Recent reviews by Gorga

Helldivers 2 was my most anticipated game of 2024 and it completely delivered.

This is absolutely how you pull off a sequel:

- Preserves the essence of the original game while still bringing a completely new feel to the game that still somehow is familiar to fans of the original.
-Respects fans of the original game while still being welcoming for a new generation of democracy spreaders.
-Not afraid to take risks with bold new directions (top down to 3D for example), yet not being reckless with decision making that effects core game design.

There aren't many sequels in modern gaming that pull this sort of thing off, but if I had to pick a good reference point I'd say it's comparable to how Risk of Rain 2 iterated on the original Risk of Rain.

Love it or hate it, there really is nothing quite like Helldivers 2 on the current market. This is one of those rare games that comes along every so often that just has that special feel to it that makes it stand out from anything else out there.

You can mark my words, but I'm very willing to bet the overall game play loop and design from HD2 is going to be emulated by several developers in the next few years, which is awesome because I would love to see other takes on this style of game.

Overall excellent game that is only getting better over time (vehicles soon!) Even full price at only 40 dollars, this is an absolute no brainer. Enjoy.

This isn't the best game I played in 2023, but it is definitely the most underrated one. This game is definitely made for a specific kind of person, but if you are in that camp it absolutely checks the right boxes that make for an excellent experience. If you've played Nioh 1 or 2 you already pretty much know what to expect coming into this game with some caveats.

The good:

-Excellent Combat. High tier action gameplay.
-Insane degrees of customization to modify your gameplay experience. There are like close to 30 playable classes and you can swap between 2 classes in the middle of combat on top of designing your own custom combos. You are constantly going to be doing pretty awesome things in combat.
-Mostly great co-op experience for up to 3 players. It's very easy to invite your friends and can play through almost the entire campaign together, outside of a couple of instances that force you to (briefly) separate. Class design allows for players to even take on roles if you wish, such as running dedicated support , tank, or dps. Or you can ignore traditional party roles entirely.
-The base game has multiple difficulty settings make the game as easy or as hard as you want it to be. Beware the optional DLC is extremely difficult post-game content.
-Great levels of polish to the mechanics. There are a ton of build templates that you can create to easily swap between classes and item sets, auto-dismantle features to make the loot pinata far more manageable, auto optimizing gear for your entire party, and million other controls that the game lets you use to really fine tune your experience.

The Bad:
-Absolutely trash tier level design. Things start out as serviceable and become increasingly more annoying as the game progresses. Multiple layers to levels with poor visual landmarks and very little direction mean you are often going to be running around going "Where TF do I go? Have I already been here before?" This is made even worse by the fact that there's NO MAP.
-This was a minor point for me, but the loot and levels progress at such an insane pace that you are basically going to just be constantly hitting the auto optimize button and calling it a day, at least until you get to the higher tier of difficulties where it starts to really matter. Your first run through the game will have a sort of disconnected feeling with the loot system where you are lacking meaningful decisions with your gear that give you a tangible impact on your gameplay.
-While the story does eventually become at least coherent, the pacing is absolutely awful and it's really not great overall. There's essentially no character development to be had and the entire cast is completely one-note and forgettable. If you're looking to primarily get something from the story experience in this game, stay far away.

Digital heroin. This is the game that started it all. You already know exactly what i'm talking about because it's pretenders are 90% of the games coming out on steam these days.


I'm nominating VS for labor of love because the developer continues to push out new characters, music, mechanics, and even co-op for this game for mostly free when the entry point into VS is already so cheap it's basically comical at this point. The dollar to hours enjoyment ratio for VS really can't be overstated.

I was here from the very beginning of the games release and I can definitely tell you that while this game was awesome even at launch, it looks wildly different now compared to back then.

Hats off to the OG.

I just completed this game 100% on hard mode and this is a PSA to anyone about to play: *DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME ON HARD MODE!* Now if you're an absolute masochist who likes outright unfair challenges then by all means give it a shot, but this is NOT a "tough but fair" hard mode.

I found it to be incredibly poorly balanced, outright cheap (off-screen attacks that can close to one shot you even with max defense etc), and there isn't even an achievement for completing it on the mode if that's your thing. I legitimately had an easier time clearing any boss in Elden Ring than I did on this game's hard mode final boss. If you don't believe me just look at other threads about this games hard mode. You've been warned.

Even though this game had some fairly glaring design issues, I'd still give this game a thumbs up with caveats. If I had to score it I'd give it a 7/10. My co-op partner thought it was an 8/10.

Here's what I liked :

• Great local or remote play co-op experience.
  
• The core game play loop of Explore over world-->Defeat Mobs--> Get upgrade materials--> Visit towns, fountains, trials for upgrades--> Clear dungeons is executed well.
  
