You Found a Secret Area!

Category: Contemporary Reviews

Reviews about mainstream games released in the past few years.

  • Mad Max (2015): Maybe we do need another hero.

    Mad Max (2015): Maybe we do need another hero.

    I gotta say, 2025 has been off to a terrible start. What with everything happening in the USA, I decided to try to take my mind off things by well, doing anything that didn’t involve doomscrolling 24/7. Watching movies, playing games, that sort of thing. I ended up picking up a game that was a post-apocalyptic free roaming action game from 10 years ago that felt… a bit too on the nose at times considering current events.

    This is the most “box art by committee” I’ve seen in a while.

    Mad Max is a game based on the famous film series created by George Miller. Our hero, Max Rockatansky, trudges along the wasteland of a blown out world, where chaos and disorder reign supreme. During his travels he’ll help out stragglers, get into epic car chases on desert lands, and even fight his way in the Thunderdome. Developed by Avalanche Studios and published by Warner Bros. Games, this came out in 2015 to fairly above average reviews. I had heard how alright this game was for being a small little timewaster, and since it was constantly going on sale, I decided to get on Mad Max’s wild ride.

    And yet, he lives.

    Our story begins with ol’ Max Rockatansky driving his godlike car until he meets a powerful villain by the name of Scrotus. Scrotus and his gang of thieves steal Max’s car and supplies, intending to leave him for dead. It’s not until Max meets a gremlin-like character by the name of Chumbucket, who is a wizard with cars. Max must get his ride back and build enough trust with the various folks around the wasteland to get to his ultimate goal: Get to Gastown and continue his travels.

    While the game is based on the film franchise, it’s a standalone entry that does not require watching the movies to understand. There’s winks and nods to the previous films, but sadly no other characters besides Max himself appear. No Furiosa or Tina Turner-likes here.

    My apologies for the blurry image. Taking screenshots while in combat is not something I do often.

    Max has a combat system similar to Rocksteady’s Batman Arkham games: Tap X to punch, hold for a stronger hit that can stop enemies from blocking, enemies will choreograph an attack that can be countered with Y, there’s finishers that can be activated with A, that sort of thing. Build up enough of a combo to activate a rage mode where Max can do more damage more quickly. Since Mad Max relies on weaponry alongside the usual fisticuffs, pressing B will shoot Max’s shotgun, locking on to any nearby target, instantly killing any non-boss foe.

    During some combat sections, there will be a War Crier that, if not dispatched, will buff enemies. This is a real pain if there’s several enemies to fight at once. There’s two ways to take him out: destroying the chain that’s holding him up, or with gunfire/explosions. Eventually I got into a groove where taking out the War Crier was priority one, which he was easily killed by shotgun or stray explosive. Since he explodes once killed, it also helped do damage to his buddies and make fights a bit less monotonous.

    On the road again….

    While most of the game is Max on foot fighting foes Batman Arkham style, there is a good chunk of the game centered towards the vehicles. Max gets a car from Chumbucket called the “Magnum Opus,” which can be upgraded with scrap – a material all around the wasteland – to have power nitro boosters, spikes on the car to avoid enemies jumping on it, sidefire jets to damage foes from the side, the grappling hook to yank doors open or eliminate snipers. Speaking of snipers, Max has a portable sniper of his own that he can use while in the Magnum Opus, which can be useful for some annoying targets at range, but keeps you completely stationary. It’s a nice deviation but I tended to use some of the other weapons in my arsenal instead.

    (more…)
  • Save Room – Organization Puzzle: Got a collection of good things on sale, stranger.

    Save Room – Organization Puzzle: Got a collection of good things on sale, stranger.

    I like Resident Evil. Whether it’s the horror aspects of the first few games, or even the goofy action-driven pivot the series took after Resident Evil 5, it’s one of those franchises I have a soft spot for. Except for Resident Evil 6, that game is… not good.

    One of the core mechanics Resident Evil relies heavily on is the inventory system. Your character can only hold a fixed amount of items, thus there’s a bit of strategy beyond exploring a place and killing all the zombies. Knowing what items and weapons to bring, making sure you’re equipped for whatever the game throws your way, whether or not it’s worth getting the big ticket item now or coming back later once your inventory’s empty. While it can be frustrating that you can’t just hold everything, it’s a deliberate design choice that I can appreciate.

    The RE4 inventory system in action. (courtesy of r/oddlysatisfying on Reddit, likely taken from elsewhere.)

