Recent reviews by DUNCAN DONUTS

Crystal Caves HD is a modernized version of the old DOS platformer Crystal Caves. In addition to running natively on Windows, the game also boasts cleaned up graphics versions of the original game’s graphics that keep a lot of the original art, but boost the palette so the game looks better.


The goal of Crystal Caves HD is to collect all of the crystals in a stage. Sounds simple enough, but there’s a lot of platforming you’ll have to do and enemies you’ll have to kill or avoid to get ‘em all.

The real fun of the game is trying to maximize your score. Each stage has optional collectibles, such as mining gear, optional clear crystals hidden inside of blocks you can hit while jumping (ala Mario’s ? blocks) or eggs containing the letters in the word BONUS. As you’d expect, these tend to be placed in tricky locations, so you’ll need to play smart to get them all. Also, completing a level without taking a single hit will give you a substantial bonus.

Just trying to get all of the bonus items to maximize your score is fun, as you’ll have to take risks or plan out a different route to get them all instead of going just for the crystals. Seeing the large amount of points you get from collecting every bonus item makes completing levels very satisfying. Getting everything while avoiding taking a single hit can be a real challenge in some levels, but it's well worth it to shoot your score into the stratosphere.

Your character controls well. He’s responsive and you’ll very rarely, if ever, run into situations where he jumped before you wanted him to. He jumps the same distance and height no matter how much speed you have beforehand, so there won’t be any times where you’re screwed over because you didn’t run far enough before taking a jump.

You’re equipped with a rocket-firing gun that’s used to kill enemies and destroy clear blocks that serve as obstacles. The game does not give you near enough ammo to kill everything in the game, so being smart with what you take down is essential to success, especially on Hard difficulty. Even in Normal, blowing away everything can lead to a situation where you’ll run out of ammo at a critical moment, such as needing it to take out an enemy that would be near-impossible to dodge. Smart ammo conservation is necessary to succeed.

Several powerups can be collected, such as inverting gravity, powering up your gun so it can kill any enemy in one shot, or an invulnerability powerup that behaves exactly like the one seen in the Mario games. Unless you’re playing in Easy
difficulty, these do not respawn after being used once.

The problem is that several levels require you to use powerups at specific times in order to succeed. If you didn’t or a powerup ran out before you were done, you’re screwed and have to restart the level. This isn’t too annoying due to how short the game’s levels are, but it would’ve been nice to have them respawn no matter the difficulty level as an optional QoL feature.


Crystal Caves HD is broken up into four episodes with sixteen levels each (+ one bonus level in the fourth episode). These levels are accessed in a hub that lets you go to any level you want as soon as you start the episode. This is quite handy on replays, since it gives you the ability to tackle harder levels first so you can knock them out ASAP.

Each level is a giant single area with clearly defined paths, so there’s no way to get lost. Several levels will require multiple attempts in order to figure out the best way to go through them, so be ready to reset a level. If the levels were longer, this would be a pain in the butt, but Crystal Cave’s short level length means that resetting means you didn’t waste a lot of time before being unable to proceed or dying.

Some levels will force you to use powerups in certain ways, such as using an invulnerability to take out enemies that are otherwise invincible or using a reverse gravity pickup to get a group of crystals before it runs out, so it’s best to examine a level and decide what’s the best way to use a powerup before you actually pick it up. It rewards thinking, which adds a bit of depth to the game.

Crystal Caves HD’s levels never get nearly as hard as the levels in games like Super Meat Boy or Celeste, so nearly anyone can play it and have a good time.

The game has a fairly good difficulty curve. Episode 1 is, as you’d expect, the easiest one. Episode 2 is harder, but not in a way that it feels like too much compared to the first episode. But, when you enter Episode 3, the game undergoes a very noticeably difficulty spike. Levels are filled to the brim with crystals, platforming, and enemies are placed in harder locations than before. It’ll take a bit of effort to complete Episode 3, but it never feels unfair.

Episode 4, on the other hand, is easier than Episode 3 despite being made for this remaster. You’d think it would be harder since it was created almost 20 years after the original game came out, but its more manageable. Its difficulty makes it a good bridge between Episodes 2 and 3, so if you’re playing the game for the first time, you might want to hop into Episode 4 instead of 3 after completing 2.

If you’re done with the game and want more, the game comes with a level editor and Steam Workshop support, so you can play custom levels and build your own to share with the world!


Crystal Caves HD is an addicting casual score-based platformer. It’s not too hard and its focus on planning an ideal route and getting the highest score is fun and keeps you wanting more. Highly recommended for platformer fans of any skill level.

The Citadel is an anime-style FPS made by a single developer in Unreal Engine 4 that has hand-drawn sprites for almost everything in the game. As the Martyr, a superhuman mass-produced clone with a sexy outfit, your goal is to take down an unborn replacement for God that has brainwashed cybernetically augmented humans for its own goals.


Despite being billed as a “love letter” to games like Doom and Marathon, trying to play it like Doom all the time will get you killed. Enemy attacks are fast and are near-impossible to avoid in close quarters or when you’re being hammered by multiple enemies from a distance, so taking cover is your best option. Thus, the game plays like a hybrid of a typical classic FPS and a tactical shooter. This leads to a unique gameplay flow where, one minute, you’re going guns blazing, then the next, hiding behind cover and picking off enemies one by one with a ranged weapon like you’re in Rainbow Six Vegas. It’s very fun and rewards smart thinking at a moment’s notice.

The exception to this is the game’s hardest difficulty. Enemy aggression is so high and your health is so low that you have to play things tactically in order to survive. It’s a completely different experience from Normal difficulty that feels like a different game at times.

The game has impressive difficulty options. You can adjust

• Player health
  
• Enemy health
  
• Enemy aggressiveness
  
• Amount of supplies in a level
  
• Range enemies can hear you
  
• Whether guns can jam or not
  
• What kind of recoil system you want (arcade or tactical)

To make the game play how you want.

The game has an unusual health system. Instead of having just health, there’s also a food meter that governs your maximum health and sprint duration. The lower your food is, the less health you have and the smaller your sprint running time cap is. You can use a food item at any time to increase your food meter, and with it, your maximum health and sprint duration. Technically, the game would benefit from removing it because it unnecessary complicates how health is usually handled, but in practice, it’s only a minor inconvenience since it’s easy to get food.

The Citadel features sections where you go through levels in a mech. These are really fun carnage-fests that let you blow away large groups of enemies with a mech that’s equipped with a standard machine gun, an auto-cannon, and a rocket launcher. For extra mobility, the mech comes equipped with a jetpack that lets you fly up buildings and rain death from above. One level even lets you destroy buildings enemies are perching on!

While your mech is powerful, it’s fairly fragile, so strafing and some smart thinking are essential to success. That’s not to mean you have to take things slow, but using your mech’s mobility to your advantage is important for success.


In the Citadel, there is no hitscan; both you and enemies shoot projectiles. However, this doesn’t mean that you can dodge projectiles with ease and circle-strafe around every enemy you see; projectiles fired by gun-wielding enemies are fast and nearly impossible to avoid at close range. Taking cover is essential for survival despite enemies “only” shooting projectiles.
You can still run and gun in some situations, usually with the Cultist enemies, but playing it like Doom all the time is suicide.

How the Citadel handles projectiles may sound like a mixed bag, but it works out well. It gets rid of one of the most annoying parts of hitscan enemies, not being able to figure out what direction you’re being hit from, but the projectiles are fast enough from several enemies that you simply can’t sleepwalk your way through the game by running side to side and circle-strafing, like in other boomer shooter revivals such as DUSK. They spice up the gameplay while being fairer than hitscan.

