Recent reviews by Shere

This game represents a brief period of time in my life. By the time it ended, all I could do was yearn for the moment it started.

If we could somehow reassure ourselves we'd enjoy an experience, would we commit to new ones more often?

When you reach the finale of (the) Gnorp Analogue, it'll be everything you foolishly thought you wanted the entire time. Much like uncorking a bottle of champagne, though, the action wasn't the point. There was no meaning in the contents, either - more for show than substance - but in this case you'll still be celebrating something important: normal days spent frivolously on a decent $7 game.

Enjoy it, take your time with it, and bask in something that dared to be itself. Use this comforting experience to gather the courage to begin anew.

It's a good game, but I think it's a bit oversold.

I was never really captivated by it like some seem to be. It's a bit thin on content and extremely mild in difficulty. Should you not be the type interested in bumping into corners and crannies looking for collectibles, you'll barely need a few hours to beat it. I don't do the dollar-per-hour calculus because I think it's a bit disingenuous, and for as short as this game is, it will still take up a night or two of your life for less than it costs to see a bad movie with no popcorn.

Overall, it seems to be dedicated to maintaining the ambiance for better and worse. It wants you to chill and respects your ability to chill on your own. If you want to take the tools it gives you and find some other way to clear a room, it's fine with that - we're chill bro. It feels almost a bit TOO laid-back. There are maybe a handful of moments in the game with any sort of expectation of precision gameplay, and the majority of it is going to just be real easy, breezy puzzle platforming. Most of the puzzles felt, to me, too easy to gain much satisfaction out of, usually amounting to no more than "use the item we just gave you". To it's credit, every room in this game invited something new, but it never really caught me much off guard.

I respect a game that respects me; the best thing about this game is how hands off it treats the player. No tutorials, no dialogue, no quest arrows, or anything of the sort. All of the learning is organic, all of the problem solving is left to the player respectfully. It takes a brave creator to allow their work to be interpreted (played, in this case) by the free will of the beholder (player) but it's a beautiful thing when it happens. I kept feeling like I had to bring up Outer Wilds in this regard, that's how hands off this game is - perhaps even more so. I think this may have factored into the overall difficulty though, and really it might feel too easy out of fear of someone missing out or getting stuck.

On the whole, this game left me wanting for more of an experience, more of a work. As it stands, it feels a bit on the simple side and left me a bit unfulfilled. There's all this ambiance and environment but it never really builds to anything substantial. It's not really going to leave much of a lasting impression on me, is basically what I mean. Whether that's a reason to avoid it or not, I leave up to the reader. I think it's a worthy experience and if you LOVE metroidvania games or atmospheric self-driven experiences, it might really be for you.

This is the essential video game. It's a roguelite deck-builder based around standard playing cards and poker hands. It's a brilliantly pure concept with similarly pure execution. It's a constant loop of simple, satisfying feedback for deceptively complicated decisions. Luck factors in significantly, but only just enough to keep the experience from getting stale or "solved".

This game is like 60mb. There is nothing extraneous or unnecessary, it's just absolutely masterful. It's like the food a Michelin star chef cooks for themselves at home. Nothing fancy, just an exceptionally well-made grilled cheese sandwich.

When I first saw this game, all I could think of was the car segment from Half Life 2: Episode 2. I thought of how instantly attached I got to that rust bucket, and how cool it felt driving it around in a mad dash with hybrid sort of on-foot/on-wheels gameplay.

Whether or not this was inspired at all by that, it really fits the bill. The entirety of this game is spent scavenging for materials as you traverse a dilapidated, overgrown, and extremely hazardous rural PNW-inspired environment, a so-called exclusion zone. You're semi-tethered to your multi-purpose shelter/storage container/transportation as you roam about. Your mission is largely focused on scavenging, upgrading, and delving deeper into the more dangerous parts of the zone.

There's an overarching plot told by way of radio conversations, it's well acted & delivered and at times quite engaging but ultimately a bit limited by how disjointed it can feel from the gameplay. Many a time one of the characters would be pouring their heart out about their life's work, meanwhile I'm being harassed by a hovering alien tow truck dragging me off a cliff and into a pile of exploding mannequins. It's there, it's worth following along with, but it never really shakes the feeling of being a bit... draped over the core gameplay.

Speaking of, the core gameplay loop is perfect if you like that sort of The Long Dark style scavenging where the environment is actively hostile. The zone is full of all sorts of things you need to keep an eye out for, and if you die you might lose most of your stuff. You mostly bounce around landmarks carefully looking for things to take back to the garage to upgrade your car. Available upgrades span a wide array of utility options to the point where you ultimately will wind up with a car that's all your own and more reminiscent of KITT or the Batmobile than a normal car, replete with active and passive countermeasures for all sorts of challenges.

