Whatcha Been Playing?

This is where you can deliberate anything relating to videogames - past, present and future
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Simonsloth
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Simonsloth »

That’s amazing Alex. When I get around to Judgement I’ll check this out. Ambient German Jazz sounds intriguing!

Crazily enough my ps2 and PS3 have been getting some love recently as my wife has (understandably) had enough of the multiple boxes under the tv so I’ve promised her they will only come out for weekends. This inadvertently has focused my gaming towards a particular console and been really enjoyable clearing some games off my backlog finally.

Finished Drakengard on PS2 which has so much going on that I don’t even know where to start. Strangely the game gets better towards the end where there is less playing and more watching.

Started Wolfenstein (2009) on my PS3 this evening which feels remarkably like Dishonored. I wonder if there’s any connection.
Marlew
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Marlew »

Alex79uk wrote: November 8th, 2020, 9:51 pm Bohren & der Club of Gore
Absolutely fantastic, I'm a big fan. Doomy!
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stvnorman
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by stvnorman »

I’ve mostly played Secret of Mana on SNES Classic all week, and I reckon I’m on the home straight. I’m enjoying it so much now I even spent an entire evening just grinding my levels up in a single area, over and over, which is slightly worrying new behaviour for me!

I just got agonisingly close to the final finish line in the arcade version of Continental Circus on PS2. I’ve really got into this though, so getting there again won’t be a chore. It brought a few things to the arcade racer party, but takes a bit more investment to get there than something like Out Run, which might be why I’m only finding out I love it now.

Finally, despite being a mega fan of the 1983 Star Wars arcade game, I’d strangely never played the sequel before. I played the Spectrum version and it’s great! Need to find the way to the hidden original on GameCube Rogue Squadron again now!
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Angry_Kurt
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Angry_Kurt »

I've been properly into Gears Tactics since getting my Series X on Tuesday. I find that it's really good at explaining its mechanics and is quite accessible to anyone new to the genre. Weirdly, despite me being a huge fan of XCOM style games, I'm not really into XCOM2, I think this is due to not being hugely into the base management aspects. Gears doesn't really have that, instead between missions it just focuses on levelling up your squad members with skill points and better equipment. I'm finding the gameplay to be really satisfying with some neat twists due to it being in the Gears universe with both your abilities and the enemies abilities. If I carry on to enjoy it as much as I have been so far, I can easily see this usurping The Last of Us 2 as my GOTY. The only downside is that I have encountered two bugs which have forced me to restart from the last checkpoint. Not too frustrating as those runs were not going well, but would be a pain if I was having a good run.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

I've been playing Blasphemous on Switch after starting it again since they updated it a couple of months ago. I really like it. It's very much a Souls-alike MetroidVania in every sense, but it's a very good version of 'one of those'. I think I still prefer Salt & Sanctuary (and I'll never stop wondering why that game wasn't a massive hit when you have stuff like Hollow Knight - which I also adored - being almost universally loved), but I'm still really enjoying Blasphemous all the same. I'm about 1/3 of the way through so far.
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Feirsteax
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Feirsteax »

Blasphemous was very cool. The aesthetic / atmosphere is extremely good, all feels very well realised and cohesive. The biblical enemies and locales all feel suitably epic.

Been a while since I posted here, cool to see it's still active.

What I've been playing lately:

I recently finished off my first playthrough of Outlast on the Switch. Wowowow. That is a scare-fest of a game. Keeps you right on the edge of your seat, teeth a-chattering with fear as you stumble and crawl and breathlessly sprint your way through a sprawling mental asylum that's seen better days. The whole game is very dark, meaning you have to keep your night vision camera switched on as you comb through the building, but this requires batteries to keep up so you'll find yourself at times staying immersed in darkness in order to conserve them, which is always a terrifying situation to be in.
Lots of tension and atmosphere, a few good jumpscares, a silly sci-fi plot a la resident evil and some unexpected humour and self-aware writing makes this game quite the treat to play if you're in the mood for a fright. Only thing I would say is that it kind of outstayed it's welcome a wee bit, for me. There was one point where I audibly groaned as the lift descended to the ground floor leaving me looking at the exit of the building (about 3 or 4 hours in I think), only for it to malfunction and drop you straight down to the basement again. "Oh great, another 2 hours of basement trudging", I thought to myself. Despite this, I still thoroughly enjoyed the game, even in the latter half, the scares and thrills were still fantastic and that kept me going to the end.
3.5 🌟


