Recent reviews by carl ruins everything

devs left a folder named "DoNotShip" in the game files 10/10

Insurgency: Sandstorm is the Goldilocks of tactical military shooters. Somehow NWI struck a perfect balance with this game where it's realistic and immersive enough to provide a tense, engaging, and exhilarating experience where every single moment matters more than you are aware, but still has enough room for dumb arcadey ♥♥♥♥ to hold your interest and put a smile on your face on a bad day.

It also helps that NWI's sound and weapon design is quite literally second to none. You could probably argue that Battlestate Games is on par with them for visual and auditory design, which is fair, but even then NWI has absolutely NAILED the way their weapons feel and behave when fired when shot on a level that no other developer ever has. It's NUTS.

If there's one real problem I have with the game as it is, it's that mod.io is kind of stinky. I understand that there are good reasons for using mod.io and all because of crossplatform support, but oh my god mod.io has caused so much pain and suffering that it makes Ronald Reagan look like Mahatma Gandhi. And you have to deal with it pretty regularly if you want to try modded content - which you do want to try at least once, because the custom maps for this game are excellent and the ISMC expansion package is absolutely incredible, though I recognize it may not be for everyone, and that's totally fine.

In so many words, if you are on the fence about getting this, make like Shia LaBeouf and just DO IT. It'll be fun. I promise.

This is one of those cases where you have to give something a thumbs up not because you liked it, but because you didn't dislike it.

To start off with, BPRE is about as polished as a construction worker's boots. This game needed a lot more time and effort than went into it, and this is something you can tangibly feel while playing through it. It's clunky, it's rough, at times it seems like it runs contrary to your expectations and tells you one thing will work one way but then make it do the exact opposite of what it says. It doesn't feel like a published game with a Steam page and a price tag, it feels like a demo you found on itch one morning and played around with for a day before being done with it.

All of this being said, however, pulling off an operation successfully in BPRE is a level of satisfying that is hard to reach in most strategic games such as these, not only making you feel like your operators are badasses, but like you yourself are a badass as well. Add onto this the fact that this game manages to capture the overall atmosphere and feeling of BPRE surprisingly well even when considering it's all pixels and you have a recipe for something good.

Unfortunately, that recipe was left in the oven a little too long, so I'd only try it if you can get it for a discount or as a gift. Doesn't mean it doesn't have its tasty spots, though. It's just got some crunchy spots too.

Audiosurf is a good little game. It may not be super deep or intricate, but it does what it sets out to do and it does it fairly well, so I'd say it's worth a try, easily.

The biggest strength of this game is that it dynamically generates stages from music files on your computer, but it's also the game's biggest downside. Let's say you and some of your friends are rhythm game buffs, and you all want to try playing through the song "Freedom Dive" in this game and see who gets the highest score. First, anybody who gets their music through streaming services and not digital downloads is unable to join in - which excludes a LOT of people in our post-Spotify world - and second, once all of you are done, comparing your scores is completely meaningless because unless you and all your friends all had the exact same file for "Freedom Dive" there is no way to guarantee you didn't all just play completely different courses from each other.

But if you're looking for a small rhythm game with the novelty of custom generated tracks you probably don't care about the whole competition thing, in which case, go for it!

God I love it when games let me play as the bad guys.

ENEMY!
MAN!
THREE HUNDRED METERS!
RIFLE!
FAST!
FAST!
FAST!

This game is closer to being the game shown off in the original Rainbow Six: Siege reveal trailer than Rainbow Six: Siege itself is. Which is something I love to see.

However it's also ratchet as all hell. The anticheat is useless and does nothing but tank your performance, some of the menus are a bit wonk to navigate, there are a few places where this game smells like unfinished unity asset store project, so on and so forth... But it's also a hell of a lot less pricey than Ground Branch and Ready or Not, and it's also actively being improved and expanded over time.

So if you just want to squad up with the boys and relive that old Rainbow Six: Vegas terrorist hunt nostalgia with the boys, all things considered, Zero Hour ain't half bad.

Imagine if SUPERHOT and the original Mirror's Edge had an illegitimate kid who grew up listening to breakcore and watching old John Woo movies.

This game is a blast to play. The movement, combat, and destruction all flow into each other seamlessly to create a core gameplay loop that just feels good in your bones to experience. Seriously, it's tight as hell.

Though this also proves to be a bit of a problem with Severed Steel - the gameplay loop leaves you hungering for more, but there's only so much. The campaign is over in a few hours, and your main options for replay value are either repeating individual levels from the campaign in a deathmatch mode or community-made campaigns that vary from too easy to too hard with no in-between.

To the devs' credit, they DID attempt to remedy this by introducing a roguelike mode where you're still repeating a playlist of campaign levels, but you also get modifiers that change the experience with each level completed. But after unlocking all the cards it began to feel a little like a giant grind to me - maybe this is just a flaw in my psychology when I see rare cosmetics in video games and decide I want them at all costs.

It would be smart to add more cards to the roguelike mode, especially if they're cards that cater to goofy shenanigans like with items in Risk of Rain, or to add a means of playing randomly generated levels for infinite new things. But adding new items requires a massive creative effort, and randomly generated levels are often not very fun, so for now it's all good.

All things considered, though, hella worth the price tag. Woo!

MWII is a bit of a mixed bag. It feels unfinished in a few different places and is lacking a bunch of QoL features from previous games for some reason. And then there's the timed perk system, which just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Granted, it's not like the idea of "play the game more to gain these cool abilities" is an inherently bad thing for this game - it's just that the way IW went about deciding what perks are and are not timed is incredibly bass-ackwards and leads to things that can easily break the game.

Most common example: There is literally no justifiable reason to not pick the perk that gives you two primary weapons, use it to put a riot shield on your back at all times, and never switch off your primary weapon. So many people are doing this now to negate attacks from behind that it has begun to change the meaning of "turtling" in online games. It is that bad.

This being said though when the game decides to cooperate and not do things like shut off your display adapter without warning or throw unfair matchups at you because of poor SBMM implementation, it is an absolute blast. Cues taken from Insurgency in just the right places make the overall experience that much more frantic and entertaining. And while I can't say anything about Warzone 2.0, the base game is certainly a blast, and while DMZ absolutely needs work it has a lot of potential behind it.

Give me your MGR:R, but not your MGR:R fans