Recent reviews by jerb

The Sonic Frontiers of shooters. Take that as you will, and know that this review is only positive due to the lack of a neutral option.

Simultaneously the funniest and most tense game you'll ever play.

netcode less stable than my social life

ultrakill with guns

This game is a masterpiece.

This has some of the most fluid movement of any game I've ever played. Levels are deliberately exploitable, generally with more shortcuts than the game explicitly shows, and the game dripfeeds new mechanics at a very natural pace.

The story is... not very well written, but that's easily overlookable considering just how good everything else is.

I was initially worried that the game would be relatively short because of it being a "speedrunning" game, with the excuse being that you're intended to replay the game infinitely trying to get a lower time. Instead, getting a lower time is the icing on the cake- the game has over 100 levels.

I've done what the game considers to be 100% completion, and I've still got a while to go- I want to beat everyone else's times on my friend leaderboard, I know for a fact some of my runs weren't optimal, there's new modes unlocked during endgame, and just maybe the game will get workshop support someday.

The soundtrack is also immaculate. I really can't recommend this game enough.

From the start, I suspected the game was too good to be true, but I held out hope.

After over a YEAR of radio silence, everyone is pinged in the Discord, and we find out the fantastic news that the project was bought by Earth 2, a metaverse company, and that they intend on adding said metaverse into the game.

This is ridiculous. ZERO indication of any progress for OVER A YEAR, followed by the acquisition from an NFT ponzi scheme.

I don't think I'm alone in saying how much of a complete and utter disappointment this is. As I type this, E2 representatives in the server are spewing nonsense left and right about "building a metaverse" using "DRONE technology" and are ignoring any and all criticism. That tells me everything I need to know about the new management.

I'm done.

If you want to play a game like this that exists today and doesn't suck, look into RC15.

It's a shame I have to leave a negative review, because Neon Abyss is a game I really wanted to like. Right out of the gate, though, it feels slow, quiet, and uninspired. I found a lot of QoL issues in the demo, but figured that build's about 8 months old, so that's not really too much of an issue- but save for one, they're all still present in the base game.

Within 40 minutes of playing, I found the following problems:

• Here's one of the big ones- you can't teleport from any room to a room with the teleporter. What's the point? Teleporters are intended to reduce backtracking, right? They're still "reducing backtracking" but you still have to backtrack to the actual teleporter. The way Gungeon does it, where you can go to any teleporter at will, or Monolith, where you can go to any room at will, is perfect. I see no reason to deviate from that idea.
  
• Eggs are... weird. It's not like in Isaac where they closely follow your movements, they instead flip direction entirely once you look the other way.
  
• Music restarts every. Single. Room. If you enjoy listening to the same 30 seconds of the "intense" version of the track, then more power to you, but a Gungeon-esque system would've been better, where the track only reverts back to ambient after a minute or so.
  
• Item text persists only for a couple seconds, and you usually don't have enough time to read what the gun or familiar does. This isn't like Isaac where descriptions are two or three words, this is two or three sentences. It's inconvenient to have to go to the pause menu every time I see something with longer text.
  
• I think I got an event of some kind at one point, but I couldn't read what it said because, sure enough, the item text showed up as a familiar evolved, and I completely missed what the event said since the item splash text is so large that it covered up a good third of the screen.

The trailers will have you believe this is a fast paced, Gungeon-esque game, and I was hoping this would scratch the Gungeon itch, but instead it just makes that itch worse. Instead of taking the positives of Gungeon (its humor, polish, core gameplay loop, balance) it seems to take the negatives (visually busy design, pacing, pre-update slow backtracking) while offering almost nothing new to the table. Babies are a neat concept, but even they aren't completely polished, and that's the game's only standout factor- I had a baby that split into about 10 zombie babies, and it was never explained why- I had to go to the pause menu to figure it out. I never saw the actual health of the zombie babies either, and the item text implies it would just continually split itself, which I figured wasn't right, and sure enough they all died a few seconds later.

I feel like Neon Abyss doesn't know what it wants to be. It wants to be Isaac, it wants to be Enter the Gungeon, but what it lacks from those two games is staying power. I put this in the same category as Steredenn and Wizard of Legend, where they're games I really wanted to like, but out of the gate i saw pacing and polish issues that I just can't overlook. I'm willing to overlook problems with a game if it's fun, because no game is perfect, but Neon Abyss... isn't fun.

A game being derivative is okay and expected in today's industry. Monolith, for example, is one of my favorite roguelites, and it's just about one of the most derivative roguelites you're going to find. This is derivative for the wrong reasons. Where Monolith takes existing ideas, iterates on them, and seamlessly integrates them together into a cohesive experience, Neon Abyss feels like it's taking existing ideas, throwing them in, and praying it works, and the way I see it, it doesn't work.

I think this game has the potential to be good, but it's going to take a lot of changes. The game, overall, needs faster pacing (at the very least optional like in Gungeon) and needs to be able to stand by itself, as well as a lot of quality of life iteration. If i found this many gripes in 40 minutes, that tells me there's probably a lot of others, too.

Absolutely stellar. An exponential improvement over the original, which I wasn't a fan of. I'm really enjoying this one, though, and have already logged more playtime in it over the past 24 hours than I have in the first game total.

It's a bit rough around the edges (expected for an Early Access game) but it's already more polished than the original, and has a much better gameplay loop.

It's an okay attempt at revitalizing the Robocraft formula, but ultimately it falls short. It's much slower than Robocraft at its prime was, and there simply isn't the userbase required for a good meta and matchmaking system to form.

The lack of content can be forgiven. The repetition, though, that's another story.

Hacknet: Labyrinths is fantastic.

It takes what made the base game great and expands on it. The missions take quite a bit longer and require more brainpower than those that were seen in the base game, with some of the missions utilizing everyone in your team in order to work towards one specific goal.

The soundtrack is just as catchy and fitting as the base game's, and in a lot of ways, it's better.

This is how you make a DLC. This DLC added more of what I loved about Hacknet. More difficult and complex hacks, longer puzzles, extra dynamics and things to watch for, more intensity (especially at the end), and even a part where you get hacked and have to fix Hacknet outside of Hacknet.

Overall, this is a very high quality, polished DLC to a game that was already great to begin with.