STRIDER™ / ストライダー飛竜®
Strider stands as a reboot to an old Arcade series by the same name. The game stars Hiryu, the last remaining Strider to be sent on a suicide mission that involves taking down Grandmaster Meio, the iron fisted ruler of Kazakh City and the Earth and avenging the fallen Striders.
The game’s mechanics are pretty simple, like an old school title should. It’s structured very similarly to some older games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Super Metroid and the such as it has a lot of backtracking as well as you gain new powers to unlock new doors and the such - which may lead to new powers, health upgrades, energy upgrades, kunai upgrades, etc. There’s lots to find in the game.
– Real player with 18.3 hrs in game
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As a Strider fan, this game was a disappointment.
Compared to other “metroidvania” games, this game is a disappointment.
New and improved review with impressions I wrote up when asked for specifics about why I disliked the game so much.
For the record, I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 9-10 hours with Strider. It was just enough to get 100% and then delete it from my hard drive immediately.
I can honestly say I will NEVER play that game again. EVER. And here’s a list of reasons why:
(1) There is no variety, in anything. There’s two main types of levels – futuristic cityscape and sewer. Maybe you could count the temple area… maybe… but it reminds me a lot of a blend between the sewer and the city. This makes it feel like you’re never going anywhere.
– Real player with 15.3 hrs in game
DmC: Devil May Cry
DmC had a lot of unwarranted hate poised against it before it even before release. ‘Fans’ decried the new design, while thrashing the developers for describing the old look in blunt but apt ways. The verdict was in before anyone could get their hands on it, and even when people did, they would only look to reinforce their own idea of what the game is. Scenes meant to be tongue-in-cheek throwbacks and foreshadowing were perceived as slights against the vocal few, while actual flaws went overlooked.
– Real player with 45.4 hrs in game
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I’ve been stuck in the bloody palace for 6 days now, i’m addicted. (help)
– Real player with 24.3 hrs in game
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Ultimate Edition
First off, I’m a huge fan of the Castlevania series. So that foundation may color my opinion of this game and it’s ensuing interquel and sequel (which I’m currently in the midst of). Something about medieval through Enlightment era Europe with a heavy gothic/baroque aesthetic, corrupted through dark forces that threaten the world? Awesome. Tons of monsters pulling on a multitude of inspiration from the myth cycles of antiquity through the modern Universal monsters? Yes, please.
Konami struck gold initially by creating these dark adventures that took a quite serious tone for the early Nintendo systems, offering a beefy challenge of vintage Nintendo difficulty through several increasingly impressive platformer games. They then evolved into the famed Metroidvanias with the release of Symphony of the Night on the Playstation - trading a bit of the reflex-intensive difficulty for massive sprawling environments that took forever to explore and fully unlock - and followed this formula with several excellent installments on Nintendo’s handhelds where they found their most sustainable home and success through the late 2000’s. Then Konami, sensing the increasingly stagnant nature of the series as it became mired in repeated iterations of SotN’s sprawling platformer/RPG hybrid, started searching for a way to revitalize the series again, just as SotN ignited a sort of Golden Age for the series.
– Real player with 98.7 hrs in game
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(Important note: This game, for whatever reason, doesn’t like being set to fullscreen + max res on a display other than that which Windows / your video card identifies as Display 1, regardless if it’s your primary display or not. Weird bug but easy to fix.)
Lords of Shadow is a flawed but polished masterpiece and a triumph of artistic direction. It’s shortcomings are forgivable. That said, since you can expect to sink upwards of 40hrs into this, I’ll go into some more detail.
Presentation wise, this game is stunning. Masterful visuals paired with smooth and optimized 4K performance make for an eye-popping experience. The art team went all out on this and it shows. I’ve never taken so many screenshots of a game before. Two major detractors though: 1. Some of the cutscenes were pre-rendered for console are unimproved by modern hardware (they still look passable but they’re jaggy af); 2. Godrays are a weak point. The score is powerful but not iconic; you’ll love it in the moment but try to recall the music later and you’ll likely struggle, for the most part. This isn’t objectively a bad thing, as it simply means it’s enhancing the experience without overpowering it but I was disappointed by the lack of iconic singles and the abscence of a Bloody Tears revamp.
– Real player with 47.4 hrs in game
Shadow Warrior
Story of a demonic incestuous affair that is uncovered by her older brothers and you can kinda guess the rest.
🔸Shadow Warrior’s story is well-written for a AA game. You are in control of Lo Wang, an assassin who is hired by a powerful Japanese magnate to buy an ancient katana -Nobitsura Kage- from a collector for 2 million dollars. However as you may expect, things don’t go as planned and Wang tries to take the katana by force, then he finds out Mr. Mizayaki -The collector- is in contact with a demon named Hoji.
– Real player with 50.2 hrs in game
For some reason I decided to go for all achievements in this game, so I had to complete it both on insane and heroic difficulties. Was it worth it? No. Was it fun? No. Was it entertaining? Sort of. But let’s take one thing at a time.
Shadow Warrior 2013 is a remake of a semi-popular old school shooter of the same title. Though I cannot really call this game a remake, because remake usually means a piece that is largely refined to fit modern standards and audience but keeps its original nature. I cannot say that this game doesn’t have anything in common with the original but it also stepped quite far from it. First things first, the gameplay was changed to fit modern shooter standards: most of creative things like using enemy’s head as a major weapon, nuclear rockets, demon heart that creates a copy of you, etc were discarded. They were changed with mainstream pistol, uzi, shotgun, crossbow, and demon heart now just acts as instant-kill bomb, enemy head became an optional thing, which is mostly useless. The shooting itself is very odd: you do not really feel any impact, there is a regular lack of ammo and some weapons are too OP over the others. However, the developers tried to expand the gameplay by adding magic and sword fights. I cannot say that these are bad but they are also far from perfect. Sword acts more like a bat that you have to punch enemies with rather than a blade that slices through them, on earlier levels you tend to run out of ammo and have to poke foes for ages with it, sword techniques are interesting but there is too few of them for the whole game. As for the magic spells, it adds some variety to the gameplay but, just like with sword skills, there are too few of them. Only 2 combat spells, which basically do the same thing – stun enemies – healing, and protection, which you will unlikely use at all if you play casually. The game is also very overloaded with upgrades. Instead of a tree or gradually opening skills you are instantly given 9 different progression screens for the character + 1 for each acquired weapon. Should I say that nobody’s gonna spend 20 min of just reading each and every description? Because of this, I personally missed a useful skill of resurrection just because I skipped reading another bunch of text. If those screens were introduced in the first 3-4 levels instead of the very first one it wouldn’t hurt the gameplay at all but made the introduction to the upgrades much smoother.
– Real player with 44.4 hrs in game