Recent reviews by Adam^2

EARLY ACCESS REVIEW

Fast and fun real time ARPG.

While Humanitz is still very much in Early Access, the Dev Team has shown a promising final product is well within their grasp. Customize your character and set out in the zombie apocalypse by looting, hunting and crafting your way to not only just survive, but thrive in the new world.

The game currently supports up to 10 players in a Peer-to-Peer environment, with the dedicated servers schedule to be out by year's end hosting up 32 players.

Bear Simulator 2022.

Still in EA, and needs a ton of balancing work. Check back in 6 months...

You don't colonize Mars for the shopping.

This game is a grindy mess. Functionally, everything works. However, you have little control once it comes to getting colonists into your domes. They each have certain desires that you won't know about until they're on planet. This makes careful picking of people based on education, age and sex meaningless as soon as you need them to actually start working.

To prepare for the catastrophe that is humanity, you'll need to grind through few hours (RIP your Steam refund.) of a long research tree just to be able to build the basic necessities to support your transplants from Earth. It would almost be worth it to just forgo humanity and rely exclusively on drones to get ♥♥♥♥ done... But, for some reason, while we can send robots to Mars to build complex structures, we can't get drones to automate mining for basic metal.

This game is meant to be played for hundreds of hours. That's basically because of the slow progress to climb the tech tree, finally be able to support humans (and all their idiosyncrasies) and then work towards an end game if you chose one. Getting all the achievements for this game would take thousands of hours even at the fastest settings.

Graphics and Audio are fine, with direct inspirations from existing designs for space craft. The devs seems to have particular fancy for a certain private space company, going so far as to parrot them as once of the playable starting classes.

Gameplay however is just too slow. Frankly, Surviving Mars makes the fantasy of space colonization tedious at best, and absurd once you realize the first person to colonize a new world is upset cause they can't buy the new PS9.

I write review, I have badge.
You play game, you have fun.

Great to quiet your video card. Would use this in an HTPC.
However, if the app crashes, you will lose fan control and it will require a restart of your system to restore control.

This review was written for v1.12 of Punch Club


First off, I want to like Punch Club. I want to love it. The art and story ooze charm and humor. Everywhere you look there is an Easter-egg waiting to be discovered. The "retro" art filter in the game options further enhances the vibe of the cheesy 80's story that permeates this game. But all of this charm is crushed by the unmitigated weight of what passes for "gameplay".

Gameplay
Getting right into it, Punch Club looks like a simple stat building game. Keep earning points, to progress further in the game, until the hero is strong enough to take on the ultimate evil, avenge his family, save mankind... or maybe just rescue his cat Mr. Fluffy.

Unfortunately there are two other systems in place which grind progress to a halt and test the player's patience to see the next amusing cutscene or story beat. First of all, basic combat stats decay. And they decay hard. Strength, agility and endurance all lose points at the end of the day following a simple formula. The level of the stat multiplied by 9 is subtracted from the total value of said stat. So for example, if the player's strength was at level 1, the player would then lose 9 points of strength at the end of the day. (Level 10 would lose 90 points, level 20 would lose 180 points, etc...) At the early game this stat loss doesn't seem to be significant, but as players try to build up their combat abilities it becomes a brutal chore just to maintain combat effectiveness in the mid to late game. There are some traits the player can learn to mitigate some of this, but only to an extent.

The next major problem with combat is that it's almost entirely based on a random number generator (RNG). Players can pick 5 skills for their hero to use as well as train up their 3 core stats, but when it comes time to fight, the player is still very much at the mercy of a dice roll. While this can sometimes turn a fight into an easy win, more often than not players will be brutally punished by the other fighter even when having have double his opponent's base stats.

The game is very much about repetition. Keep training until stats are high, and then maintain them. Keep fighting the same person until the hero is eventually victorious. Unfortunately, it's a stat builder where the stats are fighting back, and the dice are hardly ever rolling in the player's favor. However, if players can keep pushing through, then they will eventually get to the end. The struggle is real here.

Story
The story is a humorous spin on the martial art films of the 80's and 90's. Someone has wronged the hero, and he's out for revenge. Can he redeem his family's honor, get the girl and save his cat? There are pop-culture references everywhere. Pizza-munching mutant crocodiles, a small snarky old man who will help you train, a shameless fight promoter with equally shameless hair... Pirates, ninja and aliens... Oh my!

While the story is brief, it also does branch in quite a few places providing a couple of endings for players to enjoy if they can brave a second play-through. Also, the free expansion adds an under-story to the main game that will be very familiar to fans of American Saturday morning cartoons from the late 80's.

While there is nothing sophisticated about the plot, the witty dialogue and events should be more than enough to keep players entertained if they have the patience to make it to the next beat.

