25th March 2021
Hey hey hey people,
8 games beaten so far in year 2021. And if you remember from my last post, I made a list of games I want to beat this year. Well, shortly after that post I added three new games there, Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I beated first two (reviews below), and I almost 100% Mad Max a >50 hour game, so I think my progress ain’t that bad so far. Next, I plan to beat Samorost 2 & 3 as they are short and it will be my first “Animata Design” games. After that I’m starting another big one - Yakuza Kiwami. Between Yakuza, which I’m guessing will take me at least over 100 hours to 100% it, I will start Noita and either RTCW or DUSK. After that, we’ll see.
Thanks for reading and stay safe! ^-^
Played on Steam09 - Eareaters
11 – Rage
15 – Deep
Beaten 1st time on difficulty – N/A
This was 50 hours of fun. Out of 18,5 hours left, around 6,5h was idling for cards years ago and 12h was spent finishing boring achievements. But I don’t regret it because Mad Max is one of the good ones when it comes to games based on a movie.
I don’t know the lore very well, but Max is on search for “Plains of silence” which is some mystical place that Max is searching for, he runs into war boys and Scrotus, a son of Immortan Joe. Max is in his iconic Interceptor with V8 engine when that happens and after watching a short cutscene Max fighting for his car and heavily damaging Scrotus, we get dumped in the desert. After an introduction to Chumbucket, a hunchbacked mechanic weirdo and a pet dog of Scrotus who he dumped after failing to kill Max, we go through a short training segment and after that we are free to roam the wasteland.
When this came out it got mixed reviews. This was because after Shadow of Mordor, Batman Arkham City/Knight, The Witcher 3 and some other games came out before, MM looked pale and outdated compared to those and I think gaming “journalists” got tired of that kind of game. Well I’m not one and I haven’t played every open world game out there so I don’t feel any oversaturation from open world games. And I played Shadow of Mordor and I happened to enjoy Mad Max more actually. Mad Max doesn’t do some of the critical mistakes that SoM (review here) did, like we actually have a two stage boss fight, not a quick time event.
Being a 2015 open world game there is a looooot to do here. Similar to SoM or even Far Cry 3, we have camps to liberate that give you free scrap, balloon outpost (essentially radio towers from FarCry) that uncover whatever activities are around if you haven’t discovered them yet, small camps and outposts (there are hundreds of those) that usually contain few enemies and some scrap. You have entire regions to liberate and around 4 allied forts to upgrade. There are also convoy runs, which are unique to this game. Smaller objectives to do like destroying structures of War Boys and sniper towers. Death runs, which are races either against opponents or you vs everyone else as you try to reach finish line before they kill you. Parts to unlock. There’s a lot, so if you’ll like the gameplay loop here, this game will last you for tens of hours.
You can’t completely ignore that too, because sometimes to progress the main story you need to do some of the above. Be it, reduce threat in the region or unlock some parts which sometimes you do by reducing threat or doing missions for fort leader.
Story becomes pretty dark near the end, don’t expect a happy ending here. I’m not complaining, it fits the world and I’m happy they went there. Max is very grumpy and pushy with everyone but at the same time he doesn’t strike me as someone completely crazy or demoralized like every other character in this game. The world is exactly like the characters you meet – cruel, ugly, demoralized.
When you’re not in a car and not looting you will fist fight a lot of dudes. This game uses Arkham style fighting, so it’s simple and has relatively low skill ceiling, but can be fun. You spam light attacks with LMB, holding LMB will do power attack, if an enemy attacks you, pressing RMB at right blocks and if you time it right before it’s too late, you can do a powerful counter attack. There’s a quite a lot of different power attacks and finishers but you need to unlock those by upgrading Max. Sometimes enemies charge at you or do something that can’t be blocked, you have a dodge button for this. You can also use your saw-off but even on maximum upgrade you can have only like 7 shells, so I would only use it as a last resort. Melee weapons are present too and it’s fun to use them. Generally all the sounds during fights are excellent, even basic punches sound have weight behind them and hearing bones cracking is very satisfying. As you unlock new moves Max will start to fight more like an MMA fighter.