Taking down bad guys (or girls, in this case) is the game’s core, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Despite being a sprite-based game, there are plenty of ways to destroy your enemies. You can blow your enemies in half, blow their heads off, tear their legs off, and outright gib them in several ways, from “still fairly recognizable debris and lower half still standing” to “organs flying everywhere”. Because of this, combat is extremely satisfying and stays entertaining from start to finish.

You also have a very good arsenal. The game starts off with the typical pistol, assault rifle, sniper rifle, and pump-action shotgun, but expands to have quite a few fun and interesting weapons, most of which have their own alternate fire modes. You’ll find uses for weapons you never expected, such as using the Meta-Magnum (pistol) as an anti-armor weapon due to its alt-fire that lets you shoot grenades from it. This game’s guns fill so many niches that you’ll never run into a moment where you wish there was a gun type that could fix a certain problem, but it’s not available anywhere in the game.

The obvious issue with The Citadel’s levels is the extremely limited palette, amount of textures and general blockiness of levels. Levels can feel repetitive after a bit in some instances, and it can be hard to remember some standout moments due to how samey most of them look.

Despite the major visual issue, level design can be quite good. You can’t get lost easily thanks to good flow, some levels have a lot of interconnect ability, and verticality plays and important role in some levels for both you and enemies. Even the game’s mech levels let you jump on top of buildings to take down enemies from a better position and find optional goodies instead of being straight corridors, like you’d see in F.E.A.R. 2’s mech sections.

The best levels are the ones that let you go crazy with your weapons. Combat is this game’s strong suit, and levels that let you unload on a ton of enemies in large areas are really what make the game shine. There’s nothing like mowing down groups of enemies in large arena, or even slinking through an enemy-filled area, popping their heads one at a time with the Auto-Rifle.

On the other hand, the levels that require you to blow away a lot of walls with Satchel Charges (remote explosives) in order to find the exit leaves a little to be desired. While the Satchel Charge is a fun and very effective weapon, having to blow up a lot of walls to proceed kills the pacing. It’s applaudable how the game developer tries to make them good, but the concept just doesn’t work.


This game is very CPU dependent, so those with weak or lower-spec CPUs will run into issues. It might be a good idea to upgrade before trying this game if your CPU is starting to age pretty bad.
Despite many patches, the game still crashes at some points. These crashes normally happen in the later boss stages, where lots of enemy remains and the amount of projectiles the bosses fire overwhelm the game and cause it to crash, along with stages where you have to blow up a lot of walls to progress. It’s best to lower enemy body and gib lifespan to as low as it can go once you enter these stages to avoid crashes.


The Citadel is marketed as a classic old school FPS, but goes beyond simply regurgitating the past by forging its own mix of run and gun and tactical gameplay that’s fun and engaging. While there are a few wrinkles with levels, some crashes, and a serious lack of texture variety, the game manages to overcome its flaws for a solid and fun experience.

In some ways, it feels like what Rise of the Triad should’ve been; lots of gore and cool weapons, but with levels that emphasized blasting enemies into pieces instead of being filled with dull keyhunts and gimmicky jumping sections.

This is highly recommended for any serious fans of first-person shooter games, boomer shooter fan or not.

Outer Worlds is an RPG developed by Obsidian, the developers behind Fallout: new Vegas, as a spiritual sequel to said game. Despite attempting to copy New Vegas mechanics, it fails at nearly everything; writing, gameplay, and even how you can build your character.


The game’s writing is meant to be one of its standout points, but instead is one of its biggest weaknesses.

The main conflict is impossible to take seriously because of how cartoonishly evil the Board, the villains, are. They engage in comically dumb and cruel plans, like refusing to send fish to a fish-canning factory, so the canners have to grab whatever they can scrounge up, making a lottery that sends workers to a room where they get killed by robots (which is blatantly ripped from Fallout New Vegas) under the guise of living in one of the colony’s best cities, or murdering a fashion designer in cold blood for thinking up a fashion style that’s considered “deviant”, that you can’t take them seriously as villains.

These buffoons are grossly incompetent at their job of running the Halcyon colony to the point where it’s a genuine miracle they hadn’t been overthrown decades ago, but the game expects you to believe they’re a major threat instead of a gaggle of moronic cartoon villains kept afloat by blatant author fiat. You’ll probably support the rebel faction not because they’re right, but because the Board is so stupid and needlessly cruel that there’s no real choice.

Compounding this problem is that the game constantly throws jokes at you to the point where it undermines any serious moments. For example, late in the game, you learn about a critical issue that the entire colony is facing…in gag-filled rehearsals of a public speech the villain is planning on giving. In a better game (or story, really), this would be a sober moment to let you comprehend the gravity of the issue and how much it changes the stakes, but Outer Worlds decides that you need it crammed in between the villain comically swearing and getting frustrated over a bad test run of a speech he has to give.

The jokes do not let off throughout the game. It seems that almost everyone, from mindless corporation workers to hardened soldiers, cannot stop making quips or sarcastic comments, no matter how inappropriate they are. It gets on your nerves after a while because it never, ever lets up.

This is made worse by the fact that characters in this game act so ridiculous it’s impossible to see them as real people. You’ll meet people that eagerly behave like living advertisements for corporations multiple times, while one planet has citizens that all talk and behave like they’re from a bad interpretation of a Charles Dickens novel. It’s really hokey.

The game has several “major” choices, but none of them really matter because they don’t directly tie into the overall plot of “Rebels vs the Board”, despite all of them being thematically similar to the main plot. You could murder everyone involved in all of the game’s conflicts and none of it would directly impact the overall narrative. The worst consequence of going postal on every faction would be no backup appearing in the game’s final planet/dungeon, but that’s no big deal considering how easy combat is and how almost all of the combat in the final planet can be bypassed. If you’re going to make major choices have the same theme as the main quest, then at least have the courtesy to have them tie directly into the main quest.


The gameplay isn’t much better. It tries to be a looter shooter, but fails at being one because there aren’t nearly enough unique weapons to justify having such a system. A decent chunk of the game’s weapons are straight upgrades of existing weapons with the same model and name, but with a prefix or suffix like “Mk 2” or “Ultra” slapped onto its name. This means that around the 5th hour mark, you’ve seen nearly every weapon in the game, but have 15 or so more hours of gameplay to go through.

The game has a modding system that lets you upgrade armor and weapons with additional attributes, such as changing the damage type a weapon does or increased melee damage. With enough points in Engineering, you can also use money to upgrade weapon damage directly. The problem, though, is that the game gives you new gear so often that using any mods or tweaking weapons before the endgame is a waste of resources. That modded Light Machine Gun you spent a lot of mods and money on to tweak will become obsolete on the next planet, so why bother blowing resources on modding gear until you’re very close to the end and know you’re not getting any more upgraded versions of existing weapons?

Combat is dull. Enemies barely react to getting hit, and when they do die, they turn into ragdolls that have no weight nor impact in them. The game tries to half-heartedly replicate Fallout’s gore system by rarely having limbs blow off, but the presentation is so awful (lack of blood and meaty sounds being the main culprits) that there’s no satisfaction when you see some idiot’s leg go flying or pop a dude’s head.


Like Fallout, Outer Worlds has a perk skill. Unlike Fallout, Outer Worlds’ perks are very basic and some clearly have advantages over others. None of them change how you play like how Fallout’s perks can. You either pick a flat boost A or flat boost B, with B clearly having more advantages than A. Boring.

