Recent reviews by Twisted

It had the best story and writing in gaming when I first played it many years ago.

Returning to it years later, it's still the best story and writing in gaming.

I imagine when I return to it again and again over the next few decades, it'll still be the best.

After four playthroughs, I can comfortably say that this is one of the best horror games I've played. Frictional Games used everything they learnt from Amnesia TDD, Justine and other games like Alien Isolation to craft one of the most effective and interesting horror experiences.

I can sit here and say I wish it was longer or had more replayability- I can comfortably beat the game in less than thirty minutes at this point- but for its price and what it was trying to do, Amnesia: The Bunker doesn't miss.

What I Want more than anything for the future of this game is a mode with a randomized map and randomized objectives. Some interesting game modifiers like having a larger bunker or two monsters could go a long way to turn this from a 6 hour single experience for most players to an infinitely replayable and revisitable lifetime experience.

Resident Evil 5 is the first Resident Evil game I ever played, fresh on my PS3. I loved this game and played it back and forth multiple times, unlocking all the best weapons and even doing some speedrunning to unlock the infinite ammo RPG.

Unfortunately, it's not 2009 anymore. Fresh off my playthroughs of RE8, RE4: Remake, and RE4: Original, I decided to dive headfirst into RE5, and... I can't finish it. This game just doesn't provide a quality experience that's worth my time anymore.

Let me emphasize something. In March/April, I played through RE4 Remake, then RE4 Original, and then did an entire play-through of RE4 Remake again. They're longer games than RE5, but I STILL couldn't bring myself to beat RE5. I'm a fan of these games; I'm not here to tell you that I don't like the arcadey-shooty action, but I am here to tell you that this is probably the worst RE game, with 6 not considered because I haven't played that one.

Let's begin with the gameplay in particular; despite being a sequel to RE4, it somehow feels clunkier. Weapons like the shotgun lack their weight and wide spread from RE4, and melee attacks are much worse at crowd control, making it much easier for enemies to frame trap you in the animation and hit you immediately afterwards. The inventory is frustratingly limited, with 19 slots shared between two players, but you can't drop items; weapons and ammo take up entire slots, so you'll have at least 12 slots dedicated to weapons and ammo. Leaving only six slots for consumables or additional ammo slots. Not to mention you can't drop items, so the manic trading and fiddling you'll have to do just to get a red and green herb into one person's inventory so they can combine them is ridiculous. If you want to wear armor or hold grenades, That's another slot, too.

Your AI companion may be the dumbest AI companion in gaming; Sheva has literally stood there and stared at me throughout the entire dying state before. There were three times where I fought entire boss encounters and she didn't fire a single bullet, and she would often ignore combo melee attacks at crucial times. The AI is also hard countered by the chainsaw boss' rampage, causing me to get two game overs in a row despite not getting hit a single time in either boss attempt, and due to adaptive difficulty, the game was suddenly dumbed down on the third attempt, and I don't enjoy that at all. They're also just not coded very well, so often they would cancel their action to loot a nearby object, or they'd refuse to use the right weapon for the job, instead prioritizing always using the pistol. I had to force them to run out of pistol ammo just so they would use some of their 40 rifle ammo, only for them to start aggressively picking up every handgun ammo drop in the level.

Level design feels very uninspired, Instead of set pieces it feels like a lot of similar, boxy rooms filled with a horde of enemies that funnel in from one direction. Later on it becomes a cover shooter with gun zombies, yeah, seriously. This game somehow feels like a slog to play, even if it's quite short. My 7 hours of playtime were broken up over about 5 play sessions over weeks because there was never a hook to keep me playing or excited compared to past RE titles. A few highlight areas are the marshlands and the pitch-black mine, but such set pieces are few and far between, and are brought down by incredibly boring puzzle sections like the mirror puzzle in the ruins.

The game also heavily features on-rails turret segments and QTEs, and... they're not great. Particularly the QTE bindings, how am I supposed to quickly press F + V when my fingers are on WASD? RE4 may have had QTEs but they weren't overly aggressive and had better bindings than this.

