Homeworld 2 Remastered and how frustration became a plot device

[Introduction]

Unlike my MDK review, I'm actually following up with a sequel after having reviewed Homeworld 1! Like last time, this is going to be more of a review of the 2015 remaster than the original 2003 release. And, as I noted then, a good remaster has one job: make the game prettier and bring it up to modern specs. I'm happy to say that Homeworld 2 Remastered succeeds in this regard!
As with the first game, this is a 3D RTS. Not so much because it uses 3D models, but more specifically because it features a three-dimensional spherical battlefield.

[First Impressions]

THE MOTHERSHIP CAN MOVE.
Unlike its predecessor, where every mothership but your own was mobile, it is now possible to move the heart of your fleet, the Pride of Hiigara. While this may seem like a relatively small change, it certainly is a gamechanger. Its speed isn't particularly impressive, but it is nonetheless a new tactical and strategic tool, as well as a sign of things to come.
Homeworld is back, and it's better than before.

[Development]

There really isn't much to say, certainly not about the remaster project in and of itself. That was mostly covered in the Homeworld 1 review, but to give you a quick recap:
>THQ acquired Relic in 2004.
>THQ acquired Homeworld rights from Sierra in 2007
>Inaction for 6 years.
>2013, THQ declared bankruptcy. Homeworld rights acquired by Gearbox.
>Remaster gets released in 2015 with help from modders.

The original Homeworld 2's development is notable mostly due to the creation of SCAR (SCripting At Relic), building upon Lua (another scripting language). As far as I can tell, this is the first game to be created using this scripting language, although it certainly wasn't the only one.

Beyond this, it appears to have been largely uneventful, which is rather appropriate given the flat improvement from the first game across the board.

[Game Mechanics]

Homeworld 2 is a real-time strategy game which, like its predecessor, particularly focuses on the strategy part. I've heard it said that you aren't planning a battle when you play Homeworld to; you're planning a campaign. By and large, I'm inclined to agree, and this is certainly what the game is going for. The foundation of this notion is that your fleet doesn't just disappear between missions. Many RTS games will have you start from scratch, but Homeworld 2 lets you bring your fleet with you when the mothership jumps to hyperspace.

Spanning 15 missions, you start with nothing and progressively build up your forces as you once again fight your way through the galaxy. Previously I praised this feature, which is present in all Homeworld games so far, but condemned the simultaneous difficulty scaling issues in Homeworld 1 Remastered. I'm very happy to say that, for the most part, this is no longer a problem in the sequel. It does rear its ugly head once or twice, but fortunately it doesn't get so bad as it once did. No longer will missions become nearly (if not outright) impossible because the player had the gall to prepare. Still, it does get rather silly. For example:

Nearly 3 minutes in: 6 enemy battlecruisers. For comparison, the player can build 3.

Sporadically wonky scaling aside, in general, the game plays much the same. Your mothership produces units, including carriers (which also produce units) and shipyards (which produce larger units). Your chief concern is gathering stuff to build ships with in the form of an all-encompassing resource called RUs, or Resource Units. What this means is that you're gonna be strip mining the hell out of any asteroid you see and turning whatever you dig out of assorted space rocks into a variety of warships.

Your fleet will be an assortment of ships in various classes: strike craft include scouts, interceptors and bombers, which scout, intercept hostile strike craft and bomb larger ships respectively; corvettes feature gunships, pulsar gunships and minelayers who each shoot down fighters, shoot down corvettes and lay mines; frigates are divided into flak frigates, torpedo frigates, ion frigates, marine frigates and defense field frigates. These are intended to shoot down strike craft, corvettes and capital ships, in that order, while the latter two capture enemy ships and reduce incoming damage; capital ships range from destroyers to carriers to battlecruisers, which blow up frigates, build smaller ships and blow up anything unfortunate enough to be in range.

Other assorted ships available to you are standard probes, proximity sensor probes, sensor distortion probes, as well as mobile refineries, resource collectors and a mobile shipyard. In addition, there are the campaign-unique units, namely movers (which move things), the Progenitor Dreadnought (which is basically a flying key that happens to be armed to the teeth) and a literal god-ship.

All in all, this means you'll most likely end up with a quite diverse fleet, and rightly so. Despite the apparent redundancy of some ships (for example, why get interceptors if there are flak frigates), a combination of target priorities, target size, unit caps, capability and raw economic impact ensure that no ship completely invalidates another. Additionally, certain missions have objectives more readily achieved by some ships than others. The circumstances of goals and battlefield obstructions certainly play a role as well.

Finally, a note of appreciation: resources are now collected in their entirety upon completing a mission. You no longer have to spend an inordinate amount of time vacuuming up every last RU in a given area. The game does it for you. This, in addition to a general increase in pacing, has made the game feel much less sluggish than its predecessor, although I would still like to have a speed-up button or some similar option to make things go a little faster sometimes.

[Graphics]

Homeworld 2, at launch, was a gorgeous game. This should really come as no surprise, because the whole thing plays like a movie. Although you really ought to be paying attention to what's going on, there's a good reason you can find videos of battles playing out rather cinematically.

The remaster didn't improve overmuch, because there wasn't much to improve, but what's there is good.

[Story]

The first game had you carve a bloody path through the Taiidan Empire to reach Hiigara. Really, it was as much about revenge for the genocide of Kharak as it was about going back home.
This second game has you carve a bloody path through the Vaygr Reaches to fulfil a prophecy about the End Time. Really, it's as much about revenge for the near genocide of Hiigara as it is about saving your home.

If you're noticing a pattern, that's because one is emerging. Befitting its mythological feel, the story has a number of recurring elements, such as an overarching threat to your home, a dangerous journey through the unknown to reach a place of legend, defeating an individual who seeks to infringe upon your prophesized success and in some way safeguarding your home from whatever peril was befalling it.

While I find the story to be very appealing, mostly because it feels like we're experiencing unfolding events that will eventually become myths and legends, I will say that certain elements of the finale fall short of expectations. Not necessarily because the story is bad, but because something that was hyped up turned out to be fairly underwhelming by comparison.

That something is Progenitor technology.

You see, the Progenitors have been set up to have been this awesome, borderline unknowable group whose technology so far surpassed anything conceivable that it may as well be magical. There are entire levels that take place inside megastructures they have built in space. Battles of cataclysmic proportions have taken place inside these things. How they even built them is unknown, much less what their purpose was. Some of their ships were so large that they built ships dwarfing even Hiigaran and Vaygr battlecruisers. A vessel designed to function as a key was more heavily armed than the most powerful contemporary warships by the time Homeworld 2 takes place.

