Recent reviews by Coolkiddo

From my playthrough, the game was quickly showing it's hand as trial and error stealth. The atomsphere and attention to details from the movie is a nice treat but doesn't carry this game on it's own. The alien is also a nice thing to observe but it gets really boring hiding from the threats for the millionth time.

I've played many stealth and horror games and so far this game is all just set dressing and not much substance underneath all that neat art direction.

Then after watching some playthroughs I think I made the right choice ending my playthrough when I did, I'm definitely am going to get sick of this game only a few hours in. I do not understand the glowing praise around the game even having seen Alien movies myself.

It's worse than Wasteland 2 by a mile, lots of downgrades that add up to be very annoying over time. I seriously tried to give it some time to grow on me, but I keep just thinking about trying yet another Wasteland 2 run.

The gameplay is better, that's practically it's only shining aspect here. There's more guns, more enemies, some skills are combine from the past game, what's not to love?

The story is trash, you are expected to take the game seriously from the intro but the whole game is filled with factions that are just satire, no reason to not just murder everyone and never feel bad about it. Decisions that make sense end up getting into a twist for irritating reasons, I usually end up having to murder everyone to create a sensible resolution to the side content that crops up instead of being able to talk my way into one. Don't worry about the continuation of Wasteland 2's ending, it's not going to be expanded upon beyond "We simply won and are displaced".

The UI decisions are absolutely horrendous. Everything is littered with buttons and submenus that are not easy to look at. I went a good chunk of the game forgetting the menu in the middle of my screen is how I hack machines / tame animals. The skills menu is just worse now that you have to re-read constantly to figure out where you are, when the previous menu in Wasteland 2 was clean and easily signified with icons to allow me to quickly assess what I am looking at. I seriously miss the old shortcut bar, the new shortcut stuff is now a chore to micro manage.

I spent twice as much for Wasteland 2 and I appreciate it much more, you are NOT missing out on anything here if you're thinking of trying this game after Wasteland 2. I keep quitting after 1 or 2 hours after experiencing the tedious menus and I'm dropping this game from my PC as of this review.

Bought this elsewhere for $10, very much worth the price. The XCOM elements are enhanced beyond what Firaxis XCOM brought to the world. You'll be making more decisions than you would in an XCOM game to manage the obstacles you face. The game is not without flaw and isn't perfect by any stretch but it was very pleasant to play when I got a decent grip on the game.

The combat which is very plentiful in the game is a blend of Fallout 1-2 combat + XCOM tactics. You can start with a default character squad or create custom characters with custom skills. You get up to a maximum of 12 Action points per character and you control a squad up to a maximum of 7 team members. VATS is replaced by "Precision Strike" to inflict debuffs on enemies, guaranteed to work on a reduced hit chance but each shot placed can be the difference between life and death for your team. Even if you miss your target, your bullet doesn't just vanish: You can hit a teammate on accident or accidentally strike another enemy. This mechanic has given me far more enjoyment of combat because placement is crucial to making sure I don't facepalm from risking a teammate getting blasted by my big enemy deleting gun, it still got me from time to time and I always had no one to blame but myself or sometimes it hits another enemy giving me pleasant surprise.

Specialists and expert characters shine throughout the game, people in deep with certain weapons or skills excelled at cost to upgrade paths elsewhere will outshine jack-of-all trades characters with average stats. Having dedicated characters has never felt better in other games for me simply because specialists will only be able to interact with 1 or 2 things making the all-in approach useless in other RPGs. There will be plenty of obstacles that may have multiple methods to interact with it so no skill in this game feels totally worthless. Some character stats can be a little less balanced than others (like Intelligence or Speed) but don't totally dwarf other stat's usefulness.

I did find questing to be the most annoying part of the game, it's not required to upgrade your characters though since enemies drop decent loot and money / supplies + Very much XP. But there were instances where angering a town wouldn't auto resolve quests I couldn't complete because the NPC I needed was hostile and cannot be spoken to, or there things I was required to do in a specific order to resolve a quest a certain way. Totally not worth going through all the side quests since enemies will provide decent enough rewards anyway.

Wasteland 2 improves upon existing gameplay formulas which lets me solidly recommend it. I'm not too big on turn based tactics RPGs, but this game kept my interest all the way through which is rare for these types of games.

Good game for what it was in 2007! Also very infamous for it's cliffhanger that everyone hates!

Still a pretty excellent game, neat and unique weapons to keep you captivated throughout the entire campaign. Love rolling some bowling bombs and watch it delete enemies with ease and seeing the shower of armor shards from it. I also really like all the alternate fire options many weapons have, it's basically better Duke Nukem.

Lotsa turd and mom jokes, 10/10. Better than Duke Nukem.

I'm writing this review after having remember my original feelings on the game. It's a decent starting point for the shock series under the right circumstances. But picking the right options for a first playthrough is something I would HIGHLY recommend which I will go over below.

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- Standard skill is the king of all combat, yeah you can pick psionics or energy weapons to start off with but these options can screw you up a lot. They are no way equal to the power of just ordinary guns with special bullets for most situations. One hotkey to swap ammo types makes swapping to what you need in the heat of battle very easy.

