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Cur part 2 Chapter 10 ‘The creature doomed to live’

Yay I didn’t kill myself haha. And Corona didn’t get me haha. And I have content yay.

I didn’t post anything last week but poems and stuff because I was just working on this, still kind of slow going but it’s good stuff, and it’s getting quicker. I feel good oddly. It only took the end of the world to make me feel like I was making headway haha.

But I’m actually a whole chapter ahead now, I feel a little reinvigorated, like maybe I might die with a smile on my face after all. I dunno, it’s too soon to tell but I think after this whole apocalypse thing is over my life might actually start making sense. Because lord knows it has not for some time now haha.

A body shouldn’t be this happy when all this badness is going on but I never claimed to be normal or sane and I have utterly no control over my emotions. I just feel happier and more blessed right now than I’ve ever felt in my whole fucking life.

And that’s all I’m willing to say about in case I jinx it haha.

See you…

–

The veil of night was lifting, a ghostly quietus fell at the mouth of the river Boyne. A rustling of the hazel trees sent shock waves into the quivering still born dawn. A woman, beautiful, her naked skin white as alabaster, her hair a dark earthy autumn hazel, like the trees that birthed the river.

She walked into the river slowly, she walked until the water was up to her ankles, her hips, her chest and until she was gone.

“Princess! Princess!” A whispered voice said. “He means to start without you! You must awake”

“Airmed, is that you?” Ernmas said groggily.

“Yes Princess, you have to hurry, I couldn’t stop stall him any longer.”

“But the sun is not even risen”

“Miach cares not for the position of the sun m’lady, only his own vainglory!” Airmed caught herself “I shouldn’t say that about my own brother I know but he is a fool and his eagerness will land us all in Bres’ keep one day.” The more fulsome maid helped the delicate Princess out of her borrowed bed. And into a robe more befitting witnessing the unveiling of the unknown. “Come now, we have little time to jabber.”

“Alright” Ernmas said faintly as Airmed lead her out of her room and into the strange hallway it felt like she was in only moments ago in the dead of night. She had hoped it would seem like a dream now but it was fresh in her mind. A part of her dreaded what she might witness at the top of that spiral staircase in the lab of Airmed’s brother Miach, son of Dian Cecht.

In her waking stupor lead by Airmed, it seemed like she closed her eyes and opened them once more in that fetid observatory that Miach had made his lab.

It was no different from the first she had laid eyes on it, the complete disarray that struck it was the chaos of a busy mind far beyond her own. But there too was an uncomfortable disquiet that hung in the air. As if a rot was nestled away in some darkened corner not yet to make itself known.

Ogma was there already, stern and solemn but also sad. He unfolded his large arms as the princes entered and made a slight bow. But said nothing and only stared at the centre of the room, where Miach tittered like an excited child.

Miach was lost in his own thoughts mumbling something to himself as he tinkered with unseen hands. Failing to notice or not caring when his sister and Ernmas entered the observatory.

“Ah marvelous, you’re just in time” He said when he made the effort to acknowledge their existence.

“Just in time for what?” The princess asked softly.

“Behold” Miach said as he directed Ernmas to the tank in the centre of the room with the opaque milky liquid in it. “We’re almost ready now, the solution has already been applied.”

“Solution?” Ernmas asked faintly.

“Yes” Miach said as he approached the stone table closest to the tank. One which had been cleared. He returned holding a strange pointed device made of glass and metal. The liquid contained within looked like water but shimmered with a dull putrescence of grey and blue as if it were petulant miasmal clouds. “My own creation, it uses the sacred waters that my father might have used during the great war but refined through my own processes.”

“And the-?”

“See for yourself” Miach smirked faintly as he directed her to the tank Ernmas was trying to avert her gaze from.

She approached it gingerly as if it were some kind of unpredictable beast or piteous retch. Slowly it came into focus. Beyond the milky liquid, pale bilferous limbs appeared, bobbing rhythmically in and out of the queer substance. As she reached the rim of the open top tank she could see it more clearly. The vaguest approximation of what was her father lay naked in the tank, it’s skin slick and squamous.

The body was motionless but for the slight undulating of the liquid. She looked at the face of her father and more closely at his neck as she could see that it was indeed the head she had brought with her. Attached by a means of some kind of metallic string. For a moment it was not Nuada’s face she saw floating in the liquid. But it was her own staring back at her with hideous stygian eyes that filled her with an unnameable terror.

It’s loathsome hand reached out and gripped her tightly by the wrist. The blasphemous thing pulled her closer to the tank. It’s hideous mouth opening filling her lungs with the foetid stench of death and decay. It uttered an accursed ullulating sound as foul black ichor poured from it’s mouth and filled the princess with darkness.

