Recent reviews by Genpei Turtle

There are a bunch of reviews out there for this game, but they're so focused on the "controversy" behind it that they ignore the game itself--so I'd like to write something that focuses a little more on the gameplay.

So as not to ignore it entirely and just to get it out of the way--the "controversy" seems tremendously overblown after playing the game to completion. Fursan Al-Aqsa is so obviously an over-the-top, self-aware parody of other jingoistic military shooters. The primary difference is that instead of playing a (usually white) soldier shooting a bunch of Middle Easterners the roles are reversed. Besides that, there's nothing here you wouldn't find in any other military shooter other than a bunch of very silly cutscenes. Anyone taking offense to this game probably just doesn't like having the shoe on the other foot. Which tells you something about all those other shooters, doesn't it?

OK, enough of that. Now as for the game proper, there are two games in one here. The first is Fursan Al-Aqsa Classic, and Fursan Al-Aqsa Remake, the latter of which isn't finished yet and has only two levels done at present. They're different games so I'll cover the common elements before diving into specifics for each:

Fursan Al-Aqsa is a retro shooter in the vein of the FPS games that came out in the 1990s or very early 2000s--think Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, or Quake. The story follows Ahmad, an unjustly imprisoned med student whose family was killed by the IDF. In prison he meets a resistance leader who teaches him One Weird Trick to take down the IDF, so when he gets out Ahmad goes on a quest for revenge against them. The plot is threadbare, tongue-in-cheek and deliberately ridiculous, with elements such as Ahmad having a pet megalodon and a "tactical genius" character who decides the best way to destroy the control room of a missile base is to blow himself up with a bomb vest in front of the console instead of, you know, just placing the explosives in the room and getting out. So not too serious. Nearly all of the levels are raids on various IDF bases, with a handful having you defend against IDF attacks in the occupied Palestinian territories. Each level requires you to perform a series of missions, one of which is always to kill all the soldiers on the level.

Both Fursan Al-Aqsa Classic can be played in 3rd person or 1st person perspective, with the ability to toggle between views at any time. Personally I find the game to be a lot better in first person, but your mileage may vary. Ahmad has a range of weaponry to fight with, which varies from level to level. He also has the ability to enter "bullet time" at will, which slows down the action to a crawl for a few seconds, giving you the chance to get the jump on the enemy soldiers you're facing. With the exception of grenades, the rocket launcher, and one level with a shotgun, all weapons are full-auto firearms who only differ in accuracy and rate of fire. Enemies are almost exclusively IDF soldiers, and the only difference between them is appearance, health, and accuracy with their weapons. There are also a few military vehicles you have to fight too. It's not a particularly complicated or groundbreaking game, but it does what it sets out to do.



Classic, unlike Remake, is a full game, but somewhat primitive and rough around the edges, which I guess is to be expected for a one-man project. It plays like an orthodox 90s shooter, with enemies having rudimentary AI that only kicks in once they become aware of your presence. This is counterbalanced by the AI being fantastically good shots, especially in the later levels where they can snipe you from the other side of the map if you're not careful. You can't play Classic like a run-and-gun shooter and hope to survive; the best strategy is to find enemy soldiers and take them out before they can see you. Ahmad is very fragile and will die quickly--the only way to revive health is to perform a headshot, or find a periodically regenerating health pack somewhere on the map. It's a simple game but immensely satisfying to plan your way through a level, taking out targets before they even see you.

Levels are a mixed bag. The ones in the occupied Palestinian territories where you're on defense feel the best. Shujaiya refugee camp in particular is my favorite as you have to balance rescuing civilians and bringing them to an ambulance, killing soldiers and dodging periodic airstrikes. On the other hand, the indoor levels and any section involving piloting a vehicle feel kind of weak. Mossad HQ in particular is rough with its massive bullet sponge of a boss, especially since it's the second level. Physics are also can be quite wonky, which especially comes into play on the level you're piloting a tank. It also can have amusing side-effects, like knocking an enemy into the water and having them rocket 20 feet above and below the surface rather than just bob.


"Remake" is something of a misnomer at this point as none of the original Classic levels have been remade--the two available levels are brand new ones. The Remake is similar to Classic, and is still janky, but much less so. It's also a lot less punishing--you have regenerating health, enemies are not as deadly and your character has additions to his moveset that weren't present in Classic. While Classic is a traditional 90s-style shooter, Remake is straight power fantasy where you can easily run roughshod over the soldiers trying to kill you. Controls are much tighter in Remake than in Classic, and there are a few new mechanics introduced like wall running, Super Headshots, and Stealth Kills. You also get rated based on how you completed the mission, which wasn't something from Classic, other than in the two Challenge Levels included separate from the main campaign. Overall, unless you completely throw caution to the winds you're not going to die in this game.

