DrunkenEngineer 最近的评测

This is a deeply nostalgic game for me, being a 90s kid and growing up playing mostly shooters on the family PC. DOOM, Dark Forces, and Half-Life were in regular rotation, and Half-Life 2 and episodes hit right at the tail end of university and just starting out in the working world. In fact The Orange Box (HL2, Episodes 1 & 2, Portal, and TF2) was probably my first ever double dip; bought first on Steam and then on X360.

Recognizing my nostalgic blinders, I still think these titles absolutely hold up in present day. The art direction is incredibly strong which has allowed them to age gracefully, and the amount of gameplay advancements with single player story telling, physics, and world building was, and still is, ground breaking. It still saddens me that the games are probably most (in)famous for the cruel cliffhanger at the end of Episode 2, but I'm still holding some hope that we will get a Half-Life 3, someday.

This is absolutely phenomenal. The 20th anniversary update brought some nice QoL improvements for the Steam Deck, reincorporating all the episodes in to one app, and even more developer commentaries. Play this now.

I enjoy how the nuDOOMs all keep the core gameplay loop but iterate slightly on a different offensive theme. Eternal started as a blend of character action games with an emphasis on quick-switching weapons, and The Dark Ages slows the gamespeed down and focuses on shield and melee combos. I played roughly 75% of this on a controller, on Nightmare difficulty and still felt really competent, though I obviously had an easier time when I sprinkled in KBM play.

The game is gorgeous, the soundtrack slaps, and the gameplay is exciting as heck. My moderate complaint is that my in-mission collectible tracker often bugged out and had me dipping out to a collectible guide which really wasn't necessary outside of the bugged maps. And multiplayer is completely absent, which if that meant extra polish went to the campaign I'm all for it!

The production is insanely top notch, the acting is superb, and world building is incredible. The mo-cap and cutscenes are such high quality that if you strung them together and released them as a movie, it would be better than the recent films. The big bad was the perfect blend of menace and camp.

The game itself is relatively shallow, and doesn't really do anything particularly well besides making you feel like Indy. More a first person puzzle game with some metroidvania elements (two upgrades that are story gated). The combat isn't really good, the AI is pretty dumb. But overall it was really fun. The Sukhothai boat stuff was pretty bad and the DLC itself was largely forgettable besides the cool set pieces.

I sound lukewarm on the game but I really had a blast. It just being first person and from MachineGames would think it would be a bit more bombastic. The only real trophy crimes here is a metric ton of collectibles, but in game maps make them relatively easy to collect but it’s still a small grind. Nothing is technically missable, though I read complaints about the “Archivist” achievement/trophy bugging for lots of folks, but it’s seems to be patched. It might be with the release of the DLC that many journal notes count towards the bugged ones, but without a trophy tracker I never noticed anything. Everything incremented as expected in my journal.

Speaking of the DLC, it’s fully intended to be done post-game but I did it when it popped up in Rome, without some of the story-gated abilities required to get all the collectibles. I didn’t know this though until I cleaned up everything before hitting the final story beats. It would be interesting to have played it after post-game as it was released. All in all, this was a great game but really it’s only for 1980’s Indiana Jones fans looking for that recreated in video game form.

It's still Oblivion, wonderful jank and all. I had a fantastic time visiting nostalgia and I think you will, too.

South of Midnight is a wonderful, heartwarming romp through the AA Bayou. This is a very narrative heavy game with uninspired, but polished, combat and exploration. It has a quirky stop-motion animation style where animations in cutscenes are often rendered at 15 FPS and it works for me, but maybe not for you. In the land of 200+ hour epic open world RPGs it's very refreshing to have a linear, "short" (12-20 hour) tight experience that doesn't overstay it's welcome and is completely elevated by it's Southern Folk soundtrack.

