Recent reviews by meat rocket

Astonishingly good. Exactly as long as it needs to be, as well.

The way Hot Wheels Unleashed constantly spams "blind boxes" (read: lootboxes) and in-game currency at you, you'd think it would be free. I shelled out $30 for the """game of the year""" edition on sale and it was still absolutely inescapable. Most of the cars are locked behind some kind of paywall, and even the ones that are included have to be randomly collected through lootboxes.

Beyond predatory monetization, the steering is overly heavy. Not heavy in a pleasing way where it feels like you're doing something significant, but heavy where the cars just feel lethargic. Doesn't really mesh with an arcade racer where you drive cars that weigh a few grams.
Make no mistake: heavy driving physics can feel great. These don't.
The music is hopelessly bland as well. It sounds like it came from a stock library, there's no character whatsoever. The music just vanishes into the background like beige wallpaper.
The main thing Hot Wheels Unleashed has going for it is the visuals. The game really does look fantastic. Some of the cars even have little casting seams on the metal parts of their bodies, like a real Hot Wheels would.

By far the best thing about this game is how it looks. Viewing screenshots doesn't cost you $30 at sale price or $90 (!!!!!) at full price, though. And screenshots don't beg you for even more money the whole time you're looking at them. If you can get the Game of the Year Edition for something like $15, you could do a lot worse. For $30, absolutely not.
It was nice to have some AcceleRacers content included. I grew up on those movies. Game's still bad, though. You'd be much better off finding old Hot Wheels games on abandonware sites and playing those for free.

HROT is a well-executed Eastern European spin on the retro FPS. The roster of enemies is varied and fun to fight, and while the arsenal of weapons isn't anything very out of the ordinary for this kind of game, they feel good enough to use. The real highlight of this game is its ambiance; Episode 1 is more industrial and rusty, Episode 2 is more straight up Eastern Bloc Quake, but it gets more into genuine horror territory. (Not that this game is particularly scary, but it does have a dark atmosphere.)

A short, simple, and charming Metroidvania, although a pretty linear one.

Undercover falls far short of the quality of the better Need for Speed games.

• The single most frustrating design decision in Undercover is that you can't enter new events from the open world - only from the GPS map, or by hitting down on the D-Pad, which teleports you the closest event and starts it. The "all-out chase where you're the hunted and the hunter" is totally optional. Skipping it is actually encouraged by a constant green flashing reminder at the bottom of the screen. In Carbon or Most Wanted, you might encounter police on the way to your next event, creating a sense of danger, risk, and always being on the run. You have to go out of your way for this in Undercover.
  
• The difficulty in this game is a bad joke. A Lotus Elise should not thrash SLR McLarens and Lamborghini Gallardos. Even with the starter 240SX, I was beating opponents by gaps of 20+ seconds on races that last 2 minutes. Police are either worthless (you have to stop and wait for them to catch up) or unstoppable (police cars spawning in front of you and rubber banding so you can't get away).
  
• Vehicle handling is... different. The cars have almost no weight to them at all. Just hold the accelerator down until the race is over. If you get into a hard corner, just tap the brakes and the car basically rotates 90 degrees into the turn. It's very arcadey. Some might like it that way, but I don't.
  
• The story is stupid, but you already know that. Acting is bad, delivery is bad, writing is bad, pacing is bad. It can hit enjoyably bad territory at least.
  
• The menus and visuals feel uninspired and dated well beyond their years. The garage seriously looks like an empty murder shack. There's no charm to the environments at all like you'd find in Carbon or Underground 2.
  
• Car customization is there, but lackluster.
  
• Undercover struggles to run well. The framerates are overall high, but inconsistent because of frequent hitching and stuttering. (I'd be okay with it if the game looked nice...) Buildings and traffic will pop in right in front of you. If you want to play this with a controller and in widescreen, the Need for Speed Undercover Generic Fix[thirteenag.github.io] makes that much less awful. This mod also allows you to turn off the horrible bloom effects the game wants to put everywhere.
  
• The only thing I can really say is very good is the police radio. It was good in Most Wanted and Carbon, and now the voices are more reactive and have more character. There are even jokes, too - the dispatcher will put out a call for something like a horse running wild in the city, and a police unit will say something like "Unit 2-1, a.k.a. John Wayne, I'll take care of it." This means the number of well executed ideas in Undercover is technically bigger than zero.

For reference, EA published this the same year as Burnout Paradise. People still talk about Burnout Paradise. People don't still talk about Need for Speed Undercover.

The GAME is excellent, but the port is only fine. Gameplay is locked to 30 FPS, and often stuttered for me at 1080p [OC'd i5 4690K, 16GB of memory, RX 470]. The game starts the first time in a tiny window, and you can't change it until after the tutorial. There's nothing that'll ruin your experience, but there are some minor annoyances.
You won't have to put up with such issues for long, because this game is on the shorter side, and I think it's better for it. It's a game full of neat ideas, and it doesn't spend too long on any one of them.
The gameplay is great, the visual style is great, the music is great. $30 is a bit steep though - this is a really good $10-$15 experience. If the other games in the series were brought to PC in the same condition, I would have no issue with getting those as well. Here's hoping that Bandai Namco remakes some Ace Combat games too, I guess.

I liked Doom 2016 - I LOVED Doom Eternal. Play on Ultra-Violence difficulty to get that perfect balance of kicking ass and getting your ass kicked.

Short but sweet. A nice mystery with some good character drama.

Absolutely don't get this unless you have friends to play it with.
If you do, it can be fun to mess around for a couple hours, but that has more to do with chasing and grabbing each other as floppy people than the actual puzzles and levels themselves, which feel kinda empty and vapid.
Gameplay and level design are where this game... falls flat for me. You might know the solution to a puzzle immediately, but the floppy, imprecise controls can make something simple - moving a box, for example - take longer than it feels like it should. The movement seems to be meant more as a joke than an actual mechanic. Solutions tend to be pretty one-dimensional, because that solution is all the controls will allow you to achieve.
I can see why someone would like this, and while I had some fun with friends for a little while, I personally can't recommend it.

Decades-old design philosophy and modern polish combine to make something fantastic. All of the praise towards Doom 2016 apply here, but doubly so. It's a lot of fun.