Read the rest on inkitt https://www.inkitt.com/stories/action/300249/chapters/10

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Sky of Stars

Waiting I gaze longingly

Beseeching the stars align

My heart sought yours doggedly

But to whom may I opine?

Spoken word pure happiness

Love and light is your domain

The stars may yet acquiesce

know our love will yet remain

Your beauty haunts breathlessly

Your soul is mine for baiting

Spirits live on deathlessly

But for the moment, Waiting.

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Sanic Movie review.

Long story short this movie was shit, err I don’t know how to sugar coat it. I didn’t have high expectations for it, well I kinda did after detective pikachu surprised me. But someone really must’ve given a shit about that movie, because clearly no one but Jim Carrey gave two fucks about the sonic movie. He is the only one not sleep walking through this movie.

I don’t know where to begin, the story and the lore and set up are all just nothing burger jj abram mystery boxes. It just sets up this world where Sonic is from only to never use with vague hopes of panning it off to a sequel that probably is coming but it doesn’t deserve it. You shouldn’t get a sequel from a movie that is only thinking about the sequel. If the first movie isn’t self contained and good then a sequel shouldn’t even be on the table. I’m not gonna hold off my opinion until I watch the next movie, by then I’ve already given you my money twice.

So it sets up this world it does nothing with, it just drops sonic into normal world which is the laziest way to have your world building by just not having any. Not even the marios brothers movie did that, sure they made up a weird cyberpunk mushroom kingdom but they at least did that. This is just like ‘no it’s in the normal world’. It doesn’t give a shit.

I don’t even have much more to say about it, I don’t feel like giving this review more effort than the google search the people that made this movie si to research sonic before they made filmed it.

The story and the world and the characters are so cookie cutter you could literally replace sonic with any character, this could be just a random kids movie about an alien they just pasted sonic over. It’s so generic, I’d get bored even describing. The plot is so contrived, sonic loses rings in a contrived way, and now has to have a middle in the movie because movie to get his rings back even though he could get them himself in like two seconds with a map.

But no, we need a movie to happen so there’s a random bar fight scene because sonic has to do something with his speed other than fight Robotnik. And this is the point where I’m like you could’ve actually used some other sonic characters or lore and made a movie here when instead all they did was make a movie that’s pretty much fluff where nothing happens and it has sonic in it.

It’s not even close to detective pikachu because there’s not even an emotional subplot. There are no moral lessons or emotions at all, it’s totally bare bones. There’s literally no meat on the bones and what’s more it feels like it was cut down. There are clearly parts of the movie that are like voice over montages that were meant to be full scenes they cut down. Scenes that could’ve added vital plot points that were just pasted over for time.

Jim Carrey is the only saving grace of the film, he’s having a lot of fun in this role, he’s basically Ace Ventura meets the Riddler and it’s good. He’s the only thing good about the movie. I just found sonic and all the other characters forced, annoying and unlikeable.

I was actually planning on doing a Jojo rabbit review because I watched that and I really enjoyed it, without a doubt the most fun ww2 movie ever but I feel much more compelled to write reviews about movies I hate haha.

So to wrap this up because I have jobs to look for that I wont get because the whole world is currently locked down haha.

So in summary, don’t watch this garbage, it’s not horrible but it’s just meh, it’s not worth your time, but if you do watch it, don’t have high hopes for it. And if you recognise the header image you’re not getting into heaven haha.

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She probably never thinks of you…

It’s so pathetic

I know, but it was so real

My heart was all yours

Could’ve been something.

We could’ve gone to prague or…

Anywhere with you.

So predictable

Now you never think of me

And I’m just adrift.

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V

I think I dreamed you

You were always there but now…

you’re a part of me.

 

Lips I haven’t kissed

Your beauty is haunting and…

I feel things I hid.

 

When I close my eyes

Sometimes you’re smiling, sometimes

I think its for me.

 

 

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Dr Sleep – Review

I went into this movie totally unbiased, I like the original shining, not a huge fan of Stephen King though, I think his writing is hacky, ok well that’s an understatement I think his face should be next to the definition of a hack writer. I don’t even really like most of the film adaptations of his work, I’m just aware of them but I can’t think of many that are very memorable other than as memes. Like Misery is an ok movie but I wouldn’t watch it more than once, same with Pet cemetery and silver bullet, they’re ok movies but they’re not something you keep coming back to. In a lot of ways once you’ve seen one King movie you’ve sort of seen them. And after some tepid reviews on youtube I thought this was movie was going to pass me by.

But that being said I have watched the shining quite a few times and I could see myself watching this again and again but it was just such a fun, cool movie. I really unironically enjoyed every minute of it. It was fun, interesting, heartfelt, sad at times, shocking at others but it constantly kept me engaged and interested and had some real ‘hell yes’ moments which were surprising. It succeeds not only in being a sequel to a great movie but also in being it’s own movie entirely. This is to the Shining what Aliens is to Alien. It’s not copying the previous movie, it evolved from it into something new and all together interesting in its own right and I really respect that.

