Recent reviews by azmo

Actually unplayable, and not just in the histrionic gamer way. So far three runs ended by teleporter spawning inside of a wall or map geometry making it impossible to proceed. Definitely wait on this DLC until they finish making it

It's just okay. It's not great, but it's better than bad. It's not Hades with guns or Doom Eternal with roguelike elements. I think it's worth it for $15.

The runs are essentially identical, with the exact same rooms, bosses, enemy groups, and progression. Some of the room orders may be shuffled but you will always see the same rooms every run, there is very little variety. The starting class you choose will be your primary way of making your runs feel different. Implants (perks) are the game's most common way of offering you ways to change your "build" in runs, but their effects are so negligible it's insulting when approximately 70% of the perks boil down to "10% more damage from X weapon when you do [specific thing]". A roughly 10% conditional buff for 3 seconds reeks of a design philosophy of a bean counter worried that players will have too much fun rather than too much balance. Sometimes you get an interesting implant or level one up to the point you can tell, but for the most part you'd feel a greater difference if you just rolled a dice and punched yourself in the head on a 1.

The game clearly draws its FPS gameplay loop from Doom Eternal, with a double-jump, recharging dashes, enemy spawn arenas, etc. Like Doom Eternal, it also requires you to perform specific actions on enemies (to "mark" them) and then kill them for resources like armor and ammunition. Unsurprisingly, this means that Deadlink falls into all the same pitfalls as Doom Eternal, namely that you will run out of resources and have to look around for something squishy to glory mark kill in order for the game to graciously provide you with two more bullets. Likewise, boss fights are marred by the same issues, as fodder enemies must continually spawn in order to provide you with resources to actually play the game by fighting the boss. I would argue it's clumsy design and distracting from the boss fights but the bosses aren't good, at least for this type of game. They all run contrary to the arena fights you will be doing for the other 90% of the game, so your run could be great for the normal arenas but come to a grinding halt in a boss fight where it will take you upwards of fifteen minutes to deal enough damage to kill the boss. You fight the same four bosses every run, and the first one is boring and tanky and discourages risk-reward close-combat like you've been trained to perform. The second has a large shield and is most dangerous up close and generally devolves into just circle strafing while peppering him from a distance -- boring. The third is a miniboss pillar from Deep Rock Galactic and it's just awful. There's little to say other than you will just be navigating a terrible arena while watching the health bar chip down while the fight emits the most obnoxious screeching noises, voices, and flying drones you can imagine. The final boss either falls apart in a few seconds or takes no damage, it's a tossup on your build.

The music is immediately forgettable and the characters are not poorly written but wholly uninteresting, you'll be skipping nearly every conversation they attempt to have with you because everything they say will be trite or eye-rolling snarky.

It may sound like I'm being overly negative but it remains to be said that in general the game loop is fairly entertaining at lower-middling difficulty. The neuromancy difficulty is overtuned, you don't do any damage and you'll have the "NO AMMO" popup and low armor SFX blaring on your screen and speakers the whole time. I recommend not playing that, it's not worth it. All in all I think this game is good. It's probably exactly $15 dollars good. Any more and I feel like you'd regret it.

This game is a masterclass in proving that you can trick people into thinking a game is good just because it's got that "charming indie style". It seems to take the worst bits from fromsofts' games, Fez, Hob, Hyper Light Drifter, Bastion, etc. and combine them all into one mishmash of the most generically indie of all indie games you can imagine. It's like scientists worked in a lab to distill the bullet points that makes Fangamer shoppers drool and Twitter reviewers tirelessly defend. Oh my god, it's got SOULS COMBAT with a DODGE ROLL and PARRY and a STAMINA SYSTEM with ESTUS and you DROP YOUR CURRENCY when you die???? SIGN ME UP!!!!!!! No way, the world is some overgrown ancient stone tech-bio hybrid? I've NEVER SEEN THAT BEFORE! A game where you don't progress in a straight line the entire way through? Oh, that's a METROIDVANIA! I LOVE THOSE! You get to stand on buttons? No, not just that, you have to stand on two buttons but in a specific order? YOU MEAN A PUZZLE?

