Recent reviews by Punished Eric

try harder lol
baby game smell you later

This game is the MGS2 of it's time. A game that sucks and is full of filler but everyone loves it because it has social commentary and political messages and "BRO THAT ENDING BLEW MY MIND" You people are normies and have never seen a good movie in your life so your standards for storytelling are set by bad video games like this.
Everyone jerks this game off like it's so smart and has such great world but it's unfortunately only as deep as a puddle, wide as the ocean it takes place in, but nothing inside of said shallow ocean. The writing isn't really the problem here it's more-so just the absurd amount of backtracking through boring tubes in, or the weak-@ss gunplay with really boring powers.
The guns feel so stiff and boring "but the powers" you cry, yeah what? electric bolt that stuns people, fire that doesn't do enough damage, bees that do much of the same, freeze powers that work the same way as electricity but it's permanent, these aren't actually fun toys for you to play with the enemies and have fun it's just another means of ending a splicer's life, all of them being inferior to the one they introduce to you at the beginning of the game which is zap+wrench hit/shotgun blast, fast, efficient, ever so slightly satisfying to do a combo move.
Most of my memories of this game are just walking around taking pictures of people and killing them really easily. It's not a great horror game (one good silent scare in the whole game you know the one) or a great shooter. I liked this game when I was 12 but that's because I hadn't played games with better, more interactive, more real and captivating worlds. This game fails at being a "lite-immersive sim." I wouldn't even call it that, it's just inspired by system shock but has no in depth systems. For a game so "groundbreaking" there's not much you can do to interact with the enemies or world, with all these fun powers you'd think they'd have really cool effects on the enemies making them behave differently, or having more creative world interactions than just "zap the pool of water, burn the pool of oil, hack the security cam" Playing this game as a teen I have already learned all the perfect strategies for this game and I have no reason to come back to this game or change my plasmids, upgrades or the way I play at all. The superior strategy in this game is easy and using weaker plasmids just makes the game longer and more boring-er. Why would I use Enrage, Cyclone Trap, or security bullseye when I can just zap and hit and the game ain't sh't.
People praise this game all the time for the passive Big Daddies but that's like the closest thing this game has to an interesting enemy that interacts with the environment and the player in a unique way, it'd be cool if other enemies acted in other ways but they just attack on sight because rapture is a boring place full of only hostile crazies that all act the same way. The setting looks/sounds cool but that's about it, there's some neat villains and some tragic audio logs but that's hardly anything new for it's time.
Oh and there's a broken morality system that is pointless. If you do the math sparing the little sisters loses you barely any Adam, the Adam you get from sparing them+the gifts that are left for you at adam vending machines give you with just slightly less Adam than the Evil player who gets the bad ending because he wanted more Adam to waste on weak useless plasmids after he maxed out the strongest plasmids. Being evil in this game sucks, it's not like other games where being evil is fun, killing innocents left right and center, stealing from people, being evil in this game means you murder children, being good in this game means you don't murder children, and turn them into even creepier "human girls" (the cured little sisters genuinely look so much scarier than the evil ones with glowing eyes) Being evil or good is not really a playstyle, or something that really changes the way you play the game. You get barely any additional Adam, and you have no fun while doing it, because the only difference is cutscenes.
This game walked so other mainstream action games that are inspired by immersive sims could run. This is just Dishonored but worse in every way. Worse powers, worse weapons and gear, worse mechanics, a more boring world with an endless amount of crazies to kill because the morality system is pointless. It's okay to be worse than dishonored, that game was made by really talented people 5 years later so don't feel too bad. This game is like a 6/10 at best and even then I think it's still boring, both in it's "very deep" story and it's gameplay that lacks impact in the moment and doesn't have any consequences for your actions on this world. It's probably lower than a 6 but I guess I'm just feeling nice today.

