Recent reviews by Midnight Animal

I am - by modern standards - an ancient MechWarrior fan. Not BattleTech; I never got into tabletop games. No, my first experience with BattleTech at all was MechWarrior 2 and its expansions, especially the wonderful MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries, which I sunk hundreds of hours into over the years. I fell in love with the franchise and I've been a faithful fan ever since. And as a faithful fan, I've long cursed PGI and the horridness of MWO. My heart sank so hard when that reveal image they teased finally revealed the "Online" in the title. Another beloved game of my youth turned into a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ free-to-play MTX farm. Horrible. But, unfortunately, far from a unique case.

MechWarrior 5, also, has also generally failed to impress me. Mercs ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucked at launch, it had (has?) horrendous technical problems, the combat is clunky and unsatisfying - not to mention the brutal balance issues and useless lancemate AI that sometimes actively works against you - and the procedurally generated missions are an absolute joke. The first time I saw tanks spawning out of thin air to attack my generic defense point I almost shut the game down right there. ♥♥♥♥♥, this isn't 1995 anymore. At that point, I was thoroughly convinced that the MechWarrior franchise was doomed to die in the grip of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥, profit-driven developer like so many other old favorites.

So then Clans came out. And like the stupid MechWarrior simp I am, I bought it. And... wait, it's actually good? The missions are hand-designed again, there's a story with fun characters, the combat and visuals are improved? I'm actually having fun in a MechWarrior game that's not 20+ years old? And it's made by the same idiots that made MWO and Mercs?? It feels like a glitch in the simulation. It never happens like this.

The reason I wrote that stupid preamble is to give context to the following take: MechWarrior 5 Clans is good. It's finally a real, proper MechWarrior game, the likes of which we have not had since 2002 (!!). It's built on Mercs, and it shows - it has some performance issues, the combat is still a little clunky, the mechs are not animated well, and it could stand to do a lot more to deliver the audiovisual fantasy of driving a massive walking tank, especially considering how far these technologies have come in the last few decades. But despite its shortcomings, it is a good game. And the progression systems, the customization, the mech lab, they're all great. But the cutscenes and the story are especially a treat. Perhaps there really is a future where PGI can fulfill the legacy of FASA.

Chinese in all the worst ways. Derivative, bland, zero fresh ideas. Dialogue and tooltips are awkwardly written. All the sounds used by the undead enemies you encounter at the beginning of the game are stolen straight from World of Warcraft, lol. Apart from all that, it's competently made. If you somehow haven't gotten tired of soulslikes or roguelikes, which comprise approximately 69% of the game releases in the past 10 years, I suppose this game is decent enough.

This game is WILD. I've been playing Lumines games for a long time, but nothing has given me the same level of surprise and intrigue as the original did 20 years ago, until this game right here. The level of visual spectacle on display here is very intense, and it can make keeping track of what's going on somewhat difficult sometimes, but it's absolutely worth it. There's a dance party in the Simulation and everyone is invited.

It's not a bad game, really. The art direction is nice, the controls are snappy, the combat is decent. But it's just so boring. For a company like Heart Machine who has made genuinely interesting projects like Solar Ash and, of course, Hyper Light Drifter, this feels like it's aiming so low. In a massively overcrowded genre besides. There's no real vision here, no identity to separate it from the pack. It is simply yet another 8/10 indie metroidvania with the obligatory souls elements that plague just about every action game. And these days, that's just not enough to grab me.

The first and natural question to ask with these re-releases is, "Why buy this instead of playing the original on a source port?" The Doom + Doom II re-release did a very poor job of answering that question. This, on the other hand, does not. I have played through both Heretic and Hexen dozens of times, starting with the shareware episode on my mom's 386, up to as recently as last year. This is the most fun I've had playing these games in decades.

Here's the short list of new features:

• A polish pass on the old levels that adds many improvements, mostly visual, sometimes even adding new areas or secrets. Heretic especially shines under this treatment, as the original game often suffered from low texture variety and plain level geometry.
  
  
• A balance pass on the weapons. This one is going to be controversial among oldheads, I imagine. Many weapon changes are linear upgrades - for example, Hellstaff projectiles now have a slight homing arc, and the Mage's Ice Shards now fire faster and pass through frozen enemies. On the other hand, the Ethereal Crossbow fires much slower in exchange for launching two additional lesser projectiles. Against 30 years of muscle memory, that one definitely feels weird.
  
  
• HEXEN LETS YOU CHANGE CHARACTER CLASSES MID-HUB. This one is huge. It's not something you can do completely at will - you have to interact with a prop, which is placed somewhere obvious in each hub. Changes have been made to accomodate this. Instead of weapon spawns changing depending on your class, now, every weapon for every class spawns and can be collected individually. In places where pieces of each class' ultimate weapon spawns, you now find the same piece of all three. So, for example, you'll find the Serpent Staff whether you're playing the Cleric or not, and picking it up allows you to use it whenever you switch to that class. I'm not sure how I feel about this change, as being stuck with each class' limitations and being forced to figure out how to work around them was a big part of the original game. However, I'm definitely having a lot of fun with it, especially with the weapon improvements.
  
