El Paso, Elsewhere Reviews

Unique shooter

Stylistic as all hell and I adore it!

I LOVE ABSTRACT STORY TELLING CHARLIE, I LOVE ABSTRACT STORY TELLING!!!!!! also please play this game if you love max payne

All I have to say has been said. The gunplay is simplistic fun, and I like the journey that James goes through.

if you need a max payne fix, this game is for you. though i feel like there isnt enough variation of enemy types to keep things fresh. 50 levels is a tad bit much. other than that, strange scaffold has done good

Better to approach in pieces, the game way overstays its welcome. 50 chapters is a lot for a game that is essentially a Max Payne clone with a more abrupt gameplay loop.

The story, the dialogue, and the gameplay all mesh together in a wonderful collaboration. I was hooked from the beginning to the end. A tragic and beautiful game. 10/10

Overbearing. You will listen to me rap, you will listen to me speak. You will endure my cut-scenes and my bad poetry when all you really want to do is shoot monsters and jump around in slow-motion. The actual gameplay loop is so close to being excellent. There is one enemy type that ruins it at times. A teleporting orb-thrower that can one-shot you and darts about from corner to corner above where your sight line tends to be. As every single human on Earth has pointed out, this game pulls a lot from Max Payne, but it generally just feels steeped in media of that time. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, John Carpenter's Vampires, David Lynch movies, it has a motif and style that is certainly well-realised, but the game is spread a bit thin over 50 levels and I was pretty tired with it at about 36. But it all comes down to my experience with the character and storytelling getting to the point where I was rolling my eyes at perhaps three lines in every cut-scene and chuckling at one. If Xalavier can dial it back or run his script past someone else in the future, that could really produce something next level. Lot of excellent ingredients in here but I gradually got angry at this game for dragging on as long as it did and presuming a level of interest in its characters that I did not develop.

This could've been a brilliant 2-hour game, a good 4-hour game, a mediocre 8-hour game. But instead it's an unbearable 12-hour one.