Outer World’s skills will seem familiar to Fallout fans, as the basic gist of the system is very similar to how Fallout did things. The major difference, though, is that skills are grouped in sets of three. For example, Handguns, Long Guns, and Heavy Weapons are under the “Ranged” group. You can only put points in the group as a whole until two out of the three skills in a group are 50 or higher. After that, you have to put points in the individual skill to continue to grow it.

The idea seems to be that you can eventually start specializing your character after a certain point, but in reality, it leads to builds feeling a bit samey since, say a character that specializes in Heavy Weapons is also a pretty good shot with a pistol no matter how you try to build him.

Another issue with the skill system is that you get plenty of skill bonuses from clothes and armor, so there’s little need to really put a lot of points in a skill. In fact, the game even has a perk that doubles the bonuses armor and clothes provide.

The ultimate problem with Outer Worlds’ gameplay is that, for all of the skills and ways to build a character it offers, there’s clearly an optimal build that stands head and shoulders above the others that can be figured out as you play. All you need to do to sleepwalk through the game is

• Put your skill points in all of the speech-related skills and in a weapon skill
  
• Pick weapons that do a large amount of base damage to bypass enemy armor but still have good DPS
  
• Equip armor that has the highest armor rating you can find for combat, then swap armor and clothes for skill bonuses as you need them when you’re not fighting enemies.
  
• Burn some points on skills like Engineering and Hacking when clothes and armor bonuses are no longer letting you pass checks for those skills.

and you win.

Sure, the game tempts you with things like stealth archer builds or playing as a brute with no speech skills, but all of these are worse than what was listed above. Trying to be smart and create unique builds makes the game less fun and more of a chore than going for the standard “best” build talked about above. That’s very damning for a game that’s, you know, built on player choice.


Outer Worlds tries to be a Fallout game but fails at every attempt at doing so. Whether it’s because of inept writing that mid-90s JRPGs can run circles around, average gameplay, and a half-baked character-building system, Outer Worlds finds new ways to disappoint.

Super 3-D Noah’s Ark is a Christian game based on, you guessed it, the story of Noah’s ark. Surprisingly, the game is a first person shooter based heavily on Wolfenstein 3D. The developers had a license for the Wolf3D engine for a cancelled game meant to be developed for the NES, so they used it to make a Christian game based on it. Even stranger is the story; instead of killing enemies, you are Noah and you’re shooting feed at unruly animals on Noah’s Ark while it’s at sea in order to make them fall asleep. It sounds odd, but the game itself is solid.

First thing’s first: this is an updated version of the game that runs natively on Windows or Mac instead of a cheap DOSBOX repackage of the original DOS version (though the original DOS executable is included as a bonus). Along with running without the need for a DOS emulator, this also has improved controls that free it from Wolf3D’s antiquated control system and support for modern resolutions. You’ll have no problems starting and playing the game thanks to these improvements.

The game comes with an auto-map system, so navigating levels should be much easier, especially for those that have difficulty navigating mazes. It’s not as advanced as Doom’s since it doesn’t update with the player in real-time as the player moves, but it can make more mazey levels much easier to go through.

At its core, Super 3-D Noah’s Ark is a reskinned of the SNES version of Wolfenstein 3D. This includes everything; weapons, items, and enemies. All violence has been removed too. It does contain two differences from SNES Wolf3D; a backpack item that’s required to carry more than 99 rounds of feed (read: regular ammo) and a quiz-giving item.

The quiz giving item is the biggest difference the game has from vanilla SNES Wolfenstein 3D‘s gameplay. Scattered throughout levels are parchments that have a question about the story of Noah’s ark. Answer it correctly and you’ll get 25 health and 10 feed (or 25 feed only if you’re at maximum health). Get it wrong and you’ll only get four health. It’s an interesting idea, but frankly, almost all of the questions are dumb trivia that focus on random details in the story that nobody in their right mind would normally care about. I don’t think God would be upset about you looking up a guide to answer these pointless questions.

Most of the changes are fine. But, there is one slight problem; the enemy death (or fall asleep, in this case) sounds play a tiny bit after the enemy is technically asleep. This makes knowing when to stop firing once an enemy is asleep a little tricky compared to Wolfenstein 3D, where you knew to stop firing as soon as an enemy’s death sound started.

Since the core gameplay is SNES Wolfenstein 3D, the thing that makes it stand out from its predecessor is the levels.

The game starts simple enough with easy levels. Enemy resistance starts out easy but escalates to fair. Level layouts are also straightforward, so you won’t be getting lost. It’s a surprisingly relaxing experience that distills the core of Wolf3D into a fun package.

Then Episode 4 happens.

Once Episode 4 starts, the game’s difficulty picks up significantly. How? Through two ways; hard enemy placement and a lack of resources.

Starting at Episode 4, the amount of resources you have will start to decrease compared to previous episodes. Ammo will become scarce when it wouldn’t before, and health pickups are something you need to conserve instead of liberally use. Using the projectile weapons to conserve feed and mastering controlling the Super Feeder 5000 (Chaingun in Wolf3D) now becomes important.

By Episode 6, resource depravation is crazy; you need to find secrets just to survive because the game doesn’t give you nearly enough feed and health to take on what it throws at you without them. Every round of feed will start to count and enemy feed drops can make or break you. Health becomes scarce as well, so 1ups go from “nice bonus” to “lifesaving” since they heal you to 100% when you pick them up. Conserving them for just the right moment is vital.

The lack of resources is compounded by the fact that the game throws much harder enemy compositions at you once Episode 4 starts. Once you’re in Episode 4, the game starts using Ostriches and Oxes a lot more often.

The Ox is a particular problem. It has lower health than the Antelpope (SS in Wolf3D), but can have insane reaction time, being able to hit you as soon as it can see you and has a fairly high rate of fire too. No matter how you cut it, you will get killed by an Ox suddenly behaving like an aimbot at some point.

It’s Wolfenstein 3D equivalent, the Mutant, is just as deadly, but was limited only to the second episode and a secret level in the 6th in the PC version of the game. Super 3-D Noah’s Ark is not that merciful. Once Oxes start to appear, they’re never going to stop, and the deeper you get in the game, the more of them you’ll face. Mutants were bad enough even with the heavy amount of ammo Wolf3D gave you, but when you compound a lot of Oxes with a severe feed shortage in Noah’s Ark, things get hard fast. You need to conserve feed ammo to stunlock them to death, which is bad because feed becomes rarer as you progress throughout the game, but Oxes do not.

Ostriches are also a problem. They’re fast and are completely silent, which lets them easily ambush you if you’re not paying attention. Their “alert” sound is much softer than their Wolfenstein 3D counterpart, the Officer’s, is, so it’s possible for one of them to slip through until it’s too late and you’ve a point-blank shot from one of them.

Compounding all of this is the fact that the levels start becoming more complex and mazey once Episode 4 starts. If you’re not good at navigating them, the automap feature will become essential for success.

All of this leads to the second half being much more difficult than the first half. If you’re new to Wolfenstein 3D, it might be best to lower the difficulty down one or two levels once you hit Episode 4 because the second half will eat you alive if you’re not prepared.

If you’re a fan of Doom, a good comparison would be the custom mapset Scythe; starts off easy and is great for simple Wolfenstein 3D fun, but the third or so is much, much harder than anything else the game has thrown at you before. Noah’s Ark does a better job at easing you into the harder content than Scythe does, though.

