Recent reviews by blake++

I played this with keyboard, and have currently SSd all levels in Bronze and Silver.
I have 320 hours in Celeste focusing on doing deathless runs of the individual chapters. I have 80 hours in N++.
Celeste is my favorite game of all time. I heavily enjoy games made in the Source engine, specifically ones which allow for skill-based movement like Bunnyhop, Surf, Rocketjumping, etc. I heavily enjoy N++. I think Super Meat Boy is overrated and not good when stacked up against other 2D platformers we see today.

I'll keep this short; I doubt I'll ever get to experience a lot of this game.

Primer: Dustforce has a ranking system: F to SS. It also has different tiers of levels, in order of difficulty: Bronze, Iron, Gold, etc.

Dustforce starts out with a couple of tutorials. 1 and 2 are very easy, but 3 is surprisingly difficult to get an SS on. I had to come back way later after SSing all of the Bronze level section to defeat Tutorial 3 once and for all. It is very odd that Tutorial 3 is more difficult than a lot of the Bronze levels.

Bronze and Silver for the most part are a breeze. There's occasional difficulty spikes due to a weird trick you have to learn, but it's not insane. It then starts to get tricky at the Gold levels. Not all Gold levels are similar in difficulty though; some are way more difficult than others. But where the real kicker is is getting to these levels. Dustforce is unique in that it makes you work just to GET to the difficult level. A difficult level is blocked by a trickjump that you have to figure out. Some of these you HAVE to look up (once is mentioned on the one (1) newbie guide for this game on Steam because it's so obtuse and unintuitive). I've had to ask for help in the Dustforce Discord. I've seen some other reviews praise this game for not "holding your hand", but damn I'd love some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ guidance every once in a while.

Overall, I ended up losing steam and stopping at around some of the Gold levels. There's a lot of depth and skill-based movement here, but the difficulty imbalance and poor guidance stops most players from ever getting there. This is easily one of the greatest platformers ever made, I know it. The problem is just having places to learn how to get good in a way that doesn't require you to just try a difficult level over and over and over again that's far beyond where you're able to comfortably attempt.

So, if you're very experienced with platformers and want to try this one, I highly recommend. Just get ready to have the learning curve whip back around and punch you in the face.

Also:
-Amazing soundtrack.
-Unique menu system combined with a hub world; very cool.

• Excellent platformer with a lot of history, soul, and style. Feels just the right amount of floaty with a lot of ability for expression through movement.
  
• Ridiculous amount of depth to movement, especially for something as simple as a game with only three buttons (left, right, jump).
  
• Many mechanics and enemies actually have some of their own depth too, even though on the surface they appear quite straightforward. Rockets are actually phenomenal and super interesting.
  
• Absurdly impressive amount of levels and stuff to do; 100%ing N++ is a difficult task, and takes most people around 800 hours minimum
  
• Episodes/levels are structured in a way that results in you always having something to do or to strive for. Along with community levels, if you want to play N++, you will always have something you can do at any skill level.
  
• The ability to not be able to do something no matter how hard you try, then come back much later after you've gotten better and nail it in a few attempts is a constant. few other games make me feel as good as I do when that happens
  
• Amazing soundtrack
  
• Tons of levels, customization, color palettes

• Songs do not have permanent license with the game, so at some point songs will be removed from the game in patches. This has already happened. You can downpatch to get the music back though.
  
• The soundtrack is also not for sale anywhere. If you want to buy the entire soundtrack, you'd have to go to multiple different Bandcamps and websites to purchase all the tracks (some of them are not even publicly available anymore btw). After all of that, you'd probably be down about $200. slsk is a good program!
  
• Secret challenges. Holy ♥♥♥♥, the intended system for these SUCKS. I'll just link this guide[gamefaqs.gamespot.com] because explaining it means the review hits the character limit. TL;DR, It's esoteric, annoying, absurdly difficult, and time-wasting. The actual challenges are fun (usually), but discovering them is not.
  
• Some levels/secret challenges are total misses. SU-X-02-04 "losing ground" is one solid example; it's 60 seconds of nothing and then the actual hard part. "temerity" G--T++ is 60 seconds of pure waiting.
  
