Recent reviews by JMac

TL;DR: There's a lot to love about this game, from the music to the style, but it is held back by a lot of things that contribute to the game being much harder than it should be. The control scheme is archaic and obsolete, enemies spawn endlessly in all directions, and the mechanics are such that there is no avoiding damage; rather you only make it so you die *less* frequently.

I went into this expecting an experience like Death's Gambit or Blasphemous (both of which are punishing soulslike side scrollers), but with a space marine theme. Unforgiving and brutal combat that punishes tactical mistakes, but still fair and rewarding. Instead, I got a game where the developers wanted everything about it to be hard, from controls to level design, and INSISTS upon the fact that you're going to die, to the point of practically WILLING it upon you.

Let's start with the controls. Valfaris is best played on a controller, and only true masochists would play it with Keyboard/Mouse. You cannot change the control scheme, and you'll see why this is a problem. Controls are archaic and can best be compared to Super Metroid for the SNES, but even more frustrating. While there's not necessarily anything WRONG with the Super Metroid control scheme, even Metroid moved on to better control schemes when the option presented itself. Additionally, rather than feeling like an artistic choice for Valfaris, it winds up feeling like the developers saying "we couldn't figure out how to make the game truly difficult so we implemented frustrating controls." In Valfaris, you can aim your gun in one of 8 directions. Problem is, both movement and aiming are mapped to the same stick. To aim your gun, you have to be actively moving, or you can stand still to aim your gun if you hold down the left trigger. That doesn't sound so bad, right? Well, Left Trigger, as you learn earlier in the game than when you learn to aim, is mapped to your shield. So to aim your gun while standing still, you have to deploy your shield. Still doesn't sound so bad, right? Now realize your shield is ALSO directional, and aiming your gun aims the shield. Still not bad? Well, you can shield at the right time to catch projectiles and return them to sender, except you'll usually be too busy trying to aim your gun to use that ability. You'll also have multiple enemies at different angles, which means you're GOING to take damage whether you like it or not. Add to this that using your shield depletes energy - energy that you could use for one of your better guns - and why would you EVER bother aiming while standing still? The game PUNISHES you for doing it! The game punishes you for NOT standing still, too!

Soulslike games don't do the whole "unavoidable damage" thing. If you take damage in a soulslike, it is a skill issue - you mistimed a dodge, you got too close, you dodged in the wrong direction, you ran out of energy, you fell into a trap that you'll avoid next time you see it. You can always look at the scenario (when you're not angry) and see that it was your fault you got hurt. Valfaris doesn't do that. Taking damage or dying in Valfaris is often the result of the game's bad controls, bad hitboxes, bad collision detection, bad spawns, or bad enemies, combined with their INSISTENCE on the fact that you're going to die, to the point of WILLING it upon the player with unfair scenarios. Perhaps with more hours into the game, I'd be better at it and die less frequently. But as it stands, I'm not going to invest more time into a game that actively hates me for playing it.

The enemy design is.. fine. It's fine. It's not bad. It's not great. It's fine. I didn't get far enough into the game to really experience the full breadth of enemies. But what I experienced was enough. From endlessly spawning mech dogs to punishing enemies that require you to focus fire on them while still dodging said endlessly spawning mech dogs, the enemy setup is just fine. It would be entirely manageable if it weren't for the horrible control scheme that you can't even change.

Level layout gets a bit strange later on. You get branching paths that are easy to miss, and you are unsure whether you just missed a really good item there.

I imagine weapon upgrades would be great, but they also relied on a very limited resource, meaning there would be no room for experimentation. I'd either be stuck with subpar weapons, invest in weapons now that turn out to be weak later, or hoard all those tokens for a better gun that might never come. It's just not a good system. I didn't get to deal much with it, but as soon as I learned the system I was already turned off by it.

Do I recommend this game? Yeah.

Am I confident that we'll ever get to the Mistlands update? No.

All in all, the game is a really solid foundation that just needs to be built upon. The world is vast, and it's far bigger than one would initially think. I love the sense of adventure on a first playthrough. However, once you reach the end of the content, it becomes rather... boring. You've reached the top and now all that's left is a building game with tedious resource management.

I've spent a lot of time in this game, but I unfortunately have moved on to other games.