Scrap is currency used for everything – upgrading Max, upgrading your car, fixing and upgrading the allied Forts. And if you want to unlock it all you will need A LOT of scrap. I highly recommend liberating as many camps as you can at start, for easy scrap flow. I didn’t do that and had to sometimes just go exploring for scrap. It’s the only decent source of scrap. Everywhere you look, small or big camps, random finds like car wreckages in ground and so on give you so little scrap it’s not even funny. You will have to grind a lot without liberating camps. There’s one more good source but that’s only available during storms and I’ll get to that.
Ok but what about cars?! And driving, this is what Mad Max video game is supposed to be about right? It’s… ok. Despite the world being one giant desert, there are “roads” which is just sand with tire marks and driving is obviously easier and there’s less resistance when driving and steering. It’s not the best driving I experience in a game, but it is a little disappointing considering you will drive a lot in this game. Your main car through the game will be a custom built car that’s called Angel, and there are unique setups that are called Archangels.
At first your car will obviously suck. It’s not going to be very fast, will have weak defenses and driving will be pretty bad. Steering is definitely the worst part of that because there will be a delay after you try to turn, after pressing left for example, your car will start to turn but after like 1 second. It’s possible to overdo steering and so your car will take very sharp turns every time. So before you unlock enough parts where you can really start playing around, there’s something you will always have to take into consideration when driving. You can upgrade your defense too with better armor, but it makes your car heavier so in effect – slower. You also don’t want to just grab everything at far right end, the best equipment. Want to be the fastest? Then you gonna have to go easy on armor and so on. Some parts don’t have effect on your car driving, like border spikes that have chance to kill enemies trying to board your car. You have few ways to fight back enemy cars or convoys. The simplest one is just ramming other cars. You can also use your saw-off to shoot at their fuel tanks and destroy them instantly. You also have a harpoon that you will use often, for harpooning enemy drivers and pulling them out, attaching yourself to their back grill and boosting right into them for high dmg. Later on you get a thunderstick, which is basically a panzerfaust. Harpoon and thundersticks are operated by Chumbucket who is always with your Angel, he uses weapons after you point him where to shoot. He fixes your car when you’re not driving it. With fully upgraded thunderstick the game becomes pretty easy as even heavily armored vehicles get easily destroyed. But I don’t think you get there until end game. You will use harpoon very often. You can easily destroy sniper towers and scarecrows with it. With it you can tear apart gate’s leading to camps, but like everything else it needs to be upgraded, as you move into more dangerous regions gates and scarecrows are more fortified so you gonna have to upgrade. Also you can literally pull the wheels off cars, but you need to get it to level 4.
Max can be upgraded too, in two ways. First, you can upgrade his equipment and combo moves – armor, knuckles, shotgun and so on, with scrap. Secondly, you can upgrade his health, how much fuel he uses during driving, how long melee weapons lasts before they break etc. It’s helpful, but it’s mostly boring stat upgrades. But to get that kind of upgrade you need to visit a special NPC Griffa who appears only when you have tokens. You get those by doing special moves in game. Don’t worry, you’ll get plenty just by playing, because a lot of them require stuff like “destroy 10 vehicles by ramming into them” etc. Most of those are NOT repeatable, but few are like getting to x25 combo during fist fight will always get you a token. Getting to him…well the Avalanche studio took some inspiration from Far Cry with upgrading your abilities while taking drugs. Griffa seems to know Max and talks about his struggles, his character and the dialogue he blows some kind of drug right into his face and we get a menu to upgrade. When you get closer to him the screen becomes more blurry, a strange music plays and the place around is covered in strange tribal paintings. After you’re done upgrading, it’s all gone. Makes you wonder if Griffa is even real or is Max just becoming more crazy.
Every now and then, a sandstorm will descent onto the wasteland. If you spot it before it hits your area, you’ll see a giant sand cloud silently approaching you, it looks spectacular. Then it hits you, breaks the silence with a roar, visibility quickly diminishes, and pieces of metal and car parts are flying everywhere, they’ll sometimes send you flying if you get hit by them. The only safe place is a set of 4 walls. Your car is semi-safe, but flying piece can damage it. But it’s also an opportunity to get some scrap. Trapped inside a sandstorm are boxes of scrap, that give you 150 scrap each if I remember correctly. I never found more than 3 boxes, but it is still worth the risk as 450 scrap doesn’t come easily in this game.
