Recent reviews by Starkiller

As a huge fan of the first SUPERHOT game, I can't believe the SUPERHOT team decided that this game was OK for release.

• It's a SUPERHOT game, so you get most of the selling points of the first game: the bullet-time/ultra-slow-mo game mechanic enables many amazing situations, and watching the replay after ending each level is as funny as in the first game.
  
• The storyline is still as mysterious and thrilling as that of the first game.
  
• Some interesting new features have been added. These include new weapons, new types of enemies, as well as an HP bar (you no longer die with a single shot) and temporary buffs (referred to as hacks).

There are just so many of them 😕
Before I start the list, I believe it is essential that we quickly explain how this game changes from the first SUPERHOT game.

Instead of having a menu where you pick individual levels, you have a kind of world map where you can pick nodes, each of which starts a sequence of levels picked randomly among a set of 32 levels. Dying in any of the levels in the sequence causes you to restart the whole sequence.

• The whole game has a huge problem with how its difficulty ramps up. If you have played the first SUPERHOT game, this game will feel absurdly easy and even boring for the first 50-75% of the game, depending on your skill level. You will complete sequences of 3, 5, or sometimes even 8 levels without dying even once. But once you reach the point from where sequences last for 10 or even 15 levels, the game very suddenly starts to feel absurdly hard. From this point, you will start every single level with 2-3 armed enemies right in front of you, almost no weapon around you for picking, and you have only 3 HP for the whole sequence (although sometimes you can restore your health upon completing some levels). Oh, and did I mention that some of the enemies that spawn are literally invincible (all you can do is try to avoid their attacks, which works roughly 50% of the time)?
  
• Overall, the whole random level mechanic made me feel like levels were almost all the same. I really wish there had been 25 fully hand-crafted levels like in the first game, rather than 200 levels resulting from picking a random level among 32 of them and adding a bit of randomness on top of that. It really feels like the SUPERHOT team favored quantity over quality ("let's make players play more, even when it is absolutely not fun"). The climax of this can be experienced when you find out a node that starts a sequence of 100 levels (yes, one hundred, you read that correctly!), or when you end the game, and the game starts an 8-hour 2-hour-and-a-half timer before you can play again (and do not even think about switching the game off to skip this timer!)[www.gamerevolution.com].
  
• This may sound like nitpicking, but being taken immediately into the first level upon launching the game feels very weird, especially when the game tells you to use the WSAD keys to move, even when you don't have a QWERTY keyboard. As most french players, I am playing with an AZERTY keyboard, so WSAD hardly makes sense for me. Worse part is that the keyboard options are very hard to find in the menu (you have to exit to the main menu, then press F1 to access the options). Overall, this felt somewhat unwelcoming.

I am honestly happy this game was offered to me for free for getting the first SUPERHOT game, because it is definitely not worth purchasing outside of a huge sale.

A simple, yet challenging tactical game that any turn-based strategy game fan really should consider purchasing.

As an Advance Wars fan, this game features everything I love in this kind of game: creativity is strongly encouraged (need to protect an objective from an enemy attack? Just put yourself between the objective and the enemy unit, and freeze yourself! Wanna hamper the enemy? Bomb them with electric smoke bombs to both stop their attack and damage them!), and the game has a very clever AI with just a few point of failures to allow for the player to get out of most tough situations.

The main campaign can be completed in just a few hours, but the whole game is designed around strong replayability, in such a way that fully completing it (getting 100% achievements) will take several dozens of hours (as of writing, I've earned all achievements, just after 69 hours of total playtime!).

The main pain point of this game if the way it mixes permadeath with procedurally-generated maps. Roughly 1 out of 5 times you will run into situations where there is simply no good way out (no matter what decision you make, it will eventually cause you to lose). This means permadeath will happen frequently... with all the frustration it brings.

Overall, if you like challenging tactical games, Into The Breach is definitely worth buying without any discount.

Katana ZERO is a masterpiece. PERIOD.

While it strongly draws inspiration from the Hotline Miami games (which you can clearly tell from its pixel art graphics, its synthwave tunes, and its dark/noir storyline), it has all the selling points that make a classic.

Its gameplay is astoundingly simple, while enabling a wide range of insane situations. I mean, do you often play games where you can cut several enemies in half, and return a bullet to its sender, all of this in a single katana blow? If the answer is no (and I bet it is), then I have good news for you, because this is just a glimpse of what this game will enable you to perform.

The storyline is fairly mysterious so far, but itis quite similar to that of the Hotline Miami games and deals with violence, war, and drugs. It also provides the ability to choose what your character will say to other characters, which can directly influence future events (sometimes in a truly dramatic way, and some other times in a pretty funny way). I hope future DLCs will make the storyline's mystery points clearer! (Oh, by the way, since we're mentioning future DLCs, you may want to know that the upcoming DLC will be free! Yay!).

