Recent reviews by NixEmotions

crashes once per hour. save your game often!

EDIT: devs have added a warning to the store page in regards to those with AMD GPUs experiencing constant crashing. it's rather scummy to hide this below the "Read More" section of the store page, but at least they're acknowledging this and hopefully working on fixes to the issues.

that being said, i have a high end NVIDIA GPU, not AMD, and i still experience crashing at least once or more an hour, oftentimes almost exactly on the hour. there are more widespread performance issues than the store page would suggest - buyer beware!

the game plays worse than the beta, has worse netcode than the beta, has less features than the beta, and is monetized much more disgustingly than the beta. yea, i'll probably keep playing it because i hate myself

Carol from Onirism and Alice from Alice: Madness Returns had a slumber party and played Dark Souls and Devil May Cry before falling asleep to an isekai anime.

I was absolutely blown away by this game. Before going in, I definitely did not expect it to be my favourite game of the year so far and possibly even one of my favourites of all time. It's so incredibly fun and addictive to play; it's very apparent that this is a labor of love by its developer. Plushie from the Sky is a bit rough around the edges, but that perfect amount of jank just adds to the charm. I beat the entire game in one long session before immediately beginning the game again and getting a decent portion of the way through... then I realized that it was 3am and I had been playing for over five hours straight.... I'll definitely be playing more of this game tomorrow.

Crayola Scoot is a true hidden gem. The game is equal parts Splatoon and Skate/Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, with a splash of Jet Set Radio thrown in for good measure. Scoot is packed with modes/content and is a blast to play; it's also quite a challenge on the higher difficulties! I only wish it had even more content and featured not only split screen but also online multiplayer. It's an incredible shame that this game has now been delisted off of the Steam store, presumably due to its Crayola license expiring. The crayon brand's license adds nothing to the game, and more people deserve to try this cult classic. If this game sounds intriguing to you, add me on Steam and send me a message for a complementary Steam key.

the devs shadowbanned me for playing with bubbles

EDIT: According to the devs, I was not shadowbanned, but encountered a scoring bug that was new to them and required some time for them to figure out. I could no longer gain XP on the trivia leaderboards and lost a personal best score. The devs told me that they will be looking over their code to prevent this issue in the future. I can score on the leaderboards again, although I still lost several hundred thousand XP and my personal best score. This is an incredible coincidence of timing to have this happen, although coincidences do happen. I played trivia for years prior to this, (hundreds of hours and getting to #2 worldwide), and had never encountered this issue before. It then happened within a week after I was upsetting players in game who were complaining about my behavior of blowing bubbles while playing trivia. At least one of whom said they hoped I got banned for it and people complained about me in Discord and on the forums. The devs did respond to this in the next update by removing bubble blowing from trivia. I jumped to conclusions and was wrong about the complete nature of what happened. I appreciate the devs being quick to respond this issue when I used a support ticket in their Discord rather than when I posted on their forums.

Still, do I recommend Tower Unite? No, I don't, although I'd probably leave a neutral review if I could. I will continue to play Tower Unite because I am addicted and invested in the game. Tower Unite changed my life. On the game, I met my partner with whom I now live with and met countless great friends. That being said, Tower Unite is a game full of great ideas with mediocre execution and game development at a snail's pace. I think the devs have an amazing vision that they are perhaps not capable of producing. If you haven't already started playing, I don't think you should. Don't get me wrong, the game has a lot going for it, but just as much if not more going against it.

Tower Unite is riddled with half baked content, unfinished features, and loads of bugs. Some bugs eventually get fixed, but more are created in the process of fixing them, and new ones are introduced every update. The game's performance and optimization is horrific, even on powerful machines. Awhile back, I requested bug fixes for trivia, but I now regret doing so. The bugs weren't fixed, and new bugs were introduced. This issue I had with the leaderboards is just another issue that wasn't present before the "bug fix" for trivia. I hope that the game will be finished someday, but I often joke that the game will leave early access in 2073. Exploring the plaza, you will see lots of content that has said "coming soon" for years now. Even if the game eventually becomes "finished" content wise, I struggle to think it ever won't be a buggy, unoptimized mess.

Tower Unite is a great game if you love grinding and love building things. The game is packed with activities, but to progress and unlock content in them, you will be grinding an obscene amount compared to the amount of content on offer. Building your house or "condo", is awesome if you love to customize a space. It is the most fleshed out and truly unique feature that the game offers. If you want to build stuff, I can ALMOST recommend the game for this feature, although like all of Tower Unite, building is buggy at times. It's a shame that co-op building is EXTREMELY buggy to the point of being borderline pointless, which is a shame because co-op building is one of the things that appeals most to me as a concept.

Moderation on Tower Unite is very questionable. I am biased due to negative past experiences. I was permanently muted for calling myself a "t" word (rhymes with granny) despite being a transgender person and only using the term to describe myself. I understand that using such language can be harmful to others, but I received no real warning before being permanently muted in game. Before my mute, the word in question wasn't even a word that was blocked by the game's chat censoring. I would have changed my behavior if I received a real warning. The devs said I was temporarily muted for an hour twice before being permanently muted. This is the biggest issue with the game's moderation. If you are offline for the duration of a mute, the game doesn't notify you in any way that you were muted in the past. I had no way of knowing that I had received these two one hour "warning" mutes unless I was online while they were still in effect. The game could easily pop up a message when you launch the game, like "you were muted for an hour, mute has now expired" but it doesn't. Because of this, I felt like I was silenced out of the blue. I did not receive any sort of response to my mute appeal initially. After a year, I appealed again and was able to be unmuted. I believe slur reclamation is a real thing, but even if the devs don't, I think that a permanent mute for such behavior is extremely excessive. I know I'm not the first player that has been subjected to objectively unfair moderation practices, and I certainly won't be the last.

lesbians/10

We all knew that this game would have Denuvo, since that has become the unfortunate norm for every Sonic game on Steam. What we did not know, however, was that this game would require an Epic Games Store account for Epic Games Online Services to access the full features of the game. This is not disclosed anywhere on the game's store page and was never indicated before the game's release. This double dose of DRM does little to combat piracy, and rather just punishes the paying consumer. If I wanted to surrender my data to the CCP, I'd choose to shop on Temu like some double digit IQ ignoramus. At least in that case, I'd receive some free or cheap random junk in exchange, whereas in this case I'm paying full retail game price to surrender my data over for a game that should have been comparatively priced to Sonic Mania for the quality and amount of content on offer. If I wanted to be forced to use an Epic Games account to access the features of my Steam game, I'd have purchased the game on that storefront rather than on Steam. This isn't even mentioning the frankly absurd day 1 launch separated distribution of preorder DLC, deluxe edition DLC, email newsletter DLC, and region retailer exclusive DLC, the very latter of which isn't even able to be obtained at the moment if you're located in the United States. Purchasing the most expensive version of ANY game should include all currently available content for the game, especially at launch. From what I played, the game is fine, but not spectacular enough to avoid being overshadowed by all of these negative aspects surrounding its release. I love Sonic, but I hate SEGA. I'll take a pass and request a refund.

The instructions weren't clear enough. I got my ♥♥♥♥ caught in the particle accelerator.

finally, a game that lets me hold hands with Sonic.

cat game is unironically my GOTY for 2022. that is both a genuine compliment to the overall quality of this title, but also a sad commentary on the current state of the video game industry~

meow/10