And the god-ship we find at the end... it really is not as impressive as it was made out to be.

[SPOILERS]

It's Sajuuk.

The god-ship is Sajuuk, and was likely created by the actual Sajuuk, who turns out to have been one of the Progenitors and the creator of a great many of the wonders encountered in the Homeworld games. The hyperspace cores, the galaxy-spanning hyperspace network, the titanic foundry-ships the size of a moon, those were all made by the creator-god who, curiously, appears to be prevalent in the mythology of every single culture in the galaxy.

The ship bearing his name is used in conjunction with the three hyper space cores by Karan S'jet to unlock the aforementioned galaxy-spanning network of hyperspace gates, allowing everyone to far jump everywhere, albeit under the watchful eye of Kiith S'jet and the reformed Hiigaran empire.

[Pros]

- Substantial improvements over 1

- Satisfying space naval combat

- Full 3D spherical battlefield

- Unique features, such as ships carrying over between missions

- Oddly mythological story

[Cons]

- Significant frustration toward the end of the game

- Scaling mechanic has some issues, although no where near as bad as 1

- Slow pace (and in dire need of a speed-up button)

[Conclusion]

Originally, my frustration surrounding the finale was actually going to be represented more strongly, but upon reflection, perhaps it's better this way. This is, after all, a story about a people who barely reclaimed their homeworld and held on to it by the skin of their teeth, with a hair's breadth between triumph and disaster. In retrospect, while certainly frustrating, I actually think it's really rather fitting.
This is the story of the End Time. Moral compass optional.

[Score]

Homeworld 2 Classic: 8/10
Homeworld 2 Remaster: 8/10

/DUX

Homeworld 1 Remastered - The Good, The Bad and The Scaling

[Introduction]

If you're a fan of RTS games, then you've probably heard of Homeworld, Relic's story-driven space navy strategy game. It was notable for a number of things and has garnered a cult following since its release in 1999.
This will be a review of its 2015 remaster though. Not that it necessarily matters, because a good remaster has one job: make the game prettier and bring it up to modern specs. Add widescreen, tart it up, that sorta thing, and Homeworld Remastered does succeed in that regard.
With some hurdles. Well, one hurdle. A pretty big one.

[First Impressions]

Perhaps the first thing a new player will notice is the pace.
Sure, there's the borderline mythological narrative, the three dimensional space ships can navigate in, the almost cinematic way the fleet jumps to hyperspace, and those are all good things. But when you actually get to playing, it won't take long to realise that, no matter what the story tells you, Homeworld is definitely not in a hurry. This isn't a point of criticism, but you really shouldn't go into this expecting Star Wars action or something to that effect, even if the movies were a major source of inspiration.

[Development]

Imagine you're pitching a game concept to a publisher.
You could provide a tech demo, proofs of concept, artwork, storybooks, all that stuff. There's a slew of things you can do to prepare to really wow them and seal the deal. But what if you don't do any of that? What if you just write some stuff on a whiteboard and call it a day? Well... that's pretty much what Relic did when they presented Homeworld to Sierra. They approached them so early in development that they really didn't have anything to show, sat through two whiteboard meetings and somehow it worked.

So after Relic successfully faked it till they made it, development began in earnest. The fact that it's a real-time strategy game is, surprisingly, largely incidental. It just so happened to be the formula that best suited their vision of "epic space battles," the proper implementation of which was their main concern. RTS games were nothing new at the time, and bearing in mind that the genre was a means rather than an end, they kept things simple. No innovations there.

Where they did innovate was the position filled by the player. Drawing inspiration from Battlestar Galactica, the intent was to put us in the position of Commander Adama; to give us control in a space battle where we steer the course of the action, rather than taking the role of a pilot. It was a new idea at the time, particularly when factoring in that three dimensions must be accounted for. In fact, I was unable to find any prior RTS game where players operated in a sphere rather than a plane. I don't know for a fact that Homeworld was the first game to do this, but it may well have been.

This ties into the art direction and design philosophy of the game as well. This goes from something so simple as the vertical design of the Mothership being intended for use as a reference point in contrast to the horizontal plane, all the way to something so complex as flight patterns and associated sounds. In the case of the latter, substantial effort went into strike craft and corvettes having dynamic movement patterns and a wide array of sounds associated with individual actions. In fact, movement patterns aside, the sound-to-action association is featured with all ships in the game, and all sound is relative to the camera's current position.

But, of course, this is a review of the remaster.
As it happens, the remaster was not made by Relic at all. This might sound strange, considering it's a remaster, but let me explain:
Relic was bought by THQ in 2004. In 2007, THQ also obtains the rights to Homeworld from Sierra. Nothing happened for the next six years, and THQ declared bankruptcy in 2013. That same year, Gearbox acquire the rights to Homeworld from THQ at an auction. Shortly thereafter, they announce that they're going to remaster Homeworld and its sequel. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the source code is so fragmented that it's basically useless. In the words of producer Brian Burleson, "the bike had one pedal, needed a new chain and overall was just missing parts." So far, not so good. This effectively meant that Gearbox had to fill in a hell of a lot of holes themselves, but, luckily for them, they were not alone. Remember that cult following I said Homeworld has like 7 paragraphs ago? Well, wouldn't you know it, they came to the rescue.

I'm not making this up for dramatic effect or anything. The Homeworld modding community pretty much saved the remaster project and helped Gearbox fill in the holes in the patchy source code. The Homeworld Remastered Collection was released in 2015, less than 2 years after the remaster project was announced. It even includes compatibility fixes for the original (or "classic") Homeworld 1 and 2. The remastered versions meanwhile feature a completely new engine as well as upgraded visuals and sound.

Oh, and the Homeworld 1 remaster also breaks the game's scaling mechanic, meaning that in a game that allows (and incentivises) players to bring fleets with them between missions now punishes players for bringing fleets with them between missions.

Damn it. It was almost perfect.

[Game Mechanics]

Let me get this out of the way real quick.
So, one of the unique aspects of Homeworld 1 was that players can keep their fleet from one mission and bring it with them to the next mission. This means that, if you want, you can harvest every available resource in a mission area and build up a sizeable force before moving on. There's even a fancy docking sequence before you jump to hyperspace, and any ship too big to fit inside the Mothership is lined up next to it for the jump, giving you a nice view of the force you have assembled.

