Recent reviews by SmaSh it Up

Beautiful, haunting, atmospheric, contemplative, brief adventure made by indie legends.

A faithful recreation of the original that captures the hallmark tight level design, inventive puzzles and chaotic action of Black Mesa's sprawling complex. As in Half-Life, claustrophobia is brilliantly amplified by the punctual, limited use of vast outdoor canyon areas, deftly changing pace, adding variety, and convincingly conveying a frenetic and unrelenting conflict is escalating beyond the confines of the subterranean scientists. There are touches of AAA quality in strikingly well done cut scenes, especially towards the end, and the Source engine is made to shine with modern and very nice lighting effects.

While I respect the desire to innovate, and the re-imagined Xen levels are artistically highly imaginative, ultimately they bloat the game and disrupt the harmonious gameplay found back on earth. The end chapters fall short because of stale level design (that in the workers' quarters reminded me of Jedi Knight 2); uninspired puzzles that tediously dilute the pace of action, and most irritating is the unnecessary shoehorning of the double jump 'feature' into repetitive and frustrating platforming elements. I hung in there until the end out of respect for the developers and the captivating and colourful Xen ecosytem, and eventually the double jump became a truly useful tool in dodging boss attacks.

That last attack from the expert AI at the very end of an early war conquest game, when your captured KV1 (healthy and crewed by senior vets) is suddenly and very magically one-shotted by a single infantryman throwing a single grenade at the front of your tank...
The Call To Hatred™ intensifies...
Calls for greater crushing of the hordes...

If you know and liked "Where's Wally?" then you'll love this gem. It's an interactive take on the format, where you have to pick out particular things from a visual maze of animated black and white objects. The hilarious and often adorable sound effects add an extra dimension to the gameplay, with ambient sounds cleverly acting as audible hints. There are a few "connect the dots" puzzles that give it another layer of depth without being obtuse, as the game design carefully introduces the particular mechanics of a zone (mostly buttons or levers) in smaller areas before elaborating into larger areas. If you get stuck the brief written clues with each object are logical and simple to follow; by the end of the game I was going to the clues first and thereafter quite rapidly locating the targets, rather than spamming left click on everything! Very satisfying to complete and find all the hidden folks and things!

The definitive, upgraded and expanded edition of the RTS that changed the game way back in late 2006 (a game that I played for many hundreds of hours before the Steam version was a thing). Technically, COH 2 was a step up from the innovation of the brutal physics and beautiful particle effects of the first title, by way of true sight, which models the fog of war based on actual obstruction of a unit's line of sight. It's something we think of as normal but at the time it was a modest deal. It's now 2020 and the game performs beautifully in it's ultra polished final state. The most notable design change of the second game is the introduction of commanders, which give an extra breadth to the styles and dynamics of battle, and test a player's capabilities to respond to a specific commander's often unique threats and abilities. There are also subtle tweaks to controls, implementing a more responsive, satisfying and refined tactical play. Overall, it's aged like a fine gaming wine!

Following years of determined development Squad reached 1.0 in mid-2020, adding an absolute stack of content along the way and spawning two notable spin-offs in Post Scriptum and Beyond The Wire. It is very well optimised, even when there are one hundred (!) people in one server, and most importantly I've already had a load of laughs. My one gameplay gripe is the time-to-kill is a little bit too long considering you are using high-powered modern weaponry that is supposed to leave fist-sized holes in recipients in real life. It does break the immersion; rattling off multiple rounds into the enemy for them to crawl off and stick on a band-aid momentarily, and then rejoin the action like nothing ever happened. So for those bolt-action, one-shot-kill purists like myself, it can be a bit frustrating constantly plugging the enemy apparently made out of sandbags. It goes both ways, so you can survive a total mauling when really you shouldn't have..

