Recent reviews by Dirk Bolero

I get to be a wizard and go on cave adventures. I die a lot and I doubt I'll ever find everything there is to find here, but the chaos of the mines more than repays me for the time spent.

I have a strange story about this game, but to tell it requires me to explain the way I play this game: I don't. I don't actually play it. All of my character classes have 0:00:00 playtime, I have a record of 0 wins and 0 losses, and a 100% match completion rate achieved by having never entered a match. I imagine I got the achievement for "jumping once" from one of the tutorials, but that was so long ago (2014!), I don't even remember what the tutorial consisted of, or if I even finished it. Yet here I am, level 19 on all classes after having accrued 15-and-a-half hours of playtime over the course of nine years.

You see, back in December of 2014, I installed Guns of Icarus Online, possibly played a tutorial, and promptly started doing something else with my time. Fast forward to 2022 and an update in my news feed mentioned free cosmetics for wishlisting Muse Games' upcoming release. I log in to redeem my new swag, spend half an hour messing around with the character customizer... And notice the signin bonus in the bottom-right corner. There's nothing new about a game rewarding you for checking in; it's been a common means of user retention since the age of Neopets! But upon seeing I got character experience for logging in, feeling the familiar dopamine rush of seeing Numbers Go Up, I thought to myself, Wouldn't it be funny if I maxed everything out without ever playing the actual game?

So began one man's quest to see what the biggest number is.

That number turned out to be about 30,000. Almost a year into my adventure, I was at the maximum amount of gold a player can have, meaning I could either ignore it and let any incoming gold go to waste, or learn how to interact with the menus in a way that wasn't customizing my profile or playing dress up. I had no idea what gold was actually used for (even now I'm still not entirely sure), but I remember I'd joined a faction called the Anglean Republic, and vaguely recalled the map mentioning gold.

Paydirt! A few clicks and I was treated to a map of the world of Guns of Icarus, color-coded to show which faction owned each region. I was coming dangerously close to actually playing the game, but I knew that I would regret it if I let all that gold go to waste. Besides, my faction had unknowingly been host to a deadbeat this entire time, and some of faction leader memos had been fun; maybe spending all this money on the war effort would help repay them! So I clicked on regions mentioned in the latest memo, buying all the upgrades I could before the game stopped letting me and forced me to upgrade somewhere else. Maybe we won the battles in those territories? I'll never know for sure. But by the end of it all, I had 10 new achievements, an empty bank account, and the warm feeling that comes from doing good and expecting nothing in return.

Three days later, I was made Faction Leader.

The day started normally enough, logging in just in case I forgot to do so the night before, my weary mind struggling to understand what was happening in front of me. A couple new achievements pop and I'm slammed into the most unexpected rise to power since King Ralph. It turns out that a new faction leader is picked every four days based on how much they contributed to that faction, and my sudden funding injection had sealed my fate. I would have to find some way to abdicate, but how? I'd no experience in navigating the menus of the game. There was a Discord server for the faction, and everything I'd ever heard said that the community around Guns of Icarus was lovely, but I dreaded actual human interaction; talking to other people would be even worse than playing with them! No, I had to do this alone.

Breathing heavily, my shaking hands charted a circuitous course to the Faction tab; unfamiliar with the game's layout as I was, I must have taken two, maybe three clicks before coming face to face with the source of my agony: The Candidates board, and the thousands of points earned in my ill-fated spending spree. And with one final click...

Honestly, abdicating was pretty easy. I'm not sure why I got so worked up about it, but all of what happened works into whether or not I would recommend this game: Absolutely. Not because of the gameplay, which I have no real experience with. Not because of the community, who I'm sure would have helped me if I'd asked but, again, who I have avoided for almost nine years. What makes me recommend Guns of Icarus Online is that I've been allowed to interact with it on my own terms, and to find my own fun in it, even if that fun is collecting daily rewards, changing the color of my armor, then panicking when I become leader of an army of flying technocratic Norsemen.

I am allowed to do this, and hope to continue doing so for many years to come.

You can play The Stanley Parable again without affecting your Go Outside achievement!

There are some crashes. There are some bugs. But there are moments like drinking enough coffee to be able to throw a fridge, or mourning the death of a gnome, or struggling to make a dog centaur. I have fun messing around in the character creator! I have an absolute blast throwing toilets at zombies! The throwing mechanics in this game are one of the best parts. The fact that you can pick up dead teammates and use them to lure zombies elsewhere is equal parts silly and morbid (especially when it's a dead sumo wrestler).

I have had so much fun playing this game that I have to recommend it, warts and all, and with patches and updates still coming out, those warts might not be there for much longer.

Tcheco looks and plays like a classic NES game, with all the difficulty that entails. In Tcheco's case, that's part of the "joke", complimenting the overall feel the art is going for. And it is art! It purposefully introduces ridiculous gameplay elements for comedic effect, often killing the player in the process. With the lack of continues, you're supposed to remember how to pass each screen with as little damage as possible, only to be swatted down by something even sillier later.

The problem is the joke becomes a lot less fun when the game crashes to desktop and you have to start all over again, because there are no save points. That's when the game feels less like it's laughing with you, and more like it's laughing at you. It's not the most money I've ever paid to be laughed at, but it's still not an experience I'd recommend to others.

Reventure is a neat idea that suffers in its execution. Other reviewers have called it repetitive, and it feels like it tries to be as part of an artistic statement, as part of "the joke". That doesn't mean it's fun to play, and that definitely doesn't mean I have to be the one to keep playing it.

About fifty "endings" into it I started using a guide, by ending seventy I was willing it to be over. Ending 100 was actually kind of funny, but when it came time to do the post-game content I quit in frustration. Platforming puzzles that require you to restart your game for every mistake are a type of torture.

I wouldn't recommend this game. If you do decide to watch someone stream it, be warned they might have jump scares turned on.

Easily the best game released this year, it tightens and improves upon everything Supergiant Games is known for. The writing is superb, and the combat is a delightful mess of explosions and projectiles that never feels cluttered. And because story and character progression are tied to your number of deaths, you never feel like a run is wasted. Dying just means more dialogue from some of your favorite characters.

Hades was an ambitious project and I'm happy to say it succeeds in everything it sets out to do. The Steam awards don't let you nominate a game for multiple categories at the same time, but for a game this good I wish they'd make an exception.

Kyle is Famous is easily one of the funniest games I have ever played. Even though I've gotten all the endings, I know there are still a few things left to discover; the journey is often as humorous as the destination, in this case.

I enjoyed what I played of it, but there could have been a lot more to play. It's a darn good demo of what the developer(s) is capable of.

I do not recommend this game.

Right off the bat, it asks if it can collect analytical data. And I mean, yeah, that's the world we live in now, and at least they asked first, but with how buggy the menus are I wasn't sure if clicking No was actually doing what I wanted it to? And given how buggy the product is I'm not sure I would ever want to give them anything.

It's not finished. Trying to click on main menu options causes them to shift to the right. Trying to change the game's resolution may or may not actually do anything. Even getting out of the game's patch notes was an experience; the button prompts are for a PlayStation controller, but I eventually got out using backspace. You can return to the main menu while still in the patch notes, but you can't actually click on anything until they disappear.

Trying to talk to the Captain about your notebook, literally the first NPC in the game, gets you an error message. Even after completing the quest, talking to him again only gives you the option to talk about your notebook while returning an error message.

I love the idea, I love the character designs, but you shouldn't bother trying to play this game.