Recent reviews by Sharkdude

The Ancient Gods - Part One is Eternal at its best. And hardest.

The Ancient Gods - Part One, or TAG1, is the maturation of all of the ideas put forth in Eternal. Concepts like weapon quickswitching, learning combos, and becoming familiar with your movement tools are no longer merely helpful. They are effectively required in TAG1 just to stay alive. It is considerably harder than any content in the base game. If you barely managed to scrape by Eternal's base campaign, TAG1 will crush you, mercilessly and repeatedly, until you have mastered the combat loop or given up. The lack of one of your strongest weapons is felt strongly, but a fourth rune slot and accompanying new runes lessen the blow somewhat.

All of the levels featured in TAG1 are excellent, both artistically and in gameplay. While not packed full of collectible toys, records, and cheat codes like the base levels, they still feature Secret Encounters and Slayer Gates to complete.

UAC Atlantica Facility is a personal favorite, more aesthetically reminiscent of DOOM (2016) than anything else found in Eternal. Its gloomy, sullen skies are accompanied by a torrential downpour, colossal waves, and the booms of distant thunder. Close-quarters combat is found in abundance, and I hope you're good at dealing with Marauders.

The Blood Swamps is a true endurance test. It is a long, unforgiving level featuring branching paths. While DOOM has featured plenty of Hell levels, the Blood Swamps stands out with its sickly green skies and the rotting corpses of giants that litter the landscape. It is filled with environmental hazards like exploding plants and fog that obscures your vision. Parts of the Blood Swamps toe the line of sadism.

The Holt is an uncanny juxtaposition of beauty and unrestrained violence. Its rocky forests of white and red trees provide a beautiful and eerie background for demon slaying. It is undoubtedly the hardest portion of the expansion, with a few arena fights that will push you to the limit of your abilities. The Holt's Slayer Gate deserves special mention; its difficulty so controversial that it is now on its third iteration. The reward for beating it, a new rune, is certainly not worth the effort. But the sense of gratification is priceless.

TAG1 also features multiple new enemies introduced in each level. They fit into Eternal's combat well. Turrets have the potential to be incredibly annoying, so they are used sparingly. Spirits force you to use an underutilized weapon and weapon mod and spice up every encounter they are in. Blood Maykrs teach you quickscoping, and the price for every missed shot is movement impairment. There are other, more minor enemies introduced too.

The story in TAG1 is enjoyable, and it furthers the plot of Eternal in an interesting way. There's no resolution though, you'll have to buy TAG2 for that.

The Ancient Gods - Part One is a must-have for anyone who enjoys Eternal. It manages to be challenging, even after completing the main campaign. It is engaging throughout, and it will undoubtedly improve your abilities.

DOOM Eternal is, presently, the pinnacle of the FPS genre.

It's also a better game than DOOM (2016) in almost every way.
But not everyone is going to like it.

The thing about Eternal is that you have to play by its rules. Playing it like other shooters, even DOOM (2016), is guaranteed to result in failure and, most likely, frustration. You have a very low max ammo count and every demon has a specific weakness that you must exploit. Eternal is really a game of resource management. Health, armor, ammo. These are your lifeblood and it is your job to know how, and more importantly when, to get each.

Health is refilled with kills, a choice that forces you to run towards enemies and play more aggressively when you are near death. You get even more health from glory kills, but these require you to close in to melee range, which comes with its own risks. Should you try to get across the arena and glory kill that Revenant for a big health boost, or would it be better to just shoot the enemies near you and keep fighting with low health? These are the kinds of tactical decisions Eternal forces you to make in seconds, countless times within every combat encounter. Similarly, your Flame Belch restores armor and every enemy you Chainsaw becomes a fountain of ammunition.

This is the beautiful dance of DOOM Eternal, glory killing, flame belching, and chainsawing to keep yourself afloat against the unrelenting demonic hordes. Eternal is the rare game where you can truly enter a flow state and make these critical decisions subconsciously. Few others, outside perhaps Hotline Miami, can offer a legitimate claim to do the same.