So the player has an incentive to prepare for upcoming missions, right?
Well, yes, but actually no. Homeworld has a scaling mechanic. This means that the larger your fleet is, the more enemies you'll face in order to keep the game balanced. This is good. A game ought to be balanced. Without this, you could conceivably just build an inordinate amount of ships and steamroll the entire game with no strategy or challenge, which would make it less of a real-time strategy game and more of a... well, just a real-time game. What's the point of RTS without the S?

The problem is that the scaling mechanic is broken. Unless the player strikes the "proper" balance of fleet size, the difficulty gets dialled up to 11 and missions become borderline (if not outright) impossible. Enemy presence often jumps in excess of 250%. Now, one could argue that it'd be sensible to then retire the fleet prior to jumping to hyperspace and then rebuilding the fleet at the beginning of the next mission, and that does sort of work for a while. The problem with this approach is that a number of later missions require a military force from the get go, so having no ships isn't an option either.

So what we're left with is a game that simultaneously promotes and punishes preparation. It's a perplexing contradiction, albeit one that has been addressed by the modding community, and I'm not quite certain how it didn't get addressed during testing. But I digress.

Scaling mechanic aside, Homeworld's gameplay is, at its core, rather simple in nature, if not in execution. Using the Mothership as a base of operations, the player gathers resources and builds ships with which to attack the enemy. This is nothing new and should be immediately familiar to anyone who ever played an RTS game before. Where Homeworld stands out is its environment and the challenges posed. The core may be simple, but that's just the toolset provided to the player with which to overcome the dangers of the journey to the titular homeworld.

Without wanting to spoil anything, there are likely going to be several points in the game where you'll make mistakes, usually due to erroneous assumptions on your own part - at least, this was my experience, and I think it fits rather well with the story. We're not some galactic power; here we are, a newly spacefaring people, blindly rushing through the cosmos. We're gonna make mistakes, so save often.

Do also bear in mind that no ship is a do-it-all unit. That heavy cruiser might be big and tough and expensive to boot, and although the big guns never tire, they also usually never hit strike crafts. Fleet composition is important, and you're given a wide variety of ships to use. Brute force is absolutely an option, but more often than not, clever thinking will save you a lot of hassle. For example, you could try and match an enemy heavy cruiser with your own firepower; or you could just distract it and send half a dozen salvage corvettes to steal it.

Yeah, stealing stuff is an actual game mechanic, and I highly recommend you make use of it, because it'll frequently grant you access to a ship type before you can even build it. Hell, sometimes it even provides the technology to build similar ships earlier than it would normally be unlocked.
And of course it's also just really funny.

As a final note, while it's not necessarily a game mechanic per se, I very much enjoy the comms chatter from units. It does provide situational information depending on the status, location and activity of the individual unit, but more than anything, it adds immersion.

[Graphics]

The original Homeworld was gorgeous in its day, and quite deliberately so.
I know, I know, every game that looks good is good looking on purpose, but in Homeworld's case, it was a central philosophy. They could have gotten away with some pretty low detail models, simply because the scope of the battles can grow to involve well over a hundred ships of varying sizes. This was rejected, and rightly so, because they knew players would be zooming in on the battles to see the action up close.

This is still true in the Remaster. It's very easy on the eyes. The quality models, the beautiful environments, it all comes together very nicely.

[Story]

The opening crawl establishes that, following the discovery of an object smack dab in the middle of a big ol desert on the planet Kharak, a guidestone was excavated. This guidestone depicts a map and provides a route to the Kushan homeworld. This, along with deteriorating environmental conditions, inspire the otherwise disparate familial tribes (called "kiithid") to unite and build a ship to take them to their lost homeworld. They install a hyperdrive, uncovered along with the guidestone, in the ship, call it the Mothership and make plans for going home, hence the franchise name.

Naturally, this goes awry, and the journey becomes one of peril and takes on a tone not too different from real world myths and legends. Across 16 missions, the Kushans travel from the very edge of the galaxy to its very core, eventually reaching their home, where a final peril awaits them.

The story of Homeworld is not particularly complex, and largely serves as a device to justify the aforementioned "epic space battles" envisioned by its developers. To this end, it serves its purpose, but I think it goes above and beyond the call of duty. The plight of the Kushan people is as compelling as it is dire, and the stakes are immediately high. Depending on your actions early on, it may be downright cataclysmically catastrophic.

[SPOILERS]

As it turns out, leaving Kharak and using hyperdrive technology violates a millennia-old treaty the ancestors of the Kushans were forced to sign following their war with an enemy known as the Taiidan Empire. Consequently, following the initial hyperdrive test, the Taiidan fleet shows up and burns Kharak's atmosphere. The crew of the Mothership and any crysleep trays the player manages to save represent the full sum of the Kushan species. Depending on how many you manage to save in the beginning, this may be as many as around 600,000 individuals, and as low as around 100,000. For reference, that's as little as 0.00128% of the human race on planet Earth.

Unfortunately for the Taiidans, this all happens while the Mothership is absent, so their attempt to wipe out the Kushans fails by a hair's breadth. To make matters worse for them, the Kushans also receive aid from the Bentusi, an ancient civilisation of traders and scientists, who not only sell weapons to the Mothership fleet, but also elect to present a case to the Galactic Council.

Things kinda keep escalating until the Mothership reaches the homeworld, Hiigara, where a final confrontation with the Taiidan emperor takes place. He is, of course, ultimately defeated and killed, and the Galactic Council eventually declare the war over and recognise the Kushan claim to Hiigara as their rightful homeworld.

[Pros]

- Satisfying space naval combat

- Full 3D spherical battlefield

- Unique features, such as ships carrying over between missions

- Oddly mythological story

[Cons]

- Broken scaling mechanic

- Slow pace (and in dire need of a speed-up button)

- Solutions to problems are occasionally frustratingly vague

[Conclusion]

Homeworld was a groundbreaking game, and remains a solid experience to this day. The remaster is no different in that regard. However, the broken scaling mechanic is such a glaring issue that it overshadows every other accomplishment of the remaster and pretty much single-handedly ruins the experience. I highly recommend installing one of the multiple mods that have been made to address this issue. I played through the game without any mods, and my enjoyment was significantly diminished.
There's nothing left for us here. Moral compass optional.

