Recent reviews by Iridar

I don't usually play platformers nor indie games, so this is the best one I've ever played. In terms of the atmosphere, a strong nostalgia blast all the way back to the era of PlayStation 1 platformers, but with much better gameplay. Don't be put off by simplistic graphics, they don't really have a negative impact on how it feels to play. If anything, the world and characters are quite charming.

It's not absolute perfection - the map could've been better, and generally the world can be a bit confusing to navigate, but for the price it's an amazing experience.

Very beautiful game with very bad gameplay. Feels like the game is actively punishing you all the time for no reason.

Imagine playing an actually fun game with someone standing right beside you, and slapping you all the time, saying "No, this is wrong! Stop! What are you doing! Idiot! No, you were supposed to parry this! Why aren't you parrying?! Look at the enemy! No, not this enemy, that enemy!", with every slap chipping away at your hard-to-refill health bar.

Props to saber for trying to do something new. Too bad it's crap.

Initially I got this game on release, it was in a terrible state, so I refunded it at the time.

Two years later, I convinced two of my other friends to try it, in addition to a fourth friend who has a lot of hours in Darktide, and he was able to provide a lot of useful guidance. Despite all of that, the game just isn't fun to play.

Melee combat is okay, but very simple and superficial, 90% of the time you just make wide swings with your weapon to quell a horde of low-tier enemies. I still firmly believe that first person view is just super counter-productive to this kind of gameplay, and works against the player. Vermintide, another Fatshark's game, has the same issue.

Ranged weapons just somehow feel off, shooting guns doesn't feel right.

The environments are generally pretty dark and hard to navigate. I think the idea was to make the player feel uneasy and under pressure, but actually it's just annoying.

The unique, high-tier enemies are hard to recognize from chaff, and hard to tell apart from each other. Enemies that require completely different tactics look exactly the same to untrained eye. Left 4 Dead, a spiritual predeccessor of this genre, didn't have that problem at all.

Overall, what this game does well, isn't fun, and what could be fun, isn't done well.

The only good thing about this game are the visuals. The environments, and weapon and armor models are gorgeous and fit the warhammer aesthetic perfectly. The character banter is also excellent, albeit somewhat disorienting if you're gonna play with a group of friends in voicecomms.

Overall this game is a huge letdown, it seems this particular studio just really sucks at realizing its own potential.

Spoiler-free review.

Impressions

What an amazing experience. Riven is a glorious sequel to Myst, and both these games will make you feel smart like no other game can.

In both games you arrive into a place full of mystery. You get bits and pieces of information, and at first everything will be very confusing, and you will have no idea where you are, where you must go and what you should do.

But eventually you start piecing everything together, solving puzzles, and the world will unravel before you. Stumbling around for hours like a blind kitten until everything clicks together and you figure out a way to move forward is extremely gratifying.

The in-game screenshot & notes feature is a brilliant quality of life addition, but expect to still be required to take notes and make some napkin drawings to keep track of tips you discover.

The visuals are stunning, the world and locations are gorgeous, and a pleasure to marvel at. Sound design and music are also on point.

That's the good parts so far. Unfortunately, there are some downsides.

Technical issues

The game's stability, particularly in VR mode, leaves something to be desired. I bought Riven on release and tried using it in VR right away, and the game would crash the moment I'd try moving around. Perhaps the issue was patched out since then, I haven't checked.

In normal mode tha game would sometimes crash as well, but the auto save does a good job, and I never lost any progress.

Performance ins't amazing either, moving around some locations caused hitches and frame drops, despite me having a *very* powerful gaming PC.

Gameplay issues

On several occasions, my progress was stumped purely because some tips / interactable objects were not highlighted clearly enough. You can blame this on haste and lack of attentiveness, but I still think it's a legitimate problem. Probably caused by transitioning from the original frame-by-frame design of the game into a realtime 3d space.

Another annoyance is traversal. Vast majority of playtime in this game is spent on moving around and between locations, and often the path between where you are and where you must go is convoluted, and requires multiple loading screens and waiting for painfully slow animations of interactable objects.

