Contra: Rogue Corps is a game that’s extremely rough around the edges, yet I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think it was exactly what I was looking for. Not so much in terms of the game itself, but more in what the game represents. For me, gaming is about heading into town with £10 and emerging a few hours later with lunch and a game of questionable pedigree. Sometimes this game will be a “hidden gem”, sometimes it’s just mediocre and sometimes it’s actively terrible. Yet this ordeal in and of itself is why I enjoy buying games. I could pirate everything, but there’s no cardio involved nor is there any skin in the game. As a consequence the bargain bin is what holds the most appeal for me, and Contra: Rogue Corps is definitely a bargain bin game these days. Between middling reviews, a piss-poor PC port and modest sales this is a game that’s easy to overlook. Yet in the finest traditions of the bargain bin haul, I actually thought it was fun – even if it was quite janky at points and had some questionable design decisions. If you can endure the occasional bout of frustration, I can safely say that Contra Rogue Corps is one of the better twin-stick shooters for the 8th console generation.

Which is my seamless segue into discussing what Contra: Rogue Corps actually is. First and foremost it’s barely a Contra game in any sense of the word, and most likely wasn’t one until Konami realised they were in trouble if they didn’t staple a brand to this game. Outside of a handful of modest references, there’s really nothing related to Contra here – especially not the gameplay. Contra: Rogue Corps is not a 2D or overhead shooter, but is instead a 3D twin-stick shooter with a few… additions that arguably suit the game but would alienate any actual Contra fans who bought it. For example, I doubt that Contra fans would enjoy the concepts of their weapons overheating after a few seconds of shooting. Nor would they enjoy a quasi-RPG drop system wherein they can equip 4 augmentations to their characters and multiple augmentations to each weapon. So you’ll end up finishing a mission, getting 20 pieces of loot and then checking if any of them offer something good. Most of the time, you just get thrilling bonuses like “-7.4% damage from Enemy Type D” or “+2metre dodge roll” although equipping all this nonsense does eventually make a difference. Then you’ve got the enemy types which get a bit repetitive and gain more health/attack with each tier of missions, of which there are 7. Finally while the game does have a co-op mode, it’s entirely separate from the campaign and will require decently levelled characters to be beatable.

So on the face of it, Contra: Rogue Corps sounds a bit hopeless. It’s not anything like Contra, and the additions sound pretty boring. Why then am I, your humble bargain bin scout, recommending it? Well for the simple reason that if you aren’t hung up about what a Contra game should be, then you will probably be able to have some fun with this one. While the enemies are a bit repetitive, the game loves to throw them at you in hordes which actually results in some pretty frantic and enjoyable gameplay. There are a few missions later on in the game that are basically horde defence missions, and I had a great time playing them because they really encouraged you to learn the game. You had to know what enemies to prioritise, you had to know the enemy patterns and if you did know these things then they were a tight, punishing but fun experience. After having played so many tedious, sluggish and whiny games over the past few years it was nice to have something that was just an honest-to-God arcade experience. It reminded a bit of Mothergunship, in the sense that this was a high-octane game that no one seems to have cared about (sadly). As for the character customisation and stat systems, while the game does a terrible job of explaining how they actually work – these systems do help a bit. There are a lot of different weapons to develop for starters, which helps the variety up. Then by giving better gear on higher levels and for higher mission completion ranks Contra: Rogue Corps does a good job of encouraging you to just keep trying the higher levels and to reward you (somewhat) for going back to earlier levels and crushing them with ease. Of course as the game is admittedly a bit challenging, there’s some risk reward going on here and sometimes the scale tips a bit too much towards risk as you get nothing except weapon XP should you fail a mission.

With that being said, I actually found the game to be finely balanced most of the time. Some other reviews have cried many tears over how hard the freaking is man :'(( but I’m not sure what they were doing. You need to learn the enemy patterns, dodge attacks A LOT and then you should be fine. There are a few really annoying enemy types, like the turrets that lock-on to you and one of the bosses – but most enemies are if anything a bit easy. Plus you don’t need to complete all the levels to progress, so you can leave some for later if you are getting filtered. Generally the game is fun and lets you progress to the disappointing final boss without too much trouble. There are a few things I wanted to mention though, because as mentioned at the start of this review Contra: Rogue Corps is a bargain bin game. Which is to say, that it’s a diamond in the rough at best. So you should be aware that you can’t pause, even when playing in Single Player… for some reason. You should be aware that the graphics aren’t amazing and neither is the soundtrack. You should be aware that while you do get some invincibility frames after getting hit, these won’t save you from any other damage that happens before you hit the ground. There are just a few niggles like this that make the game feel a bit janky. Especially when we consider how many stages just repeat the same bosses (but now as mini-bosses yay) or how often you’ll go from full health to no health on some of the later campaign stages. As I said, it’s finely balanced most of the time but is sometimes a pain in the backside.

At this stage I should probably mention that there is a multiplayer mode, and some people have said it’s fun. You’ll need to faff around with it for all the CHEEVOS as well. Unfortunately for me and by extension you dear reader, I don’t have an Xbox Live Gold subscription so… I can’t tell you what it’s like. I can tell you that Contra: Rogue Corps has plenty of single player content though, including 41 campaign missions and a further 9 missions split between co-op and the HARDCORE mode. So there’s plenty of content for what is a fairly cheap game, just be aware that I would recommend the console version (hence my purchase of it on the Mighty Xbone due to the PC Port being hopeless). One last thing to mention, finding information about this game online is a nightmare so… I hope you speak Spanish, to access the one comprehensive guide that some kind soul has uploaded via Google Sheets.

In conclusion then, Contra: Rogue Corps is barely a Contra game. It’s also an exceedingly rough around the edges game, with poor reviews and a terrible PC port. Yet if you can deal with some weird quirks, it’s actually a pretty fun arcade twin-stick shooter extravaganza and one that I would actually recommend… to the right sort of person. Ask yourself whether you want a fast paced if slightly janky twin-stick shooter, because you are oh-so-tired of lousy modern FPS/Action-Adventure bollocks. If the answer is Yes then go grab the game for cheap. If the answer is No, because you love games like Uncharted 3 and whatever the latest flavour of the month game with crafting in it is, then you’ll probably be repelled by Contra: Rogue Corps. For me, it’s what gaming is all about. For you, it’s either a fun little throwaway purchase or a nightmare.

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Postal 2: Paradise Lost is a DLC I bought by accident, when I wanted to have Steam copies of both Postal 1 and Postal 2. While I wasn’t a huge fan of Postal 2 due to it’s lame combat, weak humour, weird pacing and frequent fannying around in lieu of gameplay, it’s a game that has it’s own surprisingly passionate fanbase. I guess being able to start urinating at any time is a big draw for those who think the game’s childish sense of humour is endearing. Unfortunately the FPS combat that makes up most of the game is pretty lousy, so you really have to gel with the tone to overlook the fact that most gunfights are underwhelming at best. As for why I wanted to re-buy Postal 2, well to be honest it was included with Postal 1 and I’ve heard good things about that one. Which I wanted to own on Steam for the princely sum of $1. Then when I bought this Postal pack from Fanatical, I found out that I had bought Postal 2: Paradise Lost. This meant I was somewhat obligated to give it a fair chance. Which I have done, playing through the whole thing on the normal difficulty over the past two days.

Which leads to the million dollar question, is Postal 2: Paradise Lost better than Postal 2? I would personally say yes, because it’s slightly more amusing and has better boss fights. This means that if I had to recommend one of them, I’d go with Paradise Lost. The problem is that, well, Postal 2 is in the bargain bin for me alongside such fine games as Legendary. So a better question might be, would I recommend Postal 2: Paradise Lost? Well my honest answer would be “No“. Why? Because it’s not a very fun experience and I say this with love for the small developer studio that made it. Yet after having played through it for around 7 hours, I can say that I enjoyed maybe… 2 of them? Postal 2: Paradise Lost has it’s moments but they are unfortunately few and far between. At this point I think it’s prudent to mention the bad, before we get onto the good.

And believe me, as much as I can respect small development studios this game has a lot of dumb decisions. Not even just the dumb writing, which can occasionally be amusing. Admittedly it’s rarely amusing and most of the time is just obstinately stupid and lazy. To give an example, in the first part of the day you go to get some food from an Asian restaurant. Now if you had to write a lazy joke about a Chinese restaurant, what might it be? Be honest. Did you think “haha the food is made from dogs lmao”? Well then you’d be right, and I assume you wouldn’t labour the point with 5 different puns about it being doggone good and then have the restaurant get attacked by dogs and then the dogs kill the restaurant workers and then you have to escape this whacky escapade. There’s a lot of dumb humour like this, and most of the time it just feels overly dragged out. Brevity is the soul of wit, and generally Postal 2: Paradise Lost is witless. Which is a problem for a humour based FPS. Remember Eat Lead: Matt Hazard and how it’s mediocrity was not improved by it’s inability to land jokes? Well Postal 2 was it’s predecessor, in all it’s glory. For me personally, I’d say Postal 2: Paradise Lost manages to be funny around 1% of the time. Considering that the game is throwing out jokes, there are still a few amusing moments. But I’d be lying if I said the game’s wicked sense of humour was a selling point.

Similarly the combat is pretty bad, with enemy AI being so basic that it occasionally wraps around to being challenging again. They will bum rush you en masse, but sometimes they’ll get stuck on terrain or keep respawning or just otherwise cause trouble. To the game’s credit, it is aware of this and explicitly tells you to stand around corners and wait for the enemy to filter in one-by-one towards you. To the game’s discredit, there are some truly weird design choices. For example the zombies have been given a weirdly accurate projectile attack that they just love to spam. While some enemy animals have been given ridiculously large health pools. One last pet peeve is that some enemies get a homing rocket launcher. Which is always utterly tedious to deal with due to their ability to just spam rockets at you from far away with little in the way of repercussions or recourse. At least Postal 2: Paradise Lost has a lot of enemy variety and weapon variety. Yet most combat encounters are rubbish even excluding the weird way that damage scaling has been implemented. You see, some of the dozen different melee weapons are actually pretty good. While guns on the other hand, are often weak and inaccurate with one or two exceptions.

