Recent reviews by AV

I love this game. This is the most exciting release we've seen in a long time, probably the best FPS out there right now, and it's free. Sadly, I can't recommend it in its current state due to several major issues.

1. Rampant AA Cheesing: The controller AA in this is nastily overtuned... worse so than other games with this issue. The Finals has a "snap-to-target" on ADS, so you're effectively punished for actually aiming on controller vice just getting in the general vicinity of the target and cheesing ADS snaps. It's just free hits and headshots at the press of a button. Expect your experience with the game to go like this - Do as well as you normally would in an FPS > SBMM up to the point where every match is all just people who know how to abuse the game's egregious controller AA > turn crossplay off > go back to doing as well as you normally would > SBMM up to where it's entirely PC players playing on controller (or using reWASD) to abuse the game's egregious AA.

2. Rampant Cheating: On top of the AA issue, which becomes indistinguishable from outright aimbotting at higher SBMM, cheating in this game is currently run amok. As you SBMM up, recoil script usage becomes increasingly common as well. Anytime you die, the game tells you exactly what all the damage sources were so it's quite obvious when another player is cheating based on their weapon and range and it really ruins the experience.

3. Latency Obfuscation: The game doesn't tell you your, or anyone else's, ping. If it's really bad, there's a lil red icon that'll appear at the side of the screen but you have no way of knowing how your connection is relative to the other players.

I'm waiting to see how they address these issues and will amend the review if they manage to get at least the first two points better under wraps.

This is a solid entry into the franchise that blends the original formula with the charm of Legends and beyond. Fun whether you play solo or online and with tons of replay value. The controls are tight, the visuals and audio are on point, the voice acting and writing are just the right amount of cheesy, and gameplay varies in fun ways based on your character build.

Multiplayer is still plenty active. That said, letting randoms into your games can be a mixed bag as lives are shared among all players.

This review is based on the full game, including all expansions. In addition to developing the narrative, each expansion fundamentally alters the core balance of the game, so please note that different iterations have different pros & cons.

Whether or not you enjoy The Binding of Isaac is going to depend on what you're hoping to get out of your time. While a highly addictive, unique, and occasionally rewarding experience, the game has a wide range of design issues & shortcomings and... since it's built to go on forever... you're pretty much guaranteed to encounter all of them unless you're satisfied with a surface-level experience.

The basic gameplay is simple. This is fundamentally a retro-Zelda inspired shoot-em-up... which sounds great... except for the fact that every single aspect of the game is glued together by a cartoonishly aggressive conceit of the RNG that drives Roguelikes. This is predominately due to the absolutely insane number of power-ups (~200 to start, up to over 700 which you unlock by playing the game over and over again). Again, this sounds great... so what's the problem? Balance. Some of those items are intentionally garbage while others are overpowered or allow for gamebreaking synergies. Some make the game worse just by virtue of being unlocked at all due to diluting the item pool. In and of itself, this all wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that the map layouts, conditions, enemy types/numbers, and really just the entire game are all sort of balanced around a non-existent middleground concept such that for the majority of runs you either effortlessly steamroll them or they're a horrendous slog with very little in between. In hundreds of hours, only a handful of runs after the early game weren't fairly boring due to being a grindy mess (eg. trash items + slog room clears due to large numbers of self-replicating enemies, etc) or an absolute joke (eg. "oh look... I got two items that basically let me hold fire and walk forward with impunity..."). This is supposed to create a sense of wonder at the "variety" the game offers but most of the synergies are just different flavours of "I'm basically an unkillable god now" and while it's interesting the effort that went into the designs of the items/synergies/interactions, the end result eventually just devolves into "huh... neat..." It creates a progression system where the most advantageous skill/knowledge in the game is identifying when to reset a slow run if you're going for unlocks and/or it's going to bore you.

The balance issues created by the game's unique application of Roguelike elements make some flaws in the game's fundamental shmup design stand out painfully and cause/amplify others. For example:

1. The conveyance in the game is intentionally atrocious. You learn to avoid things by getting hit by them outside of a controlled environment. If you haven't seen how an enemy behaves, you usually aren't going to be able to react to it until it's hit you and you memorize what to do. Since you may only see certain enemies, especially bosses, once every few dozen runs or worse, this means you might not have a meaningful opportunity to learn a given enemy at all for a very long time depending on how overpowered you are when you encounter it. The reason this is as big a problem as it is is that once you do learn enemies, you appreciate how mindnumbingly simple they all are to the point that if it wasn't for the artificial obfuscation of their movesets and the game's extreme RNG, the difficulty would be non-existent.