A few days ago I received the new Series X console and I have been absolutely loving it. Playing a variety of games on there, trying a few things out which I'll probably talk about in another post at some point. For now though I'll just say that I'd been saving my first playthrough of DOOM Eternal for when i got the XSX, and ohhh boy was it worth it. I'm on the final stretch now of the main campaign on Ultra-Violence, and holy crap it's challenging. I think before I head on to the final mission I'll go through with the cheats turned on and sweep up all the remaining collectibles (don't judge me! 😤).

:mrgreen: Hope all of you are well - I've been listening again to the podcast episodes, specifically the Halo ones as I plan to replay them on this new console at some point. Absolutely love the pod, and this forum is lovely too as I recall. ;)
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DeadpoolNegative
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by DeadpoolNegative »

Alien Isolation- thanks, XBox GamePass! I decided to play this for the spooky season. First off, Creative Assembly must be commended for creating a game and world that would totally resemble a sequel to Alien had it been made in, say, 1981 and still under Ridley Scott's purview (I was never a huge fan of the original Alien, in fact it was considered a pretty inferior film to Aliens in most circles 35 years ago until the increasingly low quality sequels and American critics' bizarre need to elevate Scott as One of The Greatest Auteurs- see Matt Zoller Seitz on Prometheus or Covenant, or better yet, don't) I loved, loved, LOVED how this game looked. I loved the eerily sterile and quiet environments. I loved how the logs were actually interesting and told the story of the rise and fall of Seegson and subsequently the Sevastopol, and how so many people's lives were caught up in the space expansion bubble bursting. I liked the color scheme and how haunting and silent the whole world of the game is.

Playing the game? Ummm. Even on the easiest difficulty I found this game to be a frustrating experience. The thing is, initially crawling around the station, trying to desperately avoid the alien, is thrilling. But the further I progressed in the story, the cheaper the game got. there were parts where i would just walk under a vent and it was an insta-kill. The Seegson droids were sufficiently creepy but battling them just felt like a chore.

The story got less and less interesting as it progressed, though I thought the voice acting and motion capture was top notch. There's a lot of good ideas that Creative Assembly have here that probably would have resulted in a ham dinger of a sequel, if sales had been there.

Or maybe, just maybe, if EA ever decides to bring back Dead Space...

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Campaign- when I played this in 2011, I had fun with it but also was hugely embarrassed by it. This game really is the ultimate John Birch Society fantasy- an idea of the Russians as so completely wicked that not only would they erect a monument to a madman who enabled the equivalent of Osama Bin Laden to nuke a city, killing millions, just to distract from his nationalist takeover of Russia, that one of his disciples would have no problem recruiting a bunch of men who have no issue with massacring hundreds of innocent civilians in an airport to trigger World War 3. Look at how those Russkies completely devalue human life! They sure are nuts!

(also, What the FUCK is Makarov doing leading that assault himself?)

Luckily my fellow American lefties don't have a psychotic obsession with the Russians being pure evil out to destroy us for no real reason at...

...oh, wait.

However, excising all of that from my head, holy shit, this was even more fun and exciting than i remembered. It hits all the right notes even if so many of the plot points are radioactive and stupid (I can get that Lance Henriksen wants revenge, but to do with with Zakhev's right hand and and NOT have a contingency plan to eliminate him immediately? Are we just gonna ignore Price using the EMP got probably as many people killed as he might have saved?) The controls, graphics, pacing- it's all top notch.

Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order- Thanks, EA Play, now part of XBox GamePass! Let's get one thing out of the way- I think adapting Star Wars to Dark Souls' combat is just plain loco. I get the idea on paper, I do, but so me the action of a Star Wars movie is so fast paced that using DS's parry obsessed combat sucks a lot of fun out of it. Especially since in Dark Souls (or the Soulsalike I really enjoy, the Surge) you have a variety of weapons and combat stances and classes. In Fallen Order you have... a lightsaber. And no other weapons. There have been MANY instances in this game so far where I'm fighting and think "You know what would really help here? if Cal had an actual gun!" I understand what Respawn was going for here, it's just not for me, so I'm playing on easy.