On the flipside, Remake feels too easy, especially if you come into it right after finishing Classic. There's also some control annoyances that weren't present in Classic--levels are much more vertical this time, but getting up to the higher floors feels awfully fiddly, with jump puzzles that are never great to have in an FPS. Also Super Headshots can be jarring--when you pull one off, the game switches to a slo-mo closeup of your target getting killed before giving you control back. That's not so bad when you're sniping someone from far off, but if you're in an enclosed room in a firefight with 3 soldiers, you really don't want the camera jumping away. It's still a work in progress so I have high hopes for it when it's finished.


Overall, I'd say Fursan Al-Aqsa is a good game to get if you've got an itch for a retro military shooter. It's nothing exceptional--just good, mindless fun, and a good way to kill 10 minutes here and there.

Dead By Daylight is a good game, but for most people I can't recommend it.

DbD is an asymmetric multiplayer game with one killer and four survivors; the killer's goal is to kill everyone and the survivors' is to escape. On the positive side, the core gameplay is a lot of fun, both as survivor and as killer. Despite being fairly simple on the surface, there's an enormous amount of depth and variety that can cater to all sorts of play styles and strategies.

The primary problem is that it's an established, multiplayer-only game with a very high skill floor. Getting good at it requires a lot of practice and experience. Unfortunately either the matchmaking is awful or the current player base skews heavily toward very experienced players. Every once in a while you'll luck out and get paired with players who are similar to you in skill level, and those are great! But most of the time you're going to going to get continually stomped by veterans until you can claw your way to their skill level.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing, as getting stomped can be fun too. (though the existing player base is really toxic--turn off chat and never look back!) Still, what you really want in this game is matches against players of a similar skill level, and you won't get that much unless you can afford to sink a lot of time into this game in order to get better at it first. Like, dozens if not hundreds of hours. If you've got the time and dedication to do that, great! This game might be for you. But if you don't? Then you'll probably want to give this game a pass--at least until the matchmaking improves.

Inferno - Beyond the 7th Circle is a first-person RPG with a horror theme that's a sequel/spiritual successor to The 7th Circle - Endless Nightmare. Plot-wise there's no connection between the two games--in the 7th Circle you played a man's subconscious fighting his inner demons, and in Inferno you play a human survivor fighting literal demons who have all but conquered Earth.

It's hard to review Inferno without comparing it to the 7th Circle because the two games are so similar. Both are first-person dungeon crawlers, and the basic gameplay of the two games are identical. Nearly all of the enemies are identical too. (there are only 7 or so new ones not counting palette swaps) If you liked one you'll probably like the other, and vice versa. Where the games differ is that The 7th Circle was restricted to a single dungeon with 20-odd floors and had a permadeath/metaprogression mechanic; Inferno is more of a sprawling open world and abandons the permadeath model for a more traditional RPG.

Inferno features a lot of improvements over its predecessor. Its interface has improved a lot and the visuals are crisper and more varied. Its pacing and balance is much better--while you'll still probably become an unstoppable juggernaut of death, that comes more slowly and later. There are also a lot of new features and skills, like lockpicking, hunting, sidequests, a "town" of sorts, and a food/hydration/rest level mechanic. Dungeons are better designed too, with some nice puzzles that were largely absent in the 7th Circle.

However Inferno isn't without its flaws. It's still a little rough around the edges. It has the problem its predecessor did with increased difficulty settings adding some unnecessary tedium. Its plot and setting is less interesting than the 7th Circle--"unlock an insane man's repressed memories to find out why he tried to kill himself" is less generic than Inferno's "defeat the unstoppable hordes" plot.

Also I felt a little disappointed to see the permadeath/metaprogression model go away. I understand why; that model doesn't make a lot of sense given Inferno's world and plot, but it felt like The 7th Circle was doing something fresh and unique whereas Inferno is taking a more conservative and traditional path.

Still, despite the flaws, Inferno's a great game and really impressive for a one-man-project. It's absolutely worth picking up in my opinion, especially if you're a fan of the genre.

This is a simple and straightforward but compelling first-person dungeon crawler RPG for fans of the genre with a horror aesthetic. The setting and plot are unique--you play as fragments of an insane man's subconscious as he lies delirious in a pool of his own blood after a suicide attempt. Your goal is to fight his inner demons to unlock his repressed memories and discover what drove him to the edge.