2. The AI is terrible. You can bait enemies, including bosses, into suiciding by repeatedly walking into hazards. Enemies that teleport tend to be the biggest threat due to their capacity for telefrag but aside from that, everything just goes through the motions every time you encounter it.

3. Hit boxes are a bit sloppy and the shot visibility is horrible regardless of visibility enhancements. This is exacerbated by frequent colour palette use and lighting that can make certain enemies and attacks abnormally difficult to see in certain environments.

4. Obfuscation as a mechanic. Pretty much everything about every aspect of the game is concealed from the player until they either learn it through trial and error (a painful experience when something as simple as picking up the wrong item can torpedo your run) or look it up in the wiki. This might be defensible if it wasn't for the fact that there are a ton of details/nuances that you could never learn in a vacuum but that have huge impacts on the gameplay experience (eg. something as simple as knowing certain item synergies, or even knowing what certain items do at all).

5. Poor use of screenspace. This is especially an issue when combined with the conveyance and telefrag problems in that the capacity to be hit by offscreen enemies can be problematic in some runs.

Despite these issues, BoI does have a very strong narrative to it that's reflected well in the general artistic design. However, it's a few hours worth of storytelling at best that's been crammed into a padded gameplay experience. The story progress often revolves around you beating the same bosses over and over and over again. All told, you need to beat the game hundreds of times to 100% it and unlock everything. Thanks to its achievement hell, you can anticipate spending minimum hundreds of hours doing pretty much the exact same things on repeat before completing it. This is one of the most artificially bloated games I've ever played. It's a stairmaster disguised as a mountain.

BoI is a stylish mess at best. A hodgepodge of occasionally polished ideas crammed together with reckless abandon to create as addictive and protracted an experience as possible while offering comparatively negligible substance.

Mick Gordon ♥♥♥♥♥.

It's 4 hours 43 minutes, has 68 absolutely killer (heh) tracks, and includes some of the most iconic compositions in gaming from top talent applying some very cool techniques. If you ever get a soundtrack, this one is worth it.

This includes both modern and OG tracks. Many of the new entries are a unique take on Robin Beanland's original immortal classic "The Instinct" that was a huge part of what made the original Killer Instinct a standout arcade cab in the 90s. Not only is the modern reimagining by Mick Gordon 100% perfect but the thoughtful and thematically appropriate homage paid Robin Beanland throughout keeps things very on point and, frankly, incredibly touching... especially for a game about monsters, men, and metal tearing the ♥♥♥♥ out of each other. This is all a textbook example of how to adapt a core concept to specific characters, settings, and themes without betraying the original creator.

I'll be ♥♥♥♥♥♥ if this isn't one of the most emotional soundtracks of all time. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Feelings and ♥♥♥♥, yo. Laura Shigihara vocals got me like O_O.

This is a wonderful soundtrack overall and worth it for Hela alone... but be warned that it's incomplete. It's missing two of the most powerful and evocative tracks from the game, Just Like Sleep and Illusion.

While I'm still glad to own this and to be able to show more support for the game, this doesn't capture it's full spirit without Just Like Sleep and Illusion included. It still follows the melancholy slow burn of the early game and rising action in its gradual buildup to Hela, but Just Like Sleep and Illusion represent the true climax and catharsis of the story. If you get this, I strongly recommend manually adding those tracks. Also, some of the tracks sound better in game. Not sure if they're remixed here or it's just a matter of the swells being edited.

I love this game. Every character feels unique, the voice acting and dialog are great, and the fights are fun & rewarding. So why can't I currently recommend it? The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ servers......... Iunno what the deal is but this game is running on some godawful potato servers right now and the lag in matches is absolutely horrendous. We can go hours or days without getting a clean match without stuttering/skipping/rubber banding. It's so painful. If they manage to get it fixed I'll update my review but every patch so far has made it worse.

Notes:
- I strongly encourage following this guide to setup the ECWolf source port, which allows for full resolution support, Steam overlay/screenshots, widescreen, automapping, and normal strafing controls. Additional mods can be introduced at that point, if desired.
- This[wolfenstein.fandom.com] is an excellent resource for level maps & secrets.

This includes Spear of Destiny, Return to Danger, and Ultimate Challenge. The three scenarios are similar in that each has 21 total levels with 5 bosses and 2 secret floors, each has us seeking out the Spear of Destiny, and each has the exact same ending cutscene. It is of the same overall quality as the base game and most of the points from my og Wolfenstein 3D review remain true here. However, there are a few core differences with this expansion. First, Return to Danger and Ultimate Challenge feature heavily overhauled presentation and some minor tweaks. Second, each of the three parts of this expansion has a vastly different overall flow & feel. More specifically:

General Changes from Base Game
The transition to having more bosses more frequently greatly improves the feel & flow of Wolfenstein. Similarly, the new themes, enemies, story, and soundtracks help to set this expansion apart from the original.

