Recent reviews by kjm015

If you liked Boneworks, you'll probably love this game. It has the same rock-solid platforming and physics from the first game. The soundtrack is one of the best game soundtracks I've heard in a very long time. The campaign itself is a little shorter than I would have hoped, but there is a lot more things to do once you're finished with the story. The game is wide open for modding; there's already a ton of mods only two weeks into the game's release.

The game definitely isn't perfect. There are a number of bugs that were a bit of a nuisance for me, but nothing game breaking that I've experienced. If you didn't like Boneworks or couldn't play it due to motion sickness, then this game is not for you.

I think that there's enough content and charm in Bonelab in its current state to recommend it, and it's only going to improve over time with expansions, bug fixes, and the modding community just as Boneworks did.

This game is like Portal and Half Life: Alyx combined. The combat is very physics-based with realistic gun mechanics. The puzzles and obstacles are very open-ended and can be solved in multiple ways, which lets you get really creative with solutions.

Example: you see a machine gun turret guarding an open plaza, and you need to get past it.
My friend's s solution was to put a trash can on his head and tackle the turret. It worked.
My solution was to use a trash can lid as a riot shield and smash the turret with a brick. That also worked.

There's also lots of secrets and easter eggs hidden in all of the levels. You can use these to unlock sandbox levels, which have their own secrets and unlockables. There's lots of things to find and to do.

The only downside game takes some time to adjust to. The movement is disorienting at first, especially if you're not used to VR. I was only able to play for 15 minutes at a time when I started, but now I can play for 2+ hours before I feel the need to stop.

I don't have many VR games for my Valve Index yet, but this is my favorite so far. I find myself wanting to explore and replay a lot of the levels, something that I don't do with most games. If you have a VR headset, especially a Valve Index, this game is a must-have.

This new Insurgency is pretty good. I really like messing around in co-op mode. The sound design is on point, and I think a lot of the new mechanics are neat. There are a few problems, though. One of the co-op maps is broken as of writing this, and there are a lot of other irritating bugs with the game. I'm hoping that with the recent introduction of modding support that the game and its community will be able to expand.

This is a very in-depth military simulation game with loads of things to do and an endless amount of official and community-made content. Most of my time playing this game has been spent in the mission editor. You can create elaborate single and multiplayer missions to play through with complex and in-depth objectives. The game even has its own scripting system to customize your mission layouts.

Don't buy this game if you value your time and sanity.

The game is set up to encourage grinding over everything else. Nominally, your goal as a player is to survive. Gathering food, water, and building supplies so that you can make better structures and weapons so that you can get better supplies, etc.

The problem is that at any point in this cycle, if you die and lose your home base, you have to start over from scratch. Also, other players can raid your stuff and kill you even when you're not online.

Given that success is predicated solely on the amount of materials you can harvest from the environment, being successful means dumping huge amounts of time into doing repetitive tasks for marginal gains. And like I said before, this can all get stolen from you at any time. All it takes is for some other guy or group of guys who spend more time grinding than you to gather the stuff necessary to demolish your base and steal your stuff, most likely while you're offline.

In essence, your typical Rust session goes in one of the following ways:

1. You are killed repeatedly before being able to find any tools or supplies whatsoever. You get insulted by 12 year olds over VOIP for being bad at the game. You quit and feel immense regret for spending your time on this game.

2. You manage to gather enough materials to build a small base. This takes about 2-3 hours. You log off. You come back to find that your base was destroyed, your materials were stolen, and you were killed. You must start from scratch, or you most likely quit and feel immense regret for spending your time on this game.

3. You build a base only to find out that the server is empty and there's nothing to do. You quit and feel immense regret for spending time on this game.

4. You did it. You managed to grind more than anyone else, and are now the most powerful person/group in the server. You then realize that there's no reward for doing so, and have become the person you despised for so long. You figure that any further "progress" you make is just going to deter people from the server you play on, and that your enormous amount of time spent has been for nothing of substance. You quit and feel immense regret for spending your time on this game.

By the way, the community for the game is incredibly toxic. If you're lucky enough to not be berated with racial slurs every 5 seconds, you're going to have to deal with Russian hackers, clan douchebags, people who shoot you for no reason, obnoxious 10 year old kids, and pretty much any other stereotypical ♥♥♥♥♥♥ internet troll you can think of. They are all that is left of the community now.

This is on top of the fact that the game is littered with numerous bugs, glitches, design problems, collision issues, bad hit detection, desync issues, poor optimization, and all the other fun stuff that comes with the "early access" label.

The game has been in development since 2013, and yet the core issues that I have with the game have not changed since launch over 5 years ago. The game is still in alpha. Where did the time go? Where did the money go? It seems to me like they've been doing the bare minimum necessary to prevent people from saying that they've abandoned the project.

As a person who has owned the game since its release in 2013, I have personally spent way more time playing Rust than I'd like to admit. Once you fall into it, it's addicting. With friends, Rust has its moments. But none of what you do in the game ever feels like it's worth the effort. It's probably one of the only games that I have played that consistently makes me feel worse after every time playing it. There's never been an instant where I've left a game of Rust feeling like I had a great time. You're either dejected from your lost time investment or anxious that whatever you've worked on is in jeopardy of being taken from you.

I know I've ranted a lot here, but this has been a long time coming. I can say that no other game I've played has given me such a negative overall experience. Words alone cannot describe the extent to which I can recommend against this game. Take the money you wanted to spend on this game and put it towards something you can actually enjoy. Buying it will only give Facepunch more of a reason to maintain the farcical status quo they've created over the development of this game.

Fallout 4 is a great game on its own merits. The negative reviews are mostly just iterations of "I want Bethesda to go back to Fallout 2! Make Fallout great again!" Given that you're not one of those people, and you enjoy FPS/RPG hybrids, you will have no trouble finding hours of entertainment here. I also enjoy the settlement building in the game (though most people seem to despise it).

Verdun is a decent indie game. I bought it three years ago, and the developers have definitely made many improvements since then. It's pretty historically accurate in terms of what the Battle of Verdun actually was. This can be a pro and a con. On the one hand, it's an immersive experience. On the other hand, getting mortared, shot, and cut down by barbed wire isn't exactly a party. If you enjoy real life historical reenactment but don't like inhaling phosgene gas, I definitely recommend the game.

This game is basically just a modern, more realistic Sim City. Ironically, it is also several billion times better than the most recent edition of Sim City that is out there. There's no DRM, no EA, no Origin network, no bugs, no connectivity issues, and no DLC whoring (as of yet at least). Very fun, but also very challenging.

The main game is honestly not worth your time. If you're wondering what it's like, imagine Oblivion without the free-roaming or the fun.
On the other hand, the expansion, Napoleonic Wars, is a great online game type. Gone are the days of shooting someone with a bow 35 times to no avail. You have the power of GUNS! I recommend buying this game with friends, as hilarity will ensue. I honestly think that Napoleonic should just be a standalone game, as it is superior to the original.

The game is buggy and hard to enjoy. It seems like a really bad zombie map in GMod that somehow made it into its own game.