This game, bluntly put, is pure spectacle. One is either going to really, really jive with this, or bounce off it. I don't think there is going to be much in between. I luckily, was the former. I'm not even much of a 40K nerd, I know very little about the background, the lore, et al. But the aesthetic is extremely my jam. I've completed the predecessor and really enjoyed how much it was the "anti-Gears of War" at the time. A 3rd person shooter/brawler with no cover mechanics! Yes, please! And then the series went completely quiet, and I little did I know that typically 40K games stink and Space Marine was one of the 5 good games in that license.

Until now. Space Marine 2 has released and it's fantastic. The campaign just kind of exists, but just like the previous game, the meat is really in the multiplayer modes. We have a simplistic PvP bereft of (much) microtransactions with a straight forward progression cycle and then the deceptively deep PvE Operations mode. In the latter we have a 6 classes representing unique playstyles, from a protypical Heavy to a jump-pack abusing, Thunderhammer smashing Assault (my favorite) to a sneaky Sniper. These Operations take place at the same time as the Campaign. Fair warning - this stuff is a bit of a grind. At the time of this review there are only 67 maps available, with 45 difficulty levels to scale through. It's not a whole lot of map variety but the AI director is superb and does a great job of mixing up each run.

Regarding achievements, this is a pretty easy journey. Nothing is missable, but there is an aspect of grind whether you take one of two approaches. "Still a True Son of the Emperor" requires accumulating 41 thousand kills across all game modes. This will come naturally if one maxes out all the PvE classes, but the list only requires one to be ran to completion. Or, you can do what others have, which is pick a nice spot in the campaign and grind, grind, grind those kills.

I can't write this without mentioning the mildly disappointing technical performance of the game. It's very CPU-bound and my 5 year old i9-9900K absolutely struggled here. I upgraded which drastically improved performance. So just a little fair warning here, a multi-core processor older than 4 years is going to be a bottleneck.

This is an enthusiastic recommend!

Bigger and bolder, but necessarily better, Blasphemous 2 iterates on the gameplay that made the first title such a sleeper hit. There are now three weapons to vary your play style, a more robust upgrade system, and finally no more spike pits! On the downside, the Saturday Morning Cartoon animated cutscenes are a significant backwards step from the pixel art of the first, and the overall creepy alt-Catholic Spanish vibes have been tone downed somewhat, probably for the sake of accessibility. However, this is a definite recommend for fans of the first game.

The Good

• Strong sense of place in Hong Kong
  
• Open world that is respectful of the player's time
  
• Wei Shen's karaoke is a thing of beauty

The Bad

• Camera is annoyingly unresponsive, especially during chases

A nicely curtailed, perfectly balanced open world game. Sleeping Dogs takes the very best of Grand Theft Auto, Ubisoft Collect-a-thons, and I'd guess Yakuza (having only read about them) and distills it all down into a streamlined representation of the genre. I really, really enjoyed my time with this game. Wei Shen is a compelling character, the storyline is a hard boiled undercover cop story, replete with story beats you can see a mile coming, but performed so well I didn't care. The emphasis on melee combat is the crowning jewel on what otherwise looks like a fairly superficial game at first glance.

I could have done without the "dates", the one-shot instances of Wei hooking up with various women he meets along the way. It was a funny red herring when I noticed several big name actors in the opening credits, specifically Emma Stone, and assumed they'd have a prominent role in the story. When Wei meets Amanda, a blonde American tourist, it was obvious she was voiced by Emma Stone and I rolled my eyes, thinking here would be our lame romantic interest that drives our hero. Nope. One interaction and she was outta here!

I did find the whole split XP system fatiguing, and spent the extra effort to swap out my outfits that provided Triad Bonus (for main missions) or Cop Bonus (everything else) just to reduce the likelihood I would need to replay missions to hit the achievement requirements. It turned out not to be necessary. The stat awards would a little irritating as well, but it did give me somethin to pay attention to while puttering around the open world grabbing the collectibles. A word of warning: make sure to complete jobs that show up in the phone often. I didn't realize that Tran's jobs were not infinite, nor required for 100%, so I had like 20 of them to crank through post-game.