    By the time we get to Resident Evil 4 it starts being more complex, where they use a grid system, with each item taking a specific number of slots in the game’s inventory system, now depicted as a large briefcase. It feels a bit more realistic, but also a game within a game, as one has to occasionally do a bit of adjusting to fit the new weapon or the dozens of fish they caught. It’s that one thing people always mention when they talk about RE4 that isn’t complaining about Ashley Graham being annoying. In 2022, 17 years after the original game’s release, a bunch of Brazilians were inspired by this interesting inventory system and liked the concept so much that they made a game out of it.

    I assure you, in spite of the simple title screen, this is not an asset flip.

    Save Room: Organization Puzzle is a game made by Fractal Projects, an indie studio based out of Brazil. Unfortunately I couldn’t find much information on the studio itself, but it’s made a few indie games like Npc Problems: Vertex Coloring and How to Bathe Your Cat, which are mostly pixel-driven indie games that are likely enjoyable games for the sub-$5 price all of their games go for. They don’t really have a website or a broad social media presence, so I can’t really pinpoint if these folks have prior game experience outside of their own work. Funny enough, while there aren’t clear credits for who made this, they do credit the assets they used in from the Unity store, so they’re at least considerate even if they’re semi anonymous.

    If you want to progress stranger, solve my puzzle!

    There isn’t much of a story. A Merchant – likely a reference to the merchant from RE4 – asks you to solve his puzzles, which involve having a bunch of items and fitting them within a specific grid of tiles. You click and drag them into specific spaces, right click rotates the item 90 degrees, and clicking on an item without moving it gives an option to inspect, combine or use, like in Resident Evil 4. Once you’ve filled all the slots, you can move on to the next puzzle.

    (more…)
  • Forza Horizon 2 presents: Fast & Furious – It’s about family.

    Forza Horizon 2 presents: Fast & Furious – It’s about family.

    The Fast and the Furious franchise is one of many movie franchises I just haven’t really watched. Much like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the various Star Wars and Star Trek spinoffs among many, many other series, I just can’t really see myself sitting down and watching these by myself. I know this is partially a fault of me treating watching things as a social experience, but some day I will watch those popcorn action flicks with Cool Cars and equally Cooler Stunts.

    Naturally with a franchise that’s been around as long as it has – over two decades! – there’s been video games. Official licensed ones such as the unremarkable Fast & Furious Showdown, Cruis’n for Wii, which was a port of the Fast & Furious arcade game but without the licensing, even the TV show spinoff Fast & Furious: Spy Racers got a tie-in game: Rise of SH1FT3R. But I wanna focus on one that was a tie-in to an existing popular franchise that also involved cars and wild stunts.

    Is this the car version of that Distracted Boyfriend meme?

    Forza Horizon 2 presents: Fast & Furious was a tie-in game released on Xbox One and Xbox 360 as a tie-in to Furious 7, which is when the franchise started using weird names to refer to its sequels. Developed by regular Forza devs Playground Games and Turn 10 Studios, alongside Sumo Digital for the 360 port, this was a free* tie-in that was a standalone expansion to Forza Horizon 2. I put an asterisk there because it was free for the first month or so of release, eventually requiring one to pay for it for the last few months it was available. More on that later.

    You play as a nameless protagonist who gets a call from Tej Parker, a recurring character in the previous films, with Chris “Ludacris” Bridges reprising his role. Through a semi-fictionalized version of Nice, France, the player must drive through the streets and complete races to gain enough street cred.

    If you think you need to understand the Fast & Furious films to play this, you don’t. The game starts with a clip montage of some of the wildest moments from past films, and you can get a handful of cars from the film, like Dom Toretto’s 1970 Dodge Charger. Otherwise, this is easily understandable even to a person like me who only has a bit of knowledge of the Fast & Furious franchise.

    For this article, I played the Xbox 360 version, as that’s the most recent console I own at the time of this writing. Yes, even in 2024, I still haven’t jumped to the 8th generation of game consoles. Which, y’know, when you got a powerful PC, it seems kinda pointless to grab a modern console unless you wanna play a game exclusive to that platform. Surely there’s no major differences between the two games besides graphical fidelity, right?

    The driving line: Something that folks like me should follow, but rarely do.

