Recent reviews by 459 SvenRuattalainen

The System Shock remake is an interesting title to review. A loved cult classic brought to the 2020's through a development hell is certainly not your everyday experience. After reading mixed reviews of the game I decided to wait until patch 1.2 to give it a go. I've played a lot of SS1 both in DOS CD and Steam Enhanced Edition guise as well as SS2. My comments reflect the experience with "all medium 2-2-2-2" difficulty settings.

The good:

• The game looks and audio F/X are plain awesome. Of course there isn't exactly as much as polish as other contemporary titles but it feels appropriate. Even the pixelation near objects such as walls, displays and keypads feels more like homage to original material than a case of lackluster texture resolution.
  
• The game playability and controls are lovely and responsive in general.
  
• The game appears to be quite stable. I didn't lose any items during the game either. I encountered only a single crash during my 20-hour playthrough that might have something to do with overclocked and power tuned Raptor Lake/RTX 4070 system. Automap tagging was the only feature that didn't seem to work properly.
  
• The general feeling of the original title is mainly intact. It still feels mostly the same experience as the original. It doesn't hold your hand through the ride so be prepared to conserve ammunition and read every single message you find in order to figure out what to do (unless you choose mission difficulty 1).

The questionable:

• Some added mechanics, removal and rework of items/weapons and streamlining the experience force you to play very differently vs. original. Examples include manual activation of envirosuit vs. automatic in original inadvertently creating emergency situations and lack of big explosives nitropack and earthshaker. The reworked puzzles feel nice and nobody is probably missing the riot gun either.
  
• The soundtrack is vastly different from the original. It brings more survival horror feeling but lacks the spirit, general cyberpunk soundscape and event reactiveness of the original MIDI soundtrack regardless whether OPL FM or Roland Sound Canvas module was in question. Then again, combining MIDI stuff in 2023 through poor implementation of Windows software sampling synthesizer would've been totally off.

The bad:

• Cyberspace is at best monotonic and boring. At worst it makes you want to murder someone. The only thing that works in it are controls. While navigating around the maze is as perplexing as before, there is a lot of challenging and outright difficult high-tempo extra combat mostly absent from original title. The feeling of exploration has changed into a compulsory tuberun. Many players have recommended turning the cyberspace difficulty to lowest setting and after completing the game I agree with them.
  
• Inventory management is a chore and the balance is totally different from the original. The reworking of the inventory mechanic leads it being way too small all the time. You can decently carry around 3-4 weapons vs. seven in original. Also, grenades, stims and ammunition consume inventory space as well as all more or less critical stuff you are hauling around. You end up building huge stashes of situational gear and running there every now and then. The remake introduces the cargo lift but it is of limited use as it is rather small. End result is a huge time sink.
  
• Recycle station mechanic. Fill a small fraction of your pockets with recyclable junk (rest of your pockets is loaded with abovementioned necessary equipment), dump them into recycler for a small amount of credits, run back, rinse and repeat. You can buy weapon upgrades, stims and ammunition but all of them are in very limited supply and scattered around the station. This is another huge time sink. All in all, it took me around 20 hours to complete the game even I knew what to do when and where courtesy of my numerous original SS1 playthroughs.

As the end result is mostly well-executed and faithful to the original I'm giving this remake a thumbs-up. However, if there was a choice of giving a mixed review I would've done so as there are some very irritating points absent from original where the remake falls flat on face.

I'm not exactly sure whether this game would benefit from additional minigames such as having a multinational fistfight in a drivers' lounge aboard Travemünde-Vuosaari ferry between truckers. As for driving semi-trailers between different towns in Europe... pure grand touring and reality escapade gold masked as a dull "go to work"-simulator. The best thing for a trucker to do during R&R without pants apart from drinking beer in Nordö-Link bathtub.

So much content. So much story. Such compelling and relatable characters. A decent technical execution, now also with stunningly beautiful ray tracing (at least after a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥' worth of patches). This game has received a lot of acclaim over the years and not in vain; apart from the less-than-stellar beginnings of the version 4 stability-wise and stark hardware requirements of the RT version pretty much everything is perfect. Certainly a journey worth being a time sink.

Deus Ex is a perplexing game. Gameplay-wise and graphics-wise it is a huge clunkfest and a relic from the turn of the millennium. When it comes to atmosphere, setting and plot with all the future dystopian adventure and conspiracy themes going on... well, they are timeless and ALL technical deficiencies are forgiven. The Revision mod affect the original missions slightly but the general feeling of the original product isn't altered in a disruptive way. You also get the benefit of easily accessing fully updated The Nameless Mod that adds a lot of tongue-in-cheek-but-seriously-executed content for your game.

Seriously, please try to not get turned off by the rather primitive and outdated graphical execution. There is just so much awesomeness underneath that you'll be missing the adventure of your life if you decide to skip this title because of its looks.

For rock and stone... and let's have another dive. Or five more dives for that matter.

