Recent reviews by Abusive Plague Doctor

On paper, it's crazy good, but the ui and the visibility is so bad it kills the gameplay

This game allows you to experience infinity.

Let me explain.

I assume you might be in the higher end of the intelligence spectrum since you are reading this, but of course, you will play with less gifted players.

While playing, one of them start yelling.

Then another. Then a dozen. Maybe that friend of yours you thought to be brilliant.

Deep inside you, you want to follow the group, and then it happen, you start pressing the yell button.

The others notice that even you, the usually wiser one did it. AND THEN THEY DO IT AGAIN.

You have to follow trough. Your team is charging. Everyone roar again, INCLUDING YOU.

The whole battlefield is full of clamour and people battlecrying around.

You die, you start running towards the fight and you press the same button.

It doesn't stop until the end of the game.

Last thing you know 3 hours went by.

Played during the free weekend, already done with all the content.

Despite all it flaws there is some good things in that game, but it feels like a beta at best, from an indie publisher.

Art direction, gameplay, maps, balancing and variety, everything feel on the cheap side and unlocking stuff is extremely slow, and when you finally get it, it's pretty much more of the same you already have.

This franchise is weird, every new release, you get less stuff for the same price.

Surprising pure genuine fun.
The game is basically a puzzle of inventory management based on resident evil inventory system.
I haven't been into a game for a while, I really enjoyed those two hours on this game.
My only downside is the repetitive music but that's merely a detail.

Strong GOTY contender here.

A great game of grand strategy, also the greatest scam I could witness by myself, and I did work for an insurance company.

If you never played any games like this one, don’t expect to see tanks shooting at each other, you will mostly stare at maps filled with small symbols for hours that represent your frontlines clashing against other units.

Heart of iron is mostly a game about logistics and calculation, but you will probably get overwhelmed by the daunting amount of things to think about, and forget about most of them. I, for example, didn’t know I had a navy to manage until at least 100 of hours in. But I still had fun making sure that Fascist Tibet would backstab China and be the true Asian overlord.

There’s two fun parts in that game, micro managing units, and doing unexpected things, like preventing that German moustache-wearing guy to invade half of Europe by invading him first in 1936, in the name of whatever nowadays-irrelevant ideology they used to believe in back then.

Once you did win WW2 as intended, or did rewrite history once or two, the game could get stale, do not worry, because the base game is hard to understand, but quite lacking, and there’s a big pile of dlc for you to buy to fill the void and unlock the (overpriced) content (that should have been in the base game).

And then once you clear that content, do not worry! Because the modding community got your back.
Utopia, Dystopia, Historical, Star Wars, Post-apocalyptic, Anime, Ponies, whatever you want, a modding team or a basement living made it, and most of the time, they do a better job at it than the base game devs.

You will certainly feel bad for buying those overpriced dlcs, but it’s fine, because every mechanics added are put to a good use in most mods.

Also, buy the base game first, see if you can understand it before buying the dlcs, and buy them on sales. Don’t be an idiot with your money. Or give it to me so I can also be an idiot with your money.

I remember having a lot of fun playing this game, the sci-fi ambiance mixed with the challenging horrors, to the point where I did most of the content in the hardest difficulty.
The game would reward you for aiming well (headshots are kings, like any fps) and the different guns felt good to play with, I would even sometimes stay a few seconds staring at the models and reloading animations, and that would cover the whole clunky-ness of the game.
Oh yes, it was getting stale after a while from lack of new content, but I would still enjoy it from time to time.
After a while tho, the game changed drastically, from the ambiance, going from horror to wacky, adding a lot of free gold skins, weird pinkish stuff or “fun” skins, and maps that looks sometimes like a lsd trip. It’s not that I got my badge at the fun police, but I feel like it took a lot from this game, it lost its soul. It’s neither fun, neither serious most of the time.
Not only would it lose its identity, but content wise, most of the new maps are taken from the workshop, almost barely changed, coming with a bunch of guns behind a paywall.
I don’t mind paying for them, but (you can test them if someone else own them in the server) half of them feel either gimmicky or weak, the other half a straight up easy mode, and most of the time the models are bland.
Every new update seems lazy, to the point where some new guns are basically a reskin of an existing one with a sci-fi reskin and a gimmick, there’s an upgrade system that would add replayability and incentive on trying new guns, but again it does only change damage, and it doesn’t matter most of the time since monsters either already dies or doesn’t after the upgrade.
A last point to add is all about game design, it seems that the only fix I could witness in the game difficulty is purely around making the game tedious. Spawning monsters behind you, monsters that are headshot immune and can hinder you from long range, and an annoying boss that can wipe you sometimes through a wall or if you happen to stay out of cover more than 5 sec.

At least the base game is cheap, you can get a solid bunch of hours from it with a bunch of friends, but everything is supposed to be fun with friends, even bad games.

Yakuza : Like a Dragon is basically what would be your j-rpg set in our modern world, but with more Japan in it, which is perfect since it’s actually set in Japan.
Thing is...
Turn based gameplay doesn’t allow that much thinking or interactions during fights, but the animations are entertaining enough to make you go through, and I really hated the gameplay yet made it trough over 50hours of playtime! And I’m no masochist I swear.

So why was I still playing? Oh boy, there’s so much side content, funny (or boring!) minigames, side stories, a big town to explore making it a completionist wet dream. Your side characters are very interesting, interact often and are feeling really alive, while chasing all those new crazy animations by levelling your team feels very rewarding.
Add over this a great soundtrack, a mix of dubstep and more traditional Chinese (yes!) music and here, you got my game of the year.

It’s cliché, yet innovative, it’s wholesome, yet serious, and out of that weird shaker recipe I ended up having a lot of fun.

(DLCs are useless and overpriced, don’t buy them)

DooM.
A unique experience you have to try at least once in your life before going to hell.
It's like being a crackhead after snorting three lines of coke but with degenerate pagan music in the background that goes faster as you shoot.
And you will shoot a lot, because reloading is time lost not killing demons or ripping off their arm to beat them with.
As you can see from the previous sentence, this game is violent, and that's the whole point of it, making it as violent as possible for the sake of it. And while there is a story, you don't have to actually follow it, and that's a good because timeouts are scarce but annoying and that will make you hate dying, as the game is balanced well enough so you don't fall asleep at any time.
Truely one of the few games that intellectuals, ret*rds and epileptics can enjoy.
Just some brainless good dumb fun.

This game is the proof we can remake games successfully with a lot of content.
If you are interested in this game start with Yakuza 0 or you won't understand half of the story. If you come from 0 This game is basically more of it, a bit shorter tho but still a good sequel.

Don't expect a chill management game or the classic city builder.
You may do good at first, make promises to your people. Build trust, gather ressources. Improve the living conditions of your town. Save people in the frostland.

Until fear start to spread slowly, and the insidious cold approaches.
As panic increases and pressure rise, served by a beautiful crescendo music, your tragic companion as you cross the line, start using repression, starve your people, lock them, refuse to help dying refugees, make public executions because the city must survives...