• Solid pacing and progression. The game does a pretty good job of giving you towns, fountains, etc at a good pace. Game is just the right length for a game in its genre. Gear progression is also paced well.
  
• Combat feels good and has a really great sense of speed to it. There are three main styles of weapons to choose from: Melee, Magic, and ranged. I've played around with all 3 styles and each of them have really fun weapons to pick from.
  
• Weapon upgrades tend to be exciting, ESPECIALLY late game weapons.

Here's what I didn't like :

• Poor balancing across the board. Player weapons, enemies and their attacks, and badges all need improvement to their balance. Hard mode is one of the most poorly thought out hard modes I've played in a game in a long time.
  
• There's no invulnerability period when you're hit. When you combine this with enemies that litter the screen with homing projectiles from OFF SCREEN the second you enter a map through what is effectively a funneled kill zone...it feels outright cheap without giving you a fair chance to react with informed decisions regarding enemy position, attack patterns, projectile positioning etc.
  
• Balance issues aside, badges don't feel nearly as impactful to the gameplay experience as they should. I was excited for the badges to enable distinct feeling builds or alter my gameplay in a meaningful way and that just really doesn't happen. I'd also like to see badges actually specify what they do so I could make informed decisions when equipping them (EX: Instead of "Equipping this deals increased magic damage" It should say something like "Equipping this does increased 10% magic damage".)
  
• Poor Inventory management. With stacks capping at 250 and limited inventory spaces/stash in a single-player game you really feel the pain of a lack of sorting features like auto-combine, auto-deposit, or even the ability to sell excess gear.
  
• The bomb is the only active ability in the game and it's completely underwhelming even when you equip every bomb themed badge. There's a huge missed opportunity here for more exciting active abilities besides just dropping a mediocre bomb that even hurts you.
  
  If you enjoy top-down action/adventure style games with some minor looting, bullet hell, gear upgrades etc then this is a good game to play at a pretty reasonable price.
  
  I'd love to see a sequel with this same core formula but with exploring mechanics like player classes, an actual meaningful badge system or a skill tree to replace it, or even some additional RPG-lite elements.

This game is bad. Like really, really bad.

I'm usually forgiving of overly simplistic or minimalist game design as I sometimes just crave playing an "arcadey" game, but this is on another level of basic.

The enemies are bland/repetitive, mechanics are virtually non-existent unless you count an annoyingly limiting ammo system that curbs your already incredibly restrictive player engagement options, and the pace of the map progression is so slow it's offensive. Speaking of progression, there's absolutely none of that in this game. Forget about any kind of meta progression, there isn't even progression level to level.

Going into the menu lets you adjust sound and music- that's it. The game has controller support but the right stick seems to very poorly (and slowly) emulate a mouse.

This legit feels like some dude grabbed some premade assets from a game making editor and strung some things together within an hour or two. The most enjoyable part of the game was the funny joke on the games store page that lists "dynamic gameplay" as a bullet point. Hilarious.

It's quite telling when I have an 18 year old steam account with over 1,000 games (some of which are below average to arguably even poor), yet this is the first time I've ever felt compelled to write a negative review of a game. It's really that awful.

Avoid at all costs.

Ignore the negative reviews written by the mortally challenged. They are nothing but distractions.


Rip and Tear...Until it is done.

If you're looking for a simple, inexpensive shoot-em with rogue-lite elements then you're going to enjoy this game. The music is very good, the controls are tight, and the overall gameplay is really fun.

This game didn't really have much depth, but sometimes I crave a game where I can just go back to the basics and not get too heavily invested.

In terms of longevity, there are multiple unlockables/upgrades and difficulty settings you can acquire over multiple runs.

Definitely recommended if you're into the genre.

Simply incredible. I'm writing this literally after I just finished off the very last achievement I needed for 100%. This is a game that you get out of it what you put into it. Once you've unlocked everything you can really customize your gungeon experience and play how you want to play. You can choose or combine Vanilla runs, Rainbow runs, Challenge, Turbo Mode, various loot tables, using rainbow runs to fish for certain items, Paradox/Gun Slinger runs, etc. I haven't even gotten into modding the game yet.

The updates to this game have been excellent and FREE. I've particularly enjoyed the synergies they've added to the game, which can turn really boring/weak weapons into complete balls to the wall weapons of mass destruction. I can safely say that after the final update to the game, Gungeon is an insanely polished and well-designed experience.

If you even kind of enjoy rogue-lites or bullet hell games you should get this game, which is an absolute steal even at full price. There are a lot of indepth reviews and videos you can use to support your decision if you're on the fence.



At this point I'd love to see what they could do with Enter the Gungeon 2. Perhaps even going the Risk of Rain 2 route and making it 3D, which worked out better than most any of us could have hoped for (ROR2 is amazing.)