Spear of Destiny
The first of the three campaigns. Uses all the same assets as og Wolfenstein 3D but with a few additional textures here and there. Its gameplay is a healthy balance of combat and map solving with a fairly steady flow throughout and a more varied approach to enemy layout that sometimes punishes the player for attempts to abuse the AI (eg. situations where we pretty much have to go full on run & gun to survive). Has a pleasant soundtrack. The map layout in this is better than in the original, but secrets are still a bit annoying and some levels on the highest difficult would be virtually impossible without them.

Return to Danger
Completely different audio and visuals throughout. Takes a moment to get used to but I actually prefer the new presentation in that environment textures are more detailed and audio is a bit more complex. The maps almost always feature thoughtful visual tips to alert us to the potential for a nearby secret, which is a breath of fresh air that makes the gameplay a lot more enjoyable. This campaign has, hands down, the most intense action of the og Wolfenstein 3D games. We quickly learn that this campaign was designed with increasingly heavy chaingun use in mind... and it's extremely cathartic with an aggressive combat flow. This is by far my favourite og Wolfenstein Nazi-killing vector as a result. That said, there are 1-2 maps where it's possible to aggro the entire map at once which, while they're still an action-packed chaingun heaven, they can get a little puzzle-like.

Ultimate Challenge
This uses the same, new presentation as Return to Danger but the level design is unnecessarily complex & labyrinthine to the point it just sorta feels like the map makers wanted to fill as much of the map as possible with walls in different ways... even if the result is almost entirely linear. As a result, I find this campaign to be a bit of a slog, getting especially obnoxious by the end. I still enjoyed it overall but it's easily my least favourite Wolfenstein campaign and it overstays its welcome. Also a bit frustrating with this campaign is that it reverts back to having poor or nil visual queues for most secrets. My favourite thing about this campaign is that the final level teases Doom.


Playing this with ECWolf, this gameis arguably worth it at full price or as part of the Wolf Pack, even if you just cherry pick play the campaign that most suits your tastes. As with the original game, however, I would not recommend playing without ECWolf as the vanilla experience has aged poorly.

Note: This guide explains how to quickly/easily edit the game's conf file to correct the aspect ratio so it isn't stretched. This will also allow for use of the Steam Overlay and the taking of screenshots.

Police Quest: SWAT is an outstanding piece of edutainment and serves as an impressive 1990s SWAT simulation in terms of the scenarios, overall realism, and depth of technical details.... but the gameplay is atrocious. Basically, it's a game that makes me want to enjoy it then does everything in its power to make that almost impossible.

Unlike its predecessors in the Police Quest Series, SWAT knows exactly what it wants to be. It ditches the coke-fueled, terrible writing to embrace a fully educational, maximum immersion approach that's more of a training simulation than a game.... which is actually fantastic. There's hours worth of in-game technical documentation to browse through, recorded interviews with SWAT veterans (best part of this), training demos, and relatively polished FMV briefings, training, and execution. The general presentation is solid. There are only a handful of actual "call ups," ie. the real-world scenarios where you're doing actual non-training SWAT stuff, but each scenario plays differently depending on whether you're an assaulter, element lead, or sniper and there is RNG that makes it so the scenarios are different each time regardless of our position. This is a pretty cool approach that creates a ton of replayability, if not for the game's drawbacks.

There are several issues that prevent this excellent bit of training simulation from being a properly enjoyable game. First, expect to spend way, way, waaaaaaaaaaayyyy more time than you're comfortable with doing repetitive drills and training exercises between callups and when unlocking qualifications (just like real SWAT would). This is "realistic" and the training exercises are well done.... but this takes realism to a level of pedantry that has us feeling like we should be collecting a paycheck for playing in that we're literally just sitting there, bored, on-call, waiting for something to happen. Iunno... props for the commitment to realism, I guess, but at the end of the day I want control over how my playtime is being spent, not RNG to mimic irl monotony. The next critical issue is that the controls are absolutely terribad. It's not the end of the world that scenarios generally require the exact, explicitly correct course of action, as we want the game to be accurate, but it's bs that its sometimes harder figuring out what to click & where to do the correct action when we already know what the correct action is. Lastly, skipping cutscenes is finicky as hell. Sometimes we can, sometimes it doesn't want to let us... this wouldn't be the end of the world except for the fact that, combined with the controls being so bad, you will get to watch obnoxiously long death reels while trying to figure out exactly where to click the Slice-the-Pie command on a specific screen so it registers, etc.