Ok to wrap this up, I enjoyed this game a lot in the first 30-40 hours. Fighting is easy and enjoyable, car combat too but having shitty steering at start can be a bigger challenge then your enemies. Story is ok, voice actors of Max and Chumbucket did an excellent job, I only wish more voices had Australian accents, there were fat too many unimportant npcs with americanized voices. Upgrading your Angel, it’s weapons and giving it different looks at whim with different colors and chassis is fun. Soundtrack is meh, but works within game. If you listened to links at start, first two are car combat music. Highly recommended, unless you’re sick of open world games :) Achievement hunters beware as the last achievement requires online functionality and it was killed in Dec 2020 :/ I'm marking this as completed.
07 – Bestest Detectives in the World
31 – Time is a Place
54 – Wish My Life Away
Beaten 1st time on difficulty – N/A
Mods/fixes used = Beta setting "alternative" to fix stuttering (via Steam settings)
I liked this more than To The Moon. This story, really moved me and there were tears near end. And if you own it, play “A Bird Story” before playing this, it’s a prequel to this game and it will make a little more sense. Even though “A Bird Story” is quite boring on its own, please give it a shot first.
If you played To The Moon you’ll feel right at home. It plays exactly the same, made in RPGMaker and you mostly walk, talk with people and solve some puzzles every now and then.
We play again as Dr. Eva Rosalene and Dr. Neil Watts from previous game, trying to fulfil a wish of a dying man, Colin Reeds (who we play as little boy in “A Bird Story”, seriously play it first!). As in first game after setting everything up, we start in a most recent memory and through finding different clues around said memory, we progress further down into the past of the client. It’s our job to fulfil his wish. Actually I lied a little about everything, because this game jumps a little differently in time than in To The Moon, but I won’t spoil you the story.
There’s little I can say without spoiling! But once again, I think it’s better than To The Moon. I also really like how game tone changes as you go on. It’s silly at time, sad, depressing, funny, sometimes even scary and creepy. But don’t worry, it never turns into horror, you can safely play it if you don’t like horror games.
Highly recommended, it’s a must play for anyone who played To The Moon before. And if you didn’t, it’s ok there’s almost no reference to previous game from what I remember. If you like good story and mystery I highly recommend it too.
04 – The Field
17 – Boss Battle
24 - Brigade Town (Belchior's Workshop)
Beaten 1st time on difficulty = Normal
This was almost a complete blind playthrough, I knew this was about cooking but I didn’t know this was a match-3 cooking sim! Topped with anime aesthetics, wholesome characters and world.
Battle Chef Brigade is a story of Mina, a young girl from Windy Village who helps her parents run a local restaurant and who aspires to join the titular Battle Chef Brigade. To join the brigade, one must attend and win 7 matches in a tournament that attracts chefs from all over the realm. But loose three times and you out.
Making a dish is split into two parts – one, fighting monsters to gather the ingredients and two, actual cooking by mixing the ingredients, that is matching the gems and increasing the rating of your meal.
There’s a good variety in how you can destroy monsters for a cooking game, you can melee attack and you have various attacks. Standard hitting by just mashing W, power attack that sends enemies flying, kick upwards that you can also use to reach areas up faster. You have magic too and Mina can throw her cooking knives or cast a tornado that stun locks most enemies and deals some damage. There are different tiers of monsters too, for example forest arena has little birds that are harmless and like to steal any ingredients from ground and eat them, man-eater plants that attack when you’re close or buffalo’s that charge at you and can knock you quite far. Forest and Underground have boss monsters too, that only spawn once and are tough to kill, that’s Dragon and Hydra respectively. But you’re not restricted to just meat, there are usually some kinds of plants, fruits or mushrooms in each arena! There’s even an item that gives you bonus points if you make your dish vegan.
And yes there is an inventory system. You have 3 slots for combat phase, 3 slots for items related to cooking and 3 slots for different pans and pots. For combat items I liked to always have one that increases your pouch size, so you can pick up more ingredients before returning to kitchen. Rest of combat items are pretty boring, they increase your mana or health, boost your magic abilities which sounds good on paper but I didn’t used them much. Items for cooking include stuff like ready level 3 gem of a specific color, 4x level 1 gems of color etc. But more useful are expertise books that give you bonus points for doing something specific with a dish. Tasks like making it vegan, using same ingredient 5 times, having 4x fire level 3 gems in a dish. They can give you quite a lot of bonus points and sometimes can win you a game, but each book gives different amount of points and you have to figure out how much.
