Recent reviews by William Shakesman

I worked as a mercenary once and this game is extremely realistic for what you have to deal with. It was horrible.

All your fun abilities and upgraded guns are removed, so you have to shoot several clips to punch through armor before enemies stagger and all the threats are hitscan and you cannot heal outside the slow and inadequate takedown special. Just takes the nu-SR combat and makes it worse on every level. Absolutely zero value in this DLC. Volition has NEVER made good combat ever. Nu-SR was good by accident after patches and this DLC shows they don't understand what makes it good at all.

Embracers latest humiliation ritual doubles as a perfect SR3 reference: play upon your fond memories of the charming but dumb LARP arc of the main game to make you pay $10 to be forcefully married to an unpleasant annoying ugly bald woman just so they can set up a bad Game of Thrones reference. Its just like I am playing SR3 for the first time all over again.

Doesn't help that the missions average out to bad. The carnival games mission is easily the worst of the entire game and made me feel like I was playing a Rockstar game. If you just want one DLC, buy heist, not this.

10 tracks in MP3, not FLAC or any other format, and not even the 10 best tracks from the game, whose full soundtrack is about 4 full CDs. If you want to pay $10 more for Rain Code, you should do it for the art book which IS worth it and not this joke of a teaser. It is better than nothing and the game soundtrack is great, but you would barely guess from this teaser.

One of the few mysteries remaining at the end of Rain Code was what the black void beneath Shinigami-chan's skirt was hiding. I assure you that this artbook provides the answer to this mystery in exact and precise detail, enough to make any detective proud.

It is provided as an program, not a PDF or collection of pictures. The program is slickly produced and provides quite a lot of quality art of a beautiful game, but it includes voice snippets for each character and no way to select dubs. So if you select English text for the book you unfortunately must suffer hearing the English dub as well. An excellent package otherwise if you are aware of those tidbits.

Crab Champions but without anything slightly interesting happening mechanically.

If Risk of Rain 2 were a good game it would be this game

The game makes a lot of hay about all these girls sent to an asylum for misbehaving but once they're there and introduced to a wondrous dream where they can't die and magic is real they almost all decide to become psychotic witches and start murdering people. Whatever misbehavior was an old school euphemism for, I suspect people were right to send girls to an asylum for that.

Also the back half of the game is absolutely bloated and drawn out with enemies with equally bloated stats but you can always leg it to a merchant and will always have enough money to restock medkits and consumables so it just feels like the soulless ARPG drudgery of shooting at a big fat health bar and mashing the health potion button whenever you get wrecked all just lasting WAY too long. It's not like I have a tactic available to me to meaningfully mitigate damage anyway. Even the ones you could pretend worked would just draw the fight out longer and cost more than chomping medkits.

And the roguelite part is a wash. It was supposed to make horror game pathing no longer a solved problem but now it's just an even longer, even more boring Dark Souls corpse run spread across an entire level collecting your old power back piecemeal before you can start killing again.

In this game there are two ladies who worked as researchers for Amadeus Syndicate, basically the evil science company. One is a half naked catgirl who does experiments of questionable ethical standards on a literal werewolf. The other decided her office job was too limiting and quit to be a pirate queen. As a pirate queen she battles aliens, ninjas, cultist wizards, and giant mecha while stumbling around drunk hunting for treasure and ordering her crew around before joining up with the Jedi knight from the future trying to reverse the evil cult leader's control over causality itself alongside his bikini-clad pipe-smoking swordmaster gf, their kids from the future, a trenchcoat wearing vampire hunter, and a treasure hunter. And these are just a few of the characters of the Independent Faction, one of five.

It's rather a shame this turned out to be a SINFULLY grindy auto-battler because any three characters in this game could have starred in THEIR OWN game back in SNK's prime when they could actually make new franchises.

European Extreme Difficulty: Find a single female NPC in this game that has a proper haircut, i.e. not bald, not cornrows, not that weird undercut/half head cut. Note that by default half of every enemy faction you fight is female so it's not like it is hard to pull on this gacha.