Recent reviews by Freaky Mutant Man

So there is a really, really solid foundation for a great racing game here, every moment I've spent playing this game has been really fun and makes me want more. The driving physics feel great, the flight sections are a cool change of pace from your usual F-Zero style game, and in general most everything about the actual game portion of this game feels like it's clicking together very nicely. The track editor is a fantastic addition, every bit as powerful as the F-Zero X Expansion Kit editor but a lot easier to use because you can use a mouse and keyboard instead of futzing around with a controller (but you can still use the editor with a controller if desired). You can make tracks 100% on par with the default selection, and the toolset makes the process quite easy. You could, theoretically, play an infinite amount of tracks as-is, and have just as much fun with all of them as you would any other - which is to say, quite a lot. Playing this makes me excited to see more from this game.

...which brings me to the unfortunate part where there, as of this writing, just isn't much to do in this game yet. There are 9 race tracks total, 2 of which seem to more be demonstrations of the editor than they do proper tracks, and a grand total of 1 track available for Death Race that is pretty much the F-Zero X Death Race track but with flight added in. There is only one grand prix cup available to play, which only encapsulates the first four tracks for some reason (seriously, this game is joyfully lifting so much from F-Zero X, but the one cup available only goes 4 tracks instead of the 6 it could very easily do with the tracks already available in the game?), and once you've played it, there's really not much else to do besides single races and time trials. The track editor seems the easiest solution to this until further updates, but there's no convenient place to share custom tracks yet and there's no way to play them in a custom grand prix sort of setting, either. As it currently is, you pretty much need to make your own tracks or get into making some with friends to get the most out of this game at the moment. There's a lot of unlockable characters, but without custom tracks, you're going to be playing a lot of the same small pool of tracks + whatever you make in the editor to get them at this time.

This is, of course, something that will improve with updates, this is an Early Access game after all. A recent Steam forum post seems to indicate an update may be sometime soon, though no concrete date yet. For now, though, just be mindful of what you have access to if you buy - I do think it's worth it if you're looking for a really solid arcade racing game and are willing to have some delayed gratification when it comes to further content. The moment this has more content, I am going to eat it up happily - this is really good stuff. I don't regret spending the money, but it's important to know what you're getting into with this, and if you might be better off waiting if you're short on money and need something that'll keep you occupied for longer (and a robust track editor isn't enough to fulfill that need for you).

EDIT: As far as actually finding custom tracks, look up SilentFox on Youtube for some excellent track packs, including an original 5 track cup and remakes of BS F-Zero tracks (the Satellaview game in the series), and you can also go on the game's discord to look at the custom tracks people have posted on there. I do think the game could use an inbuilt way to share tracks, but there is a decent amount to play if you're willing to look around.

So far, I haven't run into any significant issues with the game technically - it works, and better than some reviews on here would suggest. I have not experienced any crashes, and the worst issue I have run into is occasionally not being able to enter shops until I take damage. I have not tried online and cannot vouch for anything about it.

The game is pretty much as it was back in 2010 - i.e., pretty fun time, solid fundamentals for a beat-em-up with plenty of secrets... and an unfortunate likelihood that you'll have to grind at some point to make sure you can actually beat it. I understand it's a River City Ransom-kinda thing, and it's not wholly out of line with the original graphic novel's themes (even as a lot of the game is deliberately a bit flippant about said themes), but it's an aspect of the game I could do without; you can pretty easily end up way outpacing the intended power curve for the mid-game, in no small part exacerbated by said power curve being more like a series of peaks and plateaus where new enemy types can be oppressively strong until you buy a bunch of stat boosts at once and then they kinda just... aren't. That does make for a good power trip, of course, but it can also undercut the mid-game's challenge before you really realize you did so. (Mind this is all from my initial Average Joe playthrough - this may or may not change with higher difficulties. There are also some oddities with the game feel that I can't be entirely certain aren't just a consequence of Wallace potentially being kinda weird as a last-minute DLC character, so I won't dwell on those either.)

