Recent reviews by Catbus

The first half of the game, while not perfect, really impressed me with how well it blended short bursts of action heavy Leon segments to "de-stress" with Grace's more classic RE gameplay where the enemies are slightly more threatening and you have to think a bit about resource management, including when to save (I can't imagine playing on any of the difficulties that don't involve ink ribbons). The return of a crimson head-like enemy that gives you more to consider when deciding where and how to dispatch zombies was welcome! Early story beats were compelling enough and Grace is endearing. Gideon was a mysterious and entertaining antagonist and the first half of the game concludes with a hard hitting bit of drama that gets your mind spinning about where these characters might go from here.

Things went mostly downhill for me from this moment.

You're tossed into a very lengthy segment with Leon. Leon is no longer a tasty treat to break the tension but the main course for a good long while. Very little resource management, no ink ribbons, frequent auto-saves, boring and drab level design and enemy encounter design, a shop for upgrading your weapons to trick you into feeling like you're still making choices that matter, and a completely different villain has now taken the spotlight. Everything that had me hooked in the first half of the game is basically gone at this point. Aside from one or two intensely ridiculous (in a fun way) moments this portion of the game really blended together into mush for me.

The game finishes in a way that seems to signal that an era of RE has ended and the series has reached a conclusion (aside from a tease for the upcoming DLC), which feels oddly welcome. I say this as a big RE-head but I think the series probably needs a break, though that doesn't seem to be in the cards given that several more remakes are rumored to be in the works.

As much as I enjoyed a large Chunk of the first half of the game (and a few bits in the back half), there are several things that made me uninstall this rather than dive right back in with a second playthrough. Much like some other recent RE games, Requiem has a prologue that plays out like a lengthy playable cutscene. These are always... "fine" the first time around but tiresome on replays and sadly un-skippable. There's another sequence like this later on involving running from bald murderous children that I'm not eager to play through again.

There's also a serious lack of bonus content aside from a higher difficulty setting that seems to have been at least partially balanced with cheat items in mind if the tips that appear when you die suggesting you buy more cheat items and the fact that you can't attempt it on a fresh save file are any indication.

I might re-install this once the "Gold Edition" is ready, but for now this probably isn't going to be an RE game I revisit much in the future. I wish there was a third option other than thumbs up or thumbs down, but what nudged me towards a thumbs down is this:

- The care center section with Grace feels like a miniature RE game rather than something worthy of a $70 release. This was the strongest part of the game for me but feels like 40% of the total package here.
- The Leon gameplay doesn't have the pacing and tight design of RE4 or the combat depth of RE6 to bring me back for more.
- The game is constantly defanging itself in too many ways to mention for the sake of a frictionless modern experience.
- The plot devolves into complete non-sense, even by RE standards. Normally you'd give this sort of thing a pass but the game presented things so seriously at first that you feel like a fool for becoming invested in anything going on by the end.

PS: Huge respect for the game running well and looking incredible without any ray-tracing or path-tracing, which are incredibly expensive to run but do not offer much visual benefit in this game 90% of the time. The audio is also truly excellent.

This game really isn't as good as the original, but I don't mind that it exists. I do think you should be allowed to make an "arranged" version of a classic as long as that classic is still broadly available, and you don't try to assert your new version as the Definitive version or a Replacement for the original (though this seems to be how Capcom feels about their remakes, given their reaction to GOG asking for the right to publish the original RE games). Sure, it's probably a little too soon to be making a massive budget remake of RE4, but. Whatever.

What pushed me over the edge into giving this a negative review is Capcom's behavior towards their PC releases over the last 2-3 years. They removed Denuvo! Yay!

But now they've inserted something that is somehow worse for your performance, Enigma.

I've lost track of the number of games they've retroactively added this incredibly shady Russian-born anti-tamper technology to. This seems to be the first instance where it has noticeably degraded a games performance for many! We're talking a 10-50% reduction in framerate, depending on the area and your hardware, or frame-times that are all over the place making the game feel and look worse even if the framerate is roughly the same. To top it all off, it will make the development of future mods for any game it is added to slightly more difficult. Lovely!

Capcom keeps showing that they're incompetent when it comes to coding (the recent controversies over DLC checks in Wilds tanking performance, and the massive stutters that were present in Village due to anti-tamper checks triggering from enemy animations come to mind) AND treating their paying customers properly. They would rather give those who DON'T pay for their games a better experience as long as their games have the mandated "anti-tamper" tech.

My GOTY 2023 and my favorite 3D metroidvania since Prime 1. I genuinely can't wait to buy whatever this dev makes next. Please release something else someday!

I think this is probably my favorite game of the year.

Please try it! The demo is substantial.

I love this game, please give it a try.

That said, Capcom could have done much better with this port. There's no Genma content, no choice of soundtrack, the backgrounds should be re-upscaled with newer techniques, and they've made alterations to the controls that I don't agree with.

Really nice! Very polished combat and platforming, I can't wait to see what's possible in the full game.

To be clear, the Metal Slug games are amazing. This is a review of *this* version of Metal Slug.

I'm actually in disbelief at how scuffed these games are on Steam. Dotemu should have gone directly to prison for this one.

- The music sounds drunk as it lurches around wildly, it's hard to put into words how jarring this is
- Certain sound effects sound like they're blowing out your speakers, not in a good way
- There's a large amount of input lag, even when played on a high refresh monitor and a wired controller with 1000hz polling. Would be worse if you have any other setup.
- Controls feel buggy and the default control mapping is poor
- The included video filter meant to imitate a CRT display is laughably awful compared to most filters you could find in an emulator
- Doesn't play nice with high DPI scaling in Windows, making full-screen unplayable. You have to tinker around with compatibility options to resolve this

Buy the Arcade Archives release from Hamster Corp on some other platform, this was made by an incompetent team.

I won't settle for anything less than Extreme Grand Master Pegging, and that's exactly what this game offers.

A game so polished and well made Ubisoft had to disband the team behind it. Can't allow that kind of quality to exist at Ubisoft!

I like it a lot!

This has an astounding level of polish and the gameplay is completely addictive.

The visual effects can get a bit hectic at times, slightly hampering my ability to discern threats, but other than that this is a fantastic little puzzle game to lose many hours to.