I'd also like to bring some attention to the story and cut scenes, which are a massive step down from the original RE4. With low video and audio quality, some of these cutscenes are just shockingly bad, and not in a campy, fun way.
When the protagonists are being morons and refusing to shoot a war criminal, Irving, that has killed thousands of people, who's vulnerable and right in front of them, I'm left a little confused and frustrated. I've shot people so many people during gameplay, why am I giving this guy an opportunity? Then when they're dying, Chris even feels sympathetic for them afterwards, sympathetic for a man that catalysed the deaths of 1,000s with potentially billions next. It leaves me in complete disbelief at the low quality of the writing.
Chris is a personality black hole in this one, but Sheva is honestly a good character even if her design is pushing it in terms of being too sexualized over practical function. I liked Wesker, but with every year that passes, his entire character archetype only ages worse. The game is fortunate that it's just self-aware enough to not be cringe. It's also a story about how colonialism is bad while using a lot of racist tropes, such as implying the tribals are savages or giving them generic Native American war cries. The fact that there isn't a bigger emphasis on how the Africans that were used as a test bed for this zombie outbreak are the real victims in this kind of situation makes the story collapse into itself. And while I appreciate that's not really what RE5 is going for, it still went places it really didn't need to, mostly out of ignorance.

I can see how this game could be fun if you have a friend you can bounce off of; I really do, but everything is more fun with friends, and as a single-player experience, I can't begin to recommend this.

I'd give the original RE4 a 9/10, but RE5 is more like a 5 or 6/10.
And this rating makes sense, RE4 was built with a lot of time and care. It had so much talent and loved poured into it that not even the remake over a decade later can best it in every area. RE5 was likely made with tighter time constraints with fewer of the talented staff that worked on RE4. Sorry if I've mentioned RE4 a lot in this review, but it's important to recognise how similar these two games are, but how a lot of insidious changes can make or break a game.

I hope they don't remake this.

One of my favourite Triple-A releases in the modern era of gaming. Endless replayable fun in one of the most engaging combat and war sandboxes in perhaps all of gaming. It's a unique experience you can't get from any other game, and there's a reason I've replayed the entire game from start to finish three separate times over the six years it's been released.

And to take this even further, it's also set in the world of The Lord of the Rings, which gives it an added edge in terms of lore and intrigue. While the main story itself is nothing special; it's closer to fan fiction than anything else, the game is self-aware and doesn't waste your time. It knows that the story is just a vehicle to contextualise the game play, and it does this excellently with many surprisingly compelling characters. This game just wouldn't be as fun if it tried to tell a long, serious, cinematic story.

My only criticisms of the game are:
The initially scummy microtransactions WB Games forced into the experience, along with some especially mediocre DLC, Fortunately, the microtransactions have been completely removed, and instead all the benefits you could have gotten from that system are given out with an in-game economy with plentiful currency, so you never feel like you have to grind even on the hardest difficulty.
The game definitely isn't balanced or designed around "Gravewalker" or "Brutal" levels of difficulty, with enemies often attacking you during animations such as the captain intros or captain "fleeing/enraged" cutaways, causing you to immediately take significant damage, and getting one shot by captains in this difficulty isn't unusual. This also happens often; sometimes you could be executing an enemy and another orc is swinging at you during the i-frames of the animation, and you get frame-trapped into taking a hit afterwards.
Gravewalker/Brutal also makes stealth more difficult, making some of the stealth challenges in-game nearly impossible. This clearly wasn't tested.
Enemies can also be bizarrely aggressive sometimes, in ways that can feel inconsistent. Some enemies will unnaturally leap and lock onto Talion from great distances while they're attacking, particularly if they're enraged. This doesn't match their steps, causing them to unnaturally float or leap towards you in a manner that looks janky, unnatural and always catches me off guard. Also, when approaching enemies in stealth, enemies are supposed to be briefly surprised, giving you a chance to perform a stealth attack in this brief reprieve window. For some reason, this just doesn't work if there seems to be an arbitrary number of orcs, like three or more, spotting you simultaneously, causing you to just stumble around like a goof because you can't attack from stealth- which I'm not a huge fan of, and takes some getting used to.
Sometimes this brief surprise window doesn't happen at all, and the enemy instantly locks onto you with a quick attack that comes out in 0.1–0.2 seconds. This type of hit often gets me the most because even if it can be countered, it's so quick and unexpected that I can't react fast enough.

