Seneste anmeldelser af Reformed Restroom

A preface: I played Mafia 2 first, back on the 360, then 3, years later, and have only gotten around to playing 1 now, so it it worth noting that this is from the perspective of someone whose primary connection to the series is Mafia 2.

Mafia: Definitive Edition is a pretty good game, all things considered! I'm fresh out of the incredibly long end credits, and I would say this game is worth a play! There's not enough games set during the Great Depression and Prohibition Era, and this has some fun exploring the city of Lost Haven (not-Chicago) during the opening era of the North American Italian-American Mafia, going from a guy on the streets to a made man. There's great stuff on the origins of things like Big Break Whites, and Swift Cola. The driving in this game hands pretty well, and I think, in simulation mode, a fair number of driving game aficinados may have some fun exploring old jalopies in their element.

The game does suffer some issues, and it seems like a fair number probably stem from what is, ostensibly, a good idea: being faithful to the original. Top of the list is that this game is hard as nails! I tried playing this game on normal, but about midway through, I gave up on any sense of optional difficulty. Most enemies take a fair number of rounds to put down, unless vital areas are precisely aimed for, which the game's primary weapons are less than ideal for. More than once I'd emptied a full, 7 bullet magazine from a pistol, only for him to gun me down. Certain sections like the armored border patrol car with a turret on top are absolute meat grinders, and looking for advice on some of them will come up with "Reduce difficult to minimum, maximize aim assist, and repeat until accomplished". I can't imagine playing this on Hard, much less Classic Mode.

The game is, compared to 2 and even 3, not focused on realism, except maybe on the cars. Major weapons and free cars wouldn't be invented for years if not decades, and several characters sound much closer to cartoons than real people. While this can be disappointing, and slightly distracting early on in the game, once you embrace this is going to be a fun, if not realistic, romp, you can get over it. While sometimes sounding a little silly, most of the characters are engaging enough that you grow to care for a fair number of them.

While this game has some issues, I still feel like I can recommend this game to others, especially if you love Mafia 2. It's replaced some of the setting's charm with bone-grinding difficulty, but it still feels like a great fit with the other games, and is worth a play-through.

-A Note about Definitive Edition vs The Original-

At the end of the game, when Vito and Joe kill Tony, I noticed that Vito was in the wrong outfit. I remember the mission in 2 very specifically, because you have to wear one of Joe's stupid floral shirts, and the mission being OBSESSED with you not letting the car be damaged at all, to the point of making you restart it over and over again. I had always assumed it made you wear Joe's shirt because it was what you wear in the ending of the last game, so I decided to look up a comparison of the two endings. Upon doing so, not only did I realize that Vito and Joe just look like 2 generic bad guys in the ending of 1, which is a shock, but that the conversations of ending monologues are very, VERY different! While in the Definitive Edition, Tom monologues about the value of family in one's life when he's dying, in the original, he's talking about finding a balance in your greed. The conversation between Tom and Sam in the art gallery is also of a very different tone, though a few of the lines are kept in place. This makes me wonder exactly how different the two games are! I don't think I'll go and find a copy of the original, as well as a computer than can smoothly run it, but I imagine that, if the endings are of such different tones, that the two may be much more different than I originally expected. So, if you're expecting the original game and this Definitive Edition to be the exact same game, don't.

After an evening to think on my original positive review of this game, I've decided I'm changing this to a do not recommend. In my first review, immediately after playing the game (which I will leave at the bottom of this review) I'm against the idea of giving this game a thumbs down, mostly because I love Star Trek, and I don't want to poop on an old DOS game I couldn't fix an end-game glitch on. But, even ignoring that, this game is not really all that good.

Firstly, the game is broken into 7 individual "episodes", and they're all super short. The story here is next to non-existent in each, which is a real shame, because writing engaging stories is where Star Trek can really shine, and there's some idea nuggets here for stories. One is about an ancient nuclear missile base rearming itself, and the insanity that is world-ending weapons. Another is about Harry Mudd on a super science ship, selling miraculous technologies he doesn't understand as his usual snake oils. Even another is about a member planet in the Federation attempting an insurrection against the Federation! These are stories that could have some real meat to their bones, but not one of them goes anywhere. They're all interesting ideas, just sorta tacked onto the beginning of each episode with a mission given by Starfleet, maybe given a line or two during the episode, and then referenced again in the end-of-episode chatter between our three main boys, where they act like we had a profound discussion, but we... didn't. This wouldn't bug me so much, if the writers here didn't clearly show that they could do good Trek writing!