I would recommend this to anyone hardcore interested in police work or SWAT tactics circa 1990s. The game has a ton of educational and historical value, it's just completely missing any semblance of gameplay polish. Had the controls been better fleshed out and had we been given more direct control over when we do in the call-up scenarios (and manual scenario customization options, if we wanted), this could have been a phenomenal game. This all has nothing to do with its age, it's just a game that fails to live up to its full potential due to poor quality control. This is a game that I find myself really, really wanting to like in that it's not without its charms but it's objectively a mess overall. If you still decide you're interested, I strongly suggest waiting for a 90% off sale.

Notes:
- This guide provides a link to the BStone source port, which allows for higher resolution, widescreen support while preserving aspect ratio, increased texture resolution, better controls, and 3D audio support. Contrary to what's written in the guide, the easiest way to install the source port is to extract the zip to your install directory and rename bstone.exe to dosbox.exe, which will allow you to run the game normally through Steam.
- This[jalu.ch] is an excellent map resource if you want to find all the secrets and extra levels in the game.

Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold was released about a year and a half after Wolfenstein 3D using the same engine. It takes full advantage of the engine and plays kinda like Wolfenstein 3D on crack, improved in every way. Unfortunately, this game was released exactly one week before Doom, so despite its quality it ended up being relatively obscure in comparison.

If you like Wolfenstein, you will love this. It's super fun, has a great style/aesthetic & overall feel, there's a ton of enemy variety, the soundtrack is funky, the palette & animations pop, level design is smart and diverse, weapon variety creates increasingly satisfying run & gun gameplay, and the game has aged gracefully (especially with the BStone source port). Unlike Wolfenstein, which grows increasingly tedious and labyrinthine as the game progresses, Blake Stone's levels are much more balanced. The first few missions are arguably the most complex and each mission has a bit of a different feel to separate it from the others. This results in the overall gameplay actually having a bit of a subtle but noticeable dramatic structure to it, which is pretty neat and not something I was expecting.

It's easy to tell that tons of love went into the making of this. The manual includes a comic book with the backstory (in addition to the Story option on the main menu). Every frame on every enemy looks fantastic. We can not only blow holes in some of our enemies but we can actually see through those holes as they die, which is extremely cool. The run & walk speeds feel better than Wolfenstein's. Enemy stagger feels less cheesy than in Wolfenstein; in Wolfenstein, you can permastagger any enemy with the machine gun but here you only get a momentary stagger occasionally so every enemy is as capable of dishing it out as we are. There's no firing through solid objects (opening/closing doors & around corners) like in Wolfenstein. We can backtrack to previous levels to find secrets we missed or to stock up on supplies. It launched with a a fantastic in-game automap function which Wolfenstein lacked. It's just a solid game if you're into this style of FPS and there is a lot of gameplay to be had here with 66 fresh feeling levels to climb through. Also, the Plasma Discharge Unit, which handles like a rapid fire grenade launcher, feels incredible in this.

The few negatives are a bit nitpicky but worth mentioning. The game has an interesting scoring system that grades us on how much treasure we find, how many enemies we kill, and how many informants we keep alive. Scientists can be informants or enemy combatants and the only way to tell the difference is to pop a round off in the vicinity to see who attacks us or to talk to them (friendlies give supplies). This adds a lot of depth to the play, especially when we get scenarios with friendlies mixed with bad guys such that we can't just go in blasting or rely on splash damage, but there are a very few levels where this mechanic is a bit annoying due to informants blocking our path temporarily or standing close to explosives which we need to destroy to 100% the map. Only like 1% of the levels had them be a pain, however. Another minor annoyance is that some levels have Plasma Alien generators, that infinitely re-spawn these very dangerous but squishy energy alien thingies. The mechanic isn't explained anywhere, however, so in one of the early levels it's possible to waste a huge chunk of ammo before it's obvious they keep coming forever, since they're cockblocking the way into a room and we can't actually see them spawning. Once we know about the mechanic it's not that big a deal, however, and creates a solid "oh ♥♥♥♥" feeling whenever we see the Aliens, panicking to see if they're standalone or as part of a generator swarm, as the generators are only in a few maps.

I wish I had known about this when I was younger but it was still a blast with the source port. Worth it at full price if you're a fan of this type of FPS.