Recent reviews by trovo.live/djkaty

Truly a unique experience that has to be seen to be believed.

Imagine an inventory management system composed entirely of Square Enix board of directors' dried up coagulated knob-cheese, peppered with enough QTEs to give speedrunners PTSD.

Other than that, great game!

Bought this game to play co-op with my partner. Unfortunately the behaviour of the camera and sluggish spongy controls make this very difficult to play. Additionally, in co-op the 2nd player has much less agency than the 1st. While the first player is highlighted in yellow, the second player has no highlight; the camera moves around wildly but generally only follows the first player, and the 2nd player mostly just gets dragged along in the conga line for the ride.

That's a great shame because the game is very pretty, well-animated with nice storytelling and great user interface polish.

Other notes: there are no checkpoints so you can't save during a level. Drop-out for co-op does not work correctly. The game will still assume there is two players even when the 2nd controller is completely disconnected. You need to restart the game to fix this.

As a dev I can clearly see the labour of love poured into this game, but it's just way too frustrating to be enjoyable in either solo or co-op, so I can't recommend it at this time :(

The premise of Tin Can bubbles with promise: you are in a failing escape pod and need to stay alive long enough to be picked up by rescuers. Parts on your ship keep going wrong and you have to fix them. You are presented with a long technical manual, a list of error codes, some rudimentary spare parts and a repair/dismantle station and wished good luck. The gameplay loop consists of repairing each item as it breaks and trying to stay cool under pressure until you're overwhelmed and inevitably die. There are a vast array of gauges, monitors and components to keep an eye on and possibly failure points.

The setup is a little bit like a single-player Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, with the addition of tactical decision-making: if the CO2 scrubber breaks, should I dismantle the emergency lights to get a replacement part, knowing that we might lose main lighting later on?

In principle, this all sounds great. Sadly, the execution is woeful. The tutorial is absolutely horrible, facing you in the wrong direction, not highlighting or misnaming the discussed components, and not giving clear directions on how things work. The main game modes throw you in at the deep end with alert sirens going off and you quickly die before you can even figure out what's wrong, let alone how to fix it. The learning curve is just far too brutal for all but the most patient of spacefarers.

At the time of writing this game is in Early Access and I think it has a ton of potential and could be one to watch, but I can't recommend it in its current state unfortunately.

Alright I want to leave the developer some love because I hate to see a polished well-executed game languish on Steam with insufficient exposure.

Overall, great little mix between light puzzle-solving and precision timing. The object of each level is to use a small number of interactive objects to guide the balls from their starting chute to the output funnel. Generally levels are solved in two stages: first, figuring out how to actually move the balls to their target, and second by smoothly and quickly executing the manoeuvres to achieve a high rank.

It is in this latter area where the game stumbles somewhat. Simply passing the game's 60 levels within the time limit should not be too taxing for casual players, but the timing margins to achieve gold rank are so tight and so often based on luck in some of the later levels that you enter into a tortuous cycle of restarting over and over and hoping that the last ball goes down the funnel 0.1 seconds faster this time. This is where the game stops being fun and just becomes frustrating instead.

That quibble aside, this game looks stylish, plays smoothly with an inoffensive soundtrack, with generally great level design; definitely recommended gaming for puzzle fans!

overhyped pile of mediocre garbage

I wanted to love this game so much. Doom 2016 is my favourite fps of all time, and I'm old so my gaming started in the 80s.

Balance-wise, this game is an absolutely broken mess.

Ammo is constantly low regardless of difficulty level, forcing you to chainsaw kill constantly, which in turns makes the once-spectacular animations tedious and repetitive.

Melee is completely worthless, you can melee the lowest HP trash mob a dozen times and nothing happens. Blood punch (AoE melee) is tied into glory kills, so charging it up makes those animations become tedious and repetitive too.

You cannot simply kill any enemy with any weapon. You are given an arsenal of tools but it's really an illusion, most larger enemies can only be effectively killed in a particular way. Get ready to watch the same glory kill animation another 200 times, and switch weapons constantly.

A ton of useless RPG-lite mechanics were added. Collect praetor suit tokens from the previous games, but also sentinel crystals, runes, sentinel batteries to fill out various skill/upgrade trees. Weapons now have mods.

They also thought it would be a good idea to add platforming. Yes, platforming. To an fps. Clunky, annoying platforming.

All in all, what is served up here is a recipe of disjointed gunplay with any fluidity completely destroyed by the incessant weapon switching, resource management and ability cooldown management.

It's extremely frustrating because at its core we see here a clearly brilliant game that looks and sounds great, and plays very smoothly. Unfortunately, like so many AAA games of recent years, it's buried under layers of caked on over-convoluted unnecessary trash mechanics that ruin it.

As a Doom fan, this was extremely disappointing.

Runs better than the majority of AAA games released in the last 5 years.

Being able to full-screen with F4 during gameplay would be nice.

Have been competing with another streamer on Twitch, online leaderboards would be a very useful addition.

Avocados in the rain look too similar to rotten avocados.

Does not support ray-tracing, but is also not Epic exclusive so that's a big plus!

WARNING: A REVIEW IS APPROACHING.

Pros:
- Threadripper 1950X 16-core, GTX 1080 Ti overclocked can play this game at a staggering 50 fps on Ultra at 1080p, 25-30 fps at 1440p. Which by itself makes it better optimized than Anthem.
- Game is not available on the Epic Store - a win-win for consumers.
- Game contains no microtransactions - pay 60 bucks and get the whole game!
- Only takes 3 hours to get working - relatively fast for a modern AAA title
- Controls better than Getting Over It
- Lets you connect to your most primal emotions of true agony and a full sensation of cringe and bone-shattering heartburn
- Superlative menu design

Cons:
- Loads slower than Apex Legends
- Graphics not as good as Crash Bandicoot
- AN ENEMY IS APPROACHING
- Far too easy
- No battle royale mode

Ignore the haters. This game will change your life and broaden your horizons of just what is possible in the gaming industry when talented developers and artists really put their mind to it.

5 out of 7, would AN ENEMY IS APPROACHING again.

A great premise with sloppy execution.

(I have played to the part where you enter the basement, and for another hour or so after that)

The art style is really nice, the puzzles work fine. The AI is extremely annoying with the warning sound giving no obvious directional indication and no real way to avoid getting caught most of the time. Queue you being thrown into the street or the top of the basement over, and over, and over, and over again.

No tutorial, spent the first half hour trying to figure out what to do until a viewer who had seen it on another stream gave a first clue. A hint system would have been a great idea.

Putting 'Action' and 'Use' on two different controller buttons is confusing, and putting 'Pick Up' on the same button as 'Use' is even more awkward, when it is not always clear which button to use for what.

Some minor rendering / physics issues.

Since there don't seem to be any maps beyond the neighbour's house (2 floors and a basement), I would have to hazard a guess this game is also very short on content. For $6 or $7 on sale, it's probably worth a punt, but $30 is grossly overpriced and seems to be in an early beta state.