Recent reviews by vtipoman

Having grown up after the prime of the WW2 shooter era, and going back to the roots of Call of Duty with a simple wish – a fun, cinematic shooter, capturing the war in a somewhat realistic manner – I didn't expect much from the series known for mainstream popularity, silly cosmetics and small deathmatch lobbies. Yet the campaign is genuinely fun – the combat feels deadly and satisfying, with a surprisingly fast time to kill both for you and your enemies, the armaments you go against and the situations you find yourself in are always believably represented as both dangerous yet exploitable, the actual operations you take part in are rather well selected, giving you a slice-through experience of the war, ranging from more mundane missions, across unusual circumstances, to special op fanfare, always building up on that theme of no-one winning the war alone. It's fun following the different protagonists, most of whom progressively go from a relatively random soldier surviving thanks to chance and quick thinking to a recognised commando, yet the game can get suprisingly somber and serious. The three different nations you play as are cleverly used to showcase different equipment and circumstances, but also to approach the war with a different narrative tone. My only real complaint is that few of the missions see your John McSoldier Callofdutyman go and succeed against odds that get genuinely very silly, but hey, it's CoD, why not.

Just as a word of warning, this is one of those games that treats the harder difficulties as something for people who have already beaten it, to add to replay value – genuinely don't go with the hardest one for your first time through (the game wasn't designed with no healing in mind), even the second-to-hardest one feels to me, as someone with a pretty good amount of experience and skill with singleplayer shooters – like it expects a decent amount of trial-and-error. But again, that's on me for playing it without knowing the levels at all.

Genuine recommendation if you like singleplayer shooters and have missed out on this era of WW2 games. I'm looking forward to playing the sequels.

This is peak TF2. Gameplay, style, weapons, maps, graphical fixes, new gamemodes, even the soundtrack– everything. Almost like Valve took an alternate development path, one that aimed to never sacrifice the soul and heart of the original.

Some moments from this game's campaign have etched themselves onto my soul.

Presents a fascinating deconstruction on the ethics of genetic engineering, the limits of personhood, and the human condition. As in real life, society as a whole decides on the moral legitimacy of concepts, and law plays catch up with technology. In the middle of all this is caught an emotionally torn protagonist, who has to come to terms both with the reality of creatures strongly similar yet critically and poignantly separate to humans, and his own developing relation with two such beings. Add a dose of commentary on the nurturing yet restraining nature of family, the inherent risk in pursuing one's dreams and the sobering acceptance of having to let them go, and you basically have NEKOPARA Vol. 1.

To quote a great reviewer, "'Neko-', meaning 'cat', and '-para', meaning 'I enjoy disappointing my paraents'."

The "temple raiding" roguelike. Stay vigilant, think ahead, keep pace. Slow is fast. Sluggish is dangerous. Everything always remains a threat. Fun! :)

You crack open the cave, shoot the wildlife, grab the minerals. Sometimes you stumble upon rare minerals or a cave chock-full of them. Sometimes you're sent explicitly to murder something. You get a beer and mess around the bar afterwards. Good times.

One of THE definitive zombie games, even all those years later. All the effort they put into animations, damage models, physics, balancing, weapons, horde behavior and so on truly makes it feel like you're up against endless thousands and thousands of infected humans, and makes it a joy simply to play.

In a review of a different game, I've seen the author coin the term "authentic failure", and I feel it applies here as well. The art, visuals and vibes are phenomenal (if they're what you're looking for, at any rate), the places you go in the story are consistently surprising and fun to discover, but everything that actually happens, and everything the game tries to hint at fail to come together in any cohesive whole. MiSide feels like a constant stream of ideas that at a first seem they should create an amazing game, rendered in an exquisite style, but you can't help but feel like they early on needed many more critical passes, removals, reworks and additions to try and figure what the game is actually about, how the events that transpire make greater narrative sense, what they should as a greater whole tell the player and make them feel... all that good stuff that would make it anything more than a string of anime vibe/horror candy without much deeper substance. It feels like that if there was a writer on the team, they were either not allowed, or didn't apply enough pressure to cut out or rework individual cool ideas and scenes in order to allow them to properly connect and make something better.

MEN, THIS PLANET IS LITERALLY FILLING WITH RUBBER. YOU WILL STAND YOUR GROUND IN THE NAME OF THE TRUE SUN GOD!!

The writing is poor, the RPG elements have been boiled down to next to nothing, and the game likes ignoring its own worldbuilding whenever convenient. That said, it's great if you want to turn off your brain and blast/slash/snipe your way across an arguably pretty but shallow fantasy world and get a mix of pre-placed and leveled loot for your troubles (regardless of whether or not finding it where you do actually makes any sense). If you're looking for something with substance, I'd recommend searching elsewhere.