Recent reviews by vivi

I sincerely doubt there will be a better game released in 2026.

Short but very sweet. I was very caught off guard by how much I saw myself in Royal. 11 minutes, fantastic sprites. Try it.

I'll be honest, I was surprised how much I ended up falling in love with this game. I've been too depressed to play really anything new for any significant amount of time for months, so the fact I've put 8 hours in across 3 sessions on 3 different days really speaks to how much this game works for where my head is at right now. This is a vibes game. An ode to the power of the open road. The game has it's challenges but, if you want it to be, you can just relax and drive until you can't anymore. One of the things that I think really helps the game is actually the down time. There's a lot of time spent not really doing much. I can see that time becoming tedious eventually, but right now, it's just more time to soak in the amazing soundtrack and think about what road trips mean to you. Highly recommended.

The most impressive game in years. Has as much care put into individual games as some entire releases. The scale of it is something to behold.

I have not finished the game yet, but this is already a top 5 game for me this year. It's jank as hell, has really strange voice acting and writing, and deliberately evoking mid-budget ps2 games. these are all positives. in addition, it supplements the time spent between missions with numerous charming idiosyncratic digressions that really make the game feel like a guileless work of love. the pc port runs well on a GTX 1070 at 1440p with no upscaling, with only cutscenes and weirdly the rhythm game sections dropping below 60 consistently. it's frustrating in a way that games should probably be more often.

game good

I was initially slightly disappointed in this port, but I still think it's a great way to play one of the best Doom games. The removal of true-mouse aiming from Kaiser's previous Doom 64 EX port, as well as a few other QoL features like crosshairs and visible item/enemy/secret count is unfortunate, but I get why that decision would be made. In exchange, I now have an official way to play the game with mouse aiming that doesn't jitter (I had issues with EX, even after installing the Win10 mouse fix). I'll take it.

As for the new levels, they are excellent. Sufficiently difficult with some quality art design and great understanding of the specifics of what makes Doom 64's monsters and weapons so fun to mess with. The last level in particular is great fun, a sort of mashing of the final two levels of Doom 64 together, with a outer ring just filled with high level enemies and cyberdemons, with a mad dash to find all the demon keys among the chaos. The final boss is lame, especially since there's no way to not have a fully upgraded Unmaker by the time you fight it, but it's a much better final level than the main campaign itself.

Even if this didn't come with Doom Eternal, I would have happily bought it on it's own. Great game, one every single Doom fan should play, and a port worthy of it.