• Episodes sometime seem randomly scattered around without much thought for difficulty and progression.

• There is NO ingrained online multiplayer. The only multiplayer you can do is Steam Remote Play which means that your friend's save does not progress while yours does. So in order for a Co-Op pair to fully complete N++ on their respective machines, you MUST do all of Co-Op TWICE (which is a monumental task). There is also a Race mode which was built around multiplayer, which has the same issue. Thankfully, you can complete this solo but it takes all of the fun out of the mode. It's best to do this with multiple friends but... good luck with that.
  
• Community is hit or miss. To complete Co-Op, you're basically required to join the official Discord to find another player to play with, and even then you have to find someone who's willing to progress on YOUR save file AND who is also in a region close enough to you to not cause significant input delay. As time passes, this just becomes harder and harder of a task.
  
• On a related note, the Official Discord community can be quite awful. I've seen some of the 100%ers tell minors to kill themselves while mods don't give a ♥♥♥♥. Multiple users made fun of a 14y/o kid who used emojis in his messages "too often". There's this one extremely self-hating dude named Renard who made it his life's mission to annoy and harass me (spoiler alert: he just hated himself so he lashed out at a stranger). Some people are just straight up strange. It's something you don't want to actively involve yourself in; if you're looking for a sense of community, go literally anywhere else. I'm not going to say there AREN'T nice people there (there were a couple of nice people I enjoyed talking to, s/o Emmoji, Doc, xela, Nova, and eyre), but it's the best of a bad bunch.

• Cannot bind multiple keys to one action. This is important for some late game mashing that is required for certain secret challenges.
  
• No option to save all successful replays. Which is really lame. Incredibly useful since you might wanna replay a successful secret challenge attempt but your all-gold run overrides it because it's technically a better score and therefore doesn't save.
  
• No option to replay your latest death.

• Saves have a tendency to corrupt. Saves tend to not work with the Steam Cloud, and it's recommended to keep the Cloud off. You need to keep manual backups, as your save can corrupt for no reason at any time. The game does not keep backups for you. In 348 hours, it hasn't happened to me, but it could at any moment.
  
• Your dead body colliding with enemies can destroy your ears because parts can become stuck inside of enemies.
  
• Can't view replays during an episode. Apparently, you weren't supposed to be able to view a replay of a level before you beat the episode either (which you can). I really don't like this, because you either view the replay for a level you can't figure out or you just look it up on YouTube. The extra intended barrier just does not seem appealing from a player's standpoint.
  
• Profile menu has a bug where it won't display progress correctly.
  
• Issues displaying on certain high resolutions
  
• Game will display sharper on certain languages (German is sharper compared to English)
  
• Replays are 5.5% slower than actual gameplay. I experienced this odd bug when I tried to make a video syncing a replay with a game recording's audio.
  
• Extremely loud on first launch (as in, when you first install the game)

This game is phenomenal. I know it sounds like I hate it, but I really just hate aspects of it. I wouldn't have put 350 hours into something that I didn't enjoy. N++ is a great game, but it makes a couple decisions that have me scratching my head trying to wonder what they were thinking at points. It's got a couple of really screwed up and strange bugs, a mostly ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up community, and a serious lack of some QoL features.
But it's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fantastic platformer. There is truly nothing else like it. It captures such a delicious style and vibe that other platformers don't really go for. This game is absolutely in a league of its own, and it's dominating.

Buy on sale.[isthereanydeal.com]

Here's hoping for open source release in 2025.

I wanted this to be good so much I played it all the way through for 13 hours.

Here's my review of Clear Sky on reddit. There, I'm able to offer a little more context for my background with STALKER, my expectations going in, and my reasoning for mod installations I'm not able to do here due to character limitations.

I used mods in this playthrough that changed the gameplay to make it more bearable/enjoyable while still keeping true to STALKER. This does not have a bearing on most of the opinions I have in this review, and when it does, it puts points in Clear Sky's favor. Look at the reddit post for the mods I used or scroll to the bottom of this review.

---

• Graphics, story, music, dialog. STALKER's still STALKER in those areas, so it's still good.
  
