off loving sucks

[The Resonte!]

"kill me" the snipers are trying

[Ad Bot]

[DestroyerOfBlocks]

i think i like paladins more than overwatch

[Gytyyhgfffff]

paladins is not a bad game

[DestroyerOfBlocks]

dominions 4 is pretty cool

google it

[Crystalwarrior]

Since this whole thing started with OFF I would like to share a little somethig
Behold, my stuffty attempt at trying to rebalance the whole game of OFF so it's not a boring slog to play through at the very least
Hilariously enough I probably posted this thing in the wrong forums because it received little to no feedback or attention despite OFF's combat being one of its biggest criticisms. It doesn't fix the "meh"-tier story but it did give me an opportunity to experiment with RPG mechanics and stuff.

the worst part is i barely even received any criticism to speak of so i dunno if my balance changes are good or horribly, horribly wrong.

[DestroyerOfBlocks]

spec ops: the line

   spec ops the line is a third person military shooter about you and two ai squad guys going into dubai to save some guys after the city got ass blasted by giant sandstorms. what seperates this from of call of duty action movie stuff is its about the horrors of war and how good intentions can get you into hot stuff while masquerading as a call of duty. it doesnt work as the gameplay is generic, the plot holes are cavernous, and the idiotic attempts at hard decisions and moral questionability are boring. i've been wanting to review this for a while because this is apparently some hidden masterpiece so i was immediately wary as that was how the internet described off. lifting the fog and figuring out how stuff this game is is not only tradition but a duty to all indecisive consumers who are without reliable anecdote. don't play it and tell all your friends who told you this game was a stellar brown townysis of the human psyche and other bullstuff to piss off.

   i'm just going to jump right into the giant plot holes and other ridiculous stuff immediately so if you don't want your boring spoiled close the tab. right off the bat you are attacked by the remnants of the us army you are trying to save for no reason. by no reason i really mean no reason they just start shooting at you and the entire game is spent trying to find out what the deal with this army is by finding the leader. at the end it is revealed the protagonist starts to hear voices and pretends to be the leader by talking into a broken radio and neither of his two squad mates ever said anything about this despite them being extremely talkative. it is not explained why the army is trying to kill you.

   for some reason the cia are also in dubai and are trying to cover something up so they destroy all the water in storage so everyone dies of thirst. what they are covering up is never explained despite it apparently being so important it can start a war with the usa. the actual excuse of "we need to cover it up" is the writer fishing for cheap drama as it is used like once to explain why the guy destroyed all the water and never brought up again except as another reason everyone hates you. also there is a massive loving aquarium filled with water in the last area that apparently didn't count because ??? despite water being specifically lifted from aquariums before. at that point hallucinations and stuff were kicking in so i dont know.

   as expected of a game of this style there are a bunch of moral quandaries and too many are forced to the point of losing all emotional impact. the white phosphorous one is notable due to it being one of those big character development scenes and the abysmal way it is handled mechanically. the only two i cared about were both unessential to the plot and were the pick which guy to die and you can execute enemies for ammo ones. the pick which guys one was nice because it was an actual choice and the execute downed people for ammo and is the only implementation of a moral grayness for buffs mechanic. also none of your choices matter in the end so have fun.

    for all the plot's flaws characterization was for the most part enjoyable. you and two other soldiers, all with action hero personalities, enter the city with stereotypical sarcastic tough guy personalities and have to immediately confront the whole oh stuff gray morality thing. they have realistic looking breakdowns in cutscenes as each of them become more desensitized and hardened killers who are constantly angry at everything. i'm not entirely sure how accurate this is to real desensitization but it was okay. vocal changes not in cutscene were sort of stuff since all that changed was forget and angry yelling being added to every voice clip which was sort of grating and stupid but again i am not an actual expert on this stuff.

   despite that your characters still don't have much personality. they are still generic action hero husks except now with ptsd. all of them are basically the same person who does nothing but slowly get more angry and traumatized over time without any notable characteristics. any decisions which rely on how much you care for a character are nullified by this boring homogeneity. it is possible to have actual characterization in the genre while still remaining true to the generic action hero and it is unfortunate the writers skimped out on such a critical element.