Customization actually tries to play a big role in the game (because they really want you to get attached to this car). You're encouraged to decorate it with paints, decal kits, stickers, accessories, etc. that you find in your travels. My main problem is that what my car looked like had more to do with the function (i.e. what kind of armor or tools were on it) than with what I wanted aesthetically. Some of the panel types don't accept paint or decals very well and I wish I could be way more specific with the paint than only being able to pick the main color for the entire panel. I don't expect every game to be Armored Core but... it's hard not to compare. I was ultimately pretty happy with how my car looked but it felt very much like I filled in a paint-by-numbers and less like I created anything my own. Even something as simple as being able to select secondary colors on panels would go a long way.

Speaking of customization though, the level control the player has in this game over the experience is unprecedented and extremely cool. You can adjust just about anything you want as far as difficulty goes. Don't like having to repair after each run? You can turn on an option that full heals you when you complete a run. Want to reduce the material grind? Lower the amount required for crafting with a simple slider. You can change the consequences for failed runs, change the consumption rate of gas, anything really. This game is as casual or hardcore as you want it to be.

Also I have to mention: the custom radio update was brilliant and I had a ton of fun with it. I did just so happen to have an old mp3 player full of 15+ year old music laying around so it kind of just worked out perfectly. Highly recommend trying it out.

I'm all over the place and this is getting a bit long but I think I more than got my money's worth out of this game, and it's an experience all its own that I won't soon forget. If you're in the mood for a bit of a self-guided, (at times) pensive experience, give this one a try.

this is basically an environmental storytelling game that tells bleeding heart idealized SWAT cop fanfiction

the way the hostile NPCs wallhack would be more frustrating if it weren't frequently so sudden and funny to see your friend in front of you collapse into a ragdoll like a YTP

the gunplay is solid, i wish there were more weapon variety but they're angling for pseudo-realism rather than goofy fun. not much to say about weapon customization either, limited options.

uhh yeah it's a blast to play with friends, everything is.

The visual aesthetic is on-point, the boss fights are very fun (so far), and the music is incredible.

The only down side I can think of is the mob stages in between the bosses feel incredibly long and repetitive, but I think the main issue with them is that there's nothing to do BUT survive during them. There's no point of interest or secondary goal, you just walk in circles for a few minutes and then the boss (the fun part) happens.

For $5, this is a worthy entry in the sort of "horde shmup" genre and you will get your money out of it.

If you're looking for another one of those survival buildcraft games where you progress through a tech tree and gradually make better and better tools & bases until you burn out and get bored, this is one of the better ones.

The PVP isn't really PVP. It's passive-aggressive people waiting until you log off to destroy your persistent character & base. That's fully it. You won't ever actually fight anyone, even if you go looking for it. You'll just login naked one day because you didn't login one night.

The most egregious thing is that the only "good" base designs for PVP are ones that put your base in a place that is unreachable by conventional methods, or difficult to see due to abusing certain... fringe aspects of the game design. There's nothing inside of the game that will communicate this to you, unless you go look up some years-old youtube videos you will just never actually know.

Just avoid PVP, play PVE, clear the content, get bored, and move on for a bit to the next one.

In spite of itself, this was a good game. I don't regret the time I spent with it. If it were still available, I'd recommend it to anyone who would give it a try. It was a janky kind of dumb fun and I'll miss what it was before it was abandoned.

I'd like to just ramble a bit as something of a retrospective. I don't really have a train of thought here so I'll just dump it all out and let the reader sort it out:

I've never seen a game so focused on getting you to spend money on it but with so little to actually buy. The cosmetics were so drab, understated, and boring it was ridiculous how much some of them could cost, being gated behind lootboxes. A very, very small percentage of the cosmetics were at all desirable or unique and they were dumped in these massive loot piles with dozens of pointless, nearly invisible weapon charms and faded, boring paint colors to pad out the drop table. And if you got a duplicate item drop it would give you a teenie-tiny amount of materials to craft a limited pool of mostly underwhelming cosmetics. It was bafflingly bad, and that's without getting into the weirdly steep pricing of everything.

