Recent reviews by MxSelfDestruct

Pretty good, but not without flaws. Bear in mind that I've never played the original.

The Good:
* The combat is great. Dismembering enemies with the Plasma Cutter is a grand old time. All the weapons feel like they have a place and, more importantly, they all feel unique.
* The art direction and set/level design are excellent.
* The story is a bit campy but overall solid, and the characters are all pretty well written.
* Seems to be pretty decently optimised, which is a rarity in the current market.

The Bad:
* It's really not very scary. Maybe I'm just harder to frighten than I realise, but… Eh. I'm at chapter 6 and I'm still waiting for a good scare.
* Not as "hard" sci-fi as I was expecting. A lot of the tech in this setting is basically indistinguishable from magic, but it's played straight in a kind of jarring way. No, I am not fun at parties, thank you for asking.
* Very linear in the way a lot of 7th gen Third Person Action Adventure™ games tend to be.

The good vastly outweighs the bad, though. If you think you'll like the game you're probably right.

DEADLY ANOMALIES ✓
DANGEROUS MUTANTS ✓
ANARCHISTS ✓
BANDITS ✓

finally, Shadow of Chernobyl for gay people and furries/scalies

A great little arcade-y tactical shooter. The gunplay is a lot of fun, the combat is really tense and rewarding, the level design is actually pretty good, all in all it's a great time. Definitely worth your money.

My only complaints would be about the progression (it's a little grindy for me) and how poorly optimised the game is. A game that looks like this* shouldn't struggle to stay above 60 FPS on any computer made in the last 15 years, let alone a modern PC with a mid-range GPU. Turning off the dynamic lighting setting helps, but it also completely butchers the game's aesthetics.

* No hate for the art style, to be clear, I actually like it a lot.

this game perfectly captures the feeling of connecting to a QuakeWorld server running a jillion different conflicting mods, except instead of being really unintuitive and needing you to manually bind half your keyboard to a bunch of random commands to do anything it's actually a great time. easy recommend. soundtrack is also a banger.

gay furry redneck sim, goty 2024 no contest. it's five dollar. buy

I'm about two hours in, and I'm absolutely loving this game so far. Sonar Shock feels like it was specifically tailored to my own weird tastes.

Sonar Shock is an immersive sim/dungeon crawler with a SS1-style interface, Lovecraftian horror elements, and a saves-as-a-resource system a la Resident Evil. It does most of what it sets out to do very well; the controls are clunky, but in a very obviously intentional way that adds a lot to the game. The combat is very fun and tense, the characters are interesting, and the atmosphere is excellent. My only real complaint about the game design itself is that it's very restrictive about the types of weapons you can carry; you may have one long gun and one sidearm or melee weapon. this can get pretty annoying.

There are also some pretty annoying bugs at time of writing; you can get stuck on furniture sometimes, exiting dialogue often makes you accidentally fire your weapon (you can get around this by using the cursor and Enter keys to navigate dialogue), and the game has serious performance issues. I am confident that these will be fixed soon, though.

Overall though, I think Sonar Shock is fantastic. If you like immersive sims and/or charmingly janky games, this'll be right up your alley.

lovely little bittersweet mood piece, give it a shot.

there's a bug some people experience where the game only appears in a tiny little square in the top of the screen, but you can just alt-tab in and out to mostly fix it.

Oh my god.

Duke Nukem 3D, as directed by Andrei Tartovsky.

Great atmosphere, solid combat and level design; definitely worth the price of admission. Only complaint is that, at least on normal difficulty, the game is far too generous with ammo. HROT is at its best at the start of each episode, where resources are scarce and you feel grateful to have nine shotgun shells left.

Note for Linux/Steam Deck/Proton users: particle effects make the game chug super hard and AFAIK there's nothing you can really do about it. Sorry! You'll get used to it. If the chug gets really bad, save and restart the game.

like if Karl Marx did a cover of The Big Lebowski. 9/10