Lastly, your choice of pans and pots. You start with a standard cooking pan, that matches 3 gems of the same color. There are fire, earth and water gems. Later on you’ll be introduced to bone gems, that when matched, create a rainbow gem which can match with any color. And poison, which create an upgrade point on your board and after some time gem in that place will level up by one (but you can’t level a gem beyond level 3, so don’t waste it.) But if you shuffle poison more than twice it’ll explode, weakening gems around it and they’ll shatter if you move them too much. Level 1 will be destroyed completely, level 2 & 3 will be de-leveled by one and won’t be broken anymore. To help you cook with all that, you have pans that for example match 2 gems, but only of one color. You can take your dish to a different pan/pot at any time, so you could throw ingredients with a lot of red gems, turn them quickly into easy level 3 gems, switch back to standard match 3 pan and continue with more varied gems. There pots that safely trigger poison or bone, but can only match that. Or pans that match 4 a specific color, but turn it instantly into level 3. My favorite one is slow cooking pot, that slowly upgrades all gems in a meal over time, so you can just leave it on and work on other dishes or hunt more. There’s also a cutting board to cut off any unwanted gems or if you want to mess with poison and bone.
Every cooking match has at least one judge, up to 3 and they all have different preferences. So one judge really like water gems, so you want to prepare a meal for them with at least one level 3 water gem to get extra points, other might really like fire & earth, so make sure to have at least one lvl 3 earth & fire, but if a judge has two preferences and it’s unbalanced you won’t get bonus points. There’s always a theme monster or plant too, so every meal you prepare should have at least one ingredient from that theme or prepare to loose half of points right away.
Between matches you can hang out in the town and do some optional jobs to earn gold, that you can spend in the shop for new items and pots/pans.
As I mentioned, the characters and the overall aesthetic is very anime and wholesome :) All voice actors have very pleasant voices, there’s no swearing and everyone is very friendly most of time. Everything Is hand-drawn and colorful, even the Underground arena. I liked the game, but it was starting to drag on after some time. Also there’s waaaay too many cutscenes and talking. I think I can recommend this to anyone, even if you never played match-3 games before. If you’re match-3 veteran I don’t know if you’ll like it, I don’t have enough experience with this genre to know.
Beaten 1st time on difficulty – N/A
Well I heard it was a garbage before I played it and it… really is.
Included in Humble Monthly on the same as its release day, HUSK is a FPS horror that some may say copies a lot from Silent Hill, but I think it has very strong Alan Wake influence. Story has very familiar bits, the town feels very familiar and I would even say it uses the same color pallet as Alan Wake.
Game opens up on a train, where our protagonist travels with his wife and daughter to visit his dying father, who’s last wish was to see his son and family. When our daughter, who looks 12 years old, decides to go to a bathroom and for some reason asks mommy to escort her (???) and they don’t come back after a while, our dude decides to look for them. The train opening is way too long as for what felt like 5 minutes of just walking through empty carts with nothing happening. We get it, the train is suddenly empty, very strange! Then one spooky thing happens, train is derailed and we slowly make our way towards town Shivercliff.
This short segment with no enemies and before you get a gun in your hand is actually not that bad. The atmosphere is not bad, it’s dark, you are defenseless and there are glimpses that something is wrong. You walk through gas station, train station and wander around completely empty town for a while until game throws the first enemy at you in a small stealth section. We have a pipe to stun enemies and this is where the jank starts.
Besides few enemy animations, all other animations in this game are horrible. Items sometimes clip into walls or are spawned right inside them, volume on few voice lines was too low, voice actors do a mixed job, the delivery of protagonist VA is sometimes laughable, sometimes it was pretty good. Game is horribly optimized and I often experienced FPS drops. There are even typos in documents you pick up, yes really. Story is actually similar to something I finished recently, that is it’s all an illusion for something else.
It has a really nice street art and creepy art on walls in some places. Whoever did this, or whoever they bought them off from, deserves a bonus. When there’s nothing happening on screen the game does look pretty good. The sad part is, if they spent like 6 months more on just fixing and polishing what’s already included, this could be an ok game, at least it wouldn’t have mostly negative reviews on steam and the studio could make something better in the future. But as it is now, I can’t recommend this to anyone. Farm your cards, delete this from your steam account.
04 – Cozy Canyon
14 – Snowland
Beaten 1st time on difficulty – Normal
A very average 3d platformer. Poi was in early access for almost 2 years (!!!), yet it’s a very bland game. It’s an obvious homage to games like Super Mario 64.
