Senaste recensioner av TH3G4M3GRL

EDIT: Out of interest to confirm my review, I attempted to do a full playthrough. Initially I claimed the game was causing BSOD, but the truth is that it was Windows 11. All other performance issues I mention have remained though.

With Shadows of Doubt hitting the big 1.0 full release update. I have to put my two cents in. This game at first seems shockingly in depth and promising. But if you put a few hours in, you'll quickly find how lifeless most of the game truly is. You have the finger prints, footprints with types of shoes and size, handwriting styles, etc. NPCs seemingly have A LOT of various traits you can work with. Need to find some information? Take a look in their house and find their job schedule to know when they leave and break into their home when they're out. Maybe break in while they sleep. Perhaps even toss a coin in the corner and slip past while they look away.

A majority of these aspects of the game are pointless. Staking out a target for them to sleep is entirely unpredictable as NPCs will choose to wake up for random purposes whenever they really want, even when they should be at work, there's a chance they'll still be at their home or will come inside for no reason. There's plenty of tools and gadgets to use for luring and distracting NPCs, ways to block them off by wedging doors, using motion trackers to know when someone is coming... The stealth aspects seem promising but the best way to get information is just to beat the suspect unconscious. While they're completely unconscious, root through their pockets, grab their fingerprints, and have free reign of their home without needing to waste time sneaking around. There are zero repercussions for beating people unconscious multiple times so it's easy enough to just knock them out again when necessary.

Similarly, the combat aspects seem initially interesting with how your fists let you time a parry and a counter attack when fighting. Except it only works against other unarmed targets so anybody with a weapon is just backpedaling to easily avoid their attacks. Your fists are also weak weapons, and it's far easier to just buy a sword to KNOCK OUT someone in two swings. They made a point that your character has sworn off guns to the point of using them as melee weapons but for some reason stabbing people is perfectly okay. This distinction is rather dumb, and pointing to the Yakuza series: characters in that game have no qualms with using guns and knives. However, a character with stricter morals like Yagami from Judgment can't use guns OR bladed weapons. Removing these more inherently lethal weapons as tools entirely makes more sense than deciding it's perfectly fine to stab everyone but a gun isn't. So from an immersion aspect, it's baffling that guns are off limits but a literal katana is acceptable.

Let's also not forget the BIGGEST aspect here: the downright HORRID performance and bugs. I have a decently strong computer and will get stutters whenever the game wants, objects will load and pop in AFTER I run into their hitbox. This issue pulls into cases as well, with some side jobs giving you a picture of a briefcase somewhere. Except all the objects won't load in on the picture because I haven't been in that area yet. A murder happened in an apartment building? Let's go check that camera system! Except, oh wait, they didn't render any of the people walking around in this area so you don't even get a possible suspect. A rooftop that happened to generate so you can clamber down to an apartment's windows, smash them open, and get inside? There's a solid invisible wall preventing you from breaking the window or climbing inside to begin with.

For a full release, this game's content and systems feels depressingly undercooked, the actual hardware performance of the game is horrid, and there's a real chance that you'll get shafted from something bugging out and ruining your experience. I would not recommend getting this game until the modders really flesh out the skeleton that was laid before them.

Corpus Edax is a game that pretends it has more going on than it truly does. It had a reputation system and character traits in the menu that did nothing. I was neutral with every faction by the end of the game, including the faction you primarily fight against. The reputation system was recently culled in an update however, minus one faction: Citizens. The reputation you have with the civilians does affect the ending. Every other bit of reputation mentioned when you kill someone is pointless. The character traits as far as I know doesn't do anything either.

The game introduces you to a base of operations, you can get free healing, there's an armory to buy weapons/tools from and even sell excess loot you wouldn't want. You never return to the base about 1/3rd into the game. The entire money mechanic from this point onwards is just to buy extra heals from vending machines with an optional NPC you can bribe. One of the biggest pulls to me is the combat system of the game, a melee focused experience with combos you can perform. There is only one source of information about these combos in game: The tutorial. Outside of this, your combos are locked behind a high enough combat skill AND you need to figure out the inputs on your own. Most combat is trivialized from how strong your block is and the running kick you can unlock with minor investment. The raw power you ragdoll foes lets you pretty easily knock them into pits or knock them down to hit them while they get up. You also are able to grab objects from the environment as improvised weapons. Chairs, pipes, even emptied healing syringes! There's just one problem.