Super 3-D Noah’s Ark is an interesting game. It’s a great introduction to Wolfenstein 3D for those that haven’t played it before, but it also a good game for Wolf3D vets seeking a challenge after completing the iD campaigns in the hardest difficulty. The QoL improvements from vanilla PC Wolf3D, such as the auto-map and better controls, make it easier to play than vanilla PC Wolfenstien 3D. It’s fun and worth a try, no matter how much experience you have with Wolfenstein 3D.

Let’s not beat around the bush: Postal 3 sucks.

The game had a morality system featuring two sides; good and evil. Good starts you off playing as a police officer, while evil starts off as you playing as a member of an extremist animal rights faction. Each faction has their own missions.

It sounds simple enough, but the problem is how the system is handled. You see, you can gain good points while evil by taking enemies down non-lethally or continue to get evil points by massacring civilians, but you can only gain evil points by taking down civilians and certain types of hostiles lethally while you’re on the good side. Your character acts like a total saint in the missions, but no matter what you do, you can only go down. Lovely.

This game is also pretty liberal about what it considers “evil” actions. Some of the heinous crimes I’ve committed were

• Going from good to pure evil for accidentally charging into two police officers while sprinting during a mission.
  
• Arresting a man for public urination simply because it wasn’t a mission objective, despite being a crime.
  
• Shooting protesters armed with melee weapons that are actively trying to kill Uwe Boll.
  
• Somehow losing points when fellow police officers were killed by enemies while trying to defend the US-Mexico border.

You can use lethal force without being penalized, but only when enemies have firearms themselves. Of course, the game occasionally scatters civilians with dumb AI to make things more “challenging”. Essentially, playing through the “good” route forces you to be careful about your shots and avoid collateral damage.

The question is, why bother adding a “good route” when it forces you to play completely against how the series is usually played? Sure, that could be a fun challenge for an errand or two, but building an entire route around it is dumb. Did the people that make this even fully understand what the series was about?

Unlike Postal 2, the game is linear. While there is a large city that could be used to link missions from one to another, it’s only used in patrol missions on the good side, where you’re confined to one part of the city and have to stop criminals. Otherwise, you’re teleported from one area to another without being able to explore the city or cause mayhem between missions, which is one of the things that made Postal 2 so good.

The strange thing is that beating the game once opens up a freeplay mode in the city, letting you do whatever you want in it and go into several buildings featured in missions (but without any meaningful law enforcement or things to find), so they clearly were able to do a Postal 2-style world at one point. What happened? No time or money? Developer incompetence?

The missions themselves range from “generic third person shooting sequences” to “stop criminals in the city”.

As odd as it sounds, the generic shooter sequences are the best part of the game; there’s no annoying objectives, no unfun bosses, and little ways for it to glitch out. It still finds a way to piss you off, though; some missions force you to kill everyone before proceeding, but doesn’t tell you how many enemies are left. Over missions have infinitely respawning enemies, but you have no idea about this until you notice they keep coming after killing them a few times.

The worst is the “patrol” missions that appear in the good path. In these, you’re given a section of the city to roam around in and stop crime. It sounds like it’s a return to how Postal 2 did things, but it completely drops the ball because there’s no indication of where to go. All you do is mindlessly run around until a cutscene appears, taze and arrest the character(s) shown in it, then continue on. You can shoot enemies if they have guns and fire back, which doesn’t do a lot to change things up. There’s no hint about how many crimes you need to stop until the mission ends, and you must stop certain crimes before others will appear, so the whole thing is essentially a linear romp, but you have no damn idea where to go. It’s as dreadful as it sounds.

Making things worse is how buggy the game is. From crashes to pisspoor AI, Postal 3 knows how to be a mess. Some fun examples include

• Allowing the game to restart from a game over instead of loading a save the moment the Postal Dude dies can cause the game to break in various ways. This includes as a vital NPC deciding to stay where he is instead of moving to his destination, the game becoming unstable, and, somehow, the controls completely messing up, making the Postal Dude uncontrollable. If any of these happen, you’ll have to reload from an earlier save and hope that fixed it. If it doesn’t, you’ll have to close out of the program (if it didn’t crash already) and hope the problem is fixed when you reload the save.
  
• Godawful AI pathing. This isn’t much of a problem with enemies (in fact, it can be a big help when it does happen), but your allies are brain-dead dumb. This is especially bad in the game’s token escort mission, as the AI has genuine trouble trying to follow the path laid out for it. I saw the NPC I had to protect ram into a wall, do random U-turns, spend several minutes driving into a fire hydrant, and somehow get stuck hitting the very edge of a ruined car, which forced me to free him by running into him just when he was on the very edge of the car’s collision box.
  
• An NPC that you must kill to proceed somehow disappearing. After some testing, I discovered that if the NPC (or any, for that matter) entered ragdoll mode for any reason in the level, he would fall through the floor and never return as part of a performance saving measure. This forced me to kill him ASAP, causing me to take a ridiculous amount of damage in the process and making things much harder than it should be.
  
• Multiple crashes when trying to protect Uwe Boll from a wave of hostile NPCs.
  
• Not really a bug, but since it’s related to ♥♥♥♥♥♥ design and programming, it goes here. One area featuring a gigantic firefight between three factions and random civilians running around. The issue is that the level is absolutely flooded with NPCs, which the poor engine can’t handle. Seriously, it has like 20 to 30+ characters doing their own things at once. Even people with strong CPUs will probably have trouble with this section.

The cherry on top of this ♥♥♥♥ Sundae is poor sound mixing. Music and sound levels are inconsistent, leading to situations such as music that’s ridiculously loud while NPC chatter can barely be heard, despite having the same volume for sounds and music in the game’s options. At one point, I had to mute music entirely because it was close to blowing my eardrums out when it didn’t in previous levels. I never turned it on afterwards.

It’s not just music that has mixing problems either. Most weapons have sounds that aren’t too loud, but the M16 is ridiculously loud. While this is fine when only one person is using it, multiple characters using it feels like an assault on your eardrums. This makes enemies wielding the M16 the most dangerous enemy in the game; not because of the damage they do (which is sort of piddling), but for the fact they’re effective at directly attacking your IRL hearing abilities. I’ve never heard of a game where enemies are more effective hurting you IRL than in game, but Postal 3 manages to surprise and amaze.

As for good things, there are some fun weapons, such as the Machine Gun, and the graphics are pretty good for the time they were made in. The generic shooting segments are fun when there isn’t any BS in them. It’s not much, but it is something.

Overall, Postal 3 is a tremendous turd of a game and should be avoided. It fails at nearly everything it sets out to do. There are many reasons why the people that own the Postal IP, RWS, has disowned this game, despite their involvent in the game while it was being developed.

NOTE: This game was obtained for free as part of a Pride Month promotion in June 2021.

Tell Me Why is a slow-paced adventure game developed by DONONOT, the creators of Life is Strange 1. The game’s gameplay is very similar to LiS1’s, but features some new twists and a completely different story. How does it actually stack up, though?

Gameplay is a fairly typical modern point and click game. Your character is in a certain location, and in order to proceed, he or she must explore the area to learn more about the area, discover a problem or create a plan, and find a way to solve the problem or execute the plan. It’s simple, but fun.

You also have conversations with other people, where you can pick responses to what characters say. The controls for this can be a bit awkward, as you have to press a button on initiate a conversation instead of the response prompt appearing automatically, but it does allow for things like responding to someone while you explore instead of accidentally canceling a response prompt because it appeared just as you began examining something.

