Recent reviews by LtKillPuppy

I really don't know what to say in this reivew. If I talk about the story, gameplay or presentation, it will be just mirroring what has been said a millions times already.

So my review is just going to be a warning from Cassandra: Check this game out. Please. While you still have time.

I've been fortunate. I have been a gamer since the early 8-bit era, and I've seen the rise of some really impressive and impactful games. I bought, installed, played and beat seminal classics such as Half-Life, System Shock (1 and 2), Thief, Deus Ex. If you are a gamer under the age of 35-40, you might know about these games today due to a variety of sources: Perhaps, retro-interest streamers or via spiritual successors such as Bioshock, but for a long time only a few of my friends had actually heard of these games, let alone played them. And when they experience the game (either through GOG re-releases or lets-plays), they say to me, "This was AMAZING, why didn't people give this game more attention at the time?"

And guess what? It's happened again. Another game that arrived, made little impact, and will be forgotten in a few years -- and in 10-20 years, people will be saying: "This was AMAZING, why... etc."

Prey is a game I cherish and have already placed on a very short list of what I consider historical classics. It has high marks from me in all aspects: Immersion, story, plot, gameplay and experience. Now is your chance to experience it, and I think you should consider it if any of the previous games I mentioned piqued your interest.

Do so now, before the visuals, gameplay, and software implemention (ie: no support under Windows 2040) is considered too much a barrier to enjoy it as it was meant to be played.

Prey is a game that is trapped in the eternal recurrence which is such a pivotal theme in its own narrative. This has happened before, and it will all happen again. Sucks, and I congratulate Arkane Studios for producing and releasing such a seminal game, and at the same time hope it isn't a Pyrrhic victory. Bethesda give them mo money, pls.

PS: Mooncrash is amazing. It's basically more of the gameplay mechanics, without as much story or narrative, but with decent replayability if you just want to live in the world of Prey a bit longer.

Uaggh. I really want to recommend this game, as it's super-rare we get games like this. I only found out about The Neverhood until later, though I was familiar with TenNapel's work on Earthworm Jim. When I heard about Armikrog I was like, "oh awesome!" I really enjoyed those quirky, FMV-rich point and click adventure games from the 90s.

But Armikrog? I like the story, I like the setting, the world and presentation. Tommynaut, voiced by Michael J Nelson? Rob Paulsen as Beak-Beak? Napoleon Dynamite plays the villian? Mixed with the quirky, weird music stylings of the original Neverhood composer? This sounds great.

But I saw some negative reviews, particularly those from long-time fans saying the game was short, shallow and very buggy. I decided to wait until it was on sale, and here I am.

The verdict? I wish those reviewers hadn't been right, but I fear they are. And what's worse is that I am playing the patched verison; I can only image what it was like on day one. The game just isn't very well coded.

Visual glitches, physics weirding out, or even the fact that cutscenes will trigger where it's clear they expected me to be standing at point A but I'm over at point B, so things don't sync up...

It's also very short. As in, I beat the game in just a few hours. (And I could have shaved off 30 minutes if I hadn't decided to back-track to re-experience parts of the game which will only make sense once you unlock something later in the game.)

But what bothers me the most? The game has tons of visual flavor, but Tommynaut and Beak-Beak maybe trade 10 lines total during the game. And half of that dialog is related to triggering in-game events. There's that amazing opening intro movie (which was available during the kickstarter), but the rest of the game is much more subdued. You really only get that opening intro movie, a confrontation video, then an ending movie, and the rest is no more than glorified animatic storyboards. The game feels very lean, rushed.

I felt I was in trouble the first time I launched it and I saw the basic default Unity launcher pop up. I mean, later in the game you encounter an obstacle which is literally just a 2x stretched version of an earlier obstacle and it looks terrible.

I say pass on this game, even if you are a fan of those involved. And it really pains me to say that.

I tried to like this game.

Like From The Depths, this game is a weird, garish almost incomprehensible mess from the start. Though unlike FTD, I was able to actually figure out the UI (for the most part), but it still requires tons of experimentation and wiki-reading.

There's a lot of stuff in this game, but I found it totally inexcusable that it had no working sound support. (Aside from, what I could tell was just a single laser beam sound effect.) It's also completely written in Java and runs pretty clunky. Imagine the performance of Minecraft set in space with infinite procedurally generated planets, and it plays about as well as that sounds.

The constant requirements of digging through forum posts and wiki pages in order to learn how to do the most basic of things, and the clunkiness of how everything controlled/felt, just turned me off from the game and I've stopped trying the infrequent updates.

Ever played Minecraft with Tekkit back in the day, and thought to yourself, "Man, wouldn't it be great if I could skip all the exploding green monsters and 3D and just go right to building super-complex industrial complexes in an overhead view?"

The team behind Factorio has got you covered.

I was hooked after downloading the demo and trying it for fifteen minutes. A game where you build factories to survive? Sign me right up!

And, about a year later, the developers released a multiplayer version. Bam, one day, this game went from a "check out this cool factory I made -- I'll share a screenshot!" to "check out this cool factory I made -- by connect to my game and trying it out!"

And it worked. Just worked. I have $60 triple-A games in my Steam library with barely functional multiplayer! How could this small indie dev team take their previously single-player game, in such a short time and turn it multiplayer? They know their stuff!

This game is loaded with complexity. The railroad system alone is practically a sub-game all on its own.

Buy it! Play it with friends! Join the rocket-launching factory club!

Any negatives? The only bad thing I can say for this game is that even with the new Steam achievements, there isn't much driving you to keep playing once you build a mega-factory. There are a LOT of mods which add whole new modes to the game, but I am really hoping we get some cool story missions or at least some sort of mechanism which gives you a better sense of progress (aside from just how many rockets you can launch with your factory per hour, or nerdcred challenges such as building computers from factory parts).

