Recent reviews by CheekyChan

Having put a stupid amount of hours into CD2, especially the tank deathmatch mode, I immediately purchased CD3 when it was announced. There is honestly nothing inherently bad or amazing about this game. It's just fun to jump in, play for a bit and shut it down when you're done or bored. Driving feels good, collectibles are fun to drive, the events are decent, the stages are a nice mix of locale and layout, selection of cars is good too. It's really just "more of the same" which isn't a bad thing. You basically know that going into it.

I haven't experienced much in the way of cheaters in this one but CD2 was RIPE with them, in a split second when a event starts another player will have an impossibly massive score. It happened almost every single match in CD2. CD3 seems to be mostly intact online? I didn't play it a ton online to be fair.

But overall it's a good game that's not trying to be something it's not, it's just good mindless arcade fun.

Let me start off by saying that RICO is a great concept. Procedurally generated roguelite corridor shooter akin to FEAR without the horror is the best way to describe it.

I tried every single facet of this game, I played at least an EASY case, a MEDIUM case and a HARD case, I beat the dailies which I almost always ended up 1st in the leaderboards every time I played them. I actually bought this game on Switch first, didn't even get around to playing it and then discovered it was also on PC and ended up buying and playing it here instead which I'm glad I did. The Switch version has a TON of input delay and the aiming feels inconsistent and off with all of my Switch controllers. It is definitely a mouse and keyboard kind of game, especially in the later levels in Lockdown and Case and harder difficulties.

I was really hoping RICO was going to be really good. The idea sounds fantastic on paper but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

Plays fluidly enough.

No performance issues maxed out.

The art style is pretty decent though nothing amazing. It does the job without annoying me is the best way I can describe it.

The selection of weapons is also pretty nice.

Procedurally generated so it's never the same twice which is great because it forces you to react instead of memorize.
The action and gameplay loop is pretty fun.

It's co-op.

Daily challenges and level seeds.

Gunplay feels good and sounds are well done.

Jumping and melee: One of the only FPS games I own that doesn't let you JUMP. it's a corridor shooter so there's not a lot jumping is gonna do for you BUT there's so many times I got stuck on furniture that was poorly placed because it's procedurally generated and so many times I wanted to jump shot an enemy or jump over a railing/object instead of running around it. This is also a massive missed opportunity to use one of FEAR's best features, the contextual melee system. You can bicycle kick, round house, slide kick and weapon butt depending on your actions in-game. In RICO you can baton and slide kick and the slide kick is inconsistent. It either comes out when I'm just trying to crouch while walking or doesn't come out when I'm sprinting. Also wish we had a super kick to launch enemies and objects into enemies.

Roguelite elements: Personally? I would have much preferred something like Dark Souls, where you lose your XP, currency, revives, grenades and even skills than lose the weapons and attachments. By the time you have exactly what you want there's only a few more levels left in Case mode. Or at the very least let us keep the weapons and lose the attachments.

Weapons and customization: The selection of weapons is great. I like them. But I was under the assumption that you could customize weapons and such because I remember seeing screenshots with a goon holding a custom painted rifle, I think it was a massive missed opportunity to not have a customization system in place for the weapons.

Movement: The movement is kind of clunky, you get stuck on object corners a lot, you can't really sprint diagonally which is a SIN IN ANY FPS GAME and again, no jump. It can make the game very frustrating when you're trying to run to reload after an enemy kicked a door down after clearing a room and you just get stuck on a fireplace or some ♥♥♥♥ and get shot in the back because you can't move thanks to the clunky movement and randomly placed items. I also can't always sprint when I want to, like there's some kind of limit as to how many times you can start a sprint in a given time frame but there's no stamina in the game.