The game has a great aesthetic and a fun improve-skills-as-you-use-them character building system, but what really sets it apart from other games of the genre is its permadeath/metaprogression mechanic. The 7th Circle is designed to be played in multiple runs, with each successive character getting a little stronger and/or inheriting perks and items from previous ones. It rewards experimentation with different builds and playstyles and there's lots of well-designed dungeons to explore and content to find.


The 7th Circle isn't without its flaws though. Pacing and balance is a little off--despite the permadeath mechanic, most characters will be nigh-unstoppable after a couple of dungeon levels, making the rest of the game something of a formality. Opting to play on higher difficulty levels doesn't help much as its major effect is to draw out battles and make them more tedious than actually harder. There's also very little to distinguish enemy types outside of their base stats and a handful of passive effects, as none have any sort of special attacks to speak of. The translation is also a little clunky.

Still, despite these flaws it's quite an entertaining game and impressive when you consider it's a one-man project. It's definitely worth buying if you're a fan of the genre.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is fun and unique, and overall is worth playing, but has a ton of flaws.

This is a survival game that gives you minimal direction. You're a hominid clan in the middle of the African jungle and you have to figure out everything for yourself. How to find food, how to pick things up and use them--you can't even move objects from one hand to the other at the start. Every little thing you have to figure out for yourself, and it feels like a major accomplishment to learn to do something as simple as crack open a coconut. Your "skill tree" is a network of neurons that you unlock as you do things--listen for predators a lot and you'll gain new listening abilities, make tools a lot and you'll gain new toolmaking abilities, etc. As you change generations you can "lock in" skills and make them permanent.

The game world is huge: it has a half dozen huge biomes, each with lots of different plants/animals/geographic features to discover and learn how to use properly. As you explore the world you'll accomplish Evolution Feats which you can use to advance the timeline and potentially evolve your clan into a different species. The world is beautiful and detailed and has a lot of variety. Fans of exploration games will find a lot to love here.

However the game does suffer from a few serious flaws. The first are the controls, which are very unintuitive. While you're learning the ropes expect to get your hominids injured a lot as you fall out of trees and fail to dodge predators. Once you're used to them it's not so bad but it takes longer than it really should.

The larger flaw however is that the two central goals of the game--evolving your species and exploring the world--are in direct conflict with each other due to the "genetic mutation" system of advancement. Genetic mutations are abilities that each new baby in your clan has a 50% chance to get. To "lock in" a mutation the baby has to grow to adulthood, and then you have to do an "Evolution Leap," cashing in your Evolution feats to advance the timeline. Many "normal" abilities are gated behind mutations--for example there are three separate branches of the skill tree you can't advance without locking in the first Metabolism mutation.

The problem is that there are nearly 90 of these genetic mutations and only a finite amount of time you can advance the timeline via Evolution Leaps before the game ends. The more you explore the world and gain Evolution Feats, the faster the clock advances to the end of the game and the fewer chances you have to gain these mutations to flesh out your skill tree. The whole system is so poorly explained that it's easy to get your clan in a position where they can no longer meaningfully advance, even to the point where you're potentially locked out of major advances like becoming bipedal or omnivorous.

Still, despite these flaws Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is fun and innovative, and if you're even remotely interested in the concept is probably worth a buy. Just keep in mind that it's a little rough around the edges.

I think at this point I've seen pretty much all of what The Witness has to offer. I still have about a dozen puzzles and a bunch of obelisk "lines" to find, I think I've gotten close to the full experience of the game, if not the full experience of the game. I really would love to recommend this game, but in the end I just can't.

Let's start with the good stuff--the presentation and ambiance of the island you're on is wonderful. It's a gorgeous environment with all sorts of hidden nooks and crannies to find and explore, and innumerable easter eggs to find. Many of the puzzles are quite clever, and the way The Witness slowly teaches you the "language" of the puzzles bit by bit is great. It's a really good example of how to allow the player to learn the rules of the game on their own in a satisfying manner.

However, there's one critical flaw to the Witness that keeps me from recommending it: It isn't really very much fun.

I love puzzles in general, especially ones that require creative thinking, and rarely ever get bored doing them. But by the time I reached the end of the The Witness, I was pretty much fed up with it. I was sorely tempted to just look up puzzle solutions online, not because I couldn't solve them, but because I wanted it to be over.

Part of the problem is the puzzle design. While each puzzle has its own "rules," they're all fundamentally the same--trace a line through the correct pathway on a panel. The Witness does an OK job of using the environment in tandem with the panel puzzles, but there's really only so much you can do with this formula. It gets repetitive extremely quickly, and honestly this type of puzzle is more suited to a mobile platform than a full-fledged PC game.

