Recent reviews by Ottomic

I'll be brief: For the time being, I hate this game.

The main thing are the graphics. There are obvious asset streaming issues with the game that cause godawful textures to pop up, everything looks shimmery and smudgy, and while I was able to somewhat improve the look of the game statically by fudging around in the settings, once things get moving everything looks like a blurry mess of browns and blacks. I really hope whatever is happening with the engine gets fixed, because this is not acceptable.

The game also feels incredibly imprecise and laggy, but this could also be related to the graphic problems. Monster moves feel very staggered with weirdly weak feedback and bad readability, and my hunter also feels imprecise, laggy and messy to control. Monster hunter world had very deliberate and readable movesets for both monsters and your hunter, and now half the time you can't tell what's going on or what the monster is going to do. Again, these readability problems could very well be related to the game's godawful performance. I might need to get used to how the game plays, I have only fought a couple of monsters, but World was also very different from previous entries and I don't remember having feeling this wrong to play. I dunno.

Keeping on the trend of the game feeling like slurry to play, Wilds tries to add to the same streamlining that started with World, but now it's reaching a point where it's just unnecessary and hurtful to the game loop. You no longer pick up a job and go out with a clear objective, you now can... leave your base, and... walk around, and fighting a monster, for example, will automatically start a mission, even though you're just on an expedition, haven't picked up a job, nor was your intention to. There's no clear separation between what's story and what's free play, there are a lot of moments where you can't just go out and hunt because you have to complete a story section that just consists of a yap session with someone... In its effort to be ImMerSIvE, the game just turns into slop. As a player, you no longer are in control of deciding what you are going to do: instead it feels like the game is deciding what you are doing or are able to do at a given time.

There are a few changes that I might not agree with but I can make do, changes that I absolutely begrudge but I can make my best to cope with (like the absolute, complete, total removal of tracking, because I guess gamers are too dumb to track prey in a game about hunting monsters), but overall there are what I hope are unintentional technical issues with the engine that will get fixed down the line and are causing the game to look bad and play bad. I hope these problems will get fixed, and I hope I grow to love this game. But for now I just don't want to play it any more because I don't want to get more pissed off at it than I am.

God forgive me to say this, but right now even Rise is a better game than wilds. Yeah the combat feels anemic and mashy and the monster hunter equivalent to jingling keys in front of a baby but at least it's organized and conveys all information the player needs successfully. And if you're going to play a disappointing mohun game, might as well do it on one that doesn't charge 70 bucks for the privilege.

The Sinking City is the platonic ideal of a AA game: an incredibly ambitious project that punches way above its class and does so quite successfully, but that also feels limited at every turn by its technical and financial constraints, a game smack dab in between the Sherlock Holmes graphical adventures Frogwares had developed up to this point, and a third person shooter with RPG elements, whose enjoyment of will squarely depend on your capacity to keep the forest in focus instead of the janky ass trees that form it.

The game follows the path of Charles Reed, a private investigator who arrives at the city of Oakmont following strange dreams and visions that seem to drive people towards it. Over the course of this investigation, our detective will delve deep into the multiple happenings into this city, battle eldritch horrors beyond comprehension, and resist the madness emanating from its citizens. Why is everyone acting so crazy? What lurks below the city? And why the hell does this town have so many ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ men's clothing stores?!

tSC is divided into several cases and side quests consisting of a rather straightforward loop: Find clues, find the location these clues point towards, arrive at location, put a cap on some Deep One ass, put everything together, and advance to the next case; all the while navigating the open world-ish city of Oakmont, exploring its fog-ridden streets against a rather limited selection of enemies during combat sections featuring music that is between ethereal and industrial. Yes, this is pretty much Silent Hill 2 At Home with an investigation-oriented gimmick, and trust me when I say this without an inkling of negativity.

The art style is, frankly, quite impressive. While most of it comes from the technical prowess of UE4 like lighting, physics and volumetric fog, the characters and scenery also feature really great looking assets, and this is one of those games that you will just gawk at while going through it. Boats and fish corpses litter the semi flooded streets, people wander the street muttering to themselves and acting crazy, and hey, I'd also be a little nutty if my entire town had only 4 faces to share between all its inhabitants.