The level design going into the Mines (the same point you lose access to the shop) and onwards is incredibly sparing with objects in the environment. In the Mines itself, I found ONE pickaxe to use in the entirety of my exploration. There was one chair. Zero pipes. This level of scarcity continues throughout the rest of the game. In the Hotel there's always something nearby you can use, but that quickly falls off. Levels were surprisingly linear as well, usually having just one side path (two rarely). By the final stage it's just a turning hallway where you handle threats along the way

The story is passable but feels like it flip flops on which crisis it wants to focus on. I don't intend to get into spoilers but it feels a bit unfocused.
Despite all of this, if you want some goofy ragdoll brawler to bash through in five hours? It's probably worth going for that. I didn't explore the Allure/Intuition approach with dialogue options but I can't imagine they'd do too much. Consider this a very tentative recommendation.

An enjoyable experience for people looking for a more arcade styled stealth game. The gameplay is more in depth from the first game, with some issues. Such as the moment you dump your last body, you lose the blood meter telling you how much is left. As well as lack of level select so if you want to perfect clean the levels, you better have done it your first run through.

Visually the game is servicable, and has stylistic choices that give it an interesting perspective. I again feel the first game painted a better style for the game, but the grittier aspects they included wouldn't work in the first game. An evolving visual direction is good, but it wasn't too impressive to me.

Story was never a strong suit of the first game, but it felt concise and enjoyable. You're a momma's boy who cleans up crime scenes. Eventually you work for a client that has you cleaning up a serial killer and it escalates until you're stuck having to rescue your mom and clear your own name. This game however felt much more lackluster in the story department. There's several storylines, one for each character, and then the main story tying together the narrative.

The main story is the group of cleaners celebrating New Years after cleaning up a scene. Each level is served as a flashback of the character explaining the job. After each level you usually have a flashback of some kind with the character. As the night progresses, eventually a pager alerts everyone. Suddenly there's apparently a traitor in the crew. Everyone's holding up each other at gunpoint. Depending on choices made in dialogue, you can sway who the traitor actually is. The traitor dies, you pick somebody to dump the body. Game over. The traitor plot twist feels like it comes out of nowhere. I didn't really feel like this was a crew of friends... or coworkers really. They didn't ever have much of a cohesive relationship that felt genuine in much way. The characters existed but the only ones I felt really developed was Hal. He started depicted as a stilted dialect psychopath. Then you learn of his loved one he has, her desires to have a kid, that she wants him to go clean. The thoughts that nobody he works with views him as a proper person. His way of talking comes from trying to improve and express his barely present emotions, pausing every word to ensure he explains his exact thoughts. It gave a surprising bit of depth to him. Interestingly the more stressful the situation the more eloquent and composed he seemed, needing to pause less between words. It gives Hal a nice dynamic.

If you don't care for the story, the game itself is enjoyable. If you care for the story, it's a mixed bag. It's passable, but could have been executed better.

Madness: Project Nexus. This game has been a long time coming, and I've ridden through a lot of versions of this game. To put it simple is that if you enjoy the Madness series, you'll enjoy this. If you enjoy more arcade oriented beat-em-up games, you'll enjoy this.

The combat is easy to understand, but there's a surprising amount of nuance and depth from fight to fight. With mechanics as simple as the Arkham-style press attack button just before hitting to critical hit, to weapon durability and stabbing the broken weapon into someone for an instant kill. Dual wielding melee weapons to increase your damage output or taking a weapon and a gun in both hands to beat people up close and shoot them immediately after. There's a good amount of variety in your options.

Storywise the game is relatively self-contained and gives you enough information to rely on just the game. There are details that you can piece together from the animations and the game before, but none of that is necessary to enjoy the story of this game. Although, I am biased in this regard and may be wrong.

There is also the Arena mode, which is separate from the Story mode with its own story and gameplay mechanics. I do have some issues with the Arena mode, due to how the end game functions feels at odds with the other main aspects of it. It still is enjoyable despite that of course, if you enjoy the base gameplay enough.

Remember though. Just do what comes natural.

A buggy game that even once fixed would be lacking in many capacities.

The combat is just passable, but unless the enemies are vastly outnumbering you, typically you will out heal them or out damage them. Their AI is meagerly depressing. Where at one point, while defeating a rival boss, for three turns in a row the remaining enemies just spammed overwatch whilst I shot them to pieces. There's nothing I saw to indicate what skills enemy goons will have, nor your own goons defending places. In the goon vs goon combats, they can drag on dreadfully long thanks to this and their poor stats.
The risk of a game over is typically barely a threat, BUT I have faced heavy losses from when the AI spammed explosives (which are guaranteed decent chunks of damage), and did game over when one of the generic enemy goons turned out to have the meat hook skill to pull my boss into the wide open of five enemies and they focus fired on them.

