Recent reviews by JcqC

Went in blind without even reading the store page and usually don't really look for Metroidvania games but damn the soundtrack & background art really is 6/5 and sets the game apart from the rest of its compatriots.

Play with controller unless you want to have a bad time with a keyboard and it's not exactly a long game but it doesn't force you to backtrack or play the game multiple times if you want to see all of the quests and treasures hidden in the maps.

Well the level up/status tutorial felt really immersion breaking at the start but that's about the only negative thing I can thinkg of, Colonel & Snake "press button to activate your codec" from PS1 tier.

vanripper & Mittsies are back with a simple game that makes you an offer you can't refuse.

Pinnacle of culture included, and as with Helltaker the core gameplay loop is simple but easy to catch and adds more depth/tweaks as it progresses so it doesn't get stale.

And a similarly domebanger soundtrack and most of all it's free so what do you have to lose? Other than time and hairline if you're bad at video games.

If you really like the game you can buy the lossless soundtrack from bandcamp and support high cultural value developer on Steam by bying the artbook & recipe DLC.

Oh boy I should have done the latter half of hard mode sober as it's now 04:00 in the morning and I'm going to need a sauna to feel clean from all this sweat.

And maybe caffeine and early breakfast into allnighter, instead of more gin.

I want whatever Konami suits are smoking if they think 70e is a fair ask for a game where they haven't given devs time or budget to fix the numerous performance & UE5 issues and it has been nearly three months since launch and more or less no communication with the playerbase.

Glad I paid 40e for this game on a sale and for unoptimized garbage that's the highest I'm willing to go when you get frequent dips to 40 fps on 4080 Super at 1440p and most of the time GPU load is hovering around 40~80% because you-know-why.

Technical issues aside the remake itself is great and for the sale price mentioned above there's plenty of old memories to rekindle here for the old fans and for new players to the series, unlike in Silent Hill 1 and 3, you don't need to know about Silent Hill nor the cult as this is James' own personal doomspiral of torment into abyss, canonically anyway.

I'm glad they added UFO ending to this as a homage though the other secret ending was bit eh, just bit more trippy variant of the canon ending so I guess that could be the new canon.

If you wish to have less UE5 garbage artifacts, noise, and issues please do yourself a favor and head to NexusMods and sort this game's mods by most downloaded and grab the ultra plus and the shader optimization mods.

Wish there was more, the menu theme is still a favorite bgm revisit every now and then.

Do yourself a favor and play it blindly without looking at guides or achievements, and obviously with headphones.

This game took a simple aesthetic and threw in soul to its atmosphere if you can get immersed into the mood by preferably playing it in dark.

As much as I would love to give this game thumbs sideways sadly that is not possible and I have to lean on negative.

It has been quite a few weeks since launch and there hasn't been enough communication on Steam or a roadmap from the developers about how they aim to polish this game's performance.

With a 4080 Super I'm forced to run this game with framegen and thus have memory leaks (~14GB VRAM, ~12GB system memory, and whopping 20~30GB page file) just to run the game at high preset at 1440p and to avoid frames dragged under 60 FPS, not just dips, drags.

Which is frankly absurd, I would expect 1% lows to dip there but the developers felt either pressure from the expectations, the previous delays or just financial pressure to get money in, and decided to go forth with the launch either way.

IF you end up buying this game I implore you to take a look at nexusmods and grab the most popular mods in regards to optimization, shader performance and input.

I bought this game for 45€ from an initial sale since I want to support the developers that made the previous trilogy I have so much enjoyed and they deserve money but let's just say that the game's launch day condition is rocky is an understatement.

I even created a grump's Steam group for this, alias optimizepls, because I'm quite frankly annoyed by the state of gaming and how somehow asking for a polished product is too much to expect.

PS. A major update with 1800 fixes just hit before the winter holidays but I will revisit this game in January and hopefully they have addressed the memory leaks if not performance by then, hopefully so I can amend the review.

Yeah this was worth a revisit, the engine has some funky bugs even now but at least it's not as bad TEW1 was where you even today 2024 need console commands to make the game work bit better because buggy vsync implementation.