Staying true to its source material, Oakmont is a seemingly organic location, but once you start paying attention, its veneer will slowly crack, showing its true, janky self. First of all, the city has not been affected by a flood, but a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Kaiju attack. Cthulhu himself has risen up from the depths and dragged his scaly ballsack all across this city: it's littered by boats straight up yeeted into buildings, cars appear to have suffered horrific accidents in places where they could have never even managed to get up to speed even if they tried, and calling the state of its buildings "squalid" would be making them a kindness. It looks positively post-apocalyptic, and while it's super cool to navigate a location that gives out the feeling of dilapidated, unsettling and hostile that one imagines when reading a Lovecraft book, it's... a bit too much.

Like, at first it will feel creepy and unsettling, but quickly you will realize that no, it's just that the level designer went a little too overboard with the ambiance to the point of caricature. The bartender at the Under the Keel inn will stay there buffing the one spot in his counter, while the floor under him is chock full of seaweed. You'll see people sweeping the floor, in a rainstorm, next to a pile of rotting, half eaten fish. The people in Oakmont might be a touch off the rocker, but I'm sure they at least grasped the essentials of sanitation, or at least they'd keep enough of their sense of smell. It's these incongruous details that will keep breaking the otherwise great immersion, and you will soon be able to see the reason: tSC is a painting made with only half a palette of colors. It's a massive city created on limited assets, and as a result, you're going to see a lot of copy-and-paste design that not only looks off place, but also quite repetitive after a short time.

There's only a handful of interior location plans, shamelessly reused over, and over, and over throughout the investigations. Even major locations like the Throgmorton manor will be reused multiple times, and in most of those locations you will expect to fight the same 3-4 monsters in several waves and configurations.

Combat in tSC will start feeling clunky and dangerous, but soon you will realize you can just peace out of most combat encounters. At the start you will only have a melee attack and a pistol to your name, but as you complete investigations and level up, you will obtain new weapons and improve Charles' abilities, gradually becoming a force to be reckoned with. Fights can easily be cheesed by kiting enemies or stunlocking them, and your main hampering is the very limited ammo count per weapon; but at the same time you can just craft ammo and supplies mid fight. The combat is nothing to write home about and it's quite limited and repetitive, but it's never not satisfying to blast a bunch of Chtonians to kingdom come. Keeping an eye out for lootables is also very important to stay topped on materials, but I rarely felt like I was so short that I had to deliberately go out of my way to scavenge more.

Having said this, you might wonder what the point is in making a massive city if most of it is going to be copy-paste buildings and repetitive combat encounters, right? Credit where credit is due, the streets themselves do feel quite organic and lived-in, but most importantly, unlike games with a purely decorative open world like Cyberpunk or LA Noire, the core of the game's cases will consist on opening your map and manually locating where you must go next. I'd hesitate to call it a "minigame", but it is a little problem solving exercise that you will have to do for practically every objective, multiple times per case. Thankfully you will unlock quick travel points as you explore the city, and navigating it never felt tedious or stretched out for me. Much like the combat, both consulting the corresponding archives to figure out where to go next and actually getting there felt quite satisfying to pull out, despite how straightforward this loop is. The game also features a few gimmicks like visions where you have to put a series of embarrassingly obvious events in order, or dispelling illusory walls with your "inner eye", which are probably the more annoying and dragged out moments in the game, but overall, it wasn't too terrible.

Look, there's something that has to be appreciated about a game that knows its limits and tries to make the best of it. During my playthrough I never encountered any game breaking bugs, or collision issues, only a couple of times enemies spawned either below the floor or above the ceiling, and none of it was game breaking, or resulted in unwinnable situations. It's a game that maybe does 4-5 things, but it makes damn sure it does them well, even throwing little gimmicky flourishes like underwater sections, or letting you travel the debris-chocked flooded streets with a surprisingly solid feeling motorboat. It really feels like Frogwares only delivered the quantity they were confident to deliver with quality, which is something rare to encounter in the current gaming landscape. A bold leap from their previous work, and a landing they could hardly have stuck better, given the circumstances.

The Sinking City is a very solid game that tries to do the best with what it can, and that has the right amount of focus on the right places to deliver a mostly alright experience, As long as you are within this wavelength, that will provide 30-ish quite entertaining hours of content, and while I would not buy this game at full price, I would absolutely recommend experiencing if you can snag it at a 30-50% discount.

7/10.

This game is pure, unadultered, 100% complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ jank.

