Recent reviews by Zach Fett

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Had a blast playing this with my friend, I especially like the mechanic of reviving by putting your teammate's two halves back together.

Really looking forward to release now, but I do have a few minor suggestions and one bug report to mention:

1. I would greatly appreciate a "Toggle Crouch/Slide" setting.
   
   
2. I assume this will come with the character skill trees that are currently unavailable to view, but if not, I'd like a way to upgrade the charge on our movement abilities. The giant pole that you can swing around on for example lasts way too short.
   
   
3. A third person view would be neat. Or at least one we can toggle while in vehicles. Which speaking of, are vehicles gonna be in actual missions or only the hub? Hopefully the former!
   
   
4. Full Body Awareness would also be extremely neat! I love when games have it; being able to look down and see your character's body/legs, it adds a lot to the immersion imo. Especially nice for games that have sliding.
   
   
5. Please either convert the FOV values to horizontal like most games use, or make mention that the slider is for vertical FOV, not horizontal. Right now the default value is set to 90, but I have no idea why since you're using vertical FOV, that's equivelant to 121 horizontal FOV! That's gonna lead to people who don't know better complaining and wondering why the game is making them dizzy at an FOV value they're used to.

1. During the "clear the fungal infection" mission, one of the chunks we had to shoot was stuck inside a building. Thankfully I was playing as the medic character so my lock-on missiles could just barely hit it, but otherwise we'd have had to restart due to our regular weapons being unable to shoot through the wall.

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(TL;DR at the bottom) About two years ago I played the first RICO and didn't care much for it (see my review of it here). The guns felt floaty, the sounds were weak, the AI was awful, and the level generation wasn't enough to keep the levels from feeling extremely repetitive. Steam reviews for both games had left me under the assumption that the first game was superior in nearly every way compared to its sequel, RICO: London, so I didn't bother picking it up.. until now.

I'm happy to say the gunplay in the sequel is vastly better, gun sounds are solid, there seems to be far more weapons available, movement feels good (I like being able to John Woo dive), and while the AI is still very barebones, you can at least ambush them if you find yourself in one of the very rare room layouts that allows it. They don't always know where you're at if they lose sight of you.

Unfortunately level generation is about as bad as it was in the first game. You'll feel like you're going through the exact same tiny rooms over and over with very little variety. There's some nicer room types (like the small apartment with two floors, but it counts as one single room), but they're extremely rare for seemingly no reason.

To add to this issue, each full level lasts WAY too long. The game shouldn't feel monotonous within the first 30 minutes of gameplay.

After each level you'll be able to open a shop and choose from a few upgrades, weapons, and refill ammo/health/revives. There's a pretty huge issue here, though: You don't earn enough to buy more than one, maybe two things from each shop. On average I was earning 6 of the currency per level, but just refilling a TINY amount of my health cost all 6 points. The economy seems to be really unbalanced and poorly thought out.

So, TL;DR: would I recommend RICO: London? I'm very barely leaning toward yes, only because compared to the first game this one at least felt better to play overall. The game hasn't had an update since September 2021 so this won't happen, but it'd be nice if the devs had shortened each level's length by a few rooms and increased the currency rate. Those two things alone would've made this a vastly more enjoyable experience. As it is, I'd recommend it in a deep discount, no more than about $5.

Oh, also, why the hell is a game from 2021 not recognizing side mouse buttons when rebinding keys? C'mon.

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Guns feel and sound good to fire, animations are fine (other than the minigun's reload animation), and there are some occasionally nice-looking rooms, though far too many of the rooms are same-y and very basic. However nearly everything else feels extremely barebones and basic.

The enemy AI is completely braindead, less intelligent than most 90s FPS'. They instantly aggro as soon as you have a straight line of sight on them, even if their back is turned toward you (???), and then, depending on the enemy, they either stand in place and fire in your direction even if you ducked behind cover, or they'll walk directly toward you. They don't seem to care if you fire a gun nearby or kill their robot friend that was standing four feet over, as long as an enemy hasn't seen you, you're fine. There's nearly zero depth to the combat because of how weirdly stupid the enemies are. You can cheese most rooms by starting combat in a spot where only a few enemies have line of sight of you at a time.

It's baffling that they put so little effort into the AI.. and then you start noticing all of the other kind of AI in the game, and it starts to click that the devs are just lazy. See, nearly every single bit of artwork in the demo is AI-generated. And poorly, at that, it looks like they used a very early model to generate all of it. You'll see it everywhere; upgrade/skill icons, environment art (one of which features an AI-generated Elon Musk), and it's always ugly looking. They also appear to have AI-generated the main character's voice, the delivery of many of his lines don't sound right. This doesn't really surprise me given that they also used an AI-generated female voice for their weird sexual advertisements on YouTube, but it's disappointing.