Also, if you don't have time to play the entire game through in a week you're gonna have to google stuff because the main conceit of the game is that there are mechanics you learn about only by collecting the manual to the game itself while playing. God forbid you go somewhere and forget something because you're not gonna be able to remember it or piece it together from one funny illustration in the game manual you picked up a month ago.

Anyway this game is charming but that's all it is. The combat is mind-bogglingly boring and you can easily beat anything by button mashing, the bosses suck and are far too easy to cheese, you're often rewarded for exploring with a single one-time consumable that might deal a little bit of damage to a common enemy. For anything you want from this game, there are other obvious inspirations to it that do it way better and for less money. If this game were a person, it would be insufferable, because it would be ham-fistedly aping whatever circle it's standing in in an attempt to fit in. It's all so exhausting.

There are few games I've played in my life with as much soul as Pizza Tower. It begins as if it's an homage to the Wario Land series, particularly Wario Land 4, but quickly develops its own style, substance, and feel within minutes of playing. It becomes a frenetic, cocaineish haze of dashing around in a comical 90s cartoon MS paint ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ world. The mechanics are rock-solid, the platforming is fantastic, and every bite, punch, and smack is juicy. It's unbelievably refreshing to see a developer care so much about the experience of a game, I found myself actually laughing out loud throughout it at many points. There are so many bizarre things in this game, even many of the mechanics themselves, but nearly everything seems to be put in with the reason "because it's fun". It doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense, it doesn't matter if there's no lootboxes or open-world survival crafting BS, it doesn't matter if fifty writers made the most touching hamfisted triple-A bait story you've ever seen, none of that matters. All that matters with a game is that it's fun, and Pizza Tower delivers on every front.

Tour De Pizza understands what videogames are about more than any talking head you have ever seen on any game awards show. Also shoutouts to /adgd/

It's an okay platformer roguelite. It suffers from being blatantly unfinished and full of bugs and design flaws. Hitboxes are atrocious, with enemy animations not lining up with their attack or movement state, i.e. an enemy will damage you the frame it starts a bite attack, with the actual bite animation being a full second later. Enemy spawns appear to be mostly random, meaning that they can spawn on you and create undodgeable attack patterns very quickly. It is entirely unclear if an enemy will deal contact damage, sometimes they have spikes (obvious) sometimes they just look like balls and still contact damage you anyway, despite the game telling you to your face that most enemies don't deal contact damage. Runs are samey, there's five hundred items that barely do anything, and many that will completely screw you over and encourage you to quit your game and restart rather than delay the inevitable death by self-damage. The music is uninspired and forgettable, and the art itself is probably the only saving grace. That being said, I have yet to play a single run in which I did not see an art-related bug, such as texture seams not lining up properly or sprites getting ordered wrong and showing up behind things they shouldn't.

Despite all these flaws, the game also manages to be completely devoid of challenge. I pumped up the difficulty to max and won my first run handily, and all runs afterwards, save for the ones that were ruined by a "screw the player" item (why would you even put these in the game?) or boss attacks with unclear telegraphs or damage sources, like making the floor damage you without any animation to indicate such. This is because, while many of the guns are jokes and do nothing, there are enough guns that erase enemies so quickly that there is no need to dodge anymore. You simply damage enemies too quickly and any damage you take is quickly mitigated by the pickup balancing being out the window. I have ended all my runs with more consumables / hearts / shields than it was possible to spend in the run, it really needs some resource rebalancing.

There's definitely some real replayability somewhere deep in the game loop, but the developers haven't found it and I think it's clear the game needs at least another year in the oven.

It's a fairly solid roguelike but it definitely has mobile game balance. Compared to classic roguelikes like NetHack and DCSS which I have a lot more experience with, making progress in this game is unfortunately much more of a coinflip. Especially when it comes to combat, you should expect the vast majority of the experience to be you missing the enemy and the enemy missing you, until someone high rolls a hit and does 80% of the opponent's health. That being said, it's entertaining from a casual perspective and if you're looking for something that isn't too deep or mentally taxing this is a great casual time waster.

Edit: I have since beaten the game a couple times and understand it much better, and I can officially say the game is entirely random whether or not you win. The variance in damage and spawning mechanics is so atrociously poorly-designed that you will find yourself ducking behind doors for 90% of the fights. While I still rate this game mostly positive you should be aware that if you are looking for a roguelike with which you can truly interface strategically, this is definitely NOT it. Thankfully, the code is open-source on Github and easy enough to understand and edit, and I have had a much more fun time with the evasion and hunger mechanics both tuned down by a factor of 2.

