Recent reviews by Shere

How have I not written a review for Roboquest yet?

This is a game I'll be revisiting for the rest of my gaming days, just a pure & good experience where every element is in service to fun.

The movement in this game is satisfying in a way that brings to mind things Apex Legends and Team Fortress 2. You can rocket jump, grappling hook, slide, slam, dash, and grind however much you want while blasting your way through hordes of deadly robots.

The weapon variety is phenomenal, truly, and doesn't shy away from either end of the spectrum - if you want to go at every enemy in the game with a pair of frying pans or a shovel? You're welcome to try! By that same token there are guns that launch torpedoes, laser crossbows, mortar launchers, handheld missile pods, and vacuums full of bees. You can pick the tools you prefer, or venture outside your comfort zone and have an entirely different experience.

I adore the aesthetic, the visuals will hold up for years to come with their cartoon emphasis and flat textures. The narrative world itself feels a bit thinly laid, but really is extraneous to the overall experience anyway - the story and overall narrative is just fine, and that's all it really needs to be. It kinda just stays out of your way as much as possible, told only in brief comic-style cutscenes and the odd in-game quip or data log.

The music is incredible. Noisescream delivers on something so special with the soundtrack here. It starts off great and only ascends from there with each new stage. Keep in mind you're listening to these songs loop for the entire stage. I'm 90-some hours in and I have not muted the music in this game yet, even though it's the perfect kind of game to play your own music on top of. Roboquest's soundtrack is almost essential to the experience, as if the levels themselves were built on these songs. The final stage theme isn't just good for a video game, it's one of my favorite songs of all time, period, and instills the experience with some much needed emotional pull.

I mean, I always do this and get carried away, I could write out my thoughts on this one all day. What you need to know is that this is a rogue-lite first person shooter with excellent movement, satisfying gun play, poppy cartoon visuals, and an absolute banger of a soundtrack. Throw on top of that, it's a family-friendly experience, too, and no worse for it. Just good, clean fun at a great price.

You can & will easily get your money's worth from this one, absolutely highly recommended.

This is a delightful game, a modern take on Missile Command, thoughtfully made at every level. The sound design in particular is phenomenal. The music is bizarre but enjoyable. The visual aesthetic is executed well and the enemy variety is excellent. The game utilizes its simple aesthetic to amplify the noise in other ways, sometimes drowning the screen in all manner of shapes and colors.

There are a lot of small details here that I like! When I first read what Blackout Protocol actually was, I actually laughed out loud. I really like the Galaga-style bonus for wiping out a full squadron or enemy group. In fact, the whole bonus-oriented play and the way score impacts your overall progression just adds a real element of depth to the whole thing that not many roguelike/lites emphasize. Every sound in the game has a satisfying punch to it. Every enemy is easily recognizable despite the lack of finer details. Care is evident in every layer of this game.

The recent update to the upgrade trees is phenomenal. It's now abundantly clear what the consequences of a given upgrade choice are beyond just the stat bonus. A huge step in the right direction, with room still to improve for sure.

Currently it's begging for some sort of meta progression system - the difficulty ramps up quite quickly and while I currently welcome the challenge, repeating the early stages begins to get tedious because while the enemy patterns are fresh, the upgrades are not. Those first few days invariably have you waggling around the weenie laser and the game could do with some kind of means to ameliorate that. It's not uncommon for games of this type to have early-game skips that sort of throw you into a run at the true beginning of the ramp with all of the basic upgrade options or the opportunity to pick them quickly, something like that could be nice.

The only other real nagging item is that the upgrade paths feel a bit hungry for long game depth, I feel like they could get absurd but stop short of that. That might just be me having a skill issue so far, but you really hug the curve pretty tightly in my experience in this game. There doesn't really seem to be a way to "tilt" things like getting a "god run" in certain other roguelikes based on luck falling a certain way or reaching a certain upgrade goal/threshold.

Anyway, for the price of an expensive coffee you can have a pretty chill/fun game and I think that's neat. Looking forward to how it develops.

Overwhelmingly Positive perfectly describes my feelings while playing this game.

Gawr Gura announced her graduation literally while I was playing and somehow I was still in a good mood until the moment I stopped playing.