  
• Two totally new episodes - one for Heretic, and one for Hexen. I haven't played them yet so I can't comment on their quality, but I've seen many people saying positive things.
  
  
• A redone soundtrack courtesy of Andrew Hulshult who kicks ass here as always. Side note for real heads - John Weekley (the guy who did the Ashes and Dread Templar soundtracks) also released his own spin on the Heretic soundtrack last year. Highly recommend.
  
  
• Cheevos! The great thing about Steam isn't beating the games, it's showing everyone online that I did.

Now, much like No Rest For the Living, you could probably simply extract the new WADs and play them in GZDoom. In fact, that's probably the power move, since KEX is unfortunately lacking many features GZDoom has, such as true 3D rendering to eliminate the awful distortion effect that comes with freelook in the old 2.5D shooters, and the option to turn off Heretic's horrible automap background texture. However, for the uninitiated, this is an excellent way to play two of the best shooters of the 90s. For the real heads, you probably already bought the original games on Steam at some point to get at the WADs, in which case - oh look, it's already in your library.

PROS:

Graphics. Looks beautiful. The remaster fixes one of Oblivion's main problems, that the original game is ugly as hell. The environments look great, the animations look smooth, and the character faces - well, most of them, anyway - look substantially less mutated than they originally did.

Plays better. The remaster fixes another one of Oblivion's main problems - the original's pants-on-head ridiculous leveling system. You get a flat 12 stat points every level up regardless of which skills you've leveled (if you're not familiar with how absurd the original leveling system was, search the Elder Scrolls wiki for "Efficient Leveling"). Now you can simply play the game how you want without having to learn obtuse powergaming strategies to ensure you don't end up inexplicably underpowered... to a point. More on this later.

Mechanics enhancements. Several things have been reworked to make them more useful and/or less broken. For example, The Lord birth sign now gives you a permanent passive armor and magic resist bonus rather than a weak HOT and fire resistance penalty. Endurance now increases your health retroactively as you would expect instead of only affecting future levels.


CONS:

Bugs. The number of bugs in this game is obscene. This is not entirely the fault of the remaster devs, as this is the normal state of Oblivion even after years of patching, and what they are delivering is a product that is faithful to the original. Oblivion's bugs are so ubiquitous that they are actually a feature. You will see simple things like enemies stuck walking into walls, or NPCs with invisible legs, and other silly ♥♥♥♥ like that. There are about ten million different item dupe glitches, randomly floating environmental objects, broken quest triggers, the list goes on. This game is almost 20 years old, it is actually insane that so much of this remains unpatched. If you enjoy exploiting bugs to break games, you'll definitely enjoy this one.

Level scaling. The level scaling system is still awful. This is the "more on this" I promised earlier. Oblivion, like Skyrim, ensures the world levels up with you. Oblivion, unlike Skyrim, does not care about whether or not you can actually survive in the leveled up world. You are effectively penalized for every non-combat skill you level, unless you deliberately delay your level-ups to allow them to catch up. If you're not careful, you can end up stuck with an overleveled world where your attacks barely move the enemy's health bar, simply because you put too much effort into leveling skills like Sneak, Acrobatics, Mercantile, etc. - skills that are useful, but don't directly help you kill things.

---

In short, it's still Oblivion. For the uninitiated, this is a very atmospheric but deeply broken action RPG that frequently trips over its own feet. It has great environments, a good story, and decent combat. As a complete package, it wasn't amazing in its own day, and it's not amazing now. But if you have the patience to deal with the flaws, there's definitely a good time to be had here.

really wish I could leave a neutral rating on this one. to say this game is overrated is a massive understatement. it's not a *bad* game, but it's just Assassin's Creed with more polish. the environmental graphics are pretty, it's optimized well, the combat is alright. other than that it's just another Ubislop-style "open world" icon-squasher with a map full of busywork. lots of "find all the X to unlock the Y" and "do this minigame event to incrementally increase the maximum size of one of your meters". it even has a pointless "crafting" system where you get to upgrade one of your things every time you pick up enough random resources off the ground. I suppose that's what's to be expected of a Sucker Punch game these days, so if you enjoyed Infamous, you likely won't be disappointed. personally, I found it uninspired, but entertaining enough, at least until the endless running-between-icons action got old.