Gameplay: The AI is either dumb as hell or they corner shoot you constantly, and by corner shoot I mean there is such a small portion of them sticking out that it's almost impossible to shoot them but they're nailing you with every single shot fired. There's also this really annoying thing where they can shoot through certain objects (Or around them?) but you can't. Stair case railing, wall corners, objects that are physically movable like doors/door pieces and random every day objects that can be moved around. The door one really irks me because every time I kick a door down I can't shoot through the splinters of it but the enemy can, it's super frustrating and I have to wait for the debris to clear to shoot them which ruins the whole point of the bullet time door kick. Most of the time the enemies are dumb as bricks and sometimes there's inconsistent damage to them but in the later levels and harder difficulties they become aim bots. They also have almost no AI other than crouch in place, run around the corner to see you and shoot, melee enemies can also teleport to you and also cover 200ft in the blink of an eye randomly, I feel like they took this feature from Unloved, it was lovingly known as demon speeding in that game.

Objectives: This is probably the part that pisses me off the most about RICO. Bomb objectives while not too bad can be a nightmare if you find yourself in one of these situations. You may open a door that leads to a room with a bomb, you may only have 2 bombs on that floor, cool, NOPE, NOT COOL. You get a higher timer for more bombs found per floor but if you only have 2 bombs and the second bomb is locked behind a door that needs 5 security consoles broken to unlock it and that entire floor is a maze and/or you're playing on a higher difficulty this is probably a suicide run as you have no time and must check every single room. It forces you to risk your life to find the security terminals to unlock the door to the other bomb and even if you do find most of them you can't leave to the next room until you clear the one you just entered so you can't just rush you have to whoop ass and pray you find the terminals in time to then run all the way back to the other side of the map, unlock the door, hope the bomb is in that room, whoop ass and then defuse it. Lockdown was the only mode I failed by dying. I only failed Case mode twice and both times was due to BS bomb defusal placements. I had so many bomb defusals finish at like 1 and 2 seconds left on the clock. It's exciting when it gets down to the wire but it feels like BS when you have no idea where the bombs are and are stuck behind artificial barriers. This has also lead me to skip evidence because I was panicking to get the terminals and then had to spend 10 minutes looking for one single briefcase of evidence before being able to leave.

The UI: It's fine looking but navigation is clunky and there's too many sub menus for seemingly no reason.

Other thoughts: Very little is actually explained to you about anything in this game. The gameplay, the reason why there's SWAT after your ass, the gimmicks like bomb defusal and needing to destroy terminals to unlock doors was NEVER explained except in a loading screen WAY after I discovered what the terminals did. I feel like with a little more polish this game could have been an absolute banger but as it is, it's pretty mediocre. Fun for a bit but the roguelite elements actually made it more boring for me. It would be nice if there was a way to continue to another case with everything you already unlocked instead of starting from scratch every single time, a way to reward good players if you really wanted to keep the current system of losing your weapons and attachments. Also, this is just me nitpicking because I adore good ragdolls, the ragdolls in this game feel like they're stuffed animals, they're super light and have no life to them and after like 5 seconds they stop responding to the environment and player and after like 10 seconds they fade away. I would have much preferred to see something like FEAR where they stay until a limit is met and they also feel really meaty and heavy and life like.


Do I recommend RICO? Yeeaaahh if you get it cheap, it's fun in short bursts and probably fun in co-op. The procedural generation keeps it fresh.

Not sure why this game gets the hate it does. I certainly didn't play this for the 15+ hours it shows on Steam but probably at least half that. The controls work well on controller, it's honestly a rather great control scheme for controllers and it makes sense, this is a TWIN STICK SHOOTER. Not a M+KB shooter. I play FPS and TPS games with a mouser and keyboard but I play anything like this with a controller. People also complaining that the game is difficult or the enemies are cheap. I played on the hardest difficulty and it was a BREEZE, I didn't die a single time. Make better use of your items and learn to scavenge if you're having a hard time.

Game looks great with a couple of tweaks. Remove the FPS cap and turn off motion blur in the config files and super sample it. Sure it's from 2010 and it's top down shooter that was never meant to look like a AAA release but it actually looks really good when maxed out with super sampling enabled, blur and FPS cap turned off.

The game can be a little clunky, you'll get stuck on objects here and there but it didn't happen much and there was only one time I got stuck for longer than a couple seconds.

