Recent reviews by Bitterkitty

After the fun I had with the first two games in the reboot series. I was excited for the third.

All I can really say is there's a reason that the reboot series ended with this one. If you want a good game, go replay the first reboot, or the second, or even the remake of the very first game, or the topdown co-op game. They're way more worth your time.

Most of the time? finding your way around is incredibly difficult. I left the game on standard difficulty, but I had problems really identifying where the game wanted me to go. Or even what was ABLE to be traversed. There's supposed to be "white paint" where you can go on the normal difficulty, but the white paint is lost in busy and dark environments which lead me to look up guides, not because I wasn't competent but because when the environment is this busy you're not sure what the developers intended to be intractable. Since every jump is met with an instadeath if you slightly mess up, you're gonna be watching those death scenes over and over and over again. The climbable walls are vague, things that look climbable aren't, things that are climbable don't look like they should be and it all just leads to a frustrating experience.

The puzzles are either boring or impossible. One puzzle required a pendulum that you had to swing, but if you interact with it at the wrong part of the swing, nothing happens, and it's a new mechanic never used until that point, so you have no indicators that this is a mechanic the devs programmed into the game. At one point, the only answer I could figure out for the puzzle was "guess until you get it right", and then the part after that was just "radio deus ex machnia". This happened throughout all of the challenge tombs, which either were vague, or so straightforward there was no "challenge" in them. Multiple times I looked up a youtube video purely to be told "it took me 10 minutes and constantly dying to find this one thing you can climb or interact with that doesn't look like you should".

The graphics and animations are rough here too. Like. Sonic Boom levels of rough. There's character pop in on cutscenes, there's animations that don't match up to what's going on. Characters look less realistic than the previous 2 games that came before this. Remember that cool clothing water physics thing where Lara's clothes got wet when you swam and then dried out in the first game? No more! now there's no difference in your character model. She looks completely out of place while swimming. Running through mud looks like she's wearing a diaper, and she comes out completely clean. Those cool RE4 style death animations? sometimes they're just disjointed. Fell off a sign above a raging river? Impaled on rebar in a completely different part of the map because you have to die "somewhere". How about overly long ones where you might as well go get a coffee because it'll be that long before you can play again. Multiple animations are cleverly hidden "below the camera" so you can't see how disjointed they are (looking at you "knife digging animation").

Mechanically the game is mediocre, it's not that the platforming isn't competent. it is! Combat is brokenly simple! At one point, I literally just stood in one place and killed everyone in a fight with the first rifle, before walking over and maxing out my ammo off the bodies. At another point I stood in place and just waited for the enemy to hit me, bullets wizzing around me, the enemy acting like some stormtrooper wannabe, without landing a shot despite me just watching him fire in my direction for a good 2-3 minutes.

Stealth is laughable. Glue yourself to walls or bushes to stay hidden and play red light/yellow light with your "objective sense" while you murderize the people around you that you can't bring into the bushes so you're undetected. Nope. you just leave them out in the path for everyone to see. At one point, the whole charade falls apart as you "hide from pirhanas in the "water bushes" while sneaking by them...Yes. you play hide and go seek with fish.

The objective sense is clearly a crutch for a game that couldn't do enough graphically to make it's game world both engaging AND functional, so instead you just spend your whole game MASHING Q so you can figure out where you're going or where the latest collectable is so you can upgrade your weapons. "but Upgrading weapons and having their visual appearance change was a big part of the previous game!" I hear you say. Correct! But in this game, most of the upgrades do little to change how the weapon feels, or acts, or looks. It's just "the hammer is now hollow! look. you can see it on the inspect scene!".

And finally the story, While the original idea is reasonably serviceable, it's plagued by the narrative device of "phoning it in". You meet someone, they tell you to not piss them off, you piss them off and then 30 seconds later they're telling you their life story and helping you commit war crimes cause "they love you so much" (not really, but that's how it feels.) The enemy is always a step ahead, while also being behind, and you're the plucky adventurer who can do it all and yet is responsible for everything and got all her weapons "samus-aran-ed" away from you by $CALAMITY_OF_OPPORTUNITY. Heck, at times Lara is brutally mauled by some random animal or event, and then she shrugs it off by the next cutscene, like suddenly she's healed from getting a jaguar bite to the shoulder. Either Lara is literally made of adamantium, or that Jaguar was only gently holding her while it DRAGGED HER THROUGH THE UNDERBRUSH.