Let’s start with positives. I love the hub world in this game. You are on an airship and to choose a world you need to steer it into the direction of the world you want to travel to. As you pick up more medallions, new islands and airships pop around in the sky. The visuals are nice, the game is very family friendly, you could probably play it with your kid (but I can’t promise they’ll have fun). Some music tracks are nice…but that’s really it. The game is not full of bad stuff, it’s just like I said at start, most of stuff here is very average.
I played on K+M and it was fine. You move around with WASD (you can’t change bindings via menu), you can double jump and if jump right after landing you jump a little higher and on third time you can jump really high! However I feel like perspective is a little off. Sometimes I felt like I was closer to a platform than I actually was and other times it was opposite, I jumped way too forward than I actually had to. I’m not sure what’s the reason for this. You can ofc always set your camera right above the character, but it’s not always possible or ideal. There is also a simple inventory system and you buy items from a guy in a hub world. Usefulness of items varies from completely useless to somewhat useful in unlocking more medallions. For example we have telescope which you only use once to unlock a secret medallion but it’s pretty much useless besides that. I never felt the need to use it. There’s also shovel which you use to dig up fossils. There are sets of fossils to find in each world and if you finish one set you get a medallion and an extra island pops up with showcase of what you dug. You can buy a bag to carry extra coins. Also there is a compass, but for some reason you need to activate it like other items. It’s really easy to forget you bought this lol. But it is useful, shows you the direction to your objective as pointing you to some extras like fossil dig sites or undiscovered locations.
I mentioned medallions before and they’re key to finishing the game. Each world has around 6-8 medallions. You can get around 3 from each world by doing specific story mission, you pick those after choosing a world. There are also optional objectives on each world that reward you with a medallion and you do them at any time. There are two that are always there regardless of the world. One is to get 100 coins and buy it from a local shop. Another one is a key-minigame, find 7 keys and that will spawn a medallion. There are around 120 medallions total in the whole game. Besides doing things I already mentioned, there are two extra worlds, a set of different challenges you do from islands in hub world and so on. There’s A LOT to do. But like everything in this game none of it is very exciting.
This game lacks personality. Humor. Interesting or funny story. Enemies. A lot.
To me, it feels like devs wanted to create a next hit platformer like A Hat in Time or classic SM64, but they lacked ideas and good designers to make it happen. I cannot recommend this, unless you’re STARVED for a platformer that you haven’t played before.
02 – Bedroom Music
04 – Garage Music
05 – Garden Music
Beaten 1st on difficulty – Easy (I used magic marmalade on most levels)
A meme game where your main enemy are supposed to be controls, but for me it was the camera. Though that could be because I played on keyboard? On keyboard you move bread into a certain direction with arrow keys. But to do so you need to “tense your muscles” if bread had muscles. You do that with 1,2, 3 and 4 on your keyboard. So you place one hand on arrow keys, another one on numbers keys under your F1-F12. How do you move the camera? With your mouse. But humans usually don’t have three hands, so you can see the problem already. But it’s actually not a big issue. You can compensate for having static camera during movement if you just look around before moving and remembering your surroundings. That’s not the issue I have with camera. The issue is it like to move around or even jump around on it’s own and completely ruining your moves. It’s so fucking frustrating. It loves to do that especially during wall climbing and I can’t take my hand off, because I either have to drop to floor or stop moving and waste time. I could understand why they recommend the controller, because you can just adjust camera on fly. But it shouldn’t happen in the first place.
There are more reasons why I think this game is unfinished. First one you’ll see when you get to main menu, a welcome screen says “Welcome to the early access of I am Bread!”, yeeeep it looks like it got rushed from EA. Second – I experience random FPS drops and crash to desktop twice, where nothing was happening, no weird collision with objects or anything like that. And few times I got thrown into air by just touching some objects.
It’s a shame because this game could actually be fun! You play as a slice of bread and to complete a level you need to toast yourself on both sides, but you need to be careful not to overdo it. You want to be 100% toasted on both sides, no more no less. You need to avoid dirty surfaces, so that’s floor generally and places with bugs. If your edibility level reaches 0% it’s game over. On first level you can toast yourself by using the electric oven that’s on. But later levels have less obvious ways to get toasted and sometimes there’s more than one way. For example in the bathroom level you need to turn on hairdryer and heat yourself that way. On garden level you can turn on the car by rotating the keys in ignition and laying flat on the mask of the car. But none of it is easy, and to get A++ rating is on a level is very, very challenging. You need to beat it in par time and stay at 100% edibility. Oh and if you find it too difficult, just try dying 2-3 times and a magic marmalade will spawn next to you and give you invincibility, however doing so will always give you E rating, no matter how good you do.