I don't really mind the graphics, and I'm not even bothered by the extremely simplistic "just chase around and bump against you until you're dead" enemy AI, but the combat "system" in this game is near to non-existant. I couldn't believe when the game told me that I'm supposed to just kite enemies, turn, run away, turn, hit, turn, run away, turn, hit, THIS IS THE BULK OF THE COMBAT. ON A GAME THAT IS MEANT TO BE A ROGUELIKE. You're going to be fighting for most of the game, and you are going to be tested on your skill. Your skill to hit, turn, run, turn, hit, turn, run, turn, hit, turn, run.

You know you're ♥♥♥♥♥♥ when Resident Evil Gaiden has a more sophisticated combat system than your game.

Just allow me to make myself perfectly clear: there's no parrying, or dashing, or sidestepping, or shoving or kicking of any description. You can block, but enemies spam attacks so often that even if you use that, you will have to kite them anyway. A dagger has the same range as a spear. The pinnacle of Barony's combat complexity is timing your attacks so they hit the enemy before they can hit you, and running away from them once they can hit you. Over, and over, and over, enemy after enemy, floor after floor. Ranged combat is essentially the same, only you can attack a few times before having to run away.

If you're going to make a "hardcore" game where death has important repercussions, you better damn make sure you have a tight, responsive, predictable, interesting and especially FUN combat system, not this barely-above-rock'em sock'em robots ♥♥♥♥. I genuinely feel embarrassed for anyone who has publicly endorsed this game, but at least I can take solace in the fact they will one day find their way into Skyrim and the resulting stroke will contribute to increasing the average level of standards for the gaming community at large.

I had seen reviews about it and I was kinda piqued when people talked about how complex this game is, and how it's got so much content, and how it keeps getting updated and how deep it is-- It's not! It's the most basic ass RPG system draped over a "game" that would be an insult to compare to Minecraft in terms of combat depth. And I wouldn't even mind it being simplistic if it was pleasant to play, but it's not. You are going to be walking around dungeons to find enemies, and once you do, you're going to hit them, turn, run, turn, hit them, turn, run, turn, hit them. Feel repetitive yet? Good, 'cause that's all you're going to be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ doing.

I unfortunately cannot refund this ginormous piece of ♥♥♥♥ as I've had this gifted to me, but please, for the love of god, do not even consider wasting your money in this unless it's AT THE VERY LEAST 75% off. And even then do yourself a favor and consider any of the other available options, depending on what you're looking for. Ziggurat, Elderborn, Dark Messiah, Lichdom, Zeno Clash, Daggerfall, Battlespire, Arx Fatalis, Grimrock, Vaporum, Lunacid, Monomyth, Shady Knight. I know they don't perfectly overlap what Barony goes for, but at least they're pleasant to play, not this absolute atrocity.

Compared to any of those, this game is like a Youtube Kids video next to a 2 hour in-depth Chernobyl documentary; a rudimentary facsimile of something that itself doesn't seem to grasp. I'm sorry because I know someone has gone through the trouble of developing it, but jesus christ it is pure trash through and through.

3/10, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this is probably the worst "game" I've played in years. You have to try to be this abjectly bad.

This. If you ever wanted to play a happy medium between a traditional twin stick top down roguelite and the comfy brain slop of a "survivors" game, this is it.

You might be taken aback by the graphics, and it's perfectly understandable, as I was too, however, the NES-y, primitive presentation works very well in a game where enemy lifespan is measured in seconds and you can turn your character into what can only be described as a mass of explosions. The graphics are simple, yes, but once you start playing the game, they will simply take a backseat to the additctive, satisfying and hilarious loop of building up your character, picking up ever increasingly powerful weapons, and cumulatively becoming a harbinger of doom while chewing room after room and boss after boss.

And the music. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, the music. The game is chock full of absolutely boppin' chiptune classics, from the upbeat level themes to the intense and kickass boss tracks. It probably sounds weird to say if you haven't played this yet, but you'll have to trust me when I say that it's hard to find games where the graphics and music complement each other so well to deliver an enjoyable experience.

The game lets you aim your shots with your right stick or mouse if you want, but you can simply hold down an autofire button and focus on evasion and positioning. While you can end up with veritable meat slabs, your character will have very limited health at the start, and your healing options are quite limited throughout the game, so the game takes on a focus of frantically dodging enemies while trying to nuke them as fast as possible with bonkers powerful attacks, which can be done by carefully hedging your bets as you make your way through the runs, holding onto that gear set hoping to complete it, or suddenly having to shift your leveling focus once you come across a really REALLY good weapon, for example.