I'm of two minds on ROGUE FLIGHT and it's made me put off this review for a bit. Mostly to make sure I'm being as fair and honest as possible to both the game and the review-reader in kind. If you stick with me for a moment I'm going to approach this from both directions, but if you don't want to read my whole dissertation here, the short version is this:

ROGUE FLIGHT is both a very cool experience and, frankly, a mediocre game. In a world of experiences big and small, however, this is not one to outright avoid. For a certain type of person, I even recommend it. Like most things though, it's not for everyone, and in fact I feel like the audience that's enamored enough with the spectacle to overlook the shortcomings might be rather small. Read on if you want the details.

So first of all, let's talk about ROGUE FLIGHT as an experience.

ROGUE FLIGHT plays its hand right up front, this is something birthed from the minds of fans of any number late 80's/90's mecha anime. Most nearly, it's emulating something like a SDF Macross or Martian Successor Nadesico, but there are callbacks and subtle nods to even things like Evangelion. The plot itself is straight out of those first two, focusing mainly on a single super advanced spacecraft pitted against impossible odds, humanity on the brink, leveraging nothing but raw pluck and determination. Fully voiced (and very well-acted) cutscenes and mission dialogue set the somewhat familiar stage well.

The character & ship designs, the cutscenes, even the menus; all of it emulates that late 80's/early 90's era of anime & games. Speaking of the cutscenes, I often found myself impressed with the animation, camera angles, and framing, it was clear a lot of care went into them by someone with a keen artistic vision. As well, Nadia in particular leaves a great impression, she's got all the no-nonsense makings of a real mecha protagonist, I love her design and overall attitude.

Driven along by a beautiful, booming, rhythmic soundtrack of high octane, growling guitar-driven jet jams, you'll race through missions cutting the air with your thunky, chunky, satisfying weapons in your (somewhat) customizable super ship. You'll find yourself slicing through entire armies of enemies, taking down a few giant bosses along the way. The sense of movement and impact is satisfying, to say the least.

Controlling the ship feels good, it's very snappy and there's a great sense of speed to everything. The weapons feel strong, the enemies mostly shred like fodder regardless of what weapons you prefer to use. Early on the game clues you in to a special "drift trail" attack that has a real satisfying weight to it, especially when you use it to wipe out a whole conveniently lined up row of enemies. All in all, if you're looking for a hard sci-fi anime power fantasy, you've found it.

But first, let's talk about ROGUE FLIGHT as a game.

Well... if you're looking for a hard sci-fi anime power fantasy, you've found it, for better... and for worse. You will breeze through this game, and I say that knowing that gaming journalists exist and most people can barely tie their shoes. It's taken me longer to write this review than it ultimately did to play through the main portion of this game, and I am not some sort of TAS speedrunner savant, I'm a middle aged internet catgirl with a busted Xbox controller. It says 11.6 hours as of the time of this review, but at least half of that was spent with the game open, troubleshooting my stream and writing this review. After two hours I had 75% of the achievements, after 4 hours more I was at 88%.

The difficulty slider seems to mostly impact how much damage you take from hits, which doesn't really make things more "difficult" but it definitely ups the frustration level a ton. A base element of the straight-ahead rail shooter design of this game is that depth is struggling to be represented. For as little as any enemy in the game even bothers to shoot at you, it is very difficult to intentionally dodge bullets coming at you from askew angles relative to the camera. There is a boss that shoots lasers "straight" ahead and regardless of how close you think you are or are not to them, you will probably eat a random hit because you couldn't tell where they "really" were. It's annoying enough to not bother with, especially since it seems the difficulty selection itself doesn't change much else.

You know the drift trail attack I mentioned feeling so cool? Yeah, it's your absolute best option against any fodder in every level of the game. It only falls out of favor come boss time where the sustained damage isn't high enough. What this ultimately adds up to is you spamming the slow-mo drift trail attack, over and over again, because shooting the enemies takes slightly more effort for no actual benefit. The game is aware of this and, as mentioned, mainly sends enemies at you in polite horizontal lines to be deleted. There's even a mode where you do nothing but this attack so clearly I'm not alone in finding this out.

