Recent reviews by A Tomato

This is a game of significant shake-ups in established themes. From the cold and dreary New York, to the vibrant and nigh-overwhelming São Paulo. Private-eye monologues and film noir morph into crass, vulgar snark and eye-searing visual effects. Yet beneath the plastic surgery, gameplay is as good as ever. This is Max Payne 3.
- Big epilepsy warning: there’s no way to disable flashes and other “intentional” screen artifacts from occurring at pretty much every point. With that out of the way, we’re treated to high fidelity environments, long draw distances, and good character models (for the most part, anyway), which you’d be hard pressed to believe came out for 7th gen consoles. Some finer animation is lackluster, namely character faces, but it overall still holds up where it matters.
- Most of the in-level soundtrack blends in with each other; it’s not so much bad as it’s unremarkable and repetitive. That is, until HEALTH kicks in, then it’s a blast. Voice acting is good in its established tone – that being the kind of writing you’d expect from Rockstar Games, with frequent profanities. Sound effects are as good as ever, though the weapons are just a tad muted and not as punchy as one might like.
- For performance, it’s decently well optimized and can comfortably maintain 60fps at 1440p on a Ryzen 9 3900X, 64GB RAM, RX 7900XT, Windows 10 Pro system. For stability, I encountered a few odd crashes when messing with settings mid-game. More annoyingly, it has odd frame-pacing in fullscreen, which went away when forced into borderless windowed. You also need to deal with the Rockstar Social Club launcher whenever launching the game, and another aggravating bug makes the game pause repeatedly for no apparent reason. Thankfully these can be bypassed or fixed entirely, thanks to community efforts.
Nine in-universe years since Max Payne 2, our eponymous hero seems to have forgotten the lessons from the past games, and is an even worse wreck of a man than ever before. He’d now moved from being a policeman, to working as a bodyguard for the rich Branco family in São Paulo. Naturally, things go bottom-up, as the now-alcoholic, smoker and painkiller-addicted Max tries, and fails, to protect and rescue members of said family. During this time, sinister plots and government conspiracies slowly unravel.

The story itself is gripping and worth scouring the levels for clues, but my goodness, Max is so miserable that it becomes annoying. Guy can’t spend a minute without remarking he’s a failure and needs to die. This hits harder after playing the previous two games, and one compares the stoic and collected Max back then, with the rude, crude and blunt iteration in this title. The rest of the characters are also unlikeable, mostly due to being selfish and plain jerks.
Max Payne 3 further refines the series formula with a few shake-ups. Players can now mix-and-match one handed weapons, for dual-wielding or just for the cool factor. The absence of individual weapon controls, like shooting just the left-hand weapon or the right one, is admittedly baffling. Yet in exchange for this freedom of choice, one cannot have an entire arsenal up the unbuttoned coat: it’s one long-arm and two compact weapons at most, and to go guns-akimbo you have to ditch the long-arm. This would make weapon choice more impactful and strategic if 1) most weapons didn’t already have perfect first-shot accuracy (or perfect accuracy period for single-shot pistols), and 2) so many cutscenes didn’t steal control away and sometimes eat up your rifle.

Yes, the in-level cutscenes are so numerous that the playable gameplay ratio skews below 50% overall. Most of these cutscenes can’t be skipped in the unmodified game. Not a good look.

“But surely, there has to be a draw!”
Oh, you betcha.
Bullet Time is in full force. Max can trigger slow-motion when he has some remaining in his meter, or at any time by diving in a direction. Bullets whizz past harmlessly as our hero barges into rooms to pop enemy heads in dizzying spectacle. The fact that Rockstar’s in-house Euphoria engine powers so many animations during gameplay makes each gunfight more visceral and tactile. Enemies you don’t kill immediately still stumble and take some time to get back in the fight; enemies you do kill writhe or flail in gruesome ways; and every dive into a hard surface is gonna look like it hurts.

Bullet Time gives Max the edge to pull through the tough enemy arenas ahead, but it’s quite possible to manage without it (barring forced slo-mo situations)… Well, I say it’s possible, but much less fun. Max’s on-foot control is dubious at best, often being locked in weird side-stepping or fumbling animations that may just cost him his life. Yes, he has weight now; no, it’s not as responsive as I would’ve enjoyed. As a measure against cheap deaths, players are graced with Last Man Standing: kill the guy who would’ve killed you, and you pop a painkiller and can go back into the fray right after. Even though Max is frail and easily killed, autosaves are frequent and the game lends a helping hand if you die repeatedly, so it’s not too frustrating.

Levels carry Max & co through all manner of expected locales: nightclubs, parties, favelas, rickety villages, industrial areas and offices. Several flashbacks also take him through snowy Hoboken, New Jersey. Level design is quite solid, despite being obviously linear: plenty of spots to hide and dive to and from, and enemies generally make their presence known ahead of time. Diving from the top of stadium stairs and headshotting over a dozen mooks is worth the broken ribs that ensue.

The story’s over in around 8-10 hours, give or take. My playthrough was on Hard difficulty, so that counts for a bit of extra time. Collectible clues and golden gun parts give token replayability, but many levels take quite some time before you’re actually shooting in a third-person shooter game, so.. I didn’t feel worth revisiting just for that. Haven’t touched multiplayer, though reports are that it’s quite inactive.

As a one-and-done experience, though?
Can go a lot worse than that.

Max Payne 3 still has what it takes to remain relevant and fun, thanks to visceral gunplay and exciting Bullet Time... all in bite-sized chunks. Eyesore visual flair, a wangsty main character, and obnoxious cutscenes and level loading diminish an otherwise-comfortable recommendation.

No witty introduction or quotes. That's simply my conclusion after pretty much two full playthroughs of CarX Street. I wouldn't have played this game nearly that much if I didn't like it. Indeed, there are lots of things I like. But I still struggle to fully recommend it...

This game has its roots in a mobile game, which can be seen in some UI and gameplay elements. The actual graphics and art style are fairly good: nice and clean art direction, though at times a bit too clean. The city really pops at night, its coloured billboards and neons a treat for the eyes. Car models are a mixed bag, with interior modelling and textures suffering in some examples. Expect a handful of annoying visual artifacts, whether it be smearing and ghosting from TAA, or aliasing from the other AA methods. Photo mode is hilariously basic with no options to adjust motion blur, depth of field, or anything you can really think of.

There are about 23 songs to listen to. Variety is a little weak, and none of the tracks either stand out on their own, so the soundtrack ends up repetitive pretty quickly. Car engine noises are extremely inconsistent: some vehicles are alright, others have weird pitch, and several more are extremely grating or completely ill-fitting. There's blatant AI voice acting in the prologue... I turned off all dialogue and subtitles within 5 seconds of being granted control, and didn't feel like I missed anything.

On high graphical settings, 1440p resolution, and a Ryzen 9 3900X, 64GB RAM, RTX 3070, Windows 10 64bit system, I mostly had a 60fps experience. However, a good chunk of the time it was also in the high 40s-low 50s, which felt quite less smooth but still playable. Updates have evened out most reports of stuttering, but the fact it's worth mentioning means you should still be wary of such, even when on an SSD.

