Recent reviews by mr_daemon

A delightful game that flew under my radar entirely. The best way I've heard it described is that it's the videogame version of these car roads in a town carpet you might remember from your childhood.

It's a little bit of spintires/mudrunners/snowrunner, a little bit simcade racing, a little bit Euro Truck simulator, all in an open world. Basically, if it has wheels, you can drive it and do things with it.

The town's economy is all dynamic and interlinked, too. For instance the pizza shop you can take pizza deliveries from will not produce a lot of them unless someone also delivers meat boxes from the meat factory to it. And the meat factory requires containers and other things.

It can be multiplayer, and all the progress is client side and will follow you, so that is nice.

It's also apparently more or less a solo dev effort, which is incredible for the amount of polish this exhibits.

It's really difficult to hype this game up, but everyone I've goaded into trying this game to so far started from "This seems kind of dumb", only to end up sinking 25+ hours in it, almost straight.

It's very chill, entertaining, and open ended. Would deeply recommend if you like driving things.

An incredibly polished and competent game. Great writing, great beats, great everything.

Even if you feel like you know where it is going, you don't. Would recommend a blind playthrough, absolutely.

The most cozy and comfortable game I have played in a while.

I joined a lobby at random, met wonderful people, we hung out and fished, someone played an in-game instrument.

Big 90s/early 00s internet chatroom energy, and I am here for it.

The game has way more depth than you'd expect also, upgrades feel rewarding, there's a crapton of fish, bait and cosmetics to unlock, as well as secondary minigames and objectives.

A very relaxing yet social time, which for a deeply introverted person like me, is kind of a first.

I wish reviews could have "Yes, but" as an option, as there are caveats.

If you want an easy way to play doom, and gain access to a bunch of really good community maps, this is a supremely convenient way of doing it.

The port has MBF21 support (the engine port standard most big megawads target), and the store makes playing community stuff trivial. Cross platform multiplayer is also very much welcome. It's not gzdoom however, so you won't be able to play anything relying on zscript or advanced gzdoom features. Yes that includes Brutal Doom, which people really want to play always somehow.

As a bonus, you can use a version of the soundtrack by Andrew Hulshult, legendary music man behind everything metal for everything indie and not, who started by making doom metal covers as loadable mods for gzdoom, among other things.

That is also great.

The port itself is fairly good, it performs well, but lacks a bunch of QoL options most other source ports provide, namely:

1) no mouselook (even though it's not strictly needed)
2) movement feels somewhat different but I can't quite put my finger on how. Not a dealbraker
3) You cannot scale or reduce the HUD, which looks goofy at 21:9 aspect ratios
4) In contrast to the seemingly important adherence to classic gameplay elsewhere, it forces a crosshair on you that you can only disable by setting its transparency to 100%, which is weird for a game that has vertical aim assist and centered weapons.

This may seem like nitpicking, which to a point it is, but meanwhile community source ports of Doom have gotten 30 years to get really good, so the bar is quite high. Whether or not this matters to you is ultimately a personal choice, and there is nothing wrong this playing this as is, and you will have a grand old time.

In general though, if you want to play some doom, and coop some megawads with the boys(gender neutral) this is absolutely a good buy. And also nothing prevents you from running the IWADs this package has in gzdoom, so it's not like you need to choose.

Also the MachineGames episode included exclusively in this is absolutely worth the price of admission, and you should play it.

I have been putting off writing a review for this game for a while now. Not because I'm on the fence or anything, this is in fact easily my game of the year, and after beating it once, I subbed to their patreon. Then I beat it again on a higher difficulty, immediately, and had an absolute blast.

It just feels daunting to try to distill exactly what resonates with me so much when playing this game, so that you might extract an idea of whether or not it could also gel with you. There is so much.

I could go on with the insane, bordering on unecessary amount of love and care that has been put in every single detail in the game, down to the way every object can be shot, interacted with, or otherwise generates meaningful visual feedback.

I could wax lyrical about how good it looks, how it's difficult to believe they've done such absolute black magic to the GZDoom engine to achieve all of this, but it feels like everyone has said this already. It doesn't look like doom, it doesn't feel like doom, not even a little bit.

Instead I'm going to talk about the combat, which is, after all, the meat and potatoes of the game, and how absolutely out of this world it is. Simply calling it "very competent" feels like it does it a disservice. It's not that it's good, it's in the nuances of how exactly it is good that my urge to absolutely shill the hell out of this game was born.