There is good writing in here! Shock of shocks, in this boring mission writing, there's some real gold in here, it's just hidden in the use of the look and speak options, between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy during the missions! There's some genuinely great lines, usually a real nugget of gold every screen, you just need to stop, on every screen, and spend 5 minutes asking everybody in your away team a question, and looking at them. You'll get great atmospheric lines of our main trio bantering about everything from what they'd like to do to Harry Mudd, to the great tragedy of human deaths in space, but it's a bunch of effort on describing how McCoy is anxious about how many dead men he'll see on this mission, and no effort on, y'know, telling an interesting story for the episode, or even setting up who the villain of a piece is! I've heard the next game, Judgment Rites, has more dialogue, which leaves me hopeful that it might be better balanced between story writing, and general atmospheric writing you have to dig for.

In balance to these little tidbits of gold between the three amigos of the bridge of NCC 1701, no bloody A, B, C, or D, is the voice acting, specifically, from one actor. This game utilizes the voice talents of the original actors for most of the main crew, and most of them give some solid performances. McCoy is passionate and excited, Spock is thoughtful and supportive, and Kirk... Sounds like he's reading his lines as monotonously as possible. For the great overactor Shatner is, Kirk here sounds bored half the time, and unfortunately, he's the one who has the most lines. Everyone else is giving gusto to their performances, and Kirk really sounds like he's bored in a stuffy sound booth, recording lines without any since of context or meaning, which really brings the whole thing down.

There are a few other highlights, but they can't lift this game from what's a really kinda boring and short experience. The space combat gives some real sense of three dimensional ship fighting, and that's surprising as a modern gamer to see from something that run on DOS. It's no Elite Dangerous or anything, but it's a surprisingly satisfactory space ship fighting simulator, when you get some space ship fights. The intro to the game is a beautiful recreation of the TOS theme as well, given what level of audio fidelity they have. The game is also usually pretty good about not throwing any absurd point-and-click adventure puzzles at you, unless Spock out-right tells you what the weird solution is.

But none of it is enough to cover for what feels less like a Star Trek game, and more like a game that someone wrapped Star Trek around, and it doesn't feel like it delivers on being a continuation of the 5 year mission. Sorry, Star Trek, I can't recommend you to someone else, even without the game breaking glitch I had encountered at the end of the game, leaving me unable to finish you.

The Old, originally positive Review:

"This game is a little tame, and I needed a walk through a few times, but was generally a fun game. Unfortunately, I was unable to circumnavigate a glitch involving the torpedo tubes in the 7th mission, and was unable to actually beat the game, and had to watch the ending on YouTube, which was dissapointing, but I don't wanna tank the game's score because I gave up on fixing a glitch in a DOS game."

A fun, vehicle construction collect-a-thon, where you build different cars, boats, and planes to collect all the parts for an escape rocket! This game is a blast for a long while, and you can have a lot of fun working with making different vehicles... Until it gets to the air. By the 90% done, you're stuck with parts you can only collect via precise flying, which is not this game's strongest point. It comes with pre-built versions of all vehicle types, but the air ones are very difficult to manage. While I played for 25 hours, I'll probably stop here, the remaining pieces are way too hard to get.

As more of an RPG or construction-based game player, a puzzle game like this is ways off my radar usually, but after watching Lets Game it Out play it, I knew I had to dive in.

The primary driving force here is the combination fighting game and cooking game: ingredients are gathered through a side-scrolling platformer combat section, from a plethora of monsters, which you then cook in a Bejeweled-style gem matching game. I can handle both in small portions, but together they make for a very exciting experience.

Wwhile a little short for my tastes (taking me, a relative newcomer to both of the game's main genres 10 hours), I never the less enjoyed the experience thouroughly. I only wish the gam ewas longer!

I actually really liked this game. I wish it got more episodes.

I bet the sequel is good!

gud wun

I got this game as a Christmas gift, and, nearly 2 weeks later, I have finally finished this game.

The Good: More than enough for me to suggest it. The game is an enjoyable enough 3rd person shooter romp through an SCP-adjacent "Federal Bureau of Control" overrun by a hostile paranatural presence known as "The Hiss", you play as Jesse Faden, the new "Director" the the Bureau, fighting off this intrusive Hiss. The setting is interesting, and the parantural Altered Items and Objects of Power kept me interested up to this moment. I'd still be interested in a little more information about this universe. The combat, when it's flowing smoothly, especially in the early game, works. It's challenging, but never feels unfair, just a very difficult challenge. (If you find the game to be too difficult, there's a whole section in the settings for enabling different types of cheats to make combat a little easier. I ended up having to use a little bit of them to finish the game) The story rolls along at a steady pace, never bogged down for too long at any one point. (Oh, and the song tie in for "Control"is amazing, I only wish I could play it again)

