Recent reviews by Negativ Nein

A work of contemporary art.

Steamworld Dig 2 is all about progression. You start the game with a pickaxe and walljumps but by the end you have a jetpack, triple grenade launcher, flaming pickaxe, and all manner of life preserving upgrades.

Movement feels good after you get a few upgrades, there are a few quirks to mining that may tick people off (you can't hit blocks while you are jumping) but taking some time to learn the game if you weren't already a fan of Steamworld Dig 1 will help. Tip: Stand on the edge of a block to hit a block that is one further away than where you can normally hit.

Backtracking to complete earlier caves isn't a pain thanks to the transit system or the constant need for more money to spend on upgrades.

You are heavily rewarded for being on the lookout for hidden passages and secrets. There are caves (puzzle rooms) towards the end of the game which will test your agility, timing, and sometimes patience, yet you always complete one feeling just a little proud.

The visual style is charming and the music is adequate. There is a large variety in visual design for the places you explore, to name a few: nuclear-irradiated underground forest, apocalypse god worshipping temple, and a very cyberpunk-inspired robot graveyard.

I highly recommend Steamworld Dig 2 and also 1 if you haven't already played it, it's considerably shorter than 2.

Written by the fine folks who brought the you the browser-based Kingdom of Loathing, West of Loathing is a fairly humorous take on american western culture, featuring all manners of silliness, such as demon cows, devil clowns, necromancers, snakes of all flavors, an apocalyptic entity named Roberto, a bureaucratic fetch quest, manifest destiny, Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Bill, a Blood and Breakfast, and that's not even a fraction of it.

It's $11 and it'll get more than a few laughs out of you if you take the time to read.

This game has a solid concept, interesting progression of events until the last 1/4th or so, and a combination of audio and visuals that really draw you in for a while. However, the game throws the whole experience away by giving an ending which was alluded to in earlier dialogue, but frustrates you and sours the experience as a whole. Buy it in a humble bundle.

Plays generally like ♥♥♥♥ in the less than half an hour I played, glad I got it in a bundle.

I see myself catching on level geometry like ramps all the time.
Controls are frustrating. The camera is way too close and aiming is a pain.
Classes don't seem very balanced
Looks like a game from 2004. Space Marine did a lot better job of capturing the Warhammer style.

I'd write more but this game isn't worth my time.

If you like other Souls games, it's fairly likely you will enjoy this, but with a few caveats.

To start, I want to get Soul Memory right out of the way. It was a bad decision made out of From's distaste for SL1 players ganking newbies. I get why they did it, but they didn't think about it hard enough. If you gain any amount of souls in a way that isn't you picking up souls you lost, it adds to this number which determines who you get matched up with in PvP. If you suck a lot and lose souls due to a death before recovering, that amount of souls still counts towards your SM, which is ridiculous. I think it should have counted souls you spent in any way, but hindsight is 20/20. From fixed this in DS3 via matchmaking based on your soul level and highest upgraded weapon, but this mistake is still burned in everyone's memory. Overall, it will not ruin your experience of the game because there are people willing to PvP at any SM tier.

Now, roll mechanics are DRASTICALLY different from the other games due to the addition of the Adaptability/Agility stats. If you do not take care to use either items or Adaptability to get your Agility to around 110, rolls you make will have so few iframes they will throw off your entire game. Another complaint people have about SotFS is the addition or change of enemy locations. As someone who never played base DS2, the change of locations wasn't a big deal and the addition of enemies isn't overwhelming except for the first time you enter Iron Keep (which can be overcome easily if you purchase poison arrows from Gavlan). The last caveat is that this Souls game probably has the most obtuse mechanics of all Souls (including Bloodborne and Demon's Souls). There's adaptability as I mentioned, lighting certain torches in areas will cause enemy invaders to spawn, a lot of armor pieces have unique abilities which will potentially leave you using particularly unfashionable sets just to have ideal abilities (I like this quirk personally), power stance is a special kind of dual wielding which gives you new attacks that works when you hold the swap weapon button and are using 2 compatible weapons and have 1.5x the max required stats of the equipped weapons, and your level of Sin has an effect on how much you can hollow.

What I'm trying to say by listing all of the weird ♥♥♥♥ this game has, is that you might be able to get through the game without consulting a wiki, but you will find yourself confused and frustrated by a things here and there. If you can figure out the game on your own, you will feel good about yourself, but I sincerely doubt most people who play the game, let alone complete it, fully understand the reasons parts of the game happen the way they do. If you are adamantly against playing SotFS without consulting a a wiki for the answers of minor questions like "why do my hands move like this when I have these two weapons equipped" (power stance), "do I really need to use all of my fragrant branches on all of these lion statues?", or "why is rolling doing absolutely nothing?" (adabtability), then I think this isn't the game for you. I would argue there is more challenge in getting through the puzzles devs lay out for you in enemy placement than simply discovering what the answers for the aforementioned questions are. If you are happy to look at a wiki for weird ♥♥♥♥ you can't figure out, SotFS has a lot to offer.

