Recent reviews by SeansShow

I've played and enjoyed many a rhythm game. The devs of this utterly nailed it in that it makes you uncontrollably smile from ear to ear...a combination of the memes, the baboons, the trivia, the tracks and accompanying videos. the pure feel good fun of the game and that madcap quest to be the trombone champ.

Fantastic.

That it triggers some people so hard that they refer to it as "woke" despite having never played the game deserves an award in itself.

Were I to tag the game I'd choose visual novel, artsy, great soundtrack, stylised - the black hole side to the story is confusing enough to warrant either a second playthrough or giving the game complete and utter attention during a playthrough. What really separates the game from the typical termed visual novels is the originality of the presentation, scratching away scenes and creating them as transitions, as simple as the art is being highly colourised sketches at times its beautiful and flanked wonderfully by that soaring soundtrack.

I don't think it's as bad as some people make out but it is poorly executed and suffers technical issues relating to connectivity per other reviews, per the steam hub and per my own experience with the game.

Carpenter Brut equalled a purchase here, set against a breakneck trailer of quips about the only good nazi being a dead one, contextual executions, gore, mobility slides and lots of guns and in truth the trailer does a god job of showing the pace and style of gunplay, this is how it plays. However.......

It's a poorly executed mish mash of styles which reuses what are small levels pieced together with loading screens to try to create a semi open world RPG of sorts with levelling, player levels, enemy levels and skill trees plus a currency which I'd struggle to imagine anyone wants in a game like this. For all that the gunplay is serviceable it fails on so many levels as a quest and mission driven open world game, they show on many counts that they didn't have the experience or take the right design choices to make it work. The size and loading of the levels removes any sense of grand game world which you would experience in say something like the Division and is arguably a genre requirement, you frequently hit enemies which will one shot you in a way which just isnt satisfying or handled as well as other open world games handle high level enemies and possibly the poorest aspect of the game is that the multiplayer simply doesn't reliably work.

You could add the twee nature of the characters to the list of complaints, I feel that most Wolfenstein fans would have given these characters the thumbs down (not the devil horns) not because there women in gaming leads but because the voice lines are twee zoomer rubbish which have a degree of humour if you're past the point of expecting a solid Wolfenstein product but taken unironically some of the lines and the silly hand gestures dont suit the series.

It's the sort of product you would buy at deep discount only for completion of a Wolfenstein collection with expectations of no form of multiplayer and a sub par, patchy, fragmented RPG game style in place of the fantastic story of the previous games.

Easiest recommendation in a long time.

It scratches that primordial gamer's itch of seeing XP orb after XP orb drawn to your character and ding after ding after ding with the latter end of a play through gravitating towards the simplest of mechanics, a DPS check. If you pass that you generally find yourself in the tiniest circle of space only created by the slashing and AOE of your weapons with the rest of the screen engulfed in enemies up to the end.

It's worth it because in the simplest terms it's what games should be....fun and addictive and with it being early access and at this stage already successful hopefully some of that goes into fulfilling the crazy amount of potential the game has.

Everything that you'd expect from an Anniversary edition ("remaster"?) and then some.

The videos are sharp given the source material. There are numerous UI's to choose from, numerous extras including a survival mode, a few documentaries one of which explores the senate hearing and controversy surrounding what by today's standards and back then was very tame / tongue in cheek camp horror in the face of the era of slasher flicks. There's another more up to date interview with Jim Riley and one of the original playable prototypes for this style of FMV games, "Scene of the Crime".

Replayability outside of achievements is arguable but in terms of pouring effort into a game which was one of the original trailblazers for interactive video / FMV gaming and in terms of the product standing out as a thick slice of gaming history for anyone remotely interested in the genre / the legacy of the game in terms of it's creativity / influence on gaming / unintended influence on video game classifications and the general design process of making something like this work, deserve a look.

On the gaming side there's the short lived fun of trapping ambling men wearing tights on their heads, wrapped head to toe in bin bag liners, with tropes of save the co-eds from comedic vampires alongside a crack squad of completely useless, goofball commandos.

