Recent reviews by Amalia Kalio

Excellent gameplay, even if a bit repetetive towards the end.

Brilliant sequel to Beneath a Steel Sky. If you've played the original, you'll enjoy all of the love put into this. If you haven't, you don't necessarily need to know the references to the original to have a great time with it.

If you enjoy either of the recent Shadow Warrior games, you'll love this.

If you haven't, here's what you can expect:
-Skill trees
-Combo/style ratings
-Heavy rock battle music
-An emphasis on being mobile and knowing how to mix up your arsenal

Seriously, this game is good. Can't wait for the final release!

Great game, especially if you enjoy Dark Souls, or Souls-like titles. I've seen a lot of complaints about the difficulty to control, but that kind of comes with the genre.

Decent story, overall.

One of the most frustrating things is that there isn't a fast-travel system, which eventually doesn't matter as much as you obtain various upgrades/ability to allow for easier traversal. It's odd how it starts out feeling frustrating, then gradually becomes satisfying to know you've come so far.

Great hectic sidescrolling platformer with a semi-retro feel to it. Lots of hack-and-slash, humor and plenty of "wtf" moments.

As an avid player of mecha titles... This had so much potential but executed it so, so very poorly.

Pros:
-The texture and model work are exceptional for an indie game. I was finding myself impressed with the ships, mostly.
-A variety of customization options, ranging from base mech types to research queues and categories for replacement parts at various joints. The customization aspect of the frame design reminded me of Armored Core, but a little more simplified (which is fine here.)

Cons:
-The camera is very jittery. The frames are smooth, it's not eating up resources, but it's as if the camera simply can't keep up with your mech (even at base speeds), which causes it to frequently (every .5s or so) skip forward to catch up. This problem also applies to camera rotation while stationary, which led to nothing but motion sickness and a nigh-impossible aiming system. To elaborate on the latter, camera jitters would cause your reticle to jump off the target. Oddly enough, it behaved just fine the first time I alt-tabbed, then became a permenant part of the game after that one mission was complete.
-The sound design is sub-par. I feel like I'm playing an early 90s title where they'd loop a small sound clip for weapons and not bother to produce pitch variance or smoothing. The end result produces clipping on your primary weapons, which just gives me a headache.
-The execution sequences are just awkward. They begin as a control prompt, which will only accept input while the target is within your reticle. (See above comment regarding usability for that.) Once triggered, the player teleports over a great distance for a cutscene in melee range. Though these are amusing to watch the first two or three times, it took me out of the game so much that I just didn't want to use it. If you play through the training sequence, there's one scene in particular that's just excessively long and leaving me wanting to get up for a drink in hopes it'll be done by the time I get back. I was not able to get far enough into the campaign to see if this shows up again. (Bailed due to nausea as a result of the camera. See point one of Cons.)
-The data gathering/hacking has the same awkwardness as the execution sequences, prompt, cutscene et all. Unlike hostile targets however, these do not seem to show up on your radar. I wandered around for at least three minutes in training before I figured out there were three vastly different data points right next to each other. The hacking sequence isn't terribly obvious as to how it works and definitely has an RNG-per-second mechanic applied to it, which is frustrating to someone who enjoys hacking/cracking/picking mechanics of other games.


I wanted to like this. I really did. But there's just so much wrong with it that I can't bring myself to start mission two.