Review Archives (All Reviews)

You are currently looking through all reviews for games that are available on every platform the site currently covers. Below, you will find reviews written by mardraum and sorted according to date of submission, with the newest content displaying first. As many as 20 results will display per page. If you would like to try a search with different parameters, specify them below and submit a new search.

Available Reviews
	Doom review (PSX) Reviewed on July 09, 2010 Doom has evolved into its very own software platform, and because of that, all of its straightforward console versions would be useless even if most of them weren't wretched. Most of iD's original maps are great, sure, but I'd have stopped playing years ago if that's all there was. It only takes one or two trips through each before you're wise to the tricks and sleepwalking through the traps. No, Doom owes its absurd longevity to all of the user-made maps that are still being churned out even in...	3.5/5
	Castlevania: Circle of the Moon review (GBA) Reviewed on August 20, 2009 It's no secret that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was absurdly easy, but I've always found a certain beauty in that. While I wouldn't want every game to be like it, there's something satisfying about seeing enormous boss monsters strut their stuff and then slaughtering them before they have the chance to pull off a single attack. Turning Alucard into an unstoppable machine was half the fun, and it was no accident; in the final battle, Dracula summoned earlier bosses and crushed them in the ...	4/5
	Scythe review (PC) Reviewed on August 05, 2009 Almost every Doom II mod out there, good or bad, takes the same approach: endless sprawl, insane enemy counts, and the subtlety of whichever metaphor cliché you prefer. I'll go with a sledgehammer. Play one and it's fresh, play two and it's still exciting. Once you've barreled through enough of them, though, you come dangerously close to thinking it's time to give up on Doom.	4/5
	Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty review (PS2) Reviewed on July 29, 2009 If nothing else, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is interesting. The games-as-art movement hadn't even gotten off the ground in 2001, and doing what director Hideo Kojima did with this one takes balls so huge that I expect to see him on a Paris runway now that the drop-crotch pants trend has taken off.	3/5
	Metal Slug 4 review (ARC) Reviewed on July 15, 2009 Lots of words come to mind when I think about SNK's Metal Slug games, and one of the very last is “competent”. Riding an elephant, turning into a zombie—I didn't love this shit because of how well it complemented the gameplay. I loved it because it was fucking insane. An elephant eating chili and incinerating the enemy army with his breath would be the highlight of any other game, but in just one level of Metal Slug 3 it's a distant second to seeing your undead hero melt the flesh off their bone...	2/5
	Metroid Fusion review (GBA) Reviewed on July 01, 2009 Ambivalent as I am about Metroid Fusion, Nintendo deserves credit for putting in something fresh. Designing the same old confusing labyrinths filled with hostile wildlife without changing a thing would have been a mistake, and even as the first new entry in the series for almost a decade, the game would have been an enjoyable letdown if it was just a retread. If all you want to do is emulate the Super Nintendo game, there are programs for that.	3/5
	Devil May Cry 4 review (X360) Reviewed on August 23, 2008 Nero's no Raiden. Folks who were somehow dumbfounded by Metal Gear Solid 2's ending may have groaned the last time a popular series ditched its popular hero, but it's tough to argue that starting fresh for Devil May Cry 4 wasn't a great idea. The third game did everything there is to do with Dante. Six different fighting styles and ten different weapons, one of which was a fucking electric guitar that shoots lightning and bats—how do you top that? You don't. Not that Devil May Cry 3 was perfect,...	3.5/5
	PO'ed review (PSX) Reviewed on May 03, 2008 Fun story. My e-chum EmP and I spent an afternoon looking at some dumb old PlayStation games, trying to pick one to lie about and build up as a lost classic. We ended up choosing PO'ed, though the fact that I'm the only one actually writing a review of it shows how reliable the man is. We'd go on eBay, the plan was, since the game only sells for a penny (even when the auction says that it's in GREAT SHAPE L@@K LIKE NEW and promises overnight shipping). We wanted to build PO'ed up as a cult hit D...	0.5/5
	F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon review (X360) Reviewed on April 06, 2008 15 minutes of FEAR is the most fun you can have with an FPS. Put it on the hardest difficulty you can handle and it's easy to forget about Half-Life and Halo after even just a few firefights.	2.5/5