That's not to mention the whole chapter of the game where you just play "child endangerment simulator" as she waltzes around the outside of the Croft Manor. Look. nobody's gonna miss the small child destroying your property values while trying to play Santa Claus. Not unless dear old daddy Croft really was as detached as mom said.

Look. I REALLY wanted to enjoy this game. And I don't hate for whoever spent the time making the Definitive Edition. It's really hard to polish something that was lackluster in the first place. This game really feels like they pulled an Ubisoft and was required to pump out their once yearly "long-running game franchise entry" instead of putting any soul into it. So you have a game that you can play, but...that's about it. It's the gaming equivalent of wonderbread. Offensive to nobody because it's the consistency of cardboard but with no flavor. It feels like the lady version of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, but with less death metal, and in that game saving could corrupt your save file locking you out of the ending of the game the lack of polish was so bad.

You deserve better than Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I deserve better than Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara and Crystal Dynamics and the legacy that predate this game deserve better than Shadow of the Tomb Raider. It just sucks we didn't get it.

The game is an absolute blast with friends. It's basically like playing starship troopers the game. DEMOCRACY and all that.

Sony's idiotic tho. 0/10 for them.

10/10 gameplay
10/10 developer
0/10 publisher

TLDR: One of those "farm simulator" style games. But in space. dismantling spaceships.

I'll be honest, I did not expect to sink as many hours into this game as I have. And I'm not near done. Shipbreaker is one of those games that grows on you, you start small and then level up until you're breaking apart cargo vessels and dodging radiation burns.

The campaign is well done, a little preachy, but the characters are believable, and the villian is a legitimate villain. I hate that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. You'll enjoy the banter between your compatriots as you slice holes in someone's old junker and feed the machine of capitalism.

The only thing i really wish this game had, was the ability to keep a door open. If you de/re pressurize a part of the ship, then all the doors toggle depending on whether they're pressurized or not! let me depressurize the ship safely darn it!

In the end though, if you are into the idea of space rednecks dismantling spaceships, this is a game worth picking up and playing.

TLDR: An amazingly well crafted PvE resource-management game with a shorter playtime if you don't like repeating the small number of scenarios. Absolutely fantastic storytelling, soundtrack and theming. Will happily question your morals.

I used to play a lot of RTS games, but I never really played them against my friends. PvP was just frustrating and a way to make us break out in arguments after a 6 hour game (or 20 minute if your friend rushed you). I spent hours and hours playing against the computers though. Then it was about managing resources, and dealing with issues as they showed up.

Frostpunk is a lot like that. The violin in the soundtrack will tug at your heartstrings, and houses will not just show how warm they are on the heatmap, but have different amounts of snow on them depending on how warm they are. The mechanics are solid and make sense, both from a gameplay perspective and from a world theme perspective.

Frostpunk also asks you fun questions:

Do you bury your dead?
Do you throw them out into the cold so they become corp-sicles so you can slap their organs in someone else when theirs start to fail?

Is it wrong to use force to keep people in line for their own good?

Is it better to help everyone at the cost of your own stability, or do you covet your resources making sure you and your city survive?

It's not a horror game, it's an existential horror game. Each decision has it's own benefits and drawbacks and after a couple missteps suddenly you'll be deciding whether the moral high ground is worth being lynched by the mob because they're panicked and scared.

The weakest part of this game is probably the number of scenarios. There's sadly only 5 or so, and while they're all reasonably different, they're all kinda short, "Endless" mode can be solved and eventually you just have nothing left to do. There are difficulty sliders, but they don't necessarily make the game more fun to replay. Unless you like replaying the same scenario over and over, you'll probably put this game down after 20 or 30 hours...which isn't always a bad thing.

I'd really recommend Frostpunk if you enjoy resource management at all, because it's probably the best example I've seen. A smaller playtime means that it doesn't overstay it's welcome, even if you wish it would. It'll probably give you some new things to think about in the process.