You're a street racer, freshly landed in the cleverly named "Sunset City." I'm pleased to say that, on the driving front, CarX Street is quite good. You can throw around cars by their inertia, break traction in most any way you can reasonably think of, yet never feel fully out of control even in the fastest of drifts. I spent equal lengths of time on gamepad and on keyboard, and never felt like I lost finesse even on the ol' arrow keys or WASD. You can quickly toggle on-and-off some assists like automatic gear shifts or a traction control, to minimize wheelspin, which is also helpful. What's much less useful is the presence of some permanently-on assists, which make extremely tight low-speed drifts and spins way harder than needed. You can fiddle with some assist sliders in the options menu, but they don't change much if anything. Otherwise, pretty good driving feel.

The map is open from the start, with roads and points of interest to discover. Peppered around the world are gas stations, tuning and visual shops, car dealerships and houses. Exploration is incentivized with minor cash gains and collectible wrecks, which can unlock extra cars from the dealership. Tyre wear and fuel depletion are modelled in a simple manner, so it makes sense to pay the ol' pump a visit fairly frequently. Depletion rates aren't too bad, and you can mitigate them through driving habits and various vehicle upgrades like larger fuel tanks. "Sports" fuel is a noobie trap and WILL bankrupt you in the early game, for little perceived benefit.

There's a lot of variety in terrain and road layouts. The main city is PACKED with interchanges, overpasses, side streets, parking garages - almost everything you'd want from a major urban environment! To the west are winding mountain passes aching for some tight drifts, and over to the north are long, sweeping bends through the hillside settlements. Its overall size tends towards the compact end, but the map is pretty much perfect for gameplay (if not quite realistic)...

...Which hurts even more when the actual race courses barely take advantage of it. Most circuits are two block-wide circles at most, laps often concluding in about a minute. Many sprints are especially egregious, taking not even a minute to complete. Potential shines through in the few races that carry you for longer distances and at varied speeds, but everything tends to blur together pretty quickly - there's just not enough event variety. The AI is mostly a pushover: while they have an advantage in collissions, they can be intimidated off the ideal path if you're close enough, and rubberband in your favour.

You gain currency slowly by just driving cleanly, drifting and doing various stunts. You win more from the freeroam quick challenges, and a lot more (relatively speaking) by winning club events. That money then can go into upgrading and personalizing your car. There's a surprisingly in-depth tuning system, allowing you to change the rev limit, torque curve, transmission losses, weight distribution, steering angle, wheel offsets... Huge plus for gearheads, despite some baffling ommissions that only car enthusiasts might care about. Similar story for the visual side. Body kits for days, but you can't mix and match fenders, and lots of body parts are locked behind specific choices or "require extension". Bah.

So what do you drive and race towards? Good question, honestly. There are some 11 clubs to race in, each club with its own required car class and rating. Clubs take between 15 and 19 races to complete, and outside of a neat little cutscene at the start of the final race in each, it's practically the same thing across them all. The only differences are that three clubs only focus on drifting, while the rest are straightforward circuits and sprints. Extremely repetitive. Beating a club unlocks elite events, which are infinitely replayable but otherwise IDENTICAL races from the club - you just get a handful of extra Streetcoin™ and then have to wait 15 minutes for the next race in the same club.

Ah yes, Streetcoin™. Remember when I said this is a mobile game? You have two currency types, with this coin thing used for top grade engine/body/suspension upgrades... for some reason. You can't even buy this type of currency with real money, so what's the point?

Race rewards slowly scale up as you progress through the clubs, but nowhere near enough to let you start to experiment with cars. The more expensive the car is to buy, the pricier the upgrades are as well, which is maddening. You grind, and grind, and there doesn't feel like any fulfillment. When the final race against a top-spec supercar at 350+kmh rewards me with a freaking hairdresser's coupe, I start to doubt my senses. There's not even a cool cutscene, or a "You're Winner!" text upon completion - just, whoop, back in the open world again like nothing even happened.

Is the multiplayer any good? Couldn't tell you directly. Every time I joined MP after launch, there were at most just two clusters of people doing tandems in different parts of the city. No one wanted to race, and probably for the best - every multiplayer event is structured as a zero-sum game, since everyone pays to enter the race but only ONE driver gets the WHOLE prize.

Expect some 20 hours of playtime to beat every club. Devs are slowly adding new content, including as basic a feature as a livery editor with no ways to share wraps. I only got the Deluxe Edition, which granted a few extra cars in the dealership, but doesn't offer additional post-launch DLC.

CarX Street has great mechanics but barebones content. It's long in the tooth. If you just want to drive and customize cars, you can do a lot worse than this. You can also do a lot better.

Welcome to the Darkest Dungeon. This is a turn-based strategy title with roguelike elements, mostly in the form of permanence of mistakes and decisions. A long, grueling campaign awaits the player, as they have to cleanse the lands surrounding their late ancestor's hamlet from the encroaching horror that threatens the world.

• Presentation: Gothic and Lovecraftian influence is prevalent everywhere, especially visually. The stencil-shaded art style is as simple as it is beautiful, and the same can be said for the animation. Wayne June steals the show on the audio front, though every part of the soundscape is satisfying... or able to instill dread, in the case of some music tracks.

• Synopsis: Before their death, the player's ancestor learned of, created, and unearthed unimaginable horrors from the abyss. It is up to the voiceless, formless player character to direct droves of mercenaries through extremely hostile dungeons, in the hopes of gaining the resources and experience to finally put an end to the madness consuming this place. Many will die... horribly.

• Primary loop: You send teams of up to four Heroes into dungeons, in order to complete objectives of some kind: from scouting enough of the area, to murderizing foes, to collecting or cleansing certain items. In addition to health, individual - and party - stress have to be managed carefully. Highly stressed characters have a hefty chance of going mad in some way, endangering the rest of the expedition through uncontrollable or simply uncooperative actions. Chance-based attacks and critical hits keep you on your toes, requiring the right parties, buffs, debuffs or trinkets to safely see the end of each venture, though you will call foul when your healer suffers three crits in a row, and likely dies the next turn before you can save them. Each hero can use a limited subset of their total skills in any fight, and everyone specializes in something or another, no matter how seemingly trivial or useless. The Ancestor (Wayne June) provides color commentary to almost everything, his voice lines as memetic as they are amusing or inspiring.

• Secondary loop: Treasure and heirlooms collected or won from expeditions are pooled up, to be used at the hamlet every in-game week. You have to rebuild the estate in order to unlock more facilities and increase the potential of your roster. Each successful expedition improves the survivors' experience, and allows upgrading their equipment and skills in a linear fashion. Anyone still alive from traumatic incursions into the unknown may gather quirks and diseases - some positive, many negative, and almost all of them varying in severity or usefulness based on the hero itself. The player is expected to either get many of these hapless mercenaries killed, or otherwise sack those who'd be too expensive to treat of their quirks; a cynical, cold calculation when the greater good is at stake.

