NEURO Steam Charts & Stats

OLD not GOOD GAME

I had played this before a couple years back but got the infamous elevator softlock made popular by YouTuber TehSnakerer and never continued after that. Now it's on Steam for a couple dollars so fuck it why not finally finish it? And... whatdya kno? It's a mess! An ambitious mess, but my GOD this is a fucking chore to play. Don't get me wrong, there's some aspects to this that redeem the game (like the previously mentioned incredibly awful VA). I love the visual aesthetic of Neuro. Dark moody cyberpunk is the only thing anymore that gets me going, and this is some delicious cyberpunk right here. And near the end when we leave the grey industrial sci-fi hallways, we get to briefly go outside and enjoy the sounds of nature. Lush greenery and fantastical birds cover the skies. For the majority of the game you've been fighting through grimdark generic space corridors, and occasionally an office or living quarters, but now you're trekking through labs and military bases on the side of mountains (and sometimes through mountains) which was a very nice change of scenery. The psionic abilities are a neat addition that help to mix up the gameplay loop, but ultimately don't serve much use outside of the completely broken ESP. I rarely found a use for the pyrokinesis or thunder wall, and I don't even know what berserk did. Health regen came in handy especially since you can only take a few bullets before death, but these additions felt more like gimmicks than well-integrated gameplay components. The addition of these psi abilities gives me the impression that at one point this game was trying to be like Deus Ex, but along the way lost a lot of its immersive sim-ness in favour of a more linear experience. The ESP gun you get in the beginning was pretty fun at first but afterwhile it becomes too much of a hassle, taking way too long to charge up (and if the enemy leaves your crosshair it restarts the charge so good luck doing it to anyone on patrol) when you could just as easily pop around the corner and use the AR. The level design is... uhh... LARGE. This is a 3 hour game that took me almost 5 hours because the levels are ginormous and labyrinthine. Repetitive and monotonous design stretched out because your character is tiny (everyone towers over you) and you run just slow enough to piss me off. The game also suffers from some frustrating optimisation issues, namely quicksaving taking upwards of a minute. No, not loading a quicksave, but saving in general. My quickest save took me 10 seconds, my longest about 90 seconds, and on average were about 30 seconds, further lengthening the game. I couldn't tell you what happened in the story, but I was captivated by the voice actor's tenuous grasp on the English language. The guy who voices Basil (or sometimes referred to as Ivan?) should be in everything. He was pure comic gold, unintentionally so of course. The voice acting helps to lift this dreck from the coveted 1/5 rating that I so loftily throw around. A sluggish and unsatisfying shooter with grand ambitions and hysterical voice acting, Neuro is not one I can recommend unless you're already tapped into obscure sci-fi shooters from this time period.

This game is bad, and this review is to tell here why you should never buy the game. I know, you're thinking to yourself, you have played jank games before and this one isn't anything new. And mostly, you'd be right. But this one is special. Our story starts fairly normally enough. NEURO is a game from a Russian developer in the year 2006, where you have a story about something that don't really matter. Really, it doesn’t matter. You’re Jimmy, going to find some bad guy with your best buddy Craig, but then things don’t go right. This gives us a reason to run around and shoot bad guys. Honestly, I had written a bit about why this game is jank like the weapons, story, movement, skills, and all that. You could probably enjoy that with the other games, but let’s just say they’re in line with other jank Russian games of the time. The real reason why you should never play this game? The load times. Holy hell, those load streams. It’s not just the loads. It’s the saves, too. Say you are playing along, finding this game isn’t as bad as people are saying it was, then you hit save. Then, you wait. A full minute. And you’re like, okay, that’s not too bad. I just won’t save too much. Then, you accidentally die and now it’s time to load. You have to do that again now. It seems pretty normal, but the more you’re playing, you find wondering how you got to this point in your life? I don’t want to be sitting here talking about why my life. I just want to play bad video games. Oh, the game loaded, now I can keep playing and... I just took fall damage and died. Okay, time to load again. The game is more about time management of your saves/loads than anything. Now, the reason why I noticed into this issue and not as many people did? I had the game on hard. Please, I beg you. IF you do buy the game for some reason and play it, despite me telling you to not buy it, please don’t play it in hard. It’s not fun. You’re looking at like 3+ hours of your life just saving and loading. More even, if you’re worse than I am. This review is a rescue for help. [hr][/hr] If you’d like to see the game in motion through my eyes, [url=https://kuoushi.com/videos/neuro-complete-archive/]take a look at this complete archive of me playing it[/url] here. It should give you a good idea of how the game plays and what to expect.