• Graphics are REALLY good. Huge step up from SoC
  
• Improved ability to find important NPCs through the use of an extended map legend system.
  
• Weapon upgrade system is neat. Not as robust as I was expecting but I still enjoyed it and felt my hard-earned cash was well spent
  
• Fast travel system that you use money for is a smart idea (for the most part)
  
• Finding artifacts and it being a challenge/puzzle is really smart and really rewarding. GORGEOUS.
  
• New locations added to the map are very cool and help flesh out SoC by proxy

Short list, I know.

• Putting this at the top because it's so important: Money actually really matters in Clear Sky. That's why, halfway through the game, the game takes all of your money and items. It's a scripted sequence that's part of the main quest that you cannot avoid where bandits take your stuff. Despite the fact that I recovered my stash of items within two hours of in game time, the two bandits managed to spend all 100,000RU of my money. They sold none of my items, destroyed or damaged none of them. Just let that soak in. All my money's gone, but my items are just as I left them.
  
• No more horror. I got jumpscared twice, but that's not really horror.
  
• Faction War system: it's a new system added and only in Clear Sky where you can participate in factions and make war against each other; really good idea, terrible execution; longer writeup on this on my reddit post, but the basics are:
  
  1. Friendly AI sucks and doesn't help
     
  2. Taking encampments is boring and tedious once you recognize how scripted it is
     
  3. The randomness present in SoC of fellow STALKERs roaming the Zone is completely gone. There is no air of intrigue and mystery in your surroundings
     
  4. The game makes you feel like the main character, which is directly against the principles of what makes STALKER so good
     
  5. Your faction is annoying and screams in your ear constantly asking for help. No, you can't mute them
     
  6. Areas have obvious reinforcement wave timers, which kill immersion. Most obvious at the army outpost next to the rookie village
     
  7. Reinforcements to capture areas have and will fail due to poorly coded AI. I had to sit at the Depot for 20 minutes of real time waiting for reinforcements. Just sitting there
     
  8. Your faction members will be screaming for you to help them (there is not another STALKER in the Zone that can) and when you get there to help defend they are idling without a care in the world. Immersion killer.
• Machine Gun Emplacement; let's just say there's a reason there's a mod to nerf this. Even after you nerf it, it still ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks. It's so awful, and it's in such an important part of the map that you are told to go as part of the main quest. It's a beam of death that barely lets up with infinite ammo. Peeking it is suicide. Common recommendations to remedy the issue are to "get lucky" and run away while spamming bandages and first aid kits. Another is to go all the way around back through the swamps (a 10 minute walk with dangers along the way) to another travel point that only opens up after you come through this area (which after that you still have to walk all the way down to the rookie camp to proceed with the main quest). Both are ♥♥♥♥. This feature is ♥♥♥♥. You can't pick up the weapon the emplacement uses btw.
  
• Base camp is a totally separate area for no reason
  
• Ladders suck still. Half Life was released in 1998. Get good ladders please.
  
• Locations need clearer label sections; Had trouble finding labels when I needed to fast travel
  
• Fast travel prices are overpriced and absurd. Most of the distances take less than 5 minutes IRL and are not dangerous at all because the world is dead.
  
• Ammo and health items are overly abundant; you will never worry about running out.
  
• Locations you can hide from emissions seems totally arbitrary.
  
• Cannot reject quests you've taken remotely. There is no way to deny quite a few side quests.
  
• Fetch quests. Hope you like them; that's all this game has.
  
• Stamina regen has been nerfed into the ground, and stamina runs out faster. Exploration is hindered.
  
• Members of my faction got called homophobic slurs by the bandits. Pretty disappointed with that.
  
• How do you recycle this much map and not have enough budget for women in the Zone?
  
• The end section is a total mess and complete enemy spam, just like SoC, but somehow less interesting.

On a fundamental level, it's still STALKER. With a modded experience, I'm sure you can still have some level of fun as long as you avoid the major new things Clear Sky introduces. I think. Let me remind you that the mods I install change fundamental aspects of the game. If you go vanilla, the gunplay will be worse, you can't sleep through nights, enemies spam grenades like it's CoD:WaW, machine turret emplacements are absurdly difficult to deal with, and your immersion is ruined even harder.