• Tertiary loop: Four base game regions can be accessed within the first hour or so, from corrupted forests to undead-infested ruins. Each zone has its specific challenges and common enemies. While not strictly required, completing quests in each region unlocks progressively more difficult boss fights that will test your party's cohesion, well-being, and the player's judgement. The end goal is to gather multiple parties of highly skilled, strong fighters with the right qualities and items to put back into the ground the eldrich abominations spewing forth from the Darkest Dungeon.

• Extra content: Two major paid expansions grant access to major regions each.

-The Crimson Court is a courtyard of blood-sucking, infectious monsters lurking in labyrinthine levels. Uniquely, each expedition into the main Courtyards consumes invitations but retains progress, so hurting parties can retreat without losing progress. Beginning The Crimson Court storyline is still optional to the wider campaign, but starting it increases the pressure (and possible annoyance) on the player through persistent, resource-draining and annoying diseases. Not for the faint of heart, but mostly worthwhile.

-The Color of Madness takes place on a corrupted farmstead, where an eldrich comet destroyed time and space, turning its inhabitants into husks. It also uniquely features a (quite difficult) endless combat arena, rewarding an extra type of currency for powerful short- or long-term upgrades. A roaming boss can be encountered in other areas, and proves quite frustrating to deal with as parties tailored against it are not well-suited for the dungeons themselves. A decent and lucrative side-activity.

-The Butcher's Circus is a free expansion, giving access to a PvP mode with separate progression from the main campaign. All heroes have had their stats and abilities tweaked for the new environment. While engaging in its own right, and cathartic to take down a stubborn enemy party, it's a crapshoot whether one is able to play a match to the end without disconnection issues. A harmless diversion.

-Two extra heroes can be purchased (and a third one is a free reskin of a backline sniper). Both of them have unique mechanics central to their characters, and are quite powerful in their own rights. Very much worth considering.

• Replayability and miscellaneous notes: It took about 100 hours to complete the main campaign. It is thoroughly exhausting, not to mention repetitive, but each victory is sweet, knowing that there's permanent progress to the end. Dozens of hapless mercenaries put into the ground, and many times as many sent packing, their madness consuming them to the point they weren't useful anymore. Even with all risk mitigation possible, the game sometimes simply hates your guts and decides that someone must die on some dungeons. Add onto that the roaming bosses, random town events, chance-based curio interaction... I'm not saying to dive into wikis and spoilers from early on, but this game is not forgiving.


Addicting yet hostile. Darkest Dungeon deconstructs the average dungeon crawler and challenges the player in a war of attrition. Victory is sweet, but defeat is painful. Always remember that overconfidence is a slow, and insidious, killer...

A game that is poised to begin a renaissance of old school-style racers, even if the road ahead is long, winding and difficult. Welcome to Japan, sometime between 1990 and the late 00's. NIGHT-RUNNERS could be considered a "best-of" compilation of gameplay and aesthetics from cult classic racing games.

NOTICE: Frequent updates bring additional features, user friendliness, balance passes and generally smooth out the experience. This review will be occasionally updated as time passes.

Grungy, slightly-worn VHS and DVD aesthetics. Film grain, chromatic aberration, vignetting and other digital imperfections are on full display. Combined with the darkness of playing only at night time, it sounds like there’s too much for the eyes. For many people, this may very well be the case; changing ingame settings like removing camera noise helps a lot, as does increasing the brightness. But for those who can stomach it, the presentation is nothing short of stellar. It could also be done to mask the lower-detail textures, models, animations, but that’s not really a complaint from me. Just know that clarity could very well be problematic at such "uncommon" occurrences as blazing down the highway at Vmax.

Complementing the visuals is the soundtrack. Here we have a surprisingly varied mix of EDM: house, electronica, drum-and-bass, and probably more. It’s something special when I enabled, and left enabled, the option to dynamically adjust music volume based on how I drive the car. Nothing says underground street racing like this soundtrack collection, even if it’s a little limited. Otherwise, car audio is passable but weirdly pitched while driving, and the variety of sound effects is rather limited.

Some people have reported program crashes and instability when trying to run the game in its early form. This is something to keep in mind, even though I report no problems starting and playing. A Ryzen 9 3900X, 64GB RAM, RTX 3070, Windows 10 64bit system is comfortably overkill for this game, at 1440p 60fps, with all graphics settings cranked to the highest. Controls can be rebound across keyboard or gamepad, though function keys cannot be assigned to.

Your unseen player avatar arrives in Japan as a total zero. With what little money is available, you have to buy a car from a used vehicle auction – which is realized remarkably authentic, and probably a little sinister. Choose wisely, as cars with too many problems will make things even more difficult down the line. You’re then loaned some money, and off you go to race. Crews fight for territory and influence, something that becomes apparent in the late game.

A standard premise for a racing game, but it hardly needs any more elaboration, honestly.

Right after starting out in NIGHT-RUNNERS, one may realize the cars are slow. Perhaps a little too slow. They take over 10 seconds to accelerate to 100km/h, buzzing like angry hornets all the while. Things naturally get better over time, though you still can't quite crack 4 seconds to the triple digits, no matter the upgrades. Steering is slow, and grip is a little inconsistent. A ridiculously strong sense of speed alleviates some of this: the edges of the screen blur, the field of view widens massively, and the camera shakes like your ride’s going to rattle itself apart. It’s all artificial at low speeds, but becomes more than justified when horsepower soars beyond 500. Alternate camera and view settings can also tone down the visual feedback and noise… but, personally, it's so exhilarating that I cannot say "no".

The only real way to make money is by challenging racers from the only available hub, “Tatsumi PA”. The GPS arrow is still useless, but GPS routes and easy fast travel make this a non-issue, on top of a familiar route to take each time. Once finally at the hub, players walk to the other racers’ cars, and call them to wager their money. Your debt money acts as a safety net, but can only be used for betting, which can cut into your profits and bottleneck you.

All races are point-to-point sprints down the Shutoku Expressway. Event and route variety are quite limited, with players potentially seeing the same races a few times per night. It's not a stretch to say one will race across the same stretches of highway hundreds of times, if they play long enough. A small portion of races include tyre warmup (with no indication of what’s hot or cold), but otherwise plays out the same. In either case, hopefully you don't jump the start... in fact, you can stay a few seconds at the starting point, because the early AI is quite hilariously slow. Even the tougher opponents from the lategame, on the highest difficulty, pull their punches and wait for you to catch up. Your car also can attain much higher speeds than them. All of this is a far cry from the release version, where the racers were nigh-unbeatable outside of cheese.

Sometimes opponents may crash into the nearly-invincible mass traffic cars (or you do). Sometimes the other drivers just fall through the map and despawn. Growing pains, one hopes.

Reputation allows you to challenge progressively more lucrative, but faster racers. There's a possibility of soft-locking if you're not prepared: forced boss races may prevent you from grinding lower grade rivals to be able to improve your car enough. On the other hand, winning races adds a multiplier to subsequent wins, so NIGHT-RUNNERS has a tough time balancing the lose-more/win-more phenomenon.