The game is more on the easy side (provided you can take advantage of the gear and boosters you pick up along the way), but it takes this into account, being designed to kill your character at a certain point while still making overall progress. This is great, because it means that the game can stay fun and not overly difficult, while at the same time engaging with its roguelite mechanics. It does suck having your unstoppable wrecking ball of a character get killed out of the blue at the end of a run, but it's honestly quite easy to end up with one, so next time you'll try another class and, quite possibly, end up with an even stupider character by the end.

Speaking of, starting classes will be unlocked as you progress; some as you progress through the main loop of the game, some for fulfilling specific paths. There's quite a lot of content to just keep coming back to a new run and trying new things out, The only thing that you need to be aware of is that while runs are quite brisk they can still take up the better part of an hour, and there's no way to just save and quit mid run, so once you start one you better make sure you have the time to finish it.

I consider this game to be on par with Binding of Isaac, which to me is the gold standard for the genre, sometimes surpassing it by virtue of its more forgiving, breezier progression. While less skill based, it provides a quicker, comfier and more satisfying game loop, and while I'm not saying that one is better than the other, they each reign supreme in their own little niches of top down roguelite goodness.

8/10.

Roboquest is a real pickle of a game to review, because nothing in its presentation particularly stands out. In fact, it was the comic booky, cel shaded looks of it, complete with onomatopeias and comic book looking cutscenes, which kinda drove me away from it when I first saw it come out in Early Access: it did look like a game that put form over substance to cash in on an otherwise bland and stiff pew pew roguelite.

If you listed all its bullet points, Roboquest is just an aggressively mid game in every sense of the word: It's got RNG-y weapons, it's got a few classes that play essentially the same just with a couple different actions, it's got mostly static maps with branching paths, you get perks every once in a while, there's some collectibles, whoop de doo. So why should you pick this over Immortal Redneck, or Nightmare Reaper, or Witchfire, Gunfire Reborn, RoR2 or even something like a Borderlands?

Before I get to the main reason, it's important to mention that, while Roboquest doesn't have many standout gimmicks, what it does have is an exquisite craftmanship. It is a delicately spiced melange of otherwise mundane mechanics, tuned in such a way that they deliver a fun, solid experience run after run regardless of what class you picked, how you leveled your guy through the game, what weapons you grabbed and which path you picked. Every class feels unique, and every improvement is palpable, and there are a ton of ways you can play through the game, and yet everything feels viable while retaining the identity of the class and the choices you made as a player. I would be remiss if I didn't mention the music, which is absolutely incredible and perfectly accompanies the action as you progress through the game.

Either as a happy accident or whatever baguette witchcraft the developers practiced, it cannot be understated how well everything comes together and how pleasant the game is to play. From sniper rifles to shotguns to deployable turrets to room-clearing gatling cannons, the player will be able to pick up whatever class they choose, with the corresponding unique abilities and melee attack, and advance through the levels however they see fit. You can stand on top of a level and snipe everything, or you can even just skip entire levels, if you don't mind missing on the level-ups. Or, you can charge headfirst into a room and let the hallmark feature of Roboquest take center stage: the schmovement. Oh my god the schmovement.

It is hard to describe how incredibly good movement feels in this game. There's nothing fancy, you can run, jump, crouch-slide and grind on the rare rail, but it's how it comes together. Again, it's hard to do it justice in text form, but it's just so, so good. Chaining actions is so effortless, and it's so easy to keep the action going while shooting and swapping guns and using your abilities, and just running into Mario jumping off a robot into another jump into a stomp into a slide, and the genius of Roboquest is that it makes it easy. I don't know how, 'cause the game doesn't feel as if it's helping you, but it somehow makes it so easy and accessible and yet incredibly rewarding at the same time.

It doesn't matter if you're playing as a juggernaut spitting missiles and shotgun blasts, or a scout teleporting around and backstabbing enemies, no matter how you play it, the game is going to make you feel better than you really are, and it feels incredible. Let me tell you, I'm an absolute scrub when it comes to FPS games, and Roboquest has awakened feelings in me that shouldn't be attainable without chemical assistance.