[Score]

Homeworld 1 Classic: 8/10
Homeworld 1 Remaster: 5/10

/DUX

MDK, a space janitor simulator (kind of)

[Introduction]

MDK (Murder, Death, Kill, abbreviated for marketing) is a fast-paced third person shooter in which you take the fight to invading aliens by dropping from low orbit and landing on their minecrawlers. Your goal is simple: fight your way to the boss of each respective minecrawler, take them out and get the hell out, preferably before any more cities get demolished.
This all sounds quite serious, but I promise you that the game is actually really rather silly.

[First Impressions]

If you bought the game on Steam and you're running a modern OS on modern hardware, then you might notice something upon launching the game: namely that it doesn't run very well, if at all. What a bummer. But before you request a refund, don't worry, because there's a fix for that:

Download the MDK Steam Fan Patch, it not only allows the game to run on modern systems, but also adds widescreen support, brings back a couple ending cutscenes that were removed from the Steam release for some reason and a few other neat things.

With that out of the way, you can actually play the game! 5 minutes in, you can also realise that the control scheme is weird as hell, quit to main menu and rebind the keys in the options.

NOW you can actually play the game, and it won't be long before you realise it's gonna be a strange one, because MDK starts as it means to go on.

[Development]

Would you believe it if I told you that this game started its conceptual life as a doodle born from frustration with being too family-friendly? It's true; Nick Bruty, arguably the original creator of MDK, had gotten tired of games like Aladdin and Earthworm Jim, so he drew up some concept art of an armored suit with a machine gun and a sniper helmet. This would later become the coil suit, but back then, it become a sort of proof of concept. Bruty paired it with a story draft and put a team together to put things in motion.

The video game market was, at the time, replete with what was known as "DOOM Clones," so called due to the popularity of DOOM. Today, we know them as first person shooters, but the team knew that this wasn't what they wanted anyway. They wanted something different, something that would stand amidst the dross, something that hadn't been done before. While they didn't make the first 3D third person shooter, they were among the earliest. And they certainly set themselves apart from the likes of DOOM.

Motion capture was used in animating both enemies and the player character, and this may well be the first game to have separate motion scrips for individual limbs. The whole game is written in a unique programming language built from scratch. Every level was intensely playtested and subsequently optimised so that the game would run at a bare minimum of 30 FPS at all times. The game doesn't even require a GPU, and was designed around specs allowing even very basic contemporary machines to run it.

I want you to really understand how wild this is for a 1997 title. We're talking about a game that has no fancy tricks like reducing quality or not rendering distant objects. And this is all in a true 3D world, with the sole exception being the player character, whose model is a sprite. Everything else is texture mapped polygons. These aren't small levels either, and they all feature substantial vertical movement, a not insignificant number of enemies (whose projectiles all move in real time - no hitscan here!) and elements destructible through scripted events. Hell, some are destructible by the player outside of scripted events.

The enemies all possess a decently capable AI as well. Sure, every hostile alien SOB will beeline towards you if they've seen you and you move out of sight, but in a firefight, they'll make use of cover and stay mobile if none is available. Granted, most of them aren't as nimble as you are, but they'll do their best. Failing that, they might panic and run away or hit the deck and cower in fear. They'll also react to limbs being shot off and adapt to being disarmed, falling back to their remaining weapon(s) if they lose one.

Oh, yeah. You can dismember enemies, who will then adapt to you shooting off their arms and/or legs, and without meaning to beat a dead horse too much, this is still in 1997.

Another neat thing is that every level had a separate designer. This resulted in a pretty good variety in level design, with one even taking inspiration from James Bond movies of all things, perhaps most obviously The Spy Who Loved Me.

That said, development wasn't necessarily a smooth affair. Several design aspects have changed. Crucially, MDK was apparently once intended to be much more stealth-focused. There are still remnants of that idea in the game. Occasionally you will be able to sneak up on enemies, and the sniper mode definitely allows for a more thought-out approach to certain situations, but make no mistake, this is an exception rather than the norm. The vast majority of the game will be spent running and gunning.

The concept proposal video also portrays a far less silly and much darker game, with greater emphasis on the aforementioned stealth mechanics. What we might have gotten if the earliest design documents had never changed is unknown and, I suppose, largely irrelevant, particularly considering that we won't be seeing a new game in the series anytime soon.

[Game Mechanics]

You run, you gun, and you don't stop running or gunning until everything is dead or you reach your objective. The core of MDK is a simple affair of holding down the trigger while dodging incoming fire and keeping an eye out for power ups. It's not quite a bullet hell shooter, but as enemy projectiles are actual physical objects moving along a trajectory in real time, often over significant distances, you will occasionally run into blankets of incoming fire.

While your chaingun lacks the same kind of range, being a hitscan weapon that only shoots so far, your sniper mode allows you to engage distant targets with a variety of munitions. This includes mortars, homing bullets and even painting an area for a bombing run. Unlike your chaingun, the sniper mode is not a hitscan weapon, necessitating leading your shots when dealing with targets in motion.

Unusually, sniping affords you a zoom of up to 100x. This might seem excessive, and it kind of is, but while you'll only rarely be using that level of magnification, it comes into play more often than one might think. It's a smooth zoom, too. No momentary cut to black as you jump between zooms. This, along with the bullet cams following the trajectory of projectiles, makes sniping impressive both as a tool with which to take out enemies, and as a technical accomplishment.

There are also a number of fairly rudimentary puzzles. They're all things like moving a certain object to a certain spot to open an exit, so don't expect anything particularly challenging. Honestly, half the time, the challenge comes less from figuring out the solution and more from actually implementing it. If you have to move something, you're gonna be pushing it by shooting it, and the direction in which an object moves when shot at might not be what you expect.

The aforementioned powerups are about what you might imagine. Put a chaingun on your chaingun to increase firepower until your chaingun's chaingun runs out of ammo. Throw portable tornadoes at groups of enemies. Apply the world's smallest nuclear explosion to a locked door in order to open it. Present your foes with the world's most interesting bomb. It's all really rather silly. But then, they were also all invented by Dr. Hawkins, who isn't exactly the most grounded person in the world, what with being a mad scientist who built a space station out of recycled aluminum cans.

[Graphics]

I've mentioned that the game was relentlessly playtested to maximise performance.
Truthfully, this did come at the cost of visual quality in certain areas. For example, in particularly hectic levels, you may notice that some surfaces have been flatshaded, i.e. have a single, solid color. However, this certainly is not universal, and far more often than not, MDK provides a shockingly good graphical presentation.