    Anyone who’s played the previous Forza Horizon games will be right at home here: Racing with driving lines, a rewind feature for mistakes, and a big amount of difficulty customization from racing game newbies to veteran Forza players. When not racing, you can accrue points for stylish driving, go through speedtraps to break your friends’ records if any, and even get “barn finds” for hidden cars that can help build the old collection.

    (more…)
  • WRATH: Aeon of Ruin – Revisiting an early access boomer shooter.

    WRATH: Aeon of Ruin – Revisiting an early access boomer shooter.

    Have you ever written a critique about something, then come back to it years later to see if it still holds up? I have that feeling with a lot of things I’ve played. Since I try to improve myself as a person, sometimes I have to reassess my opinions on something or if I’ve changed. With how games change from day one to day 365 thanks to the wonders of patches and Early Access, it has me occasionally revisiting stuff to see if it’s gotten better. And in this case, it’s going back roughly 4 ½ years ago… when the boomer shooter craze wasn’t at a fever pitch. I’m gonna look back at WRATH: Aeon of Ruin.

    Developed between small indie studio KillPixel Games and slightly larger studio Slipgate Ironworks, and published by 3D Realms – the new one ran by Fredrik Schrieber, not the old one that gave us Duke Nukem Forever – the game initially came out in Steam early access in November 2019, the game went through a dormant dry spell before finally being released in February of 2024, nearly five years later.

    A friend had gifted me the game back during that early access period, and I was… pretty darn harsh on the game. To quote my now out of date Steam review from that time:

    This game, on the other hand, has problems. Lots of questionable design decisions that don’t make sense. Enemies that take too much damage, on arenas where circlestrafing is not an option. An unwieldy inventory system which is counter-intuitive to the style of gameplay this wants to emulate. And whoever thought that reviving the “save gem” concept from Daikatana was a good idea needs to be smacked in the head with a baseball bat […] I cannot recommend the game in the current state it’s in. It needs some balancing adjustments to be mentioned in the same breath as the aforementioned retro FPS throwbacks.

    This game definitely didn’t have it’s balance set correctly in 2019. (Taken from the Early Access period.)

    Basically I lauded the look and style of the game, while also feeling the gameplay needed some improvement. By 2019, the concept of a retro FPS/boomer shooter requires a type of finesse to make it stand out from the others. A lot of New Blood’s work, like DUSK or Amid Evil, is a good example of this. This is more important 2024, when we’re in peak Boomer Shooter Heaven, where everybody’s getting in on the craze. So let’s see how KillPixel and Slipgate Ironworks did to improve from their early access version.

    I feel like I’m crossing the River Styx.

    A quick story primer: You play as the Outlander, an unknown figure who meets with The Shepherd of Wayward Souls, where one must find the sigils of an area before fighting a big boss at the end of three episodes. The Outlander transports to levels and defeats any monsters in their way to get the sigil at the end. Basically a little bit HeXen, a little bit Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, with a pinch of Blood and Quake for flavor. (Fitting, since WRATH is made on DarkPlaces, a source port of Quake’s engine.)

    Sharp. Pointy. Zoomy.

    Much like other boomer shooters, the Outlander has a myriad of weapons at their disposal. First is the Blade of Ruination, a good go-to melee that also has an alternate fire where you lunge forward, which is great for getting past gaps and doing massive damage to certain foes. Then there’s your usual FPS arsenal of a handgun, a double-barrel shotgun, a “Fang Spitter,” which amounts to the game’s rapid-fire automatic weapon, an acid-spitting launcher and even a railgun equivalent. There’s other weapons too, but most of these are in those early episodes. All the weapons have an alternate fire that can be useful in sticky situations.

    (more…)
  • Celeste and my frustration with puzzle platformers.

    Celeste and my frustration with puzzle platformers.

    You know, there’s a kind of genre I don’t quite get why people like it: The puzzle platformer. I’ve tried playing some of the ones so highly recommended to me, only to leave with frustration and disappointment. A lot of puzzle platformers get me so frustrated that it soured the overall experience for me. But there’s one I played recently that got me rethinking my outlook on this genre, transgender memes notwithstanding.

    Celeste. The puzzle platformer from EXOK Games that came out on 2018 that has become a transgender allegory in recent years, due to some of the plot relating a lot to trans folk. Lead designer Maddy Thorson realizing her own trans journey through the game after the release probably helped a bit too. We always need more queer game designers, after all.