Stages feel a bit barren. They look cool at first blush but there is nothing like a Corneria or even really any Star Fox stage as far as environment & details go. The majority of the stages are a blurred amalgam of speed lines, lens flares, and random non-collide-able debris for visual intrigue. They leave virtually no impression on their own (beyond the lava stage, which itself is an homage to a more detailed level from Star Fox 64). The most prominent feature on any stage is the progress bar at the top, showing how much longer you have to keep killing fodder enemies until the boss shows up.

The bosses are the most interesting enemies in the game, and another place where it's really taking inspiration from other rail shooters like Star Fox. Without exception, they're basically static segments of the rail shooter where you knock out some targets and then shoot a big red weak spot. Unfortunately they also don't have much personality and usually have one really basic attack pattern. I never felt pressed or pressured by any of the bosses in this game, basically. Again, the higher difficulty options just punish you more rather than making them more difficult. Particularly for the bosses this is bad because getting a game over means sitting through the whole boring stage again.

Your first run through will be fresh and fun but by the "true" ending of the game you've played every stage at least twice, most of them three times, and absolutely nothing about the experience will make you want to keep doing them. Dying to a boss and having to redo the easy boring fodder-enemy part of the stage that drags on too long is a non-starter. It's not like a Star Fox where you're seeing through the chaos, identifying enemy patterns, and trying for some sort of score goal. It's just... going forward into lens flares and blowing up a bunch of enemies with the drift attack for 3-5 minutes.

Look, I'm 5 runs deep into this game and it isn't throwing anything new at me, I'm not going to go rifling through the many minutes of monotony to find the tiny pebble of friction or personality the gameplay maybe has to offer. I'm just not.

Do I still recommend ROGUE FLIGHT? If the aesthetics sound AT ALL appealing to you, I do. This is a love letter scarcely written, don't entirely write it off.

The thing is, this is an experience that just doesn't get richer as it goes along, it rubs itself raw, wears through the paint and exposes the less than impressive core. That's okay, games can just be what they are, they don't have to be some expansive, never-ending experience. I'm still left wanting for more, more personality, more memorable stages and enemies, more upgrades, boosts, weapons, and variance between runs. That's what I was hoping for and it didn't really match my expectations. Hopefully after reading this, it matches yours.

You will see Balatro's name dropped in these reviews a lot. Under normal circumstances I would probably feel bad about comparing the two, but the inspirations are obvious and the comparison is necessary.

The structure is overall derivative of the working Balatro formula but the construction itself is way less obviously appealing and significantly busier/more complicated. Ultimately the biggest problem i have with this game so far is that Balatro has sharp, snappy, linear progression with escalating & clearly defined challenged & end goals and this has none of that at all.

Everyone has at least seen a deck of playing cards in their life and can understand the hierachy & value of hands within a few minutes. I don't think mahjong tiles are particularly hard to grasp (at least before we get into this game's insistent on painting them and manipulating them), but the scoring throws a wrench in the gameplay for new players and ultimately feels like it doesn't-matter-until-it-does.

I think that's really the problem: there's an impossible amount of information the game is trying to transmit and it needs more work. I think in particular the attempt to stick with a somewhat washed out visual theme by default leads to many of the important UI elements blending in or appearing way too small for the information contained (think about how big a tarot/arcana card is vs. the teenie tiny "gadgets" in this game). The blind progression is pallid-brown-on-beige in the top left and it took me ages to even notice it.

Balatro takes from like 60+ years of video poker/gambling and all of the effort that's been put into making that as enticing & easy to read as possible and leverages it perfectly with high contrast buttons and solid numbers. Aotenjo is angling for something soft and I think it's often to its own detriment. Fu and Fan make perfect sense but dull green and dull blue are not contrasted enough for me to ever keep track of which is which like I can with Chips (blue) and Mult (red).

I could gripe more about the way this game transmits information but I think some of it will just be chalked up to a learning curve - you'll figure it out if you bother to try.

Anyway, I still recommend this so far. I love mahjong and roguelites and deckbuilders and this is a capable, if a bit awkward, entry into the genre. It's come a long way since the demo last year and still has room to improve yet.

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.