- If you go with Psionics and your only way of doing things is casting abilities using suprisingly limited amounts of Psi hypos, going with attack abilities makes fighting sometimes a chore when you could just turn the target into swiss cheese within a second or two. Worse, you go for stat boost abilities and you now need a whole checklist of things to cast before engaging in anything you want to be stronger in because you just feel the need to setup most encounters a certain way. It's not advised at all for a first playthrough, if you get too many abilities then swapping between can be VERY tedious on it's own.

- Energy weapons are only good for machines, not much else to it other than not typically needing to have armor piercing rounds which plenty are already sprinkled around for pistol users and take up far less inventory space. Exotic weapons same thing but only for fleshy targets, which I didn't see enough of aside from hybrids.

You may as well stick to standard, I also personally had hundreds of shotgun shells just sitting around from killing many hybrids so there really is no reason not to just use standard weapons for most of the game.

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Some skills in the game did not age well and were thankfully re-iterated upon or straight up removed in Bioshock altogether.

- Hacking just totally sucks in this game, it is completely RNG from my experience even moreso than mid game or late game bioshock puzzles. You are required to hack at the end of the game, but ICE picks do the job instantly without wasting your time AND your precious nanites.

Research, kinda pointless nonsense honestly, it's required for an objective early in the game and it's just extra busywork.

Maintenance is a very necessary skill to prevent weapons from being unusable make sure to sink points into it right away you won't regret it.

Repair, don't even bother. You'll usually find a working gun eventually and then maintain the gun forever, preventing it from breaking which this skill only had use for.

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This game has the worst respawn system of the shock games. You need nanites to respawn in the levels, if you die without ever saving the game regularly you can lose plenty of progress. Save your nanites or get bit hard, also make sure to avoid dying in a different part of the ship you just entered as you will not respawn from a previous area (for anyone fresh off of SS 2023).

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Every time I watch people play this game they are told they can do whatever they want by others, but they do not understand how poor the game accommodates anything beyond the skills I recommended people use in this review. You can get stuck doing things very tediously if you did not binge guides online prior to committing your skill points and be left with weaker skills later on in the game.

Aside from that nonsense, the game does everything else quite well. The story is good, audiologs are an absolute treat to listen to, great objective checklist, and navigating the levels aren't painful like in other games of the shock title. A solid 8/10 under the right circumstances or a very stinky 6/10 or 7/10 if you decided to pick other paths.

The game is quite good and done well in many areas! It's shooting feels great, and they still capture the atmosphere of the original game without all the color vomit! Though they do the latter too well to it's detriment.

Yes the station is supposed to feel like a maze, but you don't really need to make the 2D map actually turn some levels into a nightmare for navigation. You could AT LEAST add a way to change floors on the map menu so I won't find myself feeling it necessary to retread each corner to fully complete the map? Some map layouts are absolutely abysmal and make it a chore to find something I missed.

Another massive problem with the game is it follows the previous game progression to the T. You need to THOROUGHLY search each floor and be absolutely sure you've seen every nook and cranny, if you do not you could miss a required item to progress requiring backtracking or even in my case cracking open old guides to figure out what in the hell I just happened to have missed. And that's not even the worst of it as the some of the wall screens in the game are required to progress and you wouldn't know it even with having all the logs you were able to obtain. All of it an issue of the previous game which could easily be addressed.

I could easily get through SS2 without needing to look outside the game for assistance thanks to just proper map making and a proper note taking system in the game. My play through ended at the 6 digit code keypad in the Reactor room, my screenshots of some old screens didn't help at all and I explored each level multiple times before giving up, this area could definitely use a change, it's probably the WORST for anyone going in completely blind. I haven't forgotten the order events I had to perform earlier in the game: like gathering a safety override code for the mining laser in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ library!!!! But thankfully there was ONE SPECIFIC audio log that told me after running through Research and Reactor at least 3 times to figure out what I should be doing.

SS1 (remake?) could really use those SS2 systems so I currently cannot recommend this game to anyone but people who don't mind wading through outdated game design to dig into Citadel station with a new coat of paint. I don't expect this to change so this review will remain here forever. I played on 2,2,2,2 for anyone curious.

I had many great moments playing this game, I enjoy all that it sets out to recreate and add to the formula. However it is seriously held down by old bugs and nonsense issues that makes it an extremely tough sell.

I had many strange bugs and oddities throughout all of my playthroughs that could have doomed me, Grappling hooks sending my soldiers to another area of the map, enemies that can shoot my soldiers without me being able to spot them, turns that cannot end because of an impossible circumstance (panick a supressing enemy or the bodyguards at the end of the game being invisible). It's a huge shame this game continues to be sold in this state and it deserves better from the devs, even autosaves every now and then would make simple bugs like these more tolerable but we don't even have that so get ready to be struck by an annoyance at the wrong time or just save every few turns like a paranoid schizo.

The new visual effects and weapon alternative additions are very nice but come at the cost of playability for the rest.

Elevators, moving objects or even stationary can just instantly gib and crush you many times, I had none of these issues even with Half-life: Source. It's probably got to to do with the additional gibs or maybe the first person legs, since this crushing issue is usually only prevalent in multiplayer settings with multiple players stuck on a moving brush. It's way too common and annoying to constantly reload and reposition to avoid instantly dying by a mysterious cause.