The only bad things I can say about this game are:

No story co-op, massive missed opportunity. The assault mode is cool but I would have preferred if story was co-op instead.

There should have been options in-game for removing the awful and down right sickening motion blur and to uncap the FPS but AT LEAST being UE3 it was possible to remove via the config files.

And thirdly, the upgrade system is stupid. You can only choose ONE upgrade and they don't explain this to you. I wasted so many credits thinking I could have all the upgrades unlocked on all weapons. And it's only worth having the damage upgrade on every weapon as ammo can be scarce if you don't buy it from the checkpoint vendors where as double damage means double ammo essentially.

No ragdolls kinda annoys me. I hate static death animations with a passion.

All in all, I really enjoyed it and was looking for something to scratch that Shadowgrounds itch, I've yet to play the other two, they've just been sitting in my library for literally 10 years and I figured it was time to give them a try. I'm going to assume they're just more of the same and that's fine since this game is relatively short.

NFS Payback starts off painfully slow, the slowest to start racing game I think I've ever played and I've played a LOT. The majority of the games I own on Steam/PC and consoles are racing games.

Payback looks great, performance could be better but it's not a deal breaker, the car models are very nice looking, the city is a breath of fresh air as not many games have ever really used fake Las Vegas as it's basis. The world is very nicely done and rather interesting but there are so many shortcuts taken during development, in my 5+ hours I found so many unfinished areas with literal gaps in the ground and objects. Constantly hitting invisible objects or gliding through rocks with no hit boxes.

Pro's:
+Responsive controls. A lot of Ghost/Criterion's other games like Most Wanted and Hot Pursuit were absolutely PLAGUED by awful responsiveness that was programmed in as "steering delay" a fix was created for Most Wanted by a community member but Hot Pursuit was left untouched and to me is borderline unplayable because of this.
+Everything looks really good aside from the character models.
+Selection of cars.
+Customization is pretty in-depth, you have nearly as much control creativity wise as the later Forza games.
+Tuning, that's a good thing but it's hampered by the card system.

Cons:
-The handling model doesn't feel all that great, played with my Xbox One S pad and with my Logitech G29, wheel support is an absolute joke, there are literally NO wheel options at all, on my G29 which is one of the few supported wheels for this game my steering didn't work properly at all. out of 900 degrees of turning radius the car would maybe turn 200 of that, no clutch option, no H shifter option, just nothing. Controller felt the best unsuprisingly, car drifts just by turning too much leading to too much oversteer constantly or the car won't turn hardly at all and will lead to massive understeer, this makes it very annoying to drive depending on the vehicle.
-Feeling of speed is horrible, probably one of the worst I've seen. 150MPH feels like 60MPH. Vehicles take forever to get up to speed unless fully modded. My modified '06 Subaru OBXT in real life can do 0-60 in about 3-4 seconds on average and with no heat soak at sea level I can pull 3's all day, an Audi S5 in this game takes about 5 seconds to get up to 60MPH and then it's painfully slow after that point as well. I feel like the crippling slow upgrades and the weak feeling of speed were designed to get people to drop money on this game.
-Rubber banding is atrocious and extremely easy to spot. There's also some weird hoodoo with police and enemy vehicles when they're chasing you. Multiple times when a cop has gotten close to me, without touching, my steering goes bonkers and the game starts auto steering me
-Little to no damage model.
-Tuning is stupidly limited to the card system they put in place so you're limited to only what upgrades you randomly unlock or purchase as they become available after every so minutes randomly.
-Story is weak. Characters are all extremely forgettable, models for them look awful as well. I could feel the need for tokenism pandering almost immediately. Literally every single character is awful, there is NOTHING redeeming about any of them.