10/10 for the time and effort Screaming Villains put into repackaging this, it's cheesy enough and fun enough to still be relevant in FMV gaming and the cast and crew looked like they had a blast making it which shows in the product and performances.

Frequently see Full Clip for sale as low as a few pounds, for that price very much worth the double dip.

I've platinumed the original on PS3 back on release and thoroughly enjoyed it but I guess the best way to sell the game would be to look at who it's made by...People Can Fly (Painkiller series) & Cliff Blezlinksi (UT. Gears series) and it shows in the gunplay, actual design of the guns, game mechanics and styling.

The elephant in the room, for me at least, were elements of the dialogue, characters, story side which come off as trying a touch too hard, a cringefest, marmite. Some love it and I know some loath it, People Can Fly have talked candidly before about pressures put on them to go down that route and yeah, im not a huge fan of that but the overall substance of the game, skill kills and Anarchy mode solidly outweigh the negatives and like most UE3 games it's aged well for a decade old game.

It's a well made game for sure, for me the story is overwhelmingly the most captivating aspect of the game, almost Tron but not quite, laden with 80's references including that old staple the DeLorean.

What I would say though is as a tagged "metroidvania" it's lite on that aspect, it introduces power ups and enemies at an alarming rate then you never see or need to use them again. As an example colour / elemental matching is a nice idea but it's completely unnecessary for completion of the game. At one stage your a horse, then it morphs into a robot and then all of that is never to be seen again. In specific areas, even across the broader game that thick and fast approach comes across as muddled, less is more at times when you make a comparison with something like Guacamelee (and two dozen others) where every power up has a clear purpose game wide...dimension switching, colour matching which is a requirement to beating enemies and just more refinement generally and certainly more refinement to the platforming and combat.

Nitpicking aside however it's an enjoyable playthrough with the casual approach to difficulty allowing the story to take centre stage.

Some of the games mechanics are more representative of games of yesteryear and with that in mind a younger generation possibly won't appreciate this as much as those that played it on original release, that said it stands the test of time exceptionally well and strikes the finest of balance between taking an older game and pouring enough love and technical improvements into it without completely removing the feel or look of the original.

The only thing I would change (other than the unresponsive double beat timings in the dance off) is the checkpoint system which has a knack for saving when you don't wont it to and not saving when you want it to, otherwise surprisingly good fun in 2021....even on Insane difficulty.

NOT JUST a cult classic or classic platformer, I'd say it falls more under classic game.

Why? A combination of Double Fine's distinctive art, humour and story writing. The originality of levels being representations of characters brains and the games overall originality which comprises everything from standard platforming (not a millions miles away from A Hat in Time), to orb racing, a platforming take on a civ style board, rampaging through cities as an oversized monster and a disguise laden level amongst others set in a semi open world hub linking it all.

It's testament to how good the game is that it still holds up to most things and likely inspired a huge percentage of developers and subsequent platformers.

Although not as well fleshed out as it could have been I appreciated the representation of such topics in gaming. It's brave as generally it brings out the more vocal, uglier side of gamers.

From a pure gaming standpoint however in comparison to their previous games it's a nearly but not quite for me in every department. It ticks every DontNod box ie. young LGBT+ ensemble and themes, powers, some real world issues thrown in, even runs a fairy tale alongside all of this in the form of Mary Anns book much like LIS2 with Sean's wolf story and this is a negative for me. LIS felt very fresh because of what it brought to the genre, repeating it to a cookie cutter formula I think will start to get very very old, very quickly, I feel there better than this, more creative.

Everything else from themes to storytelling just lacks something, the transgender themes aren't explored well enough to be as meaningful as they could, the powers are somewhat meh and I agree with some of the comments about it being slow. It's not slow as in slow burner, slow with an explosive kick, slow suspenseful but more close to slow as a week in jail and this is coming from an older gamer who enjoyed the slow burn of LIS2 never mind the younger generation which embraced the first LIS games characters but struggled with everything thereafter.

It is good but not their finest work for sure and certainly leans on well established DontNod tropes, for better or for worse.