They would put out these updates with new characters in them and be surprised when they generated zero hype because the new character was unavailable to a large portion of the playerbase. They would be locked behind $10~ microtransactions or a very limited resource that only trickled in with a new battlepass. Even if you played religiously there was basically no way to catch up with the releases, worse still for new players who would have almost a dozen units to unlock and zero prospects of earning them faster than one every couple weeks. I put 160 some hours into this game and didn't have even half of the unlockable mechs.

This was especialy egregious because the majority of the expansion units were all absurdly overtuned at one point or another in their lifespan, usually in the weeks after they were introduced, before they get nerfed to make way for the next one. If I didn't suspect incompetence here, I'd almost say they were trying to bait people into purchasing units by letting them be overpowered for a bit. Almost.

Also there was all of this focus on adding mediocre things to buy while the game languished with matchmaking issues and weird gaps in QOL features. Early on in this game, if someone left your match at any point for any reason you basically had to ditch the entire game because it would never backfill. You would load into round after round where people were just missing and you had to just sigh and go back to matchmaking queue. Also, there was no minimap? Such a weird omission, even if it only showed friendly units it would have been nice.

Early on, before the rules update, matches could drag on for ages if there was a tie, sometimes more than double the standard length of a round. It took them half a year to fix this.

The gameplay was so solid and smooth, it was really satisfying to glide around. The guns all took some getting used to, especially coming from other shooter games, but that was part of the charm. The units mostly had a unique identity and skill set and were for the most part fun to play in their own ways. The maps were... serviceable, a little barren but competitively sound. Some of them were better than others, but the playerbase also had bad opinions about which ones were the good ones.

That all said, this was a game where HeavyArms could be getting pocketed by Unicorn, fighting off Barbatos and Sazabi and it was kinda rad. Sucks that it was run by greedy clowns.

For context, I'm a late-comer to this game. The very first time I touched any Destiny game was just before Root of Nightmares dropped. I wound up buying the jacket for that raid. I've had my fair share of fun with it in the time since then, and made some memories I wouldn't trade for anything. Even still, where I am with it right now and where Bungie is as a company, I can't recommend you play this game. I wish I could give a neutral recommendation. I do think you can get your money's worth out of this game if you have some friends to play with, but that's about it.

I had a whole big thing written up, but it's honestly more effort than this game really deserves. The short version is that the horrid monetization system combined with some insultingly-stupid grinds get you a game that misses a stupidly optimistic revenue projection to the surprise of some extremely oblivious decision makers. There is a deeply set rot in this company and none of it was trimmed in the layoffs, proof of which lies in the fact that the layoffs themselves were handled with that trademark Bungie incompetence. Whoever is responsible for the rest of this mess clearly had a hand in picking scapegoats as well.

The state of this game basically feels like every time they touch anything, they make it weirdly worse for no reason at all, and then sometimes they charge you money for it. It's such a weirdly antagonistic relationship, I can't think of any other live service game like this where the developer and player feel constantly at odds. Most of the players who spend the most on this game externalize that they hate doing so, they know they're being played, they know the values don't match the input, but still they do it anyway. Their monetization model basically hinges upon stockholm syndrome.

If you can't figure out how to buy this game, you aren't alone. Which expansions should you buy in which bundles? Who knows! Just count it as a blessing and bounce off of it like everyone else. If you press on, you'll probably have some fun for a good bit if you have a few other people to play with. Most of that fun will be from having people to play with, and the game is just a pretext.

I'll be honest, I was a bit worried for this franchise. Armored Core V was middling, Verdict Day was merely okay, both were a huge step down from 4 & 4A. Add to that, it's been what? an entire decade? FromSoft is an entirely different company from the fringe studio they used to be. Surely this would be where the series jumps the shark?

Nope, it's basically perfect. Armored Core 6 doesn't just feel like another game in the series, it feels like a realization of what the series has wanted to be all along. This is FromSoft sampling the best parts of every game in the entire series and refining it with an additional decade of encounter design and action combat experience under their belts. This is Armored Core but with a multitude of memorable, challenging, interesting encounters and a flair for the cinematic. They have finally, at long last, put this game together in the complete package it deserves.

But that doesn't mean they've smoothed it over: This is still unmistakably Armored Core and it is uncompromising. The menus are obtuse, the stats are confusing, and the interplay between parts and performance is nebulous at times. The story is fragmented and subtle, the world it's set in is bleak and hostile. Very little is outright explained in any regard.

This game doesn't care if you bounce off of it because it's too hard or you can't spare the effort to figure it out. You're only getting out of this experience what you're willing to put in. That's the way it's always been, the way it should be. Even after all this time, they straight up made this one for the fans and simply dare you to become one, too.