TL;DR: I'm glad to have gotten it for free on a sale, because it's NOT worth the asking price. The creators obviously put a lot of effort into the design and style of the game, but it kind of falls apart in execution. The story is witty and funny, and the events that arise are also clever. However, the game suffers from three major problems: bad balancing, lack of clarity, and bad RNG. In addition, the devs seem unwilling to listen to feedback.

And now for the rest of the review. Everything I am about to say is about the easiest difficulty. Keep that in mind.

The art style and writing for this game are great. I think they're the strongest selling point, honestly. A campaign where you're a machine exploiting the humans and essentially exacting revenge on them for years of what you view as slavery. Very nice touch, and the writing for the random events keeps this personality and humor. The permadeath feature adds a little extra risk, which is nice, but it's also why the game's poor balancing, lack of clarity, and RNG become such a problem.

The balancing is pretty bad and turns this into a frantic and chaotic mess.

• You need humans to generate power, but your humans consume food. So you need humans to generate food.
  
• Your production needs increase daily, requiring more humans. So you need humans to create more humans.
  
• Your humans can die of exhaustion (which isn't told to you), but will slowly rest in storage if put there before they die. Therefore, you need to have enough humans in storage to replace exhausted humans.
  
• The more humans you have, the more food you need, so you need more humans making food.
  
• Stations can be upgraded to produce more power, contain more humans, etc. This costs power.

These seem like pretty easy rules, but when combined, they turn into a constant need to upscale your production of everything at a frantic rate in order to keep up with your ever growing power needs. Upgrading the wrong station at the wrong time, or not producing enough of one thing or the other, will lead to defeat. If your humans are getting exhausted faster than your humans in storage can rest, it becomes a downward spiral. You can create more humans (assuming you haven't hit the storage cap), but now you need more food and more power. There is no upgrade that doesn't require you to then upgrade everything else in order to keep up. You're always only barely keeping up, or you're falling behind. There is no getting ahead. There is no optimizing your production. You are either optimal all the time, or you are dead.

Probably the biggest problem is the lack of clarity. Every cycle (20 seconds), time advances one step and resources are consumed. The visuals give me a general idea of how screwed I am, but not how to get out of the situation I'm in. I would hope for a single screen where all my information is located:

• How much energy is being drained per cycle, and the rate of energy production (either every 20 second cycle, or every however-long-it-takes-to-generate-energy-and-show-a-number)
  
• The rate of human production
  
• How much food is being consumed per cycle, and the rate of food production

Instead, I get some general visual ideas of resource consumption per cycle. I can mouse over the energy tank to get a numeric representation of how much energy I will lose at the end of the cycle, but it doesn't tell me how much is being generated. To see that, I have to watch the power generator station for the number that pops up overhead every few seconds, and then kind of extrapolate from there how much that would be at the end of the cycle. I can see how much will be generated at the next level of structure in the upgrade screen, but that's the only place I can see it listed out. The same goes for food, by the way. And all I have to go by for food consumption is a different colored yellow bar. The game tells you that the green in your energy tank is what will be consumed, but not how to visually tell what will be consumed food-wise.

The lack of clarity extends to other important elements. I didn't know that the humans could die of exhaustion until I happened to mouse over the little bar next to him when it turned red. Turns out that was a stamina bar. The game could have given me this information, but decided to let me discover it. I didn't know what the bioreactor was or what it would do until I clicked the upgrade button. I don't know if I would have learned about it with a tutorial tip later, but I also don't care to find out anymore.

You never have the luxury to just look over the UI and venture an educated guess as to what each element is, because your eyes are going to be constantly focused on your energy tank and the humans' stamina bars. I still can only GUESS whether there's something that tells me how many cycles are in a single day. Is there? Yes, it's below the little countdown timer, but you won't know unless you're watching it. Did they ever tell me? No.

The game has a tutorial of sorts, but the tutorial explains only the very basics and then you just have to figure the rest out yourself. Which only leads to a bunch of quit moments as you frantically try to balance everything out.

Finally, the RNG. At the end of every day (which is I don't know how many cycles), you get a random event. The outcome of this event is based on your answer, and if you choose the wrong answer, the penalty is usually so bad that you won't last another day or two. Some of the events don't really have a good outcome, either. Some don't really have a bad one. The penatlies and benefits are just really poorly balanced and make your game entirely dependent on RNG. So all that frantic scrambling to upscale and keep your humans alive to meet the ever-increasing survival demands becomes meaningless. If you memorize all the correct answers to all the random events, the game becomes a trivial clickfest where your only challenge is not being able to click things fast enough.