Your time for racing is limited, especially as you have to be mindful of overheating, so eventually you’ll be sent back to the garage. This time is best spent tending to the car and upgrading it. While the upgrade system itself is really solid, navigating the menus is cumbersome. There’s no UI indication for parts you have equipped or in storage, and sometimes the 3D text is partly obscured by being off-screen. Swapping parts from storage is similarly awkward: select the system to work on, go into storage, select the part to change, walk over to the car, drop the part in, drop the swapped part back to storage, and repeat for every other thing to change.

Players race and build for the end goal (so far) of taking over the race crew at “Tatsumi PA” and making them even stronger. At the moment, the endgame elements of challenging other crews is either absent, broken, or so luck-based that it has yet to trigger in newer patches. You only have two cars to drive currently, and they're variations of the same model with differences too few and too minute to matter in the long run. Content on its own is pretty limited, and you'd be looking at some 4 hours, tops, before you explore basically everything on offer.

Not that I really mind, honestly.
The vibe is unlike any other.

NIGHT-RUNNERS screams for more content like a fire-breathing engine. Keep this one in your sights: this is illegal street racing like we've not seen in over a decade.

You meticulously plan and build your perfect ride. A humongous engine thunders beneath the bonnet, the chassis sitting low on the best tyres money can buy. Not two yards out of the garage, you fall through the ground and plummet forever into the abyss. Welcome to Street Legal Racing: Redline (henceforth shortened to SLRR).

Allow me to be nice for just a moment. This is one of the most unique and intricate racing games around because every major car component can be bought, installed, damaged and repaired individually. It’s a real struggle to begin your career in a lousy shoebox… but that just elevates the atmosphere. It’s terrifying to go full-blast in your machine, knowing an ill-fated traffic car or scenery object can mean total bankruptcy – yet it is necessary to prevail in the cut-throat street racing scene. Now that’s exhilarating!

Or, at least, if half of the game were up to snuff.

For you see, whenever there’s a brilliant idea waiting to be showcased, SLRR does its best to undermine it somehow. Driving, for example, is pretty weird – a red flag in a racing game. Steering has a sense of vagueness to it, compounded by the bouncy collisions and unpredictable road surface. If playing on keyboard, this is further exacerbated by the weird input curves for acceleration and braking. The cars always act like there’s at least a split-second delay between pressing or releasing throttle, and the car actually responding. Gamepad car controls are better, but literally every other function aside from straight up driving is unavailable then. In spite of all that, driving is probably the most functional core component of this title.

Anyway, your goal throughout career mode is to increase your reputation and bank account, rise through the ranks of the local street racing crews, and eventually win the “Race of Champions”. To this end, you can try to race roaming drivers during the day in point-to-point races, where you always pick the finish line. Very convenient, but doesn’t do enough to justify the pitiful money rewards here (and by the way, there’s no on-screen prompt to challenge to a race: you have to get really close and honk the idiots).

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3094257048

The big bucks come from night races. Gather up to the randomly chosen race start - making sure to not get clotheslined by drivers racing for themselves – set up a bet, and participate in rather menial drag races… over and over again. Different starting locations do nothing to mask the fact that you have to race some 20 odd dudes, per crew, in order to progress. They don’t even follow a particular progression curve: more than once I competed against a tough opponent, win, and then face off against someone decidedly slower afterwards. Huh?


Ah yes, and when they cross the finish line, they act like their right pedal is stuck to the floor. They only make a token attempt to slow down when the race ends, as otherwise they careen into scenery and demolish their own cars. Pretty frequently they smashed up my rides too, leading to expensive repairs.

There’s an extremely fine line that the game tries to tread: on one hand, lose miserably and crash your car enough, and you might as well retire from street racing before the second night. But win a couple of back-to-back night races on maximum wagers, and you’re set to build up a good car from scratch, with funds to spare.

So, you manage just that, and go and buy some parts. You then discover that the parts catalog must be the single worst UI interface in the game. Everything is strewn throughout categories and on pages with no rhyme or reason. You have to cross-reference the parts in your inventory or on your car, remember where random items were strewn in various categories, and hope the purchased items actually fit anyway.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3094253253

Oh, I mentioned the parts catalog being garbage, but right beside it stands the actual garage screen. You have to hover your mouse on, or around, the part you want to remove or tune, and then hope you click at the exact time the name of the part flashes in the corner. Miss the timing, and you either spend another few seconds trying to take the thing off, or remove something else entirely – possibly damaging your car a bit in the process. Lovely.

Finally, you install the correct parts after figuring out what else was missing. You can then tune your car in a fairly in-depth way, going as far as the air-fuel ratio, shock stiffness, gearing and even your engine’s idle and rev limiter. Would be great if there were more varied aftermarket parts. Yes, if you buy a top spec car, your options to further upgrade are much more limited, save for wheels and tyres. Can’t swap engines either; you need an entirely new chassis for a new set of engine blocks.

Trudge through a couple more hours of night time racing and you’re cosmetically awarded with a different garage. It provides no meaningful difference to gameplay, save for acting as a different spawn point. Reach the top 5 racers of the final crew, and you can participate in the “Race of Champions”. It’s a one-lap loop around a highway and a few hilly bends, which you must repeat some 12 times before you finally win. Your reward is a snazzy supercar, one that’s honestly not that special in the event you were driving your own for the event.


In career mode, you can participate in special events on what must be race tracks ported from other games. The entry conditions are so incredibly specific, the payouts so meager, and the penalties so unfair that they’re not worthwhile. I’m not racing on Spa for 6 laps when it takes four instances of touching kerbs to disqualify me.

Multiplayer… doesn’t exist, five years after the last official update. Freeride and quick race just give you a random car to cruise with on a track, or race in the city. Replayability is limited to those who really want to build and stance cars. Workshop functionality mostly serves to add more parts and cars to play with.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3094280550

This is an abysmally looking, sounding and performing game. Despite horrific pop-in, including mini-map icons, framerate is seldom at 60fps 1440p, on my Ryzen 9 3900X, RTX 3070, 64GB RAM, Windows 10 64bit system. No number of settings changed can remedy this; the most you might achieve is even worse visuals. Sound channels regularly glitch out as well. Even when sound doesn’t glitch, cars sound pretty poor. Some engine noises are borderline sensory abuse. The soundtrack is honestly okay, were it not extremely repetitive – only about a dozen total music tracks.

And that bit about falling through the floor? Not hyperbole, it’s happened repeatedly until I installed a Workshop addon specifically to prevent that. Hasn’t stopped the game from simply freezing and crashing to desktop repeatedly in my playthroughs. Save files can also corrupt at random. The game does make the odd extra save slots, for some reason.

Nevertheless, after some 10 hours of racing, I came out with one R.O.C. win and don’t exactly feel the need for more.

For everything Street Legal Racing: Redline attempts to do, it fails in at least two more places. A unique yet overly-ambitious racer, collapsing under its own weight.

Who wouldn’t love to smash cars up and be rewarded for it? That’s the essence of demolition and destruction-derbies. And our title today harkens back to several such titles from the mid-2000s – this time, aided by modern technology and amenities. Welcome to TRAIL OUT.
Visually, this title is rather impressive. Particle effects steal the show: vivid fire, spark and debris particles making most any impact or crash that much more satisfying to look at. Sometimes they might be a bit too much, and clutter the screen. Anything that has to do with environments and the cars has plenty of visual flair and pop. The worst parts visually speaking are the characters, and only really in cutscenes. They have stilted animation, and a plastic appearance in some lighting conditions that just screams “uncanny”.

