Recent reviews by lime-eater

The gritty setup of the Story works. Your friend is kidnapped by an extremist government group and you have to cross the country while working gigs to pay your way so you can save him. But the dialogue is outrageously silly to the point of farce.

I could forgive that if the gameplay held up, but it's a step backwards from Not Tonight 1. There's little progression in difficulty. Instead, new cities have unique mechanics - but it's a grab bag. NYC in particular has an ill-conceived rhythm game which YOU THE PLAYER have to play for the entrants. It's so out of place.

That's a no from me dawg.

I like FP2 but it's not love. Time to cook is needed. By the time DLC starts coming out I believe the game will be refined.

Good atmosphere. Why not? It's free.

The setting is true 10/10. And I can dig the punishing atmosphere... when it's on purpose.

When it's only hard, the game is incredible. But mechanics work in questionable ways. They seem to come out of nowhere and are riddled with exceptions. The translation is poor in some key descriptions. Triggers break.

And buildings... oof. Buildings stretch to fill gaps, which is dumb as hell. When building dimensions expand you lose valuable space - key to survival. There's whole Steam community guides on how to trick building into not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ itself. It's on purpose but I don't think it should be.

The hardest difficulty, "Survivor", puts you in Ironman rules - not a good combo with jank. Worse, this hard mode also disables pause. Morphing Frostpunk into an RTS for the game's ultimate challenge feels wrong - like a spelling bee with a javelin toss. When each second matters the insufferable building mechanics overshadow even the cold. Losing an hour into a run because your build just wasn't enough already sucks. But when you lose to some mechanical problem like an idiot villager deciding not to eat it's damn frustrating.

The ludonarrative of Frostpunk works best at its max difficulty. That's where the fun is. But I think the speedrun-level of rote memorization required to overcome its unpolished components is overtuned. I'm hardly a casual player -I love a good deep dive- but this doesn't feel like a good RoI even for me.

I'd love to see an update for Frostpunk that clarifies some event triggers and gives pause back to Survivor mode. Its would really make a huge difference in my opinion.

It's been a rough ride planetside but Helldivers finally seems to have landed.

The devs have figured out a reasonable pace to deliver content. Financing is based on mostly-palettable DLC packs("warbonds").

The game is always buggy. IF you can look past that there's something special waiting for you. This game rocks.

Gunplay is top tier. The best in any 3rd person shooter today. Plus, for precision, switching into 1st-person mode is seamless.

The animations are so detailed you have to watch a Youtube Deep Dive to notice all the little embellishments.

BUT

The true winner here is the physics engine. It's just the best damn one I've ever played. (And probably will remain so until GTA releases 2026.)

Seriously, I thought I was out and then they released the humvee and I got another 100 hours just driving around the maps at jackknife speeds.

It's simply never been so fun to die. 10/10. The rewards are well deserved.

(Lowkey: this game ironically might achieve world peace.)

If you all die you just lose all the loot up to that point. You already get a money penalty for dying. No need for a second penalty that bones the run.

This creates a situation where the fastest way to continue having fun is to quit so you don't need to watch the death animation. I think that is a bad game loop.

I love the idea but this is pretty slapped together. Not a fan of the Full Clear condition being timed. Minimum number of moves makes more sense for puzzle games imo. There are 5 minigames total:

Number Tower - 50 levels. There's several seconds of animation between clicks, and you have to click even when there's a single option. Ends up tedious. 2/3 stars.

Parking Lot - 25 levels. Mouse controls are bad. The clicking isn't crisp and it takes at least 3 clicks to move a single car a single time. Once to select, once to confirm, once to choose direction. As a result this minigame especially suffers from being Time Trial based. 0/3 stars.

Cash Run - 25 levels. The 3/4 perspective makes determining height difficult. And you have to watch a pretty lengthy animation every time you clear a stage. 1/3 stars.

Color Lab - 50 levels. This one is great! It's exactly what I wanted from this game. 3/3 stars. I would love to get more levels for this if a new mechanic could be introduced.

Pull the Pins - 100 levels. The pins are finicky when they're close to each other so sometimes it'll pull the wrong pin. 2/3 stars.

There are monthly multiplayer rankings for a separate challenge bracket too if that's your thing. You can customize your nameplate if you want, too; though there's a gacha mechanic for unlocking new titles and even a daily spin which I hate. It would have been nice if Esc opened the menu like every other computer program; it's Space in this game which took me an hour and a half to discover.

Overall, YYWTGRSHYGNLSYCT's charm doesn't hold it together in the face of its interface. It's pretty close though, and if some controls were polished I'd happily turn that thumb upside-up.

I honestly kinda like the game. Not enough for a positive review obviously, but it's got heart. The character writing is punching above its weight. It's gritty and grounded but imaginative and well-realized. The troubles are all pretty obvious, but there's surprising joy in its old-school feel. There's a perk that grants 10% more XP from fights and I love that classic broken design. You just don't see it anymore. There's a stealth perk which lets you immediately knock out enemies; no noise, no weapon stat check, no QTE, barely an animation - which feels great honestly. And it actually lets you be a bastard! The game rewards it!

Of course the execution is bush league and that sinks it. The NPCs are rudimentary thus the world feels little better than if it were empty. Enemies have a generous dodge mechanic which snags the combat badly. Your companions are no help; they're basically just target dummies only good for splitting the herd. Getting locked into animations sucks and sucks often. The melee is clunky. The ranged is clunky.

So it's got serious flaws but it's obvious real effort was poured into it. The setting is well-embellished and might have worked if Unity had been bigger back then. It's actually a good setting I would like to see more of.

I can't finish it. It started strong! But it just kept wasting my time.

I like to see all a game has to offer, but by the end the number creep is just insane. Late-game small-fry fish can take more bullets than early-game sharks. Shop prices start sensical but devolve by the midgame. (2000 gold for a watering can? Come on.) Upgrading a gun to its final form is gonna set you back a good 5 dives alone. Upgrading a single staff member to the highest rank takes weeks worth of grinding for what feels like diminishing returns. It gets so gamey and baseless that the charm wears through -which is a problem because charm's the main offering of Dave the Diver.

I was wrong. It turns out what games need is active development and at least passing efforts at realism.

Passing realism as in jumping off a 2 story building hurts you.

Proving that games don't have to look good, they have to be good.