Recent reviews by FRQDO

Is this a Valve reference?

No more than 3/100 points. Let me try and verify the review text.

No more than 3/100 points. Let me try and verify the review text.

No more than 3/100 points. Let me delete the entire review and start over.

No more than 3/100 points. Let me try and verify the review text.

No more than 3/100 points. Let me try and verify the review text.

Oh, 100/100 points, interesting mechanics, pretty stages, amazing soundtrack!
Unfortunately the "Post Review" button is broken and can't be clicked.

No more than 3/100 points. Have you tried writing the review as an administrator?

Finally, 100/100 points again. Nice, 1800 crowbars and 3000 teddy bears! Such an easy game.

An awe-inspiringly beautiful and, at times, melancholy game, Firmament feels to me more like an exploration than a puzzle game, as your progress in one Realm is hindered primarily by whether you have acquired the necessary upgrade rather than by how tricky a puzzle is to figure out.

This leads to a highly relaxing atmosphere where you get to immerse yourself in the vistas, soundscapes, and emotions rather than focusing on a puzzle and tuning out the environment.

Each Realm has its distinct looks and conveyed sentiments, and throughout your journey you are accompanied by a lovely soundtrack and the pre-recorded voice messages of your mentor, and I'm not sure what impressed me more: The voice actor's superb delivery (prompting me to try and find more content voiced by her), or that after finishing the game, I found out to much surprise that it seems to be, in fact, an AI voice.

This is one of the few games I've had the pleasure to play so far that leave me with that longing to get to play them for the first time a second time. Unfortunately, I'm not an Entropy Centre Puzzle Operative.


While there are several very noticeable downsides to The Entropy Centre, they may still astonish when considered in context.

Almost all puzzle mechanics felt very similar, if not identical, to their counterparts in Portal 2. I refuse to believe that we have already peaked as a species in terms of puzzle element innovation, so I was hoping to see more new ideas being introduced in The Entropy Centre. However, the game's core mechanic does breathe new life into how these well-known components can be thought about and made to interact with one another. There were a few puzzles that took me a while to wrap my head around, and I think I solved at least one in an unintended way; I was certain that I had to do a certain series of actions but I was missing the third step from the end of the sequence and ultimately went with a different approach that worked but did not feel like the solution the puzzle was designed for.

The environmental design has several gorgeous vistas and evoked -- for me -- exactly the right atmosphere. It did, however, get a bit repetitive over time. This is not a surprise given that a single person apparently built the entire game (now that is a surprise given the quality and scale of it all). I am a big fan of brutalist architecture and like the charm of the office designs of the early computer age, similar to what could be seen in Control.

The third bigger issue for me was the pacing, as the game tries to both put you under pressure with time running out while also leaving you with all the time you need to complete a specific puzzle. This, however, can be seen as fitting the setting of the game, as (spoilers ahead) the Entropy Centre exists outside of the timeline we're accustomed to. Given that time on Earth is being rewound again and again, sometimes by years, Earth might have experienced a handful of decades since the Entropy Centre's construction while Centre has persisted for centuries, and still the everyday technology in the Centre is outdated already on decades-old Earth. Time as we know it starts to unravel and behave erratically at first glance, yet still living in accordance with its own laws, just like we assume it to behave past the event horizon of a black hole. So why should there be a logical conflict between the imminent doom and the infinite time window to solve a puzzle?


In summary, I am impressed by the range of emotions this game managed to evoke, and I am thankful for the occasional chuckles it gave me.

An absolute grind. The "complete the game with villain X at difficulty Y" achievement had been unlocked by at most 7% of players per villain/difficulty. My first play-through took me 55 hours.
Pretty much all quests are basically a combination of "send minions on X missions spread across the world map", "complete research X", or "defeat X in your lair".
In several cases, after having done that, you get to advance to "Quest X, part 2: Do all of the above again".

To finish the game (I assume this to be independent of the villain you pick), you have to fire your super weapon at maximum strength at each of the five Forces of Justice strongholds (and maybe also at each other region afterwards; I decided to fire at each other region first for one of the achievements because after sinking over 50 hours into this, why not). This costs several units of ammunition per shot, which must be loaded individually into the machine by your minions and can be obtained on the world map in packs of at most 3 at a time. The missions that allow you to get ammunition for your super weapon spawn randomly and sometimes not at all for quite some time, so firing that thing over 20 times required a lot of waiting for those "click here to get ammo" popups to appear.

I see a lot of potential in this franchise, but the execution of this installment was just painful. There is some decent humor scattered about, some nice trivia references and all, but it just disappears under the mountains of grind.
It reminded me a lot more of that Facebook abomination from a few years ago than of the original game.


Oh, and selling QoL updates as a DLC? Really?
Additional content as a DLC is fine, I guess. But locking playability updates behind another paywall is just disgusting.



Or fitting for a game about nefarious geniuses that exploit everyone else for their personal gain...

With the core idea that you can jump from one point in space to the same point, but in a different reality, Quanect has a very interesting and potentially mind-bending concept.
In games such as Portal, you would navigate one reality but have to come up with unusual ways of connecting said reality to itself; in Quanect, you have to navigate multiple realities at the same time.

Unfortunately, I see several issues with the current (February 2021) state of this game:

1. The game is still unfinished. After not even a dozen small levels, your progress is blocked by a note from the developer thanking you for playing, and informing you that the subsequent levels are a work in progress that will be released with the next update. This “next update” would have been in the making for almost three years now.
   
2. The game’s advertising is misleading;
   
   1. It claims that the device you use “repeats your movements in another reality” (technically not wrong, but it made me expect time loops and puzzles akin to Braid)
      
   2. “Portals serve to work between realities” which they don’t. All portals in the game move you through space within the same reality, except for one in the last level which is black, teleports you right back to itself, and is probably just broken.
      