Outside of the combat loop, much of one's like or dislike for Eternal comes down to preference. Eternal is unabashedly video game-y, with brightly colored ammo pickups, floating health and weapons in its levels, balloon-popping headshot sound effects, and yellow stars circling above dazed enemies. While I preferred 2016's atmosphere, Eternal's gameplay more than makes up for the difference.

The story is more prominent than in 2016, a source of disappointment for some who liked the previous game's message of "the Slayer doesn't care about any story, and neither should you". It's enjoyable enough but don't expect anything groundbreaking. Eternal doesn't bother to answer all the questions that it asks.

Much has already been written about Eternal's music. Yes, it is as good as everyone says.

Eternal also features Battlemode, a 2v1 asymmetrical multiplayer mode that pits the Slayer against two player controlled demons mixed in with AI. It's enjoyable enough for a few hours but has little staying power compared to the base game. There's nothing to unlock and a competent Slayer player will almost always win. Despite the amount of attention it continues to receive in the form of new skins every few weeks, it's no reason to buy the game.

Eternal is the best shooter to release in a very long time. And despite the colossal reputation that its predecessor from 2016 established, Eternal manages to forge its own identity. It greatly improves on not just the DOOM formula, but the FPS formula. It is undoubtedly the new gold standard. And with combat that has been perfected to this degree, it is likely that people will keep coming back to Eternal for a very long time.

Project Wingman is a love letter to the Ace Combat franchise.

As such, it is inevitably going to be compared to that franchise a lot. But these comparisons aren't meant to insinuate that the game is a copy. Rather, these comparisons illustrate the many ways that Project Wingman has improved the formula of flight action games and pushed the genre forward.

Running on the same engine as Ace Combat 7, it has flight models more reminiscent of Ace Combat 04, the dialogue of Ace Combat 5, and the theming and story of Ace Combat Zero. It's a beautiful, satisfying infusion of oldschool arcade flight action with modern graphics and quality of life improvements. It even boasts some advantages over Ace Combat 7, like a FOV slider, customizable HUD, and completely rebindable controls, not to mention VR support.

But this isn't a purely derivative work; there's a number of innovations here too. You carry can carry several special weapons across multiple pylons at the same time. This is a simple change, but it completely transforms how you plan and perform your missions. This, in combination with powerful guns and useful allies, helps the game forge its own identity and gameplay style. There's also an infinitely replayable rougelite mode to keep you occupied after finishing the campaign. It is surprisingly fleshed out and fairly difficult; there is certainly a lot of content to keep you occupied there. The roster of flyable aircraft also includes some pleasant surprises.

Of course, the game lacks the same polish as a AAA title. You will encounter some bugs. You will find typos. But that's to be expected given the pricepoint and the tiny developer team of just 3 people. The developers are also active in interacting with the community and pushing updates to the game, so expect more fixes and content to come in the future.

Whether you're familiar with Ace Combat or not, Project Wingman is a fantastic flight action game with a well-composed soundtrack that's well worth playing. If you have the means and the desire to play it, it is fully worth the asking price.

Ace Combat 7 is a flight action game developed by Project Aces, part of Bandai Namco. This is a significant game for multiple reasons. It is the first Ace Combat game to release on PC since Assault Horizon, which was almost universally maligned and has since been pulled from Steam, leaving Ace Combat 7 as the sole Ace Combat option for PC. It is the first numbered, mainline entry in the franchise since Ace Combat 6 in 2007. And it returns to Strangereal, the alternate version of earth with fictional continents and countries.

Ace Combat 7 is not a realistic flying experience. You shouldn't go into it expecting one, because you will find its realism lacking as you pull 50G turns and launch hundreds of missiles before getting hit with an enemy missile and shrugging it off. This is a flight arcade game, through and through. Many of the game's missions are simply "score X points before time runs out". There are checkpoints in each mission as well. And you will likely need them, because some of the missions here can be brutal. There is one significant difficulty spike around missions six and seven, but other than that, the difficulty was quite manageable, playing through on normal difficulty.