The choices affect you make affect small details of how the story works. For example, being nice to characters will make them more willing to open up, while being a jerk will not. However, no matter how you play, it will have very little impact on the ending, which is determined solely by a choice you make at the very end and a choice near the middle of the third chapter. It’s disappointing to see that the developers didn’t really learn from Life is Strange and made most of your choices irrelevant at the end again.

There is also an option that lets you psychically communicate with your twin during conversations in order to unlock alternate dialogue trees and ways to solve problems, such as calming down a situation that could lead to the person you’re talking to becoming belligerent. Unfortunately, this cool feature is underused, making it feel more like a gimmick than a proper part of the gameplay.
The twins’ psychic abilities can also be used to conjure up memories in order to advance the plot. These are not only used to create in-game flashbacks to events (which is important, since this game is all about discovering what actually happened in the past with the twins and their mother), they’re also used choose how certain events played out. While fun, your choices don’t really lead to much.

Finally, there’s a sort of “karma” system that tracks your responses on certain things. In theory, the idea is that certain choices that are nice to the twin you’re not playing as will improve their bonds, while ones that are antagonistic to the other twin will weaken the bond. Part of the ending changes depending on how strong the bond is at the end of the game. While a neat idea in theory, most of the “correct” choices are about sucking up to Tyler and saying he’s right, even in situations where he might be wrong or the answer is not clear. Only a few “correct” answers are about how Alyson feels, so the mechanic feels more like “how much can you kiss Tyler’s butt” like you’re trying to befriend a companion in a Bioware game than actually building a strong bond between the twins.

The game’s story focuses on a set of twins. One of them killed his mother when she attempted to murder him as a child ten years ago, and is now leaving juvie in order to help his sister, Alyson, sell the family’s home. However, the events of 10 years ago are not what they seem and the people in the small Alaskan town the twins live in are unwilling to discuss what happened that day and the months leading up to it.

The game is as it’s peak when it has the characters directly involved in the main plotline, investigating what really happened the night the twins’ mother was killed. Looking through old memories and documents to piece together what happened and using what you’ve learned to get the truth out of people unwilling to spit it out is very fun. Chapter 2 is filled with the nitty-gritty of the investigating, making it the most fun chapter out of the three.

However, the game does not spend all of it’s time on the main plotline. In fact, the main plotline does not truly start until the player is deep in the first chapter! Instead, it spends a lot of time focusing on more personal moments. This would be fine if the moments were fairly short, but they end up eating too much time in the story. Having moments to cool down between investigations is fine, but these parts seem to drag on forever with nonsense like “slowly walk around the twins’ house while labeling things and listening to the twins make witty comments with each other”, “calmly explore a general store”, and “yet another dull romantic sequence with Tyler’s love interest”. These makes the game feel like it’s more interested in spinning its wheels than moving things forward. Life is Strange 1 managed to hit a good balance between investigations and more personal moments, so it’s disappointing to see Tell Me Why completely fumble it.

Early on in the story, the twins (re)discover an old book of homemade fairy tales created by them and their mother called “The Book of Goblins”. What should’ve been a cute background element instead plays a vital role in both the gameplay and the plot. At some points, your characters will have to solve a puzzle, and conveniently, the solution is found in one of the stories in The Book of Goblins. The solutions are not just in the story, but also in the art included in the stories. These slow down the game significantly as you crawl though the story the game tells you to look through to find a solution. It feels like a hackened way to tie the gameplay into the overall story that just drags the game down as a whole.

The Book of Goblins leads to another issue with the story; there are a ridiculous amount of mechanical puzzles in a cabin located far away from civilization. It’s understandable that the developers need to add puzzles to the game so there’s more to do besides examine objects and talk to people, but it’s pretty ridiculous that a two-story cabin seems to have as many obtuse puzzles and mechanical devices as Resident Evil’s Spenser Mansion or Raccoon City’s Police Department HQ. Did the twins’ mom work for Umbrella Corporation or something?

The biggest issue with the story is how much it makes Tyler the center of the world without giving some sort of good reason why. Based on how the story acts, you’d think that Tyler is some chosen one that everyone needs to ass-kiss, but he’s just some nobody that never earns the characters lining up to stroke his ego. To his credit, he is the main agent that keeps the plot moving forward, but the amount of focus and love he gets becomes grating fairly quick.

Tyler is special enough that he gets his own romantic interest, Michael. Michael is probably the most pointless character in the series. The scenes he’s in drag the story and pacing to a crawl and contribute almost nothing to the overall story. His voice acting is about a step or two about porn acting, and he dresses like a tremendous tool.

Tell me Why starts off with an interesting premise, but seems to be unable to stick to what makes it work best. Between underutilizing an interesting mechanic, too much focus on one of the twins, and uneven pacing, the story and gameplay is just too uneven to really recommend.

Grand Theft Auto III one of the most famous games of all time. It’s crime-focused open world revolutionized gaming forever, setting the template for future open world games. However, it’s been nearly 20 years since the game was released. Has it held up?

Driving is simple, but effective. Controls are easy to use with KB+M and most cars are not slippery, so driving around town and getting from point A to point B is simple. It’s nothing special, but it works. Car physics are very arcadey, though, so realism fans will need to adjust to how III’s cars work.

The most notable thing about driving isn’t the driving controls or handling, but how little damage vehicles can take. Regular cars take a surprisingly small amount of damage before the engine starts going up in flames, while sports cars feel like they’re made out of paper. The only cars that have the durability you expect in later games are the heavier ones. This is a double-edged sword; while this means enemies can destroy you easily in cars, this also means you can shred enemy vehicles with ease. It adds an interesting risk/reward to drive-bys and missions with combat.

Boat handling is good, but the big problem is that you can’t do drive-bys with them. This makes dealing with other boats awkward, as you can’t fire back if they’re on you, unlike with cars. All you can do is outpace them or, if it’s a mission, follow them until you can hit them for a pitiful amount of damage.

Combat is basic. Your character fires in the direction the cursor is pointing at without any fancy over-the-shoulder camera or zoom in that you see in later GTA games or in modern third person shooters. It’s very primitive, but the game’s AI is extremely stupid, so killing them isn’t a problem.

The weapons are also barebones. The only exotic weapons you have are the Flamethrower and Rocket Launcher, with every other weapon being a grenade, pistol, SMG, or assault rifle. This doesn’t mean your weapon selection sucks, because several of your weapons are lethal as hell.

Interestingly, you can carry every weapon at once, unlike later GTA games. This is overkill for the most part, as the Mini-Uzi, Shotgun, Grenades, M16, and Rocket Launcher tower over the other weapons, but it’s nice to have some extra gear to mix things up or if you’re out of ammo for them.

The world map is great…with one big exception. The first two areas, Portland and Staunton Island, are very well-connected with several side-paths. The areas are also small enough that you can easily memorize the areas and create your own routes for things like Paramedic or evading the police without too much trouble. Fans of San Andreas and onwards will be disappointed, but it’s refreshing having a world small enough to work with and plan around with ease.

