2003’s Manhunt is a brutal, gritty title that occupies a strange place in Rockstar’s catalog as something that should be considered the company’s best work, yet it remains overshadowed by their own mega-hit franchises. This bleak, uncompromising meditation on the nature of voyeurism questioned the player’s participation in horrific bloodshed, and has since become something of a cult title — and PIGFACE is certainly one of its descendants.

Set in a post-industrial wasteland, PIGFACE places players in the role of a woman with a bomb in her head. Faceless handlers have assigned her to murder members of a drug-dealing gang across a handful of locations, and what little characterization the game offers has those same handlers shocked by how little pushback they receive from their living weapon – almost as if she’s as much down for all the murder as the people playing the game. The gameplay is as basic as the graphics – this looks like a Quake-era experience and feels like gritty, vicious shooters of that time, back when most titles were developed by a handful of people and when it was easier to smuggle bizarre and extreme content into even major titles.

After choosing a mission, the player picks their loadout from a decent arsenal – but in a twist that feels strange for an FPS (and may have been inherited from Manhunt) the player can only bring a single ranged weapon. This creates a bit of awkwardness, as the player is asked to decide on a playstyle before they have a sense of what the level is like, and pre-mission the briefings are not particularly voluminous. So, there’s often nothing to do but guess whether a sniper rifle or a shotgun is better for any given area, and if that doesn’t pan out, they can hope to snag a more appropriate weapon off of a dead body somewhere along the way.

The strange part is that for a game seemingly built around experimentation and taking chances, the developers punish players harshly for mistakes. Any time they fail a mission, a steep financial penalty is incurred. While guns only have to be bought once and ammo is free, healing syringes cost money, ensuring that if a player fails a particularly difficult level more than a couple of times, they’ll be forced to try again with even fewer resources, and consequently, less chance of success.

Enemy AI is also a little on the spare side at this point. I’m sure it’s a difficult to balance and all of the enemies can be best described as drug-addled wastrels, but they were remarkably unobservant and unresponsive whenever violence kicked off — enemies will watch a guard’s head get blown off with a sniper rifle, shrug, and then get right back to their patrol seconds later. Setting off explosives or blasting away with a machine gun might attract reinforcements, or it might not – enemies were largely unpredictable in an ‘is the AI broken and not responding to triggers?‘ kind of way.

Still, there’s plenty to be optimistic about here. The violence is every bit as brutal and upsetting as one would hope given PIGFACE’s obvious inspiration. There are huge blood spatters with every shot, and enemies scramble around and scream as they’re injured, making the whole thing feel doubly unpleasant.

This unpleasantness also permeates every bit of the world. Every room is full of trash and dirty needles. The player is asked to shut down drug factories, and all they find are a few drums and jars crudely linked together with hoses and tape. This game is about the absolute lowest-tier of criminal being executed by an assassin who lives in a dingy one-room apartment next to a set of elevated train tracks. It’s a celebration of the grindhouse aesthetic and seemingly pointless violence – although as the story gets developed in later updates, that might well change.

PIGFACE is in a rough Early Access state at the moment, with inconsistent enemies and no real narrative to speak of. I don’t expect the graphics to get any better – the low-end look is the point — and it’s a clear throwback to a rougher, more brutal past. Anyone lamenting that we never got a Manhunt 3 will find a lot to love here.

Assuming gameplay is rebalanced and more levels are added – I beat all five in just under an hour – this is extremely promising. Hopefully the devs manage to turn it into a more complete experience, as games this heartlessly brutal are few and far between.

Or maybe this kind of game being rare is a good thing? I’ll let history be the judge.

The post PIGFACE Preview appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH I just love the title.

LOW The boss fights.

WTF Kicking an anthropomorphized brain in the testicles.

Anger Foot isn’t subtle… though with a title like that, I don’t think anyone should expect nuance.

A bizarre ménage à trois between Hotline Miami, Boogerman and John Wick, Anger Foot is a first-person kicker/shooter that blends improvisational gunplay, high flying footwork and scatological humor. While it may not reach the heights of its inspirations (except for Boogerman – it’s definitely better than Boogerman) when it’s firing on all cylinders it can be a hell of a good time.