The graphics are impeccable, running on Unreal Engine 4. And, for me personally, it seems to run flawlessly. FPS drops, stuttering, freezing, none of these have occurred. In terms of bugs, I did not encounter any my first playthrough of the game. The second time, I did encounter one minor glitch where a mission objective would not update, but I simply died and it corrected itself. And this is a game you will be playing through multiple times. Ace Combat 7 pushes replayability, with many unlocks like skins, emblems, and nicknames tied to challenges like "beat the campaign without taking damage", "beat the campaign with machine gun only", and "beat the campaign in under four hours". Not to mention the ranking system that assigns you a letter grade after every mission. You will want to go back and chase those elusive S ranks to unlock even more goodies.

And there are lots of things to unlock here. Ace Combat 7 features an impressive plane roster, with around 30 playable aircraft. American, Russian, European, and Japanese aircraft are all represented. The Russian side is a little heavy on the number of Flankers, but that's not really a bad thing, is it? Some obscure aircraft are included as well, later on. The Aircraft Tree system is borrowed and upgraded from Ace Combat: Infinity. Each mission in singleplayer or multiplayer earns you MRP. This can be used to unlock new aircraft, weapons for them, or upgrades. The progression is nice, and if you stick to one branch, you will have no problem unlocking an end game plane before the end.

Not all is well in Strangereal, however. The game has a few noteworthy faults. Firstly, the controls are not reconfigurable. I played through with a standard Xbox 360 controller. You can switch control presets, but there is no way to change what each individual button does. Secondly, there are some annoying scripted fight sequences. Occasionally, an enemy will not die no matter what you do, because they are scripted as such. You can pump as many missiles into them as you want, but they won't die if it is not time yet. Otherwise, I had few issues with the game.

tl;dr Ace Combat 7 is one of the best flight action games that currently exists. It's graphics are outstanding, performance equally so, aircraft roster is impressive, minute-to-minute gameplay is extremely fun, the story is goofy and full of lovely, cheesy dialogue, and issues are minimal. This game is a must buy for anyone remotely interested in flight action or military aviation.

Now that War Thunder is officially released as of update 1.65, I figured I should probably get around to writing a review. This is the state of the game as of 12/20/16.


War Thunder is a free to play vehicular combat game for PC and PS4, commonly described as an MMO. It's not an open world and there isn't one massive server with thousands of players playing side by side in the same battle, so I don't know if that's really an apt description though. The range of aircraft spans from just before World War II to the Korean War. The range of ground vehicles is from just before World War II to the Vietnam War.


Players face off against eachother in teams of 16 versus 16. Airplanes have three modes: Arcade, Realistic, and Simulator. Arcade is just that, and the mode most players should begin with. Most pilots fly with a mouse and keyboard in third person view, with a crosshair and lead indicator to help target enemies. Players can win a match by bombing out the enemy base, shooting down all enemy aircraft, or destroying all of the AI ground targets. Flight models are simplified and an instructor is present, meaning all planes of the same class (bomber, fighter, etc) perform relatively similarly and the computer will help you fly, eg, controlling the rudder in turns. Matches are typically ~10 minutes. Realistic battles have the same objectives, but the maps are much larger, flight models are not simplified (though an instructor is still present), and players must take off at the beginning of each match rather than spawning in the air. No lead indicator is present, and less HUD elements are present as well. A more comprehensive spotting system is included. Matches are typically 30-40 minutes long. In Simulator battles, players are locked to a first person cockpit view. A joystick is heavily reccomended, but not required (players can use a "virtual" joystick with their mouse).


Tank battles follow a similar logic, with less HUD elements present as the difficulty increases. Aircraft play a minor role in tank Arcade Battles. In Realistic and Simulator battles, aircraft play a larger role.