So what's bad about Roboquest? Well, progression will always be funneled down into big room fights where movement speed and being able to nuke a lotta robots a lotta fast is the only thing that matters. This means that a lot of builds and weapons are suboptimal at best and a death sentence at worst, so invariably whether a game is successful or not will boil down to being able to find something that shoots very fast for a lot of damage most of the time. Certain upgrades are massively more useful than others as well, and finally, the (mostly) static levels will eventually end up feeling repetitive. But like I said, these are the rare blemishes in an otherwise incredibly well balanced game that at the end of the day will give you an incredible amount of bang for your buck.

Roboquest is an example of polish over gimmicks, and how focusing on the fundamentals of gameplay pays off. An incredible example of a game laser focused on providing an exquisite moment to moment gameplay that will never fail to feel amazing.

9/10.

This game is both a disappointment, and one of the best games I've played all year.

I haven't played much (if at all) gunpoint, but I did enjoy Suspicious' last game, Heat Signature, a lot. I hope I can make it justice someday with a proper review, but in short, all three games share quite a bit of trademarks, which include pseudo-stealthy tactical elements and providing the player with dummy OP weapons and abilities and setting them loose in multi-solution situations where they can have fun putting them to use. Tactical Breach Wizards applies these principles to an isometric, turn based squad strategy game very reminiscent of Invisible Inc. And it does this really, really, really, really well.

In TBW you will advance through a linear story, sub-divided in preset levels following the adventures of Navy Seer Zan and Anxiety Survivor Jen as they try to avoid World War-- uh... (checks notes) 5! Cutting through levels meticulously designed to make the most of a plethora of skills and abilities that will be unlocked as you advance through the game. (Most) skills are really nice, and can be upgraded on top of that, giving you a lot of flexibility on how you build your team as you advance through the game, and it's pretty crazy how everything is so balanced that you can complete most of the game, including the bonus secondary objectives, with a massive amount of builds and strategies. There are no to-hit percentages, or locational damage, and you will be able to rewind any action during a turn, so while some missions can be tough sometimes, it's just a matter of finding the right combination of things to do in sequence.

But gameplay aside, this game shines in the story department. Besides the fact that it is set in a world where magic users are commonplace, most levels will include a bit of banter between the characters before they start, and every single one of those is gold. They're dry, amazingly paced exchanges that will rarely not be at least snort-worthy. And this is consistent throughout the entire game. Just these conversations are well worth the price of admission and never fail to deliver.

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3341624766

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3341625169

With that linear story, however, also come the negatives, and this is not as big of a problem in and of itself, but it more relates to the developer's previous game, Heat Signature. Contrary to TBW, HS was very very light on the story, but it offered a massive sandboxy universe where you could play however you wanted, with whichever loadout you wanted, and with total freedom when approaching each situation. You picked a random schmuck, each with their strengths and weaknesses, and played them until they died or retired, which provided incredible amounts of replayability and unexpected situations that were incredibly satisfying to get out of.

TBW is almost the opposite: While there are many ways to resolve a situation, you will always be sure that each room has been painstakingly designed to be beaten with the team you ware with, using the abilities at your disposal. As a result, it feels much more like a puzzle game: Even though its puzzles can have several possible solutions, player expression is reduced to "do you want to play the next story mission or the next *side* mission?", changing your squad's clothes, and choosing which abilities to upgrade or respec. Which is a bit disappointing compared to the follow-up game I was picturing in my mind when I read the devs were working on a new one.

The game does make a noble effort to provide a healthy amount of content, with not only the main story mode, but also opening "vr training"-like side missions and a level editor as well. Having played it for 9 hours I have finished act 2 and a few of the dream scenarios so there is plenty to do in the game, but how much of it you will want to enjoy is highly dependant on being loaded into a challenge map with a gajillion of enemies and being excited about the prospect of finding where to move and what to do for each character for the next 30 minutes to play it.I really like this game and its story, but that feeling of "this is just a linear sequence of pre-designed puzzles" kept nagging me.

Anyway, even though TBW does not reach the lofty expectations that its predecessor set, it does not detract from this very fun, very well put together game. If you are looking for a story driven, tactical, turn based, defenestration-heavy game, it can't get much better.

8/10.

Where we are going we do need roads, actually.