That being said, it's important to emphasize that the game stills feels damn good to play - beating the hell out of dudes has the right amount of oomph to it, and once you've leveled up and gotten access to most of the moves, you have a fair few ways to pummel people around the screen, get yourself out of danger, and just generally be flexible in approaching encounters. It's not necessarily an exemplar of the genre, but it *does* hold its own respectably well, and the grinding pains are more a speed-bump in the experience than an actual showstopper.

Beyond that, the game's presentation is as solid as ever - elements of the original graphic novels and the movie are blended together, the story is largely tossed out for a very loose, dialogue-less adaptation that just invents things whole-cloth for the sake of it, and on the whole it's not an especially serious take on the story. The pixel art is still fluid and damn good looking, the soundtrack is still top-notch (Anamanaguchi is pretty much *the* sound for 2010's particular strain of video game nostalgia bait, and I say that with the utmost compliments), and as a whole the game's still just charming as all hell. Though the game's presentation was certainly made with 16-bit nostalgia in mind, back when that was a much more novel thing to do and well before PSX/N64 nostalgia truly took hold and near-replaced it, it's perhaps interesting how distinctly 2010 the whole thing feels now, for good and sometimes ill. A game made as a love letter to a bygone era of gaming, now itself emblematic of its own bygone era - certainly anyone thinking of Scott Pilgrim nowadays is more likely to think of the mid-late 00's and early 10's than they are the 80's and 90's video games that influenced its creators. I might just be overthinking.

Anyway, if you can stomach Ubisoft Connect, this is still a game well worth playing nowadays. Get it on sale, enjoy some good beat-em-up action, maybe read the graphic novels again and realize that, damn, you really were a dumb teenager that overlooked what the story was actually saying and just went "oooh, cool video game fights and funni jokes :)" and then didn't really question it because the movie also just kinda missed out on a lot of the nuances in the later books and jeez, they're doing a Netflix animated series now? That seems like a better way to adapt the novels, but also it might well have died with all the slashing and burning Netflix has been doing to their animation end of things, but maybe not since Edgerunners and Arcane have both done so well and maybe Scott Pilgrim's closer to those than the Bone series that was supposed to happen? Oh hell, are you going to have to contend with modern day Scott Pilgrim discourse? Are your bones ready for that? Will it even be *good* if it actually comes out? Brian Lee O'Malley's been working on this thing called Worst World for five years and there's barely been a word on what it's even about? Is that still happening? The last thing anyone said about it was apparently a couple years ago, is it still happening? What the hell is that man up to? Has he said anything about it on Twitter? Do you even want to check at this point?

Maybe you should just play the game.

Works damn well, though in my experience going in and out of layout mode several times can result in said mode hanging and subsequently crashing the app. This can be avoided easily enough by not closing it when you don't need to, and it's not too hard to re-launch the app afterwards anyway.

This has been so useful for checking Discord while farting around in VRChat, and it certainly works a hell of a lot better than trying to do the same with the SteamVR or Oculus home menus - keyboard is even just plain nicer to use than either of those. I haven't tried OVR or any other alternatives, but for my money this works quite well and I'd recommend it even with the crashing issues I was experiencing.

I'm frankly kinda shocked that Beamdog is *still* pecking away at this game - they're still updating the game regularly with all kinds of fixes and improvements, most notable of which (since I last played) is officially integrating certain fanmade campaigns into the game, either bundled with the game or otherwise downloadable right from the launcher. Particularly good, since you're probably not playing Neverwinter for the official campaigns (or at least, not the game's vanilla campaign) - the biggest feature of this game was and still is the sheer breadth of custom content created for it over the course of decades. Traditional campaign modules are aplenty in both the workshop and NWNVault, and it can be well worth delving into; they're not all winners, as might be expected from thousands upon thousands of user-made campaigns, but there still far more gems buried in here than you'll probably ever have the time to play.

(One custom module in particular that may not be the most well known, but which I can vouch for being a pretty damn good time: Bloodright: The Blood Royal, an open-ended city adventure where you climb your way into prestige in order to determine the result of a succession crisis. Naturally, you're the secret child of the dying king and thus have claim yourself, but you're going to have to put in work if you want things to go your way - and maybe you don't, actually? It's a good time with some good characters and a decent degree of player choice.)