Just don't bother. Go to Call of Pripyat, which is better than SoC twice over and is the peak of the series easily.

---

Mods Used:
Sky Reclamation Project w/ following normal addons:

• Widescreen Patch
  
• Improved LuaJit Library
  
• Smaller Inventory Grids
  
• SweetFX
  
• User Configuration Patch

Game-changing addons:

• Alternative Ballistics (contains Feasible Stealth and Restored Pistol Ironsights)
  
• Prefilled Stashes
  
• Reasonable Machine Gun Nest Lethality
  
• Reduced Grenade Spam
  
• No Enemy Map Spots
  
• Sleeping Bag

Settings:

• Crosshair off
  
• Dynamic music off
  
• All graphics options maxed out
  
• Master difficulty
  
• Probably some other setting I can't remember

For a quick explanation, this is a writeup[github.com] of the optional features for Sky Reclamation Project, a bug-fixing community patch for this game. Most notably, Clear Sky is the only STALKER to put a dice roll on hit registration for targets on whether they get shot. If you shoot someone in the head, you can miss. Not to mention all the other issues.

This review will mainly focus on the campaign aspect of the game.
Played on Plutonium, completed on Veteran

• Cool history shots as cutscenes is awesome
  
• Feels focused on still reminding you "this is history; stuff like this actually happened" which most newer CoDs forgo
  
• Probably the best soundtrack I've heard from a COD so far; the occasional heavy guitar work is amazing along with the variety of genres used here
  
• Flank routes on a ton of missions; lots of different ways to tackle a problem
  
• Vehicle sections are a bit absurd but still loads of fun
  
• Graphics hold up well surprisingly. Put everything on max and the game looks great
  
• Missions have a nice balance and flow to them; each mission I feel like I'm doing something different from the previous without straying from the base gameplay concepts
  
• While barely used, the sniper AI during the first mission with Reznov is really cool. Totally underutilized
  
• You get to kill fascist scum.
  
• Zombies is awesome and changed the game when it comes to PvE modes
  
• Multiplayer is a blast and still alive via community servers

• Some moments are just absurd ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Just. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
  
• Checkpoint system is generally pretty good, but sometimes you don't get checkpoints for really long times resulting in frustration over having to replay a long section more than you should
  
• Shotguns suck; the trench gun is the coolest gun in the game yet it sucks balls because the map design is centered around mid-range fights, even in "close quarters combat" areas (it's useless in trench warfare lmao)
  
• Deployable weapons system seems totally undertested and not at all well implemented; a lot of surfaces you should be able to use you can't and it results in you basically never being able to use the feature
  
• The way the game wants you to play != how you should play in veteran. Big open areas with immediate unreactable ambushes are plenty here. You'll get punished for something you couldn't have reacted to at all.

Veteran's difficulty is overhyped; insane amounts of grenades from enemies encourage you to play risky but not too risky; keep them engaged or you'll pay. It is definitely difficult, but I feel like people exaggerate its difficulty online.

But what truly makes this game difficult is the AI. You are not fighting a war, you are a one man army fighting a swarm of hyper-intelligent robots while the people on your side are hardly people; they're more like dumb animals who see a treat and go to it. Friendly AI will routinely not check corners, not kill any enemies, and throw grenades that harm you instead of the enemy. It is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ brutal, solely because of the friendly AI. And also because enemy AI prefer to target you instead of friendly AI.

In conclusion, I still had a lot of fun. Veteran difficulty was engaging, and while the campaign has a few missteps, it more than makes up for it with variety of missions, setpieces, and music. The levels are well-designed for the most part and give you options on what to do. Highly recommend.

Gloomwood is a phenomenal immersive sim horror for someone relatively new to the genre. It is a thrilling experience and incredibly well-crafted despite being very early access.

This review was given on the v0.1.222 version of the game. Some or all of these criticisms may not apply due to updates.
Unless the developer somehow massively ♥♥♥♥♥ up (I doubt), you should 100% buy this game.
Played on Full Moon.