Shoreside Vale is the final area and is easily the worst one out of all the areas. The area has far poorer interconnection compared to the rest of the map, making navigation a chore at times. For an example, the area is divided into two sections via a river. There are only two bridges (well, one bridge and one dam) that connect each side, so your options for crossing from one side to another is very limited. And, since the only aerial vehicle is a gimmicky plane and there are no boats, your options are limited to just those bridges all the time. There are also a lot of dead ends that make traveling more of a pain. Most of the map is underused in missions, so at least half of the area feels almost pointless. The only real interesting area is the airport, which takes up a surprisingly large chunk of the island for little benefit. It feels very rushed and incomplete compared to the previous locations. It’s a shame, because if Shoreside Vale was as good as the other two areas, GTA III would have the best map in the series.

There is one major issue with the map; as you progress through the game, gangs that prowl a region will become permanently hostile once you do a certain mission. This is a particular problem with one area, where a Shotgun-wielding gang will become hostile and will destroy your vehicle in seconds if they see you. To make things worse, you will anger 7 out of 9 gangs in the game if you complete all of the game’s missions and make one gang that always aggros on you be given powerful AK-47s after the final mission. This “feature” makes travel and enjoying the sandbox troublesome the further you get into the game, as driving through certain neighborhoods can make your car go from 100% to critical health in no time due to gangs going nuts and opening fire the moment they see you. Having to plan around avoiding several areas in a sandbox game is pretty dumb.

Even worse, hostile gangs make activities such as Paramedic and Firefighter very difficult, as the game will make you go to areas filled with a hostile gang that will shoot up your vehicle. This means that, if you’re going for 100%, you have to do side missions as soon as possible or else they’ll become very difficult to outright impossible because of enemy gangs.

The missions are much simpler than in other GTA games. Minigames are non-existent and gimmicks like “spook-o-meters” appear very few times. Instead, you spend most missions doing basic things like driving to certain locations to kill someone, getting a certain wanted level and evading the police, or collecting objects. It’s all barebones, but feels oddly refreshing in that you don’t have to deal with any dumb minigames or gmiccks.

The great thing about III’s missions is how open they are. Many missions are open enough to let you tackle missions how you want instead of exactly how the designers want. For example, there is a mission that requires you to hit a car until it’s dropped six pieces of evidence, then destroy the car used to collect the evidence. Instead, you can get into a tank and blow up the vehicle with a shot from the tank’s cannon, instantly completing the mission. Being able to handle missions, including some difficult ones, how you want to makes going through missions more fun and memorable than nonsensical railroading you see in later GTA games.

One big problem with the game is that money is essentially worthless in this game. Weapon shops have a limited stock and Hidden Packages make free weapons spawn at every safehouse in the game, so blowing cash on weapons is pointless except if you really, really need a certain weapon that is only gained from Hidden Packages in the final island but can be bought in the second one. There are no purchasable safehouses nor properties, so there’s no huge money sink in the game. The only other thing you can spend money on is Pay ‘n Sprays, but after a few missions or some Hidden Package hunting early in the game, you’ll have all you need to afford Pay ‘n Sprays for the entire game. It seems the developers intended money to be treated more like score than money, like how it was treated in earlier GTA games, but III isn’t a score attack game or is there a high score board.

Grand Theft Auto III is an unusual game; it launched the GTA series into the mainstream and kickstarted the modern open world genre, but it has its own quirks that make it stand out from the games that came after it. Compared to later GTA games, it feels like a rough prototype of things to come, with basic missions, barebones combat, and a simple map. However, this can be seen as an advantage, as it avoids pitfalls later GTA and Rockstar games have fallen into, such as gimmicky missions and too much plot. Those that want a pure sandbox experience will love it, but those that like their sandboxes with minigames, a deep plot, and will find themselves bored fairly quickly. As a fan of the basics without any nonsense, this game hit the spot.

(Ignore the time played. This review is based on playing the game in GZDoom on the second highest difficulty.)

Hexen is a dark fantasy FPS using the Doom engine. While it serves as the successor to Heretic, it plays very differently from the game it descended from, despite sharing some mechanics with it.

It plays very different from its predecessor, Heretic. It’s heavily exploration-focused and has levels grouped into areas called hubs. Hubs are a collection of levels where you explore multiple levels in order to gain access to other levels and gain access to vital keys, switches, or more areas in already-found levels. Your goal is to open up the door that leads to the exit, which may either lead to a boss, a boss level, or the exit to the next hub.

This game is in love with hiding things. You will need a decent eye for several doors and switches needed to proceed, particularly in the game’s early. The areas are fairly easy to spot if you’re decent at exploring and discovering things like walls with different textures or with patterns that signal a door, but if finding obscure things is difficult for you, it’s a very easy deal-breaker. A guide is a big help if you want to go through it despite not being good at finding secrets and hidden things.

Hub 1 has several problems, chief among them being that you have no clue how close you’re getting to opening the level’s exit. Several things in the hub feel arbitrary but are actually essential to completing the hub, so all you can do is pay attention, use every switch you find, and explore every new area to its fullest because the game won’t tell you how much you’ve actually progressed towards your ultimate goal. Most of the levels are split into two parts that eventually interconnect after you’ve visited the second half, which feels like padding. It’s not the worst set of levels, but it’s defiantly weaker than the rest of the game.

Hub 2 is better simply for the fact it shows that you need to use three special switches in three areas in order to open the door to the boss level. The levels lean more heavily on hiding switches and keys vital to progress than in Hub 1, though. It can get annoying having to double and triple-check areas to make sure that you’ve scoured the area for anything essential. The hub is meant to focus on outdoors areas, but oddly, two of the levels are filled with samey corridors like the first hub, making it feel more like “Hub 1: Part 2” instead of a unique hub.

Hub 3 makes the smart decision of splitting the hub into two sections; in the first one, you find five jewels across two levels. In the second one, you activate nine symbols across three levels to summon the hub’s boss in order to escape. The levels themselves are straightforward and contain only a tiny amount of moments that are illogical, like one of the symbols being activated by walking over a platform. Combat becomes noticeably more difficult in this hub, with every level being filled to the brim with lots of enemies. This is where the game takes the gloves off as far as combat difficulty goes. Positioning and having enough ammo for crowd control are essential here and in future hubs.

Hub 4 feels like a more expanded Hub 3 in terms of design. Like 3, it’s broken into two halves; the first one is about unlocking access to the second half via finding gears in the first level and finding key items for the second half in the second level. The second half has you exploring three levels, one of this is a mini-hub area of its own, in order to find a key to access the boss’ room in order to leave. The levels in the second half are fairly small, but packed with areas and enemies and have some interesting ways they’re tied together. Getting lost won’t be a problem due to how many distinct areas the levels have and how small they are.

Hub 5 is easily the shortest of the hubs; all you need to do is go through three straightforward levels and beat a boss in each one to retrieve a key, then use the three keys to unlock the final level. However, the combat in this chapter is brutal, with a connecting level that’s filled with a legion of enemies that only appear in this hub, while one of the levels containing a key is filled to the brim with one of the tougher enemies in the game. Ammo management is a serious concern in this hub and you will find yourself running out of it if you don’t play things smart. It’s easily the most brutal hub as far as combat goes, which makes up for its simplicity in terms of scope and puzzles.

To mix things up even more, you can play as one of three classes, each with his own strengths and weaknesses along with unique weapons instead of a generic character that has access to every weapon, like in Heretic and Doom. These attributes include weapons, speed, and the minimum amount of armor the class will always have. No weapons are shared, so you’re getting a unique experience for each of them.