Then you’ve got the general pacing of Postal 2: Paradise Lost, which could be generously described as a mess. At the start of each day, you’re given a list of tasks and the freedom to do them in any order. Yet these tasks almost always boil down to: go to X, grab Y (or pay for Y), CHAOS ENSUES BIG FIGHT PEWPEPEPWPEWPEPWEPEWPEWP until you can escape. There are one or two exceptions, but this is basically how the entire game is structured. You wander around between locations, enter a building, go to the back of the building, something CRAZY happens and then you fight your way back out onto the streets. It’s not the worst way to handle things, but it does extremely repetitive and boring after a while. Especially when the combat isn’t great. The game also has a weird checkpoint system that often overwrites itself between attempts, alongside unskippable cutscenes. If you can get past all of these issues, then I do have some good news. Which is that Postal 2: Paradise Lost does have some good things to say about it.

First and foremost, while the general combat frankly sucks there are some boss fights that are actually enjoyable. They aren’t terribly common, but when they do happen they’re generally and make for a nice change of pace. These bosses have plenty of health and some unique attacks, which makes defeating them a fun challenge that requires a bit of improvisation. Due to these boss fights being some of the highlights of the game, Postal 2: Paradise Lost manages a rare trick. Namely that the tail-end of the game, manages to be a nice culmination of the players skills and lets them try out some of the better guns they’ve accumulated. Too many big budget have final boss fights that are just glorified Quick Time Events, whereas Running with Scissors have managed to implement them correctly. Ultimately I’d much rather have a boss fight than more of the fairly brain dead combat that exists in the rest of the game.

Alongside the boss fights, Postal 2: Paradise Lost tries to keep the pace up with a few dumb, if memorable set-pieces. They’re hit or miss, with sections featuring abrupt platforming challenges and out-running a mining drill being off-set with weaker sections featuring out-running zombies and a mining cart roller-coaster ride. In spite of the hit-or miss nature, these sections are at least proof that the developers were trying. As for the moment-to-moment gameplay, there is a somewhat decent risk/reward mechanic that rears it’s head. For context, you’ll always be short of money in Postal 2: Paradise Lost. Yet if you have enough money through selling cats of all things, then you’re able to complete quests “properly” and avoid combat. For example, instead of stealing a quest item you can pay for it and avoid a combat encounter. This is more useful as the game goes on, because when you fail to pay for quest items, you’ll often antagonise certain groups. Which means that from that point onwards, they’ll be hostile whenever you encounter them in the overworld. As such you often have to consider whether you have enough health and ammo for large fights, or whether it’s worth playing things through in the law-abiding manner. This is one of the game’s most successful unique selling points, even if doing things the legal way is often incredibly boring.

In conclusion Postal 2: Paradise Lost is a game with a few good ideas that are let down by two significant issues. Namely that it’s a humour focused FPS game with poor FPS combat and generally unfunny humour. Fortunately it’s a game that still has some merits, including a good variety of enemies and weapons alongside fun boss fights and a unique quasi-morality system. Yet in spite of the good parts, I feel that the bad outweighs the good with this game. As a consequence I struggle to recommend it to anyone, although I will give the small developer studio credit for making a product that’s better than Postal 2. Especially one that manages to be so madcap and varied, even if I found it to be ultimately as dull as many of the more bland games that have come out.

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Quick Note: My screenshots didn’t save for some reason, but that’s OK because this is a very short review.

Alright so I recently played through the BF3 campaign and found it to be pretty underwhelming and an FPS experience I couldn’t really recommend. As this blog is about me and my one-man-mission to rise up clear my games backlog, I also remembered I had Battlefield 4. So I decided to play through it while my memory of BF3 was still fresh. To my surprise, the Battlefield 4 campaign is actually decently entertaining and while it still can’t really compete with the better Call of Duty campaigns, it’s better than some of them! This might not sound like praise, but considering how much BF3 and especially Battlefield 4 have been trying to emulate the success of those CoD campaigns, it’s nice to see that DICE finally managed to make something that succeeds in this regard.

I’ll try to keep it concise, much like the campaign. Because Battlefield 4 has a grand total of 7 campaign missions – that’s it. In them we play as a silent protagonist muhreen who is fighting to save the world from a coup in China. The levels are fairly linear although you can sometimes find an empty vehicle or turret to use. The enemy variety is minimal, as you only fight enemy soldiers and the occasional enemy vehicle. There are a lot of bombastic quasi-cutscenes where things explode/collapse near/onto our protagonist. As for the gameplay it’s what you’d expect. You can carry two weapons (and two pieces of gear like mines or grenade launchers). Your health regenerates. The enemy is all over your ass 24/7 and there are a handful of opportunities to use vehicles and turrets. You always have a squadmate or squadmates with you, but generally they are absolutely useless unlike in BF3. I’m not sure why your squad is so useless now, but sadly they really are hopeless. It’s no wonder that you get chosen to be the new squad commander/overall badass. The enemy AI isn’t great, although they are freakishly good at using grenades. There are a couple of positive changes that Battlefield 4 has made to the single player formula though. So I’ll give them credit for the following.

First things first, there are now collectibles in each level and they are exceedingly well hidden. Nothing fancy, I think every CoD has done this since the Xbox 360 came out. Yet it’s something “new” that wasn’t in the previous game. More importantly, you now gain score just like in multiplayer for killing various enemies and the multiplayer score-streaks carry over. So multi-kills, headshots, “adrenaline kills” (ones that occur when you are near death) etc now give you bonus points. These points then unlock 3-tiers of medal for each mission. Each medal gains you access to new weapon unlocks, in the myriad gun-cases scattered around every single player level. This is another new idea and one I actually quite liked. Basically the way it works is that you can take any unlocked gun out of these gun cases. This lets you swap your load-out frequently, and lets you experiment with every gun in the game. They also reload your ammo, and as you can’t carry much at a time they are very useful. There are also equipment cases which do the same thing except for your gear. Unfortunately these always have an arbitrary restriction on what gear you can use. You can’t unlock the RPG by being swagtastic on the 3rd mission for example. You can also spot enemies with some cool binoculars, which lets you tell your squad to ENGAGE certain enemies. This is the big new gimmick, as it lets you tell your squad which enemies to focus on. In theory this would be pretty useful. In practice your squad sucks and they will barely even ENGAGE enemies you haven’t told them to. Seriously if I had a single great British pound for every time my squad failed to deal with the one enemy who flanked me – despite that enemy being right in front of them – I’d be able to buy every battlefield game.

Other than these new additions and tweaks, the campaign hasn’t changed too much. Fortunately the Quick-Time-Events are now totally gone (thank God). Plus as mentioned the visuals have been improved at least for the Xbone/PS4/PC versions of the game. The story is a bit weaker almost as if to compensate, with more of a focus on your squad’s characters. By which I mean, the character called Irish. Seriously he could be mistaken for the protagonist if he wasn’t absolutely useless at shooting people. Fortunately I don’t think anyone was too enraptured with the BF3 campaign narrative. Especially as this game basically shares nothing in common with the previous one. Well except for a single returning character who you only see for a total of one mission. In terms of smaller gameplay changes, your character does feel like they have more health so you can actually run-and-gun as the game expects you too, which is a welcome change. As for the soundtrack, it’s still fine if nothing particularly special. That’s about it honestly, as there isn’t much incentive to replay missions. While I could make snide comparisons between the prison level in Battlefield 4 and the gulag level in CoD: Black Ops I won’t bother.

In conclusion then, the Battlefield 4 campaign is better than the BF3 one. It’s nothing amazing, but there are some solid gunfights if you can look past the Michael Bay explosions. The narrative has some weirdly dark moments for a game that generally doesn’t take itself that seriously, but other than that it’s a standard 7th generation console shooter. You run around, you regenerate health, the AI is dumb, your squad is dumb and the action is constant. It’s not a bad experience by any means and the smaller tweaks add up to make a campaign that’s much better than the one in BF3.

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Quick Note: It shouldn’t matter, but I’m reviewing the Xbox One version of this game – just in case it’s AMAZING on PS4 or something.

Oh Jagged Alliance: Rage, the critics and fans of the series have not been kind to you. You were to be a spirited spin-off of a venerable classic PC series, revitalised for a new age and of course a new customer base. Yet it’s hard to find anyone who has anything nice to say about this game. Even I can’t be too nice to a game that has so many issues, that it’s honestly concerning. I try to keep my reviews relatively short, but to describe all of the flaws in Jagged Alliance: Rage would take up basically my normal quota of 5ish paragraphs (plus 5ish lovely pictures). So I’ll just rattle them off in quick succession during this deftly written opener. The game looks mediocre, runs badly, crashes every few hours, has incredibly basic writing and characterisation, wastes a ton of time on inventory management, has limited enemy variety, inconsistent mechanics, a wonky difficulty curve, weird allocation of resources, some baffling design decisions and limited enemy AI. If (and it’s a big if) you can overlook all of that then you’ll find a decent turn based strategy experience. Now I know what you’re thinking “Big Boaby how am I meant to overlook the fact that apparently everything in this game is rubbish?”

Well I’ll tell you! You see, Jagged Alliance: Rage is an incredibly rough game that desperately needed a bit more time in development. I can easily envisage a version of the game that doesn’t run bad, doesn’t crash, has a bit more tweaking with regards to the inventory, item drops and enemy AI and would therefore be pretty solid. Unfortunately in spite of my sagely wisdom, I have to acknowledge the reality which is that this is the game we got, not necessarily the game we wanted. Despite this seemingly rushed (or underfunded?) development, the game still has a solid core where you are juggling stealth and normal combat in each level. Stealth is slightly overpowered, to the point that you’ll want to use it as often as possible as it grants instant killed at no cost. However, stealth also requires you to be out of position and understand the enemy patrol routes, which often requires an odd mix of haste and patience. You need to close the gap, while remaining undetected because sneaking is an alternative form of movement which eats up action points like nobody’s business. Before continuing I should explain that Jagged Alliance: Rage is a turn based game, where you move all of your guys and then the enemy gets to move all of theirs. Each character gets around 12ish action points per turn, with movement, shooting and using items all sharing this action point pool. You’ll therefore only be able to move a maximum of 12 spaces per turn (the map is split into grids of squares) or shoot around 4 times at the absolute maximum (many weapons require 5+ AP per shot). Enemies are relatively blind, but they can react to nearby gunfire, spot bodies and of course radio in your position which triggers an alarm which causes every enemy on the map to bum-rush your last recorded position. Stealth is therefore a great way to get kills without taking damage, but it involves a great deal of risk. Now you might be tempted to skip the stealthy route, but frankly because all of the enemies share vision and some of them are snipers and they all bum-rush you – things generally don’t go well. That’s not to say your necessarily stuffed, as you can make use of sight lines or bait them by having one guy distract them while the rest of your team sneaks around to deal with the enemy commander who summons reinforcements like an absolute jerk. But with that being said, stealth is generally the best option even if the intense gunfights can be quite fun to try and figure out. Yes the odds are against you, but if you can stop the enemy from getting vision (by shooting all the guys near you) then their comrades will keep running towards you like lemmings and you’ll be able to create effective killzones.