Performance is mixed. My Ryzen 9 3900X, 64GB RAM, RTX 3070, Windows 10 Pro system maintains 60fps at 1440p with all settings to the max and DLSS Quality mode, for only half the time. There are instances of drops to the low-40s that don’t seem to be rectified entirely by dropping quality settings to low or medium. Thankfully, this title looks good even on lower fidelity. Controls aren’t rebindable, whether it’s keyboard or gamepad, but a full playthrough on keyboard hasn’t given problems during gameplay.
On the audio front, things take a turn for the worse. The actual music is good: tense instrumental orchestra for the menus, and flavours of alternative rock, punk and metal during events. Not all of it hits the bullseye, but the soundtrack is the highlight. Sound effects themselves are good, but the audio levelling is anything but. No matter how you set up your audio, engines are far too quiet, and voice acting during gameplay is muted and hardly comprehensible. The last part is a benefit of sorts: voice acting is pretty universally corny, awkward, and simply poor.
Say hello to Mihalych. Our stunt-driver protagonist, down on his luck from the introductory sequence, has but one thing to look forward to anymore: the eponymous stunt-driving, destruction-derby festival of TRAIL OUT. Mihalych sets out to win the derby festival – even if it means risking his own life.

There are a couple of dramatic moments in the story (insofar as a racing game can have such a thing). However, the story presentation is so full of dated memes, references to other media, and terrible presentation, that it’s difficult to be invested for any other reason than unintentional hilarity. The actual opponents are presented in a way as to be intentionally unlikeable, and you want to smash their cars, and their faces in. In the end, I could go entirely without seeing most if not all cutscenes.
Let’s get to racing, then... It’s genuinely pretty solid! Don’t expect proper simulation, but the cars have a decent sense of weight and inertia to their handling, without compromising on direct steering and forgiving grip. Kicking out into a slide is straightforward, and different drivetrains respond differently to being pushed to the limit. Just be mindful of the weirdly harsh suspension.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2907730358
The number of opponents during races is usually pretty modest: eight racers on the track. What the races lack in the number of opponents, however, they make up for in chaos. Shrapnel, sparks and body parts fly off within the first few seconds of a race, as racers use each other for better cornering, or to simply demolish rivals.
Do be mindful of what else you smash into while racing or derbying. Scenery props reward you with fans and nitrous, but they slowly chip away at your car’s health, and can make you lose control.
TRAIL OUT features a bunch of cars inspired by real life models. They’re all separated into classes of increasing performance, and further differentiated by body style and drivetrains. One nice touch is you have to buy the bare chassis of a wrecked car, and install components until it’s a fully functional vehicle. It’s darn cool to see your ride being built back up from the ground.

Body, wheel, suspension and nitrous modifications determine how well a car will perform on various surfaces and in certain game modes. An armored shell will make it less nimble around the track, but is vital in derbies, for instance. All is pretty good, so it’s a shame, then, that actual personalization is very lackluster. You can only choose between four preset, basic paints, and two more preset liveries that grant bonus fans or money for finishing events, and makes repairs automatic and free. There’s no proper reason not to take the liveries with bonuses.

The most frequent game modes you’ll compete in are flavours of races and derbies. The maps themselves have quite a high variety of styles and themes. Races send you through cities, the countryside, storm drains and abandoned race tracks, while some derbies have you smash up malls and museums, in addition to the now-standard mud pits.

Other fun game modes are Hunter, where you destroy as many generic racers as you can in your police interceptor, using weapons; and Escape, which are races where the last place driver gets BLOWN UP BY A FLYING GUNSHIP. And lastly there are Dead Out, an isolated yet competent zombie survival mode; and Stunts... I wish I could enjoy these, but the event variety is lackluster, and sending your driver out the windshield feels woefully inconsistent and just unfun. Honestly, don’t bother with Stunts.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2907730726
During events, destroying roadside objects and your opponents is incentivized with nitrous refills and bonus fans. Said fans are what you need to get most of the new cars and parts. Money, sadly, doesn’t get improved by going out of your way to become a wrecking ball – only by the aforementioned sponsor wrap. Various challenges can be accepted from the progress menu, amounting to things like “drive X distance” or “wreck this many racers”; and every so often Mihalych can stream himself to the fans too. Helps give players an extra source of fans early on, and is entirely optional. Similarly, you receive random, small cash donations for fulfilling various challenges. It always feels like you’re just a little behind the curve in terms of money, though; you’ll have to do several custom events to get the funds you need, even with any bonuses.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2993902997
To progress through the career, you have to win events and amass enough fans to challenge racers on the blacklist. These generally involve one point-to-point duel with some lackeys to slow you down, and one derby event. While far from impossible to win, the derbies sometimes turn supremely cheap and annoying due to said lackeys attacking you with weapons you can never use. Beating every blacklist racer and reaching the credits takes around ten hours on the default difficulty setting. Replayability is rather low, as you cannot replay career events unless you start a new playthrough in a different save file. There’s also no multiplayer.

While it’s a rocky ride with inconsistent presentation quality and limited replayability, TRAIL OUT is still plenty of good fun. When in doubt, Flat Out.

A world-ending invasion and infestation problem that can only be solved by a multi-national team of soldiers and researchers, who are supposed to save the world via application of overwhelming firepower and reverse engineering, respectively, through multiple layers of turn-based and real-time strategy? It checks all the basic boxes, but Phoenix Point is decidedly not an X-Com clone. No really, it isn’t. It’s kind of its own thing, for better or worse.

This isn’t to say that this title’s presentation is poor, just that it’s hard to deny the amateurish feel conveyed at almost every step. Starting with the good, all the models, textures, lighting and general art style are rather solid. Special praise given to the latter, as the enemies are one step away from looking properly Lovecraftian. On the other hand, UI is messy to look at, even messier to interact with, and there are plenty of instances where animations bug out in rather amusing ways. Your soldiers could run from cover to cover, with their upper bodies contorted as they’re leaning down or up.

When it comes to performance, a Ryzen 9 3900X, 64GB RAM, RTX 3070, Windows 10 Pro system is decidedly overkill. Usually performance is a rock-steady 60fps at 1440p, though there are some rare drops to the 30s or 20s (plus awful visual glitches) when free-aiming towards fire and smoke. Loading times for saves are rather long, but after that it’s not too bad.

An eerie, tense soundtrack plays on both the Geoscape and in the Tactical battle portions. Were it not for the very basic track mixing and general repetitiveness, it only heightens the atmosphere and instills dread into the player, making one doubt just what monstrosity or horror you’d fight next. Sound effects are of decent quality as well, and I’ll give particular praise to the booming echo after firing your weapons... And then there’s the voice acting. It’s fine in diplomacy screens and cutscenes – very well done, actually – but in gameplay you can definitely sense some early-draft grunts, screams and death cries, both from humans and from Pandorans.

