Recent reviews by [MM] WMan22

To people who already watch ENA on youtube: They did not skimp out on animation quality for this game, no wonder it took so long to come out. This is like 3-4 ENA episodes worth of stuff to see. Chapter 1 was short but absolutely worth the long wait it took to get here, you just don't get this kind of fully realized artistic vision from much stuff these days.

To the people who have no idea what ENA is: This game is like if LSD: Dream Emulator from the PS1 got modernized and had characters you can actually talk to who are presented in a very Phillips CD-i game type art style. If you don't know what LSD Dream Emulator is, think like, 3D Yume Nikki but more nonsensical.

You take this scene from John Wick 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3d0j_W75no
Then you pour in the essence and atmosphere of Evan Royalty SCP youtube short-style (Specifically Dollhouse and Overlord) horror. Turn it into a video game. That is the elevator pitch for HOLE.

This game needs some graphics optimization since it runs choppier than it has any right to, and the concept is barebones, it's essentially go into an arena, pick up some stuff, leave alive.

But where it excels and becomes a cut above a lot of stuff I've played lately is that it wisely made the decision to make enemy stunlocking and 2 stage reloading core mechanics that you WILL have to contend with, which adds way more than you would think when enemy armor enters into the equation.

You genuinely have to juggle enemies at some points while basically crouching inside an urban foxhole hoping not to get overwhelmed, because they are not down till they bleed their coins.

I got this for full price, and yet I still paid less than the price of a fast food meal, but got an absolute banger of a snack game you can pop in, have some fun, and pop out of.

Describing this as "We have ULTRAKILL at home" could not really be an insult honestly, it's a compliment on how well your gameplay systems work to the point you're getting compared to something beloved.
Outside of some optimization/technical issues like my mouse cursor not getting captured in the window, this game is a really nice look at an otherwise cool roguelite, I just hope it has more depth to the gameplay systems in the final game than a parry window and shot timing.

My main critique is that the soundtrack needs to be less "Royalty free epic music playlist 2025" and have more of a tonal direction of something akin to artists like Zardonic or Celldweller.

I am absolutely this game's target audience due to the writing in regards to overworking yourself to exhaustion hitting pretty close to home, but with that comes the caveat that I am certain I know what the twists will be ahead of time. There's no way Boro wasn't a warrior of some kind in the past, it's obvious if you've known people with that level of meditative calm IRL or are familiar with the tropes of this kind of story. What I'm interested in is the way they will present that revelation. Considering they got the stanley parable writer doing this, I'd imagine the way this is done will at least be interesting, or at least I hope, because if you are already past this arc in your life and have learned the lesson this game is trying to teach before playing it, there is pretty much no reason I felt to pick anything but cooperative/nice dialogue options with Boro unless I'm either trying to roleplay the main character or do the equivalent of an undertale genocide run.

Even if I (think I) know what some of the twists will be ahead of time, I am invested in the characters and wanna see the rest of the game quite a bit, because the presentation and story carries this in a way that is kind of missing from other survivalcraft/farming games I've played. They got C418 to do the soundtrack for this and I could absolutely tell, in a good way. It's very good.

This game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool, a very entertaining warioware type vibe. Soundtrack is S tier thus far and had me head bobbing at points, art style has a unique enough voice to it that you could take a screenshot in most places and I'd go "yeah, mindwave", I know I will like the full game from the demo alone, because I want more.

The game itself? Fun. Very fun. Hell, I'd even recommend the game itself despite me not even liking marvel for years thus not knowing who half of these characters are, but unfortunately Unreal Engine 5 rears its ♥♥♥♥♥♥ head again with crashes and bugs so frequent that it kills your interest in playing this fun game. If this game were made on an engine that wasn't unfinished trash I'd be giving it my full support.

Also, hope you're okay with Netease Anticheat.

A great survival horror experience that runs quite nicely on the Steam Deck. That means it also comes with the drawbacks of older survival horror games too, like lots of backtracking and sometimes getting lost, but that's part and parcel of this genre.

The people in charge of art direction and UI did a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ incredible job on this especially with how consistent it is with the new Half Life: Alyx-esque art direction of Half-Life, this thumbs down isn't for anything they did, they killed it with this and deserve a bunch of praise.

The problem is, no matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, Unreal Engine 5 is an un-optimized mess of an engine that will only be looked back on fondly about 3 GPU and CPU generations ahead from now when we get something even worse with UE6 but at least computers will have a baseline level of processing power to run UE5, just like what happened to UE4 before it.

Additionally, the hit detection just feels floaty, weird, in a way that Half Life 2 doesn't. The problem is that it's very subtle in the ways it feels off, the only way I'd even be able to begin to describe it is to just have 2 computers side by side playing ravenholm, 1 in Half Life 2, the other in this, and just shoot a room full of zombies over and over and noting the way the same weapons feel in both. I also don't like how zoomed in the weapon viewmodel FOV is for the pistol which makes it look enormous. The crowbar's mostly fine, though.

It's a straight 1:1 port with some achievements which, frankly, is exactly what I wanted this to be. And they even added achievements.
I get some occasional audio popping issues on my Steam Deck that I hope get fixed with an update to the game, but otherwise, it's a solid experience just like it was back in 1997. The drawn art style has ensured that outside of some aliasing, this game barely feels like it's aged more than 2 years despite being almost 30 years old.

To be CRYSTAL ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clear, this is not a thumbs down for Doom itself, or the concept of the 30 years of mods you get when you buy this masterpiece of a game that everyone is playing 3 decades later for a reason. I still think you SHOULD buy this, and that it's all but mandatory to do so if you like FPS games even a little bit, but on GOG where you get the original game versions as separate downloads.

I have low time read from steam, but possibly thousands playing doom mods through source ports like Zandronum and GZDoom, the GOG version, and the Xbox 360 version back in the day. Hell, the Doom Infinite mod and Doom: The Golden Souls series alone probably has eaten a hundred hours of my time. EACH.

This thumbs down is for the early access feel of the newfound Kex Port. Not the concept of the Kex Port, I appreciate that it exists, and that nightdive was nice enough to give us this for free, but:

- It is now a 1.07 GB download if you JUST wanna get the .wads to run in a source port, with no beta branch on steam to remedy this anymore like with the unity engine update before the kex update.
- The mod browser has no text search function.
- The Kex port lacks many features we have grown to become used to from source ports, which kinda defeats the purpose of even making this or hosting some of the mods like myhouse.wad which just crash the game.
- The sound mixing is odd. Sometimes you'll kill an enemy, and their voice will cut short too fast. It's hard to reproduce why this happens. Additionally, switching between remixed tracks and original tracks has a HUGE difference in volume.
- Freelook is not a thing. This is the biggest personal problem I have with this port.
- On controllers, analog stick deadzone setting is hard tied with analog stick response curve. This needs to be separated.
- You can no longer use single player maps as deathmatch maps like in the unity port.
- The online server browser does not have good sorting options, similar to the mod downloader menu.
- Input delay seems to be a thing in the kex port.

Fix all these problems and I change my review from negative to positive, because I appreciate the THOUGHT, Nightdive. I really do, don't take this review as a "♥♥♥♥ you" please, that's not the intent. I appreciate that you put work into this and even gave us a whole new campaign, but you need to do better than this otherwise I'm just gonna go back to using source ports after uninstalling the steam version as I always have.