That's not to say that everything is necessarily pleasing to the eye. One particular level features a section of the minecrawler which was apparently used for some kind of artistic experiment, but to be fair, this is an odd one out. By and large, despite every level having a different designer, a common aesthetic is preserved, but with each crawler having its own identity. This is reflected by the grunts, your most common opponent, having different appearances depending on which minecrawler you're aboard.

If nothing else, you're certainly gonna come across some pretty unique stuff. There's often an odd blend of comical and serious. On the one hand, the interior of the minecrawlers often feature massive industrial landscapes and sinister machinery. On the other, they also often feature stuff like the aforementioned arts and crafts project, or the ammo storage where grunts are carrying around ridiculously oversized artillery shells.

All in all, as with everything else about MDK, the graphics are impressive for their time.

[Story]

You are KURT HECTIC (yes, really) and you are going to SAVE THE WORLD!
Of course, you don't want to. You're literally just a janitor working for a mad scientist who got bribed with Hungarian goulash in exchange for going to space. Your boss, the "esteemed" Dr. Hawkins, built a space station to study "Flange Orbits" and only managed to convince you to stick around by showing you how to work the VCR.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Flange Orbits aren't real, but rather than return to Earth and face ridicule, Dr. Hawkins opts to stay in space until he events... something. Anything, really, so long as it's useful. He spends years on various projects, including creating a coffee machine that ends up destroying parts of the space station, as well as creating a genetically engineered cyborg dog named Bones to help around the station. Not only does Bones not really do much to help, instead spending most of his time in his vegetable garden, but both he and Kurt prefer the name Max.

So, here we have our motley crew. A mad scientist, a janitor, and a 6-limbed bipedal dog ostensibly named Bones, but really named Max. Dr. Hawkins, as it happens, eventually becomes aware of an "energy stream" penetrating the galaxy from the rim. And, because his research quote: "indicates the farther away an object is, the smaller it appears to the human eye," (except the Sun, apparently), he deducts that the stream is not growing in mass, but actually approaching Earth. He tries to warn the planet, but no one takes him seriously.

Turns out they should have, because the energy stream is actually a means of transportation for the so-called Streamriders, a group of aliens who travel between planets, stripmining them with enormous minecrawlers the size of Chicago. Although Dr. Hawkins briefly forgets about the aliens due to actually sleeping for once, as well as having a dream about "all humans having an evil twin in the form of a masked chicken," he promptly plans a daring mission to save humanity once he remembers.

Now, the good doctor just so happens to have an advanced suit of body armor with an integrated chaingun. Unfortunately, he himself is old as hell, and Max has two arms too many, so Kurt is elected hero of the day.

And this is just from the game's manual. We haven't even launched it yet.

[SPOILERS]

There's not much to spoil, really. Once in-game, the story is told pretty much exclusively through the environment.

Max gets captured by the BBEG (having apparently fallen off the space station along with some power-ups) after Kurt foils the Streamrider attempt to stripmine the planet, but Kurt of course rescues the cyberdog, kills the final boss and saves the world.

[Pros]

- Provides a fairly unique experience

- Gameplay is entertaining, if somewhat simple

- Certain gameplay elements are still impressive by today's standard (smooth 100x zoom!)

- Zany humor

[Cons]

- Requires a fix to run on modern systems

- Even with the fix, the game is finnicky (I got at least 1 hard crash to desktop)

- Certain gameplay elements are rudimentary by today's standards

- What made MDK impressive in 1997 is, of course, not particularly impressive in 2021

- Rather short for what it is; a playthrough likely won't take more than 4-5 hours, if that

[Conclusion]

In the sense that it pushed the boundaries of PC gaming technology to their limits, MDK is effectively the Crysis of its time, except it was actually optimised extraordinarily well and could run on basic systems. What we really have here is a playable case study in cutting edge 1997 technology.
Mission: Deliver Kindness.
Moral compass: optional.

[Score]

7/10

/DUX

Warner Bros becomes a Nemesis of creativity

Since 2015 game development studio Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment has been trying to patent the popular and innovative Nemesis system from Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel Shadow of War. It comes with great misery and regret to say that they've finally been successful in the attempt, but what is the Nemesis system and why is this patent such a potential blow to the industry?

Released in late 2014 Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor marketed itself as an open-world story driven game with a particular feature that had a lot of people excited; the Nemesis system. It's a system that lets randomly generated NPCs remember you and your actions. An example being that a randomly generated Orc (among the countless unnamed ones) can literally gain a name for himself by killing you, and then he will remember that fight and the way you fought during it. Likewise Orcs that enter conflict with you and escape, be shamed, maimed, or otherwise, will remember the encounter and reference it upon the next appearance, including any physical alterations like burn marks if you used fire, or scars from your blade.

It was and is a innovative and fantastic system that was only built upon further with the later game. Each Orc has one of many personalities, traits, weapons and even rivals and blood brothers amidst the others of its kind. There is also a hierarchy of captains, bodyguards, warchiefs, and so on. It was one of the most creative and fresh systems in recent time and really pushed forward dynamic storytelling and the company should by all means be praised for its creation.

So now we've got this system in the industry and it opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for future games and AI development. Great, right? Think of all the games that could adopt a similar system and take a step closer to that holy grail of game design; each playthrough being unique and different.

But no.

Warner Bros decided that the development of AI across the gaming industry needs to be knocked down a notch, and that it needs to patent a system it seemingly has no plan to use again just for the sake of locking it down. Because another company making a good game is just criminal, right?

To get further into the actual direct wording of the patent it protects 'Nemesis Characters, nemesis forts, social vendettas and followers in computer games'. Notice how vague that is? One could argue that 'Nemesis' could be easily slipped by, but social vendettas and followers? If this is enforced heavily that itself has just delivered a glancing blow to interactive AI across all games. The patent not only does that, it goes a step further and protects the concept of characters changing their appearance after an encounter with the player character, as well as their own ability to move within a hierarchy based on the actions of the player character. Again, very vague, which can be both a blessing and a curse.

The patent goes live on the 23rd of February and has the potential to be held for a seriously long time. Here comes the money maker for Warner Bros though; If any other studio wants to use similar systems they have to purchase a license to do so from the patent holder.

With any luck the industry can get by this frankly greedy and selfish patent and make similar systems of their own for the sake of pushing the industry and AI development forward.

I vehemently disagree with any action that prevents the growth of the gaming industry and this patent holds no value to anyone but Warner Bros and their desire to lock down entire game systems and concepts in order to profit from it. Let's hope other companies don't follow in their steps and start patenting more systems, lest we be left with the most creatively starved and samey games we've ever seen to date (And that's already an issue).