Extremely charming puzzle adventure game akin to older 2D top-down Zelda games. No eye-rolling plot for kindergarteners, no unnecessarily time-consuming menial tasks, just a vibrant and secret-packed world to explore with great dungeons full of solid puzzling. The writing, though sparse, is witty and refreshing, and the game has no problems being goofy or whimsical just for the sake of entertainment. I have found that in some combat encounters you will have an easier time just mashing your attack and dodge buttons and hoping you out-damage the enemy rather than attempting to learn patterns, and in general combat-heavy encounters are kind of lackluster. Thankfully those encounters are few and far between and the vast majority of the gameplay is dedicated to solving puzzles and sometimes engaging riddles as well.

This game has lots of soul and the devs' personalities really shine through. There's so many silly "wtf was that" moments that it is impossible to not enjoy this game.

I wish I could rate this just okay or so-so. Rogue Legacy 2 certainly has more than the original Rogue Legacy, but it's not necessarily more GOOD. The more I play it, the more I am led to believe that the developers were never entirely sure what lightning in a bottle they captured that made the first installment so successful, and as a result have simply dialed up everything to 11 hoping that something will stick. There's more classes, weapons, skills, enemies, etc., but there's ten times the amount of garbage you will have to deal with experiencing it.

The grind is obviously part of the experience of this game, and is put front-and-center with the iterative upgrades you buy after each run attempt, but feels orders of magnitude worse than the previous title. The risk-reward proposition in this game is abysmal. The game will highly discourage you from taking any risks and instead you will quickly find that you will amass much more treasure and experience by steamrolling lower-difficulty areas over and over rather than attempting somewhere more challenging, where you will eventually be killed in two or three hits. Damage can come from anywhere, and projectiles often move faster than you can react, with projectiles or traps coming from offscreen to whittle a third of your health down after you've already scoped out your plan for things on the screen. The end result is often expending your mechanical resources of an extra jump or dash to cleanly eliminate what is on screen, but now that you air in midair and have those mechanics disabled until you touch down, you can easily be tagged by new things that have entered the screen after executing your plan. Normally having to react to things is such a standard part of video games that it seems almost ridiculous to mention something like this at all, but it will happen to you SO MUCH in RL2 that it bears mention. You WILL be tagged by things coming from offscreen, you WILL be hit by attacks that make no sense, and you WILL die to BS, over and over again. To some people, this grind can be exciting, as it becomes more akin to gambling, hoping to get lucky and not spin bankrupt rather than outplaying the enemies, but to me I find it tedious.

Enemy telegraphs in this game are abysmal, and I don't mean in the "enemy makes a windup motion and then you react" sense. I mean, an enemy will clearly show that they are executing some sort of attack, but instead of it being something you can safely react to or learn from, it will suddenly be a fast-moving projectile that will shoot through walls to hit you. Why does an enemy who only appears to have a melee weapon have an attack like this? Why do some projectiles go through walls and others don't? There's dozens of overengineered mechanics in this game ranging from several kinds of weights and how they affect what you can pick up without ruining your max health, down to several currencies, bonuses, debuffs, and all these things which should really just be taking a backseat to the hack and slash mechanics. I doubt many players care that their new armor gives them plus seventeen smeerps instead of fifteen, when the areas you want to explore will still kill you in three hits. The upgrades are so incrementally tiny, it feels like garbage even sinking points into any of them at all.

There's simply so much crammed into this game that don't strictly make it better that bothers me. There's lore books shoehorned in in the most hamfisted manner, sidequests which are vague enough that even when you know exactly what a riddle is referring to, you will still fail because you were standing two inches too far away to trigger a secret door. Just google this stuff, it's legitimately not worth trying to solve the riddles, especially since it just leads to more ways to obtain more nonsense currencies that let you buy more tiny upgrades, seriously, sometimes simplicity is better.

