Recent reviews by NecroVMX

Great game marred by the publisher.

This is actually a really great game, and I enjoyed i from the beginning to the end. About the end, I was streaming on twitch, and suddenly, the chat told me the screen was black. Apparently the entire ending is blocked from capture. This is an invasive and unnecessary feature, and stifles creation of content.

Yikes

I had this wishlisted based purely on aesthetics, as I love a good throwback rpg but this is TERRIBLE.

It has mobile game mechanics such as enemies dropping treasure chests that you need to wait to open or spend one of 4 different types of ingame currency to open. It promises a lot of characters but most of them do nothing except contribute small amounts of damage in battle. The graphics are attractive at a standstill but moving around causes shimmering and other BS. The menus are byzantine and impossible to navigate as they have touch screen in mind but the game doesn't support touchscreen or mouse controls.

The game assaults you with tons of information about the various system and it's a confusing mess almost immediately, though you can skip most tutorials and figure things out on your own, some things are explained and just don't work as intended, for example you're told to use an option in your menu to warp to the beginning of a dungeon, but this option doesn't seem to actually exist

The story is usual four fiends/four crystals type of things, which wouldn't be AWFUL for a throwback rpg but it's marred by a creepy brother/sister incest subplot that the game starts almost immediately that isn't at ALL subtle.

I played this for a few hours on a stream to see what it's like, but I was so thoroughly creeped out and disappointed I just uninstalled it.

So buy this game if you're a fan of mobile mechanics being translated poorly to a steam game, or if you enjoy shimmering graphics as you walk around, or if you just enjoy brothers and sisters who are ~into~ each other.

Don't buy it if you're normal, however.

This is the best Shmup I've played in a long time.

ZeroRanger is a weird mishmash of bullet hell, magical girl anime weirdness, dream-imagery and buddhism. You choose a ship and select weapons you unlock along the way, characters talk about random events, you fight expies of ships from r-type and gradius, at one point the game turns into Undertale, it fake-crashes and loads a completely different game, your save gets deleted, and you drown in an avalanche of citrus puns.

It's glorious.

Catherine was an interesting curiosity on XBox 360/PS3 years ago, but now it's a strange time capsule that proves to be better than I remembered it being.

I remember having fun with the game for the most part but being put off by the characters at times, how could anybody be this oblivious? Is this what Atlus thinks people are like?

In 2019, i nod my head sagely. This game predicted so much of the toxic internet culture, that it's almost painful to play because of how very real these characters come off...what were once horrifying pastiches of what men in their 20s would be like if they lacked any self-awareness is now you know, accurate.

The gameplay wavers between simply walking around and talking to characters and a frantic block climbing game that can best be described as an aggressive puzzle game that does exactly what it needs to do, makes you feel stupid until you solve it, then you feel like a genius. The story is wild and changes at certain points based on your decisions and answers, and there's plenty of endings.

Now, some of this has become controversial, especially in light of the coming remake which seems to aggravate the already problematic areas, but instead of throwing away the baby with the bathwater, i recommend giving Catherine a legit shot, as it's a fun game that is insanely prescient of the weird incel culture that pervades gamers now, and has a lot to say about when it's time to just grow the hell up already. Some characters are done dirty by the end, but the fact that we care about them at all proves how good Atlus was at creating them.

It's worth the asking price.

Breath of Death VII brings you to the bad old days when the only viable platform for commercially selling indie titles to a broad market was Xbox Live Arcade Indie Gamestore, and you had to wade through the crappy UI and hostile sorting to find something decent.

Breath of Death VII is a very short game that doesn't take itself seriously, with a nonsensical plot, janky mechanics and it's over just when it's getting good, but what makes it work is the amusing dialogue and flavor text that parodies many familiar games of the past.

This is a curiosity, but considering it's a dollar (and the game even calls itself out for that being overpriced near the end), it's worth a look to have some fun and remember the days we had to scour for gems in a pile of rubbish.

An excellent console game gets a mostly solid port, that's what you really need to know.

The game plays pretty much identical to it's console versions, which were already very impressive. Though it's a bit awkward to go back to this one after playing the sequels with all of their QoL enhancements, it's still a solid narrative, good graphics, fun gameplay and you get to feel like batman.

The port is mostly good, though I did have issues with a persistent crash that forced me to reinstall once. The game plays very smooth and you get the usual PC options. Worth picking up if you want to play it on PC or never experienced it.

So, after 14+ years of development, Duke Nukem 3D's sequel finally gets released to a universal "wow, we waited 14 years for that?" The common complaint is that this is a game that would have done great back in 2006, but missed that mark by several years. Looking at it objectively, maybe that's true, but only because 2006 was a pretty bad year for FPS games.

I was told mixed things ranging from "it's awful" to "it's an underrated gem" to "it's flawed but fun" The latter was the most common and made me think that I might enjoy this, I still play a lot of older shooters, DNF being dated is literally no problem for me.

But then I was shocked at how dire it actually is.

The visuals are often blurry and many levels are too dark to really see what the hell is going on. Duke has night vision that you can activate at any time and is unlimited, but a lot of areas are too bright for night vision, and too dark to actually see. I ran through the whole campaign without getting a jetpack, even though the control options menu mentions one. Most weapons are absolutely useless, meaning that you'll be going through this with the shotgun, ripper and pipe bombs for hte most part, and then using RPGs on the bosses. The game is a linear slog through boring levels that don't offer much in the way of exploration (compared to a lot of the open ended levels of Duke Nukem 3D) and the same 3 or 4 basic types of enemies swarm you at pre-determined action-setpieces.

