Recent reviews by Nic5 Cyprus

I can't believe that they gave Terry from Smash Bros his own game

Short game but I'd say it's worth the price. Blitz Games was the developer of Frogger 2 on the PS1, which is widely regarded as one of the best Frogger games. Soon after that game released they started work on the third game but Konami turned them down because they were already working on a 3d platformer starring a new version of Frogger, the Godawful Frogger: The Great Quest. Instead of scrapping their work Blitz Games redesigned Frogger into Zapper The Cricket.
Getting this game to run is a bit difficult but there's a guide in the community tab that helps you set the resolution to 1080p and I think with some tinkering it's also possible to run this game on the Steam Deck. Atari/Infogrames should release this on other systems, like the Nintendo Switch, too because I think this is a hidden gem.

I mean if you already have the old version then might as well upgrade it to the current one, it's only $7. This seems to be the unpatched day 1 version of Global Match interestingly. I remember when it released on the other platforms the rollback had issues too but they were addressed with a patch. Now why didn't SNK just release the patched version from the get go I don't know but maybe they're working on a day-one patch specifically for PC. Either way, I doubt the rollback is gonna stay broken for long and everything else besides that works fine (though if you have an nvidia you might wanna limit the fps to 60 from the nvidia control panel because the game runs too fast, which was also an issue with the old steam version)

Capcom failed but the fans picked up the pieces of this game and molded it into something a lot better. If you are at all interested then buy this game right now that's in a discount and then check out Marvel vs Capcom Infinite & Beyond which is a graphics and balancing mod for this game. Hopefully this will give this game a new wave of fans and revitalise its community.

20 years. I wasn't there since day one but I was ever since the Orange Box back in 2007. Honestly what's there to be said about Half Life 2 that wasn't already said? The fact that you're even here means you have at least heard of what it did for the gaming industry. I think everybody needs to play Half Life 2 at least once in their lives because this really is a game that changes your perspective on fps games and video games in general.
Other games of the time that need to be remastered with mods or otherwise in order to be able to be played in an acceptable state nowadays. However, Half Life 2 doesn't need any of that and honestly it doesn't feel dated in any way in my eyes. That's why I always push back on the idea that it's a "boomer shooter". It's not a game just for the people who played it back in the day and are nostalgic about it. The added features that were added on the anniversary update, like the workshop, are the cherry on top. Yeah, the shooting and gunplay is a bit "vanilla" now but that's because of how monumental it was at the time which caused every future Valve fps game, and many non Valve games, to either literally build off it or copy it.
After you're done with it might I recommend playing Synergy, which allows you to play the campaign online with others. Even though it wasn't build for more than one player the dumb fun you can have with it is crazy. Anyway, launch it and play as you're listening to the 2 hour documentary.
Speaking of which, near the end of the documentary it's finally revealed that Episode 3 was in the works only for 6 months and that Valve abandoned it to work on Left 4 Dead. It's incredibly tragic and even the devs said that this was a mistake and that they should have gone back to it. However, later on Gabe says that shipping Half Life 3 is Valve's obligation towards gamers. To me this means that HL3 is not only in active development but that we'll most definitely see it soon enough.

If you play Duke Nukem 3D, you like Duke Nukem 3D

This game is the third entry in the free to play mobile run and gun games released by Tencent with Contra Returns and Megaman X Dive being the other two. It plays exactly like those right down to the automatic aiming and customisable weapons and heroes. I'd say this game is better than the others and the devs did a good job adapting the 2d art in 3d (though if you ask me nothing beats the good old Neo-Geo graphics). However, I feel like they could have done better in the particle effects and death animations because they just don't feel as spectacular as they should. There is a story here and the levels are original, they're not just reused from other Metal Slug games. To play you have to create an account and always be connected to the internet, as is tradition with these games. I prefer playing this game on Steam rather than mobile because here I can use a controller and I'm not limited to my phone's battery and internet. Though I'm pretty sure that your save data are saved to Tencent's cloud service so they carry over and thus you can play this game on both with no issues.
With this game, Metal Slug Attack Reloaded and the upcoming Metal Slug Tactics game we are in a revival era for the franchise. However, all these projects are spinoffs and are made by other studios instead of SNK. I will always yearn for Metal Slug 8, and this is an ok hold over until then, but there's no word by SNK when or if a real Metal Slug sequel is going to happen.