Nice third game bait at the very end but I doubt we'll see that one since it has been so long since TEW2. And hopefully less open world memes next time, or at least put some more content to it than resource/upgrade hoboing, bit more side quests would have been nice.

After experiencing the technical jank of Silent Hill 2 (UE5) I decided to revisit this game (UE4) and even with 4080 Super the game set to 1440p and High & RT off settings, or alternatively High & RT & DLSS on, I got massive frametime spikes during almost every cutscene and area transition.

It was one of the main reasons I originally bought the game from <30e sale because if you can't even hit 60 fps consistently at 1440p with then 3080 and now 4080 Super then yeah, I'm not going to pay a full price tag for technically subpar product.

Only one crash in 8 hour revisit this time but had to reload about three times when I got stuck in terrain and couldn't unstuck myself or a cutscene wouldn't trigger because I ran past a event trigger or whatever and just stood there knowing from memory that there should be an cutscene now but why am I not getting it.

Grab it from sale, worth it solely for the audio and presentation work, though the split world gimmick can get bit tiring when most of the time the puzzles and hilights are solely in one or the other side of the world.

If you like Commandos' like games then this is quite good and has aged well in the last years. The presentation with the cast and setup is fantastic and the soundtrack is stellar.

Some of the viewcone angles and mechanics feel bit too demanding about near pixel perfection or absolutely precise timing, combined with the fact that you can't chain actions with the shadow realm stuff like set them to hit enemies and start dragging the bodies to another location.

There's lots of replay value in the game but if you have any games in the backlog all of the optional medal stuff feels bit too gimmicky and slow to grind through, compared to games like Hitman games of last decade where the experiementation and in-game achievements come naturally if you like to experiment with the sandbox.

Easy grab from a minor sale with the Aiko's Choice expansion, some of the positioning and "who should I knock out first to make this easier" will tickle your brain stem a bit if you haven't played these kinds of games in a long time.

To wrap this up with the Part 1 review, the latter half where all of the payoff and actually interesting stuff happens with the story, its world and characters but it all ends on a sequel bait between "fricking really?" and "okay I might be interested to know more", from a sale price.

The same technical/presentation comments carry over from the first part's review since these two should have been a single game in the first place and plot carries over quite seamlessly so you get bit of a breather between the serious moments and clandestine mythological conspiracy theories. And no the latter wasn't allusion to the separate adult only DLC content but yeah, there's some balance here with all three ingredients.

The ending paints this out as trilogy that was hacked apart to be a long winded prologue, actual content and oops we don't have time to do anything interesting with the world's background lore outside of the Kunai Organization's village, single mall and the Sealing Stone locations. I did laugh out at the ending where it was basically alluded that the main cast wakes up in a world that nobody wanted, how apt and but color me interested.

As a crowd sourced game the part 1 moniker missing from the title I'd feel robbed if I didn't buy this and the part 2 in tandem and go through them back to back and given how it's split apart and comments below I'll give this one "No" and "Yes" recommendation for the part 2, a package deal of sorts if you will.

Part 1 here really feels like massively outstretched prologue where nothing of real importance happens. And as you can see from the game time I kept losing interest and alt-tabbed to do something else when the game has enough length to be a 6~9h thing at best.

The background art is okay but the monster and enemy spritework is just downright early 2000s, not to mention kinetics for sprite work/action vfx is really dated and at times even rely on fmv that scales really badly from the native resolution the game runs at.

The relationships between the cast members are also not given any time to develop and are just slammed in, no surprise as you need to deliver what the crowd sourcing probably was paying for, a payoff for their expectations.

At least the "flower gardening tips for adults" content is pretty decent but not free which is another minus, but a bonus how it actually connects with the characters growth after and before the scenes.

The comedy and antics between the cast members, the decent soundtrack and promise of part 2 waiting in the backlog are the reasons I forced myself through this. So yeah if these types of games are of interest to you, buy the games and the dlc in a bundle/sale.