Overall, Brutal and Gravewalker difficulty are still fun; you just really have to go into it with the perspective that the game is actively not being fair, and you should absolutely not play fair either. This does create a problem where you're encouraged to cheese encounters and only use the absolute strongest methods like Shadow Strike Pull or summoning a Graug, especially when the stakes are high. Playing like this isn't necessarily the most fun, though, so I recommend your first playthrough be on Nemesis difficulty; it's definitely a much better balanced experience with less severe consequences for the game's janky moments.

One of the best games ever made, and it almost all comes from the phenomenal writing.

I like it a lot

This game is great in theory, but it has a really big problem. After about only 3-4 hours, you'll effectively finish everything this game has to offer, unless you want to jump into the ranked pit with all the sweaty tryhards. If you have a life elsewhere and don't feel like you have something to prove, this game offers nothing beyond completing some basic PVE content and building a deck.

1. The PVE content is far too basic, it basically boils down to several tutorials for deck archetypes and if you build an even remotely functional deck you'll slaughter anything they offer you.
2. It's far too easy to get an amazing meta deck. In only 4 hours, I finished an extremely strong meta deck and proceeded to go 3/3 on first day ranked. (Against some good decks too!)

Functionally, modern Yu-Gi-Oh kinda fails as a PVP game. Card effects are too complicated, too frequent and turns take too long. It's not fun reading and keeping track of all the cards you've never seen before that your opponent is using. Additionally, it feels extremely awkward to spend two minutes summoning endless cards and looping deck combos while your opponent sits there twiddling their thumbs. It makes you feel like a bit of a jerk and it's not fun for either player honestly. I mean the timer for this game starts at like 480 seconds; modern Yu-Gi-Oh just isn't that fun to play vs strangers.
PVE however, could have been the perfect time for this format to shine. A gradually climb in difficulty while you get new and improved cards to tailor and improve your deck to rise to whatever challenges appear could have really made this game into a unique Yu-Gi-Oh experience.
What we ended up getting was just an excellent dueling simulator, but I'd argue that its only value is in dueling with friends. And yeah, it's so easy to get all the cards you could possibly need for free, that this game is actually an alternative to playing Yu-Gi-Oh IRL. Get two people with this game on your phones, and why would you ever play physical Yu-Gi-Oh again? It's cheaper, there are less rule issues, and it looks and sounds great.
I guess in a way the game sacrifices a potential wider appeal by enabling its most hardcore fanbase. I genuinely think Konami were accidentally too generous with this game, and are going to begin dialing it back rapidly.

What would really improve this game would be the ability to face PVE challenge decks where you can take your time, and really push yourself against an increasingly difficult set of AI combatants. You wouldn't have to deal with the issues PVP with a stranger has. But given that I already have an extremely powerful meta deck in four hours, there's no longer any point in playing PVP or even PVE. What do I have to prove? What do I have to gain? I already have all my hand traps, my boss monsters, my extra deck and negates.
There's no more progression to be had, and no more content beyond endless PVP and basic PVE tutorials. Therefore, I can't really justify playing this game again.

Best FPS of the decade, and I've played almost all the great ones that have released.

It's just not fun.

The game bored me so much that I'd actually want to stop playing it, and had to force myself to keep going.
Mechanically the game does a very poor job of hooking you, and drawing you in as a player.
Which is a problem when paired with lethargic gameplay that is purposely sprinkled with annoyances.
I'm sure the game dev is well-meaning, and the game looks great, but on a mechanical level the game is sub par.

You might be wondering why this game is Overwhelmingly Positively reviewed, then? That's because it's in a genre people are really craving, and it's not complete crap. But if you're like me, and you don't have a lot of time to play games, this one is more likely to waste your time.

10/10, one of my favourite games.