Recent reviews by Singlain

I wish all the best to this project, since it looks rather promising, but with the amount of things this game has right now it hardly is worth your time. As other people mentioned - the AI in this game is done like in Tarkov, the enemy can see you through obstacles and attack you through half the map. Other than that, it's just a fetch quest simulator with comfy possibilities for customizing your hideout.

The place where it rained got me right in the heart 💔

Is it even possible for Toby to compose a bad song?

Compiling shaders, please wait...

I'm not really a Madness Combat fan, never was and probably will never be and I'll be reviewing the game as is, since my introduction to the Madcom lore was very brief.

First game I play in such genre and, honestly? It's a decent game. Not too bad and not too good. The story mode, despite it being heavily tied to the lore of the universe told in other media manages to hold up pretty decently.

Although, past the second third of the game it starts to really repetitive and routine, the game uses very cheap methods of complicating the enemies you fight and does one of three things: makes you kill the enemy twice, makes the enemy breakdance, making you dump all your mag on the guy to drain his Tacbar, and worst of all - making enemies invincible. The worst example are golems, closer to the end of the game you'll encounter more and more, and the game barely makes any effort to somehow make it fun.

Now take all the types of enemies mentioned above, multiply their count by 4 and you'll get the endgame of this game.

Speaking of golems - it's the worst enemy type in the game - period. I can tolerate the breakdancers, the guys you have to kill twice, even the guys that can withstand 100 minigun rounds with a crude shield, even them, but not the golems. Golems is what shifts this game from a B+ to a C-.

But okay - rant over, let's talk about things I liked - that being the Arena Mode. It somehow managed to fix all the problems I had with the story mode and introduce gun customization, recruit management and overall made the game much more fun. Even if it's not as engaging and playing past the first loop may not be as good, playing it for the first time sure is an amazing experience.

Overall, I had fun! And that's the only thing that matters.

The reason Escape from Tarkov hasn't died yet is because anyone trying to replicate its success formula always produces a cheap copy of the game with no soul and makes it so casual you wonder how employed you have to be to actually die to someone in this game.

First raid — it took me 2 magazines and one grenade to kill a bum dressed the same as me, and it's not like my aim is bad, all those shots I aimed straight at the guy's head and he was completely chill about it. And that's pretty much all it took for me to refund this game.

The fact that the developer of this game funds Russian terrorism in Ukraine (Partnership with Kalashnikov, 715 TEAM, who's logo is plastered on plenty of locations in-game and other evidence) is already enough to never even approach this game. Not only that, but the devs are too ♥♥♥♥♥ to admit they are sponsoring terrorism, chickening out every time this topic is brought up.

But let's ignore the reality for a bit and see how the game plays and feels. Short answer - horribly. The concept of this game is really, really good. The reason Tarkov is still the king of the extraction shooters is the fact that no one else to this day was able to execute it as well as this game did. But this fact alone and the fact that how much of punching bags the audience of this game are lets the devs get away with things that wouldn't be possible for any other developer.

The lighter examples include no refunds AT ALL if the game is purchased via the dev's website, constant server outages and queues in the launcher as a result, things in the roadmap that were bluntly ignored and never made it into the 1.0 and the bugs and issues in-game that exist for years with no attention from the devs whatsoever.

The heavier examples include the fact that all the people that already bought the game on the game's website will need to buy it again in order to be able to play it on Steam. Mind you, games like Path of Exile have a linking system that allows you to transfer your game to Steam and play it without paying 40$, like with Tarkov does.

Well, BSG fanboys might yell something along the lines of "you're not obliged to buy the game again", which further confirms that the fanbase of this game is willing to eat up every anti-consumer practice in existence and come back for more, since there's really nowhere to go in Tarkov's case and overtime you practically get used to it and start enjoying being degraded.

Oh, and dare I mention The Unheard Edition drama that got completely forgotten by everybody once BSG settled down on giving all the EoD owners PvE access and letting the homeless Standard Edition people like me buy it separately, trying to pinch them a "6 months trial version" of PvE access prior to that, which for some reason got forgotten too.

That being said, this game offers an experience you'd never experience in any other game prior to this, hence why people that reasonably hate it still play it despite all that, even including me, and since the devs handle the game so badly, playing Singleplayer Tarkov was a much more pleasant experience as a whole.

But back to the Live game, the way RMT is treated shows just how much BSG are both unprofessional and don't give a ♥♥♥♥ about this game in general, given the "Found in Raid" mechanic, In-Raid item discarding limitations and much more, not to mention how financially stupid they are by spending 70 million dollars on developing a Tarkov e-sport that has 500 viewers on Twitch as of now, and afterwards integrating it in the base game as a quick way to earn money and transfer it to your character in the base game just so that at least someone plays it, backing it up with therefore mentioned The Unheard Edition to make up for the losses by strapping the most loyal fans for cash a bit more.

