Recent reviews by Metals

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Good luck to all of your hard working staff when you become the next Telltale.

This is a great game. It has a very playful atmosphere and the story is filled with positivity. The dialogue is mostly light hearted and full of humor. There is also an insane amount of replay value and a co-op mode too.

This game has so many awesome features!

- Play with a wide variety of personalities and temperaments! The community filled with the nicest haters and flamers. Some call mid and feed if they don’t get it. Others farm jungle all game, ignoring any and all pleas for assistance. My favorite are those that go afk or disconnect because F!@# your time, they don’t care.

- Play with people from around the world! There's a 50% chance (playing solo) of being grouped up with Russians and/or Hispanics, even on the US East/West servers. A good proportion of them know English, but they prefer to use their native tongue instead.

- Learn a foreign language! I learned the Russian communication system. It consists of 5-6 different sounds that can be pronounced in a multitude of ways to convey different meanings. Cyka (sooka) is the most commonly used sound in the language. They are like Pokémon, “CCyka, Cyyykka, Cykaaaa”.

- Every true protagonist needs a nemesis! In real life you probably don’t have many enemies. Spend some time in Dota land and soon enough you’ll despise half the worlds population including people from the Soviet Bloc and those inhabiting one of Spain’s many South American colonies!

- The servers are better than release week Diablo 3 servers! They’re usually in a state of tranquil chaos caused internally or externally. Play for 50 minutes only to find out that your best game in weeks won’t count for anything!

- Free data on worldwide crime! Not all criminals play Dota, but most Dota players are criminals. Rape is the most common crime, and moms are the primary victim.

- A valid and reliable ranked system that derives your score from the behaviors (and subsequent consequences) of others!

- Have fun 50% of the time. If you’re awesome you might even enjoy the game 55% of the time!!!!

- Everything is fashioned around the professional META. Sure, it may ruin the game for scrubs, but who cares? The top 10% are happy!

- It’s free!!!

AWESOME GAME WITH MANY AWESOME FEATURES!

Uninstalled.

I love recommending Dark Souls to others just to hear them complain in frustration after they’ve bought, played, and failed at it. The game is not easy; if anything, it’s one of the most punishing games of the decade. One misstep can set you back 15 minutes or more if you’ve been collecting souls (a leveling and bartering currency). The standard enemies provide a reasonable challenge. The bosses… they’re a different story. They don’t provide a reasonable challenge; instead, they provide you with some of the most frustrating confrontations you will ever experience in a video game. Some of them seem downright unbeatable. More than once I found myself smashing my keyboard or throwing my headset out of anger. Oppositely, more than once I felt a great deal of accomplishment and gratification upon slaying a boss after ages of failed attempts. Overall, Dark Souls is one of the best games of the past decade. It’s unique, innovative, and hella-challenging!

Check out GameSpot for a more in depth review:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REygw1ocB7Q

WARNING:
The PC port was done poorly and requires the download of a few essential game improving files. I tried playing the game without these files and found it half unbearable.

Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition: 9.0 / 10.0

Metro: Last Light shines as a beckon of hope for gamers that love FPS games but disdain the direction the genre is currently headed in.

The graphics and atmosphere are second to none. Walking through dark, gloomy, and death ridden metro tunnels creates an atmosphere of despair and hopelessness that few other apocalyptic games possess. The gameplay is a vast improvement over the original title. Bullets carry weight and the hit detection is flawless. Most segments can be completed stealthily or ‘all guns blazing’. As for your foes, enemies continually change. By the time you become bored of one enemy, a new one is introduced. The same can be said for the environments. The environments are filled to the brim with interesting side areas, multiple paths, and interesting tidbits that add to the backstory.

The story picks up shortly after the end of the first game. It’s intriguing for most of its span, but the last few sections of the journey bring the game to a somewhat abrupt and underwhelming conclusion. For the most part, the characters that you interact with are believable and well thought out. The only poor character is the love interest that appears out of nowhere and manages to avoid any meaningful character development.

Lastly, akin to the previous title, Metro: Last Light is a system hog. Don’t expect to play the game on max settings and enjoy 60fsp unless you have a godly system. Even then, be prepared to agonize when you discover that the low performance you’re experiencing originates not from your hardware, but from the software instead (drivers or the game itself). Unfortunately, I had to suffer through micro stuttering that spanned the entire game.

