Recent reviews by HSAR

Possibly the best story-based RPG in the last 20 years, in a remastered format reasonably worthy of a fresh price tag.

TL;DR Ultimately a disappointment. Buy and play Left 4 Dead 2 instead.

While it has improved a little over time, all the specials are bullet sponges, killing the zombies is mostly meaningless and the card system is a way to produce a fully solved build with very little in the way of interesting customisation. The attachments system, while interesting, never quite produces much in the way of interesting choices. The gameplay itself feels like a giant RNG wheel - whether you complete a level or not comes down to good or bad spawns or cards as much as it does player skill, with the pace and difficulty of enemies varying wildly.

Overall, this produces an incoherent and aimless gameplay experience, without the AI Director strengths of the Left 4 Dead series and unable to do anything with its new elements.

It's strange to say that a game 12 years older is better, but that's the simple truth. Back 4 Blood has doesn't do anything new well, and it does the old stuff worse too.

It's a destructible first-person shooter that is reminiscent of Call of Duty and Battlefield with all the downsides of those games: corner camping, snipers, dolphin-diving. It adds a few more with the incredible prevalence of enemy noise, where a large number of your kills and deaths come from hearing your enemy rather than smart positioning or good shooting.

A reasonably fun third-person shooter that could almost be recommended except for the huge numbers of bugs. Most of them don't matter and can be fixed with a quick reload, but co-op is completely broken. Don't buy this for the co-op, it may as well not exist.

A remaster of Half-Life 1 that updates a classic game for modern graphics, though not its gameplay design. Be prepared to look for the "correct solution" in each area.

A deep and complex real-time strategy with a fresh and interesting pre-game decision-making element. You are allowed to choose which units you bring to the game beforehand, accepting various restrictions in return for increased numbers of units in reserve or increased effectiveness of your units. This alone completely changes the game for me and I have found this pre-game strategy layer incredibly engaging and rewarding to master.

Strongly recommended.

Slick 3-player co-op action that makes good on the Aliens (note: plural) branding. Surprisingly excellent in gunplay, depth of tactics and amount of content to unlock.

A worthy successor to other heavyweights in the genre such as Slay the Spire and Monster Train, improving in a few areas without necessarily breaking new ground.

The game has a great asymmetric co-op setup. However, it's riddled with bugs, the writing is absolutely awful (not just forgettable, awful) and the levels rarely reward creative thinking. 7/10 concept, 1/10 execution. Skip.

Co-op stealth shooters are not very common, and the moments when this game is good are incredible satisfying. However, much more frequently the randomness of enemies and supplies frequently leads to a frustrating spike in difficulty and overall the game feels both light on content and somewhat under-polished. Recommend waiting for (a significant amount) more development or skipping altogether.