The REAL tragedy with this game is the devs think they've created the perfect game and seem entirely unwilling to listen to feedback. Their only response to reviews that I've seen is "this is a permadeath game and your review sounds like you don't like permadeath."

TL;DR: VRChat is a mediocre Virtual Reality chatroom made better by mods, which they are choosing to ban. This will only cause more harm.

Without mods, VRChat is... serviceable. I certainly wouldn't have continued to use it if I wasn't part of a community. It largely benefited from being the first of its kind, and from many memes that raised awareness of its existence. But that's about all it has. You can pick an avatar (provided you find one you like in one of the several avatar worlds, and provided the avatar dev doesn't just delete the avatar, etc), go into a world, and chat with other people. Many have tried to create games in it - making it the Gmod of VR. But it lacks any other Quality of Life features that would make it GOOD. Now, add to that a dev team who is ENTIRELY disconnected from their community and ENTIRELY out of touch with the wants and needs of the community.

Modding this game is a very popular thing to do. While it has technically been against the rules, VRChat has turned a blind eye onto it for long enough that a HUGE modding community has sprouted. Rather than taking this in stride by providing support for modders, and publishing an official modding API and modding system while policing for malicious mods (like most people would), VRChat has decided to crack down and implement an invasive anti-cheat (Easy Anti-Cheat) in order to ban all modded clients. It's clear that the VRChat devs want a walled garden. That would be fine... if they had designed VRChat as a walled garden with curated experiences.

Their reasoning is that malicious mods create moderation issues (EAC will not fix this, by the way - a minority of malicious users use malicious mods), and that the existence of modded clients complicates the support and development of the game. However, there would have been an easy solution: adding official mod support would allow the devs to differentiate between data from a MODDED client and data from a VANILLA client. If a game crashes, they'd be able to immediately see if it was the mod or the client. So, needless to say, this is a cop out on their part, and an excuse to not listen to their community.

Mods ranged from accessibility (subtitles, etc) to quality of life improvements for the game. VRChat's default client and UI are clunky and lack several basic features, which the most popular mods address. Some of the UI features just don't work, or only work sometimes; mods solve this problem. The default client is also very prone to crashes and instability, which the most popular mods ALSO address. Several hard of hearing or deaf users use mods that provide subtitles. Others use mods that provide other accessibility features.

Easy Anti-Cheat will do nothing to stop malicious users. They will find a way around it, or will be malicious WITHOUT modding VRChat. It will harm the already dodgy stability of the game, remove a bunch of quality of life features that mods added, and ultimately sour the entire VRChat community against the developers.

Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters is a game of wasted potential. A lot of great features come together to form a mediocre and frustrating game.

While on the surface, it appears to be a fun, Xcom-like Warhammer game, the problems really don't start to show until it's too late to refund. There's a LOT of potential to this game. It's just wasted and hidden behind clunky and unbalanced mechanics.

1. Combat is frustrating, Your marines are WEAK. I get that you need to not be walking tanks in order to have some good gameplay, but this just isn't it. Enemies outnumber you and deal just as much damage as you do, leaving razor thin margins of error. You will spend most of your combat hiding behind cover that may or may not be destructible, trying to find a way to shoot at an enemy. Your melee weapons will almost never get used. With how little health your marines have, melee is a last resort even though it's mechanically treated like your bread and butter attack.

2. Even the smallest mistake can have devastating consequences. They also ALWAYS snowball into much bigger problems. If you're up against a pod of gunners, and you place a marine in what turns out to be a bad spot (even if there's no easy way to determine what spots are "bad"), that marine is good as dead. They'll whittle his health down, and then one gunner will suppress him from a mile away while two or three others put him under direct overwatch. If you're particularly "lucky," a grenadier will throw a grenade that applies the Pinned status, follwed by a timed grenade. If that marine does anything but armor up on the next turn, it's dead. Moving out of the grenade range or shooting at an enemy will trigger the overwatch and suppression. That marine is USELESS for an entire turn unless you have the perfect placement of other marines to take out all the threats. But your marines are typically busy dealing with their own problems.

3. Abilities are kinda blah. If they don't heal your teammates, debuff the enemy, or allow for extra mobility (teleport is VERY useful), they're trash. If they buff your teammate for a turn, you will get more out of just attacking with both knights than you will out of buffing one and then attacking with it. Your overwatch, which is shown off as this crucial skill, only really works against melee enemies since ranged enemies won't ever get into overwatch range.