Conclusion

If you enjoy puzzle games at all, I cannot recommend Riven enough, despite the technical issues and small gameplay annoyances.

And do yourself a favor, and avoid cheating by looking at walkthroughs. Even if you're stumped and roam aimlessly for hours. Trust me, all of the game's puzzles can be figured out if you pay attention and think, with no need to look into outside sources. I cheated only once, and I regret it endlessly, because the answer was right before me, but I was impatient.

I'm a huge Starship Troopers fan and a veteran FPS player, but this game just doesn't feel nice to play. Basic tasks like running around and shooting bugs just don't feel right. Guns handle like ass, hit sound is awfully chirpy, bright red projectiles are ugly and don't make sense, and overall this game feels like it was made in 2010s.

Positive review is not available in this region.

It takes a couple hours to get going, but the combat is incredibly fun. It sets a new bar on how arcade space combat should feel like. The gameplay is very reminscent of Freelancer. Overall this game is way better than I expected.

There will be no spoilers in this review, so read safely.


In order not to walk away disappointed, you must clearly understand what this game's genre is.

Aliens: Dark Descent is not a shoot-everything-that-moves action game, like Aliens vs Predator or Aliens Fireteam Elite, and it's not a let-me-spend-an-hour-planning-one-turn tactical game like XCOM.

Dark Descent is a stealth tactical action game with some base management between missions. If you heard of Partisans 1941, Dark Descent has very similar gameplay, with the main differences being that you largely can't control individual soldiers.


As an Aliens fan, I enjoyed the hell out of this game. My first playthrough on normal difficulty took around 33 hours.

To me it felt like the developers of this game sat down for a month and repeatedly watched Aliens (1986) frame by frame, meticulously analyzing it in order to convert the movie into enjoyable gameplay mechanics, and by Giger, they succeeded.

And unlike Fireteam Elite, none of the Prometheus and Covenant pathogen nonsense made it into this game, for which I'm very grateful.

Though to be clear, the game doesn't follow the plot of the movie, it has its own self-contained story, set in the same universe.


I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of cinematics between missions that you don't often see nowadays, even in AAA games.

Unit animations are nothing to write home about, but most of the time you're zoomed out far enough not to get bothered by them.

Voice acting is not amazing, but it gets the job done.


As you move through the missions, you are generally trying to stay undetected. If you are detected, you will have to fight some enemies, but usually you will be trying to escape and hide until enemies stop looking for you.

At any point in time, you can bring up tactical pause and aim your abilities, but some enemies are very agile, so you have to predict where they will be by the time the ability activates.

Abilities require line of sight to wherever you're aiming them, but most of the mission space is usually pretty claustrophobic and full of line of sight breakers, and since you can't control individual soldiers, getting the right soldier into the right position to fire an ability can feel like an exercise in cat herding.

Being unable to aim most of the abilities at specific enemies, and being unable to just tell a soldier to use a specific ability at a specific area/enemy, and have that soldier automatically move into line of sight, make the gameplay feel very constrained and awkward.

Most of the abilities are useful for holding off chokepoints, and while there is a decent amount of that during the campaign, most of the time you're just moving around between areas trying to stay hidden, and most of the abilities don't really help with that.

Getting rushed at close range can particularly make you feel naked, as there's not much you can do once enemies make it to your soldiers.

Overall, combat in DD gets the job done, and at times recreates the tense moments of the movie very well, but still could use a lot of improvement.


The stealth mechanics in this game are clear and transparent, but herding your squad of cats around the map can feel pretty tedious, especially when you're trying to move through an enemy lair undetected.

Overall, having to stay undetected as you move around feels more as a nuisance, and not something you do just for the thrill of it, like in Deus Ex. You do it to survive, and while it can bring that tension and atmosphere, it can also start feeling boring and tedious.

That said, being able to just say f**k it and come in with the guns blazing, if you want to, does make the whole thing easier to endure, though it will be your soldiers paying the price for your impatience.