This is seriously one of those games that is more than sum of its parts. The graphics aren't particularly flashy but the distinct style certainly won't make you angry especially if low-polygon stuff akin to 80's and 90's is your cup of tea. You can play it alone or with up to three other friends. The single player will eventually get bit repetitive but at least the single player exclusive Bosco drone will help make the missions bearable. The multiplayer... well, it rewards successful co-operation and punishes lack of it, especially with higher difficulty levels. Even though the amount of different mission types and biomes is limited, the procedural level generation always generates maps that are interesting and different, helping with replayability. The end product is more or less devoid of frustrating bugs and stupid design choices.

With 300+ hours clocked during one year I'm still not complaining. Of course there could be more frequent releases of additional content but you will be getting good bang for buck with this game in its current form even by paying full price.

Stupid and boring console-style shooter with unmemorable plot, utterly repetitive and predictable level design and weak weaponry crowned with "fall to your death through floor upon respawn when resurrected" -tier bugs. Please avoid spending your money this useless excuse of game; I lost 4 € that could've bought multiple cans of beer that would've provided a lot more of fun.

There is only one single sane reason for anyone to play this game through.

If you are a masochist, you will enjoy the game. For people feeling even remotely sane, it is to bridge the storyline between Witcher 1 and 3, both strong titles that stand easily on their own feet. Witcher 1, while interface-wise is a clunkfest in graphical appearance and interface just like Deus Ex, in a similar fashion it is a fair dinkum as far as the level of challenge goes; doing stupid things gets you in trouble and getting creative usually gets rewarded. Witcher 3 has become a legend in its genre as a highly balanced and memorable experience in pretty much every regard. However, while Witcher 2 isn't bad as far as storyline goes, its playability on PC is horrible. It feels like frustrating console port with unintuitive and perplexing controls. There is a feeling of inertia and unresponsiveness that get magnified, for instance, when you are slamming the "next quick slot" button without getting the another assigned bomb available for use when you run out one of them. Stupid QTE boss fights and strong enemies promoting use of cheese tactics, all overly reliant on circlestrafing that are frustrating even with the easiest difficulty level make you feel like going to murder your neighbors just after, like, two tries. End result is a degenerate load/save fest where you try to min/max your potions, gear, weapon enhancements etc. just to blast past a combat scene.

Seriously, right now, amidst my second playthrough to get a decent save game for the shortly upcoming Witcher 3 refresh I'd like to choke the person responsible for balancing and playtesting the game. Seldom I get such feelings; this tells enough about this title.

I recommend this game purely as an easily accessible showcase of real-time ray-traced lighting effects. That is, as you can have the demo for free and the full game data files for few bucks/euros you can easily test drive your RTX and Navi 2x series or any later real-time RT compatible graphics cards for their functionality just by having a little run with this shooter. I have to commend the developers of this port for converting a 90's FPS quasi-classic into 20's showcase of the ever-present technical advance in PC graphics hardware.

As for the level design and gameplay, the game itself is a dull FPS experience with confusing level design that is made even more confusing with the extremely dark-light polarized lighting. Because of this, you will have issues finding the critical spots for progression without watching Youtube playthrough videos vs. for instance the dull and bland lighting provided by software renderer that was used by most of the systems that ran the game when it originally launched. Then again, in its prime this game was remembered as the ultimate late 90's mod platform for titles such as Gloom and Action Quake 2.

More than 20 years after its initial launch, Quake 2's role has yet again been morphed from an apex FPS shooter via mainstay multiplayer mod platform to a tech demo for current GFX hardware. You gotta love the games' value in showing the everlasting strength of PC gaming in different aspects of user experience even though by design it's way past its prime.

This game isn't exactly a great work of art or technical masterpiece and it is in need of considerable amount of balancing. Yet it does something very important very well: Being a free Fall Guys clone, Crab Game is a perfect lighthearted competitive game for LAN parties with zero entry barrier for every participant. It will almost certainly give you laughs. Yet if it turns you off, you don't need to regret for any money wasted.

Now, this is a _very_ iffy upvote. I haven't touched the multiplayer so this opinion is completely on single player base game. First, the negatives: The game itself is quite repetitive and at times somewhat boring. The plot is a joke but then again, this game shouldn't be played for its story. Some map designs are very frustrating with problems finding switches, figuring out what next etc. I also wished that the missions were shorter and there were more of them as now competing one mission could take up to one hour but the entire base game takes around ten hours to finish.

However, for almost everything it's trying to do to replicate original Doom experience from 1990's it works like a charm: Weapons are great throwback into Doom 1/2 with new twists on them. The controls are smooth and fluid. There is a plethora of different monsters to smash and combat is always very tense. Any technical hiccups have been ironed out and the game is running 1440p144 all settings maxed out (scaler notwithstanding) with FPS right at the Hz cap on modern 5900X/RX 6800 system without any drops save for 60 FPS locked scenes.

Buy this game if you are a fan of fast-paced brains off styled FPS action and you'll be able to acquire it with a large discount. There isn't really that much content to play through as far as the single player is concerned. Thus the value isn't there if you pay full price.