    I’m not gonna get too much into the non-gameplay elements here. The art style’s cool by using pixel art in a way that’s unique without feeling too much like deliberate retro bait, Lena Raine’s soundtrack is tense yet touching at the right moments (and I never got to play any of the B-sides which also sound like a bunch of bangers), and the story is rather touching and something I can relate to as someone who struggles through life. But I wanna talk about this game further cementing my belief on puzzle platformers.

    This part from Blood of the Werewolf still haunts me to this day.

    When I mention I get frustrated by these kind of games, I’m not kidding. When I think about some of the action/puzzle platformers I played for the blog last year, like Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit and Blood of the Werewolf, I leave those games with frustration and anger. How one mistake will usually result in death, with little chance to redeem yourself. Some parts of these games are so malicious to the player that requires so much perfect timing that I’m surprised I haven’t thrown my controller into my computer screen after some of the bullshit I had to go through to beat it.

    This is apparently the only screenshot of VVVVVV I took. Rather fitting, really.

    But it doesn’t just apply to those mostly-forgotten niche platformers. It applies to the more popular ones as well. For example, I never finished the critically acclaimed VVVVVV. The gravity-shifting puzzle platformer with a pseudo-DOS art style and catchy chiptune music was an absolute chore to play at spots. A lot of hazards and pixel-perfect precision to make it across made it maddeningly to play, so much so that I only got about halfway through it before giving up on it.

    (more…)
  • Blood of the Werewolf: The hunt for a good werewolf game.

    Blood of the Werewolf: The hunt for a good werewolf game.

    (content warning: blood and cartoonish gore.)

    Y’know, I realized there haven’t been many good games where you play as a werewolf. Out of all the horror monsters out there, werewolves seem to be the ones who get the shaft the most. Often times they’re used as an enemy or a villain, but rarely are they ever the hero. I even asked a few folks about good werewolf games and the one suggestion I got was a quest line in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. So yeah, it seems kinda dire.

    But then there was this one game I saw where you play as a werewolf that seemed kinda neat. And I have a knack for playing the fairly niche Xbox Live Arcade/PlayStation Network titles from the early 2010s, so I grabbed it. Will this game be the one that breaks that curse?

    Gotta say, that title is metal as hell.

    Blood of the Werewolf is a platforming game developed by Scientifically Proven, a studio that proudly boasts its 11-person development team, as per one of the load screens states. Scientifically Proven doesn’t have much of a major resume; outside of this game, they worked on assisting Epicenter Studios on games like Real Heroes: Firefighter and… Man vs. Wild with Bear Grylls. Now, to be fair, just because they work on what amounts to shovelware doesn’t mean they can’t put out an original game on their own. But this definitely doesn’t bode well.

    I had heard of this game because it was being one of the few games being delisted off of the Xbox 360 marketplace. I was trying to grab games that were only available on the 360, and since this had a PC release, I figured I’d just grab it there instead. In hindsight, this was probably a good move, as we’ll get into in a bit.

    This was available a few days early for patrons. Wanna get in on that yourself? Well, transform into a werewolf and howl your way over to my Patreon, where just $1 will get early access to my work. It’s fun! Like being a werewolf.

    She’s quite the resilient mother, that’s for sure.

    The story goes like this: You play as Selena, a mother who’s child, Nickoli, has been kidnapped by some monsters, and her husband has been left for dead. Armed with her trusty crossbow, she must travel the various hazards of the world to save her son and keep the blood family alive. Oh, by the way, Selena is also a werewolf. One of a dying breed, according to this game’s lore.

    This… doesn’t bode well.

    Selena in her human form has the usual platformer rules: Walk, jump, climb ladders, and shoot a crossbow. Pressing RT will shoot in the direction she’s facing, but using the right stick will have her aim at a specific angle, which can be useful for hitting enemy targets or switches.

    If you’re expecting an elaborate transformation sequence, you will be solely disappointed.

    At certain points in each stage, Selena turns into a werewolf upon a full moon, which follows common werewolf lore. In werewolf mode, she can double jump, do a forward dash with RB, and charge up a damaging shot with RT that takes a bit of time to charge. There’s other powerups you can find and switch between with LB, but for most of the game I stuck with the default dash. Playing as a werewolf is a lot simpler than playing in human form, which turns out to be a good thing, as I’ll get into. The game will switch between Selena’s two forms at certain spots, and sometimes they get quite crafty with the change.

    I knew something was off when the first level takes place in The Sewers…
    (more…)
  • Avicii Invector: A rhythm game tribute to an electronic musician.

