Recent reviews by ThePissedPsychologist

Requires an account from epic games store. Which aside from any moral arguments means it just literally will not work if your machine has any problems with EGS' store app like mine does. From what I understand is a decent game if you actually get to play it.

It's a visual novel showcasing an alien whale documentary. I have been unapologetically in love with this series since I was recommended it by an old youtube video and have been throwing it at every creator/friend/stranger too polite to walk away I know. It is an immense labor of love and you can feel it in every panel. It also loves to drop little side comments with such a world building rabbithole behind it you sometimes have to stop and process before becoming irrationally annoyed with the fact that this is JUST a documentary about alien whales.

It's free, takes about 2 hours to get through at a leisurely pace, and only takes a gig of space. It is worth your time and then some.

I give it 10 prefamulated amulite batteries out of 10 retroincabulators.

TL;DR: This is not a single player game, do not buy it expecting such. Buy it with a friend if at all possible. Expect to be bad at it as nothing you learn in other video games will help here. It's a damn fun game.

First things first: despite the single player tag in steam this is VERY MUCH NOT a single player game. There is a brief tutorial where you can lab against a robot that will spam random moves with varying difficulty and a few moving targets and then that's it. Literally every thing else will require another human being. Which depending on where you live could mean the difference between this being everything you paid for or a rather pricey tech demo.

Secondly: This IS by all definitions a fighting game, but don't expect anything you've learned reaching TOP ELO in Guilty gear or SF5 to matter here. Execution is a matter of physical coordination, combos are a matter of learning the deep magic of what moves need a full reset to your default fighting stance and what poses can be flowed into mid move to get an odd curve to your projectiles. Labing out moves is gonna feel more like practicing guards/goals in rocket league then working on any true combos.

Finally: There's a lot of weird things to nit pick in this game. They opted for a full hub world rather than a menu system to navigate. Moves are locked behind PVP experience points in a VR only title meaning you will spend a lot of the early game fighting people able to do much more than you just to get to the cool stuff due to low player bases. And a lot of veteran players understanding this will just suicide out matches on new players to speed level you to the basics like dashing and jumping. Mini games use a lot of these moves that are locked away too, so after the tutorial your only option is to find other players and likely get beaten senseless by them. There's an choice to sort other players by exp unlocks but not by ELO, so it's hard to say what skill level you're gonna face.

BUT

Much as my other fighting game love: Absolver, there is no other experience out there like this right now, and once you get through the slog of early game there is depth and genuinely unique and complex gameplay to be found here. They don't fail to make a good game here. They just fail to make it easy to enter.

Do you *really* like goku? If yes buy it, shell out for the entire DLC if you want. You'll have a blast.

Do you want a game with a balanced roster, decent netcode, a thriving community, an interesting single player campaign, or to not have to shell out over a hundred dollars into DLC to even pretend you have a chance in competitive? Buy literally any other fighting game.

This is a game that despite fan requests for years to implement Rollback, and the Dev team now having implemented rollback in their newest game, still uses an estimated delay system that will regularly drop combos and ♥♥♥♥ with your timing.

This is a game with autocombos that can never drop in lag due to being guarantied to connect into each other, as you are only pressing one button. Most people's tierlists are influenced heavily by how good a character's autocombos are.

This is a game where half of the top tiers in the game are DLC.

This is a game where your difficulty getting out of pressure is entirely defined by how good your character's jab is, as the block push has quickly become irrelevant thanks to autocombos that teleport.

This is a game where every character has a touch of death combo, but not every character can do it solo. I'll let you guess which ones can.

This is a game that nerfed 60% of the base roster for having overpowered mechanics and then gave those mechanics to DLC characters without weaknesses.

This is a game with auto tracking specials that literally cannot miss and can only be blocked.

This is a game I played on and off for about two years now failing to genuinely improve, then switched my team to a higher tier comp and instantly shot up two ranks in one play session.

This is a game where you can either play the characters you like, or the characters who win. Not both. At least for me, anyways. So I ask again:

Do you *really* like goku?

Absolver is a everything I've wanted in a game and it lasts all of two hours.

The ability to build your own moveset is fantastic, and something I've yearned for ever since playing GodHand. The necessity to learn moves by dodging or blocking them so that you understand their weaknesses before you gain their strength is inspired. The combat feels rewarding, and strikes an excellent balance between player skill and deck craft. The world is vibrant and pretty, with an interesting lore to explore through item flavor texts. And this lovely experience is all soured by the fact that it feels like you've completed one level, and the game is over. It is extremely sparse for content.