And what's here is an effective, enjoyable tale so far with some really neat design work from Respawn, creating worlds that feel a part of Star Wars but still feel new on their own. I wish we could have spent more time in the crazy-ass junk planet Cal had been hiding out on. I knew his friend was dead meat but the actor and script did a great job fleshing him out so I actually felt bad about what happened to him.

The overall plot I'm hesitant about, since it involves something that would seem to be very, very important but of course hasn't been brought up in any other Star Wars material, so there's the lead balloon of thinking these characters will all be dead by the end of the game since it takes place between episodes 3 and 4. But I've been told something different happens. Still, I wish they'd just tell a story... in the world. Not tying it to a big event in the mythology. Maybe next time.

--Dan
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ThirdDrawing
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by ThirdDrawing »

Been eking out progress in the Witcher 3 around school work.

On Blood and Wine now but I don't think I'm going to have time to finish it before break.

On the plus side, I ordered a couple of EU only PSVR horror games so those will be fun to try to relieve stress from schoolwork!
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

My sister has posted me The Last Of Us 2 to borrow and it arrived today. Can't wait to have a look later!
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Scrustle »

A few days ago I decided to see if I could track down a Steam key for the original version of Darksiders 2 with all the DLC, for the sake of completing my collection on PC, and being able to see what that version looks like compared to the remaster with the best possible presentation. It was rather hard, and ended up forcing me to give business to a company I'd rather not have. Given that was the only way though, I'm not too torn up about that. But I figured it was too soon since I last played that game to jump in right away, so I turned my attention to another game in the series I've been thinking about going back to.

So I've started a NG+ run of Darksiders 3, and I've been really enjoying coming back to it. I'm even liking these earlier parts more than I originally did. For the sake of achievements, I cranked up the difficulty to the max that the game shipped with, so two levels up from the usual normal. So far it has actually been sort of easy. Definitely a lot easier than the first time through. Part of that will be down to using the Classic combat mode from the start, but a bigger part is definitely that I'm carrying over a pretty overpowered character I think. With all the levelling up from a previous run, and all the DLC that gives you a ton of XP, I haven't come across any real roadblocks, and have way more ability to use the Havoc form which is basically just a win button. It's still fun though, and bosses are really good. Although Havoc form can take away a huge chunk of their health for free, you still have to fight them normally for most of the encounter. This game is supposed to do a Dark Souls-like thing with its NG+ cycles, making enemies stronger and even adding in a few new extra strong enemies too. So far it seems like the balancing of that is a bit off. Although, I guess it is a pretty smooth progression from what the first run of the game ends at. To initiate a NG+ run, you have to beat the final boss, and so I did that again with the difficulty set to what I'm having it this whole run, and it was already not particularly hard. Even compared to when I did that boss before on the much lower difficulty, but before I levelled up with the DLC. So I guess that's the thing that has broken the difficulty curve.

Fun side-note, as I was looking back at my posts on these forums to remind myself when I last played these games, I found that it wouldn't let me search for "Darksiders" since it was too common a word through my post history. Not sure if that's a good thing or not.
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Feirsteax
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Feirsteax »

Finished DOOM Eternal, and it was brilliant. That super shotgun meat hook, oof. Truly inspired weapon design. It's cool seeing id Software pushing the boundaries of FPS games once again after setting the standard back in the 90s with the original doom.

I also do want to play the DLC at some point, but not just yet. I'm happy to take a break from demon slaying for the moment. Even though it was absolutely fantastic, it was also incredibly intense and singularly focused in terms of gameplay, so a bit of variety is needed I think.

Which will probably be in the form of Yakuza Kiwami which is also free on Gamepass. I started playing it a month or two ago and I remember getting really into it, but then I got distracted with some other games. So now I'm finished with DOOM I think I'll get stuck back into that. Love the style of it, dramatic, funny, action packed, very charming. So far I've enjoyed it a lot, although the gameplay is a biiiit janky (not sure if I'm absolutely in love with the combat from what I've played so far...)

