Nintendo Switch Review: RICO London (2021)

I play RICO London on my Switch every so often, even relatively recently, and not because it's any good. It's not. I've just left it in my system every time I return from a work trip or vacation, and then I don't touch the thing again until I'm out the door for another long trip. This is a horrible cycle in which I play RICO London way too much on airplanes and buses, and I don't really know why I keep doing so. There's a bunch of fun digital purchases on there for me to mess around with instead of this game. I own a physical version of RICO London because I imported it. I don't really know why.

Maybe part of it is probably because I loved the original RICO and wanted this to be more of that. It's not. The first RICO (2018) was a fun, unsophisticated, procedurally generated mess of an FPS with cool co-op and some really goofy, solid slo-mo shooting. You could slide through doors and enemies and bust down doors with your boots! It was therefore a good game. RICO London takes that blueprint and screws it up virtually from top to bottom. There's an oddly compelling game here, but it's hidden underneath the backsliding gameplay, dated graphics, and consistently awful performance.

They tried to add a storyline to this one! Ha ha. There's even little comic book panels with voice-over narration to transition between some floors of the building you're sent to infiltrate, as it's supposed to be New Year's Eve and you're an inspector lady trying to bust some drug dealers on multiple floors of a high rise building in London. This means you get a bunch of different floors, including a garage, casino, and penthouse, and a group of Eurotrash baddies in beautiful track suits. The rooms on the floors are mostly random, but they're straightforward and linear (unlike the first game), and they always wind up in the same place against the same boss characters. You can pick up weapons now, but there's much, much less ammo, and your enemies are bullet sponges this time around, so you're constantly juggling a bunch of random guns as you dump ammo into them. The combo system is fairly well-implemented, pushing you to run through the levels in order to keep your combo up, score higher, and upgrade your character. That part mostly works, but the rest of the game often doesn't. Performance on the Switch isn't just bad, it's broken. The game just crashes for no reason, or crashes after the framerate often stutters real bad. I hope your enjoy rebooting games often.

Just play RICO again instead. Don't be like me. I beat this game. Take RICO London out of your Switch, or don't put it in there in the first place.

Xbox Series X Review: Trepang2 (2023)

It's a new F.E.A.R. game! kind of.

If you're wondering what the heck Trepang2 means, don't worry, because it simply doesn't. The meaningless name is indicative of an equally meaningless wrapper of alleged "story" or "plot", cloaked around a series of otherwise disparate missions and locations in which hella shooting and explosions happen. This is what happens when your game starts development as mid-2000s FPS cover band, principally playing the hits from the original F.E.A.R. (2005). You play an enhanced super soldier guy, waking up in a prison and rescued by a group of mercenary people who then recruit you for some missions to do things involving a lot of death and finding keycards. As you might expect, the storytelling in Trepang2 is delivered by a lot of men speaking in thumbnail images. Thrilling!

That paragraph makes it sound like I really soured on Trepang2. I didn't. You won't either. Ignore the plot and just start moving the character around and you'll know. Trepang2 is beautiful in motion. It feels good simply to move in this world. T2 has some of the best FPS movement and shooting I've ever experienced. While your powers (bullet time, cloak, general kung fu) can be a bit much at first, as the enemy counts grow and the blood and sparks fly around everywhere and drench the screen with way too much stuff, pretty soon you'll get used to it and you'll just flow, man, with the brutal mutilation and blood splatter. There's really nothing quite like the ferocity and speed of action in Trepang2. No other game can quite match it, except maybe Doom (2016).

Still, though, it's hard to ignore how shallow Trepang2 ultimately reveals itself to be. It makes a hell of a first impression, but soon enough you'll see the empty storytelling for what it is and you'll see how the side-missions are all just wave-based survival nightmares, and the final boss is beyond irritating and cheap. I had to turn the default difficulty down in order to push throw it. Growing up is allowing yourself to turn the difficulty down because you have other things you want to do in life. Don't be too proud.

Trepang 2 is a good game. Maybe wait for a sale and pick it up then.

Xbox Series X Review: F.E.A.R. 3 (2011)

I miss writing reviews for Code Redd Net, so I'm back! Unofficially... maybe? We'll see how this goes. We started this as a Geocities page in 2001 (holy crap) while Chicken Man and I were both in grade school, letting the world know what we thought of 007 games and Jet Li movies from our world headquarters in the school's keyboarding classroom. We also brought it back in 2012 when I was a grad student, living in the world's worst studio apartment in Montreal. I'm old enough now to really miss it, and even though I have an actual job now, I'm writing this seasonally-appropriate October review of F.E.A.R. 3 because I want to and it's the last thing I (re-)played and I just found out I can still log in to this account. The world needs to hear my thoughts on this game from 12 years ago! Let's go.

I love the first F.E.A.R. game. I even like F.E.A.R. 2 a little bit more than most seem to. I suppose we'll get to this in future reviews of these games (when I go backwards in time and review the first two in the series), but I avoided these games for a long time because I thought they were just horror games and I'm not really into horror stuff. It wasn't until I watched a YouTube video on them and someone described them as J-horror mixed with John Woo that I became interested. I'm glad I did, even if 3 is by far the weakest in the series. It's still a decent FPS by the standards of 2011, but it loses a lot of what made those previous games special.

It's virtually meaningless to map out the plot of F.E.A.R. 3, or the other games, because it's both difficult and simultaneously and definitely not the point of playing something like this. You play (at least the first ime) a super soldier man, rather artfully dubbed The Point Man, on a mission with his psychic brother?-guy, Paxton Fettel, as they run from and sometimes fight a experimental haunted girl named Alma. She's going to give birth? and this future military corporation wants to harness or reclaim her powers. That's good enough. It's mostly just a lot of gunplay; the horror elements are essentially limited to a few jump scares and generically spooooky images of creepy little girls and blood on things.

Sadly, F.E.A.R. 3 is so mainstream now. Unlike the first game, with its wide-open combat and remarkable enemy intelligence, 3 is hella Call of Alma: Black Ops. ADS, vaulting, super linear level design, experience point upgrades, very scripted events, the works. It's smooth and plays well, but your options for movement and shooting are much more limited than they need to be, and once you've played through the campaign you've mostly seen it all. And your series trademark slo-mo powers have never mattered less. As in 2, in 3 you get to jump into a huge mech from time to time. It's fun and mixes things up a little bit, it's a welcome change from the normal business of shooting guys, but it's not enough (and not as good as it was in 2).

When you finish the game, you open up the option to play as Fettel. This 100% should've been the option from the get-go. As Fettel, you can possess the bodies of enemies, throw stuff, and fire little energy balls from your fists. It doesn't sound like much, but his powers make the gameplay much more dynamic, varied, fast-paced, and unique. While F.E.A.R. 3 needs it, it still isn't quite enough. We never gave scores back in the day, but if we did, F.E.A.R. 3 is the definition of a two star game: brimming with promise, but the new ideas don't matter much and the other games in the series render the entire exercise almost pointless. Give it a try if you're bored.