Recent reviews by DUNCAN DONUTS

Half Life: CAGED is a short mod from an ex-Valve developer. While he is now an employee at Guerrilla Games, he found the time to make CAGED. It’s combination of good level design and humor makes it a great little way to play some fresh Half-Life content, even if it is a bit short.

Unlike the original game, the combat is quite difficult. The issue is that most of your guns are completely ineffective for whatever reason. An alt-fire from the Shotgun will not put down a soldier at point blank range, even though it did. The SMG is borderline useless because it does ♥♥♥♥ for damage. The best weapon is, oddly, the Pistol. It’s accurate enough that you can easily land headshots on foes, which shreds them. It’ll also let you put some distance between enemies and yourself, which is vital for surviving. Explosives also get a chance to shine. The Grenade is very useful this time around, as levels are fairly tight and there are some points where enemies are stuck in booths, making them easy targets for a surprise Grenade. I don’t really understand why the Shotgun and SMG were nerfed so badly to the point of near uselessness, but the Pistol makes up for it.

Level design was well-done and straight forward. There aren’t any points where you get stuck because of some cryptic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, like having to move an object somewhere you’d never think or play switch hunt. The levels are heavily chunked into smaller, more manageable bits, making it simple to comprehend what you need to do. It does open up into a longer area near the end, but the easy-to-understand design makes it very difficult to get lost and even gives you an advantage in the big encounter at the end of it. I only got lost briefly once the entire time, and that was because I wasn’t paying attention, not because of confusing design. It’s clear there were pros behind this mod’s level design.

The art is quite good for a Half-Life 1 mod. It’s fairly detailed, with the “high tech” art, like the computers, feeling like they were directly inspired by Team Fortress 2 in terms of their style. For some reason, I get a “Condition Zero” vibe from the art as well, though that could be simply because of how higher res textures look on GoldSrc.

The only problem I had with the art is that some of the first person weapon models are a bit off. Most of the models are taken straight from the HD pack for the original Half-Life, but the Pistol and SMG use modified textures for the original versions of those weapons. The new skins for them look a bit off. The Pistol looks like it was a skin for another weapon pasted onto the UV maps for the original Pistol with little thought as to how it would actually look in-game. The SMG is a mess of colors and odd details that don’t fit the original model that make it look like an odd hunk of grey and black.

The game tries to have an 80s-style aesthetic in the music and ending animation, but it feels out of place compared to the rest of the game. Having 80s synths jamming while you fight your way though an industrial facility doesn’t really work like the developers intend. I’m guessing the idea was to make it seem like an action flick from the 80s, but it doesn’t click. If they were going to go for a typical 80s style with neon and everything, I would’ve preferred they went all the way instead of confining it to the ending and music.

The only real new sounds is the music. The 80s synths mentioned earlier are pretty enjoyable and help it stand out compared to the original Half-life. Maybe not something I’d listen to on my own, but for the game, they fit well.

Like other classic Valve games, CAGED has a nice little sense of humor reminiscent of Portal. Some of the devices in the area use Portal-like euphemisms, such as the turret defense/execution system being called the “Turret Wellness System” and random boxes being called “exercise boxes”. The facility seems to have a slight obsession with bananas, as it gives them out as “special” rewards to prisoners. There’s even a special alert that lets staff know if the oh so vital vending machines are damaged. Clearly, CAGED’s IPCSCORP takes a bit from Portal’s Aperture Science. Maybe they worked together at one point? ;)

CAGED is quite short, with my first playthrough clocking in at 45 or so minutes. However, it does have some replay value in the form of an in-game achievement system. Various tasks can be performed throughout the game, such as blowing up radios playing music or finding a secret area. If all of these are complete, the game will send you to a secret level that can best be described as Aperture Science’s take on a law system. These little tasks encourage you to give the game another shot after you play, exploring and finding all sorts of wacky sub-events which add to the experience. I particularly liked the “event” with the VOX system and destroying the vending machine, if only to see the prison had a special warning sign for a damn vending machine being destroyed light up.

