Matoking 最近的评测

Probably the best one out of the three recent single player retro shooters (AMID EVIL and DUSK).

The single player campaign is easily the longest out of all three (12 hours played so far, probably going to be 16 hours long in total), and the level design is packed with the most detail, with plenty of nice details and interactive elements sprinkled throughout the levels.

AMID EVIL and DUSK focused more on surrealistic and original levels, especially as the games went on. Ion Fury on the other hand focuses on more realistic architecture, featuring city blocks, skyscrapers and malls: the usual shooter cliches you've seen before. The levels feature a lot of alternative paths and turns, plenty of secrets (both big and small) and plenty of varied open areas for gunfights, so it all works in the game's favor despite being less inspired at first glance.

Gunplay feels solid, with all weapons remaining useful throughout the game (I still use the starting revolver the most). New elements like headshots are solid additions and feel like an integral part of the game without betraying its run n' gun roots.

The game could use some more enemy variety and some of the secrets involve way too much trial-and-error to find that you'll never find them all without consulting a guide or mashing the use key at every prop in sight. Those didn't hamper my enjoyment all that much, so I can easily recommend if you've either played AMID EVIL or DUSK, or want to find out if retro-inspired shooters are your cup of tea.

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Also, to address the elephant in the room: the game has been under a lot of controversy due to a thread someone posted on ResetERA, featuring short snippets of text from the developer's Discord chat room. The end result is that 3D Realms will be patching the game to replace a small soap bottle with the word "OGAY" (which is a play on Olay) in it and making a donation to a charity.

I normally wouldn't have made this review in the first place, but considering the amount of irrelevant negative reviews (the most helpful review at the moment is from a "player" who has a total playtime of 0.1 hours), I felt like I should put in my two cents. The individual comments that started the controversy and the publisher response have been blown way out of proportion, and the game's developers don't deserve getting dragged through the mud considering the amount of effort that has gone into the game.

Impressively lengthy and detailed walking simulator/environmental puzzle adventure game, INFRA builds on the Source engine used in Half-Life series and other Valve titles and delivers a set of levels taking you all the way from derelict dams to maintenance tunnels and urban areas. The game took me around 25 hours to beat, which is pretty impressive considering most games in the genre clock in at well under 10 hours.

Instead of a crowbar, you're equipped with a camera and a flashlight, tasked with photographing structural damage around Stalburg, the game's setting based on Nordic countries and especially Finland, if the appearance of saunas, the odd Finnish name or two, and evidence of widespread workplace alcoholism is anything to go by. And just as with the Half-Life games, INFRA rarely breaks the flow of gameplay with cutscenes or abrupt time skips, with the entire game taking place during a single prolonged work day. On top of ordinary hand-written notes and audio logs that are scattered around the world, there are also plenty of secrets that range from off-beat (hidden moonshiner camps and complex coffee machines) to just straight horror (here's a tip: don't enter the B2 door), the latter of which seems to be a strange reward for thorough exploration in a game where the atmosphere may often be desolate and dim, but not frightening. Regardless, the little details add a lot of flavor to the game's world and help give it an unique tone.

I didn't find the game's overarching story or characters all that gripping. Instead, the game's strength lies in the areas the player has to navigate through and the mundane and not-so-mundane details that cast a spotlight on the city and its past and current inhabitants. The few times when other human characters make an appearance, they're poorly animated and coupled with average voice acting.

The game's environments are without a doubt the game's highlight, varying from outdoor areas to vast underground tunnels and urban areas in the later parts of the game. These levels are tied together with environmental puzzles, which I felt started growing a bit repetitive by the game's second of three acts; a lot of them involve turning valves, finding keys and scouring the environment for tools such as bolt cutters or electric fuses lying out of the view. The longest and most frustrating puzzles involve running around a large facility trying to get all the valves, pipes and switches into a correct configuration, error and trial gameplay combined with having to navigate long stretches of hallways. The third act fortunately improves them by improving their pacing and variety, and cutting down on the longer puzzles. Some of the long puzzles in the first two acts are also optional, but that might not be apparent when solving them for the first time.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by both the game’s length and level of detail (a Steam guide suggests that there’s even an ARG hidden within the game). Although the game has a few rough edges and some of the puzzles bring the game’s pacing to a temporary halt, the game was engrossing all the way until the end and in my opinion deserves way more attention than it has received.

EDIT (July 17th, 2018):
I've had a chance to play the patched version for about 9 hours, and I can confirm that the game has been greatly improved since the disastrous first launch. The UI has been reworked and is now a pleasure to play with a gamepad, the (original) graphics no longer appear smudged and covered in vaseline, and the port as a whole is more refined.

There are still some lingering issues.
* The game now supports widescreen (16:9) ratio, which comes with the occasional graphical glitches, such as cutscenes where NPCs disappear near the edges of the screen, and some areas where the boundaries of the map are a bit glitched, since you wouldn't see them when playing the original 4:3 version.
* The shop UI in the game is glitched for some reason: my gold amount always shows up as 0 G and some items are missing their prices, but I can still buy and sell them as normal.
* The anime cutscenes from the PSX/DS version are here, but the first cutscene is missing for some reason.
* A few times a character animation continued looping instead of playing only once.

However, when it comes to it, my impression of this port is now more positive than negative, and I have a good feeling the remaining issues will be fixed soon enough: the DS version is still superior, but not for too long if the current updates are anything to go by.

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THE ORIGINAL REVIEW IS BELOW:

A lousy port of an iconic JRPG.