At least until you get unlucky with the hit%, or deal with a gun jamming. Which happens all the time to a ridiculous degree. Seriously you’d think that the guns were made out of unrealised aspirations and butter for how often they suddenly melt and fall apart in the middle of combat, to the point that I’d say a gun jams every… 5ish times it’s used if fires in bursts? You barely even have to reload in this game, because when your gun jams (and it will) unjamming it also counts as reloading. Don’t worry though, as your enemies guns will jam too if they live long enough. Then again, worry some more because unjamming a gun takes a lot of AP, which means you can shoot less, which means you’ll probably get shot more. Which is bad. I suppose you can just keep looting new guns and indeed you will throughout most of the game because guns continually get better while the enemies keep getting better armour, but once you’ve got a good gun with some weapon attachments it’s a real pain in the backside. To the game’s credit, Jagged Alliance: Rage has a weirdly comprehensive variety of guns and ammunition. To it’s disservice, you’ll spend way too much time looting every single enemy to see if they have the one ammo type you need because you can’t buy, sell or otherwise trade equipment. The game was smart enough to let you loot everyone remotely once a map has been fully cleared of hostiles, but it still takes a lot of time to optimise everyone’s inventory especially in the late game when you can have 4 mercenaries at a time.

Now you might be thinking something along the lines of “well managing 4 guns doesn’t sound too bad hrurhrdudhdurr” but I’ve got news for you PAL. Because Jagged Alliance: Rage also features a bunch of quasi-survival mechanics, which require items that also take up inventory space. You need to stay hydrated (but not fed), think about bandages to heal the bleeding debuffs, have medkits and revival syringes for when you mess up a combat encounter mid-level, have weapon repair kits and armour repair kits and grenades and antibiotics if you drink the dirty water. Then there’s the fact that I picked Ivan who is cool as a character, but is an alcoholic so I also always had to have beer on hand otherwise he would be bad at shooting people. So there’s a lot of faffing around, as you’ll probably want a gun that’s decent at ranged and a gun that’s OK close up for each character, both of which probably use different ammo types, then some healing supplies and some survival supplies, before we even consider stuff like carrying grenades or whatever. Fortunately Jagged Alliance: Rage is happy to just let you focus on the combat and the inventory stuff, as the plot is very basic and consists of a series of pre-baked levels that you can do at any time – so long you’re on the right Act (of which there are 3). To access these maps the game has an overview map, which you can move across with one space taking one hour. As it takes time, you need to bring water/booze or suffer debuffs from your team being dehydrated or in withdrawal. This brings us to the day night cycle. The way it works is pretty simple, each map can be played during the day or at night. If you play at night, enemies have reduced vision and everyone except for one or two out of the 7 potentially playable characters suffers a debuff to their aiming unless they’ve got night vision goggles equipped. You might therefore be tempted to wait for night to fall upon the map, so you can sneak around better (and have the sheer thrill of shooting out the lights) but good luck. There just isn’t enough non-dirty water in the game to wait for multiple turns. Plus the game sends out patrols from enemy bases that force you into semi-randomly generated battles.

Should you stumble upon one of these patrols, you enter one small map from a pre-baked selection that will feature a bunch of enemies on two sides. You’re able to sneak behind these guys, but generally these maps are fairly easy so I often didn’t really bother and only used stealth to wrap them up. As mentioned, enemies share vision so once most of the enemy squads are dead the few remaining enemies will often have lost sight of your squad. Letting you switch back to stealth for those 1-hit instant stealth melee kills. This happens more often than you’d think, because the AI loves having one or two squad members hang back and sit in overwatch constantly. Overwatch is actually one of very few abilities that the enemy uses, although the squad leaders and commanders have an annoying rally ability which gives everyone standing near them some extra AP. So you’ll quite often have some enemies rush towards you, run out of AP, then a squad leader appears seemingly out of nowhere and lets them all shoot your exposed team member. To compensate, each of your mercenaries get some unique “rage” abilities (hence why it’s Jagged Alliance: Rage) that range from great to OK. Ivan can taunt enemies and gets passive damage resistance, Fidel can suppress enemies in an area, Dr Q has some light healing abilities and can convert rage points into extra AP and so on. To get rage you need to get adrenalin, which comes from dealing and taking damage alongside some other effects (like having the shrapnel or infection debuff or drinking alcohol). Aside from the rage abilities, basically every action is determined by what equipment you have equipped and there aren’t skill trees or anything like that.

In conclusion then, Jagged Alliance: Rage is a game with plenty of issues but a nice balance of risk reward through the effectiveness of stealth, ability of enemies to rack up the damage through large numbers and extra AP abilities and the introduction of rage abilities which require you to take and deal damage or suffer from debuffs. This keeps the game fun and frantic, aside from the admittedly large amount of time you need to spend dealing with the inventory system and survival elements. The enemy variety is fine, but by tying abilities and damage to equipment Jagged Alliance: Rage is able to scale the difficulty with each batch of maps. As for variety and the other elements of the game like the OST, visuals and so on they’re pretty lacking. The music is fine and the maps are generally varied albeit fixed, so replayability isn’t the best. It’s a shame the performance isn’t great and that the characters are so bland, but you can’t have it all. I’d therefore say that Jagged Alliance: Rage is an OK/10 game. TBS fans might have a good time if they are patient, but for genre newcomers I would recommend another game like Wargroove or XCOM: Chimera Squad.

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Quick Note – While this game was initially designed for Android and iOS, it’s only available on PC as of 2018. No console ports were ever released.

Considering the rough-and-tumble reputation that Deus Ex: The Fall received in the brief period of time in which it was relevant, you’d be forgiven for asking why I even bothered paying for it. Of course as my 5 (count em, FIVE) subscribers know I obviously didn’t pay any significant money for the game and it cost me around 150 pennies, but still. I could’ve bought a sausage roll, or a can of Stella Artois or something instead of what is widely considered to be the worst Deus Ex game – much to the relief of Invisible War. As ever my morbid curiosity got the better of me, as I have memories of trying Mass Effect: Infiltrator on my Gen 1 iPad back in the day and I just couldn’t get past the recurring idea that maybe those Android and iOS games from the 7th generation would’ve been fine with a normal control scheme. DE:TF kind of supports my theory, as once you play it on PC (which is now the only option!) it’s not a bad game. In fact if I were the type to dish out scores I’d give it a 6 because I was genuinely disappointed that it abruptly ended after a mere 4 hours of gameplay. Sure 6/10 isn’t a great score, but Deus Ex: The Fall is a valiant attempt at porting a great game to a lousy platform (sorry mobile gamers) and it largely succeeds, with a couple of big fat caveats.

Before diving into the issues though, I think it’s important to consider what’s actually been carried over largely intact. The core gameplay of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided has been ported over, with a decently sized weapon roster, fully functional weapon upgrades, levels that have multiple routes through them, unlockable augmentation upgrades that enable further routes and the lethal/non-lethal split for combat encounters. The game also retains the dialogue system and it’s associated upgrade, alongside e-books, a fully working port of the hacking mini-game and decent stealth gameplay. Of course there are some limitations such as some missing augmentation upgrades, smaller levels, less multi-choice dialogues and the like but the core systems are largely here and immediately identifiable. So if the core systems are fine, what’s wrong with DE:TF? Surely we should all be DTF (Down To Forgive) an ambitious and affordable game that successfully carries across most of the gameplay systems to a weaker platform of systems.

Well the first and most forgivable of the game’s issues would be the graphical limitations that come from it being designed first and foremost for mobile platforms over a condensed development cycle of only a year. While the game generally looks fine, it’s pared back significantly from it’s bigger brethren and the most noticeable cut back has been to the facial animations, with hair and eyes looking particularly janky. A considerably larger issue with the game that’s very quickly made apparent is how small each area is, from the single over-world hub that’s split into 5 areas and multiple buildings each with 0 overlap, to each of those various buildings that often feature multiple floors that are again split up by loading screens. This wouldn’t be an issue, but these areas have distinct AI and as such if you’re alerted in a building you can often just sprint past every enemy and then enter the next area. Alternatively if you take the stealthy route, you’ll often only have to deal with between 4 to 8 enemies between each loading screen. Sure the game remembers if you took down or avoided the enemies, to the point of even saving their alert status but it’s still a significant limitation. On the subject of the AI, it’s really terrible and has myriad issues. The stealth detection system doesn’t quite work right half the time and enemies manage to be both blind and surprisingly aware at the same time. Even if you’ve been detected though, the enemy is incredibly stupid and can often by tricked by simply moving slightly or even just remaining totally still on various occasions.

Perhaps the biggest problem faced by the game though is that it’s both incredibly short, with a run-time between 3 and 5 or maybe 6 hours for completionists. Short games have their place of course, but the real spoiler for Deus Ex: The Fall is that it ends on a totally unresolved cliff-hanger with a vague “TO BE CONTINUED” which comes almost as a bit of a shock. There’s even a warning that you won’t be able to finish any side quests in Hub #1 if you proceed which is true because the entire game just ends with a short cut-scene. The promise of a whole new batch of quests, essentially entire narrative and even a subplot featuring a nemesis from our protagonist’s recent past all end up going nowhere. To this day if you boot up the game there’s still an option for “additional content” on the title screen which when opened promises more content coming soon, even though it never will. So while the plot and characters are decent and make use of a rich setting, it never really gets to go anywhere and indeed will never go anywhere. You’re left with the first third of a potential game and everything, from the balancing to the story has been crafted with the intention that there will be considerably more content than what actually got made.