-Incredible atmosphere
-Great controls and movement
-Well-placed music
-Incredible amount of alternate paths and different ways to tackle problems for almost every scenario in the game
-Being daring is rewarded: you can get better loot and weapons early if you take risks
-Inventory management system feels great; I don't feel too limited but I still have to make hard choices on what all I want in my inventory
-Safes are brute-forceable. This is kind of a double-edged sword. I could not figure out any of the passcodes but I think that's just because I'm dumb.

-Alternate paths best shown here
-Enemies are well placed and provide interesting challenges; clearing them feels satisfying and rewarding
-Great showcase of initial mechanics and many pathways back to the save point

-Forcing the player to turn off the lights to progress is evil genius
-Good use of mushrooms to provide some light

-Very clever intro to this
-Basement area builds a very good sense of fear and tension

-Enemies can be easily exploited by terrain (this happens to basically every enemy). This can really break immersion. However, I do applaud the developer for not massively removing your movement options to prevent this.
-There is nothing that really teaches you how the dogs work. That, or I missed it. They just seem like massively better Huntsmen. Better hearing and sight.
-The boss's triggers on what is too much noise is dumb. Eventually figured out it was opening a dresser. Why specifically that? If you want to do that, can we have an option to open things slowly?
-AI can sometimes feel really dumb. They won't check areas that I think they should and I'll get away with more than I should.
-I've carried an expensive item from a safe found in the docks for a full 3 hours. I cannot find a vendor. Apparently there is one inside the next unreleased area, but it's a bit absurd nothing really tells me that it's better to leave it and come back later.
-Gems are pick-uppable but the first two gems I encountered would not let me pick them up for some reason. I could come back and pick them up later once I picked up a gem the game wanted me to pick up. It was weird.
-Mines had a warning for "unstable ground" and I was supposed to use my lantern to avoid the unstable ground. I figured it was going to be a balance of using your light and not to avoid holes but not trigger enemies. I did not have to use my light. There's so much natural light in the caves it makes it easy.

And my biggest issue of all:
Gamma and contrast sliders do not have fine-tuning. What the ♥♥♥♥.
For a game that requires good brightness, gamma, and contrast settings, why can i not carefully fine-tune these values? You can use your mouse but that's not precise.

Though it does appear like I have a good list of cons, some of them may have been due to me being dumb or not familiar with Gloomwood-like games. I'm also sometimes not the most observant player. But I feel like I played the best I can.

To close this review out, Gloomwood is a fantastic project. Ever since trying the demo way back, it's been incredibly exciting to see this game progress. I can't wait until the final release, but I'll be playing every update going forwards. I recommend buying this at full price!

EDIT FOR MARKET UPDATE:
Gloomwood is still awesome.
-New slide mechanic for sliding down walls is extremely useful and smart
-The new enemies are engaging to fight and to try to stealth around
-The Market itself is a sprawling city that is awesome to walk through and fight. I wish there was more within the city like puzzles and objectives that you can do though.
Can't wait for the next update!

• Fun setpieces; good variety
  
• Feel like a one man army. Thought older CoDs wouldn't feel like this but I guess that's not true. Still having fun though
  
• Cutscenes that give history lessons and context are more interesting than following the characters themselves. I'm not a history guy but it's very neat
  
• They always give you smokes, and they are always extremely useful. Often times in other CoD games your secondary grenades are more for show and not very good.
  
• The Tiger is by far the best campaign mission. It's so effortlessly dynamic, AI allies actually respond to your movements, you have to watch for flanks, etc. It feels like a real push trying to stomp the Germans out, and it's great.
  
• Addition of hidden areas that have weapons and ammo is a great idea. Rewards players for checking all their options.

• Repetitive mission types that occur in different settings. Most of the time it's not bad, but sometimes you could swap the missions and it'd be indistinguishable
  
• Assault on Matmata features an ambush section that is awful and not playtested. Same for the end where the airplanes come in: you have to clear everyone out otherwise there will be some still firing at you. Your team won't do a good job actually killing them so you have to get off real quick to shoot and then get back on to take down planes before they bomb the area killing you.
  
