Recent reviews by popcar2

At what point does an MMORPG turn into a clicker game? Brighter Shores aims to streamline the genre but swings too far in that direction that the game is so, so simple and ends up being very shallow.

• Every single skill boils down to clicking on something and waiting for a bar to fill up. Gathering items, cooking, alchemy, combat, everything is so automated that it doesn't feel like you're doing anything.
  
• The game is comically grindy for no reason and there's no real reason to level anything up in general. You'll be doing the exact same thing on level 1 of gathering vs level 200. The only difference is the icon you're clicking on is different.
  
• The map is grid-based and relatively small-scale. It doesn't feel like a world, more like a set of connected hallways.
  
• Every quest is either a fetch quest or asks you to go talk to another NPC. There is no story to redeem this either, the writing is poor and full of fluff. The devs seemingly created the most generic fantasy world ever on purpose.
  
• The progression system means none of your grind and effort carries over between acts.
  
• Saying this is an MMO is a stretch. There's zero group activities, and people you meet disappear between rooms, so communicating with others becomes impossible.

I had hopes for this game, but my 4 hours of playing Brighter Shores were completely dull. I have a hard time seeing why anybody would play this compared to any other MMORPG in the market.

Long story short, Marvel Rivals is a great hero shooter, one of the only games that manages to remind me of classic Overwatch. It's fun to jump in and mess around, there's an impressive variety of heroes and abilities that guarantees everybody can enjoy the game. The production quality is superb, too.

That said, Marvel Rivals' gameplay feels very "messy" compared to many other multiplayer games. Visual and audio clarity are non-existent, you will often be in very fast paced team-fights with no idea of what's going on, who's damaging you, where your team is, and which team actually has the objective. Characters shout voice lines constantly and there are a few characters which would just cover the whole area with very distracting visual effects.

This problem is made way worse by the fact that this game has ZERO downtime between fights. Everybody respawns in only 10 seconds, and since maps are very small they'll be back on the objective in no time. There are times where we would kill 3-4 enemies, and by the time we get to the last ones alive, the rest of the team would be back in 15 seconds.

There's no time to strategize, no time to position properly, and no time to decide who wants to switch to which hero. Hell, matches even start before everybody loads the game. People who don't have the game on an SSD often miss the first half-minute of a match, and you'll be wondering where your team even is.

Another thing everybody's talking about is the lack of a role queue. Most matches will have only one or even zero healers since nobody's picking support, and there isn't anything you can do if the other 5 teammates are all DPS-mains.

Playing support is also very rough. Movement abilities are crazy in Marvel Rivals, a decent player can just jump over your whole team and focus you like Venom and Psylocke. Unless your team can turn around for a few seconds (not going to happen when they can barely see what's going on), you're probably dead.


The game is fun and I'm really looking forward to playing it more. That said, I hope they can improve clarity and balance, and maybe tone down the pace of the game a little bit. At the very least make respawn times longer so we can actually capitalize on kills.

Quest Master is just fantastic. I don't mean to put other games down, but it is leagues ahead of other "maker" games like Super Dungeon Maker. It's not even close.

Let's start with the gameplay itself: The controls are tight and very enjoyable. There's a good variety of enemies and items, and a ton of creative ways to use many of them. There's some you will expect like a boomerang and grappling hook, but quite a bit of unique ones like a wand that creates tornados which shoot you upwards, or a ghost lantern that shows invisible objects around you.

Dungeons can have multiple floors and there's so much you can do with it like being able to see floors below you and fall down to them assuming the level creator lets you. There's also a detailed map that automatically updates the more you explore, with teleporters to move around easily - encouraging huge levels and exploration without feeling lost!

One thing that surprised me is that there's some meta progression to Quest Master, there are rings you gain over time that grant you small bonuses when playing levels, and NPCs that visit the town at certain times to play small minigames. Pretty fun!

The production quality is S-tier as you can probably guess. Art, music, and sound effects are lovely and full of detail. It's obviously... Inspired... But there's a great amount of unique themes that it never feels like just a Zelda clone.

If you're here for the level maker, rest easy. It's awesome. It's very easy to use and has powerful mechanics like signals and conditionals to trigger events whenever you do something, whether that be solving a puzzle or opening a chest or killing an enemy, etc...


The game is fun. The community, while small, is creating TONS of quality levels with huge amounts of variety. Whether you're here just to play levels or make them, Quest Master is one of the best maker games out there, even in early access. Buy it!

I just realized I haven't written a review for this game which is insane considering I spent over 100 hours on it.

It's a fantastic collection of retro-themed games, and I reviewed every single one on my personal blog: https://popcar.bearblog.dev/reviewing-every-ufo50-game/

Trackmania is a fantastic arcade racing game that has VERY powerful map-creation tools and an amazing community that gives us an infinite amount of content. I have well over 150 hours outside of Steam and still enjoy watching this game.

You might be wondering why I'm downvoting this game, then. It's because of two reasons:

* Ubisoft gimped the free version of the game, limiting it to just 10 easy campaign maps per season rather than the whole 25 maps, making the free version a joke

* The "premium version" is a $20/year subscription, which is outrageous especially considering 99% of content is made by the community and NOT Nadeo. I could stomach another subscription service when it was $10 per year, but last year they doubled the price to squeeze the playerbase.

