Recent reviews by Takarias

I wish the playercounts were higher, because this is an amazing game that deserves much more attention than it's getting. Are there a couple rough edges? Sure. But it's incredibly fun, the devs are very active, and it's got more style than it knows what to do with.

Unplayable.

I started playing on MKB, but the negative look acceleration cannot be disabled, so I switched to controller. Unfortunately, controller does this fun thing where the response region is a square. You may note that controller joysticks are not squares, so your diagonal movement is significantly slower than it should be. So I switched back to MKB. Ignoring how god-awful negative look acceleration feels, a modern FOV pulls back the viewmodel as well, so half of your screen is obscured by useless diegetic fluff. This also makes the crosshair seem entirely too low, which, when coupled with the 'self-correcting roll' that you can't disable means you're going to be crashing into everything and have a very poor understanding of the orientation of your ship. Which is kind of the whole point of the game.

Skip this if you don't like games that feel like trash.

I have 30 hours on the full version, and 61 hours on the old SteamFest demo.

This game is honestly ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing. In my eyes, it has only a single issue: You need to be into it.

I mean that it isn't for everyone. It's a game for people that like to play with logic, puzzling out how things work together and working to twist them into doing what you want. It's thrilling... for the right person. If you're that person, I give Plasma the most full-throated endorsement I can muster. If you're not that person, stay away. If you're on the fence, find your nearest autistic (highly affectionate) friend and have them stream it in Discord for you - you'll be able to figure out pretty quick if it's a game meant for you or not.

This game has the worst first 5 minutes that I have ever seen.

It opens with a tutorial that runs through all of your abilities, but they don't actually seem to be any different from each other (at least on the character that they start you with). They then quickly run through several different mechanics but explain none of them, and completely fail to explain some kind of weird goal-blocking mechanic that exists?

Anyway, pressing escape to change options exits the tutorial, which cannot be restarted, bringing you to the main menu, which is a mobile design disaster of tiny icons that have no labels (or tooltips for a mouse). This is when you are introduced to the biggest issue this game has: There is no practice mode to learn characters or adjust settings, and the Play button immediately loads you into a match (this is apparently a bot match, though this is not communicated to the player in ANY WAY - I had to learn it from the weird Discord server that has full-screen popups to select a bunch of roles as soon as you join). Not knowing that this was a bot match, I was definitely not going to try to change settings during an actual game.

The really absurd thing is that a tutorial mode and a vs bot mode are both in the code, but you can't manually select either of them. There are literally two modes that could be for practicing, and they don't let you use either of them.

There's apparently a mode switch button that unlocks after a number of matches against bots, but I can't see this button and the private match option requires a full compliment of 6 players so you can't use that either.

I have never had a less pleasant first few minutes with a game.

The most annoying part of it all is that it seems like a genuinely neat game, but I'm downvoting and not playing it until there's a practice mode so I can mess with my settings in peace. This is an egregious oversight in design.

It says I only have ~30 minutes in-game so far, but I've put several hours into the demo from when it was in Next Fest.

Deliriously stylish, pulse-pounding action, brutally streamlined, and polished to a dystopian cyberpunk shine. Hedge your chances by being greedy, or run lean and mean while pushing for the high score by donating your illicitly obtained goods to the impoverished survivors of a global catastrophe.

This is arcade gaming at its best: Controls are impeccably tight and responsive, visuals are ludicrously stylish while always being clear and readable, and the allure of a higher score is always right there, just waiting to be grasped... if only you were good enough to take it.

Jamestown+ is a remaster of the earlier game of the same name, which I have not played. Production quality in this edition is impressive, with fluid performance, lavish animations, and excellent sound quality. Unfortunately, that is also where the problems begin.

Despite the quality of the soundtrack, the overall audio presentation leaves much to be desired. Both your and your enemy's shots lack any audio at all, and when combined with a lack of shot impact audio, means that attacks lack impact and the game feels rather sterile to listen to.

While individual sprites are enjoyably colorful and detailed, no mind appears to have been paid to how these sprites actually work in concert. Enemy fire is red, blue, green, and occasionally gold, with gold also being a color of a score pickup. These colors are shared with the player's own fire. It's also worth noting that those pickups are cartoonishly massive, which when paired with the rich contrast and animations in the sprite, means that the player's eye is often drawn to these ultimately unimportant pickups over enemy fire.

Much like the audio and graphical issues, smooth gameplay with responsive controls and tight hitboxes is marred by baffling design decisions. Gameplay takes place in a vertically-scrolling field with an internal resolution of 511x320 pixels, with chunky entities to allow for the detail in each sprite to shine. This leaves very little room for the player to maneuver, especially vertically, and even more so when you consider that some of the limited vertical resolution is occupied by player info, score, and boss health running across the top of the screen. The developers seem entirely unaware of this limitation, however, as enemies routinely spawn halfway (or more!) of the way down the screen, and some will even come from the bottom at the same time.

Unfortunately, this is not where the problems stop. The first bullet point on this store page is that Jamestown offers a “wide array of difficulty levels.” This might as well be a blatant lie, as the game requires that you beat prior levels on harder difficulties before you can progress. This means that the easier difficulties might as well not exist.

But finally, I come to performance, which is the issue I noticed first. Yes, the game runs quite well with no real issues. However, it runs in fullscreen windowed mode (which is good), at a quite low resolution, and then uses the OS scaling to fill the screen. This produces a number of unwanted effects, with windows and desktop icons being resized and shuffled around under the game, and mouse sensitivity does not decrease proportionally. Additionally, when I had closed the game, my mouse was registering a second click a few seconds after I clicked. A restart fixed this.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this game due to numerous design stumbles and a technical implementation that I personally found wanting.

This game is baasically just a bad version of Castle Crashers with none of the polish or control finesse mashed together with the loot system in Binding of Issac. It's miserable to play, since the one-button combat manages to feel overworked and yet also completely unrefined.

Coop also exists in the same vein as Magicka, where the expectation is that you're going to cause the other player some trouble. If the game was fun to play in the first place, this would work, but gameplay is a miserable chore, and the coop ends up feeling antagonistic, like you exist as a malevolent force in your friend's game, some invincible ghoul put there to push them endlessly off the all-too common cliffs.

Not worth being one of the games you don't care about in a bundle. (Where I got it from.)

Good lord the balance in the game is terrible. There are plenty of offensive and defensive actions available to the player, but the only defensive action that is actually beneficial is breaking someone's guard. The issue there is that the game is so incredibly heavily weaighted against guarding in the first place that no one has a guard to break. The only viable strategy become charging people and spamming the quick attack, and hoping you land the first hit.

If you're interested in a melee combat game, go play Chivalry. It isn't garbage, is a lot cheaper, and has dedicated severs with a healthy population.

I got this game because it seemed like a fun 'standalone Nazi Zombies' that I would be able to play with my friends. Sadly, I never got to actually do that.

While learning my way around the game, I opted to play medic, because I'm always drawn to support classes. This, apparently, was a mistake. See, in Killing Floor 2, as you level a class, that class gets better. In the case of the medic, that includes how much healing he's able to deal. As a low level medic, I spent entire matches getting ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ at by this game's toxic community because my healing wasn't strong enough. Making new players suck is a great way to alienate them, devs.

Also, the boss is a terrible damage sponge that isn't actually interesting to fight and ends every match on a sour note, even if you kill it. Something like L4D's climax finales would have been much better in basically every way.

-WARP INHIBITED BY STELLAR MASS-