So the movie is set after the shining and the main character is a grown up Danny Torrence played by Ewan Mcgregor. Danny is tormented by the spirits of the dead and the death of his own mother and thus driven to alcohol and substance abuse which seems like a logical response. But as fate would have it he gets a second chance and finds meaning and friendship working in hospice care helping the elderly come to terms with death and it’s both really sweet and heart rending. Me and my brother joked that this could also serve as a weird sequel to Sixth sense haha.

But at the same time this is happening you’re also following a gang of literal fucking vampires as they trek across america in camper vans like Near Dark recruiting and turning other people who shine and brutally torture and kill children to suck out their shine which they call ‘steam’. Basically how this idea has evolved in the sequel is that shine is like a literal substance and I know what you’re thinking, star wars and medicloreans and yeah I thought the same (that and it being Ewan Mcgregor again haha) but this goes in a much cooler direction with it. Because it turns out that people like Danny have existed for a long time and you can live a long time if you drain this power from others like you. So this group of basically psychic vampires seek out children to drain of their essence. The reason they target children is because the steam is pure and untainted and the first time they do it they sort of cut away but the next time you see them do it they literally slice this kid to pieces torturing him because pain and fear purifies the steam.

Now the first part of the movie just with Danny putting his life together could be a movie on it’s own, it’s sweet and interesting and sort of horrifying, it could’ve just been a nice supernatural drama oscar bait movie but you add this second layer with the psychic vampires and it almost becomes a bad ass Carpenter movie. It’s such a cool direction to take it in.

I really liked the villains because they seem almost like anime villains like the vampires in Near Dark but also really normal at the same time. They don’t seem or look like monsters, especially the main villain but she’s a fucking psycho who takes pleasure in cutting up kids basically. They’re all sort of believable and understandable, they see themselves almost as forces of nature, not as good or evil or monsters.

You have this great dichotomy between Danny’s story and the villains and you’re just waiting for them to collide. It makes me miss this type of film making, any other film maker would show you the villain once and then you wouldn’t see them again for an hour but in this you follow them almost as much as Danny which I love because you’re really getting to know all the vital characters.

The story is pretty simple in that Danny basically becomes psychic pen pals with this really powerful little girl during the eight years he’s putting his life back together. But during that time the little girl has come onto the radar of the vampires after she psychically witnesses one of their murders so now they want her because she has more steam than they’ve ever seen before. Because there’s a plot line basically where they haven’t been eating very well lately, the steam is drying up, they’ve been living on scraps so they’re sort of desperate for a big score.

The little girl called Abra reaches out to Danny to help her against the vampires so this is where the movie goes from interesting and fun to fucking awesome haha. It essentially becomes a really cool vampire movie with psychic powers and of all the ways this could’ve been done it happens in the best way possible. This could’ve been really silly like a stupid comic book movie, I wont spoil it but the confrontations with the actual vampires are really cool and grounded and awesome and hard hitting and clever. The end fight puts a nice capstone on the first movie without shitty sequel bait.

The movie very tastefully uses things from the original shining, it borrows from it and references in a way that is very respectful of the original. Sure they use new actors to play his mother and father and Dick Halorann but the performances are very subdued and they’ve picked actors that look a lot like them and they’re used sparingly.

Now a lot of people me included would be forgiven for saying “The shining doesn’t need a sequel” and you’d be totally right and there are lots of old movies that get sequels nobody asked for that serve just to squeeze money out of an old franchise manipulating people with nostalgia. This is probably 99% of the time but there is the 1% that is exception to the rule and this and maybe the Blade Runner sequel (which is hotly contested) are sequels that add to the original movie but are entirely their own movies and are good in their own right. Doctor Sleep is that in spades.

Like I could watch Doctor Sleep never having watched the shining and still enjoy it. You could show someone who’s never read King or watched a single one of his movie adaptations and they will enjoy this movie. The acting is great, the story and premise are fun, the action is surprisingly good, the effects are decent. Now I’m not gonna bullshit you and say the camera work and cinematography are on the level of Kubrick but they emulate him slightly and are competent. It’s not trying to copy the original, only call back to it for context.

In summary there’s no reason you shouldn’t see this movie, if you like supernatural thrillers, if you’re a King fan or just like the Shining or even if you like Near Dark or Scanners and weird fun movies like that. Hell if you just like Ewan McGregor go see this movie, I can’t think of a single bad thing to say about, I kinda wish it was a tv show just so we could have more of it, it’s such a cool premise. But as a movie it’s a perfect package, made by people who know how to make movies.
To a lot of people this will feel like an older movie because it follows a proper formula, film makers today try to subvert story telling conventions thinking they’re above them but they can’t see those conventions are there for a reason and without them movies just feel like a sloppy unsatisfying mess. You will come out of this movie satisfied you watched a real movie. This is without a doubt my movie of 2019, go see it.