I really love this game but enemies attack without warning. They establish a rule that enemies attack when they have an exclamation point over them, but on later levels enemies just start advancing faster and attacking you with no warning whatsoever, the exclamation part is not over an enemy's head and they will hit you, meaning you can't anticipate what the enemy is going to do and you can't play around it. I've died many times because a basic enemy (not a boss that has a movement-boot icon telling me how many moves they are going to take) just moved 2-3 times and then smacked me and that's the run, it's now game-over. Why did I get killed there? I don't know because the game quite literally doesn't tell you. If the enemy doesn't have any way of telling that it's going to attack then I don't know which enemies I need to prioritize for attack or defending against enemy attack. The game is really fun but it just doesn't work, it establishes a clear gameplay rule for the players to follow and then breaks said rule. This kind of miscommunication simply can't be in a strategy-puzzle game, especially a rogue like where death means restarting.
It's like if I was playing XCOM and I saw a regular grey alien, and usually what they can do is move and shoot in one turn, or mind meld with another grey, imagine if you saw that grey and it just sprinted through your squad, shot 3 times and killed two of them, how would that be fair? The game clearly told me the rule, "greys move and shoot and mind meld" well this guy didn't do any of those so I couldn't form a plan for attack or defense in this STRATEGY game. If I see a guy in a robe at the back of the room with no exclamation point over his head, I'm going to prioritize the other enemies who ARE attacking me, but then my turn ends only for the robe guy to attack me. It's seriously like I'm back in gradeschool playing colonists vs natives and f'cking Blake keeps changing the rules, I shot you Blake "nah I had a shield" that's what Bumbo does. F'ck you Blake, this is why your parents divorced.
Please patch your game, it's a very good one, but this is actually a broken product. This game does not work, the instructions given to you when you start are false and any rules they made are broken as long as it is to the detriment of the player and the benefit of the game's enemies. What a shame.

I originally tried this game before buying it and I sure do regret actually buying it.
I can't restart missions from the pause menu. Aborting missions costs money. There are no manual saves. Any time a crew member dies you lose one star that you could have earned on the mission otherwise. I want to perfect every mission but whenever someone dies it's the same sh't every time: I either continue the mission and beat it knowing that I have to play it all the way through again and beat it again perfectly (not hard because I actually know where the rooms and enemies are now) or I can abort now, lose money and play through the entire mission perfectly. I'm already playing on veteran, I want the game to be hard I just also want to be able to make multiple attempts on a mission without losing time and in-game money. Losing money from aborting missions means you don't have that money to buy gear later in the game, soft-locking your save file because you are playing missions that were designed around higher tier weapons and gear.
I really hate that some asinine decision such as not having manual saving, or not allowing the players to restart missions. It's not just that aborting costs money, it makes you go back to your ship, back to the map screen, click on the mission, start the mission, watch your crew walk onto the ship and NOW you can restart the mission. It just makes me realize how much wasted time this game has already. Why is there no "fast-combat" setting? Why do I have to watch my robots walk slowly over to their point every time I tell them to move? Why do I have to watch the enemy's phase when there could easily be a setting or have a key I could press that skips it? I hope the sequel is good because there are things I really do love about this game, the XCOM-lite combat with bullet ricochets in a side-scroller, very cool, and pretty fun but it's lack of basic features or settings makes it genuinely unplayable to someone like me who wants to perfect every level.
Go ahead and tell me I'm bad at the game in the comments and give me the clown awards, you will only make me more powerful.

An immersive sim that is not immersive, or even anything like any immersive sim. I mainly make the comparison because the options the player is given to complete whatever objectives they have is so open in the same way that an Immersive Sim game is. I mean the description of the game name drops Deus Ex I think this Im-sim approach is very intentional.
This kind of freedom this game gives you, in a somewhat randomized rogue-like environment. It makes for probably the most replayable game in my steam library, that's pretty high praise as replayability is something I really look for in a game.

I just love the options to approach each problem in this game. Quite literally dozens of ways to complete each quest depending on your gear, your perks, your character and their ability, who you can hire in the area to help you, things in the environment you can interact with like air vents and computers, vending machines that let you buy new items that create new options for you. It really is endless and completely based on how that floor happens to be generated. I really think this game is my favourite rogue-like: So much randomization, constant choices for the player to make that will significantly impact their run, always rewarding the player, (level ups, chicken nuggets, money, quest reward items) a myriad of playable characters with unique "big quests" to complete, several options aka mutators to adjust difficulty to enjoy the game however the player wants.

Pro-tip for the combat, switching weapons slows down time so you basically have bullet-time in this game whenever you want, I was originally going to say the combat in this game is a bit too simple but you can actually use this to dodge bullets and get around enemies and it's really fun, the combat in this game is overall just more item based, you can use your skill to kill a melee enemy but if you are out-gunned then you are just out-gunned.