Anyway, back to the laughs! After a few hours of interacting with totally random team mates the unintended mishaps, jokes, and natural and also artificial accents pile up and culminate in moments of greatness, such as role-playing suicide biker terrorists. And what happens is truly utter hilarity, for example attaching layers of explosives to a motorbike and driving them into a behemoth tank (that will obliterate you in an instant if it catches sight of you), while shouting the appropriate religious-laden obscenities. On first attempt as a terrorist sapper - think Team America - my random team mate and I hunted infidel armour in the vast desert, on a crappy yet surprisingly stable scooter rigged with a physics-defying number of home-made bombs. We did a lot of sneaking and stalking and then finally, as the tank entered the town, we launched our sudden attack, my new brother driving our motorbike bomb directly towards the invading pigs from behind! I jumped off out about fifty metres from the infidels, detonating the bomb (and my team mate) via my cheap and trusty mobile phone. I had to martyr my brother as there was no time to allow him to escape. Our team swarmed around the disabled tank and eventually picked it off. There's something very original GTA and very satisfying about driving a 'remote controlled' bomb into the enemy, especially when the bomb is an intelligent team mate - it becomes comedy gold. I'm looking forward to many more moments like these.

PS is still my favourite WW2 shooter on the market and I've enjoyed the many hundreds of hours I've had with it, but it has so far failed to realise its great potential.

I rate Chapter 1 (Market Garden) content "very good," Chapter 2 (early war France) "very poor," Chapter 3 (Normandy) "poor," and lastly Chapter 4 (Ardennes) "OK." The only officially integrated community content, Chapter Mercury (Crete), I think is "good" with some unique mechanics introduced.

November 2023 update: OWI has acquired the game and Mercury Arts (creators of Chapter Mercury) are heading its development, which is very good news. There appears to be many players again.

Here is my award: Worst Game Of The Decade, and the first game I permanently remove from my Steam library. I am incredulous that this abomination won a 2019 Steam award, a sad joke in itself and an indictment of the sales platform, the developers, and the sheep sucking it up and actually voting for this mess.

I bought this game soon after it went on sale in 2013 - yes, 2013 - and at the time of my original review in 2017 it still hadn't had a full release. Fast forward a couple of years and essentially a whole slew of development objectives were chucked out of the window in order for the game to be relieved of its Early Access status. Somehow it was thought calling it "1.0" would make it all better. To this day I am still utterly exasperated by its startling lack of progress. The development "cycle" of nearly a decade is an insult to anyone with one iota of intelligence or self-respect. Now there is paid-for DLC - disgraceful! In 2017 I requested a refund for the first time for a product I purchased via Steam, simply out of principle. This was promptly denied because I had played it for more than two hours, even though this rule had only come into existence long after I purchased it.

This is the first and last Early Access game on Steam I purchase, such is the sour taste it has left. In fact, this malignant tumour of a game is the sole reason I will never again consider buying a Steam Early Access title. Valve and Bohemia Interactive should be ashamed for flogging this mess for so long. In doing so they demonstrate their willingness to adhere to abhorrent business practices and my trust in both parties has been critically eroded. It's totally vile; that scummy 'I've been scammed and can't do anything about it' feeling. And yet it's still perpetuated on unsuspecting consumers, now with some joke "award" slapped onto it. That is principally why I wrote and have updated this scathing review: to warn others not to further fund these scam artists.

I loved the mod, I played it for hundreds of hours using a boxed copy of Arma II. I admired (past tense) Bohemia Interactive for establishing the mil-sim shooter genre with Operation Flashpoint and then raising the bar with the Arma series. I now question their fundamental reliability and seriously doubt I will ever buy another of their products. The grating, inescapable truth is that DayZ mutated into a shameless shambles of a cash grab, disgustingly harvesting the good faith generated by a promising mod. It should have just stayed as a mod. I normally don't rant about titles but given the unbelievably generous funds (it was a top seller for ages) and more than ample time afforded to develop the title, it is no exaggeration to say DayZ sadly goes down as the most abysmal and disappointing failure in modern game development history. Clearly, a spectacular achievement that deserves special recognition with some nonsense Steam award and further front page promotion.

GTA gone mad! A short, sharp, shock of explosively brilliant violence!

It's up there with Team Fortress Classic/2, the original Counter Strike, and Battlefield 2 as one of my favourite multiplayer shooters of all time, and Rising Storm is easily the best approximation yet at capturing the brutal struggle in the Pacific during World War Two. If and when the next installment materialises it will be first on my wishlist.