There are some other weird little niggles with the game that belie it’s roots as a mobile game, such as the fact that enemy “corpses” begin to disintegrate around 10 seconds after they “die” whether they’ve been taken down in a lethal or non-lethal fashion. This means that there’s no risk to having enemies be woken up by their colleagues, while non-lethal takedowns still give more XP so you get the reward without much of the risk. There’s also an in-game store, which is accessible from anywhere at any time via the menu and which enables you to buy basically anything. I can only assume the iOS/Android versions let you buy things with REAL MONEY but in the PC version it basically means that at any point you can just some more ammo, or an EMP grenade or whatever. You’re never really short of cash either, unless you’re aiming for the big ticket items so resource management isn’t much of a concern. As previously stated though the game was clearly balanced around having 3 separate acts, so I don’t think it’s possible to gain every unlock or item within the relatively small world of DE:TF. Finally it should probably be mentioned that the game has barely any enemy variety, you’ve got guards, guards with shotguns, guards with assault rifles, some rare robots (I counted 3), two turrets and a type of guard that goes invisible when they spot you. Oh and there’s a big boss robot. So basically 98% of the time you’re up against normal guys who have crap AI and anyone you knock out melts into pixels shortly after “death”. So it’s a pretty easy game, with the only real risk being that you could get caught while reading an in-game book as doing this doesn’t pause the game.

In conclusion then Deus Ex: The Fall is an ambitious game, that ports over all the core systems while botching the execution in various ways. It has a good story that abruptly ends a third of the way in, decent graphics that are let down by some poor posing and details, adequate combat that’s let down by poor enemy AI and variety, and so on. There are some decent story beats and the occasional cool moment, so I can’t be too mean on the game especially as it was made by a small team with a tight schedule for platforms with limited power. In fact the resulting game in the form of DE:TF is actually pretty impressive considering they gave about a dozen people a year to bash this out. Unfortunately though it’s hard to recommend, especially at it’s normal price because it’s just not finished. In spite of my inability to recommend the game however, I still had some fun with it and with the right mindset towards bargain bin gaming I’d say this is one to considering giving a shot. It’s nowhere as good as the main games, but of course it bloody isn’t. Most people will get this in a Deus Ex franchise bundle, and once you’ve played the bigger games this one is a fun little diversion. If you haven’t played the rest of the series, or take a dim view on deeply flawed games then obviously give this one a pass. But I personally have played much worse games, some of which I’ve even “reviewed”!

The post Deus Ex: The Fall appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

First up is the wannabe Star Fox imitator “Redout: Space Assault” (henceforth referred to as “AS”) which in spite of the name has nothing to do with the quasi-popular high speed racing game Redout, aside from one or two shared sound effects. Now Redout was widely seen as a spiritual successor to Wipeout on it’s release and while it did have some differences, that inspiration was pretty nakedly and unabashedly worn on it’s sleeve. Space Assault is a similar attempt to piggy-back off a formerly popular but now dormant IP, and unfortunately it completely and utterly sucks. The first of AS’s myriad issues is that it’s a mobile phone game port (yay!) which is not disclosed anywhere on it’s Steam page with the exception of the mixed review section. Now I was willing to let this one slide, against my better judgement, as I thought that a Star Fox clone didn’t really need many controls as the whole point is that it’s an on-rails shooter. So all you’d really need is the ability to shoot and do a modicum of movement across the screen, which theoretically a smartphone could handle. Alas the game handles poorly and has a weird feel to it that I can’t quite put into words, but essentially you always feel a little sluggish and the enemy projectiles have the same issue. This means dodging them can be weirdly annoying, an issue that really makes the game a pain in the butt. To make sure it wasn’t just a SKILL ISSUE I went and played the original Star Fox on SNES, only to discover that I didn’t have that issue at all and so it was just AS living up to it’s moniker.

But(t) of course just having weird controls and a suspect pedigree wouldn’t be enough for me to totally drop the game, as I’ve beaten around 600ish releases and honestly a lot of them had some issues. What makes AS so wretched is just the lack of any redeeming features. The story is cliché and bear in mind, this is cliché within the context of videogame writing. It is so, so, aggressively bland and utterly fails to provide even the flimsiest reason for the player to engage with it or care about any of the characters. These characters also don’t do themselves any favours because their dialogue is below “Direct-to-DVD sequel” levels and it feels like every line of dialogue was cranked out by a bored intern on a single, lazy afternoon. The voice actors meanwhile appear to be totally aware that the plot, writing and characters are all a big pool of wank because they put zero effort into their roles. In space no one can hear you scream, so why bother having any dialogue with emotion, wit, charm or warmth? I can only assume they had random members of staff perform these lines because honestly everyone has the same accents (despite ostensibly being a diverse international group) and no one can act. As for the rest of the sounds, you’ve got standard PEWPEW space laser noises. Alongside a totally forgettable OST with some occasional attempts to insert PUMPIN electronic music during the action sequences. Last but not least, you’ve got a missile lock-on noise so enjoy a slightly tinny beep beep beep every time an enemy shoots a missile at you – which they do quite frequently!

And you’ll need to frequently avoid those enemy missiles with a half-hearted barrel roll feature as you have a Hull strength life bar and a regenerating Shield. So far, so Sci-Fi. But for some reason a bunch of random attacks just ignore the shield, to the point that in the early game it’s pretty much 50/50 as to whether you can regenerate any damage or not. Fortunately the developers have included absolutely 0 penalty for dying (I guess it’s a phone game so they know the controls are garbage?) …Well that’s not entirely true, as you lose the money you’ve accumulated thus far in that mission when you are instantly respawned exactly where you died. Although as the money can only be used for really, really lousy upgrades that barely make a difference (e.g. you need to buy the missile upgrade ten times to go from shooting 3 missiles per salvo to 4) AND you get most of your money from objectives and upgrade cards (you can equip one of these at a time, and they do really exciting things like increase your shield bar by 6%) it’s a very light-touch punishment. Speaking of the missile upgrades, you have two main ways of attacking the baddies; your normal laser weapon which can be swapped during the game for a variety of equally useless types and missiles which are much better because they do more damage and auto-lock on. You have infinite ammo for both, but the enemy health bars have been deliberately designed so that you’ll need to constantly spam both weapons to clear through everything in good time. This wouldn’t be an issue, but some missions just abruptly end after around 3 minutes if you didn’t shoot enough of the bad guys down. But don’t worry, as the missions are very bland anyway and you’ll probably not even notice that you’re replaying them as they’re basically all premised around doing the same thing against the same enemies (seriously the Act 1 boss and the Act 2 boss are the same). To it’s credit the game does have some “free flight” missions where it dumps you in space surrounded by the same props that it uses in every other mission, but this time you need to find the enemies as they won’t come to you! This would be more interesting if your space ship didn’t feel really slow and, there was like, stuff going on but alas these missions blow chunks too. Oh and once you beat all the 48-ish missions the game comes with, that’s it as there are no other gameplay modes. Probably for the best to be honest.

Second up on the naughty step is a game that broke my big fat clogged heart, as it just has such a great concept. Big Mutha Truckers 2 (henceforth referred to as BMT2) is an attempt to marry Crazy Taxi with a big dumb parody of truckin’ across all 48 continental US states. Unfortunately this parody is really, really dull and is very predictable with every character falling short of the “amusing but played out” archetypes they’re aiming for and instead feel like a very uncreative pre-teen designed them. But it’s a quasi-budget release, so it doesn’t matter if it’s dumb and unoriginal so long as it’s a dumb kind of fun. After all, no one was that bothered when the Simpson’s made their own crazy taxi rip-off even though it had extremely familiar characters and very little original gameplay ideas. Unfortunately BMT2 is just… bad when it comes to the actual moment to moment gameplay and it feels like it was really, desperately hoping it would be carried by it’s tongue in cheek characters and world. Alas this doesn’t pan out, as neither the gameplay nor the writing is above D-tier and so you have two shoddily put together halves colliding to form a weak whole. There’s really not much to be said about the writing, other than the fact that every character is summed up in their entirety the first time you meet them and after a few encounters you’re just bored of them. You’ve got the Hollywood airhead, the douchebag celebrity, an Area 51 inspired alphabet agency spook, a couple of hill-billies, a generic greedy millionaire businessman and a corrupt Russian who spends the game on his big ass yacht. You go between these KOOKY, ZANY, THIGH-SLAPPING characters to earn cash by moving items that one of them will sell you on the cheap, to another character who is willing to pay more. Ostensibly there’s some strategy to this, but… there really isn’t. Just buy the cheapest items and Keep On Truckin’ til you make a profit while trying not to let the stale, repeated character quips get you down.

And trust me, I don’t enjoy writing this as the game has a sort-of heart to it. You can tell the developers wanted to make an amusing game, but much like with Cel Damage the humour is simultaneously going to go over the heads of the well-behaved kids and yet isn’t funny enough for the grown ups. It’s just stuck that awkward spot, much like a stand-up comedian who’s bombing because their material just isn’t that good. You don’t hate it, but you do wish it would end if only to save everyone’s sanity. As for the gameplay, as mentioned above it’s pretty basic and while you can use the money to buy upgrades they don’t really make that much of a difference, because pretty the whole game is split between two activities. The first is driving from character to character to make that sweet, sweet money. The second is compromised of missions, which also involve driving from place to place but have a bit more effort put into them even if they’re still pretty bland. The big issue here is just that the driving mechanics aren’t very well implemented, so you have a game that’s almost entirely based on driving and the driving isn’t very good. Sure there are some moderately entertaining environmental hazards (and the cops) to watch out for, like UFOs stealing your cargo, but these are little sprinklings of inspiration that are trying to distract you from the fact that the core gameplay mechanics are bad and that the game just isn’t funny. Unlike Redout Space Assault this game does have plenty of content, but most of it’s locked behind delivering enough cargo to store up money so you can the next mission which plays the same as the grinding so that you can then grind so more to unlock the next mission and so and so forth. There are one or two features that are actually OK, such as the ability to set a time limit between destinations with lower limits providing a larger delivery bonus (which encourages and rewards skill) and a variety of radio stations ala GTA including a talk show with a decent amount of content. It’s just that none of it is good and there’s a reason that this franchise died on it’s ass with mediocre reviews. If you played this game as a kid, hang onto those memories and do not bother revisiting BMT2. Especially as the current Steam port is so busted that even basic Steam features like the overlay and screenshots don’t work.