This leads to the second problem--the island is horribly disjointed and lacks cohesion. With nearly all of the "meat" of the game contained in flat panels sprinkled about a three-dimensional world, an inordinate amount of time is spent running from place to place trying to find the next puzzle. In many cases there doesn't even seem to be any reason for the game world to be there at all.

What's worse is that there are some puzzles you won't be able to solve upon initially discovering them--and since there's no sort of map to mark places to come back to, there's a real risk of not being able to find places you want to go back to, or at least waste a lot of time trying to do so.

In a way, that pretty much sums up The Witness in general--a pointless waste of time. After finishing the game, the optional "challenge" achievement, and unlocking the videos in the windmill (though I have yet to watch them) I didn't feel any real sense of accomplishment or satisfaction, just a vague sense of "that's 20 hours of my life I'll never get back."

If you want to get a good mindbending puzzle game with a good variety of puzzles, a beautiful aesthetic, and an interesting story to boot, get The Talos Principle. The Witness feels like a wannabe Talos Principle without any of the understanding of what made that game so good. It's a shame because The Witness isn't that far off from being a good game, it just fell a little bit short.

I've been playing The Hunter for about 5 years, and have sunk hundreds of hours into it. It's a really, really good game. Since the pricing model is what has everyone up in arms, I'll get that part out of the way first.

This is not a free-to-play game. But it is also not a pay-to-win game. It's a subscription-based game.

The "free" part of the game will get you one rifle and the ability to hunt Mule Deer. Think of it as an extended demo. If you play it and like it, buy a subscription. With a subscription you can hunt anything, anywhere. You're also best off getting one of the bundles, since the included weapons will be enough to let you shoot anything legally. (like real-life hunting, there are prohibitions on using certain weapons on certain animals--no shooting rabbits with high-powered rifles for example) With the trailrunner bundle you'll pretty much never have to do microtransactions ever again unless there's some sort of weapon-specific competition or mission you really, really want to do but don't have the right gun.

Do not buy the individual licenses, they are a complete waste of money. Also do not expect the in-game currency to get you anything substantial either. (In-game currency is actually a relatively new addition to the game--for years it was premium-currency only)

The pricing model does kind of stink--it's on the expensive side even if you go with subscriptions--but it's worth it if you like it. I've spent a little less than $200 on it, which figures out to about $40 a year--again, not cheap, but I don't regret the purchase.

tl;dr: Try the free version to get a feel for for the game. If you like it, buy a subscription, but don't do license microtransactions.

Now, about the actual game:

The Hunter is not a game for everyone. It is very much a slow, methodical, stealth shooter. If you approach it like a typical FPS you will never even see any animals because they will notice you and run long before you get near them. Slow movement and careful preparation is key. Killing 3-4 animals in an hour-long gaming session is actually a really good hunt. Think of it as sort of a sniper simulation. A lot of players will not like this sort of slow-paced gameplay, but if you're OK with that, it can be very rewarding.

There are multiple approaches to hunting you can take. You can look for animal tracks and follow them, hoping to sneak up on them before they notice you. You can get in a hunting tower, stand, or blind, and wait for something to come by. You can attempt to use callers to lure animals in, or drop bait or to get animals to investigate a specific spot. Or you can use a combination of all of these.

There is an enormous amount of content in The Hunter in the form of animals, missions, competitions, equipment, and so forth, and the devs are always adding more. It's hard to believe it started with just one area and three types of animals. Most of the equipment is bought with in-game currency and is totally optional. All you really need to hunt is your PDA, binoculars, and a weapon--the other stuff can make things a little easier, but are by no means needed. And some equipment actively makes things more difficult--hunting with a bow is vastly harder than with a rifle, for example, but it makes for a fun challenge.

The different areas in the game are enormous and actually add quite a bit of variety to gameplay. Logger's Point, for example, has lots of wide-open fields, which makes it a great area to try to get record distance shots, but at the same time has less cover to hide in. Settler's Creek has a lot of heavily forested areas and steep hills, making it really good for getting up close to animals, but at the same time hampering visibility. The animals have different behaviors as well and react to stimuli differently. Deer will mostly rely on smell and run away, pheasants will try to hide in tall grass, and moose might actually try to stampede you to death.

Overall, if you like stealth shooters/sniper simulations and can get past the subscription fee, you really can't go wrong with The Hunter. Again, it's not the type of game for everyone, but if it's the type of game you like, you'll probably have a blast with it.