Every so often, a game gets released that gets all kinds of kudos, but when I sit down to play it, none of the “hype” makes sense to me. Mouse: P.I. For Hire is an example of that. This game makes no sense to me. Mouse: P.I. For Hire should…
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Satire is a difficult challenge for a game developer. On the one hand, the satire needs to criticise the subject. On the other hand, if the game feels too good to play, it is very easy to feel like a celebration of the subject instead. If you were to undermine…
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I’m not the world’s biggest fan of first-person shooters, but People Can Fly’s Painkiller is one of the exceptions to that rule, thanks to its grim, gothic theme, great monster design, and furious pacing. It was like the developers blended Hexen (another of my small list of beloved shooters) and…
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While I’ve never been much of a FPS fan, and even the mighty Doom and Quake I’ve respected but had little patience to play myself, Heretic and Hexen are the exceptions to the rule. It’s amazing what a simple change in setting can do. Despite being only minimally different to…
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I do think that Indiana Jones shouldn’t have persisted as the property that it has. The two films that have come since The Last Crusade have been so drenched in a desperate kind of nostalgia, all but begging people to love them because they brought back a beloved ’80s classic.…
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Nightmare Reaper aims to be a blend of roguelike and nostalgic throwback to the “boomer shooter” era of Doom. In a sense, it succeeds. It is indeed a roguelike (with procedurally-generated levels and a need to start from scratch with each death), and it has the violence and manic action…
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So, as it turns out, if you take the raging, rancid, unapologetic nationalism, historical revisionism, and military hero worship out of an FPS, and instead drop in a really pretty girl with a bikini costume option and pink gun skin, then I go from hating the genre to loving it.…
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Bright Memory: Infinite is exactly the kind of shooter I like. I tend to rip on the genre, but in reality, like with any other genre, if there’s something there for me I’ll be more than happy to give it a go (and enjoy it for what it offers). It’s…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. At first, Serious Sam 4 is disappointing. Here I was watching an extended loading screen on the PlayStation 5 and, while these things don’t typically bother me, wasn’t the whole “no more loading times,” a big deal for the console? If I can play Ratchet &…
Read MoreReview by Matt R. Ask any fan what they like about Dishonored, Deus Ex, Thief, and the like—”immersive sims”, as they’re often referred to, because the game industry has a weird obsession with genre descriptors that are vague to the point of being meaningless unless you’re already familiar with them—and…
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