Recent reviews by Big Sneeze

This is good in the sense that a couple or two good friends can play through this and have fun banter with eachother as you deal with activities and puzzles that fluctuate from simplistic to mildly challenging (at random). It should be noted though that most co-op games have the capacity to do this.

I'd like to make particular mention of the fact that the story of this game is actually really bad and the main characters are pretty much psychopaths. They decide - on a PURE WHIM - that to reverse the spell that turned them into toy dolls, they have to make their daughter cry by tearing apart the sentient toy elephant which is her favorite toy. They proceed to tear her ears and limbs off as she is begging for mercy. It has no effect on the spell. They tortured a magic creature and made their daughter cry. The game makes no mention of it or attempt to chastise the main characters whatsoever.

I highly recommend this game for those who are looking for hidden gems from past eras in gaming. On the surface, there's a unique kart-ish racing game here, with a gimmick most similar to Lego Racers, where you build your own power ups by driving through colored gates in different orders. This in itself is fine, there's a sweet PS1 atmosphere with a very enjoyable soundtrack to accompany it all, and a relatively fun little remote controlled buggy "bouncy" physics to the driving.

However, not all is as it seems. You will find that you can unlock additional buggies. Some are rewards for progressing in the hub by winning races but what about the many others that stay locked? Well I do not want to spoil it completely so that you have a reason to play and find out for yourself, but I recommend taking a trip over into Time Trial mode and exploring the levels. The way you unlock many buggies is really unique and - though I definitely view this with nostalgia glasses - I find it still a deeply fascinating example of game design to this day.

Having to make my brain work together with my girlfriend's brain to haphazardly paint a shared mental picture of an OC DONUT STEAL weird logic switch puzzle the devs made up might have been cute and interesting once, twice, maybe three times, but this is simply not something you should be making the player do over and over and over in all your games it seriously does NOT carry the game for you guys.

Okay, imagine you are placed in solitary confinement and given a Rubik's Cube but you've never seen a Rubik's Cube once in your life. You don't know it's a puzzle that can be solved, you don't know what the solved state looks like, you don't know every row can be rotated on both axis, you don't know that all sides can be made to be one uniform color. You're not allowed to leave your imprisonment until you solve this cube you know nothing about. Now imagine that you also only have one half of the Rubik's Cube and someone locked in a different room has the other half of it and all you two have is a radio to communicate. You both have to work together to solve the Rubik's Cube, without knowing what it even is or being able to see the other person's half.
And then you know when you are working on a Rubik's Cube and you turned like 7 out of the 9 squares on one side Yellow? So close but you ultimately have to mess the surface up and start moving everything around again and make it less orderly before you can get close to the solution again? Imagine that frustration but in co-op, where half the surface is split away and in your partner's hands so you have to verbally communicate back and forth for several minutes to realize you're in an "almost solved but not really" state, and then you BOTH have to frustratingly undo the progress to find the real solution.

This is how the majority of the puzzles work in We Were Here and honestly, it's just not fun. There's no real life applications for the skillsets being demanded of the players, it's a completely unergonomic, anti-human game design. Einstein and Feynman weren't in separate cities when they cracked the atom, and if they would have been, they wouldn't have been prevented from sending eachother pictures or other varied information.
Presenting esoteric, random puzzles that are split between two people who then must communicate the nonsense between eachother until the two people's brains can together paint some semblance of a full picture is simply not a fun or ergonomic or sensible activity it's a complete chore.

The devs need to go back to the drawing board if they intend to continue this franchise because this is just getting too much. The puzzles where you have to describe weird shapes to eachother and come up with things like "this symbol looks like Shrek, press the Shrek button" are cute and fun. Puzzles where both players can see the puzzle are way better, too. There's puzzles that have one player doing most of the work - these are a little boring but even they can stay.

Again, though, the "Rubik's Cube split between two isolated players" style needs to be finished or relegated to "Final Boss Puzzle" because they're not fun in the least. I'm not an Eldritch creature training to ascend as an Outer God, give me human puzzles that feel good to do. If they insist on keeping these around, they need to expand players' tools. Give us picture-in-picture view of the other player, or the ability to draw and send the drawings to the other player. I'm sick of describing one half of a complicated logic-switch puzzle with made-up alphabets to my girlfriend who then must describe her half back to me.

It's a mixed bag but overall a completely fine way to play these three classics.
Aesthetically, the vibe of Crash isn't quite right and overall worse, but this has no bearing on the gameplay and the rest of the art direction is fine. The PS1 voice acting cast is simply better but the devs deserve credit for getting the PS2 voice actors back, which do have a cult fanbase.
I'd actually say that Crash Bandicoot 1 feels better to play here than it did in the original PS1 game, as the remake uses a standardized game engine between the three games. It's a remake that isn't perfect but does very little that is wrong.
My biggest criticism is that considering the length the devs went to recreate the game's systems and functions instead of simply porting the original game's code, it's a waste for them to not come up with a few original levels.