Well, my subscription ended and I can no longer play online levels - the entire point of the game. I'm frankly very upset the community didn't cause a bigger ruckus at how insane the pricing of this game is. None of the updates or mediocre campaign maps justify such an expensive price to a game you'll never own.

In fact, the newer updates introducing legacy cars arguably made the game worse. The new cars are so finnicky to control and constant switching of them mid-track intentionally messes with your muscle memory and will force you to crash or lose control constantly.

Save your money and play TM:NF which is ACTUALLY free - or buy an older TM game like Turbo when on sale.

~15 years later, still remains to be the greatest element sandbox ever made. An absolute ton of elements to play with - both real and fantasy. I've got fond memories playing, and it only seems to have gotten better over the years.

The game is also a technical masterpiece, the download size is only like 3 megabytes and it could run on a potato.

That's kind of the big question. There's quite a lot of content available in the game right now and I've unlocked everything major. Hades 2 is a ton of fun, but as you might expect from early access the content abruptly ends at some point and you'll have to wait until the next update. While it is fun, there are also some kinks and pacing issues that will be ironed out over EA, so I would recommend waiting if you're not impatient like me.

The big issue with EA is obviously the story. When you beat the final boss, the story abruptly ends and you don't get to know what happens next. There's a couple of unresolved side stories as well,

Gameplay-wise, Hades 2 is awesome. It's as satisfying as you might expect from a sequel to Hades 1. The bosses are also a massive step up in quality, they're a lot more fun and creative.

There's some balance issues but something that really needs tweaking is omega abilities (charging attacks). If you base your build around charging attacks the combat becomes kind of tedious since you slow down time every time you charge, and you're incentivized to use your mana actively but it can feel like it takes forever to use it up.

You won't run into this in most runs, but when you have an omega attack build you'll quickly realize you have to hold attack for one second, release, and repeat 20 times until combat is over. All the while time slows down, which can bring the pacing of the combat down with it and it turns into a bit of a waiting game where you stand still and spam. Supergiant have acknowledged this and I trust they'll figure it out in time.

The one thing I am a bit worried about is the writing. The story is still excellent of course, but like others have mentioned it feels more dry than Hades 1. Melinoe isn't as interesting as Zagreus, her mission comes down to "I want to kill Chronos" and isn't very personal.

Hades 1 had a lot of fun dynamics like Zagreus' spiteful relationship with his father, his awkward friendship with Dusa and Meg, his funny rivalry with Theseus, etc. This game is lacking a bit of that energy. A lot of dialogue feels empty and a lot of Melinoe's relationship with others is just "good luck on your quest to kill Chronos we're rooting for you". Maybe this will improve as they add more content and the story evolves a bit more.

Still, the story's pretty good when it kicks off and I'm eager to see where it goes.

In short: Hades 2 is a worthy sequel. There's still some stuff that can (and probably will) improve. That and the fact that the story is incomplete means you should probably wait until release unless you're impatient like me.

Tetragun is a great arcade game, very much worth the low price of free and pretty fun for a handful of rounds.

Some feedback:

* I agree with adding a high contrast mode. The issue isn't just the colors, but the enemy death particles being the same color and shape. It's hard to parse where enemies are when there are 100 circles on screen, most of which are just remains of dead enemies.

* Higher difficulties are very RNG-driven. On Extreme and Nightmare you have to hope you don't get a run-ending enemy trait *and* getting the right upgrades. Also, sometimes you just lose since fast enemies come from all directions and rotation speed is constantly a bottleneck.

* It would be nice if I can view my current stats

* The game could use a balance pass. Some enemy traits are inconsequential while others (like Duplication) are total run enders. Many upgrades are also not useful outside of stat upgrades. Helpers like asteroids and military dudes feel to weak and unreliable compared to just 50% more fire rate or rotation speed, things that are necessary to win.

That's it. Thanks for making the game free!

This is an improved, more polished version of the best social deduction game ever made. If you like the last one or the genre as a whole, you'll love this game. It's that simple. The classic mode is pretty bad for veterans because it's very balanced in favor of town winning but the other modes are a blast.

There are some technical issues and the UI is more complicated than it needs to be, which is what's driving all the negative reviews. Some people are crashing but ever since they restarted the servers earlier it's been a stable experience for me.

The new roles are awesome. New neutral roles like Doomsayer and Shroud can cause a lot of chaos and confusion, new town roles like Admirer and Deputy are creative and support risk vs reward gameplay.

Mafia has been merged into Coven, which while initially disappointing turned out to actually be a great idea. They took the best parts of Mafia and Coven and merged roles. There are no longer boring roles like framer or consig around. Every coven role feels like it carries its own weight.

The devs also reworked problematic roles like investigator, which limited how many roles you can claim. If you were a serial killer for example, you *had* to claim doctor. Now, you have a wide range of roles you can fake, and the game has more depth as a result. So far, it's been really fun. Highly recommended.

TL;DR: Like ToS1? You'll like ToS2. Hate complex social deduction games? Then this game isn't for you.

Murder on the Orient Express if it were good

Jokes aside, I expected a silly April Fool's joke but what we got was a surprisingly great game. It had no right being this polished and fun AND FREE. Worth a play for any Sonic fan.