The few cons about this game are its rather short lifespan (roughly 5 hours to finish the main campaign – but honestly, this is not that much of downside, because levels are a bliss to play again, and the game also provides a pretty challenging speedrun mode, which features a hard mode), and some minor gameplay issues (as an example, if you're playing with a keyboard, you have 2 different ways or rolling – either by pressing Down + Left or Right, either by pressing the Return key – the former feels more natural in my opinion, but will fail to work in situations where the Down key can be used to get down from a platform – this can be very frustrating when you want to dodge an attack and you'll die often because of this issue).

Just get the game. It's cheap (12.49 EUR here in Europe), runs at a consistently smooth framerate while weighing less than 300 MB (which is sadly a rare thing these days), and provides an experience that you're unlikely to forget as a gamer.

This game is OK, and you'll enjoy it if you've liked slightly-horrific-but-mostly-action games such as Resident Evil 4. I wish Steam offered some kind of "gray thumb" option, because The Evil Within is not exactly the kind of game I would strongly recommend buying, but not the kind of game I want to strongly recommend against buying either. I would just call it... fair.

Overall, the storyline and gameplay are pretty good, the framerate is consistently OK on my gaming machine, and the atmosphere is nicely presented both in visual terms and in terms of sound.

However, you will most likely experience a strong desire to ragequit this game quite a few times due to its highly-punishing mechanics and bugs, just as I did.

Some enemies have an absurdly-high range and will just kill you instantly, no matter how much life you have left; weapon bindings just break, forcing you to open the menu (which does not pause the game, but slows it down just a bit) and select the weapon you want to switch to, all of this during a fight where each fraction of a second matters. And those are just some of the main sources of frustration I've experienced throughout the game.

Tne outcome of some boss fights (such as the huge dog before the church, which, no matter how fast you run and turn, will hit you anyway, un less you're lucky) is mostly luck-based, so you end up dying and retrying until you're lucky enough to get past them.

Also, the Steam achievements are awful. Let's just face it. Having a Steam achievement per difficulty level is a terrible practice in my opinion, as it requires players to finish the exact same single-player campaigns multiple times, just with some (sometimes insane) added difficulty between each restart. By the way, the highest difficulty level will require you to finish the game... without getting hit a single time. Wow, much fun.

Nevertheless, if you're not a Steam achievement hunter like me (which I fully respect), The Evil Within is a rather interesting experience. I would just recommend not playing it on high difficulty levels if you care about your own well-being. 😛

This game may feel like an old game at first glance, but it is a very pleasant experience, especially in multiplayer.

It's basically just a top-down shooter where you play as a soldier going to war, killing enemy soldiers, capturing crucial points, so his army can conquer the world.
From the beginning to the end, this game is meant to be a caricature and to get you laughing, thanks to its cartoon/cel-shaded art style, its sound design and one-liners (like "Can you guys turn off your phones? I can hear a 'beep beep' sound!" "It's not my phone, it's my Tamagotchi!").

Its gameplay is very accessible, although fully mastering all of its intricacies will require you to read wiki web pages, and can be very fun once you accept that you are just one soldier and that, as skillful as you may be, your actions will not necessarily influence the outcome of the battle significantly.
Multiplayer (ideally with friends) is the definitely the best way of playing this game; single-player experience can actually range from not so fun to truly awful, given that you are just one soldier in an army of NPCs facing… an army of NPCs (so the outcome mostly depends on NPCs, which means you have to rely at least partly on luck to win battles).

Another downside of this game is the rather poor save/XP management. Your XP is saved on a per-server basis, meaning that any XP you gain while playing on a server is saved only for that server (so once you play on another server, your XP is not accessible); also, this game has no Steam Cloud support, so even your single-player saves and settings are no longer accessible once you play the game on a new computer.

Now bring it on soldiers! Your motherland is waiting for you!

A cute tribute to very early shooter games (Wolfenstein 3D, Marathon) with a very distinct art style.

Don't expect too much from this game though; the first levels, being a bit too blocky, linear and not so fun, don't introduce you to the game in a welcoming fashion, but once you get past that, you can fully grasp this game's selling points.

Its gameplay is very basic: select level from hub, start level, shoot, open doors, pick up keys, end level, and so on. There is no such thing as jumping or crouching in this game, but this is enough to make an accessible game lasting roughly 5-6 hours that is worth discovering.
Its pixel-art-based, cartoonish-yet-gory-and-dark visual style is unique and definitely worth checking out.