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Once upon a time in Hollywood – review

First thing I have to say about this movie is that it’s basically not reviewable, it’s not reviewable because it’s basically not a movie.

So you know this is gonna be a short review haha.

Movies generally have a beginning middle and an end and this movie has none of those. It’s like a weird documentary slice of life of a made up person. It’s a what if history moment that asks this odd questions that is basically along the lines of ‘What if the manson family went to the wrong damn house’ haha. An interesting question but evidently not enough to make a movie on. Because the movie is like 99% unrelated filler garbage that has nothing to do with anything other than just Tarantino jacking off his love for movies and like 1% the actual idea the movie was based on.

You don’t even get a lot of time with the manson family because it’s not really about them, they’re just sort of there.

So what is the movie about? Nothing, it’s sort of about this ageing movie cowboy and his life but there’s no message or theme with that, it’s just filler. It’s just like one unrelated scene after the other until the ending. And there’s so much in it that is just pointless and boring and I’m watching this movie and I’m thinking ‘Why does this have to be like two hours forty minutes? Why am I watching Margot Robbie go see a movie she’s in? What is this adding to the movie?’ The answer is nothing, it’s just filler. It’s just stuff that Tarantino put in his movie and an editor didn’t have the balls to tell him to cut it. Because this movie is just peak Tarantino self indulgence and he’s reached a peak in his fame where no one can give him advice so boring scenes that add nothing will stay in whereas in his earlier movies they would’ve been cut and improved the film significantly. But this movie is just 99% fluff, if someone was allowed to cut this movie you’d probably just be left with the last ten minutes and maybe the Bruce Lee fight and that would be it.

But that’s pretty much how this movie works, because I was cheering at the end of the movie like most people but most people wont stop and analyse why they were cheering. Most people will just cheer and then assume that the other two hours and thirty minutes that lead up to this point were building up to this so it was good and worth it. I don’t think that, I think the movie is almost intentionally boring us to make the last ten minutes seem better out of relief. We’re so desperate at that point for something to happen and we know it’s been building to this point so when something eventually does happen we’re hit with a wave of euphoria and relief that colours our opinion on the film overall when really it’s only the last ten minutes that are getting this response.
This is less a movie and more a hostage situation where a creepy foot fetishist film nerd is holding us hostage boring us with movie trivia and then at the end he lets us watch ten minutes of a cool movie and lets us go.

We’re not actually enjoying the movie or the ending we’re just relieved that the torture is over, we’re relieved that we’re no longer bored. It’s like literal torture, when torture is over you feel euphoria, when pain ceases you feel good, not because you actually feel good but because you’ve stopped feeling bad. This movie doesn’t entertain you, it just bores you so much that when something does happen it’s like the best thing ever. It doesn’t entertain as much as it ceases to bore, as much as a torturer doesn’t give you pleasure as much as he ceases to cause you pain.

Notice I haven’t mentioned anything actually about this movie, I can’t comment on it’s story because it doesn’t have one, I can’t really comment on the characters because there really aren’t any. I mean it was an ok movie, the ending was fun but is it worth the two hours forty minutes of your life it’s asking, not really.

I mean it’s a Tarantino movie where no one was able to tell him ‘No’ so it’s just self indulgent to the point where you question what you’re even watching and by the time the movie is over you’ve forgotten most of the film. I can maybe describe like three scenes including the ending in that.

It’s a tough recommend for sure haha. If you’re a Tarantino cultist you’re going to see it regardless but is it a good movie? On every technical level it’s a no because it literally isn’t one but is it enjoyable, I mean sure, some of it is, but not really enough to justify your time and money.

Those are the big stinkers I watched over christmas I also watched Zombieland 2 but it’s pretty unremarkable, not really worth a review it was just ok.

 

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Joker – Review

If you’re friends with me on facebook you’re probably well aware of my feelings on this movie. Been really busy over christmas but my brother hooked us up with his usual piracy and we watch Joker and a few other movies only one other I want to review the others were just ok, not worth reviewing. I only review stuff I really love or really loathe.

So yeah guess which one Joker falls into.. ah… I fucking hated it haha.

Kinda surprising because this should’ve been right up my alley, I love the character, I love the movies it’s basically copying/pastiching. This should’ve been another Logan here and honestly it could’ve been and that’s what really pisses me off about this movie. All the elements are there for this movie to have been the next Logan or even the next Falling Down or Taxi Driver/King of comedy but the writing and the direction and maybe just the editing are so weak it can’t pull it together.