Ultimately, it scratches a deep seated itch in my brain that hadn't been touched since stuff like Blood (1997). Not that it plays anything like it specifically, but it's in the way movement, using learned knowledge of enemies and their behaviors, using the environment for cover and damage and staying mobile comes together in a joyous celebration of very purple video game violence.

Each action you take rewards you with cool things to feel and look at. Stuff flies around, you know someone is shooting at you from across the room, glass shatters, shredded stacks of paper dance in the air, the sound of footsteps echoes revealing the position of enemies, you hear bullets hitting the wall behind you as chunks of it fly off.

It's a flurry of immediate improvisation and response to events unfolding around you. The enemies call out what they're doing, you can hear them flanking you. You can do a vast number of things using your knowledge to turn the tide, and it is so, so satisfying when it all comes together and you stand alone in suddenly deafening quiet, lording over the huge mess you've made. You did it, you outsmarted and outgunned everyone. Enjoy the endorphins.

Fights never play out the same exactly. Sometimes it doesn't go your way. You goof up, make a bad decision, get shot in the face and everything goes south at alarming speeds. But as I stare at the game over screen, all I can think is "Oh amazing, I get to do that cool fight again only this time, I can see the future!".

And boy it is shockingly hard. I would recommend being very humble when selecting a difficulty level. Set the weird pride aside because the higher modes absolutely assume you've learned every detail and interaction of the complex dance of these firefights, that you know how very situational every weapon is. If you go for Captain immediately, you're unlikely to be able to learn all this before you get shot, and your experience will differ strongly from what I described above.

Every weapon is so finely tuned to its best usages, the "worst" one is the sniper simply because it's the most situational and slightly dull, and yet it's still good. Not a single weapon is ever made redudant. And they have a bunch of upgrades you can secret hunt for that modify their behavior to make them fit your playstyle even more.

It's absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ perfect.

I realize I've been essentially just gushing for a while now and that's probably enough, but essentially, all of this takes places in a nice story driven campaign with large interconnected maps à la half-life.

Some people feel the early levels are difficult to navigate, and yeah, the starting hospital sure can be. Once you pick up on the design language and visual clues the game has to hint at you that "hey, it's this way", however, you get much better at it and it eases up.

The subsequent levels are way easier to wrap your head around too. There's also a very nice automap with a waypoint system to mitigate this. It absolutely eases up as you progress.

If any of what I described so far made you think "Oh yeah I know exactly the feeling you mean, and I want that, a lot", you're likely to enjoy this game, provided you understand you need a second to acclimatize and learn how it fits together, like any hard old school fps. And you definitely should get it.

--
As an update, some time later -- I forgot to mention two things:
- The soundtrack slaps
- The updates are ambitious and massive, and I am constantly excited for an excuse to replay this again whenever that occurs, even though I already beat it a few times. That's the hallmark of a good game, honestly.

A wild, thrilling, adrenaline fueled ride.

I had seen a bunch of coverage of this game in its earliest stages and thought "Eh, the aesthetics slap, but I don't know if that whole constantly-refuel-10-seconds-of-life thing is for me"

And then I noticed they had a demo. I did the whole thing in one sitting and immediately bought the game.
Once you get the flow of it (which it is very gentle at introducing), it is basically dopamine reward fueled machine of swift dancing and rythm, and I am here for it.

It's fairly short but very replayable given the high variation in builds and difficulty you can roll for. Tuning a game so that it's challenging, but not so ball busting hard that you go URGH and uninstall it on failure is a delicate balance, and I think they've mostly succeeded here.

The aesthetics are on point, beautiful art, banging music. It has a Big PC Box Unboxing Experience option in the main menu that is full of fuzzy warm feelings.

The Voice Acting is also absolutely on point for circa 1996 Anime OVA English Dub, it's spot on. Some may find the Streamer lady grating, in which case you can mute her immediately from the same screen where she shows up, but I personally love the touch.

Man, what an exciting ride. The story mode is fairly short on normal difficulty, it took me about 2.5 hours to make it to the end in a few sittings and retries, but I don't feel like the game is over and can be shelved yet. I just want to do it again.

Basically, give the demo a go, if you have a good time, you're gonna love the full thing.