Last but not least in our trinity of tedium, we have Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop which is the sequel of sorts to Alien Swarm the throwaway Valve project that was most notable for letting the player receive a free TF2 hat. Unlike either of the two preceding games, I didn’t pay anything for this one but instead came across it while searching for a free game that I could play with a friend on his lousy laptop. As such you might argue that it doesn’t deserve it’s place on this list, as it’s literally free and to my knowledge doesn’t even have a monetisation system due to the fact that it’s a labour of love from a dedicated modding community. Yet in spite of the potential for a cute little underdog story, I’m including it here for the simple reason that neither me nor my friend enjoyed it. In fact the more we played, the more frustrated we became as while the game has some good ideas it’s also riddled with questionable design choices that got on our collective tits. Due to it’s price I promise not to be as mean to it, but still why the fuck does the infestation system require you to place a medkit down and then wait for some god damn long? Who thinks this is fun? Who thought “oh my goodness we’ve made the game BETTER take THAT Greg Coomer”??? There’s a ton of content in this game, but also a lot of WHY’s that remain on our minds after playing through the first campaign and mutually agreeing that we are not going to bother with the rest because fuck that noise.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself, because many of you are probably asking “what the hell even is Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop?” Well I’m glad you asked dear reader, as it’s a top-down shooter that allows up to 4 player co-op in which your team is split between around 8 characters and 4 classes. Each class has two characters who are slightly different in terms of their stats, but these stats don’t seem to matter that much anyway so I think this is more for the advanced players to care about. As me and my buddy were casuals only playing the game because we were running out of options, we just went with a medic (because otherwise you are guaranteed to die) and a Tech Marine because they’re mandatory for most of the missions. Once you’ve chosen a character you get a surprisingly extensive unlock system, where you pick 1 weapon, 1 weapon or utility item and then one equippable item. There’s a variety of guns, but also some more interesting tools like a deployable sentry turret, a medkit that heals the squad, an ammo pack for the squad and a bunch of other things that aren’t weapons per see but are useful tools for the entire squad. Then there’s that utility item which is generally a bit mediocre, such as the ability to weld the occasional door, take a bit less damage (not that matters much), lay down mines, take a personal medkit for emergency heals and so on. Once you’ve picked your squad and your gear, you’re then able to play through any of the game’s approximately eleven multi-mission campaigns. These missions might have sections where you need to use a certain item to clear the path, such as big rocks that need to be destroyed with a mining laser or hive-growth that needs to be destroyed with a flamethrower (or a mining laser). Unfortunately the game doesn’t tell you if this is going to be the case, but in our experience the map-makers are generous enough to provide those items when they are needed to prevent you from being totally stuck. Now as for all these shiny new weapons, they’re generally pretty varied but they all have not that much ammo which is a problem in a game where you are shooting things a lot. Missions do tend to give you some more ammo every now and then, but generally speaking you need to be careful with your shots (especially as friendly fire is enabled) and even your reloads as reloading a magazine throws any remaining ammunition away. Plus reloading can take a surprisingly long time for a game in which even the basic enemies can knock you around like a pinata, which is somewhat negated by the introduction of the active reload system that’s also used in Gears of War.

So the game itself is free, it has a lot of content, why is it in the did-not-finish triad? Well aside from the counter-productive nature of the game having eleven freaking campaigns which feels a tad excessive frankly the biggest issue is just that most of the enemies are annoying to deal with. You’ve got the standard grunts who can almost stun lock you, as their attacks knock you back a little bit and can mess you up more than they otherwise would. Then you’ve got ranged enemies which love to hang out just off-screen while pelting you, big fat enemies that eat up a lot of ammo then explode, annoying little enemies that spawn into the game world with a little jump that makes them temporarily immune to gun fire and are too quick to melee. Plus there are flying enemies that are a fucking pest because they’re so small and fast, spawners that spawn in those little enemies with their stupid little jumps constantly and are a chore, especially as when they die spawn more. Wrapping up the selection of annoying enemies are levelled up ranged baddies that fling explosives at you and finally (from what we played anyway) a boss monster that is immune to damage from the front and takes a lot of bullets being fired into their ass to give up. Oh and of course I almost forget the small infectors who will take you from full health to fully dead (no respawning btw) in about 6 seconds unless your medic deploys the tiny medkit with it’s tiny healing radius next to you. An action that takes slightly more fumbling than you’d hope for, and if you’ve split up or they’re picking their nose it’s over for you. As a bonus if the medic dies, then everyone who isn’t a medic can’t take their medkit tool so after that it’s basically sudden death. Did I mention that the basic bitch enemies are almost constantly respawning? Because once you combine that with the skimpy amounts of ammo, the game does become a bit of an endurance test. Can you and your friends manage to get through an entire campaign without getting frustrated at the game? Great, then go do another 10! The scoreboards tell you if your friends bothered, and I can safely say that all of mine gave up around the end of the first campaign. Because this is a game with a lot of love put into it, by people with questionable test in videogames. It’s the quintessential problem with the fan project, namely that the fans are really into the base game and so they’ve made a game that’s only going to be of interest for people who really into the base game. Imagine if they made L4D3 but each player had a specific type of mini-game they’d occasionally have to do, and if any of your team died you got to eat a big mouthful of shit. That’s basically the Alien Swarm: Reactive drop experience. A great game for those who really want a 4 player co-op top-down shooter that requires coordination, but a bad game for those who don’t have 3 friends with those interests. The best I could do was one additional buddy, and he kept dying which meant that I slowly lost the will to live. After clearing out 3 of the boss enemies, avoiding infection, fighting through the whole map and then rushing our way back out, I died at the final hurdle because the extraction objective wanted to make things more exciting by taking even fucking longer than it usually did. Oh and did I mention my buddy kept dying because you can’t see shit in most of the areas of each map, as everything is made deliberately dark so that the game can have a spooky horror vibe. Either find 3 patient friends with plenty of co-op top-down shooter experience, or crank the brightness up and hope for the best. Either way, it’s an acquired taste much like that freakish Corsican cheese that’s filled with maggots and mould. You might have a great time and I wouldn’t think less of you for doing so, but we didn’t and that’s why we cut our losses.

And that’s the trio, each of which I’m proud to say are in different genres and from developers (or modders) of varying pedigree. Unlike the slightly meaty promise at the start, I didn’t end up HATING all of them and in fact consider Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop to be fairly impressive in it’s own right. As for the other two however, they can eat my big fat arse as they are fucking garbage and I am mad that people are inadvertently still paying real money for them. Of the three, I’d give Alien Swarm: RD a tentative chance of redemption as we all love modders really, but the other two should be avoided at all costs. Especially Redout: Space Assault as the developers really should know bloody better than to shit out such a woeful and half-assed game. If you disagree with my take on the worst Starfox clone I’ve ever had the misfortune to play, then get on your bike. At least Big Mutha Truckers 2 was trying (albeit failing) to be entertaining and to offer something a bit different. It had heart, if not only brains or intelligently designed gameplay. Redout: Space ASSault is the definition of a bland, boring, ambitionless, uncreative, tedious gaming experience. They couldn’t even be bothered to avoid repeating the boss fights. Fuck that game. I did hate it, and Big Mutha Truckers 2 was a Big Mutha Pile of Poo (don’t complain about this petty and childish insult, it’s exactly the level of dialogue and writing from that game) even if it’s not quite so reprehensible because intention matters. In conclusion, Redout: Space Assault is fucking woeful, Big Mutha Truckers 2 is a Mutha-Trucking disappointment and Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop is just a bit of a pain in the backside.

The post The Did Not Finish Triad (Part 1 of ??) appeared first on Big Boaby Gaming.

The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog came out of nowhere earlier this year as a free download on Steam with minimal fanfare, yet it was quickly able to gain a popular following due to the fact that it’s just brimming with charm. In the Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog you get to play as a random train employee who is assisting the cast from the Sonic series in hosting their own little murder mystery shindig to celebrate Amy’s birthday. This plot device essentially justifies almost the entire game, as you’ll be wandering around with Tails and engaging in some light Visual Novel (VN) gameplay with a detective theme. As you’ve probably figured out, this is a light-hearted point and click adventure where you’re tasked with helping figure out the mystery of who “killed” Sonic. Due to the fact that everyone is a suspect aside from Tails and Amy (due to the roles they’ve been assigned), you’ll go through the train grilling everyone as to their whereabouts before finally figuring out the “murderer” in your midst is. This plays a bit like the Phoenix Wright series, in that you have an inventory with a handful of items and you’ll occasionally be called on to show which item proves the latest suspect is a dirty liar. Unlike most detective games however, there is no penalty to guessing the wrong one and your inventory never has that many items in it at a time. As such this is a pretty straightforward “case” to work through, although getting it wrong will cause various characters to call you a dummy.

Once you’ve figured out the correct item to use, the game abruptly changes gear and initiates an auto-runner to represent you thinking through the evidence. While this might sound silly (and it is!) the reason for this is that you’re constantly being told by Tails to think like Sonic would and so it makes sense that Sonic would be running through some isometric stages. Initially these are very easy, but overtime the amount of rings you need to gather continues to increase and the stages begin to contain various hazards such as spikes, ninja stars hurtling you and even platforms which fall away. The difficulty these stages is handled nicely, and the rationale for acting like Sonic would actually pays off in the end. Regardless these primarily serve to break up the gameplay and do provide a modicum of challenge, although let’s face it they’re not particularly challenging. If for whatever reason this little bit of trickiness has caused you to panic, then rejoice! Even in these areas failing has no consequence aside from requiring you to start again.