Also as I mentioned at the start of the review, most of the level design is mind-numbingly boring corridors and rooms repeated over and over. There is occasionally a room that'll look nice, like the hangar or bar, but I only saw each once in my 2 hours of finishing the story missions in the demo. 90% of that time was fighting in the same basic box-like rooms.

Given the developer's history of near-instantly abandoning each of their games on release, I have little hope that this is going to improve in much of any meaningful way by release or after.

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This collection frequently goes on sale for a measly $10 for all 6 games, highly recommended for that price whether you've played the series before or not, if you like FPS' and/or co-op this is a must-own.

Halo CE's campaign hasn't aged particularly well, a lot of levels drag on far longer than they should and copy/paste the same handful of rooms ad nauseam, and there's a few too many times the game goes, "Hey remember that level you played earlier? Now do it again!" For a first-time playthrough this isn't a big deal, but on replays you'll be very tempted to just skip half of the campaign. However that other half is really good, there are some excellent moments in the campaign that it's still worth revisiting occasionally.

Also if it's your first time playing Halo CE, please for the love of God don't use the ugly, unfaithful Anniversary remaster graphics. Toggle to them occasionally if you want to see how horribly they ruined the tone and atmosphere of the original, but don't use it as your primary graphic mode.

I've made a few comparison shots of Halo CE Anniversary if you're curious to see how bad it is:
https://imgsli.com/MzYyMDkz
https://imgsli.com/MzYyMDg5
https://imgsli.com/MzYyMDkw
https://imgsli.com/MzYyMDkx

On the other hand Halo 2, 3, Reach, and ODST's campaigns have aged phenomenally, their campaigns have plenty of variety and the good levels far outweigh the bad. Their multiplayer modes are also still very active and just as fun as they were many years ago.

Even the black sheep of the series, Halo 4, is still worth playing through because it has some very fun levels and set pieces.

It's a shame Halo 5 was never added (or ported to PC to begin with) because while it has arguably more issues than 4, it'd still be nice to have the entire series playable on PC, and Halo 5 had a pretty good multiplayer.

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A stressful multi-tasking work simulator where you try to keep a reactor from overheating. I liked a lot of the little minigames, the satisfying buttons and switches to press, and the humor was pretty good, but be warned that the last few levels get pretty hard. I was able to get all but one ending (successfully get 4500 energy on Day 10) because of the difficulty spike, but that's fine, I'm not a completionist.

My only real complaint, other than maybe the difficulty spiking after Day 5, is that two of the endings are disappointing and try to be meta but it fails a bit for me. The one ending I couldn't get (but I looked up a video of) at least has a bit of a story conclusion, but I would've liked a little more there.

I'd like to see more like this, the only other similar game I know of is STAY, but it's even more stressful lol. I just wanna press more fun little buttons and doodads.

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I picked this up to play with a friend since we like the COD Zombies formula, and I liked TimeShifters, but man.. this is not good. Even for the current discount of $0.89 it isn't worth that. You can buy a vastly better and more-polished zombie horde indie game for extremely cheap, such as CYBERHUNK, Ultimate Zombie Defense 1 & 2, Zedfest, Zombie Estate 2, Nation Red, or the upcoming Imperium.

I'm not even sure where to start with this game's issues, so here's just a few short sentences of various problems the game has:

There's only one slightly interesting map (Church) while the other 3 are extremely forgettable and made up of generic square corridors and rooms.

None of the guns feel very good, they sound weak, and have pretty terrible animations (the G13 straight up doesn't even have a reload animation..).

It's a very buggy game, not even rebinding keys works properly (also the game doesn't recognize side mouse buttons). Most things your teammate does aren't shown properly on your end, like a lot of weapons are missing world models so you'll see your friend using a pump shotgun when firing a Junkgun (and you can't see the bricks fired from that unless you're the one using it), or a pistol when holding the "Smite" bible, or when meleeing they'll just glitch out and have no animation. I also loved how every time a bullet hits a metal surface it's excruciatingly loud.

Everyone has the same generic bald man model (Why make such a boring character if you're gonna have every player use it? Just do faceless grunts or something).

Lastly, the balancing is really not good. There's no reason to even use any of the guns because the zombies move very fast at high waves and hit you without even finishing their attack animation (they also just phase right through barricades once broken), so you're better off just buying the axe and spamming it. It's a one-hit kill to wave 30. Meanwhile the two Tier 5 guns that the game has (AA-12 and Junkgun) aren't remotely as good.