   the gameplay is boring and abysmal at conveying the narrative present in the cutscenes. perhaps to parody themselves the devs made a cover based third person shooter that plays very similar to gears of war but clunkier. most of the game is spent in cover waiting for your health to regen after you popped out to shoot a guy although i played on the second highest difficulty out of five so this might drastically change if you play something lower. either way it was a snorefest because as soon as you pop out every motherforgeter on the map is lighting your ass up so you get real good at popping out and headshooting a guy really quick as it is the only viable strategy. if you get a grenade lobbed near you you are trusting your life in gods hands as now you have to relocate to a different spot of cover, a feat only attempted by the most foolish or desperate. 

   the ai, despite laser accuracy, is handicapped and assists in their murders greatly by exposing their heads to your line of fire frequently even while in cover. these ai weaknesses are supposedly mitigated by there always being 10 guys trying to kill you at once which does nothing but make the game more tedious. differences between enemies is limited to weaponry with most of them being automatic and identical and a special miniboss guy who is even worse than normal enemies. he has 10 million health and slowly walks towards you while firing a minigun and you have to throw all your nades at that motherforgeter before he gets to you and its a pain in the ass whenever he shows up which is thankfully only like seven times. nothing about all of the identical combat encounters in this game is enjoyable.

   the horrendous ai further impedes attempts to blend the morality and the gameplay. hundreds of soldiers are sent to methodically be torn apart by your guy without any regard for their lives and the game just assumed you will care because they are american. if i am actually fighting living breathing humans with emotions and stuff surely they would show at least the smallest amount of self-preservation in the face of the player's apparently superhuman combat skills. the enemy ai never changes its tune and stops the stupid stuff even as  you lay waste to their entire batallion, going so far as to veer into self parody later in the game when enemies talk about how this is their final stand despite there being like 30 of them shooting you at once.

   the game does have some intentionally over the top touches that i liked as they were actually decently juxtaposed with all the stuff going down. when you shoot an enemy in the head his head pops off and the game goes in slo-mo which does provide some excellent contrast with the setting and the genre standards. i think that was the only thing that wasnt annoying as stuff or badly implemented.

   graphics and music are sound design are passable i feel obligated to include a paragraph about this stuff in every review because all the cool reviewers do it. this game sucks. don't play it unless you like being told how morally gray war is like wow no stuff.

extremely unessential games
boring tier
  spec ops the line
  hylics
  mogeko castle
  soma
  presentable liberty
  bad rats show
  imscared (a pixelated nightmare?)
  stray cat crossing
  spookys house of jump scares
  lieat
  ananke
  home
  super columbine massacre rpg
  crypt worlds
  ao oni
  suits: a business rpg
  unforgiving trials: the space crusade
  inflation quest
  stellar 2d
  the chosen rpg

[Timestamp]

u forgot the list

[Crystalwarrior]

Oh you know what else you definitely need to play?
http://store.steampowered.com/app/359400/
It looks and feels like an RPG maker game so why not play it.

[Shift Kitty]

The first quarter second and I was already infuriated by sounds

[Crystalwarrior]

The first quarter second and I was already infuriated by sounds

yeah thankfully you can skip over them by pressing Z to skip to the end of current line but they're still really annoying

[DestroyerOfBlocks]

alright everybody i got some big news

1. new video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76CXXANg0tc

2. i figured out how to game that mcdonalds tycoon thing that was released 200 years ago


one day i will add the tier list to the spec ops review

[Akio-]

the chosen rpg sucks

[DestroyerOfBlocks]

unreal gold or just unreal i havent actually played the gold levels yet

   unreal is an old ass first person shooter about some guy loving around and shooting aliens made a billion years ago. it is mostly a singleplayer experience and differentiates itself from games like doom and other "horde shooters" in that combat is centered on duels or small battles between intelligent foes who are as strong and fast as the player. think of it as single player multiplayer where both guys are trying to shoot and dodge simultaneously instead of a mob mindlessly charging the shootdodger. while the fights are pretty good, the rest of the game hasnt aged too well and suffers from some rather outdated map design, genericy graphics, and repetition due to lack of variety. it isnt terrible but it really is an early shooter and its pretty obvious they were loving around with a lot of concepts that were fidgety or half-implemented. also it spawned the unreal series of tournaments and engines.

