Recent reviews by ko

Beautiful art direction wasted on some of the worst designed, lazy and annoying bosses From has ever created.

Truly this is Dark Souls 2 - 2 : Revenge of the Smelter Demon.

Unless you thought the final 1/3rd of the base game was the pinnacle of creativity, you'll loathe this.

Don't waste your time, it's not worth it in the end.

P.S. The last boss should come with a seizure warning, I don't even have photosensitivity and it gave me a serious headache. It's just an absurd visual mess that makes an already bad fight even worse.

The new guns and feats are fun, but charging 8 dollars for new guns and feats, plus an aggravating, poorly balanced, annoying and ultimately dull side area is a joke. Infinitely spawning large groups of enemies that can see through stealth, have long range, high damage and high damage resistance is just sadistic adversarial DM garbage. If you've played the Gray Army Base, imagine the enemies that spawn after the alert goes off but for a whole area.

Styg, we get it, you really like Gary Gygax and Sandy Petersen.

Timing based laser maze, in a turn based game, really? No. There is no excuse for this.

Buy on sale if you really like the game and really want to play with LMGs and GLs (the miniguns currently are awful, unless used by enemies funnily enough) but it's absolutely not worth the money, considering Expedition is a dollary doo more and comes with a huge amount of enjoyable, well designed content.

This ain't it, and if Infusion is cribbing off this I think I'll be avoiding it.

Very entertaining gameplay loop, simple in presentation but very challenging.

- You drop down, holding jump lets you hover
- Air kills only give you a combo
- Combos run down over a short timer, reset on kill
- Ammo for your weapon only restores when you land OR bounce on an enemy
- Weapons take a few shots, bounce is an instant kill
- 5/10/15/20/etc combos give you red gems, to spend on weapon upgrades

From that you can see the gameplay loop becomes trying to rapidly move downward through the level sniping kills to keep up a combo and thus become stronger. The better you do, the stronger you get and the 'easier' the game becomes.

It's really cool to promote 'perfection', but you're also not punished completely for missing combos as you can progress without the upgrades fine. It's a neat 'win more' mechanic, and also allows for more mistakes later as the game gets harder.

I really really like it, very quick to pick up and play.

A very very pretty game that is genuinely awful. Don't even play this if you get it for free, it's just terrible.

The designers once watched a trailer for a Dark Souls game, didn't even finish the whole thing and decided they could make a competent game. Surprisingly, they could not.

Between hitboxes and animations not matching up even in the slightest and absurd levels of damage and HP on enemies, the game just becomes a tedious slugfest.

There is no nuance here, you will just get extremely bored of the repetitive, poorly designed enemies. If you do ever make the extremely poor decision to play this game, save yourself the trouble just load up on a cheap oneshot build or something that gives you the only usable Quick speed dodge - because the iframes of all the other dodges are useless - and brute force your way to the end.

But to reiterate, don't play it, not even for free. Not even if someone pays you.

Very well written game, more than just a simple VN at least. Story is very solid and consistent, great characterisation, art is very unique.

Goes very weird places you wouldn't immediately expect, lots of good surprises.

Would definitely recommend.

Great game, feels like a solid evolution of the Thief series but isn't limited by that inspiration.

Multi-route level design lets you plot your way freely through areas allowing for satisfying traversal.

Great weapon design and very satisfying, punchy feedback on the guns.

All-around very good introduction, gameplay mechanics are great just needs more content.

That said, very satisfied with the content there is so far. Will be replaying it a few times so absolutely worth picking up now and experiencing it as it evolves. Might even try some speedruns.

Great platformer, very basic gameplay but not at all to its detriment. If you want a simplistic but satisfying platformer, it fulfils that perfectly. Would definitely recommend it considering the pricetag too.

Very well paced, short, enjoyable horror game. Visuals and sound design are top notch.

Story is simple but well told, definitely recommended.

tl;dr Simple but satisfying roguelite, not much depth but the core gameplay is very fun. I'd recommend it, solid 7/10.

Pros
- Guns all feel satisfying
- Movement is good
- Dodge has generous iframes
- Simple upgrade system mitigates bad RNG hurting a run
- Enemy variety is interesting
- Pixel art visuals are brilliant
- Soundtrack is an absolute banger

Cons
- Game is pretty simple, just wave based combat in simple rooms
- Upgrades are just raw stats, no uniqueness or variety
- Guns are limited and straightforward, again not much variety
- Can only carry two guns
- Runs are fairly short
- Character hitbox is the full character, which is way too large for a bullet hell genre

tl;dr : I wish there was a 'middle ground' for thumbs up or down, because this game fits right there, it's a 6/10 you should get on 40-50% or so discount. I'll detail why below, but there's your quick review.

The basic flow of the game is that you traverse a forest finding artifact samples, while evading a monster that grows increasingly aggressive as you find more artifacts. It feels like one of the Slenderman games where you hunt down pages, but adapted and improved upon significantly. Along the way you have to manage your temperature by lighting fires, your suit battery by recharging at stations, finding materials to break down and 3D printers to make suit upgrades.

The movement is clunky, but makes sense, you're in a sealed mech suit and interacting with the world is slow but deliberate. The upgrades you craft change the game to be smoother but not massively game changing, slower heat loss but higher battery drain, an exoskeleton to carry more, a better backpack, etc. The upgrades are fairly essential, but there's no real variety.

Combat is limited to a Mosin Nagant, a powerful but slow rifle, and a wood chopping axe. You'll never need the axe as you're absolutely showered in ammunition, and you never fight more than 2 enemies at once. All enemies are the same, basic zombies, aside from the monster that stalks you. They're never a threat, just a bit of flavour to the world.

The most interesting part is the forest you traverse in an endless snowstorm. This combined with impeccable sound design helps build tension wonderfully, and the ever present threat of the monster does generate a solid horror experience. However, once you get attacked by the monster and find it does functionally no damage the threat pretty much dissipates.

Finding artifacts in the forest unlocks side areas, these just provide more resources and are completely optional and really not at all essential. They do offer some interesting side story, but again not enough is done with that story.

There's about 3 hours of gameplay, I played a little more because I was streaming and I took my time, but even at your slowest and dying a few times it'd be 4 at maximum.

The game overall feels like the first chapter of a larger story, and I really hope the devs do more with it. But until that's the case or the game is on discount, I can't recommend it.