This Half-Life mod is a great experience for anyone looking for a little bit more Half-Life after beating it. Despite its short length and difficulty, it’s clear a lot of love was put into it, making it an enjoyable experience that you’ll want to replay to find all the achievements. The easy to navigate levels make the drab-looking levels easy to go through and the The main developer worked on both Team Fortress 2 and Portal 2, and it shows in both the game world and humor. In some ways, it’s a love letter to the Valve of old, combining Valve’s first hit, Half-Life, with the humor and world of the games that ended the “old” Valve, TF2 and the Portal series. Considering that this also came out the same year the plot summary for HL2 Episode 3 came out, it feels like it’s part of the Valve everyone loved giving one last goodbye. It’s certainly worth a playthrough.

"Hunt Down the Freeman" is one of the biggest pieces of ♥♥♥♥ I have ever played.

Gameplay: In theory, gameplay is standard Half-Life 2, only without the Gravity Gun. In practice, it usually consists of you running from point A to point B. And I mean literally. There is very little point in fighting enemies in most cases, and there are usually no impediments preventing you from simply holding down the sprint key and running straight to the exit or an objective. Yes, that's right, combat is completely pointless for most of the game. "Shift + W to win" is a very practical strategy in the game.

Balance itself will swap between either having way too much health and ammo, or none. You will have to pop God Mode sometimes because there simply isn't enough health to get you through some portions of the game, such as most of the "New Alaska" part. But then, you'll enter a new level and will be awash in health and ammo, letting you laugh off enemy attacks as you destroy them.

Level design: The level design is terrible in most cases. Levels range from passable levels ripped from Garry's Mod to gigantic wide areas that just waste your time because of how large they are. The level design has a bad habit of making vital equipment, such as weapons, easy to miss, which sucks because you will often need this equipment to survive.

One example can be seen in the first ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ level. Right behind you character is a knife, which is needed because there are a lot of Zombies and you must conserve your ammo with the knife. However, it is extremely easy to miss this knife because there is no indication you need to go behind where you start. It is quite possible to get cornered by enemies have both no ammo nor melee weapon because the level designer thought hiding the knife behind you at the start was a fabulous idea. Oh, and this happens multiple times in the game.

The actual level design just plain sucks. The levels seem to have a chronic habit of not giving you any hint as to where you should go, forcing you to roam around like an idiot until you find something that looks like it could possibly be a new section. Oftentimes, this will be mixed with areas that are either way too big or too dark, which makes finding what the hell you're supposed to be doing a complete chore. Your best friends are noclip and the developer command that lets you disable lighting. You will use them very often.

Bugs: This game is one giant bug. You will occasionally start a new level embedded in a wall, forcing you to noclip. Early on, you will start behind a ramp you used to leave the previous level, but now there is an invisible wall. Again, noclip to victory.

Story: The story is a mix of teenage edginess and an extremely convuluted plot twist that would be right at home in an anime. you are Mitchell, one of the HECU guys sent to Black Mesa. You encounter Gordon, but are whisked away by the G-Man right before he can kill you.

The first half of the game is basically a generic zombie movie, only with alien soldiers occasionally popping in to kill you and generic military guys as your companions instead of a teenage girl your hardened guy must take care of to learn his purpose in life again or warm up his cold heart or whatever. This portion is about an hour longer than it should be and ends in a godawful dock area that must be experienced to see how not to make a large level.

The second half has your guy crawling around in the US state of Alaska in order to infiltrate a Combine base. This entire area is the apex of inept design. It has:

*A pitch-black cave that you must navigate, but you only have a single flare. To go through it, you must disable lighting.

*Gameplay that consists of you roaming around absolutely gigantic ice fields with the only resistance being blue Antlions you must kill by hipshotting with a bolt-action rifle. This gigantic emptiness of the levels makes them take 15 minutes longer than they should and is extremely dull.

*Level boundaries arbitrarily marked by sudden blizzards that will quickly kill you.

*No health and ammo for most of the section.