Instead of crisp pixels, the sprites have been resized with a filter that makes the sprites blurry and some of the background tiles so inconsistent they don't even line up. Add other oddities, such as large UI elements from the port's original mobile platform and a vector font that doesn't match with the (blurry) pixel art, and the game ends up resembling a fan-made Flash game rather than an official release. Playing the game using a gamepad is also awkward due to the aforementioned mobile UI.

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You're better off acquiring a copy of the SNES or DS version and playing it on a console or an emulator; the experience will be better either way. But if you're willing to look past all the flaws that were introduced in this port, the underlying game is still as timeless as ever: a captivating story that keeps the player engaged without overstaying its welcome, with enemy encounters that are not random, require no grinding and utilize the environment in some neat ways. The protagonists are likeable and have side quests that introduce further depth into the characters, not to mention the music which continues to be performed and rearranged to this day.

This version of the game, as well as some of the previous re-releases comes with two extra dungeons: Lost Sanctum and Dimensional Vortex. They lack the same amount of detail the base game has, and while Dimensional Vortex adds a few story bits that tie into the sequel, Lost Sanctum is nothing more but repetitive fetch quests, meaning you can safely skip it.

Probably the best Metroid game to come out in years.

Unlike most of Metroidvania games, Axiom Verge is most clearly influenced by Super Metroid: there is no RPG inspired system of progression where you grow stronger by continuously killing monsters and watching your numbers slowly increase. Instead, your character grows stronger and more versatile by finding tools, weapons and health upgrades scattered around the world, both in plain sight and hidden in the levels. The game is similar to Super Metroid in length, with Axiom Verge taking around 12 hours to beat on my first playthrough.

The game does a good job introducing a number of new weapons and tools that only make it more efficient to kill your enemies, but also make it faster to travel around the world. Some of these are inspired by Metroid (a small drone you can remote control) while others are a bit more interesting (a gun that can "glitch" enemies, causing their graphics to go nuts, become vulnerable or start destroying their surroundings, among other effects). There is a nice line of progression to these powerups, giving them more uses as you progress through the game, allowing you to backtrack and find more secrets. There are a few bosses, ranging from smaller ones to ones that fill out the entire screen, giving them nice variety while giving a nice break from the constant exploration every now and then.

The game has a story, told with the few cutscenes in the game and log entries you can find scattered in the world. While the story isn't all that groundbreaking, it complements the game's atmosphere without being too overbearing; the game rarely stops your progress with a cutscene and never forces you to go through a certain path or arbitrarily locks places in the game due to not having gotten far enough in the story; the meat of the game is gameplay, and the narrative is really a secondary element rather than the main course.

If there is something to criticize here, it's that the regions in the game aren't as memorable as in other similar games, even if the H.R. Giger inspired graphics aren't bad at all.

If you've had an itch for a Metroid game, pick this game up. And while you're at it, try out AM2R too.

A good sequel to the first Hotline Miami game, although I find it hard to call it a better game than the first one. The core gameplay has been kept mostly the same, with the player taking down floors filled enemies in a top-down view, with both you and your enemies able to take a hit or two before going down. The soundtrack is once again excellent and fits the game's presentation perfectly. The game is also noticeably longer without overstaying its welcome (at least in my opinion). It is also a lot harder, although not always in a good way.

However, there are some notable differences to the first game, which might disappoint those who enjoyed the first game.
- There is a lot less room for different play styles, especially during the latter half of the game. While in the first game you could play each level differently, be it strictly gun or melee oriented or something in between, you could finish the level any way you wanted. Not so in Hotline Miami 2. As the game goes on, most of the levels get larger, more open and filled with more enemies, most equipped with guns. Trying to go melee only in these levels will only get you showered in bullets from multiple cardinal directions, reducing you to a bloody pulp before you are even able to kill more than one mobster. This is made worse by the later levels having more windows than walls and some enemies staying off-screen even when you are looking farther using Shift, making it difficult to survive certain situations except by blindly firing bullets across hallways and open areas, hoping you'll kill whoever is on the other side before they are able to kill you. Not all levels are like this and only a few are truly frustrating in terms of level design, but if you enjoyed the first Hotline Miami because of the ability to mow down entire floors with only your fists or a beer bottle, you might be sorely disappointed.

- The narrative and gameplay focuses on multiple characters. While in the first game you could choose a different mask for each level, in this game you are sometimes limited to a choice between three or four different masks, your starting weapon or in some levels, you don't get to choose at all. Personally I liked the different characters as well as the non-linear storyline which hops between different timelines and protagonists, although I felt the Pig Butcher's storyline remained wholly undeveloped and some others felt underexploited due to the large cast of different player characters. Again, your mileage may vary.

Hotline Miami 2 is a bold sequel both in terms of scope and execution, which may surprise people who expected just more Hotline Miami. If the differences in level design and gameplay don't bother you too much, go for it.

A great FPS game. Although the game doesn't have a multiplayer mode, the single-player campaign is fairly long in terms of FPS games (about 11 hours long). The single-player campaign has a good plot although the game itself is over-the-top at times.

Although most of the recent shooter games I've played allow you to regenerate your health fully by hiding behind cover, in Wolfenstein you have to rely on finding medkits and armor to keep yourself alive. This fact alone makes the shooting sections far more frantic and fun than using stealth, which is also an option in the game, although not something you have to use. Other old-school shooter influences include the vast levels which help break up the otherwise linear campaign by giving you a lot of options on approaching enemies, as well as secrets which can be found by exploring your surroundings.

The only gripe I have with the game has to do with the graphics. The game runs on idTech 5 and uses the megatexture technique first used in Rage. What this means is that nearly all environment textures are unique with no noticeable tiling, although this results in a far higher filesize (the game is a 44 GB download) and worse looking environmental textures, in terms of resolution and image quality.