That’s about it as far as the gameplay goes, as this is a pretty short and easy game to play through without too much depth in terms of gameplay mechanics. Really the main focus of the game is to faff around with the characters from the Sonic the Hedgehog series, and appreciate both the good natured writing and the surprisingly good visual design. I know Sonic has had his up’s and down’s (especially when they had redesign him for the movie), but this is a really good looking game and I wouldn’t be surprised if the positive reception has made some folk at Sega think that this silly idea could have some legs to it. After all, the game got a ton of positive press and if it had been longer and perhaps some sort of fail state, then it’s entirely feasible that we could see some sequels pushed out as low cost games. But that’s beside the point, the main point here is that this is a game that looks really good and has a charming stylised art-style with plenty of merit. It’s not cutting edge graphics by any means, but it’s clear that the art team put some serious into this little giveaway game and it really shows. Not only is the character art done well, but the backgrounds are pleasant to look at and each area has it’s own little introductory graphics which give the whole thing a quality feel. Plus, without wishing to spoil there’s some good use of colours and plenty of character expressions on offer.

The musical score is also pleasant to the ears with some light musak vibes, even if it’s fairly restrained and the sound effects are done well, although they’re not anything to rave about. All I can really say is that each piece of the puzzle here goes together nicely, and while the game isn’t a huge standout success or anything it’s still well made and well put together. I did take a look at the 60th Sega Anniversary games earlier and compared to those, this is a big step up and really does feel like it could’ve been expanded into it’s own game. Of course it would need to be expanded significantly, as while there is a cheeky little twist and some fun moments throughout, this is a game that will take you around 90 to 120 minutes (or 2 hours) to beat. It’s a super short experience and while it’s been made with care, if you’d paid money you might be disappointed. Fortunately it’s totally free and still available for download as of time of writing (Mid September 2023, although you won’t be reading this for two whole months as I’m trying to get a bunch of reviews done before I go visit Vietnam and Cambodia).

With that being said, there isn’t much more to say funnily enough. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is a charming, short and free release that is great for Sonic fans and still enjoyable for those who haven’t played a Sonic game since the Dreamcast was a thing. The characters are all written well with some light-hearted dialogue and plenty of jokes, the visuals are great, the soundtrack is fitting and the gameplay has some nice variation. Once you’ve resolved the “murder” the game has an extra little dollop of content that throws everything together nicely and then you’re free to either replay the game or move on with your life. Either way The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is perfect for a rainy afternoon or if you’ve got a laptop/Steam Deck, a great way to spend a bit of time at a coffee shop or college library (assuming you’re a student of course). Ultimately I’d recommend this game to everyone as it’s nice to experience a pleasant little game every now and then, which this most certainly is.

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Nail’d is a 7th generation racing game brought into the world by Techland (of Call of Juarez and Dead Island fame), which came to my attention due to a combination of three significant factors. The first was that it was aggressively cheap with a sale price of around $1, the second was that it promised an earnestly unironic and heartfelt attempt to deliver a relentlessly energic racing game based around EXTREME off-roading action, and the third factor was that it somehow maintained a very positive average review rating on Steam. It’s definitely an obscure choice for a review considering the fact that it came and went without leaving much of an impact or fanbase behind, but I’m a sucker for bargain bin games from this era and honestly the fact that they managed to persuade Slipknot to put their music in the OST spoke volumes. Sadly they were only able to get 1 Slipknot song and one Rage Against the Machine Song, which I feel is honestly emblematic of how the entire game panned out. You see, the game itself is enjoyable but it definitely feels as though development time (or budget) ran out midway through the project and as such Techland panicked and desperately tried to pad out the game so that they could punt it onto the market as a fully priced AAA game.

Now that’s not to say that Nail’d doesn’t have it’s areas of refinement and effort, as the tracks you race on are generally pretty good and both the racing AI and soundtrack are par for the course with some nice touches. The tracks themselves fit into 3 broad clusters, each with equal-ish amounts of courses and they include off-road American desert tracks, off-road Andes mountains/woodland forest tracks and finally Mediterranean Grecian ruin tracks. Each group has it’s own biome and lighting and each track has it’s own hazards and moving parts, generally designed to make traversing them chaotic and to provide racers with ways to bash into each other and force their opponents to crash. The game also places a surprisingly large emphasis on aerial jumps, with most courses being absolutely ridden with ramps, jumps and hair-raising falls. To it’s credit, these jumps are often spectacular and are often just the right amount of challenging, requiring a bit of knowledge or skill to traverse successfully lest you smash into the side of a cliff or spend far too long airborne while your competition speeds off into the sunset. To keep these tracks and the ensuing races interesting, Nail’d also provides you with a Nitros boost ability which passively regenerates and which can also be increased quickly via performing one of a series of “Feats”. These include performing wheelies, causing other players to crash, nailing a perfect landing or driving through flaming circles / checkpoints. While these may sound like a silly little side activity, most of the tracks are built with them in mind and learning how to master them will give you a significant edge thanks to the nitros boost that they provide.

As for the AI, it’s often in the goldilocks spot of providing an acceptable challenge without being too perfect and has a surprising habit of making mistakes while the player isn’t looking. For most racing games you’re safe to assume that the AI is frankly cheating when they’re off screen, as they’re often immune to course hazards at best or actively gaining speed boosts via the tedious “rubber banding” effect at worst. Yet in Nail’d the AI can and will make an absolute mess of things while they’re far in the lead or eating your dust in the rear-view mirror, which gives the races and especially the tournament cups a much needed dose of unpredictability. Opponents that were placed 1st in the last race will suddenly drop down to 6th without any input from the player, or vice-versa which prevents the feeling that a cup has already been decided only a race or two in. There are one or two quirks to the AI though, such as the fact that it definitely has a pre-determined racing line (which is common to the genre) that it will follow even when it’s a really, really bad idea. You can also cause it to commit suicide at multiple points, as the AI will boost when you’re boosting near it but there are some jumps that it just doesn’t know how to handle while boosting and as such you can force it to over commit 100% of the time. Finally as for the soundtrack, it adds an air of cheesy metal rock which is era appropriate and that features some original pieces which serve to fill in the gaps between the bands that you might have heard of. While you’re not going to rush out and buy the Nail’d OST, the tracks all fit the game well and help push the game’s overall atmosphere of unabashed high-octane thrill seeking with an edge of the EXTREME

Alas this EXTREME feeling is hard to sustain in any game, and as mentioned above Nail’d has the definite air of a game that ran out of something during it’s development. While the OST is great (at least within the context of the game), it is relatively skimpy and will loop frequently even before you’ve raced all of the tracks that the game has to offer. And even though those tracks are almost all good (one or two feel like they were designed by malicious designers who want to see you crash and revel in your frustration) there just aren’t enough of them to sustain the game. For context the campaign is split into a series of events, starting with a tutorial and then gently easing you into a series of “tournaments” that each feature multiple events that correspond to a race or maybe two that have the same rules. This section of Nail’d is great fun as you’re constantly encountering new tracks and learning their tricks, but then it abruptly ends around the 3 hour mark and you’re then asked to complete multiple of the aforementioned courses per event with multiple events per cup. If you’re like me you’ll initially assume this is a heightening of the stakes and a way to introduce the cup mechanic, wherein winning one race isn’t enough and now you need to prove your mettle against the same racers in multiple races at a time.

Alas the majority of the game takes this format, as you’ll have done every course before you’re even halfway through and then burned through the “mutators” in no time. These mutators are ways in which the game influences the courses so as to spice things up and introduce new goals, but there aren’t many of them and most of them are fairly rudimentary. You’ve got “no collision” mode, which disables collisions with other drivers, a max boost mode which means your nitros boost is always full, a “stunt” mode wherein the “feats” mentioned earlier add to your score with the highest score winning and finally a time attack mode where a timer is ticking down and you need to race through the checkpoints in time. In other words the mutators are go fast because no one can hit you, go fast because you have infinite boost, perform feats or lose and go fast against no opponents or lose. I’d be fatuitous if I said they didn’t change how the game feels, but when you’re doing the same course multiple times per tournament and there are multiple tournaments with those same courses it does start to feel extremely repetitive. All the higher difficulties do is increase the number of courses per event, culminating in the GRAND FINALE where you do 8 courses back-to-back. The same 8 courses you’ve been racing since the campaign started…

And honestly that’s about it, as the game has very little else to offer once you’ve cleared through the initial wave of tracks and played through the handful of mutators that are on offer. There is also a time trial mode which involves, err, racing on the same tracks against the developer times but that’s basically the same thing as the time trial mutator mode you’ve already played through in the campaign (albeit harder). There was a multiplayer mode for this game, but as stated the game came and went without causing much of a fuss and as such the game died years ago and even if you still found people who cared it’s too late as the servers are down. I suppose there is a modest customisation aspect to mention as you can choose different parts and liveries for the vehicle of your choice, but honestly these parts don’t change much and I was able to breeze through the entire game with the stock setup as the parts have a modest impact at best. You can increase handling in exchange for acceleration/boost, or vice-versa and that’s about it. The game does differentiate between ground and air handling, but really it’s all very minor stuff and I didn’t notice much of a difference to how my vehicle controlled even after I picked all of the +boost -handling parts.

In conclusion Nail’d is a fun little racing game that spreads itself too thin in the pursuit of the AAA price tag. Had it been released as a humble XBLA game, or a budget release then it would have been commendable and a fine example of a racing game that makes due with a modest amount of courses and a short soundtrack. The boost feats are fun to go for, the courses themselves are largely enjoyable and the AI is surprisingly honest for a racing game. Yet sadly this was not a budget title and was instead an example of an overly ambitious developer attempting to compete with the big boys, an attempt that leads to an unflattering conclusion. Nail’d is a decent game but one that quickly wears out it’s welcome and which needlessly prolongs it’s presence in the vain hope that you’ll consider it a worthy competitor to the bigger games of the era such as Motorstorm and Need for Speed (hell even Fuel has more content). Instead it merely highlights it’s own insecurities by forcing you to beat the same courses a dozen times each before dumping it’s half-assed ending onto you. Which I will unceremoniously share below (look away spoilers haters!)