Now, my biggest gripe with Neverwinter Nights is the ruleset of choice: Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition was pretty good for the time, but hoo boy has it aged and Neverwinter isn't about to do it any favors any time soon. It's all playable, but perfectly reasonable character concepts will be stifled by arbitrary alignment restrictions and harsh racial ability score penalties, feat taxes will have to paid to make certain characters at all viable, and you don't even get the wide breadth of character options that 3(.5) developed over the course of its life-cycle - it's all corebook stuff in here, and you will eventually feel that lack of variety. (This is, of course, where the Player Resource Compendium comes in, a mod that adds in many, many of those expanded options, though not without some jank and especially not without some pains in actually getting the damn thing to work. Still, it's worth noting if this bothers you as much as it does me.) Builds can be dead on arrival without you knowing for quite awhile if you're not aware of certain intricacies and caveats that Neverwinter isn't in any hurry to tell you. If you have any experience with modern editions of D&D or Pathfinder, you'll likely find yourself aching at least a bit at the overall lack of streamlining and QoL (particularly if you're like me and have recently gotten into Pathfinder 2E, a system that pretty deftly melds the modern comforts of newer D&D editions with the sheer variety of character options of D&D 3E/Pathfinder 1E).

But this shouldn't be too big a barrier (and if you're one of those people that still swears by 3.5E, it's probably no barrier at all), and it's well worth getting used to for the sheer amount of quality material available here. Other reviews have gone on at length about the persistent worlds that this game is probably most famous for (and they're better equipped to tell you about them), but traditional RPG experiences are in no short supply here and you can spend a practically infinite amount of time delving into all of it if you so wish. Multiplayer should now be fairly painless due to NAT punchthrough being implemented and allowing you to circumvent the usual port forwarding or virtual LANs you'd need to play before, and if you're looking for a good co-op experience it's hard to go too wrong with this. Dungeon Master mode is still supported, so you can still run a campaign of D&D 3.0 through Neverwinter if you really wanted (though I can't imagine why you'd choose this over, say, Roll20 or Foundry or even Tabletop Simulator in the year of our lord 2021; novelty, I suppose?), and the content creation tools are still seeing plenty of updates if you happen to find yourself wanting to make your own module or something.

On the whole, a pretty damn good time, would recommend.

As of the time of this writing, the gunplay just feels miserable. Everything else about the game could be excused if it was fun to actually shoot people in this game about shooting people - but it unfortunately just isn't. It's a huge shame, because I really like the idea behind the game, but it just doesn't feel good at all.

Nothing like spending some quality time with your long-distance (and/or quarantined) SOs in VR - if you and your partner(s) each have headsets, I would absolutely recommend looking into this as a way to connect with them. You'd be surprised how nice virtual cuddling feels, even without any actual physical presence.

There's also the usual neat stuff, but you've probably seen plenty on all that already.

A very satisfying beat-em-up in spite of (and maybe even in part because of) its odd aesthetic. Blend Guardian Heroes with Streets of Rage and this game's own special sauce and you have something quite special indeed. If you enjoy beat-em-ups at all, you absolutely want this; if you're like me, you'll boot it up every now and again as a dependable, cathartic way to burn an hour.

I didn't write a review for this yet? Let's go ahead and rectify that.

This is a fantastic beat-em-up, one of the best out there. If you like the genre at all, you really should give this a shot. The story isn't anything too special, though there are some branching routes and a bunch of endings to get depending on the route you take and the character(s) you play as. As well, dialogue also changes significantly depending on the character(s) played; this carries over into co-op, where every possible combination of characters will result in very different banter. It doesn't branch to the degree of, say, Guardian Heroes - regardless of route, you'll always fight the same final boss and largely achieve the same end goal of taking down the bad guy, you'll just fight different bosses and go to different stages on the way, with a couple twists you may or may not miss out on. But it doesn't really need as much branching as GH, if we're being honest.

