Recent reviews by Kolonel

This game ran so Helldivers 2 could crawl. Simply incredible.

Insanely good story mod. Gameplay is improved from HL2. Wider enemy selection that makes a lot of sense (and they thankfully bring back a couple of HL1 enemies, which I think shows a lot of love for the series). There's a bunch of new guns that all feel very punchy and responsive. There's a lot of dialogue, with a lot of it being funny/cheeky.

Between the upgraded gameplay, dialogue, level design, etc. it genuinely feels like a new Half Life entry. Would recommend.

It's a roguelike deckbuilder (think slay the spire) with the positioning and "knowing what the enemies will do on the next move" of Into the Breach. It has a few new ideas (weapons that affect where your attacks land/add dmg/special effects, etc). The gameplay is pretty interesting, and it's honestly a pretty good blend of all the ideas it's based off of. The actual balancing is abysmal though.

The big issue with the game is that mobility is extremely limited. You get a single tile move every turn (which costs 1 energy), and this move disappears if it isn't the first card you play. Mobility cards are extremely rare and/or expensive as well. Block cards are pretty subpar, and enemies damage VASTLY overscales how much you can block in the 2nd floor onwards.

Basically, you'll have a good time, and then you'll take a ton of AoE damage or face a boss that rushes 3 tiles width (so you need at least 2 moves to escape) and you won't be able to get out of the way. Meanwhile, bosses will hop around like mad, and you'll spend quite a few turns just moving the one tile you can and then passing (since you likely won't be able to move again after that first card, unless you prioritize picking up mobility cards)

It's frustrating more than anything else, since there's so much unavoidable damage, and you can see that it is indeed unavoidable.

Curious to see if I change my mind as I continue playing it, if the devs change the mechanics, etc.

tl;dr the first game is better story wise, this is better gameplay wise, but this is still pretty good if you want to get more of the AISTF world.

The biggest issue is that the game tries really hard to not spoil the first game, to the point where the characters from the first game (Date, Mizuki, etc) act as if they never underwent any of the character growth from the first game. So, they have very flat personalities, and usually have one extremely strong character trait that vastly overshadows everything else.

The twists are cool, but also extremely contrived. The issue is that they sacrifice logic to the point that there's a lot of things that don't really make sense or are way too coincidental to be true. At least one character literally only exists to make the twist make sense (and it's still "ok, I'm going to pretend that makes sense even though it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥")

Game has almost no patches/updates. Game is very clunky but charming for some reason. Graphics are pretty good.There's a surprising amount of depth in gameplay mechanics (for example, crafting, or the level up skill system). Despite all the shortcomings, it's really fun with friends, it's quite difficult at the start and progression is really satisfying. Very easy to host your own servers, too.

Roguelike first person shooter. The best part is the movement; the game has very fast and crisp arena-FPS style movement (think Quake). Most weapons are projectile (so leading is necessary), enemies have telegraphed/projectile attacks, so there's a high skill ceiling in landing hits and dodging attacks. Good variety of weapons with different firing modes, elements, etc. Story is kind of mediocre, but just a vehicle for unlocking new heroes, etc. Graphics are (really) good too. Just wish there was more depth in RPG elements in the middle of a run.

Best way to describe it is, "better than expected". Movement is pretty fast and developed, there's wallrunning and a dash/slide, which is way more than I expected. Guns have enough variety that you keep playing to see what new gun prefixes you can find. A lot of the prefixes are interesting/fun to play around with. There's a lot of thoughtfulness put into this. Map stages get stale after a while, but can't really complain about a free game.

Great sound, map design, and graphics, for a pretty underrated game. Easy to pick up and hard to master, mostly because guns are one hit kill and you will get killed across the map from an unseen enemy. Really unique differentiation between all the guns, too. 3/4ths of the game might be bolt action rifles, but they all handle differently, have different sights, reload times, recoil, etc. so they all feel different (which is really, really nice)

Recently, devs added bots and updated the UI to be much, much slicker. Some people hate this change, I personally like it. Gives the game a lot more longevity and makes it look nice.

Incredibly punishing game where your characters start up weaker than literally every other character in the game, but is also incredibly rewarding when previously tough enemies are now easy to beat. No quest system, you can do whatever you want which is a plus and a minus. Very indepth mechanics, building your own base is possible and so is near complete automation. Honestly a really fun game, and I'm really excited to see what mods will bring us next. Hoping to see a quest system/much more NPCs with dialogue (right now there is a very small amount of NPCs to talk to)

Do NOT min-max it by bee-lining straight for the most OP weapons and armor, it'll ruin the game for you.

Huge variety of weapons, insanely good dual wielding system (you can dual wield any two different one handed weapons, and they're different enough for it to be interesting to try out), several jokey weapons like a hatchet for chasing boys down and hacking and wackin and smacking. Decent amount of maps, very meme-worthy lines, and runs well on literally any computer.

Only issues are that it gets a little stale if you play it nonstop for several days, so just try a different playstyle or take a break. It also has a somewhat janky aiming system which will take a bit of time getting used to, but once you know it it'll be a breeze.

This game is a banger through and through, and reminds me of the good old days of source mods. Also, it's free, and beats so many paid games.