    Avicii Invector: A rhythm game tribute to an electronic musician.

    (content warning: mention of suicide.)

    My tastes in music are… rather eclectic. If you’ve ever been a longtime reader of the site, you’ve probably had me write about some of the weirdest stuff and sometimes finding good stuff in them. I end up picking up soundtracks a lot because of the licensed music. Hell, while I may not talk about it a lot on the site here, I really enjoy rhythm games. So when I saw a rhythm game based on one of the most notable EDM artists out there, I had to give it a try, even if I never heard of him before playing it.

    Is he about to drop the sickest beat?

    Avicii Invector is a rhythm game developed by Hello There Productions, a small developer based out of Gothenburg, Sweden. Originally released in 2017 on the PS4 as simply Invector, the game was updated and re-released in 2019 to more prominently feature the artist whose music was used in it, Avicii. Avicii is the stage name of Tim Bergling, a Swedish EDM musician who was a major worldwide success, releasing two major albums and a few EPs in his lifetime.

    Tragically, Avicii committed suicide in 2018 at the young age of 28. In the years that followed, there’s been work released posthumously, an Avicii museum in Stockholm, Sweden, and his family launching The Tim Bergling Foundation, a mental health/suicide awareness charity, in his honor.

    I grabbed this game on a cheap discount on Fanatical, a digital discount storefront. Since I’m a fan of rhythm games – glancing at the hundreds of dollars I’ve spent on Rock Band and Guitar Hero stuff over the past decade – I figured I could probably enjoy this game even with only knowing Avicii as “a guy who has a game dedicated to his music.”

    So I’m basically Faith from Mirrors Edge but piloting a spaceship? Cool.

    The story is rather barebones: A female ship pilot has to send things to various planets, while blasting the songs of Avicii to get from planet to planet. These cutscenes play every few songs, and while they’re mostly non-contextual, they bring a bit of life to the game’s overall feel. After all, if you’re a rhythm game, you either play it super-serious like a Rock Band or you go full over-the-top like a good chunk of the Guitar Hero games did, so for Hello There Games to go for the latter route is a wise call.

    I assure you it’s a bit more complex than this.

    Avicii Invector plays rather simply: Press buttons in time with the music for points and to build a combo. While most of the time you’ll be pressing the face buttons, sometimes you’ll also need to hit either shoulder button for lines that are on the track. Changing lanes is handled with the left stick. Higher difficulties add more buttons to press and a lot more lane shifting, which can be quite disorienting if you’re not used to it. Much like most modern rhythm games, if one hits enough notes, they can activate a booster with the triggers which doubles score for a brief time.

    While I’m used to games like Rock Band where it’s less about timing and more about making sure you hit the notes, Avicii Invector takes its cues from games like Dance Dance Revolution, where hitting notes right on time gets more points and a bigger combo. This took a bit for me to get used to, but thankfully the timing seems to be rather generous, even with that little gameplay quirk.

    (more…)
  • I Am Alive: Ubisoft’s dollar store version of a survival action game.

    I Am Alive: Ubisoft’s dollar store version of a survival action game.

    I never really cared for post-apocalyptic stuff. That stereotypical dystopia of derelict cities fighting off some zombie horde or devastating dust storm while people living in squalor… It all felt a bit too played out to me. Considering what’s happened in the past few years with us living through a global pandemic, I can’t say I’m really interested in playing too many things that hit a bit too close to reality like that.

    That doesn’t mean I never play those kind of games. I’ve played stuff like Fallout 3 and Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead which take place in dystopian worlds and yet still enjoyed them. But it’s definitely not something I actively seek out.

    Yet, I decided to start 2023 by playing a game that took place in a post-apocalyptic world. One that was recommended to me as something interesting, but fairly clunky. And as you’re gonna learn, feels like the dollar store brand of something more notable.

    I mean, it’s better than being dead, I suppose.

    I Am Alive – a title that while grammatically correct, still sounds weird to my ears – is a survival action game published by Ubisoft and developed by Ubisoft’s Shanghai studio. Released in March 2012 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and later the PC through Steam and Uplay Ubisoft Connect; the game was one of those aforementioned post-apocalyptic games, coming out just as the survival action genre was starting to take off.

    Originally announced as just Alive in 2008, I Am Alive was being developed at Darkworks, a French studio who had done other similar games, such as the interesting survival horror game Cold Fear and the mostly-forgotten Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. 

