Recent reviews by Suicide Machine

I was not expecting this to be such a good immersive sim with such a complex level design, where melee combat, shooting and stealth all work well (which is a rarity for immersive sims). And then also sold at that mad price. What the ♥♥♥♥ Dave.

This game is just so incredibly addictive and if anything, I just wish it had something more to offer than endless mode. What it is, is a fast-pace score based shooter with level randomisation. You end up at the bottom of the building and you are suppose to save the girl who got kidnapped. Twist is, you have only 10 seconds on the timer (more on lower difficulty) and as you kill enemies, you get some additional time - but be careful, getting hit takes the time away. If the timer reaches 0 - you die and return to the previous checkpoint. You get a checkpoint every 10 floors. Completing a floor allows you to pick an upgrade - at the end of a chapter, there is a boss. And that's pretty much it... and yet this game is just so fun to play. An despite what I consider to be a bit high of a price (in PLN at least), the experience was just so intensive with almost no padding anywhere, that I have no problems but to recommend it. It's fantastic... just short!

Crow Country is a classic horror game in the style of titles like Resident Evil and Silent Hill from the late 90s and early 2000s. It gives you just enough resources to get through the game, but not enough to kill all the enemies. As you play, you will also pick up various items and read various notes, which you then have to use to solve puzzles in order to progress further. The game does a decent job of pointing the player where to go while the map marks any found, but unresolved puzzles. This should at least prevent the player from getting stuck without knowing where to go. In emergency cases, there is also the crow hint system, which allows you to get a maximum of 10 hints per playthrough that tell you where to go and what you need to solve a puzzle (without giving you a direct solution). Even with all these systems, I did get stuck on one puzzle in the game and I needed help from the community to figure out a solution to it. In another puzzle it also took me a while to notice the numbers needed to solve it. So, keep that in mind when you're deciding whether or not to buy the game.

In terms of horror elements this one is a bit weird. It is surprising how with the game's camera perspective, the game actually manages to create a pretty good atmosphere and make occasional jump scares work. I also think the pixelated, low resolution rendering style, helps the game in the end. The whole idea of the story and the ultimate plot twist (that you can see for coming for a while) works very well. Abandoned amusement park certainly works well for a horror setting and this kind of story. Worth of note is also the game's length, which will take you - most likely - between 5 and 8 hours on first playthrough.

As for the issues with the game - I think the default controls are bad. You can flip the shoot and reload buttons - that already makes them better, but switch layout to modern controller layout - I think makes even more sense. I have tried playing the game with the default controls, but after 4 hours, I was still dropping grenades and shooting instead of reloading, because of how illogical the default mappings are. Switching to modern layout for the last 2 hours of my playthrough made entire experience significently more smooth.

On technical sides there are some bigger issues, though. One of the biggest annoyances being the way this game approaches fullscreen, trying to enforce - now abandoned by Unity - Exclusive Fullscreen mode. I have no idea how even, as trying to set ExclusiveFullscreen in Unity 2022, should result in it falling back to FullScreenWindow. But in the case of this game it doesn't and instead, my Samsung monitor blanks out for like 2 seconds when switching to the game - which is a pain in the ass, when you actually use 2 monitors and have to alt+tab from the game.

Finally the keyboard and mouse support is atrocious and borderline unplayable and I don't think there is an excuse for it releasing in such a bad state (although with indie games and limited budgets - it is understandable, to prioritize one over the other). Still, this again isn't one of those games, where getting a decent keyboard and mouse support is impossible - it requires creating some branches in code, to have different behaviours for mouse and keyboard cause you can't just remap control to keyboard on the fly, but it certainly can be done. And by that I am NOT saying breaking the logic of how you can not move when aiming a weapon etc.

At the end of the day - I recommend Crow Country - it's a good survival horror game. However, make sure you have a controller laying around - otherwise it's going to be a really bad time.

Don't question... Don't look for videos about it... get it! It's like gambling, but more fair... and with guns.

Well, with the last patch being a month and a half ago and reportedly over 50% of Slipgate being fired, entire history of scarce early access patches and how many reworks this game needs, I think it's now safe to say - there is not going to be saving GRAVEN, while Slipgate - just like CDPR cements its reputation as "marketing first, game and development second" studio. There was potential here - people really want games like Dark Messiah or Elderborn - heavy on visceral, first person combat, with exploration and occasional puzzles. This is not it. This is a misguided first-person Metroidvania with a melee combat that can at best compete with Morrowind with its player feedback. Where spells - as one of the other Steam reviews stated - are support only, yet again lacking any feedback and are mostly reserved for low, over-time damage or puzzles, and where the only thing that does any kind of damage are literal equivalents to first-person shooter weapons. Combine that with absurd, out of place stamina system and save system that doesn't store information which mob enemies you have killed and you have an extremely tedious game, where you run through massive maps, filled with brain-dead enemies, having barely any plot to give you a motivation and not even having any atmosphere - it's not fun! Freakin' Underworld Ascendent is more fun than this.

Best visual novel of all times... it just, it puts you on feds watch list.

I am just leaving this out of spite, because of it using Valve's suggested prices that are heavily outdated and Polish people who generally earn between 1/3 and 1/4 of what people earn in western Europe shouldn't be paying 10% more than the price of the game in western Europe. For something that even for western Europeans earning 3x-4x more is very hard to justify - as yet again... this is just a basic remaster - a solid remaster, as usually with Nightdive - but an overpriced one, where often a lot of the remakes end up being priced at this level. Fix that pricing to be at least even with € zone... I will rethink the review - because for now it feels like treating Polish people as class B citizens.