*A really bad "evade the snipers" section that forces you to sneak behind cover while snipers in a very far away posts can easily put a bullet in your head. You cannot snipe them with your own rifle, so you must run around the ice fields like a ninny and hope you will survive.

*An atrocious stealth section that seems ripped straight from an early 2000s game. You have to reach a Combine fortress, but there are towers that have searchlights on them. If a searchlight spots you, it will shoot a laser that will instantly kill you. Did I mention that the lights have much further range than their spotlight suggests and it is quite possible to reach a dead end, forcing you do redo a light?

*A stupid combat section in the Combine fortress itself that has equipment in it randomly blow up while you fight and consists of a giant corridor with props scattered here and there. What fun!

*Multiple instances of level exits being impossible to find, forcing you to nocilp to proceed.

The Alaska portion is one of the worst parts of a game I have ever played and I cannot see how the developers could salvage it with patches. It is that bad.

The final part of the game has you going through rehashes of parts of Half-Life 2 and Episode 2 to get that Freeman bastard, only these rehashes are the developmentally delayed brothers of HL2 and Ep2. You start the part redoing Half-Life 2's intro, then help the Combine raid Black Mesa East, which is the only part of the game i truly had fun in and enjoyed. after that, you are sent to Ravenholm's "open world" retarded cousin, enter a random city that is completely pointless, go through a take on Episode 2's Antlion caves if they were made in Wolfenstein 3D, and go through a bad redo of the drive to White Forest.

The heart-stopping finale has you enter Nova Prospekt, which consists of gigantic and empty areas that exist seemingly to pad time and feel like rough drafts for a non-existent fleshed out version of the levels. Eventually you will reach an "expanded" version of the teleport room Half-Life 2's Nova Prospekt ends in, but there is nobody there and the level filled with visual glitches, giving the impression that the "designer" simply decompiled the original level, added some new brushes, then recompiled it, bugs be damned. You are then teleported to a rebel-held prison after hopping into a water flow beneath Nova Prospekt, which has you running like an idiot while 10+ rebels unload into you at once as you search for doors that let you proceed. The pulse-pounding finale has you hold off a swarm of Combine in 15 real minutes, which boils down to you hiding in a stairway and picking off enemies, occasionally running to a first aid station to heal up. Or, better yet, just activating God mode and doing other things while the timer runs down because you just want it to end at this point.

Graphics: The new models are ♥♥♥♥. Just LOOK at them. The humans are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ugly and the new weapons mesh with Half-Life 2 as well as a cat does in a dog show.

Shout-out to randomly remaking the rebel models with whatever modeling program was made to make the hideous new NPC models, even though the original rebel models appear as corpse props. Why?

Conclusion: This game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ terrible. There is no reason to play it except to suffer. Nothing goes right and it is a giant waste of time and money. Any sort of interesting idea is wasted in the most retarded ways possible. I don't care how many patches the developers put out: the game is fundamentally ♥♥♥♥♥♥ in every way and you have to redo the entire thing from scratch to make it passable.

I'm Duke Nukem!

This is one of the few games that has ever given me motion sickness. Your character's head constantly bobs like she's in an earthquake, especially when you're running. I cannot imagine who thought this would be a good idea, because I've never, ever had "head bobbing" remotely close to this in real life (nevermind the fact that your eyes will automatically adjust to the body bobbing in real life). It's stupid and makes the game unplayable for me because I can't play it for more than 10 minutes without wanting to puke.

For the game itself, it's very dull. You go around extremely similar-looking corridors, looking for notes with a glowing red sigil on them. Occasionally, ghosts will appear, but you can "defeat" them by simply not looking at them. Yes, the only threat in the game can easily be defeated by walking backwards while staring at the floor. I've done the same ♥♥♥♥ against the Boos in Mario, but at least Mario has the courtesy of making the damn Boos appear in inconvenient locations for a challenge. There are some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ moments where one of them will suddenly pop up and bring you close to death, which is stupid as hell.