The REAL issue though is how often you're not actually playing Duke Nukem. A lot of times you're playing a bad version of Half Life 2, trying to solve physics puzzles. Sometimes you're in a racing game, and sometimes you're shrunk down jumping across hamburger patties (yes, really). Sometimes, you're shrunk down AND driving a car, because why not?

The interface is godawful, even if it had been released in 2006, which it wasn't, and most mechanics are fairly useless. The game is very easy, but you'll die in cheap ways a lot due to not being able to see what's going on, or just randomly at some parts. I'm told the DLC is better than the actual game, but I think i'd rather uninstall it than continue playing.

Lastly, the humor is just not my cup of tea anymore. Duke Nukem was funny to me when Duke3D came out and I was a teenager. Now, it's just very cringe-worthy, and even over a decade after his last big game, he still repeats the same 15 or so lines over and over again.

There are a few exciting parts, such as the highway battle that cumulates in a second battlelord boss battle, where he stomps around and kicks the cars that you need to use as cover, forcing you to adapt. The last level escaping a dam that is flooding and collapsing is fairly exciting and the last boss is well structured, even if it is super easy (the one time I died was friendly fire from the AI allies attacking from helicopters). The ending is almost non-existant, teasing at a sequel that likely won't happen.

If you want to see for yourself how bad it is, the game is often on sale for very cheap (I got it for 5 bucks) but considering how many great games you can get at the same price during sales, you're best left looking elsewhere.

Dungeons of Dredmor is a game with a lot of personality that stays fun for a long time.

Essentialy, this is a roguelike that relies heavily on referential humor and old-school charm,, while giving you great music and nice graphics. At it's core, it's a fairly deep game with lots of interesting mechanics, none of which you absolutely HAVE to use, and character loadouts with enough variety to make almost any playstyle viable with enough skill. There's also sliding scales of difficulty and complexity (You can make the floors of the dungeon smaller, while XP gains for a faster, more streamlined experience), and DLC expansion that actually add quite a lot.

The only negatives really are glitches (there's an achievement for crashing the game) and the ones that are inherant to roguelikes, such as it being absolutely unforgiving. Despite each new game starting from scratch (you can never unlock things to make your character stronger from the get-go), you may have quite an easy time as you slice, crush and kick your way through the first few levels, or you may die a few steps from the starting point because an above-average strength monster appeared there. The game's layout for inventory and menus can be a bit unweildly, though you can move things around where you want them to be and resize most windows.

Also, good luck on getting all the acheivements, some of them are quite hard to get simplly because so many of them involve your character dying in weird ways (for example, if you don't have a lockpick, you can kick down a locked door, but there's a chance instead of kicking it down, you'll hurt your foot, takiing minor damage, like 1 or 2hp. There's an acheivement for dying to this, which is pretty impossible to get, since you regenerate health naturally as you move, so you have to position yourself in front of a door while being at low enough health that hurting your foot will kill you, and then kick it, hoping the door doesn't just open. Then, if you fail you have to get to another locked door while regenerating health, meaning you'll have to hurt yourself, but it'll be hard to not die doing that.) There's also achievements that have been impossible to get due to changes in the game, such as filling out a skill tree that has been removed from the game. So, if those sorts of things bother you, buy with caution. Otherwise, great game.

Great, but imperfect.

To be honest, I would have been happy with basically porting the NES game with a graphical makeover, but there are a few things here to make the game more modern, but not TOO modern. You still have lives, still can get a game over, and the basic mechanics are all the same, so it's essentially the same game, but you have an option to make the pogo bouncing a bit easier (Hold the button instead of having to also hold down), though you can disable this for a more old school feel. Some areas are changed up and there are more hidden items to find that will make the game a bit easier, and there are 2 new stages. There's also an in-game map.

Where the game really excells is reuniting the old voice cast and fleshing out the plot, essentially giving us an new episode of the cartoon, and making the formerly all-too-simple boss battles harder and more interesting. The remixed music is nice, the graphics are very good and it's a great nostalgia trip.

That being said, the game has a lot of bugs, some of which have been unfixed since it's release, and sometimes hitboxes seem off, or you oddly can't jump when standing next to something. Some of the machanics ported over from the NES game (like how Scrooge kind of "sticks" a landing after a jump and there's a few frames before he can jump again) should probably have been polished or changed, and for people unintersted in the cutscenes (or perhaps replaying the game) there should have been an option to play without them (though you can skip them.)

Cuphead is everything I wanted, and never knew I did.

As a fan of hard-as-nails sidescrollers, old-as-hell cartoons and jazz, this game was right up my alley. What makes it great is the exressiveness of the characters, the inherant ridiculousness of the world that could only exist in a cartoon, and the absolutely crazy-difficult gameplay.

This is a punishing game that never stops being fun, it's addictive and I found myself willing to put up with a LOT of it's abuse to continue playing. My only complaint would be the auto-scrolling bosses, but that's a personal gripe against auto-scrolling in general.

The graphics, music, gameplay and fun factor are all extremely high, and I look forward to next year's DLC. Would be my pick for best game of 2017 if not for Hollow Knight.