All anyone talks about is Phoenix’s performance and yeah it’s pretty good but is it good enough to carry a really weak pathetic script and the director of the fucking hang over movies? No it is not. He’s almost the only character in this movie, or the only one that’s trying, every other person in the movie seems to be barely there, they have almost no development, not even Robert Deniro’s character who is supposed to be sort of the titular antagonist. He barely gets any screen time for the audience to decide if he’s a hero or a villain.

Honestly that’s kind of how I feel about the Joker in general. I feel like the entire movie is walking this line with his character where it wants him to be this pathetic character who then becomes a strong anti-hero in his mind but really he’s a villain. And the trap there is if you do that wrong he’ll just become a hero and then you’ve fucked up and made batman’s greatest villain an anti-hero instead and lost everything that made his character fun. But the script is so fucking juvenile it’s like he’s not likeable/relatable enough to be an anti-hero like D-fens in Falling down or Travis in Taxi and he’s not really evil enough to be a straight up villain like the actual Joker. He just wallows in this pathetic obese of nothingness the whole movie punctuated by a pretty weak speech at the end which boils down to “People are mean” basically a fucking tumblr post before he throws a ballistic tantrum. If you compare that to the scene it’s copying from the dark knight returns comic you can see everything that’s wrong with this depiction of the joker.

He’s kind of pathetic and not smart or calculating or amoral at all. He basically puts on this cool evil Joker persona at the end but it’s just guise, it’s not really him and it kind of comes out of nowhere. I didn’t feel invested in his downfall, it doesn’t feel very organic or interesting and every.
This is not a Joker that could ever be a threat to Batman, they basically turned the joker into an impotent pathetic school shooter and it’s not a good look. I just never liked this Joker, I never felt invested in him and I felt like I was watching a movie, it never sucked me in. It’s not gritty or intriguing, it’s just maudlin and sort of boring. Like there’s so much in this movie that just feels like padding that could’ve been about another character like I dunno… Batman. There’s a shocking idea, put Batman in a Batman movie haha. But obviously the way this movie is written and the time its set wont allow for that but there’s just so much dead air in this movie it only ever feels like it starts when he becomes this movies idea of the joker and then it ends.

I kinda could’ve seen this movie working if it was part of another movie but on it’s own it’s fucking boring. The story of the movie is just ‘he sad goes mad’ it’s not a story, its just a bunch of stuff happening, stuff mostly stolen from older better movies. It just doesn’t feel like it goes anywhere or does anything with it’s time and it pretends like it has something to say but it’s like some kid trying to make a speech just falling over itself having no idea what to say and how to say it. The message in this movie is so weak, it’s so noncommittal and safe, it’s like “err, fuck rich people, I guess, people are mean!” and it’s almost like the director knew it was being too safe and just threw in random acts of violence and the ending to spice it up and it seems to have won over most people but to me this movie was just garbage wrapped in tinfoil.

The themes of the movie are sort of shitty and uninteresting because what basically happens that starts this weird like faux 99%er rally is he *spoilers* shoots and kills these white wallstreet guys who are drunk riding the subway just being generally annoying. I mean yeah you know how it is, you get off your job on the wallstreet and then you get drunk and harass random people on the subway for kicks, I mean it’s like the purge kind of except not interesting or realistic.

I feel like the main premise of the movie is apologising for the start of the movie where he basically gets beaten up by a group of ethnic children. That was their only source of edginess and they used it up in like the first ten minutes. And then the rest of the movie is him taking revenge on white rich people to apologise for being beaten up by poor ethnically diverse people haha. I mean if he was really a villain he would’ve gone after those children, just saying haha.

I can’t really get into more without going into major spoilers but the movie is just not very good, there’s nothing really in that makes it stand out in any way. I didn’t feel anything while watching it except sad and bored.

I really think the hype behind this movie is just because it’s the Joker and it’s Jaquin Phoenix playing him. I think if this movie was called “The Jester” and it was played by some no name actor no one would give a shit, this movie would hit some streaming service and no one would even know it existed. It’s being carried by memes and the title and a strong performance and nothing else, it’s emperor’s new clothes shit. Literally because I got people on my facebook saying “Bro you just don’t get it bro” to which I obviously asked “Ok bro, well explain it to me, what don’t I get” which of course either doesn’t get a response or gets a response like “Ok bro you’re just too retarded to get it”. People don’t know what this movies about because it’s not about anything, it’s made by the guy who made the hang over movies, this isn’t David Lynch, this is a stupid comic book movie edgy enough to impress fourteen year old boys and idiots but it’s not entertaining in any way. I don’t even really like comic book movies but I would much rather watch any other comic book movie than watch this ever again.
I think the last comic book movie I watched was Spiderman far from home and that movie wasn’t amazing but it was fun, it’s what you expect, it wasn’t this pretentious mess, it knew what it was.