The Fighter is the first of the three characters. As you’d expect, he’s focused on melee attacks. To make meleeing easier, he’s the fastest of the characters and has the highest amount of base armor. His melee attacks make him a beast when facing a single opponent, but he a bit of a problem; his focus on taking down single foes with melee weapons leaves him a little shorthanded when it comes to crowd control and ranges enemies. Most of the game’s later combat is focused on dealing with huge hordes of enemies, so the poor Fighter will find himself either having to take down a group one enemy at a time or use ammo-hungry weapons to burn through enemies as fast as he burns through ammo. This makes him the best class for the early game, but once he hits the halfway point, he’s going to find he needs to be a lot more careful with his ammo and cautious to take down the huge hordes that appear.

The second class is the Mage. He’s the slowest out of all the characters and has the least minimum armor, but he focuses on ranged attacks. His only proper melee attack is a hidden function of one of his weapons, so he’s not completely helpless. However, he excels in crowd control. His starting weapon, the Sapphire Wand, shoots a fast projectile that can go through enemies until it hits a wall and penetrate a certain boss’ shield, making it handy weapon that’s always viable and useful from start to finish. His third weapon is single target, but destroys enemies very quickly and can be used at a distance. His final weapon turns thick groups of enemies into gibs. While he struggles a bit against single foes, his crowd control abilities are what makes him shine, and in a game about crowd control, this makes him king.

The Cleric is the last class and serves as something of a hybrid between the Fighter and Mage. He’s faster than the Mage and has more minimum armor than him, but less than the mage. Quite frankly, he’s a bit of a mess. he starts off with a terrible starting weapon that’s just the Fighter’s starting weapon but worse in nearly every way, and turns into a middling version of the Mage, complete with a weaker knock-off of the Mage’s third weapon, until he gets his fourth weapon, where he becomes a god of crowd control that makes the Mage look like a pansy. One shot from it can turn the biggest crowds into a pile of gibs, something not even the Mage can do. He’s the roughest and has the most payoff out of all the classes, forcing you to be a weaksauce version of the Mage and Fighter until you get your final weapon, where suddenly everything is effortlessly destroyed by you in seconds.

Hexen is an interesting beast; it’s the technical sequel to Heretic, but plays radically different from it with its focus on exploration and having three classes to choose from. While the combat is fun, the real meat of the game is exploring and watching the hubs open up. If you’re a person that’s not good at exploring, this game is a hard pass. But, if you love checking out levels and finding new paths, this is well worth it.

(Ignore the time played. This review is based on playing the game in GZDoom on the second highest difficulty.)

Heretic is a fantasy-themed first person shooter based on the Doom engine. The game shares more than a few similarities to Doom itself, such as having weapons that behave very similar, if not exactly the same between Heretic and Doom. However, there’s more than meets the eye, as Heretic manages to go beyond being a reskinned Doom into becoming its own thing.

The biggest difference between Heretic and Doom in terms of technology is that you can look up and down, unlike in Doom. This sounds great, but it’s bound tow awkward keys and there’s no native mouselook support. Source ports such as GZDoom alleviate this problem, thankfully. Having vertical looking makes the game feel less restrictive compared to Doom.

Like Doom, Heretic is broken into several episodes. The first three episodes are the original episodes, while episodes four and five are from an expansion pack that was released later.

Episode 1 is the first and most impressive of the episodes as far as level designs go. The episode is linear as far as level design goes, but two levels have large areas that could be confusing. However, the amount of items and enemies in them makes them fun to explore. Its biggest failing is a lack of unique weapons. It makes the episode feel repetitive in terms of combat, even with the Tome of Power.

Episode 2 is the weakest out of all the episodes. While it introduces the rest of the game’s weapons, making combat a lot more interesting, the levels themselves are either generic lava caverns or feel like B-list episode 1 levels. The new enemy introduced, the Weredragon, is unimpressive, since it’s a generic “single projectile and melee” enemy that’s less impressive than the enemies in episode 1.

Episode 3 is a good boost in quality and hits similar highs that Episode 3 does. It’s the most well rounded episode in the game, as it has good levels and gives you full access to the game’s arsenal while throwing some tricks to keep things fresh along the way, such as having the strong boss in episode 2 be a regular enemy and add a fun new enemy.

Episode 4 is a huge difficulty spike. E4M1 is ball-bustingly difficult due to a severe ammo drought, and the ammo situation only gets better around E4M3. This episode does not mess around as it throws high-level enemies at you in a way that previous episodes did not. It also likes to hide switches and items vital to progress in hidden and sneaky areas, so if you’re the type that’s bad at finding secrets, a video guide is highly recommended.

Episode 5 is also intended as a challenging episode, but oddly, it feels easier. You’re given more ammo to deal with what the game throws at you, so it feels overall more manageable than episode 4 does. It also hides vital switches and keys behind secret and hidden areas moreso than in episode 4, so this is another episode that those that aren’t usually secret finders will need a guide to look for.

Due to how many enemies levels have, you’ll have to play smart. Trying to circle-strafe all the time like in Doom can and will end up getting you killed. Having the right positioning to tackle enemies with, being able to identify weaknesses in enemy formations in order to exploit them and finding chokepoints to funnel enemies through will be more successful in many cases. There’s more than goes into dealing with Heretic’s hordes than in Doom.

Pistols starters should be careful with Heretic. While the game supports wand starting, a lot of levels clearly seem to be designed with the idea of you carrying items from one area to another, so weapon and item placement for wand starts is treated more like an afterthought. You’ll have to do a lot more planning and route development beforehand than you would in Doom. It’s best to play continuously unless you’re a hardcore pistol starter.

Heretic introduces Ghost enemies. In addition to having a semi-transparent effect (the same one from Doom, in fact), ghost enemies can only be damaged by magical weapons. While most of the weapons in the game are magical, you’ll want to watch the ammo on your magical weapons so that you can always take down ghost enemies in case they pop up. It’s not a huge change to the typical Doom enemy formula, but it adds just enough to combat that you’ll need to do a little bit of planning around them.

At first glance, your arsenal consists of several reskinned Doom weapons. It’s possible to break it down like this

Staff = Fist
Chainsaw = Gauntlets of the Necromancer
Pistol = Elven Wand
Crossbow = Shotgun
Dragon’s Claw = Chaingun
Hellstaff = Plasma Gun
Phoenix Rod = Rocket Launcher

The only truly new weapon in the game is the Firemace, and it’s an odd duck. It fires a fast stream of bouncing balls that damage enemies on contract. If a ball does not hit an enemy right away, it will bounce around for a few second before it quietly disappears. Each ball does less damage than a projectile from the Hellstaff, a common weapon starting from episode 2, yet the game treats it like the ultimate weapon, randomizing when it can appear in maps. It feels like a tech demo weapon that was added to the game without properly balancing it to make it a beast of a weapon like the developers thought it would be.

To differentiate weapons, Heretic has the “Tome of Power” item, which radically changes how weapons behave as long as it is active. For example, the Hellstaff normally fires a fast stream of average-power projectiles, but it’s powered-up form greatly cuts down the weapon’s rate of fire. The Tome increases the projectile’s damage and makes it so that damaging rain appears for several seconds above where the projectile hit. This rain can make quick work of enemy groups, particularly powerful enemies. This is a very clever item that adds useful and powerful alternate fire modes in a way you can’t just spam them all the time, like you would with normal alt-fires.