it's finally here, and it was completely worth the wait. for a while now I've lamented that the so-called boomer shooter genre has been stuck in the 90s, running out of ideas. this is the game to lead the genre into the 2000s. Selaco feels like a combination of Half-Life and FEAR from devs who understand very well the successes of both of those games. it's more tactical than the usual boomshoot, requiring you to plan your movement, use cover, engage enemies strategically and defend yourself from AI that will intelligently use the level layout and the various abilities and weapons at their disposal to outmaneuver and outsmart you. combat is tense and rewarding, especially on higher difficulties. the level of detail on display in the level design is very impressive. secrets are well-hidden, and the many different types of resources - money, weapon crafting parts, upgrade kits, portable medkits, in addition to oft-needed health, armor, and ammo - ensure they stay quite useful. and the most important part - the gunplay - is absolutely excellent. weapons are punchy but somewhat inaccurate from the hip, forcing you to aim carefully and focus fire to ensure enemies go down quickly without wasting ammo. an extensive upgrade system allows your weapons to accrue functionality as you progress, making you more deadly as enemies ramp up their own tactics and equipment to match. it's so slick! thanks to the devs for all their hard work - I hope this game becomes a massive success!

this game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid and I am so here for it

Well, it's Ubislop. You probably know what to expect at this point. A huge map full of busywork, a bunch of ridiculous online features that don't need to exist, an absolute smorgasbord of every terrible AAA trope from the last 15 years. And you know, I normally find these kinds of games utterly repellent. The last Assassin's Creed game I genuinely enjoyed was 2. FarCry 3 tuned me out about two hours in. I've been aggressively avoiding all things Ubisoft for years, but a friend bought this for me to play co-op - unfortunately he couldn't get the game to work due to connectivity issues - and I've been playing it solo, and I have to say, I'm enjoying myself.

Let's get some criticisms out of the way. For starters, this is a deeply ridiculous game. The plot and dialogue are so shockingly bad that I am fairly convinced some or all of it was AI-generated. If not, they have paid an entire team of people to write a ChatGPT-quality story, and it is hilarious. There's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wild west cowboy sheriff running the central hub, complete with a fake ass movie accent. The bad guy is a Steve Jobs type hippy tech savior. The evil mercenaries are run by a creepy PMC psycho who, for mostly incoherent reasons, is also working with a rogue Ghost unit led by none other than your old war buddy!!! The looter-shooter paradigm also shows its weakness from time to time, resulting in ridiculous situations like switching your ceramic tactical helmet out for a cloth beanie with higher defense, or taking an instantly fatal stray bullet to your pinky toe because the shooter's videogame number is much higher than yours. The UI is also instantly overwhelming, deluging you with options and game modes while tutorials fire off every half-second as soon as you get past the startup videos, and continuing well into the first hour of play.

However, these things don't ultimately get in the way that much. the dialogue is skippable and doesn't waste much of your time anyway. The looter-shooter mechanics avoid much of the genre's worst aspects (i.e. having huge numbers of affixes or making it impossible to find an upgrade due to RNG). You can also just turn the whole dang system off if you find it too cringe. This, in fact, is the spirit of the game: customizability. You can tweak a number of properties of the game world, for example, whether you can access vehicles at camps littered around the map or whether you have to return to the hub to fetch the hoopty. There are a ton of different classes representing different approaches to combat, and you don't have to commit - though they all level separately, you can unlock all of them and switch between them at camp. Guns can be freely customized in the field, with plenty of different components to play around with. Every piece of gear that drops is unlocked as a skin you can apply over your equipped gear at will. You can even completely change your character's appearance whenever you feel like it.

What we have here, then, is an impressively solid military tactical shooter sandbox. Ignore the dramatic screenshots and talk of an epic story or whatever - this game is a playground, purely. The core gameplay is solid. Having not played any Ghost Recon games previously, I would describe this as an off-brand Metal Gear Solid V with a dash of Just Cause. It has very similar elements of tactical stealth gameplay, but it also lets you teleport around the map, pull helicopters and other vehicles out of your ass, blast an entire brigade's worth of dudes all by your lonesome while pulling ammo and grenades off their corpses, stuff your pockets full of grenades and C4 and rocket launchers and mines and every kind of weapon of destruction you might imagine. And all the while, the game is drip-feeding you multiple layers of progression, like skill points, gear upgrades, and crafting materials. If you die, all your progress is snapshotted, you are teleported just a short distance away, and all the enemies are reset. The lightest slap on the wrist.

It's pure candy. You like cool military guns? There's a whole arsenal of them here. Find your favorites, kit them out with all the tacticool equipment you want. Use crafting materials to upgrade them. Play however you want. Be a sniper, a frontal assault madlad, an explosives psycho, a medic that makes all your co-op friends invincible, a stealthy invisiboi who can disappear at will, the list goes on. Dress up your soldier man. Put him in a ghillie suit, or a matte black stealth kit, or ♥♥♥♥♥♥ blue jeans and a cowboy hat. Become the high speed low drag mass murderer of your dreams.