   3. The trailer asks you to “Get out alive” which you cannot do because (a) the game does not have any real ending and (b) the only failure state is when you fall onto a black surface, which just teleports you back to the entrance. There is no sense of threat to your life whatsoever.
3. The game could heavily benefit from visual cues in the level design. You have no clue where a button that the door in front of you might be, if you can even see the door (as opposed to having a part of the wall shift away); you don't always have a clue what a particular button does (usually there is a green line leading somewhere, but not always; some locations that you need to reach are rather hard to make out without carefully peeking in every direction in every dimension until you realize that there is actually a walkable platform above you. Besides that, many of the rooms are very large with very litte in them, which could be remedied with some more interesting design elements.

All in all, as someone who sometimes creates prototypes for game mechanics I think might turn out interesting, I’d be proud to bring it to a state similar to that of Quanect—but I would not be proud enough to publish it as a commercial, non-early access title.

I will not change this recommendation regardless of whatever patches the no doubt passionate and talented developers will deliver to make this game into what they (and I) want it to be; I want this to be a lesson for the responsible managers.

The original XIII was one of the very few games that I replayed several times since I enjoyed the vast diversity in gameplay and environments. The moment I saw that there was going to be a remake, I pre-ordered it, and was looking forward to its release for months.

However, someone "smort" decided to push this game out before it was ready to meet the world:

• Dialogue occasionally cuts out mid-sentence
  
• Sound (especially gunshots) in general breaks many times, resulting in a painful mess of white noise
  
• Sound levels sometimes behave rather strangely (you can hear a radio on a rooftop, but not on the fire escape two stories up, but then again another story up, for instance)
  
• Mission and enemy indicators are sometimes not showing when/where they should, or showing when/where they shouldn’t (In the bank, my feet were my target location)
  
• I had to empty roughly four-and-a-half assault rifle magazines into one soldier’s head at close range to kill him (that’s about 135 rounds. Don’t tell me the helmets in this game are that strong.)
  
• AI glitches out all the time. My companion does nothing, and the enemy behavior is so bizarre that I only manage to die on the “Only pick this if you have a lot of shooter experience” setting if I try to rely on punches only.
  
• Cycling through your arsenal is very unresponsive, which makes it tough to quickly switch to the right weapon in a dynamic combat situation
  
• Prompts for introducing gameplay mechanics don’t show reliably
  
• Shooting enemies through windows often didn’t work, whereas those same enemies could see and shoot me through those same windows

Now why would a game be such a mess upon release?
In their official statement, Microids say that "the pandemic […] has added unexpected delays in the development schedule and the QA process"—but for some interesting reason, it has added neither unexpected nor expected delays in the release schedule or the marketing process.
Well, here’s a brain-twister for the clever managers who made these decisions:

If you drive your kids to Disneyland on the highway and suddenly run into really bad weather that leaves you no choice but to slow down, YOU WILL NOT ARRIVE AT DISNEYLAND BY THE TIME YOU HAD PLANNED.

Now, you can

• Risk your life and the lives of your kids in the back seat by speeding through the storm (“crunch time”)
  
• Tell your kids that they’ll just have to make do with the local funfair instead (“release on schedule”)

OR:

• You say “Hey kids, we care about our own moral integrity, so let’s please hold out for a bit longer” (“let the hard-working developers, artists, and designers finish their job”)

If your budget doesn’t suffice to make it through that extra stretch, then maybe get a smaller yacht next time?


Seriously, imagine if we developed medical treatments in this fashion. “Ma’am, the potential vaccine showed a 50% mortality rate in our most recent trial”—“I don’t care, we promised to inject everyone by the end of the year so let’s do it!”
…riiiight.


I really hope that the folks at PlayMagic manage to fix the open issues so that their debut title may shine as brightly as the original game did.

---

In the past six weeks, we have seen three larger patches now that—to give credit where credit is due—make it possible to
✨𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘢𝘮𝘦!✨

There is still a lot of fun to be had when you fall through the floor, drown because the surface of the water spontaneously decides to be a one-way street, or everything turns pitch black unless you look at the world from certain very specific angles...

But my favorite fun feature in this version TAKKA has to TAKKA be the TAKKA glitch during TAKKA the final TAKKA boss fight TAKKA during which TAKKA you get TAKKA some heavy TAKKA machine gun TAKKA support fire TAKKA that doesn’t TAKKA stop at TAKKA any point TAKKA because apparently TAKKA this gun TAKKA has a TAKKA magic magazine TAKKA with unlimited TAKKA clip size TAKKA and additionally TAKKA possesses a TAKKA kind of TAKKA voodoo magic TAKKA that allows TAKKA it to TAKKA fire continuously TAKKA even when TAKKA the level TAKKA ends and TAKKA you continue TAKKA through the TAKKA next one TAKKA and then TAKKA enjoy the TAKKA credits rolling TAKKA while this TAKKA permanent gunfire TAKKA sound keeps TAKKA playing non-stop TAKKA until the TAKKA credits stop TAKKA and you TAKKA are sent TAKKA back to TAKKA the main TAKKA menu, in TAKKA which the TAKKA gun is TAKKKA still firing.

This game is absolutely [REDACTED].

#NinaLivesMatter

Playing this DLC reminded me a lot of playing Alan Wake's American Nightmare.
Somehow, it feels like you're playing the same, familiar game, sort of like a "returning home" feeling, but at the same time, everything is new and different.

I loved the humor and how a lot of the mechanics were incorporated in clever new ways (the door knocker, for instance, was just grand!)

However, I had numerous crashes while playing the game.