    After an initial trailer showing a player surviving a catastrophic event in Chicago, Illinois, the game went dark, with only occasional news reports of the game still being alive (no pun intended). After countless delays, the game was rumored to be canceled until Ubisoft moved the development in-house around 2010, while also shifting the game’s focus from a major retail title to a smaller digital-only title. Darkworks shuttered its doors not long after.

    Unless some Darkworks developer held on to some unfinished development code, this particular version of I Am Alive is presumably lost, with only some proof of concept trailers still available online.

    Even after moving development to Ubisoft Shanghai, they opted to take Darkworks’ concept and start completely fresh, basically making a new game under the same name. Let’s see if they revived this concept, or if it should’ve stayed dead.

    It’s like I’m watching a found footage movie!

    In I Am Alive, we’re introduced to the playable character, a boring, run-of-the-mill dude protagonist whose name is never mentioned at all during the game. For some reason, I thought his name was “Ethan,” but all the sources I checked have him unnamed, so he’ll be named Our Hero going forward. 

    After The Event – the nebulous term the game uses for the apocalyptic event that ravaged the country – Our Hero returns to Haverton, a fictitious New York-like locale. He goes to find his wife and daughter – who do have names unlike Mr. Unknown here – but after finding that they’re not home, Our Hero then gets wrapped up in a journey that involves reuniting other families, getting supplies, and taking advice from various strangers around Haverton to eventually escape out of this hellhole.

    Ezio Auditore he ain’t.
    (more…)
  • Magrunner: Dark Pulse – Now you’re thinking with polarity!

    Magrunner: Dark Pulse – Now you’re thinking with polarity!

    It really cannot be overstated how much Portal made an impact to video games when released in 2007. Valve snatched up a few Digipen students with an ambitious project, gave it that high quality Valve polish and released it as part of The Orange Box. The game was considered tertiary to the rest of The Orange Box – the more hyped games being the long-awaited Team Fortress 2, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two, the continuation of the Half-Life 2 saga – but Portal somehow became that surprise smash hit that started making small waves in the puzzle platforming genre.

    In the years following, a fair share of games would copy Portal’s first-person perspective but try it with different ideas. Antichamber did puzzle-solving in impossible spaces. Quantum Conundrum involved shifting between dimensions to affect objects in the world. Even something like The Ball had the titular ball be used to solve tricky puzzles. But I couldn’t think of a puzzle game that involved gravity and polarity. Until now.

    He looks like Cole MacGrath from inFAMOUS‘s dorky half-brother. (Cover courtesy of Mobygames.)

    Enter Magrunner: Dark Pulse. A first-person puzzle platformer that involves polarity and gravity to solve puzzles. Released in 2013 for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, it’s another one of those puzzle platformers that involve shooting objects to solve puzzles.

    This was developed by 3AM Games, a small development studio based in Kyiv, Ukraine. They had done contract work with Frogwares, the developers of the myriad of Sherlock Holmes games. Funded on the crowdfunding site Ulele, they received €110,000 in funding, just barely hitting their €100,000 goal. With some help from Frogwares and distributor Focus Home Interactive, they were able to make this game a reality. As far as I know, this would end up being 3AM’s last known project, as most of the team joined Frogwares proper not long after. 

    I had gotten this for free on GOG not long after its release, and had mostly thrown it into The Pile that is my neverending backlog. Struggling to figure out a game to play, I let The Backloggery’s Fortune Cookie feature do its magic, and it picked this. Though I opted to use my Steam copy, of which I don’t remember when I got it. Maybe around the same time as I snagged the GOG edition. So if you’re wondering why this game might be in your game library, that might be it.

    2 Unlimited not included. You gotta go to BioMetal if you want that.

    You play as Dax Ward, an orphaned child whose parents died rather unexpectedly. Being mentored by a mutant scientist named Gamaji, Ward enters a contest to be one of the first people to use MagTech’s space training program, sponsored by LifeNet, a major social media conglomerate. The whole Magrunner event is broadcast and shown, featuring Magrunners from all walks of life.

    Everything starts out smoothly, where Magrunners are solving the puzzles within. Parts of Magrunner start out feeling very Portal-esque at first. Dax moves from test chamber to test chamber through elevators, the test chambers are very clean and scientific like Portal’s Aperture Science test chambers, stuff like that. So far you’d expect that it’s gonna be similar to that, right?