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Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is a modestly interesting game by Techland which tries to break the mould and implements a couple of fun ideas through the course of it’s fairly short duration. The game’s main campaign mode will only take you around 4 or 5 hours to get through as you fight your way through 14 missions, but you do also have some collectibles to hunt down through each level and you’ve also got two additional modes in the form of a score challenge Arena game and a collection of Duels for you to blitz through. Regardless of these additional modes, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger isn’t aiming to be a fully fledged competitor to other contemporary FPS games unlike the other games in the Call of Juarez series, and is instead comfortable to settle down as a budget game. Considering the relatively mediocre reception that both of it’s preceding games received and the perpetual budgetary arms race that AAA games have found themselves in, this was undoubtedly a wise decision. Instead Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is trying to be a short but sweet FPS game with a pleasantly surprising amount of content, but this alone wouldn’t be enough for the game to have earned it’s “Extremely Positive” review score on Steam. So why does Call of Juarez: Gunslinger have such glowing reviews if it’s merely a budget FPS release that is fairly short, at least for the first campaign playthrough?

Well the biggest reason for the positive reviews is the fact that the game is told via the perspective of Silas Greaves, a hard-bitten bounty hunter who is retelling the tales of his youthful gunslinging days to a group of bar patrons. This group includes a young dime-novel enthusiast called Dwight that is practically gushing about your exploits, alongside his considerably more sceptical friend Jack who doesn’t believe in anything Silas is saying. Aside from occasionally dealing with their interjections, you also have to contend with Silas occasionally forgetting details of the story. As a consequence of this narrative technique, there are multiple points in the story where control is either taken away from the player entirely, or the circumstances you’re dealing with abruptly change. Sometimes this is to your benefit as hordes of enemies diminish in numbers or a suicidal attack gets “rewound” and at other points things become more challenging for you. More often than not however, these revisions to the game are used for comedic effect and they do a fair bit to keep the relatively short campaign engaging as otherwise this would be a fairly typical cowboy’s tale of revenge.

This tale of revenge features Silas tracking down various famous outlaws and their gangs which are lifted from the history of the Wild West, all in pursuit of 3 murders who handily enough keep joining these various gangs and managing to escape just-in-time. These 3 murders are especially noteworthy as they killed Silas’s two brothers and who tried to kill him as well, so it’s not just business it’s personal. The story itself is fairly unremarkable outside of the occasional interjection, although it does have some nice touches along the way and picks up massively towards the end of the game. As ever I won’t spoil anything, but I’ll just say that you do revisit some areas across the campaign and that the twists are choreographed in advance with aplomb. This is mainly a tale about Silas however and the various cowboys of legend you encounter are really just a footnote, although the game does featured a bunch of historical facts about various outlaw figures via it’s collectibles system. These collectibles are of interest to all players, regardless of their desire to engage in some reading, due to the fact that they are a substantial part of the game’s skill-tree system thanks to the large amount of XP you receive for finding them.

And yes, you did read that right. This short FPS game has decided to implement skill trees for some reason, but fortunately they are at least impactful and not the +10% damage to hat wearers on Tuesdays nonsense that has plagued gaming for decades at this point. The way it works is simple, you gain XP for shooting enemies and there are various modifiers such as killing them with headshots, killing them while on low health, hitting them in melee and so on. In addition, you also have a combo system that multiplies the XP you gain by the number of enemies killed while the combo is running (you have 4 seconds between each kill before the combo runs out). This means that you’re encouraged to play with some haste, as otherwise your combo meter will run out which is the best way to gain XP. Unfortunately, I found that the game’s Hard difficulty mode encouraged slow and cautious gameplay due to the high enemy damage output, accuracy and the fact that you have regenerating health (it is a 7th generation console game after all!) which puts these two systems at odds. As such I would generally recommend normal for a first playthrough, even if it is a touch easy in my opinion – probably because there isn’t an easy option! Fortunately there is a new game+ system in place so that you can go through the game again on a harder difficulty, but with higher XP gains and the ability to keep your unlocked skills. These skills mainly relate to unlocking abilities, such as the ability to dual-wield revolvers or shoot grenades dynamite in mid-air but some are more boring straightforward such as the ability to carry more revolver ammo or dealing more damage while in precision mode.

Precision mode is another of the ways in which Call of Juarez: Gunslinger attempts to differentiate itself from the other FPS games on the market when it came out, alongside the ability to dodge lethal shots and a “reflex” system wherein you occasionally gun down multiple enemies in short succession so long as you succeed in a quick time event (QTE). Precision mode is the most prevalent of these mechanics and essentially functions as this game’s bullet time mode, as it slows the game down (particularly enemies) and so lets you rattle off a succession of shots without being at too much risk. It also highlights enemies in red and with the purchase of a skill, shows the location of nearby enemies that aren’t currently on your screen. You gain precision in much the same way as you gain XP, with more “skilful” kills gaining you more precision than normal ones. Initially you don’t have much precision to use at a time, but there are multiple skills which improve both the duration of the precision you have and the maximum amount of precision that you can store at any given time. The other two major mechanics mentioned above are, much like precision, fairly straightforward to understand but do fit into the game quite nicely. You’ve got the lethal shots system wherein enemy shots that would otherwise kill you occur in slow motion and you’re able to dodge them, by either moving to the left or to the right. In spite of what you might be thinking, this isn’t an entirely free get-out-of-jail card as you do have to dodge in the correct direction and should you fail, you’ll die anyway. Additionally this ability is on a cooldown and regenerates at a fixed pace, so you can’t expediate it by playing in a stylish but reckless manner. Finally you’ve got the reflexes system, which is tied to certain sections in the campaign and essentially functions as a QTE multikill system, although it does require you to have ammunition loaded in the gun(s) you’re using. Once you’ve unlocked a certain skill, you can also trigger this power on demand albeit at the cost of your precision as it occurs during it and eats up the bar at a fast pace.

There is also one other way that Call of Juarez: Gunslinger differentiates itself from other FPS games, although it is a returning feature from the rest of the series. Throughout multiple points in the campaign, you’re forced into a duel with one of the head honchos that you’re fighting against. The way it works is simple and yet irritating; essentially you need to keep the target in your crosshairs, while moving your hand left and right over your gun with either the keyboard or thumb-stick. Doing these two things will increase your Focus % and Speed % respectively. Focus refers to where your cursor will be once you start shooting, while speed refers to how quickly you’ll draw your gun and both are pretty important. In addition to juggling these two %’s, you’ve also got two other things to bear in mind. Firstly you need to keep your eye on your opponent so that you can draw your sharpshooter as soon as they go for theirs, as otherwise they’ll just shoot you. Secondly, you also have a heartbeat mechanic that acts as an indicator as to when you’ll be able to draw your gun, but doing so before your enemy draws theirs is considerably dishonourable and thus cheating. This doesn’t impact much within the game, but it is tracked and if you want to get 100% completion becoming dependent on this will cause you trouble in the later Duelling mode. Oh and if all that wasn’t enough, there is also the bonus complicating factor that some duels feature more than one enemy to gun down! Opinion is relatively divided on this mechanic & mode and from what I can tell, console players (or those using a gamepad) have a slight advantage as they get haptic feedback when the various thumb-sticks are in the optimal places – whereas mouse & keyboard users need to watch those percentages like a hawk. The duels do get easier as you get more practice, but honestly I’m not a huge fan of them as they are an abrupt break from the rest of the game and the control scheme feels a bit like patting your head while rubbing your tummy while jumping up and down.

On the subject of duels, they comprise one of the two additional game modes that exists within this game. Aside from the campaign, you’ve got a duelling focused mode and an arcade mode which is essentially a retreat of various locations that you fight through within the campaign. The duelling mode strings together the duels from the campaign and scores you based on your focus %, speed % and whether you completed them honourably or not, with the only main difference being that you have 5 lives in total to beat them all. As for the arcade mode, it’s a selection of areas from across the campaign but with the twist that you don’t have access to your skills and weapons. These are instead unlocked separately within this mode and are split into three separate load-outs, which loosely correspond to the three skill trees from the campaign. In this mode you’re tasked with clearing through these areas while trying to gain the highest score possible, which is primarily done via racking up those combos and thus requires you to burst through them pretty quickly. In addition there’s also a par time and beating it will increase your score substantially, further adding to the need to act fast. These arena levels have 3 stars that correspond to the score you receive and you are encouraged to try and beat your friends scores within them, but otherwise there isn’t much here that’s unique or new. Ultimately these two modes add some further meat to the game but are almost entirely a retreat of existing content, so most players who don’t care about 100% completion will probably skip them.

Even if these additional modes are a bit basic, I’m not going to get worked up about them as they’re bonuses to what is explicitly a budget game and they do help give the game a bit of extra depth. The real meat of this game is the campaign, and while it does have some minor issues such as the 2-weapon limit and regenerating health system I found it to be a decently enjoyable yarn. The gameplay is fairly typical for 7th generation shooters for better or for worse (outside of the bullet sponge boss fights), but the scoring system and combo system encourage and reward skilful gameplay while the skill-trees do help you feel more powerful as the game progresses. The story while nothing exceptional has it’s moments and the narrative framing device is great for adding some amusing and un-expected moments, including flash backs and even ghosts. One of the best things I can tell you about this game is that the developers clearly enjoyed working on it and this comes through regardless of what game mode you’re playing. In summary I would tentatively recommend Call of Juarez: Gunslinger and would encourage those playing it to stick it through to the end, as while some of the boss fights can be tedious due to their high health bars the game continues to improve as it goes on.

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Duke Nukem Forever is a game that wears it’s heart on it’s sleeve and that successfully brings across the sheer madcap insanity of the Duke in all of his cheesy, 80’s action star glory. It’s a game with endless one-liners, dumb set pieces, larger than life characters and a constant inability to take itself seriously. Aside from the gratuitous amount of movie references, Duke Nukem Forever also takes the time out of it’s busy schedule to throw in endless little references towards other games including Half Life, Call of Duty and Halo.

Alongside the references the game has also spent a surprising, if not downright overwhelming amount of it’s time on creating interactive elements within the levels. While these are mostly concentrated in the earlier half of the game, they include fully functional vending machines, drinking fountains, microwaves and microwavable popcorn, nudie calendars, dumbbells, flushable toilets and a whole lot more. There are even multiple fully functional mini-games, including Air Hockey, “Alien Abortion” (whack-a-mole), One Armed Bandits and even an entire pinball table. It’s clear that the developers spent a lot of time figuring out ways to let Duke piss around with his environment and honestly it really helps to develop the game’s cavalier attitude towards itself. While having one or two of these interactive elements would be amusing, having so many of them is one of the admittedly rare areas in which this game shines.

