Reviews - Calvinic

I'm two faced when it comes to this mod. There are times where I absolutely hated it and then there's times I absolutely loved it.

I love the further complexity of the survival aspect behind the game. Surviving in an irradiated disaster zone with little to your name I imagine is hard. Very hard.

You have to make note of everything you eat, drink, wear, and carry if you expect to live long. Because every choice you make could be your last. The zone is a harsh teacher after all.

And I don't use that phrase lightly. This is a VERY hard mod, even debatably too hard at times. Especially in the combat part of the game. In fact, it can be downright infuriating. This is the part I often hate about this mod. I mean, I get it. You can't take ten bullets to the chest and expect to live in a real gunfight.

But, the way this mod handles it would bring the most seasoned stalkers to their knees. If an enemy even so much as breathes on you, you're done. HAVE MERCY ALREADY!

I get quite sick of having to constantly reload a save after every enemy encounter. It's annoying and ruins the experience. I'm all for a hardcore experience, but without a break in the equation. It rapidly becomes a pestering experience.

Overall, Misery clearly had effort put into it. You can tell what the devs wanted to do and they accomplished it pretty well. But difficulty really needs some tweaking in combat. There is such a thing as too hard, my friends.

On the other hand, maybe the hard combat is precisely why the game urges you to avoid it unless needed. So I gave it a 10/10 because maybe I just suck at Misery in terms of fighting.

Ever since I got my hands on Brutal Doom v18 a few years back. I knew Brutal Doom was one of the best mods I have ever played for any game.
Everything from the monsters, gameplay, sound, effects, etc. Brutal Doom takes what made the vanilla Doom good and adds to it tenfold. Basically if Doom was to have a modern edition, this would be it.

When you first look at it, Brutal Doom looks like any other dime a dozen gore mod. But once you start playing, you realize it is far more than a gore mod. One of things Brutal Doom is best known for is it's difficulty. The game is a lot harder now as opposed to it's vanilla counterpart. Even the simplest monsters pack a punch.

Furthermore, the luxury of endless magazines are gone for better or worse depending on your taste. You will have to reload most of your weapons. But this to me makes the player want to conserve ammo before spraying it all over the place and think about where to place their shots.

On the topic of such, to balance the added difficulty of monsters, they all have various hitboxes on them. Where as before in vanilla Doom you basically shot a monster till it dropped dead. In Brutal Doom, you can now go for headshots, leg shots, arm shots, etc. All of which have their own brutal death animations and can be used to even the odds.

Even gibing enemies into tiny little pieces has gotten even more satisfying. Barrels and rockets explode with a lot more force and will just turn anything into bloody chunks.

If you're looking for a reason to play Doom again but want something to spice it up a little. Try Brutal Doom because it revamps Doom to the point it feels like a new game. But, manages to keep vanilla Doom's glorious pixelated dark, hellish, bloody spirit while amplifying it to maximum levels.

The creator clearly takes pride in this mod and wants it to be the best experience it could possibly be. I can't wait to see what games he will take on next.

10/10 would rip a demon in half with my bare fists again.

Okay, I will give the developers credit in how the level design, sound, and atmosphere is. It is really faithful to what made Silent Hill so good and is well crafted. The voice acting for instance was quite good. The character had emotion and was believable. The textures are nice and crisp, so much that you'll be forgetting that you're playing a source engine game.

But sadly, that's where the good ends for this mod.

The gameplay is not so good. It isn't the worst I've seen, but far from what I consider great. Basically all you do is just wonder around the area looking for clues and items in order to solve puzzles or quests to advance to a new area. Lather. Rinse. Repeat...Nothing changes, nothing to switch things up, it's just this formula through out the game.

Yes, I do acknowledge the fact the developers couldn't bring in combat or the like. They try to fill in that gap but in the end it still fell short. There is nothing wrong with something that challenges your mind. But when the gameplay is practically nothing but puzzles it starts to loose it's charm pretty quickly. Variety is key to keeping your player's interests.

Silent Hill was just meant to have monsters and other characters, they added tension, suspense, and show the more darker side of the protagonist. Showing things about them when they are most vulnerable.

Without them, it doesn't feel quite like a Silent Hill game.

Overall, Silent Hill: Alchemilla isn't a bad mod. It is quite good in some aspects. But rough around the edges in gameplay. The developers did everything they could to make it as faithful to the Silent Hill formula despite limitations. But in the end, the gameplay doesn't have the same charm as what made the original games good.