A very underappreciated hidden gem of the late 2000s. Radical Entertainment used the knowledge they gained while making Hulk Ultimate Destruction and also the PS2 and PS3 Spiderman games (since the game was published by Activision several devs of those games aided in the development of this game). Unlike these games though you actually get to play as what's essentially the villain. You control Alex Mercer, an amnesiac scientist and winner of the edgiest attire of the 2000s, who after being seemingly killed woke up in the morgue with superhuman abilities and also found out that he can't die. In the game you are tasked with finding out who's behind a zombie infection in Manhattan and also getting revenge from those responsible.
Since you are the villain the game rewards you with causing as much mayhem as possible by giving you credits that you can use on upgrades. You automatically gain credits after beating a story mission and you can gain even more by finding and completing various side missions that are scattered in the open world. Unlike other open world games of the time, traversing the map is done almost exclusively on foot. This might sound bad at first but Alex runs extremely fast and has the ability to run on walls forever and even glide. This essentially turns Manhattan into a giant obstacle course a la Mirror's Edge and frankly, running and jumping around never gets old. You will eventually gain the ability to drive tanks and helicopters but this is mostly done for combat since they are a lot slower.
The game's combat essentially works like a beat em up and a hack and slash. You have a regular and heavy attack and while battling you gotta alternate the two and form combos. Alex also has the ability to shapeshift meaning he can turn his hands into claws, swords and even giant fists, all with different pros and cons. You can also absorb and turn into your enemies in order to infiltrate enemy bases without being noticed. You can also grab and use enemy weapons but the only decent ones are the rpgs, since the rifles don't seem to do more damage than your fists.
The only negatives I have is that some of the more powerful enemies are really spongy and also have really long attack animations. That would have been fine but once they start attacking they can't be staggered meaning you are forced to dodge them. The dodge roll isn't as good as modern dodge rolls and every time I used it I felt like I was in the mercy of the environment. In an open area it works fine but in close quarters you can get stuck up the walls and if you're getting attacked by more than one enemies you can get stunlocked and have your health drained in seconds. Eventually I got the hang of it but it's something that could have been improved.
On a technical level it's not the best pc port, since I had to download a fix I found in the Steam guides in order to get the resolution to go higher that 1024×768 and the audio was very quiet (I gotta crank up the volume to 100% to hear the game properly) there used to be a sound fix somewhere as well, but all the links I found were dead and I couldn't find a way to fix this on my own. I believe this isn't an issue for every PC but keep that in mind.
Overall, I rally enjoyed this game and it's actually a shame that nobody ever talks about it nowadays. Activision used to allow their studios to work on their own passion projects instead of forcing them in the COD mines which lead to gems like this being made. I hope that this will change now that Microsoft bought them but seeing the recent layoffs I doubt we'll see the devs taking risks like they did back then.

Not a good game and a massive downgrade over the first Lost Planet game and its sequel. Unlike the other two games this one wasn't developed by Capcom, it was developed by Spark Unlimited, a company Keiji Inafune was heavily partnered with once he left Capcom to form his own studio named Comcept. His involvement in this project isn't clear though, since he doesn't appear in the credits. What's clear for certain is that the game was handed over to them because of Keiji's push for Capcom to stop developing games themselves and instead outsource them to western studios because as he said, "Japanese games are finished". That was a dark era in Capcom's history and I'm glad it's over.
It's clear that the devs had little understanding of the source material or frankly didn't care or want to make a game like the others. That's something you can see as early as the title screen. For some reason they felt the need to make the game "moody" and "atmospheric" which is odd since I don't consider Lost Planet a horror franchise. Most aliens are unique to this game and honestly their designs suck. Akrid used to be giant aliens that resemble grasshoppers and other insects (hence the name) but now most Akrid resemble giant dogs and crabs.
Instead of the game being split into multiple missions and stages the game takes place in an open world. However this is pointless because the missions are assigned to you in a linear fashion and happen one after another. You can deviate from the path in order to do some side missions for extra unlockables but there's not much reason to do it because the rewards don't matter much and the only thing you achieve by doing them is to make the game last longer.
The enemy encounters are not fun either. Many times killing enemies is completely pointless because they spawn indefinitely and only serve to slow you down and drain your resources. This is in complete contrast with the other Lost Planet games where killing all enemies was heavily encouraged because each enemy kill would reward you with extra health that stacked. In this game your health regenerates automatically and you have unlimited ammo for the pistol. The Thermal Energy drops from the enemies and the environment only serve as currency for the weapon upgrades, something that is again pointless because you gain a lot more automatically after completing a mission. Also, even if you don't upgrade any weapon at all, on Normal difficulty at least, is not a big deal.
There are no VS suits anymore. Instead you have a giant mech called a "rig" that you'll mostly use to activate switches and rotate valves. When you get to do combat with it it's basically a QTE where you have to block attacks and press the right button at the right time to do damage. At around the half way mark of the game you get a welding torch upgrade for your rig. Once I got it I was like "Cool, now I basically have a flamethrower". Well, no. The welding torch is only used once in the entire game to fix a pipe and isn't effective as an attack during combat. Why did they include it then? Maybe it's used again in a sidequest I didn't do or in the multiplayer but if an upgrade is used for optional stuff only then might as well not have it at all or make it optional too.
Another thing that was neutered in this game is the grappling hook. One of the most fun things of the original game was using the grappling hook to gain elevation and you could use it on pretty much any surface as long as it was in range. Well here the grappling hook is only used in dedicated spots and it's basically just another thing to use in order you reach your destination.
The plot of the game is bad too. The game takes place 150 years before Lost Planet 1 and tells the story of the first unsuccessful attempt by NEVEC to colonise the planet EDN III and the forming of the Space Pirates. However, as the story progresses the narrative starts to deviate heavily from what was established in the first game and introduces many things that contradict the lore to the point where I question why this was a Lost Planet game in the first place.