	BioShock review (X360) Reviewed on February 29, 2008 I'm not normally one for videogame stories, but BioShock's impressed me. Ken Levine and his team at Irrational, if you've managed to miss the sweeping praise, wisely sidestepped the usual Philosophy 101 nonsense while still grasping at a bigger meaning than “aliens are bad”. It's an interactive Xbox 360 condemnation of unfettered capitalism and greed that goes far beyond Metal Gear's soliloquies on cardboard boxes and the meaning of life. Every now-ironic banner lining the city of Rapture procla...	3/5
	GunValkyrie review (XBX) Reviewed on August 30, 2007 Poor GunValkyrie didn't stand a chance. From Sega came a tough but gorgeous game where a hot chick flies around with a jetpack and blows shit up... alright, on a system whose raisons d'être were Halo and Dead or Alive, that was probably a good move. But development team Smilebit stupidly—wonderfully, valiantly, but really quite stupidly just the same—refused to cater to any modern gamer's taste, and predictably, gamers hated their game because of it. There's no instant satisfaction to be found h...	4.5/5
	Killer 7 review (GCN) Reviewed on August 15, 2007 Killer7 squandered more potential than most any other game this decade. On top of making me wonder if Capcom was an LSD production front, its hyper-stylized and totally off-the-wall trailers made it seem downright unbelievable. A hero that can burst into a cloud of blood and reforming as any one of his seven split personalities at will; a crippled old sniper with a maid who slaps the shit out of him when she isn't pushing his wheelchair around; and a TV news dude with an afro and a yellow t-shir...	1.5/5
	Doom review (PC) Reviewed on August 01, 2007 Doom took the world by storm. You know the drill: all nine levels of opening episode Knee Deep in the Dead were released as a free demo, with network play included to boot. Videogame inspired homicides then soared almost as much as office productivity plummeted. And already I'm sure you've braced yourself for yet another tedious history lesson, the usual story about how we never would have had Halo or any of those other newfangled games without good 'ol iD Software laying down the foundations fo...	3/5
	Hitman: Blood Money review (X360) Reviewed on July 25, 2007 Hitman: Blood Money would be the perfect Hitman game if it actually made you live up to the series' name. Mass murder is unsatisfying but easy: fire a shot up into the air and then go ballistic as every single living (if not intelligent) being on the map strolls right into your crosshairs, laughing off any return fire that barely chips away at your charitable health bar. Wiping out an entire cruise ship should be impossible, not impossibly tedious, and that the filthy money you're whacking folks...	4.5/5
	Alien Vendetta review (PC) Reviewed on July 14, 2007 Alien Vendetta is everything that Final Doom's The Plutonia Experiment should have been, a brutal pack of levels unbeatable by all but the hardiest veterans of Doom II's Ultra-Violence difficulty. Tough enemies aren't tough when Plutonia's level design lets you pick them off and the only choice to be made is whether you'll do the deed with your hundreds of rockets or dozens of BFG cells. It's unsettling to see demons from Doom II's endgame hanging around in the very first map, but the whole thin...	5/5
	N3: Ninety-Nine Nights review (X360) Reviewed on July 12, 2007 mardraum: HOLY SHIT	2/5
	Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike review (GCN) Reviewed on July 07, 2007 Us reviewers like to exaggerate. Just look at Panzer Dragoon Orta, hailed the world (wide web) over as a grand philosophical statement, or Play magazine's ten page review of Super Mario Sunshine that may as well have called it the second coming. A certain someone on this very website even called that Dead or Alive Volleyball game good. Negative commentary is even worse--I'd know, I've been there myself. It's just too easy to get carried away in one's own hyperbole and say th...	2/5
	Cybernator review (SNES) Reviewed on May 05, 2007 Call it Assault Suits Valken, call it Target Earth 2, call it Cybernator. There are lots of things you can call this confusingly and frequently redubbed mech romp, but the sane among us who've played it will settle for awesome! On a system whose unsung sidescrollers shine the brightest over shallow Contra III and pushover Castlevania IV, Valken is at the very head of the pack, a system seller that never sold a system and a buried treasure that's o...	5/5
	JSRF: Jet Set Radio Future review (XBX) Reviewed on April 29, 2007 Jet Set Radio Future is an easy game to like even if it's an impossible game to love. It's dripping with the sort of self-consciously hip style that only Sega could pull off, and were it human, I'd expect nothing less out of it than oldschool checkerboard Vans and a garish blazer to go with 'em. Funky, pseudo-cartoony graphics lend developer Smilebit's graffiti/skating hybrid an impeccable sense of popping, colorful style, with areas like nightlife hub Benten Street brought to life by its orient...	3.5/5

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