Recent reviews by Jobko

Bad

It's like if Halo released in 2024

One of the better Worms games. Too expensive for what it is.

Fun with friends.

If someone disconnects you have to restart the lobby.

Permanent early access game. Feels like a bunch of bought assets and animations slapped together. Auto save feature doesn't work. Just go play Ark or Palworld instead.

Extremely boring; you walk VERY slowly from one end of a 2D hallway to the other, and sometimes have the option to write about what you see. More of an art piece than a game.

SpaceBourne 2 is an ambitious game considering it’s made by a single developer. The ability to run around, shoot enemies, loot their corpses, and then jump on your ship, fly from a planets surface into space, and get into a dogfight… This formula is extremely hard to replicate, and so far we’ve only seen a handful of games do it well. However in saying this, I have a lot of issues with this game currently, and wouldn’t recommend it.

If this is your first game like this, it might surprise you, but if you’ve played Star Citizen, it leaves a lot to be desired. I will say that what this game achieves is impressive, with space/atmosphere flight feeling a lot better than No Man Sky, but comparing to Star Citizen it does feel like a poor imitation of what that games achieves – which is understandable given the development time and development team size.

My key main issues that I immediately experienced: crashing on startup and crashing on settings change; extreme lag in city areas, and hitching in space areas; motion blur is over-the-top even at its lowest settings, with seemingly no way to turn it off; outside the cities the planet generation goes from flat to bumpy, with nothing to really explore/look at; the main tutorial stops you from using certain key binds, making you feel like the game doesn’t work properly; most voices are AI generated, and a lot of sounds are abrasive to the ears; mouse sensitivity is extremely high initially, and if a setting did exist to change it, I didn’t want to crash just to try adjust it; you have to double press space to skip dialogue, which is tedious/repetitive; there is a lot of doubling of UI elements, most likely due to some poor implementation of chromatic aberration, which turning down in the settings didn’t fix; in general there is just too many motion effects on screen, which when you add in the lag I was experiencing, I could easily see making people motion sick.

This game has a lot to work on, as you can see, and this is just within the first 52 minutes, which should realistically be the best part of the game with the most effort put into it. This review is more of a warning, that while it’s impressive what a single developer can accomplish, this game is early access, and at this price point, is not worth it - currently.

If the developer decided to push this game further by hiring people with the money he’s made from it, or even just putting together a Discord community, making it open source, and allowing people to help him with bug fixing, this could flourish into something truly amazing… However I can’t help but feel like this is another permanent early access game.

While Ultros’ visuals are beautiful and music outstanding, the gameplay didn’t hook me. The games combat is satisfying, but the lack of difficulty and enemy diversity doesn’t sell me on it. This issue compounds as the story requires you to loop over and over, going through the same areas and fighting the same enemies, and re-earning the same abilities/perks.

To try make up for this they have a farming activity, where you find seeds that grow various different plants, each plant opening up possibilities for shortcuts upon every repeat. However if you plant the wrong seed, you can’t dig it up until later in the game, meaning early game you’ll find yourself wasting these seeds over and over. The farming system feels tedious in design. You can also lock in a small portion of your abilities/perks (to keep them on reset), but neither this nor the farming system mitigates the tedium of restarting.

Backtracking/re-exploring feels even worse due to the movement system; there isn’t really any fast way to move through the map, with sprinting tied to continuous running, and all momentum being stopped as soon as you bump into anything, or roll. It’s not even strong as a platformer, with little to no environmental hazards (none that I’ve see so far).

None of this is to say Ultros is a bad game, just that it’s not for me. If you’re going in expecting something akin to Blasphemous or Hollow Knight, you’d be sorely disappointed. The movement/combat in those games feels a lot tighter, and there is more emphasis on platforming. Ultros feels more akin to an experience, as you take in the music, atmosphere, world and its unique visuals, and is best treated as a casual game. If that appeals to you, I heavily recommend it, it’s just not for me.

Loved the first game; this just isn't it.

I have currently defeated two bosses, both forgettable and easy. I have found no secrets despite hitting every wall. The dodge rolls further past the enemy than my attacks reach, and there’s usually not enough time to catch back up to them before they start swinging again. The parry is gone, and now you just have a timed block that acts as a stagger, rather than the original system of block + attack, which just feels awful paired with the dodge roll. None of this was an issue in the first game.

As well as this, the hub is super confusing to traverse, and is way too big. You have to go back to the hub to level up as well as do various other things, splitting the original camp in the first game into multiple areas. To travel back to the camp you have to teleport back, and upon reaching it, travel up to level up, then travel down through caves towards the portal, which you then have to put 5 specific runes in each time to unlock the ability to teleport back to your original location. This issue gets worse when you realize that there are two functionally different save points, one that you can travel to, and one you can travel from, meaning if you haven’t unlocked the former you have to carry on until you do, or lose progress in the map. This is functionally similar to Dark Souls 2/3, but made even more tedious, while the first game was functionally similar to Dark Souls 1. This whole system is just made unnecessarily inconvenient, and adds nothing to the experience.

While I haven’t got much hours, I do not want to go over 2 hours and lose my refund period, and I don’t see myself enjoying this game after reading the other reviews describing more flaws than I’ve experienced so far. If I had to compliment this game, I do enjoy the grappling hook + wall jump. If I had to nit pick, I prefer the jump + dodge = fling yourself far bug in the first game, even though it wasn’t intended, making for some fun/fast movement.

I just don’t see the appeal of this game. The combat isn’t anything special either compared to other games like Blasphemous 2/Hollow Knight. While Salt and Sanctuary was my first 2D souls-like game, and holds a special place in my heart, it’s been long enough that the standards for games like these have raised so much that this just feels out of place.

2 player doesn't allow you to add bots and doesn't let you start due to "not enough players".