The music is very catchy, it fits and I really enjoy it, might grab the OST actually. Story is quite hilarious. At the start of each level, you can read a note from psychiatrist of the guy who lives in the house we live in. As you complete the levels, you can read from psychiatrist how our guy is becoming more and more insane and starts talking that the bread is alive and it leaves a mess in the house and how he tries to fight it by setting traps or locking the bread in different places, but it always finds a way out. I won’t spoil the ending but I thought it was hilarious. AND while I haven’t played it yet, I think this is actually a prequel to Surgeon Simulator 2013, the game from same developers.
I would enjoy this more with better camera. No, I don’t care it recommends a controller, don’t release your games on PC if you can’t support K+M.
07 – The March to War
13 – Into the Dungeons
18 – The Ultimate Challenge
Beaten 1st time on difficulty = “Bring ‘em on!” (Hard?)
Mods/fixes used – ECWolf Source Port
I played this out of curiosity to see what I missed from my childhood. And after beating First 3 episodes + 3 Nocturnal Missions, I have to say – not much.
This game really didn’t aged well. I don’t mind the graphics, I really don’t. Also the fact you can only aim horizontally doesn’t bother me, as through the whole game you stay on the same level, there are no structures or buildings with different floors like in Doom or Duke Nukem where you have to aim at the direction of the enemy that is up/below you, everyone is on the same level in Wolfenstein.
Wolfenstein 3D is an FPS distilled to its most basic elements. You run around and shoot nazis. There’s almost no story at all, no puzzles, cutscenes etc. But it is a little too basic for me.
Your enemies are german shepherds which I hate because they’re just good boys used by bad guys. And nazis, lots of nazis, every single one of them use hitscan weapons. Worse, they can shoot through eachother and when they do it only hits you, so you ideally want to face them 1v1 or quickly wipe the room with a chain gun or bottleneck them in door frames. And your arsenal is very small too. You have a knife, which you’ll almost never use, a Luger pistol, MP 40 SMG and a chain gun, they all share the ammo. You might think there’s no reason to use for other guns after you get a chain gun and you’ll be wrong. Chain gun shoots REALLY FAST and it’ll eat your bullets like crazy, so SMG still is useful for killing single enemies or small groups to conserve ammo. Hell I even used pistol too sometimes for single guards or dogs, since they can die in one shot. You’ll see the same enemies through all six episodes. Guards with pistol, SS guards who use MP 40 and officers, who are faster and a little tougher version of normal guards. Only episode 2 has a unique enemy and that’s a nazi mutant, that has a gun sticking out of its stomach and they pull a trigger by doing a “sieg heil!” lol. But they are the most annoying enemies in the game. When you hit an enemy with a pistol or SMG, it breaks their animation for a half a second, effectively stunning them. The nazi mutants can shoot between your SMG shots and kill you really easily, only a chain gun stops them. At the end of each episode is a boss fight. Most episodes have a big guy with one or two chain guns. Go for cover when they shoot, peek and shoot back at them, repeat. Only Hitler has two phases, first you need to break his armor, then finish him off. Ah, also on episode where you kill Hitler there is a special enemy, a wizard that looks like Hitler too and he casts fire orbs at you, a lot of fire orbs, it’s better not to dodge them but hide.
For some reason this game has a lives system. You can have up to 9 lives, the floor you’re on resets when you die and you spawn with pistol and 8 bullets. Perhaps original version had no save system or something? ECWolf introduces modern save system, you can save at any time and have up to 10 saves. If you happen to die on boss level and you didn’t saved and don’t want to come back, I found there is always a secret with a chain gun and lots of ammo. That’s not always the case on different levels but every SS Guard drops their SMG if you don’t have one, so it’s not a big issue.
And besides seeing same enemies, get used to seeing same damn wall textures through all 6 episodes. And episodes 4-6 and 2 really like to throw in floors that are fucking mazes and really hard to navigate without a minimap. Luckily ECWolf adds a minimap that you can customize and it saves a lot of your time.