Soundtrack is made of some rather decent (albeit a bit repetitive) electronic, 8-bit, and sometimes metal tunes. It is definitely not designed as an action soundtrack, but more as background music, which makes the game feel rather casual.

Overall, you'll enjoy this game if you're looking for an FPS experience that is not designed for hardcore fans, and you'll do even more if you've played some of the very first shooter games in history.

If you liked FPS's from the 90's (especially Quake 1), get this game now!

This game is not only an amazing tribute to shooters from this era; it takes the retro FPS concept to a whole new level by adding smart and refreshing ideas.

Its dark lovecraftian horror atmosphere, combined with its old-school/pixelated visual style, turns this game into a pretty unique experience.

Through a truly genius level design, this game also managed to keep me engaged all the way through. Feeling lost and having no idea what to do or where to go is something I've experienced often in many shooters, but very seldom in DUSK. Levels also tell you a lot about the game's narrative through exploration, while always keeping a bit of mystery until the very last minutes of the game.

This game's soundtrack is also a real selling point. Bringing death/industrial metal music to a horror game may sound wacky at first, but this game subtly alternates dark ambient music for exploration and metal music for battles and this results in an even more horrific and terrific journey.

There just a few downsides in this game. First of all, the weapons lack a bit of uniqueness and originality. Weapons can be roughly summarized as follows: start with a melee weapon, then pick up pistols, then find shotguns, then get a machinegun, and finish with explosive weapons. I just wish there had been some more demonic tools to fight your enemies.
Also, once you finish the single-player adventure, the other game modes don't make the game last much longer. The Endless battle mode is something I've played only a few times, and the multiplayer mode is something I've skipped right away once I figured out that only a few players were online at the times I would play it.

So, what are you waiting for? Come and prove yourself worthy. 😈

I'm usually skeptical about physics-based games, but Human: Fall Flat is fun and mind-challenging.

Controls are simple: you can move, jump, grab items and ledges. The whole game is made of levels where you are required to combine these actions smartly. As simple as it may sound, the game actually creates interesting situations where creativity is nicely rewarded.

Its graphics are a bit too simplistic and the piano music fits rather poorly into the atmosphere of this game, but this is not much of a problem as you go further into the game.

The game is fully playable in solo, but most of its fun can be experienced by playing in co-op (the trailer shows this nicely).

The major downside of this game is its short lifespan. Once you've finished its 9 levels, there isn't much left to do, apart from going for achievements.

Wait for a small discount before getting this game, and ensure you have friends to play with to get the best out of it.

Yes. Definitely yes! Duck Game has nailed it!

It's straightforward, easy to handle, and every tiny bit of this game is designed for pure fun.
You have countless weapons to fight your duck opponents with, ranging from classical, miltary gear to tools which are absurd at best (such as a holy book to turn your opponents into allies 😂), and I'm not even mentioning the one feature to rule them all: you can quack!

Also, some more selling points off the top of my head :

• Cute pixel art graphics;
  
• Awesome 8-bit-ish music;
  
• Fast-paced action where any hundredth of a second can decide whether you'll survive or die (but this is done a in a rather non-punishing way);
  
• Although this is mostly a multiplayer game, it features around 20 single-player challenges.
  
• You can quack.

Oh, by the way, did I mention you could quack? If not, please let me tell you: you can quack. 🦆

The only downside I would mention is that you can't play matches against AI opponents. This would have been a great addition, although I understand that could have been a huge amount of work for devs.

So, what are you waiting for? Just get the game and go quack with your friends. 🦆

This is a purely physics-based game, so it has all the selling points, but also all the flaws that physics-based games have.

Pros :

• it's a physics-based game, so it makes a huge range of absurd-but-fun situations possible;
  
• it's easy to grasp;
  
• its graphics are pretty cute;
  
• its electronic music is really cool.

So why did I put this red thumb? Well :

• it's a physics-based game, so it has its tons of physics-related bugs. As an example, your character can be pushed at a velocity such that you go through walls and fall through the floor, and I doubt this was intentional;
  
• it also has its tons of network-related bugs. This includes :
  - broken matches, where everyone appears to be dead, but no one wins and you can't skip the round (all you can do is leave the server). From my experience, matchmaking typically results in joining 2-3 such games before you can join a game that actually works;
  - some rather dubious lag management, where some players somehow have their deaths delayed (the death animation is played but the server does not consider the player dead yet), and if you die during this delay, the game considers you died before them.
  These bugs are truly pervasive but they have never been adressed, and I've been called a cheater and a hacker several times when they favored me.

In the end, I feel like this game has been rushed on the programming side, leading to a result that is just unacceptable. Too bad, because it had some real potential.

Just skip this game, or wait for a discount before buying it.