Reviews - ExtraMana

The one Deus ex mod you need. Enhances models, textures, animations and sounds without adding anything unnecessary or bloating the loading times (looking at you revision). It also just works, unlike other graphics mods which have bugs and missing textures.

Somewhere between the snarky forum posts-style humour, ugly level design and just barren game World I had to give up. I wanted to like this mod, the custom assets and full voicing acting are commendable but it lacked any cohesive narrative structure.

Toxikk sets out to recapture arena FPS from the late 1990's and for the most part it succeeds. If you're looking to recapture the feeling of playing Unreal Tournament 1999 this game does a pretty good job at it.

The latest version (2013) is a nearly 20GB download plus nearly 50GB install. On top of that it uses this terrible out of place music instead of the original soundtrack, and the new characters look nothing like the originals, this is a problem for a narrative driven game. Sure you can use the default models with the new textures and turn off the music but that seems to be missing the point for an overhaul mod like this. Additionally the new take on mapping is basically just to cram unneccessary details into every corner. More trees, more random tat, it adds nothing artistically and makes the World seem to busy and confused.

Some pretty solid mapping along with a few nice touches such as showing the friendship between vortiguants and humans make this mod worth a play. The Chinese titles in place of the health and armour numbers are midly annoying, and there is some pretty clunky platforming at some points but otherwise a fun little mod.

Pretty much perfect. This is what a basic graphics mod should do, upscale the textures without changing the original artstyle. This is the core mod you should pick for System Shock 2.

The new models are quite frankly horrible. Especially the cyborg midwife which originally was an old haggered looking woman more machine then human. In this version it looks like some kind of wierd cyborg porn, nipples and all. Worse still the animations for deaths literally fall flat. Avoid this at all costs, there are mods that replace the textures of effects and the environment use those instead.

Full Video Review: Youtube.com

Silent Hill A tale Of Silence is a fan made game that will take you many an hour to complete. Although the developer refers to this game as an "engine test" it is anything but, it has several characters plenty of lines of dialogue interactive puzzles. And truly amazing graphics for a fan made game, not to mention an impressive user interface.
This is a point and click adventure game where you take on the role of heather. The twist is that this game has a very bizarre and highly amusing sense of humour yet it still manages to capture the atmosphere of Silent Hill.
The point and click style gameplay is actually alarmingly similar to that of silent hill, interacting with objects and combining them to solve puzzles and progress.
One of your earliest tasks is to take a shower and to do this you need to listen to some music for some reason, and to do that you need that you need to fix your portable radio and find a battery for it. Once this is done you get your first glimpse at how wierd this game's sense of humour really is.
After a while you'll end up back in Silent Hill. You'll see the true power of this home brew engine at work as you explore the rooms and corridors, your cursor is now a flashlight and you can see that classic film grain effect used.
You'll see all kinds of details on the walls such as bloodstains and every object looks great in this game a lot of craft when into making this game.
In this game you Will have a handful of puzzles to solve such as stopping a ventilator fan, to finding the code a locked door. You will come across some completely unpredictable scenes of humour that make this game both unique and unmissable.
There are several different endings based upon your actions, and I think a lot of that may be determined by this final scene which actually works rather well. You'd think that having the protagonists from both Silent Hill 2 and 3 in the same room would make no sense but their interaction is surprisingly touching.

This is one of the greats when it comes to Half Life mods. It's a total conversion with a Universe that feels familar in a lot of ways yet fresh, this is helped by some great new weapons with pretty tasty looking animations. There is some poor platforming and few parts where the level design really falls down, but overall a good experience.

Truly unique, it sets up a fun light atmosphere with a World close enough to ours to to set a slice of life in and it features some tightly designed little set pieces with a fair amount of player agency thrown in. It's short you can beat it in 1 hour if you aren't taking your time with it, but it's well worth that hour.