/DEAD

Star Wars: Republic Commando - the little cliffhanger that could

[Introduction]

Remember last week, when I reviewed a squad-based third person cover shooter?
Well, this week, I'm reviewing Star Wars: Republic Commando, a squad-based first person tactical shooter with particular emphasis on the squad. Through 3 missions of increasing length, you'll be playing as the leader of a squad of clone commandos fighting for the Galactic Republic. These are the toughest, scariest, most elite warriors the Grand Army of the Republic has to offer short of throwing a Jedi at the enemy.

Incidentally, it's also a console port, and actually not a very good one.

[First Impressions]

Assuming you're playing on PC, you'll probably notice that your cursor is trying to beat Han Solo's Kessel Run record. Moving your mouse an inch will send the cursor flying across the main menu, which is gonna get pretty frustrating pretty quickly. Fortunately for you, there's a solution. Download and install the Star Wars Republic Commando Graphics Fix, go to the in-game options and set your FPS limit to something appropriate. Around 60 should do the trick, but I found that as high as 144 still allows precision mouse control in menus. As an added bonus, the fix also adds improved widescreen support and some graphics fixes without impacting gameplay.

With that out of the way, you can actually enjoy the game, which wastes no time establishing your circumstances and the stakes: the galaxy is at war, and you and your 1,199,999 brothers are gonna save it. More to the point, you and your 3 squadmates are gonna do some "covert" ops.
And by "covert" I mean we're going in guns blazing, but in a sort of unexpected way.

[Development]

Would you believe that this is a first party LucasArts game, developed and published entirely by LucasArts themselves? It's true - so true, in fact, that George Lucas himself was directly involved, particularly with how the commandos presented themselves. He made the decision to discard the original plain white armor with something more personal. Say what you will about the man and his other, weirder decisions. I think this was the right call, but I digress.

The most significant element of the game's development was surely its AI. Just like how armor decoration helps characterise the individual commandos, the squad's behavior helps characterise them as a team. Bear in mind that this is an Xbox title from 2005 that got ported to PC. Your squad know how to take cover, will call new targets, maintain variable proximity depending on standing orders, that sort of thing. Crucially, they can also assist the player if you get downed, and will determine whether it's currently safe to do so. It's not the best AI ever developed for a game, but it's pretty damn good for its time, and it's done with very few scripted events.

This is a year after Half-Life 2, and you can tell that the devs learned from Valve. For example, Combine soldiers would seek out cover when taking damage and coordinate with allies to provide suppressing fire and advance to new positions. The enemies in Republic Commando aren't quite as cunning, insofar as they won't coordinate in a similar fashion, but they absolutely will make individual calls for when to take cover, when to advance and when to open fire. Of course, this isn't true for battle droids, but who really expects tactical acumen from Separatist clankers?

Another big thing is the animation and general mannerisms of Delta Squad. LucasArts had a Navy SEAL instructor on board to train motion capture actors in room breaching and firing positions, that sorta stuff. It goes a long way in selling the characters as elite soldiers when they actually move and gesture appropriately.

[Game Mechanics]

Shields, no health regen, limited weapon selection, ammo counter on your default weapon...
You'd almost think that Halo: Combat Evolved was a popular and influential game in the early 2000s. Its influence on Republic Commando should be pretty obvious for anyone familiar with Halo, because setting and tactical elements aside, the two games play quite similarly.

You get your wrist-mounted vibroblade, providing your melee attacks. You get your DC-15s pistol which never runs out of ammo, but because you've got a knife in your hand, you won't be using it. You get your DC-17m blaster, which in its default setting provides you with a somewhat bland but effective assault rifle - and which can turn into a sniper or a grenade launcher as well. And then you get your interchangeable miscellaneous weapon slot, allowing you to pick up a wide variety of firearms.

It's really a shame you can only hold one "extra" weapon at a time. I'd happily ditch the pistol to carry both a concussion rifle and the infamous not-a-shotgun weapon wielded by the trandoshans. Or a wookie bowcaster. Or one of those giant particle accelerator machine guns. You get the idea, there's solid variety.

Where the game sets itself apart is, as has been mentioned, through the inclusion of a squad as a permanent fixture throughout most of the game. You issue commands to them, designate special weapons firing positions, determine squad movement, and it all really works rather well. It seems somewhat simple to us today, but go back 16 years and this was fairly unusual.

The game sold itself with the advertisement "the squad is your weapon," and this is true. To reiterate: the squad AI is intelligent. It's not just functional, it's actually competent. You don't have to babysit your squadmates. You're not dragging along 3 braindead conjoined twins here. You're advancing as a squad. This is crucial, because the game is designed in such a way that you will frequently have to rely on your squad for protection, just like you frequently have to protect them if they're carrying out an important task. There's an investment in those situations, because if either of you fail, it's game over. It takes two to tango, and it takes four to Delta Squad.

There are also elements that may not be readily apparent to the player initially. For example, did you know stealth is sometimes an option? I didn't. I always ignored the occasional advice to just hack a door instead of breaching it with explosives, but you actually get opportunities to sneak up on enemies or enter areas quietly to better position yourself or circumvent obstacles. It's not a one-off thing either, this happens multiple times. So while you could absolutely go in guns blazing in every situation, you could also dedicate yourself more to the sneaky elite operator role that Delta Squad are meant to fill. Become Delta Force in space. Be an actual commando.

Finally, you might notice that although each squad member is introduced as a specialist within a certain field (i.e. hacking, blowing stuff up and shooting good), these specialisations don't seem to really matter in terms of raw gameplay. And you're right. Sev is just as good at hacking as Fixer, and Fixer is just as good at planting bombs as Scorch, who's just as good at sniping as Sev. For a long while, I did wonder about this, and I was somewhat critical of it, but in the end I came to the conclusion that I assume the developers came to as well: that it would probably be too frustrating to try and get the right guy into the right position with the controls being what they are. So, in a frankly sensible compromise, the specialisations were sacrificed on the altar of pragmatism in all but name. The commandos maintain their characterisations, but it has no impact on gameplay.

[Graphics]

Not bad.
I mean, it's a 2005 Xbox title. It was never gonna be mindblowing, but LucasArts decided to flex their cinematic muscles and add a lot of neat effects. Lighting, atmospheric fog, that sort of stuff. They managed to create something visually appealing that, in my opinion, still holds up today, albeit with the caveat that you temper your expectations somewhat. There are, of course, nicer looking games around in 2021, but if you can reinstall a game older than your average American high schooler and it still looks decent? That's a win on graphics.