• Some of the objectives are absurd. Like "Push an enemy tank essentially by yourself across an open field and plant explosives on it". This is the final objective of the final mission of "The Brigade Box". It's absolute hell trying to get over to that tank. Didn't take me too long but still.
  
• Why can my allies throw grenades back but I can't?
  
• Wish there was more weapon variety. I guess it's period-accurate but I feel like they sacrificed a lot of period accuracy already in order to make the game fun. Just give me more guns to play around with
  
• Your AI teammates are stupid; but for the most part, so are the enemy.
  
• Grenade spam from enemies can be a real issue. It's crazy that they don't limit these enemies to like 6 grenades so they cant just hold you in a corner. This only happened two or three times.
  
• Pushing some of these houses where enemies set up a crossfire is REALLY annoying. Even nading them out doesn't always work, and your team won't push with you.

---

Apparently the multiplayer is alive and well, but I wasn't able to get it to work, even with Steam guides.

Also, if you're a masochist looking to get your rocks off, unbind your G and 4 keys for an extra challenge. No smokes or grenades allowed. Good luck.



Is worth more like $5. Don't buy if its above $10.
Took 9.7 hours to complete on Veteran.

Took me 3.6 hours to complete.

Manifold Garden is a great non-Euclidean/impossible geometry themed puzzle game. No real story, and feels like it builds upon what Antichamber got going way back in a fantastic way. It removes the inane quote-hunting that Antichamber does and creates a phenomenal linear puzzle experience similar in difficulty to Portal 1/2.
The puzzles themselves have very simple mechanics that the game builds upon in extremely interesting ways. It's the mark of any good game, and I'd have to say Manifold Garden is a very good game.
I took a long time to play this game, and I'm not sure why. It's a very awe-inspiring experience; it does much more for the eyes and ears than most triple AAAs could hope to achieve. Don't let the short run-time fool you; Manifold Garden doesn't waste your time. It knows what it is and how long it can stay.
This game really impresses me.

• Super impressive, jaw-dropping, shockingly stellar visuals. As in, physically, my jaw hung open sometimes. The massive scale and detail of so many structures along with the impossible geometry makes for a delightful experience.
  
• Like I said, puzzle mechanics build upon each other in interesting ways. It keeps the gameplay fresh and fun without introducing totally new mechanics. This is the basis for a lot of games, but it's easy to get wrong.
  
• Puzzles have been designed in a way to give you that "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, that's so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool" moment a LOT. Water puzzles especially.
  
• Sparse soundtrack that is used purposefully and fantastically. The soundtrack people really know just when to cue the music and when to cut back and let the world breathe.
  
• Switching gravity, despite not having a way to really build on it, ends up still being fun throughout the whole game. You can 'catch' yourself if you mess up or complete a puzzle faster if you get good at this mechanic. I can't believe this game doesn't have a time trial mode.
  
• For the most part, the game knows how to teach the player without really teaching the player.

• Sometimes there's a bit too much walking. Distances between required objectives can be absurdly far sometimes. I'd find myself wanting to do very basic tasks and having to hold down W for 15-20 seconds to just get there. The rainbow section is the worst contender. While it works for the latter half of the rainbow section, the first half doesn't have that same level of suspense and intrigue due to it being the beginning of the section.
  
• Half Life already taught us this: Stop locking your player from moving during a cutscene. When you unlock the Dark Cube and go put it on the tree to complete the section, the game stops you from moving as everything collapses in on itself. You can look around, but it'd be MUCH cooler if I could just exist in that space.

All in all, this game is an excellent and short puzzle game that is a treat for the eyes and ears. Overall, the game is phenomenal and has a lot to offer, with incredibly few shortcomings. If you're a fan of Antichamber, buy this game. It's kinda worth full price, but I'd say wait until it goes on any sort of sale. Thanks for reading.

EDIT: Formatting overhaul!

Voodoo Vince is a great platformer with a lot of charm from the Original XBOX days. It's good to see a release on Steam for it, and it's a great buy if you're looking for a (mostly) relaxing and charming platformer.

Voodoo Vince is mainly set in Lousiana, in the French Quarter. There's lots of cajun themes that do a great job playing around with cajun ideas and culture. I'm not personally cajun, but I live in Texas, so we see a lot of foods and culture that is cajun.