In the year 2022, melting permafrost has allowed a completely unique prehistoric virus to invade Earth’s oceans and mutate the ocean life. Following wars amongst ourselves and against the hostile seafood, this Pandoravirus has driven humanity to near-extinction, huddled up in isolated havens across the globe. Now, split between three ideologically-conflicting factions, mankind’s only chance of survival rests upon the Phoenix Project, who must preserve the remaining population, analyze the threat, and come up with the necessary solution before it’s too late.

Putting a small spin on the “alien invasion, gotta reverse engineer fast” formula via diplomacy is clever. As we’re about to find out however, it’s imperfect… and you’ll really wish people would get along better when the extinction of humanity is at stake.



As with the X-Com series to which this title is a spiritual successor, Phoenix Point’s gameplay is split between multiple strategy layers. Its tutorial introduces the player to the Tactical layer first, where you control a squad of up to eight operatives on a small field. Your goals generally are to neutralize enemy forces, though sometimes you also have to recover a vehicle, other people, defend MacGuffins, or simply extract with necessary resources before being overrun. Subtle gameplay twists significantly change up the usual turn-based tactics from its inspiration, however – in many ways acting like the classic, 1990s titles. Per-region health and armor add important tactical decisions to be made with every combat engagement. Adding onto this are the granular action point system, which lets you peek from cover, shoot, then duck back in; and the cover system itself, which is only as effective for protection as its physical durability and coverage.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2907732177
But what sounds good on paper doesn’t work perfectly in reality. Line-of-sight and line-of-fire are sometimes exclusive; this means your machine guns and heavy cannons, held waist-high, can’t be used in the same manner as other weapons. Or you’ll be notified of a target in sight, but you can only take the shot on its toe or whatever. Most annoyingly, enemies quickly develop strong armor. Couple this with their annoying counter-tactics and abilities, and you’re backed into a corner, unless you pay close attention and make use of every available skill and gear.

What saves the punishing mid-game combat loop is your troops’ own advancement. From both personal and common point pools, you can improve their base attributes and unlock skills. Dual-class to get proficiencies in multiple weapon types, allow instant reloads, attack for fewer action points, lockdown enemies and provide morale for your own teammates with each kill. Max rank Assaults, especially when dual-classed, are my favourite because they can pull off some serious cleanup on damaged or low-ranking troops, getting back action points per kill.

After the tactical layer, we move onto the strategic one. You’re supposed to send aircraft with troops aboard to discover havens, scavenge resources and fight back against the Pandorans. The more planes you can send around the world to examine sites, the faster you can expand and build up your resource depots. This is also necessary to undertake story and faction missions, or engage in trading. Everywhere else you can scavenge for resources or items, or rescue potential recruits.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2907727177
However, scavenging sites can be visited only once, at most twice with a mid-game refresh. Equipment, vehicles and even recruits cost a large chunk of your resources. Playing with a single plane is either a major strategic error, or a serious challenge.

The most immediate problem is that the generic faction missions – where you’re tasked with sabotaging rival havens – drop your relationship with the victims too much to be worthwhile. You’re genuinely better off letting these havens suffer attacks from the fish monsters, then rescue them from attack. It’s both easy and a good idea to befriend every faction – you unlock their own tech trees once allied.

Just protecting humanity won’t be enough. The end goal is to research how the Pandorans came to be, and how to put a stop to them. The quintessential alien capture and base destruction are critical mid-game tasks for this purpose, and it might not be too easy when you’ll eventually have to neutralize towering monsters. Eventually, you’ll gather enough intel and have a strong enough crew, that you can wage the final assault and save humanity. The Phoenix Project can go about it solo, or ally with one of the other factions, for slightly different endings.

By the time I finished the game at the roughly-50 hour mark, on the default Veteran difficulty, I was exhausted. Missions are repetitive, and even combat turns tedious eventually. Small haven events are randomized, but the general progression is similar between playthroughs. Downloadable content doesn’t feel balanced or fun to engage with.

A solid dual-layer strategy game with significant faults in user-friendliness, late-game tedium and mechanics. If you can get past those, Phoenix Point will keep you hooked in its gameplay loops.

Once in a while, one encounters a game where the core genre it belongs to is difficult to make out. Well, Nier Automata is most definitely still a stylish action title, but is nonetheless a unique mix of solidly implemented tropes and mechanics from a variety of action video games.
In actuality, however, it’s only a modestly good-looking title. The character models are well realized and animated, especially in gameplay, and the general art direction for the environments convey a strong sense of isolation. That being said, limitations are apparent without needing a thorough examination of the graphics.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2850372163
Still, it shouldn’t really be an issue for a Ryzen 9 3900X, 64GB RAM, 1070Ti, Windows 10 Pro system to run, even at 1440p and 60hz, right? Well… not really. Without MSAA, 60fps are maintained usually, though some intense areas still dip into the 40s. Employing any multi-sampling to curb the nasty aliasing thoroughly tanks the frame rate to below 30. Beyond that, technical and stability issues are thankfully absent. Full keyboard rebinding is possible, and I’m pleasantly surprised to confirm gamepad rebinding too… that being said, the former’s controls are spread out and cumbersome to the point that it’s a lot easier to just play on a gamepad.

On the audio front, the music is plain and simply beautiful. Simple enough in terms of dynamic layering, but epic orchestral arrangements are backed up with chill-inducing vocals, kicking in when the action ramps up (or alternatively turning into high quality chiptune occasionally)… it’s sensational. Everything just clicks together in the sound department: weapon attacks and general sound effects are appropriate and satisfying. While I found the voice acting delivery overall excellent, be wary of the stereotypical “anime gasp” that’s often thrown about by the characters in dialog.
In the very-distant future, androids and machine-lifeforms are locked into a forever war on Earth, with humanity having left it desolate for millennia. As part of YoRHa, an elite military force of androids, you play as combat model “2B” - and are joined by your chipper and endearingly awkward, scanner-type sidekick “9S” - to conduct reconnaissance and data-gathering on the curious behaviours of the adversary. An ever-destructive journey for the protagonists ensues, as they struggle to comprehend the bewildering nature of their enemies… and slowly unravel multiple long-running conspiracies that shake their beliefs to the very core.

Story connoisseurs might quickly read through the lines and pick apart the plot twists and revelations long before they’re officially spelled out, while the philosophical questions raised seldom have much depth. Also, to get the full picture, you have to play through the whole story at least three times over, so strap yourself in. Past all that, the journey of the main characters is engrossing enough that I found myself significantly emotional by the end of each’s individual tale.

Also, there is no autosave. The game makes sure to remind you, because there is, indeed, no autosave. Did I mention there’s no autosave? If you forget, the 45-minute long prologue will remind you harshly...
For most of the run-time, Nier Automata is a hack-and-slash, with unique flair courtesy of the developers Platinum Games. Mix-and-match two weapons into your light or heavy attack slots, swap through your ranged pod’s basic and charged attacks, and string together simple yet satisfying combos against a variety of foes. On the normal difficulty level, evasion and offense are still emphasized, as you cannot afford to tank a lot of hits by default. To help with this, your dash/sprint function works as attack evasion if timed right, which you can then string into powerful riposte.