The bosses are generally varied with the singular problem of having a few too many humanoid enemies. You will feel satisfied with exploring from Majula in practically any direction, even if at first glance a given path may seem impossible. Locations each have their own theme that stays interesting while you're there, but later connections between locations in a given path to a primal bonfire or endgame area will seem disjointed in a way Dark Souls 1 never did. For example, after beating the last boss in Earthen Peak at the top of a tower, you take an elevator up which brings you to a castle full of lava, Iron Keep. Regardless of this, the game is enjoyable. Having played every game in the series, I will say SotFS has the best PvP of them all. Poise is relevant unlike in DS3 but not overwhelmingly important as in DS1, and there's a large amount of variety in weapon and build viability. Magic, hexes, and miracles are each relevant in PvP, but miracles are less so because they were overpowered when DS2 released and nerfed into the ground thereafter. Covenants are a bit more interesting than in DS1 or 3, via covenants like the Bell Keepers, Rat Kings, and Pilgrims of Dark which each are variations on the concept of the Gravelords from DS1. Company of Champions, another unique covenant, is a self imposed hard mode for the game with a reward that is amusing for PvP or an even harder mode for PvE.

I'm starting to come to a loss of things to say at this point, but I want to stress that this game is flawed in ways other Souls games aren't, but that's because it tried things other Souls games didn't. Some changes are for the better, some are forgettable, and some make the game decidedly worse for including them. If you can see past the few (albeit critical) drawbacks, there is a gem of a game here.

Let me begin this review by saying I enjoyed my time with this game, but ultimately am conflicted about recommending it. This game is like candy, and that may sell it for you or not. It has a lot of visual flair, interesting gameplay, and decent sound design. What makes it like candy is that it's short (though 7.5 hours to complete a $20 game 100% is good bang for your buck, if that matters to you) and is entirely lacking in substance beyond its general gameplay concept and gorgeous visuals (which I have found to be the case with other Double Fine games of late, maybe their writing team doesn't know they aren't good).

The story tries to allude to ideas regarding what it is to be human in a post-corporeal world, but the few audio logs you find, what Earl and Methuselah say, and the world at large don't tell a complete story in my eyes. Even though it's only 7 hours long, you will begin to tire of repeated lines from the security doors (some of which were entertaining the first dozen times) and if you re-explore old areas after completing the game, you will get tired of the new lines added in after the first time you hear them.

The gameplay is compelling as you start out, with the main exception being aiming. When using a controller, it's a complete pain in the ass to aim reliably without getting killed pretty quickly in the process. If you play this anything like I did, you will end up avoiding combat and instead of shooting, rip heads off bodies. It's fairly fun to fly around, though, and see the sights. The general concept of "rip heads off, pick best color for security clearance, and avoid lasers" does not overstay its welcome. The best part of the game in terms of making you think spatially and about what you need to do to get somewhere is the Power Dome. The areas following it are a little bit more combat oriented and feature only small parts wherein you need to think. The puzzles about hitting markers nearly simultaneously are fun and brief, but I wish there were more of them.

Headlander is full of many gorgeous sights to see, and the visual effects they layer on top of well executed 2.5D make it all the better. 99% of the game is inside space station type areas, but it stays fresh in my eyes throughout the whole game. You will love shooting fractal laser beams, watching them bounce around everywhere, even if those lasers don't accomplish much. The single tiiiiiny negative I can give about visuals is overwhelming chromatic abberation after a certain point in the game where an area is slow motion for a good while. I think it might have been a bug, but my game went back to normal speed but still had a kind of glow around everything from that point on. Sound-wise, the game has an enjoyable soundtrack that I would probably never listen to outside of playing the game and excellent sound effects, with no faults I can remember, writing this just after finishing it. Having said the lasers look beautiful, I also think they sound beautiful.

If this game didn't look as good as it did, I wouldn't have purchased it, and if it didn't keep me interested as long as it did, I would have returned it. It's not great, it's just good. I recommend it only on two conditions: you like eye candy or it's on sale for less than $10.

Do you like a cyberpunk setting? Do you like yuri? Do you like reading a lot? If the answer to all 3 questions is yes, this is the game for you.

Offers some good insight into both the author's mind and the feelings the player can insert into games sometimes. That said, it's not worth paying for, at least not at full price. Get it on sale if you really want to play it or don't get it at all and just watch a playthrough, you're not missing anything.