Recent reviews by (◕ ◡ ◕)つRefia™

Note: I received this key for free to review. Also, this is coming from someone who doesn't often play RTS games although I play a lot of other games. With that said, I'll write what I honestly think.

The tutorial is kind of confusing. I felt like the concepts were explained too fast to really get a grasp on, like what can be built where, and the names of the facilities were too opaque to really understand everything the first time through, and when I went to go to single player afterwards it told me I didn't do the tutorial even though I did. Regardless, I'm more of a just play the game kind of person anyway, and eventually I just kind of reduced it down: the ODS is like your radar and helps you make more fighters and scrap your buildings, the GPA is like for a defense field and all the defense buildings, the QDL lets you cloak fighters and build things to launch attacks, and the LOCF is something you just wanna build near as many planets as possible to get resources and then you can use it to see cloaked units or get more mobility.

After a couple games, it was obvious what everything did and actually felt pretty simplistic, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The games I played were very fast as described and it seemed like the game was an RTS stripped to the core elements without a lot of the fancy junk, I just didn't understand at first because the names don't make it obvious what things do. I had fun with it, and it's pretty interesting overall although I feel it may end up lacking longevity. I'll probably come back to it at some point but it was an interesting game even for me as someone who almost never plays RTS games.

This game is tons of things at once. Frustrating, fun, weird, awful, exciting, nerve-wracking, inspiring. If it wasn't obvious, this is a hard game made for people who seek out challenges in games just for the sake of it. If you never related with that idea, you won't enjoy this game. If you do, you still won't enjoy this game, but you'll be compelled to try and finish it anyway, because this game is made for people like me with abnormal, messed-up brains that are 100% masochistic and love every second of it.

I've played this since it was in the Humble Monthly Trove and spent enough time on it that I figured I should support the dev more, but in total I've probably played about 10 hours. I've only made it to a pile of furniture that I know is nowhere close to the top. And yet I keep climbing anyway. Initially I felt anger as I sometimes do with these kinds of games. Who would make such a thing? This cruel behavioral-psychology-experiment-turned-game?

An hour passes. Two more. I soon lose all capability of getting frustrated, I've fallen down all the way to the start over a dozen times. I've been stuck in the same 3 areas for hours, but I'm compelled to keep going anyway. I reach a zen state after playing long enough. I realize, I got sent back to the start, but I can get where I was faster than before. Did I really get sent back to the start, then, or is this just the next step on my path to overcoming this horrendous obstacle? No, my skills have improved, but the game knows this, and it knows I won't give up that easily. As I inch slightly higher up the mountain, the game evolves. It becomes more and more sadistic, more and more complex, the angles more brutal and unforgiving. I fall back down again over and over. But I get back up. And that's exactly what the game wants you to do. It wants you to make progress a tiny bit at a time, failing over and over. It wants to take your challenge-seeking attitude to its limits, to test it, to break you as a person.

I hate this game. But I also love this game. And if you have the kind of mind this game targets, then you'll probably already know it, and you'll feel the same way too.

I'll note here that we only completed the free level. It's fun for half an hour, but there's not really enough content I feel like to sell me on the paid levels, especially since you need a copy for everyone to play it. Graphics are a bit rough and some interactions (like the picture pieces in the mine with the frame) are not as intuitive as they should be. The concept is a good one, though obviously not a novel one, but there needs to be more there for me to recommend it. It's not bad per se, but not really what I expected either. I'd give this one a maybe if I could. There's not really enough there to tell if the paid levels will be worth playing in my opinion.

Pretty good game overall, the story is pretty coherent and really good. Some parts are made a little bit annoying kind of incidentally by virtue of travel being slow when you have to backtrack to check something, which happens a decent amount. Some monsters are a little annoying as well, but these negatives don't really detract too much from the overall experience. The atmosphere and sound design are very well done, and although there are technically jump scares, they don't feel obnoxious or out of place. Most of the horror itself is achieved through atmosphere and the things you experience in the game as you piece the story together. The puzzles are mostly easy, but there are a few that are easy to miss the solution to as well, so you might get stuck thinking you have what you need to solve it when you don't, but overall they're pretty good. I would say Detention is one of the better horror games I've played recently, but not too many good ones come out. Definitely worth 10 dollars if you like horror.

This game is something people wanted for years, but does it hold up? Well, the gameplay does, but I don't think the writing is any good.

Mankind divided is a very slick game in terms of its gameplay. As expected of a Deus Ex game, there's lots of freedom in terms of where you can go and how creative you can get in getting there. There's lots of augs to choose from, and once you have just a select few of them, playing the game really starts to feel like you're cheating; with just the aug that lets you see through walls and remote hacking, you become pretty overpowered in terms of your skillset, and that's not even to mention vision cones, brief invisibility to cameras and people, landing from any height, super high jumps, a blink dash like from dishonored, and even more. By the end of the game, I had about 10 praxis I hadn't even used yet because I felt like I already had more than enough. I'm not sure why they have microtransactions for it when it's absolutely everywhere, but at least they're very nonessential.

