, perhaps it's not where it should be, perhaps it's going the wrong direction, perhaps it's lost it's personality a little bit, but it's not by any means a bad game. If it were so - it wouldn't be this successful after all, and it sure as hell wouldn't still be around after all those years.

DBD killers (games that were supposed to smash DBD) are a bit of a meme in the community, however I wholeheartedly believe no other game will topple off DBD's success as much as DBD will do it to itself.

The game has mostly lost it's horror element, and it seems like now they're just adding whatever licence they can lay their hands on. By that measure, it is easily the most versatile game in this genre, featuring most of the horror icons, some famous characters from the media and other crazy licences. It's a blessing and a curse. There's so much choice here it's enough to give you a headache, but with that - I feel like a lot of things just feel out of place. And the roaster just keeps getting bigger and bigger...
By extension - so does the amount of DLC's here and the money you need to spend...
Sadly, for a while now the devs have been working tirelessly on providing a new chapter about every 3 months or so, meaning that a new player coming into the game will have a hard time getting used to everything, and returning players who left the game for a while will also struggle just as much, especially with existing stuff constantly changing as well, on top of all the new stuff coming in. In other words - if you're not playing or watching this game religiously and you don't eat, drink, breath and sh*t Dead by Daylight - you will most likely have a hard time adjusting.
Another thing worth mentioning, the pace the devs have thrown upon themselves with releasing a new chapter with such consistency has resulted in significant decrease in quality of said chapters. Each new killer feeling more like a mixture of existing ones, like Killer Z feeling like if a Killer Y and Killer X had a child with a mixture of Killer B kinda thing. It starts to feel a bit lazy and uninspired. Quality over quantity, guys.

It's a fun game in it's core, but the balance here is atrocious. It always had terrible balance, but at this point the game itself doesn't know what it wants to be. It wants to be competitive, but at the same time it panders to the more casual players with all it's might.
Dead by Daylight is sadly not a game where your skill matters. It's a game of advantage. There's very little skill expression here, and whatever little of it there was, it's also slowly getting taken away, replaced by absolutely smooth-brain mechanics.

Now, Dead by Daylight easily has one of the most toxic, entitled, cry-baby, man-children community in gaming, only comparable to League of Legends from what I hear (but I never really played that myself, only seen snippets) and it's like a very sad, unfunny joke. Every other game someone leaves, leaving the team handicapped. People throwing tantrums left and right. People dictating other side how they should play, witch hunting, doxxing, cheaters holding people hostage, death-threats over losing a match in a video game... Just a full catalogue. It's sad, and it's disgusting.
A thing worth mentioning, people who are supposed to help direct the game toward the healthy direction apparently have no say at all in what happens with the game. Not only that, but their advice is often hardly ever taken into consideration at all, despite them usually being very, very experienced in the game, often sharing knowledge the devs simply lack of. These guys are really just there for the promotion, nothing else.

Despite all this, it's a fun game. Awful community, but a fun game.