After a brief tutorial level, you will be dropped into a area with 1 optional boss (repeated in two areas), 6 mini bosses, and two actual bosses. After that is a short tower path, then the final level which has one last boss at the end. A brief cutscene later you're plopped back into the previous area and told to "continue your training." There is some after game procedural dungeons you can run for extra cosmetics. But that's about it for the single player experience. Chances are you will probably not learn more than a quarter of the available moves in the game before you've beaten it.

There is more to the game of course. There are harder versions of the bosses you can fight that continue their story some, locked behind a competitive multiplayer rank cap. The competitive multiplayer offers two modes: a 1v1 first to three death match and a 3v3 king of the hill type game mode. And at the time of writing Absolver is enjoying a burst in new players from being included in the humble bundle's monthly. Still, as it uses a match making system, expect a good two minute wait for 1v1's. Don't expect to play 3v3's at all unless you find a community arranged event. The suspicious part of my brain suggests the developers had eyes for a bigger game than they were actually able to make. And my fears were confirmed when after the recent downfall update was released, the developers announced they will be working on a new game and Absolver will be placed on the back burner and receive only bug fixes from here on out.

Over all this game has an exciting premise, interesting gameplay, and the over all feeling of finding a fantastic new show that got canceled in the middle of it's first season. Would I recommend it for 30 bucks? No, not particularly. I'd stick to around 15$, 20$ if the player count is high. It is certainly worth the Current $8 price tag on 2019's summer sale. Just understand what you're buying is a multiplayer fighter game and a rather low community count.

I was assigned a mission to rescue someone from a ship in a warzone. This particular someone was a character I had lost earlier who happened to have a very nice gun. I wanted that gun back. When I arrived, the first volley from an opposing faction immidietely killed my target and with it, my chances at the gun. I then left the ship I was on, got onto the ship that made me fail, and knocked everyone on board unconscious with their own wrenches before setting their ship to drift off into enemy territory where they were shot down.

I was not told to do this, and was awarded no points for it.
But it made me feel good.

10/10

This game was built using a economy system in order to balance the guns. The most powerful guns were hard to get, and if you lost them, you lost a lot of money. Which made your climb back up even harder. This made an instant kill gun like the awp, more reasonable as it was a rare and hard to acquire weapon. In a similar fashion, the AK-47, the M16, and the Deagle all made their respective ownership harder to come by.

This system is no longer in place. A majority, if not all servers at this point, give you the max amount of money possible which means you'll be buying a game full of primarily useless guns. As the best guns are the high damage weapons with predicatble recoil. The most popular still being the awp for it's infamous one hit kill status. Which renders the game rather simple, with an unforgivable difficulty curve.

Other than a poor balancing structure limiting gameplay choice, this game was made long before modern gaming design concepts such as silhouette recognition, colour seperation, or animation recognition were ever implemented. So you will struggle to decipher friend or foe from a distance, and that is after you manage to discern them from the often dark and mangy backgrounds.

This game made waves when it first arrived, and with good reason. But nowadays it's just old. Really old. And it has not aged well. Anyone who is used to, or learned from, modern design conviences in gameplay will simply not have an easy time adjusting. As well as an old engine resulting in things like bullets coming out of your head or your crotch, depending on how your standing. You could call this difficulty, but it would be difficulty in the same way that it is more difficult to find your location on a topographical map, then a map of a mall.

All of this really only contributes to the already large difficulty curve new players will face when coming into such a long lived community. The community is by no means bad, but their general high skill level means you will not have an easy time learning. Though that does deter small children from playing... so there's that.

TL;DR: ♥♥♥♥♥ unbalanced, competative difficulty is through the roof, overal graphic design is fugly and difficult to understand but hey! No kids. 10/10 If you don't already own it, don't ♥♥♥♥♥♥ buy it.

A fun rougelike with fantastic promise. No real ending to the story yet, kind of a cliffhanger. But the joy of finally stealing the trinkets from that smug bastard is more than enough for the cost. I suggest getting it on sale if you're going to judge it by it's current content, but I feel that the end product will be more than worth it's current price.

Pros: Unique concept, Rewarding game play, and a player skill based progression.

Cons: Artstyle occasionally gets in the way of play, weapons can be lost permenantly, requires multiple playthroughs to unlock all the game modes, minimal customization in the way of visual settings

Best moment: I disarmed a guy so hard his weapon flew around the map and killed him.

Worst moment: The game ends with a cliffhanger and there is no sequel of anysort planned.

Is good yes. Space ninja pirates. Good.