In general, it is baffling how in an industry as greedy as this, devs will routinely develop whole suites of creation tools and then not do anything with it anymore after a single game.

Completely unplayable at the moment from a recent patch, you can not get past title screen and nobody on the internet has a workaround as of today. If you see this, play/buy the non-enhanced version instead. There's also a EULA-Roofie fiasco with the entire franchise, but honestly, they are welcome to all my data, let them pretend wasting money and resources to know my browsing history will make them more money (it wont, late stage capitalists are actually extremely bad at economy and waste millions the way you and I breathe air).

Since the game requires a full 4 players to play on the interesting difficulties (or versus) and the general quality of random players is dumpster tier nowadays, I do not think this is much of a good purchase anymore, especially because Vermintide and Darktide are simply better.

The elevator pitch here is:
Take System Shock, one of the first games ever made in the FPS genre and originator of an entire subgenre, and repackage it in modern graphics, changing only the extremely outdated control scheme out with a modern FPS scheme and leaving most everything else regarding gameplay and art style intact.

The result is something that succeeds in the elevator pitch and so is worth your money.
It is not, however, a substantial gaming experience and is suspended purely in the realms of nostalgia and content tourism - sightseeing the past of video gaming in a modern package.

The game design is all very loose, with a lot of things present that do not serve to add any function to the gameplay loop. One of the first things you'll likely learn is that there is really no good reason to hoard a lot of junk to later turn into scrap metal, for example - then, as an extention to such a design, you'll also learn that there is really no need to be hauling a diverse array of weaponry either, as everything will kill the game's enemies all the same.

On that note, the enemies themselves don't ever offer very much excitement. Their biggest feature of note is that the space station's rogue AI, Shodan, can repopulate the level's enemies with some frequency. Respawning enemies are usually unwelcome for my tastes but I find that it doesn't break any fun factor in System Shock. It is lamentable that the sentient and rogue Artificial Intelligence themeing is paired with a very rudimentary enemy AI.

The game's biggest positive is the level design, as it is a sprawling semi-maze, with multiple rooms connecting to multiple other rooms on every floor. Therein lie multiple pockets of Resident Evil "take x item to y location" micro designs worked into the greater macro spread of interconnected rooms. Positional awareness, along with a set of pretty good power puzzles serve as the game's only ability to engage the player's senses, as the combat and gunplay are of a very stock affair.

Lastly, on the visuals. They are too faithful to the original for my liking. The space station is full of goofy neon lights and blocky metal panels. Most areas to be explored simply do not give off any kind of "lived in" sensation, which is - I think - one of the best qualities of the Shock genre. On a related note, the story serves a means to an end but is merely a prologue to the iconic plot of System Shock 2.

Overall, it's a fair purchase and far from the waste of time that millions of other games would be, but it only barely registers as a classic on the technicality of originating something substantial.

Barely a thumbs up.

Final Fantasy II is in an unfortunate state currently. The Pixel Remaster does good work for FF I but is very lackluster for the rest of the titles, such as FF II here. Some quality of life features are good to see and the soundtrack is the best rendition yet by far, making it a valid version to play. The downsides however are the absolutely awful tiny and pixelated sprites for all characters and enemies - seriously, even the GameBoy Advance version has more detailed sprites. There is also a COMPLETE LACK of character portraits and the text is in a small, thin and ugly font size for ants that doesn't fill out the dialogue boxes whatsoever.
In the graphics department, it is a complete and utter case of "What were they thinking???" in almost every department.
The PSP and GBA post-game extra story is also missing. just why...?

Buyer's guide for Final Fantasy II (no perfect solution):
-NES Version: If you want to simply see how the original release looked. Grindy and crude.
-PSP Version: The best graphics, modernized (less grindy) gameplay and access to the extra post-game campaign. However, the soundtrack in this port is pretty weak.
-GBA Version: Same post-game content and gameplay as PSP but a slight downgrade in graphics - though still charming - and a much better soundtrack, if a bit chiptune-y.
-Pixel Remaster: Graphics are completely gutted but by far the strongest soundtrack rendition yet and there are some quality of life features such as map/mini-map, screen resolutions, etc.

[Real playtime is on PS5]

As someone who is generally forgiving towards remakes, I must say that this is probably the worst remake I've ever seen, it's even worse than Resident Evil 3 by a long mile - and that remake was a travesty in itself to begin with, yet this is still even worse.

To the uninitiated, Soulstorm is a re-imagining of Abe's Exoddus for the PS1, which was the second Oddworld game made. While Exoddus was a great success, it was nonetheless not the original vision of the team at the time, with the limitations of the PS1 tech, budget and dev team at the time (supposedly) forcing them to step away from their intended plot. Abe's Exoddus, was nonetheless an absolute masterpiece, which should be the first red flag when we consider that the creative director of the original games - who, to his credit, is still in charge of this developer/publisher after all these years - decided that he simply must throw away the accomplishments of Exoddus and remake the game with what is SUPPOSEDLY the original vision in mind.