It also warrants mentioning that although Republic Commando is a sort of "realistic" take on Star Wars, in the sense that we're following a crack team of clone commandos in some pretty gritty situations without any fancy space magic to help them and no hero's journey story arc to brighten things up a little, this still looks and feels like a Star Wars game. We're crawling through the dust of Geonosis and Vietnaming our way through the jungles of Kashyyk, but we're doing it in a galaxy far, far away.

[Story]

You are RC-1138, AKA Boss, a clone commando. It's established from the get go that regular clones are all well and good, but you're particularly well and good. You get more independent thinking, better armor and bigger guns. You also get a few extra guys like yourself to lead into battle. This is where the rest of Delta Squad comes in: RC-1140 (Fixer), RC-1207 (Sev) and RC-1262 (Scorch).

Your first mission takes you to Geonosis, where you're tasked with doing assorted commando stuff. Taking out enemy leadership, sabotaging infrastructure, stealing data, that sort of thing. By this point, it should be clear that you're not gonna be going down in the history books as the big shots who won the war. That entry belongs to the Jedi and the Grand Army of the Republic as a whole. You're the ones making things happen behind the scenes.

Your next mission takes you to an Acclamator assault ship. Things have gone awry and nothing aboard is quite what you expected. This is when things escalate and become particularly grim, and it's where the player probably starts coming to terms with the fact that there won't be any sunshine or rainbows in Delta Squad's story.

Finally, you go to Kashyyk, where shit really hits the fan. Here, you will face your greatest challenges in the direst of straits and win your greatest victories at the greatest of costs. This is where things come to a head, and it's where the game asks you:
"Are you invested?"

Each mission is longer than the preceding one, and each features a number of set pieces that provide further insight into the personalities of your squadmates, in addition to the general interaction throughout the game.

The story isn't glamorous, but there's something very compelling about it all the same. It scratches that same itch as Band of Brothers, fills a similar niche in terms of narrative and appeal. just like last week, the story is what truly carries the game, even though the gameplay in and of itself is also quite satisfying this time around.

The story also ends on a cliffhanger.
There is no sequel.

[SPOILERS]

I'm not gonna tell you what the investment test is that the game throws at you, but I will share some gripes I have with the story. These are rather specific (and perhaps nitpicky), so I'll put them here.

On Geonosis, clone troopers more often than not die in droves to plain old battle droids. I understand that this is an effective means to introduce an enemy as a threatening opponent, capable of inflicting damage on you and your allies, but... man, they're borderline harmless to the player. It would have been nice to see the clones put up more of a fight before getting blown up.

Aboard the Acclamator, Sev gets incapacitated fairly easily by some trandoshans. This is the guy who talks a big game about jungle hunts and gets introduced by wrestling a geonosian to the ground and stabbing it with a vibroblade. This really doesn't strike me as the type of soldier who gets ambushed and knocked out that easily.

And at the end of the Acclamator mission, two assault ships take out a Lucrehulk battleship.
What?
Lucrehulks are like 6 times as large as Acclamators and an ungodly amount of firepower. It's a space donut covered in guns. It's a huge cargo freighter converted to a design intended to soak up as much firepower as possible while disgorging a ridiculous amount of strike craft, while Acclamators are essentially armed transports built for planetary invasions.
I just don't buy that two of these things stand the shadow of a chance against a Lucrehulk, particularly considering that the ghost ship Delta Squad are on is not exactly operating at peak efficiency, what with its entire crew being dead.

[Pros]

- Solid shooter experience

- Excellent weapon variety

- Competent squad AI

- Compelling story

- Clones troopers of any stripe are awesome

[Cons]

- Bad PC port

- Player loadout gets limited

- Some weapons lack satisfying impact

- Cliffhanger with no sequel

[Conclusion]

We may never have gotten a sequel, but Republic Commando is absolutely still worth picking up and playing today. It's not the most advanced shooter on the market, but in its day, it had some fairly impressive technology on display.
Moral compass optional. Good soldiers follow orders.

[Score]

8/10

/DUX

Bloodborne - Fear the Old Blood

[Introduction]

It has almost been six years since Fromsoftware's Bloodborne hit the PS4 and to this day the waves that game caused are still felt by many. Riding the increasing popularity of the Dark Souls series it sparked interest as something new and different and it was no surprise that the game itself practically sold consoles for Sony. Indeed, even I myself bought a PS4 just to get my hands on it.

Amidst the distant and longing cries for a sequel or a remaster, or anything to do with it at all, we'll be taking a look into just what made this game give the lasting impression that it did.

[First Impressions]

On initial load-up you might find the game to be strikingly similar in all but theme to Dark Souls and its predecessor Demon's Souls. The menu is familiar, the character creator is familiar, and the UI is also quite very familiar. The formula could be considered the same but where the game quickly set itself apart in was theme and combat.

As is tradition for Fromsoftware you start the game very much at a disadvantage and often faced with a much stronger foe than you'd regularly encounter in the starting area. Many people will likely die to this first encounter and they won't truly know anything about the combat other than 'that dog one-shot me'. Which is still very much in the realms of what any Souls game provides for its starting experience.

It's only once you die and come back with weapon in hand that you get a fair start at the game. What immediately becomes apparent is the speed of the game. You're much faster than you ever were in Dark Souls, you can take very few hits, and your defensive options are limited. There are no shields here, only dodging and shooting. The game rather quickly shows you just how hectic it can be with the 'rally' system. That being should you take a hit a portion of your health bar will turn orange. Striking any enemy will recoup some of that lost health, and the more you do it within the time frame before it decays, the more health you get back. Literally an eye for an eye. This system encourages you to be aggressive, to really just get back into the thick of the action after taking a hit, and it works wonders down the line.

The setting itself lends well to the game. Yharnam is a bleak gothic city with narrow cobblestone roads, bridges and tunnels, houses and wider open streets. Creating a mental map for the city is harder than it ever was with Dark Souls and you can get turned around fairly easily. There are plenty of hidden nooks and crannies too, so exploration is highly encouraged along with a good amount of completely optional bosses.