TLDR: It's a cute horror game that isn't too scary, but if chase sequences trigger you, don't play it.

Some of the more recent horror games try to subvert your expectations with cutesy graphics that hide violent and gruesome stuff in the writing/deaths/etc. The original version of this game was one of the front-runners in subverting expectations this way, and is worth a play if you can't afford the HD remake.

Gameplay in the main game is pretty simple and it's got a pretty minimal control set. The monsters are all generally based around a chase mechanic which can get kinda tiresome, but the later enemies switch things up enough for things to not get boring. This is a great game for getting into these kinds of horror games without ponying up a lot of time or cash.

The HD remake adds 2 expansions and some graphical upgrades that are all worth working your way through if you enjoyed the main game. Plus there's always endless mode with additional monsters if you want more content.

Overall, very worth the low cost of entry if you've heard about it and are curious about it.

TLDR: One of the most unique puzzle games I've ever played. Stunningly gorgeous in a way that adds to the gameplay instead of getting in the way of it. If you play any puzzle game. This should probably be high on the list next to Portal and Myst for impact.

There's this little indy game called "naissanceE" on steam. It's free. You should play it It is hauntingly beautiful, and has actively made me a better person just through playing it. it's an advanced walking sim, where your whole goal is just to meander through the world and explore,

This is like that, but they decided to cram an AMAZING puzzle game into the game too. I don't think I've played something else so strikingly beautiful while also so desolate in that backrooms, liminal way in years.

I don't even regularly like puzzle games. Portal is amazing, and I've been known to pick up and play Myst, Witness, etc. but this one, I keep coming back to. I will probably replay this in the near future once my memory of it has faded a little, just so I can re-experience how stunning this game is and how it made me feel.

I don't think I can heap enough praise on this game to anyone. This will forever be one of those games that'll have this place, stuck in my head, where I just can't forget it entirely, and I'll hold it up as a prime example of gaming as an artistic medium, not just entertainment. If you're reading this, and haven't played it yet, it's worth every penny. and then some.

(Disclaimer. I played this game on Proton. I dunno if that heavily affected my experience. ProtonDB rates this as platinum.)

Ok. So I loved the demo for this game. It was stylistic, the gameplay was solid, if slightly awkward and it just looked like my kind of game. I love skill based games, and I LOVE cyberpunk as a setting.

And the beginning of the game is SOLID. They clearly put at lot of work into the feel of being an awesome cyber swordsman runner thing. And the atmosphere is just....*chefs kiss*. The music is excellent, and some of the pictures of this world rival CP 2077 for just flat out gorgeous. When this game works, it WORKS, and feels smooth and enjoyable and like everything the trailers and the demo promised it would be. The story is a bit predictable, but that's OK. That's not why we're here.

But...the further you get into the game, the more it's cracks show. And the more it shows that the devs had some really cool ideas, and loved building the world, but didn't do enough polish on making the gameplay consistent. It devolves heavily into style not substance.

Multiple times I clipped through a wall and had to restart the area. Or jumps just...didn't work, the game would decide to throw me some random direction, or through a wall to the back of what I was interacting with, or toss me into a kill floor because the engine didn't interact well.

Multiple times the game would chug while it was loading in the background, killing the gameplay. Load in happened a lot around enemies and the game would stutter for a moment, returning to me...already dead. Starting the fights again fixed that issue (the enemies were already loaded), but the flow was gone.

The bosses are....rough. Distances between checkpoints (if there are them), are way too long if they exist at all. There's a boss that's very timing based, but the timing isn't telegraphed well, leading to deaths that make no sense.

And that's before the last 1/3 of the game. There's a melee enemy they introduce late game that has an ABSURDLY large strike box. Basically, it feels like the game tosses the "but fair" part of the "hard but fair" out the window.

Things kinda degraded, with me eventually feeling like I was guiding a well mannered horse. If the game decided it would work with me, then we could both get where we wanted to go, and MOST of the time, it wanted to go to the same place. When it didn't get distracted anyways.

The last few levels in particular really suffer here, because the platforming just become a "redo it until you eventually memorize it and can make it through". Eventually you're faced with a really rough section with moving parts that do not match up, meaning getting through it is basically a guessing game of whether the parts will fit together correctly, and since the world does not reset upon your death (you just respawn), this section is basically a guessing game.