   i want to go out on a limb to say how enjoyable the combat is because i have never seen anything like it done for an entire game. the closest comparison would be bot games but even then they are usually of lower quality ai and often are not being designed for singleplayer. it helps greatly that the player the ai imitates is blessed with old school fps super speed so every shootout requires the player to be aware of enemy patterns and aim appropriately and stuff. bots who use weapons the player has are a staple as well so it really does feel like youre throwing down with body doubles. the combat is easily the best and defining feature of this game and it sets an enemy design benchmark that lasts to this day.

   unfortunately the rest of the game is either bland or actively annoying, most notably the level design. maps often take a page from the older school of fps maps and can be quite maze-y, which is bad where the objective is find things to shoot. i can understand having levels where you can find stuff if you search around but there comes a point where a map transitions from linear with alternative paths to where the hell do i go. when combat is a game's best feature and a map prevents the player from going from firefight to firefight its a bad map.

   further aggravation is drawn from the game's lighting system which appears to exist only to show off a lighting system as the game was also the debut of the unreal engine. the game is dark as stuff to the point of actually obscuring where enemies are for no reason and the only way the player can light it up is with consumable items that last way too loving short to matter. any map that actually uses this goofy ass lighting stuff is immediately worse off because of it and every one does at least partially. some use it a lot, those are not fun maps. imagine a multiplayer game about ducking and weaving where the only light source is gun flashes. hell just imagine any popular shooter like counter strike or tf2 as being dark as stuff and the uselessness and annoyance of the lighting system is immediately understandable.

   there is also a slight issue with one specific movement mechanic, the dash. dashing propels you rapidly in a direction of your choice and is enacted by pressing a movement key twice in rapid succession. rapidly pressing a movement key twice in a game about strafing and repositioning causing a usually unexpected and potentially dangerous reposition is the dumbest stuff ive ever heard and the developers should feel bad for this mechanic still being in the unreal series circa the newest unreal tournament. there is no option to rebind it to something like a dash button. the only fix is turning it off but dashing is important as it is the fastest way to move around so you cant even do that.

   unreal is a decently long game clocking in at more than a few hours and the unfortunate reality of long games is that they can suffer from repetition. doing the same thing over and over again eventually wears down the enjoyment it brought previously no matter how good it is. although unreal's battles are good they are all very similar to each other due to the small amount of types of enemies. its got around four total, two of which are dumb mobs that functionally serve to place more projectiles on the screen and get shot, two are intelligent and fight extremely similarly in a straft/dodge style. as a result the player is fighting battles that have been fought before for most of the game. while fighting is certainly more entertaining than average, the long periods of repetition can be grating especially when combined with the other annoying stuff.

   fight format also factors heavily into the feeling of repetition. rarely does the game ever step away from its 1-2 intelligent mobs or 3-4 dumb mob encounter format and almost never does it combine dumb with smart. the player will basically be repeating the same encounter with the same mobs for hours on end, an error able to end games of lesser quality. unreal tries to power through it anyway and mostly does but mileage may vary.

   graphically the game shows the most age. everything looks boring and all the environments are bland and blue-green-brownish. the themes are indoors with rock walls, outdoors, and spaceship. all of the outdoor and spaceship levels look identical but there is some variation on rock indoors. normally i would give less of a stuff except the whole length and repetition issues before make this a more pronounced problem than i would like. same deal with the music although its less left behind by technology and more just ass in general. the entirety of the soundtrack is boring electronic ambient stuff that is dull beyond belief.

   in summary its an alright singleplayer experience with interesting ai weighed down by everything else around it. the multiplayer is dead so i dont give a stuff about that. theres a story but its irrelevant.

decent tier
  lisa: the painful
  chrono trigger
  station 37
  skelemania
  the witch's house
  unreal
  out there somewhere
  warhammer 40k dark nexus arena
  sluggish morss
  space funeral
  planetside 2

[Marios]

That game is what helped make the Unreal engine and Unreal Tournament exist, but judging from your first paragraph you'll say the game was overrated back then.

Then again I shouldn't jump ahead - Let's wait for your opinion first.

[DestroyerOfBlocks]

That game is what helped make the Unreal engine and Unreal Tournament exist, but judging from your first paragraph you'll say the game was overrated back then.

Then again I shouldn't jump ahead - Let's wait for your opinion first.

i review games based on how they held up in the modern day instead of at release as i lack sufficient experience for that