Empire management in this game is technically there, but it is basically just upgrading without thought as all of it is beneficial. The alcohol production has some level of matching the demand that the neighborhoods want, but they'll all reach Whiskey guaranteed if you buy everything. Police apparently can shut down your businesses but unless you're actively slaughtering them I don't think they'll do anything. I could be wrong but they never bothered me.

Diplomacy between factions is present. Everyone seems highly eager to hate you however, unless you fork over absurd amounts of money to them. There's a "like" meter and a "threat" meter. The standing arrangements you can typically make with them however are very lackluster in power, and the only reasonable use for trading with them would be to snag a Unique tier weapon without having to kill them. Supposedly you can offer to protect others for money, but when I tried my "threat" was too high or something and it wouldn't let me. Along with this is a thing called a Mole for espionage. You send them to infiltrate an enemy faction and after six months, you sabotage them in some form depending on the class of the gangster you send in. However, six months is a very hefty chunk of time, and they're not guaranteed to succeed. For reference, I killed 6 enemy bosses or so after setting out my mole, and they never did their job.

In a similar vein to diplomacy, there is the gangsters and their relationship system. Some of your hires like, hate, or love others. They will refuse to shoot those that they like, and there's some interactions if you have their lover in your group, but I cannot tell if there's any benefits or if it's just drawbacks, as I believe they gain a negative status effect if their lover is low health. However, if you kill someone they just like, there's a chance that they will get upset and just leave. Which, to keep that, you'd need to ask a favour from another faction to kill the person they like if an enemy boss has them and you want to ensure you keep this one gangster. Overall the system here is barren but does have groundworks with some unique gangster specific quests (I have only seen two of them with a quest though).

Everything about this game is just average. It's meh. The setting helps carry it enough for me to say I could probably enjoy it in stints every now and again, but the gameplay is very dull and I don't think they can fix that unless they overhaul the systems.

A fun and challenging 2D shooter with enough of a compelling story to keep you invested. I thoroughly enjoyed and loved the game, and there's even workshop support so there's plenty of content to play with even past the base game. Especially with the hard mode version of the campaign.

That said, there's a few issues that very much disappoint me but don't really hinder the core of the gameplay.

The achievements, I would rather Death and Famine to be a "complete every stage without dying" and "complete every stage in total under an hour", rather than having to start an entirely new game to do such, as that means in order to fully 100% the game, you need to complete the game without dying in under an hour and then go complete the other achievements.

On top of that, you cannot buy every weapon in the game even with every achievement completed. You will always be short something, whether it's the scythe (in my case) or some other combination. You will not have enough souls to get everything. I'm not sure why the devs decided to make it so you can ALMOST get everything but not quite?

In the end, I really hope they come back to make a sequel that improves upon the gameplay and fixes the few janky parts of the game. (Making it so you can actually 100% the game in one file would be nice.)

A great story, fun gameplay, and great soundtrack combine into one of my favorite games of all time. Story currently ends on a cliffhanger, hopefully more content is coming. Also lets you pet cats.

With recent allegations of what the devs behind Starbound were doing with not paying their workers along with Rhopunzel making claims of sexual harassment cases... it's not looking good.

I've enjoyed the game. I think they've made some bad changes from early access to full release, but the overall product is still good and can go further beyond thanks to modding. I cannot however recommend this game until Chucklefish has provided proof that these claims are actually false. Not paying people for their work is plenty scummy and I've a personal investment in this. I backed this game on Kickstarter.

Prove it wrong if you can, Chucklefish. But I cannot in good heart say you should buy this game until that's proven otherwise.

I'm not going to be particularly in detail. The game is a spiritual successor to Advance Wars while bringing its own twists to the system. The only major issue I have is the big difference in this game is that your commander (strong ground unit, you lose if they perish) sometimes will almost never play a part in a battle if the map is heavily water and air based, as the commander is unable to interact with those unit types. Essentially this turns every water based map into a normal fight with no commander options.

Otherwise, the game is pretty well designed, although the "hard difficulty" in the Arcade mode isn't that fun to play against most of the time as their way of making it more challenging when I last played it was to just double the income of the AI. This results in eventually the AI overwhelming you with higher cost units if given enough time. The AI still falls for common tricks that they would fall for in normal too.

This game despite its flaws is plenty fun, has a ton of heists with varying objectives, simple horde wave based shooter. Ultimate Edition unlocks a lot of content, but isn't exactly needed. I'm bad at reviewing.