Several of the weapons are satisfying to use. The Gauntlet of the Necromancer is essentially a reskinned Chainsaw from Doom, but it’s sounds and looks (it’s a gauntlet that shoots Force Lightning at close range) made much more fun to use than the Chainsaw ever was. You might even find yourself meleeing just to use it. The Dragon’s Claw has a meaty and distinctive firing sound that makes mowing down crowds so much better with it. On the other hand, the Hellstaff, one of your most used weapons once you reach Episode 2, has a wimpy firing sound and unimpressive impact sounds for your weapon. The Firemace has the same problem. The Phoenix Rod also poor sounds, but the amount of damage it can do gives it a bump over the Hellstaff and Firemace.

In additional to an arsenal of effective weapons, Heretic also has an inventory system that lets you store almost every item and use them whenever you need them. This adds a surprising amount of depth to the gameplay, as you can choose when to use a powerup or healing item when you really need them instead of grabbing and using them ASAP, or backtracking to find a certain healing item you passed up earlier. By using the right item at the right time (or even doing something like impulsively using a Tome of Power during an ambush), you can quickly change things in your favor, making battles feel more strategic than in Doom.

Proper inventory usage is vital to your success in this game. The game expects you to be willing to use items as you proceed, so trying to be a hoarder will just get you killed. Hoarders will have to learn a few hard lessons in this game.


Heretic is an interesting beast. While clearly derived from Doom, it puts just enough twists on the Doom formula to stand out from its progenitor. It’s monster-packed levels, weapons with alt-fires via the Tome of Power, and inventory system give it enough to stand on its own as a great experience instead of merely being a Doom copy. It’s a must-play for any FPS fan.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas almost needs no introduction. Packed with content, it’s seen as the apex of the GTA series by many fans. It defined the amount of content open-world games should have for years and still serves as an example of THE open-world game.

I’ve tried to beat the game for several years, but either lost interest or gave up. I’ve finally managed to beat the game very recently. As someone with no nostalgia for the game, I figure it would be interesting to review it.

Driving works well for the game. The only real bad part of it is how car handling is tied to a driving skill stat, which improves as you keep driving. This stat goes up fairly slowly and has a noticeable impact on driving the further you get into the skill, so it sucks having your car not handle the best unless you really invest in car upgrades, bump up your driving skill a lot, or start farming cars that handle great off the bat.

The best part of driving is the bikes. Even the slowest of them is a blast to use due to having a better feeling of speed that most cars in the game. Weaving through traffic, pulling off stunts with them, and going off-road with them is really fun.

Flying is…unusual at first glance. It’s oddly a lot more realistic than the rest of the vehicles in the game as far as controlling them goes. While they handle well once you start to get the hang of them, they have a fairly bad learning curve, which is at odds with how easy the rest of the game’s vehicles are to control.

Combat is decent for a game of its age. You can use the right mouse button to zoom in the mouse and look over CJ’s shoulder to get a better shot at enemies. This makes combat fun on PC, since the mouse and the zoom give you enough precision to take out enemies with ease. Headshots are simple as well. It’s certainly nothing special in today’s age, but it gives you enough control to make combat enjoyable.

The game also has stats for each weapon type. Basically, the more living or vehicular targets a weapon hits, the better CJ can get at it. Weapons are generally broken into three levels; Poor, Gangaster, and Hitman. There are some exceptions to this, such as the Tec-9 and the Micro SMG sharing the same weapon skill, but generally, each weapon has its own unique skill to level up. Obviously, you’ll want to aim for (no pun intended) Hitman level as it tightens up weapon accuracy the most and has some perks, such as letting CJ dual-wield Micro SMGs. Thankfully, this isn’t a situation where your weapons are useless until you’ve put some skill in them; CJ can inflict plenty of damage even at “Poor” skill level. The system also encourages you to swap your weapons up a bit in order to build up skill instead of sticking with one or two weapons the entire game, adding a bit of spice to combat. Some weapons do not have skill levels.

There are other stats as well. Tying stamina and health into stats that naturally grow as you play instead of only being boostable by activities is a great idea, but having to feed CJ or else he starts wasting away, and eventually starving to death, is unnecessary. It feels like you have to babysit CJ at times. There’s also a “fat” stat eventually turns CJ into a fatass with hilarious lines if you eat too much and don’t burn off the fat, but considering how much your character moves around and how saves auto-restore your health, you almost deliberately have to be trying to get CJ fat.

SA expands the GTA formula by adding several minigames. Most of these are, quite frankly, pretty bad. You have a dull and barebones DDR clone that might as well not exist past the mission you’re forced to do it, janky stealth sequences which have mechanics that are useless outside of their missions, and a burglary sidequest that becomes more fun when you try to game it then try to play it how the devs wanted, among others arse minigames.

The worst part of the game are the missions themselves. They run into three flaws: either serving as uneeded tutorials, are filled with padding driving sequences, or are too scripted for their own good.

The uneeded tutorials are the most obvious of the bad missions since the game front loads a ton of them at the start of the game. For some reason, Rockstar thought you needed dedicated missions to teach you fundamental things like buying clothing, getting a haircut, eating food, and even gun stores. It’s ridiculous how many things the game forces you to learn that are obvious.

The tutorials do not end after the start of the game either. You’re given a steady stream of tutorial missions throughout the game. You’re forced to do a long series of advanced driving tutorials, including one that’s heavily luck-based, in order to unlock the quest line that leads to Import/Export. You will never need these driving skills outside of a single mission in the quest line to unlock Import/Export. The mid-late portion of the game grinds to a halt until you’ve learned how to fly via several tutorials.

The ironic part is that several of these tutorials come too late. For example, the flying tutorials come after two missions where you fly RC vehicles, which handle exactly like regular-sized planes and helicopters. It really would’ve been nice if you had a proper tutorial or were given experience to mess around with aerial vehicles before starting the RC missions. I will admit this is a slight problem in Vice City as well, but San Andreas makes it more egregious since it beats you over the head with tutorials for things the first time you’re meant to encounter them in most cases.

Other mission are filled with pointless driving that require you to be on the road a long time just to reach the destination while you hear characters banter. Failing these missions can get frustrating quick since you waste so much time driving over and not every mission lets you skip the drive. It feels like the game is just wasting your time with these trips.

San Andreas also started the trend of scripted missions. There are more than a few that require you to drive a specific vehicle and fails you for any deviation from what the developers expect of you. A few missions being more challenging because the developers force you to use a certain vehicle is fine, but when you’re forced to use the same vehicle or else have the mission stall out for no logical reason multiple times, such as in early Los Santos, it feels less like you’re in an open-world game and more like you’re in a mediocre linear game. As much as people complain about GTA IV’s missions, San Andreas has the exact same problem IV’s do at times.

All of these tie into the game’s ultimate problem; it takes forever to fully unlock enough to truly enjoy the world. In order to get the entire map unlocked, you need to complete a whopping 61 missions. If you want to be able to have safehouses in the last city, you’ll need to complete 66 missions. In order to actually have an open world with all the resources you need, you have to go through a gauntlet of missions of various quality, some of which are completely unnecessary. Having to go through a legion of missions just to get into the meat of the game is ridiculous.

It’s a shame it takes so damn long to fully open up the game world, because the game is fantastic once the essentials are unlocked.

Despite the tone of this review, I enjoyed San Andreas. Once everything you need is unlocked, it’s the best of the best of the 3D era GTA games. However, it takes far, far too long for you to actually reach that point. At times, it feels like the game is actively fighting you from enjoying the world and gameplay with bad missions or poorly made minigames that just serve as obstacles towards the next great area or item to unlock. A decent amount of cutting missions and minigames would’ve made this the definite GTA game. As it stands though, it takes too long to reach the good stuff, such as a fully unlocked world and all activities open, which can be a big turn-off for some.