I went back to The Crew 1 after this and had MUCH more fun with full proper wheel support. You can tell they were trying to make Payback as a Horizon clone but it falls short in every single aspect. I just wanna race, make money, upgrade my car, race, progress the story, make money, unlock ♥♥♥♥ and race and upgrade some more and buy and upgrade more cars along the way. Payback hinders you in almost every single way and the little activities you come across aren't even very fun. The Crew did a much better job with being able to restart immediately and even a mostly base vehicle could at least get the job done, maybe not a gold but a bronze at least. In Payback, there's some speed traps where the base vehicles or even modified can't even reach that speed yet or during the Speed Runs there are so many ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pedestrian cars and blind turns you can't do them properly period or if you bump one of the pedestrian vehicles as a base model vehicle you'll slow down to such a point you won't make up the difference. I don't think I've ever played a game that HINDERS a vehicle's performance in the game compared to it's real life counter part. They're usually either on-par or way faster.

Just play The Crew or play Forza Horizon 4. Way way way more worth your time than this game.

With a now 22 hours in this game, not all gameplay, some just idling waiting for friends or family to join, I feel I can finally give this game a fair review. I added this game to my wishlist some time ago expecting a decent romp as a ghost hunter and didn't really pay much more attention than that to the game.

Fast forward to a month or so ago and I saw one of the VR streamers I watch play it and I decided to give it a whirl, didn't realize it would become as massive as it did. This game in solo isn't all that special but in co-op this game is fantastic.

I have never had a game of this likes hook me like it has, The Forest is another good co-op horror game but it takes forever to get going and I just don't have the time for that, this game on the other hand is get in, setup quick, find the ghost's room, get out, figure out the evidence, piece it all together, finish the objectives if possible and get the ♥♥♥♥ out without dying.

It has a bit of a learning curve but I even got my 52 year old dad to play it as his first mouse and keyboard game and he enjoys it greatly even with the unintuitive controls.

Once you get the hang of what needs to be done and what each tool is really used for it becomes easier but it's still a good challenge and this is the main thing that draws me back every time, this game is randomized heavily, even the same type of ghost can and will act completely different every time you play. I've had extremely shy demons which are supposed to be violent and in your face, I've had demons that tried/did shred us the second the safety timer was up and I've had some that just mess with us the entire time, throwing stuff, breathing in our ears, slamming doors, popping up unannounced and then disappearing, flickering the lights, playing with our equipment, etc. I've even had some where no matter what I did I couldn't get them to confirm the third piece of evidence I needed and had to spend 30 minutes talking to it on the spirit box before it finally answered. And then there's ghosts that prefer multiple people, don't care or prefer single people in order to show signs or respond to any questioning.

My biggest gripe with this game is just that there's not much you can do to defend yourself from the ghosts when they attack. I've managed to successfully escape them a few times and hide until the doors unlocked but there's times where I swear the game borked out and the ghost was permanently agro'd as I hid for a solid 5 minutes, it was dead quiet, I walked out of the locker and BAM, I get grabbed. I wish we had more tools to stop a ghost in their tracks like a salt shotgun or iron bar or even tossing a crucifix at them.

And if they're one of the ghosts that moves twice the speed you do, there's no way to win against it if it shows it's face to you. You could hide if you see the doors lock but on average the ghost is in the next room or just out of range of the crucifix when it enters attack mode and sometimes smudge sticks do very little to curb their attack phase.

Also, big maps aren't that great, they're extremely dark, way too big and don't give the same sense of claustrophobia as the houses, I think we need smaller maps like a small abandoned church, school, small market, maybe even a small section of an abandoned village, in and out of alleyways and small houses, etc. that would be terrifying.

But all in all, I love this game deeply, it has kept me entertained every single time minus a couple no show ghosts that would do nothing no matter how hard we tried to anger it. There's nothing more enjoyable than having your friend/family in a room alone talking to the spirit box when they ask it what it wants and they say "DEATH" or "HURT" and it starts breathing in their ear or appear and they absolutely SHRIEK in terror.

I would absolutely love to experience it in VR, especially co-op VR but until the Index becomes cheaper that's probably not happening any time soon. Anyways, just wanna give the dev a huge round of applause for this absolute masterpiece.

AvP 2010 is a weird one. I feel like it was a Predator game first and then they added the Alien and Marine campaigns afterwards and I'll explain why.