First off, it passes the first test of any beat-em-up: is beating the ♥♥♥♥ out of enemies fun? Hell yes. Beyond that, the gameplay seems simple at first but reveals its depth pretty quickly; the three main characters are varied in about the ways you'd expect (Gal is fast and combo-focused, Ricardo is slow and strong with shorter combos, and F. Norris is the middle-ground between the two), and each of them have a healthy amount of special moves that you'll need to learn to do well, which the training mode will help you with quite nicely. The game is very challenging even on the normal difficulty, but even if you game over, you'll be able to continue from the start of a given section as much as you want - you'll just get a lot less coins than you would have if you got to the end without dying, and you'll need those coins to unlock costumes, bonus modes (and extra characters for those modes), and other such things.

The soundtrack is also really good, by the way.

This is absolutely worth $20; highly recommended. You may wish to avoid it if you know beat-em-ups aren't your thing, but if you like them, this is a real treat.

Even as someone who has enjoyed EA's Battlefront well enough (at least what little I've been able to), I still enjoy this one rather more. Multiplayer still persists on GameRanger, though in my experience, there's usually only one, maybe two servers with a decent population (20+) at any given time; better than many other older games, of course, but still pretty small. However, most of my time with this game has been spent killing time with the singleplayer - and mods. Install the fan-made 1.3 patch, and you'll gain access to a wide range of mods. Want to play on maps from the first Battlefront and battle in the Knights of the Old Republic era? Grab the Conversion Pack. Want maps based on various EU/Legends locations with randomized units each time you play? Go get Dark Times 2: Rising Son. Want to forget Star Wars entirely and fight in the Mass Effect universe? Grab Mass Effect: Unification. The list goes on.

Modding alone makes this one worth it. You'll struggle to find people to play these mods with you - at least not without actively asking around - but the large amount of content available and the amount of fun you can have even just playing alone makes up for it.

A classic mod with tons of custom levels to play far beyond the campaigns of Half-Life and its expansions. Being a multiplayer focused experience. how much you enjoy your time will likely depend on who you end up playing with. So far since installing this new version, most servers I've played on have had a number of immature (to put it somewhat lightly) players; in these cases, enjoyment will be determined by your tolerance of such people. If you can, a lot of the fun I've had with Sven comes from the chaos of running through these levels with a horde of strangers, everyone charging through guns blazing and getting in each other's way more often than not.

However, given that you no longer need to own Half-Life to play Sven Co-op (and don't even need to own it to play its campaign in Sven), getting a group of friends to play with should prove easier than ever; if you've been wanting you and/or your friends to experience Half-Life, there's no better way to share the experience than with Sven Co-op. The campaign experience is now the closest to the original its ever been; no more arbitrary "kill all monsters to advance" gates inserted, just survive your journey through Black Mesa and Xen as you would in the original game. Even the opening tram ride and ending sequence are now fully playable in Sven after nearly two decades of being unplayable! (At least, I'm pretty sure they weren't playable in previous versions; I might need to be corrected on that.) You can also play the Opposing Force and Blue Shift campaigns, though all players will need to own the respective expansions in order to play; additionally, a co-op conversion of the horror mod They Hunger is also included. New to the latest version of Sven Co-op is Survival mode, enabled by default; in this mode, each player only has one life and the death of all players initiates a vote to either restart the level or move on to the next. This should be a good option for those seeking a more challenging experience, but can be disabled if you're just looking for a ride; if so, death only means you'll have to respawn at the last spawn point.

There's far more to Sven Co-op than just playing the official campaigns, however. The real meat is the treasure trove of user-made levels that have been created over the course of the 17 years Sven Co-op has been around. A large selection of these are included with Sven, but you can find even more on various sites (including the official Sven Co-op website). Given that's there such a large amount that covers a large range of gameplay styles, you'll probably be able to find plenty that suits your tastes. Action or puzzles, story or plotless, 16 players or 4 or even alone; whatever you want, you'll be able to find plenty.

Note that while the devs have made modifications to the engine, you'll still run into some annoying engine bugs; a very noticeable one concerns elevators and other moving platforms, where a combination of many players moving around on one and lag can result in the platform suddenly murdering players standing on it. While not a bug, you'll also have to portforward if you want to host an online server (simply playing on a server does not require this, of course).

Overall, if you're interested in some co-op classic FPS action with friends or strangers, I highly recommend giving this a try! You've got nothing to lose but time.