All in all, Metro: Last Light is an awesome game. I can only hope that future developers embrace innovation and uniqueness (like the Metro team did) instead of spitting out CoD clones left and right. Metro: Last Light sits strong upon the video game mountain of awesomeness with other astonishing titles like The Witcher 2, Bioshock Infinite, Dark Souls, and The Walking Dead (episodes). Few games sit upon this throne, and those that do deserve to be revered and remembered for the awesomeness that they are.

Metro: Last Light: 9.0 / 10.0

If you want to experience large scale (64 players), asymmetric (i.e. each side has different weapons), multiplayer warfare set in Europe or Japan, then this game is for you. The action is intense, realistic, and punishing. Running down the field whilst spraying the air with bullets does little but get you killed. To succeed, Rising Storm demands patience, caution, and strategy. It only takes one bullet to die (most of the time), and even minor wounds, if left untreated, can cause you to bleed out. The graphics are great and the audio authentic.

Rising Storm is not problem free. Leveling feels slow and gives few rewards in the form of unlockables or upgrades. The realism is awesome, but getting sniped over and over again shortly after spawning can become frustrating, especially if you’re unlucky enough to endure 23 second re-spawns. Team work is vital for success, but rarely do other players utilize microphones. Lastly, Japanese mortar bombardments and artillery strikes can make for breathtaking moments of epic havoc and death, but constantly getting picked off by random mortars can get infuriating. All in all, the game is fantastic. This mini-review may appear very critical, but that’s only because I prefer writing about shortcomings rather than accomplishments. For twenty bucks (or less) you really can’t go wrong giving this game a shot!

Red Orchestra 2: Rising Storm: 8.5 / 10.0

Van Helsing is an arpg fantasy game set in the not too distant past. You play as the son of Van Helsing and, like your father, you have a variety of spells, ranged weapons, and blade weapons at your disposal. The story isn’t great, but it’s also no worse than the stories in other arpgs. Van Helsing, the ghostly companion, and a few other notable characters have decent voice work, but the rest of the cast is plagued by lines likely composed by the programmers themselves. Most of the locations are graphically pleasing, but some appear slightly blurry (idk why???). The-game play is smooth and responsive; the enemies vary in aesthetics and behavior; and the progression system is elaborate and rewarding. Overall, the game at its core is great, but bugs, glitches, and oversights (see comment section) compound to drastically ravage the overall experience.

The Incredible Adventures Of Van Helsing: 7.5 / 10.0

The art style is nice and the idea behind the game is cool, but the developers made some stupid decisions that devalue the overall experience:

- The giants move too slowly.
- The music is boring and unremarkable. Good music in a game of this type is a must.
- Free-play mode has barred features that can only be unlocked by playing the campaign.
- The campaign is nothing more than free-play mode with a 30 minute time limit.
- Achievements (most of them) are tied to the campaign and can’t be unlocked in free-play mode.

Overall, even if you like the game, there’s not much to do or see after only a few hours of gameplay.

Reus: 7.0 / 10.0

Riptide’s biggest flaw is not differentiating itself from Dead Island 1 in any way whatsoever. You’ll fight in jungles, beaches, swamps; in dark tunnels and military bases; and in a town… just like you did a couple of years ago with Dead Island 1. The skill trees remain the same; combat hasn’t changed; and the story + voice work is as a cheesy (not in a good way) as ever. Even the bugs that plagued the original were left unfixed. Overall – if you liked Dead Island 1 and you want to continue the story without any innovations or changes to gameplay/setting/story, then give this game a go. If you’re expecting a true sequel, then wait for Dead Island 2 or whatever it’ll be called.

Dead Island Riptide: 7.5 / 10.0

The first two hours, alone, of Bioshock Infinite are worth the $60 price point. The game begins by ‘importing’ you into the city of Columbia, a city with as much, if not more substance than Rapture (from Bioshock 1-2). The city is beautiful, well organized, alive, and full of atmosphere. The citizens go about their daily lives in believable, and in many instances, entertaining ways. The plot seems simple: infiltrate the city --- rescue the girl. In reality, the plot is far from simple. From the very beginning ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted.’ The combat itself is also a step above Bioshock 1-2: the enemies are more varied, both aesthetically and mechanically; every weapon is powerful in its own right; each vigor (equivalent of plasmid) is useful at one time or another; and strategy plays a more prominent role in combat. Simply said, go buy it!

Bioshock Infinite: 9.5 / 10.0