The map design is slightly more complex than Wolfeinstein 3D's, and that's only because it has stairs you can use. It even lacks the various landmarks and differently-shaped rooms that made Wolfeinstein 3D's maps possible to navigate, meaning it's level design is somehow more primitive than Wolfenstein 3D's. Wowee!

The "scares" are either random junk rattling around or the previously-mentioned ghosts suddenly appearing and taking off most of your health with nothing you can do about it. You are trapped in some evil haunted building that has souls corrupted by darkness or whatever in it, but apparently being consumed by darkness makes you like to pull out drawers, bang on stuff, and generally engage in acts of petty vandalism. Truly an evil force that requires your character to brave through to find the truth or end the evil or whatever. Might as well make your character a street patrol cop, since they deal with petty vandalism better than your character does. What's the sequel going to be about, a cop that's called to a haunted house filled with darkness-consumed teenagers that are partying and drinking alcohol or some other stupid crime? Will you have to collect glowing notes to find the 17 year old guy getting an awkward blowjob in the bathroom?

If you want a good horror game, play Outlast. If you want a game made up of rectangular corridors that is actually fun and enjoyable, play Wolfenstein 3D.

The fun, if dated at times, prequel to the hit comic Sonichu.

EDIT 2: TWI has done a complete 180 on the game. Resistances are pretty much gone, the classes are more powerful than ever, and the game is in the best state it's been since it was first released on Early Access. I'm keeping the review for archival purposes (but changing the recommendation to Yes instead of No), but it no longer applies to the game as of early September 2016.

EDIT: Tripwire has reversed some of the resistances, but not removed the stupid thing. It's more playable than before, but still not that fun. Plus, the team seems hell-bent on making the game more unfun and annoying to play, so I'm keeping this review up until Tripwire straightens up their act.

I do want to note that Tripwire is communicating with the community a bit more than before, but I want to see positive changes, not just fluff.

Let me say this straight: I loved the basics of Killing Floor 2's gameplay. The gore and gameplay are very satisfying and kept me playing for a long time. However, the latest update served as the straw that broke the camel's back and made me stop playing KF2 (at least for the time being). Here's why.

* A horrible, horrible resistance system that turns Killing Floor 2 into a 90s RPG, like Baldur's Gate. Firearm damage is now divided per weapon type, meaning that a bullet from an assault rifle can do more damage against one enemy, but do terrible damage to another. It makes no sense. Because of this, most classes are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ against most enemy types in a half-baked attempt at promoting class diversity, making most of the weapons unfun to use; a cardinal sin, since one of the game's key points is fun gunplay. In order to be effective, you have to read a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ spreadsheet to know exactly what weapons suck and what weapons work against each enemy type. I'm serious. This isn't the 90s; you shouldn't have to read a spreadsheet and memorize a bunch of variables just to shoot enemies in the head.

What's worse is that the resistances make no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sense. A completely naked woman can take shotgun shots and explosions like a champ, but melts if she eats a handful of bullets fired only by an assault rifle. Meanwhile, a naked man on fire can tank nearly anything for no apparent reason. Fire I can understand because he's on fire, but damage from assault rifle rounds doing half damage? Really?

You can get used to the system, but the fact of the matter is that there's no reason why this system was considered a good idea and fun. If you want to encourage class diversity, make the classes kick ass in their own way (which, ironically, Tripwire was getting close to until the Sharpshooter update dropped) or maybe make enemies weak to certain weapon types, not resistant to most of them. Making enemies resistant to attacks from most weapons for the sake of encouraging teamplay is awful; all it does is turn enemies into unfun bullet sponges.

* The team blows off criticism they disagree with, which goes against the point of EA. Confront them about an issue, and they'll throw their feet down and say "BUT IT PLAYED WELL IN INTERNAL TESTING", as if a game being played by a handful of jackoffs in a small office that can consult the devs is equal to it being played online by thousands, often with complete strangers. If you're going to be like that, just make it a full game instead of pretending the game is Early Access and listen to people.