That is one terrible way to waste such talent as Stephen Russell... and to try and advertise this game as having him is really disingenuous. Yes, he is "technically" in the game - but that's as "technically" as Sheb Wooley (famous voice behind Wilhelm Scream) is in Star Wars.

This is just not good. And I don't get it. On one hand it tries really hard to be a remaster, despite having to do some insane effort trying to replicate everything inside of Unity... on the other, because it tries to stick so close to the original, everything that it gets wrong is just sticking out so much more and it fails to replicate many elements correctly.

What we end up with is a game in this tragic state, where on one hand you get all of the problems of original game - the wobbly per vertex animations, the less than stellar shooting mechanics and damage model (which was improved, by not by much), the junky Quake 2 AI feel. But on the other hand you also get the game where none of the things that Unity is good at are allowed to shine and at the same time all of the common pitfalls of Unity (like non-interpolated movement for the camera or other characters) are still present. Essentially - everything is wrong. Some things are just a tiny bit off - just enough so, that you notice - like the AI that seems to now run way too much and not want fight a lot most of the times or how the cutscene play out. Others are massively off - like pretty much everything related to sound balancing or conversation system that now seem to trigger everyone nearby to a point, where it's pretty much impossible to hear what NPCs say to you, when there is more than one of them.... or ambient sounds and music missing due to different approach to sound... or light flares (not lens flares!) being way too big... or movement itself that now clearly uses a capsule collider making precise platforming so much harder than it was (especially when combined with low frequency at which it updates).

And I truly believe, this game would be better off, if it threw the entire idea of remaster out of the window and tried to be more of a remake that tries to hit the key points of the original but no longer worries about sticking to close to original and actually tries to modernize the gameplay. This would also lean better into Unity's strengths of its material systems, shaders and lighting - which as it stands, seems to only look diffuse textures and prebaked, low resolution shadow maps.

As it stands now - there is a very long and difficult road ahead for the developers, if they and the publishers are hoping to get this to a point, where this is at least "a worthy alternative to the original". For now this definitely can not get my recommendation. And it sucks, cause that's 2 remasters in a row that I am disappointed with. Turok 3 done by Nightdive presented a significantly higher quality, but was extremely light on concent and terribly overpriced. This? This at least has a significantly more reasonable price as of now (which is 25% off = 69 PLN), when you consider the amount of content Kingpin has, but due to poor quality it just can not get my recommendation either. And for people who want to experience Kingpin - there is no doubt - play the original! This needs so much more work! So much, that I don't hold my hope that it will ever be fixed. It is comparable I guess to initial release of XIII (remake) and that required moving the entire project to a new developer and over a year of reworks to get it to a good state.

-- EDIT --
Light flares have been significantly improved in patch 1.0.2.

I am sadly going to say "no". 32€ (as if we were earning more in Poland than in western Europe... Valve, fix your outdated suggested prices!) for a game that takes 3.5h to beat on first playthrough, that is a "just" a remaster of 23 year old game (a good one, but still just a remaster) is really hard to justify. Yes, technically it's not "just" 3.5h, cause there is still collectables and there are some minor differences in playthrough whatever you select to play as Danielle or Joseph, but... ugh still - this is not much content and it's not of a particularly "up to date" quality for such an asking price.

Nightdive has put a solid work, even if there is still some junk there (especially broken ladders). Nothing too serious, but it's not exactly outstanding either. There are upgrades in graphics, loads of textures got reworked, models got upgraded, draw distance is higher... and yet it doesn't feel anywhere as impressive as their recent Quake 2 remaster or Powerslave. I guess part of it is just the gap between original release and remaster - Quake 2 needed to have animations reworked, meshes had awful gel-like artifacts in animation due to the format the game was using and their remaster managed to solve those and make the game look significantly better, while restoring the multiplayer and importing N64s campaign. Powerslave was a game that was ahead of its time, but very limited on original platform, so having Nightdive's remaster that just works with keyboard and mouse is already making a massive step... this? This somehow doesn't feel that massive and I guess when combined with the asking price (and me still being salty about having to pay more than in countries where you earn 3-4 times as much money on average) is a pretty big problem.

As for the game? What is there to say - it's Turok 3. Surprisingly "modern" in its gameplay, feeling definitely like a game created after Half-Life with its level design, which does a lot to make sure the player knows what to do and if it asks the player to figure something out - it has a decency to lock the player in fairly small area to limit the amount of possible solutions. Shooting works and is fun - kind of to be expected with Turok and its damage system, honestly. Story on the other hand is very basic with cutscenes almost exclusively placed in-between chapters and the ending that feels like "Oh, so Acclaim was short on money and N64 was old, so this is where we stop" and not an actual ending to a trilogy - just a cliffhanger and not even a very good one - my reaction on stream literally was just "Come on... that's it?!".

So no, I don't recommend it... not at this price point. 20€ at most - not more. There is just not enough content.

-- EDIT --
OK, had a better look - there are 2 hidden characters. Stil.... ugh - how much can you play the same levels. It's not Quake - there is not cool, smooth movement and bhops or rocket jumps that would drastically change the way you play the game. Playing the game for the 2nd time already feels like stretching the content. I don't want to play it 3rd and 4th time with secret characters.