There are five nations available: The United States, Germany, Soviet Russia, The United Kingdom, and Imperial Japan. Each country has ground forces and air forces available. Each country has a tech tree, divided into five tiers. Players earn Research Points in battles to unlock new vehicles and modifications for their vehicles. Five vehicles must be unlocked in a tier to progress to the next tier. Players also earn a currency, Silver Lions, that is used to purchase these vehicles. Each tree has several lines, such as Fighters and Bombers or Light Tanks and Self-Propelled Anti-Aircraft Guns. Each vehicle has a Battle Rating to determine what other vehicles it fights.


A premium currency, Golden Eagles, is available to purchase with real world money. They can be used to purchase a premium account (earning more Research Points per battle) or Premium Vehicles. As far as the issue of 'Pay To Win' goes, War Thunder is fairly well balanced. Premium vehicles do not have any inherent advantages. Premium vehicles are usually a certain pilot's aircraft, such as Alexander Pokryshkin's P-39, a lend-lease or captured vehicle, like a British F6F Hellcat or German P-47D Thunderbolt, or prototypes, like the Ki-87. Premium tanks are similar. They have higher currency and research rewards or offer a unique playstyle not available elsewhere in that respective nation's tech tree.

The game tries, and succeeds in most cases, to be historically accurate. Some late war prototypes like the Maus tank or Kikka jet fighter are present, but most vehicles fought in a war of some kind.

Visually, War Thunder is a beautiful game. Almost every moment is worthy of a screenshot. For lower end machines, the graphics can be lowered a decent amount.


The main issue with the game is the grind. While there is no hard pay-to-progress paywall, around the fourth tier of a tech tree the grind becomes sufficient to cause many players to lose interest. Again, it is possible to reach the top tier of vehicles for free. But without a premium account or any premium vehicles, it can take multiple months to research a single vehicle. At lower tiers, progress is fine. But for jet-powered aircraft or ATGM-equipped tanks, one has to be an extremely dedicated player or purchase a premium vehicle or account to have any semblance of progress.





War Thunder is well worth your time. For a Free to Play game it is visually stunning, and it's easy to have fun whether you're storming a factory in Stalingrad in your T-34, part of a bomber formation in your B-29 superfortress, enduring artillery and cannon fire in a Leopard I, or dogfighting over MiG alley in an F-86 Sabre. And with naval forces on the horizon and the release of update 1.65 adding numerous much awaited features like bomber cockpits and Japanese ground forces, there's never been a better time to jump in.

Depth is, simply put, a fantastic game. It's an asymmetrical multiplayer game pitting divers against sharks, but an offline play mode versus bots is also available. There are two game modes, Blood and Gold and Megalodon Hunt. Blood and Gold is arguably the main game mode, and at the time of writing it offers six playable shark types: Great White, Mako, Tiger, Hammerhead, Thresher, and Bull. Each has differing stats and a unique ability, leading to a completely different playstyle for each shark. From the tanky Great White, to the nimble Mako, each shark has a place. Divers can purchase a variety of weapons, but more on that later.

In Blood and Gold, four Divers escort a submersible robot known as S.T.E.V.E. to various safes throughout the level. At each safe, S.T.E.V.E. takes some time to unlock it and you have to cover him while fending off two sharks. After all safes have been cracked, the divers must escort S.T.E.V.E. back to the ship. Divers can swim around the area to pick up gold while S.T.E.V.E. works, and though doing so exposes them to sharks, it is necessary to do so to buy better weapons. Starting out with a pistol, the divers will get better weapons as the match continues, including spear guns, sentry guns, and naval mines. Each weapon has a variety of upgrades, from explosive ammunition to night vision scopes. Sharks get points as the match progresses to pick and upgrade a variety of skills. Each side also has a set number of respawn tickets. The divers win once they have made the sharks lose all of their tickets or escorted S.T.E.V.E. back to the ship. The sharks win upon making the divers lose all of their tickets.