Yet despite all this, the game still ends up feeling fun to play. There's always new stuff to find and new ways to accomplish your goals. Often you'll reach your destination, only to find a vent you completely missed or electric breaker you could have used to kill someone or something along those lines.

There are glitches though, like how I never saw the alarm pop-up in my playthrough, but I didn't get the achievement for no alarms, which I painstakingly made sure I'd get (no failed hacks, no red text aside from a story part that as far as I know forces searching status). Other stuff I ran into was occasional crashes (every 8 hours or so I ran into one, maybe 3 total during the game) and bugs with the tesla system, where enemies would sometimes instantly turn hostile even when being shocked from an area not visible to them, which wouldn't happen if i did it again after loading from the exact same spot in the exact same way.

In terms of content, there's really a lot here. If you like exploring, you will spend hours and hours examining the environment for secrets and pickups. The world of the game is so dense and packed with stuff that I continually found myself surprised at just how much stuff there was everywhere, even in places you might not expect.

People will try and sell the game short and say it's a super short game, and that might be true, if you don't collect anything and just do the main story, but Human Revolution probably isn't that much longer if it is at all. Most of the game's content is in its sidequests, which probably outnumber the main quests 2:1, and overall the game offers quite a bit of playtime if you're willing to invest more in the side missions. A game is more than the sum of its hours, though, and I'd have honestly preferred if it were shorter but had a better story.

Regarding the story, there's a lot of weird stuff going on. The game is very obviously cut off so as to make room for the next game, but it's very jarring regardless of that. The game's central plot element is allegedly the augs vs naturals thing, and the illuminati working to make augs look bad. The first and most obvious problem is that the racism parallel doesn't make a lot of sense when augmented people are inherently more advantaged, and its effects are lessened because only very rarely do you actually experience what most of the other augmented people do, you just kind of experience it vicariously through other people, which kind of works, but it's so much less than it could have been. Yeah, you're insulted regularly and chastised if you ride the naturals train and they check your info if you use the naturals exit, but it never really stops you since you're an aug with special privileges that basically let you do the stuff normal people can, if with a bit of additional harassment.

Your interaction with the juggernaut collective is pretty much limited to Alex and Janus, and I feel like they should have been prominent in the story in the form of interacting with more people or places, especially given how big a role they play, even if they're saving part of that for the next game. The big reveal at the end that Jensen is actually doing what they wanted all along and looking for Janus is the most eye rolling plot development I could have imagined. It completely destroys the point of the entire game's developments in my opinion, which kind of annoyed me. And one huge point I was wondering was why the hell do you go back to your apartment to do stuff supposedly in private TWICE after your apartment gets broken into? Did it just not occur to Jensen or anyone involved that Picus could have put a bug in there, since they know where he is and could easily get there while he's gone? The plot of this game is basically a giant intro, and that's the main reason I didn't end up enjoying it much.

It's a good game barring the occasional bug, but don't play it for the story.

I've played this game now for about six hours actively (the other two were spent wondering what I've done with my life), and I don't have anything good to say about it. It lives perfectly up to the first game's reputation. The first Bad Rats game was infamous for how horrible it was back in the olden days before Steam Greenlight, as most of you who have any thorough experience on Steam are aware. It was a puzzle game much like The Incredible Machine, except unlike that game, this one had different results every time you hit start! Sometimes the rats or object you had to move to the end would fall out of the level! Even the suggested solutions didn't work a good percentage of the time! Add all that to the fact that the art was bad, the level design was bad, and just about everything else imaginable was bad, and you had a legendarily bad game. People gifted it to each other en masse as a cruel joke, and the punchline was that this game got made.

Here we are, the second Bad Rats game. I never thought I would see it on Steam because I never thought the company that made it would have the balls to make another when they HAD to have known the first one was awful. So why did I buy it? Honestly, I couldn't tell you. My masochism for bad games has just grown to a point where it's gone out of control and I have no idea what I'm doing anymore. I suspect for most people that willingly bought the game, it's the same.

So is it good this time? No, it's somehow even worse in some ways. While now you can actually play it in 1080p, and there's a slight tinge of production value with better models and fancy intros and death scenes, it still ultimately looks like a game from the late 90's or early 2000's. The ball still goes outside the play area sometimes (in the third dimension). They try to acknowledge this as a feature. It's definitely unintentional. There are a couple neat levels where you can make the ball go out of bounds above the map (since it has no ceiling), but it's very quickly overshadowed by the whole RNG issue being back. Puzzles run differently with the exact same setup from run to run, and I feel like it's probably due to the models moving around when they're idle. I'm not really sure why it happens though. The music sounds like a bunch of Toads from the Mario universe got their own band, and it's horrifying. Also, just like the first game, even the official solutions don't work half of the time when you reconstruct them. For some reason, I played through about 34ish levels of this ♥♥♥♥ before I gave up and wrote this review. For the first 3/4 of the game, the game is basically just like the first game but slightly better looking. ♥♥♥♥ doesn't function like it's supposed to half the time, of course, so sometimes you have to rely on the randomness working in your favor (not always, but a good percentage of maps have this). It's pretty awful as a puzzle game. I was sure it couldn't get any worse.