Multiple runs in this game are tiring and overtly repetitive, something that is not good for a roguelite or any game that has "rogue" so brazenly spotlit in the title. I want to experience all this game has to offer but this gameplay loop is trying my patience and you can get about triple the dopamine per run in many other similar roguelites. RL2 isn't bad, it's not great, and it really is just about as okay as RL1, with a more convoluted path to the golden gameplay loop that seems to take the backseat. Sometimes simplicity is best, and I honestly feel stripping about 50% of the stuff from this game would make it objectively a more fun experience.

It's really good. It's not great, but a solid B-movie roguelite. There's some real satisfying combat mechanics and moments and a substantial amount of content to explore for the first time. The runs do start to feel samey VERY quickly as you can spot repeated patterns and trap layouts in levels after only maybe two or three plays. The combat is by far the most satisfying part of this game's experience, and it falls short in many other areas.

- Combat
The combat is the great part about this game. The average enemy has just enough health and moves to make fighting them over and over again fairly interesting while offering enough challenge to not feel like a chore. There's a huge variety of weapons, magic, abilities, etc. with random effects and bonuses which really let the player tailor their kit a lot on a run-by-run basis. I have some nitpicks with the combat regarding status effects and stunning, mainly in that hitting an enemy with a strong enough attack can stun them, but it's not easy to tell if any given weapon or move will stun a given enemy so sometimes you will be punished for what feels at random for hitting an enemy with a flurry of attacks that don't hit the arbitrary stun threshold and then you take a giant heap of damage from a counter. On that same note, many status effects simply don't work sometimes -- e.g. you find a weapon that freezes enemies, but sometimes if the enemy is particularly strong it just won't work. It doesn't matter if you've planned out your attack combo using the information given to you, where you might freeze something and then follow up with some other weapon to finish them off, your freeze just won't work, and now you will be whacked for all your health because you committed to a second attack in the time the enemy should have been frozen, by the game's own rules. This actually sucks a lot and it happens often enough that I feel it's worth mentioning. Consistency in mechanics matters when unknowable arbitrary thresholds can be the difference between beating a single regular enemy or losing all of your health in less than a second.

- Platforming
This part is actually quite bad. It's very janky and the movement is too imprecise for many of the emergent gameplay moments, especially during combat. If you want to experience all this game has to offer mechanically, you will end up getting caught on level geometry that doesn't look like foreground, your character will stick to walls when you don't want them to, and you will be spending a lot of time just mashing buttons to fall through multiple semisolid platforms as the landing mechanic is very imprecise and sometimes you will be stunned for what feels like random durations of time. The visual style of this game often hampers the gameplay quite a bit as well given that background and foreground elements can blend into each other making it difficult to discern terrain you can jump to or terrain which will block you. Finally, the imprecision of the platforming, especially when it comes to verticality (your speed when using a ladder is not constant = difficult to integrate into more demanding mechanics, ledge grabbing is inconsistent, pathetic jump height), makes any movement which isn't specifically left, right, or using the down smash feel awful. I suppose it could be argued that these are subjective ideas about what makes good platforming, but I think it's telling that games that are lauded for their platforming don't have mechanics like this.

- Design
The art style, while expertly executed, looks to me like a visual cluster****. 3D-looking models superimposed on 2D layers, along with questionable parallax and atrocious use of mixels, rixels, and all the other "retro 8-bit pixel art indie platformer" pitfalls plague this game's visuals. I mentioned it before but layers blend in to one another, danger zones or effects are sometimes unclear, and all in all I feel the confusing mess of the visuals actually detracts from the gameplay more than adding anything. The music, while fine, is unremarkable, forgettable, and overly-laden with amateurish reality TV cymbal rolls. I suggest muting it and putting on your own favorite soundtrack or something.

All in all, I think it's a very good game that brings a lot of mechanics from different genres together. At $25, the amount of content you get is great and the dopamine to playtime ratio is solid. However, as a game that tries to be simultaneously the indie trinity of metroidvania, roguelite, and tough platformer, I feel it falls short and is less than the sum of its parts.

One of the best VR games out there despite the developers repeatedly refusing to support core functionality added by mods and breaking said mods with superfluous updates which only add options to purchase small packs of mediocre songs. With mods this game is outstanding, just cross your fingers and hope the devs don't update the game too often because every update will break your mods and make your game worse until modders fix it.