Depth does something many other asymmetrical games fail to do: the humans are fun to play. Before each game, players can choose to queue as sharks or divers, and this cannot be changed in-match. Playing as a diver is an extremely intense experience, desperately shining your flashlight around and firing wildly into the darkness as your teammates are picked off one by one and your heart is thudding in your ears. All of the weapons are extremely satisfying to use and each has a unique identity. They all have clear pros and cons, and it's never an easy choice what to buy. Depth also does something else other games fail at: the support items are fun to use. A small hand-held vehicle to move around the water allows easier collection of gold. A portable radar spots sharks and treasure for your team. Deployable medkits and supply packs increase your chances of survival. Choosing to support your team is its own rewarding experience.

Playing as a shark is a fantastic, unique experience as well, and when you lunge and grab a diver in your jaws you have to shake your mouse wildly to finish them off. You feel powerful swimming around the darkness, and you can't help but smile when you spot a lone diver off collecting treasure.

Depth is WELL worth the price of admission, and with free updates adding new content, it's never too late to jump into the fun.

Now that the Hotline Miami DLC has been out a few days I decided I share what I thought of it. First up, the guns.

Guns

Cobra: Underwhelming. IRL the Skorpion is a pretty cool gun, so it's a shame to see it's not very good in-game. It looks nice though, and with a suppressor it can become a decent stealth weapon, having 30 detection without ANY points in the Ghost tree (not even ECMs).

9mm Blaster: Mediocre. It's not bad but it certainly isn't good either. Just me nitpicking here, but it has a really weak firing sound that makes the gun seem way weaker than it is. This thing lives up to it's name though, and spews out lead at a pretty decent rate.

Uzi: This is where it's at. Compared to a fully-modded Para SMG, the Uzi has a higher rate of fire, higher concealment, and does more damage, all while having the same accuracy and stability. A very very good gun, my new favorite secondary for now.

Masks

Neat looking. I like Aubrey (pig) a lot, but Grahm (bunny), Dennis (wolf), and Rasmus (owl) are cool too. The masks you get for owning Hotline Miami itself (not the Hotline Miami DLC) look way cooler in my opinion. Richard (chicken) is a must, and Brandon (leopard ) and Tony (tiger) look cool too. Don Juan (horse) is alright.
Materials and Patterns
The DLC patterns are not very exciting, but the DLC material ERROR is awesome. Materials look alright, but again I think the materials you get for owning Hotline Miami itself look better.

The Heist

Initially I didn't like Day 1. But after replaying it and playing on higher difficulties it's grown on me. You have to kill all the Russian mobsters (wearing white and cyan like in Hotline Miami), set fire to the cars (which can have cash in the trunk), blow up the gas station with C4, then pry open a metal door to an underground basement using a car. There is also a meth lab in the motel for cooking and getting some extra cash. In the basement Bain tells you the town the Commisar is in and you match it to an item, get a crowbar from an area that needs to be drilled (or c4'd) into, then use it to open crates and look for the right one. Once you've found it, put the bar code into a computer and defend the area while it checks it. Cops will place C4 on manholes above and rappel down into the basement. Oh, and did I mention that the escape car is a Delorean?

Day 2 begins by putting on your masks in a box then busting out and killing mobsters that were opening them, Trojan Horse style. You find some C4 in a courtyard and blast down a door, then run through a long twisting maze up and up through the apartments. You might find someone with a sack over their head wearing a bomb vest. You can defuse the vest and pick up some bags of cash lying next to them. Once you finally get to the Penthouse level you discover that the Commisar locked himself in his own vault. Bile drops off a thermal drill that you use to crack it open. You spend most of the heist defending the area from police while waiting for the drill to finish. The Commisar has a gunship that he will use to fire rockets into the building and set it on fire, in which case you have to go find the sprinkler system and use it to extinguish the fires. Once it finally finishes you kill the Commisar, who has a ton of health (around Death Wish Skulldozer level) and a KSP LMG. The Commisar has some great and humorous lines, so whoever voiced him did a wonderful job.


tl;dr Two mediocre guns, one great gun, awesome two-day heist, awesome masks, okay patterns and materials.