DLCs were fun, especially the first Nightmare in North Point. I suspect it was part of the zombie media craze going around in the early 2010s; gave me strong Undead Nightmare vibes from Red Dead Redemption. The second DLC Year of the Snake was a pretty big disappointment. It was fun seeing Wei adjust back to his life post-game, but the presentation and effort just felt off, like it was completed by a skeleton crew of developers. The voice acting is way underplayed, the objectives are samey, and the big bad's motivation never felt fleshed out. Oh well.

With the news that Square-Enix has sold off their Western IPs I'm hopeful we will get a sequel. This game lives up to every bit of cult status it's built up over the years. A strong recommend.

The Good

• Awesome music
  
• Slick graphics
  
• Fantastic parkour and platforming

The Bad

• Dorky story
  
• Bosses are an exercise in frustrating pattern recognition

This is like playing Hotline Miami, Mirror's Edge, and Cyberpunk 2077 while cracked out on Russian Dubstep. You will die. A lot. Or maybe you don't suck as bad as me, and you won't. But I doubt it. Ghostrunner is a first person parkour cyberpunk platformer that is completely unabashed in flaunting its influences. The story is ham fisted and derivative, and honestly I had a hard time following it just because I was so enamored in the gameplay. The music is intoxicating electronica that really sets the mood. More than once I felt that if a camera were trained on me, the scene would be like one of those hacker montages from classic movies of the 80s & 90s, complete with dilated pupils and quick cuts of keystrokes and mouse wrist flicks as my character leaps from surface to surface, bouncing from kill to kill.

Until I get tagged by a goon and die in one hit. And then I hit a key to immediately restart from a convenient checkpoint. Try again!

The achievements are pretty straightforward, nothing is missable. Several are skill based. The base game has an obnoxious challenge for killing 23 enemies in a row, while the DLC furthers the sadism with a complete no-death level run. But we are talking an hour or two max to get these done, the rest of the difficulty is just clearing the story naturally. For those that have played Titanfall 2, the entire experience was akin to my time trying to clear the "...Becomes the Master" trophy. Often times frustrating, but immensely rewarding.

Square Enix...what did you do? The follow-up to Deus Ex: Human Revolution, DXMD is an immersive sim/stealth action game that was somehow thought to compete with other contemporary heavy hitting AAA gaming franchises, and had a large marketing campaign to match. Who here remembers "Aug Lives Matters", and the furor that caused? Who bought this game thinking it was a first person shooter and was sorely disappointed that you were expected to sneak around, read ebooks and newspapers, and engage in sidequests purely for worldbuilding? Lots of people did, and felt like they were sold a bill of goods. DXMD didn't live up to the publishers sales expectations, and was quietly taken out behind the wood shed and shot. Square Enix tried to present this game as something it most definitely was not, and the results should surprise no one.

I love this game. I really do, and so the treatment it received and the legacy it left behind really bothers me. This series, Dishonored, Half Life 2, are all coming from a shared lineage of strong narrative focused first person action games. And so the fact it was stuffed with MICROTRANSACTIONS, and a live-service game mode, is all the more bewildering.

The Good

• First-person Metal Gear Solid
  
• Prague hits a high bar for hubs in semi-open world games
  
• Lots of player choice to approach obstacles (do I climb that air vent? Cloak past the guards? Or just go loud?)
  
• Michael McCann is back to provide the soundtrack
  
• Cool new augments that you'll probably ignore if you want to be a stealthy sneak thief!
  
• Breach Mode is an interesting concept, and as an excuse for more of the gameplay it's completely fine

The Bad

• Story is very obviously the middle-part of an intended trilogy, so more narrative threads are began rather than concluded
  
• Can be very very short if exploration and side quests are skipped
  
• Microtransactions (thankfully completely tacked on and can be ignored)
  
• Doesn't iterate much from Human Revolution

Warts and all it is a worthy entry to the immersive sim genre, and folks who enjoyed Human Revolution, Prey, Dishonored, et al. should give it a shot.