I like.

A fairly enjoyable co-op/PVP space building game with a lot of features.

Good things:

* You build spaceships! Not just one, but multiple ones (later in the game), and even starbases!
* Lots of items to find which can be bolted onto your ship to change its abilities.
* Big universe to play around in, with lots of mutually-exclusive factions.
* Combat is pretty fun, particularly with the variety of weapons.
* Multiplayer works really well, even with high-latency connections. Something I expect to be a given for a coop/PVP game but surprised at how many gets this wrong. (COUGH COUGH space engineers)
* Has exploring element, where you can find hidden bases, cargo and goodies if you like that.
* Crafting system which becomes prevalant later in the game, allowing you to build starbases and manufacture your own items.

Bad things:

* Reeeally strange implementation of Newtonian physics that will take a while to adjust to.
* Feature incomplete, such as captains of your fleet won't function if you warp away from them (meaning this will never be an X-style game). Or your AI captains will blow each other during combat (if they catch each other in cross fire).
* Occasically nasty bug will eat your ships/savegames, so make backups/frequent saves.
* Can be grindy/tedious, as you are constantly attacked by waves of pirates/aliens.

Avorion takes some time to get used to but it's neat to play with friends.

Check out my indepth review of MANOS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2qu38Ipt4I

I was going to recommend this game despite the terrible on-foot combat and the really repeative Far Cry-style sandbox world.

But then I beat the game.

And all I have to say is: Don't play this turd. The ending is the worse cop-out I've ever seen in a video game, and quite literally p1ssed me off. I've never been so incensed by the ending of a video game, never had my moderately-positive impression of a game turned right on its head by the last 15 minutes of play. Until now.

The worse of it? The game decides to kick sand in your face right after the ending. "OH MAN, YOU SHOULD SPEND MORE TIME IN THIS WORLD WE'VE CRAFTED AND FINISH ALL FETCHQUESTS!"

No.

I'm done.

*uninstalls*

I like it. It's a bit too over-the-top at times (the director can get a little annoying with his commentary) but overall this is quite an enjoyable action game. The B-grade sci-fi movie trope is a lot of fun, and while the jokes are juvenile at times, it wasn't enough to make me dislike the game; But do expect to groan loudly at the purile humor.

I very much enjoyed the ability to upgrade weapons and character traits, and while most of the powers were underutilized (most of the time being used as plot-drivers, ie: Need ability X to cross here), they were varied enough to give you some relief from using the same tactics over and over. It was possible to mix it up and that's fun.

The vertical component to this game coupled with the open-world-like map feels great and helps the game from wearing out its welcome too soon. Back tracking is necessary if you want to unlock everything, but a liberal spread of teleporters and the ability to teleport back to a ledge you fell off of makes this fairly painless.

The downside? The camera. You have no control over it and at times it feels like the camera is out to get you. The first problem is that it can pick strange angles to view the action, but mostly what got to me is how slow it transients when you are falling. For example, some of the jumps required strict timing, and when you leap into the air and the camera sort of pauses before adjusting -- and does so at a leisurely pace -- it would mean I'd miss something or crash into a pipe or ledge I had no idea was there. This becomes particularly frustrating when you're looking for secrets; I spent most of my time just trying to trick the camera into showing me something so I could learn if it held a secret or not.

The game also feels a little too easy, but the developers have a Hard Mode (I recommend enabling if it you're a vet of twin-stick action games like this) and a Survival Mode to offset that.

A very solid game worth about 10 hours of play, with an enjoyable tongue-and-cheek subject matter and enough hidden secrets to make you want to take your time and really get to know the world. I recommend it.

Have you ever seen a game that looked weird and you were curious about it, but when you picked it up and played it you were like Where was this game for all of my entire adult life?

That's My Summer Car in a nutshell. I never even knew I had the urge for a new genre of gaming: Drunken project car simulator roguelike. Until now.

This game is set in Finland and is loaded with lots of Finnish injokes; But let me assure you, as someone who grew up in the backwoods southern parts of USA, you can easily search-and-replace Suomi Republic flags for the Star Spangle Banner and you'd have the exact same feel.

Well, okay, we didn't have saunas, either. But all the hick craziness of assembling cars in a swarm of heat and mosquitos is still the same.

This game brings back memories of scrounging for engine parts, carefully assembling them, and then that moment of pride/panic when you turn the engine over. And it either works perfectly and you are some kind of MECHANIC GOD or more likely, things explode/fall apart and it's back to hours of rebuilding.

And if you do end up being the PATRON SAINT OF PISTONS, and you drive to the nearest town to celebrate your victory -- Only to realize you left the oil cap off and leaked out 90% of your engine oil along the way.

Or you crash and burns in the woods at 4am when over estimating your ability to correctly toe your steering.

Or die of thirst on your way to the store which is 30 miles away and you forgot to buy basic necessities since you spent every cent of your hard-earned summer job cash to buy more parts for your masterpiece.

This game is brilliant. It's not for everyone, but if you were ever a project car gearhead then look no further than My Summer Car as a way to re-create that experience with far less Lava soap scrubs.

A re-make of Robot Arena 2 with less features, more bugs, and a wishy-washy development cycle.

After their public gaffe over releasing the game as Early Access when promising a full release, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. And in the last month, they have taken the game from being a nearly-unplayable mess into something akin to working as I would expect, albeit with still less features than RA2.

And now? They've decided it's done. Full release! "We promise we'll keep working on it."

Nope, sorry. I am sick of Early Access being used this way.

The game isn't done. Don't waste your time or money.