Faris_V5 Reviews

  Where's my Duct Tape Another Retro style boomer shooter to throw on the pile. Forgive Me Father take an amazing art style and builds a relatively standard, but nonetheless solid shooter around it. Feeling akin to something like Blood or maybe Duke Nukem over say, Quake. You jump and shoot your way through a ton of levels using various powers and weapons that, frankly, aren't unique enough to go into detail on but are nonetheless solid. Yada yada-ing past the gameplay. The art style and atmosphere is the real star of the show here, enemies are beautifully animated in a manner akin to the original Doom. Using stills to make for a strange, weighty illusion of movement alongside careful use of 3d effects and locational damage. Tearing apart the cast of Forgive Me Father is as satisfying as any super shotgun blast at point blank on a cacodemon. Alongside wonderful levels that basically run the full gamut of Lovecraftian tropes. If you find the art style appeal in it's own righ...

  I was gonna make an MCU joke before realizing "Marvel's" is in the flarkin' title Can someone give me a hint how I'm supposed to review a game like this when I've been suffering Marvel/Superhero movie fatigue since Infinity War? I'm kind of serious. Like do I review it in a vacuum, put all my biases aside and acknowledge the games many strengths and faults in their own merit. Secure in the knowledge that at the very least, this game will remain accessible to people for long enough (probably, rights issues ahoy) that people can come back to it once they have an urging for that kind of story? But that feels disingenuous, after all can I really review this thing in a vacuum when it blatantly copies it's homework from both the MCU and Marvel comics in style and setting? When even the parts I really enjoyed feel so blatantly like they were put in purely because they were existing beloved things from the comics themselves. I mean I know some of those thing...

The building blocks for what came next Condemned is a 2005 melee focused horror game brought to us by the FEAR and future Shadow of Mordor developers, Monolith Productions. And to be honest that description tells you almost everything you need to know about the game, at least if you're aware of the other games mentioned. This is a game I had known of for a long time, but never really bothered to play until now when I was looking for some <10 hour games to play.  The games reputation being what I'd known best, I'd heard of it as intensely scary and brutal. With a lot of wild melee combat and some basic detective elements. But actually sitting down to play it, while a few moments did live up to that reputation in my head, what I instead found was a game about 5 years ahead of it's time in general gameplay and story structure. Most evident in the graphical bugs and weird design choice, but I get ahead of myself. What the game clearly wants to be is a highly cinematic e...

  Only slightly Objectionable Another in the "parody bird base visual novel" camp. Aviary attorney is a shorter experience that starts as a very simple satire of Phoenix Wright... Get it, cause phoenix, bird? Anyway. Suffice to say it is perhaps a bog standard example of an indie parody with a single gag that doesn't particularly last. Not to give it all away so soon, but it's not as though this is an extensive review. The story is solid and the characters likeable, taking the aesthetic of 1840s france to give a beautiful atmsophere of simultaneous class, intrigue, and scandal. However it also feels a little shaky in certain key ways. For one the core gag of all creatures being animals is only a gag in that the visual of a bird in a hat looking thoughtful is amusing. In practice it has no bearing on the story and only dilutes the themes of class divide that are natural to the setting. It is also not very set on structure, starting out as a very direct phoenix wright p...

  Thus was redefined my criteria for 'epic' When it comes to CRPGs, it can be hard to analyze them in the manner I usually like to for these little reviews. Where I normally enjoy giving small design insights, observations on ludonarrative related topics, or appreciation for a games themes or historical impact. Instead I find myself with a story spanning approximately 200 hours. Full of constant story, gameplay, growth, twists, expansions, reveals, choices, dilemmas, designs, alternatives, challenges, questions, delves into forum threads as old as the games themselves and additions from the Enhanced Edition that felt so natural it took me a while to learn they were new do you see why this is a hard nut to crack.   I'll try to break this all down into something more digestible. But if you've read my reviews before you'll realize why I hesitate to separate the paragraphs by- Story:  A highlight so obvious it almost feels redundant to bring it up. Baldur's Gate 1, ...