4. Cover is destructible. I get that one of the marketing points of this game was a destructible environment. But when a single enemy out of six can just break my cover and then the other five can just kill the knight hiding behind that cover, it feels really useless. There's no indication of whether a particular piece of cover is destructible or not, or how easily destructible it is. You just have to guess and learn.

5. There are no tactics. Want to split up your knights? They'll die. Want to spread out and cover a wider area? They'll get singled out. Want to keep your knights together? They'll get mowed down by the six gunners that decided to enter the fight. The only tactic is to hide behind cover and pray that you kill the enemies before you get a really bad Warp Surge

6. Warp Surges SUUUUUUUUCK. I've had warp surges that bring in extra waves of enemies when I'm in the absolute worst position. I've had warp surges that give all my enemies lots of bonus shields right when I got into a position where I was risking my health but could easily kill the enemies. They were then able to escape. I've had warp surges that completely hobble one of my knights for a series of turns, which is DEVASTATING since you only get four knights. Warp surges that boost enemy health. Warp surges that give bonus mutations to enemies. Warp surges that lower my max hp. All of these are at random, and all of them SUCK. You're being punished for not taking out the overpowered enemies fast enough.

I've heard it gets better after you've upgraded your knights, and that it can eventually become boring. But there are so many quit moments before that, that I'm never going to get to that point.

I want so badly to love this game. But it's so horribly buggy, so horribly optimized, that it just isn't good. The game crashes frequently, to the point where it's more terrifying than the monsters itself. There are often server issues that prevent inviting and creating lobbies, which everyone has to exit and restart the app to fix. Sometimes players can't interact with objects in the world, and they are therefore helpless. The devs seem to have abandoned this game. Don't play it.

Outer Wilds is an absolutely unforgettable experience. I don't want to go into spoilers on this review, so I'll give you the general idea. You, the main character, are an astronaut. Your main goal is to explore exploring a small solar system, learning about these ancient beings called the Nomai and their lost civilization. The longer I explored, the more and more invested I was in the story of these ancient people, and I had some absolutely mind-blowing moments.

Discovering new things is always thrilling, and it leads to you being able to piece together more and more about the solar system and the Nomai. Your ship log keeps track of important information that you uncover, with "rumors" for you to follow up on, which is great for when you need a hint of what to do next. The game also doesn't hold your hand. It gives you the knowledge you need, and lets you do the rest.

Everything about the design of this game, from the gameplay and mechanics to the sound design, is phenomenal. It's a truly immersive experience that I'd highly recommend to anyone.

Excellent tactical shooter. The AI is a bit less intelligent than I would have liked, but it was still very good. I've played this for countless hours on my Xbox 360, and now several hours on the PC.

One of the biggest things I like about Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 is that there are different ways to approach almost every situation. In the campaign and in single-player Terrorist Hunt, you command two other men, which allows you to plan different entrance strategies, tag enemies for your teammates to engage, and engage the enemy from different angles.

The campaign is pretty well-paced and gives a good mix of opportunities to use different tactics. There are a few intense firefights spread throughout the campaign, some of which take place on a massive area where you have to utilize cover and positioning to make it through. None of the firefights can easily be done in a "run and gun" style that you would typically see in games like Call of Duty. In fact, on Realistic difficulty, you will not survive with such an attitude.

Ranking is fairly intuitive. There is the classic rank (private, corporal, etc, all the way up to general), which unlocks different armor and gear (the gear is mostly cosmetic while the armor actually has stats). There are three different combat ranks as well: Assault, CQB, and Marksman. Getting certain types of kills grants points to one of the three. As you rank up in each of the three areas, you unlock new weapons and gain XP toward your main rank.


Now, for some PC-specific details. The controls can be customized and re-mapped to suit you; if I recall, I actually did re-map some of the keys and am glad that this feature actually exists (I wish I could say the same for certain other games). The graphics settings are a little lacking, especially for a PC game.

I don't know how populated the multiplayer on the PC is, and I might not find out for some time (ranking up takes a while, and I want my guns, dang it!). Having played Multiplayer Co-op and Versus on the Xbox360, I can attest that it's a fun break from the norm. It's more challenging than the rest of the game, and there is even different gear that you can access that can't be accessed in Terrorist Hunt or Campaign mode.

I'll probably update this as I continue to play the PC version.