Right so, first off the bat: Star Trucker is a simulator game. Far from a hardcore simulator, mind you, but it is a videogame that puts a strong emphasis in recreating a complicated machine, with multiple co-dependent systems dedicated to keeping you both alive and moving, and turns out, in the future your survival is a bit more hands-on than it is now.

The first few hours of your playthrough will be both wonderful and terrifying. The game does provide a tutorial mission, and a reasonable manual, and your truck has so much stuff on it, with clicky buttons and levers to control from the lights on your cab to your AC, your thrusters, breakers for each individual system, flight assist, most of them with actual applications that you are encouraged to micromanage to get the most out of each one, and the larger part of them can, at any point, start screaming at you which will launch you in a mad dash to find what's wrong and how you can fix it while barreling down a space highway at 120mph, trying to complete the job that will pay for your next air filter.

And I mean, this will really depend on how much you enjoy in-depth system simulation and more importantly, how relevant this simulation is to your minute-to-minute, but I was immediately hooked. I had seen nothing about this game until I picked it up, and exploring the sheer depth of all the fiddly bits in my truck was really cool, and resulted in moments I do look fondly on, like when I realized I was almost out of oxygen and had to figure out, on my feet, a way to replace my busted filters and race to a replacements shop, o2 level steadily decreasing, vision getting blurry, when I was like "wait! spacesuit!", managing to run the last few kilometers wearing it, finally reaching the shop and resolving the crisis. It's stressful at first, and I can understand how you can easily die during these first hours, and I can see players being frustrated at it. But if you are in the same spectrum that I am, man, it's really nice to come out on top at the end of it.

As you finally start getting settled into the complexities of your truck while panickedly running non-stop jobs to just be able to stay on top of spares, you'll inevitably question yourself if you can even keep up with this, if you'll be able to reach the next filter change, if you'll find enough batteries before these go, running through systems, checking new shops, making a sense of what's where, and eventually, through much work and grinding, you'll finally reach the "mostly space truckin" part of the game.

Your space truck flies... well, like a truck. You don't get lateral translation, however, you do have lateral thrusters that will keep you moving forward. It's more kind of like a boat, where it's more about momentum than direction, but once you get used to it, it's really great. Learning how to coast, what turns you can take at what speed, how to account for your haul, dealing with traffic, using the external cameras in your MFDs to get a sense of your surroundings... There's an external camera (with no hud), but you don't really need to switch to it. You can upgrade several aspects of your truck, and soon you will be piloting your cab as an extension of yourself, flipping around to dock into hauls and drifting a 3 trailer into a turn while well over the speed limit. Which, oh yeah, space roads.

So you'd think you can just go from A to B in a straight line, since, well, this is space, right? Well, most of this space is filled with debris, and trust me that a single debris strike can become VERY problematic for your truck, so you'll want to follow space roads. This is something you'll quickly need to get used to, and at first it won't be easy because you don't get sector maps. You will need to figure out and get used to the layout of every system, and how to get from A to B with the least amount of pain. Every sector is unique and has it's own personality, from the tight and industrial Edgeburgh to the Outrun-esque Dependency Loop, the windy and dangerous Haze Way, some of them almost feel like racing game stages, and they are really fun to go through haul after haul after haul.

To go along with this space truckin, you will sometimes get a little bluegrassy kinda music from time to time, and you can also turn on the radio in your cab, which will play a selection of rock/bluesy songs, all purpose made for this game, and all absolutely bangers.

The main point of the game is to do hauls so you can stay on top of your maintenance which, after the first hours, is something you will have to deal on the regular but in a way, WAY more routine manner. Swap a few of batteries every couple of jobs, keep a few spares of everything, angle your hauls towards systems with cheaper spares, or several shops. You can salvage space debris and sell it too, which is very lucrative, but to me space truckin was my main gig and if you like your truckin, you're gonna get a hell of a lot of it, and it's really good space truckin.

Once you are in a good enough spot, you can start doing the story missions that, while have very paltry rewards, will open new sectors to play with, alongside a new truck subsystem to deal with them. They don't add a whole lot of complexity, but their gimmicks are alright. The story missions feel very disjointed, and their existance seems more out of obligation to somehow pace your progress through the game than anything else. They're not terrible, but nothing special either. The "story" ends abruptly at an arbitrary point, with no rewards, so it feels like there might be more to come in future updates, but as it is now, there's more than enough content to get 40+ out of it. Much more depending on how much you want to truck for the hell of it.