Ok well to stop me going around in circles I’m just gonna leave it there haha.

All I can say is I know they’ll probably do a sequel of this and I can’t wait to see how they fuck it up haha.

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This is the police 2 – review

Hey, still not dead, just been working a lot because christmas sucks haha.

I was definitely looking forward to playing this, I’d been waiting for it to go on sale for under a tenner since I got the first game for a couple of quid and it is an indie game I guess so that’s a fair price in my opinion. But the first is a lot of game for not a lot of money, the story, characters and game are really great and well done, so I was looking forward to this. Needless to say I was a little bit hyped. These niche little management sims are sort of my jam between big sprawling rpgs and stuff add in turned based xcom turned based strategy combat and I’m hooked.
I actually only wanted to play the first because I saw someone playing the second one and it looked right up my alley and it was.

The first game is pretty much perfect and the second adds in xcom style turned based combat and your cops have stats that are important in regular call outs and these new tactical missions where you actually control the cops as they stealth or blast their way to catching criminals.

Yeah well I already said ‘but’ but there are more buts coming because this game is great but I can’t help feeling like it just has more content for the sake of content. In the first game it felt like it was constantly evolving, you never felt like you were doing the same thing over and over, every day the gameplay evolved in some way. One minute you’re in an election and have to manage shifts so people work well together, the next you’re tracking a serial killer, or taking down a crime family but that never really happens in the second game.

Yeah sure you can take down crime families but there are only like three and it feels like it’s been really dumbed down but on the bright side you actually get to do a tactical mission to capture the gang’s leader which is really fun and satisfying. Another great change which is actually something I said in the first game review is that they added a description on the polaroids in the investigation missions so now you know what the fuck is going on in each slide and don’t just have to just guess what the expressionist art is trying to depict. It just tells you, so I didn’t need a guide for any of the cases in this game because I could actually tell what the pictures were showing me and put them in the right order. Just a little thing but it’s such an improvement, when you can spend ages trying to tell if a person is getting out of or getting into a car in a badly drawn still image.
But I dunno, the investigations don’t seem as interesting for some reason, they’re just kind of annoying and you don’t have detectives in this game so you have to commit officers from your main force to investigate them which is just dumb. Do small town sheriffs not have detectives? I guess not.

Oh yeah forgot to even talk about this game, it’s basically a direct sequel to the previous game where Jack Boyd is in hiding as he’s being used as a scapegoat for a lot of crimes for some reason. It’s kind of thin honestly because it’s never really explained how all this happened, it’s kept really vague because there’s no way for the game to know what you actually did in the previous game because it doesn’t follow on from your save file, it’s not that type of game with branching story choices. Which just begs the question why they didn’t just go for a new character, it’s probably because they wanted to keep John St.John (Duke Nukem) as their main voiced character. Which is understandable. But there’s no reason they couldn’t have worked him in just not as the main character.

So in terms of story you just need to accept that Jack Boyd has a cool mullet and a beard and is now wanted for some reason and he has to pay this random guy who may have been in the last game but I can’t remember or he’ll rat you out to the feds. And you’re hiding out in this little mountain town that I hoped would be a lot like twin peaks but kind of wasn’t at all but I’ll get into that later on. So of course you get back into basically doing criminal shit and favours to make money to pay this guy off and this is kind of where you run into the first flaw of the game. Money, you don’t really need it. In the first game the goal was to make half a million so in that the reason you got money was just because you were saving for retirement but *spoilers* it doesn’t even matter at the end anyway.

But you could also spend money on various services in game that were pretty useful like setting up a hit on a cop that was going to turn on you or something like that. But in this game you only need money to pay off this guy and buy more equipment.

And here’s where you get into my second gripe, the equipment, and my complaint with this is sort of two fold, it’s not interesting equipping your officers at the start of each day, it’s just annoying and time consuming, yeah there’s an auto-assign but it’s retarded and it never equips them with the stuff I want. The second reason this is annoying is because every call can be solved by an item. It’s just the instant win button, you can solve most cases with the tazer or the shocker/pepper spray/baton. They’re just instant win buttons and all the thought is basically taken out of the calls. In the previous game you really needed to think about how to handle the situation. In this you don’t even have to read the description you just click ‘use baton’ and the case is done. You could basically speed run this game with this.
On top of this your officers have skills and some of the options are skill related and they’re basically instant wins too, so if your officers have high negotiation they can end the call with a command, or if they’re high stealth they can sneak it and so on and so on. So all that really happens at the end is all your cops become jack of all trades and can just do everything and the difficulty just artificially spikes.
You see you need a certain level of professionalism which is like their xp to complete a mission and by the end of the game every mission is just over 2k professionalism nomatter what it is. Like you’ll need the same level of professionalism to take down a bank robbery as you’ll need to catch a guy that pinches a waitresses ass. It’s dumb, It’s not a realistic difficulty curve.

