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Portal reloaded review12/27/2023 Basically, every time you fire it up, it calls the server to verify your serial number, which is fine, that doesn’t bug me all that much, unless of course I have no internet, then I get pissed. Then there’s the DRM which actually killed the review copy I received completely dead. Honestly, the switching between land and water had me interested, but the way it’s been implemented here really makes me shake my head. Being a budget title at around $20, you’re getting a decent amount of levels for your money – if you can get the game to work and can get past the clunky mechanics. I don’t mind a challenge, but on easy, the game should be, well, easy. It’s an odd choice letting the drone fire on you and hit for so much damage on the easiest setting. If this had been a demo, I’d have deleted it at this point as it was beyond frustrating. The opening sequence took me multiple tried to get through, mainly because the underwater drone firing on you near the beginning needs to be hacked by harpoon while it continues to fire at you, requiring you to manage to not be in line of sight, but you have to be so you can hack it while it’s firing on you. The game doesn’t lend itself to balance well. There’s an interesting mechanic where you harpoon things in the water and reprogram them while you hang on for dear life if it’s a drone and just wait if it’s a door lock or switch to bring in more water. Once you get used to it, it’s mostly ok, but it just doesn’t seem to work all that great. Firing works ok, but moving around and aiming feel like you’re working through a fine layer of slime to get it to do what you want. The controls here though, while standard, respond slowly and at their own pace. The formula is, for the most part, unchanged since the 90s with the first person shooter. The controls are a pretty basic set-up for a third person shooter with the keyboard and mouse. The animations there aren’t that great, the environments are bland, and to be honest, your character and armor looks like a rip-off of Isaac from Dead Space, complete with the glowing bar on the back along the spine. On land it feels like a clunky third person shooter. Movement there is smooth, and you feel like you’re in water when you’re in it. In fact, I’d say that the game’s strongest point are the water sections. Visually the game does some interesting things when you’re in the water. The installation screen had some decent music along with the menu but I can’t remember a single moment from the game. The sounds are pretty basic and do what they need to get things done, but nothing here screams out at you to get you to really think about what’s going on. I couldn’t ever connect to anyone on the multiplayer end of things, so its inclusion in the game is in name only at this point.Īudibly there’s not much going on. You take out people and underwater drones to get through to your objectives, flooding areas or dropping the water to get to others. You have a suit that can help propel you through the water with short boosts from rockets on your legs to get you around obstacles or behind sunken objects for cover. You get sent on missions that involve you alternating between ground and water based objectives, shooting on both, but also some puzzle solving. They’re there to basically be an information dump to get you to care about what you’re doing in the game, more or less, and try to help make sense of what’s going on, and since I don’t really have a clue, I’d say that ship has sailed. The game itself isn’t very good at delivering on a story in the cutscenes, which seem disjointed and not all that well put together. The premise is that you’re an operative for an agency that’s out to stop, presumably, bad guys from doing, well, things. Let’s take a look at Deep Black: Reloaded, shall we? Then there’s the issue of game-breaking DRM that seems to plague just a few of my titles on the PC, which can be infuriating in and of itself, but I’ve never actually played one where the DRM made it so the game wouldn’t even launch past the menu, until now. Some titles, when they come out, just need a little fine tuning to make them perfect, some need a little more than that, and others just seem to need a complete overhaul or to start over from scratch.
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