The Alright: More than I'd like. The combat is alright, the weapon modding system is alright, the powers are alright... A lot of this game is Good Enough. It reminds me starkly of the ignored and forgotten XCOM game that I happen to really like, "The Bureau: XCOM Declassified". While there's less emphasis on allies in combat than that game, Control feels The Bureau remade into it's own thing, and it makes a pretty fun game. The writing for the story and characters of the game itself are also alright. Jesse Faden came come off as a little edgy sometimes, particularly during her inner monologues. and most characters feel kinda one dimensional: the excited researcher, the brave young security guy who jokes around, the grizzled veteran. Not terrible tropes, and they all make sense in this context, but no action anyone takes isn't exactly what you expected them to take. The story is also incredibly linear, as is the map design, being literally a series of concrete hallways between large battle areas. Not really an issue, not every game is an open-world game, but it does mean you can find yourself disagreeing fully with what Jesse does, and just have to deal with it.

The Bad: More, more, MORE! The game drowns you in some aspects of this game. The number of superpowers you get in this game is overwhelming! Maybe it works more fluidly on controllers, but you are given far too many things to do in combat, and rarely does it feel like you can afford to ignore one. Half a dozen distinct weapon options (with their own modification options, more on that in a second), a melee magic burst, telekenesis to throw stuff, a dash, a shield, dashing with the shield as an attack, dispelling the shield as an attack, limited enemy unit conquering, flight, and an attack only usable from flight makes for an overwhelming number of choices of how to handle a fight, and there's not enough buttons for all of it, much less brain power to keep up with and utilize all of them. What you can do in combat isn't the only place where things are overwhelming. The weapon and personal mod systems are similarly endless feeling, with a dazzling number of options, that has the game goes on, become increasingly esoteric. By the end of the Foundation, I was dealing with stuff like "decreased reload time on Gun A when using the shield's secondary attack", or "decrease dash cost if you pick up health", all of which clogs up the already overpowering combat even further. I ended up ignoring entire aspects of the game to deal with this: I completely ignored melee, several guns, the shield (except for in specific situations where it was clearly required to advance) and the attack abilities of the shield and levitation, and any mods associated with them, because if I had tried to keep up with them, I'd have lost track of something somewhere. Not usually an issue in a game, too many options, but none of these options really feel impactful. This game isn't really about making choices, everything is on a pretty straight and narrow path, so they try and let you make all of those choices in how you handle combat. Unfortunately, it is entirely too complex, like a pocket knife with too many tools on it. It becomes unwieldly, and better to just remove parts, to make more usable. With all that, there's one place needing more: the ending. Taking place largely in cut scene, it feels like there's about an hour or so of the end of this game missing, including an entire department, a round of conversations with NPCs, and the final fight of the game. This issue is mitigated in this version of the game, "Contol: Ultimate Edition", as, post credits, the game relatively smoothly transitions into the Foundation Expansion Pack, which adds a final chapter of the game that gives you some much needed closure.

Conclusions: I like this game, I really do. I'd like to say I love it, but it's about an 8.5 on a 1 to 10 scale for me. I definitely suggest playing it, it's a great time, with some areas where it shines, a few areas where it's drowning in it's own mechanics, and a lot of long, shifting grey cement hallways of Good Enough.

Rock and Stone!

A fantastic 4 player co-operative game in the vein of L4D or Vermintide, you play as Dwarves with guns in space fighting bugs and digging up GOLD! With a fun primary gameplay loop, an OST that makes streamers turn off their normal music to hear the music the game has, and some great robots deserving of many pats, it's a joy to play.

Just remember: If you don't rock and stone, you ain't going home!

A worthy remake of Half Life 1. As many have noted, the game is really to seperate games: Before, and after entering Xen.

The first half is a well made remake of said portion of Half Life 1. It holds very close to the original, with slight changes in path or design to keep it from being literally just Half Life 1. Details, like characters from later games being displayed to an increased focus on background clutter afforded to modern game, shine in this first half, playing as a new take on the old maps.

The second half, within Xen, is almost entirely redone. Xen turns from scant floating islands floating in an abyss, with only mysterious portals connecting them into one large world, with continents and active flora and fauna. While it comes as a bit of a shock for someone used to HL1, Black Mesa's Xen is by far superior. While managing to take ideas briefly touched on in the original Xen and expand on them, this section is really what takes this from a remake to it's own game. Canon is changed, with Black Mesa scientists having an established foothold and buildings in the Borderworld, as well as the enormous expansion of the civilization of the different species being explored physically, including everything from a Vortigaunt village made of adobe, to an enormous clockwork-seeming tower that the final boss is fought at the peak of but this game really puts the effort in to make itself an excellent game, and makes it all work.

Should you play this game? Yes! Should you pay full price for this game, despite it being 50% an old game that they got the build off of? Yes. It's good. Play it.