And finally, I started playing Forza Horizon 4 (which again is free on Gamepass; such a great deal, I really hope it lasts). It's pretty gorgeous looking on Series X. I mainly picked this game up because it had the "Optimised for X|S" logo on it and I wanted to see how it looked, but it's also been really fun! I haven't really played many racing games properly since my younger days with Burnout 3 and stuff like that, but I'm enjoying this one quite a lot. I think I prefer the more arcadey, over the top style versus the more simulation style games. Seeing all the stunt points and "near misses" and stuff tick up as I'm flyin' around the track listening to ravey trance beats seems to be pressing some big green dopamine buttons in my brain.

So far so good! :lol:
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duskvstweak
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by duskvstweak »

I've been playing Snake Pass. I was going to do Death Stranding, but my stress levels have been high so I decided on a cute platformer with a David Wise soundtrack. The music is great. The game is harder than I thought it would be but it's interesting, those snake physics. Plus, even the scary volcano levels are pretty.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

I put The Last Of Us 2 in my PS4 two nights ago with the intention of 'just seeing the first hour'.

The last two nights have seen me get 11 hours in to the game, going to bed at a RIDICULOUS hour.

It's good, isn't it.
Marlew
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Marlew »

Ooh, yes. It is a little bit good. Would be my GOTY by distance if not for FF7R, and I'd say it's actually better.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

I can't stop playing!

I've just finished the...
Spoiler: show
Flashback to Ellie's birthday, going round the natural history museum.
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Kacey
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Kacey »

Played a couple hours of Crysis 2 again. It's been about 7 years since I finished the game and man... I still really like this game. It may not be as impressive as Crysis 1 in terms of tech or sandbox, but man... it's gorgeous and the story is actually really interesting, in my opinion at least.
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Angry_Kurt
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Angry_Kurt »

Crysis 2 was my first Xbox 360 game and I enjoyed it a lot too.
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ReprobateGamer
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by ReprobateGamer »

I'm sticking to using the expiring Game Pass games as a guide for what to play recently, though this can be hit or miss with the games.

I've read a few good things here about Demon's Tilt so I installed that over the weekend. It's a visual mess, and woefully underexplained as to what's going on. There seems to be only a single table, the addition of shooter mechanics means that your ball can randomly be pinged off-course or just obscured by the sheer screen candy ... but ... but ... I keep going back to it. Not a great lover of chiptunes but the music at the start of each ball is absolutely on point and there is that wonderful feeling of hitting something for the first time and watching something utterly bizarre manifest onto the table. Don't think I'm going to miss it too much when it leaves but definitely interested to have tried.

Then up to last week, we had The Talos Principle. A first person puzzle game (that you can also play in 3rd person) but this one has a narrative of AI, consciousness and the infinite around it's classically themed, but 'sci-fi' infused area's. Quite honestly, I very early lost interest in the narrative and only carried on as a daughter was watching and was intrigued. Graphically it was poor and missed the gleam of The Witness or the coherency of Tacoma, aurally had nothing outstanding. The puzzles were decent though there were a few where it felt like having to brute force the solution. Definitely not going to miss this one.

Other Game Pass games not likely to depart: My wife has really taken a shine to Minecraft Dungeons so we've regularly had ourselves and the girls playing. She's not really a fan of the gothic overtures of something like Diablo but it seems like the more colourful theme of Minecraft, and the daily trials have definitely piqued her interest - and the rest of us are enjoying it.

Also tried out Gears Tactics last night. This is essentially XCOM in the Gears 'verse and the bit I played last night worked very well. I love XCOM but I always preferred the tactical missions to the base management side of things so this is very definitely a hit for me. Of course, I've barely started with it but it has made a good first impression

Finally, I've also spent several hours over the past few weeks on Slayaway Camp. This is a take on the '80's horror flick era in a voxel sliding puzzle. The homage does all it can and the voxel gory deaths are a suitable cutesy take - the first time you see them. As they continue to get repeated time and again, to the same chiptune remix's of horror scare notes, it begins to drag. Worse, the graphics actually make it harder to see what's happening on the levels - I've missed important features like blocking fences, or laser sights as other assets were in the way. You can swop the view to a top down version but that just looks like the screen my Spectrum did when a game crashed. If this hadn't been a Games with Gold I wouldn't have tried. There do appear to be a lot of puzzles - the movie theme of a level then opens up with similarly themed versions once levels are finished. But at this point, it's only the completist in me that is keeping me going. If you have a thing for sliding block puzzles and slasher movies this may be of interest ...
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The J-Boog
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by The J-Boog »