Anyway, this is a really great game for what it is. The developers have said that they will rebalance how the maintenance side of things works so I would expect it to become somewhat easier to deal with, but right now I think it is alright, and besides, one can freely customize the difficulty of their games with 0 negative repercussions, if you find it too hard, or if you just want to space truck. But even so, having beaten the game in "recommended" (with "poor" engine efficiency) without having died a single time, I think the difficulty is pretty okay if a bit wonky.

Absolutely recommended. 9/10.

Great way to relive the best moments in the series, including voices, sound effects and music in beautifully animated, peak ♥♥♥♥ level battles, unfortunately marred down by a convoluted level up system and sections of what can charitably be described as "superman 64 the MMO" that desperately tries to add completely uncalled for padding in between missions. The open world sections, community system, badges and collectibles are a whole lot of busywork in exchange for minor buffs because someone was insistent in tacking RPG mechanics to a franchise that doesn't need them.

Had this been an Asura's Wrath kind of interactive animated show deal, it would probably be the best way to experience the show for those who don't have the patience to sit through it. Instead, it's a serviceable button basher 40% of the time, and an intensely lame action RPG the rest of it.

Not worth 40 bucks, kind of in the fence at maybe a 75% discount. You might be better off just watching a let's play on youtube, honestly. 5/10.

Man, I hate leaving a bad review on this game.

I had played the demo, and I remember I liked it quite a bit, I just wanted to give it some more time to mature before I picked it up. Unfortunately, it is not there and I doubt it will ever be.

I really like all the different management options that the player has access to between rounds. They're just menus, but it's nice to have so much to put your money and reputation towards. It's very satisfying to advance through fights, and even some of the jank is enjoyable, like when you hit an enemy on the head and he violently cartwheels past the railing and deep into the rafters. But god the rest of the jank is just too much.

The camera is an absolute trainwreck. There's an over-the-head camera which is incredibly disorienting considering most of the fighting controls are motion based, but the over the shoulder camera is also kinda janky because it's essentially fixed to your character's back, and the movement is incredibly exagerated on the slightest of movements, nevermind the fact that you need to move the mouse in order to hit your enemies.

Speaking of the combat controls, the game goes for a Mount and Blade-y control scheme, but even more janky. Your fighter will switch wind-ups while you move your mouse around, slow ass attacks will deal tons of damage, triggering certain moves (like throwing weapons, or overheads without using the dedicated key) is incredibly finnicky, the AI is not ultra-aggressive, which is appreciated, but instead they just... stand there most of the time. This is particularly noticeable on fights of more than 1v1. It's hard to read what your opponent is doing, and it's hard to get your guy to do what you want him to do.

Also for some reason the character's necks are freakishly long and tend to jot out at an angle, which is incredibly jank looking.

I'd vastly recommend M&B or Bannerlord's arena fights over this, even without considering the fact that the latter are just a minigamey sideshow and not the entire game. And it is a damn shame.

The game itself is fine, but I opted for asking for a refund once my 2 hours were up. I like how it plays, and it does everything the store page says it does, but on my second run (including the tutorial) I already cleared the third section of the map. Rogue Voltage has a real pickle of a problem, and I don't envy the developer that needs to get it on track.

The synergies between modules are fun and satisfying, which is the main goal of the game, but you're going to spend round after round of wiring this to that and then that to this, and I mean yeah, it's cool, but you can only make this process entertaining for a limited amount of rounds. Adding more modules to that will just increase the amount of clicking around on the same components back and forth every round.

Component management aside, the combat feels very simplistic. I don't expect Darkest Dungeon levels of dragged out here, but a good bunch of the enemies die with just 2-3 hits, and the others you can just manage with the game's temporal alteration mechanic. I don't think I was particularly lucky with my game, but I ended up with more healing options that I knew what to do with.

Finally, unless I'm missing something, I believe the game right now only has the first act available, which means a full run can be completed in about 2 hours. I couldn't get to the very end as I reached that point before the last encounter.

Overall, I think this game will probably be worth it once it's content complete as a nice time killer, but right now it needs some more time in the oven, and sort out its balance, which is admittedly incredibly tricky and a core element of the experience. And good luck making the cabling mechanic anything other than tedious. I wish the developers the best, and I hope to change my review in the future.