I had been waiting for this ever since watching a single trailer some time ago. I thought "This looks like someone who played Jalopy thought that game should have taken place in The Zone instead of in eastern europe and I'm here for it".

And I got _exactly_ what I wanted, ultimately. It's a great time if you enjoy exploration, weird anomalies, and the loop of preparing for trips, keeping your craptastic car up with duct tape and whatever you find, and getting further and further out every time.

I would stress two things:
1) it's a roguelite, with everything that entails. That said I personally did not die die once, but there were very close calls.
2) The early "starved packrat rummaging for scraps in every container" gameplay loop quiets down as you progress, as you start getting the feel of what you need, and where to find it.

I personally generally enjoy the "exploring hostile place while rummaging around for stuff" mechanics, so this was a great time for me.

if you like this, weird places and otherworldly anomalies, maintaining cars, road trips, and good storytelling, you will enjoy this.

The storyline is pretty good, characters are endearing, and more fleshed out than you'd expect. Well written, even.

The ending was somewhat abrupt, but ultimately did not leave me hanging. I wish there would have been more to it, but it doesn't marr the experience.

Basically it is what it says on the tin, and if that speaks to you in any meaningful way, you are likely to enjoy this.

It's really good. The achivements completion rates tell me most people who own this are sleeping on it, and they shouldn't.

The compressed nature of it makes it much more in line with a more traditional expansion for say, Duke3D or Shadow Warrior, and that is a specific vibe I deeply enjoyed. Great variety in levels and scenery.

The vehicle sections have been said to overstay their welcome but personally I gelled with it and thought it was just enough to be fun, since it's interesected by sections in which you are meant to get off and do stuff. It's more like the highway bits from Half-Life 2 than "a vehicle section" outright.

It feels good, looks good, has banging music, the very Build Engine Game environmental humor and detail is present through and through. Maps are, as usual, freakishly detailed while not being confusing to read, which was an infrequent, but still present issue in the base game.

In true old school expansion fashion, you get a new weapon, a handful of ammo types that are actually interesting, and enemy variants. It's a fun romp from start to finish, with the exception of one specific section involving the basement of a church that was somewhat tedious. It also ends VERY abruptly, but neither of these things mar the experience much.

It's fairly short, in all, but the maps are large and sprawling, yet varied and interesting, so it makes for a good compact adventure.

Would deeply recommend if your heart has a bit of a Build Engine Game shaped hole in it currently, and you crave that specific vibe and feel, because this definitely delivers it, and perhaps in a more digestible or accessible fashion than even the base game does.

What a wild time. Play illegal poker hands in this roguelite and try to slant your deck towards what synergizes best with the passive jokers and multipliers you find.

It has incredible depth, so many synergies and interactions, and yet it feels balanced.

Every time your run feels like it's kind of meh, something happens, you find a hot new strategy and it gets super interesting again.

I was "just gonna try it" and then 3 hours passed. It's the kind of dangerous game where you think "ok, one last run and then I go to bed."

The UI is brilliant too, super polished, and satifying. Those cards sure have the wiggle and shiny shaders.

I picked this game up on a complete whim when 1.0 launched, curiosity was piqued by "City builder? Roguelite? What is this?"

It's great. It has no combat, just events, that are either negative or positive, depending on context and your circumstances. It's both very chill and also challenging in terms of resource management, you need to adapt, improvise, overcome etc.

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY: I usually lose interest in city builders and games like this when my stuff reaches a size and scale where it gets boggled into bureaucratic tedium, and I see everything i've done wrong and should have done different, and just want to start over, but somehow don't feel like it anymore because I've spent so much energy in the late stages.

Here: the game just ends before you get to that point, and you move on a new exciting set of challenges once the city is self sufficient. You return to your citadel, unlock new things and mechanics, get rewards, and do it again, further down the line of outposts you've built, in an effort to reach some objective.

Eventually a big event resets the map and you do it again, better, more prepared, and more boldly.

On paper you'd think it gets old, but it really doesn't: each city has a TON of parameters, including biomes, starting people, equipment, and RNG'd situation once you get there. So each playthrough feels completely different. Every time you think you've figured out the winning formula, it throws something at you that makes you reconsider all your plans.

I can see myself coming back to this for a long period of time.
Deeply recommend, this is absolutely a fresh take on the genre.