But I haven't touched on the most important issue, which is cheaters. There are so many cheaters in this game, Counter-Strike 2 can actually be playable compared to this. No matter what the devs do, the cheaters will prosper and it's very disappointing. Probably one of the reasons the devs added PvE is an attempt to sell the solution to cheating problem instead of dealing with it directly.

I can go on and on about how poor this game is treated, but as I mentioned, the only reason it has lived for that long is because no one was dedicated enough to actually replace Tarkov with something worth your while.

Summarizing, please, don't buy this game, it hates you, just as much as the developers of it hate you, seeing you as nothing more as a source of cash that will eat up everything they make up. It's only up to you whether you like being degraded or not, but please, avoid this game like fire.

If you were unfortunate enough to buy it back in the day and still want to make your money worth your while - play SPT.

I miss times when you actually bought the game as one purchase of $20 instead of spending $5.99 on 20 parts of the game to make it full. God, even Hitman Absolution is better than this.

I played for an hour and tried coming back like 4 times after that, but ended up playing for 2 minutes and quitting the game for no reason.

Guess no game can fit everyone, right? If Steam had an option for a mixed review, I'd pick it. It really pains me to give this game a negative review, though. This game is much better than this, but here we are...

Haven't even got to try the game out because any graphics setting lower than epic give you the image worse than Tarkov does on the lowest settings. Can't even begin to mention the blurriness of the game itself. Guess that's what Unreal Engine is, after all...

After playing all the STEINS;GATE visual novels, I was excited to try something else in the same universe, first in line being CHAOS;HEAD NOAH. Now, I guess my journey in SciAdv will end right here. This game is even worse than Everlasting Summer, (and believe me, you need to write a really bad story to get put below Everlasting Summer) I cannot even begin to express enough how much I hate this game and the fact I've wasted 44 hours playing it, but let me get that out the way and I'll try to explain why do I hate this game. I'll try to draw the least amount of comparisons between this and STEINS;GATE, but I'll have to do so at least a bit.

Just to clarify, I've barely managed to finish the game on the common route and I'm not coming back to see any other endings, no thank you.

First things first - the protagonist. I'm sure many people will agree that following the thoughts of this delusional shut-in pervert was all but pleasant. Half his thoughts are about him being an incel and hating on people around him just because he's a pervert and a huge loser who plays games all day. He never values even a tiny bit of things he has.

Now, I get the fact that Yua and Rimi were lying and hiding things from him all the time and that is justifiable to hate them, but the way the protagonist treats his sister is just painful to watch. I can rant on and on about how bad I feel about the protagonist being so damn disappointing, but I'll just say that single-handedly, this is one of the worst, if not the worst protagonist I've ever seen. Also, on top of that, his voice is very annoying, nerdly and ugly, I was on the verge to just straight up mute his voice entirely, though managed to get used to it.

Moving on - the plot itself is a total joke. If in STEINS;GATE the main plot twist is very much obvious, in CHAOS;HEAD NOAH I've never really seen the plot move somewhere reasonable, at some point the plot moves on from the topic it set up in the beginning, which are the NewGen murders, to the point of these 7 knights (???) wielding.. swords. (??????) Why did the plot suddenly shift all the attention from the murders to fuc*ing swords???

Oh, and by the way, the murders? The person behind them all is just slapped right into your face at the end of Chapter 9, revealing her to be a nurse that right after that just straight up slashes her throat right in front of you, never to be seen or mentioned again. This is by far the worst way to end the plot the game was setting up all the 40 hours it lasted. I'd much rather see killer never revealed than to see this.

Also, the way the plot is told manages to fail all the suspense and interest in the things that are happening around the protagonist, because the game often shifts the perspective to a third person, observing other characters doing other things. And it would be fine if the game had multiple protagonists whom thoughts you'd follow just the same you follow the thoughts of the protagonist, but get this - the game often just tells you the stuff the protagonist will learn chapter or two later, killing all suspense. And then the protagonist acts all clueless, which made me feel like I got spoiled by looking up the game's plot online, rather than learning it from the game itself.

And here's another example where STEINS;GATE did it all better - in STEINS;GATE you never leave the protagonist's perspective, not even for a second, making you sympathize with him on a much deeper level, unlike CHAOS;HEAD NOAH, where in the later chapters the protagonist's story becomes just another ongoing subplot, and the game shifts to his perspective less and less.

Overall, the plot is boring and the resolution of all mysteries feels rather unrewarding at best and doesn't feel like anything at worst.

Also I'd like to mention the fact that the game never even tells you who is speaking right now, hence I got the names of the characters memorized only by the end of the game. But it also plays better for the immersion, so this is debatable.

Unbelievably, this game also has some good sides. That being, the music and the vibe of the game. It feels like Takeshi ♥♥♥ can never compose a bad song.

So, this is CHAOS;HEAD Noah. I only played till the end just because I had some hope in the bottom of my soul that this game somehow manages to be good, but I wouldn't be writing this if it did.

Please, save your time and don't play this, especially if you've never played STEINS;GATE and it's sequel and two spin-offs, because I'd rather replay all of them than get other endings for this game.