My only real complaints is that there aren't more mutators and more achievements. I 100% this game on achievements like 100 hours ago and I didn't even complete all the big quests for the whole roster of characters. Please Matt, add an achievement for "completed every big quest in the game" and another for "completed all DLC character's big quests" I know you are working hard on SoR2 and I'm really looking forward to it but PLEASE, I need to earn more achievements, I need to prove my love of this game to the whole of the steam community.

traps are gay now

This game is great and I love it, one of my favourites for a long time, it's one of the first games I bought on steam. It's a game that is very special to me, but it has some of the worst levels in any video game I've ever played, and some of the best levels in any video game I have ever played.

CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+END thank you very much
F'ck you Thieves Guild
F'ck you Mage Towers
Partially F'ck you Undercover
another partial F'ck you to Return to The Cathedral
F'ck you Strange Bedfellows

Some levels are actual horsesh't and some levels have great moments in them but have such massive maps with nothing. Everyone hates thieves guild (for justifiable reasons) but I replayed it recently and if it wasn't for the sewer that level would be pretty cool, it's just there's this huge sewer with dead ends that is connecting the multiple small manors of the guild leaders and the casino. If you didn't have to walk through the sewer of confusion to get anywhere the level would be great.
Most maps that have issues tend to have one glaring problem like the sewer, for example mage towers has 4 towers, all of them of which are only accessible from the key-locked bottom floor, even though all of the towers have connecting pathways and doors on the third floor, you can only access each tower by using a tower key on the first floor door on the outside and then unlocking the third floor door from the inside, but there's really no reason to go back into the tower through the third floor because you already entered it through the first floor and climbed all the way up the tower, you've completed the tower and the only reason to go back is navigating the level. Half of these towers have broken 1998 moving platforms that don't work most of the time, maybe it's not the platforms but the platforming and ledge grab mechanic? The controls in this game for the most part are excellent but jumping and climbing ledges is... iffy, and whenever I want to crawl through a window that is too short for me to stand in I'm going to be there for like a full minute trying. Mage Towers has a great level layout that's really easy to understand but like I said about the maps in this game: one design choice just f'cks it. Does it make sense that four high security mage towers should have only one access point, with one lock? yes that makes sense in the context of the world but it actually adds 20 minutes of playtime that is just walking around places where you already blackjacked everyone. I love this game and the sequel but they both really have the tendency to go from being really engaging and immersive to being really frustrating.
Many fans complain about the lack of "mansion levels" about the amount of supernatural levels and dungeon crawls. I was once with you, I think for like the first 3 years I played this game I only played the first 3 or 4 levels because down in the bonehoard as well as others confused me so much. After beating the game however I think the tomb raiding levels are amazing. I love down in the bonehoard and The Lost City now, the former has a few tunnels that can be frustrating but they don't have too many branching paths so on a replay while using my compass it was no problem. The lost city has some amazing visual storytelling showing you the talisman of fire early and making you explore and climb for it, beyond that the city itself is really cool. The atmosphere as usual is great in these levels and I love the approach to make this almost a horror game, I don't think I'll ever forget that zombie reveal in the mines when I first played Cragscleft. Using very in-depth stealth mechanics in a supernatural horror situation is something that is unique to this game and deadly shadows, instead of having some sh'tty outlast or amnesia horror-stealth this is an actual game that gives you tools and ways to move around enemies instead of cowering in a closet waiting to die. The non-human enemies present a challenge that is very doable, and one that is bound to the core gameplay of stealth. Rat-men and bug-men can be blackjacked, as well as the people that taste like crab and talk like people. Rat-men are really easy to fight 1 heavy swing and 2 light sword swings take them down, a couple regular arrows do the same. I'd argue the later levels don't force combat as much as some players criticize but I still do think the last levels of the game are for sure some of the weakest. Aside from when you kill a bugman and it gives you the objective to kill them all combat can be avoided here, especially escape! and since the final level is very linear and has a ton of space to maneuver I don't have a real problem with it. I won't spend any time defending Strange Bedfellows or Return to the cathedral, carrying an accomplice out of Cragscleft alright I'm in, saving a priest and carrying around corpses for funeral duty, no thanks I'm good. On higher difficulties they want you to kill ghosts too, forced combat is a complaint from all players, myself included. Not to say that levels that are annoying or I don't like should be skipped. I really do think this whole game should be experienced, for fans of stealth games, for writers of fiction, for anyone who would want to make a stealth game, this game is really something.
The legendary things that everyone says about this game are true, this is the progenitor of stealth games, the first game of the genre to knock it out of the park and even to this day when any dev is making a stealth game, said game will have to contend with Thief 1 and 2 and said game will typically have less depth in it's stealth systems. I honestly find it mind-blowing how few games have ripped this game off, how almost every single stealth game, games that I still would say I love, have just abandoned like half of the mechanics this game has, be it the light gem and the shadows providing different levels of visibility for your character, or the importance of the sound of your footsteps and where you are walking. These in depth sight-and-sound systems have been modernized today with "stay crouched and you will move silently and be less visible" which is basically just a toggle between "stealth mode" and "running/action mode" this isn't a jab at Dishonored I love that whole series dearly, but I find it extremely common in stealth games that the only mechanic really is "crouch to be less visible and quieter" where as with this game's mechanics the player is constantly paying attention to where they are and what they are doing. This creates player decisions for such a simple thing as just walking, I know where to walk and how to walk doesn't sound like a captivating "video game" nowadays with all these flashy stealth kills, but it's those subtler things that make this game magical, are what make you feel "sneaky" because you have to think about how to sneak. Getting into this game was such an ordeal for me, a story of me getting into hardcore PC games, because that's what I'd say this really is: This is a game made by total nerds and it's hard, it's not exactly user friendly for modern gamers, it will not hold your hand, but that's why it's so great to actually get through it. Learning to read your map and use your compass to navigate, rebinding the controls to be a bit more sane, quicksaving and saving very often. I can say after 100 hours and owning this game for almost 12 years I beat the game, and I can play this game like Garrett. I can be a master thief who can never be spotted on many of my favourite maps. It's extremely gratifying and it's a unique challenge that only this series presents, be silent, do not be seen and complete your objectives, what most stealth games do, this game embodies, the title of the game is perfect, if this was a superhero game journalists would be saying "It really does make you feel like Thief-Man." I love this game, it's not perfect, but most of my favourite games aren't.