*The Sharpshooter perk was delayed in favor of a PvP mode few wanted and that was essentially stillborn, despite promises that it will increase the playerbase more than a new perk would. It's poorly balanced and a mess to play to thanks human players being able to stomp human-controlled enemies, even with the Sharpshooter update revising it. Before the Sharpshooter update, PvP had one or two active servers at max. I expect it to go down to that level a week after the Sharpshooter is released.

* Terrible patching system. Most companies would patch major issues as they came up; not Tripwire! Tripwire often packs a ton of fixes into one giant package released every 4 or 5 months instead of issuing quick fixes.

One example is the auto-raging at the end of a wave; heavy hitters, like the Scrake, would automatically enter their rage mode (endless sprinting, mostly) when there were five or less enemies. There was no way to make them stop; if you didin't have enough people to deal with the enemy or a class that could handle him, the game was over right there with no chance to prevent this.

The kicker? It took Tripwire several months to fix this, despite complaints about it appearing a few days after the patch that added it went live. Why would a game-ending issue allowed to persist for several months except for incompetence?

* 1 step forward, three steps back when it comes to balancing. When Tripwire wants to nerf a class, they will nerf it into utter uselessness.

The Berserk perk became quite powerful after the Firebug and Demolitions update. When people complained about it, it took Tripwire almost a full year to "fix" it, even though opinion was divided if it was OP or not. When they did "fix" it, it was nerfed to the point where it's currently useless thanks to a terrible rework of the Berserk's skills and the awful resistance system making all of the Berserk's primary weapons do half or less damage to every foe.

I hate to post this review, because KF2 has solid and addicting core gameplay. However, Tripwire seems to have no idea on what direction to take the game, but seem hell-bent on making the game more obtuse to play for God knows why and ruining the core gameplay for the sake of making it hardcore or some crap like that.

If Tripwire pulls their asses out of their head like Overkill did, I'll come back and give this game a positive review. For now, I'm not playing this game and I'm keeping this review up.

I became fly Jesus and sacrified myself to a light bulb so that all flies may be redeemed.

Gone Home is an house vandalism simulator with a teenage angst lesbian love story tacked onto it to look deep.

By the end of the game, I managed to:

*Throw some of my character's father's books in the trash to rub in what a has-been he is.
*Turn all of the faucets on to jack up the water bills.
*Throw a recyclable milk jug into the trash.
*Build a satanic shrine to a cheap duck statue and a JROTC beret on a kitchen table.
*Opened the refrigerator and threw out several of the contents into a hallway, then kept the fridge open.
*Lodged a SNES platformer inbetween two drawers.
*Flush all of the toilets.
*Put a guide for a "couple's retreat" on the kitchen table so that my character's parents know that I know they're on the fast tract to a divorce.
*Threw several of my character's sister's private objects onto my character's parent's bed as incriminating evidence against her.
*Stuffed a book my character's mom was borrowing into a bathtub, then turned the water on.
*In fit of rage, put perfectly fine toothpaste into a waste bin because I hated the brand.

Also, for some reason, your character's house has as many secret compartments and areas as Resident Evil's Spencer Mansion. I did not find a secret entrance to an underground lab. Perhaps Chris and Jill already sealed it up.

In this game you are a Terrorist or elite Counter-Terrorist who has never fired a gun in their life before a round starts. You must help your character learn how to control their guns while killing enemies. Strangely, each character has the mysterious power to fire one or two shots without ridiculous recoil by very briefly jerking in the opposite direction they are moving in.

When your character wears a Kevlar vest, every part of your character, except the head, are made out of steel. Therefore, the only way to quickly kill people is to shoot them in the head. This can be annoying at first, but you will soon get used to shooting a small smudge of pixels on top of a character's body.

The Goddess of Guns can materialize guns in your character's hands a few seconds before a round starts. However, your character must pay for the guns, which have vastly overinflated prices. When you have the right amount of money, the Goddess will flash a menu in your character's eyes, allowing them to select the guns they want. More advanced users can make guns materialize out of thin air with their mind as long as they have the right amount of money.

