Recent reviews by mountain goat

I got Olija on sale as part of a bundle. It was enjoyable, but left me wanting more. The movement and game-feel are top notch; it's super satisfying to dash around with your spear, whether you're just platforming or closing the gap on an impaled enemy. The controls are tight and responsive, the combat is engaging and weighty, and the visuals and sound design do a lot to pull you into the experience.

All that said, I'm left with a bittersweet feeling as I wrap up the story, since Olija doesn't feel terribly interested in fully exploring these fun, polished mechanics. I've never seen a game nail the game-feel this well, only to fumble on level design. Imagine if Celeste ended on Chapter 3 and had no B-sides. That's Olija, in both length and depth. Lovely to play, but there's just something missing from this 5-hour playthrough.

Most of the challenges in Olija are simple and straightforward; even the secrets I found mostly just consisted of throwing my spear offscreen in a different direction from the beaten path. The most engaging parts were the boss fights, and while those were exciting and did take me a few tries, they ultimately boiled down to learning simple patterns and throwing/dashing to your spear accordingly. It just wasn't a very challenging or deep experience, which is a shame, because it definitely had the potential to be something you could really sink your teeth into.

Olija is a nice little indie game, and while I really wish it offered a bit more to chew on, I enjoyed getting to know it. It was a nice 5 hours. If you enjoyed the demo (play the demo! it's great!), I would recommend picking it up on sale or as part of a bundle. But I don't think it's worth paying full price for, when the free demo is about as deep and challenging as the gameplay ever gets.

this game has no right being as good as it is. it's a simple package of fast-paced side-scrolling multiplayer violence, but it's just executed so, SO well for what it is. truly a paragon that similar games should look up to. it is very funny with tons of charm, but it's just as impressive from a gameplay standpoint. every weapon feels satisfying to use and the movement is super snappy and responsive. it has a way higher skill cap than you'd expect, but anyone can jump in and press buttons for a fun time. also a special shoutout to the outstanding netcode - multiplayer from across the united states feels nearly seamless, and even from california to europe, lag is present (almost exclusively in the form of rollback) but not really a problem. input lag is nonexistent - take notes, nintendo.

+Fun, challenging platforming with tight controls
+Teleport gun is a cool gimmick

-Extremely short, with very little content and replayability
-Lazy level design that misses the point of the Metroidvania style
-Lazy presentation
-Ham-fisted shmup sections at the beginning and end don't work
-Awkward dialogue

Above all, this game feels lazy. It feels like the dev wanted to make a metroidvania but quit halfway through because it was too much work. It is so short. One hour and I finished my playthrough. No real replayability either; I could probably squeeze another playthrough out of it to try and get to more "secrets" and upgrades, but the game isn't fun enough to make me want to sit through it again just for that. The metroidvania-style screen-to-screen progression is wasted when your game is this linear and small; it just comes off as a level design cop-out. The upgrades are uninspired and the one that actually affects gameplay, the gun, is implemented really awkwardly. It pretends to be a metroidvania, but doesn't actually succeed at anything a metroidvania does, and we're left with a platformer with clunky levels that just feels unfinished. It's like a kid stomping around in dad's big shoes, but with none of the charm. Meanwhile, it has two shmup sections, one at the beginning and one at the end. They're bland and rather slow-paced with wonky hitboxes, and they don't really tell you when you've gotten hurt.
The presentation of the game is mediocre across the board, neither offending nor dazzling. Mediocre "retro-style" pixel art and music only make the game seem even lazier. The levels look like they were made in a level editor for an actual complete game - outside of background setpieces, almost every single part of the environment is blocks with repeating textures. From a visual standpoint, this game is just bigger, uglier Terraria. The sound effects are unremarkable, and while the music isn't inherently bad, it's extremely loud even on the lowest setting and gets grating fast.

I do have to give this game one thing: the platforming is fun. As a puzzle-platformer, this game shines. It's challenging, but not frustrating, and the wide variety of things you can do with the teleport gun really makes movement in the game feel free. The controls are tight and responsive (with the exception of firing your gun feeling a bit clunky at times), and I enjoyed the mix of puzzle solving and technical skill that the game encouraged. Unfortunately, this alone just can't support the weight of the game's flaws.

Out There Somewhere is based on a good core concept with the teleport gun, but it doesn't go anywhere with it. If there was more content and the game encouraged exploration better, it could be a solid metroidvania. If it ditched the metroidvania level style and instead had actual levels more like your average puzzle platformer, it could be a solid platforming game. If this whole game was only the first world, and the game had more worlds like it with more and more challenges, upgrades, and progression broken up with shmup sections, the game could succeed as the weird mix that it is. But as it stands, Out There Somewhere is little more than a proof of concept. As cheap as $2 is, there are better ways to spend your money. It's a decent experience if you get it on a good sale or in a humble bundle, though.

