Recent reviews by AlumiuN

Rise Of The Triad is a game I have known existed for almost my entire life - an old physical Apogee shareware catalogue, sadly long gone, registered its name in my head from a young age, and it was mentioned here and there in various places by various people as I was growing up. Somehow, until this remaster, I had managed to unintentionally avoid playing it, despite playing and loving many of its contemporaries, a lot of which it was compared to (often unfavourably). All of this in mind, I knew I wanted to finally play it, but I was also prepared to run through it and call it a day whenever I got bored of it, consigning it to the status it seems to have been given popularly - a historical curio.

Playing through in the order in the menu - shareware into the full Dark War campaign followed by Extreme ROTT, I found myself liking it, and wanting to play a bit more every now and then, but it didn't grab my full attention. It was at about 30 hours in, partway into the Extreme ROTT expansion, something clicked. Deep in the sea of surreal moving walls, spinning blades, pyrotechnics and overenthusiastic jump pads that make up ROTT's arsenal of environmental death traps, I came to understand that ROTT is not a game that exists to make sense.

ROTT is a messy game, built on a messy engine that was already a couple of years out of date by the time it released, using messy conventions that barely made sense at the time, and yet somehow it not only doesn't feel limited by it, it *thrives* in it. It's silly, it knows it's silly, and it knows that you know it's silly. It doesn't try to make itself look or feel realistic, even by the standards of the time. It gives you a bunch of silly weapons and powerups, a big pile of enemies, some weird platforming challenges, and points you in the general direction of more things for you to blow up.

The shareware and original campaigns show their age, but are quite fun. The new campaign, built by various Nightdive and New Blood devs, serves to even more strongly highlights the game's stronger aspects, with more imaginative levels and layouts, more generous availability of the best weapons (i.e. anything explosive), and bigger piles of enemies to expend them towards, and the remaster itself is well made (including Andrew Hulshult's soundtrack from the 2013 reboot was a particularly nice touch).

But for me, the most surprising part of this package is Extreme ROTT. It has... let's say a poor reputation, and by the standards of the shooter ROTT otherwise is, it's not an unfounded one. A lot of the levels are poorly decorated, often quite simple in terms of layout, and in a lot of cases, *very* difficult. But if you can look past that, Extreme ROTT is full of some extremely creative ideas and uses of existing objects. In some levels, it almost plays more like a puzzle game. In others, it plays more like a platformer. In a few, it plays like nothing else I've ever seen, a chaotic maelstrom of blood, explosions, moving walls with strange faces on them, trap elevators that teleport you into a huge open space full of enemies, thirty enemies shouting "HERE, CATCH" simultaneously, robots that look they were made from used cans of food with wheels on them, and the giant illuminated face of Scott Miller watching it all unfold.

I couldn't stop playing. Not because the gameplay was exceptional, it was merely solid. Not because the graphics were all that interesting, it's mostly greys, browns and reds. I couldn't stop playing because, despite knowing that I had seen all the objects before, even having come to understand their behaviour fairly well, I had *no* idea what would be thrown at me next. The level design constantly showed me the same building blocks that all the levels I'd played before had used, but in a way I hadn't seen them used before, or even considered that they could be used.

In short, this game won't be for everyone. Although it gets a lot right, there are plenty of questionable design decisions, some fairly strong limitations, and the "looking up and down by stretching" technique (also employed by other games of a similar age) will make some people feel sick. But for me, it made exactly the right impression, in the right order - first it endeared itself to me with its sense of fun, then it reinvented itself repeatedly, first with its unusual expansion, and then with the remaster's new levels, drawing me further and further into a game that I hadn't expected would be capable of it, just to see what it would come up with next. This may indeed be a historical curio, but it is one that is well worth studying.

EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot - if all of this wasn't enough, the remaster has a very capable built-in level editor and Steam Workshop support, and there's already a bunch of properly solid user levels for it.

Winner of the official 2023 Most Badass Superweapon award

Scorn is an art piece. Everything the game has - the visual style, the music, the sound design, the careful wordless hints about the environment's history and purpose, even the strange and often awkward combat - are in service of its atmosphere. I can understand parts of that being offputting to some, but for me, as a complete and horrifying experience, it is a significant success.

Cool concept, and fantastic song (as expected from CoL), however:
- Exceptionally poor performance (averaging under 30FPS on Medium on an RX 5700XT, dropping well into single digits when inside a tornado)
- Buggy movement, particularly with respect to vertical control (or lack thereof), in my case leading to the player's orb becoming seemingly stuck in the ceiling
- No options for volume level
- Enough flashing lights that the game should really come with an epilepsy warning

A solid Hexcells-like game with a few interesting tricks up its sleeve.

One of the most fun and ludicrously content-packed games I've ever played.

Think Minesweeper, but without having to ever guess and with a whole bunch of new mechanics to keep things interesting. Easily worth the extremely cheap asking price.

An ingenious and devilishly tough puzzle game, with one of the most inventive core mechanics I've ever seen.

Fluid combat, powerful weaponry, exquisite level design, brilliant particle effects and a fantastic soundtrack combine to show that not only did the Descent developers know what they were doing in the 90s, but that they haven't lost any of their skill in the intervening 20 years.

I have never before played a game where you can pause it indefinitely at any point to plan and even perform actions that still manages to feel so fast-paced. For extra fun, equip your character only with self-charging glitch traps and swappers, because everyone knows the way to efficiently deal with a group of guards is to teleport them all into space, one after the other, at high speed.