[Development]

Originally titled with the placeholder name of Project Beast; Bloodborne began development during the Prepare to Die edition of Dark Souls and was developed besides Dark Souls 2. The game came as a result of Sony wanting to collaborate with the studio which leading director Hidetaka Miyazaki was all but too pleased to agree to so long as they got to make it for the PS4 since with his vision he had doubts that older generation consoles would be able to support what he wanted to deliver. Outside of that no hiccups that I can find. Development must've progressed rather smoothly. Some leaks came out a few weeks before the actual reveal of the game, but that's about it.

[Game Mechanics]

Bloodborne plays similarly to Dark Souls and Demon's Souls but only really in a foundation sense. What makes up the combat of Bloodborne after that is vastly different. As mentioned earlier; no shields means no standing and waiting. Enemies are going to rush at you and attack you and you need to be ready to counter. With a well-timed shot from a gun you can stagger enemies into a vulnerable state. Approaching a staggered enemy and attacking will deal a visceral attack, which is essentially a parry and riposte from the Souls series. When you first start out visceral attacks are an exceedingly good way to get through tougher enemies providing you can land those shots.

The weapons in Bloodborne are particularly great too. Every weapon you pick up is called a Trick Weapon and they all have a kind of second, or alternate, form. An example is the saw cleaver. It's basically a giant razor blade and has short range, but it's fast with a decent amount of damage. However, upon pressing L2 you'll activate the trick weapon and the blade of the saw cleaver will fold out in an instant; giving you a weapon with much better range and higher damage but at the cost of speed. The creativity of the trick weapons is fantastic and my only gripe is there aren't more of them.

I think that the moment you're really taught how to play this game is after encountering the first progression boss Father Gascoigne. He's a Hunter like you, only he's been driven mad by the blood. When you fight him he shares much the same kit as yourself. He has swift dodges, a shotgun he can fire suddenly and even stagger you, and he has a trick weapon of his own, the Hunter's Axe (Which is a weapon you too can select at the start). Gascoigne is fast and aggressive and you'll find yourself with scarcely a moment to heal should you take hits. But after numerous deaths it'll finally click for you. The best defense is a good offence. When Gascoigne takes a chunk of your HP, take a chunk of his and heal your own back. Don't backpedal away from him, get up in his face and slip behind him, shoot him during his attacks, don't give him a chance to play by his rules and set the pace yourself. Of course the second part of the fight only makes it all the more intense, but the method remains the same. I adore Bloodborne's combat and the way it forces you to be aggressive, it's great.

Being a game from Fromsoft though we can expect the usual progression in the form of leveling up through increasing your stats. Blood echoes are your new soul currency and you lose them upon death. Sometimes an enemy will pick them up and you'll have to kill them to get it back. You've got your standard weapon upgrades too and this time around we also have blood gems which are slotted into weapons to increase their stats in various ways.

Bonfires are somewhat done away with in favor of lanterns. You can't rest at a lantern; only return to the hub or light a new one that you just found. Bosses seemingly come out of nowhere sometimes as there are no fog gates to clearly show you where they are. The fog only appears after you've first encountered the boss.

There's a bunch of NPC quests to get through too that have some pretty specific conditions but generally provide good rewards for following them through. As expected there's more than one ending too, so if you don't get it the first time you can head into New Game+ with all your stats and gear and take another crack at it.

[Graphics]

I'd personally say the game is only just starting to show its age but Yharnam is still a visual marvel and a delight to navigate. Some areas are less so appealing like the forest or the hamlet, but whenever you're in Yharnam proper the amount of detail is pretty staggering. Visually the combat is quite clear and easy to tell what's happening and when. Sometimes the camera can really freak out when locked onto a large enemy right in front of you though.

I must however commend whoever designed all the armor and weapons for the game though, as they're all visually appealing. I go out of my way to mix and match gear just to get that perfect look, stats be damned.

A nice feature I've always enjoyed was how blood visually appears on your character in dynamic fashion. I liked using the Kirkhammer in the early game, it's just a giant hammer that's also a sword, but after swinging it around enough the hammer itself is completely covered in blood and so are you. You can essentially tell how much progress you've been making by just looking at your character and seeing how much blood is on them, and you can get utterly covered in it.

[Story]

The story this time around is a little more direct than previous Fromsoftware titles as now we've cutscenes with dialogue taking place here and there. There's also the standard method from Demon's and Dark Souls in the form of item descriptions and NPC dialogue letting you essentially fill in the blanks yourself and interpret exactly what's going on. The basis of Bloodborne however is that you're an outsider who came to Yharnam and for reasons unknown you undergo blood ministration and become a Hunter, whisked away to the strange and mysterious Hunter's Dream where you're instructed to just hunt beasts, as that is what Hunters have always done. Of course the story isn't so simple and things do indeed go places down the line. For me though, the setting itself is the story. The world itself will show you exactly what's going on.

[SPOILERS]

Hey do you like H.P Lovecraft? I sure do, and so does Miyazaki. As you're running around more strange occurrences start to appear around Yharnam and its neighboring locations. You start to notice some kind of worship, or reverence of some other entity, and more than one. You start seeing mention of 'Old Ones' more and more, and slowly you begin to really notice the madness taking hold.

As you progress through the story it'll become apparent that we're not playing some simple horror beast hack and slash, we're playing a cosmic horror game and god damn did they pull it off so perfectly. The realization of cosmic horror only increases the further you go as you're exposed to more of it, and they did it so perfectly that I'm more than certain that Lovecraft would've shed a tear at it. I'm not going to go into specifics as usual, because this one really needs to be seen yourself to be experienced fully.

[Pros]

- Great combat.

- Story twist is fantastic.

- Intricate level design.

- Visually still holds up.

[Cons]

- Not enough trick weapons.

- Some stats (Bloodtinge) find little use.

[Conclusion]

Believe me when I tell you I tried pretty hard to think of more cons, but I really can't. There not being enough trick weapons is only my desire for even more variety in a game that has plenty enough already. Everything else from level design, combat, bosses, gear, progression, music, there's really just nothing more I can find to pin against this game as being bad. I suppose one of the greatest sins is that we don't have another? Or that there isn't some kind of remake or a PC port. Bloodborne is an all time classic by now and it wouldn't surprise me if it was even selling a few PS5's to people who hadn't played it before. I don't often give out 9's but when it comes to Bloodborne I just can't give it anything lower. If I were to be asked what game I'd recommend people play when it came to Witcher 3 and this? Then it most definitely has to be this.

Now get out there and hunt some beasts. 

It's just what hunters do.

[Score]

9/10

/DEAD