Recent reviews by CharlesSurge

I bought this 3.5+ years after its release. Since then, Capcom has added "The Enigma Protector" DRM to the product.

I have 141 hours played and I think I'm pausing playing until I get a new PC. This game literally warmed my heart the first day of playing it. I was purely happy it was so good. I consider this an incomplete review. I will one day delete it and write a real review. When I someday complete the game, I expect this to be one of the top games I have. This is a game I feel I owe a temporary positive review. I only speak English and I don't remember any complaints about the translation. There are two DLCs that continue the game, the first of which is free. The developers intend to create a second game. Play the Online mode to see other players' avatars, choice info, and contribute to overall mission status; You can still download an offline copy of your save every 24 hours.

I've played Spelunky for 100s of hours. In Caveblazers, I have the mainline achievement that 16.4% of players have: drink 100 random potions. Sensitivity is too high for how small the grid/other things are. It feels like the player will need to hit a rather small percentage of random drops to get farther, and to get gameplay that is a positive. Melee can be used to greater bullying effect than you might think on the enemies, and discovering that is one of the actual increases in learning and enjoyment. The other main weapon is limited to 8-way ranged. There is a random boss every two floors. You want randomness: to not get an unlucky boss, to get strong ranged option (melee is not viable) for the bosses (and apparently similar need for ranged for later level enemies), and to get HP recovery.

The main unlock is a single advantage in your starting "perk". I already pushed through more of the game than I should have, and of probably nine unlocked, three are certainly a new tier in power to use. I'm doubtful that others could give a tier higher yet. I also bring this up to say that the unlock bar doesn't tell you what you'll be getting next, and most often filling it unlocks a cosmetic that changes some pixels on your character. That's the game -- a disappointment and maybe a bit of a joke at the player's expense.

★★★★ out of four.

This review is for the game and all its DLC with "LW Rebalance" mod by Ucross https://www.nexusmods.com/xcom/mods/686 , which is of low-medium complexity to set up. This is an overhaul-level mod. I assume everything has been altered on at least the numerical level. (It is a mod on top of the "Long War" mod.) I haven't played the mod "enough" but a review and its score is justified, though I have first used it three years ago, and the original upload date to at least that website was August 2016. This mod is frequently updated. Making backups (duplicated originals) of the folders the mod changes should be considered mandatory, so that when one wishes to update the mod, the original unmodified folders are always available to work from.

This mod has the "XCOM 2" feature that when mousing over a place to move an XCOM unit, the UI will show what aliens sighted by XCOM can be hit from that location. The mod also changes how discovering aliens work; Some examples are alien groups activating can trigger other groups to activate if they run into them and XCOM gets at least a move-only option upon uncovering new enemies. Overwatch only works on aliens currently sighted. There is weapon steadying on sighted aliens to hit them better next turn. There is the ability to boost upward other units to higher elevations. A unit's fatigue/injury takes recovery time until they're optimal again. There are UI alterations and colorations, even colorations to distinguish "leader" enemy units. Friend and foe have additional perks; Perks and stats can be reviewed per unit on a UI window.

★ out of four.

See Season One Review for the punishing gameplay concerns for those who wish to restart scenes to re-do choices. The choices that happened in Season One can be selected when starting a new game, or a save imported. The Season Two plot has more interest and there are more characters involved. I only played it once. At least on one of two paths, it had another minor helping of criticism -- but more direct this time -- of whatever "Batman" is. It is still obvious criticism that is a small bit of game time.

Season Two crashes the same amount as before, but now scene camera twice glitched for me completely randomly, taking three retries for one scene and seven for the other to be corrected. Thanks to Harley/Joker for the voicework. I played through once in Shadows Mode. I don't know if that was the right decision, since in this season characters have more visual elements; I didn't know Harley was wearing white face paint.

★ out of four.

Rather than "movie-like", one's play experience will likely be quite different if they care about the choices made. Potential exploration of ideas nearly comes late in the season's last episode, but doesn't due to a convenience, though a narratively fair one.

The actual experience of making choices is reading the options and then pausing the game to comprehend/contemplate them since the timer is on the short side. I say contemplating is justified since these choices are why this is a video game at all and so that one can try to pick something most close to what is desired to have happen and what may actually be done. You are not in control of when the game saves. So, if you've made decisions you want to change, you have to restart before the unforeseeable autosave happens. You can copy your save file in the menu: that provides some management. If a choice wasn't what you wanted to do, or what it actually did you didn't like, or you just want to see a different option, you can choose to restart the whole segment. This will cost many minutes of re-doing the scene until then (the only time I timed a scene from start to my decision-to-change was 7.5 minutes), and there will likely be more choices you wish to re-do until you hit another autosave. This is a bad experience and absolutely nothing in the game is skippable. (Game crashes ~2.5 episodes.)

I played this twice and actually picked the exact opposite major choices the second time and those were the ones I wanted to carry over to Season 2. This may say something about the choices themselves. In one path, kind behavior to a character forever doesn't do anything. In the other path, such behavior towards that character is actually the key to mitigating bad outcomes.