Elements of bullet-hell are apparent from the beginning: adversaries fire large damaging orbs as projectiles, which can either be shot through with your floating pod or otherwise dispersed with melee attacks. Several hidden abilities are left for the player to discover, but as a whole your movement and combat kits are straightforward, if lacking in depth.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2884849489
With growing frequency over time, you engage in a hacking minigame that plays out like a more traditional twin-stick bullet hell shooter: you control a little ship and have a limited time to destroy a central node before you have to try again. I found these generally enjoyable, but the growing frequency made them a bit of a chore to go through by the end.

RPG elements are sprinkled throughout the experience. You level up through defeating enemies and completing quests. Both of these, as well as exploration, reward with minor crafting/trade items, or the odd weapon and equipment upgrades. Side quest design is lackluster – the bulk of them function as fetch quests. Go here, kill some creeps or find some item, come back, sometimes do that again, and be rewarded.

It’s the written dialog that primarily make these worthwhile… that and getting something to make your damage numbers larger. Also, through these, you further get to explore a majority of the map’s varied biomes – overgrown city ruins, urban areas turned into scorching wastelands, an amusement park kept alive by your enemies, and several more.

You can also fish in bodies of water.
One can break the difficulty into pieces through the plug-in chips system. The playable androids can have various improvements to combat, defense and movement slotted into memory – at the same time, you can make more room for enhancements by taking away unnecessary HUD elements (but don’t touch the OS chip!... or do). Chips of the same level can be combined to provide a greater effect at the cost of more memory usage.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2884834102
With the right setup, equivalent-level enemies and bosses will falter quickly. Level scaling is still present to ensure you don’t quite curb-stomp all opposition, and high-level enemies will demand your full attention to ensure not dying immediately, but - outside of a few optional gauntlets – a skilled player wouldn’t have to die often.

If you do die, it’ll sting: you lose your equipped chips and have to recover your old body before it disappears or before you die again. Or, you can reload a previous save.
Finishing the first story on the most critical path would require about ten hours of playtime. Subsequent stories are real emotional rollercoasters – and take another combined 15-20 hours to complete. Thus, the proper finale is after the 30-hour mark. Side content can take a lot longer to explore, though be mindful of their repetitive and uninspired nature if the gameplay becomes boring. Hilariously, a bunch of endings are “fake” and require the player to go against objectives or even common sense at certain moments – rewarding you with a few lines of text on how you screwed up and adding to the completion tally. So, don’t eat that fish, no matter how tasty it is.
Sure, combat is simple and the quests are boring – but come for Nier Automata’s otherwise satisfying gameplay, and stay for the emotional story. Difficult to talk about, yet easy to recommend.

In a world where racing games weren’t striving hard enough to one-up cheesy blockbusters, one franchise steps to the plate, and most notably replaces the word “family” with “crew.” Need for Speed: Payback touts quite the adventurous story, and an expansive scope, but how much of that is any good?

Have to say, Frostbite 3 might not be the smoothest game engine around, but it sure is pretty... sometimes. Garage close-ups of cars and vibrantly lit downtown areas are some of the best views you’ll get in this title, with great shading and model qualities. Compromises are apparent when you look closer to your usually shiny car: reflections are toned down or even absent, no matter if you’ve wrapped your ride in chrome. Daytime looks visually flat despite its vibrant colours. Human animation is a weird mix of bad and good, with nice details but poor posing and timing.

Just one notch below the highest graphical settings, my Ryzen 9 3900X, 64GB RAM, 1070 Ti, Windows 10 Pro system runs the game at 60fps and 1440p resolution, with occasional dips to the 50s when passing through dark tunnels. Gamepad controls are unrebindable and you have to make do with just two presets… This is how I also realized keyboard controls are rebindable, and not actually bad.

Oh boy, the dialog is just awful. It might’ve banked on the cheesy presentation of mid-2000’s street racing movies, but… come on now. Poor delivery, repetitive self-congratulatory statements from the main characters, forced lines and a generally obnoxious feel to it. Trust me, you’re hardly missing out if you mute it entirely.

Sound design is a little better, thankfully. Aside from being on the quiet side for some reason, even with all sliders at the maximum, you have decent car noises and environmental effects. Finally, music is mostly harmless: a few really good tracks are buried in a sea of generic rap, country and rock. Some standouts are the composed pursuit soundtrack and the Speedcross-exclusive songs. There’s an attempt to reduce repetition by “theming” the score based on time of day and location, but in practice it achieved the opposite.

After a disastrous heist attempt on a high-tech hypercar and the subsequent splitting of his gang, resident boy-racer and self-proclaimed best driver in faux-Las Vegas Tyler Morgan re-assembles his crew with overly-happy British™ person Mac and straight-faced Jess. Helped by a group of slightly less insane characters, one of which being the victim of the prologue’s attempted heist, the protagonists seek out vengeance against the one who sabotaged their heist, and save Fortune Valley from a tyrannical cartel by beating a bunch of gangs at street racing.

A totally ridiculous premise where any genuine tension is broken when racers trash-talk with weak lines such as “gonna CRUSH you”, and totally shattered because the leagues are pretentious butts who are “mistreated and outcast” for literally performing illegal activities.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2869512682
At its core, Need for Speed: Payback is a thoroughly arcade-like racer, where the best lines are taken by drifting through corners rather than holding on the edge of grip. This, in itself, is fine. What’s less fine is the handling model’s specific details that undermine this. Instead of throwing your car’s back end out, the handbrake sooner makes you understeer for a good while. Drifting response, stability and turning circles are, at best, vaguely communicated, and you won’t know if a car is a boat to drive until you invest some good time and money into upgrading and tweaking it. The worst part about this is that the cars generally drive the same, though some weird choices remain dominant over all others – as the likes of 911 RSRs can attest in online play.