Another thing I found annoying was the crank calls were too subtle in this game and the humor is such that the real calls sounded like cranks some time. In the previous game you get some calls that are fake, just some idiot with a false alarm like in real life and you have to avoid them otherwise you can’t use those officers for a real case until they come back. Which you know isn’t how police work because they have radios and can go to calls if they’re in the vicinity. Imagine if cops had to go back to the station every time to pick up a new call. That would be retarded. They haven’t had to do that since the invention of the radio.

But in the last game the crank calls were pretty obvious and eventually you could spot them and avoid them rather easily but in this game there’s almost no way to tell them apart. I think it’s a lot to do with how wacky they’re trying to make the setting for this game.

I thought this game would reference twin peaks what with it’s setting in a kooky little mountain town or maybe it’s fargo but I’ve never seen that movie. But it’s not really like twin peaks at all, there are like weird cultists who worship strange forest gods but that’s always off to the side, it’s not really that relevant to the main plot, it doesn’t really go anywhere. The main ‘villain’ if you can call him that is just this retired military colonel, but he’s not really a villain as much as he’s just someone in your way, kind of, that goes for pretty much every ‘villain’ in this game. I dunno the characters in this game just felt a little flat and generic and the story doesn’t do much with them, they don’t have arcs or move on from the story of the first game as much as they just wallow it. The story almost just feels like an add on or a dlc despite how much it clearly improves upon the game.

But for all it’s improvements and addons some are just irritating like managing each cops inventory and there’s this fucking irritating part where the cook for the station goes on her honeymoon and you have to pick food for everyone matching their specific requirements and it’s just annoying. There’s nothing fun or interesting about picking what food they eat and you can lose their respect if you choose food they don’t like, it’s not a fun gameplay addition, it’s just an annoying hurdle to waste your time. There’s a line between fun and challenging and annoying time wasting.

That’s something I forgot to mention, there’s a respect system in this game where basically if you get the cops to like you they dress properly and they’ll listen to you. If they don’t respect you they dress sloppily, they refuse to work consecutive days and they out right do whatever the hell they want on tactical missions so for the love of fuck don’t ever use them for that. They also won’t go out on calls if you send them with another cop that doesn’t respect you. So getting their respect is really important.

This sounds interesting but they can lose respect for you for the most asinine reasons like you don’t let them take off work to scratch their balls. I had this one quit because I hired a masseuse for the station which I thought everyone would like but this guy was like “that masseuse touched my cock, I didn’t know this station was home to rampant faggotry” or something nuts like that and he just fucking quit. How was I supposed to foresee that outcome?? How would I ever know that was a possibility? It’s just fucking bullshit there solely to trip you up. The game is kind of full of moments like that, situations that happen that you would need fucking psychic powers to predict and just becomes frustrating.

I really liked the gameplay though, I’m a big fan of xcom and it really steps up in that respect. The combat and the guns feel nice(feel might not be the right word since I’m not handling them, they sound good), although you only get to use their revolvers but I like how they work. Basically they’re one shot kills but you can choose whether to hit them in the hand and try to disarm them so you can arrest them, shoot them in the head and kill them, in the leg and hobble them, or as I always go centre mass, because that downs them but it takes them a while to die so if you finish the stage before their life timer runs out they live. The game rewards you for suspects you take alive, so you’re encouraged to and I prefer to go quiet and use batons and tazers to stun and cuff them and then shoot to wound them and take them alive. But you can just literally stab them all to death which is quicker and easier but feels less immersive to me having cops going Sam fischer on a guy and it lowers your score which is in can ring pulls (I guess bottlecaps would’ve been derivative) and you trade these pulls for more cops and equipment.

Because the premise of the game is basically you’re working for the real sheriff who’s really inexperienced and she is trading equipment and men for how well you perform.