This also leads me to another major issue with this game which is the fact that this is a very shabby PC port, especially if you plan to use a keyboard to play it. The keybindings are frankly bizarre to the point where I question if whoever made them had ever played a PC game before. For some reason the interact commands are mapped to P, and I can't even begin to imagine why. If you wanna change that from the menu who can only do it for one of them only since after you do the game will say "this key was already mapped to another command". If you want to map a key to multiple commands you gotta do it from the files of the game. There's a pretty comprehensive guide on how to do that so go read that. HOWEVER something that the guide doesn't say and something that I can't even explain is that if you remap a key then reloading STOPS WORKING. I finally got it to work after I bound reload to something other than R, then rebound it to R and then I bound the secondary reload input to 0 (a random button that doesn't do anything) since if you leave it blank it will not work anymore.
In addition, the localisation files are horribly messed up, which is something that the aforementioned guide explains in greater length. Just as an example the game will tell you to use the wasd when inside the rig to rotate the valves but in reality what you have to to is mash the struggle button which is mapped to F. The guide explains how to change this and also some other wrong prompts but even though I followed it I couldn't get it to work. Frankly I didn't have to do any of this in the first place, this was the job of the devs. It would have taken them a maximum of 10 minutes to fix and the fact that they didn't do it even after the game was out tells me that they didn't care at all for the quality of the PC port.
Another thing that happens and this might be a laptop only issue is that once I clicked apply to change the graphics settings the game would instantly crash. This has something to do with the resolution since it wouldn't show anything when I selected the option to change it. The only workaround I found is to connect an external monitor and display the game on that. Then I was finally able to change the settings. Finally, another issue is that at seemingly random intervals the game would throw me out in the middle of playing and say "a sign in change has occurred" I think this happens when the game momentarily loses connection to steam so it panics and resets. I don't understand why this needs to happen when I'm playing the campaign mode. Why do I need to constantly stay connected to steam in an offline only mode? Some speculate that this is a drm but I doubt it because the game works fine if you aren't connected to the internet. You lose access to the achievements and the multiplayer but the story mode works. In my opinion this is just another thing the devs overlooked when porting this game to steam.
After all that was it worth it? No, not really. This game killed the Lost Planet series entirely which is a shame because I think there's still a lot of potential in it, especially considering the success of Helldivers 2. I can only hope that eventually Capcom will release a remake or a reboot of the first game but as it stands this doesn't seem to be in the cards currently.

Playing through this game I could see the ambition it had. I could tell that it pushed the limitations of what was possible in the early days of the Xbox 360. Fighting giant bugs while on a mech suit or swinging around with a grappling hook never gets old. However the enemy ai is a little cheap and the performance is not the best during tense moments. The story is average and never gets that deep but I still found the characters likable. I really think that a remake or a sequel would be an excellent thing to do and it will also be really lucrative for Capcom especially considering the recent success of Helldivers 2. There's still a lot of untapped potential to this series.
As you can see Steam has 2 versions of this game with the current one being unavailable for now. In 2021 Capcom halted the sales of their steam games that rely on the old drm/client Games For Windows Live. This includes this game and its sequel. It's been three years now with no word from Capcom when or if these games will ever be relisted. If you really want to you could get a key for this release on the gray market but this will cost you around $100 and there's no guarantee that the key you'll get is going to work. Frankly, I don't recommend you to do this since most of the features this version has are for the multiplayer which while still functional is dead because nobody's playing it. However, if you still wanna go through with buying a key you gotta have a Microsoft account and login to the Xbox app on Windows 10 and 11. Games for Windows Live is basically an older version of the Xbox app so that way you can "trick" it into working. You also might need to find and install the last version of GFWL for it to work properly.
Anyways, if you are willing to jump through all these hoops to get a slightly different version of this game or if you already have it and want to experience the multiplayer reply below and send me a friend request, I'll play with you.