The most interesting aspect is cut-short -- and these productions probably couldn't be able to and probably wouldn't dare to say anything meaningful. I respect this and season two for hinting at least at any subversion of any of this crap. It seems explicit educational material to improve the USA/its puppets' conditions would improve conditions faster than some "think for yourself, if you want" prompts after the Brainwashing has already happened. I assume Batman only works in the 100% fake fantasy world where there are "Joker's minions" who get scared away from doing crimes via Batman's weird outfit.

There are the legal economy and the illegal economy. Capitalism demands/creates/sustains the illegal economy. Capitalism must have the "reserve army of labor". In the recent years the USA Federal Reserve has been explicit about how "low unemployment" is a bad thing -- something they are "worried" about. What then are the unemployed to do? Their choices are to die (by their own action/inaction[starvation]), take part in the illegal economy, or possibly: subsist somehow. No matter how many people Batman incarcerates or the police kill, the system necessitates the unemployed exist to fill the ranks of the reserve army of labor.

I played in Shadows Mode the second time and prefer it. I don't know why. Nothing looks like night in full color mode, and nearly everyone has at most a two-color outfit. If starting the second season (a different game), one can just pick the choices that happened in season one, or import a save. One save can sync to "Telltale" cloud and Steam Cloud saves are supported, though unlisted on the store page.

Very limited ability to save. "Quitting" more than 30 seconds into a run counts as a "loss"(whatever that means). Poor controls/platforming experience even with a controller, and a missed jump around a predator of yours can kill you. It seems this is highly rated since it is an "indie game" + "where the predators move around the screens and may fight each other". When the rain starts to rumble and come down, you have to quickly get back to a sparse save room or lose (restart at the last time you were able to use a save room). Pretty sure the second rain I experienced would've just killed anyone before they could get to safety. Regardless, you'd have to memorize the screens' relations to each other or spend time looking at the map, and then navigate back, but predators could also be between you and save room. The rain will kill you even if you are underground and in a tiny room as big as your character. You can easily kill your helper character. No goals or direction given, so do as you will, but with these negative conditions.

Playing with a controller seems best to fluidly change the direction of spells while they're firing. This game regularly has pits to properly dash across or else damage is taken. They are part of the level generation between rooms and you will fail them with probably any meaningful obliqueness to your angle. This is simply a bad experience and ideally means swapping thumb to D-pad to get perfect angles on them all the time. I'm not certain but believe one of the types of random things in-level had me choose between spells but only gave the spell icon with no description. I played for a limited time. Neutrally I say for now it seems the unlocks are largely alternative loadout options rather then power improvements.

Combat seems great and is why I may try it again some day.

FAR: Lone Sails often fails immersion, which is too injurious to this niche gimmick genre. It has consistently disappointing texture detail, limited colors, walking into walls too often, minor camera annoyances, frequent camera manipulation of preset zoom levels, and a part where you can get stuck and have to open menu to reset checkpoint.

Zero out of 4.

West of Dead could have been a good or great game. The bugs are the problem. I've played at most seven runs. In three of those, progress was lost to a bug. One level didn't have an exit spawned. Once, selecting "Continue Run" from the main menu started me at the beginning. And lastly, upon killing a sub-boss the game just froze all controls there.

I'm pretty sure I was shot through a wall. It is a certain wall that juts into half a room that spawns rarely. And no, I'm not being confused and talking about the wall-enemies in The Town.

If you wish to play with no Aim Assist, it's kinda a bad idea because -- I know it sounds illogical -- the lines... I think they aren't straight in all/certain camera angles (cursor placement vs. where the bullet visually goes vs. where the bullet counts as a hit); And yes, I know you have to aim for the feet area of the enemy.

Your character's light-radius isn't actually always on, it only activates when you step in a dark area. This is bad generally, and slows your exploration. An unlit area was either unlit due to this or a "wall" of the room was blocking or casting a shadow -- regardless, what I thought was a walled off region in combat was not.

You can remap controls unless you want to remap the buttons to... shoot. Basically due to a bug. So the right-most weapon on your UI will always have to use your left mouse button, and your left-most weapon use your right. This was actually rather difficult to mentally try to correct for. Controller also doesn't let you remap shoot successfully, but left/right default is set correctly.

Time waiting on traveling between warp points is too long, and the short "shortcut" version takes even longer. The button to advance dialogue usually doesn't do anything, so you have to wait for it to auto-expire. A certain level objective always has dialogue. To learn game/level structure concepts you can talk to the person in the starting area who has this dialogue issue and is vague. This is the only game knowledge -- no journal/how to. Sub-boss random names are often like Leeroy and Cletus. In one of my first runs I had two with the same first and last names. One run I completed a level and instead of the next area, it loaded the same area, but with only one room which had a sub-boss fight. I assume it didn't correctly put him in the previous level space, but then the game progressed correctly until -- as mentioned before -- the next sub-boss I killed put the game in an unresponsive state.