Finally took the plunge (no pun intended) and gave Assassin's Creed Black Flag a try.
But of personal histoey: I had tried some of the earlier AC games, but never got into 1 and 2 (which I could borrow from my brother), mainly because the main game play loop did not really click with me. Always thought there was way too much to do and collect, and could really connect with the main story and characters as a result. Nevertheless, I did buy AC3 on release as I was taking a course on American History at that point and AC3 seemed like the perfect game to delve deeper into that Era. Played it for a while, but had the same issues connecting with the game and soon abandoned it. Never touched the series again until now.

Black Flag intrigued me mainly because of the raving reviews of the sea missions and being called a "Pirate simulator" and I'm happy to report that I'm loving every bit of it. Sailing your ship while listening to the many great shanties (many of which I grabbed by by just waiting for them to respawn, more on that later) is just enchanting to me. I can spend hours just sailing the seas at the slowest speed just marveling at the ocean and downing a ship or two. It's by far the game's greatest pro.
As for the rest of the game play, I'm having simular issues as I had with the previous entries. No surprises there as this was way before the fated switch to a more rpg-like system, but I'm willing to put up with it more, simply because of the sailing. The sword combat can feel great though, and the animations give you a great sense of power, but in the end it's a rather simplistic counter system without much depth. Sneaking around and picking guards off one by one is great the first couple of times, but this also gets a bit old after a couple hours. Platforming and running feels slow, and I really don't like the chase missions, which is also why I've given up on trying to catch the shanties through regular methods (but I want them all, because they are so great).
The story isn't particularly gripping either in my opinion, and feels a bit disconnected, a feeling I had with the earlier entries as well. It's great meeting all the pirates though, and the voice acting and some of the characters are great. And I'm still interested to see where the story's going, so I'm definitely sticking through with it (although I might leave some of the side content for what it is).
All in all, the sailing is fantastic and what keeps me interested in the game. Might try out Origins or Odyssey later, to see if the switch to a different style of game play might be more appealing to me. And who knows, might even dip into Valhalla after that.
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Scrustle »

Played a bit of Hard Reset: Redux recently. I've been curious about this game since playing the Shadow Warrior reboot games, since this what that studio did before those. Unfortunately I wasn't very impressed with this one. While it does have a somewhat similar feel to the Shadow Warrior games, it feels a lot more primitive and rough to play, and so struggles to be particularly compelling in any way. The environments are pretty drab, all a dull grey industrial cyberpunk look, but without any distinguishing character to it, and the audio design is pretty bland and unexceptional. Voice acting is poor, although that could be somewhat excused by this being from a small non-English language studio. But the story is not well conveyed either, where there's no clear plot or goal at any given time, aside from the very immediate gameplay objective. There's usually little sense of why said objective is worth caring about however.

The gameplay is pretty mediocre too. The shooting lacks impact, and enemy design is uninspired, with some of them having way too much health. Your arsenal is pretty small, although it's not as bad as it first appears. You have only two main weapons, a machine gun and a plasma gun, but each of them has four forms. But there's quite a lot of overlap between them in terms of their role in combat, so they can feel somewhat redundant. You also get a katana later on, which I think was added in to this Redux version since it came out after their first Shadow Warrior game. But the moveset is massively reduced from that game, and also has way less feeling of impact. The game also doesn't feel very good on a controller. The aiming acceleration feels off, very awkward and like it doesn't have a smooth curve to it in a way that feels natural. The aim assist is pretty strong, so it feels very obvious when playing, but also feels like you're fighting against it at times when you're trying to adjust your aim slightly.

I got to a boss fight that I later found out was about a third of the way through the game, against a giant statue that had come to life through nanomachines or something, and that is when I quit. Really tedious fight that I had to repeat a few times, that didn't have many interesting attacks to speak of. That was the point where I decided to give up on the game. So while this game sort of has the fast movement and strafe-heavy gameplay that I appreciate in the Shadow Warrior games, here it isn't done particularly well. As if they had to learn from the mistakes this game made to iron out the problems and refine these systems much more for their later releases. As well as all the stuff outside the core combat mechanics too.
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