Honestly? if you want a game to just futz around in, as a cool cyberpunk ninja warrior with a sword, and you're not too worried about reaching the end of the game, this isn't a bad pickup. Get it on sale though.

But if you tend to complete games, expect the last 1/3 of the game to be a slog through what feels like a rushed, poorly designed and poorly optimized set of levels. Especially the last few.

We all know about the problems this game had on release, and while honestly, I saw so many less of these problems than most people did. a lot of it was just brutal.

But for me this game was almost salvation in a 2021 where I hadn't been able to socialize in person in months. Even through the glitches, I loved this game. I refused to fast travel within the world as it was too gorgeous to want to spend my time watching load screens. I played every quest I could, and still wander the streets of Night City looking for secrets and stuff to do regularly, even though I don't think there's a lot left in the base game for me to see. I love the ADs all over the city in this game, not because they're raunchy and/or violent (which they are) but because someone spent that level of time making something that felt like it was in place in the universe.

I'm excited for the DLC, not because of bug fixes or new guns, but because I just want a valid reason to spend more time in this world. Running around with Johnny Silverhand and making mistakes.

I know CDPR ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up the release of this, but for someone who actively avoided the hypetrain that took over 2020 about this game, it's everything I could have wanted and more. It brought the worlds of Snow Crash and Neuromancer and all of the other books in a genre I love dearly to life in a way that no game has before.

And if you're into cyberpunk at all, and have a computer that can run it. You should at least give it a shot. Not because the anime was good (which it was), not because you gotta see the glitchfest for yourself, but because honestly, I don't know the next time we'll get a love letter to cyberpunk as a genre like this again.

It's a deckbuilder, with a creepy man in a cabin. and you should buy it and play it. The gameplay is well designed, and my biggest complaint was I always wanted to draw more cards than I had.

I'm not gonna spoil it. It's good. REALLY good. You should play it.

Kinda like previous Daniel Mullins games, what you see is not always what you get. sometimes it's better.

I started playing this game and was enjoying a weird sniper/WW2 themed/zombie shooter. There was some sniping, but not a ton, but it was enjoyable to just derp around in. Chapter 1 and 2 are fairly well designed to play to the strengths of the Sniper Elite series.

But by the end of the last chapter, I HATE this game as a solo player.

All of the weapons are different with different stats, and yet none are unique enough to switch between or feel good to use while playing. The pistol and machine gun are accurately inaccurate, but for a game that requires headshots to kill an enemy, you can't guarantee a hit. They're only useful at basically shot gun ranges. It means that only the rifle is functional to make accurate shots, but it also is frustrating to use because the zoom means that you can't accurately shoot close range. The enemies are mostly melee-only, which means that for them to be a threat, the developers had to make areas rather cramped. This leads to no gun feeling particularly enjoyable to use, especially in the later levels.

It feels really like rebellion forgot this was a sniping based game, and just throws wave after wave after wave of enemies at you. The fights become incredibly unfair requiring cheesing and just general bullshittery by the end of the game. By the last few levels, you're getting stuck in tiny areas just getting SWARMED by tons of enemies, and it doesn't feel intense, or scary, or anything but just...cheap. You will die, not because you made a mistake, but because the game spawned enemies on top of you, or environmental damage, or you turn a corner trying to gain distance and run into a dead end. Even on normal this game is incredibly rough to solo, and being that it's several years old, chances of you finding friends to play with is...slim.

To top it off? When you FINALLY kill the big bad? You don't get to actually have a moment of like...sniping him at distance, no. he's just a regular enemy one-on-one you can shoot with a pistol. The whole "super enhanced omg zoomy look how cool this shot is" thing...doesn't happen for killing what is the final boss kinda...defeating the point of this being a Sniper Elite game.

I never did play horde mode, but I can't see how it would make for a more satisfactory play experience than the story line, as it's basically zombie hoards from COD but with weapons that aren't really functional.

Spend your money on something that will respect the dollars you throw at it. Rebellion was clearly trying to get massive buy in on the love for l4d2 when this came out, but they clearly didn't think about what made people like sniper elite as a series.