The two biggest issues this game has are technical problems, like no FOV options with a notoriously awfully low default FOV, controls could have been more streamlined and the gameplay itself could have been WAY more fluid, it feels really chunky in all campaigns, Predator's is probably the most thought out in the gameplay department and Alien was definitely last, Marine's was alright but the gameplay issues make it such a chore to play, guns feel awful, damage is inconsistent with the assault rifle and the shotgun and it feels super chunky, you can't crouch, you can jump but it's like a six inch jump and again, chunky, movement is chunky, weapon handling is chunky, weapons are chunky, changing weapons isn't great either, etc.

Great, so now we know the gameplay isn't all that great, it's clunky, it's chunky and could have used a ton more polish.

Buuuut, for being a 2010 game this game has some beautiful scenery, some really good texture and model work on the main characters and even the enemies, it's fateful to the movies and definitely better than Colonial Marines, it's wonderful going through so many well done set pieces, it's very linear but it's definitely a story driven game than it is anything else surprisingly and again, gorgeous looking game for it's time and the main models still hold up well to this day.

This game definitely felt like a love letter to the source material but still deeply flawed.

The technical issues alone will probably turn a lot of people off, there's a FOV changer on PCGWiki but it can get you VAC banned if you use it online which shouldn't be an issue, the online isn't very alive and with the awful controls it's not surprising. Then there's the awful frame pacing issues which can be fixed by a quick ALT+Enter or ALT+Tab every time you start the game. Now, it takes a lot for a game to give me motion sickness but at first before I got the FOV changer and discovered the ALT+Tab trick, I felt so sick playing in just minutes it wasn't even funny and playing as the Alien's is just self torture, the constant clinging to the walls and ceiling will get vomit inducing especially if you haven't used the two mentioned fixes, there's probably a reason the Alien campaign takes like an hour to beat.

Despite all that I enjoyed the game, I feel like all the stuff wrong with it could be easily fixed even by a dedicated modder, the movement and gameplay just needs to be a little more fluid and the technical issues need work. Other than that there's really no reason to not give it a go, just go in expecting the clunkiness.

I love HL2 mods that follow the story of HL2 even if it's from the perspective of an average citizen, refugee, resistance, etc. because it's usually more HL2 and that's never a bad thing.

Year Long Alarm is very very short, I saw players saying it took them 30 or so minutes. Generally I like to take the sights in during most play thrus and this was no exception but I managed to beat it in about half that time and was able to accidentally skip entire sections by just farting around. My time in-game shows 43 minutes because I let it idle to be able to write a review.

That said, this is a really good mod in that the level design is miles ahead of most other HL2 mods, it thinks vertically, it gives you amazing set pieces with nice details, follows some of the HL2 level design, secrets and puzzles while keeping it fresh and using subtle hints to help you through them. I particularly liked the air duct that kept creaking to get your attention as to what you were supposed to do with that grenade cache you just opened.

Here's an example of the set pieces:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2171523531

Another thing you'll notice while playing is the Combine's brutality towards the resistance and refugees as you play, just another nice detail strewn throughout the mod. Example:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2171523628

Subtle hints you may miss but convey the Combine's sinister intentions, they were burning bodies in a fire pit before you came along and ruined their day.

This mod also has some interesting combat setups, there's more environmental choices when it comes to taking down the combine forces which is great because it gives you more choices during every encounter so it never plays out exactly the same.

Overall this is a great mod and worth the small download and time spent on it, it feels incredibly hand crafted, not just slapped together like some other mods just to pad the length, my only gripe is I wish there was more to it with the same attention to detail this short presentation has.

So where to start with this one. PAKO 2 is a lot of fun, it's hectic as all hell when you've got a few minutes into a map and messing with the cops is a lot of fun. Top down is fun but chase cam is GREAT. I feel like chase cam is how this game was designed to be played.