Unfortunately this isn’t Duke Nukem’s Farting Around Simulator (DNFAS) and is instead meant to be the heroic return of the eponymous Duke after over a decade spent in developer hell. Sadly, Duke Nukem Forever is thoroughly mediocre and has been saddled with a Monster Truck’s worth of baffling design decisions which were the hottest trend at the time of release. The game does feature the return of The Ripper and the Devastator alongside a shrink gun and freeze ray, but these weapons are significantly handicapped by the amount of ammo that Duke can carry at one time, which is embarrassingly small (I’m sure he would just say he’s too cold…). This choice is then compounded by the fact that you can only carry 2 weapons at a time, which means that the game has to shove conveniently placed Infinite Ammo crates at every location in which you have to face off against hordes of enemies at a time. Much like the abrupt appearance of a multitude of chest high walls in Gears of War, the sudden appearance of multiple rocket launchers and ammo crates is a vivid sign of impending carnage.

And it’s these rocket launchers which best reveal the true issue of this new system, because you can only harm boss enemies with turrets and explosives. But you can only carry 5 rockets at a time, and most bosses require closer to 20+ rockets when you’re playing on the Normal difficulty setting. As such you spend the majority of every boss fight running around, looking for more ammo and occasionally glancing at the boss to make sure you’re not about to get blasted because you haven’t been looking at them. It’s honestly a shame because these boss fights are some of the few encounters in the game that actually require some form of positioning and, for want of a better term, strategy. That’s not so say that’re massively complicated, but they each have their own quirks and they are much, much more enjoyable than the rest of the game’s decidedly humdrum combat encounters.

Which is the main issue I have with Duke Nukem Forever, as it’s a pretty basic FPS experience with rare flashes of inspiration but the tedium of most of it’s combat encounters is too much for even Jon St. John to carry. Due to engine limitations, you only ever fight a small number of enemies at any one time and as a consequence combat encounters will often have 3 enemies spawn in, then you shoot them, then another 3 enemies spawn in, so you shoot them too, then another 3 spawn in by bursting open a hitherto locked door. Then you can proceed through that new entrance for 30 seconds before you get jumped by 2 enemies, who you gun down, so that another 3 enemies can spawn in… and so on and so forth for the better part of 6 hours. Now this limitation in and of itself wouldn’t be a deal breaker, as I personally enjoyed Doom (2016) and that game had a similar problem – albeit with more enemies on screen at once. Unfortunately Duke Nukem Forever tries to balance this lacklustre amount of enemies on screen at once by making Duke surprisingly brittle, as most enemies can do a large amount of damage to the Duke. This would add some challenge to the game but Duke Nukem Forever also has a generic regenerating health system… so what it really means is that you shoot 3 guys, then wait for Duke’s health to regenerate, then shoot the next 3 guys… and so on and so forth.

To be fair, this regenerating health system is called “Ego” and gels nicely with the previously mentioned farting around, as Duke gains an increase to his maximum health by messing around with the environment. This means that it’s in your interest to play the mini-games, sign autographs for fans and slap the alien wall titties.

But even this silliness can’t mask the fact that Duke Nukem Forever is a 7th generation console FPS masquerading as something more than it is. Not only does the game have a limited amount of enemies on screen at a time, and not only are you limited to two weapons at a time, but even the enemy pool is pretty shallow and as such you spend most of the game fighting the same handful of enemies at a time. You’ve got the Assault Troopers with laser guns and jetpacks, the slightly tankier Assault Trooper Commander variant that quickly replaces them and that can teleport (which just makes them annoying to deal with), Pigcops in all their glory who can wield pistols, shotguns, machine guns and RPGs or be berserkers with janky melee animations, the Octabrains who are floating jerks that throw stuff at you or blast you with psychic energy, and the Reptilian Enforcers who have powerful-ish guns that fire homing rockets and occasionally have large metal shields. This is basically it, with most levels having either some Assault Troopers/Commanders or Octabrains (depending on how far into the campaign you are), a bunch of Pigcops and then a couple of Enforcers thrown in when the game is trying to be a bit more challenging. There are also Octolings who are tiny, non-flying versions of the Octabrains that try to swarm you alongside the big fat Assault Commander (essentially a giant pigcop with their bottom half replaced with a metal floation device and helicopter blades), but these enemies are both relatively rare.

Making the enemies even more of a chore, not only does Duke have regenerating health, a small health pool, only 2 weapons at a time with limited ammo pools and a small amount of enemies at a time to fight but he also has to contend with some hit-scan attacks and weird spawning locations. As mentioned earlier, the game doesn’t like to spawn in too many enemies at a time as this game also had to run on the PS3 and Xbox 360, neither of which could handle the sheer unadulterated carnage that having more than a handful of enemies on screen at once would cause. Due to this multiplatform handicap, the game spawns enemies in small groups, but these gaggles of baddies really can spawn in at the most inopportune of timings. Sometimes the Octalings will get stuck on a piece of level geometry and thus the swarm of them (a whole dozen) will become a trickle as they gradually unstuck themselves, or sometimes an Assault Trooper Captain will teleport behind you while the next two spawn in. Generally it means that the only challenge these enemies pose is the fact that they have messed up spawn patterns, making it hard to tell when an encounter is over or has at least entered the next phase. When you combine this fact with the Pigcops amazing ability to utilise hit-scan weapons, which then make Duke flinch and thus waste a limited shot on his Shotgun or Railgun which has limited ammo as it is (and long reload animations because who doesn’t love reloading and iron-sights???), while making the screen flash red most of these combat encounters are just… kind of annoying. I can count the amount of times I died in normal combat encounters across the entire game on one hand, but counting the amount of times I was annoyed at the sheer bitchiness of the AI would be near impossible.

To break up the monotony of these fights, the game does at least have a few sections which don’t involve slowly plodding through brown-and-grey environments so that you can gun down the latest triad of the same enemies you’ve been fighting for the rest of the game. Sometimes it livens things up with a… TURRET SECTION!!! I’m not really sure where Gearbox got their enthusiasm for these from, but there are more of them than different types of enemies in this game so I hope you enjoy them. Sometimes you’re shooting space ships, sometimes you’re shooting pigcops and sometimes you’re shooting both, but either way you had best be prepared for them. Fortunately to prevent things from getting too exciting, they always have a cool-down mechanic in which if you shoot too much your gun overheats. Sadly this cool-down bar is pretty aggressive and as such you need to be quite careful with your shooting lest you become a sitting duck.

Aside from boss fights, farting around with the environment and the occasional frequent turret sections the last major way that the game breaks up the sluggish combat encounters is with a big-ass monster truck. This is exactly the sort of thing that the game needs to be more enjoyable, but unfortunately these sections are flawed. Now don’t get me wrong, running over those lame enemies in my big truck was amusing but sadly there are a few issues with them. First and foremost is the fact that they are kinda short, all clustered together within the story and are frequently handicapped by a recurring gag that Duke’s monster truck has poor gas mileage, so you need to hop out of your kickass monster truck and go back to shooting the bad guys on foot. The second issue is that the physics are kind of janky (a fact that is unlikely to surprise Borderlands fans) and so I found myself needing to reposition myself and by extension my truck more often than I would’ve expected. Lastly the truck suffers from having a really, really annoying engine noise when you’re at max speed which I won’t be able to illustrate fully with my limited verbiage, but suffice it to say that it sounds like they cut 2 seconds of revving a moped and put it on a loop.

One last thing that the game seems to really, really enjoy doing is introducing shrinking sections wherein Duke is made to be tiny and must navigate an otherwise unremarkable level albeit with the handicap of being made tiny. Now I’d be willing to count these sections as being an attempt to break up the monotony of the rest of the game, where it not for the fact that they play exactly like the rest of the game. In fact the only way they differ is that you now get attacked by rats, which made me hate the furry little bastards while playing as regular sized Duke. Oh and that now regular enemies are considerably more dangerous as you deal way less damage and they can stomp you, but these encounters are fairly rare (I think they happen like twice) and so most of the tiny duke sections basically function as platforming puzzle sections. I wish I could say more about these parts of the game, but they’re just kinda… meh and so I don’t have anything to add.

With all that being said, Duke Nukem Forever isn’t a terrible game. In fact it’s not even the worst I’ve reviewed thus far (a dubious honour that belongs to Legendary, at least for now). It does have it’s charms and while the enemies are limited in both quantity and AI it is still a functional FPS game that is smart enough to try and keep things from getting stale. You’ll blast through some combat encounters, then hit a turret section, then hit an abrupt platforming section before having to deal with a mini-boss or normal boss. Then you’ll start moving forwards, only to need to interact with the environment in a certain way to proceed before a combat encounter begins, which then leads to a vehicle section. The game is perfectly capable of keeping itself moving along and at introducing new abilities, enemies or weapons. It even gives you Steroids and lets you punch the enemy NPCs so hard that they explode into meaty chunks! But even writing about this while attempting to remain balanced can’t help me deal with the fact that while these are all cool ideas, they aren’t implemented very well. It’s all serviceable, but even those Steroids are quite rare and as you’re stuck in melee-mode while using them they obviously suck for encounters dealing with enemies that are out of reach (or the vehicle sections, or the turret sections, or the boss sections…)

As such Duke Nukem Forever is a game that’s hard to recommend in spite of the fact that it’s arguably the peak of the bargain-bin FPS “genre”. It’s a game that really does a good job of capturing the essence of the Duke, largely thanks to a great performance by Jon St John, but even with plenty of variety and good voice-acting the game itself is just so mediocre in the areas where it matters most. The FPS combat isn’t good and no amount of quipping can distract from this. Normally I’d complain when a game is short, but much like with Legendary the brevity of the campaign is a blessing as it ensures that only the memories of the game’s highlights really remain. Therefore my final recommendation relies on a simple question, do you already like Duke Nukem? If the answer is yes, then suffer through a mediocre FPS campaign to spend some quality time with the Duke. If you haven’t played any other Duke Nukem games, then start with Duke Nukem 3D and then consider playing through some of his earlier PC and PS1 appearances before even considering this one.

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