Planning a night in with his significant other, the titular Anger Foot’s plans are interrupted as gangs break in and steal his prized sneaker collection, and one can easily surmise that this is no laughing matter. Soon enough, I am storming through the apartments, sewers and nightclubs of Shit City (yes, that’s really what it’s called) in pursuit of my wayward footwear.

Who needs doorknobs when an angry foot will get the job done just as well? In lieu of a traditional “use” button, I can mash the “E” key to kick down doors and send adversaries flying. Grabbing limited-ammo guns as I go, a typical scene might have me draining the clip of a nearby machine gun before whipping it across the room to stun a bat-wielding, humanoid crocodile. I can then pivot and send a kick to the gut of what appears to be Grover from the wrong side of Sesame Street. As he sails through the air, grab his falling pistol and headshot the still-reeling crocodile.

Things move fast in Shit City, and death comes easy. While no level takes more than five minutes to complete, Anger Foot proves to be as fragile as the opposition, and his rage can be permanently calmed with a bullet or two. As such, it was rare that I could clear a stage on my first attempt, but blessedly short load times allow for rapid iteration, and there was a satisfaction in finding my perfect line through each map, slowly but surely landing every kick, headshot and jump, anticipating enemy movements and dancing my way to the exit.

This repetitious try-and-die nature of this design is clearly intentional. Completing each level under certain conditions unlocks stars that can be redeemed for new foot gear such as a new pair of stilettos, sandals or galoshes, each of which grants new abilities – things like making enemies explode when kicked, or enabling a double jump. Some are more context-specific, like granting immunity to fire – especially handy as the enemies up their arsenal to include flamethrowers in later stages. My personal favorite was a pair of sneakers that would slow down time when I kicked in a door.

Given levels’ general linearity, there is a surprising amount of room for player expression between alternate paths and the spontaneity of combat. Choosing when and where to pick up a shotgun versus a pistol, and when to send the empty gun flying across the room to stun an enemy is just as meaningful as which shoes I pick at the beginning of each stage. It feels as though I’m carving my own path through each area rather than following a prescripted route and method.

There’s also variety in the level design – in the first half of the campaign, at least. Starting out, each of Anger Foot’s stages feels as though it has a unique concept. In one, a sniper is perched and taking shots from afar — unable to reach my assailant, I must be in constant motion to avoid their aim. In another, I’m leaping across pipes in a cavernous sewer fighting an army of tentacles. With enemies being stationary, there is a clockwork, rhythmic precision to my movements as I take shots before they even appear, anticipating their presence.

Unfortunately, while I can clearly remember many of the early sections, later stages begin to feel more indistinct thanks to generic hallways and fewer mechanical differentiators as the developers come to rely more and more on the volume of enemies. There’s certainly an adrenaline rush in taking down a room of thirty foes, but Anger Foot loses the sense of flow and tempo that characterizes its first half.

Furthermore, the multi-phase boss battles that conclude each area feel out of place and frustrating. These fights, with an emphasis on timing and waiting for precise moments to attack, lose much of the dynamism that highlights the rest of the experience.  The worst offender introduces a mandatory parry mechanic, requires memorization of attack patterns, and takes place in a restrictive arena over toxic sludge where one small misstep means restarting the fight from the beginning.  These more prescriptive encounters seem to forget the fluid, freeform combat that made the preceding stages so engaging.

As mentioned earlier, there’s obviously an element of humor to the proceedings, and it doesn’t take long to realize that Anger Foot doesn’t take itself terribly seriously. However, beyond the baseline absurdity of the premise, the developers might be trying a bit too hard to make players laugh. I’m no stranger to puerile humor, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t crack a smile the first time I burst into a bathroom to find a surprised enemy, pixelated genitals and all. However, by the time I reached the end and had seen this same gag countless times, it began to lose its luster. Anger Foot is funny on a conceptual level, but the overt, repeated attempts at humor feel like selling past the close.