I don’t think I can recommend this, it didn’t age well and it’s more of a historical curiosity at this point.
Beaten 1st time on difficulty = “Bring ‘em on!” (Hard?)
Mods/fixes used – ECWolf Source Port
Spear of Destiny is a prequel to Wolfenstein 3D. The nocturnal missions I mentioned in W3D review are also prequels, but what comes first I’m not sure. What I’m sure about is that SoD and it’s extra mission packs that are included in steam version are for veterans of first game only. ESPECIALLY the mission packs, in those named “Mission 2: Return to Danger” and “Mission 3: Ultimate Challenge” the devs use maze-like level design a ton, hide enemies in various corners and on some floors make sure that if you shoot one enemy, half of the map hears it and they all start charging at you. All of it was present in base game, but it was not a standard. Here it is. And sometimes to progress, you need to find keys that are inside secrets.
On the plus side, mission 2 & 3 come with completely new textures for literally everything – enemies, walls, treasure, guns, even new sounds for all the nazis and guns! It’s a nice change.
In all 3 missions you have to retrieve the titular Spear of Destiny, which is a religious artifact of sorts. In first mission, after picking the spear you are transported into hell to kill Angel of Death. On next two you are again transported somewhere but you fight some kind of Lovecraftian looking creature that speaks german. Each version of hell has some kind ghosts that slowly follow you and dmg you really fast if you let them touch you. You can make them disappear for few seconds if you shoot at them, but they will respawn. And each boss in hell uses fast projectile attack, but is avoidable. It makes them a little too easy, but you need to keep an eye on ghosts because they will slowly surround you. Some of nazi bosses used rocket launchers too, a bad choice to take a projectile weapon to a hitscan fight.
Again, this is for veterans only. Some levels gave me a hard time, but jumping from nocturnal missions straight into this helped a lot, I think. I would definitely NOT recommend this if you haven’t played W3D before, because you’ll have a hard time. And gameplay wise this is still W3D but with more bullshit, so I enjoyed it less.
Damn, I wanna play mad max just for the sandstorm now :D
Yeah they’re awesome and I think I forgot to mention they don’t appear that often. I had maybe like 5 throughout the whole game. And that’s good, I think they would be just annoying if I had sandstorm every hour :P
Mad Max is a great game, as is every other Warner Bros. game in this genre imo.
Ya, looking at their steam catalog they published a lot of good games (except FEAR 3 lol)
Oh, I love F.E.A.R. but yeah, third part is probably the worst. My favorite is Extraction Point despite it being seriously glitchy and unfinished. It is just so dark and depressing…What else to wish for when you’re 15. xD
Extraction Point is my favorite part too :) Way more scary than original IMO while still being a great shooter.
Hmm, you know, I don’t like shooters in general but F.E.A.R. is a great one indeed. I remember a weapon shooting nails that could pin enemies on walls. It was so weirdly satisfying to shoot with it. I guess its probably my favorite shooter of all time. It fitted my teenage angst so well back in the day.
Congrats on your progress! :D
Nice reading about Mad Max, I am also enjoying it very much, although he’s on hiatus now as I am playing other games from PoP… but coming back to him soon! ;)
I haven’t noticed the delay in the steering, maybe it’s because I don’t play driving games that much? Also weaker car should be less or worse controllable than the upgraded beast, no? ;)
Of course, but I’m not a fan of giving them delayed turning :) I looked at your achievements and you seem to finished act 1 and then cleared the first territory, weird path D: I’m curious to see what you think about story after you finish it.
It took me some time, but I am back with my thoughts on the game! :D Mad Max is completed, here is my review. ;)
Well, I like to explore before moving out in the story, if it’s possible. ^^ It was then in Pink Eye territory when I wanted a neat upgrade for my car that was locked behind a side mission further in the story, that I have skipped my tactic of exploration first and moved a lot in the story at once. Not sure if it make any sense. ^^
As for the story. Well, I really liked the main missions. They were pretty cool and greatly paced. All characters around Max were just of a support role though as they didn’t developed anywhere. Also Max is stone-heart badass beast, but I suppose it’s with cannon of the franchise. But what he did to Chumbucket was cruel, even more as it was completely pointless and without a real effect, because Scrotus survived unscratched. So I didn’t liked that much (more than the death of the girls actually), but I would still like to see the sequel. ^^
I’ll keep the tab open and read your review tomorrow :)