Overall the gameplay is good, I would’ve liked it to be a little more like xcom where you can unlock more equipment instead of just skills and perks and the stealth is a little bare bones, if one guy sees you that’s pretty much done for the stealth portion, now every enemy knows where you are haha. Also weirdly when you play xcom there are basically infinite tactical missions you can do randomly generated to a point where it gets sort of tedious but in this game there feels like there aren’t enough. Because they’re really fun and tense and brutal because you can’t save scum so you’re basically permanently on iron man mode unless you want to redo the whole day because these missions usually pop up at the end of the day. And your cops aren’t armoured, they have the same health as the enemies so one shot and you’re done, if it’s in the leg you can’t move, in the hand you can’t shoot, centre mass and you’re bleeding out, headshot and it’s goodnight. And on top of that if they’re injured in the mission they’ll be out of commission for a couple of days. And for some reason when one of your cops is shot there’s no like medic mechanic, not one of your cops knows first aid, so that person just has to limp away and hide and bleed until the end of the match. So it’s tense, but there aren’t really enough of them and there’s this one later on that almost made me fucking rage quit.
Basically I think it’s the second to last tactical mission in the game, you had to take down this whole camp of guys without being spotted once, because if you got spotted it was an instant fail state and you had to start right from the beginning. And once you’ve chosen the guys to go on the mission you can’t change them unless you want to restart the day. Just stuff like that is really annoying and I don’t see why the mission couldn’t have just carried on or you could get another chance of taking down the person who saw you before they raise the alarm. Bare in mind all my guys are like max rank with top stealth and stuff, but no if they get spotted or someone finds a body it’s done and I don’t think you can hide bodies, despite the fact there’s a perk where you can pick up injured people and carry them. So why can’t they move bodies or hide them?

Overall all these missions are pretty great which makes it sting even more that the last mission is this really boring easy tower defence mission. I mean the last mission in the first game was more interesting and you didn’t even get to play it, you could only play it out in your imagination as you set it up.

Also I would’ve liked more control over planning the raids like the assault in the first game. You could decide what men to put where, in this game you can only decide who to place you can’t decide where to place them. You just gather intel and fill slots, there’s little to no strategy in planning the assaults. But the level design, I just feel like they could’ve done more with it, there could’ve been more going on with the story in these missions. They could’ve been more dynamic and worked into the plot like you find a weird altar with human sacrifices or you stumble upon a conspiracy or another serial killer.

It gets into my whole feeling towards this game, it feels shorter and less developed than the first despite having more content. It’s like they put more effort into nuts and bolts gameplay than the story and the world than they did in the first. The ending left me just totally cold, zero emotional resonance, it was just kind of meh and it didn’t fit and I constantly felt like I was on the outside of the story. It also didn’t really resolve what happened with Jack’s wife in the first game which really pissed me off. It just feels unfinished and like they were trying to be mysterious or ambiguous with the plot but it just didn’t suck me in enough for me to give a shit. They don’t do much with the pagan cults and forest spirits, I really thought that was going to be core to the plot like twin peaks but it’s really not, it’s just a fun side thing which is fine. I just wanted a deeper, weirder experience. I feel like this game kind of played it safe and just added gameplay but took no real risks with the story or world building.

Also I’m lead to believe there was a good ending and a bad ending which I fucking hate in games. I much preferred the ending of the first where it wasn’t a moral choice as much as it was between two people. You chose whoever you thought would fuck you over the least but *spoilers* they both fuck you over haha.

What bugs me is this game is so niche I can’t even really find accurate guides or people talking about the endings. I’m gonna have to dig to even find the good ending. Which I think I read somewhere you can only get if you do zero illegal shit which I’m not sure is even possible or what this game even counts as illegal stuff because this game is never really black and white with it’s moral choices. I can’t see how you’d make any money in this game without cutting corners and committing crimes, I made most of my money selling drugs and evidence. In the previous game you actually had a salary that I don’t think you get in this game so I don’t see how else you’re going to get the money in time to pay for the silence of the asshole leaning on you. I mean that’s the justification for taking the short cuts in the first place. The reason you do illegal stuff in the first game is because it makes you money which you need for retirement but also because if you don’t and you piss off the mafia they’ll just kill you.

But in this game if it wasn’t for the blackmailer you could probably just not be a dirty cop haha. But I guess him turning you over to the feds is the equivalence in this game for the mob killing you.

Ok a lot of waffling there, I really liked the game, I had a lot of fun with it. I really liked the new combat system but I feel they kind of slipped up on a lot of things they did right in the first game. So in all honesty, I think as a whole I preferred the first game. But maybe it’s because I didn’t expect much from the first game and I had higher expectations from the sequel.

Minor niggles I thought the writing was verbose to the point of hair pulling. Characters in this game will take ten times the amount of words to say something as is necessary. Were the writers in this game paid by the word? I mean even the text is too long, you get these fucking text crawls, short essays that are small even to read on a big screen tv and all they’re basically saying is “I need a strong cop to move some boxes”. Why the fuck couldn’t you have just said that? Why did it take like 500 words to get to “I need cop with strong stat”. I get it’s world/character building but some of these characters are just random one offs. It just feels like a needless waste of time and an editor could have cut this down. I mean again there’s a line between interesting world building and annoying time wasting. Eventually I’m going to stop giving a shit and just scan what they’re saying to get to what they want.

I have ranted enough and despite all this bitching I would still definitely recommend it, it’s a great game, if you like xcom and mutant year zero and games like that, definitely pick it up, for the price you can’t go wrong.

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