Anger Foot is at its best in motion. Falling into a hallway hypnosis of garish ’90s aesthetics and murderous footwork, I don’t have to think – I just react. It’s when I’m forced to slow down and hear a joke or fight a boss that requires pauses in the pace that I begin to notice the seams. While these moments aren’t dealbreakers, they’re unfortunate stumbles in an otherwise sure-footed experience.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10

— Ryan Nalley

Disclosures: This game is developed by Free Lives and published by Devolver Digital. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC.
Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game
was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: While this game has not been rated by the ESRB, it is certainly not intended for younger audiences. Anger Foot contains violence, blood, sexuality, nudity, vaping and crude humor. While this content is presented in a cartoony manner, it is pervasive.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. Most audio cues have on-screen indicators. However, there are some enemy barks that can give away an enemy’s position that are not represented visually. Therefore, this game is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

The post Anger Foot Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Early previews for Swedish developer Angry Demon Studio and publisher Wired Production’s upcoming Gori: Cuddly Carnage are flooding in, and since there’s no such thing as too much praise, I want to get my two cents published before it drops next month.

Between the ubiquity of distractions on smartphones and the oversaturation of new games on the market, players have ever-increasing demands of their attention, but if there’s a title that can hold even the most distracted person’s attention, it’s this one.

For me, Gori is an amalgamation of things that I have enjoyed at one point or another — hack and slash, skateboarding, cyberpunk, comic books, dubstep… and cats. However, the eponymous character whom the player controls is not actually a cat despite his being so feline, cute, fluffy and prone to grooming himself.

No, soon after starting, the player finds out that Gori is an Ultra Pet which was a property of Cool-Toys Inc., the corporation most at fault for a toy uprising and the apocalypse which followed.

The cutscenes depicting Gori and Professor Y (Gori’s creator) in the days leading up to the apocalypse are presented in comic book-style panels with voiced dialogue to get the player invested in Gori’s quest of finding his creator and saving her from the clutches of the evil Adorable Army.

On the surface, Gori‘s concept sounds similar to that of Stray — another adventure involving a ginger cat’s odyssey through a post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk world to reunite with its loved ones. That’s where the similarities end, though.

Where Stray dealt with heady themes such as existentialism, artificial intelligence and unbridled human ambition, Gori thrives in absurdity and is all the better for it as gameplay is far more important than story in an experience like this — with an action focus, players must not only hack and slash, but also wall-ride and grind with his rocket-powered hoverboard.

Each area in Gori is dynamic and often strange, but level design is also consistently balanced and intuitive. The world felt fairly open, especially in the bigger city areas sometimes offering a few ways to get to a destination, but I never had a hard time figuring out where to go. However, where the game really shines is in its fast, fluid and, of course, gory combat.

Fans of Bayonetta or Lollipop Chainsaw will appreciate the frenetic pace of combat and how Gori provides the player with weapons to hack, slash, smash and blast their enemies to smithereens, allowing for a wide variety of ridiculously gruesome enemy murders.

For instance, whenever a hostile “uglycorn” is lying dazed on the ground, the player can press R1 (if playing on a controller) and Gori will perform a finishing move by pouncing on the enemy in slow motion before tearing it into shreds, spraying blood everywhere. With some bigger enemy types, Gori might launch into the air and decapitate them with its hoverboard.

Speaking of Gori’s hoverboard, it’s a joy to ride and fight with, but also a great source of comic relief. Its humor is consistently absurd and vulgar, but tastefully so — there’s even an upgrade which allows players to turn off the profanity filter so they can hear it in all its unbleeped glory.

In general I was into the themes and tone, though I did have a few concerns about mechanical aspects at this stage. For example, the floaty physics sometimes led me to overestimate how far I needed to jump to land on a rail, causing me to fall. Then, I’d be six feet below a rail when I hit the button, only to suddenly be on it and grinding.

I could also simply mash my attack while I was in the air to cut through flying enemies without having to aim, and once I figured a the trick to make bigger enemies vulnerable, I dispatched them with relative ease by doing the same thing over and over. This applied to bosses as well, though I still enjoyed their design and their variety of attacks in multiple phases.

While there are some glitches and bugs to be ironed out in addition to any possible work that might go towards navigation and combat, I still found it to be fluid and engaging, and I’m looking forward to exploring more of it and rooting for its success when it finally drops into 1.0 on August 29th.

The post PREVIEW Gori: Cuddly Carnage appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Finding the secret faction’s hidden bunker.

LOW Trying to balance a motorcycle on cables.

WTF I was supposed to be watching for [REDACTED] this whole time?!

I finished playing Laika: Aged Through Blood two months ago, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Normally I roll credits and then start a review immediately, because I’ve got a pretty good sense of how I feel about a game by the time it’s finished. My feelings about Laika, however… well, it’s safe to say that they’ve been colored by real-world events that the developers couldn’t possibly have anticipated when they picked a release date in October, 2023.