This feels like a game that should still be in Early Access, yet it's not and the last update was February 20th, 2023, so I don't think you're going to see any of these issues ever fixed.

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Clearly inspired by Jak 2 with many of the same moves/combos, and that's a good thing imo. I had almost no complaints with the demo other than a few minor bugs I posted in the forum. Otherwise it ran really well, looked nice, felt great to play, and the map was really fun to explore while finding all of the purple bolts so that I could use them to buy all the outfits.

Very excited for this one after playing the demo!

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"What if we copy all of the worst parts of BF2042 that everyone hated and combine it with COD?"
That's what this new Delta Force is.

Everyone keeps comparing this to Battlefield and yet it's not. Superficially, at a glance perhaps, but this is far more of a Call of Duty clone. Specifically it feels far more like I'm playing COD's failed attempt at a Battlefield-like mode ("Ground War") than BF itself.

The only nice things I can say about it are the graphics are decent, it runs well, and the weapon customization is solid. Negatives, on the other hand, I can say a whole lot of:

• The TTK is INSANELY fast like COD.
  
• Every single gun is a bullet hose with almost no recoil.
  
• Obnoxious specialists with repetitive voicelines you hear constantly.
  
• Specialist ability spam is worse than even 2042, because each one in this game has multiple abilities rather than just one.
  
• There's very little destructibility, I feel like it's even less than 2042's and that's saying something.
  
• Multiple currencies, tons of microtransactions on day one, some are gacha that require drawing many, many times to get the main reward (a gaudy, ugly COD Mobile-style skin).
  
• There'll be a mobile version of the game and it's very obviously affecting the PC version. It does that COD Mobile/Asian MMO thing where the main menu has a billion exclamation marks it wants you to claim to keep you logging in daily for rewards.
  
• Not sure if there's an exploit or bug at the moment involving smoke, but I am constantly being killed by people through it as if they can see me just fine.
  
• There also seems to be latency issues, I often start taking damage before the player is even visible on my end, like when they're coming around a corner.
  
• When you inevitably uninstall, make sure to open the install folder first. You'll need to delete it afterward because it leaves behind nearly 500mb of junk.
  
• After uninstalling, it also leaves its "AntiCheatExpert" services installed on your PC.

This isn't a Battlefield clone, and it certainly isn't anything like the old Delta Force series. It's Tencent's attempt at COD.

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Boy, I sure do love searching through a hundred drawers to try finding keys across an entire motel. Maybe the "Notes" menu would've helped me find the keys, I don't know because the notes are completely unreadable. They're images of physical notes with ♥♥♥♥ all over them so you can't read 75% of the text on them.

Meanwhile enemies respawn every minute or two in the exact same spots, but they don't hurt you, they're just a nuisance. The one that sprints at you at 100 mph and blinds you for a bit especially got on my nerves by the end.

There's no tension here either, because you have infinite ammo to deal with the infinite enemies since ammo also respawns every minute or two in the exact same spots. I don't understand why the devs went this route instead of having limited spawns for enemies and ammo. Also you can hardly carry any ammo on you, it feels weirdly limiting.

Then there's the big bad demon of the map. For the motel it's an old lady in her nightgown. Very terrifying. You can just shoot her 5-6 times to get her out of the "aggro/chase" mode, which is a bizarre design choice. Except, you can't always do that. After you've fed her 5 (?) times she goes into a invulnerable and constantly aggro mode for the rest of the match, so you better have found all the keys before that point otherwise there's no chance of being able to search around while she's constantly after you. I hid for ages and she never got out of that invulnerable state.

Lastly, leveling is painfully slow so if you want to try some of the cooler looking weapons like I did, too bad. You'll have to play the three maps this game has on repeat dozens and dozens and dozens of times just to get to the final unlocks.

The game is more annoying than it is scary.

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I'm sorry developer, but this is way, way too unfinished to be charging a price for it.

• Zombies don't make any sound until they're attacking (or dying), so you'll often not realize one is coming up behind you until you're taking damage.
  
• Every single map consists of extremely basic/generic rooms and corridors with no personality.
  
• The Holes map has multiple doors that you pay to unlock that lead directly into another door that requires paying to unlock. It felt like a joke.
  
• Floor 52 has a doorway next to spawn that says something like "Pay 10000 to complete the map." You can walk right through that door and endlessly fall down out of the map.
  
• The most over-the-top head bobbing I've ever seen in a game, and this is coming from someone who likes headbob usually!
  
• No key rebinding.
  
• Motion blur setting does nothing. It's always on.
  
• The UI is extremely basic and feels like placeholder.