Recent reviews by amc215

Shoot, Jump, Cry, Shoot

The game that got a lot of people into the tower defense genre. I first ever tried it back in the day on my iPhone. But left it due to the microtransactions. But playing it on my Steam deck it felt right at home with no microtransactions and mouse support. For such a simple genre each tower and troop has such depth and strategy necessary to master to be able to play on higher difficulties. And the art style keeps you wanting to see what the next level/map looks like.

Works on Steam Deck now!
Under Proton Experimental Comparability.

• Story: What the hell even happened? Snipe your way through an army in the forest to kill an evil leader. I think that’s what took place.
  
• Gameplay: Involves a lot of running through the forest then sniping someone from a ledge. Rinse and repeat for many hours with no enemy variety or location variety. Playing it becomes a chore after a while and you start to use your postal more often so you can run and gun through each level to get it over with faster.
  
• Online: Online is run of the mill modes with more of a focus on shorting each other from long distances. They make you create and account to play online but was not able to on my Steam Deck due to menu navigation issues.
  
• Graphics: Looks like a poor man’s jungle level of Crysis. With everything being pretty low detail. Only decent graphical aspect I can think of is the water. And even that’s not great.
  
• Audio: Just like the graphics. The audio detail and variety is pretty poor. Generic and repetitive sounds. And basic gun sounds. But by far what is the worst is the voice acting.
  
• Performance/Bugs: Experienced stutters and frame drops all over the place. Lots of shadow artifacting, which is terrible for a kindle based FPS. Checkpoint based difficulty spikes that made no sense.

• Gameplay: It’s classic brick breaker with a twist. Force push and pull powers. And bricks that fall towards you that affects the trajectory of the balls. The most fun and frustrating part of the game was the boss battles. Each having a unique way of defeating them. With many gameplay difficulties along each battle.
  There are multiple modes of play. Story Mode, Endless, Co-op, Boss Rush.
  With Story-Mode being the only one worth the time.
  
• Online: Consists of online co-op via its endless mode.
  
• Graphics: The game has a unique 2.5D’ish sci-fi art style. Simplistic for what it is.
  
• Audio: All of the audio bits sound clean and unique. Pleasant on the ears. The soundtrack is just alright.
  
• Performance/Bugs: Anything can run this game. The only annoying things that I ran into was when the ball would get wedged between a wall and an enemy. It showed that the physics weren’t that grate. And the users paddle hit-box isn’t the most accurate.

• Story: This game is the beginning of Desmond’s story for four games. You are tasked as an Assassin to take down 9 targets. In order for you to get back in good Frances with the Assassins Creed. But after doing so many twists are involved. Rulers get the info they want and you learn you were never told the truth. Then the sort cuts off after these things are learned. Hyping up the story for the next game in the series.
  
• Gameplay: The feeling of the game back in 2007 was unmatched. You felt like you were really moving around in this world. But that’s where things fall off. Parkour is clunky but revolutionary for the time. 50% of the time you go where you were aiming to go. The rest of the time you grab stuff or fall off things you didn’t mean to do. Combat oils down to countering attacks for instant kills. But I really enjoyed that at first because of the animations that came with those moves. Content wise the game consists of doing basic side objectives multiple times until you earn the info to assassinate a target. The side content is generic and annoying. But the assassination targets were surprisingly varied for the time. With unique gameplay challenges being involved.
  
• Graphics: Back when the game first game out I have never seen graphics or animations like it. Character Models felt like they had substance to them vs. games that came before it. You wouldn’t clip through people or things. You would have impact with them. Things containing clothes had physics to them. One of the biggest downsides was the texture work and environmental/model design variety.
  
• Audio: The audio of the entire game sounds very poorly recorded. Most of the sounds from the environment and characters sound alike it was recorded on speaker phone. And the main character Altair has an American accent which throws everything off.
  
• Performance/Bugs: The game crashes at start on the default exe. You have to go into files and force the DX10 version to be the launch exe. And to get a controller to work, it requires a bunch of wonky steps. Through out the game there are many graphical bugs as well. Other than that the game runs smoothly.

Who won? You decide!

Pros
+Unique Story
+Graphics Ahead Of Its Time
+Simple But Effective Combat
Cons
-Graphical/Performance Issues
-Story Has Filler
-Controller First Designed

• Story: The story was fun at the start when you went back in time. But over the course of the game the reasoning behind what you were doing just began to drag. There wasn't enough substance to hold your attention through the short runtime. The characters at the time might have been funny, but in todays games they would be considered annoying. Definitely not worth your time running through more than once. Simplified version of the story is bomb goes boom back in the 1940's. Then comes modern day component when you have to find said bomb to make it not go boom again.
  
• Gameplay: The shooting is actually decent for being a game from 2010. There is no prone which is a shakeup from the traditional COD and Battlefield games. But that is mostly what the game consists of. Glorified target practice because the enemies are dumb, but they do do heavy damage even on normal difficulty. Vehicle segments perform rather poor. The one gameplay element that sets BFBC2 apart at the time was the destruction. but even its implication of it is in predetermined chucks when you decide to destroy things. Online is where the gameplay shines. It makes the basic destruction and other components fun when others are involved.
  
• Multiplayer: Online on PC contains the annoyance of its anti-cheat not working properly out of the box. But there are many fixes online for that. None of which I wasted my time with. But when I played the online back when it came out on Xbox 360. It was a blast to play. Being one of my first online full scale experiences. This game contains some of the best designed Battlefield maps ever made. And conations the best implantations of the Rush gamemode on said maps. The unlock progression system doesn't hold up to todays standards but it gets the job done. The player base is small now, but it is still there. Much more of a fun experience to play than the campaign that is for sure.
  
• Graphics: They don't hold up to well today. Due to the older version of the Frostbite Engine. But they get the job done. The color palette through the game is very muted which doesn't help. And many assets are reused heavily throughout the game. Both online and offline. The environments and and objects/buildings feel very empty both in the sense of clutter and texture detail. Gun models might be the only decent visual in the game.
  
• Audio: The sound design was game changer when it released. But doesn't hold up today either. Partially due to the repetitive soundboard. There are much better sounding Battlefield games out that's for sure.
  
• Performance/Bugs: The game should run at a high refresh rate on any modern pc now matter the graphical settings or resolution. When it came to bugs the only noticeable ones where random bits of geometry popping in/out and such. And audio effects clipping. The heaviest bug was at multiple times at the end of a level my PC would lock up on the loading screen. Forcing me to restart my PC and restarting at the previous checkpoint.

Pros
+Interesting Story
+Detailed/Varied Environments
+Old Game Holds Up
Cons
-Poor Textures
-Bad DLC's
-Graphical Glitches