The result? One of the worst pieces of trash I've ever seen, and a creative directorship failure that outdoes Ridley Scott's Prometheus/Covenant failboating by a straight mile.

Where the original game was a Prince of Persia inspired slow puzzle-platformer, Soulstorm is a loosely designed, generic action platformer. The plot is much smaller in scope than the PS1 game (bravo) - in fact, Soulstorm is a complete step down in virtually all conceivable aspects from the original game, unless you'd like to split hairs by saying "well the textures are higher res than a PS1 game". Even on a technical graphics level, the PS1 game was more impressive, having to overcome limitations by use of pre rendered sprites, 2D backdrops and CGI sequences that blended together seamlessly with gameplay, versus the pedestrian 3D graphics of today. The lemmings interactions between Mudokons are much less engaging and went from the micro of one, two, maybe a handful of Mudokons to be guided, to the macro of having you direct armies of them in very brainless barely-puzzle sequences. Then, on top of being an unsatisfying feeling action-platformer instead of a methodical, momentum based, slow puzzle platformer, also has a casual slop gigatrash ultraturd addition in the form of scrap metal you can walk over to collect and a crafting menu - wow. It's incredible how one of the most imaginative developer from the 90's has become an absolute pigfeed peddler, incorporating one of the most generic, the quintessential PEDESTRIAN of all pedestrian game features into their creation. Embarrassing...

One of the biggest steps down is the art direction. The dark fantasy world building of the PS1 game's pre-rendered backdrops were amazing. They conveyed a dystopian industrial world so well and really succeeded in making the game feel lived-in and portrayed the world to be in a dire situation. It also presented the play-space perfectly, with the girders, platforms and terrain you can walk on feeling like natural parts of the world that happen to line up for 2D gameplay. Soulstorm completely botches this. The girders, platforms, terrain you can walk on are in most cases inexplicably suspended in mid-air and are almost completely nonsensical. It is literally a design on par with a Sonic game or the Mario vs. Donkey Kong game. The world building is also much worse. The graphics and art direction have been brightened in both color and theme. The game's cutscenes reek of Insomniac Games style "we desperately wish we could be Dreamworks" bozo bungus animation that thinks it's high quality because it makes the cutscene characters have a high polygon count so you can make them have veeery detailed "cute sad baby eyes awww" faces when they feel sad, not understanding that a good world building and story is what you actually need to succeed.

The game flopped hard as it deserved but sadly the creative director thinks it's because the game released immediately onto PS Plus. That might not have helped, but trust me bro, it flopped because it's total garbage.

Oddworld's best outing was on the two PS1 games when it had excellent visual direction with it's dark industrial gothic themes with a dash of goofy humor. Ever since the 2000's, Oddworld Inhabitants have stepped away from high fidelity visuals and focused on presenting Oddworld in empty 3D spaces that feel less lived-in. While that was understandable due to PS2 tech limitations, the developers seem to never have recovered, never thought to step away from the looser visual designs and while they almost rebounded with the remake of the first game, they ultimately just don't understand what they should be doing with the property. In 2025, if you can spend millions on your game, you should have the capacity to create rich environments that rival the 2D arts of the 90's games. If not, THEN JUST USE 2D BACKDROPS AGAIN, YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE 3D GAMES!

Really crazy how the great visionaries of yesteryear are routinely colossal failures in the modern games industry. The limitations at the time really did drive creativity.

Really solid graphics and one or two great gameplay concepts, but there's far too much that is half baked. I think the biggest issue by far though is the ultra casual game design. Every point of interest is pre-marked on the map and there are no gameplay elements that would keep you playing immersively. I can simply sprint from marked location to marked location, ignoring 90% of the map. A game like Red Dead Redemption would slow you down with realistic character animations and subtly inspire a slow and immersed playstyle. Games like STALKER or Metro have enough wildlife and enemy humans littering the map to make you slow down and explore slowly and attentively. In this game, I'd have to be extremely autistic to give the environment enough respect to play immersively. It's just poorly thought out.

Additionally, the combat is quite poor and the base building is fueled by a boring, pedestrian Elden Ring-esque resource collectathon. You even have a scanner that pings resources nearby and you have to - I kid you not - select from like 5 categories of resources to ping, instead of just pinging everything, like anyone is ever going to give a ♥♥♥♥ about this type of "walk near plant and press f" resource gathering, I mean what were they thinking?

The plot is also super pedestrian. I know I'm using that word twice now but here's how pedestrian it is. In the beginning you meet some mysterious adversary who jumps out of a wormhole and attacks you. I instantly said "that's the main character in some other timeline or from the future or whatever". I jumped on the wiki for plot synopsis and yep, I'm correct. Can these devs quite possibly have done a less obvious plot? You aren't the only one who played Infamous bro. I could literally write 100 better stories for this every week of my life if I had to, I mean where do these multi-million dollar projects find these loser "writers"???