Laika: Aged Through Blood is the story of the titular Laika, a dirtbike-riding coyote with an unusual gift — she can’t die. Every time she does, her body and all of her possessions explode into a mist that reforms at a nearby checkpoint. What would be an unremarkable mechanic in most titles instead forms the backbone of this story’s narrative.

Laika is a member of an oppressed minority. In the desert wasteland where she lives, any creature that isn’t a bird is forced to live in a state of constant precarity. At any moment, the avians can come along and kick them off of their land, killing anyone they please with no repercussions. All of her people have been forced to hide in the most barren section of the wasteland, with their only defense against complete annihilation being Laika’s strange gift.

The plot begins with an act of brutality so vile that it requires a content warning of its own at the start of the game — Laika’s nephew is murdered in the most awful way imaginable, and his father goes looking for revenge. Laika has to rush in the hopes of stopping him before he kills any bird soldiers — she wants revenge for her nephew as much as anyone, but is aware that any attack on the birds will be used as a justification for their army to restart their genocidal war against all non-birds in the desert. She’s too late, of course. Once the prologue is complete, the wasteland is flooded with soldiers dragging Laika into a war she didn’t want, and can’t possibly win.

That’s a bunch of words I’ve just written without mentioning gameplay, because while the mechanics are effectively perfect and its levels expertly designed to take advantage of Trials-style 2D motorbike gameplay, Laika doesn’t want the player to enjoy what they’re doing.

Every element is meant to be as unpleasant and difficult to manage as possible. The currency is the innards of Laika’s slain foes. Bonuses to abilities are only available by cooking meals, and their effects wear off so quickly that they’re not worth the trouble of making. Weapon and equipment upgrades are so ridiculously expensive, and their unique parts so hard to find, it’s as if the developers are actively discouraging the player from improving their gear — which wouldn’t surprise me, since improved gear makes it easier to kill birds, which is the last thing the game wants players to be doing.

For the first two-thirds of the adventure I struggled to figure out exactly what Laika was trying to accomplish. The bike controls are incredibly smooth, and it’s a pleasure to speed through the wasteland. Other than a couple of punishing boss fights, the combat isn’t particularly difficult — Laika is exceptionally good at killing birds thanks to a bullet-time effect whenever she aims a weapon. Also, most fights are essentially optional, as the player can use Laika’s bike to block incoming bullets, or even reflect them back at foes, allowing her to speed away safely without pulling a trigger. This is an experience with well-designed combat that seems to actively discourage the player from engaging in it. I couldn’t wrap my head around whether this was a choice or a mistake.

…And then I arrived at the bird city.

It’s a tiny section of the campaign. Laika has to go looking for someone in a city, which is a location completely different from everything else offered to this point. In the city, non-birds are allowed to live as an underclass with no rights of any kind, but at least they’re not being actively wiped out. While there, Laika can find a bird soldier with a message that changes everything, turning the narrative on its head and forcing the player to question everything they’ve done up until that point. It’s as brilliant a moment as I’ve seen in a game, and it reveals that nothing has been unintentional about the design. Every mechanic has been in service of the story, and unlike most games, the misery is the point.

Laika is not an easy game to enjoy. It’s a story, at its core, about how dehumanization of an enemy is a necessary step preceding genocide — about how people will become monsters if left with no other options. Most importantly, though, it’s about how cycles of violence can only end if people make the decision to not pull a trigger, no matter how difficult that might be. It’s a brutal, uncompromising journey, and it should have been one of the best titles of 2023, even if reality hadn’t decided to make it painfully relevant.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed Brainwash Gang and published by Headup Publishing. It is currently available on PC, XBO/S/X, PS4/5, SW. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 20 hours of play were devoted to the singleplayer mode, and the game was completed.

Parents: This game is rated M by the ESRB, and it contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, and Strong Language. It’s an experience about bloody vengeance and it doesn’t shy away from children being killed. Keep young kids away from it, but show it to older teens so they can’t appreciate its incredibly valuable message.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played the majority of the game without audio and encountered zero difficulties. All dialogue is subtitled and all vital information is provided visually. Subtitles cannot be resized. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, the game’s controls are remappable.

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