Being a modern entry into the franchise, customization and player expression are a big deal. Thankfully you can bet that most every car on display has at least some body parts to pick through. Wider fenders, different rims, a different front and rear end, and a couple generic rear wings with the occasional unique spoiler – not a bad showing. I must give particular praise to the livery editor, which is not only powerful and host to some high-quality wraps, but all can be applied to any car at will. Add some vanity tyre smokes, a lower stance and neon lights, and you can really stand out
Yet while visual customization is fine, performance customization is terrible. You have performance cards with specific brands and bonuses attached to them. Buying from in-game stores yields only higher-level cards with barely any bonuses. The ways to get good cards are by either repeatedly grinding out events, or rolling a literal slot machine to get the right combo of stats boosted. Live Tuning, independent of performance cards, makes too little difference towards a better-performing or -driving car.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2869511017
You’ll cover a sprawling map, open for exploration after the prologue with perilous serpentines, wide highways and grid urban layouts. Its size is on the larger side, but you don’t really need even more boring desert to offroad through. Events are split across six different disciplines, which means you’ll have to upgrade at least six different cars, independently of each other. Some discipline-specific gripes include Drag events also including straight-up races and time attacks, in cars that pop wheelies even when stock; and offroad cars are very eager to go airborne and still have an awkward speed limit off the pavement.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2869511562
Meanwhile, another series staple – police pursuits – are sadly locked away in either linear-course events or as part of open-world “bait crates”, where you drive to a nearby destination without getting busted. Their lack of escalation and predictability are a huge shame when considering how solid the pursuit gameplay itself can be. Dodging oncoming Rhinos and shunting cops out of range of their ECMs are a right rush.
The main story takes about 20 hours at a leisurely pace, taking you through five chapters and several blockbuster-caliber heists along the way. Past that, exploration is incentivized via collectibles and score-attack sections on the map, which reward cash and rep, and unlock visual customization categories. Rep grants you shipments, from where you unlock vanity customization and get a massive influx of cash and card parts – the Deluxe edition’s free shipments can actually turn the atrocious upgrade system into mere tedium. Meanwhile, beating street leagues gives clues on finding derelicts scattered around the world. Catch ‘em all from generally obvious map indications, and you’ll have another set of free cars to customize and upgrade to your liking. Roaming racers are but a momentary distraction, and finally, multiplayer is actually still alive, if quite limited. Open-world activities generally revolve around simple impromptu drag races with no one bothering to do much else; Speedlists with PvP racing work fine and you can stand a chance to win even against overpowered cars.
Peak cinematic flair with minimum substance, charm and consistency makes Need for Speed: Payback difficult to recommend in general; due to its upgrade system, it’s better to avoid entirely.

Call of Juarez Gunslinger is an arcade first-person shooter spin-off of the eponymous franchise. Players join Silas Greaves, a retired bounty hunter, through his increasingly wild tales of past skirmishes and quests.
In sharp contrast to the previous entries, this title goes for a heavily stylized presentation. Props and characters are renditioned with cartoony outlines, giving an appearance close to cel-shading. Complementing this dime novel-like look are the vibrant and picturesque locales, which include untouched forests, sprawling canyons and dense border towns. Sure, the character models lack any facial animation – the few times you see them up close and facing you, they’re blankly staring into space; and a few environment textures can vary in quality from one region to another… but you’d generally have to go out of your way to look for these imperfections.

Not all stylistic choices land, however. A comic book-like border stretches along your screen edges, which might be distracting. The field of view is also on the slightly narrow side – thankfully both of these elements can be tweaked through the game’s files fairly easily. While remaining in-game options are on the limited side, I had no trouble running this title at a rock-solid 60fps, at 1440p, on my Ryzen 9 3900X, 64GB RAM, 1070 Ti, Windows 10 Pro system.
The star of the audio experience is the voice acting. It’s witty and comedic, but with great punch to every character’s delivery where necessary. It all serves this title’s framing device brilliantly, and kept me invested in the story all throughout. Not far behind are the sound effects – and par for the course for this franchise, the weapons are punchy and booming. Their Concentration Mode sounds are a little mixed, as some are too muffled and indistinct while others remain sharp. All other foley is remarkably well done, with personal standouts being simple footsteps and landing sounds being “crunchy.” Lastly, the soundtrack is good too, but it takes a backseat to the remaining audio elements. Half of the music tracks are reused from previous installments, though this doesn’t detract from their quality.
Call of Juarez Gunslinger’s framing device is a unique spin on storytelling, displaying an exquisite level of gameplay-and-story integration. In 1910, in the setting days of the Wild West, the retired bounty hunter Silas Greaves tells his exploits over the years, as he claims to take down notorious outlaws. He is an unreliable narrator - the sequences told are experienced through gameplay, which means any inconsistencies, or even intervention by the in-universe audience, affect the course of levels and which enemies you fight.
It’s a wholly refreshing spin on video game narrative, and genuinely well-done at that. On its own, the story warrants a second playthrough, because some details only become apparent in hindsight.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2840786249
Unlike previous Call of Juarez games, you don’t alternate between gameplay styles or choose characters with different proficiencies. The entirety of normal gameplay has players control a single character, with the primary loop being to shoot everything shooting back – and maybe break a few random props scattered around to get a few points and keep combos going. Movement is the fastest and tightest it’s ever been, though jumping is stiff and falling damage, rather punishing.

The arcade shooter inspiration further extends to the enemies. Most of them run out into the open and start shooting you after a few steps. Some have even graduated school, able to take cover and try to flank you, or wield wooden doors as shields, but they all know this is a shooting gallery. A handful act as end-of-level bosses with their own large health pools. Again, nothing that either explosives, headshots, or both can’t fix.
Weapon variety is pretty low this time around. Your picks are between three revolvers, two variants of a lever action rifle, two lengths of double-barrel shotgun, dynamite and the odd emplaced gatling gun. While you can’t mix-and-match individual revolvers for dual-wielding, you can definitely combine the flavours of long-arms and handguns to specialize or generalize for various ranges and encounters.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2855224078
Concentration Mode returns, now in a more refined and consistent flavour. Enemy fire turns from hitscan to projectiles when engaged and action all around you slows down significantly. Gunslinger’s other party trick is a skill tree system, featuring plenty of fun upgrades letting you, say, split thrown dynamite into several sticks, or get a full CM refill every six combo multipliers. My favourite synergy has the double-barrel shotguns of all types, get bottomless ammo reserves when in slow motion, so you can really give enemies a taste of bullet hell…Even if a very small number of skills are less exciting, the majority of the system is excellently executed and makes for fun, frantic gameplay.

Difficulty is decent – you will need some focus and experience to beat the higher challenge levels, but it’s hardly unfair. Checkpoints are plentiful, and the Sense of Death mechanic lets you dodge a lethal bullet every minute or so, which is as awesome as it is useful.
And the quintessential Wild West duels return once more, in arguably their best form in this franchise. Players control the cursor with their mouse, keeping targeted on the opponent to built up accuracy and better reaction. At the same time, they must adjust Silas’ hand to be in the right place above the holster and ensure a faster draw of the revolver. It takes some adjustment, but it can be consistently performed to great effect. Then the choice becomes to draw first and forfeit a score (experience) bonus, or let the enemy draw first and race to shoot them dead before you fail to dodge their bullet. Great system, overall!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2840786529
Beyond the roughly three-four hour long campaign, players have extra content waiting to be explored. In Arcade Mode, it’s all about the highest score, so grab your preset loadout and get shooting everything that moves. Your skill sets improve as you accrue total score, so you’re further encouraged to replay levels with enhanced abilities. On the other hand, if you wish to fight in fifteen duels, back to back, and put your reaction time to the test, then the Duel Challenge is for you. Lastly, Nuggets of Truth are scattered around the story levels and serve as collectibles. They reward with both a chunk of experience, and some neat trivia on history, society and the reality of the story events as compared to the game’s portrayal. All combine to greatly extend the playtime… maybe to the dizzying heights of two-digit hours.

But for the sub-$15 price tag, these are a really fun dozen hours.
Short but sweet, like a dime novel. Call of Juarez: Gunslinger draws its audience in with its great presentation, and further provides a unique, compelling story and excellent shooter gameplay.

They say you can get great reviews on great games over at Review and Brew.