this game reeks and I didn't even want it
It's honestly astonishing how this sequel can be worse in literally every single way, let me sell this game on steam, I never wanted it, only F.E.A.R.
You can buy this game individually, and you can buy Fear 3 individually, but you can't ONLY buy the first game. In order to sell these sequels they are actually forcing you to buy them. Extremely bizarre business practice.

This is like the 6th borderlands game and they still haven't learned that we don't want to stand around waiting for an NPC for finish their unfunny dialogue in a MULTIPLAYER LOOTER SHOOTER.

Imagine you wanna play diablo with your friends, or destiny or whatever some multiplayer looting game, now every quest you accept, and turn in, in fact every quest objective you complete, your friend makes you all stop playing the game so he can show you this cringe recording of this guy bombing at stand-up comedy, you have to sit there for like a full minute each time and watch this video in your discord call, with all of you and your friends just sitting there, not laughing, whole audience in the recording, not laughing. And now you can go back to shooting and having fun and exploring and getting really cool guns.

This isn't f'cking skyrim, this isn't an actual RPG with a story and world I want to get invested in, same thing with BL3, no one cares about this stupid world, you are all hack writers and no one thinks this is clever except for 12 year olds. People do not want to play these games so they can watch an NPC talk to them for 5 minutes at a time, this isn't Mass Effect where the characters and world are fascinating and complex, this is a stupid reddit joke game that literally makes me sit and watch while they go "ERM KIND OF AWKWARD"
The writing in this game is so much better than Borderlands 3, it's genuinely way funnier and I remember on my first character actually laughing sometimes which is extremely surprising, but really the point is that you shouldn't have such a pace-breaker in a multiplayer game, why are you making me and my friends sit around not laughing not having fun, when we were doing that just 5 minutes ago? Regardless of whether the dialogue is interesting, or funny, or has actual character, we don't want it in a multiplayer shlooter, we don't want to sit around waiting for the game to continue. To hammer in my point even further I wrote most of this while Zygaxis was talking to me in Brighthoof and all I could do was just wait for him to finish.

THERE IS NO REASON THAT ANY AND ALL DIALOGUE GIVEN BY NPCS CANNOT BE DONE VIA RADIO WHILE WE ARE SHOOTING THINGS
I hate to use all caps but that's really the only point I need to get across. There is no reason for the pace to stop in these games, if you made a quest in this game that requires the player to sit still and watch the NPCs talk, that's a bad quest in a borderlands game, you f'cked up, that's bad.
Oh uh, the game is fun in the background, shooting feels good. I like the guns. why is this a positive review?

(Review text hidden)