Recent reviews by Flash-The-Robo-Dog

Strafe is a great 90s-shooter-styled game. Despite how it looks, it's not played like quake. It's more related to a modern roguelike, due to the rarity of health stations and shield powerups, and the care that has to be taken around every corner.

The weapon system is unique, with one main weapon that will be used constantly (and to be honest running out ammo is a rarity) and all other weapon pickups have their own ammo set and are never going to have enough ammo to be a constantly used weapon. They're meant to be more powerful than the main weapon and used in a few firefights.

This game has a great quirkiness about it with a lot of different weapon mechanics, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes FPSs and roguelikes.

I played through most of this game this year, and only recently did I buy gta V.
I find that there is almost no reason to buy gta IV.
I have also played gta 3's spinoffs and both of those still hold up.
The main problems are the driving, as many have said, every single car feels like a dumpster on ice. Even modding the game can't really help due to the way the physics were made, increasing traction causes other problems.
The shooting feels clunky and switching between weapons is slow, although it does have weight behind each shot.
Niko has been one of the only characters I care about and marginally so, besides one group of characters that are pretty late in the game, the bank robbing crew. All other characters I had no care for and I would almost always tune out during cutscenes (I tried not to skip them just to understand what was going on).
The dreary color palette makes the game feel more boring.
Games for Windows Live plagues this game as well and either has to be dealt with or modded out.

I find the only reason to play gta IV now is if you want to know the story (and it's not incredibly interesting). The gameplay and characters are not compelling.

Honestly the most enjoyment I had out of gta IV is from the references to its characters in gta V.
In conclusion, unless you absolutely must experience the story of gta IV, just buy gta V or gta: Vice City and San Andreas instead.

A great starting fighting game (it was my first one) that has beatiful animation and a perfect tutorial. For me it was great at first because I could still mash buttons and do cool-looking stuff. As I played some more I got more involved and had great hours with friends.

Coming into this game, I had heard that it was Telltale's finest work, and I think it really did live up to that, if not tied with Walking Dead season 1. The story told has a great fit (and a quite sizable fit) into the overall Borderlands universe.

There are still the 'telltale' glitches of a Telltale game, with occasional immediate face changes and the typo here and there. But it wasn't distracting enough to make the story not worth getting.

If you haven't played the Borderlands games and are just a Telltale fan, coming into this might be difficult but not impossible. General premises are set up well enough to follow along.

And if you're looking to do only one or two telltale games, this one is a great one to cherry pick to play.

If you're looking for -a- Flatout game, just get Flatout 2 or Flatout Ultimate Carnage (Same as flatout 2, but different soundtrack and slight graphical update).
If you want to play the older Flatout to see what it's like, it's overall a solid game. It has more flaws than Flatout 2 does though, which is why I say to play the later.
Some issues:
-Cars are not very distinguishable from each other (besides having their name plastered across the trunk). They all look like the 2nd racing category of FO2.
-Most objects are very heavy and are not worth the nitro earned from crashing into them
-Hitting something and flying out the windshield is easy to do, even with a small impact or a glitchy landing from an airborne ramp.
-Nearly impossible to pit maneuver other cars and get out of when you are pit maneuvered by two of them.
-Reset starts you at 0mph, rather than the 35 mph and invincibility frames that flatout 2 starts you at
-The only stats are Horsepower and Weight, making it unclear what a lot of the upgrades really help.
The driving from FO1 definitely feels different than 2, the cars can swing their back ends out much further to get into a drift, but have a lot more slide if you go into a turn too fast.
A unique mechanic that I liked was as your car gets damaged, the suspension starts to act up so that your wheels start bouncing a lot, and at the maximum effect, even driving straight on a flat road can get you wobbling. This makes any bumps a lot more challenging to keep grip on since your car is in the air a lot more often.
The soundtrack is not as high-budget as the later games, with a mid-2000s punk-rock vibe. Some of the songs are good, but not all to my taste.

tl;dr
If you're interested in seeing what the old Flatout is like in comparison to 2 or UC, there's fun to be had.
If you only want one flatout game, get Flatout 2 or UC, since they are better versions of this game.
The game's sitll good, but the sequels are all better.

I was quite disappointed during and after I finished the game.
I was told there would be a premise of hopping between game timelines, and although they do, I expected going from Duke-Nukem-3D era to modern. The game doesn't go back that far, starting near Quake era.
The weapon graphics don't change with the time period, so your weapons are entirely unmodified throughout the game.
This leads to direct comparison of the quake-esque weapons with a Halo setting.
Despite that, the graphical differences are not very noticeable.
Modern is not an immensely HD texture, and the retro ones aren't polygonal messes (I think they should be).
The player character's voice is a Scottish woman, which didn't annoy me but could be annoying to some. She talks a lot.
The premise is interesting and develops throughout the game but ends on a cheap cliffhanger.

The most entertaining part of this game was using an MP40 from the mid-2000s WW2 era of games to fight Skyrim skeletons. That was a moment that put a smile on my face at just how silly it was.

Quick, fast, bloody, on-a-whim, gameplay. With a decent story backing it up. Worth the price.

A crazy pseudo-80s-future-sci-fi-movie adventure, full of all the action you could want

The buildup in the story is so incredible. There's so much feels, possibly too much.

Quite the adventure; so much can happen. It's such an invigorating travel through space. It's easy to sink dozens of hours into FTL