• Vince controls really well. He's a little bit slow, but all of his moves and jumps are pretty great. He was really fun to control.
  
• There's plenty of variety. There's vehicle sections, boss battles, fighting, and regular platforming in tons of different locations. Easy to not get bored.
  
• The soundtrack is fantastic. I went in for nostalgia purposes, and came out just absolutely loving this soundtrack. Every song is a total jam and fits the game really well.
  
• Vince's humor isn't bad. Usually in these old games you'll find crude or really dated humor, but here his dry delivery and poor attitude is still charming.

• They should've leaned more cajun with VAs and dialects. For someone who doesn't know the culture at all, this is fine, but I think they should've not been afraid to crank up those accents.
  
• Some sections will kick you out once you complete the objective within. This is stupid, as sometimes there's more to collect within a section. You'll need to go traverse all the way back to the section in order to get whatever collectibles you missed if you're going for 100%.
  
• Combat is majorly lacking. Often I would find myself not enjoying combat at all or even avoiding it entirely when I could. The voodoo powers are cool, but it's not cool enough to save the combat.
  
• The swing movement mechanic is really meh. It's not very exciting and there's not a lot of personal expression in it.
  
• The final section (Carnival) is way harder than anything else. The last big boss fight is a total pain. The difficulty curve is way too severe here. It feels padded out and a bit rushed.

Overall, the game has its flaws, but because of the atmosphere, tight controls, music, and variety, it's hard not to love it.

As for the remaster:

• Apparently some audio is missing or cut out, and that's the major flaw with this remaster. It did not impact my experience whatsoever. I think you'd have to do a direct comparison or really be looking for it to find this.
  
• A shootout section requires aiming using WASD instead of the mouse. Why?
  
• There is a graphical glitch with some NPCs where they don't display properly. This is usually not bad until you get to the Evil Vince miniboss. I ended up having to look up a guide because it wasn't clear to me what was happening. After that though, it was easy.

Overall, a very good remaster. Authentic to the source material and tries its best to honor it, flaws and all.


Regardless if you're an old or new fan, this game is awesome and is a great buy for anyone looking for some relaxing fun.

This took 7 hours to 100%.

EDIT: Formatting overhaul!

♥♥♥♥ anything else about this game; this is the pinnacle of Call of Duty zombies. Buy the Zombies Deluxe version on a big sale.[isthereanydeal.com]
There's plenty of perks and weapons to enjoy, as well as remastered versions of classic maps and new ones too. The new stuff is added in a way that allows you to play without the extra stuff for a more authentic experience if you desire.
In addition, there's also community created modded maps that you can install easily from the Steam Workshop. You will NEVER get bored with this game.

EDIT:
Also, follow these guides:
Disable Intro
Save Space (by removing Campaign and Multiplayer)
Also make sure to look up on YT "how to get free liquid divinium bo3" and there's a really easy method to get some that's safe. That way you don't have to line a bunch of Activision execs pockets.

EDIT2:
Install this mod called All Around Enhancement for Zombies. Genuinely fantastic and improves so much on an already fantastic formula by adding a ton of QoL features and cool ♥♥♥♥. Works with multiplayer.

EDIT: Now requires a SHIFT account when it didn't before. GFY 2k.

A looter shooter unchallenged by any even in its own series. Borderlands 2 is a phenomenal looter shooter with an unmistakable art style, vast array of cool weapons, huge variance in builds and skills, as well as an excellent villain to root against. The dialog ranges from hilarious to awfully cringy due to its comedy based in 2012 internet culture, and the story can be painfully undercut by poor in game character movements and bad timing (for some reason this is the case with all Borderlands games).
The main draw of the game is the looting and shooting. And woo boy, there is a metric butt ton. It is easy to stack thousands of hours in this game and not get bored due to its excellent character variety, build variety, and weapon variety, but for me, I found my comfortable limit around 300. Not necessary with friends, but it's even better.
There's mods and community fixes to the game that change the game and allow for new experiences; they're definitely worth trying out.

Buy the GOTY edition on a fat sale, and have a blast with or without your buddies.