It got worse.

At this point having endured so much of the game I thought "well, why not get all the achievements?" and I tried the last fourth of the game.

This is where ♥♥♥♥ gets real. The game actually gives you puzzles in THREE DIMENSIONS and expects you to solve them even when ♥♥♥♥ happens differently almost every other run or so. The first map was easy, but I could just not replicate the correct angle to get to the end for the second puzzle. Bad Rats, as ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ designed as it was in 2D, could kind of work sometimes. You could adjust things a little bit to make your weird wonky MacGyver solution that looks nothing like the official solution yet somehow solves the puzzle more often work. This isn't really possible in 3D because if one part is off even a little bit, it starts a chain reaction with the other parts, and they get off the mark even more, and pretty soon you'd have to do some really weird ♥♥♥♥ to solve some of these. I've reached my limit with these puzzles, they're somehow even worse than the original "2D" ones.

Also, there's a level editor, which I kind of feel like they must have used to put the game together. It has all the features you can find in the normal levels, and you can even make 3D levels. The game has workshop support, and an achievement for uploading a stage so you can be sure there will be even more Bad Rats to be annoyed by pretty much indefinitely! Also something I didn't mention that was disappointing was they recycle level "endings" (the way the cat dies) pretty fast. There's only about ten of them, and I was already tired of them by the first one. I guess there's only so much they could do to fix it though, other than...I don't know...make it a game NOT about being kinda racist with the rat designs and needlessly killing cats? The whole concept is still very weird to me.

Really though, with the cesspool that is Greenlight, this game is nothing special. Games just as bad as this and often worse get on Steam daily, and most of them you never would have dreamed of seeing on Steam back when they actually cared for the concept of a curated games platform. It's absolutely a terrible game, but at least it's playable. If their goal was to make a game just as bad as the first Bad Rats, well, they've done it. You can gift this game to all your friends knowing it'll troll them just as much as the first game did, only this game isn't 50 cents yet, and in buying it you'll be helping to fund more bad sequels in the future.

A lot of people seem to have been disappointed with this game's ending, and I can see where they're coming from. I would highly recommend playing this the first time with the map marker of your location off (it's an option in the options menu). I did this my first time and I really enjoyed it. Like many people, I expected something bigger than what the big reveal actually was, but I'm okay with it because it almost felt like that was the point of the ending being the way it was. I'm not really sure if it's simply the result of a rushed game or not, but I really enjoyed the journey, even if the destination wasn't the best. Having to use the compass to figure out where you are and where to go feels daunting at first, but by the end I felt confident I could go anywhere and I almost always knew where I was. I think the quality of the dialogue and fun navigational gameplay give this game an edge over some other popular "walking simulators" as they've come to be called, as long as you know that this game is short, and that you may not like the ending.

As is I couldn't say this is worth $20 unless you're really enthusiastic about it, but still I recommend this game hesitantly because it's somewhat promising. It's still quite new in early access, so at the time of this review the game still feels very bare-bones and hopefully that will be fixed with future additions.

The core gameplay idea is interesting. Slimes can absorb the "plorts" other slimes make after they eat and become a larger hybrid slime of the two types. You can also collect and sell these for upgrades to both yourself and your slime corrals (and you can also build a few different buildings). Also, there's a "stock market" with different prices each day on different types of slime plorts, which forces you to diversify, since they are unique to each type of slime, and it also encourages you to make lucrative slime hybrids of two high-value types since hybrid slimes give plorts of both their constituent types.

In my opinion it could either become a really great game if they keep adding interesting things to it or a really bad game if they just take their money and run. I feel like the game could stand to use a lot more land for slimes and exploration as it is now, but being early access it could either happen or not happen at this stage.

One of the more overlooked games on Steam (probably because it was made in Wolf RPG Editor), this game was actually made by the creator of Wolf RPG Editor. In this game, you have to battle against the screen scrolling basically. If you get scrolled off the screen, you die. There are lots of interesting RPG elements at play here, such as different classes, leveling, skills, weapons, partners, and more. You can also save some items from your failed runs to use for the next run. The game is procedurally generated, and you can play worlds other people played by entering their world's seed. The game will also show you who was/is online on the same map you are. There are daily maps to explore and this game has a ton of depth you might not expect just looking at it. The expanded version is out on Playism and coming to Steam in the near future, but this version is well worth playing on its own.

Wanna go fast? well too bad there's a rock in the way lmao