Just can't recommend this. It looks nice, and it moves smoothly, but it's just not engaging for long. Yes, it's a first-person parkour game, but it fails to capture what made Mirror's Edge's best moments so great. There's very little depth to the movement. The character doesn't need to accelerate; he runs at full speed right away - this kills what made doing well in Mirror's Edge so rewarding. There's no sense of momentum or buildup as you move fluidly through a level, which makes doing well less fun and screwing up less meaningful.

It's missing mechanics like skill rolls or turning around and jumping out of a wallclimb; I'm not trying to bash this game just for not being Mirror's Edge, but it doesn't introduce anything new to bring back that depth and creativity. You've got your anomalies, but even they don't do a whole lot; by adding skills like super jumps or slingshotting but restricting them to particular locations, you're not really creating more depth. It's a glorified springboard; it's a tool placed in the environment that's clearly meant to be used in one specific way. That's not depth; it hardly qualifies as gameplay. It doesn't make you think; all it really does to "deepen" the game is force you to backtrack once you've unlocked a given anomaly so that you can get all the stuff that you couldn't before. That's not gameplay. That's more walking.

It's not just anomalies that suffer from the issue of being very clearly placed for a specific purpose. The whole environment has this problem. If something has wooden beams hanging off of it, you climb it. If it's got that floral pattern (and, frustratingly enough, ONLY if it's got the floral pattern), you can wallclimb/wallrun. The levels are very telegraphed; you can tell at a glance exactly what the dev wants, and this is problematic because the only option is what the dev wants - there is no room for creativity. It makes the game really easy and linear.

The devs saw the number one complaint with Mirror's Edge, the lack of player freedom, and attempted to fix it by creating an open world and a skill tree and anomalies. But with little depth to the movement and painfully linear level design, Downward is far more restrictive than Mirror's Edge ever was.

Downward is early access, so maybe I'm passing judgment too soon. But seeing as the early access blurb mentions nothing about deepening the mechanics, I'd give this one a pass. It's too shallow to be entertaining for long.

I wanted this game to be good, but it's just too flawed. I bought it on sale and still requested a refund. In less than two hours, I encountered two level-breaking bugs. One forced me to act out half the level over again to prompt a waypoint to appear, and I couldn't progress without it. The other would have forced me to restart the entire chapter, and there was nothing I could do to fix it. Enemy movement frequently bugs, with guards getting stuck on each other. This game also has WAY more performance issues than it should, likely as a result of being made in Unity.

A less technical issue is just the actions of Aragami himself. As fun and fluid as blinking around is, it's the best part of the game. Kills are sluggish and repetitive, movement is slow outside of blinking, and Aragami just doesn't feel as mobile and fluid as a ninja made of shadows should be. In Dishonored (a game that heavily influenced this one with the blinking mechanics), you are highly mobile, quick, fluid assassin badass who can also teleport around. By contrast, Aragami feels like it's a hair's breadth from a VR game where your movement is entirely based on teleporting around.

I got this game on sale, and as much as I wanted to enjoy it, it just doesn't succeed. I can't recommend it.

just play civ 5

If you're not in it for the lore, this game isn't worth buying. There simply isn't much gameplay. The gunplay is piss-poor; the weapons are hitscan and pinpoint accurate. And what other gameplay is there besides the combat, which is honestly even worse then Skyrim's? Talking to NPCs? If I want that I'll play one of the many bad indie VNs on the Steam store. A friend of mine has told me that Fallout is like an RTS, and the point of the game is to analyze areas and figure out how best to bring them down. The fun comes in strategizing before the combat, not the combat itself. This is pretty cool, but I think FONV is a bit outclassed as an RTS. If you're looking for a deep, story-driven, open-world, atmospheric game, this is for you. But that's not what I'm looking for. If you want an open-world shooter ARPG, I think STALKER is more your type of game. In the end, I just can't recommend Fallout New Vegas. Lore and atmosphere are great, but they can't carry a game, and aside from those things, FONV really doesn't do much right.

Personally not my sort of game, but well-made and free. You might as well at least give it a shot.

In The Binding of Isaac, you play as a young boy of about 4 who, on the run from his demented mother who wants to sacrifice him to God, falls into a twisted basement full of grotesque and horrifying creatures whom he must fight...by crying on them. In this game there is permadeath--no checkpoints; if you die you must start over from the beginning. In each procedurally generated floor, there are progressively greater numbers of rooms filled with progressively harder enemies. Within these rooms you get pickup items such as bombs and keys, as well as collectible items that upgrade your character with such effects as increased fire rate, homing tears, flight, and many many more. The enemies are varied and entertaining, the endless RNG ensures that no two runs are the same, and the selection of nearly 200 items will have Isaac finishing every run with a different look and different abilities. This is an absolutely brilliant game with well-balanced difficulty, (that is, hard, but not rage-inducing Dark Souls-tier hard) tight controls, amusing art, and endless replay value. Go ahead and spend the small price of five dollars. I assure you you won't be disappointed.