Presentation
The art is well done in a classic 16-bit style. It looks even better with the "retro" filter that is available in the options menu. Backgrounds and characters are detailed, and there are homages to games, comics and movies littered throughout each new location. There has been a lot of care put into making Punch Club look great, and it shows.

On the audio side, there really isn't anything to exuberate, but at the same time there is nothing to complain about. Combat sounds are appropriately old-school. And the music, while not memorable, is not annoying despite it's repetitiveness.

There is an additional DLC for the game that includes an Artbook and Soundtrack, but it is by no means a must have purchase.

Overall
Punch Club is the kind of game you hope gets a sequel, not because it's great, but because it could be so much better.

If you can tolerate the grind, and then the grind to regain your losses, there is a fairly humorous affair to be had. It seems, to me, that the game was unfairly padded out with how it handles its mechanics because there isn't a lot of content here. To be honest, the content itself is good enough to stand on its own, and the gameplay mechanics really shouldn't be punishing the player from enjoying the story, art and humor that is here.

I can't recommend this game, and it's a shame because I really want to.

http://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/394310/

Ultimately, the driving force in Q.U.B.E is its narrative, which tries to hold your attention between gaps where thinking is actually involved.

Gameplay
First thing's first: The core game is short. Like under 2 hours short. No doubt there are some speed runs out there that drastically cut that time even further. But my first foray through the game was done in under 120 minutes, and that included exploring the environment and planning out how to do the puzzles.

The puzzles themselves are for the most part pretty easy to figure out. There is a nice gimmick where you do one section in the dark, but those puzzles are actually rather rudimentary, the challenge being that you can't see until you light up each element. Then there is the game's self described "hardest puzzle" which is really only difficult because it requires precise finagling to get the pieces in the exact right spot needed to complete the puzzle. That, unfortunately, is a reoccurring theme with many of the puzzles, their solutions may be simple, but getting the timing just right can be a bother when there are moving elements that need to be relocated at precise moments. While annoying, they aren't particularly difficult unless you have slow reflexes.

Story
There is an overarching theme in the narrative between the two supporting characters and the player about faith. There is also the illusion of having a choice, which can bring about a disappointing conclusion for some players as there is only one ending to the game. This ending further hammers on the point about having faith. There is also something of a personal redemption story, though it is weak at best, with regards to the player doing something good after doing something bad, of which the bad is only talked about and never experienced first hand. There are a few other religious overtones, mainly christian, but don't try to find anything too deep in the narrative, because it's frankly not there.

Presentation
Q.U.B.E runs on the Unreal Engine, and it's hard to mess that up. There are very few load times, and they are generally hidden behind room transitions. The graphics are nice, but with very few art assets, don't expect much in the way of a change in scenery. The audio is fine, and while there is a soundtrack, it takes backseat and is really only noticeable during story beats or cutscenes.

Overall
People are going to play this for the puzzles, and sadly they're just not there. Nothing is going to make your head scratch, but at the same time there isn't much that is really unfair either. One glaring issue, is that many of the later puzzles come with an "undo" button, which shows that not enough thought was put into preventing failure states for many of the challenges.

If you're looking for something to challenge your creative thinking, you're going to have to look elsewhere.
http://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/239430/

♥♥♥♥ this ♥♥♥♥.

If I could downvote this game on Steam I would. Figuring out the puzzles is easy. Pulling off the complex timing and repetitive reflex manuvers needed to solve them is maddening. Being forced to restart from the beginning of a puzzle because of one mistake is the work of the devil.

The art assests and level design are the very definition off cookie-cutter layouts, and the music is as bland as it is forgettable. John De Lancie phones this one in, but he can't take all the blame as the writing is as witless and dry as he portrays it to be.

I've actualy encountered game halting bugs while playing, where the game fails to keep track of objects being destroyed through the various dimensional shifts causing me to have to reload certain sections of the game in order to retry them.

I can't even recommend this game for kids as death is a constant factor in the game, which is handled poorly with one-liner throw-aways telling you of how bland and stale life is. Add to the fact that some zones that appear to be safe are infact instant death only makes this situation worse. In one area you can walk on metal plating and in another area it will kill you without rhyme nor reason.

If there was one word to describe this game, it would be "Bland." What made this game so annoying was that I was actually trying to enjoy it, but at almost every turn the crappy gameplay would just get in the way and punish me with death for a mis-step or force me to start an entire room over for a single mis-click.

I will attest to being a masocist for challenging games, but there was no hint of a reward that would make me want to pursue playing this game further. I can easily forgive bad gameplay if there was good writing, music or art to back it up But this game has none of those things going for it.

One afterword: This game was designed for consoles in mind and it shows. If that bothers you, well that's even more of a reason NOT to play it.