There are a few things that annoy me though, chase mode doesn't feel fleshed out, you can change the zoom of the camera via the pause menu which is nice but because it uses the right stick to shoot there's no way to just turn the camera so you're stuck not knowing what's on either side of you and you can't see very far behind you which leads to a lot of unfair shooter cop deaths as they fire at you off screen.

I would have loved a rear view mirror and maybe using the shoulder buttons to look left and right if need be and I would have absolutely adored a two player mode where one person can shoot and the other can drive kind of like the Starsky and Hutch game on PS2.


Gameplay is fun, it's simple to learn and the basic customization is nice, the driving physics are solid and it's great in short bursts.


This game has bugs, many times now whether in chase or top down mode I've had cops spawn literally right on my car and blow me up or stop me in place so that I get railed from behind by the 8 or so cops that were chasing me and get blown up.

Turbo is inconsistent at times, barely speeds me up and other times it launches me off a cliff to my death and the aiming of the passenger seems off at times as well, he'll fire right over cops quite a lot. As mentioned, the camera bugs out and doesn't show the shooting cops off screen in chase mode mainly which leads to cheap hits on my HP. Cop spawns are also pretty broken in general.

A co-op mode via two players in one car and maybe two cars on the map would be fun, a way to make chase mode more polished would be nice too, maybe show arrows that point at, grow and shrink as cops move in closer to you from behind and again a rear view mirror would be nice.

Overall I really enjoy the game, it reminds me of the original Driver games and that's a good thing. We've never quite had another one since D2.

But yeah, maybe some more polish in an update or for the next game.

Pretty much as close as you can get to the OG Demolition Derby games on the PS1 but with a really nice cardboard theme.

This game is NOT SHOVELWARE, I want to make that really clear, you can tell someone put a good amount of effort into this and made it to be FUN so get that thought out of your head.

This game can get really hectic but it's a lot of fun and THANK YOU DEV for being able to adjust the damage modifiers for CPU's and players and adding options for infinite boost, sometimes I just want to destroy everything and watch the world burn for fun. This is something more developers should take note of.

I originally bought this on Switch and it's got some hitching and input delay issues on there as I'm sure the game is locked with Vsync and the Switch is naturally very input laggy though the average Joe doesn't seem to notice this, that made me hesitant to rebuy it again as the input delay really killed it for me but I'm happy to say the PC version is clear of these issues and I figured it would be, which is why I bought it again and for the price you can't beat it. I did get a random hitch here and there VERY rarely on a Ryzen 7 3700X @ 4GHz, 3600MHz 16GB DDR4, RX 5700XT so I'm not sure it was a hardware issue so much it was the game engine pausing to think. It's worth noting that this game has basic video options and supports XInput fully and I had absolutely no issues with it running like it should out of the (cardboard) box, a nice thing to see these days.

Only gameplay issues I really ran into was not being able to tell where the last vehicle/vehicles were on the map, especially when they're running unpainted and match with the stages, I think an arrow system that rotates around your vehicle and maybe a mini-map would help a lot with that issue. And sometimes the debris on the ground can get annoying mainly with the lower vehicles but I actually enjoy this as it reminds me of Flatout 1&2 and how crazy races could get when there was debris all over the track from destroying everything.

I really really adore this game, it's just pure fun and I can't really fault it for anything especially at it's current price, the art style is great, the gameplay is good and again, it's FUN though maybe in short bursts as it is a fairly short experience but it's definitely one of those games you'll go back to here and there for some good entertainment. Hoping the dev adds to it in the future, more vehicles, arenas and maybe add a race mode or something, survival is hella fun with two players by the way. Workshop support would be insane for a game like this. *wink wink*

Also, 69 minutes played on PC, nice.

Just a friendly update to say that I still enjoy this game immensely and I look forward to the dev releasing another title/sequel in the series.

This game holds a special place in my heart and a spot way up at the top of my all time greatest games list.

I've got nothing but faith in the dynamic duo who are updating this masterpiece and can't wait for the day we finally get it.

Throwing this bad boy out there to keep the good reviews flooding in so Volition/Deep Silver understand just how much this means to us.