Trying to avoid spoilers, but just in case: The story starts strong and down to earth, but later takes a weird turn, and at some point makes the protagonists fall down a pit of moral ambiguity and hypocrisy, that personally left me disappointed. It doesn't help that the motivation of the main villain is never properly explained. The atmosphere stays tense the entire time, though somewhat suffers due to those weird plot twists, especially closer to the end.


Having your soldiers get additional gear as you level them up feels amazing, but soldier customization itself is a bit barebones, as there's not many options to choose from, and most of the faces are ugly. And apparently whoever is responsible forgot that blonde hair color exists :D

Overall, you can customize your soldiers enough to be somewhat distinct from each other, but forget about recreating your favorite characters from real life or other media in anything other than the name.


I've encountered a handful of bugs during my campaign and one crash. I can't say they ruined my experience, but I'm pretty tolerable to that kind of thing.


To be honest, while enjoying this game very much, I don't really see myself starting another playthrough any time soon, especially on the higher difficulty.

Combat and stealth mechanics are a bit rough around the edges, and due to this the gameplay just isn't enjoyable enough to want to come back to it.

Also, I don't do well under pressure, and everything in this game is about pressure. You're not solving tactical or stealth puzzles, you're trying to survive, and any mistake can spiral out of control and cost your soldiers their lives. Just reloading a save when something very bad happens is how I played this game, but it's hard to pace yourself to still feel challenged.

Another issue that's bad for replayability is there's just one way to play this game, and there's not enough variety in soldier or equipment progression to experiment with different approaches.


Despite all my gripes with this game, it's still amazing, and a very faithful recreation of the atmosphere and the universe of the Aliens movie, so as long as you're a fan, and are not completely averse to this game's genre, I wholeheartedly recommend you give it a shot.

What an absolute baller of a game.

Updated review after 22 hours of playtime, which includes all of the campaign missions played through several times.

I'm a huge fan of the Aliens franchise, and I played almost all games made for it. Aliens: Fireteam Elite is best of what has been done in this field since Aliens vs Predator 2 (2001).

Thematically, the game is extremely faithful to the franchise, and is full of references to all of the movies and some of the novels. There are lots of dialogues and intel you can uncover and learn more about the universe. It definitely doesn't feel like a soulless, empty husk of a cash grab game. This game was done by people very passionate about what they are doing and it shows every step of the way.

Visually, the game is very well executed. Characters, weapons and the environment are all consistently great. Something that strikes the eye the most is lack of lip sync / jaw movement when characters are talking, and some of the particle effects are on the cheap side, but it's not a big deal.

Gameplay-wise, the game can be summarized as "Left 4 Dead, but third person and with Aliens". There are many familiar mechanics: characters have a large amount of health, and enemies gradually whittle it away. Each player can carry one medkit, and use it on themselves or someone else. Low-tier enemies attack you more or less all the time, but they're not much of a threat and easily dealt with. Higher tier enemies appear from time to time, they can be identified by having healthbars. They have special abilities and take more effort to take down. As you progress through the mission, you will encounter areas where you can rest and rearm before pulling a switch that will trigger a horde attack. Weapons, except for backup sidearms, have finite ammo, which needs to be replenished from ammo crates.

For things more unique to this game, the player can choose from at least 4 soldier classes, each with their own weapon selection and abilities. There are weapon upgrades, consumables, different weapons and abilities can be unlocked by finding them on missions or leveling up. Each large mission is split into several smaller episodes, and you have an option to "bow out" and quit inbetween episodes.

The game is a three player co-op, but you can play it single too, in which case you'll get two bot companions, which seem to be surprisingly competent, though they don't get any of the players' special abilities. They are perfectly adequate for playing solo on lower difficulties, but on higher difficulties you will want human companions.

The character customization has a satisfying amount of options - a dozen faces and a few voices to choose from, and lots of cosmetic options for the armor (one piece) and head (one piece), as well as many emotes, some of which are references as well.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the game and massively enjoying it.

It's very sad to see a perfectly great game being review bombed by entitled kids that demand Triple A quality out of the box for a game made clearly not by a Triple A studio, and not on a Triple A budget.

I can wholehertedly recommend this game to all Aliens fans and people who enjoy Left 4 Dead -style of gameplay.