Maps are often about evil terrorists trying to bomb deserted places. Vandalism is a very serious crime in the Counter-Strike series, so elite Counter-Terrorists are deployed to stop them. Unfortunately for the Terrorists, they are dumb and only packed one bomb. However, the Counter-Terrorists do not know how to pick up a dropped bomb, so the Terrorists can still pick it up after it is dropped by a fallen friend.

In some maps, the terrorists have kidnapped a janitor and low-level desk jockey in a building. The Counter-Terrorists have been deployed to save one, not both, of the hostages. In reality, this is just a thinly-veiled excuse for the CTs to murder the Terrorists while pumping rounds into the invincible hostages. One weird thing about hostage maps is that you can purchase a "Hostage Rescue Kit", which somehow makes gives you the ability to put a grown man on your shoulders in a second. Perhaps it is a spell scroll that allows hostages to hover to your character's shoulders.

Overall, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is a surprisingly solid game about people with the worst gun handling abilities ever seen on Earth. Even though your characters have the aiming abilities of someone with Parkinsons Disease, you have many tactical options that make the game very fun and dynamic. It's worth picking up.

This review is for RoTT v1.3 from someone that played the game at launch.

Quick-saving makes the game much more fun. Being able to save whenever you want instead of having to rely only on wonky checkpoints makes the game more fun and relaxing because you can lose a lot less because of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ design, such as the combat in E2L2. Instead of constantly worrying that some dumb trap will suddenly murder you when you haven’t had a checkpoint in a while, you can quicksave, and if you die soon after, you haven’t really lost anything. It makes the trap and platforming sections a lot more tolerable because one mistake won’t send you back about ¼ into the level.

However, the quicksaving doesn't excuse idiotic decisions in the game, such as the awful platforming, inconsistent way it handles how jump pads work, and the bosses. Quicksave is akin to a band-aid to bad design decisions; it doesn’t get rid of ROTT’s problems; it makes them much more bearable. The only problem it really gets rid of is the bad checkpointing, but that was a pretty big problem at launch.

Another issue is that quicksaves don’t work on bosses. I can understand why, but it’s frustrating that the most annoying part of the game, the bosses, have to be done in one go. I would’ve loved it if I could’ve saved when dealing with the bullet sponges that are NME and El Oscuro because it would save me a ton of time when the bosses would inevitably pull a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ move and kill me right before I finished them off.

I’ve noticed that the quicksaves can be buggy at times. One map, E4L4, is unwinnable if you place a key, quicksave, and quickload. I’ve also seen enemies respawn after a quicksave, which is a bit annoying if you like to backtrack. Most of them aren’t a big deal, but you should be careful just in case.

I have no idea how MP is now because I felt it was pretty ♥♥♥♥ even before the Firebomb spam murdered any chance of MP being played beyond a skeleton hardcore group. It seems they’re putting more effort developing the MP and trying to cultivate an MP community instead of fixing SP mode, which seems to have more potential than a bunch of hArDkOrE gamers trying to relive the glory days of UT99 and Quake 1/2/3 with a busted MP mode.

I can’t say anything about any sort of optimizations since the game ran at max settings with no problems at launch. I’ve heard that the game still has some pretty big optimization problems from others, so it looks like the devs haven’t managed to fix it yet.

The modding tools seem nice, but right now the community seems to be more interested in rehashes of maps from old FPS games instead of making new stuff.There’s a lot of potential in the game, but remakes from maps from your favorite FPS games when you were a kid is not the way to do it.

The new patches make ROTT a lot more fun. Quicksaving doesn’t fix the bad level design, awful platforming, and the obnoxious bosses, but it does make the game more fun and relaxing when you don’t have to rely on poorly-spaced checkpoints when going through a bad level. Thanks to quicksaving, I feel that ROTT is a worthy purchase for anyone that likes old school FPS games, even if you’ve never played the original. There’s still several problems that probably won't be fixed, but quick saving is a good enough band-aid that it’ll make it easier to stomach them.