    Then the power starts malfunctioning and people slowly are dying. Dax must survive and get to the bottom of this mess by solving puzzles involving polarity. Which sounds silly, but hey, it’s a puzzle game, those things don’t need that strong of a plot.

    The polarity in action, with a fancy cube. Yes, it does look like Christmas by default.

    If you’ve played Portal, most of Magrunner’s mechanics will make sense pretty quickly. Dax has two polarity colors – Red and Green by default, though they can be changed to any color – of which he can put onto objects highlighted in yellow. Much like magnets and polarity in real life, two objects of the same polarity color will often stick together, while two objects with different polarity colors will repel them away from each other.

    Throughout Dax’s journey through the catastrophe, he’ll solve a multitude of polarity puzzles, flinging boxes, using platforms, trying to avoid turrets that’ll shoot him on contact – sorry, these ones don’t talk with a cutesy voice – all the typical puzzle platformer stuff.

    This section required me to bring three platforms to an ideal height so I could jump off the box at the top. This… took a while to complete.
    (more…)
  • Doom Eternal: Time to Rip and Tear once again.

    Doom Eternal: Time to Rip and Tear once again.

    Something I’ve constantly talked about on this blog is how eternally behind I am in games. Procuring a massive backlog, buying games thanks to Humble Bundles, cheap Steam sales, and gifts of spare keys from friends has been the primary causes of my never ending back catalog.

    Yet, I try to keep myself in arms’ reach of the current video game landscape, even if I’m not a fan of the direction the industry is going sometimes. This results in me playing the newest games usually years after their release. Anyone who’s been a reader of this site has seen me write about big popular games after their popularity, such as BioShock Infinite last year. But this time around I kept myself a bit closer to the zeitgeist this time, by playing a game a year or so after its initial release. And it’s from one of my favorite game developers.

    Still fun as heck to this day.

    Let’s talk a bit about id software. They’re the absolute pioneers of the first-person shooter realm: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake. Important games that really made an impact on the industry as a whole. However, there was a sea change by the late 1990s. When John Romero left id on less-than-pleasant terms to form his own studio, there was a very clear change on how id Software worked as a company: Pushing technology at the cost of making games that while good on a technical level, were kinda boring to play.

    Any excuse to use this screenshot again.

    I’ve talked about Quake II a few times on here, and while my opinion has softened a bit in recent years, I still think that while a technical marvel was just boring to play.This was id’s MO during the age of John Carmack. Stuff like Quake III Arena, and Doom 3, while solid games, didn’t have the massive highs that their early works did. Indeed, their competition – Epic’s Unreal Tournament and Valve’s Half-Life 2 respectively – were making more of an impact on the industry in a way people could easily see.

    Rage was sort of the lowest point of this era, the unremarkable first-person exploration game of which the only good things about it were John Goodman voicing a character and its reload canceling mechanics, of which I wrote about way back in 2016, and that was around the point id was no longer the amazing developer it once was. Hell, I even had doubts id Software were ever gonna release an awesome game ever again.

    Then John Carmack left, a bunch of people got shuffled around, canned a version of Doom that was more like a big-budget shooter like Call of Duty, and gave us the 2016 Doom reboot. While the multiplayer beta was enjoyable but boring, the rest of the game turned out to be the return of id Software as an awesome company that could make good games. With an amazing game like Doom 2016, it’d be pretty hard to follow up. But in 2020 they decided to give it another try, with Doom Eternal.

    Not to be confused with Eternal Doom, a pretty alright megawad for Doom II released in 1996.

    The story of Eternal is a bit more pronounced than in the previous game: The Doom Slayer has noticed that there’s been Hell on Earth with demons destroying what’s left of the planet. In typical Doom fashion, the Doom Slayer must travel around Earth and Mars to eventually stop the Khan Maykr’s hell demons from invading everywhere once again. Pretty simple stuff.

    It doesn’t help that you can customize the look of the Doom Slayer, thus making them look like an absolute goofass in serious, emotional cutscenes.

    It’s kinda weird to see Doom Eternal go all in on story. While Doom (2016) had a story, it was just about enough of it to give motives on why the Doom Slayer must rip and tear and it worked. In Doom Eternal, they go all-in, with cutscenes that take place in third person, giving diatribes that would seem in line with many contemporary games. It’s not bad per se, but compared to the previous game where there was basically one motive — Stop the demons by any means necessary — it just feels a bit ridiculous here.

    (more…)